Lost City Radio (6 page)

There were others, Rosquelles explained, locked in cells below the ground in lightless, stiflingly hot tombs. “These,” he said, motioning over the yard, “these are the good ones.”

“Can we see them?” Elmer asked. “The others?”

Rosquelles shook his head. The others were the ones who had shaken the country to its core. Out here were the soldiers, the triggermen. The leaders were below the ground, held incommunicado, only dimly aware that the war had ended, that they had lost. “Are you looking for someone in particular?”

“Yes,” said Norma, at the exact moment that Elmer said, “No.”

Rosquelles smiled. “Well, which is it?”

“My husband,” Norma said. “There was a mistake.”

A steady group of men had tracked the visitors' progress around the yard, but most had given up trying to elicit any response at all, had broken off. A few sat on their haunches, smoking and spitting. The sun glowed brightly, and Norma felt faint. She coiled her fingers around the chain-link fence, steadying herself.

A prisoner invited Norma to sit on his face.

“Animal!” Rosquelles shouted. He turned to Norma. “I'm sorry, madam. We don't make mistakes.”

The prisoners responded with curses and laughter, and they called him by name. “Rosquelles!” they called. “Killer! Is that your girlfriend?”

He frowned. “You have fans,” Rosquelles said. “This is no place for a woman. Are you well?”

Norma nodded. “May we see the lists?”

“There are no lists,” he said.

They continued around the causeway above the yard. The men below were unshaven and dirty, shirtless and sunburned. The elevated metal corridor opened every fifty meters into a watchtower. Rosquelles greeted each guard the same way—“Friendlies behind!” Still, the young guards had fear in their eyes, and they kept their guns trained on Norma and Elmer until they had walked past.

Rosquelles led them to the observation tower, the highest one, two flights of stairs above the causeway. There were two soldiers inside and an imposing array of weapons trained on the prisoners below. Norma peered out: from this distance, the imprisoned men moved like ants, a dizzying and chaotic display. She studied them through binoculars: their faces, the lines of their jaws, their brows, and saw nothing and no one who could be her husband. He would recognize her, wouldn't he? And he would call out to her? But he wasn't there. She'd known it, of course, but hadn't allowed herself to think too much. What options were there? He'd been near the battle. There were prisoners and there were dead: wouldn't it be better to find him here, locked up among the warriors? Or was he a leader, entombed below?

No one had ever accused him of such a thing.

Maybe they saw her watching them. Maybe it was their way of mocking her interest. The buzzing crowd fell apart and regrouped in straight lines, row after row of thin, dark men. “Killers!” they chanted. They were fearless. Some smiled.

Norma turned away, stared into the mountains. Without the shanties, it could be a postcard.

Rosquelles shook his head. “They're going to sing.”

Where before there was confusion, now there was order. Were these the same men who had chased them around the yard, the same feral pack of sun-scarred, hungry prisoners? A murmuring rose from below, a scratch of a melody, nothing more. There was a code at work, the men held their arms at their sides, statuesque and military. What could Rey be doing here, if he was? They were less than human, they puffed their chests and stood straight, and their faces were stern now. They were cogs of a machine. They sang.

“Is the IL real?” Norma asked. She could think of nothing else.

Rosquelles looked at her, disbelieving. He turned to Elmer. “Who is she?”

“I'm sorry,” Norma said. “It's just that—”

“Why don't you ask them?” Rosquelles said, waving his hand at the prisoners below.

“What about the Moon? Are there still people there?”

“Woman, are you mad?”

Norma said nothing. She closed her eyes and listened as Elmer apologized on her behalf. Her Rey wandered the jungle and inhaled the soggy odors of the forest, he loved birds and verdure and the smell of wood smoke. He was not IL, because he told her he wasn't. He'd said those words, hadn't he? He wasn't IL, because the IL did not exist.

“Why are we here?” Norma whispered.

Elmer blinked his eyes. “You wanted to do this.”

“Fire a warning shot,” Rosquelles said to the guard.

The guard aimed at the ground in front of the prisoners and let off a few shots. Dust bloomed in tiny mushroom caps. The men kept singing. Norma looked over her shoulder at Elmer, and he shrugged when he met her gaze. The bullets kept coming at regular intervals, advancing toward the line of men. They sang, and Rosquelles cursed. There was something mechanical about them, something terrifyingly disciplined. The war planners hadn't counted on that mania. It had been the key to their success. The country's history was dotted with guerrilla episodes of varying intensities: here and there, a ragtag militia fired by an empty ideology or a provincial grievance, a lightly armed band led by a quixotic upper-crust dropout—it happened all the time, twice a generation, and ended the same way: the insurgents marched themselves to starvation, were felled by malarial fevers. They played at war on the fringes of the nation-state, then gave up as soon as the shooting began. The IL had been different. They didn't give up. They began the war and never planned for a truce. They wanted everything.

The guard fired a few more shots that pierced the ground in front of the singing prisoners. Norma watched the young soldier, beads of sweat gathering on his hairline, the heavy kick of the weapon pushing against his shoulder. The bullets advanced, and the men sang in unbroken harmony,
about the war and the future, their paeans to outdated dreams. Some closed their eyes. It was prison opera, replete with bullets and dust and scorching light. The young soldier fired steadily around the men. They didn't flinch. “Sir,” the soldier asked, “may I?”

Rosquelles shook his head. “I'm not allowed to hit them,” he explained to the visitors.

Norma read disappointment on the young soldier's face. Elmer took notes, studying the scene. The sun had bleached everything of its color. She might fall at any moment.

The bullets whizzed by, the prisoners singing in sonorous swells. Rey sang, too, he'd always sung to her in a comically bad voice, with off-key trills, a theatrical falsetto. He sang because it made her laugh. Sometimes he sang in the crowded streets, in the park by the Metropole, unperturbed by the weary frowns of passersby. Another crazy, what can you do? I'm crazy, he'd tell her later, I sing because I'm crazy about you; Norma turning red, embarrassed, heat in her face. At home, too, songs of love, saccharine tunes from the era of the troubadours. She could hear the urgency now in the shots, the young soldier's longing to snipe one, just one, maybe wound him, a bullet to the shoulder, a slug in the meat of a prisoner's thigh. To watch a man fall—what joy! It's not possible Rey is dead. The singing forced Norma's eyes closed, she could feel the sun burning against her eyelids. A minor chord, a sad melody, an image: her Rey in his underwear, crouched at the foot of the bed, singing. Something romantic, something sappy. You are my sunshine…or something even cheaper than that.

“He's not here,” Norma whispered to Elmer.

The sun buried them in white light, and the shots continued steady, rhythmic. Melodies drifted skywards.

“Just one, sir?” the soldier said.

Rosquelles frowned wearily. He took Elmer's notepad from his hands. “I'm going to have to hold on to this,” he said. “You understand.”

Elmer said nothing. He reached for Norma's hand, and she let him hold it. She stepped closer to him.

“Show me the lists,” Norma said to Rosquelles. “Please.”

“What was the name? The one you're looking for.”

She told him.

Rosquelles raised an eyebrow. “Never heard of him. Did he go by any other names?”

She bit her lip. “I don't know.”

“How do you expect to find an answer if you don't ask the right questions?” Rosquelles sighed. “It was a big war, madam. A very big war with many, many players.”

“Sir?” the soldier asked again.

The official nodded with a smile. “Oh, to be young and brainless again!”

Then there was a shot, and a man collapsed: third row, second from the back, so that most of the prisoners didn't see him fall. They sang, looking straight ahead. The downed man had been hit in the stomach. He slumped to his knees and tumbled forward, prostrate in the dust. His burnt-copper back arched, his arms buried beneath him. He was praying. Norma was too: her fingers curled tightly around the chain links, her nails digging into her palms. Rey wasn't coming back.

 

S
HE SLEPT
with the door open every night. At one time, when she was more hopeful, she had thought: if Rey were to come back tonight, he would see right away that I am sleeping alone. That had been the logic at first, but now it wouldn't be truthful to say that she expected anything of the sort. It was habit, pure and simple, of the kind whose origin was vaguely recalled but which existed nonetheless, a constant and unchanging fact of life. Her door was open.

But this night, the boy had come. He was there, resting on the couch. The apartment was small: from the living room, one could see through to the kitchen and into the bedroom. It wasn't exactly self-consciousness that Norma felt; it was an awareness, sudden and stark, of her solitude. It wasn't the boy. Victor said little. He was a tangle of emotions and wide-eyed observations buried beneath a rigid silence. She didn't know what he had seen, but it had rendered him nearly mute. He was small, thin-boned, and there was nothing at all imposing about him. She guessed he would be as content to sleep on the cool tiled floor of the kitchen as on the soft, pillowed couch. But he was there. She could have hidden his frail body in a cabinet under the sink, and still she would feel his presence. It wasn't him: it was his breath, his humanness, so close to her in the apartment. In the space that had been hers and Rey's, that had then been only
hers. A sealed place, an impregnable store of memories where time had stopped for nearly a decade. Visitors? She could count them on her fingers. Without Rey, she had lived like this: spectacularly alone.

Victor slept on the couch, breathing softly in the humming blue light of the pharmacy. The blanket covered nearly all of him, except his feet, and these stuck out, his toes curling and straightening as he dreamed. The place was too small. They'd always meant to move to a bigger apartment when they had children, and they'd tried. She was thirty-two when Rey disappeared. They'd never stopped trying. On their last night together, they'd tried. The doctors had said there was nothing wrong with her, that he was in perfect shape, that these things took time. So time passed. When Norma and Rey were married, they'd daydreamed of a gaggle of children, a half dozen, each more beautiful than the last, each a more perfect representation of their love. His hazel eyes, his hair curling skywards. Her delicate hands, long, stately fingers. Her aquiline nose—not his that crooked slightly to the left—but Rey's skin tone, more suited to the sunny places where they would vacation once the war ended. They built variations of themselves, portraits of their unborn children, unique amalgams of their best features. My voice, Norma said, for speaking. No, Rey said, laughing: mine, for singing.

They made love regularly and hopefully, just as the doctor prescribed. And nothing. Passionately and desperately—still nothing. When he didn't return, Norma's period didn't come for ninety terrible days. She wrestled with the possibility of raising his child alone, almost allowing herself a glimmer of happiness—but it was only stress, her body as traumatized as her heart, shutting down, slowing very nearly to a standstill. She discovered in the mirror one day that she'd lost weight, that she was as spent, as ragged as the soldiers returning home from the countryside. All bone, gaunt and pale. She wasn't pregnant: she was dying.

Now the boy slept with his face buried in the cushions of the couch. Norma turned on the radio: softly, a melody, strings, a wistful voice. The boy did not stir. She edged the door closed, the blue light vanished. She was alone again, in darkness. She undressed.

Y
EARS AGO,
a lifetime ago, it went this way: on a moonless night, Rey and a few friends tossed back shots of grain alcohol and then tested their aim against the front wall of the school, rocks against brick and glass. They were drunk and alive, just boys playing a prank. But that same night, something else happened: a small, homemade bomb exploded inside the mayor's office. This was the war's prehistory, its unnatural birthing, more than a decade before the fighting would begin in earnest. It occurred in a distant town, in a country as yet unaccustomed to such things. The blast awoke a restless, confused crowd. Fire tore at the roof, and windows were blown into the street in neat, glowing shards. The men lined up with pails of water, but it was no use. The water ran out, or their resolve did, and so they stopped. The sky was black, a soft breeze blowing. The building smoldered. It was a beautiful night for a fire.

Rey was only thirteen years old, but he would end up in jail that night, locked away for his own safety. Outside, a crowd would be calling
for his head, gripped with the paranoia only a mob can feel. The jailer, his father's brother Trini, would be preaching calm. Inside, Rey's father, headmaster of the aggrieved school, would be red-faced and shouting, “What did you do, boy? What did you do?”

 

T
HE TOWN'S
jail was two blocks off the plaza, sharing a quiet side street with the humble homes of maids and stonemasons. The exterior of the building was a pale blue, adorned with a rudimentary painting of the national seal, which, if examined up close (as Rey often did), was as blurry and inexact as the pixilated photographs that ran on the front pages of the town's only newspaper. An old Indian maxim—
DON'T LIE, DON'T KILL, DON'T STEAL
—was inscribed in severe black lettering above the door-jamb, perhaps giving the sleepy jail an import it didn't deserve. Rey liked the jail: he liked to sit with his uncle, whose job, it seemed, consisted of waiting for trouble to manifest itself. According to Trini, there wasn't enough of it. He complained bitterly about the quiet town, and liked to tell stories of his year in the capital. There was no way of knowing which were true and which were false. To hear Trini tell it, the city was peopled with thieves and louts and killers in equal parts. To hear Trini tell it, he'd been a one-man crime-fighting machine, justice patrolling the crooked streets, all grit and courage. The city! It was hard to imagine: a rotten, dying place, even then, crumbling and full of shadows. But what did it look like? Rey couldn't picture it: the boiling, black ocean, the jagged coastline, the heavy clouds, the millions draped in perpetual dusk. Here, there was bright sun and real mountain peaks capped with snow. There was an azure sky and a meandering river and a cobblestone plaza with a trickling fountain. Lovers held hands on park benches, flowers bloomed in all the municipal flower beds, and the aroma of fresh bread filled the streets in the mornings. Rey's hometown ended ten blocks from the plaza in any direction, giving way to dusty lanes and irrigated fields and small farmhouses with red-thatched roofs. Trini described a place Rey couldn't imagine: a city of glamorous decay, a place of neon and diamonds, of guns and money, a place at once glittering and dirty. Everything here bored Rey's uncle: the undulating countryside, the sharp teeth of the gray mountains, the scandalously blue sky. Most of all, the simple people, incapable of hatching plots against each other, or unwilling. Wholesome
and therefore disappointing. “Why'd you come back, Uncle Trini?” Here Rey's beloved uncle always fell silent, as if under a spell.

“There was a woman,” he'd say, and trail off. He'd fiddle with the keys to his kingdom, that empty cell. “There's always a woman.”

Uncle Trini told stories and locked up the drunks that came in raving, the same ones who knew him by name, the ones who began all their confessions with the words: “I was minding my own business when…” It was part jail, part hostel for the hopeless drinkers, part psychiatric retreat for the colorful, if not criminal, elements of the town. And most nights, Rey rushed through his homework, walked the four blocks to the cramped little police station, and sat on the front step with his uncle. Together they waited for something to go wrong. The ordinary crimes of the countryside: purse-snatching was as common as the graceless theft of fruit from a market stall. Murders occurred twice each decade, usually the tragic finales to disputes over land, livestock, or women. The drunks. “Trini!” they'd protest when the sergeant brought them in, and Rey's uncle, impassive, would throw up his hands and unhook the keys from his belt loop. “Welcome back!” he'd say and smile despite himself. “Trini,” the drunks would plead, but they knew it was no use, and Rey watched them hang their heads and stagger in, chastened. Later, after the sergeant left for the night, Trini would send Rey to the store for liquor, his nephew bounding through the empty streets to Mrs. Soria's all-night bodega, where you had to knock a certain way—
taptap tap tap tap
—before she would open the window and show her wizened face, squinting in the dim light: Who's there? It's me, madam. It's Rey. She'd hand him a bottle topped with a scrap of a plastic bag held tight by a rubber band, ah, the homemade stuff…Made in wooden vats and old bathtubs she kept in her courtyard, emitting odors her tenants grumbled about, the stuff that came out clear, stinking like poison, the stuff Trini drank, wincing, an involuntary spasm shutting his right eye. But Rey's uncle was a magnanimous drunk. He described the warm sensation in his chest, liquor's sweet embrace, described his mind under its influence as a tower built of loose, unmortared bricks, and he prattled on about the woman, the one who'd seduced him, whose ass was a most delicious thing, the one with blue eyes and a tiny scar on the side of her neck, which she covered with her curly, brown hair. She had ruined the city for him by getting pregnant.
She'd sent her brothers after him. “They beat me, boy,” Trini said, still incredulous years later, “right in the middle of the street, in broad daylight. Me! A uniformed officer!” Rey listened, his uncle's words losing their borders to drink, syllables bleeding into each other. And the drunks gathered at the rusty bars of the cell to listen, to offer their condolences, their slurred and pithy advice: leave her, forget her, drink. Rey and Trini smiled. Trini's confessions, like those of his jailed charges, presupposed a circumstantial innocence, a helplessness, a purity of intent. He had a son—“I have a son,” Trini shouted at the sky—somewhere in the city he'd been chased out of. After a few hours, Trini let his nephew take a shot—a small one—or pour a little in a plastic cup for the locked-up drunks, who had been stirred by the ammoniac smell of the stuff. Rey saw that the captives loved him in those moments. They took the drink with the reverence of the devout accepting Eucharist. He made them promise to be good. Rey made them swear. “Trini,” they called out, “tell your nephew to quit torturing us.” They drank, and the hours passed like this, until it was early morning. Rey's head spun, and he played with the radio until he got a scratchy signal, news from the capital or old Cuban songs or a show of weather predictions for Indian farmers. Eventually, everyone fell asleep, woozy, in their assigned places: the drunks on the cool floor of the cell, Rey and his uncle on the steps of the jail, the sky creeping toward orange, and day already breaking on the other side of the mountains.

And then, when he was thirteen, there was an explosion at the mayor's office, and, on the same night: the windows, the stones, the school. Rey and his friends had donned bandannas to cover their faces, nascent guerrilla tactics, like in the papers that came from the capital. Just that week, an arrest had been made, a man caught in a house full of weapons. He would spend a few years in prison, take advantage of an amnesty, and be released. Later, he would consolidate five disparate factions and form the IL, but no one knew that then. It had been big news in Rey's town, because the arrested man had spent part of his formative years there, before moving to the capital.

But really, who could worry about such things: wasn't there always someone trying to start a war in this country?

Under cover of night, Rey and his friends set out to prowl the streets. Stray dogs, here and there a bum resting in a doorway, the town asleep,
the four boys raced down alleys. Rey and three friends—“Who? Which ones?” his father asked later on, but Rey wouldn't say. It didn't seem right to give them up. The town at the hour had seemed abandoned. It was easy to imagine that you owned it: every corner, every low-slung house, every park and park bench. The steps of the cathedral, the palm trees that listed gently west, the fields at the edge of town where the hungry mice scurried and stole grain. The whole of it—yours. It was easy to imagine you were the only ones in the streets, but you were wrong.

The school. There were no watchmen, only a wrought-iron fence held together with an ancient padlock. Easy to climb over. Later, “What did you do,” his father asked him, “and why?” Rey's arms were bruised where the crowd had gotten hold of him, the tight clasping of hands and fists.

“I didn't do anything.”

“Anything?”

Rey choked on a cough. Outside, the crowd clamored for justice. “I didn't do
that
,” he clarified.

“Explain,” his father commanded.

So he did: the boredom that had led to setting small fires in the field behind the clinic, the flames that had cast orange shadows over the gravelly earth, the smooth stones that had glowed in the firelight, and then, the target shining and obvious, calling them from the other side of town. The evening was clear and cool. It felt good to run with a pocketful of rocks. They stopped at Mrs. Soria's bodega—
taptap tap tap tap
—with coins they'd pooled together, and the liquor burned but they choked it down, closing their eyes as they swallowed, everything emerging jagged and blurry. “Why?” his father asked again, but Rey couldn't come to any conclusions about his own motives. He looked his father in the eye, a thirteen-year-old, still not sober three hours after his last swig, and felt something approximating pity, his father's black eyes like pools of oil, his father's graying hair, his face creased with disappointment, not a bad man, at least not at home. At school, he was a tyrant, of course, but in this sense, he was normal, no better or worse than any other headmaster. And Rey didn't hate school, at least not with the passion that his friends did.

“I don't know,” Rey said. Is it possible to confess without acknowledging blame?

The fact was, he shouldn't have been caught at all. Rocks thrown at
the school building on any other night? Harmless. A few windows shattered. What might have happened? Would anyone have thought to blame the son of the headmaster? There were dozens of poor kids from poor families, children with ashy knees and grim faces, who would have been blamed first. No one saw Rey. An elderly neighbor claimed to have spied four boys, but they were just shadows, laughing and carrying on. They could have been anybody. Then there was a flash of light and the boom: this changed everything. The explosion brought the army into town the next day. They came with guns, determined to find a culprit.

These things would come later, and still, that night, there was no reason to get caught. Rey and his friends raced to the plaza to see it. Curiosity, nothing more. His friends had disappeared into the crowd, hadn't they? Hadn't they drunk as well, weren't they in awe of the fire and as full of adrenaline? Why did you throw rocks at the school (in the end a meaningless crime, something that might have gone unnoticed on any other night), his father asked, but just as logically he could have said: Son, how did you turn the town against you? Why did you bring this all on yourself? On us?

Something important had happened. Rey knew it at once. The mayor's office was a small building, and when he arrived in the plaza, it seemed ready to collapse. Flame clung to the wooden roof beams. Glass had melted into yellow and red shapes, transfigured. Burning papers, burning chairs. Someone ran to tell the mayor. A plume of smoke curled into the sky, and there was heat. Everything had the air of urgency, of that long-wished-for, long-awaited trouble. And Rey was still drunk. He felt it in his breathing, in the strange glare of the fire. He felt shy and self-conscious. The fire crackled, and then the roof beam fell in a shower of embers. Smoke. The crowd gasped. Rey pulled his handkerchief up once again, resolved to find Trini, to share the excitement of this moment. His friends were gone, dispersed and disappeared, and Rey felt invisible at the peripheries of the crowd, but he was not. It took only a few moments for him to be spotted: ambling about unsteadily in the shadows of the plaza, wild-eyed, a dark bandanna covering his mouth and nose. As if terrorists dress this way! As if there were a uniform! But there he was, at the edge of the scene, looking very much the part.

Similar pictures had run that week on the front page of the newspa
per—photographs of the arrested man in his youth—at a protest over school fees, and this was all it took.

“I'm innocent,” he told his father later in the cell.

“You're stupid,” his father said. “They think you tried to kill the mayor.”

And in response, the town had nearly killed Rey, right there in the plaza. The tailor, who had made Rey his first suit, grabbed him by the arm and called out, “Here he is!” There was a struggle; the angry crowd surrounded him, his face still covered, and they yelled:

Arsonist!

Criminal!

Terrorist!

They didn't yet know who he was. The fire burned hot, and they puffed their chests out, a pack hungry for retribution. It was an instant, only an instant before his bandanna was removed, and then the crowd gasped again: the headmaster's son! A terrorist! They recognized his face, and he recognized theirs: the butcher with his heavy mustache; the mayor's secretary with her perpetually worried look; the stooped, old grounds-keeper, his leathery skin taut and gleaming. His town, the people who had raised him, aghast, betrayed. They surged at him, to eat him, Rey supposed; it was that kind of anger. He was an animal ready for slaughter. Just in time, Trini stepped out of the crowd, took his nephew away by the arm, led him ahead of the crowd, to the jail, the town parading behind the headmaster's captured son, certain they had found their terrorist.