‘Shot … Estela … murderer there … father dead … I listened …’ Hewhoisdeafofmind whispers, squeezing the telephone he is holding in his hands, as he realises that it is not simply his past and his future that are being obliterated, but his present, and he tosses the phone on to the dashboard, opens the door of the truck and clambers out.
‘They’ve taken your Estela!’ Sepelio shouts, leaning over the dwarf who was once a giant and vainly trying to reach the open door: yet the something that manages to reach the open door, leaving behind the bottomless well of emptiness and solitude in which it lived, is the black bird from his chest: ‘You should have listened to her … She told you a hundred times … She told you over and over … You should have listened.’
Clambering over the body of the dwarf, Sepelio reaches the open doorway and watches as Epitafio wanders aimlessly along the road: ‘Even I listened to her … because you wouldn’t,’ he calls and laughs once more, and as he does so he feels the emptiness that the bird inside his chest left a moment earlier filled by a creature of hope and the stillness that comes only with revenge. ‘Why didn’t you listen to Estela? … I would have listened to Ausencia!’ he shouts, expecting Epitafio to turn, if only briefly, before he Hewhoisdeafofmind does what Sepelio knows he will do.
‘I would have listened to her … I would never have ignored Ausencia … never!’ Sepelio insists, relishing this vengeance he has spent so long planning as he watches Epitafio stagger and weave: Hewhoisdeafofmind is about to mimic Cementeria, he is about to make the plan Sepelio devised so long ago a reality: ‘That’s something I never did … I never disregarded Ausencia … I always listened to her … I’m listening to you now … Why didn’t you listen? … Why didn’t you listen to Estela?’ Sepelio says it over and over, convinced that Epitafio will turn around or look over his shoulder. But, having decided he will never again listen to anything or anyone, Hewhoisdeafofmind continues to walk away, now disconnected from his mind and disconnected from the earth.
Without a second thought Hewhoisdeafofmind waits for the moment that happened some time ago and when the truck his mind has chosen is about to overtake his, he takes two steps, almost two leaps forward: the thud of metal against flesh makes Sepelio shudder and flattens Epitafio, whose last act is to beg forgiveness of Estela: Estela, the lone person in this world who could have made him different to this world.
Estela, who, back in La Caída, gives up searching the shack and decides to look out the window, only to see that the man who helped her earlier, whose face she can scarcely remember between dreams, is outside.
VI
Staring at the window she has just peered through, Estela pushes away the chair she has been using as a support, takes a couple of panicked breaths and once more feels the ribs broken against the rocks bite into her flesh: He must have gone outside … I’m sure there was a man here … that he dragged me inside … I can’t have imagined it, she thinks, while reminding herself to take short, shallow breaths.
If he left the house he is in danger … If there was an old man and he went out, they might attack him, Estela reasons silently as she takes two faltering steps and looks through the window at the morning light: the sun’s rays have reached the depths of La Caída and the world is alive with those creatures stirred by the heat, who lie on rocks, sating their hunger or basking in the sun.
But maybe there was no man, Estela thinks, leaning against the table that bisects this shack that belongs to the triplet who left El Infierno after quarrelling with his brothers. At this point she realises that she can go no further without dragging her left leg and the numbing pain that has spread to her shoulders and her neck: There must have been a man … What the hell am I thinking? … He was the one who brought me in here … Now I have to warn him … to save him from danger.
No … I don’t care that he is in danger … If he went outside, then that is what he chose to do … He should have waited for me … He should have asked me! Estela thinks, shuffling closer to the window whose glass flames in the morning light: I don’t care what happens to him … but I need him to lend me his phone before they hurt him … He must have a mobile phone … I saw a phone charger when I was looking for the landline … I saw it just a minute ago, Theblindwomanofthedesert thinks, turning her head.
Scanning the room and realising that there is no phone in the house and nothing that she can use as a weapon, Estela sees the charger plugged into the wall: a cable trails along the floor, lying there like an earthworm in a puddle. ‘The man must have his phone with him … I need him to lend it to me,’ Theblindwomanofthedesert mutters, turning back to the window, and moving two steps closer to the pane of glass where three cracks glitter in the sunlight.
I need to call Epitafio … to warn him … to let him know he’s in danger, Estela thinks and, gritting her teeth, releases her grip on the table and quickens her faltering steps, mentally repeating the words Epitafio once said: Pain is all in the mind, not in the body, while screaming at the top of her lungs: Nearly there … just a few more steps … a little further and I’ll be able to see him … to ask him.
But just before she reaches the window Theblindwomanofthedesert collapses and, for a moment, Epitafio and the words she needs to say to him and the words he said to her so long ago are pushed from her mind. Lying broken on the floor, all that is Estela is now reduced to a struggle with her body and a desperate urgency to save the man who went out into La Caída some time ago: I hope he’s safe … that they haven’t hurt him … at least not until he lends me his fucking phone, so I can talk to Epitafio.
As Theblindwomanofthedesert resurfaces in the mind of Estela, so too does her strength; raising both arms, she clamps her fingers on to the edge of the window sill and, using every ounce of energy, hauls herself to her feet: but a second before she can look out at La Caída, the dogs begin to bark, and though she cannot hear them, she somehow senses this and her body slackens and falls: ‘Fuck … fuck … that must be them … They’re going to slaughter him,’ Estela yelps as her words and her breaths come faster.
The stabbing pain from her ribs is more brutal this time and the lungs of Theblindwomanofthedesert spasm: little by little, the light streaming through the window and bathing the triplet’s house begins to fade to black and the warmth Estela could feel becomes an icy coldness. From her mouth comes a panicked rush of words which lose all meaning and then they too trail away: ‘Kill me and kill him … the old man … no more me here nothing … fuck they … can’t call him … could … save him.’
A second before slipping into oblivion, in the echoing emptiness of her mind, Estela repeats the last words she will ever utter: ‘Save him.’ And it is these words that accompany Theblindwomanofthedesert to the place where she suddenly finds herself, trailing with her the memory of Hewhoisdeafofmind, who embraces her for a moment and then disappears, stripping all meaning from the dream in which Estela is floating: a dream in which she is saying to Epitafio: Without you the earth has no centre … without you everywhere is anywhere … nothing but distance … nothing but nothingness.
When Estela emerges from her blackout, the sun — which even now is stifling those still trudging through the jungle that divides the ravaged lands, and beating down on Sepelio’s truck in Sombras de Agua, where he and Mausoleo are selling another of the soulless — shimmers on the floor where she lies curled into a foetal position and floods this house that delimits the madness of Theblindwomanofthedesert. This woman in whose mouth words of wakefulness and coma are commingled: Pure nothing … to borrow his phone … Without you there are no compass points … not here he must be outside.
‘He must still be outside … He must still be alive … Otherwise they would have come in here … He’s outside and when I call he will come,’ Estela says to herself, believing she has completely regained consciousness, and, forgetting her dream, she grits her teeth again, reaches up and, clutching the windowsill, she hauls herself up
with a strength she has never felt before: ‘He has to come and help me … He’ll hear me and he’ll come … He’ll lend me his phone,’ Theblindwomanofthedesert mutters as she finally draws herself to her feet: ‘I just have to call him … to ask him to come back!’
Opening the window and sticking her head out, Estela looks at a world robbed of its shadows, she is surprised by the calm that reigns over La Caída and excited when she finally sees the triplet who long ago left El Infierno and came up to the mountains: the old man is standing next to a tin barrel. ‘Please … señor!’ Theblindwomanofthedesert shouts, looking at the fire that the man is stoking and seeing from the rising smoke how high the sun is in the sky. Then Estela feels a sharp pain in her chest, tells herself that it is too late and, summoning up Epitafio’s face, she begins to slip back into the dream from which she has barely emerged.
But before she becomes lost in this world that is calling to her again, Theblindwomanofthedesert manages to regain her self-control, to reduce her terror to agitation, to remember what she has to do, and to scream: ‘Please … señor … help me … Please … I need … your phone … I have … to call him!’ Less surprised by the screams of the woman stumbling towards him than by the fact that she has already managed to get to her feet again and is able to scream, the triplet who left for the mountains hurries back: ‘Keep calm … Please, don’t strain yourself … I’m coming … We can talk.’
For her part, Estela is surprised by the silence that issues from the mouth of the triplet, who is now racing back towards the house, and by the soundless barking of the dogs under the window, then she remembers that she lost her prostheses among the rocks up in the sierra and her deafness turns agitation to sheer terror and her worries to grief: How can I call him now … How the hell can I talk to him? Theblindwomanofthedesert wonders and the silence of the planet suddenly becomes the silence of the nothingness in which she found herself moments earlier.
‘I need to phone Epitafio … Please … you have to help me … I need to talk to him urgently,’ Estela pleads even as she racks her brain: But how am I going to talk to him … How, if I can’t hear anything? Meanwhile the triplet approaching the house forces his legs to run faster and shouts: ‘Don’t worry … Please, just stay calm … Please, sit down again,’ as he silently wonders whether he truly heard or merely imagined that the woman used the name Epitafio.
‘Epitafio … is that what you said?’ the man calls, unable to imagine that the man he now dredges up from his memory can be the centre of Estela’s world, the meaning that prevents nothingness from taking hold, the certainty that glimmers in her eyes, the desire that makes it possible for her to embrace her hopes. ‘Epitafio? Did you say Epitafio?’ the triplet calls again and his words collide with those Theblindwomanofthedesert inside the house is still shouting: ‘Epitafio … Epitafio!’
Epitafio, the man who a moment earlier — a moment that could be a minute or an epoch — was betrayed by Sepelio. Sepelio, the man who has just brought the truck to a halt, and, after ordering Mausoleo to get out of the Minos, climbed down and headed towards the rear of the container. The container that the giant opened a second ago and which he and Sepelio are now climbing into, singing ‘Eeny, meeny, miny, moe … catch a tiger by the toe … and the last man standing … is the one hanging here!’
‘Take him down and get him outside … We need to sell him and get moving … We have to keep heading north … We shouldn’t be driving around here at this hour … It’s not safe to be on the motorway in daylight,’ Sepelio shouts, signalling the last of the godless, and, watching Mausoleo, he smiles and thinks: He was right, you really are huge … and you’ll be very useful to us … and it’s true that we’re better off travelling by night … during the day anything could happen to us … because he was right about almost everything … Epitafio … Epitafio.
‘Epitafio … Epitafio!’ Estela wails as the triplet stands in front of her: ‘Calm down, woman … I’ll help you … Please calm down, you’re not as strong as you think … You’ve lost a lot of blood. Calm down, you’ve taken a serious blow to the head … Come on, calm down and I’ll help you … He helped me many times … He even helped me to get away,’ says the triplet, but the silence streaming from his mouth makes Theblindwomanofthedesert even more agitated.
‘Your phone … I need you to lend me … no … no … I need you to talk to him … I can’t hear anything … I need you to call Epitafio,’ Estela shouts to the man standing in front of her and, sensing that the desert, the void, the nothingness now brood over her life, she tries to read at least some of the words on his lips: ‘ call him want … don’t really understand two men guns … following you what do to you!’
‘Exactly … those bastards … They were coming after me to kill me … They were trying to hurt me … They’re going to try and hurt Epitafio, too … The people who work for Sepelio and the priest,’ Theblindwomanofthedesert explains, looking up and, picturing vultures circling overhead, she mumbles: ‘Shit … it might be too late,’ then she stares into the eyes of the triplet, who is now smiling proudly and, though he knows that she cannot hear, he excitedly exclaims: ‘Those two no problem … killed … hack to pieces … bodies burning barrel.’
If he’s killed them and burned the bodies, that means a lot of time has passed, much more than I thought … It’s too late to warn Epitafio … too late for me to save him, Estela realises and the hope in her eyes gutters out and the desert descends on the world: The three vultures I feared have landed. ‘Call him right now … Call Epitafio,’ Theblindwomanofthedesert cries, and, though she no longer really knows where she is, she tries to read the old man’s words: ‘ calm! in danger really help you … not listening call him if you can … phone now.’
‘Yes, yes … you have to talk to him … You have to phone Epitafio … Tell him we’ve been betrayed … that he’s in danger … that’s what you have to tell him,’ Estela pleads, even as she silently resigns herself to the fact that it is futile, that it is too late, and, realising for the first time that, without this man she has loved for so long, there are no longer two worlds, that without Epitafio the world of her dreams is the world of her waking: ‘ the number? Tell me … talk to him number to dial you want to … ?’ says the triplet, who owes so much to Epitafio, and this time, as his lips move, Estela surrenders and allows herself to fall, accepting her defeat and her misfortune, she turns the knife in her own wound since she believes it is deserved, and rather than give the number to this man, she spits in the face of the world of Sepelio, while, in heart, soul certainty, meaning and hope crumble to dust as her body musters all its strength and stands up.
Leaning against the window again, Estela stares out at the courtyard where the barrel is still blazing and, having seen what she was looking for, she clambers on to the window ledge and allows herself to tumble outside. Struggling to her feet again, without knowing how or why, Theblindwomanofthedesert shoos away the dogs trying to lick her wounds and is about to start walking when she feels a claw-like hand grip her and, turning, she sees the triplet who one day left El Infierno.
‘ is dead … some man Epitafio … run over … threw himself … oncoming truck told me he laughed I’ll tell him and laughed happening laughing … to understand … the other one about Cementeria!’ the man shouts, but Estela has already turned and is walking away. Around her the six dogs silently yap and, up ahead, the flames crackle soundlessly: for the first time Theblindwomanofthedesert does not miss the hearing aids she lost up in the mountains: for her, the only sound in the world was the voice of Epitafio.
Looking up for a moment, Estela sees the summit of La Caída, glances at the dazzling, distant sun, spots a flock of storks, stares at the steep slope she came down some hours ago, catches a glimpse of the road that brought her to the place where she now finds herself. Then she watches as they crumble, the place where she finds herself, the road that brought her here, the flock of storks, the dazzling sun th
at shimmers on the summit of La Caída: for Estela, the only sight in this world was the sight of Epitafio: without it, her world is already in ruins.
Crouching next to the blazing barrel, Estela picks up the machete the triplet used to dismember the bodies now burning in the drum, looks at her reflection for the last time, and, as the triplet now running towards her screams something that neither she nor we will ever hear, she decides that she cannot kill herself because of the thing she is carrying in her belly and so puts out her eyes: why would she need them when she will never again see Epitafio, when her world is a perfect circular void, pure distance, pure nothingness?
‘ !’ the triplet shouts again as he reaches Estela: it will be many years before he will understand, this man whom life is soon to make a godfather, why this woman now struggling to her feet again has just done what she did, this woman who, feeling a hand grasp her, cries out: ‘Pain is all in the mind, not in the body!’ This woman who, in the midst of her desert and using her new blindness, summons up the first image of the world that Epitafio made visible, not quite knowing why it is this rather than another image that her memory offers: it is an image of the sons of the jungle.
The same two boys who, at this moment, are urging on the men and women who recently arrived from other lands for they have almost reached the clearing that some know as the Eye of Grass and others simply call The Shooting Range.
VII
‘We’re almost there … get a move on, we’ll be there any minute now!’ shouts the elder of the two boys, pointing into the distance and considering the colours the sun has imposed upon the world: the procession of men and women who will soon lose their names are framed by every possible shade of green, the brash, smouldering reds of a poisonous creeper, the muted purple of the bromeliads that infest the kapok trees, the black and blood-red mud and the symphony of browns made by tree trunks, roots and vines.
Among the Lost Page 27