Guatemala – Journey into Evil. David Monnery
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once their mission had been accomplished. To see his uncle was the obvious answer, but his uncle had hardly been at home, and his aunt had been turned into a nervous wreck by his mere presence in the house. There would be no next time, Tomás decided. Or at least not until the war was won.
It was getting dark now, and even a couple of his fellow travellers were beginning to stir with impatience, muttering to each other in Cakchiquel. This wasn’t a language Tomás was fluent in, but the gist of the conversation was clear enough – where the fuck was the driver?
Tomás rearranged his legs on the wooden floor. Judging from detritus scattered across it, the truck had arrived at the Central Market that morning loaded with squash, but now, like the many others waiting nearby, it was empty save for those taking passengers back into the Western Highlands.
On the nearest truck three Indian women were wearing the traditional skirts of San Pedro La Laguna and conversing in his native language, Tzutujil. Tomás had grown up in Santiago Atitlán, another large village on the shores of Lake Atitlán, and thought perhaps he recognized one of the women. But he made no attempt at contact – it had been almost ten years since he had lived in his home village, and he had no desire to draw attention to himself.
The driver arrived at last, wearing the smile of several beers on his face. But his driving skills seemed unimpaired, and soon the truck was threading its way out of the capital and on to the Pan-American Highway. As it climbed the first of many winding inclines the last slice of setting sun was briefly visible between distant volcanoes, and then night descended, reducing the world to those stretches of tarmac, verge and cliff face which fell within the glare of the truck’s headlights.
Staring out into the darkness Tomás found himself studying a mental picture of his father.
Miguel Mendoza Xicay had been tall for an Indian, five feet nine inches by the American count, and he had worn his hair long, the way he believed their Mayan ancestors had always done. He had not been an educated man – how could he with no school in the village of his childhood? – and it seemed likely that he had been too good-hearted to understand the realities of life in Guatemala. The family had access to a little land on the slopes of the volcano behind the village, and they had grown beans, coffee, corn and various fruits. The prices they received were always derisory, and no money could ever be saved, but the family only rarely went hungry, and there was usually the additional cash the children earned from making and selling handicrafts to help them through the worst times.
Then the Army had come, and established a camp only a couple of kilometres outside the town. The amount of land available to the townspeople shrank as Indian deeds went mysteriously missing and other claimants appeared with deeds which the local Spanish-speaking authorities fell over themselves to approve. The local people protested and the most vocal swiftly disappeared, never to be seen again, either dead or alive. Rumour had it that most of them had been thrown from helicopters, still conscious, into the smoking maw of San Pedro.
Through all these troubles Miguel Xicay had tenaciously clung to the hope that somehow the Army’s behaviour was an aberration, that if the authorities only knew what was really happening then they would step in and put a stop to it. No one expected life to be fair, and no one expected the rich Ladinos to behave like true Christians, but he found it hard to believe that such a campaign of brutality and murder could be sponsored by a government.
It was no accident that the man whom Tomás’s father most admired was the local priest, an American named Stanley Rother. The father had arrived in Santiago Atitlán in the mid-sixties, and like Miguel Xicay he had watched the escalating brutality with a mixture of horror and disbelief. When the Army called a meeting of all the village leaders he had listened with mounting rage as the local commander blamed all the killings, the rapes, the tortured corpses, on the communist subversivos, and furthermore demanded that the villagers report any suspicious behaviour to the Army.
He had got slowly to his feet, and in a silence pregnant with dread, told the Army commander that no one was fooled, that everyone knew it was the soldiers who raped and killed and tortured, and that they must stop these acts against man and God.
The next morning Stanley Rother had been shredded by automatic gunfire in the doorway of his church.
Tomás’s father had gone out that evening to talk with his friends, and had never been seen alive again. His body had been found on the volcano slopes a week later, minus tongue, eyes and hands. The twelve-year-old Tomás had not been meant to see it, but he had, and he was not sorry. He had needed to imprint it on his brain like a scar, because only then could he be sure never to forget.
And nor would he, he thought, as the truck laboured its way up another slope. Not that he needed that one dreadful memory any more. In the thirteen years which had passed since that day he had lost a mother, two brothers, many friends – and all of them still lived inside him.
His father especially so.
I knew him and still he is there in me…
Tomás’s hand moved involuntarily towards the pocket where he kept the dog-eared copy of Neruda’s poem. It was too dark to read, but that didn’t matter – he knew all the pages, all the lines, off by heart.
‘I, who knew him, saw him go down,’ the inner voice recited. ‘Till he existed only in what he was leaving – streets he could scarcely be aware of, houses he never would inhabit. I come back to see him and every day I wait …’
Luis Serrano leaned back in his leather swivel chair, fingers intertwined behind his head, and ran his tongue along his upper lip, tasting the trace of brandy which still clung to his moustache. Through two walls he could hear the TV football match his son and friends were watching, and the faint rat-a-tat of fireworks in the distant Plaza Mayor was audible above that. Presumably the Indians were dragging one of their Jesus statues around the square, choking themselves on incense as they went.
Serrano leaned forward once more, and absent-mindedly tapped the report with his right index finger. He now felt reasonably certain that the El Espíritu who had been such an irritant in the early eighties, and the subversivo on the tape from Quiche, were one and the same man.
It was not a good time for his reappearance. The Americans wanted a negotiated settlement with the subversivos, and the Government’s ability to impose one that was lacking in any specific commitments – one that avoided any discussion at all of the land issue – rested on the Army keeping a strong upper hand in the rural areas. The last thing anyone needed was the public resurrection of some old Indian hero, and more humiliations like the Muñoz business.
Serrano reached for his Zippo lighter – a gift from a former American military attaché – and the packet of Marlboro Lights. Alvaro’s idea of asking the English soldier to identify the voice was a good one, as far as it went. The previous day he had read through the records of the business in Tikal fifteen years before, and there was no doubt that both of the Englishmen had enjoyed several face-to-face conversations with the leader of the terrorists. If anyone could definitively identify the bastard, then they could.
He had ordered G-2’s man in the London embassy to run a check on the pair of them. The older one – James Docherty – had retired from the Army, and was apparently no longer living in England, but his younger companion was still on active service. It had taken some time, and not a little money – always assuming the agent’s expenses sheet could be believed – to ascertain that Darren Wilkinson was still serving in 22 SAS Regiment. His current rank was sergeant, he was attached to the Regiment’s Training Wing, and he was stationed at the Stirling Lines barracks near Hereford, some 120 miles west of London.
Serrano watched the smoke from his cigarette curl away, remembering the woman in London on his second and last visit. She had been one of the English secretaries at the embassy, with bright-red hair and pale skin. So exotic. So aggressive in bed.
He sighed and forced his mind back to the matter in hand.