by Pablo Medina
“Bello cielo matutino,” she said. “Beautiful morning sky. Angel of Field Work, Angel of the Precipice, Angel of the Depths of Air.”
Diego sat upright on the mule, surveying the edges of the marsh and claiming it for his most august majesty, Philip IV, king of Spain and Portugal and sovereign of the Indies.
Elena asked Diego to help her remount Eulalia and take her back to the house. She wanted nothing more than to leave the two behind and return to Piedra Negra.
“It is written,” Diego said, “that the victors shall ride, the defeated shall walk.”
“Diego,” Elena said. “Eulalia is a saint. We must save her.”
Diego looked down at the ground where Eulalia lay. She was still pointing at the sky and continuing her litany: “Angel of the Seven Plagues, Angel of the Little Birds, Angel of Solitude, Angel of the Tears of Forlorn Mothers, Angel of the Toothless Mouth, Angel of Torment, Angel of Thursday …”
“The saints die of putrefaction, not of glory,” said Diego. “Far be it for me to deny Your Highness’s wish.”
He dismounted uncertainly and helped Elena raise Eulalia to the saddle. Her head drooped to her chest and she was so light it seemed all they had to do was touch her and she levitated onto the mule. Diego insisted Elena ride behind her, as he couldn’t bear to have a lady of such distinction walk while he rode. She mounted the mule and held Eulalia tightly against her as the three of them made their way to La Sabrosona, where, Diego said, a huge feast prepared by one of the great chefs of the kingdom awaited them.
Elena washed Eulalia and dressed her in a red brocade gown she found in a trunk, no doubt left behind by one of the prostitutes. She changed the sheets that were soiled during the exorcism and placed Eulalia on the bed. The old woman giggled, calling her sobrinita again, and said she was ready to enter paradise.
Diego refused to wear anything but his dirty white shirt and would not take a bath, claiming that water made his skin fester and break out in sores. Elena left behind one of the ham sandwiches and the bottles of firewater and opened a couple of cans of peaches she found in the kitchen. “Welcome to the feast,” Diego said, and invited Elena to join them. She declined, rushed outside, and mounted the mule.
She trotted through the plague of mosquitoes, which was tolerable in the early morning, and into the forest, bouncing on the saddle till she thought her kidneys would burst. About an hour into it, the rain began. She covered herself with a plastic sack she found just before leaving Eulalia’s, but that was of no help against the wind-driven drops that stung when they hit her face and arms. The forest canopy blocked what little light came through, and the rain came down thick as oil, soaking the sack. Suddenly the mule stopped moving. Inexperienced in handling animals, Elena shook the reins, jumped on the saddle, and kicked the mule’s sides to no avail. When she got off and pulled on the reins, the mule reared and took a few steps back.
“Mula,” Elena yelled. “Stupid mule!”
They stared at each other, waiting for a sign that would break the impasse. And then Elena did something that surprised even her. She pulled down on the reins, and before the mule had a chance to react, she took a hold of its ear and bit it as hard as she could. The mule snorted and whinnied and took off down the path. As Elena chased after it, the mud underfoot sucked at her shoes and her wet skirt weighed her down. After thirty yards she was out of breath, her lungs on fire and her head pounding. She leaned against a tree trunk and, about a hundred feet away at a fork in the path, she saw the mule looking back at her. She walked slowly toward the animal, trying not to startle it. When she reached it, she leaned her head on the neck, which smelled like a wet mule smells, something that cannot be compared to anything else, and stroked its mane, trying with all she had in her of affection to calm the mule down. It seemed to work, for the animal lowered its head and became submissive. Elena understood then that a mule’s intelligence manifests itself through stubbornness. You can reason with a mule, but you have to do it at its level, not yours. It may not understand your words, but it will sense your intent. Elena climbed on and they continued to the river, which was full with raging rapids that seemed impossible to cross.
It had stopped raining and the clouds were low and moving at great speed across the sky. She dismounted and moved along the bank, looking for a place where the rapids were not as menacing, and found one near a bend where the bank sloped down gently onto a sandy beach. She took off her clothes and tied them to the saddle horn and led the mule by the reins, imploring it to enter the water. There was trepidation in the animal’s eyes, but the mule followed Elena’s lead. The water deepened and Elena felt the current tug at her legs, forcing her to lean against it in order to walk. When she entered the channel, she could no longer walk and the current took both of them. She grabbed the mule’s mane and let it do the work, nostrils flared, ears up, eyes ablaze with determination. The mule swam valiantly until its legs hit bottom and it forced itself onto the shallows, where Elena could walk again. She let go of the mule, and in a few steps she was in water to her ankles, then fell on the bank and rested on a pile of small, smooth stones the river had deposited there. They had beaten the river. Eulalia’s exorcism was working.
When Elena awoke, the sun was past its zenith and dipping behind the trees on the other side of the river. She stood with difficulty, trying to keep her balance among the stones. The mule looked at her and twitched its ears. Famished now, Elena stuck her hand in the saddlebag that contained her last sandwich, but all she grabbed was watery bread and bits of ham she couldn’t get herself to eat. She put her damp clothes back on, mounted the mule, and led it upriver to find the path. The animal took a few steps, then scrambled up the bank to a clearing, on the edge of which grew a wild guanábana tree loaded with fruit. Elena picked as many as she could and ate several, being careful to spit out the seeds, for her mother had once told her she would get sick with dyspepsia if she swallowed them. She then fed the mule, who wrapped its lips around the fruit and swallowed them whole—rind, seeds, and pulp—and followed them with some of the leaves it stripped directly off the branches.
They went back down to the river and found the path about half a kilometer away and continued under the canopy of the forest for about two hours, Elena dozing on the saddle and jerking herself awake as she leaned sideways, nearly falling off twice. The mule took a wrong turn away from the path and soon they were surrounded by brambles. The animal stopped as if it’d come upon a wall, and Elena prodded it by applying pressure with her heels. The mule responded and moved farther into the brambles, which tore at its hide and made it shake its head and neck continually the way mules do when discomfort and pain get the better of them. Elena too felt the thorns on her calves and thighs and, in order to avoid them, she put her legs up, balancing herself on the saddle on her haunches.
It must have been a horsefly that spooked the animal and made it bolt into a gallop through the thicket. Elena had no choice but to bring her legs down and hold on to the pommel as tightly as she could while the thorns tore at her skirt and cut her legs. By the time they reached the edge, on a ridge overlooking the valley, Elena’s skirt was in shreds and her legs were scratched and bleeding. Down below were the lights of Piedra Negra, and despite the hurt and the frayed nerves, Elena was exhilarated. She and the mule walked the rest of the way, tired and hungry, wanting very much to reach the place of their rest. It would be hard for her to put into words what had changed in her, but something had. Despite her exhaustion she felt strong; despite the dark, a light was shining in her.
When Cándida saw Elena leading the mule by the bridle, illuminated by the few streetlights that were still operational, she yelled out her name and ran out to greet her. Elena was ragged and miserable, her hair matted with vegetable matter, and she all but collapsed in her mother’s arms. Cándida took her daughter by the waist and helped her walk the last few steps to the house. The mule followed and stopped in front of the porch, waiting there blankly, all strength and intelligenc
e gone out of it.
The next morning, while Elena slept, Cándida found the mule lying on the street unable to get up. She sent for the muleteer, who came in an old sugarcane truck and snarled at her that he was owed two hundred pesos for the animal. He hadn’t shaved for several days and spoke through a toothpick. Cándida countered that the mule was not worth more than twenty, and the muleteer said that that was because her daughter had ruined it. He stood on the sidewalk, his large belly protruding over his belt buckle. He was wearing a blue T-shirt with the English word GOTCHA! in white italic lettering on the front.
“I have no choice but to put her down,” he added.
Cándida told the muleteer that, in addition to the twenty pesos, she would pay for the cost of euthanizing the animal but not a cent more.
The muleteer looked befuddled, and she added, “That means killing it.”
The man assented. Cándida went into the house and came back with a fifty-peso note, plus twenty in loose change in a jar just in time to see the muleteer aim a revolver at the mule’s head and shoot it as it lay on the street. The animal’s head jerked upward and, as blood began to pool under it, he said he’d have to get someone to help get the carcass on the truck and out to the countryside to burn it. He didn’t return until the afternoon with an assistant, a length of rope, and a winch. By then the mule was stiff and attracting swarms of flies.
The hired woman had come to pick up the money due her, and as she and Cándida watched the truck drive away with the mule bouncing around on the bed, she said, “He won’t bother burning it, he won’t. In the town dump he’ll throw it and blame one of the marsh people for leaving it there. That’s always the way around here, always.”
After the hired woman counted the two hundred pesos Cándida gave her, an impermeable silence grew between them, eventually broken by the woman herself, who told Cándida that nothing good would ever come to her family. “To the end of the world, to the end of time, to the end of light, the child Soledad must remain with you. In such a fashion will you keep her from the corruption of the dog world, the poison of the asps of the capital.”
Then the silence closed between them again. They stood on the sidewalk under the blaring sun looking over each other’s shoulders until the hired woman heard her son’s voice calling her name from several blocks away. That was the way of the marsh people, whose voices penetrated distance like the music their ancestors had brought from their rock-strewn land across the sea.
Elena slept for three days, getting up only to go to the bathroom and eat bowls of turtle soup her mother prepared for her. Turtle meat, according to Piedra Negran culinary lore, fortified the blood and was an excellent antidote against brain fever. When Elena finally rose from her bed for good, the scratches on her legs throbbed and her back was so tight she had difficulty straightening herself out. She shuffled over to the garden and noticed that one of the tomatoes she had planted on top of her father’s grave had germinated and sprouted a small shoot. She went to the kitchen, filled a pot of water, and dribbled it tenderly over the shoot, thinking that the best legacy her father could leave behind was a fertile and verdant garden where all manner of vegetables and flowers would grow. The act of watering the plant exhausted her. She resisted the urge to return to bed and instead went in search of her daughter and found her in the distilling room, seated in a child-size upright chair of the type called taburete, while Cándida did her best to make the alembic work properly. Elena bent over to kiss Soledad, but the girl pulled away and placed the doll in front of her face. The doll’s blond hair stuck straight up, and one of her cheeks was chipped, the result of being thrown about repeatedly. One eyelid was stuck halfway down the eye. The other eye was wide open, blue and disturbing.
“Mama,” Elena said, “what is the matter with Soledad?”
Cándida was up on a stepladder trying to fix a leak on the alembic by putting surgical tape around a copper pipe. “Children have a way of making their feelings known,” Cándida said. “She’s telling you she wants you to be here in Piedra Negra with her.”
The surgical tape slowed the leak but did not stop it completely. Now there was a slow drip coming through the tape. If the leak wasn’t fixed soon, the batch of firewater would be ruined.
“That makes no sense,” said Elena. “At her age she doesn’t know what she wants.”
“She knows better than any adult.”
Cándida stepped down from the ladder and looked up at her less-than-effective repair.
“It needs to be soldered,” Elena said. “Papa could have done that.”
“Papa,” Cándida said, looking through the window to the mound on which the tomato plant was growing, “is dead.”
“You must get back in bed,” she added, seeing that her daughter’s legs had become swollen. Some of the scabs had opened and small globules of congealing blood were forming on them like tiny jewels.
For now Elena was grateful to be told what to do. Cándida picked up Soledad and led Elena by the arm back to her bedroom. She spread a salve made from iguana oil on Elena’s legs and wrapped them with torn strips of cotton cloth.
While she lay in bed with her legs propped on pillows, Elena thought that a poet’s place was in the capital, not in a town where everything smelled like the swampy past. She could take Soledad with her, but she knew life would be hard with a daughter in tow. Elena moved in the direction of her art, unlike her mother, whose imagination had been diminished by her domestic duties. What did it mean to be a mother, anyway? Was it instinctive, in the way that animals behave maternally without choice? The hens took care of chicks, sows took care of piglets, bitches took care of puppies. After a time the mothers lost interest, and their offspring were left to fare for themselves. In human terms, if you weren’t devoted in body and soul to the child’s care, it meant something was amiss. And yes, she had felt the need to hold Soledad and feed her, to make her look pretty, wash and powder her. Unlike other mothers she knew, however, she’d never behaved as if the maternal was the only privilege accorded a woman. She had poetry: that was her calling, and she was pulled toward it. She would take care of her daughter—society demanded it, as did her own sense of responsibility—but she would never put herself in a place where she had to choose between motherhood and art. Cándida had surrendered herself to her domestic role, and she paid dearly for it. She was a shadow of a woman, whose only purpose, now that her husband was dead, was the production of that awful firewater that made people stupid.
Later that day, while Elena lay in a somnolent state brought on by yet another bowl of turtle soup, she heard a man’s voice coming from the living room, which she quickly recognized as Pedro el Cruel’s meaty grumble followed by his grating laugh. Her rage was immediate and blinded her to anything but the urge to drive the man out of the house once and for all. He was the only person she wished death on, first for the way he’d treated Pedrito and second because he reminded her of all the things men had done to women that could not be forgiven.
Despite the throbbing in her legs, she stood as if she were Christ indignant herself and moved deliberately to the living room.
Seated on the couch that had belonged to Elena’s grandmother were Pedro el Cruel and Cándida. Pedro was counting out bills onto Cándida’s outstretched hand, and there was a bunch of tired roses wrapped in newspaper lying on the coffee table. Soledad was on the floor by Cándida, playing with her doll. Before Elena could react, Pedro el Cruel rushed over to her, put his arm around her shoulders, and planted a kiss on her cheek. He smelled of charcoal and iron. For the first time she noticed he walked with a limp, as if one leg were shorter than the other. He reminded her of Pedrito in his movements, but the father was rotund and his arms were heavily muscled from his work at the forge.
“Elena,” he said exuberantly. “Resting you should be to get well and care for my granddaughter in the proper way a mother should.”
There was motherhood again, in the voice of a man she detested. What had he done for
his own child except beat him with a leather belt and send him scurrying away like a broken dog?
“I know what I need to do,” Elena said, sliding out from under Pedro’s grasp.
She took a few more steps in the direction of the armchair facing the sofa. The act of sitting down sent currents of pain up and down her back.
“Why is he giving you money?” Elena asked her mother.
Cándida hesitated. Her lips quivered before she answered.
“Pedro has been helping me with expenses,” Cándida said.
“For how long?” Elena asked.
“For several months, while you were busy with your poetry,” Cándida said, “sales were decreasing. Then your father mated himself and his mind declined. He lost interest in firewater production and everything else. He walked around the house mumbling to himself. If you only knew what I have been through.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?” Elena asked. She had no idea of the silent burden her mother had been carrying on her shoulders.
“I will not allow my granddaughter to go hungry, by the grace of God,” Pedro el Cruel interrupted.
If Elena had had a gun, she would have shot the man.
“And the flowers?” she asked Cándida.
“For you,” Pedro lied.
Elena had no way of knowing at the time that he’d brought them for Cándida, and so she was confused, her anger undermined and her righteousness threatened by a presumed act of goodwill on the part of this man she detested. She said a weak thank-you and retreated to the bedroom.
As she recovered, with little else to think about, Elena’s inner struggle intensified. She loved her daughter, even if the girl barely acknowledged her, and she was driven to her poetry, although writing it was arduous during the three weeks she stayed in Piedra Negra. Some days she thought she would take Soledad with her and surmount whatever difficulties awaited her in the capital. Other days poetry deafened and blinded her, and she could think of nothing else. Her sleep, when it came, was crowded with nightmares of children torn apart by dogs and of the hired woman sitting in judgment over her while she wrote poems in a language she couldn’t understand. One night the wind enveloped the house and made it shake so powerfully she thought the walls would collapse. Another night she heard Soledad crying in her room, and when she went to investigate, her daughter stared at her from her crib as if she were a stranger and refused to be picked up, screaming for her grandmother.
