The Goodbye Kiss

    THE ALLIGATOR
WAS GENTLY BOBBING BELLY-UP. It'd been picked off because it started to get too
close to the camp, and nobody wanted to lose an arm or a leg. The sweetish
stink of decay mingled with the scent of the jungle. The first cabana stood
about a hundred meters from the clearing. The Italian was calmly chatting with
Huberto. He felt my presence. He turned and grinned at me. I winked, and he
resumed talking. I came up behind him, took a deep breath and shot him in the
back of the neck. He collapsed on the grass. We grabbed him by the arms and
legs and threw him beside the alligator. The reptile belly-up, the Italian face
down. The water was so thick and stagnant that blood and scraps of brain sluggishly
formed a spot no bigger than a saucer. Huberto took the gun from me, slipped it
into his belt and with a nod signaled I should get back to the camp. I obeyed,
even if I wanted to stay a little longer and stare at the body in the water. I
didn't think it'd be so easy. I rested the barrel on his blond hair, careful
not to touch his head, avoiding the risk that he might turn round and look me
in the eye. Then I pulled the trigger. The shot was abrupt; it made the birds
take off, I felt a slight recoil, and from the corner of my eye I saw the
chamber of the semiautomatic slide back and load another round. My eyes,
however, were focused on his neck. A little red hole. Perfect. The bullet
exited the forehead, ripping open a ragged gash. Huberto watched him die
without moving a muscle. He knew what was going down. The Italian had to be
executed, and Huberto offered to lure him into the trap. For some time now he'd
been a problem. At night he would get blind drunk and abuse the prisoners. The
comandante called me into his tent the evening before. He was sitting on a cot,
turning over a huge pistol in his hand.

    "It's
a nine caliber," he explained, "Chinese make. An exact copy of the
Browning HP. The Chinese copy everything. They're careful, meticulous; if it weren't
for the ideograms, you'd take it for the real thing. But the mechanism ain't
worth shit. It jams at mid-clip. Perfect in appearance but weak inside… just
like Chinese socialism."

    I
nodded, feigning interest. Comandante Cayetano was one of the original
guerrilla cadres. And one of the few who survived. Now in his sixties, he wore
a long, thin goatee just like Uncle Ho, and just like the Vietnamese leader he
was long and thin. The son of a landowner who raised sugar cane, he chose to
take up the cause of the poor and the Indios when he was young. Always stuck to
the same line. Boring as hell, but macho. He definitely didn't call me over to
jaw. He never did. He was never especially nice to me.

    "Kill
him," he said, handing me the pistol. "One shot should do it."

    I
nodded again. I didn't show any surprise, didn't even ask who I had to kill. It
was obvious.

    "Why
me?" was the only question I allowed myself.

    "Because
you're Italian too." He spoke with a vicious tone that wouldn't stand any
backtalk. "You came here together, and you're friends. It's better if this
thing stays in the family."

    I
nodded again, and the next night I pulled the trigger. Nobody in the camp said
a thing about what happened. They were all expecting it.

    That
was the sum total of my guerrilla experience, that double-crossing execution.
Killing somebody who, like me, had decided to dedicate his life to the cause of
a Central American people. To words. Fact is, we were two pricks filled with
delusions of grandeur, who ran away from Italy and the stuck-up babes at the
university, pursued by an arrest warrant for subversive activities, among a few
other petty offenses. Not counting the bomb we planted in front of the offices
of the Industrialists' Association. It killed a night watchman, some poor
bastard about to retire. He spotted the bag, climbed off his bicycle and made
the mistake of poking his nose into it. From the newspapers we learned he
passed by every night. We simply didn't check beforehand; we were much too busy
bragging at the bar about operations others had carried out. A girl I'd been
with a couple weeks decided to come clean half an hour after her arrest, and
she squealed on us. In a flash we crossed the French border. In Paris, a year
later, when we heard we were sentenced to life in prison, we looked into each
other's eyes and decided to play hero. Except the jungle wasn't the Latin
Quarter or Bergamo, let alone Milano. And the enemy, if he captured you, didn't
throw you in jail but skinned you alive from your ankles up. We arrived full of
enthusiasm and healthy revolutionary fervor, but it took us a week to discover
a guerrilla's life is utter hell. Luckily we always stayed behind the front
lines. Unlike those silent Indios, we didn't have the balls to confront the
dictatorship's rangers and their American instructors. The Indios never smiled.
They lived and died with the same expression. My friend gradually went out of
his mind. He started to drink and play weird games with the soldiers the Front
captured in ambushes. I'd warned him certain failings weren't appreciated in
those parts, but by then he'd stopped listening to anybody. During the day he
moved like a robot, waiting for night.

    I
exploited the arrival of a Spanish TV crew to put some distance between myself
and Comandante Cayetano, the danger of combat and the cause. I didn't give a
damn anymore. A short fat-assed journalist had her eye on me. I led her to
think she'd have a thrilling affair with one of the last fighters in the international
brigades. After a few passionate nights, she requested and received the
comandante's permission to have me assist her in the interviews. I escaped to
Costa Rica, crossing the border on foot. I promised to join her in Madrid. But
I needed a passport, and the thought of returning to Europe with a life
sentence hanging over my head still seemed a pointless risk. I looked for work
on beaches. European investors, particularly Italians, had begun building
hotels on the most beautiful, pristine strips. There were no contractual
obligations, no town-planning schemes; licenses were granted through a
convenient system of bribes. An earthly paradise metamorphosed into a cement
paradise. In addition to Italian, I spoke Spanish and managed quite well with French.
I was hired as a bartender in a hotel owned by an Italian woman. She was
loaded, in her forties, separated, no kids. A Milanese prone to affairs. The
kind of woman who knows how to handle people. When I introduced myself, she
gave me the onceover. She must've liked what she saw. But she wasn't stupid.
She told me straight out I was clearly a terrorist on the run. One of the
shitheads who'd destroyed her car to construct a barricade right in the center
of Milano. She remembered the date. So did I. Three days of rage. The city
stank of gasoline and tear gas and two deaths, Varalli and Zibecchi. I reeled
off a lie that was pathetic but credible. She advised me not to act up; the
Costa Rican police had no sympathy for political refugees. The place did seem like
paradise to me, compared to the jungle, and for the first time after my escape
I could entertain the idea of putting down roots. My fate was in my boss's
hands, however, and slipping into her bed whenever it was vacant seemed the
best method of keeping the situation under control. Her name was Elsa, and she
wasn't bad-looking. Of course, women who were much more beautiful-and much
younger-strolled the beaches. But I wasn't in a position to indulge in certain
luxuries. She played hard to get and made me suck up to her for two months
before I could kiss her. She doubted the sincerity of my love, as well as
almost everything I told her. Lying to her was easy, and it gave me a kick: it
let me construct a different identity. Like a fake passport. Except on the
inside. It let me live long stretches without squaring accounts with my real
life, which I began to hate. That frightened me. For too long my life was based
on declarations of intent I never carried through. For lack of courage. And
deep down I always knew it. But I had no problem lying to myself, not to
mention the people at bars and meetings. They weren't all like me. Just the
opposite. I formed part of that minority who found the movement a site of
camaraderie and freedom. Things my family always denied me. If I imagined the
price was life in prison and murdering a friend, I would've stayed put at home,
stomaching my father's bullshit, my mother's failings, my sisters' bigotry.

    Elsa preferred
to screw in the morning, before getting breakfast for the guests. I always
thought she preferred the morning because she didn't have to spend a lot of
time having sex. She was always in a rush and totally without imagination. An
orgasm, a kiss on the forehead, a cigarette. I first cheated on her two years
later with another forty-year-old. A Florentine with her husband and
sister-in-law in tow. On the pretext that her complexion was too fair and
delicate, she spent most of her time perched on a barstool. Gin and tonic plus
an endless desire to chatter. She was a little overweight, but she had a pretty
face and a look in her eyes that said she was up to no good. She wasn't the
only one; the others were all younger and more attractive. But I was drawn to
the forty-year-olds. The thought of worming my way into their lives and toying
with their weak spots made my head spin. I betrayed Elsa with no regrets. The
others were a cinch. In those days I was little more than thirty and, like Elsa
used to say, a handsome piece of ass. The bar was a strategic spot, and you
didn't need a bunch of irresistible come-on lines. It was enough if your
glances were just a bit shifty, if your smiles were polite and defenseless and
if you were ready and willing to listen.