by Ciro Bustos
During the first year of the cage’s life, León shared his cell with Paco for a few months. But their personalities were totally incompatible. Paco suffered from bouts of unbearable depression and was finally moved to a room in the military police headquarters over the road. So León ended up as the only inhabitant of the best room, the new one. But the wider space only increased his sense of isolation, lying alone on his bed, in an empty universe. Not even the thought of lunch helped him pass the hours. When Ana María came, she brought me non-perishables like sugar, coffee, cigarettes and toiletries, and within the realms of the possible remembered León. He urgently needed pulses and cereals, a few tins and cooking oil or fat, to make delicious dishes from his native Beni.
There was a military coup in Bolivia in October 1969, when the army openly seized power and General Ovando became president, and the coup coincided with the ‘wine’ period, our third year in the cage, when conditions improved. The doors of our cells stayed open until seven in the evening, illegal deals with the guards were much easier, communication between us was freer, and much easier with the outside world as well. I thought chess would be an excellent pastime so I carved a set of figures from a broom handle and drew squares on some cardboard, with the idea of copying games I had seen in magazines and improving my rudimentary knowledge. León was enthusiastic too so we decided to go one better. Our ‘suppliers’ got us good bits of wood without knots in, and we asked for other materials like sandpaper, saws to cut wood, black shoe polish, cardboard and shaving knives, with which we made instruments to carve with. I designed a chess set inspired by Niemeyer’s cathedral in Brasilia which was beautiful and modern and would not be too hard to carve. We set to work.
The first thing I had to do was teach León to work in something so far from his normal work: he was a farmhand, a gaucho. To him, wood was cut with machetes or axes. I drew a proper scale model, with the exact measurements, and numbered the stages he would have to follow. Since we had no workbenches or clamps, we had to carve, polish and file all the figures while they were still on the long broom handle, leaving a good margin between them, before sawing them apart. The fine details, like the horses heads, the queen’s crown, the king’s cross, the tops of the castles and bishops, were the last steps and the most difficult for him, but he learned and he did pretty well in the end. The black pieces were dyed with shoe polish, while the white ones were left as polished wood. I made the chess boards.
One afternoon, an officer saw us playing in the patio. He liked the chess pieces and wanted to buy them. León sold him his set. He showed off his purchase to his fellow officers and there followed a wave of orders, that increased with time. León rose to the challenge and virtually ended up with a workshop producing unique quality artisanal chess sets for the local market. I don’t remember the price but it rose as the finished product improved, and ended up being a good source of income for León, allowing him to change his diet, his clothes, his spirits and his humour. Although I laboured from dawn to dusk too, all the income went to him. His detailed descriptions and day by day reconstructions of what had happened, every event, every anecdote, drama or amusing situation, were payment enough for me.
Although I aimed originally to write only what I saw with my own eyes, I think it is valid to include what I heard with my own ears too. So I am repeating one of León’s stories, probably the only time he told it, as we worked on our handicrafts. One day, while the guerrillas were in one of their temporary camps, with the army on their tails, he went down to get water and found an M2 left beside the stream. Returning to his job in the kitchen, he told Che, who sent someone, maybe Pombo, to find out who it belonged to. He returned with the rifle which turned out to belong to Che himself. The punishment had already been established so Che, who allowed no privileges for anybody, least of all for himself, did kitchen skivvy duties for a week. León told me it was harder for him, the cook, than for the helper, because how could he say: ‘Ramón, wash the pans’? He tried indirect methods like: ‘The pans need washing …’ or ‘I need water …’ and the chief went off with the jerry can to get it. ‘We’re low on wood …’ and Che went looking for dry sticks for him. There was nothing León could do, or he would have been punished for toadying, something Che could not stand. All Che’s appreciation of León was wiped out by a sentence in his diary on 3 October. It said: ‘Here ends the story of two heroic guerrillas’, one of whom was León.
Sometimes at the weekend, León ordered meat to barbecue: spare ribs, steak, etc., and a carafe of wine. We had real feasts, and even the Frenchman joined in, although being a refined gourmet prevented him from enjoying criollo-style barbecued spare ribs.
The local bourgeoisie and the upper echelons of the army used to pay me to draw portraits of their children and even their wives. In the worse case, they brought old photographs of dead family members, fathers or grandfathers immortalized in inscrutable poses, made worse by horrendous retouching or stylized backgrounds that the actual descendents wanted to make more human and bring up to date. Dogs, cats and horses were likewise my noble models. I sketched officers’ wives, Reque Terán’s daughters, García Mesa’s white horse, all enhanced to make them more beautiful, except for the horse. A local lady brought her three children to my cell, one after another, and finally sat herself. She gave me photos of the drawings that I still have.
One morning, a nurse came to examine me for my bronchial infection. My blood pressure, which was usually boringly normal, took a leap skywards. She was a spectacular woman, tall and strong, and very beautiful. She wore a long skirt buttoned at the front with disconcerting slits up the sides revealing sculptured legs, and an abundantly filled white linen blouse. While she fulfilled her duties with the pressure metre, the thermometer, and tiny syringes, I made various attempts at verbal rapprochement, which was the only thing I could aspire to anyway. She told me not to play with fire. She was General Barrientos’s local girlfriend. As well as having been being president, he was a pilot and used to take advantage of his professional skills to make frequent visits to distant garrisons, piloting planes and helicopters himself, trips during which, accidentally on purpose, he attended to his extensive and well-endowed harem. Barrientos was ‘El Macho’ par excellence.
The woman’s reticent replies awakened my interest, and I made sharper, more provocative comments, finally inquiring tenaciously: ‘Is he as macho as he’s painted? What technique does he prefer?’ She intimated that he was without doubt very macho, but not great on subtlety: that he arrived like the master taking possession of his property and left deep in discussion with his advisers. ‘What a waste!’ I suggested wickedly. ‘He should stick to planes; a woman is not a machine, but something much more exquisite, that takes to the air only when she is finely tuned.’ And I set out in detail, sitting on the other side of the table from her, what button by button, step by step, kiss by kiss, in all minutiae, a person of such rank should do. ‘Would you do that?’ she asked, as she gathered up her things, her neck and face covered in blushes.
When the door closed behind her and I was alone, enveloped in the lingering fragrance of her perfumed talc, a state of vague unease came over me. Would I end up in one of those terrible punishment garrisons in the middle of the jungle? More than playing with fire, I had started a blaze. But no. It did not happen. Instead, to my surprise, she came back the following week with a weird and wonderful present: a very beautiful angora cat, with one golden eye, the other a blueish grey. It was her favourite pet. She brought it in her perfumed arms and gave it to me like a warm purring offering. I called her Pocha.
Pocha had absolutely no problem changing owner and domicile and, after a quick inspection of my cell, decided to stay. She lived with us for several weeks and provided continual entertainment, locked in continual battle with the patio mice until there wasn’t one to be seen. Then one night tragedy struck; she got stuck in the drain under my cell. Despite my pleas, not even the most indulgent guard was going to dig up the cell floor to save
her. You could say she died in my place.
Pocha’s disappearance meant regressing to the everyday boredom of the cage, to its petty power relationships, time at a standstill, and life in the fourth dimension. In the outside world there were radical changes in society, political and military catastrophes, and historical advances by mankind, like setting foot on the moon; but our world was a watertight compartment, which had minimum impact, nationally, locally, even on the barracks.
The radio was our umbilical cord. News and music reaching us over its magical airwaves was our sustenance. Initially, I had a small radio that received local stations and, with great difficulty, Radio El Mundo from Buenos Aires. Ana María brought me a better one with several short waves so I could listen to national and municipal stations from Buenos Aires with continuous classical music programmes. What a privilege to be able to enjoy a symphony. León inherited my small one, and the sounds often overlapped, with Mahler acquiring unusual rhythms. If there was especially important news at night, I banged on León’s wall and held the radio against it so he could hear it more clearly. In the final months, the radio became even more important.
The communications room of the Fourth Division’s headquarters was a few metres on the other side of the wall. Throughout the day we could hear the communications officer’s efforts to make himself understood, or repeat inconsequential messages to do with the division’s internal functioning and even of a more personal nature, to other divisions or regiments round the country. Sometimes climatic conditions hindered reception and voices rose until they were howling. Better results would probably have been achieved by going up onto the roof and doing away with the Hertzian waves altogether. Distant voices, heard through whistling and crackling, as if the communication was coming from a First World War battlefield, asked a troop truck to reply, inquired after last month’s payments, or requested a medical pass. A couple of months before our release, the conversations began to concern us and became menacing. A kind of internal opinion poll was being held over the airwaves. There was no doubt that rumours of our release were getting the officer class worked up. The paradox began emerging, like a photograph from the developing tray.
Stuck in the cage, with neither voice nor vote, we were audio witnesses to a tide of contradictory opinions, from clashes between divisional commanders and officers of the High Command. They ranged from benevolent plans for deportation to demands for the firing squad. Sounds, not only voices, dominated our lives. The rattle of the chain on the door opening for lunch could be festive, like a pianola, or funereal, reminiscent of the gallows.
Relations between the Frenchman and myself depended on his mood swings, and the news that arrived officially, via the embassy and Elizabeth, or unofficially, through journalists coming to interview him. Every now and again, we heard the chain on the door jangle and, peeping through the hole in our cell door, would see them come to fetch Debray. He would go out with his best hang-dog look: unshaven, shirt outside his trousers, in sandals, but without quite managing a convincing Monte Cristo. When they came back, you only had to look at him to imagine what kind of mood he was in. He could spend days inside his cell, only coming out for minimum exercise; or he could have sudden bouts of cordiality and seek me out to pace up and down the patio discussing the latest world news, like the 10 million tonne Cuban sugar harvest, the Seven Day War, the moon landing, or, changing the subject, wanting urgent information about Borges, about where in Buenos Aires was the corner of Maipú Street where the writer lived, and how far it was from the National Library. ‘I must go and see him as soon as I get out of here’, he told me.
Literature was a bridge that could have united Debray and I, but it was a bridge he crossed unilaterally. Over the course of her visits, the Consulesa had brought him many important books and he built up a large library arranged in boxes stacked as shelves along the wall separating our cells. It included philosophical publications, including Tel Quel, and new unopened books that, after selecting certain ones, he sent back. He told me proudly that he had got his ‘prison writings’ out by putting single written sheets between the non-guillotined pages of the books he sent back. Yet he never lent me a single one of the numerous books in Spanish that Elizabeth brought, although he could borrow any he found interesting in my small collection.
However, he left his masterpiece of sado-egoism to the end of our last year as prisoners, after Elizabeth’s last visit. He had read The City and the Dogs and The Green House by Mario Vargas Llosa that Ana María had brought from our bookshelf at home for me to re-read. The Peruvian’s entrance onto the stage of literature in Spanish was a huge event; he was then without a doubt the greatest novelist in Latin America, capturing its turbulent history and the creative genius of its peoples. (He was an enthusiastic admirer of the Cuban Revolution in those days.) Debray and I had also discussed the whole gamut of Caribbean, Central and South American writers, those of the ‘boom’ and their precursors. On that particular day, he came into the patio, where León was preparing a barbecue, waving a packet of papers in his hand. ‘Look what I’ve got’, he said very excitedly, and showed me the proofs of a Peruvian edition of Vargas Llosa’s latest book Conversations in the Cathedral. It had already been published in Buenos Aires and I had read amazing reviews in magazines from there. The writer himself had sent them from Lima via Elizabeth. Always short of things to read, especially as it had been ages since Ana María’s last visit, I was thoroughly delighted and naturally asked him to lend it to me as soon as he could. His reply was memorable: ‘I’ll lend it to you later, for Christmas … let’s say Christmas of 1995.’ This was September or October of 1970. Ana María brought the book to Chile after our release and I read it there, but thinking back to that unkind retort, he must have already known we would be leaving soon, before Christmas.
The way he behaved for the three years we shared that space, knowing his back was being watched by Castro and De Gaulle, two of the greatest living heroes of the twentieth century, caused me no end of problems. No sooner had we arrived in the cage, in March 1968, than he set up his lines of communication, again through the Consulesa, so that his isolation was no more than a relatively fruitful inconvenience, like a writer shut away up a Swiss mountain with his books, papers, pipe and cognac. He planned a method of dialectical cut and thrust with the local centre of power, well coordinated with international support and regular visits from carefully chosen people. Straight off, he proposed a hunger strike to protest our conditions, and wanted to involve Paco and León, the two Bolivian survivors. They had not been tried or sentenced, so they were merely hostages of the army. They had absolutely no protection and knew that they would be the ones paying for any broken plates. I did not agree either, because a hunger strike influences the general public not the oppressors. Without adequate press coverage putting pressure on the state, it achieves nothing. And even so, if the state is represented by an ‘Iron Lady’, as happened in the UK with the Irish prisoners, dozens of people can die and the powers that be don’t lift a finger. We could not even tell the Italian to stop sending us food. The guards would have calmly eaten our lunch, without anyone in Camiri even knowing about it. But he had already decided and I could not refuse without having the whole world on my back. At least I got it restricted to the two of us who were serving sentences, leaving the Bolivians out of it.
The strike went on for ten days and was lifted without any gains except that the Consulesa got them to promise to discuss the matter of a transfer again. We went back to our lunch routine, but the anecdote was registered in the Frenchman’s laboured autobiography.
Debray subsequently asked if he could hire my lawyer, Jaime Mendizábal, so he could deal with the legal matters related to the negotiations about a possible transfer. I did not control Jaime’s time or workload, so I told Debray to ask him himself via the Consulesa. Jaime agreed and returned to Camiri. He reassured me that he was still my lawyer even though he would deal with some matters for Debray at the same time. He thought the
transfer to prison in La Paz was only useful if we had good political support. If not, the Panóptico was a terrible place compared to the exclusivity of the cage. Working with Debray would also open up a source of income that Jaime had never had with me; the Almaraz group were paying his costs out of solidarity. Cuba and France would be picking up his bill from now on.
Cuba was financing two or three monthly visits by his wife, a brand new ‘lieutenant’ in the Cuban security services. She arrived laden down with top drawer revolutionary presents: quality cigars in silver tubes; mature Bacardí rum; books, reports … During this last year, Elizabeth would stay no more than ten minutes alone with him before coming out and sitting on the wall to get some air. ‘I can’t stand it’, she would say; I don’t know if she meant being cooped up in the cell. We used to chat a bit, as if we were not connected in any way, as if dropping the odd slanderous comment was an occupational hazard.
Cuban responsibility for this, like the presents, came from the top. The Cubans who knew me, had worked with me, and knew I had kept silent, held their tongues too, murmuring only on the odd occasion, here and there, their solidarity and understanding. Among them was the Cuban intelligence officer I met in Copenhagen twenty years later. He had received the letter I sent to Furry when he became minister of the interior, and he told me: ‘Furry read it in my presence and said “I knew Pelado would write something like this. It is heartfelt, but solid.”’
Sitting on the wall under the wire mesh, Elizabeth talked about people we both knew, all of them members of Barbaroja Piñeiro’s intelligence apparatus currently re-writing history. She told me who was doing what, recent promotions or postings, what country or continent they were in, as if she felt completely at ease with me, one of the gang, on holiday. But she did not bring so much as a greeting from anyone, no word of encouragement or reproach. Nothing. Not even a matchstick.