“At this point, nothing’s going to happen tonight,” Norberto Gavino tells himself again. That piece of news should have been broadcast on the radio a while ago already. For a moment, he thinks “Marcelo” is right. But then he brushes it off. If nothing’s happening, then no one’s in danger. Many of them have simply stopped by, people he doesn’t even know; it’d be ridiculous to say: “Get out, I’m about to start a revolution.”
Because there’s no question that Gavino, despite being out of the loop and not knowing what to expect, is a part of the uprising.
Gavino is about forty years old and has an average but athletic build. He was once an NCO of the National Gendarmerie and later started selling plots of land. Sharp, short-tempered, and prone to bragging (as well as to the dangerous missteps that it can lead to in a life like his), Gavino has been conspiring for some time now, and at the beginning of May, an upsetting incident sealed him on this path. His wife, completely unaware of what her husband was up to, was thrown in jail as a hostage. Gavino found out that they would only set her free when he turned himself in. From that moment on, he thought only of revolution.
He had been on the run ever since, and believed military authorities and the police were after him. With very good reason. Everything that happened that night, the press that came out about it in the days that followed, and other pieces of evidence confirm this.11 He couldn’t come up with a better way to avoid the siege than to take refuge in his friend Torres’s apartment.
And that’s where he was now waiting, nervously, for the news that he would never hear.
Footnotes:
11 In mid-1958, Gavino wrote to me from Bolivia to express his dissatisfaction with the brief portrait of him here, which I sketched based on the testimony of other witnesses. He also denies responsibility for the death of Lizaso, but I never suggested that the responsibility was his to bear. It seems clear that Lizaso knew something about Valle’s uprising, and went there that night of his own accord.