Poor Augustus, he doesn’t fully realize how serious the problem is. He’s very busy walking up and down the labyrinthine hallways of the Department of Philosophy and Letters, distanced from the world of concrete facts, as if nothing was going on with that woman. Little by little, his power fades. Up on the fourth floor where the research institute is located, there is a hive of tiny and deviously well-hidden offices and classrooms. Attacks by ineffable assailants are far more common than necessary (although perhaps the number of such attacks is coincidental, and “attack” and “necessity” harbor some mysterious semantic bond). There went the two of them, followed by B.M., a.k.a. Fat E.G.
I watched them, my earphones on, manifesting, through my vestal stillness, the deadly implications of the spatial syntax that had been perpetrated; I stood like the I that rises up at the beginning of a sentence, on the verge of throwing itself upon a verb and an object, of ruling over them, possessing them, or remaining tacit, not quite revealing itself—and yet in control of events. As a sort of reply to the tenor and quake of that scene, here is the song I was listening to at the moment—here we go with the guitars and the lyrics:
Se te olvida
que me quieres a pesar de lo que dices,
pues llevamos en el alma cicatrices
imposibles de borrar.
Se te olvida: que yo puedo hacerte mal
– si me decido –,
pues tu amor lo tengo muy “comprometido”,
pero a fuerza no será.8
Y hoy resulta que no soy de la estatura de tu vida,
y al dejarme casi casi se te olvida
que hay un pacto
entre los dos. viii
3.
The sunlight turns the brownish waters green, blazes out from behind the silhouette of Collazo, who stands upright in the boat. He’s wearing a wide-brimmed hat, a white shirt open at the chest, black trousers. Willow branches caress the surface of the water; the vines open before him like an endless succession of curtains. He leans against the rubber-lined edge, tests the hand-forged blade of his knife on the swollen lobes of water hyacinth that float alongside. At times the light goes dark, and his face, his eyes are hidden in shadow; his dark mustache glows sweatily above his mouth. We have a dog, a Winchester, and the knife that Collazo now tucks into his belt.
The boat glides slowly across the water. The roots of the trees are submerged; the weighted air molds itself to the gold and black forms that enclose it. The bromeliads twist in on themselves, swaying softly. The riverbank shows the rough lay of the land, the broken line of treetops. Branches lean out over the river, observe the water’s flow, see it quiver beneath them. Black birds circle in the sky. The branches trace endless paths on the mirror between us and the mud and rot that lie beneath.
I have the feeling that Collazo’s enormous hand is about to grab hold of my thigh. I say nothing. I lower my gaze. Vertigo criss-crossed by chasms, the air ceases to move, the ferocious sun covers everything in white. I fear only that my obsession has been revealed, that the monsters have made me translucent, can be seen through the cracks.
From time to time the water goes totally black. The sun disappears, and we hear a quiet hiss, as if something were catching fire somewhere out of sight.
Collazo stands at the edge; my eyes rest at the height of his belt, or a bit lower. He looks down, and there I am. He looks at me and grabs at himself, his hand tracking across the zone. Beneath the cloth waits the red spear, the mute inhabitant. She (I) pushes her hair back from her face, turns her head to look toward the trees. Collazo slides his hand slowly along his critical apparatus, and shifts it to one side of his fly.
–You see? This is what they mean by “packing.” Everything off to the side.
She (I) looks closely. The mountainous chain hangs well down his thigh. She waits for a few seconds, takes a deep breath, looks him in the eyes.
–The left side, she says.
Collazo smiles. Of course, from her perspective it’s actually off to the right.
–And that tells you quite a bit about a man, doesn’t it.
Collazo is behaving magnificently.
–Do you always pack to the same side?
–Me, always.
Collazo rubs his hands briskly up and down his body, shooing away the stubborn mosquitoes that have come to appropriate his blood. We pass below some branches and his face falls into shadow.
The heat grows. Our clothes stick to our bodies, and the air is dense, filled with bright flecks. Collazo’s white shirt is open down to his solar plexus, the valley through which knives enter; the grayish fleece on his chest shines with sweat. Collazo slaps his arm for the Nth time, and looks at me.
Any moment now. Any moment and he throws himself on top of me. His huge horrific hand takes me by the back of the neck—I feel an inverse wind, a momentary tornado of heat and teeth—I release my breath, squeeze my eyes shut, and whisper to throw him off track:
–Have you ever hunted for white-eared opossum?
The light shines on Collazo as he lets go of my neck and grabs a handful of cartridges.
–They’re an appalling animal, he says. Whenever they feel trapped by a predator, they spray a defensive secretion out of their genitals, this revolting yellow liquid. And if the threat is inescapable, they lapse into a coma and go completely still.
As he speaks, he puts the cartridges in the shotgun. The river gathers speed—I can feel the current humming in the tips of my toes. My body, a vessel full of blood on the verge of spilling over. I run my tongue across my lips.
Collazo looks at me.
–They love to play dead, he says. To play dumb.
He bites down on his cigarette, and comes down off the edge. Then he hefts the shotgun, presses it against his temple. I treasure the moment intensely. A few sparrows twist and turn against the sky, and Collazo aims, tracks them in his sights, breathes, the seedpods around him yellowed by the heat. At the other end of the boat, the dog chews on Collazo’s overshirt. The dog came with the boat, I don’t know its name. Collazo lowers the shotgun and looks at me, his brow suddenly furled. Everything goes dark.
(Silence. Collazo, fear and trembling.)
As we come out of the tunnel, the light returns like an exclamation. There are countless golden flecks suspended before our eyes. His long calloused fingers spread suddenly against the foreshortened mirror of black water, move lightly across the surface of the swamp amidst the chirring of crickets and the creak of wood as it begins to break.
Then he brings his hand to my ear. I jump, startled.
–Relax, he says, smiling, wetting my ear with water. It’s just a little shit.
I let loose a bored sigh, and take my comic book back up—a Nippur de Lagash. The Man of Lagash has fallen in love again, this time with Karien the Red, queen of the Amazons, with whom, several issues later, he will engender his three-eyed daughter Oona. In the issue I have here, the Wanderer meets Hattusil, the Hittite hunchback considered to be the greatest warrior on the planet, who will become his best friend.
I watch Collazo out of the corner of my eye. He doesn’t notice. My mind wanders silently through the swamp, shimmying along as it awaits the sudden appearance of a supernatural anaconda.
Then Collazo coughed. He gestured at an opening filled with scrub. The grayish bank was covered with hills of garbage rising to the sky. He said that at 6:30 one evening, just as summer was beginning, his organization had launched an assault on the Itatí, a yacht that belonged to the Commander-in-Chief of the Navy. An underwater mine of ammonium nitrate had been laid by a team of divers formed in Cuba in the late 1960s—the same team that had blown up Villar’s yacht in some other inlet here on the Tigre Delta. They knew that the admiral would not be aboard—armed Peronist left-wing loyalists by profession, what they actually sought was an unwitting ally in the Armed Forces. They’d shot up a
police helicopter to facilitate their getaway; a few days later, they went up against the last of their targets on the Peronist right wing, Alberto Campos, political and military enemy. Just beyond is the Reconquista shipyard; they’d occupied the entire facility, and posted a sign to serve as warning and prelude, Danger: Dynamite. Nearly a thousand vessels were blown to bits, and the oil from their motors covered the water with black, and the fire floated on the water. It burned until morning, and the attackers flowed south across Buenos Aires; the combat platoons blocked Libertador Avenue and took over the public transportation system. The din was deafening as the magnificent youths advanced along the city’s main arteries, slamming their vehicles into banks, smashing windows and storefronts. More than fifty cars were set on fire, as well as businesses, concession stands and police vehicles. This was followed by a wave of hand-thrown bombs, and banners filling the air, and bursts of gunfire to which any number of meanings would later be attributed. All of this was in 1975—two years before I was born—and timed to coincide with the anniversary of Evita’s death.
Occasionally Collazo looked over at me to make sure I hadn’t taken my eyes off him. His Panama hat burnished by sun and sweat, his wrinkled skin, and the blackened tips of his mustache; beams of sunlight, insects; a Colt Commander .45 with a grip safety, the bombing of the Army Information Service headquarters in Buenos Aires, the theft of sanitary materials, stalking and assassinating a union leader, machine-gunning the facades of the Fiat and Ford plants. The clarity of these acts went beyond what is required to send a message. It assumed that all the corpses and threats formed a ritual path leading to exemplary ends: the negotiation of exclusively political objectives, and, rather greedily, the provocation of a new coup d’état by the army. It was believed that the masses would then rise up voluptuously to resist the ferocity of the State, thereby automatically strengthening the armed organizations’ political wings, which would assume power once the victory was complete.
Collazo stabs his pole fiercely into the water and we pick up speed, impelled toward the triumph for which his determination, his very nature, had destined us. I lie down on the bench so as to be looking up at him. His eyes, coffee brown or dynamite red, they pierce me. I know that he’s on the verge. He will throw himself on top of me, will not be able to control his teeth, his filthy claws will send shivers down my spine, and I will lose consciousness. I close my eyes the better to resist. Collazo pins my arm behind my back, his breath is in my ear, thick, cavernous. He puts all his weight on top of me, and I gasp. He paws at his zipper, trembling; he bites my hair, right behind my ear. I cannot breathe. He is apparently subduing me. In the thinnest of voices I say:
–Are you going to sing or not?
I push my hair back, scrutinize his face. I feel like shouting I will neither collaborate nor surrender! (quoting Norma Arrostito, legendary Montonero leader) but I’m afraid of ruining this parodic bliss so I keep quiet. I can hear his breath at my ear. He doesn’t move. He doesn’t speak, neither do I, and there is no sound around us. Suddenly it is as if the spell were broken, and in place of the Beast, an old man stood up only to sit down again, tiredly, on the bench, resignedly:
No somos putos, no somos faloperos,
somos soldados de FAR y Montoneros.ix
I rise up before him, my face alight. I find it irresistible that he would agree to sing, I can’t help it. Behind my eyes I confirm the presence of a feeling so powerful I want to bite him: his very being exudes a vulnerability so unpleasant that it makes me dizzy, rivals the strength of my patience without rising to the level of my disgust. But enough. Let us return to the scene. I have no desire to distort a rigorous political theory such as has been established in this book just to make of it a simulacrum for some monstrous sort of love. I shake my head. I speak softly but firmly:
–The rhythm was a little off.
In fact all he’d done was recite the words. My dear Collazo then did something absurd—he demanded a kiss first—and I, all but creating the objective conditions (back arched, tender breasts offered in lascivious salutation) which would enable him to obtain one, I said no. The fact that instead my spine stayed straight, that the shape of my body did not form a hollow in which he might take shelter, must have awakened in the old soldier some instinctual urge to obey.
Ni votos ni botas / fusiles y pelotas.
Brujo vení, vení Brujo vení / te va a quedar el culo como el Tango de París.
Rucci traidor / saludos a Vandor.
El pueblo te lo pide / queremos la cabeza de Villar y Margaride.
Duro duro duro / éstos son los Montoneros / que mataron a Aramburu.9
Cinco por uno / no va a quedar ninguno.
Mugica, leal / te vamos a vengar.
Qué lindos son tus dientes / le dijo Rucci a Perón / Perón contestó sonriente / ¡Jaja! Morirás como Vandor.
Con las urnas al gobierno / con las armas al poder.
Fumando un puro / me cago en Aramburu / y si se enojan / también me cago en Rojas / y si siguen enojando / me cago en los comandos de la Libertadora.
Fumando un pucho / me cago en Santucho / y si se enojan también en Estrella Roja / y si siguen enojando / me cago en la zurda y en todos sus comandos.
Vea vea vea / qué cosa más bonita / peronistas y marxistas / por la patria socialista.
Vamos a hacer la patria peronista / vamos a hacerla montonera y socialista.
Vamos a hacer la patria combatiente / en su medida y armoniosamente.
Si éste no es el pueblo / el pueblo dónde está.
Abal, Medina, ¡queremos cocaína!
No rompan más las bolas / Evita hay una sola.
Luche luche luche / no deje de luchar / que a todos los gorilas los vamos a colgar.
Con los huesos de Aramburu (bis) / haremos una escalera (bis) / para que baje del cielo / nuestra Evita montonera.
Qué pasa General / que está lleno de gorilas el gobierno popular.
Conformes, conformes, conformes General / conformes los gorilas, el pueblo va a luchar.
Qué pasa General / no alcanza para nada el aumento salarial.
Yo te daré, te daré / Patria hermosa / una cosa que empieza con P…
Se va a acabar, se va a acabar / la burocracia sindical.
Aserrín aserrán / es el pueblo que se va.
Juventud, presente / Perón Perón o muerte.
No es hora de votar / es hora de luchar.
La sangre derramada no será negociada.
Si Evita viviera sería montonera.x
I sat back down and crossed my legs, the better to question him:
–Why did you stop singing? Just for dramatic effect?
–It doesn’t make you better than us, the fact that you weren’t on the wrong side. Everything about you shows how arrogant you are. You would have done anything to be the least bit like Evita, to be a montonera.
You should have seen me, Augustus. My thoughts slid furtively forward, hunched down in the brush, in italics; the roar of Collazo’s prerogatives in my mind was quickly silenced. The game was mine in every sense. The victim belonged to me.
We tied up the boat. Collazo stepped onto shore, and used his pole to clear a path through the piles of garbage. The bank was quite narrow; only a few steps away was a thick grove of coconut trees and other palms, so dense that it was impossible to see through them. The dog, tired of being held captive on the boat, threw itself excitedly into the bushes. Watching it flee, Collazo gave me an unfathomable look, and tossed the gun at my feet, where it landed in a pile of dead leaves.
I walked behind him, swaying as if in drunken euphoria. I look at the shotgun in my hands and can barely restrain my laughter. Collazo is several meters ahead now. Noises filter through the forest: the trees strangling one another, quebracho branches snapped by the wind and baring their bright red hearts. I imagine his ash-gray neck twitching in the leav
es, he disappears in the dark, reappears, and the scene is so powerful that to continue building it I picture myself digging my nails into his throat, firing shot after shot at close range. The sky changes color, and scatters mournful, sallow shades through the trees. Either a storm is coming or night is about to fall. I’m following Collazo and although he can’t see me, I’m not actually hiding. The wind splinters and swirls, blows hard across my face, whips leaves into my face. I nearly scream but hold myself back, and laugh. I think I’m going to kill this idiot. I’m going to kill him because I have the compassion and nobility of spirit required to choose my victims for reasons that are strictly personal.
* * *
5 Walsh, R., “Curso de la guerra en enero-junio 1977 según la hipótesis enemiga.” 4. Descripción de la inteligencia enemiga. Ediciones de la Flor, Buenos Aires, 1994.
6 remember: even when in his COmpany, i wiLL actually be tAlking [Z] to yOu.
7 “Who is she that looketh forth as the morning, fair as the moon, clear as the sun, and terrible as an army with banners?” (Song of Solomon 6:10).
8 I’ll take the liberty of arguing down the seventh line—the potential end of the sonnet. I propose the word “oh:” “Que a fuerza Oh será.” In exceptional cases, both in politics and in love, a narrative’s sovereign entity—the First Person, the one who organizes its desire—rules over the lives therein. I shall carry on with my plan.
9 To which the unionist right wing responded, from the other side of the plaza, “¡Duro duro duro / la patria socialista se la meten en el culo!”
Savage Theories Page 13