The lieutenant pointed toward the thrashing but still invisible shore of the river. There they were, the same as yesterday and the day before, not moving, waiting … waiting for some miracle, some divine intervention, who knew what these crazy old women and their daughters were waiting for.
Over there, above the slow, gray dawn, a flock of birds crossed the sky, calling, formed in a graceful wedge against the high clouds, following their leader toward some destination beyond the mountains. The two officers and the orderly followed the flight of the birds, so radiant and soothing and clear, and the three of them felt strangely united in that moment. The captain thought that there overhead was something the women would also be watching, and maybe the boy on the truck headed for the capital and the rest of the soldiers, and he could understand why the lieutenant was waiting for the last bird to disappear, and the last echo in the pure air of the day that didn’t want to begin but was on the verge of beginning anyway. The lieutenant waited till they were alone again in the silence, alone with the monotonous sound of the river, before calling out, “Form ranks, Sergeant.” And then, more softly, “With your authorization, Captain.”
The captain nodded. He saw how the soldiers lined up, creating a sort of human wall between him and the shore below. Beyond those backs he could just make out the group of women, in an opaque and foggy sort of way, some standing, others reclining or seated, next to the rocks. From that distance, and at that early hour, no shadow was individually distinguishable. Together they still formed a floating, savage mass, one huge spread-out female with fifteen or twenty heads. The captain noticed the absence of wind. Something told him that at a time like this there ought to be lots of wind, lots of air moving around and not settling.
“Attention!” the sergeant commanded.
The soldiers obeyed.
The sergeant signaled with his hand. “We’re ready, Lieutenant.”
“Perhaps, sir,” suggested the lieutenant, “it would be advisable to give them one last warning.”
The captain’s voice didn’t waver. “I don’t see why, Lieutenant. They’ve had plenty of chances. They know what to expect.”
“All right, Captain. If that’s your opinion.”
“As a matter of fact, Lieutenant, it is.”
The soldiers began to move toward the beach.
Everything was hazy and barely clearing.
Suddenly the women came apart, split into two groups, the women opened up, and the captain could see the river, the beach, the rocks. A first ray of sunlight lit that spot, struck the air like a sword.
“Just a minute, Sergeant,” said the captain.
The soldiers had stopped already.
There, among the women, was the body, the body of a third man the night and the river had deposited on that bank.
xiii
For an instant and another instant and another longer one, the women looked at the group of soldiers, we let the dawn go on defining the colors, the silhouettes, the faces, the rifles, the straps, so they could see exactly how many we were and our empty hands and just these bodies of ours between them and the river, between them and the dead one. It wasn’t going to be the women, it couldn’t be. They didn’t want to be the ones who’d wind up breaking the silence again, that stillness, the patient light bathing them. We stayed there, the way we are, the way we can be if they would leave us in peace, if they would only leave us the difficult peace of the earth and the loom, like this, as it has had to be, with no other man in the world than this unknown dead man at our feet, simply waiting one more time in this story for them, the soldiers, to decide what they were going to do, how they were going to do it, when.
The women then saw one of the officers, it had to be the lieutenant, take a step forward, they saw the deliberate way his stiff stride fractured the clean air of what might have been, what could have been called dawn, morning, day.
And immediately they heard the other’s voice, an animal sound wrenched from far away, the voice of the one who was the captain, a voice heard with the clarity of the first day of creation, a voice that said, incredibly, “It’s time to put things in order, Lieutenant. Proceed at once.”
And eight women bent down and took the corpse in their arms, its head hanging, its eyes lifeless, what the rising river had brought up into the light one more time, in the arms that belonged to women who would not move and to no one else.
They waited for the lieutenant’s order.
While the body was rocked in our arms like a newborn child.
Widows Page 14