12. The World from Above and the World from Down Below #2
On top of the dead girl’s thorax, I lay my head day and night until I heard her first heartbeats, far-off, like the sound of a belly drum.
I brushed her hair with her mother’s comb.
I filed her still ugly, still blue nails.
I put on her the white dress into which my wife had buried her face to cry.
I stroked her foal-like legs. I washed her feet, her groin, her armpits, her neck.
I kissed her lifeless, youthful skin with the passion a father harbors and watched, moved, as my wife’s oval face faded to make way for a round one with thick lashes and thin lips.
I saw a skull shrinking along with each phalanx, each scapula, each rib. I saw scars disappearing in the pure landscape free of Gabriela’s pain.
I lie down at her side. Her exterior reeks, but inside she breathes and pumps blood so that I can sleep calmly. “Wake up, little one,” I tell her with the water-like language that moistens stones. “We’ll gallop together toward the volcano; we’ll climb it, and you’ll see the true height of clouds.”
Her eyelids flutter. They open.
With the last rays of sun, I see the grandeur of her vicuna eyes looking back at me. One of her pupils fixes on me, but the other slides to the left and hides inside her skull.
The sun sets.
From her open hand shoots a frenetic blue hummingbird.
STONE VII THE PROMISE
“We’ll gallop together toward the volcano, we’ll climb it, and you’ll see the true height of clouds,” I told the reborn Gabriela while braiding her hair. The páramo was quiet and luminous. From far away, the earth trembled. An Indian rode by on a red horse and looked at us, horrified.
I smiled at the wind.
“I don’t feel fear in the high páramo, but I will be afraid,” I told Gabriela and cleaned the drool soaking her neck.
The blue hummingbird keeps close to her in its tireless flight.
Every three hours it plunges its beak into the middle of her chest as if drinking from her heart.
Gabriela barely moves. Her pulse is arrhythmic, her breathing ragged.
Her eyes often get lost in the plains and inside her head.
Then a gaze white and lunar like the stones from her grave is carved into her face: a gaze that shows me the true depths of the world from down below.
The Uku Pacha, from where I ripped her shadow.
My daughter does not speak. Her jaw falls open when I take her out of the house so she can get some air.
The smell of her flesh is strong, but strong are the scrublands and the footprints tapirs leave on the earth.
Strong is the love of a father who covers her from the cold of her own death.
“Gabriela, your daddy and mommy have rebirthed you,” I tell her, caressing her bruised back.
“Remember how much you like the flowers, my hands, hominy, the mist? Remember how you scrunch up your nose when I call you my treasure, my little rosemary, my star?”
Her mouth opens to let out a little orange drool.
“I’ve filled the house with flowers. I give you my hands, hominy, the mist. They’re for you, my Hanan Pacha.”
When I rock her in my arms, I go back to the first time I held her. The most beautiful, fragile thing in this world, I thought, a hummingbird egg crying out for my warmth.
And I called her Gabriela.
Gabriela stone-white teeth.
Gabriela stardust hair.
I gave her a name, and her name covered me with ashes and the hunger of falcons.
“It isn’t normal for a father to outlive his daughter,” I tell the wind as I watch her trying to walk toward me, but she teeters and falls like when she was three years old.
Her mother would have picked her up, but I let her find her own way.
I put the saddle on the horse, hanging on the right side a backpack with water and supplies. “We’ll take a journey together, my little rosemary. A journey to the volcano.” I hang from the left side a bag full of white stones.
A black feather falls on my head.
STONE VIII THE WOLF AND THE WASTELAND
We gallop, pressed into the hillside, the sun slipping behind the mountain. We saw young goats, hares, cows, lambs, until the land ceased to be green and sand covered too much space and there was only silence behind the flowering frailejones.
Monochrome serpents emerged from the rocks and plowed across the ground.
I thought I saw an eyeless one lift itself up like a cobra a few meters away.
I asked Gabriela if she had ever seen an animal without eyes, but she did not answer.
The hummingbird buzzed tirelessly around her head like a thought.
I felt the weight of my daughter resting against my back and the beating wings of her chest. I took her blue hands, fastened her limp arms around my waist. “Don’t fall, my child,” I told her. She did not answer.
Before, Gabriela’s skin was clean and smooth like a bird’s. Now it is dry like an empty nest.
“She will learn to speak and walk,” I whispered into the air coming from the mountain. “I know because I ripped her shadow from the underground.”
This writing is a conjuring.
The wasteland found us alone and alone we found it.
As we penetrated its grounds, the scrublands multiplied and the wind picked up, stirring dust. We saw half-buried skulls, vertebrae, and femurs; skeletons of alpacas, falcons, deer, wolves, opossums, and curiquingues filled our path.
The horse dodged most but sometimes stepped on a bone, causing his muscles to tense into the depths of the sun.
“A horse never steps on a dead body,” I reminded Gabriela.
Close to the volcano, the skeletons increased, and the sand turned dark as night. The sun faded, but the moon and stars illuminated the path. I stroked the horse’s mane and hummed an old song so he would ignore the smell of ashes. I looked up at the sky.
I rested from the osseous vision of the earth.
The skeletons cracked under the hoofs and the sound brought with it an intimate pain that made me squeeze my daughter’s hands tight. There were bones as big as a man’s pelvis and others so delicate they turned to dust under our weight.
These were God’s skulls. Backbones that formed gardens.
Death carves our bodies in its essential shape and then leaves us all alone.
“We are sculptures relegated to the desert,” I told Gabriela.
“Except you, my little rosemary, who were ripped from your own shadow.” The crunching made my back tense up in the spot where my daughter’s drool slowly dripped.
The volcano above looked like a planet. We began the ascent and among the rocks we saw a wolf with bright eyes smiling at the night. In his mouth he held the long neck of a young vicuna. I thought I saw her cry, and the cold from the snow seeped into my temple.
I asked Gabriela not to look at the blood, but she did not answer.
STONE IX FIRST REFUGES
We arrived at the first shelter before the sun rose.
I tied up the horse, whose coat was smattered with the dust of the dead, and sat down with my daughter on my lap.
I held her tenderly. I gave her my heat, though I was the only one shivering.
The sun rose from behind the volcano like a bloody wound until it took on the color of daisy pistils.
“My little rosemary, you liked the daisies that will never grow in this páramo,” I told Gabriela as the hummingbird drank from her chest.
An Indian woman with three braids opened the refuge. She had a limp, and her face was swollen and red.
“It’s really early,” she told me, examining my daughter.
“Better early than late,” I answered.
She looked at us suspiciously and removed the locks from the gate on the main door.
She brought a mangy dog along with her. A small black dog that licked her heels.
Gabriela entered the shelter, taking her first teetering steps.
I held her arm and told myself: it is the volcano’s strength flowing into her.
The strength of the volcano and the geology of my love.
I set the bag with stones from her grave on a wide table. I write:
Men and women arrive. Men and women with dark hair and broken teeth.
An ancient man drags a giant block of ice through the living room toward the counter.
Fresh ice from the volcano. Ice for the drinks that protect us.
The people make the space smaller. Their faces are red, their hands calloused.
They carry sacks of potatoes and corn that they leave on the floor next to their feet.
They drink, talk, and roar with thunderous laughter.
The wind makes itself heard through the roof and windowpanes.
From time to time Gabriela’s pupil peers out from its socket, but almost always her eyes are two moons that don’t belong to me.
“My dear, what is it you see inside yourself?” I quietly ask.
Her jaw opens and a thread of reeking drool drips on the table.
I look on either side of me. Various Indians have stopped talking to one another and look at us with rough expressions and wrinkles the size of scars.
The blue hummingbird flies in circles. From the counter, the woman with three braids walks toward us with the dog at her heel. In total silence she places a handful of coca leaves in front of me.
“For you and your little girl,” she says, but I keep writing on the stones.
I write: She shall learn to walk and talk like before. I am the father and the shaman. I breathe into her mouth. I inject her with wild life. I shall teach her to put on her shoes. I shall teach her to thank the grass.
I write: Speak, my treasure, my sky, my life.
Speak, my Hanan Pacha.
From her open mouth five teeth fall and bounce like dice on the floor.
“This is her fate,” the wind tells me.
Her saliva is a frozen river with no fish.
STONE X THE PASSION
White stone.
Bitter stone.
My eyelids hurt. In the mornings, I squeeze my jaw and grind my teeth. I spit blood when the sun rises. My body hurts. I know what this means, but I don’t like to write it.
White stone.
Bitter stone.