Corporal Carrera pulled open the door behind us, our signal to vacate the room: our business here was concluded. But just as we reached the door, my legs working autonomously and Fruto heaving for breath and wiping at his massive face with the great sopping field of his handkerchief, the Colonel called out to us. “Now go and do your duty, for the love of your country and of the President. Go to your female volunteers — whose stipends are but half of yours, incidentally, and so it should be — and, in your throes, think of him.”
—
The Colonel was as good as his word. Improvements came rapidly, laborers from the village appearing the very next day to reinforce the frames of the cages with four-by-four posts, enclose them in walls of lath and stucco and lay tile in a handsome herringbone pattern you could stare at for hours. There were tin roofs. Each of us got a radio. At night, electric fans stirred the breezes and mosquito netting held the insects at bay. I’d volunteered to help with the work — let’s face it, I was bored to the point of vacuity with all that sitting around — but the Colonel wouldn’t hear of it. “No,” he said, on one of his inspections of the compound. “You must conserve your energy”—and here the hint of a smile appeared beneath the dark cantilever of his mustaches—“for your President and your country.”
In the interim, we were bused to the women’s compound, which, as it turned out, lay some three miles to the north of the men’s facility, on the banks of a nameless oozing watercourse that bred mosquitoes and stinging flies in the pestilent millions so that we were all of us, men and women alike, scratching furiously the entire time we were there. What distinguished their compound from ours, aside from the increase of insects? Not much. They too lived in cages, but they were crammed in, four or five of them to a cage, and their camp stretched as far as the eye could see. If we were nine, the women numbered in the hundreds, and this of course reflected a simple calculus any cattle breeder could have worked out on a single sheet of paper.
The women I was put in with the first night were among the biggest in the camp, selected especially for me. And by big I don’t necessarily mean the heaviest — such women were reserved for Fruto and his ilk — but the tallest and broadest, with the longest limbs and thickest bones. These women could have felled forests, collapsed mines, held back the sea just by linking arms. Where the President had found them, I couldn’t imagine — not till one of them called me by name.
I’d just set down my overnight bag and taken possession of the bed, as uninterested in these women as I’d been in the phalanxes that had trooped in and out of my cage at the men’s compound, when one of them broke ranks and came across the dirt floor to me, my name on her lips. She was Magdalena Duarte, she’d been raised in the city I called home and — in a shy voice — told me she’d often come to the drawbridge to watch me at work when she was just a girl. “Before my growth spurt,” she said, covering her mouth with one hand as she laughed at her own joke.
Later, after we’d coupled by rote while the insects whined and the other women, utterly indifferent, unfurled straw mats and lay down to sleep, she asked me how I was adjusting to my new role in life. Did I like it?
“Anything for the President,” I said.
Her voice was soft, with a scratch in it. “All work and no play, eh?”
“Something like that. But what of you — do you like serving your country?”
I could just make out her features in the light of the guard tower where it fell across the wire mesh of the cage. She glowed a moment, her face like a moon rising over a dim horizon. “They move us to a nicer place once we’re pregnant,” she said. “And the stipend is all my parents have to live on in these times. You see, I come from a large family”—she caught herself, giggled softly—“of many children, that is, thirteen of us, and so when the recruiter came to us, I did my duty. To the President, yes, and to my family as well.”
I was quiet a moment, thinking about that — duty — when she dropped her voice even lower and whispered: “You know, there’s another compound. Two other compounds.”
“No,” I said, “I had no idea.” Beside us, in the dark, the giantesses heaved and blew and let their stertorous snores crash through their dreams.
“For little people.”
“Little? What do you mean little?” Forgive me if in that moment I thought of Rosa, my Rosa, my Rosita, and her perfect diminutive feet that were the size of a child’s, of her mouth, her lips, the way she would tease me good-naturedly every time I had to bend double and squeeze sideways through a doorway or avoid the chairs in her parents’ parlor for fear of splintering them.
“Not dwarves, not midgets — the President wants normal stock only — but people who, by the grace or whim of God, are very fine and very small.” She left the thought hanging there, the darkness seizing me, the mosquitoes raging till the furious cacophony of their wings drove down every sound in that place.
“But why? Why would he want—little people?”
I couldn’t see anything but her face in the mosaic shadow of the wire, but I could feel her shrug animate the mattress. “They say he wants to create a race no more than two feet high and normal in every other way, intelligent, active, people like cats who can come and go in the night without detection.”
“Spies?”
Another shift of the mattress. She was nodding now. “Our fatherland has many enemies,” she said, whispering still, as if fearful of being overheard. “We must be ready for them.”
—
I couldn’t sleep that night, not a wink, not after what Magdalena had told me. I kept picturing Rosa in a camp like this one, stepping into a cage where a wiry little man like a human Chihuahua lay waiting for her, though I knew it was absurd. Rosa was an innocent. She would never volunteer, never allow herself to be conscripted no matter what pressures were brought to bear. Or would she? Would she feel moved in her heart (in her loins!) to serve her country like all these patriotic women laid out snoring in the darkness around me? The thought seared me, burned in my brain like the perpetual flame illuminating the grave of our President’s lamented mother. It was dawn by the time I finally dozed off, my dreams poisoned and my heart constricted as if a noose had been drawn tight around it.
After that, I bided my time, and when they moved us back to our new apartments in the men’s compound — the very night — I broke out again. This time I went straight for the bus terminal and soon experienced the giddy release of the wheels revolving beneath me as a dark curtain of vegetation lurched past the windows and the striped margins of the road home came clear in the first light of dawn. What I didn’t yet appreciate was that after our first abortive attempt at escape the Colonel had issued an alert to all carriers to be on the lookout for any big man seeking passage out of the province. They were waiting for me at the end of the line.
Did I go quietly? No, I didn’t. When I saw them there in their Black Maria with its chopping blue light, I came down off the bus like a hurricane and laid that vehicle over on its roof till the men it contained came crawling out the windows and I snatched them up two at a time and flung them behind me like so many paper dolls. Sadly, they’d anticipated me here too, and their chloroform canisters brought me down as swiftly and surely as if I were that king ape in the cinema show we’d all marveled at in simpler times, when the images played across the screen like waking dreams and Rosa breathed quietly at my side.