Century of the Wind Read online

  But the war continues. The war will continue as long as corn sprouts in secret mountain crannies, as long as Zapata’s eyes flash.

  (468)

  1918: Mexico City

  The New Bourgeoisie Is Born Lying

  “We fight for the land,” says Zapata, “and not for illusions that give us nothing to eat… With or without elections, the people are chewing the cud of bitterness.”

  While taking the land from the campesinos of Morelos and wrecking their villages, President Carranza talks about agrarian reform. While applying state terror against the poor, he grants them the right to vote for the rich and offers illiterates freedom of the press.

  The new Mexican bourgeoisie, voracious child of war and plunder, sings hymns of praise to the Revolution while gobbling it down with knife and fork from an embroidered tablecloth.

  (468)

  1919: Cuautla

  This Man Taught Them That Life Is Not Only Fear of Suffering and Hope for Death

  It had to be done by treachery. Shamming friendship, a government officer leads him into the trap. A thousand soldiers are waiting, a thousand rifles tumble him from his horse.

  Afterward they haul him to Cuautla and exhibit him face up.

  Campesinos from everywhere flock there for the silent march-past, which lasts several days. Approaching the body, they remove their sombreros, look attentively, and shake their heads. No one believes it. There’s a wart missing, a scar too many; that suit isn’t his; this face swollen by so many bullets could be anybody’s.

  The campesinos talk in slow whispers, peeling off words like grains of corn:

  “They say he went with a compadre to Arabia.”

  “Hell, Zapata doesn’t chicken out.”

  “He’s been seen on the Quilamula heights.”

  “I know he’s sleeping in a cave in Cerro Prieto.”

  “Last night his horse was drinking in the river.”

  The Morelos campesinos don’t now believe, nor will they ever believe, that Emiliano Zapata could have committed the infamy of dying and leaving them all alone.

  (468)

  Ballad of the Death of Zapata

  Little star in the night

  that rides the sky like a witch,

  where is our chief Zapata

  who was the scourge of the rich?

  Little flower of the fields

  and valleys of Morelos,

  if they ask for Zapata,

  say he’s gone to try on halos.

  Little bubbling brook,

  what did that carnation say to you?

  It says our chief didn’t die.

  that Zapata’s on his way to you.

  (293)

  1919: Hollywood

  Chaplin

  In the beginning were rags.

  From the rag bag of the Keystone studios, Charles Chaplin chose the most useless garments, the too big, too small, too ugly, and put them together, as if picking through a garbage can. Some outsized pants, a dwarf’s jacket, a bowler hat, and some huge dilapidated shoes. To that he added a prop mustache and cane. Then this little heap of rejected rags stood up, saluted its author with a ridiculous bow, and set off walking like a duck. After a few steps he collided with a tree and asked its pardon, doffing his hat.

  And so came to life Charlie the Tramp, outcast and poet.

  (121 and 383)

  1919: Hollywood

  Keaton

  The man who never laughs creates laughter.

  Like Chaplin, Buster Keaton is a Hollywood magician. His outcast hero—straw hat, stone face, cat’s body—in no way resembles Charlie the Tramp, but is caught in the same absurd war with cops, bullies, and machines. Always impassive, icy outside, burning inside, he walks with great dignity on walls, on air, on the bottom of the sea.

  Keaton is not as popular as Chaplin. His films entertain, but with too much mystery, too much melancholy.

  (128 and 382)

  1919: Memphis

  Thousands of People Flock to the Show,

  and many are women with babies in their arms. The family performance reaches its high point when Ell Persons, tied to a stake, is baptized with gasoline and the flames draw his first howls.

  Not long afterward, the audience departs in an orderly fashion, complaining of the brevity of these things. Some stir the cinders seeking a bone as a souvenir.

  Ell Persons is one of the seventy-seven blacks who have been roasted alive or hanged by white crowds this year in the southern United States for committing a murder or a rape—that is to say, for looking at a white woman, possibly with a lascivious gleam; or for saying “Yes” instead of “Yes, ma’am”; or for not removing his hat before speaking.

  Among these lynched “niggers,” some have worn the military uniform of the United States of America and hunted Pancho Villa through Mexico’s northern deserts, or are newly returned from the world war.

  (51, 113, and 242)

  1921: Rio de Janeiro

  Rice Powder

  President Epitácio Pessoa makes a recommendation to the managers of Brazilian football. For reasons of patriotic prestige, he suggests that no player with black skin be sent to the coming South American soccer championships.

  It happens, however, that Brazil won last year thanks to the mulatto Artur Friedenreich, who scored the winning goal and whose boots, grimed with mud, are still on display in a jeweler’s window. Friedenreich, born of a German and a black, is Brazil’s best player. He always arrives on the field last. It takes him at least half an hour in the dressingroom to iron out his frizz, so that during the game not a hair will move, even when he heads the ball.

  Football, that elegant after-Mass diversion, is something for whites.

  “Rice powder! Rice powder!” yell the fans at Carlos Alberto, another mulatto player on the Fluminense club who whitens his face with it.

  (279)

  1921: Rio de Janeiro

  Pixinguinha

  It is announced that the Batons will soon be appearing on the Paris stage, and indignation mounts in the Brazilian press. What will Europeans think? Will they imagine Brazil is an African colony? The Batons’ repertory contains no operatic arias or waltzes, only maxixes, lundús, cortajacas, batuques, cateretês, modinhas, and the newborn samba. It is an orchestra of blacks who play black music. Articles exhort the government to head off the disgrace. The foreign ministry promptly explains that the Batons are not on an official mission.

  Pixinguinha, one of the blacks in the ensemble, is the best musician in Brazil. He doesn’t know it, nor does it interest him. He is too busy seeking on his flute, with devilish joy, sounds stolen from the birds.

  (75)

  1921: Rio de Janeiro

  Brazil’s Fashionable Author

  inaugurates a swimming pool in a sports club. Coelho Neto’s speech exalting the virtues of the pool draws tears and applause. Coelho Neto invokes the powers of sea, sky, and earth on this solemn occasion of such magnitude that we cannot evaluate it without tracing, through the Shadows of Time, its projection into the Future.

  Sweets for the rich, denounces Lima Barreto, an author not in vogue and accursed both as a mulatto and a rebel, who, cursing back, dies in some godforsaken hospital.

  Lima Barreto mocks the pomposities of writers who parrot the literature of ornamental culture. They sing the glories of a happy Brazil, without blacks, workers, or the poor; a Brazil populated with sage economists whose most original idea is to impose more taxes on the people, a Brazil with two hundred and sixty-two generals whose job is to design new uniforms for next year’s parade.

  (36)

  1922: Toronto

  This Reprieve

  saves thousands condemned to early death. Neither royal nor presidential, it has been extended by a Canadian doctor who a week ago, with seven cents in his pocket, was looking for a job.

  On a hunch that deprived him of sleep, and after much error and discouragement, Fred Banting discovers that insulin, secreted by the pancreas, reduces suga
r in the blood; and thus he commutes the many death sentences imposed by diabetes.

  (54)

  1922: Leavenworth

  For Continuing to Believe That All Belongs to All

  Ricardo, most talented and dangerous of the Flores Magón brothers, has been absent from the revolution he did so much to start. While Mexico’s fate was played out on its battlefields, he was breaking stones, shackled in a North American prison.

  A United States court had sentenced him to twenty years’ hard labor for signing an anarchist manifesto against private property. He was many times offered a pardon, if only he would ask for it. He never asked.

  “When I die, perhaps my friends will write on my grave: ‘Here Lies a Dreamer,’ and my enemies: ‘Here Lies a Madman.’ But no one will dare write: ‘Here Lies a Coward and Traitor to his Ideas.’”

  In his cell, far from his land, they strangle him. Heart failure, says the medical report.

  (44 and 391)

  1922: The Fields of Patagonia

  The Worker-Shoot

  Three years ago young aristocrats of the Argentine Patriotic League went hunting in the barrios of Buenos Aires. The safari was a success. The rich kids killed workers and Jews for a whole week without a license, and no one went to jail.

  Now it’s the army that is using workers for target practice in the frozen lands of the south. The boys of the Tenth Cavalry under Lieutenant Colonel Héctor Benigno Varela roam the great estates of Patagonia shooting peons on strike. Fervent Patriotic League volunteers accompany them. No one is executed without a trial. Each trial lasts less time than it takes to smoke a cigarette.

  Estancia owners and officers act as judges. The condemned are buried by the heap in common graves they dig themselves.

  President Hipólito Yrigoyen in general doesn’t approve of this method of finishing off anarchists and reds, but lifts not a finger against the murderers.

  (38 and 365)

  1923: Guayas River

  Crosses Float in the River,

  hundreds of crosses crowned with mountain blossoms, flowery squadrons of tiny ships cruising on the swell of waves and memory. Each cross recalls a murdered worker. People have thrown these floating crosses into the water so that the workers lying in the riverbed may rest in peace.

  It happened a year ago, in the port of Guayaquil, which for several hours was in the hands of the workers. Fed up with eating hunger, they had called the first general strike in Ecuador’s history—not even government officials were able to circulate without a pass from the unions. The women—washerwomen, tobacco workers, cooks, peddlers—had formed the Rosa Luxemburg Committee; they were the most defiant.

  “Today the rabble got up laughing. Tomorrow they’ll go to bed crying,” announced Carlos Arroyo, president of the Chamber of Deputies. And the president of the republic, José Luis Tamayo, ordered General Enrique Barriga to take care of the matter: “At any cost.”

  At the first shots, many workers tried to escape, scattering like ants from an anthill squashed by a foot. These were the first to fall.

  No one knows how many were thrown into the Guayas river to sink, their bellies slashed with bayonets.

  (192, 332, and 472)

  1923: Acapulco

  The Function of the Forces of Order in the Democratic Process

  As soon as the Tom Mix film ends, Juan Escudero surprises the audience by stepping in front of the screen of Acapulco’s only cinema and delivering a harangue against bloodsucking merchants. By the time the boys in uniform pile on him, the Workers’ Party of Acapulco has already been born, baptized by acclamation.

  In no time at all, the Workers’ Party has grown and won the elections and stuck its black-and-red flag over city hall. Juan Escudero—tall, thick sideburns, pointed mustache—is the new mayor, the socialist mayor. In the blink of an eye he turns the palace into a headquarters for cooperatives and unions, launches a lîteracy campaign, and defies the power of the three companies that own the water, air, ground, and grime of this filthy Mexican port abandoned by God and the federal government. Then the owners of everything organize new elections, so that the people may correct their error, but the Workers’ Party of Acapulco wins again. So there’s no way out but to call in the army, which promptly normalizes the situation. The victorious Juan Escudero receives two bullets, one in the arm and the other in the forehead, a mercy-shot from close range, while the soldiers set fire to city hall.

  But Escudero survives, and continues winning elections. In a wheelchair, mutilated, hardly able to talk, Escudero conducts a victorious new campaign for deputy by dictating speeches to a youngster who deciphers his mumblings and repeats them aloud on campaign platforms.

  The owners of Acapulco decide to pay thirty thousand pesos so that this time the military patrol will shoot properly. In the company ledgers these outlays are duly entered, but not their purpose. And finally Juan Escudero falls, very much shot, dead of total death you might say, thank you, gentlemen.

  (441)

  1923: Azángaro

  Urviola

  His family wanted him to be a doctor. Instead he became an Indian, as if his double-humped back and dwarf stature were not curse enough. Ezequiel Urviola quit his law career in Puno vowing to follow in the footsteps of Túpac Amaru. Since then he speaks Quechua, wears sandals, chews coca, and plays the quena flute. Day and night he comes and goes, inciting revolt in the Peruvian sierra, where the Indians have proprietors like the mules and the trees.

  The police dream of catching the hunchback Urviola; the landlords pledge it; but the little shrimp turns into an eagle flying over the mountains.

  (370)

  1923: Callao

  Mariátegui

  A ship brings José Carlos Mariátegui back to Peru after some years in Europe. When he left he was a bohemian nighthawk from Lima who wrote about horses, a mystical poet who felt deeply and understood little. Over in Europe he discovered America. Mariátegui found Marxism and found Mariátegui, and this was how he learned to see from afar the Peru he couldn’t see close up.

  Mariátegui believes that Marxism means human progress as indisputably as smallpox vaccine or the theory of relativity, but to Peruvianize Peru one has to start by Peruvianizing Marxism, which is not a catechism or the tracing of some master plan, but a key to enter deep into this country. And the clues to the depths of his country are in the Indian communities, dispossessed by the sterile landowner system but unconquered in their socialist traditions of work and life.

  (321, 277, and 355)

  1923: Buenos Aires

  Snapshot of a Worker-Hunter

  He peruses the firearms catalogs lasciviously, as if they were pornography. For him the uniform of the Argentine army is as beautiful as the smoothest of human skin. He likes skinning alive the foxes that fall into his traps, but prefers making target practice of fleeing workers, the more so if they are reds, and more yet if they are foreign reds.

  Jorge Ernesto Pérez Millán Temperley enlisted as a volunteer in the troop of Lieutenant Colonel Varela, and last year marched to Patagonia for the sport of liquidating any strikers who came within range. Later, when the German anarchist Kurt Wilckens threw the bomb that blew up Lieutenant Colonel Varela, this hunter of workers swore loudly to avenge his superior.

  And avenge him he does. In the name of the Argentine Patriotic League, Jorge Ernesto Pérez Millán Temperley fires a Mauser bullet into the chest of Wilckens as he sleeps in his cell, then has himself immediately photographed for posterity, gun in hand, striking a martial pose of duty done.

  (38).

  1923: Tampico

  Traven

  A phantom ship, an old hulk destined to be wrecked, arrives off the coast of Mexico. Among its crew, vagabonds without name or nation, is a survivor of the suppressed revolution in Germany.

  This comrade of Rosa Luxemburg, fugitive from hunger and the police, writes his first novel in Tampico and signs it B. Traven. With that name he will become famous without anyone ever knowing which
face or voice or footstep is his. Traven decides to be a mystery, so that no bureaucracy can label him. All the better to mock a world where the marriage contract and inheritance matter more than love and death.

  (398)

  1923: The Fields of Durango

  Pancho Villa Reads the Thousand and One Nights,

  deciphering the words out loud by candlelight, because this is the book that gives him the best dreams; and afterward, he awakens early to pasture the cows with his old battle comrades.

  Villa is still the most popular man in the fields of northern Mexico, and officialdom doesn’t like it a bit. Today it is three years since his men turned the Canutillo hacienda into a cooperative, which now has a hospital and a school, and a world of people have come to celebrate.

  Villa is listening to his favorite corridos when Don Fernando, a pilgrim from Granada, mentions that John Reed has just died in Moscow.

  Pancho Villa orders the party stopped. Even the flies pause in flight.

  “So old Juan died? My old pal, Juan?”

  “Himself.”

  Villa half believes and half not.

  “I saw it in the papers,” Don Fernando says, excusing himself. “He’s buried over there with the heroes of the revolution.”

  Nobody breathes. Nobody disturbs the silence. Don Fernando murmurs: “It was typhus, not a bullet.”

  And Villa nods his head: “So old Juan died.”

  Then repeats: “So old Juan’s dead.”