Arturo Fontaine - La Vida Doble

In the meantime, Canelo had opened fire on the man coming at him head-on, and people scattered, shouting and running. In the curve of the street, the protuberance of a building served as cover. At first he didn’t know where to fire, because all he saw was Samuel’s body bent roughly and a man underneath shielding himself with it. He fell back, covering me. Another agent shot at him from the side leading to Ahumada. That’s where he aimed his next shot.

After that the report of the skirmish gets hazier. Bone, they say, got personally involved in reconstructing the battle. He wanted to extract lessons. Our training was based, in part, on the stories of different confrontations. The idea was for the combatant to imagine the kinds of situations he or she could possibly face. The problem was, of course, that no encounter was the same as any other. Even so, the study of these cases, of past failures and successes, prepared us for the day of combat. Most of our fighters — as was my case until that morning — spent years and years without meeting the enemy in a firefight, without hearing the whistle of a bullet seeking their bodies; in other words, without being subjected to the test of reality. Shooting at a flesh-and-blood person who’s also armed is different from target practice on a bottle hanging from a tree branch, you understand.

I used to wonder how true to life these kinds of reconstructions really were. We’ll never know. The Spartan grew impatient when someone like me raised epistemological objections. He’d gotten used to acting quickly and taking risks without waiting for certainties. To me it seemed like the stories we were given left out and censored doubts or alternative hypotheses. It was a polished and carefully selected version of what memory was capable of restoring. I would have preferred an interpretation that was more open and contradictory to the facts. I was suspicious of so much precision. Because, they warned us from the start that a shootout in the streets is a confusing, fleeting event, and you remember it in fragments. No one was watching it all from outside in order to give a complete, unified view. In spite of that warning, they inevitably put forth, borne on a fallacious and inviolable voluntarism, an ordered chain of events, with a beginning, a middle, and an end. But I always held onto the doubts appropriate to a graduate in French literature.

The only answer I ever got from the Spartan was something like: “We have to try for a coherent, complete, and objective story of what happened. It’s an unattainable ideal, we know. But as an ideal it’s inalienable. We see its usefulness in practice.” And then, considering the matter closed, he took a Havana from his jacket pocket. The Spartan gazed placidly at its wrapper, he sniffed it and then smelled the tobacco itself, and then he started to palpate the cigar, enjoying its corklike consistency. “It’s an Upmann,” he told me. “A Sir Winston, maybe the most balanced cigar I’ve ever had in terms of smell, taste, and strength. It has a very wide pull. When you draw on it — not the first puffs, of course, which are for lighting it more than anything — you can taste notes of coffee and cocoa. It should be smoked with utmost respect, let me tell you.” He offered me the other one.

“Some other time,” I said. He lit it serenely with a cedar match and then cut it. A thick smoke with an inviting aroma enveloped him.

According to Puma, it was our own Kid of the Day who hit the agent threatening Canelo from in front. The man fell face-first onto the pavement. Then a skinny, well-dressed woman, who emerged all of a sudden from among the terrified, fleeing pedestrians, a woman who could have passed for a young secretary, took a pistol from her briefcase and opened fire. Canelo and the Kid retreated toward Moneda. They withdrew little by little, firing, each one glued to his piece of wall. And they discovered that the walls of those buildings were full of protrusions and hiding places that allowed them to maneuver. It was that skinny woman who hit Kid of the Day. According to information in the press, a bullet went through his left eye. Another two perforated his abdomen. Rafa and Puma, our lookouts, fought until Canelo fell. The street had emptied out, and only agents and machine-gun fire were left. They had set a trap.

The shots came now from up above. They had to protect themselves. Rafa says in his report that he remembers a man with a casual suit and dark glasses, glued to the wall, looking for Canelo. Puma says he didn’t see the man, he was focused on the roofs, where he could make out one or another jockey hat and pair of dark glasses that appeared and disappeared with each gunshot. The man in the dark suit hid behind a protruding entrance to an office building, and, pressed close to the wall, was trying to reach the next doorway. He says Canelo shot at him twice. The man kept coming. Suddenly, he was already too close; and he was holding his gun with both hands. He shot Canelo in the chest. Impossible to miss at such close range.

Canelo fell. He tried to get up. Rafa and Puma — because they both saw this final scene — say that he managed to get on one knee when another burst of fire hit him point-blank. Was it an unnecessary death after all? The story in Commander Joel’s monthly letter ended more or less like this: “After a bullet perforated his artery, a stream of hot, living blood poured forth. The enemy agent sprang back. Canelo fell, secure in the knowledge that he was a hero, secure that he would go on living forever in us. According to the Mapuches, Canelo is now an am, which means he lives and eats and celebrates and fights with us as long as we keep his memory with us. A hero who gives his life lives forever.”

Of course, I didn’t read that reconstruction until months later. I read it alone in my sweltering apartment on Carlos Antúnez. The walls, I think I’ve mentioned, were very thin, and I could hear the constant murmur of my neighbor’s TV. I hadn’t finished moving in yet. There were still suitcases and boxes to open. I got into bed and I couldn’t cry for Canelo. I spent the whole day between the sheets, not eating, my face turned to the wall.

Canelo was thin and lanky, with straight, blond hair cut short like a soldier’s. I loved to run my hand over that short, wiry hair, toothbrush hair. I liked his eyes, very light green. We were friends, and we slept together purely as friends. We didn’t love each other with the madness and faith of lovers. It was more a way of keeping each other company while the passion of fear pursued us. I still feel the shape of his bony shoulders in my hands sometimes, his ribs where I would pretend to play the piano until it tickled him. His smile was a little shy. We kissed a lot, but there was no savage hunger in our kisses; they were tender. He was a tender man. I’ve never felt a tenderness toward anyone like the one Canelo awoke in me. I trusted in him. I’ve never trusted anyone more than Canelo. Although sometimes I tried to ward off my feelings. I didn’t want to be just a pawn in Canelo’s plan.

Like I said, I wasn’t even in love. We were comrades in arms. But something resonated in me, and I told myself that if it weren’t for him I wouldn’t do it, I stuck to him and his fight like ivy to the wall. Just listen to the sexist cliché I use! Without him, what I was just evaporated.

That’s why I agonized so much when I couldn’t take comfort in our leader’s words in the report. I couldn’t stand his rhetoric. My antipathy opened a rift. His words made me grit my teeth like I would at the sound of nails on a blackboard. I felt my ears burning red when I remembered swallowing that kind of drivel before. And I did as I was told like a little girl, and I felt put upon and I blamed myself the same way I did in school when the nuns punished me, when it filled me with peace to accept my blame and it brought me happiness to repent. What the fuck!. . Canelo wouldn’t live among us forever, because we, too, were going to die without shame or glory. And that hot, living blood . . No. They’d wipe us out like fumigated ants.