Then, at day’s end, the farmer came home from his labors. He held the children up in his arms and kissed his wife and bowed to the bishop. Then candles were lit, and the family took up the routinized activities of their evening. All was action and gestures of interchange, and the calavera thought of the possibilities of exaggeration as he watched them and thought nothing of the next leg of his journey, the search for that future circumstance in which he might find his place.
The woman was at the stove baking. The farmer had lifted a block of wood and was carving the face of a man into it, shavings cast in the fire, and the children sat on the floor, a few feet from the fake bishop’s hem, fitting paper clothing on small anonymous figures. All faces were lit in the wavers of candlelight, and the calavera watched them dissolve and reconstruct as heads turned on their axes and words drifted in lazy half sentences across the room. And in a moment of silence he saw the mother’s face pause in its animation, her hands sunk deeply in dough. She was looking out the window and her gaze was vacant where it met the glass, and the calavera was stunned to see that same look of longing in life that he was aware of in his own face in death, and he recognized it was an avenue of possibility that she was looking down. It was as if between her and the window were actions and the meaningful assumption of actions, but at the glass itself was nothing, just her desire for a place beyond where the terms of her longing ended. And when he saw the same vacant look in the farmer’s face, as he glanced down to the floor in his whittling, he found he was seeing into the human condition with a new understanding. He sat in his robes in the chair watching its manifestations as he mulled it over in his mind. He thought of life as a central artery, running parallel to the spine, and each vein and capillary, extending out along bone to the exuberant extremities, as those possibilities of alternative bloody avenues down which one might glance but never go. He thought of his own life, before he was a calavera, and its necessarily stunted quality, though it had been a life of satisfaction and fullness, and he had walked its broad and easy causeway free of any care.
He’d been a journalist, this calavera, privy to the hidden corruptions of government, present at the forefront of shipwreck and devastating fire. On his bicycle he’d ridden to the brink of individual illness and family difficulty, often into circumstances of possibility where he might have stepped from the saddle into another life. He’d seen a boy he’d desired, saved from the roots of a tree. He’d seen women whose lives were frustration, wife, daughter and nun. Each had been ripe for engagement, but he had simply written their stories and moved on, life’s longing recorder. Now his bones shook under his bishop’s garment as he silently articulated his proposal.
All men and women long for the might have been, those avenues of life they didn’t take, and in the recognition that each one was a possibility, held in the memory as vision grown hazy at terminals beyond all bright beginnings, longing becomes empty nostalgia as the veins dry and collapse along the bones and the broad gestures of the body wither at the outer reaches. Devoid of the animation of living, all come narrowed and regretful to their deaths, since of the many possible lives, only one was lived.
He saw it in the look of the farmer’s wife and in the farmer, and though the children glanced up from their play and down those first narrow byways only with bright eyes and curiosity, he knew their time too would come.
And he knew now that the living he’d longed for again as a calavera held its own profound longing, and that when he reached a new circumstance the force of his look would be doubled in the intensity of its longing, drawing the eyes of the viewers to a bloody familiarity, and would overwhelm the dry extravagance of the dancing bones.
There was no sound, but the children turned to him as he fell down, the dark robes of the bishop collapsing to a pile of dusty fabric on the chair’s wooden seat. It was bone dust, and it puffed through the weave, then settled into a haze, obscuring the chair’s legs. And the farmer was rising, his wife turning, and the children’s faces were invisible behind their heads. But the face of the farmer was intense, as was that of his wife; their jaws creaked open, the blocks of their teeth visible to the pink gums. All paused as they reached the chair, as if gathered around the last event in an old story. A wind came in at the window. It blew the door open and blew the fine dust of the dissolved bones of the calavera out into a final burial in the night.
I no longer think of my condition. I’ve grown thin, and the bones press out at my clavicles and the points of my hips, and even my own clothing hangs loose on my body and is blown against my thighs and bony shoulders by the wind leaking in at the tortured frames, all the doors and windows now, and there’s a place where the roof has twisted and torqued shingles free and the rain comes in. I’ve had to place pots in the bedroom and move the rifle, and I can see the lighthouse from the window there. Its tilting is perceptible now, and I wonder when it will fall and if my house will follow or precede it. No longer. Because a condition is something separate and discernible, and though I remember my father and mother and Tampico and the days before my agora, I’ve come to distrust that sweet nostalgia. I was someone else then, and memory’s world belongs only to the dead.
Arthur is gone. He took the last load. There was a truck at the barricade when he came through, and they told him it wouldn’t be safe to return again, and he told me this when he’d finished loading and that they’d asked if I’d be coming out with him, and he smiled when he told me he’d said he didn’t think so. He paused at the foot of the steps and looked back, and I thought of my last lover and that going, though they are nothing alike, but his hair in the wind, that moment of hesitation before the finality of turning.
It’s night now, and the gas is gone and they’ve shut the power down again and I’ve lit the candles. The lights are on at the barricades, and there’s no storm, but a star-filled night, and I’ve left their calls on the answering machine and pulled the plug on the phone. I’ll handle all that in the morning, figure a few more excuses to put it off. I can see the shadows of the Manor across the meadow, a slice of white wall lit by the light on the ambulance dock, but there is no light in the solarium, though it’s early, and I wonder where the old men are and I wonder about the other, deep in his dreamless coma, out on the ward. Is it Saturday? The house is quiet now, no hum of pump or appliances, no radio, and what I hear is the drone of a plane, and when I get to the cliffside window I can see it clearly. It’s a small plane, and it’s flying low out over the beach and the edge of sea. Then it’s climbing up into the sky and banking away, and I can see the numbers and letters on the undersides of its toylike wings as it rises against the stars in a world that seems quite impossible, and horizonless, heading for places I will never go.
BOOK THREE. Tampico
The House
When the breeze came up and lifted the desert sand into a veil that set the few remaining derricks in the distance shimmering, Carlos turned his head and tipped his hat and looked down at the door’s sill, seeing once again those shallow scratches. He was standing at the veranda’s rail beside the stairs, and once the breeze fell and sand no longer showered against his sleeve and he could turn, he saw the two surveyors, one standing at the tripod of his spirit level, peering into the telescope, the other far off to the right, holding a bright yellow stick. They’d finished both sides of the property and would soon get to the back. He’d been there and had seen the rusted iron cauldrons, too large and heavy to be hauled away by scavengers. Inside, they’d taken most everything, if there had been anything, though they’d left the sink and hand pump and the brass bed, which seemed odd, since it was valuable. As the only imposing object in the single open room, it seemed significant somehow, as if it had been readied for some special occasion. There was a rod too, a piece of wooden doweling affixed where walls joined in a corner, a place for hanging a few pieces of clothing.