Blog 29-La Barraquita

La Barraquita
Three days went by since we breached the base. Franz was gone again. I texted him over and over, wanting badly to make a time to meet him, in Coral or anywhere in Palenque. I didn't think Machi had reached him either, not since our (heroic!) wade in. Machi guessed he was in El Pico again doing whatever he did as a Guardia in the Zona Libre by the border with Ventura. Too restless to stay on my writing dune I went into Coral, sat in La Fonda Migajas. I meant to come and write but I couldn't focus on writing and stared at the bench Franz and I sat in, wanting to conjure him. I walked over to Justice Works (closed). I had cafe con leche and pastelillos at Cuentos y Cafe across the street. Another woman was there having a late breakfast of coffee and pan con mantequilla. She said, “I think I've seen you in Palenque." I nodded. "We've been together several times at La Fabrica." She came over and kissed me. "Si, claro. Marina! What brings you here? I'm killing time.” I told her I'd been trying to find a Guardia and when she pressed me I described Franz: tall, square face, light skin, big grin.”
“Have you gone to La Barraquita?” I shook my head. She explained there was a sector of Palenque where guata Guardias hung out, had a couple of bars, stayed on leave, or hid in plain sight when they deserted. She walked me one block along Calle Esperanza, off the Plaza, and treated me to the Cine de Coral. We saw a comedy from Ventura about two brothers who crossed El Pico into Karaya to find their father, an exilado. The man, never actually shown in the film, was described as having escaped Ventura only to come to the City “a acabarse de joder”. For me it was more painful than funny, too close to my own father's story, but I got completely lost in the images of the city the boys ran away from, so much like Todos Santos I made the woman, whose name was Elba Luz, sit with me for the credits so that I could see where it was shot. “What and where is Palmivilia?” She explained the City where El Lider had been born was renamed in honor of his mother after the revolution. I'd have to search online to learn what Palmivilia used to be. Elba Luz had no idea.
This time when Elba Luz dumped me in the plaza, after she made me promise to join her in her vigil at the Base, I knew how to get myself back. On the last stretch of open beach just before the spot where Franz and I went off road into the mangrove, I stopped to watch four wild horses running in the direction of Palenque. Where did they live? Where did they sleep? Would whatever force took care of them take care of me and mine?
After I got to the old EcoPreserve path into Palenque I decided to stay on the Carretera Naval to see if I could find the next entrance to the Encampment further toward the Base that Elba Luz said would get me closer to la Barraquita. I turned downhill at the next opening in the dense vegetation and wandered on a narrow path amid clusters of better built small shacks (better than those in my Palenque neighborhood).
I peered into the darkness of a small bar with a small wooden sign with the words La Providencia in graffiti lettering. Eight Guardias (I counted them) were drinking beer and smoking cigarettes, three at the bar and the rest at two small tables. I approached the youngest two, they seemed less scary, and said I was looking for my friend, Guardia Franz Arroyo. They looked at each other and shrugged, but another young man, older than these two, at the adjoining table waved me over. “What do you want him for?” I studied the man and decided not to lie. “He's helping me find my husband who may be renditioned in the prison Camp they say exists on the Ventura side of the Base.” The man laughed. “Tracking your tracker, there's an irony. I hear Franz isn't cheap.” I blushed. It never once crossed my mind I should be paying Franz, that he expected to be paid. Of course. Tracking was highly skilled, hard work. Should I be paying Patria? That was why he hadn't come again. He'd taken me the closest I'd been to my husband in almost two years and I had given him nothing. What was I, raised by wolves? “He's got a place that way.” The helpful young Guardia pointed me inland, deeper into Palenque then I'd ever been. The plunge into humiliation left me numb so I wasn't as scared as I might have been wandering deeper and deeper among the older, more solid wooden structures and the clusters of official issue tents, asking every third or fourth person I passed, those I could get to look at me, if they knew Franz and where I might find him.
I asked a boy of maybe twelve who was dribbling a soccer ball by himself in a clearing, steering it toward a goal marked with branches stuck into the dirt. He pointed me to a shack with an actual zinc roof. “Ahi vive la novia.” At last some real information from someone too young to know he shouldn't tell me. I reached into my pocket and gave him a half peso coin. (I'd learned.)
I knocked and the door swung open. Behind the young woman who opened the door barefoot, in a pink sundress, with long black hair in a lose braid, I saw Franz in a t-shirt, sitting on a cane seat rocking chair. His gaze was fixed on the soccer game playing on a small flat screen tv propped on a homemade easel. I had done it. I had found this needle in a haystack. There was a real world and it appeared that I was in it! He jumped up to hug me and introduced the young woman as Beatricita. "I know you." She kissed me on the cheek. "Yes, yes. From El Comedor. You look different with your hair down."
I'd never seen Franz look embarrassed. “I know, I know, I should have been in touch. Sometimes I hit a wall and get sunk and come here to hide out. I just can't move, go anywhere, do anything.” I smiled. “Not even a one letter reply to a text?” He pulled Beatricita to his side, gave her a big smile, and put his arm around her waist. ”Cuando me apesta la vida Beatricita reminds me life is good.” She touched his face. “Yes, if we todos are worth fighting for, Franz, that includes even you.” She kissed him on the cheek.
She went off to the narrow kitchen counter and spooned into a flannel funnel coffee filter what looked from where I sat like coffee from the Navy Base. She poured steaming water over the filter she'd set into a blue tin pot. I sat beside Franz as he turned the volume on the soccer game off. I dragged the chair toward him so that we were knee to knee and whispered. “I apologize for not asking you what you charge for tracking. I can be ignorant.” He put his hand on my knee and shushed me. “Para usted no cobro, Dona Marina. Nunca. Ustedes son familia.” Beatricita brought us little cups of cafe negro, kissed Franz, said, “Tengo turno en el Comedor.” She loosened and redid her hair into a tight braid, slipped her feet into rubber thongs, and left.
"Since we breached the Base I've been lying awake nights thinking, what's to stop us from going there for Ori?”
I could see him consider whether or not to answer me. He drained his tiny cup.
“We have an underground railroad of sorts. There's more than a few of us guatas. We've gotten more than a few people out of the Camp and the Force se hacen de la vista gorda. We've approached your husband. He won't budge.”
I stood. “What?” I screamed and the sound I made stunned me. I half growled and screamed again. Franz rose and held me and I kept screaming and pounding his chest and back with my fists. “You offered to get him out and he refused? He could have been with Machi and with me and he refused? He could have been out and instead he's in there starving himself to death?”
I couldn't stay in an ecstasy of rage and collapsed onto the rocking chair. Franz sat with me, holding my hand. “He, they, the hunger strikers, there are ten of them, say they have reason to believe from their network of officers that support them that the City's on the verge of a concession.”
“Something significant or so they can save face?” I screamed again. “What about me, what about his son?”
Franz waited until I was done.
“Short of shutting the Camp down, the answer to that is going to be relative. But they think they can force them to take some of them to trial, let them see their attorneys."
“Who gives a shit about their trials, their courts, their laws?”
Franz laughed. “Now you're sounding like your son.”
“A stealth escape is much the bigger victory.” I stood. “You tell Ori this for me. He'd better live. Tell him he is not allowed to die in there. He is not allowed to die without even making them waste a bullet.”
Franz stood, pulled me up, offered me his hands. I understood he wanted me to push into them. I looked into his eyes, pushed hard into his arms, and screamed. “Tell him it's not his decision whether to live or die.” I made my hands into fists and pummeled Franz, collapsed into his arms and sobbed, then pummeled him some more, again, again until I was spent.
“What am I doing here? Why have I thrown my whole life out for a man who could have come back to me, to his son, but chose to stay in there? Is that all my life has been? Amounts to? An accident of negative decisions. I'm here for what? And how did I get here, to Cayo Karaya? Would I ever have gotten free of the burocrazy if it hadn't come undone? If Machi's urgency to go find Ori hadn't coincided with another round of layoffs? Has anything I've ever done in life been mine, from my own thinking, my own choice?”
Franz shoved me, gently but firmly, and I felt another surge of rage, this time on my own behalf. He offered me his hands again, nodded, kept his gaze on mine, nodded and shoved. The rage coursed through me into my hands and I pushed against him. He took me in his arms, held me hard enough I couldn't break away, could barely breath, had to push harder than I ever had, breathless. I thought for one moment I was going to die. But I pushed, pushed pushed, pushed until I broke his grip. Or rather he deftly knew he'd better let me win just then. He folded me into his arms and let me cry, longer than I ever cried, a moco tendido, wiping the snot on his shirt.
“You've done your best. We can't just opt out of capitalism one by one. We won't be free until we're all free.”
“Even months after my lay-off a shudder of rage burns through me as I tell you this.” I pushed into his hands, and beat his shoulders with my fists. “I can't forgive those who still have jobs there even when I feel I was let out of prison early...I am chronically outraged by the injustice.”
Franz said, “The biggest injustice, the biggest body we all step over, I have a job while you have none....Why else do you think I'm here? Being a Guardia was the only gig they got.”
I laughed, embarrassed to have said so much, shown so much to this young man. I looked at him for the first time in a long while. Again he laughed with me. “You should be a therapist, or a priest. How did you ever learn to listen so well?”
He shrugged and held my gaze. “We've had to learn to have each other's back. I”ll walk you Beachside.”
We walked outside. The sun was setting over Palenque. He pointed to our right. “There's the Base fence glinting pink in the far distance,” I said. “The Base and it's prison Camp somewhere in its entrañas, no longer secret to me. Is Ori really there? Ori is there. I saw him with my own eyes. Or so I sometimes let myself believe. But do I remember him? Do I miss him? Do I long for him?”
I turned to look at Franz. He was looking straight ahead at the path and still I could feel his mind with me. “You tell that motherfucker for me, that he is not allowed to die.” It seemed in Palenque there were no thoughts I wouldn't find myself saying out loud.
We reached a rise on the path and there was a break in the trees. Franz pointed to the uncountable tents, lean-tos and casitas of Palenque. “There is the beginning of the new world. There are a myriad mushroom towns rising up where we are building up the new world right inside the crumbling shell of the old.” I wondered if he was serious or joking? “I want to see through your eyes, Franz. I want to be like you. You are able to see heaven where I see hell.”
I had this thought, 'Will we build enough of that new world, and build it soon enough to survive, before the old world crushes us?' But Franz had set out again, striding into the maze, heading for my shelter. There were still some thoughts I wouldn't utter after all.