On the subject: The Storm and the Day After.
Afterword.
Part Four: Between pay and imagination.
d). – You are part of a theater group. Well, you were. Nothing is left of the brilliant improvisations, the tedious rehearsals, the corrections in posture, diction and intonation, the fights over costumes, the “intra-acting” conflicts (“hey Luis, I don’t like this speech, in my role as a statue I should be more eloquent”), the lavish set designs, the fights over the budget, the premises to be adapted, the advertisements, the tickets. Nor are there the expectations of a role in that movie, soap opera, series, show.
On the other hand, another you already sensed the outcome of the storm. When you were in different corners of the world, trying to get children’s smiles where there were only grimaces of pain and empty gazes of anguish. The mutilated tree of Palestinian childhood, the cynical indifference of a “civilization” full of the cult of banality, the humble huts of the natives in the prolonged oblivion called Latin America. You were also a driver, with the chofera colleague – “it’s the same thing,” the Zapatista girl who does not deal with biological genders but with the essence of each being would say-, that time when a small mountain sailed against the grain of history, as if that was what it was all about, to go against the grain. Its passengers reiterating the warning, warning of the imminent expiration date of a system gone mad. The culmination of the tragedy, the world as you knew it crumbling in a muffled whimper because there was no social network to warn you. You could almost say you expected it.
Now that is behind us. You have been in that community for several days now and you, who are moderately intelligent, have understood that those people gathered together do not want to repeat the story of “Little Malcom in his fight against the Eunuchs”.
Now it is about to be your turn. Those who were part of the group have sat down together, as human beings gather in misfortune. Why can’t you get the dialogues of “The Honest Person of Sechuan” out of your head? Perhaps because it all seems the same: the challenge to be a better person and to be good, to live better without giving up honesty as a human value. There are only two people left to introduce themselves. You make a quick calculation: there are those who can play the characters: there is Shen Te – Shui Ta, and you trust that he remembers the dialogues; there are the gods, there are Wang, Sun and Shui Fa. But what about the set design? How? With what? Where? It’s your turn. Then your group and you realize that you face the greatest challenge in your profession: with your performances you must get the audience to imagine the scenery. “This is the story of a woman who was also a man who was also a woman and so on,” you begin, standing in the middle of the basketball court.
At the end nobody applauded. There were no interviews, flashes, autograph requests, critical reviews from the specialized press. Nor applause and laughter at the solidarity of a dramatized story. Because now you sense that this solidarity is given to you, like a murmur among the audience in an incomprehensible language. And now you understand: victims only cease to be victims when they survive by dint of resistance and rebellion. Only then can they start again.
Did you do it well or poorly? You don’t know, but you took turns presenting yourselves. The next day, in the community dining room called “En Común Come Comida Común (In Common Eat Common Food),” you hear a woman comment to another: “The problem is that the theater workers paid the girl. See if they didn’t, it’s something else.” ‘Or maybe, it depends,’ replies her companera. “La Paga,” you are left thinking… ‘Sure’, you say, ‘Bertoldo was looking at what would be the Second World War and its horrors, and thus pointed out the dilemma caused by the money, the pay, as they say in this place.’ You go to sit with your group, who eat in silence because they doesn’t know if they did well or badly either, and sit down. You set down your plate, look at the others and say: “the problem is the pay.” Everyone stares at you. “You have to imagine another world,” he continues. Finishing his meal, while lining up to wash your plate, you murmur: “You have to imagine the day after.”
The next day, at the assembly roll call, you hear “teatreros” and simultaneously, as if after hundreds of rehearsals, you answer “presentes.” You sit looking at each other with satisfaction. Your look changes when they hear: “it’s your turn to carry the planks to the auditorium.”
As they load the planks, you all think: “auditorium… stage… set… theater!”. Although now you understand that they don’t need an auditorium. For art, a collective heart is always enough. They don’t say it out loud, but they say to themselves “the problem is no longer the pay, we no longer have to wait for Godot.”
-*-
e). – You used to be a writer. You know: poetry, short stories, a novel or two. It was not easy. Scholarships? Bah, those were always for those who knew how to relate… and flatter with constancy and certainty. “The problem is the pay,” you heard the theater people say in the dining room called ‘Atásquense que hay lodo.’ Or is it “Now or Never”? You remember that lecture you gave at a university. “Whoever writes tells stories. No more, but no less,” that’s how it began. All that was left behind. Paradoxically, the day before you listened to Bob Dylan prophesying: “How does it feel / how does it feel / To be on your own, / with no direction home / A complete unknown, / like a rolling stone”.
Now, with the tip of your toe, you roll a pebble. No more to the time alone, the half-light, your library, the work table or desk, the computer, the ghosts, the dozens of drafts, the hard drive full of truncated words, the search for a publisher: “Oops, no young man. Literature has gone out of fashion. Nowadays it’s all about interactive stories, stories in a minimum number of characters. Something light, that doesn’t require a lot of thinking. But come another day. You know, the world is round and it turns.”
But the world no longer exists, at least not YOUR world. Your turn comes. You inhale and stand up. You start: “I am going to tell you a story.” And without even realizing it, you are weaving a story of stories that, while looking at the faces of those present, you are pulling out of your imagination. Dozens of stories embroidered into one. Just as in the embroidery of “La Hidra,” which you saw in a museum in Madrid, in the Spain “of teasing spirit and still soul,” the “Spain of rage and of the idea,” when, later, you accompanied the Open Arms band that, in a tavern in Andalusia (between tapas, clapping and flamenco heels, with the cante jondo and Federico, they called out to the earth with a “Wake up!”), decided to use the pay for a boat to rescue shipwrecked migrants.
Perhaps they imagined then that the day would come when they would all be shipwrecked, trying to emigrate from a broken world, populated by debris and nightmares, looking for someone who would open his arms to welcome them and thus try to start over…
Silence rules and commands, and it is only its voice that can be heard. Even the crickets, always malicious, are silent.
The next day, in the dining room “Corre porque te Alcanzo (Run because I’m catching you),” you hear an old man declare: “I do like that story because I am younger there.” An older woman: “And me, because I’m pretty there”, and adds flirtatiously “Well, prettier.” At another table, two young people: “What I don’t understand is what that mutt had to do with the story”; the other “He’s hardly a mutt, I saw clearly that he is a cat”; “How do you figure, he even barked”; “It’s not that he barked, I heard clearly that he did it like a cat.” Later, in the assembly they say “Contador (Accountant),” everyone turns to look at you and you understand, stand up and declare “Present.”
Inwardly, you think to yourself, “As my grandmother used to say: mija, you are good at arithmetic, when you grow up you are going to be an accountant.” Your smile disappears when you hear “it’s your turn to help Doña Juanita in the kitchen.”
You go to the kitchen, when a little girl (about 5-6 years old) bumps into you and blurts out: “Hey Contador, tell me a story about how I already know how to ride a bike. Because I don’t like the fact that I always fall.” The girl shows you her knee so that you can see a scrape still with blood and dust. You politely ask, “Does it hurt a lot?”. She stands up and says: “not so much, believe me, what hurts more is the mockery of the fucking men who only show off but they fall down, I looked at them the other day. El Pedrito fell down, but his head was in the mud, so he simply washed himself, the damned man, and he makes fun of me. But I fell in the gravel. Because not just anyone can ride a bicycle in the gravel.”
At that moment a friend of mine passes by and says: “Listen, Accountant, if the captain comes and tells you to prepare a meal called ‘Marco’s Special,’ don’t listen to him. The whole world will thank you for it.”
You are moderately intelligent, so you understand two things: that the captain’s dish is not welcome at any table, and that the world is now that small community in search of a destiny of its own. A group of storm survivors who, as individuals and as a collective, seek to move forward, to start over, without repeating the same mistakes… in the day after.
To be continued…
From the eve.
The Captain
October 2024.
Original text published at Enlace Zapatista on October 14th, 2024.
Translation by Schools for Chiapas.