Nacho opened my side of the car and hauled me out, pushing me and half dragging me up the stairs. It was just as well, I could not have managed them myself. Once he had me over the threshold of the door he turned around and disappeared back into the night.
Dante’s face was a mask of murderous rage. I started to count each breath I took, trying to see how many I had left before the last. My hand strayed to my hidden weapon, but fear had stolen my bloodlust, made me slow and hesitant. Dread constricted and cramped my bowels, numbed my lips, dried my throat, and made my heart skitter and twist. Outside the godhead was clashing and booming and banging, a one man band of jubilant terror.
Dante advanced on me, twisted my hair round his fingers twice and yanked me up to his face. He smelled of smoke and whiskey. “What did you think you were doing you worthless cunt?”
Imminent death gave me a voice, made me reckless. “I was leaving you, you crazy bastard. I was trying to save myself while I still could.”
His eyes bulged and he licked his puffy lips. He backed me out the door and to the head of the stairs where he suspended me from my hair. “Too late,” he said, and let go.
It didn’t hurt right away. I lay at the bottom of the stairs trying to orient myself. I couldn’t seem to control my legs so I clawed and crawled away from the stairs, away from the source of my terror. I wasn’t even sure in my head what it was. I couldn’t hear over the oom pah pah of tribal drums and heavy breathing. The object of my fears found me again and began to strike me in blunt glancing blows and sharp jabbing kicks, that both shocked me and made me insensate. What I finally felt was a ripping, a shredding and tearing, that started in the pit of my loins and spread through my back and belly. That’s when the blows ceased and the emptiness began to fill me again, replacing the blood that ran out of my womb into the earth.
And that is where Julián found me in the early dawn, in a blood-soaked puddle at the base of the silent godhead. Me. And what would have been my son.
Chapter Nineteen
LIMBO
I woke in a white antiseptic world filled with soft voices, and clean wrists, and strange fingers probing my body, and tucking the blankets around me securely, the way one might wrap a baby to keep it snug. When my feet got cold a new pair of socks was slipped on, and another blanket warm from the dryer was added on top of me. During the day the curtains were drawn, so that the only light was pure and artificial. At night the room was dark, except for the light coming from the hall, and the various machines that hummed quietly in a way that was more soothing than sinister.
I clung to this void as long as I could, though I could sense the people that came to see me. I could hear the man’s voice in the chair beside me praying almost constantly. Sometimes, he held my hand, but only until I pulled mine away, tucked it back into my body where it would be safe. I made myself a cocoon, of warmth and hushed breathing, and the steady stream of words lacing up to Heaven.
Eventually, I had to open my eyes, come back to my body. Julián was still beside me, his face rubbed down to large eyes and cheekbones and jaw. This face was a shadow play, purple beneath the eyes, black with prickly stubble along the sides of the face, pinched and green around the nose.
He reached for the hand I had slid under my leg and his palm fell empty on the side of the bed.
Neither of us had anything to say for each other.
A nurse bustled in and gave me a crooked smile. “Well now, sleeping beauty, good to see you coming around. Are you hungry?”
I shook my head.
“Well you need to eat anyhow. I’ll bring something simple, and perhaps the Father will help you eat it.”
“I am not a priest anymore,” Julián said.
The nurse’s smile disappeared into her face, leaving her cheeks too round and her lips too thin. “Well...” she faltered. “You still have a good bedside manner.” She looked cross and questioned.
“Pardon me for my rudeness. I remember you from many bedside vigils. Your care is always exemplary. Please bring the tray. I will help Isabel eat.”
She nodded curtly and tamped off in her marshmallow shoes.
Without speaking Julián raised the back of the bed and readjusted my pillows, helping me to sit up. I did not hurt anywhere particularly, but I felt dizzy and hollow. The IV was awkward and uncomfortable in my arm.
“It was a boy,” Julián said, and my blood rushed down to my feet, out of my head, not leaving enough to churn my heart for a beat or two, before it rushed back and choked me. “I thought you would want to know.”
I nodded again. I had already known of course. But somebody else knew now. It made him real...it made him someone I could mourn. “What did you do with him?”
Now, underneath all the macabre colors, Julián added a layer of white, the color of lard. “I buried him near the lagoon by…by the hibiscus. It is not consecrated ground, but I thought perhaps his innocence would make it that way. I said mass for his soul. I didn’t know his name so I chose one for him, so that he could be christened first.”
I shuddered deep into my bones, wished that I too lay under the earth where I could hear the lagoon and the pass of ages. With a great effort I reached out my hand and took his. I tried to wrap my fingers into a comforting gesture, but all I could do was let them lay there so he held them firmly warmed them with his.
“What did you call him?”
“I called him Aaron.”
Aaron. Moses’ son. “That’s good,” I said. I was tired now. I wanted to sleep. The nurse came with the tray and Julián fed me soup and bread and tepid tea, and then he drew the curtains shut again, and I drifted in darkness a while longer.
I watched the clouds knit and unravel. The curtain stayed open all day now. I wanted the light. I shifted to see better. My ribs protested. The nurses had wrapped them, but there was little I could do but wait for them to heal. I pulled myself up with my left hand. The right wrist was broken, stiff in a cast. I had a motley collection of fading bruises, and a lump on the back of my head that had made the doctors nervous for a week. They drained the fluids, waved their little lights in front of my eyes, and held up their fingers, and finally went away, leaving me to recover.
“The doctors say you can go home soon,” Julián said.
“To whom would I go?” I asked him, myself.
He did not answer, and I could not read his silence.
“May I have a drink of water?”
He handed me the glass, and I hid my face in it. “I know you’re protecting something Isabei, and I will not press you, but it is my job to hear confessions. “
“You quit remember?”
“So now it is my job to listen only to you.”
I looked up into his eyes, eyes that could see me clearly now whether they wanted to or not. He did not turn away. “I don’t want to be your obligation.”
He smiled, reached out and traced the shape of my face, touched the soft pulse in my throat, and finally laid his hand over my heart. He closed his eyes and listened to my life quiver under his palm, and when he opened them again, they were clear and free from pain. “You are a miracle of God,” he said. “You are not just a responsibility. You are a gift.”
When I was released from the hospital, Julián brought me home to his cottage. He opened the windows and aired it out; he put flowers in the pitchers and sent a neighbor to town for some groceries. He tucked me in into his bed beneath the woven blanket and tended to my every need.
I was terrified that Dante would come here to exact his retribution. The villagers told us he was still prowling around in the house, while the land lay smoldered and untended around him. The Indians had not returned to the plantation. I had no reason to worry. Every time I glanced out the windows I saw an assortment of Mayan men lounging in the bushes laughing and talking, or having a drink on the porch. They all carried machetes propped on their forearms or placed close by their sides. We were protected.
At night Julián lay beside me in the little bed,
gathered me in his arms and told me where he had been and what he had seen.
“I would not have come back from Guatemala,” he told me. “But I felt you. I knew you were in trouble…I knew that you needed me. So I came home.”
I could not lay here forever and let Dante run loose in the world. I was responsible for letting the tiger out of its cage, and I was the one that had to trap it and lock the door again.
But for now, just for a while, as long as I could make it last, I wanted this place of safety and non-existence, where we were simply a man and woman seeking shelter in each other.
We did not go out except to walk around the house, and tend the flowers, and leave seed for the birds so that we could watch them through the windows, undetected and unbelievably close. We cooked together and fed each other with our fingers, read books until the light dwindled to indigo. Then he would play the guitar while I crooned tunelessly along. We filled his bathtub so deep it spilled onto the floor if we moved too much, and drank the home brewed beer the Maya brought up, so cold and bubbly in the hot water, until we were dizzy with steam, and warm and red, and we took each other to the cool tiles and let the heat flow out into the night and up to the stars.
He was delighted with the tasks of everyday life, the luxurious asceticism of sleeping in, eating breakfast in bed, wearing his soft worn denim shirts everyday, his feet bare. When I woke up screaming, he pulled me close and he prayed plangent low voiced pleas, just for me with God, and I fell asleep to the rumble.
When he stood at the window and his eyes stared into nothing, I took his hand and gently pulled him back into life, into me.
He sculpted again, and found his eyes useless tools, so he blindfolded himself. Sometimes, I stood with him with my eyes closed, and he guided my hands and made me feel what he felt, the smooth convex shapes that imitated existence, the great swallowing capacity of art to fool even the hands.
On Sundays we prayed quietly, and read the Bible together, and I came to respect the knowledge he carried, the burden of his belief.
It was sublime for all its transience. We did not know how it would end, only that it had to. We had forgiven each other for our rapaciousness and refusal. We accepted our humanity, its faults and cravings, and we gave completely to each other without borders or thought.
And we knew that nothing this easy, this separated, nothing this gold, could possibly last forever.
It began with a restlessness that seized him in the middle of the night, and an inability to sleep. His mind churned over a dusty moonscape that ran through his fingers when he tried to scoop it up. His impetus, his motivation, had evaporated. He was learning that living the life of an ordinary man was just that, ordinary. It held little passion or impulse without some exterior force. We lived in the axis of the world, and it spun around us.
He tried first to calm this agitation with my body. He single mindedly absorbed himself in his senses, buried in the darkness and escape of my flesh, feeding off of me, using me, not even really aware of my presence on the other side of his deep tongued kisses and demanding probings.
I became less than responsive. I let him wander the abandoned playground of my body. Disconnected, he grew lonely and confused.
When I turned away from him one night, he arced out of bed angry. “Don’t you want me anymore?”
“Not like this,” I told him. “Not this senseless rooting. Not just your body.”
“I gave up everything for you…because of you. Do you want my soul too?”
Ah, well. There was that.
He sat up all night and did not speak to me, but after that he developed a weak guilty sort of desire for me again, something forced and mendicant.
Because of the way we had come together, because we had alienated everything beyond us, we were trapped there in an unraveling web. There was blame and desperation, an unknown wanting.
The Maya told us that Dante had left and returned. He had brought crates on his boat, and they had been loaded into the house in the middle of the night. How they knew this was not revealed to us. They had been chased off of the land at gunpoint. Dante’s contract shredded in the wind.
They came to Julián to ask for advice, and in response he sent a letter to the archbishop, a powerful man with many friends and connections, asking if he would inquire into the contract.
He did not tell me until after the mail was sent, and I stood stock still after his announcement, trying to feel the floor with my feet, growing colder and colder and colder again.
“Isabei what is the matter?” He gathered me up and held me close under his chin, probably glad to respond to something familiar, someone else’s need.
My bones felt exposed, the truth close to the surface “I can only protect you if you do not know anything.”
“What do you mean? Dante’s secrets? Is that what he holds over you, the threat of my death?”
“It’s not just a threat.” I was actually uncomfortable now in his arms, I felt stifled and trapped.
He let go led me to the rattan rocker. “Isabei, I can imagine that he has emotionally blackmailed you, beaten you, made you afraid. But you must understand that he is not a god, that he cannot be everywhere at once, cannot know everything. If you were to tell me the truth he would have no way of knowing.”
I shook my head fervently, like a child protesting with her head and neck and shoulders. “He will know, he always knows and people have died.”
“Did he kill Matilde, Isabei? Or Gerald Alton?”
“I’m not sure. It was him and Nacho, and that godhead…and even me…we all worked together to kill them”
His spoke in the modulated even tones one would use to soothe a crazy person, a hysteric that must be handled with kid gloves. “What do you mean the godhead?”
“I can hear it sometimes…it…it hums. It tries to drown out my thoughts, my head. It wants me to die.”
He took my hand in his. “That is the devil Isabei, not that stone head, he is using you because you are not refusing him, you are inviting him in you are offering yourself to him for whatever purposes he wishes.”
“Like defrocking a priest?” I was bitter. I would have preferred that he accuse me of losing my mind and hearing things, rather than courting Satan.
“No.” His eyes darkened, held mine. “I let that happen, not the devil, not God, I chose you with my own free will out of my own weakness and desires. I should not have done it. I betrayed my calling; I disappointed my superiors and sinned against my vows. I did it because I have wanted you since we were little more than children and I could not take it anymore. If you think that you brought me to that point, that you manipulated me, you are only partly right. I did not have to come to your house or seek you out or spend time with you. I have always known I loved you the wrong way for a priest. I should have left well enough alone. But God tests man. You are the only woman I have ever made love to. Maybe I was not supposed to be a priest, maybe another faith, maybe just a devoted man with a family. I do not know all of the places I have gone wrong. None of us ever does.”
I leaned back to escape his willingness to accept blame. “I do.”
He was frustrated by my obstinate self flagellation. “Why are you afraid of the archbishop?” he asked changing tacks. “Are you afraid he will ferret out one of your secrets, tell the Maya or me? Do you really think Dante can kill us all?”
He made it sound so foolish, so paranoid. It was really a simple truth. I had been blackmailed, and I had willingly allowed it because of a weakness in my character, a flaw like the crack in the stele, one push and I would break into a million pieces. I was so fractured and uncertain, now I clung to my silence because it was all I remembered how to hold on to.
He sat there watching me, not entreating or coaxing, just watching with eyes that were so new in many ways and had still seen too much already.
“It was his company that owned my father’s land. It isn’t mine. It never was.”
“The fruit company?”
“Yes. He told me I could stay if I helped him do…certain things.” I felt the blackness, the poison seeping out with each word, and yet I was still so very afraid for him.
“You don’t want me to ask what things, do you?”
I shook my head again.
“He is going to think you have told me anyway. Lovers have a way of confessing to one another. He could not believe otherwise. And I’m still here.”
I thought of the wager and Dante’s ability to delude himself. Could he still think that I was here only to win my hand? That I might come back to him defeated and resume where we had left off? “I am not sure about that either. He has a way of thinking that I will do what he wants no matter what.”
“If you keep this to yourself you are doing just that. He owns you as long as you own his secrets.”
I took his hand up suddenly and pressed it to my cheek. “I don’t want you to die. I don’t want to murder you with my confession.”
He traced my lips with his finger and brought it to his own mouth. “I am asking you to tell me. It is the only thing I have asked you. If you will not then I will honor that and I will not ask again. But I want to know. I want to help you. We can go away from here.”
“He’ll find us…or he will kill my mother. He knows everything he needs to.”
Julián got up and put on a cup of tea. He watched the birds outside, the sleepy Indian man guarding our porch today. He poured two cups of a red and earthy brew, and sat back down at my feet.
“Alright,” I said. “But first you have to pray.”
He bowed his head. “Father I ask you to place a hedge around us, to protects us from evil intentions and happenings. I ask you to place freedom in Isabei’s breast and let her words take wing and fly up to you. I ask that you give my shoulders strength to bear her burdens for her. I ask for life for me and for Isabei, and release from fears, and that you will guide our footsteps to your Will. The glory of heaven is yours forever and ever. Amen.”
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