Alejandro's Lie E-Book

Bob Van Laerhoven

• Herausgeber: Next Chapter
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

Terreno, 1983, Latin America. After a dictatorship of ten years, the brutal junta, lead by general Pelarón, seems to waver.

Alejandro Juron, guitarist of the famous poet and folk singer Victor Pérez who's been executed by the junta, is released from the infamous prison "The Last Supper." The underground resistance wants Alejandro to participate in its fight again. But Alejandro has changed.

Consumed with guilt by the death of his friend Victor, whom he betrayed to his tormentors, Alejandro becomes the unintended center of a web of intrigue that culminates in a catastrophic insurrection, and has to choose between love and escape.

A love story, a thriller and an analysis of the mechanisms that govern a dictatorship, Alejandro's Lie is a gripping novel about violence, betrayal, resistance, corruption, guilt and love.

Best Political Thriller, 2021 [Best Thriller Book Awards, BestThrillers.com]

Leseprobe

ALEJANDRO’S LIE

BOB VAN LAERHOVEN

Contents

Fin A La Censura

The Wind From The Cordillera

The Doubt Of A Priest

The Dove In The Mountains

The Paths Of Power

The Curse Of The Past

The Two Faces Of A Man

A Fire In The Heart

The Darkness In The Soul

The Cruel Need To Love

The Unbearable Lightness Of A Sense Of Honor

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About the Author

Copyright (C) 2021 Bob Van Laerhoven

Layout design and Copyright (C) 2022 by Next Chapter

Published 2022 by Next Chapter

Edited by Alexa Baczak

Cover art by CoverMint

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the author’s permission.

Fin A La Censura

1

For them, our blood is a medal

merited in eternity, Amen

murderers against us all, our men.

A verse was from one of his friend Víctor’s last songs before he was tortured to death. It tormented Alejandro Juron while he watched the tanked-up demonstration on Wednesday, October 19th, 1983, in Valtiago, the capital of Terreno.

The rally had been announced with much pomp and pageantry as “a powerful expression of the will of the people.”

Speakers assured the demonstrators that The People were finally going to defeat the junta of General Pelarón.

Their puffed-up rhetoric amused Alejandro:

“Shoulder to shoulder, we will force open the door to democracy promised by General Pelarón!”

“I’ll cross my fingers, dimwits,” Juron muttered aloud, a habit acquired from years in solitary confinement.

Usually energetic and vibrant with color, today, the large shopping centers on Avenida General Pelarón had the same sullen hue as the Andes Mountains behind the city. Black police buses with armored windows appeared at the end of the street.

Alejandro Juron stepped onto a café terrace. It would normally have been packed with office workers at that time of day, but because of the commotion, it was empty. A police tank blocked the road.

Years back, Juron had been the much-applauded guitar player in a group named Aconcagua that was famous across the Latin American continent for its protest songs, but he didn’t feel inspired to participate in the protest march.

The demonstrators were out of their minds: the junta that governed Terreno for the last ten years wasn’t on the brink of collapse like the speakers said. In the last few months, it had made a few compromises to make it look a bit less dictatorial, but Alejandro felt that was all a smoke-screen.

The economic crisis and growing popular protest had recently forced General Pelarón to announce he “would open the door to democracy at the appropriate moment and in the appropriate way.”

The opposition, a picturesque collection of splinter groups that were more often than not at each other’s throats, took to the streets after the general’s speech as if victory were already within reach.

Juron was sure Pelarón made that promise to force his opponents into the open to have them clubbed in the interest of ‘national peace.’

He wanted to run, but his eyes held him back—seeing the fata morgana that had endlessly tormented him in his prison cell. There she was—shimmering in the mist which rose from puddles of morning rain.

Lucía.

The name of his secret love sounded out of place in these circumstances. While Juron’s instincts told him to get the hell out of there, he was unable to peel his eyes away from a woman in the crowd. She had knotted a scarf over her mouth, effectively gagging herself, and was carrying a board around her neck that read Fin a la Censura – End Censorship. Her ponytail, the oily sheen on her hair: just like Lucía used to wear it. Could this be a sign that I can finally shed my penance?

Alejandro cursed: such were the thoughts of a romantic songster, not of a man who needed to keep a low profile. Out of there!

What held him back? He knew bloody well that melancholy was a noxious creation of the ego. After ten years in La Ultima Cena, the prison people called ‘The Last Supper’ because supper was the only meal they gave you on the day of your execution, Juron’s melancholy had decayed like the rotting jellyfish he used to inspect on the beach when he was a boy.

A white Peugeot was parked further down the street, across from the Centro Médico Dental. A man wearing sunglasses and armed with a handgun stepped out and started to shoot at random.

The police used the incident to charge into the crowd. At one moment, the demonstrators were a slowly advancing mass, and at the next, they scuttled in every direction like crazed ants. The man stepped back into his Peugeot and disappeared down the adjoining street.

The police threw tear gas grenades. Alejandro assumed the man in the Peugeot was an agitator, a member of one of the ultra-rightwing factions that enjoyed considerable influence in Terreno. By firing in the direction of the police, he had given the carabineros a reason to attack.

Juron wanted to run away, but he noticed that the woman, her mouth still muzzled, Fin a la censura still bouncing on her breasts, was running through the clouds of tear gas in the wrong direction. He sprinted towards her. The noise had become deafening in the meantime – shots interspersed with car engines starting.

Juron caught up with the woman and grabbed her by the arm: “Wrong direction, follow me.” She looked at him—eyes bloodshot from the gas. Juron pointed to a side street. She realized her mistake, and the two raced into El Paseo de Lyon, a pedestrian street full of shops.

A couple of police jeeps appeared at the end of the road heading in their direction. The buildings disappeared from Alejandro’s field of vision. All he could see were the rifles pointing from the jeeps, as if at the end of a tunnel. There was a metro entrance a few meters ahead, so he grabbed the woman and pulled her inside. They had just made it to the stairs when the jeeps passed outside. Alejandro shuddered as bullets punctured the wall above their heads. The woman screamed something incomprehensible. They raced down the stairs and bolted towards the metro tunnels.

Juron looked back. No one had followed them. You prepare for the worst, and this time, your luck’s in, he thought – not the usual course of events. In the brightly lit corridor leading to the ticket desk, he started to laugh and stopped in his tracks. The woman let go of his hand. She sized him up, pulled the muzzle from her mouth, and stuffed it into her trouser pocket.

“I have to catch a train,” she said so quietly that Alejandro barely understood her. She hesitated for a second: “Thank you.”

She wasn’t Lucía, of course. Lucía was dead, he knew that. He caught his reflection in the window of the ticket desk: the thin pencil mustache he had been cultivating of late and the thick lines either side of his nose. He was small and shabby, not the he-man type with slick, brilliantine hair, not the kind of man a woman like that would look up to.

“I understand,” he said, wondering if she’d noticed he’d been drinking. “You should never miss an appointment with your hairdresser; I get it completely.” He knew why he was nasty. Her clothes and hairstyle pointed to money. She was probably one of those left-wing feminists who like to jump into bed with big-talking ‘revolutionaries.’ It allowed them to flirt with the idea that they were ‘in the resistance,’ fighting against the junta and its old-fashioned views on the status of men and women.

Alejandro smiled in response to the surprise on her face: “Have a good day.” He nodded and walked away.

“Hey!” she shouted. “What are you going to do?”

“Get a breath of fresh air.”

“Back to the streets?”

“I’m a street brat. Where else should I go?”

“Can’t I at least buy you a metro ticket?”

Alejandro stopped. A Terrenean man was supposed to be able to pay for his metro ticket, even if he had only been released from The Last Supper a couple of weeks ago.

“Can’t you smell I’m broke?” he asked. He had to quickly ensure the woman despised him; that was the best option.

“That’s not what I meant,” she said nervously. She glanced at the exit. “I should be up there too, on the streets, with the others.”

“Solidarity is a fine quality in a person,” Alejandro confirmed. “But not when live ammunition is flying around.”

She ran her fingers through her ponytail.

“We should split up,” she said as if they’d been in a relationship for years. “What if the police follow us down here?”

Alejandro could see it in her eyes: she had realized that he was pretty well-oiled.

“Where do you want to go? Let me buy you a ticket; I owe you that much at least,” she said, her head bowed, rummaging in her bag.

“I’m heading for Canela. I’ll pay you back another time.”

She smiled for the first time. Alejandro looked away. They walked to the ticket desk. The woman brought her mouth close to the glass partition to make sure he didn’t hear her destination. Alejandro scowled. He had concealed the fact that Canela, the working-class area, wasn’t his final destination but the slum just beyond in what they called the porqueriza.

“Oink, oink,” he muttered. If she was smart – and she looked smart—she would have guessed he lived in the Pigsty by now. The look on her face betrayed that she was feeling less and less comfortable in his company.

They made their way to the platform. A grey metro train arrived. She handed him his ticket. “So, eh... this is my train... Bye.” She hesitated. “And thanks again.”

“Bye.”

The doors glided open. The woman stepped inside.

“What’s your name?” said Alejandro through the closed door. “Let me write a song for you.” The woman looked at him through the dirty glass and nodded politely. She probably hadn’t understood. The train started to move. Alejandro watched it pull out of the station, his arms raised as if he were holding a guitar. He was still standing in the same position when his train arrived.

He got off at the end of Avenida General Pelarón, a journey of several kilometers, and left behind the wealthy districts, his gaze fixed on the Cordillera, now rusty-red like a castellated rampart rising above the city, its peaks covered in snow.

His past was like the mountains: inhospitable.

2

Let me tell you a secret,

in the carousel of my pitter-patter heart

I chose a nickname for myself.

A funny rhyme with my little house

of rotting wood and slow decay

where every night I call myself a louse.

Alejandro stood in front of the hovel he called home, disgusted by the cold mud, the stench, and the flaking paint on the Coca-Cola board that served as a door. He pushed it aside. The working-class area, known as Canela, led into what everyone called ‘the pigsty,’ a slum housing more than one hundred thousand souls. Alejandro was aware that he had to be grateful for the shack his old buddies managed to find for him. Tens of thousands of people in Valtiago were homeless.

For as long as he could remember, ugliness had deeply troubled Alejandro. He once asked his grandfather why things grow ugly. “Grow old, you mean,” his grandfather had answered. “Maintenance, that’s the key, Alejandro. If you keep things in good repair, they keep their value, and sometimes they even increase in worth.”

The ten-year-old Alejandro asked himself if he would keep his value if he kept himself in good repair.

But his worth had not increased, that was clear. Alejandro knew why the junta recently released him from prison. The government threw inmates they considered washouts out of prison to lower the exploding prison population.

After the strict regime of The Last Supper, Alejandro found himself in a society that confused him. Ten years behind bars had turned him into a stranger in a strange land. In that same period, the junta had succeeded in changing Terreno with the help of the mass media. Nothing was the same, not even the music. The National Government under President Galero Álvarez had seen music as part of the country’s cultural heritage; now, it had been replaced by an invasion of American disco.

He quickly realized that resistance against the junta had gone underground and was particularly alive in the poorer parts of the city. Their limited means required them to budget their activities, although their plans were still pretty grand in the scale of things. Many had forgotten the heroes of the past. Álvarez, who shot himself in the head when the army turned its weapons on the presidential residence, was often spoken of in scoffing terms as an ‘idiot Marxist’ who had steered the country into an economic abyss..

Nevertheless, news of Alejandro’s release had quickly done the rounds in the shanty town. People brought him gifts at the start, mostly middle-aged men with children who had no respect for them. Most people over thirty-five still looked up to Víctor Pérez—Alejandro’s dead friend and the former popular leader of the band Aconcagua—as something of a hero. For them, Pérez’s magnificence as guardian of the country’s cultural uniqueness still reflected a little light on Alejandro Juron. But the kids walked past him, indifferent, their jangling radios pressed to their ears: Whack-a Whock-a.

Inside his shack, Alejandro watered the plants he was trying to grow in old cardboard boxes, with water from a rusty tin can. He clung to the little things that were meant to make his life bearable. I live by the grace of people who have little more in life than memories, he thought to himself, dispirited. You too, Violeta. More than fifteen years ago, you taught me to play the guitar, and two weeks ago, you found this shack for me. You rested your head on my chest and cried when you met me in front of The Last Supper after my release. I stood there, blinking in the sunlight, a whistling sound in my ear. You may have turned grey, Violeta, but you still believe in the old ideals. I saw you perform a couple of days ago for the people of the campamento. Bitter few had come to hear your husky voice and listen to your songs. You were just as jaunty as in the old days, and your eyes still sparkled under your thinning hair, but your hips were slower than before and your breath shorter. I turned away. I’m pretty sure you saw me leave, and I think you know why.

Alejandro gritted his teeth, grabbed a tin of Nescafé, and lit a flame under a pan of water. The light in his rancho was filtered red by a sheet of plastic he used as a window. When it was warm, he stored it away, but the wind from the Andes could be cold and blustery in the spring.

He watched the tiny waves of boiling water collide in the pan with the same rhythm as the thoughts in his head. A significant writer once wrote that the sea never stopped moving because if it did, every one of us would suffocate. He felt the steam begin to burn on his face. Some memories were unstoppable, especially memories of the Valtiago football stadium.

Ten years earlier, the army had herded the junta’s opponents together in the stadium. Alejandro’s memories were repugnant—the rusting bath of boiling water naked prisoners were forced into. The electrically charged batons they used on prisoners’ genitals—how they gave off blue sparks in the darkness. The constant screaming that ricocheted off every wall.

Teeth-grinding memories: the self-evidence with which their torturers went about their business, their impunity.

Why did the world look the other way? President Nixon had applauded Pelarón’s junta when it seized power in 1973 and used words like ‘order’ and ‘calm’ and ‘economic prosperity’ and ‘ally.’

Had Nixon given Pelarón carte blanche because the general consistently referred to Nixon’s opponents as communists and terrorists? Or because the junta had borrowed massive amounts of money ‘in the people’s name’ and left the citizens to foot the bill?

Alejandro tried clumsily to remove the pan from the heat, but it fell from his hand, and the water poured down the corrugated iron wall behind the gas cooker.

Morally, he faced an undeniable inner abyss. The woman who bought him the metro ticket was a shadow of flesh and blood, a phantom he had to suppress as quickly as possible.

“I’m an idiot, a complete fucking idiot,” said Alejandro as he picked up the pan. He chuckled and groped under the plank of wood that served as a bed, the safest place to store his guitar. Violeta Tossa had kept it for him when he was in jail. She should never have done it: the guitar made him dwell on the past. Now the instrument seemed insistent that he write songs again in a land that lost its hearing.

All the misery in his life had its roots in the attraction between words and music. It wasn’t love at first sight: for much of his youth, the guitar was an unwilling favorite. Violeta Tossa, a cigarette permanently dangling from her lips, taught him with inexhaustible patience how to seduce the instrument. She changed Alejandro’s life completely the day she suggested he meet the legendary singer Víctor Pérez.

Alejandro remembered the heat in the air that day, the low horizon induced by the mountains, the mass of clouds reminiscent of Rembrandt’s gloomy skies. Violeta and Alejandro were sitting in his parents’ garden. Violeta had asked him to write something à la Pérez a couple of days earlier. Alejandro stayed up the entire night working on the verses. He had been drinking, and the words weren’t exactly cohesive, but he convinced himself that the world should hear them.

He was nineteen and thought that his brand-new protest song outclassed anything Pérez had ever written. He sang his song and played with passion. But Violeta’s eyes narrowed as she listened.

Violeta’s reaction to his performance cut into him like a blunt knife: “Spare me the whining, boy!” When she laughed, her motherly breasts would shudder on top of her plump belly. “That’s politics you’re trying to sing about.”

“Of course it is,” he answered, pouting at her stupidity. “You wanted something Pérez-style, didn’t you? Doesn’t he write protest songs? Old-fashioned stuff. My work is the kind of protest song Dylan would write.”

“You sound like a bullfrog!” Violeta roared with laughter. “If you shout like that, you’ll make people deaf. You have to fill their hearts with passion. You sound like a gringo yelling slogans on TV and driving everyone crazy.” She strummed her guitar. “And that guitar, boy, that’s not a mangy burro. It doesn’t deserve the donkey beating you’re giving it. It’s your very first girlfriend, the one with the hair softer than your cold heart can remember.” She plucked a spirited melody that slowly became wistful and sad.

When she looked up, she saw the hurt in Alejandro’s eyes. “Chin up, boy, you’ll get there one day. You can do it; you can make that guitar sing. It’s the voice of the people who lost their tongue.” She gestured in the direction of the street.

“Speechless, all of them, struck dumb: all they can do is wait until death comes to get them.” Violeta shook her head, and cunning filled her eyes. “Your guitar has to give voice to their silence, coaxing, wheezing, licking, threatening, screaming. And you can do it if you weren’t so easily satisfied, for Christ’s sake. You’re no Dylan or Bob Seger. You’re Alejandro Juron, and your soul belongs here, in this place. Those miserable bastards outside deserve your voice and not some phony imitation. Go on, play me a Víctor Pérez number!”

Alejandro sighed and strummed a chord. How could he tell Violeta that he was only really interested in fame and often had doubts about those Terrenean protest songs, no matter how popular they were? The only way to become a star in 1970 was with pop music. Víctor Pérez had a decent voice, but the stuff of his songs was folklore. The poor always won. Instead of singing about sex and politics like the American pop stars, his songs were fairy tales. Alejandro felt sure that the love songs he wrote in secret were better than protest songs, certainly if he wanted to make a name for himself. The Terranean poor didn’t want to hear about their moral rights. They wanted to dance to the provocative tones of sizzling love. Didn’t Violeta understand that? But no matter how old-fashioned she was, he had to admit that she was and remained an inspiring guitar teacher. His mother—also pathetically corny— encouraged him to take lessons with her, adding that Violeta didn’t accept just anyone as her pupil.

Alejandro wondered how long he was going to be able to put up with Violeta. One thing was sure: he was determined to play in a pop band, come what may. He treated her to a Pérez song as she had asked, concentrating on the sound of his voice and guitar. He wanted adoration, even it was only from Violeta, and when he had finished, she said, “Plenty of technique and voice, but a reluctant heart. I’ll put you in touch with Víctor Pérez. He’s still looking for someone for his new group Aconcagua. Maybe that’ll wake you up.”

That was 1970, the year in which he found himself, entirely astonished, under the influence of Víctor Pérez and discovering the wealth of Aconcagua’s repertoire. Thirteen years later, the radio vomited American pop all day long, and songs by Aconcagua were banned. Alejandro had been right about the future of music, but not in the way he had hoped. Now he was an old man as far as the jittery youth were concerned, and he thought Irene Cara’s Flashdance…What A Feeling and Cyndi Lauper’s Girls Just Want To Have Fun were soulless crap.

Alejandro flipped the guitar, sniffed the sound box, and strummed a chord. His fingers glided self-assuredly across the strings. Amazing how they remembered their way through the scales. Alejandro didn’t have to search long for a melody: it emerged inside him, languishing with desire. He could fish it up from a timeless reservoir in which every note was as young as the day it was born. But the words resisted. After what he had been through, they seemed infantile. They convulsed like the catch in a fisherman’s net. Alejandro took the well-thumbed pages from under his pillow and read what he had written a couple of days earlier:

Boots trample grass underfoot,

Mortars leave hearts in ashes.

But out of their sight,

the passionflower bleeds,

and freedom is weighed up

against an empty death.

Traditionalist and common. He would never be able to imitate Víctor’s talent for reconciling tradition with modernity. He remembered how Víctor dismissed his attempts to introduce amusing dance songs into Aconcagua’s repertoire. Alejandro reacted by adding insult to injury: here’s a piece about a gringo who wants to get laid in Valtiago, Víctor. No? One about Jesus Christ getting lost in the wilderness of Terreno? But while Víctor laughed and shook his head, Alejandro felt envy. He was young, wanted to be like Víctor, only different. Or, better still, take his place.

Alejandro sawed himself into pieces like a magician who jumped too high. Finally, and in spite of himself, the sense of justice innate in Víctor gradually started to affect him, influence him, together with Pérez’ seriousness which refused to yield even when the military threatened him and even after he’d spent his first night in jail with intertwined traces of truncheons across his body as a result.

Alejandro was not only enamored and envious of his friend; he was also enchanted by Lucía Altameda, Víctor’s wife.

Alejandro ran his fingers over the damp plasterboard that formed the wall next to his bed. The line of Lucía’s jaw. He shook his head and started to sing in a falsetto voice, strumming a simple ditty on his guitar:

There was once a country boy

a Terrenean country boy

a man no one could trust.

But he thought he was a hero

A true blue popular hero,

no, no, don’t joke with the man.

He had a friend, a genuine friend,

who had a wife, an honest wife,

and when she looked at him,

well now, he just wasn’t sure

he was honestly lost for words,

honestly, not a single word.

He was a man you couldn’t trust,

he wasn’t the faithful type

our popular country boy hero.

Under his breath, as he had often done in The Last Supper, he said: “I might have been worthless, Víctor, but because of you, I slowly came to believe in fraternity, a brotherhood of man. All you lacked was a halo, patron saint of kiss my ass.” The halo had been sent to heaven ten years earlier after thirty-four bullets had slammed into Víctor Pérez’s body. The officer who delivered the final shot as Víctor lay dying in the stadium received the nickname ‘Prince of the Night.’

Alejandro made his way outside, stopped, blinded by the sudden sunlight, and mumbled, “I did penance for believing in fairytales! Do you hear me, spirits of the Cordillera?” He collapsed in a fit of laughter. How crazy could he get?

“Out of the way, borracho,” said a teenager on a rusty bike, sweating his way through the sludge between the ranchos.

“So,” said Alejandro, staring at the mud at his feet. “If that’s your answer, spirits of the Cordillera, snot boys who call me a boozer, then I think it’s time I grabbed a drink.”

3

That same evening, with a veil of fire-colored clouds in the sky turning the slums orange-red, the paramilitary security police raided the pigsty. The junta didn’t want the average citizen to know that it could barely maintain control in the barrio.

Officially, the reason for the raid was ‘to neutralize communist infiltrators.’ The police top brass didn’t want to—or couldn’t—see that some of their men on the ground were taking advantage of a burgeoning trade in poor quality drugs by demanding a share of the profits. Those policemen warned the dealers they did business with that a raid was on its way.

The dealers waited for the police with Russian AK-47s and South Korean Daewoo K1 machine guns on shack roofs. The ‘pigs’ couldn’t use their armored cars in the narrow muddy streets of the favela. The inhabitants always carried used plastic supermarket bags with them. They were everywhere. And what was in the bags being carried by the guttersnipes who worked for the drug dealers and called themselves ‘soldiers?’

If the ‘soldiers’ had courage and brains, they got an Israeli Uzi, a great weapon, precise as a poisonous snake. The less talented received Daewoos, awkward, cumbersome, clumsy recoil. But ooh-la-la, what firepower, what tremendous salvo capacity! You didn’t just kill your opponents; you ripped them to pieces.

The cops advanced in a tight formation in the alleys. Oops-a-daisy! The plastic bags fell on the ground, out came the weapons. Chaos and destruction to the rhythm of frenetic salvos. The police had bulletproof jackets, helmets, lightweight M16s. They had the advantage of their equipment. The favela warriors wore T-shirts over their mouths, knew every nook and cranny of the terrain, and were in the majority.

Gun smoke filled the air. The informants had told the dealers that a particular house in yellow brick would be the target of the attack. The cops knew that it contained a large quantity of cocaine. There weren’t many brick houses in the pigsty. The cops advanced towards the location but had to fight for every centimeter of ground.

José Melo, a corporal with the special forces, was sweating profusely under his heavy protective kit. The sun hung low in the sky but was still furiously hot. The red ants of the favela had to be eliminated, destroyed, trampled on. That’s all they were worth.

The cops arrived at a crossroads and came under fire from above, bullets ricocheting right and left, adrenaline rocketing. The mangy dogs had taken cover on new rooftops! “Cover me!” José shouted to his buddy Rodrigo. Rodrigo fired to his heart’s content while José kicked in the door of the nearest slum and ran inside, weapon at the ready. The place was empty. It had only one window, easily smashed by the butt of his M16. José fired at the roofs on the opposite side of the street. Rat-tat-tat, fully automatic. Screaming, not fully automatic, surging and waning.

José peered over the edge of the window sill. Where was Rodrigo? In the corner of his eye: a figure in combat uniform, on the ground, arms and legs spread out. José scowled, glared. Blood dripped from his buddy’s mouth. José cursed, wasted a rain of bullets on roofs that were already empty. A rasping sound behind him made him turn. A boy little more than ten years old was pointing a pistol at him. The pistol quivered, shook, juddered. Staring eyes, very dark, shiny as tin.

José stayed where he was, crouched low, and smiled obliquely: “Come on, kid, let’s not screw around. If you don’t kill me with your first shot, you’re a dead boy; I’ll shoot you to pieces and feed you to the dogs on the street. I mean it. Are you willing to take that risk? Want to be a man? Then go ahead, shoot!” José thumped his chest in the hope that the boy would fire at his bullet-proof vest. Then he had a chance of surviving the bullet. The boy’s mouth trembled. A handsome kid with full lips, an aristocratic nose, intelligent eyes. A doubter: José could feel it.

“There’s another option,” crooned José, sugar-sweet. “You walk out of here. I wait a couple of minutes and then leg it myself, and no one gets hurt. Let the big boys do the work, kid. Then you might live long enough to know what it’s like to fuck a woman.” As he spoke, his left hand fumbled unnoticed towards his boot, where he had hidden his throwing knife. José liked to boast to his colleagues that he could earn more money at the circus than with the special forces: I can skewer a mosquito by the balls from ten meters.

“Mosquito’s balls!” José roared as the blade left his hand. The boy jumped at the sound, took the knife in the belly, doubled over, stumbled sideways, fired a round into the plasterboard wall. Convulsing and bleeding heavily, the young body fell to the ground. José kicked the pistol out of reach. A .38, his professionally trained brain took note. He rested his foot on the driveling child’s throat and pursed his lips.

“You should have learned to shoot someone in the back,” he said smoothly. “But for you, it’s too late.” He fired three bullets from his M16 into the body on the floor, which tensed like a spring then collapsed.

The gunfire on the street below appeared to have subsided. José peered outside. He noticed uncontrollable shivers running all over his body as if he had a fever. He’d had enough for one day. No need to push the envelope too far. He planned to stay where he was until his mates retreated and then join them unnoticed. Later a beer, a willing bit of skirt…

Then he saw the plastic supermarket bag beside the table. That wasn’t there before. Had to belong to the dead cricket. José inched towards it. It was full to bursting. He opened it.

Moments later, José furrowed his brow, deep in thought.

The plastic bag was bulging with bottles of Polvo de Estrellas, high-quality crack traded by the influential ultra-rightwing secret society, Patria y Sangre. José , like many of his police colleagues, was a member. One of its primary sources of income consisted of importing Polvo de Estrellas by air and sea from Bolivia via Argentina and exporting it from Terreno to the United States.

How did Stardust of such exceptional quality manage to find its way into the pigsty?

4

The steel-grey buildings of the National University, a project of the junta’s Elemental think-tank, had something Stalinist about them. Not a trace of the architectural finesse of the high mountains or the Italian and French influence evident in the city’s older neighborhoods. The buildings concealed a few older constructions built by the National Government before the junta threw them out. They were low-built and shaped like a honeycomb.

The woman at the counter of the central administration building was playing it cool. “The law states that you have to pay a registration fee,” she said. She slipped a form across the counter and turned back to her Apricot computer. The form stated the fee that prevented country kids and the children of city laborers from registering.

“I already have a degree, thanks,” said Alejandro. “I want to talk to the librarian.” He took a furtive glance at the computer and felt unsteady.

The woman looked disapprovingly at his clothing. Alejandro tried to smile. “I’m a performer,” he explained.

“Señor Vial is in a meeting.”

“I can wait,” said Alejandro.

The woman ostentatiously flicked a couple of switches on her switchboard. “I suggest you leave. Or would you prefer me to have you removed?”

“If you give Mr. Vial my name, he’s sure to receive me,” said Alejandro.

“If you don’t leave now, I’ll call security.”

Since the coup d’état, the military ran the universities, and they operated the security services.

Alejandro was about to slink off when the woman he helped during the demonstration walked into the room. She caught sight of him and halted. Alejandro smiled. “Hello, mysterious lady,” he said, trying to hide his surprise. “Alejandro Juron, at your service. What a coincidence, meeting you here in this shrine of learning.”

“Miss Candalti,” said the secretary behind the counter. “This man is….”

“I want to talk to Cristóbal Vial,” Alejandro interrupted, without looking away from the woman named Miss Candalti. “It was a great deal easier ten years ago than it is now.” Candalti was wearing large earrings and had tied her hair in a bun. She lowered her eyes. She looked bright and competent in her business outfit.

“I’m his secretary,” she said. “Does Mr. Vial know you?”

“If he’s not suffering from amnesia.”

She smiled in precisely the same way as she had after he said he would pay her back for the metro ticket. “I’ll take care of it, Luisa,” she said to the nervous receptionist. She nodded to Alejandro: “Follow me.”

She stood against the wall in the lift, her arms folded over her chest, as far away from him as she could get in the confined space.

“Do you know Cristóbal?” she repeated, this time without a smile.

“From way back, when he used to be an ordinary librarian. He seems to have done pretty well for himself under the junta.”

“Do you think so?”

“Oh well, maybe not. Cristóbal was running for Vice-Rector under the National Government. Chief Librarian seems like slim pickings by comparison. What happened to Eduardo Corrientes?”

Alejandro noted with satisfaction that Beatriz was surprised he knew the name of the former rector. “Mr. Corrientes is dead.”

He nodded as if he didn’t need to hear the details. “My father knew him well.”

He was a completely different person, Beatriz thought. Yesterday he was a drunk, almost childishly proud; moments ago, he was nervous, a little pompous; now, he was calm, with a bluntness that surprised her.

They headed into the corridor. “Do you know what this building reminds me of?”

“No.”

“Bulgaria.”

“Were you there?”

“Yes.” He smiled. “We gave a concert there, the end of the sixties. Didn’t do much for my communist ideals when I realized our Bulgarian comrades were such bad architects.”

Cristóbal hurried out of his office. He was short, balding, his scalp brown and shiny, a sturdy fifty-something to whom the years had granted a certain paternal charm. “Cristóbal,” said Beatriz. “This man wants to….”

“Alejandro Juron,” Alejandro interrupted. “You’ll probably remember my father.”

“Yes, of course,” Cristóbal nodded affably. His defense against uninvited encounters with others was to look like a man in a hurry. It particularly impressed the military he had to deal with. Vial took a couple of steps and then stood still.

“Alejandro Juron?” he said, his eyes pinched. “I read somewhere that you were free again.”

“Ten lines on page thirty of the newspaper, I imagine,” said Alejandro. “I’m not yet in a position to buy the papers; otherwise, I would’ve cut out the column and preserved it for my grandchildren.”

“Come inside,” said Cristóbal without reacting to Alejandro’s cynicism. He nodded towards the office door.

“Will you be joining us?” said Alejandro to Beatriz. She turned to Cristóbal.

“Do you know each other?” asked the librarian with an absent-minded smile. Cristóbal was a talented actor who quickly adapted himself to the preconceptions the military had about academics.

“A little,” said Beatriz. She had told her boss that morning what had happened the day before during the demonstration. Cristóbal gently chided her for her recklessness.

Cristóbal sighed and turned to Alejandro: “The Last Supper. What was it like? All those years...”

“A picnic,” said Juron with a straight face.

Cristóbal’s face echoed the expression. “What do you plan to do now?”

“Get out of Terreno as soon as possible. I paid a visit to the Ministry for Foreign Affairs this morning. I noticed that the department dealing with emigration has glass doors. Brought tears to my eyes.”

Beatriz frowned.

“I’ve been dreaming of glass doors for ten years in The Last Supper,” Alejandro explained. “But despite that good omen, I was told that even if I got permission, it would take at least a year to leave the country. Not precisely my long-cherished dream of flying through glass doors.”

“So what are you going to do in the meantime?” asked Cristóbal.

“That’s what I wanted to ask you.”

Cristóbal sipped at the cup of tea on his desk. “I can’t help you openly. The situation is too delicate for that.”

“How many times this week have I heard those words from old friends?” Alejandro smiled. “Not so many, to be honest, but that’s because I don’t have many old friends left. And precious few of them were willing to talk to me. People have short memories.”

“I haven’t forgotten you.”

“That’s still to be determined,” said Alejandro bluntly.

“Do you have somewhere to sleep?”

“Violeta Tossa arranged a rancho for me in the pigsty.”

Beatriz caught herself looking left and then right as if she was following a tennis match. She also noticed that Alejandro’s gaze kept drifting in her direction. What was she to think of it? Was he mocking her or just confused? It was hard to tell.

“Let me see if I can find you a decent room. Unfortunately, there’s a shortage, so it might take a while.” Cristóbal turned to Beatriz: “Did Luisa at the reception see him?”

“Yes.”

“Tell her I got rid of him on the spot.”

“With a kick in the ass for good measure,” said Alejandro.

“Luisa likes to stick to the rules. And she’s not the only one at this university.” Cristóbal smiled. “I make sure everyone thinks the same about me. Why did you wait so long before coming to see me?”

“Because I wanted to be sure that nobody was tailing me.”

“Sensible. Was anyone?”

“I’ve got a cramp in my neck from looking over my shoulder. But I don’t think so.”

Cristóbal nodded. “We’ll get you some money and do what we can.” He stood. “Next time, we can talk about more important matters, things that still have to happen. But not here. What are you going to do?”

Something happened to Alejandro that Beatriz found almost terrifying: first, he looked at her, then his eyes filled with such incredible pain that it cut her to the quick. She noticed that even Cristóbal lost his poise for an instant when Alejandro answered without looking away from Beatriz: “Look for similarities.”

The Wind From The Cordillera

1

“Residents of the Canela-quarter, effective today, it is forbidden to leave your houses after eleven PM. Violators will be shot on sight.”

Beatriz was on her way to meet the Belgian priest René Lafarge, who, according to Cristóbal, could “do something” for Alejandro. As the military jeep passed her, she reacted like all the others in the narrow street. She ambled and looked at her feet. One of the soldiers whistled sharply at her during a lull in the megaphone message. Beatriz didn’t look up. The rifles in the jeep tilted upwards. The image reminded her of her ex-husband Manuel Durango when, in bed, he leered at the sight of his erection.

Beatriz didn’t have to traverse the porqueriza to reach René’s home next to Canela’s old church. But her curiosity about Alejandro had been growing since he left the university the day before, when Cristóbal told her who the man was. She knew now who the woman was whom she resembled so much. She wasn’t flattered but rather painfully shy, to know that she and Lucía, who had been executed in Valtiago’s football stadium with her husband Víctor Pérez, resistance hero and singer of the famous folk-group Aconcagua, were outwardly like twin-sisters.

“Similarities, Beatriz,” Cristóbal had concluded. “Sometimes, I think life floats on them.”

Alejandro walked, tacking between the heaps of rubbish in front of the houses across the street. His head was a beehive of pangs and pains caused by the booze he had bought the day before with Cristóbal’s money. His guitar dangled on his back. The years of neglect had dulled her; the snares needed love and attention.

He had two things on his mind: to leave Terreno as quickly as possible and, from now on, to be stubbornly rooted in the mad humor of existence. The first mission was difficult; the second should be a piece of cake. In prison, he survived amongst murderers and rapists. Hadn’t they found him irresistibly funny? They had cracked up, the psychopaths, when he played his pranks. How then was it possible that since he was free, no one laughed with him anymore? Alejandro concluded he should stop drinking. You could only be a comedian with a clear head.

He saw Beatriz walking on the other side of the street and stood still. Now that he had decided to take life more lightly, he couldn’t just yell señorita at her, could he? Too formal. He grabbed his guitar from under his right armpit, cleared his throat, and started singing Abre la Ventana as he crossed the street. His strokes, from a hesitant start, grew more precise. His voice, coarse at first, became clear and melodious.

Beatriz stopped, shaking her head, when she saw Alejandro walking over to her. His voice surprised her. She didn’t remember it ever sounding so strong and soulful.

A jeep’s engine started to whine and subdued Alejandro’s voice and guitar. Shots rang; people ran. Beatriz remained motionless. She had to duck, squat down at least; her knees refused. A man ran into the street, chased by a jeep. He charged past Beatriz. Afterward, Beatriz would remember nothing of his face except his half-open mouth, as if he were calling her. The jeep approached Alejandro, who plunged in the mud. The vehicle skimmed past. More rifles fire. The fugitive fell, kicked his legs like a wounded horse, and finally, lay still. The jeep stopped beside the body. Soldiers jumped out. One of them finished the man with a bullet in the neck. They hauled the body in the trunk. The jeep’s engine revved up again.

The street was empty now, except for Beatriz and Alejandro. He crawled to his feet and went to her. She gave him a shaky smile and smoothed her hair back. He noticed her earlobes, elf-like and tender.

She suddenly snorted with laughter. “Your pants.”

Alejandro stopped and looked downwards. Mud caked his pants, not only at the height of his calves but also on his crotch.

2

“If I were a woman with decent morals, I wouldn’t invite you in,” Beatriz said with a little laugh, parking in her driveway in Calle Ordoñez, in one of Valtiago’s plush quarters. A big patio and a horseshoe-shaped garden surrounded the white-plastered house. “I live here separated from my ex-husband, but our divorce isn’t official yet.”

The nonchalance with which she said it should’ve alarmed Alejandro, but he wasn’t paying attention. During the ride in Beatriz’s Land Rover, with a towel underneath his buttocks, he had been staring at electronics shops and sumptuous Mercedes dealers.

So much had changed during his ten years in prison. Beatriz told him that raids on the shops in the quarter had at least doubled in the last couple of months. Windows with steel shutters, cameras, private militia, and police tanks were needed to protect the city’s affluent areas.

“So long ago,” he mumbled. “For me, this is 1984.”

“That’s only next year.”

“I mean the novel. Georges Orwell’s 1984.”

Beatriz was surprised. She hadn’t seen a reader in him.

“Yesterday, I talked about similarities,” Alejandro said. “And look: your house resembles my parents’ cottage, only bigger.”

“But we’re not similar at all,” Beatriz said. She had received her house as a present from her father after she married. This fact still irked her every day.