The three of them, always the three of them! Rosa, Pinín, and ‘Cordera’.
Somonte meadow was a triangular parcel of green velvet spread out like a drapery at the base of a small hill. The lower angle sprouted in close proximity to the railway line from Oviedo to Gijón. A telegraph pole, left there as a banner of conquest, with its little white insulation cups and parallel lines to the right and left, represented for Rosa and Pinín the big, wide, mysterious, frightening, eternally ignored world. Pinín, after thinking the matter over at great length and watching for days on end how the quiet, inoffensive pole stood so open to the world, and noticing how in its desire to fit in the village it did everything in its power to take on a resemblance to an ordinary tree, dared draw closer until he became confident enough to wrap his arms around the wood and climb toward the lines. But he never managed to touch the porcelain at the top, which reminded him of the small cups he had seen at the parish house in Puao. Seeing himself so close to a sacred mystery brought on a feeling of panic and he slid fast down the pole until his feet touched the ground.
Rosa, less audacious but more taken with the idea of the unknown, was content to bring an ear close to the telegraph pole. She would listen for minutes on end, even entire quarter hours, to the formidable metallic sounds the wind extracted from the fibres of the dry pine where they came in contact with the wires. The vibrations, at times intense like those of a tuning fork and that seemed to burn with the giddying beat of a flame when heard close up, were for Rosa the ‘papers’ that passed, the ‘letters’ transmitted on the ‘threads’, the incomprehensible language the unknown wrote to the unknown; she felt little need to understand what the people in one far-off place had to say to others on the opposite side of the world. What did it matter to her? She was only interested in the sound for the sound’s sake, in its tone and its mystery.
‘Cordera’, so much more formal than her companions and much more mature, in years too, kept her distance from the civilised world and looked at the telegraph pole from afar as if at an inanimate thing not even worth scratching against. She had lived through a great deal. On all fours for hours upon hours, an expert in pastures, she knew how to make use of her time. She meditated more than she ate and enjoyed living in peace beneath the grey, tranquil sky of her country, as if she was scouring her soul – something that even the brutes of this world possess. Were the idea not profane, it would even be possible to say that the matronly cow’s thoughts, which derived from much experience, resembled Horace’s most calming, doctrinal odes.
Like a grandmother, she took part in the games of the shepherd boys given the task of taking her to pasture. Had she been able to, she would have smiled at the thought that Rosa and Pinín’s task in the field was to care for her, ‘Cordera’, to see she did not wander too far, or go near the railway track or leap into the adjoining property. Why leap? Why go astray?
To graze a little from time to time, but every day a little bit less, without bothering to lift her head out of idle curiosity, choosing the choicest mouthfuls; afterwards, to rest on her hindquarters with delight, contemplate life, and enjoy the pleasure of not suffering; anything else would be a dangerous adventure. She could not remember when a fly had last bitten her.
The bull, the crazy leaps through the fields … all that was a distant memory.
Her peace had only been disturbed on the inauguration of the railway. The first time ‘Cordera’ saw a train pass by she went berserk. She leapt Somonte’s tallest hedge and ran through the adjacent fields. Her fright lasted days, returning with more or less the same intensity every time a train appeared on the line. Little by little she grew accustomed to the innocuous racket. When she managed to convince herself that the danger always passed, that the threatened catastrophe never came to be, she took no more precaution than to rise on all fours and gaze straight ahead, her head raised, at the formidable monster; later, she did no more than look at it, without rising, with antipathy and distrust. Eventually, she reached the point of not bothering to gaze at the train. For Rosa and Pinín, the novelty of the railway left lasting pleasant impressions. If, at the start, it was a crazy kind of happiness, mixed with superstitious fear, a form of nervous excitement that brought on shouts, gestures, and wild pantomimes, later it was peaceful and gentle recreation, renewed several times a day. It took a long time to expend the emotion of watching the giddying transit, accompanied by the wind, of the great iron snake that carried with it so much noise and the faces of so many unknown, strange people.
However, the telegraph, the railway – all this really amounted to a momentary accident that drowned in the sea of solitude surrounding Somonte meadow. No human dwelling could be seen from there and the only sound that could be heard from the outside world was that of the passing train. On endless mornings, beneath the occasional rays of the sun, among the buzzing insects, the cow and the children awaited the onset of midday and the return to the house that followed. And later, the eternal afternoons of sweet, sad silence in the same field, until night fell, its evening brilliance silent witness at the heights. The clouds gathered, trees cast shadows, birds perched among the rocks in the ridges and ravines, some stars began shining in the darkest sections of blue sky; and Pinín and Rosa, the twins, Antón and Chinta’s children, holding onto the sweet, dream-like serenity of solemn, serious nature, remained quiet for hours on end after their games, never exceptionally rowdy at anytime, seated near ‘Cordera’, who punctuated the august silence of the afternoons with the pointed sound of a sluggish cowbell. In this silence, this calm undisturbed by activity, there was love. The twins loved each other like two halves of a ripe fruit, united by the same life, with scant consciousness of what made them distinct from one another or of what separated them. Pinín and Rosa loved ‘Cordera’, the big, yellow, grandmotherly cow, the nape of whose neck resembled a cradle. ‘Cordera’ would have reminded a poet of the zavala of the Ramayana, the sacred cow, in the abundance of her form, the solemn serenity of her deliberate, noble movements, her air and contours of a dethroned, fallen idol, pleased with her fortune, happier to be a real cow than a false god. ‘Cordera’, to the degree that it may be possible to guess such things, would have said too that she loved the twins charged with the task of grazing her.
She wasn’t that expressive; but the patience with which she submitted to the twin’s games, in which she variously served as pillow, hiding place, saddle, and whatever else accorded with the children’s fantasies, silently demonstrated the affection of the peaceful, thoughtful animal.
In difficult times Pinín and Rosa had gone to incredible lengths to care for the ‘Cordera’. Antón had only recently acquired the meadow. Years before, ‘Cordera’ had to graze as best she could, at random along the roads and narrow streets of the sparse meadows of the community, comprised as much of public thoroughfares as pasture. In such days of penury, Pinín and Rosa guided her to the prime hillocks, to the quietest and least heavily grazed places, thus liberating her from the thousand abuses to which poor animals forced to leave their search for food to chance on the road are exposed.
In the most difficult days, in the barn, when the hay was scarce and the corn stalks used to make a warm bed for the cow were also lacking, the Cordera owed the amelioration of her misery to the inventiveness of Rosa and Pinín. And what can one say about the time of the calving and the breeding, when the needs of the offspring conflicted with the Chintos’ interest, which consisted of robbing from the udders of the poor mother the entire quantity of milk with the exception of what was absolutely indispensable for the survival of the calf! At such times Rosa and Pinín always sided with ‘Cordera’, and whenever they found the opportunity secretly set the suckling free. The creature, blind and as if crazed, bumping against everything, ran to the shelter of the mother, who lodged him under her belly and turned her grateful, diligent head, saying in her way:
‘Let the children and the sucklings come to me.’
Such memories, such ties, are among those never forgotten.
Also, no cow in the whole world could have been better tempered or more patient than ‘Cordera’. Whenever she found herself paired with a companion, attached to the yoke, she bowed her will to what was alien to her, and hour after hour found her with neck bent, head twisted, in an uncomfortable position, on her feet while her yokemate slept on the ground.
Antón understood that he was destined for a life of poverty when he came face to face with the fact that he would never realise his golden dream of acquiring a farm of his own with at least two heads of cattle. By dint of hard labour and unstinting privation, he eventually saved enough to purchase his first cow, ‘Cordera’, and that was that; he would not be able to buy a second until he paid arrears to the landlord, the owner of the little house that he rented, and carried off to the market that piece of his insides, ‘Cordera’, the love of his children. Within two years of the Lamb’s arrival at the house, Chinta died. The cow’s shed and the double bed shared a wall, that is, a partition comprised of the branches of chestnut trees and corn stalks. Chinta, muse of the miserable house’s poverty, died looking at the cow through a hole in the divide, pointing her out as the salvation of the family.
‘Take care of her. She’s your bread and butter,’ the eyes of the poor moribund appeared to say. She died debilitated by hunger and work.
The twins had focused their love on ‘Cordera’; the mother’s lap exudes a particular affection that a father cannot compete with. The children sought it now in the warmth of the cow, in the shed, and in the field. Antón understood all this in his confused way. He did not have to say a word to the children about the need to sell the cow. Early one Saturday in July, in a bad mood, Antón began walking toward Gijón, ‘Cordera’, which had only the bell around her neck, in front of him. Pinín and Rosa slept. Other days he had to practically whip them awake. On this day he left them alone. When they awoke they discovered that ‘Cordera’ had gone. ‘Papa’s taken her to the bull.’ No other conjecture occurred to them. Pinín and Rosa believed the cow went with reluctance; they thought she wished for no more offspring because she always ended up losing them soon, without knowing how or when.
At dusk, Antón and the Lamb entered the yard in front of the house, gloomy, tired, and covered in dust. Their father said nothing though the children guessed the danger.
He had not made the sale because nobody agreed to the price he asked. It was excessive; his affection for the beast clouded his reason. He asked so much for the cow to ensure nobody would dare take her away. The men who approached intending to obtain a good deal soon moved off, cursing the one who looked with rancour and defiance at those among them who insisted on nearing the price that Antón obstinately maintained. Until the last minute of the day, Antón was in the Humedal, leaving the matter to fate. ‘It can’t be said,’ he thought, ‘that I don’t want to sell the cow. It’s that they don’t want to pay me what ‘Cordera’s’ worth.’ Finally, with a sigh, if not exactly satisfied but with a certain relief, he turned and started walking along the Candás Road, among the confusion and noise of bullocks and pigs, oxen and cows, which the villagers from many parishes in the district conducted with greater or less exertion, in accord with the length of time the men and beasts had been acquainted.
At a crossing in Natahoyo, it seemed as though Antón might yet lose the cow; a neighbour from Carrió who had pestered him the whole day offering a price just a few duros less than that asked, and who was now rather drunk, made a final attack.
He bid higher and higher, torn between greed and the whim of owing the cow. But Antón held firm as a rock. They ended up with their hands joined, standing in the middle of the road, blocking the way … Finally, greed triumphed; the amount of fifty duros separated them like an abyss; they let go of each other’s hands and each went his own way; Antón followed a lane adorned with honeysuckles that had not yet bloomed and budding blackberries and led her to the house.
From the day they surmised the danger of the situation, Pinín and Rosa did not rest. In the middle of the week, the steward showed up at Antón’s yard. He was another villager from the same parish, a short-tempered man, known for his cruelty toward tenants who fell behind in their payments. Antón, who did not stand for his reprimands, turned livid when the other threatened him with eviction.
The landlord would not wait longer. In that case Antón would sell the cow at a low price, for the equivalent of a light snack. It was either that or the streets.
The following Saturday Pinín accompanied his father to the Humedal. The child looked horrified at the meat dealers, who were the tyrants of the place. A man from Castile bought the Lamb for a just price. Branded, she returned to her shed in Puao, already sold, somebody else’s, her bell sadly ringing. A sullen Antón walked behind her with Pinín, whose eyes were swollen. When she heard about the sale, Rosa wrapped her arms around ‘Cordera’s’ neck. She inclined her head at the caresses just as she did when they submitted her to the yoke.
‘There goes the old girl,’ the unsociable Antón thought to himself, broken-hearted.
She is a beast, but his children had no other mother or grandmother!
The silence of the following days, in the field and in Somonte’s greenery hung funereal. Ignorant of her fate, ‘Cordera’ rested and grazed as usual, apparently unconscious of the passage of time, as she would rest and eat a minute before the brutal cudgel killed her. But Rosa and Pinín lay grief stricken upon the grass, which would soon be good for nothing. They gazed with rancour at the passing trains, the wires of the telegraph pole. It was that unknown world, so far from them on both sides, that would take ‘Cordera’ away from them.
When it grew dark on Friday, it was time for the goodbye. An agent of the new owner came for the animal. He paid and took a drink with Antón and they brought ‘Cordera’ to the little square. Antón had drained the bottle. He was in a highly excited state. The weight of the money in his pocket further enlivened his spirits. He wanted to blind himself. He spoke a lot, singing the praises of the cow. The other man smiled because it was impertinent of Antón to go on in this fashion. Who cared if the cow provided so much milk? That she was noble in the yoke, strong when heavily burdened? So what, if in a matter of days she was going to be turned into chops and other delicious cuts? Antón did not want to imagine that; he thought of her alive, working, serving another labourer, having forgotten him and the children but alive, happy … Pinín and Rosa, sat holding hands atop a mound of fertilizer, a sentimental reminder for them of ‘Cordera’ and their own work, looking at the enemy with terrified eyes. At the last moment, they threw themselves on top of their friend; kisses, embraces, everything. They could not release her. Antón, now that the effect of the wine had worn off, fell as if in a marasmus. He folded his arms and entered the darkened yard.
The children followed for a good distance, along the narrow street with high hedges, the sad group of the indifferent agent and ‘Cordera’, who accompanied the unknown man unwillingly and at such an hour. Finally, Rosa and Pinín had to abandon their pursuit. In a fit of pique, Antón shouted from the house:Children, come here. That’s enough foolishness,’ so the father implored from a distance, in a tearful voice.
Night fell. The high hedges along the darkened, narrow lane appeared black, practically forming a vault. They lost sight of the vague shape of Cordera, who seemed equally black from afar. In a moment there remained nothing of her but the slow tinkle of the bell, a sound that faded little by little in the distance among the sad creaks of countless cicadas.
‘Goodbye, ‘Cordera!’ cried Rosa, overcome with weeping. ‘Goodbye, my love!’
‘Goodbye, ‘Cordera!’ repeated Pinín, equally distraught.
‘Goodbye,’ the bell answered at last, after its fashion, the sad refrain coming apart, resigned, among the sounds of the July night in the village…
Very early the next day, at the regular hour, Pinín and Rosa went to Somonte meadow. For them, the solitude encountered there had never been sad. But that day, without ‘Lamb’, the Somonte resembled a desert.
Suddenly, the locomotive whistled, smoke appeared, and then the train. In a closed wagon, in narrow, high windows or air vents, the twins glimpsed the heads of cows that peered, bewildered, through the openings.
‘Goodbye, ‘Cordera’!’ cried Rosa, imagining her friend, the grandmotherly cow, there –
‘Goodbye, ‘Cordera’!’ yelled Pinín, with the same faith, brandishing his fists at the train, which flew toward Castile.
The tearful boy, more conscious than his sister of the villainy of the world, cried out:
‘They’re taking her to the slaughterhouse … Beef, for the gentlemen, priests … for those who’ve come back rich from America.’
‘Goodbye, ‘Cordera’!’
‘Goodbye, ‘Cordera’!’
Rosa and Pinín gazed with rancour at the railway line and the telegraph, symbols of a malevolent world that snatched from them, that devoured, their companion of so many solitary hours, of so much silent tenderness, to gratify the appetites, and convert her into the food, of rich gluttons.
‘Goodbye, ‘Cordera’…!’
‘Goodbye, ‘Cordera’…!’
Many years passed. Pinín grew into a young man and received a summons from the king. The third Carlist war raged. Antón was a farm manager for a local boss of the defeated party, but it would have been futile for him to declare his son unfit for duty. Besides, Pinín was like an oak.
One sad afternoon in October Rosa waited alone in Somonte meadow for the mail train from Gijón. It carried with it her only love, her brother. The locomotive whistled in the distance and then the train passed along the cutting in a flash. Rosa, nearly caught up in the wheels, saw for an instant in a third-class coach the heads of numerous poor conscripts, crying out and gesticulating, greeting the trees, the soil, the fields, and everything about their mother country that was familiar to them, their local areas, everything left behind to go and die in the fratricidal conflicts of the country as a whole, in the service of a king and ideas they had no knowledge of.
Pinín, half his body out the window, spread out his arms toward his sister; they almost touched. Rosa heard the clear voice of her brother among the noise of the wheels and the shouts of the recruits. He sobbed, exclaiming, as though prey to a distant memory of pain:
‘Goodbye, Rosa…! Goodbye, Cordera!’
‘Goodbye, Pinín! My love…!’
There he goes, like the other, like the grandmotherly cow. He goes into the world. Beef for the gluttons, for those who return rich from America. Flesh of her soul, cannon fodder for this world’s craziness, for the ambitions of others.
So ran the train of Rosa’s thought, among a riot of pain and ideas, as she watched the train disappear in the distance, whistling sadly, whistles that echoed in the chestnut trees, the valleys, and among the boulders…
How alone she felt! Now, yes, now Somonte meadow resembled a desert.
‘Goodybe, Pinín! Goodbye,Cordera!’
With what hatred did Rosa gaze at the tracks stained with burnt coal, with what rage did she appraise the telegraph wires. Oh, Cordera had chosen well never to go near them. That was the world, the unknown, which swallowed everything. And without realising what she was doing, Rosa leaned her head against the pole that stood like a banner at the extremity of the Somonte. The wind sang its metallic song in the entrails of the dry pine. Now, Rosa understood. It was a tearful refrain, of abandonment, of solitude, of death.
In the rapid vibrations, like moans, she thought she heard, very far off, the voice that sobbed on the line ahead of her:
‘Goodbye, Rosa! Goodbye,Cordera!’
Tuesday, March 2, 2010
No Oyes Ladrar Los perros by Juan Rulfo
-Hey you up there, Ignacio, tell me if you can not hear a signal of something or see some light somewhere.
-Nothing can be seen
-We should be close already
-Yes, but nothing can be heard.
-Look well
-I can’t see anything
-Poor you, Ignacio.
The long dark shadow of the men continued moving up and down, tripping over the rocks, shrinking and growing according to the shore of the river. It was a solo shadow, wobbling.
The moon came over the earth, like a round blaze of fire.
-We should be arriving at that town, Ignacio. You who have ears free to hear, look and see if you can hear the barking of the dogs. Keep in mind that that will tell us Tonaya is just around the mount. And it has been hours since we left the mount. Remember that, Ignacio.
-Yes, but I don’t see a sign of anything.
-I am tired.
-Put me down.
The old man walked backwards until he reached a wall and he rearranged his load there, without releasing it from his shoulders. Although his legs were buckling, he did not want to sit down, because afterwards he would be unable to lift the body of his son, since back there, hours before, they had helped him load him on his back. And this is how he was carried since then.
-How do you feel?
-Bad.
They spoke little. Each time less. At times he seemed to be sleeping. At times he seemed to be cold. Trambling. He knew when the trembling would seize his son because of the jerkings he felt, and because he would dig his feet into his loins like spurs. Later the hands of his son, locked around his neck shook his head vigorously like a rattle.
He gritted his teeh so that he would not bite his tongue, and when his son finished he would ask:
-Does it hurt a lot?
-Somewhat- his son answered.
At first he had said: “Let me down here… put me down here… go on alone. I will catch up to you tomorrow or whenever I recover a bit”. He had said this like fifty times. But now he never said that.
There was the moon. In front of them. A big and colored moon that filled their eyes with light and that stretched and obscured more their shadow over the earth.
-I can’t see where I am going- he said.
But no one answered him.
The other was sitting up there, completely illuminated by the moon, with his pale face, without blood, reflecting the opaque light. And he was below.
-Did you hear me, Ignacio? I’m telling you that you aren’t looking well.
The other remained silent.
He continued walking, stumblingly. He slouched his body and later straightened to return to stumbling again.
-This is not a road. They told us that behind the hill was Tonaya. We have already passed the hill. And Tonaya can not be seen, nor is any noise letting us know that we are close to it. Why do you not want to tell me what you see, you up there, Ignacio?
-Put me down, father.
-You feel bad?
-Yes.
-I will take you to Tonaya no matter what. There I will find someone to care for you. They said there was a doctor there. I will take you to him. I have carried you for hours and I am not going to leave you thrown aside here so that you die.
He trembled a bit. He walked a few steps sideways and returned to straightening up.
-I will take you to Tonaya.
-Put me down.
His voice became soft, he barely whispered:
-I want to rest a bit.
-Sleep up there. After all, I have a good grip on you.
The moon continued rising, almost blue, into the clear sky. The face of the old man, wet with sweat, was filled by the moon. He hid his eyes to block what was in front of him [the moonlight] since he couldn’t bend his head held tightly by the hands of his son.
-All that I do, I don’t do for you. I do it for your deceased mother. Because you were her son. That’s why I do this. She would reprimand me if I left you there, where I found you, and I would not have picked you up to take you to be cured, as I am doing. It is her that has given me courage, not you. Firstly because to you I do not owe anything more than difficulties, absolute martification, absolute shame.
He sweated to talk. But the night winde dried the sweat. And over the dry sweat, he began to sweat again.
-I will break my back, but I will carry you to Tonaya, so that they cure the wounds they have done to you. And I am sure that, when you feel better, you will return to your evil ways. This is not what is important to me. As long as you go far away, where I will not have to know anything about you. Provided that happens… Because to me you are already not my son. I have cursed the blood that you got from me. My part is cursed. I have said: “May the blood that I gave you rot in your kidneys!” I said that whenever I found out that you were wandering the streets, living by robbery and killing people… good people. And if you don’t believe me, there is my friend Tranquilino. He baptized you. He gave you your name. He also received bad luck from knowing you. Since then I have said: “This could not be my son.”
-Look to see if you can see something. Or if you hear anything. You that can do that from up there, because I am already deaf.
-I see nothing.
-Worse for you, Ignacio.
-I’m thirsty.
-Hold on! We are already close. What’s happening is that it is night and they have turned off the lights in the toen. But at least you should here if the dogs are barking. Try to hear.
-Give me water.
-Here there is no water. There is nothing but stones. Hold on. And even if there was, I wouldn’t let you down to drink water. No one could help me to lift you up again, and alone I can not.
-I am very thirsty and very tired.
-That reminds me of when you were born. That is how you were then. You awoke hungry and ate to fall asleep again. And your mother gave you water, because already you were finished with her milk. You coun’t be filled. And you were very rabid. I never thought that in time I would get so enraged at you… But that is what happened. Your mother, rest in peace, want you to grow strong. She believed that you would support her when you grew up. She didn’t have anything but you. The other son had to go and kill her. You would have killed her again anyways if she had seen you at this point.
He felt that the man he carried on his shoulders had stopped tightening his knees and had begun to loosen his feet, balancing them on one side or the other. And it seemed that the head, up there, was sweating as if it was sobbing.
On his hair he felt big drops fall, like tears.
-Are you crying, Ignacio? It makes you cry to remember your mother, right? but you never did anything for her. You only paid us bad. [meaning: you only gave us bad things in return.] It seems that, instead of care, we gave you nothing but wickedness. And see? Now they wounded you. What happened to your friends? They killed them all. But they had no one. They could well have said: “We have no one to whom we can give our pain”. But you, Ignacio?
* * *
There was the town. The roofs shone brightly under the light of the moon. He had the impression that he was being crushed by the weight of his son when the back of his knees bent in his final efforts. Upon arriving at the first building, he rested briefly on the railing around it and let go of the limp body, as if it had been disjointed.
He unclasped with difficulty the fingers with which his son had been holding onto his neck, and, upon being free, heard on all sides the barking of the dogs. [his ears were covered by his sons hands, so he was unable to hear the dogs before this.]
-You didn’t hear that, Ignacio?- he said -You didn’t even help me with this hope.
-Nothing can be seen
-We should be close already
-Yes, but nothing can be heard.
-Look well
-I can’t see anything
-Poor you, Ignacio.
The long dark shadow of the men continued moving up and down, tripping over the rocks, shrinking and growing according to the shore of the river. It was a solo shadow, wobbling.
The moon came over the earth, like a round blaze of fire.
-We should be arriving at that town, Ignacio. You who have ears free to hear, look and see if you can hear the barking of the dogs. Keep in mind that that will tell us Tonaya is just around the mount. And it has been hours since we left the mount. Remember that, Ignacio.
-Yes, but I don’t see a sign of anything.
-I am tired.
-Put me down.
The old man walked backwards until he reached a wall and he rearranged his load there, without releasing it from his shoulders. Although his legs were buckling, he did not want to sit down, because afterwards he would be unable to lift the body of his son, since back there, hours before, they had helped him load him on his back. And this is how he was carried since then.
-How do you feel?
-Bad.
They spoke little. Each time less. At times he seemed to be sleeping. At times he seemed to be cold. Trambling. He knew when the trembling would seize his son because of the jerkings he felt, and because he would dig his feet into his loins like spurs. Later the hands of his son, locked around his neck shook his head vigorously like a rattle.
He gritted his teeh so that he would not bite his tongue, and when his son finished he would ask:
-Does it hurt a lot?
-Somewhat- his son answered.
At first he had said: “Let me down here… put me down here… go on alone. I will catch up to you tomorrow or whenever I recover a bit”. He had said this like fifty times. But now he never said that.
There was the moon. In front of them. A big and colored moon that filled their eyes with light and that stretched and obscured more their shadow over the earth.
-I can’t see where I am going- he said.
But no one answered him.
The other was sitting up there, completely illuminated by the moon, with his pale face, without blood, reflecting the opaque light. And he was below.
-Did you hear me, Ignacio? I’m telling you that you aren’t looking well.
The other remained silent.
He continued walking, stumblingly. He slouched his body and later straightened to return to stumbling again.
-This is not a road. They told us that behind the hill was Tonaya. We have already passed the hill. And Tonaya can not be seen, nor is any noise letting us know that we are close to it. Why do you not want to tell me what you see, you up there, Ignacio?
-Put me down, father.
-You feel bad?
-Yes.
-I will take you to Tonaya no matter what. There I will find someone to care for you. They said there was a doctor there. I will take you to him. I have carried you for hours and I am not going to leave you thrown aside here so that you die.
He trembled a bit. He walked a few steps sideways and returned to straightening up.
-I will take you to Tonaya.
-Put me down.
His voice became soft, he barely whispered:
-I want to rest a bit.
-Sleep up there. After all, I have a good grip on you.
The moon continued rising, almost blue, into the clear sky. The face of the old man, wet with sweat, was filled by the moon. He hid his eyes to block what was in front of him [the moonlight] since he couldn’t bend his head held tightly by the hands of his son.
-All that I do, I don’t do for you. I do it for your deceased mother. Because you were her son. That’s why I do this. She would reprimand me if I left you there, where I found you, and I would not have picked you up to take you to be cured, as I am doing. It is her that has given me courage, not you. Firstly because to you I do not owe anything more than difficulties, absolute martification, absolute shame.
He sweated to talk. But the night winde dried the sweat. And over the dry sweat, he began to sweat again.
-I will break my back, but I will carry you to Tonaya, so that they cure the wounds they have done to you. And I am sure that, when you feel better, you will return to your evil ways. This is not what is important to me. As long as you go far away, where I will not have to know anything about you. Provided that happens… Because to me you are already not my son. I have cursed the blood that you got from me. My part is cursed. I have said: “May the blood that I gave you rot in your kidneys!” I said that whenever I found out that you were wandering the streets, living by robbery and killing people… good people. And if you don’t believe me, there is my friend Tranquilino. He baptized you. He gave you your name. He also received bad luck from knowing you. Since then I have said: “This could not be my son.”
-Look to see if you can see something. Or if you hear anything. You that can do that from up there, because I am already deaf.
-I see nothing.
-Worse for you, Ignacio.
-I’m thirsty.
-Hold on! We are already close. What’s happening is that it is night and they have turned off the lights in the toen. But at least you should here if the dogs are barking. Try to hear.
-Give me water.
-Here there is no water. There is nothing but stones. Hold on. And even if there was, I wouldn’t let you down to drink water. No one could help me to lift you up again, and alone I can not.
-I am very thirsty and very tired.
-That reminds me of when you were born. That is how you were then. You awoke hungry and ate to fall asleep again. And your mother gave you water, because already you were finished with her milk. You coun’t be filled. And you were very rabid. I never thought that in time I would get so enraged at you… But that is what happened. Your mother, rest in peace, want you to grow strong. She believed that you would support her when you grew up. She didn’t have anything but you. The other son had to go and kill her. You would have killed her again anyways if she had seen you at this point.
He felt that the man he carried on his shoulders had stopped tightening his knees and had begun to loosen his feet, balancing them on one side or the other. And it seemed that the head, up there, was sweating as if it was sobbing.
On his hair he felt big drops fall, like tears.
-Are you crying, Ignacio? It makes you cry to remember your mother, right? but you never did anything for her. You only paid us bad. [meaning: you only gave us bad things in return.] It seems that, instead of care, we gave you nothing but wickedness. And see? Now they wounded you. What happened to your friends? They killed them all. But they had no one. They could well have said: “We have no one to whom we can give our pain”. But you, Ignacio?
* * *
There was the town. The roofs shone brightly under the light of the moon. He had the impression that he was being crushed by the weight of his son when the back of his knees bent in his final efforts. Upon arriving at the first building, he rested briefly on the railing around it and let go of the limp body, as if it had been disjointed.
He unclasped with difficulty the fingers with which his son had been holding onto his neck, and, upon being free, heard on all sides the barking of the dogs. [his ears were covered by his sons hands, so he was unable to hear the dogs before this.]
-You didn’t hear that, Ignacio?- he said -You didn’t even help me with this hope.
Mi Caballo Mago by Sabine R. Ulibarri
He was white. White as memories lost. He was free. Free as happiness is. He was fantasy, liberty, and excitement. He filled and dominated the mountain valleys and surrounding plains. He was a white horse that flooded my youth with dreams and poetry. Around the campfires of the country and in the sunny patios of the town, the ranch hands talked about him with enthusiasm and admiration. But gradually their eyes would become hazy and blurred with dreaming. The lively talk would die down. All thoughts fixed on the vision evoked by the horse. Myth of the animal kingdom. Poem of the world of men.
White and mysterious, he paraded his harem through the summer forests with lordly rejoicing. Winter sent him to the plains and sheltered hillsides for the protection of his females. He spent the summer like an Oriental potentate in his woodland gardens. The winter lie passed like an illustrious warrior celebrating a well-earned victory. He was a legend. The stories told of the Wonder Horse were endless. Some true, others fabricated. So many traps, so many snares, so many searching parties, and all in vain. The horse always escaped, always mocked his pursuers, always rose above the control of man. Many a valiant cowboy swore to put his halter and his brand on the animal. But always he had to confess later that the mystic horse was more of a man than he. I was fifteen years old. Although I had never seen the Wonder Horse, he filled my imagination and fired my ambition. I used to listen open-mouthed as my father and the ranch hands talked about the phantom horse who turned into mist and air and nothingness when he was trapped. I joined in the universal obsession like the hope of winning the lottery - of putting my lasso on him some day, of capturing him and showing him off on Sunday afternoons when the girls of the town strolled through the streets. It was high summer. The forests were fresh, green, and gay. The cattle moved slowly, fat and sleek in the August sun and shadow. Listless and drowsy in the lethargy of late afternoon, I was dozing on my horse. It was time to round up the herd and go back to the good bread of the cowboy camp. Already my comrades would be sitting around the campfire, playing the guitar, telling stories of past or present, or surrendering to the languor of the late afternoon. The sun was setting behind me in a riot of streaks and colors. Deep, harmonious silence.
I sit drowsily still, forgetting the cattle in the glade. Suddenly the forest falls silent, a deafening quiet. The afternoon comes to a standstill. The breeze stops blowing, but it vibrates. The sun flares hotly. The planet, life, and time itself have stopped in an inexplicable way. For a moment, I don’t understand what is happening. Then my eyes focus. There he is! The Wonder Horse! At the end of the glade, on high ground surrounded by summer green. He is a statue. He is an engraving. Line and form and white stain on a green background. Pride, prestige, and art incarnate in animal flesh. A picture of burning beauty and virile freedom. An ideal, pure and invincible, rising from the eternal dreams of humanity. Even today my being thrills when I remember him. A sharp neigh. A far-reaching challenge that soars on high, ripping the virginal fabric of the rosy clouds. Ears at the point. Eyes flashing. Tail waving active defiance. Hoofs glossy and destructive. Arrogant ruler of the countryside. The moment is never ending, a momentary eternity. It no longer exists, but it will always live… . There must have been mares. I did not see them. The cattle went on their indifferent way. My horse followed them, and I came slowly back from the land of dreams to the world of toil. But life could no longer be what it was before. That night under the stars I didn’t sleep. I dreamed. How much I dreamed awake and how much I dreamed asleep, I do not know. I only know that a white horse occupied my dreams and filled them with vibrant sound, and light, and turmoil. Summer passed and winter came. Green grass gave place to white snow. The herds descended from the mountains to the valleys and the hollows. And in the town they kept saying that the Wonder Horse was roaming through this or that secluded area. I inquired everywhere for his whereabouts. Every day he became for me more of an ideal, more of an idol, more of a mystery. It was Sunday. The sun had barely risen above the snowy mountains. My breath was a white cloud. My horse was trembling with cold and fear like me. I left without going to mass. Without any breakfast. Without the usual bread and sardines in my saddle bags. I had slept badly, but had kept the vigil well. I was going in search of the white light that galloped through my dreams. On leaving the town for the open country, the roads disappear. There are no tracks, human or animal. Only a silence, deep, white, and sparkling. My horse breaks trail with his chest and leaves an unending wake, an open rift, in the white sea. My trained, concentrated gaze covers the landscape from horizon to horizon, searching for the noble silhouette of the talismanic horse. It must have been midday. I don’t know. Time had lost its meaning. I found him! On a slope stained with sunlight. We saw one another at the same time. Together, we turned to stone. Motionless, absorbed, and panting, I gazed at his beauty, his pride, his nobility. As still as sculptured marble, he allowed himself to be admired. A sudden, violent scream breaks the silence. A glove hurled into my face. A challenge and a mandate. Then something surprising happens. The horse that in summer takes his stand between any threat and his herd, swinging back and forth from left to right, now plunges into the snow. Stronger than they, he is breaking trail for his mares. They follow him. His flight is slow in order to conserve his strength. I follow. Slowly. Quivering. Thinking about his intelligence. Admiring his courage. Understanding his courtesy. The afternoon advances. My horse is taking it easy. One by one the mares become weary. One by one, they drop out of the trail. Alone! He and I. My inner ferment bubbles to my lips. I speak to him. He listens and is quiet. He still opens the way, and I follow in the path he leaves me. Behind us a long, deep trench crosses the white plain. My horse, which has eaten grain and good hay, is still strong. Undernourished as the Wonder Horse is, his strength is waning. But he keeps on because that is the way he is. He does not know how to surrender. I now see black stains over his body. Sweat and the wet snow have revealed the black skin beneath the white hair. Snorting breath, turned to steam, tears the air. White spume above white snow. Sweat, spume, and steam. Uneasiness. I felt like an executioner. But there was no turning back. The distance between us was growing relentlessly shorter. God and Nature watched indifferently. I feel sure of myself at last. I untie the rope. I open the lasso and pull the reins tight. Every nerve, every muscle is tense. My heart is in my mouth. Spurs pressed against trembling flanks. The horse leaps. I whirl the rope and throw the obedient lasso. A frenzy of fury and rage. Whirlpools of light and fans of transparent snow. A rope that whistles and burns the saddle tree. Smoking, fighting gloves. Eyes burning in their sockets. Mouth parched. Fevered forehead. The whole earth shakes and shudders. The long, white trench ends in a wide, white pool. Deep, gasping quiet. The Wonder Horse is mine! Both still trembling, we look at one another squarely for a long time. Intelligent and realistic, he stops struggling and even takes a hesitant step toward me. I speak to him. As I talk, I approach him. At first, he flinches and recoils. Then he waits for me. The two horses greet one another in their own way. Finally, I succeed in stroking his mane. I tell him many things, and he seems to understand. Ahead of me, along the trail already made, I drove him toward the town. Triumphant. Exultant. Childish laughter gathered in my throat. With my newfound manliness. I controlled it. I wanted to sing, but I fought down the desire. I wanted to shout, but I kept quiet. It was the ultimate in happiness. It was the pride of the male adolescent. I felt myself a conqueror.
Occasionally the Wonder Horse made a try for his liberty, snatching me abruptly from my thoughts. For a few moments, the struggle was renewed. Then we went on. It was necessary to go through the town. There was no other way. The sun was setting. Icy streets and people on the porches. The Wonder Horse full of terror and panic for the first time. He ran and my well-shod horse stopped him. He slipped and fell on his side. I suffered for him. The indignity. The humiliation. Majesty degraded. I begged him not to struggle, to let himself be led. How it hurt me that other people should see him like that! Finally we reached home. “What shall I do with you, Mago? If I put you into the stable or the corral, you are sure to hurt yourself. Besides, it would be an insult. You aren’t a slave. You aren’t a servant. You aren’t even an animal.” I decided to turn him loose in the fenced pasture. There, little by little, Mago would become accustomed to my friendship and my company. No animal had ever escaped from that pasture. My father saw me coming and waited for me without accord. A smile played over his face, and a spark danced in his eyes. He watched me take the rope from Mago, and the two of us thoughtfully observed him move away. My father clasped my hand a little more firmly than usual and said, “That was a man’s job.” That was all. Nothing more was needed. We understood one another very well. I was playing the role of a real man, but the childish laughter and shouting that bubbled up inside me almost destroyed the impression I wanted to create. That night I slept little, and when I slept, I did not know that I was asleep. For dreaming is the same when one really dreams, asleep or awake. I was up at dawn. I had to go to see my Wonder Horse. As soon as it was light, I went out into the cold to look for him. The pasture was large. It contained a grove of trees and a small gully. The Wonder Horse was not visible anywhere, but I was not worried. I walked slowly, my head full of the events of yesterday and my plans for the future. Suddenly I realized that I had walked a long way. I quicken my steps. I look apprehensively around me. I begin to be afraid. Without knowing it, I begin to run. Faster and faster. He is not there. The Wonder Horse has escaped. I search every corner where he could be hidden. I follow his tracks. I see that during the night he walked incessantly, sniffing, searching for a way out. He did not find one. He made one for himself. I followed the track that led straight to the fence. And I saw that the trail did not stop but continued on the other side. It was a barbed-wire fence. There was white hair on the wire. There was blood on the barbs. There were red stains on the snow and little red drops in the hoof prints on the other side of the fence. I stopped there. I did not go any farther. The rays of the morning sun on my face. Eyes clouded and yet filled with light. Childish tears on the cheeks of a man. A cry stifled in my throat. Slow, silent sobs. Standing there, I forgot myself and the world and time. I cannot explain it, but my sorrow was mixed with pleasure. I was weeping with happiness. No matter how much it hurt me, I was rejoicing over the flight and the freedom of the Wonder Horse, the dimensions of his indomitable spirit. Now he would always be fantasy, freedom, and excitement. The Wonder Horse was transcendent. He had enriched my life forever. My father found me there. He came close without a word and laid his arm across my shoulders. We stood looking at the white trench with its flecks of red that led into the rising sun.
White and mysterious, he paraded his harem through the summer forests with lordly rejoicing. Winter sent him to the plains and sheltered hillsides for the protection of his females. He spent the summer like an Oriental potentate in his woodland gardens. The winter lie passed like an illustrious warrior celebrating a well-earned victory. He was a legend. The stories told of the Wonder Horse were endless. Some true, others fabricated. So many traps, so many snares, so many searching parties, and all in vain. The horse always escaped, always mocked his pursuers, always rose above the control of man. Many a valiant cowboy swore to put his halter and his brand on the animal. But always he had to confess later that the mystic horse was more of a man than he. I was fifteen years old. Although I had never seen the Wonder Horse, he filled my imagination and fired my ambition. I used to listen open-mouthed as my father and the ranch hands talked about the phantom horse who turned into mist and air and nothingness when he was trapped. I joined in the universal obsession like the hope of winning the lottery - of putting my lasso on him some day, of capturing him and showing him off on Sunday afternoons when the girls of the town strolled through the streets. It was high summer. The forests were fresh, green, and gay. The cattle moved slowly, fat and sleek in the August sun and shadow. Listless and drowsy in the lethargy of late afternoon, I was dozing on my horse. It was time to round up the herd and go back to the good bread of the cowboy camp. Already my comrades would be sitting around the campfire, playing the guitar, telling stories of past or present, or surrendering to the languor of the late afternoon. The sun was setting behind me in a riot of streaks and colors. Deep, harmonious silence.
I sit drowsily still, forgetting the cattle in the glade. Suddenly the forest falls silent, a deafening quiet. The afternoon comes to a standstill. The breeze stops blowing, but it vibrates. The sun flares hotly. The planet, life, and time itself have stopped in an inexplicable way. For a moment, I don’t understand what is happening. Then my eyes focus. There he is! The Wonder Horse! At the end of the glade, on high ground surrounded by summer green. He is a statue. He is an engraving. Line and form and white stain on a green background. Pride, prestige, and art incarnate in animal flesh. A picture of burning beauty and virile freedom. An ideal, pure and invincible, rising from the eternal dreams of humanity. Even today my being thrills when I remember him. A sharp neigh. A far-reaching challenge that soars on high, ripping the virginal fabric of the rosy clouds. Ears at the point. Eyes flashing. Tail waving active defiance. Hoofs glossy and destructive. Arrogant ruler of the countryside. The moment is never ending, a momentary eternity. It no longer exists, but it will always live… . There must have been mares. I did not see them. The cattle went on their indifferent way. My horse followed them, and I came slowly back from the land of dreams to the world of toil. But life could no longer be what it was before. That night under the stars I didn’t sleep. I dreamed. How much I dreamed awake and how much I dreamed asleep, I do not know. I only know that a white horse occupied my dreams and filled them with vibrant sound, and light, and turmoil. Summer passed and winter came. Green grass gave place to white snow. The herds descended from the mountains to the valleys and the hollows. And in the town they kept saying that the Wonder Horse was roaming through this or that secluded area. I inquired everywhere for his whereabouts. Every day he became for me more of an ideal, more of an idol, more of a mystery. It was Sunday. The sun had barely risen above the snowy mountains. My breath was a white cloud. My horse was trembling with cold and fear like me. I left without going to mass. Without any breakfast. Without the usual bread and sardines in my saddle bags. I had slept badly, but had kept the vigil well. I was going in search of the white light that galloped through my dreams. On leaving the town for the open country, the roads disappear. There are no tracks, human or animal. Only a silence, deep, white, and sparkling. My horse breaks trail with his chest and leaves an unending wake, an open rift, in the white sea. My trained, concentrated gaze covers the landscape from horizon to horizon, searching for the noble silhouette of the talismanic horse. It must have been midday. I don’t know. Time had lost its meaning. I found him! On a slope stained with sunlight. We saw one another at the same time. Together, we turned to stone. Motionless, absorbed, and panting, I gazed at his beauty, his pride, his nobility. As still as sculptured marble, he allowed himself to be admired. A sudden, violent scream breaks the silence. A glove hurled into my face. A challenge and a mandate. Then something surprising happens. The horse that in summer takes his stand between any threat and his herd, swinging back and forth from left to right, now plunges into the snow. Stronger than they, he is breaking trail for his mares. They follow him. His flight is slow in order to conserve his strength. I follow. Slowly. Quivering. Thinking about his intelligence. Admiring his courage. Understanding his courtesy. The afternoon advances. My horse is taking it easy. One by one the mares become weary. One by one, they drop out of the trail. Alone! He and I. My inner ferment bubbles to my lips. I speak to him. He listens and is quiet. He still opens the way, and I follow in the path he leaves me. Behind us a long, deep trench crosses the white plain. My horse, which has eaten grain and good hay, is still strong. Undernourished as the Wonder Horse is, his strength is waning. But he keeps on because that is the way he is. He does not know how to surrender. I now see black stains over his body. Sweat and the wet snow have revealed the black skin beneath the white hair. Snorting breath, turned to steam, tears the air. White spume above white snow. Sweat, spume, and steam. Uneasiness. I felt like an executioner. But there was no turning back. The distance between us was growing relentlessly shorter. God and Nature watched indifferently. I feel sure of myself at last. I untie the rope. I open the lasso and pull the reins tight. Every nerve, every muscle is tense. My heart is in my mouth. Spurs pressed against trembling flanks. The horse leaps. I whirl the rope and throw the obedient lasso. A frenzy of fury and rage. Whirlpools of light and fans of transparent snow. A rope that whistles and burns the saddle tree. Smoking, fighting gloves. Eyes burning in their sockets. Mouth parched. Fevered forehead. The whole earth shakes and shudders. The long, white trench ends in a wide, white pool. Deep, gasping quiet. The Wonder Horse is mine! Both still trembling, we look at one another squarely for a long time. Intelligent and realistic, he stops struggling and even takes a hesitant step toward me. I speak to him. As I talk, I approach him. At first, he flinches and recoils. Then he waits for me. The two horses greet one another in their own way. Finally, I succeed in stroking his mane. I tell him many things, and he seems to understand. Ahead of me, along the trail already made, I drove him toward the town. Triumphant. Exultant. Childish laughter gathered in my throat. With my newfound manliness. I controlled it. I wanted to sing, but I fought down the desire. I wanted to shout, but I kept quiet. It was the ultimate in happiness. It was the pride of the male adolescent. I felt myself a conqueror.
Occasionally the Wonder Horse made a try for his liberty, snatching me abruptly from my thoughts. For a few moments, the struggle was renewed. Then we went on. It was necessary to go through the town. There was no other way. The sun was setting. Icy streets and people on the porches. The Wonder Horse full of terror and panic for the first time. He ran and my well-shod horse stopped him. He slipped and fell on his side. I suffered for him. The indignity. The humiliation. Majesty degraded. I begged him not to struggle, to let himself be led. How it hurt me that other people should see him like that! Finally we reached home. “What shall I do with you, Mago? If I put you into the stable or the corral, you are sure to hurt yourself. Besides, it would be an insult. You aren’t a slave. You aren’t a servant. You aren’t even an animal.” I decided to turn him loose in the fenced pasture. There, little by little, Mago would become accustomed to my friendship and my company. No animal had ever escaped from that pasture. My father saw me coming and waited for me without accord. A smile played over his face, and a spark danced in his eyes. He watched me take the rope from Mago, and the two of us thoughtfully observed him move away. My father clasped my hand a little more firmly than usual and said, “That was a man’s job.” That was all. Nothing more was needed. We understood one another very well. I was playing the role of a real man, but the childish laughter and shouting that bubbled up inside me almost destroyed the impression I wanted to create. That night I slept little, and when I slept, I did not know that I was asleep. For dreaming is the same when one really dreams, asleep or awake. I was up at dawn. I had to go to see my Wonder Horse. As soon as it was light, I went out into the cold to look for him. The pasture was large. It contained a grove of trees and a small gully. The Wonder Horse was not visible anywhere, but I was not worried. I walked slowly, my head full of the events of yesterday and my plans for the future. Suddenly I realized that I had walked a long way. I quicken my steps. I look apprehensively around me. I begin to be afraid. Without knowing it, I begin to run. Faster and faster. He is not there. The Wonder Horse has escaped. I search every corner where he could be hidden. I follow his tracks. I see that during the night he walked incessantly, sniffing, searching for a way out. He did not find one. He made one for himself. I followed the track that led straight to the fence. And I saw that the trail did not stop but continued on the other side. It was a barbed-wire fence. There was white hair on the wire. There was blood on the barbs. There were red stains on the snow and little red drops in the hoof prints on the other side of the fence. I stopped there. I did not go any farther. The rays of the morning sun on my face. Eyes clouded and yet filled with light. Childish tears on the cheeks of a man. A cry stifled in my throat. Slow, silent sobs. Standing there, I forgot myself and the world and time. I cannot explain it, but my sorrow was mixed with pleasure. I was weeping with happiness. No matter how much it hurt me, I was rejoicing over the flight and the freedom of the Wonder Horse, the dimensions of his indomitable spirit. Now he would always be fantasy, freedom, and excitement. The Wonder Horse was transcendent. He had enriched my life forever. My father found me there. He came close without a word and laid his arm across my shoulders. We stood looking at the white trench with its flecks of red that led into the rising sun.
Chac Mool by Carlos Fuentes
Not too long ago, Filbert died by drowning in Acapulco. It happened during All
Saints’ week. Although he’d been dismissed from his job in the Ministry, Filbert couldn’t resist the bureaucratic temptation to go, same as every year, to the German pensión, to eat sauerkraut sweetened by the sweat of the tropical kitchen, to dance on the Saturday of glory in La Quebrada, and to feel himself a “regular” in the dark anonymity of evening on the beach of Hornos. Clearly, we know that in his youth he had swum well, but now, at forty, and in as bad shape as he seemed to be; to try to cover, and at midnight, such a distance! Frau Müller wouldn’t permit his vigil –such an old client– to be held in the pensión. On the contrary, that night she organized a dance on the little suffocated terrace,while Filbert waited, very pallid in his box, for the morning truck to depart the terminal,and passed the first night of his new life accompanied by baskets and bundles. When I arrived, early, to watch over the shipment of the coffin, Filbert was under a mountain of coconuts; the driver said we should arrange him quickly on the awning and cover him with tarps, so that the passengers wouldn’t get frightened, and to make sure we wouldn’t bring a curse on the voyage. We left Acapulco, still in the breeze. Toward Tierra Colorada the heat and light came to life. Over a breakfast of eggs and sausage, I opened Filbert’s briefcase, retrieved the day before, along with his other belongings, from the Müllers’ pensión. Two hundred pesos. An old newspaper; lottery stubs; a one-way ticket –only one way?--, and the cheap notebook, with pages divided into squares and covers of marble paper. I ventured to read it, in spite of the curves, the stench of vomit, and a certain natural sentiment of respect for the private life of my deceased friend. It would record – yes, I started with that– our everyday work in the office; maybe I would find out why he’d been in decline, neglecting his duties, why he was dictating official documents without feeling, or number, or “effective suffrage.”* Why, in the end, he had run away, forsaking a pension, with no regard for the payrolls. “Today I went to fix up all that business about my pension. The lawyer was very friendly. I left there so happy that I decided to spend five pesos in a café. It’s the same one we went to when we were young and that nowadays I never enter, because it reminds me that I could afford more luxuries at twenty than I can at forty. In those days, we’d all been on the same plane, we would have rejected with energy any negative opinions about our comrades; in fact we waged war on those in the house who even mentioned bad breeding or lack of elegance. I knew that many (perhaps the most humble) would go very far, and here, in school, they would forge the lasting friendships in whose company we would cross the wild seas. No, it wasn’t like that. There were no rules. Many of the humble ones stayed there, many went further than we could have predicted at those lively, friendly gatherings. Others, we who seemed to have all the promise, we remained in the middle of the road, disemboweled in an extracurricular test, isolated by an invisible trench from those who triumphed and from those who never accomplished anything. Finally, today I came back to sit in the seats, modernized –also, like the barricade of an invasion, a soda-fountain— and pretended to read briefs. I saw many of them, changed, amnesiac, retouched by neon light, prosperous. With the café that I almost didn’t recognize, with the city itself, they had been chiseling themselves out to a rhythm different than mine. No, they no longer recognized me, or didn’t want to. At the
most –one or two— a fat, quick hand on the shoulder. Bye, old man, take it easy.
Between them and me intervened the eighteen holes of the Country Club. I hid myself in the briefs. There paraded past me all the years of big dreams, of happy predictions, and also, all the omissions that impeded their realization. I felt the anguish of not being able to put my fingers in the past and fit together the pieces of some abandoned puzzle; but the toy chest is being forgotten, and in the long run, who knows where they’ve come to rest, all the tin soldiers, the helmets, the wooden swords. Such cherished disguises, they were nothing more than that. And, nonetheless, there had been constancy, discipline, devotion to duty. Had that not been enough, or did it suffice? I was struck, on occasion, by the
memory of Rilke. The great payback for the adventure of youth must be death; young
people, we should do away with all our secrets. Today, I wouldn’t have to return my gaze to the cities of salt. Five pesos? Two for the tip.”
“Pepe, apart from his passion for commercial law, enjoys theorizing. He saw me
leave the cathedral and together we walked to the Palace. He’s a non-believer, but that’s not enough for him: in half a block he had to fabricate a theory. That if I weren’t a Mexican, I wouldn’t worship Christ, and –no, look, it seems evident. Here come the Spanish and they propose that you worship a God, killed by a coagulation, with a wounded flank, nailed on a cross. Sacrificed. An offering. What could be more natural than accepting a sentiment so close to your whole ceremonial, to your whole life...? Imagine, instead, that Mexico had been conquered by Buddhists or Mohammedans. It’s not conceivable that our Indians would venerate an individual who died of indigestion. But a God who, it’s not enough that they sacrifice themselves for him, but also that they tear his heart out; caramba! Check-mate to Huitzilopochtli!* Christianity, in its warm, bloody feeling, of sacrifice and liturgy, turns into a natural and novel prolongation of the indigenous religion. The aspects of charity, love, and the other cheek, in turn, are rejected. And everything in Mexico is that: you have to kill men to be able to believe in them.
“Pepe knew my affinity, since my youth, for certain forms of indigenous Mexican
art. I collect statuettes, idols, pottery. My weekends are spent in Tlaxcala, in Teotihuacán. Perhaps for this reason, he likes to relate all the theories he elaborates for my consumption back to these themes. It’s certain that I’ve been looking for a reasonable replica of Chac Mool for some time, and today Pepe tells me about a place in La Lagunilla where they’re selling one of stone, and cheap, it seems. I’m going to go on Sunday. “Some joker dyed the cooler-water in the office red, with the consequent disruption of work. I’ve had to bring it to the attention of the director, who just laughed a lot. The guilty party took advantage of this circumstance to make sarcastic comments to me all day, all having to do with water. Ch...!” “Today, Sunday, I took the opportunity to go to la Lagunilla. I found the Chac Mool in the junk shop to which Pepe directed me. It’s a precious piece, of natural dimension, and although the merchant insists on its originality, I doubt it. The stone is common, but that doesn’t lessen the elegance of the posture or the solidity of the block. The disloyal vendor has smeared tomato sauce on its belly to convince tourists of the sculpture’s bloody authenticity. “The move to my house cost me more than the acquisition. But it’s here now, for the moment in the basement while I reorganize my trophy room to make space for it. These figures need sun, vertical and fiery; that was their element and condition. He loses a lot in the darkness of the basement, like a simple mass of agony, and his grimace seems
to reproach me for denying him light. The shop-owner had a light bulb directly above the sculpture, which clipped all the sharp edges, and gave a more friendly expression to my Chac Mool. I’ll have to follow his example.” “I woke up this morning and the plumbing was broken. Carelessly, I left the water running in the kitchen and it overflowed, ran across the floor and went into the basement,
without my noticing. The Chac Mool resists the humidity, but my suitcases suffered; and all this, on a work day, made me late to the office. “They came, at last, to fix the pipes. The suitcases, twisted. And the Chac Mool, with moss on the base.”
“I woke up at one in the morning: I had heard a terrible moan. I thought maybe
thieves. Pure imagination.” “The nocturnal laments have continued. I don’t know what to attribute it to, but I’m nervous. Just to make matters worse, the plumbing is broken once again, and the rains have dripped inside, inundating the basement.”
“The plumber isn’t coming, I’m desperate. As for the Department of the Federal
District, it’s better not to talk about it. This is the first time that the rainwater refuses to obey the drain-pipes and has drained into the basement. The moans have stopped; if it’s not one thing, it’s another.” “They dried the basement out, and the Chac mool is covered in moss. It lends him a grotesque aspect, because the whole mass of the sculpture looks like it’s suffering from a green rash, save the eyes, which have remained of stone. I’ll set aside Sunday to scrape the moss. Pepe recommended that I switch to an apartment, and one on the top floor, in
order to avoid these aquatic tragedies. But I can’t leave this big old house, certainly too big for me alone, a bit mournful in its Porfirian architecture, but it’s the only inheritance and memory of my parents. I don’t think I could stand to see a soda-fountain with a jukebox in the basement and a house of decorations on the ground floor.” “I went to scrape the moss off of the Chac Mool with a spatula. The moss seemed to have become part of the stone already; the work took more than an hour, and only at six in the afternoon could I finish. It wasn’t possible to see in the half-light, and upon finishing the job, with my hand I followed the contours of the stone. Every time I scraped the block it seemed to grow softer. I didn’t want to believe it: it was almost a paste. That shopkeeper from la Lagunilla has taken me for a ride. His pre-Columbian sculpture is pure plaster, and the humidity will end up ruining it. I’ve put some rags over it, and tomorrow I’ll transfer it to the room upstairs, before it suffers a complete deterioration.” “The rags are on the floor. Incredible. Once again I touched the Chac Mool. It’s hardened, but not turned back to stone. I don’t even want to write it: there is, in the torso, something of the texture of flesh, I squeeze it like rubber, feel that something is running through that reclining figure... I went back down in the night. No doubt remains: the Chac Mool has hair on his arms.” “This had never happened to me before. Messing official matters up in the office: I issued a purchase order that hadn’t been authorized, and the director had to call it to my attention. I almost let myself be rude to my co-workers. I’ll have to go see a doctor, to find out if its imagination, or delirium, or what, and rid myself of that damned Chac Mool.” Up to here, the handwriting of Filbert was the old version, the one that so many times I saw on memoranda and forms, wide and oval-shaped. The entry from August 25th seemed to be written by another person. At some times like a child, laboriously separating each letter; at others, nervous, to the point of declining into unintelligibility. There are three missing days, and the story continues: “Everything is so natural; and later, what’s real is believed in..., but real it is, more than what’s believed in by me. A water-cooler is real, and more, because we take more notice of its existence, or presence, if a prankster dyes the water red... Real drag from an ephemeral cigarette, real monstrous image in a funhouse mirror, real, aren’t they,
all of the dead, present and forgotten...? If a man walked around Heaven in a dream, and they gave him a flower as proof that he’d been there, and if upon waking up he found that flower in his hand..., then what...? Reality: one day they broke it in a thousand pieces, the head came to rest over there, the tail here, and we don’t know about more than one of the severed parts of its great body. Free and fictitious ocean, only real when it imprisons a snail. Up until three days ago, my reality only was one to the degree of having been erased today: it was a reflex movement, routine, memory, briefcase. And later, like the earth that one day trembles so that we remember its power, or death that will arrive, reprimanding the forgetfulness of all my life, another reality presents itself that we knew was there, homeless that must shake us to make it alive and present. I thought, anew, that it was imagination: the Chac Mool, smooth and elegant, had changed color in a
night; yellow, almost gold, he seemed to indicate to me that he was a God, lax for the moment, with the knees less tensed than before, with the smile more benevolent. And yesterday, at last, a startled awakening, with that frightening certainty that there are two breaths in the night, that in the darkness there beat more pulses than one’s own. Yes, steps are heard on the staircase. Nightmare. Go back to sleep... I don’t know how long I pretended to sleep. When I opened my eyes again, dawn still hadn’t come. The room smelled of horror, of incense and blood. With a black gaze, I scanned the bedroom, coming to rest on two orifices of blinking light, on two flickers, cruel and yellow. Almost breathless I turned on the light. There was Chac Mool, upright, smiling, ocher, with his belly flesh-colored. Two eyes paralyzed me, almost cross-eyed, very close to the triangular nose. The bottom teeth, biting the upper lip, unmoving; only the luster of the square headpiece on the abnormally
voluminous head suggested life. Chac Mool advanced toward the bed; then it started to
rain.” I remember that at the end of August, Filbert was dismissed from the Ministry,
with a public reprimand from the director, and rumors of madness and even theft. This I didn’t believe. Yes, I’d seen some pretty whacked-out memos, asking the Senior Official if water could be smelled, offering his services to the Secretary of Hydraulic Resources to make it rain in the desert. I didn’t know how to explain it to myself; I thought that the exceptionally strong rains, from that summer, had enervated him. Or that some moral depression must have been produced by life in that big, ancient house, with half the rooms under lock and key and covered in dust, without servants or family life. The following notes are from the end of September:
“Chac Mool can be nice when he wants to..., a glug-glug of delightful water... He
knows fantastic stories about monsoons, equatorial rains, the punishment of the deserts; every plant derives from his mythic paternity: the willow, his long-lost son; the lotuses, his spoiled ones; his mother-in-law: the cactus. What I can’t stand is the smell, inhuman, that emanates from that flesh that isn’t flesh, from the ragged flaming shoes of antiquity. With a strident laugh, the Chac Mool reveals how he was discovered by Le Plongeon, and put, physically, in contact with men of other symbols. His spirit has lived in pitcher and storm, naturally; his stone is something else, and to have taken it from its hiding place is artificial and cruel. I think that Chac Mool will never forgive it. He knows about the imminence of the aesthetic deed. “I’ve had to get him scouring soap so he can wash his stomach, which the merchant put ketchup on, thinking he was Aztec. He didn’t seem to like my question about his relation to Tláloc,* and, when he gets mad, his teeth, in and of themselves repulsive, grow sharp and glint. The first few days, he went down to sleep in the basement; since yesterday, in my bed.” “The dry season has begun. Yesterday, from the hall where I sleep now, I started to hear the same hoarse wails from the beginning, followed by terrible noises. I went up and cracked open the door of the bedroom: the Chac Mool was breaking the lamps, the furniture; he lunged toward the door with his hands spread, and I barely had time to close it and go hide in the bathroom… Later, he came down panting and asked for water; all day he has the faucets running, there isn’t a dry centimeter left in the house. I have to sleep all bundled up, and I’ve asked him not to drench the hall any more.”
“The Chac Mool inundated the hall today. Exasperated, I said that I was going to
bring him back to La Lagunilla. As terrible as his laugh –horrendously distinct from any laugh of man or animal—was the smack he gave me, with that arm loaded with heavy
bracelets. I must admit it: I’m his prisoner. My original idea was different: I would
dominate the Chac Mool, like one dominates a toy; it was perhaps, a prolongation of my infantile security; but childhood –who said it?— is a fruit eaten by the years, and I hadn’t realized… He’s taken my clothes, and he puts on the nightgowns when he starts to shed green moss. The Chac Mool is accustomed to being obeyed, always; I, who have never needed to command, can only submit. As long as it doesn’t rain –and his magical power?— he will live angrily or irritably.” “Today I discovered that at night the Chac Mool leaves the house. Always, at dusk, he sings a song, out of tune and ancient, older than singing itself. Later, it stops. I knocked several times at his door, and when he didn’t answer me, I dared to enter. The bedroom, which I hadn’t seen again since the day the statue tried to attack me, is in ruins, and that smell of incense and blood that has permeated the house is concentrated there.
But, behind the door, there are bones: dog bones, rats and cats. This is what the Chac Mool steals in the night to sustain himself. This explains all the frightening barking at dawn.” “February, dry. Chac Mool watches every step of mine; he’s made me telephone a restaurant so that they’ll bring me daily rice with chicken. But the severance pay from the office is going to run out soon. The inevitable happened: since the 1st, they cut the water and the light for lack of payment. But Chac has discovered a public fountain two blocks from here; every day I make ten or twelve trips for water, and he watches me from the roof. He says if I try to flee he’ll strike me down; he’s also the god of lightning. What he doesn’t know is that I’m on to his nocturnal movements… Seeing as there’s no light, I must go to bed at eight. I already should be accustomed to the Chac Mool, but a little while ago, in the darkness, I ran into him on the stairs, I felt his icy arms, the scales of his
renewed skin, and I wanted to scream. “If it doesn’t rain soon, the Chac Mool is going to change into stone again. I’ve noticed his difficulty recently in moving,; sometimes he reclines for hours, paralyzed, and seems to be, once again, an idol. But these rests only give him new strength to torment me, to scratch me as if he could draw some kind of liquid from my flesh. Those friendly intervals in which he would relate old stories no longer take place; I think I notice a concentrated resentment. There have been other indications that have made me think: he’s almost finished off my wine cellar; he caresses the silk of the nightgowns; he wants me to bring a maid into the house; he’s made me teach him to use soap and lotions. I think that the Chac Mool is falling into human temptations; there’s even something old in
the face that before seemed eternal. There may lie my salvation: if the Chac Mool is
being humanized, maybe all his centuries of life will accumulate in an instant and he’ll be struck down. But also, here, could lie my own death: the Chac Mool won’t want me to be there for his downfall, it’s possible that he’ll want to kill me.
“Today I’ll take advantage of Chac’s nocturnal excursion in order to flee. I’ll go
to Acapulco; we’ll see what can be done about acquiring a job, and await the death of the Chac Mool: yes, it’s settled; he’s gray, swollen. I need to sun myself, swim, recover my strength. I have four hundred pesos left. I’ll go to the Pensión Müller, which is cheap and comfortable. Let Chac Mool keep everything: we’ll see how long he lasts without my buckets of water.” Here ends the diary of Filbert. I didn’t want to think about his tale; I slept untilCuernavaca. From there to México I tried to give coherence to the screed, relate it to an excess of work, to some psychological motive. When at nine in the morning we arrived in the terminal, I couldn’t even conceive of the madness of my friend. I hired a truck to carry the coffin to Fibert’s house and from there to arrange his burial.Before I could fit the key in the lock, the door was opened. A yellow Indian appeared, in a house robe, with a scarf. His appearance couldn’t have been more repulsive; he gave forth an odor of cheap lotion; his face, powdered, trying to cover the wrinkles; he had his lips smeared with badly-applied lipstick, and his hair gave the impression of being dyed.
“Pardon..., did you know that Filbert had...”
“It doesn’t matter; I know everything. Tell the men to bring the cadaver to the
basement.”
Saints’ week. Although he’d been dismissed from his job in the Ministry, Filbert couldn’t resist the bureaucratic temptation to go, same as every year, to the German pensión, to eat sauerkraut sweetened by the sweat of the tropical kitchen, to dance on the Saturday of glory in La Quebrada, and to feel himself a “regular” in the dark anonymity of evening on the beach of Hornos. Clearly, we know that in his youth he had swum well, but now, at forty, and in as bad shape as he seemed to be; to try to cover, and at midnight, such a distance! Frau Müller wouldn’t permit his vigil –such an old client– to be held in the pensión. On the contrary, that night she organized a dance on the little suffocated terrace,while Filbert waited, very pallid in his box, for the morning truck to depart the terminal,and passed the first night of his new life accompanied by baskets and bundles. When I arrived, early, to watch over the shipment of the coffin, Filbert was under a mountain of coconuts; the driver said we should arrange him quickly on the awning and cover him with tarps, so that the passengers wouldn’t get frightened, and to make sure we wouldn’t bring a curse on the voyage. We left Acapulco, still in the breeze. Toward Tierra Colorada the heat and light came to life. Over a breakfast of eggs and sausage, I opened Filbert’s briefcase, retrieved the day before, along with his other belongings, from the Müllers’ pensión. Two hundred pesos. An old newspaper; lottery stubs; a one-way ticket –only one way?--, and the cheap notebook, with pages divided into squares and covers of marble paper. I ventured to read it, in spite of the curves, the stench of vomit, and a certain natural sentiment of respect for the private life of my deceased friend. It would record – yes, I started with that– our everyday work in the office; maybe I would find out why he’d been in decline, neglecting his duties, why he was dictating official documents without feeling, or number, or “effective suffrage.”* Why, in the end, he had run away, forsaking a pension, with no regard for the payrolls. “Today I went to fix up all that business about my pension. The lawyer was very friendly. I left there so happy that I decided to spend five pesos in a café. It’s the same one we went to when we were young and that nowadays I never enter, because it reminds me that I could afford more luxuries at twenty than I can at forty. In those days, we’d all been on the same plane, we would have rejected with energy any negative opinions about our comrades; in fact we waged war on those in the house who even mentioned bad breeding or lack of elegance. I knew that many (perhaps the most humble) would go very far, and here, in school, they would forge the lasting friendships in whose company we would cross the wild seas. No, it wasn’t like that. There were no rules. Many of the humble ones stayed there, many went further than we could have predicted at those lively, friendly gatherings. Others, we who seemed to have all the promise, we remained in the middle of the road, disemboweled in an extracurricular test, isolated by an invisible trench from those who triumphed and from those who never accomplished anything. Finally, today I came back to sit in the seats, modernized –also, like the barricade of an invasion, a soda-fountain— and pretended to read briefs. I saw many of them, changed, amnesiac, retouched by neon light, prosperous. With the café that I almost didn’t recognize, with the city itself, they had been chiseling themselves out to a rhythm different than mine. No, they no longer recognized me, or didn’t want to. At the
most –one or two— a fat, quick hand on the shoulder. Bye, old man, take it easy.
Between them and me intervened the eighteen holes of the Country Club. I hid myself in the briefs. There paraded past me all the years of big dreams, of happy predictions, and also, all the omissions that impeded their realization. I felt the anguish of not being able to put my fingers in the past and fit together the pieces of some abandoned puzzle; but the toy chest is being forgotten, and in the long run, who knows where they’ve come to rest, all the tin soldiers, the helmets, the wooden swords. Such cherished disguises, they were nothing more than that. And, nonetheless, there had been constancy, discipline, devotion to duty. Had that not been enough, or did it suffice? I was struck, on occasion, by the
memory of Rilke. The great payback for the adventure of youth must be death; young
people, we should do away with all our secrets. Today, I wouldn’t have to return my gaze to the cities of salt. Five pesos? Two for the tip.”
“Pepe, apart from his passion for commercial law, enjoys theorizing. He saw me
leave the cathedral and together we walked to the Palace. He’s a non-believer, but that’s not enough for him: in half a block he had to fabricate a theory. That if I weren’t a Mexican, I wouldn’t worship Christ, and –no, look, it seems evident. Here come the Spanish and they propose that you worship a God, killed by a coagulation, with a wounded flank, nailed on a cross. Sacrificed. An offering. What could be more natural than accepting a sentiment so close to your whole ceremonial, to your whole life...? Imagine, instead, that Mexico had been conquered by Buddhists or Mohammedans. It’s not conceivable that our Indians would venerate an individual who died of indigestion. But a God who, it’s not enough that they sacrifice themselves for him, but also that they tear his heart out; caramba! Check-mate to Huitzilopochtli!* Christianity, in its warm, bloody feeling, of sacrifice and liturgy, turns into a natural and novel prolongation of the indigenous religion. The aspects of charity, love, and the other cheek, in turn, are rejected. And everything in Mexico is that: you have to kill men to be able to believe in them.
“Pepe knew my affinity, since my youth, for certain forms of indigenous Mexican
art. I collect statuettes, idols, pottery. My weekends are spent in Tlaxcala, in Teotihuacán. Perhaps for this reason, he likes to relate all the theories he elaborates for my consumption back to these themes. It’s certain that I’ve been looking for a reasonable replica of Chac Mool for some time, and today Pepe tells me about a place in La Lagunilla where they’re selling one of stone, and cheap, it seems. I’m going to go on Sunday. “Some joker dyed the cooler-water in the office red, with the consequent disruption of work. I’ve had to bring it to the attention of the director, who just laughed a lot. The guilty party took advantage of this circumstance to make sarcastic comments to me all day, all having to do with water. Ch...!” “Today, Sunday, I took the opportunity to go to la Lagunilla. I found the Chac Mool in the junk shop to which Pepe directed me. It’s a precious piece, of natural dimension, and although the merchant insists on its originality, I doubt it. The stone is common, but that doesn’t lessen the elegance of the posture or the solidity of the block. The disloyal vendor has smeared tomato sauce on its belly to convince tourists of the sculpture’s bloody authenticity. “The move to my house cost me more than the acquisition. But it’s here now, for the moment in the basement while I reorganize my trophy room to make space for it. These figures need sun, vertical and fiery; that was their element and condition. He loses a lot in the darkness of the basement, like a simple mass of agony, and his grimace seems
to reproach me for denying him light. The shop-owner had a light bulb directly above the sculpture, which clipped all the sharp edges, and gave a more friendly expression to my Chac Mool. I’ll have to follow his example.” “I woke up this morning and the plumbing was broken. Carelessly, I left the water running in the kitchen and it overflowed, ran across the floor and went into the basement,
without my noticing. The Chac Mool resists the humidity, but my suitcases suffered; and all this, on a work day, made me late to the office. “They came, at last, to fix the pipes. The suitcases, twisted. And the Chac Mool, with moss on the base.”
“I woke up at one in the morning: I had heard a terrible moan. I thought maybe
thieves. Pure imagination.” “The nocturnal laments have continued. I don’t know what to attribute it to, but I’m nervous. Just to make matters worse, the plumbing is broken once again, and the rains have dripped inside, inundating the basement.”
“The plumber isn’t coming, I’m desperate. As for the Department of the Federal
District, it’s better not to talk about it. This is the first time that the rainwater refuses to obey the drain-pipes and has drained into the basement. The moans have stopped; if it’s not one thing, it’s another.” “They dried the basement out, and the Chac mool is covered in moss. It lends him a grotesque aspect, because the whole mass of the sculpture looks like it’s suffering from a green rash, save the eyes, which have remained of stone. I’ll set aside Sunday to scrape the moss. Pepe recommended that I switch to an apartment, and one on the top floor, in
order to avoid these aquatic tragedies. But I can’t leave this big old house, certainly too big for me alone, a bit mournful in its Porfirian architecture, but it’s the only inheritance and memory of my parents. I don’t think I could stand to see a soda-fountain with a jukebox in the basement and a house of decorations on the ground floor.” “I went to scrape the moss off of the Chac Mool with a spatula. The moss seemed to have become part of the stone already; the work took more than an hour, and only at six in the afternoon could I finish. It wasn’t possible to see in the half-light, and upon finishing the job, with my hand I followed the contours of the stone. Every time I scraped the block it seemed to grow softer. I didn’t want to believe it: it was almost a paste. That shopkeeper from la Lagunilla has taken me for a ride. His pre-Columbian sculpture is pure plaster, and the humidity will end up ruining it. I’ve put some rags over it, and tomorrow I’ll transfer it to the room upstairs, before it suffers a complete deterioration.” “The rags are on the floor. Incredible. Once again I touched the Chac Mool. It’s hardened, but not turned back to stone. I don’t even want to write it: there is, in the torso, something of the texture of flesh, I squeeze it like rubber, feel that something is running through that reclining figure... I went back down in the night. No doubt remains: the Chac Mool has hair on his arms.” “This had never happened to me before. Messing official matters up in the office: I issued a purchase order that hadn’t been authorized, and the director had to call it to my attention. I almost let myself be rude to my co-workers. I’ll have to go see a doctor, to find out if its imagination, or delirium, or what, and rid myself of that damned Chac Mool.” Up to here, the handwriting of Filbert was the old version, the one that so many times I saw on memoranda and forms, wide and oval-shaped. The entry from August 25th seemed to be written by another person. At some times like a child, laboriously separating each letter; at others, nervous, to the point of declining into unintelligibility. There are three missing days, and the story continues: “Everything is so natural; and later, what’s real is believed in..., but real it is, more than what’s believed in by me. A water-cooler is real, and more, because we take more notice of its existence, or presence, if a prankster dyes the water red... Real drag from an ephemeral cigarette, real monstrous image in a funhouse mirror, real, aren’t they,
all of the dead, present and forgotten...? If a man walked around Heaven in a dream, and they gave him a flower as proof that he’d been there, and if upon waking up he found that flower in his hand..., then what...? Reality: one day they broke it in a thousand pieces, the head came to rest over there, the tail here, and we don’t know about more than one of the severed parts of its great body. Free and fictitious ocean, only real when it imprisons a snail. Up until three days ago, my reality only was one to the degree of having been erased today: it was a reflex movement, routine, memory, briefcase. And later, like the earth that one day trembles so that we remember its power, or death that will arrive, reprimanding the forgetfulness of all my life, another reality presents itself that we knew was there, homeless that must shake us to make it alive and present. I thought, anew, that it was imagination: the Chac Mool, smooth and elegant, had changed color in a
night; yellow, almost gold, he seemed to indicate to me that he was a God, lax for the moment, with the knees less tensed than before, with the smile more benevolent. And yesterday, at last, a startled awakening, with that frightening certainty that there are two breaths in the night, that in the darkness there beat more pulses than one’s own. Yes, steps are heard on the staircase. Nightmare. Go back to sleep... I don’t know how long I pretended to sleep. When I opened my eyes again, dawn still hadn’t come. The room smelled of horror, of incense and blood. With a black gaze, I scanned the bedroom, coming to rest on two orifices of blinking light, on two flickers, cruel and yellow. Almost breathless I turned on the light. There was Chac Mool, upright, smiling, ocher, with his belly flesh-colored. Two eyes paralyzed me, almost cross-eyed, very close to the triangular nose. The bottom teeth, biting the upper lip, unmoving; only the luster of the square headpiece on the abnormally
voluminous head suggested life. Chac Mool advanced toward the bed; then it started to
rain.” I remember that at the end of August, Filbert was dismissed from the Ministry,
with a public reprimand from the director, and rumors of madness and even theft. This I didn’t believe. Yes, I’d seen some pretty whacked-out memos, asking the Senior Official if water could be smelled, offering his services to the Secretary of Hydraulic Resources to make it rain in the desert. I didn’t know how to explain it to myself; I thought that the exceptionally strong rains, from that summer, had enervated him. Or that some moral depression must have been produced by life in that big, ancient house, with half the rooms under lock and key and covered in dust, without servants or family life. The following notes are from the end of September:
“Chac Mool can be nice when he wants to..., a glug-glug of delightful water... He
knows fantastic stories about monsoons, equatorial rains, the punishment of the deserts; every plant derives from his mythic paternity: the willow, his long-lost son; the lotuses, his spoiled ones; his mother-in-law: the cactus. What I can’t stand is the smell, inhuman, that emanates from that flesh that isn’t flesh, from the ragged flaming shoes of antiquity. With a strident laugh, the Chac Mool reveals how he was discovered by Le Plongeon, and put, physically, in contact with men of other symbols. His spirit has lived in pitcher and storm, naturally; his stone is something else, and to have taken it from its hiding place is artificial and cruel. I think that Chac Mool will never forgive it. He knows about the imminence of the aesthetic deed. “I’ve had to get him scouring soap so he can wash his stomach, which the merchant put ketchup on, thinking he was Aztec. He didn’t seem to like my question about his relation to Tláloc,* and, when he gets mad, his teeth, in and of themselves repulsive, grow sharp and glint. The first few days, he went down to sleep in the basement; since yesterday, in my bed.” “The dry season has begun. Yesterday, from the hall where I sleep now, I started to hear the same hoarse wails from the beginning, followed by terrible noises. I went up and cracked open the door of the bedroom: the Chac Mool was breaking the lamps, the furniture; he lunged toward the door with his hands spread, and I barely had time to close it and go hide in the bathroom… Later, he came down panting and asked for water; all day he has the faucets running, there isn’t a dry centimeter left in the house. I have to sleep all bundled up, and I’ve asked him not to drench the hall any more.”
“The Chac Mool inundated the hall today. Exasperated, I said that I was going to
bring him back to La Lagunilla. As terrible as his laugh –horrendously distinct from any laugh of man or animal—was the smack he gave me, with that arm loaded with heavy
bracelets. I must admit it: I’m his prisoner. My original idea was different: I would
dominate the Chac Mool, like one dominates a toy; it was perhaps, a prolongation of my infantile security; but childhood –who said it?— is a fruit eaten by the years, and I hadn’t realized… He’s taken my clothes, and he puts on the nightgowns when he starts to shed green moss. The Chac Mool is accustomed to being obeyed, always; I, who have never needed to command, can only submit. As long as it doesn’t rain –and his magical power?— he will live angrily or irritably.” “Today I discovered that at night the Chac Mool leaves the house. Always, at dusk, he sings a song, out of tune and ancient, older than singing itself. Later, it stops. I knocked several times at his door, and when he didn’t answer me, I dared to enter. The bedroom, which I hadn’t seen again since the day the statue tried to attack me, is in ruins, and that smell of incense and blood that has permeated the house is concentrated there.
But, behind the door, there are bones: dog bones, rats and cats. This is what the Chac Mool steals in the night to sustain himself. This explains all the frightening barking at dawn.” “February, dry. Chac Mool watches every step of mine; he’s made me telephone a restaurant so that they’ll bring me daily rice with chicken. But the severance pay from the office is going to run out soon. The inevitable happened: since the 1st, they cut the water and the light for lack of payment. But Chac has discovered a public fountain two blocks from here; every day I make ten or twelve trips for water, and he watches me from the roof. He says if I try to flee he’ll strike me down; he’s also the god of lightning. What he doesn’t know is that I’m on to his nocturnal movements… Seeing as there’s no light, I must go to bed at eight. I already should be accustomed to the Chac Mool, but a little while ago, in the darkness, I ran into him on the stairs, I felt his icy arms, the scales of his
renewed skin, and I wanted to scream. “If it doesn’t rain soon, the Chac Mool is going to change into stone again. I’ve noticed his difficulty recently in moving,; sometimes he reclines for hours, paralyzed, and seems to be, once again, an idol. But these rests only give him new strength to torment me, to scratch me as if he could draw some kind of liquid from my flesh. Those friendly intervals in which he would relate old stories no longer take place; I think I notice a concentrated resentment. There have been other indications that have made me think: he’s almost finished off my wine cellar; he caresses the silk of the nightgowns; he wants me to bring a maid into the house; he’s made me teach him to use soap and lotions. I think that the Chac Mool is falling into human temptations; there’s even something old in
the face that before seemed eternal. There may lie my salvation: if the Chac Mool is
being humanized, maybe all his centuries of life will accumulate in an instant and he’ll be struck down. But also, here, could lie my own death: the Chac Mool won’t want me to be there for his downfall, it’s possible that he’ll want to kill me.
“Today I’ll take advantage of Chac’s nocturnal excursion in order to flee. I’ll go
to Acapulco; we’ll see what can be done about acquiring a job, and await the death of the Chac Mool: yes, it’s settled; he’s gray, swollen. I need to sun myself, swim, recover my strength. I have four hundred pesos left. I’ll go to the Pensión Müller, which is cheap and comfortable. Let Chac Mool keep everything: we’ll see how long he lasts without my buckets of water.” Here ends the diary of Filbert. I didn’t want to think about his tale; I slept untilCuernavaca. From there to México I tried to give coherence to the screed, relate it to an excess of work, to some psychological motive. When at nine in the morning we arrived in the terminal, I couldn’t even conceive of the madness of my friend. I hired a truck to carry the coffin to Fibert’s house and from there to arrange his burial.Before I could fit the key in the lock, the door was opened. A yellow Indian appeared, in a house robe, with a scarf. His appearance couldn’t have been more repulsive; he gave forth an odor of cheap lotion; his face, powdered, trying to cover the wrinkles; he had his lips smeared with badly-applied lipstick, and his hair gave the impression of being dyed.
“Pardon..., did you know that Filbert had...”
“It doesn’t matter; I know everything. Tell the men to bring the cadaver to the
basement.”
El Hijo by Horacio Quiroga
"El Hijo"
Horacio Quiroga
It is a powerful summer day in Misiones with all the sun, heat, and calm the season can offer. The wilderness, fully open, feels satisfied with itself.
Like the sun, the heat, and the calm of the environment, the father also opens his heart to the wilderness.
"Be careful, chiquito," he says to his son, abbreviating in this sentence all his observations, which his son understands perfectly.
"Yes, father," the child responds, while reaching for his shotgun and slipping his cartridges into the pocket of his shirt, which he closes carefully.
"Return at lunchtime," says the father, still observing.
"Yes, father," repeats the boy.
He balances the shotgun on his hand, smiles at his father, kisses him on the head and leaves.
His father follows him with his eyes for a while and then returns to his task of the day, happy with the happiness of his little one.
He knows that his son, educated from his tender infancy in the habit and precaution of danger, can manage a cannon and hunt anything; it doesn't matter what it is. Even though he is very tall for his age, he is only thirteen years old. And it would seem like he is younger, judging by the purity of his blue eyes, still fresh with childlike surprise.
It isn't necessary for the father to raise his eyes from his work to follow the path of his son with his mind: he has crossed the red trail and walks directly to the jungle across the clearing in the forest.
To hunt in the jungle - to hunt furred game - requires more patience than what the son has. After crossing the jungle's island, his son will go around the cactus boundary and to the valley in search of doves, toucans, or perhaps a pair of herons, like the ones his friend Juan had discovered some days ago.
Alone now, the father smiles at the memory of the hunting passion of the two children. They sometimes hunt a raven, a quetzal, even, and return triumphant, Juan to his ranch with the nine millimeter rifle that he had given him, and his son to the plateau with the great Saint-Etienne shotgun, of caliber 16, quadruple lock and white gunpowder.
He was the same. At thirteen years he would have given his life to possess a shotgun. His son, at that age, possesses one now; - and the father smiles.
It isn't easy, however, for a widowed father, without other faith nor hope invested in the life of his son, to educate him like he has done, free in will, sure of the small feet and hands he has had since four years of age, conscious of the immensity of certain dangers and the weakness of his own strengths.
This father had to fight strongly against what he considered his egoism. It is so easy for a small child to miscalculate, set a foot into the emptiness, and result in the loss of a son!
Danger is always present for a man no matter his age; but the threat diminishes if, from early on, he is accustomed to his own strengths.
In this way, the father has educated his son. And to succeed, he had to resist not only his heart, but also his mental torments; because this father, of weak stomach and weak eyes, suffers, starting from some time ago, hallucinations.
He has seen, concrete in his sickness' illusions, memories of a happiness that should not spring anymore from the nothingness in which it has isolated itself. The image of his own son has not escaped this torment. He has seen him one time, rolling, covered in blood, when his son was struck by a bullet in the workshop because he smoothed the buckle of his hunting belt.
Horrible things... But today, with the shining and vivid summer day, the father, whose love for his son knows no bounds, feels happy, tranquil, and sure of the future.
At that instant, not very far away, sounds a gunshot.
"The Saint-Etienne . . ." muses the father at recognizing the detonation. "At least two doves in the jungle..."
Without paying more attention to this insignificant event, the man abstracts himself anew into his chore.
The sun, already very high, continues ascending. Wherever it wants to look - the rocks, the earth, the trees, - the air, pulsing as if in an oven, vibrates with heat. A profound buzz that fills the entire being and infuses the environment as far as the eye can see concentrates all tropical life on this hour.
The father takes a quick look at his wrist: 12 o'clock. And he lifts his eyes to the jungle.
His son should already be back. In the mutual trust that they have with each other - the father of gray hair and the child of thirteen years, - they never trick one another. When his son responds: "Yes, father," he will do as he says. He said that he would return before twelve o'clock, and his father smiled at seeing him leave.
And he hasn't returned.
The man turns to his work, exerting great effort in concentrating on his chore. It is so easy, so easy to lose your notion of time in the jungle, and to sit for awhile on the ground while you rest immobile...
Suddenly, the midday light, the tropical buzz, and the father's heart stop at what his mind had just touched upon: his son resting immobile...
Time has passed; it is 12:30. The father leaves his workshop, and supporting his hand on the mechanic bench, the memory of the crash of the bullet surfaces from his inner recollections, and instantly, for the first time in three consecutive hours, he realizes that after the boom of the Saint-Etienne, he has heard nothing more. His son has not returned, and the wilderness is waiting at the border of the forest, waiting for him...
Oh! A temperate character and a blind confidence in his son's education aren't enough to escape the specter of fatality that his father, of ailing vision, sees rising from the line of the jungle. Distraction, forgetfulness, fortuitous delay: none of these insignificant motives that could slow the arrival of his son succeed in entering the father's thoughts.
One shot, only one shot has sounded, and it has done much. After it the father has not heard a sound, hasn't seen a bird, and one sole person has not crossed the clearing to announce that upon crossing a wire, a great calamity...
With a head of air yet without an axe, the father goes. He rushes to the clearing in the forest, enters the jungle, skirts the line of cacti without seeing a single sign of his son.
But the wilderness continues endlessly. And after the father has traveled to the well-known hunting trails and has explored the valley in vain, he perceives the dreaded assurance that, with each step he puts forward, he brings, fatal and inexorable, the cadaver of his son.
There is no reproach, lamentably. Only the cold reality, terrible and consuming: His son has died upon crossing a...
But where, and in which part! There are so many wires there, and the jungle is so, so unclean! ...Oh, so dirty! ...It is such a small act, that he is not careful when crossing the threads with a shotgun in his hand...
The father suffocates a shout. He has seen rising into the air...Oh, it is not his son, no!... And he turns to the other side, and to the other and to the other...
Nothing can compare with the color of the complexion and anguish in his eyes. The man still has not called to his son. Even though his heart clamors for him to shout, his mouth continues to be mute. He knows well that the sole act of pronouncing the name, of calling to his son in a loud voice, will be the confession of a death...
"Chiquito!" suddenly escapes from him. And if the voice of a man of character is capable of crying, then mercifully cover your ears against the piercing anguish that resonates in that voice.
No one and nothing has responded. By the red light of the sun, grown older by ten years, the father goes looking for his son, who has just died.
"Son of mine!... Chiquito mío!..." he calls in a small voice that echoes from his core.
Already before, in plenty of happiness and peace, this father has suffered the hallucination of his son, rolling, with his forehead split open by a chromium-nickel bullet. Now, in each dark corner of the forest he sees the brilliant reflections of wire; and at the foot of a post, with a discharged shotgun at his side, he sees his...
"Chiquito!... My son!..."
The strength that can enter a poor hallucinating father at the worst nightmare also has a limit. And we feel that his hallucinations escape when he suddenly sees them flowing into a side path towards his son.
For a boy thirteen years old, it is enough to see, from fifty meters away, the expression of his father without an axe inside the jungle, quickening his pace with wet eyes.
"Chiquito..." murmurs the man. And, exhausted, he lets himself fall seated in the white sand and gathers his son's legs into his arms.
The child, embraced as such, remains standing, and upon understanding the pain in his father, he caresses the bowed head slowly:
"Poor papa..."
In the end, time has passed. It is already three o'clock. Together, now, the father and the son begin their return to the house.
"Why didn't you look at the sun to figure out the time?..." murmurs the first.
"I did, father... But when I started to return home I saw Juan's herons and I followed them..."
"What you put me through, chiquito!..."
"Papi..." the boy also murmurs.
After a long silence:
"And the herons, did you kill them?" asks the father.
"No..."
An unimportant detail, after everything. Under the sky and the hot air, the soft light in the clearing of the forest, the man returns to the house with his son, whose shoulders, almost as tall as his, carry the happy arm of his father. He returns drenched in sweat, and even though his body and his soul cry out in sorrow, he smiles of happiness...
--------
He smiles of a hallucinating happiness... Well the father goes alone. He found no one, and his arm is supported by emptiness. Because behind him, at the foot of the post and with legs up high, tangled in barbed wire, his beloved son lies before the sun, dead since ten in the morning.
Horacio Quiroga
It is a powerful summer day in Misiones with all the sun, heat, and calm the season can offer. The wilderness, fully open, feels satisfied with itself.
Like the sun, the heat, and the calm of the environment, the father also opens his heart to the wilderness.
"Be careful, chiquito," he says to his son, abbreviating in this sentence all his observations, which his son understands perfectly.
"Yes, father," the child responds, while reaching for his shotgun and slipping his cartridges into the pocket of his shirt, which he closes carefully.
"Return at lunchtime," says the father, still observing.
"Yes, father," repeats the boy.
He balances the shotgun on his hand, smiles at his father, kisses him on the head and leaves.
His father follows him with his eyes for a while and then returns to his task of the day, happy with the happiness of his little one.
He knows that his son, educated from his tender infancy in the habit and precaution of danger, can manage a cannon and hunt anything; it doesn't matter what it is. Even though he is very tall for his age, he is only thirteen years old. And it would seem like he is younger, judging by the purity of his blue eyes, still fresh with childlike surprise.
It isn't necessary for the father to raise his eyes from his work to follow the path of his son with his mind: he has crossed the red trail and walks directly to the jungle across the clearing in the forest.
To hunt in the jungle - to hunt furred game - requires more patience than what the son has. After crossing the jungle's island, his son will go around the cactus boundary and to the valley in search of doves, toucans, or perhaps a pair of herons, like the ones his friend Juan had discovered some days ago.
Alone now, the father smiles at the memory of the hunting passion of the two children. They sometimes hunt a raven, a quetzal, even, and return triumphant, Juan to his ranch with the nine millimeter rifle that he had given him, and his son to the plateau with the great Saint-Etienne shotgun, of caliber 16, quadruple lock and white gunpowder.
He was the same. At thirteen years he would have given his life to possess a shotgun. His son, at that age, possesses one now; - and the father smiles.
It isn't easy, however, for a widowed father, without other faith nor hope invested in the life of his son, to educate him like he has done, free in will, sure of the small feet and hands he has had since four years of age, conscious of the immensity of certain dangers and the weakness of his own strengths.
This father had to fight strongly against what he considered his egoism. It is so easy for a small child to miscalculate, set a foot into the emptiness, and result in the loss of a son!
Danger is always present for a man no matter his age; but the threat diminishes if, from early on, he is accustomed to his own strengths.
In this way, the father has educated his son. And to succeed, he had to resist not only his heart, but also his mental torments; because this father, of weak stomach and weak eyes, suffers, starting from some time ago, hallucinations.
He has seen, concrete in his sickness' illusions, memories of a happiness that should not spring anymore from the nothingness in which it has isolated itself. The image of his own son has not escaped this torment. He has seen him one time, rolling, covered in blood, when his son was struck by a bullet in the workshop because he smoothed the buckle of his hunting belt.
Horrible things... But today, with the shining and vivid summer day, the father, whose love for his son knows no bounds, feels happy, tranquil, and sure of the future.
At that instant, not very far away, sounds a gunshot.
"The Saint-Etienne . . ." muses the father at recognizing the detonation. "At least two doves in the jungle..."
Without paying more attention to this insignificant event, the man abstracts himself anew into his chore.
The sun, already very high, continues ascending. Wherever it wants to look - the rocks, the earth, the trees, - the air, pulsing as if in an oven, vibrates with heat. A profound buzz that fills the entire being and infuses the environment as far as the eye can see concentrates all tropical life on this hour.
The father takes a quick look at his wrist: 12 o'clock. And he lifts his eyes to the jungle.
His son should already be back. In the mutual trust that they have with each other - the father of gray hair and the child of thirteen years, - they never trick one another. When his son responds: "Yes, father," he will do as he says. He said that he would return before twelve o'clock, and his father smiled at seeing him leave.
And he hasn't returned.
The man turns to his work, exerting great effort in concentrating on his chore. It is so easy, so easy to lose your notion of time in the jungle, and to sit for awhile on the ground while you rest immobile...
Suddenly, the midday light, the tropical buzz, and the father's heart stop at what his mind had just touched upon: his son resting immobile...
Time has passed; it is 12:30. The father leaves his workshop, and supporting his hand on the mechanic bench, the memory of the crash of the bullet surfaces from his inner recollections, and instantly, for the first time in three consecutive hours, he realizes that after the boom of the Saint-Etienne, he has heard nothing more. His son has not returned, and the wilderness is waiting at the border of the forest, waiting for him...
Oh! A temperate character and a blind confidence in his son's education aren't enough to escape the specter of fatality that his father, of ailing vision, sees rising from the line of the jungle. Distraction, forgetfulness, fortuitous delay: none of these insignificant motives that could slow the arrival of his son succeed in entering the father's thoughts.
One shot, only one shot has sounded, and it has done much. After it the father has not heard a sound, hasn't seen a bird, and one sole person has not crossed the clearing to announce that upon crossing a wire, a great calamity...
With a head of air yet without an axe, the father goes. He rushes to the clearing in the forest, enters the jungle, skirts the line of cacti without seeing a single sign of his son.
But the wilderness continues endlessly. And after the father has traveled to the well-known hunting trails and has explored the valley in vain, he perceives the dreaded assurance that, with each step he puts forward, he brings, fatal and inexorable, the cadaver of his son.
There is no reproach, lamentably. Only the cold reality, terrible and consuming: His son has died upon crossing a...
But where, and in which part! There are so many wires there, and the jungle is so, so unclean! ...Oh, so dirty! ...It is such a small act, that he is not careful when crossing the threads with a shotgun in his hand...
The father suffocates a shout. He has seen rising into the air...Oh, it is not his son, no!... And he turns to the other side, and to the other and to the other...
Nothing can compare with the color of the complexion and anguish in his eyes. The man still has not called to his son. Even though his heart clamors for him to shout, his mouth continues to be mute. He knows well that the sole act of pronouncing the name, of calling to his son in a loud voice, will be the confession of a death...
"Chiquito!" suddenly escapes from him. And if the voice of a man of character is capable of crying, then mercifully cover your ears against the piercing anguish that resonates in that voice.
No one and nothing has responded. By the red light of the sun, grown older by ten years, the father goes looking for his son, who has just died.
"Son of mine!... Chiquito mío!..." he calls in a small voice that echoes from his core.
Already before, in plenty of happiness and peace, this father has suffered the hallucination of his son, rolling, with his forehead split open by a chromium-nickel bullet. Now, in each dark corner of the forest he sees the brilliant reflections of wire; and at the foot of a post, with a discharged shotgun at his side, he sees his...
"Chiquito!... My son!..."
The strength that can enter a poor hallucinating father at the worst nightmare also has a limit. And we feel that his hallucinations escape when he suddenly sees them flowing into a side path towards his son.
For a boy thirteen years old, it is enough to see, from fifty meters away, the expression of his father without an axe inside the jungle, quickening his pace with wet eyes.
"Chiquito..." murmurs the man. And, exhausted, he lets himself fall seated in the white sand and gathers his son's legs into his arms.
The child, embraced as such, remains standing, and upon understanding the pain in his father, he caresses the bowed head slowly:
"Poor papa..."
In the end, time has passed. It is already three o'clock. Together, now, the father and the son begin their return to the house.
"Why didn't you look at the sun to figure out the time?..." murmurs the first.
"I did, father... But when I started to return home I saw Juan's herons and I followed them..."
"What you put me through, chiquito!..."
"Papi..." the boy also murmurs.
After a long silence:
"And the herons, did you kill them?" asks the father.
"No..."
An unimportant detail, after everything. Under the sky and the hot air, the soft light in the clearing of the forest, the man returns to the house with his son, whose shoulders, almost as tall as his, carry the happy arm of his father. He returns drenched in sweat, and even though his body and his soul cry out in sorrow, he smiles of happiness...
--------
He smiles of a hallucinating happiness... Well the father goes alone. He found no one, and his arm is supported by emptiness. Because behind him, at the foot of the post and with legs up high, tangled in barbed wire, his beloved son lies before the sun, dead since ten in the morning.
Dos Palabras By Isabel Allende
Dos Palabras-Isabel Allende- Tomo Uno
She went by the name of Belisa Crepusculario, not because she had been baptized with that name or given it by her mother, but because she herself had searched until she found the poetry of "beauty" and "twilight" and cloaked herself in it. She made her living selling words. She journeyed through the country from the high cold mountains to the burning coasts, stopping at fairs and in markets where she set up four poles covered by a canvas awning under which she took refuge from the sun and rain to minister to her customers. She did not have to peddle her merchandise because from having wandered far and near, everyone knew who she was. Some people waited for her from one year to the next, and when she appeared in the village with her bundle beneath her arm, they would form a line in front of her stall. Her prices were fair. For five centavos she delivered verses from memory, for seven she improved the quality of dreams, for nine she wrote love letters, for twelve she invented insults for irreconcilable enemies. She also sold stories, not fantasies but long, true stories she recited at one telling, never skipping a word. This is how she carried news from one town to another. People paid her to add a line or two: our son was born, so-and-so died, our children got married, the crops burned in the field. Wherever she went a small crowd gathered around to listen as she began to speak, and that was how they learned about each others' doings, about distant relatives, about what was going on in the civil war. To anyone who paid her fifty centavos in trade, she gave the gift of a secret word to drive away melancholy. It was not the same word for everyone, naturally, because that would have been collective dece it. Each person received his or her own word, with the assurance that no one else would use it that way in this universe or the Beyond.
Belisa Crepusculario had been born into a family so poor they did not even have names to give their children. She came into the world and grew up in an inhospitable land where some years the rains became avalanches of water that bore everything away before them and others when not a drop fell from the sky and the sun swelled to fill the horizon and the world became a desert. Until she was twelve, Belisa had no occupation or virtue other than having withstood hunger and the exhaustion of centuries. During one interminable drought, it fell to her to bury four younger brothers and sisters, when she realized that her turn was next, she decided to set out across the plains in the direction of the sea, in hopes that she might trick death along the way. The land was eroded, split with deep cracks, strewn with rocks, fossils of trees and thorny bushes, and skeletons of animals bleached by the sun. From time to time she ran into families who, like her, were heading south, following the mirage of water. Some had begun the march carrying their belongings on their back or in small carts, but they could barely move their own bones, and after a while they had to abandon their possessions. They dragged themselves along painfully, their skin turned to lizard hide and their eyes burned by the reverberating glare. Belisa greeted them with a wave as she passed, but she did not stop, because she had no strength to waste in acts of compassion. Many people fell by the wayside, but she was so stubborn that she survived to cross through that hell and at long last reach the first trickles of water, fine, almost invisible threads that fed spindly vegetation and farther down widened into small streams and marshes.
Belisa Crepusculario saved her life and in the process accidentally discovered writing. In a village near the coast, the wind blew a page of newspaper at her feet. She picked up the brittle yellow paper and stood a long while looking at it, unable to determine its purpose, until curiosity overcame her shyness. She walked over to a man who was washing his horse in the muddy pool where she had quenched her thirst.
"What is this?" she asked.
"The sports page of the newspaper," the man replied, concealing his surprise at her ignorance.
The answer astounded the girl, but she did not want to seem rude, so she merely inquired about the significance of the fly tracks scattered across the page.
"Those are words, child. Here it says that Fulgencio Barba knocked out El Negro Tiznao in the third round."
That was the day Belisa Crepusculario found out that words make their way in the world without a master, and that anyone with a little cleverness can appropriate them and do business with them. She made a quick assessment of her situation and concluded that aside from becoming a prostitute or working as a servant in the kitchens of the rich there were few occupations she was qualified for. It seemed to her that selling words would be an honorable alternative. From that moment on, she worked at that profession, and was never tempted by any other. At the beginning, she offered her merchandise unaware that words could be written outside of newspapers. When she learned otherwise, she calculated the infinite possibilities of her trade and with her savings paid a priest twenty pesos to teach her to read and write, with her three remaining coins she bought a dictionary. She poured over it from A to Z and then threw it into the sea, because it was not her intention to defraud her customers with packaged words.
One August morning several years later, Belisa Crepusculario was sitting in her tent in the middle of a plaza, surrounded by the uproar of market day, selling legal arguments to an old man who had been trying for sixteen years to get his pension. Suddenly she heard yelling and thudding hoofbeats. She looked up from her writing and saw, first, a cloud of dust, and then a band of horsemen come galloping into the plaza. They were the Colonel's men, sent under orders of El Mulato, a giant known throughout the land for the speed of his knife and his loyalty to his chief. Both the Colonel and El Mulato had spent their lives fighting in the civil war, and their names were ineradicably linked to devastation and calamity. The rebels swept into town like a stampeding herd, wrapped in noise, bathed in sweat, and leaving a hurricane of fear in their trail. Chickens took wing, dogs ran for their lives, women and children scurried out of sight, until the only living soul left in the market was Belisa Crepusculario. She had never seen El Mulato and was surprised to see him walking toward her.
"I'm looking for you," he shouted, pointing his coiled whip at her, even before the words were out, two men rushed her -- knocking over her canopy and shattering her inkwell -- bound her hand and foot, and threw her like a sea bag across the rump of El Mulato's mount. Then they thundered off toward the hills.
Hours later, just as Belisa Crepusculario was near death, her heart ground to sand by the pounding of the horse, they stopped, and four strong hands set her down. She tried to stand on her feet and hold her head high, but her strength failed her and she slumped to the ground, sinking into a confused dream. She awakened several hours later to the murmur of night in the camp, but before she had time to sort out the sounds, she opened her eyes and found herself staring into the impatient glare of El Mulato, kneeling beside her.
"Well, woman, at last you've come to," he said. To speed her to her senses, he tipped his canteen and offered her a sip of liquor laced with gunpowder.
She demanded to know the reason for such rough treatment, and El Mulato explained that the Colonel needed her services. He allowed her to splash water on her face, and then led her to the far end of the camp where the most feared man in all the land was lazing in a hammock strung between two trees. She could not see his face, because he lay in the deceptive shadow of the leaves and the indelible shadow of all his years as a bandit, but she imagined from the way his gigantic aide addressed him with such humility that he must have a very menacing expression. She was surprised by the Colonel's voice, as soft and well-modulated as a professor's.
"Are you the woman who sells words?" he asked.
"At your service," she stammered, peering into the dark and trying to see him better.
The Colonel stood up, and turned straight toward her. She saw dark skin and the eyes of a ferocious puma, and she knew immediately that she was standing before the loneliest man in the world.
"I want to be President," he announced.
The Colonel was weary of riding across that godforsaken land, waging useless wars and suffering defeats that no subterfuge could transform into victories. For years he had been sleeping in the open air, bitten by mosquitoes, eating iguanas and snake soup, but those minor inconveniences were not why he wanted to change his destiny. What truly troubled him was the terror he saw in people's eyes. He longed to ride into a town beneath a triumphal arch with bright flags and flowers everywhere, he wanted to be cheered, and be given newly laid eggs and freshly baked bread. Men fled at the sight of him, children trembled, and women miscarried from fright, he had had enough, and so he had decided to become President. El Mulato had suggested that they ride to the capital, gallop up to the Palace, and take over the government, the way they had taken so many other things without anyone's permission. The Colonel, however, did not want to be just another tyrant, there had been enough of those before him and, besides, if he did that, he would never win people's hearts. It was his aspiration to win the popular vote in the December elections.
"To do that, I have to talk like a candidate. Can you sell me the words for a speech?" the Colonel asked Belisa Crepusculario.
She had accepted many assignments, but none like this. She did not dare refuse, fearing that El Mulato would shoot her between the eyes, or worse still, that the Colonel would burst into tears. There was more to it than that, however, she felt the urge to help him because she felt a throbbing warmth beneath her skin, a powerful desire to touch that man, to fondle him, to clasp him in her arms.
All night and a good part of the following day, Belisa Crepusculario searched her repertory for words adequate for a presidential speech, closely watched by El Mulato, who could not take his eyes from her firm wanderer's legs and virginal breasts. She discarded harsh, cold words, words that were too flowery, words worn from abuse, words that offered improbable promises, untruthful and confusing words, until all she had left were words sure to touch the minds of men and women's intuition. Calling upon the knowledge she had purchased from the priest for twenty pesos, she wrote the speech on a sheet of paper and then signaled El Mulato to untie the rope that bound her ankles to a tree. He led her once more to the Colonel, and again she felt the throbbing anxiety that had seized her when she first saw him. She handed him the paper and waited while he looked at it, holding it gingerly between thumbs and fingertips.
"What the shit does this say," he asked finally.
"Don't you know how to read?"
"War's what I know," he replied.
She read the speech aloud. She read it three times, so her client could engrave it on his memory. When she finished, she saw the emotion in the faces of the soldiers who had gathered round to listen, and saw that the Colonel's eyes glittered with enthusiasm, convinced that with those words the presidential chair would be his.
"If after they've heard it three times, the boys are still standing there with their mouths hanging open, it must mean the thing's damn good, Colonel" was El Mulato's approval.
"All right, woman. How much do I owe you?" the leader asked.
"One peso, Colonel."
"That's not much," he said, opening the pouch he wore at his belt, heavy with proceeds from the last foray.
"The peso entitles you to a bonus. I'm going to give you two secret words," said Belisa Crepusculario.
"What for?"
She explained that for every fifty centavos a client paid, she gave him the gift of a word for his exclusive use. The Colonel shrugged. He had no interest at all in her offer, but he did not want to be impolite to someone who had served him so well. She walked slowly to the leather stool where he was sitting, and bent down to give him her gift. The man smelled the scent of a mountain cat issuing from the woman, a fiery heat radiating from her hips, he heard the terrible whisper of her hair, and a breath of sweetmint murmured into his ear the two secret words that were his alone.
"They are yours, Colonel," she said as she stepped back. "You may use them as much as you please."
El Mulato accompanied Belisa to the roadside, his eyes as entreating as a stray dog's, but when he reached out to touch her, he was stopped by an avalanche of words he had never heard before; believing them to be an irrevocable curse, the flame of his desire was extinguished.
During the months of September, October, and November the Colonel delivered his speech so many times that had it not been crafted from glowing and durable words it would have turned to ash as he spoke. He travelled up and down and across the country, riding into cities with a triumphal air, stopping in even the most forgotten villages where only the dump heap betrayed a human presence, to convince his fellow citizens to vote for him. While he spoke from a platform erected in the middle of the plaza, El Mulato and his men handed out sweets and painted his name on all the walls in gold frost. No one paid the least attention to those advertising ploys; they were dazzled by the clarity of the Colonel's proposals and the poetic lucidity of his arguments, infected by his powerful wish to right the wrongs of history, happy for the first time in their lives. When the Candidate had finished his speech, his soldiers would fire their pistols into the air and set off firecrackers, and when finally they rode off, they left behind a wake of hope that lingered for days on the air, like the splendid memory of a comet's tail. Soon the Colonel was the favorite. No one had ever witnessed such a phenomenon: a man who surfaced from the civil war, covered with scars and speaking like a professor, a man whose fame spread to every corner of the land and captured the nation's heart. The press focused their attention on him. Newspapermen came from far away to interview him and repeat his phrases, and the number of his followers and enemies continued to grow.
"We're doing great, Colonel," said El Mulato, after twelve successful weeks of campaigning.
But the Candidate did not hear. He was repeating his secret words, as he did more and more obsessively. He said them when he was mellow with nostalgia; he murmured them in his sleep; he carried them with him on horseback; he thought them before delivering his famous speech; and he caught himself savoring them in his leisure time. And every time he thought of those two words, he thought of Belisa Crepusculario, and his senses were inflamed with the memory of her feral scent, her fiery heat, the whisper of her hair, and her sweetmint breath in his ear, until he began to go around like a sleepwalker, and his men realized that he might die before he ever sat in the presidential chair.
"What's got hold of you, Colonel," El Mulato asked so often that finally one day his chief broke down and told him the source of his befuddlement: those two words that were buried like two daggers in his gut.
"Tell me what they are and maybe they'll lose their magic," his faithful aide suggested.
"I can't tell them, they're for me alone," the Colonel replied.
Saddened by watching his chief decline like a man with a death sentence on his head, El Mulato slung his rifle over his shoulder and set out to find Belisa Crepusculario. He followed her trail through all that vast country, until he found her in a village in the far south, sitting under her tent reciting her rosary of news. He planted himself, spraddle-legged, before her, weapon in hand.
"You! You're coming with me," he ordered.
She had been waiting. She picked up her inkwell, folded the canvas of her small stall, arranged her shawl around her shoulders, and without a word took her place behind El Mulato's saddle. They did not exchange so much as a word in all the trip; El Mulato's desire for her had turned into rage, and only his fear of her tongue prevented his cutting her to shreds with his whip. Nor was he inclined to tell her that the Colonel was in a fog, and that a spell whispered into his ear had done what years of battle had not been able to do. Three days later they arrived at the encampment, and immediately, in view of all the troops, El Mulato led his prisoner before the Candidate.
"I brought this witch here so you can give her back her words, Colonel," El Mulato said, pointing the barrel of his rifle at the woman's head. "And then she can give you back your manhood."
The Colonel and Belisa Crepusculario stared at each other, measuring one another from a distance. The men knew then that their leader would never undo the witchcraft of those accursed words, because the whole world could see the voracious-puma eyes soften as the woman walked to him and took his hand in hers.
Copyright © 1989 by Isabel Allende
She went by the name of Belisa Crepusculario, not because she had been baptized with that name or given it by her mother, but because she herself had searched until she found the poetry of "beauty" and "twilight" and cloaked herself in it. She made her living selling words. She journeyed through the country from the high cold mountains to the burning coasts, stopping at fairs and in markets where she set up four poles covered by a canvas awning under which she took refuge from the sun and rain to minister to her customers. She did not have to peddle her merchandise because from having wandered far and near, everyone knew who she was. Some people waited for her from one year to the next, and when she appeared in the village with her bundle beneath her arm, they would form a line in front of her stall. Her prices were fair. For five centavos she delivered verses from memory, for seven she improved the quality of dreams, for nine she wrote love letters, for twelve she invented insults for irreconcilable enemies. She also sold stories, not fantasies but long, true stories she recited at one telling, never skipping a word. This is how she carried news from one town to another. People paid her to add a line or two: our son was born, so-and-so died, our children got married, the crops burned in the field. Wherever she went a small crowd gathered around to listen as she began to speak, and that was how they learned about each others' doings, about distant relatives, about what was going on in the civil war. To anyone who paid her fifty centavos in trade, she gave the gift of a secret word to drive away melancholy. It was not the same word for everyone, naturally, because that would have been collective dece it. Each person received his or her own word, with the assurance that no one else would use it that way in this universe or the Beyond.
Belisa Crepusculario had been born into a family so poor they did not even have names to give their children. She came into the world and grew up in an inhospitable land where some years the rains became avalanches of water that bore everything away before them and others when not a drop fell from the sky and the sun swelled to fill the horizon and the world became a desert. Until she was twelve, Belisa had no occupation or virtue other than having withstood hunger and the exhaustion of centuries. During one interminable drought, it fell to her to bury four younger brothers and sisters, when she realized that her turn was next, she decided to set out across the plains in the direction of the sea, in hopes that she might trick death along the way. The land was eroded, split with deep cracks, strewn with rocks, fossils of trees and thorny bushes, and skeletons of animals bleached by the sun. From time to time she ran into families who, like her, were heading south, following the mirage of water. Some had begun the march carrying their belongings on their back or in small carts, but they could barely move their own bones, and after a while they had to abandon their possessions. They dragged themselves along painfully, their skin turned to lizard hide and their eyes burned by the reverberating glare. Belisa greeted them with a wave as she passed, but she did not stop, because she had no strength to waste in acts of compassion. Many people fell by the wayside, but she was so stubborn that she survived to cross through that hell and at long last reach the first trickles of water, fine, almost invisible threads that fed spindly vegetation and farther down widened into small streams and marshes.
Belisa Crepusculario saved her life and in the process accidentally discovered writing. In a village near the coast, the wind blew a page of newspaper at her feet. She picked up the brittle yellow paper and stood a long while looking at it, unable to determine its purpose, until curiosity overcame her shyness. She walked over to a man who was washing his horse in the muddy pool where she had quenched her thirst.
"What is this?" she asked.
"The sports page of the newspaper," the man replied, concealing his surprise at her ignorance.
The answer astounded the girl, but she did not want to seem rude, so she merely inquired about the significance of the fly tracks scattered across the page.
"Those are words, child. Here it says that Fulgencio Barba knocked out El Negro Tiznao in the third round."
That was the day Belisa Crepusculario found out that words make their way in the world without a master, and that anyone with a little cleverness can appropriate them and do business with them. She made a quick assessment of her situation and concluded that aside from becoming a prostitute or working as a servant in the kitchens of the rich there were few occupations she was qualified for. It seemed to her that selling words would be an honorable alternative. From that moment on, she worked at that profession, and was never tempted by any other. At the beginning, she offered her merchandise unaware that words could be written outside of newspapers. When she learned otherwise, she calculated the infinite possibilities of her trade and with her savings paid a priest twenty pesos to teach her to read and write, with her three remaining coins she bought a dictionary. She poured over it from A to Z and then threw it into the sea, because it was not her intention to defraud her customers with packaged words.
One August morning several years later, Belisa Crepusculario was sitting in her tent in the middle of a plaza, surrounded by the uproar of market day, selling legal arguments to an old man who had been trying for sixteen years to get his pension. Suddenly she heard yelling and thudding hoofbeats. She looked up from her writing and saw, first, a cloud of dust, and then a band of horsemen come galloping into the plaza. They were the Colonel's men, sent under orders of El Mulato, a giant known throughout the land for the speed of his knife and his loyalty to his chief. Both the Colonel and El Mulato had spent their lives fighting in the civil war, and their names were ineradicably linked to devastation and calamity. The rebels swept into town like a stampeding herd, wrapped in noise, bathed in sweat, and leaving a hurricane of fear in their trail. Chickens took wing, dogs ran for their lives, women and children scurried out of sight, until the only living soul left in the market was Belisa Crepusculario. She had never seen El Mulato and was surprised to see him walking toward her.
"I'm looking for you," he shouted, pointing his coiled whip at her, even before the words were out, two men rushed her -- knocking over her canopy and shattering her inkwell -- bound her hand and foot, and threw her like a sea bag across the rump of El Mulato's mount. Then they thundered off toward the hills.
Hours later, just as Belisa Crepusculario was near death, her heart ground to sand by the pounding of the horse, they stopped, and four strong hands set her down. She tried to stand on her feet and hold her head high, but her strength failed her and she slumped to the ground, sinking into a confused dream. She awakened several hours later to the murmur of night in the camp, but before she had time to sort out the sounds, she opened her eyes and found herself staring into the impatient glare of El Mulato, kneeling beside her.
"Well, woman, at last you've come to," he said. To speed her to her senses, he tipped his canteen and offered her a sip of liquor laced with gunpowder.
She demanded to know the reason for such rough treatment, and El Mulato explained that the Colonel needed her services. He allowed her to splash water on her face, and then led her to the far end of the camp where the most feared man in all the land was lazing in a hammock strung between two trees. She could not see his face, because he lay in the deceptive shadow of the leaves and the indelible shadow of all his years as a bandit, but she imagined from the way his gigantic aide addressed him with such humility that he must have a very menacing expression. She was surprised by the Colonel's voice, as soft and well-modulated as a professor's.
"Are you the woman who sells words?" he asked.
"At your service," she stammered, peering into the dark and trying to see him better.
The Colonel stood up, and turned straight toward her. She saw dark skin and the eyes of a ferocious puma, and she knew immediately that she was standing before the loneliest man in the world.
"I want to be President," he announced.
The Colonel was weary of riding across that godforsaken land, waging useless wars and suffering defeats that no subterfuge could transform into victories. For years he had been sleeping in the open air, bitten by mosquitoes, eating iguanas and snake soup, but those minor inconveniences were not why he wanted to change his destiny. What truly troubled him was the terror he saw in people's eyes. He longed to ride into a town beneath a triumphal arch with bright flags and flowers everywhere, he wanted to be cheered, and be given newly laid eggs and freshly baked bread. Men fled at the sight of him, children trembled, and women miscarried from fright, he had had enough, and so he had decided to become President. El Mulato had suggested that they ride to the capital, gallop up to the Palace, and take over the government, the way they had taken so many other things without anyone's permission. The Colonel, however, did not want to be just another tyrant, there had been enough of those before him and, besides, if he did that, he would never win people's hearts. It was his aspiration to win the popular vote in the December elections.
"To do that, I have to talk like a candidate. Can you sell me the words for a speech?" the Colonel asked Belisa Crepusculario.
She had accepted many assignments, but none like this. She did not dare refuse, fearing that El Mulato would shoot her between the eyes, or worse still, that the Colonel would burst into tears. There was more to it than that, however, she felt the urge to help him because she felt a throbbing warmth beneath her skin, a powerful desire to touch that man, to fondle him, to clasp him in her arms.
All night and a good part of the following day, Belisa Crepusculario searched her repertory for words adequate for a presidential speech, closely watched by El Mulato, who could not take his eyes from her firm wanderer's legs and virginal breasts. She discarded harsh, cold words, words that were too flowery, words worn from abuse, words that offered improbable promises, untruthful and confusing words, until all she had left were words sure to touch the minds of men and women's intuition. Calling upon the knowledge she had purchased from the priest for twenty pesos, she wrote the speech on a sheet of paper and then signaled El Mulato to untie the rope that bound her ankles to a tree. He led her once more to the Colonel, and again she felt the throbbing anxiety that had seized her when she first saw him. She handed him the paper and waited while he looked at it, holding it gingerly between thumbs and fingertips.
"What the shit does this say," he asked finally.
"Don't you know how to read?"
"War's what I know," he replied.
She read the speech aloud. She read it three times, so her client could engrave it on his memory. When she finished, she saw the emotion in the faces of the soldiers who had gathered round to listen, and saw that the Colonel's eyes glittered with enthusiasm, convinced that with those words the presidential chair would be his.
"If after they've heard it three times, the boys are still standing there with their mouths hanging open, it must mean the thing's damn good, Colonel" was El Mulato's approval.
"All right, woman. How much do I owe you?" the leader asked.
"One peso, Colonel."
"That's not much," he said, opening the pouch he wore at his belt, heavy with proceeds from the last foray.
"The peso entitles you to a bonus. I'm going to give you two secret words," said Belisa Crepusculario.
"What for?"
She explained that for every fifty centavos a client paid, she gave him the gift of a word for his exclusive use. The Colonel shrugged. He had no interest at all in her offer, but he did not want to be impolite to someone who had served him so well. She walked slowly to the leather stool where he was sitting, and bent down to give him her gift. The man smelled the scent of a mountain cat issuing from the woman, a fiery heat radiating from her hips, he heard the terrible whisper of her hair, and a breath of sweetmint murmured into his ear the two secret words that were his alone.
"They are yours, Colonel," she said as she stepped back. "You may use them as much as you please."
El Mulato accompanied Belisa to the roadside, his eyes as entreating as a stray dog's, but when he reached out to touch her, he was stopped by an avalanche of words he had never heard before; believing them to be an irrevocable curse, the flame of his desire was extinguished.
During the months of September, October, and November the Colonel delivered his speech so many times that had it not been crafted from glowing and durable words it would have turned to ash as he spoke. He travelled up and down and across the country, riding into cities with a triumphal air, stopping in even the most forgotten villages where only the dump heap betrayed a human presence, to convince his fellow citizens to vote for him. While he spoke from a platform erected in the middle of the plaza, El Mulato and his men handed out sweets and painted his name on all the walls in gold frost. No one paid the least attention to those advertising ploys; they were dazzled by the clarity of the Colonel's proposals and the poetic lucidity of his arguments, infected by his powerful wish to right the wrongs of history, happy for the first time in their lives. When the Candidate had finished his speech, his soldiers would fire their pistols into the air and set off firecrackers, and when finally they rode off, they left behind a wake of hope that lingered for days on the air, like the splendid memory of a comet's tail. Soon the Colonel was the favorite. No one had ever witnessed such a phenomenon: a man who surfaced from the civil war, covered with scars and speaking like a professor, a man whose fame spread to every corner of the land and captured the nation's heart. The press focused their attention on him. Newspapermen came from far away to interview him and repeat his phrases, and the number of his followers and enemies continued to grow.
"We're doing great, Colonel," said El Mulato, after twelve successful weeks of campaigning.
But the Candidate did not hear. He was repeating his secret words, as he did more and more obsessively. He said them when he was mellow with nostalgia; he murmured them in his sleep; he carried them with him on horseback; he thought them before delivering his famous speech; and he caught himself savoring them in his leisure time. And every time he thought of those two words, he thought of Belisa Crepusculario, and his senses were inflamed with the memory of her feral scent, her fiery heat, the whisper of her hair, and her sweetmint breath in his ear, until he began to go around like a sleepwalker, and his men realized that he might die before he ever sat in the presidential chair.
"What's got hold of you, Colonel," El Mulato asked so often that finally one day his chief broke down and told him the source of his befuddlement: those two words that were buried like two daggers in his gut.
"Tell me what they are and maybe they'll lose their magic," his faithful aide suggested.
"I can't tell them, they're for me alone," the Colonel replied.
Saddened by watching his chief decline like a man with a death sentence on his head, El Mulato slung his rifle over his shoulder and set out to find Belisa Crepusculario. He followed her trail through all that vast country, until he found her in a village in the far south, sitting under her tent reciting her rosary of news. He planted himself, spraddle-legged, before her, weapon in hand.
"You! You're coming with me," he ordered.
She had been waiting. She picked up her inkwell, folded the canvas of her small stall, arranged her shawl around her shoulders, and without a word took her place behind El Mulato's saddle. They did not exchange so much as a word in all the trip; El Mulato's desire for her had turned into rage, and only his fear of her tongue prevented his cutting her to shreds with his whip. Nor was he inclined to tell her that the Colonel was in a fog, and that a spell whispered into his ear had done what years of battle had not been able to do. Three days later they arrived at the encampment, and immediately, in view of all the troops, El Mulato led his prisoner before the Candidate.
"I brought this witch here so you can give her back her words, Colonel," El Mulato said, pointing the barrel of his rifle at the woman's head. "And then she can give you back your manhood."
The Colonel and Belisa Crepusculario stared at each other, measuring one another from a distance. The men knew then that their leader would never undo the witchcraft of those accursed words, because the whole world could see the voracious-puma eyes soften as the woman walked to him and took his hand in hers.
Copyright © 1989 by Isabel Allende
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)