The rainy season didn’t intimidate the operation. It would continue throughout that October, and would see out the year on the Araguaia.
Soon afterwards another guerrilla, said to be very beautiful, was caught. She was shot in the leg first, and a soldier approached her and asked her name. And she said guerrillas don’t have names, you bastard. I fight for freedom. And all of the soldiers in the patrol, almost ten of them, pumped the beautiful guerrilla full of bullets. Want freedom? There you go.
And soon after that another guerrilla was killed. He was found by his companions without his head — a trophy sent to the army base in Xambioá.
It became a fad and another combatant was decapitated after he was killed by soldiers.
Things weren’t going so well for the communists. Several subsequent actions were unsuccessful. They still didn’t have enough weapons or ammunition and many guerrillas no longer had any shoes. There were casualties and there were also deserters.
In the beginning the guerrillas had no idea of the size of the new military offensive. Little by little they learned. And that was how they spent Christmas of 1973, six years after they had moved into the region: listening to helicopters overhead. In other encounters with the forces of repression, throughout December, more of them were killed, including members of the guerrillas’ Military Commission — and among them the commander general, Maurício Grabois, who went by the codename Mário.
Fernando, who was no longer Chico and was now far away, didn’t know anything about it. He found out afterwards.
Afterwards he found out that the guerrillas who stayed in the area dispersed and then regrouped, trying to throw the enemy off their trail. But none of it did any good.
He also found out that a report from the Army Information Center, with the word SECRET (a word that was a hallmark of much of what went on in those days in that region, and would continue to be so for some time) stamped across the top said: To Cease Operation “MARAJOARA” before the enemy has been completely destroyed could allow them to rise up again, with even greater vigor and experience. It could even provide them with proof of the viability, in BRAZIL, of guerrilla warfare in the countryside as an instrument in the struggle for power.
In early 1974 a member of the guerrillas’ Military Commission fled the forest — Ângelo Arroyo, Chico and Manuela’s former commander at Detachment A. (He fled but insisted, back in São Paulo, that the armed struggle on the Araguaia should continue. Less than three years later, he was hunted down and murdered by the forces of repression.) Other members of the Central Committee, such as João Amazonas and Elza Monerat, hadn’t been in the Bico do Papagaio region for quite some time.
In February, Osvaldão, another who had been there from the beginning, who was the communists’ immortal warrior, was killed. His body was exhibited in local settlements. The immortal one was dead. Brought down by a woodsman. Then they made his body disappear. The military would finish exterminating the guerrillas with Operation Cleanup — a simple, crystal-clear, honest name that required no interpretation.
General Geisel, who took office that same month, said that the whole business of killing was regrettable, but it couldn’t have been any different.
And with that the killings went on. And on. They needed to kill and then kill the deaths, so to speak. They needed to kill history. To kill the memory and a certain inconvenient awareness.
They all died, one by one. Some simply went missing, but missing was one of the codenames of death. It was another way to pronounce it.
Among the missing, among those who no one knew how they had died and where they were buried, was Manuela. She was captured one day when she went to visit a local woman who used to collaborate with the guerrillas, in search of food. Famished, thin, sick, barefoot, covered in sores and insect bites, Manuela spent the night at the woman’s house and woke up surrounded by soldiers. That was the last anyone heard of her. Her parents grew old and died without ever knowing what happened to her.
The last guerrilla was executed in October. Walkíria Afonso Costa, a.k.a. Walk, was captured in Xambioá.
To erase their own footprints, the military decided to dig up the bodies, which were compromising, and burn them in the forest, which they did using tires and gasoline.
In the country’s unofficial, confidential history, the Araguaia guerrilla war was over.
In São Paulo, Ângelo Arroyo continued to believe in the strategy of armed struggle in the countryside. In the second half of 1976, he traveled to other regions of the country in search of alternative scenarios for the fight. He visited the states of Rondônia, Acre and Mato Grosso, and sailed down the Amazon. He was machine-gunned down two days after the party’s Central Committee met in São Paulo in December of that year, a meeting in which he continued to insist on the guerrilla movement.
Florence gazed at me. We came here because during the time she spent with your son Suzana fell pregnant, and at the end of the year she had a daughter.
Florence gazed at me as June, whose words still rang in the air, and Fernando, whose expectation resounded even higher, gazed at Florence and Carlos kneaded his ball of clay as if he were trying to pulverize it. To transmute earth into fireworks. To see dancing lights explode in the air and ricochet off sculptures and items of pottery.
Florence looked at me and asked, is it true?
I saw her eyes moving slowly within their orbits. I saw the wrinkles around her eyes growing longer and deeper, the genesis of a new mountain range in swift animation. Unstable plates were moving inside her, in a subterranean heart, amidst cold underground water and corridors of hot lava.
Why didn’t you call me first?
We did, said June. A few weeks ago.
I must have heard your message — I listen to them at least once a week. But I’m a bit absent-minded. I think I’ve already told you that. And even if I didn’t, you must have noticed. One notices such things.
It doesn’t matter, said June.
No, said Florence. It doesn’t.
And then, having obtained whatever it was that she needed, she turned to June and Fernando and said thank you for coming and for trusting me.
There was an inversion in that, I thought. She was the one who was trusting us. She was the one who was doing us the favor of believing, in a world of unbelievers and the mistrustful. She was the one who was accepting a tiny revision brought to her on a tray with tea and ginger cookies. A new member of the family on a plate, to use as a sugar substitute.
But Florence took my hands in hers, and it was as if our hands were also exchanging words, looks, completing phone calls that had gone astray. My small, thin, rough hands. Her long, knotty hands, with age spots.
Isabel came with us when we returned to June’s house after that night in Vista del Mundo, in Albuquerque. I was going to celebrate Thanksgiving for the first time in my life, without really knowing what it was that we were celebrating, together with my Salvadoran friend, my mother’s Brazilian ex-husband, my mother’s old friend made-in-the-UK, my mother’s former Puerto Rican student and the two old mastiffs. And the next day, now familiarized, we would look like a rehashed hippie community. And in the middle of the night I would see the pair of coyotes, the Canis latrans, which were thin, with long legs and pointy ears. The aloof, nocturnal pair.
On the Sunday, we would head back north. To Colorado, Lakewood and the house on Jay Street. Isabel would take a bus back to Albuquerque. And things would silently migrate out of themselves and become other things that no one imagined they would. Things would revolutionize themselves, slowly and quietly.