Resistance by Fuks Julián

Author:Fuks, Julián [Fuks, Julián]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Charco Press
Published: 2019-07-29T16:00:00+00:00

26.

I t’s necessary to learn how to resist. Not going, not staying, but learning how to resist. I think about those lines of poetry my father could not have thought of, lines unwritten at the time, lines he was lacking. I think about my father at the last secret meeting he was to attend, quiet among the rowdy militants, abstracted from the hubbub of voices. Resist: how much of resisting is the fearless acceptance of misfortune, compromising with everyday destruction, tolerating the ruin of those close to you? Does resisting mean managing to stay on your feet when others are falling, and until what point, until your own legs give way? Does resisting mean struggling in spite of inevitable defeat, shouting despite the hoarseness of your voice, acting despite the hoarseness of your will? It’s necessary to learn how to resist, but resisting will never mean surrendering to a fate that’s already sealed, it will never mean bowing down before a future that’s inevitable. How much of learning to resist isn’t learning to question yourself?

Quiet among the hot-headed militants, abstracted from the hubbub of voices, my father was giving himself over to the politics that always exists in self-absorption. Within him there were no calls to literal battles, there was no space for fury and courage. Where are they now, those utopian horizons? Where are the ideological considerations? How many important arguments had been lost in the minute detailing of pains, in the counting-up of the fallen? Why hadn’t anyone noticed that new tactics were no longer being discussed, as they progressed toward that badly-treated new society, why hadn’t anyone noticed the whole thing was becoming a clinic of failure? How did they not realise that politics was being reduced, in those stormy encounters, to a mere cry of agony?

Not going, not staying, but learning how to resist, that was what his thoughts said, but his eyes betrayed him and flickered between his watch and the door. Hot-headed or abstracted, everybody feared the same threat: in the large circle they made up, under the diffuse light from the closed windows, only one chair remained vacant. Time passed, the minutes hurried by, and the person who had called the meeting did not show up to join them, did not show up to bestow even the smallest amount of calm on the day. To the beat of that second hand that my father was following so closely on his watch, fear completing the incomplete circle, every five minutes another face would grow haunted, within an hour the whole room had succumbed. Had he fallen, then, the one who had called them together? And if he had, if by now he had been handed over to the military, how long could they wait there, sitting around distractedly, ignorant of the ill fortune that awaited them? When should they put into action their long-deferred stampede?

Learn to resist, yes, my father might have thought, giving over as best he could to his politics of self-absorption.

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