Panic Signs

33. Mam's Farewell

we positioned ourselves, sitting down without fear of soiling our clothes. It was all so simple and cordial, like a visit from relatives or friends. There was even some young man who helped an old lady to sit down, since she had difficulties because her aging bones made it hard for her to bend down. We all sat down without sensational gestures. Those coming down last from the grass passively occupied their place in the street, with a certain unhurried calm, with tranquility, as if they had their reserved seats at the movie or the theatre. As if an usher had guided them there with his flashlight and his program . Seated, we filled the street to the edges, to where it becomes the sidewalk . There was a sweet young woman putting on some lipstick, taking out a mirror from her purse to see herself, a girl sucking a big round sucker that looked like a coloured Host, a fat lady, as big as an elephant, two cyclists who had abandoned their bicycles by a tree, and a hot dog vendor who was not serving anyone, but was sitting like us, motionless. This transgression was more violent, if we consider the scandal it caused the many drivers who had to stop their vehicles or else run us over, the pedestrians who were furious (because they couldn’t join us), cursed our presence and kept on walking really irritated: soon, the bus and car horns caused a tremendous noise, like a storm’s thunder, like when the army runs over a crowd, and the line of stopped cars, waiting for us to move, was enormous. A woman sitting beside me, very agitated, confessed to me ecstatically: “I have never done anything like this before. Never did any of my acts get a similar reaction. I’m very excited. I’ll write it down in my diary.” A driver got out and started to insult us. He accused us of disturbing the peace, of being insurgents, of maintaining secret relations with the enemies of the country, of possessing links with foreign powers. He got out of his vehicle wielding an iron bar, like the municipal guard waving the sign that said to keep off the grass. He waved it for a while in the air, threatening; we all looked the other way, out of compassion; the truth is that he hit two or three people in our group, and broke their skulls, but that didn’t make them stand up and walk away, like he wanted them to, but on the contrary, they were left sprawled, permanently, on the ground. After that, he was disappointed , and sat down with us. He couldn’t start the bus because it had broken down, but if it weren’t for that, he assured us, he would have run us over; he was tired, he had a wife and a son, which was an added tragedy we all understood, and there was no guarantee that the company would not fire him due to the delay, and no one knew when it would be that we’d pick up and go, and so, he decided to sit down and wait with us. He said, philosophically , that he had not done anything else in his life, since birth, even though in reality he had moved a lot, and we all knew that this was the first opportunity he’d had to sit down. But that was life. —— 65 —— The third stage started when a young woman started to undress, taking her clothes off slowly. This went against municipal Decree Number 1 in all the codes (in the old nomenclature as well as the modern), chapter 1, “Against political and moral vices,” since we have given much attention to social ethics. We allow neither the advertising nor screening of immoral or revolutionary movies; we don’t allow the sale of books or magazines that incite rebellion; we censor, a priori, any expression, be it oral or written, in order to prevent the dangerous germs of communism or immorality from infiltrating our lines, our batteries. There are a large number of decrees that legislate all this. They stipulate what must not be done or said in any situation, to the degree that we’ve reduced our language to a few words that allow us to name the realities we can talk about without undermining public morality: the prestige of the armed forces, or the democratic structure of our state. Aware that...