There were lines on her face he’d never noticed before. She bit her lip. Her eyes were red. “I thought you were dead,” Maruja said.
Their apartment was cramped and small. He sat at the kitchen table while she prepared the candles and the matches. They listened for the rumble of war’s progress, for a bomb to scratch out the quiet, the calm. It happened almost every night now. Electrical towers felled by explosives, a hammer and sickle ignited on the hillsides. It was best to be prepared. A pot of water boiled on the stove. He skimmed six weeks’ worth of newspapers. She’d saved him the front pages, thrown away the rest. She summarized for him: “While you were dead,” Maruja told him, “things got worse.”
She wasn’t going to forgive him easily. From the stack of scattered pages, she pulled one. It was dated from a week and a half before, and told of the ambush he’d fled. There were photos of the camp, of the weapons seized, and one of six lifeless bodies laid in a neat row. Though their faces were covered, Fernando knew them. They were his men, his friends. They had names. He recognized them by the shoes they wore.
An hour later, they heard it: boom.
Lights flickered and faded.
In the tense dark of their apartment, it occurred to him that he wanted a child. It struck him as exactly right. He felt embarrassed to tell Maruja. He said nothing. His entire body ached. They listened in darkness to the radio announcer calmly describing the evening’s events. The room glowed orange.
Sometime in the middle of the night, when she was asleep and the candle had gone out, he reached for her.
It took him weeks to regain his courage. The city appeared strange to him, and his two-day walk through the jungle still had the glow of an apparition. Some mornings he woke and caught himself dreaming of insects and flittering birds. Bombs. Running. He caught himself paying attention to strangers’ shoes. Every day he thought of the child he wanted. He rode through the city, debating quietly with himself: a child was a preposterous thing to want at a time like this. Absurd. Dangerous. Around him, men and women were disappearing, people dying. It was no time to indulge in bourgeois fantasies. But he let himself imagine fatherhood and a hundred other conventional pleasures: a small house with a courtyard, an olive tree, and a tomato plant, a childhood like the one he’d had. Sometimes Fernando imagined himself as an old man, the war long since over and nearly forgotten. His children now grown, his grandchildren asking to be told stories. What stories would he and Maruja tell them? Stories of survival, perhaps: How we fled Lima, Fernando mused. How we escaped the war.
He was riding a bus one day when a young woman got on. Visibly pregnant, her belly pushed dramatically against her dress. She was pretty, her lustrous hair in a single braid, woven as thick as rope. He gave her his seat. She didn’t thank him, or notice him hovering over her. The bus stumbled on, filled past capacity. Fernando kept his right hand in his pocket, holding his wallet, and the other he placed on the back of the pregnant woman’s seat. What was he expecting? He wanted her to pull out a book of baby names, or a spool of yarn to knit tiny socks. She didn’t. She chewed gum. There was nothing at all special about her except that beautiful roundness. Fernando couldn’t help but stare. He tensed. Finally, she opened her bag, pulled out a newspaper, and turned it to the crossword. Then there was a pushing and a jostling on the bus, and someone was being robbed at that exact moment. Everyone knew it: a dozen pairs of eyes darting back and forth, accusing. The pregnant woman sat still, unconcerned, nibbling on the tip of her plastic pen. By the time he got off, she’d fallen asleep with the crossword half-done in her lap.
That night, like every night, he and Maruja sat by candlelight, listening to the radio. But he had heard enough: the news was uniformly dismal, and it did no good to hear it all. He turned it off. He told her: “Let’s have a baby.”
They sat close together and spoke in circles about the child, he saying yes, she saying no.
He’d already heard her arguments, of course. They were his own. He suspected they were true, but as she voiced them, they sounded profoundly pessimistic. Hadn’t they always believed in a future? Had they come to this place so soon: were they this defeated already? He held his head in his hands and cried, Maruja stroking his hair, wrapping the black curls around her fingers. Did she have to hurt him like this? She took his glasses and laid them on the nightstand. Their bed, resting on cinder blocks, creaked as she stretched. With the flame clinging to the wick, orange light gliding along the walls, Fernando told her for the first time of the jungle. “I walked for days. Alone. I could barely see the sky, and I was sure someone was following me.”
Maruja touched him, kissed him. She laid him down and undressed him. Fernando could scarcely keep his eyes open. It wasn’t such a terrible thing to want, was it? The city was full of children.
“We can’t, Nano.” She sighed deeply. “I can’t.”
Maruja had two boys from her first marriage, the oldest now nearing fifteen. Fernando was good with her children. He took them to San Miguel or to the movies. The noise and chaos of parenting seemed to excite him, to energize him, and Fernando would drive the children, singing and shouting. When they played soccer, Fernando would feed the pass that let his stepchildren shine. They were the youngest players on the field, but he made them feel welcome, wanted. He picked them first. Maruja’s children were in love with Fernando. They let him know. All of this, Fernando thought, was proof. Hasn’t she seen me with them? “I’d be a good father,” he said.
“For how long?” she asked.
III. Drive, 1987
The call came before dawn, a phone ringing, startling him from dreams. He hoped it wouldn’t wake the baby. Maruja didn’t stir. It was a man’s voice. He seemed to know who Fernando was. “Can you drive?” the voice asked.
Fernando dressed without turning on the lights. The station wagon started on the second try. He drove along deserted city streets, avoiding the known roadblocks, hoping not to stumble upon others. They changed every night. He had documents ready — real ones — and an excuse, a story to tell, if it came to that: “I’m going to pick up my brother. He’s a doctor. My little girl is sick.”
It was four-thirty in the morning. He idled his car on the fourth block of Avenida Bolivia and waited. He blew hot air on his hands. His neck hurt, his mouth was dry. It was cold, but in an hour, the darkness would lift, and the curfew as well. He closed his eyes and buried his hands in his armpits. A few moments later, a man stepped out of the shadows, glanced up and down the empty avenue, and got in the car. He muttered a greeting and gave an address on the other side of town. With a nod, they were off.
These people, whoever they were, always seemed like ghosts to Fernando. They shared many things, one might suspect, but nothing they could talk about. There was an unreality to this existence, floating from house to house. The art of clandestine life was to be invisible, to leave no trace. Fernando only saw it from the outside, these predawn drives through the backstreets of Lima, a morose stranger in the seat beside him. He could imagine the rooms where they stayed: the bare white walls, the single bed and thin mattress, the creaky chair. He had promised Maruja he would never do it. He had a daughter now, and the thought of that life made him sick. Fernando gripped the steering wheel tightly.
There were no traffic lights at this hour, or at least none that anyone paid attention to. The city was shuttered and asleep. The car rattled noisily. The man took off his knit cap and rubbed his face. He pulled a pack of cigarettes from an inside pocket and offered one to Fernando. They smoked and said nothing. There was no one out, not a soul. The radio had been stolen a few months before, but Fernando had never missed it as much as he did now: a song, a voice, anything to erase this quiet. He ran through a handful of questions in his mind — How long were you at the old house? Do you know José Carlos? Where will you go next? — but they were all wrong. He couldn’t ask anything like that. Nice sweater, Fernando nearly said, where did you get it? He was embarrassed by the thought. Was it allowed? Talking about clothes? Soccer? The weather?