They put him in a makeshift casket bought last-minute in the slums of El Alto. It wasn’t very solid—rather rustic with a light coat of varnish with bare spots in the wood. I don’t know if it was Sergeant Walter Rubin de Celis, Non-Commissioned Officer Juan Barrón Huet, Lieutenant Torres or first battalion commander Major Trifón Echalar Miranda who gave the order to buy two 25-litre cans of 100-proof Caimán-brand liquor so they could prepare té con té for the wake. It was almost midnight and the quarters where soldiers in other companies slept—unaware of what had happened—were still quiet, barely lit by the dim yellow lamps that edged the battalion’s square. One week earlier, the soldiers had limed the walls of the dorms. The off-white greyish walls were pale and ghostly like a screen in the ruins of an abandoned movie theatre. Every so often, steps would echo through the space, grumbling faraway voices repeating the mechanical nightly ritual of “Stopwhosthere!”, soldiers who went from post to post in the cold darkness of the Altiplano, rifle on their shoulder. Soldiers on watch at their adobe, calamine and straw quarters would return the tired watchword selected for the night followed by the recited formula: “Guardpostnumberelevennothingtoreport.” That night our company was the only one busy with wake arrangements. At his own or someone else’s hand, Boxeador had died fulfilling his duty, in full service to the patria, blocking the enemy—whoever they were—at the northeast end of the military base. Death came disguised in 7.62 calibre when it blasted his brown Andean body and sank its fangs of smoke, gunpowder and metal into his skull. It was cold in the early dawn hours. The Altiplano wind was blowing, lifting small swirls of paper, plastic bags and garbage in the garrison yard. Our superiors ordered us to change out of our daily fatigues—old, mended rough wool—and don a newer cotton-polyester formal uniform and light cap. We were posted as the honour guard at each cardinal point of the casket, in the centre of the improvised reposing room in the officers’ casino. We all took shifts watching the body of the dead soldier until it was time to bury him at the General Cemetery. Cardán, do you remember when we walked into the room where the body was and there were already four soldiers from our company standing at each corner of the casket, their faces sullen, sad and absent? A few soldiers decided to close the coffin to avoid looking straight at the corpse, to evade the intense gaze of his single eye, the only thing left on Boxeador’s face. The sergeant on duty that week, in charge of the eighty-one soldiers in company B, ordered all personnel to be present equipped with their tin mugs. Every so often, two soldiers filled the mugs to the brim with a potent mix of liquor and agua de sultana in the last instants of martial pain with the mangled soldadito boliviano. Officers from other companies in attendance sat on one side of the officers’ casino, some half asleep, some sipping the coarse té con té, admiring within their inner jurisdiction the stoicism required for someone to put the barrel of a rifle under his chin and pull the trigger. Three shots had come out of Boxeador’s automatic rifle. The first pierced the visor of his kepi and launched it across the room—we later found it curled up in a corner of the guard post. The second bullet sliced open his lips, eyebrow and forehead as if he’d been hit with a sabre or a bayonet, tearing off one of his nostrils as well. The third bullet hit his left malar bone causing a massive earthquake in his facial nerves and muscles. The power of the shot tore through all tissue in its path like a battering ram, blowing up his eyeball, inferior cranial wall, part of his frontal bone, parietal bone and the entire side of his skull. His brain burst and splattered pieces of brain mass everywhere and embedded bone splinters in the walls and wooden beams. Around 2:00 AM the officers went to sleep, bored by a death that had failed to be epic. We simple soldiers stayed behind with Boxeador’s body. Perhaps because for many it was our first time drinking such a cruel alcoholic mix, or because our empty stomachs were being eaten away by the liquor, or perhaps because the spectacle of death before us was terrifying and hypnotizing, suddenly some of the mourners began to stumble around. Some dozed off and fell off their chairs, woke up frightened upon finding themselves in a place they didn’t recognize and quietly slipped away to their dorms. The soldiers’ faces began to lose their shape, became stretched and distorted. Against the military casino’s walls, their faces turned the bitter yellow-green of the walls in that painting at the Guggenheim showing gaunt soldiers in a shower. Silhouettes softened as dawn approached. Noises reached us taking long, slow steps. Some of the soldiers looked like sleepy children wandering through the casino hall, their faces flooded with guilt and regret as if their presence at the station, at the funeral, was somehow a betrayal to their families. A voice began to hum a Native song, perhaps a yaraví, while the rifles started walking around on their own and mingling with the chairs, pouring té con té into their thin barrels whose necks and long beaks stretched out like a flock of black storks drinking out of tin mugs. Some soldiers held their weapons tenderly, or yelled at them, or whispered to them calling them their cholas, their sweethearts, twisting their belt around their arms, giving them slow sips or sprinkling them with alcohol in a sort of baptism—a mythical challa. “Estoy challando a mi chola,” they explained with a grimace and a twang in their voice. They would laugh and repeat the Carnival Tuesday ritual over and over. Then either the dead soldier got up, only a few shreds of charred lips on his face, or the casket fell on the ground when someone bumped into it and the body rolled out of the casket like a doll. A few solicitous soldiers approached him, talking to him in Aymara and Spanish, grabbing him by the arms. They propped him up on a chair against the wall. Boxeador sat and leaned what was left of his head on one of his shoulders. He was drunk, too. Someone put a mug of té con té in his bruised hands. We could see he wasn’t dead. He was with us, or we were with him, and instead of blood his flesh and exposed bone were oozing a yellowish fluid, like blood mixed with sugarcane juice, and it became lodged in our throats and mixed with the sweet taste of liquor in the té con té we were drinking. That was the scent of our own baptism, the mark, the sign of a ritual that would never leave us. Death welcomed us joyfully in her domains, inebriated us, seduced us and made us laugh showing us what she was capable of. Somehow that night ripped something out from deep inside our bones. We lost something and were ever since then incomplete, fragmented. Some soldiers cried in a corner watching Boxeador’s incomplete, disfigured face. Another cried and didn’t notice himself wetting his pants. We were floating in the air. At one point we walked up to Boxeador and formed a semicircle around him, asked him why he’d died, if he’d been killed, what death was like. He looked at us with his one good eye, an island of light in a bloody, black-and-blue face and responded by sweating tiny beads of blood that struggled not to clot and dry up. He tried to have a drink but couldn’t move his lips. Someone dipped a handkerchief in té con té and put it to his lips. Slowly Boxeador savoured that last sip with what was left of his mouth. We said goodbye, told him to take care of himself. We promised we would always remember him and hugged him as if he’d just won the most important boxing match in Bolivia’s history. Moved by all the attention he was receiving, as if we’d all forgotten we were indios, mestizos, indios again and sometimes white coming together to be close to him, he decided to spare us further pain. He wobbled and stood up slowly. He felt his way across the short distance between his chair and the casket, which was now back on top of two tripods in the middle of the room. He climbed into his coffin as delicately as one would climb onto a totora raft swaying in the middle of Lake Titicaca, sat down and arranged himself inside his wooden boat and looked at us one more time. He wanted to say something but he no longer had a voice, so with a small movement of his hand he lay back down in his coffin. He then became still forever. By then, sleep had slowed down our breathing, and fatigue yawned heavily on our eyelids. Some of us stepped outside and headed to our sleeping quarters—the stars above spiralled in the still dawn sky like eyes around a faint eddy reflecting in our pupils. I managed to drag my body all the way to the edge of my cot. Someone cried out in the distanc
e, “Buenas noches, Boxeador.” Another voice responded, “Güenas.”
January of 1994 brought days in which Alfredo could see in the open space of his imagination words flying high in the distance—magnificent migratory birds he’d never be able to see up close, never be able to make them say anything on the silent horizon of every page. All he could do was take refuge again in the black waters of the river that splits past from present, ruthlessly condemned to be the boatman between two shores that would never meet, carrying dead bodies from all the deaths he’d had to die. In 1980, Alfredo had died twice, a hundred times, a thousand times, and since then—who knows if for a long time before—he hadn’t stopped dying steadily and relentlessly, and yet every morning he’d hold himself up standing before his piles of paper, invigorated and full of words—first words, last words, the ones no one would ever hear, brought by the imaginary huayra and harmattan air streams, having crossed gullies, cordilleras and deserts, carrying to his ears and hands the whispers, sighs and voices born in some street, city or region he would never know. Clutching his pen, he would write down the taut urgency of desires—those that come first, those that come last, in various tongues and scripts. Alfredo’s pages were inhabited by all the desires of the world, filled with words that mingled with threads of memory and the swollen currents that rushed down the streets and tore up the urban bedrock of La Paz in February.
The first time he died, he’d been warned in a dream he hadn’t known how to decipher. In the dream, Amelia—a young woman with long hair and fine lips—spoke to him through fragmented images and large gestures from the other side of a thick clear wall, as if she were under an old bell jar, the kind used in old houses to store heirloom antique clocks and protect their delicate gearbox from the dust. At her gesturing, he woke up drenched in sweat in the quiet dorm he shared with ninety other teenaged soldiers enrolled in compulsory military service under threat of imprisonment, imposed by the ever-malleable national laws. He was sleeping, and in his dream he was waking up inside another dream, a sheltered microscopic fossil in the intricate strata of his memory. A sleeping soldier was muttering incomprehensibly at the back of the large dorm, somewhere in the dark forest of four-level loaded bunk beds. Slightly more awake now, he looked up in the half-light and saw a boy in the silence of the Andean night. He was sitting on wooden boxes near the window, looking over the vast cradle of the sleeping city and watching the stars spin above the Ceja de El Alto. Alfredo got up quietly. His boots untied and his dreamed face of Amelia still fresh in his retina, he crept through the dorm’s big metal gate out to the wide cement-and-stone yard. He scurried with his back against the wall, his ear sharp to evade the officers doing military rounds, who could capture and punish his alleged escape by putting him behind bars for weeks in the adobe and rammed-earth guardroom. It was March and the night air chilled his eyelids when he stepped out to the main yard of the Air Force Security and Defence Unit. He stopped to tie his bootlaces and felt the pungent smell of uric acid. The pale light of the night revealed hundreds of damp snaking tracks, a wide and fetid filigree covering the ground. Every night at bedtime, to encourage the purest patriotic sentiment in the uniformed mass, army officers ordered thousands of conscripts to repeat an innocent war cry: “Viva Bolivia! Death to Chile! Aaaah!” The scream required special attention—in more than a few occasions hundreds of soldiers had been severely punished for failing to produce it adequately. It wasn’t meant to convey defeat or sound like someone being wounded. In Bolivia’s dense military tradition, the goal was to accompany the bayonet in its mortal drive into the enemy’s body. After repeating the fierce phrase, sometimes framed in laughter, the little Bolivian soldiers would joke around on their way to their dorms, emptying their bladders as they walked and sang in chaotic military formation, avoiding their comrades’ boots to prevent the potential resulting insults and fistfights, weaving night after night an endless carpet of micturations. Now the urine snakes slept quietly in the centre yard, vanishing slowly under patches lit by weak spotlights that fought in vain against the darkness. He moved slowly with his back against the wall, a cautious fox seeking invisibility in the cover of darkness. He crossed the yard and reached the back of the troop dorms—he could see the hangars of sleeping rheumatic T-33 aircraft, left over from the Korean War, ancient military donations and source of boundless pride for the thantosa Bolivian aviation. He crossed the road that stood between the night and Amelia’s voice and reached the only telephone available to the almost eight hundred soldiers in his battalion. There was no one there. A good sign. He looked up at the stars, trying to guess the time, imagining his beautiful Amelia’s surprise upon receiving his call. He picked up the receiver, searched in his pocket for a coin, inserted it in the slot and entered her number in the slow rotary dial.
For years, that name—Amelia—even before recalling her figure or her face, had had enough power to keep him awake entire nights. In bed, eyes open or closed, he restlessly reconstructed in his memory the city corners he’d walked through every time he went to see her. Alfredo remembered every house, every window and every dog bark along the way. He’d actually gone to see her only once, but in his imagination there were many—enough to feed night after sleepless night. Perhaps she had invited him over for tea or to listen to music; or he had invented some unlikely reason to go to her house in Miraflores, near Plaza Germán Bush, an enormous square that hosted the annual flamboyant military parades to honour the national flag. He arrived at the red metal door, looked at the blue walls, then up at the pine branches over the roof tiles that capped the wall around the house. He coughed nervously before ringing the bell. He could recall the colour of her skin, her beaming eyes, her delicate knuckles, her measured voice, her teeth, the blouse she was wearing that afternoon, the tenderness in her arms, her lips, her entire being. He filled his chest at the closed door and rang the bell. He waited, and waited, and waited. A pair of eyes scrutinized him at length through a crack, judging whether he was drunk or armed, and finally, as the door opened, Alfredo heard a familiar song. Hanging in the air over cigarette smoke and people’s sweat, a song by a fiercely anti-Castro singer, a beautiful and maternal gusana, a political term used to refer to enemies of the Cuban revolution—as his Chilean friends and devoted militants of the party of socialist nostalgia had carefully explained to him one afternoon over coffee, empanadas and a barros luco sandwich at Montreal’s El Refugio bakery. The song, “Mi Tierra,” was playing on a record as the barflies danced with admirable dedication, sweating and admiring their own reflections in the mirror that lined the wall along the dance floor. In a double rise and fall, the dancers’ bodies turned and got drunk on music from a mythical collective patria. “La gente toma aguardiente porque es valiente,”10 a few Central Americans sang with their shirts unbuttoned—happy, sweaty Sancho Panzas. They danced in a loud unison and were finally swallowed into the unstoppable waves of salsas and merengues that followed at an impossible volume, a sort of high mass full of rituals and contortions that only the initiated understood and could execute thanks to the vigour of their hips and shoulders. Watching the clamour around his table, Alfredo wrote in his small notebook about the moment he’d knocked at Amelia’s door at her old house in La Paz. He was absolutely convinced his descriptions could never recreate the buzzing beat that penetrated the tables and his kidneys, made his glass vibrate, his pores flood and his underarms quiver while he just sat there trying to define and find meaning in his constant going back in time, confused and not knowing whether he was in the past—standing by a telephone at the El Alto garrison about to call Amelia, or reminiscing about the only day he’d visited her in Miraflores—or in a future point in the story and was now folklorizing himself listening to Gloria Estefan in some bar in Montreal, or if he was alone at last with pen and paper, anywhere in the world at any time, witnessing the increasing fragmentation of his mind. Does time actually pass or is it a continuous simultaneity in which past, present and future end up tangled up in a circ
ular chaos? Four women walked into the bar with a man whose cunning eyes began to scan the place for a table for his entourage. One of the women gathered and put her hair back into a neat bun. Alfredo suddenly remembered a story about a passionate couple that walks into a café where people reeking of loneliness come hoping to find someone to say good morning to or hold during long winter nights. They sit and pretend to read a newspaper, sneak spying looks at each other guessing who is the unhappiest loner among them, who has no chance at all. A couple arrives—impetuous kisses, excited hands, beaming eyes—and the timid souls end up biting their lips, sipping unsweetened solitude from their cups between deep bitter sighs, knowing the happiness they were witnessing would forever refuse them. Alfredo tried to convince himself of his good and non-alcoholic reasons for being at the noisy bar. His theory was that, in the midst of that brutal chaos of people, music, smoke, noise, screams, lights, fistfights, and rum, he could achieve such complete inner silence that words emerged without effort. A word-hunting trick. The confusion in the space allowed words to emerge as trusting and innocent as groundhogs at the end of the winter, and find themselves trapped on a piece of paper. His trap—like the long, thin tongue of an anteater—had captured many words. How many? Hundreds, thousands, ten million words per day. He noticed he was almost out of rum, which had failed to melt the heart of the massive block of awkward bashfulness that remained lodged inside him and gave no indication of wanting to leave. He’d need to order another rum before he could launch into the centre of the dance floor, a discombobulated hybrid—quixotic windmill and headless chicken in euphoric rapture—able to defeat all distance, absence and nostalgia. Three glasses later he was still sitting there, unable to convince his feet to move while his stubborn hands worked on building a bridge of words that—he presumed—would enable him to travel across one more night. He only came to the place to drink a little rum, pretend he was in Havana or Barranquilla, La Paz, Toronto, Motril or Cochabamba, and try to tempt words to come out, to go on a date with him, who waited for them devotedly holding a bouquet of paper-and-charcoal flowers.
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