Among the Lost

by Emiliano Monge

  To me, the burn is nothing but smoke … and like smoke … melts away to reveal what it hides … Melt away and let this taste show me what is to come … That’s it … That’s right … I can see what lies ahead … You will return whence you have come … You will be happy once more!

  In the back of the blood-red pickup, these words, like those of a shaman, fall to the ground as the old man stumbles and falls again, echoing between the bodies of those who have lost their balance and rolling around unheard: the driver has just slammed on the brakes, having seen Estela’s Ford Lobo come to a sudden halt; Estela, who a moment earlier heard her phone beep and played the message Epitafio left for her some time ago.

  IX

  As she listens again to the voicemail that Epitafio left her before setting off from El Teronaque: ‘Fucking mountains … just my fucking luck … shit!’, Estela brakes sharply, throws open the door of the trailer truck and gets down, feeling more nervous than ever: she must be able to get a signal in this part of the fucking sierra.

  If I got his message, he will probably have got mine, ShewhoadoresEpitafio thinks as she strides off, emerging from the past in which she was wandering, lost, and deciding not to carry on driving: We’re not leaving here until I’ve answered you.

  I don’t want you thinking I don’t want to call, Estela thinks, hurrying through the thick clouds of dust produced when the convoy screeched to a halt: she does not know, cannot imagine, that the message she has just heard was recorded by Epitafio hours ago.

  ‘Don’t get out …! We’ll carry on to La Carpa as soon as I’m done here!’ ShewhoadoresEpitafio shouts from the dust storm that, in the headlights of the battered trucks, looks almost like a living creature. ‘And don’t turn off your engines!’ Estela calls, forcing her legs to move faster as she silently repeats: It has to be possible to get a signal around here somewhere.

  But the drivers had already cut the engines of the two battered pickup trucks by the time their boss shouted to them, and so the convoy is shrouded by a dense, deep silence. ‘Why did you turn off the engines? Didn’t you hear what I said?’ Estela roars as she scrabbles away, but the men she is leading can no longer hear her: she is now so far away they can barely make her out in the shadowy darkness.

  I guess it’s my turn to call you … You’ve already given up … I knew it … I knew you wouldn’t stick it out! ShewhoadoresEpitafio with a smile and a flicker of exasperation hurries along the path in the torchlight from the phone she is holding: You’ve got your tail between your legs! Then, turning back into the darkness, Estela yells, more mechanical than serious: ‘Even from this distance I can hear that I can’t hear those engines!

  ‘Start them up again or I’ll show you what’s what,’ ShewhoadoresEpitafio orders and, acknowledging to herself that she no longer cares whether her men are listening, she turns back towards the sea of shadows that swathes everything: I’m going to call you just to hear you say: I shouldn’t have hung up on you … To hear you beg me: Don’t be angry.

  And then I’ll tell you what’s going on … Tell you what that fucking priest has been up to, Estela thinks as her feet carry her to the place where La Caída plummets, and away from the location of the men who act upon her orders and, where, in the back of the pale-blue pickup, the women whose souls know only suffering once more give voice to their fears, under the guise of wishes.

  ‘Perhaps they won’t come back,’ a woman would say each time they raped us … ‘This surely was the last … I think they will not come again … Let them leave us lying here … We cannot hear them … We will leave here alone … searching for someone to help us … Perhaps we are close to some road … Who knows, perhaps help is at hand.’

  Meanwhile, in the blood-red pickup, the nameless are still gathered in a circle around Merolico and still listening to the promises of the old man, who is currently addressing a man whose palm is crisscrossed by a sea of scars.

  You will soon forget this time … forget the days that were evil days … Happiness will bury the sadness of these years … Well-being will bury the ill-being that is coming to a close … You will find a good job … You will find the woman you have longed to meet … Your dreams will be fulfilled … and you will fulfil your promises.

  How can you not call me back when you’d hung up on me so rudely? Estela is thinking as she moves deeper and deeper into the ocean of shadows that the sierra winds once again set quivering: How could you not call when I’d told you I have something important to tell you? … How could you? … How can I? … Why am I thinking like this? … Why do I still think that I’ve won, just because you called?

  What does it matter whether I won or you won? … Fucking hell … all that matters is what matters … That Father-fucking-Nicho has shafted us! Estela thinks, shaking her head and hurrying towards the lip of La Caída: There we were, you and me, worried that he might think we were betraying him! Where Estela is standing, the wind from the mountaintops and the wind rising from La Caída meet and mingle in a shriek of squalls.

  ‘There we were, you and me, still thinking we had to do things secretly so he didn’t catch on … so he didn’t realise that one day we were going to abandon him,’ Estela thinks, talking to herself now in a low voice, because the roaring winds dancing before her eyes have set her head spinning and deafened her: ‘So you see, you should have listened to me from the very beginning!

  ‘You should have made up your mind long ago … Fucking hell … How many times did I beg you to have done with him … to come with me and disappear without a word!’ ShewhoadoresEpitafio shouts, standing two feet from the brink of La Caída, then, shouting at the top of her lungs, she adds: ‘But you wouldn’t do it, and now he’s betrayed you!’ The winds from mountain and plain continue melding their twin furies, they are blustering faster just as the fake armoured truck deep in the ravine of La Caída is moving faster, and their twin roars give birth to a new howl.

  ‘That bastard has played us!’ Estela says, standing on the edge of La Caída, and, looking down at her phone, she discovers she has finally got a signal. Frantically, ShewhoadoresEpitafio dials the number she knows by heart: I’d love to see your face fall when you hear what he did to me … when you hear what happened in La Cañada and realise that he has probably laid a trap for you, too!

  But the only face to fall is that of Estela as she hears the same voice Epitafio heard some hours ago: The number you have dialled is currently switched off or is out of signal range. After a couple more vain attempts, driven by the same fury Epitafio experienced when he reviled the world in the courtyard of El Teronaque, in the toilet at his house and in the cab of the Minos, Estela screams: ‘Fuck! … I need to warn you right now!’

  But her scream is drowned out by the whistling winds and, as she lets herself fall on to the stone slabs that cover the ground, ShewhoadoresEpitafio lets her past fall and crush her: the last trace that the present inflicts on her is the stench of a corpse rotting somewhere nearby. But all too quickly even this stench does not matter: Estela is lying next to Epitafio on the first day she woke up in that bed.

  What we had to do to keep it from him! Estela remembers and this is all that she remembers: waking with a start, having to hide, and later creep out through the window. Hijo de puta! All the time I had to creep out! ShewhoadoresEpitafio thinks and, closing her eyes and smiling, she pictures herself as a girl in the orphanage of El Paraíso. Then she recalls Epitafio as a boy and her smile fades: I have to tell you what’s going on with me … If I’d told you earlier, it might not even be happening … We might already have ditched that bastard Father Nicho!

  Why didn’t I say anything? … Why have I waited so long? … ‘I can’t leave here without telling you what’s going on,’ Estela says again, and though she does not open her eyes, she grips the phone in her hand more tightly: Why am I afraid to say what I have to say? Why am I so afraid of what you have to say to me … of what you will do to me �
�� of what others might do to us … and just as afraid that you might do nothing … that no one will do anything? ShewhoadoresEpitafio thinks, allowing her cocaine-addled mind to wander: What if there’s nothing going on? … What if he is not thinking of betraying us … if we’re not in danger?

  ‘What if I’m imagining all this … if it’s just an excuse for not talking to you? … What if I believe it simply because I’m more afraid of telling you the truth … afraid that even then you won’t want to give up everything?’ Estela says, as on her closed eyelids an image forms of Epitafio, who even now is driving the Minos ever faster, picturing the woman he so loves listening to the message he believes he left on her voicemail before setting off from his house: a new life together … a life that would be theirs alone.

  Meanwhile, in La Caída, the winds are buffeting harder, shaking the antennae of Estela’s hearing aids as she reluctantly opens her eyes. All this fucking noise! ShewhoadoresEpitafio complains bitterly, and angrily brings her hands to her ears and rips out the two tiny implants. Plunged into a sudden, self-imposed silence, Estela closes her eyes again, and once again diverges from the time and place in which she finds herself: What if there’s nothing going on, nothing but my own fears?

  Why can’t I talk to you about what we’re feeling? … Why the hell am I so scared that even then you won’t give it all up? ShewhoadoresEpitafio says over and over in the solid, compacted stillness that enfolds her: all of a sudden there is no world, no time, only the doubts in which Estela cloaks herself; there is no other place, no other moment but those in which she has shut herself and from which she will not emerge until the universe has exploded; then, suddenly, flashes of fire and gunpowder set the darkness blazing.

  For Estela, in this moment, the mountains and the men do not exist, nor the soulless creatures, nor La Caída, where she finds herself and up whose steep slope the van that only seems to be an armoured truck is moving. The fake security van in which sit the captain and the lieutenant who govern the Madre Buena plateau; these two men who, a moment earlier, picked up the thread of the conversation they abandoned at the gates of El Infierno.

  ‘Where did we leave off?’

  ‘The part about what he did to his son … His son and his son’s son.’

  ‘That’s right … the grandson of El Gringo,’ El Tampón says, nodding. ‘Crazy fucking pervert … to do something like that to your own son.’

  ‘What? What did he do for fuck’s sake? … Stop beating around the bush.’

  ‘I’m afraid you won’t believe it …’ El Tampón’s head is still, ‘although, thinking about it, he didn’t actually do it to his son … at least not exactly.’

  ‘What the fuck are you saying?’

  ‘I’m saying the boy was dead … He was dead when he did what he did,’ El Tampón says, opening the ice box.

  ‘Pass me one.’

  ‘So he did it to his corpse … but he must have thought about it when the boy was still alive,’ El Tampón explains, ‘so I suppose he did do it to his son.’

  ‘Where’s my beer?’

  ‘This is the last one,’ El Tampón says, slamming the lid of the box and returning to the subject, continues: ‘People say the idea first occurred to him when the boy was sick … some people are twisted.’

  ‘Just tell me what he did.’

  ‘And they say that he talked about it with a guy who had stuffed and mounted his pets,’ El Tampon goes on, rolling down his window. ‘Used threats to make him do the work … forced him to measure his son while he was still sick in bed.’

  ‘Are you serious?’

  ‘He arranged for a clock tower to be built and set in the gardens facing the house … He had everything ready for the moment when the boy finally died.’

  ‘Did you see that light?’ El Topo interrupts, pointing to the upper slopes of La Caída.

  ‘What light?’ El Tampón says, leaning forward and staring up. ‘I don’t see a light … You’re just trying to shut me up … You don’t want me to tell you the rest of the story.’

  ‘Of course I do … I just thought … It was probably nothing,’ El Topo hesitates and accelerates faster. ‘Forget it … What was this clock you were talking about?’

  ‘By the time his son died, it was finished … They set it in the garden, the clock tower where he later put the child … They didn’t even allow his mother to sit vigil for him … They dissected him while his body was still warm and carried him up to the top of the tower.’

  ‘This is bullshit!’

  ‘I’m telling you the truth … The fucking lunatic put his stuffed and mounted child inside this clock, which tolled only once a day at the hour of his death,’ El Tampón says, then trails off, leans forwards and says: ‘I saw it … I just saw something up there.’

  ‘I told you so!’ El Tampón snaps, stopping the former municipal garbage truck and, forgetting the story El Topo has been telling, says: ‘Better if we continue on foot.’

  Illuminating the ground with the beam from his flashlight, El Tampón throws open the rear doors of the former municipal garbage truck and the six soldiers nervously jump down. But before they can start to complain, the man who just opened the doors raises a hand and, turning the beam towards the space before them, barks: ‘I don’t want any of you opening your mouths … We don’t know when there might be someone nearby!’

  ‘And you, point that flashlight down!’ El Topo snaps angrily, and, punching El Tampón in the arm, adds: ‘You’re the one who’s going to get us killed! Let me be very clear … there are to be no lights shining in that direction,’ El Topo jerks his chin towards the headlights of the Ford Lobo and the battered pickups in the distance, so far away they are scarcely bigger than six quivering sparks. Then, looking down, El Topo sets off walking, shielding himself from the wind buffeting the landscape and unsettling the men clutching their weapons and the nameless creatures in the pickups high up in the sierra, but not ShewhoadoresEpitafio, who is still lost in her own mind.

  ‘We’re going to take this path, but we won’t be using flashlights … OK? … I don’t want anyone turning on a torch,’ El Topo says, looking over his shoulder, and urges the soldiers. ‘You heard him … no talking … no stopping … and no flashlights,’ El Tampón says, glancing up at the sky: the Milky Way is so dense it could be mistaken for the shadow of a cloud.

  ‘No slacking … I don’t want anyone falling behind!’ El Topo says, striding ahead and, looking over his shoulder again, sees beyond the six soldiers the first sliver of the moon. ‘Shift your arses, the moon is rising and those fuckers might see us,’ El Topo barks as El Tampón turns his head and, seeing the silvery gleam, backs him up: ‘First one to fall behind will feel my boot up his arse!’

  Meanwhile, inside the cabs of the pickup trucks, the drivers are also staring at the bright circle rising over the mountain peaks. But though she is sitting facing La Caída, Estela does not notice the bright herald burning in the far-flung reaches of the sky: in this moment, the only horizon that exists for her is the one conjured by her memory, the horizon she is gazing at from the rooftop of El Paraíso as she leans against Epitafio: she is still on her inner journey.

  ‘We said no stopping!’ El Topo snarls after a while and, turning to his men, is about to chivvy them along when El Tampón interrupts: ‘We don’t know how long they’re going to be there.’ ‘And if they drive off, you’re the ones who’ll pay!’ El Topo adds, cheering his men and watching as the rising moon floods the plain with light. This same moon that, to Epitafio, Mausoleo and Sepelio as they drive along, is barely a faint glow and, far off in Tonée, where the boys of the jungle are in the churchyard, haggling, cannot be seen for the approaching storm.

  Thirty or forty metres farther on, as the eight men who come from Lago Seco scale a rocky outcrop, an unexpected sound brings them to a shuddering halt: somewhere in La Caída, one of the walls patiently fashioned by mi
llennia cracks, causing the thunderous rockslide. The echoing rumble of the rocks, now dislodging other stones, also reaches the convoy, alarming the men clutching their weapons, the soulless ones whose bodies have recently recovered the will to live and the nameless one who are still listening to Merolico.

  ‘They’ve finally left us in peace …’ the woman said over and over … ‘They won’t come for us again … Perhaps we have made it …,’ the old woman said again and again … then she said: ‘Free, though some of us were raped … Free to take to the road again … to move forward.’

  Love and passion lie ahead for you … A tall, blonde man is waiting … Tall and strong, his hair fair as gold … Your lifeline extends for many, many years … A long life awaits you … rich and filled with happiness … Your palm cannot lie to me … You will come through this safe and sound.

  For her part, despite the intensity with which the echo of the rockslide rolls through the mountains, Estela does not hear the discordant concert or feel the tremor that accompanies it: the wall she has built between herself and the planet is impregnable, ever since she removed her hearing aids she is holding in her hand. Right now, ShewhoadoresEpitafio can hear only the voice of the man scrabbling to his feet on the roof of the orphanage and challenging her: Let’s see who can get to the rocks first.

  The rocks where Estela and Epitafio so often hid, that vast fossil hand within whose bone-white palm she struggled to contain her panting breath the first time she opened her body to him: How the hell am I going to tell you that that bastard has rumbled us? … How, now that I am carrying the one you do not want to see born? ShewhoadoresEpitafio wonders, oblivious to the new earthquake just beginning: How can I, when I’ve heard you say a thousand times that the world doesn’t need more babies?

  The eight men who left the Madre Buena plateau and who, now, having crept a hundred metres closer to the convoy Estela led to this place, come to a halt as El Topo calls: ‘Stop, right now!’ Then, when the roar of the second tremor has faded to the faint rumble of rocks disturbing the void, El Topo approaches the lone tree he can find and, beckoning El Tampón, commands the six squaddies: ‘Don’t move from that spot … We’re going on ahead for a bit.’