EL NOCHE DOWNS his last gulp of Salva Cola then passes me the bottle, burping loudly. As is routine, the men fish for their cigarettes and we sit down to smoke and to tell stories.
A few days ago they tried to kill El Noche. It was Columbia Little Sycos of Barrio 18 from downtown. They failed. Their mistake was employing a tactic tired out among gangsters. The bait. This consists of sending someone to win your trust, then, banking on that, luring you out of the safe zone. Often with the promise of sex. Siren songs. Once at the spot you find a group of enemies there to eviscerate you. These deaths tend to be gruesome; the victim is tortured long before dying. This is precisely what was intended for El Noche.
Beside us stand Tombo, Destino, Hugo, and some others. Three cigarettes make their way through our hands. El Noche and Tombo share a knowing glance, then launch into an offensive of anecdotes they know will make their visitor—that is, me—blush.
“Hey man, do you let your girl lick your ass when you’re fucking?”
“Nah dawg, I haven’t tried it, but I do like to give it to them up the ass. Or finish in their mouth.”
“Damn, dawg. Try it man, it feels crazy, besides it’s not gay shit because she’s a girl. I mean if a faggot licks your ass it’s gay shit because he’s a faggot but if a girl does it, it ain’t, because . . . well, she’s your girl.”
Their eyes meet mine, searching for some response. They talk some more and look again at me, make a few explicit gestures, and look again for a response . . .
I entered this community through a religious congregation so it’s unsurprising that the Guanacos Criminales Salvatrucha associate me with them. Besides, a little wooden crucifix hangs from my neck, by my mother’s request, like Little Down and his amulets, my own form of protection. So the Guanacos think me a prude, and have fun trying to shock me.
“Damn man, so good to give it to them up the ass and pull their hair man, and damn do they scream, ha ha ha.”
El Noche and the rest wait, between laughs, for me to say something. I think for a bit. They don’t seem to be slowing down at all, so I join in. I tell a few anecdotes and El Noche and Tombo both seem satisfied. Or, at least, the jokes on me were no longer as funny.
Barrio 18’s plan to kill El Noche consisted of sending a young woman to live in the neighborhood. Once there, her task was to seduce the gangster and get him somewhere his enemies could snatch him up without having to face the Guanacos. She succeeded. Well, at least in the first part. The bait seduced her victim, they had sex for several nights. Just as part two was imminent, El Noche discovered the ploy. The bait was a little too insistent, a little too intent on showing him her house on the other side of town. He knows this tactic, he’s killed with it before. He took her by the hair and dragged her to a cliff. He took her by the hand and snapped her wrist. Then he asked her.
She resisted, maybe thinking if she denied everything she would have some chance of surviving. El Noche kicked her until he tired, dragging her by her broken wrist. She wouldn’t talk, so he took her cell phone. There he found the answers he needed. Names and incriminating messages. Then, he says, the real beating began.
El Noche thought that it would be best to hang her. But he didn’t. Or so he says. He says he let her go, battered and ailing, as a human message to the boys of Barrio 18.
We finish the cigarettes, and Destino gets up to tend to a plot of dirt where he plans to grow vegetables. Hugo starts kicking around a ball, and the two gangsters sit on the patio smoking and talking shop. Others arrive and join them. They, too, come with stories, some exaggerated, others backed up by scars.
The logic of this war reveals itself in fragments. With every story, with every action and reaction it seems to reveal its secret. Each day one can peer more deeply, and realize that for these young men there is honor in barbarity, bravery, and sacrifice, and that it is only the cause—their name for war—that makes life worth living. For this made-up cause, an army of young men kill each other, catching thousands in the crossfire.
It is impossible to know what really happened to the young woman who tried to trick El Noche. Maybe it’s true that he let her get away with a few broken bones. Or maybe she is rotting several feet underground in one of the gang’s clandestine graveyards. Maybe she’ll come back, with friends, to avenge her suffering. If she’s dead, surely others will do it for her.