In the background you could hear distant voices as well as the metallic sound of footsteps approaching down the entry hall. “I don’t like it when people talk about me like I’m not there,” someone could be heard saying. “Calm down, Mister Munk,” answered the guard, a black man with white hair, as they entered the room.
Thomas Munk was taller than I’d imagined, and he had an air of calm and startling pale blue eyes. He was dressed in a prisoner’s brown uniform, kind of like pajamas, which hung too big on him; his legs were shackled with a metal bar at his ankles, yet he still retained a distinguished quality, as though his distinction was independent of any external circumstances. When he moved, his footsteps clinked with a gloomy sound; he was detained, and for the first time the word took on its full meaning for me. An iron, mechanical pressure, a ludicrous, impersonal efficiency that has the power to immobilize a man.
He situated himself directly opposite me, on the other side of the table; he was so close that I slid back a little in the seat as he opened and closed his left hand, dotted by scars and burns.
He didn’t have much time left, he said, there were things he wanted to say, and he wanted some of his ideas to be heard firsthand. He was thankful for the people who came to see him, and he had many requests for interviews but had accepted mine because he was intrigued by the fact that I was from Buenos Aires.
“Is it true that the Argentine revolutionaries carried cyanide pills?” he asked me.
“To avoid torture… Not because they wanted to die.”
“I understand,” he said.
“When the repression came down, the average lifespan of an activist in hiding was three months…”
“In this country, secrecy is impossible,” he said. “A man can hide for a while but will always be filmed and observed, no matter what he does, and they’ll read his mail, monitor his bank account, and secretly break into his house and his friends’ houses. The only way to keep yourself safe is to live on your own in some remote place. On a desert island you brood, you murmur, you mutter, you think. No one can know of the things we plan, thoughts can’t be seen. That’s what secrecy consists of now, you have to withdraw and start anew. We live in an era of decline and defeat; you have to be capable of being alone before you can start over again. Nature took the precaution that ideas would be invisible. It’s rebellion’s last refuge. It used to be possible to create clandestine groups, little iron-willed organizations, a network of closed cells, disciplined and effective. That phase came to an end, there was a terrible series of defeats. Now we have to start over again, we’re in the era of lone men, private conspiracies, solitary action. We can only resist by hiding our invisible thoughts, blending them in with the crowd. We are scattered individuals, off in the woods, lost in big cities, subjects in flight and adrift on the prairies. We are isolated, but we are many. We’ve gone from the mass to the herd. That is the new political situation: scattering, retreat, the vanguard lost behind enemy lines. Kropotkin, Prince Kropotkin, the Russian revolutionary and brilliant anarchist theorist, used the term consistency for the energy that keeps men bound together in situations of assault and danger. United in dispersion, unknown to each other, these groups in fusion are constantly changing: in direction, in dimensions, in territory, in velocity.
“Anarchism denies the false distinction between the one and the many: The individual, to begin with, and contrary to the etymology of the word, is multiple. The Prince called it an aggregate of power, where every individual is a collective of forces and each collective can be conceived of as an individual. As the Bible says: ‘Does not the potter have the right to make out of the same lump of clay some pottery for special purposes and some for common use?’ (Romans 9:21). That means”—he said—“a life for honor; a life for dishonor. A life of anger. A life of compassion. Each way of life has its values, its language, and its law, and they’re in constant flux and redefinition. Anarchist subjectivity is variable. Its discontinuity is a fact that Kropotkin explains as the ‘resultant’ of a series of autonomous units and sequences that simultaneously compose it.
“Our most intimate memories, our most intimate feelings, our ways of living are multiple. Each decision we make closes off a series of possible alternatives. What happens if we try to make several contradictory decisions at once and keep them separate, in open series? A political life, an academic life, an emotional life, family life, sexual, religious, all of which may have diffuse (not to say clandestine) relationships between them.”
He was articulating his thoughts without emphasis, rather wearily, like someone meeting a stranger on a train and initiating a casual and meandering conversation. He’d begun to study his peers in solitary, and their behavior never ceased to surprise him. They’d be watching the images on TV in the break room, and it was there that the bloodiest rebellions were set off. It infuriated them to see people on the outside, living normally. It wasn’t the oppression that made them rebel but the trivial repetition of everyday gestures reflected on the screen. To know that life was proceeding on the outside infuriated them and stirred them up to revolt.
“Sometimes,” he said then, “I am caught off guard by nostalgia for eras that I don’t remember living through.” There was a patio with red flowerpots and
