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Another one who thinks he is safe. The small army surrounding his hilltop palace is armed with guns that could only have been provided by U.S. money; one only has to proclaim oneself anti-communist for his munitions to quadruple, and monitoring of said munitions to disappear. So many men with guns, so many. I was once one of nine men with guns, and then one. I did the job I was sent in to do. I will do the job I have set for myself. I have been a disciplined soldier from childhood onward.
These palatial homes are always on the top of a hill, the villagers' hovels squatting at its foot, as if the homes' inhabitants are preparing for the deluge; if they are high enough, they think, the water won't rise up and get them. Perhaps they think that if they are physically high enough, the millions of poor at their feet, under their heel, will not rise up against them.
I have never met this man face to face, but I have seen the photos taken privately, read the dossier. The usual story; drugs, arms, paid-off politicians and judges, laundered contributions to U.S. senators and congresspeople that make them turn a blind eye to his activities in a country most of their constituents could not find on a map. He has never seen the face of one of the thousands of people he has ordered imprisoned, tortured and killed over the years. His hired muscle and lead has allowed him to live this way without fear of reprisal, ever.
I make my way through the soldiers, not bothering to alert them to my presence. Misdirection, lack of movement, movement at the right times, camouflage and a stealth beyond the ability of human ears to hear and human eyes to see accomplish more than a few rounds from the unslung rifle over my shoulder. I have been trained by better men than they will ever be.
Infrared sensors, of course, easily negotiated; electronic sniffers that are the work of minutes to disable. More men with guns. Safely lodged high in a tree, I observe for two hours, until I am sure of the pattern of their watch. That too is bypassed. Dogs starved into viciousness pass my hiding place with no snarl of recognition. They are seeking a human scent, not that of the spiny succulent I have doused myself with. Even I do not recognize my own scent.
It is nearly dusk when I breach the security system and enter the house, resetting the locks as they were. I have timed it well; the outside guard doubles at night, and my senses have told me when my host is furthest from the door, unable to see or hear my approach. Not even the music thumping from his top-of-the-line stereo system covers up his sounds; I have learned well how to filter out unnecessary distractions. (Extremely unnecessary -- the music is an Aqua CD. One's net worth is always inversely proportional to one's taste in music, or so I was once told.)
I hear him preparing in his bedroom for a night on the town, and quickly send my sight to follow. Handsome, smooth-faced, unscarred -- this one did not work his way up but was born into this wealth and thinks it is his birthright; the son of drug-lords, who is little more than a CEO with a gun. He is wearing expensive cologne, aftershave and pomade -- and faintly, under soap and shampoo, is still the chlorine scent of his swimming pool. He has probably been awake for no more than a few hours. He is dressed in a hand-tailored Armani casual suit; I can all but taste the popper in the gold tube hanging from the thick gold chain around his neck.
Everything about him reeks of his money, and the popper hints at its source. Like most of his kind he is solitary when not entertaining or doing business. Perhaps he is preparing for a night out -- the limousine, the trendiest downtown places, the recreational drugs, the pretty and costly girls and boys all his for the taking. Maybe he will pick up the phone and his entertainment will come to him -- bodyguarded sycophants, fellow drug-dealers, his paid politicians and friends, their cocaine-addicted prostitutes of both sexes. All of it is far from the staring hungry eyes of the Indian families he works and starves to death in his coca fields. Far from the windowless rooms and unmarked fields into which go the troublemakers and protestors and luckless bystanders.
His complacency is a taste all its own -- the supreme untouchability of his kind in a land ruled by plumbo o plato, "lead or silver," where the very judges, police chiefs and bishops have the choice of assassination or accepting bribes from the drug-lords. It is this pure, uncut power that has implicated more than one American president and corrupted more than one congressmember, and turned windowless rooms and unplowed land into killing fields.
It is a taste I am removing from this country, one person at a time. I use my gift of senses to touch the untouchable.
I am waiting for him when he comes into the foyer. He registers my presence and goes for his sidearm just before he sees the black stripes on my cheeks that tell him who I am. Terror fills his eyes even as my gun butt breaks his jaw; the backsweep of my weapon strikes away his drawn pistol and breaks his gun-hand at the same time. Stunned with pain, silenced by my first blow, he makes no resistance as I drag him to his bedroom. The entire assault has taken less than three seconds.
The bedroom is lavishly appointed, a huge fantasy suite of fur and mirrors -- and at its center, a round bed big enough to accommodate a modest-sized orgy. No taste. The bed has no posts, so I dismantle a chair and use the legs as posts, driving them through the mattress before securing his wrists and ankles to them in a spread-eagle. I pull off the expensive Italian shoes and begin to cut away his expensive hand-tailored clothing with the same efficiency, though some part of me is sorry at the waste of an Armani suit.
He already smells of pain and fear. He has wet himself. Soon he will soil himself as well.
The only way he can scream now is with his horrified, pain-filled eyes. But I pick up what his contorted, bleeding lips are frantically mouthing, mute around the shattered jaw and broken teeth: Drogas, oro, plato, dinero, diez million dolares! Veinte million! Dolares, senor, dolares!
I cut the thick ugly gold chain from around his neck and toss it aside like a snot-stained tissue. Mierda de rata, I mouth back (there may be voice-triggers), and keep working.
The look on his face is precious -- far better than fear and pain is the incomprehension there. As a kid he probably bribed the priest into giving him lighter penances, and had the biggest gang of friends money could buy. Everything, his whole life, has been about the money. And I've just told him that the drugs, gold, silver, and/or $10-20 million American he's just offered for his life are rat shit to me.
Brujo! he soundlessly forms. Sorceror! Understandable; I didn't just make his way past his extravagant security measures and private army in broad daylight -- I refused a bribe in the land of plumbo o plato. I'm either a madman or a witch.
I finish cutting away his clothes. Un hombre como usted. (A man like you.) I do not tell him about un hombre mejor que usted (a better man than you) for whom I bypassed his security and scorned his entire sense of value. I used to; it doesn't matter any more. What matters is that I do this.
Jaguar! It is the name by which I am known here, the name the wealthy have begun to fear.
I shake my head. Only the doomed learn the truth. Panthera.
Now I stand and heel off my boots, begin to remove the rest of my clothing. The look of horror on his face as I undress completely is laced with disgust at my perverted nature. Rape is for putas y maricones (whores and queers), not for a man like him! I wonder, briefly, if the female students would cheer me on if I did indeed do such a thing. It doesn't matter. I am being practical, not perverted.
Naked, I straddle his naked body. Comenzo, I mouth. It ends.
And out comes the knife, a heavier longer blade than the one that cut away his clothes. Not lead. Steel.
I feel no enjoyment at this. I feel nothing at all. I am simply recreating a template my senses hunger for; the taste of blood, the stink of fear, the sight of a tortured body, the feel of pain. The only sense I deprive is hearing, for safety's sake.
Porque? is the last thing his twisting lips form. His eyes have told me all the pain I have put him through.
Porque, I lip-form, and disembowel him.
Why? he asked me. Because, I told him. I do not even give him a reason why I torture and kill him.
The bed is now saturated and dark. The fantasy sex-grotto reeks like a slaughterhouse, reeks of pain and fear as well as of blood and entrails. I make my mark on the dying man, to keep innocents from being accused of this murder -- three horizontal gashes on each cheek, the whiskers of the panther I have painted on my own cheeks, red where mine are black. They don't bleed much; most of his blood is already soaking the big round mattress.
I am a mess when the work is done. His shower removes all traces of him from me, and I dress beside the staring, blinking thing on the bed. Blood and tissue wash off bare skin easily; they stay forever in clothing. Now that I smell like his soap and shampoo, the dogs will be untroubled if they catch a whiff of me.
There is still a flicker of breath and heartbeat in him when I leave the house the same way I came in, a few hours before dawn. I head into the trees, and I wait. Every sense of mine is attuned to the moment when that single, feeble spark of life goes out. Surrounded by his millions, protected by his marching guards and electronics, he has died in agony and terror, alone. Not even his murderer stayed with him at the end.
I will be long gone by the time his corpse is discovered. His army, true to form, will demonstrate their fierce loyalty by looting the house rather than hunting down the brujo who killed their boss, and scattering. I briefly wonder which hired gun will get the Aqua CD. I seriously doubt that any of the men will dare get between the vicious, ravenous dogs and the smorgasbord I have laid out for them on the bed.
They know I am out there. They know I am stalking them. They put their men between themselves and the jungle -- hired guns sweeping the brush, bodyguards at the gates where the poor die in droves at their hands, top-of-the-line electronic surveillance and computer-controlled security nets, spies lurking in the villages to pick up gossip on my whereabouts. They can afford it; these few hold all the wealth and all the power in a land peopled by masses of the poor and powerless.
And yet the spies learn nothing; the hunters are eluded, the bodyguards are found slumped and dead by the gates where they have murdered so many, the electronic systems bypassed. And in another palatial home of the wealthy, another untouchable is found in his bed -- naked and spreadeagled, gutted like a slaughtered hog, cheeks slit with the Jaguar's mark, eyes frozen open in agony and horror, his wealth untouched. I remove all traces of myself when I go, until not even my own senses can detect my presence.
Brujos are called in to scry over the corpses and try to learn the last sight of the dead men, trying to see what I look like. Priests paid off by the wealthy to maintain the status quo pray over the corpses, calling on Quetzalcoatl and the Virgin Mary to drive out the demon spreading death and chaos in the highest echelons of the land.
In contrast, shrines in the poorest villages are filled with candles burning continuously to the Jaguar, the vengeance of God who claws his whisker-marks on all his kills. Offerings of bread and fruit are left at the shrines in thanks for other disappeared loved ones; when the Jaguar passes through their village, the offerings are gone in the morning. The village thus honored considers itself blessed, and under the Jaguar's protection.
In public the religious figures beg the Jaguar for an end to the devastation. But the nuns and priests who daily risk disappearance, torture and death by praying for the poor mark their cheeks with horizontal stripes in candle soot before saying Mass in the secret places. It is now a capital offense to be seen in public with striped cheeks.
Spies shake down the poor, bribing, cajoling, threatening, imprisoning. But not one poor villager will bend. There is nothing for them to say. I have never been seen. And they love me. I am the Jaguar whose killings avenge everyone who has disappeared into a windowless room and an unmarked field. So many disappeared. So many innocents.
They have killed many, many innocents. Nothing was done because they were too powerful and held too much money. They reviled the enemies of other politically powerful, and they were left alone to wreak havoc on their own people, their own land. If the occasional stray from my country got caught up in the violence, as happened with four nuns, it is explained away as a solitary act, an unfortunate accident in a violent country.
Some protested in the halls of my country's wealthy and powerful, and were shown a deaf ear. They were driven out, driven to speak and protest in the lair of the enemy. For the most part they were left alone because of their country of origin. But wealth and power made the few careless, and they began to strike at even these protestors.
One they struck was not a protestor. He was a student among other students, in that country for a two-week expedition. When the eight students were taken prisoner along with the entire village hosting them, I travelled into the halls of my country's wealthy and powerful to seek an end to the situation, and freedom for the students. There I was told that "convincing evidence" (never displayed or explained to me) proved that the students were pro-communist agitators disturbing the trade balance, if not outright anti-government terrorists. My rebuttals got me ejected from their offices.
I prepared to travel into that land on my own against orders, to bring freedom and expose the truth, when I was called into a friend's office and gently told that the situation had resolved itself. Seven students were released in a show of clemency, bearing only a few visible scars from five days of imprisonment, beating and rape. Their self-confessed leader had been made into an example for others -- tortured into divulging a long list of crimes against the government, then taken out into an unplowed field with a truckload of other dissidents and machine-gunned, buried in an unmarked mass grave.
He had trained me in the use of the ancient gifts I was given, and joined me on the most dangerous of work because I needed him. He had loved me. He had worried about leaving me alone for two weeks while he traveled; I had kissed him, promised to keep myself safe, and joked that if he didn't come home in two weeks I would go down and get him.
A handful of students in my country wept and protested. Some small papers raged at my country's complicity in a citizen's murder. If the official newspapers, politicians and anchors mentioned the incident at all, they called the murdered man "the self-confessed ringleader of an anti-government movement" and closed the book. Too many students are tortured and killed and buried to be newsworthy; it is the fate of many in that country.
The surviving students' stories meshed and I learned what had happened. He had taunted their captors, bragged about the information he had that they would never get from his "assistants," pretended indifference when other students were threatened, and cowered when they finally focused on him. It was enough to convince them to concentrate their efforts on him. He had not been able to save the women from repeated rape by their captors, but had saved the others from torture except for the first day of beatings, and had most certainly saved all their lives by offering himself instead.
He was a student. All his life, he had lived for the acquisition of knowledge. His last knowledge was how much pain a man could take, and yet live, before bullets ended the pain.
I am a warrior from my boyhood, and a hunter without equal. I have spent three years learning the ways of an ancient gift of senses. I made my way into that country, armed with the knowledge given me by his students, with my lifetime of skills and with my new gifts, and tracked until I found what I sought.
The soldier wearing his earrings was an easy target; he told me everything about the man he shot, and took me to the place, before I broke his neck. I dug until I smelled him under the overwhelming miasma of rot, death and pain, and brought him back into the light; one corpse identified in that mass grave. I examined him carefully, and learned who had laid their hands on him before he died. I buried him again, among the people who were his last companions in life; the kiss I gave him tasted of death. I marked his burial site. I understand that his mother has visited it once already; I do not know, for I have never gone there again.
I had only sought to end the lives of those who had hurt him. But one, a novice at torture, had been proud enough of his work to make an audio recording of one session. I made that one play the tape and listened to it with all my gifts. I smelled the sweat, urine and excrement of the interrogation room, saw and felt what they did to him, tasted his blood. He screamed my name, and then screamed for his mother, until he had no voice left. In the tape the novice laughed and called him a hog in the slaughterhouse. When the tape was done the novice screamed, too, until he had no more voice. I left him laid open like a hog in the slaughterhouse.
It was the tape that changed everything. From then on all my senses were on line, honed to their sharpest acuity, hungering for the sensations they had experienced, but turned against everyone who had had a hand in his death. Landowners and drug-lords, their enforcers, their paid-off politicians -- everyone whose money and power and complicity had led to that windowless room and unmarked field for a man who could not inflict pain and would not kill was a walking corpse awaiting the panther's claws.
Pain sharpens the senses. I have never been more alive than in this past year of making death.
I know I am insane. I know that whatever humanity and warmth inside me had been coaxed to the light by my student has been boiled away by the rage inside me. Rage has also taken what tears I could shed. Every time I consider ending my pain by swallowing the rifle barrel, I remember that men responsible for unmarked graves still sleep sound in their hilltop palaces, far above the peasants' hovels. They still think they are safe from the deluge.
But water rises, and rises. Panthers are excellent climbers; they are agile enough to venture onto the frailest of limbs; they can carry off prey that weighs more than they do. And they swim.
I cannot weep for my dead; they weep for me. I cannot scream for the loss of my loved one; they scream for me. I cannot die of grief; they die for me.
As long as I live, they will never be safe, and they know it. I have the ancient gifts they scorn to believe, trained to a fine edge by the one they murdered. Mine is the hand on the knife, making mortal the immortal, bringing terror and death to the makers of terror and death, leaving many identifiable guilty corpses in retaliation for one innocent corpse. I was the student; now I teach the untouchable what it is to live in the constant fear and dread they give their people, and now I teach the peasants that these untouchable men with guns can be brought down and terrorized. I once knew the taste of love; now only the taste of blood can take away the death lingering on my lips from my last kiss. I was the sentinel; now I am the panther whose five senses are saturated with an addiction to death.
It is only a matter of time before trained people are sent down to remove me. The ones I kill are secret allies to many men in power in my country. Enough people suspect my whereabouts; at least two know my motive. It is known that I was Special Forces, and they will send their best assassins. But they will never find me, not while I can smell and see them coming before their equipment finds me. I will not kill them unless it becomes unavoidable.
I cannot let myself die or be killed now. These drug-lords have other hired hands soaked with his blood -- some of them in my country. Some of them are respected members of Congress who let a student be tortured to death, and accused him of pro-communist insurrection rather than anger their drug-money connections by investigating his murder. Their treason is a capital offense. I will find them, whoever they are -- and when I do, not all their prestige and power will save them, just as not all the money, hired armies and security measures save the men who die at my hands now. They too are on a hill -- Capitol Hill -- and think the water will not rise up and cover them too.
When I am done with my work here, I will go home; I will go to the halls of power, and before I die there will be rivers of blood for all my senses to drink, to drown out the kiss that still tastes of death.
I am the panther, and I always catch my prey.
Cry for Guatemala, with a corpse at every gate.
...Every time I think about it, water rises to my eyes.
...If I had a rocket-launcher, some son of a bitch would die! - Bruce Cockburn
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