May 27, 1911, and another knot in our account of this life—a knot in which, at the hour when the sun beats down on the backs of men across the Mesa Madre Buena and the earth succumbs to the drowsiness and slowness that succeed spring, Germán Alcántara Carnero hears a sudden whistle and stops swinging his mattock. Puzzled, ourman, still a boy at this point in our story, turns and gazes over his shoulder, and when the whistle cuts through the air again, the three mangy dogs that were sleeping on the ground nearby rouse themselves, sniffing the air for a smell that is yet to reach the boy—the smell of a smudge coming down over the scrubland, where the heat from the earth meets the heat dropping from the incandescence that is the sky at this time of year.
He looks at the horizon, which is very clear, and sees the smudge as it continues to advance over the scrub. It’s been so long since we’ve had any kind of wind, thinks Germán Alcántara Carnero. Two, maybe three weeks and not the tiniest gust, he thinks, casting his mind back as the smudge continues its approach, gradually growing into a silhouette. The whistling man whistles again, calling to attention the men, women, and children hereabouts, who all leave off their work and, like Alcántara Carnero, stand and wait. The local landowner—the lord and master, that is, of these lands and of all the people in them—approaches on his mare, a thousand swirling starlings following in his wake. A solitary cloud crosses the sun—brief respite for Germán Alcántara Carnero as he wonders what orders they’re about to be given.
The cloud’s fleeting shadow, as fleeting as the words I am writing here, moves across the plowed field, across the plots in which seeds have already been sown, and then over the path along which the horse—whose glinting owner we will refer to as lordandmaster—is trotting. Eye drawn by the glints coming off of lordandmaster’s clothes, ourman—whom we will be better off calling ouryoungman, though in truth he isn’t even quite a young man yet—does not notice his dogs rousing themselves until they set to barking. “Quiet, you three!” he says as the lordandmaster whistles again. But the dogs continue to bark and whine, and, leaning down, he kicks one of the beasts in the neck and the other on the snout: “I said quiet!”
A little way off, ouryoungman hears someone asking: “What’s he want?” It is the man who always speaks up when anything happens in these parts: “What is it this time?” Another peon, a few meters from us, answers with a laugh: “He’s come to hand out some presents.” All those in earshot laugh. “He’s here to give us his horse.” And the first man, plunging his machete into the soil and wiping his brow, says: “I bet he’s going to tell us to all go home. I know him, and I know he don’t like being out in the hot sun like this… Bet he’s going to tell us, ‘Whoever doesn’t stay home will pay… ’ Look at him, so sure of himself—cock of the walk!”
Lordandmaster whistles once more—not because any of his workers haven’t heard him already, but simply because he can, and because he knows it annoys these men.
“He’s frightened it’ll start here, too!” says the man who has begun exhorting his companions. “Frightened we’ll rise up as well. Bet you he’s going to come and complain about those ten men, and warn us off joining them.” “I wish he was afraid!” says one of the older men—the one who’s been working for longest on these lands, lands where the punishing heat even seeps through the ground, quickly fermenting any recently buried bodies. The man who spoke first, undeterred, indifferent to the old man’s reply, takes three steps forward and says: “He’s come to say, ‘woe to those thinking of welcoming them into their homes.’” But again, ouryoungman doesn’t hear this. He has just noticed a strange insect crawling from the ear of his dog and trying to pick it off. Seeing its blue-green wings, Germán Alcántara Carnero thinks: It’s a Jerusalem Cricket. I’ll give it to María, she’ll like it. He reaches out a hand, but then feels a sharp pain, a heavy blow that, though it doesn’t touch him, cuts the insect in two and therefore hurts him nonetheless. “That bug don’t bite, but he does!” says one of the peons as he comes by, pointing to lordandmaster at the far end of the field. “Better get over there now.”
Germán Alcántara Carnero watches in anger as the man, the machete in his hand, walks grudgingly over, but then falls in behind him. When he reaches the group surrounding lordandmaster, he catches the tail end of a phrase: “… I will go and seek them out, personally, and I will find them, and I will mete out such punishment on each and every one.” With his outsize hands, Germán Alcántara Carnero forces open a space between the men, who now turn their heads to the north, where the man who killed his insect has begun speaking: “So go back to our houses, is that it? And once we get there stay put? I have a better idea—why don’t you and your family go to fuck?” The men, though already silent, fall quieter still, and ouryoungman braces himself: lordandmaster immediately crosses the circle, his hand reaching for his gun, which he levels at the man’s head and, still advancing, pulls the trigger. And the man who killed the insect is blown onto his back.
The mouth of the fallen man issues the final gurgling sounds that his body will ever emit, as though his heart and lungs, before giving in, had to unleash a final insult to the workers looking on in silence, heads bowed, waiting for their next order. “Home,” roars lordandmaster, “all of you get home, and don’t let me catch any of you going out.” They all stare back at him, all except for Germán Alcántara Carnero, who is watching the hole through which the dead man’s brains are dribbling out. “Don’t none of you come back out again till I say so.” And with that, lordandmaster mounts his mare once more and, pulling hard on the reins, shouts: “Don’t let me hear that any of you have been talking with the Rio Verde men, nor showing them any kind of hospitality.” Pleased with their silence and with the obedient turning and walking away of his workers—men who, even with their backs to him, don’t dare to defy him in words or thought—lordandmaster spins and begins moving off, but then ouryoungman’s dogs begin barking again and he turns back. What’s Félix’s boy doing now? he wonders, with confusion that will soon produce a smile on his face. What’s he doing peering at the dead man? Is he really going to… ? Nodding his head, captivated, lordandmaster lets out a laugh as he sees the person who will one day be ourman reach out and thrust his outsize fingers into the bloody wound. Lordandmaster, up on his mare, applauds, saying to himself: This you’ll never forget, not this, Félix’s little boy, before tugging on the reins again and setting off. The surprise on the face of ouryoungman—the only worker remaining—lingers: he has seen dead men before but never gone so far as to touch one, and never imagined the blood would be this warm. Crouching, looking in the dead man’s eyes, he whispers: “That’s what you get, fucker, for hurting my beetle. It was meant to be a gift.”
He looks up, the only things around him now his three dogs and the vultures that have just landed a little way off—beyond them across the fields he can see the diminishing silhouettes of the workers picking their way through the scrub, and beyond that the rocky outcrop, sandstone winking in the sun, and beyond the rocky outcrop the vast swath of thicket land where his family lives and where a dam will one day be erected.
Picking his way across the fresh furrows to his mattock, he gathers it up along with the two halves of the beetle that crawled out of his dog’s ear, and thinks of his sister, who turns fourteen today and who has never uttered a word in her life: she was born with a tongue the wrong size for her mouth. “I’ll find her something else. By the time I get back to the house, I swear I’ll have another present.” Scanning the horizon once more, ouryoungman enjoins his dogs—who are casting resigned looks at the fly-covered corpse also being contemplated by the jumpy vultures: “Come on, you three. Let’s go!” Leaving the field behind and passing up and down a number of small knolls, he cuts into the part of the land where at certain times of the year beanstalks and at others alfalfa and sorghum and grass and corn grow, in haphazard manner: a manner replicated by almost everything on this plain and thus by this story as well. Here a hundred shoots, there a group of stalks and the heads of some maize, and over there, corncobs in an unlikely line. Here the earth begins to change: the weeds begin to break up into discrete clumps, drifting farther apart and soon coming to resemble islands and then finally small islets charting a course in an ocean of earth—on the surface of which the stone just thrown by Germán Alcántara Carnero lands.
Without breaking stride, ouryoungman leans down and plucks another stone from the path, cleaning the soil from it as he did the previous stone—spitting on it and rubbing it with both hands before carefully checking it over and then hurling it angrily toward the horizon. He has no choice but to find a new gift for María del Sagrado Alcántara Carnero. On this part of the path we are on, where the soil turns sharp and rough underfoot and even the islets of clumped grass desist, the boy who will one day be ourman is more likely to find the surprise he’s looking for: a stone with a fossil inside, one that shows how this area was submerged beneath water in epochs past. He bends down, picks up another stone, checks it, discards it. At the point the path exits the stretch of seemingly ravaged lands and enters the area that precedes the rocky outcrop we are very soon to arrive in—a place where the ground resembles leprous skin—Germán Alcántara Carnero leans down again and, picking up a fourth stone, smiles and gives a small excited skip. Finally, a good gift.
Loose stones crunch beneath his feet as he quickens his pace. His sister is going to explode in happiness when she sees it, he knows she will. She’ll howl and tremble and clap her hands, though none of the claps will connect. Hurrying along, twenty meters shy now of the rocky swath of land with glasslike edges we saw winking earlier on in the distance—where the sun plays on the twisting tracks that in turn offer up their thin, rusted iron veins—this scalding barren stretch—a scurrying, scrabbling sound turns our heads as well as that of the boy: a lizard has shot beneath a couple of slabs of obsidian. Then a screech from above makes him look up: in the sky, a strange glowing ring finally makes the sun the center of something. The sight of this white hoop and the position assumed by the sun prompt the thought: It’ll still be light when I get home, I’ll be able to give her—the cripple girl he sleeps next to and whom he comforts when she cries—two surprises.
Hurrying his dogs along, he moves forward over ground that no longer crunches but that screeches like nails scraping on glass. Halfway across this rocky tract there is a sea of silicates upon which basalt rock, obsidian, and igneous rocks, spewed up by the earth thousands of years ago, float like corks. This current stretch of the path is a kind of upside-down sky, gleaming and glinting. In a bare black triangle of earth where the path forks, a couple of opossums appear, and the dogs, baying, fly after them. After a short chase, bones are being crunched and flesh and fur torn apart: the male got away but not the female, nor the nine babies she was carrying, which the hounds also gulp down. They fight over the remains of the mother: one tries to makes off with the spine, another with one of the ears, and the other with one of the still-twitching paws. “That’s enough!” When they ignore him and go on eating, he picks up a large rock, goes over, and with a shout brings it down on the head of one of the trio—its forelegs buckle and it lets out a howl.
The wounded dog totters away from him across the rocks, trying to scrape its own head with its paws, and, like the two dogs that escaped the boy’s fury, looks up at his master when he says: “I said enough! We’ve got to go!” Hounds in tow, Germán goes back to the fork in the path, taking the left path and gathering the mattock he placed on the ground, a tool he was given by his father—who, condemned not just by the state of his thyroids but also by the diabetes that has recently begun gnawing at his hands, has had to resort to using his forearms whenever he wishes to give his son a beating—Germán—who has for a long while now been his father’s match and could take him on if he wanted to, only the thought has not yet occurred to him—again quickens his pace, calling for the dogs to do the same. The path curves east and then east again, and then it seems to veer to the west, coming up a slight incline and out of the ocean of quartzes, obsidians, and anthracites, before leaving behind the carpet of crystal and slate and the noises made by Germán’s feet on the glass and the reflections that slash back and forth across the space like daggers. Behind the boy comes the mute procession of his hounds: the oldest, followed by the most intelligent, followed by the one with bloody snout and skull.
Just where the ground turns soily once more, Germán, though giving no great thought to the strange sensation swelling in his gut, and though unsure why his insides are teeming, stops to wait for the injured animal. Wheezing with every footstep, its tail continues to wag a little as it approaches. It reaches Germán, who has knelt down, and it lies down, letting out a few yelps as the boy’s two huge hands stroke it and scruff it about the neck and head. The boy wipes the blood from the pelt with his shirt, and says into a very large ear: “It wasn’t me who hurt you, boy. I didn’t drop that stone. I could never hurt you.” Getting to his feet again with a leap, he spurs his dogs home and then notices his hands are covered in blood. He smiles to himself, very excited: I’ll tell my sister about this, too—not just her gift, but the insect, the whistling, the machete, the boss coming down and giving orders, that guy complaining, the hole in his head, the warm blood, his brain, oh, and the way it smelled so bad.
He’s advanced another ten or so meters by the time the dog gets up and, licking its front paws a couple of times, falls in behind the other two. But before it can walk five paces it halts, arches its back, opens its maw as wide as it will go, and vomits up two of the baby opossums; these it sniffs for a moment, licking at them, and then, after a moment, ingesting them for a second time. After this the dog shakes itself and, revived, lets out a bark and sets off along the path on either side of which we now see, as well as the clumps of mesquite and acacia that have lately begun growing hereabouts, two very large cacti, one agave, a kidneywood tree, and six bishop’s weed plants. We are suddenly in the thicketland. Hurrying on, Germán drops his head for a moment, looks at his lengthening but still not very long shadow, and thinks of the hours left in the day. He’ll play with María for the rest of the afternoon and evening, maybe they’ll even go down to the crater. And if Heredí gives me a hand, we could go and have a look at the tracks. The thought of the train excites ouryoungman, knowing how much María loves it, how thrilling she finds the noise and the rumble of the passing carriages.
And there it is now—beyond the tall tattered kidneywood, beyond the spread of cacti and the horizontal black pepper tree felled by lightning a couple of years ago, just where the soil turns ash-black: the shack in which he lives with his two sisters and his parents. Breaking into a run, he who will one day be ourman is thirty meters from the shack when he catches sight of his mother and the sister for whom he has not brought a present. In the ensuing three or four paces he expects to see María appear in the doorway, but no: just his mother and the other sister holding hands, and beyond them the shack and the abandoned chicken coop and the tall fig tree he climbs at night. Ouryoungman immediately senses something, he doesn’t know what, and his dogs begin to bark—very rare for them upon returning to the shack.
“What are María’s clothes doing there?” he says to the woman as his dogs begin to bay. “Where’s my sister?” Though deaf, his mother knows he’s asking after María, and, spreading her arms wide, hacks up a strange sobbing noise before collapsing to the floor. “I said where is she?” Heredí de los Consuelos Alcántara Carnero cowers behind her mother. Stepping over them, he runs to the shack, and, throwing aside the ragged cloth over the doorway, finds his father sprawled on the ground, looking somehow leonine.
“What have you done with her?” He drops his tools on the floor, seeking out his father’s eyes with his own, the blind one and the seeing one, both of which now come to settle on his son. “Where’s my fucking sister?” Leaning down, ouryoungman reaches for a brick hod and, without stopping to think, raises it high above his head and advances on Félix Salvador. “You’ll never find out,” sneers the father, waving the two gnarled stumps that were once hands: “Let’s see if you can guess! Go on, tell me what you think’s happened to her!” Ouryoungman, unable to contain himself, steps forwards and lashes his father across the face with the hod. The older man shields himself with his armstumps, but he fails to protect his mouth and his teeth, which his son, raising the hod once more, smashes with a second blow. An arc of blood splashes down over the man’s jowls and the pair of flaccid tits.
Casting around for something, anything he can bring down on his father’s head, overcome by a desire to bury the man under all the objects formerly used to instill terror in the family, he grabs a couple of canes and hurls them at him, then some planks of wood lying on the floor, various stones, a metal beam, a couple of effigies of the Virgin and Baby Jesus, a broken bench, three bottles, and a pot that smashes on contact with his father’s motionless form. Dispirited, overwhelmed, but with his blood still up, Germán Alcántara Carnero leaves his home, beckons his dogs with a wave of the hand, crosses the yard without a word to Heredí, and marches straight out into the rocky outcrop. Soon, tired from all the walking and from thoughts of what he has done, he will fall asleep on the ground, later to be found, woken, threatened, beaten, and ultimately taken in by a group of young men who will then induct him into an army that will become his ticket out of this place—all things that will happen with us no longer present to witness them.
Halting in the doorway of the shack, we watch Germán receding in the distance, a silhouette, then a blur like the blur we glimpsed at the opening of this chapter, and we then, too, take our leave of this place and of this moment, traveling forward in time to a moment when the name “ouryoungman” has been supplanted by the nickname “El Gringo.” There he is, El Gringo, propped on his elbows on the ground, drinking and chatting with Camilo Mónico Macías Osorio, El Demónico, recounting the day he left home: “Then I saw a great flock of blackbirds fly up, and I knew my little sister was dead. And I lay down and slept.” And before he can say: “It was then that the five of them found me,” El Gringo Alcántara sees two balls of fire coming at him and jumps to his feet. He is now as tall as he ever will be, though he is yet to fully flesh out as a man.
He spits out the drink and throws the bottle aside while trying to clear his drunken thoughts. It is then that he realizes that the two howling, zigzagging torches are his two remaining dogs (the oldest, the one that was present the day of his birth he buried three years ago now, high in the sierra). “Who’s done this!” screams El Gringo Alcántara Carnero. “What the fuck is this?” He moves away from the bonfire around which three of the Díaz Cervantes brothers let out deep, guttural laughs. Macario, Pedro, and Baldomero know very well it was Demetrio who set fire to the dogs. “If only you’d run like that a week ago!” shouts Baldomero Díaz Cervantes. “We would have had to burn you, too!” says Macario. For a week now, Germán Alcántara Carnero, the Díaz Cervantes brothers, and El Demónico Macías Osorio—who for four years have been part of the troop whose campfires currently dot a large portion of the hillside—have been a tight group, an unbreakable brotherhood, looking out for each other, even putting the others before themselves.
But on July 24, 1917, six days before this moment in which the burning, screaming dogs run around trailing columns of smoke and cinders, Germán Alcántara Carnero broke this brotherhood by handling a very delicate moment very clumsily: Jacinto Díaz Cervantes and El Gringo Alcántara Carnero separated from the others to go and scout the higher ground, and stumbled on a couple of large watering holes. “Must be geysers,” said Jacinto, excited. “What’s a geyser?” asked ouryoungman, puzzled. “Can I drink the water?” With a laugh, dropping his carbine rifle and his knife on the ground, Jacinto said: “What you can do is bathe in it.” And the oldest of the brothers that had found Carnero six years before removed his threadbare garments and proceeded to dive into the water.
Gathering up Jacinto’s weapons and glancing about like a rabbit leaving its warren, El Gringo Alcántara Carnero—who was given this nickname because since learning that there were countries other than his own in the world, he’d been swearing over and over to someday go and settle in one of them—approached the water’s edge and hissed: “Come on, leave it. It’s hot as hell round here.” The oldest of the five Díaz Cervantes boys just splashed some water at him and let out a laugh before diving down. Surfacing, he laughed: “Come on, dive in. You’ve seen as well as I have there’s nobody around.” Germán Alcántara Carnero barked: “We aren’t here to splash around. They told us not to be too long.” With a hard look, Jacinto Díaz Cervantes groaned at the young man he had looked after and schooled for the past six years. “Since when do you raise your voice at me? I’ll get out when I damn well want to!”
Before El Gringo Alcántara Carnero could answer the de facto leader of their small group, they both heard the thump of footsteps and the unmistakable sound of men’s voices. “Here, my things!” said Jacinto, half-shouting—trying to shout quietly. He turned and began swimming toward the edge—he was fifteen or twenty meters out by now. Our young man looked down at the rifle and the knife in his hands and, taking a few steps backward, said: “This is what you get for not listening to me—for never listening to anyone.” The approaching voices were already very near, and the oldest Díaz Cervantes, seeing there was no chance of escape, stopped swimming and simply glared at El Gringo Alcántara Carnero as he turned and crept off in the direction of their camp. And when he got there none of the brothers could bring themselves to believe the story ouryoungman had hurriedly concocted, leading them, six days later, on July 30, 1917, moments before we arrived at this current knot, to put a match to both of his dogs.
“I heard them say it was Demetrio, and then they said we should’ve burned you alive, too!” exclaims El Demónico Macías Osorio as he catches up with Germán Alcántara Carnero, panting and sweating from having run for a mile behind the two balls of fire that, even as the flames consumed them, had stayed close to each other. Kneeling on the ground, Carnero is embracing what remains of his dogs. “I couldn’t even hold them properly at the end! I couldn’t even touch them.” “I told you,” says El Demónico, who’s had running disagreements with his brothers for months, “we shouldn’t have stayed on. Without Jacinto, those four are a piece of shit.” “Where are those bastards now?” says the young man who will one day be ourman, pushing away the hands that have just helped him to his feet. “They’ll be up there waiting for us,” El Demónico whispers, as he brings Alcántara Carnero close, keeping him from running straight off. “Instead of heading up there, why don’t we drop down and go after Demetrio? It was him who lit them up.” Ouryoungman, a little calmer now, kneels next to the two scorched corpses, silently promising them vengeance. Then, to El Demónico: “All right, we go after Demetrio.”
The soldiers, in large groups around their fires, watch as Germán Alcántara Carnero and El Demónico come running past. Some offer condolences—they know how dear his dogs were to him—while others make the sign of the cross. The Milky Way is visible in the night sky, scored by the halting tracks of fireflies.
“Take my gun if you want,” says El Demónico when he sees that El Gringo Alcántara Carnero is unarmed—he set off running without taking anything. “Or my knife?” “The knife, give me the knife,” says ouryoungman, reaching back like a runner reaching for a baton. Feeling its hilt in his hand, he quickens his pace, drawn on by a clear, striking premonition, turning onto the very track taken by Demetrio Díaz Cervantes minutes before. Coming past a thick clump of high grasses and ducking under a very tall agave, he picks up on the sound of panting, of heaving lungs—a snorting, almost—that gives away the man running up ahead. They stop: the sound is coming closer. “Who else is going to be hurrying anywhere at such an hour?” hisses El Gringo, answering El Demónico’s question before he has even spoken it.
Germán Alcántara Carnero leaps at Demetrio Díaz Cervantes the moment he emerges, and the pair tumble down the slope, knees, elbows, and hips cracking against stones and boulders as they go. Several meters lower down, the pair we are now watching struggle to their feet, and ouryoungman realizes he has dropped the knife; his adversary brandishes a long blade. “Let’s see if you’ve got the balls,” says Demetrio Díaz Cervantes as they begin to circle each other, “to take on a man who isn’t in the water. We got our hands on one of the Federal soldiers who killed Jacinto today, and a while back we found his knife among your things…” At this, the second oldest Díaz Cervantes brother squints and throws himself at ouryoungman with a snarl. In a single, unexpected movement—an unexpected sideways-forward jump—Germán Alcántara Carnero avoids the blow and, rapid and assured, knocks Demetrio to the ground, before disarming him and kneeling on his chest. Flinging away the knife, El Gringo Alcántara Carnero says: “I don’t need your knife and I don’t need to throw you in the water. I don’t even need to set you on fire.”
His two enormous fists begin pummeling Demetrio’s face and head, while he shouts down at him: “I couldn’t even touch them! I didn’t even get to hold them before they died!” Jumping to his feet, he begins kicking Demetrio about the ribs and stamping on his battered head, shouting all the while: “They were innocent—why’d you have to hurt them?” Looking down at the head, a bloody mess by now, Carnero becomes aware of a second yoke, one that has weighed on him for a long time, and is reminded of the one he removed from his back seven years earlier, and the dead man whose bloody head he thrust his fingers into comes to mind, and now, now that the memories are under way, he cannot stop them, he sees again the moment he arrived back at his house, his mother’s guilt-ridden look and the empty eyes of little Heredí de los Consuelos, the violence he inflicted on his father, leaving the house where he was born, meeting the brothers Díaz Cervantes… If they hadn’t picked me up, I’d surely have gone back and looked for her… “If you five hadn’t kidnapped me,” he growls, “I’d never have gone off without her.”
After kicking Demetrio Díaz Cervantes, harder, harder, El Gringo finally stops, falls quiet, and is still for a moment before leaning down and taking the prostrate body by the neck. He lifts Demetrio up so that their eyes are level—though Demetrio’s have fallen shut. I’m going to have to make another getaway today! thinks he who will very soon become ourman, placing his hands, seemingly made for such a task, around the throat of Demetrio Díaz Cervantes, and proceeding to strangle the life out of him.
“We need to get away before the brothers come looking.” And with that the pair head down the mountainside—Germán Alcántara Carnero guessing at the terrain in the dark, hastening El Demónico Macías forward—who stops every so often for air. They make their way down a long, steep scarp and head along a ravine. So! thinks Germán Alcántara Carnero, turns out there was a worse way to leave a place! And at the point when he places a foot in the river, we cease following these two young men, who are soon to be enveloped by the night, and, as Alcántara Carnero cries: “Into the water! That way they can’t track us!” we move in a direction that in fact puts distance between us and the moment when I become a character in this story. The rest of this escape we will not see: the knots contained in this chapter have been untied and now the only things that matter are the story of a person dear to ourman who choked, and the bullet that one day struck ourman in the chest—the two knots that follow this barren blank space: