By Fabricio
In memory of Juan Rulfo.
It was Palm Sunday when Ishmael returned to Zautla as a risen man. Through the cobbled streets, whole families marched in procession with freshly blessed palms, green and ocher, raised above their heads, basking in the inclement April sun. No clouds covered the sky. The tops of the lush trees were too far from the path followed by the faithful, too distant to provide a little shade in their tortuous progress.
Unable to continue advancing because of the tumult, Ishmael resigned himself to delaying more minutes before meeting Ana again, and began to look calmly at the pilgrimage that was passing before his eyes. He threw his body forward and leaned on the handles of the pushcart where he carried the urn with the ashes that he had gone to look for in Colima months before, hoping that by contemplating them, Ana could finally escape from the lethargy and the demons that hardened her face and prevented her from laughing and accepting caresses.
As he looked at the expression of faith, Ishmael inquired inwardly if it was still time to believe. It was long ago when he started losing track of Holy days. He had even lost the concept of God, the good, the bad, the fair. “What would Ana think?” He wondered when the swaying of the dust next to the dark drawer that constituted his war booty separated him from his thoughts and returned him to the present time, almost like an alarm clock that brought him back to reality. In front of his eyes, the men and women continued walking slowly towards the main road, most dressed in white blouses or shirts and palm hats.
When the faithful clear the way, the man who treasured Ana’s face in his mind would use the path to return to the roof of brown modest tiles under which he had lived with the niece of the priest of Comala for months, some time ago.
When he left Zautla to seek to settle accounts, Ishmael wandered for several weeks, struggling to raise money through errands and simple jobs that were entrusted to him here and there. Thus he managed to earn enough cash to pay for transportation, and that way he was able to reach Comala, the town where Ana lost her father, her uncle –the village priest– and also her purity, from which she had escaped so many months before to avoid turning of stone, as most of its inhabitants ended up becoming, as she felt herself anyway: face and heartbeat turned into rock, despite living in Zautla, numerous miles away from Comala.
Ana came from the haunted west town hoping that the change of scenery would transform her life and help erase from her mind the infamous memories of Miguel’s rough chin sticking to her throat, insistent and ruthless; the loud prayers that his uncle uttered at times full of shame and at times very proud of having granted redemption to Miguelito, murderer and rapist; and also the other voices and calls, older and more distant, those of her father and mother, one untraceable since she had turn eight years old and the other dead at the hands of famous Miguel, the son of the most powerful landowner in that whole boiling region.
In Zautla, Ana met Ishmael one Sunday night when she was coming back from church, where she helped the parson –an old acquaintance of his uncle– to clean the stained-glass windows and the benches after the last mass of the day, which ended at seven at night. She felt dizzy as he moved forward and was suddenly unable to stand, perhaps from the effort, she thought later. Ishmael, who was walking towards her, saw her vanish and went diligently to help her. The young woman did not lose consciousness, but she had no strength to stand up and accepted that Ishmael held her in his arms for a long time, while he sprinkled drops of pure water on her brow and arms with the intention of reviving her.
After that meeting, the trust between them became certain and both exchanged countless smiles each time they met on the sidewalks and cobbled roads of Zautla, surrounded by lush trees with hard bark and thick roots. One and fifty times they found each other in secret places before approaching again and clasping hands as they strolled through the kiosk in the center of town. Several days went by and then they decided to share more and more afternoons together, with the melody of the organ grinders sweetening their nights and the tender summer breeze taking care of their backs. Thus, by dint of being accompanied, looking into Ishmael’s eyes, Ana almost forgets the cruel years lived in her birthplace.
It was after their first kiss, after they both recognized their bodies, after they got married and shared entwined several nights, that she pronounced the name of whom still tormented her from beyond the grave. And she unveiled to her husband, while shedding stiff gray tears, that this man had killed her father and outraged her, and that once he died he had received absolution for all his sins from his uncle, the village priest. That was why she escaped from that boiling land, where the dead are more alive than those who still breathe and carry blood running through their veins, that isolated town north of Colima.
She explained to him that she wanted to recast the memory of Miguel in the darkest corner of her conscience, but that it continued to torment her and prevented her from feeling, anesthetizing her inner voice and desires. Naively, she had decided that by escaping she would recover, but her feelings were still gone. Then, as she realized she was not salvaging herself, she thought she would get well later, in time, by falling in love and kissing with her soul, or by marrying and being loved and caressed again. But nothing. Time passed, and she fell in love, she became Ishmael’s girlfriend, who proposed to her and she accepted without hesitation. And nothing. She couldn’t feel anything. Sensations could not blossom in her petrified nerves, preventing her from feeling even desolation, much less tenderness, joy, happiness or affection.
–He’s dead –Ana explained to Ishmael after confessing what paralyzed her and darkened her face, as he went back and forth through the bedroom, making plans to assassinate Miguel–. He fell off the horse and killed himself. They buried him in the eyes of all the people in the cemetery that was closest to his father’s farm –she added–.
–I’ll unbury him, if it’s necessary –announced Ishmael–. I’ll bring him here, I will bring his ground bones so that you regain tranquility and hope. So you can feel again. I’m going to do it –he stated.
And the promise did not fall on deaf ears. A few days later the young man with a bushy beard left for Colima to find the town his wife had escaped from. He promised to return to her with the marrow bone from the one who had hurt her; even if he was dead, he swore to her that he would kill him again and break his bones, what was left of them, to squeeze the bone marrow out of them and take it to her so that she could regain her calm and sensations.
Ishmael retraced the path that his wife had traveled to escape and reach Zautla, first on foot along the nearby roads, occasionally by bus, and when he was lucky in a rickety freight train with rusty sheet metal. Then he advanced again on foot and then he found a muleteer whom he followed until he reached the very mouth of that town, from which his wife had fled with no help other than that of another muleteer to whom his uncle had given all the alms of the weekend.
Once in town, when the path he was on stopped descending, Ishmael understood what Ana had described to him: the cracks under his feet and the rooms without doors. He was hearing cracks and laughter, quiet noises and footsteps of people prowling around; howling dogs. But he didn’t see anything. No image of what he was hearing appeared in front of his eyes; pure emptiness was there. Then he caught a glimpse of a sprinkled light, as if the ground beneath it was awash with tears, and he watched the wind blowing tree leaves, though he still couldn’t see a single tree. Then he looked up at the leaden sky, barely lit by a dun light, as if it was evening, although it had been dawning for hours. He blindfolded himself to avoid the hallucinations. And so, he went on for a long time, trying to focus on what Ana had indicated: the path that would lead him to the pantheon, the path of dehydrated powder, the dry smell of the breeze.
He kept hearing murmurs and screams, distant voices, howls. The ringing of bells shook him. He fell to the ground a couple of times; he got to his feet and continued stubbornly on his way. Suddenly he realized that the specters enclosed in that place were made of sounds and not images. He took off the cloth he had moored in his eyes and spent a long time looking for something to cover his ears, until he found a stone-tipped and decided to rip the rag to extract two pieces of fine cloth that he placed in each one of his ears. He could hear some names and still make out footsteps; but both pieces of cloth seriously lessened the noises. Then he could follow more firmly, and without being distracted by the thick sounds and insistent calls for help that repeated names and names, sometimes even his own.
When he touched some barbed wires held up by lots of almost rotten wooden poles, he realized they were separating Don Pedro’s land from the rest of the town. He did not penetrate the mesh. Instead, he followed the line from right to left until he found the cemetery in which Miguel’s body must have been buried, as Ana had told him months before. The graveyard didn’t have a door, or he didn’t see it. He clung to the stones that made up the fence and climbed until he could cross to the other side. There he felt with anguish his dry mouth. He saw many empty graves, mounds of earth and stones piled up, as if preparing to cover the tombs, or exhuming bodies from them, from the crypts that were open. He examined the crosses that marked each of the sepulchers in that place and he knew that they were all a single family: the same surname was repeated on each of the tombstones, each of the epitaphs. Where was the rest of the town? He wondered.
Confused by the aroma of decomposition and the tears that pierced his drying skin, he still walked many steps before finding the inscription where the surname of all the dead in the cemetery was preceded by the name that Ana had repeated in anxiety: Miguel. He read it twice carefully, and both times he found that what he had come to look for was right there, at his feet. Then he set out to dig it up, just as he had promised.
A long time later, by dint of scratches and blows for which he went to look for stones and one of the posts that supported the fence of the adjoining ranch, he finally found the bricks that protected the coffin. It was night, the exhumation work had consumed the entire day. From the bag he carried, he pulled out the last piece of dried meat that he had bought at Contla. He held it in his hands freshly shaken from mud and dirt, and raised it to his mouth. He could barely stand the thirst when he fell asleep on top of the cover of that sepulcher. The ground flooded with tears quenched his thirst in dreams. He saw his wife’s uncle wrapped in an off-white cassock and heard Eduviges, Dorotea, and Damiana murmuring and then asking Ana to come back and pleading to him to let her go with them. “Where to?” “Where are you going?” He wanted to know.
Ishmael woke up just as thirsty as before, aching because of the contortionist posture in which sleep had overcome him. He scrambled out of the pit and climbed the graveyard wall to fetch water. He found it dripping from a faucet behind a hall without doors. He did not hesitate to put both hands out to receive it and then to bring it to his mouth, cloudy and yellow. The taste of old age and stagnation got impregnated to his lips for many hours, almost until he could achieve his mission, almost until he had Miguel’s ribs in his hands.
Back in the pantheon, at the tomb of Ana’s molester, Ishmael prepared to break the partitions that separated him from the coffin where the corpse should be. He hit them with the post he had taken from the fence, he also bumped them with his own weight, jumping on them over and over again, without success. He had to go out and back to where he had found water to look for a chisel. He was surprised by the scarlet soil inside a house that had a closed bathroom. A brown pottage dripped from the wall that prevented access. Nearby he found a hammer. He held it firmly and judged that it might serve him. He moved out of the room with it, still seeing the reddish paste bubbling through the cement. It is nothing but another hallucination, he told himself.
On the way to the cemetery, the neighing of a horse pierced the plugs with which Ishmael had covered his ears. He recalled the words of Ana when she told him about the horse that remained wandering after Miguel’s death, after killing him, because, by not jumping properly, it made him stagger and fall to the ground, from which Miguel never got up. Ana said the animal spent its last days in pain, inconsolable for the loss of its master. The misery of the beast could be felt in the breadth of its wailing, she described.
With the first hammer blow, Ishmael opened a tiny hole; nothing would fit through, but the space allowed him to work the whole night, until he could touch the gnawed wood of the coffin he sought. When he got to it, he didn’t dare to open it. He covered it again with some stones and jumped out of the tomb. He did not fall asleep, but he waited until the timid rays of the sun warmed his face to return to the grave, and this time he did penetrate the wooden box where his wife’s molester rested. He used the hammer as little as possible and tried to open the wood without warping it. The guilt of that felon was in the air, despite the time, so much time he had been dead. The smell was unbearable, more concentrated and fetid than what he had experienced outside. He gathered all his tolerance to stay and look at the remains of who had cut Ana’s life, the devil himself, he thought. The frayed clothing barely covered the remains of rotten meat that revealed several bones. In the spaces, worms and cockroaches ran, disoriented by the light that fell upon them like fire on their backs.
He could not recognize the features of the face, but there he was: Miguel, still covered with some skin, no longer with eyes. Ishmael looked up only to see that the sky remained blue. He picked up the hammer again and used it to crush several of the bones in front of him. He was filled with anger as he did it. In his brain he confused at times Ana’s voice and his own, the promises he had made to her, the ones that pierced his ears, the ones he hadn’t managed to turn off despite everything, despite anything. Then he announced and repeated to anyone who would listen, anyone who could hear that he was there to save the one who wanted to be saved, the one who escaped before becoming rock in that cloistered village, where the land scorches like burning embers.
It was Palm Sunday when Ishmael returned to Zautla and found Ana waiting for him, nail varnish between her fingers, a wedding ring around one of them, ready to try once again, but sure that she would feel nothing, that contemplating the marrow bone of Miguel would not change anything, that her senses would not reflourish. He found her staring blankly, her body cracked, as if she hadn’t moved in all those months, turning to stone just as he had left her.
–Here I am –Ishmael announced.
Ana did not respond. She stared at him from the chair where she was painting her nails without saying anything. Ishmael approached her and caressed her face. She remained silent, oblivious to what was happening. Ishmael thought he saw a hint of expectation on her face, so he showed her the chest where he collected the spoils of his war and offered it to her. With a few nimble movements he opened the urn and exhibited the ground bones that he had torn from the tomb in Comala’s pantheon.
–This is Miguel’s marrow bone –he said.
Ana’s eyes widened when she saw the dust inside the chest and recognized the cross that Miguel used to carry, with which they had buried him. She remained silent. The room was filling up with the pestilence, rottenness and decomposition of the bones. Was she still certain that it didn’t matter how far she had fled, or the underworlds that Ishmael had entered and returned from? Sure that she remained tied to Comala, sewed with invisible thread to what she had lived there, to his assassinated father, to his uncle, the priest, to Eduviges, Damiana, Fulgor, Susana, Toribio, Justina, Don Bartholomew, Peter and Michael?
–Did you feel something? –Ishmael wanted to know.
END.
Fabricio was born in 1987 in Mexico City. He studied Communication at Universidad Iberoamericana, and Literature at Casa Lamm. He has worked in various magazines and newspapers, such as El Universal, Marvin, and The Huffington Post. He is the author of the novels El vendedor de certezas y su corazón de acero, Asdrubal y Carne lívida. As well, he has published short stories in cultural magazines, such as Confabulario and Monolito. Recently he started writing stories in English, inspired by Edgar Allan Poe and Juan Rulfo.