Watching him run joyously about on the playing field, the General had moments when some angle of jaw or cheek or hairline brought Maria back with a sharp, unwelcome ache. Aware of her own innocence, she had been as fearless as the boy, and she had paid for her carelessness when a motorcycle roared up to her limousine and the pillion rider loosed a burst of fire. The assailants had expected the General to be in the car, and though he’d escaped, he had known that his days were numbered.
Eventually, he fled north, where he had contacts, protection, assistance of useful kinds, and money. He hadn’t gone into either the army or politics to remain poor. Now he lived in luxurious retirement; in exile, true, and with greatly diminished powers, but with vastly enhanced safety and comfort. Alejandro would grow up to be a citizen of this new and often enigmatic country, where power of many sorts would be available to him. The General had no doubt of that.
So he was as content as a man of his past and temperament could be. He raged sometimes — though never at Alejandro. The General was known to strike his kitchen staff and even his young and pretty mistress, who lived in an apartment a mile away from his home, but he did nothing worse. The past was gone and buried, and all that he had done and seen and ordered — for the good of his country and his party — was put to rest.
With wealth, a gated acreage, state-of-the-art alarms, and armed guards, the General could be confident that his life would run smoothly. It was therefore surprising that he allowed one irritant: Manuel, the gaunt, silent head gardener whom it had pleased the General to hire after precipitously firing the last one for burning the perfect turf with a carelessly placed glass tabletop.
Manuel was, naturally, one of the General’s countrymen, an old, dark, sad Indian without papers. The General preferred illegals, whom he could pay next to nothing. But although his salary was minimal, the elderly gardener was permitted to live in the shed at the back of the yard.
Why the General arranged this is unclear, since he was cautious to the point of paranoia. Yet to save a few dollars on Manuel’s salary, dollars that the General could well have afforded, having left the capital with a suitcase full of gold bars, he allowed a stranger, and a mysterious one at that, to live within his gates and beyond his immediate oversight.
There was no physical danger, of course. The General’s two bodyguards, Hector and Jesus, were always vigilant. One or the other was perpetually on duty, and at some point, it would surely please the General to throw the old man into the street. Yet from a strict security standpoint, Manuel’s residence in the garden, even briefly, was unwise.
If asked about this, the General would have said that Manuel was a wonderful gardener who would get the place into shape. The orchids, the lilies, the flowering cacti, the bananas, the bamboo, all the various ornamentals and tropicals thrived under his care. Every time the General went into his garden, he was reminded of his patio back in the capital and of evenings sitting with friends under the palms.
But, as with so many aspects of the General’s life, the situation with Manuel was complex. Even in retirement, the General had considerable business dealings and still retained influence back home. He was absent a good deal, and Alejandro, who was lonely, had taken a great liking to Manuel and a great interest in the operation of the garden.
At home, the General would have put a stop to that at once. The son of the General was not training to be a gardener. But here, things were subtly different. The boy missed his adored mother and none of the housekeepers or cooks had won his heart to the degree the old gardener had. When the General was away, the boy spent hours down in the garden shed talking to Manuel and learning the mysteries of propagation and pruning.
One evening the General asked Alejandro what he and Manuel found to talk about, the old man being, as the General knew, quite illiterate.
“We talk about the plants,” said the boy.
“Nothing else?”
“This and that. He comes from the highlands.”
The General pricked up his ears at that, and it came into his mind to fire Manuel instantly.
“He says,” Alejandro added, “that you were a great man at home, and one day I’ll understand the sort of man you are.” The boy gave a smile of such trust and sweetness that the General was disarmed. There were, after all, some good people in the highlands, faithful, sensible souls. Even there.
Just the same, he began to take a greater interest in Manuel and in what Alejandro was learning in the garden. He had the boy show him which plants he had pruned and how the small orchids — propagated, as even the General could see, with delicate skill — were progressing. Sometimes in the evening when Alejandro was in bed, the General would wander through his garden, smoking a thin cigar, thinking of this and that, of days in the capital when his power was supreme, and of earlier days in the mountains when his word, his every impulse, was law.