A Call to Arms in Any Language Sounds the Same

By Alejandro Puyana

In a country there’s a city. In a city there’s a slum. In the slum there’s a street that was paved many years ago and is covered in potholes—depressions that remind us of a violently hormonal teenager.

In the street—named in honor of a man that once had some importance but now is just a name for a street—there are houses. Well, there are homes. Because a house has a connotation of sturdiness, of quality of construction, that these structures don’t share. 

In the homes there is furniture; there are bathrooms; there are TVs and radios informing about what is happening in the country, in the city, sometimes even in the slum. There are speakers that blast out music, usually with a beat that makes certain waists gyrate, feet stomp, hands grab. In the homes there are people. One old man has one old motorcycle—Honda, 1976—that he works on with the help of his five-year-old neighbor; an oily rag, more black than white, sticks out from his back pocket, always. One woman still has a husband that she loved years ago but no longer. She covets other men and makes them sweets—when she can find the ingredients, when she can afford them—calls the men to her with the taste of her conserva de mango. When they leave she feeds the leftovers to her husband, sweaty and smelly from driving a bus for twelve hours. He never asks why they are half-eaten already.

In one home there’s a pantry. Like most of them in the slum, in the city, in the country, this one is nearly spent. There’s a bag of white rice, almost empty. There’s a bag of black beans, almost empty. There’s a can of ground coffee, almost empty. There is one can of tuna, so full and heavy that the man who lives there does not want to touch it, let alone open it. Because when he does it will mean that he has nothing else that is full, that is heavy, that will pop with promise with the power of one finger on a metal loop.

The man with the pantry has one dead wife and one living son. The death is recent. The death is so recent that there are mornings when there is no death at all. It is the man’s arm reaching across a half-empty mattress. It is his confusion about an unused pillow. The death comes back in these mornings barreling at furious speed; it comes angry; it comes splattering the walls of the room with the stink of collapsing hospitals, of depressed doctors, of black-market chemo medicine he could not afford.

The living son walks on the pockmarked street. He listens to music on an iPhone he bought secondhand from the man in the slum who sells secondhand iPhones, and Androids, and Samsungs. The first hands that held these phones could not resist the slum man’s requests, made with the aid of a sharp blade. The living son wears a shirt, wears pants, wears combat boots. They are normal boots, but they have seen combat. He wears a backpack that is heavy with what he needs: layers to protect from the military’s birdshot; a helmet against the rain of tear gas canisters; a bandana with the color of a flag and a bottle of white vinegar to dip it in; a homemade slingshot that once hurled a small stone: it pierced a plexiglass visor, took out the eye of a woman in uniform. The living son carries a photo of a dead mother in his pocket. She is smiling on a beach, holding a bottle of beer, almost empty.

The living son leaves the slum on a bus. The living son gets to the city, its own pockmarked streets under his boots. The living son fights for the slum and the city, for his country, but mostly for his mother who is gone. He faces off against a wall of soft flesh, hugged by black Kevlar, wrapped in green cotton, holding plastic shields. A tear gas canister whistles to him and lands by his feet like a bad gift. He throws it back as his dad taught him when he was a boy playing center field, relax your arm, mijo. Use your whole body. Give it your all.

Published November 17th, 2019