The Arid Sky

by Emiliano Monge

  Hidden behind these white rocks, ourman, Will, and Amparo watch as he approaches, and cannot stop themselves from laughing at the man’s anguish as he runs headlong, coming up onto the small promontory where Ausencia lays hidden from sight. When he does see her, on the floor, unmoving, her clothes torn and stained with what he believes to be blood, El Demónico Macías stops, drops to the ground and opens his mouth to cry out, but the only noise to come from his body is the crash and tumble of his pounding heart. Hidden in their cave, his colleagues are still beside themselves, and they talk in low voices while Ausencia, still on the floor—they told her: “Don’t get up till you hear us call to you!”—does not know her man has arrived. El Demónico tries to stand, and eventually manages to do so, but after just one step drops to his knees again. It is then, seeing him fall down this second time, that ourman feels bad—he knows what his friend is like—but before he can make it to the cave mouth, and before Ausencia can shout out for him to stop, El Demónico Macías is raising his gun, placing its black barrel in his mouth, and has pulled the trigger. A plume of blood and bone and brain and skull.

  “Then the shouting began, the recriminations,” says ourman at the top of his voice, as he once more experiences the pain, the guilt, and the terrible depression that inundated his mind at the time. “Then all the shouting, all the recriminations!” El Gringo Alcántara Carnero says, and again once or twice, each time a little more quietly, and he, and we, are back in this present moment:

  At 15:56 on February 18, 1975, Germán Alcántara Carnero draws the last of the curtains in his bedroom and looks out into the night—in the silver moonlight the land has the aspect of both metal and velvet. He whispers to himself: “Then all the shouting, all the recriminations… same as it was with María and with our son… whereas with you, and with Anne, everything just fell silent… the silence He demands… the silence that might be my way to solace!” While we were away recounting the circumstances of El Demónico’s death, ourman picked up the book his wife used to read, and found she had marked a page, and that, before she hanged herself, she had highlighted a certain line:

  And immediately there fell from his eyes as it had been scales: and he received sight forthwith, and arose, and was baptized…

  “The way forward,” he whispers, “is not to renounce my faith… but rather to allow that faith to deepen!”

  He placed the book next to the radio and came and stood by the window, with its view out over the land, the layer of fine-spun metal-velvet covering the land. The lamplight illuminates the garden, in which the children have been playing for some time now: they have continued to inhabit the floor below. When was the last time they asked after you, ourman wonders, the last time one of them came up to see how you were… that one of them even spoke your name… Turning to look at Dolores Enriqueta, he says: “How do I make Him forgive you… how do I bury you so that He might forgive you… how do I go about tricking Him… I’m going to need to do something else about your neck… I definitely can’t tell anyone what’s happened!”

  The light spilling past him draws the attention of his two dogs, dogs he bought after the death of his oldest son, which then clamber over the ruins of a limewashed wall and come trotting toward the front door.

  “Do I bury you in the clothes you chose, or put you in something else… put lipstick on you and tie up your hair… maybe I use the same bit of ribbon you used to hang yourself!”

  Approaching the bed once more, his whole body trembling, ourman points at his wife:

  “Maybe you don’t deserve to be put in the earth… maybe I shouldn’t even bury you… Maybe I just leave you shut up in here… you’ll rot in this room if that’s what I decide!” While at the same time he says to himself: What my path needs now is silence… my path demands that I be on my own… The word of the Lord means I can’t have any connection with the world anymore… first of all those kids are going to have to go… they have to be gone from this house before the day is out.

  It is 04:22 in the morning when he comes down the stairs shouting: “Alonso… Enriqueta… Mariangeles… Ramiro… José Julio!”

  What follows when ourman comes down the stairs in his house: him entering, one by one, the rooms on the floor where he will spend the rest of his days, him pulling his children and nephews and nieces from their beds and running them out of the house, him falling to his knees on the tiles in the entranceway, just as El Demónico Macías fell to his on the riverside forty-four years and six months ago, and then drawing one of the dogs close and calling after the departed children: “And don’t come back… Don’t come anywhere near this house… I don’t want you or anyone coming anywhere near this house!”—we are not going to witness because this is the end of this moment, the moment that shows why Germán Alcántara Carnero went on to shun the company of men, and that leads to the final moment in our story, which begins directly:

  At 10:08 on November 17, 1981, at the hour, that is, when the birds fly across the Mesa Madre Buena and the dogs lie down for their second siesta of the day, Germán Alcántara Carnero gets up from the armchair he has sat in to read during the last five years and then, going out of the room that one day belonged to bornsickly, says: “What has been, will be.” In the hallway, the scene of his children’s and his nephews’ and nieces’ ejection, where he told them never to come back, El Gringo Alcántara Carnero weaves past a half-drunk glass of water, three dog shits, and a yellow plastic bottle and throws the book he inherited from his wife onto a table, raising a cloud of dust when it strikes the top. Stale seclusion hangs heavy on the air.

  Crossing the room in which he sleeps and eats and plays with the dogs, Germán Alcántara Carnero, whom we might also call manwhoregrets, repeats the phrase: “What has been, will be!” while inwardly saying to himself: How was I to know that solitary life wasn’t the way… that the problem wasn’t other people… that it was no bad thing, in fact, to be connected to the world? It really was simply a question of finding connections with other men. Stopping at the front door, with the six dogs whining behind him, about to lay his hand on the worm-eaten door handle, he stops, shaken for a moment: it’s come again, it’s happened to him again, having to depart a place once more. Reaching out his left arm—these days the right one hangs inert at his side—Germán Alcántara Carnero wraps his outsize hand around the door handle and squeezes his long-nailed fingers together, the rusted hinges creak as he pulls, before ordering the dogs to stay. For the first time in six years, the door swings open and in pour fresh air, glimmering light, and all the warmth and aromas of the Mesa Madre Buena. “Really, all I needed was to find out how to connect with people… how to form connections,” manwhoregrets says as he takes in what remains of the garden. There is a mound of dry leaves under the fig tree, pepper tree, and the cypress planted here many years ago by Dolores Enriqueta in the hope that they would bring her a healthy first child, and something rustling about underneath—rats, he thinks it must be—but as the dogs dash past him the leaves burst upwards and, with a great clamor of wings, the blackbirds that were scratching about for food in the leaves take to the air.

  The blackbirds fly away, over a scattering of donkeys and over the tops of the buzzing power lines that crisscross the mesa, away in the direction of the highway. Watching the birds depart, birds that will again feature at the end of this chapter, and watching the forms they trace in the air—a sphere, rippling waves, a braid, an elongated horn and a half-moon—he thinks of his own going away, and sees the farmland, the scrublands, the rocky outcrop, and the mountains as they were twenty years ago and not as they are now. “I won’t stand a chance if I’m on my own… I won’t make it the whole way… if I’m on my own solace will never be mine.” No longer shielding his eyes, manwhoregrets is about to take a step but stops, placing his foot back down: “Really think this is the way… that it’s other men you need… Really think they’d care… or that you could even make them listen… Why wouldn’t the kingdom of heaven be enough for them?” />
  Yes, I do believe it, he thinks, picking up his left foot again and, having placed it forward, picking up his right. Then, turning, he puts the key in the lock without knowing why he does so—he doesn’t plan on ever coming back—and turns once more and sets off in the direction of the scrublands. Of course I believe it: they will come to understand that it isn’t only heaven’s solace they desire… when they hear my message they’ll see they also want freedom here on earth… they will understand, and they’ll join me, and together we’ll walk the true path… one after another they’ll enlist, they’ll give form to the army I am founding this very day! manwhoregrets says to himself, while also regretting the fact he did not set out like this years ago, when his body was not so worn out, when the sun did not weigh heavily on his back, when he could still remember how to address God’s creatures and the manner to adopt if you want them to obey. Hurrying forward as best he can and hushing the six whining dogs at his heel, Germán Alcántara Carnero looks up at the horizon and sees the same flock again, forming cup and funnel-like shapes now—at the end of our story this flock will seem to form a huge turning windmill and then an immense blanket in the sky.

  Laboring forward, manwhoregrets reaches to the last of the paths still visible on his land, the path used by the young girl who for the past five years he’s paid to bring him food and to come and feed the dogs—the dogs now snuffling about their master, urging him on. “Of course I believe it: they will follow me on my path… I have found it and I will be the one to show other men… they’ll have to follow my orders again today… all you need to do is find them, and speak to them… men who will form my army on earth!” ourman insists, coming to a promontory he would have had no trouble scaling thirty or forty years ago but that now is as good as a vertical cliff face to him. Toiling up, Germán Alcántara Carnero looks out across the land: “Look for some familiar shape… a shape that is human… the outline of the first person to join the army of believers.” The six dogs—confused and agitated by their master’s conduct as he stands muttering to himself—muttering, that is: “Show yourselves, do not hide from me”—bark, whine, and turn circles on the floor.

  After a minute of this—whining, turning in circles, and getting no response—the dogs begin biting their master’s pant legs, while he merely goes on with his questions: “Where are the inhabitants of this kingdom? Where are my soldiers this day… the army that will walk with me… troops in the universal battalion of solace!” The dogs, baying and tugging at their master’s clothes, finally succeed in setting him walking once more: manwhoregrets comes slowly down the other side of the promontory, and sets out along the sun-petrified path once more, stone-dry for lack of rain. Running his fingers over his neck, which is also splashed with moles and with small red cracks and with a thousand greenish veins, manwhoregrets wipes the sweat from his dripping brow, and quickening his pace a little, or at least thinking he does, he covers another twenty meters, stops, hushes the dogs with a wave of his good arm, and clambers onto a rock. In the distance, very far from where we are, he discerns a number of possibly human silhouettes.

  Standing atop the rock, manwhoregrets squints, eventually deducing that they are indeed human forms. “The first… they will be the first to hear the word… the first to have to obey me… they will be my first recruits!” He climbs carefully down from the rock, in spite of the great excitement that has suddenly taken hold of him, and whistles at his dogs—the dogs that have lived by his side these five years past and that have shared his solitude, time, and seclusion—before setting forward along the path once more. Ignoring his rusty bones, his wasted tendons, and his atrophied muscles, manwhoregrets succeeds now in moving a little more quickly and not only in telling himself he is doing so. An eighty-meter stretch brings him to the rocky outcrop, and once he is among the high boulders, sunlight no longer falls from the sky alone: it rebounds off the glasslike edges of the rocks and the exposed seams of bright iron where portions of rocks have been shorn away. The path brings him, and us, down to a sunken but brightly lit clearing, the boulder around it obscuring the view, which makes him nervous. Germán Alcántara Carnero whistles to the six dogs again and quickens his pace, while murmuring: “Eight believers to carve a path with me… who will help me spread the news of the Lord’s great compassion… who will help me bring news of the one true path, which exists in the collective life.” Deciding he cannot wait for the path to emerge from the rocks, and seeing one some two or three meters high with an edge he might scale, he clambers laboriously to the top.

  The eight men are only eighty meters or so away now and Germán Alcántara Carnero’s heart begins to pound: Plus they look ready, almost completely prepared… they’re even wearing uniforms, five of them at least, and then says at the top of his voice: “Why are they armed… what do they need those weapons for… who are these eight men?” Catching the scent of the eight men now some sixty meters away from the clearing, ourman’s dogs turn and begin barking at the horizon. “Quiet!” shouts manwhoregrets. I ought to get down and go over to them… I don’t want the dogs to put them off… maybe they haven’t seen me yet. What ourman does not know and still cannot imagine, is that the approaching men did see him and are on their way to find him, and have in fact already decided, whoever he might be, to have some fun at his expense. “Quiet!” shouts Germán Alcántara Carnero again, raising his good arm. None of the dogs obey, and he despairs—he does not want the people in the distance to go away—before losing his footing and then, swaying for a moment atop the rock, loses his balance completely and falls—his body crashing against the obsidian and basalt jags as he comes tumbling to the ground.

  A couple of minutes have passed by the time manwhoregrets regains consciousness, as the dogs snuffle at him and lick his face—they have detected the scent of the people approaching, and their hackles are up. Ourman, coming round, makes an attempt to rise, but, confusingly, finds his body unwilling: all the strength has gone out of him. A short while later the eight men come into the clearing, and he calls out for their help, these would-be soldiers in the army he is to lead, an army to bring tidings of great neighborly compassion to the world. Unlike his dogs and unlike the man he was many years ago, Germán Alcántara Carnero feels entirely unsuspicious of their approach, and lying twisted on his front in the clearing—a clearing which, viewed from above, has a strange shape: like that of a horn or tusk, the tip of which resembles the barbed tip of an arrow—calls out for assistance, or tries to: all that comes from his mouth is a string of bloody saliva.

  Two of the dogs yelp and fall to the ground, to laughter from the men, who have taken up position at the entrance to the clearing. The rest of the dogs try to get away, but they go down, too: the men, now shouting and whooping, have leveled their guns and shot the beasts down. Manwhoregrets, still lying on his front, fails to comprehend anything that is happening—what are the gunshots, why are his dogs going down around him—and neither does he understand it when the men come forward, turn him over, and lay him against the rock he fell from. One of them steps forward and gives him a backhander across the face—Not this! Why do they not listen? He brings good news! “I know the way to your salvation!” he says through bloody teeth. “Listen! I know the way for you to give up your fear and sadness… I know where you can find solace… listen, listen!” And it is less clear still to manwhoregrets why these laughing men—what, laughing?—taking a few steps back, pick up stones and begin hurling them at his body—what?—but he does feel regret, regret upon regret: in particular he regrets ever having believed that solace would be found in the company of men.

  Soon, the sound in his ears of the men’s departing footsteps, he asks mercy for his dog—he can hear one of them whining excruciatingly nearby. For a moment his body contracts very slightly, drawing imperceptibly back into itself, before expanding beyond the confines of the flesh. It is 12:16 on November 17, 1981, the hour when the blackbirds appear over the clearing and pour down onto the body of ourman, covering him
like a blanket, before dispersing across the immeasurable mesa, a place that from this day on, and like the rest of the country once illuminated by the memorable moments in the life of Germán Alcántara Carnero, will belong to him and to the beings that walk beside him.

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  About the Author

  Emiliano Monge (Mexico City, 1978) studied Political Science at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. His first short story collection, Arrastrar esa sombra, was published in 2008, followed by the novel Morirse de memoria; both were finalists for the Antonin Artaud Award. With a wide array of non-fiction essays, reportage, and book reviews, he has been an ongoing contributor to the Spanish newspaper El País, the Mexican newspaper Reforma, and prestigious magazines such as Letras Libres and Gatopardo. He is the two-time recipient of the Fondo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes Conaculta award, and is now a member of the “Orden del Finnegans,” a group of Spanish-language writers that gathers annually on Bloomsday in Dublin in honor of Joyce’s Ulysses. In 2011, the Guadalajara International Book Fair chose him as one of the top 25 best-kept secrets in contemporary Latin American literature, and in 2013 he was awarded the Corte Inglés prize “Otros ámbitos, otras voces.” He was also selected for “México20”, a list of twenty important young Mexican authors chosen by The British Council, the Guadalajara International Book Fair, the Hay Festival, and Conaculta. The Arid Sky is his first book to be published in English translation.