Concealed about the cart under Death’s skirts and petticoats are other primitive instruments of execution — an ax-head, a stone hammer, a heavy rock.
Sometimes Death’s eyes are covered to symbolize her blind uncertainty.
When the Indians dance, they wear skunk-fur anklets to ward off evil spirits. Everywhere their feet touch the ground, it is sacred soil.
Los Hermanos de Luz have their Campo Santo.
The physicists of Los Alamos are said to sublimate their fears in wife-swapping orgies and sado-masochistic sex games. All this comes out whenever there is a divorce; Los Alamos divorces are notorious in Santa Fe legal circles. No one wants to settle out of court. Spouses can’t wait to get on the witness stand and divulge their dirty secrets.
The physicists at Los Alamos are trying to transmute elements; they are trying to build engines that make their own fuel; they are trying to travel in time and render themselves immortal.
Like them, I do not know where I am safe.
All this is alien to Ramon who has escaped, fled, translated himself out of culture, who has died (albeit symbolically). It is night (the night of our visit to Chimayo, an indeterminate number of nights after his disappearance from the prison) and he has acquired an immateriality which renders him invisible.
Nights, his sister waits anxiously for a call, her car loaded with food, medicine, money and our monkish disguises. Just as now, during the Feast of Easter, wives and lovers pack their cars with food and warm clothing and drive along the highways to succour the pilgrims marching toward Chimayo with their Cristos, Madonnas and Santos.
This immateriality has its own terror; Ramon travels barefoot in the mountain snows with his hair perpetually on end. He has left the hell of his prison, which at least possessed a certain interior logic, for a hell of the spirit, the shocking emptiness of his freedom. He craves food, love, sex, wine, pain, birth and death. He feels a crushing nostalgia for the certainty of desire and walls. But that’s all gone now. He lives on pinyon nuts left by the squirrels or maize cobs abandoned in ancient pueblo warehouses. He tries to kill a coyote, but the animal twists its back like a trout and disappears through his fingers.
To survive, in order not to succumb to the elements, he needs a new vocabulary.
Esmé comes with a sigh. She crosses her hands over her belly and rocks with pleasure.
Her preoccupation with death repels and fascinates me. I do not know if what I feel for her is love (I am certain with Larry, for example) or if I am merely attracted by her oddity, her history. Dona Sebastiana.
I put my hand down there and smell my fingers. Everything smells of old, rotten rubber. I lock myself in the bathroom, rip the shower curtain from its rod, upset the medicine shelf into the sink and tie an enema tube around my neck so that the bladder flops against my chest. I smash the mirror with a jar of Noxema. Esmé weeps in the hallway. I take a shard of glass and examine myself in its incomplete and inaccurate reflection.
My feet are bleeding.
I realize that I am prey to dualisms, diagrams and allegories which are only masks for the truth, that my truth is nothing but an obsessive topological assault upon reality.
My feet are bleeding.
This is what I think: failure reveals intention. Certain questions cannot be asked, let alone answered. We kill what we love, we love what we cannot have, we destroy ourselves pursuing illusions we cannot live without.
Jornada del Muerto
I am feeling a little on edge.
I have used a shard of mirror glass to slit a hole in the shower curtain, which, draped over my shoulders, forms a kind of poncho, ideal in case of rain. I wear the enema bag like a neck-tie. The other two enema bags I have fastened around my ankles where they drag as I walk.
My bandaged feet no longer fit properly inside my shoes. It is difficult (a combination of sore feet and tangled enema bags) for me to operate the pedals of Esmé’s car. There are shooting pains in my palms. I can’t get the image of the dead man with his head between his legs out of my mind. He is like some mythic constellation placed in the heavens as my guide.
Certain things begin to make sense to me — for example, Edwin Hubble’s discovery in 1929 that the galaxies are moving away from each other and the abrupt extinctions at the end of the Triassic period.
I drive to Larry’s place, having some trouble with the manual stick-shift which turns out to be automatic.
Ramon has been here before me.
The window next to the corner fireplace in Larry’s room has been smashed inward. Shards of glass, smashed pottery bowls, Larry’s sketches of Mimbres pot designs and broken kachina dolls litter the floor. Rocks the size of grapefruit are everywhere. I think of the word erratics, which geologists use to refer to stones bulldozed and left in odd places by glaciers. Larry is naked on the bed, his body a pattern of blackened welts, bruises and lesions, his eyes open and his jaw slack. Cold air blows in through the window. The air smells like stale rubber. Larry’s arms are stretched out at his sides, one foot covers the other, one knee is slightly flexed. His anorexic torso seems carved from wax. His gray rib bones look as though they have worn right through his skin.
I am relieved to see no signs of stigmata.
Snow blows through the open window. My shower curtain poncho is no protection against the cold. My feet leave marks on the floor. The enema bag anklets drag behind me, defining the zone of safety.
A! que penosa jornada,
Que camino tan atros!
Me voy para la otra vida
Lo determina mi Dios.
Nothing surprises me.
Only the week before, worshippers at the little church in Mora claimed to see Jesus’ face outlined in the adobe plaster of the nave wall.
I have heard tales of a renegade Charismatic priest who travels through the remote Spanish villages healing the sick with his hot hands.
I can think of only one possible ethical rule: live with the maximum intensity.
On a mountainside not far off, Ramon lifts his head and howls. He is a soul in torment. His pace quickens as he rushes toward the place of assignation. He has (of course) lost all sense of direction. His bare feet go slap-slap along ancient Indian trails worn deep into the soft tuff-rock, leaving little bloody toe prints.
I pick up a crumpled piece of paper from the floor. It’s a mailer from a gay group Larry belongs to. The publishers profess to have started a homosexual religion. The paper is printed with a depiction of their man-god: a bearded male, seated in the lotus position, with a huge, erect phallus rising from his lap. His palms are pressed together as if in prayer. He has antlers growing out of his temples. I recognize in the man’s face the lineaments of my own.
I touch Larry’s cold toes. Once he brought an old woman back to life with a kiss and was mistaken for the devil. He moans a little and makes a smacking sound with his lips. He looks just like me. With the moustaches, we could pass for brothers. I find the black gloves with his glasses on the bedside table.
Slowly, piece by piece, I am taking on the guise of another.
There is something dreadful in all this. I have a deep yearning to get back to solid ground instead of sinking every step, as it were, into the quicksand of semiotic equivalencies.
I think of Ramon and what has happened to Larry.
Everything that is of the Absolute is evil.
The rocks in Larry’s room have a strangely metallic quality which I associate with meteorites. I think of the danger of meteorite showers (common events at high altitude), thankful that I am wearing a shower curtain.
The phrase assaulted by words comes to mind.
I notice that each of the rocks has a word chiselled into its surface. Turning over the nearest ones with my feet, I read the words, “Turning over the nearest ones with my feet, I read the words, ‘Turning over the nearest ones with my feet, I rea
d the words …
Black Mesa, or the Future
I notice that the back seat of Esmé’s car has been packed as if for a long journey: sleeping bags, backpacks, freeze-dried food, a short-wave radio, canteens, a bottle of whisky, a Bible with several passages marked and the monk’s habit disguises.
With a clarity that is like the heat flash of an atomic bomb, I recall the initial message, the sister’s prayer.
Dear Baby Jesus, Take care of my brother Ramon who is in the prison and we have not heard from him.
Esmé greets me at her door with a sour look and then begins to weep.
Standing in her living room, with the Chimayo blankets hanging from the walls and the smell of saffron everywhere, I begin to predict the future.
Esmé will marry a man named Yolk who already has a child by another marriage. They will move to Spearfish, S.D., where she will be no happier than she has a right to be.
Larry will die of a disease in his blood.
(I am speaking Spanish so she does not understand.)
I tell her about Ramon, my alter ego, and about the sister who waits in vain.
I try to explain that I am in love with the one who cannot touch me because she does not know me except as the unnamed friend of her brother who, they say, dies in a prison riot.
Fragments of coloured glass cling to the soles of my feet like blood and ink. Every step I take leaves a trace that seems to form itself into a word.
Outside, the sky beyond the Sangre de Cristo Mountains is the colour of dead skin. Already the roads are clogged with pilgrims marching toward sanctuaries hidden in the hills. Some go home with their wives in the evening, only to return the next morning to resume their holy journey. Others trudge guiltily through the night, dragging heavy, wooden crosses, sipping sparingly from water bottles, denying themselves food and love and warmth.
At Pojoaque, the Christians take the right turn toward Chimayo.
Westward, the lights of San Ildefonso sparkle beneath the dark shape of Black Mesa, the Pueblo sacred mountain.
Climbing the cliff-face, Ramon discovers ancient pictographs drawn and abandoned over the course of centuries by anonymous Indian artists: herds of sacred animals, hunting scenes, spirals and winged snakes, humans disguised in skins and antlers, male and female genitalia.
It is a kind of code Ramon finds impossible to break, a mathematical equation he cannot solve. Yet his fingers trace the outlines longingly, as though they represent the walls of some protective haven.
A haven he cannot enter because inside they’ll kill him.
From a distance he looks tiny and glows like a salamander.
I start to shiver.
You’re cold, says Esmé. Her voice suddenly sounds exactly the way I would expect Ramon’s sister’s voice to sound.
Gently, she unties the enema bags and lifts the shower curtain from my neck. Naked, I see that I am turning blue from the cold. My body is wracked with chills that move over it like squalls across a lake.
What’s going to become of you? she asks.
I don’t know, I say. I will be ordinary too, and only dream of love and miracles. I cannot escape the story, I say, though every time I tell it I shall try.
She leads me into the bedroom and tucks me up against her breasts beneath the covers. We sip whisky from a bottle. In other parts of the house, her roomies are waking up.
Ramon quits the ledge of hieroglyphs and begins to scale the bare heights of the mesa. The only thing that feels good and safe is to keep moving, to keep climbing.
Restless, I disengage myself from Esmé’s embrace. I find my clothes and start to dress. She crosses her arms over her breasts and frowns. Her hands are shrouded in long, black gloves. It’s dreadfully cold. I wince as I pull my shoes on.
She catches my eye.
Her nipples are black and erect like nailheads. She has tiny, androgynous breasts. Her ribs press outward against her skin like the bars of a cage.
Dona Sebastiana.
She has become, or always was, that which I desire and fear most (also the woman to whom, years later, I say these words).
Her eyes glow with anger as I slip through the door.
Outside, the pilgrims are thronging the roads.
I step up beside a man whose knees are buckling under the weight of a redwood cross. The bark has been peeled away, and the wet wood shines like blood.
The Dream of Life
This was a sort of daydream, which is to say, the mind dancing. The meaning of a story is only another story. The past is the meaning of the future. The future is the meaning of the past. The end is the sense of the beginning. But what is love, and what is the meaning of meaning?
Esmé was the one with her feet on the ground.
Recalling the pathetic note pinned to the sacristy wall, she filled the car with fried chicken, sodas and coffee, and together we drove to the prison (Jerusalem) where friends, lovers and relatives waited (like pilgrims) before the gate. They were mostly poor people, Indians, blacks and Chicanos. (We have ordained that the poor and the speechless will commit our crimes for us. All unknowing, torn by fear and anger, they make the sacrifice.)
In their sad eyes, I could see the wounds.
There was no one I would have taken for Ramon’s sister. Nevertheless, I found a certain peace there, as Esmé knew I would, among the sinners. We understood that we had stumbled onto a holy place, a nexus where the plane of agony (Eternity) cut the plane of signs (Time).
Ramon had not escaped.
No one escaped.
That day or the next the prison authorities announced that all the inmates (dead ones, live ones and the ones with their heads cut off and stuck between their legs) had been accounted for. For them, at least, the riot had a satisfying statistical resolution.
The New Jerusalem remained inviolate upon the plain below the town.
Smoke rose from the ruined cell blocks. Sometimes, when the wind changed, a light, white ash would fall upon our heads like a blessing.
A black preacher began to speak. In his sad eyes, I could read the wounds.
We sang a hymn, and the dead were everywhere.
With the smoke rising and wet snow falling around us, we knelt in the mud and began to say the only words that could ever mean anything.
Father, I stretch out my hand to Thee.
No other help I know.
If Thou withdraw Thy help from me,
O Lord, whither shall I go?
But when I stand up, I am not changed and in my heart I am raging again. I am full of desire and hate. I want to throw myself away. I want to be the worst kind of son, so that when God finally takes my hand, it will prove that He really does love me. I want His forgiveness, His love, to be a test, not a reward. To me, that is the true meaning of the word Father, that I belong to Him, that He cannot abandon me, that He cannot cease to cherish me even though I cause Him the worst pain. Undeserved love is the only love I want. It’s a horrible contradiction, I know. My impulses are all chaotic and self-destructive. I throw myself into the abyss, shouting, “Save me! Save me!” The terrible images of the prison riot only serve to excite and inspire me. They are a clue, a sign that something real has happened here. Emotional fallout is as tell-tale as the clicking of Geiger counters over ancient atomic bomb sites (Trinity). What I mean to say is only this: at the moment of slaughter, the killers (Ramon) were most open to themselves. This is often what it takes for a man to know the world. And when you ask yourself unanswerable questions, you come back to the beginning, like the man with his penis in his mouth. The truth is our bodies (lives, histories) are our metaphors, and the worm gnaws us all.
WOMAN GORED BY BISON LIVES
1
Days, while my husband is at work, Susan and I make love on the couch in her parents’ basement. It is a desperate thing to do, and we are b
oth a little stunned by it. But something has pushed us to the edge of caring.
Gabriela, the baby, is upstairs sleeping, while Susan’s mother does housework or watches soap operas. We keep our clothes on, manacled at the ankles by a tangle of underwear, jeans and belts. And when Susan comes, I press my palm across her lips to keep her from shouting out her joy.
I don’t know if we are in love. But we are both in need of solace, and our sex is a composition of melancholy and violence, as though we are seeking to escape and punish ourselves in the same act.
The walls are decorated with hangings Susan made during a university art class. The weaving is sinuous and convoluted, with objects embedded or hidden in the loosely spun wool. They are analogues of a spirit which remains secret from me even at the height of passion. Her loom stands idle at the end of the room.
After sex, we lie together on the couch, our tops rucked up so that our breasts crush together, hot and soft, smoking dope and holding slides of Susan’s work to the light. I profess to see themes, leitmotifs and images, and it is true that her work excites me with a mixture of admiration and anxiety (what is hidden; what is lost). But my insights are all superficial, and I cannot connect the woven mysteries with the woman who whispers or the woman who is Gabriela’s mother.
Except during sex or when she is crying, Susan’s face is expressionless. This is one source of my fascination with her. My own face is endlessly mobile and gives everything away. But Susan is always reserved, watchful and hidden. At first I took this for a sign of maturity and intelligence. She is tall and graceful, and her silence gives her the appearance of inner poise. I say appearance, because it is all a mask. Not even a mask, for the word mask implies that it is something she can put on or take off.
Susan’s face is forever sad, and her sadness is her strength. Sadness has schooled her in waiting. Her expressionless face conceals her naïveté, her confusion, her lack. She is stunned — that’s what her face means. She meets what she cannot understand with a blank stare and a few graceful gestures.
Guide to Animal Behaviour Page 15