Denis Johnson - The Stars at Noon

Right through the doorway we could see the soldiers’ kiosk, country women combing through a wicker tray of rice for pebbles or sticks, and monster pots brewing up something steamy. But I wasn’t feeling hungry just yet.

“I’ve made a terrible mistake of everything,” the Englishman said.

I’d been thinking the same thing about myself.

He said, “There are spiritual principles at work here.”

“My. Aren’t you swift to grasp?”

“Your attitudinizing really doesn’t protect you, you know, not from anything important.”

“Does it protect me from dinner? What about dinner?”

“That’s up to them, I would presume.”

“Maybe we have to make a noise about it before they decide to feed us.”

But we didn’t say anything. He sat beside me, in my corner there.

He wanted to take me in his arms. “No, it’s too hot.” I let him hold me for a while nevertheless.

I felt sweaty, sticky — I felt slimy. This is one of those things it’s difficult to put into words: yet letting him hold me I felt more like a whore than I did being lowered down upon by a naked stranger and thinking only about the money.

“I’m sorry I was such a bear,” he said.

That was funny to me—“I do like the way you talk,” I said.

“I know we’ve been under equal stress. We'll have to give each other the benefit of the doubt, does that sound reasonable? Listen, can you talk to these people? You know the language, you were with soldiers up in Matagalpa, wasn’t it, you — helped them. I’m in your hands, I’m afraid.”

Oh, poor man, in my hands. .

I said, “I was only up north a couple months. Actually it was one month. I was late with my first report, I kept putting it off. . When the second one was already due and I still hadn’t done the first one —I don’t know. I left! Actually I’d made up my mind before that. I was gone from the first day.”

“My God, we’re so much alike. .”

It made me uncomfortable to hear somebody say this. Anybody at all.

“One attempt, one gesture,” he said. “Something to bring you back . . It comes up empty. . You go on as always. As always. . And then that one thing, that one attempt becomes a sort of ugly lump, doesn’t it. Almost a cancer. That act that was supposed to be good. The thing that was going to bring you back, it becomes an obscenity.”

I knew what he was talking about. I knew exactly. “That’s a boring theory,” I told him.

He was strong. He just asked the guard, who was some distance away paying more attention to the women than to us, for some food and water. The guard mocked his gestures, laughing, and said he’d find out if it was permitted.

THAT NIGHT, an explosion of thunder and water drew me slowly out of sleep. Flashlights herded us out into the middle of the night, through the rain, into a church on the other side of the dale. Not that we prisoners were in any hazard of a soaking until they got us wet — not under our corrugated roof. But the soldiers had all been sleeping in hammocks, and the bits of plastic sheet they depended on probably didn’t work against such a downpour.

The church’s floors felt cool when we lay down on them — they were stone, or tile, I couldn’t tell by the small glow of votive candles in the corners. The candles were far off, it was a sizeable church, the town must have been populous — certainly there’d been a fair number of barnyard animals going under the knife that afternoon — exactly as up north, you thought you’d lost contact forever, but it turned out a small civilization thrived just over the next shrub.

It was true. The next morning we found that the church square opened into a tiny town of a few buildings whose purposes remained unexplained. Nobody was out on the streets except soldiers.

The air was cool and wet. After our breakfast of rice and beans they let the Englishman relax in the doorway, in a patch of sun next to the tub of holy water.

But me they took into town to see a full-Tenente at a Sandinista campaign office, which also apparently served as the area’s military headquarters.

I was looked after first, silently, by a frightening person who came from the back and took charge of me with the slowness of somebody just awakened from a coma, an older enlisted man in a clean white undershirt and mud-encrusted combat boots.

In Managua almost every soldier I’d met had seemed just another citizen of the general stupefaction; but these people, hardened by this rural life and very often by actual combat, were of quite another order. “Good day,” I said to him as he searched me. “Are you ordered to search me, or do you like to touch me?” He had no right to be feeling my ass. .

He didn’t answer, but he looked hard at me. Actually, I saw nothing of his face except for two eyes brilliant with fatigue and irritation, but I created for him one of those interrogator-faces from films and television, a cruel, deceptive face, at first bland and dreamy, suggesting interstellar distances, and turning suddenly into a cage for his inward, rabid self.

This man took me into the rear office and stood by the window while I talked with the Tenente.

The Tenente sat behind his desk, comfortably, with one leg crossed over the other, examining papers prefatory to our interview. I knew these papers had nothing to do with his thoughts. What made him think it was necessary to pretend like that?

On the wall behind the desk was a poster invoking Efficiency & Discipline, a sentiment I found too ridiculous, considering the nation around us, even to be a joke — riveting, in fact, for its psychopathic denial of all experience. . Beside it was a poster presenting the photograph of an old woman in the embrace of someone who looked a lot like Daniel Ortega. And the caption read in Spanish:

Mother,

where they speak your name

it says victory. .

They don’t ask much of life, these revolutionaries. To sit at the desk there with the telephone in the flickering light and know that the grown-ups are never coming back: this is the peace of man . .

I sat before the Tenente quietly, but inside I was covering up my head with my hands. . Reasons, images, memories came at me, the advance weapons of fear. I drove myself out into the street and whipped her, pleaded forgiveness from the dust as I was whipped . . Just because I’d wanted to help the Englishman. . While forgetting to stay objective I’d leaned my elbow inadvertently on the Fate lever. I’d brought it all down on my own head.

The Tenente’s lollygagging had its desired effect. I weakened myself considerably while nothing happened at all.

In his own language he said, “Why do you come to this country and make yourself to be such a nuisance?”

Get to the point! Will I live?

But I could only shake my head and say: “I’m sorry.”

He was different. It was the way he looked at me. It had something to do with the chemistry he generated, or rather didn’t generate. . For him there was no more of the swooping between grandiosity and resignation that usually characterized the demeanor, from moment to moment, of the Latin men I knew. Whatever powered those flights had been leached out of him.

“Your passport.”

“Certainly, I carry my name and my face right here, I keep them hidden between my tits. .”

“Please speak Spanish. It’s true you speak it?”

“The other man took my passport and the Englishman's passport also.”

“Who took them?”

“The customs officer.”

“Ah. It’s clear,” he said.

“Good.”

I might have been applying for a job I didn’t really want, a job they didn’t really have available. . We might have been stewing in a void of casual and absurd lies like that. .