by Serge Pey
Who would ever have recognized in this man – in this brewer of herbal teas – that ten-year-old boy, the head of whose decapitated horse had once been thrown into the pool of the spring on the family farm?
Anyway, The Thing itself came knocking at Santamaría’s door in the shape of the emissary of the very one whom The Thing was supposed to strike. And so it was that the day after the visit from the Mayor’s messenger, Santamaría conceived the idea of combining a scorpion and a scarab for the living brooch of Toad’s daughter Doña Inés.
Santamaría knew scarabs, and he knew scorpions. But how could he conceal a scorpion in a scarab? The feat was daunting, not to say impossible. A scarab could not be opened up and a live scorpion placed in its belly. Nor could a scorpion be slipped beneath a precious stone or disguised by an artificial color.
Santamaría gave much thought to The Thing over several nights and reached the conclusion that the answer lay in the small piece of wood he used to moor the chain holding the scarab captive to its carapace. He considered the fact that every evening a scarab needed to be placed not in a jewel box but rather on a plant upon which it fed, near the dressing-table, with its chain fast to the piece of wood. This piece of wood, the mobile base of the jewel, was meant to be pinned as a brooch to a dress or blouse.
For three days and three nights Santamaría worked patiently on the piece of wood, no bigger than a thumbnail, that anchored the little chain. Meticulously, he dug into the wood, smoothing the sides of the aperture with his knife, as if designing a miniature coffin or crib. This done, he used a pair of tweezers to insert a tiny reddish scorpion, one of those whose sting can precipitate a drawn-out, fevered, and ineluctable death. Last, using a little corn-flour paste, he sealed the cavity with a wood chip, just next to the fastener for the little chain.
Santamaría used his stick to trace a sign in the earth which he immediately erased with a bare foot.
“This is how The Thing will be consummated. I know that Doña Inés wants to wear the brooch at the Mass of San Fermín, and that, as is the town custom, it is her father who will attach the piece of wood to the collar of her blouse. At the slightest pressure the seal will break, the Little Creature will escape and Toad will be stung.”
“But Master, how can you tell that the scorpion will not sting Doña Inés but pick her father instead?”
“Remember what I told you: if you want to catch a Little Creature, look to the side of it, just as you would if you wanted to focus on a star. The same applies in the case of your enemy. Death is also a star in the night. You must not look it straight in the face, or it will split in two and come at you from behind and kill you.”
After sealing the fragile cover, Santamaría chose a scarab with brilliant green wings to which he affixed two emerald chips. As a finishing touch he laid a blue canary feather on the insect’s head.
“Oh Lord of the Three Powers, preserve us from the vengeance of the earth and of the eater of the three venoms!”
* * *
—
Everything turned out just as Santamaría had foreseen. Before the Mass, just as Toad was detaching the scarab from its wooden support in order to pin the latter to his daughter’s blouse, the wood split open and the red scorpion emerged from its hiding-place and stung him between his fingers. Toad tried to cry out, but his tongue was immediately paralyzed. A dull pain surged through his arm and white foam dribbled from his mouth.
No one, except for Toad, had seen the scorpion surface from within the piece of wood that held the scarab by a little gold chain. Not even Doña Inés, though she was standing before her father as she waited for her gift. True, a few policemen said that a scorpion had fallen out of the tree under which the mayor had been standing. But in that dry season, when trees and plants must draw nourishment from deep under the earth, nobody saw any connection between Santamaría and the scorpion.
“Vengeance is an art as difficult as the art of love. It is not given to everyone to take revenge,” Santamaría would say. “Vengeance is the highest form of forgiveness. When you take revenge on earth, you do not take it in heaven, and a person who dies like a child in the arms of vengeance wins eternal salvation. Getting revenge avoids a Mass.”
Santamaría had slept with his vengeance after the fashion of a madly jealous lover. Every night he had slowly undressed it and hung it on the posts of his bedstead. Then he would begin to caress it with the tips of his fingernails, tattooing its skin with white and obscure tracks. But only death could satisfy the Master’s dark companion. He would leave it alive until dawn, causing it to cry out in fury and despair. Then he would free it, but keep its arms shackled so that it could not obtain gratification on its own without its night-time counterpart.
Santamaría had concentrated all the love in the world until the world’s end on his vengeance. Santamaría loved vengeance. Vengeance loved him and caused shrubs to flower in front of his shack. That night, after the death of Toad, Santamaría untied the hands of The Thing and, pushing it back down onto the floor, a dark lover, possessed it with great thrusts of his loins to the point of death. The Thing had the body of a dancer and created rivulets of sweat on the earth, while its rattling groans pierced the night as far as the drunken women still sleeping in the streets. As the Master’s wife for eternity, The Thing always made love with a knife rusted by the moon. The two of them, drenched in sweat, engaged in a tit-for-tat of deep wounds and shrieks. And then, with a last pelvic shove and a long cruel close-lipped kiss, Santamaría killed The Thing, like an invisible woman, at the very moment of Toad’s death.
The thing was done and The Thing would no longer come to visit him. The Thing was stronger than its name, vengeance. It was almost daybreak and the donkeys were already hee-hawing on the farms when Santamaría in his sleep dragged the invisible body of The Thing down to the river and threw it in. The dark dancer floated for a few moments among the logs coming down from the mountain, then vanished in the torrent rushing beneath the rocks on its way to the sea.
Santamaría woke at noon, all alone for the first time in his life, in the cords of his hammock swinging between the two posts of its stand. That day the moon passed in front of the sun and all of a sudden the birds fell silent.
* * *
—
Toad’s death was celebrated with all the pomp and all the accolades that befitted his rank. The corpse was embalmed, shaven, and perfumed. The bishop delivered the funeral oration in person. The luminaries of the administration were on hand. Likewise the prefect of police, all the big landowners, and all the main members of the Party. During the service, however, a whole cortege of toads made itself heard in the church tower, in the street, and even behind the altar during the elevation. When, at the cemetery, a toad from the mud of the last rainfall leapt onto the casket, everyone took this as a sign of fate.
It is well known that, at death, a life’s lines come together as a double that leaves our body. This double disappears into the eyes of other, live people whom we do not see, but who wander through our dreams.
“Toad is dead! Toad is dead!”
The cry reverberated through hovels, prisons, and cooking pots. Among the village populace fires were lit. But the celebration was gentle, muted, without singing, and lamps and cigars were shielded for fear that soldiers on patrol might fire on the red flares that signaled people smoking. Around five o’clock Santamaría went to the cemetery. On an anonymous headstone he placed another scarab, its wings inset with emerald and adorned with shards of candy drops and a canary feather. He tidied up the grave, placing rice and meatballs alongside flowers. He also dug a little gutter leading from the grave to the ditch, because the rains would be coming.
“By tomorrow the soul of a woman will have eaten everything by way of the stars,” he said. “The clouds and rain foretold by the bad moon are on the way.”
* * *
—
“The Thing i
s finished,” Santamaría told me. “The Thing is happy. The Thing is sleeping now in the river. The Thing will never return.”
Grabbing hold of a burning log, he uttered incomprehensible and irremediable words with his mouth closed, words that that no one could understand. Except, perhaps, for the dead – and those among the living who were still caressing a Thing with their fingernails as they waited for the right moment to kill.
“Our strength lies in knowing how to look to the side in order to see the center of what we see. Each thing here below is a star, and we all have a shadow that follows us even at high noon. Only The Thing can redeem human beings. Only The Thing.”
Santamaría thrust his hands into the fire, looking me straight in the face for the first time. After a moment I lowered my own gaze and noticed that the fire was popping the skin on his knuckles. It was as if his hands wanted to eat the flames or to separate them and braid them with the smoke like a woman’s hair. During this painful purification not a murmur came from his mouth until he began to sing an unknown song in a deep voice as he struck the fire with the flat of his hands:
My betrothed cuts the cords
My betrothed loves not the earth
and is burning my house down
Suddenly the wind pushed the door open and the flickering candlelight made the green god’s eyes on the walls, clipped from dollar bills, begin to dance. Santamaría went outside and scrutinized the stars in the night. From each one he drew down threads that he wove into a garment to protect us from the world. Was there someone way up there on a star, he wondered, who was gazing at the earth, where he was, and pulling on an endless thread?
Santamaría wondered whether, on the point of a needle, lost in the dark, there was not another man explaining to a young fiancé of death how to catch scorpions without dying. For on the far side of the infinite, Santamaría’s double knew that he was there, looking at him. On the far side there was another him, and his mission on earth was to help the one who was on the far side, but who was at the same time him, complete the building of awareness that he had undertaken.
Dying meant reuniting with this other, this absolute brother who was looking at him, eating in unison with him in the mirror that separated the two of them. When both had finished their last meal and ripped up all the images of their lives, they would depart, each leaving his remains on one side of the infinite. Their freed souls would fly toward one another attracted by the magnet of a love that knew more than love. They would found a star with their reunited soul in a forge of the infinite. For Santamaría the day was an illusion just like the night, and it was the alliance between a day and a night that you cannot see which created the true fire of fire’s immortality. Shadow and light divided the two faces of a being that are always reunited at death. Human beings on earth were merely the silent spectators of this reunion.
“It is going to rain light on the mountain,” he said, pointing with a trembling finger into the obscurity. “The eagles are coming down to enter our dreams and take us into a slumber unknown to us that will awaken us for evermore.”
* * *
—
Santamaría had studied the science of shadow and light. In his isolated shack, he had laid down the fundamental laws of the universe. For him the day was the shadow of the day and the night the shadow of the night. Each object belonged to a pair of twin objects whose perfect similarity could never be qualified. Thus the day was never the shadow of the night, nor the night ever the shadow of the day. The blending of shadow and light was the foundation of the supreme and secret wisdom of this doctor of the stars living in a shack.
I also sought to discern shadows in the hierarchy of clouds and to wrench new faces from the night. I heard a tree fall into the river.
Since the night before, soldiers had been marching along the far bank, their faces and bayonets painted black and their weapons sheathed in oilcloth for the river crossing.
Santamaría began to sing once more, then he went off with his bags of fabric and his staff covered with signs and bottle tops. He walked slowly, head back as he gazed at a group of stars coming down to him and pouring into his mouth, which thirst held open.
Santamaría drank the sky every night.
Suddenly I heard gunshots and the dull sound of a second tree falling into the river. When I turned around, I saw soldiers moving off and something ragged floating among the rocks and the logs.
It was Santamaría’s jacket.
I ran along the riverbank trying to retrieve it, but the low arms of the trees tugged at my clothes and prevented me from getting close. I followed Santamaría’s body, floodlit by the moon, as far as the rapids beyond the bridge. Then true night established its high and silent empire and I halted.
Santamaría knew that the shadows of the water dwelt in its crevices. He knew that the fish were souls of children, not yet born of women, whom the dead fished for from boats of bird feathers.
I was surprised to hear a voice not my own singing:
My betrothed loves not the earth
and drops flowers in the waters of the dead
The door of his shack was still open.
The Movies
WHEN WE WENT to the cinema, we left the house with chairs on top of our heads. Naturally we took the lousiest ones, the most caved-in, and the straw sticking out from the seats endowed us with hairy yellow wigs.
This was how, looking like African witch doctors, we covered the two kilometers that separated us from the picture show just beyond the border. Our faces, framed by the chairs’ spindles, were hellish masks. We would hail one another from chair to chair: “Hello! Hello!”
Sometimes the chairs began to sing. These were odd processions, with no Virgin and no saints, headed to the beach despite the threat of mosquitoes or ghosts from the sea. We were monsters – or rather knights, Don Quijotes of the night in search of unlikely windmills. When it rained, the chairs were our umbrellas.
On the beach, the movie screen was set up next to the latrines. As for the stench, you couldn’t tell whether it killed the mosquitoes or attracted them. There were different schools of thought, my father used to say.
Admission was not expensive, but we were the poorest of the poor, so we would settle down behind a reed fence to see the film for free. We were the kings of the night.
When all went dark, we parted the reeds to watch the film. We were just behind the screen. For the sound, we were fine. Even too fine at times. At least we couldn’t claim not to hear. On the other hand, the reverse subtitles put our eyes to the test.
Papa gave us peanuts and, if he had sold plenty of sardines that day, bought us popsicles from the ice cream man who was also just by the latrines.
We were little kings, Papa kept saying: when we had to pee we didn’t have to go outside because we were already outside – and already next to the toilets. We didn’t need to rile up the audience by pushing past people, and what was more the show was free.
We had no choice of picture. There were Charlie Chaplins, bottom-rung westerns, and a few Tarzans. Romantic films too, during which if a man and a woman kissed we had to shut our eyes or else Mama would give us a good whack.
Eventually we knew all the films by heart. We would tell people next to us what was going to happen next: “Cheeta is hiding up in the tree. Tarzan is going to screw a monkey. Jane has passed out. A croc is going to eat her.” We exaggerated. We lied. We were taken for prophets.
The American films were subtitled. At first this ticked us off, but we got used to it. Peering through the reeds, our whole family screwed up their eyes as they tried to decipher what could be read from the back side of the screen.
Papa would say “I couldn’t care less. You can tell me about it later.”
It was there, however, that we learned to read French – but back-to-front French, since we were behind the screen. My brother and I figured
it out together, during the very same show:
“Me hungry.”
“Where is Cheeta?”
“Up in the tree.”
“Me love Jane.”
“You lion my brother.”
Little by little we learned to read all the subtitles with ease. We became experts. We would read them out loud for those who couldn’t read them from either the front or the back. My brother even did sound effects. We were a real attraction and sometimes generated more interest than the film itself.
Before long, lots of people were joining us behind the reeds, less to see the picture than to hear us reading from behind the screen and doing sound effects. The public grew at every show – on our side of the screen.
The day came when we were more than a hundred behind the reed fence. This situation upset the projectionist, because he was losing a good many paying customers, and what was bound to happen happened: one evening he draped a green plastic tarp the full length of the fence. We could no longer either see or read anything. Unless, of course, we paid to go in at the entrance. This burned the whole family up, and by common accord we swore never to return.
My mother said we would be better off reading books. For a time we would read them backwards to remind us of the movies. Then we began to read them in the normal way. But now and again we would still read backwards, and it made us laugh.
Impressed by our virtuosity, Papa thought for a while that we might become politicians. My mother talked rather of the printing trade. My uncle, who made the rounds of the fairs with a caravan, thought he should take us on tour as a novelty act. In fact we were so gifted that Mémé, a grandmother by marriage, wanted to take us out of school since we were brighter than our teacher, who could only read forwards.