The Lady in Blue

by Javier Sierra

  “Hell’s bells!” Txema roared at him. “It’s cold. You made a full stop right in the middle of the highway. Do whatever you like, Carlos. Let’s turn off the road and drive into the village. Question anyone you like, but get this car out of here!”

  “Why didn’t I think of it before?”

  Txema gave him a serious look. His friend was acting like a drunk.

  “This can’t be mere chance, it just can’t be. Do you know how many villages there are in Spain?”

  The photographer doubted he should take the question seriously.

  “Do you know?” Carlos insisted.

  Txema rummaged around in the glove compartment for the map of the country’s highways they always took with them, and leafed through the list of towns by geographical regions at the back of the book.

  “I found it!” His finger stopped at the bottom of one of the pages. “There are 35,618.”

  “You see? One possibility in thirty-five thousand isn’t chance. What do you say now?”

  “I say let’s get the hell off this highway, dammit!”

  SIXTEEN

  LOS ANGELES

  Tell me, Jennifer, did you ever try to find out if those dreams were real?”

  Dr. Meyers had been silent for a long while, listening closely to every detail of her patient’s dreams. Jennifer related each of them so vividly that the doctor found it difficult to classify them as simple delirium.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Simple. Did you ever think, once you had awakened, that what you saw in your dream was a memory? That you had really been there, among the Indians?”

  “Come on, Doctor,” Jennifer protested. “You’re not going to tell me you believe in reincarnation? I have some American Indians in my family tree, but I’ve never read anything about them, or their rituals, or—”

  “That’s not what I meant. Have you ever tried to differentiate between dream and reality?”

  The psychiatrist’s tenacity intimidated her patient.

  “You know what? Even when I was very little I was able to remember everything I dreamed at night.”

  “Go on.”

  “Before I went off to college I told my mother everything. I explained to her that it was like the feeling of flying, or climbing over a wall. Or even like singing underwater. My grandmother, who lived on the outskirts of Mexico City for many years, near the Sanctuary of the Virgin of Guadalupe, gave me the nickname the Great Dreamer.”

  “The Great Dreamer?”

  Jennifer nodded, pursing her lips in a gently mocking expression.

  “My grandmother was the one who taught me to distinguish between the world of dreams and the real world. Thanks to her, I know now that all those scenes of New Mexico were only a dream. They have to be!”

  Dr. Meyers rested her chin pensively in her hand. The thick, insulated glass windows of her office muffled the sound of a police siren.

  “Tell me about your grandmother,” she said as the last reflections of the strobing light disappeared from the windows.

  “Her name was Ankti, which in the Indian language means ‘dance.’ All the women in my family were given that name, at least until I made my appearance in this world on the other side of the border, in the United States, and they named me Jennifer.”

  “What comes to mind about her?”

  “I saw very little of my grandmother, except for the one summer my parents let me stay with her while they went to Europe on vacation. And every day I was there she took me to the basilica of the Virgin of Guadalupe. She told me the story a thousand times. And you know the strangest thing? She taught me to think of the Virgin as a woman surrounded by a blue light, a woman who shone, who every so often appeared in the Mexico of our ancestors.”

  “She seems like the woman in your dreams?”

  “Exactly the same. My grandmother told me the story of her appearance. Did you ever hear it?”

  Dr. Meyers shook her head.

  “It’s a lovely story. Juan Diego, who came from the same people as my grandmother, had several encounters with a mysterious woman bathed in a blue light, on a hill known as Tepeyac. The woman told him that a basilica should be built on that very spot as a way of honoring her. The Spanish who ruled Mexico at that time paid no attention to him. The Archbishop of Mexico City demanded that Juan Diego bring him some proof, and Diego, out of desperation, communicated the Spaniard’s demands to the mysterious blue woman herself.”

  “And what happened?”

  “This part of the story was my grandmother’s favorite,” Jennifer said with a smile. “In her fourth apparition, the blue lady gave him something as proof: she asked him to carry roses to the bishop. Now, roses were uncommon in that part of the world, and it wasn’t the time of the year when they flowered. But the Indian, obedient to her request, carried the flowers in his poncho and laid them down at the entrance to the Archbishop’s palace. The Virgin had left the roses in some bushes near where she had appeared.”

  Jennifer took a breath before she went on.

  “When the Archbishop let him in and Juan Diego opened his poncho, do you know what happened? The flowers had disappeared! The Spaniard fell to his knees marveling at the phenomenon: instead of the flowers, engraved on his humble poncho was a mysterious effigy of the Lady in Blue.”

  “A portrait of her?”

  Jennifer nodded.

  “I saw the cotton fabric, the poncho, every day that summer. In fact, if I close my eyes and concentrate, I can still re-create it in mind. It stays with me.”

  “This is interesting, Jennifer.” The doctor’s dark eyes were flickering as she spoke. “Do you feel that someone is always with you?”

  Her patient had no idea how to respond.

  “Let me rephrase it. This may sound harsh, so please try not to misinterpret me. Were you, at any time either in your civilian life or during your work for the military, diagnosed with some type of psychiatric illness?”

  “Well, as you can imagine, before becoming a part of the remote-vision project, they gave me all kinds of medical tests.”

  “And?”

  “Nothing, Doctor. They found nothing wrong with me.”

  Linda Meyers scribbled something into her notebook, and then took a breath.

  “Fine, Jennifer. Before I write a prescription for an anxiety medication to regulate your dreams, let me explain what I think is happening to you.”

  The Great Dreamer shifted her position on the sofa.

  “Among the many sleep disorders that have been cataloged, there’s one that is especially rare, affecting less than one percent of the population. They call it somnimnesia, which is a Latin word that comes from somnium, sleep, and mnesia, memory. In short, it is a question of the difficulty that certain subjects have in distinguishing their dreams from their actual memories.”

  “But I already told you that my grandmother taught me to—”

  “Let me finish, please,” the psychiatrist broke in. “At first, many of my colleagues believed this to be a variant of schizophrenia. Just imagine: ‘false’ memories but seemingly very real, fabricated by the mind. Some patients thought they knew how to drive or to swim because they dreamed that they had done it, and owing to these false memories, they ran the risk of drowning or having a car crash in real life. I have to know if this is true in your case. I have to find the origin of these oneiric experiences. We have to discover what is causing them: why they are so coherent and why their internal structure is so solid. You understand, right?”

  Jennifer nodded.

  “So you will search for the origin of your dreams?”

  “Yes, of course . . .” She didn’t know how to answer.

  “Take your time. And find out if your mother, her grandmother, or anyone in your family had this type of experience. Should you find anything, let me know. As long as your dreams aren’t the source of other problems, I will resist prescribing pharmacological treatment.”

  SEVENTEEN

  GRAN QUIVIRA


  Everything followed the course foreseen by the great Walpi.

  For eight days, the ten men who governed the Cloud tribe remained in the kiva, apart from the others while they practiced the ritual of contact. Two times each day, their wives drew close to the tiny opening in the roof of the building, and without looking inside, they lowered baskets of boiled corn, cactus, agave leaves with its sweet pulp intact, and water.

  Neither the women nor the members of the other tribes knew the nature of the ceremony being performed inside. Each group of Cueloces had its own rituals, its ancestral ways of communicating with the spirits, which remained a well-kept secret. All that was known was that the fermented substances prepared in the kiva enabled them to make contact with the Great Spirit.

  Inside the kiva there was always a fire. Night and day, Walpi and his men stayed in the shadows, chewing on the leaves of plants and beating their drums, which were made using buffalo intestines. As the days passed, the atmosphere inside the kiva became more and more intense. Only the old leader kept track of the days as they sped by, taking care to perform the ritual tasks in the hours of silence: during the long waits in between rituals, the men slept, adorned one another with new tattoos, and cleaned the masks handed down by their ancestors. These were fearful heads, with sharp teeth and big, bulging eyes, sometimes crowned with feathers and other times with spikes, meant to be an imitation of the faces of their spiritual protectors. And they tightened the heads on their drums, or prayed before the sipapu, a small hole dug in the center of the kiva, which the Indians believed allowed them to communicate with the spirits from the other world.

  But all those activities were only a prelude to their true work: dreaming. Once they had ingested the sacred plants and the soup made from fermented yucca, which they had been preparing since the first day they went into isolation, their minds were ready for the search for the blue spirit. The great Walpi was anxious to make contact.

  And at first, as might be expected, nothing happened.

  It was as if the great spirit who was to come had not yet heard their invocations.

  Outside the kiva during the night, four men were posted to guard the tribe’s privacy. They were the kéketl, or small falcons, young men who, while they had yet to be initiated in the secrets of the adult world, were fully trained as warriors. Sakmo, as the most skillful warrior in the tribe, was in charge of their fighting skills. He was still greatly affected by what he had lived through a few days before.

  He instructed the kéketl that during a ceremony like this, no one save a benign spirit could approach the kiva. If anyone transgressed this rule, and did not respond to their sacred warning gestures, they would put him to death, tearing his body into four equal parts and burying them outside the village, each piece as far from the other as possible.

  No one would dare to profane the kiva of the Clouds.

  • • •

  The eighth night, when Hotomkam shone more brightly than ever, something began to move in the sacred enclosure of the Jumanos. Walpi’s face was bathed in sweat when he looked out from beneath his blanket. He looked bewildered. The kiva was asleep. That night’s ceremony had left everyone exhausted, except for the head of the tribe. Suddenly he jumped up and rushed out of the kiva telling the kéketl to remain on guard. Looking back to be certain no one was following him, he disappeared into the brush.

  He behaved as if possessed, as if he were following the steps of someone who could guide him through the darkness. As if, at last, the geometric signs that had been tattooed on his chest when he was a young man as a form of protection were now fulfilling their task.

  Someone or something had made contact with him.

  In the moments before his flight, an extraordinary blue light had descended around the half-moon-shaped passage in the rock that stood near the Cemetery of the Ancestors. This time Sakmo did not witness it; no one in Cueloce had noticed its presence. If anyone had been able to observe the scene from close by, he would have been struck by a certain complicity between that glow and the ancient warrior. While the pulsing light flickered deep in the canyon, the old man was drawn toward it, running like an antelope.

  At the same time, a hush descended on the nearby fields.

  The remarkable silence that had so impressed Sakmo now began to spread around the outskirts of the village. And with it, the oceans of grass that surrounded the mountain ceased moving. The grasshoppers stopped chirping. Even the unmistakable gurgle of the waters at Fox’s Spring, which the old man leaped across as if it were no wider than a breath of air, quieted their monotonous song and grew still.

  The leader noticed none of these prodigies. His five senses had taken leave of this world in order to concentrate on the other.

  “Mother!” he yelled. “At last!”

  The old warrior had found her.

  At first he was only able to see the glowing light. But as his eyes adjusted, he was able to perceive the outlines of a beautiful young woman, her pale face giving off rays of light, who stood just a few feet away from him. “Protective spirits,” he said quietly. The woman radiated light in all four directions, partially illuminating the ground where the great Walpi stood. She was dressed in a long white tunic, with a celestial blue cape that descended from her shoulders to just above the ground.

  As the great Walpi approached her, the young woman smiled.

  “You have called for me, and I have come. What is it you want?”

  The woman did not move her lips, nor did she make any gesture with her hands. Nevertheless, her words were as clear and transparent as those Sakmo had heard just nine nights before.

  “Mother, I want to ask you something . . .”

  The apparition nodded. The great warrior paused before continuing.

  “Why did you let yourself be seen by my son and not by me? Have you lost confidence in the one who has guarded the secret of your visits all this time? I have always kept silent about our encounters, I have instructed my people about the next coming of the white people, and you—”

  “It is no longer necessary to maintain our silence,” she said, interrupting him. “The moment I spoke about so often has arrived. You have completed your task. In a short time, your son will take your place.”

  “Sakmo? He still has much to learn!” the old warrior protested.

  “I need someone like him. He has the sign engraved on his skin. Like you. He is the only one in your family who inherited your gift. And now he will inherit your mission.”

  “What will happen to our village?”

  “God will guide it.”

  “God? What God?”

  The lady did not respond. Instead, she let something fall to the ground. A rough cross of wood, which the Indian looked at incredulously.

  The warrior knew well what was going to happen next: the blue light would grow in intensity as a harsh buzzing sound, like the squealing of countless rats, would fill his ears until he collapsed on the ground. It always happened that way.

  But this time, the “blue spirit” had one last instruction to give him.

  EIGHTEEN

  ÁGREDA, SPAIN

  Carlos took three deep breaths to steel himself before starting the car again. In response to Txema’s pleas, he had steered the car onto the shoulder, while he took a moment to get over the shock his discovery had caused. “Ágreda,” he repeated like a zombie. “Ágreda.” It turned out to be difficult for him to accept the existence of a town whose name was spelled identically to that of the “last name” of a nun, evidence of whose existence he was unable to produce when he was on her trail, and which he now castigated himself for not finding before this latest incident. “Just one town in Spain among 35,618 listed localities,” he said with hindsight. “I should have checked it out!”

  “Hidden treasure reveals itself only to those who know what it contains,” Txema mumbled, sounding like an ancient Chinese sage. Carlos could never tell when Txema was making fun of him.

  “What do you mean?”r />
  “That perhaps when you began your work on teleportations, you weren’t at all prepared to understand what they were about.”

  “What sort of cheap philosophy is that?” Carlos protested.

  “Think what you like. I know that you’re an unbeliever, but I’m convinced that we all have our own destiny. And that sometimes the force of that destiny pushes us violently, like a hurricane.”

  The photographer’s words struck Carlos as odd and strangely serious, as if they had been pronounced by some long forgotten oracle and not Txema. Carlos had never heard his friend talk like that—in reality, he even doubted Txema was capable of letting his mind entertain such thoughts—but his words had nevertheless stirred something inside him. Right then and there, once he had left the frozen shoulder of Route N-122 behind, he knew he had no choice in the matter. He had to drop the fatuous hunt for holy shrouds, switch the order of priorities in his list of pending assignments, and do a little fieldwork in the small town named Ágreda. When he felt the cool touch of the little medal with the “holy face” against his skin, he smiled. Who knew, he thought, if this most unlikely round of events would revitalize his stalled investigation into teleportations?

  The growls from the car’s engine dragged him back to reality. He closed the notepad and replaced it inside his coat, then told Txema to put away the highway map. Training his sight on the asphalt once more, he headed down the one street leading into the center of town.

  Ágreda turned out to be a real discovery: located at the foot of Moncayo (an impressive mass of mountain over 7,590 feet tall that stared at them defiantly from between passing clouds), the layout of the town was a vivid reflection of the scars it had collected over the course of its history. Christians, Jews, and Muslims had shared its streets and marketplaces until well into the fifteenth century. The setting for royal weddings, the waters from its river, the Queiles, were venerated by Roman smithies, who forged their most durable weapons in it. It was of course a while before the two men learned all this.