They part and he starts to head home. He traverses the night, bumping into things, bouncing between walls and doubts. We aren’t making history, he thinks: We’re being carried away by it. Like the currents of the sea. We’re getting farther and farther from the coast. We’re drifting: History is sweeping us along. After decades of trying to tame it, it’s rebelled. We haven’t been able to transform it, and now we have to pay the price.
A day is scratched . . .
27
They’re knocking angrily at the door. His hangover has him frozen. He was sleeping with his clothes on, including shoes, and now with more than questionable balance he gets up. The eighty-year-old woman’s smile fades when she sees him, although she is too polite to make a vulgar or inappropriate comment.
She shows him the newspaper:
“You see? I told you there’d been an accident,” she says, pointing to a paragraph. “An irresponsible act of piracy . . . an unfortunate accident.”
“Good,” he murmurs. “That means we can have a clear conscience.”
The woman smiles. “Conscience maybe. All the rest is worry,” and she goes, closing the door delicately.
The office manager on the telephone:
“Listen . . . I know you’re sick but you have to be there this afternoon; there’s going to be an emergency meeting. I assume you’ve read today’s paper.”
“Yes, I have, comrade, a neighbor brought it to me. The truth is that ever since I heard the rumor I’ve been keeping up to date with the news.”
“Very good,” he can almost imagine the manager slapping him on the shoulder condescendingly, “as I’m sure you’ll understand, we cannot permit a few traitors, drug addicts, and criminals to get away with it. We have to do something. And something drastic . . . ”
“Of course, comrade. The nation comes first,” and he hangs up.
28
The nation as otherness, which demands the death of those who comprise it, he thinks. An institution surrounded by enemies, always paranoid, calls to us. We owe it everything. Our first obligation is to it. Without it we are nothing, he thinks.
He takes some coffee and an aspirin, then a tortilla. On the radio they talk about what happened, and he intuits that this type of event will give rise to other similar ones. It happened with the Mariel boatlift, he thinks (the fire spread though the country as if it were a dry cane field). It’s three-thirty when he leaves for the office, cutting through the rarefied atmosphere of the city. The buses and cars advance by inertia, people are falling asleep, the buildings are melting in a Dalíesque manner: tropical surrealism.
29
The meeting is presided over by a skinny young guy (well-trimmed mustache, 26th of July sweater, blue jeans) who explains in a rabble-rouser’s voice why we have to be alert and prevent (he emphasizes the word) any occurrence outside the established norms.
“Prevent how?” someone asks loudly.
“By force if necessary!” screams the orator, who is on the verge of either hysteria or ecstasy. “Yes, comrades! By force if necessary!”
At that moment, without knowing why, he raises his hand, gets to his feet and in a slow, deliberate voice states:
“I’m not going to suppress anybody,” and a tragic silence falls. Dozens of faces turn toward him (the scene unfolds in slow motion, with not much depth of field), mouths open.
“What are you saying?” asks the orator with a mixture of surprise and indignation, not very accustomed to having people say no to him.
“I’m saying I’m not going to suppress anybody,” he replies firmly; and without adding anything more he takes his party card from his pocket, goes to the table, and drops the card on it, without heroism, as if it was the most natural, most obvious thing in the world, the only thing possible in the present circumstances. “I’m not going to suppress anybody.”
And he turns and goes.
30
He’s tired. His world is collapsing: He receives summonses, they’re investigating him, delving into his life. He’s lost his job, of course, and is left with his meager savings and some of the money his mother sends. With this stain on his record, there’s already nothing to be done: He knows he’s fucked. On the balcony, in his shorts, he follows the events as if they had nothing to do with him—he observes, calculates. He dresses in light clothes and goes out toward the seawall. He carries his camera slung over his shoulder.
Everything begins suddenly. He photographs a group gathered on a corner. Then others approach, and still others, and in an instant, as if it’s a piece of theater—a performance, a happening—they all start to cry down with and death to! (It seems like the end of the world, or at least its announcement.) And so it continues. For the first time in his life, he witnesses the beautiful sight of a spontaneous demonstration, not the scratched record of a staged event. To be witness to a genuine, albeit minimal, revolt makes him, for a split second, regain his optimism.
Windows are smashed, metal rods come out. A mob from some brigade or other appears on a corner to crush the rebels: There’s a pitched (medieval) battle: one horde against another, pipes and stones as ammunition—war cries, opened skulls, lost eyes, lost lives . . . The unthinkable is becoming reality, even if only for a moment. Hours later, the leader appears in his jeep, surrounded by his people. The streets fill with the faithful, who must have been hiding. Vivas! sound. The fire is going out . . .
31
For weeks, he wanders with his camera along the city’s coasts, photographing the world that is escaping—faces smile at the adventure of escape, the adolescent provocation of running away from home. He witnesses with surprise the uncommon spectacle of police officers watching without intervening (there are no blows, no arrests, they just watch from a distance). At the seawall, groups form to encourage those who leave (applause, good luck wishes, cries of support): a collective party, a mass farewell, a joyful service. A liturgy. He never thought that the scratched record of daily life could sound like that, that the city could be transformed to that extent. It’s not that society is disintegrating, it’s that right now there is no social body (we are predators, he thinks: trying to devour our fellow man). Hunger unites us, yes, but also make us prey for the strongest—and always, he thinks, there is someone stronger than ourselves.
Every day they hear news (or gossip, how can they know?) of those who make it and those who don’t. Whole families disappear into the sea—statistics, a topic of conversation. Weeks and weeks watching the city empty out; not a day goes by that he doesn’t hear about some friend or acquaintance who has left (the doctor, the former fat man, his ex-wife, so many others): The nine o’clock soap opera is replaced by the soap opera of daily life. The scratched record of politics is repeated again and again: Workers can be sacrificed, the straits are the notice board: We are dispensable, trash tossed into the sea, he thinks.
32
A noise—a crackle—and the cycle starts again. He can’t sleep: The hour is getting closer. The storm pounds the coast, the waves rise against the wall, the wind howls like a broken bassoon, and the natural darkness coincides with the scheduled power outage. He settles down in the kitchen with half a bottle, by the light of a candle (a black stain runs through the barrio, fusing with the sea). The hours don’t pass—time comes to a halt. The voices of the citizens cannot be heard. He takes his backpack (full of negatives and undeveloped rolls), puts on a raincoat, and covers the camera with a plastic bag. He goes out. He meets the others as they prepare the raft, they arrange the final details. It’s a wooden hulk some fifteen feet by six, with gasoline tanks as floats and an outboard motor from a Russian washing machine: Only we could call this shit a raft, he thinks. They load the provisions (water, hard bread, preserves stolen from God knows where), the gear (a compass, toy binoculars, a flare that nobody’s sure will work, fishing line, and bait), and talk without stopping. He records the process in the merciless rain. He
lives it as a photo story (his own: the one that’ll make him famous when he gets there, his farewell to anonymity and mediocrity, his true profession, he thinks). Everything is ready. They throw themselves in. The sea seems infinite . . .
33
Day breaks as the raft moves off, lurching over the swell (in the rain, struck by the wind, subject to the ups and downs of chance). For the first time in his life, he sees the city from the sea and thinks it looks like a worn-down old whore who hasn’t completely lost her beauty. He also thinks he’s going to miss her.
At about ten, they encounter the coast guard. The launch approaches and they are asked if they have what they need (the dozen or so photographers, film cameramen, and journalists who are with the coast guard insist on interviewing them, even though they have to yell). He, in his turn, photographs the coast guard. They tell them the cyclone will hit them in the straits, that it’s better if they turn back and try again in a few days.
“No way! We’re going!”
Dizzy, he agrees with the coast guard. He knows, nevertheless, that there’s no turning back: The die is cast.
By four, the sea looks like a chain of black mountains and snow-covered peaks; the sky is a negative of itself, the sun has stopped existing, and everyone starts to suspect that indeed the cyclone has arrived. The swell has detached one of the drums that have been keeping them afloat, and the raft, limping, does what it can to continue its wandering. They blame each other, the disaster is coming closer—one weeps, another prays, someone laughs hysterically, and so on, going through all the stages of understanding the failure. He, in a corner, calmly photographs the scene. He wants to smoke, but by now the cigarettes have turned into a foul-smelling paste, devoid of identity. The camera is soaked; he suspects that these photographs will never be developed.
They climb a mile-high wave; from the top they see the mouth of the abyss. For a few eternal seconds, they contemplate the teeth of the sea (the throat of Neptune, the snout of the end) and begin the descent, aware that it’s all over. Another wave hits them from the side: The boat lurches and falls apart.
Reaching the eddy, they sink, turning like a scratched record.
At thirty-three revolutions per minute . . .
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Canek Sánchez Guevara, grandson of Che Guevara, left Cuba for Mexico in 1996. He worked for many of Mexico’s most important newspapers as a columnist and correspondent, and he wrote a regular newspaper column called “Motorcycleless Diaries.” He was a measured and informed critic of the Castro regime. He died in January 2015 at the age of forty.
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