“Tell me, Juan, talk to me from the upside-down world where you’ve come to rest,” she said, still walking forward. “What should I do now with something I cannot refuse or give away? What does one do with love born with a purpose? Where, in what being, in what thing, can I deposit something created for someone else, someone who disappears without taking it with them?”
Bathed in a reddish glow, she looked up to the sky, a pomegranate sliced in half. She looked behind her. What she saw might easily have turned her into a pillar of salt or granite. The church had become a flaming skeleton, supported by a single pillar on the brink of collapse.
“Juan,” she shouted, walking back. “The church is about to fall on top of you, I’ll drag you away from there, let me pull you away!”
“No!” a voice roared from the ground, it seemed to come from all those who are not given a choice over the manner of their death.
The dog, still licking the face of the dying man like a wave lapping at the shore, rocked back as though she had been slapped. She sat on her haunches, whining uselessly.
And so, just as he had told her: she had to walk away. But where? And what grist was left for her mental mill? She felt as uninspired as a cabbage. Perhaps she should follow the sun west. West. And suddenly she remembered. Someone had said something about the pain of man, all men. Something that would be useful walking any path in any direction. “My pain is the north and south winds, like unfertilized eggs laid by strange birds on the gales. My pain is like the death of my lover, it would be no greater if my neck were cut to the quick…”
She felt the painful mark left by the wire in her dream. “My pain is the north and south winds,” she repeated.
Yes, that was where the knot was. She had to untie it. A pain that is everywhere and yet has no place on this earth, like the pain of drifters who throw themselves off cargo trains at places unmarked on the map. But it was precisely where they had to die for reasons they would never understand.
She had always hated morals. She rejected conclusions and the myths they create in a world that erupts suddenly like a volcano, like a landslide, like a silent shadow wandering in search of a crumbling body. But at least the man who has leaped to his death in his dirty rags, his fleas abandoning his body as it cools, has brought an end to the cycle, the cycle that those settled comfortably in the seats of their first-class carriages never imagined existed, she thought to herself. She had reached a location where life appeared to have forgotten its rush. She realized that she was on the rarely used path that led from the village into the wilderness, ending at the river.
More trees, more primitive pebbles under feet, bloody footprints. More uninhabited silence, the kind emitted by denizens of cemeteries. She felt the thick, sticky semen of the only man in the village running down her thighs. She remembered him once more, lovely and erect next to the haystack by the stable, telling her about his experience in her hair cocoon. Fear. This damp substance, still alive and full of power, and the creature from whose bones it came were one and the same. The only difference was that she could offer shelter to this small offering, while the person who had given it was lying behind her in irredeemable solitude, struck down by the cause. Yes, the cause. But in whose name? She wouldn’t be able to explain it to a court if she were caught and tried. And yet, she must make a symbol of its message, she thought, a message that they can understand when they wake the next day, uselessly scratching their bellies, their eyes sleepy, a bitter taste on their tongues. No, it wasn’t a dream, they’d say. There’s Juan on a stretcher, one of his arms dangling down like an oar. There’s his gray-and-white dog licking his hand, his fingers leaving a trail in the dust. Then they look to the church for strength. It’s gone. They remember the priest’s leap into the flames. But there was also a naked woman, wasn’t there? Now they’re fully awake and she completes the trinity, but they still don’t understand its nature. They don’t understand… Suddenly those three words get lodged in their heads. In their efforts to suppress them, they multiply. Not because of what they contain, but the stickiness of the threads that link them together. More trees, more empty silence, more confusion over timeless experiences. But most of all, three innocuous words pounding away incessantly in her brain. Now someone had returned from some unknown place to remind her: a young man she once saw in a similar plight. Throwing a handkerchief into the air and catching it a million times until he was sweating profusely from all the pores on his body. “He’s never done an odd thing in his life,” squealed his mother to the men who came to fit him for a straitjacket. “But then he started this business with the handkerchief.” Each of us has our own handkerchief of madness, she thought. But why this approaching darkness? Is it an eclipse? She didn’t remember having stopped anywhere, not long enough for night to overtake her on the path. Perhaps the twilight came from inside of her, spreading outward from her soul into the shadowy landscape. She grew increasingly unsure of what was and wasn’t real—as though everything visible were taking refuge behind shards of dark glass dropping out of the sky.
“Nobody falls asleep while they’re walking,” she said, using up her final reserves of inner clarity. “No one ceases to exist while their legs are still moving…”
“They don’t understand.” Sudden death had fallen upon the trees ranged on either side. Now she wanted to scream. But scream at whom? Everything was frozen. And what throat would she use? Then she began to feel the presence of the other. At first he was far away, but soon his footsteps grew closer, more real. They were slow, purposeless, like they had long ago refused to acknowledge their commitments, and, eventually, the body making them. It was the plough horse, or its ghostly double, which nobody had dared tie back up again. She was about to climb on top of him—he was the only thing in the forsaken valley she could claim as hers—when she saw that, from his hooves to his blank stare, he bore the burden of complete indifference. Nothing could now get through to him. But at least he was alive. Now that he was ahead of her, she could run to catch him, even with the cotton legs that had apparently replaced her real ones. Touching a real body could bring her back to the world they shared. Those people have probably driven it mad, the way you can drive an animal mad when it has been judged to have been in contact with evil. But surely he’ll recognize the person who kissed his festering wound, fighting over it with that fly like a pair of widows squabbling over a lover. But even when she approaches him on her stupid rubbery legs, he walks on. He gets away from her again and again. Finally, after a series of such encounters, they come across something that will finally allow her to catch up: the riverbank. He has no choice, he can either turn back or wait for her there. Meanwhile, she will look back in time, to where she left her love, where the pain of the man of the four winds lingers on: “Juan, the burning church is going to collapse, let me pull you away…” “No!” The animal doesn’t stop or turn away from the shore, but continues on through the water, its hooves somehow still dry, like Moses reincarnate.
Then she finally broke out of her three-word prison. She understood. The beast looked at her from the other side with phosphorescent eyes; it didn’t seem as though he was only just noticing her. His gaze was that of someone who knows that the time has come for something, something that can only happen at the right moment. The river closed over itself and he stood there, eyes gleaming in the darkness. He was the only one still with her at the end, staring unblinking like a beacon of green light. But he was on the other side. And so she stepped into the water, her cotton, leaden legs propelling her forward.