Witness César Vallejo

55 WITNESS CÉSAR VALLEJO We call on comrade compañero César Vallejo. We assemble his corrections passions exasperations, his nimbus of humble respects. To his card carrying communism we appeal, his blank passport Utopian forehead, his vest and shoes, his marxist-leninist study groups. And, why not, his arrogance his fractured earnestness so literal! and the blushing aureole on his pillar of militant lightWhy not! For his palm pledges the muscle pump crammed into his chest. For, in fact, 40 years dead and the corpse, which is very dead, is yet very warm— 56 like a book, face up under a single staring lamp! It has taken dictation, it translates oxygen in blood. But whose, where to? What says this same comrade compañero, for whom the correct line was a spinal column not a rope or a stick, for whom the precise path followed in footsteps of the Spanish workers' militia, and through a maze of International Brigades, carrying their countries on their backs— what does he say? this scribe whose future was as the reptile left behind, observing the shoulderly, the modest, the anguished, the firm pass it by... Who meanwhile gritted teeth at the wretched, shouted 'Get up!' And with one nail scribbled 'Do not lie' and with a painstaking thumb would write Trust the workers. Speak with your production, how much human you produce, 57 or shut up.' Who, having exhausted this last vein of irony, breaks off one last message after the last, says, simply, 'Serve the sovereign workers.' At which he begins to sweat bullets bridges clouds, and this and that. And with his navel his stunned Peruvian clay his Parisian rain he sits down, cannot go on. He has forgotten himself. Now there is no César Vallejo. Where César Vallejo was is the abrupt erect million, 100 million, 800 million corpses of workerssome angry, some embarrassed, most plain with wonder but none, not one, is cold— who rise now, are rising laboriously, 58 sick, and at the same time relieved to deliver this witness, and to be our verdict ...