“It perches on the water.”
“There’s no water here.”
“There used to be, as much as there is in the sea.”
“But you weren’t born then, Gabriel…”
Cornered, because he’s never made clear whether he saw the bird, dreamed it, or has described it from secondhand accounts, the man argues back:
“It nestles down in the smooth sand, all this that used to be at the bottom of all that water.”
Lumila’s trained ear perhaps couldn’t distinguish the hoofbeats of the returning horses, muffled in the shelf of sand, were it not that the irons click constantly against the shells of mollusks, which cover with bluish white those vast extensions of what they say was once sea, where that couple has settled in poverty.
The horse stops. Lumila’s points of reference dwindle, and time passes. Did he come alone…? Has Gabriel been injured…? She waits, chewing the edge of the sheet. Lumila can’t go out to look with her own eyes, she’s bound to the bed.
The animal gives a cautious whinny, which confuses Lumila’s impressions: it seems to be trying to alert those inside, or else it feels alone, and wants to call those familiar to it; fortunately, it appears to have roused the person riding, letting know he’s reached his destination.
Then comes the rugged sound of a falling bundle (or a dead body hitting the ground). For Lumila, the wait continues, but now more desperately. Because she imagines they’ve killed the man, laid him across the saddle, and let the beast loose, sure it will make its way home.
Still, she is intrigued, because she can’t investigate with her own eyes.
Later, after various preliminary sounds, the master of the house, looking devastated, fills the doorframe, his face clouded before the serene shimmer of the candle.
From Lumila comes a rabid, solaced cry and a feeling crashes over her, making her complain – a vapor of alcohol has invaded the room: “It stinks…!”
The man crawls toward the bed, climbs in as best he can, grabbing the iron arches of the bedstead, nearly crushes the passive woman as he reclines, and without further preparations, sleep shoots him down.
Lumila wakes up with a thirst eased by what’s left of the water in the bowl. She’d like more, but she won’t ask for it from the man sleeping so serenely, so silently, by her side.
Dark velvet butterflies whirl around Lumila and finally cover her eyes, delivering her to a peaceful nothingness.
Once more, her thirst expels her from its domains. But it’s dawn now, and she craves yerba mate and nourishment as well, because Gabriel missed dinner yesterday and naturally, impeded as she is, she can’t prepare it alone.
This thought – that he was missing – intimates to her that something different is happening now. It’s strange for the sun to rise without his warm, aromatic mate greeting her, because even if he does stray at times, she has to admit he’s trustworthy, hardworking, and compassionate with her, and alone, she can barely get along.
Now she remembers everything, and she examines him with a protracted stare and a jealous and wary soul. He’s still dressed, curled up, on top of the covers. And now that she can see him better, she notices his left hand almost suspended in the air, half-resting on his chest, the fingers curved, as if where the heart lies, an ember was burning, and he was making ready to dig it out.
Then Lumila understands.
She has swallowed her grief, which ran untrammeled for hours, and her tears have lessened the dryness in her mouth.
With the coming of day, all that is living in the land has been reborn.
The bleating, without losing its inherent humility, begs insistently for the freedom the warped fence posts of the corral negate, blocking any trot toward the scant grass and tender straw that serve as sustenance for the meager flock.
The hens and rooster have turned to their routine, rooting with their beaks for bugs to peck and roots to shred.
The dogs loaf around, without a flock to drive to the open field.
The horse, tied neither to the fence or the hitching rail, has dared to dig into his portion of fodder in the lean-to, weighed down only by the now-useless saddle and the reins that drag the ground and get caught in his legs if he steps on them.
The morning thrives, and that moment of general contentment arrives, as if every living thing obeyed the magic of that star with its burning eye above all, which stops, for a moment, motionless and vigilant.
The goats have softened their moaning.
The silence abounds and inundates the farm.
Lumila’s plaints and hiccups cease. She yields.
And there the two of them are, on the bed, one utterly dead, the other with half her appendages possessed by death.
Lumila has ignored her most intimate necessities, which now manifest themselves, impatient and exacting after so much procrastination.
She knows she will be faced with an extraordinary effort, because she relies on her husband even for that, and now she’ll have to do it alone.
She gets ready to climb down from the bed. She leans on her left arm and tries to follow suit with her left leg. But it doesn’t obey.
She tries again and fails.
Her left leg defies her, just as long ago, up to the present, and perhaps forever, she lost control of her arm and leg on the right side of her body.
She curses and then flinches, less from her state than from having uttered profane words.
She asks herself if she’s dying bit by bit and looks at her hand, which is still useful, imagining the moment when it will fail her.
Between so much sorrow and dread, she wets herself, and is ashamed as if it were the first time. She makes excuses, upbraids herself; she whines, and seems to try to explain that she wanted, was trying, to go relieve herself in the proper place:
It’s because I’m so clean that this happens to me…
She reacts, called upon by the need for sudden, immediate change, for an end to the suffering of near-total paralysis that has afflicted her unexpectedly. She lifts her head, tilted to the side, to read the prayer cards lying on the nightstand, and, panting fervently, she prays and beseeches, prays and beseeches, begs…“A miracle, Lord, restore my Gabriel to me.”
She gazes intensely at her pale, prostrate husband, with trepidation, should what she has sought suddenly occur. As she waits, Lumila asks herself in what way life will return to him: through his flesh, or through his understanding…If his eyes will open first (they have remained closed through her plight, perhaps because he perished in his sleep). Or will he manifest himself in words, and if so, what mysteries will he reveal? And will he suffer on returning…
Nightfall.
Her necessities torment her, tearing her up inside. The heat won’t die down. She is sweating from the sultry air and her valiant attempts to free herself from the bed.
It must be fear…Fear of the dead, even if he’s my man. Fear kills, and it killed my one good leg.
She needs to see something living near her, in her vicinity. She calls the dogs:
“Trusty, Lion, Bingo…”
There’s no need to continue: “Whitey, Patches, Ginger…”
All six of them are already there, shaking off the dust from a long nap in the yard or under the eaves. They must be hungry, Lumila thinks, and continues: Same as me.
But contrary to custom, and despite their aplomb, they don’t go beyond the door, not even Whitey, so affectionate she usually jumps up on the pillow without permission.
The hounds’ reticence leads Ludmila to another intimation: it is not Gabriel, but a dead man who is now on the farm, and if his presence disconcerts even the dogs, what sort of night awaits her…? How will she bear the darkness with a cadaver in her bed…?
The urge to light the candle overcomes her, regardless how much strength it takes. She talks to her working hand as if it were a friend, begging it not to collapse, to save her, not to leave her in the blackness…Nervousness makes her waste matches and energy until, in the
end, a flame rises up. Lumila says her thanks, and when she sees the images around her once again, in the light, she decides to request another miracle. It already seems to her she’s asked for too much, and she’s afraid of causing offense and incurring punishment. He was my husband, she thinks by way of justification. He was good with me, even if he was a nobody to all the rest. Poor little Gabriel, he never got any credit.
The temptation to pray for her son to return presses in on her. He’s gone to the city, to the factories. She could say in her prayer: My son, Lord, Gabriel’s and my boy, born in wedlock, baptized and everything…She falls short, not daring to begin again: It would be a lot to ask, too much of a miracle…And she burrows into her thoughts: It could be he’ll come back on his own…that he’ll sense my call. She asks herself what he must be like now, after ten years. If he’ll remember her, if he’ll know somehow his father’s not alive. And she concludes that if his father’s died, then he’s a spirit now, and a spirit can speak with the living, and maybe Gabriel’s spirit will let their son know that she’s alone and she needs him desperately…Could he…?
Despite what she’d imagined, the night doesn’t add to her terror.
In a certain way, the shadows shelter her, extending her the mercy of obscuring what lies by her side. She has a sense of it, there’s no escaping that; but she doesn’t feel it, or else she already feels it, or wants to, as something alien, which she resists touching.
But then she recalls, like a dereliction, that she hasn’t given him a kiss goodbye on the forehead. She forgoes it, speaking to someone who isn’t him:
“There will be time. He’s still here, he hasn’t left.”
She defends herself to him now:
“I can’t move, I can’t reach your forehead. I don’t even have water, you know, and I’m dying of thirst…”
Then she moves on to more immediate worries. She needs to drink, she needs to eat. She needs help from beyond but must resign herself to smaller miracles than those she’s been beseeching, and she solicits them abundantly, by the handful: for Don Casimir to look in, or for the offal vendor to pity her. For Inés to help her out, to think to stop in. For the patrol to make its rounds. For the mad dentist to come. For someone to come…someone…
But, for now, no one comes. There’s no lack of possibilities: Don Casimir, the lacemaker, the travelling salesman and lovestruck Arab, only comes to those parts every few months, and irregularly. (Reborn in Lumila, like a picture, is the memory of that finespun lace she could never afford.) The offal vendor won’t forgive their debt, and once a week, they hear him blowing his horn – that’s how they know it’s Tuesday – but always from far away. (From the cane lattice in the hallway, the wire mesh basket for the meat hangs empty.) Inés only takes the road when she’s headed to the village, because she’s heard the Health Department trailers with the doctor are finally passing through. As for the police patrol, they only bother to go past the farms where the chief can get a bite and wet his whistle and even then, it’s best if they get a suckling pig on their way out the door. And the dentist, with his hardtop Ford and his treadle drill thrown in the back…He insists on taking the ramshackle roads and never notices the shacks he drives past, unless someone comes out from to wave him down or chases him on horseback until his car gets stuck in a patch of brush. Lumila, in her long white smock, hands immaculate, gaze fanatical, evokes him, saying, “He’s so kind, but so mad…” over and over until she comes back to herself, says, “My soul, so alone…” and flounders in her helplessness, which nothing can relieve.
Sleep overtakes her, and she dreams she’s a little girl walking barefoot over the sand, looking for seashells, and the sea licks her feet and covers them in foam and Gabriel is courting her and she refuses him because she’s thirsty and her lips are loath to kiss, they covet the water, and she doesn’t want Gabriel because he…has died.
She awakens. It’s true: he’s dead, long dead, cheek by jowl with her.
She screams. She needs to scream.
From the yard, the dogs hear her, and they follow her lead, imitating her with rending howls.
Save for one. He slips off, humbly, to the bedroom and lies down at Lumila’s feet. It’s Trusty.
Lumila is laid low by tenderness and cries sweet tears.
But later, drained, she slips once more into sleep, and she dreams of the lake or sea that was, and there’s a storm that batters the canoes woven from rushes of the fishermen throwing their nets, and the bird with the huge wings and the body of a fish breaks into her room on the farm with a caw and a clamor.
She awakens. No wings are flapping. No rare bird profanes the sad, secluded space where Lumila’s angst abates, because nothing’s happening, perhaps, save in her nightmares, or because Trusty is guarding her, so devoted.
Devoted, that’s what we should have called you, she thinks, and pronounces the new name with a tender tone.
She foresees the coming day. As she sleeps, the daydreams and desires pile up, and in them, her home is flooded with people who care for her in her mourning, and no doubt they will manage to furnish a grave to the deceased. But no one slakes her thirst.
When it’s time to pasture the goats, she grieves for the flock, which has no way to get out and graze, and is left with the dry boards in the trough…At the same time, she covets the milk in the nanny goat’s udders, which could give her drink and nourishment.
She endures the dawn and the sorrowful bleating. She lives with, or tries to ignore, her obligatory companion in the bed, because – she comforts herself – it’s better not to witness what is happening on her husband’s skin.
She forces her senses and her imagination to abide. At odd seconds, she hears the little bell of Don Casimir, the lacemaker; other times, she’s dazzled by a glimmer of sun on the curved tin roof of the offal vendor’s cart as he comes around the corner toward their home…
None of this happens. No one comes.
The Zonda does come, the cruel wind, hot and dusty, unliable to human will.
It drones, dances, whips, hurls its winds dense with soot and sand, crushes blossom and branch. In the immensity, it sets to shaking the scattered houses of the families that tend the goats, so far each from the other that even in adversity they find no strength in unity. It invades them, ripping off their roofs.
At Lumila’s, it is worse. The bedroom door has been open since Gabriel’s return. She can’t close it.
Brutally, the wind chokes her with dirt and hurls her about while shattering the flimsy furnishings, the full-length mirror, the tranquil treasures for ornament or devotion in their wonted place on the top of the dresser.
The door lurches on its hinges till it comes loose. The window struggles not to splinter.
Lumila hides under the blanket, chokes, uncovers herself, and covers back up. She repeats the process over and over.
The reprobate is known for visiting his infamies on them for twenty-four hours without reprieve. This memory brings the woman to the outer edge of desperation.
But this time, after midday, its furor wanes, and little by little, it sees fit to let the air be breathable again.
Lumila emerges in a mask of earth furrowed by tears. She contemplates the disaster; she imagines the devastation, perhaps the deaths, among her animals; she asks herself if that loud noise in the morning wasn’t the shed being torn away…and she tries not to look at the man.
She can’t help it.
The chaos of the wind has knocked him from the bed. Lumila already sensed it some time ago. There was missing weight, a missing form by her side. But she didn’t hear the noise, it was covered by the rumbling of the air.
She doesn’t dare admit that she’s relieved. She no longer has him attached to her, she won’t see him unless she bends over and looks in that direction.
And yet, in another way, his presence lingers:
“It stinks!” Lumila sniffs with disgust.
It stinks. The burning heat of the Zonda has sped up the decom
position of the corpse.
The woman is bitter, and creaks with impotence. But she takes care, from respect for the dead, not to inveigh against that man.
Famine makes the packs of dogs split up. They run off into the mountains to resume their ancient calling of hunting for food. Only two stay behind: Trusty and Whitey.
Ginger and Bingo, fast friends and allies, drift quickly from the uncertain gain of the scrubland to human territory, knowing that where there are people, there’s extra food, at least at times.
They sidle up to the farms they came to on occasion with their master; but the others of their species are hostile, and chase them off.
When they catch sight of Inés’s home, her house dogs face off with the invaders, but the dustup is nothing more than a bit of snipping, because the owner recognizes the visitors and obeys the code of country hospitality. He brings peace and lets them in, convinced that his friend, Don Gabriel, must be wandering nearby, maybe rounding up stray goats, and that he’ll bring up the rear soon enough.
Inés has observed her husband’s actions, asks him why, he states his reasons and she respects them, though she doesn’t share them. For a moment, she suspects something strange is happening at Lumila’s. But she won’t talk for now. She tells herself she’ll do it later, when her husband figures out he’s erred on his own. Not to be sneaky, just to keep from bucking his authority.
Not the next day, but the one after, Trusty, now the only pet worth mentioning that has remained close to its owners, even after jumping over the fence, plagued with hunger, and getting rammed by the billy goat, walks with a disturbing restlessness. Only briefly does he return to the master bedroom.
He curls up now in the nook his bones have hollowed out in the floor of the room, and the disordered voice of the woman, halting, so close to his ears, disturbs him.
Nest in the Bones Page 14