Open Pit (13 page)

That is as far as Danielle managed to get. When Pepe finishes reading, he looks up.

“
Lo siento,
” she says. I'm sorry.

Pepe points sharply towards the campsite, which is just out of view. He doesn't even bother leading Danielle there because he knows she won't run. She leaves him on his rock staring at the papers in his hands.

Before making her last turn though, she glances back. Pepe still hasn't moved. He looks frozen. What must it be like to read the story of your past, of the loss of your family? Danielle thinks of her own parents, of her mother's illness, and then of Aida, reading her letters from the
1980
s. Was it fair to leave, to force Aida to interpret them alone?

An unnatural sound interrupts these thoughts. A vibration. Very faint. So faint Danielle thinks she's dreaming it. Pepe is reaching for something — his phone. He puts its boxy form to his ear, answering. Danielle wants to scream for joy — for help. Someone is calling! But no. Whoever it is will be on Pepe's side. She should go. But her curiosity is physical. She takes a step off the path and into the bushes to watch.

How the same, and yet how different Pepe looks. Moments ago he was stiff with what Danielle read as pain and memory. Now she sees only need. Pepe barely moves as he receives whatever information is coming over his precious line out. She should be back with the group by now. She's pushed it too far. Also, she needs to piss. But Danielle feels that she has no choice but to keep standing where she is. She presses her legs together and waits.

Pepe shifts. He reaches into a pocket of his fatigues and pulls out folded paper, holds it up. It's her story! The first or this latest one? Impossible to tell. Pepe starts reading into the phone. He's sending one of her stories to the newspapers — or
TV
, the internet. Whatever. Part of Danielle is amazed that Pepe can bear to repeat those words about his life. Part of her can't help picturing her name attached to them.

Then Pepe touches a button and the call is over. Danielle wants to go, but something's wrong. Pepe seems perplexed and then flinches — with anger, Danielle thinks. He looks directly over at the spot where she stands. She doesn't breathe, makes herself as small as she possibly can, praying to each branch, each leaf between her and him to do its job as camouflage. Has she been seen? If so, Pepe will kill her, murder her while the others eat their dinners. But he just looks back at his phone. Danielle is about to get away when Pepe reaches into a different pocket in his pants. This time he pulls out the Swiss Army knife Danielle has seen him use before. Cursing under his breath, he flicks out one of its implements and presses the tip into the seam where the front and back components of the phone come together. He applies enough pressure that his mask bends at the mouth, the hole closing outwards. He keeps at it until
schwwiiick!
The front plastic cover pops off abruptly, landing among the leaves at his feet. To Danielle, this is tragedy. Why would Pepe ruin his perfectly good phone? He puts on his flashlight and scrutinizes the inner parts. After a moment, all of his body seems to relax. Pepe retrieves the cover and snaps it into place.

Danielle senses that he will get up at any moment, and so she moves, letting tree branches pull against her as soundlessly as she can, returning towards the shed. She tells herself that Pepe will not hear or even think of her. As she goes, she plays back everything she's seen. Why check inside the phone? And then she knows — for no reason except years of watching police procedurals: he thought it was bugged, that someone was tracing him, someone he doesn't trust. Who? Rita? Danielle cannot imagine Rita trying such a sophisticated ploy. Who else? Pepe's contact out there in the world — the one calling him? But that makes no sense at all. The contact is almost certainly someone like the delegation's bus driver, Ramón, obviously paid to lead them into a trap. Or like the spies who sold out Pepe's family. People in need of money.

Unable to determine the object of Pepe's distrust, Danielle is left with a strange feeling that takes her some time to identify. It's pity. She pities the man who has taken her captive. His aloneness, his history. She wills the feeling away. She doesn't need Stockholm syndrome on top of everything else. But Danielle also knows firsthand how distrust can make you crazy.

By the time Pepe returns to the shed, Danielle is sitting down, having already wolfed down half the food on her plate. He looks around for her, finding her as she knows she is: pale and sweaty, sick with fear, about to piss her pants. But he must assume this is a consequence of what she's just heard about his life. Pepe's eyes only rest on her a moment before he snarls at the others, then goes back out. Ten minutes later, Delmi comes in. That didn't take long. Everyone knows they're sleeping together. No one cares. Danielle finally gets permission to urinate. Returning, she sits down to share the silent anxiety of the group over the walk they know begins momentarily. Will it be harder? Rockier? What happens if someone breaks an ankle?

Finally, Pepe reappears. The sex must be working for him because he's looser. He walks directly over to Pierre, tears off his gag unceremoniously and cuts his wrist bindings. “
Vamos,
” he says, and everyone tries to overcome their surprise to scramble into line, retying boots and hauling on their packs. Pierre is last to get going. Danielle turns back and sees him running a hand delightedly over his lips like they're brand new.

June 14, 1980

HAPPY BIRTHDAY NEELA!!

Do you believe it? A quarter century! Who knows, maybe I was already too old to take this trip on. I'm bored, Neela. The faction controls my entire life. I need permission to go anywhere, do anything. But they're so disorganized, nothing ever happens when it's supposed to! I end up sitting around reading. If it wasn't for that American journalist I told you about, who left me some paperbacks, I'd be reduced to reading canned food labels.

The other day I was cutting my toenails, eating a banana, thinking: aside from the food, the diarrhea and the bugs, I could be anywhere. What am I doing here?? I'm still gathering material, sure. But it's like being allowed to add one piece to a puzzle per week. And can I just add that a lot of people in this faction are quasi-literate at best? I hear you cringing. I guess I thought it would be idealists and visionaries all around. But I've only got Sosa and Adrian to talk to, and Adrian's not here right now, as you'll have guessed by my mood.

DB

THURSDAY
APRIL 7

12:50 PM
. San Salvador

Aida is riding in the backseat of an overly air-conditioned car between Ralph Joseph and Sylvie Duchamp. Having watched the kidnapper's video an unhealthy number of times, Aida notices that Ralph has the same jaw and the same high forehead as his niece, the hostage named Tina, while Sylvie, so tall and freckled, bears only a passing resemblance to her son, Antoine — unlike Sylvie's husband Benoît, seated in the front, who's a dead ringer for Antoine.

Ralph clears his throat loudly. “Bad drivers,” he says, shaking his head at traffic.

Aida agrees. She's already seen two motorcycles riding on the sidewalk, one with an entire family arranged on it. And there are endless run-down buses spewing black clouds of diesel fumes, grinding their gears. Every so often she also spots a luxury vehicle, and even one candy yellow Hummer rolling calmly forward in a far lane, which, to Aida, is even more jarring.

“They need some truck inspectors around here,” Ralph adds.

Aida has overheard him say that this is what he does for a living — truck driving. Ralph wears large, dark sunglasses and a shirt with a soft collar. He smells strongly of cologne. He seems as uncomfortable to be here as Aida is, like he would prefer to be alone, or at least to be the one driving. The man currently behind the wheel is named Pedro. Marta Ramos said he's trustworthy. She claims he was once a guerrilla commando and can respond to any problem, traffic-induced or otherwise. Seems far-fetched. Pedro is slight, dressed in a faded denim jacket, jeans and a baseball cap. His teeth aren't good. Not the picture of a fierce guerrilla — although Aida admits to herself that she's not the expert on what Salvadoran guerrillas looked like, on people like that man her mother fell for, Adrian.

“There's a lack of respect for life,” says Sylvie, looking at Aida, but responding to Ralph's comment about truck safety. “In poor countries, that's the way it is. You were so brave to come, Aida.” Sylvie pats Aida's knee. “Foreign Affairs, they don't want us here, you know.
Espèces de bureaucrates
.” She says this like a bureaucrat is the worst thing a person can be.

“They
don't
want us here,” says Benoît, repeating his wife's view exactly, as he has already done more than once. He twists in his seat, wide-eyed. “They know we're going to cause trouble. Put pressure. We're going to fight until they shut that
maudite
mine down for an excavation.”

“Exhumation,
chérie,
” says Sylvie, trying to smile.

“People need to be buried properly,” says Ralph, without turning from his window. He and Antoine's parents rarely communicate directly. Aida wonders if this has to do with Ralph being Native. She has no experience with Native men — not much with Quebeckers either. She's curious about what the other families make of her.

“Isn't it
ironique,
” says Sylvie, casting the word like a stone, “that someone who says he wants to find his family would threaten other people's families?” She is truly stuck on this irony and has closed a well-manicured hand over her mouth as if to keep from crying over the contradiction. Aida gently points out to her that she has lost one of her earrings, but Sylvie just shakes her head. Up front, Benoît gives his wife a sympathetic look, then returns to staring at a composite photo of the hostages, made up of stills from the kidnappers' video. It's been printed on the front page of a local newspaper that's folded on his lap. He turns to Pedro. “He's our only son,” he says in French-sounding Spanish.

Aida looks away. She doesn't like Benoît's pleading or the stills. Her mother looks so awful in those shots, so haggard. By now, everyone in Toronto will have seen the video. And those who also know Aida's background, how little Danielle participated in her upbringing, have probably found reason to further pity her. Aida wishes she could avoid all this press.

Which would be very difficult right now, with Benoît thumping the newspaper, trying to force a reaction from Pedro, who finally concedes with a friendly sniff. Benoît still doesn't seem satisfied, which Aida finds sad. She can see how helpless he feels. They're all helpless. But Aida knows she's even more so, because she can't say for sure that a reunion with Danielle will make her or her mother happy. Aida is here on a meagre hope. To meet a different Danielle, to be a different kind of daughter, to talk in person about the letters and move past them. Excavating their authentic selves and all that. It's a long shot.

She stares out the window. Heaps of garbage appear every so often by the side of the road. When the car is stopped by a haphazard-looking roadwork crew digging a huge, muddy hole in the middle of the street, Aida glances up an embankment and sees a group of five children in school uniforms but no shoes leaning out the doorway of a tin and wood shack. Further on, a tree glitters, bits of debris hooked among its sparse branches.

Though she has no sense yet of the geography of the city, Aida guesses they must be nearing its centre when the road suddenly curls around and is squeezed into a single lane between the walls of buildings blackened with soot. Every inch of the sidewalks they pass is suddenly covered with goods for sale. Pirated
DVD
s, Mayan-themed plastic and wooden jewelry, massive stacks of newspapers (her mother's face on many of them, she marvels), sweets, hair products,
TV
antennae, religious icons. People cross in front of the car frequently. Each time, Sylvie says, “
Dieu Seigneur!
” Ralph shakes his head and Pedro brakes. They turn another corner and Aida's eyes go wider. The view has opened up. Across a large, busy plaza that includes a garden and an equestrian statue is a white building with two narrow bell towers. The cathedral.

Pedro moves the car gently to the side, careful not to kill anyone, which Aida can see is a challenge. They stop. Sylvie immediately grabs the door handle, but Pedro says quite firmly in decent English, “Please. Wait.” Sylvie throws Aida a look that says she's not pleased to be told what to do by this man, but they all remain seated until another man, who looks a little like Pedro, short and unremarkably dressed, appears at the driver's side door. Pedro gets out, keeping a hand up to indicate that his passengers should hold on a moment longer. He looks around for whatever or whoever could be a threat, Aida supposes, and the other man takes his place behind the wheel.