“
El noticiero
, but I write for American papers, too.”
Masked as they are, Alma can tell they are happy to know they have gotten the widespread attention they wanted. “What's your name?” The red bandanna seems to be the one doubting Thomas.
Mariana, Alma almost says, but stops herself. Mariana is attractive. The newspaper is probably savvy, prints the journalist's picture by her column. Not even by a long stretch can Alma pass herself off as the honey-skinned, thirty-something, black-haired celebrity. “Isabel,” she tells him, hoping he is not a detail man who will ask for a last name
that won't match up with whatever Isabelâif there is even an Isabel writing for
El noticiero
.
“Isabel,” he repeats the name, looking her over with narrowed eyes, as if assessing the probability of Alma being an Isabel who is a journalist from
El noticiero
as well as an American paper. But there is convincing proof: the journal, the entries thankfully in English, so he can't read it and realize this is a private journal in which Alma talks about her feelings, her shock about Helen, her phone call with Lavinia, her saga novel that never got written, her buried antidepressants. But what seems to end all disbelief is the cell phone, which he must assume she uses to call in her columns to the newspapers. If he asks for further proof, Alma will just phone Tera and dictate a manifesto.
“I'd like to interview you,” she addresses the guy with the red bandanna, as he seems to be doing most of the shouting and bossing around. “Readers want to know what it is you wantâ”
“We told them what we want!” the guy snaps back.
“Remember,” Alma reminds him, her heart beating so loudly she is sure it is drowning out her voice, “you spoke with officials. I need the story direct from you.”
“Okay,” he says the word in English. “Okay.” He lets his gun fall to his side. “Take him out back,” he orders the young man handling Richard.
“Un momento.” Richard holds his ground. Alma beams him a look that pleads with him not to blow her cover. He beams back:
I'm going to kill you when this is over!
But he goes along, no doubt thinking Alma is part of some elaborate plot cooked up by the army with the help of U.S. advisers. “I want to ask about my wife,” he says in Spanish. “It is easier for me in English.”
He is not exactly given permission to speak in English, but on the other hand he is not shoved away. Alma speaks up in a flat, matter-of-fact voice as if the information she is communicating is nothing to her. “Your wife is well. She wanted to be by your side. She was told that she would be eating leftover turkey with you in a few days. She did not call your sons so as not to alarm them. She says she loves you and to just go alongâ”
“Ya!” the red bandanna is getting nervous at this much talk he doesn't understand. Richard is shoved down a hallway that seems to lead out onto a patio where the rest of the staff is being held. She can hear talking and movement from back there, a little radio with the overinflated voice of a DJ announcing the next bachata, then, of course, the voices of the patients calling out from their dormitorios.
“The first thing to tell the world,” the red bandanna tells her after his young comrades have taken up their posts at the windows, and he and Alma have sat down in two of the plastic chairs, the cell phone in the empty chair between them; the PowerBar seems to have been confiscated. “The first thing to tell them is that we are sick of being utilized. They come with their empty promises and build this fucking jodida clinic and bring in all the pájaros and putas so we all get sick, millones de dólares, to test their drugs and our children die because they cannot get medicina for a little fever that would cost us una fortuna to buy!”
Alma writes hurriedly, trying to keep up with what he is saying, to give a credible performance as a journalist. He is not very eloquent:
fucking fags and cunts
. If this is the best the group can do for a spokesperson, they are not going to get the following they need. But through the broken sentences and curses, Alma sees the little spark of human yearning. How can she blame him? She remembers telling Richard on their first date when he had explained what it was he did, consultancy for development projects in the triage nations of the world, that if she had been born one of the poor in her own homeland she would have had blood on her hands by now.
He had seemed startled to hear her say something so fierce. “But what would that accomplish?”
“Nothing,” she had agreed. “But I'd kill, I would, if that's what it took to feed my children.”
He had raised his brows and said nothing. Well, there goes a second date, she thought to herself. But she couldn't let it go. This periodic homeland rage that would crop up out of nowhere, even though she had been in the United States almost forty years, this feeling that
her own luckiness was off the backs of other people, not because her family had been exploiters but because the pool of the lucky was so small in that poor little place that God forgot. In the United States there was a larger pool of luck, and the overspill trickled down: extra toilet paper in the stalls, soup kitchens, social service programs, sliding scales, legal aid, free clinics, adjunct teaching posts and arts enrichment grants so that people like Tera, like Helen, like Alma before she lucked out with her novels and marriage to Richard managed to scrape by.
The young man seems to have run out of things to say. He is looking her over again as if he is reconsidering this whole interview idea, not sure it isn't some delay tactic. He wants his visa. Fuck the double-crossing town and its ass-kissing mayor. He gestures toward the village beyond the windows. “They get a little solar panel and a hole in which to shit with a zinc roof over their heads and they are as happy as little pigs.”
A few of the young men at their posts turn around to show their approval to their comandante. It must be a joke, worthy of repetition. “Happy as little pigs,” he addresses them, laughing. “Jacobo's little pigs.”
“So you are not representing the community, just yourselves?” Alma wonders out loud. She hopes it doesn't sound like a critique of his authority. It does seem like a question she should address to everyone, not just this jumpy guy, who seems to be the brawn, if not the brains of the operation.
“It is not just for us,” one of the young boys speaks up. His mask is from Killington, a chilling name, given the situation. His voice is vehement. Maybe he doesn't find the joke so funny. “If we go to the United States with our visas, it is to help our families.”
Alma doesn't have the heart to point out that Jacobo's group sells their souls for solar panels and latrines with zinc roofs, the comandante's group for visas, cigarettes, an interview with a journalist. In fact, she is glad they have a price. Otherwise what? Suicide bombers and plane hijackers? Desperation videos? A bloodbath?
“Does your group have a name?”
“We don't need a name!” The red kerchief's temper is tinder, and the wrong word a match. “Fuck having a name! So they can hunt us down. We're nobodies, nadies, the fucked-over and forgotten. Put that down.” He points toward her journal.
Obediently, Alma writes down
nobodies, nadies, fucked-over, forgotten
and holds up her journal as if to prove she has done his bidding. He reads it over, nodding.
“But won't you need names for your papers and visas?” Alma points out, trying to sound helpful. Maybe they will realize their demands are so implausible, the best deal they can strike is shortened prison sentences in return for turning themselves in and turning over all their hostages unharmed.
“They can make up whatever papers they want!” the young man states angrily. Alma can't help thinking of the general in the car, how he thought the americanos were genios, who could cure leukemia, make cell phones that work wherever on earth they wandered.
“We ask for these visas because we have no other opportunity,” the Killington ski-mask guy explains.
“But we will return!” The young man in the black kerchief who was guarding Richard has reentered the room. He has a thing or two to say to the journalist. “Con tu permiso,” he defers to the comandante, who is, after all, the one being interviewed.
“Of course, of course,” the red bandanna agrees in a gush that reminds Alma of that old line, “The lady doth protest too much.” “We are all brothers,” he adds, for Alma's benefit. He nods at her journal. She should write that down.
“We will come back,” the black kerchief asserts. It's hard to tell his age with a kerchief covering half his face, but she'd guess him to be in his twenties, pale-skinned, with dark, sad eyes and thick, curly black hair. “We will infect them with our questions!”
Alma's heart quickens. She had been feeling sorry for this misguided group of kids, like watching her chosen candidate be stupid in a televised debate. She had hoped to feel solidarity with them, but
their name-calling spokesman had made them sound like thugs, backwoods bigots, out for themselves only. Now the poet has arrived, and she feels a different kind of sorry: sorry for herself because she is not, nor could she ever be, one of themâshe knows too much, wouldn't for the world give up her lucky life with Richard in Vermontâwhich leaves her on the side without poetry, without a redeeming story. “What would those questions be?” she asks the black kerchief. “The ones you would come back and infect them with?” Strange word,
infectar
, but he picked it, not her.
“What would be those questions?” the black-kerchief man repeats, looking around the room as if inviting the others to answer. But they all look back at him waiting, even the red bandanna, whose right foot, propped on his left knee, is shaking impatiently. How did he get to be the leader?
“The questions are very simple. Why do we go hungry? Why do our people die of curable diseases? What is it that has excluded us? What is it that has isolated us?”
His voice is impassioned, throaty, as if he were on the point of tears. Were it not that here in this place, cunning qualifies any genuine feeling, Alma would do a Patty Hearst, throw down her journal and ditch Starr's cell phone, and say, I am with you, compañeros! But she is fifty, frightened, eager to get her husband out and return to Vermont where she feels they can at least live simply, doing minimal harm.
“Can I write that down as your ⦠statement.”
Statement
doesn't sound right. But Alma doesn't know the word in Spanish, or come to think of it in English, for that glimmering of hope she sees underlying all his statements.
“Is this our statement?” the black-kerchief poet asks, again looking around the room at his companions, then narrowing in on the seated leader with the shaking foot. By his tone, Alma is almost sure he means this as a rhetorical question.
But the red-bandanna leader takes up the question. “Our statement is that we want an opportunity to be a human being.” His blackkerchief comrade nods deeply as if their leader has said something
brilliant. “You can put that in your book,” the red bandanna adds with a touch of pride.
As Alma writes, the black-kerchief poet watches her with such awed, primitive attention that she is almost 100 percent sure he doesn't know how to read or write his own name. No wonder the other guy is the leader. “Is there anything else?” she asks, trying to include the red bandanna with a quick glance, but it is obvious she is asking the poet to continue.
“Everything we want my friend said, y ya. We can say too much. We don't have a platform like the politicians that come here every time there is an election. We don't stand for something that can be argued or taught in a book in a school. What we stand for is not an opinion, it is an intuition.”
Why? Alma wants to ask him. Why with such a soulful, beautiful message that would mobilize anybody who has a heart in this world, why did he do something so stupid, take over a clinic without a real plan, get mixed up with this leader who has dumbed down their discontent to a plea for visas? If he had only gotten hooked up with Richard instead of the red-bandanna guy. But then HI was in bed with Swan, and Richard was hanging out with Bienvenido and Starr and reps from whatever aid agencies divvy up the help at this end. This guy's hope couldn't get through so many goodwill handlers.
The red-bandanna leader bolts out of his chair. He seems to have grown impatient with all the talking. Where are their visas, their cigarettes, their breakfast and coffee? He paces back and forth, everyone watching him. “Didn't they receive our demands?” he asks Alma, as if she should know. After all, sending a journalist was on the list and here she is.
Alma shrugs. “I think they did. With the women, right?”
Another round of pacing, back, forth, the length of the room. When he catches the young boys watching him, he gestures with his chin for them to look to their posts. Then he gestures toward Alma's notebook. “We'll write them down this time. Our demands.”
In a heartbeat, Alma goes from journalist to amanuensis.
TO THE
AUTORIDADES: WHAT WE DEMAND
. U.S. visas are at the top. Cigarettes. Then meals: each meal delivered, one patient released; the staff and the rest of the patients will be freed after visas are in hand, safe conduct out guaranteed. Forgotten is the demand that Swan's drugtesting clinic be removed from the village, replaced by a health clinic for locals. Fuck the villagers, let those double-crossers get AIDS if they want to.
From time to time as they have been talking, there have been calls from the patients in the dormitories. Now there is an outcry, the loudest one yet. Someone has fainted. They need immediate medical attention.
“Shut those fuckers up!” the red bandanna shouts down the hall. Moments later, someone on the back patio fires what must be some warning shots in the air because after a long pause, the outcry starts back up again.