“No, no — no photo,” the waitress said, reaching out as if to take the camera from Alfonso. “No.”
It was then that Alfonso noticed that Gideon had stood up and covered his head with one arm. The waitress had also moved to stand in front of Gideon, her body becoming rigid and stiff, straight-backed and strong. All pleasantness had gone from her face.
Gideon turned his back to them and walked out quickly. The door creaked on its hinge before coming to a rest. Lara slid out of her seat.
“We’ll be starting early,” she said. Then, with a thank you to the waitress, she too left the bar.
The waitress relaxed once they were alone. “He’s a nice man, he’s my friend,” she said, pointing to Gideon’s empty seat. “But in Qey Shibir...” She snapped her fingers looking for the right word. “Red Terror. The revolution in 1974. He was not good. He was famous, many photographs of him in Addis Zemen.”
Alfonso nodded. He was familiar with the Red Terror, the intense period of violence heaped on the people of Ethiopia by an iron-fisted dictator.
She pointed to Gideon’s empty seat again. “He was a singer.”
“For a band?” Alfonso asked, remembering a small brochure at the Ghion Hotel that recounted the history of the popular hotel band. “Which one?”
The waitress’s face clouded and she brought that second beer back over to Alfonso. “For funerals.”
“The families liked him, then?” Alfonso asked. “Like Alberto Cortez in my country.”
The waitress scrubbed the inside of a glass dry and held it up to the weak light for inspection. She set it down softly. “He was a Derg singer.” She continued when Alfonso shook his head as if he didn’t understand. “He sang to celebrate deaths of the Derg enemies. The families hate him. Even now, some people never forget.” She peered over his shoulder at the door, a faraway look in her eyes. “How could you forget? His voice was beautiful.” She fluttered the fingers of one hand gracefully.
The beers were giving the room soft edges; he’d been drinking on an empty stomach. The flimsy wooden door, which couldn’t prevent Addis Ababa’s smells from seeping into the bar, began to pulse in slow rhythm to a new song spinning out of the old, worn stereo. Exhaust fumes, manure, smoke, berbere, and, beneath it all, the sweet pungency of myrrh mingled with the sharp smells that were coming from either the waitress or the plastic jug of tej that he hadn’t been brave enough to sample, choosing bottled Ethiopian beer over the homemade honey wine.
“You are visiting Addis Ababa?” the waitress asked, her hard smile and knowing eyes forcing his gaze from her hips to her face.
He didn’t know when the horror had ebbed and he’d begun to pose his subjects, straighten their clothes, and use shadow to hide bruises. The impulse had grown slowly, between f-stops and focal points. The slight shift to include the whole face in the frame turned into attention to composition and expression. He’d never ask anyone to smile, he’d tell himself, but for the prettiest prisoners, the ones whose cuts started below the necklines of their gowns, he found himself unable to resist. A small curve in your mouth, señorita, to soften your face, he’d whisper. Just for me, ignore the soldiers. The look they gave tipped into helplessness.
At some point, after hundreds of photos of hundreds of prisoners who had walked out of frame and into an interrogation room or the line of fire, Alfonso began to hide a few damning rolls of film from the commander. He’d dreamed about his mother and her distaste for his photography, for his bourgeois skills in a working-class family. It will turn you into something else, she’d once said to him, and you won’t be my son anymore. In his dream, she’d become the bird that tapped ceaselessly on the window of the fourth floor of the Navy School; she’d tapped a hole into the room, flying onto his camera and perching on the flash. Her wide-eyed stare, first at the sheet he’d pinned to the wall, then back at him, had forced him awake with a hand swinging at empty air.
“I’ll keep these for you, Commander,” Alfonso had said the next day to the heavy-breathing man who sweated profusely, a damp handkerchief constantly in his grip. “You don’t need to hold these, they’re a bother.” He put a used roll of film in the pocket of the same filthy trousers he’d worn since his arrest. He tucked the exposed rolls into his front pockets, then his back pockets, and then into the pocket of his shirt — and when there was no more room, he smiled widely, innocently, and slid a few into his socks.
Whenever he could, he would hide a few rolls inside his cell, a square cold box of a room that held a rotating group of twenty prisoners. Raul, a baby-faced university student with an unflagging spirit, dug a small hole into one wall for the film, then stood or slept in front of it until one day he too was called to pose for Alfonso. Alfonso scratched an R into the film canister of the roll that held Raul’s forgiving smile. Four years later, when the junta fell and he was released from prison, it was the first one he took out and slipped into his shirt pocket.
If there was such a thing as redemption, he reasoned, he would give the families of these prisoners proof that, once upon a time, there had been a man who looked into the face of their loved one and saw a life worth remembering. That he did nothing to save them the indignity of a photograph just before death, he hoped no one would ever point out.
“You’re a tourist, visiting?” the waitress asked again.
“I’m working,” he told her, patting his camera.
“Journalist?” she asked, her face suddenly curious and interested. “For the trial of the Derg officers?” She spat out the words, her features contorting into a scowl. “Let them die for what they did to us. They kill us, they leave the bodies on the streets. My sister...” She stopped and took a deep breath. “It’s good you are here,” she said simply, then turned away as if embarrassed.
After a revolution dethroned Emperor Haile Selassie in 1974, the Derg regime had reigned until just three years ago, 1991. The Red Terror had been declared by Mengistu Haile Mariam to eliminate all opposition, meaning a population that Alfonso was all too familiar with: young, educated, idealistic, innocent except for the crime of hope. The Red Terror had nearly stripped Ethiopia of an entire generation, kept her in the firm clutches of violent and bloody chaos from 1977 to 1978. But the violence had started earlier, and it had never completely stopped until Mengistu fled. Many had not been allowed to properly mourn for their dead. Others had never found the bodies of the disappeared. When a new government came to power, the first steps toward bringing Derg officials to trial began. But courts needed evidence, proof.
The team of forensic scientists had come from Argentina with skills honed in their own land, among the bones of their own people. They had come to excavate mass graves in Addis Ababa and prove what former Derg officials tried to deny. The team had been to other places — Kurdistan, the Balkans, El Mozote, and Croatia — before Ethiopia, they understood the power that the dead still hold. They worked under the belief that witnesses, documents, even photographs could deceive, but a restored skull, a bone fragment, a skeleton dug up from a hole filled with the remains of dozens of others, spoke a kind of truth for which there was no defense.
And Alfonso, he’d come to Ethiopia because he wanted to stand in front of these remains and pretend the bones could substitute for the Argentine prisoners who understood what they were really looking at when they turned to face his camera. “I know how to photograph the dead,” he’d said to Lara during the interview. “We know each other.” She had finally relented.