kept to the road, and, finally, after a week on horseback through the high peaks, temperate mountain terrain, and crossing the Marañón, one morning I reached the outskirts of the plantation. The overcast space intermittently reverberated with claps of thunder and fleeting sun showers.
I dismounted alongside the post of the gate to the house near the driveway. Some dogs barked in the mild sad calm of the sooty mountain. After so long I now returned to that solitary mansion, buried deep in the ravines of the jungle!
Between the garrulous alarm of riled up domesticated birds, a voice that called and contained the mastiffs inside seemed to be strangely whiffed by the weary trembling soliped who several times sneezed, perked his ears forward almost horizontally, and by bucking tried to get the reins out of my hands in an attempt to escape. The enormous door was locked. I knocked on it mechanically. Yet the voice kept trilling from inside the walls, and, as the gigantic doors opened with a frightening creak, that oral doorbell rose over all sixteen of my years and handed me Eternity blade first. Both doors had swung open.
Meditate briefly on this incredible event that breaks the laws of life and death and surpasses all possibility; word of hope and faith between absurdity and infinity, undeniable nebulous disconnect of time and space that brings on tears of unknowable inharmonious harmonies!
My mother appeared and wrapped me in her arms!
“My son,” she exclaimed in astonishment. “You’re alive? You’ve come to life? What’s this I see before me, Lord Almighty?”
My mother! My mother in body and soul. Alive! And with so much life that today I think I felt in her presence two desolate hailstones of decrepitude suddenly emerge in my nostrils and then fall and weigh on my heart until making me hunch over in senility, as if, by dint of a fantastic trick of fate, my mother had just been born and I, on the other hand, had come from times so remote that I experienced a paternal feeling toward her. Yes. My mother was there. Dressed in unanimous black. Alive. No longer dead. Could it be? No. Impossible. There’s no way. That woman wasn’t my mother. She couldn’t be. And what did she say when she saw me? She thought I was dead …?
“Oh my son!” my mother said, bursting into tears, and she ran to pull me close to her breasts, in that frenzy and with those tears of joy that she would always use to protect me during my arrivals and departures.
I had turned to stone. I saw her wrap her lovely arms around my neck, kiss me avidly, as though she wanted to devour me, and weep her affection that will never again rain down in my guts. She then coarsely took my impassive face between her hands, looked at me head on, asking question after question. A few seconds later, I started to cry too, but without changing my expression or attitude: my tears were pure water that poured from a statue’s two pupils.
I finally focused all the diffused lights of my spirit. I took a few steps back and stood before—oh my God!—that maternity that my heart didn’t want to receive, that it didn’t know, that it feared; I made them appear before the mysterious holiest of whens, till then unbeknown to me, and I let out a mute double-edged scream in her presence, with the same beat of the hammer that comes close and then withdraws from the anvil, the same that the child lets out with his first groan, when he’s pulled from his mother’s womb, indicating to her that he’s going to live in the world and, at once, that he’s giving her a signal by which they can recognize each other for centuries on end. And I groaned beside myself.
“Never! Never! My mother died long ago. This can’t be …”
She sat up, startled by my words, as if she doubted whether it was me. She pulled me in again between her arms, and we both continued to cry tears that no living being has ever cried or will ever cry again.
“Yes,” I repeated to her. My mother already died. My brother Ángel knows this too.”
And here the bloodstains she’d noticed on my face passed through my mind as signs of another world.
“But my dear son!” she whispered almost effortlessly. “Are you my dead son that I myself saw in the casket? Yes! It’s you! I believe in God! Come to my arms! But, what? … Can’t you see that I’m your mother? Look at me! Look at me! Touch me, my son! What, don’t you think it’s me?”
I beheld her again, touched her adorable salt-and-pepper head, but nothing. I didn’t believe her one bit.
“Yes, I see you,” I replied. “I’m touching you, but I don’t believe it. Such impossibilities just can’t happen.”
And I laughed with all my strength!
[JM]
________________
THE RELEASE
Yesterday I was at the Panopticon print shops to correct a set of page proofs.
The shop manager is a convict, a good guy, like all the criminals of the world. Young, smart, very polite, Solís, that’s his name, he’s whipped together excellent intelligence and told me his story, revealed his complaints, unveiled his pain.
“Out of the five hundred prisoners here,” he says, “only as many as a third deserve to be punished like this. The others don’t; the others are as or more moral than the judges who sentenced them.”
His eyes scope out58 the trim of who knows what invisible bitter plate. Eternal injustice! One of the workers comes up to me. Tall, broad-shouldered, he walks up jubilantly.
“Good afternoon,” he says. “How are you?” And he shakes my hand with lively effusion.
I don’t recognize him, so I ask him his name.
“You don’t remember me? I’m Lozano. We did time together in the Trujillo penitentiary. I was so glad to hear that the court acquitted you.”
Just like that. I remember him. Poor guy. He was sentenced to nine years in prison for conspiring in a murder.
The thoughtful man walks away.
“What!” Solís inquires with surprise. “You were in prison too?”
“I was,” I reply. “Indeed I was, my friend.”
And I in turn explain the circumstances of my imprisonment in Trujillo, charged with frustrated arson, robbery, and sedition …
“If you’ve done time in Trujillo,” he says smilingly, “then you ought to have met Jesús Palomino, who’s from that department. He drained away twelve years in this prison.”
I remember.
“There you go,” he adds. “That man was an innocent victim of the poor organization of the justice system.” He falls silent for a few moments and, after looking me in the face with a piercing gaze, decisively breaks out, “I’m going to tell you off the cuff what happened to Palomino here.”
The afternoon is gray and rainy. Metallic machinery and linotypes painfully hang clanging in the damp, dark air. I turn my eyes and in the distance notice the chubby face of a prisoner who smiles kindly among the black steel bits in movement. He’s my worker, the one who’s paginating my book. This bastard won’t stop smiling. It’s as though he’s lost the true feeling of his misfortune or has become an idiot.
Solís coughs and, with a toilsome inflection, begins his tale: “Palomino was a good man. It turns out that he was swindled in a cynical, insulting way by a hardened criminal never convicted by the courts, since he was from an upper-class family. Verging on misery, as Palomino was, and as a result of a violent altercation between these two, the unforeseeable occurred: a gunshot, a dead body, the Panopticon. After being locked up in here, the poor man endured sinister nightmares. It was horrendous. Even those of us who used to watch him were forced to suffer his hellish contagion! It was awful! Death would’ve been better. Yes, indeed. Death would’ve been better! …”
The tranquil narrator wants to weep. He noticeably relives his past with clarity, since his eyes moisten and he has to pause in silence for a moment, so as not to show in his voice that he’s started to sob in