She continued telling him about the festival, and he could see it, the scrawny little monkey men, their striped shirts with red and purple collars shiny as velvet, swaying drunkenly on their bony mounts, and for a while it was enough to listen to her, hear her, watch her memories unfold; but not for long. He sensed her fraying attention in the patchiness of the memories, and he felt her arousal, knew that she wanted to make love, that she was open, wet, and her readiness seemed to him obscene, because something bad had happened, something no amount of lovemaking would erase. But there was no use in dwelling on it, he decided, and there was nothing they could do except make love. She skinned out of her jeans, her panties, sat on his cock, lifting and lowering herself, using the front seat for leverage, and he got into it on the level of prurience, watching her ass come down and sheathe him. At the end her cry sounded as eerie and distant as those of the birds lost in the mist.
They talked for a bit afterward, but their hearts weren’t in it, and soon she was asleep again. Mingolla tried to stay awake, to keep watch. He was troubled by the lack of pursuit, and he suspected they were being spied on from above by choppers with thermal imagers. But realizing that if this was the case, no amount of watchfulness would save them, he gave in to sleep and fell into a dream.
In the dream he climbed out of the car, leaving Debora asleep, and walked farther up the hillside into the mist, picking his way through vines and ferns, his trousers growing heavy with dampness accumulated from the leaves. Before long, he saw a crumbling glow in the mist that resolved into an oblong of yellow light defined by the doorway of a hut. He was not afraid to approach the hut; in fact, it seemed he had been searching for just this hut for a very long time. He ducked inside and sat down facing a gnarled root of a man with black hair and wizened features and coppery skin: an old man, yet with the vitality of youth about him. He was wearing a loose-fitting shirt striped with red and purple and black and yellow, and trousers of the same fabric. The light came from three lanterns hung on pegs and made the freshly skinned poles of the walls gleam like rods of gold.
The brujo—for such Mingolla knew him to be—nodded on seeing him enter and went back to staring at a complicated pattern traced in the dirt floor of the hut. Mingolla, too, stared at the pattern. It took his eye ever inward like the chart of the labyrinth, and he realized that this pattern was the core pattern of the world and time, the one that all the patterns of thought and movement of all living creatures were destined to create. As he followed its course, he found the particular point at which he and Debora made their contribution to the weave, and understood that his visions of the future—of which this was one—were nothing inexplicable or magical, but were a result of being attuned to the pattern, of intersecting its flow and seeing along it to other points that were pertinent to his course. He was on the verge of looking along it into the future, past the time of their meeting with Izaguirre, when the brujo, with a sweeping gesture, rubbed out the pattern and grinned at him.
‘Why’d you do that?’ Mingolla asked.
The brujo reached out and touched his forehead, and when the brujo spoke in a harsh language that had the sound of a language of crows, full of hard h s and aspirates, he understood every word.
‘I had no choice,’ said the brujo. ‘It was given me to do.’
Though this answer seemed an evasion, Mingolla was satisfied by it and could think of no other question he wanted to ask.
‘Tell me what you’ve learned,’ the brujo said.
This at first struck Mingolla as an impossibility, because he had learned so much; but he found himself giving quite a concise answer, as if the brujo’s demand had sought out the level of answers and dredged up the exact quantity of knowledge required.
‘I’ve learned that everything men prize is a joke,’ he said. ‘An illusion. That what men see as their essential things can be stripped away by the power of a whim, that action has no value, that peace and war are the same, that beauty and truth are the convictions of fools, and that fools rule everywhere in the name of a wisdom that exists like music, like smoke, for a moment and is gone.’
‘You know all this,’ said the brujo, marveling, ‘and yet you are sad?’ He burst into peals of laughter, and his laughter choreographed the pale streamers of mist furling in the doorway into the likenessess of dancing women.
‘Why shouldn’t I be sad?’ said Mingolla. ‘I think that’s pretty goddamn sad.’
‘It’s only sad because you don’t really believe it,’ said the brujo. ‘You don’t want it to be true. But once you accept it as true, then other truths will become applicable, and you’ll see things aren’t so bad.’
‘I doubt that.’
‘Doubt is fine for now,’ said the brujo, and then, doing a perfect imitation of Mingolla’s voice: ‘Whatever works for ya, right?’
Irritated, Mingolla asked, ‘What am I doing here?’
‘I’m just checking on your progress,’ said the brujo.
‘And who the hell are you?’
‘Your cousin,’ said the brujo with a mad cackle. From beside him, he picked up a weed that had tiny violet florets with magenta centers; he waved it in Mingolla’s face. ‘Those idiots back in Panama City aren’t the only ones who know about this, and they certainly weren’t the first to discover it… just the first to abuse it. Now they’ve paid for their abuse.’
‘Did something happen back in the city?’ asked Mingolla.
‘You’ll know soon what happened,’ said the brujo. ‘There’s no use in dwelling on it now. But when you find out, remember that you weren’t the agency, only the spark.’
Mingolla couldn’t frame a response.
‘You’ve got a lot to learn,’ said the brujo. ‘Remember that, too.’
There was something hopeful in the brujo’s words, his tone, and Mingolla looked up at him, ready for some good news, but none was forthcoming.
‘It gets a lot worse before it gets better,’ said the brujo, who—along with the hut—was fading, growing as insubstantial as the mist. ‘And when it does finally get better, you won’t care one way or the other. At least not the way you’d like to care now.’
Despite its air of unreality, the dream was so vivid that when Mingolla awakened back in the car he expected to find some talisman, some proof that his meeting with the brujo had actually occurred. A piece of fern stuck to his trousers, or a portion of the weed. There was nothing like that, but there was a proof of sorts. The knowledge of the disaster in Panama City. As real and palpable as a gold coin in his hand.
Debora was still asleep, scrunched into a corner of the backseat. He ran a hand along her flank, loving her, wanting love to mean more than the meaning it had acquired in Panama. She stirred, blinked. ‘What is it?’
He leaned down, brushed hair from her cheek, and kissed her. ‘Go back to sleep.’
She struggled up to a sitting position, looked around at the misted windows as if awakening somewhere unfamiliar. ‘Did something else happen?’ she asked.
In the morning they followed the road through the hills into gray light, to a ridge overlooking a valley. Tres Santos was situated at the far end of the valley between two jungled cliffs that nearly formed a natural arch overhead; from their vantage, the cliffs had the look of two cowled figures gazing down at an unlucky throw of the dice: little white houses with shadow-blackened windows and doors. Green mountains surrounded the valley, appearing to extend forever in every direction; roads wound through them, visible as red threads. Dark cloud bellies swirled and changed shape above the cliffs, lowering, intensifying the atmosphere of gloom.