The dark-skinned waiter refilled our bread basket after taking our order.
“Do you think you’ll ever tell them?” I asked.
Alejandro took a moment to reply. “I’m afraid to articulate my experience with those close to me, with people who might think I went too far. Because whenever I wonder about that, I always conclude that I didn’t go far enough.” His eyes were dark with pain, in a way I recognized from our years together. “I wonder if it would be easier to have the conversation if I’d been a Sandinista, riding into Managua in the back of a truck the day they won. We lost so badly in Chile. Maybe we threw in the towel too soon.”
I looked outside at the lazy summer afternoon, at the trees offering shade to the passersby on the cobblestoned street.
“There was nothing more we could have done,” I said. “But when it was all over, there was nobody to talk to about it. Everyone dispersed, took cover. We mourned our losses alone, weeping in corners.”
Alejandro nodded. “There’s nothing lonelier than watching the world being taken over by the enemy you fought so hard against. But I’m proud of our continent, proud to feel that my little grain of sand contributed to the changes taking place.”
“How did you deal with the fear in those days?” I asked him.
“I didn’t feel afraid.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Really—I didn’t feel it. But it comes out now, I suppose. In my depression.”
“It’s all I felt,” I admitted. “Fear. Terror. Paranoia.”
“You never talked about it.”
“I worried that if I did it could break me, us, the little world of facades we’d built to keep going. I knew what they were capable of if they caught us. But what was required was absolute commitment, body and soul. I wonder if that’s one of the reasons we lost, the reason so many struggles are lost—the inhuman demands placed on those who are fighting for the dream. We lived in a state of terror, and it was unrevolutionary to feel it, let alone speak of it. I tried to be a hero, but I was just the opposite: a teenager fucking up all over the place who wanted to give everything to the struggle.” I turned to Peti. “Your generation seems to understand that you don’t have to let your beliefs consume you. You have your loves and your lives and your activism, and you don’t let anybody dictate to you what you can do.”
“Remember, Skinny, when Michael Jackson came to town?”
I smiled at the recollection. “The Thriller concert at bc Place stadium in Vancouver, 1984.”
“I had just arrived from Argentina, and I wanted to go so badly.”
“Me too. And yet neither of us said anything to the other. It would have been unacceptable to admit we liked something so blatantly commercial.”
Peti spoke up, her voice filled with emotion. “It’s incredible to listen to you two. It’s how I imagine my parents would be talking if they were still alive.”
The sun dropped in the west. It was time to say goodbye. Alejandro and I embraced by the side of the road, cried together for a minute. Then he climbed into a taxi and was gone. The next morning I’d fly back to Canada, but first Peti and I were heading off to see Boca Juniors play a soccer match in La Bombonera, their home stadium. It would be a religious experience, chanting with thousands of neighbourhood boys and then running with them through the streets.
In November 2010, Evo Morales, president of South America’s poorest country, announced that 82 per cent of his country’s resources were now in Bolivian hands. Bolivia’s gross domestic product had doubled over the previous five years, along with the average yearly income per person. A literacy campaign had reached all corners of the country, and there was now universal access to health care. Amazingly, even the army had declared itself anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist, socialist, in the service of community and Mother Earth.
The previous month, the world had held its breath as the thirty-three miners trapped in Chile’s Atacama Desert were rescued after spending sixty-nine days underground. Simultaneously, thirty-two members of the Mapuche nation were in the midst of an eighty-two-day hunger strike they’d staged in jail; they were facing terrorism charges for vandalizing trucks owned by the logging companies that were destroying their ancestral lands in southern Chile. They would eventually get what they wanted: to be tried in a civil court, not a military one. The thirty-three miners, dubbed heroes by the Chilean state, had almost starved to death because of dangerous working conditions—the privately owned mine had failed to meet international safety standards and should not have been operating at the time of the accident. Luis Urzúa, the last miner to be brought to the surface, a man whose father and stepfather had been union activists who were murdered during Pinochet’s dictatorship, uttered these words to Chilean president Sebastián Piñera the minute he saw him: “May this never happen again.”
The struggle continues. Hasta la victoria siempre. Until the final victory, always.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I WOULD LIKE TO thank Peter Campbell, Marcus Youssef, Camille Gingras and Don Hannah for reading the first drafts of what became Something Fierce. Thanks to Michael Helm for editing an early version of chapter 1 and publishing it in Brick magazine, and to Scott Steedman, who signed the book up for publication. Those participating in the 2006 Banff Playwrights’ Colony, which I was attending as an actor, gathered once a week for four consecutive weeks to hear me read from the book’s early chapters. I am deeply grateful for the support of those playwrights, dramaturges, directors, translators, producers and actors, whose numbers grew every week, as word of my informal readings spread. That was encouragement enough to keep writing. I would also like to thank the Playwrights’ Theatre Centre in Vancouver for hosting a public reading of the first two chapters of the book.
Thank you to Zool Suleman, Adriana Paz, Mariza García, Eva Urrutia, Jorge Rodríguez, Fernando Frangella, Sarah Neville and Barbara Czarnecki. And to all my friends, near and far, for being generous enough to be my chosen family.
Thank you to Gioconda Belli and Gillian Slovo, who agreed to meet for coffee and share their experience of writing memoirs with similar themes. Their books, The Country under My Skin and Every Secret Thing: My Family, My Country, inspired me, and I was humbled by their generosity.
I am deeply grateful to the British Columbia Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts for their individual writing grants.
There are not enough words to thank my editor, Barbara Pulling. Her keen eye, gentle prodding and utterly open mind gave this book its shape. She demanded nothing but the best from me, asking tough questions, insisting that I go deeper, be more specific and more truthful. Without her I’d still be lost in a maze.
I would like to thank my mother for teaching me that we were put on this earth to give. I would like to thank her, a fellow writer, for her unconditional support of this book and her blind trust in me. She has allowed me to write my version of the story, and in so doing to reveal her secrets. She has taught me everything I know about passion, courage, strength, conviction and integrity. She is a woman who could have spent her life in comfort but chose to give up her privilege for a greater cause. I had the good fortune of being raised by a revolutionary, and for that I am eternally grateful.
I would like to thank Bob Everton, my late stepfather, for urging me to write this book in the months before he died. A true internationalist, he fought for causes locally and globally until his last day on earth. To quote Bertolt Brecht, “There are men who fight for a day and they are good. There are men who fight for a year and they are better. There are men who fight many years and they are better still. But there are those who fight their whole lives: these are the indispensable ones.” Bob’s exemplary life leads me in my decisions every day.
I am grateful to my sister, Ale, a very private person, for accepting my writing of this book, even if her version of the story is completely different. Thank you to my brother, Lalito, who when asked if he wanted his name changed, responded, “It’s an honour to be i
n your book.” I would like to thank my father for his trust and faith in me, for supporting and championing my choice to follow my calling as an artist, and for agreeing not to read this book. The information in it would be too much for his weary heart to bear. I would like to thank my cousins, aunts and uncles, who lent their quiet support to this book.
Thank you to my grandmother Carmen, who passed away in 1993, and whose spirit has been with me through the writing of this book. It is only recently that I learned she was a helper of the resistance, providing her services as a messenger. Thank you to my uncle Boris, who passed away in 1995 and whose spirit is also always with me.
Thank you to the man I call Alejandro, great love of my youth, compañero, friend and brother. I could not have written this book without your blessing and permission.
Thank you to one of the founding members of the resistance, who, on his deathbed, made me promise to tell this story, because it has not been told enough, because it is a story that must not die with the people who lived it.
And my grateful thanks to all those who came before, those who are fighting now and those who will continue to fight for a better future for all. I am awed, inspired and humbled by your dedication to the struggle, whether you are in the Gaza Strip, in India, in Mexico or in Bolivia, continuing to support Evo. I stand in solidarity with you.
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