Red, Yellow and Green

by Alejandro Saravia

  “No!” Alfredo screamed, startling other customers at the café as if a cockroach had just come out of one of his nostrils. He wanted to stop seeing all of that. “Why didn’t I do something? Why didn’t I revolt? Why didn’t I empty my magazine on them the night we went with Non-Commisioned Officer Juan Barrón to escort gonorrhal García Meza across the entire line of flight to the Prevención? Why did I have to participate in the rape of Boxeador’s girlfriend? I should have done something, trampled and burnt the flag we worshipped every morning, in whose name and glory we murdered so many people. Dance a vigorous malambo on the trumpet that summoned our battalion every morning. Put eyeglasses and long hair on Eduardo Abaroa and put a joint in his hand.” Alfredo’s tragedy was that of having lived without realizing that his personal life, thoughts and experiences were part of a social scaffolding, that he was part of the collective history, of the life experiences of people with whom he had shared his life, way of thinking, decisions, indecisions and betrayals. He’d never been alone. He’d never been an island because the horizon of his decisions would always be part of that deep, silent river of his peoples’ unwritten history, those he vaguely sensed were his people, removed from the corrupt stain of every instrument of power.

  His right eye turned off as quickly as it had turned on. He noticed his coffee cup was empty. He looked at the time. His left eye was misty with tears, a fact he accepted without being overwhelmed by what in the past he would have interpreted as a sign of unforgivable weakness. He carefully folded the printed news of the extradition of the aforementioned subject and walked out of the Café des Virtuels. He was surrounded by people. The air smelled of bread, coffee, onions. The loud bang of a car crash reached his ears. He was now living in Montreal, hundreds of kilometres and centuries away from his first death. He could continue remembering every detail of the events on July 17, 1980, when gonorrhal Luis García Meza inaugurated a Reich that would last at least twenty years based on his calculations. Alfredo could have climbed on top of a bus and yelled at passersby on the boulevard that the new government had baptized his new military uprising with the ironic title of Government of National Reconstruction, that his master plan was for the country he ruled to survive on chuños and potatoes. Who even cares today about the rear-guard militiaman who ironically declared himself anti-imperialist the day cocaine started coming out of his ears? Who the hell cares about this story at all? No one. Absolutely no one. And yet, Alfredo felt he had to write it down. And if young people decided to reject him, at least the dead—those who left waiting in vain for a promise of better days, the promise of living in humane conditions, those who were gunned down thinking it was worth sacrificing themselves for others, for those who would follow—the dead will know they are remembered, that their memory is still alive. That we have learned something. Even if it’s only not to forget so easily. Our memory belongs to everyone, to those who died and those who live with buried memories. Our memory belongs to this solid ground, the earth that supports a tree of days in an infinite present. Even if no one came close to his writings, Alfredo thought that by writing these lines he would fulfill his promise to Amelia and Boxeador, what they had requested of him in the midst of horror and whispers: they had wanted to remain in this world, even if only as simple characters in a humble novel, they wanted to feel the eyes, the breath, the imagination of another human being who moved closer to the faint mark their fleeting lives left behind. Alfredo realized all of a sudden his one good eye was crying again under the March sun.

  He thought about the historical convergence of pragmatized memory, in the postmodern exercise of a virtualized, hypertransient past. That memory, those days are a nuisance to the present. Alfredo thought that the only explanation for gonorrhal García Meza’s words—“I am innocent”—could only be an effort to negate, deprecate and caricature memory. Even though we are now in 1995, even though today is January 1, 2001, even though today is Tuesday, July 17, 2080, even though fifteen or twenty or a hundred years have passed, even though we are literally halfway around the world, the Plaza de Mayo grandmothers are still there, demanding justice while Argentinian military officials continue on their edifying task of training Central American armies. Command headquarters filled with the grey, unpunished vultures of the Chilean army are still there. So are the US military missions, a cancerous tumour in every country, training locals in their art of slaughter as well as importing their culture of instant forgetting, denying the past. So are the Ley de Punto Final, the pardons, and the purchased or imposed innocence in the great carnival of Latin American democracies. Alfredo felt a bitter taste in his mouth. “Maybe foam should come out of my mouth. I should write, ‘I want to write but only foam comes out.’ Volibia: the land of burning foam. Is this triumph? Is this justice? It might be. Volibian law is famous for its fickleness, corruption and venality. Maybe García Meza will serve his entire sentence. Maybe the years he has left to live won’t be enough to atone for the number of months of July he deserves to be behind bars. Or he might feign illness, endemic amnesia, for example. He may be pardoned and be granted freedom. He may even organize his own political party and become a decent, noble political figure like that mockery of democracy ex-dictator Hugo Banzer.

  “There are two heroic blades stabbing through the language of memory. The first is the reason that García Meza stepped down. It wasn’t because of an effective civil resistance or because the Bolivian elite had demanded it. Neither of these was true. Private industry, mining and agroindustrial sectors in volibia continued to grow during those years, earning profits, signing fake balance sheets, and exporting capital. That elite of important frogs, led by one who would later become President Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada, did not find dictatorship objectionable. In fact, the so-called ‘private industry’ had always felt more at ease and protected under military regimes. It was only when the collusion between the dictatorship and drug traffickers had become too blatant that the US and their domestic shysters forced García Meza to step down. The other blade is the constant expurgatory edge of memory. To this day, in his cell at the Chonchocoro prison, former general García Meza still believes he is innocent, while thousands, millions of Bolivians lived and continue to live the deaths and terror of that month of July of 1980.”

  I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t get it up. It was my turn. The officers’ voices howled, thunderous in my ears, and she was there, on the floor of a cell at the Prevención, at the battalion entrance the night of August 6, 1980. The woman had tired of screaming. She had screamed until she lost her voice and was now sobbing quietly, the hands Sergeant Vásquez had tied now seemed to have surrendered above her head. A lieutenant, two sub-officers and four soldiers had already been bitten, kicked, spat at and scratched on the face by the woman who now lay in front of me. Lieutenant Ustariz was bitten and received the deepest scratches, until he bled, and only after punching her face hard half a dozen times did he manage to force her legs to open. Now the lieutenant was bright eyed and laughing, his hand resting nervously on the .38 Ruger revolver in his holster. Get it over with, dammit! A good soldier follows orders! Do it for your country! Jump on the chola!

  “At 11:00 PM, the sirens of all parked and moving tanks and military trucks would warn the civilian population of the beginning of the curfew. Anyone found on the streets between that time and 6:00 AM could be shot without cause anywhere in the country. The sombre wailing would slowly take over the city as fear watched from behind doors and curtains. In the distance, desperate fists rapped on a door that was taking too long to open. Silence would rise above the city for an instant, then faraway bursts of gunfire one after the other. Warnings. A bloodied body falling on the ground. Soldiers pushed and kicked doors in, sometimes found small family gatherings. They arrested aunts and uncles, a grandmother, young boys, didn’t even let them finish putting their coat on. Entire wedding parties, bride and groom, musicians and guests would wind up shoved into military trucks at the height of the celebration to be
put behind bars in the army guardrooms and yards. Amid panic, rage and shame, the couple would surrender to the idea of spending the first night of their honeymoon outdoors, trembling with fear and cold like two sad chickens on another planet, in a country that could not be their own. In the distance, again the sound of shots, bursts of machinegun fire, a scream, dogs barking, silence.

  “The war tank went out leading the convoy. During one of our night rounds in one of the outlying districts on the way to Río Seco, some courageous indios or cholos had managed to blow up a stick of dynamite as one of the tracked armoured vehicles was driving by. The beast wobbled like a giant scarab, opened its infrared eye, turned its turret and continued on its way punishing the daring civilians with brief bursts of gunfire. Three army trucks went out behind the tank single file. We rode around El Alto under orange streetlights that bathed deserted cobblestones in plazas and streets. I was sleepy. My helmeted head swayed with the rocking vehicle. A shadow was moving slowly, feet feeling their way along the street. The shadow stopped. Started moving again. Cautious dogs were sniffing around the corners. The trucks continued their advance. The shadow didn’t attempt to run or hide, waiting calmly for our arrival instead. ‘¡Viva Bolivia!’ a nasal greeting, followed by an awkward attempt to sing the national anthem, trying to stand up still and straight to avoid the inevitable arrest. The lietenant jumped out of the cabin. ‘Get in the damn truck!’ The poor drunk took a bottle of pisco out of his pocket, took a sip and offered it to the officer. ‘Have a sip, mi capitán! I used to be a soldier too.’ The lieutenant accepted the bottle. He examined it with disgust for a moment, then smashed it on the sidewalk across the street. The drunkard was about to blurt out, ‘You fucking asshole, why’d you have to waste my booze like that!’ but the officer kicked him in the groin, ‘I said get in the fucking truck! Two of you over there, come here and take this piece of shit!’ Two soldiers jumped out of the first truck right away and managed to shove the man and his insults and complaints into the truck, where he landed curled up in the centre of the floor. A few minutes later he started humming a song by the band Savia Andina: ‘Sombríos días de socavón, noches de tragedia, desesperanza y desilusión se sienten en mi alma…’1 ‘¡Silencio, mierda!’ someone yelled, maybe a miner’s son. Another kick landed on his ribs, followed by a weak protest from the man: ‘Come on, che, let me pssst sing a bit! Just a little song, why’s singing so bad, che?’ He kept singing: ‘…más en la vida debo sufrir tanta ingratitud, mi gran tragedia terminará muy lejos de aquí…’2 He stopped singing all of a sudden, perhaps to avoid thinking about the weight of death hanging in the air and the trucks of the night. He started humming a morenada just to himself, completely oblivious to what was happening around him, as if he weren’t really there.

  We arrived at the Ceja de El Alto. The cradle of La Paz was a vast starry field, as if the sky had keeled and turned its territory around until it kissed the earth. La Paz was still and bright, as if it were suspended in mid air. It was midnight and the air was hazy with calm and danger. We heard the rat-tat-tat of a machinegun nearby. The poor neighbourhoods were most generous with their deaths. During the day, the place simmered with people, the place where the Altiplano and the city met. From there, the campesinos would see the giant urban construction for the first time, and for an instant all dreams were possible: work, school, health. The city was a stunning vista backdropped by the snows on Illimani’s massive summit and, drawn in the blue distance, the contour of its three peaks, whose terrifying silence sometimes devoured planes and human beings. Perhaps the mountain was about to devour the city itself. But the city was reeling in the aftershocks of a plaza tomada. There, before entering the city was a stop that welcomed an endless stream of toiling buses all day long—windshields adorned with romantic decals, bringing from the most remote Altiplano villages young Native Bolivians, maktitas with their bayetas and abarcas who would come out confused and dusty from the road, wonder in their eyes, white eyelashes, dry tongue. Now in the dark of night, a few of the same patched-up buses were waiting at the stop, likely waiting to head out on their first trip at dawn. There, amid jolts inside our military transport, we saw a cautious figure lightly knocking on the door of one of the buses. The caimanes—how people referred to our military trucks—were at the spot within seconds shining their powerful headlights on everything. It was a woman. The lieutenant walked out of the cabin as a shadow inside the dark bus stood up and walked towards the door. Machinegun in hand, the officer and a few soldiers promptly ran up to the bus. The woman glanced at the driver with a nervous smile as he opened the door. “¡Tío!” she said with a voice like a dove trying to fly out of her chest, “how are you?” biting on the stone of fear with each word. “I came to see how you’re doing before you leave on your trip tomorrow.” The poor driver listened for a second, still half asleep, not understanding much of what the young woman was saying, but once he saw the army men running up behind her and the panic welling up in her eyes, he said in a haste, “Get in, hija! Get in quick. It’s cold out there!” The woman hoisted her skirts and took a first step up reaching up for the driver’s hand. “Stop right there, carajo!” the lieutenant cried out as they exchanged terrified looks.

  “Don’t you know it’s illegal to be out on the street after eleven?”

  “Sí, mi capitán,” the driver answered, “but we’re leaving for Pulacayo early tomorrow morning and…”

  “I don’t give a shit where you’re going! This woman was out on the street and we’re taking her back to the station. She’s under arrest.”