“It hurts here, señor apostle,” said Sacramento to Pajabrava, sinking his index finger in his left side below his nipple. “Here, look, right here, it burns like the devil. You who know so much, can you tell me why when I think about a certain girl my heart hurts like this?”
“That's why they put it in your chest,” Pajabrava told him. “As Yahweh revealed to Samuel, the heart is the organ of pain and of love, which are one and the same. They say that when you see it consumed by flames it's a sign of divine fervor, and when it is pierced by an arrow it means that it's repentant. If it is pierced by a knife it is enduring one of life's extreme tests, if it is lanced with thorns it is bearing the torment of a human love, and if it is bleeding it has been abandoned.”
“Well, then, mine must have fire, arrow, knife, thorns, and bleeding, all at the same time, because it hurts like hell,” said Sacramento, who forgets about piety when it comes to expressing the furors of his spirit.
“After hours with that rope around my neck I suddenly found myself free and miraculously alive and that cheered me up,” Frank Brasco tells me, as the fire in his hearth warms the interior of his cabin in Vermont, “but I was struggling to understand the situation. The overall one, of course, which was chaotic, but also my own. The executives of the Troco, my compatriots, had abandoned me by refusing to negotiate for my life. So, one thing was clear and another unclear; it was clear that I had no allies and it was unclear who my real enemies were. The only one who proposed something concrete in the midst of that disorder was Payanés, who wanted us to defend Emilia, and it seemed right to me because I too felt affection for that great prehistoric hulk. In lieu of a better strategy, we entrenched ourselves with a good supply of projectiles to throw from the tower; that way we could prevent anyone from getting close enough to damage her and at the same time cover our backs. Night was in my favor, because it hid the fact that I was one of the gringos, whose heads the mob was demanding for being exploiters and imperialists. I was a renegade gringo, cast off by the rest, of course, but the rebels didn't know that, so that with the light of day things were going to get more complicated for me. But there was still time before that happened and I thought, as they say in Colombia, Morning will come and we'll see.”
Morning came and they saw. Outside the fence, surrounding the camp like a ring of steel, the army's Fourteenth Brigade had taken up positions under the command of General Demetrio del Valle with all three hundred twenty of its men armed and wearing camouflaged uniforms.
“That same night the news of the insurrection at Camp 26 reached La Catunga and it brought us out of the bars,” relates Machuca. “We heard about everything, the flying balls of rice, the kidnapping of Frank Brasco, the resurrection of the veteran Lino el Titi as union leader. Then we
putas
gathered and decided to head over there with food and provisions, in the spirit of solidarity and knowing that the striking workers must be starving. When we approached, well into the morning, we found that the troops had the camp surrounded. The boys were fenced in like the famous warriors of Masada and it turned out to be true that they were howling with hunger.”
Then the professional women, nurturing and generous, elbowed their way up to the fence and showered the other side with bread, oranges,
panela
, plantains, bacon, and canned food, which the workers greeted like manna from heaven, since they'd had nothing in their stomachs after their breakfast the previous day, before the revolt erupted.
“Tell her, Machuca,” urges Fideo. “Tell her about Payanés and the beans.”
“The workers built fires, heating up the food in tins, and then ate heartily,” Machuca begins telling me, “while on the other side of the fence the troops, without food, watched them with faces like beaten dogs. So Payanés said: Do you want some?âoffering part of his beans to an adolescent soldier who vacillated between accepting or not, between hunger and suspicion.”
“Don't touch that!” shouted the captain to the young soldier, who stiffened upon hearing the order. “It's probably poisoned . . .”
“How can you say that,
hermano,
do you think we're inhuman monsters?” said Payanés indignantly. “Are you going to call me a murderer for feeling sorry for this boy who hasn't had anything to eat? Think about it,
hermano,
the workers are people and so are the soldiers; there's no need to tear each other apart . . .”
“You are subversives from the guerrilla . . . ,” the captain tried to justify himself while the soldier hastily devoured the beans like a hungry child, because deep down that's what he was.
“They're good, these beans,” he acknowledged. “If they're poisoned, well, the poison suits them. To your health!” the boy shouted to the men inside the fence, and they, following Payanés's example, shared their bread with the soldiers only a couple of hours before events would lead them to a cruel confrontation.
The members of the battalion threatened to enter the camp, take it by force, and squash the rebels, but they hesitated. They put off the decision, as if giving themselves time, since they knew that once inside they wouldn't be able to shoot because any stray bullet could ignite the wells and unleash hell. In the meantime the workers were reinforcing themselves. The strike committee was gathered in some secret corner; Lino el Titi resumed control and decreed that the strike must continue until victory or death. And this news, which spread like wildfire, caused the initial fear, confusion, and chaos to yield to greater fervor, worker unity, and a feverish determination to fight.
“Victory or death?” said Brasco. “You people speak in hyperbole. I would propose victory, or a reasonable alternative.”
“We made history,” says don Honorio Laguna, the old welder, and a few big tears of pride pour from his left eye, because the other one is false.
“It was then that he saw them, and in that instant he felt the full weight of his pain,” Machuca tells me.
“Who saw? Who did he see?”
“Sacramento. He saw those two.”
On that dawn of historical repercussions, Sacramento was floating in an air magnetized by Sayonara, as if sealed in a cave of solitary bliss. He turned to look toward the place where a cluster of women were causing a commotion by passing food over the fence. Among them he recognized the girl, although she was already a woman, dressed for combat in an oriental blouse with its tight row of cloth buttons covering her heart. She still had the same bearing of an undomesticated animal he had noticed the first day he had seen her, and her shiny hair was gathered at the crown of her head in a ponytail that fell wildly down her back.
“First I saw her, then I recognized her and then I suddenly realized what she was doing . . .”
Sayonara was extending her delicate fingers with their almond-shaped nails through the holes in the wire fence to touch the thick hand of a worker who was none other than Payanés: separated by the fence and the presence of the armed forces but joined together by a shared look, dissolved in the sweetness of their encounter, hypnotized and dormant in the timeless moment of their contact. Their index fingers sought each other with pleasure and confidence, unaware that the mere touch would bring rebirth and give new impulse to their story, unaware that salvation would be won if the connection was madeâfingers inter-twinedâor disaster if not.
“Sparks,
mi reina,
” sighs Olguita. “Between his index finger and hers sparks and stars emanated to illuminate the sky.”
“I only had to see how they looked at each other to know everything,” Sacramento tells me. “I felt a sharp pain in my gut and a great desire to fall dead; then came a nausea, like a sour mouthful, the quiet taste of death. What was life for them was death for me, and every time I tell it I kill myself again as if I am reliving it. The world was paralyzed for me and it became night in the middle of the day, as if the images had fled and all that remained around me was a nothingness frozen in black and white, while I burned over hot coals. Jealousy? No, it was jealousy that had burned me earlier, but now it was worse, because as I told you it was pure death, but a wrenching one, not a gentle one. With the passing of the hours my panic dimmed and I faded away to ashes, and the only thing that remained alive in me was the memory of unbearable pain. I was there but I no longer had bones, or flesh, or eyes, or hair: I was a mass of dazed pain that walked without knowing where.”
Sacramento didn't notice when the troops violently pulled the
prostitutas
away from the fence as the women tried to hang on to the wire with hands like hooks. Nor does he remember the many hours of being blocked off without communication from outside, which prevented them from receiving food and forced them to eat iguanas,
chigüiros,
cats, and other domesticated animals; nor did he know when Lino el Titi, demonstrating the power of his old charisma and newly recovered leadership, said that any worker who damaged a machine would pay with his life.
“Faced with this last measure, Caranchas and the men from maintenance confronted him with his error, warning him that he would have to settle accounts if the company brought in scabs and reactivated production, thus thwarting the strike,” don Honorio informs me. “But Lino el Titi, being a
petrolero
, the son of a
petrolero
, and now the father of three
petrolero
sons, could not tolerate the idea of damaging a means of production which, he believed, would give substance to the families of his grandchildren and great-grandchildren tomorrow. He was a straight man, Lino el Titi, incapable of comprehending that others played crookedly.”
Besieged by hunger and the psychological war being waged by General del Valle, who kept airplanes flying low over the camp, and resolved to continue the strike clandestinely in Tora, the workers, through their strike committee, agreed to abandon the installations without committing industrial sabotage in exchange for the troop's agreement to allow them to leave peacefully, without aggression, firings, or reprisals. Despite his great anguish, Sacramento does remember the exodus of men passing in single file through a double cordon of defiant troops, the unbearable tenseness, the sensation of expecting a shot in the neck at any moment, the certainty that one of the soldiers aiming at them would shoot and unleash a massacre.
That was when Lino el Titi, surrounded by the strike committee and a group of bodyguards, appeared out of nowhere and approached Sacramento, distinguishing him as someone in the leader's full confidence.
“You know Machuca, right?” he asked Sacramento. “When you get to Tora look for her and tell her to dig out the mimeograph machine, oil it, and fill it with ink, because the strike bulletin is going to circulate again. You will be in charge of it. The committee members will send you the content, we'll figure out how, and you will be responsible for seeing that a thousand copies are printed daily. Machuca knows how to type, how to use the mimeograph machine, and how to do things quietly. Is this your friend?” he asked, referring to Payanés.
“That's Payanés,” responded Sacramento, spitting out the word “Payanés” as if he were saying “Judas,” but Lino el Titi didn't notice the subtlety.
“Well, then, you, Payanés, you'll be in charge of distribution, which must be handled in secret,” he ordered. “You'll give the bulletins to the neighborhood leaders and they will give them to the block coordinators, so that they can be circulated to everyone. That way at least eight or ten people should read each copy. Is that understood?”
“
SÃ
, señor,” said Payanés, puffed up with pride, barely able to believe that he had been honored with such a responsibility. “Yes, sir, don't worry, we will do everything exactly as you say, but I have one question, señor: Who are the neighborhood leaders and the block coordinators?”
“They know who they are, they know from the last strike, and they will come forward ready to do their part as soon as they see the first bulletin passing from hand to hand. The bulletin is the heart of the strike,” Lino el Titi informed Payanés, before he disappeared majestically, surrounded by his guards. “As long as the bulletin goes out, the strike will remain alive.”
“Payanés urged me to identify myself to the troops as a North American functionary, so they would release me as was my right and I could spare myself a lot of anxiety,” Frank Brasco tells me, “but I wasn't eager to do that. First out of anger at my people, who had given me up for dead, and then out of solidarity with the Colombians, because I felt closer to them and because their claims were based on reason and basic worker rights. So I covered my head with a straw hat and hid my mouth and nose under a handkerchief, as I saw others doing, and I left the camp pressed against and hidden by the mass of workers.”
Then all at once what had been expected occurred: the burst of betrayal from the soldiers' rifles and the workers' response with bottles of sulfuric acid and phenol, with the tragic resultâwhich could only be tallied three days laterâof eleven dead workers and three burned soldiers. It's a good thing don Honorio describes this to me, because Sacramento, who was lost in the unconsciousness of his immense sorrow, doesn't remember it clearly; he didn't even hear the shots, he says, because inside him the voices of desperation were shouting even louder.
“We made history,” don Honorio assures me, and tears trickle down the furrows on the left side of his face.
I have in my hands a copy of the sixth strike bulletin, printed in faded purple letters stiff from the rigor mortis that attacks paper over the years. This same piece of paper must have passed through Payanés's hands fresh from the mimeograph machine, its ink still damp, and he must have given it to Sayonara, his accomplice, his beloved, his efficient and unconditional helper in the risky task of clandestine printing and distribution, at a moment that must have made them feel like protagonists not only in their own personal drama but also in the history of their nation, which for an instant sat them in its lap.