When they opened the mine, she was right behind the soldiers, lost in the crowd, wearing her black armband. From a distance she saw the large yellow bags, and squinted her eyes, hoping to see some clue. Someone told her it would be impossible to identify the remains without a study of dental records and every scrap of bone and clothing that had been found, but she was sure that if she could see them up close, her heart would tell her whether they were theirs.
“Can you take me where they have them now?” she asked Irene Beltrán.
“I’ll do everything I can, but it won’t be easy.”
“Why don’t they give them to us? All we want is a grave where they can lie in peace, where we can bring them flowers and pray for them, and visit them on the day of the dead.”
“Do you know who arrested your father and brothers?” Irene asked.
“Lieutenant Juan de Dios Ramírez and nine men from his command,” Evangelina Flores replied without hesitation.
* * *
Thirty hours after the death of Sergeant Faustino Rivera, Irene was shot down at the entrance to the publishing house. She was leaving work, rather late, when an automobile parked across the street started up, accelerated, and swept by her like an ominous wind, loosing a burst from an automatic weapon before disappearing into the traffic. Irene felt a powerful blow in the center of her being, but did not know what had happened. She fell to the sidewalk without a cry. All the breath rushed from her soul, and she was consumed with pain. She had an instant of lucidity in which she reached out to touch the blood forming around her in a spreading pool, then immediately sank into sleep.
The doorman and other witnesses were also unaware of what had happened. They heard the shots but did not identify them as such, thinking they came from a car backfiring or an airplane overhead, but when they saw Irene fall, they ran to her aid. Ten minutes later, she was in an ambulance with sirens screaming and lights whirling. Her life was spurting from countless bullet wounds in her abdomen.
Francisco Leal learned of the shooting by chance an hour or two later, when he called her house to ask her to dinner; it had been some days since he had seen her alone, and he was drowning with love. Weeping into the telephone, Rosa told him the bad news. That was the longest night of Francisco’s life. He spent it sitting beside Beatriz in the hospital corridor on a bench opposite the intensive-care unit where his beloved was roaming aimlessly through the shadows of the valley of death. After several hours on the operating table, no one had any hope that she would live. Connected to a half-dozen tubes and cables, she lay awaiting her death.
The surgeons had opened her up and attempted to repair the damage, discovering for every stitch they took another opening to close. Quarts of blood and plasma were poured into her body, she was flooded with antibiotics, and, finally, crucified on a bed, suffering the enduring torture of catheters, she was sedated in a mist of unconsciousness to allow her to bear her martyrdom. With the complicity of the physician on call, who commiserated with such obvious grief, Francisco was permitted to see Irene for a few minutes. She was naked, transparent, afloat in the glaring white light of the operating room; a respirator was connected to a tube in her trachea, cables joined her to a cardiac monitor on which a scarcely perceptible signal kept hope alive, and her veins were pierced with numerous needles; she was as pale as the sheet, dark shadows purpled her eyes, and a compact mass of bandages covered her stomach, from which erupted the tentacles of rubber drains. A mute sob gripped Francisco’s chest, and lingered there for an interminable time.
Beatriz assaulted him the minute she saw him: “It’s your fault! From the instant you came into my daughter’s life, we have had nothing but trouble!”
She was grief-stricken, beside herself. Francisco actually felt sorry for her; for the first time, he saw her free of artifice: nerves rubbed raw, human, suffering, approachable. She collapsed onto the bench and wept until she had no tears to shed. She could not understand what had happened. She wanted to believe that this was the work of an ordinary felon, as the police had assured her it was; she could not bear the idea that her daughter had been pursued for political reasons. She had not a hint of Irene’s role in discovering the bodies in the mine, and could not imagine her involved in murky activities directed against the government. Francisco went to buy a cup of tea for each of them, and they sat side by side drinking it in silence, united by an identical feeling of catastrophe.
Like so many others during the previous administration, Beatriz Alcántara had gone into the streets banging pots and pans to protest the food shortages. She had backed the military coup because it seemed infinitely more desirable than a Socialist regime, and when the time-honored Presidential Palace had been bombed from the air, she uncorked a bottle of champagne in celebration. She burned with patriotic fervor, although her enthusiasm had not been so great as to cause her to donate her jewels to the fund for rebuilding the nation; she feared she would see her jewels adorning some colonel’s wife, as wagging tongues had rumored. She adjusted to the new system as if she had been born to it, and learned never to speak of what it was best not to know. Ignorance was indispensable to peace of mind. That horrible night in the hospital, Francisco was at the point of telling her about Evangelina Ranquileo, about the dead of Los Riscos, about the thousands of victims—about her own daughter—but he took pity on her. He did not want to use this moment when she was convulsed with grief to destroy the illusions that had until that moment sustained her. So he confined himself to asking questions about Irene, about the years of her childhood and adolescence, taking pleasure from each anecdote, begging for the tiniest detail, with the curiosity every lover has for everything connected with his beloved. They talked about the past and, between confidences and tears, the hours went by.
Twice during that night of torment, Irene was near death, so near that returning her to the world of the living was a phenomenal feat. While the doctors clustered around her, battling to revive her with electric shocks, Francisco Leal felt he was losing his grip on reason, regressing to the days of prehistory—to the cave, to darkness, to ignorance, to terror. Despairing, he sat and waited as evil forces dragged Irene toward the shadows, believing that only magic, chance, or divine intervention could save her from dying. He wanted to pray, but could not utter the words that as a child he had learned from his mother’s lips. Distraught, through the strength of his passion he tried to bring Irene back. He exorcised the darkness with the memory of their pleasure, setting against the shadows of hovering death the light of their coming together. He longed for a miracle, for his own health, his blood, his soul to pass to her and give her life. He repeated her name a thousand times, beseeching her not to give up, to go on fighting; from the bench in the corridor he called to her in secret; he wept openly, felt crushed beneath the weight of centuries, waiting for her, seeking her, desiring her, loving her. He remembered her freckles, her innocent feet, her smoky pupils, the aroma of her clothing, the silk of her skin, the line of her waist, the crystal of her laughter, the peaceful abandon with which she lay in his arms after making love. He sat there, muttering to himself like a madman and suffering insufferably, until the new day dawned and the hospital awakened; he heard doors opening and closing, elevators, footsteps, instruments clanking on metal trays, and the sound of his own racing heart. Then he felt Beatriz Alcántara’s hand in his, and remembered her presence. Drained, they looked at each other. They had lived through those hours in similar pain. Bare of makeup, Beatriz’s face was ravaged, the fine scars of her plastic surgery revealed; her eyes were puffy, her hair limp with sweat, her blouse wrinkled.
“Do you love her?” she asked.
“Very much,” replied Francisco Leal.
Then they embraced. At last they had discovered a common language.
* * *
For three days Irene Beltrán wandered along the frontiers of death, at the end of which she drifted into consciousness, pleading with her eyes to
be allowed to fight using her own resources, or to die with dignity. They took the respirator away, and little by little her breathing stabilized, as did the rhythm of the blood in her veins. Then they transferred her to a room where Francisco Leal could stay by her side. She was submerged in the stupor of drugs, lost in the fog of nightmare, but she felt Francisco’s presence, and when he left she called for him in a voice as weak and helpless as a baby’s.
That evening Gustavo Morante came to the hospital. He had read about Irene in the police reports in the newspaper; the item had been published, much delayed, along with a list of other bloody offenses attributed to common criminals. Only Beatriz Alcántara, however, clung to the official version of events, just as she believed that the search of her house was some strange mistake on the part of the police. The Captain, however, had no illusions. He requested permission to travel from his garrison to visit his former fiancée. He was dressed in civilian clothes, following the recommendation of the High Command: No uniforms in the street, we don’t want to give the impression that this is an occupied nation. Morante knocked at the door of Irene’s room and Francisco opened it, surprised to see him there. They took one another’s measure, each probing the other’s intentions, until a sigh from the patient drew them both precipitously to her side. Irene lay motionless on the high hospital bed, like a white marble maiden sculpted on her own sarcophagus. Only the living foliage of her hair emitted light. Her arms bore the marks of needles and tubes; she was breathing shallowly, her eyes tightly closed, the lids dark smudges. When Gustavo Morante gazed upon the woman he had loved for her vitality, reduced now to a poor lacerated body that looked as if it might evaporate into the surreal air of the sickroom, a shock of horror ran through him that left him weak and trembling.
“Is she going to live?” he whispered.
Francisco Leal had watched over her for several days and nights, and had become expert in reading the slightest sign of improvement; he counted her sighs, weighed her dreams, observed her fleeting expressions. He was euphoric because she was breathing without the aid of a machine and could move the tips of her fingers, but he realized that for the Captain—who had not been present when she was truly dying—the sight of her was a cruel blow. He forgot that his rival was an Army officer and saw him only as a man suffering for the woman he, too, loved.
“I want to know what happened,” Morante asked, dumbstruck, his head bowed with grief.
And Francisco Leal told him, not omitting their participation in the discovery of the bodies, hoping that Morante’s love for Irene would supersede his loyalty to the uniform. The same day of the attempt on Irene’s life, armed men had burst into her house and turned everything upside down, from mattresses, which they ripped open with knives, to jars of cosmetics and kitchen canisters they emptied onto the floor. They took with them her tape recorder, her agenda, her notebook, and her address book. Before they finished, they shot Cleo for good measure, leaving the dog in a pool of blood. Beatriz was not at home; at that very moment she was sitting in a hospital corridor outside the room where her daughter lay dying. Rosa had tried to stop the men, but received a rifle butt in her chest that had left her speechless and gasping for air; after they were gone, she gathered up the dog in her apron and cradled her so she would not die alone. The men took a quick look through The Will of God Manor, terrifying the residents and nurses, but did nothing when they realized that the frightened old people lived on the fringes of life and had nothing to do with politics. The following morning, the magazine offices were searched and everything in Irene Beltrán’s desk was requisitioned, including the ribbon from her ancient typewriter and her discarded carbon paper. Francisco also told the Captain about Evangelina Ranquileo, the untimely death of Sergeant Rivera, the disappearance of Pradelio Ranquileo and most of the Flores family, the massacred farmers; he told him about Lieutenant Juan de Dios Ramírez, and everything else that came to his mind, shedding the discretion that for years he had worn almost like a second skin. He poured out the rage that had been dammed up so long by silence; he painted a different picture of the government—a picture Morante had not seen because he was not inside the barbed wire circle—not omitting the tortured, the dead, the wretched poor, the rich who were profiting from the nation as if it were just another business. The Captain, pale and silent, listened to words that at any other time he would not have allowed to be spoken in his presence.
Francisco’s words exploded in Morante’s head, along with others he had learned in military training. For the first time, he found himself on the side of the victims of the regime, not among those exercising absolute power, and he was hurt where he was most vulnerable: through his Irene, motionless between the sheets; seeing her so wan, his soul shivered like a bell tolling for the dead. He could not remember a moment in his life when he had not wanted her, and he had never loved her more than now that she was lost to him. He thought of their years growing up together, his plan to marry her and make her happy. Silently, he spoke to her, telling her all the things he had not had an opportunity to say. He reproached her for her lack of confidence; why hadn’t she told him? He would have helped her; he would have opened the damned tomb with his own hands, not only to be beside her, but for the honor of the armed forces as well. Such crimes could not go unpunished or their society would go to the devil, and it would make no sense for them to have taken up arms against the previous government, accusing it of illegal acts, if they themselves were acting outside the law and common morality. There are only a few guilty of such misconduct, and they must be punished. The honor of the institution, though, is intact, Irene; in our ranks there are many men like me, men ready to fight for the truth, ready to dig through the rubble until all the filth is removed, even if they lose their lives doing it. You betrayed me, my dearest. Perhaps you never loved me as much as I loved you; maybe that’s why you turned away from me without giving me a chance to prove that I am not a party to such barbarism. My hands are clean, I have always acted in good faith—you know me. I was at the South Pole during the coup. My work is computers, blackboards, confidential files, strategy; I have never fired a regulation weapon except in target practice. I thought the nation needed a respite from the politicians, and that we needed order and discipline if we were to eradicate poverty. How could I dream that the people would despise us? How many times have I told you, Irene, that the process itself is painful but the crisis will be surmounted? Although now I am not so sure. It may be that it is time for us to return to the barracks and to reinstate a democracy. Where was I that I did not see that? Why did you not tell me in time? You didn’t have to be riddled with bullets to open my eyes—you didn’t have to turn away, leave me with more love than I can bear, with my whole life ahead of me without you. Ever since you were a little girl you have wanted the truth. That’s one reason I adore you so, and it’s also why you are lying there now. So still. Dying.
Francisco had no idea how long the Captain stood watching Irene. The light faded from the window and the room sank softly into shadow, blurring the objects in the room and transforming Irene into a pale blotch on the bed. Morante was saying goodbye to her, convinced that he would never again love anyone as he did her, and gathering strength for the task ahead. He bent to kiss her parched lips, pausing in his caress, recording in his memory her tormented face, breathing the odor of medications on her skin, imagining the delicate form of her body, stroking her rebellious hair. The Bridegroom of Death left with dry eyes, a determined expression, and a resolute heart. He would love Irene the rest of his life, and he would never see her again.
“Do not leave her for a moment, or they will come and finish the job. I can do nothing to protect her. You must get her out of here and hide her” were his only words.
“All right,” Francisco replied.
Their handshake was prolonged and firm.
* * *
Irene’s progress was extremely slow; it seemed at times she might never recover, and she su
ffered excruciating pain. Francisco assumed responsibility for all her bodily needs, as devoted in easing her pain as he had been in giving her pleasure. He never left her side during the day, and at night he lay on a sofa beside her bed. Normally he slept calmly, and deeply, but during that period his ear was as sharp as that of a night stalker. He was immediately awake if he noticed a change in her breathing, heard her stir or moan.