Revolution

By Ruxandra Guidi
Illustrations by Clay Rodery

We watched as the crowds began to form up the street and noticed Doña Lucy’s corner store had already opened and she was selling her marraquetas to a long line of people curving around the block. Whenever the protests crept back into the daily news, families in Nueva Roa worried about food and this drove them to hoard produce and flour and rice in a self-fulfilling cycle that led to more shortages, which, in turn, led to more protests and then more shortages until the government stepped in and it all died down for a bit. Ultimately, nothing ever changed. Protests, however, always brought profits to small business owners like Doña Lucy. 

Suyay and I walked down the middle of the street holding hands, something we wouldn’t dare do if the streets had been quieter. We stood out just for being in each other’s company: She, for being the Quechua girl in a traditional pollera, and I, the blanquita from out of town who refused to wear skirts altogether. People gossiped, boys stared at our bodies and made rude comments about our breasts, and if we didn’t smile back at them, they fired insults at us. 

At the intersection of Calle Colón and Avenida Sagrado Corazón de Jesús we turned right toward the cathedral, and then, halfway down that block, we kissed briefly and parted ways. I stood there watching Suyay as she walked away from me, and when she didn’t turn around to flash me a smile I thought she might be hesitating. Everything kept moving so fast. Strangers whizzed by her, and I needed to rush myself to go see my grandmother at the hospital. 

I was only able to make it against the growing current of marchers for about a block until a much bigger crowd took over the street and sidewalks with their wide banners. All of them men, they had their copper-colored miners’ helmets still on. Then came the bus drivers wearing navy blue uniforms and the nurses in white pants and the empleadas. I could have sworn that I even spotted my old friend Teresa among them wearing her typical bright pollera with her apron tied around her waist. Hermanos y hermanas, nos vemos en la plaza! The protest organizers’ call was coming in loudly, bouncing off the buildings. 

In my years living in Nueva Roa, I’d heard all kinds of things about these types of demonstrations. The news often called them illegal, disruptive, and one-sided, a product of a so-called culture of protest, the only tactic that peasants seemed to have in their arsenal to draw attention to themselves. I knew they were asking for basic things like affordable medicines or demanding an end to the unfair mano dura policing that targeted Indigenous people, so I supported them, of course, though I’d never held up signs before, never put my body on the line. But this time was different: Suddenly I was among them and about to witness how fast a crowd can grow and mutate and suck you into its very center.

I tried going the opposite direction. “Hey! That’s the wrong way!” a woman shouted. Did I know her? I wanted to stop everything from moving so fast all around us so I could tell her I’d gotten stuck on my way to visit my sick grandmother and didn’t mean to be there for the protest itself. Though I supported it, of course. And then I remembered what my Tía Ligia told us as we walked out of the house: This isn’t a protest. This is the revolution everyone’s been waiting for. 

It took me about five minutes to move just a few feet from the middle of the block toward the next intersection. From that corner, with a view that extended toward Plaza Colón in one direction and to the statue of Cristóbal Colón in the opposite one, the real magnitude of the march finally became clear: There were thousands of people heading in my direction. On the TV news, those people might have described them as rivers of protesters climbing over the roofs of parked cars, looters preying on the chaos who’d later get blamed for toppling the cast iron statue after detaching it from its base. I could see my old school, the Escuela Sagrado Corazón de Jesús, its main entrance boarded up with plywood, and I imagined the tormented sisters stuck inside it like prisoners. One of the protesters, a guy about my age, had scaled the stone statue of Jesus on the crucifix in front of the school building and sat awkwardly on the cross, waving a colorful wiphala flag. 

Whenever I tried taking a step in the hospital’s direction, the mass of protesters pushed me right back to my original spot. My heart was now beating harder with a stinging mix of fear and anticipation, like I knew I was living through something that was about to unravel. I needed to make myself as unobtrusive as possible. I took a deep breath and stood still, my body flat against one of the boarded-up entrances to a store where the marchers kept bumping into me. Finally, in that relative quiet, I realized that it was going to be near impossible to find my way to the hospital to see my grandmother, or even, to get back to the plaza where Suyay and I had planned to meet. 

Banners and rainbow wiphala flags hung from the tree branches in the plaza and along the power lines and balconies along Avenida Sagrado Corazón de Jesús. Even the typically graceful bell tower swallows seemed to be responding erratically to all the chaos, flying low and in circles around the plaza like bats emerging at dusk out of their caves. I put my right hand on my chest to count my heartbeats. I watched the birds and the crowds swelling and flowing slowly by. 

Kutimusaqtaqmi millonnintin runakunañataqmi kasaq! 

The chants came softly at first, as if the protesters were saying the words only to themselves. Kutimusaqtaqmi millonnintin runakunañataqmi kasaq! 

I heard them from about a block away, but this time in Spanish. 

Volveré y seré millones! 

I’ll be back and I’ll be millions! 

Like a call and response, the chants kept growing louder each time, over and over again, until it hit me: Those had been the famous dying words of 27-year-old Túpac Amaru, the Inca warrior who’d led one of the last Indigenous rebellions against the Spaniards. Go ahead, kill me, he’d allegedly told his captors. Kill me, but my descendants will come back with great force. In the end, the Spaniards not only did kill him but they made a spectacle of it, beheading Túpac Amaru in front of a towering cathedral similar to Nueva Roa’s, facing a crowd of 15,000 people. 

Now, I knew there was no way I’d be able to see my grandmother or Suyay stuck as I was in this crowd that had taken a life of its own, mutating like a virus. Almost three hours must have passed. Then, all of a sudden, a curtain of silence came down over all of us. It was as if time stopped. Even the birds settled down. We had nowhere to go—no steps to take forward or back. The only thing that kept on as before was our chanting—Kutimusaqtaqmi millonnintin runakunañataqmi kasaq! Volveré y seré millones!—and I’d even joined in by now, screaming the Quechua words in my bad accent, convincing myself that not only did I truly understand the weight of each of them but that I meant them as much as everyone else in this crowd. Because those words were also mine. Weren’t they?

This eerie lull went on for a few minutes—or maybe hours—when, all of a sudden, an orange flash took over the sky, and then we heard a loud BOOM that shook the ground beneath our feet. A dense cloud of smoke rushed in our direction, its darkness coating everything until I couldn’t breathe. A woman next to me wouldn’t stop screaming, and I stared at her wide-eyed until we were both shaken by yet another explosion, and the earthquake of people running toward us. We heard it once more. A third explosion that detonated much closer to us this time. That was the last thing I remember: its force pushing me violently to the ground and into a darkness I’d never seen before.

• • • •

The cathedral bells rang twelve times so it had to be noon.

I found myself walking past Jesus on the cross outside my old school entrance and then heading straight on Avenida Sagrado Corazón de Jesús until I could see her standing by a bench in the plaza wearing her royal blue pollera, her favorite, the one she’d worn the evening she came to the house. Next to her was the older vendor whom we liked getting our ice cream from. 

A few other people walked leisurely toward the plaza, seemingly unbothered by the mess we’d all left behind. Strewn all over the ground was the kind of waste you’d expect after a street festival: crumpled flyers, empty soda cans and fast-food wrappers, but also old tattered sweatshirts and scarves that lay by the gutters looking like dead bodies. The big protest hadn’t become a revolution: it’d ebbed out. But I couldn’t stop thinking about what we’d unleashed; we’d been a dammed-up river, swollen with torrential rains that could no longer be contained, and now, after the flood, the streets were dry again. Quieter than early on a Sunday morning.

The ice cream vendor stared at Suyay and me as we hugged and kissed. She’d set her hair free from her twin braids, something she never did outside the house, and I buried my face into the thick and wavy strands to breathe in her shampoo’s fresh coconut scent. “Let’s go,” she said, pulling me by my hand. At long last, we were leaving Nueva Roa to start a life of our own. 

I felt it on my shoulder—a rude tapping—but I ignored it as we kept walking up the hill toward the house, passing Doña Lucy’s bodega and then standing under the swallows’ nests outside the house. I felt the tapping again. My eyes opened and all I could see was whiteness, and when that whiteness cleared, I felt my hands tucked under a blanket on a bed inside a room that reeked of bleach and that I couldn’t recognize. Between my bed and the window to my right, I saw a girl with long and straight black hair draping over her shoulders.

“Suyay?” I asked. “Thank God, I thought you’d never wake up,” she said, reaching for my hand. 

I couldn’t figure out when I’d fallen asleep. I tried moving my arms and my feet and my head, all of them as sore and heavy as my torso and my cement block thighs. I shifted my eyes toward the girl, but I couldn’t make out the details of her face. Or of her voice. 

“What happened?” “You tell me what happened,” she said, sounding annoyed. “You’re the one who was there. Whoever told you to go to the protest?”

I closed my eyes and hoped it would get me back to Calle Colón by the hand of Suyay, but instead, my mind swept me right back to Avenida Sagrado Corazón de Jesús, to the moment the first explosion lit up the sky and then to the second one that followed it just a few seconds later. Terrified, all I could think about was Suyay and how I loved her and she loved me. The more I pictured the magnitude of this love, the harder it got for me to breathe, wedged as I was between hundreds, no, thousands of other people as panicked as myself. Most of them must have been praying to God at that moment, but I, of course, knew that he didn’t exist, and if he did, I knew he didn’t owe me anything.

“There was an explosion,” I said to the woman.“Well, you lost consciousness, and you got banged up pretty badly.” she said. “And Suyay?” I asked, again. This time, the girl just stood quietly. I began to wonder if she’d know about her—about us—and whether she was trying to hide something. “Do you know what happened to Suyay?”

“We got a call yesterday afternoon telling us that you were at the hospital.” I tried moving my limbs again, but it was as if my body couldn’t hear my brain. “We didn’t get a call about anybody by that name. But get this: Your grandmother is in her room just above yours, on the third floor. Thank God. It’s an answer to her prayers.”

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