I made myself even smaller on the bed, curling around myself in that fetal position until I was almost tied in a knot, clutching the corner of the towel with all my might, as if that towel were my last hope for salvation, the rope thrown to a drowning man in the middle of a stormy sea when there are no more life preservers, a large towel made in El Salvador at the Hilasal factory, as it turned out, its tag showing a painting of naïve, or primitive, art, painted in La Palma, a lovely mountain village in the north, a destination for artists and ex-hippies from the ’60s, which had been trapped in the theater of war. And in that particular way the mind has of making capricious associations, I immediately started remembering that the artist who had founded that school of naïve painting in La Palma had also been a member of Banda del Sol, a short-lived progressive rock band from the beginning of the ’70s, a band that attained epic status in El Salvador, especially for its songs “El planeta de los cerdos,” “The Planet of Pigs,” and “El Perdedor,” “The Loser,” both composed by a guitarist nicknamed Tamba, after the chimpanzee who costarred with Johnny Weissmuller in an old black-and-white movie called The Killer Ape—the famous Tamba, who years later would leave progressive rock to become Comandante Sebastián, a mythic figure among the guerrillas, someone who went from rock-and-roll to the armed struggle with the same sense of adventure and who would die precisely near La Palma in an ambush about which I had firsthand information. I sat up on the bed, as if energized by this memory, though I kept daydreaming, leaning my back against the wall, my private parts covered with the towel as if at any moment someone might enter the room, because the truth is, in that house you never knew, several of Eva’s relatives lived in the houses next door to ours and along the same short dead-end street, and it was not unusual for her mother or one of her sisters to suddenly appear in the living room or start up the stairs to the bedrooms without first knocking on the front door. Tamba’s story deserved to be written, I told myself, like so many other stories from the war, someone really should do it, though not I, I only had information about the ambush that cost him his life that day in January 1982, after he participated in the first guerrilla operation of any magnitude in Chalatenango — a devastating attack on the army outpost in San Fernando, a town located near La Palma, as I said. Soon I was trying to remember the details of that operation, which I had written a cable about the same day it took place, because at the time I was a reporter for a news agency secretly controlled by the guerrilla organization Tamba was fighting for, details that now, nine years later, had grown a bit hazy, though there was one that would always stick in my memory: after several hours of combat, the soldiers and paramilitary forces under siege at the base decided to surrender, as was confirmed in photographs I saw a few days later, photographs that showed a row of about three dozen prisoners face down on the ground, their hands clasped behind their necks, some of them looking right at the camera, frightened, their faces smeared with dirt, whereas the official dispatch released by the guerrilla organization that landed on my desk stated that no prisoners had been taken, that all the enemy combatants had died in battle. What happened to those prisoners? I asked Héctor, who had led the operation, a few months later. “They got malaria,” he answered calmly after recounting the battle in detail and pointing out that the raid Tamba would die in a few hours later, after the guerrilla troops had withdrawn in victory, was carried out by the military commander of San Fernando, who had managed to sneak out of the barracks with some of his soldiers during the early stages of the battle and was such a clever bastard that he evened the score by carrying out said ambush, first attacking the scout, or guide, of the guerrilla column, to whose aid Tamba came, crawling through the bushes and into the circle of enemy fire, though as fate would have it, failing to advance any farther before he was shot, a hero’s death, like that of hundreds of fighters over the ten years of war, but this was not what impressed me, I was sure of that now; the image of Tamba I most identified with was of the young guerrilla leader sitting to rest after a long day, his FAL across his lap, listening with earphones to music by Pink Floyd or Yes on his Walkman. It was, of course, that image — like a postcard and just as romantic — that impressed me because Tamba had been the two things I never could be: a composer of progressive rock music and a guerrilla, two ideals from my tender youth that he had managed to embody and I hadn’t at all, though perhaps fortunately, I reconsidered as I made myself more comfortable on the bed: thanks to the fact that I was not a rock musician turned guerrilla leader, I could now think about this, because if I had been those things, my fate would have been similar to that of the comrade with the nickname of the killer ape.
Again and suddenly, I felt thirsty, because even though the memory of Tamba’s story as Héctor had told it to me had managed to extricate me from the distress produced by the memory of that terror, my hangover was still there, pressing in on my temples and constricting my throat, extracting a high price for my binge the night before. I wrapped the towel around my waist and went down to the kitchen to drink some more water and make fried eggs and more coffee, lamenting the fact that there wasn’t even one goddamn beer in that fridge and that the Coca-Cola had already gone flat and telling myself that the best thing I could do was eat a good breakfast so as not to collapse in the street, then leave the house without further delay, even if I felt wretched, because my final paycheck was waiting for me at the news agency; right after picking it up, I could slip into the bar in Sanborns, on the corner of Insurgentes and San Antonio, where two Bloody Marys, or rather Bloody Caesars, would put an end to my malaise and, more important, to all those revolting fears that were threatening to paralyze me. And while I was making my eggs and coffee — my salivary glands stimulated by the image of the Bloody Caesar — I told myself that Héctor’s life also deserved to be written down, somebody should do it, not I, of course, I knew only what he told me during those two days together in the forest in the mountains of Hidalgo, around the middle of 1982, where we spent two long nights around a campfire, Héctor recounting his war adventures and me fascinated by what I was hearing: anecdotes from his life as a sergeant in the Argentine Navy, as a Montonero guerrilla, then years later as an officer in the Cuban army fighting in the wars of Angola and Ethiopia under the command of General Arnaldo Ochoa — this had been Héctor’s trajectory before he ended up in Central America as the leader of the assault troops on the Southern Front in the Sandinista insurrection. Héctor, who looked like a military man through and through, was an unforgettable character of medium height, swarthy and solidly built, with a furrowed brow and a thick mustache, an Argentinian who was too swarthy and too reserved to be Argentinian, a man who left Che in the dust as far as revolutionary adventures are concerned, having fought in war after war, only to end up in El Salvador after being run out of Nicaragua by the Sandinistas immediately after the triumph of that revolution, because while the comandantes were still singing the refrain “implacables en el combate y generosos en la victoria,” “implacable in battle and generous in victory,” he, on his own initiative, paid a visit to several prisons and expeditiously executed all the officers and noncommissioned officers in the dictator Somoza’s defeated National Guard — only by exterminating them immediately could a counterrevolution be prevented, he explained to me on one of those cold nights next to the campfire in the mountains of Hidalgo; the Sandinistas had gained hardly any war experience from their short war, whereas Héctor had already fought in many others, and he knew that those officers and noncommissioned officers would be the transmission belt of a future counterrevolutionary army, which is exactly what happened a few years later.