Hunger's Brides (212 page)

Here, Jacinto? This is really it? It's the third ‘Blue Cenote' sign we've passed.

There are a hundred
cenotes azules
, Beulah. It is the name we use when we have lost the old names.

Parched scrub, dusty parking lot, cardboard signs Cenote Azul fifty metres. Park the ancient Tercel, take a beaten path, follow the trash of drinking cups and straws. Dengue hatcheries. Through the last screen of branches I hear children's voices—laughter and shouts, deep splashes.

Turquoise!
—colour as oasis of the eye!—a diving tank sunk in limestone a greenish blond. The water starts two metres down, jump from anywhere! A step of notches to climb back up.
Karst
, this rock is karst.

Cenote Azul
. Here we are. In this water you can see sixty metres to the bottom.

Here? So many people….

No, we go upstream. Two kilometres.

Upstream—what stream?

That runs beneath our feet.
Cenote
is where the earth falls, into the
rivers that run under us…. Come. This is palmetto. This is
chechen
. If you sleep under this in a storm, it rains down poison. And this one, in a certain season when the sun shines hard it pops like popcorn. The whole tree, for hours.

An hour deeper into forest. We walk under taller trees, through a deeper green. Through a line of leaf-cutter ants.

Is it not like a picket-line, Beulah, tiny strikers waving signs?

Look, the iguana eating them, I haven't seen that kind.

Basilisco rayado
, not quite iguana, but a cousin.

Banded basilisk. Chocolate brown, striped in lime. Stern-eyed, cowled, its throat a wimple of white. We wade deeper into green. Two green parrots flush—their broken faces a bob of apple-red, twin pugilists, little rams with bloody-brows….

Jacinto stops. These tall ones are mahogany. This is ceiba. Their roots run down into the river here.

Where? Scan the ground the high canopy, filter the dappled light…. Clean muscular trunks, veined in heavy vines—calfed—
sandalled
they stride a lawn of giant ferns, elephant ears. Hush….

We stand on the heart of a riddle, we dance in its palm. Paradox, a river that runs underground. Birdcalls in the hush, sun and shade, coolness in warmth, spaciousness as embrace….

Come. He slips under a fern, another. Still I do not see. Another.

Here.

A meteor has crashed to earth broken its crust of karst—scorched it lilac—veined it rust. Mintgreen wells to the wound—roots creepers vines start from the water in a shock of green wire I can't make sense of this. My eyes … make them slower, slower … see the ruined windings of an ancient motor, a clock. Broken trunks furred in a caterpillar moss crisscross the cenote five metres across. Stand stunned in a bower of tall ferns, in a blind of zero time.

On the crater's far side spreads a blistered skin of water lilies … Sprigs of shy orchids nestle in the vines. They hover just above the green water, their roots are strands of golden hair … that skinnydip.

I remember … this mint green, the Bow in winter. Wintergreen cracks in a river of ice. A breeze stirs the canopy—

Ohh
—a shaft of sun—a turquoise wedge driven deep into green.

God.

I wanted you to see. Before you leave.

He undresses. In two stoops of white cotton. Two
huarache
shucks. He is naked, hairless as a child. Scentless as a fawn. We can swim. There will be no one. He stands at the edge, his naked back to me. A ray of light. A shadowbrand of perfect leaf in the small. In the small brown small of this back. He stands, watches the water. You see, he says, angel fish. He speaks without turning his face, half turns his shoulders. He is swelling for me or a shape he has seen in the water. Tropical fish, they come upstream in fresh water. The food is so rich. His nakedness … a slow wag, a little swing bridge of friendliness. My heart could break for this. He stands there so calmly, speaking to me, swelling still, so painfully now. This long sprain of cinnamon from a dove's swollen throat, petal-soft ruff….

Will you swim?

He turns to face me. His large black eyes. He seems unaware. A length of anatomy, straining. A length of him, for me. To me. This small man. He clambers down the vines—little bum—pauses at the water, points—
That
one is an iguana. Clinging sideways in rigging, a lizard sailor.

Is it cold?

Same as the earth.

He goes in, lowers himself on the roots. Lowers himself to the brows, to the little bowlcut bangs. Crown dry, temples damp, scrolls down his neck, to the blades of his shoulders.

Will you swim?

I follow him to the edge. I make myself naked for him. For this small man, this scribe. I see his want. Now in his eyes. They follow me up. I stand for him. Naked in this air, in this blind space, in this zero time. I feel his onyx eyes. Their glow, their pause, their lingering. They follow me up. My thighs. I do not flinch. I let him in. This is me, this is real.

I follow him down, by the roots of trees. Down to the warmth of the earth to my chin.

This is making love. This silence, ankles wound into vines. Surges of water, this weightless angels' buck and plunge. Holding on. Hanging by roots, pushing back with white palms. Bucking like angels … we are mustangs with wings. We are mustangs with wings.

A whir, a hummingbird low in the orchids—lady doctor, dancing in her emerald sari. Her ruby veil tucked beneath her chin to work, a veil as soft as red as tulip lips. Jacinto, this is real, this is me. In this silence.

No … not silence.

In this small tide that rises and falls, in this breath before a moan before a sigh before the hush, in this lung of karst, this is not silence but the breath that quickens it.

Your hazel breath. I answer you with almonds—

Splashdown to water—our voyeur iguana, my startled laughter my breath moves in your mouth. I quicken you. We are in motion, in love, in the echoes of breath, in the warmth of the earth in a place off the map, where the lizard swims….

It clambers out, drunken sailor, up the rocks. Breath, laughter—

Penny-echoes in a well.

Jacinto Ek Cruz, I have seen, I have heard. And felt.

I will remember. Now, I can write her death.

[3 Mar. 1995]

T
HE BUS FROM
C
HETUMAL
passes in less than an hour, or a lot more. The only one today. One
A.M.
It is never early, you can be sure. If he sees people, he will slow down. If we leave now, we can walk in plenty of time. You have so little, would you like to leave something behind?

Sweet lover, sweet friend …

As you say, I have so little.

I am becoming a little transparent no?

I'll be back—I promise. Now
you
have to learn.

Learn?

To trust
me
.

The dress looks very nice. My cousin did a good job with the hem. A few little scorches. Is it practical to travel … in a dress?

For peeing at the roadside or crouched on a toilet seat. Very.

Ah, I did not know.

Something else for you.

You see, you can teach after all. Here, I would like you to take my jacket. It is a light cotton but better than nothing. For the air conditioning on the bus. For the nights….

Yes you are becoming transparent.

We walk north along the shore. A warm mid-night of cricket anthems, lightning far out to sea. We turn left to the lights of the little town. One main street, four streetlights, four storms of moths … blindness spirals down.

We wait here.

You're not angry anymore?

I am calm now. What does one say to someone who wants to leave.

I
don't
—

Who cannot see why she should stay, then. I have had a month to find the words. What does one say,
¿quién sabe?
Now I have said all I can. I have let the land speak for me….

Jacinto … I have seen I have heard
.

So not angry, calm. Sad, a little. As your friend, I should have done better. I have failed to understand you. There is some thing I am not quite seeing.

There are things I haven't said. About being responsible, about work.

But if we forget
all this
, even good work is a prison. And if it is service, I think our service goes nowhere if it does not lead … back here.

Sweet man, I want so badly for you to understand. I'll learn. I'll find the time in now. I'll fight for it, I promise. But first I need three weeks of soon
.

Jacinto, there's something … I can finish now. This thing of five years,
yo tambien he andado buscando palabras
. And then I'll be back. But now I need you to trust me. Can you?

You can teach me.

I'll
write
.

Write if you want but come back…. ah, the bus.

With stops, five hours to Cancún. The road hugs the coast. Remember, the eight
A.M.
to Chichén Itzá. It arrives just as the tourists start to check out of their hotels. Close to the equinox the prices—

Go sky high, I know.

Driver,
un momento
. So what do you do?

Go to Valladolid and bargain a long term rate. I have your friend's name at the ruins.

No, Beulah, no more kissing until you come back to me. And no adioses.
Hasta luego
, is all.

I'll see you, Jacinto. Hasta la vista, hasta muy pronto, hasta la proxima vez. ¿Ves …?

Jacinto—wait.

Yes?

I'll bring you back your jacket.

Queridísimo Jacinto
,

I promised I'd write I am writing now, before the lights of the town die out. Four lighthouses, beacons back to you. We'll make a space together for this, the hardest thing in the world: to speak the simple truth to one another. And to speak of this greatness that runs in us, trapped in too few notes. Too many promises, too little hope. I'll learn, I'll try with you, to stop the engine in my head, let it run into the world like a child.

But for now I can write, that much I know how to do. Tell a complicated truth, begin with this. I will tell you about this work, for the sceptics who won't ask, for the believers who just can't anymore, for the others who won't let us. Who make forests into parks, while the sceptics build deserts for cynics to golf in. But how will I find words for you?

I'll start with what you've shown me. What can we hope for a people who every year sees fewer and fewer stars, less night in the sky? Each year more light, the combustion of what was. Ancient life forms turned to burning tar, light from younger stars. Each year bigger telescopes to show us still more of what once was. A sky of old news—out-dated by millions of years. The zeroes, we'll count them together from now on. Smudges in our heads—whole galaxies, Jacinto, not just Time. Little smudges of once and soon. We see stars
die
, like old home movies.

So why not a planet, a people, a language, a species—thirty thousand a year? Too many to name. And what's in a name but another kind of bias, of local perception. Of local affection. When a serial number would do. An order number in a star catalogue. Nothing really
is
anything else—no that would be a
metaphor
—admit one and the whole world starts sprouting tails and wings and horns. Again. Even numbers we make into trinities and pentecosts, octaves and hexes, the days of creation and the three names of serial killers. But all things are number, and number the first metaphor. We are the meaning machines, Jacinto, we make belief.

But more than that, through us, Being
means
—
believes
—and even
doubts
, who knows? Was our greatest invention ever and always our soul?

When we make these things meaningless—confuse myth with untruth—we sever the dragon twins and set them loose like storms, like only-children fighting over the world. Orphan twins riven at the ankle—dragons of rage and indifference, wonder and cynicism, Typhon and Apophis. Storming over the land while we sleep, swallowing the world, devouring us while we dream of certainties and shearing sheep.