Sergeant Faustino Rivera waited, consulting his watch between cigarettes, squatting in the shadow of the stables. Occasionally he stood up to stretch his legs and once, overcome by sleep, he nodded off, leaning against the wall. From his position he could see the guardhouse where Corporal Ignacio Bravo was whiling away his boredom masturbating, unaware of any witness. Just before dawn the temperature dropped and the cold dispelled Rivera’s drowsiness. It was six o’clock and dawn was tinting the horizon when the truck returned.
Sergeant Faustino Rivera wrote all that he had observed in the greasy notebook he always carried with him. He had a mania for jotting down everything that happened, whether important or trivial; he could never have imagined that this habit would cost him his life several weeks later. From his hiding place, he watched his superior officer adjust his cartridge belt and holster, get out of the vehicle, and walk to the building. The sergeant ran to the truck and felt the tools, noting the fresh dirt adhering to the blades. He could not swear to what that might mean, or to the officer’s activities during his absence; he made that very clear to Digna Ranquileo. But anyone could guess.
The car driven by Francisco Leal stopped before the Ranquileo home. It was not a school day, and all the children came running out to greet their mother and the visitors. Mamita Encarnación, with her pouter-pigeon bosom, dark bun pierced with hairpins, stocky legs marbled with varicose veins, followed close behind, a formidable old woman who had intrepidly sailed through the disasters of life.
“Come in and rest, I’ll fix you some tea,” she said.
* * *
Jacinto took them to Pradelio. He was the only person who knew his brother’s hiding place, and he understood that he had to guard that secret, even at the cost of his own life. They saddled the Ranquileos’ two horses; Irene and the boy rode the mare, and Francisco rode the other, hard-mouthed and skittish. It had been years since he had been on a horse, and he felt uneasy. Thanks to a childhood friend at whose farm he had learned to ride, Francisco was a good rider, though he had no style. Irene, on the other hand, was a regular Amazon because, during the good years, her parents had given her a pony.
They rode toward the cordillera, up a narrow, lonely path. Normally, no one ever passed that way, and weeds had almost obscured the trail. After they had ridden a way, Jacinto told them they could go no farther with the horses; they would have to climb now, looking for ledges of rock to find a foothold. They tied the horses to some trees and continued the climb on foot, helping one another up the steep slopes. Francisco felt as if he were hauling a cannon in his backpack. He was at the point of asking Irene to carry it for a while, since she had been so stubborn about bringing it, but he took pity when he saw her gasping with fatigue. The palms of her hands were raw from the rocks, her pants were torn at the knee, she was sweating, and every few feet she asked how much farther they had to go. The boy’s answer was always the same: Just up there, around that bend. Weary and thirsty, they continued for what seemed hours beneath a pitiless sun, until Irene said she could not go a step farther.
“Going up isn’t so bad. Wait till you have to come down,” Jacinto observed.
They looked down, and Irene shrieked. They had climbed like goats up a sheer gorge, clinging to any underbrush that had sprouted in the rugged terrain. Far below, they saw the dark splotches of the trees where they had tied the horses.
“I’ll never be able to get down. I feel dizzy,” whimpered Irene, leaning forward, seduced by the precipice plunging below her.
“You came up—you’ll be able to go down,” said Francisco, supporting her. “Hang on, señorita, it’s just up there, around that bend.”
Then Irene pictured herself wobbling on a mountaintop, moaning with terror, and her sense of the absurd came to her rescue. She drew a deep breath, took her friend by the hand, and announced that she was ready to go on. Planning to retrieve it later, they discarded the knapsack with the provisions, and Francisco, liberated from the crippling weight, was able to help Irene. Twenty minutes later, they came to a cleft in the cliff where suddenly there were shadows cast by tall brush and the comfort of a miserly stream of water winding down through the rock. They realized that Pradelio had chosen this refuge because of the spring, for he could never have survived in these arid mountains without it. They knelt down and splashed water over their faces, their hair, their clothing. When Francisco looked up, the first thing he saw were cracked boots, then green pants and a sun-reddened, naked torso. Last of all, he saw the dark face of Pradelio del Carmen Ranquileo, who was looming over him, pointing his service revolver at them. He had grown a beard, and his hair, matted from dust and sweat, looked like some sort of exotic seaweed.
“Mama sent them. They’ve come to help you,” said Jacinto.
Ranquileo lowered the revolver and helped Irene to her feet. Through an entrance hidden behind brush and rocks, he led them to a shady, cool cave. There Francisco and Irene stretched out flat on the ground while the boy took his brother to look for the jettisoned backpack. In spite of his extreme youth and frail body, Jacinto seemed as energetic as he had when they started out. For long minutes Irene and Francisco were alone. Irene fell immediately asleep. Her hair was damp and her skin burned. An insect crawled up her neck toward her cheek, but she did not feel it. Francisco moved his hand to brush it away, and touched her face, soft and warm as a summer peach. He admired the harmony of her features, the lights in her hair, her body abandoned to sleep. He wanted to touch her, to bend near her and feel her breath, to cradle her in his arms and protect her from the premonitions that had tormented her since the beginning of this adventure, but he too was overwhelmed with fatigue, and he slept. They did not hear the Ranquileo brothers return, and when one of them touched his shoulder, he waked with a start.
Pradelio was a giant. His enormous frame was inexplicable in a family of short people. Sitting in the cave, reverently opening the knapsack and extracting his treasures, caressing a package of cigarettes in anticipation of the pleasure of the tobacco, he looked out of scale with his surroundings. He had grown thin; his cheeks were sunken and dark circles rimmed his eyes, aging him prematurely. His skin had been cured by the mountain sun; his lips were cracked, his raw shoulders blistered and peeling. Huddled in this small chamber carved from living rock, he looked like a buccaneer who had been blown far off his course. He used his hands carefully, two great paws with gnawed and filthy fingernails, as if he was afraid he would destroy everything he touched. Uncomfortable in his body, he appeared to have shot up suddenly, without time to get used to his own dimensions; incapable of calculating the length and weight of his extremities, he bumped around the world, eternally searching for ways to move and stand. He had lived in this confining lair for many days, eating rabbits and mice he hunted with stones. His only visitor was Jacinto, the link between his solitary confinement and the land of the living. He spent his hours hunting, never using his gun, because the revolver must be saved for emergencies. He had fashioned a sling for hunting birds and rodents, and hunger had refined his marksmanship. A rank smell from one corner of the cave marked the place where he had piled the feathers and skins of his victims, to avoid leaving any traces outside. To ease his boredom, he had only a few cowboy novels his mother had sent him; he made them last as long as possible, for they were his only diversion through the long days. He felt like the survivor of a cataclysm, so lonely and desperate that at times he longed for the walls of his barracks cell.
“You shouldn’t have deserted,” said Irene, trying to shake off the inertia that had sunk into her soul.
“If they catch me, they’ll shoot me. I have to leave the country, señorita.”
“Turn yourself in, they won’t shoot you.”
“No, I’m fucked whatever I do.”
Francisco explained the difficulty of obtaining asylum. After so many years of dictatorship, now no one left the country by that route. He suggested that Pradelio should hid
e for a time, while he, Francisco, tried to arrange false documents for him; with new documents he could go to a different province and begin a new life. Irene thought she must have misunderstood; she could not imagine that her friend knew anything about counterfeit papers. Pradelio spread his arms in a gesture of hopelessness, and they realized it would be impossible for a man who stood out like a giant cypress, and whose face was unmistakably that of a fugitive, to escape the notice of the police.
“Tell us why you deserted,” Irene insisted.
“Because of Evangelina, my sister.”
And then, little by little, searching for words from the still waters of his habitual silence, interrupting their flow with long pauses, he told them his story. What the giant did not say, Irene asked by looking into his eyes, and what his eyes did not tell she could guess from his deep flush, from the gleam of his tears, from the trembling of his huge hands.
* * *
When the rumors began to fly about Evangelina and her strange sickness, attracting the nosy and dirtying her good name, putting her in the same class with the locos in the insane asylum, Pradelio Ranquileo had lost sleep. Of all the members of his family, Evangelina, from his earliest memory, was the one he loved most, and that love had grown with time. Nothing had ever touched his heart like helping that tiny, frail little thing take her first steps—she, with her blond hair, so different from all the other Ranquileos. When she was born, he was still a boy, too tall and too strong for his age, used to doing a grown man’s work and to taking over his absent father’s responsibilities. He was a stranger to either pleasure or tenderness. Digna spent her life pregnant or nursing the newest baby, which did not keep her from working the land and doing the household chores, but she needed someone to lean on. She had turned to her oldest son, giving him authority over the other children. In many ways Pradelio was the man of the house. He took on that role while still very young, and even when his father came home, he did not completely relinquish it. Once when his father was drunk and was getting rough with Digna, he had stood up to him—and that was what finally made him a man. The boy had been asleep, but was awakened by the sound of muffled sobs; he leaped out of bed and peered through the curtain that separated the corner where his parents slept. He saw Hipólito with uplifted hand, and his mother huddled on the floor, covering her mouth with her hands to keep from waking the children with her moans. Pradelio had witnessed similar scenes before, and in his heart even believed that a man has the right to keep his wife and children in line, but that night had been more than he could stand and he had gone blind with rage. Without thinking, he rushed at his father, beating him and cursing him until Digna begged him to stop, because a hand raised against your parents will turn to stone. The next day, Hipólito awakened with his body covered with bruises. His son ached from his exertion, but none of his arms or legs were petrified, in spite of what the old proverb said. And that was the last time Hipólito had lifted a hand against any member of his family.
Pradelio del Carmen Ranquileo had always been aware that Evangelina was not his sister. Everyone else treated her as if she were, but to him she had always been different, ever since she was a toddler. Using the excuse of helping his mother, he had bathed her and rocked her and fed her. The little girl adored him, and at every opportunity she put her arms around his neck, or climbed into his bed, or curled up in his arms. She followed him everywhere, like a little puppy, hounding him with her questions; it was his stories she wanted to hear, and she would only go to bed if he rocked her to sleep with his songs. For Pradelio, the games with Evangelina were charged with anxiety. He suffered whipping after whipping for putting his hands on her, in that way repaying his guilt. Guilt for the wet dreams where she called to him, obscene, tempting; guilt for hiding and watching as she squatted in the bushes to pee; guilt for following her to the irrigation ditch when it was time for her bath; guilt for inventing forbidden games where they hid far away from everyone, hugging and petting until they were both on the verge of collapse. Obeying the instinct that all women have, the child kept her brother’s secret; she was as sly as he was. She was innocent and shameless, flirtatious and modest, and she used these emotions in turn to drive him crazy, to rub his senses raw, to keep him her prisoner. Their parents’ restrictions and vigilance merely fed the fire that boiled in the blood of the adolescent Pradelio, a fire that led him to prostitutes at much too early an age, for he found no consolation in a boy’s solitary pleasure. When Evangelina was still playing with dolls, he already dreamed of possessing her, calculating how the thrust of his manhood would go through her like a sword. He sat her on his knees to help her with her lessons, and as he looked for the answer to the problems in her notebook, he felt his bones dissolve, and something warm and sticky flowing through his veins; his strength melted away, he could not think, he felt he would surely die when he smelled the smoke of her hair and the lye soap of her clothes and the sweat of her neck, and felt the weight of her body on his. How could he stand it, unless he howled like a dog after a bitch in heat, unless he grabbed her and gobbled her up, unless he ran to the nearest poplar and hanged himself by the neck till he was dead to pay for the crime of loving his sister with such sinful passion? She could sense what he was feeling, and she wiggled around in his lap, pressing, rubbing, shifting, until she felt him grow tense and moan like a drowning man, pressing his knuckles against the edge of the table as a sharp, sweetish smell enveloped them both. Those games lasted throughout Evangelina’s childhood.
At eighteen Pradelio Ranquileo left home to fulfill his military service, and he never went back.
“I left in order not to sully my sister with my hands,” he confessed to Irene and Francisco in the mountain cave.
After completing his service, he immediately enlisted with the police. Evangelina had been frustrated, confused; she could not understand why she had been abandoned; she was oppressed by feelings that she could not name but that had been in her heart long before the stirring of sex. This was why Pradelio had fled his destiny as a poor farmer—he had fled from a girl becoming a woman, and from memories of a childhood tainted by incest. In the years that followed, he had grown to his full size and found a certain peace. Change in the political scene had contributed to his maturity and dimmed his obsession for Evangelina; overnight he had ceased to be an insignificant rural guardsman and had found what power was about. He had seen fear in other men’s eyes, and he liked that. He felt important, strong—in command. The day before the military coup, he had been told that the enemy intended to wipe out the Army and set up their Soviet tyranny. The enemy must truly have been dangerous and skillful, because to that day no one had ever learned of their bloodthirsty plans except the commanders of the armed forces, who were always vigilant on behalf of the nation’s interests. If the military had not made their move, the whole country would have been sunk into civil war, or would have been occupied by the Russians, as Lieutenant Juan de Dios Ramírez had explained to him. The timely and courageous actions of every soldier, Ranquileo among them, had saved the country from a terrible fate. That’s why I’m proud to wear the uniform, although some things I don’t like. I follow orders without asking questions, because if every soldier started arguing over what his officer told him to do, we’d be in it up to our asses, for sure—the whole country would go straight to hell. I had to arrest a lot of people, I admit that, even men I knew, and friends, like the Floreses. A bad business about the Flores men getting mixed up in the Farmers Union. They seemed like good people, and who would ever have thought they would get it in their heads to attack the barracks? What a crazy idea. How did Antonio Flores and his sons ever get mixed up in something like that? They were smart enough, they’d been to school. Luckily, Lieutenant Ramírez had been warned by the patrones of the neighboring farms and he’d been able to act in time. It was tough for me to arrest the Floreses. I still remember the screams of the other Evangelina as we took off all the men of her family. It hurt me, because she’
s my true sister, as much a Ranquileo as I am. Yes, there were lots of prisoners in those days. I made a lot of them talk. I took them to the stables and tied them up and beat the hell out of them. We shot some too, and other things I can’t tell because it’s a military secret. The lieutenant trusted me, he treated me like a son. I respected him and looked up to him. He was a good chief, and he sent me on special missions that he couldn’t trust to weaklings and bigmouths like Sergeant Faustino Rivera, who loses his head after one beer and starts blabbing like an old woman. Lieutenant Ramírez told me many times: Ranquileo, you’ll go far, because you know how to keep your mouth shut. And you’ve got courage. Tight-lipped and courageous, those are a soldier’s greatest virtues.