Monkey Boy. Francisco Goldman

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СКАЧАТЬ for immigrant kids in Bushwick that I volunteer at. Penny’s back again on her relentless lecture circuit, too, paying her own travel expenses, traveling the United States speaking to ever-smaller audiences. She says she doesn’t even care as long as at least a few people show up, and now and then she’s nicely surprised, in California, say, by a college or even high school crowd that includes many students who came from Central America as small children, others born here, kids so eager to learn everything they can about what went on during the war decades in their ancestral countries that their parents fled, the most common complaint being that those same parents often refuse to talk about it. Penny always tells me she’s writing a memoir, I hope she does.

      Outside of my aunt and uncle and cousins, I couldn’t deal, back then, with people who didn’t get what was going on or didn’t want to; people, both up here and down there, who weren’t bothered by or were just passive consumers of all the lies endlessly poured over mass murder. The war and its politics made me judgmental in a vehement way I’m likely to roll my eyes at now whenever I encounter it in others, less over the judgments than over the vehemence, sometimes as embarrassing as hearing a recording of my own much younger self. But a fundamental truth of the war in Guatemala was always that those with the most wealth and power to lose were the most indifferent to how many were slaughtered: young mothers, babies, entire villages, whatever, it made no difference to them. To this day they’re sure they were on the correct side of history, even if what they have to show for it are failed narco states with starving populations and everybody trying to get the hell out, and now here comes the next narco president, General Cara de Culo, “a good muchacho,” as the gringo ambassador called him in a newspaper article the other day. Those trips back to New York in those years were always incredibly isolating.

      But by the end of the eighties I’d moved back anyway, where I shared an apartment in Brooklyn with Gero Tripp. We still sometimes worked in Central America, even went down together for the Panama invasion. But soon after, I decided I wasn’t going to do that anymore. I was at last finishing my first novel. Gero was on his way to becoming an international war correspondent superstar. Bosnia, the West Bank, and Gaza, with the Pashtuns who fought the Red Army in Afghanistan, the Tamil Tigers, the Polisario Front in Western Sahara. He’s in Iraq right now. I was also venturing into risky territories I’d never been to before. At thirty-three, I started having girlfriends and relationships, one after the other, and that enormous change in my life consumed me. It started the night I went to meet a younger friend, a Harvard law student who’d been an intern reporter in Managua, for drinks in the city, and she turned up at the bar with a friend of hers, Burmese Belgian Pénèlope Myint, raised in Hong Kong and Brussels, a doctoral student writing a dissertation on Italian feminist writers. At the end of what turned into a long New York club-hopping night, we wound up in a crowded taxi, Pénèlope sitting on my lap as we made out, the other people wedged into the back seat around us making cracks about how we were so fogging the windows the driver couldn’t see. And so began that crazy incineration of a year, split between New York and Cambridge, the memory of which I treasure so much that often when I’m in Boston I walk down to the Esplanade only to gaze Gatsby-like across the river at that grad student high-rise against the sky and the white balcony from which, one winter night, Pénèlope threw her symbolic trinket engagement ring—I’d promised to replace it with a properly gemmed one when we made the engagement “official,” that is, when I could afford one—down into the snow-covered playground eleven stories below. After Pénèlope came Camila in New York and Gisela Palacios in Mexico City, two long relationships, back-to-back, in a decade that lifted off when I was still a young man and dropped me back down in middle age.

      But I hadn’t done any journalism in years when, in 1998, the human rights bishop was murdered in his parish house garage in Guatemala City, just after presiding over the presentation of a church human rights report that exposed generals and colonels to possible future trials for war crimes. What I thought was going to be only one magazine article on the murder led to seven years of regularly returning to Guatemala to keep up with the investigations and trials and publishing occasional magazine pieces that I finally collected, along with some newer reporting, into my slender book. I thought, Now I can leave the case alone, and it will leave me alone. Fat chance of that.

      Just this past weekend, General Cara de Culo, a former troop commander in the Ixil and later head of the Archivo and of the G-2, announced that he’s running for president of Guatemala. He’s suspected by some investigators of having been one of the masterminds of the bishop’s murder, and when in my book I published some of the evidence against him, including allegations made by the Key Witness that had never been made public before, that did make some noise, though mostly down there. Of course, the general denies all, and because he’s so powerful and people are so terrified of him, that was enough to make the issue go away—so much so that now he’s running for president. On Monday morning, a Boston public radio station contacted me for an interview about Cara de Culo. They said I could do it from a New York studio, but when I told them I was coming up to Boston later in the week, we decided to do it there. I have to be at the radio station this afternoon, before I meet up with Marianne.

      Seems they can never tear us apart, me and General Cara de Culo, also his main protégé, Capitán Psycho-Sadist, convicted for a role in the bishop’s murder along with two other military men, the first Guatemalan military officers ever convicted of a state-sponsored political execution. Psycho-Sadist is a much more volatile and adroit figure than the other soldiers he went to jail with. Over the years the notorious capi has built a crime empire from prison: he runs the narcotics street trade in Guatemala City and also the city’s most feared squad of assassins for hire. Supposedly Cara de Culo offered to protect and empower the capitán in his ambitions in exchange for his keeping quiet about others involved in the bishop’s murder. In the meantime, several witnesses, a couple of Psycho-Sadist’s losing defense attorneys, among others, have been mysteriously murdered. That was the first thing I thought of when I was urgently summoned to the US embassy in Mexico City last year to speak to a consul there who had information from Guatemala to pass on to me. Prosecutors there had been intercepting Capitán Psycho-Sadist’s mobile phone conversations, some with General Cara de Culo, that revealed his ongoing obsession with everyone he thought had played a role in sending him to prison. All the people he named, among them a few journalists, including myself, were offered police protection if they were in Guatemala. That wasn’t an option in Mexico. Cara de Culo and Psycho-Sadist have power, but it doesn’t reach up to New York is what I thought when I decided to get out of Mexico for a while. Maybe the Key Witness came to a similar conclusion; the last time I’d spoken to the prosecutors they’d told me that the Key Witness, who had refugee status in Mexico, had gone missing, and they suggested that maybe he’d headed north, across the border.

      Maybe Cara de Culo worries I’ve found more evidence about his role in the murder beyond what I included in the book. I know I’m still sometimes on his mind, because in an interview on CNN last year he accused me of being a liar in the pay of his political rivals and said he had proof, which of course he’s never explained or revealed. Really, I don’t have any more information than what I’ve already published, nor have I made the slightest effort to find out anything more. If the general somehow hears what I say about him on Boston Public Radio later today, he won’t like it, but he also won’t hear anything new, nothing that will be newsworthy down there. It’s not going to be me who stops Cara de Culo from becoming president.

      And yet if not for the murder of the human rights bishop and General Cara de Culo, and if not for the Key Witness, too, without whom the case would never have gone to trial, I would never even have met Lulú. That chain of circumstances is a little weird to think about—and to acknowledge.

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