The Fugitive (14 page)

I don't know if she loved me; she certainly found me amusing, and laughed at the stories I told her. She told me that her husband was boring, and that she couldn't wait to come see me so that we could make love and then stretch out and she could listen to my voice for hours. I was fond of her. She was sweet and gentle, and most important of all, she was the only carefree person I met in all those years.

 

For a while, there was a hybrid social group of Americans and Japanese, with the addition of one Italian (me), an Irishman, and a Brazilian woman. We mostly organized excursions and parties. The Yankees were all white Reagan supporters, and the only way to tolerate them was to scatter them around, diluting them among the groups of various nationalities. One of the Yankees—Bob—got Cassandra, the Brazilian woman, pregnant. For some mysterious reason, she decided to turn to me for help and advice. I was the least suitable person imaginable, and I wasn't especially flattered to have been singled out. All the same, after she asked repeatedly, I agreed to go have a talk with Bob, the careless American. He made it blindingly clear to me that the matter was none of his concern.

I still wasn't ready to get back in touch with my friends who had good connections with the medical world, so I advised Cassandra to go see the gynecologist at the university health center. I went with her. The doctor thought that I was Bob, and gave me a long and excruciating lecture on love, sex, and children. I made no effort to set him straight; the situation was already sufficiently painful for Cassandra, and it did no good to make matters even more complicated. All the same, the gynecologist was a reasonably understanding person. He arranged for Cassandra to have a quick abortion in a private clinic. Cassandra was very wealthy, the daughter of a prominent livestock breeder, but I still had to lend her the money for the abortion. She paid me back a little at a time, to avoid having to explain things to her father.

 

When I got tired of the endless idle banter of my student friends, I tried to find opportunities to go see the rest of the country. While attending a course on the military history of Zapata's cavalry, I learned that they were looking for six volunteers to go interview the last surviving veterans.

Of the six, I was the only non-Mexican. We drove down in an old, beat-up Volkswagen microbus to Cuernavaca, Puebla, Guadalajara, Zacatecas, Morelia, and Jalapa. We visited museums and libraries, we contacted historians and journalists, and, much further south, in Chiapas, we managed to track down three veterans of Zapata's cavalry who were sufficiently alert to be interviewed.

They were poor
campesinos
, and at first they were obsequious and uncomfortable in front of the video camera and the tape recorder. When they finally felt at their ease, they began to show their old pride at having belonged to the elite division of a revolutionary army.

I already knew from the movies that it had been a harsh war. But I was astonished to learn that they took no prisoners because they had no way to feed them, and that they were forced to abandon their wounded, because they had neither medicine nor doctors to care for them.

Their accounts were very detailed, and it emerged quite clearly that Zapata's troops were considerably more ideological than Villa's. The land, the agrarian reform, and the
revolución incumplida
were deeply rooted concepts in each of these three veterans.

I could not help but consider as naïve and infinitely romantic their certainty that Emiliano Zapata had never died, and that he still rode by night through the mountains. They were certain that one day he would ride down to complete the revolution and implement agrarian land reform. They were still ready to follow him. In order to persuade us they were serious, they dug up old rusty Mauser muskets, and showed them off proudly.

When I returned to the university, I wrote my report and went on at some length about the myth of Zapata and how it undermined the
campesinos
' ability to construct a real path toward social emancipation. I wished I could believe the same things as the three veterans. In my bedroom, between the posters of Che and Sandino, a poster of their general had pride of place. I considered Zapata to be the finest figure of that unfortunate revolution. I believed, however, that the Mexican proletariat needed to make a break with the past and seek a new path. And I believed that the factory workers of the center and north would point the way.

The south, according to my analysis, had no place in the struggle. When I visited the south, I was impressed by its natural beauty and by the widespread racism against the Indios. In particular, I had been impressed by the fact that Mexico's southern border divided ethnic groups, all of Maya origin, who spoke the same language, practiced the same customs, and had the same historical memories. For them, that whole region was like a single large house, but to go from one room to another they needed a passport.

I had taken one of these trips to help two friends bring home one of their cousins, who had been thrown in jail for trashing a church. He had taken a trip to Chiapas, purchased a shopping bag full of
mota
(marijuana), and smoked practically the whole thing in the only cool, quiet place he could find—the local church. He had then mistaken the place for an amusement park.

We went to see the parish priest. Like most of the priests in Central America, he worked on behalf of the poor and to defend the Indios. He said that he was sorry our friend had got into trouble; he assured us that he hadn't called the police; it had been the noise from the church that attracted their attention. We gave him money to cover the damage, and we told him how sorry we were about what had happened. Then we went to see the only lawyer-
qua
-coyote in town. In exchange for a truly reasonable fee, he got our friend out of jail. We went to meet him at the gate of the Cerro Hueco prison, and we took him to the church to make his apologies to the priest.

I had heard about Cerro Hueco. I had heard the story of an Indio who fell victim to one of the most absurd miscarriages of justice in history. The Indio was charged with murdering his father, and sentenced to thirty years in prison. Apparently he had confessed to the murder and signed the transcript of his confession with an X mark. During the trial, he appeared relaxed and meek, and he'd listened to the reading of the verdict and sentence without batting an eye.

An old man would come to the prison every day to bring him food. The old man wasn't always allowed to see the Indio, because that was entirely subject to the whims of the guards. Otherwise, they ignored the inmate and his relative. After all, they were just Indios; why worry about them?

One day, a Mexican parliamentarian, a member of the opposition party, went to visit the prison, and a number of the inmates told him that the Indio, of Tzotzil Maya descent, spoke no Spanish, and moreover had no idea of why he had been thrown into prison. The member of parliament investigated briefly, and discovered that the old visitor was none other than the Indio's father, officially the murder victim. Obviously unaware of his official status as a murder victim, because he too spoke no Spanish.

What emerged was a grim story of drunken policemen who had beaten the Indio, until he finally agreed to put his mark on a transcript that was a complete fabrication. For the judges, the case was clear: the Indio had confessed, the Indio was guilty. They decided there was no need even to question the accused man. He was released from prison only because of the uproar that the story triggered. Those who were guilty of the miscarriage of justice, as always, preserved their jobs and suffered no punishment.

 

I had been to the south one other time, with Tomás, the Guatemalan singer and songwriter. He came to see me at home one day; to prepare for his arrival I stopped by El Farolito to stock up on
tacos, tortas y cerveza muy helada
. He ate in silence, as always, with his guitar on his knees. After he was done eating, he lit a cigarette and said to me:

“Max, I have to take a trip, and I don't want to go alone.”

“Where do you need to go?”

“To the border.”

“What border, Tomás?”

“The only border I've ever crossed in my life.”

“It's dangerous, Tomás, there's a death sentence pending against you in Guatemala.”

“I don't want to go into Guatemala, I only want to look at it from over the border.”

“It's just as dangerous, the death squads cross the border whenever they want.”

“I have to go, Max.”

“Why?”

“It's my home.”

“And you want me to come with you? Is that what you're asking me?”

“Yes, Max. I'd like that.”

We boarded a bus run by the Estrella Blanca coach lines. We were an odd couple, two fat men—one of us white, tall, and dressed as a tourist, the other dark-skinned, short, wearing traditional dress and carrying a guitar. People looked at us, uncertain what to think. We sat side by side, our enormous asses and bellies filling the space so that it looked as if we had been born and raised aboard that bus, but we weren't uncomfortable, or perhaps I should say, we didn't pay any attention to our discomfort, because anyone who has to carry around a big awkward intrusive body like ours is accustomed to adapting to any situation. Anyway, we had so many things to talk about that the trip seemed short.

We arrived. Tomás walked toward the bridge that marked the border between the two countries. He turned off to the right and walked along beside the bridge until he found a low wall, where he sat down. I caught up with him.

“Tomás, you've been here before, haven't you?”

“I come here every year.”

We pulled out of our little cooler a huge pile of fried chicken nuggets with aromatic herbs and two six packs of beer. Time went by and the shadows slowly lengthened. Including the shadows of two fat men sitting on a low wall, intently looking across the border at Guatemala, eating, drinking, and smoking. In complete silence.

Actually, I wanted to talk. I had thought of a number of important questions that I wanted to ask Tomás, but clearly, this was a moment that he wanted to experience in silence—though I sensed that deep inside he was playing his guitar and singing. Sweet melodies, lyrics steeped in sadness.

We polished off our food, and after a while Tomás touched my arm: “Max.”

“I'm right here,
hermano
.”

“I'm getting cold. Let's go back to Mexico City.”

 

When I heard the news of his death, I thought to myself that he had died in a war without hope, because I had always considered the Indios to be the victims, not the protagonists of their own history, of their own destiny.

But I was wrong. Those three old men that we interviewed for the university had given me a rare opportunity to understand Mexico, and I let it slip through my hands, because I was too “tainted” by my pride as a member of the European Left, and I therefore assumed that I was culturally and politically emancipated.

 

On January 1, 1994 I was at Bono, in the interior of Sardinia, feeling stuffed after a magnificent meal of
malloreddus
, roast suckling pig, and the powerful local grappa,
filu 'e ferru
. I was intently playing a game of Trivial Pursuit with a group of friends. Mexico was buried in my mind, an old and not especially pleasant memory. The television was blaring away in the background; no one was really paying any attention. At a certain point, however, the words “Mexico,” “Chiapas,” “
campesinos
,” and “revolt” filtered through. I was suddenly glued to the screen, watching all the international news reports.

The three old men had been right: Zapata wasn't dead at all. He had come back and was leading an army of Tojolabales, Tzotziles, and Tzeltales, Indios and
campesinos
just like him, children of the Maya, armed with rifles they usually used to hunt rabbit. The meek of the earth had declared war on the most powerful state in Central America. A war waged on behalf of agrarian land reform, a war to stop dying of hunger, measles, and diarrhea, and to abolish the privileges of the big landowners, such as the “
jus primae noctis
.” I bowed my head in grief when the television screen showed pictures of young
Zapatistas
, their hands tied behind their backs, murdered execution-style with a bullet to the back of the head. I couldn't watch; I was afraid that it might reawaken the pain and memories of the death of Tomás, killed four years earlier, just across the border.

Then I saw footage of one hundred thousand people demonstrating in Mexico City, wearing T-shirts that said “
Yo soy Zapatista
,” and after the flood of happiness, I was immediately seized by a wave of nostalgia. Nostalgia for the Mexico that I hadn't understood, and that had only done me harm, a Mexico however whose dream of revolution I loved and will always love.

The voice emerges as an echo

from the marble halls of memory

men and women pass by

as in a film

 

 

 

 

Love and life on the run.

When I finally understood that Alessandra's words—“Get out of my life, please, I beg you”—had swept away the last feeble hope that this was a passing crisis and instead marked once and for all the end of our relationship, I was overwhelmed by the general set of sensations that one experiences, I think, after being run over by a fast-moving semi.

Probably, it had dawned on Alessandra that she had one last chance to create a new life for herself. I have to admit that she made the right decision, but in order to find the strength to break off with me forever, she had to cut off all contact with me and vanish literally into thin air, as far as I was concerned.

The truck hit me from behind, at the beginning of the long road through the second phase of my battle with the courts, a battle that went on for eight more years. Without Alessandra it was just that much harder. It made much less sense to take on a legal battle of that scale, a battle to regain my right to a life, if she was no longer at my side.