both sides of the coin; I’ve doubted and even felt the crunching of the heel that insinuated a one-eighty. One morning this barfly, in great pain, thought about going on the straight and narrow, left to look for a job, then ran into an old friend and took a turn for the worse. In the end, he stole out of necessity. And now, given what his legal representative is saying, his sentence isn’t far off.
This man is a thief.
But he’s also a killer.
One night, during the most boisterous of benders, he strolls through bloody intersections of the ghetto, while at the same time, an old-timer who, then holding down an honest job, is on his way home from work. Walking up next to him, the drinker takes him by the arm, invites him in, gets him to share in his adventure, and the upright man accepts, though much to his regret.
Fording the earth ten elbows deep, they return after midnight through dark allies. The irreproachable man with alarming diphthongs brings the drinker to a halt; he takes him by the side, stands him up, and berates the shameless scum, “Come on! This is what you like. You don’t have a choice anymore.”
And suddenly a sentence bursts forth in flames and emerges from the darkness: “Hold it right there! …”
An assault of anonymous knives. Botched, the target of the attack, the blade doesn’t pierce the flesh of the drunkard but mistakenly and fatally punctures the good worker.
Therefore, this man is also a killer. But the courts, naturally, do not suspect, nor will they ever, the third hand of the thief.
Meanwhile, he keeps doing pushups on that suspicious cot of his, while humming his sad yaraví.
[JM]
________________
WINDOWSILL
I’m pasty. While I comb my hair, in the mirror I notice that the bags under my eyes have grown even blacker and bluer and that the hue of my shaved face’s angular copper has scathingly jaundiced.
I’m old. I wipe my brow with the towel, and a horizontal stripe highlighted by abundant pleats is highlighted therein like a cue of an implacable funeral march … I’m dead.
My cell mate has gotten up early and is making the dark tea that we customarily take in the morning, with the stale bread of a new hopeless sun.
We sit down afterward at the bare table, where the melancholic breakfast steams, within two teacups that have no saucers. And these cups afoot, white as ever and so clean, this bread still warm on the small rolled tablecloth from Damascus, all this domestic morning-time aroma reminds me of my family’s house, my childhood in Santiago de Chuco, those breakfasts of eight to ten siblings from the oldest to youngest, like the reeds of an antara,56 among them me, the last of all, glued to the side of the dining room table, with the flowing hair that one of my younger sisters has just endeavored to comb, in my left hand a whole piece of sweet roll—it had to be whole!—and with my right hand’s rosy fingers, crouching down to hide the sugar granule by granule …
Ah! The little boy that took the sugar from his good mother, who, after finding our hideout, sat down to snuggle with us, putting in timeout the couple of fleabags up to no good.
“My poor little son. Some day he won’t have anyone to hide the sugar from, when he’s all grown up, and his mother has died.”
And the first meal of the day was coming to an end, while mother’s two blazing tears were soaking her Nazarene braids.
[JM]
________________
BEYOND LIFE AND DEATH
Hackneyed rockrose of July; wind belted around each of the great grain’s one-armed petioles that gravitate inside it; dead lust upon omphaloid hillsides of the summertime sierra. Wait. This can’t be. Let’s sing again. Oh, how sweet a dream!
My horse trotted that away. After being out of town for eleven years, that day I finally drew near to Santiago, where I was born. The poor irrational thing pushed on, and from all my being to my tired fingers that held onto the reins, through the attentive ears of the quadruped and returning though the trotting of the hooves that mimicked a stationary jig, in the mysterious score-keeping trial of the road and the unknown, I wept for my mother who, dead for two years now, would no longer be waiting the return of her wandering wayward son. The whole region, its mild climate, the color of harvest in the lime afternoon, and also a farmhouse around here that recognized my soul, stirred up in me a nostalgic filial ecstasy, and my lips grew almost completely chapped from suckling the eternal nipple, the ever lactating nipple of my mother; yes, ever lactating, even beyond death.
As a boy I had surely passed by there with her. Yes. For sure. But, no. It wasn’t with me that she’d crossed those fields. Back then I was too young. It was with my father—how long ago must that have been! Ah … It was also in July, with the Saint James festival not far off. Father and mother rode atop their mules; he in the lead. The royal path. Perhaps my father who had just dodged a crash with a wandering maguey:
“Señora … Watch out! …”
My poor mother didn’t have enough time and was thrown from her saddle onto the stones of the path. They took her back to town on a stretcher. I cried a lot for my mother, and they didn’t tell me what had happened. She recovered. The night before the festival, she was cheerful and smiling, no longer in bed, and everything was fine. I didn’t even cry for my mother.
But now I was crying more, remembering her as she was sick, laid out, when she loved me more and showed me more affection and also gave me more sweetbread from underneath her cushions and from the nightstand drawer. Now I was crying more, drawing near to Santiago, where I’d only find her dead, buried beneath the ripe fragrant mustard plants of a poor cemetery.
My mother had passed away two years earlier. The news of her death first reached me in Lima, where I also learned that my father and siblings had set out on a trip to a faraway plantation owned by an uncle of ours, to ease the pain, as best one can, of such a terrible loss. The country estate was located in the most remote region on the mountain, on the far side of the Río Marañón. From Santiago I’d head that way, devouring unending trails of precipitous puna and unknown blistering jungles.
My animal suddenly started huffing. Fine dust kicked up abundantly with a gentle breeze, blinding me nearly. A pile of barley. And then, Santiago came into view, on its jagged plateau, with its dark brown rooftops facing the already horizontal sun. And still, toward the east, on the ledge of a brazil-yellow promontory stood the pantheon carved at that hour by the 6:00 p.m. tincture; and I couldn’t go any farther, as an atrocious sorrow had seized me.
I reached the town just as night did. I made the last turn, and as I entered the street that my house was on, I saw someone sitting alone on the bench in front of the door. He was alone. Very alone. So much so that, choking on my soul’s mystical grief, I was frightened by him. It must’ve also been due to the almost inert peace with which, stuck by the penumbra’s half strength, his silhouette was leaning against the whitewashed face of the wall. A particular bluster of nerves dried my tears. I moved on. From the bench jumped my older brother, Ángel, and he gave me a helpless hug. He’d come from the plantation on business only a few days earlier.
That night, after a frugal meal, we stayed up until dawn. I walked through the rooms, hallways, and patios of the house; even while making a visible effort to skirt that desire of mine to go through our dear ole house, Ángel also seemed to take pleasure in the torture of someone who ventures through
