Alejandro's Lie

“A gripping plot, beautifully written, filled with characters trying to remain true to themselves in impossible situations while confronting evil, which will touch the hearts of all who read it”

— Goodreads Review

“I loved the era and the setting of the story... The story takes you on a ride of ups and downs and reminds you that all decisions have consequences”

— Goodreads Review

“A lyrical novel that will resonate with readers familiar with the history of many countries (not only South-American) that have suffered under the rule of dictatorships and corrupt governments”

— Goodreads Review

---

Alejandro’s Lie

Book excerpt

For them, our blood is a medal

merited in eternity, Amen

murderers against us all, our men.

A verse was from one of his friend Víctor’s last songs before he was tortured to death. It tormented Alejandro Juron while he watched the tanked-up demonstration on Wednesday, October 19th, 1983, in Valtiago, the capital of Terreno.

The rally had been announced with much pomp and pageantry as “a powerful expression of the will of the people.”

Speakers assured the demonstrators that The People were finally going to defeat the junta of General Pelarón.

Their puffed-up rhetoric amused Alejandro:

“Shoulder to shoulder, we will force open the door to democracy promised by General Pelarón!”

 “I’ll cross my fingers, dimwits,” Juron muttered aloud, a habit acquired from years in solitary confinement.

Usually energetic and vibrant with color, today, the large shopping centers on Avenida General Pelarón had the same sullen hue as the Andes Mountains behind the city. Black police buses with armored windows appeared at the end of the street.

Alejandro Juron stepped onto a café terrace. It would normally have been packed with office workers at that time of day, but because of the commotion, it was empty. A police tank blocked the road.

Years back, Juron had been the much-applauded guitar player in a group named Aconcagua that was famous across the Latin American continent for its protest songs, but he didn’t feel inspired to participate in the protest march.

The demonstrators were out of their minds: the junta that governed Terreno for the last ten years wasn’t on the brink of collapse like the speakers said. In the last few months, it had made a few compromises to make it look a bit less dictatorial, but Alejandro felt that was all a smoke-screen.

The economic crisis and growing popular protest had recently forced General Pelarón to announce he “would open the door to democracy at the appropriate moment and in the appropriate way.”

The opposition, a picturesque collection of splinter groups that were more often than not at each other’s throats, took to the streets after the general’s speech as if victory were already within reach.

Juron was sure Pelarón made that promise to force his opponents into the open to have them clubbed in the interest of ‘national peace.’

He wanted to run, but his eyes held him back—seeing the fata morgana that had endlessly tormented him in his prison cell. There she was—shimmering in the mist which rose from puddles of morning rain.

Lucía.

The name of his secret love sounded out of place in these circumstances. While Juron’s instincts told him to get the hell out of there, he was unable to peel his eyes away from a woman in the crowd. She had knotted a scarf over her mouth, effectively gagging herself, and was carrying a board around her neck that read Fin a la Censura – End Censorship. Her ponytail, the oily sheen on her hair: just like Lucía used to wear it. Could this be a sign that I can finally shed my penance?

Alejandro cursed: such were the thoughts of a romantic songster, not of a man who needed to keep a low profile. Out of there!

What held him back? He knew bloody well that melancholy was a noxious creation of the ego. After ten years in La Ultima Cena, the prison people called ‘The Last Supper’ because supper was the only meal they gave you on the day of your execution, Juron’s melancholy had decayed like the rotting jellyfish he used to inspect on the beach when he was a boy.

A white Peugeot was parked further down the street, across from the Centro Médico Dental. A man wearing sunglasses and armed with a handgun stepped out and started to shoot at random.

The police used the incident to charge into the crowd. At one moment, the demonstrators were a slowly advancing mass, and at the next, they scuttled in every direction like crazed ants. The man stepped back into his Peugeot and disappeared down the adjoining street.

The police threw tear gas grenades. Alejandro assumed the man in the Peugeot was an agitator, a member of one of the ultra-rightwing factions that enjoyed considerable influence in Terreno. By firing in the direction of the police, he had given the carabineros a reason to attack.

Juron wanted to run away, but he noticed that the woman, her mouth still muzzled, Fin a la censura still bouncing on her breasts, was running through the clouds of tear gas in the wrong direction. He sprinted towards her. The noise had become deafening in the meantime – shots interspersed with car engines starting.

Juron caught up with the woman and grabbed her by the arm: “Wrong direction, follow me.” She looked at him—eyes bloodshot from the gas. Juron pointed to a side street. She realized her mistake, and the two raced into El Paseo de Lyon, a pedestrian street full of shops.

A couple of police jeeps appeared at the end of the road heading in their direction. The buildings disappeared from Alejandro’s field of vision. All he could see were the rifles pointing from the jeeps, as if at the end of a tunnel. There was a metro entrance a few meters ahead, so he grabbed the woman and pulled her inside. They had just made it to the stairs when the jeeps passed outside. Alejandro shuddered as bullets punctured the wall above their heads. The woman screamed something incomprehensible. They raced down the stairs and bolted towards the metro tunnels.

Juron looked back. No one had followed them. You prepare for the worst, and this time, your luck’s in, he thought – not the usual course of events. In the brightly lit corridor leading to the ticket desk, he started to laugh and stopped in his tracks. The woman let go of his hand. She sized him up, pulled the muzzle from her mouth, and stuffed it into her trouser pocket.

“I have to catch a train,” she said so quietly that Alejandro barely understood her. She hesitated for a second: “Thank you.”

She wasn’t Lucía, of course. Lucía was dead, he knew that. He caught his reflection in the window of the ticket desk: the thin pencil mustache he had been cultivating of late and the thick lines either side of his nose. He was small and shabby, not the he-man type with slick, brilliantine hair, not the kind of man a woman like that would look up to.

“I understand,” he said, wondering if she’d noticed he’d been drinking. “You should never miss an appointment with your hairdresser; I get it completely.” He knew why he was nasty. Her clothes and hairstyle pointed to money. She was probably one of those left-wing feminists who like to jump into bed with big-talking ‘revolutionaries.’ It allowed them to flirt with the idea that they were ‘in the resistance,’ fighting against the junta and its old-fashioned views on the status of men and women.

Alejandro smiled in response to the surprise on her face: “Have a good day.” He nodded and walked away.

“Hey!” she shouted. “What are you going to do?”

“Get a breath of fresh air.”

“Back to the streets?”

“I’m a street brat. Where else should I go?”

“Can’t I at least buy you a metro ticket?”

Alejandro stopped. A Terrenean man was supposed to be able to pay for his metro ticket, even if he had only been released from The Last Supper a couple of weeks ago.

“Can’t you smell I’m broke?” he asked. He had to quickly ensure the woman despised him; that was the best option.

“That’s not what I meant,” she said nervously. She glanced at the exit. “I should be up there too, on the streets, with the others.”

“Solidarity is a fine quality in a person,” Alejandro confirmed. “But not when live ammunition is flying around.”

She ran her fingers through her ponytail.

“We should split up,” she said as if they’d been in a relationship for years. “What if the police follow us down here?”

Alejandro could see it in her eyes: she had realized that he was pretty well-oiled.

“Where do you want to go? Let me buy you a ticket; I owe you that much at least,” she said, her head bowed, rummaging in her bag.

“I’m heading for Canela. I’ll pay you back another time.”

She smiled for the first time. Alejandro looked away. They walked to the ticket desk. The woman brought her mouth close to the glass partition to make sure he didn’t hear her destination. Alejandro scowled. He had concealed the fact that Canela, the working-class area, wasn’t his final destination but the slum just beyond in what they called the porqueriza.

“Oink, oink,” he muttered. If she was smart – and she looked smart—she would have guessed he lived in the Pigsty by now. The look on her face betrayed that she was feeling less and less comfortable in his company.

They made their way to the platform. A grey metro train arrived. She handed him his ticket. “So, eh... this is my train... Bye.” She hesitated. “And thanks again.”

“Bye.”

The doors glided open. The woman stepped inside.

“What’s your name?” said Alejandro through the closed door. “Let me write a song for you.” The woman looked at him through the dirty glass and nodded politely. She probably hadn’t understood. The train started to move. Alejandro watched it pull out of the station, his arms raised as if he were holding a guitar. He was still standing in the same position when his train arrived.

He got off at the end of Avenida General Pelarón, a journey of several kilometers, and left behind the wealthy districts, his gaze fixed on the Cordillera, now rusty-red like a castellated rampart rising above the city, its peaks covered in snow.

His past was like the mountains: inhospitable.

Book Details

AUTHOR NAME: Bob Van Laerhoven

BOOK TITLE: Alejandro’s Lie

GENRE: Contemporary Fiction, Thrillers

PAGE COUNT: 292

IN THE BLOG: New Literary Fiction Books