Canción by Eduardo Halfon

Author:Eduardo Halfon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bellevue Literary Press

IT’S THE LAST DAY OF MARCH 1970. A Tuesday with a hint of spring sunshine. Just past noon. A black Mercedes is driving down Avenida de las Americas, very slowly: for the last week there has been a ban by official decree—due to all the military roadblocks in the city—on driving over thirty kilometers per hour. The driver of the Mercedes is named Edmundo Hernández. Chito, they call him. Sitting in the backseat, reading the paper, is Count Karl von Spreti, the Federal Republic of Germany’s ambassador in Guatemala. The driver looks at him in the rearview mirror, a handsome, elegant man, and once again he thinks von Spreti looks like a movie actor—he reminds him of Marcello Mastroianni—and isn’t sure when it happened or where they came from, but suddenly two cars are blocking his path in front of the monument to Christopher Columbus: a white Volkswagen Beetle and a pearl blue Volvo.

Stop, von Spreti orders him, resigned. They’ve come for me.

Six guerrillas get out of the cars. They have balaclavas and Thompson machine guns (Tommies, they call them). One of the six opens the back door of the Mercedes, takes the count by the arm, and without a word, and meeting no resistance, leads him to the pearl blue Volvo. The guerilla is Canción.

The main purpose of the kidnapping: the exchange of the ambassador for seventeen political prisoners. But the military government, within four days, and by way of a response to the guerrillas’ demand, murders two of those they are holding.

That Sunday, somebody uses a pay phone to make a call to the fire station. An anonymous voice tells the fireman on duty that von Spreti is in a low, roofless adobe house at kilometer sixteen of the road to San Pedro Ayampuc, a town on the outskirts of the capital. The firemen head over right away.

They find von Spreti’s body in the backyard, with a single bullet hole in his left breast, a 9mm caliber. The count is sitting on the ground, legs stretched out in front of him, leaning against some bushes. He is still dressed in a fine blue Dacron jacket and a black silk tie. He is holding his glasses in his right hand, as though he had taken them off before dying, right before the shot was fired, so as not to have to see the face of his killer, or so as not to have to see the face of death.

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