Blood Lake (7 page)

His office has a splintery wooden table, three wobbly chairs, a stack of water-damaged Bibles, a transistor radio that he must carry around with him, and a square window opening cut into the wall overlooking Dead Man's Swamp.

So good food and drink are about his only sensory pleasures.

“Let's go somewhere and talk. Come on, I'll buy you a beer,” I say.

“If you're buying, I'd rather have a whole meal.”

He doesn't pretend.

“Sure.”

“Give us an hour,” he tells Ismaél, who relays this information to the waiting souls. They do not move. I feel bad, but nobody seems to mind as we tromp down the creaky stairs.

He takes us to a wood-and-cane place with velvet paintings of tropical scenes and framed poster-sized photos of bare-breasted women that Padre Samuel ignores so successfully he practically
wills
them out of existence. The
salonero
looks us over, then leads us through a bamboo curtain to a deck out back, where we settle into a couple of dockside seats not quite high enough above the water, so that the smell reaches us if the wind's just right. Or wrong.

“This is a bad neighborhood,” I tell him.

“There are no good neighborhoods around here, Filomena,” says Padre Samuel. “You know that.”

He orders an appetizer of
ceviche de camarones con canguil
and a plate of
lomo a lo pobre
,
arroz con menestra
,
patacones y
dos cervezas
. The shrimp are still alive when they're brought past us into the kitchen.

The Padre tells me that his assistant Ismaél is a local boy who got caught stealing food from a nearby grocery store a few months ago. The Padre convinced the store owners to let him give the kid a chance, and he's been working out fine ever since then. This is the kind of work the Padre does best. But there are still a lot of old memories, prejudices, vendettas.

“And the law doesn't really touch people's lives most of the time here,” I say, observing the estuary's fluid borders.

“We are in a place that is often beyond the law,” he says.

I shake my head, disgusted at how little has really changed. “I have such a love/hate relationship with Ecuador.”

“That's because you have a love/hate relationship with
everything
,” he says, making me chuckle.

“True, but so do you. Because I've heard—”

“You've heard that a dozen socially conscious theologians have been getting death threats ever since they issued a report criticizing the government's collaboration with lawless paramilitary units and death squads.”

“Yes. Including you.”

“Yes, including me.”

I check on Antonia. She's looking over the railing, fascinated, studying the water's surface, hoping to catch a glimpse of a poisonous snake amid the primordial ooze.

“But those aren't the threats I'm worried about,” he says.

I look into his cool gray eyes with renewed urgency. “What do you mean?”

“Filomena, when the city first approved my permit to build a school here, I got death threats every day. The people living in this filth had never met a person from the outside who wasn't planning to take something away from them, and they were ready to fight, even for that garbage dump, because it was
their
garbage dump. They were afraid that once someone—anyone—got ahold of one piece of land, pretty soon they would lose everything.
Those
were real death threats.”

“The ones you're receiving now aren't?”

“Most of them are practical jokes. An initiation rite for snotty-nosed street kids. I know their voices. The threats they make are terrible enough, but there's no teeth in them,” he says.

“Yet all the priests who signed that report have been getting similar threats. That's a pretty elaborate initiation rite for a street gang. Whatever happened to hot-wiring cars?”

The Padre laughs.

“What about the ones that aren't practical jokes?” I ask. “Just in time to spoil the meal,” he says, as his first course arrives. I follow his lead as we clasp hands, bow our heads, and he prays, “Bless us, O Lord, and let us be thankful for all you have given us, for Thou art the Lord, whose word makes all things possible.”

“Amen.”

“And bless you, too, my daughter.
Audentes fortuna iuvat
,” he says, straightening up. “All right, here, take a look at this.”

He takes a yellow paper out of his pocket and tosses it across the table at me. I unfold it. It's printed on rough newsprint paper, but the ink hasn't smeared. It's a pamphlet attacking the squatters on the west side of the estuary, accusing them of bringing “every kind of vice to this place of natural beauty, fashioned by the hand of God for his believers to enjoy in its undeveloped state.” On the bottom of the last page his name is set in small caps,
FATHER SAMUEL CAMPOS
.

“What the hell is this?” I ask.

“Obviously, someone wants the squatters to believe that I'm a hypocritical, backstabbing what-have-you, and turn against me.”

A hundred questions press in on my brain at once: What would that accomplish? Who would benefit from it? Who wrote this? Where was it printed? What kind of paper is this? Why hasn't the ink smeared? What about the language? Are there any phrases he recognizes?

“Now, who is up to that level of planning and disinformation?” he asks me. “Certainly not the small-time thugs who rig the rackets along the marsh's edge, am I right?”

“I don't know, they're getting more and more sophisticated
these days. Anyone with a scanner and a color printer can copy just about anything if they want to.”

“Look around you, Filomena. Do you think anyone who had access to that kind of technology would waste it producing
this
kind of nonsense?”

“No, I suppose not. Can I keep this?”

“Be my guest,” he says, waving it towards me as if he wished the gesture would make it disappear from his physical plane of existence. He's got a bit of shrimp shell caught between his bottom front teeth. He removes it with his fingernail and spits it out on the floor.

“So what does this mean?” I ask.

“It means we're in more danger today than we were yesterday.”

“We who?”

“Everyone who signed that document. Padre Aguirre of La Merced, Padre León of La Esperanza, Archbishop Duarte of Riobamba—”

“Why? What's happening?”

He waits while the
salonero
removes the empty bowl and ceremoniously places the steaming
plato fuerte
in front of him.

“Please tell me, Father.”

He draws in a breath, lets it out slowly.

“You've been gone a long time, Filomena. The end of military authority didn't really change the basic rules of power,” Padre Samuel explains. “When I come to a
pueblo
, agents of this supposedly democratic government are already there waiting for me, to see what I am going to do. They think being a missionary means saying, ‘Christ did this, Christ did that, hallelujah, amen, go home.' I bring the
true
Gospel with me, and for a lot of people, the true Gospel is a real pain in the butt. But this never happened before, in spite of everything. It started with this administration, assigning secret police agents to keep constant watch on my movements. Someone is always following me.”

Oh, crap. Why didn't he warn me? I should have called first. But the Padre has no phone.

“So I've been seen?”

“You're probably being seen right now,” he says, eyeing the salt shaker as if it might contain a hidden microphone and video transmitter. “They're always waiting to catch me rubbing elbows in solidarity with a bunch of radical extremists.”

I'm beginning to feel like I should leave through the back door, which in this case would be a rather slimy swim.

“Don't worry, I won't tell them your name.” He smiles. “I've been followed before. I never gave it much thought.”

“Well, maybe you should start.”

“Don't let this sunny disposition fool you, kid. I know how deep this garbage goes. Every few years some would-be banana dictator comes along saying, ‘The country needs a strong leader,' and the first thing he does is start compiling a list of enemies to be eliminated, and the regular politicians are usually happy to keep a bulldog like him on a leash for a while, because he's taking care of all the nasty troublemakers while their hands are kept clean. I've seen your family on such a list.”

“Too late. They already got them all.”

“Your extended family.”

“My aunts and uncles? Are you serious? What did they ever do?”

“Not just aunts and uncles, Filomena. Cousins, nieces and nephews, stepsisters, the paperboy, the neighbor, the neighbor's cats. This isn't about what they did.”

“Whose list is that?” I demand.

“Doesn't matter. He's been out of power so long he couldn't raise a flag in a high wind.”

“
I want his name
.” I say it so sharply that several diners turn and look at me. Damn. I've got to learn a whole new level of keeping my mouth shut. “Sorry.”

“Yes, I can see that. Your hotheadedness is going to get you into trouble. I don't know if I should tell you this or not.”

“Tell me what?”

He looks at me.

“Okay, I'll take it easy. I promise.”

“See that you do,” he says, pouring the rest of his beer into his glass. “Because the city likes to keep things subtle, like tripping you up with paperwork and filing deadlines. But last week I was giving Mass near Balzar, and five heavily armed men from the North Guayas Militia stopped me afterwards and told me, ‘You better watch what you bloody say here, or we'll cut your effing throat.'”

“It's that damn report you wrote.”

“I'm just one of the signatories.”

“Yeah, I'll bet. Where can I get a copy of this thing?”

“I'll have Ismaél send you one.”

Jesús del gran poder
. I force myself to take several deep cleansing breaths, until my blood pressure comes down from the high two hundreds.

“Okay, I'm calm,” I say. “And I seriously think you should try to protect yourself, or at least keep a low profile, just until this commotion blows over. Or else I could act as your bodyguard. It's the least I could do—”

“
Señorita
Buscarsela,” he says sharply, then his voice softens. “Always trying your best to help,” he reassures me. “You would have made a good novice.”

I smile.

“But, my daughter, the call to serve is a lifelong sacrifice. There is no ‘just until this commotion blows over.' I have an evangelical mission to speak the truth, and I will
never
stop speaking the truth.”

We eat in silence for a while. Antonia's dropping bits of food into the water and watching the ripples, waiting for a bite.

The Padre takes a long swallow of beer and wipes his mouth. “You remember Alberto?”

Of course I remember Alberto. Padre Samuel sees that and nods. “He's playing around town with a group called Los Cuervos Rojos.”

The Red Crows. That used to be our unit's code name.

“I'll look him up,” I say.

“Do you remember Johnny?”

“Same as I'd remember being struck by lightning.”

He nods. “Yes, I suppose that God can strike you pretty hard sometimes.”

“Tell me about it.”

And the love. I remember it vividly—in camps, in fields, on horseback, on the run, warm, fleeting, hard and intimate.

“And I remember that he's dead.”

Silence.

I look deep into the Padre
's
eyes.

“Don't get yourself killed,” I say.

He doesn't respond.

Then: “Thank you for dinner, Filomena. Why don't you two come by during Holy Week and we'll put you to work in the soup kitchen?”

“Sure.”

“Now if you will excuse me, there are people back there who need my help.”

“Don't you ever rest?”

Padre Samuel tells me, “
Descansaremos en el cielo
.”

We'll rest in heaven.

Was there a man dismay'd?

Not tho' the soldier knew

Some one had blunder'd.

—Tennyson

IT'S OVERCAST.
The sky's that dreary, funereal gray that robs the morning of its color, as if someone has wrapped all the brightly painted walls in a layer of dull film and sucked a couple of pints of blood from all the people walking past. Every cloud wafting east across the vast Pacific gets stopped by the formidable obstacle of the Andes, and then it rains. The winter rains are not especially heavy, but they're steady. Persistent. It can rain every day for weeks. There are three types of weather in Guayaquil: hot and humid, hot and raining, hot and flooding.

I'm sitting among the empty beer crates, my elbows propped on a rustic desk piled high with receipts and ledgers, studying the pamphlet Father Samuel gave me. The words themselves offer little more than an outline of his alleged plans to expand his school and drive all the poor people in La Chala from their homes. It's the object itself that offers the most tantalizing clues about its origins. The rough newsprint is thick with absorbed moisture, and still the ink doesn't smear. So we've got high-quality oil-based ink on the cheapest paper available, which presents a discrepancy. Maybe not a significant one, since so many things in this place
are cobbled together from available parts like the bride of Frankenstein. But nobody likes to spend money unnecessarily, so this ink issue sticks in my mind as I assemble my own grisly collage across the desktop, consisting of high-contrast ink-jet printout describing the murders of two center-leftists named Paz and Segovia. This ink doesn't smear, either.