ARANDIS REMINDED ME of Los Alamos, not only because its infrastructure broke the desert landscape, but because of the inexorable sun, the heat suffocating everything like an allegorical representation of what was being cooked up there, the atomic material. A rudimentary cardboard and wire sign on the way into the housing zone read WELCOME TO ARANDIS. It was something like a bad joke, welcoming one to a place that could scarcely be differentiated from the work camp barracks. The atmosphere was laden with despair. The way the building materials had been arranged made the settlement a far more soulless place than Los Alamos. People were there simply to earn their daily bread—literally, the bread for one day, not the bread for two days. All the hope had been sucked out of the place. The air was grimy and bleak, unlike in the North American camp.
Not a soul could be found outside the tiny shacks. They were all working in the mine. Within an hour I was there. The hellish oval yawning under an open sky, the great pit where so many black people worked, as Yoro had explained in her letter. I remember reading her words and thinking how working here must have been a bit better, at least in comparison with toiling in the subterranean galleries. But when I walked into Rössing, I was overcome with pity for Yoro because of the blistering sun she would have had to endure there. So again I proved my case that data alone can’t be trusted at all. I would never have believed that there was something worse than suffocating in a tunnel until I experienced that heat: being scorched by the free-falling rays of sunlight that burn more than the skin—the stomach, the throat, the nostrils, other organs. To me, it was like the sinister prank of a superior being: an invisible cloak of fire laid out between the blue sky and our heads, held in place by the unremitting breath of a dragon condemned to immobility, not allowed to fly an inch into the open air. I couldn’t find a single white face among the black ones. After I had paid the negotiated fee, they let me walk down to the mine’s first level. I could now see down into it and into that upside-down cone used to extract the sterile material that would be separated from the mineral.
The scaled terraces of Peruvian farmlands came to mind; those terraced plots that follow the natural curves of a mountain. The shapes were similar, but the colors were wildly different. In Peru, everything was green; in Arandis, it was all yellow. A massive film of yellow powder coated everything, even the lungs, though you couldn’t see it, and of course the workers weren’t told about this. Soon, though, any connection between the living terraces of Peru and these fell away. This was an open-air mine contaminating the atmosphere and the surface and subterranean waters. It was destroying or extinguishing the local flora and fauna and dismembering the landscape. The simple thought that Yoro could be there made my heart skip a beat in my chest, though knowing she might be in some other mine, far away from me, also brought a sense of panic. My anxiety was exacerbated by a sun that blistered my skin even under my clothes, even though I was covered and wearing a hat. Some workers wore helmets, but the majority went unprotected. There was no water anywhere, even though sweat streamed from everyone’s face. No one ever looked up, either from force of habit or to avoid the impact of the sun shining straight in their faces. In that awful space, the land’s once-beloved sun had become a source of humiliation, like the foremen who obliged them to work with heads hanging; the work didn’t allow for hats or even shirts. The blackness of their skin was tinged with red.
It was too much for me, at my age, to take in all that horror in a single day. I felt a wave of fatigue and had to sit down on a rock by myself, crestfallen and all choked up, with no idea how or where to begin. Though I took care to sit in something akin to shade, I still had never experienced heat like that. It was like the summer at the dead center of all summers. My vision clouded and I remained transfixed like that for minutes that felt like eternity. I’m aware of what happens in these processes. I knew the sun’s heat was beginning to damage my cells, to clog the invisible ancestral passageways all over my skin. Only once had I felt comparable temperatures, though less intense. It happened in America, when I was with S in Teotihuacán. Both experiences of extreme heat fused somehow, and the weariness brought me back there, or maybe it was the dizziness or a need to escape or stay put, but I relived, collapsed into, that day in Mexico.
A man was holding a prickly pear leaf in his hand beneath a colossal sun. It was an edible cactus, and he told us to look closely at the little white dots. I brought my face a little closer and listened as he explained what they were: “They’re the eggs of cochineals, which reproduce on the leaves of this species of cactus.”
The man gingerly removed an egg with a very thin stick and placed it on a piece of paper. He poked it and a red stain spread over the white paper. Then he drew a garnet-colored circle with the same stick. Finally he jabbed the cactus leaf, extracted a kind of sap, and covered the stain with it. “Now,” he said, “the prickly pear juice protects the color. It helps to dry and fix the blood.”
I touched the circle with my fingertip. It was perfectly dry. I pulled my finger away, startled. Maybe I saw a mirror inside the red circle that reflected back to me my own dehydrating self because it was high noon—noon in the mine and noon in Mexico. The temperature was still on the rise, but was it in the mine or in Mexico? I couldn’t remember because the little tails of fatty acids were melting, the cells moving more fluidly, the sperm liberated from their reproductive burden. But other, much less benign things were happening too. Membranes were being damaged and breaking into tiny pieces, pieces that were replicas of elements of me, multiplied, reduced, infinitesimally; and so the multiple breasts, knees, ankles—visible only under a microscope—that scuttled here and there, similar to those lizard tails I used to see when I survived Hiroshima, started thrashing around again and again and again, never locating the body. This is what was happening to the people I was watching. As in Mexico. It was the death of proteins. And I wanted contact with other flesh, other liquids, other sweat, because the body always finds a way to communicate. I felt that in Teotihuacán, but not in the mine; in the mine, all I felt was heat and decay.
The man in Teotihuacán took out another plant. It looked like a thistle. “It’s called chicalote,” I heard him say, and he bled it too. Its sap was yellow, and he used it to draw the rays around the sun. Animal blood and vegetable blood. This plant was similar to the one I saw in the Namib Desert, a place so dry that who could imagine a flower growing there whose scent could be appreciated in all its intensity from several yards away.
I looked at the circle the man had drawn, the rays, and raised my eyes to look at L, in front of me, from behind my glasses. S had introduced us the day before and he had offered to accompany us. I liked him. L was also admiring the painted circle and didn’t realize I was looking at him and musing. But I didn’t think the way I thought about everything else, but
with the kind of thought
that isn’t linear
like the Avenue of the Dead,
but alive,
circular,
running the perimeter over and over
of the circumference that tied the tail
of the eyes I used to see him, with the mouth,
of the eyes he used to elude me.
Circular thought also like the mine,
spiral,
curling,
toward the inside.
We left the man working on the drawing he had started, sitting in a chair under the full force of the sun. The heat didn’t seem to bother him, dark flesh whose long shadow projected over the earth like a clock hand that ticked for everyone but him. Ticked for everyone but especially for me, knowing I had been given a single day beside L. I could feel the little fleeting hand of time, an intangible hand that couldn’t be grabbed or held back. The horror of the shadow, always the shadow, the awkward tracing that mistakenly interprets the arms opening in an embrace and projects instead a cross on the wall; the body that might have delivered her will never pass before it, never.
“I’m thirsty,” I said. I a
sked L for water. I had been sweating, had lost salts and electrolytes.
I drank less than I needed, thinking (hoping) we still had a lot of ground to cover. And I hadn’t paid attention to the sunburn that was becoming more and more visible, though I did notice what was going on inside me, the blood vessels dilating, trying to irrigate as much surface area as possible to bring cooler blood to the deeper tissues. I wiped my brow with my hand and detected the activities of that army of microscopic mechanisms organizing themselves to alleviate the effects of the heat.
L took me to a place where, he said, they could hear us from very far away even if we didn’t raise our voices. From there, the feathered chieftain would address the crowd. I whispered something to J to give this amazing acoustic phenomenon a try: “Can you hear me?”
Nothing. L couldn’t hear me. But a person in the distance, someone walking toward the valley’s horizon, appeared to turn around. What a strange place, where closeness protected itself with an operculum, an organic door, like that tiny plate a sea snail uses to close its aperture after retracting into its shell; that lid that is shaped like an ear, though it’s deaf, covering the ears of the mollusk in its shell. Isolating it.
The sun continued to scald (it was Mexico, it was the mine, it was Hiroshima) more and more, and my immune system persisted in announcing my biological response in ever deepening shades of red. But it was a chain of the deaf: L couldn’t hear me. Yoro can’t hear me.
since neither did I hear the process
destroying me
inside,
that fatal snap
of the cellular RNA.
Nobody heard anything.
We were too near.
IT WASN’T SO HARD to climb the stairs of the highest pyramid, the one dedicated to the sun. A lot easier than I expected. Far easier than descending into the mine. That’s what they say: the descent is more difficult than the ascent. People were resting in different spots around the pyramid, not everyone suffering from a lack of energy but more from a kind of halfheartedness passed down from their parents or the parents of their parents, like a dust accumulating over their long or short lives and passed from generation to generation, a genetics of apathy, a sort of contagion spreading this indolence from one to another, loosening the legs and the will, purging the words of tension.
It wasn’t difficult to climb up the pyramid, but it was hard to accept that the view from the top didn’t allow one to see beyond the people. A large group of people gathered around a preacher all raised their arms. The red of my shoulders had begun to descend upward and ascend downward; there was no order to anything anymore, like a fire that spreads itself following the whim of the winds. The mine was that upside-down pyramid, and the people there extended their arms, but instead of raising them to the sky, toward God, they lowered them to the minerals underground.
I moved in full knowledge that the cells were setting loose an altered material due to the ultraviolet radiation, drawing from the neighboring healthy cells an inflammatory response meant to remove the cells the sun had damaged. Though the lesions weren’t painful yet, I was beginning to feel woozy, and like the healthy cells, I wanted to be free of the presence of these damaged people. So I asked L if we could jump the fence. The fence had been put in place to keep tourists from leaving the group, pushing the limits of safety, of decorum, of the history they’d just been told. An insolent divider separating what was accessible from what was not. I pleaded: “Let’s jump.” And we did. And we didn’t have to walk anymore, because other things were walking over us. Not people, because there were no people on the other side. There were massive lightweight blocks of stone; there were those little plants that asked for so little and stuck like lichens to our shoes, same as the desert rocks. The vertigo of the genuine. It was peace. It was shared loneliness. And after the silence, laughter. I painted something on the palm of my hand: “We laughed here, and we rested.”
We got into the car after seeing the pyramids. So yes, we were both beginning to feel the sting of the burns, though I had it worse, being so fair-skinned. The heat in that closed-in space, the excitement, the tight skin urgently needing a salve or another person’s saliva or maybe just a caress . . . all of it, all that was lacking, on four wheels, in a blind car or just a selfish one, both of us realizing it had to stop right there, that we needed water.
At a stop sign we looked at each other and pointed out our burns.
“You’re sunburnt,” L said.
“You too,” I responded.
He was dark-skinned and I was very fair-skinned, but the difference in skin color doesn’t matter in regard to the sun’s passage, the cellular massacre, the regeneration. Pigmentation, individual genetic makeup—a sunburn allows any passerby to notice the nice coincidence:
Both of us came from the same place,
both of us were exposed,
both of us had walked together
and unprotected.
But all we had was a single day. And the end was nigh. My thoughts still whirled like the wind inside a tornado, moving without having to break the loop of desire that attracts everything toward it. But sadly, time imposes its own form; time then and now doesn’t move in circles like my thoughts. Time continued to be (or appeared to be) linear like the Miccaotli, that Avenue of the Dead that only a few hours before we strolled together, unwittingly or perhaps knowingly carrying ourselves along its stretch. A mile-long walk in the heat, with something much heavier than death in tow: the burden of self-sacrifice, the rejection of a gift that we would never be offered again.
Before returning to the hotel where S and I were staying, L and I drank a beverage from a can—no glass, no table or chairs. Just the two of us, two cans, sitting on a bench in a plaza whose perimeter came to a close with the first church of New Spain. The circle’s only light was a very dim streetlamp, like a cigarette in the mouth of a giant who took pity on us and embraced us. We rested our backs against the colossus. It was warm. But the silence had already begun to settle, not the uncomfortable kind resulting from a lack of words, but the coming glaciation after an entire age (an entire day) of heat.
We arrived at the hotel, our heads drooping as if to protect ourselves from a nocturnal sun. The burgeoning inflammation hurt. The heat had carried desire to those spots the sun hadn’t seen, hadn’t touched, that we hadn’t seen or caressed either. The heat had drenched us like a liquid—our backs, our lips, our throats, our genitals. I asked for more water.
Water.
Water to cool the burns.
Water to part the waters of red breasts.
Water to drown the sweet word (stay)
that shouldn’t be pronounced,
because only one day, or so we believed,
had been given to us.
And our skin hurt so much (or the desire, one and the same) that we embraced in front of the hotel, like two irresponsible people, ignoring or misinterpreting our screaming cells—lame, one-armed, blind—that asked us, begged us, to rejuvenate all the members who fell from the cliff of the two hundred and eight stairs of sun.
We moved away from each other, foretelling sorrowfully the closing of the wounds. Neither one of us was going to use cold compresses, cortisone creams, anti-inflammatories. What for? Cellular death is irreversible. We knew that even once we were scarred over, when the blisters appeared and burst and then dried out, returning the skin to its winter shade, it’ll continue to smart.
When I opened my eyes, I saw that I was on another level of the mine. My forehead was fiery. Nobody had come to help me. There was a tiny bruise on my forearm. The slaves—I insist that slavery is the only word to use for this—hadn’t come to my aid either, not even to put me back into the shade. I got up as best I could. Me, an old woman. Me, nearly lifeless from the heat. Me, missing that Mexican lover who never was but whom I brought to mind once again while immersed in the mine.
Once I’d resuscitated myself—when all is said and done, something I’m rather used to doing�
��I located the interpreter again and we started asking the laborers about Yoro. I didn’t have a recent photograph of her, but I had one thing working in my favor: her fair skin and Asian features. Luckily for me and for Yoro, nobody in that place could distinguish Japanese features from Chinese. China hadn’t yet sunk its claws into the mine or sent Chinese prisoners there to work off their crimes through forced labor, as they did later in certain African operations, with reduced sentences for the prisoners if they finished doing their time in Africa. Unfortunately, in most of the cases when Chinese prisoners consented to work in Africa, they were condemning themselves to a death sentence they hadn’t received in China. So that was my only advantage: Yoro’s physical difference from the other workers. The people we asked said nobody there fit her description, and they’d instantly segue into nervous complaints about the working conditions, always keeping their voices low. They asked for money and help, screaming in silence, really screaming for help in whispers. The people who worked there, they said, got sick. The foreman assured them it was because they smoked and drank alcohol, but that wasn’t a plausible explanation, since only a small minority of them drank and smoked. There was something else going on, they said; all they wanted was to know what it was. Neither the directors nor the mining company’s doctors admitted the negative effects of radioactive dust, which some of the miners were exposed to twenty-four hours a day.
The Story of H Page 25