The doctor was disconcerted. He could not imagine who they were up against. Was General Aipe behind all this? Now he doubted it.
“They said,” added another apprentice, fair, almost albino, “that in any case they were going to boot us all up in the air, one by one.”
“Like we were lying around to start with,” the fat one said, laughing. But the fair boy spoke again, very grave:
“They especially mentioned you, Doctor. They said: ‘We’re going to boot that so-and-so sky high.’”
“As if I were lying around too,” the doctor said.
“And if you carry on being a nuisance, they will shoot you, not boot you, Doctor.”
The fat boy burst out laughing; only then did the rest join in.
“Lucky none of us is lying around,” the doctor said in parting.
He drove through the muddy streets, unable to guess Cangrejito Arbeláez’s destination. The midday chill dampened his spirits. Who was he fighting against? Was it possible the mayor and bishop’s warnings would come true? He was worried about the sculptor’s fate — where would he have gone? Maestro Abril was the only person who could bring him up to date with events.
The secret poet Rodolfo Puelles was not convinced by the direction things were heading in. He had, above all within himself, serious reasons for this — or, better put, one single and terrible reason, although he admitted, inwardly, that things had begun with the best of intentions. But why, he yelled inside, are we messing them up?
Two years earlier, the group’s founding members had participated in one of Colombia’s historic student marches, which brought together more than five hundred thousand citizens in the capital. It was during this encounter that the group gained in numbers and enthusiasm: one of its members had even been given a grant by Fidel Castro’s government and travelled to Cuba to complete his studies. He sent passionate and inspiring letters from the island, which were seen by the group as triumphant war reports. When the student wrote that he was to go to Russia to specialize, and in addition receive political training, maybe military, the group was divided: some argued the student should return to Colombia immediately to take up the struggle again and occupy the position allotted to him, while others felt his sojourn in Russia was an “essential” experience, which would be to everyone’s advantage. So the hours had flown past until the early morning, and the wasting of energy on similar controversies, and other even more trivial matters (should you read or not read Count Leo Tolstoy: decadent writer, retrograde, symbol of Russian aristocracy?), undermined the poet’s morale, all the more so when the “polemic” about Tolstoy originated not from a sensible study of his work, but in a chance occurrence: the book had fallen out of his knapsack onto the table, and in spite of the covers being carefully wrapped in newsprint, the paper came adrift and title and author appeared before them alclass="underline" The Devil, Leo Tolstoy. Enrique Quiroz picked up the book, showed it around as if showing them the actual devil, and did so with a disparaging smile, the same one spreading across the others’ faces: incredulous eyes scrutinized the poet Puelles as if they would unmask him. What was he up to, this Puelles, who was he, really? Puelles prepared himself for the fight, more apathetic than resolved: he gave up before he started — and with all the more reason, he thought, when Tolstoy was the namesake of the dissident Trotsky.
Was it so important to finish your degree, or better to take up arms, go into the mountains and educate the rural masses?
The recent death of Father Camilo Torres — founder of the sociology faculty at the National University, principal representative of liberation theology, leader of the people — which took place in February 1966, when he was cut down during his first combat, had been the trigger for Enrique Quiroz’s group to seriously consider the creation of an urban guerrilla front. The poet Puelles backed the initiative: he would prefer to fight in the city (he could not imagine himself firing a gun in the depths of the jungle), finish his degree and, above all, pursue his secret occupation, poetry, his poetry, the humorous love that sprang from his pores, as he put it. That is why he devoted himself to supporting the urban front and making it a reality. Up to that point, everything had gone well for Rodolfo Puelles, but formulating urban guerrilla war in Bogotá, with the Quiroz brothers plus three others from the Pasto front, and four from the capital, got off to an unanticipated start.
The secret poet Rodolfo Puelles had returned to Pasto after that whole venture in a state of shock, his life for ever divided into a “Before” and “After.”
As a “trial by fire,” the members of the group (without anyone knowing who came up with the idea, nor how or when) had decided to “eliminate an enemy”: kill a policeman, the secret poet repeated to himself, still incredulous; a policeman they had already had under surveillance and who did nothing but earn his wages chasing pickpockets in Bogotá; a policeman, what’s more, who was in civilian clothing at the moment of his “execution”; they killed him when he went to buy milk at a shop, one block from his house, in a working-class neighbourhood. He was the enemy. The enemy, the secret poet thought, what enemy? He was not in the least convinced.
Although the revolution should give no respite, a trial like that never seemed necessary to him, and he had not managed to get a decent night’s sleep since, but the reason he could not sleep in peace — over and above everything else in the world — was because it was him, in short, Rodolfo Puelles, secret poet, who had shot the policeman, an “indigenous-looking man in a poncho who turned out to be a police officer”—as reporters for the gutter press would later describe him—“He went out to buy milk, and never came home,” “Killed for a bottle of milk,” “Policeman, out of uniform, was buying milk,” “Thieves unaware he was carrying service revolver.”
It happened at seven o’clock at night.
Enrique Quiroz was in charge of the strike: when the big moment arrived, he froze. The other Quiroz got drunk the night before, and had stayed that way. There were three more from the Pasto front with Puelles and Quiroz—“Ilyich” from Cali, “Catiri” from the plains, and “Ulyanov” from Chocó—and four from Bogotá, scattered at strategic points around the objective: all frozen. Only the secret poet fired once, at the head. Yet he was the most frightened and the one who least supported the action. He fired out of pure, physical fright, he thought; he remembered he’d wet himself as he did it. The policeman crumpled instantly and they all fled, every man for himself; they did not seize the police weapon. Did anyone take the bottle of milk? No, that was an invention of the bourgeois press, they said, it must have been filched by the homeless guy who was looking on.
They returned to Pasto by separate routes, and only met up again after several nightmarish days.
Enrique Quiroz could not forgive the fact that no-one had taken the victim’s gun, that no-one retrieved it as a trophy, that they did not leave a written note, that they did not shout a defiant warning, a challenge, advance notice of the new revolutionary force. “What utter retards,” he bawled, “and we haven’t even got a name.”
Quiroz, better than anyone, understood the radicalism of guerrilla war, and applauded it. The year before, a commander in the People’s Army had executed a deserter. That was something else, he thought, that was betrayal, and fully deserved execution. The death of the policeman was a mistake that Enrique Quiroz, the real originator of the idea, did not want to, nor could ever, admit to in front of his men—“Bolívar made big mistakes,” he said to himself, “the mistakes of a great man: necessary errors, but he didn’t go around confessing them”—and when the group was back together again, in the safety of the parish church of Nuestro Señor de los Despojos, he told them the elimination of anyone in uniform was one more victory for the revolution, and that the death of a policeman must not be “sentimentalized,” because even if he was a plain and simple officer, he was someone who, although an authentic son of the people, was still in the service of imperialism, the master’s dog, the guardian of the oppressor, dammit, this is a war to the death, like the one Bolívar waged against the Spaniards. And he banged his fist on the table: