The Good Cripple Read online

  When Bunny reached the cantina, a boy of about ten who was behind the counter disappeared at a run through the door into the courtyard calling, “Papá! Papá!” Carlomagno’s wife, who was a cousin of Luvia’s, walked out of one of the rooms on the other side of the courtyard and came towards the cantina.

  “Come in, Don Armando.”

  Bunny followed the woman to a small, dark room, where Carlomagno was sitting on the edge of a cot with a packed rucksack at his feet. Bunny shook his hand and put his bag down next to the rucksack. Carlomagno said, “One of my kids just came in with the news that the judiciales …”­­––and he drew a circumference in the air with one finger. “We’ll see if we can make it out of here, even so.”

  “Really? For sure?”

  But Carlomagno was already on his feet and picking up the rucksack

  “Monós,” he said.

  Why bother asking where, Bunny said to himself, and picked up his bag to follow Carlomagno the Indian. Two more boys, who seemed to have been waiting in the entryway to go outside, ran to stand in front of their father.

  They seemed more cheerful than afraid.

  Indian-style, in single file, the boys first, then Carlomagno and Bunny, they walked down the sidewalk. The boys ran on ahead and stopped at the corner, looked left and right, then turned to signal the adults to come on. They proceeded like that from street to street all the way to the little bridge of Chamelco, where an old Land-Rover was waiting for them, driven by Sean Acuña, son of the hotel’s owners.

  “Move it, muchá,” Sean told them. “The polacos are everywhere.”

  Carlomagno and Bunny got into the jeep. The boys stood there waving at their father, and disappeared when Sean went around the corner to cross the bridge.

  “Bunch of tough little guys, tus patojos,” said Bunny.

  Sean laughed.

  “It’s true, they’re real tough guys.”

  Carlomagno looked serious, his eyes fixed on the road. Sean explained to Bunny that he’d had a fight with his parents a few months before and no longer worked at the hotel. Now he made a living driving tourists out to remote areas in his jeeps. He had another Land-Rover with its own driver, and two assistants.

  “I can’t complain. I like these roads. The tourists are a pain in my balls, but the people in the towns I take them to are usually pretty decent, and since I bring them business they don’t have any problem with me. I ask for no more than that.”

  A bit later, Bunny said to Sean: “By the way, tigre, where are you taking us?”

  “To Sebol, for the moment.”

  “Great. Sebol’s real pretty.”

  Bunny relaxed. His body rode along in total abandonment between the other two men, and his spirit felt free of anxiety, while the Land-Rover jolted along the narrow road and his eyes took in the landscape of rounded mountains covered with mist and moss, like a Chinese watercolor. From time to time they had to pull over and stop on the edge of a cliff or next to a wall of rock, to let another vehicle go past.

  Part Two

  II.

  Juan Luis Luna was kidnapped one cool November morning when the Guatemalan sky, swept by the north wind, was at its purest and bluest. He was kidnapped for money, but not his own money, for though he lacked nothing he was not a rich man. His father, however, was.

  There were five kidnappers, but he only recognized three of them: Barrios the Tapir, Bunny Brera, and Guzmán, a.k.a. El Horrible. As a boy he’d made friends with them, then broken off the friendship. The other two, who must have been a little older and looked as though they were just following orders, answered to the nicknames Carlomagno and the Sephardi. Carlomagno was a bulky man with Mayan features; the Sephardi was tall and lean, with an aquiline nose and curly hair.

  They lowered him on a nylon rope down a deep, dark hole lined with rusted metal and smelling strongly of gasoline. They left him there with a Rayovac flashlight, a copy of Dante’s Divine Comedy translated into Spanish by the Conde de Cheste and a plastic bucket for a toilet. Juan Luis had a very bad feeling about the whole thing. He knew many stories about kidnappings. He knew that if the Tapir, Bunny, and El Horrible hadn’t bothered to conceal their faces it was because they weren’t planning to let him out of there alive.

  He remembered the Tapir and Bunny from when they were all in school together, the two of them standing at the door of a luxurious house in La Cañada where a birthday party to which neither one had been invited was going on. He remembered them so clearly that for a moment he forgot what they had since become. Illuminated by a powerful floodlight, they stood at the house’s grand entrance in their awkward polyester suits, their long hair still wet, the Tapir with an enormous pimple on his forehead, Bunny with his precocious adolescent stare, arguing with the portero who wouldn’t let them in.

  When the kidnappers got in touch with Don Carlos, he paid no attention. He did not place an advertisement in the daily papers as they requested, or give any sign of wishing to negotiate.

  Juan Luis was given no food for two days. On the third day, Carlomagno opened the hatch and the hole filled with light and warmth. Dazzled, Juan Luis raised his eyes and saw the silhouette of the Tapir, who was standing at the edge of the hole with his arms crossed, looking down.

  “Your old man doesn’t want to play along,” he said. “So you’re going to have to help us out if you don’t want us to start getting drastic.”

  El Horrible’s silhouette appeared next to the Tapir’s.

  “You’re going to write him a nice letter from his prodigal son, sí?”

  Juan Luis lowered his gaze. El Horrible continued: “You’re going to tell him that you’ve repented of the way you live and that when you get out of here you’re going to lick whatever he wants you to lick—catch my drift? What would you like to eat? A sandwich? A little coffee? We’ll give you pen and paper and after you eat you can get down to work. Let’s see if we make a writer out of you.”

  A few minutes later they lowered down a basket with black beans and tortillas, and a plastic thermos of instant coffee. After that, Bunny dropped down two or three sheets or white paper, a pen, and two batteries for the flashlight wrapped in a sock.

  “Let’s see if you get inspired!” he shouted down from above and disappeared.

  Juan Luis put the new batteries in the flashlight. Then he opened La divina comedia down the middle, to have a surface to write on, read two or three lines at random, and wrote a very short, impersonal letter to his father. He felt that the old man was to blame for the fact that he was there.

  His eyes followed the movement of the paper with his handwriting on it as it rose, hooked to a clothes hanger that Carlomagno threw down on a fishing line.

  At night, in a moment of optimism, curled into a ball and ready to go to sleep, he thought, “They’re crazy, that’s what it is. They think they’re invulnerable. They’ll get the money and let me out of here, and then they’ll go off somewhere and blow it all.”

  Two more days went by, and when on the third day he had no breakfast, he knew something was wrong. He was losing all notion of time. The sky was blue when they finally opened the hatch.

  “Ya te llevó la chingada!” The Tapir’s voice boomed. “That letter of yours did no good at all. Now we’re going to have to operate on you.” The Tapir stepped away from the rim and his voice became almost inaudible, but Juan Luis heard, more than once, the word “bet.”

  “What’s happening!” he shouted, his voice reverberating off the tank’s walls as it rose toward the light. “I don’t understand.”

  El Horrible’s head materialized up above.

  “What part do you want us to cut off and send with your next letter,” he asked.

  “Just like that?” Juan Luis shouted.

  “Like that,” said El Horrible, making a sawing motion.

  Juan Luis’s voice was weak when he said, “Give me
one more chance.”

  Later Bunny came to toss down the pen and another sheet of paper. He said, in an almost friendly tone, “Try a little harder. This time it’ll only be a finger or an ear, we’ve already placed our bets. But if your old man doesn’t start giving in it could be more serious the next time. A hand or a foot. Así que ya sabés.”

  In his second letter, written in tiny letters to save space, Juan Luis tried to move his father, promising him that if he got out alive he’d work as hard as he had to in order to repay his own ransom.

  Once more Carlomagno threw down the fishing line with the clothes hanger attached to it to reel up the letter. That night, shortly before dawn, two figures scrambed down a rope into the tank. They wore lights on their foreheads. It was the Tapir and the Sephardi.

  They stood in front of Juan Luis and shone their lights on him. The Tapir took three pills, each a different color, from his backpack, along with a small bottle of aguardiente, and Juan Luis took the pills without protest and washed them down with the liquor. Instantly he felt a pleasant dizziness. They had him take off his shoes and sit down.

  “It’s going to be the little toe on the left foot,” the Tapir said to the Sephardi. Then, addressing Juan Luis, “Let’s see: give us that foot.”

  “But it’s not necessary,” he protested. “My letter might convince him.”

  “Let’s see that foot,” the Tapir shouted.

  Juan Luis stretched out his foot and the Sephardi grabbed it by the heel.

  “This will just take a second,” he said soothingly.

  “Please!”

  The Sephardi was making a tourniquet for him.

  “We have to prevent hemorrhaging.” He’d taken a short, curved razor from the pocket of his pants. He held the toe between two fingers as the Tapir said, “We don’t even need anesthesia.” With a quick movement, the Sephardi separated the toe from the foot.

  “That’s all there is to it. See?” said the Tapir.

  “I can’t believe it,” Juan Luis moaned, holding his foot which was covered in blood.

  The Sephardi raised his eyebrows then dropped the amputated toe into a small plastic bag the Tapir held up.

  Juan Luis felt more rage than pain. Two tears rolled down his cheeks while he watched the two figures climb up the rope with their lights aimed toward the reddish light of dawn. He passed the back of his hand over his face to wipe the tears away, then realized that he had covered his face with blood. After removing the tourniquet, he wrapped himself in his wool blanket and fell asleep right away. He had a series of brief, strangely happy dreams.

  Carlomagno––who was called that because like the French king Charlemagne he’d never learned to write, though he’d made several attempts––was the one designated to take the amputated toe to Juan Luis’s father. They wrapped it in sterilized cotton and put it in a hygienic zip-lock bag, which, in turn, was placed in a DHL envelope along with Juan Luis’s second letter.

  After receiving instructions from the Tapir, Carlomagno left the abandoned gas station on his old 80-horsepower motorcycle, heading towards Guatemala City on the Calzada de San Juan. It was a cool morning, just before ten. Carlomagno rode happily along humming a song, his face caressed by the broken light that fell through the cypresses. When he reached Avenida Roosevelt, he ran into the usual traffic jam, which wouldn’t clear up until nightfall, but on the motorcycle Carlomagno managed to get to Pops de Las Americas, the ice cream place, in less than fifteen minutes. He thought about the money. It seemed incredible that it had all happened so fast. Everything was going to work out. They’d give it one more shot and then he was out of there. He didn’t entirely trust the Tapir, who was half-crazy, took too many risks and had no discipline. Unlike Carlomagno, he’d never been in the army.

  He stopped the motorcycle outside the Vistalago building where there was a payphone, which he checked to make sure it was working. He went into Farmacia Hincapié to buy aspirin and get some loose change. He went back to the payphone and called Don Carlos’s house. When someone answered, he hung up. He crossed the avenue towards the Plaza de la Cruz, which was empty, walked over to the central monument, and used sticking plaster to attach the DHL envelope to the back of the concrete cross. Then he walked slowly back to his motorcycle and stood there watching. A woman in shorts and a sweatshirt jogged across the plaza and continued on towards the Parque de Berlín. Carlomagno went back to the payphone and this time he didn’t hang up when Don Carlos picked up the receiver on the other end. He put a twenty-five centavo coin into the slot so he could talk.

  Then he went into Pops and had a hot fudge sundae. He glanced at his watch several times until it was eleven o’clock, just like the Tapir had told him, and then went to take another turn around the Cruz. He rode his motorcycle slowly around the monument and caught sight of the blue and orange envelope that no one had come to pick up.

  That afternoon, the five of them gathered in the former office of the abandoned gas station to deliberate.

  “I can get the instruments,” said El Horrible, “What do we need?”

  “A Vanghetti saw, at least, and some morphine,” the Sephardi answered unwillingly.

  “No problem,” said El Horrible, moving his head with satisfaction.

  “Okay,” said the Tapir, placing his hands on the old desk in conclusion. “It’ll be a foot.”

  You can’t imagine how I felt when I heard none of my letters has reached you, said Juan Luis’s third one. Is it true that they told you one of my toes was included with the last one, and even then you didn’t send anyone to pick it up? Of course I refuse to believe it. But even if I’m wrong about that, I still want to try to soften your heart one more time. I’m writing this letter in the knowledge that first thing tomorrow morning they’re going to amputate my left foot. That, I hope, will be sufficiently eloquent. Maybe the promise that I’ll mend my ways is too vague and abstract to be convincing, but I promise you that if I have to I’ll struggle for the rest of my life to repay the debt I will owe you, if you decide to pay. In my last letter I promised to do all I could to live the rest of my life without bringing shame on you as I have in the past. Today I ask only for your pity. My life is in your hands. They’ve told me that the ransom they want from you is reasonable. Last of all, I beg you, as I did in the last letter, to freeze my foot immediately as soon as it reaches your hands, in case it’s possible to sew me back together.

  When he finished the letter, Carlomagno threw him the fishing line with the clothes hanger to bring it up. A little later, he lowered the basket with dinner in it and Juan Luis ate avidly.

  There was something in the food. The bitter taste of some drug lingered in his mouth, and with the last mouthful he began to feel a drowsiness that made him dizzy and was too sudden to be natural. He closed his eyes in the anguished certainty that when he woke up part of his body would be missing.

  This time the dice elected Bunny to be the bearer of the body part. The Tapir and the Sephardi went down the hole at dawn to perform the amputation. El Horrible and Carlomagno had left, and Bunny was pretty sure they were going to go whoring with the money they’d won playing cuchumbo. He felt unlucky and envied them. He took a small envelope full of marijuana from his pocket, carefully picked through it, and made himself a joint. The smoke relaxed him. He improvised a cardboard mouthpiece with the matchbook in order to smoke the joint down to the very end, and then sat there for a while looking at the orange electric cable that snaked out the half-open door into the yard and then down into the prisoner’s pit, from which the faint buzz of the amputation saw reached him.

  When, half an hour later, the Tapir and the Sephardi came back up and gave him the heavy package wrapped in black plastic, Bunny still didn’t know how he was going to get it into old Luna’s hands.

  “Don’t let them catch you. No sitting around on your lazy ass like you always do,” was all the Tapir said to him.

&nbs
p; The Sephardi, who seemed angry with the Tapir, accompanied Bunny to the jeep which was parked in the old garage. Bunny started the engine and hid the package under his seat while it warmed up.

  “Why don’t you take it to the girlfriend?” The Sephardi asked him. “That’s the least dangerous way.”

  “I was thinking about that,” Bunny replied. “Thanks.” He waved and pulled out.

  “What a joke,” he thought. “The fucking dice always pull this kind of thing on me. I’m not playing that game again.” It wouldn’t be a bad idea to visit Juan Luis’s girlfriend. The Sephardi was no idiot.

  Ana Lucía, Juan Luis’s girlfriend, had spent another bad night. When she woke up, she remembered guiltily that while she was turning this way and that in the dark between the sheets, she’d felt anger––only a very slight anger, true––at Juan Luis. It was a complicated anger. She couldn’t help him, not only because the kidnappers hadn’t communicated with her, but also because she was not in a position to do anything. If only he’d agreed to marry her about a year before … But he was very stubborn and a little arrogant, too. Even so, she was sure he loved her. He was opposed to marriage, but he had brought her to live with him and practically made her his wife.

  There was a time when Juan Luis’s father had looked on her favorably, perhaps as a possible ally. Because deep down inside Don Carlos had not given up the fight, and believed that it was not too late to make an honorable man of his son. But that was not the way she saw it––not when honorable was synonymous with being married and in business––and she’d been unwise enough to say, in the old man’s presence, that she would leave Juan Luis the day he decided to play that game. After that, Don Carlos, without ever being at all rude, stopped inviting her to have lunch in his house, as he often used to; whenever they met he always seemed to be extremely busy or would come up with some excuse to keep from talking to her.