RIDDLE
(2005)
It is the lieutenant’s first execution. Five men are to die by firing squad, and his company has drawn the assignment. He does not look forward to it, but he will not falter in his duty. He is a hunter and has killed often, creatures large and small. Nor will these five be the first men he has killed, though they will be the first he has put away in this manner, tied helplessly to a post and shot on command. At least, he believes, they should be allowed to run free and be chased down as fair game. He is a sportsman and a soldier, not a butcher. Still, what’s to be done will be done. The five—a priest, a truck driver, a labor organizer, a student, and a farm worker—will not see the morrow. Their fate is a harsh one, but it is not an undeserved one. Directly or indirectly, with arms or with words, they have brought about the deaths and injuries of many, have sown the seeds of lawlessness, and have even threatened the downfall of the state. They have their reasons, their causes, but they do not justify the havoc they have unleashed on orderly society. Which is, at best and by necessity, as all know well, an unsatisfactory compromise. Not all rules are good rules, but they must be obeyed until better ones are found, else all collapses into anarchy and humankind returns to that condition from which it has so laboriously emerged, one ruled by blood, not by mind.
That is anyway what the lieutenant, dedicated keeper of law and order, believes: that civilization such as that he serves is hard-won over many centuries and all too easily lost in a day, man being the capricious undisciplined animal that he is. He understands, as the student Lázaro Luján would say, his own weaknesses and urges, and fears them in others, the law their safe container. Lázaro Luján, known to his comrades as the Reader, also believes in civilized society but does not believe that he lives in one. Moreover, civilization is not a condition or an achievement or even an ideal, but a process, demanding constant renewal, its good health dependent upon periodic upheavals, such as this one he is presently guilty of fostering. He does agree with the lieutenant that civilization does not come without hard work and sacrifice. There is always a price to be paid, and in his case that price is high. He has suffered expulsion from the university, rejection by his family, the deaths of friends and loss of lovers, injustice, incarceration, and torture, and now must pay with his life. His remote austere father, a judge with high connections, might have saved him but did not. As Lázaro Luján himself fiercely demanded: Hands off, this choice is mine! Thus, he feels at once respected and abandoned. When the lieutenant asked him if he had any final request, he asked that he be allowed to say in what order they will stand for their executions, placing himself at one end.
Which is why Carlos Timoteo faces the firing squad with the labor organizer on his right. The lieutenant understands the student’s choice. He knows that Carlos Timoteo has no ideology at all unless it be that of a primitive and superstitious religion which even the priest would scorn. He seems confused by life, speaks only in incoherent mutters. The labor organizer beside him is a brave man, brazen even, devoted to his dangerous politics, ambitious, well spoken, proud. He has lived a life of confrontation, this thus its natural conclusion, whereas Carlos Timoteo is a man who finds himself on history’s stage without quite knowing, though his crimes were many, how he got there. The lieutenant therefore supposes that the student wanted the least committed of the condemned to stand alongside someone who might give him courage and a sense at the end, however illusory, of purpose. Actually, however, Carlos Timoteo’s purpose is clear and free of illusions. His has been a long life of humiliation and abuse. He has been beaten, chained, mocked, knifed, used as a human mule, kicked, branded, tied to a tree and whipped. Even now, his gnarled calloused hands are suppurating at the fingertips where, until yesterday, his nails were. They laughed, who tore them out, as many have laughed before. Carlos Timoteo was not born to wealth or power, nor has he even dreamed of it; all he has sought his whole life through is dignity. Which at last today he has found. For once, he signifies. He will face his executioners with his head held high.
It’s true, the populist creed of Carlos Timoteo is not that of the priest, but he would not scorn it. In fact, simple as it is, it is more reliable and steadfastly held than his own. All the poverty, injustice, corruption, cruelty that he has witnessed have taken their toll. Suffering humankind has won his love at the expense of his lost love of God. Which is an idea he no longer trusts, any more than he trusts the church which propagates it, handmaiden to the venal state. The priest’s logic is simple: If God is good, He cannot exist. If He is not, He should not. All but the student have asked him for spiritual guidance at this moment of extremity, even the anarchist. He has told all of them that in the eyes of the church they are saints and will be blessed by the best the afterlife has to offer. Which, he knows but does not say, is nothing; he could provide the lieutenant and his soldiers the same consolation, or even the corrupt and ruthless leaders they have struggled against, the lascivious bishop who denounced him. The soldiers will raise their rifles, silhouetted against the blank whiteness of the overcast sky, and the door will close. The priest, unlike Carlos Timoteo, has no one on his right to give him company and strength. I am merely one of the thieves, he thinks bitterly, and what’s more, I will it so.
The anarchist, Umberto Iglesias, sees no conflict between anarchism and religion. Indeed, he thinks of God, in His absolute freedom and cosmic violence, as the ultimate anarchist. Order stifles and is the devil’s realm. Look only at the devils who maintain it. He’s not as smart maybe as the Reader beside him, but he’s not stupid. He knows that violence is the natural state of things, the universe a boiling pot of ceaseless eruption, destruction, and renewal, life itself a mere fleeting aberration, the nation-state life’s mad invention. Destroy it, Umberto Iglesias figures, you’re doing the universe a favor. The labor leader cries out now for justice, and the others mutter their assent, poor fools. They just don’t get the joke. They’re like a comedian’s nightmare audience, probably they deserve to die for that reason alone. But, then, who doesn’t, and for whatever reason? Umberto Iglesias has never actually blown anything up, but he’s trucked the explosives around for those who have. He’s dreamed of hitting the floorboard one day and driving his loaded truck at top speed into the capitol or the stock exchange or even the casino where over the years he has been robbed of all he’s ever earned, but much as he disdains life, he’s been reluctant to give it up, having too much fun in it. Especially with the women, fucking being the best thing about being alive, maybe the only good thing, and at the same time the weirdest thing of all. Now, it’s too late for revolutionary glory (fuck glory of any kind, history is a farcical delusion), too late for anything short of shitting himself. Already, he is shackled to the post, the firing squad is standing at attention, the lieutenant is giving the soldiers their final instructions. Umberto Iglesias has had his eye on the lieutenant, that jaunty bastard, recognizing in him a kindred spirit, but one warped by fear and ambition into its contrary, that sickness men, suckered by reason, call sanity. The lieutenant is calling out their names. So how is Umberto Iglesias going to meet the end of things? By thinking about the open road and about all the women he’s had. See if he can remember them all in order and how they smelled and what they did.
The lieutenant has also been aware of Umberto Iglesias—while being bound to the post, the condemned man winked at him and grinned—and he too recognizes that there is something that they have in common, though the lieutenant supposes this simply to be the love of women. Umberto Iglesias is a handsome man with dark eyes and sensuous lips and a dissolute air, no doubt a favorite with the ladies. Perhaps he should have had the insolent wretch emasculated before executing him, but, though this has on occasion happened under the lieutenant’s command, he has never himself ordered it, being respectful of the authority of love as of all authority. He has never even neutered animals, his own possible neutering in warfare his worst and most persistent nightmare. The lieutenant is not a superstitious man—even
his gambling is grounded in a mathematical logic—yet he fears (irrationally, he knows, and reconsiders the truck driver’s wink) love’s reprisal should he in any way interfere with its sweet mechanics. He could at least have blindfolded Umberto Iglesias, but he, like the other prisoners, chose as his final request to face his executioners with open eyes, and this, because it suited him, he granted them. He too, as with the animals that he hunted, wished to gaze into their eyes before killing them, watching them as they watched death’s advent. Noting Hugo Urbano standing to the right of Amadeo Fernández while calling out the names of the condemned, the lieutenant realizes that there was a purpose after all to the student’s lineup, an unexpectedly ironic one, and that consequently he will have a riddle tonight for his riddle-loving lover. He raises his hand as a signal.
As the members of the firing squad raise and cock their rifles, the lieutenant having turned toward him with a bemused gaze, his hand in the air, Lázaro Luján suddenly, with deep chagrin, realizes his mistake. His last chance to raise a word against the gun, and he has, yet again, written, not for his audience, but for himself. Trapped as always in his own ego, just as his mentors and peers have so often said. What a pity at such a moment as this to feel their scorn. His comrades have fallen silent. In the distance, he sees a lone black bird, scribbling its riddles on the white sky. Its message is obscure but, Lázaro Luján realizes with a sudden flash of insight, it is not completely illegible. If only . . .
Later that night, the lieutenant describes the day’s events to his lover while she works aromatic oils into his chest and abdomen. He does not tell her about his personally giving each of the condemned the coup de grâce with his pistol while they were still hanging from their posts, nor about the stripping of the bodies of their possessions by his soldiers, but he has left in the truck driver’s knowing wink. I think my men found too much pleasure in the killing, he says. Pleasure? Well, excitement. Thrills. One is never so aware of consciousness as at the moment of annihilating it in another. They are probably all with their lovers tonight, as am I, and no less rampant and awake. I’m afraid I don’t understand such excitement, she says. Is that the riddle you spoke of? No. From what I have told you, can you tell me who were each of the condemned and in what order they were standing? And what was the message the student wished to leave behind? I had supposed he might have been given to some jejeune romantic gesture, and so I was surprised by its bitter irony. I have already solved it, his lover said with a smile, and told him the names and occupations of each and where in the line they stood. And as for the message, she added, spreading the oils between his thighs, perhaps you yourself have not entirely puzzled out the riddle left you.
GRANDMOTHER’S NOSE
(2005)
She had only just begun to think about the world around her. Until this summer, she and the world had been much the same thing, a sweet seamless blur of life in life. But now it had broken away from her and become, not herself, but the place her self resided in, a sometimes strange and ominous other that must for one’s own sake be studied, be read like a book, like the books she’d begun to read at the same time the world receded. Or maybe it was her reading that had made the world step back. Things that had once been alive and talked to her because part of her—doll, house, cloud, well—were silent now, and apart, and things that lived still on their own—flower, butterfly, mother, grandmother—she now knew also died, another kind of distance.
This dying saddened her, though she understood it but dimly (it had little to do with her, only with the inconstant world she lived in), and it caused her to feel sorry for these ill-fated things. She used to think it was funny when her mother chopped the head off a chicken and it ran crazily around the garden; now she didn’t. She no longer squashed ants and beetles under foot or pulled the wings off flies and butterflies, and she watched old things precious to her, like her mother, with some anxiety, frightened by the possibility of their sudden absence. Since dying was a bad thing, she associated it with being bad, and so was good, at least as good as she could be: she wanted to keep her mother with her. If her mother asked her to do something, she did it. Which was why she was here.
She also associated dying with silence, for that was what it seemed to come to. So she chattered and sang the day through to chase the silence away. A futile endeavor, she knew (she somehow had this knowledge, perhaps it was something her grandmother taught her or showed her in a book), but she kept it up, doing her small part to hold back the end of things, cheerfully conversing with any creature who would stop to talk with her. This brought smiles to most faces (she was their little heroine), though her mother sometimes scolded her: Don’t speak with strangers, she would say. Well, the whole world was somewhat strange to her, even her mother sometimes, it was talk to it or let the fearful stillness reign.
Though the world was less easy to live in than before, it was more intriguing. She looked at things more closely than she had when looking at the world was like looking in at herself, her eyes, then liquid mirrors in a liquid world, now more like windows, she poised behind them, staring out, big with purpose. To be at one with things was once enough, sameness then a comfort like a fragrant kitchen or a warm bath. Now, it was difference that gave her pleasure: feathers (she had no feathers), petals, wrinkles, shells, brook water’s murmuring trickle over stones, not one alike, her mother’s teeth (she hadn’t even seen them there in her mouth before), the way a door is made, and steps, and shoes. She thought about words like dog, log, and fog, and how unalike these things were that sounded so like cousins, and she peered intensely at everything, seeking out the mystery in the busyness of ants, the odd veiny shape of leaves, the way fire burned, the skins of things.
And now it was her grandmother’s nose. It was a hideous thing to see, but for that reason alone aroused her curiosity. It was much longer and darker than she remembered, creased and hairy and swollen with her illness. She knew she ought not stare at it—poor Grandma!—but fascination gripped her. Such a nose! It was as if some creature had got inside her grandmother’s face and was trying to get out. She wished to touch the nose to see if it were hot or cold (Grandma lay so still! it was frightening); she touched her own instead. Yes, dying, she thought (though her own nose reassured her), must be a horrid thing.
The rest of Grandma had been affected, too. Though she was mostly covered up under nightcap, gown, and heaped-up bedclothes as though perhaps to hide the shame of her disease, it was clear from what could be glimpsed that the dark hairy swelling had spread to other parts, and she longed—not without a little shudder of dread—to see them, to know better what dying was like. But what could not be hidden was the nose: a dark bristly outcropping, poking out of the downy bedding like the toe of a dirty black boot from a cloud bank, or from snow. Plain, as her grandmother liked to say, as the nose on your face. Only a soft snort betrayed the life still in it. Grandma also liked to say that the nose was invented for old people to hang their spectacles on (Grandma’s spectacles were on the table beside her bed, perched on a closed book), but the truth was, eyes were probably invented to show the nose where to go. The nose sat in the very middle of one’s face for all to see, no matter how old one was, and it led the way, first to go wherever the rest went, pointing the direction. When she’d complained that she’d forgotten the way to Grandma’s house, her mother had said: Oh, just follow your nose. And she had done that and here she was. Nose to nose with Grandma.
Her grandmother opened one rheumy eye under the frill of her nightcap and stared gloomily at her as though not quite recognizing her. She backed away. She really didn’t know what to do. It was very quiet. Perhaps she should sing a song. I’ve brought you some biscuits and butter, Grandma, she said at last, her voice a timid whisper. Her grandmother closed her eye again and from under her nose let loose a deep growly burp. A nose was also for smelling things. And Grandma did not smell very nice. On the way I also picked some herbs for tea. Shall I put some on? Tea might do you good.
No, just set those things on the table, little girl, her grandmother said without opening her lidded eye, and come get into bed with me. Her voice was hoarse and raw. Maybe it was a bad cold she was dying of.
I’d rather not, Grandma. She didn’t want to hurt her grandmother’s feelings, but she did not want to get close to her either, not the way she looked and smelled. She seemed to be scratching herself under the bedding. It’s . . . not time for bed.
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