I moved in full knowledge that the cells were setting loose an altered material due to the ultraviolet radiation, drawing from the neighboring healthy cells an inflammatory response meant to remove the cells the sun had damaged. Though the lesions weren’t painful yet, I was beginning to feel woozy, and like the healthy cells, I wanted to be free of the presence of these damaged people. So I asked L if we could jump the fence. The fence had been put in place to keep tourists from leaving the group, pushing the limits of safety, of decorum, of the history they’d just been told. An insolent divider separating what was accessible from what was not. I pleaded: “Let’s jump.” And we did. And we didn’t have to walk anymore, because other things were walking over us. Not people, because there were no people on the other side. There were massive lightweight blocks of stone; there were those little plants that asked for so little and stuck like lichens to our shoes, same as the desert rocks. The vertigo of the genuine. It was peace. It was shared loneliness. And after the silence, laughter. I painted something on the palm of my hand: “We laughed here, and we rested.”
We got into the car after seeing the pyramids. So yes, we were both beginning to feel the sting of the burns, though I had it worse, being so fair-skinned. The heat in that closed-in space, the excitement, the tight skin urgently needing a salve or another person’s saliva or maybe just a caress… all of it, all that was lacking, on four wheels, in a blind car or just a selfish one, both of us realizing it had to stop right there, that we needed water.
At a stop sign we looked at each other and pointed out our burns.
“You’re sunburnt,” L said.
“You too,” I responded.
He was dark-skinned and I was very fair-skinned, but the difference in skin color doesn’t matter in regard to the sun’s passage, the cellular massacre, the regeneration. Pigmentation, individual genetic makeup—a sunburn allows any passerby to notice the nice coincidence:
Both of us came from the same place,
both of us were exposed,
both of us had walked together
and unprotected.
But all we had was a single day. And the end was nigh. My thoughts still whirled like the wind inside a tornado, moving without having to break the loop of desire that attracts everything toward it. But sadly, time imposes its own form; time then and now doesn’t move in circles like my thoughts. Time continued to be (or appeared to be) linear like the Miccaotli, that Avenue of the Dead that only a few hours before we strolled together, unwittingly or perhaps knowingly carrying ourselves along its stretch. A mile-long walk in the heat, with something much heavier than death in tow: the burden of self-sacrifice, the rejection of a gift that we would never be offered again.
Before returning to the hotel where S and I were staying, L and I drank a beverage from a can—no glass, no table or chairs. Just the two of us, two cans, sitting on a bench in a plaza whose perimeter came to a close with the first church of New Spain. The circle’s only light was a very dim streetlamp, like a cigarette in the mouth of a giant who took pity on us and embraced us. We rested our backs against the colossus. It was warm. But the silence had already begun to settle, not the uncomfortable kind resulting from a lack of words, but the coming glaciation after an entire age (an entire day) of heat.
We arrived at the hotel, our heads drooping as if to protect ourselves from a nocturnal sun. The burgeoning inflammation hurt. The heat had carried desire to those spots the sun hadn’t seen, hadn’t touched, that we hadn’t seen or caressed either. The heat had drenched us like a liquid—our backs, our lips, our throats, our genitals. I asked for more water.
Water.
Water to cool the burns.
Water to part the waters of red breasts.
Water to drown the sweet word (stay)
that shouldn’t be pronounced,
because only one day, or so we believed,
had been given to us.
And our skin hurt so much (or the desire, one and the same) that we embraced in front of the hotel, like two irresponsible people, ignoring or misinterpreting our screaming cells—lame, one-armed, blind—that asked us, begged us, to rejuvenate all the members who fell from the cliff of the two hundred and eight stairs of sun.
We moved away from each other, foretelling sorrowfully the closing of the wounds. Neither one of us was going to use cold compresses, cortisone creams, anti-inflammatories. What for? Cellular death is irreversible. We knew that even once we were scarred over, when the blisters appeared and burst and then dried out, returning the skin to its winter shade, it’ll continue to smart.
When I opened my eyes, I saw that I was on another level of the mine. My forehead was fiery. Nobody had come to help me. There was a tiny bruise on my forearm. The slaves—I insist that slavery is the only word to use for this—hadn’t come to my aid either, not even to put me back into the shade. I got up as best I could. Me, an old woman. Me, nearly lifeless from the heat. Me, missing that Mexican lover who never was but whom I brought to mind once again while immersed in the mine.
Once I’d resuscitated myself—when all is said and done, something I’m rather used to doing—I located the interpreter again and we started asking the laborers about Yoro. I didn’t have a recent photograph of her, but I had one thing working in my favor: her fair skin and Asian features. Luckily for me and for Yoro, nobody in that place could distinguish Japanese features from Chinese. China hadn’t yet sunk its claws into the mine or sent Chinese prisoners there to work off their crimes through forced labor, as they did later in certain African operations, with reduced sentences for the prisoners if they finished doing their time in Africa. Unfortunately, in most of the cases when Chinese prisoners consented to work in Africa, they were condemning themselves to a death sentence they hadn’t received in China. So that was my only advantage: Yoro’s physical difference from the other workers. The people we asked said nobody there fit her description, and they’d instantly segue into nervous complaints about the working conditions, always keeping their voices low. They asked for money and help, screaming in silence, really screaming for help in whispers. The people who worked there, they said, got sick. The foreman assured them it was because they smoked and drank alcohol, but that wasn’t a plausible explanation, since only a small minority of them drank and smoked. There was something else going on, they said; all they wanted was to know what it was. Neither the directors nor the mining company’s doctors admitted the negative effects of radioactive dust, which some of the miners were exposed to twenty-four hours a day.
Sometime later, when demonstrations outside the mines became widespread, mostly by antinuclear groups, it came out that the so-called daily controls meant to measure radioactivity levels were actually done only once a year. According to the mining companies’ spokesmen, the registered data showed radioactivity levels below the danger zone. But independent experts warned about the danger of never being at the zero point, and since radioactivity is cumulative, daily exposure to the ingredient that supplied countries with nuclear arms, uranium—at levels far below dangerous for short periods but always above the zero point—was a trigger for illnesses.
So here I was in Africa so many years after Hiroshima, yet another place where doctors obeyed orders that were clearly inhumane: they colluded in hiding the diseases from the people who were sick, allowing them to continue working under conditions that were killing them off little by little every day. Hundreds of pawns worked like that, dying for some foreign king in this endless rummaging around, the relentless burrowing under death’s sun.