Timote: A Novel

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 Unlike the others, she got her start in Marxism. Nothing to do with churches or sermons from the pulpit or hosts or bowing down before the tortured man on the Cross. She read Marx, Lenin . She didn’t read Hegel, but something she did read—or found things relating to her in other authors—on the basis of which she reached that conclusion that we all, sooner or later, reach: Hegel is everywhere. Or, as someone said, every age defines itself on the basis of how it reads Hegel. She read other things and saw films that changed her. She read Fanon and Sartre. That brave woman, who will have to tolerate the most terrible forms of pain without saying a word to her tormentors, knows by heart sentences by Sartre from the incendiary prologue he wrote to Fanon’s book, “In the first moments of rebellion.” And what are these our moments but that: the first moments of rebellion? What does Sartre say, Gaby? What must be done in these moments? “You must kill: killing the European is killing two birds with one stone, suppressing at the same time an oppressor and someone oppressed: one man is left dead and the other free.” How closely allied are the destinies of Algeria and Argentina! Even their names are closely linked, signaling that their struggle is one and the same: Algeria/ Argentina. Argentina suffers from internal colonialism. Also external colonialism. It is subjugated by imperialism and its local allies. That’s why liberation must be both national and social. And they must occur together. They are not two stages. They are josé pablo feinmann 82 | | one and the same. One must through the same struggle free himself from imperialism and from the national ruling classes that represent it. We are part of the Third World. Our subjugation is not colonial, like that of Algeria. In that way we are different. Our subjugation is neocolonial. The colonizer is not within. He has his allies on the inside, of course. His puppets have linked their interests to imperialism. And the army that defends the neocolonial project of subjugation. But the true colonizer, the one who maintains the system of colonization, is the external colonizer, the Yanquis. There is no going back, this Gaby knows. Sartre tells her that: “Decolonization is on the march and all our mercenaries can do is delay it.” Like the soldiers of the right-wing army. They will kill ten, they will kill a hundred. They cannot kill History. History is on the march toward socialism and that will bring order to the world, grievances will be avenged, the past of infamy will be avenged, pending accounts will be settled, the mercenaries will be shot. There will be no mercenaries. No one will any longer attempt to halt History. Only those who will thrust it into the future will remain. Gaby read Fanon. His fury seemed devastating to her. All the more so because it was black. All the more so because it was cultured. How could he help but hate the white colonizer with all his guts? He speaks of absolute violence. Is, she asks herself, killing Aramburu absolute violence? “The colonized is ready at any moment for violence.” But Fanon advances towards fearful limits. Even she, who fears no one, at times wavers. The word madness makes her dizzy. It is not a humanistic dizziness—something that would make her say to herself, “How am I going to kill someone like me, another human being?” That is humanitarian shit. Gandhian tripe. If someone kills someone t i m o t e| | 83 else it is because that other is not, for him, someone in his own likeness. Not another human being. Aramburu the gunman is not my likeness nor “another” human being. He is only an assassin. An assassin in the service of the regime of exploitation. That strips him of his humanity. Humanity wins. It wins by being on the side of the cause of mankind. The cause of mankind is liberty . The death of oppression. The liberation of the country. The creation of a new humanity. Of a new man. Anyone opposed to this lacks humanity. What will keep us from killing him? Fanon, in the face of the colonizer, rejects any method that is not violent. For the oppressed, only this madness, violence, can pull them out of colonial oppression. Are...