Collazo (like Augustus) has long, stabbing, beautiful hands. They scratch and stretch everything they touch. The thought of them reaching for me makes my hair stand on end. In the words of Pasteur, that genius of evil germs, le hasard ne favorise que les esprits preparés, isn’t that right, Montaigne, ma petite chat?
2.1.3
I’d imagine a train. The blood-curdling nature of a straightaway. The dark spill of a tunnel, the weight of the eyelids, this darkness. The streams of lava, their halting flow; the black earth shuddering beneath the thunder’s throat, stained by this glowing red saliva. My mind would return to me, if only to hide beneath my fist for a few brief moments; a sigh would be heard, and a princess, weak, sallow and feverish, would be seen falling from a fog-laden tower toward the erect lances eager to impale her. The hand of the fog would tighten lasciviously around the curves of her body, licking wildly at her secret rage. I would paint a picture of a train destroying a village, the devastation reaching both forward and backward in time—first out on the plains (floating pollen, tranquility, distant hills) but the noise grows, becomes deafening, implacable, time and space inverted, so loud one must clench one’s eyes shut. Avenues of fire; at the outside doors, asphyxiation. I would paint the lava streaming down across the black earth, lava from the sky that hides wolves and maidens beneath that same stain of fear, an explosion of blood set free—warning bells and clouds would destroy the remains, the echo of insane gunpowder and silent visions, and the rhythm that has set the world atremble would swallow me whole.
2.2
At times I think about the hidden life of certain harmful thoughts. It seems to me an enigma: the second name their presence acquires. I know of a relevant interpretation of the myth of the Cretan labyrinth. Minos is having nightmares in which Asterion becomes disgusted with having to eat those who have come to usurp the throne. The youths who owe their lives to that disgust hide behind walls of fury; they conspire together there in the bowels of torment to create a new race. Power consists in terrorizing fear itself, thinks Minos. These walls exist to multiply my strength; terror is the stone that gives form to and divides our thoughts. Minos can’t stop thinking, his thoughts reflecting the silent struggle that in time turns men into marauders. His wife, Pasiphaë, watches him silently from where she leans against an onyx column. She forsook her taurian loves the moment she saw how others fled at the sight of her little one; her blood has emptied out in the ensuing wait. The myth’s one empirically significant detail is that Pasiphaë likes “brute access,” a phrase derived from the Greek meaning “sex in the rear.”
Minos doesn’t yet know that the conspiracy for which this magnificent labyrinth was created is itself a form of thanks offered by the partisans. Nor that in order to get them to leave their holes and abandon their weasel disguises, he must make use of the ferocity from which his strength derives. He intuits, thanks to this apocryphal sect of thought, that his analysis of that ferocity, that dark figure of suspicion, has at last obliged him to rise up in a pure form of physical domination and destruction. It isn’t enough to have sacrificed a bastard child for the cause. (Asterion, fruit of the queen’s desire, of her lust for both animals and men, has no cause of his own.) The strategies of Minos’s army must be determined by its physical structure. Meanwhile, throughout the labyrinth, from its center out along its tunnels and days, in each nook and corner the walls pray: When the State feels itself obligated to rise up in a pure form of physical domination and destruction, the conditions are ripe for the triumph of the revolution.vi The walls pray, but no one else does, as everyone else is dead.
2.2.1
But:
Can Collazo be considered a Person in the strict sense of the term? I watched him nestle an ashtray in the graying hair on his bare chest, the way men do when they’re accustomed to surroundings organized around them.
I made his gaze climb onto mine.
2.3
He walks alongside me, a heavy shield, or a giant ogre. An ominous moon hangs overhead. We cross Libertador Avenue, head toward the dark woods of Palermo. The wind hisses softly through the foliage, and there are glints of blue in all directions. We can just make out the burbling tumult of a distant underground stream. A bird grazes me as it flits by, but no, night has fallen, these are bats. The trees are prototypes for demons. Our feet sink deeper in with each step; the trees and the signs are links in a single chain. I turn back to look at the avenue where beastly quadrupeds roar in a river of lights; here inside, in the forest, I catch the scent of the snares of bushmen. The drooling apostles who spread revealed truths with dick and dagger much as one tears something out by the roots—the vine that bears the fruit of a curse, or of a slaughterhouse, or of a brothel—I can see them coming. Don Juan Manuel Rosas and his mazorqueros are here, are roaming my body.vii I cannot cover the page with my body, must keep walking, but I can feel the greedy mouths twisting livid deep in the porous black soil, down near the chorus of serpents, their infinite girth, infamous executioners, their fangs, the rites of a horrifying colossus, devourer of hymens and men. We’d felt the roar of this darkness as far back as the edge of Libertador: the gray ghosts from the time of Rosas still stalked the paths along the canals.
I think Collazo sensed my fundamental terror, and spoke as if to calm me. He talked of the corridas of doña Laurencia, of her many appetites, her crepuscular lover. He said that she was kidnapped, taken to the domains of Don Juan Manuel to be abused, forced to submit. Whispering directly into my ear, Collazo repeated the part about “the custom, here in the delta of the Río de la Plata, of the right to rape,” his massive hands leaving marks on my arms.
I looked up at the sky, terrified, and thought of Augustus, of the quote from Prototype for Approaching the Victim where a motive for the existence of armies is proposed: “Only within a plausible psychological theory can human wretchedness, organized to function as antidote, persist.” If you can’t beat them, I thought, you can at least confuse them. I recycled a series of poisonous opinions about a historical novel based on the life and times of Rosas, a book I’d never read, but I knew the plot fairly well. I spoke quickly and vehemently; carrying on that way for quite a while, I basically destroyed the author. Collazo said nothing, perhaps impressed. Later he asked me if that author, too, was listed on syllabi in my department. I laughed, and so did he. Striding along, dodging my solemn pronouncements, Collazo returned to the task, declaring himself fully prepared to defend the theory that one summertide afternoon, Manuelita Rosas must have snuck away with that contrite poet (what was his name?) to listen to a few strains of the national anthem that Vicente López y Planes would one day inherit. Collazo pointed to a plot of sunken ground in the middle of which a rusty iron spike stood erect.
–Right here. He had her by the arm, wasn’t letting go. She was crying uncontrollably, whimpering and wailing like a snot-nosed little girl.
He squatted down to inspect the ground. The dying light fell across the back of his sweatless neck. Up ahead there was a small abandoned fairgrounds thick with weeds, inhabited at present by a sect of spooky-looking merry-go-rounds.
With a quick right hand, I pulled open the two buttons of my blouse; I stood motionless, my legs spread, my boots sunk into the earth. All it would take now is for him to turn to say something, and I, swathed in this tenebrous ardent light, would look into his eyes, ready to unveil the artistry of my pitiless verdict, to perform my duty in the name of all, terribilis ut castrorum acies ordinata.7
A shadow slipped past, was now behind us, and whatever the man said ended emphatically: The money, give me all the money, now.
Collazo was still hunched down. Maybe they hadn’t seen him. Maybe he was planning the perfect strategy for taking the assailants down with two or three blows. He would rip the rusty spike out of the earth, throw himself at them like a master samurai, spit that cyanide-laden Montonero tooth with the precision of a ninja’s dart. He gathered himself up, his fa
ce deadly serious, and took a step forward. The violet branches of the trees stretched out overhead. He shot me a wink, looked one-eyed in the dark.
–Leave this to me, he whispered, rooting around in his front pocket. Boys, here you go, ten pesos. He pawed again through the contents snug up against his balls. Hey, look, that’s twenty altogether. All yours.
–Son of a bitch, give me everything you’ve got, this isn’t some scene from Tumberos.
One of them brandished a knife. With a brief sigh, I opened my little backpack and brought out the French edition (1934) of Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution, Naufragios by Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, De Civitate Dei by St. Augustine (the Migne edition, bilingual, with the disastrous Spanish translation), Storie italiane di violenza e terrorismo (a fascinating analysis of Potere Operaio, cradle of the Red Brigades), and a small anthology of Catholic poems (very funny) by Péguy. Collazo and the two socio-political outcasts watched as the books piled up. It was then that I realized, thanks to the roving eyes of the muggers, that the buttons of my blouse were still open. Oh my god, I thought. I didn’t want to make any false moves, so I left them open.
One of the two correlatives of capitalist perversity took a deep huff from the plastic bag in his hand, and stared at me. Loki was thin, light on his feet, with coarse skin stretched tight around his proletarian bones. He now showed us the angriest facets of his earthly I.
–Give me your cell phone, your wallet, your credit cards—both of you, right now.
Cacha, the other inheritor of social injustice, began poking at the pants pockets of the ex-guerrilla, who raised his arms. Leaning sideways against a tree trunk, Collazo furled his tiger’s brow and murmured:
–Nice and calm, I’m unarmed.
–Hey douchebag, who said anything about you being armed. Let’s see if you’ve at least got some cash.
He opened Collazo’s wallet, started flipping through the credit cards.
–Visa, Mastercard, American Express, cool. Nothing gets canceled until tomorrow night, you feel me?
I lit a cigarette, and took a step forward.
–Loki, Cacha, wait a second. Let me say something to you guys. This person here in front of you, whom you’ve disrespected, he basically dedicated his youth and his life to a cause that included saving indigent slum-dwellers like yourselves, and everyone else who wasn’t born where they might have liked, who’s been treated like shit by Fate. Your families, your loved ones. The socialist fatherland wasn’t merely a dream. There were years and years of underground struggle, of getting insulted in the streets, of books that no one wanted to publish, of taking your head in your hands at the Bar La Paz and shouting, “No! Enough! This is not how things should be!”
The three men stood stiffly for a long moment. I kept talking; I don’t even want to remember what I said. Loki walked over to where Cacha was standing beside the ex-militant.
–So you’re a politician? he said to Collazo. Are you? Are you?
Collazo tried to duck but Loki’s hand caught him full in the face.
–Answer me! No? Nothing to say? You motherfucking thief!
Now he started punching Collazo, and in my stubbornness I shouted, No, no! He’s not a politician at all! He’s just a leftist intellectual!
Cacha and Loki looked at me, looked at Collazo, and started hitting him even harder. There were no more arguments worth making; history had ruined all hope of discussion. My tone had been appropriate, and even my sentimental choice of certain terms, but what perverse idiosyncrasy—so harmful! so fruitless!—had strained my common sense to the point that I tried to make Collazo seem heroic? Are good intentions enough to make someone a hero? And what must his good intentions have been, exactly, if they were never to become anything more, or if in the process of transforming them into actions he’d done some horrible things, and if the very ineffectiveness of the transformation demonstrated the incoherence and criminality of this hardly ideal situation? What’s more: what absurd aspiration had led me to intrude upon the natural right of a poor man to mug me in the forest? Dignity? What dignity could there be in this old bag of ideologemes lying in the grass, bleeding from the nose? Analyzing the situation now from a metatheoretical standpoint, how could I have hoped to convince them with the pathetic irony implicit in a situation where one monkey holding the knife of possibility faces off against other monkeys holding knives of . . . actual knives? I sighed. The expected recipients of revolutionary benevolence kept kicking Collazo there where he lay. I had committed the sin of atavistic condescension. I was on the verge of losing my earnestness and starting to cry.
–Enough, enough! Please leave him alone!
Loki shot a sign to Cacha, his twin in structural poverty.
–Tie the fat girl up and make her quit yelling.
Cacha advanced on the fat?!?!?! girl with a roll of sisal twine. I still had my lit cigarette, and buried the burning end indignantly in his arm. He smacked me in the face; then, with amazing precision, he tripped over the iron spike, his foot striking it so hard it made the earth shake. He hunched over, mute with pain. Then he limped to his partner, who was punching the prone Collazo below the poverty line.
–Loki, come on, we’re done here, let’s go.
–You got everything?
–Yes, come on, time to bail.
These two, long pillaged by the system, bundled up their booty and took off toward the dark circular drive too small to be called an avenue. I ran to the wounded-in-action.
–Did they hurt you?
With a certain agility, Collazo rolled onto his side in the grass.
–A little, yeah. But I played a lot of rugby when I was young—my stomach is still hard as steel.
–Really? Can I see?
–Sure.
He opened his shirt. There were a couple of red marks, a few bruises; the stingy light made it hard to see much more. My hand drew close to the grainy skin. Scars, offered like a harem of thirsty mouths, the toothy topography of ancestral sharks, the palpitating cartography at the mouth of the slough. The red, the black—the fur. I closed my eyes, being not quite ghoulish enough to carry on.
–I’m really sorry about your American Express card, I said as I helped him up.
–Don’t worry, he answered, brushing the dirt from his clothes.
–But they took the books!
–Maybe they’ll help raise awareness . . .
We laugh a little. Then we walk for a while without saying a word.
–Should we follow them?
I could hear the disappointment in my voice.
–No, let it go. They took some money, they beat me up a bit, but nothing serious. Look!
And there was my poor old useless history of the Russian revolution, abandoned in a pile of dead leaves. I brushed away the dirt with my hands, scraped off the edges, paged through quickly as I hefted the book to make sure its spine wasn’t broken. I held it up high and inspected the cover, searching for signs of human meddling. Then I tucked the volume deep into my backpack.
–Of course they kept the Péguy, I murmured bitterly.
–At least the police didn’t come. They’d have confiscated the book, and nobody’d ever have seen those poor thieves again.
–Did you know that police officers and thieves tend to come from the same social class, and have exactly the same disdain for anyone who got the education they never received?
I would have kept talking, but I was exhausted.
–Are you okay?
–I don’t know.
I kicked at a loose leaf.
–They called me fat.
–I thought they said slut.
–Um . . . Are you sure?
–You like that better?
–Well . . .
For a second I pretended I had something caught in my throat.
�
�At least it’s good to know that their nutritional shortcomings haven’t damaged their vision too badly.
The son of a bitch said nothing. Nothing! He just let my sentence hang there in the air until it finally floated away.
In the ice cream parlor on the far side of Libertador, the middle-aged guys and the young girls were like separate voting blocs in Congress, not obviously at odds but definitely from different camps. We explained to the guy behind the counter what had happened, and he consoled us with some free almonds. I ordered Nero chocolate with the works; Collazo had a mango and strawberry.
I looked at his forehead. His bald pate reflected the street on all sides. I sighed. From then on, every time he saw me, the word “fat” would be hanging from my neck like a cowbell, right there in medias res.
But just now Collazo didn’t even see me. I wasn’t there at all, or it was time to go.
–Should I call you a taxi?
–No, that’s all right, I’d rather walk.
I headed out along República de la India, impregnating myself with the nauseating odor of the zoo, the dogs’ excretions, and my thoughts.
2.3.1
I simply can’t understand how it’s possible that they didn’t even try to throw me down in the mud with their muddy hands and decivilize me from behind. And me, on my knees in the mud, comme un chien.
Now that dusk has fallen, (now that Yorick of Minerva emerges to splash about in the swamps of the world,) I withdraw into my chambers. It’s been a long afternoon of not wanting to think about things. I opened a soft drink and looked at Yorick, swimming calmly around in his bowl. Lucky fish, who doesn’t have to struggle against scale-lined reality or its doppelgänger minions, these thoughts. “We will triumph!” I muttered. “They’ll see!” The kitten Montaigne tensed up and ran from my sight; predictably, she had omitted defecating in the litter box.
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