Read Online The Tattooed Soldier by Héctor Tobar - Free Book Online

hit this man, to feel his own arms doped with adrenaline, to feel his wrists cut through the air as he pummeled the man’s face. Antonio stopped when his knuckles began to throb. For a moment he felt strong and free; fury was a much better drug than self-pity.
    He walked away and left the man moaning in the dry grass, the milky skin of his face already swelling purple and black. The thief smelled of urine and stale wine; Antonio wondered if the odor would linger on his hands. He wiped them against his trousers, then picked up some dirt and rubbed it quickly between his palms.
    José Juan gave him a disgusted, incredulous stare.
    â€œWhat?” Antonio asked. “What did I do?”
    José Juan did not answer.
    â€œHe was taking our things,” Antonio said. He shrugged his shoulders and went to collect the scattered groceries. The old man was still lying on his back by the bushes, moaning loudly. A pathetic, theatrical moan. Antonio unwrapped a block of cheese and bit off a piece. The plastic taste was not satisfying.
    â€œWhy did you hit him like that?” José Juan said finally. “He’s just an old man. You didn’t have to hit him.”
    Another moan from the wounded man in the bushes, who turned over onto his stomach.
    There was revulsion on José Juan’s face. He’s looking at me as if I were an animal. Antonio took an angry bite of cheese and saw the red patches on his knuckles, the dirt embedded in his fingernails. This was what José Juan saw, the stains of the old man on his hands. He thinks I beat the old man up for sport.
    Antonio began to feel like the ugly person in José Juan’s gaze. To beat up a viejo who was too anemic and emaciated to defend himself was not an honorable act. It was my temper coming out again. My famous, uncontrollable temper. The men in Antonio’s family had a genetic propensity to bouts of rage. They liked to scream, to shout, to bare their teeth to their wives, sons, and business partners. Elena said she was afraid of my “reacciones violentas.” In family lore these outbursts were blamed on Antonio’s peasant ancestors in Zacapa, a dry region on Guatemala’s eastern frontier, where men still settled accounts with rifles and machetes. Antonio’s grandfather was from Zacapa. A Zacapaneco took it seriously when you doubted his manhood. A Zacapaneco would shoot a man who stared at his wife. When Antonio or his father or one of his uncles raised his voice at a family gathering, people said, “That’s the Zacapa coming out.”
    Antonio had never hit a man before. True, he had grabbed the building manager by the collar and pushed him against the wall, but he hadn’t drawn blood. He had been known to raise his voice, to open his jaws, pantherlike, and scream in rage, but he did not think of himself as a violent person.
    He blamed his actions on the surroundings. The exposed lots and the dirt and the hunger seemed to demand violence of him. Living out here on the street, you had to prove you were a man. To beat someone up had a purpose here.
    I must become a Zacapaneco. Only the blood of Zacapa that runs through my veins will protect me now.
    *   *   *
    â€œI’d rather be up here than down there on the row, that’s for sure. You’re on the mountain, it’s kind of nice, you know, up here with the trees and the breeze.”
    Frank liked to talk. He was a stout man, perhaps a former athlete, healthier than most of the men in the camp, and his freckled face was the light brown of chocolate con leche. He wore gloves that didn’t match, one brown leather, the other gray wool. Antonio had awakened on his second morning in the camp with a great thirst, and had wandered around for an hour in a futile search for water. Finally he fought off his growing suspicion of the homeless people around him and approached this black man, who lived in a tent a few lots over from Antonio