Even worse, for the first time in my life I had to contend with the fact that I wasn’t the biggest man around. At six feet ten inches and four hundred and twenty-odd pounds I wasn’t far off, but there were two men heavier, in addition to the pituitary case (freak or not, he’d still looked down at me). All my life I’d been the one looking down on the world, the biggest boy and then the biggest man not only in my own bustling port city but in the entire province. I was strong too. At the Fiesta de Primavera I once lifted two sheep above my head, one in each hand, and for a prank when I was in my teens I hauled the Mayor’s shining black Duesenberg coupe up the steps of the Ministry of Justice and left it there at the feet of the gilded statue of the President. By the time I turned twenty I was earning a good wage cranking the capstan that lifted the wooden drawbridge in the center of town so that the high-masted fishing vessels could pass beneath it — and if that seems unremarkable, just consider that formerly three mules had been required to do the job, mules that were now free to pull plows through the fields of maize that ring the city, while the muleskinner himself was able to retire on a small pension and move into the house his mother had left him at the place where the river runs brown into the moss-green sea. People would come out to watch me work — families with picnic baskets, nubile women, strongmen, grandmothers, sailors. My legend grew. Of course, to be a legend, to attain that status, is to court attention. That was how they found me. And truly? I wish they never had.
—
Within the month the first rumors of discontent began to circulate among us. If in the beginning it had seemed as if we’d arrived in paradise, our days given over to leisure and nothing expected of us but the essentials, the routine began to wear on us. We were free to roam the compound by day and we had books and a communal radio and we played games of cards and dice, the usual sort of thing, but we were locked in at night, and the cages — though they were roomy enough and each equipped with a toilet, desk, couch and reading lamp in addition to a gargantuan steel-frame bed — were an oppression of the spirit. The man I was to become closest to — Fruto Lacayo, a former circus fat man who stood seven inches shorter but outweighed me by some forty pounds — was the first to voice his complaints.
We were in the courtyard one afternoon, smoking, chatting, getting our bearings in this place that was not, despite appearances, a former zoo, but in fact a camp where the regime had kept dissidents in a time before dissidence had been so radically discouraged as to eliminate it altogether. Fruto had been pacing along the path that traced the outer walls under the beneficent gaze of the guard in the tower (who wasn’t a guard at all, we were told, but rather a facilitator) when he came directly across the courtyard to where I was sitting in the shade with the latest issue of Hombre, examining the photographs of the slim-ankled women who stared out from its pages with looks of air-brushed longing. “Jesus Christ,” he muttered, gasping for breath, “I feel like my joint’s about to fall off.”
I gave him a wary smile. He was a fat man. I was a giant. And if you don’t see the distinction, then you have no access to my soul and no appreciation either. I shrugged. “Better than working, isn’t it?”
There was a sheen of sweat on his jowls. It was winter then, thank the Lord and the Blessed Virgin, but still the humidity was high and the afternoon temperatures were in the eighties and even nineties so that we were always uncomfortable, especially where our parts chafed. “I’m not so sure,” he said. “It’s these cages. We’re not animals.”
“No,” I said, “we’re not.”
“Do you know what the President did before he joined the army — professionally, I mean?”
I didn’t. He’d been president before I was born and I expected he’d be president still when I moved on to the next world.
Fruto winked, as if he were letting me in on a great secret. “You don’t? You really don’t?”
I shook my head.
“Well, let me tell you, let me awaken you: he was a cattle breeder.”
—
The initial breakout wasn’t a serious attempt — it was perfunctory, at best — but at least it made a statement, at least it was a beginning. Early one night, after we’d lain with the evening’s women and were gathered around the radio in the courtyard half-listening to the tail end of one of the President’s speeches (rumba music, that was what we wanted, and “Rumba Ciudad” was due to come on at eight), Fruto heaved himself up from his chair, and addressing us all, growled, “I don’t know about you, but I’ve had it. I’m going home. Tonight. Soon as it’s dark.”
There was a flutter of astonished voices: You can’t be serious! Have you gone mad? Leave here? Melchior Arce, a former stevedore who was nearly as wide across the shoulders as me though his head was disproportionately small and his left hand had been mangled in an accident so that it looked like a crushed tarantula dangling from his shirtsleeve, gave a whistle of surprise. “The only way they’ll get me out of here,” he said, “is in a coffin.” He paused to bite off the end of his cigar and spit it in the dirt. “What’s wrong with you, fat man — you a maricón?”
“You want to know the truth?” Fruto went on, ignoring the insult. “I don’t like big women. Never have. I like them petite, the way women should be — if I want to see fat I can just look in the mirror.”
If I’d been feeling the stirrings of my own discontent, now I went rigid with longing: all I could see was the face of Rosa, my Rosita, the girl I’d left behind when I’d signed the agreement and come all the way across the country to be cooped up here in this stifling compound with its jungle reek and chicken-wire cages that showed us for what we really were. Rosita was petite by any measure, a hundred pounds, if that, and an inch short of five feet. I too had always been attracted to the sleek and unencumbered, to the girls who looked more like children than women, and why was that? Because opposites attract, of course they do — otherwise we’d all be pygmies or giants instead of something proportional, something in between. I’d asked her to wait for me. I’ll be gone six months, I told her, a year at most. And we’ll save the stipend — every penny of it — so we can be married when I come back. She asked what the government wanted of me — pressed me, over and over — but I couldn’t tell her. Secret work, I’d said. And she’d looked up at me out of her saucer eyes, beseeching, wanting more, the truth. Top secret, I said. For the military.
But now, as soon as Fruto spoke the words, I knew I was going with him. We gathered a few things — sliced meat, bread, chocolate bars left over from dinner — and waited till lights out at ten, when the nocturnal clamor of the jungle rose to a crescendo and our fellow gigantes, exhausted from their venereal labors, turned over in their massive beds and began to snore. Then we made our way across the courtyard to the main gate, which was secured by a padlocked chain doubled over on itself. The guard was asleep. Nothing moved but for a solitary rat silhouetted against the faint glow of the village that lay three miles to the west of us. I took hold of the chain in the grip of my two hands and snapped it without even trying (it was nothing, a child’s toy, a poor weak thing designed to forestall ordinary men), and then I rolled back the gate on its lubricated rail and in the next moment we were outside in the darkness.