“The young males that go first are called squires,” the old man says seriously before he is gradually overcome by laughter. “The young squires are the ones that get hunted, the ones that die. But the old hog knows more and more just because he’s old. He lets the piglets and the females be sacrificed for him.”
Now indeed, now indeed he looks at you with a red burning gaze like a coal brought back to life, the final coal in the middle of the ashes that everyone thought were dead.
“When they’re old they get gray. The hogs. They only come out at night, when the young have already been hunted or have come back alive to say that the path is clear.”
He laughed heartily.
“They only come out at night. They get gray with time. Their tusks twist around. Old hog, twisted tusk.”
He stopped laughing and tapped a finger against his teeth.
He hired you a car on this side of the tunnel. He didn’t have to tell you he was counting on your sense of honor. He left you alone to drive to the other side. It took exactly fourteen minutes to cross the tunnel of Barrios de la Luna. He would start counting the minutes as soon as you pulled away. After fifteen minutes, you would turn around to enter the tunnel again and he, the old man, would begin to drive in the opposite direction.
“Good-bye,” said the old man.
Surrounded by smoke from the power station and mist from the high mountains, they were leaving the highway that ran by abandoned coal pits slowly healing in the earth. Kids were playing soccer. Old women were bent over their gardens. The concrete, the poles, the blocks of cement, and the retainer walls progressively split the earth to make way for the highway and the succession of tunnels that penetrated the Sierra Cantábrica, conquering it. It was a splendid highway and Leandro drove his boss’s Mercedes quickly, with one hand. With the other he squeezed his Encarna’s, and she asked him to slow down, Jesus, not to scare her — let’s get to Madrid alive. But no matter how she softened him, he had his macho habits and responses he wasn’t going to give up over night; besides, the Mercedes was purring like a cat, it was a pleasure to drive a car that slid over the highway like butter over a roll. He smiled as they entered the long tunnel of Barrios de la Luna, leaving behind a landscape of snowy peaks and patchy fogs. Leandro turned on lights like two cats’ eyes. Behind him was an old van driven by a man dressed in black, his black hat pulled down to his huge ears and his gray whiskers prickling the top of his white collarless shirt. He scratched the lobe of his hairy ear. He took care not to change lanes or pass on the left and risk a crash. Better to follow at a distance, safely, follow that elegant Mercedes with Madrid license plates. He guffawed. Honor was for assholes. He was going to avenge his poor son.
You were doing sixty miles an hour, ashamed to think you were doing it so a highway patrolman would pull you over and keep you from entering the tunnel, which was coming up. The rapid transition from the hard sun to the blast of smoke, the breath of black fog inside the tunnel, made you dizzy. With great assurance, you took the left lane, driving against traffic, telling yourself that you were going to leave that village of stone, that language of stone. It was better to go to America — that was the real thing — to be yourself, take a risk to win a bet, and what a bet, two hundred thousand pesetas in one shot. You were risking your life, but with luck you’d be rich in one shot. Now you’d see if luck was protecting you. If you didn’t put everything on the line now, you never would — luck was destiny and everything depended on a bet. It was like being a bullfighter, but instead of the bull what was rushing toward you was a pair of headlights, blinding you, two luminous horns. You took the bet: would it be the old son of a bitch, the father of his faggot sons? Who was the person, who were the people you were going to give a great embrace of stone, you with your shining bull horns, like the starry ones that support the virgin, all the virgins of Spain and America? You thought about a woman before smashing into the car coming in the opposite direction, the right direction; you thought about the bread of the virgins, the bride’s bread of the whole world, pan de chourar, the bread of tears transformed into stone.
9. Río Grande, Río Bravo
To David and Laanna Carrasco
fathered by the heights, descendant of the snow, the ice of the sky baptizes the river when it bursts forth in the San Juan mountains, breaks the virginal shield of the cordillera, abruptly becomes young, youthfully challenges the canyons and open cuts of land so that the stormy waters of May can pass on to sleepy June tides
it then loses altitude but gains the desert, wastes its maturity generously leaving liquid alms here and there amid the mesquite, parcels out its luxurious old age in fertile farmlands, and bequeaths its death to the sea
río grande, río bravo,
let me ask you:
did the thick aromatic cedars grow with you, since the dawn of creation, and then become the wood for your cradle? did the plants that roll across the desert merely announce your arrival, always defending you from the spines and bayonets of yucca and palo verde? were your loves always perfumed by the incense of the pine nut? did the white poplars always escort you, the spruces disguise you, the olive-colored waves of your immense pastures always rock you? was your death avoided by the nervous nursing of wild thistles, did the black fruits of the juniper announce it, the willows not weep your requiem? río grande, río bravo, did the creosote, the cactus, the sagebrush not forget you, thirsty for your passage, so obsessed by your next rebirth that they have already forgotten your death?
the river of shifting floors now travels back to its sources from the coastal plains, their fertile half-moon a cape of swamps; the valley drops anchor between the pine and the cypress until a flight of doves raises it again, carrying the river up to the steep tower from which the earth broke off the very first day, under the hand of God:
now God, every day, gives a hand to the rio grande, rio bravo, so it may rise to his balcony once more and roll along the carpets of his waiting room before opening the doors to the next chamber, the step that brings the waters, if they manage to scale the enormous ravines, back to the roofs of the world, where each plateau has its own faithful cloud that accompanies it and reproduces it like a mirror of air:
but now the earth is drying and the river can do nothing for it but plant the stakes that guide its course and that of its travelers, for everyone would get lost here if the Guadalupe mountains were not there to protect the river and drive it back to its womb, rio grande, rio bravo, back to the nourishing cave it never should have left for exile and death and the blinding hurricane that awaits it again to drown the river again and again …
Stopped for the night by the river’s edge, Benito Ayala was surrounded by men who looked like him, all between twenty and forty years old, all wearing straw hats, cheap cotton shirts and trousers, sturdy shoes for working in a cold climate, short jackets of various colors and designs.
They all raise their arms, spread them in a cross, clench their fists, silently offer their labor on the Mexican side of the river, hoping someone takes note of them, saves them, pays them heed. They prefer to risk being caught than not to advertise themselves, declare their presence: Here we are. We want work.
They all look alike, but Benito Ayala knows that each of them will cross the river with a different bagful of memories, an invisible knapsack in which only their own memories fit.