After a couple of days wandering around the city's sea walk and listening in his Mp3 player to the radio analysts debating news about the end of the violence in between commercials and Top Ten hit lists he started feeling bored and empty.
No more instructions, no more reasons for hiding due to the amnesty, no fast heartbeat when the police cars got close, no demonstrations... The streets suddenly seemed again those of that same old ugly city he had wandered around for ages before becoming a title, a number and a code in the organization.
He went to a bar and ordered a glass of wine. A dark woman approached him with a smile. Then she stepped back. `Oh God, I know you! Your face was yesterday on TV!', she said. He felt famous and smiled internally. `How does it feel now that everything is over?' she asked sounding a bit drunk. He didn't answer. Some of his colleagues felt guilty for all the violence. But he didn't, as he had never shot anyone.
He just managed information and passed around names, numbers, car plates and addresses, mostly through internet. It was others who took action. Actually, after the first couple of years he had stopped paying much attention to blasts, shootings, kidnappings and other results of his organization, as if these were somewhat unrelated to his Planning and Resource Management Section activities.
He had to confess, though, he secretly felt envy for the `warriors' -as they called themselves- and all their charisma. He also believed, however, that most of them were plain psychos. You just needed to look at their faces.
The TV showed now images from a conflict ridden place, maybe Iraq or Afghanistan. The music of the bar was too loud to understand what the TV man was saying and the third glass of wine started to make an effect. `I am so lost and so free', he thought, `how good is not to listen to orders'. He suddenly remembered himself as a kid insisting on eating the ice cream before the soup. More often than not he ended up eating the soup and punished without ice cream.
The woman put her hand in his hip. `Come to my place. It's right there and I have a bottle of rum from La Habana', she said with a sad smile. `Damn, I need a real girlfriend', he thought. It had been such a long time since he had felt obliged to leave Louise. He left her for History, Justice and the Homeland Revolution. Now he neither had the homeland, the revolution nor Louise. She was in fact truly history for him and apparently also a known painter in south France.
`I am starting to wonder what I fought for all these years. To be here now with you?', he asked the woman. She smiled to him: `let's see: did you make good money?'. `Not really. But I had dreams about the future: my life had a clear purpose'. `Baby, life is always a mix of dreams and mistakes. Just make one more and come to my place'. They paid the wines and left. The TV showed now the opening credits of the hundred and fifty seventh chapter of the latest soap opera from Brazil, but no one watched.
