Eyes inflamed and face shaking, Germán Alcántara Carnero begins barging the thick door with his shoulder, arm, elbow, forearm, hip, thigh, and knee, but it does not budge in the slightest, indeed this immovability was ourman’s intention when, three years before, he said: “Make those doors thick and make ’em solid, make it so no one can knock ’em down. I don’t want no one getting in here if they’re looking to get their own back.” The window! He turns and goes back along the passageway, thinking: I’ll climb in through the window! Coming to the top of the stairway, he hears a strange noise behind him and halts, a buzzing and vibrating that, when he turns back, becomes a whispering. Someone is crying, or rather weeping, uncontrollably. Germán Alcántara Carnero retraces his steps, places an ear to the wood, takes in a lungful of the pestilent air seeping out through the cracks, and, hearing the priest again exclaim, “The child is sickly!” begins pounding on the door once more, the sound of his blows stirring the silent room to life. Footsteps can be heard now, a woman bathed in blood crying out, her niece crying out, and the priest muttering rosary after rosary. I should not have let you into this house, surely you have come to take vengeance for what I did to your people, thinks ourman, and a fire that he had thought extinguished flares up within him.
Wasn’t leaving the ministry going to be the end of it? Did I not say I’d leave all my anger there? El Gringo Alcántara Carnero wonders and, sitting down on the bench in the passageway again, insists: Did I not promise to leave the ministry and become something else? Did I not swear to no longer be that same man? How could I believe that my victims would forget? Leaning against the wall, on the other side of which Dolores Enriqueta Celis Gómez has just given birth to Germán Camilo Alcántara Celis, ourman tries to bring his breathing and his heartbeats into step as he hears the cracked mewling of the child born a minute earlier, at 01:34 on September 28, 1960. How could I think they wouldn’t come looking for me eventually? They can do what they like with me, it’s my child I care about. Getting up again from the bench, which he stole from a hacienda nearly twenty-one years ago, Germán Alcántara Carnero bangs on the door of his room and begs: “Don’t hurt them, please! Let me in, I want to see my family!” And he hears footsteps approach, a key turning, a bolt shooting back, and the lock opening.
The stout wooden panel inches open to reveal the pale and beardless face of the priest, a man no older than thirty. His eyes have the capacity to eradicate ourman’s dread anytime he talks to him about his past, but fail to alleviate the fear awoken in him now. Coming out and shutting the door behind him, the priest goes over to the bench, sits, waits for ourman to do likewise, and only then speaks—words that make no sense to Germán Alcántara Carnero: “Your boy has not been born in good health. My son, there’s something wrong with your child…” The priest’s words send ourman spiraling back through time, briefly glimpsing the home in which he was born nearly sixty years ago, then the country in which he lived more or less unintentionally for a time, and the journey back from that place, the years of his reign in the Mesa Madre Buena, the day he gave it all up, the morning when he collided with the woman now moaning inside the room, the afternoon of their wedding, the breakfast at which his wife told him she was pregnant, and then the moment just a couple of minutes before, when this person standing before him pronounced the baby sickly. “What do you mean?” Germán Alcántara Carnero thunders. “What has happened to my child?” And for the first time he understands that this—a child, or, more specifically, a family—is what he was waiting for all that time, what he needed in order to break with his past.
Feigning sadness, but unable to quell the glimmer—or rather the joyful sparkle—in his eyes, the pale, beardless, and balding priest—who might in fact be in his forties—says, “My son, your child has a sickness of the bones, and your wife is not in the clear. The Lord is calling her home, let us pray that she quickly finds peace.” Having failed to fully register this answer, but unable to contain or control himself, El Gringo Alcántara Carnero jumps up from the bench and wraps his enormous hands around the priest’s throat. Shoving him against the wall, he roars: “What are you so happy about? Why are your eyes smiling like that? Who sent you to my home? Who sent you, you leech?” The priest, who has heard all the tales of ourman, pisses himself before he knows it; the release of liquid finds its way down his legs and into his old, worn-out boots. Germán Alcántara Carnero whispers in the man’s ear, leering: “What have you done to my family, eh?” But before the priest can speak, a woman’s cry bursts from the room, so distorted and painful that ourman knows something is broken, irrevocably broken, in the breast of his wife.
Tossing the priest aside, ourman pushes open the door only to be confronted with Dolores Enriqueta Celis Gómez emitting another howl; with the vexed faces of the midwives, who a few hours earlier had given the woman a ribbon for good luck; and with his niece, whom he also pushes to one side, going straight over to the mattress on which Germán Camilo Alcántara Celis has been placed. The baby’s form, head included, looks all wrong. Balling up his fists, and his stomach, too, ourman leans over, stretches out his arms, and picks up the child who, feeling hands holding him, stops crying from his misshapen mouth. Ourman turns and moves toward Dolores Enriqueta Celis Gómez, who also falls silent at her husband’s approach. Coming to the bed, he holds his child out to the woman we are now watching—this woman we met for the first time just two years prior to this moment in the town square of Lago Seco and who now clutches the blue ribbon given to her by the midwife, spurning the child with a desolate look and burying her face in the pillow.
In astonishment and surprise, Germán Alcántara Carnero makes a half turn and goes back over to the mattress where he found his son. He lays the deformed body back and without pause goes out into the hallway again, where he sees the back of the priest descending the stairs. “What have you done to my family?” cries ourman, hurrying after him. “Who told you to do this to my child? Who sent you to do this to me?” He is at the top of the staircase in an instant, and kicks the priest from behind, sending him headlong down the stairs—and even as the man tumbles, eventually ending in a heap on the black flagstones, ourman demands to know: “What have you been feeding my wife these past months? What have you been doing to us all this time?” all the while torturing himself with unanswerable demands: weren’t you going to change? Weren’t you going to leave everything behind and never hurt anyone again? And the emotion that tightened around his heart ten years and eight days before this does so again now: did you not say you would be different when you left, that you would leave all that anger behind? Ourman hurries to the foot of the stairs, lifting the priest to his feet when he gets there. “Are you all right?” he asks, giving the priest a vacant look—the priest, paler still, blinks back at him, eventually finds the words, murmuring, “Nothing broken.” He stands, blinking, before turning and going outside. He hobbles away through the garden, to where his car is parked outside the gate, and, opening the driver’s door, begins to wonder why he came here at all. For his part, Germán Alcántara Carnero, who followed him out but now turns to go back inside, wonders: Don’t you remember what you said the day you left? Is it not perhaps important to remember, especially considering you have grown so stupidly fearful of late? The car accelerates and drives away, and ourman, crossing the plot that for three years now he has been tilling and sowing—it will not be long before he is the main grower of produce on the mesa—comes inside and slams the door behind him. I told myself I’d do whatever it takes to forget my deeds, Germán Alcántara Carnero remembers, reaching the stairs, and what I was missing, it turns out, was this—I had to control my anger! I had to prove I really did dump all the anger and vengefulness at the ministry! Distressed by his ill-shapen son but also pleased at having controlled and contained himself, ourman takes the steps two at a time. So this is how everything ends… I’m no longer the person I was before. No reason for anyone to come looking for me now.
In the hallway that leads to
his room and to his family, ourman quickens his pace, his mind once more departing from the present moment and turning to another instant—one that underscores this present day. With no wish to do so, Germán Alcántara Carnero observes this other event, the one that planted the idea in him that the priest was to blame:
January 1, 1948, when the year has yet to burn away the first of its hours, and exploding fireworks continue to pepper the sky: José Ángel el Cerebro Ordóñez Sánchez and Will D. Glover exit the house they had burst into earlier on, and once they are outside hesitate over whether to take Encarnación or San Antonio. Germán Alcántara Carnero is waiting for them at the Pascua sisters’ house, and they need to hurry if they are to avoid upsetting him. At the corner, El Cerebro Ordóñez—“Ordóñez the Brain,” the most slow-witted of all the crew—turns and sees the lit-up windows of the house in which we find ourselves: a house with a sloping roof, a senseless feature in this part of the world, enclosed by brick walls—and clicks his tongue. He would dearly have liked to stay behind and witness the demise of Ignacio del Sagrado Sandoval-Íñiguez Martínez, the leader of the rebel group that for the past thirty years has been raising trouble on the mesa: a mesa whose principal settlement is Lago Seco: a village that is not yet a city and that houses 21,234 inhabitants, the majority of whom are believers in God but have also come to the conclusion that He is worthless.
El Cerebro Ordóñez envies the others—Manuel el Trompo Trápaga Mora and Óscar el Chino López Ley—whom El Gringo Alcántara Carnero told: “If you get him, I want you to stay at the house and look after him for me. Don’t take him into the streets where people can see him. And don’t mess him up too much! Remember he’s mine.” But now, having climbed into the house and tied up the priest, they need to do something to shut him up. El Gringo Alcántara Carnero’s men are tired of listening to the priest, who launched into the psalms and the rosary the moment he saw his captors emerging out of the bathroom of this house and is still muttering incessantly, even as he lies flat on the floor in front of them, bound at ankles and wrists. Scratching his neck, El Chino, who got this name—“the Chinaman”—because of the far-off lands his grandparents came from to work on the train tracks that snake through the rocky outcrop and the scrublands, tells El Trompo to do whatever he likes as long as it shuts him up: “Bitch is humming like a fucking beehive.”
Having looked around the living room and found nothing useful, El Trompo, who not only got this name—“Whirligig”—because of the shape of his body—short legs, thin hips, massive muscular torso and arms like tree trunks—but also because once he goes into a rage there’s no stopping him, goes into the kitchen and, finding a cloth on the windowsill, smiles down at the family huddling there in silence. The father is the one who betrayed Ignacio del Sagrado—who can still be heard repeating scripture in the living room. Going over to the sink, El Trompo turns on the two faucets, places a flat stone over the plughole, submerges the cloth in the water, and, lifting it out by two of its corners, rolls it into a long snake. Any moment now Ignacio del Sagrado Sandoval-Íñiguez Martínez—whom it would be better to refer to as “Delsagrado” for now—is going to start swallowing those prayers. El Trompo taps his feet as the jug in his hand fills with water, then turns off the faucets and lays the wet snake over his shoulder. He learned this trick during his time in the army, living in barracks on the border, where there was so little to occupy the men they fell in with local drug-runners—but we’ll come to this later.
As El Trompo crosses the kitchen, the children who live here, whose father stares down at his hands and whose mother feigns looking up at empty air, exchange looks—bored, frightened, annoyed looks: they do not understand why four men have come into their home, why these men occupied the bathroom for most of the afternoon, why their father called out to the four men when Delsagrado came to the door, why the priest was then tied up, and why they were then told to go and sit tight in the kitchen and keep quiet.
El Trompo comes back into the living room and tells El Chino to help him get the priest up off the rug, and once they have him sitting up on a chair they bind him again, this time with a rope around his forehead. Meanwhile in the kitchen, the youngest girl is on the verge of tears but her mother turns and implores her to be quiet: “Shhh… shhh…” The same request that El Trompo is making—except that from him it is an order. “Shhh… shhh…” El Chino yanks Delsagrado’s head back and El Trompo, stuffing the cloth down the priest’s throat, begins pouring water after it: now Delsagrado must either swallow or drown. The priest’s hands shoot outward and his legs begin to writhe like wounded snakes.
Swallowing desperately now, Delsagrado ingests a piece of the cloth and El Trompo lets go of the fabric and laughs to see the way it flops from the man’s mouth, resembling the head of a bird whose neck has been wrung. “See if you go on with your praying now,” says El Trompo to the wide-eyed priest. “See if you ask your god to come and save you now,” he says, imitating his boss, who must be getting impatient in the house of the Pascua sisters, desperate at the lack of information, and furious at himself for sending his men alone—but we will speak of El Gringo Alcántara Carnero when we find ourselves in his presence again, given that this current moment is being recounted as it initially was told to me and that this is the only way that I—finally having discovered how to tell this story so as to clear the poison from my system—know how to narrate this tale.
“Easy,” says El Chino, as El Trompo stuffs the cloth in a little more. “Screw this up and he won’t be happy,” he adds, just as one of the girls in the kitchen begins to wail and, farther off, in the street, a cluster of firecrackers go off. By the time the fireworks die down, the two men we are currently watching shout for someone to shut up the girl, before a single booming thud shakes the building. “What was that?” says El Chino, as he goes over to the window, opens the shutters, and sneaks a look out into the street—finding nothing but the blackness of nighttime. El Trompo opens the door and goes out, pointing toward the street corner where a group of boys are ducking behind a barrel that was once a keg and that will one day be used as a trashcan. El Chino, trembling with rage, shouts down, “Get back inside and shut the door! What do you think you’re doing, idiot?” The face of the man who will one day succeed ourman at the ministry flushes red. “What do you think you’re doing? They could be out there! Hasn’t it occurred to you that they might have come?” he cries. “We don’t know if they’ve left the Pascuas’ house yet. We don’t even know if Will and El Cerebro have gotten there yet.”
El Cerebro Ordóñez and Will D. Glover are still racing through the streets of Lago Seco, their boss’s words resounding in their ears: “Come and tell me if you got him, but be discreet. I don’t want anyone using the car today. I don’t want anyone coming up here shouting and screaming. It’s got to look like you’re out taking a nice stroll, like you’re out to smell the fucking flowers.”
As they do each time they receive an order from their boss, El Cerebro Ordóñez and Will D. Glover—whom we will follow now, for this was the way this story was told to me—obey. Coming to the corner of Calle Republica del 37 and Calle Candelaria and staying hidden in the mass of people, El Cerebro and Will stop outside the church in which, nearly twenty years before, Delsagrado gave the first of his incendiary sermons and, glancing at each other, try to decide whether to dive into the mass of people in the town square ahead. “Let’s turn at the corner and go along Candelaria,” says Will D. Glover, “then go through town from there. That’s the quickest way.” The two men turn left and quicken their pace, certain that their boss—who just a short while earlier cast his mind back to this memory—will be getting very anxious by now.
“It’s straight all the way from here,” declares Will as they pass the shop where Germán Alcántara Carnero bought a table for his house, his bed frame, and the iron trunk that adorns his workplace and of which we spoke at the beginning of this story, though we did not mention that it was Delsagrado’s men he threw in
side it. When they ensnare one of these men, they strip him, torture him till passing out, splash him with water to revive him, and submit him to further tortures before, having reduced each to the animal that lies inside every man, placing him inside the trunk and leaving him there for five, six, or seven days. “Come on, tell that good god of yours to come and do a little lovely miracle!” Germán Alcántara Carnero would say, enormous hands pressing shut the metal cover that will not be opened again until the man of faith is dead. Before we get to the next corner, we will pass a chandler’s shop, a very large shop for yarns and threads, a mill, a butcher’s shop, and a tailor’s shop—the lights of which are strangely still on. Then, leaving Encarnación behind and passing a convenience store, we will glimpse the town square in the distance. At 00:34 on January 1, 1948, like every other year at this time, a town party is in full swing.
Ignoring the crowds, the booming music, and the smell of the food stalls, El Cerebro and Will D. Glover turn off Distrito and down a narrow alleyway that takes them onto Calle Magdalena, inhabited only by some pigeons picking meat from a dead rat and by three dogs tracking a small female in heat. Taking no notice of the birds that fly up as they pass, the two men we are following, convinced that they are not being watched and that their boss will be in a frenzy by now, break into a run and so, at a run, make their way along Sufragio Efectivo, Independencia, Escuinapa de Dalinas, and Reforma. They do not stop, these two men whose hearts pound as if bursting from their chests, until they notice a drunkard on the corner of Yotepec de Covarrubias. The alcohol has emboldened him, and he watches them distastefully. Much as El Cerebro would like to stop and teach this vagrant a lesson, Will snaps his fingers, saying, “No time!” And now, here on this corner, and suddenly—as suddenly as we began following them a few minutes ago—we will leave this pair of men we have followed for several blocks, and who still have a dozen more blocks to go before they reach the Pascuas’ house, where we will shortly join them again.
The Arid Sky Page 6