I tested the only exit, listening. I tried to peer underneath into the hall beyond. I could hear no patrol. It was as if I was alone in the building.
“Cleave,” I said. “We need to talk.”
“Not now, poet,” a voice immediately whispered on the far side of the door. So very close. “You have work to do.”
El Emisario requiere un recipiente. The Emissary Requires a Vessel . . .
One shall prepare the way, chosen and marked, to cut through night. He will draw minions to him. The first bargain. The sunderer of veils.
El mar se convierte en el cielo. The Sea Becomes the Sky . . .
A tide, sweeping in, scouring the shore. A freedom for the mountains beneath the waves, inverting the sky, the darkness between stars. All will be loosed. Tearing the last sheets from the pads, I went to the door and slipped them underneath.
Immediately I heard the bolt slide back. The door opened up, and Cleave stood before me, fresh as ever.
“Come with me.”
• • •
I followed him through the building. I saw no soldiers, but there was such a presence about the man—a powerful remoteness—that I never considered attacking him. Instead of tunneling downward, he led me up myriad stairs, rising higher and higher, until I found myself coming into a half-lit, blue-gray world. A high stone patio, far above a city. Santaverde. The mountains stood at our back. Tattered wisps of clouds tore across the sky, driven by relentless wind from the sea. It was cold. Even though the outer world was dim, I blinked my good eye furiously in the blooming of light.
“Poet,” Cleave said. “You have done good work, though some of your early translations were inelegant. Nevertheless, my counterparts are pleased.”
“Your . . . The American president?” I said. “Nixon?”
“Noooo,” he said, drawing it out. Then laughed. “Even my employers have masters. And they, I assure you, are well satisfied,” he said. “For now.”
Something about that chilled and relieved me, all at once.
“I have a place for a man of your . . .” I thought he was going to say “weaknesses.” He did not. He said, “talents.”
“What about Alejandra? Can she—” I began.
“Rafael,” Cleave said. He withdrew a cigarette and a lighter, cupped his hand around the end, and lit it. He took a long drag and then offered it to me. “May I call you Rafael?”
“I don’t care, I just want—”
“Alejandra is dead, I’m afraid,” he said. “I’m sorry it happened how it happened and I hope you’re not too traumatized by the—”
“Traumatized? By what?” I said. “What could’ve traumatized me?”
“You do not remember, and that is understandable. Our work has certain—” He withdrew another cigarette and held it in his hand, unlit. He gestured with the tan-speckled filter. “Amnestic effects.” He indicated Santaverde, which was spread out below us like a map on a table. The sky was dark and I could not tell if it was night or day. The lights of the city glowed in a feeble electric grid with large areas of blue-black darkness. Fires burned, and pillars of dark smoke rose crookedly up to higher altitudes where wind streams caught them and sheared away the tops of the plumes. From the city a haze rose, undulant.
“What happened to Alejandra?” I asked. “What did you do?”
No answer.
“What did I do?”
Cleave walked to the edge of the patio, rested his hands on the waist-high stone wall there. He looked out over Santaverde. “You see it, don’t you? The haze. The scent.”
“The miasma,” I said without thinking.
“Yes,” Cleave said. “Yes! It is pleasing, is it not? Think of the amount of suffering. We are almost there.” Cleave snapped his fingers and something changed, the world tilted. It was bright now, and a watery sun shone above. I could hear cars honking and the crackle of what sounded like gunfire below. Smells of sewage and burning tires filled the air. We had come out of collapsed-time. The sway of the miasma was broken. For the moment.
Cleave turned. “Sepúlveda.”
The lieutenant colonel stood near the passage we had come from, waiting. Two soldiers flanked him. “Señor Cleave,” he said. “The helicopter is ready.”
“Perfect,” Cleave said. “And the sarin canister?”
“On board,” he said. “The facility is ready in the north.”
“Wonderful.” He turned back to me. “What do you say, Rafael? Are you with me?”
“I don’t—” I said. “I don’t know what—”
Cleave allowed himself to grin. “This is where I promise you things—things you want—and then you yield to temptation.”
“Alejandra,” I said.
Cleave sighed. “Anything except that. There is no bringing her back. Especially not for you, after what you did. Anyone else, we could—” He paused, thinking. “Work something out. Your mother. A sister? No?” He shrugged. “I’m very sorry, but we’re bound by certain rules and the hand that kills cannot be the hand that resurrects.” He gestured to the guards. “Think about it, Rafael. We have time, do we not?” He drew a huge draft of air into his nostrils. “Within the miasma, there’s all the time in the world.” He lit his cigarette. “Take him back to his cell. Give him food, drink. Let him think about it. Right, Rafael? You’ll think about it?”
The soldiers looked at me dubiously. Maybe it was my lost, dumbstruck expression. Maybe it was that I didn’t move until they raised their rifles and nudged me back into the villa.
The hand that kills cannot be the hand that resurrects.
What have I done?
What did they do to me?
In the cell, once the guards were gone, I found they had not removed the photographs of the manuscript. An oversight, possibly. Another avenue to torture. They were valuable to Cleave, obviously. And they were what kept me alive and useful.
I felt sick at the uncertainty of my role here, but ate the food and smoked cigarettes anyway. I pretended to sleep, but then slept. With no clock, no way to tell the passage of time, no indication that Cleave or the soldiers watched me in my cell—I was out of the miasma, the collapsed-time of torture, I had to assume Cleave’s frightening immediacy and surveillance had ended—I took up the photograph I had been thinking of since looking out at Santaverde, the thick haze rising up under the dark skies.
Un pasaje a los sueños. A Passage to Dreams.
From sojourner to journeyer, the pretium is dear; for the one rich in flesh, a measure of beloved filial blood, a hymen, a punctured ear. For the one poor in flesh, the egg, the eye, the stone and nothing less. In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni. We turn in circles in the night and we are devoured by fire.
So much more, long passages, swimming in my failing sight. Markings, Aramaic, Greek, Gnostic symbols. Rough drawings painted in blood: the hanged child, a man mounting a girl, a needle in an ear, a dagger in the eye. Blood-streaked phalluses slipping through viscera. Tongues split to the root. Images writhed and danced in the photograph.
I stood, taking the magnifying glass in hand. I cast it down, on the floor. The brass ring around the looking glass pinged and broke, a spring suddenly releasing its tension. The glass skittered across the floor like a skipped stone and hit the wall. Scarred but unbroken. In my mind, with the impact, it would fracture into shards, but it remained whole. I snatched up the glass and placing it on the floor, raised the desk’s corner-leg up, nudged the glass forward with my toe, and let the desk’s metal foot fall, slamming down on the glass. I thought it would fracture into knife-like shards. It did not. The blow reduced it to glass powder.
Sobbing, I beat the table until my hands were raw. I screamed and clawed at the door until my fingers were bloody tatters. I drank the vodka and swung at phantoms, bellowing for Cleave, for Sepúlveda. I cursed god, I cursed myself. I screamed for Alejandra. I screamed for any memory of what they made me do to her.
Delirious, my gaze fell upon the brass ring that once held the looking
glass. Picking it up, I tested the edge with my thumb.
The hardest part was prying down the swollen lower eyelid so that the lip of brass could slip under the eye, into the ocular cavity. It met some resistance, gristly, tenacious sinews and fibers. Occipital ridge, blood welling, unraveling of the woven tissues, the tearing of the fabric of blood vessels and capillaries. I mouthed the words, over and over, backward and forward. The shock of pain spread. Yawing, I pitched forward, the floor flashing in my one good eye. I righted myself, unsteadily, working the piece of brass into my socket. A soft sucking pop, as the eye came free, dangling upon its bloody stem. My brain sparked and flashed with occipital nerve death. Would I see things still, through those dead ends? The light overhead flickered and went out. I put the bloody eye on the desk, to stare balefully at any who entered. The pain was gone. I looked down at the stark contrast of blood on my chalky white skin. Shock. I am become a phantom. The walls stood indistinct. The cell, though dark, was not pitch-black—a pulsing scintillate haze floated through it, like a ghost’s trail. And . . . the door stood open.
I took up the photographs in white, unsteady hands, and clutched them to my chest. I walked through the doorway, out into the far landscape beyond, mountains shifting in the distance.
I wandered through lands I could not tell you of now; lands made strange by impossible geometries and vile arcologies my mind could not comprehend. I knew not how long I was there, how long I roamed that land, but when I was conscious again, I felt rough hands on me and I was being pulled from the cold, black shore of the Mapache.
• • •
Men lifted me from the ground, dried my skin with rough woolen blankets. Pried loose my frozen hands from the sheaf of photographs. For days, my tongue failed me, aphasic once more, so close to the miasma. They took me to their fishing village, near the sea. A veterinarian tended the ruins of my eye, silently. He’d seen men and women like me before—state-gnawed bones coughed up by the junta’s dogs and Vidal’s men, once their usefulness was over, cast into the Mapacho or the Palas. You are lucky to be alive the men said. Laborers, stevedores, fishermen. Those workers who dallied with socialism, but never took up a book or attended any meeting. The hard memory of Pávez’s end was fresh among them.
They took me into their houses, among their wives and children. This is Avendaño? The Avendaño?
I do not know. I saw him once on the television, and he was fatter then.
He can’t be Avendaño. Look at his face.
Mary mother of Jesus, they hate poetry. Pinochet kills Neruda and Vidal mutilates Avendaño. Will all beauty in the world be extinguished?
Surely not Avendaño. He can’t be Avendaño. Look at him. A shadow of a man.
This is not Avendaño.
And I wasn’t. Avendaño was gone. That wastrel man, so full of pride, died in his cell.
When I could talk, I sent the men to my old flat near the university, to retrieve my checks, and what money I had there. They came back with the checks, but no cash. A locker full of clothes. Vidal and his generals did not have the foresight to confiscate the belongings of enemies of the state. At least not then. I told the men there was nothing in my possession they could not have. I left them a small fortune. They laughed and fed me lamb stew and salmon and poured wine into chipped glasses in their small houses. The sea called outside. A reminder. The junta and Vidal seemed very far away.
They placed me, clad in rough-spun laborer’s garb, on a container ship, holds full of copper wire, bound for Cape Town, then Mauritania, and then Lisbon. I spent those yawing days at sea wondering if I still inhabited the miasma, or if I’d ever left.
I found, eventually, warmer shores.
Now I am well, and my family money—I never had much want—has been transferred to me here. My publishers know I’m alive, but not many others. I have kept few contacts in Magera. To what end? Vidal’s arm is long. I dare not return home, I dare not publish again. I don’t think I can write poetry anymore.
A poet sees what the world offers and gives voice to its wonderful strangeness. We look at the world, and all those who move within it, with frank stares and brutal words. It was not just an eye I gave up, in that cell on the mountainside. It was so much more than that.
This manuscript will remain secret, until the time comes for all to be known.
I am content. As content as I can be.
Some knowledge forbids happiness. Some knowledge makes action impossible. I spend my days trying to find what pleasure I can. They’re filled with garlic prawns and polenta and lovely rich wines, and my nights are replete with aromatic smoke and pisco and sweets, soft music, and the smell of the Alboran Sea.
And forgotten dreams of the things I have done. And what was done to me.
Forgive me for forgetting your name.
Forgive me for forgetting.
Forgive me, Alejandra.
5
The Eye was, most assuredly, insane. Possibly the stress of being an exile had driven him to this particular psychosis. As Magerans, we are all prone to paranoia, by either experience or necessity. And this manuscript—apparently the only writing Avendaño had done since the coup—stood as testament to that. The man’s demented imagination was prodigious and disgusting by turns. Whatever injury that had occurred to his eye during Vidal’s coup (and I do believe that part, at least, the injury), it could have resulted in an infection that spread to his brain, leading to a fevered perception of reality. The rampant horde of imagery: body parts, blood, outrage, loss, guilt, mutilation, fecal matter, chiaroscuro, food, shit. The terrifying realization of madness crept in as I read—breathless and stunned, galloping down dark paths, a pornography of excruciating psychic pain—if not by him, then by me, as his audience.
The stress of being a fugitive alone would have broken most men and some women. His time in the hands of Vidal’s secret police had shattered him—left him with a burden of guilt it was not wholly clear he deserved. It became muddy the further along the testament went. But despite all of that, it did give me an idea of what might have happened to my mother. And for that, I was grateful, however much it hurt.
One thing was clear, he could not be abandoned and forgotten. If I abandoned him, left him to whatever end he found in his enfeebled and deranged mental state, I would be forsaking any right I had to return home. Avendaño was like an infection—I had spent many years not thinking about my homeland, and now it was forefront on my mind. Mother came to me unbidden, and my father, before the drink took him, had become mingled in my mind with The Eye. Avendaño would vanish back into that forgotten landscape. One of the disappeared. I could not allow it, for my own sanity’s sake.
I had to find Avendaño and help him.
* * *
Claudia did not call.
The semester had wound down to its inevitable end—papers, grading, wheedling students, the desolation of faculty offices, vacant cafeterias, and eventually a two-week stint of barren campus before it was all to start up again. And I came to a conclusion regarding The Eye. He had never contacted me, nor had he contacted the bank. Something would have to be done.
“I have to take a leave of absence,” I said to Matilda Orés, my faculty head. “Just for the summer.”
“You won’t come back,” she said, shaking her head.
“What do you mean?”
“Word is you’ve got some patron keeping you in style now. An old lech,” she said.
Whatever contortions my expression went through, she realized I was not taking that well.
“I’m going back to Magera. A family emergency,” I said.
“Magera?” she said. “Santa Maria, you’re really asking for it.”
“I just want to know if I’ll have my position when I return,” I said.
Matilda shrugged. “Filling your classes this summer—even though it’s a light load—will be difficult. What’s the emergency?”
“My uncle is dying,” I said. “Cancer. I’m the only living family membe
r.” I can lie with facility if I have enough preparation.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” she said. She didn’t sound it.
“We’re all sorry,” I said.
She produced an official Universidad de Málaga faculty absentee form, sat me down and had me fill it out. When I was finished, she picked it up, looked at it, and slipped it in an envelope, addressed it to the board.
“Your advisees need to be shifted to someone else, and any clubs or groups you supervise will need to be adjusted. Are you on any committees of master’s or doctoral candidates?”
“No,” I said.
“Let me be honest. You don’t have any close friends here who could take up your slack. If you were beloved by the faculty, they’d jump in, but—”
“I’m not,” I said. I looked down at myself. “I eat alone. I wear black.”
“That is apropos of nothing. Yet it is true,” Matilda said, nodding. “I can’t tell you much other than your job probably won’t be here when you get back. If we have to replace you for a summer, we might as well just replace you,” she said, shrugging. “Not a lot I can do about it. But you’re young,” she said, as if that meant loss, or change, did not affect me as much. And maybe she was right. “And it’s possible we won’t find a replacement. So check in. If things go sour sooner than you expect—” She realized what she was saying, shook her head, and then nervously began packing up her papers and stuffing them into a briefcase. “Call or send a letter. You’ve got my number.” She stopped and looked at me. “You’re a good teacher and I don’t want to lose you, but more and more, this university is run like a business and I have people I have to answer to. So . . . I’ll do what I can.”
Afterward, I went to the bank. “I need to withdraw all of my money.” A hundred thousand pesetas that Avendaño paid me, and more. I never managed to burn through my own pay plus the monthly stipend. It was the first time in my life I was flush.
The bank manager counted out more money than I had ever seen or held before, and I signed for it. I found myself clutching my bag to my chest on the way home.
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