by Noah Richler
La Abuela Lucía holds me in her arms.
“It is time,” she repeats.
I follow her back into the Maloka. We wet our hands in the dye from the huito fruit. We brush the girls’ body with our hands, painting our stories onto her body.
The next morning, we wash in the great white river. Three grey dolphins join in before the great pink dolphin swims by. He’s back home.
And I remember the lullaby that my mother sang when I was in the womb.
Like her mother, and the mother before her mother, and the mother before her ...
Dying, a mother’s name comes even to an old man’s lips. The very act of being born is one of loss — of a mother’s life rended and finite, and the child separated from all that is dear and made life possible in the first place. So why would she ever leave our minds? Maybe her name comes to our lips not with regret, but because with death the separation is ended. A separation that is all the more painful when, cruel life, it is played out a second time unnaturally.
OPEN FIRE
CARMEN AGUIRRE
Canada and Chile
For years she’d been convinced that her mother had been alive when they’d abducted her from The Greek Cafe in Buenos Aires. After all, they’d shot her in the stomach — not the head or heart — before throwing her into the backseat of the idling Falcon. She’d chased the car as it pulled away in a futile effort to lock onto her mother’s steady gaze for the final time, eyes that had fixed on hers as she’d pounded her fists on the window.
Afterwards, a puddle of blood lay in the centre of the sidewalk. She went to it and stared down, the outline of her mother’s faceless frame reflected back at her. From above, she could hear the flapping wings of a bird passing by, and her ears were buzzing as if a swarm of bees had suddenly taken up residence within their canals. Her coat was covered in her mother’s blood. Turning her palms up, she saw that they too were red. For a moment, she had the impulse to press them on to the sidewalk tiles, like she might have done at finger painting at kindergarten earlier that day, or the prints left by celebrities on a walk of fame — disembodied hands imprinted for eternity.
A wonder about eternity was overwhelming her now. Eternity and infinity were concepts she’d been chewing on since learning about the number eight. When, back home, she’d asked her mother about the end of things, she had answered with the question that was bothering her now, “If time is finite, then what comes after?”
A pair of arms grabbed her and she kicked with all her might. She bit too. Beads of blood rose from the top of the snatcher’s hand and the taste of lead had filled her mouth. Her mother had shot at her abductors and she’d watched one of them fall. Now she too was drawing blood. Hands balled into fists, she tried to strike out at the men. There were four of them. In suits and dark glasses, guns pulled, their mouths cursing her through gritted teeth. They carried her, all twisted up, and threw her into the back of a waiting Peugeot 505. Face down on the floor, she’d felt the bottom of one of their shoes at the base of her skull and the barrel of a gun digging into her sacrum.
Her spinal cord was a slithering serpent pinned down by its extremes. The car tore through the streets, faster than the speed of sound, which was easy to surpass, she’d learned. Was it eternity she was feeling — or mere moments? She’d lost all grasp of that human construct called time, designed to measure the immeasurable, and somewhere in the thick of it they’d dumped her on steps beneath a carved wooden door from another era. There she stood, staring at her bloodied palms again, and this time pressed them down onto the sidewalk. She heard the door open and looked up and met the eyes of a gasping nun who, peeking up and down the street, grabbed her, took her in, and then locked the door behind her. For a month she’d stayed at the orphanage, mute until her grandmother, who’d pounded the pavement for thirty sleepless nights, found her. On Thursday afternoons, for years afterwards, she’d walk around the Plaza de Mayo hand in hand with her grandmother and a procession of other women, chanting, “You took them alive, return them alive!”
Now, almost forty years later, here she was again looking down at the spot where her mother had been murdered. She’d yelled the slogan with conviction but accepted long ago that the mother’s open eyes she’d glimpsed inside the Falcon had been devoid of life — that she was witnessing her mother’s assassination, not just her kidnapping. It was a relief, in a way, knowing that the last pair of eyes her mother had looked into had been her daughter’s, not a torturer’s. But, despite being certain of her death, she’d spent all her subsequent years irrationally searching for the body of a woman whose lungs still filled rhythmically with air, whose iambic heart still pumped blood through its four chambers, whose spirited hands still held her daughter’s, still able to dance a mean chacarera famous in the province of Tucuman’s militant circles.
A nun in full grey habit was walking against the tide of pedestrians, right over the spot where she’d imagined her own rendering in the puddle of her mother’s blood. She remembered how the chase had left her red hand prints on the Ford Falcon window as it pulled away and she was impressed, now, at the psyche’s ability to retain such a distinct memory in its countless folds, only to release it four decades later at the scene of the crime.
“This is where the earth swallowed my mother whole,” she said out loud to those who’d accompanied her. Secretly, she was hoping that the passing nun would hear and stop to offer solace, perhaps a prayer. “This is where my mother disappeared,” she clarified.
The nun’s habit swung like a bell now, a pendulum as she navigated the cobble-stoned, working class avenue on which The Greek Cafe was situated. She returned her gaze to the abyss into which her mother had fallen. Intact or ground to pieces, her skeleton was sand between her fingers, likely beneath cement or in a common grave somewhere in unidentified, infinite space. For without edges or cliffs to fall from, without specific oceans or rivers to land in, was she not in infinite space?
The ceremony was brief. A tile had been removed from the sidewalk where she could place her own red one, the blazing sun around which the other grey tiles would now spin.
Its inscription read:
“Maria Luisa Cervino, ‘La Negra’, Popular Militant from Tucuman, was shot down and kidnapped here in front of her daughter. Detained and disappeared on August 5th, 1977, by state terrorism. Barrios for Memory and Justice. ‘I live for joy, I fight for joy, I die for joy... may sorrow never be associated with my name.’- Julius Fucik’.”
It had been a second revolutionary act, to add the words “in front of her daughter.” Hundreds such tiles could be found on the city’s sidewalks but this was the first to acknowledge the children of the disappeared.
Pictures were taken, songs sung, hands held, flowers left. Bystanders stopped and nodded, murmuring their support.
When it was all over, she took a seat at The Greek Cafe and noticed that the burgundy place mat promised her a perfect Coca-Cola, the proclamation flanked by two Acropolis pillars.
“Well, that’s reassuring”, she thought to herself, wiping the sweat from her forehead.
The oppressive heat was a counterpoint to the cold winter day on which her mother disappeared.
“I’ll have the perfect Coca-Cola”, she said to the dark-skinned waiter, old enough to be have been here in 1977. She was on the lookout for witnesses now, anyone who might lift the shadows from the men’s faces, shadows that had obscured whatever were their tell-tale features and devoured eyes, mouths, and cheekbones. She wanted someone to tell her more about the day that a twenty-eight-year-old woman was sitting with her five-year-old daughter at this very table when two cars pulled up. She needed someone to corroborate just how the mother had ordered her daughter to stay inside, not to follow her out, and how the woman had pulled a gun as she ran through the door, the little girl running after her and hanging on to her mother’s leg as the woman had opened fire, until the men shot her do
wn. Which is what the mother had wanted, she’d come to recognize. She’d wanted to be murdered for the sake of the daughter that had clung to her with all her might. For she’d known that if the men had taken her alive, then they would have tortured the daughter in front of her mother to get her mother to talk.
The daughter, in her forties now, was ready for others to deliver the cold, bare facts and to travel with her to her magnetic north that was the fixed point of the red tile now. She wanted witnesses to put features on the assassins’ faces and walk the route of her mother’s final moments on that Villa Devoto Street.
The perfect Coca-Cola was set on her place mat and she took a sip, ice cubes bumping against her parched lips. She noticed that the ad on the bus stop outside ordered spectators to undress. “Disrobe” was the lone word against a lime green background. She pondered that. Specifically, she wondered who in hell she would disrobe for in her world. The woman she loved was straight so that held no promise. But perhaps the instruction telegraphed to her through the window was not suggesting that she disrobe for the sake of intimacy, but that one could disrobe without onlookers. Mulling over the idea, she realized that finally she had become tired of living her story in the prison of her own solitary confinement. In absolute silence. It was she that was her mother’s star witness, hers that was the future generation for which her mother had died, and now here she was seeking other participants in this, the defining narrative of Argentina.
The waiter approached and asked if she needed anything else. She took a deep breath.
“Yes, I do,” she answered. “I need to tell you a story. And I need to know if you were part of it.”
But here’s the truth and the paradox of it. Losing often brings the lost thing closer: a life or a condition that we might not otherwise reflect on. Lost things, the dead, are a conduit to the middle space their ebbing suggests — that netherworld beyond this one, short of the great absence that we imagine in our unknowing lies to the far side. This is the place in which stories, not yet articulated, reside and art, literature, is a conversation with that space. So why are we surprised that in literature, in stories that often we had no idea we had the power to tell, is the agony but also the resolution of our uncertainty of being?
THE ASSASSIN
MARIANO PENSOTTI
Argentina
For years, my obsession has been to avenge the murder of my parents.
Everyone has their little obsessions and this is mine.
My parents were militant revolutionaries kidnapped in ‘78, when I was three years old.
They never reappeared, of course.
I am now a film director, I’m doing very well.
People say that what I do is avant-garde, though I don’t really know what that means.
A month ago I was hired to direct a musical about the dictatorship.
The idea was to address the subject from a different perspective; to shed light with a certain grace.
I have my doubts, but in the end, I agree to direct it.
The truth is that I desperately need the money and don’t have many options.
During the casting process, I discover my parents’ murderer among the actors that show up.
I recognize him by the weirdest of tattoos that he has on his hand, a tattoo in the shape of a spider with two heads that was etched in my memory forever when, at three years of age, I watched the military kidnapped my family.
I have no doubt that the actor who presents himself at the film’s casting is my parents’ murderer.
It strikes me that I don’t know what to do in this situation.
I look at him while remaining mute as he performs for the camera.
The murderer has little acting experience, he’s only taken on minor roles until now, but I convince the producers to hire him.
I assign him the role of one of the victims and tell him that he is playing one of the tortured.
The filming is done in a place that was previously a clandestine detention centre and it is likely the place where the murderer tortured my parents.
Despite the film being a musical comedy with commercial overtones, the producers insist that it include realistic scenes.
From the very first instance, from the very moment when I noticed him during casting, my intention has been to assassinate my parents’ murderer.
I have chosen him to be one of the actors for that reason.
I’m like a zombie that has suddenly found a purpose in life.
I spend sleepless nights thinking of a way to kill him.
But I can’t think of how to do it.
One day I decide to add a scene that wasn’t in the original script, a shooting scene.
The actors playing the militia will shoot my parents’ murderer.
At the key moment, I shall substitute a real gun for one of the fake weapons, loaded with actual bullets.
The film advances without breaks.
Everyone is very happy with my parents’ murderer and, surprisingly, he becomes the hit of the film. The producers praise him and his cast mates agree just how good he is, extolling his realistic acting and the rhythmic sense of his the musical scenes.
And I have to admit, his acting is brilliant.
Even I can see that he could have a great future as an actor, that he’s like a diamond in the rough but a keen interpreter of character. He’s one of those mature actors that elevates the commercial intentions of a film because of his intensity.
Finally the day in which we are to film the shooting scene approaches.
The night before, I cannot sleep.
I have studied the weapon that I have procured hundreds of times and practice how I’m to leave it, replacing one of the fakes with it.
I work on set with a photo of my murdered parents in the inside pocket of the jacket that I am wearing.
I think it’s the best tribute.
It’s the most important day of my life.
I go over the scene with all of the actors, including my parents’ murderer; I repeat my directions several times.
At first I propose that he wears a blindfold during the shooting scene, but then I decide that he remove it.
I want to look into his eyes at the very moment when the real bullet passes through him.
The crew is ready.
They start filming.
The moment of the shooting arrives.
The real gun I’ve substituted does not fire.
I ask that the scene be repeated.
The gun misfires again.
I keep repeating the same scene, the same shot over and over again.
The fake weapons work, the real gun keeps failing.
The crew and producers don’t get what’s happening to me. My parents’ murderer is performing fantastically well in the scene, they don’t understand why I am obsessed with doing so many retakes.
I sweat to the point that I’m about to pass out.
I secretly check the gun again, everything seems fine, it should work but it’s not firing.
The day concludes and the assistant director and the producers decide that enough is enough and that we should move on to another scene, my despair and complaints of no use now.
It is the last day of work for the murderer of my parents, tomorrow he won’t be back.
His days of shooting with us have ended.
The film will end on schedule.
It will prove a big a success.
My parents’ murderer will win an award for his performance.
Receiving it, he will weep excitedly.
He will dedicate it to the memory of the victims.
Translated by Mary Luz Mejia.
Story provides closure, an end to the uncertainty, though it can be hard to know just where the telling and the healing start. For sometimes the hole where the
lost thing was can appear a terrible infinity. And yet we are in dialogue with it — with the something that existed there. The absence may or may not be God.
A YEAR WITHOUT LIGHT
ALAIN FARAH
Montreal, Canada
If you see a shadow there’s something there
— Arcade Fire
Forget about where to begin; here’s a story with a thousand tellings. I’m looking for the one that hurts the least but there’s no such thing.
* * *
I’d been sure that anguish would seize me, if not at that moment. My legs are like stones. I cannot move a step further and I’m sure that I’m about to fall. The driver of a car, aghast at this haggard pedestrian standing in the middle of chemin Queen Mary, presses on his horn. I take a few steps and finally reach the far sidewalk, my gaze settling on the Oratoire Saint-Joseph.
* * *
The imposing character of this place, one that I have visited a lot in recent years, no longer overwhelms me in the way that it did. Hope has conceded to fear, my serenity has been crushed by doubt. I am dreading the ascent, but today I shall manage it. I haven’t set foot inside the Oratoire for months — not since the summer, I think, after I came by and we went for ice cream on the chemin Côte-Saint-Luc. I can’t find the words to express just how much I miss my friend and thinking back to that excursion does little more for my anguish than compel me to reflect upon the concrete things that surround me. The hooded pilgrim who, halfway along the hundred steps leading to the crypt, fervently recites his prayer; the painter on site — she who is also on her knees, though to apply a fresh coat of paint to the treads of the stairs; the gardeners planting the flowerbeds around the statue of He, the most famous of carpenters; the tourist from Guatemala who asks that I take his photograph with a cellphone.
* * *
Where did I get the idea that walking on the mountain would aid me in some way? What led me to believe that Mont-Royal, a mere 243 metres above sea level, would be anything more than a mundane hill? You tell me.