A peculiar thought, the one that allows ourman to hope, that lets him think he is in a position to put an end to the hatred inside him. A strange calculation, this one, as even now, even as his guilt continues to move him, he considers it a thing that may fade. Like a bird arcing through the sky, full of incomprehension for the laws governing the winds that buffet it, full of hope.
“What has been, will be,” ourman will say over and over on the day he dies, the day our story will end, but that is a long way off yet, not yet important. The same goes for his past and future. And for the moment in which ourman was born, and the moment his father died, and all the years he spent in the army and in foreign lands. What matters now is that, finally and without any further intervention of any further memories, the moment of our story’s beginning is upon us:
May 13, 1956: El Gringo Alcántara Carnero, raising up his left arm and letting the blinds rattle shut, leaves in thick darkness the office in which we find ourselves. He does not need to see in order to move around the murkiness he has created, he knows it well, every inch of this space and of its neglected heaps of furniture, their scores and scuffs on top and their undersides gobbed and gibbed with his own snot. He grabs his jacket—taken years ago from the first man he ever stuffed in his iron trunk and left to die—from the back of a broken chair. “Time’s the killer, not I,” he would always say before putting men in his truck. Then, laughing: “Why don’t you tell your god to come get you out? Tell him to pull off a little lovely miracle for you.” This always made him laugh.
But nor is it the moment for these things! The only thing that matters is that ourman has folded his jacket with unusual attentiveness, placed it over his forearm, turned his body, started to walk toward the door, and is now crossing the threshold, leaving the door open behind him.
El Gringo Alcántara Carnero walks steadily along the hallway, past a couple of overflowing trashcans and a corkboard that spits at him with the black and white likenesses of all the men who have escaped his fury. They no longer exist, ourman swears to himself as he comes to the staircase that takes him down to the ground floor, where his arrival makes people look but then look away. From now on they are nothing, he thinks, finding the emptiness these words produce in him strange, as if something had dropped away from his body, as if he himself were about to take to the air. They’re nothing. As though to stop feeding the anger would in fact make his existence less heavy, as though solace were out there just waiting for him in the street.
Just as he is about to set foot in the ministry’s main room, the scene of his earliest involvement in this line of work, one he entered after coming back from abroad, the country he went away to with El Demónico Macías and returned from in the company of Anne Lucretius Ford and Will D. Glover—a moment for later in our story—his face warps until a look of near-happiness appears, reflecting the cautious joy that for a couple of hours now has slowly been taking hold of his soul.
Pretending to himself he is thirsty, Alcántara Carnero takes one of the paper cones from next to the small fountain and fills it. He drinks from the paper cone, wondering what he’ll do with it afterwards. (He’ll crumple it up and put it in his pocket.) He wishes to draw the moment out, to savor it. Truly believing that solace is out there, waiting, on the street.
Water drips from the bunched-up paper cone, trickling over ourman’s leg and running down it. A couple of steps shy of the ministry room, he hears clapping break out: Will D. Glover whistling with two fingers in his mouth, Óscar el Chino López Ley howling, La Madrina yelling, José Ángel el Cerebro Ordóñez Sánchez pounding on a trashcan as if it were a drum, Ramiro la Madrina López Palas tossing into the air the strips of paper he spent half the morning tearing up, and the Pascua de Ramones twins, Ausencia and Amparo, goading the others, stirring the room. This racket serves to fan the embers of Germán Alcántara Carnero’s fury. I said I wanted to go quietly. I won’t let them ruin it now, he thinks, muttering with eyes narrowed: “To accept praise is to be in people’s debt.” He narrows his eyes, and yet the vision he wishes to escape, the faces of these applauding men and women, fragments and clinging scraps of their likenesses, accompany him into the darkness.
“Didn’t I say no send-off?” He throws his arms wide, he implores. “My fault, of course, thinking they had it in them to follow an order! All the times they’ve shown that to be absolutely not the case! All the times they’ve shown they understand precisely fuck all.” A couple of steps from the front door, that final borderline between ministry interior and street, Germán Alcántara Carnero stops and spins on his heels with a flourish, and is confronted with a row of silent faces, these now-silent men and women. They are watching him leave. “Let’s just see how you all manage now,” he grins, hair and shoulders lit golden yellow as the sun breaks through the skylight that broke in the earthquake of February 22, 1946, a day that, unlike the days mentioned heretofore, sheds no light on the life of ourman, and therefore does not form part of our story. “Let’s just see how you fuckers manage without me.”
“I don’t care. Their problem now.” With the same forefinger that a moment ago touched the spider of a scar on his chest, ourman loosens the strap on his belt and grips the cold steel he’s reached for so many times in his life. They won’t dare pick it up. They haven’t got the balls. Unhurriedly, Germán Alcántara Carnero unholsters the gun, feeling its worn hilt and the weight of the cylinder and the chamber. “I doubt they’ll dare while I’m standing here before them.” The silence expands like a balloon as he arcs his arm and lets go, launching the weapon into the air, watching as it hits a chair, bounces off the seat, falls to the floor with a clatter. “There’s so much stuff up there,” he says, looking at them. “If this isn’t enough, maybe all those things up there will do.” At this, a shudder passes through the people watching him.
“Lot of rage and fury up in my office, too, whoever wants that, plus all the guilt, eh?” He turns on his heel once more and makes for the door, the handle of which he grips like a shipwreck survivor plunging fingers into dry land. “I also leave up there the shame that none of you could understand or even feel, not even if you spent a hundred years trying.” Alcántara Carnero unlocks the door, and hearing the click pulls on the handle with his huge hands. The chink of light becomes a rectangle as the door’s four rusted hinges pose their rasping questions:
Really think you’re leaving all that?
Truly believe your fury, anger, and shame will stay just where you left them?
That you have it in you to free yourself?
“I don’t know, but I do know that I’m leaving,” he says. Ourman steps into the rectangle of light, putting an end to the moment he has been waiting for so long, the moment that, for all that it should not have, begins our story.
Conception
It is also a cross section, this story, of the moments that shine beaconlike in the murk of Germán Alcántara Carnero’s existence. Glittering instants that might’ve been placed at beginning, middle, or end—the cruxpoints in the life of ourman—these being a murder, the flight of two young men abroad, the unfolding of a war, the death of a child, one uprising, one love affair, one conflagration that consumed two dogs, the unveiling of one great dam—some bitterness, some condolences, many bullets, a religious conversion, much rage, and the conception of a being Félix Salvador Germán Alcántara Arreola and María del Pilar y del Consuelo Carnero Villalobos never imagined would be important enough to have his story remembered.
A story that might just as well have begun here: August 8, 1901, a moment in which the pigeons abruptly fall quiet, as though on some sudden command, and when Félix Salvador Germán Alcántara Arreola regains consciousness, having had a weeklong fever, and is instantly offended by the stench of his own body: oh sweet, oh acid fetor. How long have I been lying here? He does not know how long, and lets out a moan, more animal than human, while, at the far end of the shack we have just entered, María del Pilar y del Consuelo Carnero
Villalobos parts the ragged, sun-blanched drape in the doorway and ducks outside.
Félix Salvador Germán Alcántara Arreola, third child of José Germán Froylán Argenis Alcántara Castillo and Hilda Heredí Arreola Avella, gradually comes to his senses. He keeps his eyes shut a little longer, and with the bitter taste of fever still on his lips, runs his hands along the cloth beneath him, damp from all the sweats. He feels the warmth of day on his skin, and hears the owl’s too-whoo cut across by the cawing of a magpie shooed by his wife a moment ago. It is the hour when the sounds of the day mutate: croaking of frogs gives way to buzz of cicadas, donkeys’ braying replaces cock-a-doodle-doos, and the constant chorus of dog barks gives way to the grief-stricken call of a coyote.
With much effort, Félix Salvador Germán Alcántara Arreola—whom we will also refer to as Félix Salvador—begins hefting himself onto his left side, and after a few moments’ struggle succeeds, shifting onto one very ample hip and the leg that hurts him nowadays in cold weather. For four years now, such simple actions have been a trial.
María del Pilar y del Consuelo Carnero Villalobos, meanwhile, rolls up her sleeves as she moves across the yard, glancing at the sierra beyond, the vastness of this land. The sun is but a handspan from the tops of the mountains, and a faint shadowy haze has settled over the earth, itself pinpricked by hundreds of infinitesimal bright lights—fireflies whose tiny luminescences seem to María del Pilar’s eye like so many floating splinters. Strange, but it is a shimmering spectacle that Félix Salvador Germán Alcántara Arreola has never contemplated, and in any case he, lying where he is currently lying, now has other things on his mind.
After pausing to catch breath, restoring his lungs to their usual labored rhythm, Félix Salvador tenses his jaw and, straining, kicking his legs like an upturned beetle, he finally succeeds in rolling onto his back. The pestilent little eddy of dust raised in this maneuver eventually drifts back down again, settling on the body, still quivering from effort, of this corpulent man.
In the last four years, Félix Salvador Germán Alcántara Arreola has put on ninety pounds, and more is yet to come: within seven years his weight will be double what it is now, and at that point he will no longer be able to get up. A red, swollen welt upon the ground, a pustule of anger and rage that will poison the lives of his daughters and his son. His entire lineage, and even the men and women who merely happen to live in his vicinity, will be affected by his malignance, a malignance I, too, am fighting—but we will come to that. For now, the only thing that matters is the woman filling a wash pail outside, spilling a little onto earth so dark it could be mistaken for ash: María del Pilar y del Consuelo Carnero Villalobos, who cups water out of the pail with her hand like a dog’s tongue laps up water.
She fears dust more than anything, and she lives in a place where dust is all there is. Her wet footprints follow their mistress over to a pool in a rocky hollow. María del Pilar y del Consuelo Carnero Villalobos—whom we will refer to as María del Pilar y del Consuelo or as simply María del Pilar from now on—does not hear the church bells ringing on the other side of the plain, in distant Lago Seco, the town where our story began—a place where, I insist, it should not have begun. Here, on this flank of the Mesa Madre Buena, it should have begun here, where the sound of the church bells from Lago Seco, accompanied by the sound of two other bells now pealing across the Mesa, combines to resemble that of glass buckling—cracking but not quite shattering—more closely than it does metal striking metal. The two bells that accompany Lago Seco’s principal bell are not nearby, either: one is in the grounds of the mesa’s main hacienda and the other is in the tower of the church on the mountainside, hard to access between sheer scarps and gullies.
Here, without leaving María del Pilar—remaining at her side as she inexpressively scoops up water with her pail—here now is the story of the church on the mountainside: the story of February 17, 1934, a day when Germán Alcántara Carnero, accompanied by Will D. Glover and El Demónico Camilo Mónico Macías Osorio, reduced the church to a rubble of charcoal and bent nails. Teobaldo, the boss on the mesa at that time, who had in years gone by provided work for half the people in these lands, the same lands in which this present chapter unfolds, twelve hours earlier had given the order: “Burn that church tomorrow, and no fucking up. I don’t want a single one of those bastard priests left alive, and I don’t want them scurrying their way past you, either. That’s where they get together to plot and scheme. You, go hide out between the buildings, and I’ll go do the same in the scrub up there. Some of you go into town, and the rest of you stake out that empty lot.”
The empty lot being the place we left María del Pilar y del Consuelo, back in August 8, 1901, as she put down the pail and looked over at a spot a couple of meters away, at the ashy soil and at the worms that her trail of water had brought writhing to the surface. Like smoke from a fire, she thinks. Then, without knowing why, she says aloud: “Worms, but like smoke turning and twisting, writhing on the ground…”—to which I’ll add: like the smoke that rose from the church that El Gringo Alcántara, El Demónico, and Will D. Glover burned down on February 17, 1934. They had set out six hours earlier, and it wasn’t till the sun was up and they came in sight of the church—where the majority of the rebels had gone to sleep the previous night—that they posted their horses, unloaded the jerrycans and their weapons, and set forth on foot, no one saying a word, crawling for the last forty meters. Ahead of them, peace enveloped the church, chrysalislike.
By the time the doors of the church were being pushed on from the inside, Teobaldo and Will had already shut them from the outside. The dying men shrieked and battered on the door, but could not sway the men whose trio of chains kept it shut fast. The bells, normally silent at that hour, began to chime. The bell tower, which El Gringo Alcántara had scaled earlier with the help of an insider paid off by Teobaldo, had been doused with the contents of the jerrycans they’d dragged up the path. The black billowing thread of smoke reached skyward, a tongue mute and never-ending, twisting back and around on itself like María del Pilar’s worms. By the time the two tall church windowpanes exploded, the ten men shut inside were also exploding: before the flames could reach them, the heat had boiled them alive.
Before leaving what was by now a heap of charcoal and bent nails, El Gringo Alcántara, taking in his arms a small Christ that had somehow escaped the flames, spotted a body in the distance: “There’s someone behind those rocks!” he yelled. But now is not the moment to follow him as he gives chase; now we go back to María del Pilar—who was sent to the Mesa Madre Buena as a young girl in order to keep her from an epidemic that had struck several towns around her family’s home, and who does not hear the bells in the distance—cannot hear the bells in the distance—being that she is deaf.
Inside the small shack, Félix Salvador does hear the bells and, still delighted at his success—at having managed to roll over—entertains the idea of this trio of bells chiming in celebration of his recovery. He is, he decides, not feeling feverish but just hot, nauseated, too, and, having once more emerged from a feverish affliction that troubles him from time to time—a result of the day when his system first shut down—thinks: Just need to get this cover off. Shuffling his feet back and forth, back and forth, he manages to do so—the sight is something like seeing an anaconda emerge from a chrysalis.
Only when Félix Salvador’s body is revealed in its fullness, bathed in sweat and covered in welts, does the gravity of his illness become clear. As his feverish body comes in contact again with the air, Félix Salvador, the first person in our story’s lineage who thrives on anger and rage, and whom we will also consequently call thefirstone, feels better for an instant, and wonders if the time is right for him to peel open his eyes. He hasn’t wanted to do so yet, fearing he might still be delirious, might again be showered with the scythes and sickles and awful lacerating implements that have been raining down in his hallucinations. Thefirstone opens his eyes and gradually discerns a
white ray of light, one might almost say grayish if rays of light could be grayish. The sun, slipping behind the mountains, is spreading its most leadlike tones over the world, a late light that filters in through the roof beams. María del Pilar, meanwhile, leaning against the wall of the coop, decides she should go back now, where one of her daughters, María del Sagrado Alcántara Carnero, is crying, though in fact her mother cannot hear.
María del Pilar retraces her steps across the dark, powdery soil, and walks silently across the yard and past the slumbering dogs. The boastful vultures turn lazy circles high above, and every now and then smaller birds flit past as though shot from a catapult. In the shrubland, where a large dam will one day be built, the shacks begin to light up one after another, shimmering like torches as the men and women who live inside them, 39 adults and 180 children—all the youths and young men and women have left—light their stoves, their tallow candles, and their small lamps. Slowly but irremediably, the shadows thicken around these shimmering torches, robbing everything of color, texture, and shape.
Moving aside the threadbare cloth in the doorway, María del Pilar enters the place that has been her home for seven years, and sees that her husband is awake. He has succeeded in shifting the blanket off his naked body and rolling over. María del Pilar averts her gaze. Her disgust for this man, whose churning folds of flesh are near-black in color, is such that she simply does not want to be here. Glancing at the useless cloth across the doorway—still rippling slightly—María del Pilar feels a strong urge to go away and never come back. “I should, that’s exactly what I should do,” says the woman quietly, looking away from her husband so as to avoid his instructions—instructions to do things she doesn’t want to do. His waking strikes her like a body blow.
The Arid Sky Page 2