Three Messages and a Warning (17 page)

All afternoon the woman cooked the meat over the fire that burned thanks to scraps and pieces of wood taken from construction sites. The meat had a rancid odor. Newspapers strewn about the floor absorbed the blood from the meat. Working on the floor tired her out because her ample belly prevented her from sustaining a sitting position for very long. So she hung the rest of the meat from a rafter and tore it into strips from a standing position. As time passed her legs began to feel as if they were anchored to the ground and her ankles began to swell for she was a big woman with thick blood. There was a lot of meat for her to clean. The sorcerer hoped that with fewer workers, fewer guests, and so much meat, there would not be any quarreling at the feast. This year there would be no foremen present to defuse conflicts, none of the strongest laborers, none of the men who had taken jobs from others then refused to share their ration with the unemployed. The woman trusted the sorcerer to dispel envy, the evil eye, and foul moods, for the sorcerer had achieved mastery over his shadowy counterpart. She finally succumbed to deep drowsiness while sitting in front of the stove watching the pot simmer. It was almost twilight on a sultry day of the kind that anesthetizes your tongue and fingers. A radio playing reggaeton shook the silverware piled on a table. Bam, boom, bam, boom—the mugs and plates shook, and the bass was so resonant that even the dishes sounded like a leather drum, a rhythm so primitive it seemed ancient, savage, accompanying the woman’s slumber. Occasionally the fire sparkled with fluorescent colors, greens or pinks, from the chemical makeup of the burning scraps that served as firewood. The woman had found herself staring fascinatedly at the magic contained in the cauldron, the fire speaking to her, the voices of the nahuales emerging from the dancing flames, when sleep overcame her.

The next day the evil eye would be dispelled because that is what the festivals always accomplished, easing relations between foremen and workers, and among the workers themselves. Of course peace did not always reign during the festivities. When food ran short, for example, someone or another was blamed and a fight ensued that sometimes ended in blows and sometimes in knives. When only some could eat and others went hungry, the hungry ones would riot by nightfall, bursting into the homes of those with provisions and attacking the inhabitants: taking away the women and leaving the children crying and the men nearly beaten to death. The woman had been staring at the fire intently, and its hazy light carried her off, as the flight of a vulture, to a luminous slumber. Her dreams offered her nahual opportunities to heal her.

Doña Rosarito dreamed of a city aglow in white, built of a substance more precious than gold. There was something secret in its construction. What made the city shine came from inside it: intrinsic to the walls and the leaves on the trees. The city shone with a light radiating from within the objects it contained: a white metallic light, akin to silver or to the liquid morning sun, flowing like sap through the veins of the walls. There were pyramids with vertical staircases and thick walls seemingly constructed not from stone but rather from a single crystal rock of brightest amber. It was as if the temples were made of golden plasma radiating light, an eternal light akin to the rays of the sun.

She dreamed of a very young girl named Huetzé whose skin was the same color of the golden city and her eyes of amber. Huetzé slept in the embrace of the leader of the community, a man with translucent eyes and smooth, cinnamon-colored skin. She dosed off as the sun was just setting and one could hear the laughter of many children who, after having sung and played beautiful instruments around a bonfire, had permission to run free among the trees, climbing them and caressing their leaves while their mothers prepared food and their fathers harvested seeds with the last light of day.

Huetzé’s golden skin shivered. She pressed her breasts closer to the leader’s body, entangling herself in his legs. She heard the murmur of children and felt the tepid evening breeze. The ritual drums sounded: bam, boom, bam, boom, and she dreamt that a peripheral tribe came and took away the women and children of her tribe to a hilltop. They set up a cross and were dancing around her to a primal rhythm. They drank liquor until they were growling and lurching. They ate meat until they were satiated. Afterward they quarreled, exchanged blows, unsheathed knives, and sacrificed the maidens in a bloody frenzy.

The meat was cooking very slowly on the burner, stewing in a sort of corn-flour gruel. Doña Rosarito awoke to the same flame with its sparkling green, pink, and violet phosphorescence caused by unidentified chemicals that were likely poisoning her lungs and confounding her mind. She thought of the privileged people who lived in the tall buildings her people constructed and kept their provisions chilled or frozen in tightly sealed chambers: abundant foods of all kinds, packaged in colored boxes, in plastic wrap, in aluminum foil. All that food would be enough to feed the workers’ children for quite a while. The sorcerer informed the woman that this year the nahuales wanted the foremen to ensure that none of the opportunistic workers would be in attendance: that this year all the poor, the unemployed, and their families would eat. The stew contained the flesh of the opportunistic workers and the foremen. When the pilgrims arrived at the hilltop, they set up the cross and made an offering of the victims’ flesh and blood. The three nahuales ate only corn and did not linger but returned across the bridge. Rosarito recalled the golden city of light from her dream where there was fruit for the children, quality seeds with which to feed the elders, and where mothers would gather happily around a bonfire to share their food.

Huetzé awoke too. Her nightmare was unpleasant. She remembered havin seen a sorcerer carrying baby-goat heads at the foot of a cross and an obese woman dismembering human bodies, placing them in chunks in a large pot. But Huetzé had found her nahual, a powerful jaguar that led her from the jungle vegetation to the hilltop. She had glimpsed the future and remained frightened even now by that nightmare in which humanity constructed one cube box upon another.

Huetzé shook herself from her slumber and hugged the leader, waking him with a kiss. It began to rain. It was time to go down and help carry the grain that had been harvested that day. It was time to protect the bundles of food in straw nests fastened to tree trunks from the rain. From those nests our community would eat for a year. Afterward it would be time to rest, to smell the wet earth, to tuck in the children, to listen to the wise elders. It would be time for song and melodic music by the bonfire.

The fat ones are in mourning, a big fat man outside of the Treasury Department. Damned mania for considering myself insulated . . . the economy invests in me. Milk, cereal, water, eggs, meat: your flesh . . . ode to the infinite. To touch you is to touch myself without losing my mind. Is this lust? It depends. Excitement, in my case: for others, perhaps a kind of excessive thirst more proper to whores and clerics. Although, isn’t there something clerical about my flight? Night approaches and my notebook traces its last notes; it discovers that it is surrounded by monsters and coffee-shop fortune-tellers; it’s resting on Nemesis, at the feet of Bacchus and Venus, with an amnesiac tranquility that disrupts sleep, abandoning it to oblivion. Women, men: common sense? The boy from apartment 602 is crying. Not long ago he returned from Paris. His mother takes him to the park.

Suppose that in addition to heaven existing, God exists; your ascent and arrival are as previously described, only now you find a counter and, behind the counter, a caretaker in a green frock coat who signals with his gas lantern for you to come closer. You take a few steps and, in doing so, surmise from the tacky green glow of his frock coat that heaven isn’t the place for you, that you should concern yourself with other matters, like deciphering for certain the reasons why the woman refused to share her umbrella with you, and so on.

Suppose God exists and He’s waiting for you, that you traverse eternity and infinity, which is nothing more than an endless series of little waiting rooms, waiting rooms and anterooms, and at the end, or what you consider to be the end, there’s some furniture resembling that of a café, some comfortable blue vinyl chairs made of imitation leather, and you take a seat convinced that if God awaits you then you must be meeting Him here. Your fingers rub the chair’s blue upholstery, as if to confirm its reality, and out of habit you want to order a milk shake: but God, even though He’s waiting for you, never comes; and in His place, mixed up with your longing for a milk shake, comes the memory of the woman in the rain who told you, “No.”

Suppose God does make an appearance: this scenario might be identical to the last, except that if God indeed shows up, the color of the caretaker’s frock coat would have to be a bishop’s purple. You’re sitting in the blue vinyl chair craving a milk shake and right then God arrives dressed as a waiter, wearing a bow tie and a hairnet over His head, and on a tray He’s carrying just the milk shake you wanted. You respectfully get up and invite Him to have a seat. God complies and you offer Him a sip of your shake, but He refuses, explaining that He’s just finished eating, that He appreciates the offer but isn’t in the mood. You draw back, a little embarrassed since you realize that the confident way you offered him a sip was probably inappropriate, and, afraid of having acted so rashly, you ask if smoking’s allowed. He says that it is and even requests one of your cigarettes. Your hands shake, as it’s not easy to light a match in the face of God. But God inhales and says, “Great cigarette; is it of blonde tobacco?” “No,” you answer without realizing that you’re correcting God Himself, “it’s of dark tobacco.” “Not as processed, right?” He asks, and you say “Yes,” that they’re cheaper. “Well, it’s great,” He repeats. You inhale the smoke and think that they’re really not very good but you don’t dare say it. God looks around and says something about the blue vinyl on the chairs, something about how it looks like leather. You agree. God finishes his cigarette and says: “Well, I’ve got to go now, it’s been a pleasure.” You aren’t able to say anything, and, as God moves away between the chairs that look like they’re upholstered in blue leather, you remember the way your killer moved down the street while it rained and the face of the woman who refused you shelter under her umbrella.