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Ernesto
80 miles from Debar, Abyssinia, April 1968:
A miserable wattle hut, rotted twigs bound with festering rags, the roof of caked dung, the floor the hard rock ground. Roaches scurry among the inhabitants' dismally few belongings: some rags of clothing, a few rusted cooking utensils, a couple of Italian pots, a broken clock, a torn straw mattress. Seven people live here: mother, father, five children, all gaunt, with aged-looking, wrinkled faces. All are ill, of one malady or several. Not one has healthy eyes. The children already bear the telltale distended belly of malnutrition. Flies settle everywhere. They will not bother to scatter far when slapped, simply move aside in a horrible communal mass to resettle their infested kingdom.
I, too, am their subject. The only escape is at night, when I can squat, at the hut's entrance, my rifle strapped to my back, the rolled cigarette burning down to my lips. Remembering the luxury of cigars! As the family behind me scrape into their maws the last of the captured Italian K-rations, then settling down to the `normality' of sleep with their plethora of sighs and hisses.
What can they dream, these isolated people, eking out their daily struggle for existence in the furthest clefts of the dying Italian Empire? For myself, I am home again, in my own way, home among the lost and the forgotten. Argentina, Cuba, the Gold Coast, Libya or Italian East Africa, it is the same. The One Enemy, and the battlefield enclosing the earth...
All the riffraff, the fallen, the dispossessed, the shirtless, the pandess, the shoeless. The barren and the expendable. Those full of hate, those full of despair, those drained of both hate and despair. Dwellers of favelas where hopelessness runs like a wide open sewer. The bohios of endless unrequited labour, the barracones of latinfundist's slaves. The crop pickers of Central America who wander barefoot over asphalt and gravel, stone and briar, on their odyssey from one pittance to another. Squatters, evicted by United Fruit or Union Miniere, scratching a living outside the fence, collecting the garbage thrown from the van of capitalism's brave progress. The kraals of indentured South African workers, the bare tukuls of the Ethiopian peasant. Everywhere - the malnourished, the sufferers from trachoma, malaria, worms. Everywhere - the dead, dead of starvation, dead of misery and the fading of hope, dead of the exploiter's whip and the Coloniser's bullets and shells –I hear the wind's crack over the sleep of slaves,
a thousand ancient beings, scarred by storms, smoothed by scarlet streams...1946, in Argentina: The students and workers in the streets of Cordoba, fighting the false idol Peron… Red blood from cracked heads and pierced stomachs imprinting the pavements like a surrealist street-artist's sketch, while up the road in the Presidential Palace the siren Evita still wooed the descamisados... In the world outside, the Yankee preoccupied with his Pacific Wars, as he and his Asiatic rival cut wide swathes through China, Indonesia, the Philippines, battling for their lucrative markets, until the vultures swooped home to roost in the bombed-out ruins of Los Angeles and Tokyo... Would the terrible lessons be learnt? China gains her freedom under Chu Teh... The Japanese withdraw from the world Imperialist stakes… But Yankee greed - no, that still knows no bounds...
1954 - Guatemala City: Facing the mercenaries of Castillo Armas. Arbenz, the nationalist reformer, called on the people too late. There we were, lit up by our youthful hopes, a few old rifles, two mortars, a clutch of grenades, against the tanks and planes of Monopoly ... Children running in the streets clutching carbines they cannot load. Peasants and workers barricading the streets with their bodies. Again, the red stains… An old man spreadeagled in the dust, while chickens peck their way around him… In the jailyards, the fusillades echo… The sleek North American executives, their patrimony reclaimed, purr in their limousines down `purified' trails... And again, the sorry path of exile - Mexico, 1955, at last - Fidel and Raul. The three sticks of dynamite to be bound together... The sparks, to light a flame which would burn, for a time... But of those three I am here, alone...
A crunch of sandalled feet from my left. A cigarette end briefly glows from the next tukul and is then extinguished. Quick eyes gleam in the dark beside me. A curious man, this exile like myself, but wielder of a quite different weapon... An Italian, of the Socialist Resistance, he has trekked six hundred miles with his cameraman and camera to rendezvous with us on the escarpment. I had heard his name before, but seen none of his work. Pier Paolo Pasolini. Eight years ago, he outraged the Duce's censors by presenting on the screen a caricature of the great leader as an insane rapist. Like so many of his colleagues, exile was the only option, other than jail or rotting on a far island. Free expression, to Fascism, is not the decadent playground of the Imperialist nations' arts, but a threat as lethal as grenades... We had met, Pier Paolo and I, in Argentina, in the aftermath of yet another Peron Coup, and then again, in Berlin, at the Party Congress, where the seeds of his present project were sown… `A new form of document,' he had suggested, `of a culture we Italians have, in our stupidity and arrogance, tried to defeat but is defeating us, or, we can rather say, saving us from our darker side…'
We sit and discuss the tactical situation; neither of us sleeps well at night. Soon the food we took from Il Duce's 3rd East African Rifles will be consumed and our small column will have to leave the shelter of this impoverished village, to play the waiting game elsewhere. In a thirty-year war, there are inevitable lulls. I may fret, but I cannot ignore the rooted knowledge of the Ethiopian strategists. As long as the Italians keep their troops in their barracks in the major towns the Committee of Equals, the Dergue, which runs the Revolution, prefers to consolidate its political hold on the country rather than goad the enemy into retaliation raids. They are not in a hurry, confident as they are of victory. `Like the desert and the mountains,' says the old lion Walda Sion, `we have been here a long time.' But what is uncertain even after victory is the Dergue's control of what follows. Feudalism and the old Emperor Selassie, ensconced with his caviar in Claridges, London, might well rear their ugly mane… I have learned to live with patience, but never to like it, considering the magnitude of the task ahead, the forces which would yet have to be ruptured even after the breaking of the stranglehold of Mussolini's Italy - Britain, France, the United States, and all this with a socialist world wary and weary of conflict, with both Germany and Russia walking a tightrope of evasion and appeasement...
We sit, the film maker and I, long into the night, under the canopy of stars, two strangers on a mountaintop plain in East Africa, waiting for the new day to dawn...
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