22

I looked into that house, Arroyo said later (later, she now sits alone and remembers), and I saw my mother married. My mother married in my father’s house. I saw my father’s wife and saw her as a spinster. I willed her so. No one had touched my father’s legitimate wife. He had not touched her. He had touched my mother; I was born. My mother was married to him, not his lawfully wedded wife. She was not what I had imagined with old Graciano that evening which marked me forever, gringuita. She was yellow as an old, cracked cheese, curled up from being left uneaten for too long. She was black as her clothes, the blackness of the clothes imitating the blackness of all the recesses of her hidden flesh. Mortified, mortified: what we hear since childhood in church, the mortification of the flesh, the confession of all sins, the pardon of all sins before we die—is your church as harsh and as kind as ours, gringa, as quick to attribute sin but also as quick to absolve it? When my father’s legal wife came to the chapel on feast days, I wondered if she would be absolved after confessing her sins; for I could not imagine my father kneeling and saying “Forgive me”: that was she, the bearer of my father’s sins since she was the happy recipient of his wealth, his name, his care; she must have to pay for all this by confessing for him. I could never see him kneeling. Instead, he had offered my mother no joy, no wealth, but no sin either: I was not a sin, I her only possession was not, I repeat, a sin. I had nothing to confess, ever. Not even my transforming of the legitimate wife into a withered, black, untouched woman. And he? My most secret desire was to be with him after he died. Not when he died; don Graciano deserved that more than my father ever did, and I had not given him that. No. I swore that if by some strange fate I came to be present at my father’s death, I would refuse him my eyes, even if he begged for them to lead him on the road to death. I swore that I would reserve my eyes for his corruption, I would disinter him and take him with me and stay with him for all the days and nights that were needed so as to see his flesh decay, his hair grow and then stop, his creeping nails scratch the stillness of the world, and then stop, too; his eyelids crumble and the look of death reappear, defying me to gaze on it, his bones appear as white and clean as the heads of dead calves in the desert. How long, do you know, does it take for this real death, the absolute nakedness of bone (she asked him before he could ask her)? How long for the sheer essence of our eternity on earth to appear, Arroyo, how long, above all, for us to tolerate the sight not only of what we shall be but of eternity on earth as it truly is, without fairy tales, without faith in the spirit or acceptance of the resurrection? How long would you have stayed watching your father, Arroyo? How long would you have watched death after death, Arroyo, without knowing, you poor brave fool, that death is only what happens inside us—all right, you are right, but not the way you think, not death inseparable from life as you think, but death instead of life while we think we are living? I, Harriet Winslow, was in so many ways living a death inside of me, knowing that I was dead and that because I knew it death could only occur inside me, only inside of me, and the rest did not count. Now you tell me, General Tomás Arroyo, you tell me if I have come out of myself, somehow, mysteriously, I myself know not how, and having lived my death inside me only, have now come out to the life outside me, the life I ignored, I admit it now; and you are part of that life, but only a part, my little man, do not be proud of yourself, there are a million things rushing forth, and my words, my dreams, my time, even if doubled as you said of the old man, who would hate us if we gave him the gift, as you say, of another seventy years to live, would detest us for it: oh, is he doomed by others rather than you, Arroyo? He is part of the life outside me which now miraculously seems to be the only life inside me, do you understand? And so is your lover the Luna woman, and so is the poor woman whose daughter’s life I saved even as I doubted if it was worth saving, if I could ever have a child and then save its own life as I saved the life of an unknown, unnamed. Arroyo, I know, I have not looked at all of your people, I wish I had, I have certainly missed something, what have I missed? Is there a pair of eyes that should have met mine, am I derelict in establishing, for the first time, a world outside myself, outside my own closed world, am I, Arroyo? You must tell me. I cannot take it all in in such a short time. I am weak and foreign and, even in my shabby gentility, sheltered. Do you understand this? Yet I have learned. I am making an effort, I swear it. I am trying to understand all this, you, your country, your people. But I am also a part of my own people, I cannot deny what I am, Arroyo, and all that I have here is not father or mother or anything else but only the old man, he is the only thing I can recognize myself in here, as I try to understand all of you. Only he, you hear? You have made me hear you all (tell me if I’m missing something, Arroyo), and I have tried to understand why you are doing all this. But if you do something that lets me see that you will do to them the things that they are fighting against, the death-within-them that they are fleeing from in this drowning movement in which we are all caught, if I think you are going to hurt them as you yourself were hurt as a boy, Arroyo, then, Arroyo, you will have killed me and sent me back into the isolation which is my own death, the only death I have known, ever. But I will not forgive you for that, Arroyo. Do not do anything against your people. But also, do not do anything against my only people: the old man who writes, Arroyo. I will not forgive you that, she said.

Then the bodies from the encounter on the night of the squealing pigs were laid out around the square in front of the church. Harriet had seen the reproduction of one of the Masters that her great-uncle both hated and desired, desired if they were famous and priceless, but hated when even their fame could not disguise their distortion of reality, their perspectives outrageously unreal and self-dramatizing. (Did her great-uncle hate anything so much as theater displacing life: all things that did not blend and disappear into his scheme of things, silent and reticent so that he, Mr. Halston, could occupy the dignified center of the world? How far, she almost cried in rage.) They reminded her of Mantegna’s Christ, so lonely at his death table, His feet, His whole body jutting out of the canvas, kicking the spectator as if wishing violently to arouse him or her to the fact that death was not noble but base, not serene but convulsive, not promising but irrevocable, unredeemable: the glassy half-opened eyes, the skimpy two-week beard, the ulcerated feet, the breathless half-opened mouth, the clogged nostrils, the blood-clotted flanks, the matted hair soaked in dust and sweat, the terrifying sensation of the presence of the newly dead, of their swearing and bearing and walking and standing erect just a few hours before. Arroyo was right as he spoke of his father’s death and the son’s vigil over the remains: what if they suddenly sprang back and proved we were already dead (this is what she had known a moment before as she lay with Arroyo in the railroad car) and were doubling our time in another circumstance, another place, another time. Were all these bodies lying around the square carefully stretched out there like so many bleached dolls (pale as the haze Arroyo dreaded on the lowlands yet craved on the tops of mountains) simply the proof that they themselves—the old man and the young general, her errant father and her abiding mother, little Pedro and the moon-faced woman—were all bodies occupied by the dead, carcasses presently inhabited by people called Harriet Winslow, Tomás Arroyo, Ambrose Bierce … She stopped in a cold fright, as if naming someone, especially for the first time, was indeed a violation of his life: by saying this name, she immediately condemned the old man to death, she saw him now lying there among the corpses on the battlefield, wondering if Arroyo had killed him, or she in her imagination, or he himself in his own dark, labyrinthine desire; a name she had read on the covers of the books the old man carried with him, a name that was surely not his, because he did not want to be named and she respected his express desire, thus respecting the unexpressed ones as well: she was learning to take care of the unseen through what she saw, and of what she saw through what she could not see. These corpses had been animate a few hours before, and now she was seeing them ripped open by bayonets, their guts spilling out, their brains shot through by bullets, their chests punctured by shrapnel, their legs erupting in red volcanic holes of sulfuric powder, their buttocks caked with the last shit, their trousers wet with the last urine—the last seed, maybe, if they had died with the erections some men have when facing death. Ambrose Bierce was a dead name printed on the covers of two books the old man traveled with. She could not call him Cervantes, the author’s name on the other book. So maybe calling him Bierce was just as farfetched. But this latter name gave her a chill: it was an invisible name, simply because the old man had no name; it was, already, a dead name. As dead as the corpses neatly laid out around the village square. Did they ever have names?

Who was there among the bodies she now saw tracing zigzags across that square whom she had now seen in feast and in mourning, as the wailing women set up shop in the comers and began their ritualistic metamorphoses of both life and death into gestures and words: who was there whom she knew among them? Was her own father there? Was the old gringo there? Was Arroyo’s father there in the midst of the wailing and the rising dust and the dying embers of forgotten meals?

“My father was shot to death in Yucatan. The old fucker was determined to have a beautiful Indian girl in the hacienda of none other than don Olegario Molina, who was endlessly the governor of the province. Those were the days of the sisal boom. We all knew that nothing made as much money as the maguey crop. Yucatan was ruled by the divine caste—that’s what they called themselves, the fucking swine. My father was a big landowner up north, where we are now; desert and cattle and a few vines here and there, and also agave plants and good cotton crops. Cold nights, here in the desert, you know. High up, thin air. Down there they say it’s hot and damp all year. A brittle crust of land, riverless. Deep wells. Gray jungles, they say. I have not been there. They say virgins used to be thrown into the wells. My father was a guest and felt he had a right to the beautiful girl he saw working in the hacienda. It happens all the time.

“He had her, they say, right on the eve of the Revolution. He was old then, but as much of a cock as ever. Maybe because the land was all smelling of sulfur and blood, he thought he was going to plunge into the pit of hell soon and should hurry for his last big glorious fuck. They say he had her in his own room and she kicked the mosquito net down on them and he growled with pleasure at this, feeling the moistness of her blood staining the net as the flies and insects got caught in the fabric falling like a light but strangling cloud upon them, and the brass stands shivered, and the girl, too. Now another man like me—her sweetheart, you know, her promised one—was in charge of the keys of that hacienda, of winding the clock maybe, who knows? and he saw her come out of my father’s room and struck her in the face with the keys, but she did not cry out, she said he’s in there—my father’s in there, gringuita, again rubbing his ulcerated cock, rubbing it clean of blood, a strong old man now with his penis eternally smeared with blood, imagining he was fucking, in one virgin girl, all the women of Mexico in their moon days, having the moon as he had a woman, oh, the fucking bastard, how I hate him and how I wish I had been there when this young couple, a couple like me and … and … and … God damn it, not you, Miss Harriet, damn you, not like you, like another woman I never had, not like La Luna either, oh, damn it, that last girl my father ever had is like no woman I have ever had, oh, damn you, gringa, no one like that woman, I say damn you and damn La Luna and all the other women who do not resemble my own mother, who is the twin sister of the last woman my damned father ever had: they killed him right there in the bed, you know how? It is horrible: they stuck the keys of the hacienda into his mouth, all of them, made him swallow keys, gringa, until he choked and turned blue on metal, and then they dragged him out wrapped up in the mosquito netting and the sheets in the high hours of the night, when daybreak is never to be suspected. They put him into the laundry basket and waited until dawn, then they took him to the deep well, and he hung him there, hung him from his balls with a hook they use for the sisal bales, gringa, and he told her: I am going off to the Revolution, but you stay here and say nothing. You come and see him rot hanging from his balls right here where no one will know where he is. You don’t know anything, remember. Just come and see him alone. Don’t let anyone know. You will tell me when he has rotted and there is nothing left of him but his clean old bones. Then you can discover him and let him have a Christian burial.

“I come from the north. This unknown man, my father’s killer, is from the south. The Revolution moves. We will meet somewhere. Maybe in the capital, in Mexico City. I will embrace him. He will come to see this land where my father was once powerful and feared. I will go down to see the land where he is a skeleton hanging in a well.”

“You will also love the girl, and take her from your father’s killer.”

“Perhaps.”

Then he took her once more and as she felt that rough and svelte body pounding so fiercely and so sweetly against her clitoris, knowingly stroking it with his own nervous and sleek body as he lasted inside her for an eternal moment, waiting for her to come, relying not only on his hard shaft but on this stroking, pounding, second heartbeat from his pubis on her clitoris, she knew that this was an instant and that she would never have it again, not because she could not have the sex again and again and again, but because she could have nothing else of Arroyo’s. She came with an unbearable groan, a great animal moan she would have tolerated in no one, a sinful sigh of pleasure that was God-defying, duty-mocking (she would not have tolerated it in herself, a month ago), a scream of love that told the world that this was the only thing worth doing, worth having, worth knowing, nothing else in the world, nothing else but this instant between that other instant that gave us birth and that final instant that took our life away forever. Between these two moments, let me have only this moment, she prayed, and then violently wrenched herself from Arroyo’s body with a gesture more fearful than castration, a gesture of boundless hatred for the man who offered her what she knew could never be, and knowing this, she found out that what he was giving her and could give her at any time was precisely what he could not give her: the translation of the plenitude of his body into the long, piecemeal, squandered, pedestrian voyage into the years. This exceptional instant was hers forever, but the source of the instant could never be. For the girl waiting for a corpse to rot hanging over a sacred well in Yucatan, it could be, or for a shoeless old man who refused city clothes, or a child-bearing woman called La Garduña, or a moon-faced woman who permitted her lover to take other women as she patiently waited outside the door—for a virtually idolatrous people on their knees moving toward a bloodied Christ swathed in velvet and crowned with thorns, or another murderous young man, Arroyo’s double, marching with the Revolution from the south to meet Arroyo at the navel of this country that was like a brown body, the sum of its brown bodies, shaped like an empty cornucopia of hard skin and thirsty flesh and sweating thighs and scrawny arms—for them all, it could be, but never for her, it could never have a meaning, a prolongation, a continued presence in her own future, whatever that might be.

It was at that moment, in Arroyo’s arms, that she hated Arroyo most for this: she had known this world and could never be part of it and he knew it, yet he gave it to her, let her taste it, but knew that nothing could keep them together forever, and maybe even laughed at her: Wouldn’t you have been better off if you had never come here, gringuita? And she said no. If I had treated you with respect? And she said no. If I had sent you back immediately to the border escorted by my men? And she said no. If you stayed here with me forever and I left La Luna and you came with me to meet my unknown brother from Yucatan who murdered my father? And she said no, no, no. (If we lived together and raised children and got married and grew old together, sí, gringuita?)

No.

“You’re afraid a bullet will kill me any day?”

“No. I’m afraid of what you may kill.”

“Ha, your gringo, you think?”

“And yourself, Arroyo. I fear what you might do to yourself.”

“Believe me, gringa, I am not myself most of the time. I come rushing out, in swift movement, from all I have told you: my past is the wolf that pursues me over this desert. I have stopped here at the home that was my past. But it is no longer that. And now I know it. We must move on. The movement has not ceased.”

“Have you disobeyed orders by staying here too long?”

“No. I am fighting. Those are my orders. But”—Arroyo laughed—“Pancho Villa hates anyone who thinks about going back home. It is like treason, almost. I have gambled heavily by taking the Miranda hacienda and remaining here.”

He was going south, to Mexico City, to meet his brother who killed his father.

She was not.

“This cannot be,” she said bitterly. “You are offering me what I can never be.”

And this she never forgave Tomás Arroyo.

She would have liked, at the end, to reach out to touch the old man’s bony, freckled hand, with its thick wedding ring, and tell him that she did what she did, not to avenge him, but to repay Arroyo for the wrong he did her: he knew she would never be what he had shown her she could be. Condemned to return home with the body of the old gringo, she had to show Arroyo that no one has the right to go home again.

And yet Harriet Winslow knew (she said so to the lost writer, stroking his hand covered with white hair) that she had not harmed Arroyo but given him a hero’s victory: a young death. The old gringo, too, had won his own victory: he came to Mexico to die. Ah, old man, you did it, didn’t you—you’re the good-looking corpse you wanted to be. Ah, General Arroyo, you did it, didn’t you—you died young, as you wanted to die. Ah, old man. Ah, young man.