The red chalk mark I saw on the corner two weeks later meant I should call the number they’d given me. I did, and I met up with the Spartan in a dive bar on Prince of Wales Avenue. I told him I wanted to infiltrate Central Intelligence, to pass on firsthand information, to climb the ladder in Central; I wanted to plan with him a master stroke that would lift Red Ax to new heights and light the fuse of the revolution. I’m thinking of the Red Orchestra. I believe that every intellectual learns to split in two by interpreting texts that throw them into an arcane world full of trompe l’oeils and mirages. When they’re thirsting for action, they want to be a double agent. Rimbaud: Je est un autre, I am an Other.
“I want to be a Kim Philby,” I tell him, “a John Cairncross. You should be my Arnold Deutsch,” I laughed. He listened to me attentively while we ate some Spanish omelets. He told me, “I’m not some intellectual recruiting students at Cambridge, like Deutsch. Even less if we’re talking about sexual matters. .”
But we agreed he would explore my idea. “Nothing else?” he asked as we said good-bye. “Nothing else?” I never found out what happened to my infiltration plan. It became clear to me, little by little, that my brothers and sisters were starting to phase me out. They didn’t trust me. It happened sometimes with people who’d been detained. It hurt me more than I realized at the time. Inside, deep inside, I felt wronged. Canelo had died protecting me, I had withstood my hours, and I wanted revenge. I wanted action. I deserved another chance. I couldn’t quit. But the Spartan had decreed distance.
FOURTEEN
I rented an apartment in the Carlos Antúnez Towers. Just one room, plenty of light, and thin walls that let the constant murmur of my neighbor’s TV filter in. Without my stipend I had no other choice. My daughter went on living as before, with my mother. I went to pick her up early in the morning to bring her to school. And I often brought her to stay with me on weekends. “I have to send her to Havana,” I told myself sometimes, and my heart would skip a beat and the sweat would run down my back and soak my blouse. The Spartan leaving the restaurant on Prince of Wales: “Nothing else?” I had to do it; there wasn’t the slightest doubt. I had to get in touch with him to make it happen. And the sooner the better. I promised myself I would talk to her on Friday night at my apartment. Friday, without fail. It wasn’t easy, of course. But hell, it was my duty. In the long run she would understand. I resumed my classes and I reconnected with my friend Clementina. Like me, she taught classes at the Chilean-French Cultural Institute. She also wrote catalogs for art installations. She showed me the latest one she was working on — a text that emphasized, of course, the politics of the work. My life returned to its course, only now at the sidelines of any real mission.
Clementina let me read the essays she wrote for conceptual artists and art actions. Clementina inhabited a world of gestures and words and metaphorical objects, a world I used as camouflage. I was always well aware, though, of the abyss that separated her form of “political activism” from filthy reality. I never lost my mental reserve. “The only interesting artists,” Clementina would repeat, “are those whose gestures call power into question. That’s our parti pris,” she’d say. “Our starting point. It’s not about content, of course. No.” She took me to see works that, according to her commentary, infiltrated the official media culture to counteract it from within using the logic of “hunger for novelty”—an art-news that accused the circuits of production and reproduction of power. “News understood as poiesis,” said Clementina, “as creation.”
Clementina, with her black hair dye, purple lips, and schoolgirl’s black lace-up shoes, was an intellectual leader. A group of dissident artists and critics circulated around her. At one of their openings I met the attaché culturel of the French embassy. It was she who introduced me to her Swedish counterpart, Gustav Kjellin, a big, friendly man with long, white hair, who imparted calm from the moment you met him. A couple of times Clementina and I went to lunch at his house. His wife was pretty, cordial, and silent.
“The artist,” Clementina was explaining to them in her whispery voice, a glass of Veuve Clicquot between her purple-tipped fingers, “is the inventor of destabilizing spectacles.” That’s what she wrote about in her texts, positing that, once they were decoded, of course, they would allow the observer to transform the observed. Gustav saw it all as very political, but at the same time very much in the province of elites. Of course, I agreed with him.
“Fassbinder’s films won’t overthrow capitalism in Germany,” he said. “It could very well be the opposite that happens: capitalism could leave Fassbinder with no audience. .” and he started to laugh.
“But the critic,” she went on, with stubborn missionary conviction, “discerns and creates at the same time; he’s an inventor of inventors. It would be bragging to drop names. .” she tossed back a good swallow of Veuve Clicquot. “But those who know, know. And the day and the hour will come when we are recognized,” said Clementina. That “we” included her and no more than three critics who followed in her wake. Artists believed themselves to be creators, but really they were mere actors in a film directed by a handful of critics and some gallerists, Clementina maintained with a conviction that I found attractive. Because the power of that select group determined what was art at any moment. “Nothing is natural,” said Clementina. “There is no essential art that we contemplated in our beginnings in the Platonic cave, and that we later recognize in the real world. No.”
For my brothers and sisters, that world was my cover. Sometimes they congratulated me on it. Because through all this I continued to receive, on occasional afternoons, messages from the Spartan. Coded, of course. And I attended some unimportant meetings, and they gave me some unimportant tasks. I wanted to join a cell, take up arms once again. .
Days and weeks passed. I thought nostalgically about the old times. I remembered nights spent in groups in some safe house listening to tapes played with the volume turned low, Quilapayún, Silvio Rodriguez, Los Jaivas, Inti, Serrat, Violeta, while we drank a well-steeped mate, a habit a brother from Cuyo had introduced us to — Pelao Cuyano, we called him — and talking and talking in order to escape our fear, to forget about what we would do as soon as dawn came and the patrol cars watching over the night disappeared from the streets. Then Pelao Cuyano would start telling us stories about the Bolivian ELN; about the Tupamaros’ glory days in Uruguay, details about what the escape from Punta Carretas was really like; about the FMLN in El Salvador; about the great Santucho and the ERP’s heroic fight in Argentina, his collaboration with the Chilean MIR, his attempt to join forces with the Montoneros, and the building custodian who, under threat, knocked on Santucho’s door and told him to open up, about how Santucho, who didn’t have time to get his weapons out of their hiding place, seized the gun the enemy was pointing at his head and killed him with it, and then killed one more enemy before they got him; and then he would talk about the growing forces of the Shining Path in the mountains of Peru; and of FARC in Colombia. .
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?