Crematorium for Phoenixes (6 page)

It was not the smell of hot manure,
golden-yellow and sprayed on dusted hay and fresh milk. Instead, it
was the stench of a male mixed with sulphuretted hydrogen that is
coming from a tank full of sludge.

It penetrated from behind the walls, causing
all sorts of images to spring in their heads, as if a bull had just
been unleashed and was running toward them, having jumped away from
the adolescents. The snakes in the hands of the half-naked girls
that were painted on the walls seemed like they would come to life
at any moment; the men were certain their black shades would live
in a monstrous way.

The beautiful rooms furnished with brick-red
ceramics and furniture in curved, rounded forms created the feeling
that somewhere hidden within them lay the placenta from something
that never should have been conceived, born, and allowed to
mature.

But the men, led by Tammuz, went from door
to door, looking for the source of the stench, while like a
slippery snake or parasite, it slipped under the branches of the
water and hypocaust system.

Tapping on the walls, they came to the
central throne hall—a small room with a suspended two-edged ax. Its
corners had emanated the strongest sources of the smell even though
it had been masked by the thick baked bricks that formed the walls
of the room and the jars filled with fragrant water distributed
around it.

Once they understood that it would be very
difficult to break the masonry, they leaned on the brownish-wood
sandstone throne and fell silent.

Entangled between horror and the task they
had undertaken, the men realized that life is a winding road upon
which we leave pieces of ourselves.

They had to go forward.

And there was no way for them to do so.

Out of anger and frustration, Tammuz pounded
on the handles of the throne. The carving in the form of a
salamander echoed like thunder coming off of a mountain rock.

Tammuz smiled like a breathless child, ready
at any moment to cry. As always, fate had given her answer. Then he
motioned to the men to each take one of the bronze axes that hung
like meteoritic iron on the wall. He wedged the ax under the
throne. The other men followed his example.

They heard the scrape of retractable levers.
The throne moved. Beneath it, stained in silver, gaped a hole with
winding unrailed stairs leading down into the womb of the
Earth.

Waving their arms, the men began their
descent.

Chapter
Nine

Like a swarm of ghosts, figures surrounded
the man with the hairy robe, trying to convey their messages and
extract information that is difficult to accept because of the
barriers between the worlds.

“Who are you?”

“What on earth happened to you?”

Questions rained down one after another,
accumulating as the fog does, cast over fields and forests.

The man was silent and waited for the
unleashed stream of questions, for the human curiosity, to
stop.

The patients clustered around the
linen-white lean body. It was strange to watch them embrace vanity
with their (seemingly) immortal souls dressed as they were in their
simple hemp shirts, which hung like robes or cloaks on their
bodies.

“He is the white devil, I tell you,” said
one of them whose disease had dried him like a rolled up
yellow-brown newspaper.

“Nonsense, this will be a new disease,”
added a second, who did not look any better.

“Everybody is talking nonsense. I’ve heard
that north of us lived the Ainu, and there are more paleface people
such as begotten snow,” said a third, wincing all the while like
the upper twigs of a tree.

The man stood still in the meantime and
looked at them. He began to speak unknown languages; they were not
the familiar Asian speech, throaty and gurgling.

After several exclamations resembling an
adjustable radio, sparkling and elongating, the new arrival adapted
and began to speak with that cold, clear focus of a computerized
machine.

“I’m here because I need your help,” he
said, choosing his words among thousands.

“Who or what are you? We know that if we
announce you to the authorities . . . .” interrupted one of the
sick.

“Nothing will happen because no one will get
close enough to believe infectious ones,” completed the man,
stretching his face into a lifeless smile. “In your lands people
called me ‘Takeshi’ and I’m here to offer you the chance to regain
your health if you go with me,” he said.

“My friend, we do not know much, but we know
that these things happen with the good and the evil ones. We are
suffering from leprosy.

“Let’s forget about it. You came here by
accident. Leave now and we can guarantee that we will take your
secret to the grave,” Akuma said, shouting above the rest.

Takeshi smiled. His protruding cheekbones
with their pink hue trembled, and he ran his hand over his right
arm, as if stroking an animal hidden there.

“Trust is the only sign of life on the roads
that are pointed straight ahead. I thought that of all the people
in the world, you would want to be healed. But apparently I was
wrong.”

There was silence.

“Yes, we would give anything to be healthy
once more,” Akuma replied, breaking the silence with a quiet voice
that came through the wall of pain that brick by brick, grief by
grief, mud by mud, had created a swampy castle from which there was
no escape.

“Then what’s stopping you from believing
me?” asked Takeshi.

“As you have already answered: ‘me.’ It is
terrible when a person loses the meaning of his life, but the real
fear is to not be himself at all,” Akuma said. “Don’t think that
you are the first that has promised to help us. We have met many
such as you. There were those who had strayed from the stormy North
Aleutian islands. They came as shamans. And there were priests of
the desert steppes of Mongolia, and also the Brahmins from the
Malabar Coast in the far south of India.

“We are tired of waiting to meet our God,
and there is nothing worse than a tired soul, my friend. It hopes
only to sleep the eternal sleep so that it may sink into
nothingness forever.”

“Then each person, be he good or bad, is the
answer to the prayers of someone else. Maybe I’m the one for you. I
need people who have almost broken all their ties to life to agree
to go with me,” said Takeshi.

“I told you that . . .” Akuma said.

“You need a little proof to believe me. I
know this, and so I will show you,” Takeshi finished, and rolled up
the sleeves on his right hand which he began to shake to show that
it was broken.

Above the wrist was an expanse of unhealthy
skin; it was dried out, as wrinkled as a winter apple, and
completed with boils and spots.

The man focused and the sick places seemed
to come alive. His skin swelled, moved, and become red. It enlarged
by a few inches and it was clear that his muscles were throbbing
and trembling. A surprised cry could be heard, and all of the men
turned to Akuma, who stirred his hand.

He was perfectly healthy.

The sick ones collapsed on the floor,
worshiping the miracle. They wept like helpless children or losers
whose dreams had come true.

“Who are you?” Akuma shakily asked with his
throat released from the stranglehold of pain.

“They call me Takeshi in Japan,” he
repeated. His eyes were narrowed into slits and hazy, signs of the
control it took him to command the pain.

He wiped his face with trembling limbs,
caught in a Parkinson rhythm. He did so slowly and said again, “I
am here because I need you . . . .” There was a long pause. “I need
you, but not all of you.”

It was as if a stone had fallen with a thud
into stagnant water.

“You said that you were going to cure us!
And now you are saying that you won’t heal everybody?” asked the
patients with a naïveté that young children use in those interviews
that open their eyes to the evil in the world surrounding them.

“I cannot. Otherwise I will die.”

“But you have healed Akuma!” they insisted,
again with that childlike innocence that the mud of the everyday
throws over the idyllic.

“Yes. But you have seen what happens
after.”

There are times, reader, in which life is
nothing but a station that people arrive at. Some get on the
vehicle and others get off. They are separated and collected, taken
in one direction or another. At this moment, there are no special
words that can be used, no words of the kind that are spoken in the
great volumes of literature.

But separation and distance, like the
layered, broken faces of mirrors, remained.

“Then you’ll go without me.”

“Without me.”

“Without me, too.”

The lepers, one by one, like a disheartened
army without a cause, dispersed and moved again to their beds. They
were quickly rendered as nothing more than shadows chased away from
the sun.

Takeshi stayed with Akuma.

“You think it’s easy? To play God? If only
you knew . . .” he shouted.

“Knew what?” Akuma asked, standing as the
only tree that had weathered the storm.

“How difficult it is to have the power to
help, but before you to have the whole world and the grief that
exists within it. To face the choices from which there is no
correct path. I leave fathers, the only supporters of their
families, to die so that I can help save palaces from not being
destroyed by wars. And those twin curses at infinity are jamming
the cheers of the royal minstrels.”

Akuma sighed, threw off his cloak, and
looked at the others who had gone home like the students of their
spiritual master. It seemed that he wanted too much.

“There is one word that those who have
learned to listen in their heads are wise to heed and that is
‘reason.’ And there is another word that the wiser who have learned
to hear with their hearts know and that is ‘hope.’ Do it, Takeshi.
Help the others.”

Silence, the kind that creates the passage
of the time, occurred, freezing objects. It prolonged their shadows
and dropped them like a number of cars on the roads.

“Maybe you’re right,” said Takeshi.

The air filled with a new snappiness,
curative and invigorated, as if it came from a place of eternal
verdure come straight from the hand of the stranger. The men stood
from their bunks and hammocks. They swayed on the floor like
toddlers.

“Savior,” they breathily exhaled as
individuals laying a miracle before a prophet.

“I’m not that One, but follow me.”

Chapter
Ten

Paved tar-black steel fences creaked as they
flexed like rotten sticks in the gaping holes between the pins that
filtered the blood-red orbs of bubbling molten lava kilometers
below.

The company, headed by Victor Drake, dragged
the web flour with their metal shoes, stepping on it as it popped.
The umpteen ice was ready at any moment to collapse into the depths
of the Earth.

They, as we said, were walking slowly and
carefully, shifting their weight while the place, lined as it was
with a massive apparatus—an assembly of coils deployed—bent with
its cast iron supports. It vibrated in such a way that it seemed as
if at any moment electric arcs would be generated, lighting up a
laboratory of profane arts.

But perhaps the most wonderful thing was the
music.

Legendary and resonating, it filled the
Earth’s cavities and bounced in echoes, drenched by the water and
fire suppression of the earth-gray scree.

The music narrated stories about palaces
that were excavated in the ground, about forgotten golden
treasures, about the fate of people who had crawled to live
underwater and underground. The men listened to this song while
staring into the gloom between the already described places. They
went past more rows of copper-green units until finally, at the
very end, they saw its source.

Piles of bodies bumped into each other as
peat—wormy mud filled the floor to the ceiling so that the bodies
were heaped on one another like a freakish humanoid hive.

For them, wrapped like a queen mother, lay
bathed in sweat, a disproportionate and unnaturally fat man whose
body hung caressed by the thousands, stroked by their cerebral
palsy hands.

That view generated disgust and fear. It was
Dante’s imagination recreated in real life—lured by the heady song
of sinful people and their demonic keepers.

Maybe those were the inhabitants who had
built the legendary Kingdom of Thule?

I do not know, gentle reader. Sometimes,
life is like a broken smile, furrowed by bullets. It is the statue
of an angel that only decorates the door of the furnace to a
crematorium able to burn even phoenixes. And the only water that
can quench the flames is hope. It is those small, pathetic, and
melancholy dreams that can generate enough saliva for you to spit
into the face of despair.

But even with them, sometimes evil will come
back. And when it does, you will not be able to do anything against
it. Perhaps you will only stay paralyzed.

That is exactly what the men from the
Leviathan were doing while the sibilant eruptions of lava bubbled
and cast their shadows.

Only Victor Drake moved, pulling the fuse
from his speargun rifle. He hardly stiffened because he was already
as stiff as a hunched old man.

“William, what a meeting!” he shouted to the
buzzing swarm that sounded like sirens from the myths with their
abated, inconsolable pain.

The crowds moved, as if at any moment they
were ready to descend like an avalanche, but one voice stopped
him.

“Victor, who would have thought I would see
you here, my friend? How long has it been?” The speech came from a
pink, fat lump that lisped and bounced with every spoken sound like
a membrane bladder full of unborn spawn. “How much? How much?”