12. The World from Above and the World from Down Below
The World from Above and the World from Down Below
Mónica Ojeda
Translated by Sarah Booker
You should have surpassed me as the tide does the beach
But your death grew faster than my love
Delicate spine of a sea urchin.
—EFRAíN JARA IDROVO, translated by Cecilia Mafla-Bustamante
STONE I THE CONJURING
This writing is a conjuring.
I write my daughter’s second birth with the freshwater of my words. I am a father-creator of consciousness, forger of cosmic errors. In the high páramo, I do not feel fear but desire.
When my wife was alive, she would declare to the sun: “God cares not that the birds sing the future.” Nor does he mind when a condor soars over volcanoes and ushers in the feathery night.
“God is great and understands our hunger.”
This is why a shaman debones the words sleeping in the shadows of mountains. He knows the musculature of language, the description of the universe like a tangled inner jungle. A father, he talks with nature and speaks the language of animals. He spares their lives and ends them with equal respect.
A shaman is not God but looks like him.
Among the frailejón plants I sense the divinity of the white stones.
I write on them as if drawing things to come.
Nearby, a llama shelters from the sun and chews the flowers meant for Gabriela’s grave.
I do not feel fear in the high páramo, but I will be afraid.
I am a father, like God, and a small shaman before the sacred.
This writing is a conjuring woven in the depths of the earth.
A challenge cast into the pit of my grief.
“You must resurrect Gabriela,” said the ancient voice of the rocks.
“For it was you who shaped her entrails and made her in her mother’s belly.
” Many nights I cried over my daughter’s open eyes.
Many mornings into her mother’s open mouth.
“Fatherhood weighs heavy on me,” I answered that ancient voice.
“I saw my daughter be born and saw her die. I buried her with my own hands. Now my wife is dead, and her body is still in our home.”
“Resurrect your daughter, Kay Pacha,” whispered the wind.
Blinded by tears, I write on Gabriela’s grave. I am the puma-man. The wolf-man. These words contain the size of my breath. A conjuring that brings someone back from the dead calls for cardiac writing: words that leave the body to enter another and transform it.
Magic is an incarnation: a song that unites the world from above and the world from down below to resurrect Gabriela.
These words are the seed.
STONE II AND THE MOTHER SAID: “SHE SHALL BE RESURRECTED IN MY BODY”
It is summer every day, winter every night on my land. In the morning I sweat next to my room’s closed door, but when the sun sets, I shiver.
The cold is a spider weaving its web over the unprotected skin of men.
My wife faded away twenty-five days after our daughter.
As she died, she held my hand in hers, an eagle’s claw slicing my flesh.
“Keep my body safe from the wind and snow, Hanan Pacha,” she said with lips like the páramo.
“Fill my mouth with ashes from the volcano, cover my skin with horsetails and chuquiragua leaves, place a hummingbird in my left hand, and conjure Gabriela’s rebirth. ”
That’s what I did because it was my wife’s wish as well as mine.
I protected her from the maddening winds and snow.
I filled her mouth with dense volcanic ash.
I covered her skin with horsetails and chuquiragua leaves.
I placed a hummingbird in her right hand.
I left her lying on our bed and closed the door.
Forty days and thirty-nine nights have passed since I last entered our room.
The cold is a dark spider fleeing at dawn. My skin sweats as the sun rises. I leave the house and walk fifty meters to Gabriela’s grave. With each step I remember the living little girl, her hands the size of a deer’s ear.
My fox-hair daughter.
My flint-teeth daughter.
I silently cried over her open eyes, a destroyed chest, tiny before the vastness of the mountains. “This pain is impossible,” my wife said while kissing my daughter’s frozen foot. “I’ll die, too. There’s no other way.”
The birds sang it in their lofty flight. The Indians yelled with their swampy eyes:
Invaders. Landowners who play at Andeanity.
“Those savages set an evil eye on our baby,” my wife said, gnawing at her knees.
“They took her away. They snatched her away from us.” She cut her hair and placed it on Gabriela’s grave like flowers.
She folded my daughter’s clothes and sank into them.
“There’s no other pain so deep. I’ll die, as would be expected. ”
Far away, the Indians from town looked suspiciously at our house.
I am the puma-man. The wolf-man. I write on the white stones that cover my daughter’s body. I break the natural law: I keep her spirit from reaching the world of the dead. I rebel against the gods because I have been stripped, and there is nothing more miserable than a stripped man.
The animals remind me: a shaman must respect the circle of life, honor death. But resurrecting Gabriela was my wife’s wish as well as mine.
Lord, forgive this desecration.
Have mercy on my hunger.
The Indians look at me like vultures awaiting carrion.
Two months ago, a condor soared across the broad sky and ushered in the night of Gabriela’s death.
Black feathers covered the páramo, feathers like embers, and I said into the nothing with my knees bleeding on the ground: “It isn’t normal for a father to outlive his daughter.
It doesn’t make sense that a grain of sand weighs the same as a feather.
” Such strength is only a privilege of the gods.
Instead we, men and women of flesh and bone, know there is no strength in loss, only defeat.
This wailing in my ribs is my cry: a loneliness asking to be named in the desert. This is why I write words like water that feed Gabriela. Because I buried you, daughter of mine, like the seed of a tree.
Surrounded by darkness, you and I look for the sun.
STONE III THE WAIT
I breathe next to the room’s closed door. I smell something sweet, like honeycomb. It is the smell of the world from above and also the mystery I explore in the whiteness of the stones.
On the other side of the door, lungs rejuvenate.
A uterus.
A heart.
Sometimes I look through the peephole and see my wife’s shriveled body on the bed, younger every day, as if death were retreating.
I cannot remember when I last felt so much love.
STONE IV FEATHERY NIGHT
It is summer every day, winter every night on my land. But the night Gabriela died, it was hot, and the Indians left their huts to surround our grounds.
Invaders, they called us. Landowners
who play at Andeanity.
I draw on the white stones. I name death because a word is like a volcano that holds the earth’s elevated temperature. Ecstatic, mineral writing unites the world from above and the world from down below in a single resurrector song.
A song of the dryness, the silence that remains behind the emptiness.
That night a condor dropped its feathers over the dry páramo.
It was an omen, but we didn’t want to see it.
The animals fled with the healer. I looked into the face of horror in the dust. My daughter was sweating on the cot, her eyes rolling into the back of her head.
I kissed her ninety centimeters of pale skin.
I sang her Mama Quilla’s song. I promised we would gallop together toward the volcano and climb it to see the true height of clouds.
A thread of blood fell from her chin to her chest. A still river bare of fish.
From the hills came the hoarse voices of the Indians: “You are not a shaman but a man.” A skinny, excessive man who cannot support himself.
At dawn, while my wife squeezed my daughter’s cold foot against her face as if it were a heart, I entered a trance: I was an eagle, a stag, an alpaca, but no terrestrial creature could bear my loneliness.
I am alone, I learned, and the earth is barren.
Now I walk barefoot in the blackness. I hear the scream of the wind. I try to feel the sacred and embrace myself, blinded by grief, when I see it is no longer possible.
For some, death is liquid like the rain. For others, solid like a rock. I know the sound of long and short tongues is Gabriela’s spirit rising in her mother’s body. The tree’s seed splits open to give me a new daughter.
A daughter who forgives me.
A second chance.
From the depths of my wife’s bones, like a flower opening up a space for itself in the crevice, my daughter is born.
Like a condor, I find light and food in the carrion.
STONE V THIS IS WATER
I carried my wife’s body to Gabriela’s bed. A curled-up body, half-transformed, the size of a little girl. I looked at her ocelot face and said to the wind: “It’s still my wife’s face.”
The wind answered: “Yes but look at her hands: two deer ears.”
And I looked, moved to tears, at my daughter’s hands on her mother’s body.
Her little feet, her flat chest.
When I write I give death water to sate her thirst.
I follow what is foretold.
A body almost turned into Gabriela rests in my house. A small young creature with skin the age of a girl.
She will speak the language of animals.
She will frighten the condor.
When my daughter is reborn, she will open her mouth full of water and say: “Your eyes saw my embryo, and in your book were written all the things that were later formed.”
This is the book.
This is the water.
STONE VI AWAKENING
When I buried Gabriela, I asked God to keep her spirit within her body like a skylark. Ever since, an ancient fluttering vibrates in her chest.
In the bed is a ninety-centimeter corpse. Thin hair black as basalt. Igneous cheeks. My heart trembles at the chest that almost imperceptibly rises and falls. It is Gabriela’s breath expanding at the speed of a flying swift: the mountain air enters and expands her.
The air of the word.