I turned the knob and opened the door. The first thing I saw, sitting on my bed, was a bright, multicolored wig. Beside it, tubes of face paint, and a note from my colonel. Tomorrow was my turn to be the clown.
• • •
When I returned from Saravena, I had difficulties. I’d be in the middle of a meeting, or drafting a report, and a memory from Saravena would strike, some fragmented image, the packed dirt of a jungle trail or the way the exterior of a shop had caught the sunlight. Stupid things like that. And there was an unease, this sense that I was a little thing in a cold universe that was out of my control, and threatening. I don’t want to exaggerate these difficulties. I know soldiers who have had terrible problems, years where they could only sleep with alcohol, and spent their waking hours with every muscle tensed, always on guard. My difficulties were minor. Manageable. But nevertheless, it was irritating. It interfered with work, and with my relaxation at home.
Sofia told me I was more impatient than before, more hostile, and I trusted her sense of the matter. She demanded I go to confession. To please her, I went, and the old priest interrupted before I even got halfway through what I wanted to say. “But these aren’t sins!” he said. Everything I’d done had been for my country, he pointed out. And even though I agreed, I felt rage coming up my throat.
“Good,” I said, “because even if I believed in God, I’d never believe an old fool like you could forgive me.”
It was a disproportionate response, further evidence that something was wrong. I wrote down everything that happened on my deployment in a list, and then burned it. I wrote it out again over the course of a week, this time telling the stories of my deployment not as something I experienced, but as something “we” experienced, the strong, unbeatable “we,” who cannot be destroyed. My mood turned unbearably black, and Sophia demanded I return to confession.
“I don’t care if you believe or not,” she said. “You’re definitely a sinner, and I’m only going to forgive you if God does.”
This time, I didn’t go for an old, conservative priest, I found myself a nice young Jesuit. Perhaps I went to him because it was the Jesuits who had introduced me to God in the first place. Perhaps because Jesuits tend to be leftists, and maybe I’d get some fool with a tattoo of Camilo Torres and a heart shaped like a hammer and sickle. The sort who would refuse to forgive me.
That’s not what happened. Like Pope Gregory and the emperor, they’re not allowed to withhold forgiveness, even if they want to. The Jesuit listened, and then gave me as penance the command to contact the families of every man injured or killed under my command.
“What kind of officer do you think I am?” I said, genuinely offended. “Of course I’ve contacted the families.”
“At the time,” he said. “It’s been almost a year. How are they doing now?”
He forgave me, and over the next month I went about the awful penance he’d demanded, reaching out to the families and reopening the scars of their loss.
One night during this time, Valencia had a terrible nightmare. She was seven years old, and asked to sleep with us, which I never allowed. “She cannot become weak,” I’d tell Sofia, who agreed. This time, however, I said yes.
Our wide-eyed daughter, holding her stuffed rabbit, started crawling up onto the bed. Unwilling to let go of her rabbit, she clutched the sheets with one hand, trying to pull herself up ineffectually until I grabbed her by the armpits, hauled her over my body and into the space between Sofia and me. Briefly, before she turned from me to Sofia, I looked into her eyes, and I could see that she truly was recovering from terror. A yearning as sharp as desire stung me. I wanted to comfort her.
People say a lot of stupidities about fatherhood, as if it were some magical, sacred thing, when in truth it is the least magical, least sacred, and most purely animal thing about us. Holding a baby, changing her, clutching her to your skin. And even before that, watching your wife go through pregnancy, and then labor, this intensely physical act that is entirely out of your control and that, as a man, you can only watch in terror. We have this illusion that we are rational creatures separate from creation, that we can control and shape nature, the way a dike shapes the course of a river. It is a comforting illusion. Then the dike breaks, and you have a bloody screaming child that you bring home, thinking, We are animals, because what you witnessed was not so different from a calving. It gives you a new appreciation for calvings. And then you have a wife whose breasts refuse to give enough milk so during the times you’re home, and not in
