For B and B

       1

      I AM THE KIND OF MAN WOMEN love. My face is seamed by time, and in each line they count a century of my country’s hopeless, bungling despair. In this ordinary expression they see peasant uprisings, earthquakes, and dictators whose asses widen with each year in power. Women stare into my sad eyes and trace each day spent in prison, my sufferings barely imaginable. Yet they do imagine. Then they run a manicured nail across the skin between my eyebrows and touch my pulse, and their smiles are coated with desire.

      What they don’t always see is that I am afraid.

      My prison was a room in the basement of my sister’s colleague and her husband: Marta and Rodolfo. I was lucky to be there, hidden from enemies. This woman was a professor at the university, in the department of cultural studies. The basement room had been a wine cellar, but there was no wine anymore, just red stains on the concrete floor and a faint briny smell. There was no toilet, only a tin bucket. Each morning when I passed the bucket to Marta I could read the disgust in her eyes. I watched the way she held out her arm stiffly as she climbed the stairs, horrified that the contents might slosh onto her tailored blouse. She knew my shit intimately. The maid wasn’t allowed below although sometimes I heard her singing as she cleaned, her pail scraping across my ceiling. And often at night I could hear them arguing upstairs. Rodolfo would start in a low voice, which would gradually erupt into a shout, “Get him out! It is too dangerous!”

      I would huddle beneath, anticipating the worst. Because I’d lost everything, had no useful opinions, nowhere to go, my life was waiting for others to decide. If I walked out the door to buy a magazine at the kiosk next to City Hall, I would disappear forever. You do something careless, once, and everything changes, not just the world, but your insides.

      Both state and national police had my case on file. My employer, the newspaper, abolished all references to my work. No one was allowed to publish my poetry or my essays, and my books had been stripped from the shelves. I had insulted a very serious man.

      Marta wanted to get rid of me, too. I had made her house into a place she dreaded entering. Yet my sister, Rosario, sent food, money, and probably the goddamn shit pail and begged Marta (I can hear this, Rosario’s wheedling voice) to have pity. “It is an unfortunate situation.”

      We all underestimated the sensitivity of our General’s ear. That supreme organ had sucked up the whispered idiocy of the poor writer, and with a few muttered words, he’d caused my life to shrink to nothing. One day you are everybody’s friend, cake-walkingdown the streets of the Old Town like the mayor, half-pissed, money sprinkling out of your pockets onto the cobblestones, wondering only which bar to visit before returning home for supper. At first I thought — we all thought — this will blow over in a few days.

      Carlos, after all, is nothing, nobody, a flea in the ear of the General.

      The morning after my catastrophe I saw my face in one of the daily papers, grainy, a not particularly flattering snapshot taken back in my days with the Normal Forces, wearing fatigues and that crummy short-brimmed hat. Every male child has to endure eighteen months in the military before his real life begins. Believe me, I’ve made up for wasted time.

      At first it was a lark being a fugitive. You could even say I felt a trifle proud at being selected, out of many, to perform this role. It would all blow over in a week or two, we thought; yet this is where we miscalculated. It turned out that I was despised by this malevolent official. I developed a chronic cough, as if the word had lodged in my throat and no amount of water or wine would clear it. The General’s despising was notorious, and now, so was I.

      In the small room I sat on the leather-backed chair and knew that given the chance again, I wouldn’t have spoken so boldly. I am no hero. It is more important to be alive, to breathe the diesel-perfumed air of our city than to crouch like a mole in this tunnel.

      At first, in my basement chamber I was treated like a member of the family. When Marta came home from work at the university she would scoop up chops and rice the maid had cooked, pour something to drink, add a sweet that she’d picked up from the café, and bring the tray downstairs. While I was eating she would pull up a chair and tell me about her day. I think she was lonely.

      That was the first couple of weeks. Then it changed. I had become a guest who lingered too long, whose every throat-clearing and fart was an irritation. Whereas at first they would invite me upstairs late at night, after the children were put to bed, to watch television and drink coffee (Marta’s coffee is like tar, with a shimmering membrane of oil floating on top), they gradually retreated into their private lives. As if they wanted to forget about this pathetic human pacing their basement room. Marta’s smile, when she brought food, became strained and distant, then disappeared altogether. When your life has shrunk, and when the only human contact is the food provider and the remover of the shit pail, your heart drills in your chest at the sound of feet clattering down the stairs. You begin to sweat in anticipation. You arrange yourself in the room, first sitting, then standing propped against the wall, hands in pockets. What else could I do but receive their diminishing attentions? I knew they wished me to disappear, but I had no choice in the matter. I depended completely on their good will and it made me disgusting. To them, and to myself.

      I began to stink. It was difficult to bathe. Marta and Rodolfo have two small daughters, curious,