12. The World from Above and the World from Down Below #3
Gabriela does not say the word I put in her mouth; she barely moves in the water of my words.
She is like a dry leaf floating in the lake, and I am the clumsy boy who confuses it with a vision: a green leaf, a tree, a seed.
But in the páramo there are few trees and life beats like a stone knocking against another stone.
White stone.
Bitter stone.
My daughter’s skin is the turbid color of ashes.
It is not the skin I love. It is not the skin I kiss in dreams and remember like a yellow field of butterflies.
Sometimes I sing to her in an invented rhythm so that her cartilage awakens: “You don’t know it, but volcanoes are the tear ducts of the earth. ”
She would have smiled before. Instead, now she lets her teeth fall on the trail.
White stone.
Bitter stone.
We ascended on horseback, contemplating the landscape of black rocks. By the evening, the volcano pierced the sky like a terrestrial spear. Down below, the sun burned and the air became ice in our lungs. I sang, exhausted:
“My little rosemary, you don’t know it, but we are climbing to the origin of tears.”
The oxygen soon started to thin. Gabriela lay against my back, but my body became as fragile as glass. The earth was rocky, and every time the trail got steep the horse slipped a few meters backward. We abandoned it along the way, exhausted and with wounded hoofs.
I carried on my back my girl and the bag of white stones where I conjure her pulse. “Your words don’t have enough passion to resurrect her,” the volcano’s icy wind told me, but my job is to pull living words from nature.
White stone.
Bitter stone.
The páramo is the heart of the stone. Its creatures preserve under their fur all the pleasure and all the pain there is in this world. I write:
A deer gives birth to a fawn and discovers kindness.
She discovers the meaning of her biology, the desire to protect that which is impossible to protect: the vulnerable.
Then she goes through life with another, and the days are blue and the nights are white.
But a wolf appears and the deer lets her milk drip onto the dry earth.
She feels heartbreak for the first time.
She howls in the haze. She eats though no food calms her hunger.
The grass is the same, but her body will be weak forever and will lie in the dust.
I understand the language of animals, I understand their cry: I am a shaman. And a small man before the constellations.
White stone.
Bitter stone.
I carried Gabriela and climbed to show her the height of the sky.
Close by, I saw the same wolf that caught the vicuna following us with a bloody snout.
Its presence clouded my mind, and suddenly I saw hail, lava, thighs, scorpions.
I saw children with melting faces and my hand carving a plea at the back of a cave.
White stone.
Bitter stone.
The wolf followed us toward the glacier’s tongue and did so with even greater vigor over the snow. Its eyes are big and dark like the flesh of night. When I look into them, I fear for Gabriela. I grab her hands and kiss them with my cracked, bloody lips.
I tell her: “My little rosemary. My star. My treasure.”
My daughter does not drink from the words I give her. My daughter no longer knows how to drink.
White stone.
Bitter stone.
There is only one truth flowing from the cracks: to write is to be close to God, but also to that which sinks. There is only one truth emerging from the depths of the ice: the written and the sacred find each other in thirst.
In each stone there are revelations I did not ask for: fossils among scrublands, fingernails, and hair among the flowers. “You don’t know it, but volcanoes are the tear ducts of the earth and I’m taking you to the origin of tears,” I tell the hummingbird circling Gabriela’s skull.
White stone.
Bitter stone.
I carry the universe on my back.
STONE XI SECOND REFUGE
When we reached the second refuge, the fog came in with us.
In the main room a dozen men and women were embracing, kissing, lying on tables with red cheeks and dilated pupils.
They roared with laughter. A bald man played a bone quena, and the people danced around him in circles.
They grabbed their companion’s waists and the air.
They leaped, panted, repeated words with their arms stretched out and eyes closed.
Their hair stuck to their necks and foreheads.
They sighed. They drank San Pedro from big jars. They wet their chests.
It was hot and a tenuous light bathed the bare feet beating the ground. Gabriela and I sat far from the fever. I placed my elbows on the table, and my breath slowly calmed, resting from the weight and altitude sickness. Her breath, however, remained labored.
The hummingbird clumsily flew around our shoulders.
“It isn’t safe to ascend the volcano so quickly: a volcano should be climbed slowly,” I told Gabriela. “But I’m afraid of the wolf’s footsteps and its smell of poison.”
The quena played a song from the world down below that bewitched eardrums. A bird skeleton sound, a possession.
Before us the bodies danced happily, divided: from the waist up they floated in the air, from the waist down they sank into the earth.
Crying from happiness, a woman raised her arms and said, “Let us learn to cry! Crying is beautiful. Crying gives the stone something to drink, gives the desert something to drink.”
I looked at Gabriela. Her bruised skin and lunar eyes reminded me of my daughter’s true appearance: the mien I had not brought back, the voice I now only hear in memory.
A wolf moves swiftly in the snow, but slow is the glacier that melts.
Slow is the lava and the lahars. Slow is the day.
Slow is the night. Slow are the rays and the smell of death that impregnate everything to remind the living: “I’ll rip your shadow from the depths of the mountain and from the sun. ”
There is no food for a wolf at this altitude, only us.
The shelter door opened and an Indian wearing a gray poncho stood on the threshold.
The bodies continued their dance, indifferent, as he closed the door behind him.
He took off his shoes, waved at a robust woman in the distance.
The light was so dim I did not recognize his face at first, then he approached, hunched over, frozen stiff, and I saw on his skin the marks of all the deaths.
The quena whistled louder. I took Gabriela and pressed her to my chest.
“It’s difficult to follow the footsteps of a suffering man,” he said, sitting down with us as if his limbs were too heavy.
His eyes were flesh of night. His mouth, a snout stained with the dry blood of the vicuna fawn.
“Pedro, I’m here to tell you something important,” he said, pointing at me with his calloused finger.
“You are not a shaman but a man. And there are no words in this world with enough passion to resurrect the dead.”