The Time of the Hero Page 5

  “Okay,” Vallano said. “Let me know if you change your mind.”

  The Slave sat down again and reached out for a slice of bread. Arróspide batted his hand and the bread slid across the table and fell to the floor. Arróspide, roaring with laughter, bent over to pick it up. Suddenly he stopped laughing. When they could see his face again it was grim. He stood up, stretched out his arm, and grabbed Vallano by the collar. “You’ve got to be pretty damned stupid not to tell colors apart in broad daylight. Either that or you’ve got to have pretty shitty luck. It takes brains to be a crook, even if you’re just stealing a bootlace or something. What would happen if Arróspide settled it with his fists, black or white, what would happen?” “I didn’t notice it was black,” Vallano said, taking the lace out of his boot. Arróspide accepted it calmly. “Good thing you gave it back,” he said, “or I’d have beaten the hell out of you.” The chorus exploded again in a rhythmical falsetto: Ay, ay, ay. “Bullshit,” Vallano said. “You watch, I’m going to empty out your locker before the end of the year. What I need now is a lace. Sell me one, Cava, you’re the peddler around here. Wake up, I’m talking to you, what’s the matter with you.” Cava looked up quickly from his empty cup and gazed at Vallano in dread. “What?” he asked. “What?” Alberto leaned over toward the Slave: “You sure you saw Cava last night?”

  “Yes,” the Slave said, “it was Cava.”

  “You’d better not tell anybody you saw him. Something’s up. The Jaguar tried to tell me they didn’t get the exam, but look at his face, the bastard.”

  The whistle blew and they jumped up and ran out to the field. Gamboa was waiting for them with his arms crossed on his chest and the whistle in his mouth. The vicuña loped away, terrified by the sudden stampede. Look, can’t you see they’re going to flunk me in chemistry on account of you, Golden Toes, can’t you see I’m sick on account of you. Here’s twenty soles, the Slave loaned them to me, if you want I’ll write you some letters, don’t be like that, don’t get me nervous, don’t make me flunk the chemistry exam, can’t you see the Jaguar’s got the answers, can’t you see I’m worse off than Skimpy. The brigadiers made their count again and reported to the noncoms, who reported to Lt. Gamboa. It had started to drizzle. Alberto touched Vallano’s leg with his boot. Vallano glanced at him out of the corner of his eye.

  “I’ll write you three letters.”

  “Four.”

  “Okay, four.”

  Vallano nodded, and ran his tongue over his lips to lick off the last crumbs of bread.

  The first section’s classroom was on the second floor of what was still called the New Building, although the dampness had already stained it and discolored it. The building next to it was the Assembly Hall, a big barn with crude benches where the cadets saw movies once a week. The drizzle had turned the parade ground into a bottomless mirror. The cadets trampled its shining surface with their boots. Their boots rose and fell to the blasts of the whistle. When they reached the foot of the stairs, the cadets broke ranks and charged up. Their muddy boots kept slipping on the stairs and the noncoms never stopped swearing. The classrooms looked out on one side over the cement patio where on any other day the cadets of the Fourth and the Dogs of the Third would have to march through a shower of spit and missiles from the Fifth. One day the Negro, Vallano, threw a piece of wood. There was a loud scream, and one of the Dogs raced across the patio like a meteor, covering his ear with both hands. A trickle of blood ran out between his fingers and made a dark stain on his jacket. The whole section was confined to the grounds for two weeks but the guilty person was never discovered. On the first day they were free Vallano bought two packs of cigarettes for each of the thirty cadets. “Jesus, that’s a lot,” the Negro grumbled. “One pack each’d be plenty.” The Jaguar and his buddies warned him: “Two apiece or we’ll hold a meeting of the Circle.”

  “Just twenty points,” Vallano told Alberto. “Not a point more. I’m not going to risk my neck for just four letters.”

  “No,” Alberto said, “at least thirty. And I’ll show you what questions with my finger. Don’t whisper the answers. Show me your exam.”

  “I’ll whisper them.” The desks held two students each. Alberto and Vallano were sitting in the last row behind Cava and the Boa, who were both so broad-shouldered that they made a good screen.

  “Like the last time? You told me the wrong answers on purpose.”

  Vallano laughed. “Four letters,” he said. “Two pages each.”

  Pezoa the noncom appeared in the doorway carrying a stack of exams. He looked at the cadets with his small, malevolent eyes, and from time to time he moistened the tips of his thin mustache with his tongue.

  “Anyone who takes out a book,” he said, “or looks at anyone else’s exam, will automatically flunk. And besides that, six points. Brigadier, pass out the exam.”

  “The Rat.”

  Pezoa started and flushed, and his eyes looked like two slashes. He straightened his shirt with his babyish hand.

  “The deal’s off,” Alberto said. “I didn’t know we’d get the Rat. I’d rather copy from the book.”

  Arróspide passed out the exams. The noncom looked at his watch.

  “Eight o’clock,” he said. “You’ve got forty minutes.”

  “The Rat.”

  “There isn’t a one of you that’s a man!” Pezoa roared. “I’d like to see the face of that hero that keeps saying ‘The Rat.’”

  The desks came to life: they rose up a fraction of an inch and banged down on the floor, at first in disorder, then in rhythm, while a chorus of voices shouted, “The Rat! The Rat!”

  “Shut up, you cowards!” the noncom bellowed.

  Suddenly Lt. Gamboa and the chemistry teacher entered the room. The teacher was a slight, nervous-looking man, and next to Gamboa, who was tall and muscular, he seemed very insignificant in his civilian clothes, which were somewhat too large for him.

  “What’s going on, Pezoa?”

  The noncom saluted. “Just a little horseplay, sir.”

  Everything stood still. There was absolute silence.

  “Oh, really?” Gamboa said. “You go to the second section, Pezoa. I’ll take care of these youngsters.”

  Pezoa saluted again and left. The chemistry teacher followed him. He seemed to be intimidated by so many uniforms.

  “Vallano,” Alberto whispered, “the deal’s back on.”

  Without looking at him, the Negro shook his head and ran his finger across his throat. Arróspide had finished passing out the exams. The cadets bent their heads over the pages. Fifteen plus five, plus three, plus five, blank, plus three, blank, blank, plus three, no, blank, that’s—what—thirty-one, right in the neck. If it’d end in the middle, if they’d call him out, if something’d happen so he’d have to leave in a hurry, Golden Toes.

  Alberto answered the questions slowly, printing the words. Gamboa’s heels clicked on the tile floor. Whenever a cadet raised his eyes from his exam, they always met the mocking eyes of the lieutenant, who said, “Do you want me to whisper you the answers? Keep your head down. The only people I let watch me are my wife and the maid.”

  When he had finished answering all the questions he could, Alberto glanced at Vallano. The Negro was scribbling furiously, biting his tongue. Then Alberto very cautiously looked around the room. Some of the cadets were only pretending to write, moving their pens a fraction of an inch above the paper. He reread the exam and answered two more questions by sheer guesswork. There was a distant, underground noise. The cadets stirred restlessly in their seats. The air grew denser: something invisible floated above those bent heads, a warm, impalpable something, a nebulosity, a diaphanous emotion, a dew. How to escape the lieutenant’s watchfulness for just a few seconds?

  Gamboa laughed at them. He stopped walking about and stood in the middle of the classroom. His arms were crossed, his muscles showed under his cream-colored shirt, and his eyes took in everything at a glance, as they did in the field exercises wh
en he sent his company through the mud and had them charge through the scrub or the boulders with a mere flick of his hand or a short blast on his whistle: the cadets under his command felt proud when they saw the anger and frustration of the officers and cadets from the other companies, who always ended up by being ambushed, surrounded, trounced. Gamboa, with his helmet shining in the early light, would point his finger toward a tall adobe wall, calmly, casually, imperturbable in the face of the invisible enemy occupying the heights and the nearby defiles and even the stretch of beach beyond the cliffs, and shout: “Over the wall, you birds!” And the cadets of the first company would race forward like meteors, their fixed bayonets jabbing at the sky and their hearts filled with a tremendous rage as they trampled down the plants in the furrows—if only the plants were the heads of Chileans or Ecuadoreans, if only the blood would spurt out from under their boots, if only their enemies would die—until they came gasping and swearing to the foot of the adobe wall. Then they would sling their rifles, reach up their swollen hands, dig their nails into the cracks, flatten themselves against the wall, and slither up it somehow, keeping their eyes on the top, and then they would jump in a crouch, and land, hearing nothing except their own curses and the excited pounding of the blood in their temples and chests. But Gamboa would already be ahead of them, standing on top of a high rock, with hardly a scratch, sniffing the sea wind and calculating. The cadets, squatting or sprawling, kept their eyes fixed on him: life or death depended on his commands. Suddenly he would glare at them and they were not his birds any more, they were worms. “Spread out! You’re all bunched together like sheep!” So the worms would stand up and move apart, with their old mended fatigues flapping in the wind, with the patches and seams looking like scabs and scars, and then get down in the mud again, hiding in the weeds but still looking at Gamboa with the same docile, pleading eyes they had turned up to him on the night he broke up the Circle.

  They formed the Circle only forty-eight hours after they had taken off their civilian clothes and been scalped by the Academy barber and put on their crisp khaki uniforms and fallen in for the first time in the stadium to the commands of whistles and harsh voices. It was the last day of summer, and the sky over Lima, after burning like an ember for three months, was ash gray with clouds, as if this were the beginning of a long dark dream. They came from all parts of Peru. They had never seen each other before but they were all together now, lined up in front of the cement hulks whose insides they had not yet seen. The voice of Capt. Garrido informed them that their civilian lives had ended for three years, that they would all be made into men, that the true military spirit consisted of three simple things: obedience, courage, and hard work. But the Circle came later, after their first meal in the Academy, after they were free at last from the supervision of the officers and noncoms. As they left the mess hall they looked at the cadets of the Fourth and Fifth with suspicion, something less of curiosity, something even less of sympathy.

  The Slave was coming down the mess hall stairs, alone, when his arm was gripped tightly and a voice murmured in his ear: “Come with us, Dog.” He smiled and followed them meekly. Around him, a number of the classmates he had met that morning were also seized and hustled across the field to the Fourth Year barracks. There were no classes that day. The Dogs were at the mercy of the Fourth from lunch time until dinner. The Slave was not sure to what section he was taken, nor by whom. But the barracks was full of cigarette smoke and uniforms and he could hear shouts and laughter. He had hardly entered, the smile still on his lips, when he felt a blow on his shoulder. He fell to the floor, rolled over and lay there on his back. A foot was planted on his stomach. Ten faces looked down at him impassively, as if he were an insect, and he could not see the ceiling.

  A voice said, “To start off, sing ‘I’m a Dog’ a hundred times in the rhythm of a Mexican ballad.”

  It was impossible. He was stunned, his eyes were bulging from their sockets, his throat was burning. The foot pressed a little harder on his stomach.

  “He doesn’t want to,” the voice said. “The Dog doesn’t want to sing.”

  And they opened their mouths and spit on him, not once but again and again, until he had to close his eyes. When the spitting stopped, the same anonymous voice, turning like a screw, repeated: “Sing ‘I’m a Dog’ a hundred times in the rhythm of a Mexican ballad.”

  This time he obeyed and his throat forced out the required words to the tune of “Rancho Grande.” It was almost impossible: without the original words, the melody sometimes turned into hoarse screams. But apparently that made no difference, because they listened to him attentively.

  “That’s enough,” the voice said. “Now, in the rhythm of a bolero.”

  And after that, a mambo and a waltz. Then they told him: “Get up.”

  He stood up and ran his hand across his face, then wiped it off on the seat of his pants. The voice said, “Did anybody tell you to clean your face? No, Dog, nobody told you to.”

  Their mouths opened again and he automatically closed his eyes until it stopped.

  “These two gentlemen here are cadets,” the voice said. “Stand at attention, Dog. That’s good. These cadets have made a bet and you’re going to be the judge.”

  The one on the right hit him first and the Slave felt a searing pain in his arm. The one on the left hit him an instant later.

  “Now, then, what do you think? Which one hit you the hardest?”

  “Both the same.”

  “So that means it was a tie,” the voice said. “We’ll have to break the tie.”

  A moment later the relentless voice asked him, “By the way, Dog, do your arms hurt you?”

  “No,” the Slave said.

  It was true. He had lost the sense of his body, and of time also. His dazed mind was remembering the waveless sea off Puerto Eten, and he heard his mother tell him, “Be careful, Ricardito, you’ll step on a sting ray,” and she reached out her long, protecting arms to gather him in, under a pitiless sun.

  “That’s a lie,” the voice said. “If they don’t hurt you, Dog, why are you bawling?”

  He thought they had finished. But they had only begun.

  “Are you a dog or a human being?” the voice asked him.

  “A dog, Cadet.”

  “So why are you standing up? Dogs go around on all fours.”

  He dropped down, and when he put his hands on the floor he felt a burning pain in his arms. There was another boy next to him, also on hands and knees.

  “Correct,” the voice said. “And when two dogs meet in the street, what do they do? Answer me, Dog, I’m talking to you.”

  The Slave was kicked in the buttocks, and he answered hurriedly, “I don’t know, Cadet.”

  “They fight,” the voice said. “They bark and they leap at each other. And they bite.”

  The Slave could not remember having seen the face of the boy who was being initiated with him. He must have come from one of the last sections because he was so small. His features were twisted with dread, and the voice had scarcely stopped speaking when he lunged forward, barking and frothing at the mouth, and suddenly the Slave felt a bite on his shoulder like that of a rabid dog. Then his whole body reacted, and as he barked and bit he felt certain that his skin was covered with thick fur, that his mouth was a pointed muzzle, that over his back his tail cracked like a whip.

  “That’s enough,” the voice said. “You’re the winner. But the midget fooled us. He isn’t a male dog, he’s a female. Do you know what a male and a female do when they meet in the street?”

  “No, Cadet,” the Slave said.

  “They lick each other. First they sniff around and then they lick each other.”

  After that, they took him out of the barracks to the stadium and he could not remember if it was still daytime or if it was night. They stripped him and the voice ordered him to lie down and “swim” on his back around the soccer field. Later they took him into one of the barracks of the Fourth, where he made
up a lot of bunks, sang and danced on a locker, imitated movie stars, polished many pairs of boots, cleaned a floor tile with his tongue, screwed a pillow, drank piss, but all that took place in a feverish dream and suddenly he found himself back in his own section, stretched out on his bunk, thinking: I swear I’ll run away from here. Tomorrow morning. The barracks was silent. The boys looked at each other, and in spite of having been beaten and spit on, smeared and pissed on, they were solemn, even ceremonious. That same night, after the bugle played taps, the Circle was born.

  They were all in their bunks but no one was asleep. The bugler had just left the patio. Then a silhouette left one of the bunks, moved down the barracks and went into the latrine. The leaves of the door swung back and forth behind him. A few moments later they could hear him retching and then vomiting, loudly, desperately. Almost all of them jumped out of their bunks and ran barefoot to the latrine. Vallano, who was tall and thin, was in the middle of that yellowish room, rubbing his stomach. Instead of going over to him, they watched his strained black face as he threw up again. Finally Vallano went over to a sink and rinsed out his mouth. Then they began to talk excitedly, all at once, cursing the cadets of the Fourth in the vilest language they knew.

  “We can’t let this keep on,” Arróspide said. “We’ve got to do something.” His white face stood out among the copper complexions of the others. He was in a rage and his fist shook in the air.

  “Let’s bring in the guy they call the Jaguar,” Cava suggested.

  It was the first time they had heard that name. “Who?” some of them asked. “Is he in our section?”

  “Yes,” Cava said. “He’s still in his bunk. It’s the first one next to the latrine.”

  “Why do we need the Jaguar?” Arróspide asked. “Aren’t there enough of us already?”

  “No,” Cava said, “it isn’t that. He’s different. They haven’t initiated him. I saw the whole thing. He didn’t even give them time. They took him to the stadium along with me, out there behind the barracks. And he just laughed in their faces and said, ‘You’re going to initiate me, are you? We’ll see, we’ll see.’ Then he laughed in their faces again. And there were ten of them.”