The Last Great Road Bum by Héctor Tobar

Author:Héctor Tobar
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

17

Mejicanos

THE CLOCK MOVED PAST TWELVE and Joe paid for and ate two pupusas, garnishing them with cabbage slaw, as per the local custom. At 12:26 p.m., the guerrilla fighter named Fito entered through the door in a freshly laundered polo shirt, looking like an office stiff eager to get a burger. Fito walked toward the booth where Joe was sitting and said, “Seguime,” and Joe followed him to a table in the back where the restaurant was emptier. After a minute or so of sitting and listening to the sounds of the restaurant, Fito began to speak. “If you want to work with us, you need to know how we operate.” By “we” he meant the Ejército Revolucionario del Pueblo, or ERP. They were not a “front,” or a “movement,” or a “league,” like the many other organizations Joe had seen operating in San Salvador, but rather an “army.” The People’s Revolutionary Army, with all the discipline that name implied. I’m going to have to come up with another code word in the letters to Mom and Calhoun. I can’t call them “schoolteachers.” I’ll call them “scientists.”

“You haven’t been organized before?” Fito asked, by which he meant had Joe ever been a member of any other revolutionary fronts or movements.

“No.”

“Well, when you operate underground, the way we do here in the city, you have a very disciplined structure,” Fito continued. In other words, Lucas wouldn’t be able to drift freely around San Salvador the way Joe had been doing, because after a day of conversations with his comrades, and questions placed to a member of another organization, Fito had learned that Lucas was known as the gringo who floated around the city, and who had helped here and there with the groups based at the now-closed university. “I need to know if you’ll accept this kind of discipline.”

“Yes.”

Fito told Lucas that his next contact with the organization would be tomorrow at a San Salvador bus terminal. He would be guided to a safe house where he would likely have to stay for some time; Joe nodded and said he understood. His only problem was his Salvadoran visa, which expired in one month. Would he need to have a valid visa if he went underground? Joe removed his passport from his pants pocket and placed it on the table, and Fito picked it up and opened the pages, and for the first time he glanced at Lucas’s real name—Joseph—and he chuckled as he looked at the ridiculous number of stamps inside it, most of them from South American countries. Peru in red. Chile in blue. A big stamp from Brazil: Visto. República Argentina. Bolivia. He saw the manic, improvised life of a free man wandering across borders, chasing a personal ambition.

“Let me think about your visa problem,” Fito said. “For now a camarada will meet you at the bus station tomorrow.” Fito stood up and left Lucas at the table, and Joe wondered if he had become a member of the

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