Gathering up Jacinto’s weapons and glancing about like a rabbit leaving its warren, El Gringo Alcántara Carnero—who was given this nickname because since learning that there were countries other than his own in the world, he’d been swearing over and over to someday go and settle in one of them—approached the water’s edge and hissed: “Come on, leave it. It’s hot as hell round here.” The oldest of the five Díaz Cervantes boys just splashed some water at him and let out a laugh before diving down. Surfacing, he laughed: “Come on, dive in. You’ve seen as well as I have there’s nobody around.” Germán Alcántara Carnero barked: “We aren’t here to splash around. They told us not to be too long.” With a hard look, Jacinto Díaz Cervantes groaned at the young man he had looked after and schooled for the past six years. “Since when do you raise your voice at me? I’ll get out when I damn well want to!”
Before El Gringo Alcántara Carnero could answer the de facto leader of their small group, they both heard the thump of footsteps and the unmistakable sound of men’s voices. “Here, my things!” said Jacinto, half-shouting—trying to shout quietly. He turned and began swimming toward the edge—he was fifteen or twenty meters out by now. Our young man looked down at the rifle and the knife in his hands and, taking a few steps backward, said: “This is what you get for not listening to me—for never listening to anyone.” The approaching voices were already very near, and the oldest Díaz Cervantes, seeing there was no chance of escape, stopped swimming and simply glared at El Gringo Alcántara Carnero as he turned and crept off in the direction of their camp. And when he got there none of the brothers could bring themselves to believe the story ouryoungman had hurriedly concocted, leading them, six days later, on July 30, 1917, moments before we arrived at this current knot, to put a match to both of his dogs.
“I heard them say it was Demetrio, and then they said we should’ve burned you alive, too!” exclaims El Demónico Macías Osorio as he catches up with Germán Alcántara Carnero, panting and sweating from having run for a mile behind the two balls of fire that, even as the flames consumed them, had stayed close to each other. Kneeling on the ground, Carnero is embracing what remains of his dogs. “I couldn’t even hold them properly at the end! I couldn’t even touch them.” “I told you,” says El Demónico, who’s had running disagreements with his brothers for months, “we shouldn’t have stayed on. Without Jacinto, those four are a piece of shit.” “Where are those bastards now?” says the young man who will one day be ourman, pushing away the hands that have just helped him to his feet. “They’ll be up there waiting for us,” El Demónico whispers, as he brings Alcántara Carnero close, keeping him from running straight off. “Instead of heading up there, why don’t we drop down and go after Demetrio? It was him who lit them up.” Ouryoungman, a little calmer now, kneels next to the two scorched corpses, silently promising them vengeance. Then, to El Demónico: “All right, we go after Demetrio.”
The soldiers, in large groups around their fires, watch as Germán Alcántara Carnero and El Demónico come running past. Some offer condolences—they know how dear his dogs were to him—while others make the sign of the cross. The Milky Way is visible in the night sky, scored by the halting tracks of fireflies.
“Take my gun if you want,” says El Demónico when he sees that El Gringo Alcántara Carnero is unarmed—he set off running without taking anything. “Or my knife?” “The knife, give me the knife,” says ouryoungman, reaching back like a runner reaching for a baton. Feeling its hilt in his hand, he quickens his pace, drawn on by a clear, striking premonition, turning onto the very track taken by Demetrio Díaz Cervantes minutes before. Coming past a thick clump of high grasses and ducking under a very tall agave, he picks up on the sound of panting, of heaving lungs—a snorting, almost—that gives away the man running up ahead. They stop: the sound is coming closer. “Who else is going to be hurrying anywhere at such an hour?” hisses El Gringo, answering El Demónico’s question before he has even spoken it.
Germán Alcántara Carnero leaps at Demetrio Díaz Cervantes the moment he emerges, and the pair tumble down the slope, knees, elbows, and hips cracking against stones and boulders as they go. Several meters lower down, the pair we are now watching struggle to their feet, and ouryoungman realizes he has dropped the knife; his adversary brandishes a long blade. “Let’s see if you’ve got the balls,” says Demetrio Díaz Cervantes as they begin to circle each other, “to take on a man who isn’t in the water. We got our hands on one of the Federal soldiers who killed Jacinto today, and a while back we found his knife among your things…” At this, the second oldest Díaz Cervantes brother squints and throws himself at ouryoungman with a snarl. In a single, unexpected movement—an unexpected sideways-forward jump—Germán Alcántara Carnero avoids the blow and, rapid and assured, knocks Demetrio to the ground, before disarming him and kneeling on his chest. Flinging away the knife, El Gringo Alcántara Carnero says: “I don’t need your knife and I don’t need to throw you in the water. I don’t even need to set you on fire.”
His two enormous fists begin pummeling Demetrio’s face and head, while he shouts down at him: “I couldn’t even touch them! I didn’t even get to hold them before they died!” Jumping to his feet, he begins kicking Demetrio about the ribs and stamping on his battered head, shouting all the while: “They were innocent—why’d you have to hurt them?” Looking down at the head, a bloody mess by now, Carnero becomes aware of a second yoke, one that has weighed on him for a long time, and is reminded of the one he removed from his back seven years earlier, and the dead man whose bloody head he thrust his fingers into comes to mind, and now, now that the memories are under way, he cannot stop them, he sees again the moment he arrived back at his house, his mother’s guilt-ridden look and the empty eyes of little Heredí de los Consuelos, the violence he inflicted on his father, leaving the house where he was born, meeting the brothers Díaz Cervantes… If they hadn’t picked me up, I’d surely have gone back and looked for her… “If you five hadn’t kidnapped me,” he growls, “I’d never have gone off without her.”
After kicking Demetrio Díaz Cervantes, harder, harder, El Gringo finally stops, falls quiet, and is still for a moment before leaning down and taking the prostrate body by the neck. He lifts Demetrio up so that their eyes are level—though Demetrio’s have fallen shut. I’m going to have to make another getaway today! thinks he who will very soon become ourman, placing his hands, seemingly made for such a task, around the throat of Demetrio Díaz Cervantes, and proceeding to strangle the life out of him.
“We need to get away before the brothers come looking.” And with that the pair head down the mountainside—Germán Alcántara Carnero guessing at the terrain in the dark, hastening El Demónico Macías forward—who stops every so often for air. They make their way down a long, steep scarp and head along a ravine. So! thinks Germán Alcántara Carnero, turns out there was a worse way to leave a place! And at the point when he places a foot in the river, we cease following these two young men, who are soon to be enveloped by the night, and, as Alcántara Carnero cries: “Into the water! That way they can’t track us!” we move in a direction that in fact puts distance between us and the moment when I become a character in this story. The rest of this escape we will not see: the knots contained in this chapter have been untied and now the only things that matter are the story of a person dear to ourman who choked, and the bullet that one day struck ourman in the chest—the two knots that follow this barren blank space:
Conversion, Forsaking
The escape through the ravine is followed by these moments: a moment, three quarters of the country and a little more than fifty years away, that concludes with Germán Alcántara Carnero’s bloody chest, and with him offering his trinket to another person. This person being the one who at 07:26 on October 12, 1968, is rolling around on the ground gasping for air. Six minutes are still to transpire before we see El Gringo Alcántara Carnero come in and offer his bullet and chain to this defor
med young man, currently lying on the floor—the same deformed young man whose birth occasioned a priest’s cry: “Sickly! The baby has been born sickly!” This young man, really no more than a boy—and he won’t live to become a man—has accepted a challenge from his siblings and cousins, who have taunted him with the words: “Can’t you swallow it whole?”
First though, a short while before, at 07:13, when daylight makes mirrors of the windows and splashes violets and reds on the adobe mud walls, and as sparrows and mockingbirds begin their chattering, and Germán Camilo’s cousins and his two brothers, Enriqueta and Alonso Alcántara Celis, and Ramiro, José Julio, and Mariangeles Celis Comesaña, give up playing in the deserted garden—a place where the break of day acts as a warning: time to go home.
The gradual drawing away of the darkness and of the silence, which elsewhere in Lago Seco mark the beginning of children’s games, here means the end of any such fun. Germán Alcántara Carnero has forbidden his children and nephews and nieces from playing after bornsickly wakes, which is why they have developed the habit of getting up at night, why they have been chasing one another around for the past two hours, and why they ought now to be going inside. But today the five of them have not gone inside at the appointed hour, and rather than slinking home in single file they advance in a rowdy circle, their raised voices breaking another of the rules laid down by ourman.
“Stop shouting, we don’t want them to see us!” Enriqueta cries.
“I’m not shouting!” declares José Julio: “He lost!”
To which Alonso Alcántara Celis says: “You didn’t even touch me—how can I have lost?”
These voices rain down over the scrubland, one falling on the house that ourman ordered be constructed twelve years ago.
“I don’t care who won!” insists little Enriqueta Alcántara Celis. And then, even louder: “Stop shouting, let’s go in now!”
It occurs to none of them that their raised voices are raining down on the house—“Why won’t you accept it? You know you’re lying.” “You’re the liar!” “No, you’re the liar!”—and have indeed awoken bornsickly. The group we are watching is no longer being watched by us alone, as bornsickly drags himself over to his bedroom window and, seeing them crossing the parched garden, he begins to melt with excitement, like an ice cube melts when placed on the floor. Beneath the poorly tended lawn lies the memory of the ruts and furrows made here more than half a century ago by El Gringo Alcántara Carnero when he worked the land with mattock, scythe, and trowel.
“You didn’t get anywhere near him!” yelps Mariangeles Celis Comesaña, leaping across a dip in the earth, just as bornsickly brings his face up to the window, and as Alonso Alcántara Celis, who wants an end to the matter, cries: “You didn’t even catch up with me. You’ve never caught me. So how could you have got me?”
The voices carry to the door of the bunkerlike house before us, transpiercing the windows—ourman wakes with a start, and can immediately tell that it isn’t his wife’s voice he’s hearing. For eight years now, ever since the day the priest imparted the news of his son’s birth and his son’s ailment, the woman we first met in the town square of Lago Seco has lived inside the pages of the book she now sits holding in her hands, a volume in which, every now and again, she comes across a story that fills her withered soul with hope once more, a passage or phrase that seems to contain some speck of absolution.
El Gringo sits up with a frown, cracks his aching neck, swings his legs over the side of the bed—his hips and lower back also creaking, cracking, and popping. He thinks to himself: It’s against the rules, and they know it. Ourman is utterly tired—bornsickly’s never-ending weeping has worn him down in these intervening years—but the sounds of the children’s voices immediately rouses him, and he hurtles across the room. “Still out there?” he cries, while hoping, though not feeling hopeful, that bornsickly might not have been awoken. Throwing open the curtain, he feels Dolores’s bony hand grip his shoulder—but before she can say “Can I read you a little of my book?” he has already given his answer: “First I have to deal with those children of yours.”
A few meters outside the door, where the garden—which, were it not for the presence of the children, would be overrun by plants and quiet as a cemetery—drops down into a small cobblestone patio, Enriqueta and Alonso Alcántara Celis, and Ramiro, José Julio, and Mariangeles Celis Comesaña hear a sound, and look up in unison: El Gringo Alcántara Carnero is at his bedroom window banging on the frame: the window itself no longer opens, its frames having long ago melted and fused under the punishing sun. “Piece of shit window,” hisses ourman as he continues to bang on the frame, while at his back Dolores Enriqueta Celis Gómez, whose left arm bears the ribbon she was given upon the birth of her first child, insists: “I want to read you this part—let me read it to you before you go down.” Ignoring her, glaring down at the children, El Gringo Alcántara Carnero repeats inwardly: They must’ve woken him up… I hope at least he hasn’t made it to his window. Ourman brings his fist down on the window frame once more, which, as distressed by the sun as Dolores Enriqueta Celis Gómez has been by the lack of it, splinters, coming clean off its hinges.
El Gringo Alcántara rests his hands on the flaking sill, hears without hearing his wife stubbornly repeat herself: “It’s just a short passage,” while in his pupils—once black, now shadowy—the frightened children are reflected. A barked whisper: “How many times do I have to tell you?” All at once the children begin hissing apologies, saying they weren’t really out playing, really they weren’t… but El Gringo Alcántara doesn’t want to know: “Get inside now! And don’t let him see you!”
Meanwhile, as the children hurry forward across the cobbled courtyard, inside his room bornsickly loses his balance and topples to the floor: he twists and writhes, his attempts to get up like those of an overturned turtle.
Inside the sturdy, warrenlike house, the others’ hatred for ourman and for his firstborn—his favorite, the one he lives for—comes pouring forth: “It isn’t fair that we don’t get to go out.” “I wish he was dead!” “Who cares if he sees us?” “Why should he mind?”
“What if we asked him to come and play with us?”
At this they stop and look at one another.
A noise drops from above them: Germán Alcántara Carnero is dragging a chair across the cement and placing it in front of his wife’s chair, where, having shut the blinds, she sat down a moment ago with a sudden shout: “Come here, now!” Then, smiling: “I’m going to read to you of our salvation!”
Still trying to get up, bornsickly hears this, too, following by his father’s grumbles and then by footsteps approaching his door: his cousins and siblings have thought up a game.
El Gringo Alcántara Carnero sits sullenly, saying to himself: You ought to be downstairs… there’s no way he’s still asleep…
His wife, stretching out the arm that bears the stained ribbon she was given the day of the birth and that she has not taken off since, turns on the desk lamp, the faint light pushing back the darkness as the Alcántara Celis couple, whose oldest child trembles to hear the voices on the other side of his door, look at each other for a brief moment: both briefly letting down their guards after eight years of indifference, disappointment, and resentment.
In the hallway below, meanwhile, bornsickly is being lifted off the floor and taken through into the kitchen. Bornsickly, a child who has never developed properly, is little more than an enormous head, a torso the shape and size of an old toaster, and four stubby limbs. Ramiro Celis Comesaña, the oldest of ourman’s nephews, props bornsickly up on his two deformed legs. He looks like a lump of clay that has been crushed in someone’s hand, in much the same way bornsickly now crushes the peach given to him by Mariangeles Celis Comesaña. “Don’t give him anything yet!” cries Enriqueta Alcántara Celis, seeing what her cousin has done: “Who told you we’d started yet?” she adds, putting half an avocado, three lemons, and a knife into the pail that her brother
and cousins are also filling up. “Clean his hand off now… when have you ever seen a cripple with filthy hands like that?” says Ramiro Celis Comesaña, and instantly his eyes widen to the size of plates: bornsickly has put the crushed peach into his mouth and swallowed it in one go.
Laughing like they have not laughed in a long time, the cousins and children of ourman—who is still in his room inwardly demanding that his wife get on with it—entertain themselves by stuffing more and more things into bornsickly’s mouth: a lemon cut in four, a crushed guava, half a sausage, three cloves of garlic. The giggles have turned to howls of laughter, the children’s original idea for a game forgotten.
You ought to be down there by now… what if something’s happened to him?
Spurred by the flare of yearning in her stomach and the hope, not yet entirely extinguished, that they might finally find peace, Dolores Enriqueta, little interested in ourman’s glowering demeanor, readjusts the camisole she has not washed in a number of months, crosses her legs, lets out a long sigh, and begins, haltingly, to read:
“Saul, who had conserved the vestments in which Saint Sebastian was stoned, was an Israelite who had been born in Tarsus, the capital of Cilicia. By birth he was a citizen of Rome and, this being so, as well as his Hebrew name, he had a Roman one: Paul. His parents, Jews hailing from the lands of Benjamin, were Pharisees, and it was in this environment that the boy was raised…”
The Arid Sky Page 9