Ever since Capitán Psycho-Sadist had become an inmate in his prison, the warden had changed. He had much more money, and was driving a new jeep, one of those like the narcos drive, with bulletproof dark windows. He bought geese to keep in his yard, which in Guatemala City some people prefer to watchdogs and not just because they respond to a nighttime intruder with an eruption of frenzied honking. It’s easy to kill two or three watchdogs. But try to kill a dozen geese with one pistol or machete, María says the warden had told Zoila.
Zoila was already disturbed by these changes in the warden even before she heard about the murder. But after the murder happened, she broke up with him. She didn’t want the father of her future children to be one more corrupt official involved in murders and who knew what other crimes.
Wait, I interrupt. What murder? I think I maybe know the prison murder she’s referring to, one there’d been rumors about, connecting it to Cara de Culo and the men imprisoned for the bishop’s murder. But María says she doesn’t know which murder, because Zoila didn’t tell her. There are so many murders in Guatemala, she says. Look how many murders of witnesses are just in your book, she says. Yes, that’s true, I say. Because María had to be at her laundromat in time to open it, that morning their conversation was a little hurried. She thought she and Zoila would have many other chances to speak. Also, she has to admit, Zoila frightened her. María says, I think Zoila was worried she’d told me too much already, because before I left, she asked me: Please don’t even tell Padre Rolando that I said the general was involved, I only told the padre about the warden and the capitán. But Zoila must have told the lawyers, says María. Because if she needs to argue for asylum, of course she should tell about the general.
Lawyers here in Boston, I assume you mean. Did Zoila come up here right after she broke up with the warden?
No, after she broke up with the warden, Zoila went back to the house she shared with her friend, says María. A few days later, Zoila was going to work when she was kidnapped and taken back to the warden’s house, and locked in a storage room with just a little foam mattress on the floor. The story María now begins to almost race through is horrifying but familiar, even inevitable. Two men wearing ski masks came regularly into the storage room to demand that Zoila tell them what she’d overheard Capitán Psycho-Sadist and the warden discussing and also everything else she knew about the capitán’s prison dealings and about Cara de Culo’s role. They also demanded to know who she’d spoken to about it. They were sure she’d at least told her friend she’d shared the house with. Zoila insisted she’d only overheard that one conversation and that of course she hadn’t told anybody. The men didn’t believe her. They came into the room every day to shout at her. They beat her and called her a liar. The geese were always noisy in the mornings. Whenever Zoila heard their uproar after hours of quiet, says María, she thought another morning had arrived and that soon the daily torture sessions would begin again. The warden came into the storage room too. By then she was too weak even to sit up, but he kneeled by the mattress and begged her to tell the masked men what they wanted to know so they could be left alone. He promised he would stop being a warden. They would go live somewhere faraway and peaceful, maybe Switzerland, and they would be married and he would love her forever. Zoila’s friend, her housemate, was murdered; the masked men showed her a newspaper clipping. Now María draws a deep breath, exhales, and says gravely: They did the worst things bad men can do to Zoila, and she became ill and almost died. She woke up in a clinic. By her bed was standing the warden, the warden’s mother, and some men she didn’t know. Do you know who the warden’s mother is, Frankie?
No, María, I don’t, I say.
She is Matilda Ercolano Garay.
The woman Cara de Culo picked to be his vice president. I say, Ah, now I’m beginning to see. Though really, I’m looking into a tunnel of fog. I’ve heard Matilda Ercolano is the married general’s lover. I’ve heard but don’t mention now that her late father, the owner of a construction company and a former congressman from the Petén, had a hand in many of the country’s dirtiest businesses and that his family still does.
Yes, the future vice president, says María. But this was three years ago, when this happened in the clinic. Nobody had heard of that woman yet. The warden’s mother said to Zoila: You are alive because of me, because I intervened, and she told Zoila that if she promised to keep everything she knew a secret and went home with her son the warden and let him take care of her, and if he was good to her and she was good to him, then nothing would happen to them. Zoila obeyed, or pretended to obey, but a few weeks later, she somehow escaped. She came here to Boston, to Chelsea, to live with her cousin and to work as a housekeeper. Last year her cousin’s husband, a puertorriqueño, tried again to molest her, Frankie. Do you understand? Yes, many times, he wanted to, but this time was different. Zoila was so angry and frightened she told her cousin about it, and the husband, for revenge, called ICE, and she was put in deportation proceedings with an electric bracelet on her ankle.
