by Sergio Brito
The Americans always complained the most in captivity, wailing and wailing and sobbing and screaming about their rights, their omnipotent government, their protected status as foreign nationals and on and on. Their entitlement knows no bounds; keep them away from the creature comforts afforded to them by their position within the imperial core and their nerves falter, they unravel. Admittedly, some fellow Mexicans could be like that as well, the ones raised behind gates with armed security guards and educated in private schools; these fresas behaved almost like Americans, except their threats carried more venom, but at the end of the day they’d do nothing, a fact they knew we knew. The humble worker was the model captive, though we tried to avoid them unless we were desperate, the sums we collected for their ransoms were a pittance compared to the substantial fees we extracted from the relatives of local business leaders and parasitic tourists; plus, the working-class prisoners merely accepted their fate and only ever asked for us to make their deaths swift and leave enough of their bodies for their families to properly mourn them, which made us feel incredibly guilty to be honest, so despite them being less of a nuisance, we mostly just left regular people alone; we were trying to do good, after all, and extorting everyday families didn’t align with our guiding principles. It took a few years to find the right avenues for our radical values (which are only radical because our globalist oppressors have deemed equality a cardinal sin of the modern world, sowing seeds of discord across every nation in order to divide us, creating false binaries of have’s and have-not’s, salting any land from which a true anarcho-socialist utopia might have a chance to sprout from; they’ll kill a Catholic priest or an Atheist intellectual, and they’ll kill you too, if you don’t turn a blind eye) but after plenty of trial and error, we settled on extortion and kidnapping as the most efficient method for raising capital. The cartels sniffed around, of course, sending men to Paloma and I’s house, but we owned very little, certainly not enough to ransack, and given the vacuum of power at the top of the narcotrafficking hierarchy, they allowed our small-fry political praxis to continue, and continue it did. For a brief period, Paloma and I made waves domestically and abroad, though we ended up spending most of our lives in La Mesa prison. Who knows, maybe if it weren’t for the Gringo we never would have been caught and we would be revered as revolutionary heroes, but the past is crystallized and immutable, all I can do now is recite it.
Several months before we encountered the Gringo (I think his name may have been William, but I can’t remember, we only ever called him the Gringo) Paloma and I made a name for ourselves blowing up a Coca-Cola plant in San Cristobal de las Casas, an operation we coordinated with a few of our friends within the Zapatistas (I won’t them name now for obvious reasons). They were brilliant tacticians who taught us so much in the brief time we spent with them in the Lacandona. In fact, without their guidance and military arms training, Paloma and I likely would’ve died in our first act of resistance. Instead, because of their ubiquitous surveillance network that procured for us the hourly schedules of the security guards and identified vulnerable entry points, we were able to place our homemade explosives in secure locations under the cover of night, triggering them with a remote detonator Paloma had designed while at university; giddy, we watched the factory burst into flames and fill the air with the scent of burning sugar. That insatiable industrial behemoth had been imbibing 300,000 gallons of water a day, water that rightfully belonged to the people of Chiapas, yet corrupt government officials greedily sold it off to the Coca-Cola corporation. No mas, we said. As it burned we fled back to camp, our path illuminated by the soft drink conflagration, narrowly avoiding detection by the authorities who had swarmed the area, and all night we celebrated, drinking in the intoxicating air of revolution. In the spirit of the occasion, Paloma and I made love for the first time in our flimsy tent. The sweet sticky sweat on our bodies attracted hordes of mosquitos, but we paid them no mind, too enraptured to care about any insect, or man, or god; all that mattered was our victory, a victory we shared with the people of San Cristobal, a victory we shared with each other. Of course, the following morning we could barely move from the mosquito bites that riddled our nude bodies, though in a way these bites, too, felt like a shared victory, a redistribution of our blood with our fellow creatures of this Earth. Ecological Marxism, romantic until we developed Malaria and spent the subsequent 11 days battling the worst fever of our lives, vomiting bile because we could not eat and fading in and out of painful consciousness. Our friends nursed us back to health, and 2 weeks after our romp in Chiapas, we headed back home up north to regroup.
The operation in Chiapas left us penniless— homemade bombs aren’t cheap to manufacture— so we moved into Paloma’s family’s ranch home in the outskirts of San Felipe, on Baja California’s desert coast. I spent most of the days fishing; one of the local boys taught me how to make a reel out of a soda can and some fishing line, and while they caught bucket-fulls of Corvina, Halibut, and other fish I don’t know the name of, I usually caught two or three a day, more than enough for Paloma and I to live on. Any more than that was, in my eyes, a waste of a precious natural resource, so, once I caught my two or three fish, I holstered my makeshift reel and shot the shit with the local boys for a few hours in the blazing sun. On occasion, they’d pull beers from their coolers and we’d drink on the hot beach until our faces were red and bloated from the sun and from the beer. Eventually I stopped drinking. Paloma wasn’t fond of me stumbling into the house, incoherent, holding a stinking fish in either hand; she was right, after all, because while she spent her days toiling in the workshop to fasten useful gadgets— like a signal jammer or encrypted satellite phones— I fraternized as if I were still a student and our lives weren’t at stake.
Anyways, back to the Gringo.
We lived off my daily catch and whatever we could muster out of our barren garden for three months after we returned from Chiapas, though sometimes comrades who had heard of our exploits down south managed to locate us and send us money via a clandestine postal network reserved for friends of the international movement for liberation; this, however, was never enough to completely sustain us. The bout of Malaria emaciated us, and the scarcity of our life afterwards made regaining our strength an uphill climb. One night, after having no luck on the shore, I showed up empty-handed. I felt so pathetic I wanted to use myself as bait, hook myself onto a giant barb and sacrifice myself to catch a sea creature so large Paloma would never have to fear going hungry; of course when I told her this, she told me to stop pitying myself, that too many people across the world live their lives with a permanent emptiness in their belly for me to indulge in my conceited fantasies, besides, while I was gone she had meticulously concocted a plan for a kidnapping that could result in a significant windfall for us.
‘What is it?’
She said: Over the past few weeks, I’ve developed an algorithm that scrapes location data from all public social media posts, training it to hone in on any mention of “San Felipe” and “vacation” and other similar words, then, it analyzes the posts of anyone who might be a match to deduce financial standing, creating a profile with their digital footprint that includes their name, age, marital status, sexual orientation (if applicable), and a conservative estimate of their personal wealth.
‘And?’
And it produced the ideal target, a North American from Chicago, straight, with a lucrative plumbing business, in his early thirties, unmarried and childless, who’s in town for a deep-sea fishing trip with our old friend Lozano (himself a former guerilla fighter who focused his work on sabotaging North American efforts to strengthen their southern border, culminating in his assassination of four U.S. Border Patrol agents in a motel in El Paso), who, in his retirement, captains a charter boat. I already reached out to Lozano to get us on that boat, where we’ll act as if we’re a newly married couple on a romantic getaway, befriend the American and invite him back to drink with us at La Anguila, where he’ll get too drunk— as they always do. Then, we’ll invite him back here to spend the night with us and continue drinking. I’ve already drafted a list of contacts for our ransom demand. This one should be fairly straightforward, we won’t need any weapons, just a bit of cash in case we’re intercepted by any of the local police.
‘Nothing arouses me more than your meticulous attention to detail, please, let’s make love tonight.’
She stared at me. She said: Callate, pendejo. We have work to do.
She looked beautiful in her mother’s dress as we left the house to the marina. I wore one of her father’s silk shirts. We must’ve looked like luxury itself as we boarded the boat and reunited with Lozano, filling him in on our recent work, our economic situation, and the plan Paloma devised. A man of few words, Lozano simply smiled and nodded, assuring us of his loyalty to the cause. He looked great, the salt air and the sun really softened his features, rejuvenated a face once grizzled by decades of armed conflict. The Gringo arrived shortly after us, climbing into the boat and shaking all of our hands, introducing himself warmly, his Spanish better than we anticipated; I whispered to Paloma that we had to be careful what was said around the Gringo, he was sure to understand. She brushed me off; she said: Don’t tell me what I already know. My cheeks blushed. The Gringo wore sunglasses and board shorts, he was about my height with broad shoulders and calloused hands, he sat with his spine erect but despite his strong posture he seemed relaxed; nothing in particular about him stood out, but as we made friendly conversation both Paloma and I found ourselves disarmed. As it turned out, his mother had been an immigrant from Mexico— which explained his Spanish fluency— his father a descendant of Polish immigrants, and their shared devotion to their Catholic faith served as a foundation for an unshakable marriage. In everything he did this stability showed itself. The Gringo possessed an unshakable aura, a serenity that emanated from him, ingratiated him to us; as the boat rose and crashed speeding through the waves of the Pacific, the four of us drank beers and consumed his endless stream of charismatic anecdotes, so distracted that we forgot to fish altogether, until the Sun began to set across the horizon and Lozano steered us back to the harbor as Paloma and I fell deeper and deeper under the hypnotic spell of this Gringo. As Lozano eased the boat into his assigned dock, we invited the Gringo to drink with us at La Anguila, an offer he accepted without hesitation. We left Lozano in the harbor and had ourselves a raucous evening at La Anguila, where we all drank more than we had anticipated, me especially, and I knew Paloma would be angry at our indiscipline, but in the bar she seemed to be thoroughly enjoying our night out. All night she danced, her body a dynamo on the dancefloor, and when I couldn’t keep up, she took the Gringo by the hands and tangled him up into her fervor, which I watched with great enthusiasm, and this is how we spent the night teaming up to match Paloma’s energy. I’m unsure now of how we made it home, but we discovered our plan succeeded when we rose with the rooster’s crow the following morning, as the Gringo was passed out on the couch in the den in nothing but his boxer briefs, and Paloma and I looked at each other excited, and violently hungover.
We ignored our throbbing headaches as we zip-tied the Gringo’s hands while he remained asleep. As we searched his pockets, I noticed Paloma’s fingers lingering on bits of his exposed body more than once. The air became charged with jealousy and danger and, truthfully, arousal. Paloma never promised herself to me alone, she didn’t believe in the patriarchal notion that a woman must belong to a man exclusively, and it did not bother me much, we were mostly too busy with our work to pursue any romance outside of each other, but I could tell now that the Gringo’s charisma had rooted itself inside her. Paloma knew better than to allow this faint attraction to grow. I was sure she’d nip it in the bud as soon as she recognized where her feelings were heading. The prospect of a tryst between them, however, excited me.
The Gringo woke up with his hands bound behind his back and his mouth gagged. He remained surprisingly calm, as if he had expected this moment to come, which, quite frankly, I found to be uncomfortably prejudiced. He did not end up kidnapped because kidnapping tourists was standard procedure in Mexico, he was not evidence of a stereotype. I let him know as much; I told him his lack of alarm disgusted me.
‘You Gringos are terrible racists,’ I told him.
We spent the next few days in a lethargic, criminal haze. The Gringo didn’t resist his capture at any moment, he surrendered himself to his circumstances, and Paloma spent most of her time in her workshop while I kept an eye on him. She contacted anyone and everyone associated with the Gringo, but no one responded to our demands for ransom in exchange for his liberation.
‘Your friends up north don’t value your life,’ I told the Gringo, ‘American individualism has destroyed any semblance of obligation to those you love.’
It felt good to pontificate to this man, to prove myself to be on the right side of the struggle against the encroaching values of Western imperialism. Paloma didn’t allow me to pontificate much, not like she had when we were still students, when I had impressed her with my profound knowledge of Marxist theory. I had brought her into the fold, and she repaid me by quickly developing a ferocious, unrelenting dedication to class warfare despite her own upper-middle class background. In recent years, that same dedication had rendered her cold and distant. Sometimes I felt like nothing more than a henchman, a tool in her arsenal. That night in the Lacandona was the first time we’d slept together in one year, only the rush of victory inspired her to allow me to touch her.
‘But you still love her,’ the Gringo said, and I realized I had been thinking out loud, baring my innermost feelings to our prisoner.
I told him to shut up, but felt a stirring in my loins. It wasn’t lost on me that she’d taken an interest, however slight, in this man. My envy aroused me.
Soon enough, we were eating meals together, the three of us. Neither of us worried about the Gringo, it was evident that he possessed no desire to do us harm. We kept his hands tied but we removed the restrictive zip ties and replaced them with a piece of rope. There was enough slack in the rope for him to do anything he wanted. It was symbolic really, a reminder that he remained our captive. During the day, I brought him fishing with me and occasionally he’d drink with me, the alcohol disinhibiting his otherwise stoic demeanor. He began to ask more about Paloma, innocuously enough at first, but his questions grew more and more invasive as the days passed. I answered every single one, no matter how private, out of a sense of fraternity. Paloma, being the professional she was, betrayed no further interest in the Gringo. She locked herself away in her workshop, toiling on the ransom front.
One night, we received an email from a man who claimed to be the Gringo’s uncle. The Gringo, in an uncharacteristic show of emotion, shed tears of relief as Paloma read the email aloud to him.
‘Let me see my nephew, just to prove that he is alive, and I will give you anything you ask for.’
The Gringo confirmed to us, over a dinner consisting of roasted electric eel, stewed nopales and a few shots of mezcal, that his uncle was an honest man, and more importantly a rich one, who would meet our demands without second thought if we accepted his request to see him. Paloma’s wariness twisted her visage, she looked angry in the dim light of the dining room. I was surprised to hear my own supplicating voice echoing off the concrete walls.
‘Take him, Paloma, I’ll stay here and guard the house.’
Incredulous, the Gringo stared at me. Paloma held firm for a minute, but she agreed to arrange the meeting with the Gringo’s uncle. Back in her workshop, she replied: Meet me tomorrow at La Anguila. 8AM.
The following morning, they set off for La Anguila; Paloma in non-descript cargo shorts and jacket with a pistol holstered on her hip and the Gringo in one of my t-shirts and a pair of my sweatpants. I watched them pull off towards the bars along the beaches in a cloud of exhaust smoke, my mind racing with the anxiety and excitement of all the possible outcomes of this rendezvous. They were gone for half the day. I have to admit that, in order to pass the time, I drank mescal and masturbated. Then, I dozed off.
Whispers. Tantalizing whispers coming from the bedroom stirred me from my sleep. I tried to rise but fell flat on my face as both my legs remained asleep, refusing to hold me up. I wiped the putrid dried saliva off the corner of my mouth and picked myself up— this time my legs were prepared to follow my commands— and tip-toed to the cracked door of the bedroom.
Through the sliver I watched them as if in a prescient dream. Except this was no dream; Paloma and the Gringo made love on the bed, doused in the gleaming sweat of a long night. I had fantasized about this moment, it’s true, but witnessing it crushed me. I dropped to my knees and my head fell against the door with a thud; I was out cold.
What happened next, happened fast.
Cold steel pressed against the nape of my neck; my hands bound; blood caked on my forehead. Based on the intense pressure, I assumed it was the Gringo’s hand gripping my shoulder, but the sun hadn’t yet risen, so I couldn’t tell. The man behind me spoke, a voice I didn’t recognize, and a black bag came down over my head like a final curtain. More voices, the house filled with strange voices, all of them male. I was led out into the warm night and into the open door of an SUV. Bodies moved around me, boots crunching grains of sand under their soles, but no one addressed me directly. I leaned back onto the headrest when someone shoved her body next to mine. Just from the impact of her shoulder against mine I knew it was Paloma. A relief. She didn’t say anything. Suddenly I remembered what I saw, the image of her and the Gringo entangled in love seared into the anteroom of my memory, a space reserved for it and it alone. My blood boiled, in anger. I wanted to slash her with a word, go for her jugular for betraying me, for betraying our cause, but all I could muster was a flaccid exhalation, barely a statement.
‘I hope it was worth it.’
‘It was,’ she said. I shrunk against the seat.
I haven’t seen her, or anything beyond the walls of my cell, since. If I could do it again I would, but given a second chance, I’d do what my heroes would’ve done: cut the Gringo’s throat at La Anguila.
****
Sergio Brito lives in Los Angeles. He never drinks in a shed, he doesn’t own one.