Ángel did not leave home, where, according to him, everything lay just as it was left after Mom’s death. He also told me about the state of her health during the days preceding the fatal pain and what her agony was like. Oh, the brotherly embrace scratched at our guts and suctioned out new tears of frozen tenderness and mourning!
“Ah, this bread box, where I used to ask Mom for bread, with big crocodile tears!” And I opened a little door with plain dilapidated panels.
As in all rustic constructions of the Peruvian sierra, where each doorway is almost always accompanied by a bench, alongside the threshold I’d just crossed, there sat the same one from my boyhood, without a doubt, repaired and shined countless times. With the rickety door open, we each took a seat on the bench, and there we lit the sad-eyed lantern that we were carrying. Its firelight went in full gallop onto Ángel’s face, which grew more tired from one moment to the next, while night ran its course and we pressed on the wound some more, until it almost seemed transparent. As I noticed his state, I hugged him and, with kisses, covered his severe bearded cheeks that once again got soaked in tears.
A flash in the sky, without any thunder, the kind that comes from far away, during the highland summer, emptied the guts of night. I kept wiping Ángel’s eyelids. And neither he nor the lantern, nor the bench, nor anything else was there. I couldn’t hear. I felt like I was in a tomb.
Then I could see again: my brother, the lantern, the bench. But I thought I saw in Ángel a refreshed complexion now, mild and perhaps I was mistaken—let’s say he looked as though he’d overcome his previous affliction and gauntness. Perhaps, I repeat, this was a visual error on my part, since such a change is inconceivable.
“I feel like I still see her,” I continued weeping, “without the poor thing knowing what to do about that gift, she keeps scolding me, ‘I caught you, you little liar; you pretend you’re crying when you’re secretly laughing!’ And she kissed me more than all of you, since I was the youngest!”
After the vigil, Ángel again seemed broken up and, as before the flash of light, shockingly emaciated. I’d surely suffered a momentary loss of sight, brought on by the strike of the meteor’s light, when I found in his physiognomy relief and freshness that, naturally, couldn’t have been there.
The dawn had yet to crack the following day when I mounted up and left for the plantation, bidding farewell to Ángel, who’d stay a few days more for the matters that had motivated his arrival to Santiago.
With the first leg of the journey behind me, an inexplicable event took place. At an inn I was leaning back, resting on a bench, when from the hut an old woman suddenly stared at me with an alarmed expression.
“What happened to your face?” she asked out of pity. “Good God! It’s covered in blood …”
I jumped up from the bench and, in the mirror, confirmed that my face was speckled with dried bloodstains. A giant shudder gripped me, and I wanted to run from myself. Blood? From where? I had touched my face to Ángel’s, who was crying … But … No. No. Where was that blood from? One will understand the terror and shock that knotted my chest with a thousand thoughts. Nothing is comparable with that jolt of my heart. There are no words to express it now, nor will there ever be. And today, in the solitary room where I write, there’s that aged blood and my face smeared with it and the old woman from the wayside inn and the journey and my brother who cries and whom I don’t kiss and my dead mother and …
… After tracing the lines on my face, I fled onto the balcony, panting in a cold sweat. So frightening and overwhelming is the memory of that scarlet mystery …
Oh nightmarish night in that unforgettable shack, where the image of my mother, between struggles of strange endless threads that later snapped just from being seen, became the image of Ángel, who wept glowing rubies, for ever and never!57
I kept to the road, and, finally, after a week on horseback through the high peaks, temperate mountain terrain, and crossing the Marañón, one morning I reached the outskirts of the plantation. The overcast space intermittently reverberated with claps of thunder and fleeting sun showers.
I dismounted alongside the post of the gate to the house near the driveway. Some dogs barked in the mild sad calm of the sooty mountain. After so long I now returned to that solitary mansion, buried deep in the ravines of the jungle!
Between the garrulous alarm of riled up domesticated birds, a voice that called and contained the mastiffs inside seemed to be strangely whiffed by the weary trembling soliped who several times sneezed, perked his ears forward almost horizontally, and by bucking tried to get the reins out of my hands in an attempt to escape. The enormous door was locked. I knocked on it mechanically. Yet the voice kept trilling from inside the walls, and, as the gigantic doors opened with a frightening creak, that oral doorbell rose over all sixteen of my years and handed me Eternity blade first. Both doors had swung open.
Meditate briefly on this incredible event that breaks the laws of life and death and surpasses all possibility; word of hope and faith between absurdity and infinity, undeniable nebulous disconnect of time and space that brings on tears of unknowable inharmonious harmonies!
My mother appeared and wrapped me in her arms!
“My son,” she exclaimed in astonishment. “You’re alive? You’ve come to life? What’s this I see before me, Lord Almighty?”
My mother! My mother in body and soul. Alive! And with so much life that today I think I felt in her presence two desolate hailstones of decrepitude suddenly emerge in my nostrils and then fall and weigh on my heart until making me hunch over in senility, as if, by dint of a fantastic trick of fate, my mother had just been born and I, on the other hand, had come from times so remote that I experienced a paternal feeling toward her. Yes. My mother was there. Dressed in unanimous black. Alive. No longer dead. Could it be? No. Impossible. There’s no way. That woman wasn’t my mother. She couldn’t be. And what did she say when she saw me? She thought I was dead …?
“Oh my son!” my mother said, bursting into tears, and she ran to pull me close to her breasts, in that frenzy and with those tears of joy that she would always use to protect me during my arrivals and departures.
I had turned to stone. I saw her wrap her lovely arms around my neck, kiss me avidly, as though she wanted to devour me, and weep her affection that will never again rain down in my guts. She then coarsely took my impassive face between her hands, looked at me head on, asking question after question. A few seconds later, I started to cry too, but without changing my expression or attitude: my tears were pure water that poured from a statue’s two pupils.
I finally focused all the diffused lights of my spirit. I took a few steps back and stood before—oh my God!—that maternity that my heart didn’t want to receive, that it didn’t know, that it feared; I made them appear before the mysterious holiest of whens, till then unbeknown to me, and I let out a mute double-edged scream in her presence, with the same beat of the hammer that comes close and then withdraws from the anvil, the same that the child lets out with his first groan, when he’s pulled from his mother’s womb, indicating to her that he’s going to live in the world and, at once, that he’s giving her a signal by which they can recognize each other for centuries on end. And I groaned beside myself.
“Never! Never! My mother died long ago. This can’t be …”
She sat up, startled by my words, as if she doubted whether it was me. She pulled me in again between her arms, and we both continued to cry tears that no living being has ever cried or will ever cry again.
“Yes,” I repeated to her. My mother already died.
