Saturday, October 21, 2017

Revolution

He laid down beside her. The curves of her body reminded him of the gently rolling hills below the mountains where he lived as a boy. Her brown eyes were the land and life to him. She was beautiful like that land, like the flowers he found as he roamed the countryside, like the soil he walked over barefooted as his grandfather turned the earth with a donkey and plow, like the leaves of the trees that sparkled green after the rains of the rainy season. He moved close to her until he felt the breathing of her breath upon his face and the beating of her heart upon his chest. He closed his eyes. 
     
He felt the heartbeat of her as a little girl. 
     
She had lived with her landless family on a farm in a neighboring village. Her weathered Father was a campesino, with wrinkles on his face for all of the times he had  walked down long rows of beans in the hot sun to hoe away weeds. There was a kindness in his eyes that welled up from the deep feelings he had felt as he worked to keep his family alive. His hands and feet were calloused and gnarled for they had been blistered and broken and used as tools all of his life. He had worked from the time he had toddled beside his own Father and the workers of the plantation of his childhood until now, in the time of the middle of his life, when the same land, the land of the wealthy owners, had bent his back to make it appear as if he were continually genuflecting to God, or to the wealthy, or to the land itself. He was not a political person. She had observed his life, however, for she was a gifted girl who saw deeply into the lives of people and knew, simply knew, the inner workings of their minds and hearts and the true meanings of their words and actions. In that observation she saw the life of her Father eloquently speak, "I am a human being...no person is more important than another...my family has a  right to food, shelter, clothing, school, and medicine...We are human beings," and those words grew with her and were watered by the laughter she laughed as she was playing with friends in her community and the tears she
cried as she was laying in bed hungry from only one meal from the day.

He felt the heartbeat of her as a young woman. 
     
She had been there at the mass rally at the university in Santiago de Cuba the week before the struggle began to overthrow the Batista regime. He had been there, too. Their voices joined together with the voices of hundreds and thousands of students, campesinos, professors, and rebel leaders and rumbled across the night sky to the furthest reaches of the island. "We ask for a fair price for beans and rice...we ask for a fair price for a room to sleep...we ask for a fair price for shirts and shoes...we ask for schools for our children...we ask for care from doctors and hospitals...we ask for work so we can build up these things for our people because we need them to live...we need them to live!" It was then that he had seen her for the first time. Her fist was clenched and raised to the sky, her black hair hung down along her back, her brown eyes glistened under the lights of the field where they shouted and sang their hopes and dreams for their country, for their poor families, for their people. Out of all the people there around him, she was the one...the one his eyes could not leave...the one his heart could not forget. He knew then that their courage and compassion would draw them together and bond them as friends and lovers. In those first days he thought of what it might feel like to be with her, to feel her hunger for his body, for her to feel his hunger for hers...to be with her, to hear the stories of her childhood, to share the stories of his...to be with her as they were together now, naked and holding each other, loving each other, protecting each other.
     
He felt the heartbeat of her as she was now. 
     
One week ago, he was sitting in a barracks in Santiago de Cuba, shoulder to shoulder and knee to knee with compañeros, under the watchful eyes of Batistas henchmen. Those government soldiers had fired their guns in the air and jammed them into their backs as they left a mass meeting demanding rights for the campesinos and a new, democratic government for the people. The prisoners had been stripped down to their undershorts, slapped across their faces and heads, and spit upon by the soldiers. One soldier had taken his hands, hands he had used to write the speech that was delivered that night at the mass meeting, hands he had used to build up instead of tear  down...the soldier had taken those hands, tied them to a table, and hit them over and over again with a heavy, jagged rock until they were swollen and sore, broken and bleeding, until tears streamed down his cheeks and fell off onto the dirt floor like drops of rain from a heavy sky. The prisoners had not eaten for three days and drank water from a bucket and a rusty, dented dipper set down in the middle of the room early in the morning and late at night. His eye was swollen and blackened from the abuse, his stomach hollow and cramped from hunger, and his tongue so dry he could barely speak. It was then, as he held his head in his arms, hunched over, falling into despair, that he heard explosions and gunshots around the camp. The guards ran this way and that way in confusion. The prisoners moved en masse toward the door and spilled out into the night. He made his way to the barbed wire behind the barracks and she was there. She leaned close to him, catching her cheek on a barb, and took the wire into her own hands and pulled it apart until he could step one leg and then his whole body through to freedom. She pulled him to her and kissed him softly on the cheek. "Hola, mi cariño," she had whispered. "Gracias," he had breathed. "Estoy aquí," she had gently sang, "Estoy aquí," as she rocked him back and forth in her arms, and he had wept as if he were a boy lost but then found by his mother, and the tears fell again but not onto the dirt floor of the prison but onto Gabbys dark, tender skin. In all of the chaos around them, she took his arm. "Vamos, tenemos que ir," she said and pulled him away.
     

For one week they had made their way west across the island toward Havana, finding clothes and shelter in the homes of friendly, frightened campesinos along the road, eating sugar cane and drinking water from rivers and swamps, sleeping in the swamps covered with mosquitoes but surrounded by stars by night, making their way to the great city where they would continue their work in the revolution. Now they were here, body to body, heartbeat to heartbeat, in the morning light of a rainy day in Havana.



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