It is also a cross section, this story, of the moments that shine beaconlike in the murk of Germán Alcántara Carnero’s existence. Glittering instants that might’ve been placed at beginning, middle, or end—the cruxpoints in the life of ourman—these being a murder, the flight of two young men abroad, the unfolding of a war, the death of a child, one uprising, one love affair, one conflagration that consumed two dogs, the unveiling of one great dam—some bitterness, some condolences, many bullets, a religious conversion, much rage, and the conception of a being Félix Salvador Germán Alcántara Arreola and María del Pilar y del Consuelo Carnero Villalobos never imagined would be important enough to have his story remembered.
A story that might just as well have begun here: August 8, 1901, a moment in which the pigeons abruptly fall quiet, as though on some sudden command, and when Félix Salvador Germán Alcántara Arreola regains consciousness, having had a weeklong fever, and is instantly offended by the stench of his own body: oh sweet, oh acid fetor. How long have I been lying here? He does not know how long, and lets out a moan, more animal than human, while, at the far end of the shack we have just entered, María del Pilar y del Consuelo Carnero Villalobos parts the ragged, sun-blanched drape in the doorway and ducks outside.
Félix Salvador Germán Alcántara Arreola, third child of José Germán Froylán Argenis Alcántara Castillo and Hilda Heredí Arreola Avella, gradually comes to his senses. He keeps his eyes shut a little longer, and with the bitter taste of fever still on his lips, runs his hands along the cloth beneath him, damp from all the sweats. He feels the warmth of day on his skin, and hears the owl’s too-whoo cut across by the cawing of a magpie shooed by his wife a moment ago. It is the hour when the sounds of the day mutate: croaking of frogs gives way to buzz of cicadas, donkeys’ braying replaces cock-a-doodle-doos, and the constant chorus of dog barks gives way to the grief-stricken call of a coyote.
With much effort, Félix Salvador Germán Alcántara Arreola—whom we will also refer to as Félix Salvador—begins hefting himself onto his left side, and after a few moments’ struggle succeeds, shifting onto one very ample hip and the leg that hurts him nowadays in cold weather. For four years now, such simple actions have been a trial.
María del Pilar y del Consuelo Carnero Villalobos, meanwhile, rolls up her sleeves as she moves across the yard, glancing at the sierra beyond, the vastness of this land. The sun is but a handspan from the tops of the mountains, and a faint shadowy haze has settled over the earth, itself pinpricked by hundreds of infinitesimal bright lights—fireflies whose tiny luminescences seem to María del Pilar’s eye like so many floating splinters. Strange, but it is a shimmering spectacle that Félix Salvador Germán Alcántara Arreola has never contemplated, and in any case he, lying where he is currently lying, now has other things on his mind.
After pausing to catch breath, restoring his lungs to their usual labored rhythm, Félix Salvador tenses his jaw and, straining, kicking his legs like an upturned beetle, he finally succeeds in rolling onto his back. The pestilent little eddy of dust raised in this maneuver eventually drifts back down again, settling on the body, still quivering from effort, of this corpulent man.
In the last four years, Félix Salvador Germán Alcántara Arreola has put on ninety pounds, and more is yet to come: within seven years his weight will be double what it is now, and at that point he will no longer be able to get up. A red, swollen welt upon the ground, a pustule of anger and rage that will poison the lives of his daughters and his son. His entire lineage, and even the men and women who merely happen to live in his vicinity, will be affected by his malignance, a malignance I, too, am fighting—but we will come to that. For now, the only thing that matters is the woman filling a wash pail outside, spilling a little onto earth so dark it could be mistaken for ash: María del Pilar y del Consuelo Carnero Villalobos, who cups water out of the pail with her hand like a dog’s tongue laps up water.
She fears dust more than anything, and she lives in a place where dust is all there is. Her wet footprints follow their mistress over to a pool in a rocky hollow. María del Pilar y del Consuelo Carnero Villalobos—whom we will refer to as María del Pilar y del Consuelo or as simply María del Pilar from now on—does not hear the church bells ringing on the other side of the plain, in distant Lago Seco, the town where our story began—a place where, I insist, it should not have begun. Here, on this flank of the Mesa Madre Buena, it should have begun here, where the sound of the church bells from Lago Seco, accompanied by the sound of two other bells now pealing across the Mesa, combines to resemble that of glass buckling—cracking but not quite shattering—more closely than it does metal striking metal. The two bells that accompany Lago Seco’s principal bell are not nearby, either: one is in the grounds of the mesa’s main hacienda and the other is in the tower of the church on the mountainside, hard to access between sheer scarps and gullies.
Here, without leaving María del Pilar—remaining at her side as she inexpressively scoops up water with her pail—here now is the story of the church on the mountainside: the story of February 17, 1934, a day when Germán Alcántara Carnero, accompanied by Will D. Glover and El Demónico Camilo Mónico Macías Osorio, reduced the church to a rubble of charcoal and bent nails. Teobaldo, the boss on the mesa at that time, who had in years gone by provided work for half the people in these lands, the same lands in which this present chapter unfolds, twelve hours earlier had given the order: “Burn that church tomorrow, and no fucking up. I don’t want a single one of those bastard priests left alive, and I don’t want them scurrying their way past you, either. That’s where they get together to plot and scheme. You, go hide out between the buildings, and I’ll go do the same in the scrub up there. Some of you go into town, and the rest of you stake out that empty lot.”
The empty lot being the place we left María del Pilar y del Consuelo, back in August 8, 1901, as she put down the pail and looked over at a spot a couple of meters away, at the ashy soil and at the worms that her trail of water had brought writhing to the surface. Like smoke from a fire, she thinks. Then, without knowing why, she says aloud: “Worms, but like smoke turning and twisting, writhing on the ground…”—to which I’ll add: like the smoke that rose from the church that El Gringo Alcántara, El Demónico, and Will D. Glover burned down on February 17, 1934. They had set out six hours earlier, and it wasn’t till the sun was up and they came in sight of the church—where the majority of the rebels had gone to sleep the previous night—that they posted their horses, unloaded the jerrycans and their weapons, and set forth on foot, no one saying a word, crawling for the last forty meters. Ahead of them, peace enveloped the church, chrysalislike.
By the time the doors of the church were being pushed on from the inside, Teobaldo and Will had already shut them from the outside. The dying men shrieked and battered on the door, but could not sway the men whose trio of chains kept it shut fast. The bells, normally silent at that hour, began to chime. The bell tower, which El Gringo Alcántara had scaled earlier with the help of an insider paid off by Teobaldo, had been doused with the contents of the jerrycans they’d dragged up the path. The black billowing thread of smoke reached skyward, a tongue mute and never-ending, twisting back and around on itself like María del Pilar’s worms. By the time the two tall church windowpanes exploded, the ten men shut inside were also exploding: before the flames could reach them, the heat had boiled them alive.
Before leaving what was by now a heap of charcoal and bent nails, El Gringo Alcántara, taking in his arms a small Christ that had somehow escaped the flames, spotted a body in the distance: “There’s someone behind those rocks!” he yelled. But now is not the moment to follow him as he gives chase; now we go back to María del Pilar—who was sent to the Mesa Madre Buena as a young girl in order to keep her from an epidemic that had struck several towns around her family’s home, and who does not hear the bells in the distance—cannot hear the bells in the distance—being that she is deaf.
Inside the small shack, Félix Salvador does hear the bells and, still delighted at his success—at having managed to roll over—entertains the idea of this trio of bells chiming in celebration of his recovery. He is, he decides, not feeling feverish but just hot, nauseated, too, and, having once more emerged from a feverish affliction that troubles him from time to time—a result of the day when his system first shut down—thinks: Just need to get this cover off. Shuffling his feet back and forth, back and forth, he manages to do so—the sight is something like seeing an anaconda emerge from a chrysalis.
Only when Félix Salvador’s body is revealed in its fullness, bathed in sweat and covered in welts, does the gravity of his illness become clear. As his feverish body comes in contact again with the air, Félix Salvador, the first person in our story’s lineage who thrives on anger and rage, and whom we will also consequently call thefirstone, feels better for an instant, and wonders if the time is right for him to peel open his eyes. He hasn’t wanted to do so yet, fearing he might still be delirious, might again be showered with the scythes and sickles and awful lacerating implements that have been raining down in his hallucinations. Thefirstone opens his eyes and gradually discerns a white ray of light, one might almost say grayish if rays of light could be grayish. The sun, slipping behind the mountains, is spreading its most leadlike tones over the world, a late light that filters in through the roof beams. María del Pilar, meanwhile, leaning against the wall of the coop, decides she should go back now, where one of her daughters, María del Sagrado Alcántara Carnero, is crying, though in fact her mother cannot hear.
María del Pilar retraces her steps across the dark, powdery soil, and walks silently across the yard and past the slumbering dogs. The boastful vultures turn lazy circles high above, and every now and then smaller birds flit past as though shot from a catapult. In the shrubland, where a large dam will one day be built, the shacks begin to light up one after another, shimmering like torches as the men and women who live inside them, 39 adults and 180 children—all the youths and young men and women have left—light their stoves, their tallow candles, and their small lamps. Slowly but irremediably, the shadows thicken around these shimmering torches, robbing everything of color, texture, and shape.
Moving aside the threadbare cloth in the doorway, María del Pilar enters the place that has been her home for seven years, and sees that her husband is awake. He has succeeded in shifting the blanket off his naked body and rolling over. María del Pilar averts her gaze. Her disgust for this man, whose churning folds of flesh are near-black in color, is such that she simply does not want to be here. Glancing at the useless cloth across the doorway—still rippling slightly—María del Pilar feels a strong urge to go away and never come back. “I should, that’s exactly what I should do,” says the woman quietly, looking away from her husband so as to avoid his instructions—instructions to do things she doesn’t want to do. His waking strikes her like a body blow.
As though sensing her, thefirstone turns his head around to the left, and the portion of the shack he previously could not see invades his two corneas—the one out of which he can see and the other one, the dead one. They watch each other in the thickening dark. Their disabilities mean the picture they form of each other is forever incomplete, but also that neither could survive in this kingdom alone. But let’s be clear: their impairments are not the reason they married; this union came out of another kind of necessity: a time of poverty when the only things in abundance were hunger, coldness, and enervation. María del Pilar finds a candle and lights it.
Félix Salvador’s good eye comes to rest on the figure that resolves in the candlelight, and desire immediately rushes out of its nothingness and everythingness to take hold of him. Something important is about to take place in this story—a moment that, hinge-like, joins the life of Germán Alcántara Carnero and the lives of his parents.
So our tale might just as well have begun here: August 8, 1901: Thefirstone, having moments before emerged from his illness, with his one functioning eye fixed on his wife’s outline in the faint yellow light, starts to stroke his balls and cock. A longing has sprung up like a soldier hurtling forward at the sound of enemy fire. María del Pilar y del Consuelo, holding the candle that illuminates this moment, looks down on the movements of her husband’s hands and at the tremoring of his good eye, which quivers incessantly: watching it quiver is like watching a rotten egg joggle slightly inside a jar. He should’ve gotten up today, thinks the woman who now places the candle down on the table. If he had he’d be tired by now, dead tired after having gone up to the hacienda, she thinks, looking at the network of scars on the forehead, temple, and left eyelid of her husband, whose desire seethes, close to boiling point.
As María del Pilar sees his hand go up, her second daughter starts crying on the other side of the shack, finally awoken by the other girl’s wail. María del Pilar, who gave birth to the youngest of the girls four months earlier, does not register María del Sagrado and Heredí de los Consuelos’s cries. Her skin, which often senses surrounding sounds, has gone numb at the sight of her husband’s hand lifting, ordering her to come closer. A small pearl of sweat rolls down the woman’s forehead and trembling face as she approaches the sweating, pulsing body of her husband, who has just drawn back his foreskin: the tip gleams like his dead eye. With a swift gesture out of keeping with his hulking frame, thefirstone throws himself forward and snatches up his wife’s wrist. María del Pilar lets herself be pulled toward him, while her daughters wail so loudly that the dogs, awake now, begin to circle the shack.
Thefirstone’s jaw slackens at the sight of her lifting her skirt, but then his face turns taut again: a strange movement behind his wife catches his eye, and he thinks he sees, through a gap in the boards that make up the wall, the scythe of his delusions come tumbling from the sky once more. Shaking his head like a dog shaking the water from its back, thefirstone hears his wife’s knees creak, and sees her face, dissolved in sweat. Outside their shack, meanwhile, a trio of black vultures is feasting—it was these carrion birds that thefirstone mistook for the bastard scythes of his fever. In a matter of minutes, the ravenous birds will have devoured the coyote they are currently vying for, a coyote that was killed three or four days ago by a hunter and his dogs, whose collective fury widowed the female coyote that was wailing earlier on, just as the two girls now wail inside the shack.
The dogs, unsettled by the crying girls, have begun to bark. Hearing the barking and pulling down his wife’s underwear, thefirstone is taken back to a day, long ago, when he and his brothers looked up at the horizon and saw an enormous dust cloud approaching, drawing behind it a dry, intermittent, drumlike noise. A wall of dust coming at them. The cloud cleared a number of minutes later, revealing a hundred horses galloping forward, however many howling dogs there were, and a huge mass of men shouting and whistling. When this ocean reached them—stock still and enchanted by a strong and strange sensation he would later try to describe by saying: “It was both longing and fear, both at once”—thefirstone begged the riders to take him with them, riders accompanied by the same pack of dogs that went on to beget the hounds currently barking in the yard outside.
As happens whenever barking starts up among a pack of dogs and there is no reason for it, the barking soon turns to snarling, and the animals turns on one another. The smallest animals capitulate first, followed by the sickly and then the old, and the yard only falls quiet again once all the dogs bar two—the two strongest and most vicious—have been vanquished, a quiet broken by the wailing of the girls, by the panting, gasping, and huffing of thefirstone, and by the cries of María del Pilar y del Consuelo—whom we should not now refer to by her full name, but simply as “consuelo,” which after all is the word for “solace.” As this violence is inflicted on her, consuelo succeeds in imagining herself elsewhere. For the first time, she finds she truly hates this man with his arms around her; a hate that will only grow from this day forward. Blind son of a bitch, she says inside her head. Her husband has never told her the story of how he lost his eye, has not told her, that is, that he lost it in a skirmish with the police when his horse, startled by bullets and cannonballs flying, threw him onto some rocks, one of which, sharpened by wind and rains, was only too happy to relieve him of his sight.
How well my deafness has suited you, consuelo thinks, still staring into the dead eye. How convenient, never having to explain yourself. She is full of hate, it expands inside her and she opens her mouth while saying inwardly: How convenient for you, to never have to hear me say a word—and then spits into her husband’s dead eye. Thefirstone feels the impact of it, wonders what it is, but before he has worked it out another gob of spittle has landed at the center of the doughy gray scar of his blindness. “What the fuck are you doing?” he says, not out loud but rather with a gesture of his hands and mouth, and the only reply he gets is to be spit on once again. Furious, thefirstone wraps his arms around the body on top of him, and, pushing down on the coarse cold thighs with which she is trying to lift herself off his lap, shoves himself into her. Chin on his wife’s shoulder, Félix Salvador Germán Alcántara Arreola shuts his eyes as her warm saliva drips from his face in the same way blood dripped from it on the day of the accident: If only it had been just my eye, he thinks, even as he thrusts into her. If only I hadn’t ended up alone as well. He shoves his wife’s face back and, his frenzy increasing, bellows, “They left us to die. They told us to get out of there, and told us that what we thought wasn’t enough, was actually got more than we deserved.”
With a few cracks of his neck, thefirstone shakes away the memories that are close to submerging him completely, and raises his huge haunches from the earthen floor, lifting his wife up with him. As though trying to insert his entire body into her. For her part, she only wants this moment to end. “Go on, you animal, get it over with,” this woman says to herself in silence, using other words, words from a language she made up long ago. “Get it over with, and let me go,” she says. Félix Salvador opens his mouth and, throwing his head back, spews up a viscous sort of yowl, fingers juddering as a shock runs through him, an earthquake throughout his entire body. Spent, his seed deposited, he rolls back onto the ground and pushes the woman off him, dribble running down over his jowls and chest and a good part of his abdomen. He then very slowly begins coming back to himself and, on noticing his daughters crying, the youngest and the other one, the one born with a puckered face and a lolling tongue, points to the other side of the shack. You: go.
Consuelo lifts her face and, feeling the seed of hate gaining purchase deep in her body, gets up. One of the girls must be crying. As she crosses the space, the light from the candle sets her features trembling—features that have grown hard with rancor and that now fail to find the configuration previously known to them. She is changed, a woman whose every inch now complies with an order she utters in a language that is solely her own: “You: stop your trembling.”
María del Pilar’s dislocated expression will from this day on be her only expression and this her body with its hard new armature of courage or anger, anger she will pass on to sons and daughters alike. When she reaches the girls and finds them both crying, her anger evaporates and shame flushes through María del Pilar, every inch of her. She feels an urge to go to the well, to plunge naked into it, and to stay there feeding on mud forever.
The dogs outside, spent from their fight, descend into sleep, borne down by the low song of María del Pilar y del Consuelo, behind whom thefirstone falls asleep in an instant. His dreams are of the years before his illness, his years as an outlaw. As the candlelight trembles, its wick about to expire, the two girls, calm now, look up at the woman as she places them gently back down before opening her arms wide, bringing her legs together, opening them again when she feels how wet they are, arching her back, and getting up and going over to the doorway, passing through it and out into the night, the massive darkness that buries everything. This is the same darkness that ourman will look upon each sundown of the year between his decision to leave the ministry and the day that awaits us at the turning of this page, a day about which, if this story yet had no beginning, it might be possible to say: this is when it begins.