The Dark Bride

thirty-three

At night all cats are brown, and that night all men were cats. With feline and furtive steps they traversed the extreme tension of the 26, all around them a night hermetic and strangely devoid of noise for the first time in seven years — the quiet, heavy machines like enormous animals dreaming in the mist — because the rebels had extinguished the power plant and blocked the valves in and out. With technology forcibly silenced, the human voice took possession of the camp, newborn and still testing its own strength in the form of anonymous shouting that at times ebbed and at times surged, and it was also possible to hear tremulous breathing and other slight noises produced by figures who were crouched in anticipation of something, who were moving toward somewhere, who were protecting themselves behind barricades of oil drums.

“Despite my nervousness I was thinking about her,” Sacramento tells me, “and by saying that I’m not telling you anything new, because I have never been able to think about anything else. I cursed myself for not having sent her postcards again, since she enjoyed receiving them so much, but at the same time I forgave myself by reflecting that I hadn’t done it, not because I had forgotten or out of laziness, but because of my confusion about words; since I had confirmed what I suspected, that the girl and Sayonara were one and the same, I lost the sense of how I should write to her, especially in the ticklish area of how to address her: Adored fiancée? Señorita? Dear girl? My beloved? I got all tangled up in those meditations on grammar while the revolt in the camp was growing, and vigorously. Payanés, the gringo míster Brasco, and I went to find Emilia. I lit the way with a company-issued lantern in my hand, holding it far out from my body so it wouldn’t reveal too much in case someone decided to shoot at me. The other two men thought it would be prudent to put out the lantern because mistrust and confusion were alive and palpable in the darkness. I didn’t want to extinguish it because its greenish light calmed me, but they convinced me, so we continued on in the dark, sniffing our way uncertainly, until we found our tower.”

“At first, spokesmen from management harangued over the loudspeakers, threatening reprisals against the striking workers and attacks from the troops,” I am told in a bar in Tora by don Honorio Laguna, an old welder who was also present the night preceding the strike. “But then somebody smashed the speakers and we didn’t hear anything else from the enemy, nor did we know the color that things were starting to take. We began to see groups organizing with tools and iron bars urging the seizure of flash points like the pumping stations, the warehouses, and the UCD plant. And there were others who were saying we should rig the machines, by which they meant remove some vital piece so they would explode when the scabs tried to start them up again. Or that we should cap the pipes, and some even proposed attacks against the golf club with all those foreigners inside.”

“I had wild ideas that night,” Sacramento tells me, “and I let myself get carried away by the suggestion that we should arm ourselves so we could crush the skull of anyone who crossed our path. Because we were sure that under such crazy circumstances there was no Lino el Titi to step forward, or anyone else with authority to give us better orders.”

“It’s well known that Sacramento had lost heart that night, having decided to join the participants of the last judgment. What I mean,” says Machuca, “is that he was already anticipating the personal catastrophe that was about to befall him. He must have sensed that the world was going to end for him, so it would be that much better if it just ended for everyone.”

But he couldn’t make any headway down the road to annihilation because Payanés was obstinate and had a different plan in mind. He kept on repeating that they shouldn’t join the mob who were fucked anyway, that they weren’t going to destroy the machines that were their only guarantee of sustenance; instead they were going to defend skinny Emilia from anyone who tried to damage her.

“He talked about that tower as if rather than a framework of steel it were a woman, exposed and solitary, in the midst of all that vandalism,” says Sacramento, “and I was bothered by his way of referring to something as if it had a soul.”

“Look at her,” exhorted Payanés, “my Emilia, tame and quiet beneath the stars, and more loving than ever.”

“I wanted to check, so I turned to look at the stars,” says Sacramento, “but the sky must have been stormy, because I could only make out five or six, nothing in comparison to what the nights of a petrolero are like, dotted with stars, as the song goes. So I told Payanés not to exaggerate, that it wasn’t the time for it.”

“Sacramento and Payanés spent the night perched like monkeys in the tower, airing, through questions and accusations, the rivalry that had unsettled them and to which both of them avoided direct reference in order to mask the real issue,” says Machuca. “Every now and then they would throw stones down below against suspected threats, but they did so blindly in the pitch dark and without really intending to hit anyone. With them was Frank Brasco and later they were joined by old Pajabrava, who also climbed up to ensconce himself in the tower.”

“It hurts here, señor apostle,” said Sacramento to Pajabrava, sinking his index finger in his left side below his nipple. “Here, look, right here, it burns like the devil. You who know so much, can you tell me why when I think about a certain girl my heart hurts like this?”

“That’s why they put it in your chest,” Pajabrava told him. “As Yahweh revealed to Samuel, the heart is the organ of pain and of love, which are one and the same. They say that when you see it consumed by flames it’s a sign of divine fervor, and when it is pierced by an arrow it means that it’s repentant. If it is pierced by a knife it is enduring one of life’s extreme tests, if it is lanced with thorns it is bearing the torment of a human love, and if it is bleeding it has been abandoned.”

“Well, then, mine must have fire, arrow, knife, thorns, and bleeding, all at the same time, because it hurts like hell,” said Sacramento, who forgets about piety when it comes to expressing the furors of his spirit.

“After hours with that rope around my neck I suddenly found myself free and miraculously alive and that cheered me up,” Frank Brasco tells me, as the fire in his hearth warms the interior of his cabin in Vermont, “but I was struggling to understand the situation. The overall one, of course, which was chaotic, but also my own. The executives of the Troco, my compatriots, had abandoned me by refusing to negotiate for my life. So, one thing was clear and another unclear; it was clear that I had no allies and it was unclear who my real enemies were. The only one who proposed something concrete in the midst of that disorder was Payanés, who wanted us to defend Emilia, and it seemed right to me because I too felt affection for that great prehistoric hulk. In lieu of a better strategy, we entrenched ourselves with a good supply of projectiles to throw from the tower; that way we could prevent anyone from getting close enough to damage her and at the same time cover our backs. Night was in my favor, because it hid the fact that I was one of the gringos, whose heads the mob was demanding for being exploiters and imperialists. I was a renegade gringo, cast off by the rest, of course, but the rebels didn’t know that, so that with the light of day things were going to get more complicated for me. But there was still time before that happened and I thought, as they say in Colombia, Morning will come and we’ll see.”

Morning came and they saw. Outside the fence, surrounding the camp like a ring of steel, the army’s Fourteenth Brigade had taken up positions under the command of General Demetrio del Valle with all three hundred twenty of its men armed and wearing camouflaged uniforms.

“That same night the news of the insurrection at Camp 26 reached La Catunga and it brought us out of the bars,” relates Machuca. “We heard about everything, the flying balls of rice, the kidnapping of Frank Brasco, the resurrection of the veteran Lino el Titi as union leader. Then we putas gathered and decided to head over there with food and provisions, in the spirit of solidarity and knowing that the striking workers must be starving. When we approached, well into the morning, we found that the troops had the camp surrounded. The boys were fenced in like the famous warriors of Masada and it turned out to be true that they were howling with hunger.”

Then the professional women, nurturing and generous, elbowed their way up to the fence and showered the other side with bread, oranges, panela, plantains, bacon, and canned food, which the workers greeted like manna from heaven, since they’d had nothing in their stomachs after their breakfast the previous day, before the revolt erupted.

“Tell her, Machuca,” urges Fideo. “Tell her about Payanés and the beans.”

“The workers built fires, heating up the food in tins, and then ate heartily,” Machuca begins telling me, “while on the other side of the fence the troops, without food, watched them with faces like beaten dogs. So Payanés said: Do you want some? — offering part of his beans to an adolescent soldier who vacillated between accepting or not, between hunger and suspicion.”

“Don’t touch that!” shouted the captain to the young soldier, who stiffened upon hearing the order. “It’s probably poisoned…”

“How can you say that, hermano, do you think we’re inhuman monsters?” said Payanés indignantly. “Are you going to call me a murderer for feeling sorry for this boy who hasn’t had anything to eat? Think about it, hermano, the workers are people and so are the soldiers; there’s no need to tear each other apart…”

“You are subversives from the guerrilla…,” the captain tried to justify himself while the soldier hastily devoured the beans like a hungry child, because deep down that’s what he was.

“They’re good, these beans,” he acknowledged. “If they’re poisoned, well, the poison suits them. To your health!” the boy shouted to the men inside the fence, and they, following Payanés’s example, shared their bread with the soldiers only a couple of hours before events would lead them to a cruel confrontation.

The members of the battalion threatened to enter the camp, take it by force, and squash the rebels, but they hesitated. They put off the decision, as if giving themselves time, since they knew that once inside they wouldn’t be able to shoot because any stray bullet could ignite the wells and unleash hell. In the meantime the workers were reinforcing themselves. The strike committee was gathered in some secret corner; Lino el Titi resumed control and decreed that the strike must continue until victory or death. And this news, which spread like wildfire, caused the initial fear, confusion, and chaos to yield to greater fervor, worker unity, and a feverish determination to fight.

“Victory or death?” said Brasco. “You people speak in hyperbole. I would propose victory, or a reasonable alternative.”

“We made history,” says don Honorio Laguna, the old welder, and a few big tears of pride pour from his left eye, because the other one is false.

“It was then that he saw them, and in that instant he felt the full weight of his pain,” Machuca tells me.

“Who saw? Who did he see?”

“Sacramento. He saw those two.”

On that dawn of historical repercussions, Sacramento was floating in an air magnetized by Sayonara, as if sealed in a cave of solitary bliss. He turned to look toward the place where a cluster of women were causing a commotion by passing food over the fence. Among them he recognized the girl, although she was already a woman, dressed for combat in an oriental blouse with its tight row of cloth buttons covering her heart. She still had the same bearing of an undomesticated animal he had noticed the first day he had seen her, and her shiny hair was gathered at the crown of her head in a ponytail that fell wildly down her back.

“First I saw her, then I recognized her and then I suddenly realized what she was doing…”

Sayonara was extending her delicate fingers with their almond-shaped nails through the holes in the wire fence to touch the thick hand of a worker who was none other than Payanés: separated by the fence and the presence of the armed forces but joined together by a shared look, dissolved in the sweetness of their encounter, hypnotized and dormant in the timeless moment of their contact. Their index fingers sought each other with pleasure and confidence, unaware that the mere touch would bring rebirth and give new impulse to their story, unaware that salvation would be won if the connection was made — fingers inter-twined — or disaster if not.

“Sparks, mi reina,” sighs Olguita. “Between his index finger and hers sparks and stars emanated to illuminate the sky.”

“I only had to see how they looked at each other to know everything,” Sacramento tells me. “I felt a sharp pain in my gut and a great desire to fall dead; then came a nausea, like a sour mouthful, the quiet taste of death. What was life for them was death for me, and every time I tell it I kill myself again as if I am reliving it. The world was paralyzed for me and it became night in the middle of the day, as if the images had fled and all that remained around me was a nothingness frozen in black and white, while I burned over hot coals. Jealousy? No, it was jealousy that had burned me earlier, but now it was worse, because as I told you it was pure death, but a wrenching one, not a gentle one. With the passing of the hours my panic dimmed and I faded away to ashes, and the only thing that remained alive in me was the memory of unbearable pain. I was there but I no longer had bones, or flesh, or eyes, or hair: I was a mass of dazed pain that walked without knowing where.”

Sacramento didn’t notice when the troops violently pulled the prostitutas away from the fence as the women tried to hang on to the wire with hands like hooks. Nor does he remember the many hours of being blocked off without communication from outside, which prevented them from receiving food and forced them to eat iguanas, chigüiros, cats, and other domesticated animals; nor did he know when Lino el Titi, demonstrating the power of his old charisma and newly recovered leadership, said that any worker who damaged a machine would pay with his life.

“Faced with this last measure, Caranchas and the men from maintenance confronted him with his error, warning him that he would have to settle accounts if the company brought in scabs and reactivated production, thus thwarting the strike,” don Honorio informs me. “But Lino el Titi, being a petrolero, the son of a petrolero, and now the father of three petrolero sons, could not tolerate the idea of damaging a means of production which, he believed, would give substance to the families of his grandchildren and great-grandchildren tomorrow. He was a straight man, Lino el Titi, incapable of comprehending that others played crookedly.”

Besieged by hunger and the psychological war being waged by General del Valle, who kept airplanes flying low over the camp, and resolved to continue the strike clandestinely in Tora, the workers, through their strike committee, agreed to abandon the installations without committing industrial sabotage in exchange for the troop’s agreement to allow them to leave peacefully, without aggression, firings, or reprisals. Despite his great anguish, Sacramento does remember the exodus of men passing in single file through a double cordon of defiant troops, the unbearable tenseness, the sensation of expecting a shot in the neck at any moment, the certainty that one of the soldiers aiming at them would shoot and unleash a massacre.

That was when Lino el Titi, surrounded by the strike committee and a group of bodyguards, appeared out of nowhere and approached Sacramento, distinguishing him as someone in the leader’s full confidence.

“You know Machuca, right?” he asked Sacramento. “When you get to Tora look for her and tell her to dig out the mimeograph machine, oil it, and fill it with ink, because the strike bulletin is going to circulate again. You will be in charge of it. The committee members will send you the content, we’ll figure out how, and you will be responsible for seeing that a thousand copies are printed daily. Machuca knows how to type, how to use the mimeograph machine, and how to do things quietly. Is this your friend?” he asked, referring to Payanés.

“That’s Payanés,” responded Sacramento, spitting out the word “Payanés” as if he were saying “Judas,” but Lino el Titi didn’t notice the subtlety.

“Well, then, you, Payanés, you’ll be in charge of distribution, which must be handled in secret,” he ordered. “You’ll give the bulletins to the neighborhood leaders and they will give them to the block coordinators, so that they can be circulated to everyone. That way at least eight or ten people should read each copy. Is that understood?”

“Sí, señor,” said Payanés, puffed up with pride, barely able to believe that he had been honored with such a responsibility. “Yes, sir, don’t worry, we will do everything exactly as you say, but I have one question, señor: Who are the neighborhood leaders and the block coordinators?”

“They know who they are, they know from the last strike, and they will come forward ready to do their part as soon as they see the first bulletin passing from hand to hand. The bulletin is the heart of the strike,” Lino el Titi informed Payanés, before he disappeared majestically, surrounded by his guards. “As long as the bulletin goes out, the strike will remain alive.”

“Payanés urged me to identify myself to the troops as a North American functionary, so they would release me as was my right and I could spare myself a lot of anxiety,” Frank Brasco tells me, “but I wasn’t eager to do that. First out of anger at my people, who had given me up for dead, and then out of solidarity with the Colombians, because I felt closer to them and because their claims were based on reason and basic worker rights. So I covered my head with a straw hat and hid my mouth and nose under a handkerchief, as I saw others doing, and I left the camp pressed against and hidden by the mass of workers.”

Then all at once what had been expected occurred: the burst of betrayal from the soldiers’ rifles and the workers’ response with bottles of sulfuric acid and phenol, with the tragic result — which could only be tallied three days later — of eleven dead workers and three burned soldiers. It’s a good thing don Honorio describes this to me, because Sacramento, who was lost in the unconsciousness of his immense sorrow, doesn’t remember it clearly; he didn’t even hear the shots, he says, because inside him the voices of desperation were shouting even louder.

“We made history,” don Honorio assures me, and tears trickle down the furrows on the left side of his face.

I have in my hands a copy of the sixth strike bulletin, printed in faded purple letters stiff from the rigor mortis that attacks paper over the years. This same piece of paper must have passed through Payanés’s hands fresh from the mimeograph machine, its ink still damp, and he must have given it to Sayonara, his accomplice, his beloved, his efficient and unconditional helper in the risky task of clandestine printing and distribution, at a moment that must have made them feel like protagonists not only in their own personal drama but also in the history of their nation, which for an instant sat them in its lap.

“The cocktail of collective enthusiasm, solidarity, and fear was so explosive,” Frank Brasco tells me in Vermont, “that you could say that we were all in love with everyone, that we didn’t need to drink to get drunk and that we didn’t need physical contact to make love.”

I understand his words: They allude to a communal eroticism that electrifies the air in certain exceptional moments, inviting people to believe that happiness is possible, that life is generous, that you can subdue loneliness and isolation, that one has in his own hands the ability to assure that today will be followed by a tomorrow, and that tomorrow by a day after tomorrow, in a dazzling succession of futures that we Colombians have never experienced. So, although they barely had time for kisses between events and to embrace between tasks, during those thundering days Payanés and Sayonara were given the privilege of living love in that splendid and fruitful place in which it moves beyond itself, casts itself upon the affairs of the world and becomes contagious. Never had they been so young, so beautiful, or so happy as then, nor had they ever been so convinced that they would love each ever forever and that they would never die.

Machuca, distinguished woman of letters, master of graphic duties, lieutenant under Lino el Titi, and supervisor of underground operations, has kept this copy of the Boletín de Huelga number six safely stored for years among photographs, love letters, foreign money, magazine clippings, and other prized mementos.

“This sheet of paper,” she tells me, “represents perhaps the most important thing we have done in our lives.”

The chronicle of bulletin number six began with the arrival of the striking workers of Camp 26 in Tora, where they went into hiding because the strike had been declared illegal and therefore punishable. To camouflage himself among the crowds, given that he was being pursued by the law with orders for his capture, Lino el Titi, already consecrated and on the verge of becoming a legend, bleached his hair yellow and shaved his mustache, with the result that people who saw him pass would say: There goes Lino el Titi with yellow hair and no mustache. So he decided instead on a disguise consisting of a cap and dark glasses. There goes Lino el Titi with a cap and dark glasses, they said then.

Infected with rebellious passion and led by Machuca, the prostitutas of La Catunga went on strike with legs crossed in solidarity with the petroleros and stayed out of the café. They traded dangly earrings and diadems for red rags that they tied around their heads and took to the streets, along with the general populace, to participate in the manifestations that arose on every street corner and to join protests and massive acts of resistance in support of the list of demands. And, out of an extra sense of civic concern, they demanded an aqueduct and sewers in the neighborhoods of Tora, which were burning with thirst and drought. Repression sharpened its nails and selected its victims. The arrested, nearing a hundred in number, were kept under the rays of the sun and the chill of the moon on the baseball field, which had been converted into a temporary prison. And during a brutal siege, General Valle’s men beat Chaparrita to death and left Caracoles paralyzed on one side of her body, for the simple crime of having hidden several strikers under their beds.

To prevent solidarity with Lino el Titi and the rest of the members of the strike committee, the army issued, on behalf of the oil company, the written order that the townspeople not “shelter in their homes persons who are not members of their family, or persons of dubious or bad conduct who would compromise the good name of the family.” Despite this mandate, Machuca, for years the soul mate and mistress of Lino el Titi, hid him for a week in her big oak armoire, among plush robes and feather boas and facing a window that was open to the street twenty-four hours a day so that anyone who passed by could see and not suspect a thing. Acting as if she were taking clothes out of the armoire to dress herself, once a day she gave Titi a plate of food and received from him a full basin and pages of writing scrawled by the light of a lantern that were to orient the strike activity with precise instructions and general politics. In the darkness of night, Machuca would rescue him from the armoire and hide him in her bed, beneath her large, matronly body. She would whisper news to him and transmit messages from the other members of the committee, and with delicate movements that barely altered the sheets, she made love to him until he was exhausted. To the song of the blackbirds she put him away again in the big oak wardrobe, where Lino el Titi, in the company of extra-large bras and baby-doll nightgowns, and pressed between inexplicable winter coats impregnated with camphor, spent the day ruminating, sleeping, and writing instructions, recommendations, and sermons as heated as he himself must have been closed up in that hiding place without ventilation.

“Under those conditions he wrote strike bulletin number six,” Machuca tells me. “He did it in his usual style, so instinctively in tune with the general feeling that he began by saying, ‘The people and I think that…’ or ‘The people and I feel that…’ Confidently he spoke of ‘a voice that vibrates and does not tremble,’ of ‘a life for humans and not for animals,’ or of other ardent notions in that tenor. I don’t remember clearly anymore. Then he slid the sheet through the gap between the armoire’s doors and I hid it between my breasts to take it to Payanés, as I had done with the five previous bulletins, but this time on the way from my house to Adela Lightfoot’s, where the mimeograph machine was hidden, I was detained, and although they didn’t find Lino’s paper, they did prevent me from delivering it.”

The barrio leaders were already waiting to pass it along to their block coordinators, and so were the neighbor women who would distribute it under plantains and heads of cabbage in market baskets, and the children who would post themselves on the street corners to look out for the enemy. The mimeograph machine had been oiled and filled with ink and was ready to chew through the stacks of paper, Payanés was impatient to begin the work, Sayonara peered out from the doorway to see if Machuca was approaching, as did the band of horn blowers and timbal drummers who offered themselves as volunteers to cover the noise of the printing with the blasts of their music. All of Tora tense, awaiting their bulletin to prove that the strike was still alive, that in spite of all the repression the leaders hadn’t given up, that in spite of the difficulties victory was within reach. But Machuca, detained at the baseball field, never arrived.

“Give me a pencil, beautiful,” Payanés said to Sayonara. “I’m going to write this blessed bulletin myself.”

“How could you think of such a thing! How do you know what instructions to give out?”

“You’ll see.”

A few hours later the sheets were being passed from hand to hand, raising the strike to its highest peak and rekindling the energy of the townspeople, who still remember with emotion that its content was reduced to three words, or more precisely to a single word repeated three times: Rebeldia! Rebeldia! Rebeldia!

But if the workers counted on discontent to unite the masses, the company knew how to use contentment to divide them, and it began to offer promotions, bonuses, and privileges for those who returned to work ignoring the union authority. “A free house for the worker who starts a family,” promised one of the flyers circulating around Tora to encourage modernization, moralization, and the return to normalcy, which ultimately landed in Sacramento’s hands, good, tormented Sacramento, who from the moment he saw another man with the woman he loved had been writhing in an agony of jealousy and rancorous suffering, keeping himself on the margin of the collective exaltation. I don’t dare ask him when or how he made the decision to present himself at the personnel office to put himself on the list of candidates for subsidized housing, because I know it’s a subject that hasn’t healed and still festers in his conscience, in the memory of Tora and in the disgust of Todos los Santos, who still recriminates every time she remembers the incident.

“As a result of the virulence of the strike,” don Honorio Laguna explains to me, “the company management had begun to reconsider its position. They realized that to have rootless men piled up in barracks with a hammock and a single change of clothes as their only belongings and with a puta as their only love, or in other words with everything to gain and nothing to lose, was to be confronted by bitter enemies that were impossible to manage. On the other hand, a man with a house, a wife, and children, which sizable burden the company helped him to support, would think twice before risking his job to join the fight. At least that’s what the Tropical Oil Company decided: that it was time to modernize its structure to better control the untamed personnel that it kept caged up in the petrolero camps.”

“Sacramento knew that only by setting up a home far from La Catunga would he be able to separate Sayonara from prostitution,” Machuca tells me. “That’s why he ran to sign up on the list. And also to get back at Payanés: An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, you betrayed me in matters of love, so I will betray you in matters of work. It was clear that he did it for her and only for her, but that wasn’t a valid excuse for the others.”

Because it turned out that with the help of scabs and through sentimental weakness of the workers in not damaging the equipment to make it unusable, the company was able to partially resume operations in Campo 26, giving the coup de grâce to a workers’ movement that it had already weakened through violence.

“We workers hadn’t counted on the eighty survivors of the killing spree at Orito, who had arrived in Tora two weeks before the strike, looking for a petrolero’s salary,” says don Honorio; “or the forty-some families made homeless by the flooding of the Río Samaná; or the group of recent arrivals from Urumita, Guajira, who offered themselves for work; or the one hundred sixty Pipatón Indians recently expelled from their ancestral lands by the Troco itself in its project to expand operations; the displaced from who knew where, the one hundred twenty-seven from somewhere else, the thousands of unemployed who proved to be more than willing to accept any job without imposing conditions.”

“Not to mention the Sacramentos who betrayed us out of anger,” comes the poison-filled voice of Todos los Santos.

“Don’t judge, Todos los Santos,” responds Olga, and for the first time since I have met her I detect harshness in her voice. “No man knows another’s thirst.”

“One thing has to be cleared up,” announces Machuca, “which is that Sacramento was never a rat. He didn’t sneak in to work behind the strikers’ backs to help break them and benefit from the situation. That never even occurred to him. His only error was to put his name on the list to receive a house, but given the circumstances, that was an error people considered criminal.”

The strike bulletin, which appeared every day come hell or high water, had become the visible testimony of the fact that the strikers didn’t give in and continued the struggle in hiding. Dodging threats, beatings, and arrest, they managed to circulate fourteen bulletins, but when the fifteenth was in the process of being created, General Valle and his men descended upon Adela Lightfoot’s house, arresting her and the band of musicians, seizing the mimeograph machine, and destroying pots and pans, utensils, and papers — saying it was “guerrillero material” they had found inside. They didn’t lay a hand on Sayonara or Payanés because the two managed to escape across the roof and then later to hide in separate locations. That day, for the first time since the strike had been declared, people kept waiting for the bulletin and interpreted it as a clear signal that things were going badly.

“It’s true that the rice strike achieved almost none of its demands and that it ended in failure,” recognizes don Honorio Laguna, as he drinks the last sip of his coffee, “but it was a valiant, dignified failure, and that’s fairly close to a victory. Well, one thing concrete was achieved, and that was that at the 26 they never gave us balls of rice for lunch again,” he adds in closing and laughs at his own joke.