Inescapable History, Inescapable Fates

Bearing Witness

They were lying on top of each other in Alex's twin bed, talking about poets. Two bodies melting together. Alex talked about how Garcia Lorca introduced Pablo Neruda to communism.

The men became so close, they finished each other's sentences. Two twenty-year-olds on the outskirts of war, in the center of a revolution. In 1936, fascist soldiers arrested Lorca. The Spanish government at the time, the Franco regime, executed him a few days later. By firing squad. Shot dead in the streets of Madrid.

"If I could cry out of fear in a lonely house,

if I could take out my eyes and eat them,

I would do it for your mournful orange tree voice

and for your poetry that comes out screaming."

It was in the first moments of the Spanish civil war, which would become World War Two, which would become all of society, according to Alex.

We killed Hitler, but the fascists still won. They won the moment they killed Lorca, the moment they realized peaceful revolution, idealists, poets, people who push boundaries and implore us to be better humans, can simply be dragged into the street and shot. That's what the Leninists did to the anarchists who led their revolution. All of that idealism, sent to the Gulags and beat to death. In the US, the Black Panthers... The FBI shot Fred Hampton in the head while he slept next to his pregnant fiance. The head of the FBI said the Panther's free breakfast program was the greatest domestic threat to national security. Imagine being that afraid of our idealism. That you shoot us for feeding children?

The way he said us, Henry almost forgot that Alex was not Fred Hampton, Emma Goldman, Frederico Lorca.

Hope is too fragile. That's why no one believes in us anymore. Not because our ideas are wrong, but because they are fragile. They can be dragged into the street and shot. But the poets in Spain didn't know that then. They flocked to the war, thought the danger made them stronger. Lorca. Pablo Picasso, W. H. Auden, Emma Goldman, Joaquín Arderíus, Norman Bethune, Pedro García Cabrera, Fernando Gerassi, John Dos Passos, and Hemingway, and Orwell. They didn't know yet, that they were on the losing side. But the fascists knew. They knew when they took Spain. How easy it is to kill poets.

Henry didn't question Alex's timeline, he just listened to his voice weave a path through history. He thought about Richard Siken, and Thomas More, and La Canto General, and how maybe poets are supposed to show us a different path, beyond history. Henry quoted from Gabriel Marquez,

Faced with this awesome reality that must have seemed a mere utopia through all of human time, we, the inventors of tales, who will believe anything, feel entitled to believe that it is not yet too late to engage in the creation of the opposite utopia. A new and sweeping utopia of life, where no one will be able to decide for others how they die, where love will prove true and happiness be possible, and where the races condemned to one hundred years of solitude will have, at last and forever, a second opportunity on earth.

Henry felt Alex turn beneath him. Towards him. Closer. Henry had the sudden, morbid thought that he wanted to be inside Alex's skin.

"He was lost, he didn't know the way to that utopia. Gabriel Marquez was the last great poet politician."

"Bolaño"

"Not the same, he was bearing witness. The boom generation was trying to change the world."

They might have laid there forever, and it still felt like a bittersweet loss when Alex broke their embrace to kiss him. His lips were honeydew on Henry's. Oh, this... this was going to hurt.