The only answer I ever got from the Spartan was something like: “We have to try for a coherent, complete, and objective story of what happened. It’s an unattainable ideal, we know. But as an ideal it’s inalienable. We see its usefulness in practice.” And then, considering the matter closed, he took a Havana from his jacket pocket. The Spartan gazed placidly at its wrapper, he sniffed it and then smelled the tobacco itself, and then he started to palpate the cigar, enjoying its corklike consistency. “It’s an Upmann,” he told me. “A Sir Winston, maybe the most balanced cigar I’ve ever had in terms of smell, taste, and strength. It has a very wide pull. When you draw on it — not the first puffs, of course, which are for lighting it more than anything — you can taste notes of coffee and cocoa. It should be smoked with utmost respect, let me tell you.” He offered me the other one.
“Some other time,” I said. He lit it serenely with a cedar match and then cut it. A thick smoke with an inviting aroma enveloped him.
According to Puma, it was our own Kid of the Day who hit the agent threatening Canelo from in front. The man fell face-first onto the pavement. Then a skinny, well-dressed woman, who emerged all of a sudden from among the terrified, fleeing pedestrians, a woman who could have passed for a young secretary, took a pistol from her briefcase and opened fire. Canelo and the Kid retreated toward Moneda. They withdrew little by little, firing, each one glued to his piece of wall. And they discovered that the walls of those buildings were full of protrusions and hiding places that allowed them to maneuver. It was that skinny woman who hit Kid of the Day. According to information in the press, a bullet went through his left eye. Another two perforated his abdomen. Rafa and Puma, our lookouts, fought until Canelo fell. The street had emptied out, and only agents and machine-gun fire were left. They had set a trap.
The shots came now from up above. They had to protect themselves. Rafa says in his report that he remembers a man with a casual suit and dark glasses, glued to the wall, looking for Canelo. Puma says he didn’t see the man, he was focused on the roofs, where he could make out one or another jockey hat and pair of dark glasses that appeared and disappeared with each gunshot. The man in the dark suit hid behind a protruding entrance to an office building, and, pressed close to the wall, was trying to reach the next doorway. He says Canelo shot at him twice. The man kept coming. Suddenly, he was already too close; and he was holding his gun with both hands. He shot Canelo in the chest. Impossible to miss at such close range.
Canelo fell. He tried to get up. Rafa and Puma — because they both saw this final scene — say that he managed to get on one knee when another burst of fire hit him point-blank. Was it an unnecessary death after all? The story in Commander Joel’s monthly letter ended more or less like this: “After a bullet perforated his artery, a stream of hot, living blood poured forth. The enemy agent sprang back. Canelo fell, secure in the knowledge that he was a hero, secure that he would go on living forever in us. According to the Mapuches, Canelo is now an am, which means he lives and eats and celebrates and fights with us as long as we keep his memory with us. A hero who gives his life lives forever.”
NINETEEN
Of course, I didn’t read that reconstruction until months later. I read it alone in my sweltering apartment on Carlos Antúnez. The walls, I think I’ve mentioned, were very thin, and I could hear the constant murmur of my neighbor’s TV. I hadn’t finished moving in yet. There were still suitcases and boxes to open. I got into bed and I couldn’t cry for Canelo. I spent the whole day between the sheets, not eating, my face turned to the wall.
Canelo was thin and lanky, with straight, blond hair cut short like a soldier’s. I loved to run my hand over that short, wiry hair, toothbrush hair. I liked his eyes, very light green. We were friends, and we slept together purely as friends. We didn’t love each other with the madness and faith of lovers. It was more a way of keeping each other company while the passion of fear pursued us. I still feel the shape of his bony shoulders in my hands sometimes, his ribs where I would pretend to play the piano until it tickled him. His smile was a little shy. We kissed a lot, but there was no savage hunger in our kisses; they were tender. He was a tender man. I’ve never felt a tenderness toward anyone like the one Canelo awoke in me. I trusted in him. I’ve never trusted anyone more than Canelo. Although sometimes I tried to ward off my feelings. I didn’t want to be just a pawn in Canelo’s plan.
Like I said, I wasn’t even in love. We were comrades in arms. But something resonated in me, and I told myself that if it weren’t for him I wouldn’t do it, I stuck to him and his fight like ivy to the wall. Just listen to the sexist cliché I use! Without him, what I was just evaporated.
That’s why I agonized so much when I couldn’t take comfort in our leader’s words in the report. I couldn’t stand his rhetoric. My antipathy opened a rift. His words made me grit my teeth like I would at the sound of nails on a blackboard. I felt my ears burning red when I remembered swallowing that kind of drivel before. And I did as I was told like a little girl, and I felt put upon and I blamed myself the same way I did in school when the nuns punished me, when it filled me with peace to accept my blame and it brought me happiness to repent. What the fuck!. . Canelo wouldn’t live among us forever, because we, too, were going to die without shame or glory. And that hot, living blood. . No. They’d wipe us out like fumigated ants.
I knew, I had been in their dungeons. Instead of heroes, our destiny was to be misguided extremists half-invented by the military, idealists who inspired pity. The vanguard of combatants that was to inaugurate a new world would become a herd of victims; the spear point of warriors and heroes would turn into a flock of sacrificial lambs. And after all, maybe it wasn’t power that we wanted but rather to oppose all power — maybe we wouldn’t have known how to do anything with power except lose it. And that was, perhaps, what we wanted: to be the lambs of a great sacrifice and for its memory to remain on the altar of history so that others who came after us would identify with us and resurrect us.
And when President Salvador Allende fired the AK — the one Fidel gave him — into his own mouth, what if he had wanted precisely to avoid our sacrifice, to sacrifice himself for all of us? A Christ, then, revolutionary, Masonic, then, and atheist, a disciple of “historical materialism”? Do you think I’m off base, that I’m being disrespectful, that I’m moving away from the stubborn and inexorable facts? Allow me some imprecision, some imaginative improvisation, which can be more illuminating than the fetishism of facts. Sometimes interpretation is better than the data. For better or worse, you’ve told me you want to get a novel out of this. Or have you been convinced it’s better if you don’t? In any case, there’s another hypothesis, one that sticks closer to actual history. You know, he sent a message to Miguel Enríquez, the head of MIR, the leader of those who thought armed struggle was inevitable and were preparing for it. He sent it just moments before he died. “Now it’s your turn,” he said. Miguel’s turn, he meant, and the turn of all those who thought the way he did.