Your brother saw your expression and warned you: resistance would be futile, a heroic but empty gesture; a few guerrillas could never defeat the most powerful army on earth; we need order and stability, we must accept the reality of our contemporary world, be satisfied with being a protectorate of Anglo-Saxon democracy, we are interdependent, no one will come to our assistance, the spheres of influence are too perfectly defined, U.S.A., U.S.S.R., China, get rid of your anachronistic ideas, there are only three powers in the world, we are going to realize the dream of universal government, and shelve your moth-eaten nationalism …
You seized the paper knife lying on the desk of the First Minister and plunged it into his belly; your brother had no opportunity to cry out, blood spurted from his mouth, choking him; you drove the bronze dagger into his chest, his back, his face; your brother fell against the multicolored buttons and the pictures faded from the screens, the mirrors once again covered with smoke.
You walked calmly from the office, amiably, you bade goodbye to the secretaries: your brother had asked that no one interrupt him for any reason. Slowly you walked the length of the corridors and patios of the National Palace. You stopped for an instant on the stairway and in the central patio before the murals of Diego Rivera. The Military Junta had ordered they be boarded over. They gave as an excuse the imminent need for restoration.
You open your eyes. You see the real world surrounding you and you know that you are that world and that you battle for it. It is not the first time we have fought. Your smile fades. Perhaps it is the last.
“What shall we do with the old woman, sir?”
“I don’t know. I don’t want to decide.”
“Forgive me, sir, but who, if not you?”
“We could stow her away somewhere, Dusty. In some solitary, well-guarded house. How about a madhouse or a convent, Dusty?”
“Is there no superior officer who decides these things?”
“No, sir. There’s not enough time.”
“You’re right. It’s also true that we don’t have any extra men to look after prisoners…”
“Besides, they limit our mobility.”
“And as an example, Dusty, as an example. Of course she was a spy, one of the enemy. This isn’t her country.”
“Very well. Shoot her today. Over there, against the wall behind my hut.”
“What’s she doing?”
“Writing names in the dust with her finger.”
“What names?”
“Names of old bitches: Juana, Isabel, Carlota…”
Beneath the sun you walk back toward the Indian hut. You wonder whether as it appears every morning the sun sacrifices its light in honor of our need; or whether that light, in some manner sufficient to itself, spends its transparency in revealing our opacity. But the light gives form and reality to our bodies. You must shake off this nightmare. Because of the light we know who we are. Without it, we would come to invent identity antennae, detectors for the bodies we wished to touch and recognize. You wonder whether it is possible to shoot a ghost. You aren’t lying to yourself anymore, you know where you have seen before the eyes of an ancient, mutilated, armless and legless woman wrapped in black rags, the eyes of a Queen of vulnerable strength and cruel compassion. The nightmare calls you again; you were also in that painting …
You stop. Beside the entrance to the hut a young native girl with smooth, firm (you are sure) skin, tattooed lips, and scarred ankles is weaving and unraveling, with dexterity and serenity, a strange cloth of feathers. At her side, a soldier is playing a guitar, and singing. You approach the girl. In that instant, the bombardment begins anew.
The lazy dog consists of a mother bomb fabricated of light metal that bursts while still in the air and close to the ground, or when it strikes the ground. Inside the mother bomb there are three hundred metal balls, each the size of a tennis ball, which, as they are liberated from the maternal bosom, scatter independently in every direction, either exploding immediately or lying in ambush in undergrowth or dust, awaiting a child’s foot or a woman’s hand, blowing off the foot, the hand, or the head of the first woman or child who touches it. The men are all in the mountains.