“How did you do it?” Riad Halabí asked finally, wiping the sweat from his forehead.
“With the machete for harvesting coconuts. I came up behind him and lopped off his head with one swing. He never knew what hit him, poor man.”
“Why?”
“I had to do it. It was fate. This old man had very bad luck. He never meant to stop in Agua Santa; he was driving through town and a rock shattered his windshield. He came to pass a few hours here while the Italian down at the garage found another windshield. He’s changed a lot—we’ve all grown older, I guess—but I recognized him instantly. I’ve been waiting all these years; I knew he would come sooner or later. He’s the man with the mangoes.”
“May Allah protect us,” murmured Riad Halabí.
“Do you think we should call the Lieutenant?”
“Not on your life; why do you say that?”
“I’m in the right. He killed my boy.”
“The Lieutenant wouldn’t understand that, Inés.”
“An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, Turk. Isn’t that what your religion teaches?”
“But that’s not how the law works, Inés.”
“Well, then, we can fix him up a little and say he committed suicide.”
“Don’t touch him. How many guests do you have in the house?”
“Just that truckdriver. He’ll be on his way as soon as it’s cool; he has to drive to the capital.”
“Good. Don’t take in any more guests. Lock the door to this room and wait for me. I’ll be back tonight.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I’ll take care of this in my own way.”
Riad Halabí was sixty-five years old, but he had conserved his youthful vigor and the same spirit that had positioned him at the head of the throng the day he arrived in Agua Santa. He left the schoolteacher’s house and walked rapidly to the first of several visits he was to make that afternoon. Soon after, a persistent murmur began to spread through the town. The inhabitants of Agua Santa wakened from the lethargy of years, excited by the unbelievable news that was being repeated from house to house, an insuppressible buzzing, information that strained to be uttered in shouts, gossip that by the very need to be held to a murmur was conferred special status. Before sunset you could sense in the air the restless elation that for several years would be a characteristic of the town, one incomprehensible to strangers passing through, who could find nothing extraordinary in this town that had the appearance of being an insignificant backwater like so many others on the edge of the jungle. Early in the evening, men began arriving at the tavern; women carried their kitchen chairs out to the sidewalk and sat down to enjoy the cool air; young people gathered en masse in the plaza, as if it were Sunday. The Lieutenant and his men casually made their rounds and then accepted the invitation of the girls at the whorehouse who were celebrating a birthday, they said. By nightfall there were more people in the street than on All Saints’ Day; all of them were so studiously occupied in their activities that they seemed to be practicing a part in a movie: some were playing dominoes, others were drinking rum and smoking on the street corners, some couples were out for a stroll, hand in hand, mothers were running after their children, grandmothers peering nosily from open doorways. The priest lighted the lamps in the parish church and rang the bells signaling a novena to Saint Isidro Martyr, but no one was in the mood for that kind of devotion.
At nine-thirty there was a meeting in the house of school-teacher Inés: the Turk, the town doctor, and four young men she had taught from the first grade and who were now hefty veterans back from military service. Riad Halabí led them to the back room, where they found the cadaver covered with insects: the window had been left open and it was the hour of the mosquitoes. They stuffed the victim in a canvas sack, wrestled it out to the street, and unceremoniously threw it into the back of Riad Halabí’s truck. They drove through the town, right down the main street, waving, as usual, to anyone they happened to see. Some neighbors returned their salutation with more than ordinary enthusiasm, while others pretended not to notice them, furtively giggling, like children surprised at some mischief. Beneath brilliant moonlight the men drove to the spot where many years before the son of the schoolteacher Inés had stooped down for the last time to pick up a mango. The overgrown property sat amid the malign weeds of neglect, decayed by time and bad memories, a tangled hill where mangoes had grown wild, where fruit had dropped from the trees and taken root in the ground, giving birth to new clumps that had in turn engendered others, until an impenetrable jungle had been created that had swallowed up fences, path, even the ruins of the house, of which only a lingering trace of the odor of marmalade remained. The men lighted their kerosene lanterns and plunged into the dense growth, hacking a path with their machetes. When they felt they had gone far enough, one of them pointed to a spot and there, at the foot of a gigantic tree weighed down with fruit, they dug a deep hole in which they deposited the canvas sack. Before shoveling back the dirt, Riad Halabí spoke a brief Muslim prayer, because he knew no other. When they got back to town at midnight, they found that no one had gone to bed; lights were blazing in every window, and people were circulating through the streets.
Meanwhile, the schoolteacher Inés had scrubbed the walls and furniture in the back room with soap and water; she had burned the bedclothing, aired the house, and was waiting for her friends with a fine dinner and a pitcher of rum and pineapple juice. The meal was eaten to the accompaniment of merry chatter about the latest cockfights—a barbaric sport according to the schoolteacher, but less barbaric, the men alleged, than the bullfights in which a Colombian matador had just lost his liver. Riad Halabí was the last to say goodbye. That night, for the first time in his life, he felt old. At the door, the schoolteacher Inés took his hands and for a moment held them in hers.
“Thank you, Turk,” she said.
“Why did you come to see me, Inés?”
“Because you are the person I love most in this world, and because you should have been the father of my son.”
The next day the inhabitants of Agua Santa returned to their usual chores exalted by a magnificent complicity, by a secret kept by good neighbors, one they would guard with absolute zeal and pass down for many years as a legend of justice, until the death of the schoolteacher Inés freed us, and now I can tell the story.
THE PROPER RESPECT
They were a pair of scoundrels. He had the face of a pirate, and he dyed his hair and mustache jet black; with time, he changed his style and left the gray, which softened his expression and lent him a more circumspect air. She was fleshy, with the milky skin of reddish blondes, the kind of skin that in youth reflects light with opalescent brush strokes, but with age becomes crinkled paper. The years she had spent in the oil workers’ camps and tiny towns on the frontier had not drained her vigor, the heritage of her Scots ancestors. Neither mosquitoes nor heat nor abuse had spoiled her body or diminished her desire for dominance. At fourteen she had run away from her father, a Protestant pastor who preached the Bible deep in the jungle; his was a totally futile labor, since no one understood his English palaver and, furthermore, in those latitudes words, even the word of God, were lost in the jabbering of the birds. At fourteen the girl had reached her full growth and was in absolute command of her person. She was not sentimental. She rejected one after another of the men who, attracted by the incandescent flame of her hair, so rare in the tropics, had offered her their protection. She had never heard love spoken of, and it was not in her nature to invent it; on the other hand, she knew how to make the most of the only commodity she possessed, and by the time she was twenty-five she had a handful of diamonds sewed into the hem of her petticoat. She handed them over without hesitation to Domingo Toro, the bull of a man who had managed to tame her, an adventurer who trekked through the region hunting alligators and trafficked in arms and bootleg whiskey. He was an unscrupulous rogu
e, the perfect companion for Abigail McGovern.
In their first years together, the couple had fabricated bizarre schemes for accumulating capital. With her diamonds, his alligator hides, funds he had obtained dealing contraband, and chicanery at the gaming tables, Domingo had purchased chips at the casino he knew were identical to those used on the other side of the border where the value of the currency was much stronger. He filled a suitcase with chips, made a brief trip, and traded them for good hard cash. He was able to repeat the operation twice more before the authorities became suspicious, and even when they did they could not accuse him of anything illegal. In the meantime, Abigail had been selling clay pots and bowls she bought from the Goajiros and sold as archeological treasures to the gringos who worked with National Petroleum—with such success that soon she branched out into fake Colonial paintings produced by a student in his cubbyhole behind the cathedral and preternaturally aged with sea water, soot, and cat urine. By then Abigail, who had outgrown her roughneck manners and speech, had cut her hair and now dressed in expensive clothes. Although her taste was a little extreme and her effort to appear elegant a little too obvious, she could pass as a lady, which facilitated social relationships and contributed to the success of her business affairs. She entertained clients in the drawing rooms of the Hotel Inglés and, as she served them tea with the measured gestures she had learned by imitation, she would natter on about big-game hunting and tennis tournaments in hypothetical places with British-sounding names that no one could locate on a map. After the third cup she would broach in a confidential tone the subject of the meeting. She would show her guests photographs of the purported antiquities, making it clear that her proposal was to save those treasures from local neglect. The government did not have the resources to preserve these extraordinary objects, she would say, and to slip them out of the country, even though it was against the law, constituted an act of archeological conscience.
Once the Toros had laid the foundations for a small fortune, Abigail’s next plan was to found a dynasty, and she tried to convince Domingo of the need to have a good name.
“What’s wrong with ours?”
“No one is called Toro, that’s a barroom name,” Abigail argued.
“It was my father’s name, and I don’t intend to change it.”
“In that case, we will have to convince the world that we are wealthy.”
She suggested that they buy land and plant bananas or coffee, as social snobs had done before them; but he did not like the idea of moving to the interior, a wild land fraught with the danger of bands of thieves, the army, guerrillas, snakes, and all the diseases known to man. To him it seemed insane to head off into the jungle in search of a future when a fortune was theirs for the taking right in the capital; it would be less risky to dedicate themselves to commerce, like the thousands of Syrians and Jews who had debarked with nothing but misery in the packs slung over their backs, but who within a few years were living in the lap of luxury.
“No small-time stuff!” objected Abigail. “What I want is a respectable family; I want them to call us don and doña and not dare speak to us without removing their hats.”
But Domingo was adamant, and finally she accepted his decision. She nearly always did, because anytime she opposed her husband, he punished her by withdrawing communication and sexual favors. He would disappear from the house for days at a time, return hollow-eyed from his clandestine mischief, change his clothes, and go out again, leaving Abigail at first furious and then terrified at the idea of losing him. She was a practical person totally devoid of romantic notions, and if once there had been a seed of tenderness in her, the years she had spent on her back had destroyed it. Domingo, nevertheless, was the only man she could bear to live with, and she was not about to let him get away. The minute Abigail gave in, Domingo would come home and sleep in his own bed. There were no noisy reconciliations; they merely resumed the rhythm of their routines and returned to the complicity of their questionable dealings. Domingo Toro set up a chain of shops in poor neighborhoods, where he sold goods at low prices but in huge quantities. The stores served as a screen for other, less legal, activities. Money continued to pile up, and they could afford the extravagances of the very wealthy, but Abigail was not satisfied: she had learned that it is one thing to have all the comforts but something very different to be accepted in society.
“If you had paid attention to me, they wouldn’t be thinking of us as Arab shopkeepers. Why did you have to act like a ragpicker?” she protested to her husband.
“I don’t know why you’re complaining; we have everything.”
“Go ahead and sell that trash, if that’s what you want, but I’m going to buy racehorses.”
“Horses? What do you know about horses, woman?”
“I know that they’re classy. Everyone who is anyone has horses.”
“You’ll be the ruin of us.”
For once Abigail had her way, and in a very short time had proved that her idea was not a bad one. Their stallions gave them an excuse to mingle with the old horse-breeding families and, in addition, were extremely profitable, but although the Toros appeared frequently in the racing section, their names were never in the society pages. Disheartened, Abigail compensated with even more vulgar ostentation. She bought a china service with her hand-painted portrait on every piece, cut-glass goblets, and furniture with raging gargoyles carved on the feet. Her prize, however, was a threadbare armchair she passed off as a Colonial relic, telling everyone it had belonged to El Libertador, which was why she had tied a red cord across the arms, so no one would place his unworthy buttocks where the Father of the Nation had sat. She hired a German governess for her children, and a Dutch vagabond who affected an admiral’s uniform as custodian of the family yacht. The only vestiges of their past life were Domingo’s buccaneer’s tattoos and an old injury to Abigail’s back, a consequence of spread-legged contortions during her oil-field days; but long sleeves covered his tattoos, and she had a silk-padded iron corset made to prevent pain from infringing upon her dignity. By then she was obese, laden with jewels, the spit and image of Nero. Greed had wrought the physical havoc her jungle adventures had not imposed upon her.
For the purpose of attracting the most select members of society, every year the Toros hosted a masked ball at Carnival time: the Court of Baghdad with the elephant and camels from the zoo and an army of waiters dressed as Bedouins; a Bal de Versailles at which guests in brocade gowns and powdered wigs danced the minuet amid beveled mirrors; and other scandalous revels that became a part of local legend and gave rise to violent diatribes in leftist newspapers. The Toros had to post guards before the house to prevent students—outraged by such extravagance—from painting slogans on the columns and throwing excrement through the windows, alleging that the newly rich filled their bathtubs with champagne, while to eat, the newly poor hunted cats on the rooftops. Such lavish displays had afforded the Toros a degree of respectability, because by then the line that divided the social classes was vanishing; people were flocking into the country from every corner of the globe, drawn by the miasma of petroleum. Growth in the capital was uncontrolled, fortunes were made and lost in the blink of an eye, and it was no longer possible to ascertain the ancestry of every individual. Even so, the old families kept their distance from the Toros, despite the fact they themselves had descended from other immigrants whose only merit was to have reached these shores a half-century sooner. They attended Domingo and Abigail’s banquets and sometimes sailed around the Caribbean in the yacht piloted by the firm hand of the Dutch captain, but they did not return the invitations. Abigail might have been forced to resign herself to second-class status had an unforeseen event not changed their luck.
On a late August afternoon Abigail had awakened unrefreshed from her siesta; it was unbearably hot and the air was heavy with presages of a coming storm. She had slipped a silk dress over her corset and ordered her chauffeur to drive
her to the beauty salon. They drove through the heavy traffic with the windows closed, to forestall any malcontent who might spit at the señora through an open window—something that happened more and more frequently. They stopped before the salon at exactly five o’clock, which Abigail entered after instructing the chauffeur to come for her one hour later. When he returned to pick her up, Abigail was not there. The hairdresser said that about five minutes after she had arrived, the señora had said she had a brief errand to run, and had not returned. Meanwhile, in his office Domingo Toro had received a call from the Red Pumas, an extremist group no one had heard of until then, announcing that they had kidnapped his wife.
That was the beginning of the scandal that was to assure the Toro’s reputation. The police had taken the chauffeur and the hairdressers into custody, searched entire barrios, and cordoned off the Toros’ mansion, to the subsequent annoyance of their neighbors. During the day a television van blocked the street, and a throng of newspaper reporters, detectives, and curiosity seekers trampled the lawns. Domingo Toro appeared on television, seated in a leather chair in his library between a globe of the world and a stuffed mare, imploring the kidnappers to release the mother of his children. The cheapgoods magnate, as the press had labeled him, was offering a million in local currency in exchange for his wife—an inflated amount considering that a different guerrilla group had obtained only half that much for a Middle East ambassador. The Red Pumas, however, had not considered the sum sufficient, and had doubled the ransom. After seeing Abigail’s photograph in the newspaper, many believed that Domingo Toro’s best move would be to pay the ransom—not for the return of his wife, but to reward the kidnappers for keeping her. Incredulity swept the nation when the husband, after consultations with bankers and lawyers, accepted the deal despite warnings by police. Hours before delivering the stipulated sum, he had received a lock of red hair through the mail, with a note indicating that the price had gone up another quarter of a million. By then, the Toro children had also appeared on television, sending desperate filial messages to their mother. The macabre auction was daily rising in pitch, and given full coverage by the media.