Shall My West Hurt Me?
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Abiquiú, New Mexico
1852
__________________________
We have men-stealers for ministers, women-whippers for missionaries, and cradle-plunderers for church members. The man who wields the blood-clotted cowskin during the week fills the pulpit on Sunday, and claims to be a minister of the meek and lowly Jesus. The man who robs me of my earnings at the end of each week meets me as a class-leader on Sunday morning, to show me the way of life, and the path of salvation.
Frederick Douglass, 1845
__________________________
It is morning. The sky is back to blue and kind sapphire, and the light is warm—warm in its unique and far-between rays because it is winter. Heat is not close. I am liking it. Inés. I am Inés.
I ask, what does it mean? I am asking all my life because I do not know. I will not know. I am in the town and the town is full of holy people and insects—yes, big full ripe ones. There are three big lines of wood with others put horizoned just by the middle, all standing on the hill. I can’t remember, but the holy men are in love with them more than the very earth they stand on. I see them slam their selves in it. Slamming because they go back in forth. Back—forth.
Inés. Call me it because there is no other.
Morning comes up past the sticks and it is now white with painted wetted smashed up gravel clouds and swooshing cane lines going all through the time. Many people are crawling out around me, off of wool they wear at night. They are crawling and naked and changing in the light. Many whispering threads. North is where we are—it is cold, winter.
Huts.
Huts deflate when people leave them. How the rocks have deflated since.
Stirring and just getting my skin is Saúl—he is clean. Skin like untouched walnut, no sugar. A scar along his back reminds me that he is man every time a fabric of skin begins to go out and a tear of blood goes too. It hits the ground and stays a while, fighting off the sand. Now he wishes more than anything to go to sleep, for this is our day.
He wakes:
“Inés. Do not call yourself that, please. Ready your things, the don is coming. He expects us to be orderly before we go out—we have to make the town look pleasant. You want that, yes? Remember: never to be seen again, yes?”
I do want that, because holy people live here. The pack of loose leather bandage lines holding us from the outside crinkles and unsheathes somebody coming in.
***
It was a hundred thousand days ago and there were only wanderers with silver armor and no sticks, and the forces of expeditionaires were only just starting to change the ground. The holy people came. It was then. A hundred thousand days ago—she was charged with apostasy by the don of those times, and the don of forever lasting.
When it all went grey, there were others—all witches, Saúl says is not true, but I’m aware. I am aware. They would go out at night when the stars were whispering little things of magic to them out of their pink and blue twinkling shrowds, and they would boil and stir under them until they had been replicated—little jays. Magic is a mix of things known and unknown. Men with curved together steel hats came and took them away, took the witches away. Many people clapped, and me. It is dark out, then, and they’re put in a cell and go to Santa Fe for apostasy.
Apostasy. Apostasy. Many ways to see it:
i. The killing of the holies from men back to boys.
ii. freeing a body to its electricity in witchery.
iii. el Cristo: not ever feeling him.
I know that they did all three. In their stirrings there is the pumping heart of the Spaniard, the wanderer, pumping lowly acid where there was once blood through its four chambers like an insect. Insects are boys. Insects are the freed, freed from their power—stolen. And in the harvesting of the man-boy Spaniard he suffered, and they did not. They were picked to death until they died, apostates no more. Saúl leaves when ever I tell it to him, calling it lies.
“Ours were not witches. Do not say that. You’ll be dried.”
I tell him that witches go against el Cristo, but he doesn’t believe me.
“Say that least of all. You don’t know it, you don’t know it. What is Christ to you?”
***
The don is in now, and I want him to see me and Saúl resting, barely stirring in peace, ready. We’ll be standing soon, like always. Like always, always. I can feel the dirt and scattered feed and corn and hay right between my toes, in their nails which Saúl cuts for me. And I am moving them all one and one. Balancing myself and one heel digs deeper into the earth than the other. All deflated.
The don is a man. Eyes of Ni'hodilhil mist, floating with the black century sun. They don’t dart and are lazy because he only sees two. Two headed. For living, we sleep. His shirts are made out of linked grass and bending, teeming weeds. It is alive and moving on him, I see. Rivers here make the surrounding green. They have thorns on them. I don’t ever touch. He says and I pick Saúl up by the arms and he stands too. His feet are flat. He doesn’t look at the don. He is grasping in his palm, something.
***
Night before our day.
It is barely time for frost and yet it has already arrived. The earth is sleeping and heaving, and Saúl’s back is turned towards me with its range of lumps of bone that sound and appear music. Walnut, dark-shell skin, and it glows. The dandruff falls further and the slumber goes on, and we, alone, awake. Eyes sleepily watch us, eyes of God. In the shadows there are more hunchbacks in the shape of hills, black and primordial, walking in place. I am saying I love Saúl. I am saying I love him. All is solid, now.
He says it to me, too. He loved me yesterday.
“Do you love your God more than me?” He says.
I go inside to the pitch deflated sagging hut, and I cannot see the layers of hair that lay upon it anymore. Inside is like the womb, unremembered and unfeeling, untouched. There are no stars out, no witches. I hear the ribbons shuffle and now Saúl arrives and his breathing is coarse and hard like a man too small for himself.
There are such things of sounds that contract and divide as one and turn into songs and creature groans. Creatures groan tonight when both the fibers of home and Saúl go up and down with the silver—like the bracelets—moving through the air and the hills of the moon, and as she breathes the air moves with and through her, and we are all not seen, and it is new. My lids are tired. Tired.
***
Each blade a tower, the Chama is lazily floating to port with journeying ice and rafts of it and through the smothered sun it beams and I can see rays and spikes of light, golden more than all fruits. I am in the bracelets, each joined by long branches of gun grey ribbon, hard and put on fast. Around them my bones have learned to curve, pledging to do so, knowing so. Flying pulp bugs circle and crawl up their hardened sides and take, and so I give. It receives and holds in rotation and shape of a celestial body, round, round, round.
I can feel them cool my skin.
Tomorrow is our day, it is. What is our day? This I asked. The don told me to quit with worry but what is Abiquiú but holy, and what is leaving but not so? Holies that slam themselves pretty. Oñate the journeyman, the first wanderer, gorged himself on the old hills. His face is still here.
Our day. Our day.
Dragon flies and yellow beetles go here in the basin. Basins of creation stir.
Grass abdicates and abides behind me and there is a man behind me now saying in rattlings what I worry over and that I must have quit.
The don is a man. There is no other man.
He calls my name. Inés.
I cry of our day, no length of time or lack of care lets me forget. I say it. And he hears.
He says to leave myself out of it. To sit by the river until the cubit-wide island of crystal water adorned with bosques of stuck leaves passes out of my eye down to the grande, and then to return up-trail for help, work.
I leave myself out of it and the leather boots go up back. I watch my arms curve like the river. How mighty and terrible the apostate is.
***
Months before our day
“Do you love your God more than me?” Restless waking dark brims with the hot breathful air of fire and drought. Summer, and the sun disappears underneath to warm the ground. It is known.
And he is asking again. We are naked in heat on verges of slumber.
He is holding his mouth closed with teeth and lips and hands.
My heading shaking both ways.
“Why then do you put him in your words? Your words, infested with el Cristo.”
I shake again and my neck hurts because there is force in it. I swear, swear, there is no love in me but for those that ask and need, and Saúl.
Behind his eyes which are blank with nothing but kurnamescent citrus, iris-shaped streaks, I see the arranged twigs atop the Morada, the horizontal lines going across the middle, all standing, watching me.
“Oh, stop it. Your shaking, please quit it. The heat is already enough. There is so much, so much.”
I wish I knew what he said. He repeats for the cycle’s comfort, and it does good for him, so I let him go back and forth.
“What is your name. Say it again.”
Inés. It is Inés. There isn’t any other, please.
And now he is shaking, shaking because he can’t stop it. The mouth remains shut and I myself am dry and yet pooling into sweat. There are puddles, puddles of it and draining into what is left of our sheets, and it is summer, and heat lasts through all hours.
I don’t wish him to know any other name for me, as it is only Inés that matters.
In silence and failing dark, a picture makes itself out of dust and outed breath on the ceiling of our hut, and the heavings of Saúl. It is swirling in mist, rising and churning by its own force, above the second earth. There is me: I am seeing myself. My hair is cut short and brushed pretty, like a black cat, and I am by an arroyo not far from the river, bare and breathless. In its profundities, I am alone. Colors are dancing. Insects are dancing—beetles, ants, dragonflies. Blue herons. Nothing climbs on me or looks; the sky and sun are kind.
And I am sweating my skin off in it.
My bracelets are on tight, hard and cool, made of metal with little symbols carved on the edges. Another heron flies past. Saúl is nowhere, and I miss him not. I miss nothing, nothing. It is all for the don, and there is only Abiquiú, and I am alone.
I will be alive, I will not meet Saúl there. The arroyo is mine, and I will live. No matter the sweat, heat, frost. I will be alive. The ants pass me by, going South until water is reached, and I will not follow. I will not move. I will not move.
***
Week before our day
Saúl is very happy. There are roaming patches of castillejas and he’s laughing at them and their reds, their spiked and cross reds. They are trenched and passed through by brown hoppers moving like dust, and he is trying to enclose them with his bracelets, bigger and thicker than mine. His brown skin like sugar in the light, catching and reflecting like unearthed still-sand geodes—and he is happy. His hair like chains of smooth obsidians lay across his face, crescented in wet and dark currents pointing to his eyes.
He takes one. I pick up the prairie-fire out of the dirt, too. He gives the hopper to me, his breath still, and I see on his face a smile of quartz-white teeth, glowing like starburst blots in the night but it is day; he makes it day. And he is not so anguished for a moment, and his patchy, matted locks are frayed by wind from all of his running and jumping in the world. I’m holding his gifts in my hands.
The hopper has fear and is now hugging its stem for shelter in the shadow of me, my size, my body. And Saúl is watching me stare into it. My hands are shaking but I don’t move, and now they burn through my bracelets. Saúl expects me to do something, anything, and I stare.
It hops away, and Saúl asks, not slack: “What happened to it? Was it scared of the violence?”
I don’t know. I’m staring at him, now.
“Oh, you know it. There’s violence in the field, in the red. Look at my arms!”
They are throbbing. He brandishes his bracelets to show me.
“These are violence, and so is turquoise, and the water buffalo, and the coyote. Look at our hogan. Violence there. Most of all, these chains we must wear.”
He crinkles them.
“These are violence, for they are force. This is our force. What happens if you take them off—you can’t, but what?”
The don puts them on, and Saúl is mad again, almost heaving, but the weather is kind now. The don puts them on because he is a man, a misted-primordial man with simple hearts in him, pumping real, true blood. He sees me souring, my eyebrows cascading down upon myself, and he keeps up a smile of powerlessness, and he takes mercy on me.
“I am sorry. I won’t scare you anymore, I’m sorry.”
I am smiling because he has relented, and the grass grows taller longlegged and gangrinous at the roots with red cities and houses and the hogan is overtaken and I am with Saúl, groping like stickers and hoppers with bent legs like mad, and we are dancing and laughing like never before, and he is saying he loves me.
The don is nowhere. I am nowhere. Saúl is nowhere. There is no before, no after to be seen.
And my heart swells, swells, swells, when he calls to Inés, and blood is mixed with cane in my wires. He calls me, and I grow like a prairie-fire all of my will, all of my will. When in my bracelets I am found alone do not call for me, do not look for me. I will be there, there in Abiquiú, and there will be no force and no violence because the don is there, God willing.
***
There are such things as chains, it is said, of long ago. Witches go in chains—apostates, unserving. There are men, too. Chains make them fight, make them drive like cattle. There is fear, too. Fear in chains.
I am tying blades with rocks together, and they are marching somewhere very important and not kinder. The sun is grey, there.
***
Saúl on his flat feet is a head above me, and the don a head above him. He blinks and flakes of dead skin drift down and become part of the dust and sand and he sweeps them away with his shuffles off a creaky wooden leg bound with hemp that grows thinner by the hour. In a little while, clear, his pale skin, lying there in film that is present only to those outside his own view. He is a man.
He is asking if we are ready and that the caravaners are waiting outside, waiting for only us.
***
I am following him up from the Chama, back to where the work is. Wood is being turned into smaller planks for primary exports, he says, and there is time yet for me to finish the legs of his table. And as I am scrubbing trying to be careful of the varnish I can feel as if it were a tree, and the don is watching me with great surprise as I avoid every blemish. And they are peach trees, silent and not of this world, of below, now in front of me. Unearthed from the younger worlds. There are orbs of sweet blush pink on them, caressing me and soft. And for a moment I can see myself in the tree, and I am jumping in a way of Saúl only I cannot see a river in the Branches; I am further West, in the cradle, in the emergence, and there are pools of joy because it is sweet, and there is flesh and it is sweet, too. Must I stay?
They will stay for ever, and there are mites, and they are happy too—not because they are stupid or otherwise pacified, but because they have seen the trees and the ground and the world for what they really are. I can feel it. Saúl is grunting outside; it should be his vision, not mine. I have stopped the finish, and the don is not here. I am not here.
There are sand lizards running on the ground. They slam into pillars, slamming until they figure out what’s in front of them. Men are much the same way, and the don, too.
Saúl is turning trees into smaller planks and he grows louder. I do not see him work, only the strings and pulleys and axes, his methods, yes.
***
The pinprick rocks atop the not far hills from the riverbed that now runs slow are just piercing his skin. I am not sitting, but his legs are done and trembling in pain. It is dusk and there are tangerine bright full clouds, and my finish had just been done, and night was darkening upon the sky. In tangential wisps.
I do not speak. He, “Any marks?”
I shake my head. It is a daily ritual, and now it will be tomorrow: “Good. Good. Your back?”
Again, I shake my head. This makes him happy but he stays still, his fingers sticking to the chinks in his fingers left by picked-off and dried skin.
Saúl is rising and the foothills themselves crawl with red ants in the formation of agues on skin, and there are no other men to speak of. I am in my own eyes and they are careless, and their sockets pink with age, opening and closing their liquid quarries, over time and under and with it, and looking at Saúl.
I muster: “Saúl.” He doesn’t answer, because it is not his name.
Saúl is anointed by Samuel to far-gone places. Far gone deserts, and he is a king of them—so here, a king of very little, and not even a name. His heart pumps less with blood.
He stands atop: “And do not call me by that. It is Klah.” It is his apostate name, and with it comes fear and blood, and I rise to the scrape of tacks and my hand is taken—Saúl—and he is leading me down through the pass where there is no water and no sprouts and it is empty of all life, and he is the king of this place, for only in his place does it lose air and then gain it at his own will and heave. There are only divoted, scraped and socket stones, black with ash and new birth and form.
And it is silent and still, except our disturbance, and the sand is going in the rocks. Saúl is higher, and looking at the paths out ahead, into open green and then layers of desert, by himself, tracing and muttering.
We are alone. It is God-unseen, and he is standing in the middle with all the clumps and pokings-out of hedges and his skin is running from him, running out, and fluid. It goes dark and we are blind; nobody comes to retrieve me, and we dance by the black flame of immotion and still heat until the sun rises, and we stilt back to our beds—antwalkers.
***
I am thinking in my own not visible eye of a sea of people.
People that are seeing me.
I am seeing a shadow as it creeps up the lines of the nickel moon.
They do not see it; the dropping of the dawn, and the moon is black.
In this new dark I can see new things, new people.
He wasn’t here before.
Arms like frail corn husks in width and strength and there is an odor of grey unfeeling;
Perfect round pared teeth poking out of his lips.
And nobody sees him; they only see me, though I am not there.
I am not there. The moon has left my shadow in its powder tracks.
He is smiling. Where is Saúl? What is a hogan?
***
Sunrise before our day
In its turning the sun rises, and I am outside again. It is silent against nature and I can only hear the running Chamas, hundreds of steps away, creeping between rocks and pebbles downstream to the crossing. There is a quail.
It has a smooth tear-shaped knot atop its little head and there is a patch of cactus between me and it, and a patch between me and the river from which I must make water. It stands still, searching for something in the pricks and flesh pink dew-drop pears, in the dawning shade. All is caked in fine sand that is nothing like dust, for it is sharp.
And it steps across the pricks, one by one, two by two, thoughtful and lighter than air and without song, and without care in its body or for it. And it yet doesn’t notice that there is pain to be felt at all. There are a few stops atop the more blighted pieces of dehydrated green and its there wondering its best path slowly and deeply, and I am almost choking on dust; I love how it feels down my jaw and mouth. It doesn’t know I’m here, smoking with billows in this rising air. I love it; I love Inés.
It finally takes steps through the final pricks, near gliding and flapping, nails scratching lightly at the surface and drawing water, liquid green, and like mine own eyes, glossed and shining in a sun.
Footsteps: Saúl. He is saying to me to come back inside and I can hear his rigid and crumbling morning-voice above even the wind and the water, raging though now they are, alone—and I am not there.
***
“If you could go anywhere, anywhere at all, Inés, where?” Saul asks me. He is bleeding and the Don is not looking just now.
I look down for a moment, and I know my answer, not should I say it. His arms are at his feet, punctured a little.
I would be at the Don’s house. There was a box of pork by the door to the castilla some days ago, red and dripping through wood, I said. I was in hunger, I said.
He shook his head like a hanging leaf by threads of twig as if I was sick and my body lying there in bile. Was I sick?
“No, you are not. Just el Cristo. Only that” He went away and I was alone; a few men from Taos passed me by on the roadside and I didn’t look at them. There are buds sounding quickly at dusk, in a daze. Little bodies of bugs are on my nails.
***
Night before our day.
And my lids are reopened by the stinging presence and fetor of lies and deceit and their remorse pouring out of a man that hangs in front of me almost gasping at me, his hair so stringy and curved with saliva and finger-twirling that it is nearly in locked threads. Saúl hangs over me. It is Saúl: watching and waiting for me and the first specks of dawn are falling like soot to water pools in his eyes; first suns of morning are rising atop his red and something varicosed eyes which lie in wait and with dried husked glazes covering his pupils— embalmed bodies.
He is whispering in methods so delicately as to underpass the centuries of lesions in every part, so he is one uncarried line: “Inés? Will you listen to me, if that is your name?”
I nod, I say.
“Inés? I cannot hold it within me any longer, Inés. Do you believe me?”
He doesn’t wait for me to answer.
“This dwelling, this place, this Abiquiú, what is it? Look at me. This is our home,” he filters his tongue between rows of chipped teeth and it is black, black and blighted with something I have never seen, lines of blood and mucus.
“We are in chains and the metal is snapping my wrists every day, so much so that they do not even heal themselves anymore—they always used to do so. And my disease, my disease, Inés, has spread to my full breathing body. There is such an extent of foreign objects in my body that what am I but Saúl, what am I but my católico name any longer? And it hurts, my scraps of wood and paint and nail and rust that litter my fibers, Inés, it hurts so much that my tears are all dried and my eyes raisins, and in the shadow of witch-nights of silver I am nothing but nails, nothing but. I feel as if I am going plagued. I am not saying it. You don’t realize?”
I feel we are in a separate language across a cliff. He rotates his lips and says my God to please me, and I am afraid of my brother.
“We are not free, Inés, we are not free,” The words are not going in; what does it mean, I ask, “Look at your arms!” He grabs me like mad by my branches and I can see and hear the clinking of them.
“Please! They’re so heavy. We are chained to the world. Tell me. We are slaves! Slaves and I cannot tell you, slaves and I must tell you! For what am I to do but yell that we are slaves, yell it so far that we wake up the Don, how unman he is. Unman: alive and without mercy. You cannot stay. This is he, our master.”
The don is a man. The Don is a man and Saúl is wrong, please. He falls away for a second and I can feel air moving again for one hundred years.
It is all silent and womb-like, alone, in the starless black of shelter, so all-closing and made for sleep. And I am waiting to be born.
Slave. Slave. Slave. What is a slave?
A slave is unman, unloved. I love Saúl.
Saúl does not become a slave, and this because I love him.
But who loves me? Who loves Inés?
Questions leave and enter my chest through breaths and shot-out air and little twigs are snapping, writhing in sole. It is the darkened earth in my favorite light, then, then, tangerine and silent and unmoving and deaf, stumbling upon itself in parts of grass I cannot see and know, free of shame.
Questions.
Questions:
What is my name?
Call me Inés because there is no other, I say.
Saúl remains asleep and I must watch and wait. Morning will come and the car will yoke.
***
Know my body and its currents.
My feet and soles: broad and abdicated to stone.
My knees: ready in ash, bent.
My legs: strong, planted deep in the earth’s rolling ground.
My torso: broad and jagged. Bark-thick and I could not puncture it if I wanted it.
My arms: Long to my hips and their protruding bones like caveteeth juts; they can lift well.
My wrists: lyres.
My hands: soft like cheeks and tender and fair.
My head: what is it?
***
It is years ago and my own rosy-armed pink ankle body is still twirling in red and purple egg grass tulips, softly and slowly whispering secrets to me, secrets of blades, and there is a murmur of a cold stream as it is still winter, then. It blows cold air and the grass my blanket, I lie in wait, waiting in the thickets, sleek with horses and roaming men.
By the old places and people and houses, and the Don and the mounted sticks in cross, I am waiting. It is my stasis and my ever lasting, this wait. Flakes of sand and white stars of gypsum hang overhead in migrating gusts, little logs on water, and I am watching my own skin.
My own skin: breathing and patches of thin-tree hairs, no more delicate than mine own visions, and they retreat and waver. My own skin: soft and with warts, dry like earth and lying there. My own skin: not with ridges, and silent, and not coarse, and singing, and dancing. I kiss mine own arm and elbow with mine own lips.
A cuckoo sounds itself from above me, and below me an earthworm bellows in its removal of dirt. And I am with el Cristo—it is said, it is said—for he bled and bleeds up on the mount by the penitentes, for and due to me. My only counsel.
Sounds of work: sounds of the others working, in ways and manners, all crawling together and living together. Am I spared? Am I solitary? Yes, yes, I say; ripe-to-burst and unpicked, I nod my head and leaves are crushed around me, in a pupil. It contracts.
***
The delicate hoshdódii peers out of the smoke pit as a night-upon-night ends—when, I don’t know. Scaly and big-eyed it comes to me, taller than others. The changing woman is upon me, morphing into something strange and alien and to be driven away from, and the beak is breaking. It is sounding the arrival of gale blue-flame morning to itself, and the world now is beautiful in hearing, just to myself. We are working up to the redrock mesa of infinity, I think, yes—clay pipes move on out of the lined soil by where the watered fields lie.
***
I have felt my bones my whole life.
***
Saúl is scratching as hard as he possibly can onto a small pile of leaves and a little bit picked from a scree, black and glossed. Many hours. It is all stringy and puffs of smoke emerge on off hand seconds. He is trying to start a fire, Saúl. He is angry at it for not working; the leaves themselves are wet and brown and red, pointed pieces.
“I need your help. Scratch this rock with everything you have. Leave nothing.”
I say yes and stand up on myself, two, to do so and am given the rock and I can see half a head in it twisted as a spiral. And I begin. He is watching me and I can see in the quick mirror of the stone (which I am sullying with the fire-making) that he is smiling, if only for I am not watching, smiling, and I cannot see the flexed tendons heaving on his neck, and he is perfect, my brother, in the shadow of the stone.
My brother. Name my brother: Saúl.
It is hours before we get it lit, the fire, the light, and it is white and phosphorous and changing. And I think, no, Saúl has shown no use for the fire in all this time? I ask, what is it for? He looks at me and in his visage is a vacant need to destroy and make large small, and I can see the dancing in his face, waiting.
Saúl throws the fire first at the base of the Don and it rises up his legs and body screaming and roaring as he whimpers breathless. He takes a piece of burning wood straight off and lobs it somewhere else in the chapel by the friars and they all go up, too, and run like insects with hooked angular legs. He grabs the burning and next the fields and mountains and ranches and hills are on fire, and the sky is red with the corpses he has made in the fifth and final world.
We are sitting in silence, passive. He says, “Do you know what will happen to us, Inés? Where are we going?”
I say no.
“They are taking us down in exchange for dollars. There are many vineyards in Corrales down by the río. And they need pickers. We are being taken, and we never need to see anybody again.”
This I know. What is our day? Humming, low humming, he makes in response.
Our day, our selling.
“But, you must see. We are not to go easily. There is a road, alone and open, where we will be taken. I know; I see it. This rock,” he fishes it out of the remaining embers, smouldering, his skin scalding around it, “with this rock, we free ourselves. It must happen quietly. We subdue them, our transport, and we take it for ourselves, and we go. Never to see anybody again.”
***
“Do you know what it means to be sold, Inés?” The Don says to me.
I say no.
“I know, I said to stop your worrying.”
I say I know. The Don is looking at me desperately, green in fabric and yellow in skin, and his chattering teeth are unseen cliffs emerging off the face of the plain, hitting each other. He retreats into his hair and skin like a hard shell, eyes barely looking out.
“But you are not like them, Inés. It does not have to be this way; we do not have to sell you,” he is saying, “you can stay here, with the water, if you would like. Don’t you like that?” The Don is a man, an abundant man, and not unman.
I do, I do like that, yes, I say. I am required, yes. Beautiful bugs and herons and air spirits. Counting, this is what I do, and all of the walking insects are counted.
“Do you understand, Inés? Repeat your name.” and I say Inés, but there is a venom in it. There is malice. What am I thinking? The Don is a man, and he’s desperate and feverish, and sick, and I am by distance. He must be healed and taken care of, yes.
I ask of Saúl, what of him, where is he going? The Don: “Corrales. He is being sold to Corrales. He will pick there. What of Saúl concerns you? He is his own affairs, nothing more. I do not need him, and his wretched scars,” I stare and he pauses, “he lags. He is our least productive. Ugly in his work, too, always grunting and scowling, solitary. Impure and dirty, what a profit was made on him. I pity his next endeavors.”
Saúl? Saúl? I need Saúl. He cannot leave without me. Only do not leave without me. Abiquiú, only do not let me leave. The Don is gazing at me for an answer, watching I am silent for him. To go is to kill.
***
It is morning. The sky is back to blue and kind sapphire, and the light is warm—warm in its unique and far-between rays because it is winter. Heat is not close. I am liking it. Inés. I am Inés.
Saúl wakes: “Inés. Do not call yourself that, please. Ready your things, the don is coming. He expects us to be orderly before we go out—we have to make the town look pleasant. You want that, yes? Remember: never to be seen again, yes?”
Never to be seen again—never?
Our day.
The Don is standing still and flaking. The caravaners are standing still, and Saúl, and me. They sit him down and the rock is in his elbow. To go is to kill. Nobody sees, but I see. I am waiting to be born, still, in my years. It is light, out. The Don looks at me in wait, lying in wait. His flicks of the lash tell me to stay. Stay. Everybody is waiting for me, looking for me.
Stay! The Don! Stay!
No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No! Happening, no! No turning back!
Saúl is gazing and wonder and the Don is furious as I muster a first step and then another, walking heel-toed and one in front and then the next, no! No! Do not stay!
And I am flowing in the stream and Saúl—no, Klah—awaits me and his rock awaits me and the Don awaits me and for a first moment in this emerging world I am painting myself in all sin and color and my bones are poking my stomach out of elbows like knives and yes, pounding and beating like mad.
And there is a word there, too, a word and I will walk again. A word and my chains shattered. A word and my self ripe on the tree and the sprout as I am picked. A word and I stand. It is me, Jóhonaa’éí. Call me that because there is no other. There is no other.