Among the Lost

by Emiliano Monge

  ‘I will be you in a while … by the end of the day I will be who you have been,’ Mausoleo says, his voice feeble and faltering, then, reaching out his left hand, he grabs the belt that Sepelio is proffering.

  ‘You’re going to be me later … Are you sure?’

  ‘I’m sure … Whatever happens I’ll be who you’ve been until now … who you’ve been to Epitafio,’ the giant’s voice drops even lower. ‘Whether it’s with him or with you, I’ll end up in your position … I’ll take your place.’

  ‘Jesus, who would have thought? … Just look at the dumb fuck … Not so dumb, though, are you?’ Sepelio says and his smile broadens into a laugh, then, leaning on the bumper of the truck, he threatens: ‘If you know that much, you know what you’ve got to do … So don’t fuck up … Don’t pick the wrong side … and don’t fucking say a word to him.’

  ‘I won’t fuck up, you’ll see … I know what I’ve got to do … I’ll make sure you’re happy with me,’ Mausoleo says, bringing a new enthusiasm to his words as he prises the buckle from the belt, thinking: Good … you were right to say something to him … There was nothing else you could do … You had to offer him something, too.

  ‘I’m serious, you better not fuck up … and you better not be playing me … playing that other fucker’s game,’ Sepelio growls, moving away and, wiping his hands, he creeps round the side of the trailer without standing up completely.

  I can’t let him see me … He needs to think I’m still under there, Sepelio thinks as he walks, half-crouched, along the side of the truck, not stopping until he reaches the container, where he straightens his body, but not his legs. Then, taking out his mobile phone, hiking up his trousers, which, without a belt, are about to fall, Sepelio stares out into the darkness and thinks: I should get the hell out of here now … hide in the shadows so I can talk to those clowns … Otherwise he might overhear … and I don’t want him to know what’s going on yet.

  Without stopping to think, clinging to the idea that has just occurred to him, as he does to every idea: pathologically, obsessively, brutally, Sepelio starts to run into the Llano de Silencio, and when he feels that he is totally alone, that he is far enough away from the Minos, he stops, turns his body into the shadows that envelop the earth and looks back at the cloud of steam still hanging in the air: there is not a breath of wind.

  Hiking up his trousers again, Sepelio stares at the illuminated cab of the truck, and the figure of Epitafio, who suddenly senses that someone is watching him, thinks: I don’t want you suspecting anything … I don’t want you to have the slightest intuition … I need to know that when I strike, it will hit home … that everything will go according to plan … the way I’ve always thought it would … I want to see you doubled over … I want to see you crumple when you see her body riddled with bullets.

  Still keeping an eye on the figure of Epitafio — who shifts nervously in his seat and, though he is still wandering through another different plain of silence, pleading with Estela: Why haven’t you talked to me? … Not a single fucking word! is still peering through the windows of the truck for the eyes he can feel upon him — Sepelio thinks: I want everything to work out the way I always planned it … I want you to see her utterly disfigured … I want to end your life only after I have destroyed you … You owe me that … You’ve owed me that and more for a long time now.

  A plane glides over the Llano de Silencio and, since there are no other sounds here, the roar of the turbines startles Sepelio, who shakes his head, smiles at the figure of Epitafio, then tears his eyes away and looks up at the plane and, with a rictus grin, punches in the number of the men from Lago Seco. They better have got her … They better have done what I told them to do, Sepelio thinks as he listens to the ringing tone that only serves to irritate him: You better not have fucked up … You better have done exactly what I said … I want that photo … I want a picture of Estela’s corpse on my phone. Estela, who still lies unconscious back in La Caída as the two soldiers left behind in the sierras search for her on the orders of El Topo and El Tampón.

  El Topo and El Tampón, who, seeing the screen of the phone on the dashboard flashing, burst out laughing and congratulate themselves that they have just spoken to Father Nicho, and, seeing the phone slide off the dashboard and fly out the window of the van, they laugh harder, convinced that they will not have to deal with Sepelio, the angry man now listening to the same voice that tells everyone: The number you have dialled is currently switched off or is out of signal range.

  Believing that they did not hear the phone ring, Sepelio dials the number again: but the chasm that opens up in his left ear leaves him anguished and desperate. Furiously, he hangs up, shaking his head, then slaps his forehead, kicks out at the darkness, only to once more dial the number of the men from Lago Seco, who can no longer hear the telephone chirruping in the grass somewhere on the sprawling plain that separates El Infierno from the site where, years ago, Estela built La Carpa, the compound that El Topo and El Tampón now plan to appropriate: La Carpa, the place where hundreds of migrants work as slaves.

  Meanwhile, freed of the pressure of the eyes he felt upon him, Epitafio allows his own eyes to roam, leans back in his seat and studies the cloud of steam that has still not dissipated, picturing Estela’s face in the misty curves that hover in the air. Spellbound, Hewhoisdeafofmind once more sinks into his private plain of silence: Maybe you haven’t called because you don’t want what I want … If you haven’t called me back, maybe it’s because you don’t want anything … Maybe that is what you wanted to tell me … that you’re tired of wasting your time on me?

  ‘What if that was the important thing you needed to say? … To tell me to fuck off … to say: “I don’t love you … You disgust me … How could I carry on loving you?”’ Epitafio mutters in his plain of silence and, as he does so, his eyes suddenly open and his hands suddenly lash out at the steering wheel, pounding out his rage on the horn in a blare of trumpets that booms around the plain.

  The clamour sets every creature on the Llano de Silencio on the alert; it alarms Mausoleo, who is just about to finish repairing the damaged engine; it startles Sepelio, who furiously grumbles: ‘What the fuck is Epitafio up to now?’ even as he resigns himself to the fact: Those bastards aren’t going to pick up; it shakes the shadowless souls still strung up in the container, their feet still shackled to weights they can no longer feel.

  I left because everyone else had already fled … The old people and the kids … the women and the men … there was nothing left … not even people’s voices … nothing … absolutely nothing … Why are they hammering …? Why have they started up again … They’ll come for someone else … Who will they pick this time?

  After a moment’s hesitation — while Epitafio is still flailing in his fears, while Mausoleo finishes repairing the Minos, while the luckless listen to each other’s song — Sepelio opens his eyes, decides he had better call Father Nicho and, his thumbs flying, he punches the tiny keypad and dials the old man’s number.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Sepelio?’

  ‘I’ve been trying to get through to those two clowns, but they’re not picking up … I’ve called the fuckers a couple of times, but they haven’t answered … Did you hear what I said? Those bastards aren’t taking my calls!’

  ‘Calm down, Sepelio … get a grip on yourself.’

  ‘How do you expect me to calm down? … They’ve let us down … I’m sure they didn’t manage to capture Estela!’ Sepelio protests, trembling with rage. ‘I don’t know what the fuck to do now.’

  ‘Listen to me … this is what you have to do … listen … First off, you need to calm down,’ Father Nicho bellows into the phone. ‘They called me a while ago.’

  ‘A while ago … they called … the two … when exactly?’

  ‘What does it matter? … All that matters is that I’ve spoken to them … They said they tried to
call you, but you didn’t pick up!’ the priest says. ‘What matters is that they said they’ve done the job … that everything went like clockwork.’

  ‘How could I take the call when I had Epitafio breathing down my neck? I’ve only just managed to get away,’ Sepelio explains, his tone calmer. ‘So they said everything went to plan?’

  ‘That’s what they told me … they said they killed her.’

  ‘And they didn’t say whether they’d done as I asked … whether they’d carried out my plan?’

  ‘Who cares? All that matters is that Estela is gone,’ the priest says, then, caressing each word with his tongue, he adds, ‘What matters is that you’re free now.’

  ‘What matters is what matters,’ Sepelio interrupts the priest, who listens in astonishment. ‘Why shouldn’t it be important? … It’s important to me … very important … I want to know exactly how they did it … I want to know if they followed my plans!’

  ‘…’

  ‘Whether they did all the things I have thought about so often … whether they skipped even part of my plan … whether they trashed my ideas … whether those fuckwits even looked for her corpse … or found it, but didn’t take a photo … the photo that I insisted …’

  ‘Shut up for one fucking second,’ Father Nicho roared, interrupting Sepelio. ‘I have the photo right here … They sent me the bloody photo … If you hang up now, I’ll send it to you … I don’t want to …’

  ‘Send it now, I’m hanging up.’

  Without another word, Father Nicho rings off and searches for the picture sent to him some hours back — he doesn’t understand why Sepelio wants him to send the photograph — he finds it, attaches it to a brief message that reads: ‘What’s important is that now you can take down Epitafio’; sends the message to Sepelio and then tosses on to his desk this phone he has no desire to use again in a long time.

  When he receives the message sent by Father Nicho, Sepelio opens the attachment, stares at the image before his eyes, grits his teeth, kicks out again at the darkness, sucks in a lungful of air and grumbles: ‘Fuck … I told them I wanted a photo of her on her own … In this picture, you can’t tell if it’s her or not … This is no good to me … He might not believe that the body in the picture is Estela.’

  Then again, why wouldn’t he believe me? Sepelio wonders after a moment, and feels his face relax: You’ve no reason to disbelieve … After all, you’ve no idea what’s been happening … You’re not expecting something like this to happen … You’ll believe me because you can’t believe it … You’ll see her in the photograph, despite it being blurred. Jubilant now that he has convinced himself, Sepelio hitches up his trousers and stares at the Minos, thinking: Today I’ll finally get to see you crushed. He puts away the phone and says to himself: But I’ll do it the way I’ve always planned … First I’m going to drive you insane.

  A few metres from the Minos, Sepelio tears his eyes from Epitafio, who passed from shadow to figure to effigy to face as he approached the truck, then he turns his head to the right and another dark, spectral shadow makes him shudder and sets his heart hammering. Once more a panicked babble spills from his mouth: ‘Fucking bastard, you just scared the shit out of me!’ He cannot know that the urgency of his words will govern the events that follow.

  Laid one above the other, as though someone were laying out a row of slides relating the stories of Epitafio, Estela and the sons of the jungle above another that tells the stories of Sepelio, Mausoleo, Father Nicho and Merolico, the events that now follow will blur the boundaries and put all of them to flight: Sepelio and Mausoleo will climb back into the cab of the Minos, the truck will pull away, eating up the ribbon of road that crosses the Llano de Silencio, and with every metre that flashes past, with every second they share, they will become more nervous, more tense, more agitated and, in the end, will set off for other territories, each once again immersed in his innermost thoughts.

  Then, after a while, having bought and fitted a new drive belt for the Minos, and another six-pack of beer, Hewhoisdeafofmind, Mausoleo and Sepelio will reach Bermajío, each lost amid his deepest fears, each gnawing at his bitterest words: They can’t realise that I’m playing them both, Mausoleo will think for the thousandth time, while Sepelio will clench his jaw and, twisting his face into a rictus, will doubt himself for the hundredth time: What if he doesn’t believe it’s Estela … that she is among the charred, mangled bodies? … I need to be sure he’ll believe me … that everything will go the way I’ve planned … I want to see him ruined … The bastard owes me that … I want to see him founder before I kill the fucker!

  Meanwhile Epitafio, briefly forgetting that he is no longer alone, will growl a litany of complaints that will make Sepelio and Mausoleo laugh against their will: ‘Why would you tell me to fuck off when I’ve just told you I love you?’ And a thousand times Hewhoisdeafofmind will grumble: ‘Shit … Where is this fucking village …? Why aren’t we there yet?’ … though in his mind all he wants is to go to the place where he believes he would find Estela. The same woman who, up in La Caída, suddenly opens her eyes and, petrified, emerges from her oblivion: What the fuck happened?

  III

  What am I doing lying here? Estela wonders as her eyelids flicker open and she raises her head from the stones and makes an inventory of her injuries: she feels a shooting pain in the femur and tibia of one leg, a smarting from two irregular lacerations in her collarbone and neck, six broken ribs are stabbing at her flesh, and her guts are in spasm as though gripped by a hand.

  When did I fall on to the rocks? … How long have I been lying here? Estela wonders, and, heedless of the pain in her back and her hips, she presses her palms against the ground and slowly sits up, bends her knees and struggles to her feet amid the shadows of night. She has lost several things: she no longer has her gun, her flashlight or her telephone, nor, more importantly, the prostheses she needs in order to hear.

  Turning her head, spitting a thick gob of saliva and leaning against the rocks to stop herself from tumbling into the abyss where the shadows are thicker, Theblindwomanofthedesert recognises where she is: to her right the sheer drop of La Caída plummets, before her and behind are rocks that threaten to fall at any moment, to her right is the steep slope of the hill where she was standing when she fell, and where the two soldiers left here by El Topo and El Tampón are still searching for her.

  The same two soldiers who, having vainly scoured this ledge that towers over La Caída stop for a moment, look at each other and give a helpless shrug. ‘How are we going to tell them that we couldn’t find her?’ says the first soldier, but his words meet with no response except the throaty whistle of the wind still whipping through the sierra. ‘Seriously though, what are we supposed to tell them?’ the first soldier says, holding up the telephone in his hands.

  ‘We don’t need to tell them anything yet,’ the second soldier says, walking along the edge of the chasm and then suddenly turning his head as he hears barking in the distance. ‘We need to keep searching … We have to find her, otherwise we’d be better off not calling … not having any contact with them,’ the second soldier says, training the beam of his torch into the depths of the shadows: the barking they can hear is coming from the slope were La Caída plunges towards the plain.

  ‘The slope … we haven’t searched that slope,’ the second soldier says, still peering into the depths of night as he begins to walk. ‘She could be hiding there … I bet that’s where we’ll find her!’ ‘She could just as easily have climbed higher up,’ the first soldier says. ‘Hang on a minute, she might have gone the other way, into the hills opposite La Caída.’ ‘She could have, but I mentioned the slope first,’ the second soldier says and, turning, walks back to the first and takes out a coin: ‘Heads, I go with you up into the hills … tails, you come with me down the slope!’

  Catching the coin in mid-air, the second soldier claps it between his hand
s, and, as the clapping sound is whisked away on the wind, he opens them to reveal the coin glimmering in the light of the rising moon. ‘Tails it is … Let’s head down the hill!’ Without another word, the two soldiers sling their rifles over their shoulders, turn their torches towards the spot where La Caída begins its descent, and set off walking, unhurried and with little hope, to the spot where Estela has just struggled to her feet and where her memory has just quivered into life, stirring up images of fire and dust.

  ‘You bastards … treacherous fucking pigs … It’s your fault I’m here,’ Estela curses, recalling the faces of El Topo and El Tampón framed against the cloud of smoke lit by gunfire and, leaning against one of the rocks that broke her fall, she adds: ‘And if that wasn’t bad enough, I bet they know … They’re bound to have realised … bastards … but I won’t give them the satisfaction … I’m not going to let them take me!’

  I have to get out of here … get anywhere, Estela thinks, surveying the place in which she finds herself, and, without a second thought, she chooses the gaping chasm that yawns to her right. She takes her hands from the rock against which she was leaning, but her left leg is not strong enough to support her and she crumples to the ground again. The burning ache in her femur and tibia has become a deep, stabbing pain, but, squeezing her eyes shut and clenching her teeth, Theblindwomanofthedesert growls: ‘I’m not going to let this leg stop me … I’m not going to let a couple of broken bones be the end of me … I’m going to get up and get out of here!’

  Biting back the pain throbbing through her limbs and pounding in her head, Estela remembers something that Epitafio once said, something she mentally repeats as she remembers: Pain is all in the mind, not in the body! Pain is all in the mind, not in the body! Theblindwomanofthedesert thinks again, opening her eyes and looking at the stars high in the dark sky, flaunting their colours — blue, green, red, copper, yellow. ‘Pain is all in the mind, not in the body!’ she mutters, and in doing so she manages to struggle to her feet, to think about descending the steep slope, to begin the long walk. First one foot, then the other, Estela thinks as she grits her teeth harder, stretches her arms wide to keep her balance, and deep down in La Caída where shadows reign she notices two tiny, flickering lights at a spot where dogs are barking, though she does not hear them; however she does see the two soldiers who are coming to the top of the slope. ‘First right … okay, good … then left,’ Theblindwomanofthedesert murmurs, lifting her feet and shuffling away from the place where she fell.