“Lovers and sons and daughters, too.”
She shook her head, coughing, stubbed out the cigarette. “Not so important. You can find another lover, give birth to another child.”
“You mean, you'd sacrifice your child?”
She stroked the grass. She spoke as if she were on stage. “It doesn't take much to break a man-made law. A little dust, that's all. So what can we do, AgustÃn? We can follow orders and do nothing. But aren't there other demands? You've been back to your people. Don't they need our help?”
I didn't move. She stared at me, her face swollen. The path her tears had taken shone down her cheeks. In a hurt voice, she said, “AgustÃn, do you have a reason for not telling me about your journey?”
I had been concerned to protect Yolanda from knowing the things which churned me inside. My eyes fastened on her ankle and the scar an inch or so above her boot where the leggings had pushed up.
“I'm not who you think I am. I've deceived you.” I nodded at the Teatro. “I'm like one of the photographs in there. Laura may have told you I was a lawyer, but I'm not.”
I couldn't reveal to her the work I did, but it involved lies, violence, death. I had been engaged in it when I returned to La Posta. I kept back the details of Father Ramón's murder, but not the church massacre, nor the communal grave at the airstrip, nor the people beating their pan lids along the eucalyptus avenue.
“They never found me, nor did their dogs. I can only think it's because I had changed my clothes.”
I told her how I had lain, tucked under a lip in the crevice throughout that cold night, my clothes damp with urine and insects crawling over my face, under my shirt. At sunrise I climbed out of the hole, my arms and legs aching. I was filthy.
After washing in the river, I walked back to the village. During the night I had made a decision. Because of it I had to move with extreme care, so that neither the Mayor or the army would discover my presence.
I wasn't going to leave La Posta until I had gathered depositions.
“People were too scared to talk to begin with. But when word got out it was AgustÃn from the farm, they filled Lazo's surgery. I didn't like to think how many of those faces had chased me the night before.”
I spoke still to her ankle. I was conscious of my hand jerking in the air and the ice cream melting, running down between my fingers.
“For many, this was the first time anyone had paid attention to them since they'd been at school. They reverted to the elementary habit of raising their hands to speak. One old lady, no longer able to walk, told how three soldiers had escorted her to the far end of a field and raped her, beginning with the officer.”
Yolanda took the stick from my hand and poked it into the earth.
“Another woman lost her son when soldiers found the toy gun he carried for the Independence Day Parade.”
She rested her hand on my hand, the ice cream sticking her skin to mine.
“There was a woman holding a baby, born as a result of a rape she'd suffered on a previous invasion by the military. She'd been asked for her identity card. The soldier had ripped it up, put the pieces in his mouth, eaten them. He had repeated his demand. âWhere's your identity card?'”
Yolanda raised my sticky hand to her lips. She spread out the fingers. One by one she inserted each finger into her mouth and licked it clean.
The air went still and in that instant something altered between us. It was as unsuspected as a conversion, and as explosive.
Absent-mindedly I rubbed a damp finger over her eyebrows, down her cheeks. She pressed her head to my knee. Her face had a cracked look. Neither of us said another word, but when we got to our feet, she was no longer Laura's teacher.
Much later I contacted Sucre.
“Still no luck with that number,” he said.
“It must be on the computer.”
“The exchange is down, sir. Lorry-bomb.”
“If you hear anything, call.”
I had collected the car from where I'd parked it behind the shopping arcade and driven home. The lights blazed in our street. On the night of my wife's presentation, Ezequiel had decided to be charitable.
I could hear Sylvina talking. I closed the door softly behind me. Reflected in Laura's mirror, six ghostly visitants sat chin up in a line, towels bibbed under their necks.
Sylvina was saying, “You risk tragedy if you mix different products from different cosmetic companies.”
“I've just spent a lot on a new Estee Lauder.” Marina's voice.
“Well, you could try Sally Fay's under-eye cream and see how you like that.”
“We're not supposed to mix, you said.”
“I was thinking of having a facelift,” another said, doubtfully. “Like Marina's.”
“Then I suggest before you undergo the knife, Consuelo, you try this alpha-hydroxide cream. It works something like an actual facelift â it's the most revolutionary product we've created.”
“It does exactly what?”
“It will protect you against environmental damage. It will combat free radicals. It's even got Vitamin E. Here, put a little under your eyes. No, let me help you. Maybe on your chin, I see a little blemish there.”
She took up position behind the next chair.
“Maria, you have reddish undertones to your skin so we're going to use this colour to even them out. Yes, it does seem a little green, but don't be scared . . . Oh, Agustin â”
“Don't get up, don't get up.” Six hands gesticulated from beneath their towels. “How's it going?”
From the chairs an uncertain chorus. “How do we look? Horrible?”
Necks extended, they peered at Sylvina's husband. My unpredictable hours, my weekend shifts, my unexplained absences in the countryside, ensured that many of them could barely remember what I looked like.
I gave an enriching smile of encouragement. “You're going to be angels.”
Patricia said tartly, “If there's a blackout, we'll need to be.”
I mumbled my excuses and went into the kitchen. Since leaving Yolanda I felt hungry. I toyed with the sandwiches Sylvina had made for her guests.
My appearance, far from discomposing the women, had relaxed a tension. I heard them swapping blackout stories.
Patricia had come home ten days before to find her angelfish belly up. The filter had gone off and it had died of heat and suffocation.
Margarita, a cheerless woman who complained about bleeding gums, had come home to find the freezer thawed and already squirming with maggots. “They'd hatched in the beef â so there was not only this bad smell, but the meat was alive!”
Tanya's husband had not come home at all, having started an affair with a total stranger with whom he had been stuck for three hours in a lift.
Sylvina spread her lotions.
“Now this is a really good defence against skin fatigue”
Patricia said, “This old man, he was directing the traffic in his pyjamas.”
“It goes on like silk, see, and it doesn't have to be reapplied.”
“There are characters who like to direct the traffic,” said Marina. “In Miami, the nut-houses were full of them.”
“It'll give you a more youthful appearance.”
“Daddy!” Laura's head appeared at the door. “Those aren't for you.”
I sprang up. I wanted to make peace with her.
“Someone's on the phone,” she said, writhing away from my kiss.
Sucre had an address.
“1128. That one!”
He'd collected me in the Renault. Behind us Sergeant Gomez and three others sat in a van we'd borrowed from Homicide.
“Tell them to overtake and park the other side.”
Sucre spoke into his handset. The van crept past. Its headlights uprooted a tree outside the house, kaleidoscoping its shadow-branches against the blue stucco.
Santiago's last resort in an emergency was a flat-roofed, single-storey building five minutes' walk from the sea. Paint curled from the wall in page-sized sheets. The shutters, unvarnished and lopsided, were closed. No one had cared for 1128 Calle Tucumán in a long time.
“Not much squeal on the place,” said Sucre. “Lease ran out in February. Until then rented to a Miguel Angel Torre. Says he's a poet on his lease form.”
“Where's Torre now?”
“We're looking for him. But someone's paying the bills. Electricity and telephone haven't been disconnected.”
The van drew into the kerb fifty yards beyond the house. Opposite, boys threw stones at a beer bottle on a low wall. One boy, spotting our car, detached himself and loafed towards us. He stopped some way away, trying to look uninterested. The radio in the car came alive.
“What's that up there?”
“A cage, it looks like.”
I took the binoculars. A wire coop on the roof fluttered with birds.
“Stake it out for a day or two, sir?”
“No.” Santiago might have alerted them. I lowered my gaze. Sprayed on the door in grey paint was the name of a novelist who had stood for president.
“Ask Gomez what he sees.”
Sucre spoke into the radio. In the van someone, not Gomez, was saying, “. . . she promised she'd clean my straw if I let her go.”
“Gomez, what do you reckon?”
Gomez came on. “Light in the yard at the back, sir. Otherwise no movement.”
To me, Sucre said, “Go in now?”
“Tell Gomez to drive round the other side and keep watch. There might be a garden they can escape from.”
I heard a snarl in the air. A helicopter tilted northwards into a sky scratched with red fireworks.
“Red, what's that mean?”
“No one's worked out the colours, sir. Yesterday they were shooting blue. The day before, green.”
All kinds of confusion had been going on when he left the headquarters. Roads piled high with burning tyres. Windows smashed. Stores looted.
“The General reckons some enormous piece of shit is floating down the pipeline.” He took the binoculars and raised them to his eyes.
We watched the street, waiting for Gomez to radio back. The boy knelt in the road twenty yards away and re-tied the laces on his gym shoes.
“The General, you won't recognize him, sir. Calderón and Lache, they treat him like he's garbage. Cut him out of everything.”
He unwrapped something from a sheet of newspaper. “Pear, sir?” They'd come from his farm.
A shutter opened in the house next to us. Through the window I saw a girl in a rugger shirt. One arm raised, she leapt to touch a slowly revolving fan. She reminded me of Yolanda. Everything did. A laugh floated out and a fat man in a vest appeared at the window. He leaned on the sill, glass in hand. Give his red nose a twist, I thought, and it would come off. After a while he stopped laughing and turned back to the room.
I ate my pear, concentrating on the girl, wondering why she wanted to touch the fan like that, when my vision was blocked by a hideous face. Sucked to the car window, the lips of its distorted mouth moved down the glass.
“Beat it!” Sucre, throwing the newspaper over his pistol, reached across me and slapped the glass
“Can't I stand here?” The boy's voice, faint through the glass, sarcastic.
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Just beat it.”
His gaze roamed over our laps. Then he pushed himself upright. He sauntered back to the others, on the way stopping to pick up a stone. I heard the tinkle of shattered glass, followed by a shout. Then a quietness settled over the street. A quietness which terrified.
Gomez radioed that he was in position. A firework exploded, hidden by the roofs. Sucre, fidgeting with his pistol under the newspaper, said, “Ezequiel, if he's inside, I'm going to stop his clock for him.”
If, behind those shutters, we did find Ezequiel, how tempting to believe it would cease overnight â the shooting, the murders, the knives at our throats â and the days would be unsoured and Sylvina could take Laura to the beach and buy her a balloon or polish her toenails in the sun. But Edith would not have handed out Ezequiel's number to a bit-player like Santiago.
“What's that?” I said.
“Sounds like a dog at a dustbin.”
“Let's go.”
Filling the house was the smell of a burned filter from a cigarette crushed into a mug. The television set was warm and the door to the yard was open. A lamp on the porch swayed in the breeze from the beach.
Sucre barged back in from the yard, followed by Gomez.
“They were tipped off, sir. We should have gone in immediately.” He smashed his foot into the door.
I ordered Gomez to round up the boys in the street, then went through the house. Alerted by Ezequiel's thousand eyes, whoever had been here had left in a panic. Clothes jettisoned over a narrow iron bed; on the kitchen table a tin of peaches, half-empty beside an architecture magazine; in the front room, stacked on top of the television set â three video tapes.
A stepladder led through a hatch on to the flat roof, from where I watched Gomez running down the empty street. I waited, looking at the fences and rooftops. In the cool, dry night no shadows moved.
My presence had disturbed the birds in the cage. Agitated by the fireworks, they clawed against the wire, opening and closing their cramped feathers. I had assumed they were doves or pigeons, but now I saw that they were parrots. Raging, impervious to the screeching and scratching and clatter of wings, I heaved the cage to the edge of the roof and I pushed.
When I went downstairs, the ruined green wings flapped blood over the porch, and dying birds sang their pain through smashed beaks.