‘What’s he saying?’ he asked Alvina.
‘He says the water tastes good… reminds him of a time back in the old days.’
‘Right after we killed that bastard Arenas.’ Hermeto struggled up, fell back. ‘Remember, Alvina?’
She soothed him, cautioned him to be quiet.
‘She doesn’t like me talking about the old days,’ Hermeto said.
‘What’s there to talk about?’ she said roughly.
‘The struggle,’ said Hermeto. ‘The struggle was…’
‘The struggle!’ Alvina pretended to spit. ‘All we did was die.’
Mingolla felt sad for the old man. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘You…’
‘No, she’s right. We achieved nothing.’ Hermeto’s voice rose in pitch at the end, making the sentence sound like a question, as if he couldn’t believe it himself. ‘We thought we were fighting men, and because we killed so many, we thought we were winning. But we weren’t fighting men. We were fighting tides… tides caused by two giants splashing the water thousands of miles away. We didn’t have a chance.’
‘We didn’t have a choice, either.’ Alvina opened a tin box, took out bread and cheese. ‘They were killing us.’
The old man’s voice became inaudible even to Alvina, and she asked him to repeat what he had said.
‘My brother’—he made the sign of the cross—‘may God deliver him.’
Alvina stroked his hair.
He asked for more water, gulped it down. ‘But don’t you remember that time, Alvina? Up in the Cuchumatanes?’
‘Yes, I remember,’ she said wearily.
‘They had us trapped in the high passes,’ he said to Mingolla. ‘We didn’t have water, hardly any food. We could see the river down below, but we couldn’t get to it. The sky was filled with the hum of helicopters. We were so thirsty, we ate the flowers of shrub palms, and everybody got cramps. Once we found a place where animals drank, a little pond filled with scum. Finally the helicopters left, and we staggered down to the river. It was such a strange day… thunder and mist. We looked like skeletons, but whenever the sun touched us we glowed like angels, our flesh almost transparent. Like angels throwing themselves into a river.’
‘You make it sound beautiful,’ said Alvina disparagingly.
‘It was beautiful,’ said the old man.
She began feeding him crumbs of bread and cheese. Mingolla was glad for the interruption, because the old man’s description had been hard for him to bear. He settled back against the wall, listening to the noise from outside, thinking about the struggle, the Army of the Poor; to banish thought he opened the packet of frost and snorted a quantity. He loaded a smaller packet with a supply for Leon, then lay down and closed his eyes. Through his lids the candle flames acquired a dim red value, and the bloodiness of the color started him thinking about Hermeto and Alvina. He realized that if he were to relax his guard, he would begin to sympathize with them, and his sympathy would be as ingenuous and ill-informed as his lack of concern. He had no way of understanding what it would be like to starve in the hills. The hardships he had endured seemed by comparison a privileged form of agony, and just knowing that made him want to pay some penance.
The candles were snuffed out, and Alvina lay down beside him. He edged away, afraid of contact, afraid she might contaminate him with principle and lead him down a risky path. She smelted of earth, of musky heat, and those smells and the action of the drug inflamed his desire. And as if she sensed this, she said, ‘If you want me again, you have to pay.’
He couldn’t frame a reply that would convey his mood, but at last he said, ‘I can get you out of here.’
‘No, you can’t.’
‘But I can.’ He propped himself on an elbow, trying to see her in the dark. ‘I…’
‘The government has my sister and her children. If we were to escape, they’d die.’
‘They could be located, they—’
‘Stop it,’ she said.
They lay in silence, and the screams and gabble of the Barrio seemed to add a pressure to the darkness, squeezing black air from his lungs.
‘I don’t understand,’ she said.
‘What?’
‘You… I don’t know you well, and I don’t like you very much, yet I trust you.’
‘I’m sorry you don’t like me.’
‘Don’t feel put upon,’ she said. ‘I don’t like most people.’
Implicit in her statement, Mingolla thought, was a studied rejection of life, and he pictured how she must have been back in the days when politics was in the hills, when everything seemed possible: an ordinarily pretty Indian girl imbued with extraordinary zeal and passion. He wished he could help her, do something for her, and remembered the stack of romance novels.
‘Do you like making love?’ he asked. ‘I don’t mean do you like… your work, but would you like it with someone you cared about?’
‘Go to hell,’ she said.
‘I’m serious.’
‘So am I.’
‘I could make you like it.’
She laughed. ‘I’ve heard that before.’
‘No, really. Suppose I could hypnotize you, make you feel passion? Would you want me to do that?’
The mattress rustled as she turned to face him, and he could feel her eyes searching him out. ‘Ten lempira,’ she said. ‘And you can make me crow like a rooster.’
‘That’s not what I’m talking about.’
She reached down, fondled his genitals. ‘Come on, man,’ she said bitterly. ‘Ten lempira. You’ll forget all about the other girls.’
Humiliated, he pushed her hand away.
‘No?’ she said. ‘Well, maybe when you’re feeling better.’
He was tempted to coerce her pleasure, but couldn’t bring himself to do it, unable to shake the conviction that she was his superior.
‘I don’t understand,’ said Alvina after a while. ‘I just can’t figure anything out anymore.’
Morning in the Barrio was different from night only in that when sections of the roof were lifted, chutes of gray light spilled in, and people stood beneath the open sky, risking mortal harm for a glimpse of freedom; otherwise the same smoky orange gloom prevailed among the black beams and fires. The center of the Barrio, where Leon and Mingolla sat in a shadowed niche, featured a row of stucco houses strung out across the width of the prison; and in one of them, a house with a white wall and black shutters, and an oil drum fire burning at its corner, lived Opolonio de Zedeguí. ‘See those four guys out front?’ said Leon, inserting the tip of his knife into his packet of frost. ‘They’re always there. His bodyguards. You’ll have to do something to get rid of them. A diversion, maybe.’ He inhaled from the knife blade. His black eyes widened, his cheeks hollowed. ‘Chingaste! This is good stuff!’
The four men ranged in front of de Zedeguí’s house were young and well muscled, and Mingolla could tell from their slack attitudes that they were under psychic control. De Zedeguí was being terribly incautious: these men might well have been the signal that had alerted American agents to his presence.