Calling All Heroes: A Manual for Taking Power: A Novel

Calling All Heroes A Manual For Taking Power Paco Ignacio Taibo II Translated by Gregory Nipper

Calling All Heroes: A Manual For Taking Power Paco Ignacio Taibo II Heroés convocados © 1982 by Paco Ignacio Taibo II Translation copyright © 2010 by Gregory Nipper © PM Press 2010. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be transmitted by any means without permission in writing from the publisher. ISBN: 978-1-60486-205-8 Library of Congress Control Number: 2009912421 Cover by John Yates Interior design by briandesign 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 PM Press PO Box 23912 Oakland, CA 94623 www.pmpress.org Printed in the USA on recycled paper.

To the memory of Emilio Salgari: suicide, novelist, fellow traveler. For certain special friends who are far away: René Cabrera, Chema Cimadevilla, Gerardo Baumrucker. For José Emilio Pacheco, who opened the doors of the short novel to me and with whom I competed (from one Friday to the next) for the better part of a year in the mutual theft of cigarette lighters.

This course of events obliges the revolution to concentrate all its forces of destruction against the power of the state. Vladimir Ilich Lenin He gathered everyone together and attacked boldly. Amadis of Gaul Not to admit ragged sarcasm to this congress seems to me a little unrealistic. Don’t abuse your frowning kid. Félix Grande

Note I ask that readers unfamiliar with adventure novels flip to the final pages and read Appendix One. For readers with no knowledge of the Mexico of 1969, I suggest going to the final pages and reading Appendix Two. Insecure readers (those who think that if they don’t read the footnotes they will miss something important) are invited to skip to the final pages and read Appendices One and Two. The rest can go ahead. Thank you, PIT II

I If You Weren’t Here, Where Would You Be?

For example, on Insurgentes Bridge, on the side where that insipid mercury light doesn’t disturb the night; over Avenida División del Norte, where the darkness is broken by the constant line of automobile headlights (and there, ten meters below, is the viaduct), like an urban river with all its roar. You toss the butt and watch it fall, secretly hoping it will bounce off the roof of a car (you miss). In a way, with the butt went the seven minutes it took to smoke the cigarette, and now you feel like climbing up on the guard wall and pissing on the automobiles. Below, a moving van raises curtains of water as it bursts through the puddles. It’s raining again . . . For example, in the doorway of the Teatro Roble at the end of the last show. They were featuring The Battle of Algiers, of course, and the crowd came down the stairs as if anxious not to return to itself, not to leave in stunned silence but to erupt in the Apache war cries of the Algerians overflowing the Casbah. For example, in the faculty mimeograph room, surrounded by the two machines that Eligio Calderón (nicknamed “The Tricolor”) and Adriana had fine-tuned like Swiss watches to produce an average of two thousand leaflets an hour. In the midst of that fascinating noise, 7

celebrating each new spot of ink on your hands, forehead, nose . . . For example, in San Juan de Letrán at six in the evening, when the light in the city changes, contemplating a long row of lead soldiers in a shop window and fondling the two hundred pesos you had in your pocket to buy books in the old Zaplana Bookstore: Howard Fast in Ediciones Siglo XX paperbacks for seventeen and a half pesos, and Dos Passos novels, and Fučík’s Notes From the Gallows, on sale for seven pesos, and you go in to buy it all, to see it all, to . . . But you are on a gurney that runs along the corridors, as the skillful hand of an audacious driver of gurneys guides you along the racetrack of the white hallways. The guy ought to notice how a spot of blood is spreading on the sheet that covers you. According to the rhetoric of hospital scenes, it is obligatory to find a beautiful woman at the door to the operating room, hiding her tears (but not so well that they can’t be seen); but there is no door to the operating room, only the spreading spot of blood and the hand that slips from the gurney and falls to the floor, the knuckles bouncing and dragging across the green tiles. The orderly wonders whether to stop and/or to push the gurney forcefully, his eyes fixed, captivated by the red spot that spreads on the white sheet. You think, “There are spiders, huge spiders climbing over my hands, a shitload of them.” And you feel like if you don’t moisten your arms with ice water, they’ll rot, they’ll fall off. “Could they be termites instead, or piranhas?” “They’re piranhas, the kind that when you stick in your arm you pull out bloody bones . . . But it is a game, a gaming board with the feet acting as markers, moving around the colored squares. “And the loneliness, all of it. All the damned spiders and all the assholes in the world. I am tired. I am not going to 8

be able to read anything this way because I’m too dizzy. The trapeze is moving.” A nurse says something while she tears your blue, bloodstained shirt from your body. “Long live Mexico, children of La Chingada,” you whisper when they move you from the gurney to the operating table, to the bewilderment of a young doctor. A flash of consciousness hits you. You open your eyes and say, “They bare their teeth at me . . .”

9

A as in Accident

Mexico City, December 1970 My dear Néstor: You asked me to tell in three pages the story of your run-in with the whorekiller last year. As I am accustomed to your wild ideas, here goes: The version that I have is very exact (gathered from various sources), but it doesn’t go further than the most superficial details. Exact, but irritating. It seems you left the newspaper office at 5:30. “To drink a cup of coffee,” the editor-in-chief said. “I’ve got it,” you said after hanging up the phone, according to the sports writers. “He ran out. But that doesn’t mean anything; he’s always running out,” the office boy said. You had a tape recorder slung over one shoulder. “From the right shoulder, and it was swinging so much I thought he’d bust it,” said Serafín Nava of the entertainment section, who passed you in the swinging door of the editorial office. “From the left shoulder. And now who’s going to give me back the tape recorder? Not that it’s so important, you see, but it was an Uher and belongs to the newspaper, and 10

everything here is inventoried, and so on,” the administrative clerk said. “’Do you have a tape, dummy?’ I said to him, because sometimes a person forgets; and he replied, ‘I’ve got a pair,’ but I didn’t understand him,” Serafín Nava said. It seems you left on foot. There’s no proof one way or another. Here a question arises: Who called you? I had been following your articles. I was buying El Universal to see what the fuck you were trying to do in a world as alien to your own as the scandal sheet. And there you went, quick and speedy, driven by the same intense passion as always, hot on the trail of the whorekiller. He hadn’t killed many, only three, but you had linked the murders together (all of them in fleabag hotels, all of them with a switchblade, all of them in the afternoon), and you had given him the name of “the prostitute murderer” in public and “whorekiller,” one word, when talking about him with friends. Your motives interested me more than what you uncovered, but you ended up shifting the balance and getting a story that had two characters, you and the whorekiller. Both with the same backdrop: the city that the ’68 Movement had allowed us to discover. It seems that you did go on foot. Direct, without hesitating (hesitating at each corner?) to the seedy hotel on Artículo 123. It was 5:50. “At ten of six, chief, he went inside, because I saw him go in, right? I was at the juice stand and turned around and saw him go in, and I said, ‘Look, there goes some dumb-ass with a tape recorder worth three thousand pesos.’ And later when they brought him out on the stretcher I said, ‘Where’s that tape recorder?’ And quick I run up, but it was to return 11

it, to see if they’d give me a little work there at the newspaper. I sure as shit didn’t want to rip it off.” “The law, yes, the cops wanted to get their fingers on it,” said Bernabé Quintanar, the juice vendor, who they found making off with the recorder. “Don’t even ask me. They already asked me the same thing a hell of a lot of times,” said the hotel manager, who smoked those foul-smelling Veracruz cigars. You went directly to the second floor, using the stairs, and without knocking pushed open the door of Room 203. “Did you really kill them?” says your voice, distorted but easily identifiable on the recorder. “Keep that shit away from me . . . Are you the one who writes?” says the voice that later would be identified as that of the whorekiller. “Why, why did you kill them?” your voice says. “Get that fucking thing out of my face. Sit there on the bed; don’t come near me with that shit,” says the whorekiller’s voice. “It’s only a microphone. There’s no reason to be afraid of it. You’re the one with the knife.” “Yes, but I’m not sticking it in your face.” “Why did you kill them?” There is a long silence in the recording. A trained ear might be able to pick up the rumbling of traffic in the background. Then, once again, the whorekiller’s voice. “You wrote all that stuff in the newspaper? About me?” “Why did you kill them?” “Don’t come near me! Get that damned microphone out of here!” Then noises are heard, as if the microphone were hanging from the recorder and swinging around the room, striking things. A moan and labored breathing that comes and goes. 12

“Only I would think of shoving a microphone under the nose of some asshole with a switchblade,” you whispered, according to the stretcher-bearer, Horacio G. Velasco of the Red Cross. The testimonies of the hotel manager and a cleaning lady confirm that the whorekiller went down the stairs with the switchblade in his hand (the knife was bloody), holding his head with the other hand. He was staggering, and it looked like he had a wound on his forehead. “Over his eyebrow, about six centimeters, an arc, produced with a blunt instrument . . . A tape recorder microphone? Sure, why not? A tape recorder microphone, for example,” said Dr. Ruiz, who attended the whorekiller at the Sixth Precinct. And then: “He fell. He was coming down, he looked up, and just like that he fell, bouncing on the stairs really bad. It hurt to watch because he was getting knocked in the face and head; but when they told me who he was, the one who killed the women, I rather liked it. He should have gotten hit harder. Because they may be whores, but there’s no reason to kill them,” said Severina Balbuena, the maid. And then: “We called the Red Cross,” the manager said. “I’ve already told everyone, so quit bugging me.” What happened to you during the half hour that it took them to find you? “That, that big puddle the young man left, the reporter,” Severina said; but the tape recorder picked up no sounds until . . . “That fool, he’s had it.” That voice would be identified as belonging to Ledezma, the other stretcher-bearer from the Red Cross. “No, he hasn’t had it,” said Horacio G. Velasco, the first stretcher-bearer. 13

Now I’m only left with questions: Who placed the call? Why did you insist on sticking the microphone into the whorekiller’s face? And that was everything that happened. Warmly, Paco Ignacio P.S. For the purposes of this story, what happened to the whorekiller, whose name is Andrés B. Domínguez, is not of great significance; but I will state, so as to leave no more loose ends than necessary, that he is locked up in the Castañeda Asylum for the Insane. When you return, you can go visit him. P.P.S. The sun . . . tell me, how is the sun in Casablanca?

14

II General Without an Army

In the city the tanks had been replaced by solitude, with similar effects. The wounds would seem not to have closed. We would belong to a generation of idiot princes, hemophiliacs, whose skin the blood flowed down at the slightest cut. Was it you or the whole country that had been split down the middle? Drying in the sun. In the hospital the sun entered timidly through the window. You open your eyes and look around: the room, your bed — this Houdini’s coffin in which you are confined, which seems more like some apparatus from a children’s park than from a sanatorium (it can be raised on one side or the other, moved around, it has wheels, strange mechanisms to elevate the feet, a call bell with a microphone behind it, bottles of serum attached to the bed, and a vein of yours that carelessly let itself be incorporated into the device) — the night stand with apple juice, the few books (they insist you not read too much), the empty white walls. You think, “I am the shadow, the great vampire, the phony who glides over Mexico City. Above and below the clouds, dozing between spin and flight . . . Someday the fever will break. A music box playing a polonaise used to keep me 15

company as a child whenever I had a fever. My great aunt put it beside my bed, and Chopin’s music lulled me and took away my fear, and one day when I wasn’t paying attention they took out my tonsils.”

16

B as in Biography

Mexico City, January 6, 1970 Dear Son: Although I still don’t understand a thing, I’m taking advantage of a moment free from work (damn, they don’t even give us Three Kings Day off ) to send you the biography you asked me for. It would have been easier to send you your medical record, which I keep somewhere around here; you already know that writing is not my forte. I suppose you can make whatever corrections you want, as you see fit. But if you wanted something better, you should have written it since you’re the one who knows it best. As you want me to write it, well, let’s see how it goes. Biography of my son (as far as I know): I can vouch that he was born in Morelia, Michoacán, because his parents were taking a literature course (one of your mother’s ideas) and because he was two months early; he surprised us while we were out of the capital. Besides being a seven-months baby and giving us a hell of a scare — well, he was our first and had an intense stare (imagine scaring fellow human beings before you could even see) — everything was normal. It was in November of 1943 and World War II was in progress. 17

A normal childhood, maybe a little lonely. There were no brothers or sisters. Not overprotected, although too many grandparents to suit me. Surprising reactions between the ages of five and six. At times a tendency toward introversion that upset me. No childish fears, no night terrors. He stopped wetting the bed very early, much to my pride and comfort (you may remember that according to the deal the nighttime hours were mine). At about two and a half, he was no longer wearing diapers at night. Favorite games: “Ayints,” as he called it (consisted of going out to the patio — we were living in Narvarte, remember? — and collecting ants, giving them advice, and letting them go); handball (sometimes bouncing the ball against the wall by yourself for hours on end until I went out and joined you, more from desperation than for therapy); the bicycle (at six you knew the neighborhood better than the mailman and the milkman put together, who by the way were great friends of yours); and “school” with two younger neighbor girls. Primary studies in the private Melchor Ocampo school, which my friend Simón Betanzos ran. Above-average grades. His mother very proud, I a bit awestruck. First dance at age eleven. (You showed up with such a bored face!) Antisocial adolescence. Many family conflicts, thoroughly irrational on both sides. Paternal victory in bringing science fiction novels into his room for reading in his spare time, which moved from my bookshelf to his little by little. I suspect that at age fifteen he was mixed up in the prep-school demonstration in support of the Vallejista railway workers (you had just entered Preparatory School No. 1, located in the city center), and I believe he spent many hours walking around there. More than once I came across him walking around the city. In those days it was still possible to meet people in the city without meaning to. 18

Steady girlfriend at age seventeen (1960) when he enrolled in medical school. A girl from the north (named Cristina?) who used to arrive at the house with his white coat and his books (things happened backwards with you; did you ever carry this Cristina’s books?). We discussed medical ethics, we discussed family honor, truth, the meaning of life. In 1964 he spent his vacation building a room in the patio, into which he moved. With wages from his first job he bought a rug and a phonograph for the room (you were working selling subscriptions to Reader’s Digest), but I got the impression he spent more time roaming the city than cooped up in the room. Unsuspected taste for classical music. Accompanying his mother, he didn’t miss a single one of the Bellas Artes Symphony concerts during the ’64 season. Mamá’s death. I don’t know how it affected him. I was too desperate to take time to find out. I was a shadow of the shadow that I used to be. He dropped medicine and enrolled in Spanish literature. I regret not being able to say what happened between 1965 and 1968. They were very uncertain years for me. I know that we ate together, that we shared the solitude of the big house in the San Rafael neighborhood. Sometimes we saw each other at dinnertime and spoke of politics. I got the impression that he joined the Communist Party in 1966, but I have nothing to prove it. I got the impression he fell violently in love, seriously for the first time, in 1967. Again, I can’t prove it. I can say very little about the ’68 Movement. I know it changed him much more than it did me. He divided his time between school and the room out back, full of his fevered comrades, who spent the night arguing. I know his fears were not my fears. I can testify that my medical studies 19

enabled me to put three stitches in a head wound he got the day the boys were thrown out of the Zócalo. I know that I love him, that stranger, you, my son. I hope these notes will be worth something to you, besides letting you know that strangers can love each other. Come back soon. Affectionately, Papá

20

III Interview

She was a talkative nurse who moved her hands and winked and squinted while she flung words at you. She said things like “How did you sleep? It’s time for your shot. Oh, just look at you. Now you’ve spilled the water. Do you want me to adjust your pillow?” without waiting for a reply, mixing questions with commands and advice. Seeing her for the first time, you gave her a bleary-eyed stare, eyebrows raised and gloomy, but it didn’t stop her chatter. “May I smoke?” you asked. “Oh, for goodness sake! You don’t understand that if you cough the stitches will all come out. Besides . . .” “When can I smoke?” you insisted. “You have to take these pills.” “Can you get rid of that?” you grumbled, pointing to a white crucifix with a Christ of plastic imitation wood placed on the television set in front of the bed. “The nun will be angry.” “What nun?” “The one who comes every day.” “No nuns. I deal only with whorekillers.” “Oh!” Later the doctor arrived. Tall, paternal, smoking a pipe. 21

“When am I going to be able to smoke?” you asked. “I knew your dad. We studied together.” He looked out the window and it appeared that he wasn’t too concerned about your wound. You weren’t concerned about the wound either. You weren’t going to die. Not from this. Not now. “To smoke, doctor.” “One cigarette after each meal.” You sighed. Now it was just a matter of getting tobacco. You had taken the first step in your return to life. “You know, if the knife had been two more centimeters to the right, we wouldn’t be here chatting,” the doctor said. He shifted his eyes from the window and they came to rest on the bed, staring at you. In these few days — how many, six, five, four? — you had begun to grow a moustache. You ran your index finger over the fuzz on your lip and thought, “It was just a matter of centimeters, then.”

22

C as in Context

Mexico City, March 1970 My good friend Néstor: You ask me some very difficult things, you little bastard, such as how it was in ’69. Such as what we were like, as if out of the blue you had the right to make me go back a year in my life and enter our hell again. You must think one regains his vision in so little time and that one can look back without turning into a pillar of salt or a pamphlet . . . We lived convinced that life wasn’t like that, that someone, something, all of us had gotten mixed up in a big mistake. “The Louse” de la Garza threw parties, and we went to all of them knowing full well that you can’t squeeze joy from a lemon. Gloomy parties in dark basements in the Santa Maria section, interminable dances in the Roma and the Nápoles districts. Lots of alcohol, memories of the year before that always remained incomplete, because why remember, why tell someone what he already knew? Only halfway making out because, after all, what were you doing with that casual dance partner for rock or danzón, who clung to you like you clung to her? And yet we never missed a Saturday. We had to see each other, to know that at least we were still around: the We Shall Overcome Brigade and 23

the Red Group from Prep Schools One and Six, the Brigade Committee from Night School Eight, the Political Science Press Committee, the best friends, the mates, the bullet gang. I think now that it’s hard to go from the glory of being all of us to being just an individual. You didn’t even have a girlfriend; you had separated from Gloria, the girl with the large black eyes like mirrors, who had an enormous braid and very tight jeans. As I recall, we didn’t go back to our studies when the strike ended; nevertheless we dropped into philosophy, where Tania “The Indian” Santiago and Patricia were; or into economics, where Paco Ceja hung on stubbornly. We didn’t discover the neighborhoods until the mid-year, when what would later be called the Popular Workers’ Committee, the COP, started to form. The police broke it up at the end of December, detaining a dozen of our comrades. And we ended up behind the airport, in the Aviación Civil, Ampliación, and Caracoles districts, where neighborhood committees had been organized. I remember Alejandro and the work that began in a market, a problem between the administrators and the tenants, and our sad intervention, trying to turn the market into a demonstration, a meeting, a student struggle. We changed the setting. We wandered by ourselves not only in the Roma neighborhood but also along the Calzada Zaragoza. At least our city had expanded. All without much certainty. More than anything, we felt a debt toward what we had been throughout the ’68 Movement, toward those who remained prisoners. As I recall, we played a lot of chess. We drank too much: you beer, I a thousand and one exotic stupidities (Cinzano vermouth and Don Pancho banana liqueur and crème de menthe). 24

We had a job, you remember? The adaptation of the novel The Picture of Dorian Gray for television. They paid six hundred pesos per chapter, a fortune. I waited for Fanny to marry me and discover anew my failure (our failure), and I suffered with each letter that came to me from Paris. Damned Paris, the ambiguity, the distance, the Eiffel Tower. We organized a club called “The Sons of the Resistance to the Environment.” Its members were “El Loco” Cendejas, who played tunes from Michoacán on the violin; Paco Ceja Pérez Arce, who stayed enrolled in economics; and René Cabrera, who wrote brilliant poems and then used the paper to fill the holes in his shoes so the rain wouldn’t get his socks too wet. Rain-fodder poems like: “But dawn was possible for other reasons.” “After all, the rains continue to be the same.” It did rain a lot, granted. That year it rained everything, it rained sometimes, it rained always, it rained too much. I remember the mercury lights in the puddles. I remember the raindrops licking at the windows. Wait. On the other hand, I suppose I spent hours watching it rain. Many hours. President Díaz Ordaz, the black monkey, appeared on television frequently. I swore never to have a television set. “Tijuana” went off to live in a pot paradise. Surprising news arrived of what Pepe González Sierra was doing in the Amazon basin, eaten alive by mosquitoes, with Dulce María. Paco Quinto remained politically active and had gone to Monterrey. Mario Núñez wrote from Switzerland, where he got involved with the Spanish Workers’ Commissions and took a survival course. The shadow of the tanks followed in the streets. You started working at the newspaper. Jonathan “the 25

Werewolf” Molinet, “Lucía Sombra,” gave private classes in logic and lived in a rooftop shack. Adriana used to come to my house and make me soup and would then spend the afternoon listening to samba records and crying in a corner. Elisa Ramírez called me on the telephone at the most unexpected hours to make plans to walk around the streets. She wore very short skirts and long black boots. Wandering hour after hour, we used to cover the whole city. I don’t know about you, but I was a sad guy of twenty who wrote fotonovelas for a living (which sometimes paid nothing), roamed a city that had been ours and we had lost, rented a room in the Condesa district, had a record player, read Faulkner, Rodolfo Walsh, Italo Calvino, and Dos Passos, and watched it rain. PIT P.S. I must know, how is the sun in Casablanca?

26

IV The Decision to Appeal to the Heroes

The first time the idea crossed your mind, you dismissed it without batting an eye, just as one gets rid of an unpleasant thought, as one drives away a bad dream or disposes of a risky job. Anyway, there was something that made the idea stick, perhaps the novelty of it, something in the sheer madness of it that, even early on, made it hard to abandon. You were dozing. You knew it was afternoon because there was that strange light and the branches of a tree could be seen clearly through the window, and you could confirm the time because the nurse had brought the midday meal and taken it away, hardly touched, a couple hours ago. Then Alejandro Cendejas arrived (some friends had nicknamed him “El Loco” Cendejas because of his stare and his insistence on making strange connections between urban life and magical thought), a brilliant poet from Michoacán. With him (by chance) was “the Zapotecan Prince,” René Cabrera Palomec. “Hail,” Alejandro said, sitting on the bed to study the room, looking for microphones, smudges on the wall, little boxes of loose medicine that he could walk away with. “How do you feel?” René asked, taking out a notebook and a chewed-up pencil. 27

You limited yourself to smiling, which was as good a way as any to thank them for visiting. You didn’t feel like talking and dozed while they discussed movies, compared anecdotes about local characters, and spoke of the cliques that had gradually worked their way into the university. They had started out controlling the drug trade, then they began living off small subsidies from low-level officials who hired gunmen, then allying themselves with the police as stool pigeons, and finally creating such power that ran through the facilities getting drunk, raping, and pillaging. It was then that you said to them, “I’m going to get everyone together and we’re going to kick their ass.” “There’s no one left to get together,” René said. “They got us together once before and we failed,” Alejandro replied. “No, not us,” you said. “Who?” asked René. “The heroes.” “Which ones?” “Mine.” “Are there really heroes left?” asked Alejandro, who always turned out to be quite skeptical in political matters. “Yes, really.” “It’s time for your medicine,” the nurse said.

28

D as in Documents

Dear colleague: So many damned months of hearing nothing from you, and just look at the kind of requests you come up with. I definitely have them so I have to send them to you. The two articles, the one by Revueltas about the political prisoners’ hunger strike and the one by Taibo about the mailman from Uruapan, give a good sense of the year 1969 and the beginning of ’70. We’re in agreement on that. Now, to tell it really well, you should put in one of my sports articles. If you want it, fine, I’ll send it. If not, whatever. It’s up to you, my friend. Chucho Star reporter of the sports section of El Universal (Third desk of the center aisle as you enter the editorial office.) New Year’s at Lecumberri José Revueltas (Excerpt from the letter to Arthur Miller, president of International PEN Club, dated January 11, 1970) I relate the following in my triple condition as witness, participant, and victim . . . 29

A little past eight p.m. on January 1, from inside our cells in Cellblock M — where some of the political prisoners in the Lecumberri Preventative Penitentiary who had been on a hunger strike since December 10 were held, with the rest in Blocks N and C — we heard a comrade’s voice calling out from the corridor, telling us in alarmed tones that the visitors who had come to Cellblock M that afternoon had been detained for over two hours and not allowed to leave the jail and go into the street. Our visitors had left Cellblock M around six and we assumed they had left the prison a long time ago, so a deep sense of anxiety overcame us, particularly those who had only most recently said goodbye to their relatives. At the sound of the alarm call, all the strikers, and a few comrades who had not joined the hunger strike, went into the block’s small interior yard to gather behind the bars that separate the yard from a heavy double-doored iron gate, which in turn connects to a circular corridor (called a “ring” because of its resemblance to the “alley” in a bull ring) in the center of which stands the elevated watchtower known as the “polygon.” The corridor onto which the majority of the blocks of the prison converge, though others like M, N, and L make up interior parts of the building, is separated from the “ring” by courtyards, corridors, and walls with barred doors, as with Cellblock M’s yard, which is bounded by two walls at an angle to form a trapezoid with the entrance and exit gates. These details are of fundamental importance in understanding the way the events of the first of January occurred. Well, as has been said, more than twenty of us gathered at the doorway of Cellblock M to ask the jailors what had happened to our relatives and to request that they allow delegates — or even a single delegate — out to obtain accurate information. The guards denied our appeal and, with a vague air of distraction and indifference, moved away from the gate and disappeared around a turn in the “ring” in a 30

matter of seconds. An unusually empty and desolate jail appeared before our eyes, without a single guard or official to appeal to. It was a strange and oppressive feeling. Then, the distant cries of women and the muffled sobs of children reached our ears. “Political prisoners! Political prisoners!” they shouted in unison. No one could resist a call like that. We pounded frantically on the door, and some jumped to the other side, while others took a barbell from the gym and attacked the chains with it. The locks gave way, and we were in the “ring.” We ran toward the shouting. There they were in a corridor, imprisoned behind a tall barred door: women, men, children — our visitors. (My wife was not there, however; by chance she had left an hour before the visiting period ended.) But now there was nothing we could do, because our intent was simply to talk with the prison director or the head of security to obtain an explanation and the freedom of the detained visitors. The former’s name is General Andrés Puentes Vargas, and the latter is Major Bernardo Palacios. But there was nobody in charge of the prison at the time; or rather General Puentes Vargas and Major Palacios were indeed there but had assumed a very different kind of authority. They were at the head of the well-fed and tightlyknit ranks of over a hundred common criminals who constituted a powerful elite, “commissioned” to carry out a wide assortment of administrative functions in the prison — cellblock “majors” and “officers,” “clerks,” “messengers,” “gofers” — and each of their strange guilds with its own boss, who was, of course, the most feared ruffian of all. The prison director and his head of security, a general and a major who perhaps had proudly commanded soldiers of the National Army in other times, opted this time for the doubtful honor of being those who authorized gangs of the worst miscreants, from cellblocks populated by those with the black31

est reputation, to enjoy two long hours in which attack and pillage with total impunity. We who had left the corridor of Cellblock M stopped about fifty paces from the point where we came face-toface with a tight mass of “deputies,” with the general and the major a short distance from them. Between us and the “deputies” was a no-man’s-land, the barred corridor in which the visitors were trapped. From behind their gratings the prisoners in E showered us with vile insults and shot us looks of an animal ferocity that was almost unbelievable. One event followed another with a fantastic, dream-like rapidity. Coming up behind us were our comrades from C, male students who had initially surprised us perhaps because they looked so extraordinarily young. At the same moment, the miscreants from D, for whom the doors of the cellblock had been opened, advanced in an uproar, armed with pipes, clubs, and iron bars, through the mass that formed the cordon of “deputies.” They began here and there to fall on those they managed to surprise who were within reach of their blows. Projectiles rained from all sides, including bottles, rocks, and bricks, in the midst of the noise of windows exploding into shards, and shouts and curses no one could understand. Before my very eyes, and with gestures that seemed singularly slow and calm, a jailor slid his key into the lock of F, carefully turned it a few times with the expert air of a professional, then took off the chain and then opened the door. For a few seconds, those in E were caught off balance, perplexed, without daring a step toward the “ring.” Under normal circumstances this offense meant weeks in solitary confinement. But this hesitation lasted only the blink of an eye. Those in E emerged in an avalanche to join those in D, and ran us down, attacking our rearguard, to pin us between the two gangs. In an instant flash like a camera shutter, I made out the shape of the general, who was waving his arms over his head, a black 32

object in his right hand. Immediately afterwards, detonations were heard, hollow, precise, as if produced in a vacuum. The general had emptied his pistol into the air. The result was a an uneven burst of fire that seemed to come from all imaginable directions, from above, in front, behind, and the sides. The jailors from the “the big wall” and “the polygon” began firing in turn. “Take refuge in Cellblock M, in M!” we cried. That was the only spot, we thought, where we would be safe. Between Cellblock M, toward which we were running in full stampede, and Cellblock D, from which the hoodlums had come out to attack us, was Cellblock N, which, like our own and C, was occupied entirely by political prisoners. Someone had opened the door to the courtyard of N, providing an unexpected intermediate refuge before we could reach the entrance to M. A large number of our companions immediately took shelter in N, while the rest of us, now greatly reduced in number, continued to run toward M, where we entered in disarray, panting, enraged, defeated in our powerlessness, but also determined not to fight with the regular prisoners, having resolved from the beginning of our imprisonment not to involve ourselves in any battles, which in any case would be, without doubt, a monstrous provocation that the government plotted to bring us down. Now when we least expected it, we had finally fallen into their trap. Inside Cellblock M there was no way to close the doors, and anyway there still remained an indeterminate number of comrades outside who were unable to enter N and were without refuge. A group of fourteen of us decided we should barricade ourselves in cell number 21, which seemed the most secure and able to be fortified to keep the assailants out. Behind the door of cell 21 we piled the beds, a table, and anything else we could, then threw the bolt on the door. Minutes later, the sacking of the block began, and then the siege of our cell. We could hear the hoodlums’ obsessive and 33

cynical cry inciting to pillage, intoned with that doleful and repugnant modulation that is their style of speaking, “Get him, get him!” which means the act of getting at the victim, seizing the opportune moment when he is unarmed and defenseless, in the most cowardly and opportunistic way. “Get him, get him!” At this point it is unnecessary to continue the account. They beat us, stripped us of everything we had on us — pens, watches; they sacked our cells, taking desks, typewriters, books, beds, mattresses, clothes, manuscripts, everything. Books and books. Of what good to these miserable people were Hegel’s Phenomenology, or the Lukács’s Aesthetics, or Marx’s Manuscripts of 1844, or Proust’s correspondence with his mother? I was lucky when it came to my original drafts. The floor of my cell was covered with a carpet of sheets of paper in disarray, but these were clipped together according to theme and content, and most were safe. I lost a cardboard box with more than fifteen folders of notes, not all of them essential, and now I have no typewriter with which to make a clean copy of my work after writing it by hand. De Gortari, a doctor of philosophy, on the other hand, unfortunately lost irreplaceable drafts on which he had invested whole years of labor. He clung to me, moaning with pain, when I met him in his devastated cell. For me there remains nothing more to say except for the last detail in what has been called the scene of the sacking. It’s a detail that I can only consider marvelous because of its incredible significance. When at last those miscreants allowed us to leave cell 21, after having covered our entire bodies with blows and punches, the block was still full of thieves who entered and left with stolen objects. But the amazing, incomprehensible thing was that the jailors were there among them, walking from one side of the corridor to the other with an indifferent tranquil air, twirling their clubs, 34

as if they were out for a harmless stroll. What were they doing there if they were not protecting the victims of this robbery? Very simply, they were directing the delinquents’ traffic, pointing to the doors where they could leave unseen. They would hurry the slowpokes, “Move along, move along, or the lice will get you.” I still remember what the jailor said to me as I left cell 21, while he looked at me with a smile. “Are you badly hurt, teacher?” And he answered for himself, “Just a few little blows, right?” The title of “teacher” on his lips sounded like the vilest filth. No, I am not badly injured, some punches in the face, that’s all. I’m not badly hurt. These are the events that occurred New Year’s Day in 1970, seen by someone who was at the same time witness, participant, and victim.

Death by Fire The story of José Refugio Ménez, mailman from Uruapan Paco Ignacio Taibo II Basic Facts Name: José Refugio Ménez Gómez Occupation: Traveling postal agent Seniority: 25 years of service Age: 51 Marital Status: Married (with several children) Cause of death: Severe burns caused by auto-incineration Date: April 8, 1969. A Witness Speaks Rafael Alvarez, student at the Eduardo Ruiz night school, sixteen years old: “It was awful to see how that gentleman burnt himself to death. We ran because we were scared that the can of gaso35

line he was emptying over his head would explode, but we didn’t know what was happening until we saw him turn into a torch.” (From the declarations to the public prosecutor, April 9, 1969) Officer David Naranjo Plascencia, Police Crime Prevention Unit, Badge no. 66: “We couldn’t do anything about the suicide, since his death was so quick, a matter of a minute, maybe two. It was something truly horrible.” (From the declarations to the public prosecutor) About an Hour Before “About an hour before I left, he came and said hello. I noticed he was a bit nervous. We saw each other in the station. The train to Apatzingán was about to leave. He said to me, ‘What’s going on? When are they leaving?’ because our train was running late. We left about 11:20 and he died at 12:00. “I know that after he died there was a letter by his side to the authorities and his fellow workers in Celaya, but its contents weren’t made known because the police inspector stepped in and confiscated it.” (Natividad Rodríguez, postal worker, Irapuato) The Mail Coach Overnights in Uruapan “Cuco took a bus from here (Irapuato) to Celaya and another from Celaya to Acámbaro. There he took the train. “At about ten the train arrived at Acámbaro, he got on, and there was a change of postal agents. He took the place of the person he was relieving, traveling alone in the coach. I registered the mail from Acámbaro. It was the train that covered Route 36. Half an hour later it left for Escobedo. He set to work in the Cage and at about 12:00 the train arrived in Escobedo. About 4:00 it arrived at Celaya. It was dawn. 36

From there he spent the night in Uruapan, where he arrived around four in the morning, and the following day he killed himself.” (Natividad Rodríguez) Last Day With the Family “While we were having breakfast or dinner, we used to chat about things like our studies. One of the last days we were in Guanajuato. It was an unforgettable day, a day in the country, at the lake. From there we went shopping. We bought charamusca candy and things like that. It was Saturday so we just fooled around, the boys having water fights the way they like to do, and my dad helping get everyone wet. “The next day he sent us on a picnic. It was Sunday and he liked us to get out for a day in the country. So I gave my dad some money to keep for my fare back to Mexico City (because I was studying there to become a beautician). “Anyway, he said to me, ‘If you don’t ask me for it later, you’ll be screwed.’ “When we went on the picnic, I was going to ask him for it, but since he had given my sister a thousand pesos spending money, I didn’t. He was going to work . . . “He never returned . . .” (Sobs are heard on the tape. The interview is interrupted for several minutes.) “Was he nervous those last days?” “Just the opposite, he was very happy. The only odd thing was that he spent his time at the typewriter, working till all hours. He liked to write songs and memories of various things. Later we found out that he was writing letters: to the press, to his friends, to family. His old papers disappeared.” “Did he talk at home about union problems?” “No, not at home.” 37

“Four years have passed. What about him stays with you?” “There are memories, the way he was with the family. The neighbors envied us. He liked us to have friends and to have parties. He used to help at our parties and say to me, ‘We’re going to have sorbet. We’re going to have soft drinks.’” (Interview in Irapuato with José Refugio Ménez’s eldest daughter) The Shift Supervisor Says “No, the painting isn’t there anymore. What he painted isn’t there. “The instant it was known, they took the mail car and sealed it. The authorities then repainted it.” (Morning shift supervisor on the Uruapan Express) Gone Without a Trace “They even took down the kiosk. It was there (pointing to a spot in the middle of the garden). He stood there, opened the mailbags and sprinkled paint thinner and gasoline on them and on himself, and he stood on the bags and lit a match.” (“Old Cap,” a porter in Uruapan) What He Wrote in the Mail Coach The night before he died, José Refugio wrote four slogans in the car where he was working. Whitey García from the Express Office in Uruapan collected the slogans that the authorities later wiped away. “The employee who asks for a raise in his salary is called a Communist.” “The Revolution was written in blood, and so are union victories.” “Let my sacrifice weigh on the consciences of irresponsible public officials.” 38

“Politicians with bank accounts; postal employees with pure promises; our children with hunger and misery.” Besides the four slogans, he spattered red paint around the coach. From a Reporter’s Notes I have been able to establish that on the last day: He sent his family on a picnic and didn’t wish to accompany them. He ate alone. One of his girls returned for her sweater and he was on the verge of weakening. He gave his watch to his eldest son. He gave spending money to his eldest daughter and did not allow her to go to Mexico City, where she was studying, asking that she stay the weekend. He took the bus to Acámbaro. Before that he must have mailed some letters. During the night he painted the slogans in the train. He wrote some notes that contained the slogans, according to the first mailmen who saw the body. He bought gasoline and paint thinner. He talked with his co-workers. Although he didn’t drink, that night he had a tequila. At one o’clock he set fire to himself on the kiosk. His screams attracted people. Whitey García Remembers: That Cuco Ménez was nervous the last day. That someone had seen him paint the coach the last night. That it seemed odd that he offered him a shot of tequila the last night because normally he didn’t drink. 39

That he told him he was going to Mexico City. That he went around telling everyone he was going to go, and his co-workers thought that he had been transferred to a better post. That he had been saying for a month, “Something important is going to happen. You’ll see.” (Interview with Whitey García) Coincidence “The immolation of the aforementioned postal worker, who fought for years for the betterment of salaries and benefits for himself and his fellow union members, coincided with the visit of Secretary of Communications and Transportation José Antonio Padilla. The secretary was on a tour of working conditions in various parts of the State of Michoacán and and, upon being informed of what had happened, ordered an investigation.” (From the Irapuato Herald article) Motives “Why did your father commit suicide?” “Well, from what they said in the newspapers, so they would give the workers a raise. My father was always involved in that because they belonged to the union. He was helping the workers and said that the authorities never paid any attention to them . . . We had problems like any other family, but that wasn’t why . . . in the postal service they earn very little . . . my dad had some debts, and it was difficult, but nothing serious . . .” (Interview with Isabel, his second eldest daughter) “He Was a Good Friend” “Now, only when there is some turmoil do they speak of him, of José Refugio Ménez.” 40

“We wanted to build a monument to him in Uruapan, but the authorities wouldn’t permit it.” “He had an idea deep down that he didn’t tell anyone about.” “When they told us, we didn’t believe it.” “The same authorities prevented the disclosure of the letters that he left.” “The burning was not in vain.” “Some good did come of his death. The whole union saw an economic improvement.” “There were secret police at the funeral because they thought there would be a demonstration.” “They sent agents from Mexico City to the funeral here in Irapuato.” “After all the legal procedures were over with, the wake was held at his house.” “We went into the post office with his coffin, wanting to have a moment of silence, but they wouldn’t let us.” “The mail car he traveled in was number 1267.” “He was a very good friend.” (Juan Martínez and Jesús Aguado, traveling postal agents based in Irapuato) The Telegram “At twelve a telegram arrived that said, ‘Señora, your husband has just suffered an accident.’ I thought the train had been derailed. I didn’t think that anything major had happened, that he would be at the most injured, in the hospital. “I checked with his friends, because he had lots of friends in the post office here, and they found out and told me not to go . . . but I wanted to go because he had told me that if anything happened, the whole family should go there, and I was insistent . . . I had to go, and they wouldn’t let me . . . and they didn’t want to tell me that . . . only that it was very seri41

ous and that an ambulance from Social Services was going to bring him . . . This scared me, and more so with all the work left to do on the house . . . and later, I knew . . .” (Anita Rosales, Ménez’s widow) Whitey García’s Final Statement “The sacrifice was useless. No one here said anything about it after he died. Just the morbid stuff. And the newspapers had orders to keep it quiet. He should have burned himself with the other guy, then there would have been a real scandal. With the big-shot who was on tour and came through here the next day . . . As it is, it served no purpose.” He Lit a Match . . . “. . . he was enveloped in flames and was screaming, screaming ‘Aiee!’ and things that no one could understand . . . screaming.” (From the Irapuato Herald article)

42

V Liliana, General Headquarters, Letters and Telegrams

When Liliana arrived, you convinced her. She was a tall, thin girl, almost too much so, and you had met her a few months before the encounter with the whorekiller. Showing up in the newspaper’s editorial office, she asked for you and then dropped into a swivel chair, telling a story that had to do with words and the police report, her graduate thesis in Spanish literature, her Argentine origins (she was the daughter of an Argentinean who exported wines from the Southern Cone to Mexico and the United States), and how your reports had interested her. Before stumbling onto the whorekiller story, you had written, in addition to about fifty news briefs, a pair of features: one about a thief who had thrown himself off the second floor of the police station, and another about a boy who had killed his little brother and himself. A pair of damned bloody stories, very typical of Mexico City and close to your ideal of yellow journalism, which makes the pages catch fire and burn your hands. You kept looking at the girl with the big eyes and the tiny skirt (Liliana would explain to you later that the skirt looked shorter because she had very long legs), enraged because someone could like what you had written. You had written it to disgust, to piss off, to anger as much as it pissed you off to write it. You had taken it on as a responsibility and 43

an obligation, as blame and Christian atonement for being one of the children of this city who failed to take it by storm. Liliana endured the brunt of your disgust and decided that she could love you, on the condition that you could collect all that love with a couple of kicks in the guts every day. However, the relationship never developed. You saw her only a couple of times before the final encounter with the whorekiller, both resounding failures. On one occasion, you took her to the theater and ended up leaving in the middle of the second act. On the other, you went out to dinner but couldn’t decide what to order and decided to take a rain check. When she showed up at the hospital, you were suspicious at first, but then you were pleased to find in her the smiling sister you never had. Now she was your ace in the hole. Only in her could you confide about such a difficult undertaking. Besides being loyal, she turned out to be efficient and came back less than six hours later with the following: Telegram forms, white paper, two felt-tip pens, one red and one blue, a map of the city (wall size), two boxes of colored tacks (red and green, like the flag), a tabletop bell (stolen from a hotel, where it was used to call the bell boys), air-mail envelopes, stamps, a map of the Crimea cut from the McGraw Hill Atlas, one of those stamps that prints the date, complete with its purple ink pad, a .38 caliber pistol borrowed from René Cabrera, an English-Spanish pocket dictionary, two shorthand notebooks, a box of paper clips, a cardboard file box, a desk calendar, the white pages of the phone book, a book titled The Most Famous Codes of the First World War (published by Molino, Barcelona, 1948), the airline companies’ blue book, a 1917 Sears catalog, a manual on anarchists and explosives (published by Red Dawn in 1922), and a business directory. 44

All this she placed around the room and then sat down in front of you with one of the stenographic notebooks and her pencil, attentive, her hair put up in a bun, her short skirt slipping over a tan leg, a half smile on her face. “You have to swear on your grave that you’ll do it, that you’ll send every single one.” “I swear,” Liliana said. “And that you’ll bring me the stubs from the registered letters and stamped telegram forms.” “Okay, stop fussing. I said I’d do it and I’ll do it. Dictate.” “The first one to the island of Mompracem, Borneo, to a Mr. Yanez de Gomera. ‘Urgent you meet me Mexico City, February 28 at latest. Will need a few companies of Tigers. Invitation automatically extended to Sandokan, Tremal Naik, and Kammamuri, of course.’” “Naiq with a q?” “Naik with a k.” “You need a return address.” “The hospital address.” “Next?” “A telegram to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.” “The one from . . . ?” “The same. Send it to Baker Street, number 221 B. With a note on the envelope that says ‘Attention: Mr. Sherlock Holmes.’” “Darling, I’m sure that address no longer exists.” “What did we agree?” “Okay, okay.” “Text: ‘Interested in your presence. Request you bring Hound of the Baskervilles and leave Watson. Haste is of critical importance.’ “Look, this is crazy. Do you really want me to send this?” “Of course.” Liliana stared at you. You had sunk among the pillows 45

and were much paler than that morning, your eyes sunken and feverish. She thought that something was up. “Are you feeling all right?” “Fine. The next one, to Jomo Kenyatta, colon, ‘Heard you would like to get rid of the rest of the Mau Mau. Request you send them to me in Mexico. Will settle cost of passage later. Forever in your debt, et cetera . . .’” An alarm went off in the room next door. The patient had just suffered heart failure, and in the hallways the chaos that accompanies emergencies had broken out . . . You continued dictating letters and notes to Liliana, who was growing increasingly nervous, increasingly unsmiling, increasingly incredulous, increasingly worried.

46

E as in Examination

Néstor: I didn’t save the minutes from the student sectional meeting in the mid-October 1969 that you refer to in your letter. As I recall, those minutes were never written down. I still have (by some quirk you wouldn’t believe) the notes for the “examination of the situation” that Julio, Paco, you, and I made just before leaving the organization. I’m sending you a photocopy of that piece of paper. Reading it over, I get the impression we didn’t have much to say. Well, no matter. Warmest regards Jorge Robles Celerín

1.

2.

Notes: We persist in acting as if things were not in decline. A small militant division has taken over The Movement, and a handful of cadres have dominated a once-broad militancy. We persist in behaving as if nothing had happened. Look at what we do in political science at the UNAM and what the “Mamelukes” in physics and mathematics do at the IPN. Fundamentally there has been a failure to find a “way out” for popular militancy, and that is the issue. The COP has not thrived, nor has the work of the Emiliano 47

3.

4. 5. 6. 7.

Zapata Coalition of Brigades. The only logic is in the various rhythms of the popular movement (if indeed there is such a thing as a popular movement); we are going at it with the mentality of the ’68 Movement. The Left continues to fragment into more and more groups. This is coupled with natural attrition and the continuous defection of militants due to boredom. The Communist Party has retreated to the most narrow and primitive reformist line. Attitude toward prisoners dominated by “guilt complexes” and other emotional mindsets. Lack of understanding on the entire Left of how to consolidate the “social” progress that has been achieved. Acknowledge that we are as starry-eyed as anyone else and that the first step consists in sitting down to think, instead of promoting meetings, assemblies, and brigade propaganda, as if we were at the peak of the ’68 Movement.

48

VI Shadows and Answers

The doctor had told Liliana that it was a “complication” and that she was to leave the room. You had continued to stare at her with a clouded light in your eyes, an opaque but diabolical stare, as if wanting to remind her of her promise to put the letters in the mail that day. She had noticed this and nodded affirmatively. As if that weren’t enough, when the doctor pushed her gently from the room she said, “Don’t worry, the letters will go out today.” The morning was clear, a breeze from the southwest rippled through the red flag with the tiger head in the center, which crowned the highest cliff on the little island in the Indian Ocean. The room appeared to be a combination of opulence and disorder. Here, a silver tray of unpolished precious stones; there, walls adorned with Persian rugs slashed by sabers. On a table of brilliant sandalwood were various specimens of gunpowder on scraps of old Dutch newspapers. In a dilapidated armchair a European, evidently from the south, slept with a cup of red wine gleaming in his languid hand. A little further away, at a wind-battered windowsill, a human shadow whose eyes tried to penetrate the unfathomable ocean. 49

The second man was a bit younger, an exquisitely dressed Malaysian whose head was covered with a green turban in which there glowed a ruby worthy of a royal crown. His hands tensely gripped the wood of the window frame. A hundred meters below, the sea dashed against the base of the cliff. Sandokan turned his head toward the peacefully resting Yanez just as Kammamuri entered the room. All the splendor of the Hindu people was on display in his olive, muscular body, which was marked with several deep scars, unmistakable signs of his encounters with the Hindu tiger, one of the most terrible beasts in all of creation. “Tiger, a missive has arrived,” the Hindu said, for it was by this name that Sandokan, Prince of Mompracem and lord and master of the Malay Archipelago, was also known. “Finally, something new,” Sandokan said, taking the letter in his hands and briefly contemplating the strange postage stamp (there is no reason to believe he would have recognized the image of Benito Juárez on the Mexican tenpeso stamps). “Who is it from?” asked Yanez de Gomera, stretching and finishing the glass of wine he held in his hand. “We’re going to Mexico,” the Tiger of Malaysia replied vehemently. Yanez was accustomed to the sudden whims of his friend, who had lapsed into a period of inactivity as a result of a truce with the English. He got to his feet, shook the ashes from his trousers, placed the Colt firmly in its holster, preened his moustache and said, “When do we leave?” Under the influence of sedatives that dulled pain and filled the head with cotton, and with tubes that replaced blood lost in internal bleeding and drained bodily waste, you could barely perceive the faces that occasionally came into the 50

room and looked at you. You thought you remembered that the warmth in your hand was a result of the presence of your father, who had been in the room a couple of hours, smiling, talking with the doctors colleague-to-colleague, and holding your hand between his without taking them away, without ever letting go. “Well, Watson, what do you deduce about all this?” Watson, sitting with his back to Holmes, tried to hide the telegram he had been reading. “About what?” asked the hapless doctor. “About the telegram you were reading.” “But you had your back turned . . . You had no opportunity to see . . .” the ill-fated fellow stammered. “But on the other hand, I had before my eyes a neatly polished silver coffee pot. If that were not enough, I was able to perceive a change in your breathing, an unmistakable sign that you were poking into papers not your own . . .” Holmes said. “Tell me, what is your opinion of the telegram?” “It seems like a trap. The writer can’t be unaware that the hound died in that memorable encounter . . . And besides, you never do without with my company.” “Watson, Watson,” was Holmes’s only reply, and he stood up and got ready to practice for a while on his Stradivarius. The following day he hired a carriage to take him to Liverpool, where he left for New York. With him was the son of the Hound of the Baskervilles, endowed like his progenitor with two enviable rows of teeth. This time Watson was not with his admired teacher. They thought the sudden kidney infection was going to kill you. You didn’t think anything. You put your entire focus on your wounded body. You couldn’t die now. Not after having 51

found a way out. You let the antibiotics and the fever and the serum and the second operation and the faces of Liliana and your father and your friends pass. Meanwhile, you waited. The first time you smiled was three days later, when the nurse handed you an envelope and stood there, awaiting your reaction. You took it, turned it over in your hands, and winked an eye. “Will you give me the stamp? My nephew collects them.” You agreed and there in your hands was a reply from Sir Richard Bachelord Hynes, Acting Commander of the Light Brigade, who from the Crimea had responded to your call. The next sign that the conspiracy was thriving came on Friday, when the doctor, after pointing out that with a period of pleasant convalescence you would be in the clear, took from the pocket of his hospital coat a telegram from Dick Turpin, which gave the number of the Braniff International flight on which he would arrive in Mexico.

52

F as in Fiesta

Do you remember, you skinny jerk? We got together Saturday after Saturday to see if it still felt the same as it had during the Movement. And even though it didn’t, we did it again every other week to say it had all been a mistake and that the parties, even with all the familiar faces there, weren’t worth a nickel compared to a meeting, a brigade day, and those gatherings. “It’s no big deal,” you said. “We have to get used to being alone.” But even so, you continued coming Saturday after Saturday. The worst thing is that you didn’t get drunk, or play the Russian roulette of changing partners, or propose political projects that nobody would believe in. You spent your time at the party putting on records for others to dance to, especially “To the Rhythm of the Rain” by Johnnie Rivers, and smoking unfiltered Delicados one after another. You went to the parties beaten. I remember one time you came with a ridiculously high fever from the flu, and even so you sat in your corner smoking and smoking, putting on records, and sweating it out, all red in the face. I only remember having seen you dance twice. Once was at “The Louse” de la Garza’s house with an ugly girl from the Polytechnic, who insisted on dancing with everyone. 53

The other time was to a slow ballad with Marta, a couple of days before she committed suicide. That was it. You were loved, then and now. Big hugs, Blanca P.S. I have a job! I’m a translator at the Mexican Institute of Foreign Trade!

54

VII A Question, Several Questions

Liliana kept staring deep into your eyes. Her eyes were grayish and there was a touch of humor and mockery in her look, a little complicity and surprise, and a great longing to get in, as if it were possible to form a passage of truths between eyes. “You’re serious, aren’t you?” she asked. “Absolutely,” you replied. You were smoking your afternoon cigarette, the prohibited 1:30 cigarette. The vice was regulated: there were the allowed cigarettes of 8:30, 2:30, and 9:00, the clandestine ones of 12:00 and 6:00, and the smuggled ones (even from your own conscience) of 8:00 and 10:00 at night. “And how did it turn out?” she asked. “They were ready and waiting.” There couldn’t be so much disillusionment, so much defeat. If it could be understood, it could be explained . . . Liliana uncrossed her legs and came towards the bed. With her right hand she smoothed the wrinkles in the bedspread, without taking her eyes off you. You stifled a yawn and looked at the ceiling. Anything to get away from those questioning eyes. In your head you made up a list of questions that someone should answer, one after another, rapidly, before Liliana 55

could inject herself into your thoughts: Who washes the dirty pajamas? Technically, how does a radio station operate? What is the first name of “Baldy” Osuna? Who founded the Republic of Paraguay? How many spermatozoa in a cubic centimeter? What is Iran’s annual oil production? What is the chemical formula for potassium hydroxide? How many kilograms in a hundredweight? What year was Porfirio Díaz born? In spite of having your eyes closed, you felt Liliana’s lips approach (When did a Russian win Olympic rifle shooting from three positions? What year was gold discovered in the Klondike? How many pesos does a kilogram of Caracolillo coffee cost?) to plant a kiss — the first in several months of knowing you — on your lips. (Did Attila have children? What saints are celebrated February 13?) Then her footsteps and fragrance grew more distant and the door closed. You opened your eyes and stared at the ceiling for a while: whitish, with a small crack that ran from the wall with the window toward the center.

56

G as in Grab

My good friend, just to ask me to write a letter is a sacrifice. To ask that I write you about the last COP meeting in June of ’69 is even more of a bitch. I’m dysgraphic. You told me that four years ago. I didn’t know what dysgraphia was until I discovered it could take me a month to write a flyer. Just because I love you so much, you bum, I’ll see if I can give you that boring account. I arrived with Gerardo de la Torre in a Datsun, and at about half past four the car conked out on us ten blocks from Marcos Plata’s house. I headed toward an apartment building with a bucket because we needed some water. Gerardo went to Marcos’s house after a while, because no matter how much we pushed we couldn’t move the car. Shortly after, he came running up with you. You were the color of paper. You told us that you were taking a crap when the police showed up and came into the house. That you went through a bathroom window onto another patio in the complex and from there you took off. That afterwards on the corner you saw “La Gordita” and Marcos, along with a few teachers and railroad workers, being brought out under arrest between cops with submachine guns. They were going around the neighborhood because someone had said they missed some of the people who 57

always went to the meetings. And all of us standing there with the fucked-up car like fools. We finally abandoned it. This freaked me out so much that the car, which wasn’t even mine, sat there for a month. After letting the others know, we holed up with Armando in his house to see if we could figure out what had happened. The COP didn’t warrant anything like this because when all was said and done its only influence was among primary school teachers and railroad workers, and it would have been difficult to fulfill the dreams we had at that time of bringing the student movement to the workers at large. We had a theory that they had lashed out without really knowing at whom. Later we learned that Manuel, the train conductor, was a stool pigeon and that the day following the arrests he was in a meeting in Pantaco, as if he’d never been arrested. After that I left for Monterrey and you stayed here, hanging around with the group until you finally dropped out. I hear that Marcos and the others are just getting out of the can. They’ve been inside for a year. And that’s what happened, from my point of view. Monterrey, August ’70 El Quinto

58

VIII The Arrival of the Characters and the Doubts of the Host

Sherlock disembarked from the great steamship and contemplated with admiration the brown faces around him; he delighted in the singsong accent of the stevedores and the colors of the flowers, fruits, and the women’s dresses. Behind him the boat’s double stacks emitted a languid smoke. Undoing the top button on his shirt, he loosened his collar and, in an instinctive act that was truly rare, pulled off his tie. The hound trotted at his side. Glad to have recovered the freedom it had lost while shut up in the hold, it showed with frantic tail-wagging its appreciation for freedom and exuberance of the tropics. A dog of middling intelligence, it swore to give its best bites to the people throughout that land. With his acute and typically penetrating gaze, Sherlock contemplated the people, the calculated indolence of the longshoremen who, with a distant air, unpacked pieces of German machinery. While having coffee under the entryway of the Diligencias Hotel, he calmly decided that the palpable reality had nothing to do with what he had read, and almost in the same way he separated his little finger from the cup as he brought the aromatic liquid to his lips, he decided that he came to learn many things. Dick Turpin descended from the Braniff airliner, dressed 59

elegantly but without his maroon frock coat, his embroidered silk shirt, or his mask, which was in his suitcase. Circumstances had required him to dispense with his two French flintlock pistols. Instead, he and his men — Peters, Batanero, Moscarda, Tomás Rey, and the Knight of Malta — carried a handbag containing twelve thousand pounds sterling in gold dust, the product of a raid in Leicester County in 1788. With this they could obtain seven pairs of pistols of the best quality, if that should prove necessary under these new and unusual circumstances. On arriving at the immigration counter, he took a silk handkerchief out of his sleeve and patted his nose (he couldn’t give up everything at one fell swoop), which made the Mexican official, Gaspar, think he’d come face-to-face with a half-gay Englishman. Nothing could have been further from the truth. The presence of Sherlock Holmes and his hound still floated on the sea breezes of Veracruz when, at the other end of the country, the battleships King of the Sea and The Tiger of Malaysia from the Momprocem fleet, flying Dutch flags, arrived from across another ocean at the port of San Blas. Here the disconcerted locals could observe the arrival of three hundred Malays, mountain people, and Javanese, whose wild looks terrorized the beautiful young ladies and industrious inhabitants of the port of Nayarit. Yanez lost no time at all and, after a nighttime maneuver to unload several culverins and light cannons as well as three hundred carbines and cutlasses, he rented five large trucks and various Jeeps and ordered the departure of his small army for Mexico City. Sandokan ruminated uneasily in the front seat of the first Jeep. “We had to leave nearly seventy men on the boats just because they lacked passports. That’s the last straw.” 60

The administrative red tape, the rational world of the occidentals, did not sit well with him. Even in moments of calm something like a faint halo surrounded him, the aura of desperate charges, of the smell of gunpowder and the fierce battle cries of the Tigers of Malaysia. “Calm down, brother. We were still able to bring more than three hundred,” Yanez said assuredly. “But it cost us thousands of rupees.” “Get it into your head once and for all, that’s how this country is. If you remember the our friend’s letter, it shouldn’t surprise you.” The night filled Sandokan’s eyes and he seemed to be asking himself what he was doing here. When Winnetou’s noble face appeared in the window of the hospital room, and after him Old Shatterhand with his fearsome Henry Carbine and bear-killing rifles, you couldn’t keep your lips from opening in a smile. “And who are they?” Liliana asked you in a whisper. “My brother Winnetou and my brother Old Shatterhand,” you replied, taking in the sight of the two legendary figures of the prairie. “Little brother, we have come a long way at your request,” Old Shatterhand said in Spanish with a guttural accent that did not disguise his German origins. The white man collapsed into an armchair and threw his Stetson hat and saddlebag to the floor. Winnetou, on the other hand (moccasins, fringed leggings, rawhide jacket), slipped into a corner where he sat with his legs crossed, placing across his knees the double-barreled shotgun adorned with silver nails. From the window the stamping of the horses could be heard. At that moment, and the only time during these events, you doubted. Were you going to do it? Were you going to unleash the heroes’ fury upon the powers that be? Would 61

you, a member of the generation of the defeated, be capable of masterminding a victory? The nurse entered the room and after looking with suspicion and disgust at your two guests, she gave you your medicine, waited for you to swallow it, and went out, saving her dull chatter for another time. “Did you come by yourselves?” “You didn’t say anything in your letter, so all we have with us are a dozen Mescalero Apaches. They’re in the park, taking care of the horses and resting. Then, to make sure this was true, you got out of bed and limped toward the window. Liliana gave you her hand and Old Shatterhand supported your elbow. Sure enough, around a fountain where fourteen mustangs were watering, a dozen Mescalero Apaches basked in the sun. Little by little the old men from the nearby old people’s home had left their rooms to share a little of the sun with the Indians, and one was trying to convince them that the horses of Andalucía were better than theirs. And then all doubts were dispelled. “With your help, all hell is going to break loose in this city,” you told your new companions.

62

H as in Hunches

Néstor, I am assuming that it’s just as you say, that strange things happened in Mexico City between January 14 and 26, 1970. At that time I was in the hills of Puebla, doing radio programs on shamanism and witchcraft, and heard nothing about it. Since receiving your letter, I’ve been determined to dig something up, and here are the surprising facts I was able to collect. 1. There were rumors going around that a military coup was going to break. It was said that the general in charge of the Jalisco zone had gotten the trucks and tanks out on the highway, and that they left him behind and he ended up committing suicide. There was also talk of alleged insubordination by Hernández Toledo, the general of Tlatelolco. Lastly, it was rumored that there had been an uprising in Tlaxcala. Rumors and nothing more, impossible to confirm. 2. We know that on the 21st the Cathedral’s bells sounded a call to arms. There are no explanations. 3. I spoke with a buddy at the Science Institute (Rolo Diez) and he told me that on the 18th there was a cloud of ash over the capital. He believes it originated in the Azcapotzalco Refinery. I spoke with the public relations chief of the Azcapotzalco Refinery, and he threw me out as a lunatic. 63

4. The president made no public appearance between the 22nd and the 26th. Not even a register of his audiences at Los Pinos could be found. Later it was said that he had suffered a detached retina. After that, it was rumored that the injury had originated in a lesion resulting from a twenty centavo coin mixed with confetti thrown at him during a parade. Of course, it was also said that a double took his place. If that was true, the double turned out to be as sinister as the original. 5. Channel 2 stopped broadcasting from 11:45 to 1:30 the night of the 24th to the 25th. No explanation was given for the technical failure. 6. I was told there was a shootout in front of the Chamber of Deputies and a “cavalry charge” (sic!) on Calle Luis Moya. I found out about the former in a bar on Bucareli called La Favorita, and the latter from a guy who was so completely drunk he wouldn’t have known the difference between his sister and a horse. 7. Many people have told me about a riot in the Mercado de San Cosme, although no one could say why. Of course the papers said nothing. 8. Your dentist, that crazy Maripi, informed me that she was going out with Dick Turpin, a very nice Englishman, and that she even acted as his chauffeur in a bank robbery. You know Maripi. If she told me she practices witchcraft in the dentist’s chair with López Rega, I’d believe it. 9. I’m beginning to suspect that something strange happened during those days. The final proof was when I asked your friend Liliana, crazy Javier (Bighead’s brother) and Pedro Páramo about it and the three of them acted crazy and went off without answering, becoming more mysterious than Chinese policemen (before Mao Tse-tung). 10. Clear up my doubts. You were here in the capital, right? You didn’t go to Casablanca until the 26th, did you? 64

What was it that happened? If I had known that this crappy city was going to get interesting, I wouldn’t have gone to Puebla. Tell me all about it. René

65

IX Strategy, Infirmary, and Mau Mau

Contrary to what future detractors might suggest, you thought that the insurrection was a very serious thing, and you began your convalescence ready to create an operational master plan, a strategic project that would allow you to sink your teeth into the evil Mexico. It was not enough to enlist the obvious centers of power, along with those not so obvious. You had to trust in the spontaneity of the people (because if you didn’t believe in that, then what the hell could a veteran of ’68 believe in), and to add to it the precision of clockwork, a few touches of humor, a dose of the absurd, and a lot of vengeance. You had to put all the operations together, to link them and give them a purpose. That is why you and your little pencil took advantage of the afternoon to set up the greatest commotion this valley would ever know. Comparable only to the arrival of the bearded centaurs of Andalucía, Castilla, and Extremadura that accompanied Don Hernando Cortés, or to the approach to the presidential chair of Villa and Zapata, or to the earthquake of ’57. To your misfortune, when creating the master plan you discovered that the summoned forces were meager. Besides, you didn’t know for certain who would respond to your call. Because counting must be done on the fingers and not in dreams. 66

The sun beats down on their backs. The pounding of horses’ hooves on the asphalt highway, the soft whistle of Doc Holliday and the rhythm of the six men riding. The highway signs are written in Spanish; the sweat is familiar, that soft tingling of the hands that signals the beginning of an adventure, the nearness of danger. The oiled pistols stuck in their holsters, the rifle hanging from the saddle, the small sawed-off shotgun that the doctor caresses with his black-gloved fingers, reviving its bluish sheen. Morgan scratches his horse’s back and Virgil dreams of the redhead that slept in his bed the last day in Abilene. Bren chews a piece of straw and lets his eyes become one with the parched, arid landscape. Wyatt Earp accompanies Doc Holliday’s song with a soft movement of his head. A Hercules moving van passes them. The driver sticks his head out of the window to fix upon his retinas the image of the six gringo cowboys trotting along at kilometer thirtythree of the Querétaro Highway. A little further on is a wheat field, and there they meet a landless farmer who is working it as a laborer. Circumstances conspired to give you a tranquil afternoon. Neither friends nor hospital personnel had appeared in the room. This was fine so long as you hadn’t needed someone to bring the map of Mexico City over to the bed, but now you rang the bell desperately, trying to convert a nurse into an aide-de-camp. On the third ring, a face dark as night appeared through the half-open door. “Mr. Néstor, I presume?” You nodded and the man entered the room. Behind him another, and then another. At first glance they appeared to be young executives from developing African nations visiting the hospital, but you shrewdly discovered that under67

neath their European vests and well-tailored pants were short machetes, kitchen knives, and razors sharp enough to cut paper. You were among the Mau Mau. The war chief introduced himself as N’Gustro and indicated how the hierarchy functioned in different situations. In conversations on protocol it was necessary to speak in the plural, directing yourself to the war chief, to a man in a leopard-skin cap (whom you learned was the witch doctor when he began poking around in the room, in the medicines, and even in your wound), and a third figure who was not present. For military problems it was necessary to deal with the chief. And problems about dividing the loot were taken up with the accountant, a small African of light complexion named Styron, who took a calculator rapidly from his pocket, clearly eager to introduce himself. Little by little the room began filling with Africans. Several sat at the foot of the bed, observing you and making comments in a musical dialect. And the invasion went far beyond the room: the 450 men of the Mau Mau had entered the maternity ward in the nearby annex, the great window in front of the incubator, the cafeteria downstairs, the little park out front, and even the game room of the old people’s home. After resolving the problems of protocol and evading the delicate subject of dividing the loot, you had managed to direct the conversation to the problem of whether or not they would use war paint on their faces, when a young nurse made her way fearfully through the Mau Mau to bring you two little red pills and a glass of water. Glancing back and forth between the little plate of medicines and the suddenly smiling faces of the Mau Mau, she managed to say, “Are they friends of yours, Néstor?” “Students, students of mine, from when I gave Spanish classes at a school in Kenya,” you replied proudly. 68

Hours later the poster hangers of the Mexican Arena plied their trade by putting up flashy banners throughout the city, announcing the one and only performance in Mexico of the world’s most spectacular troupe of lancers, the Light Brigade. Directly from the Crimea, to the three rings of the Mexican Arena, for one time only and within a week. You slept well, peacefully, filled of that sensation of calmness that comes from knowing you’re not alone in your madness.

69

I as in Inertia

Ah, dearest little Néstor: I am writing you in a free moment between breastfeeding, changing diapers, and preparing bottles for the twins. Imagine me like this, please, just imagine me like this. Not as the woman who existed two years ago but the one I am now, please, Néstor. I don’t know why you remember me now and write me a damned letter with two stupid lines, “Tell me about what we had. What was there between us?” What we had was falling onto each other, just as if we’d fallen on the ground. There was such a huge emptiness around us and around our people that any kind of relationship that went into the bedroom and on interminable walks through that horrid and sickening capital city (how beautiful it had been in ’68 and how shitty the streets and the people and the city were in ’69) seemed like love. Honestly, we might have been better off falling to the ground. Wherever you might be, send a kiss to my sons, to me (the woman you no longer know), even to my husband, Pablo (do you remember Pablo?). 70

What we had was like falling on the ground, and the worst thing is that our butts didn’t smart; something else did. Gloria

71

X Momentous Meeting in the Hospital Room

“May I smoke?” Holmes asked. You nodded. He was an unusually thin man, almost two meters tall. He looked a little like Basil Rathbone, but of course without that ridiculous little hat with which the movies had stereotyped him. Aquiline nose that gave his face a perspicacious look. Solid lower jaw. A dreamy look that fooled the observer who was not able to perceive the tension hidden in his facial muscles. Hands spotted with ink and chemical burns. Now the spark of ingenuity in his gaze. “I understand your wound is much better,” he said, lighting his pipe. A thick, acrid smoke filled the room. “They tell me there’s no danger.” For an instant you and Sherlock contemplated each other in silence. “What is my part in this story?” he asked suddenly. “Stage presence, elegance, the assassination of Díaz Ordaz.” “Strange propositions . . .” “I suppose this is all going to be a little out of the ordinary,” you replied. Sherlock agreed. Once more you both were silent. The jingling of Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday’s spurs in the hospital corridors preceded their arrival. 72

They were impassive men with imposing moustaches, their revolvers hidden in vests covered with loose-fitting black coats; favoring discretion, they had not worn holsters. Myth had given them steely looks, and myth had been right. “Here we are,” Wyatt Earp said. “We were called and here we are.” You reached out your hand from the bed and they both shook it, conveying a feeling of solidarity through the warmth of their grips. Later Dick Turpin arrived, and Sir Richard Bachelord Hynes in his blue cuirassier’s uniform. Doctors and nurses loitered outside the room but didn’t dare to enter. After introductions, the group remained silent, smoking, looking out the window once in a while or going to the bathroom to empty the ashtray that Liliana had stolen from a hotel. It was your moment of glory and the tension would not permit you to enjoy it. Winnetou and Old Shatterhand arrived preceded by murmuring. Their carbines had scandalized the hospital personnel, and you felt obliged to casually say, “They’re part of a movie, you know.” Enigmatic, but sufficient for the doctor to let them in. Finally, Sandokan, Yanez, and Kammamuri made their entrance, and moments later N’Gustro arrived in a state of anguish. “I can’t find them. They’ve disappeared.” From his disconnected talk you were able to determine that to kill time the 450 Mau Mau had gone on a tourist jaunt to Teotihuacán and had gotten lost. “Let’s handle this calmly. They won’t be necessary until tomorrow afternoon,” you said to calm the war chief. You looked around the room, trying to create the necessary pause that precedes great occasions. In the armchair, Holmes placidly smoking his pipe in an aloof manner. In the window, Old Shatterhand and Winnetou, the moral 73

gentlemen of the Southwest, they who had succeeded in going through the white-Indian wars untainted by racism. Near the bathroom door and leaning against the wall, Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday, the fastest guns in the West and ruthlessness personified. Seated at the foot of the bed, smoking and smiling, Yanez de Gomera, stolid but nevertheless passionate, a mastermind of anti-colonial resistance in the Malaysian seas. Next to him, Sandokan, the Tiger. Sitting on the floor, Kammamuri and Tremal Naik, calmly waiting. And against the wall next to the door, seated on three stools the hospital staff had provided, Dick Turpin, the commander of the Light Brigade, and the war chief of the missing Mau Mau. It wasn’t a bad team. “Well, gentlemen, this is all about taking power,” you said.

74

J as in Justification

The truth is, I don’t have it. I gave it to you, you lost it, I lost it, I gave it to that skinny girl I was so in love with. But in view of the fact that our friends here say you’re rebuilding something important (they say it because of the variety of mail you’re sending and receiving), I’ll redo it for you. The Motives of the Revolution That Néstor is Plotting For us there is no longer any consolation in truths: we burnt the pages of the manual in the torches we made loneliness with cooking recipes we created sensation out of multitudes we learned to think: Fatherland without the word becoming full of cherubim marching to the beat of the national anthem. We discovered a country and we accrued our debts. Wasn’t it something like that? Warmly, René Mexico City, Colonia del Valle, April ’70 75

XI Concerning the Insurrection

At dawn the following day, the inhabitants of Mexico City saw “a spike of fire, a flame like an aurora; it showed itself as if it were dripping, as if it were piercing the sky.” Hours later a rain of ash fell on the Azcapotzalco neighborhood. Both events went unnoticed by the majority, and those who did see them were convinced of their accidental nature by the midday television commentators. But other signs were in the wind, perhaps not as visible as the first two but equally portentous. A little before two-thirty a couple of men in masks, decked out in red coats embroidered in gold and white, burst into the room where the bell ringer of the cathedral was sleeping and, after threatening him with eighteenthcentury pistols stolen from who knows what museum or stall in Lagunilla, forced him to ring the alarm bell. Then, just as they had arrived, they disappeared. Half an hour later, to top off that morning of strange situations, three hundred lancers on horseback departed from the open area in front of the Museum of Anthropology and traveled at an easy trot down the Paseo de la Reforma. On arriving in front of the U.S. Embassy, one of them opened a sack that he had hanging from the saddle horn, 76

took out a dead pig and threw it in front of the railing at the entrance. A Colombian tourist who photographed the scene sold the photo to Time-Life for six hundred dollars. Around four in the afternoon it started to rain. Hours later the insurrection began.

77

K as in Kulture

Enclosed is the little notebook of quotes that the brothers and sisters gathered together and that only I took the trouble to copy down in the past year. Frankly, I forgot what we meant to do with it. I pass it along because you reminded me of it. It’s both a manual for survival in the jungle of the capital and a course in local philosophy. Warmly, René There, too, we died again. Alejandro Cendejas Armando Manzanero began his fight for good taste at a very early age. Back cover of a Capitol record album Only the chastity I was able to maintain throughout this whole period enabled me to persist in my task without a loss of health. José Vasconcelos, Minister of Public Education, 1921–1924 Comrade life, let us march faster. V. Mayakovsky 78

But let’s return to this atmospheric violence, this violence rippling under the skin. Frantz Fanon Facts are what decide, not illusions. We intend to show the face and not the mask. Leon Trotsky The conscience is wiser than science. Batman, in the Editorial Novaro translation

Tokyo (AP). Juan Máximo Martínez, Mexico’s best distance runner, was in a bad mood due to his defeats in a series of races in Japan, according to a report in Hochi Shimbun, Japan’s most widely circulated sports daily. The races were of little consequence and it is inexplicable why Martínez, one of the best runners in the ’68 Olympics in Mexico, should be so dejected. The reason, according to Hochi Shimbun, is that Martínez had promised President Gustavo Díaz Ordaz that he would win the events. Martínez took second place in the five-kilometer event in Hiroshima and also second place in the ten-kilometer run during the Carnival in Kobe on April 29. According to the daily, the Mexican president had promised to install running water and electricity in Martínez’s house upon his return to Mexico City. The Japanese daily added that after the race Martínez just looked at the ground and didn’t even wipe off the sweat. The saddened runner smiled only when he spoke of the Mexican tracks with synthetic surfacing. He said with pride that in Mexico there were six such tracks, and he wondered how it was possible that in Japan, 79

where everyone had running water and color television, there were none. I am not dead there and then. I am alive here and now. Luis Martín Santos One can also be a scoundrel from loneliness, from sleepiness, from fatigue. Jorge Enrique Adoum Be silent and smile, nothing is the same. Ángel González Three items about the wind: 1.

The wind blows where it wishes. You hear its voice, but you don’t know where it comes from or where it goes John 3:8

2.

You are wind, nothing more, when you complain You are wind if you roar or if you murmur, Wind if you approach, wind if you depart Vicente Riva Palacio

3.

I am tired of chasing the wind. Pierre Schoendoerffer

Pornoproverbs He who carries a good stick is bound to leave you a memory Don’t blow a gift horse’s trumpet 80

Guadalajara on a plain, and you will eat my prickly pear You snooze, you lose; go and fuck your mother Neither love nor weariness nor loneliness nor the wind can shelter us now, not even from ourselves P.I. . . . all these signs and others by which the natives’ end and demise were foretold, because they said the end must come (. . .) and new people had to be created. Muñoz Camargo, History of Tlaxcala

81

XII Concerning the Insurrection (II)

When the three school buses and the Social Security Jeep stopped in front of the barracks, the sentry stretched himself and gave them a bored look. It was only three school buses and a Jeep full of Malaysians and Dayaks armed to the teeth. A jícama vendor, who turned out to be the only credible witness, observed how a group of men (“like Indians, from India? No, like from Oaxaca, but with nasty expressions”) lowered a bronze cannon from one of the trucks. “There’s no parking here. This is a military zone,” the sentry said to Sandokan and Yanez, who were getting out of the Jeep. The Tiger of Malaysia was dressed in red velvet pantaloons of and a black silk shirt, his long hair tied with a red band at the forehead. Yanez, with two Colts in his belt, looked at the sentry with a smile. Sandokan drew a Malay kris and placed its point, poisoned with upas juice, at the throat of the sentry who, without thinking, let his M-1 fall to the ground. “Forward, my Tigers!” Sandokan cried, answered with howls of fury and jubilation. Then a firestorm was unleashed. The earth boiled. Pistol in hand, the Tiger directed the lead combat units, throwing sticks of dynamite that destroyed buildings and casemates. 82

Kammamuri led a group of Tigers that climbed the water towers and from there acted as sharpshooters, killing all the soldiers who tried to mount a resistance. Blood gushed from a thousand wounds as the horde covered the installations of Military Camp Number One with fire and lead. The embers were still glowing in the military zone when Dick Turpin — heading the group of his six faithful companions: Peters, Batanero, Tomás Rey, Moscarda, Pat, and the Knight of Malta — burst into the Chamber of Deputies with pistols drawn and, in place of the traditional “Your money or your life,” ordered the upright public servants to take off their pants. In the midst of the confusion this provoked, with pants dragging on the ground, the Forty-Seventh Legislature paraded down Calle de Donceles, guarded by seven masked gunmen, who led them to an unknown fate. The official republic had still not recovered from the disorder when the forces of the Army of Reconquest, as they had been christened, delivered their next blow. Just before eleven, Old Shatterhand and Winnetou, armed with their mighty carbines, began to shoot at the Offices of the State Judicial Police, causing disorder among police officers and onlookers. If this were not enough, a half hour later, six hundred riders left the Mexican Arena in perfect formation and with lances at the ready. After a wild ride through the Doctores neighborhood and the city center, they charged the barracks of the riot police, located on Calle de Victoria. A commander of this illustrious corps, after the first surprise, tried to mount a defense and placed two ranks of riot police in the street, who with Mausers and tear gas launchers tried to block the second charge. The brigade 83

started its advance at a slow trot, then began to accelerate, its lances pointed at the blue chests of the forces of law and order. The clatter of the horses’ hooves mixed with the sounds of shots and the dry explosions of gas bombs that flew toward the lancers. In the midst of a cloud of gas and smoke, the charge broke through the ranks of the riot police. The lances skewered bodies, strung the police like beads, and hurled the sad remains against the electronics stores on Calle de Victoria. Tearful but content, the area’s inhabitants began throwing flowerpots and pieces of furniture from their windows at the fleeing police. A third charge was unnecessary. The last action of the day sent a surge of rumors through the city. It was said that the president of the republic had died during a reception at Los Pinos, that he had been attacked by a ferocious black mastiff whose eyes shot fire. The mastiff, which a British gentleman had brought to the reception, leapt at the throat of the first magistrate, ripping it apart with a single bite. It was said that the president’s last words were, “Oh, shit.” Two things preoccupied you: that the Mau Mau were still lost in Teotihuacán, and that the moment would soon arrive when you would know whether the noble and loyal people of Mexico City would join the insurrection or remain as observers of such incredible events. You had been kept informed of all this and more throughout the first day of combat. Contacts came and went between the sanatorium and the battlefronts, and you logged and sent out orders to the forces scattered throughout the city. In the meantime, you ordered the execution by firing squad of the owner of the television networks, and in remembrance of the shootings on the Cerro de las Campanas you 84

placed the news manager to his right and the director of children’s programming to his left. As an appropriate finish to a day filled with sensations, emotions, and triumphs, during the night the deputies were thrown into the Gran Canal sewage system.

85

L as in Legend

Letter to the Great Néstor, from little Laura (dated the middle of 1970 in the capital, written in the Roma neighborhood on a sunny day): They tell me you write letters and notes to friends asking them to tell you their stories, to send you news clippings and to tell you about themselves. You haven’t asked me for anything, and that’s why I dared to write. If you had asked me for something, I would’ve been paralyzed and would never have been able to put two words together. I’m going to tell you how the Great Néstor looked from the viewpoint of little Laura. Remember little Laura? Remember how you would pat me on the back and give me chocolates and novels by Simone de Beauvoir when I went to your house and told you that nobody loved me? Remember how you complained bitterly that I had adopted you as a father figure and spattered your shirts with foolish tears every other week? Maybe that’s why I’m the only one who can tell you the legend of the great Néstor. The Great Néstor never cried. When it appeared that he was going to cry, he raised his eyes and looked at you, all serious and grim for a while, and then he smiled. He never cried in public and, from what I found out from Gloria, not in private either (not in private with her, anyway). And at 86

least according to René and Paco Ignacio, he never cried when he was drunk. The Great Néstor was helpful, had studied medicine for three years, and knew how to treat colds and tonsillitis. He could distinguish between menstrual cramps and stomachache and knew how to inject antibiotics (at sixteen this was as close as I could get to you). This was why we liked him so much, because in addition to reading poetry and organizing flash protests, he was practical. The Great Néstor was strong. He was always ready to listen to us and love us from a distance. I suppose that had something to do with his having more free time than we had; his days lasted longer (did you really sleep less than other mortals?). He always had time to walk around with us, or read what René had written, or edit a pamphlet, or work and earn a little money. The Great Néstor was strong and lasted a long time (like Mimi lollipops). It was said that the Great Néstor made decisions and turned them into deeds. This was important for us mortals, who filled notebooks with projects that were never finished and drew up lists of plans knowing they would die on paper. One day the Great Néstor decided to be a yellow journalist, left the house, and returned three days later with the job and his first article. The Great Néstor decided to stop smoking for a month and threw his butt out the window, and I swear he picked it up thirty-one days later. He decided to leave the organization, went to the cell meeting and said, “I’m leaving. This doesn’t work, and I can’t explain it to you.” And he hugged everyone and left. The Great Néstor was tough, didn’t wear an undershirt, ate junk food, read not only what he liked but also “what needed to be read,” never asked favors, was punctual, could go all day without speaking, shaved himself every day (without soap, dry). 87

The Great Néstor was a legend. In 1968 he had stood up to the riot police in La Ciudadela, to punches, to rocks, and to clubs. But, above all, the Great Néstor had a magnetic smile . . . After spending an afternoon holed up in silence in a corner, he was able to get up, look at us, and smile, as if sharing a great discovery. These are the things I tell some of his friends. The legend of the Great Néstor. That I can tell it to you, too, shows that I am eighteen now. Don’t be sad. Don’t feel lonely. Laura

88

XIII Judicial Police and Musketeers

The fat one entered first. He stared at you and a cat-like smile appeared underneath his Pancho Villa moustache. “Morning,” he said. After him, the pockmarked one, wearing an ample navy blue shirt with a zipper. He looked at the bed with an air of boredom, lifting his eyes slowly toward you. They paused when they met your eyes and continued upward, as if he had lost what little interest he might have had. The mustached fat one sat down at the foot of the bed, obliging you to pull in your feet. “Let me guess,” you said. “Lottery ticket salesmen? A romantic duo? Assistants of Nacho Trelles?” “Let him have it,” the pockmarked one said without looking at you. The fat one flashed his feline smile, ambled toward the head of the bed, and without any warning took a squad pistol out of his belt and destroyed the bottle of serum with the butt. The pieces of glass dotted your pillow. “You don’t hit wounded people. You’re a real ass, Malpica,” the fat one said to the pockmarked one. Once again that feeling along the spine, that fierce tickling, constriction, that rose through the vertebrae. The pockmarked one inspected the levers and cranks at 89

the foot of the bed and began to turn them. The lower end of the bed squeaked as it raised up higher and higher. You placed a hand over your wound as if to protect it. The guy cranked the other handle, lifting the head if the bed. You felt the bed’s mechanisms sandwiching your body. Meanwhile the fat one opened the drawers of the night table, dumping the maps, pencils, books, medicines, and notebooks on the floor. You jerked out the serum needle just out of spite, and threw it in the pockmarked man’s face. “What bad manners,” he remarked. Just at that moment the night nurse opened the door and watched in terror what was happening. “What are those gentlemen doing?” she exclaimed. “Judicial Police,” answered the fat one, showing a wallet with a shiny metal badge. The pockmarked one wasted no time in giving explanations and, taking her by the arm, threw her in the armchair. “What’s your name, sweetheart?” the fat one asked the terrified nurse, whose fright was giving way to anger. “Silvia Singer. I am the night nurse in charge.” “Uh, what good nights the sickies must have here.” “Consider yourselves deceased,” you said suddenly, trying to adjust yourself in the contortionist’s bed. One of the pieces of a serum bottle had cut your cheek and you were bleeding. “He’s a macho Mexican,” the fat one said. “They just told us to get him ready and stay here until the Major arrived. Don’t get all excited,” added the pockmarked one, whose slimy look kept the nurse pinned to the armchair. The fat one scratched his chin with the sight of his pistol. 90

“You wouldn’t have some ice and glasses around here by any chance?” the fat one asked the nurse. The nurse stared at him. “This is a hospital, you fat slob,” she replied. The pockmarked one went over to her and slapped her. “Don’t speak that way to Sergeant Robledo.” “Calm down, Malpica,” the fat one said. The door opened again and a man attired in a plumed hat and crimson velvet cape entered the room. After him came two others in similar dress. The fat one could only look at them in surprise. They left no time for him to raise his pistol. The first opened his cape and there flashed a two-hand sword of Toledo steel. The subsequent thrust cleanly pierced the neck of Sergeant Robledo. The pockmarked one started to turn away, but the nurse kicked him in the balls with such good aim that he doubled over. When he tried to lift his head, three inches of steel ran through his chest. Athos cleaned his sword on the pockmarked one’s shirt. “Tell Aramis to come in,” said the man who had entered the room first, giving you an enchanting smile. “These things should not be happening in a hospital,” the nurse said, clearly herself once more. “We must get out of here, gentlemen. The situation may become untenable at any moment,” Aramis said upon entering the room. “There are more gunmen in the entrance to the hospital and one at the end of the hall.” D’Artagnan helped you out of bed. The nurse came up and tried to clean the cut on your cheek. “What are you doing here?” you asked. “The odor of all this can be smelled for thousands of leagues, sir,” Porthos replied. 91

“Miss, quickly, a stretcher,” Athos said, and with a magnificent gesture swung his cape to hide his face and leave his sword free. “Where are we going?” “To a safe place.” The nurse winked at Aramis.

92

M as in Movement (The Following Year, Told Another Year Later)

You drive me completely up the wall. I realize I have to reconstruct events according to your strange needs; and you must have strange needs in a place like Casablanca, Morocco, because otherwise what the hell are you doing there? But to require me to remember the ’68 Movement as seen from the viewpoint of ’69, and now ’70, seems like madness. I swear that if it drives me crazy, it will be my own fault more than yours. Some people think that understanding something allows them to put it away in a box of nicely arranged memories and leave it there. These are the asses who think that a ghost can be exorcised by inviting it to dinner and making it use a napkin and a place setting. I know several people who spent ’69 in sleeplessness. I believe I was one of those who allowed anguish to follow them and change them. I changed in ’69. Wouldn’t you say so? No shit, it was ’68 that changed me, but I changed in ’69. I became disagreeable. I became more calculating in emotional things. I learned to be afraid of emotions. You also withdrew inside yourself, as if by building a shell you could preserve the valor of ’68, which threatened to escape from our bodies. 93

Typical dialogue between you and me in ’69: Me: What are you doing this afternoon? You: Who knows? Me: You bought tickets for the movie? You: I think so. Me: Don’t be a stuck-up asshole. You: Yes, yes, I bought them. Me: How many? How many did you buy? You: Two, I bought two. Me: Why the hell did you buy two tickets to the movies if you don’t have anyone to go with? You (smiling): Because if I gave you one, you’d just complain bitterly. Me: Fuck it, go yourself. You: No, you go. I don’t feel like it. I want to stay and read. Me: Which theater? You: I don’t know . . . At the Diana, at the Cine Diana. Me: What’s showing? You: Who knows? Me: You bought tickets at the Diana because you were walking the route of our demonstrations from last year, and since there was no demonstration you were stuck, and not wanting your paranoid mother to ask what you were doing there you got in line and bought two tickets. You: And how do you know, or how did you think up that story? Me: Because I bought tickets at Cine Chapultepec. You: How many? Me: Two. You: Who are you going with? Me: I don’t know. I think I’m going to stay and read. You: And what’s showing at the Chapultepec? Me: Who knows? 94

You: With what we spent on tickets we could have bought beer. Me: This just goes to show how shitty this year has turned out for us. There was a feeling. A feeling that could be described in any number of ways, and there was a bunch of memories. A feeling and a bunch of memories. A feeling as if you were just about to take something in your hand and it got away: water, a veil, a shadow. A feeling as if the heart were going to burst and ring like a bell, and you within the multitude. A feeling that everything had intensified. Damn, what a rotten way of mythicizing, of longing for something. Nostalgia by the bulldozer-load. Was it really like that? Or has it turned out that the memory of ’68 as seen from ’69 is extremely-fucking-mystified in ’70. The truth is that we had been numerous, heroic, honorable, responsible, supportive, sympathetic, red, giddy. At least that’s what we thought of ourselves, or wanted to think, or wanted our enemies, our detractors, our parents to think. But that was in ’69. In ’68 we had no time to think of such bullshit. A hundred and twenty-three days of general strike. Schools taken. Demonstrations, brigades, street sieges, meetings in Lecumberri, gunshots. All the walls of the city painted in a single day. Retreats, advances. Power, revolution. This damned letter is distressing me. I don’t know what the hell would make you think that now, in ’70, I can start looking back without being filled with the same wretched sadness. Listen, damn you, Néstor. Why don’t you come back and we’ll try going out in the streets again, with a sandwich board that says “Death to bad government.” You and me alone. And the others, if we can find anyone around. 95

We’ll do it and get rid of all this shit, all this nostalgia, all this survivor guilt, all this guilt for having been beaten. I leave you. I’m going to finish smoking the cigarette I started (so as not to leave it half finished), and I’m going out in the street to see if I can find a companion who wants to come drink vermouth at my house and then sleep with me. I hope I can find one of the good ones, who doesn’t get scared if she wakes up in the middle of the night and finds you whimpering, hugging the pillow. See ya later, dude. Paco Ignacio

96

XIV Concerning the Insurrection (III)

Headquarters had been moved to the center of the city. From the top floor of the Torre Latinoamericana, in an improvised field hospital attended by a Canadian doctor who had showed up in the early morning hours and introduced himself as Norman Bethune, your fingers kept the insurrection going, holding the pencil that raced over the notebooks, checking events and issuing orders. When the Mau Mau appeared at the Hotel Reforma first thing in the morning, you put them to use unleashing a lightning attack on Lecumberri Prison, which had ended with the hanging of the director and jailors and the freeing of political and common prisoners alike. A little later Doc Holliday and the Earp brothers had climbed the stairs of the Federal Security offices, firing a cloud of deadly lead and sowing their path with agents’ bodies. Doc Holliday’s sawed-off shotgun and the Earp brothers’ Colts coldly opened terrifying paths of fire. Miraculously unscathed, they reappeared once again in the doorway, followed by clouds of smoke and echoing gunshots, leaving 107 dead police behind them. The restaurant on the floor below agreed to provide us with food and beverages under threat from a group of Tigers, who acted as escort for headquarters. While the rest ate, you 97

watched Holmes as he went around the balconies searching the city below for some sign, some clue. “The fires haven’t started, have they?” “Not yet,” the English detective replied. “Don’t worry, it shouldn’t be long until the riot breaks out.” “What makes you so sure?” “I know these people. It’s impossible for chaos of this magnitude to break out without everyone wanting to get involved. We Mexicans are hot-blooded,” you concluded. “And that, what’s that?” Sherlock said, pointing to the beginning of Avenida Juárez. You didn’t have to run to one of the little telescopes mounted on the handrail to confirm what you already knew: down Avenida Juárez came the front of a procession of four hundred thousand demonstrating students.

98

N as in Novels

Néstorazo: How did you remember? It’s just like you to recall Signs in the Wind. It was my nighttime obsession and I often forced you to share it, obliging you to keep quiet while I banged away on the Olivetti I’d inherited from my uncle. But how did you remember I’d begun it seven times before chickening out? It was the novel of beginnings. Every time I started out full of good intentions, and the following day I’d read what I’d written and be disheartened because I didn’t know what to put next. It was a bad year for writing about the previous year. All material that goes into literature should be allowed to cool. I have never been able to write while stories were still hot. One has to let the bonfire go out before walking on the ashes. Maybe one of these days — if militancy makes any time for me it will be jail or retirement — I may be able to write that novel about ’69 and all of us. Maybe. In the meantime I’m sending you photocopies of the beginnings of Signs in the Wind and keeping the originals for myself. Just in case. Affectionately, Paco Ignacio P.S. You’ve already told me how the sun is. Now tell me what the moon is like. 99

P.P.S. I reread them. I don’t believe I’ll ever write about the past year. The memories are fading. Something inside my head is trying to wipe away that sad year. A Pelican eraser conspires against my nostalgia. My head emptied itself of stories and all that remains is a vague feeling that turns into synthetic, empty words about the year of our defeat. I will not be able to write about this. Signs in the Wind By Paco Ignacio Taibo II CHAPTER 1 What the hell was I doing in those days? What days? Those days, the ones before. Before, certainly, before. Then. I was going in circles around the keyboard, the roof, the block, nighttime walks, around a novel, a woman I had lost in another country, nights, around the Party (the building of ), loneliness, the Committee for the Faculty’s Struggle, silence, and around the mirror. And I was going around like a madman. Signs in the Wind By Paco Ignacio Taibo II CHAPTER 1 Having eaten a pile of pork tacos with my grandparents, I thought for some reason that instead of taking a siesta I would sit down awhile and write. It was Sunday and I had been sitting in front of the window trying to find a thread to start a page (it didn’t matter what: a poem, a soap opera episode I was working on, a caption for a photo, a course in Latin, whatever came). Sitting down and getting up, I had washed dirty glasses, put on and taken off records, drunk 100

Coca-Cola and a glass of somewhat acidic wine, and I had cleaned the ashtrays and filled them with butts. As for writing, nothing, not even the last lines of my completed works were coming out. It was Sunday and this was more apparent after the meal. That was evident. Through the window I saw the closed shops, the kids playing touch football, some couples, the light of Sunday afternoon. As for writing, nothing. I was becoming disconsolate (which is what happens at writing desks when you can’t write) when the telephone rang and I said to myself, “Great!” In two somersaults I reached the telephone, took down the receiver, and said, “Mansion of the author of this novel . . .” Signs in the Wind By Paco Ignacio Taibo II CHAPTER 1 Night and wind between the teeth. Gentle breeze, nice; pleasant solitude accompanies the flight of your powerful bike; 58 kilos/20 years of animal drive. Night. Night — street empty across the entire width, the whirring of both wheels polishing the asphalt. Miguel hunching over, pricking up an ear approaching the corners to pick up the noise of automobiles. Nothing. Empty streets. Miguel on the bicycle, pedaling: strong and smooth, making S’s and little jumps, letting himself go. Night. Night. Night of stars? No, night without stars, silent. The air hits his sweaty neck and Miguel thinks, “Miguel Strogoff, the czar’s mail courier, not in the capital but on the steppes of the Caucasus, ready to desert and join Putilov’s division of Red Guards, serving under Lev Davidovich.” 101

Arriving at Glorieta Popocatépetl, he realizes that the fountain is broken. A few meters further on he brakes. He approaches the doorbell of an old apartment building and rings. He waits. It’s three in the morning. The Red Mail has arrived. Signs in the Wind By Paco Ignacio Taibo II CHAPTER 1 We will end up inventing another city, another country, and will walk with it stuck between our eyebrows, fixing the vision before our eyes. Close yet ungraspable, distant. Shopworn words will recover their meanings: background, mirage, in the distance, there in the distance, slope, abyss, perhaps wind. We will walk the streets like those possessed: disconnected, alienated, frank, and determined, the truly insane of the internment hospitals that the city has made immense. And it will be inevitable. We will be the guardians, the keepers of our memory and our city. We will wind up carrying an M-l, flickering our fingers over the edge of the trigger with our conscience resting in the sights, our gaze placed paternally on the lone bullet in the chamber. Ready to shoot it out with the first one who deserves it. Ready to die in name of that new city, that new country we invented (always to our regret, always to our shame, with a certain fear of faith and hope, which is necessary, however damaging) in a lapse in judgment that became set in all those years. Signs in the Wind By Paco Ignacio Taibo II CHAPTER 1 It was the month of June in the city. I know what I’m telling you. I was coming back to you out of loneliness, out of jadedness, and in an airplane. 102

The aircraft flew above the patch of lights, the carpet of fires drawn out of the darkness. The flight attendant spoke your name and I sniffled, hiding my tears, while an elderly Englishwoman at my side finished her last gin. “From here, are you from here?” she asked kindly. I looked at the city there below, which I didn’t end up loving or understanding well but to which I was returning. Signs in the Wind By Paco Ignacio Taibo II CHAPTER 1 I will walk across the plaza slowly. The wind will dance in my ears, a lock of hair will be tossed back as if by an undertow; my eyes will measure the little paving stones, seeking the plaza’s dimensions. The plaza of the fallen, a year later. Somewhere around here the last molecules of our dead brothers are scattered. In my head dance the visions of dreams, the bluish images of nightmares: the shoes lined up, the bodies lined up, the tanks lined up; the flares that began the massacre burning in the wind, as if scratching the air, as if making a scar where the scar is, where the blushing lips of the wound still await a cure. I will walk in silence, slowly, well beyond the sounds of traffic, of the guitar recital that is heard in the morning. I will walk slowly, thinking that there is the meeting place, the point where all of us encounter each other. Signs in the Wind By Paco Ignacio Taibo II CHAPTER 1 You mean that one, the one that’s so ugly, so screwed in advance, with so few opportunities? You mean that is me, that pink spot with the pointy ass and the reddish nose? So despicably well-behaved, wrapped in a blue blanket and 103

with clean diapers? You mean that one? That one? Miguel for always. Miguel since a few hours after the first day. That one, Miguel, the one in the third incubator, the one divided between smiling, growling, and crying with all his heart. No, he is not ugly; he’s adorable. Premature? Yes, a sevenmonths baby. The red nose, some bruises on his body. A boy? Of course a boy, the first. Miguel crying, Miguel being fed by efficient, aloof nurses, Miguel somewhere between the shadows and the lights. Miguel: an inexpressive look since January 11, 1949, that watches from behind the windows of the incubator room. First discovery: Am I a boy or a girl? A boy, fantastic! Miguel, who does not sense that twenty years later he will walk through the plaza of the dead, searching in the air . . .

104

XV Organized Forces and Those Who Go It Alone

From a balcony of the multi-family Juárez apartments, Winnetou incites the neighbors. Three, five thousand, eight thousand neighbors, increasing in number and applauding the spirit of the insurrection. Yanez confers with tenants from the Merced, and D’Artagnan debates with three thousand railway workers from atop a train car at Pantaco Terminal. The insurrection seems to be approaching a decisive moment. The Mau Mau attack the María Isabel Sheraton and the Presidente de Hamburgo, but they’re not alone. Over the entire city descend hordes of the nameless. They come down from Cerro de Guadalupe, along the highway from Toluca, and from El Molinito; they come by forced march along the Puebla Expressway, and leave the suburbs of the Texcoco basin; they come from the sand pits of Santa Fe and the Tlalnepantla industrial zone. In columns of hundreds of thousands they come down from Indios Verdes. They are the transient workers from Santa Clara, from Xalostoc, from San Juanico, from the 14½ kilometer marker, from Tulpetlac, from all of Ecatepec. Those who have burns and wounds from unsafe industrial equipment, those dismissed in December so they wouldn’t have to be 105

paid their Christmas bonuses, those who work a sixty-hour week but are paid for fifty-six, those robbed of their union dues over the last fifteen years, those who were fired for wanting to form an independent union, those the Barapem police squad unjustly fined on payday. They are the hordes armed with old pieces of iron, pipes, and steel rods; and if the weapons are rusty, so much the better. Contaminated by industrial fumes, full of dust from the most eroded areas of Mexico City. Smiling ferociously, however, as always. They come to the city to join the Tigers of Malaysia, who have erected barricades in Reforma Norte so as to resist the Presidential Guard’s tank assault. Some go off on their own and attack the Puerto de Liverpool department store. Looting the National Bank of Mexico, Wyatt Earp fills his saddlebags and those of his companions with crisp bills, centenario gold pieces, and silver coins. It is said that the general who gave the order to fire at Tlatelolco has fallen in combat. It is said that the governor of the Federal District, in a desperate attempt to halt the insurrection, has ordered the poisoning of all sources of potable water in Mexico City. The forces of reconquest don’t give a shit, however, because they invaded the bottling plants and are happily consuming the soft drinks in great gulps. The fires make the afternoon air reddish and smoky. Authority is breaking down. To great applause the Light Brigade charges against the antiriot police. Along San Juan de Letrán horses’ hooves thunder on the asphalt. The onlookers applaud, shout cheers, the lances descend. The police let off a few timid shots, (so that it could be said they put up some sort of fight) and then scatter and flee. 106

People shout all over the city, honk their horns, dance in the streets, and throw confetti. The street vendors have a field day. It grows dark.

107

O as in Outcasts

My dear Néstor, Paco gave me your address and your message. I never knew that you had left Mexico. I was aware of the stab wound you got working for the newspaper, but that was all. Now Paco comes and tells me I should write to you in Casablanca to report on how the gang is doing. When going over the group of friends from ’68, I realized that your situation, going and letting yourself get stabbed and then shoving off for Casablanca, fell within the norm. Look at the rest. Rolando works in a dairy farm in Puebla. He got married and is going to be a father. I heard that he’s reading like crazy (science fiction!). He’s a technician and although he says he wants nothing to do with politics, I was told he’s working under the radar to organize a union with the farm laborers there. Who knows? You know as much or more than I do of Paco. He quit the group in which he was politically active and wrote a novel that four publishers rejected. He earns his living in the strangest ways (he does fotonovelas and writes radio programs that are transmitted to doctors via closed circuit). He got married and separated six months later, deceived and beaten, he says. He goes between euphoria and depression 108

(more euphoria than depression, as you might expect with him). He doesn’t want to hear anything about the student movement. He says that if he begins, he begins from zero and in union work (does such a thing even exist?). Marta committed suicide at the beginning of 1970. She left a note that no one could understand; then she got into bed and swallowed a box of pills. Germán disappeared. There’s a rumor going around that he’s training in Korea. Paco Ceja went back to being a professional student. In the mornings in economics, and he’s just started anthropology in the afternoons. He goes from one failed relationship to another (the optimistic bastard says he will learn from experience). He writes stories that he shows to no one and is getting a few gray hairs. Mario Núñez lives in France or Switzerland. That’s all I know about him. I imagine him in a big overcoat, working at a gas station or playing the harmonica in the Paris Metro. Luis Lobato went off on a scholarship to study in Italy. Maria Helena left literature and is studying to become a nurse. She says that she wants to do something useful. She remains politically engaged as if her life depended on it, now in housing struggles. It seems to be the only way for those who want to stay active but avoid the insularity of the traditional political groups. “The Werewolf” got a job with CONACYT. He’s still committed to studying philosophy and walks around the campus with a huge stack of books under his arm. I’m sure he’ll make it. At least a doctorate. In that flight from Nezahualcóyotl that began in his adolescence, there can’t be any other goal except the Sorbonne. I don’t know who else. If I take everyone and add it up, it seems like we’re in a period of transition. Everyone is gone but nobody has finished going. Everyone has guilt 109

but no way of explaining it. Something will have to happen. And with a little luck, we’ll even return and get together again. Warm regards, Rogelio Vizcaíno

110

XVI To Return

While you button your shirt for the first time in a month, and while you tie your shoelaces for the first time in a month, you look out the window. The city is always the same, you think. The day is gray. You wouldn’t have expected it to be that way. It’s slightly cold. Liliana doesn’t hold you with her gaze as she smokes, sitting in the gray plastic chair where Dick Turpin was just a few hours earlier. Putting on a black turtleneck, you slide your fingers over the place where your scar is, proof that all this happened, that not everything was false. At the entrance to the sanatorium a Red Taxi is waiting. “And what are you going to do now?” Liliana asks, not knowing whether to get in or say goodbye to you and these days together. “I don’t know.” “Are you going somewhere?” “Yes, to Casablanca.” Liliana gets in after you; the taxi pulls out. Soon it will begin to rain. Through the window of the taxi comes the noise of horses’ hooves, the dull echo of shots from Malay carbines, the clash of swords. “Why? Why Casablanca?” “To return someday.” 111

Appendix One Clarifications About Some Characters

Baskervilles, Hound (of the). Dog, as its name indicates. Main character in the novel of the same name by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Extraordinarily endowed with a ferocious bite. Its relationship with Sherlock Holmes dates back to the aforementioned book. Bethune, Norman. Communist doctor from Canada. He lent his knowledge to the Republican side during the Spanish Civil War and later to the Chinese Revolutionary Army. Died in 1942. Mao Tse-tung wrote a short account of him, “In Memory of Norman Bethune,” and there is a biography in English titled The Scalpel, the Sword. D’Artagnan, Aramis, Athos, Porthos. The four musketeers who are paradoxically known as three. Alexandre Dumas père made use of the memoirs of the first of these in crafting one of the most notable sagas in the history of the adventure novel. They lived in seventeenth-century France and served successively under Louis XIII and Louis XIV, with varying fortunes. More chaotic than consistent in ideological matters. Ranked number one with the sword and cape. Earp, Wyatt. Sheriff of Dodge City and Abilene in the middle of the nineteenth century. Went down in history for the duel at the OK Corral. Gentleman of the Colt. 113

Earp, Virgil, Morgan, James, and Bren. Brothers of the aforementioned. Their quickness on the draw and filial love include them in this story. Gomera, Yanez de. Blood brother of Sandokan and creation of Emilio Salgari. Portuguese by birth, international renegade by choice. Politically a pure anti-imperialist. Specialist in dirty tricks. Sagacity and elegance. See the entry on Sandokan. Holliday, Doc. Doc as in Doctor. Companion to the previously mentioned Earps. Many romantic legends surround him, viewing him variously as an early advocate of voluntary abortion or as a precocious member of the dispossessed. Any story of the Wild West will remark upon his black clothes, his silent presence, and his sawed-off shotgun. Holmes, Sherlock. English detective of the nineteenth century, creation of Conan Doyle. Despite his suspicious relations with the nobility (see “A Scandal in Bohemia” and “The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet”), his extreme personal behavior places him nearer the revolutionary: abstainer, misogynist, virtuoso violinist, morphine addict, specialist in the most absurd things (tobacco ashes and London mud), exceptional shot with a revolver. Approximate age at the time he enters our story, forty-five. For additional information see above all The Sign of Four and A Study in Scarlet. Light Brigade, The. Is remembered for its absurd charge in the Battle of Balaclava, where Russian cannons decimated it. It has become synonymous with absurd military tactics that combine arrogance with a disdain for common sense. Mau Mau. Twentieth-century tribal sect, originating in Kenya and deeply involved in the anti-colonial rebellion against the English, beginning in 1949. It was exterminated in a fiery bloodbath. The leaders of postcolo114

nial reformism such as Jomo Kenyatta renounced it and did away with those who had been saved from the white police. Sandokan. Prince of Borneo. Ruler of the Island of Mompracem, general headquarters of The Tigers of Malaysia, friendly pirates who tried to bring a halt to Anglo-Dutch colonialism in the Indian Ocean and the South Pacific. Tempered in a thousand battles, wounded in a hundred duels. See The Mystery of the Black Jungle, The Tigers of Mompracem, The Pirates of Malaysia, The Two Tigers, The King of the Sea, (from the series by Emilio Salgari). Tigers of Malaysia, The. A motley collection of Dayaks, Malays, and blacks of the archipelago, with some island Chinese, Hispanicized Filipinos, and even a Maori and two Tibetans. They serve under Sandokan and Yanez. Not too trustworthy in a game of manitas calientes (the blacks are cannibals) or poker. According to Salgari, “the fiercest forces in hand-to-hand combat.” Tremal Naik and Kammamuri. Companions in the wanderings of the aforementioned. Hunters of tigers and of men, of Hindu origin. Turpin, Richard (Dick). English highwayman, creation of W. H. Ainsworth. The publisher Editorial Molino during the Franco era defines him as a mixture of the political criminal and the vulgar looter. It appears that his phobias center on the prosperous children of the English industrial revolution. He robs nobles on the highways. Maintains excellent relations with the common people. Tomás Rey, Moscarda, Batanero, Peters, Pat, and the Knight of Malta. Companions of the previous. Batanero is black, Peters is a redhead with sideburns, the Knight of Malta is a perpetual victim of amorous deception, Tomás Rey of political persecution. 115

Appendix Two Clarifications About a Moment

At the beginning of 1969, Gustavo Díaz Ordaz, vulture on a throne of skulls, reigned in Mexico. The student movement, massacred in the Casco de Santo Tomás, in the Plaza de la Ciudadela, in Tlatelolco, at Military Camp Number One — overthrown politically because it was unable to ally itself with the worker movement in the major cities — was in disarray. Thus began the long ebb after a struggle of 123 days in which thousands of Mexicans had come to life as human beings. The ebb meant a painful regression for militants and leftist activists who had known moments of euphoria and freedom — back to classes at an oppressive, defeated university in whose yards discouragement was eaten by the mouthful. It was also a return to the family, to the necessity for many of us to work and plan for economic survival. It was the end of the student life. The crisis that affected the movement swallowed the Left nationally and spit it out in pieces. The first popular work reforms took at least a couple of years to come to fruition. Meanwhile, those who had been, ceased to be. Consciously or unconsciously, we broke with the past, refusing to even mention it. Marijuana (which the government flooded into the universities), discouragement, the 117

collapse of love relationships that had risen above the clamor of campus struggles, re-adapting to employment, opportunistic reliance on day laborers, the bureaucratization of the political apparatus, the smooth turning of the mill that ground down the daily lives of the middle class — these things finished us as a generation. Empowerment was ever more distant; the underground dream of those who lived the ’68 Movement foundered and ebbed away. In defeat, we could only take refuge inside ourselves and in a bleak militancy for the hope of future fulfillment of the dreams of those 123 days. Under these deplorable conditions, this shortest of novels was created. Brewed in the midst of a premature divorce following a premature marriage, of a political crisis, of an era of hunger and underemployment, the novel became a pretext, a vendetta, dealing with Power by other means. Then it was put away in a drawer and rewritten three times during in the following twelve years.

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About the author Paco Ignacio Taibo II has lived in Mexico City since 1958 when his family fled from Spain to escape the fascist dictatorship of General Francisco Franco. Taibo II is a Spanish leftist intellectual, historian, professor, journalist, social activist, union organizer, and world-renowned writer. Widely known for his policial novels, he is considered the founder of the neopolicial genre in Latin America and is the president of the International Association of Policial Writers. One of the most prolific writers in Mexico today, over five hundred editions of his fifty-one books have been published in twenty-nine countries and over a dozen languages, and include novels, narrative, historical essays, chronicles, and poetry. Some of his novels have been mentioned among the “Books of the Year” by The New York Times, Le Monde, and the Los Angeles Times. He has received numerous awards including the Grijalbo, the Planeta/Joaquin Mortiz in 1992, the Dashiell Hammett three times for his political novels, and the 813 Award for the best police novel published in France. His biography of Ernesto “Che” Guevara (Ernesto Guevara, también conocido como el Che, 1996) has sold over half a million copies around the world and won the 1998 Bancarella Book of the Year award in Italy.

119

About the translator Gregory Nipper is a copy editor and translator currently doing freelance work, as well as numerous projects for PM Press. He completed master’s degrees in Latin American history (U.C. San Diego) and U.S. history (Portland State University), after studying philosophy and politics as an undergraduate. His archival research dealt with intersections between social history and private enterprises, particularly energy industries. After completing a thesis on the history of Oregon’s Trojan Nuclear Plant and the region’s anti-nuclear movement, he focused on Latin America, doing research and speaking on topics such as gender and management strategies in Colombia’s textile industry, and Venezuela’s political conflict over nationalization of its oil industry. He has also worked as a newspaper copy editor. In his spare time, he pursues avid interests in film and music from around the world. He lives in Portland, Ore., with his partner, Jessica Walker. He can be reached online at www.gregorynipper.com

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ABOUT PM PRESS PM Press was founded at the end of 2007 by a small collection of folks with decades of publishing, media, and organizing experience. PM co-founder Ramsey Kanaan started AK Press as a young teenager in Scotland almost 30 years ago and, together with his fellow PM Press co-conspirators, has published and distributed hundreds of books, pamphlets, CDs, and DVDs. Members of PM have founded enduring book fairs, spearheaded victorious tenant organizing campaigns, and worked closely with bookstores, academic conferences, and even rock bands to deliver political and challenging ideas to all walks of life. We’re old enough to know what we’re doing and young enough to know what’s at stake. We seek to create radical and stimulating fiction and non-fiction books, pamphlets, t-shirts, visual and audio materials to entertain, educate and inspire you. We aim to distribute these through every available channel with every available technology - whether that means you are seeing anarchist classics at our bookfair stalls; reading our latest vegan cookbook at the café; downloading geeky fiction e-books; or digging new music and timely videos from our website. PM Press is always on the lookout for talented and skilled volunteers, artists, activists and writers to work with. If you have a great idea for a project or can contribute in some way, please get in touch. PM Press PO Box 23912 Oakland, CA 94623 www.pmpress.org

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