1.
The Red Yamaha
When the motorcycles come, we tremble.As soon as we hear the crescendo of the distinct sharp rev of an engine, we scatter like a herd of frightened deer. Amid the chaos of the town’s lunch hour, we aren’t sure if the pops we hear are from the loud bangs of the Yamaha or if they already found their target.
We hide. Underneath restaurant dining tables set out on the plaza. We run. Into our neighbors’ homes. Into each other’s arms. We shout. May God and El Capo forgive us.
Two more pops, and now it is certain they are from the kids on those motorbikes. We know this from the screams. From the agony arising from that poor soul calling for his mother. Who are they hunting today? We won’t know until after they zoom off. They are told to leave the bodies as a lesson. Last week it was Don Guillermo, the local sheriff. We all hold on to our gold crosses hanging from our necks and pray to La Virgin it’s not one of our own.
When will this end, we hear Doña Mariela question from her coffee cart in the middle of the plaza. Malparidos hijueputas, Don Victor yells from his butcher shop. God Save Agua Pura, our Priest prays.
When they leave, it is near silent. We all emerge like a fog looming over the plaza, whispering as if the Yamahas are still around. We search for the victim, but all we see is a pool of blood, a couple of bullet casings, and an emerald ring. They must have taken the body with them, Don Victor claims. I know those boys, they’re too skinny to pick up dead weight, Doña Mariella shouts. No police arrive. No reporter comes by. We pass out rags and mops and buckets, pushing bloody water around ’til the streets run clear. A chair accidently is pushed over and echoes a sharp thud.
We all jump, and the trembling comes back, as if it never went away.
2.
The Angel Boy and the Camera
The boy looked like an angel. Unassuming and unaware, a paramilitary soldier shoots the boy in the head, and I snap my camera. Blood splatters over my face. The solider realizes I have captured his act. I run home and develop the film in my lover’s bathroom outside of town. I fax over the photo to an American newspaper. Overnight there is anarchy, a chaotic uprising in the city. Because of the Angel Boy and the rest of the schoolchildren massacred. My lover makes me coffee in the morning and kisses my nose. My frightened editor sends me packing to a country whose land I do not know. They will come looking for me, or so I’ve heard this is what happens to those in my line of work.
A photojournalist is a calling that will end up killing you, my lover tells me.
A civil war isn’t the time to ask questions, my sister argues.
I want to be like you, my nephew gloats.
On a packed bus seeking to leave the city, the streets are blocked. We snake over to a roadside pit stop before we head to our first check point. I find a pay phone and call my lover to let him know I’m safe. His mother picks up.
He has been killed in the plaza. The sicarios mistook him for you, they didn’t even bother to leave his body, she cries out.
We both have dark hair, similar brown skin complexion, and style our beards the same way, I suppose. We would borrow each other’s clothes sometimes.
I ask if it was because of the Angel Boy photo or because of . . . she scoffs at me, tells me that they’ll keep looking for me and if I don’t hang up, she’ll tell them where I am. That if it weren’t for me, her son would still be alive. She calls me names I do not wish to repeat to myself. I stay on the line until it disconnects and all I hear is a dial tone.
I take off my matching emerald ring my lover and I bought at the beach one day when the sun was strong, the air salted, and we decided to love each other forever. I seal it tightly in an envelope and drop it in a mailbox. It will arrive at my sister Selda’s home; she always wanted that ring anyway. It serves me no use. Forever now lives among the stars.
I want to be like you, I tell the moon.
A civil war isn’t the time to ask questions. I throw my camera to the river.
Being me is a calling that will kill me, I tell myself.
3.
Little Kid Guns
My blood is beginning to coat the dry white rice. Kneeling on raw rice is my least favorite punishment, but Mami says it builds character. She says as soon as she’s done throwing corn cakes on the griddle, I’ve met my time for hitting my little sister. Bianca was the one who started it and tripped me first, but I’m older and she’s only five so I should have known better, she says. I’m the man of the house and I need to watch after her instead of pushing her around, she says. Soon I’ll be old enough to start working, after I learn how to read and finish the third grade, she says. I’m not allowed to run bags and talk to the older kids down the block who join the guerilla or paramilitary or gang or the ones who ride motorcycles even if the motorcycles are cool, that I need to focus on honest clean work like working for the city or helping construct buildings or even become a soccer player she says. Not like your hijueputa father, who abandoned you before you were born to run in the jungle with guns who’s probably dead anyway, she says.
She says I look just like him.
While I kneel, my arms need to stay raised above my head, but they are starting to tremble and ache. That’s when the table and chairs begin to shake so hard and the earth rumbles like a monster is roaring under me. I wonder if they finally found our town and are taking over it. I hear about them taking boys away from their families and making them shoot guns that are heavy as they are and living far away where there’s no running water or food and that they have to survive on whatever is grown or hunted. That’s what my Tio said, at least before he disappeared. I had asked him why are the guns so big and why don’t they make them smaller so kids don’t have to worry about them being so heavy? Like little kid guns. He just laughed. That was a long time ago now. I wish my Tio was here.
Plates and cups shatter to the ground and I throw myself to the floor, afraid of the punishment I’ll get afterwards. Afraid of what happens if I’m taken away. But I cannot let Mami see it. She army crawls herself to me. She looks cool doing that.
Alfredo don’t move, she says.
I tell her I’m big now and I’m strong and I can carry the heavy guns if they claw me away from her.
She hushes me. The shaking stops, the rumbling ends.
That was a strong one, she says.
4.
The Sack of Black Beans
I notice I can’t fit into my favorite purple dress anymore three months after It Started Happening.
Mami has already hemmed it, twice.
He’s just the Strange Man, Bianca, ignore him.
He follows me everywhere. I open the door, and he’s around the corner. I walk home from school, he is waiting for me. He lives in my periphery. Once I woke up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom, and he was right by my window. Watching me sleep.
Today marks one year since It Started Happening. Since he spotted me walking home from el mercado with my friends and followed me to my house. Only once he came close enough to try and pull my skirt. I’m down twenty pounds. Mami is getting worried I’m losing too much weight, that I’m thirteen and I should be getting my period by now and that this weight loss can’t be good for me. I am disappearing and Mami keeps on hemming and does not look up. Does not see what I see. I’m getting worried about how I feel like I can’t breathe every other day. How I get headaches and feel like fainting during class. She tries to feed me red meat.
I am not hungry.
Mami has a tiendita at the front of our house, where a living room should be. We sell dulces, water, dried goods, milk and the newspaper. We have two sacks of beans, one black and one red near the front counter. Ever since the war, we begin to close earlier than before, so we make every hour count and leave it open for our lunch hour.
Mami goes off to the city to try and find my uncle. Brazen-faced, she ventures onto the local minibus in some cheap red lipstick and run down heels. It’s the city, after all, she says as she sashays. Maybe she won’t find her brother’s body among the unclaimed again. Even though a body that is missing for more than five years is technically considered dead, she still searches, wearing his emerald ring on her pointer finger. She leaves my brother and I in charge of la tiendita.
As soon as she walks off to the bus stop, I see the Strange Man approach the counter, like a dark cloud eerily rolling in. I freeze—my skinny arms shaking. He never says anything to me. But he always gives me the same look. Like a street dog who hasn’t eaten in weeks. My brother barks at him.
Aren’t you ashamed? Leave my sister alone.
The Strange Man huffs and points to my brother, a you don’t know what’s coming kind of look.
My brother isn’t that much bigger than me. He sinks our machete into the Sack of Black Beans. I feel more at ease. I hope he doesn’t come back.
We listen to the radio about the war. The unsettling hum I’ve grown accustomed to. There’s a story about how our civil war is causing huge migrations. People are leaving our town, our Country to go to places like the united states and canada and france and germany. Even australia. I dream of speaking english, maybe french. They won’t teach us in school. Gringos don’t come to Agua Pura. There are too many bodies to walk over.
It’s almost curfew and we’re closing for the day when the Strange Man comes back.
Alfredo, he’s back!
The Strange Man pulls out a rusty revolver. My brother runs from the back of the house to our tienda and smoothly pulls out the machete from The Sack of Black Beans and runs up to him, as if there is no gun staring down at him.
Shoot me motherfucker. I dare you.
The Strange Man’s hand is shaking. They wrestle each other and my brother’s skinny body pushes The Strange Man off him. He whips the machete back and slices the Strange Man’s face and torso. He cuts him so deep you can see the fat in between the skin layers. I close my eyes and shout.
The Strange Man lets out a guttural cry and crawls away, like an animal who knows he is slowly dying after an attack. He becomes a pool of black goo, emitting a smell of rotten old meat. A crowd is forming, and my brother marches with conviction back into la tienda, not looking beyond his gaze.
He returns the machete back into the Sack of Black Beans.
I am hungry now.
5.
September 21, 2014
Good evening, this is 98.5 T-O-L-U FM, I am live with breaking news. After a four-decade civil war, it has come to an end with a handshake and a gala in the southwestern valley of the Country. The rebel group UNAS gathered in a peace agreement to lay down their arms and finally join society. The war has cost over 100,000 lives, displacing two million with over 25,000 disappearances. Activists, women, children, journalists, civilians, and farmers are the most common victims of the conflict. Though the capital has seen much of the violence and turmoil that the war has caused, it’s the town of Agua Pura on the Caribbean coast that has carried the burden, with close to 35 percent of the rebels originating from the town. They must now decide how to reintegrate with society.
6.
From The Raw Bar
My dentist tells me to I should consider taking out my gold caps too, they are dated.
They look fine to me, don’t you like them, I wink.
He rolls his eyes.
What, I ask him. I don’t bite.
Up to you, but you don’t come here very often and I’m giving you a discount on these veneers, he says.
I run my tongue on my gold cap, almost giving it a goodbye kiss.
I feel like a new woman, new smile and all. My dentist instructs me to avoid red meat, to stick with soft foods, like seafood. He also mentions that I should look into getting a mouth guard back in the States, I have a deep bite.
Maybe next time when I come back, I tell him as I leave the badly florescent lit office basement in my new heels, new nails, and throw my chain strapped purse across my shoulder.
I forget how cheap the mall and salons are here sometimes. I only spent twenty bucks to get these neon claws, Lord knows I love me a razor-sharp stiletto nail shape. See?
It’s only been three years since I’ve moved out of this godforsaken town. I don’t even take the bus around anymore. When I visit, I rent a driver. They do that now over here. I make sure everyone in Agua Pura sees me. I want them to say, wow look at Griselda now, thinking her shit doesn’t stink. And I’ll say back to them, it doesn’t ’cause I’m classy now!
My son tells me that it’s tacky to show off what we have. He’s the one who brought me with him to the United States. Isn’t it always the first born who have a blind loyalty to their mothers? Bianca would have never. She lives in a city I can’t pronounce in a desert that dries out her skin. She never calls her mother. Says I’m toxic, I don’t know what she means, that girl. That sounds like something an ungrateful daughter would say. She has no idea. Sometimes that daughter of mine chooses not to see me. Even after their fathers abandoned them, those sons of a bitches. All she sees is who I had to be because of the war. Now look at me. But I digress.
Anyway, I stay in Alfredo’s big ol’ house in Texas with his annoying wife who can’t seem to pick up a finger and work while my son pays for everything. It’s still not clear to me what he does, but he works at the university studying something about our war. It’s nonsense, we lived it. Even though it is supposedly over, we’re still living it. Why pay someone to study it? I can tell you all about it, why not pay me? But my son is a good son. It’s crazy to me how much he reminds me of my brother. He looks just like him.
Oh, and don’t even get me started on how good of a father he is. On my days off, I take care of my beautiful perfect grandbaby. But I don’t want her calling me abuela, no no no. I already told Alfredo. I want her to call me Selda. I do not look like an abuela, see these teeth? These nails, this face?
I fly back home tomorrow so I ask my driver to take me back to the mall, it’s one of the only places in town that has AC. It’s a small mall, I can’t wait to get back to the big Texas outlets. There is not much I miss from here, but I will say, one thing I do miss about my homeland is the beach breeze. I roll down my window and my arm swims in the air as. . . .
Ma’am, please keep your window up, it’s not safe here, my driver suggests.
I pretend I don’t hear him and rest my arm on the open window, admiring my new bracelets and rings shining in the sun. The honey gold around my wrist reminds me of brother’s eyes. Last time I saw him, he borrowed my favorite earrings; he always took my things. Even if it’s been over twenty years, I’ll get them back. There was never a body, so one can hope, right? I light a cigarette and my driver turns out of the main road and into a sketchier one.
Wait the mall is on the next right sir. He pretends he doesn’t hear me. He puts the car in park and gets out of the front seat.
Sir, I demand you drive me to where I’m paying you to drive me.
Ma’am don’t make this hard for me, he says as he opens my door and points a gun at me.
You motherfu—
Ma’am, your jewels, your purse, he demands rather calmly and motions to unload all my new gear I saved up for. I’m in shock but also, turned on?
Sir, all of that was just talk. My son doesn’t even make that much money. I saved for all this working at a Walmart when I’m not taking care of my grandchild. I’m just a helpless grandmother, how are you going to steal from an old lady? Have you no shame? Sir, how are you going to do this to your own people? Sir, please don’t.
At this point I’m begging, it’s embarrassing. But it’s all about psychology, at least so I’ve heard. But when he clicks back the pistol, I’m pretty sure he’s serious. No more role playing.
You son of a bitch. Fine.
I flick my cigarette to the ground. He points to my wrists as I lovingly hold them.
Not my gold.
But he motions to put them in his bag. I take them off one by one, silently bidding them farewell. He demands me to strip my clothes.
Sir, this is from the Ross on the outskirts of Dallas.
I don’t think he cares or even knows what Ross is. All I’m left with is my underwear and bra.
The ring, he says.
I gave them all to you.
No, the green one.
Sir, this isn’t worth anything, please let me keep it. It’s all I have left from my brother.
I’m in tears at this point. But as soon as he reaches for my right arm, I pull him in toward me. I make sure those intro jujitsu classes I took for free do not go to waste. I look directly at him and my instincts tell me do it. I sink my sharp two-inch stiletto nails into his eyes. Between screams and squirms, I pluck out his left one, it feels just like an oyster from the raw bar.
Believe me, I would know.
7.
Alias “El Jaguar”
Do I regret signing the agreement? No, no I don’t. We are men of our word. You have to understand, no one wants war. No one. When I heard about the agreement, I was excited, I was hopeful even. But look, two of my comrades were killed by the paramilitary last month. These camps we live in were set up to help us. Now, we’re just a target.
Santa Rosa is supposed to be a permanent village for former guerilla fighters like yourself to start over after laying down arms and signing this peace agreement. Do you feel like the country and the peace council has kept their word?
Absolutely not. We feel betrayed. We were supposed to focus on farming. I even received some funds to set up my chicken farm. I’ve also gotten some cows. They bring in decent money. Enough to take care of my girls. But these threats are out of control. I did my part, I walked away from the only stability I’ve had over thirty years. I need them to do their part. I didn’t realize trying to get to peace would cost so many more lives.
Do you miss the jungle?
I miss the solitude and the silence. I miss how subtle stillness can feel. I was part of a special unit, we were called the Jaguars. Agile and stealthy, we used to spend hours interpreting the sounds of the jungle as kids. Over the decades, we sharpened our senses and became one with the shadows. Learned the difference between an afternoon breeze and an enemy brushing up against the vegetation.
But there’s also a lot I don’t miss.
When did you join?
I was recruited when I was fifteen. I didn’t have much of a choice for survival back then. I had to leave my pregnant girlfriend. I have a son out there in the world, probably already grown. Maybe already has kids of his own.
So you’ve never been in touch with them since? How does that make you feel?
Well, how do you think it would make you feel? I tried one time to contact the mother. Well, she wanted nothing to do with me. So, I moved on. I’m a father to three girls now. Their mother was my comrade. Aren’t we supposed to focus on how I’m doing since coming to the transition camp?
Evaluating your emotions and how you’re psychologically adjusting is part of this assessment.
*
So, tell me, how have you been sleeping?
My sleep? Well, I get a couple of hours in a night. But I slept better when I was in combat. I have strange dreams though. The same one happens every couple of days. Where I wake up thinking I’m still fighting.
Tell me about that.
Well, it always starts the same. We’re running. Me and the Jaguars. Then we stop, and the jungle isn’t the same jungle we know. The trees are marked differently. The sky is at a different angle. And all the sudden we’re getting bombarded. My comrade, the mother of my girls, gets hit and I see one arm on a tree, a leg on the ground.
Did this happen to you in your waking life?
*
Do you have some water? I, uh . . . my throat is a little dry.
We can pick this back up tomorrow if you-
No, continue with your questions.
Um. Ok. You’ve noticed other rebel groups filling in the gap for the coca trade, which you have said in the past you worked in and was lucrative. Knowing what you know now, would you have made a different decision to demobilize?
Heh. You doctors and your questions.
I’ve mentioned at the beginning I’m not a doctor, I’m just a state—
You’re afraid I’ll re-arm and go back. No, I haven’t lost hope yet.
What keeps it going? Your hope?
Look at where we are. My land is beautiful. The soldiers don’t want war. The guerilla doesn’t want war. The police don’t want war. Militants don’t want war. My daughters don’t want war. Peace is all I’ve ever—
POP! POP! POP!
Miss, miss. Get up from the ground, let me help you. Don’t be scared. Those must be fireworks or just a motorcycle popping. It’s ok.
Remember, I’m a Jaguar.
8.
At the tone, please leave a message.
Hi, it’s me.
I’ve been calling every other hour now. If you don’t answer soon, Selda, Tia Bianca and I will have to fly down to Agua Pura to come find you. Selda even called your biological dad out in Santa Rosa.
Weren’t you the one who told me that it doesn’t matter if a peace treaty was signed years ago? That as long as there is greed and poverty, peace is a fleeting ambition that only lives in our minds. I don’t know what you’re thinking. I know your work is important, but the kidnappings have been getting worse. You’re not a combat journalist, Papa. I think you forget that.
I think you forget what happens to those who try to remember.
Memory is strange. Memory can be dangerous.
I don’t know. . . .
I’m driving home and something about the way the sun is shining brings me back to the first time you took me to Agua Pura. I was seven. I remember how the sea glittered, how the black sand burnt our feet, how the salted breeze made a home on our skin. How the deep and cool jungle behind the town felt ominous and magical.
How Tia Bianca distracted me at the beach with passionfruit juice while you and Selda went to a mass grave and dig for your Tio’s remains. We stayed there ’til the sky transformed into neon pink and purple gradient. How you and Selda came back holding hands and crying but with a sense of peace on your faces and that is when I knew what peace was. How you gifted me an emerald ring and you told me it holds the love and memories of a man trying to make a country remember what it pretends to forget. There was a pale moon that hung in the deep Caribbean sky, and you said there’s always a light behind the darkness. We set a bouquet of white roses into the ocean and sent them off for your Tio ’til the flowers blended with the moon and the stars. You said one day you want to be sent home this way and I didn’t quite understand.
Sorry if my voice is trembling, but I just want you to answer the phone, to tell me you’re OK. You know what, I’m buying my ticket right now because I can’t just sit here anymore. I love you, Papa. And I’ll look for you in all the corners of our land and our waters and our sky, until—
Beeeeeeeeeeep.
If you would like to send your message, please press one.
If you would like to cancel and re-record your message, please press two.
***
Artwork by Mélanie Villette
