Monkey Boy

Burmese Belgian Pénèlope Myint, raised in Hong Kong and Brussels, a doctoral student writing a dissertation on Italian feminist writers. At the end of what turned into a long New York club-hopping night, we wound up in a crowded taxi, Pénèlope sitting on my lap as we made out, the other people wedged into the back seat around us making cracks about how we were so fogging the windows the driver couldn’t see. And so began that crazy incineration of a year, split between New York and Cambridge, the memory of which I treasure so much that often when I’m in Boston I walk down to the Esplanade only to gaze Gatsby-like across the river at that grad student high-rise against the sky and the white balcony from which, one winter night, Pénèlope threw her symbolic trinket engagement ring—I’d promised to replace it with a properly gemmed one when we made the engagement “official,” that is, when I could afford one—down into the snow-covered playground eleven stories below. After Pénèlope came Camila in New York and Gisela Palacios in Mexico City, two long relationships, back-to-back, in a decade that lifted off when I was still a young man and dropped me back down in middle age.

But I hadn’t done any journalism in years when, in 1998, the human rights bishop was murdered in his parish house garage in Guatemala City, just after presiding over the presentation of a church human rights report that exposed generals and colonels to possible future trials for war crimes. What I thought was going to be only one magazine article on the murder led to seven years of regularly returning to Guatemala to keep up with the investigations and trials and publishing occasional magazine pieces that I finally collected, along with some newer reporting, into my slender book. I thought, Now I can leave the case alone, and it will leave me alone. Fat chance of that.

Just this past weekend, General Cara de Culo, a former troop commander in the Ixil and later head of the Archivo and of the G-2, announced that he’s running for president of Guatemala. He’s suspected by some investigators of having been one of the masterminds of the bishop’s murder, and when in my book I published some of the evidence against him, including allegations made by the Key Witness that had never been made public before, that did make some noise, though mostly down there. Of course, the general denies all, and because he’s so powerful and people are so terrified of him, that was enough to make the issue go away—so much so that now he’s running for president. On Monday morning, a Boston public radio station contacted me for an interview about Cara de Culo. They said I could do it from a New York studio, but when I told them I was coming up to Boston later in the week, we decided to do it there. I have to be at the radio station this afternoon, before I meet up with Marianne.

Seems they can never tear us apart, me and General Cara de Culo, also his main protégé, Capitán Psycho-Sadist, convicted for a role in the bishop’s murder along with two other military men, the first Guatemalan military officers ever convicted of a state-sponsored political execution. Psycho-Sadist is a much more volatile and adroit figure than the other soldiers he went to jail with. Over the years the notorious capi has built a crime empire from prison: he runs the narcotics street trade in Guatemala City and also the city’s most feared squad of assassins for hire. Supposedly Cara de Culo offered to protect and empower the capitán in his ambitions in exchange for his keeping quiet about others involved in the bishop’s murder. In the meantime, several witnesses, a couple of Psycho-Sadist’s losing defense attorneys, among others, have been mysteriously murdered. That was the first thing I thought of when I was urgently summoned to the US embassy in Mexico City last year to speak to a consul there who had information from Guatemala to pass on to me. Prosecutors there had been intercepting Capitán Psycho-Sadist’s mobile phone conversations, some with General Cara de Culo, that revealed his ongoing obsession with everyone he thought had played a role in sending him to prison. All the people he named, among them a few journalists, including myself, were offered police protection if they were in Guatemala. That wasn’t an option in Mexico. Cara de Culo and Psycho-Sadist have power, but it doesn’t reach up to New York is what I thought when I decided to get out of Mexico for a while. Maybe the Key Witness came to a similar conclusion; the last time I’d spoken to the prosecutors they’d told me that the Key Witness, who had refugee status in Mexico, had gone missing, and they suggested that maybe he’d headed north, across the border.

Maybe Cara de Culo worries I’ve found more evidence about his role in the murder beyond what I included in the book. I know I’m still sometimes on his mind, because in an interview on CNN last year he accused me of being a liar in the pay of his political rivals and said he had proof, which of course he’s never explained or revealed. Really, I don’t have any more information than what I’ve already published, nor have I made the slightest effort to find out anything more. If the general somehow hears what I say about him on Boston Public Radio later today, he won’t like it, but he also won’t hear anything new, nothing that will be newsworthy down there. It’s not going to be me who stops Cara de Culo from becoming president.

And yet if not for the murder of the human rights bishop and General Cara de Culo, and if not for the Key Witness, too, without whom the case would never have gone to trial, I would never even have met Lulú. That chain of circumstances