The young man seems to have run out of things to say. He is looking her over again as if he is reconsidering this whole interview idea, not sure it isn’t some delay tactic. He wants his visa. Fuck the double-crossing town and its ass-kissing mayor. He gestures toward the village beyond the windows. “They get a little solar panel and a hole in which to shit with a zinc roof over their heads and they are as happy as little pigs.”
A few of the young men at their posts turn around to show their approval to their comandante. It must be a joke, worthy of repetition. “Happy as little pigs,” he addresses them, laughing. “Jacobo’s little pigs.”
“So you are not representing the community, just yourselves?” Alma wonders out loud. She hopes it doesn’t sound like a critique of his authority. It does seem like a question she should address to everyone, not just this jumpy guy, who seems to be the brawn, if not the brains of the operation.
“It is not just for us,” one of the young boys speaks up. His mask is from Killington, a chilling name, given the situation. His voice is vehement. Maybe he doesn’t find the joke so funny. “If we go to the United States with our visas, it is to help our families.”
Alma doesn’t have the heart to point out that Jacobo’s group sells their souls for solar panels and latrines with zinc roofs, the comandante’s group for visas, cigarettes, an interview with a journalist. In fact, she is glad they have a price. Otherwise what? Suicide bombers and plane hijackers? Desperation videos? A bloodbath?
“Does your group have a name?”
“We don’t need a name!” The red kerchief’s temper is tinder, and the wrong word a match. “Fuck having a name! So they can hunt us down. We’re nobodies, nadies, the fucked-over and forgotten. Put that down.” He points toward her journal.
Obediently, Alma writes down nobodies, nadies, fucked-over, forgotten and holds up her journal as if to prove she has done his bidding. He reads it over, nodding.
“But won’t you need names for your papers and visas?” Alma points out, trying to sound helpful. Maybe they will realize their demands are so implausible, the best deal they can strike is shortened prison sentences in return for turning themselves in and turning over all their hostages unharmed.
“They can make up whatever papers they want!” the young man states angrily. Alma can’t help thinking of the general in the car, how he thought the americanos were genios, who could cure leukemia, make cell phones that work wherever on earth they wandered.
“We ask for these visas because we have no other opportunity,” the Killington ski-mask guy explains.
“But we will return!” The young man in the black kerchief who was guarding Richard has reentered the room. He has a thing or two to say to the journalist. “Con tu permiso,” he defers to the comandante, who is, after all, the one being interviewed.
“Of course, of course,” the red bandanna agrees in a gush that reminds Alma of that old line, “The lady doth protest too much.” “We are all brothers,” he adds, for Alma’s benefit. He nods at her journal. She should write that down.
“We will come back,” the black kerchief asserts. It’s hard to tell his age with a kerchief covering half his face, but she’d guess him to be in his twenties, pale-skinned, with dark, sad eyes and thick, curly black hair. “We will infect them with our questions!”
Alma’s heart quickens. She had been feeling sorry for this misguided group of kids, like watching her chosen candidate be stupid in a televised debate. She had hoped to feel solidarity with them, but their name-calling spokesman had made them sound like thugs, backwoods bigots, out for themselves only. Now the poet has arrived, and she feels a different kind of sorry: sorry for herself because she is not, nor could she ever be, one of them—she knows too much, wouldn’t for the world give up her lucky life with Richard in Vermont—which leaves her on the side without poetry, without a redeeming story. “What would those questions be?” she asks the black kerchief. “The ones you would come back and infect them with?” Strange word, infectar, but he picked it, not her.
“What would be those questions?” the black-kerchief man repeats, looking around the room as if inviting the others to answer. But they all look back at him waiting, even the red bandanna, whose right foot, propped on his left knee, is shaking impatiently. How did he get to be the leader?
“The questions are very simple. Why do we go hungry? Why do our people die of curable diseases? What is it that has excluded us? What is it that has isolated us?”
His voice is impassioned, throaty, as if he were on the point of tears. Were it not that here in this place, cunning qualifies any genuine feeling, Alma would do a Patty Hearst, throw down her journal and ditch Starr’s cell phone, and say, I am with you, compañeros! But she is fifty, frightened, eager to get her husband out and return to Vermont where she feels they can at least live simply, doing minimal harm.
“Can I write that down as your … statement.” Statement doesn’t sound right. But Alma doesn’t know the word in Spanish, or come to think of it in English, for that glimmering of hope she sees underlying all his statements.
“Is this our statement?” the black-kerchief poet asks, again looking around the room at his companions, then narrowing in on the seated leader with the shaking foot. By his tone, Alma is almost sure he means this as a rhetorical question.
But the red-bandanna leader takes up the question. “Our statement is that we want an opportunity to be a human being.” His blackkerchief comrade nods deeply as if their leader has said something brilliant. “You can put that in your book,” the red bandanna adds with a touch of pride.
As Alma writes, the black-kerchief poet watches her with such awed, primitive attention that she is almost 100 percent sure he doesn’t know how to read or write his own name. No wonder the other guy is the leader. “Is there anything else?” she asks, trying to include the red bandanna with a quick glance, but it is obvious she is asking the poet to continue.
“Everything we want my friend said, y ya. We can say too much. We don’t have a platform like the politicians that come here every time there is an election. We don’t stand for something that can be argued or taught in a book in a school. What we stand for is not an opinion, it is an intuition.”
Why? Alma wants to ask him. Why with such a soulful, beautiful message that would mobilize anybody who has a heart in this world, why did he do something so stupid, take over a clinic without a real plan, get mixed up with this leader who has dumbed down their discontent to a plea for visas? If he had only gotten hooked up with Richard instead of the red-bandanna guy. But then HI was in bed with Swan, and Richard was hanging out with Bienvenido and Starr and reps from whatever aid agencies divvy up the help at this end. This guy’s hope couldn’t get through so many goodwill handlers.
The red-bandanna leader bolts out of his chair. He seems to have grown impatient with all the talking. Where are their visas, their cigarettes, their breakfast and coffee? He paces back and forth, everyone watching him. “Didn’t they receive our demands?” he asks Alma, as if she should know. After all, sending a journalist was on the list and here she is.
Alma shrugs. “I think they did. With the women, right?”
Another round of pacing, back, forth, the length of the room. When he catches the young boys watching him, he gestures with his chin for them to look to their posts. Then he gestures toward Alma’s notebook. “We’ll write them down this time. Our demands.”
In a heartbeat, Alma goes from journalist to amanuensis. TO THE AUTORIDADES: WHAT WE DEMAND. U.S. visas are at the top. Cigarettes. Then meals: each meal delivered, one patient released; the staff and the rest of the patients will be freed after visas are in hand, safe conduct out guaranteed. Forgotten is the demand that Swan’s drugtesting clinic be removed from the village, replaced by a health clinic for locals. Fuck the villagers, let those double-crossers get AIDS if they want to.
From time to time as they have been talking, there have been calls from the patients in the dormitories. N
ow there is an outcry, the loudest one yet. Someone has fainted. They need immediate medical attention.
“Shut those fuckers up!” the red bandanna shouts down the hall. Moments later, someone on the back patio fires what must be some warning shots in the air because after a long pause, the outcry starts back up again.
“It is that they are hungry,” his black-kerchief comrade speaks up. He seems to be the only one willing to risk stating the obvious.
The red bandanna turns on him, a furious look on his face. “They’re hungry?” he asks incredulously. “I’m hungry. They’re hungry.” He points to all the boys. “Is everybody hungry?” he asks, his voice almost a scream, and to a one, they all nod, yes, coño, of course they’re hungry!
Alma gazes up at the large clock above the desk on which a funky, old-style phone sits, same vintage as Tera’s wall mount. It is almost ten. All those big pots of plátanos she saw boiling in the mayor’s house must have been for the soldiers. The time for breakfast has come and gone. Are Camacho and Jim Larsen and crew going to starve them out of their siege? Is that the plan? Don’t starving desperadoes shoot innocent people, especially americanos whose country has denied them visas?
“The women last night said they would send food,” the blackkerchief guy reminds them. “What hour is it?” he adds, as if there might still be time for miracles.
Alma wonders why he doesn’t just look up at the clock. She remembers Richard’s saying that he was glad he had brought down digital watches. Nobody knew how to tell time on a clock with hands.
The red bandanna is wearing a wristwatch. Alma wonders if he got it from Richard’s duffel bag of gifts. “Nine zero seven,” he announces. He seems pleased to be able to provide the exact time. Thanks to technology they can all know the very hour to the minute that they are starving. “That clock is wrong,” he adds, pointing at it with his gun. And then, without warning, as if in fury at its error, he shoots it off the wall. There is a burst of gunfire, plaster and metal pieces flying. Alma drops to the floor, in shock. Around the room, everyone scrambles for cover.
A moment later, realizing where the gunfire came from, his comrades curse their leader softly for el susto he has given them. But none of the curses seem particularly fierce. They are probably impressed by his show of violence. Another reason he is the leader, he can tell both kinds of time and shoot the kind he doesn’t agree with.
The black-kerchief poet is the only one who seems to have expected this outburst, no cowering or covering his head, no curses or admonition that the leader save ammunition. Instead, he looks dolefully at the hole in the wall, as if it he regrets ever having asked what time it is.
In the silence that follows this blast, they hear the patients again in the dormitorio.
The kerchief poet gestures for the red bandanna to come over to a corner to talk. Even with their backs to her, Alma can guess they are again disagreeing about the patients. She wonders if the poet is arguing for letting them go, even before any food provisions are delivered. These are sick men and women. Not fags, not cunts. Human beings. Intuition says they shouldn’t be used as pawns. But after a while the poet falls silent, subdued, seemingly convinced. Perhaps he realizes that poetry has never gotten them anything. It needs the muscle of power. That is why he defers to the red bandanna. Their leader is the only one who can read, tell time on a clock with hands, check out that what Alma writes down is, word for word, their demands.
BY MIDDAY, IT LOOKS like that power muscle is going to have to be flexed. No food has been delivered. The list of demands Alma wrote down earlier has been sent out and no reply has been returned. The leader dictates a second message that if food is not received by six in the afternoon, “we will begin to take action on the patients.” Alma looks up as if to check that he means what he says.
“Write it down!” he screams when he sees her hesitate, the same high-pitch scream that so scared her when he first cried out that she should be frisked. Maybe Alma guessed wrong; maybe the leader doesn’t know how to write down his own demands. Maybe she should embed some message. Send food. These guys are not fooling around! Her hand is trembling so much she worries that Jim and Emerson and Camacho won’t be able to read her writing.
When she finishes, the red bandanna grabs her notebook, reads over what she has written, then tears the page, folds it, calls through the windows for a boy to be sent in. A little kid no more than five or six runs up to the porch and takes the note back. This time he returns with a reply.
The authorities will send in food once all the patients have been released. They will then give the captors until noon the next day to release the rest of the hostages.
Why are they starting with the patients? Alma wonders. Why not start with Richard and Alma, now that she has joined him? All lives are valuable, so the general said, but given the presence of Jim Larsen and the embassy boys, shouldn’t the American lives be more valuable than others?
Maybe their strategy is to begin with the neediest, a strategy Alma would wholeheartedly approve if she were not part of the competing group of valuable lives that should go first. She has gathered from comments the young boys make while the leader is in the john or visiting the back patio that the patients have faucets and, therefore, water in their dormitories, but they have not eaten since Thursday’s takeover. The captors and staff ate the last of the food in the Centro last night, cooked by the women before they were released with the promise that they would return with food this morning. Now this new development. Food only after the release of all the patients.
And no word on the visa demand. The amnesty demand. Not even a fucking box of Marlboros.
The red kerchief is furious. It’s as if their voices make no sound. Their words mean nothing. He steps into the small bathroom and brings out a handful of toilet paper, wipes his boots on it. The brown smear could fool anyone. “Tell them,” he tells the boy waiting on the porch, “this is what I think of their reply. Mierda! Mierda! We mean what we say. This is not a story. We will see what happens by tomorrow noon.”
Since this morning when she was dragged inside the clinic, Alma has felt a low-grade fear like a pilot light that burns sometimes more brightly than other times. After all, it’s unnerving to be surrounded by masked faces and firearms. But after hanging out for hours with them in the front room, she has started to agree with Don Jacobo, these are not criminals, they’re kids, adolescents, most of them; they have to be listened to, to be talked to in the right tone of voice; to be given one of those golden eggs of hope. But their leader is a loose cannon, and led by him, this standoff could end in violence. Alma’s fear kicks up a notch, a visceral fear, in the pit of her stomach, rumbling with panic.
She wonders if it puzzles the red bandanna at all that the only demand that has been granted so far is the one for a journalist to tell the world their story. All morning, on and off, he has made comments, expounding on libertad y justicia, dignidad y democracia, the clichés he has no doubt heard from politicians on election years. Mostly, he grows more and more irritable, kicking at one of the boys dozing at his window post, shoving another one back who is headed for the bathroom twice in an hour. Another of the world’s bullies with his little army of fodder foot soldiers—don’t they see through him?
In fact, Alma detects a growing tension among the young companions. From time to time, they exchange looks, increasingly worried. They have been led to this moment by a leader who hasn’t thought through the details, meals, cigarettes, visas. They are beginning to wonder what will become of them.
At least he hasn’t started picking on Alma yet. Hasn’t asked her when she is going to phone in her interview to the papers. So far he believes her story. But she has been kept in the front room, away from Richard and the clinic staff on the back patio. As if she has to be at the ready, by his side, like a weapon. The writer who will tell the world their story that is not a story. Such a simple plot: teenage boys in ski-resort masks and cowboy bandannas asking for a chance to be human beings. r />
BY LATE AFTERNOON, the waiting room is hot, the only breeze is coming in from the hallway that leads to the back patio. The heat and lethargy and hunger are getting to everyone. When the leader is out of the room, Alma asks permission to use the bathroom, more out of hope that she might see Richard than out of need. No one bothers to escort her; the boys just point down the hallway. On her way, Alma peeks in an open door and is surprised to see the leader alone, his bandanna lifted like a woman’s kerchief over his hair. He is sitting on an examining table, eating her PowerBar.
She hurries away. No telling what he’d do if he knows Alma has gotten a glimpse of his unmasked face.
In the bathroom, she looks around. On the back of the door hangs a poster of an attractive couple, in hot embrace, the copy urging everyone to use condoms even with a partner of confianza. The sink is tiny, the bar of soap a sliver, the medicine cabinet empty. In the mirror, Alma’s face is pale, sweaty. The shower stall door is open, the floor still wet. Someone has taken a recent shower. Probably the leader, who seems to get all the goodies. A damp towel hangs from a hook.
Maybe she can leave Richard a note here. Her journal and pen are in her pocket. She could scribble something directly on the poster, but where to make sure Richard sees it? A balloon coming out of the woman’s mouth? Right below the couple, by the words partner of confianza? Before Alma can think through the details, one of the young guardia has come back to retrieve her.
She feels like weeping as she sits back down at what has become her post, the chair she took this morning to interview the leader. How interminable this day has been! The hardest part has been her isolation from Richard. She needs to lay eyes on him, to touch his hands and face, to renew her flagging faith that everything will come out all right in the end. When it comes to being a doubting Thomas, she’s just as bad as the red bandanna.