Among the Lost

by Emiliano Monge

  ‘We need to cross here,’ El Tampón suggests as he reaches the branch on which El Topo is sitting and, pointing to the space, adds: ‘Duck through those clefts there … Appear from nowhere, all guns blazing.’ ‘I agree,’ El Topo nods, scanning the vast space that opens up before his eyes, which have long since adjusted to the darkness: ‘Unless … unless they’ve already spotted us and are planning an ambush.’

  ‘You think they’re lying in wait for us?’ El Tampón says, surveying the ocean of rocks lit by the blue metallic glow of the moon: ‘You really think that’s possible?’ he prompts when he gets no response, and it is at this point that he, too, founders in his fears, the same fears that held El Topo’s tongue a moment earlier, but not those that have silenced Estela for some time now. Estela, this woman who, still buried in her memories, is stepping into the basement of El Paraíso and once again burning Epitafio’s skin with Father Nicho’s branding iron: I hope you will forgive me … that you will tell me what you did that day. Nothing you can say now will make me love you less.

  Above the spot where Estela is sitting, a muster of storks crosses the sky in a noisy display of bill-clattering, and are disappointed not to have caught the attention of ShewhoadoresEpitafio. And so, seeking others to impress, the flock comes to the place where those who came from Lago Seco are stationed, where their clatter attracts the attention of the eight men; looking up, El Topo breaks his silence and says: ‘We might think that they haven’t seen us, but we’re not going to go through the clefts in the rocks … just in case they did see us … because if they did see us they’ll be waiting.

  ‘We’ll have to skirt the cleft and go up that way,’ El Topo adds a moment later, only to for El Tampón to interrupt: ‘Come from behind and take them by surprise … They won’t know what’s hit them.’ ‘Exactly, attack them from behind,’ El Topo agrees and, as he hops down from the branch on which he was sitting and comes back to earth, he gazes at the storks as they disappear forever into the distance.

  When El Topo and El Tampón have explained their plan to the six soldiers under their command, the eight men who left the Madre Buena plateau set off at a run between the rocks frozen by the moonlight. I hope those fuckers don’t hear, plead the six soldiers as their hearts beat faster in their chests and their palms are desiccated by fear, while El Topo continues to consider the plan devised back at the tree and El Tampón, in the back of his mind, begins to have misgivings about the plan.

  Why do we always have to do things his way? El Tampón thinks as he runs after El Topo, who is also having doubts: Maybe I should have divided these bastards into units. The same bastards who are still silently pleading: I hope they don’t hear anything. The six soldiers cannot imagine that, in the convoy where their paths converge, sleep has vanquished, one by one, the men loyal to Estela. The woman who only a moment ago left the basement in which she found herself.

  In Epitafio’s room, Estela tends to the blisters that will become a triangle of dots on this man she adores and hears again the words he said to her that day: You could never do anything that would make me stop loving you … nothing that happens can ever break us apart. Why have I still not told you? Estela wonders, feeling her heart beat faster in her chest. What does it matter how I say it? Nothing can separate us … You said it to me, and you meant it … and maybe everything will work out … Maybe this will convince you to finally give it up, ShewhoadoresEpitafio thinks and, turning, leaves the bedroom and, quickening her pace, heads towards the stairwell of El Paraíso.

  Quickening their pace is also what is preoccupying the eight men who left Madre Buena plateau: ‘We need to jump across the clefts,’ El Topo explains, pointing into the distance, ‘then take that path and see where it leads’ … But before his words have trailed off, El Tampón interrupts him again: ‘I’m not sure it’s a good idea to go the long way round … Maybe it would be better just to go as far as the river, like we planned.’

  ‘Shut you mouth and stop making everyone nervous … Have you seen the state of these guys?’ El Topo hisses angrily and, turning towards El Tampón, adds: ‘You and I agreed on a plan, this is not the time to have doubts … You’d do better to hurry it up or we’ll leave you behind.’ Swallowing his rage, El Tampón forces his legs to move faster as he thinks: I don’t like the way you get to do all the talking … that you never listen to what I have to say.

  As the eight hotheads leave behind the rocks, leaping across the fissures, they come to a region where the earth is alive — brushwood grows like veins between the stones, cacti swell like blisters or rise like spectral presences. ‘If everyone is ready,’ El Topo says, ‘the river should be just down there!’

  Increasingly wary, the eight men hired by Sepelio and Father Nicho skirt a thicket of acacia bushes and arrive at the river, which is barely a hundred metres from the convoy that has followed Estela to La Caída, and climb down into the dry riverbed. Just then, as the boots of those who have come from Lago Seco wake clouds of the sleeping dust, the wind from the sierra begins to whip up again. El Tampón and El Topo advance, shielding their eyes with their forearms.

  For their part, neither the nameless, nor the men loyal to Estela, nor those who left El Paraíso a moment earlier, notice that the wind is once again raging. Leaving behind her past, Estela is now lost in her future: You’ll finally have the courage to give all this up … We’ll go to La Carpa … We’ll live far away from these things, these people.

  All I have to do is call you and tell you that I’m pregnant, Estela thinks, standing on the threshold of the house that they will one day build, where she will live with Epitafio: but before she can leave behind this future and call the man she so loves, she finds herself beguiled by hope, which grabs her arm, just as El Topo is grabbing El Tampón’s arm at that same moment, and draws her deeper into herself and leaves her wandering through the rooms of this make-believe house.

  Shaking his arm brusquely to free his elbow from the grip of El Tampón, who a moment ago said, ‘Stop, hold on a minute!’ El Topo stops in his tracks: ‘What the fuck are you doing? Just as we’re … huh … huh … nearly there’ … ‘It might be best … huh … huh … if we split up … If some of them go with you … huh … and the rest follow me … We need a pincer movement,’ El Tampón pants, turning to face the soldiers.

  As he, too, struggles to catch his breath, El Topo stares at El Tampón and says menacingly: ‘Who do you think you are, giving orders? … huh … I decide how this is played out … huh … Yeah, obviously we’re going to do that, but that’s not all … just over there, where those things are sticking out of the ground, we’ll split up into two units.’ ‘Where what things are sticking out of the ground?’ El Tampón interjects, looking at the convoy which is now barely sixty metres away. ‘What the fuck are you talking about?’ But he, in turn, is cut short by El Topo, who has already walked off, ordering the men to follow him.

  Before El Tampón can protest, the soldiers are gone, he can see only their backs, caught up in a frantic race. A frantic race like the one Estela pictures in her future: Epitafio and their children are running around the courtyard next to their house in La Carpa. Whoever comes first gets to name the new puppy, Epitafio announces in Estela’s reverie, just as El Topo announces: ‘We need to leave the riverbed and zigzag through these things.’

  Pushing past the brushwood, the cacti and the acacias in his path, El Tampón catches up with El Topo: ‘Who d’you think huh … huh … d’you think you are … huh … huh … telling me what … huh … huh … what to do? huh … huh … Who said … huh … huh … who said you were the boss?’ Smiling into the darkness, now thirty metres from the convoy, El Topo turns and says: ‘OK then … huh … huh … if that’s how you want it … huh … huh … What do we do now?’

  Resting his hands on his thighs and panting, El Tampón explains: ‘We split up here … huh … and then we split up again … huh … You take those three and you split up again
… huh … over there by those huge cacti … I’ll take these three and we’ll split up, too.’

  But before the group splits up and sets off again at a run, El Tampón whispers to El Topo: ‘Throw a pebble at me when you’re ready!’ Then, just as the two groups go their separate ways, heading towards the convoy that brought Estela to this place, the sierra once again unleashes all its power: the wind howls, stirring up a whirlwind of dust and gravel.

  Shielding themselves against the hail of sand and stones, the soldiers from Lago Seco hunch their bodies, as their leaders wave their arms in a last, silent order: Face down on the ground, we crawl the rest of the way! But, having crawled only a few metres, and though they have nearly reached the convoy, the eight men are forced to stop by the gravel lashing at their faces, their ambush will have to wait until the dust storm has passed.

  This same dust storm is beating against the bodywork pickup trucks and Estela’s Ford Lobo, but the raging fury of the sierra goes unheard by the men inside, who fell asleep some time ago, and by the nameless still singing their hopes or listening to the false hopes invented by Merolico. The dust storm that whips around Estela and almost brings her out of her trance: if it fails, it is because she does not want to leave the future until she has turned it into memory: Don’t open your eyes yet … Don’t go back to the mountains, ShewhoadoresEpitafio tells herself, clinging to the image of her children.

  But although Estela does not want to abandon her future, there are events beyond her control: if the stinging of the storm were not enough, the raging wind and hail of stones steals into her dreams and, before she can stop it, raises another storm inside the house she is imagining. A storm that sweeps Epitafio and her children and then, buffeting her, forces her eyes open: she is finally back in La Caída.

  X

  When the dust storm finally abates, the men from Madre Buena plateau open their eyes, set off at a crawl and come to the place where they are to subdivide again. They have just reached the convoy that followed Estela to this place, where the moon shines like a spotlight underwater.

  ‘You go that way,’ El Tampón whispers, looking at the two soldiers to his left, just as El Topo, on the far side of the trucks, orders: ‘You head that way and don’t stop until you get to the front of the convoy.’ Transformed by the moon into pale shadows, the eight men who left Madre Buena plateau creep to their assigned positions and prepare to launch their ambush.

  A pebble … I need a pebble! El Topo thinks, and, grabbing the first stone that comes to hand, he hesitates: Do I get up or do I try to throw it lying down? What the fuck is taking him so long? El Tampón thinks, and, raising his head, attempts to see the convoy three metres away. The convoy abandoned some time ago by the woman who is now staring out at La Caída, still unsure exactly where she is.

  A moment before Estela finally comes back to earth and to the present moment, El Topo scrabbles to his feet, arches his back, swings his left arm and throws the signal he and El Tampón agreed some time earlier. The gunshots, at first so sparse that someone could count them, quickly become a hail of bullets, a thunderstorm that splits the night and, with its flares and flashes, captures the attention of ShewhoadoresEpitafio.

  ‘What the fuck …?’ Estela screams, as she sees the silent flashes glittering in the distance, and frantically tries to replace the prostheses she earlier ripped from her ears: ‘What the hell is going on? … How the fuck?’

  ‘Rat-tat-tat-tat!’ El Tampón is screaming as the wrath of his semi-automatic and those of his soldiers smites the men still sleeping and slaughters the nameless. ‘Rat-tat-tat-tat!’ he screams over and over as his bullets pierce skin, flesh and entrails, just as what Estela is witnessing from a distance pierces her very soul: How can I? … I knew it … You set this whole thing up, didn’t you, Nicho?

  ‘Fucking bastard,’ ShewhoadoresEpitafio spits, and her body begins to shudder uncontrollably: Where were they hiding? … Jesus! Shit … how can I not have anticipated this? As Estela struggles to reinsert her hearing aids, they slip from her trembling fingers just as El Topo vainly shouts at the top of his lungs: ‘That’s enough!’

  Lying on the flat stones, Estela gropes for the tiny prosthetic devices, while in the distance El Topo roars again: ‘That’s enough! … Did you hear me? I said that’s enough.’ But El Tampón is still shrieking ‘Rat-tat-tat-tat!’ while his bullets and those of his men continue to riddle the Ford Lobo and the two battered pickup trucks.

  ‘I’m ordering you to cease fire!’ El Topo bellows, his anger mounting, but even now he cannot stop the hail of bullets obliterating men and weapons: the only living creature unscathed by the bullets was saved as the bodies of the wounded fell on him and buried him. ‘I said cease fire …! Are you dumb fucks listening?’ El Topo vainly shouts again, just as Estela is vainly searching for her lost prostheses and vainly thinking: Forget about the hearing aids, get the hell out of this place!

  Get up and get away from here before they realise! ShewhoadoresEpitafio is thinking, but now, crushed by the weight of the present, she ignores her thoughts: I can’t just run away … I need to know who these men are. Raising her head and tearing her gaze from the rocks, Estela once again surveys the disaster zone and holds fast: I need to tell Epitafio who did this to us … who these fucking bastards are!

  ‘Bastards,’ ShewhoadoresEpitafio repeats, champing at the word as she watches the men from Lago Seco, whose leader is still shouting: ‘Stop firing or they’ll be no use to us afterwards!’ El Topo yells as the last salvo from his men illuminates the cloud of smoke and dust like lightning in a pitch-black sky.

  As the vascular system feeding the cloud of smoke is finally extinguished and the roaring winds of the sierra are heard once more, Estela decides that she needs to get closer to find out who was responsible for the ambush; and, abandoning her prostheses, she crawls towards the catastrophe where El Tampón is standing, smiling, and El Topo is ranting: ‘Look what you’ve done … bunch of fucking morons! How are we supposed to pay the two old men? … Where’s the cargo we were going to give them back at El Infierno?’ El Topo waves away the billows of smoke that the wind has begun to disperse.

  Then, when the wind has swept away the smoke, the moon’s radiance illuminates the scene: the same radiance that, in Tonée, marks the departure of the sons of the jungle and of the men and women who, from henceforth, will follow them, the same glow that lights the path of Epitafio, the man whom Estela is thinking about as she warily approaches the disaster zone.

  I need to know who they are … to make sure, then I can leave, Estela silently says to herself, fearfully moving forward and staring at the shadowy figures moving around the wreck of her Ford Lobo and the two battered pickup trucks. Just a little closer and I’ll be able to see them, ShewhoadoresEpitafio thinks, crawling a few metres more; then, as she recognises one of the men who left Lago Seco, she feels that her chest will explode: fucking bastard!

  Son of a bitch! Estela silently curses, feeling her stomach clench as she wriggles along the ground. El Topo, you fucking traitor, ShewhoadoresEpitafio mutters, creeping faster, and the twinge in her belly becomes a spasm as she thinks: If you’re caught up in this shit, then Sepelio is in it up to his neck … that bastard Sepelio … How could you do this to me? … How could you do this to Epitafio?

  Epitafio … you’re in danger, too … They won’t have set a trap just for me … I have to call you as soon as possible, Estela thinks, and though every fibre of her being warns her not to, she gets to her feet and flees the scene. ‘Epitafio … Jesus fuck … Epitafio,’ Estela intones the words, over and over like a psalm, forcing her legs and her tongue to work faster, and, calling to mind the deep voice of the man she adores, she remembers her missing hearing aids: only then does she realise that she cannot hear anything.

  And since she cannot hear anything, ShewhoadoresEpitafio does not hear the sound or the echo of El Topo’s voice barking orders to his men:
‘Check and see the engines are still working.’ And since she cannot hear anything, she does not hear El Tampón’s words: ‘There’s no one in the Ford Lobo … Estela’s body isn’t here … All of you, go look for her right now … We can’t let her get away!

  ‘We can’t let her escape!’ El Tampón insists, drawing level with El Topo and, seeing his face distorted with blind fury, adds: ‘How could this happen? … Why isn’t Estela’s body there?’ But before El Topo manages to reply, they hear the voices of the soldiers: ‘Estela’s not in the pickup trucks … She’s not here!’

  Because Estela is still running, and would carry on running for a long time yet were it not that she has just tripped and fallen on the edge of La Caída. Having been thrown almost three metres, ShewhoadoresEpitafio crashes between two rocks, which, though they leave her injured, manage to hide her and save her from death, though not from the unconsciousness into which she is now sinking, taking with her her fears and the fate of Epitafio, the man who is shifting gears as he says to Mausoleo and Sepelio: ‘Make sure you’re ready, we’ll be stopping soon,’ as he thinks of the creatures he is transporting in the container, and the sons of the jungle.

  The sons of the jungle, followed by the men and women who crossed the border a few hours since, have just left Tonée behind and are moving into the jungle, thinking about Epitafio, who right now is snorting two lines of coke, as the woman he so loves did earlier, and thinking about Estela, the woman who, now that all ties with consciousness have been broken, does not know that a moment ago a search party set out to find her, nor that the search was quickly cut short.