She took a backward step and said soberly, ‘I’m not sure we’re going to have a relationship. You’re an attractive man, but I think it’ll just be sex with us.’
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Enough crazy talk. I’ll catch you later.’
She gave me a pouty look. ‘Don’t you want to see where I live?’
‘Why should I? What do you have in mind?’
‘Americans are so paranoid,’ she said. ‘I guess you’ve a right to be. There’s a lot of anti-American feeling down here. A girl might invite you to dinner just so she can chop off your head.’
‘Damn straight.’
‘You could take preventive measures,’ she said. ‘Notify a policeman. Give him your name and destination. That way if you go missing they’d come after me. I’d be forced to control my murderous impulses.’
‘Now I really want to go with you,’ I said. ‘Because you saying that, wow, it makes clear what a paranoid asshole I am for thinking your invitation is suspicious.’
Four boys wearing designer jeans and polo shirts, expensive watches on their wrists, rich kids just into their teens, came pounding into the entranceway of the electronics store from the street, laughing and breathless, as if they had just played a prank on someone and made a narrow escape. One of them noticed Yara and said something about whores. For some reason, this infuriated me. I told him to fuck off. The boys’ faces grew stony, all the same face, the same soulless, zombie stare, and I had a shocking sense of the seven-billion-headed monster of which they constituted a four-headed expression. I spat on the sidewalk at their feet and took a step toward them. They cursed us and scooted off into the crowd, re-absorbed into the body of the beast.
Amused, Yara said, ‘You were really angry with those kids. You hated them.’
I became aware of the street sounds once more – radio music, car horns, the gabble of shouts and laughter – as if the curtain had been raised on a noisier production.
‘What’s not to hate?’ I said. ‘They’ll grow up to be fascist dicks just like their daddies.’
She seemed to be measuring me. ‘I think you’re a nihilist.’
I laughed. ‘That’s way too formal a term for what I am.’
She didn’t reply and I said, ‘You have a thing for nihilists, do you?’
‘You should come with me. Seriously.’
‘Give me a reason.’
‘You’ll like what I’ve got to show you. If that’s not enough of a reason . . .’ She shrugged. ‘You’ll miss out on the fun.’
‘What kind of fun are we talking about?’
‘The usual. Maybe more.’
Yara leaned against me, her breast nudging my elbow, and, though I remained paranoid, my resistance weakened.
‘Come with me, man,’ she said. ‘If you die, I promise you’ll die happy.’
We took a taxi to the rain forest. If we walked, Yara explained, if we went down through Barrio Zanja, we would have to traverse almost two miles of jungle terrain – this way we would only have to walk for fifteen or twenty minutes. The taxi whipped us around Plaza Obelisco, past the unsightly concrete monument to Temalaguan independence, some despot’s idea of a joke, and past the Flame of Liberty, which had been installed to memorialize the overthrow of the very same despot, and before long we were bouncing along over a dirt road that grew ever more narrow and dead-ended in the isolated village of Chajul on the verge of the jungle, set beneath towering aguacate trees. Yara gave the driver the bills she’d received from the electronics store clerk. I asked if the money had been a pay-off and she said, ‘They’re contributions. Funding.’
‘Funding for what?’
‘I’m not certain,’ she said.
