The Pit

Normally the drive from uptown to Barrio Versailles took about twenty minutes. Eduardo Viques couldn’t decide how to play it. If he drove as usual his wife, seething with rage beside him, would scream that he was a placid cow, incapable of feeling insult. If he drove fast and slammed on the brakes at the lights, she might think he was angry with her, not the people who had just put them through a grueling, two-hour inquisition, and she would explode. If, however, he drove slowly, it would show a certain pensiveness on his part that might give him enough time to put together some sort of response.

“Never have I been so insulted.”

Viques sighed. It didn’t matter how he drove.

“For the better part of an evening I had to sit and listen to your family lambaste you and stop just short of calling you a brain-addled cretin. And when I tried to take up for you, they all jumped on me. Your sister wouldn’t even address me! ‘Tell la chica this is none of her concern.’

“La chica! She called me la chica!”

Viques glanced at his wife. Everyone saw something comical in the twenty-five year difference in their ages, but he loved his child bride. The way she clenched her fists when she was angry, the way her lower lip stuck out — her petulance had once been so endearing. She tuned the radio to a salsa station and ignored him.

Now they were driving through the restaurant area of Avenida Sexta. There hadn’t been a bomb planted here for several weeks. The street was filled with well-dressed people going from cafes to discos. The music from several open-air nightclubs blended together to give the area a frantic, festive air. Viquez looked around. Something was missing. The gangs of street kids, the gamines, were nowhere to be seen.

They’ve run off those glue-sniffing punks, Viques thought, and he felt a bit of inspiration.

“Listen, Gloria, you have to understand why my family is so upset. They put a big stake in the place and they think I’m lazy because it’s not doing so well. I’m the one on the line here. I’m the one who pushed for an office supply store instead of a luggage shop. It will take more time to build up a customer base. They don’t understand the reality of doing business in a decaying part of town, where the well-to-do are afraid to shop. But look around. This area’s picking up. The cops have run the riff-raff out. The others are a little slow in catching on, but I think Father understands. Don’t be surprised if our gross is ten percent higher next month.”

Eduardo tipped the shotgun-totting guard a few hundred pesos as they walked from the parking lot to their high-rise.

“Do you notice anything different, Gloria? That family of beggars we always see sitting on that curb over there, they’re gone. There’s a change in the air. Decent people are taking back the city.”

Her response was a sniff and a toss of her head.

It would be another celibate night.

German Lopez Sandoval de Pastor paused in his labors and leaned on his shovel. It was going to be another hot one; the afternoon rains wouldn’t begin for a month. And Ramirez was already drunk at ten in the morning.

Ramirez was a strong, little bull of a man; he would hold up his end drunk or sober. The problem was he talked too damned much when he had a bellyful of cane liquor.

“I don’t think you realize the social implications of our work here, Sandoval. If you were an educated man, you could discern the patterns.”

God, there he goes again, bragging about his schooling.

Ramirez was a high school graduate. Sandoval had to go to work at age twelve.

“You know, Ramirez, for an educated man you chose a strange place to make a living. You work in the same stinking pit as me, an ignorant country lout.”

Ramirez smiled and broke a bag of lime open with his shovel.

“The vicissitudes of fortune, my rustic friend. The great Dostoevsky found himself working as a common laborer when he ran afoul authority.”

Sandoval didn’t know who Dostoevsky was and he didn’t care. They had a particularly heavy load today. The truck from the city had already made two deliveries and the driver promised at least one more in the afternoon. At this rate, they wouldn’t finish until dark. Maybe Sandoval would break his vow to the Virgin and ask Ramirez for a couple shots of aguardiente.

“Here, help me move this one, it’s heavy as hell.”

Both men dragged the plastic-covered bundle to a low spot in the pit. They worked without pause until noon.

They took their lunch break fifty meters away from the pit. Sandoval heated coffee over a small burner while Ramirez sipped from his bottle.

“Why do you think we’re getting so many lately?”

Ramirez scratched his beard. “Social trends, Sandoval, like I was telling you before. Remember last month, all the ones that were tortured, with their hands and feet tied with wire? Only the paramilitaries do that. Why they have to torture the poor devils before they kill them, God only knows.

“But look at what we get lately. Kids. Basuca smokers. Street faggots. The people who yell nasty words at the nice ladies who go shopping at boutiques. I read in the paper that they found a bunch of kids living in the sewers. They come out at night and roll drunks or break into cars. Some of the little girls were raising babies down there. Think of that, Sandoval, a subterraneous race. Eventually they will lose their power of sight and develop antennae, like fish living in caves.”

A car, a big Mercedes, pulled up and two men got out. One was the sub-district commissioner of sanitation, the pit workers’ boss. The other was a fat man dressed in fine clothes, the owner of the Mercedes.

“Son of a whore, Barrios knows this is our lunch break,” Ramirez muttered.

“Gentlemen, Senor Rivas here thinks that a young family member may have accidentally been picked up by one of our crews. This would have been within the past week. Please go down three layers or so and let us have a look.”

Sandoval and Ramirez starred at their boss and then at each other. A reclaim job. They’d get a few thousand extra pesos at the end of the day, but it wasn’t worth the nastiness of the work. They trudged back to the pit and started shifting the plastic-covered bundles. The fat man and the sanitation official stood on the edge.

“We’re looking for a slender, young male, dressed in bright-colored clothes, with a hairline mustache,” Rivas said as he offered a scented handkerchief to the fat man. The fat man seized it and held it to his nose.

“Fat boy there lost his maricon son”, Ramirez whispered as the two pit men dragged bundles. “Maybe he was at a pink party the cops broke up.”

The bodies three layers down had begun to liquefy. Facial features were lost — clothes were the best indication of identity. After an hour of uncovering and dragging the bundles, Sandoval and Ramirez were rewarded by a howl from the fat man.

Sandoval muttered a prayer of thanks to the Virgin.

Ramirez lost no time in explaining the ramifications to Sandoval. “The body politic has gone insane, chico. Now the children of oligarchs are getting caught in these sweeps. The vampires are feeding on each other.”

After his third glass of single malt scotch, Eduardo Viques felt a little better. His two closest friends were huddled with him in his living room, constantly assuring him that nothing was wrong: Gloria had gone out partying with her old pals and would turn up anytime. Viques was sure his friends thought she had gone on a wild binge with an old boyfriend. He prayed that was what happened. To hell with machismo — picturing Gloria in bed with another man, screaming like a cat in heat, was better than imagining Gloria sliced-up lying on a slab. She had married down. Her family was from that old money class that teaches its children the world belongs to them and Gloria would never understand how sordid life could be. Once, on a trip to Cartagena when beggar kids swarmed them, she asked the youngsters why they didn’t ask their parents for a larger allowance. She pretended not to hear their obscene replies.

Now she was gone, three nights without any word.

“We quarreled,” Viquez said. “We quarreled and the next morning she went to her mother’s house. I worked late that night and came home to an empty apartment. I called her mother and she said Gloria went to see some old school friends earlier in the afternoon. Since then, nothing.”

Viquezes’ friends made comforting noises and helped themselves to more scotch. They were all friends from childhood, now they were all chunky, middle-aged men who worked long hours in family businesses. To complete the symmetry, they all had young, delectable wives.

What happened to one always happened to the others. After the store owned by Montez was broken into, Cuellar and Viquez suffered burglaries at their businesses within weeks. Now a wife had run off.

Montez and Cuellar exchanged glances. Maybe it was fortunate that their wives couldn’t stand each other.

There wasn’t much on the television at this hour. Melodramas with impossibly beautiful women crying their eyes out. A news show with the day’s toll of violent deaths — the camera tenderly lingering over the slashed throats and gaping exit wounds. A new propaganda campaign from the government: scenes of young women and small children in humble living rooms staring at framed photographs of smiling men. Fade out with the words Kidnapping Hurts.

The tin door shook as it was pounded from outside. Sandoval grabbed his machete and cracked the door.

It was Ramirez, really drunk now and maybe something else too — his eyes were glittering.

“Didn’t wake you? Good. The bitch left me. Cleared out before I came home from work. Told me last night she couldn’t stand the stink I brought home every day. Good riddance.”

Sandoval stared at the man’s eyes. “Have you been smoking basuca?”

“So what if I have? God knows the life we have out here is fucking horrible. How do you stand it, Sandoval? You don’t run with women, you don’t drink or use dope. What do you do to keep from going crazy?”

“I put my fate in the Virgin’s hands. And I have my studies. You’re an educated man, you should know that life is a matter of self-improvement.”

Ramirez blinked. “Your studies? You mean those animals you stuff? That mail order course in taxidermy you got? Suffering Jesus, don’t you get enough dead things at work?”

“It’s my ticket out of here. It’s a useful trade. I’ll be able to get a job in a museum or maybe a university biology department. You should think about the future, Ramirez.”

“Aren’t you going to invite me in?”

“It’s late. And I don’t have anything for you to drink.”

“Unfriendly bastard”, Ramirez muttered as he tottered away.

Sandoval locked the door and returned to his chair. It was only a matter of time before Ramirez’ woman ran off. She had thick, gleaming lips and hard, oversized buttocks that strained the stitches of her pants. The neighborhood women called her itchy. A drunk couldn’t give her what she needed. And she probably needed it day and night, in every conceivable way.

Sandoval felt himself getting aroused by his thoughts. This wouldn’t do; he’d have to set a penance to perform for the Virgin. He glanced at the shrine, surrounded by candles. The Virgin was the only woman he could count on. She would never leave him.

“Don Eduardo, we have to order more large manila envelopes.”

Viquez stared at the girl. “What was that?”

“I said we have to order more large manila envelopes, Don Eduardo. We’re down to a half-dozen.”

“All right. Go ahead and call the supplier, Carmen.”

Viquez watched the girl turn away and walk to the telephone. He leaned against the shop counter with all his weight. He didn’t feel capable of standing on his own.

Did he carry the smell of that awful place? The clothes he’d worn earlier that morning were in the trash and he’d scrubbed himself for nearly an hour, yet Carmen and the customers seemed to keep a certain distance from him. He shut his eyes.

Horrible, horrible place. Everyone knew about the pit where the desfortunados were taken, but no one ever spoke of it. Viquez had left Carmen to run the store and drove by himself out to that place.

Montez and Cuellar had offered to accompany him, but he wanted to prove to himself he could stand it.

He couldn’t. He’d broken down. The pit workers, two squalid little men, uncovered bodies for a half-hour. When the fit of vomiting seized him, Viquez fell to his hands and knees and voided his stomach, then made barking noises until that man Barrios helped him up. One of the pit men spat and muttered something from the side of his mouth, but the other one regarded Viques with compassion.

I have to give them something, he thought, I have to give them something for their trouble, but he couldn’t speak as Barrios helped him to his car. She hadn’t been there. She hadn’t been there, but he saw other young women, faces frozen in the screams that had been cut off when they met their violent ends. Girls from the lower class, whores and drug addicts, but girls who’d danced to the same music as Gloria, who had watched the same telenovellas. Their bodies would disintegrate to nothing, but he would remember those distorted faces until the day he died. Years later when he married again, Viquez’s choice was an uncomplicated woman of his own age who never fully undressed before him.

Sandoval rose in the world. He completed his taxidermy course and got a job with a non-governmental environmental organization. His employers were impressed with Sandoval’s meticulous work. The animals he preserved seemed to be revealed in a flash of lightening as they scurried about their hunting and concealment activities.

When Sandoval moved to a middle class neighborhood he left his ratty furniture in the old hut, but with great, secretive effort he took his shrine to the Virgin with him. He saw Ramirez once at a public park. The poor man was a filthy rag-bag huddled with other beggars and addicts. Sandoval gave him some money, but Ramirez didn’t recognize him. One day he would end up in the pit.

There are some who say that those from Gloria Viques’ privileged class are social parasites — rich, useless people — but after her death Gloria provided the inspiration for Ramon Sandoval’s apotheosis. He never kneeled before her perfectly preserved body without feeling that an angel had fallen into his hands. In the same way luscious flowers can bloom from a mound of shit, a vile Potters Field had provided him with a blue-eyed, blond-haired gift whose delicate, white skin was so beautifully illuminated by the countless candles that surrounded her.