Gideon took a long, deep drink of his beer and turned away.
After another failed attempt at conversation the pretty waitress with dewy eyes told Alfonso that Gideon didn’t talk. “He sings,” she said in her thick English. “Famous. A long time ago. Now...” She wrapped a hand around her throat and squeezed. Her bright-red nail polish clashed with the soft glow of the light hanging over her head.
“He can’t talk?” Lara asked, leaning into the counter, suddenly interested. “How come?”
The girl shook her head. “He just stopped. He drinks one beer every night.” There was an awkward pause as if there was more she wanted to say but didn’t know how.
Alfonso caught her staring at him, curious about their presence in this bar that was far off the tourist maps. He smiled at her and she turned quickly to drop a cassette tape into the dilapidated stereo. A mournful voice held a note above a jazz trumpet climbing down the scale in slow steps.
The change in Gideon was immediate, but maybe only he could see it. Maybe only a man who’d witnessed so many moments of terror would have been able to recognize it. Gideon folded into himself and became just another man caving into his chest until his back could bend no more, became just another body in a long line of bodies that Alfonso was ordered to photograph, became just another face filled with fear staring starkly into his lens, pleading without words for a salvation both subject and photographer knew would not come.
“Dónde?” Alfonso asked the commander, knowing where the brightest patch of sunlight streamed into the window of the small room in the Navy School of Mechanics. “Aquí?” He swallowed hard and pointed, disgusted by his impulse to photograph in the best light. “Here is good.”
The prisoner shuffled against the blank white wall and stood in the gentle sunbeam. He was a young man with a long face and wild curly hair now matted to his head. He shook in his chains, his thin arms cut and bruised, his eyes nearly swollen shut.
“Señor.” Alfonso spoke softly to prevent the sudden jerk that raising his camera usually elicited. Lo siento, he said with his eyes. “Raise your chin and look at the camera,” he said with his mouth. The young man stared at him instead, as they always did, and curved his chest as if to dodge a blow to the heart. Alfonso heard a soft whimper, saw the trembling lips, then forced himself to meet the young man’s gaze. He saw that moment when disbelief gave way to naked terror. I’m sorry, he wanted to say, but the commander was standing just behind him with his thick breaths and sweat, mumbling, “Bueno. Bueno, the generalissimo will like this one for his collection. You’ll take one of me next week for a new passport.” The commander winked. “You’ll make me look like a new man, sí?”
He was on the fourth floor of the Navy School. He’d been picked up in San Isidro just outside of Buenos Aires three months ago. He’d been stopped at gunpoint in his car. He’d had his camera on the seat next to him, the windows down, enjoying the bit of wind that cut through the moist evening heat. There had been three soldiers and they gave no reason for dragging him out of his car. It was Argentina in 1978, General Jorge Videla was in charge, thousands were being disappeared. Maybe those were reasons enough. But what he thought of, in the dark backseat of an unmarked car speeding down Avenida del Libertador, were all those years he’d turned away from his mother, a woman so hungry for affection that Alfonso was sure it was her heart that killed her, not her asthma.
The music was dying. The waitress hummed, her voice wavering over the last notes before fading in a soft breath. Her expression was earnest, her eyes tender. He could have watched her for another hour, could have held her under the steady gaze of his lens until her body swayed just so, until she was simply a figure dissected by a thick band of shadow and a wilting strip of light.
She lifted her eyes to him. “‘Tizita.’ A famous song,” she said, turning the stereo off with a careful press of a button then tilting toward him so her arms rested next to his on the counter. “It means memory. A good song to hear in Ethiopia.” She stole a shy glance at him through her lashes, avoiding Lara, who had removed a carefully folded newspaper article from the envelope.
Alfonso cleared his throat and smiled uncertainly. “Birra.” He pointed at himself and Lara and then to Gideon. “What’s that?” he finally asked Laura, gesturing to the article.
“No more, thank you.” Lara waved the new beer aside. She slid the news clipping toward him. “So you understand what we’ll be doing tomorrow.”
Alfonso looked at the article. There had been a massacre of an entire village of men, women, and children in a place called El Mozote in the mountains of Morazán in El Salvador. Hundreds of corpses had been found, ranging from newborn to elderly. Villagers in the surrounding area reported a ghost had begun to roam above the mountains after the matanza by the Salvadoran army. Naked and wild-haired, she could be seen crouched near the river under the moonlight, wailing for her dead children with a dying fish flopping in her hand. Argentine scientists had arrived to exhume the site of the massacre and had been cautioned by villagers and the military about the ghost.
He closely examined the image of Lara and four colleagues standing next to a roped-off area, pointing at three tiny crushed skulls.
“How long ago?” he asked. “You look much younger.”
“It doesn’t matter,” she said. She took the clipping from him and folded it precisely and slipped it back into the envelope. “The ghost the people claimed they saw,” she said, turning to face him. “There was no ghost. There’s no such thing.” She had leaned close to him, her back to the waitress and Gideon.
Alfonso nodded, confused. “People make up these stories.”
Lara shook her head. She spoke urgently. “There was no ghost because even though the army killed infants and children and weak women, even though they burned men alive, even though they retraced their steps to make sure they’d gotten everyone — there was one survivor. More than a thousand killed but one lived. She hid in bushes then ran into the mountains. I met her while we were there digging. She came down from the mountain when she saw us with the bones. She wanted to find her children.” Lara paused, her eyes on the envelope. “She lived. She’s still living.”
The waitress held the new beer toward Alfonso, who shook his head. He waited, uncertain what to say to Lara. This was the most she had said about anything not relating to their work in Ethiopia.
“Just because someone is missing,” she continued, her gaze direct, “it doesn’t mean we’ll find them. You don’t know anything unless you have proof.” She was focused on his camera. “If you can’t see something, you have nothing.”
Alfonso expected her to get up and walk out after that, the silence drawing thick between them. But she didn’t. Instead, she stared at his camera for so long, Alfonso raised it to his eyes. And when she didn’t do anything, he took off the lens cap and adjusted the meter. He suddenly felt he could see her better this way, framed in the small box that shut out everything except those deep-set eyes and hollow cheeks, the rapid blinking and slow shake of the head. The slender, frail fingers reaching up to wipe an eye and dropping to reveal once again the stern flatness of her gaze. He aimed.
“No,” she said firmly. He flinched at the way Lara frowned and her hands flew up to cover her face.