“What was that noise?” ourman suddenly asks, but his wife is not listening:
“At a very young age he was taken to Jerusalem to complete his studies in the school of Gamaliel, a teacher renowned for his mastery of science and for the seriousness of his ways. A passionate Pharisee, loyal to the sect that had taught him everything, Saul abhorred Christians and…”
“It sounded like a cry to me…” insists Germán Alcántara Carnero, but still his wife goes on:
“His hate for the Christians grew and grew, until reaching unexpected extremes; no longer was he content to persecute them in Jerusalem, but his furious zeal led him to…”
“There’s that cry again… Now they’re all shouting…”
“Once he had reached a position of power, he put himself forward to transport as many Christian men and women in chains to Jerusalem… And this was why, on his way to Damascus, Saul’s mind was on torments and the meting out of justice…”
“Really, they’re all shouting…” cries Germán Alcántara Carnero, jumping to his feet. “Have you gone deaf, or do you just not want to hear?” He dashes over to the door. “Listen, they’re shouting our names!”
Pushing open the bedroom door, Germán Alcántara Carnero goes down into the passageway and shouts: “What’s going on?” while upbraiding himself inside: You should have gone down before… what if something’s happened to the one you love as much as you loved your little sister?
The confusion of cries coming from the kitchen reach the passageway mixed together and the voice of womanwhopreaches, who in her room has already gone into a trance and grows quieter: “And he trembling and astonished said… Lord, what wilt thou have me to do?… Arise, and go to…” The wailing of his children and his nephews and nieces are also mixed together when oneofus comes to the stairs and, as he continues to upbraid and castigate himself: “It would be different if you had been downstairs… none of these cries would be happening…” he carries on asking: “Why are they all crying?… what’s happened?” As we descend the stairs, staying with oneofus as he hurries down, the wailing of the children turns into a viscous sound that clings to everything and makes everything sorrowful, while the sound of womanwhopreaches grows quieter still, becoming an intermittent murmur: “And the men which… stood speechless… when his eyes were opened, he saw no man… the persecutor was blind…” Beside himself with worry, Germán Alcántara Carnero, who now skips across the buckled tiles that serve as the flooring here, rushes headlong down the passageway, and upon hearing the wailing fall quiet, wonders: Why nothing now… why aren’t they crying anymore? at the same time as he asks himself: Why is his door open… why didn’t you come down earlier? Womanwhopreaches’ voice is less than a murmur now, just a drip: “They took… three… not drinking… evenings… sight…”, and when the kitchen door comes in sight oneofus thunders: “You should have come down at sunrise!… you swore, a family that you would give yourself to… you ought to have said: ‘read to me later on… ’ or perhaps you believe you should have let her read to you before?”
He enters the kitchen to find the siblings and cousins of bornsickly standing around the inert body. Germán Alcántara Carnero, trembling, drops to the ground. He begins to sob, berating himself: “How many times did I say: ‘listen to her’… how many times: ‘just pay attention’… you should have listened every time she told you: ‘it’s because of all that you did in the past’…” Lifting his face up, Germán Alcántara Carnero looks at the weeping children and shouts: “What has happened to your brother?” The children look down at the violet floor tiles and again hear ourman: “What are you doing out of your room? What was he doing out of his room?”
If you hadn’t been upstairs none of this would have happened.
He can still make out his wife’s voice, and for a moment he finds it calming, and he sees bornsickly more clearly for a moment: a strange whiteness shadows his mouth. Putting his forefinger and middle fingers into his mouth, Germán Alcántara Carnero pushes his fingers in a little deeper still, beyond his second knuckles, and with a heave succeeds in dislodging half a rabbit skull, which he holds for a moment, staring at it, then smashes on the floor.
His wife’s words drift down: “And he was with them, moving about freely in Jerusalem, speaking out boldly in the name of the Lord…”
Not stopping to clean his son’s saliva from his fingers, Germán Alcántara Carnero rips the trinket from around his own neck, a trinket that he has worn for so many years, and, as clouds eclipse his pupils, holds it out as an offering to bornsickly. The trinket is comprised of the chain that used to be Delsagrado’s and of the bullet that one day, in the early hours of November 18, 1944, in the moment shortly to be recounted, penetrated his chest.
When Dolores Enriqueta appears in the kitchen, towing her words behind her like a balloon vendor towing his wares, still she is reciting: “Then had the churches rest throughout all Judaea and Galilee and Samaria, and were edified; and walking in the fear of the Lord, and in the comfort of the Holy Ghost, were multiplied…” Ourman lifts his son into his arms and tries to hand him to her but, just as was the case eight years ago, a distorted look enters the woman’s face:
“Put him somewhere else, anywhere—I don’t intend to carry him.”
A couple of seconds elapse, and she begins reading once more: “Israelite born in Tarsus…”
The children break down crying again, and as ourman asks himself: Should you, too, be looking for solace? our story departs from the place and the moment it was in.
Our story must now depart this October morning and cross twenty-four years, one month, several days, and a few hours, and a stretch of the Mesa Madre Buena itself to arrive at kilometer twenty-one of the track that connects La Cruz to the dam, thereby landing in the bright moment at the end of which ourman will find his ribs, chest, and stomach drenched in blood.
Early morning on November 18, 1944, just before sunrise, the hour when the sierra and cordilleras that rise up on all sides of the Mesa Madre Buena emerge from shadows like whales surfacing from the water, Germán Alcántara Carnero, who six and a quarter hours ago was finally handed the letter he had been waiting to receive—You decide what to do with those who do not want to join and you should also deal with these men… show no mercy to those who do not want to join the movement!—and who now brings his attention back to the interior of the car we are riding in, says: “Stop by that tree over there!” Juan Ignacio el Negro Romo Hernández, Will D. Glover, Óscar el Chino López Ley, and Ramiro la Madrina López Palas are in the car, too—the same car the ministry was given just a couple of years ago. “There, by the pepper tree!”
When the car we are traveling in—a black 1940 Chevrolet de Luxe—comes to a stop, the silence, a dense and sticky absence of sound, is broken only by the caustic screech of the rubber scraping the window as it is lowered. Resting an arm on the window he has opened, Germán Alcántara Carnero looks off into the distance and sees, through the dust-covered, bug-spattered windscreen, the three floodlights at the entrance to the dam. “Didn’t I tell you it was only two hundred meters from this spot?” Before any of the others—who’d said: “I bet it’s at least half a kilometer”—can say anything, the three floodlights flicker off for a moment, and then, after another unsettled palpitation, they go out fully—plunging our final destination into darkness. Screwing up his face, turning on the small ceiling light, and turning around to face his men again, El Gringo Alcántara Carnero asks: “Are you sure there isn’t anyone at this entrance? No guards at all?”
“That’s what Adalberto told me and El Chino,” says La Madrina.
“And that’s what the guys we got in the night said,” says El Chino, elbowing Will and saying: “Right? Didn’t they?”
“That’s what they said,” says Will, “no guards on Thursdays. The floodlights must be there to make people think there’s guards.”
Ourman’s face stiffens as he peers out into the darkness. The floodlights flicker once more.
“They wouldn’t go on and off like that if someone was there doing it… they wouldn’t be, you know, trembling like that…” When he says the word “trembling,” Germán Alcántara Carnero realizes his two hands are trembling and, placing them on the dashboard, says to himself: it must be because I haven’t slept, while out loud issuing a threat: “I hope for all your sakes you’re right about the guards…” Then, placing the letter inside—the letter given to him nearly seven hours earlier now—he unlocks his door. “Stay here, the lot of you… you haven’t come to help me today…” Taken aback, La Madrina, El Negro, El Chino, and Will watch as El Gringo Alcántara Carnero opens the door, gets out, and walks away, chewing on these words: “You decide what to do… do not want to join… these men… no mercy to those who do not want… the movement!”
Walking past the tree he previously indicated, his legs have begun trembling in the same way that the limbs of hunting dogs tremble before a hunt. This can’t be the lack of sleep, says ourman, glimpsing in the early morning light the stream that runs half a meter deep, large white boulders lining its edge: I can’t let the pain of María get to me today… I have to concentrate… Then, out loud: “If I come down between the agaves and those pulques, I can get to the stream and from there make it over to those stones.” Then, glancing up at the horizon and the light blue-gray strip gradually illuminating the tops of the sierra: It’s getting light already… I’m going to get there and they’ll all be awake… if I don’t go down now they’ll see me coming… and they’ll have a chance to get ready.
The men in the car watch as their boss hurries away.
“What’s going on with El Gringo?” asks La Madrina for the third or fourth time this morning: “Since when has he cared about orders? And anyway, why would they have told him to go on his own?”
“There’s no way,” says Will, unlocking his door, “they told him to go on his own… Do you think they would have told him to deal with six men alone?”
Though only Will D. Glover has suddenly understood what’s happening, El Negro nods and unlocks his door as well: “Who’s gonna be the faggot who stays in the car?”
At the bottom of the slope, where a rocky stretch of ground gives way to weeds and plants, their boss hurries on, all the while murmuring to himself: “You’ll forgive me, for though it might seem like a betrayal, it isn’t… you wouldn’t want me to get to the dam with my mind all over the place and then get shot down… From here on it’s just me and these bastards holed up in the dam… nothing’s gonna knock me off.” But not even ourman is capable of imagining—though in this case it would be better to say “is capable of remembering”—what it is that is truly dragging him off course.
Coming past fig trees and pepper trees, and the tall flowering agaves that rise into the sky like crosses and the cacti brought by the engineers sent from the ministry, up ahead the floodlights are still blinking on and off. That’s the shortest route, thinks ourman, seeing a path now fifteen meters ahead. It’ll be light any minute… get a move on, he thinks, only to pull up suddenly and turn back; head bowed, he retraces his steps for a distance, murmuring: “If I’ve stopped thinking about her, why am I still distracted? What’s stopping me from concentrating… what is happening right now… what happened in this place?”
“Why’s he left the path?” asks La Madrina, and then: “The dam’s the other way!”
“He’s going to take the stream,” says El Negro, coming forward on all fours. “More cover along the stream…”
“We should go after him.”
“Wait, he might see us,” says El Chino, grabbing El Negro by the ankle: “Once he’s in the stream, once he’s made it to the rocks, then we’ll have some cover, too.”
We’ll be the last thing on his mind, thinks Will D. Glover, the only one who knows what’s really happening, why today ourman has become someone else, why he isn’t fully here, why he isn’t feeling just angry today, but in fact guilty as well.
“Once he gets to the stream, me and El Chino will head down after him. You two, go get the car and drive round to the far side of the dam, and go the long way round.”
El Gringo Alcántara Carnero reaches the edge of the stream, which cuts along half a meter deep, and uses a blasted fig tree to lower himself in. The shock of the icy water stops him for a moment, even as it prompts his four men to set off.
Then, in the early morning quiet, a clattering noise goes up to the right of El Gringo: a barn owl has fallen clumsily to the ground, the branch on which it was perched having suddenly snapped. Ourman stays stock-still, eyes fixed on the dam ahead, inside which the barn owl’s fall has awoken a pair of brothers. They fell asleep leaning up against one another, and now strain to hear any further evidence of an attack, though they do not yet know they are under attack. After a few moments’ silence they shut their eyes, though sleep eludes them.
They are the commanders of the three or four rebels still left at the dam, which is the way of things in this country when any kind of uprising breaks out: after a few days the rebels go home, annoyed at themselves for having risen up, regretting they’ve tried to change the situation, and frightened to no longer be obeying—above all horrified at the thought that the world might suddenly be theirs.
The tops of the sierra are now aflame, all the colors of the world’s molten armature suddenly on display. Ourman begins wading cautiously ahead, trying not to splash too loudly. As he thinks, Nothing’s happened… nothing’s stopping me… I am the master of this moment… no one’s stopping me from carrying out my orders, he also asks himself in a quiet voice, without knowing why or where the question comes from: “Now do you remember what happened up ahead? What happened up at the end of those rocks? Who it was that died in this place, long ago? And right around this time of day?” The answer fails to fully take form, and he hurries on, soon clambering out of the stream and arriving at the end of the natural formation that divides the thicketland and the deep part of the scrubland. Walking numbly ahead, ourman is unable to quiet the last question he put to himself, or to quite govern his two legs, which stride faster and faster on, carrying him ever closer to the dam—the side entrance has now come into view. Keep your head down after the rocks… either cross the open ground keeping low, or just run… And once more, without intending to, he hears himself murmur: “This was where you fell… this was where you drew your last breath… here, where I am right now…” Trembling, transported back to the morning of El Demónico Camilo Mónico Macías Osorio’s death, he says: “We came to turf out the old townspeople… the families living on the lands flooded by the dam water… this was where you drew your last… right where I am now…” At this, ourman shouts a furious lament, one rooted in a moment four years before, one that now fully awakens the men in the dam, and one that carries back to La Madrina and Will.
“Why the hell’s he broken cover…” demands La Madrina. “Why’s he calling out… why’s he not keeping to the rocks?”
Will D. Glover grabs his arm, and they both listen:
“I’m talking to the men in the dam…” cries El Gringo Alcántara Carnero. “Come out or I’m going to come in there… it’d be better for you if you come out right now!”
Hurrying forward, and deciding to raise his voice even louder—convinced that he has no choice in the matter—ourman shouts and shouts, while thinking to himself: So this was what made me lie to them today… tell them that I had orders to come alone… I was worried there’d be another accident… another of my men might die… these idiots, they’ve followed me—how could they think I wouldn’t see them—they really thought I wouldn’t notice? Looking back over his shoulder, El Gringo Alcántara Carnero sees La Madrina and Will keeping low in the water.
He’s remembered that morning! thinks Will, he himself remembering El Demónico Macías’s death, the day they found that their boss had more to him than rage alone—the day it became apparent there was a place in his soul for guilt and sadness, too.
“Come out this instant
!” he cries, turning back to the dam. “Don’t tell me you can’t hear me. Don’t tell me you weren’t expecting me!” The guilt, the anger, the powerlessness, and the sadness of the death of El Demónico drop away as he advances on the dam. “Come and see, I’m here on my own… no one’s with me!” The same guilt, anger, powerlessness, and sadness that on a distant day, twelve years from the morning we are currently witnessing, will prompt him to forsake the ministry—and make him then grasp at anything that might explain why he did so—the bullet in his chest, Anne Lucretius Ford’s death, the mere sum of the years, wanting a different life—everything except for the true cause of his departure: the accidental death of El Demónico. It was he who stood beside him during his rise through the ministry ranks, who was with him on his return to the Mesa Madre Buena, and before that, all through the years spent far away from this country, during the war, during the end of his childhood, and in the encounter with the Díaz Cervantes brothers.
“Come out of the dam this instant… let’s see if you’ve got the balls!” cries ourman—whom we would do well to call manwhotrembles for now—maddened and gripped by a memory that until today, November 18, 1944, he had buried, and which very soon, at 06:29, to be exact, will be buried again—this time for a full thirty years. Only on the final afternoon of his life will this memory emerge out of the depths from which it steers the rest of his life, and that will also be the time to speak of El Demónico Macías and of the accidents that led to his demise on these very rocks now echoing ourman’s words: “… the balls to take me on… I’m not leaving until you come out… at least let me see your faces… can’t you see it’s your lucky day!”
Unbeknownst to him the two rebel leaders, the Díaz Cervantes brothers, Baldomero and Macario, are looking down at him from one of the windows. The same men who nearly thirty years ago, along with their three now deceased brothers, took ourman in.
The Arid Sky Page 10