by Jay Cantor
“By the way,” Soto said, smiling amiably. “I noticed that you and Fernando have very odd shoes. Is there a story?”
“There’s always a story,” Chaco said.
One of Fernando’s shoes was a black snub-nosed boot; one was a brown wingtip with a pointy toe. They were the residue, Fernando explained, of Ernesto’s last great business idea. Ernesto had figured that there weren’t that many kinds of shoes in the world. All we had to do was buy up the odd ones for a few months, then form our holdings into the matched pairs that were bound to accumulate. “But,” Fernando told Soto, “there’s something very mysterious about market forces.” The plan had concluded with heaps of orphan shoes, stored in his family tool shed in Cordoba. Our capital had been spent before we had found even one pair. Now, painfully, we wore out the inventory.
“But I don’t understand,” Soto said. “You have two matched pairs between you now.”
We stood together looking at our feet. Soto was right. We each had a wingtip and a boot. That day in Fernando’s garage fifty mismatches had made us blind with despair.
“It doesn’t matter about the shoes,” Fernando said. “None of them fit anyway. They’re all painful as hell.” And, of course, he winced accusingly at me.
We thanked Isaias, who stood by the bridge, saying farewell to his departing guests. He embraced each of us in turn, looking away from Soto’s perfumed head. “You’re just like your wonderful father,” he said to me. “You say what’s on your mind. You’re a very harsh judge, Ernesto, like him. But you’re young still. Time will soften you, as it has me, as it has me.”
Roberto led the way back across the bridge. Ricardo and Helena stayed back together. I think he had his arms around her shoulders. (Some other kind of dance I didn’t know the steps to.)
“She’s pretty isn’t she?” Fernando said wistfully, to no one in particular.
“I’d like to meet …” Chaco looked at me, his face turned to the side. He bit his lower lip, pretending to be abashed before my chastity. “… to meet … someone!”
“See you again,” Isaias called out. And added, regretfully, his voice falling softly, “Ah, Thursday, I suppose.”
Chaco sang:
Men made plans, men had hopes.
(Not that it matters. Unlucky men.)
For the price of tin was falling.
The words left their mouths, and fell to the ground
Falling with the price of tin,
Unlucky men.
Their bodies grow light, their faces decay,
And there’s only one last rite to say:
Seventy cents a ton.
My Bare Feet
He had been taken prisoner. (Soto’s voice. The crystal had formed from layer after layer of translucence, thinner than the skins of an onion; then suddenly it had darkened to a different form of jewel. We walked within that jewel. Only the tips of the eucalyptus trees were visible, as silhouettes—those, and the mounds of earth that road-building machines had piled by the shoulders, like temporary fortifications. Soto’s voice, and his darkness, moved beside me on the dirt road back to La Paz. His voice and his darkness and his perfume. Fernando and Chaco walked behind us. In this dark one didn’t speak; a voice arrived—even one’s own—severed from its author; it resonated in the crystal, floated up towards the treetops.) He had been taken prisoner. An investigation, you see? An investigation meant that they put some suspects in jail for a while. Or longer. Or the suspects disappeared. Brave friends came down to the police barracks to ask after one. Soto? No, never heard of him.… Every so often they took a man from his cell to a little room with a straight-backed chair.… He was in jail for ten days, and on the eleventh day the jail shook. Peron had been speaking in the Plaza de Mayo; dynamite charges had gone off near the rostrum. Gouts of water splashed from the faucet in the washbasin outside the cell, water red with rust shaken loose by the explosion. Soto had students who were political prisoners. They’d think he knew something about the people who had set the bombs. They’d want him to know something. Who knows what they’d think? They led some others out first, and after a few hours he smelled something odd. Pork, the guard said, smiling. Soto understood (he had burned his arm once lighting an oven): They had other things besides straight-backed chairs. Efficiency is a value to be cherished. The police wanted to show Peron how efficiently they worked to establish the facts. A burned body equals a thesis proved. Soto told the guard he had diarrhea. He did, but no one cared to investigate. He asked to go to the toilet. He pestered the guard every ten minutes, saying he had to go again. The guard became used to Soto’s sudden needful departures and kept waving him down the hall to the toilet. Then, one time, when they thought he was sitting on the can, he walked out into the street, walked over to the Guatemalan embassy, walked now with his new friends on this dark road in the Bolivian mountains. The Guatemalan ambassador had driven him to the airport. The Guatemalan ambassador was a wonderful courageous person. “Someday,” Soto said, “I must introduce you to him. He’s gone back to Guatemala City. He’s in the vanguard of their Revolution. You’ll like him.”
Soto spoke as if the exile world, and the ministers and subministers of several nationalist governments in power, circulated at a large party, and he was the host, making introductions for the people he liked.
“But we’re not going through Guatemala!” Fernando’s voice sounded urgent, insistent. “We’re going to the leper colony at San Pablo.” (His voice arrived from behind us, accompanied by the soft regular, painful fall of our feet on dirt and stones.)
Of course, Soto agreed. He wouldn’t want to dissuade us from such good work. “It made a very strong impression on you, San Pablo?”
“Yes,” Fernando said immediately.
“Yes,” I agreed. It was very cold here after sunset. The chill made my outline sharper, concentrated my sense of self. An incitement to rhetoric. “The highest form of solidarity arises among desperate and lonely men.” (I knew that I talked beyond myself; the words weren’t mine to say.)
“Yes!” Fernando sounded defiant, as if disagreeing with someone. “Not among politicians!”
“Peut-être je m’accompagne,” Chaco said.
A strong huffling sound interrupted the silence. A loud regular clangor, metallic about the edges, like a weak engine wheezing, straining along a grade.
“What’s that?” Soto’s voice went up an octave. “Do you think someone followed us from the party?” We all knew who he meant: the bogey man clothed in shadows.
“It’s an animal creeping up on us,” Fernando said. “I think it’s a bear.”
“Une chauve-souris,” Chaco said.
“What?” Fernando sounded furious.
“A bat,” Chaco translated.
“No more French, please, I beg you Chaco,” Fernando said.
“Et pourquoi non?”
“What?”
“And why not?”
“Because I don’t understand it. Because it’s getting on my nerves. Because I’ll break your skinny little arms if you do it again.”
“What’s that sound?” Soto asked again, clearly frightened. (How had he dared to walk out of that jail?)
“It’s only Ernesto’s strange way of breathing,” Fernando said. “Peculiar isn’t it?”
I gasped. The altitude was impossible. I resigned. My chest hurt too much. I gave up. But there was no one to accept my resignation. We continued walking.
“Ernesto has asthma,” Fernando explained, his voice compassionate now, familiar. “He’s had a very bad case of it, since birth almost. That’s why he has to travel with someone. Someone must always be with him. Because of the asthma, I mean.” (I mean—the phrase most characteristic of Fernando Who Wanted to Be Plain.) “Someone to give him an injection if he has a bad attack and can’t help himself.” Fernando sounded bitter. “Asthma is like a gun at his head. He thinks he might die every second of his life.”
“So that’s how you got out of the army?” Soto asked, indi
fferent to my soul.
“Yes, I used the asthma,” I said. “Usually it uses me. I gave myself an attack by taking a cold shower. Fernando had to carry me home.” It embarrassed me to speak of this small necessary duplicity. Had I already betrayed my country? I should have stayed and … and what? Nothing to be done. (What was the name of my work?)
My foot turned in a deep rut, twisting my leg. I fell forward into the dirt. “Damn!” A fork had stuck in my knee. I sat down on the road and undid my shoes, my stupid hateful torturous dearly bought shoes.
The earth, when I stood, was still warm from the day. It felt pleasant to stretch my toes, confined only by socks, out into the dirt. My knee calmed itself.
“You know,” Soto said, as we got under way again, “talking to my friend at dinner, you reminded me of the Fidelistas.” He sounded musing. “I think that despite your affinity for Gandhi, you share a certain viewpoint with them. What do you think?”
“A fiddleista? What’s that?” The night wind blew sharply. I felt my lips moving.
“It sounds like a bug,” Chaco said.
“It’s a follower of Fidel Castro. You’d like him, I think. You’d like what he stands for. You should meet him.”
“Who is he? A friend of yours?” A leader, I imagined, of some provincial party.
“Well, no, I don’t know him. Not precisely. I know friends of his, I suppose. You really haven’t heard of him? That’s remarkable.”
Soto said that Castro had been a student leader—and a gunman—at the University of Havana. “They all carry guns there, all the politicos.”
“Ernesto would have liked that once,” Fernando said, mockingly. “Before he discovered Gandhi. I mean, he used to believe in guns.”
“Did he?” Soto asked, with evident curiosity.
“Yes indeed. When I was in jail in Cordoba, Ernesto came to see me. I wanted him to organize the high-school students against the Catholic education. He said he wasn’t going into the street without a pistol. He was right in a way, I think. Not about guns, I mean. I mean about politics being death. ” There was anger in his voice at this last judgment. Had I thought that then? And now? Should I imagine a smaller stage for myself, good done slowly, in particulars? What was the name of my work?
“La vie est absurde,” Francisco said.
“Stop that goddamn it!” Fernando shouted.
“Weren’t you,” Roberto asked, “a little young for that?”
“No. Not to face guns. Fifteen years is old enough to know what your convictions are, and what is worth dying for. But not to kill. I was wrong about that.” It was the willingness to die, I explained, that shamed one’s opponent, forced him to see how he had failed his own morality, failed his nation, caused him to choke on his bad faith. My words rose towards the top of the trees, floated away. No one responded. The world came unknit. My words didn’t reach out to any object. Perhaps, I worried, they weren’t mine? My arm ached.
“Well, in Cuba,” Soto continued, “they all carry guns.” The student movement was divided into factions, factions supporting different ministers, supporting different parties, shaking down other students. “They fight among themselves. They’re gangsters really. It’s the national style.” Castro had started as a tough guy. But he was different from the others. He had grown up, and now he was an uncompromising nationalist leader, the sort Ernesto would agree with. At least he was willing to die for what he believed in. After Batista’s coup Castro had announced that he would fight for the Constitution. And, amazingly, he had. He had kept his word. In Cuba no one keeps their word! On July 26, during the carnival in Santiago, Castro’s men came out from among the masquers and fired on the army barracks. “They were going to take rifles. So I’ve been told. And distribute them to the people in the city. There would be attacks in other cities. They’d occupy the radio station. I’m not sure precisely of their plans. A coup, I think. But you are like that, aren’t you? That’s why I thought of them. I mean, you believe in taking direct action now.”
“Did I say that?”
“Yes. I thought so. Perhaps not precisely. No. Yes. In a way you did.… Don’t you?”
“Yes. Yes I do.” It was true, I thought, though I didn’t remember saying it. Not violence, but new ways had to be found to move the masses, experiments all might join in, ways that showed a real struggle must be carried out now, not more exile talk. (Soto participated in my self-discovery, my self-creation, forcing me to play my part, the part he saw me in.) “Yes,” I said, with increasing assurance (a surprise to me). “It’s important to take action, not violence but real action. To begin something. And how did they do, the Fidelistas?”
“Oh, they were all captured,” Soto said, with mild astonishment. “Most of them were tortured and then killed by the army.”
Chaco laughed.
“Soto,” Fernando said, “has offered to introduce you to a corpse.”
“Well, you know, I’m not sure he’s dead. I heard recently that they took him into custody, that he’s going to stand trial. What a forum that will be for him! He’s a wonderful speaker. Or so I’ve heard. I haven’t heard him speak myself. Of course, I’ve also heard that one of his own killed him. Shot before capture, like a bandit by the police, as the saying goes.”
“And do you know what all those young people died for?” I asked. More killing; work for stupid men. It would probably be rubbish. Like the rotten part of the MNR: renegotiating the terms with the imperialists. (But I had faith still that the militancy of the miners and Indians, if they were led by people of vision, like Nuflo Chavez, the Minister of Peasant Affairs, would prevail over that rottenness.)
“Well, no, not precisely. I don’t know his program. I think maybe Castro’s a Communist. Or his brother is.” Soto stopped, turned towards me; a different inflection to his shadow, a waft of perfume mixed with the sharp medicinal odor of the eucalyptus. What did he hope to see on my face?
“It sounds to me,” Fernando said, “like Castro’s still a gangster.”
Soto continued to look at me, for a moment, till Fernando and Chaco came up behind us. “Well, maybe he’s not a Communist. Maybe he’s a realist.” Our footsteps began their soft plof plof plof. “I suppose that would be your opinion, Ernesto? He’s certainly crazy enough.”
I stopped to stare at his darkness. “What? Crazy enough for me, you mean? Crazy like me?” Soto made me laugh.
Fernando walked into my heel, hurting me, scraping my Achilles’ tendon. Without thinking, I pushed him backwards.
“Excuse me,” Fernando whispered.
Still, I liked Soto, though he was an obvious opportunist; he had a pleasing vitality, a generous animal warmth.
“No. Oh, no,” Soto said. “Of course not. I mean that crazy people are the only ones with a chance of success in a situation like Cuba’s. A crazy situation calls for crazy measures. Like my diarrhea. Sometimes being crazy is a form of realism.”
“Like Hamlet,” Chaco remarked.
“Shit!”
“What?” Fernando shouted, amazed at my voice.
“Shit. I said ‘shit.’ Yes I said it.” I, too, was surprised by my voice. “I stepped in it. Shit.” It was still soft and warm. I hoped it was cow stuff, not human, or some nondomestic animal.
“Feces you mean?” Fernando said joyfully. “Well you should pick it up carefully, and bury it. It will be a lesson for the villagers.”
We stopped. I wiped my foot in the dirt. We had reached the outskirts of La Paz, the town of Obrajes. A glow came through the trees, golden, as from a flare, a continuous contained explosion. The trees looked molded in this light, as if they were made of some translucent material. I heard tinkly music, and the voices of drunken people. Gunshots went off very close to us. Soto and I leapt backward. A high voice, a woman’s, shouted, “Halt!”
A few hundred meters from us two Indians came out of the trees. They wore woolen ponchos, black-looking, and carried old bolt-action rifles. I smelled the oil on the barrels and the
sharp odor of powder.
Soto put his hands in the air, though no one had ordered him to.
“Damn,” Chaco hissed. “They’re not going to like me! They’re going to kill us!”
An old man brought his face very near mine and stared at me. He looked my features over as if he were studying a picture, moving along my cheeks, across my eyes, down towards my mouth. His breath smelled foul, decaying matter, a corpse’s. He didn’t say anything. I was a dummy in a store. He turned his face to the side, inspected my mouth and torso. The other Indian, a young boy, pointed his rifle at us.
“Who are you?” the boy asked. His voice hadn’t changed yet. It seemed a special indignity to be frightened by someone who hadn’t passed through puberty. Anyone can kill a man. Our lives are more fragile than eggshells. Inside me was a precious runny yellow yolk.
“I believe in God,” Chaco whispered. “I really do. I want to see a priest.”
“We’re men of peace,” I said. The Indians wore caps with long ear flaps. The wool absorbed light and gave nothing back.
“And where do you come from?”
“From feeding ourselves,” I said. “We were very hungry.”
The boy’s expression didn’t change. “Could I see your papers please?”
I fumbled about in my shirt pocket for my Argentine identity card, a thick dirty piece of cardboard. The boy examined it in the weak unnatural light. Fernando stood next to me now, smiling, showing good will. Chaco stood next to him. He had one arm on Fernando’s shoulder, and stood on one leg, the other leg poised behind his knee, like a stork. He sobbed without shame. He had lost control of his face, bereft child, as if his cheeks had melted. I looked around for Soto. He had disappeared, evaporated, beat it! I saw a darkness against one of the trees. That shadow, and Chaco’s sobbing, triggered a panic in me. Why had Soto run away? I wheezed. The young one turned the card in his hand. He had a serious intent expression; perhaps he didn’t know how to read. Perhaps he’d shoot us in a rage at not knowing how to read. And if they led us off to some field, what appeal would we have? Who would even know? Anger must be conquered. My catechism returned as a prayer. Blood soaking into the earth, streams of runny yellow blood. No! That violence must stop!