“I’m sorry. I’m not myself. It’s been a horrible day. Two policemen were killed. I knew them—they were guards near the factory and always said hello to me. One was named Socrates, can you imagine? What a name for a policeman! He was a good man. They murdered him.”
“They executed him,” Huberto Naranjo contradicted. “The people executed him. That isn’t murder. You ought to choose your words more carefully. The murderers are the police.”
“What are you saying? Don’t tell me you’re in favor of terrorism?”
He pushed me away firmly and, looking me straight in the eye, explained that the violence originated with the government. Weren’t unemployment, poverty, corruption, and social injustice forms of violence? The state practiced many forms of abuse and repression. Those policemen were hirelings of the regime; they were defending the interests of enemies of the people, and their execution was a legitimate act. The people were fighting for their liberation. I did not answer for a long time. Now I understood his absences, his scars, his silences, his haste, his fatalism, and the tremendous magnetism that emanated from him, electrifying the air around him and attracting me like an insect to a bright light.
“Why didn’t you tell me this before?”
“It was best for you not to know.”
“You don’t trust me?”
“Try to understand, this is a war.”
“If I had known, these years would have been easier for me.”
“Just seeing you at all is madness. Think what would happen if they suspected and interrogated you.”
“I wouldn’t say anything.”
“They can make a mute talk. I need you, I can’t get along without you, but every time I come to you I feel guilty because I’m putting the movement and the lives of all my compañeros in danger.”
“Take me with you.”
“I can’t, Eva.”
“Aren’t there women in the mountains?”
“No. This is a man’s war, but better times will come, and then we can love each other under different circumstances.”
“But how can you sacrifice both our lives?”
“It isn’t a sacrifice. We’re building a new society; one day we’ll all be free and equal. . . .”
I thought of the long-ago afternoon when we first met, a boy and a girl in a crowded plaza. Even then he was an ingrained macho, able to direct his destiny; in contrast, he believed that because I had been born a girl I was at a disadvantage, I should accept my limitations and entrust myself to others’ care. In his eyes, I would never be independent. Huberto had thought that way since he could think at all; it was not likely that the Revolution was going to change those attitudes. I realized that our problems were not related in any way to the fortunes of the guerrillas; even if he achieved his dream, there would be no equality for me. For Naranjo, and others like him, “the people” seemed to be composed exclusively of men; we women should contribute to the struggle but were excluded from decision-making and power. His revolution would not change my fate in any fundamental way; under any circumstances, as long as I lived I would still have to make my own way. Perhaps it was at that moment I realized that mine is a war with no end in view; I might as well fight it cheerfully or I would spend my life waiting for some distant victory in order to be happy. Yes, Elvira had been right: you have to be tough, life is a dogfight.
We parted that day in anger, but Huberto Naranjo returned two weeks later and, as always, I was waiting.
TEN
The escalation of guerrilla activities brought Rolf Carlé back to the country.
“For the moment, my boy, your world travels are over,” said Aravena from behind his director’s desk. He had grown very fat; his heart was not good and the only pleasures that stirred his senses were a good meal, the savor of his cigars, and during his outings at La Colonia, an occasional veiled glance toward the majestic but now forbidden bottoms of the daughters of Uncle Rupert. Physical limitations, however, had not diminished his professional curiosity. “The guerrillas are becoming a nuisance to everyone, and it’s time to find out what’s going on. All the information we get is censored, the government lies and so does the guerrilla radio. I want to know how many men there are in the mountains, what kind of weapons they have, who’s backing them, what their plans are—in short, everything.”
“You can’t put that on television.”
“We need to know what’s going on, Rolf. I think those men are a bunch of locos, but it may be that we have another Sierra Maestra right under our noses and just can’t see it.”
“And if that’s so, what then?”
“Nothing. It isn’t our role to change the course of history, merely to record the facts.”
“That isn’t how you thought when the General was in power.”
“I’ve learned with age. Go on, take a look around, get something on film if you can, and tell me everything you find out.”
“It won’t be easy. They’re not going to let me go snooping around their camps.”
“That’s why I’m asking you and not some other reporter. You were with them a few years back. What was the name of the guy who impressed you so much?”
“Huberto Naranjo.”
“Can you get in touch with him again?”
“I don’t know. He may not be there—they say that a lot of them have been killed by the Army, and others have deserted. But in any case, I’m interested, and I’ll see what I can do.”
Huberto Naranjo was not dead, and had not deserted, but no one called him by that name any longer. Now he was known as Comandante Rogelio. He had been at war for years, with his boots on, his gun in hand, his eyes wide open to see beyond the shadows. Violence was the order of his life, but he also had moments of euphoria. Every time he welcomed a group of new recruits, his heart pounded in his chest the way it once had on meeting a new girl. He would walk out to the edge of camp to greet them. There they stood, still untouched, optimistic, forming a line as their patrol leader had taught them, still with an air of the city, with new blisters on their hands, not the calluses of the veterans; but their eyes were gentle and, although weary, they would be smiling. These were his younger brothers, his sons; they had come to fight, and from that moment on he would be responsible for their lives—for keeping their morale high, for teaching them to survive in the mountains, for making them as hard as granite, braver than a lioness, clever, quick . . . hardy, so that each of them would be worth a hundred soldiers. It was good to have them there, he would think, and feel a lump in his throat. Then he would jam his hands into his pockets and greet them with a few brusque phrases, to avoid betraying his emotion.
Naranjo also liked to sit with his compañeros around the campfire when it was possible. They were never very long in one place; they had to know the mountains, to move over that terrain like a fish through water, as it said in the manual. But there were idle days; sometimes they sang and played cards and listened to music on the radio like normal human beings. Fairly regularly he had to go down to the city to check with his liaison; then he would walk through the streets pretending he was just like everybody else, breathing forgotten odors of food, traffic, and garbage, looking with new eyes at children, women shopping, stray dogs, as if he were just another person in the crowd, and not a wanted man. Soon on some building or fence he would come on the name “COMANDANTE ROGELIO” in large black letters, and, seeing himself crucified on that wall, would remember with a mixture of pride and fear that he should not be there: he was not like everyone else, he was a guerrilla fighter.
Though Rolf Carlé had heard that most of the guerrillas were recruited from the university, he made no attempt to find the men in the mountains by mixing with students; he had often appeared on television news programs and was too well known. He remembered the contact he had made some years before when he had first interviewed Huberto at the dawn of the armed struggle, and so he m
ade his way back to El Negro’s bar. He found El Negro in his kitchen, a little older but as good-natured as before. They shook hands warily. Times had changed, and now no one could be trusted, since repression had become the work of specialists. The guerrilla movement was no longer the ideal of a group of beardless boys with a dream of changing the world, but a conflict without mercy or restraint. Rolf Carlé did not waste words, he went straight to the point.
“I don’t know anything about them,” El Negro replied.
“I’m not an informer, I never have been. I haven’t betrayed you in all these years—why would I do it now? Get in touch with whoever’s in charge. Tell him to give me a chance, at least let me explain what I want to do.”
El Negro stared at him, studying every detail of his face, and seemed to approve of what he saw, because Rolf Carlé sensed a change in his attitude.
“I’ll be back tomorrow, my friend,” Carlé said.
He returned the next day and every day for almost a month, until finally he was granted the meeting he wanted, and could explain his plans. The Party realized that Rolf Carlé could be useful to them. He was a first-rate reporter; he seemed like an honest man; he had access to the television network; and he was Aravena’s friend. It would be helpful to be able to count on someone like him, and if they took the proper precautions the risks would not be too great.
The guerrilla leaders wanted the people to be informed: “With every victory we win allies.”
“Don’t alarm the public,” the President of the Republic ordered in turn. “I don’t want to hear a word about guerrillas—we’ll crush them with silence. They’re enemies of the government, and that’s how we’ll deal with them.”
Carlé’s second trip to the camp was very different from the earlier one: no backpacking into the mountains like a schoolboy on vacation. Part of the time he was blindfolded and transported in the trunk of a car, half-asphyxiated and nearly fainting from the heat. Then he was driven by night through fields that gave no indication of where he might be. His guides took turns, and neither was disposed to talk with him. For two days he was locked in a variety of sheds and barns, moved from place to place with no chance to ask questions. Army troops trained in schools of counter-insurgency had moved in to contain the guerrillas, installing mobile control points on the highways, stopping all vehicles, searching everything that moved. It was not easy to pass their checkpoints. Special troops were concentrated in Operations Centers spread across the country. There was a rumor that such centers also served as prison and torture camps. The Army shelled the mountains until everything was reduced to rubble. Remember the revolutionary code of ethics, Comandante Rogelio pounded into his men. You are not to abuse anyone. Respect property, and pay for everything you consume. That way people will see the difference between us and the Army. They will learn how it will be in zones liberated by the Revolution. Rolf Carlé found that within a short distance of the cities, where life seemed superficially peaceful, there was a nation at war—although officially it was forbidden to speak of it. The only mention of the struggle came from underground broadcasts reporting guerrilla strikes: a dynamited oil pipeline, a guard station blown up, an ambush of Army troops.
After five days, during which he was hauled about like a piece of freight, Carlé found himself on a mountainside chopping his way through undergrowth with a machete—hungry, muddy, and eaten alive by mosquitoes. His guides left him in a clearing with instructions not to move from that spot for any reason, and not to light a fire or make a sound. There he waited, with no company but chattering monkeys. At dawn, just as his patience was nearly exhausted, two ragged, bearded young men armed with rifles appeared.
“Welcome, compañero,” they said with broad smiles.
“It’s about time,” he replied, completely spent.
* * *
Rolf Carlé shot the only existing 16-millimeter film on the guerrilla movement of the period before defeat ended the revolutionary dream and pacification returned the survivors to everyday life—some to become bureaucrats, others deputies or businessmen. He lived with Comandante Rogelio’s troops, moving by night from site to site across savage terrain, occasionally resting during the day. Hunger, fatigue, fear. Life in the mountains was not easy. He had filmed hostilities around the world, but this warfare of ambushes, surprise attacks, loneliness, silence, this constant feeling of being watched, was worse. The total number of guerrillas varied; they were organized into small units for greater mobility. Comandante Rogelio moved from group to group, responsible for the entire front. Rolf observed the training of new combatants; he helped set up radios and emergency posts; he learned to drag himself forward on his elbows, and tolerate pain; living with these young men and listening to them, he came to understand the reasons for their sacrifice. The camps were run with as much discipline as the military, but, unlike Army camps, they lacked clothing, medicine, food, shelter, transport, communications. It rained for weeks, but they were not allowed a fire to dry out; it was like living in an undersea jungle. Rolf had the sensation of walking on a tightrope across a canyon; death was there, hiding behind the next tree.
“We all feel the same. Don’t worry, you get used to it,” the Comandante joked.
Provisions were considered sacred, but occasionally the need would be too great and someone would steal a tin of sardines. Punishment was harsh not only because food had to be rationed, but even more because the value of solidarity must be respected. From time to time, someone would crack, curl up on the ground and cry for his mother. The Comandante would go to him, help him up, walk with him where no one could see them, and talk with him quietly. But if he identified a traitor, this same man was capable of executing one of his own troops.
“It’s normal here to die or be wounded, you have to be ready for anything. Getting out with your life is rare, and victory will be a miracle,” Comandante Rogelio told Rolf.
Rolf lost weight in those few months, and felt that he had aged. Toward the end he did not know what he was doing, or why. He lost all sense of time: an hour seemed a week, and suddenly a week would go by as if he had dreamed it. It was difficult to collect accurate information, to get at the essence of things. He was surrounded by a strange silence filled with words and at the same time heavy with portents, a silence throbbing with jungle sounds, screeching and murmurs, distant voices, sleepwalkers’ wails and moans. He learned to sleep in spurts, standing, sitting, day, night, half-unconscious from exhaustion, but always alert—a whisper would make him leap. He was disgusted by the filth, his own stench; he dreamed of sinking into a clean tub, of soaping himself to the bone; he would have given anything he owned for a cup of hot coffee. In the skirmishes with the Army, he watched men die whom he had shared a cigarette with the night before. He would lean over them with his camera and film them from somewhere outside himself, as if he were a long way away looking at their bodies through a telescope. I must hang on to my sanity, he kept repeating, as he had often done in similar situations. Childhood images—such as the day he went to bury the dead in the concentration camp—returned along with images from recent wars. He knew by experience that he absorbed everything, that every event was imprinted in his memory, but that sometimes months or years passed before he realized how deeply an episode had marked him. It was as if memory congealed somewhere, then suddenly, through some mechanism of association, appeared before his eyes with blinding intensity. He asked himself why he stayed; why didn’t he get the hell out of there, back to the city? That made infinitely more sense than remaining in this labyrinth of nightmares. Leave, go rest for a while at La Colonia, be soothed by the exhalation of his cousins’ cinnamon, clove, vanilla, and lemon. But he stayed on. He followed the guerrillas everywhere, lugging his film equipment as others packed their weapons. He was present one afternoon when Comandante Rogelio was carried into camp on an improvised stretcher, wrapped in a blanket, shivering, writhing, poisoned by the sting of a scorpion.
&
nbsp; “What’s all the fuss, compañeros? Nobody dies of a scorpion sting,” the Comandante murmured. “Go on, I’ll get through this myself.”
Rolf Carlé had contradictory feelings about the Comandante; he was never comfortable in his presence. He felt he did not have his full confidence, and for that reason could not understand why he was letting him film. He was troubled by the man’s sternness, but he also admired what he accomplished with his men. The Comandante received a contingent of city boys and after a few months he had made them into fighters hardened to fatigue and pain, tough, but somehow still clinging to their youthful ideals.
The first-aid kit was nearly empty; there was no antidote for the sting. Rolf stayed at the victim’s side, seeing that he was kept covered, giving him water, keeping him clean. After two days the fever passed, and the Comandante smiled with his eyes; Rolf knew then that in spite of everything they were friends.
For Rolf Carlé, the information he had received while he was with the guerrillas was not enough; he needed the other half of the story. He said very little as he took leave of Comandante Rogelio; they both knew the rules and it would have been inappropriate to speak of them. Without telling anyone what he had seen in the mountains, Rolf Carlé visited Army Operations Centers, accompanied soldiers on sorties, talked with officers, interviewed the President, and even obtained permission to observe military training. When he was finished, he had thousands of meters of film, hundreds of photographs, hours of tapes; he had more information on the subject than anyone in the nation.
“Do you think the guerrillas will win, Rolf?”
“Frankly, señor Aravena, no.”
“They succeeded in Cuba. They demonstrated there that an army can be overthrown.”
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