12. The World from Above and the World from Down Below #4
I slammed my fist on the table. On the other side of the room, bodies danced to the rhythms of the underground birds.
A wolf knows the paths, the smell of fear.
It joins up with its pack and looks for the deviant, the twisted.
It asks them to listen to reason, to come back to life.
A man who is a wolf recognizes another man who is a wolf.
“You did not save her, now go,” I answered with all the bitterness within me.
On his left cheek I saw my daughter’s death. On his right, my wife’s.
He pulled up his chair, and I let him examine my star like before, when his hands possessed the clean power of healing.
I let him lay his ear on her beloved thorax.
I let him feel her ribs. And he listened to the weak fluttering of the hummingbird pumping pure air, mountain air, inside her heart.
That is what I did before, when I begged him to save her.
The Indians didn’t want to, but he put plants and salves on Gabriela’s body.
“You are not a shaman but a man,” he told me when the fever did not break.
“Prepare yourself for what the wind brings.”
In the shelter he examined my daughter with the same intensity. His fingers moved along the revived Gabriela’s bruised neck. He lightly tapped her swollen belly. He swam in the white space of her eyes, white as sepulchral stones, and told me, “There are returns sadder than disappearances.”
My hands trembled. For an instant my daughter turned her head, and I thought she would call me Daddy, that she would hug me, that she would kiss my forehead.
But from her mouth fell the last molar, and I saw deep within her a precipice: a tongue wrapped around itself, pale, like a monolith on Mars. And I wanted to cry.
“Volcanoes are the tear ducts of the earth!” the woman who splashed the floor with happy tears shouted.
The grief a body is able to bear is unending.
Gabriela: from your death I turn
my gaze away from any sapling.
STONE XII SUMMIT
The place is the darkness. The dying afternoon sun bursts with a primitive violence over my head.
I am tired, my legs shake. I climb the glacier with my daughter hanging from a cloth sling on my back.
I climb and fight against what is coming, ice and solitude.
There is no fog on this peak. The sky has cleared and before me is a dazzling white tundra that reflects the waning light.
I see snow dunes. Peaks of frosty ice.
The glacial wind is frigid and forces me to move slowly. At six thousand meters the air enters the body in short bursts. The lungs shrivel up. I feel a blow in the middle of my forehead and hug the bag with the stones from my daughter’s grave.
I put one foot in front of the other. I sink, but I emerge.
It isn’t normal for a father to outlive his daughter, for flowers to bud, for the alpacas to eat together in the grass, for water to be fresh and reach rivers and lakes. It isn’t normal that life goes on after the pain, the sudden aging of my bones before everything.
Life is young and I am outside it.
Down below the green of the Andean paramo stretches out. A sea of white clouds mixes with the snow and extends toward the horizon.
“We are in the sky, my Hanan Pacha.”
I set Gabriela down on the ice and sit next to her. We rest in silence on the volcano’s cupola. There is a fake ocean illuminating us, and the sun sets, sets toward the world down below that is hidden and sways.
The space of grief is the night.
“My little rosemary,” I barely whisper, my lips trembling and stripped of passion.
I thought her soul would be hidden in one of these stones. I cleaned them and wrote words that would cross the mineral emptiness, but the beauty remains and the emptiness grows. The wind picks up.
I take Gabriela’s tiny hand and say, “I wanted to see you grow up. I imagined you’d grow. Your hair reached to your heels, lustrous. You were beautiful like your mother. I pictured you running with strong legs, petting sheep, talking about horses you would later fearlessly ride.”
Her hand is a dragonfly asleep on the water. Fragile, it makes mine look like a lake.
“It cannot be. Forgive me,” I whisper, crying onto the snow.
The blue hummingbird, with its sick fluttering, descends onto Gabriela’s hand and perches. I look at my daughter with the depths of my disquiet. Around me the world shows itself to be wide and beautiful, stirring, and aggressive. I am alone in the immensity. Alone and vulnerable.
“It will not be.”
I look at her with irreducible tenderness.
Gabriela has shown me this tenderness, but it is an emotion I no longer need.
I listen to the whistling wind, the cracking ice, it seems like the earth trembles when really I am the one shivering.
Love and beauty do nothing for me. I discover for the first time the only thing the word does on the whiteness of these stones: plant a tree seed on the moon. A tree seed destined for thirst.
“Forgive me.”
Gabriela does not look back at me, but there is a tree seed in her lunar eyes. I kiss her forehead. I write: Delicately she closes her hand with the hummingbird inside and falls, inert, on the snow.
And Gabriela falls like a dead body falls.