The Revolution
After they had washed, gutted, and sewn shut the corpse of Benito
Magnifico Pasolini, they left it in the sun to dry. It lay in Menhir
square, cordoned off with ropes, surrounded by a squad of national
police with orders to shoot anyone who came within twenty
meters. They left the body in the square for one hundred days as
the sun beat down with meticulous precision, until the skin grew
yellow and parchmental, until the hair came out in handfuls, until
the body was brittle and hard and hollow. They slit the belly open,
filling the corpse with chocolates, toffee, bonbons, sugared treats,
hanging the body from a tree and letting the blind children of Saint
Mary's strike at it with their aluminum canes until the legs and the
arms broke free and the candy came gushing out. The children
fumbled through the dust at the base of the tree, searching for
pieces to cram into their mouths as the invisible heads of state
watched from behind the dark windows of three closed cars. We
watched the cars and the blind children, wondering if the children
had any idea of what they had done, wondering about these men
hiding in cars who had cut Pasolini's feet from under him, who had
slowly and methodically stripped him of his power, who had
driven him to death, wondering what the blind children would
think if they could see their pinata, wondering what, if anything,
we would find if we opened the cars.
When we returned later to the site we found that nothing
remained of Pasolini. We marched on the capitol building, waving
our flags, waving the same multicolored flags that we had waved a
year before during the time when we had sped Pasolini's fall from
power. The streets were hot and filled with our bodies. We
surrounded the capitol building, howling. Up far above, on the
twenty-third floor, the window opened and vague faces peered out
and quickly disappeared. We took turns hurling chunks of rock
and masonry at the national police guarding the entrance, who
answered by firing randomly into the crowd. Next to me Juan
Martel received a bullet in the spine and died. The tightness of the
crowd held him erect and he stood there, his head lolling, as
suddenly the gates of the underground parking sprang open and out
came the three closed cars, long and impenetrable, surrounded by
truckloads of national police. As the trucks moved forward, police
leapt out and began to fire into the crowd. The black cars stayed
within the circle of police, moving slightly back and forth. Juan
Martel received another bullet--he seemed a magnet for bullets--and then the crowd began to move, retreating, letting Juan Martel
fall.
We hid ourselves in doorways, under cars, behind piles of
garbage, waiting for all-clear to sound and the trucks to move
slowly through the streets, gathering the national police, returning
them to the underground parking. True, we had been the ones first
to lead Pasolini to his fall, but Pasolini had ruled before his time, in
a time when he was not needed. Now as a nation we needed him.
The new leaders were invisible, we had no-one substantial to hate,
we needed somebody to rule us that we could touch.
In secret underwater caves thousands of miles off the coast,
the revolution began. We hid ourselves in dark grottos, wearing
masks portraying political figures of the day. I was Pinochet, my
mask topped by the tiniest horns. I did not know who the others
were behind the masks. It was all part of the precautions. We
knew that if they captured us we would betray one another: they
had their methods--we did not know their methods but we knew
they had them and that they used them to make people betray one
another. We had our methods as well, which we knew were
obviously more humane than theirs, whatever theirs might be. I
was the one who thought of the masks because I had read about
such an organization when I was a young boy, before polio had
given me the limp, except I had suggested masks portraying actors
of the silent film period of our country. But they had said no, that
what we needed now was not silence, but words. And action.
We sat stifled in the chambers of the underwater caves
discussing through our masks what should be done, yelling and
shouting, the masks muffling all sound, occasionally striking one
another until at last we had drawn up a demands manifesto. The
manifesto ran 102 pages, with 390 articles, contradicting itself
whenever possible. It was, as we all understood, necessary that the
government be unable to meet our demands. We wanted not
satisfaction, but revolution.
In the city the government trod forward, a little impeded by
our work but still functional. Every morning at the same hour the
gates opened and the three cars pulled out, surrounded by
contingents of national police. They proceeded down L'Avenue de
la Republique, at a fixed speed of twenty kilometers per hour, as
the crowds on both sides stood silent. At Alfonso Menhir Square
they circled the fountain seventeen times, horns blaring, the glass
on the windows (assuming it was glass) black and impenetrable.
At the end of the seventeenth rotation they turned down the
Boulevard Nathalie Sarraute, turning again onto the Rue Michel
Butor and following said Rue to wind once again back to L'Avenue
de la Republique. Exactly twentythree minutes after the cars'
appearance, the gates reopened and they and their military guard
descended again to the underground parking.
When they rejected our thoughtfully composed demands,
we planted bombs along the route the cars took daily, succeeding
in destroying several military trucks, killing thirteen soldiers and
maiming twentynine others without damaging the cars containing
the Heads of State. In retaliation, they posted national police
around the clock to guard the streets and executed 3200 people
chosen through lottery. We rented the basement of an apartment
house near the capitol building and, aided by gangs of hired
mercenaries, started to dig a tunnel towards the underground
parking. But the digging stopped when, twentyfive meters away,
we encountered a wall of steel and behind that a wall of concrete.
We flooded up from the basements and sent our daughters to
parade before the entrance of the underground parking. But
although the national police were willing to rape them, those in the
cars would not open their doors for them. Our daughters never
came past the gates. Rigged with a microphone, one of our men,
the one wearing the Parnell mask, managed to scale sixteen stories
of the capitol to break into an office. He was able to list for us all
the items contained in the desk of the office and to read off the
titles of the books on the right hand bookshelf before his microphone went dead and his body was hurled out the window.
In retaliation for Parnell's break-in, the Heads of State
killed everyone in the country whose birthday fell in August,
leaving the bodies lined in the square to dry. In the mornings, the
three cars circled seventeen times around the bodies in Menhir
square and then returned to the underground parking. We carefully
counted the bodies, counting the number in each line and adding
the lines together, adding a few zeroes for good measure, putting
the total with the rest of the propaganda we had amassed to
condemn the leaders. We remembered what they had done with
the corpse of our dearly beloved leader Benito Magnifico Pasolini,
and imagined these newer bodies hanging from every tree in the
land, imagined the ships filling the ports, boats from around the
world, load upon shipload of blind children, all armed with
aluminum canes. Pasolini, where art thou?
We worked quickly in the underwater caves, trying through
videotapes of his national addresses, through the memoirs he had
written, through bits of his clothing, through the scraps of skin and
bone claimed to belong to him, to reconstruct Pasolini in all of his
glory. We chose one of our number at random, the one with the
Franco mask, and unhinged his face and tore it off. We kidnapped
from a secret clinic near the border the best plastic surgeons, taking
them late at night, bringing them to the caves, coercing them with
money and bamboo slivers to join the fight for freedom.
We took Franco's blank and featureless face and parsed it
into four parts, each of the physicians carrying his portion of face
into a sealed room to complete the surgery. Through electroshock
we razed Franco's tabula. With headphones, with electrodes, with
rapidly blinking lights, with message cards, with hypodermic
syringes, we engraved it with the information that had been
Pasolini's. When he slept, faceless on the white table, castrated
boys in a specially constructed choir loft above him whispered,
"You are Pasolini. You are Pasolini." During the seventh month,
the brain began to swell. We realized that an ordinary human brain
could not hold all the information that had gone into making such a
man as Pasolini. We cut out all those things we saw as unnec-
essary, cut out the most distasteful of Pasolini's deviances, and
assigned a battery of nurses to sponge cold water over the
braincase around the clock to keep it from bursting.
After eight months, the four surgeons were let out, each
carrying their portion of Pasolini ne Franco's face in rubbergloved
hands. We watched them sew the pieces together with fishing
wire. Where the pieces joined there were lines which, from the
front, resembled a cross. We did not mind the cross: indeed, we
thought it a fine and saintly touch. We shook the physicians'
hands, loaded them with money, and then took them out and
drowned them just outside the caves.
We marched through the streets, our Pasolini with his
crosspiece face at the fore, us carrying banners and flags with the
words PASOLINI LIVES on them. Pasolini spoke out to the
people, his people, through a megaphone, telling them to come, to
follow him. By the time we reached the capitol building we were
300,000 strong. At the sight of the reborn Benito Magnifico
Pasolini and the crowds massing behind, the soldiers guarding the
gates of the underground parking garage threw down their weapons
and, tearing free of their uniforms, joined us. We pressed our
bodies against the gates, body after body, until our flesh collapsed
them. We fled down the ramp, howling, our voices echoing off the
walls. In the underground parking, the three dark cars ran us down
again and again as we battered at their windows, scratched at their
doors, the cars moving forward and backward until at last they
were immobilized by the piles of bodies they had killed. They
remained trapped, rocking back and forth lightly, revving their
engines. We climbed over our dead to the cars and struck at their
roofs with rocks, with crowbars. Pasolini, the new Pasolini,
standing on a heap of the wounded, directed our efforts. The roofs
creased, the paint cracked, the metal split and folded back. We
clawed the metal aside with our fingers and peered inside.
Inside, we found nothing. The cars were empty.
Benito Magnifico Pasolini, standing there above us, on the
pile, beginning a speech, straightened and pitched forward. There
was a white noise coming from his fallen megaphone. The crowd
was silent and then took a breath and then went crazy, crowding
forward to see Pasolini. His skull looked larger than a man's skull
should look. I could see from where I was the cracks beneath the
skin at the temples. On his chest was a reddish stain, perhaps of
his blood. I adjusted my Pinochet mask and leaped forward onto
the hood of a car, beginning my own speech, looking out over the
crowd, rallying my people around me. This is the revolution, I was
screaming, the revolution. I was waving my arms. This is the end
of the world, I was saying inside my head. All around me people
struck one another, their voices saying the same things, pushing
against one another blindly. I was the eye of the chaos. All about
me was madness. From the heart of the madness I could see a
wedge of men moving calmly and deliberately, cutting through the
crowd. The revolution, I was screaming, keeping my eyes on the
wedge of men. With meticulous precision they pushed over pillar
after pillar of the underground parking, moving slowly from one to
the next until at last the twenty-three stories of the capitol toppled
down upon us.
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