We’re holed up in a safe house, it’s nighttime. We’ve eaten a plate of pasta with tomato sauce and, for dessert, canned peaches. We’re talking about what might happen to us. The atmosphere is tense. We’re speaking very seriously. Kid of the Day asks what a person can do when he’s afraid: “What do you do to overcome fear?” Canelo talks about a mission he carried out some time back: to set off a bomb in a bank. In a dull voice he says that, sadly, a boy died there, an eleven-year-old boy, and a nine-year-old girl was left mutilated. One of the bank’s windows exploded outward just at the moment the children were going by with their grandmother. The old lady was untouched. The boy’s name was José, he says, and the girl’s was Karina. It’s the thought of the mutilated girl that eats away at him most. There is silence. Pelao repeats a quotation from our violent Christ. The Spartan had reminded us of it when he gave us the mission that awaits us tomorrow: hold up a currency exchange. “This is going to be a long war, says Che. And, we repeat once again, a cruel war. Let no one fool himself. . They are collateral damage, see? It’s unfortunate,” says Pelao Cuyano. “It can’t be avoided. . For us—and it’s Lenin himself who says it—morality is subordinated to the interests of the class struggle of the proletariat. And that’s it.”
Canelo, who has fallen very quiet, straightens up. “I think,” he goes on talking, paying no attention to Pelao, “about what that girl’s life must be like, Karina’s, without half of her left leg, and sometimes I see the boy José’s body torn to pieces. I feel guilty, and even so. . and even so it’s necessary to act, it’s necessary to face the greatest risk out of love of justice,” he says. “It’s the only thing that can redeem my guilt for those innocent children: the danger of dying. We are not murderers. If I die tomorrow I’ll be the same as that boy José. If we aren’t capable of doing it, it means that God exists, brother. If we’re unable to make that sacrifice, it means that in order to be able to give your life for something, you have to believe in God. But we don’t believe in God, and we will give our lives for justice. We’ll prove that God is unnecessary. Once, I went to the Metropolitan Cemetery to see the boy José’s grave. There’s a little angel carved into his headstone. I promised myself that day that I would be capable of dying. For him, you know? And for that little girl, Karina. .”
He goes on saying something else, but I just look at his clear eyes, his hair that makes you want to caress it. Kid of the Day looks at him in surprise, “And the fear?”
Canelo tells him: “You can’t think so much. If they get you, they get you. Coño, you just have to give them hell, that’s it.”
And the next day, well, you know what happened the next day.
For us, “History”—that word had a lot of weight back then — gave direction to our lives, and History was something like a long, collective pilgrimage for redemption, a long and torturous Purgatory that led to Paradise. Belonging to that brotherhood, I think now, gave shape and direction to my scattered life, it incorporated my life into a chorus of pilgrims, changing my whims and impulses and trivialities into destiny and salvation. The drop of my miniscule life was transfigured when it became part of a river. Ours was a Sacred History. The revolutionary — but who understands today what that was? — sacrificed happiness. His death justified him and opened the way to the New Society. That’s what it was to believe. The way Canelo did. That he knew how to die was proof of his conviction. He needed it. And it equated him, as he had promised himself beside the boy José’s grave, with his victims. I wish he could have lived to contemplate his death, like an artist does his masterpiece.
TWENTY-TWO
After exactly seventy days of freedom, a white Mazda pulled up next to me in the street, a block away from my mother’s house. I was coming back from teaching a French class. The door opened, an arm yanked me inside, the car took off, and the blindfold went over my eyes. I recognized Ronco’s shouts and I caught a glimpse of, yes, Rat’s matted red hair. He was looking at me with the same mocking smile. My mission of revenge crumbled. I obeyed like a worn-out ox. They put handcuffs on me. Now, don’t imagine these were two big, burly men. Quite the opposite — they were a couple of buffoons, the kind you don’t even see when you pass them on the street. Ronco, like Rat, was fairly short. He had a giant head, small, narrow eyes, big hands, and squat legs. When he smiled, which he only did halfway, as if hiding, a gold tooth peeked out on one side. But in that Mazda, as I said, my eyes were blindfolded. I felt an unbearable exhaustion. I hadn’t forgotten.
We crossed a yard and I entered a space whose contours I couldn’t picture. It wasn’t Central. They pushed me forward. I took a few steps and fell and hit my head, and I kept on falling and banging my head with my hands trapped behind me. The fuckers didn’t warn me there were stairs. As I fell, the handcuffs bit into my wrists. Those scars stayed with me for weeks. Rat shouted at me. “Dirty whore!” A boot kept my nose pressed into a puddle on the floor. “Like a little bitch!” laughed Rat. “You’re a little fucking bitch, stinking whore!” A kick in my kidneys and the order to stand up.
I went stumbling into a room that seemed dark and narrow and smelled of dampness. I was thrown onto a metal cot. My head hurt and I was dizzy. Nausea came and went. In spite of my confusion I understood very quickly that Gato wasn’t here, that I was truly a secret prisoner, that I’d been kidnapped and taken to an underground storage space who knows where, that here there was no structure or command or doctors or anything else, that my life was in Ronco’s hands, and he would do with me as he wished. . My hopes were minimal then, the hopes of a dimwit, of a snail. I was consumed by the terror of dying. It’s the uncertainty that causes fear. That’s what they want: for everything to be unpredictable. It wasn’t just my own story that made me afraid; more than anything it was other women’s stories, the ones I’d heard or read about, the ones that poisoned my memory. I remembered we had been advised to defend ourselves, to kick, shout insults, scream. .
I took my clothes off in silent obedience and it was cold, the wet cold of a closed-off space. And no one knows you’re here, you catching on now, you little cocksucker? And I was a little bitch shivering from the cold and the fear. You stupid dyke, don’t fuck with us, and they tied me up and how much longer you goin’ to fuck with us, you dirty whore, and they tied me up and put the thick, stinking rag in my mouth again, and you get it now, motherfucker, you get what this is about, or are you a stupid little cocksucker? You want us to break your ass with the end of a broken bottle? And they shaved me and delved their fingers into me without desire, and on top of that the fleabag’s dry, and laughing with hard, mocking peals of laughter, she can’t be any good for a fuck, this skinny bitch is bland as hell, I couldn’t even get it up she’s fucking ruined and ugly the fucked-up bitch, and like someone examining a horse’s teeth to guess its age, what’d they do to your tits, dyke? More cackling. And wasn’t this the one they said was so hot, good for a fuck and all that, huh? It was a rough friction, harsh and painful, as if ripping something out of me, it was a suffocating appropriation to which I didn’t put up the least resistance. Afterward came a punch in the stomach with the butt of a pistol. There you go, little shit. At least you’ll like the air, you little bitch. I couldn’t breathe for a long time. The rest was passing through a tunnel of quick, sharp, unbearable pains, a horrific and dark crossing.