Meeting with Benedicto Tun and his son Edgar at the agreed-upon place. Mediocre lunch, cordial conversation. Before his son arrives, I give Benedicto two audiocassettes: one with the voice of Lemus that I recorded from his answering machine message, and the other with a short fragment copied from cassettes recorded during negotiations over my mother’s kidnapping. He says that he should be able to share the results with me within two or three days.

He tells me another family anecdote, about the kidnapping by guerrillas and subsequent police arrest of one of his brothers, a pediatrician, in 1970.

About the Tun family, he says later, someone once said in public, while his father was still alive, “It is like a rosebush. It has roses, but also thorns.” He explains that “thorns” probably referred to him, because of his left-wing ideas.

His son arrives. He wanted to meet me because he has read some of my books, he says. He writes plays. I see a clear resemblance to his grandfather, based on the photo that Benedicto (who, by the way, does not look like either of them) showed me.

Edgar Tun is a young man, about twenty-five, thin, frail-looking, and bright. He brings his own lunch, seasoning it with virgin olive oil, which he also brings with him. He suffers from a pancreas ailment, he explains. He studied legal and social sciences, and he now works as a researcher in the Reparation Program for Victims of the Armed Conflict.

Benedicto talks about the death of Turcios Lima, generally attributed to a traffic accident in Calzada Roosevelt of Guatemala City. According to Benedicto’s father, who photographed the remains of the car in which the guerrilla leader traveled with his girlfriend and his mother, it was an attack. “The car, a Mini Cooper, caught fire too fast,” says the son. “They may have used white phosphorus, but the cause of the fire, according to my father, could not have been just gasoline. In any case, it was said that if it was an attack it would have been by the Guatemalan Workers’ Party, who had decided to eliminate Lima for lack of discipline.”

He, Benedicto the son, met Turcios Lima as a teenager. Lima was the younger of the two, and very restless, Benedicto says. He was the godson of the archbishop of Guatemala, Monsignor Casariegos, and, as I understand it, the archbishop’s home was once the scene of his love affairs.