I wouldn’t be standing here right now in Boston staring down this alley and wondering if that restaurant worker is the Witness if it hadn’t been for the Witness in the first place. He’s incredibly important in my life, though I’ve spent no more than a few hours talking to him. Maybe nobody still alive, assuming he’s still alive, has had a more direct influence on how my life has turned out, recently at least. The prosecutor who’d won the convictions at the trial had had to flee with his family into exile, to a secret destination. But the prosecutor who inherited the case gave me the Witness’s address because I lived in Mexico City, where the Witness was then in hiding; there were questions the prosecutor and his assistants wanted me to ask on their behalf. This was about two years ago.
We spoke in his small, windowless room in a boardinghouse for prostitutes across the street from the taco stand he worked at, a street like a forgotten neorealist film set where the same prostitutes had been standing night and day in the same doorways and on the same sidewalks for years, while the miserly trees along the curb held out the same few leaves glowing yellow green in the sun. In his halting but dogged voice, so familiar from his testimony at the trial and the videotapes of it I’d obsessively watched afterward, the Witness said, To them, I was expendable and as easy to dispose of as trash, but we all are to them, every one of us. (Me too, then, and Zoila, expendable as trash.) During a pretrial evidentiary hearing, Capitán Psycho-Sadist had managed to get close enough to the Witness to vow in a whisper that no matter what happened at the trial or wherever the Witness ended up, they would never stop looking for him. The Witness lived his life between his depressing little room and the taco stand. Even for a taquero, he seemed a little incongruous, short and foreign, a mouth full of broken teeth, with a furtive yet self-possessed, even decorous air. People on the block had seen the heavyset men in loose-fitting dark suits, Guatemalan prosecutors who’d arrived with him when he first moved in across the street from the taco stand and who, during that first year or so especially, occasionally came by to check up on him. Those neighbors kept an eye out on his behalf and knew never to answer questions from strangers such as the one who turned up one morning at the newsstand at the end of that block inquiring about a curly-haired chaparrito guatemalteco and speaking in an accent that wasn’t Mexican, that sounded more like the mysterious taquero’s. But it was the kind of neighborhood where nobody would ever give answers to any stranger who came around with those kinds of questions about anybody. After that, the Witness didn’t leave his room for a few days. He was alone in this life, a poor indigenous man with warty hands who boasted to me that he’d been taught how to use those hands for strangling people during the military intelligence course he’d failed, and who almost never had a night of sleep that wasn’t disturbed by nightmares and insomniac terrors. The problem of staying alive consumed him.
The Witness told me in his careful, slowly enunciated manner: They considered me somebody of no importance, disposable as trash, a homeless indio without worth as a human. Yes, I was poor, he said, but I was never a dirty vagrant like they said. I took care of myself. I washed myself and my clothes in the park
