This trio, now piled together on the ground, stare at one another wordlessly. Had middling seen ourman coming he would have done everything he could to avoid him, for all that it would have made the couple later still. Disentangling their limbs but not their lives, these beings we have been watching look away from one another and, still not saying a word, begin examining themselves: knees, palms of hands, wrists, elbows, and shoulders. People in the square veer past them, the cooing of the unsettled doves in the trees drifts down, while in the distance, a buzz or murmur grows: a flock of sparrows comes into view, their little gray bodies dropping on the square like a downpour. While ourman makes to get up, the cooing doves begin to lift their heavy selves skyward.
What on earth am I thinking, Germán Alcántara Carnero asks himself, walking around without looking where I’m going? Propping himself up on one arm, he continues: Actually, what were these two idiots thinking? He brings his other arm around onto the flagstones and turns to look at the person lifting up his torso and head. Before he’s had a chance to tell middling what he thinks of him, there is a noise like an explosion on one corner of the square: a truck has stopped on Calle Sufragio Efectivo and in its bed, attached to a steel bar, stands a huge pink pig, so large it could almost be a flayed cow. Gouts of smoke are coming from the truck and continue to do so even when the owner of vehicle pops the hood and unscrews the cap that was smothering the engine. He shouldn’t have taken it off quickly like that when it’s hot, thinks ourman, eyes trained on the truck. Why did we have to crash into someone now, and why did it have to be into this man? the man we have nearly forgotten asks himself, not daring to grumble or even ask after his woman’s injuries.
Eventually, Germán Alcántara Carnero cries out: “What the hell were you thinking, not looking where you’re going?” Straightening up, bringing his weight to bear on his two knees and on the tips of his shoddy old shoes, rolling his head forward, back, and then to both sides, Alcántara Carnero realizes the blow his shoulder just sustained has awakened a wound that hasn’t bothered him for a number of years: an impact that shattered his shoulder and split it in three one morning long ago—a morning whose details are not however required in the telling of this story. Now our story dissects this moment, a moment in which ourman demands to know, as he puts his hand to his shoulder: “Are you fucking blind?” And it is the woman who answers: “You’ve got eyes in your head, too. Why didn’t you see us?” And, laying her hands across her breast, the place where the shoulder of this individual struck her, the woman we are watching says once more, as middling looks on in terror, “You were coming straight at us, too. You could have looked.”
The doves that flew up above the square a moment ago turn in the air one last time before coming to rest on the roofs, the cornices, the drainpipes, and the walls of the homes and buildings of Lago Seco, a city that for fifteen years—since the government gave the order that everyone become a pig farmer—has given off a stench of guts, blood, pigskin, and pigsties. Alcántara Carnero lets out a laugh, astonished to hear anyone speak to him like this, and, taking his hand down from his shoulder, turns to look to his left. “Is it me you’re talking to like that?” he asks the woman, her head still bowed so that all he can see is the cascade of her hair. “I said, is it me you’re talking to like that?” Looking up, she says: “Who else? Can’t you tell this one doesn’t say much?” and she points at middling, who has a hard rock of fear inside him, one that keeps him pinned to the ground: “Shut up, woman!” he shouts. “It’s our fault. We were arguing, we didn’t look.” “I don’t need you to make excuses for me!” cries the woman, exasperated. She pierces Alcántara Carnero with a look, and his rage sinks into her black eyes—like a red-hot tool sinking into a bucket of dark, icy water. Do you remember now, all those things you said you’d do once you left, all those things you said you’d leave behind? Alcántara Carnero asks himself, unable to take his eyes from her jet-black pupils. For a minute, which feels like a second to ourman and like a lifetime to middling, the woman’s gaze and that of Germán Alcántara Carnero become entwined, he murmuring all the while: “So this is it… what I needed… what I should have done… this is what was missing,” and then, louder, words he has not spoken in many a year: “Are you all right?” “It hurts here,” says the woman, pointing to her chest, then the knee and ankle of one leg, “and here and here.” Growing calmer, she turns to middling, who, sensing what is happening, overcomes his fear and finally picks himself up.
So this was what I should have been trying to find… and this is how it ends!—while aloud: “Where does it hurt? What can I do? Can I get you anything?” The truck on the corner starts up again and the sparrows make as though to fly away, an upwards feint, but settle straight back down on their branches. “We’re fine,” answers middling. “We don’t need your help,” he says, replying to a question that wasn’t meant for him and placing himself between ourman—who feels his ribs lurching in a sudden and unfamiliar way—and the woman—whose knee hurts. Examining it, she says: “What do you know about what I need or don’t need? Since when have you been a doctor or a nurse?” At the sound of her voice, Alcántara Carnero feels that strange lurch in his chest once more. Plunging himself once more into her eyes of ash, ourman takes a step, shoves the other man away, and—all the while thinking: the only way I’ll become someone else is by making a family—offers her his hand. “Let me help you, I can take you to the Otero Hospital. That leg’s really bleeding, and it was my fault.” A few meters away, next to the smallest fountain in the square, a pair of pigeons that have been fighting over a female bird fall to the ground. Their squawking startles middling, but not ourman or the woman, who continue to look straight at each other. “Let me h-help you,” says Alcántara Carnero, surprised. Never before have his words come stumbling out like this.
Middling, heart close to exploding and hands like ice—petrified because he recognized ourman the moment he saw him—stands between him and his partner: “No, no, it was our fault. Please, we’re okay.” But ourman ignores this, holding out both hands in the shadow of the fountain, where a third male pigeon comes fluttering down—an opportunist moving in as the other pigeons begin to flag—and brushes his fingers against the woman’s skin, drawing a laugh and a reply from her: “The Otero Hospital won’t be open at this hour.” Middling, desperate now, says: “They won’t see us if we’re late. Here, let me help you up… They might, just might still let us in.” “Might let us in,” sneers the woman, as middling, poor middling, tries to make a show of bravery even in the face of an overwhelming terror, and again says: “Come on. There’s no time to mess around now. Really, truly, we have to hurry. We still might talk them round.” Taking ourman’s left hand and middling’s right hand, the woman finally allows herself to be lifted to her feet, only, once she is up, to break down laughing. Neither of the men understand this, but nor do either them let go of her strong, slender fingers.
Middling, ignoring his woman’s ongoing laughter as well as the memory called to mind by the presence of ourman—a memory of pain, humiliation, and abuse—with an unexpected rush of anger, punches away the wrist of Germán Alcántara Carnero. “Let go of her hand! She is a lady! No one here wants anything from you!” The woman, astonished, turns to him. “What is with you? It’s hardly… he was just trying to help.” Why middling might have reacted like this, she can’t imagine—unaware as she is that it has nothing to do with being late, nor with jealousy, unaware as she also is that these two men have met before, on a day I will now speak of though only very briefly, since, after all, this story does not belong to middling—a man who, along with a dozen other men, was part of a public protest on the main drag of Lago Seco on October 28, 1949, three days before All Saints’ Day. Middling and a number of other farmers, having come under the sway of a demented priest, demanded that the slaughterhouses change their methods and stop killing pigs in such cruel ways. They could no longer stand aside, they said, while the animals suffered so unnecessarily. It ha
d fallen to Germán Alcántara Carnero to clear the protesters, and he took most of his men down in the late afternoon—the time of day when gnats come out in force. The police, following his orders, surrounded the precinct and waited for nightfall before cutting off the electricity supply. Once the area had been plunged into darkness, ourman and his men burst in, firing their guns into the air, and began shouting and beating the twelve men, who lay on the ground hugging themselves and trembling in fear. They dragged the twelve farmers over to a bloodstained yard used for washing pigskins and tied them up while ourman taunted them: “Really want to stop seeing those piggies suffer, don’t you? Really want to stop hearing their little squeals, huh?” Then, to his men: “So cut off their eyelids and their ears.” As I have said, though, this took place a long time ago and on a day that sheds no light on the life of Germán Alcántara Carnero, which is also why he does not remember this other man whose hair falls over the scars where his ears once were and the rims of whose glasses obscure the marks around his eyes. This is not this maimed man’s story, and we would do well to return now to June 14, 1957, the day ourman met the woman who would later become his wife.
“Seriously, what is it?” says the woman, pointing at middling’s flushed skin. “Look at you, you look like you’re about to combust”—this draws a laugh from ourman, who cannot and does not want to look away from the obsidian eyes that glimmer whenever the woman laughs—a laughter middling cannot stand—it burns in his eyes and in his ears like alcohol burns in a wound—and now he drops the hand he grasped less than half an hour ago outside the woman’s front door. Taking no notice, she says to ourman: “Really think the hospital will be open?” They form a knot, this trio, and one strand now loosens and slips free, allowing the other two to clinch together more tightly. Middling, nearly forgotten now, turns and begins walking away. No longer average-sized but small, so small he’s practically nonexistent, middling swallows his pride and keeps walking, heading toward the opposite end of the square, where a squirrel and two pigeons are squabbling over a piece of dry bread. He sidesteps some sparrows, none of which move out of the way for him, and threads his way through the people and the street dogs slumbering on the ground.
Ourman and the woman whose name he has just asked both turn toward the street, where a man is riding by on a bicycle, and she says, “Dolores Enriqueta,” looking down as she walks, then looking off into the distance, then at her hands, then at the ground again, and then again at her hands. The sun’s orange hue has now altered to a pale yellow, prompting Dolores Enriqueta to think: Perhaps I am ill. “And what is your surname?” asks El Gringo, surprised by how quickly his questions come. “Celis Gómez; Dolores Enriqueta Celis Gómez.” A few meters from these two—neither of whom can imagine the deep unhappiness that awaits them as a couple—the pigeon that managed to beat its two tired foes in corralling the female coos in victory. No longer aware of the people passing silently on either side or of the heat or of the light glinting off everything, the couple we are following, whom we will call from this moment on ourcouple, comes to the corner of Sufragio Efectivo and Candelaria. “And where is your home?” Germán Alcántara Carnero then asks Dolores Enriqueta Celis Gómez, who gestures toward the end of the street and says: “71, Nombre del Señor.”
Ourcouple turn and look into each other’s eyes again, this time smiling. Something tells her that she has found a good man, and him that he has found the mother of his future children. Neither Germán Alcántara Carnero nor Dolores Enriqueta Celis Gómez can imagine the tragedy that will eventually engulf the birth of their first child, or the misfortunes that will befall their two other two children—a blow so great that it will engulf Dolores Enriqueta in the same sadness she will experience upon the birth of her first child, the child to whom Germán Alcántara Carnero will dedicate himself body and soul until the day comes when he will dedicate himself body and soul to a faith he had formerly, for nearly six decades, repudiated and set himself against. But many years have yet to pass before then, and this current moment is still not at an end.
Germán Alcántara Carnero and Dolores Enriqueta Celis Gómez stroll in silence, as though for the thousandth time, making their way along the streets that lie between the town square and the home we visited briefly when this moment first began to unfold, a home I later resided at for a number of years and which this woman, four months from now, will depart for good.
But at this point in the story—a story that finally knows where its beginnings might have been and that knows, too, that I myself will be a knot in its thread—the only thing of import is to turn to the moment that shines least light on the life of ourman—a moment that, were someone else to tell this story, might be placed at the beginning, but to organize the life of Germán Alcántara Carnero thus—for it is a life that has no beginning—would be sorely ill suited.
Birth, Illumination
Now for the moment that sheds the least light on the life of ourman—a moment we arrive in having crossed the mesa and a span of fifty-five years, two months, and eight and a half days—a moment that, as I said before, would be our beginning if this story weren’t being told by me, or indeed if there were no knot in its thread linking my life to the life of ourman. We will come to this knot in time, but for now, what matters is this moment: María del Pilar y del Consuelo Carnero Villalobos, as the sun beyond the laden fig tree struggles to break through the wooden slats of the old chicken coop, feels a jabbing in her innards and, rolling down her skirts, observes movement at the surface of her belly. She is a number of weeks short of term, yet here are the pains she has only known previously in labor: a fire kindled inside her abdomen, her breasts, and her belly button; and her vagina suddenly like a teeming anthill.
Tearing her eyes as best as she can from that frenzied sensation between her legs, and wresting her patience from the moment she finds herself in—a moment that, as I have already said, sheds little light on the life of ourman and that a different narrator might have used to open the faucet of this tale—María del Pilar y del Consuelo Carnero Villalobos lifts her hand and vigorously waves it through the air, swatting at the tiny white flies that for a number of minutes have been showing an interest in the sweat beading around her pores. This huge brigade rises to the ceiling, where a trio of beetles are sharpening their copper-colored wings and a shadowy moth wakes and begins flying against a beam until, insensate, it drops onto this woman’s contracting belly—at which she, making a pincer of her fingers, grabs it and squeezes until it bursts: her fingertips shimmer with the pale and pearly dust of the dead insect in the same way this moment shimmers in the life of ourman—a moment that rather than lighting up the whole length of a life, sheds light on its fugitive breadth.
María del Pilar y del Consuelo Carnero Villalobos rolls the squashed bug between forefinger and thumb and flings it through one of the cracks in the wall, where a magpie, raising its beak, swallows the insect and lets out a satisfied caw, which sets off the chorus of sounds that signifies the end of every afternoon in this place: frogs and toads, a donkey braying somewhere in the distance, an owl call cutting through the emptiness, and the rasping of cicadas that drifts up like murmured prayers drift up from the temple that ourman will one day raze, condemning it for good; another thing we will come to in time. Now though, deaf as she is, María del Pilar y del Consuelo Carnero Villalobos has no sense of the noises freighting the air outside, but she does know from the waning light in the coop that night is closing in. The sky outside is now an ancient gray mantle, the pasturelands growing turquoise blue, and the glowering, metallic scree field is suddenly a deep black pit. I need to be quick about this, get this baby out of me and get out of here, thinks this woman as jab after jab strikes at her innards, increasing in intensity all the time. “Quick, quick,” she says to herself in her own inner language, one she made up many years ago.
Urged on by the fading light, by the sounds she does not hear but can nonetheless sense, and by the violence of the j
abs ramming her insides harder and harder, María del Pilar y del Consuelo Carnero Villalobos grits her teeth, leans her weight onto the pile of corn she has been husking, shifts her feet in the black soil beneath her, and, moments before giving birth, arraigns herself: My bones were aching early this morning, my feet have been swollen for days, I should not have let it come to this. Digging her toes into the earthen floor, she takes a deep lungful of air, stretches her neck, tenses her back, and, eyes squeezed shut, tries to get up by pushing down on the corn—but cannot. But since the day of Germán Alcántara Carnero’s inception she has felt hard and immovable in the face of any setback, and she takes another breath and repeats to herself: “Have to, have to, have to…” She tries to get up once more, but midway through this attempt a jab lacerates her whole body, an electric shock that expands as dampness expands inside a wall, sapping her strength so that she tumbles onto this dark soil that looks so much like ash.
The Arid Sky Page 4