We called those nights of barricades aucaye nights, rebel nights. Because in that darkness that we created, equality existed for a few hours, and the city once again belonged to everyone. The bonfires transformed the impersonal, estranged city of Santiago into our quitrahue, our hearth, our home. From the dark depths of the race awoke the primordial fascination with fire, and we recognized each other’s faces and genotypes in the light of the flames; in the shrill whistles we could hear the fateful wail of the pifilca flutes made from the tibias of dead Spanish conquistadors, calling out for an ancestral, murderous war. That’s what people forget now. The military bastards didn’t dare stop us. On those nights, carnival and combat intermingled. The blackout created a situation of objective risk. And over our heads flew the rattling helicopters shredding the air with their sharp blades, shaking the windows, deafening us with the unbearable, dirty roar of their rotors; they filmed us with their infrared lenses, but didn’t dare to get out or to use their machine guns for fear of a massacre, for fear of the aucayes, fear of the rebels. Our instructions were not to look at the helicopters so we wouldn’t be photographed and identified. The same went for the press photographers’ cameras that multiplied on those blackout nights. We were careful. We disguised ourselves, we used hoods. Aucaye nights, those were really our nights. The lords of the commerce of concession have forgotten all that now.
So then the attack from our cowardly and pragmatic branch came at us. Many of our own went over to their side, the majority. For them, we now represented the “maximalist temptation.” Our acts of “sabotage and recovery of funds legitimized the repression.” We only wanted to bear witness. We were prophets, we were nostalgic, we were not politicians with a future. And, of course, our armed approach was “unviable.” We’d heard it all before. Their knees didn’t bend out of fear, oh, no; it was because they were “realists.” As if it were human to renounce hope, as if reality were not precisely that which waits to be shaped by human beings. What they proposed meant: now there is no place for the beauty of the hero. But as it happens, history always leaves room for heroes. We know their dream; enough / to know they dreamed and are dead. Heroes are the ones who carve out that space. Allende’s death is proof. At the last second, he, alone, transformed a political and military defeat into a moral victory. He made himself into a hero when it seemed that there was no time or place left for it. Because he had to die before seeing the tyrant’s face.
When Canelo fought back, covering my escape as he had been ordered to do, he went toward death instead of letting it catch him. And what if excess of love / bewildered them till they died? He fell with a Smith and Wesson.44 Magnum in hand. That revolver, shot from a few yards away, will lift a man off the ground. It has a tremendous stopping power. They got Canelo, but he was already an inert mass, not a living combatant. Angels of fire and ice. He was equal to our oath and to what was repeated in the monthly communications that each cell had to decode and read out loud. One who allows himself to be taken prisoner puts the entire apparatus at risk; one who lets himself be captured will face torture and will merely postpone his death, which will come as the enemy wishes, without dignity or historical significance; one who lets himself be captured breaks our vow and concedes a moral victory to the enemy. Conversely, one who dies in combat will claim a moral victory that can never be taken from him; his blood will be the fount of history.
Did Canelo believe that? He fulfilled it, there’s no doubt about that. But hadn’t he been, for a long time, courting death as if it were the solution? Sometimes, when I looked at his face, I sensed that he wouldn’t last long; a dullness in his eyes, I don’t know.
Then, as Canelo said we would, as he warned us sometimes in our meetings, we ended up with the odious outcome, the one we would get if we came up short, if our revolutionary violence wasn’t enough to incite the masses beyond the level of protest, nocturnal barricades, and vandalism. Canelo intuited that, and in fact, he mentioned it sadly to me just a few days before he was killed. In the end we were useless idiots, we were involuntary accessories of exploitation. The meanness of the petite bourgeoisie won. Their miserliness won, the hard and cold selfishness that petrifies the hearts of the rich and makes them feel themselves to be good. It’s unfair to judge us only by the outcome. We lost, no doubt about it, but we came so close to winning. You have to understand ex ante the ambiguity of the situation. There was a moment when history opened a door to us. The invisible, our dream, for a while was there, pulsating in the visible. Now is the time / for what tomorrow can be. . It wasn’t an illusion. Though it seems like one now. We thought: we are what we haven’t yet become. The low drum of Quilapayún marked time for our invincible march. . La luz, de un rojo amanecer, / The light of a red dawn / announces now the life to come. The omelet was about to flip. . the rich would, finally, eat shit. But just like that, dawn turned into twilight. And when I think about it, the rage still rises up like foam within me. We paved the way for the treacherous and filthy pact of the hogs with their slaughterers. The Great Whore of capitalism won, we were fucked by the Great Slut. And I wonder: Did Canelo let himself be killed the same as I let myself be caught? And wasn’t it because of that?
TWENTY-ONE
His death was his life’s work. That’s what being a hero is. The combination of doubt and the desire to believe was resolved in action. He told me, “It doesn’t hurt to not exist, only the bullets hurt.” He wasn’t a sensual man, Canelo, as I’ve said. He was tender in love, but not passionate. He preferred the idea of love to flesh-and-blood women. But he had loved a beautiful woman—tiposa, as a Cuban would say. This was in El Salvador. She was the daughter of the pharmacist in Laguna. One night he arrived at her house with its thick adobe walls, unannounced as always — a guerrilla never announces he’s coming — and when they didn’t open the door for him, he jumped over the wall into the yard: she was in the hammock with another man. The betrayal reached to his soul.