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.
“It’s better this way,” says Torrijos, relieved. They’ve saved him the disagreeable task of blowing up the canal and all its installations.
(154)
1979: Madrid
Intruders Disturb the Quiet Ingestion of the Body of God
In a big church in Madrid, a special Mass celebrates the anniversary of Argentine independence. Diplomats, business executives, and military men have been invited by General Leandro Anaya, ambassador of the dictatorship which is so busy across the sea protecting the Argentine heritage of fatherland, faith, and other proprieties.
Through the stained-glass windows rich lights illumine the faces and fashions of the ladies and gentlemen. On Sundays like this, God is worthy of confidence. Very occasionally a timid cough decorates the silence, as the priest performs the rite: imperturbable silence of eternity, eternity of the Lord’s elect.
The moment of communion comes. Ringed by bodyguards, the Argentine ambassador approaches the altar. He kneels, closes his eyes, opens his mouth. Instantly the flutter of white handkerchiefs unfurling, covering the heads of the women who walk up the aisles, all the aisles. The mothers of the Plaza de Mayo advance softly, cottony rustle, until they surround the bodyguards who surround the ambassador. Then they stare at him. Simply stare. The ambassador opens his eyes, looks at all these women looking at him without blinking, and swallows his saliva, while the priest’s hand remains paralyzed in midair, the Host between his fingers.
The whole church is filled with these women. Suddenly there are no longer saints or merchants in this temple, nothing more than a multitude of uninvited women: black dresses, white handkerchiefs, all silent, all on their feet.
(173)
1979: New York
Banker Rockefeller Congratulates Dictator Videla
His Excellency Jorge Rafael Videla
President of Argentina
Buenos Aires, Argentina
Dear Mr. President,
I am very grateful to you for taking time to receive me during my recent visit to Argentina. Not having been there for seven years, it was encouraging to see what progress your government has made during the past three years, both in controlling terrorism and strengthening the economy. I congratulate you on what you have achieved and wish you every success for the future …
With warm good wishes,
Sincerely,
David Rockefeller
(384)
1979: Siuna
Portrait of a Nicaraguan Worker
José Villarreina, married, three children. Works for the North American company Rosario Mines, which seventy years ago overthrew President Zelaya. Since 1952, Villarreina has been scraping gold from the excavations at Siuna; even so, his lungs are not yet entirely rotted out.
At 1:30 P.M. on July 3, 1979, Villarreina looks out from one of the mineshafts and a mineral-loaded cart tears off his head. Thirty-five minutes later, the company notifies the dead man that in accordance with articles 18, 115, and 119 of the Labor Code, he is discharged for nonfulfillment of his contract.
(362)
1979: In All Nicaragua
The Earth Buckles
and shakes worse than in all the earthquakes put together. Airplanes fly over immense stretches of jungle dropping napalm, and bomb cities crisscrossed with barricades and trenches. The Sandinistas take over León, Masaya, Jinotega, Chinandega, Estelí, Carazo, Jinotepe …
While Somoza awaits a sixty-five-million-dollar loan, approved by the International Monetary Fund, in Nicaragua they fight tree by tree, house by house. With masks or handkerchiefs covering their faces, the youths attack with rifles or machetes, sticks or stones; even a toy gun serves to make an impression.
In Masaya, which in the language of the Indians means city that burns, the fighters, adept in pyrotechnics, turn drainpipes into mortars and invent a fuseless contact bomb which explodes on striking. Old women weave between the bullets carrying large bags full of bombs, which they hand around like loaves of bread.
(10, 238, 239, and 320)
1979: In All Nicaragua
Get It Together Eyeryone
,
don’t lose it, the big one is here, the shit has hit the fan, hell has broken loose, we’re at fever heat, fighting with nothing but a homemade arsenal against tanks, armored cars, and planes, so everyone get into it, from here on no one ducks out, it’s our war, the real thing, if you don’t die killing you’ll die dying, shoulder to shoulder makes us bolder, all together now, the people is us.
(10, 238, and 239)
From the Datebook of Tachito Somoza
1979
Thursday, July 12,
Love
1979: Managua
“Tourism must be stimulated,”
orders the dictator while Managua’s eastern barrios burn, set ablaze by the air force.
From his bunker, great steel and cement uterus, Somoza rules. Here nothing penetrates, not the thunder of bombs, not the screams of people, nothing to ruffle the perfect silence. Here one sees nothing, smells nothing. In this bunker Somoza has lived for some time, right in the center of Managua but about as far from Nicaragua as you can get; and in this bunker, he now sits down with Fausto Amador.
Fausto Amador is the father of Carlos Fonseca Amador. The son, founder of the Sandinista Front, understood patriotism; the father, administrator general for the richest man in Central America, understands patrimony.
Surrounded by mirrors and plastic flowers, seated before a computer, Somoza, with Fausto Amador’s help, organizes the liquidation of his businesses, which means the total pillage of Nicaragua.
Afterward, Somoza says on the telephone: “I’m not going and they’re not throwing me out.”
(10, 320, and 460)
1979: Managua
The Memory of Fire Trilogy: Genesis, Faces and Masks, and Century of the Wind Page 95