Carlos Fonseca Amador, leader of the Nicaraguan revolution, has died fighting in the jungle.
A colonel brings the news to the cell where Tomás Borge lies shattered.
Together they had traveled a long road, Carlos and Tomás, since the days when Carlos sold newspapers and candy in Matagalpa. Together they founded, in Tegucigalpa, the Sandinista Front.
“He’s dead,” says the colonel.
“You’re wrong, colonel,” says Tomás.
(58)
1977: Managua
Tomás
Bound to an iron ring, teeth chattering, drenched in shit, blood, and vomit, Tomás Borge is a pile of broken bones and stripped nerves, a scrap lying on the floor waiting for the next round of torture.
But this remnant of himself can still sail down secret rivers that take him beyond pain and madness. Letting himself go, he drifts into another Nicaragua. He sees it.
Through the hood that squeezes his face swollen by blows, he sees it: He counts the beds in each hospital, the windows in each school, the trees in each park, and sees the sleepers fluttering their eyelids, bewildered, those long dead from hunger and everything else that kills now being awakened by newly born suns.
(58)
1977: Solentiname Archipelago
Cardenal
The herons, looking at themselves in the shimmering mirror, lift their beaks. The fishermen’s boats are already returning, and behind them swim the turtles that come here to give birth on the beach.
In a wooden cabin, Jesus is seated at the fishermen’s table. He eats turtle eggs, fresh-caught guapote, and cassava. The forest, searching for him, slips its arms through the windows.
To the glory of this Jesus, Ernesto Cardenal, the poet-monk of Solentiname, writes. To his glory sings the trumpeter zanate, the homeless bird, always flying among the poor, that freshens its wings in the lake waters. And to his glory the fishermen paint. They paint brilliant pictures that announce Paradise—all brothers, no bosses, no peons—until one night the fishermen who paint Paradise decide to start making it, and cross the lake to attack the San Carlos barracks.
From the darkness, the owl promises trouble: “Screwed … screwed …”
The dictatorship kills many as these seekers of Paradise pass through the mountains and valleys and islands of Nicaragua. The dough rises, the big loaf swells …
(6 and 77)
Omar Cabezas Tells of the Mountain’s Mourning for the Death of a Guerrilla in Nicaragua
I never forgave Tello for being killed with one bullet, just one bullet … I felt a great fear, and it was as if the mountain, too, felt fear. The wind dropped and the trees stopped swaying, not a leaf stirred, the birds stopped singing. Everything froze, awaiting that moment when they’d come and kill the lot of us.
And we set out. When we broke into a marching pace up the ravine, it was as if we were shaking the mountain, as if we were grabbing her and telling her: Who the hell does this bitch think she is?
Tello lived with the mountain. I’m convinced he had relations with her, she bore him sons; and when Tello died she felt that all was over, her commitment was gone, that all the rest was foolishness … But when she saw the will to fight of the men marching there over her, in her heart she realized that Tello was not the beginning and end of the world. Though Tello may have been her son, though he may have been her life, her secret lover, her brother, her creature, her stone, though Tello may have been her river … he was not the end of the world, and that after him came all of us who could still light a fire in her heart.
(73)
1977: Brasília
Scissors
Over a thousand Brazilian intellectuals sign a manifesto against censorship.
In July of last year, the military dictatorship stopped the weekly Movimiento from publishing the United States Declaration of Independence, because in it is said that the people have the right and the duty to abolish despotic governments. Since then the censorship has banned: the Bolshoi Ballet, because it is Russian; the erotic prints of Pablo Picasso, because they are erotic; and the History of Surrealism, because one of its chapters has the word revolution in its title (“Revolution in Poetry”).
(371)
1977: Buenos Aires
Walsh
He mails a letter and several copies. The original letter, to the military junta that rules Argentina. The copies, to foreign press agencies. On the first anniversary of the coup d’état, he is sending a sort of statement of grievances, a record of the infamies committed by a regime that can only stagger in its dance of death. At the bottom he puts his signature and number (Rodolfo Walsh, I.D. 2845022). He is only steps from the post office when their bullets cut him down; and he is carried off wounded, not to be seen again.
His naked words were scandalous where such fear reigns, dangerous while the great masked ball continues.
(461)
1977: Río Cuarto
The Burned Books of Walsh and Other Authors Are Declared Nonexistent
IN VIEW OF the measure taken by the ex-Military Intervention of this National University in fulfillment of express superior orders, with respect to withdrawing from the Library Area all reading material of an antisocial nature and whose contents exuded ideologies alien to the Argentine National Being, constituting a source of extreme Marxist and subversive indoctrination, and
WHEREAS: Said literature having been opportunely incinerated, it is fitting to strike it from the patrimony of this House of Advanced Studies, the Rector of the National University of Rio Cuarto
RESOLVES: To strike from the patrimony of the National University of Río Cuarto (Library Area) all the bibliography listed below: [Long list follows of books by Rodolfo Walsh, Bertrand Russell, Wilhelm Dilthey, Maurice Dobb, Karl Marx, Paulo Freire, and others].
(452)
1977: Buenos Aires
The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo,
women born of their children, are the Greek chorus of this tragedy. Brandishing photos of their disappeared ones, they circle round and round the obelisk, before the Pink House of the government, as obstinately as they make pilgrimages to barracks, police stations, and sacristies, dried up from so much weeping, desperate from so much waiting for those who were and are no longer, or perhaps still are … who knows?
“I wake up believing he’s alive,” says one, say all. “I begin to disbelieve as the morning goes on. He dies on me again at noon. He revives in the evening, I begin to believe he’ll come soon, and I set a place for him at the table, but he dies again and at night I fall asleep without hope. When I wake up, I feel he’s alive …”
They call them madwomen. Normally no one speaks of them. With the situation normalized, the dollar is cheap and certain people, too. Mad poets go to their deaths, and normal poets kiss the sword while praising silence. With total normality the Minister of Finance hunts lions and giraffes in Africa and the generals hunt workers in the suburbs of Buenos Aires. New language rules make it compulsory to call the military dictatorship Proceso de Reorganización National.
(106 and 107)
1977: Buenos Aires
Alicia Moreau
Sometimes she goes overboard in her faith, anticipating social revolution in a none too realistic way, or explodes publicly in tirades against military power and the Pope of Rome. But what would become of the Plaza de Mayo mothers without the enthusiasm of this sprite woman? She never lets them grow discouraged or feel defeated by so much indifference and jeering: “One can always do something,” she tells them. “Together. Each one on her own, no. Let’s—we have to—”
She grasps her cane and is the first to move.
Alicia Moreau is nearly a hundred years old. She has been in the struggle since the days when socialists drank only water and sang only the Internationale. She has witnessed many marvels and betrayals, births and deaths, and whatever her momentary troubles, she keeps believing that it’s worthwhile to believe. Alicia Moreau is as lively now as she was when the century began and she
made speeches from soapboxes between red flags in the worker barrios of Buenos Aires, or crossed the Andes on muleback, hurrying the animal so as not to arrive late at a feminist congress.
(221)
1977: Buenos Aires
Portrait of a Croupier
The Minister of Finance of the Argentine dictatorship is a pious devotee of private enterprise. He thinks about it on Sundays, when he kneels at the Mass, and also on weekdays, when he gives courses at the Military School. Nevertheless, the minister correctly withdraws from the company he directs, generously ceding it to the state for ten times its worth.
The generals turn the country into a barracks. The minister turns it into a casino. Argentina is deluged with dollars and consumer goods. It is the time of the hangman, but also of the conman and the conjurer. The generals order the country to shut up and obey, while the minister orders it to speculate and consume. Anyone who works is a sucker, anyone who protests, a corpse. To cut wages in half and reduce rebellious workers to nothing, the minister slips sweet silver bribes to the middle class, who fly to Miami and return loaded with mountains of gadgets and gimmickry. In the face of the daily massacre, people shrug their shoulders: “They must have done something. It’s for a good reason.”
Or they whistle and look the other way: “Don’t get involved.”
(143)
1977: Caracas
The Exodus of the Intruders
The prophet spoke in a café on Caracas’s Calle Real de Sabana Grande. An extraterrestrial with flaming eyes appeared for a moment and announced that on a certain August Sunday a furious ocean would split the mountains and wipe out the city.
Bishops, witches, astronomers, and astrologers repeatedly issued reassurances that there was nothing to worry about, but they couldn’t stop the panic from growing, from rolling like a ball through the barrios of Caracas.
Yesterday was the Sunday in question. The president of the republic ordered the police to take charge of the city. More than a million Caracans stampeded, fled with their belongings on their backs. More automobiles than people remained in the city.
Today, Monday, the fugitives begin to return. The ocean is where it always was, the mountains too. In the valley, Caracas continues to exist. And so the oil capital recovers its terrified citizens. They reenter as if begging pardon, because they know now that they are superfluous, that this is a world of wheels, not legs. Caracas belongs to its prepotent automobiles, not to whoever dares cross its streets to the annoyance of the machines. What would become of these people, condemned to live in a city that doesn’t belong to them, if María Lionza didn’t protect them and José Gregorio didn’t cure them?
(135)
María Lionza
Her breasts rise above the center of Caracas and reign, nakedly, over the frenzy. In Caracas, in all Venezuela, María Lionza is a goddess.
Her invisible palace is far from the capital on a mountain in the Sorte chain. The rocks scattered over this mountain were once María Lionza’s lovers, men who paid for a night of embraces by being converted into breathing stones.
Simón Bolívar and Jesus of Nazareth work for her in the sanctuary. Also helping her are three secretaries: one black, one Indian, one white. They attend to the faithful, who come loaded with offerings of fruit, perfumes, and undergarments.
María Lionza, untamed woman, feared and desired by God and Satan, has the powers of heaven and hell. She can inspire happiness or unhappiness; she saves if she feels like saving, and thunders if she feels like thundering.
(190 and 346)
José Gregorio
He is chastest of the chaste, María Lionza’s white secretary. Doctor José Gregorio Hernández has never yielded to the temptations of the flesh. All the insinuating women who approached him ended up in convents, repenting, bathed in tears. This virtuous Physician of the Poor, this Apostle of Medicine, ended his days in 1919, undefeated. His immaculate body was pitilessly crushed by one of the two or three automobiles that circulated in Caracas at a snail’s pace in those happy days. After death, the miraculous hands of José Gregorio have continued prescribing remedies and operating on the sick.
In the sanctuary of María Lionza, José Gregorio busies himself with public health problems. He has never failed to turn up from the Great Beyond at the call of sufferers, the only saint ever in a necktie and hat.
(363)
1977: Graceland
Elvis
Once, his way of shaking his left leg evoked screams. His lips, his eyes, his sideburns were sexual organs.
Now a soft ball of flab, Elvis Presley, dethroned king of rock ’n’ roll, lies in bed, his glance floating between six television screens. The TVs, suspended from the ceiling, are each tuned to a different channel. Between sleep and dreams, always more asleep than awake, Elvis fires unloaded pistols, click, click, at the images he doesn’t like. The suet ball of his body covers a soul made of Codeine, Morphine, Valium, Seconal, Placidyl, Quaalude, Nembutal, Valmid, Demerol, Elavil, Aventyl, Carbrital, Sinutab, and Amytal.
(197 and 409)
1978: San Salvador
Romero
The archbishop offers her a chair. Marianela prefers to talk standing up. She always comes for others; but this time Marianela comes for herself. Marianela García Vilas, attorney for the tortured and disappeared of El Salvador, does not come this time to ask the archbishop’s solidarity with one of the victims of D’Aubuisson, Captain Torch, who burns your body with a blowtorch, or of some other military horror specialist. Marianela doesn’t come to ask help for anyone else’s investigation or denunciation. This time she has something personal to say to him. As mildly as she can she tells him that the police have kidnapped her, bound, beaten, humiliated, stripped her—and that they raped her. She tells it without tears or agitation, with her usual calm, but Archbishop Arnulfo Romero has never before heard in Marianela’s voice these vibrations of hatred, echoes of disgust, calls for vengeance. When Marianela finishes, the archbishop; astounded, falls silent too.
After a long silence, he begins to tell her that the Church does not hate or have enemies, that every infamy and every action against God forms part of a divine order, that criminals are also our brothers and must be prayed for, that one must forgive one’s persecutors, one must accept pain, one must … Suddenly, Archbishop Romero stops.
He lowers his glance, buries his head in his hands. He shakes his head, denying it all, and says: “No, I don’t want to know.”
“I don’t want to know,” he says, and his voice cracks.
Archbishop Romero, who always gives advice and comfort, is weeping like a child without mother or home. Archbishop Romero, who always gives assurance, the tranquillizing assurance of a neutral God who knows all and embraces all—Archbishop Romero doubts.
Romero weeps and doubts and Marianela strokes his head.
(259 and 301)
1978: La Paz
Five Women
“What is the main enemy? The military dictatorship? The Bolivian bourgeoisie? Imperialism? No, compañeros. I want to tell you just this: Our main enemy is fear. We have it inside us.”
This is what Domitila said at the Catavi tin mine, and then she came to the capital with four other women and more than twenty kids. On Christmas Day they started their hunger strike. No one believed in them. Some thought it a ridiculous joke: “So five women are going to overthrow the dictatorship?”
The priest Luis Espinal is the first to join them. In no time there are fifteen hundred people starving themselves all over Bolivia. The five women, accustomed to hunger since they were born, call water chicken or turkey and salt pork chop, and feed on laughter. Meanwhile the hunger strikers multiply—three thousand, ten thousand—until the Bolivians who have stopped eating and working can no longer be counted, and twenty-three days after the start of the hunger strike the people invade the streets, and now nothing can be done to stop them.
The five women have overthrown the military dictatorship.
(1)
1978: Managua
“The Pigsty”
is what Nicaraguans call the National Palace. On the first floor of this pretentious Parthenon senators spout off. On the second, deputies.
One midday in August, a handful of guerrillas led by Edén Pastora and Dora María Téllez attack the Pigsty and in three minutes capture all of Somoza’s legislators. To get them released, Somoza has but to free Sandinista prisoners. People line the airport road to cheer them.
This is turning out to be a year of continuous war. Somoza started it with the murder of the journalist Pedro Joaquín Chamorro. Infuriated people promptly incinerate several of the dictator’s businesses. Flames consume the prosperous Plasmaféresis, Inc., which exports Nicaraguan blood to the United States. The people swear that they won’t rest until the vampire himself is buried in some place darker than the night, with a stake impaling his heart.
(10 and 460)
Tachito Somoza’s Pearl of Wisdom
I am a businessman, but humble.
(434)
1978: Panama City
Torrijos
General Omar Torrijos says he does not want to enter history. He only wants to enter the Canal Zone, stolen by the United States at the turn of the century. Thus he wanders the world from country to country, government to government, platform to platform. When accused of serving Moscow or Havana, Torrijos laughs. Every people, he says, swallows its own aspirins for its own headache. If it comes to that, he says, he gets along better with the Castristas than with the castrati.
Finally the canal’s fences fall. The United States, pressured by the world, signs a treaty that restores to Panama, by degrees, the canal and the prohibited zone that encloses it.
Century of the Wind Page 26
