“You all right?” I asked. He looked at me for a moment as if trying to figure out a puzzle. “It’s Julian Perel. Large soup and half a broiled chicken, remember?”
“Oh, yeah, Mr. Perel,” he said. “Sure, sure.” He tucked the pad back into the pocket of his apron, replaced the pencil behind his ear. I saw him wince as he poured soup into a container and began to wrap my chicken in aluminum foil.
“Are you feeling okay?” I asked him.
He answered without looking at me. “Oh, sure. You get older, things go wrong from time to time. The usual stuff.”
The deli was surprisingly quiet; only a dark-haired woman with a little boy beside her stood at the far end of the display case, deciding what to order.
“Sweetheart, you do like the potato kugel,” the woman said to the little boy. “Don’t you remember?”
“It’s none of my business,” I mumbled in Frank’s direction.
“Nice of you to ask anyways,” he said, sliding the wrapped chicken into a foil-lined paper bag. “But no one really wants to hear about an old man’s arthritis or bad knees.” He handed me my food and grinned a little. “It’s what comes with old age. The body breaks down, bit by bit.” He managed a quick wink. “Enjoy while you can,” he said.
Before I had even turned away, the woman—who was standing too close to me—began to tell Frank what she wanted, the little boy now wrapping his small arms around her leg. I paid the cashier with exact change and left the deli, its tinny bell ringing behind me as the door closed. Out on the sidewalk, I stood for a moment watching a young man at the flower stall arranging a bouquet of roses the color of piano keys. The bag with the food was warm in my hands.
My father slowed down in stages the year before he died: only taking his neighborhood walk once a week, and later only once a month, the mile taking him longer and longer to cover. He began pausing more and more often to catch his breath on the hill, mopping his forehead with a handkerchief. The spring he died was supposed to be his last year of teaching; he had planned to retire after thirty-five years and spend his time reading.
“Maybe I’ll take up gardening, who knows?” he said. But I understood when he died that without teaching to wake up for in the morning, he might have been in danger of staying in bed all day, the newspaper studied column by column, every word read twice. The summer of his retirement would have been the first time he didn’t have to stay in the present, or focus on the future and his incoming students. The past would have threatened to sneak up from behind.
So many evenings after dinner he sat in his chair reading the afternoon paper, muttering “It’s crazy out there,” over one article or another. I usually sat across the room on the couch, reviewing my homework.
“People are animals. Beasts,” my father said, more than once. Then he would shake his head, frowning at the evidence on the page, confirmation of everything he already knew about the world.
I picture myself doing this: lifting the heavy wooden lid of the coffin, gazing at the face of Eduardo, even picturing a spot of dried blood at the corner of his mouth. But I truly do not know if this is a memory or if I am dreaming it, because I also remember telling my mother “I cannot” when she urges me to look at him inside his box of death.
Is Eduardo here? Alive? Trying to find me?
The idea is too impossible, it means not only that Eduardo is not dead in the accident, but that someone else’s body is in his grave, that he is managing to find me all the way in California, that now he is a man wearing sunglasses and searching for me at my apartment. It cannot be true, and yet I cannot stop it from being in my head, making me crazy and sleepless and terrified.
Eduardo not dead.
It is like unraveling the knot at the beginning, because his death is the very first one, followed by Camucha and then everyone else. If he is not dead, it takes away the foundation for all the rest of the deaths. Except that all the rest of them, I still see and hear.
Ten entries began with her name: solar cell, solar constant, solar day, solar energy, solar flares, solar parallax, solar prominence, solar system, solar wind, solar year. I made a twenty-seventh pile, to make her name its own category.
solar wind : streams of electrically charged particles (protons and electrons) emitted by the Sun, predominantly during solar flares and sunspot activity; some of these particles become trapped in the Earth’s magnetic field (see MAGNETISM, TERRESTRIAL), forming the outer Van Allen radiation belt, but some penetrate to the upper atmosphere, where they congregate in narrow zones in the region of the Earth’s magnetic poles, producing auroral displays (see AURORA BOREALIS)
In the shocking light of morning, I pulled paper from the desk in my hotel room, thinking I had to write something to Julian, write down what I had heard from Huber at the museum—as if otherwise it would vanish like some kind of dream. But I could barely hold the pen steady, and besides, what could I write? It was like Huber said, the words didn’t work.
Dearest Julian:
I’m getting more and more afraid. Of everything. Of Budapest, and these terrible dark secrets being pulled out of the stones. I have so much to tell you Jules, and you won’t even get this letter until after I’m already home.
I climbed back into bed and pulled the covers over my head. I couldn’t stop thinking about my father, about his hands that had held me and had held the bodies of so many dead. I heard Hungarian voices in the hallway outside my door; I heard a distant radio playing a waltz. And for the first time in my life, the music hurt. All I wanted was silence.
The day I finally meet the man in the sunglasses, I am driving with the radio on very loud; it seems a good way to keep myself from thinking about all of my fears. The windows are open, and when I pull up in front of Julian’s building, there is no time to protect myself. He just comes out of nowhere and before I can shout or roll up the window, he removes his glasses and shows me his face. I know him right away, even though his face is so much thinner and older, and even though something about his eyes does not match the face I know from my other life.
“Diego,” I say, the name leaping from my mouth in the same second he says my name.
“It’s really you,” he says next, surprising me even more by speaking in English.
I climb out of the car and stand facing him, my keys cutting into my hands because I am holding them so tightly. The ground seems unsteady. I feel I need to lean against the side of the car. “What are you doing here?” I ask him, and then he reaches out a hand to touch me on the shoulder, like he needs to make sure I am real.
“I can’t believe I finally found you,” he says, his hand still on my shoulder.
I look down at the sunglasses he is holding in his other hand, and then back into his face, searching for an explanation. “I do not understand,” I say. “I cannot even remember …”
Diego smiles with half his mouth, his teeth revealing gaps and a small glint of gold. “It was a party for Eduardo,” he says quietly. “You remember?” I nod, not able to speak.
Diego continues. “You know I spoke to him about you the day he died, he was telling me about the last time he saw you, about when he would be going home.…” His voice goes down and down to nothing, into silence, and his face turns dark. “I saw his body when they brought it up from the mine.…”
I touch myself on the heart, knowing that my dream about Eduardo being still alive is never something I can believe, even for a moment. Diego stops speaking. He is not here to tell me about Eduardo, there is something he wants from me, I can see it in his tired eyes.
“What are you looking for?” I ask him. “Why are you following me?”
Diego sighs. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I didn’t mean to make you frightened. But I have to talk with you, about many things.” He pushes one hand through his dark hair. “I saw you one day, by mistake. You were putting some groceries in your car outside the store, just like anybody, and I could not believe my own eyes. When I decided it was really you, I followed you to your apartment. After all the time of searching for you, I truly couldn’t believe it. And also I couldn’t talk with you, it was too much shock at first. I just kept going back to your building, waiting for courage. Because seeing someone from my old village, my old life, I felt I was going crazy. I thought everyone was dead and so you were a ghost.…”
His voice stops again, like a stone in a well with no echo. I feel the heat of the car through my back. “Maybe we should go inside,” I say. “Let us talk inside.” I start to walk toward the front door, but Diego does not follow me.
“This isn’t where you live,” he says. “Why go in here?” He sounds suspicious, almost angry.
“I am taking care of this place for a while,” I explain, waiting for him to believe me. “That is why you are not finding me at my apartment.”
“You knew I was there?”
“My neighbor tells me someone is looking for me. A man in sunglasses, she says. I could never guess it is you.”
Diego smiles his half-smile again and puts his glasses back on, becoming someone I do not know. “It is me,” he says, removing them again. “Your husband’s old friend.”
I try to say something, but no sound comes out. I feel a pain in my heart for Eduardo and his friend, born in the same month, I remember now. They are together from the time they are babies. Other things come rushing back to me. Diego leaving the village first, to find work in the mines, then returning with his stories of money, filling Eduardo with ideas about getting rich. “It’s hard work, brother,” he tells my husband, “but they pay you enough to make up for the sore muscles. Trust me. Come.”
Eduardo promises to be back for the baby, in time to see the baby’s birth. I try to believe him, but something in me knows it is not right. Diego’s stories are too shiny, too full of easy hope. I wait and wait, until the box comes to me with Eduardo’s body inside.
“Today I knew I would find you,” Diego says, finally walking with me to the door. “I woke up and there was a bird singing outside my window. I couldn’t see it but I could hear it. I knew if I waited for you at the apartment you would come. Then when you didn’t go inside, I just had to follow you wherever you went, all day if I had to, until you stopped.” He touches me again on the shoulder while I place the key in the lock. “I must talk to you. It’s the only thing I can think about since I saw you with the groceries one week ago.”
Inside, in the entryway, Julian leaves for me a stack of Paula’s new mail; it sits by the door to her apartment like an offering, like a note saying to me he is there. I pick it up and tell Diego to come inside and sit down.
“Do you want something?” I ask him, not sure what I have in the refrigerator except water and grape juice, maybe some cheese, some vegetables for a salad. “Are you hungry or thirsty?”
“Do you have coffee? I need something strong.”
I notice that beneath his eyes are dark smudges like someone has bruised his face. He sits down in the chair with a sound of pure falling, everything landing in one exhausted piece. He is so much older now. It makes me wonder what Eduardo’s face could be like if we are standing face-to-face. If we are alive together.
“I can make coffee,” I say, going into the kitchen. I hear a sigh from Diego and a creaking sound from the chair; from the doorway I can see his head turning to look at everything in Paula’s living room, the curtains and paintings and collections of glass.
“Who is she?” he asks.
“A friend. She is away.” For some reason I do not yet feel like telling him too much. Not the details. I want him to talk first, tell me what he is doing in America, how he is living. It is strange that we are speaking in English, but I have my reasons and maybe he has his too. It is better this way, I think, more true to the strangers we are now. The village is so far away.
While the water boils and the coffee drips slowly into the cups, we do not say anything. I notice Diego’s head drop slowly to one side and then onto his chest. He is asleep so quickly, like he has no choice about it. I do not know what to do, so I stand in the kitchen, waiting. Upstairs I can hear the televisions, and I think maybe Julian sees us come into the building together. I feel like I have a secret.
“Wake up, Diego,” I whisper, leaning toward him but not getting too close. “Diego.”
His eyes come open fast and wide, and I can tell from his expression that he is forgetting where he is, what he is doing here with me. “It is Sola,” I say. “Remember?”
“Sola. I know.” He rubs his face, runs his fingers along his jaw. “I’m sorry. I’m just so tired.”
“Do you still want the coffee? Do you want to come back another time?”
“No, no. I want to drink the coffee, and I must stay here now. Do you see? Do you have to go anyplace? Or can I stay? Can we talk?” He speaks rapidly, his tongue tripping over the sharp edges of English like he is afraid I am running away unless he holds on to me with his words.
“We can drink the coffee,” I say. “And talk.”
I watched them speak briefly and then walk through the door together, and I had to believe that the man was someone she knew, someone she trusted enough to bring into Paula’s apartment. I strained to listen for their voices from downstairs, but they were so quiet. And then I told myself to stop. I was paying too much attention to Sola’s life, wanting to know too much.
I closed the window and went back to my chair, turning the sounds of the televisions up high enough that I didn’t have to think about her, or the man in sunglasses, or anything.
When I sit on the couch across from Diego with our cups of coffee, I feel like I have to be dreaming. The room is filled with beautiful things; behind Diego’s head I can see a vivid watercolor painting of tulips and under our feet is a soft carpet in a hundred shades of green. And none of it belongs to either one of us. I can tell by the way Diego sits so stiffly, without leaning against the pillows, that he must be feeling as lost here as I still am.
“It was the nun at the hospital who told me about you,” Diego says. Sister Isabella, the one whose hands I remember, who holds my fingers very gently in the bowl of warm water and scrubs at the dirt under my nails.
“I went back there, looking for something. Trying to find ghosts.” He stares at me. “And she told me about you, about you being here in California. I got so excited I grabbed her hand by mistake. I had to apologize for offending her, but she was so kind, she didn’t mind, she gave me her forgiveness. She shook her head when she said your name, and then she crossed herself out of pity. When I told her I knew you she looked at me with pity too.”
“I remember her,” I say. “I remember asking her to cut off my hair, but she will not do it. She says only the nuns are allowed to deny themselves that way.”
Diego brings the coffee to his lips and takes a long swallow. It is too hot for me to drink, but he seems not to notice it burning his throat. “I’m sorry I made you afraid,” he says.
“I think someone is still trying to kill me,” I say quietly, stunned by my own words. We look into each other’s eyes for a moment.
“Yes,” he says, as if what I say is the most natural thing, and then turns his head to see the room we are in. There is no curiosity in his eyes, just a blank staring.
“I have to know,” he begins, then stops and takes a deep breath, wide enough to spread his ribs. “I have to know what happened to my family,” he says, and that makes me take a deep breath too. “You must know something that you can tell me. About how they died, about who did it to them. If I don’t hear the story I’ll keep going crazy from imagining it all my life.”
I close my eyes and hold the cup of coffee close to my face so I can smell it. Somehow this makes me feel better, like it is a real moment and not a nightmare. I can breathe that dark and bitter liquid.
“It is true I know the story,” I say. “I am still carrying it around with me, all of it.”
I think the lines of Diego’s face become deeper right then, like some invisible hand is pressing down on him. He puts his cup on the table and leans toward me, reaching out a hand like he wants to touch me. But his hand stops in the air.
“I know it’s a terrible thing to ask,” he says. “It’s not fair for me to ask you. But when I saw you alive, I felt you were the only chance, my only way to get some pieces of that story.” He takes another deep breath, releases it like a moan. “When I returned to the village after being away for so long, working in those mines, I could not believe what I found. Instead of the simple life of my childhood, there was nothing, not even a chicken or a goat to show that anything had ever lived in that place. I saw squares of black ground where buildings used to be, and everything turned into ashes. The few houses still standing were so empty I thought I was a ghost too. I kept touching walls, trees, my own arms and legs to see if my fingers would just pass through.”
I nod.
“Then I went to that place, that one awful grave, and I understood where everyone was, the entire village buried together like that. I think I lost my breath and fell down, but I don’t remember falling. I woke up later with my head in the dust, my hands full of dust. It was dark, and I was alone.”
When he stops talking, the room becomes very silent, until I hear again the voices of Julian’s televisions over our heads, like a distant crowd of people murmuring to each other.
“How are you getting here, to California?” I ask Diego, and for the first time he leans all the way back against the pillows.
“My pockets were full of money,” he says, and smiles a sad half-smile. “I was finally coming home with my fortune, but there was no one to share with, no one to admire me. What good was it? I almost envied Eduardo, for dying before all of this, for not having to stand like I did at the graves of all his family.” Diego coughs, like he is choking on his own story.
“I am ashamed of what I did next,” he says, not meeting my eyes. “But I was alone in the world, out of my head. I went to the nearest city, and for several days, maybe even weeks, I stayed drunk enough to forget even my own name. One morning I woke up in bed with someone I had never seen before, and on the radio was someone talking about California. ‘I’m going,’ I said to her, this strange woman who looked like no one to me. ‘I’m going to California.’ ”
Diego holds up his hands for me to look, and I see how bent and broken-looking his fingers are, how much like an old man’s hands they are. “It was what I had left when the money was gone,” he says, dropping his hands back into his lap. “My old tools. I found work in the fields along with all the other people searching in the dirt for their dreams.”
“Even now?” I ask.
“No,” he says, and I can see his missing teeth when he smiles wide. “I work in a store now, selling all the fruits I used to pick. It’s better for an old man like me.”
Again I think of Eduardo and what he could be looking like. He has such beautiful hands: long, slender fingers and perfectly round nails, little half-moons on each one. He dreams of being a musician someday, playing his own compositions on the guitar. And then I think of us picking fruit under the hot sun.
“That’s my story,” Diego says, and rubs at a stain on his pants. “It’s not as hard to tell as yours, I know. But I’m asking you.”
We both hold such envy for the dead, and yet it is not our time to be among them. I touch the insides of my wrists and feel the thin roughness of my scars. The voice of my blood. “I can try,” I say.
I began pacing around my apartment, feeling caged inside my own mental boxes and wanting out for the first time I could remember. I read the fortunes on my refrigerator, one after another as if they held the answers I needed. But what came to me was the longing for Paula’s voice in my ears, a steady flare of sound pouring from the one throat I ever allowed myself to love. Even when she was gone I still had her recordings to hold on to, music that made me feel as close to peace as I believed I could get. So I filled my apartment with Paula, into every spiderweb. Sing to me like ice.
When the music starts, Diego sits up straight on the couch, alert like an animal to a sound of danger. It is very loud, louder than I ever hear from Julian’s apartment.
“What’s going on?” Diego asks.
“It is from upstairs,” I say. “The brother of the woman who lives here.”
“He must be waking up the dead.” Diego almost laughs.
“That is her voice,” I explain. “The sister. She is a singer.”
Diego and I both sit listening for a few more moments, but the sound is too much even for us downstairs. Something has to be wrong. “I need to check on him,” I say. “To see if he is all right.”
I have to bang on the door with a fist to make more noise than the music, and after a moment Julian comes to open it. His face looks full of fear.
“Are you all right?” I say, and in the same moment he asks me the same question.
“Wait,” he says. “Let me turn it down.”
I do not follow him into the apartment, but stay in the hallway at the open door. The music drops to a softer level, although Paula’s voice is still there in the distance, pure and sweet. The words are in a language I do not know.
“I’m sorry,” Julian says when he comes back to the doorway. “I didn’t mean to disturb anyone. But are you really all right?”
“Yes,” I say.
He looks at me, not into my eyes but off to the side a little. “And the man? He was the one following you?”
“He is all right,” I say. “It is someone I know from a long time ago.”
“Not the doctor,” Julian says.
“No, not the doctor,” I say. Julian seems to be waiting for more, so I tell him it is someone from my village. “His name is Diego. He is a good friend of my husband.”
Julian’s eyes open wide when I say the word husband, but at first he does not say anything. I notice his hands dig down and make fists in his pockets like he is holding on to some small stones.
“I didn’t know you had a husband,” he says very quietly.
I nod. There is so much he does not know. In the background, Paula’s voice rises up to a beautifully high note and stays there for what seems like an impossibly long time. Julian’s eyes close until the note disappears.
“My husband is dead for many years,” I tell him. I am puzzled to realize that I am not certain anymore how long ago it is since his death. But the memory is in my bones, not my head. “A mining accident,” I say.
“I’m very sorry,” Julian says. He pulls a hand out of his pocket to push it through his hair; some strands fall across his forehead like streaks of dark paint.
“I should go back down,” I say. “Diego is waiting for me.”
Julian nods, sweeps the streaks back away from his face. There are lines on his forehead I do not remember seeing before. I do not know how old he is.
“You can come with me,” I say, surprising myself as much as him. But when I say it out loud it is true: I want him to listen. “I am telling Diego the story about our village, about how I am a witness there.” Julian’s eyebrows lean toward each other as I say that word, witness, and Paula’s voice begins again. I imagine I can see his brain working inside his skull.
“Come,” I say.
earthshine : a faint illumination of the dark side of the Moon during a crescent phase, due to sunlight reflected from the Earth’s surface
He was on the couch; I sat in one of the chairs facing the door and Sola sat in the other one. Watching the door made me feel as though I could leave at any time, just get up and walk out, as long as no one tried to stop me. Diego’s face was sun-darkened and deeply lined; he had hair as black as Sola’s and a mustache that disguised most of his mouth. I didn’t get a good look at his eyes, didn’t want to be caught studying him.
When Sola introduced us, we nodded at each other. She told him she wanted me there to listen, and asked if it was all right with him.
“¿Por qué quieres eso?” Diego asked her.
Sola looked over at me, as if to acknowledge I had heard the question too. “He understands,” Sola said to Diego, referring to the Spanish and maybe more. “And he is a friend. I want for him to hear.”
Diego shrugged, pulled with misshapen fingers at the edges of his mustache. I wasn’t looking straight at him but I could sense his eyes on me, examining me. Paula’s living room felt small and my skin felt too tight for my body. The door looked very close; I calculated how many steps it would take to get me out and to the staircase. Six, six and a half.
“I’ve been waiting a long time for this story,” Diego said, and he sighed.
“I know,” Sola said.
“It’s up to you how to tell it,” Diego said. “Como tú quieres.”
Sola folded her legs up beneath her on the chair and smoothed the fabric of her skirt across her lap. I saw past her to a framed photograph on the mantel of the fireplace: our family one of the last times we were all together, on my father’s birthday. We were still celebrating on the wrong day, his backwards birthday. Even after my mother died, we kept doing it, either because it was too hard to break the habit or because we wanted to believe in the lie. Maybe there were other lies we never knew about, would never know. In the photo both my mother and my sister were holding on to my father’s arms, all three of them wearing similar smiles. I was standing off to the side, half-turned away from the photographer, my mother’s best friend Betty. “Say champagne,” Betty had said.
The room was so quiet I could hear my pulse throbbing in my head.
Sola said very softly, “I do not know if I can do it. Say everything out loud.”
I watched the door again, thinking I wasn’t supposed to be here. I pictured the insides of Sola’s wrists, the mango juice staining her skin yellow orange. I remembered my father’s silences, louder than words.
Six and a half steps.
“Este dolor,” Diego said, “necesita una voz. Su voz.”
This sorrow needs your voice.
Sola looked at him. Diego lifted his hands to his heart. “El silencio magulla el corazón,” he said.
The verb was a new one for me. I turned to ask Sola what it meant, and saw tears on her cheeks, shining rivers of salt. “Bruises,” she whispered, without my asking. “Silence bruises the heart.”
If that was true I thought my father’s heart must have been completely black and blue from a lifetime of wordless grief banging around in his chest. At once I pictured myself moving so quickly I’d be through the door before anyone knew what had happened. But nobody stirred. Sola’s rivers poured down without making a sound. Far away, across oceans and continents, Paula was singing in a hall filled with light.
At first I could see how Sola didn’t want to tell Diego her story. I imagined bands tight around her heart, a conviction she had to keep the story inside in order to save him from its truth. I knew it so well, that fierce refusal. Like some permanently wrapped gift, but a gift the receiver wanted to exchange, the truth instead of silence. My father had given us the same gift, and inside the silence the knives were sharp anyway, that was the part he couldn’t or wouldn’t understand. I was cut open by that silence, and I knew Diego needed Sola’s words the way I needed them too. We were all black holes, dense with the nightmares we invent when the stories are kept hidden from us.
Paula had filled the silence with her own voice, and I had filled it with the voices of science and the electronic air, and what we really needed was the voice of our father telling us his story, giving us at least that much of himself, the life he’d nearly lost. But he couldn’t speak, the horror was bigger than anything he could name with words, and we were left to find out for ourselves what had been burned into his skin forever.
When Diego speaks of bruises, I think I see a shudder run through Julian’s body, something like a current of electricity. Maybe Diego is only trying to describe his own suffering, but I know he is right about all of us. I think of the night my sadness is pouring out of me after breaking the dam, how Julian lies next to me while I fall asleep. How many years is it since I am crying like that? And still tears never feel like enough: they rinse something away, but only the surface, not whatever is underneath.
Now Diego and Julian both sit with their hands open in their laps, like they are waiting to receive something. From me. I imagine I feel a soft caress on my cheek, the touch of my grandmother, her tender weaving fingers. Outside the window of Paula’s apartment I see the tree that Julian is helping to grow, full now with green leaves. I take a deep breath.
First I tell about the morning of that day, how beautiful the colors of the sky are, how I work with my mother to pound the tortillas. Describing it to them I can almost feel the sweet coolness of the adobe house and the steady rhythm of my hands and my mother’s as we work together. Diego is not looking at me; I think he is probably imagining his own mother and sisters doing the same thing in the house next door to mine.
When the sun is lifting high enough to cast smaller and smaller shadows around the houses and the trees, most people are inside, finishing the work of the morning and preparing the midday meal. I have a headache, something I am suffering from ever since the year before when my baby girl dies. I go down to the river to see if the fresh water might soothe my face, remembering the way I go there to hide the stains on my blouse when my breast milk keeps coming in the first weeks after Camucha is gone.
That is when I hear the army trucks skidding in the dirt and then the sound of heavy boots, sharp voices of soldiers ordering people to come out of their houses. I am behind some thick bushes that grow along the edge of the river and cannot see what is happening, but I hear a few children crying and that makes the soldiers shout even louder to be quick and gather in the plaza. There is something about the sharpness of their voices that makes me wait where I am for a little while, not moving. I hear someone shout for all the men to line up separately, and then that same voice begins yelling about the guerrillas in the mountains, about how he knows we are giving them food, about how our husbands and sons are joining to fight along with them. Then I hear a woman’s voice—this is the voice I recognize as Diego’s mother—trying to explain that her son is working in the mines, that she does not have any sons fighting in the mountains. They are innocent people, she says, just living from day to day. Diego’s eyes begin to fill with tears. I do not want to tell him the rest, but I have to: that she is in the middle of another sentence when I hear a bullet fired and then her voice is silent. More people begin to wail, and the soldiers keep shouting that everyone is going to die unless we tell them where the guerrillas are hiding and how we are helping them.
I feel a powerful longing to go into the plaza with the rest of them, that whatever happens I do not want to be alone with the river, but as soon as I hear the shooting and the screaming I know that I cannot move from where I am, I will not be able to make my legs hold me up. The horrible popping sounds of the guns seem to last for hours, mixed up with screams and crying. Some of the younger girls are taken away to the chapel at the edge of the plaza, and the screams coming from there are horrible. Diego’s sisters I am sure are in that place too, violated again and again before being finally murdered.
It is the longest day of my life, the sun does not seem to move at all but stays blazing up in the sky like the eye of a demon, burning and burning.
I tell about the branches of the bushes against my arms and legs, the river moving next to me like it always does, like it is an ordinary day. I keep thinking the waters are turning red, filling up with the blood of the dead, but they stay clear like some strange and impossible dream. I crouch very low in the dirt, holding myself into a shape like a rock, wishing I am not a woman, not even human. For the first time I think I know what it feels like to want to kill someone, because I want to kill all of those soldiers with my eyes wide open, I want to point those weapons at their own hearts.
All day long the guns make their killing sounds. My family, my friends, all the people of my village cry and pray and choke into the thick silence of death. At one point I hear the voice of my own mother, I know her cry better than my own. After that, I push my fist into my mouth to keep myself from screaming.
Afterwards, after everyone is dead, the soldiers stay in the village destroying things, stealing what they want from the store and from people’s houses, eating and drinking into the night. They sound like a pack of wild animals. Someone shouts about an order for “operativo de tierra arrasada.” It is the first time I hear that phrase. That is when they begin to burn the houses of the village, and I am terrified that the fire is coming down to the bushes where I am hiding. Every so often I hear someone crying out from a hiding place or from the doorway of a house because the fire is burning them alive. Sometimes there is gunfire after that and other times the voice just keeps going until the fire consumes it.
A few times I hear footsteps come very close to where I am hiding, and my heart is beating so loudly I think they must hear it. I know that if I make any movement at all, a soldier can find me and kill me. I stay in the bushes long after the stars come into the sky, until finally I hear them leaving, and the engine noise of the last truck echoes in the distance. The air is filled with the terrible smell of burned flesh, I have to hold my shirt over my mouth to keep from gagging.
And there are no more sounds after that. Even my own throat cannot make any sounds.