I walked all the first day without stopping. On the second day I fashioned a bow and arrows so I could hunt for her, and for myself as well. The warrior who bears the weight of another human life must fast for ten days; in this way the spirit of the dead one grows weak; finally it lets go and journeys to the land of souls. If the warrior does not do this, the spirit grows fat on the food it is fed and grows inside the man until it suffocates him. I have seen men of great courage die this way. But before I fulfilled those conditions, I had to lead the spirit of the Ila woman into the thickest jungle where she would never be found. I ate very little, barely enough not to kill her a second time. Each mouthful tasted like spoiled meat, and every sip of water was bitter, but I forced myself to swallow, to nourish the two of us. For one complete cycle of the moon I traveled deep into the jungle, carrying inside me the soul of the woman who weighed more each day. We spoke often. The tongue of the Ila is uninhibited and resounds beneath the trees with a long echo. We communicated singing, with our body, with our eyes, our waist, our feet. I repeated to her the legends I had learned from my mother and my father; I told her my past, and she told me of the first part of her life, when she was a happy girl playing with her brothers and sisters, rolling in the mud and swinging from the high branches. Out of courtesy, she did not mention her recent past of misfortune and humiliation. I caught a white bird; I plucked the finest feathers and made adornments for her ears. At night I kept a small fire burning so she would not be cold, and so jaguars or serpents would not disturb her sleep. I bathed her in the river with care, rubbing her with ash and crushed flowers, to take away her bad memories.
Finally one day we reached the perfect spot, and had no further excuse to continue walking. There the jungle was so dense that in places I had to open a path by slashing the undergrowth with my machete, even my teeth, and we had to speak in a low voice not to alter the silence of time. I chose a place near a thread of water; I put up a roof of leaves and made a hammock for her from three long strips of bark. With my knife I shaved my head and began my fast.
During the time we had walked together the woman and I had come to love one another so much that we did not want to part; but man does not control life, not even his own, and so I had to fulfill my obligation. For many days, I took nothing in my mouth except a few sips of water. As I grew weak, she slipped from my embrace, and her spirit, ever more ethereal, did not weigh upon me as before. After five days, while I dozed, she took her first steps, but she was not ready to continue her journey alone, and she returned to me. She repeated those brief travels on several occasions, each time venturing a little farther. The sorrow of her parting was as terrible as a deep burn, and I had to call on all the courage I had learned from my father not to call her name aloud and bring her back to me forever. After twelve days I dreamed that she was flying like a toucan above the treetops, and I awakened feeling very light, and wanting to weep. She was gone. I picked up my weapons and walked for many hours until I reached a branch of the river. I walked into the water up to my waist; I speared a small fish with a sharp stick and swallowed it whole, scales, tail, and all. I immediately vomited it up with a little blood; it was as it should be. I was not sad now. I had learned that sometimes death is more powerful than love. Then I went to hunt, so I would not return to my village with empty hands.
ESTER LUCERO
They bore Ester Lucero away on an improvised stretcher, bleeding like a stuck pig, her dark eyes wide with terror. When Doctor Angel Sánchez saw her, he lost his proverbial calm for the first time in memory—and not without reason, for he had been in love with her from the first day he saw her. Then she was still a little girl playing with dolls; he, in contrast, was returning from the last Glorious Campaign, aged a thousand years. He had come riding into town at the head of his column, sitting on the roof of a truck with his rifle across his knees, several months’ growth of beard, and a bullet permanently lodged in his groin, but happier than ever before, or after, in his life. In the middle of the throng cheering the liberators, he had spied a little girl waving a red paper flag. He was thirty years old, and she was not yet twelve, but from the firm alabaster bones and the depths in the child’s gaze, Angel Sánchez divined the beauty that was secretly germinating within her. From his vantage atop the truck roof, he had stared at her until she was out of sight, convinced that she was a vision brought on by swamp fever and the elation of victory; but as that night, when it came his turn, he found no consolation in the arms of a bride-for-the-moment, he realized he would have to search for that girl, if for no other reason than to determine whether she was a mirage. The following day, when the tumult of celebration had died down in the streets and the task of restoring order to the world and sweeping clean the debris of the dictatorship had begun, Sánchez set out to scour the town. His first plan was to visit all the schools, but he found that they had been closed during the final battle, and he was forced to knock on doors, one by one. After several days of this patient pilgrimage, just when he was thinking that the girl had indeed been a trick of a vulnerable heart, he came to a tiny blue-painted house; the front was riddled with bulletholes, and the only window opened onto the street with nothing but flowered curtains for protection. He called several times without receiving an answer, then decided to go in. Inside was a single scantly furnished room, cool and shadowed. He walked through this cubicle, opened a second door, and found himself in a large patio blighted by piles of castoffs and assorted junk; there was a hammock strung beneath a mango tree, a trough for doing laundry, a chicken coop in the rear, and a profusion of old tins and crocks sprouting herbs, vegetables, and flowers. There, finally, he found the person he thought he had dreamed. Ester Lucero—bright as the morning star of her name, barefoot, wearing a dress of cheap cotton, her luxuriant hair tied at the neck with a shoestring—was helping her grandmother hang out the wash to dry. When they saw him, both took an instinctive step backward, because they had learned to distrust anyone who wore boots.
“Don’t be afraid,” he bowed, greasy beret in hand. “I’m a compañero.”
From that day on, Angel Sánchez confined himself to desiring Ester Lucero in silence, shamed by his unseemly passion for a child who still had not reached puberty. Because of her, he declined the opportunity to go to the capital when the spoils of power were divided, but chose instead to stay on as director of the only hospital in that godforsaken town. He had no hope of ever consummating his love outside the sphere of his imagination. He lived for infinitesimal satisfactions: watching her walk by on her way to school; attending her when she caught the measles; providing her with vitamins during the years when there were enough milk, eggs, and meat for only the very youngest, and the rest had to content themselves with plantains and corn; taking a chair in her patio and, beneath her grandmother’s vigilant eye, teaching Ester the multiplication tables. Ester Lucero came to call him “Uncle,” for want of a more appropriate name, and the old grandmother accepted his presence as yet one more of the inexplicable mysteries of the Revolution.
“What do you think an educated man like him, a doctor, the head of the hospital and hero of the nation, gets from the chatter of an old woman and the silence of her granddaughter?” the town gossips used to ask each other.
With the years, the girl blossomed, as almost always happens, but Angel Sánchez believed that in her case it was a kind of marvel and only he could see the hidden beauty ripening beneath the schoolgirl dresses her grandmother stitched on her sewing machine. He was sure, at the same time, that when she walked by she stirred the senses of all who saw her, as she stirred his, and he was dumbfounded not to find a whirl of suitors around Ester Lucero. He lived a torment of overpowering emotions: specific jealousy of any and all men; a perennial melancholy—the fruit of despair—and the hellfire that bedeviled him at the hour of the siesta, when he would imagine the girl, naked and moist, summoning him with lewd gestures from the shadows of the room. No one ever knew his tormented state of mind. He gained a
reputation as a kind and gentle man. Eventually the wives of the town tired of their matchmaking attempts and accepted the fact that their doctor was simply a little strange.
“You’d never take him for one of those,” they muttered. “But maybe the malaria or that bullet he has there in his crotch rid him forever of a taste for women.”
Angel Sánchez cursed the mother who had brought him into the world twenty years too soon, and a destiny that had left body and soul raked with scars. He prayed that some caprice of nature would upset the harmony and eclipse the glow of Ester Lucero, so that no man could ever suspect that she was the most beautiful woman in this world, or any other. That is why, on the fateful Thursday when they carried her into the hospital on a stretcher, with her grandmother leading the way and a procession of curious bringing up the rear, the doctor reacted with a visceral cry. When he turned back the sheet and saw the gaping wound that perforated her body, he felt he had provoked the catastrophe by wishing so hard that she would never belong to another man.
“She climbed the mango in the patio, slipped, and fell on the stake where we tie the goose,” the grandmother explained.
“Poor little thing, it was like someone had tried to kill a vampire,” added a neighbor man who had helped carry the stretcher. “We had a terrible time working her free.”
Ester Lucero closed her eyes and moaned quietly.
From that instant, Angel Sánchez entered into a personal duel with death. He called on all his powers to save the girl. He operated, he gave her injections, he transfused her with his own blood, he shot her full of antibiotics, but after forty-eight hours it was obvious that life was flowing from her wound like a torrent that could not be dammed. Sitting on the chair beside the dying girl’s bed, consumed with tension and grief, he rested his head on the foot of her bed, and for a few minutes slept like a newborn babe. While he dreamed of gigantic flies, she was wandering lost in the nightmares of her agony, and so they met in a no man’s land, and in their shared dream she clung to his hand and begged him not to let death claim her, never to abandon her. Angel Sánchez awakened, startled by the clear recollection of one Negro Rivas and the absurd miracle that had given him back his life. He rushed from the room and in the corridor passed the grandmother, who was submersed in a murmur of uninterrupted prayers.
“Keep praying. I’ll be back in fifteen minutes,” he shouted as he ran by.
* * *
Ten years earlier, when Angel Sánchez and his comrades were marching through the jungle in knee-high undergrowth amid the irremediable torture of mosquitoes and heat, crisscrossing the country to ambush the soldiers of the dictatorship; when they were but a handful of mad visionaries, surrounded, their belts stuffed with bullets, their knapsacks with poems, and their heads with ideals; when they had been months without even the scent of a woman or soap on their bodies; when hunger and fear were a second skin, and the only thing that kept them on the move was desperation; when they saw enemies everywhere and mistrusted even their own shadows, that was when Negro Rivas had fallen into a ravine and plunged almost twenty feet toward the bottom of the abyss, hurtling down noiselessly, like a bag of rags. It took his comrades, using ropes, twenty minutes to make their way to him through sharp-edged rocks and twisted treetrunks to where he lay buried in dense vegetation, and almost two hours to bring him up, soaked in blood.
This Negro Rivas was a huge man, cheerful and brave, always ready with a song, and more than willing to sling a weaker companion over his shoulder. But now he was split open like a ripe pomegranate, and the deep slash that began in the middle of his back and ended at mid-chest had laid bare his ribs. Sánchez carried an emergency medical kit, but this injury was far beyond his modest resources. With no illusions, he sutured the wound, bound it with strips of cloth, and administered what medicines he had at hand. They placed Rivas on a piece of canvas fastened to two poles and carried him, in shifts, until it was obvious that every jolt meant one minute less of life. Negro Rivas was bubbling blood like a spring and raving about iguanas with women’s breasts, and hurricanes of salt.
They were just planning to make camp, in order to allow the man to die in peace, when one of them noticed two Indians squatting by a black water hole, amiably grooming each other for lice. Slightly behind them, lost in the thick jungle mist, lay their village. They were a tribe frozen in remote time, whose only contact with this century had been a daring missionary who had, unsuccessfully, come to preach to them of the laws of God. Even more grave: these Indians had never heard of the Revolution, nor the cry “Liberty or Death!” Despite these vast differences, and the barrier of language, the Indians understood that those exhausted men represented no serious danger to them, and they offered them a timid welcome. The rebels pointed to the dying man. The Indian whom they took to be the chief led them to a hut shadowed in eternal darkness and permeated with the stench of mud and urine. There they lay Negro Rivas on a rush mat, surrounded by his comrades and the members of the tribe. Shortly thereafter the witch doctor appeared in all his ceremonial garb. The Comandante was intimidated by the necklaces of peonies, the fanatic’s eyes, and the layers of filth that caked his body, but Angel Sánchez pointed out that there was almost nothing to be done for the wounded man, and anything the witch doctor accomplished—even if it were only to help him die—would be better than nothing. The Comandante ordered his men to lower their weapons, and not interrupt, so that this strange, half-naked healer could perform his offices without distraction.
Two hours later the fever was gone and Negro Rivas was able to swallow water. By nightfall the sick man was sitting up eating cornmeal mush, and two days later he was attempting his first steps outside the hut, his wound already in full process of healing. While the other guerrillas kept an eye on the convalescent’s progress, Angel Sánchez followed the witch doctor through the jungle, collecting plants in a bag. Years later in the capital, Negro Rivas was made Chief of Police, and the only time he remembered being at the point of death was when he took off his shirt to make love to a new woman, who invariably asked about the long scar that split him in half.
* * *
“If a naked Indian saved Negro Rivas, I will save Ester Lucero, even if it means making a pact with the devil,” Angel Sánchez swore as he turned his house upside down searching for the herbs he had kept all those years but until that instant completely forgotten. He found them, dry and brittle, wrapped in newspaper at the bottom of a beat-up trunk, along with his notebook of poems, his beret, and other mementoes of the war.
The doctor ran back to the hospital as if pursued, beneath a sun so hot it melted the asphalt. He ran up the stairs two at a time, and burst into Ester Lucero’s room, dripping with sweat. The grandmother and the nurse on duty saw him race by, and followed as far as the door to peer in. They watched as he removed his white coat, cotton shirt, dark trousers, the black-market socks and gum-soled shoes he always wore. Horrified, they then saw him remove his undershorts to stand as stark naked as a recruit.
“Holy Mary, Mother of God,” breathed the grandmother.
Through the little window in the door they could just see the doctor as he moved the bed to the center of the room, placed both hands for several seconds on Ester Lucero’s head, and then began a frenetic dance around the sick girl. He lifted his knees so high they touched his chest, he swooped low, he waved his arms and made grotesque faces, without for an instant losing the internal beat that set wings to his feet. For half an hour he danced like a madman, never pausing, dodging oxygen tanks and intravenous solutions. Then he extracted a few dried leaves from the pocket of his white coat, placed them in a tin basin, crushed them with his fist until they were a coarse powder, spit upon them repeatedly, stirred everything together to form a kind of paste, and walked toward the dying girl. The two women watched as he removed the bandages and then, as the nurse dutifully noted in her report, he smeared the revolting mixture on the wound, unmindful of the first laws of asepsi
s, as well as the fact that his private parts were shamefully exposed to the girl. When the treatment was complete, the doctor slumped to the floor, totally drained, but illuminated by a beatific smile.
If Doctor Angel Sánchez had not been the hospital’s director and an undisputed Hero of the Revolution, they would have strapped him in a straitjacket and packed him off to the mental hospital, forthwith. But there was no one who dared break down the door he had bolted, and by the time the mayor took responsibility for doing so, with the help of local firemen, fourteen hours had gone by, and Ester Lucero was sitting up in bed, bright-eyed, amusedly watching her Uncle Angel, who had again removed his clothes and begun the second phase of treatment with new ritual dances. Two days later, when the commission from the Ministry of Health arrived, specially dispatched from the capital, the patient was walking down the corridor on her grandmother’s arm. The whole town paraded through the third floor in hopes of catching a glimpse of the resuscitated girl and of the impeccably attired Hospital Director, at his desk, ready to receive his colleagues. The commission refrained from asking details concerning the doctor’s extraordinary dance but instead concentrated its inquiry on the witch doctor’s wondrous plants.
Several years have gone by since Ester Lucero fell from the mango tree. She married an Atmospheric Inspector and went to live in the capital, where she gave birth to a baby girl with alabaster bones and dark eyes. From time to time she sends her Uncle Angel nostalgic postcards sprinkled with horrific spelling errors. The Ministry of Health has organized four expeditions in quest of the phenomenal herbs, without a trace of success. The jungle has swallowed up the Indian village and, with it, hopes for a scientific cure for fatal accidents.