Lost Worlds (17 page)

Sometime in the middle of the night I awoke briefly. It was still very cold, but there was no wind and no cloud. The black sky was a vast scattering of stars. The moon shone between the peaks of the mountains, silvering their summits. The silence buzzed in my ears. Only the soft breathing of Paco huddled in his sleeping bag reminded me of where I was and what I was doing.

Dawn came as a fanfare: sudden surges of peach and amber across the layered ranges. Far below, the tangled valleys were filled with lavender mists.

Paco was already up, hunched over the butane stove trying to boil water for coffee (almost an impossibility at fourteen thousand feet). The animals looked fine, heads down, munching on the ice-flecked grasses. The sun rose rapidly; dun-colored hills turned bronze and the whole mountain panorama beckoned us to move on, deeper into this lost world of the Venezuelan Andes.

The descent was slow and difficult. Ice still coated the narrow path and we moved cautiously on the slippery rocks. But our spirits were different now. The worse had been overcome and we knew that somewhere down there, deep in one of the valleys, was a house, shelter, a place to cook a decent meal—and Juan Felix Sanchez.

Finally we saw the house, a rambling structure of black rock topped by sections of tin roof set against a hillside of wild bushes. There were no other buildings, no other sign of human habitation anywhere in that vast sweep of valleys and mountains. But curls of blue smoke, easing out from under the roof (no chimneys once again), made the place seem friendly, beckoning.

As we approached we noticed small rock shrines, one in the shape of a cross, one a tiny chapel the size of a doll’s house set by a swirling stream. We crossed the stream lower down and dismounted on a pasture of close-cropped grass at the side of the house. A cock crowed. A dog barked. Other than that there was no noise at all.

“They will be inside,” said Paco.

We crossed a second stream by way of a bridge of broad stone slabs and entered a dusty corral. Ahead of us a doorway led through to an enclosed courtyard. A couple of oddly shaped benches stood by the one outer wall of the house, pieced together from wood planks supported by sections of twisted branches. On a low plank table lay two clay bas-reliefs. The clay was still moist and someone had left them to dry in the sun. The figures were crudely shaped, but it was obvious that they depicted two scenes from the stations of the cross.

We entered a dark room built of black rock. Thin strands of sunlight filtered through chinks between the unmortared joints. Still nobody.

Paco pointed to a thick wooden door to our left. It was slightly ajar and smoke trickled out. We pushed it open and entered a smoky room entirely without sunlight and lit only by a smoldering fire. At first I could see nothing. My eyes hadn’t adjusted from the sear of sunlight outside. Paco eased past me and moved toward the fire. There were grunts of recognition and then he was speaking quietly—almost reverently—and stooping to greet someone beyond the flames. A figure rose up, small and hunched. Another figure remained seated in the shadows. I eased forward across the earth floor. A hand—warm and rough-skinned—reached out. I saw a dark smiling face and a magnificent silver mustache. Eyes sparkled in the glow of the fire.

“I am Juan Felix Sanchez. You are welcome.” He spoke Spanish in a slow gravelly voice. His hand gently squeezed mine and led me to a bench by the fire.

“Sit down. You will have some tea.”

At the mention of tea, the second figure arose.

“This is Epifania. She will make tea for you.”

I think Epifania smiled, but it was hard to tell with her face half hidden behind the shawl. She shuffled across the floor to bring two cups and then filled them from an enormous black kettle on the fire.

Whatever was in that odd-tasting brew worked its magic. Within minutes I felt relaxed and refreshed. All the aches in my bones after that cold night on the mountain eased away. It was time to get to know my hosts.

The conversation was slow, punctuated by periods of friendly silence as we all sipped together. Juan had obviously greeted many curious visitors to his remote retreat over the years and I was doubtless asking the same tedious questions as everyone else. But he answered quietly and politely as I tried to piece together the history of his unusual life.

As I’d been told in Mérida, he had left behind his important title as president of the community council and all the trappings of a prosperous legal career back in the San Rafael Valley. Along with his dogs, bed supplies, seeds, a container of fingerling trout to stock his own trout pond, some livestock, and a devoted wife, he had moved into the El Tisure Valley in 1943 and, except for a few rare occasions, had never ventured away from his simple home in almost fifty years.

“There was no reason to go anywhere,” he murmured softly. “Everything was here.”

The house had grown amoebalike over the years from a tiny shepherd’s shelter to this warrenlike complex of rooms and courtyards. On an upper level reached by a crude ladder made from tree branches he had built his own loom and wove his own rugs and thick cloth. Occasionally outsiders would come and stay to help him in the slow extension of his home, but usually it was just Juan and Epifania building the place together, rock by rock, over the years.

At one point as he talked he quoted something I couldn’t quite understand. I asked him to repeat it and Paco translated:

“Did you write that?” I asked.

Juan suddenly started chuckling and spilled his tea over his stained trousers.

“No, no. That is on the gate of a cemetery in Mérida. I remember reading it when I was a boy. But it is very true—yes?”

We laughed and nodded.

“Were there many dead souls in San Rafael? Is that why you left?”

Juan smiled and shrugged. As I later realized, he rarely answered questions directly.

“A soul is all you have,” he said. “Everything else is…” he shrugged again and left the sentence unfinished.

By late afternoon I was sitting with Juan on an old wooden bench set against the corral wall outside his home. We were both drinking an herb tea of some kind prepared by Epifania. She was a shy woman whose face was always partially hidden by the shawl draped over her head and held in place by a broad-brimmed straw hat.

The sun was still bright and hot, burning my face as we laid our heads back against the wall and watched the chickens peck in the dust of the corral. On the hillside in front of us our horse, mule, and donkey nibbled happily on fresh green pasture. Behind them a waterfall tumbled off rock ledges into a series of cool dark pools before becoming a stream again, chittering away behind us.

I turned to look at Juan. His eyes were closed now. A bushy walruslike mustache hung down on either side of his mouth, which curved up slightly in a smile that never seemed to vanish. His dark brown skin was lined and leathery, his chin fuzzy with a silver stubble of unshaved hair. For a man in his eighties he had the face of a mischievous boy—part cherub, part imp. His two pet parrots, bright green with red markings, cackled at one another while nibbling on a pile of sunflower seeds left by Epifania. There was a peace about the place and I was glad to be here.

When Juan awoke I began to ask him about his church built on a hillside a short walk from the house, but he seemed to grow impatient.

“Have you been there?” he asked.

“No, not yet. We’ve only just arrived.”

“Well, go first. Then we talk.”

Paco leaned over and whispered, “Sometimes what he does not say is more important than what he says.”

Oh, boy. The zen was beginning.

It came again when I asked if I could see some of his weaving.

“You can see my weaving if you can see my weaving,” he replied. Then he laughed, spilling tea again, and reached across to touch my knee. “You are a good man, Señor David. A good man.”

Paco looked pleased at the remark, which seemed to have no epigrammatic whiplash. I held his hand. “I like you too, Juan.”

More laughs and choking. Then his face turned serious and he said quietly, “I will tell you a story.”

Paco leaned forward. Epifania was nearby but, as seemed to be her custom, said nothing.

Juan coughed and spat, then began.

“There was a man, a good man of the mountains—a hermit—who had an angel for a friend. Every day, at the hour of prayer, the angel would come to greet him and they would walk together. If the man needed advice the angel would give it to him, and before he left he would always remind the man to go out to do an act of charity every day. The man obeyed and was known and loved by everyone he met for his kindness.

“One day, when the man was walking on a path in the mountains, he saw two soldiers with a third man tied up like a prisoner. ‘Why is this man tied up?’ asked the kind man.

“‘He has done wrong. The law has sentenced him to be hanged.’

“The man of the mountains asked if the prisoner could be released, but the soldiers refused. The man then said, ‘He who does it pays for it.’

“The soldiers placed a strong stick between the branches of two trees and hanged the prisoner.

“That night at the hour of prayer the angel did not appear to the man of the mountains and he was very sad. The same the next day, and the next.

“Then on the next day after that the angel came to him and the man asked him why he had not appeared on the three days before. ‘What you did was a bad thing. You said to the soldiers who were going to hang the prisoner, “He who does it pays for it.” You did not give advice to the men. Instead you said “He who does it pays for it” and for that God will chastise you.’

“The poor man of the mountains was very sad. ‘Does that mean that I will not be saved?’

“The angel replied: ‘You must go now and remove the man who has been hanged. Bury him. Take the stick they hanged him on, place it on your shoulder, and everywhere you go you must take it with you. Whenever you sleep place the stick by your head and when the stick becomes alive with flowers, you will be saved.’

“The little man—the hermit—was very sad but obeyed the angel. He took down the body. He buried the man and carried the stick with him every day—everywhere he walked—on his shoulder. At night, every night, he put the stick at his head, hoping that it would come alive in the morning with flowers.”

Juan paused in the middle of the narrative. Epifania filled his cup with more tea and he drank slowly. There was something in the way he told the tale that made it seem personal. I was tempted to ask but was learning to cut the questions and just listen.

Soon he began again.

“After becoming very old the hermit still carried the stick with him and slept with it next to his head every night. Then one stormy night, when he was very far from his home in a wild part of the mountains, he saw a small house. He was in need of shelter and in the house was an old woman. The man said, ‘Señora—please do me a favor and let me stay here for the night in your house.’

“Many times the woman refused, but the man begged, ‘I am old and very tired. I will sleep anywhere.’

“Still the woman refused and said, ‘I have two sons who are thieves. If they see you here they will kill you.’

“But the man was too weary to go farther and told the woman the story of his punishment and the stick he must carry. ‘Let me stay,’ he said again. ‘Whatever happens will happen.’ Finally the woman did not say no anymore and he found a place in the stable and put his stick in the corner against the wall.

“When the sons came back to the house they sensed the man was there and were going to kill him. But the woman said they must not, and she told them the tale. She said that there was something strange about the man and his punishment.

“‘God is watching him,’ she warned them, and the sons were alarmed.

“‘Only for that small wrong God is punishing him for so long? What punishment will we have to endure, then? We have killed many people!’

“That night the sons repented of their terrible crimes and the following morning went to see the hermit. But the hermit was dead and his stick, leaning against the wall of the stable, was alive and full of flowers. The sons were saved that day because they repented. And that is my story.”

There was a long silence.

Paco had been quietly translating the long slow tale in case I missed some of its subtleties. (I’ve tried to write it down as it was told, but even now I’m not sure I understand all its meanings.) I watched Juan’s face, hoping he’d explain more about the story and why he’d chosen to tell it to us. Was it somehow about him—about his life? Maybe about his one-time position as a judge? Was he the hermit? Had he lost his angel somewhere along his life? Or had he found something else? Had his stick flowered?…

The questions kept bouncing around my head, but I now realized that Juan was unlikely to answer them. In the true spirit of zen, you find your own answers.

As it grew darker we thanked Juan and Epifania for their hospitality and left to prepare our meal in the courtyard. They both smiled and Juan murmured something quietly to Paco.

“He says we can sleep in the room off the courtyard. There are bamboo beds. And we can stay as long as we wish. He wants you to go and see his church tomorrow.

After dinner (a remarkably unmemorable mush of a meal) I went to check out the beds in the dark room off the courtyard. Like much of the house the walls were monolithic creations of unmortared stone through which the cold night air whistled. The bed was constructed of sections of tree trunk and the raised sleeping platform consisted of thin strips of bamboo placed close together and covered with a few goat and cow hides. Paco seemed quite happy with the accommodation, but I found the utter blackness of the room oppressive and decided to spend another night out in the open.