Each of Us a Desert

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Each of Us a Desert Page 22

by Mark Oshiro


  No longer.

  The hut belonging to Téa was crowded, but Eliazar ignored the cries of the others as he pushed inside. “Téa, Téa, please,” he called out, dropping down before the cuentista in supplication.

  They had their hands out.

  They were in the midst of taking a story.

  Eliazar apologized, tried to explain that it was an emergency, but they shooed him away. “No,” they said harshly, and their brow was furrowed in anger. “You cannot interrupt this.”

  Eliazar waited outside, embarrassed but undeterred. It was nearly an hour later when Téa exited the hut. Their black hair was shaven clean on the side, but left long on the top, and the dark coal they wore around their eyes had smeared.

  “Eliazar,” they said, holding aside the curtain in the doorway, “come within.”

  When the others protested, Téa held up their opposite hand. “This will only take a moment.”

  He shuffled in, tried his best to ignore the complaints from other aldeanos, then dropped to the ground once more, though not to give a story.

  Eliazar was there to beg.

  “Mi cuentista, te necesito,” he began.

  Téa drifted to the back of their hut, seemingly interested in other things. They crushed herbs in a mortero, poured water over them, then mixed them into a paste.

  “Téa?”

  They stilled where they stood. “Eliazar, you are not here to give me a story, are you?”

  “I need your help. It’s Gracia.”

  Eliazar could see their head shaking. “I don’t think I am what you need, amigo. Or what she needs.”

  “But you must know someone. Someone who can help her with the sickness she has.”

  Eliazar moved closer to Téa. “Can’t you ask Solís for help? Just this once?”

  They spun around, anger twisting their features. “You know that’s not how it works. It never has.”

  They sighed, then reached out to put a hand on Eliazar’s shoulder. “Lo siento,” they said. “Maybe there is someone out there. Some sort of cure. But I can’t hand out favors. I can’t get Solís to change the world. Each of us is responsible for that.”

  Eliazar did not feel disappointed as Téa rejected him. He had an idea.

  He rushed homeward, pushing his mare harder than he should have, and when he dismounted at the cliff face, she collapsed. He didn’t care. He couldn’t care. He knew she would have taken too long on the narrow trail down. So he shielded his eyes from Your light, peeking over the edge of El Mar, and he searched for Gracia’s rock.

  He saw the waves that El Mar spat onto the shore, furious and frothy.

  He found the rock.

  And the body slumped over next to it.

  Eliazar walked slowly down the decline, then up to the body, saw how Gracia’s skin was sickly, pale, shriveled.

  She had a smile on her face.

  He bent down, moved her hair off her forehead, kissed her. “I’ll be back, mi amor,” he said.

  Kissed her again.

  “I’ll find you a cure this time.”

  His fingers danced over her cheek.

  “Volveré por ti.”

  Eliazar stood. Gathered some supplies. Made the climb back up the cliff face. Ignored the mare, who had not recovered. He walked to the west again, and he stopped in every aldea he found, asking for a cuentista or a curandera. If he did not find something to help Gracia, he thanked the people and moved on.

  Eliazar traveled west for a long, long time, meeting new people, seeking out a cure. A few days ago, he arrived in Obregán, and he was overwhelmed by El Mercado. But he rushed past the curanderas, past the centers for healing, and he headed straight for the northwest corner.

  CUENTISTAS.

  He spoke to one. Another. Another. They shook their heads; their faces slumped in pity; some even returned the money Eliazar gave them.

  One of them—dark coal spread over her eyes, a red veil with a dark hood hanging from her body—offered to give Eliazar what he wanted.

  He told her what he desired.

  And even she tilted her head at him, let go of his hands.

  “Señor, you must let go of that,” she said.

  “Of what?”

  “There is not anyone here who can help you get her back,” she explained, returning to her booth. “You cannot cling to this.”

  He shuffled from one foot to another in that spot. “Thank you for trying,” he finally said, and he left El Mercado de Obregán.

  It has been over a year since he first left El Mar, Solís.

  He is still walking.

  He was breathless. “Gracias,” he said to me, and this time, he steadied me as his story, his never-ending grief, became a part of me. I was a storm, a flood that ripped through the desert and toppled the saguaros and the ironwoods, ripped the bushes from the ground and sent them tumbling.

  I coughed.

  I nearly lost all the stories—because Eliazar’s was so powerful.

  Then it settled, as the others had before.

  I was getting better at keeping these stories inside me.

  “I had to tell you,” he said. “I shouldn’t have left her behind. I shouldn’t have been so slow.” He smiled, that same sad grin I’d seen so many times over the past day. “I’ll help her this time.”

  I placed a hand low on my gut, felt as Eliazar’s story settled in deep.

  But Gracia was dead.

  There was nothing to return to.

  That was the story he wanted to give me?

  Eliazar allowed me to lean on him as we walked back to the group. Emilia had water ready for me, and an affection swelled in my heart.

  It passed, though. As I drank the water down, wishing it were cooler, I saw Eliazar speaking excitedly with Rosalinda. He looked so pleased.

  I recalled Ofelia and her misguided anger.

  Or Omar, and his refusal to change his behavior. His face sparked in my mind: I saw his expression as he finished telling me his story, as he knew that he’d been cleansed.

  And now there was Eliazar, who believed so wholly that he had done his love wrong that he apologized for it.

  If I had done as You asked of me—if I had followed the rules as I had been taught—I would have wandered out into the desert, dropped to all fours, and spewed the bitterness into the earth.

  Then I would have forgotten.

  And Eliazar would never know how wrong he’d gotten it, how his grief was preventing him from seeing the truth.

  Emilia rubbed my back with an open palm. “Take as much time as you need,” she said.

  I drank more water, and the group looked at me expectantly.

  No—not expectant.

  There was another look in the eyes of Rosalinda, Felipe, y Eliazar.

  Reverence.

  Because to them, I was once again a cuentista.

  Nothing more.

  “I’ll go slowly,” I said, “but if you’re all ready, we should start walking.”

  There were murmurs of agreement. Warm faces. I gazed at Eliazar again, and he seemed lighter, stood up taller, and I knew that I had done something good for him. But that was only temporary; he was walking the land to find a cure that did not matter. His Gracia was dead. There was nothing left to cure.

  Each of us a desert, solitary and vast.

  No. Not just that, but:

  Solo quiero ser vista.

  I only want to be seen.

  Maybe that’s all these people wanted. To be seen.

  Slowly, we reached las bajadas de las montañas. There were more árboles and bushes here, more flowers in bloom, more signs of life than Emilia and I had seen the last time we crossed over unas montañas. A large lizard, green with black specks, stood off the side of the trail. Its tongue darted out and snatched a large black beetle, and then it scampered off.

  We rested in the shade of the mesquites, and I couldn’t resist. I craned my head back.

  La montaña towered above.

  Standing
there, looking up at that giant before me, terror was born anew. I couldn’t imagine something bigger than this.

  “I need a break,” I said, my voice too loud, pitched too high, then added, “To relieve myself.”

  “Take all the time you need,” Emilia said. “We’ll be ready to go when you are.”

  I made for a dense clump of ironwoods, and once I felt I was safely hidden, I pulled out las poemas. I had put them all into a single leather pouch so they would be easier to carry, and then stuffed the empty pouches at the bottom of my pack. There were four poemas now, and even though I knew each one by heart, I needed to remind myself why I had left home.

  I held the pouch containing them all tightly, clutched it to my body. I couldn’t show these to anyone. Not yet. Maybe someday. But they were too intimate to share with people I had just met.

  I crouched, spread them out on the ground next to one another, touched each of them and looked up—

  The skull was enormous. It had been picked clean and bleached by the sun, but even then, I recognized the shape. Its snout was long and came to a point, and its jaw was lined with teeth, sharp and pointed in the front, flat near the back. Two horns jutted out from the top sides, curving up toward the sky. And those vacant eye sockets seemed to be staring at me. Directly at me.

  Un sabueso.

  Out here? How? Had someone defeated a sabueso tracking them like I had? Or had it suffered a different fate?

  I examined it, but not for long, as I couldn’t shake the feeling that soon, one of estas bestias would be chasing me. So I picked up las poemas, hid them in my pack, and strode away from that monstrosity. I said nothing to the group as I joined them again, only smiled as if I’d taken care of what I needed to, and they were satisfied. Another lie. Another story they bought.

  Except Emilia. One of her eyebrows went up.

  She suspected something, but she said nothing.

  I took another drink of water, hoping it would soothe my jittery nerves.

  It did not.

  Emilia led us out of las bajadas, said that she knew our camp for the night was on the other side, and I hoped she was right. She hadn’t been wrong yet, but I still did not understand who or what guided her.

  We followed.

  * * *

  We climbed.

  And climbed.

  And climbed.

  It was not a gradual incline, not like the one I had conquered before reaching Obregán. The packed dirt trail pitched up sharply at first, so much so that I nearly got down on hands and knees to crawl. I pushed myself up, breathing deeply with each step, and then looked back to make sure those behind me weren’t faltering as much as I wanted to.

  Eliazar surprised me. He had his hands behind his head and a smile on his face. He patted me on the back as he passed me and took the lead. Emilia was next, and she smiled again at me as she passed, but there was an edge to it. She knew I had lied to her about what happened, didn’t she? But I merely returned the smile and she continued on.

  Rosalinda and Felipe were last, and Rosalinda stood at my side as her son struggled up the steepest section.

  Sweat stained the front of Felipe’s camisa, and he panted loudly. An awful image filled my head: el sabueso panting in Chavela’s refuge, staring me and Emilia down.

  “Felipe?” I held out my hand and pulled him up the last bit. “How are you feeling?”

  “It’s so hot,” he said, his voice tiny and weak. “Has it ever been this hot before?”

  I wiped at my forehead, and my hand dripped with sweat. “It doesn’t feel like it,” I said. “When was the last time you had agua?”

  He shook his head. “At the bottom.”

  “Drink more.” I thrust my water bag at him. “Not a lot, just enough to wet your throat.”

  “Lo siento, mijo,” said Rosalinda as he drank. “That we have to do this.”

  He smiled at her despite his clear exhaustion. “We had to.” He coughed, then spat into the dirt. “Come on, Mami. You’re so slow.”

  Had to? I pondered that. What drove people to leave their home and venture out into such an unforgiving expanse? I sought a change, a freedom I needed. But it seemed that Rosalinda and Felipe had a need, too. What was it?

  The trail rose higher and higher, and I looked behind me, down into el valle, back into my past. Even if I could have seen clear out to Empalme, it was too far.

  I was too far from it.

  I faced forward, refused to think about that for too long.

  I had been stuck in a recurring sequence that blended into itself—walk forward to the next turn in the trail, glance back down, continue ahead—when I collided with Eliazar, who braced himself on the sheer wall of earth to his left. I was about to apologize when I saw that he was helping tie something around Felipe’s head: a strip of cloth.

  “It’ll help keep you cool,” he explained. “Let me know when it dries out, and we’ll refresh it.”

  “Gracias,” said Felipe, and when Eliazar stepped out of the way, I saw the redness spreading over the face of that boy. The sun was burning him. We still had a couple of hours left in our climb. How was he going to make it?

  But You were now on Your decline to the west, and I tried to give myself hope that this wouldn’t get worse. Another pang hit my lower stomach, and I let everyone continue on so I could quickly relieve myself at the side of the trail. It was a bright yellow trickle, and I frowned. I needed more water. When I stood, though, the pain continued to needle at me. Was I still bleeding? I hadn’t seen anything on my padding, but I dug my fingers into the cramps, trying to will them away.

  The moment passed. I took another long drink before I increased my pace to catch up with Rosalinda and Felipe.

  It never ended. At least, it seemed to be perpetual. Each switchback led to another one, each rise brought us only a tiny bit closer to the summit. The heat bore down on us, and the endless cycle of it all began to erode my hope and replace it with a sick sense of futility. I’m never going to make it, I thought. I’m going to die right here, and I will become part of the earth. I will be forgotten.

  El olvidado.

  It was a strangely comforting thought, and somehow, it kept me going. I thought about how I could return my own body to the earth, giving not just the stories but my entire self over to the living things that would feast upon me.

  No one else saw it. If I had not looked down, if I had not teetered around that steep turn and seen the dark shape to the side of the trail, all of us would have passed it by. How many others had done so?

  I’d seen dead cactuses before, their hollowed bodies brown and shriveled, but the shape of this one caught my eye. I walked to the edge of the trail, stared down into the patch of barrel cactuses, saw the arms of the cactus wrinkled and—

  Fingers. They were fingers.

  I cried out. To You. To the others. The group was above me on the trail, and Emilia’s head popped over the ridge. “Xochitl, what is it?”

  I couldn’t speak. I lifted a shaking finger.

  Felipe was at the top of the next curve, and he misinterpreted my scream as something exciting. “¡Yo quiero ver!” he exclaimed, and I wanted to warn him, to stop him from seeing this, but my gaze fell back down to the body, as if I couldn’t pull myself from it. The corpse had been cooked in the heat, but most of the torso was picked clean. The mouth was wide open, as if the person had died screaming, and even the teeth were discolored, rotten.

  Felipe stared. He said nothing.

  This person had died trying to … what? Where was their destination? Were they going to Solado, too? What were they hoping to find there? I knew nothing of them, of their reasons for leaving home and risking their life for this unforgiving journey, the same one all of us were making. The sadness—Eliazar’s sadness and mine—spiked in me.

  I saw Gracia’s body in my mind: pale and lifeless, splayed out in the sand.

  But this person at our feet had no story. They had nothing in death.

  “Raym
undo,” I said softly.

  “¿Qué?” Felipe backed away, his face wrinkled up in confusion. “Who is that?”

  “I’m naming them Raymundo,” I said. Then I repeated their name aloud. “Raymundo.”

  Felipe was now tucked behind his mami. “Who is Raymundo?” he asked.

  How could I explain this to him? How could I tell him that there was so much sadness swimming within me, that not all of it was my own, and that I needed this person to have something to be remembered by?

  “I’m giving them a story,” I said, my voice wavering. “And you can’t have a story without a name.”

  Eliazar, who looked upon us from the rise above, made the sign. “And we honor the dead by remembering them,” he added.

  I lifted an eyebrow at him, but he smiled, his face peaceful and calm.

  There was a brief silence as we stood next to the remains. Emilia squeezed my hand.

  I squeezed back.

  Felipe tugged on Rosalinda’s hand as we continued up the pass. “But we know nothing about that person,” he said. “How can we give them a story?”

  She ruffled his hair as we made another turn, and Raymundo dropped out of sight. “Well,” I said, “what does that name make you think of, Felipe? What do you see in your head?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe … a blacksmith. Someone who uses fire to make things.”

  “What sort of things?” I asked, hoping to keep him talking.

  “Swords, maybe.” He gasped. “¡No, puñales! Those ones that hang at your side and you put them in sheaths, and you can whip them out like this.” He stopped walking and imitated it.

  Felipe didn’t even realize that he had given Raymundo a story. The blacksmith from Obregán, who had tried to find hope in the north, who died looking up at You.

  Felipe continued to talk excitedly about puñales and weapons with Rosalinda as we walked at a steady pace. But the farther we moved up la montaña, the more noise we made. Our feet, tired and weary, scraping against the dirt. Panting. The rustling of our clothing, rubbing and chafing. The conversation died, and la montaña surrounded us with silence, leaned in, waited for us … for what? For us to become a part of it? To perish as Raymundo had?

 

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