As though sensing her, thefirstone turns his head around to the left, and the portion of the shack he previously could not see invades his two corneas—the one out of which he can see and the other one, the dead one. They watch each other in the thickening dark. Their disabilities mean the picture they form of each other is forever incomplete, but also that neither could survive in this kingdom alone. But let’s be clear: their impairments are not the reason they married; this union came out of another kind of necessity: a time of poverty when the only things in abundance were hunger, coldness, and enervation. María del Pilar finds a candle and lights it.
Félix Salvador’s good eye comes to rest on the figure that resolves in the candlelight, and desire immediately rushes out of its nothingness and everythingness to take hold of him. Something important is about to take place in this story—a moment that, hinge-like, joins the life of Germán Alcántara Carnero and the lives of his parents.
So our tale might just as well have begun here: August 8, 1901: Thefirstone, having moments before emerged from his illness, with his one functioning eye fixed on his wife’s outline in the faint yellow light, starts to stroke his balls and cock. A longing has sprung up like a soldier hurtling forward at the sound of enemy fire. María del Pilar y del Consuelo, holding the candle that illuminates this moment, looks down on the movements of her husband’s hands and at the tremoring of his good eye, which quivers incessantly: watching it quiver is like watching a rotten egg joggle slightly inside a jar. He should’ve gotten up today, thinks the woman who now places the candle down on the table. If he had he’d be tired by now, dead tired after having gone up to the hacienda, she thinks, looking at the network of scars on the forehead, temple, and left eyelid of her husband, whose desire seethes, close to boiling point.
As María del Pilar sees his hand go up, her second daughter starts crying on the other side of the shack, finally awoken by the other girl’s wail. María del Pilar, who gave birth to the youngest of the girls four months earlier, does not register María del Sagrado and Heredí de los Consuelos’s cries. Her skin, which often senses surrounding sounds, has gone numb at the sight of her husband’s hand lifting, ordering her to come closer. A small pearl of sweat rolls down the woman’s forehead and trembling face as she approaches the sweating, pulsing body of her husband, who has just drawn back his foreskin: the tip gleams like his dead eye. With a swift gesture out of keeping with his hulking frame, thefirstone throws himself forward and snatches up his wife’s wrist. María del Pilar lets herself be pulled toward him, while her daughters wail so loudly that the dogs, awake now, begin to circle the shack.
Thefirstone’s jaw slackens at the sight of her lifting her skirt, but then his face turns taut again: a strange movement behind his wife catches his eye, and he thinks he sees, through a gap in the boards that make up the wall, the scythe of his delusions come tumbling from the sky once more. Shaking his head like a dog shaking the water from its back, thefirstone hears his wife’s knees creak, and sees her face, dissolved in sweat. Outside their shack, meanwhile, a trio of black vultures is feasting—it was these carrion birds that thefirstone mistook for the bastard scythes of his fever. In a matter of minutes, the ravenous birds will have devoured the coyote they are currently vying for, a coyote that was killed three or four days ago by a hunter and his dogs, whose collective fury widowed the female coyote that was wailing earlier on, just as the two girls now wail inside the shack.
The dogs, unsettled by the crying girls, have begun to bark. Hearing the barking and pulling down his wife’s underwear, thefirstone is taken back to a day, long ago, when he and his brothers looked up at the horizon and saw an enormous dust cloud approaching, drawing behind it a dry, intermittent, drumlike noise. A wall of dust coming at them. The cloud cleared a number of minutes later, revealing a hundred horses galloping forward, however many howling dogs there were, and a huge mass of men shouting and whistling. When this ocean reached them—stock still and enchanted by a strong and strange sensation he would later try to describe by saying: “It was both longing and fear, both at once”—thefirstone begged the riders to take him with them, riders accompanied by the same pack of dogs that went on to beget the hounds currently barking in the yard outside.
As happens whenever barking starts up among a pack of dogs and there is no reason for it, the barking soon turns to snarling, and the animals turns on one another. The smallest animals capitulate first, followed by the sickly and then the old, and the yard only falls quiet again once all the dogs bar two—the two strongest and most vicious—have been vanquished, a quiet broken by the wailing of the girls, by the panting, gasping, and huffing of thefirstone, and by the cries of María del Pilar y del Consuelo—whom we should not now refer to by her full name, but simply as “consuelo,” which after all is the word for “solace.” As this violence is inflicted on her, consuelo succeeds in imagining herself elsewhere. For the first time, she finds she truly hates this man with his arms around her; a hate that will only grow from this day forward. Blind son of a bitch, she says inside her head. Her husband has never told her the story of how he lost his eye, has not told her, that is, that he lost it in a skirmish with the police when his horse, startled by bullets and cannonballs flying, threw him onto some rocks, one of which, sharpened by wind and rains, was only too happy to relieve him of his sight.
How well my deafness has suited you, consuelo thinks, still staring into the dead eye. How convenient, never having to explain yourself. She is full of hate, it expands inside her and she opens her mouth while saying inwardly: How convenient for you, to never have to hear me say a word—and then spits into her husband’s dead eye. Thefirstone feels the impact of it, wonders what it is, but before he has worked it out another gob of spittle has landed at the center of the doughy gray scar of his blindness. “What the fuck are you doing?” he says, not out loud but rather with a gesture of his hands and mouth, and the only reply he gets is to be spit on once again. Furious, thefirstone wraps his arms around the body on top of him, and, pushing down on the coarse cold thighs with which she is trying to lift herself off his lap, shoves himself into her. Chin on his wife’s shoulder, Félix Salvador Germán Alcántara Arreola shuts his eyes as her warm saliva drips from his face in the same way blood dripped from it on the day of the accident: If only it had been just my eye, he thinks, even as he thrusts into her. If only I hadn’t ended up alone as well. He shoves his wife’s face back and, his frenzy increasing, bellows, “They left us to die. They told us to get out of there, and told us that what we thought wasn’t enough, was actually got more than we deserved.”
With a few cracks of his neck, thefirstone shakes away the memories that are close to submerging him completely, and raises his huge haunches from the earthen floor, lifting his wife up with him. As though trying to insert his entire body into her. For her part, she only wants this moment to end. “Go on, you animal, get it over with,” this woman says to herself in silence, using other words, words from a language she made up long ago. “Get it over with, and let me go,” she says. Félix Salvador opens his mouth and, throwing his head back, spews up a viscous sort of yowl, fingers juddering as a shock runs through him, an earthquake throughout his entire body. Spent, his seed deposited, he rolls back onto the ground and pushes the woman off him, dribble running down over his jowls and chest and a good part of his abdomen. He then very slowly begins coming back to himself and, on noticing his daughters crying, the youngest and the other one, the one born with a puckered face and a lolling tongue, points to the other side of the shack. You: go.
Consuelo lifts her face and, feeling the seed of hate gaining purchase deep in her body, gets up. One of the girls must be crying. As she crosses the space, the light from the candle sets her features trembling—features that have grown hard with rancor and that now fail to find the configuration previously known to them. She is changed, a woman whose every inch now complies with an order she utters in a language that is solely her own: “You: stop your trem
bling.”
María del Pilar’s dislocated expression will from this day on be her only expression and this her body with its hard new armature of courage or anger, anger she will pass on to sons and daughters alike. When she reaches the girls and finds them both crying, her anger evaporates and shame flushes through María del Pilar, every inch of her. She feels an urge to go to the well, to plunge naked into it, and to stay there feeding on mud forever.
The dogs outside, spent from their fight, descend into sleep, borne down by the low song of María del Pilar y del Consuelo, behind whom thefirstone falls asleep in an instant. His dreams are of the years before his illness, his years as an outlaw. As the candlelight trembles, its wick about to expire, the two girls, calm now, look up at the woman as she places them gently back down before opening her arms wide, bringing her legs together, opening them again when she feels how wet they are, arching her back, and getting up and going over to the doorway, passing through it and out into the night, the massive darkness that buries everything. This is the same darkness that ourman will look upon each sundown of the year between his decision to leave the ministry and the day that awaits us at the turning of this page, a day about which, if this story yet had no beginning, it might be possible to say: this is when it begins.
Fortuna
June 14, 1957: a day we arrive in having crossed the high mesa once more and a little over half a century, a day that holds within it a moment unusually bright in the life of Germán Alcántara Carnero. A moment that could be this story’s beginning, were it not for the fact that this story has no beginning and, of course, for the fact that it is concerned only with the knots in a thread—and not with its ends or with its length. Our story is concerned only with the moments that hinder the unspooling of a life: four men torturing a priest; a young man crying out from inside a bolted iron trunk; two young people fleeing abroad; a young man confronting his father; men having ears and eyelids cut off; a brother asking: “Where is my sister?”; a woman who, having given birth moments earlier, hears someone say: “Sickly”; and a man, this man before us right now, in fact, who is currently, tentatively, knocking on the door of a home.
Puzzled that no one comes to the door, this man we are now seeing for the first and last time—thick spectacles, very thin mustache, long mane of hair—lifts his face and sees a flock of birds flying low to the ground. In the morning light their feathers are strangely silver, and the sky is a deep, metallic indigo. He scans the house of the woman he awaits, peers at roof, cornices, yellow walls, door—a woman whose life is going to touch that of Germán Alcántara Carnero’s, who, a year after giving up his work, is still trying to ascertain what to want as much as what to do, all while trying to figure out what made him think this openness is what he wanted, what he was missing. “Still haven’t figured it out?” thefirstone’s son asks himself in the early hours every day. “What you must do to put an end to this sleeplessness, this restlessness, this searching? Did you not say you would put all the guilt behind you when you left, all the shame? Didn’t you say that peace lay this way?” But though this is his story, Germán Alcántara Carnero, currently racking himself in the massive, silent darkness of Lago Seco, is not at this moment of any importance, unlike this other man now rapping on the door.
“I’m going to knock this door down if she doesn’t get out here,” he says to himself, a man of middling height whom we will very soon forget, in the same way that ourman goes on to forget about him. What the hell is keeping her? he asks himself, looking at his watch and eagerly, or rather anxiously, turning and pacing a little way to the left. Coming to the window, he gets up on tiptoes to look in, but the light on the glinting glass prevents him from getting a good look inside.
It is the time of day when people are out on the streets of Lago Seco, when children go to school and their parents go to work, the time of day when dogs scavenge piles of trash and cats slink back to their resting places. Worried about the time, this man, neither large nor small but whose clothes are too small for him and who wears children’s shoes and a tie that could be a hangman’s noose, goes back to the door and knocks once more—harder this time, the sound much like the one made by Germán Alcántara Carnero as he slams the door of his house behind him: he has been up late again and decides to take a walk to see if going out might help him fend off his past and maybe silence the voices he has been hearing since the day he quit: weren’t you going to become something else? But now is not the time to speak of this.
Now is the time to orbit this man, a being so average, even his innermost yearnings are paragons of moderation—let us then call him middling. Having paced around a little more, leaned against a wooden post, looked at his watch, and walked a short distance from the house, middling marches up to the door and begins pounding on it. Inside, the three women sit bolt upright in the bed, extricate themselves from one another, and hurry to the door. The sound of their clattering footfall resounds in the hallway, where a figure of Christ is hung and where a dull white light bounces off of floor tiles that are the color of milk when it boils. Hearing the footfall, middling stops knocking, and the grandfather clock in the parlor strikes as the sisters bid their hurried farewells. One of them opens the door and the other two move aside. They cannot embrace as they would have hoped to, and their imagined, impossible embraces become lodged in their bodies, and there they will remain.
When the door swings open, middling takes a step forward and, pointing to his watch, cries out: “We’re going to be late again! We’re not going to make the appointment. I told you to be ready—I told you.” “Oh,” says this woman with a smile and a squint—5’2”, brown-skinned, firm-fleshed, though by Lago Seco standards she is positively tall, lean, and alabaster-white—“I’ve left my papers. Won’t be a second.” And she dives back into her parents’ home—the canaries and larks in the inner courtyard cease their singing when she comes through—and dashes into her father’s study, hunting through the writing desk, grabbing a bundle of papers, and going back out to the street, where middling points to the hands of the watch that so concern him. “It’s after eight already. Just let me know when you intend for us to leave. Maybe they’ll just wait another six months, or another year.” Her smile turns to laughter as she pulls shut the door of her home, where Germán Alcántara Carnero is very soon to make an appearance. Turning the key in the lock, she takes middling’s arm, which he sulkily proffers.
The sun rises calmly into the sky, its metallic and now orange-tinged rays lighting up the birds, the edges of a cloud that is gradually drifting farther away, the cats posted around on the enclosing walls of homes, the bark on the wooden stakes, the highest leaves on the trees, and the tops of the palm trees ourman ordered be planted all across the Mesa Madre Buena. As they turn at the corner of Candelaria and Nombre del Señor, middling, still angry, shakes off the woman’s arm and says: “You were supposed to be ready when I came—before I came!” And again she laughs and makes no reply. “Come on,” he says, “there’s still a way to go yet.”
The streets they are still to reach are the same ones that separate Germán Alcántara Carnero from the town square, and if we look up at the sidewalk ahead, we’ll see him there, dragging his feet, arms hanging like heavy vines, immersed in thought: How to make this pain go? How to make myself forget? And, as on the last three hundred and however many mornings, his answer is the same: Not by going back to the ministry. I need to find whatever it was that made me give it all up to begin with!
A car passes on the street, the sound of its motor catching the couple’s attention but not that of ourman. We will eventually come back to middling and the woman, who has quickened her pace somewhat, so that she is now advancing as briskly as ourman, for all that ourman has no particular destination, and only wants to tire himself out, only wants to find a way to sleep.
A second car comes along the street, its tailpipe spluttering and making Germán Alcántara Carnero jump—thinking he’s heard a gunshot—
Maybe you miss all that? he asks himself, alarmed. Maybe that’s what you’re yearning for? But how could you be, if that’s all you think about, if the very second I even think about laying my head on a pillow, I see her bleeding again, her dying white hands, her eyes going dim, that helpless look! Immersed as he is, Germán Alcántara Carnero walks straight out onto Unión de San Antonio, where a car nearly hits him. The driver starts insulting him, but then, seeing who it is, immediately stops and speeds off.
Startled more by his dragging tiredness than by the accident he has just narrowly avoided, Germán Alcántara Carnero quickens his pace. Must find what it is that you don’t have. Stop thinking about what you had before. God knows what it is, but you can still try to look, who knows, you might chance upon it. In fact, his quest is nearly at an end. Coming to the town square, he stops, recalling the day he laid these flagstones and thus temporarily letting go of his inner questioning, this inner siege. His eyes reflect the people crossing the space, the motionless trees at even intervals, the glistening water in the fountains, the glass plates in the streetlamps, and the worn-down metal benches.
Do you truly not see it? That you just need to admit you were wrong? Germán Alcántara Carnero asks himself, stumbling once more into his memories and raising his enormous hands to protect himself from the sparks flying off the blacksmith’s stall ahead. To just accept that you were wrong to think you could simply walk away? Repeating these questions, he sets off with the quick skip of a startled horse. A couple of meters away, meanwhile, the man we have already begun to forget is shouting at his woman: “Come on, hurry it up—we might still make it! It’ll be tight, but we might!” “I can’t run anymore,” says the woman who has now crossed the same number of streets as ourman and has arrived in the square at the same time as him. “If you’d bothered to be on time, we wouldn’t have to run!” says middling, turning to the person he is dragging along, who, stopping, says: “We wouldn’t even be here, you mean, if you weren’t as stubborn as a mule,” at which she pulls up and ourman, coming the opposite way, crashes into her. Down she goes, crashing into middling in the same way that this moment crashes into our story, a story in which, at 08:17 on June 14, 1957, three lives become entangled and simultaneously derailed.
The Arid Sky Page 3