“He’s come alone,” says Macario, ducking down from the window.
“Didn’t I tell you he’d come looking for us?” says Baldomero, before ordering the others: “No one move. Hold your positions.”
Ourman spreads his arms and throws back his head—while inside the dam the Díaz Cervantes brothers unbolt the door. All the memories have passed through him now, and he bellows in fury: “Do you not see, you’ll never get lucky like this again… I don’t mean to put up a fight!” while he thinks: All the better that it should be the Díaz Cervantes boys! and smiles as he remembers gripping Demetrio’s throat in his hands, the man’s stifled entreaties, his throbbing face, the tears and the excitement and preoccupation that crossed El Demónico’s face, who stood two meters off saying: “Let him go before they get here… we need to get out of here right now!” “What are you waiting for? Want me to toss my gun? Fine!” shouts ourman, flinging away his weapon, spreading his arms again.
La Madrina, running along the stream, calls back over his shoulder at Will D. Glover: “He’s totally lost it.”
“You cover his left side,” Will shouts, jumping up and coming past La Madrina, adding as he sees the dam entrance swing open: “Get down, and get your piece out… they’re opening that gate.” By the time Baldomero and Macario hear Will’s voice and the ensuing sound of his gunshots, they have already opened the gate and all that remains is to return fire and hide. Bullets fly, and ourman hits the ground, tumbling back into the stream.
It is 06:29 on November 18, 1944, and the moment we were in has come to an end.
Bullets continue to fly as the blood from ourman’s sternum in the water imitates the motion of a streamer blown on by a young boy with all his might. The shots and the shouting will last a few more minutes, and then El Negro and El Chino will suddenly arrive at the dam and ambush the rebels, who, half an hour later, tied to huge rocks, will be drowned in the stagnant dam water, according to the order ourman would have given had he not been unconscious. But this doesn’t concern us now. Germán Alcántara Carnero faints, still floating in the stream, while his mind goes back to the day he returned to the Mesa Madre Buena with El Demónico Macías at his side, and to the afternoon he became the leader of the ministry.
The Ascents
This story has now arrived at the moments recalled by Germán Alcántara Carnero as he lay wounded twenty meters away from the dam: his return to the Mesa Madre Buena, and his rise through the ranks of the small ministry he would later go on to lead. As well as illuminating the length and breadth of ourman’s life, these two moments light up the existence of two other human beings: Anne Lucretius Ford and El Demónico Camilo Mónico Macías Osorio—the threads of whose lives at some point became entangled with those of ourman, forming a knot this story must unravel.
At 13:02 on February 17, 1934, five years, ten months, and eleven days after the morning when ourman came back to the Mesa with El Demónico and Will D. Glover—a return journey that will be dissected at the end of the day in which we now find ourselves—Germán Alcántara Carnero looks down at his wounded shoulder as innumerable dry leaves dance and twirl in the distance, and as, farther off in the ravine between the mountains, a column of black smoke twists skyward—a serpent devouring a church. El Gringo Alcántara Carnero squints, as do the pair of men beside him—a pair that would be a trio if Ignacio del Sagrado Sandoval-Íñiguez Martínez and his men hadn’t killed ourman’s boss, Teobaldo Pascua Gómez.
“No one’s coming after us now… not one of them,” he says. “Didn’t I tell you they wouldn’t have the balls to come through the scrublands?”
“He said that?” says El Demónico, elbowing Will D. Glover and saying: “I was the one who said they wouldn’t come down after us… they don’t like it out on open ground.”
“What does it matter now who said it?” says Will, shading his eyes and swiveling around. “We made it, that’s what matters.” The wind picks up at their backs as they set off again.
“What was that noise?” asks El Demónico. “Is that someone shouting?”
“That was no shout…” cries ourman over the whistling wind—a gale that began to blow an hour ago, buffeting them with dust and stones. Gripping his bleeding shoulder, he turns to Will D. Glover: “How do you suppose we break it to him that Teobaldo’s dead… and that we left his body up there?”
“Telling Don Dante is the least of our problems…” Will D. Glover says, glancing nervously at ourman’s shoulder. “How the hell do we break it to the twins that their dad’s dead?”
The wind at their backs, the three men stumble on, each picturing the moment when Teobaldo hit the ground. They had instantly begun arguing: “We can’t carry him with us… especially not without any horses…” “You want to carry him? With your shoulder like that! None of us’ll make it back alive.” The wind drops for a moment, and the shrieking sound can be heard once more.
“There it is again!” says El Demónico Macías, stopping dead: “Don’t tell me you didn’t hear it this time,” he says, grabbing Will D. Glover and El Gringo Alcántara Carnero, who says at the top of his voice:
“I heard it… I heard a shout.”
“No,” says Will, brushing El Demónico’s fingers from his elbow. “That was something barking.” He points toward a number of moving smudges in the distance, seen for a moment and then obscured by the whirls of eddying dust. The whipping wind pelts them with loose stones, dry leaves, and scraps of wood.
Leaning close together, they form a tight triangle and shield their faces, shouting over the wind: “How do we tell them they killed Teobaldo?” “Who wants to be the one to say we left the boss’s body up there?” To say that they fear the reaction of Manuel Dante Creel Otero is putting it mildly: the man who reigns over this mesa terrifies ourmen, whom we will only refer to as ourmen in this paragraph, given that this is the single moment in which the trio’s fears are so aligned—fears they face up to by trying to avoid them, each escaping into thoughts of his own past. Thoughts, in the case of Germán Alcántara Carnero, of the dogs he once owned; of childhood sandstorms and devastation in the case of El Demónico Macías; and in Will D. Glover’s, thoughts of the accursed day when he said: “Let me come with you”—all moments we will return to.
The three men, briefly and quite mistakenly feeling hopeful that the lull in the wind means it’s died down for good, know very well that they don’t have any choice but to go and speak with Don Dante, and yet they continue to drag their feet, carried forward by a kind of inertia, a vague and obscure pulse in their bodies as they draw closer to the home of a man none of them has set eyes on before, though his name is spoken among them most days.
“Might it be his dogs?” El Demónico asks as they pass the animals, a group circling around a bitch in heat, barking and drooling.
“What would Don Dante want with so many dogs?” he says, though only to stave off the thought: What is Don Dante going to do with us? Reaching across and squeezing his shoulder hard—the pain is a stimulus and just about the only thing keeping his heavy eyelids from dropping—El Gringo Alcántara Carnero musters what strength remains him. And now, as he urges his colleagues on, we will do better to refer to him as manwhoascends, at least until this part of the story is complete, a story that has by now crossed its middle point. “All that matters is getting to his house… whatever happens after that, happens… we couldn’t stop for the body… Don Dante would hardly have been happy if none of us had come back—if none of us had lived to tell him what happened!”
El Demónico and Will turn ourman’s words over in their thoughts, and Teobaldo’s final order comes to them once more:
“Get down to the ravine!” he had cried as Delsagrado’s men appeared, guns blazing. “Whatever happens, one of us has to get back!”
Will murmurs, half to himself: “We were told they’d all be inside the church… How were we supposed to know Delsagrado wasn’t in there… that he’d seen the fire and brough
t men?”
For a couple of minutes, the three men we are following trudge on in silence, chewing on Teobaldo’s words: At least one of us has to get away… Don’t go along the trail, the ravine is better… Whatever happens, one of us has to get back… Don Dante’s expecting us back.
“There’s the house!” El Demónico suddenly cries, breaking the silence, and silencing the memory of Teobaldo. In the distance, beyond a line of cypresses and pepper trees and a gully with a stream at the bottom—a stream that will one day feed a large dam—stands the home of Manuel Dante Creel Otero, the former owner and the current master of this vast mesa. He has recently become a government minister, thereby exchanging the tangible ownership of his kingdom for an intangible, and yet superior form of ownership.
When they are thirty meters short of the house where Don Manuel Dante Creel Otero lives with his wife and three daughters, ourman sees a curtain move, and a figure at the window disappear—the same window through which, many years later, Germán Camilo Alcántara Celis’s face will look out.
Don Dante appears when they reach the doorstep:
“Where’s Teobaldo?”
They glance at one another, but say nothing. Don Dante gives a pensive nod and motions them through into the living room. He points them to their seats, and after looking his guests over—each with eyes fixed on the floor—commands:
“Out with it now.”
“They came out of nowhere!” “We’d burned the church!” “Ten or eleven of them, plus Delsagrado!” “Wasn’t inside the church!” “We had it on good information!”
Leaning back in the chair he has elected to sit in, Don Dante waves a hand to quiet the dust-covered young men. After a moment, manwhoascends goes on:
“We ran back to the horses, but they’d slit their throats.”
“And Teobaldo?”
“He was shouting at us to leave the horses, to take the ravine way down, and it was just then… Then a bullet went clean through his head.”
Don Dante has been racking his brains trying to recall where he knows ourman from, and at the mention of Teobaldo’s death, with the image of a gunshot to the head, the memory is dislodged… It’s him! The boy who stuck his fingers in the dead man’s skull and smelled the blood!
“You’re that boy,” Don Dante suddenly says. “The day before the uprising began… the morning before everything changed.” A gust of wind hits the front door, blowing it open and knocking over a low table. Without a word, Don Dante gets up, shuts the door, and, looking incredulously at manwhoascends, comes back to his chair: “I said to myself that day: don’t forget this boy… Something told me you’d show up again one day… You shoved your finger in the bullet wound that day and smelled it… then you said something like, ‘that’s what you get’?”
Manwhoascends smiles: “Yes, I told him that’s what he got for hurting my beetle. He’d taken his machete to this beetle that was going to be a gift.” At this, he winces at a jolt of pain from his shoulder.
“Tell you what,” says Don Manuel Dante Creel Otero, jumping to his feet, “if that bullet doesn’t end up killing you, I’m going to make you the new boss.” His face lights up. “How does that sound?”
The three men look confused, none more so than manwhoascends.
“Don’t you want to hear the rest?”
“No, I don’t care,” says Don Dante, pointing to the door: “What you need to do is get back to the ministry, it shouldn’t be left unmanned for so long… Don’t worry about Teobaldo, I’ll send somebody for his body.”
Going over to the door, Don Dante holds out a set of keys to ourman and indicates an imported Count Trossi SSK parked a little way from the house: “We’ll talk properly tomorrow… today I need to talk to Teobaldo’s girls… and I’m going to tell them they can work for you.”
Nodding and turning toward the car, ourman takes his two colleagues by the elbows and, once they are out of earshot, says, “Right, forget about Teobaldo now, and get me to the chemist… I can’t take this pain anymore.”
Once they are in the car, El Demónico at the wheel and manwhoascends in the passenger seat, Will reaches forward and applies pressure to the shoulder wound. Manwhoascends, hand dropping to his lap, is moments from passing out, as his thoughts travel back to Will offering to come with him, to accompany him on his flight back to this country. Will, hand covered in blood, pictures the very same scene: “I need to come with you…” he said. “I want to leave and never come back… and besides, you’ll never find your way without me! I’m not going back down there!” Will begged his foreign friends, pointing to the entrance of the mine they had been working in together, a mine they would have carried on at had El Gringo Alcántara Carnero not grown fond of the local stray dogs, and had some of the local men not started using the dogs for sport.
“Go on then, get your things. We’re going in an hour, before they find the bodies and put two and two together, and before one of them tells someone about the fight.”
Happy at this acceptance, happy, that is, to be leaving behind his life at the mine, Will D. Glover went and gathered all his earthly belongings: a piece of a mirror, a slightly warped shaving razor, a rope and an iron pick, and set off with his two foreign friends. He did not know—none of them knew—that fate was yet to add another person to their band of fugitives, and lead them back to the country ourman claimed to have left behind. So, at 14:22 on April 6, 1928, five years, ten months, eleven days, and nearly twenty-three hours before the moment when ourman is appointed head of the ministry—at the hour of the day when people are inside their homes, putting food inside themselves, sleeping—Germán Alcántara Carnero, El Demónico Camilo Mónico Macías Osorio, Will D. Glover, and Anne Lucretius Ford cross the town square of Lago Seco. The journey that brought them here was long and difficult: 2,170 kilometers covered in six weeks, 730 of which they spent hidden on three different trains, 831 of which they rode in a stolen car, a Rolls-Royce Tiger Car they abandoned at the border, and 609 of which they walked. After splashing their faces and taking long drinks at the fountain, the woman and the three men set out walking once more and come onto Calle Candelaria, where they look around in surprise at the empty streets: the mill, the barbershop, and the button shop are yet to open, nor have the locks come off at the dentist or the cheese shop that was once a poulterer’s before the swollen kidney epidemic and the decimation of the avian population on the Mesa Madre Buena.
“We leave town on the north side, go all the way along that end,” says El Gringo Alcántara Carnero, pointing: “then we take a path out beyond the cemetery. Then it’s straight on to a hacienda, take another path and go to a rocky area, then through some thicketland… keeping these enormous white rocks always in sight… damn if I don’t remember those white rocks… get to them and you’re nearly at my home…” And upon saying these words, “my home,” Germán Alcántara Carnero feels a chill, and wonders: Might anyone still be living there? Might Heredí and Mother still be there? Or just my sister on her own? Ourman shakes his head, driving away such thoughts: You’ll find out when you get there.
Reaching the corner of Calle Independencia and Distrito, Anne Lucretius Ford calls out: “Unless you get us lost again.”
“What did I say about her coming along?” says El Demónico Macías. “How many times did I tell you? She isn’t ever going to shut that mouth of hers. Get a good fistful of earth in there and it still won’t do no good.”
“What about him,” says Will D. Glover. “He’s hardly the quietest guy around… he’s the one who never knows when to shut up!”
“Listen,” says ourman, cutting them off: “We knew it wasn’t going to be easy, but we’re very nearly there now. Why don’t we all shut up for a bit? How about we all agree to say nothing till we get to my house—how about that?”
The same shudder stops ourman in his tracks as they come past the ministry building where he will one day rule, and where, later, finding himself utterly exhausted, he will say to himself: I’m l
eaving today, forever.
He knows nothing about any of that, however. His thoughts are of his childhood home: What will I do if the two of them are living there? What if Heredí has started her own family there? Or if some other bastards have set up shop there?
A couple of blocks farther on, coming onto Yotepec de Covarrubias, El Gringo Alcántara Carnero, who has tried to stop imagining his mother and sister, and his fictive nephew and brothers-in-law, looks up and, pointing at the misty horizon, adds: “Those arches up there are part of the cemetery. We need to go around the cemetery to get out onto the scrubland.”
The sensation of finally arriving, which makes their feet feel less heavy, also has the effect of sending their minds back through the journey and the events that forced them to set out in the first place—as though the sensation of arrival somehow frees them to begin accounting for all that has passed. Anne Lucretius’s thoughts turn to her parents and her brother; Will thinks of the days he spent down the mine and, not for the first time, praises the day he convinced the others to let him come along; while El Demónico thinks of the work he and ourman also took on a cotton plantation, and gives thanks it’s all over.
The man who is ourman, beset not just by thoughts of the past but by future intimations as well, shakes his head and comes back into the present moment as they leave the cemetery behind, the huge expanse of the mesa unfolding before them.
He stops for a moment and casts around:
“This way,” he says, starting forward again. “Over to those rocks… the path comes after that.”
And as he picks his way down the steep slope his mind is filled with people that are not real: What will I do if Heredí and Mother are there? Or if there are strangers in my home? Or… if she didn’t die that day? And if my father didn’t die? If nothing actually happened to my María?
While Germán Alcántara Carnero, floundering in fear and remembering his father’s gaze—the one eye diurnal and the other nocturnal—begins along the path they have been aiming for, finding himself on land worked by him and by his father before—the others continue to think about the recent days: Anne about the afternoon she left her home and went away with ourman, a man she knew close to nothing about, thereby choosing to love one of her father’s workers and not her God, her siblings, or her history. She had run to the redwoods where Will, ourman, and El Demónico were waiting. Anne Lucretius says to herself: Now we’ll find out if it was worth it.
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