Red, Yellow and Green

by Alejandro Saravia

  “Please don’t, mi capitán, she’s my niece and she’s travelling, too. She lives far away.”

  “Oh yeah, let’s see, is it true this is your uncle? What’s his name?” the officer asked the woman, who had said nothing up until then, paralyzed by fear and uncertainty. She didn’t know what to say and stared at the driver, her anxious eyes trying to decipher what his name was.

  “His name is…his name is Julián…”

  “Julián who?” the lieutrenant insisted. “Julián Perro, Julián Piedra, tell me, what’s his last name, pues?”

  “His name is Julián Apaza,” the woman replied, trying to instil confidence in her tone of voice.

  The driver looked down and bit his lips, then looked back up at the officer, sensing the inevitable. His voice dried up when the officer said:

  “Let’s see, Julián Apaza, show me your identity papers.”

  The sleepy soldiers outside were bracing themselves against the cold, tapping their feet on the rocks, the tyres, trying to warm up. They bounced up and down, rubbed their hands with their machineguns slung across their backs. The trucks idled outside with their lights on. The driver took out his identity card. The lieutenant asked him to turn the light on in a commanding voice that grew heavier with every question and made it hard to breathe in the confined tension inside the rural transportation bus. He examined the ID, then looked at the young woman, whose eyes were glued to the floor.

  “True, your uncle’s name is Julián…”

  The woman sighed quietly, feeling deep relief in her chest.

  “…but he’s not Apaza. His name is Julián Calahumana, you fucking liar! What’s your name?”

  “Genoveva Ríos.”

  Julián Calahumana the driver, the drunkard, two students, three workmen, and eight soldiers from my company are outside, running around the perimeter of the large honour yard at the Air Base, driven by sticks when they fall down or when fatigue trips them and they roll on the ground. Every once in a while they scream and complain, but it goes on and they keep jogging, sweating out alcohol, fatigue, impotence, sweating their Bolivian condition on this dawn on August 7, 1980. We are inside this cell, nine soldiers and a lieutenant, in front of the crumpled body of a woman with her hands tied above her head. The lieutenant supervises, gets excited, orders, gets excited again. An entire squadron and Sergeant Vásquez have taken turns on that body. Soldiers who were unable to penetrate the body are running outside, being beaten from time to time. “That’s what they get for being faggots!” Lieutenant Ustarez yells at them every so often. It’s my turn and I can’t get it up. She is still crying, her lips swollen, blood reddening a corner of her mouth, one of her eyes buried under bulging eyelids. I try to think about women, about breasts, thighs, about all the situations and experiences I still haven’t lived but can imagine. I only see shadows, screams, shootings, people lying on the ground, photographs of the fallen at Ñancahuazú, bloated, naked, perforated on the front page of Los Tiempos newspaper. I see nothing but caimanes loaded with corpses headed to who knows where. Not for one second does it occur to me to take my rifle, gun them all down, starting with the general, majors, captains and lieutenants, even though I only have twenty rounds. No, it doesn’t even occur to me, and because of this, because of this silence, I am guilty. We are all guilty. Speeches—from the balconies at plaza Pérez Velasco, from the university atrium—made believe there would be armed pickets all around the city aiming at resistance and victory. Guilty, those who proclaimed long life to democracy self-defence committees and left it to the construction workers and labourers to put their bodies between bullets and democracy. Guilty, those who stayed home waiting for the people, a people, some heroic, imaginary people from some leaflet to go out on the streets for us, to resist like a ghost army we are not part of. Guilty, we who waited for the mythical revolutionary left to defeat the new alcoholic order of gonorrhal García Meza. But none of that crossed my mind at that moment. The skirts had been tossed to the side, except for one that had been conveniently placed under her trembling, frightened body and the rammed earth floor. Her dark-skinned legs were spread—where they met, a glistening pubis with little hair where several men had emptied themselves in a few flapping, violent seconds. There were bloody splotches on her groin, and she kept crying and flailing, trying to free herself. Lieutenant Ustariz—a bloodied Christ commanding “Love thy neighbour,” his knees raw from his carnal attack on the earthen floor—was starting to become impatient. With a smack to the back of my neck, he tried to knock me down to the floor, get me closer to the victim. “You’re lucky, stud! So many out there would wish they could take your place. Come on, maricón… Are you gonna fuck her or do you want a fucking beating?”

  The driver Julián Calahumana was panting like an asthmatic locomotive. Seventeen of us soldiers and four civilians were running with him—our punishment—dragging our feet, urged by blows from a few sergeants posted at the corners of the yard. Around 4:00 AM the driver fell down again and collapsed huffing and puffing, unable to move again. They called Lieutenant Ustariz over only when they realized that kicking him wouldn’t get them anywhere and he couldn’t actually stand back up. The man was barely breathing when the lieutenant reached his side. Calahumana tried to speak, to not suffocate: “…and…to think…my father…died… fighting…in the…Chaco…War…” He was quiet again. His face had turned blue from heart congestion as the pan pipes in his heart stopped playing and his heart stopped beating the drums of a frantic sicuriada. They rushed to load his body into a caimán and took him to his old bus. Following the officer’s orders, they sat him up behind the wheel in the same vehicle he’d been sleeping in a few hours earlier, waiting for the right time to leave for Pulacayo, the remote village he would never reach now. Genoveva Ríos, half naked, bleeding and unconscious, was dumped at the entrance of a public hospital. Genoveva Ríos, Boxeador’s girlfriend. At 9:00 AM on August 7th, the seventeen soldiers who hadn’t succeeded in grafting our anguished flesh between her legs the night before were now in punishment position, standing still like lampposts on top of a stone wall in the centre of the main yard, at attention, hands pressed firmly to our thighs, trying to balance and contain the fatigue that pierced us one bone at a time and set our bodies in a dangerous swaying motion. Lieutenant Ustariz, dark shades hiding the bags under his eyes, flaunted a war medal on his face from Genoveva Ríos biting him on the cheek. He explained to Major Trifón Echalar during the morning’s first formation that our punishment was due to a mutiny attempt the night we’d failed to obey a superior’s orders. The officers cursed, words came out like smoke from our battalion commander’s mouth, approving our punishment. “You have to hit them hard. It’s the only way they’ll learn to be good soldiers.” Later that day, soldiers from other companies gave us commiserating glances as they walked by our wall of scorn. Little by little, the punished soldiers started falling from the punitive height as they lost their balance, defeated and thrust against the ground by fatigue and the weight of their eyelids. They fell down one by one like sacks of potatoes, like downed trees, twisting ankles, injuring elbows and heads. Some struggled to get back up and walked their stiff legs to the building where they would try to dress their wounds, apply ointments to recover from the effects of a roaring night. Others did their best to stay awake, some crying and encouraging themselves. A concession. That was exactly the goal of the punishment: to humble you, break you down, shatter your spirits, make you guilty, make you accept that the penalty was just, make you feel like a piece of shit, like a worthless monkey. You are nothing but a mangy monkey, a little monkey that obeys the rigours of the stick. “Subordination and determination… Viva Volibia!” Even when you’re out, as a civilian, you will still be a little monkey, you will continue to respect authority, the uniform, you will remain shackled to fear and accept in silence when they beat you and shoot you down in the name of the thanta volibian republic. That’s why compulsory military service oug
ht to exist forever. To get you used to obeying, so that you won’t protest. You are nothing and that’s why fear inhabits you, that’s why you take refuge in your individuality, making you more and more fragile. You are nothing but a simple soldier. You are nothing. Your decisions are worthless. You can’t do anything. That’s just how it is. That’s the way history is. Final stop. You are boliviano, un buen liviano, a good lightweight, an incomplete fuck, an obedient, patriotic half-fuck, proud of your manipulated tricolour flag: red yellow and green.

  Laugh, laugh, laugh. I laugh on top of the stone wall that’s meant to defeat me. I laugh at the flag, at the official bugle, at the national anthem. I laugh at the immortal guano that heaps star upon star on the martial shoulders of the great volibian army, undefeated conqueror of retreats and corralitos at Villamontes, heroic in Tolata, Epizana, mining centres, Chapare and the tropics. Laugh at the poor officers who joined the army betrayed by their stomach, by hunger, because in volibia only a uniform could guarantee access to the monopoly of power and fear and the spoils of war—the right to housing, food and education for their children. Laugh at their petty ambitions, their long study nights before they are tested on showing new ways of shooting at peasants or skinning cats. Laugh at their little stars, their little stripes, their little parachutist badges, their little courses on sadomasochism at the school of condors. Laugh at their honour, subordination and determination. Laugh at their little symbols, at their well-intentioned forgetting that the glorious condor on the national coat of arms belongs to same family as carrion-feeding vultures, at their primate pride and gorilla insignias in a country where chimpanzees have more humanity than the entire General Staff. At their love of shields and badges. Laugh at the lyrics to their anthems. Laugh at their honour guards, their little soldiers dressed in red at the gates of the Palacio Quemado. Laugh at their freshwater admirals and rubber ducks, their rearguard generals, their colonels in slippers, their dipsomaniac captains. Laugh about the thanta volibian army and its twenty-two thousand, thirty thousand, fifty thousand or one hundred thousand soldiers forced to enlist by the political constipation of the state or by hunger, so poorly dressed, undernourished, always beating or being beaten. Laugh at their Sunday military rituals, their uniforms and their drunken outings to Paseo del Prado. Laugh at their grim racism, their veiled homosexuality. Laugh at their rattling scrapyard aircraft, their sickly caimanes, their tanks bought at a backhanded discount. Laugh at their pig-headed servility when receiving scraps from the US Army. Laugh at their battles, at the foolish resistance at the Boquerón bunker, laugh at bugleboy Mamani who should have left everything behind to play his trumpet at the festivities of his hometown instead of winding up dead astride a useless cannon. Laugh at this kleptomaniac, alcoholic, jingoistic army. Laugh my heart out at the glorious Volibian Armed Farces, at the Suckling Forces of a country governed by tie-wearing roundworms, thieves with diplomas from a foreign university. Laugh at history. Laugh out loud, laugh the high military command into confusion, laugh your heart out because laughter frightens away tears and makes death less deadly. Laugh about this little stone wall. Laugh about this punishment. Laugh about this uniform. Laugh, laugh, laugh…

  Remember that night when Boxeador’s fists were weaving in the air, menacing knuckles, spinning slow, regular circles in the dark. Say it was the night of August 17th, when Boxeador died, when we found pieces of his skull encrusted in the wooden beams holding up the roof at guard post number eleven—or was it sixteen?—and we found his brain mass scattered in all four directions, whitish grey gelatinous blobs splattered on the walls and crisscrossed by tiny veins that looked like they were still throbbing. A fist whooshes by seeking someone’s face, yours, as an explosion of enraged bats rises up, fists sink into your ribs, flatten your nose, unleashing torrents of blood and swelling up your eyelids. You take the impact. In one blow time falls flat on the ground, stopped, retinas burst. In one blow you hit the ground, the same night Boxeador singlehandedly knocked out half a dozen soldiers who’d been guarding the gates of the Prevención for eleven nights in a row, the same night they brought in Genoveva Ríos. Remember this because the dead only die for good when no one remembers them. Remember Vicios, feeling his naked bleeding gums, feeling around for his teeth on the Andean soil, his ribs threshed and crumpled on a hillside of the Altiplano that echoed and resonated like a drum with each blow, each body that fell on the ground. Remember Boxeador’s blows falling on you, mixing with sweat, blood, saliva. Remember his hands rising up to his face from time to time to wipe away his quiet tears, and then return to yours, even more vicious now, more accusing, because you were there, too, at the Prevención eleven nights ago, and you didn’t do anything to change the course of events, because you were just one more witness, helpless and ectoplasmic, watching as the dirty, bloody sex of every officer and soldier penetrated the flesh of Boxeador’s girlfriend, Genoveva Ríos. You cover your face, hunch your back, your feet tap the ground looking for balance, trying not to fall on the ground, trying to explain you’re not to blame even though you actually are. You’re to blame for every bomb in the mines. You’re to blame for every death on every street. You’re to blame for every single second of July of 1980. Guilty of having obeyed the political constipation, guilty of having obeyed that little poster on the wall calling that year’s first echelon of recruits to duty. Guilty of believing in the Patria. Guilty of worshipping the flag. Boxeador is now a storm pouring fierce hail upon your back. You duck another punch and then—not minding your effective dodging and English guard, how tired your feet—with one tearful scream Boxeador flattens you on the mat of the Altiplano with a right hook to your face that resonates inside your skull like mortar fire. The film is erased for fifteen, twenty, a hundred years. Complete darkness. You are no longer there.

  He woke up one night around 4:00 AM. He was thirsty. He went to the bathroom, emptied his bladder and drank a glass of water. When he turned off the light, there he was, in the half-light, half a metre away in front of him: Boxeador’s silent figure in his apartment on Rue Cartier. He felt as if someone had hooked each one of his hands to a 220-volt live wire—every hair on his head and body standing on end. The apparition had a tattered bandage covering a large part of his head. He could sense the figure exhaling grief, frustration and pain, contained rage into the air. Alfredo tried to explain why he was writing about him, why he’d decided to interrupt that long silence of almost twenty years, knowing he should have consulted with him somehow before setting out to examine what had happened at the El Alto garrison that night in August 1980. But he felt his knees buckle under him, his throat full of rusty nails, his tongue a flap of dry hide. He never thought death would make Boxeador’s figure so cold and imposing. He thought he’d explained his points out loud but hadn’t heard himself say anything. As light returned to his left eye, Boxeador’s shape gradually faded away in the darkness of his right eye. Alfredo had another sip of water. Outside, only the street lamps were still awake. Once again he scanned the white walls, the corners, the doors inside his apartment. There was no one there. He turned off the bathroom light and went back to bed, where Bolivia—the Kurdish woman—was sleeping, breathing in long sighs. He looked at the line of her shoulders, the motionless stream of her hair. He reached out to turn out the light but changed his mind. He stayed still for a moment, unable to sleep, his brain flooded with voices and images. He got out of bed again. He walked to the living room barefoot, turned on a small lamp, sat at his table and began to write again.

  “The dead are never dead,” Amelia whispered, walking up to him from behind. He was thinking about Boxeador. He didn’t dare turn around to look, both startled and amazed at the welcome freshness of a voice that hadn’t lost its sweetness with the passing of time.

  “Today you inhabit the dead,” she whispered in a tone that seemed somewhat celebratory. “Do you think about me sometimes, Alfredo?”

  By way of answer, he wrote: “Your body, sometimes as dense as the sil
ence with which you touch me. Under this sun that’s almost never ours, you speak in the voice of so many voices and populate my fingers. Today the dead will speak to me about their shoes and their affections, and with their quiet, dusty love they will deny the fall.” Behind him, she may have been reading what Alfredo was writing down, as detailed as he could, about all the sensations Amelia’s presence aroused in him. He felt her rest her hands on his back, barely touching him, and heard her say:

  “And then you realize our dead will also inhabit my voice. They, who never really left.”

  “Your voice?” Alfredo asked.

  She glided towards the middle of the room and spun around, her feet not quite touching the wooden floor that now reflected her glow. She was wearing her thin green cotton dress again, the long dress that at seventeen had showed him the contours of a woman’s body for the first time. It was that year’s last dance. In the centre of the great hall at the Miraflores school, Alfredo was stunned noticing the exquisite shape of Amelia’s body for the first time. She had somehow remained invisible to him until then—he hadn’t known how to look—and now he was suddenly feeling the pull of giant magnets under his skin, volcanoes erupting in his chest, eyes and hands and lips. He couldn’t look away as she danced in front of him, saying farewell to seventeen, farewell to the Hugo Dávila Secondary School, farewell to the quiet affection he’d felt growing inside him, climbing up like a plant through his fingers and ribs all those years, lacking the voice he would have needed to get close to her, to pour on her palms the ocean of words that churned inside him like an endless storm only she could stop with her breath, her voice, her masterful touch. Amelia kept spinning and spinning, filling the large gymnasium with whispers, laughter and music, the bright-coloured spotlights in the corners lighting up her steps, her lines and her movements in a long waltz of farewell to innocence. Alfredo’s astonished eyes danced with her, feeling that month of September would never leave him after those last moments together, unaware that a few months later the light in her eyes would be extinguished forever while a phone rang in vain in another room. Perhaps she would have answered Alfredo’s call in those last seconds, but Death was mightier than the seventeen-year-old woman’s vigour. Since then, he would never stop dying—endlessly, one word at a time. Now, twenty years later, Amelia was wearing her green dress again, spinning and taking him on paths where past, present and future intermingled, erasing all reference points, all borders from which to return, all traces of identity. Now Amelia took on Marcelle’s features, spoke to him in Marcelle’s voice, reminded him they’d be meeting up again tomorrow at the Champ-de-Mars metro, near the ticket booth, right by the Montreal map, to go for a walk through the halls of the Château Ramezay, stop in the middle of the seventeenth century, look in colonial mirrors that may still recognize, hundreds of years later, that recurring game a man and a woman’s hands play to verify they exist, hold each other by the arm to enhance their vital sense of breathing one more afternoon on the streets of Montreal’s Old Port, and then, once the night had lit up the city’s luminous pulse, walk up Boulevard Saint-Laurent to drink the night right out of the bottle, followed by sweaty shipwrecks and panting silences, an attempt to bridge the distance that lay between them before they’d met, across walls and deserted rooms in the old house where Amelia was confined, watching the days being built. “Write, Alfredo, write all of this down!” But he just listened to her, unable to tell whether she’d betrayed him—her, the woman who could become every other woman at the same time as soon as he called at the gate of the colonial house of time and oblivion, asking to see her and her signs and references. Amelia would come to see him after walking through several patios, hallways filled with books no one read anymore, past the fountain adorning the centre of the patio of arches—identical to the Condes de Arana house in La Paz. Sometimes she managed to sneak out of the house of the dead without being seen, and she would come to surprise her author, who sat drinking cuba libres surrounded by cumbias and jaranas, practising in vain how to fully surrender to the exercise of forgetting in some remote northern island.