The
During
the period of flight from the government's February 1995 military offensive,
while avoiding guns, bombs, and in Durito's case, sixty thousand pairs of large
boots, Marcos tells Durito the story of an ugly man and the
To the national weekly Proceso
To the national
newspaper El Financiero
To the national
newspaper La Jornada
To the local newspaper
of
Ladies and Gentlemen:
Another thank-you letter going out, this time for those abroad. Let's
see if Gurría manages to read it, since he's sending out nothing but lies all
over
Vale. Salud, and may the spring in your blood
be destined for someone.
From the mountains of
the Mexican Southeast
Subcommandante
Insurgente Marcos
P.S. That, in mourning,
cries. I was listening on the little tape-player to that tune by Stephen
Stills, from the album Four Way Street,
that goes, "Find the cost of freedom, buried in the ground. Mother Earth
will swallow you, lay your body down..."[3] when my
Other Self comes running and tells me, "It looks like you got what was
coming to you..."
"Don't tell me the
PRI has already fallen?" I ask with hope.
"No man!... They
killed you!" says my Other Self.
"Me! When? Where?"
I ask as I go through all my memories of where I've been and what I've done.
"Today, in a
confrontation... but they don't say exactly where," he responds.
"Oh, good!... And
did I end up badly hurt or really dead?" I insist.
"Really, really
dead... that's what it says in the news," says my Other Self and leaves.
A narcisistic sob
competes with the crickets.
"Why are you
crying?" asks Durito while he lights his pipe.
"Because I can't
attend my burial. I, who loved me so much..."
P.S.: That tells what
happened to El Sup and Durito during the twelfth day of the withdrawal, of the
mysteries of the Cave of Desire, and of other unfortunate events that today
make us laugh, but at that time took away even our hunger.
"And if they bomb
us?" asked Durito in the early morning on the twelfth day of the
withdrawal. ("That was no withdrawal!
It was pure flight!" says Durito.) It's cold and a grey wind licks
with its icy tongue the darkness of trees and earth.
I'm not sleeping; in
solitude the cold hurts twice as much. Nevertheless I keep quiet. Durito comes
out from under the leaf he's been using as a blanket and climbs up on top of
mine. To wake me up, he starts tickling my nose. I sneeze with such emphasis
that Durito ends up, tumbling over himself onto my boots. He recovers and makes
his way back to my face.
"What's happened?"
I ask him before he tickles me again.
"And if they bomb
us?" he insists.
"Yes... well...
well... we'll look for a cave or something like that to hide ourselves in... or
we'll climb in a little hole... or we'll see what to do," I say with
annoyance, and look at my watch to insinuate that it isn't the hour to be
worrying about bombings.
"I won't have any
problems. I can fit anywhere. But you, with those big boots and that nose... I
doubt that you'll find a safe place," says Durito as he covers himself again
with a little huapac leaf.
"The psychology of
terror," I think, with respect to the apparent indifference of Durito
regarding our fate...
"Our fate? He's
right! He won't have problems, but me...," I think. I get up and speak to
Durito,
"Psst... Psst...
Durito!"
"I'm sleeping,"
he says from under his leaf.
I ignore his sleep and
begin talking to him: "Yesterday I heard Camilo and my Other Self saying
that there are a lot of caves around here. Camilo says he knows most of them.
There are small ones, where an armadillo would barely fit. And there are some
as big as churches. But he says there is one that no one dares to enter. He
says there is an ugly story about that cave. The
Durito seems to get
interested, his passion for detective novels is his ruin.
"And what is the
story of that cave?"
"Well... It's a
very long story. I've heard it myself, but that was years ago now... I don't
remember it well," I said, making it interesting.
"Fine, go on, tell
it," says Durito, more and more interested.
I light my pipe. From
amid the aromatic smoke comes the memory, and with it...
"It
happened many years ago. It is a story of a love that was not, that was left
just like that. It is a sad story... and terrible," says El Sup sitting on
one side, with his pipe in his lips. He lights it, and looking at the mountain,
continues, "A man came from far away. He came, or he already was there. No
one knows. It was back in other times long past and however that may be, in
these lands people lived and died just the same, without hope and forgotten. No
one knows if he was young or old, that man. Few are those who saw him at first.
They say that was because this man was extremely ugly. Just to see him produced
dread in men and revulsion in women. What was it that made him so unpleasant? I
don't know, the concepts of beauty and ugliness change so much from one age to
another and from one culture to another. In this case, the people native to
these lands avoided him, as did the foreigners who were the owners of land,
men, and destinies. The indigenous people called him the Jolmash or
Monkey-face; the foreigners called him the Animal.
"The man went into the mountains, far from the
gaze of all, and set to work there. He made himself a little house, next to one
of the many caves that were found there. He made the land produce, planted corn
and wheat, and hunting animals in the forest gave him enough to get by. Every
so often he went down to a stream near the settlements. There he had arranged,
with one of the older members of the community, to get salt, sugar, or whatever
else he, the Jolmash, couldn't obtain in the mountains. The Jolmash exchanged
corn and animal skins for what he needed. The Jolmash would arrive at the
stream at the time when evening began to darken and the shadows of the trees
brought forth night onto the earth. The old man had a problem with his eyes and
couldn't see well, so that, with the dusk and his illness, he couldn't make out
the face of the man who caused so much revulsion in the clear light.
"One evening the old man didn't arrive. The
Jolmash thought that maybe he had mistaken the hour and arrived when the old
man had already gone home. To make no mistake, the next time he made sure to
arrive earlier. The sun still had some fingers to go before it wrapped itself
in the mountains, when the Jolmash came near the stream. A murmur of laughter
and voices grew as he approached. The Jolmash slowed his steps and came
silently nearer. Among the branches and vines he made out the pool formed by
the waters of the stream. A group of women were bathing and washing clothes.
They were laughing. The Jolmash watched and stayed quiet. His heart became his
only gaze, his eyes his voice. It was a while since the women had gone and the
Jolmash stayed on, watching... The stars were already raining down on the
fields when he returned to the mountains.
"I don't know if it came from what he saw, or
from what he thought he saw, whether the image that was engraved on his retina
corresponded to reality or if it existed only in his desire, but the Jolmash
fell in love or thought that he had fallen in love. And his love was not
something idealized or platonic, it was quite earthy, and the call of the
feelings that he bore was like a war drum, like lightning that becomes fierce
rain. Passion took his hand and the Jolmash began to write letters, love
letters, lettered delirium that filled his hands.
"And he wrote, for example, 'Oh, lady of the wet
glimmer! Desire becomes a haughty colt. Sword of a thousand mirrors is the
yearning of my appetites for thy body, and in vain its double edge rips the
thousand gasps that fly on the wind. One grace, long sleeplessness! One grace I
ask thee, lady, failed repose of my grey existence! Let me come to thy neck.
'Allow that to thy ear climbs my clumsy longing. Let
my desire tell thee, softly, very softly, that which my breast silences. Do not
look, lady-so-far-from-mine, at the pitiful sight which adorns my face! Let thy
ears become thy gaze; give up thine eyes to see the murmurs that walk within
me, longing for thy within. Yes, I wish to enter. To walk thee, with sighs, the
path that hands and lips and sex desire. Thy wet mouth, and I, thirsting, to
enter with a kiss. On the double hill of thy breast to softly brush lips and
fingers, to awaken the cluster of moans that hide within. To march southward
and to take prisoner thy waist in warm embrace, burning now the skin of the
belly, brilliant sun announcing the night that below is born. To evade, diligently
and skillfully, the shears on which thy grace goes and whose vertex promises
and denies. To give thee a tremor of cold heat and arrive, whole, to the moist
stirring of desire. To secure the warmth of my palms in the double warmth of
flesh and movement. One slow first step, a light trot next. Then the runaway
gallop of bodies and desire. To reach the sky, and then collapse.
'One grace, promised weariness! One grace I ask thee,
lady of the soft sigh!
'Let me come to thy neck! In it I am saved, far off I
die.'
"One stormy night, like the passion burning his
hands, a bolt of lightning burnt down the little house of the Jolmash. Wet and
shivering, he took refuge in the neighboring cave. With a torch he lit his way
in and found there little figures of couples giving and receiving, the pleasure
worked in stone and clay. There was a spring, and little boxes that when
opened, spoke of terrors and marvels that had passed and would come to be. The
Jolmash now could not or would not leave the cave. There, he felt the desire
fill his hands once more and wrote, weaving bridges to nowhere...
'A pirate am I now, lady of the longed-for port.
Tomorrow, a soldier at war. Today, a pirate lost in trees and lands. The ship
of desire unfolds its sails. A continual moaning, all tremor and wanting, leads
the ship between monsters and storms. Lightning illuminates the flickering sea
of desperation. A salty dampness takes the command and the helm. Pure wind,
word alone, I navigate seeking thee, amidst gasps and sighs, seeking the
precise place the body sends thee. Desire, lady of storms to come, is a knot
hidden somewhere by thy skin. Find it I must, and muttering spells, untie it.
Free then shall be thy longings, feminine swayings, and they will fill thy eyes
and mouth, thy womb and innards. Free one moment only, as my hands already come
to make them prisoners, to lead them out to sea in my embrace and with my body.
A ship shall I be and restless sea, so that in thy body I enter. And there
shall be no rest in so much storm, the bodies moved by so many capricious
waves. One last and ferocious slap of salty desire hurls us to a beach where
sleep arrives. A pirate am I now, lady of tender storm. Don't await my assault,
come to it! Let the sea, the wind, and this stone-become-ship be witnesses! The
"So it happened, they say. And they say that the
Jolmash never again left the cave. No one knows whether the woman to whom he
wrote the letters existed in truth or was a product of the cave, the
Durito has followed the
whole story attentively. When he sees I have finished, he says,
"We have to go."
"Go?" I ask,
surprised
"Of course!"
says Durito, "I need literary advice to write to my old lady..."
"You're crazy!"
I protest.
"Are you afraid?"
asks Durito ironically.
I waver.
"Well... afraid,
really afraid... no... but it's very cold... and it looks like it's going to
rain... and... yes, I'm afraid."
"Bah! Don't worry.
I'll go with you and I'll be telling you where. I think I know where the
"All right,"
I say, giving in. "You'll be in charge of the expedition."
"Great! My first
order is that you march in the vanguard, in the center nobody, to disconcert
the enemy, and I will go in the extreme rearguard," indicates Durito.
"I? In the
vanguard? I protest!"
"Protest denied!"
says Durito with firmness.
"O.K., soldier to
the end, I'll go along."
"Good, that's what
I like. Attention! This is the plan of attack: First: If there are many, we
run. Second: If there are a few, we hide. Third: If there isn't anyone,
forward, for we were born to die!" dictates Durito while he prepares his
little pack.
For a war plan it
seemed too cautious for me, but Durito was the chief now, and given the
circumstances, I had no reason to object to prudence marching in the vanguard.
Above, the stars were
beginning to blur.
"It looks like it's
going to rain," I say to Durito –excuse me– to the chief.
"Silence! Nothing
will detain us!" shouts Durito with the voice of the sergeant in that
Oliver Stone film Platoon.[4]
A gust of freezing wind
and the first drops...
"Haaalt!"
orders Durito.
The drops of rain start
to multiply...
"I forgot to
mention the fourth point of the plan of attack…," says Durito with doubt.
"Oh yeah? And what
is it?" I ask insidiously.
"If it starts to
rain... strategic withdrawal!" The
last words are said by Durito now in an all out run back to camp.
I ran behind him. It
was useless. We got soaked, and shivering, we reached the little plastic roof.
It rained as if desire had, at last, been unleashed...
Vale again.Salud, and that the hunger for tomorrow
be a desire to struggle... today.
El Sup, within, deep
within, the
It's March, it's early
morning, and for being a dead man, I feel veeery well.
* * *
*First published in La Jornada on
[1] José Angel Gurría Treviño was Secretary of
Foreign Affairs from
[2] As part of
the Law of Reconciliation and Dialogue (see also note 8 in Durito II), a
"Verification and Peace Commission" composed of Federal Legislators
was created to mediate the peace talks in
San Andrés. In a communiqué dated
[3] "Find the Cost of Freedom,"
[4] Platoon, (Orion Pictures,1986; Oliver
Stone, Dir.) a film about the horrors of war, is set in the jungles of