Brief Encounters With Che Guevara_ Stories - Ben Fountain [2]
“So tell me, Joan Blair,” one of the subcomandantes might say, pointing to a manakin spouting trills and rubatos or the tanagers that streaked about like meteor showers, “what is the name of that species, please?”
He knew they were testing him, nominally probing for chinks in his cover, but more than that they were indulging in the fatuous running joke that seemed to follow him everywhere. Which he handled by coming right back at them, rattling off the Latin and English names and often as not the Spanish, along with genus and all the natural history he could muster before the rebel waved his arms and retreated. But an implacable sense of mission was rising in Blair. He eyed the cloud forest lapping the compound’s walls and knew that something momentous was waiting for him.
“If you let me do my work,” he told Comandante Alberto, “I’ll prove to you I’m not a spy.”
“Well,” Alberto answered, “perhaps.” A man of impressive silences and ponderous speech, who wore his gravitas like a pair of heavy boots, he had a habit of studying his hands while he spoke, slowly turning them back and forth while he declaimed Marxist rhetoric in the deep rolling voice of a river flowing past giant boulders. “First the Secretariat must review your case.”
Always the Secretariat, MURC’s great and powerful Oz. In the evenings the officers gathered on the steps of their quarters to listen to the radio and drink aromática tea. Blair gradually insinuated himself onto the bottom step, and after a couple of weeks of Radio Nacional newscasts he understood that Colombia was busily ripping itself to shreds. Gargantuan car bombs rocked the cities each week; judges and journalists were assassinated in droves; various gangs, militias, and guerrillas fought the Army and the cops, while the drug lords and revanchists sponsored paramilitary autodefensa squads that seemed to specialize in massacring unarmed peasants. In their own area Blair could hear shooting at night, and the distant thud of helicopters during the day. Rebel patrols brought in bodies and bloody autodefensa prisoners, while U.S. Air Force planes gridded the sky overhead, reconnoitering the local coca crop.
“Where,” Blair asked during a commercial break, “is this Zone of Disarmament they’re always talking about?”
“You’re in it,” Subcomandante Tono answered, to which Lauro added with a mocking snarl: “You mean you couldn’t tell?”
Some evenings Alberto joined them, usually when one of his interviews was being broadcast; he’d settle onto the steps with a mug of tea and listen to himself lecturing the country on historical inevitability or the Bolivarian struggle or the venemous strategies of the World Bank. After one such broadcast he turned to Blair.
“So, Joan Blair, what do you think of our position?”
“Well,” Blair said in his most formal Spanish, “of course I support these things as general principles—an end to poverty, an equitable education system, elections where everyone is free to participate.” The officers murmured patronizingly and winked at each other; amid the strenuous effort of articulating himself, Blair barely took notice. “But frankly I think you’re being far too timid in your approach. If you really want to change society you’re going to have to start thinking in more radical terms.”
The group endured several moments of intense silence, until Alberto cleared his throat. “For example, Joan Blair?”
“Well, you’re always going on about agrarian reform, but face it, you’re just evading the real issue. If you really want to solve the land problem you’re going to have to get away from the cow. They’re too big, they overload the whole ecosystem. What we have to do is forget the cow and switch over to a diet of mushrooms and insects.”
“Mushrooms and insects?” Lauro cried. “You think I’m risking my ass out here for mushrooms and insects?”
But Alberto was laughing.