By FLAVIO AGUIAR*
All that remained were the forgotten books in Andean libraries, the words whispered against the wind of history, and the glow in the eyes of a dead man that the dictatorship could not extinguish. Oscar Ferreira flew, at last — not like the sparrow he saved in his childhood, but like a bird that still haunts the skies of America.
This story, a work of fiction, was nevertheless inspired by absolutely real events. It is a tribute to a dear friend, the protagonist of a generous and unlikely quest.
A characteristic of politics in the 1960s was the progressive replacement of the word “comrade” by the expression “comrade” on the Brazilian left. “Comrade” was the name given to members of the Communist Parties, whether the Brazilian Communist Party, from Moscow, or the Brazilian Communist Party, from China. Militant groups, whether former members or those who disagreed with them because they considered themselves more radical, began to use the word “comrade.”
I belonged to a group of militants who today could be considered as part of the old communist guard of the Soviet line: we were “comrades” in the full sense of the word.
Or more or less. I say this because our behavior was not very orthodox. We did not wear the overalls of the workers, nor did we have the calloused hands of the peasantry. We were intellectuals, teachers, journalists, musicians, architects, doctors, and the occasional engineer. We were not numerous: about twenty at most made up our cell, more of a thinker than an actionist.
We met regularly once a week, sometimes at one person's house, sometimes at another. There were those who were more assiduous, including myself. There were also those who were occasional and those who had left the group for various reasons, but who maintained a loyalty to it that was more nostalgic than practical. We had our connections with other Party members. Although not all of them were registered with the Party, there was a common feeling of belonging to the national and international communist movement.
After the 1964 coup and the establishment of the dictatorship in Brazil, we began to organize the escape of persecuted militants to neighboring countries and Europe, via Montevideo and Buenos Aires, or their return, when they could. We even helped those who had broken with the Party, joining other clandestine organizations.
Among these were comrades from the old communist guard; but most were younger, and they called each other “comrade”, to mark their distance from us, whom they called “comfortable” and “petty bourgeois”, with the initial adjective in the singular, denouncing what for them was the narrowness of our convictions.
To maintain opportunities and routes for transferring militants, we relied on an information network that involved supporters of our cause in the country and abroad, and even police and military personnel who did not want to be complicit in the crimes of the Brazilian dictatorship and others.
Amidst the comings and goings of militants here and there, we learned of the fate of an old comrade, who had become a “comrade” in the 1960s. His name was Oscar Ferreira, and with his more radical preferences he would cross the Tordesillas line, going to serve as a soldier in neighboring South American countries, where guerrilla struggles had been thriving for longer than in ours, defined by that youth, even if belatedly early, as “more backward.”
I remembered and still remember his appearance the last time I saw him, on a trip I took away from my work corner. He had a pronounced bald spot, with gray hair on the sides of his skull and behind him, all the way to the nape of his neck. He wore glasses with thick, black, square frames, with bottle-bottom lenses that did not disguise the unusual glow that had lived in them since his youth.
Despite the sparkle in his eyes, the tiredness on his face could not be hidden. It could have been the price of the journey he had made to get to the bus station where I saw him. He did not see me, but I, who was there to check that his journey was complete, was aware of his origin and destination. He was coming from somewhere in the North, where he had been until that moment. He was heading for the border, to join his Peruvian, Bolivian and other Cuban comrades, who were planning to set up a guerrilla front in the heart of South America, under the leadership of someone who, at that moment, was the greatest icon of the revolutionary struggle in the entire world.
Oscar Ferreira had a strong personality and well-defined tastes. For example: he loved birds. He saw their flight as an image of freedom. When he was still very young, he risked his life by climbing onto the high roof of his parents' house to free a sparrow whose wing had been trapped by a treacherous tile. It was raining, the roof was slippery, and he almost fell from the top. But he managed to free the sparrow before a cat could reach it, releasing it into the wind with the wings of freedom.
Back in my city and with my group of comrades, I told them that, as we had known and expected, our former comrade and now companion Oscar Ferreira was heading for the jungles, valleys, mountains and highlands beyond the border. From that moment on, we unanimously decided to follow his path as much as possible, thanks to our clandestine information networks: after all, although converted to “comradeship”, which we considered a “youthful virus of communism”, he had been and continued to be one of us.
This is what we did for a few months, following the path of those guerrillas who were increasingly entrenched in the valleys and caves, sometimes verdant, sometimes dry, in the mountains. Until the day when one of our military contacts warned us about the worsening situation.
He said that up until that point the guerrillas had managed to survive because the forces fighting them were unprepared and did not have many resources. But that was about to change. The CIA had decided to put an end to the guerrillas. US Rangers, specialized in jungle combat, were coming to the region to train local troops and to join the fight directly. Cubans exiled in Miami were also being called in to neutralize the leadership of the revolutionaries.
And then there was the problem of language. Some of the guerrillas knew Quechua and Aymara, the predominant languages of the Andean highlands. Others had a rudimentary knowledge of them. But none of them had mastered the dialects spoken in the deep valleys they traversed, in the regions between the highlands and the lowland jungles.
That information fell like a cold bomb on our group. Perplexed, we met on a Friday as we usually did. After debates that were sometimes heated, sometimes dominated by fear and hesitation, we came to a conclusion. As bold as it was, it was necessary to save our comrade Oscar Ferreira: after all, he was one of ours, one of the most precious of ours. His past and his resume demanded this decision, no matter how crazy it seemed. We had to get that information to him, convince him, at least him, that he should leave there. We thought about bringing him to us, if necessary.
The task was not easy. The South American guerrillas did not have the support, or even the sympathy, of large numbers of veteran communists, who saw it as a romantic adventure with no future. We would have to act on our own, and without attracting the attention of the repressive agencies. But how? To discuss this question, we scheduled a new meeting for next Friday.
I spent that weekend completely overwhelmed. I was weighed down by the feeling of complete impotence. How could I rescue my comrade Oscar Ferreira, or perhaps even the others? In the darkness of my library, surrounded by books, I thought: I have never touched a firearm, nor had my comrades in that cell. How could I warn, help, and rescue those guerrillas who would be cornered in the jungle valleys of the heart of South America?
I was contemplating my books, and… suddenly, out of nowhere, they attacked me. Yes, words, books, they had always been our weapons. And now they would be! Eagerly, on the evening of that rainy and melancholic Sunday I made a call to Rio de Janeiro. Back then, this was complicated. No long-distance dialing. You had to call a local operator, who called a Rio operator, who called the desired number. And it cost a fortune.
My goal was to talk to an old friend from our gatherings, who today held an important position in the government's cultural bureaucracy. Although an enemy of dictatorships, he served ours in the sixties, preserving, malgré tout, a certain autonomy of thought and action. I arranged to go to Rio to meet him in the middle of the week.
Despite the high price of a plane ticket, I went, talked and came back. With an action plan that I presented to my comrades at the promised meeting next Friday.
I had boldly explained my plan to my bureaucrat friend who lived in Rio de Janeiro. As the director of a cultural institute, he had funds available to buy and distribute books. So I would gather some students I had helped to educate and with them I would go on a cross-border excursion, taking books of Brazilian literature that would be distributed to local libraries in the cities we passed through. My friend who lived in Rio de Janeiro would even get us some money to rent a bus to take us on the trip.
Could there be a better disguise? We were going to rescue a communist guerrilla, under the cover of a cultural mission sponsored by the right-wing government of Brazil!
The plan was enthusiastically approved at the meeting. And within three weeks we set off on the trip: me, plus about ten former students to whom I revealed nothing, of course, in an old rented Mercedes-Benz. We carried in the trunk a plethora of books to be distributed, letters and more letters of recommendation for libraries and librarians in the cities and towns. people where we would pass through and where we would sow Brazilian literature. And there went Machado de Assis, José de Alencar, Lima Barreto, Mário de Andrade, Jorge Amado, Erico Verissimo, Cecília Meirelles, Clarice Lispector, Guimarães Rosa, Simões Lopes Neto, Monteiro Lobato, Olavo Bilac, Gonçalves Dias, Mário Quintana and so many other authors who had recently become comrades or companions in our cause and endeavor.
I remembered the name of the party comrade I was supposed to look for in Cochabamba, Bolivia, where, apparently, the guerrilla group we wanted to contact, inform and save, along with comrade Oscar Ferreira, was roaming. Since it was a nom de guerre, I can mention it: Molina. He was the one who had contact with the guerrillas who, as was customary, were roaming around that city and another neighboring one, executing a veritable “figure of eight” around them. I didn’t even know if comrade Oscar Ferreira was in this group, but it was through there that I would get a first bridge to find him, warn him, rescue him, perhaps bring him with us on the bus that would become an ark of salvation.
I also remembered the place where I should look for him: one of the many churches in the city, the 16th-century San Juan de Dios. There was no better disguise. Both pieces of information came to me through the network of contacts that helped us get persecuted comrades and companions out of the country.
While my students were busy with the school libraries and the municipal library, I managed to sneak into the church. Comrade Molina was there, with a white carnation on his lapel, the agreed sign. After the other usual signs were identified, I explained my intention to him, and he made me see the difficulty of the situation. It was not clear that the Bolivian Communist Party would agree to put me in contact with the guerrillas. Many of its leaders did not agree with the guerrillas, seeing them as a dangerous venture that would destabilize the country's political environment, attracting more intense repression than usual.
I insisted. I said that it was not a question of judging whether this or that tactic was right or wrong, but of saving the lives of communist comrades. Whether they were mistaken or not, they were “compañeros de ruta.” Molina temporized. He said that he would take my request to the Central Committee in Cochabamba and that he would bring me a response within four days. I asked him if he knew of any contacts among the guerrillas.
He was evasive, saying that establishing such contacts was only the responsibility of the Committee members. I suspected that he himself was part of that Committee, but he did not want to identify himself as such. We arranged to meet again four days later, at the same church. I suggested that we meet at another one. He dissuaded me. To better disguise ourselves, it would be more sensible to pretend to be devotees of the same church than to go around the city, under the eyes of the enemy who were certainly lurking.
Fortunately, there was plenty to do in Cochabamba, in terms of books, libraries, and lectures on Brazilian literature. It was easy to extend our stay in the city. Despite the distractions, I spent those four days in anguish. What would the Central Committee's decision be? Would I be able to rescue comrade Oscar Ferreira?
And so it was that in the same church of San Juan de Dios I heard comrade Molina say that the Central Committee of Cochabamba vetoed any contact I had with the guerrillas, even if it was to save lives, at least one life. I argued, counter-argued, and counter-argued. It was no use. Comrade Molina was stony-faced: no, no, and that was the end of it.
I was dismayed. It didn’t take long for me to realize that there was a fierce dispute within the Bolivian Party. It was a struggle between some of the rank and file who supported the guerrillas and many of the leadership who stubbornly followed Moscow’s opposing direction. And the latter condemned the guerrillas just as much as the CIA, although for different reasons. On both sides, the imperatives of the Cold War loomed: territory of influence was territory of influence for both sides. Hungary and Guatemala could tell you that. Cuba was an exception. To be encapsulated, not followed.
And for the veteran comrades it was also a question of party discipline. Many of those older leaders had led the Revolution of 1952, when the admirable Bolivian miners had defeated the army with their dynamite. It was not a band of hasty youngsters or recently arrived foreigners who were going to dethrone them from the leadership they were entitled to. I filed my protest with comrade Molina, even though I knew it was useless. That rock would not yield water even with a blow from a sledgehammer.
We continued our journey, with the books and the lectures. We went to Peru and back through those icy plateaus, steep mountain ranges and dense tropical jungles. And I continued looking for contacts that would lead me to the guerrillas and to comrade or companion Oscar Ferreira. Without success.
In a village near La Paz I met a comrade who had been in contact with the guerrilla fighter Tania, the nom de guerre of the Argentine Haydée Tamara Burke, but had lost her reference. That was it. Tania Haydée would die in combat a little over a month later, at the end of August.
We ended up returning to Brazil without me fulfilling my mission. I spent the next few months suffering from my double disappointment. The first was due to my failure to fulfill the duty I had imposed on myself. The second was due to the fact that party squabbles were responsible for that failure. I realized that, in a way, we were made with some bad habits similar to those of the right. Thanks to them, the disputes for power and favors from (or loyalty to) the powerful informed practices and attitudes, both here and there, even though they had very different objectives and values.
And so it was that one day in October of that year of so many adventures I came across the news that my comrade and companion Oscar Ferreira had been killed, or rather, assassinated, in a Bolivian village. I saw his photo, lying on a sordid cot, he, Oscar Ferreira, the name he had crossed Brazil with, later assuming that of Adolfo Maria upon arriving in Bolivia. It was him, bald and without glasses, bearded as he had become famous for, riddled with bullets to pretend he had been killed in combat.
In fact, he had been executed in a sordid and cowardly manner by a soldier trained by the Rangers, after being wounded and imprisoned. As a corpse, he kept that glow in his eyes above the dull air of death, a glow that had been the hallmark of his life and photos, our comrade Ernesto Che Guevara, the man we had madly tried to save from the trap he had fallen into and succumbed to in Bolivia.
What remains of all this, other than my memory, now somewhat dulled by time, and that of other comrades, companions who have already gone to the eternal fields of oblivion? A few books in libraries of cities, towns and villages in the highlands, valleys and jungles of the Andes, and as always words, words and more words, those that we remember, spell, whisper, murmur, speak, shout, raise and brandish, the words that we keep stuck in our throats or that we release to the wind, like wings in freedom.
* Flavio Aguiar, journalist and writer, is a retired professor of Brazilian literature at USP. Author, among other books, of Chronicles of the World Upside Down (boitempo). [https://amzn.to/48UDikx]
the earth is round there is thanks to our readers and supporters.
Help us keep this idea going.
CONTRIBUTE
