THE SKULL
I
This much is known:
Following the death of the dragon Griaule, after his scales had been removed, his blood drained and stored in canisters, his flesh and organs variously preserved, his bones pulverized and sold as a remedy for cancer, incontinence, arthritis, indigestion, eczema, and much else . . . after all of this, Griaule’s skull (nearly six hundred feet in length) was maneuvered onto a many-wheeled platform and hauled across eleven hundred miles of jungle to the court of Temalagua. The history of this journey, which lasted two decades and featured dozens of pitched battles, a brief and nearly disastrous passage by sea, and cost many thousands of lives, would require several volumes to recount. Perhaps someday that history will be told, but for the purposes of our story suffice it to say that by the time the skull reached its destination, a tract of land outlying the palace grounds, King Carlos VIII, who had purchased it from the city fathers of Teocinte, was dead and buried, and his son Adilberto the First had ascended to the Onyx Throne.
Adilberto’s obsessions were not those of his father. He spent the bulk of his reign pursuing wars of aggression against neighboring states and the skull became a roosting place for birds, home to monkeys, snakes, and palm rats, and was overgrown by vines and fungus. His son, a second and lesser Adilberto, restored the skull to a relatively pristine condition, transformed the land around it into an exotic garden, bronzed the enormous fangs and limned its eye sockets and jaw with brass, jade and copper filigrees that accentuated its sinister aspects and inspired the creation of tin masks that years later came to be sold in the tourist markets. He adorned the interior with teak and ebony furnishings, with gold, silk and precious stones, and therein held bacchanals that established new standards for debauchery (murder, torture, and rape were commonplace at these revels) and contributed greatly toward bankrupting an economy already decimated by the excesses of Adilberto I and Carlos VIII.
Upon his death (under circumstances that even a lenient observer would term suspicious), a third Adilberto known as El Frio (the Cold One) seized power following a protracted and bloody struggle with his elder brother Gonsalvo. El Frio, a religious zealot and occultist, intended to destroy the skull, but received warnings from his fortunetellers that such an act of desecration would not have a felicitous result. Instead, he devoted his energies to the systematic slaughter of his enemies, whom he apparently saw under every rock, for during his reign he put to death over two hundred thousand of his countrymen. His heir, a fourth Adilberto, was so ashamed of his father’s legacy that he changed his name to Juan Miel, a name whose proletarian flavor embodied his proto-Marxist view of the world, and abolished the monarchy, thereby ushering in a period of tumult unparalleled in the tumultuous history of Temalagua. Forty-four days after initiating this radical reform, he was hacked limb from limb by a crowd of cane workers whom he had been addressing – they were inspired to take action by his chief rival in the nascent presidential campaign, a wealthy plantation owner who had suggested that were they to act otherwise, they might lose their jobs. Thenceforth the country was governed by a succession of generals and politicians who had all they could do to combat innumerable revolutions and the economic incursions of more powerful nations to the north. The palace burned to the ground during the early years of the twentieth century and by the 1940s the gardens built by Adilberto II had merged with the surrounding jungle and the skull was hidden by dense vegetation, though it maintained a significant place in the public consciousness and was considered to have been the root cause of Temalagua’s fall from grace . . . if, indeed, grace had ever prevailed in the region.
Travelers occasionally visited the skull – many would pose for photographs inside the jaws, standing next to one of the brass-covered fangs, sheathed now in verdigris, and then they would hurry away, oppressed by the atmosphere of foreboding generated by the huge bony snout with its barbarous decorations protruding from epiphytes and tree ferns and the shadow of the thick canopy. Those who camped overnight at the site reported disquieting dreams, and several adventurers and scientists who had undertaken longer stays went missing, their number inclusive of a herpetologist who was discovered years later living with coastal Indians and had no memory of his former life. In the 1960s the city (Ciudad Temalagua) mushroomed, growing out and away from the jungle that enclosed the skull in much the same fashion that Teocinte had spread in relation to Griaule, as if obeying some arcane and relativistic regulation. No attempt was made to clear the land or destroy the skull, and the area was accorded the status of an historical site, one deemed essential to an understanding of contemporary Temalagua, yet was neglected by historians who preferred to ignore it rather than to risk their lives by studying its central relic (a tactic frequently employed in places whose history is dominated by villains and villainy). Slums sprang up along the western edge of the jungle, creating a buffer zone between the city and the skull, and producing a steady stream of abandoned and abused children who wandered off in one direction or another, into the urban sprawl or the vegetable, there to meet a fate that, although it could be guessed, was rarely verifiable. Over the next forty years, as the country declined toward the millennium, impoverished by corporate greed and narco-business, the slums became a breeding ground for fierce criminal gangs that contended for control of the streets with death squads composed of extreme right-wing factions within the army; yet even they were reluctant to enter the jungle and confront the strange cult purported to flourish there.
It is at this point that our story becomes the story of the woman who came to be called La Endriaga, and veers away from historical fact, entering the realm of supposition, anecdotal evidence, and the purely fictive, which are, after all, the most reliable forms of human codification. Her birth name was Xiomara Garza (though she was more widely known as Yara) and she was born in Barrio Zanja, a desolation of shacks and streets without names situated on a hillside overlooking the jungle. During the rainy season, mudslides intermittently cut wide swaths through the barrio, killing dozens of people and leaving hundreds more homeless; but since the shacks were flimsily constructed of plywood, cardboard, and so forth, and because moving to another location was not an option for the majority of the survivors, within a week or two a new and equally fragile settlement would be established. By many accounts Yara was a happy child, yet this might be doubted – Barrio Zanja was not an environment conducive to happiness and other accounts testify to her sullen temperament and stoicism. In sum, far more people claim to have been familiar with her as a young girl than lived in the barrio at the time, so it is probably safest to say that her early childhood is cloaked in mystery.