Penny Moore, nonpareil information gatherer, also had a lot of contacts among the guerrillas. She’d received probably many more threats than she’d let on to me. It wouldn’t be so hard for people with the required skills to reach our windows from the sidewalk or the roof. We knew that the “bad guys”—Military Intelligence, other Guat officials, the US embassy—must suspect that Penny wasn’t just a magazine stringer, even if they didn’t know for sure. Maybe they didn’t think one person could be behind those voluminous human rights reports that were causing the Guatemalan military government and the Bonzo administration in Washington so many headaches. They didn’t think one boyishly skinny, long-legged girl whose ears stuck out through her thin black hair, who had a laugh like a neighing donkey, who’d first come to Guatemala as a Fulbright scholar and college student to study bats in Mayan mythology could be doing all that by herself. One day she told me that until she let me know otherwise, we both had to stay away from every Guatemalan we knew; a deep source had told her that Military Intelligence had put a tail on us.
Our alarm system was beer and soda bottles stacked on the seats of chairs underneath all our windows, so that if they came in, bottles would fall to the floor and shatter. I’d developed a strange tic inside my cheek that twitched constantly. From that time on and even to this day, if I’m walking on the sidewalk and the door of a parked car suddenly opens just in front of me or a little way ahead, I jump out of my skin. Penny was in her black “Vietcong” jumpsuit that I liked to tease her about, a necklace of scarlet beads around her neck. Her extraordinary character amplified her awkward beauty, electrifyingly vital, with that touch of dark Azrael energy. I was trying to absorb that we were saying goodbye, for a long time at least, and would never be roommates again. She laid the garden rake down on my bed, her bequeathed going-away present. It was, indeed, a deadly weapon. She was flying to London, where she’d spend a week huddled with “Aunt Irene,” as we were supposed to refer to Amnesty International whenever speaking of it over the phone, going over and preparing their next human rights report. She’d be briefing a parliamentary committee, flying to Geneva for secret meetings with UNHRC officials. Danielle Mitterrand had invited Penny to stay with her in Paris for a week or so, who knows what else. When she came back, she wasn’t going to be my roommate in Tía Nano’s old apartment anymore. We both understood it really was time for her to live somewhere more secure, people in London and elsewhere who knew her situation were pressuring her about it. I didn’t pay any rent and had never charged Penny; we’d just split utilities. Besides her morning cup of yogurt, a banana, and coffee, she hardly ever ate there. I helped her carry her luggage down the long, narrow stairs to the metal door leading to the street. The drive to the airport was notoriously dangerous. If they didn’t want people to leave the country but hadn’t found a way to make them disappear beforehand, they’d sometimes ambush them there. A simple hatchback car with polarized windows, electrical tape over the cracks in one, was waiting for her, and a couple of sturdy muchachos got out, one to open the trunk, the other casting his eyes up and down the street, his hand thrust into the clearly weighed-down pocket of his baggy nylon windbreaker. Afterward, I went back up the stairs and could feel tears starting in my eyes. I almost never cried. When had I last cried? I had a terrible feeling of gloom, of foreboding, like my spirit was going away, too, another passenger on a long shadow train of the ghosts of the murdered or soon-to-be murdered, a train with shadow wheels on shadow tracks, its silent clacking echoing through blood and nerves, the rhythm of the flinching tremor in my cheek. When I went back into my bedroom, the sun was coming through the windows in a way I’d never noticed before, directly hitting the roughly surfaced, painted yellow wall over my bed, suffusing it with the deep golden yellows of ripe papaya skin, which contrasted with the large minty emerald squares rimmed in blue of the Momostenango wool blanket laid over my bed. Penny’s hand rake propped atop the blanket somehow possessed the gravity of a compact heavy anchor plummeting into ocean depths despite being motionless, its glinting prongs like prehistoric fangs, with its painted whorled wood handle, the wet slurry seal color of just-laid sidewalk or maybe more a periwinkle gray, but that combination of colors and light, that unexpected tableau, as if inside a mysterious door opening in the air, suddenly struck me as unbearably beautiful and melancholy, and with a sob
