you. You are the great rumor, you are the great warning. The city is dying, you warn them, Josue, on the wings of the prophet Ezekiel who I am, the city will place obstacles before you, the city will be on guard because the spirit has entered you and therefore you disobeyed, you did not submit to the house of order, ambition, promotion, advantage, compromise, Josue, you did not lock yourself in your house, you did not cleave your tongue to your palate, you fasted, you saw the sanctuary defiled by plague and war, ruin and ignominy, crime, the desolation of the temples, the living corpses prostrate before idols, look, Josue, look from the air at the dolorous city, malodorous city, do you believe you have abandoned it forever? Do you believe you have left your house without finishing its construction? Ah, Josue, only death allows us to see the future; if we lived forever we would be the future and not know, if we continued on earth we would continue to believe in our individuality and not see the truth that accompanies us: the truth is another person, perhaps other persons, but undoubtedly there is one person, delegated by Providence, designated by the gods, made by Nature, the person who watches over you, not like an angel but like a good demon, the presence that accompanies you, the little devil you saw and did not see, knew and did not know, embraced and abandoned, the woman who gave herself completely to you, tested and proved you as a man and left you when it was necessary for you to draw near alone, as we all draw near, above all prophets like me, to the angels, to our destiny… She left. She lied to you so you would not miss her. She always guessed your necessity, Josue, your reason for waging war in the lands of Judea from the mountains of Nero and Pisgah to the edge of the sea, your personal war, Josue, the war of your unrepeatable but not solitary individuality, you have had a companion, Josue, the close assistance of the only person you really loved and who really loved you, with surrender, with rebelliousness, perhaps with vexation, always with passion and it was this, the passion that is a passage through life, suffering, enduring reversals, suffering disease, moving the soul to pleasure and to pain, desiring, becoming passionate, who was the demon of your passion?
Lost in the daily passage of life, perhaps you did not realize, Josue, that someone met you and from then on accompanied you, even in absence, invisible but always present: your woman-demon, your personal she-devil… Because when you lived, violence and habit, habit interrupted by violence, or vice versa, Josue, prevented you from distinguishing, until very late, until the final hour of your life, between the good and evil demon. Your ruthless guardian Maria Egipciaca, your fleeting nurse Elvira Rios. Your contradictory, wise, and accommodating teacher Antonio Sangines. Your dark brother Miguel Aparecido, imprisoned by himself and in himself. Your other brother Jerico, whom you loved so well, hated so well, and who in the midst of it all served you so well in measuring the infinite degrees of a man between love and hate. Your unknown mother Sibila Sarmiento to whom you can dedicate only the requiem of pity. Your distant father Max Monroy, so impenetrable because he is his own political party, the only party, so sure of never losing, turning lies into truth and truth into lies in order to move from there and affirm the power of the old, fearful the young threaten them, turning upside down the proven origin of all the things they created: This is what Max feared, he did not put you and your brother to the test to see if you waged war counting on all the comforts except that of knowing who you were, not because he wanted to avoid the brutal, inhuman destiny he imposed on Miguel Aparecido, no, but because of his fear of you if he set you free without the ties that eventually, with crumbling sophistry, he imposed on you: I will give you everything to live except what threatens me. Asunta knew this, you know? She knew the old man was afraid of you and perhaps, if she annihilated the two of you so you would not inherit, Max would understand it as another act of her loyalty: not so you would not inherit, only so you would not present yourselves as what you were and Jerico once was: the sons of Monroy whom Monroy did not put in prison, because in Miguel Aparecido’s destiny you and your brother Jerico must see not what did not happen to you but what could happen: fathers and sons devour one another, the rebel house will sit on scorpions, desolate hearths will be extinguished, corpses will bow before idols, and houses will be beacon lights…
“And Lucha Zapata?”
We were flying over the mountains of Mexico, destination unknown. The waters rushed from the hills to the sea, laying waste to the high mesetas. I looked at salt marshes and swamps. I saw the birds fleeing and the herds of bulls in the valleys and she-goats on the rocks, we flew over a valley of bones, and Ezekiel said to himself, prophesy upon these bones, such is the command of God, enveloped in a fierce sound of thunder and lightning, flying over the mountains: prophesy, Josue, prophesy that all these bones will be your house, and I rebelled, even at the cost of my life, because Ezekiel could let me go and I didn’t want to die twice without repeating:
“Lucha Zapata.”
Perhaps it was a response to my plea-for Lucha Zapata was now my final prayer-: in a cumulus of clouds I could see people I knew; approaching me on our flight, I saw Alberto-Albertina returned to her condition as girl: naked, with the languid V of her thighs displaying the limpid v of her sex, she recognized me, greeted me, and was joined by the waving hands of the children drowned in the pool in San Juan de Aragon, naked Chuchita, delighted not to have to dress anymore, Merlin who was part of the band of idiots used to sneak into affluent houses, his head shaved, an idiot now but happy, his mouth half-open and the snot running, Felix with the sad face, stripped now of the ancient guilt I saw in his face when I walked through the prison, but with his teeth always full of the remains of tortilla and egg. They greeted me with rejoicing, as if celebrating that I would be joining them, their condition still mysterious to me, though the rapid transformation of the cumulus clouds into luminous, dying cirrus clouds like a sunset and the announcement of the dispersal of the clouds into strata indicated that the angelic vision would not be seen here, that this sky was deceptive, that in the end clouds are only ice in suspension, water vapor ready to return to its origin and destiny, which is the immense embrace of the sea, from which I come, which I no longer know if I left, and to which I don’t know if I will return.
The children greet me and this makes me happy. It irritates me that out of a half-ruined hovel on the side of a volcano, crouching, dressed in black, holding a baseball bat in her hand, part of the volcanic landscape of black sand, comes my ancient nemesis Maria Egipciaca, the jailer of my childhood, waving the bat and shouting or screeching or whistling, a little old woman died shuffling the deck, a little old woman died shuffling the deck…
I gave thanks. Elvira Rios and Lucha Zapata were not to be found in the cemetery of the air.
Neither was Jerico.
Neither was Asunta Jordan.
“Lucha Zapata!”
But Ezekiel paid no attention to me. We flew over the Meseta de Anahuac and from a place hidden among stones and underbrush, leafy
Ezekiel beat his wings too late, he said, not paying attention to Antigua Concepcion who addressed us from her grave, be quiet old woman, there is no need to recruit troops at sunset, and she responded with a vast burst of laughter, the rights of a supplicant are sacred, since the beginning of the world, I beg you to return my grandson to me, let him fall, ill-omened bastard, damn prophet, let loose your prey, he is my grandson, he is mine, he is free to fall, or isn’t he?
He is free to open the way to death, Ezekiel said with a sigh without driving back Antigua Concepcion, let my children go, they are no longer Cain and Abel, they no longer fight with each other but with the necessity to which they must submit, do you hear me, wet-winged Indian? Each man is merely seafoam while he lives, grandeur is an accident death does not forgive because she is greater than everything, do you understand me, blubbermouth with wings? What are you going to give Josue? Not a
“They are sleepwalkers,” the old woman shouted. “I’ll wake them.”
“They are destiny,” murmurs Ezekiel, and he begins an even higher flight that leaves behind the grave where
