by John Gibler
You walk toward some bushes that you see in the distance. You cross some train tracks and follow a path. After a bit you turn and see a Ford pickup truck with a camper and a van similar to those used by the Army for their secret ops. Both vehicles advance slowly along a dirt road. They’re following you. You try to hide behind a small tree. There is nowhere to run. You wait. The truck and van pass by about sixty meters away and keep going until they reach a paved road up ahead. They take the paved road and drive off. At that moment you hear an airplane overhead. You look to the sky and see a military plane circling. They must be looking for you. They must have found some of the people you asked for help and followed you.
You stop, then cross the road and walk toward a group of houses. First it was those strange vehicles and then the plane. They’re launching their operation, that is what you think as you walk toward the houses. This is the race against everything. The greater the distance, the better. The more miles you put between you and the Army base, the better. You see a man in front of his house. You tell him that you were mugged in the city, that your captors beat you and made you confess to crimes you didn’t commit and then finally threw you out of a vehicle near Teotihuacán. You tell him that you are ashamed to be wearing clothes that are so dirty and torn. You ask him if he could help you out with a bit of old clothes, perhaps let you rest for a bit in his house, that you are terrified that the men will grab you again. The man tells you that it sounds like you’ve had a rough time, but that you can’t stay in his house. He gives you a threadbare old cap and wishes you luck. You thank him and keep going. Every step, a step toward hope, the hope of having walked a hundred meters.
At another house you repeat the same story and ask for permission to rest for a bit. An elderly couple making handicrafts with plaster listens to you. You offer to help them, but they say no. The man adds that their son is a detective with the police station in Teotihuacán and might be upset to see the likes of you when he gets home. Just what you needed: to ask for help at a cop’s house.
You keep walking, a piece of being roaming the streets, undone. This is not some guy who jumps a fence and then runs off. No. Every step he takes is a hope of life and a risk of death. Here he does not know who he is, he does not know where he is going. He simply walks, walks, walks . . . You could jump over the edge of hell right here and three blocks down the road come upon something worse. You will find the end. That’s why you can’t get excited. You have to take it in stride. You walk as far as you can.
You come to another small town, but decide to avoid the center. Amidst some magueys you find some bushes and sit down there to rest a bit. You look up to where the airplane keeps circling. It is, without a doubt, a military plane.
You walk again. In the distance you see a man collecting sap from the magueys. You approach and tell him that you are a bit lost. You ask him for the names of the surrounding towns and for the way back to the highway. He tells you the names of the towns and points out the path to the highway. You keep going, now with more information, and you realize that the plane is making increasingly wide circles, as if it were searching for you. But then, as you look at the plane more closely, you see that paratroopers are jumping out at intervals, as if they were creating a siege, a half-circle precisely in the direction you are walking.
You watch how they descend, so certain, one after the other, hanging in the air as if the sky had begun to sweat. After so many coincidences—the soldier who instead of shooting you greeted you in the predawn morning, the neighbors you saw going through the hole in the fence, the man who gave you a jacket, those who had given you a few pesos, a cap—to see the paratroopers in the sky feels like being taunted: the sky’s own arrogance. It is as if the horizon were repeating what your torturers told you so many times: “This is the face and the true power of the State.”
Yes it scares you. You look down the path and see nothing but magueys and bushes between you and the siege floating down from the sky. Half a mile away? A mile? You don’t know how far away they are. You don’t know if others have already descended before you realized what was happening. You don’t know how many they are, or what kinds of weapons they carry. You only know that there is no going back. Not for you. You can’t turn around. Going back would be like giving up. You have already looked too closely into the end to doubt yourself. You keep going. You can make them shoot you. You can wait for them to recognize you and attack. You can take one of them with you.
You think, again, that you will see your death in only a matter of moments. Even if there is a remote possibility that you’ll find a hole in their siege, a way out. In that hole you can burn, be destroyed, be broken. But that doesn’t matter, what matters is that you are ready for the test. Moreover, you are not escaping. You choose your own end. That end is death, and before death there are no obstacles. By declaring yourself dead, there are no more barriers. You walk with rocks in your hands. “There are things that can only be done with death stepping on your heels.”1
But you don’t come upon any soldiers, or anyone else. You walk to the next little town. You do not know that the paratroopers are not after you. You don’t know that the Santa Lucia Airbase is also close by and that the most likely thing is that the terror curtain you saw in the sky was really a routine military exercise. But just the same, you found that hole. The soldiers were all too real. How did you do it? Was it luck? It is better not to seek some speculative answer that could explain everything. Where reason cannot reach, it is better not to dislocate it to force some false explanation. It is better to get used to navigating through the uncertain. There is something more important than explanations here: Having decided to die, you keep walking in order to subvert that ruthless desire for power of those who cultivate others’ pain, of those who have experimented with your pain for four months. Why does everything have to happen at the same time? If we were a bit superstitious, we’d say, well, that you are being tested.
Yes, you are a piece of being roaming the streets, undone, but you are also a warrior. Not like the Special Forces soldiers in the Hollywood films who escape from certain death with their infinite knowledge, their rigorous training in the tactics of war, and their sudden ability to construct an impenetrable fortress in a forest with a pocket knife. Nor like the very real Special Forces troops trained in the U.S. School of the Americas or the Kaibil training center in Guatemala to torture without leaving scars. No. For you to be a warrior is not something learned in a school. It is not a matter of technical knowledge, nor doing to others what has been done to you. Being a warrior comes from your roots in a culture denied though never destroyed. It comes from the commitment to continue being, as a person and as a people, to survive. For you, being a warrior is a spiritual path.
You keep walking. You do not think that you have won yet. You come upon an unpaved road that leads to the next town and you take it. On the road you see two shepherds with their sheep and you walk up to chat with them. You walk with them into the town, and through the center. They give you directions to a store with a pay phone, but you find it closed. You have bad luck with phones. You go to a tortilla shop and buy a peso’s worth of tortillas and ask for a pinch of salt. There is a butcher’s shop across the street. You greet the owner and tell him that you don’t have enough money to pay for a collective taxi to the next town. Could he help you out? He thinks about it. He looks you over and gives you four pesos. You thank him and walk away. Up ahead you ask for directions to the path—not the road—that leads to the next small town, and a man points out the way.
You see an old man planting magueys. You sit down nearby to rest for a bit. The journey, some eight or nine hours long by now, takes its toll on you. Everything—the sun, the hours, the fear, the tension, and all the pain—weighs you down at the same time that you feel your freed body come back to life. You don’t realize that you were more dead than alive and that you are now facing the fear of revival. You are coming back to life, and that is a whole new problem because now e
verything hits you.
The man looks you over suspiciously. He tells you that there has been a lot of livestock and crop theft lately. That the thieves aren’t from around here. He tells you that about two weeks ago the locals killed two such thieves and that it would be best for you to watch yourself lest you be confused with such a thief. You tell him that you look so beaten and messed up because you yourself were mugged and that you prefer to walk and ask for help than steal from anyone. With that little chat your rest comes to an end.
You walk for an hour and a half and come to the edge of another little town near a highway. At the first house you pass you shout a greeting, and a kind-looking woman comes out, smiling. You say hello and ask for her husband, you say you are looking for work. The woman tells you that her husband has left for work and won’t be back until nightfall. You ask her for a glass of water and she gives you two glasses of hibiscus tea. She recommends you ask farther down the road, perhaps someone will have some work that needs doing. You walk a few blocks and then see a small corner store. You go inside. You ask for a razor and ask how much it costs. “Four pesos,” the young clerk at the store tells you. You have exactly four pesos. You pay the clerk and ask if he could give you a bit of water to shave. He takes you a bucket of water and some soap.
“I don’t have any more money to pay for the soap.”
“It’s enough paying for the razor.”
You go outside, where you saw a mirror, to shave. This also hits you: For the first time, you see yourself in a mirror and you find that you are not yourself. You never would have wished for this. This is a hard thing to see. You never would have done this to yourself, nor allowed anyone else to do it to you. It takes you a moment to shake these feelings. Yes, they strip you of your identity, they tear out who you are, and they know it.
The young man stands near you and you tell him that you were kidnapped and beaten. You tell him that you were left in the middle of nowhere and are now walking penniless, ashamed of your appearance, and very afraid of running into your tormentors again. You ask him if he could help you, let you rest here until dark.
He tells you that he doesn’t know anything about kidnappings but that it “sounds fucked up.” He tells you that there is a military base about fifteen minutes away from here. One time, he says, he and a friend were watching the soldiers do some exercises from the other side of a fence and they laughed when one of the soldiers tripped and fell. The soldiers trapped them and beat the crap out of them. When the soldiers finally let the clerk and his friend go, they said they would kill the two of them if they told anyone about the beating.
“I don’t know, man,” he tells you, “but those guys are assholes. They’d fuck over anyone. I don’t know if what you’re telling me is true, but what you describe, the soldiers have done that to a bunch of people.”
He tells you that he can’t help you out with any money, but that maybe the owner of the store could help.
You tell him that perhaps it would be better not to draw the attention of the owner. You tell him you are really afraid. But the clerk says that the owner is a good guy, and he calls for him. After a bit the owner comes outside. You tell him a bit of what you told the clerk and ask for help. The man asks why you don’t have any wounds on your face, why it doesn’t seem like you were just beat up. He thinks you want to deceive him, sleep for a while in his house only to rob him in the night. You start to get nervous about standing still, talking for too long there next to the store, near the highway, in plain sight. You are looking for some kind of refuge.
“Okay,” you tell him, “If you don’t want to help me, that is your right. I’m a stranger. But if anyone asks you whether you’ve seen me, please tell them no. I would very much appreciate that. Rest assured that I am no criminal and that I have spoken honestly.”
“Look,” the owner says, “I’ll take you over to where some fellows are working on a small construction site. Perhaps they can help you out with a bit of work.”
The two of you walk toward the outskirts of the town, climb a hill, and from the top of the hill look out to where some people are building a small chapel some thirty meters from where you stand. The man whistles to the workers. One of them waves for the two of you to approach. As you walk up to the chapel you see four men, one of whom had walked by when you were talking to the man and the clerk in front of the store.
You greet them and once again tell the story that you have been making up over the course of the day. The men seem suspicious but also kind. Looking at you they can tell you’ve been through something hard, even if they don’t know what. They ask you if you’re involved with drugs. You say that if you were a narco you’d call your gang rather than walk through the brush from town to town asking for help. You can see them doubting you and you add that the men who abducted you know how to wound and kill without leaving evidence in their wake. The men nod in agreement.
One reaches for change in his pocket. The others then do the same and they pull together about twenty-five pesos: “We’ll give you this money so you can go buy something to eat. But don’t go into our town, go make your purchases in the town over on the other side and then come back and sleep here in the chapel. If someone sees you, don’t tell them we’ve helped you. And don’t go telling more people about what happened to you, it puts you at risk. If someone asks, say you got drunk and got lost. Tomorrow we’ll bring you something to eat and see if we can help you with anything else. If you’re not here when we return, then we’ll know you were lying to us.”
One of the men takes off his sweater and hands it to you so you don’t get too cold at night. Another tells you: “You’ll be fine here. No one will come looking for you, nobody comes around here. Stay inside the chapel and we’ll see you tomorrow.”
After that they all head off toward their homes. You walk to the small town they mentioned and buy some bread, cheese, and a bit of ham. It gets dark as you walk back to the chapel and you lose your way. You decide to look for a place to spend the night. You find a kind of hollow between some rocks and behind some thorny bushes. You climb in and sit with your back to the rocks and try to sleep. Soon the temperature drops and you can’t fall asleep.
After long hours with your body numb from the cold you hear someone whistle, then some dogs barking, and then voices. The thought is inevitable and immediate: They found me. With those dogs surely they will find you in a matter of moments. You hide farther back amongst the rocks and think: They’ll have to kill me to get me out of here. If they find you now then all the effort, all the past hours of walking along the edge of the impossible, it will all be in vain. How to defend yourself? How to escape again? You take stock of your possessions and your surroundings: some bread, cheese and a soda, cold, fear, and darkness. Your body, like your clothes, is ragged. You don’t have much room to maneuver in your nook between the rocks. The only thing you have going for you is the implacable will to not be disappeared again.
One possibility would be to snap, for your neurons to burst right there and go crazy, lose all sense of reason. The other possibility would be to wait until the very last second. What do you need, then? A kind of coldness? Perhaps. Yes, always keep fighting. You think: I will never be prepared to lose. I will fight up until the very last thing I can do. What is that last thing? Who knows?
This keeps you from running, from screaming, from surrendering, even though you know you’re trembling and losing a shred of life.
The men approach your nook. You can see the light from their lantern and one of the dogs comes close, barking intensely. You hear the voice of the dog’s owner calling it. “That is not a cop,” you think. They must be hunters. But still, how do you explain to an armed man from this area why you are out in the cold hiding in the rocks and bushes? If this man comes upon you, he’ll shoot, or the dog will attack. The hunters will overpower you and then you could end up back with them. All day skirting death just to make a stupid mistake . . . But no, the hunter does not come close to where you a
re hiding. He keeps calling the dog until finally the dog goes back to him. You hear them move away bit by bit. You breathe in and once again feel the pains in your body and the cold.
You endure until dawn. You come out of the hollow and move about, stretching your muscles. Sometime around nine in the morning you find the path back to the chapel. You see more people there than the previous afternoon. You also see a large truck with dirt. They are leveling the floor. You greet two of the men who helped you, pick up a shovel and start working with them. You make note of how they talk and joke amongst themselves as they work. They show you what life is. There is joy here. You learn that they are building the chapel with money that migrants from the community working in the United States have sent back. Several of those migrants have returned to help with the construction. You listen to their tales of migrant life in the U.S., and also the stories from life in the town, soccer games and fights with referees. All their joking around makes you feel safer with them. It is joyful fucking around, not derision or mockery. It is that kind of fucking around that eases your depression. It is a reflection, a manner of expressing the spirit of the community.
The truck makes two trips. With all the people helping, the floor is soon level. A car with two people in it pulls up and they start to hand out meals, pulque, and sodas. One of them comes up to you and tells you to eat your fill.