The Almanac of the Dead: A Novel (91 page)

“Us? Not us!
Their spies are
liars! We
are internationalists!
We
are not just tribal!” Angelita argued vehemently. She was thinking about all the “friends of the Indians” who had sent them aid from all over the world. Millions had come from a crackpot German industrialist who wanted to see the tribal people of the Americas retake their land. Millions came each year from Japanese businessmen who wanted to avenge Hiroshima and Nagasaki any way possible. They were internationalists all right! Tribal internationalists! They wanted to keep the Cubans in the
dark about their true objectives for as long as possible. They wanted to keep aid flowing to the people’s army. “Arrest this man!” Angelita had called out in tribal dialect so Bartolomeo would not try to escape. He had still been frowning over the stack of uncompleted forms and reports when the warriors seized him by both arms.

Representatives and people from the mountain villages had been invited for Chinese orange soda and parched corn compliments of the People’s Revolution in Cuba. Meetings of the villages had traditionally cleared the air during local disputes and prevented bloody feuds. The meeting had been called to update the people on the most recent developments. Luckily some days would pass before police authorities would react to the pink handbills and reopen investigations into Menardo’s accident.

Bartolomeo begged for his life; the handbills were trivial, he said, the handbills claimed no responsibility for Menardo’s death, which authorities had ruled accidental. Bartolomeo denied he was a double agent. Bartolomeo denied he was CIA. The handbills could not be traced to the villages. The handbills had merely been part of the people’s “reeducation.” El Feo shook his head and left the tent to call the meeting to order. “There is a more serious charge,” Angelita said. “You are guilty of crimes against history, specifically, crimes against certain tribal histories.”

“You can’t do this! You’re crazy! The committee—!”

“The committee? Why do you think they sent you here?” Angelita smiled. The charges against Bartolomeo made her feel nostalgic. She remembered the first time she had seen Bartolomeo, so handsome with his brown eyes and light brown hair; in the bedroom his body had looked just as good. What a pity! Comrade Bartolomeo had outlived his usefulness. There wouldn’t be any more free Chinese soda pop or Russian anti-tank missiles from Cuba; but foreign aid from the Marxists had been drying up anyway. Angelita looked out at the people who had come to the meeting for free popcorn and soda pop; what would they think? Most of the village meetings had included discussions about obtaining more “gifts” from “friends of the Indians.” El Feo and the others were still plugging the speakers into truck batteries, while latecomers got in line for soda or wandered through the market where business was brisk.

COMRADE ANGELITA stepped up to the microphone and announced she was not afraid to talk about anything the people wanted to know. She had no secrets and nothing to hide, so there was nothing to be nervous about; there was nothing they couldn’t talk about. Was Comrade Angelita trying to get the villages to join up with the Cubans? How much were the Cubans paying her? Had they promised her Japanese motorcycles? What about chain saws? Wasn’t communism godless? Then how could history, so alive with spirits, exist without gods? What about her and that white man, Bartolomeo? To questions about her private life Angelita was quick to snap back, “What about it?” with her jaw set so hard, the questioner was afraid to open his or her mouth again. Comrade Bartolomeo, she explained, was under arrest, about to be court-martialed for betraying the revolution with capital crimes against history.

“More about the traitor Bartolomeo afterwards, but first . . .” Angelita launched into a lecture.

“Questions have been asked about who this Marx is. Questions have been asked about the meaning of words like
communism
and
history.
Today I am going to tell you what use this white man Marx is to us here in our mountain villages!”

But right from the beginning, Angelita explained, she wanted no misunderstanding; nothing mattered but taking back tribal land. Angelita paused to sip orange soda and scanned the crowd for her “elder sisters.” The “elder sisters” had complained that Angelita was hardly different from a missionary herself, always talking on and on about white man’s political mumbo jumbo but never bothering to explain.

“Are we supposed to take what you say on faith?” the elder sisters had teased Angelita.

“Is this Marx another Jesus?” Jokes had circulated about Angelita’s love affair—not with Bartolomeo or El Feo but with Marx, a billy-goat-bearded,
old white man. The elder sisters laughed; here was the danger of staring at a photograph. A glint of the man’s soul had been captured there, in the eyes of Marx’s image on the page. The elder sisters said Angelita should have been more careful. Everyone had heard stories about victims bewitched by photographs of strangers long dead, long gone from the world except for a trace of the spirit’s light that remained in the photograph.

It was time to clear the air, especially now that Bartolomeo was about to be court-martialed by the people. Angelita set down the empty soda bottle near her feet and pulled the microphone stand closer. She glanced at the elder sisters standing at the back of the crowd; they nodded at her, and Angelita took a deep breath and began:

“I know there is gossip, talking and speculation about me. I have nothing to say except every breath, my every heartbeat, is for the return of the land.” The teenage troops yell and whistle, girls and boys alike; the dogs bark and the crowd applauds.

If they could agree on nothing else, they could all agree the land was theirs. Tribal rivalries and even intervillage boundary disputes often focused on land lost to the European invaders. When they had taken back all the lands of the indigenous people of the Americas, there would be plenty of space, plenty of pasture and farmland and water for everyone who promised to respect all beings and do no harm. “We are the army to retake tribal land. Our army is only one of many all over the earth quietly preparing. The ancestors’ spirits speak in dreams. We wait. We simply wait for the earth’s natural forces already set loose, the exploding, fierce energy of all the dead slaves and dead ancestors haunting the Americas. We prepare, and we wait for the tidal wave of history to sweep us along. People have been asking questions about ideology. Are we
this
or are we
that?
Do we follow Marx? The answer is no!
No
white man politics!
No
white man Marx! No white man religion, no nothing
until we retake this land!
We must protect Mother Earth from destruction.” The teenage army cheered and even the older people had been clapping their hands.

“Now I want to tell you something about myself because so many rumors are circulating. Rumors about myself and Marxism. Rumors about myself and the ghost of Karl Marx!” There had been laughter and applause, but Angelita did not pause. “I will tell you what I know about Marx. His followers and all the rest I don’t know about. This is personal, but people want to know what I think; they want to know if I’m Marxist.” Angelita shook her head.

“Marxists don’t want to give Indian land back. We say
to hell
with all Marxists who oppose the return of tribal land!” Market transactions had slowed as Angelita warmed up; and the people listened more attentively. Angelita could see El Feo and the others working their way through the crowd, recruiting people’s volunteers to feed or hide their people’s army regulars. “To hell with the Marxists! To hell with the capitalists! To hell with the white man! We want our mother the land!”

Cursing the white man along with free soda pop put the people in a festive mood; they were accustomed to listening to village political discussions that continued for days on end. “Marxism is one thing! Marx
the man
is another,” Angelita had said as she began her defense of Marx. So-called disciples of Marx had often disgraced his name, the way Jesus was disgraced by crimes of his alleged “followers,” the popes of the Catholic Church.

Angelita announced she would begin with her early years at the mission school on the coast where she had first heard the name. The old Castilian nuns at the mission school had called Marx the Devil. The nuns had trotted out the bogeyman Marx to scare the students if the older students refused after-school work assignments, free labor for the Catholic Church. Avowed enemy of the priests and nuns, of the Baptists and Latter-day Saints—enemy of all missionaries, this Marx
had to be
Angelita’s ally! She had understood instinctively, the way she knew the old nuns had got the story of benevolent, gentle Quetzalcoatl all wrong too. The nuns had taught the children that the Morning Star, Quetzalcoatl, was really Lucifer, the Devil God had thrown out of heaven. The nuns had terrified the children with the story of the snake in the Garden of Eden to end devotion to Quetzalcoatl.

Angelita paused to scan the crowd for reactions. Spies for the federal police or the army would use up the batteries of their little hidden voice recorders before she was finished. The people’s army units could have vacated the village within a few minutes anyway. Screw the Christians! Screw the police and army! Angelita didn’t care. They would not take her alive. Before she died, she must explain to the village people about Marx, who was unlike any white man since Jesus. For now—screw Cuban Marxists and their European totalitarianism!

Marx had been inspired by reading about certain Native American communal societies, though naturally as a European he had misunderstood a great deal. Marx had learned about societies in which everyone ate or everyone starved together, and no one being stood above another—all stood side by side—rock, insect, human being, river, or
flower. Each depended upon the other; the destruction of one harmed all others.

Marx understood what tribal people had always known: the maker of a thing pressed part of herself or himself into each object made. Some spark of life or energy went from the maker into even the most ordinary objects. Marx had understood the value of anything came from the hands of the maker. Marx of the Jews, tribal people of the desert, Marx the tribal man understood that nothing personal or individual mattered because no individual survived without others. Generation after generation, individuals were born, then after eighty years, disappeared into dust, but in the stories, the people lived on in the imaginations and hearts of their descendants. Wherever their stories were told, the spirits of the ancestors were present and their power was alive.

Marx, tribal man and storyteller; Marx with his primitive devotion to the workers’ stories. No wonder the Europeans hated him! Marx had gathered official government reports of the suffering of English factory workers the way a tribal shaman might have, feverishly working to bring together a powerful, even magical, assembly of stories. In the repetition of the workers’ stories lay great power; workers must never forget the stories of other workers. The people did not struggle alone. Marx, more tribal Jew than European, instinctively knew the stories, or “history,” accumulated momentum and power. No factory inspector’s “official report” could whitewash the tears, blood, and sweat that glistened from the simple words of the narratives.

Marx had understood stories are alive with the energy words generate. Word by word, the stories of suffering, injury, and death had transformed the present moment, seizing listeners’ or readers’ imaginations so that for an instant, they were present and felt the suffering of sisters and brothers long past. The words of the stories filled rooms with an immense energy that aroused the living with fierce passion and determination for justice. Marx wrote about babies dosed with opium while mothers labored sixteen hours in silk factories; Marx wrote with the secret anguish of a father unable to provide enough food or medicine. When Marx wrote about the little children working under huge spinning machines that regularly mangled and killed them, Marx had already seen Death prowling outside his door, hungry for his own three children. In his feverish work with the stories of shrunken, yellowed infants, and the mangled limbs of children, Marx had been working desperately to seize the story of each child-victim and to turn the story away from the
brutal endings the coroners and factory inspectors used to write for the children of the poor. His own children were slowly dying from cold, lack of food, and medicine; yet day after day, Marx had returned to official reports in the British Museum. Wage-earning might have saved Marx’s children, but tribal man and storyteller, Marx had sacrificed the lives of his own beloved children to gather the stories of all the children starved and mangled. He had sensed the great power these stories had—power to move millions of people. Poor Marx did not understand the power of the stories belonged to the spirits of the dead.

The crowd had listened patiently because there was plenty of orange soda, and because rumor had it that Cuban “advisors” such as Bartolomeo were soon to become part of history too. But certainly the most exciting topic for the people had been the handbills showing Menardo Flat-Nose Pansón shot dead with his own pistol. People had questions about the handbills. What was truth? The man lying shown on the handbills had been killed accidentally; Menardo had been shot at his own request. Angelita waved a stack of the handbills in front of her; she tore them to pieces dramatically and threw them high over her head like confetti. The handbills were the work of an enemy who had slandered the good name of all tribal people in the mountains.