Open Pit by Marguerite Pigeon

for?”
    â€œNo — I’m not. Not here to write.”
    â€œWhy did you come here, then? If you aren’t going to write anything.”
    Danielle recalls the bundle of letters on her dining room table. Her own rash decision to take Neela’s place on this trip after her friend surprised her with their old correspondence, calling it an intervention — the first startling pop-up from Danielle’s past.
    â€œDid you kill a lot of military in 1980 ?” Pepe continues. “Or do you own shares in the mine?”
    â€œThe gold mine? In Los Pampanos?” she says, surprised to hear mention of the object of the delegation’s visit.
    Something in Pepe’s neck twitches. “Who did you know in the war?”
    Danielle wants to answer, but she’s busy going over everything Neela told her about local opposition to that mine.
    â€œWho?” Pepe repeats, stepping in closer, his posture more aggressive.
    â€œA lot of people — unimportant people. I knew some other foreigners. A priest. One commando. . .”
    â€œSpecial Forces?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œAnd did you yourself train as a Special Forces commando?” Pepe isn’t laughing at this absurd suggestion. He displays very little emotion altogether, like he’s fishing for what should worry him. It strikes Danielle that he might know something about interrogation.
    â€œOf course not. How would I have done that?”
    Pepe shouts: “I ask the questions!” He pauses, then adds more calmly, “I don’t assume. That’s how I survive.”
    Danielle suspects more than ever that Pepe was once in the Salvadoran military. She remembers all the stories of torture and disappearance that she ever heard in 1980 , the mutilated bodies of civilians that she saw with her own eyes. Is this who she’s dealing with? But what would somebody like that care about a gold mine?
    Pepe reaches slowly into a pocket from which he pulls paper and a pen. “Write down the names of all the people you knew and what their role was.”
    â€œThey were all assumed names.”
    â€œDo it.”
    Danielle looks down. She’s still in her underwear. “I need to dress,” she says, dying of shame. Pepe gives her a look like she’s stripped off her clothes on purpose to cause a delay. “ Allá, ” he says, pointing to a tree.
    Danielle picks up her fresh clothes — Rita can rot — and goes to change. Behind the tree she tugs on her pants and t-shirt quickly as mosquitoes bite her everywhere. She has mostly dried off, save that left foot, which is warm and wet, back in the boot, but now she starts to sweat all over again from the intense heat of the day. She tries to decide if there’s anyone she should leave off the list. But why risk angering Pepe? It was all so long ago. He’s unlikely to recognize anyone, even if he does have knowledge of the Northeast guerrilla faction, with whom Danielle was placed. Most of the people she knew really were unimportant.
    Back at the creek, Pepe foists the pen and paper back at her impatiently and Danielle bends down, laying the sheets across a thigh. She feels out of practice. At home, she runs an editing business, and her computer, pens and reams of paper are like extensions of herself. Here, writing and its instruments are alien. She begins to list the names with their occupations in brackets. Doing so forces more memories back to her with carnivalesque horror, memories she’s hoped to revisit more slowly, on her own time.
    â€œ Vaya, ” says Pepe. “It’s not hard to make a list. Unless you’re inventing.”
    â€œI’m not.”
    â€œWe’ll see.”
    They’re quiet for some time, with just insects buzzing in Danielle’s ears and getting under her collar as she puts down the names of all her main contacts from 1980 , many of whom had more than one war-given nickname, something she always