Retrospective by Juan Gabriel Vasquez

Author:Juan Gabriel Vasquez [Vasquez, Juan Gabriel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Literature
ISBN: 9780593539613
Publisher: Riverhead Books; Penguin Random House
Published: 2020-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

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Sergio, meanwhile, noticed that Comrade Wang did not participate with the same enthusiasm in the sessions, and did not shout slogans with the same vehemence. After a few weeks he noticed that the morning greeting had changed: “Long live Chairman Mao! May he live for many years!” the workers now shouted, but Comrade Wang’s deep voice could not be clearly heard. Sergio raised the subject during a break between two intense jobs. His foreman, who by then had begun to ask him to call him Lao Wang (it was like saying “old man Wang”: a term of address denoting confidence), signaled that they’d talk later. And when they left the workshop, when he was sure nobody could hear them, he began to talk about what was happening with Chairman Mao. He spoke of the portraits hanging all over the factory, in all the cafeterias, in all the dormitories; he spoke of the photos that all workers carried in their pockets; when they didn’t carry photos, they carried badges with the president’s image on them, and photos or images were invariably carried inside the Little Red Books, which the workers consulted during their breaks. Lao Wang summed up the situation in a few words: “They are turning him into a Buddha.”

Sergio had seen Red Guards sleeping in the street and enduring the cold in order to have the possibility of glimpsing Mao on his balcony in Tiananmen Square. He had seen millions of them arrive from all over China to be closer to the leader, even if they were five blocks away from him and even if the only contact they had with him were the anthems they sang for hours. There was something twisted in those excesses. Chairman Mao himself had harshly criticized the cult of personality surrounding Stalin, which contaminated Soviet socialism for many years, and pointed out how harmful it could be to the development of the proletarian revolution. Sergio found the morning and evening rituals frankly annoying, but he made sure no one ever noticed. By the beginning of November the slogan had changed again: “May Chairman Mao have an infinite life without borders!” the workers said or shouted in unison in front of a full-color portrait of Mao. One day Lao Wang said to Sergio, “The salute to the emperor was not much different.” There was a genuine sorrow in his voice, and Sergio understood the feeling very well. He had already noticed that other things functioned badly in the revolution, and the cult of Mao was not the only symptom.

He had been talking to the workers. In their downtime, at meals, on walks between one workshop and another or between the dorms and the workplace, they told him things that seemed like spontaneous conversation but were always said in low tones. Now Sergio understood why the association had had so much trouble finding a place for the Cabreras to work: the factory was one of the few that had not closed in these critical times.

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