Captives (17 page)

Then it began to rain.

[CHAPTER 10]

another life to live

When they came to the river, the morning sun had already dried them and the packs they carried. But the river was swollen from the rain that all night had drummed on the broad palms woven into their shelters. At first the river looked uncrossable, but Miguel gave the idea no thought. His feet were on the first two stepping stones and his hand held out before Rafael could pass judgement. But even Rafael was surprised that it was Martin who stretched out his hand and stepped onto the first stone. Martin gave Louise the briefest glance. She had made her choice, but he wanted to show her that he was still worthy—still one of them. A Test Driver. In Louise's words, “Pure energy unplugged in the jungle.”

He could never get straight in his mind whether Miguel had been unable to reach his hand, when he had begun to twist and fall, or whether he had disdained it, knowing he would only endanger Martin. Or whether, worst of all, Martin had begun to withdraw his own hand in fear for his safety. Whichever of them made such a decision, Martin was forced to watch helplessly as Miguel twisted savagely, almost comically, before he finally fell. There was the sickening crack of his skull on the stone, then his blood bloomed in the water.

Martin allowed himself to be held, to hear his mother's draining sobs so close to him, he felt they would drown him. As soon as he was able, he withdrew into himself on the bank. He felt the blame of Maria and El Taino burning into his back.

“Nothing you could do,” said Louise. “Nothing. None of us … about anything.”

She had lost the composure of the past few days. The space she and Eduardo had created was gone. From now on, it was made clear, they were to remain a tight group. They would camp close together and, in their closeness, she and Eduardo felt an ocean of distance open up between them.

It was then that the nostalgia began for a place they had so recently left—an encampment in the heart of a forest that was unreachable and vast. She had spent a lifetime there, she was sure of it: Eduardo and she. If there were others there, they were no more important to them than were the trees and the birds.

Eduardo had told her the local belief that it was in the green heart of such a forest that God created man and woman with a song. “
The woman is born and the man is born,
” said the song. “
Together they will live and they will die. But they will be born again. They will be born and they will die again and be born again. They will never stop being born, because death is a lie.
” For those who believed, Eduardo had said, the song was not a promise, it was just the way things were.

Strange that she should find love, not at the high school dances, not hanging about Starbucks, but in the middle of a forest. She closed her eyes and imagined Eduardo and herself still there. They were sitting around a fire. They were entwined as the sun rose, before striking camp and walking deeper and deeper into the dim green light where no one would find them.

But out of the forest, by the riverside, she found other forces at work. She had another life to live.

When El Taino pushed the muzzle of the machine gun into Jacques's neck for his stubborn refusal to stand at Miguel's graveside, she didn't see the “asshole” she had seen during the card game. Instead there was a tired man, holding on to his dignity as he refused to acknowledge the man who'd humiliated him. He rose painfully slowly and turned to face them. His eyes briefly flared when they met Louise's as if to say,
This is for you. This is the man your father is.
It was the man whom Eduardo had told her of.

She felt sharp pangs in her heart as she was forced to acknowledge that she was not and could never be free, walking the paths of the forest with Eduardo. The pain came to her in waves—exquisite and fresh—and she did not fight it.

She had never felt so alive, though all she shared with Eduardo now were scraps—a brush as they passed each other; a glance, like the one they shared at Miguel's burial. When Rafael spoke of the things that divided them all, Louise thought, I know,
I know,
and thanked Eduardo for what he had shared with her about El Taino and the dead Miguel.

[CHAPTER 11]

what scares you?

There was a small hut in the sandy soil and the thinned trees before they reached the beach. An old man with black weathered skin was sitting outside it, mending a fishing net. Rafael called to him. “
Hola, buenos días, señor.
”

“
Buenos días
,” said the old man. “I think I know you. But what do you want of me?”

“We are in a struggle to make all our lives better—yours too. We will win,
compañero,
but in the meantime we are hungry.”

“
Amigos,
you will not go hungry here.”

The old man went into his hut and brought out a line with several fish hanging from it and an armful of plantains.

“This is all I have,” he said, “apart from a little for myself. It was for the market tomorrow.”

“It is enough,” said Rafael. “
Gracias, abuelo.
You will be remembered.”

“De nada,”
the old man said.

The hostages came onto the beach, blinking in the open light, like frightened creatures flushed from the forest. By the blue sea they looked at each other, at what time had done to them, with an understanding denied to them in the closed world of the forest.

Martin saw their ripped and soiled T-shirts, the ingrained red earth that was in their shorts. His mother was painfully thin. She'd bitten her nails down to the quick and her eyes looked one way, then another, as if they couldn't find rest. His father was shambling, distracted. His beard was matted and wild. Jacques, more lightly bearded, was a shrunken figure compared to his former self. He dragged his feet through the sand. A line of coin-sized sores, weeping pus, tracked down one of Melanie's shins. Down the center of her hair, a band of gray marked the passage of time. And were their captors any better? El Taino too had bags under his eyes and trudged forward as if into an imaginary gale. Each of them had also lost weight, drained by a constant vigilance.

And then there was Louise. Crop-headed, her hair without the luster it had once had, her body having almost retreated from the fullness it promised. Yet at the sight of the ocean her heart leaped. Her life inland in America had meant that she had never been able to quell that connection between the sea and vacation, and she felt the freedom surge through her that she always felt at the first glimpse of blue. And the freedom brought with it an optimism she realized had been missing from the depth of her love—always it had been shadowed. She had a thought: perhaps it will be possible to bring Eduardo into this freedom. It would be no stranger than what has already happened. Perhaps once this is all over and we're both far away. But even as she thought this, she knew nothing could be more precious to her than the times Eduardo and she had spent together, holding each other against the slight cool of the night, once talking had taken them as far as talking could. What she'd liked best was how they breathed together, breathed in the salty, earthy smell of them both—she felt she'd never really had a body till then—until in the last darkness she had had to return to Martin, curled into himself in the shelter they had both made.

How she loved Eduardo! For an afternoon, letting her and the others swim, denying himself that cool water, so that no one would suspect their love. Only Martin knew that when Louise turned to the shore and bent forward, pulling slightly at a bra cup, it was a sign for Eduardo, sitting looking lazily onto the water.

The fish the old man had brought filled the air with a sweet sea smell; the plantains were buried in the ash. The fish was so fresh it crumbled in their hands, white flakes of it that they licked from their open palms. With the plantains, each would be satisfied. As they ate, the sun finally melted into the horizon. Behind them now was the black island; facing them, the silvered light that never quite left the sea.

Eduardo and Rafael finally strode into the water together like father and son. Louise was already there. Her fingers brushed the still surface of the water, then she swam through it, remembering the freedom of that first swim in the forest and him calling her in. Now it was she who had waited for him, calling mockingly, “What scares you? There are no water snakes here either!”

A ragged cloud began to drift over the surface of the moon, darkening the water.

Eduardo had not reached her when the government forces opened fire. Martin obeyed Jacques's call and hit the sand. He saw El Taino rise and shout—though he could not be sure, it sounded like “Miguel!”—before two bullets tore out his chest.

From where she stood in the water, Louise saw Rafael, his back to her, charging for the shore. The bullet entered below his armpit and ripped through his rib cage. His blood was a smeared sunset before he fell into the water and Maria screamed his name.

Louise had reached Eduardo, thinking she would envelop him, save him; that together they would surrender. Eduardo knew the government forces better.

“No, Louise, away!”

He was trying to push her from him when there was a burst of gunfire. The first bullet bored a hole through his throat so perfectly that Louise could see framed there a clutch of stars. The second and third bullets sliced through them both. Louise twisted as she fell and pulled Eduardo down on top of her in such a way that it was impossible to tell whether they were fighting each other or embracing.

In the silence that followed, a voice rang out: “
Se acabó! Ríndanse ya!
It's over! Surrender!”

Jacques took Eduardo by his shoulders and hauled him off Louise. All his strength came back to him as he cast Eduardo's body away from her. Jacques cradled her then, his hand stroking her stubbly hair. Melanie laid her head on her daughter's bloody chest and wept.

Maria's arms were raised as she'd been commanded. She clasped her head between her forearms; tears coursed down her cheeks. Below her lay Rafael's long, smooth back; his blood blackened the water around him.

Martin stared out to where Louise was held and where Eduardo floated close by. He felt a secret harden within him. Though his parents embraced him, he stared through the embrace to what he had learned and could not forget. (Much time would have to pass before, as if in the blink of a shutter he had missed, he would be able to see clearly before he'd turned away the look of imperishable relief and gratitude in his mother's eyes.)

Mason, in his crisp fatigues, stepped over Gabriel's body—the staring eyes, the arms outstretched, pleading.

“Jesus, what a fuck-up. You guys don't piss about, do you? Who trained you? The fucking Mafia?”

The leader of the government forces smiled at the compliment. Now they had these new assault rifles, he knew they would have no need of these American “advisers.”

“Smile all you like,” said Mason, “but this isn't the kind of wrap-up we wanted.”

“They're enemies, yes, so why cry? You have all the hostages back, I think, alive. Apart from the girl. Pity, nice girl.”

*   *   *

Martin became aware of the distant sounds of car horns voicing their disgruntlement with the snow. He expected school would be canceled today. Perhaps none of them would have to leave the house. They'd all have breakfast together. Mum, Dad, Nick and he. He'd like that. Then he would sleep. Oh, how he would sleep. He thought back over his night's work. Of course, he too would have to invent dialogue—he had little idea, for example, what Louise and Eduardo had talked about while he lay in the hut, counting lines of stars through the palm fronds in a hopeless attempt to quell his desire. And much else of what he knew had come second hand. Nor could he swear to the island having sixty types of mango. But for the latter there was the library and for the former, well, invention was the greater part of the novelist's task. For it had dawned on him, sometime in the night, that writing a novel could be the best way to tell his story, while keeping his promise to Louise.

He would have to change the names, of course, but behind the names, he could do something to honor the living and the dead; to arrive at a kind of truth, where Louise could lie in Eduardo's arms again and Rafael know that his words were answered.

“They will be born and they will die again and be born again. They will never stop being born, because death is a lie.”

[POSTSCRIPT]

The woman in the yellow jumpsuit stood in the center of the small exercise yard, turned her face to the sun, and rolled her head five times one way, five times another.

The jumpsuit made her seem larger than she was, for inside its bulk she was slim and sinewy and, for all her privations, still powerful. Though flecks of gray had spread through her black hair, when she brought her head level again, her eyes—fierce, brown—burned through the mesh of wires that surrounded her and fixed on the blue open sea. Out there, they could not catch her, could not hold her. Out there, there were a million whispers, not one of which could they isolate and catch a clear sense of.

Of course they'd tried.

On and off for a year now she'd been held in freezing cages, airless cells, at times manacled and blindfolded, been bombarded by deafening music, denied sleep, threatened with snarling dogs. “Oh yes,
señora,
” Mason had said, “I think we'll find somewhere better than El Castillo for you—you and all your kind.” She'd lost count of the number of times she'd been interrogated by government officials or Americans with bad Spanish about her links with political subversives or terrorists. She had endured it all and been brought again, once each episode was over, into this small yard, alone, to gaze on the perfect sea.