As Luz and the priest huddled in the bunker, Bernabé crouched against a dirt embankment staring at the dark sky. There was a sudden barrage of explosions, and he tried to shrink deeper into the dirt. “¡Madre!” he heard himself say.
Bernabé waited a few moments before he glanced at his watch noting that it was almost dawn. He hoped that the signal would be given soon so that he could lead the guerrilla assault on military headquarters. The building was enveloped in silence, and to all appearance the guards slept, seemingly unaware that they had been singled out as one of the guerrillas’ objective. Bernabé and the rest of his companions knew, however, that the silence and the dark windows were a ploy. It was unlikely that the Guard was not prepared. Bernabé expected a bloody confrontation, but in the meantime, all was quiet.
His thoughts drifted back to his early days with his compañeros, to the day he was promoted to sergeant for having guided the refugees across the Río Sumpul. He remembered that those days had been difficult for him, particularly when he had realized that now he would never get to be a priest. That was when he had persuaded himself that instead of peace, the gospel preached by Jesus was really one of murder and torture. Bernabé later admitted to himself that he had falsely convinced himself that as a guerrilla he could do more for his brothers and sisters than as a priest.
He shifted his body as his muscles began to feel the pressure of crouching. He returned to his thoughts, remembering that his commitment to killing had been frail from the beginning, and that it had weakened each time he put a bullet into a soldier’s head, or participated in torturing a spy. He was hounded by the thought that the victims were his brothers, Salvadorans like him, and that each time he killed, he became less human.
As he awaited the signal to attack, his thoughts shifted to his mother whose image was always with him. He didn’t ever wonder if he would recognize her if he were to see her after so many years. Nor did he consider that she would have difficulty recognizing him. His face, once joyful, had become gloomy. Where it had been oval shaped and soft, it was now flat and stiff. His forehead was furrowed by wrinkles that resembled cracks in stone, and his cheekbones had thinned and become prominent. Bernabé’s round mouth had become a straight line, its corners creased by tiny, lingering downward curves, which reflected his constant sadness. The eyes he inherited from his mother had long before dulled, betraying cynicism and dejection.
The source of Bernabé’s disenchantment came from the realization that destiny had turned his life into a cruel joke, casting him into a world of terror and violence and disappointment. He was obsessed with the fact that life had robbed him of his dream of living out Christ’s gospel by ministering to the needs of those around him. He and his compañeros had become assassins, changing little by little each day, becoming as monstrous as the enemy.
When he had first come to the mountain, Bernabé had been a young man filled with optimism. Now he was a melancholic old man, withdrawn and prematurely aged by the crimes and horrors that he had both seen and committed. He had allowed himself to become a contradiction. He had accepted what he thought was his fate and thus, had become a murderer.
Each act of terror had increased Bernabé’s depression and isolation. In the beginning, especially, his nights had been filled with guilt, but in time, his sentiments were dulled by the incessant sight of blood. He recalled the incident at the Río Sumpul which had made him a hero. There had been other times, other places, however, where he had not been as fortunate. He remembered the slaughter in the town of Mozote—its date was no longer clear—where soldiers had slit the throats of the men of the village, machine-gunned the women, and burned the babies and children in the town church.
Stark images of atrocities were jumbled up in Bernabé’s memory, and it was only with difficulty that he sorted them out. What happened in one village, merged with what happened in other towns. Pictures of starving men were stamped on every one of Bernabé’s waking moments. He was haunted by the vision of a mother holding her child’s bullet-riddled body in her arms. Her elbows dripped blood, and she moaned and wept. Stunned out of her mind, she had let out a lament, a mournful cradle song for her dead child.
Lempa, Chalatenango, Guazapa, San Vicente, Santa Tecla, even the steps leading to the Cathedral in San Salvador were now echoes of explosions, screams and moans. One episode was as painful as the last. Suddenly, Bernabé’s memories focused on an incident of several years before. It involved his compañero Nestor Solís.
“Nestor! Don’t do it, please!” he found himself saying as he relived the horror once again.
Nestor, Bernabé and a few of the compañeros had stumbled onto the campsite of three soldiers. The guerrillas were startled to find the men napping, but that had given them the advantage of being the first to take action. By the time the soldiers reacted to the enemy’s presence, the compañeros had their weapons pointed at each man’s head. The soldiers raised their shaking hands above their heads as they attempted to persuade the guerrillas not to execute them.
“Compañero, I’m a Salvadoran like you. I have a mother, and a father, and a wife. I’m the father of….”
“¡Cállate, hijo de tu puta madre!”
Nestor’s rifle butt put an end to the soldier’s stuttering. Jets of blood and splinters of shattered teeth spurted on Nestor’s face. The soldier jerked back as he fell on his haunches, his hands covering his bleeding face. The two others, eyes opened wide with terror, remained riveted to their original position on the ground. Nestor got even closer to the writhing soldier. He kicked him in the stomach with all the force of his leg so that the soldier rolled over, contorted with pain.
Muttering obscenities, Nestor kicked the soldier’s haunches again, aiming at his kidneys. Bernabé and the other guerrillas looked on in silence. For years they had assisted Nestor in his search for the soldiers who had brutalized his sisters, and they had gotten accustomed to watching him vent his rage on whichever soldier happened to be in his power. They assumed that this was just another such incident.
But as Nestor’s eyes moved from the prone soldier to the one next to him, the guerrillas sensed that this time Nestor had found his real target. He paused, startled as he crouched closer to the man. The brown skin, the slanted eyes, the high cheekbones, and the scar that stretched from the man’s nose to his right ear, betrayed his identity.
“¡Hijo de tu puta madre! ¡Ya te encontré!”
With a rifle blow that leveled the soldier to his knees, Nestor took hold of the mans’s head, digging his fingers into his face. He twisted the soldier’s head, jerking it back and forth as if his neck had been soft rubber. With the soldier’s head still gripped tightly in his hands, Nestor looked around at Bernabé. Then he let out a scream that reverberated through the small valley. Nestor’s lips were wet with saliva as he stared at his fellow guerrillas.
Removing one of his hands from his victim’s jaw, Nestor pulled a knife from his belt. As he lifted it in the air, its blade glinted in the sun’s waning rays. Savoring the moment, he held the blade in front of the terrified soldier’s eyes. The man trembled as sweat poured from his face and body.
“¡Cabrón!” Nestor hissed the word through clenched teeth.
The soldier attempted to utter something, but was interrupted by a vicious kick to the groin. The man doubled over in pain. Nestor then forced the man back to his knees and muttered, “Look, pig! Do you remember me? Try to think, it might save your life!”
Nestor glared at the soldier in silence, now and then making gestures with his face, grimaces meant to coax the soldier to speak. The soldier finally acknowledged with a nod of his head that he remembered. This was the signal for Nestor. Holding the knife directly in front of the man’s eyes, Nestor spoke.
“Pig, do you know what happens to a man when that little sack we have down there is punctured? Do you have an idea of how much blood comes out of a man when that pouch is split apart?”
Despite his own acts of terrorism, Bernabé now lost his nerve because he knew what was coming.
“¡Por Dios!…Nestor…just blow his brains out…stop this torture!” Bernabé’s voice was choked and halting.
“Shut up, Bernabé! The rest of you, keep away! Keep your distance, or as your mother lives, I swear that it’s your own brains that I’ll blow out!”
Turning his attention to the soldier, Nestor smashed his boot against the man’s shoulder, knocking him on his back. The soldier was crying, imploring for his life.
“Take off his pants! Hold him down, legs spread apart!”
The man began to shriek in horror as two of the compañeros obeyed the orders. Then with a single gash, Nestor cut the man’s scrotum. He shoved the testes into the man’s twisted mouth.
Bernabé was compelled to act. Clutching his weapon he approached the man who was still twitching. He placed the rifle against the soldier’s forehead and pulled the trigger, then he shot each of the other soldiers in the face. After this he began to quiver. Bernabé’s arms and legs shook as he felt a wave of disgust for himself and his compañeros.
Several explosions ripped through the darkness blowing away the entrance of army headquarters. Bernabé was jarred back into the present remembering that the detonations signaled the guerrilla squads to advance. Massive blasts followed, making the earth quake. Clenching a machine gun, he pounced forward leading his men and ordering them to fan out, and to enter the fortress building at will.
Slipping around a corner, Bernabé slithered through a door that had been flung open. As he made his way up a dark stairway, he was suddenly surprised by the touch of cold steel against the back of his head.
“¡No se mueva!”
The order was a whisper close to Bernabé’s ear. He froze as a hand gripped his arm, removing his weapon without speaking, the hand nudged him up the stairs, and into a dark room in which he sensed the presence of others.
“Silencio”.
Outside the shooting stopped suddenly. In its place there was an ominous silence. Eventually Bernabé heard another voice.
“We’re in control, mi Coronel. They were all bark and no bite.”
Bernabé heard a hushed laughing in the darkness, then the lights were turned on. The barrel of the pistol he had felt at his head was finally lowered. He looked around. Blinking from the brilliance of the neon lights, he saw a large room with maps on the walls. Telephones and other equipment for communications were spread out on several desks.
When Bernabé’s eyes adjusted to the light, he looked beyond the soldier who had captured him. He saw a tall man dressed in the field uniform of a colonel. The officer walked across the room, approaching the prisoner. He stood several inches above Bernabé. The man’s complexion was milk-white, his hair was the color of gold, and his piercing eyes were pale blue. Colonel Delcano’s lips were drawn into a straight, arrogant line as he gazed at Bernabé.
The overhead fluorescent lights clicked off, and the faded morning light filtered through the garrison’s barred windows.