The Almanac of the Dead: A Novel (55 page)

The school classes had been conducted in the basement of a downtown building. Lectures on Marx had been all that kept the Cuban school open. Constantly the Cubans reminded La Escapía and the other Indians about the expense and trouble involved in trying to educate them. La Escapía had expected to hate everything the Cubans taught. She and the others from the villages had only agreed to attend the school because the Cuban made such classes a condition for the delivery of arms and other supplies. In the early weeks of class La Escapía had dozed off and actually snored during the classes. Then in the fourth week, the lazy Cubans had begun to read directly from
Das Kapital.
La Escapía had felt it. A flash! A sudden boom! This old white-man philosopher had something to say about the greed and cruelty. For La Escapía it had been the first time a white man ever made sense. For hundreds of years white men had been telling the people of the Americas to forget the past; but now the white man Marx came along and he was telling people to remember. The old-time people had believed the same thing: they must reckon with the past because within it lay seeds of the present and future. They must reckon with the past because within it lay this present moment and also the future moment.

After the lecture, La Escapía had gone to Bartolomeo’s office. She had questions about Marx. What Marx said about history and about the change that comes and that can not be stopped. Bartolomeo had stared blankly at her breasts while she talked. He was not interested in what the old Indians thought about the passage of time or about history. He was not even interested in what Marx had to say about time or history. Pushing the door shut with one foot, Bartolomeo said all he was thinking about was sucking her left nipple in his mouth. La Escapía had not bothered Bartolomeo about Marx again.

MARX WAS THE FIRST white man La Escapía had ever heard call his own people vampires and monsters. But Marx had not stopped with accusations. Marx had caught the capitalists of the British empire with bloody hands. Marx backed every assertion with evidence; coroner’s reports with gruesome stories about giant spinning machines that consumed the limbs and the lives of the small children in factories. On and on Marx went, describing the tiny corpses of children who had been worked to death—their deformed bodies shaped to fit inside factory machinery and other cramped spaces. While the others dozed, La Escapía sat up in her seat wide-awake. She could not get over the brutality and all the details Marx had included. She could never have imagined tiny children wedged inside the machinery just to make a rich man richer.

El Feo was sent by La Escapía’s elder sisters to take stock of her political views. El Feo wanted to know how she knew this man Marx wasn’t a liar like the rest of the white men. La Escapía shrugged her shoulders. She wasn’t trying to convert anyone. Tribal people had had all the experience they would ever need to judge whether Marx’s stories told the truth. The Indians had seen generations of themselves ground into bloody pulp under the steel wheels of ore cars in crumbling tunnels of gold mines. The Indians had seen for themselves the cruelty of the Europeans toward children and women. That was how La Escapía had satisfied herself Marx was reliable; his accounts had been consistent with what the people already knew.

From that point on, the words of Marx had only gotten better. The stories Marx related, the great force of his words, the bitterness and fury—they had caught hold of La Escapía’s imagination then.

La Escapía used to walk for hours around and around downtown Mexico City, in a daze at what she was seeing—at the immensity of wealth behind the towers of steel and concrete and glass, built on this empire for European princes.

In the filthy, smog-choked streets with deafening reverberations of traffic jammed solid around her, La Escapía had laughed out loud. This
was the end of what the white man had to offer the Americas: poison smog in the winter and the choking clouds that swirled off sewage treatment leaching fields and filled the sky with fecal dust in early spring. Here was the place Marx had in mind as “a place of human sacrifice, a shrine where thousands passed yearly through the fire as offerings to the Moloch of avarice.” La Escapía really liked the way Marx talked about Europeans.

El Feo kept quiet but nodded vigorously at the right places. La Escapía was going to make him pay through the ears for acting as go-between for the elder sisters. The elders just wanted the land back; they didn’t want to hear about “revolution.” While he was listening to La Escapía talk about Marx and the cities of werewolves and England’s dead children, El Feo had already been formulating his report to the elder sisters. He would advise them to listen: La Escapía was on to something important.

El Feo didn’t worry about the world the way La Escapía did. The thought of retaking all tribal land made him happy; El Feo daydreamed about the days of the past—sensuous daydreams of Mother Earth who loved all her children, all living beings. Those past times were not lost. The days, months, and years were living beings who roamed the starry universe until they came around again. In the Americas the white man never referred to the past but only to the future. The white man didn’t seem to understand he had no future here because he had no past, no spirits of ancestors here.

EL FEO HAD SPENT HOURS talking with the elder sisters and the special committee. They were concerned that Angelita might already have become a communist. No, her thoughts were from her heart, aimed at helping them. She was their soldier. She was no communist. La Escapía had merely carried out her assignment at the Cuban school to the fullest extent possible. He could not possibly tell the story the way La Escapía had. Perhaps the elders should consider listening themselves. Words could not be blamed simply because stupid or evil
persons slandered the words or corrupted their meaning.
Commune
and
communal
were words that described the lives of many tribes and their own people as well. The mountain villages shared the land, water, and wild game. What was grown, what was caught or raised or discovered, was divided equally and shared all around.

No, El Feo was relieved to report, La Escapía had not been brain-washed by the Cubans. In fact, she was contemptuous of their ignorance of Marx, and she had clashed with the Cubans over which version, whose version, of history they would use.

La Escapía had originally made notes because she had to locate so many of the words in a dictionary. Gradually she had learned the words, but La Escapía had kept writing in the notebook anyway because people were always liable to ask you to prove what you were saying wasn’t just a lie. The notebook had tiny marks and numbers only she could decipher, for page numbers and titles and authors of books. La Escapía had kept the notebook to back her up when Cubans wanted to argue or the “elder sisters” tried to give her trouble. She had written “Friends of the Indians” across the front cover of the notebook as a joke. Friends of the Indians! What a laugh! The clergy and the communists took credit for any good, however small, that had been done for the Indians since the arrival of Europeans. The world was full of “friends of the Indians.” The Dominican priest Father de Las Casas had been a great friend of the Indians. La Escapía had searched through their canyons of books, but she had found it: all in printed words just as Marx had said. The Dominican priest Bartolomé de Las Casas had been a rich slave-holder with an inheritance of a plantation and Indian slaves to work it on La Isla de Hispaniola. Las Casas had gone to Cuba slave-hunting with other businessmen, although Las Casas was not present when the rebel Indian leader Hateuy was burned alive. Why hadn’t the stupid Cubans running the communist school in Mexico City talked about this part of Cuban history? Later La Escapía had pointed to this as one example of how little the Cubans knew about Cuban history. La Escapía called it further proof Cubans didn’t want indigenous people to know their history. When they denied indigenous history, they betrayed the true meaning of Marx. Not even Marx had fully understood the meaning of the spiritual and tribal communes of the Americas.

El Feo and the others had been reluctant to execute Comrade Bartolomeo without “due process” in a trial of some sort. “Kangaroo court?” someone joked at the back of the meeting hall. Because nobody
had cared what they did with the Cuban white man who was no good to anyone anymore.

Bartolomeo had somehow managed to exceed all the others in his disdain for history before the Cuban revolution. Before Fidel, history did not exist for Bartolomeo. That was his crime; that’s why he died.

La Escapía had pronounced the death sentence because Bartolomeo had had no respect for the true history of Cuba or any of the Americans except for the singsong “Fidel Fidel Fidel Fidel!” Bartolomeo had died because he had betrayed the truth with half-baked ramblings he alleged were the words of Karl Marx. La Escapía was indignant. The Cuban school in Mexico City drove people away; it did not gather new comrades for the great struggle to regain all the lands of the Native American people. Angelita had read the words of Marx for herself. Marx had never forgotten the indigenous people of the Americas, or of Africa. Marx had recited the crimes of slaughter and slavery committed by the European colonials who had been sent by their capitalist slave-masters to secure the raw materials of capitalism—human flesh and blood. With the wealth of the New World, the European slave-masters and monarchs had been able to buy weapons and armies to keep down the uprisings of the landless people all across Europe.

La Escapía was not acquainted with Cubans of African or Native American descent; but the European Cubans were a race of hairdressers. Bartolomeo had kept quiet about the great Indian rebel leaders because Fidel had not been around back then. The Europeans had destroyed the great libraries of the Americans to obliterate all that had existed before the white man.

Bartolomeo had died for other crimes too, but La Escapía, El Feo, and the others had always felt proud as they remembered that mainly Bartolomeo the Cuban had lost his life because he had neglected to mention the great Cuban Indian rebel leader Hateuy.

Five hundred years of Europeans and nothing had changed. The Cubans had lied and distorted the words of Marx; worse, they had attempted to suppress the powerful warning Hateuy had sent to the people of the Americas. Hateuy had refused baptism before Europeans burned him alive because he said he did not want to go to heaven if Europeans might also be there. Cheers and shouts had come from the back of the crowd when Angelita La Escapía had finished.

The stories of the people or their “history” had always been sacred, the source of their entire existence. If the people had not retold the
stories, or if the stories had somehow been lost, then the people were lost; the ancestors’ spirits were summoned by the stories. This man Marx had understood that the stories or “histories” are sacred; that within “history” reside relentless forces, powerful spirits, vengeful, relentlessly seeking justice.

No matter what you or anyone else did, Marx said, history would catch up with you; it was inevitable, it was relentless. The turning, the changing, were inevitable.

The old people had stories that said much the same, that it was only a matter of time and things European would gradually fade from the American continents. History would catch up with the white man whether the Indians did anything or not. History was the sacred text. The most complete history was the most powerful force.

Angelita La Escapía imagined Marx as a storyteller who worked feverishly to gather together a magical assembly of stories to cure the suffering and evils of the world by the retelling of the stories. Stories of depravity and cruelty were the driving force of the revolution, not the other way around, but just because the white man Marx had been a genius about some things, he and his associates had been wrong about so many other things because they were Europeans to start with, and anything, certainly any philosophy, would have been too feeble to curb the greed and sadism of centuries.