Conditions for the Revolution

Then he told her about when he set off for Spain, in ’73. She looked at him with her eyes open very wide, and then exclaimed in a shocked tone: But that was our brightest moment! Our whole generation, all the young people, like never before, in the streets! You couldn’t have left in ’73! She was exaggerating her enthusiasm a bit, aware that widening her eyes and raising her voice was part of the display of politics and passion and, therefore, part of Cris herself: the small groups of demonstrators talking nearby noticed her fiery presence, her dynamic and battle-hardened style, and she immediately felt younger. And when we freed the prisoners! And when we took over the Student Centre and made them kick out all the right-wing staff! And when – In a tender shift that exasperated Cris, Quique interrupted her, taking her sweetly by the chin.

‘I felt that something wasn’t going right, Cris. The maximalist prerogatives were pushing things to a crossroads. Besides, I had an aunt who was moving right then, all her things were on the boat, and I got on.’ Cris pursed her lips again; her attention was becoming erratic. He tried to get her to come to her senses. ‘Cris, the bases had shifted. The logic of the situation was headed down the pan. I abandoned Peronism when I realized that violence was the only path left for me to go down. I’ve always been political, but I’ve always considered myself more Gramscian than Peronist. Trotskyist too. Strictly speaking, for a while I was methodologically Marxist but officially Peronist.’

She wasn’t convinced, but at least he had managed to confuse her somewhat. The context helped. The democratic disillusionment with the fall of de la Rúa’s government translated into the semantic realm as ‘urgency’, ‘change’ and plans for society’s future. Carefully, Quique dropped a few names while checking out the effect they had on his prospective lover’s face. It was some sort of encoded game of Battleship, where the breadth of his combat itinerary sought out correspondence with some emotional oasis in Cris’s swampy sentimental structure. Certain facial expressions maintain bi-univocal relationships with a group of data; the expressions are stimulated by the data; Quique’s objective was to provide nuggets of information to stimulate those elusive mental objects that typically nest beneath the female skin and make a man ‘interesting’. Testing out the coordinates of the grid, Quique’s attack on the female fantasy included comrade experiences, youthful rebellious spirit, true commitment to the bases, active participation in the armed struggle (sunk!). Quique smiled, savouring very similar words, reliving an old tactic applied in Barcelona and Paris on Spanish women, Uruguayans and luscious recently arrived Argentinians. Political commitment fuelled a strong fusion with other lives. In exile, Quique had discovered that the traumatic arithmetic that melded a past and a moustache could function as proof of a set of privileged experiences, as shared as they were private, in the light of whose mysterious shadow the true socialist homeland would always exist, in the hearts of comrades and lovers, as stated in Walt Whitman’s dedication to his readers in Leaves of Grass.