'68 Read online
Table of Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Wherein It Is Explained That with Stuff Like This I Could Never Write a Novel
How from the Beginning This Story Brims with Questions
Loves That Last
Why Che and Bob Dylan Were Important for Some but Not for All
Where It Is Revealed That We Materialists Are Not, As Is Commonly Thought, ...
A Weekend When Everything Began
The Shattered Door
Concerning a Reorganization of Life and a Reduction of Sleeping Hours for Want ...
Confetti
Of Women and Mattresses
And Sometimes We Believe in the Informative Value of Tremors Running Through ...
The Godchildren
Menu
We Remember the Days of Glory but Tend to Forget They Were Fourteen-Hour Days
Radio Rumor
When Maricarmen Fernández Grabbed My Ass
Throwing Corncobs
Memo to Amnesiacs on How to Dent the Armor of a Tank with a Metal Pipe
Topilejo
Absolutely No Telephoning
With La Quinta in Parque Hundido
The Sound of Marching Feet
Wherein We Learn That the Tanks Have Arrived
In Which the Virtues of the National Anthem Are Rediscovered
Fanny and the Cop
Nabbed
The Ginza by Night
Mimeographs
Dying a Little
Even Liars Know the Truth
Everyone Blames Themselves—Forever
Tlatelolco Is Everything—The Rest Is Nothing
It Is Made Clear That Barricades, Once Built, Lodge Immediately in Memory
Leaving—and Staying
The Dead
Ending But No Happy
In Which We Return to the Idea of Ghosts and Their Persistence in Time
TWO EPILOGUES
Copyright Page
This book, which I am never going to get right, is for my very close friend Guillermo Fernández, because without a doubt his memory is better than mine; it is also for Óscar Moreno, whose memory must have been loaned to him, because on the day that the tanks rolled into Ciudad Universitaria he had not yet been born.
The Spanish poet Ángel González wrote: “Another time will come that is unlike this one/and someone will say/you should have told other stories.” During the ’68 Movement, these words were faithfully inscribed on the door of a ground-floor classroom of the Political Sciences department. For years after I wondered if there were any stories left to tell.”
Wherein It Is Explained That with Stuff Like This I Could Never Write a Novel
In December 1968 I began taking notes on what we had lived through. I did not trust my memory. I was wrong not to.
Over the next twenty years I proved incapable of turning the contents of those three notebooks into a novel; on the other hand, I never fell victim to amnesia. After twenty years—and here you can bring in Dumas and his three musketeers or Carlos Gardel and his “twenty years is nothing”—after twenty years, the only thing that works is memory. Collective memory, but also even the tiniest, most insignificant memory of a personal kind. I suspect, in fact, that the one can barely survive without the other, that legend cannot be constructed without anecdote. That there are no countries without fairy tales lurking in their shadows.
Today the Movement of ’68 is one more Mexican ghost among many unassimilated and ever-wakeful ghosts that haunt our land. It could be that because of its youth this particular ghost is still alive and well and comes automatically to the aid of our generation whenever called upon. The Saint Francis of Assisi of our doubts, Saint Che Guevara of our emotions, Saint Philip Marlowe of our private investigations, Saint Jane Fonda of our anxieties. Sixty-eight seems not only to have ensconced itself in the nostalgia factory within our minds, sharing a place there and striking the same chords as Leonard Cohen and the poems of Blas de Otero, but also to have produced the epic quantities of fuel needed to power twenty years of resistance. It has stiffened our spines in a land of submission and a hundred times placed in our mouths the words, “No! And fuck it!” It has nourished us during countless stints of unemployment, helped us wander the world selling our labor power and the smallest possible fraction of our souls, protected us from the temptations of power, and kept us away from the poisoned kiss of the Mexican State. At the very least, it has supplied us with a useful, indeed an indispensable measuring-rod for our sense of pride and guilt.
If we are all characters in a novel written on a lousy Olivetti with no ribbon, forever trying to be loyal to a personality that we once invented for ourselves, there can be no doubt that our model was forged in ’68, that its finest features (the arm upstretched in a muscle-wrenching salute, the taking to the street despite paralyzing fear, the ability to live in a collective way, the desire never to sleep) were constructed then, and that ever since we have followed that model with varying degrees of success.
But getting back to the notebooks . . . My grandmother always said that you had to change your underwear every day, because if you were ever hit by a car, it would be so embarrassing, what if anyone saw, and so on. Her logic escaped me as an adolescent. Nevertheless, in 1969 I filled those three fat books with notes on the Movement, thinking that if I didn’t put everything down on paper it might disappear. The notes were meant as raw material for a novel. But it didn’t work out that way. Not then, not ten years later, not now. I returned to the notebooks many times, eyeing them with an odd feeling of decorum, with the same feeling my grandmother had about clean underwear. They were there in case you had an accident.
I tell myself: If I die in an airplane crash, my daughter has to find them, but it mustn’t have to be easy for her. She’ll find them if she makes an effort, if she roots laboriously through the piles and piles of papers that I’m going to leave her. They’ll be there, but well hidden.
I never was able to write that novel. It’s probably a novel that does not want to be written.
How from the Beginning This Story Brims with Questions
How was the magic worked? What fed the bonfire? Where did they come from, the three hundred thousand students that came to the Zócalo on the day of the Great Silent Demonstration? Who gave the paraffin test to the outstretched hand? What became of Lourdes? Who was behind the door of Preparatory 1 on the day of the bazookas? How does a generation manufacture its myths? What was the menu in the Political Sciences cafeteria? What was the ’68 Movement protesting? Where did the Juárez-Loreto bus start its run every morning? Who was on the right and who was on the left in September 1968? Who were the radicals and who the mensheviks? How is it that the names of deserters and suicides returned, cloaked in rumor? What poem was heard over the loudspeakers when the tanks came in? Where did the idea of brigadismo spring from? How did Fanny fall in love with a cop? And when did Toño arrive at Topilejo? Where do victory and defeat begin and end? Who put up the poster of the Ginza district by night? When is revolution not revolution but reform? Why did Vocational School 5 always have the best coffee? Where was the point of no return? How did you stage a flash rally that blocked an intersection? Why were fliers hidden in the brown-paper bags bread comes in? What was the National Strike Council? Why was Romeo busted on account of a miniskirt? Where did they throw our dead? Where did they toss our dead? Where, for fuck’s sake, did they throw our dead?
Loves That Last
I confess to being in love with my debt to those four months of madness in that magical year. But I confess, too, with difficulty, painfully, that the fantasy is beginning to lose its materiality, its clear outline. Transforming into myth, into a mere collection of intransigencies. I’ve come across some people who go so far a
s to say that none of it ever happened. Some say they weren’t there, that they were other people then. To me that’s bullshit: the fact is we were ourselves, even if we were different. Living then did not mean remembering. Living then was easier.
It is so hard for me to answer my own questions, let alone the questions of others who remember a ’68 Movement that they never experienced themselves, because they were only five at the time, or because they hadn’t been born, or because they were far away. All those for whom, from that time until now, I have been writing.
In 1986 I felt the power of our ghosts when the marvelous troops of the University Student Council (CEU) took to the streets. Hesitantly, I searched, from my strategic generational position on the sidewalk, for the contingent that would sweep me along with them in empathy; naturally, I ended up marching with the kids from one of the Science and Humanities Colleges, their tattered sneakers and festive spirit tied to the conviction that life should not be lived at a snail’s pace. It was here that I put my ghosts to the test. If my memories of ’68 were no more than points of comparison, then everything had gone to hell: I was an old fart not fit to walk alongside these new plebs. But if my memories combined seamlessly with their experiences, and with what Elena Garro called recollections of things to come, then all was not hopelessly lost.
A long-haired and near-sighted student recognized me, placed the tip of his index finger on the third button of my shirt, and told me that I had to write this book because my memories were not my private property—that there are loves that last, even for those who have not lived them in the first place.
Why Che and Bob Dylan Were Important for Some but Not for All
Part of the student generation that created the ’68 Movement—a small part, no more than seven or eight thousand out of half a million high-school and college students—had come of age in a politico-cultural stew that had the virtue of universality. The madness that stalked us at life’s every turn was a global madness. It had to do with our reading matter, with our heroes, myths, and refusals, with cinema, with theater, with love, and with our sources of information. We lived in thrall to the magic of the Cuban revolution and the Vietnamese resistance.
It was “El Che” who had pronounced the first words—and the last. From Episodes of the Revolutionary War to Socialism and Man in Cuba, he had guided us, led us by the hand into an ethical debate whose terms we understood perfectly. Che’s death in 1967 left a void that not even his Bolivian Diary could fill. He was our number-one ghost. He was no more, yet he was with us still—the voice, the personality, the rousing injunction to throw everything aside and go on the road, the mocking dialogue, the project, the photograph looking down at you from every corner, the ever-growing and seemingly endless stream of fact and anecdote, the only context in which corny expressions like “total commitment” no longer seemed laughable. But above all, Che was the guy who was everywhere even though he was dead. He was dead—but he belonged to us.
We read Howard Fast and Julius Fucik, Julio Cortázar and Mario Benedetti, John Steinbeck and Ernest Hemingway, Ray Bradbury and Jesús Díaz; we read the winners of the Casas de las Américas prize and the social novels published by Editorial Futuro. We were surprised by Carlos Fuentes’s Where the Air Is Clear; in sharp contrast to our decontextualized readings of Lenin, here was a scientific account of the formation of the new Mexican big bourgeoisie, product of a perverse union between Sonoran generals and the sanctimonious daughters of Porfirist oligarchs or shopkeepers just off the boat from Spain. Fuentes was proof that the novel was history too. The Distrito Federal could be seen clearly only from the heights of the Nonoalco Bridge. Literature was real reality. We listened to Joan Baez and Bob Dylan, Pete Seeger and Peter, Paul and Mary—the music of the anti-Vietnam War generation; secretly, we (or at least the schmaltz-prone among us) listened to Charles Aznavour and Cuco Sánchez. (The schmaltz-besotted, including me, added Jose Feliciano’s schmaltziest boleros to the mix.) Poetry was in fashion. Anthologies of Cuban revolutionary verse and of the poetry of everyday life in anti-Franco Spain were passed from hand to hand. In the courtyards of Political Sciences there were impromptu readings of Gabriel Celaya and Nazim Hikmet, and everyone knew a poem of Efraín Huerta’s and at least two of César Vallejo’s by heart. Movies were part of the stew, and they meant subversion. We all wailed like Algerian women on the outdoor steps of the Cine Roble after The Battle of Algiers, and when 8 1/2 was screened in the University film clubs it was a victory, albeit one that left us with a good many bruises courtesy of the fascist students of MURO (Movimiento Universitario de Renovadora Orientación). We could instantly recognize—and identify with each other in recognizing—such buzz words as dazibao, Escambray, Camiri, and Kronstadt, and we felt that certain phrases belonged to us alone: Dicen que la distancia es el olvido. (They say that with distance, one forgets); “Be careful, Kemosabe”; “I came to Comala because I was told that my father lived here”; (from Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo); Tarzan’s “Kreeg-ah! Bundolo, tarmangani!”; or “You know nothing of Hiroshima.” We didn’t watch television. If television existed, it was a sickness that other people suffered from; we were far too busy inventing life to waste time on reactionary dream factories. We swore we would never visit Disneyland, and never again read Hermann Hesse.
There were not that many of us. The left—meaning the lefty student milieu of the Valley of Mexico—was confined to a ghetto of a dozen schools: Political Sciences, Philosophy, Economics, Architecture, Psychology, Preparatory 1, Preparatory 6, Day School 8, Sciences, Physics/Mathematics at IPN (Instituto Politécnico Nacional), and Vocational 7, along with some reconquered territories in Preparatory 3, Economics at the Poli, the University of Chapingo, and Normal Superior.
Our militancy was old-style even as we aspired to the new. We were sectarian. The enemy was powerful, alien, and far away. The State was a bookish abstraction, so it made more sense to devote ourselves to interminable disputes with our pseudo-allies—the militants of the neighboring party, the next sect along, the devotees of some parallel cult. We were utterly absorbed by ideological warfare, and we produced unreadable newspapers laden with quotations from Lenin or Mao, Trotsky or Bakunin—depending on which particular club we belonged to.
Militancy meant an unremitting succession of meetings night and day, as oppressive as the rosary of any pious village woman. In our study groups we repeated our litanies, reworked our plans of action, did precious little thinking, or started malicious rumors about couples—and we all had pseudonyms even though we knew each other’s real names perfectly well. There were strict Spartacists and not-so-strict Spartacists; there were Maoists and neo-Maoists; there were at least four species of Trotskyists (among them some almost indistinguishable from votaries of the Virgin of Guadalupe, who went about laying down the tasks of the proletariat “before, during, and after the Third Thermonuclear War”); and, last but not least, there were the eternal mensheviks of the Communist Party, who haunted the “real left” and were its main enemies, who were—and this was the dread epithet, a word far more potent than the worst moral stigma—“reformists.” Seen in hindsight, we were a weird bunch indeed. A dying breed of devotees to some obscure religion, we might as well have strangled over the position of a comma in the Dead Sea Scrolls as waste our energies on endless internal squabbles quite unnoticed by the society of spectators that surrounded us.
Now, however, the little world of leftist sects was being invaded by real reality—the reality of the novels of Carlos Fuentes, the stories of Valadés, the fictions of Fernando Benítez, and the novels of Martín Luis Guzmán. A university would be taken over by the army, a political prisoner would go on a hunger strike, a peasant uprising would be quelled by gunfire. Here were signs of another country, one to which we had no access but which now suddenly enveloped and dumbfounded us.
For we were not Mexicans. We dwelled in a smaller city within a vast metropolis. To the east, our enclave’s border was marked by the statue of General Zaragoza, w
hose raised finger said to us, “Go no farther; behind me lie the lands of the real.” To the north, on the Pachuca road, were the statues of the Indios Verdes; beyond them was wilderness—Apache territory. To the west, the H. Steele clock at the far end of Polanco indicated not only the time but also the border of the industrial section. To the south, the laboratories of Tlalpan signaled the other extremity of the known city. Beyond them was Milpa Alta, a Zapatista terra incognita. On the other hand, we were masters of Del Valle and Narvarte (even more so since José Agustín had reinvented them in his novels), of San Rafael and Santa María, of Condesa and Roma. Ours, too, were the ice-cream parlors of Coyoacán, the París Cinema, and Café La Habana, as well as Parque México and Juárez. To us the words reform and revolution meant only the avenues we haunted. All other neighborhoods were foreign to us: places you might pass through, but where you never lingered.
In the working-class neighboorhoods we visited on occasion (after all, the manuals we had been reading and quoting until we bored ourselves stiff decreed that it was up to the working class to make the revolution), we were strange birds who showed up, then took off after showering the factory with unreadable pamphlets that the employees of the Azcapotzalco refinery or the workers at the Vallejo or Xalostoc plants would later use for ass wipes.
In 1966 I worked for a literacy program, teaching a group of Santa Clara foundry workers. I boldly opted for literature, and instead of Leninist tracts I lent them a novel by Howard Fast (I never got it back). One day, two of them showed up to class drunk. They decided that learning to read wasn’t much fun and persuaded the rest of the class to go off with them and drink toritos. Being less sectarian than I was, they treated. The group fell apart after that, but I retain a certain nostalgia for the chemical-laden mud of Ecatepec on rainy afternoons. Sulfurous. Really real.