This is the story of a man who, though he did not know it, was the era in which he lived, and of a place itself held within that man’s name: Germán Alcántara Carnero. A story of violence both inevitable and boundless, one that demands to be told as biography, though not in any kind of sequence, and that should in no way have begun here: May 13, 1956, as the sun inches closer to its noonday position, the time of day when women lower the blinds in their houses, birds shelter in the recesses of limewashed walls or in the branches of the trees recently back in leaf, and the scattered cacti gather their shadows close like shawls. A moment in which Germán Alcántara Carnero, first and only son to Félix Salvador Germán Alcántara Arreola and María del Pilar y del Consuelo Carnero Villalobos, sits in his office, a bare and comfortless room, and considers these present minutes as though considering the map of his life. A moment he has imagined so many times he cannot believe it has finally come to pass.
Done, thinks Germán Alcántara Carnero, finally I am done, at which scores of emotions beat and flutter inside him, as birds beat and flutter their wings when taking to the air. Not a moment too soon, he says to himself, this man we have just now met. On this side, he says, tracing a line across his desk, on this side I place the life I have led, and on this my life to come. Here stay the anger, the hatred, the sadness, and there, over there lie hope—there lies all solace. Suddenly shaking his head and clapping his hands together, Germán Alcántara Carnero—whom we are due to follow throughout this story, a story that nonetheless need not unfold linearly given that first of all, before this telling, it was a life, and in a life the only matter are the moments that shine brightly—sweeps away the imaginary line and, noticing a small scrap of tin on one side, straightaway becomes lost in a vision, a prospect of a shack with two women standing in the doorway, only for that vision to disappear in a second: there, a heat-drunken fly has collided with his face. The scrap of tin, his since he was a child, ceases to be a shack with two women in the doorway and becomes just an object once more—just an object.
The fly completes a circuit of the room before coming to land on a heavy contraption to one side of him: a gray desk fan, the blades of which have long since lain motionless. Under the layer of dust the fan, which Germán Alcántara Carnero should have discarded long ago, is yellow. But he has never been able to do it, to throw away the gift he was given by Anne Lucretius Ford the first time she came to see him here at the office. The gray broken-down fan prompts the memory in this man—whom as we progress we will also call ourman—of turning on his heels in the downstairs passageway once, long ago, and looking up to find Anne Lucretius Ford climbing the stairs, carrying the yellow contraption that he will not, will not be taking with him today. “You have no place in my life now,” declares Germán Alcántara Carnero, looking at the three rusty blades but addressing Anne Lucretius Ford: “No place at all!” And, with a brisk shake of his head, the fan turns back into a fan.
“Today I begin anew,” declares ourman, as loud as he can. Shaking his head, throwing it from side to side, he insists: “No more thinking about the past. Today, everything begins anew.” It takes a short while for him to stop shaking his head; he stops only once he feels sure the memories have ceased. It is a moment he has longed for above all else. Another fly, however, crosses his line of vision, drawing his eye over to the portrait on the wall of Teobaldo Pascua Gómez, his former boss, the nose, the craggy cheekbones, the two massifs of his temples, curly eyebrows, lank hair, foreshortened chin, and that cold, barren gaze—ourman cannot help but think: Yes, I am right to be leaving… to stay would only mean ending up like you, that morning, the morning we burned down the church. Luckily for ourman, the fly pitches into the air again, and he notices he’s been swept under once more, that he’s allowed memory to drag him down. Germán Alcántara Carnero lifts his gaze away from the portrait of Teobaldo, balls up his fists, reprimands himself—no more, no more of any of this—before scanning the opposite wall and the objects hanging on it: a pair of thick ropes, three chains, six metal hasps, a handsaw, and various implements of dentistry. He smiles, his first smile in months, again telling himself: “Now, at noon on May 13, 1956, when the sun is at its highest and all the shadows in the world go out, I hereby leave it behind, leave all those people whose breath I cut short, so that I might one day breathe life into another.” His smile grows wider as he sends out a laugh, sonorous and deep. Then, slamming both hands down on the desk, gigantic sinewy paws that look to have been fashioned expressly to strangle, maim, and dismember, Germán Alcántara Carnero bisects the cold silence hanging in the air, just as this present moment bisects his very life: “From now on, I’ll be the one to decide… I’ll be more than I have yet been able to be.”
“It’s come! It’s truly come!” says Germán Alcántara Carnero, glancing at the gold-colored door handle: “Yes, forget it all, every single moment spent in this place.”
To the benefit of this story’s progression, a story best not associated with this idea, progression, since it is a story more of leaps and gaps than of sequence, even if ourman really were to forget all the time he spent in this accursed place, even if he could, I am here, and I will not forget. I have in my possession certain things he has written, testimonies from five of his men, and some newspaper cuttings—sufficient material to piece together the trail of destruction he left behind. This story, which, as I have said, should not be associated with any chronological thing, is a gallery of moments, and it is a capturing both of the topography of this land and the contours of this era: Germán Alcántara Carnero.
“Go down those stairs now, and never think of any of this again.” Upon which ourman tears his eyes away from the door handle as a butcher tears the pelts off animals, and, pushing back his chair, adds: “Go down the hallway, all the way down, don’t stop at the ministry room, no goodbyes, no farewells.” Heart full, spirit full, Germán Alcántara Carnero, a man so thin it makes you want to touch him just to see if your hand passes clean through, readies himself, pushing back his chair a fraction farther, and in the instant, the very instant of leaving, stops and shouts, in hope that someone might be listening: “You all better not have any surprises lined up. I was clear as clear: no farewells!” Getting up, ourman lets a smile appear on his lips again—No fond farewell to these things either, none of that—as he peers grinning around at the many objects piled up inside his office: sorry disused piles of long-neglected objects. “Leave it all behind… though perhaps, just perhaps… perhaps just the odd thing or two… but what do I want a rickety armchair for… maybe the filing cabinet, though… what use could you possibly have for either!… maybe the clock, though, maybe the chain…”
“No, just take the important things,” ourman says, and, after a pause, steps back inside the room, leans down and picks up a crate he brought in yesterday—the significance of this crate being that ourman must already have decided to both leave and to take one or two things along. Ourman drops in a couple of envelopes, some keys tied together with ribbon, the handkerchief he took from the dead body of El Demónico Camilo Mónico Macías Osorio, the sash worn by Anne Lucretius Ford the day she died, the stone he believes to contain a fossil, and a small bundle of fabric that swaddles his lucky charm: the bullet that almost twelve years ago parted his breastbone, came out through the top of his lung, and lodged in his right shoulder blade. And something then tells him that this is as good a moment as any to look inside the bundle, a bundle he has not looked inside in years.
With the bundle open flowerlike before him, Germán Alcántara Carnero, whose smiling mouth is suddenly atwitch, removes the projectile, holds it between forefinger and thumb, and, though he knows very well this is a path better left untaken, nonetheless travels back to the day he was hit. He and his men had surrounded a group hiding out at the dam, when, on some inexplicable impulse, ourman broke cover and shouted: “Come out of there right now! I come alone, can’t you see? And I’m waiting.”
Bringing his hand up to his chest, he shakes his head once more, that is to say throws it from side to side: he has stumbled into his past again. Maybe don’t take anything, maybe not even the bullet. And, with a last shake of the head, the memory goes scuttering off. “Leave, leave empty-handed, that way you might one day become full again. But what if you forget why you left in the first place? What if you begin to want this all again one day?” To which ourman immediately responds: “Take only the things that will remind you of why you left—the bullet, the handkerchief with Macías’s blood all over it, the sash Anne was wearing that day—the day I failed to keep her safe…” A jolt, no, a spasm: Ourman hiding in a ditch, his breath constricted, his heartbeats galloping one after the other, his tongue rag-dry, and a couple of his fingers lodged in the bloody wound through which Anne’s viscera were spilling. Speaking in a very low voice, all but whispering, and bringing his face in close to hers, he says: “It isn’t as bad as you think… stop guzzling air like that, would you… try breathing a little calmer now.” Her knees buckle, and as she hits the ground her eyes close and her mouth opens, and some words come out, words we do not hear for now—though later on we will—because ourman has decided that although he needs to go away from this place armed with certain memories, he would do well not to go wandering about in the dark and snag them now. Two more items go into the crate: the totem he stole from the Prieto Hernández family the night they got their hands on Ignacio del Sagrado Sandoval-Íñiguez Martínez, and a coin he’s kept as a memento of the time he lived abroad.
“What has been, will be,” ourman mutters as his eyes come to rest on the door handle once more. It makes no sense, what he has just said, and he knows it—just as he also knows that it will always be like this, memories rearing up suddenly, surfacing just when he thinks he’s dealt with them for good. At least the guilt won’t be with you… now that you’re on your way, now that pardon and solace are coming down down down… now that you’re nearly all and completely gone. Looking up, his eyes begin to wander once more, oh he lets them. What does it matter if you are forever remembering, if this keeps on coming back? What matters is that you’re leaving. Smiling, feeling the sun on his face, the big burning bully now past its noonday locus and pounding in through his window, Germán Alcántara Carnero cries out: “What matters is that I’m leaving and I’ll never come back!”
Hefting the crate, he decides, no more—yes, no more thinking about the past, no more of anything that might sully or soil this moment, the setting forth of a story that should not have set forth here: May 13, 1956, when the heat of the day is overwhelming, the sun having but moments before given up that pivot point in its empire the sky and the insects all and everywhere asleep, Germán Alcántara Carnero, also known as El Gringo, a name his men gave to him long ago, only very briefly worries at his reasons for leaving, takes out the pendulum formed by the bullet that was once lodged inside of him, together with the chain that once belonged to Ignacio del Sagrado Sandoval-Íñiguez Martínez, wraps the chain about his pinky, and watches as the trinket swings back and forth.
“Gotta go,” ourman says, and this time his words are unstoppable, they are red-hot seething lava gushing out, and even as they do he unwraps the chain, and in so doing one of his fingertips brushes the old spiderlike scar etched on his sternum. It is nearly as hot now inside the office as it is outside, the kind of heat that no sooner does it touch a thing than that thing is crushed and then distilled: the ground gives off the smell of wood, the jacket on the back of the chair gives off the odor of the leather of which it is made, and the iron trunk reeks of the cold metal it once was. Seconds pass, one or two. The bullet, swinging back and forth from the left hand of Germán Alcántara Carnero, knocks against the spot it sundered many years before, and sends a shudder across his skin.
A smile returns to the face of ourman—whom we will also call El Gringo, this being an alias he likes, for it brings to mind Will D. Glover, an old compeer of his, once very dear—we will come back to Will—a smile and a glimmer in his eyes, a glimmer bright like the crack running the breadth of the window as the sun beats down on the high mesa outside: this current hour is the worst for the heat, when the light is thin and all metal surfaces are aglow as though lit from within. On the bidding of the window’s angry cracks, which say to ourman that he should have left by now, he exclaims: “I have to get up, get this over with”: he is on the point of leaving the throne, this kingdom and empire he has ruled for almost thirty years. Coiling up the trinket and placing it once more inside its little fabric sheath, El Gringo Alcántara Carnero stretches out both legs and both arms, arches his back, and reverses the chair, hitting the wall behind him and knocking out a thumbtack that held in place the corner of a large map that depicts the local environs, and which, freed of the thumbtack, comes loose, rolling up like an eyelash.
Up on his feet again, ourman takes down the charred wooden Christ he stole—he prefers to say “abducted”—from the church he and his men burned down, a conflagration we will also come back to, and, placing it in the now nearly full crate, wonders why he wants to keep this idol, which still does not fully belong to him, but one day will, a day we will visit together when the time is such. No, the idol does not belong to ourman on this hottest of days in this sun-blasted place, a place where the wells regularly run dry: the only water source on this high mesa being a dam built long ago that waters the six towns and fifteen slums that pertain to the empire governed by the small ministry from which El Gringo Alcántara Carnero today absconds. An empire that is home to 30,234 inhabitants, the children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren, to a one, of incest—men and woman whose veins course with the same courage, aloofness, fears, servility, hatefulness, and guile as did those of the people who settled these lands over the centuries—the same courage, aloofness, fears, servility, hatefulness, and guile, that is, of the few indigenous people who managed to avoid extermination.
When he bends down to pick up the other crate he brought with him, ourman realizes that his back is dripping wet, and says, annoyed: “Not a day for shirts.” Tongue out, he sighs, feeling a sudden cramp just above the scar of Baldomero Díaz Cervantes’s gunshot. That burning sensation took its time to go, and now I’m left with this fucking searing cold instead, thinks El Gringo Alcántara Carnero, moving his chair to one side and tearing down the map of his empire, and then the newspaper cuttings also tacked to the wall, and finally the photograph of a trio of running dogs that he cut out of a magazine one day because it reminded him of the dogs he had as a boy, dogs that came with him the day he left home. The memory of his dogs drags Germán Alcántara Carnero off course, but another chest spasm brings him back. “Like an ice cube onto hot coals,” as he once described the sensation to a doctor one day, when the man asked what the matter was. Ourman sees this foreign doctor in his memory and smiles to remember his accent, the strange utensils he produced, and the even stranger way in which he checked his sternum and shoulder blade. Then, going over to the window, ourman lifts his mind back up, focusing on what’s important: this long-overdue moment.
In the stunning rust-colored sky—also slightly ocher in color at this time of year due to the great amounts of dust hanging in the air—Germán Alcántara Carnero sees the sun inching farther away from its noontime post and shadows beginning to emerge on the ground. The world is awash with light, and ourman squints, taking in the nearest portion of the town square, his eye then traveling up beyond the treetops and church tower, up at the graves that scatter the mountainside. It would be within his power to list every name etched on those tombstones in the distance, but he knows there’s no need, and he wishes there won’t ever be again, for that would mean making a roll call of his victims, the victims of the fury that once was in him. “This thing unfurling before me is freedom,” he says, not yet knowing that a man may leave a place behind but never his history. It will be many years before he understands: that a man may escape his life but never his shadow.
A peculiar thought, the one that allows ourman to hope, that lets him think he is in a position to put an end to the hatred inside him. A strange calculation, this one, as even now, even as his guilt continues to move him, he considers it a thing that may fade. Like a bird arcing through the sky, full of incomprehension for the laws governing the winds that buffet it, full of hope.
“What has been, will be,” ourman will say over and over on the day he dies, the day our story will end, but that is a long way off yet, not yet important. The same goes for his past and future. And for the moment in which ourman was born, and the moment his father died, and all the years he spent in the army and in foreign lands. What matters now is that, finally and without any further intervention of any further memories, the moment of our story’s beginning is upon us:
May 13, 1956: El Gringo Alcántara Carnero, raising up his left arm and letting the blinds rattle shut, leaves in thick darkness the office in which we find ourselves. He does not need to see in order to move around the murkiness he has created, he knows it well, every inch of this space and of its neglected heaps of furniture, their scores and scuffs on top and their undersides gobbed and gibbed with his own snot. He grabs his jacket—taken years ago from the first man he ever stuffed in his iron trunk and left to die—from the back of a broken chair. “Time’s the killer, not I,” he would always say before putting men in his truck. Then, laughing: “Why don’t you tell your god to come get you out? Tell him to pull off a little lovely miracle for you.” This always made him laugh.
But nor is it the moment for these things! The only thing that matters is that ourman has folded his jacket with unusual attentiveness, placed it over his forearm, turned his body, started to walk toward the door, and is now crossing the threshold, leaving the door open behind him.
El Gringo Alcántara Carnero walks steadily along the hallway, past a couple of overflowing trashcans and a corkboard that spits at him with the black and white likenesses of all the men who have escaped his fury. They no longer exist, ourman swears to himself as he comes to the staircase that takes him down to the ground floor, where his arrival makes people look but then look away. From now on they are nothing, he thinks, finding the emptiness these words produce in him strange, as if something had dropped away from his body, as if he himself were about to take to the air. They’re nothing. As though to stop feeding the anger would in fact make his existence less heavy, as though solace were out there just waiting for him in the street.
Just as he is about to set foot in the ministry’s main room, the scene of his earliest involvement in this line of work, one he entered after coming back from abroad, the country he went away to with El Demónico Macías and returned from in the company of Anne Lucretius Ford and Will D. Glover—a moment for later in our story—his face warps until a look of near-happiness appears, reflecting the cautious joy that for a couple of hours now has slowly been taking hold of his soul.
Pretending to himself he is thirsty, Alcántara Carnero takes one of the paper cones from next to the small fountain and fills it. He drinks from the paper cone, wondering what he’ll do with it afterwards. (He’ll crumple it up and put it in his pocket.) He wishes to draw the moment out, to savor it. Truly believing that solace is out there, waiting, on the street.
Water drips from the bunched-up paper cone, trickling over ourman’s leg and running down it. A couple of steps shy of the ministry room, he hears clapping break out: Will D. Glover whistling with two fingers in his mouth, Óscar el Chino López Ley howling, La Madrina yelling, José Ángel el Cerebro Ordóñez Sánchez pounding on a trashcan as if it were a drum, Ramiro la Madrina López Palas tossing into the air the strips of paper he spent half the morning tearing up, and the Pascua de Ramones twins, Ausencia and Amparo, goading the others, stirring the room. This racket serves to fan the embers of Germán Alcántara Carnero’s fury. I said I wanted to go quietly. I won’t let them ruin it now, he thinks, muttering with eyes narrowed: “To accept praise is to be in people’s debt.” He narrows his eyes, and yet the vision he wishes to escape, the faces of these applauding men and women, fragments and clinging scraps of their likenesses, accompany him into the darkness.
“Didn’t I say no send-off?” He throws his arms wide, he implores. “My fault, of course, thinking they had it in them to follow an order! All the times they’ve shown that to be absolutely not the case! All the times they’ve shown they understand precisely fuck all.” A couple of steps from the front door, that final borderline between ministry interior and street, Germán Alcántara Carnero stops and spins on his heels with a flourish, and is confronted with a row of silent faces, these now-silent men and women. They are watching him leave. “Let’s just see how you all manage now,” he grins, hair and shoulders lit golden yellow as the sun breaks through the skylight that broke in the earthquake of February 22, 1946, a day that, unlike the days mentioned heretofore, sheds no light on the life of ourman, and therefore does not form part of our story. “Let’s just see how you fuckers manage without me.”
“I don’t care. Their problem now.” With the same forefinger that a moment ago touched the spider of a scar on his chest, ourman loosens the strap on his belt and grips the cold steel he’s reached for so many times in his life. They won’t dare pick it up. They haven’t got the balls. Unhurriedly, Germán Alcántara Carnero unholsters the gun, feeling its worn hilt and the weight of the cylinder and the chamber. “I doubt they’ll dare while I’m standing here before them.” The silence expands like a balloon as he arcs his arm and lets go, launching the weapon into the air, watching as it hits a chair, bounces off the seat, falls to the floor with a clatter. “There’s so much stuff up there,” he says, looking at them. “If this isn’t enough, maybe all those things up there will do.” At this, a shudder passes through the people watching him.
“Lot of rage and fury up in my office, too, whoever wants that, plus all the guilt, eh?” He turns on his heel once more and makes for the door, the handle of which he grips like a shipwreck survivor plunging fingers into dry land. “I also leave up there the shame that none of you could understand or even feel, not even if you spent a hundred years trying.” Alcántara Carnero unlocks the door, and hearing the click pulls on the handle with his huge hands. The chink of light becomes a rectangle as the door’s four rusted hinges pose their rasping questions:
Really think you’re leaving all that?
Truly believe your fury, anger, and shame will stay just where you left them?
That you have it in you to free yourself?
“I don’t know, but I do know that I’m leaving,” he says. Ourman steps into the rectangle of light, putting an end to the moment he has been waiting for so long, the moment that, for all that it should not have, begins our story.