Slash and Burn Read online

  She didn’t want to go through it all a second time.

  She wouldn’t have to.

  How could she be sure?

  What was it she actually wanted to know?

  What to do now.

  Ever since the war had ended and her daughters’ dad had died, she hadn’t known what direction to move in. Maybe she’d spent so long following orders that she no longer knew how to give them. Had this happened to her, too?

  No. She’d always made her own decisions. She left when she did because the organization had signed accords that didn’t fit with her convictions. She’d put her reasons in writing and then defended them when asked to address the committee. They immediately let her go.

  She wasn’t the sort of woman who believed it was part of her duty during the struggle to provide sexual comfort for the combatants. She wasn’t like her, or like her ex-compañera either. Maybe the daughter was right when she said she was different in a way she couldn’t quite put her finger on. Maybe the woman was right when she said she should let her daughter go to Paris now she had the chance.

  25

  She’s never been to Paris. All she knows about the city is what her mother has told her. She can’t picture it. And there isn’t much point in trying anyway: she’ll be there in a few weeks and will have time to wander its streets and become acquainted with its features. The mother is worried that she won’t. She’s afraid the people taking her in will make her their slave and keep her locked up in their house, with no air to breathe or chance of coming home. Her ex-compañera-in-arms tells her it’s unlikely. She doesn’t believe her. She’s heard stories of girls being swept from their homes with promises of better lives, then forced to work as prostitutes. The daughter of a woman who sold tortillas and was her mother’s neighbor when she lived on the outskirts of the city had landed in a border town and then in jail. They said she’d killed a man for his money. This girl’s mother said it had been self-defense. And that the girl had defended herself from other men the same way but only been caught that once. She didn’t know what to think because the girl had gotten out of jail so fast. She’d been there no more than a few months. Her mother said it was because they needed the cells for another sort of person: guerrillas. Ordinary crimes weren’t an issue back then, even the terrible ones. She didn’t want her own daughter to end up like this other woman’s.

  Her ex-compañera points out that these stories didn’t take place in the city her daughter is traveling to. She doesn’t believe that the people of that country think or behave like the ones from their part of the world.

  The mother isn’t so sure. She thinks there are unscrupulous people everywhere. She teaches her daughter what to do if somebody tries to take advantage of her where she’s going. She tells her not to be afraid or to let it happen, even if they threaten to deport her or really do send her back home: better that than bend her knee. What’s more, she’ll always have a place here to return to.

  The daughter has her doubts. Though she wants to believe what her mother says, she knows her days in the community she and her sisters have grown up in are numbered: the littlest is getting older and will soon reach the age that a nearby family had decided would be the cutoff point: if they haven’t left the area by that day, they’ll come and kill their mother—and the girls, too, if they get in the way.

  It was a question of justice: the family believed the mother had ordered the death of one of their relatives after the war and had caused the death of another during it. They hadn’t asked her because they were positive she’d deny everything. And it wouldn’t have been much use, anyway: she’d never have breathed a word, not even in her own defense, because she wasn’t authorized to discuss those men’s affairs. She could assure them she hadn’t killed them or ordered their execution, but she couldn’t say who had or why. It didn’t concern them. The families wouldn’t understand. Nor would they admit that one of their own had behaved dishonorably. She understood, in a way. She wouldn’t have liked to be told such awful things about her relatives either, or to have people doubt them. Of course, she wouldn’t have threatened to kill them, as they had her. She wasn’t a civilian, nor was she a common criminal. These days, she wasn’t even a guerrilla. All she could do was come to terms with what was happening, be grateful she’d been given until her littlest grew up, and work as hard as possible to find someplace to go when the deadline set by the family arrived.

  She hadn’t been able to save up any money until now. Every cent had gone on feeding her girls and funding their dreams of university. She couldn’t even help her daughter with the upcoming trip.

  Her daughter said she needn’t bother: the people she was going to work for would cover her plane ticket. In reality, they would deduct it from her salary, month by month, for an agreed period of time. Even so, it’d be cheaper than hiring a girl from their country, or one who’d already emigrated, to look after the house. They didn’t have to bother checking her criminal record because she’d come recommended by someone they knew. What’s more, they had the chance to help a person from a different world than their own. If things went well, they’d extend her employment. If not, her open return ticket would end their troubles. They wouldn’t lose much. Neither would the girl and her family. But if things worked out, the daughter would have no difficulty studying, getting a job, and enabling her family to move, before embarking on her dream of helping people on a continent that needed her.

  When that happened, she’d send money from the other continent to help with the costs of their new home and the littlest’s education. She was sorry she couldn’t help her next youngest sister: she had to save up for her own studies and still didn’t have a single cent. The mother understood. She told her not to worry about it, that it wasn’t her responsibility. Her sister, on the other hand, thought it was. She insisted that if she hadn’t spent all that money on attending university in the capital, they’d have had enough for her to enroll in a local college, or at least take a course that would help her get work in something other than her mother’s cornmill or raising animals no one thereabouts bought. Or they could have used it to leave that place before the deadline.

  The mother considered taking her to see the woman who’d listened to her other daughter, to help her see reason. Of course, first she’d have to ask whether she was available and willing to receive her. She’d helped them before because her ex-compañera from the demobilization camp had asked, but she was under no obligation to do the same for her other daughter. They weren’t friends, though they might’ve been had they met in the mountains.

  She can’t say whether she made any friends then. At most, she could call the woman who taught her to operate the radio transmitter a friend. Without her patient instruction, she might have been assigned a more dangerous role and been killed in one of their many skirmishes with the army. The woman who trained her thought that her fine work operating the radio could save the troop many casualties. Which made her try even harder to get it right. In this respect, she was like her ex-compañera’s friend, who labored over every word and punctuation mark in the bulletin as if their entire cause rested on it. Which is why she thought they’d make good friends, even though they felt rather differently about nuns.

  She couldn’t blame her. They weren’t the same ones who sold her daughter and they hadn’t treated her badly. Her nuns, in fact, had been very helpful. When she came down from the mountains and back to the city, pregnant and separated from her life partner, they still had her school certificate from the year she’d left, even though she hadn’t sat any exams. Though they couldn’t let her finish her education there because it was against regulations to admit women who were married or had children, they pointed her in the direction of a place they knew would accept her despite it all.

  It wasn’t the nicest, there were no daytime classes, and she wasn’t allowed to discuss sex or her way of life with the other students, but at least they admitted her and let her work at a bakery during the day to cover the costs
of the child she was to give birth to, and get the qualification she needed to attend university. Based on her own experience, then, she knew that the daughter of this other combatant could get what she wanted if she persevered. She thought the girl’s mother must know this as well: she’d faced tougher situations than those her daughter would soon encounter, and at a more tender age. They and the other women who’d been in combat would rather their daughters never had to fight for anything. They hoped their struggle had been enough to change the world and free them from that need, but none of it was under their control. It may have never been.

  Her father wouldn’t have liked to know that she thought this, after everything. She wouldn’t have liked him to discover that all his sacrifices had been in vain, although he said they hadn’t been and tried to see great things in small details. He’d have lost heart if he’d witnessed the times they were living through, just as she had. Maybe he too would’ve cried, from time to time. Maybe the fact that he’d died when he had, with everyone still convinced they’d win and that their lives would be different once the war was over, was for the best.

  Her mother didn’t dwell on this. It made no sense to: the man was dead. He’d done what he had to do, and now he was no longer with them. There was no reason to question his motives or accomplishments. She had never done so, not to him or to the sons who left to join him, or to her. She’d never tried to stop them. She doesn’t understand why she now wants to stop her daughter. She has trouble seeing herself or her father in her attitude. She comes off as cowardly. She doesn’t remember her being that way when she was a kid. When had she let herself go soft?

  She doesn’t know:

  Maybe she’d always been soft, and just hadn’t had the time or chance to show it.

  Nonsense.

  Maybe it happened when she lost her firstborn. It’s hard losing a child.

  She’s saying this as if she weren’t familiar with it herself: she’d lost three kids to starvation, one in battle, and another to the drugs he took to forget what had been done to him under torture. Her daughter hadn’t died. She can get her back whenever she likes.

  She’s tried.

  She doesn’t buy it.

  She tracked her down, went to Paris to meet her.

  And does that seem like enough to her?

  What else can she do?

  Bring her back.

  It isn’t that easy.

  Isn’t it?

  She’d survived the war, pulled one brother from the army, torn the other from the hands of his torturers, and given birth to a girl against her superiors’ wishes. And she couldn’t get her daughter to come home with her?

  She couldn’t get the second one not to leave.

  That was different: children had to leave to find their way.

  She doesn’t remember ever leaving to find hers.

  Because she’d been a girl who knew her way home. Her firstborn, on the other hand, appears not to be. Maybe her other girl will help her come back. Maybe when she’s in the same city as her, she can show her the way.

  Maybe.

  Except her eldest isn’t in Paris anymore.

  26

  None of her neighbors were in favor of her letting her daughter go so far away. In her shoes, they wouldn’t have let her go to the capital either: they would’ve made her see reason, pull out of the admissions exams, and find a husband she could start a home with that would keep her busy and safe. She’d never have cut her hair. By that point, she’d have at least one son. She might even have given birth to twins if she’d paid any mind to one of the boys who had courted her and was now in a relationship with her next youngest sister’s classmate.

  He’d courted that sister, too. And he would’ve made overtures or at least intimations to the littlest daughter if their mother hadn’t gone to his house one day and asked him to stop pestering her girls. The girls hadn’t dared to tell him directly, but the fact that he kept trying to get together with them got on their nerves.

  It wasn’t a problem: the truth was, he’d have liked to have gotten involved with the eldest daughter who’d been his classmate at school, but she’d married someone else, someone older, from another town. He couldn’t compete. He’d tried it on with the other sisters, not because he wanted to be near the eldest at any cost, but because he thought he could succeed with them where he hadn’t with her. Deep down, what he wanted was to be connected to that family. Not that he was in love with the mother, she mustn’t worry about that. He just missed his own.

  She’d known her during the war. They hadn’t been close, but she remembered a handful of things (faces she pulled, expressions she used), which she shared with him whenever he asked. Sometimes, when the boy asked about his mother, she would tell him things about other women she’d known in battle, stories no one could claim as their own and which might help the boy feel better.

  About her death, she can’t say much. She wasn’t there when it happened: she’d left to give birth to her daughter. His mother must’ve had him just before. It’s possible her condition had made it difficult for her to move with her usual agility, but whenever the boy asked if she thought his mother had died because of him, she always said no. Though she hadn’t been in the usual camps during the offensive, she knew her group hadn’t stood a chance under the circumstances.

  She’d heard as much from a deserter, a teenage boy who, on the third day of the skirmish, dropped his rifle and raced toward the highway that took buses to the other side of the country. There, he’d been mistaken for a frightened civilian and taken in a car with white flags to a refugee zone, which he’d soon left out of fear someone might find out what he’d done, prosecute him, and execute him on the spot.

  Most likely no one had thought him involved at the time because he trembled just like everybody else and was built differently from the people in the hills. He’d joined their forces only days earlier, by order of his mother—who sympathized with the cause—and under pressure from his brothers, who took her side. Figuring the training he’d received wouldn’t help him put up much of a fight, he left. He left his compañeros behind. Planes chased them. Bullets whistled past as he ran. They made people scream. Made his compañeros fall. Made him keep running till there was only silence. Not even then did he slow down. He kept running until the people in the white-flagged car signaled for him to stop and begged him to let them help. He thought it was a trap, that they were coming to make him pay for what he’d done. He kept on walking, as if he couldn’t hear them, until he spotted an approaching military vehicle in the distance.

  The soldiers would never have guessed he was on the other side: they didn’t stop to check the civilian car. And if they had, they wouldn’t have been able to pick him out as a combatant: he was too frightened. None of the combatants they’d seen so far trembled like he did. They were skillful shots and refused to surrender, despite the order the soldiers shouted through their megaphones.

  The mother of the boy courting her daughters was like that. The deserter said she’d shot at the plane until it fell out of the sky and, in the time they spent together, had tried her best to save the others. She gave instructions and made sure no one made any mistakes that might jeopardize them. But not even her willingness or readiness could save them from the counterattack that followed.

  Though he was ashamed to have fled, he’d rather feel the sorrow that had long kept him from moving or talking than end up flung on a field with the rest of them. He didn’t think having his name scrawled on a wall would be any consolation to his mother.

  He was wrong: she’d have preferred it to the news that he’d quit the mission she’d sent him on. When she heard he was still alive and had crossed the border to shirk his duty, she sent word that he’d better not come back, not even for her funeral. She didn’t want him crying for her beside his brothers, who’d all survived, though not without difficulty. He obeyed her wish and didn’t come back until she was buried, a few months after the peace agreement was signed.
/>   He arrived in time to sign up as a war veteran and enroll for the benefits to which he was entitled for services rendered. Since no one from his troop was there to report his desertion, no one could hold him accountable. But the father of the girls the other boy was courting had thrown a wrench in his plans.

  After asking him a series of very specific questions, he determined that the boy didn’t deserve any of the benefits. He said that, the war being over, they wouldn’t prosecute him for cowardice, but that if he didn’t leave right that second, they’d get him for attempted fraud.

  When the girls’ father died, he stopped by to offer his condolences. He told the man’s wife that he harbored no ill feelings and asked her not to think he’d had anything to do with her husband’s death: ever since people had found out about what he’d done, they seemed to want to blame him for anything bad that happened around there. He admitted to being behind the disappearance of a couple of sacks of corn and maybe some livestock, but nothing like what’d happened to her husband. The way he saw it, it wasn’t stealing: he was just collecting what he was owed for his services during the war. Who cared if it’d been only a few days, what mattered was that he’d been forced. If they’d lived in another country, he could’ve sued them for millions. What he took was merely symbolic. What’s more, it was recompense for everything his mother had done for them. Though he couldn’t say whether his mother had helped her or her husband, she had fed many guerrillas. Countless times she’d sent him to grind corn so she could cook food for the troops that came through her farmhouse. As far as he knew, she’d never received a cent in return. The fairest thing would be for him to get back a little of what she’d given, which was his patrimony, his inheritance.

  He also assured her that he’d never stolen from her and never would. He would have done if he’d found out she had anything of value in the house. But thanks to luck and her discretion, he never did. The few times he’d visited her, it was because she’d called him over to give him some grain or chicken. Through she couldn’t say whether his mother had ever fed her or her husband, she was grateful that she had fed her compañeros.