Yumo preferred moderation. Despite his hair, which was red but tending toward carrot in color, his face marked with freckles, and his muscular torso resting on thin legs, he tried to dress with elegance. For him, prostitution was a respectable business, and he had visiting cards printed up with his name and below that “Supplier of Feminine Beauty. Imported.” He was not ashamed to visit the synagogue, even though the congregation refused to say hello to him, thinking he was a temeim, an impure person.
He argued, “I do not understand your disdain. My girls are as sacred as the Torah. We Jews are a chosen people, and our mission is to lead the goys to holiness. God is hidden in the depths of the Hebrew female sex. Every vagina is a sacred place. When the member enters there, it receives its baptism of fire about which so many speak without knowing what it’s all about. In a certain sense, the clients die when they possess my hetaeras. And when they withdraw, they are in reality born. A new life awaits them. To ejaculate into Jewish whores is, dear friends, doing it in the open emptiness of God.”
No one bothered to listen.
Simón Radovitzky also came to visit Jashe, but only on the odd afternoon. Always busy, he did his work with the same fanatical concentration with which he defended anarchism. Every bed he made was a work of art: well-beaten mattresses, geometric folds, total absence of wrinkles. He would hand his clients perfumed towels and then stand before them with impeccable dignity, making himself invisible, only allowing his ardent eyes to float about. When they gave him his tip, he thanked them with an elegant nod of his head. That elegance was actually comic, because the shame of being reduced to beggar status made his protruding ears bright red. During his tiny bit of free time, especially during the early hours — the whores slept from seven until three in the afternoon — he dedicated himself, not earning a cent, to writing for clandestine anarchist publications and then selling them, risking his life in the process. Aside from attacking the tyranny of the government and its “barbarous thugs with sabers and whistles,” the mass arrests and the expulsion of “pernicious foreigners,” which were all grist for his mill, he attacked the socialists, those “traitors and cowards who took advantage of the persecution to accuse the anarchists of being violent and move into leadership roles in the trade unions.”
One May, there was a strike by restaurant waiters protesting a municipal ordinance that forced them to shave off their moustaches. Simón, even though he no longer wore that virile ornament because he’d decided not only to live outside of religious customs but also outside of seduction (Never adorn. The free man does not sell himself, does not produce effects, does not solicit; he creates connections because severing them in order to produce archipelagos of island beasts makes no sense. The free man’s encounter with a woman should be magic, instantaneous, without calculations, definitive, and total. Why seek her when all the powers of the Universe have her reserved for you anyway?), accepted the idea that the strikers considered the new rule a grievance and opposed the cutting of that bit of hair with energetic resistance: the oligarchy needed eunuchs to serve them, and in this instance testicles and moustaches had the same meaning.
Writing in the pages of The Sun — the only workers newspaper which hadn’t been closed, as its editor was a well-known native Argentine poet — Simón, who wrote his articles in Russian and saw them translated not only into Spanish but also into Italian, German, English, and French because most of the workers were immigrants, ripped into the authorities:
The climate of cowardice engenders tyrannies. If everyone says ‘let’s give in,’ they become accomplices in the raising of the machete, in thought control. This infamous attempt to castrate the workers originates in the upper classes who, in order to erase the spiritual power of the individual, make all uniform. Everything uniform — be it religious, military, or unionized — is an assault on the always-different nature of each being. Protest, brothers! Protest out of self-defense, out of pure self-interest, because tomorrow all will be measured by the same yardstick, because the abuse committed against any member of a collectivity, even the most insignificant, becomes the shame and insult of those who tolerate it.
Radovitzky’s words affected his readers like a lit match dropped into a lake of alcohol. The coachmen’s boys joined the strike along with the leather cutters from the shoe factories. Then the port workers, sailors, stokers, and stevedores. They all asked for human respect and a ten-percent salary increase. With the good wishes of the police, the large companies, taking an intransigent attitude, began to employ strikebreakers. To stop the unloading of ships, the strikers attacked the traitors. The disturbance extended along the docks. Simón Radovitzky, part of the tumult, took out a revolver and fired. Other workers carrying weapons followed his lead. But the timidity of the workers, accustomed to bowing their heads, caused the bullets to fly over the heads of the police and land in the mountains of rotten melons waiting to be loaded. The soldiers’ ferocious cruelty, their lack of imagination, and their intelligence cut in uniform patterns caused all their bullets to land in the heart of Paolo Zapoletti, an Italian emigrant, who fell backward with his chest turned into a strainer. An enormous red stain began to surround the body until it became a halo like those that surround the Virgin.
The fighting stopped. That single casualty grew in the minds of the spectators until it became a giant. Many hands lifted the fallen man. They put him on a cot to carry him in a slow, silent march, interrupted from time to time by hoarse he-man voices singing revolutionary songs with such heartrending force they seemed like arrows. In that way, they marched for hours through the poor neighborhoods. More than ten thousand new strikers joined the funeral march. Simón began to shout, “An eye for an eye, death for death!” The crowd imitated him, repeating his motto, louder and louder. The police, fearful that the public outcry would increase and that the workers would attack the police stations, used a detachment of cavalry to stop the procession, disperse it with sabers, and take away the body. Once the scare passed, a wave of rage was unleashed among the workers. Even though they outnumbered their enemies, they panicked at the presence of a small group of horses and a few whistles.
Simón howled, “Comrades, to break bones you’ve got to sacrifice some meat! Let a few of us die willingly to exterminate all of them! Let’s be daring! Let’s continue the strike until we finish off the State!”
More modest spirits requested that the meeting be dissolved to allow time for the various associations to meet and publish a protest statement supported by organized elements of the worker mass: Socialist Party, Federation of Dependents, unions, anarchist groups, etcetera. The workers of Buenos Aires, setting aside their ideological differences, would march united, as a colossal body, denouncing the abuses of the stinking cops so the exploiting classes would understand that social issues could not be resolved with prisons, persecutions, or deportations.
Two days later, with government authorization, the demonstration began. Having received an order from Roberto Falcón, the workers did not wave red flags and accepted to suppress the violent criticism against the measures adopted by the police during the state of siege, all in order to avoid provocations that might bring about bloody reprisals. More than forty thousand workers marched in severe calmness from Constitution Plaza to Plaza Lavalle. All along the path of the march police were standing guard, and many agents on horseback closely followed the demonstrators. When they reached Plaza Lavalle, the speakers began to take their places on an improvised stage.