Free The Revolutionaries Try Again by Mauro Javier Cardenas

waiting. It’s time.

IV / ANTONIO EDITS HIS BABY CHRIST MEMOIR
    For first, there is not to be found, in all history, any miracle attested by a sufficient number of men, of such unquestioned good sense, education, and learning, as to secure us against all delusion in themselves.
    â€” DAVID HUME, AN ENQUIRY CONCERNING HUMAN UNDERSTANDING, SECTION X
    After a twenty one year absence my father returned to the church. The pious boy I was back then had convinced him to attend Christmas Mass, and, according to my grandmother, his return that night led to the baby christ’s tears. Most in my family readily adopted my grandmother’s version, as I was to do in the years that followed, sharing it with my American acquaintances as another example of the quaint superstitions of my Third World country, which would often prompt in them comparisons to eyewitness news reports of Virgin Mary sightings on trunks of trees or mortadella sandwiches. Of course I suspected my grandmother’s version was far too simple, and yet nothing ever compelled me to elaborate on it by implicating others or by including events that began long before that night or that decade.
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    Everyone was implicated, Antonio writes along the margins of his baby christ memoir, meaning everyone he’d once known in Guayaquil (Cristian Cordero’s grandfather, Espinel’s father, Julio Esteros’s mother, his own father) plus everyone else in the world (and here Antonio wishes he wasn’t inside a plane so he could search online for an essay by Leszek Kołakowski, a philosopher Antonio had been drawn to because he was from Poland like John Paul II, the first pope to visit Ecuador — we can never forget the existence of evil and the misery of the human condition, Kołakowski wrote —), and so to write about implicating others before that Christmas night and that decade seems redundant to him since it was implied everyone was implicated, although he could argue against himself and state that mostof us need reminders that we’re implicated with the existence of evil and the misery of the human condition, okay, so let’s say that you encounter these reminders in the leisurely world of memoir or fiction: wouldn’t you ignore them, Antonio, or at most be smote by yet another round of deep urges to change Ecuador that might impede your reasoning and compel you to board a plane back to Guayaquil without much of a plan or money?
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    Before my father agreed to attend Christmas Mass we were at my grandmother’s house. My father had announced I was old enough to sit with the adults, and since my grandmother’s dining table could seat only eight, and since neither my aunts nor my grandfather wanted to sour our Christmas by starting another pyrrhic battle, ten of us struggled to pass the potatoes and slice the pig without elbowing each other. And we did so in silence. My father was in an awful mood, and we knew that whoever spoke during dinner risked being savaged by his sarcasm.
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    But perhaps he has been equating Leszek Kołakowski with Father Villalba, Antonio thinks, perhaps he has been drawn to certain novelists and philosophers not because they’re from Poland like John Paul II but because their work reminds him of Father Villalba’s sermons, even though he doesn’t remember Father Villalba’s sermons anymore (once Antonio searched online for texts by Clodovis Boff and unbeknownst to him he later ascribed them to Father Villalba — never purchase a painting of your favorite landscape because that painting will come to replace your favorite landscape, one of W. G. Sebald’s narrators says, but what choice did Antonio have if his favorite landscapes have, for the most part, vanished? — bless me Father, Clodovis Boff recounts, Father we are dying —), or perhaps he hasn’t been drawn to certain novelists and philosophers because of Father Villalba but because he likes to