'68

by Paco Ignacio Taibo II

  Fanny and the Cop

  I couldn’t tell her that he was a cop, because how could you tell your girlfriend, who had just finished informing you that she had fallen for someone else, that that someone else was a cop—definitely a cop? You would sound pathetic, cowardly—like some asshole starting false rumors. But I could swear that the guy really was a cop and that the meetings held in a Chinese café with preparatory kids, who had once been offered arms there, were a lousy set-up planned by this tall skinny rat, a supposed preparatory student—at twenty-five—who had popped up out of nowhere as a second-rank student leader. I was also sure the guy was a cop because his left-wing talk never came out right. He wasn’t like the new recruits, who had a whole battery of recently acquired ideas, all mixed up with ethical notions gleaned from the films of Pedro Infante. No, this guy talked in a way that seemed right but wasn’t, because to an educated ear there was just something false about his language. His quotations from Mao or Che were correct enough, but this overgrown kid had never read Nickolai Ostrovsky, never even heard of Pavel Korchagin, was unaware that Marx had a thing with his housekeeper, and couldn’t make cracks about ice axes or puns on the titles of Lenin’s works. It was something like that—but more complicated. He was okay, but then again he wasn’t, and besides, his final look, at the end of a conversation, was always an evasive one, devoid of the affection we all felt for one another at that time. And he was vehement in a way that never managed to convince me he was for real. I thought for a time that all the bad vibes were coming from me, not from him, and that if I hated the guy with such a distilled hatred, it must be because he was stealing my girlfriend and breaking up a relationship that, however tormented, was certainly a product of the times.

  Anyway, she told me that she was in love with the guy, and it was all I could do not to blurt out that he was a cop, that she should watch out—and then, like the good Cyrano, I went off to weep in dark corners of the University. But I was no Cyrano, I was just an ugly little mouse, like the one in the children’s book. After a time I left the university and began to follow my rival at a distance; one day went by, then another, until the day came when I saw him meeting with some creeps who eventually got into an unmarked police car with its telltale little radio antenna. So he was a cop, and I was so sure of it now that I convinced Regina to keep Fanny home the next time she was supposed to meet him. And that was when the committees of Preparatories 1 and 2 were arrested and jailed, at a meeting in a Chinese café where they had gone to get guns.

  Nabbed

  I was picked up in a police sweep one night after leaving Mario Nuñez and Elisa Ramírez’s house to get some cigarettes. A patrol car stopped me two blocks from Calle de la Campana. No questions—just “Stop!” and into the car I went. Your appearance was a crime in those days; your youth, likewise. To be young was to be the enemy. They had a point. They took me to the Mixcoac police station. After a short wait my turn came. The agent of the public prosecutor was waiting behind a writing desk on a little platform. On my arrival a cop had taken my name down on a slip of paper—the first name, in any event, that came into my head—and the slip had been placed on the agent’s table. He was eating a ham roll with a lot of avocado on it, and he used the paper to wipe his fingers. I hesitated.

  “May I go out and look for her somewhere else?”

  “Look for who?” he replied without looking at me.

  “My sister. She hasn’t come home.”

  He didn’t answer. I walked out of the place between two policemen standing guard at the door with ancient Mausers. I’ll never forget that they had their bayonets fixed. Those fucking bayonets were gleaming in the light of the moon and the mercury lamps. That’s how I remember it, I swear. I got back to Mario’s house three hours later—with no cigarettes. Everyone said how much they loved me and hugged me even though I had never got the smokes. They had already written me off.

  By this time they were not just arresting brigades, they were shooting at them, and they still couldn’t stop us. A group from Psychology tossed fliers from rooftops when baseball games let out at the Social Security Diamond in Cuauhtémoc. We would stuff the restrooms of office buildings with leaflets. We were still holding flash rallies at factory gates. Brigades met in the most unlikely places. Once I arrived with mine at a waiting room in the Tangassi funeral parlor, only to find that there were already two other brigades (unmistakable because of their appearance) meeting there and mingling with the mourning family members. Without even knowing it, we were developing tender feelings for other people’s dead.

  The Ginza by Night

  At night your hands would sweat. No one was sleeping at their own place. We were waiting for the start of door-to-door raids to capture all strike-committee members. I had taken refuge in a hideaway belonging to the brother of Paco Abardía, a 2-by- 1.5-meter room in Cuauhtémoc where this guy, known as “El Polvorón,” used to take women he picked up. There were no windows, just a bed, and a poster on the wall that obsessed me: a Japanese travel poster showing the lights of Tokyo and captioned “The Ginza by Night.” The Ginza pursues me to this day, it comes back to me even after all these years from that wall, from that room where, alone, I felt nothing but fear.

  Those were times when I did not sleep.

  Mimeographs

  If the days prior to the army’s invasion of the University had been all about the future, those that followed it were all about the present. We were trying to resist, to plan for the next two or three hours, to keep acting at all costs. After renewed combat, Vocational 7 fell into the hands of the military. The response was a massive rally at the Tlatelolco housing project. The National Strike Council continued to operate, maintaining a minimum of coordination. The brigades and the assemblies in those schools that had not yet been taken did the rest. On 24 September the army blasted its way into the Santo Tomás campus, home of half the Polytechnic schools. For the first time there was return fire: among the students defending the campus, no more than a dozen were armed with pistols and perhaps four or five with shotguns—but still, there was return fire. The riot police wreaked a bloody revenge on their prisoners, beating and torturing them. There were thirty wounded. This was just the prologue, of course, a terrible foretaste of what was to come.

  We were beginning to live with blame. Who had died for you? as Retamar asked. Who had they arrested because you made a mistake about a meeting place? Why hadn’t you been in Biological Sciences when the shooting started? What the fuck were you doing asleep while the riot police were attacking Vocational 7? Why, for Christ’s sake, hadn’t you been arrested? Survival plus guilt: a poisonous cocktail for the months ahead. All the same, the Movement was not yet defeated, indeed it was still showing signs of life on every side. Suddenly, as you were crossing Insurgentes, a slogan-bedizened bus would cruise right by you, or brigades would appear out of the blue, broadcasting their message of denunciation before fading back into the city. As survivors, however, we were becoming older, angrier, and more alone. We knew that a commission of the National Strike Council was negotiating, but the assemblies were being dissolved, and some schools were being abandoned even before they were taken by the army or police: their courtyards would be left empty, and the last one to leave would turn off the mains and padlock the door. The students were in retreat, organizing solely as propaganda brigades. The nights were the worst. Contacts lost, people failing to show at meeting places, and hours without sleep.

  I met with with a woman who was coordinator of one of the department’s brigades, which distributed propaganda printed with a mimeograph machine miraculously saved from the forces of repression. The machine was hidden in the bedroom closet of an actress whose husband was unaware that printing went on in his house in the mornings. She told me enthusiastically how they would conceal their leaflets in brown-paper bags from the bakery, covering them up with bread-rolls. The next day I lost touch with her. Her brigade had been fired on outside the Alameda movie theater.

  One day �
��Doc” waited for me in his neatly pressed white lab coat, smoking behind the wheel of a green Volkswagen. We were supposed to go and retrieve a mimeograph from the house of Salvador, “El Indio,” who had been arrested the day before. We were taking a chance. El Indio knew that if he gave up his address, they would find the machine and throw him into Lecumberri to rot. He would wait for us to get it out of there and would take the interrogations in the meantime. It was nighttime. Silently, Doc drove us to a lonely street. I think Salvador’s place was on Narvarte. We drove past it twice; we saw nothing out of the ordinary. Doc and I were not friends—we had once fallen in love with the same woman. But that night, as I looked at his face in the shadows with the cigarette, I knew that he would have sooner died in agony from appendicitis than leave me in the lurch, that my back would never be so well covered, that my own mother would not protect me as well. Without saying so, we both knew that we could not allow either of us to be caught. We tossed a coin to see which of us would go into the house. We had a key. I won the toss, but then Doc said that it would be smarter to go in together—that if we were really going to load up the damn car, two would be better than one. He parked in front of the house and we got out. There was barely any light in the street. We let ourselves into Salvador’s place, which was on a low floor. The mimeograph was in the maid’s room. We packed papers and official documents into a shopping bag, tidied up, and filled a couple of cardboard boxes with Mao and Che books, along with a photo of Salvador in the Plaza de la Revolución in Havana, love letters he sent to his wife, and his old passport. We went back out. I carried the mimeograph while Doc hefted the two boxes and gripped the handles of the shopping bag between his teeth. We looked like a circus act. I was opening the door of the Volkswagen when a car with its lights off appeared at the end of the block. I shouted, but Doc had already spotted it, dropped the boxes on the ground, and produced a ridiculously tiny pistol from his white coat. The car without lights braked and someone shouted, “Don’t shoot, man, it’s Ana!” And we saw a girl get out of the car, also white-coated, but without a pistol. Another night volunteer for recuperating errant mimeo machines. Doc lowered his pistol and gestured to her to move the car. He was sweating.

  “Hey, don’t drop that shit on the ground!” he said to me, pointing to the mimeograph, a brand-new Gestetner. I made no reply—I was far too busy trying to control my trembling hands.

  He dropped me off at the statue of the angel on Reforma. We did not want one another to know where we were sleeping. We made two rendezvous for the next twenty-four hours. Doc went to stash the mimeograph in a private pediatric hospital. Ana followed him at a distance, to make sure he wasn’t taken in, and then let the Medical School committee know that the machine, which we had named Sitting Bull in honor of El Indio, was in service once again. I walked down Reforma at two in the morning, slipped into Cuauhtémoc, returned to my little room, and closed the door. My hands were shaking, my teeth chattering. I was so afraid that my lower back hurt. I began to cry as I looked at the poster of the Ginza by night.

  Dying a Little

  I don’t remember why we had to go to Preparatory 8 that night. Nor do I remember who was in the brigade. All I know is that the school was empty when we crossed the courtyard and that we were chasing shadows until we reached the auditorium.

  I don’t remember where the dozen or so drunken porristas came from and why we were unable to give them the slip. All I remember is how one of them had a bayonet and how he placed its tip against my stomach in a playful way, but then not so playful, and he cut me. All I remember is how one of my comrades struck his arm with a black umbrella that had a bamboo handle, and we ran out of there. I recall the umbrella very well. Also my bloody shirt and the bandage on my stomach, covering my belly button. And a pain that still comes back sometimes in my lower back, a pain that I recognize as the pain of fear: a sharp, shooting pain that recurs and leaves me covered in sweat.

  Was this dying? No, because in those days there were others who were dying for real.

  As much as I try, I cannot recall the features of that drunken porrista who played at killing me a little.

  Even Liars Know the Truth

  On 30 September the army relinquished the University buildings it had taken over. The government was hoping that the Movement had learned its lesson and would call off the strike. But on the first day of October the assemblies voted to hold out and demanded that the IPN schools be handed back. The Movement had tremendous resilience. In two months it had created thousands of cadres, thousands of speakers. No sooner did it find a space where it could act than it expanded into it, built up its strength, reorganized itself, and once more set about the tasks of deployment and propaganda.

  On 2 October the army attacked the rally in Tlatelolco. What happened is well known. The story of the massacre has been told and retold. The attempt to falsify history—which the machinery of the government launched moments after the first students fell, hit by gunfire—demanded a response. The response is in the second part of Elena Poniatowska’s book La Noche de Tlatelolco (published in English as Massacre in Mexico) and in the thousands of Tlatelolco poems. Preserved there forever is the rebuttal to the false version of the facts offered by General Crisóforo Monzón, who said in an official statement that the army had intervened to restore order in the midst of an exchange of fire among students. The truth is there, as compared with the official version propagated by the Senate commission, in which the students are said to have fired first. Today everybody knows that the provocateurs were soldiers disguised as civilians, each wearing a single identifying white glove, soldiers from the Olimpia Battalion. Today everybody knows that flares thrown from a military helicopter were the signal to open fire, the signal for the army to begin to shoot into the unarmed crowd. Today even the liars know the truth. But there is little consolation in the fact that the version of the survivors has finally triumphed over the official story.

  Everyone Blames Themselves—Forever

  I arrived in Madrid at dawn on 2 October. I bought a newspaper on Castellana. An enormous photograph showed the soldiers shooting in Tlatelolco. I lost my voice. Hysterical mutism, the doctor called it. The doctor didn’t understand that the Movement had struck me dumb as a punishment. I was not entitled to speak, because I had not been there, with the living and with the dead.

  For years I blamed my father for getting me out of Mexico. I blamed myself for giving in to his insistence, to the information he had obtained that the Ministry of the Interior had an enormous file on me. And I blamed the fear I felt at the time about being a foreigner. For years I blamed my father, myself, anyone. Not to have been at Tlatelolco was much worse than being there and not dying. Eventually, though, I stopped blaming the old man: his common sense had very likely saved my life. The fault was not his, but mine. Nor is it any use saying that I was only nineteen. That was no excuse. Indeed, being nineteen was the very reason I should have stayed. Your task, if you choose to accept it (as they say on Mission Impossible), was to say no, and I didn’t. To stay, and I didn’t stay. Although I returned. I left Madrid after two days and returned to the department.

  Tlatelolco Is Everything—The Rest Is Nothing

  Over time, regrettably, the second of October, with the tremendous power of our four hundred dead, many of them nameless corpses tossed from military airplanes into the Gulf of Mexico that same night, with the images of the wounded being dragged off by their hair, captured for posterity by the camera, with the memory of blood on the wet ground, with our retinas invaded and forever marked by the light of the two flares that started the massacre, with the stories of hospitals assailed by judicial-police officials intent on finishing off the wounded—regrettably, that day has been isolated.

  In memory, the second of October has replaced the hundred days of the strike. The black magic of the cult of defeat and of the dead has reduced ’68 to Tlatelolco alone. Perhaps because I was not there, because I perceived the events of the Plaza de las Tres Cultura
s through the accounts of Santiago Flores, who was shot in the leg, through the silence of the candles and flowers placed on the ground there on the second of November, a month afterward, and through the eyes of the myriad anonymous narrators—perhaps because of this I managed to escape the curse. The rest was the Movement. And it continued.