Forcing her midriff forward and crying out, María del Pilar y del Consuelo sees shadows growing and airborne insects moving: huge green beetles and grain moths and flies and gnats, a pair of cicadas and a fantastic dung beetle whose mercury wings gather the reflections of this dying day—a day as dim as this moment, which has not been called upon to illuminate the length of our thread, but rather to show us the place where our thread joins its bobbin—that is, where the life of a mother and her son are fastened together. María del Pilar y del Consuelo Carnero Villalobos stretches her arms and tenses her back as hard as she can, and succeeds in grabbing onto the low beam that crosses the coop: Now, she thinks. Do it now, even as the thought crosses her mind that she will have to clean up after herself, not wanting any of the intimate results of her childbirth to be found by her husband—who is yet to come back from work at the hacienda on the far side of this plain, part of a land forgotten by god long ago and known by its landowners as “our lands” instead of by its name: the Mesa Madre Buena. Gripping the beam, she tries to straighten up but a contraction shoots along her bones and through her veins. This woman, whom we will call for now womanwhoholds, cries out—almost a howl—while one of the dogs in the yard pricks its ears and lifts its muzzle off the ground, sniffing the air: dry grass and roots; the smell of small birds and of seeds; beyond that, the smell of stones; of brackish water and of rusted metal; and even farther off, a feline smell: the small mountain lions of this region; and of coyotes.
Relieved to find that everything is in its proper place, resting snout on paws, it begins probing the smells of the silhouettes it can tell apart from the evening darkness—a darkness that has rendered María del Pilar y del Consuelo Carnero Villalobos blind as she sits back down, sweating into the earthen floor. While we were outside this woman tried again and again to lift herself up using the beam. It’s like it’s turned to lead, womanwhoholds thinks, looking down at her belly. Bringing a hand up to eye level and moving it away, only now does María del Pilar y del Consuelo realize how dark it has become, and finds herself traveling through time, with no intention to do so. She is suddenly in that long-ago night when her parents made her leave their home on the coast and come to this plain, thereby saving her from the epidemic that would soon claim them and her siblings when it rampaged along the Pacific coast and through the sierra inland. How long until you come and join me? María del Pilar remembers asking that night. In response, her father lifted a number of fingers on one hand—she could not make out the number in the darkness.
María del Pilar y del Consuelo, ridding herself of these inner shadows with a shake of her head, says to herself, “Maybe if I do it all at once, pull with my arms and push with my legs, maybe I can make it to the hut that way, use a bit of ash to wipe myself with, find some clean rags.” Jaw clenched—as I have already said, this woman made the decision, a little over half a year before, never to give in to anything again—María del Pilar y del Consuelo, placing supporting hands beneath her belly and wheezing, becomes mired again in the shadows that are her own shadows. She sees her parents again and, perhaps realizing that this moment is not just any moment, she wonders why she never heard from them again, though she’d never known much about them anyway, only this: her father was born on this mesa but fled to the coast at a very young age and entered the army only to become a deserter later on. Her mother was a native of these lands, orphaned young and taken in by a Chinese family that had come to work the railroads, whose language she never learned, not a single word. Before María del Pilar y del Consuelo can shake the memory from her head once more, a further cramp or shock or spasm rocks her.
Curled up on the floor, womanwhoholds vomits up the harsh and rasping sound of the pain that is wracking her: a cry so curdling and cold it disturbs the world. “Have to get this baby out,” María del Pilar y del Consuelo says to herself: “I can’t stay here,” lifting her head from the patch of mingled sweat and earth, getting her hands onto the corn again, lifting herself onto the chair, and looking over at the door, in which a shadow abruptly appears. The dog has come in, and is agitated at the sight of the woman, having never seen her overcome like this: her arms limp, hair dripping wet, breathing both deep and shallow, and a very strange scent about her.
Like a drowning man who sees he is not going to be saved, womanwhoholds fastens her hands onto the beam, tenses her back, and pushes down through her legs—one second, two, three, four seconds—until finally she has succeeded in straightening her legs. In the doorway, the dog sniffs the ground nervously and watches as its mistress straightens her back and, eyes on her feet, lets go of the beam. Her eyes have adjusted to the darkness and she can discern the scabs on her hands that could easily be moles, and on the beam—as well as on the ground and the walls and even the roof of this coop—a covering of broken eggshells, dry animal shit, bird feathers, and bloodstains, all of it evidence of a cruel slaughter. Sickness emerged victorious from this battlefield—a sickness known among the men and women of the plain as swollen kidney and defined by the experts in the following way: Worse even than diarrhea, or the endolimax nana parasite, bird flu, or the diseases known as “bluecomb” and “blackbreast,” the “swollen kidney” sickness submits the animal to horrific bouts of pain and condemns it to die a very slow death. Known also as “Marek’s Disease,” this illness sends the infected animal’s temperature soaring, weakens its digestive system, and produces a thick, foul-smelling diarrhea. The vital organs eventually become inflamed and the nervous system shuts down. The final state of this illness is characterized by the innards of the bird rotting, forcing it to expel, via its anus and beak, a violet-colored mucus that contains its own liquefied organs, a mucus that furthermore will infect the ground of the pen or coop irrevocably. (Perhaps this is why only pigs, and the occasional cow, are now raised on this mesa.) In its earliest stages, however, the only effect of Marek’s Disease, named after Julius Marek, is to numb the legs of the infected bird. Once it is infected, its legs will give way constantly, just like the legs failing to support María del Pilar y del Consuelo Carnero Villalobos, whose knees wobble, ankles shake, and hips sway like a ship lists and sways in a storm. A couple of seconds later, womanwhoholds collapses, and as she lies on the ground some of the small white flies come to rest on her belly—a belly that, seen thus, in darkness and beneath her clothes, resembles more closely the swollen belly of a drowned person than that of a woman entering labor.
The dog grows increasingly unsettled, its sense of smell awash with the odors of this coop and with the smell now being exuded by María del Pilar y del Consuelo Carnero Villalobos. Instinct tells it to place a paw tentatively forward, keeping its eyes on the heap that is womanwhoholds, who feels the life inside her begin to writhe more violently still, the rage in its movements tearing at the membranes that separate her insides from the outside world—and her legs part. All at once, a draft of wind sweeps through the coop, and the dog and the woman turn their heads. The night has brought with it the gusts of sickness that blow across this mesa every six or seven months—winds that stop most plants from growing and that some people say come from the mines beyond the ridge of the mountains, and that others say originate in those places along the coast where animals are slaughtered. Here in this place where a great dam will one day be built, a dam that I have said we will visit when the time comes, winds stunt the growth of anything that is not an agave plant, a certain clumpy grass local to this area, mesquite trees, certain cacti, the odd thistle, the small, spiky bisnaga, the enterolobium pods, pepper trees, or the occasional fig tree.
The sulfurous dust and the infected wood chippings borne by these winds of sickness arrive in the coop accompanied by the sound of a bird flapping its wings somewhere in the distance, the smell of a decaying rabbit carcass somewhere else, and the sound of a rattlesnake nearby. María del Pilar y del Consuelo, though, does not pick up on the stink carried in by this wind—a smell so putrid that it forces the other dogs to their feet—and neither is she aware, o
f course, of the sounds accompanying the wind. She can contemplate nothing but what is going on in her innards, this struggle between her body and this other, smaller, seemingly molten body. Spreading her legs as wide as she can and resting her elbows on the floor, womanwhoholds lays her head back against the ground, raises her legs, and hooks her ankles over the beam she used a few moments ago to lift herself up. Above her body, in the space intersected by her moans and exclamations, the insects and bugs begin to swarm, frenzied: cicadas striking the roof in search of an opening, flies going up in eddies again, a scorpion raising its tail as the shimmering dung beetle approaches, and the spiders, feeling hopeful, poised at the edges of their webs.
Outside, meanwhile, the dogs that have been roused by the wind hurry near, approaching the place where the scent of their alpha mingles with that of María del Pilar y del Consuelo and with that of a creature who is new to their senses—a being who has decided the time has come to cut through the last two layers of the warm membranes that have until now held him inside his mother’s womb. Her face changes—tenses with alarm—and she turns pale and trembles and her face seems to dissolve again and again. As her son presents his downy head to the world, womanwhoholds, little aware of why or of how she’s doing so, contracts her muscles, squeezes her hips, flexes the tendons in her legs, and in the language she invented so many years ago, says: “I won’t let you out… I’m keeping you in me forever… I won’t let him hurt you, too.” It has just struck María del Pilar y del Consuelo Carnero Villalobos that her son—she somehow knows it is a boy—will also be her husband’s son, and this simple fact is terrifying to her. It is curious that it should be here, in the place where ourman will one day seek to alter the unalterable, that María del Pilar y del Consuelo Carnero Villalobos is now also attempting to alter the unalterable.
But before going on with the moment in which we find ourselves, let us pause—a pause that will serve as a window through which we can glimpse certain aspects of other moments in time, for example the moment I have just alluded to, which at the end of our story will be further dissected:
January 4, 1950, the sun three-quarters into the course that organizes a day, as Germán Alcántara Carnero gazes into Anne Lucretius Ford’s eyes and plunges his enormous hands into her blood-soaked midriff in an attempt to keep Anne’s blood from spilling from her. An hour and a half earlier, and while they were crossing the vast stretch of thicketland where, in the moment we have just left and to which we will very soon return, ourman is being born, Germán Alcántara Carnero and his partner were ambushed by Ignacio del Sagrado Sandoval-Íñiguez Martínez and four of his men, who had followed them across the thicket, the rocky outcrop, and much of the scrubland where, with the bullets flying closer and closer, ourman said to his woman, pointing to a group of boulders: “Go in there. I’ll be right behind you.”
Perched at the top of a pepper tree that he quickly shinned up, Germán Alcántara Carnero waited for Ignacio del Sagrado and his men to come within range, and when they were finally close enough, he shot and injured three of them. When he went to take down the fourth—he was saving Ignacio del Sagrado for last—his gun, which had never failed him before in his life, jammed—and then the bullets began flying in one direction only. Letting himself drop like ripe fruit falling from a tree, Germán Alcántara Carnero abandoned the pepper tree and, as soon as he felt his legs make contact with the ground—the same ground upon which María del Pilar y del Consuelo Carnero Villalobos had once fought to keep her child inside her belly—began running toward the boulders where he’d left Anne Lucretius: a woman who’d come to this country so as to never be apart from ourman, a man who, we will see when the time comes, had to flee this country only later to flee the country he’d fled to. When Germán Alcántara Carnero finally reaches her, she is down on her knees, face streaming and a pool of blood forming on the ground beneath her.
Ourman lifts Anne Lucretius onto her feet and asks if she’s able to run, and it takes all she’s got—more than she’s got—to even try; she cannot move at any kind of speed. Ignacio del Sagrado and his man are closing in, the bullets landing nearer and nearer. It is then that, as I said in the first chapter of our story and as I said at the beginning of this moment we are now observing, Germán Alcántara Carnero jumps down into a ditch, bringing Anne Lucretius in after him. Holding her in his arms, looking into her eyes, and placing his huge hands on the innards spilling from her, he asks: “Can you go on or not?” Shutting her eyes, she says, “I don’t think I can take another step.” Plunging his enormous forefinger two knuckles deep into the wound, so that her eyes shoot open, ourman repeats his question, though the reply is the same. Pushing his finger still farther in, Germán Alcántara Carnero moves right up close to the ashen face now two centimeters from his, begging once more: “Just one step… Or I could put you over my shoulders at least.”
“Tell them I don’t owe them anything. Tell them I don’t know anything about this,” Anne Lucretius says, or rather murmurs, in a tiny voice. Then, “You should get out of here before they come. Before those men get here.” As she looks up at the sky, fixing her sight on the dimming gray mantle, ourman once more forces his finger into the burning wound through which her life is emptying, so that she will at least hear when he says, “Really think I’d leave you now?” To which, with a final smile, Anne Lucretius responds, “At least… at least you brought me here. At least I die having seen the place you were born.” This was the reason they first came here together: she found it impossible to imagine his past. “Go, go,” she says. “They must be nearly on us, even I can tell that,” she insists, and with that her trembling legs give way, like the legs of a bird with Marek’s Disease. Pushing his finger still farther in, ourman kisses Anne… but what he did next we do not see, because our view of it fades in the second Germán Alcántara Carnero removes his finger from the wound—gives up on trying to stop time and destiny—the same defiance shown by womanwhoholds as she attempts to stave off her son’s birth, tries to draw the fragile body of ourman back inside her, concentrating all her energy on her lower regions as another centimeter of skull emerges from her, bloody and covered in black hairs—short, stubbly black hairs like ants. Forcing her shoulders down against the ground, María del Pilar y del Consuelo arches her back and lets out a guttering howl, further distressing the dogs gathered around the coop. A flick of the tail and a quick flash of teeth from the alpha, however, is enough to keep them at bay—only he gets to be inside the coop, where womanwhoholds, though she feels the whole head emerging, continues to try to suck in and up and back. Such is the effort that an unnatural fatigue immediately grips her, plunging her into a dark, dense lethargy, while the rest of the body of ourman slips toward life as a fish slips through clumsy fingers.
A second before tumbling into the chasm of unconsciousness, she manages to take her child in her arms and lie back down on the floor. Ourman immediately begins to wail. Several minutes will pass before María del Pilar y del Consuelo will regain consciousness, get up and leave the coop, taking the newborn to the shack, into which we will not follow them. Our story, a story that has now illuminated the bobbin to which its thread is attached, must now leave this hour, this day, this year. As María del Pilar exits the coop, the alpha dog comes sniffing forward, then licks and chews and eventually gulps down the abandoned placenta—as rich and sweet to it as the mother’s breast is rich and sweet to the child just born.
Stifling her child’s cries with her body as she crosses the yard, María del Pilar y del Consuelo slips into the shack in which little María del Sagrado and Heredí de los Consuelos Alcántara Carnero are sleeping bundled together. Having lit the tallow candles and the stove, she gives ourman a wash and begins feeding him, taking in the sight of him, tenderly stroking him. Then, moving him from one breast to the other and looking up, she sees in the distance, framed by the doorway, a light coming across the scrubland: it is Félix Salvador Germán Alcántara Arreola returning from work, lamp in one hand, scyt
he in the other, soon to clear the dogs from his path, cross the yard, push aside the cloth over the doorway, and, in the instant we depart, find a scene that was not the one he had been expecting.
Deception, Reparation
From now on, this story will dissect only the moments that illuminate a life in the same way that a lighthouse’s twin beams illuminate the darkness: though lighting up two specific points, they also cast light on the darkness between them, just as knots in a thread give tension beyond just the fastened point: a young man fleeing and joining a band of fugitives, a giant dam, an uprising, a journey to another country, guilt, the longing with which one remembers the dead, the sadness of losing a woman and the joy of finding another one, violent parents and brutal children, the renunciation of certain principles, the desire to make an heir and the abjuration of what is seen in his eyes, the murder of a treacherous priest, and the moment when another priest—a priest who suddenly now comes into view—says at the top of his voice, shouting, possibly even reveling in it: “Sickly! The baby has been born sickly!”
What does that mean, “sickly”? Germán Alcántara Carnero thinks, jumping out of his chair and going over to the wooden door that separates the hallway in which we find ourselves and his room. “What does that mean?” he insists, while complaining inwardly: I should have resisted her wishes. He should never have come into the house. Ourman pelts the wood with his two enormous hands, but nobody answers. At the priest’s announcement, the enormous room on the top floor of this house falls silent—a house built a number of years ago in lands that were worked by thefirstone and later by ourman. Germán Alcántara Carnero feels frightened—the cries of Dolores Enriqueta Celis Gómez have stopped, as have the sharp commands of the woman assisting her—and he beats on the door and shouts again: “What do you mean, sickly? What’s going on in there? Why is no one answering me?” While his mouth flings forth these words, he thinks to himself: I should not have let a priest come in. He must have done something… I took my vengeance, so why wouldn’t he come and try to take vengeance for them also?
The Arid Sky Page 5