The Fugitive (11 page)

The first few times I attended these salons and dinners, I practically jumped out of my chair whenever somebody said that the following week their group was planning to go underground. I thought my friends must be reckless fools to bring me into contact with such dangerous individuals, knowing full well that I was living in hiding myself. But, since I saw the same people again week after week, I soon understood that it was all just a pose.

 

I met some interesting people as well. The most significant friendship I made was with the son of Victor Serge, Vlady, who was considered the world's leading practitioner of Trotskyite iconography. And he was first and foremost a great artist; I was already familiar with many of his artworks, having seen them in major Mexican museums. I found his technique very striking.

Once we started seeing one another more frequently, he let me come watch him paint. At the time, he was frescoing the walls and ceiling of a new public library in Mexico City. I would spend days at a time watching him work.

I saw him as a physical link with the national school of Mexican art that constituted the only true example in our times of a perfect integration of art and society, and which produced such figures as Orozco, Rivera, Siqueiros, and Kalho. It was a pitiless, brutal, orotund school of art, the creation of artists who always worked in close contact with the people and who revived and gave new dignity to native tradition. Vlady was the last working artist of that generation, and for me, spending time with him meant experiencing directly a piece of history, immortalized by masters of line and color.

He worked with only one assistant, an elderly Indio who mixed his paints for him. I soon realized that the old man was far more than just a helper; he was in fact Vlady's closest adviser. When he disliked something or was unpersuaded by an approach, the Indio expressed his disappointment by turning irritable and intractable. Vlady himself wasn't the easiest person to get along with, and so the two would soon clash, and spectacularly vivid quarrels would ensue. And whenever they fought, Vlady's wife would butt in. She was a former nurse, as disagreeable as could be, and it seemed to me that Vlady would have been delighted to be rid of her.

I remember one time when Vlady had just finished painting an enormous dinosaur skeleton upon which a tiny Fidel Castro was riding, and he was preparing to sketch, on a smaller wall, a portrait of Freud on a square panel of burlap that he had glued to the wall. The old Indio wasn't happy about this experimentation with burlap, and started to bang the floor with the cans of paint he was bringing to the maestro.

Vlady stopped working and they began to argue with all their usual vim. That was when I understood what an important role the Indio assistant played. He might not have known who Freud was, but he had such a well-developed artistic sensibility that he could understand what people—his own people—would see in that square of burlap. He explained his thoughts to the maestro and, as always, Vlady paid heed. It struck me more than once that to Vlady, this elderly Indio represented the eyes of the people for whom he painted and to whom he dedicated his creations.

Vlady was a man who was tormented by his own past. Following his father, he had already experienced, as a child, the pain of exile, Siberia, and the long voyage by ship to Mexico, the only country willing to accept Victor Serge. Ideological disputes that followed the death of Trotsky had separated them, and had obliged Victor to live the last years of his life in an unjust and painful state of isolation. Whenever Vlady spoke of his father, it was clear that he was plagued by a sense of guilt for their separation during the last years of Victor's life.

He had inherited crates full of unpublished writings. One day, he let me and my sociology professor look through the papers. We immediately understood the historic importance of the material. We tried to persuade Vlady to make the papers available to the public, but he refused. A few days later I was arrested, and I never heard anything more about the artist or those documents.

The people I socialized with were not only students and intellectuals, but also labor organizers and factory workers, but I wasn't likely to run into them in the salons. We would run into one another fairly often during the various protests we took part in. I had a heartfelt admiration for them, and it was beyond me why they continued to spend time with the intellectual class, likeable as people but politically deleterious.

They were hungry for news about the European movement and whenever we met, they would eagerly compare our experiences. They were looking for a different organizational approach, one that might allow them to resolve at least one aspect of the general crisis. For my part, I did everything I could to discourage them from seeking that new model in Europe, where every approach adopted—without exception—had proved disastrous.

Women were a tiny minority in the group but whenever it was necessary to appear at a so-called “mass demonstration,” the comrades would show up with an entourage of wives and children, and the imbalance became less apparent.

They were always supremely conscious of my status as a fugitive, and whenever things heated up, a couple of guys would make sure I was hustled off to a quieter neighborhood.

My love of photography offered me a way to make myself useful. My photography was actually pretty good and a few of my shots were published in movement magazines.

On one occasion, photography came close to getting me killed. A vast area of one of the
ciudades perdidas
—cluttered with illegal hovels that were home to
campesinos
who had been kicked off the land and converted en masse into homeless beggars—was slated for clearing to make way for an industrial plant being built by one of the usual North American corporations.

In those days (and I doubt it's any different now) it was a well-established practice that the purchase price for land illegally occupied by poor squatters included the armed intervention of the police. The
mordida
(or ‘bite,' a Mexican term for bribes and corruption) was something more than an ethical problem. In fact, in Mexico, it constituted a way of life for the police force itself. Right up to the top. The chief of police of Mexico City, for instance, whom the opposition press accused of controlling a prostitution ring of over twelve thousand
putas
, was arrested in the United States in 1984 and charged with international cocaine trafficking. Moreover, whenever the police were called upon to perform a mass eviction, not only did they expect a lavish bribe to be shared out, but also claimed a right to plunder, looting the evictees of what little they owned.

At the first light of dawn, truckloads of policemen in full riot gear arrived on the scene, followed by the bulldozers that would flatten the shantytown, as well as other empty trucks, which would be loaded with the booty from the planned mass eviction. The activists and the slum-dwellers had been waiting for the police all night long, and were ready for what was coming. Everybody knew that there was really nothing to be done and that, yet again, for the thousandth but certainly not the last time, their rights would be crushed underfoot. But, after a long and exhausting assembly, they had decided to resist.

The fighting went on for hours. I was stationed on a nearby overpass, where I enjoyed an excellent vantage point from which to take pictures with my telephoto lens. As the police progressively seized control of one patch of land after another, the squads of looters would move in, followed by the bulldozers. I stopped taking pictures after the tenth roll of film. I felt nauseous. With the sense of bewilderment that I always felt in the presence of the madness that was Mexico City, with which I had discovered I was fully capable of coexisting, I sat smoking a cigarette and watching the mayhem.

And that's how a passing patrol car found me when it pulled to a stop, its occupants suspicious at the sight of my camera. I hadn't noticed them before they screeched to a halt, and my reaction of startled fear gave them an additional cause for suspicion. They understood that I wasn't just a chance passerby, so they wanted to take me in for questioning and further checking. For an instant, the end seemed near, and then my survival instincts sprang into action. With a calm voice and a string of smiles, I started bargaining for my freedom.

The police drove off with my camera, my money, my jacket, and my Timberlands. I sat back down. And smoked. And watched.

 

Alessandra brought me another camera from Europe. Taking advantage of the fact that various friends came to Mexico, I had put together a small import business selling photographic equipment, which commanded impossibly high prices in Mexico. I also imported a special kind of drawing paper, very popular with artists and almost impossible to find there. This allowed me to round out my modest earnings as a translator. All things considered, as cheap as it was to live there, I was doing reasonably well. In any case, in Mexico as well, the burden of expense was borne by my family.

Word got out that I was running an interesting import-export business, and I received orders for everything you could think of. One guy even asked me to get him a Vespa. The Mexican government's trade barriers prohibited the importation of motorcycles, and the local production, monopolized by a single company, was insufficient for the demand among the young people who could afford them. Many young people managed to smuggle them in from the United States, but then they couldn't ride them openly, because the police would surely confiscate them. A few motorcycle aficionados had organized a protest movement. They staged demonstrations every Sunday, with a thundering illegal procession of bikes rolling down Insurgentes, the broad north-south boulevard that runs through the center of the city. It was a funny sight: a cluster of festive, rumbling motorbikes zipping by, chased by another cluster of cops, also on motorbikes. It was like an old Keystone Kops routine.

Sunday was a strange day in Mexico City. An unnatural sense of calm extended over the whole city, as if it was catching its breath after an exhausting week.

Everything was closed in my neighborhood, and I took advantage of that to leave the house early and take a leisurely stroll down to Calle Benjamin Hill, where Victor Serge had lived just before his death. I would stand looking at his apartment building; deep down, I was invoking the spirit of the great revolutionary and asking him to impart an inspiration that might change my life. Or at least give me a good excuse to leave that city once and for all.

Then I would head lazily back home, stopping on the way to buy a couple of pieces of corn from a street vendor who lived in an old, foul-smelling shack. He boiled the corn up juicy and delicious. I think he considered me his most amusing customer. After a lengthy and laborious period of familiarization, I managed to explain how I liked my corn. He fixed me two pieces. I liked them boiling hot, spread with butter and mayonnaise, and then sprinkled with a copious layer of powdered spicy red chili pepper. I would eat everything with lots of chili powder. It was the only reliable remedy for diarrhea, or Montezuma's revenge, as the gringos called it. Anything that had been in contact with water caused intestinal problems; at first, I stuffed myself with pharmaceutical remedies but after a while I took the advice of my local friends and used chili pepper, the only effective natural remedy.

On every faucet in the house, I had installed very expensive filters, but they didn't do much good. I drank Pepsi and beer, and to wash fruit and vegetables I used Tehuacán mineral water, the only brand produced by the state. I bought huge jerricans of the water at the American supermarket in my neighborhood.

Another obligatory stop along my route was “El Farolito,” a legendary little taco stand, specializing in
tortas
, or grilled sandwiches. There I would complete my Sunday brunch, with a decisive shift toward the savory—two
tortas
with steak, avocado, and hot sauce, washed down with a couple of beers—in a complete reversal of my weekday routine, owing to the simple fact that the pastry shop run by German immigrants, where I usually had breakfast, was closed on Sundays.

Around noon, I would head back home and make a round of phone calls to see if anyone had anything interesting planned for the day. Usually I would leave the house, not to return until late that evening. If nobody had any plans, I would phone over to Brema, a restaurant that is renowned for its Mitteleuropean menu, to reserve a table.

For a certain period I spent my Sundays in the countryside near Cuernavaca, where a friend had persuaded me to go into business with him as part owner of a flock of sheep. We were raising them to be slaughtered for meat. We had rented a fenced field, and we hired a shepherd to keep an eye on them. Every week we drove out to take a look at our future earnings, busily grazing and fattening themselves up.

The shepherd was a likable guy; his wife, a homely chatterbox, was said to be a bit of a
bruja
(sorceress). In conversation, she had admitted that this was true, but that she merely knew the properties and uses of local herbs. After lunch, she took us on a little tour over the fields, pointing out various plants and explaining their beneficial effects. That stroll was the only part of the day I enjoyed. To spend a Sunday watching sheep—even if those sheep were half mine—didn't strike me as a very smart use of my day. The least appealing part of the day, though, was definitely lunch. Our shepherd had decided that the finest specialty of the area was armadillo, and there wasn't a single Sunday that his wife failed to cook us up an armadillo—but only after clubbing the critter to death before our eyes.

As usual, the whole thing was triggered by a misunderstanding, caused by my own excessive courtesy as a guest. The first time they served armadillo, despite the fact it tasted foul, I had said, “How delightful!” Those two words sealed my fate for many Sundays to come. Each time we drove out into the countryside, I would solemnly resolve to point out that maybe it was time to change the bill of fare, but the woman showered us with such a hail of conversation that I never managed to get out the words. Part of the problem was that my friend really liked armadillo. “It tastes sort of like
cerdolito
(suckling pig),” he would say, “but a little gamier. It has all the flavors of the countryside.” Just then, I was beginning to hate him.