Mauro Cardenas - The Revolutionaries Try Again

my mother filling up the kitchen sink to the brim donning yellow rubber gloves sticking her hand down the sink as if conducting exploratory surgery

who wants a kidney for dinner?

ewww

and on the night Eva brought up that accursed John Paul II contest her mother read to her the usual bedtime story about Marranito Poco Rabo searching for ravioli and nabo — that’s not how the story goes! — once upon time at the cacao plantations in Los Ríos men in uniforms told your grandmother that from Adam’s other rib the lord had created the rich so that miserable people like her wouldn’t die of hunger — so that miserable people like her would be less miserable and that she was miserable because the lord had ordained it so just as he had ordained for your grandmother’s brother to die of dysentery — for your grandmother’s father to toil morning to evening until his back gave out and he was let go without a handshake or a pension — what’s a pension Mama? — and then one day a different cadre of men in uniforms arrived at the cacao plantations in Los Rios and with an ire unseen in that region they told your grandmother and the other farmers that none of it was true — that the rich weren’t a gift from god — that god hadn’t ordained for anyone to be miserable — that it wasn’t normal for their children to die of hunger and that there was a different cadre of men all over the continent building schools and clinics just like they were going to build schools and clinics in Los Ríos — and then one day a bad man lambasted these cadres of good men and said that what people like your grandmother needed was guidance on how to enter heaven and not guidance on how to seek a better life on earth — and then one day this bad man whom everyone calls John Paul II sent a dark German emissary to sabotage the work of these cadres of good men — shutting down their schools and shuttering their clinics and replacing them with dark bad men in uniforms who went on preaching dark bad things — and where are the good ones now Mother? — all of them dead? — and where are you tonight Mother? — by constellations with names we didn’t know? — festering underfoot? — Pisces Mother — and where is Rolando tonight? — Corona Borealis — and where was Rolando last night? — does he assume that because I’m upset with him I don’t want to see him again? — did she ever tell Rolando about her grandmother in Los Ríos? — tell me about yourself — no you tell me about yourself — no — she never told him about her grandmother in Los Ríos or what happened to her brother Arsenio — for what end I ask you? — for what purpose? — shut up — besides — to her the point of talking isn’t to share asteroids with vague puffs of life — the Flying Dumbos Mama — landing on a coffee sack after her brother pushed her from what they called the balcony — Mama my brother pushed me! — alfalfa face — my mother telling me stories from when Arsenio was little before he was gone — I spent one whole Sunday cutting and arranging my new white curtains and when they were up your brother snuck inside my bedroom and wiped himself on them can you believe it? — to her the point of talking is simply to pass the time until we fester underfoot — to overlook how disemboweled her voice feels from the rest of her body — my voice stems from my stomach that’s why it morphs by meal type — give me your goat soup voice — bahhh — give me your lamb chop voice — Hey — Hey hottie want a ride? — and Eva not acknowledging the voice coming from the blue Trooper that has slowed beside her along Victor Emilio Estrada — We could stop by a liquor store for Boones — Drive to hell first and liquor yourself there — Oh a feisty heretic type — Eva not speeding up or slowing down not turning to look at them the brake lights of the cars ahead of her flickering as the men inside stick their heads out to check if she’s going to get in — right — pulling the hammer from the back pocket of her jeans and holding it with both hands like a crazy person who may or may not feel like swinging it at anything — the leering men inside the car are teenagers — high school boys with braces — their chauffeur seems to be the only one who takes her hammer seriously because he’s driving them away as the boys yell stop the car chofer — We’re taking the maid with us chofer — Chola hijueputa — Revolera conchadetumadre — whatever — she will not cross the street or wait by the shawarma place until they’re out of sight and she will not imagine Rolando swiping the hammer from her hand and stumping their morsels — Rolando Bobbit — good one — neither good nor bad señor — doesn’t matter we’re all going to — quit it with that refrain Evatronica — she doesn’t need to imagine Rolando stumping anything because she can imagine stumping everything herself — it isn’t so hard to imagine Rolando — you’re not the only one who wants everything to end — she has never dreamed of pulling out her hammer from the back pocket of her jeans to destroy the stagecraft — the houses and rivers — ripping the curtains is that enough Rolando? — of course it isn’t — how are we to be Christians in a world of destitution and — hearing Rolando’s stories about Father Villalba in which he never describes what Father Villalba looks like so she has come to imagine Father Villalba looking like Óscar Romero with those clerk glasses like a second set of eyebrows — Father Villalba refused to be anyone’s spiritual counselor Eva — and one Saturday Father Villalba asked me if I could help him load the boxes that he was taking to the children who scavenge at the garbage disposal site in La Libertad and that Saturday and the Saturday after that we rode to La Libertad in silence — thinking that I could sense what Villalba wanted to say to me — what was that? — that’s personal Eva — alfalfa face — boxes filled with lettuce heads and antibiotics — you know what Chagas’ disease does to you? — ewww — not listening — say chinchorro — chinchulín? — churi churín fun flais? — wishing she could be listening to Rolando asking his radio audience the questions they’d come up with together the week before — who assassinated Jaime Roldós Aguilera? — that one’s too serious Rolancho — how come we have all this oil and we can’t even rescue people from mudslides? — didn’t know you had a penchant for mud — good for the skin bobito — who’s your favorite president since our return to democracy in 1979? — none of them señor — and what is Rolando saying tonight? — what is he angry about tonight? — his radio signal doesn’t reach here and the radios here aren’t asking anything except what’s your favorite song

déle nomás / con el garrote que le va a gustar

the radios here are the background songs from the rear of the restaurants along Victor Emilio Estrada — from the hotdog stands on the street corners — from the street children who have abandoned the usual intersections and are now performing their circus tricks amid the traffic — she cannot tell if the people inside the cars have grown used to ignoring them or are worried about the street children cracking their windows as they peek inside their cars as if to check why no one’s giving them any money — hello? — perhaps Rolando’s playacting at being a lovelorn caller who would like to dedicate a song to Eva Calderón from Los Rios — a love song unlike the songs from the radios along Victor Emilio Estrada that Eva hears and doesn’t hear

(later she will forget that she couldn’t really hear any radios along Victor Emilio Estrada so the radios she’s hearing now are the radios she will imagine later)

imagining what she will imagine

for years now inhabiting in the present what she knows she will imagine in the future