The Almanac of the Dead: A Novel (92 page)

El Feo left the politics to Angelita, who got intoxicated on the subject of Marx even as she denied being a missionary for Marx. El Feo had confronted Angelita with his suspicions: somehow Angelita had been bewitched by the photographs and writings of Engels and Marx. El Feo had listened to Angelita go on and on about Marx and Engels. Angelita told El Feo about Engels’s hearty sexual appetite.

They had already made love a number of times when El Feo had teased Angelita about her two other lovers, Engels and Marx. At first El Feo feared he had gone too far because Angelita’s jaws had clenched and she had frowned. But El Feo had grinned and chuckled to keep the mood light, and Angelita had calmed down. She was no Marxist; she had her own ideas about political systems, and they had nothing to do with white men in Europe. But after Angelita had defended herself, she had showed El Feo photographs of Marx and Engels in books. She had remained quiet for a long time staring at the photographs. El Feo had settled back in the hammock to smoke a cigarette and watch the wild woman. Finally after a long time, Angelita had told El Feo the truth; the first time she had opened a volume of
Das Kapital,
she had been amazed at the blazing darkness of Marx’s eyes. The photograph had
been made when Marx was a young man. She confessed to El Feo she had never entirely believed what the old-time people said about photography until she had seen the photograph of Marx. A flicker of energy belonging to Marx and Marx alone still resided within the blazing eyes of the image; emanations of this energy had reached out to Angelita from the page. But it was only after she had heard his stories that she had fallen in love with Karl Marx. Both El Feo and Angelita had laughed and shaken their heads. Angelita warned El Feo never to repeat their conversation; enough rumors went through the villages about Angelita’s lovers. They didn’t need speculation about ghosts or spirits. They didn’t need, and their army didn’t need, any rumors about sorcery. The village committees had to caution the people: generous financial aid would keep rolling in so long as all the “friends of the Indians” remained confident. Witchcraft rumors upset white people. That was a fact they had to live with.

EL FEO HAD NEVER had sex with such a delicious woman as Angelita. It was because she was so powerful that she excited him so much. He had got aroused just listening to her reasons for secrecy about Engels and Marx. El Feo had pulled Angelita on top of himself on their bedrolls in the bushes where they retreated for “classified activities.”

“Ah! Talking about your sexual rivals, Engels and Marx, has excited you,” Angelita said. El Feo was only able to nod before he buried his face between Angelita’s heavy brown breasts. He imagined the warmth of the darkest, deepest forest in an early-summer rain; he imagined he was burying himself deeper and deeper into the core of the earth until he lost himself in eternity where wide rivers ran to a gentle ocean that included all beings, even Engels and Marx. El Feo felt how greedy this wild woman Angelita was, her eyes closed tight, lost in the imaginary embraces of fierce Marx, or the gentle caresses of the lesser presence
Engels. Luckily El Feo had never been jealous. That had been one of the worst aspects of the Cuban, who thought women were private property once they had been his sex partners.

Bartolomeo was a complete failure in El Feo’s view because communal living meant share and share alike. Bartolomeo had never lost his taste for bourgeois women. Bartolomeo was responsible for the handbills of Menardo’s corpse and the Marxist slogan. Bartolomeo had printed the handbills because Menardo had fucked Alegría while Bartolomeo was fucking her. Bartolomeo had had her first, not her “husband.” Bartolomeo was always thinking with his dick, and Cuban aid or no Cuban aid, the people’s army had enough trouble without dick brains such as Bartolomeo. El Feo knew better than to press his luck with such a woman as Angelita; he wanted to, but dared not ask what exactly she imagined Engels and Marx were doing.

Politics didn’t add up. In the end only the Earth remained, and they’d all return to her as dust. El Feo left books and politics to Angelita, who was strong enough to stomach the poison about taxes, authorities, and the existence of states. El Feo himself did not worry. History was unstoppable. The days, years, and centuries were spirit beings who traveled the universe, returning endlessly. The Spirits of the Night and the Spirits of the Day would take care of the people.

The United States allowed huge stores of grain and cheese to rot; El Feo had watched on television: the waste, great hills of discarded lumber and wire, and his heart had beat faster because he had realized someday the United States would spend all its money and sell off and strip everything they could take from the land. Finally, the United States would be poor and broke, and all the water would be gone; then the people would see European descendants scurrying back across the ocean back to the lands of their forefathers.

El Feo focused all his energy into one desire: to retake the land. El Feo’s work was to remind Angelita and the others not to lose sight of their task. There had been too many masks and disguises already, too many times government police had posed as rebel guerrillas to slaughter poor villagers in the mountains, while rebel guerrillas dressed as government police to rob motorists.

El Feo had seen enough of television and its effect on people to know the citizens could never trust what they were seeing or hearing from television, newspapers, or radio. Because the politicians now were trained actors, and on television, actors dressed as undercover police in
beards, dirty hair, and beggar’s clothes. Ordinary citizens would never again be certain who was who or what was what; no matter whether they were peasants or workers, video images and sounds were not to be trusted. Not even Angelita or El Feo himself could be trusted speaking from a television screen because electronic images were easily tampered with.

El Feo had devised a simple and clear test to reveal whether so-called “leaders of the people” were true or only impostors sent by the vampires and werewolves of greed. The test was easy: true leaders of the people made return of the land the first priority. No excuses, no postponements, not even for one day, must be tolerated by the people. Even before the burial of the dead, who did not mind waiting because they had died fighting for the return of the lands. Before bridges, roads, electricity, or phone lines were restored, the land must be returned to the people whose ancestors had lived on the land for twenty thousand years continuously. Big talk and promises of free gasoline, free generators, free chain saws and motorcycles—all of this was the wool the false leaders pulled over the eyes of unwary citizens. First the land. Without the land there was no need for chain saws or motorcycles; without the land, there was no place to set the generator or TV.

El Feo understood he had been chosen for one task: to remind the people never to lose sight of their precious land. He had listened to Angelita describe early betrayals of Marx, and the revolutions in France and later in Russia. True leaders of the revolution would deed back thousands of millions of acres of land. Even city people might identify the true leaders because true leaders would immediately seize all vacant apartments and houses to provide shelter for all the homeless.

El Feo warned the people to beware of the talkers and the foot-draggers; land first, talk and ideology later. Those were the rules. Leaders caught stalling or lying would be shot. The rules were simple. To any whiners or grumblers in his teenage army, El Feo said, “Shut up! Quit sniveling! We’ve been sent to take back the land. You can get ‘rich’ afterwards, if you have to.”

BARTOLOMEO HAD BEEN incredulous. He refused to believe he was about to be tried before the people’s committee assembled in the plaza sipping orange soda he had provided for them. He, Bartolomeo, had been generous enough to obtain the arms and other supplies they had requested; he, Bartolomeo, had many times argued on their behalf when Cuban officials had wanted to cut off aid to these mountain villages. Bartolomeo had looked intently at Angelita as if to remind her of those long sweaty afternoons in bed together; Angelita smiled and shook her head. It was time to get on with the people’s case against Bartolomeo. “Unbelievable!” Bartolomeo said. “You Indians are serious!”

All the people present in the village plaza would constitute the people’s committee; the verdict would be reached by a count of hands. Angelita would interpret the people’s discussion for Bartolomeo in Spanish.

Bartolomeo’s first offense concerned the picture of the dead capitalist on pamphlets that falsely discredited and endangered the people’s army for the sake of cheap Marxist propaganda. The second charge against Bartolomeo was for crimes against the people’s history.

“What
history?”
Bartolomeo had fired back in a sneering tone. “Jungle monkeys and savages have no history!” Bartolomeo had gone on to make scornful remarks about “dumb and gullible squaws” who had confused themselves reading too many books with ideas that were over their heads—like water too deep. “How deep?” Angelita asked, and imagined Bartolomeo on the morning they would lead him to the new pine two-by-fours nailed into a gallows; not as deep as Bartolomeo was going to dive that morning from the new pine lumber.

Bartolomeo had been clever enough to attempt to mobilize village jealousies and gossip aimed at Angelita and her wild ideas and the Devil’s books she read. Here Angelita pointed out Bartolomeo’s attempt to use
that worn European ploy: set one faction of Indians against another. But Bartolomeo had not known when to stop his attacks on Angelita. He had demanded to take the stand to testify on his own behalf. Angelita knew it was better if Bartolomeo did talk, otherwise people might begin to feel sorry for him standing mute as they might before a village council or before the soldiers or police. On the stand, Bartolomeo had harangued everyone—all of them—unit leaders, village council members, even idle spectators. It had been as if he, Bartolomeo, were not on trial but
they
were.

Bartolomeo had continued sarcastically about their “primitive animalistic tribalism,” which was “the whore of nationalism and the dupe of capitalism.” Nationalism such as theirs, he said, “had to be cut out and burned like a tumor.” Even while Bartolomeo had been speaking, the people who had crowded under the long tin drying shed where the trial was being held had whispered and joked with one another. The people had thought it amusing and typical of a white man to make a fool of himself in court. The people themselves had had hundreds of years of the white men’s courts, and they knew the one on trial was not supposed to argue and talk back the way the Cuban had.

But Bartolomeo had wanted to argue. He seemed to relish his role as defense attorney for himself. Bartolomeo seemed unable to comprehend who was on trial. What right did they, ignorant Indians, have to put educated Cuban citizens on trial? “
You
set foot in
our
sovereign jurisdiction. That is where we get the ‘right,’ Comrade Bartolomeo,” Angelita had answered. If he kept talking that way, everyone would raise a hand and vote the death penalty. But Comrade Bartolomeo had not finished. His handsome face was pinched with intensity. This was not an official, authorized court. This was not fair. Angelita nodded. At least Bartolomeo had understood one thing: the trial wasn’t really a personal matter or about personal dislike of Bartolomeo. The Committee for Justice and Land Redistribution had no time for mere personal matters. This was a trial of all Europeans. More than five hundred years of white men in Indian jurisdiction were on trial with Bartolomeo.

Angelita might have translated Bartolomeo’s ridicule and scorn differently for the people’s committee, who didn’t understand much Spanish. She might have tipped off Bartolomeo to say nothing—certainly not to argue. Angelita might have got Bartolomeo a commuted sentence if she had wished. But that afternoon in the plaza, Angelita had watched Bartolomeo, so handsome, so presumptuous, so ignorant, and she knew
he finally had to go. Oh, well, who was Bartolomeo anyway? What did he matter? Who would remember him?