La Vida Doble (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)

by Fontaine, Arturo

  We put the woman with the others in the bathroom. Canelo shouted at them, saying anyone who followed us would get a bullet between the eyes. We threw our ski masks on the floor and ran out. Canelo first, then me, and further back Kid of the Day, covering our retreat. Before crossing the threshold I looked at my watch. We’d been inside a little over three minutes.

  And Canelo saw something I had not when he shouted at me: “Run! Run!” Because when I started running toward Calle Moneda, zigzagging through the people, as we’d been taught, I heard, like I told you, his Smith and Wesson .44 and, afterward, the 9mm CZs, but not the machine-gun fire of our AK. And one brother, Samuel, he was called, had been posted outside the currency exchange to cover Canelo, Kid of the Day, and me with a Kalashnikov hidden beneath his ample coat. It was the only long gun, the report would say in its analysis of the situation: Never again only one man with a long gun. The struggle has passed to another phase. While I was zigzagging though the pedestrian street I managed to think that Samuel’s AK-47 must be silent because he had given us up. I was wrong. I found out much later that Canelo had seen Samuel fall. It was right at the moment we were coming out of the currency exchange. Samuel went down without ever making a sound.

  The street was full of people at that hour. A woman and a young man gave their versions to the police. And we had two lookouts. One was Rafa, across from the currency exchange, who was watching the exits to Alameda and north to Calle Moneda, which was the emergency route. And the other lookout, Puma, was watching the southern route leading to the subway station that, according to the plan, we would go through to get to the taxi. Rafa and Puma, who both escaped, wrote a report for the Directorate. The report gave the names of the heroes who had died in battle, Canelo, Samuel, and Kid Díaz, and of the survivors, Rafa and Puma. It also stated that I had been captured by the enemy.

  Samuel, according to the report, was attacked from behind at the exact moment he approached the door of the currency exchange to cover us. He had to check with our two lookouts, who would give him a signal that meant “all’s well” or “danger.” Samuel had to repeat the signal to Canelo and cover us with his Kalashnikov, which was easily capable of reaching a human target three hundred yards away. It’s dependable, that gun. For rapid fire, it’s the best. It’s so easy to use. I know that gun by heart. The Polish AKMS, too, the one that has a folding stock and is a little lighter. The one Samuel was carrying that day weighs a little over nine pounds, seven ounces when loaded. It has thirty rounds in its clip. But Samuel, as Rafa remembered, bent backward violently over the back of a man who turned around and knelt down. His AK fell to the ground as his legs flailed desperately. Several people dressed as civilians and indistinguishable from the pedestrians—agents, of course—surrounded the spot, and no one could see when Samuel’s body fell to the ground.

  “Garrote” is what they call that maneuver in the intelligence manuals. The victim is taken by surprise and a short, very thin wire is put around the neck and pulled hard. The man goes backward, falls heavily over the bent back that his assassin offers him, and he’s strangled. A silent way to kill. I never managed to find out who the assassin was. They finished Samuel off with a silenced shot as soon as he hit the pavement. Two days later, his body appeared in one of our safe houses that stood empty. Suicide, they said. No one believed it.

  In the meantime, Canelo had opened fire on the man coming at him head-on, and people scattered, shouting and running. In the curve of the street, the protuberance of a building served as cover. At first he didn’t know where to fire, because all he saw was Samuel’s body bent roughly and a man underneath shielding himself with it. He fell back, covering me. Another agent shot at him from the side leading to Ahumada. That’s where he aimed his next shot.

  After that the report of the skirmish gets hazier. Bone, they say, got personally involved in reconstructing the battle. He wanted to extract lessons. Our training was based, in part, on the stories of different confrontations. The idea was for the combatant to imagine the kinds of situations he or she could possibly face. The problem was, of course, that no encounter was the same as any other. Even so, the study of these cases, of past failures and successes, prepared us for the day of combat. Most of our fighters—as was my case until that morning—spent years and years without meeting the enemy in a firefight, without hearing the whistle of a bullet seeking their bodies; in other words, without being subjected to the test of reality. Shooting at a flesh-and-blood person who’s also armed is different from target practice on a bottle hanging from a tree branch, you understand.

  I used to wonder how true to life these kinds of reconstructions really were. We’ll never know. The Spartan grew impatient when someone like me raised epistemological objections. He’d gotten used to acting quickly and taking risks without waiting for certainties. To me it seemed like the stories we were given left out and censored doubts or alternative hypotheses. It was a polished and carefully selected version of what memory was capable of restoring. I would have preferred an interpretation that was more open and contradictory to the facts. I was suspicious of so much precision. Because, they warned us from the start that a shootout in the streets is a confusing, fleeting event, and you remember it in fragments. No one was watching it all from outside in order to give a complete, unified view. In spite of that warning, they inevitably put forth, borne on a fallacious and inviolable voluntarism, an ordered chain of events, with a beginning, a middle, and an end. But I always held onto the doubts appropriate to a graduate in French literature.

  The only answer I ever got from the Spartan was something like: “We have to try for a coherent, complete, and objective story of what happened. It’s an unattainable ideal, we know. But as an ideal it’s inalienable. We see its usefulness in practice.” And then, considering the matter closed, he took a Havana from his jacket pocket. The Spartan gazed placidly at its wrapper, he sniffed it and then smelled the tobacco itself, and then he started to palpate the cigar, enjoying its corklike consistency. “It’s an Upmann,” he told me. “A Sir Winston, maybe the most balanced cigar I’ve ever had in terms of smell, taste, and strength. It has a very wide pull. When you draw on it—not the first puffs, of course, which are for lighting it more than anything—you can taste notes of coffee and cocoa. It should be smoked with utmost respect, let me tell you.” He offered me the other one.

  “Some other time,” I said. He lit it serenely with a cedar match and then cut it. A thick smoke with an inviting aroma enveloped him.

  According to Puma, it was our own Kid of the Day who hit the agent threatening Canelo from in front. The man fell face-first onto the pavement. Then a skinny, well-dressed woman, who emerged all of a sudden from among the terrified, fleeing pedestrians, a woman who could have passed for a young secretary, took a pistol from her briefcase and opened fire. Canelo and the Kid retreated toward Moneda. They withdrew little by little, firing, each one glued to his piece of wall. And they discovered that the walls of those buildings were full of protrusions and hiding places that allowed them to maneuver. It was that skinny woman who hit Kid of the Day. According to information in the press, a bullet went through his left eye. Another two perforated his abdomen. Rafa and Puma, our lookouts, fought until Canelo fell. The street had emptied out, and only agents and machine-gun fire were left. They had set a trap.

  The shots came now from up above. They had to protect themselves. Rafa says in his report that he remembers a man with a casual suit and dark glasses, glued to the wall, looking for Canelo. Puma says he didn’t see the man, he was focused on the roofs, where he could make out one or another jockey hat and pair of dark glasses that appeared and disappeared with each gunshot. The man in the dark suit hid behind a protruding entrance to an office building, and, pressed close to the wall, was trying to reach the next doorway. He says Canelo shot at him twice. The man kept coming. Suddenly, he was already too close; and he was holding his gun with both hands. He shot Canelo in the chest. Impossible to miss at such close ra
nge.

  Canelo fell. He tried to get up. Rafa and Puma—because they both saw this final scene—say that he managed to get on one knee when another burst of fire hit him point-blank. Was it an unnecessary death after all? The story in Commander Joel’s monthly letter ended more or less like this: “After a bullet perforated his artery, a stream of hot, living blood poured forth. The enemy agent sprang back. Canelo fell, secure in the knowledge that he was a hero, secure that he would go on living forever in us. According to the Mapuches, Canelo is now an am, which means he lives and eats and celebrates and fights with us as long as we keep his memory with us. A hero who gives his life lives forever.”

  NINETEEN

  Of course, I didn’t read that reconstruction until months later. I read it alone in my sweltering apartment on Carlos Antúnez. The walls, I think I’ve mentioned, were very thin, and I could hear the constant murmur of my neighbor’s TV. I hadn’t finished moving in yet. There were still suitcases and boxes to open. I got into bed and I couldn’t cry for Canelo. I spent the whole day between the sheets, not eating, my face turned to the wall.

  Canelo was thin and lanky, with straight, blond hair cut short like a soldier’s. I loved to run my hand over that short, wiry hair, toothbrush hair. I liked his eyes, very light green. We were friends, and we slept together purely as friends. We didn’t love each other with the madness and faith of lovers. It was more a way of keeping each other company while the passion of fear pursued us. I still feel the shape of his bony shoulders in my hands sometimes, his ribs where I would pretend to play the piano until it tickled him. His smile was a little shy. We kissed a lot, but there was no savage hunger in our kisses; they were tender. He was a tender man. I’ve never felt a tenderness toward anyone like the one Canelo awoke in me. I trusted in him. I’ve never trusted anyone more than Canelo. Although sometimes I tried to ward off my feelings. I didn’t want to be just a pawn in Canelo’s plan.

  Like I said, I wasn’t even in love. We were comrades in arms. But something resonated in me, and I told myself that if it weren’t for him I wouldn’t do it, I stuck to him and his fight like ivy to the wall. Just listen to the sexist cliché I use! Without him, what I was just evaporated.

  That’s why I agonized so much when I couldn’t take comfort in our leader’s words in the report. I couldn’t stand his rhetoric. My antipathy opened a rift. His words made me grit my teeth like I would at the sound of nails on a blackboard. I felt my ears burning red when I remembered swallowing that kind of drivel before. And I did as I was told like a little girl, and I felt put upon and I blamed myself the same way I did in school when the nuns punished me, when it filled me with peace to accept my blame and it brought me happiness to repent. What the fuck! . . . Canelo wouldn’t live among us forever, because we, too, were going to die without shame or glory. And that hot, living blood . . . No. They’d wipe us out like fumigated ants.

  I knew, I had been in their dungeons. Instead of heroes, our destiny was to be misguided extremists half-invented by the military, idealists who inspired pity. The vanguard of combatants that was to inaugurate a new world would become a herd of victims; the spear point of warriors and heroes would turn into a flock of sacrificial lambs. And after all, maybe it wasn’t power that we wanted but rather to oppose all power—maybe we wouldn’t have known how to do anything with power except lose it. And that was, perhaps, what we wanted: to be the lambs of a great sacrifice and for its memory to remain on the altar of history so that others who came after us would identify with us and resurrect us.

  And when President Salvador Allende fired the AK—the one Fidel gave him—into his own mouth, what if he had wanted precisely to avoid our sacrifice, to sacrifice himself for all of us? A Christ, then, revolutionary, Masonic, then, and atheist, a disciple of “historical materialism”? Do you think I’m off base, that I’m being disrespectful, that I’m moving away from the stubborn and inexorable facts? Allow me some imprecision, some imaginative improvisation, which can be more illuminating than the fetishism of facts. Sometimes interpretation is better than the data. For better or worse, you’ve told me you want to get a novel out of this. Or have you been convinced it’s better if you don’t? In any case, there’s another hypothesis, one that sticks closer to actual history. You know, he sent a message to Miguel Enríquez, the head of MIR, the leader of those who thought armed struggle was inevitable and were preparing for it. He sent it just moments before he died. “Now it’s your turn,” he said. Miguel’s turn, he meant, and the turn of all those who thought the way he did.

  Nevertheless, in the end victory belongs to the crucified one, and the opiate of his church of poor souls bereft on the earth. A taboo against armed struggle has been instituted. The incapacity for revenge is called lack of desire for revenge. And meanwhile, in the vale of tears, the rich hoard more and more treasure. And, well, for the lambs to be upset at the great predatory birds is no strange thing. Of course they know, poor little rich boys, that it’s easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. Oh, how scary! They had taught us that power came from the mouth of a gun . . . In a few years, weakness was falsified into something of merit and the sanctimonious were asking, as you are, with widened eyes: But what war, what revolution, what insurrection are you talking about, pray tell? We were caught up in the vengeance of the powerless, their imaginary vengeance.

  The police report informed of an “armed confrontation” in which “two extremists and one officer of the intelligence service were gunned down.” Two others “were shot and injured, and are recuperating in the Military Hospital.” The place was cordoned off for some forty minutes, after which not a drop of blood was left on the ground. The broken windows of the currency exchange and the offices on the corner of Ahumada were replaced that same afternoon. When they took the cordon down, office workers flooded back in. From the moment when a thin wire fell around Samuel’s neck and strangled him until I was taken prisoner, four and a half minutes went by. That was what our lookouts estimated. According to more experienced combatants the encounter had been a long one. People don’t realize: normally a shootout in an urban area doesn’t last even two minutes.

  TWENTY

  And there was neither war nor guerrillas, you say now; there was nothing, so many say today. Just a few isolated acts of sabotage and erratic attacks. Insignificant factions that were, moreover, ineffective. And that’s what you’ve been told and what you’ve read, I know. There was nothing, you repeat, that could pose a threat to the terror of the established order. So the sacrifice of our comrades was in vain.

  And how do you want me to answer, from my bed in this Ersta home? What would the Spartan have thrown back in your face? What did the reports say back then? I have one here that I saved. I have it at hand because I knew you were going to ask me that. I want to answer you with the facts. I want to be meticulous with you about this. Ha! As you can see, I prepared for this interview. Well, as I told you, you can have five hours. You can take notes, if you want. I have a raspberry juice for you. I like how they make it here, it’s natural, they don’t add sugar or anything. Not bad, right? So listen, while you sip your raspberry juice:

  “The armed conflict is intensifying: in the past months there have been twelve attacks on high-voltage towers and electrical substations belonging to Endesa in Talca, Osorno, Quilpué, Renca, La Reina, Río Negro, Santiago, Concepción, and Valparaíso, which each time left a large part of the surrounding territory in darkness for some six to eight hours; nine explosions on the rail lines in Osorno, Chiguayante, Río Negro, Concepción, Valparaíso, and San Miguel; fourteen attacks with explosives or incendiary bombs on municipal grounds in San Miguel, Quinta Normal, Quilicura, Pudahuel; five bank expropriations, three of them simultaneous, with the goal of collecting funds for revolutionary activities; attacks with incendiary bombs on supermarkets in Pudahuel and Conchalí; two explosives in gas valves in front of factories in Santiago; Radio Revolución blocked the sig
nal of the national channel, interrupting transmission of the Festival of Viña del Mar to nine countries, and for four minutes the rebel, antidictatorial voice reached millions of Chileans who were listening to that channel; ambush and machine-gunning of a police patrol in Pudahuel; the resistance assaulted and set fire to a bus belonging to police; seven confrontations with agents of the repression in which the capture of members of the militia was attempted by raiding their houses, and in several of these instances the combatants gave their lives rather than fall prisoner; a combat group met for two hours with the people in the village of La Mora and explained to them that in order to overthrow the tyrant there is no other choice than to take up arms . . . It was suggested to them that one of the current tasks is to unmask the reformists and social democrats. Just as with Somoza in Nicaragua or the Shah in Iran, the wheeler-dealers are doomed to fail. Electoral conjuring entails collaboration in the subordination of class, and dialogue leads to capitulation. . . .”