Evelio Rosero - The Armies

He seems settled in San José.

“At first I was shocked to see so much blood spilled,” he tends to say, “but now I’m used to it.”

Dr. Orduz laughs all the time, even more than Chepe. Though not from around here, he has not wanted to leave, like other doctors have.

His voice subsides, becomes a whisper.

“I understand,” he says, “that the Brazilian paid his protection money, to the paras as well as the guerrillas, on the sly, in the hope that they’d leave him be, you know? So, why did they take him? Who knows. He was a cautious fellow, and he was about to pack up and leave. He didn’t manage to. They tell me they found all the cattle on his ranch with their throats slit. He must have annoyed someone, but who?”

He spread his arms in a wide shrug at the moment the girl brought our beers.

“Doctor,” Chepe shouts from his table. His wife looks up at the ceiling, blushing and anxious.

Orduz looks over at them with his grey eyes.

“We have finally decided,” Chepe goes on. “We want to know if it’ll be a boy or a girl.”

“Right away,” Orduz replies, but docs not stand up. He just pushes his chair back and takes off his glasses. “Let’s see, Carmenza, show me that belly. From there, like that, in profile.”

She sighs. And she also pushes back her chair and obediently lifts up her blouse, up to where her breasts begin. It is a seven-or eight-month belly, white, which shines more in the light. The doctor stares long and hard.

“More in profile,” he says, and squints.

“Like this?” She moves to one side. Her nipples are large and dark, and her breasts much bigger, full.

“A girl,” says the doctor, and puts his glasses back on.

The waitress who served our beers squeals, then giggles, and runs back inside the shop.

Chepe’s wife drops her blouse. She has suddenly turned serious.

“Then she’ll be called Angelica,” she says.

“O.K.” Chepe laughs, claps once and rubs his hands together, leaning over his bowl.

The troop of soldiers was marching down the street. One of those boys stopped in front of our table, on the other side of the wooden railing, and told us furiously that we could not drink, that prohibition was in effect.

“Oh, we can drink,” said the doctor, “but you won’t let us. Calm down, it’s just a beer, I already asked Captain Berrio. I am Dr. Orduz, don’t you recognize me?”

The soldier goes away reluctantly among the green blotch of the rest of the boys on their way out of town, in formation, slowly with the slowness of those who know they could well be going to their deaths. To run forward they would need a shout from Captain Berrio behind them. But Berrio is nowhere to be seen. They are very few, and very distinct, the combatants who run of their own volition toward death. I think they no longer exist; only in history.

“I bet today one of those devils is going to kill me,” a boy said to me one day.

He had stopped in my doorway, asked for water. They were leaving to confront an advance. Fear was twisting him, he was green with panic: with every reason, because he was young.

I am going to die , he said, and they did kill him; I saw his rigid face when they brought him back; and not just him, there were quite a few more.

Where are these boys going now? They will try to liberate a stranger. Soon the town will be left without soldiers, for a time. I watch the street, while the doctor across from me talks. The girls who have not gone away, because they cannot, because their families do not have the wherewithal or they do not know how or to whom to send them, are the prettiest, I think, because they are the ones who stay, the last ones. A group of them run away in the opposite direction from where the troop is heading. I see their skirts flying, I hear their frightened cries, but also, among them, other cries, the excitement of a farewell to the soldiers.

“A single battalion, in San José, against two armies,” the doctor says. And he observes me looking sad, perhaps wondering whether I am listening to him. I listen, now: “We are more helpless than this cockroach,” he says, and crushes an enormous cockroach under his heel. “The Mayor was right to ask for more troops.”

And I stare at the smudge of cockroach, a meager little relief map.

“Well,” I say, “cockroaches will survive the end of the world.”

“If they’re extraterrestrials,” he says, and guffaws, without conviction. And he stares at me the harder. He has, in any case, a wide, permanent smile on his face. Now he bangs the table: “Did you not hear the Mayor on the radio? It was broadcast on television as well, and he told the truth, he said that San Jose has only one battalion of infantry and a police post, and that it amounts to the same as nothing, being in the hands of the bandits; he said that if the Minister of Defence can come here, he should come, so that he can take stock of the situation himself. He needed balls to say that; he could be removed from his post, for shooting his mouth off.”

How will sweet Geraldina be doing? Otilia will surely be keeping her company. Warm water wets my leg. My problem, once in a while, is that I forget to go to the lavatory. I should have consulted Maestro Claudino about that. And that is how it is: I look at myself: my trousers are a little wet between the legs, it was not the fear, was it, Ismael, or was it? It was not the bursts of gunfire, the shadow that fled. No. Just old age.

“Are you listening to me, profesor?”

“My knee hurts,” I lied.

“Come to the hospital on Monday, and we’ll have a look. Now I have other things to see to. Which knee? The left one? Well, we can tell from which way you limp.”

I say goodbye. I want to hear, want to see Geraldina, find out what is happening with her.

The doctor stands up too.

“I’m going where you’re going,” he tells me mischievously, “to your neighbor’s. I gave her a tranquillizer a few hours ago. She was hysterical. We’ll see if she’s asleep yet,” and, again, he pats me on the shoulders, on the back.

They trouble me: his two hot hands feel dreadful in this heat, his two soft, delicate surgeon’s hands, the fingers burning, accustomed to so much death, pressing the sweat of my shirt against my skin.

“Don’t touch me,” I say. “Don’t touch me today, please.”

The doctor laughs again and walks along beside me:

“I understand, profesor . Being arrested just for getting up early would put anyone in a rotten mood, isn’t that so?”

The empanada seller still persists from the same distant corner, we hear his shout to nobody in particular, his violent plea, I leeeey , the same as ever for years now, looking for customers where there are none — where there cannot be any, now. He is not the same chubby boy who arrived in San José with his little stove on wheels, the roving firebox he lights with petrol, spreading blue flames beneath the big fryer He must be close to thirty now: his head is shaved; he has a lazy eye; a deep scar marks his narrow forehead; his ears are tiny, unreal. Nobody knows his name, everyone calls him “Hey.” He arrived in San José knowing no one, turned to stone behind his stove, the enormous noisy crate where the oil bubbles, folded his arms, and there began to sell and continues to sell the same empanadas that he prepares himself, and repeats to anyone his story, which is the same, but so ferocious that it does not make one want to go back to eat more empanadas: he shows the metal draining rack, points to the fryer full of black oil, sinks the draining rack into it and then holds up the rack: he says at that temperature its edge could slice a throat as easily as cutting through butter, and he says that he himself had to use it on an empanada thief in Bogotá: “One who had the bright idea to steal from me, that was pure self-defence,” and while he says it he waves the draining rack a little, a sword in your head, and shouts to no one, at the top of his voice, deafening you: I leeeey!