MIXTEC PEOPLE, AWAKE!
HISTORICAL MATERIALISM
MEANS VICTORY FOR THE PROLETARIAT
cheek by jowl with:
CHRISTIANS YES! COMMIES NO!
VOTE WITH THE SYNARCH FALANGE AND
CROSS OUT THE ATHEISTS!
and just beyond the usual fucked-over faces, my mother sends me effluvia of vibrant acid, all to this drop of tremulous life, this tiny Mercury without wings that I am, beyond the walls and among the puddles and dogs are the men, women and children, the mass of fleas, hunger, sickness, self-centered pride, and abysmal ignorance of what really matters in the modern world and equally abysmal knowledge of what no one can any longer touch, listen to, understand. My mother orders me to say, not you Homero, not you Fernando, not you Angel, not I, not you, Reader, not even you, my own future offspring.
From a distance, they caught sight of the workers busily paving a stretch of the access road to the highway: the mounds of gravel, the barrels of tar, sieves, and an ancient leveler that ecumenically announced its passage in a series of steam hiccups.
“The time has come!” exclaimed Don Fernando Benítez, sitting astride his burro, to Don Homero Fagoaga, who was docilely leading him along by the reins just as my father Angel was leading my mother Angeles through the rose-colored fields of heather in this provincial place where he had learned to love a land which he had not given up for lost, doubtless because between strolling through the garden and sitting immobile in church he’d learned to talk to himself and in doing that he’d heard for the first time: don’t give me up for lost; wipe off my makeup; I know how to endure.
“The time has come!” repeated Uncle Fernando energetically.
“The time for what?” Homero asked in consternation.
“The time for you to prove your loyalty, villain.”
“I don’t understand what you mean,” said Uncle Homero, regaining a measure of his tottering conceit.
“You most certainly do: you are going to go up to that group of workers we see in the distance and you are going to speak to them, Homero, not in official jargon but in the language of democratic truth.”
“What do you want me to tell them?” asked Homero with less irony than resignation.
Don Fernando scanned the horizon.
“I’m willing to bet they’re not unionized. In these parts, they subcontract some jobs and the worker is not protected in any way. Bah, the economic philosophy of that skunk Ulises López has spread and now people think that the democratic way to do things is for each worker to make his own contract with the boss. You must convince them in socialist-style talk of their need to join together and bargain from a position of strength about salaries. Get going, you rat.”
Don Homero’s protests were useless; the group made up by my two uncles, my father, and my mother (and I, bouncing along without anyone but your worships knowing anything about it) went trotting along in the classic style toward the workers, who stopped working when they saw them; someone whistled, laughter rang out, and a huge, powerful, dark man got down from the leveler. The machine ground to a halt, either as if the man had been pedaling it and simply stopped or as if it simply refused to go if he weren’t driving it: the image was that the man, who was wearing a wide-brimmed straw hat pulled down over his eyes, its brim turned downward so that his face was always in the shadow, was consubstantial with the machine he drove. A centaur of our national machinery.
The other workers were all wearing old khaki, as if they were in uniform. And, just like the man who got off the leveler, they, too, wore old hats to protect themselves from the sun. My mother squeezed my father’s hand, trying to tell him something’s going to happen, I have a feeling, this is no joke, I swear I suddenly feel more afraid than I did in Acapulco, as if all that had been a joke and now being here with these people was not.
But there was no time for any more hunches. Uncle Homero, following Uncle Fernando’s irrevocable command and showing the agility he only revealed on grand occasions, ran toward the leveler recently abandoned by the somber, powerful man, who was walking as if he were dragging a chain and cannonball. Still agog, Uncle H. clambered up the leveler, on the side facing a row of dried-out agave, slipping and sliding, squeezing himself over under and around the driver’s seat and finally posing on the outside stair.
Two things happened: first, our admirable relative, as soon as he realized he was once again on a speaker’s platform, recovered all his flatulent self-confidence; second, his traditional lordly bearing was comically undermined by his having to cling to the iron handle on the outside of the leveler so he wouldn’t fall into the fresh tar above which he was swinging while the members of the work squad nudged each other. Don Homero launched into the second speech of his nerve-racking electoral campaign: he always knew to whom he was speaking; in his bosom and in his tongue all opposites came into harmony; Fagoaga never loses, so: Comrades!:
“Just one look at your callused proletarian hands tells me that only a divisive, murderous faction could detour you away from the route of workers’ internationalism. But I am here to remind you that in the proletarian struggle the real enemy is the enemy within, always the one inside us.”
He glowered in a sinister way at the workers; one of them put his index finger to his temple and made a circle with it. My father tried to interrupt with a shout, as if he’d been impelled to do so by Angeles’s foreboding: “We’ve come about the keys! Who’s got the keys to the church?” he shouted, trying to speed things to their conclusion.
But Don Homero Fagoaga, master of distraction and fraud, would not allow himself to be distracted or defrauded, especially after what had happened in Igualistlahuaca.
He went on intrepidly: “The front line of the left-wing parties is made up of groups so divergent that they will never manage to form a single party unless we first search our bosoms for the vermin hidden there whose divisiveness will ultimately succeed in chaining us to the chariot of the upper classes who, even though they have been conquered, nevertheless cannot resign themselves to disappearing forever from the stage of history. But as soon as you unite, expel the turncoats, discover and break up the network of traitors and provocateurs that exists right here among you”—and here Uncle Homero’s ill-fated rhetorical impulse caused him to point his finger at this man, that man, the other man, all of whom raised their eyes from their tacos, left their bottles in peace, and wiped their mouths (which were smeared with dark plums) on their sleeves—“because, comrade, we don’t know if you, or you, or even you, comrade, have the perverted intention of sniping against the working class and the revolutionary movement.” And now the first plum splattered against Uncle Homero Fagoaga’s already ill-used jacket, another plum to the stomach, plum to the knees, plum to the backside when Homero uselessly tried to retreat. A final plum caught Uncle Homero right in the face, a black flower splattered along his nose and cheeks while our brave Uncle Fernando walked right up to the man standing with his arms crossed and his face covered by the brim of his hat, the man Fernando had intuitively singled out as the leader of the group.