Interfictions 2 (21 page)

Rodrigo Vincente, minister of commerce, former unit leader in the Southern Liberation Front:
Preparations to continue fighting in earnest had been underway for quite some time. When the storming of Apus Apus occurred, we had standing units across the country, arms and stockpiles, and there had been discussions among the leaders of the units as to when the best time to attack would be. We had agreed it would be in the next few months, and that we should all attack together, but there were no details worked out—well, not that I knew. You have to understand that communication among the units was quite poor. It had to be sporadic to avoid detection, and there were serious technical problems with the equipment we were using. It was always breaking down, and the messages that did get through were often garbled. Orders were unclear. It felt as though we were pieces in a game, being moved around, and we could not understand the rules or see who was doing the moving. [
Pause.
] We were in the jungle about sixty kilometers from San Marco, in command of two hundred men, and we had heard nothing for four days. So we sat there under the trees, sweating in the rain, arguing over whether it was quiet because there were no orders, or because ours or someone else's radio was broken. Then the news came that revolutionaries had attacked Apus Apus, and we figured that there must have been orders to move. So we radioed to ... I don't know, at least seven other units that we were moving, too. Other units must have done the same thing, but it's hard to be sure. What is clear is that the revolution began that night. But we learned how it had really started only later.

Q:
Did you know what happened?

Batide:
No, no. Once we were out of Apus Apus, we just got down to the docks as fast as we could and got on a boat out of the country.

Q:
Who was on the boat?

Longo:
Batide, myself, and the two Paraguana brothers.

Batide:
And what turned out to be enough cash and high-end merchandise to live off of for a long time. We all could have started very comfortable lives, and at the time, I think we all thought we could do it. When we got to Mumbai, we all just shook hands and made plans to reunite in the same place in a year, after our trail was cold. But we couldn't do it. Three of us were back here within the year.

Longo:
Where was I going to go? I was back in four months, and Pedro's brother was already here, working the docks, though he was calling in sick a lot. That was a flimsy cover. At least I hadn't had a job when I left, so nobody thought it was weird that I was sitting around doing nothing, though they did wonder where I'd gone. Then Batide showed up a couple of weeks later. Just came up and knocked on the door. I knew you'd be back already, he said. Then we sat and waited for Pedro. And here we are. Still waiting.

Q:
When did you realize what had happened while you were gone?

Batide:
The day I got back, when I asked why there were so many holes in the buildings. The people in the Good Foot looked at me like I was a moron. Where have you been? There was a revolution, man. For two months. No way, I said. Who started it? [
Pause.
] When they told me, I went home and threw up.

Vincente:
Would the revolution have occurred if there had been no takeover of Apus Apus? Probably. But would the revolution had gone as it did? With such energy and enthusiasm? I'm not so sure. There was something iconic about what they did, storming the playground of the lords of global commerce, that said what we wanted to say. Blurry lines came into focus, and the image was so indelible that even after we found out that the people in San Marco hadn't been revolutionaries at all—just three poor musicians and a fisherman—it lost none of its clarity. It's possible that the symbol they created is one of the key reasons that the revolution was successful.

It is ironic that, had they been true revolutionaries, they would have been granted amnesty, but because they were thieves, they ended up with five years in prison apiece and their assets taken away.

Q:
Couldn't you have given them amnesty, as well?

Vincente:
Well. As you might imagine, both Hodges and his clients were unhappy about what they'd done. And Apus Apus had them on security camera, did some investigating afterward, noted their disappearances and reappearances. Then looked into their finances. It was enough to bring them to trial. You must realize, between the four of them, they really did abscond with assets worth a great deal of money. But I realize you're asking the larger question here. [
Pause.
] Before you are in power, nothing gets you in faster than denouncing the lords of commerce. But once you are in power, you understand, all at once, that it is all far more complicated even than you thought it would be when you thought it would be complicated. You realize that you must deal with them. You must compromise. It doesn't have to invalidate the things you said to get into power, though—just as the symbolic value of what the four of them did is not diminished by knowing why they did it.

Q:
Even though Pedro Paraguana wasn't ideologically motivated.

Vincente:
On the contrary. It may be exactly what makes the symbol so powerful.

Batide:
We have a standing gig at the Good Foot now, me and Longo. The house rhythm section. We back up singers, guitar players, horn players. But really, we're still playing with Pedro, still bouncing off the way he put down a beat. No matter who's really in front of us, all we see at the microphone, all we hear through the speakers, is him.

Paraguana:
The town government says they're going to put up a statue of my brother on the shore, facing the city, a guitar in one hand, a gun in the other. Something stupid like that. I understand why they want to do it. He's a convenient hero. But if he were here now, he'd never have a gun. Just the guitar. And sometimes I wonder, if he were to knock on the mayor's door today, would the mayor give him a place to play?

Q:
Where do you think Pedro is now?

Longo:
I have no idea. He must have gone back to Mumbai a year after we got there, expecting to find us, but we were already in prison by then. [
Pause.
] I keep expecting to hear him on the radio, or on an album from another country, a big star with a different name, singing in a different language, doing a different style of music, maybe playing a different instrument. But I would recognize him instantly, I'm sure of it. He couldn't hide from me or from Batide. Or from his brother. [
Laughs.
] We would never give his secret away, even though that means we'll never play with him again.

Another part of me, though, thinks that wherever he is, he's living as he did here, when he was a kid. He probably plays in a local club somewhere with another band, and the people who hear him wonder why he isn't famous. They probably tell him he should go for it, start playing out in the big clubs in the big cities. And I imagine him smiling and nodding, and then going home and playing just for himself. I like to think that he plays the San Marcan music like we played it then. But I know that's just my nostalgia. Pedro Paraguana always seemed like a balloon to me, ready to float off into the sky. All he needed to do was cut the string. And he did.

Hodges:
When the revolutionaries came into power, they offered to buy Apus Apus back from me. I'd heard there'd been some fighting there, that the place had been set on fire. There were questions as to how much it was all worth. So I went to see for myself. [
Pause.
] From the shore, the place looked tired, but not so different. As we got up closer, though, we started to see. Half the windows broken. Bullet holes in the plastic. Lots of things stripped off, light fixtures, wiring, carpeting, ceiling tiles, appliances in the kitchen. Somewhere in San Marco, a family of ten is making goat stew on one of the most expensive stoves in the world. There were already squatters there, many of them. Children playing handball in the dirt and glass in the courtyard. A cluster of tents and shacks around the swimming pool, which had been filled in with dirt, and they were growing vegetables in it. A total loss, we all agreed. I collected from insurance, then sold it to the government, and wrote off the losses. All in all, I believe I still came out ahead.

It was getting dark as we were leaving, and one of my lawyers looked out over the city and asked me why I'd built Apus Apus in the first place. He couldn't see what I saw in the place. But I looked up, and there they were, that swarm of swifts, pinwheeling overhead, funneling into the tower at the top of the complex. I don't even remember what I said to him. I just couldn't stop looking at them. They flew with such speed and grace. Almost violent. I think that every week, I still dream about them.

I'm one of those people who thinks that nothing is stranger than the truth. I like writing fiction, but when I do, I'm always a little annoyed by its formal constraints, and more than a little envious of those nonfiction writers who have found a story that blows the mind in a way fiction never quite can. Fiction, after all, must have a beginning, middle, and end, whereas nonfiction has no such limitations; to be compelling, fictional stories must be on some level plausible, whereas some of the best nonfiction stories are so good precisely because they are so implausible. It's irritating.

"Interviews after the Revolution” is the first story that I wrote to completion, threw away completely, and then wrote all over again from start to finish. I really liked the plot, which I would never have been able to work out except by writing a draft of it, but I had told it all wrong. Too many of the plot's elements were too implausible for fiction—but not, I realized, too implausible for nonfiction. Would the plot work better if I told it instead as an oral history? Having finished the story a second time, I still don't know; but I do know that using a nonfictional form opened up the story and the characters in a way that most written fictional forms don't allow, and allowed me, at last, to keep my own mouth shut.

Brian Francis Slattery

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and the Beautiful Chicken

Elizabeth Ziemska

My father wanted to write his memoirs, but he didn't have enough confidence in his English to pull it off on his own. He had come to this country in 1974; after thirty-five years he still had trouble with his pronouns and verb tenses. Nevertheless, he did not want to produce such a document in Polish. America is where my father met his second wife (finally, a soul mate), where my half-brother and sister were born. Feeling the need to record his life on paper quickly, he decided that I would become his amanuensis. The choice was obvious, as my father had agreed to subsidize my college education even though I insisted on studying comparative literature over the more practical engineering. He is the sort of man who likes to see a return on his investment.

We met over three consecutive weekends in July at a modest resort in the Catskills, my father dictating in Polish while I translated into English.

Before I tell you the story he told me about his encounter with Count Stanislas August Poniatowski, the last king of Poland, I need to explain a thing or two about my father. For the past three decades he had been working for the same engineering firm in Manhattan, until it was sold to a large multinational corporation. Not long after the merger, my father was deemed redundant. He found himself suddenly at home, alone (his wife worked, the kids were already out of the nest), with nothing to fill the next seven years before he reached retirement age, at which time he could allow himself to behave like a retiree.

My father repainted the apartment a calming shade of blue: the color of the sky the day he met his second wife while taking a stroll after Mass one September afternoon. A complete stranger to popular culture, he decided to educate himself by going to the movies every weekday afternoon, when the tickets were half price. He read three newspapers each day, cover to cover. For a man who had been earning his living since he was sixteen, none of these activities could make him feel like a productive human being. He felt spellbound, worthless, miserable. Unbeknownst to his family, or even to himself, he began to search for a Great Deed.

One thing my father did enjoy was taking his lunch al fresco, a pleasure he hadn't had time for since childhood, when he and his brothers would take chunks of bread and cheese into the forest behind their grandfather's country house and pretend that they were woodland creatures. So it was that on a crisp, russet-hued fall day my father crossed Cabrini Boulevard heading toward Ft. Tryon Park, brown bag in hand, his head full of childhood memories, and was run down by a gunmetal gray Hummer H3.

The driver, a young German with a blond crew cut, could not have been more apologetic. He simply hadn't seen my father in his brown wool suit, camouflaged so perfectly among the dying autumn leaves of the tree-lined street. The unfortunate driver was articulate in his mortification over the accident, promising to pay for all medical expenses; all my father could hear was his German accent. And all he could think about, as he was strapped into a gurney and hoisted into the ambulance, was the day the Panzers rolled into Warsaw.

In the hospital where he stayed for two weeks while his bones knit, my father's already somber mood descended into melancholy retrospection. Why had he survived the accident? Was it a coincidence that the driver was German? Was it some sort of sign? Although he had worked hard his entire life, was his real work about to begin? He made a mental inventory of his accomplishments. Immigrating to a new country: check. Successfully raising not one, but two, families: check (though if he were entirely honest with himself, one more successfully than the other). Building a career in his profession (as opposed to driving a cab, or running a candy store, as many other immigrants must do to survive): check. Were these enough to constitute a successful life? Surely there were other things he could have done, could still do, now that he had been spared, once again. Every night before he fell asleep, he tried to work on a list of future accomplishments, but he could never get beyond item number one. The youngest of five brothers, my father was just three years old when Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, but he remembered with great clarity the day his family hid in the basement of their apartment building. Polish fighters had managed to keep the Germans out of Warsaw for eleven days of a siege before they ran out of supplies. Panzers broke through fortifications and rolled down the streets while German soldiers swarmed the city, going door to door, looking for Polish soldiers hiding among the civilian population.