by Luis de Lión
—A quarter liter of cane liquor.
While Señora María was turning toward the shelf to take down a bottle of cane liquor, she remembered that she had heard that voice somewhere, but it didn’t strike her as important at the time. She took the bottle and put it on the table in front of him. He opened it immediately, lifted it to his mouth, and put it against his lips; then he began to drink its contents, at first as though he were gargling, then as though he had been thirsty for years, as though he hadn’t had a drop of water since he’d left the village. He drank the whole thing without taking a breath, without spitting, in complete silence. And when he finished it, he asked for another one. Señora María just looked at him, surprised, but she went back over to the shelf, took down another little bottle, and put it on the table. Once again, he took the top off, picked it up, and put it to his lips. But this time he didn’t drink it all in one motion; it was like he was savoring it, as if the transparent color were a transparent flavor for his throat. The rest of the morning he kept drinking the little bottles one by one, looking at them as he held them in front of his belly as though he were trying to decipher something, as if the bottles had something inside that he was looking for. He would kiss the bottles, open them, put them to his mouth, and then, slowly, drink the river that came out of them. It was like he had anemia and the cane liquor was the blood that he needed. When the clock struck one in the afternoon, he asked them to clear the table and bring him another little bottle and a tortilla. But Señora María told him that she couldn’t serve him anymore because time had gotten away from her and she had to go since she hadn’t even started to prepare lunch yet. So he asked for the bill and pulled out the wad of bills from his pocket; he paid and went out without knowing which way to go. Once he was in the street the wind seemed to hit him hard; he stumbled a few paces and fell to the ground like a dead man. He stayed right there for the rest of the afternoon and all night. When he woke up the next day he had an unquenchable thirst. It was around five in the morning. Ten minutes later, Señora María was so tired of hearing the banging on the door of the cantina that she had to get out of bed; but when she saw the same face as yesterday, now full of yearning, she told him to come back later. However, then she remembered how much they needed the money and how she had seen that big wad of bills in his pocket the day before; and she hurried over to open the door for him.
For several days, they repeated this same ritual. Once in a while, some townsfolk would come in: and . . . ¿would ya’ serve me a nip, please, cantinera? and, under his breath . . . ¿who is that man? and . . . I wish he’d buy us a drink; or . . . look at how he’s looking at us! and . . . ¿how ya’ doin’, mister? or . . . ¿are ya’ travelin’? ¿where ya from? ¿would ya’ like to come over and have a drink with us?, alright, then, you’re not interested . . . sorry to bother ya’: but do let us know if there’s anything we can do for ya’: Francisco Chinay, at your service, Cruz Castellanos, at your service;—these guys think I can’t understand them; all they want is to get drunk and have me foot the bill. Miserable, hungry town.
At first, Señora María was overjoyed.
The man’s big wad of bills stoked her enthusiasm. But, little by little, the wad got smaller and smaller until finally one day he told her that he was going to have to pay the bill another day; so she made up her mind not to get up early anymore and, even if he kept knocking and knocking, she would tell him to wait because it still wasn’t opening time.
Finally one day she asked him:
—Well, then ¿when are you going to pay me?
—¿You know what?—he said—charge my bill to Juan Caca.
—¿Juan Caca, who’s that?—she asked.
—The guy who lives in the white house.
—Oh, ¿you mean Mister Juanito? ¿How can that be?
—Yeah, he’ll pay you for sure.
That same morning Señora María headed straight for the white house. She passed along to Mister Juanito what the stranger had said. He listened to the request calmly, told her to wait for him there, went into his house, and after a bit came back out with the money for the bill—plus some extra money as an advance on the man’s next bender.
—¿Who is it?—the voice asked from inside.
—Me
—¿Me who?
—Me, Hen.
—Oh. Just push the gate and come on in. Don’t worry. I figured you would come; I just didn’t recognize your voice . . . Anytime you come, go ahead and push the gate and come on in without knocking.
And Hen went in through the gate. And, clucking and cackling from the thrill of having been let in, Hen almost flew through the coffee plants and came up to the thatched hut where Coyote lived. Hen found him there in the patio, sprawled out on a musty straw mat, stinking of old man, of mold. He was the most gallant animal anyone had ever seen in the town. Now Hen could get a better look at him than when he had peeked at him through the front gate after years of not having seen him. He saw him as people see a bachelor god and he wanted to be Mrs. Coyote so bad that his heart skipped a beat.
As soon as Hen came up to him, Coyote got up from where he was lying, shook himself proudly, and put out his hand. His handshake was strong, like a buzzard’s jaws. He wasn’t any taller than Hen but, despite his size, his breathing was deep and filled with longing; full of strength, of life. It seemed as though all the air in the world had been created just for him, to give that strength to his gaze, to his way of walking, to his arms, to his whole body.
After his desire to be Mrs. Coyote had passed, Hen felt an intense envy; but soon he snapped back to reality and his permanent condition: a bird that always feels fear. He had to defend himself.
—Coyote, I heard that you’d come back and I’ve been over to see you several times but I haven’t found you at home. I just wanted to say hello, to see if there’s anything I can do for you, and to reminisce about the old times.
—Yeah, I’m back. I needed to come back, to put my feet on this ground again, to breathe this air again, to drink the water.
—I didn’t think you’d ever come back. Someone who leaves here . . . who comes back to this sorry place, this miserable little town . . . it’s unbelievable.
—It does seem that way. But, even if your town hates you, you won’t find anything like the warmth of your own little thatched hut anywhere else. Yeah, in other places, they’ll open their doors to you, but when they see your skin color, your face, your hair, they think that you’re not a man, but just a poor imitation of one, that you’re more like an animal, that your natural condition is to be below them; and they close the door to the house on you, and they open another one—the door to the street or the door to the jail. So you wander around, you get good at swiping things so that you don’t starve, you become a thief, you roam the earth like a wandering Jew. No, even if they hate you here, that hate seems like love because, if you die, at least they’ll bury you; they won’t leave your body there for buzzard food, they’ll mourn you, they’ll remember you, they’ll put a cross on your grave.
—I see. ¿Then you’re back for good?
—Yeah, I came back to stay, so that they can bury me here. Or to be more accurate, I came back to die—to let them kill me or to die on my own of all the things I carry around inside of me.
&nbs
p; —¿And what do you carry around inside of you?
—I don’t know. It’s everything I’ve lived, what they’ve wrung out of me; so much that I don’t even know what I carry around inside.
—Perhaps it’s hate.
—Yeah, maybe hate.
—But look, ¿why don’t you try to get it out of you somewhere else? I’m absolutely positive that, what with everywhere you’ve traveled, you’re not gonna feel at home here.
—Maybe not. But here is where my umbilical cord is buried; that piece of my flesh, which by now has turned to dust, is beneath that hearthstone over there. My umbilical cord. It’s like I can still hear the echo of my mother, whose eyes I wasn’t here to shut.
—Yeah, makes sense; but, ¿why don’t you dig it up and take it with you somewhere else?
—If only I could find it. But like I already told you, it’s pure dust by now, and I can’t go around carrying a handful of dirt.
—I only say that because you don’t really seem satisfied. It’s true that you’re from here but you can’t really feel happy here. I can’t imagine what wonders your eyes have seen; who knows what all you’ve seen out in the world . . . and then to come back here. It’s just hard to figure.
—True. There are so many unbelievably beautiful things in other places. But they’re not yours. All you can do is drool. And then you get together with some woman—any woman, as long as her skin is a different color than yours—and that woman gives you everything a woman can give a man, except a child; because she doesn’t want that child to be like you. She loves you because you give her money. You just fill up with hate. And then, it’s simply better for you to go back to your town, but not to get together with a woman of your own kind—you’re too old for that now; you couldn’t take care of a child anymore. He might grow up to be a bandit because he didn’t have his father around. Yeah, you come back. ¿To what? Maybe to die. Maybe to get your vengeance and then to die. ¿But get your vengeance on whom? You don’t know. You just get this feeling. ¿Vengeance on this town that doesn’t love you? No, not on the town, because now you know you love this town. Maybe it’d be better if you came back to avenge the women of the town or to defend its men. But you don’t know. You don’t see the thing very clearly.
—I don’t understand.
—Yeah, I know. I don’t understand what’s happening to me either. I don’t know.
—So then it’s not for happiness that you have come back. And to tell you the truth, although you’ve come back completely changed, although you are different now, I don’t know why this funny feeling keeps coming over me. I’m afraid, but not afraid of you; it’s more that I’m afraid for you being here. And I want us to be friends, I want to do whatever I can for you.
—Thanks. I need you. ¿You know? I have my vices.
—I know. But you also have to eat.—and, from a bag he was carrying over his shoulder, Hen pulled out a cloth full of white corn and another full of black beans and put them in his hands.—Here’s a little something I brought for you because I was thinking: he’s alone, forsaken, and I have a little.
Coyote felt like crying for the first time in his life.
Starting today, Hen begins to keep a close eye on Coyote’s house. When he has time, he goes out there, clucks a greeting, rolls over in front of him, cooing; he puts out his wing for him to scratch.
Who knows what’s going on inside Hen’s body, inside his soul. One thing is for sure though: he sees Coyote as though he were his shadow. And he wishes Coyote would just eat him because he feels like his hen-being is breaking apart, tearing to pieces. He wishes he could morph into Coyote, to be like him because he’s afraid. That’s why his nights are tense, sleepless, exhausting. He falls asleep and dreams that he’s a coyote. Then he wakes up and realizes it’s nothing but a dream because he’s still only a hen.
Hen’s woman says to him:
—¿What’s happening to you, vos? It doesn’t seem like you’re yourself anymore. ¿What’s got you so restless? When you sleep, you don’t sleep. ¿What’s going on with you?
—Nothing—he answers—. I’m still the same.
But he knows that he’s lying, that he’s lying to himself, that he’s not still the same, but merely a trace, a footprint of what he had been. But he’s terrified of telling the truth.
Still, Hen’s woman won’t let it go:
—Yeah, right . . . If you’d just look at yourself in the mirror. It’s your face; it’s not even . . . a face.
—¿Is it the face of the dead, then? He touches his hands, his feet, finally his face.
—Well, I don’t know . . . Just look at yourself.
The mirror is hanging on one of the pillars in the walkway. He goes over boldly, stands in front of the pillar, and looks at the face on the other side of the mirror, the one looking back at him from the other side of the dividing line of the glass.
—Yeah, it’s true; it looks like I’m a bit changed—. But he’s lying because, while he had gone up and stood right in front of the mirror, he wouldn’t actually look in it.
But his woman is watching him carefully and he can’t fool her.
—You’re scared, vos. ¿Why didn’t you look at yourself? ¿Why?—and she doesn’t say anything else; she just leaves the room and goes to the kitchen. But from that day on she keeps an eye on him, she follows him, watches his every movement.
As for Hen, he tries to run away from himself. He tries not to think.
* * *
* See footnote for mama on page 7.
* A cofradía is a religious, social, and political organization that serves as a kind of informal secondary government in indigenous towns and villages in Guatemala. The basic structure of these “brotherhoods” was introduced by Catholic priests in the early colonial period as religious organizations to celebrate the various feasts and other important dates of the patron saints. However, the indigenous people co-opted the cofradías to cover for other important social and political roles so that they could perpetuate pre-Contact political and religious structures as shadow government/church leaders. They are still quite powerful in many communities. They are still organized under the names of the Catholic saints, whose wooden images rotate among the houses of the cofradía leaders as a rotating honor and mark of leadership.
—And, in Fact, They Were Alive . . .
BUT IT WASN’T THE SAME as all the other days; it was different, a totally new kind of day that arrived suddenly, without any birds chirping to announce its arrival; and its copper sun was born on the opposite side of the sky from where it normally rose; and its rays weren’t weak like normal when it first came up; it was already so intense and spilled so much light on them and so much heat that some went blind and others were about to burst into flames. Nonetheless, all the people knelt down at exactly the same moment, as if they were trees split by an invisible lightning bolt, and they bowed their heads, and with their breath offered incense to the new day.
Then, they started to look for each other, to look at each other, to try to recognize each other. But they kept scaring each other stiff—they’d look at each other and just take off running; they’d hide under the beds and try to remember what day they
had died, how the casket had smelled, the silence and time, how much that first worm biting into their flesh had hurt, and then whether they had actually left the earth and flown, whether they had passed right by the moon, right by the sun and exactly how far beyond that last star they had gone, whether they had swum or walked across the Jordan of the sky, whether they had lived for a time without feeling hunger without thirst without heat without cold and what the flowers in paradise were like, or the angels the saints the birds, the trees the fruits the fountains, or the face of God of Baby Jesus of Christ of our Lady of Immaculate Conception of Our Lady of Sorrows, or the face of Saint Peter and the gates of heaven and its keys, which of their deceased relatives they had seen there; they looked at their own eyes to see whether they were blue from so much sky and whether their clothes were pieces of clouds with threads and buttons and zippers made of little stars; or whether, after they had been buried, a hole had opened up for them under the coffin where, by way of a chute, they had slid down and suddenly fallen among the coals of the other side of the world; and what the latest face of Satan looked like; of the satanettes; of the little baby satans; they looked to see whether their bodies were charred, if they had marks of torture on their bodies, snakebites, places where barbed wire had bitten into their flesh; and then they tried to remember, whether it had been heaven or hell they had come back from, what road they had come back on, how they had been made a part of the world again, at what moment they had been resurrected, what the transformation from dust to physical shape and from physical shape back to life had felt like, and they scratched themselves to see if they bled, they looked at their footprints in the earth to see if they had the shape of a real-flesh foot, they tried to count their ribs, tried to see if they were missing any pieces of flesh, any calluses, any strands of hair, they went to the cemetery to see if there were any open graves, they leaned over the water storage barrels to see if they could see their reflections so that the water would let them know if they were alive, or they banged their heads together to see whether that would wake them up, that it had all been but a dream, and when they finally realized that it had all indeed been a dream, still, just to be sure, they looked for the most recent photographs they had taken and looked in the mirror to make sure they weren’t other people now, they remembered their names so that, when they could speak again, if they could speak again someday, they could tell themselves that they were themselves, they tried on all their clothes and their sandals made of discarded tires and all their hats and all their shoes to see if they fit right, they made a point of recognizing their children, old and newborn, so as not to make the mistake of thinking they were from some other place and some other time, everyone counted the rest of the people to remember whether they were the same ones they had always seen, they called their dogs by their names to see whether they would respond, whether they would wag their tails, they tried to get thirsty in case the water wasn’t really water, to breathe deeply in case the air wasn’t really air, to look around them carefully in case they were really in some unknown place, they thought about whether they were thinking and then they started to walk backward, ass first, in order to run into their memories, for example, the everyday, unremarkable things that had preceded the first half of last night, then the time when their first kids were born, then when they had gotten married, then when they had tasted their first woman or their first man, then when they had stuttered, trying to tell someone that they loved them, then when they had first started growing pubic hairs and/or their voices started to change or their melons sprouted on their chests, then when Hitler, then when the first car came to the town, then when the telephone, then when World War I, which they heard so much news about but not the bomb blasts themselves, then when the locust plague and the drought and the famine that forced them to subsist on bananas instead of tortillas, then when the first Protestants arrived, who the townspeople promptly stoned, and the Revolution of Rufino Barrios, then when their great grandparents, who would tell these stories to their grandparents, died, then when their grandparents, who had told these stories to their parents, died, then when their parents, who would tell these stories to their children, died and so on until they bumped into the last memory that they no longer remembered; and when they remembered, they all began to walk forward, to bump into everything that they had wished for, for example, a piece of land, that their kids wouldn’t die of measles, or the whooping cough, that they would pass each grade in school, that, when their boys grew up, they wouldn’t turn out to be drunks or womanizers and that nobody would do their daughters before their time, that there wouldn’t be a drought, that if only their cocks would get hard again but that they wouldn’t make any more little ones, that the next government wouldn’t be another motherfucker, that they would rebuild the bridge into the town, that they would bring running water into their homes, that they’d build them another school, that they wouldn’t drag their sons off to the army, that the landowners where their daughters would go to serve wouldn’t fuck them and abandon them with the resulting kids, that there wouldn’t be a third world war, that there wouldn’t be that drunkard’s tale called elections anymore, that man wouldn’t go to the moon because that would be an insult to God, that the gringos would fuck off, and that they would fuck with the Russians but not with other countries and, finally, that they would be truly alive and not dead.