Blog 37-Hundreds of Flickering Candles in Blackness

Elba Luz called out to me when she passed our shelter. This was the third time she'd talked me into joining her for her vigil. The other two times it had been just the two of us, and we sat on the sand with our candles, talked, wrote in our journals, read each other some of what we wrote. Sometimes she shared her coffee with the guardias, when the ones on duty were those she was cultivating, working to turn guata. She glared at me, not hiding her irritation, while I packed up my water bottle, my dry coconut skin snack from the Comedor, my notebook, my pen, and the banner Patria, Julia, and Taina helped me make. ALTO A LA IMPUNIDAD: STOP THE ASSASSINATION OF THE HUNGER STRIKERS NOW. I was clear now, my political mission was to help the hunger strikers claim a victory before they starved to death.
Elba Luz was a fast walker, used to hiking Beachside and Hillside every day, and she was propelled by her constant slow simmer of rage. I struggled to keep up with her. She was strong and wiry. Her gaze was intense. She wore her old uniform from before she'd been given a dishonorable discharge for her vigils, stripped of its insignias. I knew from Patria that Elba's husband Ismael was on one of the first hunger strikes at the Base years ago. He was dead. But Elba Luz had never talked to me about him. When she read my banner, she nodded. “They are assassins many times over. They killed my Ismael.” She made her hands into fists and let out a scream so loud, from so deep in her gut, that the guardia on the inner steel mesh fence of the Base, closest to where we sat on the sand along the outer fence, broke his deliberate ignoring of our presence, and for the first time looked at us. When she caught his eye her scream became a triumphant ululation.
She told me the story of Ismael. They'd met when they were teenagers. She was cutting across the Plaza de Coral rushing to her after school job helping out at Cuentos y Cafe (where I'd run into her and after we told each other some of our cuento over cafe, she'd taken me to see a Venturan film). Ismael, a boy she'd noticed at the Coral High School before he dropped out, followed her, calling out piropos. “Me gustaría ser una gota de tu sangre, para recorrer todo tu cuerpo y dormir en tu corazón." Because my family had just moved back here from the City and he wasn't sure I spoke Spanish, he repeated the piropo in English, "I want to be a drop of your blood, to travel your whole body, and sleep in your heart." It turned out his family had lived in the City too. That was one of the things that brought us close. He waited outside Cuentos until I was done and walked me home. I sat in our sala, behind the iron bars of the window and he stood outside every night for weeks. He could keep a conversation going. He told me he had loved me ever since he'd seen me at La Escuela Superior de Coral at the beginning of the school year, but he had never felt he was good enough for me, but now he knew he was.” Here she stopped and sobbed. “He told me he'd been born targeted for destruction, one of the 80% superfluous. But he was one of the indispensables now.”
“What changed?”
“The miracle of concientizacion. Padre Ezequiel found him and others of his crew in the Plaza and hung out with them, got them to trust him, got them into his own literacy class, literacy to read not just books but the world, he said. They saw who they were, where the City wanted them to fit. The Padre helped them see all they had to do was refuse to consent, refuse to collude with their own oppression.”
Elba's tears almost squirted. I wiped my own warm tears off my cheeks.
“How I wish my Machi had had a Padre Ezequiel. Will I ever understand where the other boy came from? Street Machi. My red diaper homeboy, red diaper thug...What does he know that I don't know? Where has he been and what has he seen in those places where I can't go with him?”
Elba Luz took my hand. She spoke and she fixed her firm, steady gaze on me. “I wish that Machi had had Padre Ezequiel and that you and I had too. Your son and my husband were among the 80% superfluous. They grew up into a world that has no use for them, superfluous from birth. You and I are of the class who had a job because they didn't, you were part of the apparatus to distribute crumbs to the poor, and I was part of keeping the poor in line. The City Navy polices the poor of the whole world. My husband and your son are of the class who didn't and never would have a job. Not until we undo neoliberalism. Not unless, until we make the revolution.”
I listened to Elba Luz say thoughts I'd been wanting to form in my own mind, thrilled by her passion. She went on, a natural orator. “Not until we change the whole thing, away from this system of work being the fewest number of people working to produce the most of what can be sold, so that fewer and fewer get richer and richer; to a system of work being everybody doing what needs to be done to make all of our lives go well.”
She smiled, glad that I was listening, enjoying finding her thoughts with my attention. She went on. “It's clear to me, we need to move away from a world where a few get to live better to one where we all live well. We have enough, so what stops us? I look around me and everywhere there is work that needs doing not being done, there is work being done for no pay....”
The Guardia stood very still behind us. I realized all along, she had been speaking to him too.
I leaned toward Elba. “Will we create a society organized around the work that needs doing so that all of us, Todos, live well, before the society organized around making billions for a few so they live better, destroys us all?"
It was then more of the Todos arrived, hundreds of ululating women, men and boys carrying torches. Elba said this hadn't happened since the first two vigils months ago. A second wave arrived, young men wearing black from head to feet, dressed the way I'd seen them on streaming video many times doing wade-ins, breaching the Base fence. Elba pointed to them.“I bet your son is with them. Padre Ezequiel's Concientizados. They know each small action we take for liberation, to make the revolution , even simply inside our own heads, is the revolution...”
She found her phone buried deep in her knapsack. There were dozens of text messages mobilizing people to a Victory Vigil, several Verdad news alerts. She read out loud, “Hunger Strike Victorious: City Grants Demand for Trials in Civilian Courts.” She skimmed the story. “They won the garantia to see their lawyers.”
There was a commotion among the young men. They moved in a swarm and engulfed a man in a City Force uniform, the man my boy was haunting, the man I'd first seen when I breached the Camp with Franz. I asked Elba what the swarm was chanting. She pointed to where the young men were pressing the man from all sides, making it impossible for him to move. “They're saying Capitan Jodido. They like to haunt officers.” She laughed. “The boys call him Capitan Jodido or Capitan Jodeda.” Just then he pried himself away from the young men who swarmed away from him into the water, waded toward the outer fence of the Base, and lined up along it, looking as if they were guarding it, guarding us from them. They unfurled a banner. TRIALS ARE A FARCE: FREE THEM ALL NOW and began to chain themselves to the fence.
Capitan Jodeda came straight to where Elba Luz and I were sitting. His eyes gave me the slightest flicker of recognition. Elba Luz introduced him as Capitan Ojeda. He's the base liaison with Palenque.” She paused. “We grew up together, Ismael, Carlito Ojeda, and I.”
“This is a victory vigil now.” As he spoke he stepped in close to Elba Luz. “The hunger strikers won the garantias they were after.” She stepped away from him. “Who gives a fuck about speedy trials in civilian courts? What do I care about this concession now when Ismael had to die for it?” Capitan Ojeda snapped his head as if he'd been slapped and walked away, past the ululating women. I said to Elba Luz. “Who gives a fuck about the trials? But thank God they can stop the strike without losing face. Now they are free to escape.”