La Vida Doble (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)

by Fontaine, Arturo

  In November of ’73 in Buenos Aires, when he was very young, and later, in ’76, he went to Lisbon for meetings of the Revolutionary Coordinating Junta with representatives from MIR, ELN, the Tupas, and ERP. He had been part of an ELN containment team that never saw action. But he had heard stories, and we listened to them eagerly. He gave us a blow-by-blow account of the kidnapping of the Exxon executives in Buenos Aires. Exxon paid $14.2 million as ransom, which came from New York in six suitcases filled with bundles of hundred-dollar bills. And also about the managers of Firestone and Swissair, and how the ERP distributed the money in a spirit of Bolivarian solidarity. The ELN, MIR, and the Tupamaros got $2 million each. He knew a lot of stories, Cuyano. He told us, told us more than was necessary, more than we should have known, maybe . . . He knew the details, he assured us, of some $100 million—others said it was $300 million—that Pepe, the Montonero commander, passed on to the Cubans for them to launder, after two of his men had been arrested in Switzerland trying to do it. And he told us that he had it on good authority that Tony de la Guardia and a Chilean managed to launder it in a complicated and risky operation in Libya and Switzerland. Do you think it’s true?

  Cuyano talked to us with shining eyes about contacts with the ETA and the IRA, about combatants trained in Libya and Vietnam, about secret meetings in Algeria with Palestinians from the PLO. Once, he told us about the assassination of Roque Dalton, the revolutionary poet. Remember? What should revolutionary poetry be for? / To make poets / or to make the revolution? . . . On May 10, 1975, his comrades (or was it his commander?) finished him off with a gunshot to the head in the safe house where he was hiding. Rivalry? wondered Cuyano. Fear that Dalton would become the movement’s caudillo, its strongman? Internal divisions? That time the Spartan got furious. He cut Cuyano off short. His eyes shone with rage. He grabbed Cuyano roughly by the arm and dragged him into the next room. The punishment was for all of us. He left us locked in that safe house for a week and we weren’t allowed outside. As if we were little children. On the second day the food stores ran out and we had to ration the rice, the only thing left. One would have to write the story of our morality, of our constant state of vigilance, both external and internal.

  Later, Pelao told me that the Spartan’s anger had entirely passed. The Spartan, he told me, is in love with the cause, and love forgives all, see? He’d been annoyed that Pelao would tell those kinds of stories in front of us, when they would just weaken our conviction. Those kinds of things should be brought to him, to the Spartan, in private. Not in front of us. It wasn’t good to sow doubt, he told him. Those fits of rage weren’t unusual in the Spartan. There was another time when Kid of the Day forgot to put glue on his fingertips before a mission. Kid was a Mapuche; he’d been born in Santiago, in La Pintana. His father had a stall in the market. He could say some really funny things, and we all loved him a lot. But the Spartan, trembling with rage, jumped on him shouting: “Asshole! What are you thinking? You think it’s a game, leaving fingerprints behind? You want us all to be fucked?” And he got the kid in a hold and threw him in the air. Something cracked: he’d broken his finger. He was ferocious, the Spartan. Of course, he apologized immediately and personally made sure that a reliable doctor put a cast on it.

  They asked me, sometimes, to recite a poem. I didn’t want to, but they always asked me for Neruda. And I, yet again, would give them: “Dwarfs concocted like pills / In the traitor’s drugstore . . . they’re not, they don’t exist, they lie and / rationalize in order to continue, nonexistent, to collect.” And I would repeat: “He poured forth promises, / embraced and kissed the children who now / scour the trace of his pustule with sand . . . / Wretched clown, miserable / mixture of monkey and rat, whose tail / is combed with a gold pomade on Wall Street.” And also: “Then I became . . . order of combatant fists.” It was our motto: “Order of combatant fists.”

  What I remember most from that time is the waiting. It’s a permanent spiritual state, because the revolution is always situated in the future, it’s always the second coming that lies ahead. Sometimes, many times, our orders were literally to simply wait. The action would be delayed. Then we would escape to my apartment and bottles of red wine would appear, and we would play the same cassettes over and over in the darkness broken by the red circle of a forbidden cigarette, and I would feel on my half-asleep lips kisses that held the force of fear and hope. Canelo would be with me, Kid Díaz or Kid of the Day was with Teruca for a few weeks, but that was incidental, because most nights Pelao Cuyano was with Teruca . . . These were loves without promises or exclusions. We loved each other with ardor and the terror of losing each other tomorrow. We lived with the mantle always on the verge of falling and revealing the hidden combatant lying in ambush; we lived on the lam, fleeing from fear. Not the kind of fear that grabs hold of you suddenly, no. Our fear was our daily sustenance, tensing our jawbones, gnawing tirelessly at our insides, a bat that sneaks into your dreams. It was also food for the rage that drives revenge.

  FIFTEEN

  Our cell—I told you this, right?—reported to the Spartan. I never met anyone like him. I’d like to give you a picture of his soul. If only I could. I want to tell you about him. His character was constructed from books, you know? From certain books, of course. Something clearly incomprehensible amid the promiscuity of ideas that exists today. A Quixote, maybe, or a Bovary. He would say to us: “We must be professionals, revolutionary monks, as Lenin demands.” And he lived it day and night. “Everything else is a lie,” he would say. “Our example is Rajmetov, the main character in Chernyshevsky’s novel, a novel that Lenin”—he never tired of repeating it—“read five times.” None of us ever read Chernyshevsky’s novel. I started it twice . . . I finally finished it here in Ersta, surrounded by these medicinal smells that they use in this place to hide the stench of age and its incontinence. I liked it. Pure metafiction, avant la lettre: it was published in 1862! What to do? It’s extraordinary . . . The critics haven’t paid attention enough to its self-conscious narrator. It takes you from mise en abyme to mise en abyme. Did you know Lenin never wanted to read Demons? Neither did the Spartan. “I have no patience for reactionary books,” he explained to me. The truth is, he read very few books, but the few he read he was passionate about. Canelo was the same way. Men of action.

  Let me tell you, the Spartan was a true ascetic. He deprived himself of all pleasures, including intellectual ones. He was ashamed to allow himself pleasures that the poor were excluded from. Today it’s hard for me to imagine being like that. Today it’s hard for me to imagine how I could admire him precisely for being like that. I’ve lost that purity. Maybe you’ll never be able to imagine someone like him . . . Today’s atmosphere of complacency makes it difficult. We were so sure that the corrupt, cruel, and miserable world we knew was about to go all to hell. But it wasn’t a prediction that came from the laws of “historical materialism,” which we studied with apostolic devotion. It was much more than a theory. We felt it in our skin. We smelled it like someone who smells smoke in the house before they know where the flames are coming from. And there would be no stone on top of stone left. We hated everything that existed. Nothing would survive. Nothing had the right to. Only us, only us. But who were we? Not the wife of an everyday worker chosen at random leaving a market in Renca. No. So, who were the New Man and the New Woman? Wasn’t it Paul and his messianic Christianity all over again?

  The Spartan lived his life in wait for the great day, the Apocalypse, the Revolution. Do you think there are any men like him left, missionaries and dreamers? Will there be any tomorrow? Always? His name was Jonathan, Jonathan Ríos, I think. Or Jonathan González, I never found out. But Jonathan. His father was a math teacher in a primary school. He had been a labor leader, an anarcho-syndicalist, but alcohol fucked him up. His mother was an evangelist, a member of the Dorcas, and his younger brother became an evangelical preacher in Valparaíso. I found all this out later, of course, from Canelo. The Spartan was single. He
didn’t touch alcohol. He didn’t touch women. He wasn’t tied to anyone. The cause made it inconvenient. He repeated Bakunin’s famous definition to us insistently: “The revolutionary is a dedicated man. He has no interests of his own, no affairs, no feelings,” he’d stop to breathe and then would continue: “no attachments, no belongings, not even a name.” This last part, about the name, he emphasized more. “Everything in him is absorbed by a single exclusive interest, a single thought, a single passion—the revolution.” Then he’d smile, and there would be something childlike about his eyes. And he would say we were “the salt of the earth.”

  The Spartan avoided music. He wasn’t very Cuban that way. It made him mushy, he said. His logic, though crude, was steely. “More than anything else, I despise,” he’d say with his lower lip sticking out, “those sissies and whiners who still believe in the Milky Way toward socialism.” He loved that ironic phrase of Trotsky’s. “The substitution of the bourgeois state by the proletarian state is impossible without an armed revolution,” he’d say. “Lenin,” he’d say. The growing violence of the repression gave him hope. “The greater the repression, the greater the resistance. The process is dialectic,” he’d say. “The worse it is, the better,” he’d say. “Chernyshevsky,” he’d say. “Insurrection is an art,” he’d say. “Karl Marx,” he’d say. “To your axes! Anyone who’s not with us is against us.” Zaichnevsky, he’d say. Like all revolutionaries, he was a tireless pedagogue. His instructions and interpretations deciphering our path forward from that ferocious present, supported with the usual citations, sometimes reached us in code and written in a script we had to read with a magnifying glass, on cigarette papers which we then rolled again with tobacco.

  Cuyano and I used to get tangled up in long, theoretical discussions—peppered with quotations we recited from memory, since we couldn’t always consult books—about the Manuscripts of 44, fetishism, and labor as a commodity, about the Incan empire and the Asian mode of production or about Che’s focalism. We were troubled, as we shared the straw of a mate that Cuyano had brewed himself, by the tendency to tie the actions of a vanguard of professional revolutionaries to the proletariat, and the party to the apparatus, issues that were tackled in famous discussions by Rosa Luxemburg, Plekhanov, Lenin, and Trotsky—his thesis of the “permanent revolution”—and that were complicated even more by the function of the peasants in Maoism.

  The Spartan would put a stop to these discussions, which he called “scholastic” and “paralyzing,” challenging us to games of chess on two or three boards, which he would always win. Or he would quote Martí: Today, when the verb is brought low before the putrefaction, the best way to speak is to act. He never missed a chance to incite us to action. He liked, he would tell us, cold and calculating courage, not the harebrained improvisation of the pistol-heads or the disguised lack of resolve that went by the name of political wisdom.

  As I say, we didn’t have the books at hand, it wasn’t like before. We had to work more often by memory. Some safe houses had a few books hidden away as if they were weapons. They were, of course. I remember a little library hidden behind some kitchen shelves. That time, the Spartan himself showed us the hiding place and gave us permission to read them. They were wrapped in plastic bags. Moments like that you don’t forget. I held in my hands, as if it were a holy relic, a sky blue volume with the letters “M” and “E” in white. The selected works of Marx and Engels published by Política Press, in Havana, 1963. Then I thumbed the pages of the Selected Works of V. I. Lenin. Three fat volumes. Hardcovers with light green dust jackets. Progreso Publisher, Moscow, 1970. Of course, I used to have that edition. In the first volume there’s a photo of Lenin that I looked at for a long time. What did I feel? It was Lenin. That’s it. Canelo showed me Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution, The Basic Concepts of Historical Materialism by Marta Harnecker, with a prologue by Althusser, and a selection of works by Marx and Engels edited by Daniel Riazanov, the director of the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow. That book had been published in Chile, during Allende’s time, by the state publisher Quimantú. I also remember a few issues of the magazine Soviet Literature, published by the writers’ union in the USSR. I have a good memory, I’m telling you, it’s like a stage actress’s; we were diligent students, and more than anything, we had great powers of recall. For a combatant like me, life was a script in the Great Theater of the World, a work in which I, as a character, was looking for my authors among the bearded saints looking back at us from the book covers. I read a note in the “Literary Report” section. In the House of Writers in Moscow, there had been a soirée to celebrate the seventieth birthday of Julius Janonis, the first proletarian poet of Lithuania. It told how Eduardas Miezelaitis, winner of the Lenin Prize, had given an inspiring speech about Janonis . . . In another journal, an essay by the writer Nikolai Tikhonov: “Soviet literature, herald of the new morality.” I’m seeing a photo of a painting by I don’t know who. An enormous crane lifting a block of steel. The solderer’s flame could have been the halo of one of Fra Angelico’s saints. It certainly wasn’t the kind of work that would have interested Clementina.

  They were books that the military police had burned. “Salvaged remains from the shipwreck,” Canelo said. “A treasure,” he said. We spent all day and much of the night thumbing through those pages rescued from the barbarians: “Hey, let me read you this paragraph . . .” Or “I think it’s put more clearly here, I’ll read it to you”—and searching at random for yet another passage that would confirm us in our faith with its light.

  The Spartan was almost friendly toward us, though too formal. His suggestions and advice were, really, orders. But he gave them to us with the utmost respect. He talked to us about chemistry and explosives. That’s what he was interested in. His great love was his 9mm SIG-Sauer P-230 with a silencer on the barrel. He loved that gun and he showed it to us proudly. “The best gun in the world,” he’d say. “It’s already had its baptism of blood. It was up to the test, let me tell you.” Once, we were in a safe house waiting for a mission, and a kitten fell off the roof. The Spartan turned into a mother. He gave it milk every six hours. When we left, he set out a bowl full of milk and a blanket for it to keep warm in.

  He was extremely important to us, the Spartan. On dangerous missions, like placing a bomb or holding up a bank, he conducted himself with machinelike precision. He was obsessive about details. “The devil’s in the details,” he would tell us over and over. After any armed mission, he made us throw away our used sneakers and buy new ones of a different brand.

  But still and all, the ascetic allowed himself one luxury: Cuban cigars. A taste he’d picked up from officials at the Military Academy G. S. Rakovski in Sofia; not in Havana, certainly, where his brothers smoked Populares or, if they dared smoke blond tobacco and be seen as queers, Aromas. And if the scarcity was really bad, they would content themselves with tearing out a page from a soviet book and rolling themselves a “tupamaro” with the tobacco gathered from the butts they’d collected at hotels. He, on the other hand, would offer us a Partagás, or a Romeo y Julieta. Sometimes, a real Cohiba. All of them, tobacco for export. No one ever asked him how he got them. But the fact that he had them was a sign.

  In those long periods of waiting that fill, like I’ve said, a good part of a combatant’s actual life, he talked to us about cigars, and he lingered over explanations that were more detailed than necessary. “A Flor de Cano cigar,” he’d say for example, “is a cigar with short filler, made with tobacco trimmings. That’s why it’s cheaper. Though it’s not bad.” His eyes shone and he went on talking with a fascination that we didn’t understand: “The binder tobacco is every maestro’s recipe,” he’d say. “You have to combine a light tobacco, which comes from high leaves and gives the cigar its strength, with dry tobacco from the center of the plant, which gives it its aroma, and the flammable tobacco, which comes from the lower leaves and determines the cigar’s combustibility. The cigar roller braids the leaves in a
fan so the air can pass through, which facilitates the draw and allows each puff to incorporate all the blended flavors. This,” he’d say, “is the crucial moment, the most delicate moment. Technique isn’t enough, experience isn’t enough. Sweet Mother of God! It takes love . . . A cigar of the highest distinction is born of an act of love.”

  He would get caught up in his lecture, giving us more and more connoisseur’s details. He didn’t care that we got bored. Or he didn’t notice, who knows?

  “A Cohiba Lancero,” he’d say, “has a wrapper with a fine, smooth, and light texture.” He touched the air, seeming to feel that smoothness. “The famous Eduardo Rivero, who came from Por Larrañaga, started making them. He and Avalino Lara created the Cohiba that was produced in El Laguito. Che was Minister of Industry then. Great chess player, Che. Didn’t you know? It’s a high-caliber cigar, and it’ll last me about an hour. It’s smoother at first, it’s filtered, see? That’s why it lasts so long.”