by Lucia Ashta
He was about to ask why some more. Why, why, why? The words had already formed on his lips. But then she did something different with her hips and he couldn’t think anymore, and a moan slid from his lips, not at all the words he’d intended.
“This is how it has always been for us. It is how it must be, because of who you are and because of who I am.”
“And who are you and who am I?”
“You are man and I am mother.”
He was nearing the point when thought of any kind was nearly impossible, and if it was possible, he didn’t want it to replace the sensation of overpowering bliss that was building inside him, stretching toward her, wanting to share its beauty with her.
“Do you still choose me? If we cannot have a child together, not now or ever, do you still want a life with me over one with a woman who can give you the family that you want?”
He pulled away from the brilliant light that would burst behind his eyelids at any moment, the one that he was anticipating, savoring even before it arrived. His eyelids gave a swift flutter open, but that was sufficient for him to see what she wanted for him: happiness whether with her or without her. If he wanted a family, she didn’t want to deny him that. He was free to have children with someone else.
He closed his eyes again before she saw the one last flickering thought, before there was nothing more than that light. There could be no someone else. There could only be her. For him, that’s how it would always be.
“There can only be you for me.”
She nodded, her black hair swinging wildly, as free as she was. He didn’t see it. He was feeling her, and there was so much of her to feel, too much to contain.
She leaned into him and moved her hips side to side. Heavy breasts pressed against his chest. She whispered with palpable breath next to his ear. “Then it is as it has always been for us. It has always been just you and me. No one else.”
He couldn’t hold back any longer. He didn’t know if he would have wanted to had he been able. He released every bit of himself within her, sharing everything he had to offer with her.
Everything he had, everything of his that she wanted, was hers.
She gripped his thighs with her own, then collapsed against his chest. Their breathing heavy and hot, their hair intermixing, almost the same color, his beginning to grow long like the vines of the forest.
He trailed a fingertip down the curve of her back, from the nape of her neck to the dip of her waist. Yes, life with her would be enough for him. He would not regret a moment shared with her.
He kissed her on the lips. It was a gentle kiss that spoke of promises already made long ago, long before he ever met her.
9
Trust Breeds Contentment
That time was the last that he brought up children, and before long, he didn’t think about his life in terms of what he didn’t have, but in terms of all that he did have. His blessings were more than he could want to count.
Only once did he ask, “Should we not at least get married?” As had become his way, he formed his question in the negative when a part of him already suspected what her answer would be. Still, he had to ask.
She laughed at this question, tilting her head back with amusement. Had he not known her better, he might have taken offense. The previous version of him, the one that cut down trees by the dozens every day, would have.
“Are we not married already? Marriage is no more than a promise between two people to love and share each other. Have we not made that promise to each other already, when we first met and every day since?”
They hadn’t spoken the words, but she was right nonetheless; of course they had made promises to each other that were as binding within his heart as any contract of matrimony. “But under whose authority are we married?”
“Do we need an authority greater than our own? Do we need anything other than our hearts to speak for us?”
“I suppose not.” But in Guayucuma they did. In the big city they did.
Her voice softened. “If we need something greater than ourselves to witness our promises and our love, is the jungle not sufficient? Is all the life within this forest not enough to bear witness? Is there any authority greater than the breath that cycles around the earth?”
His voice was even quieter. “No.” She was right. She was already his wife. “And can we continue to make love even if we do not intend to create children?” He still hoped it might someday happen by accident, despite her intentions otherwise. If it were an accident, then she would know it was perfect. She always said there were no true accidents.
“Making love—creating love—needs no greater reason. Love is beautiful. It is the reason for living. Love is meant to be shared.”
And so it was that the man and the woman—whose names neither one knew—shared many years together as husband and wife, as man and woman, as lovers of the heart. They lived in their protected portion of the forest, never traveling too far from it, never seeing another human being again.
They walked the forest. The man learned to navigate its thickness almost as easily as she. They harvested fruits and vegetables ready and willing to serve this purpose. They tended to the trees and the smaller plants and their flowers, to the animals, small and large, to the insects, to the miniscule, to everything there was.
The woman was the consummate gardener. The way she tended, and taught him to tend, was through appreciation. She said that appreciation was all that a plant needed to grow or an animal to thrive. All he and she needed to do was care and discover beauty.
Life in the rainforest became easeful. How could it not? Fear was gone, trust was everywhere, and beauty for him to appreciate was omnipresent. He slept in peace beneath the jute covering of their open-air casita, albeit now he understood that even this protection from the elements was unnecessary.
He didn’t need to shield himself from the elements any longer. Nothing in nature was a threat to him, because he was no longer a threat to nature.
As he slept, his chest rose and fell in the placid type of sleep that comes from contentment. He didn’t even notice that the woman left his side every night.
She slipped out into the inky jungle, with the different set of animals that came out of hiding under the cloak of darkness. She went home only once they did.
When the sun was about to rise, she would nestle back into her bed next to the man she always chose to love.
10
A Simple Winding Truth
Tedium was a constant risk for a resident of Guayucuma, a place so small it was dubious whether it should be called a town or have a name of its own. When the man lived there, each day had been similar to the previous one so as to seem almost identical: He woke, cut down trees all day, went home to the hut he shared with his extended family, and slept.
In the jungle, he couldn’t say how each day differed from the last, and a succinct explanation of their routine might have given the impression that there was room for boredom, just as before. Yet there was not. It hadn’t occurred to him that he might become bored, no matter how many days they spent in each other’s company without speaking at all.
He had learned to see those small, less easily noticeable details of the jungle, much like she did. And it was these almost-secret details—hidden in plain sight—that gifted life with a richness that left no room for even the possibility of ennui.
Every day was filled with excursions. Whether they swam in the river—one of his favorite activities now that he no longer feared that a caiman or a piranha would sneak up under him—circled the waterfall, climbed a tree, or walked all day, they were surrounded by perfect balance and striking beauty.
The color combinations of the flowers, birds, and insects were so striking he was grateful he didn’t need words to describe them. The constant animal calls and creaking of the forest had become comforting, proof of the vastness of life that surrounded them. The constant non-stop movement that was always somewhere near them reminded him that he was a
n important part of everything else, big and small.
The splendor that each sunrise and sunset revealed was the only thing to mark the days that passed. There was no more sense of time to the man, only a sense of beauty. The woman had gifted him more than a life shared with her; she had offered him true life. She had blessed his eyes with the ability to see, to really see! He could hear, taste, touch, and feel a richness he hadn’t known existed.
Indeed, life had become so rich that he was surprised to discover that he had aged. The woman had not. She looked the same as she had when he first glimpsed her running behind the flickers of trees, except that she looked more beautiful to him.
The profoundness of her love, not just for him, but for everything—even the predator that eviscerated its gentle prey, just part of the balance of nature, she would say—made her the most radiant woman alive, and he was certain it must be true. There couldn’t be anyone else like her. It wasn’t possible.
One day, while he walked behind the firm buttocks and legs she had always had, long black, shiny hair still sweeping across them with each of her steps, he said, “I have aged. You have not.”
She didn’t say anything for a long time. He thought she wouldn’t answer. She often didn’t if she didn’t think there was a need.
When her voice finally came, it was sad. He couldn’t remember if he had ever heard sadness in her voice before. “Yes.” A simple answer, laden with a truth that wasn’t simple at all.
He thought about her “yes” for a while. He believed he had gotten quite good at reading in between the few lines they shared each day. He knew there was a lot to that one word; it was obvious.
Still, he eventually decided he didn’t know what it was. Not precisely. “Why do I age when you do not?”
Again, the melancholy. “Because of who you are and because of who I am. I’ve told you before. You are man. I am mother.”
That one other word, “mother,” sent a surprise pang wobbling through him. It had been a long while since he had thought about the fact that he didn’t have children. Now, he realized he had grown old—perhaps not old yet, but older—and it looked like he never would be a father.
“And why are you sad now?” When they discussed topics like these, if anyone was sad, it was him.
She didn’t turn. She just kept walking, those youthful legs swinging hypnotically, leading him ever forward. When she finally answered, it was on a gasp that tried to subdue a sob. He wouldn’t hear something like this from her again until they had reached the end.
“Because one day soon, you will die.”
The end was coming sooner than he imagined, yet that wouldn’t be the biggest of the surprises the end held for him.
11
The Oblivion of Dreams
Even once the man realized that his mortality trailed him across the Amazon jungle like one of its great predators, he was able to forget about it most of the time. Death stalked him, a fleeting set of glowing eyes that disappeared too quickly when he turned to catch them, to verify that the feeling of being followed was real.
Still, he wasn’t certain how much he really minded if he were to stop and think about it, which he did not. Long gone were the days when fears plagued him and stole thoughts from him. He lived amongst wild animals, where life and death were ever-present.
He was one of those wild animals now, and death would come to him as it did to them: when it was supposed to arrive. There was no point in resisting it.
His impermanence hung over him, but it did not weigh heavily. Instead, it served as a reminder of all there was to appreciate while still alive. And it was easier for him to bear the thought of his death when he knew that he would die before her.
She would pass from this world too, eventually, but he would not have to endure a life without her, a loss infinitely greater than death. He knew his heart could not stand to be apart from her. It would shatter, and he would be dead while still living; there was little worse than that.
So many years had passed them by, together in the jungle, that he barely remembered his life without her. Though he knew it made no sense, it didn’t seem to him as if there had ever been life before her. It was as if it had always been just the two of them and an infinite world contained by the ancient trees that marked the periphery of this jungle.
He never left their remote area of the forest. He never again heard a human voice other than hers. They were too far away to overhear the back and forth shouts of the loggers, many more than there had been when he was one of them. The loggers, the most dangerous of all the stalkers, circled the rainforest each day, closing in on their removed setting and its thundering waterfall.
The threat was real. One day, loggers would deliver death upon the forest. They would show no mercy nor would they hesitate.
Beginning early, the loggers’ chain saws buzzed their cacophony, drowning out the insects’ morning songs. The insects sang anyway, because it was what they were made to do. The loggers could take away their home, but they couldn’t take away their purpose.
The saws didn’t stop until dusk. When they finally did, and the silence in their aftermath made the calls of the jungle unbearably real, the loggers left right away, to begin the long trek to their homes. The walk home took longer than it had before, when trees still circled their town. Now, the trees were farther removed, deeper in the heart of the forest that remained.
For fear of the forest and everything in it, loggers traveled in packs, like the man once had. Especially now that the animals’ habitat had shrunk sharply, they were frightened. To them, the animals seemed out of balance and disoriented, more prone to attack men than ever before.
Every evening, when dusk obscured the sun, and the loggers finally arrived at their villages, they exhaled a deep sigh of relief. They hadn’t been mauled. They were home where it was safe, where things made sense, and where there was an order they could understand: wake, eat, cut down trees, eat, cut down more trees, load logs onto trucks, walk home, eat, sleep.
They didn’t realize that an order so much greater surrounded them. It functioned without them—much as it always had and much as it always would.
The man, deep in the jungle, where the sound of chain saws was still blissfully absent, where a bird’s squawk could ring out across the stillness that was, paradoxically, brimming with life, was unaware that less of the jungle remained now than ever before. He didn’t consider himself a logger anymore, and didn’t think much about the cutting of trees.
He didn’t perceive the death of the forest like he did his own. He knew his death would come, but it seemed impossible to consider that the forest could die. It teemed with life. There was too much of it. How could all that life ever die? Even if the answer—one tree at a time—had crossed his mind, it would have still seemed unachievable that so much richness could be extinguished.
The man didn’t know. Vivid color, sound, and smell continued to surround him so that all that vibrancy extended to beat inside him too.
But the woman knew. She knew everything that he did not.
At night while he slept, she walked the jungle, her jungle. And every night, she mourned the losses. She knew that the man she loved would perhaps never fully understand. Or perhaps he would, but it would be too late. It already was. It had been for a long time, long even for her.
In yawning darkness or under the filtered light of the moon, the night animals of the forest surrounded her. They couldn’t understand how deep the loss that she grieved was; they weren’t made to. They were impervious to fear, independent from immediate threat. It was one of her favorite blessings of the animal and plant kingdoms. She was glad for them, as glad as she was of their company, knowing that they were perfect manifestations of perfect design.
Predators and prey congregated around her. It was how it had always been. Near her, animals could only act peacefully. It wasn’t that she didn’t give them a choice; she did, yet they always made the right one.
She let sadness an
d disappointment flow through her. She always imagined things could be different this time around. The same seed was planted in humans as in the rest of the animals. But the seed seemed to flourish consistently only in the animals.
For most humans, the seed died shortly after germination. And in those that the seed shot strongly upward, reaching toward the light, where it eventually flowered, there were too few able to appreciate the powerful beauty of its bloom.
Yet, there was absolutely nothing wrong with the seed. She was absolutely certain of this. And that was why her walk back to the lean-to she shared with the man she chose to love was always slower than on her way out. On the walk back, there was more concern to leave behind.
He never noticed the difference in her from the night to the morning. He hadn’t realized that she left every single night.
There was so much that he didn’t realize. It had ceased to surprise her a long time ago.
This morning, when she lined herself up next to him on their shared jute mat, she didn’t close her eyes. Closed eyelids would do nothing to push away the images of the dying jungle she took in every night while he slept.
She waited for the sun to rise. It would happen soon.
In the light of the new sun, she followed the lines across his face and neck. She especially loved when two lines intersected, when they tangled to become more expressive than just one of them could by itself.
His skin was creased with the stories of age. She knew every one of them by heart; she had been with him as he gave birth to each new adventure. The later ones were deeper, carved across his handsome face.
She never woke him when he slept. She knew better than anyone that the rhythms of sleep, aligned with the rising and setting of the sun, were an essential part of human balance. But today, after so many years, she reached out one soft, warm finger to trace a wrinkle from the corner of his eye to where it met his cheek. She followed the groove that trailed down the side of his mouth. These were the evidence of the many smiles they had shared.