Irma sighed, and Mingolla glanced up at her. She was leaning against the glass of the door; a Marlboro decal with the picture of a cowboy lighting up was stuck to the glass beside her mouth like a visual word balloon. Her arms cradling her dreamed-of child. She held it up for him to approve, and still thinking of Debora, seeing not the emptiness of Irma’s arms but the memory they embraced, he said, ‘Yeah… nice-looking boy.’
It rained every morning and every afternoon, and often during the night, and whenever it stopped raining, the heat would settle in; it seemed to have a presence, to be a huge transparent animal crouching in the streets and exhaling a foul warmth. Posters plastered to the walls of the buildings wilted at the corners and hung in scrolls; heat haze rippled above roofs and sidewalks, making it look as if the entire barrio were about to dematerialize. The surface of the asphalt melted into sludge; you could peel off rubbery hunks with your fingers. The armies floundered in humid air, the buzzing of their minds weak and intermittent like that of winter flies trapped between panes of glass. Sweat popped out in drops the size of pearl onions, and smiles were sharp and strained. Then the rain would begin again, diminishing the heat a fraction, spattering on the asphalt, drumming on the roofs, ticking the windows, and lying in bed at night, Mingolla could sense in its incessant rhythms the tension of an event taking shape. Something final and powerful. Whether good or evil, he didn’t know and didn’t care. He was under the spell of heavy life, heavy weather, and he had no interest in the eventual outcome, no interest in anything other than making it through each day.
They were quartered in a pension called the Casa Gamboa, a one-story building of pink stucco with an interior courtyard centered by a swimming pool whose water was so dirty that it looked like a sector of jade amid the bright tiles.’ Macaws sat on perches under the overhang of the roof, cocking their eyes knowingly at passers-by and chuckling, and thick jungly vegetation grew in plots around the pool. Through a breezeway at the rear of the courtyard could be seen an old Oriental man in a wheelchair, who would sit most of the day beside a small garden and tie strips of paper to the stakes between the rows. The maid was a pretty dark woman named Serenita. All these things elements in the story The Fictive Boarding House. Mingolla was not surprised to learn he was living in Pastorïn’s (or Izaguirre’s) story. He realized he had been living in it ever since Roatán, and that even the fact of his existence was to some extent a Sotomayor conceit. Indeed, he found it a comfort to be part of a fiction in that perceiving life this way tended to insulate him from the real, and when he was not working, he would spend his time in the room he shared with Debora. A large white room, much too large for its sparse furnishings of chair, table, bed, and dresser. The room was cooled by a creaky ceiling fan, and mounted on the wall beside the door was a cheap tin crucifix; a cord ran up behind the cross to the light fixture on the ceiling, giving the impression that Christ had some role to play in the transmission of the current. The figure was poorly rendered, its hands and feet disproportionately long, and its expression dyspeptic instead of soulful. Mingolla sympathized with the distorted spiritual values it embodied, and he held out hope that it would effect a miracle of a quality in keeping with its grotesque appearance.
On one occasion Debora dragged him out of the room to attend a negotiating session. She wanted him to see for himself that they were going well, and though he refused to accept this, there was no use in arguing the point. It was in her nature to cling to belief, to commitment, and he knew she would have to experience total disillusionment before giving up the idea of revolution, even one as horrific as this.
The sessions were held in a working-class restaurant with pale green walls and long tables and a glass case atop the counter containing crumbs and dead flies and crumpled wax paper. The negotiating teams consisted of five members of each family and a handful of psychics who had undergone the drug therapy. The psychics—there were thirty-one in the barrio all told—were hostile, suspicious, and neither Mingolla nor Debora succeeded in establishing a relationship with any of them; they were interested only in maintaining their relationships with various members of the families. The Sotomayors, however, were—with the exception of Ruy—gracious to a fault. They were all lanky, long-nosed, and homely… though their chief negotiator, a tall woman in her early thirties named Marina Estil, had a severe hawkish beauty. She was quite tall, almost six feet, with sharp cheekbones and large eyes and black hair cut short to resemble a cowl. Her fingers were extremely thin and seemed paler than her hands. In her frankness about Sotomayor frailties, she impressed Mingolla as being someone whose concern for peacemaking outweighed the imperatives of the feud, and he came to put a modicum of trust in her.
‘You have so much power, and so little interest in using it,’ she told him once. ‘But of course many of us have a problem with the way you do use it.’