The Shadow of the Shadow (34 page)

I T HAD ALL STARTED two nights before, when three police
agents accompanied by plant manager Julio Imbert entered the
Santa Teresa mill and kidnapped Julio Marquez, Interior Secretary
of the Textile Workers Federation. All the next day, Marquez'
whereabouts were still unknown. At 6:05 the following morning,
a flood of workers entered Imbert's office demanding Marquez'
release, insulting the manager, and threatening retaliation if
anything happened to their leader. Imbert took a gun out of his
desk drawer but the workers disarmed him before he could do
any harm. Work in the factory was brought to a standstill, the
immense looms shut down. A group of workers went out into the
street and started to beat on the metal lampposts with steel bars.

The metallic, rhythmic signal paralyzed the mills all over
Contreras. Workers at the Magdalena, the Alpina, the Hormiga
all quit working and went out to repeat the rhythmic signal.

Five hundred marchers left the doors of the Santa Teresa and
by the time they'd reached Tizapan there were over five thousand.

The distant clanging woke up Tomas in the coal yard.

"What the hell?" asked San Vicente, jumping out of bed.

"Genelal stlike. Don't you heal the lampposts?"

"I didn't know that was the signal. Hells bells, man, are we ever
organized or what?"

Rosa took the Chinaman's hand and squeezed it softly. "Be
careful.' he streets are going to be full of police."

"Thele's going to be mole of us than them. Just listen to it."

Tomas went out wrapped in a heavy coat, an enormous straw
hat covering his head, and San Vicente threw a scarf across his
face. They joined the march as it turned onto Puente Sierra. And while they looked around for someone they knew to tell them
what had happened, the workers at the front of the column ran
across Imbert sitting in a car with four policemen. The marchers
showered the car with stones and captured the mill manager,
bleeding from a superficial cut on his face. They demanded that he
publicly declare who had kidnapped Julio Marquez.

Tomas and San Vicente found their friends Paulino Martinez
and Hector, and together they tried to push their way to the front
of the crowd through the enraged Santa Teresa workers.

At 8:05, on the Ansaldo Bridge, five gendarmes led by a
sergeant and accompanied by several nonunion workers from the
Santa Teresa mill tried to rescue Imbert. The marchers responded
with stones. The gendarmes fired into the air.

San Vicente brought his hand up to his coat pocket. Tomas
stopped him.

"If we file back, that gives them the excuse to shoot into the
clowd. Take it easy."

The Spaniard nodded as the workers at the front of the
demonstration chased the gendarmes with another volley of
stones.

At 8:30, nearly seven thousand marchers entered the main
plaza at the center of San Angel. Two squadrons of mounted
police were waiting for them. Imbert tried to break free, but was
hit in the shoulder with a stone. The gendarmes cocked their rifles.
Tomas tried again to get to the front, but he was trapped in a side
street while the first lines of workers entered the square. Climbing
onto a windowsill and holding on to the outer grate, he strained
to see what was happening in the plaza. A double row of mounted
gendarmes guarded the entrance to city hall. Two officers sat on
their horses behind the second line. Tomas recognized one of
them-Colonel Gomez, his face and body tense, sitting upright
in the saddle, shouting an order. The gendarmes retreated toward
Plaza San Jacinto before the surging crowd of workers. The
marchers were trying to get to city hall, where they planned to force Imbert to declare openly what had happened to Marquez.

The thousands of workers coming up from behind pushed the
front of the march toward San Jacinto, but barely five hundred
marchers had reached the plaza when the police opened up with
their first volley. Six or seven workers dropped to the ground, and
the crowd paused and fell backward. Tomas and San Vicente tried
again to move ahead, but it was impossible.

"It's Gomez, did you see him? Gomez is giving the oldels."

"Let's get him."

The police opened fire again, and now the plaza was covered
with fallen bodies. Some of the marchers tried to fight back, but
their stones were no match for the police Mausers. Tomas was
dragged along by the crowd, but San Vicente, protecting himself
behind a tree, managed to get off a shot at the mounted Colonel.
The bullet shattered a window at the colonel's back and he turned
to try to see where the shot had come from. The gendarmes fired
again, but the plaza was almost empty. The colonel made his horse
caper in place for a moment, and then spurred the animal into
a trot and left the plaza by the far side. San Vicente saw a tenyear-old boy with a bullet wound in his leg, took him up in his
arms, and with his gun still in his hand retreated from the plaza,
carefully watching the line of mounted police. Tomas waved him
into the shelter of a nearby doorway. Slowly, several workers
approached their fallen comrades-underneath the open mouths
of the smoking rifles. Two dozen wounded lay on the ground.
Two of them, the aged Emilio Lopez, veteran textile worker, and
Florentino Ramos, with two bullets in his stomach, would die
within a few hours.

The bells of the Red and White Cross ambulances broke the
fragile air. Tomas took San Vicente's scarf and tied a tourniquet
around the boy's leg. The boy had fainted.

Another squadron of mounted police entered the plaza and
headed down the streets where the marchers had fled five minutes
before.

"Let's get out of here, Tomas, they're going to start arresting
people."

"This is why they'le plotecting Gomez. They need him fol this
kind of bullshit."

"Dammit all to hell and the Virgin Mary, man, I had him in
my sights and his horse moved on me."

"Let's get him, Sebastian. He must have gone off to the
gendarmely ballacks at Peledo."

"There's no way we can get through."

"Let's get him, Sebastian. This doesn't have anything to do
with the othel stuff. This is something between us and Gomez, us
and Gomez and all of them," said the Chinaman, pointing to the
bodies lying across the plaza.

I WOULD HAVE LIKED to have sailed away in all the ships
I ever loaded, all the ships whose passengers I helped down the
gangplank, carrying their bags covered with brightly colored labels
from hotels, customs inspections, railroads. I would have liked to
have gotten aboard those big shiny white boats in the sunshine
and gone away.

I'm not from here. From this land where I was born. That's
something life teaches you, if you're willing to learn, that nobody's
from where they were born, where they grew up. That nobody's
really from anywhere. There's some people that try to keep up the
illusion, working themselves all up over memories and knickknacks
and flags and anthems. What they don't know is that we all belong
to the places we've never even been before. If there's any kind
of legitimate nostalgia, it's for everything we've never seen, the
women we've never slept with, never dreamed of, the friends we
haven't made, the books we haven't read, all that food steaming
in the pots we've never eaten out of. That's the only real kind of
nostalgia there is.

Another thing you learn along the way is that at some point
or other the road took a wrong turn and things didn't necessarily
have to turn out the way they did. Nobody should have had to eat
bug-infested rice or half-rotten corn in the oil fields, paying three
times the regular price at the company store. Nobody ought to
have had to go out in the middle of the rains to close the valves on
well number seven; muck around in the middle of the jungle laying
pipe, drilling wells in the swamps, blasting dynamite, sleeping on
the wet ground, taking in starvation wages while the foreman eats ham and butter out of the cans we carried in on our backs. And
the bossman, far away in some big house in the city, sleeps in a bed
without ever knowing who we are, without ever acknowledging
the real source of his pleasure and his power, without ever having
to think about us, while we carry him on our shoulders and our
backs, pushing and grunting like so many ants, pushing his stocks
up higher and higher every day in New York.

That's why I don't want to go on those shiny white ships.
Because I'd have to pay for my dreams-working eleven-hour days
as a waiter, a busboy, shining the polished brass handrails, sweating
in the heat of the kitchen. That's why the big boats stay far away, as
I watch them come and go from every port, from all my dreams,
from inside my nostalgia.

WORD OF THE SAN ANGEL SHOOTING arrived at the
newspaper by midmorning. Manterola, who'd spent the night
in an armchair in the waiting room outside the director's office,
prowled anxiously around the newsroom without quite daring to
get involved, but leaping eagerly on every scrap of information:
reports from the Red Cross and the White Cross, a statement
by Gasca, the Federal District Regent, a call from the CGT
central council for a general strike to begin the following day, the
description of two of his colleagues who'd been out to interview
the wounded and other demonstrators. A statement from the
San Angel city authorities maintaining that the demonstration
had been a peaceful one and blaming the gendarmerie for the
aggression.

"Manterola, the boss wants to see you."

He dragged himself reluctantly down the hall. As he passed the
windowwhere he'd witnessed Colonel Zevada's fatal fall, he saw one
of the gendarmeries'paddy wagons parked in front of the building.
During the night, Ruiz, who covered the city desk, had told him
in a whisper that the word was out that the gendarmes had gotten
the order to kill him on the slightest pretext, that Gomez had put a
price on his head and that a certain Captain Palomera had bet that
he'd be the man to win it. That same morning, two secret service
agents guarding the newspaper's entrance (Alessio Robles had kept
his promise to protect Manterola) stopped an alleged salesman,
who said he wanted to place an ad in the newspaper, from entering
the building. The man was armed, carried no identification. One of
the agents had tentatively identified him as a wanted criminal.