Birth of Our Power (18 page)

“Gusano,” says El Chorro, “this comrade is leaving for Russia tomorrow.”

Gusano stops laughing. His big shaven head, browned by a layer of sweat and dust, looks as if it had been severed and placed casually on this ugly, hairy torso rounded off in a shapeless bulb below. We look at each other intensely for a moment, down to the inexpressible depths of our being. I no longer see anything but the half-man's eyes: he has
gray-blue irises streaked with brown. A sunset over mountain snows. Warmth and virile vigor.

“He is lucky,” Gusano says simply at last.

The harbor is peopled with lights. The lighthouse beacons are corning on. The black hull of the
Ursula
(Montevideo) stands out, steeper than a cliff, a few yards from the dockside. At night the ships lying in the harbor make you think of great prehistoric reptiles. But the lines of human invention are sharper than those of nature. Collins. Small craft carrying signal lights are moving across the water—which is like flat ink, spotted here and there with phosphorescent arcs. A green light blinks at the other end of the basin between two vertical hedges of masts.

Some bales of jute that will be loaded aboard tomorrow shelter us comfortably in the uncertain glimmer of a lantern hanging from the corrugated roof of a nearby warehouse. There are about twenty of us perched on bales between two piles of merchandise covered with waterproof canvas. N
O
S
MOKING
: we know only too well what is inside: this is no time to start any trouble. Dockers, seamen, watchmen from the storehouses—all comrades, in any case. A stool pigeon? Probably. But what difference can it make to us, this evening, that there should be one that's false among these valiant souls?

We talked about the fifteen per cent and the general strike. From out of the shadows a voice, grave with forty years of labor clearly analyzed the elements of the bosses' resistance: orders from the Allies, support from the banks in Madrid, competition with certain industries in the Asturias, underhanded dealings of a group in the pay of the Central Powers, discontent created by the customs tariffs, the coming revision of Franco-Spanish agreements … And suddenly here I am, not having budged, at the center of this group to which I bear a message. “Objectivity and local color!” the Arriviste told me. That recollection is enough to dispel my scruples at being an informant without information.

There are things which, if they took place on a planet of the constellation Orion, these twenty men would understand at the slightest hint. Like war, which no people wants. The general strike overthrowing a monarchy like a well-placed sock on the jaw puts you out of commission:
knockout.
That it takes time, years, thousands of men, thousands of years in prison, thousands of men hanged, shot, murdered,
insurrections put down, assassinations, betrayals, provocations, fresh start after fresh start until, in the end, an old Empire, eaten away by termites, suddenly collapses because some workers' wives have begun to shout “Bread!” in front of the bakeries, because the soldiers fraternize with the mob, because old policemen decorated for zeal are thrown into the icy waters of the canals, because … I don't have to teach them, they understand these things perfectly. But someone wants the incredible truth repeated: that it has really happened. Someone demands, his hand outstretched:

“Well, and the Czar? …”

“No more Czars.”

Like a breeze—the final eddy of a hurricane uprooting oaks on the other side of the ocean—that makes the leaves tremble gently in a wood, the same breath of inspiration makes these men tremble with excitement. And we carry on this dialogue of shadows:

“The army?”

“With the people.”

“The police?”

“No more police.”

“The prisons?”

“Burned.”

“The power?”

“Us.”

This extraordinary confidence, this leap into confidence, I owe to you, Gusano. It is your gray-blue eyes streaked with brown that I see before me at this moment. It is you who are speaking within me, you, your sober gaze, that masculine strength underneath, so sure of life
no matter what happens.
We know how to live and to survive, truncated like worms …

The voice of the man heavy with forty years of labor asks for some clarifications. We are the power, on condition that we start up the revolution once again. The one just completed is not yet ours. The wealthy classes know only too well how to juggle away revolutions: “Abracadabra!” and one sees nothing but red, the blood of the workers. But the Russians see through this. Their eyes are wide open. It's all right. Take over the land, take over the factories.

“And the war?”

Many of them are worried. A docker says he believes the Germans will win. Germany could strangle the revolution. Phrases clash like
crossed swords. The revolution is the daughter of the war. No, the daughter of defeat. The vanquished, whoever they may be, will make it. Long live defeat! The future belongs to the vanquished. But all of Europe is already defeated! Declare peace on the world. Take over Europe …

I am leaving tomorrow. I carry with me, as my only provisions for the journey, as my only message, these twenty handshakes. And Gusano's, twenty-one.

TUFTS OF STEAM VAPOR CLING TO THE BRANCHES OF LEANING TREES: BIRCHES
, fragile greenery with pale silvery reflections, slender leaves green with moisture, green light. And the parched plains. The web of telegraph wires rises and falls. Sparrows—the notes on these dancing staves: the horizon rises and falls with the rolling of a ship. Refreshing breeze of voyage; cinders and dust lashing the face. The burning of noontide on the rust-colored plains. I think avidly of that city, that city which we did not take, of those men, comrades, my comrades. I should like to open my arms, to stretch my whole being out toward them, to say to them—what? I can only find a single word: “Comrades”—richer perhaps in their language:
compañeros
—because of so many warm men's voices united by hope and danger whose echoes are still vibrating in my ears …

El Chorro's story this morning on the streetcar still provokes laughter within me, as bracing as a swallow of rum when you are very cold. Not that it was a happy story: but so much liveliness came through the tone and the accent that, lowering my eyelids, I could imagine myself walking along a great enticing highway, in the early morning, with this secure and hardy companion:

“Hombre,
I became a man by falling off a ladder. You'll see what I mean. I used to be a house painter working for a fat swine of a Huertista
⁷
not far from Veracruz. One fine day I fall from a height of four yards with a bucket of red paint in my hand only, my boy, right on top of that bastard—as he was passing under my ladder—so that my bucket lands right on his head. I couldn't have done it better if I had been trying. My knee is hurting me, but I begin laughing, laughing so hard that my heart, my stomach, and the rest begin dancing a crazy
jota
inside me.
My buddies throw a bucket of water in my face, but it's too late. They put me under arrest. ‘You a union man?' I didn't even know what that meant. ‘No.' They tie my hands up neatly behind my back. A couple of slaps on the puss given by an extraordinary pair of hands, you can believe me, send me flying and pull me back again before I even hit the ground. ‘You a union man?' This time I say
yes.
You'd be a union man for less, right? Well, then the guy gets real nice, gives me some cigarettes. ‘Do you want a priest? Would you like to spend the night in church,
Chico?
You shouldn't die like a dog. Think of your soul.' I say: ‘In church, sure,' in order to gain time. Without that, they would have dispatched me on the spot; they used to slaughter a man without a sound, in three movements, with a nice machete chop under your chin. So I spend twenty hours waiting around like a good Christian, at the local church between two lighted candles, to be bled the next morning, just like a pig, but with the firm promise of Paradise. I spend a poor night crushing spiders with the head of a little silver saint. Well, imagine that at five in the morning the Carranzistas
⁸
take over the town! They enlist me, naturally, in a red battalion. I begin to understand things. I join the union. Then we go off to fight against Zapata and I go over to the enemy, for he was worth a lot more than we were …”

El Chorro was on the station platform. His massive jaw, his square teeth, his big nose, the rusty patina of his fleshy Aztec face.

“Adios!”

He raised his mutilated hand: the thumb too short, too wide, the index finger straight out, the sharply cut stumps of three fingers. And that whole hand seemed cut off to me, hanging in space, a votive hand.

What else did I see in those last seconds? A tall, elegant Negro went by, carrying a little leather suitcase with shiny silver buckles.

We sometimes think that life is always the same, because it carries us along with it. False immobility of the swimmer who abandons himself to the current. That moment on the
rambla,
when Angel fell, will never come back. That other moment in the Plaza Real, that couple in the semidarkness under the gray arcade and Joaquin's torn jacket; the shrug of Dario's shoulders; it is finished, all of it. There is nothing left before me but that votive hand, floating, and about to disappear. How to snatch it back?

A pair of taciturn
guardia civils
are escorting a little music hall
poule
to the border. She pouts at them from time to time. It is at those times that she looks out at the landscape; then she puts on some lipstick and looks sulkily into her pocket mirror.
They
stare into space, straight ahead. I have the feeling that she is about to stand up and smack them with the back of her hand, like Punch slapping the Inspector; and their heads will dandle pitifully right to left, left to right, like the Inspector's head. Some wrinkles around her nostrils cheapen her unpretentious little lady's face. She must have a nasty voice on the high notes, the calculating mind of a housewife who knows all about prices, and a great jealousy of the rich. She is ashamed of wearing misshapen eighteen-franc shoes. Her lover's name is Emile.

“Isn't that so, mademoiselle, his name is Emile?”

She would look up with a start. “Fresh!”—then calmer, feeling me entirely disarmed, would ask without hiding her surprise:

“How did you guess?”

This scene was played between us in the zone of possible events, just before the dark explosion of a tunnel.

We fall for a long time through the darkness: we are about to fall into the bright light.

And the idea which I am trying to get rid of pierces me, like an electric needle, from one temple to the other: Dario will be killed, for that city, for us, for me, for the future. Every morning when he leaves the house where he has slept, every evening when he enters the back rooms of little cafés where fifteen men—including one traitor—are waiting for him, at every moment of his patient agitator's labor, he moves toward that end marked out for him. And one of the many men he is (for we are composites: there exist within us men who sleep, others who dream, others who are waiting for their time, others who vanish, perhaps permanently) knows it. It is the one whose mouth has a little tired line and whose eye wanders at a friendly meeting looking for something in the distance, shelter, refuge, unforeseen exit.

My letter of transit may take me far, too. This thought restores my serenity by reestablishing in some way the balance between our destinies …

When the little blond dish goes to the lavatory, a
guardia
waits for her in front of the door, solid as a post, rigid as his orders.