An Essay on the Futility of Earthly Love

My real parents, Victor Caceres and Fernanda Espuelas, met as university students. Fernanda was the only child of a doctor, a member of the sparse Guatemalan middle class. Victor’s family came from the ruling elite: but were disgraced and dispossessed by their support for the left-wing leader Arbenz, who was toppled by a CIA-sponsored coup in 1954.

Though reduced in fortune, Victor’s family still enjoyed the fierce loyalty the very wealthy extend to the members of their class. The sons obtained sinecures: the daughters married well. Their radical sympathies diminished neither their cachet nor their own snobbery.

The closest Victor came to a political conviction was a burning resentment that his father could not afford to send him to college in the US.

Fernanda, on the other hand, embraced Marxism with the fury of the very young.

Yet Fernanda and Victor met and fell in love unwisely: with the disregard native to just-nineteen. He paid lip service to her beliefs, she flattered herself she had convinced him. When he explained that his family’s position meant he couldn’t actively participate, she argued with him, earnest and foolish. Their pillow talk was of disguised priests, forbidden books, battles in the mountains kept secret by the ruling class. There was real work to be done – she whispered, hot against his neck – lives to be saved.

And with time, with the easy valor of inaction, Victor began to see himself as a future Che, a warrior, redeemer to his bitter family.

But when she became pregnant, his family’s position meant he could not marry her.

The love story ended there. They parted, he drank to his satisfying guilt.

She was arrested. The other story began.

Victor fought and bribed and lied indefatigably to secure his jilted lover’s release. He pounded on doors, he pushed his way past secretaries. He got away with it and that became his motive, just to fuck them just to fuck them feverish in his head. He discovered his forte, the role of loose cannon. Greasing palms, he made powerful friends.

By the time he was called to collect Fernanda from prison, Victor was manic with pride. Greeting him, the duty officer was shifty-eyed, monosyllabic – afraid of him! Asked to wait, Victor put his feet up on a chair and smoked. He blustered at the long delay, laughing inside.

He was still blustering when she came into the room, supported by a nurse. Although he didn’t recognize her, he fell silent. Then the duty officer had his revenge. “There’s your girlfriend,” he said, and cackled.

She had been beaten so she was fat with swelling, beaten out of human shape. Her eyes were crusted with blood, she had no teeth. Her arms were broken and some of her ribs were broken: her painful gait came from burns on her genitals. He would later come to know well the strange, starfish scars where her nipples had been sliced away: through two pregnancies the milk trapped there would make her sweat and clench with pain.

She moved her head, ungainly, to acknowledge him. But she couldn’t speak; he didn’t know if she knew who he was. So he cursed with helpless rage, alone with his rage, as he drove her, speeding, to her father, the doctor.

The people in that house met him with shifty eyes and monosyllables. The mother spoke to him as if she were not weeping. They were cravenly grateful, but they wouldn’t let Victor Caceres in their house, thank you, and the door shut in his face, the sound of locks, a bolt drawn and checked.

The other story came into its own. Victor Caceres had decided he was a good man. He devoted his life to the cause of rescuing Fernanda.

When his son was born, Victor sent Fernanda every article a new mother might want. It was then, too, that the queer clapboard house was built, in an area reassuringly far from power. He begged and borrowed. He sold his car for her, he sold his clothes. His parents refused to give him money, flattered him with their anger. His friends called him crazy, admiringly, and Victor Caceres grew into the part.

Fernanda refused to see him, but he was gratified to learn the boy had been christened Victor. And when the child was eight months old, and she at last was healed from one thing and the other, Fernanda consented to be taken to her new home.

Victor stayed with her there for a year. They were lovers again, after the fashion of harmed people, bonded by distrust of others. For that brief span, the house became a mystery to its humble neighbors; children whispered ghost stories, passing that house.

Slowly, in exhausting stages, the baby son turned into a thing; a staring, awful reminder; the personification of blight. Fernanda cosseted him still with the impervious love of mothers. He was just her stupid child, her silly child, her child.

Victor suffered agonies of detestation at the sight of the dazed, incurious face, the asymmetrical mouth ever open.

When Victor left finally for Guatemala City, I had already been conceived. He never acknowledged me: for him, the canceled son had canceled the possibility of children. He even regarded me as something done to spite him, a gratuitous salt in his wound. I was born nevertheless, and grew to be a normal child. Without him, we became a contented family.

Without him, Fernanda resumed, too, her own life; the life of forbidden books and meetings, the life of real work to be done. She came to know the local people: through them and through her old contacts, she came to know the guerrillas of that district. Her odd house became a haven. Arms could be hidden there; the wounded could die or be healed in peace. Through her father, Fernanda obtained basic medicines; through Victor Caceres, she had a generous flow of cash.

The money this time was not begged or borrowed: Caceres had at last begun his glorious career. He fought and bribed and lied his way into his chosen sinecure: a commission in the Army was secured by a helpful cousin.

He embraced the diversions of his class. He drank away his monstrous son, he whored away his monstrous son. The political killings he used to relate to my father with such relish were a part and parcel of that life: another communal shame of whose excess young men boasted. But also, for Victor: he disappeared and disappeared thoroughly his monstrous son.

When he drank alone, he drank too much. It was then that he would drive out to Momostenago.

That became a routine. He arrived in a fury, cursing and raving. The children would be sent next door. She learned how to answer him, the path of least resistance. Sometimes he waved his pistol and threatened to shoot her, but he never struck Fernanda, he never touched her. He treated her in all ways as if she were a ghost of his own imagination, an incarnate doubt he fought to conquer.

He would pass out suddenly and wake with no recollection of having driven there. He would be sick, horrified, he would drive back to the city in a blind panic. That afternoon, after no conscious thought on the matter, he would arrange to send Fernanda a sum of cash.

He came to regard her superstitiously. She spirited him back to her, against his will. In his mind, she took on the toxic powers of a nemesis.

When he suggested Momostenago as the target for Pretty Boy, Victor did not have any clear plan. And through the following months of negotiation, when he fostered the idea of it as a hotbed of revolutionary activity, when he even lied and fabricated to secure his aim, he did it with no firm intention. There were images only, which came and went: stories in which he conquered her by saving her at the last moment; stories in which he let her know he had decreed her death.

He fought bitterly for a lethal plague, no mere fever but incurable death. He liked to think of Fernanda dying prettily, judiciously, among hushed American nurses. He imagined himself with flowers at her bedside; placing flowers on her grave. Her father the doctor would shake Victor’s hand. The children too, the children too, and a final stone would be placed on his old shame.

The agreement which enshrined psittacosis as the agent employed in Operation Pretty Boy included the provision that, after medical tests were complete, surviving prisoners should be yielded into the custody of the Guatemalan police. Then the Yankees would pack their bags and depart, seeing no evil. The standard process of interrogation would begin.

Fernanda would be tortured again, to death.

Perhaps she would not betray him, but someone would. His donations would be revealed, his lies about the village. Victor would be tortured, too, and killed.

For three months Victor played poker with my adopted father, Jonathan Moffat. He didn’t dare take a drink, he feared waking in Momostenago as he feared hell. He had no plans because his life had already ended.

He told himself the story of the woman and the man who must be tortured to death, as if it had already occurred many times. He loved Fernanda. He hated Fernanda. There were many stories in his mind, but they ended all the same.

Then, at the last moment, the loose cannon jerked from its rut and wheeled: