Why did Boxeador kill himself? In those winter days of 1980, inexplicable things were happening throughout the entire Bolivian army—at the air force garrison in La Paz, at the navy units stationed in Tiquina, at the Tarapacá armoured regiment, at the northern Amazon regiments specialized in jungle operations, the Cochabamba airborne forces, the Chichas IV infantry regiment in the south. Perhaps there was no explanation, or perhaps the explanation was too obvious, too faithful to the country’s historical pattern, too brutal to be accepted without the weapon of silence. Sixteen years later, in the middle of the snow, Alfredo was attempting to unravel the secret that had forced Boxeador to set the fire selector switch of his Belgian 20-round light machinegun not to the safety position, not to single-fire, but to the last one: burst mode. After settling more comfortably on the beaten earth floor of guard post number sixteen at the El Alto Air Base, Boxeador had blown out part of his head by firing a round of ammunition under his chin. As he wrote down these lines, Alfredo pondered for the first time that perhaps Boxeador hadn’t committed suicide, that perhaps someone had killed him. Like Mamani, an Aymara soldier whose death no one protested, not in 1980, not ever. When his parents heard the news standing outside the garrison, they lowered their eyes, muttered their misfortune in Aymara, accepting the death with a deep fatalism, and walked away, taking with them their discreet tears, their quiet pain in the face of something they didn’t understand in its full horror, trying to imagine the shape, the face, the mask worn by a State, a country that took the flesh of its flesh and destroyed and disappeared it. Alfredo recalled how each of their son’s fingers had been tied with a rope and pulled out beyond the limits of pain, how he’d been interrogated through his agony about the whereabouts of some missing rifles. Gradually and methodically, they broke Private Mamani’s bones one by one over the first days of his long death. Everyone, from battalion commander Major Trifón Echalar Miranda to Non-Commissioned Officer Juan Barrón Huet, was responsible for that death. Despite the crime, all of them will go on with their lives as if nothing happened. No one will say anything. No one will demand an investigation, a judge, a verdict. No one, ever, because Private Mamani was just a poor indio, a lari, a sad Native who never existed because in Bolivia the law doesn’t allow anyone to be born, grow up, get justice or die officially in Aymara.
Best not to think, Alfredo, best not to think. Sometimes ideas turn into curare and paralyse time itself. Some ideas make you seize, just like your arm, leg or heart may spasm when you try to swim across Lake Titicaca. Remembrance can weigh you down and pull you under, a swimmer struggling to stay afloat in the dense waters of history. Empty yourself, pack your mouth with ice, muffle your memory with rags, stop staring at your fingers and chewing on your hands—the same hands that on an August afternoon aimed a loaded rifle at a chola as she crossed a cobblestone street carrying her huahua on her back. Her steps were deliberate, containing the electricity, concealing the panic that urged her to seek cover, aware that if she took off running the soldiers would shoot her down. They were raiding a church where a terrified priest, wrapped in a sheep’s wool sweater, still had the courage to defy the blind, infinite arrogance of the Bolivian State incarnated in the figure of Major Fatso Trifón Echalar Miranda. The cholita paceña was crossing the street in the midst of Narcogeneral Luis García Mesa’s coup—her black felt hat tilted according to the occasion, her firm calves used to long walks through the Andes, her long polleras suspended from her waist tolling like serene woollen bells, and an aguayo wrapped around her back holding the light weight of a bolivianito who hadn’t the slightest idea about that place where fate decided he’d be born, or about the collective history that would some day give him a face, a memory and an identity. It was shortly after noon, and the sun was bright in the clear, cold air of the Andean heights. In the distance, the polluting smokestack of the Viacha cement factory. For an instant, the priest of the Aymara parish could sense the major’s sudden discomfort upon seeing his disproportionate forces: almost fifty well-fed soldiers each carrying two hundred cartridges of ammunition, ten thousand bullets at the command of a major of the Bolivian Air Farce, against the puny priest, who despite his noticeable pallor and outraged Spaniard demeanour held his gaze like a mongoose facing a snake. That morning around 11:00, two sections of the second company and half a dozen officers, including the battalion commander, had left the Air Base headed towards the church. The armed storm travelled in two blue buses and parked a few blocks away from the church. As soon as soldiers began to pile out and split into two nervous columns along the sides of the street, locals began to seek cover behind every corner. Doors started banging, dogs were kicked into houses against their will, mothers screamed and shoved their children inside, businesses shut their doors, people hid behind windows, men were rushing, more doors banging, angry eyes, laboured breathing, cold sweat dripping down backs. History in those moments is heavy and vicious in the stomach; the nation, a desert in the throat. Soldiers covered all four corners around the church, another group of soldiers took position by the wood-and-brick gate, under orders to aim their barrels at everything that moved, to open fire—one shot after another—as soon as the order came. Realizing right then that she couldn’t flee at the speed of a warmi walaycha, the chola took her caution across the street as if she were walking a tightrope across a swamp, hoping the alligators don’t wake up. More than a dozen gun barrels were pointed at her, following her every step. The major knocked on the door. “Open up! Open up! We know you’re in there!” And here the Scribe wavers, unsure of whether to write down in the name of history the foaming rage that had just been expressed. Did the major say, “Open up, turds!” or did he use a more forceful “fucking turds” or even a crass and cruel “Open the door, you son-of-a-whore priests!” Here your dedicated Scribe only knows for certain that the major never uttered a polite, “Please open, respected citizen, in the name of the law.” The door didn’t open right away. The major started knocking on the door with his folding-stock Belgian rifle with increasing force and fury, as if he just wanted to be done capturing all the seditious elements that attempted against the high interests of the nation. The personnel behind the bossy brute swiftly stepped aside to avoid a potential stray bullet from the rifle he kept pounding on the door of the house of God a few days after the coup d’état of July 17, 1980. After long, tense minutes, steps approached and the church door opened. The silhouette of a young woman appeared, perhaps a terrified novitiate who didn’t dare make eye contact with the moustached leader of the uniformed pack. The major cinched his paunch and threw himself against the door, making the girl stumble backwards, and forced his way towards the altar. Alfredo and a dozen other soldiers entered behind the nervous officers, who began to inspect all the rooms one after the other, opening all doors starting with the sacristy in the front until they reached the priest’s quarters in the back of the building. The priest followed them around not saying a word. They reached a room where, both delighted and dismayed, the officers discovered a manual Gestetner mimeograph next to a pile of freshly printed pages still smelling of wet ink. “Aha!” exclaimed the major, pouncing on his finding. “Why the hell do you keep doing these things? You dumb priest. Don’t you know this is illegal? Why do you come to Bolivia if you’re not going to obey the law?” He was yelling the way an unconvinced actor repeats his lines to impress the officers and soldiers under his command, convince them of his loyalty to the new regime. That’s what he was getting paid to do—it was a shitty job but it guaranteed a good salary, housing, education for his children, and status in a country that had more in common with the misery of Haiti, Somalia and a hundred other countries, than with the advanced anti-communist Western democracies in whose name and cause the coup d’état had been carried out, a saving military action that instated a national reconstruction government as malicious and fascistic as only Bolivian dictatorships could be, with or without the military, with or without the mask of democracy. Alfredo had a glimpse of the f
lyers that had been left behind on the table, like birds with clipped wings. The major kept bombarding the priest with his rancid morning breath, his frenzied eyes bulging out of their sockets, blaming him more for making him lose sleep than for printing flyers about the resistance to the coup in the mining towns of Catavi, Llallagua and Siglo XX. The flyers included details about the intensifying air bombings against mining centres, soldiers refusing to shoot down the population—and being shot in the back by a superior—and manufacture and farm unions being reconstituted and already beginning their underground work in La Paz. The small notes, with all their insignificance and spelling tragedies, urged the population to resist. Now the puny priest—a slogan made flesh—resisted with equal measures of pluck and pallor the imprecations, profanities, threats and other verbal salvos coming at him from thick Major Trifón Chantón. During one of the major’s pauses, the priest filled his lungs with as much oxygen as his church could fit, his face turned a colour that resembled communism but was in fact the colour of indignation, and unloaded a loud, “You have no right, no right at all to terrorize, to abuse, to kill people…” The major’s eyes widened in surprise at the audacity of faith, enraged by such an affront. Private Cutipa could see a tiny blood vessel burst in the major’s dilated eyes. The chola had succeeded in crossing the street a good while ago. While the major was mauling and pistol-whipping the daring, subversive mimeographer into a pulp, a neighbourhood dog—a thampulli, one of those bold, friendly, loyal and cheeky ch’apicitos, caring little about the transcendence and gravity of that moment in Bolivian history—walked up to a corner and lifted an unconcerned leg to mark its territory with a liquid signature. Before the mutt had finished satisfying its anarchic, renal impulse, its body seemed to jump up, hang in the air for a moment, then burst into a giant red splatter against the wall. At the roar of the gunshot the entire contingent of soldiers flattened against the ground, including the major, who thought his discovery of the subversive press had unleashed the communist savages’ revenge, and they were now shooting from all sides. But there was only a single shot. Some of the soldiers stood up, scanning around for the origin of the shot. The street was still. Silence burned in their ears after the shot stopped ringing. A single soldier had remained standing on the steps to the church throughout the entire incident, his rifle hanging from his arm like a freshly lopped off branch. It was Private Calditos, standing stiff, bolted to the ground, watching the puppy refuse to die, how it gnawed at itself in pain and licked its blood in vain, its intestines scattered on the sidewalk, trying to run away dragging his body by its front legs. The soldier looked down at his gun, not fully cognizant of the magnitude of his shot, and one of the officers pounced on him, his fists tight, his face contorted by rage.
“He called on one of his assistants with the voice of a troop commander and ordered, ‘Bring me some ají de fideos a la marinera!’ His carnal dagger once again demanded engagement in a new carnal campaign.” A few years had passed since Alfredo had jotted down these lines, unable to decide whether to write the rest of the scene. What had begun as a letter to Susana San Miguel—who would surely be disappointed upon reading these meagre results—had become a sort of chronicle of Montreal winters. Outside, the cold travelling on the wings of the polar winds was sinking the city in a fifty-below silence. The shame he felt at needing to describe what those words meant—the banzeroid demand for a bowl of fideos a la marinera—made Alfredo skirt around being more explicit. “It’s just a metaphor,” he said to himself, “a metaphor that will just upset the readers, perhaps even set them against the narrator, risk a premature abandonment of these lines.”
“Why don’t you just describe what happens after,” he asked me, his humble, anonymous and earnest Scribe, tasked only with transcribing the one thousand and one words Alfredo plots, scribbles, improvises, recalls and makes up. “Why me? You’re the author of this.”
“I’m not the author either,” Alfredo replied. “All I do is dig in my memory and recover or bury details, sometimes with pick and axe, others with a toothpick. The real author of all of this is that pair of eyes you can see from this plain, those eyes staring right at us right now like two faithful suns, keeping track of every single line.” (Hi Ponciano, hi Cardán, hi Mediopolvo! So now we’ve annoyed the officers of the Bolivian Air Farce, eh? This is just a story, you big cerotes wrapped in flags and uniforms! Only a tacalo would get upset che!)
“If you deny being the author,” I protested, “why do you put your messages in parentheses like you just did? You’ve just distorted things by trying to smuggle in your little personal notes. People are going to think these stories are true and the characters we just described are real flesh-and-blood people.”
“Look, Scribe, just start writing down that thing about Banzer and the bit with the fideos a la marinera and the dagger, because otherwise we’re both out of a job. If I stop telling stories for you to write down, you’ll have to look for another job. You’re the one who’s going to lose the most here, and whoever is reading us, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
“Susana San Miguel, Marcelle Meyer, Amelia. All of them names whose light and voice brightened happier days.” Alfredo thought about how much he needed metaphors, no matter how cruel they may seem. After two months of forced silence and narrative paralysis, he managed to convince the Scribe and inspire him to continue his work. (Despite his university degrees, the Scribe couldn’t find a job that was more interesting than this tangled story.)
“That’s not true! Please forgive us, dear readers. Alfredo is just lying here when he says I couldn’t find other work options outside these writings. That’s it.”
Meanwhile, Susana San Miguel’s letters were arriving in the island of Montreal like the distant noise of a fragile light plane manned by Fabián bringing correspondence from the South. The aircraft would slowly come into view, then start circling the lonely igloo. Alfredo would come out waving his arms like an excited ant welcoming the biannual visit from the plane, which would airdrop a large box filled with the victuals he’d need to survive in that island—the eye of the North Pole itself, the way he saw it. Then the propeller plane would take off and disappear again into the heavy curtains of low, cold clouds. Knowing the plane could stop coming any day, Alfredo was delighted to open the box, forgetting to put on his gloves in the blistering cold. He’d devour each word written by Susana San Miguel, while February spun around him in an ice-and-snow choreography, as if time itself was dancing in the cold and reconstructing every meticulous musical sentence from Prokofiev’s intense Montagues and Capulets. Falling snowflakes seemed to arrange themselves following the movement of the bows on the strings, pushed by the powerful currents that emerged from the deep bowels of the trumpets. They would rise and fall in the air like small flocks of white birds, slowly forming the packed, uniform surface that brought Susana San Miguel’s tight handwriting for hungry Alfredo to decipher, filling the uninhabited infinite space around him with echoes, trees, murmurs and voices.
Let’s imagine again the unfinished metaphor in which our character’s name is now María.
“Why weave a story about something that happened fifteen years ago? Soon it’ll be twenty, fifty years. Why not use the strategy of pragmatism? Why not outline the central structure of a novel, what has been called for so long the Great Bolivian Novel? An inane, presumptuous dream, as if one could speak about the ‘Great Bolivian Physics’ or the ‘Great La Paz Mathematics.’ Let’s assume for a moment that this is called ‘The Great Bolivian Novel’ even though none of what has been written may be great, or novelistic, or even Bolivian…” Alfredo reread the lines he had just penned in his notebook—where days and words gathered with no order or harmony, or rather, reflected the bustle of an existence filled with multiple referents, doubts and loyalties. Although he had the entire narrative structure on the tips of his fingers, he couldn’t make up his mind about explaining everything that self-censorship prevented him from wri
ting down. He would spend his time writing other things down, while his eyes registered the growing numbers of beggars in the Montreal metro, and both small and large groups of workers, students and unemployed protesting in the cold and snow. He was gradually beginning to recognize certain causes, until then unknown to him, seemingly unnecessary collective notions, such as those of patria, nation, or independence. Along with that, the conflictive shadow of national flags—he was beginning to see in the people around him the historical desire to be a nation, with the resulting foundation of a new country: Quebec. Winter days ran after each other like hockey players fighting over the puck that held Alfredo’s memory and consciousness. One day, as he continued his committed, secret search for Bolivia, he stumbled upon a restaurant near the Beaubien metro where they made and sold salteñas—salteñas, near the North Pole! There is no word more magical and beautiful for a Bolivian abroad than the word salteña. A faraway voice burst in from the depths of his memory: a story from Grandfather Alejandro after a meal, hidden in a long-gone childhood. At the end of World War II—during the liberation of Paris and while Hitler was yelling into the phone asking if the city had burned—as they advanced on one side of the Arc de Triomphe, Allied troops noticed in the distance a long cane, a tall, thin mast hung outside a door on a side street. Someone had tied a minuscule white flag at the end of it. Chewing on a ball of gum, one of the soldiers read it as a sign of unconditional surrender, but once they arrived, they would learn from a Frenchman familiar with the Llajta that it actually meant chicha buena in good Cochabamban. Sitting in that Montreal restaurant on Rue Beaubien with two sovereign salteñas loaded with condiments, Alfredo was shocked and satisfied to hear news on the radio about the imminent extradition of the general, the ex-general, the gonorrhal Luis García Mesa—or was it Meza?—who would be transferred from Brazil to the frigid walls of the Chonchocoro jail. He choked on his salteña, on the news, on history. He thought about the ex-dictator’s good fortune, who had sworn to stay in power until the year 2000, even if it cost the country a diet of mote and chuño heavily seasoned with bullets and repression. A photo taken a few days after the coup of July 17, 1980, showed the proud generelelos next to Johnny Walker’s smiling face, one of his cabinet’s most dedicated advisors. In the end, his megalodipsomaniac dreams had been reduced to a puppet regime, a nightmare that lasted under a year. It was lucky that gonorrhal García Meza was even still alive after all. He couldn’t breathe. What would have become of that poor rearguard militiaman if he’d suddenly found himself—with all his devotion to Bolivian neo-Nazi groups—walking on some street in Berlin in July of 1940, if he’d been detained by two hefty members of the Nazi party eyeing his skin colour and Andean physiognomy with growing eugenic interest? But no, future president of the national reconstruction government and commander-in-chief of the armed forces Luis García Mesza—in whose ranks Private Alfredo Cutipa had courageously served with thousands and thousands of other conscripts—had been born in Bolivia, a country whose extraordinary historic and climatic conditions had enabled the mass production of military and civil despots whose temples history has bestowed with a wreath of coca leaves. Only in a fictional country could four mestizos intoxicated by Mein Kampf—poorly translated and more appallingly digested—start organizing Nazi groups under the ridiculous moniker of “The Grooms of Death.”11 What Alfredo didn’t know was that, years later, the public stage would welcome a new group of Bolivians possessed by another kind of fundamentalism. They would arrive speaking English, inebriated by the most esoteric free-trade theories, bringing an entire neoliberal k’hoñichi, the same one that two hundred years earlier had justified the imposition of trade, coastal bombings, and piracy on the high seas in the name of freedom of navigation. The forward neoliberal graduates would never learn that despite free-trade, pseudomodernizing theological cosmetics, their country would continue to be the same old colony of Natives and mestizos oppressed, exiled, exploited and executed inside their own borders by a class of people who rinsed their mouths with the word “Bolivia.”
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