“Carlos, let’s get out of here, damn it,” he says, grabbing his friend’s arm.
Just then they hear a metallic banging rapidly approaching. A whistle. The crowd seems to respond to the noise, and José and Carlos are pulled along with it.
“Scabs! Scabs!”
It’s a convoy carrying goods to the wharf, and the crowd manages to stop it by hurling stones. It all happens so quickly that there’s no time to react. A few men clamber up on the locomotive and haul the engineer out of his cab. Carlos sees them drag him to the ground like a rag doll, but he doesn’t feel anything; it’s as if the images parading before him were happening in the pages of a book or being projected on a white sheet with a cinematograph. He is unaccustomed to violence, to the notion that ghastly things might suddenly take place before his eyes. Violence is something that’s always happened somewhere else, deep in the jungle, far from the clearing where he played with Román.
“Shit,” he hears José say above the tumult.
Suddenly a few shots are fired into the air. Or maybe not into the air. In the distance, perhaps, the girl. Is that her parasol, or a soldier’s white uniform? The noise of helmets falling upon the paving stones. More gunshots.
“The cavalry! The cavalry!”
Above the agitated faces, the bodies of the first horsemen come into view. There aloft, they might be at the bow of a ship that cuts through the swell of workers, who shout and scatter in all directions. He sees their sabers flash in the air. A man stabbed by a bayonet. Two dockworkers who bring down one of the horses by throwing rocks at its muzzle. José’s hand gripping his arm, bruising him, trying to drag him somewhere or perhaps trying desperately not to be dragged himself. Then he sees a horseman pass by him on his left, and at that moment he feels a sudden burning, as if a bolt of lightning had struck him in the face. The sensation is a sharp pang, one that isn’t preceded by any sound, that seems to have no origin or explanation. A cold bite that sears his temple and tumbles him to the ground.
As he falls he thinks he sees José turn to look at him. José hesitates a moment and then keeps running.
It’s possible that things don’t happen exactly like that. Maybe José does not see him fall. Perhaps he too is dragged along by the crowd and could have done nothing to help him anyway. It is possible that the person who looks at him and then runs off amid the uproar isn’t even José. But whatever the case, that’s how events will be etched in Carlos’s memory: him falling and José abandoning him to his fate.
For a moment he thinks he’s going to pass out. That’s what always happens in his favorite novels. The hero falls, wounded, and the world stops with him. Everything turns black, or white, or red, according to the author’s whims; reality disappears into a fog, and that fog does not clear until, hours or days later, the protagonist regains consciousness. But none of that happens.
He is able to feel, almost to count each of the blows he receives — twenty-seven — as the terrified mob tramples his body. He hears shouts, gunshots, horses’ hooves scraping the cobblestones. Voices cry out, pleading for help. Then something like silence. The taste of blood in his mouth. And finally some words he can’t understand, and the eyes of the soldier bending over him to check his pulse.
~ ~ ~
◊
The wounded are taken to the Guadalupe house of aid. The first to be treated is one Florencio Aliaga, who has a bullet lodged in his groin and is as gray as a corpse. Then the medics come back for the less seriously injured. Finally they even come to Carlos’s aid, though he has only a few contusions and a laceration on his face. He is embarrassed to be transported on a stretcher, since his single wound has already stopped bleeding. But he lets himself be carried, what choice does he have, while he looks around for José. He does not find him.
“My goodness, a gentleman like yourself — what were you doing among that rabble?” the aide asks as he helps Carlos remove his eighty-sol suit.
“I was waiting for some letters…”
And he doesn’t whimper once as he gets five stitches in his cheek. That’s one of the most important lessons he must credit his father for having taught him: not to cry out, not ever, even when they’re shredding the skin on your back with lashes.
He is afraid they will want to interrogate him, but nobody seems to be paying any attention to him. The doctors and nurses hurry from one cot to another, fold and unfold mosquito nets, push little carts loaded with scalpels and buckets of blood-tinged water. The aide also leaves him alone. Carlos struggles to his feet and then sits back down. The room is an immense nave with dozens of beds along either side, and everywhere are muffled moans and whimpers as the suture needle sews up wounds or the forceps dig around in them to pull out shrapnel. Two soldiers are posted by the door at the far end of the room, but they hold their rifles listlessly, as if they were laborers’ tools. They look like peasants. Perhaps, when they return home and remove their leathers and uniforms, they really are peasants. Now, though, away from their horses, their unsheathed swords, their combat formations, they also look like little boys.
That’s when he spots Sandoval. He’s going from bed to bed with concern on his face, checking on his comrades, murmuring a few words of encouragement. The doctors eye him reprovingly, but no one dares say anything. He looks like a father anxious about his children’s health, pacing back and forth with his hands behind his back and a solemn expression.
“Gálvez!” he says upon recognizing him. “Carlos Gálvez! What on earth are you doing here?”
Carlos — Rodríguez — hesitates a moment. No one has ever mixed up their last names before.
“Actually, I’m Rodríguez. It’s José who’s—”
“What goddamn difference does a last name make? Haven’t you learned anything?” he asks, making a grand gesture in the air, one that blots out genealogies, privileges, the past. “Oh dear, you’re injured! What have those butchers done to you?”
His voice sounds oddly tender. He draws near and examines the sutured wound. His eyes fill with pride. He takes off his hat and points to his own scar, also on the left side of his face, in almost exactly the same spot.
“Here’s my own baptism gift. A souvenir of the strike of ’99,” he says boastfully. “A soldier gave me this gift when I was about your age and I too was just beginning to engage in the struggle.”
“I’m not in the struggle. I just—”
“Of course, of course. You were just there by chance, right?”
Carlos begins babbling about Georgina, about letters that neither came nor went, but Sandoval interrupts him.
“Martín.”
“Pardon?”
“You don’t have to call me Sandoval. You can call me Martín,” says Martín.
Then, before Carlos can start explaining again, Martín places his hand on his shoulder and adds solemnly:
“And you don’t have to say anything. When our enemies bite the dust at last, we will remember sacrifices like yours. We will be able to sort out the wheat from the chaff. Those who were in the trenches from the beginning, and those who will have no place in the new order.”
“In 2014,” Carlos says, almost without thinking.
Martín scowls.
“Long before that! Why, today alone we have brought the eight-hour workday two or three years closer.”