Our Word is Our Weapon by Marcos Subcomandante

Author:Marcos, Subcomandante [Marcos, Subcomandante]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Random House Inc Clients
Published: 2003-07-01T04:00:00+00:00

—ERNESTO SABATO, Before the End

P.S.

WHICH, AS YOU WILL SEE below, explains the why of the fifteen double, as this is the second of the seven.

Fifteen Years Ago

EVERY AUGUST, year after year, the mountains of the Mexican Southeast manage to give birth to a particularly luminous dawn. I don’t know the scientific causes, but during this dawn, this one single dawn in the whole of a disconcerting August, the moon is a hammock of swaying iridescence, the stars marshal themselves to encircle and center, and the Milky Way proudly lights up its thousand wounds of clotted light. In this August of the end of the millennium, the calendar pointed to the sixth day when this dawn appeared. And with the swaying moon came back a memory of another August and another sixth, fifteen years ago, when I began my entry into these mountains that were and are, like it or not, home, school, road, and door. I began my entry in August, and I didn’t complete it until September.

I should confess something to you. When I laboriously climbed the first of the steep hills that abound in these parts, I was sure it would be my last. I wasn’t thinking of revolution, of high human ideals or a shining future for the dispossessed and forgotten of always.

No, I was thinking I’d made the worst decision in my life, that the pain that squeezed my chest, more and more, would end up totally closing off my increasingly skimpy airway, that the best thing for me would be to go back and let the revolution manage itself without me, along with similar rationalizations. If I didn’t go back, it was only because I didn’t know the way back. All I knew was that I had to follow the compañero preceding me who, judging by the cigarette he was smoking while effortlessly negotiating the mud, seemed to be merely out for a stroll. I didn’t think that one day I’d be able to climb a hill while smoking and not feel as if I was dying with each step, or that a time would come when I’d be able to manage the mud that was as abundant underfoot as the stars are overhead. No, I wasn’t thinking at all then. I was concentrating on every breath I was trying to take.

What finally happened is that at some point we reached the highest crest of the hill, and the man in charge of the meager column (we were three) said we would rest there. I let myself fall in the mud that seemed closest and told myself that perhaps it wouldn’t be so hard to find the way back, that all I would have to do would be to walk down for another eternity, and that someday I would have to reach the point where the truck had dropped us off. I was making my calculations, including the excuses I would give them and give myself for abandoning the beginning of my career as a guerrilla, when the compañero approached me and offered me a cigarette.

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