by John Gibler
After eating they leave. You stay sitting there and the men you had already spoken with approach and ask you what you’ve thought about doing. You tell them about the scare you had last night and they tell you not to worry: Those were hunters out looking for rabbits at night. Then you ask them if they could help you out with some clothes and a ride out of the area. They say that they know a bus driver who goes to Mexico City and could put you in the luggage area. That sounds risky to you, not because you mistrust them, but if the police have a checkpoint on the highway, they could find you. You ask if there might be another option, someone heading to a different state. They tell you they will ask around and come back in the afternoon with an answer and some food.
You wait. The afternoon hour when they were supposed to come back arrives, but they do not. After another hour you decide to return to the spot where you weren’t able to sleep last night. Tomorrow you’ll look for a path to keep going. You eat what’s left of the bread and cheese. You climb back in the hollow, back against the rocks and wait for the exhaustion in your body to defeat the cold and let you sleep.
For the moment you don’t think about all you’ve been through. The scenes of your torture don’t come to mind. There is no room to repeat that. You need to go, go. At every moment the idea is escape, escape, escape. During this escape you can feel blows, strikes, whatever. As long as they don’t kill you. You want to get away. You think that you are fleeing and being chased. There is no time for looking back. Nor do you think of the future, of seeing your compañera or your children. No. Since you said goodbye to them that evening in Zumpango del Río you keep them protected, in a safe place. It is still not time to return to them.
Where were you going? Suppose they find you. Where were you going? Who were you going to see? And so you respond automatically: “I wasn’t going anywhere.” Who were you going to see? No one. I was looking for work anywhere I could find it. This is combat. Focus on this and nothing else. Do what you must. Don’t think beyond the necessities of the moment.
In the morning you walk back into the town where you bought food the other evening. With the little change you have left you buy some food and look for a phone. Someone gives you directions to a store with a pay phone, but you find it closed. If you’re lucky the store might open by eleven in the morning, but you don’t want to wait in the town that long. It seems too risky.
Despite the risks, you return to the town of the men who helped you. You’ll ask for help once again and look for a phone. Then you’ll be on your way. You can’t stay here any longer.
You pass near the chapel and see a man riding a burro. You start to veer a bit so as not to walk by him, but you hear someone whistle and see that the man is waving for you to go over to him. A bit afraid, you walk toward him and as you get closer you see that it is the store owner who took you to the chapel on the first day.
Without getting off his burro, he hands you two tamales and a cup of atole. He had come looking for you, to see if you’d gone yet. In the town the rumor is already going around that a strange man is sleeping in the chapel, and this is putting people at risk. You tell him that you had been waiting for the men to return yesterday until late. But he tells you that it would be best if you found another route that didn’t go through this town. He asks you where you want to go. Veracruz, you tell him. He thinks for a bit and then tells you to hurry up with your meal so you can give him the cup back. You finish the atole and hand him the cup. Somewhat hesitant, he tells you that he might know somebody heading in that direction who could give you a ride. But he’s afraid that perhaps you’re lying so that you can steal someone’s car on the journey. You ask him to please let you speak with the person going toward Veracruz. Very cautiously he tells you: “Look, I’ll go speak with him and see if he agrees to meet with you. Wait for us here until three in the afternoon. If we don’t come by that time, leave. If you stay here any longer you’ll be putting us at risk.” You thank him for his help and he leaves.
You stay close by, half hidden amidst some bushes. And again the military planes. You move. Again the trucks. You walk up a hillside. Again the men with rifles. It would seem as if persecution itself had materialized from sky and soil, from nowhere, like humidity. But the planes fly off. The trucks drive by. The men fire a few shots and walk around the hill. As they get a bit closer you can see they carry a dead rabbit.
No one arrives at three. You climb up a boulder and wait a bit more. As dusk begins you hear someone whistle. You walk toward the sounds and see three men and a pickup truck. You draw closer, rounding near them, suspicious, but when they see you they wave for you. You walk up to them and say hello. They ask about your strange maneuvers and you tell them that you got scared again by some hunters and that you’re still freaked out from your abduction.
The driver immediately begins questioning you: “If you haven’t done anything wrong, why are you afraid to be seen? Why don’t you go to the police to file a complaint? Why do you think they’ll kidnap you?”
And so once again you tell your made-up story that, though invented, is supported by real trauma. You convince him to give you a ride.
It is sometime after midnight. The driver pulls off the road at a truck stop and you ask him for a few pesos to make a phone call. You walk up to a small store where a woman is selling home-cooked food.
“Do you have a phone?”
“Yes.”
“May I use it?”
“Yes.”
“How much do you charge?”
“Four pesos.”
You have exactly four pesos.
“May I use it then?”
“Yes.”
“Well, would you mind handing me the phone then?”
“It’s right behind you.”
You turn around and let out a kind of laugh upon seeing the phone hanging there on the wall. You dial a friend’s number. It rings and rings before disconnecting. You dial the number again. A sleepy voice answers. You say hello and use the name that they know you by.
“I’m at the bus station and would like to drop by to visit you all. Are you available?”
“Yeah, we’re here. Come on over.”
“Okay, but, I have a favor to ask. I don’t have any money for a cab. . . . Would you mind covering that and I’ll pay you back later?”
“Sure. How long will it take you to get here?”
“About half an hour.”
You hang up. You walk up to a taxi and ask the driver if he can take you to your friend’s neighborhood.
“How much will it be?”
“Twenty pesos,” he tells you. You get in as he looks you up and down, taking in your dirty clothes. You look obviously malnourished.
“What line of work are you in?”
“I load eighteen-wheelers,” you tell him and then change the subject. You arrive in about twenty minutes.
“I don’t have any change. Give me a second.”
You get out and go up to knock on the door. No one answers. You don’t have any money to go and call again from a pay phone, much less to pay the taxi, the driver of which, just now, is looking at you suspiciously, as if thinking, “What is this beggar doing in a middle-class neighborhood?” You don’t have anywhere else to go. You knock again, loud. Someone opens a curtain inside the house and you say, “Open up, it’s me.”
They throw the keys out to you: “Come through the gate and we’ll hand you the money for the cab through the window.”
They hand you twenty pesos and you walk back to pay the taxi driver, apologizing: “They were asleep.” The driver keeps looking you over, bewildered.
Your friends, a couple, also look you over when you go back through the gate and then close the door. They say: “If it weren’t for your voice we wouldn’t have let you in. You don’t look like yourself at all.”
And now you cry for the first time. Yes, openly weep.
You tell your friends that you are a guerrilla, that you were disappeared months ago and that you es
caped a few days back. Now you are here to ask them for help. If they can’t or won’t help you, then you only ask that they keep your secret.
“It’s okay,” the woman says. “We never knew who you were. Something seemed amiss, but we never thought too much about it. We live a life of comfort. We live in a world different from yours. You live in a world that we don’t see. What we can tell you is that, even if you don’t say it yourself, we can see that you are just coming out of some kind of hell. You look broken. . . . They tried to destroy you and you resisted. And these are the consequences. But you belong to something you believe in. And precisely what they couldn’t do to you was to destroy that spiritual part of you. Don’t let that be damaged.”
She doesn’t cry with you. Her voice holds strength, almost a kind of scolding, as if she were saying: You knew what you were getting into, and this result was within the realm of possibilities. You must reckon with what happened to you.
They make you breakfast. You try to eat but vomit. They tell you: “Go to sleep.” But you stay there, sitting in a chair. You can’t sleep.
Your friends find you some clothes and you stay with them for two days. You go to a barbershop and they cut your hair. You go back to the house and ask to see a newspaper. You see a story about an EPR communiqué where Commander José Arturo accepts with resignation your disappearance. You see that, and it makes you cry.
You think: “I’m going to try to make contact with them as quickly as possible to tell them that I’m out.”
You have to find a contact. You think of a woman with whom you worked before. She knows you. When you see her you ask her to set up a meeting with someone both of you know. In adherence with security protocol, you request that she only tell this person that “a compa” wants to speak with him.
Later she sends word to you of the time and location of the meeting. Two women accompany you on the bus. One of them gets off a few stops before you, the other after you. They are not with the guerrillas, but they move as if they had received guerrilla training.
You see the man as he stares at you. He greets you with a hug, but then freezes. Then he says:
“What happened?”
“I want you to let them know. Tell them I’m out. They didn’t let me out: I escaped. I need to tell them what happened.”
“When I greeted you I couldn’t believe my eyes. All the months you’ve been gone we held out hope . . . But after so much time disappeared the hope ran out. Just two weeks ago we spoke about you, certain that you wouldn’t be coming back, that the chances of you being alive were over. We didn’t know anything. Someone told us: ‘Surely the compañero is dead.’ You didn’t send us any signs of life. Two weeks ago we talked about you.”
Then he tells you: “In three days I’ll let you know what they say.”
Three days later he sends you a message to go to another town. You say goodbye to your friends and their house forever. You will not go back there. Everything they’ve done for you . . . all the others that helped you along the way, the men building the chapel, the truck driver . . . all of them. Just thinking about it makes you commit to protecting them, like a treasure. Everything they did means so, so much. You think: I’m alive because of them. Without them this would not have been possible. How can I repay that? There is no payment, no way of . . . The payment is to live, to keep them always in mind, at heart, for the rest of your days. They deserve a tribute for everything they did, for what they are. They probably don’t believe in the same things I do, but they are dear, dear human beings.
Some people pick you up. They take you to a house in a large city. They disguise you clumsily with makeup and a wig. During the drive they treat you with their characteristic coldness and suspicion. This is a cold welcoming. It is as if they were already telling you: “We don’t believe a word you say.”
You arrive at the house. What do you think those waiting at the house to see you will do when you arrive? Give you a hug? Show joy, or mistrust? You can’t even imagine it. You only know that you must tell them everything.
The commanders for the Valley of Mexico, Óscar and Vicente, arrive. The first interrogations are hard, stemming from distrust: “Whom did you rat out? How much money did you negotiate your release for?”
During this first stage you do not resist. You don’t interrupt them, nor debate. Sometimes you can’t even talk. Even though that is precisely what you want to do: You want someone to listen to you. But the dynamic here is different. Not only suspicion, which is understandable, but even the rhythm and tone of the interrogation. You start to relive everything . . .
Later the ones charged with studying you arrive, those who will determine whether you tell truth or lies. They take you to a psychologist and a psychiatrist. They fill you with pills. And the interrogations . . . You want them to listen to you, but they turn that into an interrogation. It is as if they had pulled you from that scene and then . . . I mean . . . no, no . . . They take x-rays of your whole body, more than thirty x-rays to see if you have a microchip implanted somewhere. Rather than caring about your state of health, they are investigating to make sure you don’t “have a tail.”
They tell you: “You don’t have any visible scars. It doesn’t look like you’ve been beaten. We just don’t see the evidence.”
It is so common to say that a torture survivor needs to come out of captivity bleeding, mutilated, dragging pieces of one’s body along the floor. Those people don’t understand that torturers, with all their diabolical, inhuman methodology, have been perfecting their techniques. These aren’t the medieval tortures. No. In some cases the manner of causing another’s pain doesn’t change . . . Today they can wrap you up in a blanket and beat you with baseball bats without leaving visible scars. They can dislocate your joints and it won’t be because they tied you to a horse.
Despite this, you don’t feel resentful toward your compañeros. You don’t feel hatred. But you know that they do not understand the magnitude of the damage done, the martyrdom of the body to the human being. They lack that depth of conscience.
Although, yes, there is a kind of complaint. Why didn’t they move everything out of the house? Why didn’t they trust me? But this complaint seems like arrogance to them. But you want them to listen to you; you want to speak, speak, speak. But they criticize everything you say. You are telling your story and they interrupt you and say: “No, you’re wrong there. It doesn’t feel like that. It feels this other way.” And deep inside yourself your question to them remains constant: Have you ever been there? They tell you: “No, they didn’t want to kill you. They just wanted to scare you.” And you only think: Oh, you should have told me so earlier, assholes, because I thought they were going to kill me.
Faced with your comrades’ distrust and callousness, you think: Now I just want the person who lived through something to speak. It shouldn’t be hidden. This isn’t for me or for them to interpret. It is just an experience. One experience amongst many, yes, but this one is mine to tell. Others cannot tell their stories. Perhaps when they reappear. I didn’t do what I did just to tell, or write, the story. After so much suffering, so much mistrust, and this denial . . . I don’t care. I don’t care and I have no intention of defending myself. Why? Because if it was this or that, or the fight, or something else . . . Fuck it. I have never been that person, nor am I now nor will I ever be. That is not my dream. This is what a rebel must face: either you win or you get screwed in every sense, on every level, with your every move. Okay then, I assume my role as rebel now and always. I identify with that role and not with any other. I don’t see it any other way. And I could have never told the story. I could have never said: I am. The one thing that is certain in all this is that I did not fight for an individual, I fought for a different world, for humanity with all that it faces. And this is what happened to me. The fight is against a criminal State, against a State that murders, against a State that massacres, that disappears, that kills. This is hard. I invent, unmake, and take apart my cha
racter. Only I can administer the telling of the story so as not to suffer damage. Because to tell the story only to tell it, besides being uncomfortable, is painful. I think that every time I tell the story other things come out, the hidden damage, or the permanence of that hidden damage, or perhaps the healing of it all.
I am not going to force myself to convince you. Perhaps you’ll become convinced of something, or a part of it, of one day of it, of nothing, or of everything. I don’t know. I simply bear it. That is how I understand it and it is not my role to convince anyone. It is not . . . I am not the one who should be giving explanations. I can do so. Yes. I could answer your absurd questions. I could accept your ridiculous observations, your racist assessment, your arrogance, your delirium in imaging things that don’t exist. I could, but no, that also is not a part of my dream.
The EPR commanders decide to organize a press conference to denounce the torture and disappearance you suffered and to publicly support your testimony. First they film you telling your story. They invite some reporters from Mexico City and coordinate so that the videotape with your testimony will be found outside of the local newspapers in Guerrero state on the same day as your interview, so that the news will be published simultaneously in Mexico City and Guerrero.
The reporters arrive. The commanders bring you out in uniform. You tell what you lived through and the first thing the reporters say is: “The story you’re telling is not true.” One of them tells you: “I just can’t believe what you’re saying, it seems too elaborate, it seems made up. It doesn’t make sense. Why believe everything a combatant says, knowing that he could be a double agent?”
You don’t answer. The commanders answer: “Look, the dirty war, the death squads in Mexico and the continent, really do use torture in a perverse way to make up stories and destroy human beings. And we, as an army, in another moment, with another combatant, we wouldn’t allow the person to reestablish contact with us. We wouldn’t be here in this press conference if there weren’t something special in this case. And what is special? That the first thing the compañero did upon escaping was to look to reestablish contact with us. He didn’t take time trying to hide, suffer, or cry on his own. Instead the first thing he did was look for us. On the other hand, look at the shape he’s in. We saw him, the people who see him for the first time detect the state of physical and emotional damage. We even had to keep him on sedatives to calm him down. That is evidence. He is not lying. And lastly, he knows about safe houses, rooms, rearguards, weapons caches, vehicles, and militants, where they travel, what they do and what they don’t do. And even when he would have been within his rights to turn any of that over, or some of that information, to avoid the martyrdom and try to save himself, he didn’t. Everything is safe. Not one guerrilla has been arrested or pursued. Moreover, in a few places we left some things in case he were to turn them over, so his torturers wouldn’t find the places empty. But he didn’t turn them over, he didn’t even use that resource. That shows his degree of resistance and loyalty. Everything he endured and went through, all of that shows that he deserves to be here. There is no reason to mistrust him because he is telling the truth, he’s not making anything up. And not because he says so, but because of everything around him. That’s the evidence, everything checks out. And that is the reason that he is here with you all. There is no doubt.”
