Heavens on Earth

by Carmen Boullosa

  But, no. I saw them get out on the other side of the river. First him, he got his clothes and started dressing. Then she got out and quickly put her clothes on and started to braid her long hair.

  “It is quite a long trek that awaits me to reach the Colegio—I must have thought—and I’m as hungry as a bear.”

  I slipped the still-wet cassock over my body and set off, walking barefoot. If I had invoked that couple with my erect animal, how many more couples might I have seen along the way? Every fifty steps I could have stopped and undressed, I could have called the copulators and they might have converged. Before my eyes might have passed a woman and her husband, a brother-in-law and a wife, a girlfriend and boyfriend, an aunt with her nephew, a niece and her uncle, a maid and her master, a mistress with her servant boy, and I might also have seen one man sodomizing another, a boy penetrating the ass of a dog, and dogs and birds copulating with each other, as if my own lust would fully awaken spring.

  But in these lands there is no spring to awaken because here nothing overcomes the winter. Behind the branches of the weeping willows, by the protected walls, hidden among shrubs and giant reeds, there, on the limestone that scratches buttocks and legs, my people, the Indians, lament their defeat with sweet moans. Steps farther beyond, in the white streets, behind the balconies—on top of the soft cushions or leaning against a table or stretched out on beds, or hiding in the stables on the straw, or even against the doorjamb (in order to keep watch), or on top of a bench, or in the garden like toads—the Spaniards, the conquerors of these lands, celebrate their victory in twos, moaning as well, the wives feigning disgust to assure their husbands of their chastity, little whores letting out fake little screams to please the ones who are paying for their pleasure.

  How many might be enjoying themselves and how many demons might be stroking the tip of the flesh with their repugnant tails? Lilith will go from neck to neck, entering and leaving to ignite the desire of the idle or the sleepers, and all the children conceived will be her children.

  But I will not dawdle anymore. I was not thinking about children, or Lilith, or demons, or the hundreds of sinners who might be celebrating at this moment in that new Gomorrah, triumphant or defeated. My head was cleared by an animalistic burst of laughter.

  Slosos keston de Hernando

  EKFLOROS KESTON DE LEARO

  Now they imitate vegetables—just as the sun guides the movement of the leaf and the flower, the sun guides them to the Punto Calpe. At the time of day that the sunlight leads the people of L’Atlàntide to the Punto Calpe, Carson dislocated her right arm, ripping it out of her torso with her left hand, right there for everyone to see.

  That really happened. Carson disarticulated her own arm, she ripped it off her body.

  When I saw her do this, my first reaction was to run away. I thought she would bleed, that the bones and the muscles would be exposed. I felt an infinite revulsion. But the people of L’Atlàntide move more quickly than I do, they accelerate time, and that’s what Carson did. Before I could hightail it out of there to avoid seeing the blood and open flesh, Carson flipped her arm around, shook it, not spurting any blood at all, and raised it to her eyes. I managed to see her hollow bones. She immediately put it back inside her body, putting her arm in her torso, hand-first into the shoulder joint.

  I suddenly saw one finger coming out of her ear and the tip of another one poking out of her nose. Carson opened her mouth: the rest of her hand was behind her tongue.

  The people of L’Atlàntide kept on gesticulating their stupid messages, not paying the slightest attention to Carson. I was the only witness, and what she did struck me as so atrociously repugnant (worse than the blood and viscera I had been afraid of) that I moved in close so that she would see me watching her and stop doing such disgusting things.

  But it didn’t matter to her that I was watching. She wasn’t in the least bit embarrassed, and before my very eyes she opened her mouth wider, and even wider, dislocating her jaw, and with the left hand she ripped her jaw off and tore a strip of skin from her body. She peeled away a strip of skin that went from her jaw to her neck, continuing between her breasts and down both sides of her belly button, and then down to her pubis where she let the strip dangle between her legs.

  She didn’t even bleed. She just blinked once. My eyes were wide open in astonishment and horror. The opening exposed by the strip of skin that now hung from her like a frontal tail allowed me to see the arm that had entered through its hole, plus an infinite number of things. Not viscera, but things, things of different colors and shapes, things arranged in strict order and the economy of space inside her body.

  Carson manipulated some of these things with her left hand. Suddenly one of the objects fell to the ground. She pulled out her right arm and reattached it to its normal place. With both hands she picked up the thing that had fallen (a triangular-shaped form) and kept on touching the other things. I did manage to see some viscera behind them.

  Have we lied to ourselves? Who made these things? Are we all filled with things, or just Carson, the anatomy specialist? What is this? It wasn’t like this before they abandoned language, was it? Or does this aberration precede the Reform?

  Carson picked up the strip of dangling skin and started to put it back in place. It was obvious that its edges were not sticking together, and you could still see a gap between her arm and her torso. She raised both of her hands above her head and clapped them once. This got the attention of the others. They drew near. I moved away from them. They formed a ball and, as if they had perceived the similarity I had observed, they “organized” and started making a droning sound.

  Droning. They were droning. Without separating from the honeycomb, Ulises and Lilia performed one of those horrendous simulations of copulation that they have taken to doing. He stuck his penis in her while she was perched on all fours, not aroused in the least. He did show some signs of pleasure—he shivered two or three times—and with one sharp moan he completed the farce. She got up as if nothing had happened.

  Caspa raced up the steps of the Punto Calpe carrying a bundle in her arms. The drones separated from Carson to open the way for Caspa.

  Carson still had the two open gashes in her skin, but now she also had more wounds on her skin—scratches, bruises, and she was bleeding here and there. The drones had been beating her while they droned.

  Caspa handed the bundle to Carson. Carson took it in her arms, unwrapped the cloth that covered it, and started to rub it over her body. It was one of Caspa’s newborns. She slid the baby over her enormous breasts, over her round and ample belly, across her broad hips, she smeared him, rubbed him. The baby cried. I would say that he melted, like soap (but I’ve never seen a cake of soap, I’ve only read about it). The drones no longer droned, but they were surrounding her again. One moment they were honeycombed against each other and then they quickly separated. There were no signs of the newborn. There were no marks on Carson’s skin.

  In seconds nobody was left on the Punto Calpe. I slowly went down to write these notes.

  I’ll go back to my Hernando. But first I have to end with these verses from Brontë:

  Few hearts to mortals given

  On earth so wildly pine

  yet none would ask a Heaven

  More like the Earth than thine.

  Slosos keston de Learo

  EKFLOROS KESTON DE HERNANDO

  I would like to be able to raise my head to look at the sky. I should hold something in my hands that would reflect it because I want to see it, to know what is moving in it, what swishes across its blue body, though its movement might not be quite a swish, but rather the smooth elegance of an enormous body that quickly passes over the dauntless smell. The cloud does not walk or fly—it seems to glide, as if through water. Its movement is an action devoid of all feeling. For the cloud, traveling is not displacement. Its movement contains something as inescapable as death, something of a violent peace. And even though it does not release any em
otions traveling like that—so slowly and so quickly at the same time, ripping without tearing, detachment without attachment—the cloud’s movement without movement, beautiful, white, almost corporeal, persistent and willful, constant, headstrong—it moves me to tears to remember it. I wanted to see it, and they will say I mourned. But it is not because I mourned that I want to see the cloud cross the sky, but rather because I miss its soft beauty. It never retraces its path. It does not change its route. It moves forward, passes over me, covers a good part of the blue sky and continues, moving forward. There it goes. Forward on its way.

  If only my life had been like the passing of the cloud, beautiful, harmonious and moving, steadfast—and not that fluttering snap, not that successive leaping and all those hurdles—because (and this is what moves me most about the movement of the cloud) in its path there is not a single hurdle. Nothing stops it, the wind carries it, its body carries it, it seems that it was born to move inexorably forward, traveling without moving, flying without flying, made of the same material as the movement, pure progress, progression, movement…On the other hand, my body—the soil watered by my life, in which my life was created—is not like that; my body is earthenware and stone. My earthenware body is fragile, brittle; my stone body is heavy and slow, it tumbles down the backside of the slope in fits and starts, and when it reaches the bottom it breaks into twelve pieces. My entire body is carved on one of the twelve fragments, which is how they put me back together. And the other eleven will remain there, as if they had not been mine, and the piece on which my torso is carved begins to grow into an arrogant trickster, confident in the image carved on it, and it does not remember that it was one of the twelve, that it is not my entire body.

  It is from that fragment that I tell you my story: that is what I am, that is what is left of me. The cloud…I wanted to at least see the cloud, feel it fly, hear it move along, but my body of stone cannot figure out how to turn to look enough above me and the pages I write on do not reflect the sky, and there is not a good soul around here who would take me to the shore of the lake to see the body of the passing white cloud reflected in it. Now that the light of the sun is dimming because a cloud is passing overhead, now would be when, if they took me to the shore of the lake, I would see the passage of the cloud reflected in it. But I do not know if the lake is even capable of reflecting the blue of the sky and the passing clouds. I do not know if trash and disorder have damaged it to the point that it has turned into a twelfth of what it was, like my body, and a trick makes it believe that it is still the entire lake. In that case, if I would not be able to see the sky reflected, I would not want to go to its shore. I prefer to imagine the cloud that has just passed. The cloudless sky shines a perfect—I would almost say immortal—light on the flagstone floor.

  The next day, I woke up to sing matins with the backs of my knees hurting and a kind of burning sensation coursing down into my belly. My arms hurt too, but it was not pain exactly that extended throughout the rest of my body, stabbing more in the backs of my knees and arms and increasing greatly throughout the rest of my muscles and bones. Before I had time, a minute at least, to remember what I had done, the memory slipped from my body. I sang with greater fervor than other times. I did not quite know if I was profoundly joyful or desperately sad. Sad and joyful in extreme degrees, my consciousness dazed, and a cloying taste turning, by the second, into an appetite that until that moment was completely unknown to me. It was Friday, the day of flagellation. The whip was already inside me. Not in the pain, or almost pain, that penetrated my muscles, but in the appetite it awoke in me like a wave that came from afar, commanded by a distant star over which I was powerless. I was not the same for weeks after that. I knew, as the Franciscans had said, that I had committed a terrible sin, but had not yet reached the confessional. I also knew that this terrible sin was the whip of my days and that it was a strangely sweet whip.

  Slosos keston de Hernando

  EKFLOROS KESTON DE LEARO

  Is my body full of things too? I’m sure it is not. I’m not full of things. I breathe. I’m alive. My body is made of flesh and not of hard artificial material. I think I’m filled with viscera. I have desires. It fills my heart with horror to know that I can never again exchange another word with anyone, that I can never again converse, but worse still is knowing that I can never make love again. Never again, Lear, get it through your head. The people of L’Atlàntide are now poor imitations of flesh; they are pieces of furniture full of things. You are the only one made of flesh and the only one who still has desires. They can never make love again; they mate, they imitate dogs in heat. They’ve lost their connection to the flesh. With words dead, there isn’t a tree that would welcome them, give them shade, fill them with Mother Nature’s spirit. I’m not a lion or tiger to supply them with meat. There isn’t a why or how to avoid the things. But they’re worse than things. They’re alive only because of them—the things. Without them they wouldn’t breathe, the blood wouldn’t flow through their veins.

  I was mistaken when I compared them to vegetables. They’re not like Caspa’s sugarcanes, which are plants with animal-like marks. They have no relation to plants. They don’t come close to being plants with their diligent and painstaking lack of consciousness. Though they’re beasts, they don’t come close to being animals. And they’re much less like stones, because they don’t stop doing for even a second. They are doing something all the time.

  In front of Ulises’ room I found Jeremías squatting down, pushing. He got up when he heard my footsteps. In the exact spot where he had been, he left a thing, a red cube. It was warm. It was covered with a slimy substance that could have been semen or phlegm, and it was probably neither of these two things, but when I touched it I thought that whatever was covering it was a secretion from Jeremías’ body and this produced an uncontrollable repugnance in me. I dropped the red cube and wiped my hands off as best I could. That fluid, the cube, Jeremías, the others, and those who are not in front of me in this very instant—they all disgust me.

  I remembered Carson peeling the skin from her body. I remembered the couples I had seen, one of them sticking his penis in the other like dogs and horses do. I remembered their droning, their tendency to dissolve, their stupid code—it all made me sick.

  They are repugnant, repulsive. Am I equally repugnant and repulsive to them? I don’t recognize my brothers and my friends in their faces and bodies. I don’t see in them the people I grew up with, my companions in the adventure of survival, the founders of the Age of Air and the repudiation of things. They are no longer what they were. Their perpetual present doesn’t understand their past. They are not the same as those beauties who ran through the forests, petted zebras, rode ostriches, and scaled the Rockies. These beings are something else because they don’t remember anything, because they don’t speak, because they don’t inhabit time.

  The people of L’Atlàntide are now an extinct species. I’m the only survivor. The ones I say don’t exist anymore are always doing something; they are compulsive doers.

  If I wanted to describe everything they do, how they don’t stop making things and don’t desist from doing and doing and doing at lightning speed, in less than the blink of an eye, I would have to follow them without taking my eyes off them, record them from the Center. Follow them while I write here. Words are slower than their vertiginous movements, but I could summarize their actions. To become their chronicler, I would have to work only on them. They invent stories all day long. Goethe said that we invent stories to escape our memories.

  Today, in the human equivalent of ten minutes, they congregated on the Punto Calpe and, mimicking speech, they pretended to argue. They divided into two angry and infuriated gangs, cursing each other with poor imitations of curse words. Then I saw them descend like a flash of lightning and pick things up from the surface of the earth. Some of them carried construction beams, others carried cement blocks, or sheets of corrugated metal, or fuselages, or tubes, and all disp
layed an astonishing amount of strength.

  They used these things to hit each other, one gang against the other, and when they lost their weapons in the heat of battle, they used their fists and teeth or other body parts to hurt each other. I saw Ulises, who had disarticulated his own leg, hold it with both hands and furiously beat Lilia with it—he turned his leg into a club to use it as a torture device. Since he only had one leg, Ulises leaned on Jeremías, who in turn was biting Lilia’s ankles and toes. I think he was even eating her toes, or that’s the way looked to me. Lilia bleated like a sacrificial lamb. She didn’t do anything to defend herself. I didn’t do anything to try to make them see reason and stop their idiotic simulation of war either. I watched them with a heavy heart. My beautiful Lilia was not only left without some of her toes, she had also lost an eye, and one of her breasts was bleeding profusely.

  With pieces of plastic taken from a trash heap, someone made a strip that served as a ludicrous banner for one of the gangs, which at times also was used to beat someone like a stupid bullwhip. Someone else tossed around an enormous rubber tire. They nailed sheets of aluminum to a stick. Another person had a net full of glass shards and was beating his enemies with it.

  They have become ghastly beings. The atmosphere has corroded their mucous membranes so much that some of them can’t close their eyes because they don’t have eyelids anymore. Their teeth are visible behind their translucent lips. Others have fallen to such a degree of neglect that they are missing one limb or another. When I was going back to my room the other afternoon I found an abandoned penis on the steps of the Punto Calpe; it seemed to have been left there out of carelessness. Most of them go around dirty, and they are always carrying things with them. The last time I saw Rosete he was walking around wrapped in a Persian rug, his hair a mess, crying out in an incomprehensible mumbo-jumbo, dragging his feet, and his face and hands showed similar signs of deterioration that reminded me of leprosy.