Hard Red Spring (17 page)

—

The Indians were marching through the rain. Drums, shouting, and fireworks. Dorie made it home just in time to see a mass of them clogging the street not far from the embassy. Cars braked and U-turned, rushing away with rain hissing beneath their tires. Dorie hurried inside the gate and Conroy locked it behind her.

The door to the apartment above the embassy was unlocked when Dorie tried her key. A year ago, she would have run downstairs for one of the guards, but now her heart leapt with danger and joy at the discovery.

He was waiting, just standing in the middle of the unswept room, doing nothing but jiggling some change in his pocket. Letting her purse drop near the door, she said the only thing to come to mind. What she had wanted to say all during lunch, what she wanted to say always now.

“Tomás.”

But saying this, seeing him again, did not have the same effect as when she said his name to others, when she was anywhere else just wanting to be with him. She felt peeved suddenly at his audacity, but tried to calm herself. If she allowed herself this initial frustration, the whole visit would be spoiled.

“I've got a meeting with Jim in a half hour,” Tomás said. “He was able to squeeze me in between Guatemala Radio and some electronics salesman.”

“Is he starting his own radio station?” Dorie laughed, trying to banish her mood.

“Freedom of the press,” he joked, hooking a finger into her belt. “The Communists want it, they'll get it.”

He tried to pull her in, but the belt was slightly elastic. She spun away playfully, thinking she could still escape the quarrel, the revelation—she had yet to decide which it would be. The apartment was an embarrassing mess. She was wet from the rain, spotted, disheveled, and depressed from the business with the Indian girl.

“How was Xela?” She called the town by its Indian name, a sign of intimacy. Jim, all the suits, called it by its Spanish name, Quetzaltenango. But she knew Tomás preferred Xela. Sometimes he slipped in front of colleagues and was embarrassed by it.

He did not answer, but brought a wooden dagger from his inside suit pocket. A crude blade, but with a magnificent handle, decorated with bright blue and green feathers.

“It's for your hair,” he said. “But I know you'd never wear it in your hair, so instead it's a bookmark.” He pointed to a book on the table,
The Role of the West.
He often brought her English-language books he found, and these comprised her entire, cherished library in Guatemala. He opened it, replaced her bookmark with the feathers, and closed it again.

“It's beautiful,” she said, raising a hand to the feathers, but stopping just shy.

“They're quetzal feathers.”

“Quetzal, like the money?”

“Yes. Our currency's named after them, as is Quetzaltenango, but before the money and before the Spanish, there was the bird. They're very rare. Do you know why?”

She shook her head.

“Because they're strictly wild. Quetzals can't be held in captivity. If they're put in a cage, they kill themselves. They're the Indian symbol for freedom.”

“Well, they're wasted on me, trapped up here in this apartment. Maybe you should give it to Marcella.”

“Not a waste, an inspiration,” he said, kissing her neck tenderly in forgiveness. “You just need to get out more.”

She tried, discreetly, to close the dresser drawers, to clean up before whatever was going to happen, happened. The disarray would wash around them if they quarreled, like wreckage, like an omen.

“I was out today, and it was horrible. Just trash and beggars. They're marching now, did you see? I can't even tell whether they're celebrating or protesting or striking. It's all the same, shouting and explosions. How do they expect to be taken seriously with these bucket drums and fireworks? It's savage, terrifying. What happened to writing opinion pieces in the newspaper?”

“It's a celebration. Fruit lost a big land case today.”

“They wanted the Spanish out, and they got it. But then they missed all the money, so they courted American businesses. Now they want to run Fruit out, not realizing they won't have an economy without them. They only appreciate the money after they expel it.”

“History repeats itself, but revolutions always think they're different.”

“Then they wanted democracy and they got it. Can't blame them for that. But things aren't happening fast enough. They think they can intimidate their representatives with these ridiculous displays. We want this, we want that. Thinking they deserve things we don't even have in the States. Racial discrimination laws, maternity benefits. Who do they think they are? More fires and drums. That's not democracy, it's rule by mob.”

“Well, you have a wall here around the embassy. They can't get to you here, at least.” He clawed at her, teasing.

“That's my point, Tomás! I feel like Jim's pet. I can't go out, and when I do, I just want to come home. And when I'm home, I just want out. Just like this cat my mother had, always pacing at the door to be let out, then you let her out and she just paced in front of the door wanting to come in. We never had to worry about her because we always knew where she'd be. On one side of the door or the other.”

“Come now, Jim hasn't abandoned you. And I certainly have not. You seem to forget that you have friends.”

“Don't you feel guilty, Tomás, seeing me right before seeing Jim?” Even as she squandered this visit on politics and remorse—and hated herself for it—she pressed on. “Poor Jim,” she said, not quite meaning it.

“Jim will be fine. Trust me.”

“So I get to carry all the guilt?” She said this, although she didn't feel guilty. Jim had dragged her to a dirty, impoverished nation and thrown himself so wholly into its demented history that she rarely saw him, though he worked two stories below the apartment. He had chosen a disease-ridden Communist country over her, which was not nearly as insulting as her choosing Tomás over him.

“I don't have the luxury to feel guilt, Dorie. You're everything to me, you're
the only future I have.” He kneaded her shoulders, pushing her dress straps down. “How do you want to spend these few minutes we have together?”

—

Tomás Raúl Mancha Egardo differed in every way from the other Hispanic Fruit men. He had come the furthest of anyone, having been raised poor in the highlands. He did not talk about his childhood, beyond the fact that he had worked on a coffee plantation as a young boy and arrived at his current station in life by his own hard work. He was handsome in the usual, exotic Hispanic way, but for his nose—mangled and squashed, broken twice by plantation overseers. Tomás was utterly dignified, above fights, Dorie suspected, even as a young boy. She imagined him taking these beatings standing straight up, with his hands at his sides in small fists.

He undressed her in the same, but reverse way she and Marcella had dressed the Indian girl at the shops. Unzipping the dress, untying her girdle, unclipping her garters, then peeling off her stockings, carefully, like skin.

“Why all this?” Emelda had asked.

“Because men like to delay gratification,” Marcella had replied.

For Tomás, however, the act did not seem to rely on any gratification, let alone delayed gratification. Making love to a Guatemalan was not at all how Dorie imagined it would be. She had dreamed of this coupling for years before it actually happened. But during sex, he remained silent and passionless, except for the last moment, when he gave a small cry, betraying his reluctant pleasure. His religion, Dorie knew, was enough to spoil the pleasure for him, but not enough to keep him away. Dorie had been raised Catholic, although if she had to describe herself with a hundred adjectives now, Catholic wouldn't be one of them. With Tomás, it would be first. She had yet to figure out how he justified all this to himself.

After months of his reticence, however, she wanted more. She wanted to turn herself inside out for more. She wanted him to hold her wrists down, to dominate her, but he resisted all her attempts with a pious frown. This frustrated passion, Dorie very well knew, caused her to provoke fights and delight in embarrassingly bad books, like
Burning Hearts.
Books she would have scoffed at normally.

“If Washington replaced Jim tomorrow,” she said as they lay naked on the damp bed, after, “if he was called back to the States, would you let me go?”

“I wouldn't prevent you from doing what you want. I wouldn't force anything on you, Dorie.” He slipped back into his undershirt and lay back down.

“I mean, if I didn't want to go and Jim made me go, would you let me go?”

“You hate living in Guatemala. All you've ever wanted, from the moment you landed here, was to be back in Boston.”

“I would stay here for you,” she said, knowing she could never go back to the States now. She didn't have a choice anymore. It would have to be Brazil. “Would you confront Jim if he tried to take me away?”

“I don't understand what you're talking about,” he said, with more of an accent than he usually had. “You want to know what I'd do if they fired Jim—which they won't—and if you wanted to stay here, which you'd never want—”

“Forget it.” Dorie had to remind herself that she preferred Tomás's seriousness to Jim's lightness. A lightness he only used to deflect real conversation. Outside, more fireworks exploded. A chant rose above the embassy walls.

“I don't like manipulative questions,” Tomás said finally, cuddling up. “Why don't you just tell me what you did today, rather than ask all these silly hypotheticals?”

“Fine, then. I had lunch with a Communist.”

“Oh,” Tomás said, making the slightest effort to sit up.

“Yes, and she threatened to rip Marcella's heart out and eat it right there for lunch. A Protestant missionary.”

“Did you tell her it would make a meager meal, that heart of Marcella's?”

They both laughed. It was a triumph, this joke. He was extracting himself from her, finally. Maybe the cruel business with their maid had done it. A young girl, barely a teenager, disappeared into the city without even the language to ask for help.

“Did she let her have it, that missionary?”

“Of course, though there was no joy in it. She used to at least enjoy a good takedown . . .” She trailed off. Tomás had made clear to her, long ago, that Marcella was off-limits. She didn't want to push her luck. Why did she keep bringing her up?

“I'm almost through
The Role of the West
,” she told him. “Do you remember the chapter ‘Women and New Democracies'? Two hundred pages on the noble cause of freedom, then, out of nowhere, he decides half the world's population doesn't qualify!”

“A pragmatic approach,” Tomás added. “For an imperfect world.”

“Of course. These impoverished countries should have their religious roots cut, their natural resources, traditional economies, and ancient cities gutted, but to offend their notions of female inferiority is just too much!” She pounded the mattress, and Tomás intercepted her fist, kissed it.

“You sound like a Communist.” He laughed.

“The Communists shouldn't have a monopoly on women's suffrage down here. That is a failing of the right, if someone like me sounds like a Communist.”

The march had moved on down the street. Tomás glanced at his watch, sat up.

“What are you meeting with Jim about? You know I can't ask him. Are you still trying to get more money for that expropriated land?”

“The taxes are done. Land in dispute is where we have the most pull,” he said as he went reaching for his pants. “The courts can be convinced fallow land is vital to the banana business. If a blight hits, all our plantations could be destroyed in two weeks. The whole economy destroyed in two weeks. Fallow land's the only insurance Guatemala has.”

“Is there much fallow Fruit land in the highlands? It's too cold up there for bananas, isn't it?”

“The point is law and order. Ownership is the basis for laws.”

“It is?”

“You should finish the book. Don't hold that silly chapter against it. Without ownership, there's no responsibility, without responsibility, there's chaos and bloodshed. There's a piece of Fruit land under dispute now that has a history going back to the Spanish. Take a look at the titles and whenever it changed hands, people were killed. Conquest, slavery, outright murder.”

“Murder?” She placed a finger on a small wet spot she'd just noticed on the sheets. She'd have to wash them now. No, she wouldn't.

“In 1902, an entire family was murdered there. They owned the land, worked it. Then one morning, they disappeared. Two parents and a little girl, just gone.” He pulled on his socks, one by one.

“That's horrible.” Dorie felt herself being pulled somewhere she didn't want to go, off track, forgetting what was important for this meeting.

“Yes, and I knew them. At least, the little girl I knew.”

“Really?”

“I barely remember her, but I clearly remember the aftermath. Confusion, fear.”

“I can imagine.”

“And her shoes. What I remember most about her was this pair of white shoes she wore, with heart-shaped buckles. I'd never seen anything like them before. When I heard she'd been killed, I wondered what happened to those shoes, because I wanted them for myself.”

“Children are so funny. All that horror, and you only wanted a pair of girls' shoes. Who killed them?”

“Well, the government's trying to find that out, since it would affect the status of the Indians' brief title to the land afterward. Never mind the case was resolved right away. A bunch of the family's Indian workers confessed and were executed. Twelve men in all, including the overseer. But, of course, now the Communists say any verdict back then was racist. That maybe the confessed killers weren't given a fair trial. And if that wasn't enough, someone just came forward this week claiming to be an heir to that land.”