Birth of Our Power by Victor Serge Richard Greeman Page B

your bundles of “merchandise” stuffed in your left pants’ pockets, your right hands resting casually on your Brownings! You surely would never have been willing to fight for the
Comité Obrero
(Workers’ Committee). But cornered in a dead end with prison the only way out, you died—valiantly—shot down by the cops. That ending was, for you, inevitable … after the squalid fights … the unspeakable anguish under the eye of the shopkeeper whose sharp looks peel the gold off the phony coin … the unavowable murders on the outskirts of town … the double crosses you perpetrated against each other—free men, outsiders, proud of being “neither masters or slaves,” of living according to reason in the cold, clear light of “conscious egotism” … Gangs of rebels, born to adventure, the gray autos carried you off to the guillotine—five thousand francs sewn in your pants’ lining, three clips of ammunition (twenty-one bullets, nicely pointed and explicit), and: “We’re nobody’s fool any more.”—“We no longer believe in anything.”—“We will carve out a new life for ourselves.” But one of the boys, who didn’t believe in anything either, found it even more convenient to make blood money on you and sold you out to fat policemen—cash on the line.
    No, I much preferred the very different truths held by El Chorro, Eusebio, and a few thousand other comrades who, at every hour, were crossing and recrossing the teeming city, running secret errands.
    â€œCome along,” the Mexican said to me, late one afternoon under a reddening sky. You’re going to have a good laugh.”
    The muscles of his massive, square-chinned face were twitching with imperceptible laughter. In a cloud of red dust, we crossed the Gracia quarter: houses, white or red, doors half-opened onto the extraordinary cool, blue shade inside. Not a soul in sight. In the middle of a sweltering, deserted market place the murmur of a fountain mingled with a monotonous female voice: “A-a-a-i-o …” A young gypsy was squatting in a narrow triangle of shade, rocking her child to sleep. Red earth, shimmering with heat, dull buzzing of glittering green flies around the squatting young woman, copper flesh of a ripe breast, and the heavy sky where great fiery waves were unfolding invisibly.
    Merciful shade gave us back the power of speech. We were climbing a hill.
    â€œYou know what’s really great?” El Chorro said, “is waking up with the birds in the early morning out on the sierra. The mountains are purple, and the night has fled across the forest. You recognize the birds’ songs. You hear the movements of the animals going to drink. The dew sprinkled on the leaves like diamonds. The sun appears and warms without burning …”
    â€œWill we take the city, El Chorro?”
    â€œ
No sé! coño!”
(“I haven’t the foggiest notion!”—followed by the foulest obscenity). “What we need is a man, a real man. Five thousand men, ten thousand men without one man, and all is lost. One they will follow and obey; one they can love. One leader, and I’d answer: ‘Yes.’”
    We arrived. “You’ll have a good laugh!” El Chorro cried out once more. He led me toward a tumbledown shack built right against the rock on the side of a hill. Our only vista a vegetable patch down below. My companion slapped his thigh joyfully and, pushing open the swinging door, we entered. A young woman seated before a second door rose to meet us. Through a hole the roof, a wide ray of orange sunlight fell across her skinny brown shoulders. She smiled. We passed through that ray of red gold, that smile, the shadow, another swinging door …
    At first I had trouble making out several squatting forms hovering around a curious low-slung machine. Factory girls. Then I recognizedJurien,