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.”