14. Dreams of a General Strike

The crowd at Paco Santander's memorial spilled out onto the church steps, onto the sidewalk, like a human river. Riot Island Detail Police in full suit uniform and with automatic weapons hanging off them lined the sidewalk and the edges of the wide church steps. Marina reached for Ori’s hand, then caught herself and dropped it. These people were the rest of the circle of their love. It was among them she had begun to love Ori and it was while they were in the party that their love had grown. She smiled left and right at faces she had once assumed she would know all her life until she was old. “We were as married to these people as we were to each other.” Ori turned to face her and she saw tears were running down his face. She couldn’t find her tears for Paco yet.
It looked like the whole Partido was here, the old Comite Timon at least. And many of the base, even though Paco had broken with the party much more visibly than even Ori. Now here she was kissing cheeks, happy to see these people even as she was hating them for falling out of her life. There was Sandra, Machi’s madrina, who’d had no contact with them for the two years since that last Congreso held in el clandestinaje, in Territorio Libre in the mountains of Karaya. Sandra had been on the other side of the terrible debates and the terrible split. All the companeros who had been in Accion y Sabotaje in the City were itching for escalation, ready to go to war. Paco took the lead. Ori always followed Paco. And they were gone. But here everyone was looking like they loved each other, had always loved each other. Marina felt almost dizzy as she and Ori pushed their way inside. She was as confused as she always was by how Papi would hug and kiss during the church saludos, all the people he and Mami had been griping about the night before. Which was true, the smooching or the griping? The loving or the hating? Were they good or were they bad?
She could barely see at first in the dark nave. The incense made her right eye begin to throb. The candles flickering blended into the aura that was forming around the bodies crowded into the pews and jammed tight at the back. She and Ori joined the people streaming to the front where Elvira had made sure Paco was laid out in an open casket for all the world to see.
Within months of returning to the City after the Congreso Paco had been arrested. His safehouse was invaded at 3 in the morning while he slept. Cops from the Isla Detail found the address on a slip of paper in the pocket of a seller of Verdad, one of the random arrests of the sellers done routinely, mainly to harass. The Isla Detail knew the political branch of the Partido was hermetic, utterly compartmentalized from the Accion y Sabotaje branch. It was a slip of paper that one thorough agent followed up on because he had some time on his hands when he didn’t find who he was looking for in Moon Park. They’d gotten Paco and found, behind a false sheetrock wall a stash of weapons.
They’d wanted Paco and they threw at him every weapon they found and some they planted. He got 20 years under the Peace in Our Time Act. He’d been put in solitary almost right away, to protect him from patriotic prisoners, according to the state.
Elvira Robles was speaking from the podium even as the endless stream of people filed past the casket. “So called Peace in Our Time seems to mean the killing of people…State of the art prison medical care means letting Paco die in a hunger strike.”
Paco was barely recognizable. His skull pushed the stretched out skin. Elvira must have asked the morticians to barely make him up. She wanted to horrify them all, comrades who abandoned him, and the state who killed him. Ori gasped. Now it was he who reached for Marina’s hand. “Let’s get out of here.”
They burst out of the river of people, came up for air at the corner where the crowd began to thin. Ori kept walking, pulling Marina, until he led them down the Moon Park hill to the Havrisi River. They walked into the brush along the bank. She sat beside Ori where the railing was broken and they could, if they wanted, bend down and touch the water. “You and Paco used to meet in this spot where now Machi and David play guerrilla.” Ori had his fist against his mouth, bit into it. “He and I never wanted to be in a war. We never wanted to be part of a protracted battle, to be the ones who had to know the war couldn’t be avoided. The political branch are come mierdas. They killed Paco. There’s only time before they kill me. What is so fucking hard to figure out here? If all the opposition forces make a front the state will topple. But the politicals can’t pull that trigger.”
She laughed at the trigger joke, put her arm around his shoulder and pressed against his side.
“Paco had the strategy, Accion y Sabotaje. With the state’s forces spread thin as they are with the Island war and the Oil war all we had to do is bring the war inside, into the metropolis. Each day the people become more and more politicized. and then a general strike...”
She bent down to touch the water. He held onto her. She turned to face him.
“Why is concerted action so hard? Why do we know the truth and still don’t act? You and Paco break my heart with your dream of a general strike. With all the work exported, what would a strike do?
“Shut it down. Shut the state down.”
Marina pushed herself up. “We’ve got to get to Elena’s and pick up Machi.” Ori nodded. “The battle for the mind, that’s where the war turns out to be.”
They walked out of the brush onto the path, up the hill toward the block.