by Jay Cantor
The older Indian bent over the card. His black poncho was tied with a brightly embroidered belt, and a leather bag hung down from a silver buckle on his belt. I recognized him. He sold furs in the square, half animal, my grandfather. He had a bright-red rash down the side of his face.
And he wore a wristwatch. How had he acquired a wristwatch?
I twisted my feet in the dirt, trying to get the shit off. The smell reminded me of mortality. The older Indian looked at my feet. He pointed to the boots I carried, and said something in Quechua to the boy. Perhaps he wanted the boots.
“He says,” the boy said, “that he doesn’t care for them either.” He handed me back my card.
I laughed. Chaco put his other foot down. He snuffled the snot back into his nose, a child suddenly comforted.
“Yes,” I said, “they’re very uncomfortable.”
The old man spoke again. The young one said, “He says he loses his balance if he can’t grip the earth. He stumbles like a drunk. The stones in the city are too flat.”
“That’s it,” Fernando said to me. “They’re not used to pavement. There’s nothing there when something should be. Funny to think of the smoothness of a thing tripping you up. The lack of an obstacle, I mean. Like being rich spoiling the personality!”
The old man spoke again, clicked, barked, made guttural sounds. Quechua ineradicable! A language of stones, pebbles in the mouth. “He says he’d like to look at your hand.”
I held it out to him, happy with the repetition, a comic scene to write my mother. His touch was firm. I felt no moisture in his palm at all; it was almost dust. (You might have bathed in mine.) “I know. I have a rich fate awaiting me.”
The old man spread my fingers out, to make the palm flat, and continued his study.
The boy translated. “He says he doesn’t know about that. But you are what you say you are. A man of peace. A very ambitious and nervous one, he says. So we will walk with you through Obrajes.”
I looked behind me. Soto hadn’t heard the happy ending. He scuttled furtively from tree to tree. No one called to him. Let him decipher our parade!
The young Indian walked ahead, his rifle held in one hand. Fernando and Chaco walked behind. And the old man walked beside me, still holding my hand. A gentle way, Soto must have thought, for the prisoner to be led to his execution.
We came around the turn in the road. A neon sign of a golden rooster glowed in front of us, on top of a wooden shack. A man in a business suit staggered out the door, his arm embracing a police officer in an open brown tunic. They got into a car parked by the side of the shack. A woman, unsteady on high heels, followed. She fell forward, supporting herself with one arm on the hood of the car, and threw up. The lighting made it look like a play.
“Isn’t that against MNR rules?” I said to the young Indian.
“I’d like to meet …” Chaco stared at me, his head to the side. “… HER!” He spoke boldly, defying my judgment.
Their putrid dance offended me. The Indians kept watch in the cold. The party bureaucrats, flaunting party discipline, drank in public.
The young boy stopped dead, fascinated. Perhaps he’d never seen a woman in high-heeled shoes. Or a woman stagger like that. Or throw up. His hypnotized voice told the old one what I’d said.
The old man lifted my hand and placed it lightly against his cheek. My mother’s face, a thousand years from now. The erosion caused by the Ice Age. A lizard.
“He says,” the boy said, still in his trance, “to feel his face. He says, we’ll be here longer than the men in jackets”—the boy pulled an imaginary string running from his neck down his shirt—“the ones with cloth around their necks. He says, we’re older than they are. We’re as old as the mountains.”
Perhaps he’s right, I thought. There have always been lizards. “But those men are very old, too,” I said. “The oldest profession: those who waste. Bureaucrats and prostitutes. They go on forever, wearing away at the mountains. You have to make sure they don’t cheat you out of what you’ve won.”
“Enough Guevara!” Chaco said. “They don’t want to hear this! I don’t want to hear this! No one wants to hear this now! Not from you!”
“What are bureaucrats?” the boy asked.
“Bosses. Overseers.”
Reluctantly, he translated my words. The old man dropped my hand. Alvarados pulled at my sleeve. “Maybe Chaco’s right. They don’t want to hear such things. Not from us.”
And Soto, the shadow, came out of the darkness. “Yes,” he said, oracularly, “they wear away at the mountains. But look, the mountains remain!”
I looked up. Tall smooth darknesses, and many many stars. A parable. I couldn’t read it.
Soto addressed his remark to the old man. The young one translated. One had to admire such a versatile flatterer.
The old man laughed, showing his nearly empty mouth, his teeth worn away to dirty brown stumps. His foul breath came out in little gasps, dominated Soto’s putrid cologne. (What decay was it hiding?) “Well, perhaps,” Soto said urbanely, as if we rose from a dinner party, “we should be getting back to town now. It’s awfully cold.”
The Indians nodded to us, and we to them.
Soto pranced away, a scampering motion that looked droll on him, his top part was so round and his legs so thin. He made me laugh again, though I was angry at him for scaring me. “I don’t mind telling you,” he said, “that I felt very frightened there for a while.”
“Oh, you needn’t tell us,” Fernando said.
“Well,” Soto said, unembarrassed, “who knows what they think? But you handled it beautifully, Ernesto. ‘Men of peace,’ that’s just the way they talk. You saved our lives, I’m sure of it. It was very clever of you to take off your shoes.”
We all laughed at him, at his inane stupid compliments.
“Guevara owed it to us,” Chaco said, “after his performance tonight. But you missed his real stroke of genius. Dunking his feet in shit. Very Indian.”
Soto laughed good-humoredly at our mockery. He had a high-pitched squeak of a laugh. “Well, why don’t we all meet tomorrow afternoon, at the Ministry of Peasant Affairs? I have a friend you should meet, the one Fernando says you admire, Ernesto, Nuflo Chavez.” We agreed. I could not have been more eager.
Fernando looked at me quizzically, for he could see how much I longed for this meeting. Nuflo Chavez, architect of the land reform, was now my hope for the Bolivian Revolution, for the democratic Left. He was the leader of the peasant unions. I had seen smudged newspaper pictures of him marching at the front of the militias; a young man with famously bad eyesight, he walked carrying a machete. He, I thought, would speak the word of the peasant, the chaste and self-sufficient life of the villages, the word, like a knife, that would destroy imperialism. Nuflo Chavez, a ruthless man, Soto said, would contest Paz for the party’s leadership. Nuflo Chavez, then, would be the land itself speaking, the rock showing through, not someone who spoke about the Indians, but someone who spoke for them, their union into a single force, as majestic as the Incas, and as ready for sacrifice. He would have work for me; and he would prevail. Chavez, I was sure, would be the leader I searched for. To speak with Chavez at the Ministry of Peasant Affairs would be to encounter the motor of the Indo-American Revolution.
Soto gave us each an embrace. “Good night dears.”
Chaco asked if we could put him up for the night. We walked back together to our dirty room on Yanachocha Street. Soto waved us out of sight. “He’s going back to that cabaret,” Chaco said.
“He’ll make many friends there, I’m sure,” Fernando said. “Politicians to introduce Ernesto to.”
My Enemies
The halls of the ministry got only a little light from a few small windows set high up in the walls. Long lines of peasants, Indians and mestizos, stood in each hall, up the broad stairwells, around corners, down the next hall, five stories of them, ranged two by two, waiting to receive certificates for land. There was barely r
oom for the three of us to walk by, single file. Soldiers stood along the outside of the line, facing the Indians, their rifles held between both hands, like staves. The lines stayed next to the walls. They seemed subdued; patient; unexpectant. Once or twice people tugged at the rope on my pants, but they dropped their hands before I could turn.
Every hundred meters or so one of the militiamen stopped us, made us explain our business. The government was uneasy. This morning Paz had dissolved the radical mine board. Their infantile and extreme positions, he said, endangered the safety of the national revolution. They would bankrupt the country in futile gestures of defiance. Paz Estenssoro, I thought, stood now in the field of the dead, a dried bag coated with blood, waving in the wind. Chavez and the forces he led must take control of the Revolution.
The people in line didn’t speak with each other.
The line moved along slowly, two by two. Many of the Indians walked barefoot; most wore sandals. They made a quiet shooshing sound as they moved down the corridor, a wave receding, receding.
Only men waited in line. They wore the hats of their regions, even here: colored wool caps of concentric circles or ridged patterns, and short-brimmed brown felt hats. The Indians looked sad; their long dour faces and ear flaps reminded me of unhappy animals, basset hounds. And the felt hats seemed cheap prizes won at too great a price from some crooked carnival. The halls were hot from the press of bodies, the lack of ventilation. The air stank with sweat and the foul breath of coca-chewing. The luster of the Indian clothes, which had lit the plaza like burning minerals, colored flames, looked sooty here, the ponchos grimed with dirt all along their intricate weaving. My stomach turned. I wanted to vomit.
Every so often, as we toiled down one of the interminable corridors, a peasant walked back along the hall the other way, carrying a small sheet of paper in both hands, his mouth turned down, his eyes absent, distracted. His face and clothing were dusted with a fine white powder. (The agrarian reform turned them into ghosts.) A round old man passed at my chest level. He held a ribboned staff in his right hand and the paper in his left. His cap was sprinkled with floury-looking stuff. He looked like a pastry.
“One more flight,” Soto called down to me encouragingly. My friends stood on the landing above me, catching their breath. I rested a floor below them, chasing unsuccessfully after mine. The air here was too thick. To walk up to my friends would be like swimming through viscous distasteful muck.
I heard Fernando ask Soto how the government knew where each parcel of land would be. Voices floated down the stairwell towards me; the words, trapped in the gelatin, reached me like light from some distant planet, long after the event. I approached my friends and they suddenly moved on. Why didn’t they wait? I would never reach them. Some geometrical paradox would defeat me.
The job was enormous, Soto explained, walking up another flight of stairs. They didn’t know which land would be part of the reform yet. The landlord could appeal any redistribution order. He could object to the map-maker’s surveying. He could (they turned a corner; I pursued) protest the decree to the local agrarian board. He could appeal the decision to the council of the National Agrarian Reform Service. Oh, there were lots of democratic safe guards. He could take the matter to the full council. He could appeal (we had to go down the hall to another stairway, and then up another flight. I stopped a moment next to two Indians in line. They stepped closer to the wall) to the President of the Republic, to Paz Estenssoro himself. “So they can’t know what’s available yet. Just one more flight, and down the next hall. My friend tells me that it will take about twenty-five years. So they’re not giving out deeds to the land yet, just certificates that say that when there is land, the Indian is entitled to some. It gives the peasants a sense of participating in the reform.” He disappeared from sight. I hurried along. My head felt light and my stomach very heavy, as if I dragged a wheelbarrow full of my nausea down the hall. Fernando’s face, moving around the corner, looked back at me, his body already gone away. “What do you think of that?” Fernando’s head asked.
“I want to vomit.”
But Fernando had already disappeared, following after his legs.
I trailed Soto’s high, amiable voice, a voice that accepted everything, a voice of good digestion. “Mostly what the government can do now is guarantee wages for hacienda workers, while this process goes on. That’s a good idea, the minister thinks. Gives the Indians some money, brings them into the national economy. They’ll start to want things like the rest of us, soft cloth, sturdy shoes. It’ll be a boost to the national manufacturers.”
I hated this; luring the Indians into history so the bourgeoisie in the city might grow rich. Chaco looked back at me, smiled sarcastically. He flapped his earlobes with his long finger.
“I want to vomit,” I said.
“Of course,” he said, and went off down another hall. Or the same one again for all I knew.
At the next corner a mestizo’s head appeared above the line. He stood on top of a wooden crate in a work shirt and dungarees. In his right hand he held a thick black rubber hose. The hose ran down to a silver pump-motor by his feet, next to the crate. The motor chugged, a regular rhythm, ka-thunk, ka-thunk; and the bent spokes of the flywheel, like the legs of a creature that was all legs, spun around in an abstract pattern that made me seasick. I stopped to rest, staring at the flywheel, hypnotized by my illness. The two Indian guards we’d met last night came down the hall to the box, the next ones in line. (I must have passed them in my hurry.) The old man laughed to see me, sucking his lips in and out. The boy translated his clicks and wheezings. “He says, ‘Everyone wants to join us now. It’s Judgment Day!’ ” The old man extended his dry hand to me, and I bent (as I’d seen people in the square do) and touched it to my forehead, scraping it against my skin.
The man on the box put his hand on the old man’s shoulder, stopped him. They stood like that for a few seconds, neither one speaking; a mime. The old man opened the leather purse hanging from his belt and took out some new brightly colored bills. He lifted two misshapen fingers and waved them towards the boy—the bribe was for the two of them. The man on the box stuffed the money into his bulging back pocket and turned the old man by the shoulder, so he faced forward. Holding him like that, he put the worn rubber hose down the back of his poncho. The man on the crate said something, and the old man closed his eyes. The mestizo sprayed my friend’s hair and neck. DDT; outside Cordoba I’d seen animals sprayed this way, to kill lice. A little of the dust settled on my lips. It tasted sharp, acidic, bitter. The man on the box gave the old boy a push forward and took the young one’s shoulder. “You can go first,” the boy said to me. He made a sour little face; for the first time he looked his age to me, a boy not yet through puberty faced with an unpleasant task. I shook my head no. The man on the box turned the boy’s shoulder forward.
I tried to fix the old man’s gaze as he went by me. But he walked past as if I weren’t there; or he weren’t. Anyway, someone had died. The mestizo put the hose down the boy’s back; waited for his eyes to close; sprayed his neck and hair; world without end. No one asked for an explanation. Someone pushed your child’s head under water; someone doused you with this evil-smelling acid. The event required of you as much or as little faith as baptism; and it was, plainly, just as inevitable. The particles of DDT caused my nose to clog. Snot wet my upper lip. I ran down the hall, unsteady on my legs, running to catch my friends, hoping to outrun the attack.
Chavez, the Minister of Peasant Affairs, the despicable hypocrite responsible for this ritual, rose from behind his desk to shake our hands. He was a short young man, a few years older than we, with curly hair and thick eyeglasses. He looked smaller than his pictures. His office had only a big desk, with a high window behind it. The light washed painfully against my eyes. A few revolutionary posters, threats against moneylenders, had been taped to the whitewashed walls. A bright unused machete leaned against his desk.
“I heard about your a
rgument with Betancourt last night.” Chavez’s head bobbed from side to side as he spoke.
“Betancourt!” Soto exclaimed.
“Yes. Our revolution, our democratic procedures, are an experiment for the whole continent. But you look surprised? Perhaps you are a different man?”
Betancourt, I thought, leader of “the democratic left” of Venezuela. Another pathetic opportunist! (Supposing it were him.)
The minister, Soto said to us, was a leader of the radical wing of the MNR. He had led the fight for extensive land reform.
The minister smiled, delighted with himself.
“He presides now,” a wheezing voice said, “over the DDT Revolution.”
“Damn you,” Chaco said emphatically. “Ernesto, this is Chavez now. The one with the machete. I don’t want to be his enemy.”
The minister stiffened and walked back behind his desk. “I don’t think you understand all we’re doing here. It’s far more than a DDT revolution. Let me give you some of our literature.” He reached into a drawer and pulled out a stack of smudged flyers. I didn’t take them. He left them on his desk. Fernando, who disliked rudeness of any sort, picked them up and leafed through them. Ink came off on his hands.
“I think they’ll give an idea of what we’re up against. Some things are a little difficult to imagine from Buenos Aires.” The minister’s face disappeared, a little at a time, eaten away by light from the window. His ears were gone, and the brightness was moving in on his nose. “The Indian is a sphinx,” he said. “He inhabits a hermetic world, inaccessible to whites or mestizos.” He looked up towards the flaking ceiling. He sounded in a trance. “We don’t understand his forms of life, the way he thinks. We call the Indian the masses, but we’re ignorant of his individual psyche, and his collective drama.”