The villain pressed Rafaela’s elbow into the small of her back and jerked her head back by the hair. The sound of her screams traveled south but not north. He jammed her into the leather cavern of the black Jaguar—suddenly a great yawning universe in the night. Springing upon her writhing body, he clawed her throat and pawed her breasts, tearing her soft skin. Her writhing twisted her body into a muscular serpent—sinuous and suddenly powerful. She thrashed at him with vicious fangs—ripping his ears, gouging his neck, drawing blood. He screamed but returned snarling, pounced, eyes bloody with terror, claws and teeth, flashing knives, ripped into the armored scales of her tensile body. Her mouth gaped a torch of fire, scorching his black fur. Two tremendous beasts wailed and groaned, momentarily stunned by their transformations, yet poised for war. Battles passed as memories: massacred men and women, their bloated and twisted bodies black with blood, stacked in ruined buildings and floating in canals; one million more decaying with smallpox; kings and revolutionaries betrayed, hacked to pieces in a Plaza of Tears, ambushed and shot on lonesome roads, executed in stadiums, in presidential palaces, discarded in ditches, tossed into the sea. And there was the passage of five thousand women of Cochabamba resisting with tin guns an entire army of Spaniards, the passage of a virgin consecrated to the sun-god buried alive with her lover, of La Malinche abandoning her children and La Llorona howling after, of cangaceira Maria Bonita riddled with lead by machine guns at the side of her Lampião, of one hundred mothers pacing day after day the Plaza de Mayo with the photos of their disappeared children, and Coatlalopeuh blessing it all. But that was only the human massacre; what of the ravaged thousands of birds once cultivated to garnish the tress of a plumed potentate, the bleeding silver treasure of Cerro Rico de Potosí, the exhausted gold of Ouro Preto, the scorched land that followed the sweet stuff called white gold and the crude stuff called black gold, and the coffee, cacao and bananas, and the human slavery that dug and slashed and pushed and jammed it all out and away, forever.
As night fell, they began their horrific dance with death, gutting and searing the tissue of their existence, copulating in rage, destroying and creating at once—the apocalyptic fulfillment of a prophecy—blood and semen commingling among shredded serpent and feline remains.
When Rafaela awoke, the sky above was a shroud of black-feathered creatures, a million pairs of eyes staring down. She focused dimly, through the narrow slit that remained of one eye, on the pebbles embedded in the dirt near her face and the flashing tail of a snake disappearing into the undergrowth. She pushed out a chunk of something fibrous between her teeth with her tongue and was horrified to see a wad of black fur emerge and shift along the dirt like scattering feathers. Retching and gagging, the remaining hair and pieces of skin spilled into a small pool of blood. More blood dripped from her forehead along with handfuls of her own hair, falling into her vomit. The pain of her convulsing body reached from her head to her feet—every part seemed bruised or torn. Despite the heat, she hugged her nakedness, tugging at the few shreds of clothing left covering her battered body.
The villain and his Jaguar had disappeared. Rafaela crawled around in the dirt exploring. A shattered piece of what seemed to be the steering wheel, still encased in its leather cover, and the gold figurine snapped from the hood, were all that remained.
A sharp sting of new pain ran along her arms to her hands, and suddenly she was aware of her fingers clutched in two hard fists. Carefully bending her fingers backward, she stared in horror at the pocketknife in one hand—its inlaid handle thick with blood—and the crumpled leaf of a human ear in the palm of the other.
Suddenly the sky was a chorus of heavenly chanting, a terrible blessing, and a great fluttering of millions of wings withdrawing nightfall, away. Rafaela crouched on her hands and knees in the dirt and bore her nakedness under the malign scrutiny of the now blue sunlight.