The white ones always won. Again and again they triumphed. For five hundred years they had always picked the longest straw. Now he, Patricio Alavez, Zapotec, would easily defeat two white men. Angel would be revenged and Miguel would not have died in vain.
Patricio grew as he stood outside on the sidewalk. He looked down at his new clothes and realized it was his fighting gear. He would not have to feel ashamed. Even a Zapotec could look sharp.
Afterward the police could take him, throw him back into jail, perhaps kill him. It wouldn’t matter. He would no longer be dishonored.
Forty-Eight
The tent flapped in the wind. Home, Manuel thought, and sat down in his favorite spot on the riverbank with a stone shaped like a back rest. From there he had a view of the river and the opposite bank where the well-fed cattle grazed. But now he shut his eyes and tried to squeeze everything to do with Sweden out his mind. He sat like this for several minutes before getting up and scouring the landscape. The sun was in the southwest and its light was reflected in quick-moving glints in the river water. Downstream some birds chattered anxiously. Manuel lifted his gaze. A hawk was circling up in the sky.
He made his way up the riverbank on stiff legs, but neither the billowing fields nor the pencil-straight lines of the strawberry plants could give him peace. He only felt bewildered by the fact that there were so many realities. All over the world, people were standing at the edges of fields, by deserts and lakes, in front of homes and graves. Or else they were resting in bed or on a sleep mat, alone, or with their beloved by their side. Many were on their way somewhere, restless or full of anticipation.
Everywhere there were people with dreams and beating hearts. Manuel looked down at his hands as if they could tell him who he was and where his rightful place was.
Miguel’s death, the violent force of the bullets that struck his body, his children at the window. Angel’s sprint across the railway tracks in Frankfurt, his mother’s sad eyes and her body worn and aching from a lifetime of work, the scent and beauty of the fields and crops, words of love exchanged in the dark with Gabriella-everything was mixed together in a burning anguish.
Give us a land to live in, he thought, a land where we can toil and love in peace. Why do you have to come to us with your manipulated seeds, your pesticides that give us panting lungs and burning wounds, your agreements that no one can understand until it is too late, fierce police dogs, armed thugs in souped-up jeeps, your drugs and your newspapers and radio stations that only lie? Why can we not till the earth in peace? Is that too much to ask?
Manuel did not understand the world. Everything was racing, as if life were a flock of horses stung by a gadfly, setting off at a furious pace.
“Patricio!” he shouted across the Uppsala plains, overcome with terror.
He looked around as if looking for his brother, but the only person he saw was a lone worker with a pesticide applicator who walked between the rows of plants and gave them their dose of poison.
The man, who may have heard his cry, looked up and waved his free hand in greeting. Manuel waved back.
A thunderclap from the sky interrupted his thoughts. A fighter jet appeared as if from nowhere, zoomed over at low altitude, banked, and disappeared. It was over in a couple of seconds. The man with the pesticide applicator and Manuel stared at the horizon and thereafter at each other. Manuel thought he could see the man laugh and how he made a gesture with his hand before he returned to his work. Maybe he’s happy that something broke the monotony, Manuel thought, even if it was a war machine that created the diversion.
He stumbled down the slope to his tent, pulled over his bag of clothes, undressed, and carefully stepped into the river. Last time he had slipped in the slick mud and fallen headlong into the reeds and cut his arm. The water was cool and the stiff and cold stems of the lily pads brushed against his limbs.
The water did him good. He swam several strokes, turned onto his back and let his head sink, and saw the sky above the water line as if in a kaleidoscopic shimmer. For a moment he had the sudden impulse to allow his body to sink to the muddy bottom. A burst of anxiety made him shoot up out of the water and quickly swim back to the edge.
He combed and shaved with care, pulled on clean pants and a T-shirt with a design by José Guadalupe Posada on the chest: a man on a horse riding across a field of grinning skulls.
From his hiding place under a low bushy juniper growing in the middle of a hawthorne thicket, he pulled out the sports bag he had stolen from the summer house, unzipped it, and checked to make sure the cocaine was still there.
At the sight of the packets wrapped up in plastic and tape, he felt a pang of grief at his brothers’ ignorant greed, but also triumph at having been able to cheat Slobodan Andersson.
As he left his tent he carefully looked around, as if it was his last time by the river. He let his gaze wander back and forth. A gray heron made a low, swooping dive over the water, some small fish rippled the surface of the water, perhaps chased by something bigger. He watched how the cattle on the other side lazily helped themselves to grass and shook their heads in order to ward off their buzzing tormentors. The cows looked dully at Manuel before resuming their chewing.
Again the image of Miguel’s death rose up in his mind. It was the thought of the children who from the window became witnesses to the execution of their father that plagued Manuel the most. One of them was also physically marked for life as she had been hit by a ricocheting bullet and received an ugly scar on one cheek.
Had the villagers actually done anything to protect their neighbor and friend? They observed passively as the murderers came to the village and asked for directions to Miguel’s house. Surely no one could have been unaware of their intentions? The villagers made their way up through the alleys to Miguel’s house without speaking, and arrived in time to see him being dragged out. He who had started the association and unselfishly had made himself a target for threats and harassment was shot in front of their eyes without anyone lifting a finger. In fact, they betrayed him even in death by giving in to idle chatter and leaving the association in dribs and drabs.
Why did no one offer any resistance? Why did I do nothing? Their shared indecision and cowardice had haunted him ever since Miguel’s murder, but now his self-contempt grew so intense he started to shake.
There was only one cure: do the right thing. Standing there before the foreign field, he made the sign of the cross and promised himself that if he ever returned to his village he would honor Miguel’s memory. What form this would take, he was not sure.
Manuel drove in the direction of Uppsala in order to meet Slobodan Andersson. The latter had described how to get there: take a left at the roundabout where the freeway to Stockholm began. It was the same road as when he had followed Slobodan and the short one. After a hundred meters he should turn right onto a parking lot.
He had left in plenty of time, found the roundabout without any difficulty, but drove straight on the road without turning into the parking lot. After a couple of hundred meters he reached the turnoff to a golf course. There he turned and stepped out of the car. He wanted to reach the agreed-upon meeting place from behind so that Slobodan would not see his car and in that way be able to track him down.
He sat down behind some bushes and waited. Twenty minutes left.
He felt a niggling unease. Not because of the transaction with the fat one-it was open area and Slobodan could not do anything-but because he doubted the very reasoning behind his plan.