The Science of Color
By H. Lee Barnes

The American came last year, a gift, a magician’s sleight of hand. We heard of a fat, wealthy gringo and went to verify the rumor. We watched from behind creepers in the shadowed tree line. He sat with his beautiful huera on the veranda of the Hotel Valencia, reading a gringo newspaper as she fanned herself. He was a well-fed, fleshy tableau of capitalism. “And what,” I asked, “brought him to Jardin de Fuego?” Ponzo, a wise but sad illiterate, said fortuity summoned him. I asked what if he weren’t rich. Raul said that if he were not, could one so repulsive enjoy the companionship of such a beautiful woman?

On the second day of our endeavor a storm turned the floor of the jungle to mud. Rain pinged on the tin roof. From his rattan chair, the American stared into the dense woods with the face of a man who dreams only in his sleep. He had reserved the entire hotel. He ate. He drank. He bedded his huera, so blonde and pale she appeared not even white, but invisible. It is best for men with a price on their heads to be cautious. Patiently we watched from our cover. She came and went as he passed time on the veranda, seemingly self amused as he sipped rum and Coke. By what, I could not, at the time, imagine. Perhaps he was looking into the jacarandas and giant ferns and seeing his fate.

In the evening they ate in silence on the stone portico and retired to their bungalow. The lantern went on inside the room. Shadows wove momentarily in the flickering light, then the room went dark. I imagined the two of them rolled into a ball of shuddering flesh. I envied and hated him.

It was our third night of shivering. We were desperate, the kind of men who would leap blindfolded from a flagpole to prove the worth of our cause. We needed bullets and blankets. Shortly after nightfall four of us crept up to the bungalow. His belly was full and his mind mellow from rum and Coke. He snored like a rooting pig. She was awake, her head propped on a pillow. Without uttering a sound, she watched as we climbed through the window. I held a finger to my lips and pointed my revolver at her head. Perhaps she thought we were the incarnation of a nightmare, but she showed no emotion.

I jammed the barrel under his nose. When he came to his senses, he rolled off the bed and attempted to crawl away. Raul and Esteban were on him. He struggled with them until he felt the cold barrel of a rifle at the back of his neck. We bound his hands and yanked him up off the floor. Naked as a peeled potato, he squared his shoulders and demanded to know who we were.

It was his Buddha shape, his flaccid penis, his trembling knees. It was hours of waiting in the rain and years of lying on the jungle floor. Mostly it was her presence in the bed. I struck him with the back of my hand and ordered him to shut up. Raul stuffed a cloth in the American’s mouth. I jerked the cover from the bed to shroud his repulsive body, then commanded him to move and shoved him toward the window. I looked at the woman to make certain she understood who was in charge. This seemed important.

Esteban gathered the American’s clothes and boots. Because of his girth, squeezing him through the window was no easy task, but we managed. Her breasts rising and falling beneath the white linen sheet, she watched with dispassionate serenity. As I looked back, she nodded almost approvingly. Perhaps, I thought, she admired our efficiency.

We hurried the American away and into the black jungle. He wheezed and coughed as we pushed and scolded him. He stumbled and fell several times but strangely did so without complaint. The jungle thickened into a mat of tangles and thorns, virtually impenetrable in the darkness, so we stopped behind some boulders a kilometer or so from the hotel. The fat American slumped down by a fallen tree trunk that smelled of mildew. When he caught his breath, I pulled the bedcover from him, threw his clothes at his feet, and ordered him to dress. He shivered as he slipped into the trousers. He asked what this was about. He said he was rich and would pay us handsomely to free him. We pointed to our ears and laughed.

“What’s so funny?” he demanded.

I rammed the butt of Ponzo’s rifle into the American’s soft belly and said in Spanish that we would trade him for 20 million pesos or send his testicles to Casa Blanca in America. We’d brought with us a canvas hood that we placed over his head and fastened a rope around his neck. After that he was quiet.

For the next hour I thought of the woman and of little else. Though not part of the plan, she had become central to the movement of events and the focus of my thoughts. When I could stand it no more, I stood and informed Raul I would return. He looked at me knowingly and argued against my going. “A risk for what?” he asked. I told him if I did not return by dawn to go on without me. My words sounded as if stolen from a gringo movie. Raul shook his head.

My feet struck the ground like mangoes falling through leaves as I plunged back through the jungle. I tumbled over vines, fell on the slick clay, ripped my trousers on thorns, and bore the dispassionate slaps of enormous ferns. Each time I drew myself up and ran with the desperation of a man escaping hounds. Lust pounded in my ears. In my village I had witnessed billy goats choking on their tethers. I had watched them ejaculate and lick their own semen, and I had laughed at them. Were they not ridiculous? What man would give himself over to that manner of passion?

I paused to study matters before I edged toward the bungalow. Nothing had changed. A window from the lobby where the clerk slept cast a sliver of light on the veranda. The clerk’s cadaverous mongrel yapped. I heaved a stone at it and crept up to the window. I did not bother looking, merely mounted the sill, swung my leg over, and climbed through. I walked to the bed casually. It seemed important to appear unconcerned. In broken English I informed her that her husband would be returned for 20 million pesos. She nodded. I stepped closer. A glint of moonlight revealed her face and her unclouded eyes.

She lifted the sheet and moved aside to make room for me. She said in an empty voice, “Don’t tell me your name.”

It was too dark to distinguish detail, but I needed no light to see. During the long idle hours she’d spent on the veranda with the American I had memorized her face and form. I smelled of jungle, of sweat and soil and fungus. Setting my gun on the bedside table, I sat on the edge of the bed and began to strip. Boots first. They landed on the floor with a thud. I unbuttoned my shirt and tossed it aside. Her fingernails measured the bumps on my naked spine. I turned around and stood before her. I wanted her to have that moment to think about the man who was gone and the one who was here.

Caught up as I was in the moment, I had forgotten the lectures of Pablo Ariendo-Sandoval. Raul, Estaban and I once attended Universidad Nacional where we sipped espresso, ate pasteles, discussed politics and studied literature under Professor Juan Dominquez Ariendo-Sandoval, who used the science of color to explain appearance and reality. His lectures argued that we must look to the physics of light and color as a metaphor for the contradictions of the human condition. Blue, he maintained, is not blue but a color that absorbs red and yellow and reflects blue, thus in fact, it is not blue. It holds then that red is not red, but blue and yellow, and so on, and so on. But what does this have to do with the American woman and the fat gringo? Everything, everything.

Since that night at the Hotel Valencia, whenever we suffered losses, whenever I was lonely, whenever I felt I must gratify myself, I imagined her. Now, sitting on the floor of a cave with my feet chained and rats crawling over me, I am haunted by nothing — not even the faces of dead comrades — except her, despite the fact that she is everything I rail against.

But that is merely the beginning.

We looped a rope around the gringo’s neck and led him like a dog up the steep trails to Santa Isabella. When he faltered, the man leading him would jerk the rope. The gringo did not complain as expected. I should have seen the future then, but the power of the gun blinds us to the power of obstinance. High above the El Jardin de Flama I removed his hood and shoved him to the edge of a rocky cliff. He blinked his eyes and recoiled, then looked down at the abyss. I held the rope. He squinted out of the corner of his eye and said his wife would pay handsomely to have him back.

“Vente millón de pesos,” I said.

He asked if anyone spoke English and said his name was Adam Silbaugh, claimed that he owned a Beverley Hills investment firm that specialized in raising foreign money for films and insisted that people would be worried about him, important people. He asked if we intended to kill him. He was but a gentle shove from eternity, yet confidence filled his voice even as the empty chasm below swallowed its hopeful sound. What is hope but the center of a bagel? I laughed like a lunatic. My soldiers appeared confused. The gringo seemed to apprehend my wild mirth. His mouth turned up in a sly grin. I jerked on the rope and brought him to his knees before replacing the hood.

We hid him in our stronghold and waited to see if the federales would come for him. None did. A month later we sent a communiqué. For four days we waited for an airplane to drop a response in the jungle near Rio Dulce. The response came in the form of a clamorous dive by a World War II vintage fighter that scattered bombs in the woods and nearly crashed at the end of its run. The gringo said the message must have gone to the wrong parties or that officials did not believe he was being held captive.

That evening by the campfire he said, as if in charge, “You must try again.”

I pointed to my ears, pretending not to understand, then drew my knife and sliced off his left thumb. He screamed and fainted. Raul cauterized the wound as I tucked the thumb into a bullet pouch. In the morning I wrote a second ransom letter, which Raul and Esteban took, along with the thumb, to the archbishop.

It took seven days, but a meeting with a representative from the American consulate was negotiated through the high cleric, who requested, from the 20 million in ransom, a modest disbursement for the Church and a Toyota 4-Runner for his personal use. We waited. The men ate red beans and yams and stared at the gringo with deadly eyes. He seemed worthless enough, a bother that could be mended with a bullet to his head. Finally, after a two-week wait the response came. A representative would meet us in the Llano de Doncellas.

The diplomat said that SeZora Silbaugh refused to pay ransom, that submitting to such an act would violate her husband’s ethics.

“He is a capitalist,” I said. “He has no ethics.”

The official said the wife, though distraught, was absolutely firm. “She has, however, offered a reward for the bandit who raped her.”

“We are revolutionaries,” I said, “not bandits.”

“It seems a matter of language,” he said.

“A matter of style,” I said.

“I’ll convey your message,” he said, excusing himself.

An hour later the same feeble aircraft that had dribbled bombs near Rio Dulce put on a similar exhibition on the Plain of Maidens, but by then we were safely away.

That night we raided a police station in the foothills village of Santa Laurenta. Two guardsmen, viejos at that, sat playing double solitaire. We killed them, confiscated weapons, and left a note stating that Adam Silbaugh was a prisoner of war. We did not wish to be confused with bandits or rapists. We demanded the ransom be paid in full within a month and insisted on the release of hundreds of terrorists in jails throughout the world and that Wal-Marts be banned from Third World countries. Raul said we should shoot the American and float his body to the capital to show the world our disdain for materialism. I said irony justified keeping the American alive. Who better to finance a revolution than a capitalist?

But something unprecedented compelled me to want Adam Silbaugh alive. The wife had offered a reward for the rapist himself, not for his death. Her message was subtle yet clear. She had reinserted herself into my thoughts. Adam was the link. If only she would bring the ransom herself!

Two nights following the raid I sneaked into the house of a district tax collector and placed a blade to his throat as he slept. I whispered that he should wake carefully and listen as he had never before listened. He lay still, his eyes blinking.

“You see how it is, don’t you?” I asked.

He nodded slowly.

“And I can return anytime. Do you understand?”

He proved quite adept at nodding. I explained my ransom demand, said that I wanted the message relayed to Adam Silbaugh’s office in the state of California. He listened carefully, and when I was finished I asked that he repeat all I had said. In a faltering voice he sputtered the message back to me almost word for word.

Two weeks later Ponzo and I hid in a cave on the side of MontaZa Libre and watched through binoculars as a caravan of tired jeeps brought the response. She came as I had asked. She stepped out of the jeep and looked about, her hand shading her eyes as she scanned the wood line. What she expected to see was beyond me. She dropped her hand, and for an instant I felt she was looking directly at me as if expecting us to emerge and surrender ourselves. Dust swirled up from the road, and she turned her head away. When the dust settled, she laid a packet underneath a balsa log beside the kilometer marker and returned to her jeep. I watched her every move as she climbed into her seat and nodded. Then the convoy swung about and she was gone in a curtain of dust and off to her California estate. I felt betrayed.

Ponzo and I waited. Occasionally, we looked up into the sky waiting for the P-51 to fly its sortie, but the heavens were silent. Near dusk a young boy walked up to the marker post and lifted the log. He ran into the woods. No one followed. No shots were fired. Ponzo and I crawled out of the cave and hurried down the trail to the stream, where the boy waited on the bank. He looked up as we approached.

“Viva la revolucíon,” I said.

“Viva dinero,” the boy said and handed me the package.

I ripped it open and found inside from a book. They had been cut in half. I leafed through them, each containing a recipe from a kitchen in Provence. I held the contents up for Ponzo to see. Though he could not read the words, he saw clearly that it was not money I held. I smiled to myself. What good were French recipes to a revolution. She wanted him dead. I threw the pages in the air.

As they dispersed in the breeze, I noticed that one had been written upon. I picked it up. The handwriting was a fine cursive, gentle looping “P”s and “A”s and “N”s, all perfectly slanted as if measured by a ruler. It was apparent that the author had been meticulous. And it was written not in English but in Spanish and said, “Provence is most ideal in spring.” Ponzo asked me what it said. I told him nothing important and threw it away. The boy asked where the money was he had been promised. I said it looked as if he would receive it when we won the war. His face marshaled an expression of grave doubt.

We traversed mountains, slipping away from a government regiment that pursued us. The American spoke little and ate his few rations without complaint. His hand healed. Though at first he slowed us considerably, he gradually gained sinew and endurance. A dense and black beard covered his jaw. His tan deepened so that his pale-blue eyes shone like two brilliant beetles. He came to look and march as if one of us. When we bivouacked, he watched and listened, his knees propped up to his chest. I should have known all along that he was more shrewd than I had imagined, should have seen that I was seeing only that which is reflected and not that which is. But a man carrying a loaded rifle tends to underestimate the intellect of an unarmed man; it is a weakness derived from holding power over another. Add to this that he did not speak my tongue and was thus reduced to the status of a deaf mute. Is not a man who does not know another’s language just another monkey in the forest?

In a coffee plantation north of Del Gato soldiers ambushed us. They fired without regard for our captive. Cut off from the jungle with no place to flee, we charged the ambush and lost four to government bullets. By noon we slipped away. Leaving our dead behind, we climbed the sheer cliffs and regrouped high above the plantation lands.

Raul circled Adam three times, the circle shrinking with each turn. Finally he stopped and stood over the prisoner. “We must kill him,” Raul declared. “The government does not care if he lives. He is worth nothing to them; therefore, worth nothing to us. And he is unlucky.”

Raul’s throat swelled as he talked. He was dangerous when overtaken with passion. To calm him, I explained that our comrades’ sacrifices would be for nothing if we released the hostage. Raul nodded several times, then grabbed the American by the hair, yanked his head back, and placed a blade to his throat. I had to act quickly. I aimed my pistol at Raul’s head.

My hand quivered. “No, we will get the money. That I promise.” But I was thinking of the woman.

Raul looked at my trembling hand, measuring me. “How can you promise what you cannot control?”

We had always talked openly in front of the prisoner, never thinking for a moment to do otherwise. Adam cleared his throat and spoke to us in grammatically precise, though strongly accented, Spanish.

“You are very poor businessmen,” he said.

He astonished us, as may be imagined, both by his Spanish and his abrupt remark.