Songs for the Flames, page 5
“Yes, I was there,” Salazar said.
“Who wasn’t,” Trujillo said. “Even my mother was there.”
Everybody laughed.
“Mine too,” Gutiérrez said. “And my wife. Who wasn’t my wife yet, but my fiancée. But there she was, for the troops’ morale.”
Only then did Salazar realize that the woman at his left was Gutiérrez’s wife.
“For one soldier’s morale,” she said. “I couldn’t have cared less about the troops.”
This time there was a histrionic quality to the group’s laughter, teeth revealed and hands clasping, and Salazar thought there was something special about this woman, something that provoked subtle courtesies. Because he was standing beside her, he hadn’t looked at her closely; now, noticing her hair so blond it resembled well-worn gray, the elegant skin over her cheekbones and her straight back, Salazar had the irresistible impulse to introduce himself, even though they’d been standing beside each other for so long. The woman responded with a firm handshake, and a tinkle of bracelets accompanied her name:
“Mercedes de Gutiérrez,” she said with one of those voices that you think you’ve heard before. “Nice to meet you.”
“Now then, we have to tell the truth,” Trujillo said. “Doña Mercedes was not there only to accompany her fiancé. Also because her surname demanded it.”
“Why demanded?” his wife asked. “What surname?”
Trujillo scowled in exasperation. “Believe it or not,” he answered as if speaking to a little girl, “Doña Mercedes is the daughter of General De León, may he rest in peace: hero of the nation and adviser to all presidents since the world began.”
“Including the one then,” Gutiérrez said.
“Of course,” Trujillo said. “Including that one back then.” Then he turned to Gutiérrez’s wife. “For me it was an honor to know your father, Doña Mercedes. He was everything I wanted to be in the army. It must have been a privilege growing up with a man like him.”
“Well, it wasn’t so easy,” she said. “Imagine: an only child and a daughter at that. I grew up more watched over than a Russian spy. Sometimes I think I got married to get out of the house.”
Nobody looked at Gutiérrez. Trujillo said:
“You two got married after the war, didn’t you?”
“I was eighteen when you guys went to Korea,” Mercedes said. “We got engaged the day before the flag presentation. We married as soon as you all came back.”
Maybe that was why this woman seemed familiar to him, Salazar thought: he had probably seen her there, at the solemn battle-flag presentation ceremony, occupying some prominent place in view of all the soldiers: she beside her father and her father beside the president. The Plaza de Bolívar was packed with soldiers from the garrison, surrounded by government police agents, and on the avenues that frame the square the soldiers’ relatives, dressed in their Sunday best, bearing up as well as they could with the persistent drizzle that stung their faces, and enduring the cold, the cold that savaged their wet hands and feet, the cold that slashed at the nape of their necks when the wind blew in those open spaces. From a distance, from his position lost in the green forest of troops, Salazar had seen Lieutenant Gutiérrez approach the Capitol steps to receive the flag from the hands of President Laureano Gómez, and now he understood that maybe the young woman Lieutenant Gutiérrez was going to marry had been there, on the steps. In front of everyone, President Gómez shook the lieutenant’s hand, unsmiling and without looking at him, and Salazar thought it implausible that this lean, resentful-looking man should have enough authority to send a whole country into a world war. The president handed the staff to Lieutenant Gutiérrez; he gripped the wood with both hands, and at that moment a gust of wind came from behind the cathedral and almost snatched it from his grasp. The president said something that Salazar didn’t manage to understand and everyone began to clap. The noncommissioned officers flanking the lieutenant stood to attention, and the three of them began to march, at the head of the retinue, toward the Plaza San Diego.
“That’s why you seem familiar to me,” Salazar said to Mercedes de Gutiérrez.
“Why?”
“Well, an hourlong ceremony . . . Us all lined up there in front of the Capitol, and you there. Because I imagine you were up there.”
“I was there for a while.”
“We were facing you for an hour, more than an hour. I remember the president, I think I remember General De León. And you look familiar to me, Doña Mercedes. That must be why.”
“Well, yes,” Mercedes said. “I can’t think of any other reason.” She paused and added: “Because after that you went to Korea.”
“Exactly.”
“Like everyone did,” Mercedes said.
One of the soldiers who marched beside him that day was a thin, fragile-looking young man, whose helmet seemed too big for his head and whose tie was not properly knotted, so the knot kept slipping and ended up revealing the button of his shirt. Salazar had spoken briefly with him some days earlier, during a break from maneuvers, and had found out his family was also from Boyacá, that he’d been an orphan since the age of ten, that he was planning to pay for his university studies with his earnings from Korea. “Maybe I’ll be able to go and study in the United States,” the boy had said to him. “If a person distinguishes himself in combat the Gringos pay for your degree, that’s what they say.” Salazar thought he was a nice kid (he saw him as a kid, despite the fact that the age difference between them must have been minimal). But he didn’t see him after that, and only noticed him again ten days later, when the troops left Bogotá in several buses and drove down the mountains toward Buenaventura. There, in the Pacific port, the Aiken Victory awaited them, the U.S. troopship that would take them to Korea. Salazar shared a seat with the soldier, and during the trip saw him crying without sound or sobs, just the weeping of fear. The soldier had finally fallen asleep as they drove down into the Cauca River valley, and he was asleep at the moment of the accident: the week’s rains had loosened the earth of the hillsides, and the driver lost control on a bend, and the bus skidded on the wet mud that covered the pavement, left the road and crashed, ten yards below, into an adobe wall. There were no fatalities, but there were several serious injuries, and two of the passengers took advantage of the confusion to desert. One of them was the soldier who wanted to go to the United States. The other, whose instinctive decision in the moment of the accident surprised himself more than anyone else, was Salazar.
And now Mercedes, Lieutenant Gutiérrez’s wife, had said: Like everyone did. Then she offered to bring them all another glass of wine. “I need a drink,” she said. “You can’t go through so many memories without something to wash them down.”
“I’ll go with you,” Trujillo’s wife said.
“There wouldn’t be anything a little stronger, maybe a little aguardiente?” Trujillo said.
“I’ll ask,” his wife said.
And there was that memory now that had so often visited Salazar: he saw himself running through the thick brush on a night of intense rain, his hands in front of him so the invisible branches wouldn’t emerge out of the darkness to scratch his face, and as he ran he left behind the lights illuminating the wet trees and making sparks of water burst through the air, and behind him he also left the cries for help and screams of pain. During the following days, which he spent hidden in the woods like a guerrilla while making decisions with a muddled head, Salazar thought he’d been mistaken, then that he’d been completely right, and finally that some of his comrades would come back dead from Korea, and he could say when he read one of their names in a newspaper: That could have been me.
And now Mercedes had returned with two glasses in each hand, arranged among the rings on her long fingers, and Salazar admired that license that lightened the solemnity of the moment. Trujillo’s wife told him they hadn’t found any aguardiente, but here was another glass of wine, and he took it without looking at her while remembering the Aiken Victory’s stopover in Honolulu, where the boat’s boilers had broken down and forced the crew to stay two days longer than expected. Four of the soldiers, after going to a brothel, got lost in the Hawaiian night, later they showed up drunk by the Kawaiaha‘o Church, had to be transported to Korea in a military plane, and were eventually court-martialed. “I knew one of them,” Trujillo said. “He was one of the ones who boarded at Buenaventura. He got killed on Old Baldy, but that’s not the sad thing, the sad thing was we all knew since before we left Colombia that he’d get killed. The guy wasn’t made for that shit.”
“None of you were made for that shit,” Mercedes said. “Or, maybe now you’re going to tell us you all knew how to fight in snow.”
“More than one lost a finger,” Gutiérrez said, “for not listening to the Gringos. It’s just that snow is something else. Did you have to fight in the snow, Salazar?”
“Yes,” Salazar said. “But with the papasanes.”
The burst of laughter from the veterans startled other groups. The papasanes were the thickset men who presided over the brothels, near the front, where slender Korean girls used empty C-7 shell cases to set up their improvised shacks and sell themselves for fifty cents. Salazar had learned over time at these occasions that a reference to those places was a way of changing the subject, of hiding in plain sight behind masculine complicity. “The ones who talk most are the ones who did the least,” a veteran had told him at one of these commemorations, and he had gone through his life like this, on the basis of short, enigmatic phrases, dropping crumbs of information where the others could see a suggestion and fill in the rest of the picture with their own imagination, with their own memories. Sometimes Salazar would drop one of these comments and believe, for a second, that he had really been there, drinking beer and playing Frank Sinatra records on the Gringos’ jukeboxes, instead of scraping by with shitty jobs while trying to avoid the war over here.
“Oh, so you were one of those,” said Mercedes, who had not only understood the allusion, but had appreciated it with a crooked smile.
“But only in my free time,” Salazar said.
And then something happened. On Mercedes’s face, over her ironic and delicate smile, a shadow suddenly passed. It was nothing, a play of light on her skin, the color of her gaze: maybe Salazar had imagined it. “Now it really does look like it’s going to rain,” someone said. Trujillo was talking to Gutiérrez about veterans who’d recently died; Mercedes, the smile gone from her face, was looking at the ground as if she’d lost something in the grass, and on her hardened mouth vertical age lines had appeared. The others had begun to remember the evasion classes, in which more highly trained officers taught them what to do if they were captured by the Chinese; Mercedes was looking for what she’d lost in the grass, a coin, an earring, an uncomfortable memory; her husband was talking about his most dangerous mission, a nighttime patrol during which twenty-five soldiers had to cross an expanse of snowy ground to get to no-man’s-land. And it was at that moment, while Gutiérrez was talking about the footsteps you didn’t hear in the snow and the fear of running into a Chinese soldier on the other side of the hill, it was at that moment when the group’s attention was concentrated on the tale of the night patrol, when Mercedes looked up and Salazar knew she’d found what she was looking for, and it was as if the last fifty years collapsed and she was facing him again, facing Salazar without knowing his name was Salazar, and he without knowing her name was Mercedes, both of them drinking coffee one afternoon in the middle of the last century and letting the hours go by there in a bar full of drunks in downtown Bogotá: a seedy place where Mercedes, despite having covered her head with a black shawl, shone like a jewel.
“What we did find were two dead Chinese,” Gutiérrez said. “Dead and frozen.”
“And could you see them?” Trujillo asked.
“The searchlight was on,” Gutiérrez said, “and there were clouds. It was almost as if dawn were breaking.”
It was a strange job he’d gotten, but at that time he hadn’t been able to turn it down: Salazar was a young man without education or experience, as well as a deserter. So he found himself, from one day to the next, driving down into the Eastern Plains in a Willys-Overland and walking along the banks of the Guatiquía River carrying a jute sack whose loose fibers scratched the skin on his arms. The routine was always the same and happened once a week: Salazar, with the help of two local boys whom he paid in soda pop, filled the sack with live frogs and returned to Bogotá to sell them for three pesos each to the laboratories downtown. After his second trip, when he dared to ask what the frogs were for, they told him about women who waited twenty-four hours to find out if they were pregnant, and Salazar, who might have been surprised that a frog would start to lay eggs when injected with human urine, instead wondered how so many clients could approach the clinics each week with the same uncertainty. He dropped off the frogs at the labs and collected others, which for incomprehensible reasons hadn’t been useful, and crossed the city to get rid of them in the northern wetlands, almost as far as the Común Bridge, where it was easy to leave the Willys without attracting anyone’s attention. That’s how he made his living for four, maybe five months. He remembered waiting for payment in the laboratory reception rooms, and finding out from the magazines about the latest Colombian deaths and thinking, That could have been me; he remembered having been in Villavicencio when the news of Old Baldy began to come in; he remembered later, when the last boat came back from Korea, he was no longer doing that job, but had moved on to the next one, which might have been cleaning the bullring. But he hadn’t remembered for many years—decades, maybe—the girl with gray eyes and hair the color of light who approached him one of those days and asked him, with three very large banknotes in hand, if she could trust him.
“In no-man’s-land?” Trujillo said. “And you were in command?”
“I had the map, at least,” Gutiérrez said. “The idea was to probe as far as the Chinese positions. Twenty-five Colombian soldiers up to their knees in the snow, each with a white jacket and trousers over his uniform. Each with a torch in hand that it wasn’t necessary to turn on.”
“Because the searchlight was on,” Trujillo said.
“Exactly,” Gutiérrez said.
Salazar took a quick look around, but didn’t see anyone; and that was strange, because the gray-eyed woman was the kind of person who did not tend to walk around downtown Bogotá on her own, without a friend, without an employee, without a chaperone. He didn’t need more explanations to understand, nor did he ask what was in the little jar when he saw it appear in the young woman’s hand like a card in a magic act. Someone had already told him in the laboratory about these brazen little women who ended up getting themselves in trouble before their time, and who in other ages would have had to wait weeks for their own blood, or rather its absence, to confirm what they most feared. Now they could find out in a matter of hours. Salazar did not take the jar; the amber liquid remained there, between the two of them, in full view of everyone on Calle Octava in the middle of the day, and the woman had to put it back in the large pocket of her overcoat. “Why don’t you take it to the laboratory?”
“That’s what I’m paying you for,” the woman said. “So you’ll take it.”
“But I don’t work there,” Salazar said. “I just take them the frogs.”
Clumsily, the woman looked in her black bag and found another banknote. In her eyes there was something pleading, something childish.
“Please,” she said.
Gutiérrez was talking about what they did so their steps—the steps of twenty-five soldiers in a quiet night—didn’t give them away. “That many people make noise in the snow,” he said. He made a theatrical pause in the story, and Trujillo recognized the order. In unison, they shouted like accomplices: “Send me Maruja!” That was the signal: the artillery observer launched a volley to cover their tracks. After that, the enemy was alert.
“And weren’t you all scared to death?” Trujillo’s wife asked.
“I don’t know about the rest of them, but I was,” Gutiérrez said.
“My husband has never told me anything like this,” Trujillo’s wife said.
“Of course I have,” said Trujillo. “A thousand times.” And then he turned to the others. “But I tell her about maneuvers and she falls asleep halfway through.”
“And did they shoot at you?” she asked.
“That was the idea,” Gutiérrez said. “The whole operation was designed to detect enemy positions and see what armaments they had. We wanted them to fire on us. We needed them to fire on us.”
“How terrifying,” Trujillo’s wife said.
Salazar returned to the lab, but found it closed for lunch. And he then found himself in an unthinkable situation: eating something in a bar full of drunken workers with a glass of aguapanela and a jar of rich girl’s urine. He paid with one of his new notes and waited a good quarter of an hour there, looking at the people, until someone left a copy of Cromos and Salazar could entertain himself by looking at the photos. There was a lot about Korea, but Salazar didn’t read the news: he stared at the images, memorized impressions, studied the captions; he struggled to imagine himself there. When he arrived at the laboratory, they were just opening. A woman in a white lab coat took the jar and wrote down his surname, and Salazar thought that it was worth more than it ever had been worth: Salazar had rented it out so another person wouldn’t have to give her own. “You’re the one who brings us the frogs,” the woman in the white coat said.
“Yes ma’am,” Salazar said.
“I see,” the woman said with a little smile that was like a judgment or a taunt. Salazar didn’t care; he thought he would have cared if the urine had been his girlfriend’s. Then he heard himself ask:
