The Shape of a Pocket

solemn. So I glanced up.
    There were two herons circling with slow wing-beats. They were low enough for me to see the black feathers like ribbons which trail from their ears. Grey wings, white throats. Whilst they flew around me one of them crossed the circle to be nearer to the other, and the other flew to meet the first, and like this both found themselves again on opposite sides of the same circle.
    It was their first morning. They had come back. Ornithologists say that the male heron searches for a partner only after he has established a nest. In which case this pair was an exception. They were cautiously surveying the terrain together.
    Yet what caught my breath, Marcos, was the leisure, the ease with which they were doing this. In that leisure there was a momentary yet supreme confidence and sense of belonging. Slowly they circled the place as if they were surveying their own lives to which they had come home.
    And this made me think of you in Chiapas and of your struggle to restore what has been stolen from the people by those who in this life know two things: how to transfer money and how to drop bombs. In their world there are no homecomings and there never will be. Four things came together in my head: the spring, the resistance of the Zapatistas, your vision of a different world and the slow beat of the herons’ wings.

II. The Herons and Eagles

    A reader may ask: What is the writer’s relationship with the place and the people he writes about?
    John Berger,
Pig Earth

    Agreed, but he could also ask himself: What is the relationship between a letter written in the jungle of Chiapas, Mexico and the response that it receives from the French countryside? Or, even better, what is the relationship between the slow beating of the wings of the heron with the hovering of the eagle over a serpent?
    For example, in Guadalupe Tepeyac (now a village empty of civilians and filled with soldiers), the herons took over the night sky of December.
    There were hundreds. ‘Thousands,’ says Lieutenant Ricardo, a Tzeltal insurgent who sometimes has a propensity to exaggerate. ‘Millions,’ said Gladys who, despite being twelve years old (or precisely because of it), does not want to be left out. ‘They come every year,’ says the grandfather while the small flashes of white hover above the village, and maybe disappear towards the east?
    Are they coming or going? Are they your herons, Mr Berger? A winged reminder? Or a greeting filled with premonition? A fluttering of wings of something that resists death?
    Because as a result, months later, I read your letter (in a dog-eared clipping from a newspaper, with the date hidden under a mud stain), and in it (your letter) the wings of dawn are hovering once again in the sky and the people of Guadalupe Tepeyac now live in the mountain and not in the little valley whose lights, I imagine, are of some significance on the navigation maps of the herons.
    Yes, I know now that the herons, about which you wrote to me, fly during the winter from North Africa, and that it is improbable that they have anything to do with those that arrived in December 1994 in the Lacandon jungle. In addition the grandfather says that every year the disconcerting tour above Guadalupe Tepeyac is repeated.
    Perhaps south-eastern Mexico is an obligatory stopover, a necessity, a commitment. Perhaps they were not herons, but fragments of an exploded moon, pulverised in the December of the jungle.
    December 1994
    Months later, the indigenous of south-eastern Mexico again reiterated their rebellion, their resistance to genocide, to death … The reason?
    The supreme government decided to carry out organised crime, the essence of neoliberalism, that money, the god of modernity, had planned. Dozens of thousands of soldiers, hundreds of tons of war materials, millions of lies. The objective? The destruction of libraries and hospitals, of homes and seeded fields of corn and beans, the annihilation of every sign of rebellion. The indigenous Zapatistas resisted, they retreated to the mountains and they began an exodus that today, even as I write these lines, has not ended. Neoliberalism disguises itself as the defence of a sovereignty which has been sold in dollars on the international market.
    Neoliberalism, this doctrine that makes it possible for stupidity and cynicism to govern in diverse parts of the earth, does not allow for inclusion other than that of subjection to genocide. ‘Die as a social group, as a