A man was holding a prickly pear leaf in his hand beneath a colossal sun. It was an edible cactus, and he told us to look closely at the little white dots. I brought my face a little closer and listened as he explained what they were: “They’re the eggs of cochineals, which reproduce on the leaves of this species of cactus.”
The man gingerly removed an egg with a very thin stick and placed it on a piece of paper. He poked it and a red stain spread over the white paper. Then he drew a garnet-colored circle with the same stick. Finally he jabbed the cactus leaf, extracted a kind of sap, and covered the stain with it. “Now,” he said, “the prickly pear juice protects the color. It helps to dry and fix the blood.”
I touched the circle with my fingertip. It was perfectly dry. I pulled my finger away, startled. Maybe I saw a mirror inside the red circle that reflected back to me my own dehydrating self because it was high noon—noon in the mine and noon in Mexico. The temperature was still on the rise, but was it in the mine or in Mexico? I couldn’t remember because the little tails of fatty acids were melting, the cells moving more fluidly, the sperm liberated from their reproductive burden. But other, much less benign things were happening too. Membranes were being damaged and breaking into tiny pieces, pieces that were replicas of elements of me, multiplied, reduced, infinitesimally; and so the multiple breasts, knees, ankles—visible only under a microscope—that scuttled here and there, similar to those lizard tails I used to see when I survived Hiroshima, started thrashing around again and again and again, never locating the body. This is what was happening to the people I was watching. As in Mexico. It was the death of proteins. And I wanted contact with other flesh, other liquids, other sweat, because the body always finds a way to communicate. I felt that in Teotihuacán, but not in the mine; in the mine, all I felt was heat and decay.
The man in Teotihuacán took out another plant. It looked like a thistle. “It’s called chicalote,” I heard him say, and he bled it too. Its sap was yellow, and he used it to draw the rays around the sun. Animal blood and vegetable blood. This plant was similar to the one I saw in the Namib Desert, a place so dry that who could imagine a flower growing there whose scent could be appreciated in all its intensity from several yards away.
I looked at the circle the man had drawn, the rays, and raised my eyes to look at L, in front of me, from behind my glasses. S had introduced us the day before and he had offered to accompany us. I liked him. L was also admiring the painted circle and didn’t realize I was looking at him and musing. But I didn’t think the way I thought about everything else, but
with the kind of thought
that isn’t linear
like the Avenue of the Dead,
but alive,
circular,
running the perimeter over and over
of the circumference that tied the tail
of the eyes I used to see him, with the mouth,
of the eyes he used to elude me.
Circular thought also like the mine,
spiral,
curling,
toward the inside.
We left the man working on the drawing he had started, sitting in a chair under the full force of the sun. The heat didn’t seem to bother him, dark flesh whose long shadow projected over the earth like a clock hand that ticked for everyone but him. Ticked for everyone but especially for me, knowing I had been given a single day beside L. I could feel the little fleeting hand of time, an intangible hand that couldn’t be grabbed or held back. The horror of the shadow, always the shadow, the awkward tracing that mistakenly interprets the arms opening in an embrace and projects instead a cross on the wall; the body that might have delivered her will never pass before it, never.
“I’m thirsty,” I said. I asked L for water. I had been sweating, had lost salts and electrolytes.
I drank less than I needed, thinking (hoping) we still had a lot of ground to cover. And I hadn’t paid attention to the sunburn that was becoming more and more visible, though I did notice what was going on inside me, the blood vessels dilating, trying to irrigate as much surface area as possible to bring cooler blood to the deeper tissues. I wiped my brow with my hand and detected the activities of that army of microscopic mechanisms organizing themselves to alleviate the effects of the heat.
L took me to a place where, he said, they could hear us from very far away even if we didn’t raise our voices. From there, the feathered chieftain would address the crowd. I whispered something to J to give this amazing acoustic phenomenon a try: “Can you hear me?”
Nothing. L couldn’t hear me. But a person in the distance, someone walking toward the valley’s horizon, appeared to turn around. What a strange place, where closeness protected itself with an operculum, an organic door, like that tiny plate a sea snail uses to close its aperture after retracting into its shell; that lid that is shaped like an ear, though it’s deaf, covering the ears of the mollusk in its shell. Isolating it.
The sun continued to scald (it was Mexico, it was the mine, it was Hiroshima) more and more, and my immune system persisted in announcing my biological response in ever deepening shades of red. But it was a chain of the deaf: L couldn’t hear me. Yoro can’t hear me.
since neither did I hear the process
destroying me
inside,
that fatal snap
of the cellular RNA.
Nobody heard anything.
We were too near.
IT WASN’T SO HARD to climb the stairs of the highest pyramid, the one dedicated to the sun. A lot easier than I expected. Far easier than descending into the mine. That’s what they say: the descent is more difficult than the ascent. People were resting in different spots around the pyramid, not everyone suffering from a lack of energy but more from a kind of halfheartedness passed down from their parents or the parents of their parents, like a dust accumulating over their long or short lives and passed from generation to generation, a genetics of apathy, a sort of contagion spreading this indolence from one to another, loosening the legs and the will, purging the words of tension.
It wasn’t difficult to climb up the pyramid, but it was hard to accept that the view from the top didn’t allow one to see beyond the people. A large group of people gathered around a preacher all raised their arms. The red of my shoulders had begun to descend upward and ascend downward; there was no order to anything anymore, like a fire that spreads itself following the whim of the winds. The mine was that upside-down pyramid, and the people there extended their arms, but instead of raising them to the sky, toward God, they lowered them to the minerals underground.