Blood Lake (5 page)

The Catholicism I knew as a child was brutal. Padre Samuel showed me a tolerant, progressive, activist Catholicism. He brought me back to life from the brink of self-destructive nihilism. I returned to Catholicism with Padre Samuel Campos because, he said, God always kept believing in me, even when I didn't believe in Him.

And now I can't sleep. There's not much rest for the vigilant, and nobody gets any sleep around here once they realize how much there is to be wary of.

And now I've got to see a priest.

El hombre es el único animal que puede ser desplumado más de una vez.

Man is the only animal that can be skinned more than once.

—Ecuadorian proverb

GUAYAQUIL
was founded on a tiny patch of flat swampland about one-eighth of an inch above sea level in the year 1538. No one knows why. Finding themselves surrounded by the ever-shifting boundaries of tidal estuaries, the first colonists built split-cane shacks on thick cane stilts to protect themselves from the rising waters of the heavy winter rains. Over the years they filled in the wetlands and built a city laid out in a grid that runs from the Guayas River on the east side to the estuaries on the west side.

It's still 1538 on the west side.

Wandering homeless people invade this muck-filled swampland and build sagging split-cane shacks on thick cane stilts. Then they gradually fill in the waterways with garbage and earth, settle in, and after two years you'd need an army supplied with tear gas, tanks, and bulldozers to get people out. Don't laugh. It's been done. But sometimes the people win. The district of El Guasmo on the south side of town started out with that kind of illicit invasion, and now four hundred thousand people are living there in cement-block houses with raised dirt roads and bus service to the city center. You'd need
two
armies to get them out. They've got the regular army outnumbered.

The district of La Chala is still in the unpredictable tide-water-and-stilts stage, which is why Padre Samuel built his school there on a piece of prime real estate called El Estero del Muerto. Dead Man's Swamp. It's as picturesque as it sounds.

I was going to go visit him as soon as I got up this morning, but my bowels had other plans. Homemade cane liquor will do that to you. Burnt toast and weak tea help, but not enough.

And remember, there's no running water.

Antonia looks at the charred crumbs on my plate and my sickly pallor, and asks, “What's the matter? Are you black toast intolerant?”

At least she gets a smile out of me. I explain that the term she wants is
lactose
intolerant. “It means you can't digest milk.”

“Oh. I always thought it meant you couldn't eat burnt toast.”

I need a strong stomach to face La Chala, the Padre, my past. Is Father Samuel seriously thinking of taking on the paramilitaries—the shadow warriors also marketed under the brand name of “death squads”? He's too old to tangle with the stomp-and-crunch brigade, although maybe that's the point. Maybe he feels he doesn't have a lot of days ahead of him as it is. Still, I feel that way from time to time and you don't see me signing up for any suicide missions.

I dig out yesterday's paper and look at the article again. The newsprint is smeared from too many sweaty palms handling it, causing the red ink from the photo to bleed outside the box and into the text. The victims were Gustavo Paz, the National Democratic Party's candidate for governor of Guayas, and his assistant, Sonia Segovia. The NDP is an ever-so-slightly-left-of-center party that could probably be bought off or otherwise brought to compromise should they happen to win, so assassinating them doesn't seem to accomplish a whole lot politically that couldn't be finagled after the election. I've got to find out more about Paz and Segovia. Who were they? Roving bands of brigands don't use
Soviet-style assault rifles. For one thing, they're
really
hard to conceal under short-sleeved tropical shirts. And Sergeant Roca of the North Guayas Police—he must be a real prize, too.

There's been a sea change in Ecuadorian politics. I can almost feel the instability rolling and bubbling beneath my feet. It's one thing to have a sideline smuggling small arms and drugs, and exacting extortionary taxes. But if these clowns have got government backing … My stomach jackknifes and I suppress a wave of nausea. So I sit in the back of the store next to the fan with a damp towel on my head for the rest of the hour.

I certainly haven't heard about a resurgence of paramilitary activity, although to be frank, the only time Ecuador makes the news up North is when we get hit by another nasty caprice of nature or another humiliating political implosion at the national level.

And suddenly the sounds around me filter through, and I'm listening to César deal with a band of angry homemakers complaining about how the prices have risen again. A thin old man with an open shirt revealing a wintry tuft of white chest hair clinging stubbornly to his dark brown skin holds up a shaking ten-dollar bill that his son sent him from the U.S. César opens the morning paper to find out today's exchange rate, which is 4,450 sucres to the dollar, and counts out some money for the man, who buys a loaf of bread with a few thousand sucres. I remember when a loaf of bread was forty
centavos
—that is, forty hundredths of a sucre. They don't mint
centavos
anymore.

César tells me they don't even mint
sucres
anymore. The smallest coin is the fifty-sucre piece, worth about one cent. Fifty sucres! When I was a kid you could run away from home on that kind of money. Or at least hop a bus to the next province and stay hidden for a week.

By midmorning I'm strong enough to take Antonia around for a little light tourism. We board a bus with the windows removed, just open metal frames empty of glass, a common adaptation in this hot climate. It takes us downtown
and drops us in front of an open-air meat market, where hunks of raw red cow muscle lie ripening on the tile-covered tables. I gag and try to hold my breath as we push our way past the smell of slowly putrefying entrails, suppressing the urge to spatter the pavement with black streaks of partly digested toast. Ninety-eight degrees in the shade and no refrigeration will turn someone's dinner into an escapee from a horror film about flesh-eating zombies in about ninety minutes, but nobody else seems to notice.

I'm bent over, staring at a neutral crater on the moonscape gray pavement, until the tiny hairs in my inner ear stop spinning and I finally get my stabilizers back on-line. We cross the Parque General Vargas, more trapezoid-imprisoned greenery and pitted cement, past an American film crew taking fashion pictures of a skinny model wearing a Soviet army winter overcoat over what looks like underwear. She is draping her emaciated body across the main slab of a memorial marking the spot where three hundred patriots were butchered during the Spanish persecution of practically everybody. They are telling her to lean a little farther backwards.

We walk along the Avenida 9 de Octubre in the shadow of the winged column marking Ecuador's independence from Spain, towards the
malecón
, a seawall named after Simón Bolívar the Liberator, and the river's edge. Antonia watches all the ships go by, taking our choicest shrimp away to the best American restaurants. My family always says that the little shrimp that are left behind have more flavor, anyway. But I think they just need to tell themselves that.

I'm feeling better now, so we walk back along the wide
avenida
looking at all the shop windows. Uniformed guards with short-barreled shotguns protect ordinary household items like imported German electric juicers and Japanese television sets. There's a crowd of people in front of a display window, listening to five different TV voices at once.

“—I'm really a simple man, I don't need silverware,” says a light-skinned face on four screens, with white hair and mustache. It's hard to see clearly over all these shoulders. “I'm
happy with a paper plate, a plastic spoon, and some
guatita
with rice.”
Guatita
is a tasty dish, considering that it's a poor man's stew made out of cow stomach and peanuts.

“Are you saying you would save the country money by calling off the lavish state dinners?” asks an off-screen interviewer.

“
¿Quién es?
” I ask the man next to me.

He looks at me. He's got polished mahogany skin, straight black hair, bad teeth, a fairly clean shirt open to the navel against this heat. Underfed. “That's
gobernador
Segundo Canino,” he says. “He's running for president.”

Governor
Canino? Sure, I remember him. Ex–police chief of Babahoyo, appointed by his brother-in-law, the mayor, when he was thirty-seven years old and had absolutely no experience in law enforcement—unless you count time spent behind bars as experience in law enforcement. How the hell did he get to be a freaking governor?

“If he's elected—”

“It means four more years of the same shit,” says a robust man with a toothbrush moustache. A few others nod.

Another TV, another face, a black man wearing a suit and tie against the TV studio air conditioning, his dark eyes burning with intensity. A caption labels him as Jorge Hernández of the Popular Workers Alliance. He argues that despite the promises, Governor Canino will only continue the cruel, corrupt and disastrous policies of the current administration run by the Centrist Coalition. A polite way of saying, “Four more years of the same shit.”

“—while the industrialized economies of the world export their filth to us, in exchange for our richest products, our finest gold and oil, our best bananas, and our precious blood and labor.”

I stand on my tiptoes to get a peek. A big-screen image of Senator Ricardo Faltorra, Neoliberal Party candidate. With his high forehead sporting an imperious crown of wavy black hair and his long straight nose, he looks like the face on a Roman coin.

Three more TVs with Senator Faltorra's face, then five more showing the interview with Segundo Canino.

I turn to go, but the voice, the words, catch my attention:

“—under the Military Triumvirate, when nearly fifty bishops and priests were jailed for speaking out?”

“Absolutely not,” says Canino severely. “This new group of priests is getting involved in partisan politics. They were given the chance to retract their statements, and they did not. We must reaffirm that priests are prohibited from intervening in political matters.”

A couple of policemen are now standing by, wide-legged, watching the crowd.

“Come on, Mom, let's go,” Antonia protests.

“Yes. Let's go.” But something tugs at my retina from one of the store windows. A color computer monitor wrapping up the TV news with a dizzying collage of dueling logos. It's almost hypnotic.

“Mom?”

“Just a minute …”

I could probably dazzle and tease it out of them for free, but that takes time, plus I've got a precocious and extremely observant thirteen-year-old with me. So I take the blunt approach, and twenty dollars buys me twenty minutes on the Net. It's the damn
gringo
price, but that's what I get for acting like a damn
gringo
. Time is money, indeed.

I do a standard search on Gustavo Paz and Sonia Segovia of the National Democratic Party, pulling up their obituaries first. Not the first thing I'd like some stranger to come across when searching for clues to my life, but that's how these searches operate. Reverse chronological order.

Paz was a heavyset career politician in his fifties with thinning hair and a face prematurely wrinkled from too much drinking and too many cigarettes. The photo of Ms. Segovia shows a smiling young woman with light, bouncy hair and her whole life ahead of her. Jesus, this is never easy. I scroll back through some articles covering the campaign, and eyeball a few standard quotes about providing more roads
and schools and drinking water, certainly nothing to murder somebody over, but then I've always been a slow burn in that department. I don't really have time to check on all the details, so I print out a few sheets to look at later. The sons of bitches charge me a dollar a page.

Out in the big, wide world I'm a respected professional investigator. Here, I'm kitchen help, getting roped into spending a good part of my afternoon helping my aunt Yolita cut a fifty-pound sack of dried kidney beans into one-pound bags, then separating the pebbles and twigs from three pounds so that Antonia can wash and soak them for dinner. Aunt Yolita insists that Lucho Jr. take the afternoon off from the free dental clinic to go with us since La Chala is such a jagged neighborhood.

I tell her we can handle it, but she insists, even though there's some trouble at the store and it seems like they could use every hand they can spare. The new delivery has arrived, and the price of a hundred-pound
quintal
of rice has gone up forty percent since
this morning
. César starts charging 320 sucres a pound, and the fickle women narrow their eyes and accuse him of sucking their blood. He asks us to pick up a head of bananas on our way back; they're almost out again.