Among the Lost

by Emiliano Monge

  Looking away from the abyss and hopping from one rock to another, Estela smiles, remembering the first time she ever saw Epitafio angry, and writes: WTF DO I CARE THAT HE 1 A MEDELL!!! Then, praying that her phone will get a signal if only for a second, IhearonlywhatIwant waves her arm in the air, spins around and looks at the Tierra Negra massif in the distance.

  Seeing the sandworms of dust raised by the vehicles crossing the mesa, which she herself crossed only a short time ago, Estela thinks: I’d get a signal down there … Shit … I was dumb not to call you from down there. Looking away from the mesa, just as she is about to launch into another rant, IhearonlywhatIwant hears her phone beep: it has managed to send the message to Epitafio.

  Taking a deep breath, Estela hops to another rock and begins to calm down: at least this time I responded. Then, as she retraces her steps to the huge truck, she feels another surge of calm: Anyway, what would I have said if I’d called you from down there? I can’t tell you what’s going on with us like that … It needs to be face to face … That’s another thing that pissed you off … when I’d leave little notes in your room … when I didn’t tackle things head on.

  Just as she is walking away from the chasm, she is hit by a gust of wind, but it is a different blow that almost knocks her off her feet: Worse than leaving you little notes was when I made a joke … That really got your back up … Why the fuck did I write WTF DO I CARE THAT HE 1 A MEDELL!!!? Each time IhearonlywhatIwant cuts a head off the Hydra of her fears, two more grow in its place and shriek at her: You’re going to think I don’t care … that I’m taunting you … that I don’t want you to call or write or tell me anything … that you’re just a pain in the arse!

  Increasing her pace even as the Hydra’s heads of fear in her mind increase, Estela takes out her phone again: IT WAS A JOKE. U KNOW I CARE ABOUT U. YOUR ALWYS RIGHT ABOUT THIS STUFF!!! Then she puts away the phone and heads back to the convoy, where her men are frantic and the willpower of the men and women who have come from other lands is waning.

  I should never have tried … never have left … to think I thought I could succeed … like an idiot … I should have known it was impossible … that every man is broken eventually … that this place breaks him … these people break him … turn him into a dog … no better than an animal.

  As she runs faster, Estela prays that her last message has been sent. Then, shaking her head, she realises: What difference does it make whether it was delivered or not? … The problem is not the text messages … The problem is that we need to fucking talk … I need to tell you we can’t carry on like this … to call you … I have to say it, even if it’s not face to face.

  Shit … I’ll have to go to El Paraíso … I have to go, though I don’t want to … At least I can call you from there, Estela thinks as she braves a whirling gust of wind: I’ll have to go to El Paraíso, even though I told you I’m not going … even though I told you something strange is going on there … Something you and I don’t understand …

  That’s another reason why you’re probably angry … Why the fuck did I say: I don’t want to go to El Paraíso, there’s something weird going on there, but I didn’t tell you what is going on with us? How could I imply that the people there are plotting against us and not say, there’s that, and there’s also what is going on between you and me? Estela thinks as she reaches the door of the truck and, looking up, sees the falcon, which has left its nest, at the moment it swoops on a flock of birds, scattering them and picking off the weakest.

  The quail captured in mid-flight still fluttering in its claws, the falcon flies off and disappears into the ravine just as Estela climbs into the Ford Lobo and slumps into the driver’s seat, tosses her phone on to the dashboard and glances at the captain and asks: ‘What the fuck is up with you?’ Her voice, he cannot help but notice, is like a bugle call, and she continues: ‘You should have phoned us yesterday … or at least called Epitafio!’

  ‘Still banging on about that … I’m with you now, so what does it matter that I didn’t call!’ says the captain, surprised to hear himself raising his voice and casually saying what he just said. In an instant, the tension in the truck swells like a balloon. The captain looks away from Estela, points to the keys that fell on the floor earlier and says: ‘There’s your bloody keys.’

  Turning the ignition of the Ford Lobo and flooring the accelerator, IhearonlywhatIwant realises that she needs to calm down, but though this is what she wants, she snarls: ‘He always stands up for you with the boss … No one defends you the way he does at El Paraíso … I can’t believe you just left him hanging … that you didn’t say anything.’ Then Estela takes a slow, deep breath, convinced that now she will be calm, only to erupt again: ‘He always says, “I like him better than the last guy … I trust El Chorrito more than any other soldier.”’

  For a moment she is mute, then the woman who loves Epitafio once again breaks her silence: ‘Do you know what Epitafio calls you?’ The captain’s face hardens and he says: ‘How could I not know? I was there when he shouted: “Just look at this guy, the way he walks, it’s like he’s got the shits” … And Sepelio got to his feet, laughing and cheering and imitating my limp … “I was walking down the lane … And I felt a funny pain … diarrhoea, diarrhoea …”’

  ‘And you still didn’t call him … He gives you a cool nickname and you go and betray him!’ Estela taunts El Chorrito, who flies into a rage: ‘He gave me a cool nickname? … Gave me … Don’t fucking make me laugh, and anyway, I didn’t betray anyone! Stop trying to wind me up … How do you expect me …?’ The captain trails off, recognising that it is dangerous for him to broach this subject. I always say more than I should, thinks the captain and, in an attempt to divert attention, says the first thing that comes into his head: ‘You’d be better off telling me how many women we’re carrying … I need to know before we get to La Cañada!’

  ‘I don’t know exactly how many there are,’ Estela says. ‘There were about sixty of them back in the clearing … He took about twenty of them … We should have about fifty.’ ‘Fifty?’ says the captain, while IhearonlywhatIwant shifts up a gear and takes a bend that runs perilously close to the cliff. ‘That’s what I said … Approximately fifty … Minus the ones my men have already finished off. Their dicks always get the better of them.’

  They said it would go easier if we cooperated … that was lies … they never stopped … until one of the women couldn’t take any more … she’s fucking hot they said and they took her from both ends … she was on her period but they didn’t care … they all raped her … afterwards she couldn’t stand … the bitch is dead, one of them said and they left.

  ‘I’m serious, I need to know … I can’t tell them: “We’ve got fifty, more or less,”’ El Chorrito says, looking at Estela, who continues to accelerate. ‘If you need to know so badly, you can count them … when we get to El Paraíso … but right now, just shut the fuck up.’ ‘I thought we were going straight to La Cañada,’ the captain says. ‘Now you’re telling me I’m going to waste a whole day.’ He is about to continue when Estela interrupts: ‘We go where I say we go! And we’re going to El Paraíso whether you like it or not!

  ‘That’s where we’re headed, and when we get there we’re going to make like everything is wonderful … like we’ve been dying to get back there,’ says Estela, speaking not so much to the captain as to herself. When finally she trails off again, the silence that falls in the huge truck seems barbed and filled with echoes.

  And like all silences that bristle with what has just been said, the silence in the Ford Lobo is pregnant with what is about to be said: with no choice but to listen to each other, Estela and the captain open their mouths, activate their tongues and talk over each other: ‘I can’t be away from we’ll eat and I’ll call Epita my checkpoint all day and all nightsome shut-eye even for a few hours don’t even know I’ve gone while we can they find out they can court martand it’s n
ot so dangerous to be out!’

  ‘Shut up, I’m trying to talk,’ screams Estela, slapping the steering wheel of the huge truck. ‘Besides, you do what I fucking tell you … What do I care if they court martial you and lock you up? … What the fuck do I care if they kill you? … You should have called him … You shouldn’t have double-crossed us … How could you betray Epitafio?’ ‘I already told you, I didn’t betray anyone,’ the captain tries to say, but Estela interrupts: ‘I said shut the fuck up … I don’t want to hear you!’

  Silence falls again, gouging out the time in the Ford Lobo while IhearonlywhatIwant shifts the truck and her mind into neutral: the convoy she is leading begins its descent just as, in her mind, she begins another descent; Estela slips into the memories of the years she spent living in El Paraíso, while her Fordo Lobo and the two battered pickup trucks coast down the slopes towards the hanging valley and El Paraíso.

  Estela cannot help it, the memories of the days long since gone resurface, clearer than the things she can see before her: two eddies of dust whipped up by the wind, a distant coyote loping across the horizon, the acacia bushes that line both sides of the ravine are superimposed by the wooden door that kept her locked in her room, by the bed where she spent years tossing and turning, unable to sleep, by the window she spent hours peering through so she could escape her present.

  What is it about El Paraíso that makes me so suspicious? … Why have they turned their backs on us? Estela wonders, as memories of this place where she first saw the man she now adores come flooding back, and as she snakes down the mountain road, the rocks lining this stretch of road are superimposed by the rocks where she and Epitafio used to hide, while the towering cacti dotting the landscape are overlaid with the memory of the cactus where they once left messages for each other.

  Meanwhile, as the trucks hurtle down the sierra, led by a woman who will remain lost in her memories for some time yet — rather than the track the Ford Lobo is following, Estela sees the sandy patch of ground where once she played with Epitafio, Osaria, Ausencia, Hipogeo, Sepelio and Cementaria — the bodies of the nameless whose souls were betrayed by the deaf God they called upon when they realised they were doomed are tossed about.

  I pleaded with God for help … begged Him not to allow this to happen to us … I prayed and they laughed … then they dragged me outside and tossed me in the mud … keep praying, they said, see what happens … and I lay there … in the darkness and the smell of putrefaction … now I dream of that stench … now I no longer pray.

  When finally the jolting stops, the oldest of all those who have come from afar finds himself lying face up, staring at a tiny hole in the canvas that is his tarpaulin shroud. For the first time this morning, the oldest of the men and women who have come from other lands might see a patch of sky, if he chose to. But rather than look at this, the old man thinks of the little girl he was tasked with looking after and weeps bitterly that she is no longer by his side.

  Meanwhile, the little girl no longer with the old man, the girl with the oversized head and the mouth that does not close, is being dragged, insulted and beaten in the courtyard of El Teronaque by those loyal to Epitafio. Hurrying across the tezontle and urging his giant faster, the chatter of a magpie transports Epitafio — as always when surprised by a magpie — to the courtyard of the house in which he was born, a house that seemed happy for many years, those years when he and his brothers did nothing but play beneath the boundless sky.

  Then, one day like any other, the years of confinement began: Epitafio and his brothers were allowed out only for a brief period every day. Later still, for only a brief period every three or four days, and only accompanied by their father or their mother.

  In the end, the boys were never allowed out of the house, something was lurking, though Epitafio never understood what it might be. Epitafio, this man who right now wants nothing more than to go and rest in this building that was once a slaughterhouse and this is why he is urging Mausoleo across the blood-red rocks.

  VII

  ‘I don’t want you trembling when we get inside … is that clear? … You have to walk in there like you own the place,’ Epitafio orders the giant and, as he does so, thinks about the days he himself spent imprisoned: when he and his brothers could no longer leave the house, when his mother spent her life in bed, when, day and night, his father could not tear himself away from the windows: ‘They’ll come today, I know it.’

  Shaking his head, Epitafio tries to drive away this memory and once more says to Mausoleo: ‘You have to walk in like you own the place … In there, you have to look strong. You have to act like they —’ interrupted by the bleep of his phone Epitafio breaks off: WTF DO I CARE THAT HE 1 A MEDELL!!! reads the message that sets Epitafio roaring with laughter.

  A startled magpie answers Epitafio with a loud cackle and he is once again transported to the courtyard where he spent his childhood: it had been filled with magpies just like this one on the morning when the men his father had so often warned about finally arrived. The morning when Thunderhead and his brothers pressed their terror to the windows, while their mother sobbed in her bed, and their father screamed and argued in the courtyard.

  Shaking his head again, Epitafio once more dispels the memory of the day when his family ceased to be a family. He quickens his pace, pockets his telephone, and comes back to the present time and place. And to what he was saying: ‘If they see you trembling I won’t lift a finger to save you … I can’t fail them … Stop that trembling or I’ll stop … I’ll take away your luck!

  ‘That’s it … make sure your body doesn’t quiver … I don’t want to go in there and have you break down … What we did out here was just the start!’ Thunderhead says as they reach the building in which they have just locked the shadows and the mute whose very souls have been ripped from them. Then, blocking his thoughts from drifting back to the months of his own imprisonment, Epitafio strokes his pocket and fills the void in his mind: What did I do to you today to make you so angry? … Why the fuck are you sending me these messages?

  A few metres from the rickety edifice that overlooks El Teronaque, Epitafio stops his giant, turns to Sepelio, who has been waiting for them, and gives the same order he gave earlier: ‘Get moving, take that ramp back where it belongs!’ Thunderhead squeezes Mausoleo’s arm and reiterates: ‘I don’t want you missing a single detail … You’ll be expected to do the same thing many a time.’

  In the doorway, where the eyes and the ears of the giant leave his body open to a hundred stab wounds, Epitafio once again wonders what he could have done to annoy Estela, and can calm himself by deluding himself: It must be something to do with Cementeria … You’re upset because of what the stupid chica did and, as usual, I get the brunt of it. Meanwhile, inside the slaughterhouse, the men obedient to Thunderhead continue to terrorise the men and women who have come from other lands.

  You’re upset and you’re taking it out on me … Bloody Cementeria … Why the fuck did you have to do that … and why did you throw yourself into the road? Epitafio silently accuses, not realising that the giant next to him has begun to totter: the daggers planted in his body a moment ago and ripping through his entrails. Why again? thinks Mausoleo, tensing his jaw, half-closing his eyes and longing to clap his hands over his ears.

  They put us in a building that reeked of something dead … They beat us again, they burned us … ‘Kill the first one that moves’ … They asked for our phone numbers, our families’ phone numbers … They demanded ten thousand dollars … They laughed at them, at us … It was just talk … They knew they would get nothing.

  As the creatures who crossed the border howl, Epitafio’s men smile and chat about a football match that took place some time ago to block what they are doing from entering their minds. ‘Hey, what d’you think, jefe?’ comes a voice, and talk of football banishes Estela from the mind of Epitafio, who snaps irritably: ‘Fucking bastards … We were
robbed … No fucking way that was a penalty.’

  But just before he loses himself in the match his men are reminiscing about, Epitafio feels a sharp tug and turns his face to Mausoleo: the daggers that entered his body through his eyes, now tightly closed, and the ears over which he has finally clamped his hands, force the giant to take two steps back.

  ‘What the fuck? Where do you think you are? Don’t block your ears … Open your eyes this minute!’ Epitafio roars angrily, but the big guy is not listening: the pain of the creatures who came from other lands shakes him, turns every muscle in his body to jelly. ‘Jesus fuck!’ Epitafio screams, but Mausoleo retreats another two steps, staggers, falls to his knees and, without opening his eyes or taking his hands from his ears, vomits.

  Hearing the gale of laughter from his men, Epitafio steps towards the giant, grabs him by the hair, shakes him violently, kicks him in the ribs: ‘Stop that now, I’m not fucking kidding … I warned you about this shit!’ It is fear rather than the pain of the blows that forces Mausoleo to open his eyes, uncover his ears and once again turn his attention to Epitafio, who bellows: ‘Stop that, and clean up that mess!’ Then, turning to his men, he says in a hoarse voice, ‘And you lot can shut the fuck up … Who said you could laugh?

  ‘Shift your arse, do what I told you … clean up your mess!’ Epitafio says again, still shaking the giant, who wants to do just that, but cannot tear his eyes from the vomit in front of his face: he can feel them, the stares of the men clutching their weapons and the eyes of those creatures who, like him, have been walking for many days, they are heavy as lead weights on the back of his neck.

  Just then, in the sepulchral silence that has gathered around him, Mausoleo feels the barrel of a gun press against his collar bone and hears the man taking aim at his existence ask Epitafio: ‘So, should we toss him in with the rest of them?’ ‘You watch, he’ll get up!’ says Thunderhead, pushing the gun away from the giant: ‘Get to your feet, I don’t want to see you shot … I don’t want to take your luck from you … Get up and prove to them you can stand on your own two feet!’