Thus we are,
we are mortal,
men through and through,
we all will have to go away,
we all will have to die on earth.
Like a painting,
we will be erased.
Like a flower,
we will dry up
here on earth.
Like plumed vestments of the precious bird,
that precious bird with the agile neck,
we will come to an end…
Think on this, my lords,
eagles and ocelots,
though you be of jade,
though you be of gold
you will also go there,
to the place of the fleshless.
We will have to disappear,
no one can remain.
- Nezahualcoyotl



Part One: An Education

It was the summer Xavier and his best friend, Tomas, wrote pastoral poems. They’d taken an interest in the history of working men and women in Mexico. They took long, sweaty bus rides into the countryside, watching the hallucinatory desert streak past, one unbroken swath of hopelessness after another. Tomas was reading a book on native flora and fauna of the Sonora, and he would read the words aloud.

Fremont’s Dalea. Peniocereus’ cerise. Desert willow. They were like voices from a dream, a dream Xavi didn’t understand.

“It’s important to be precise,” Tomas said. “Our language is all we have. We can’t be loose with it, or careless.” He was just home from a tour of France, where he’d read some feverish poems that he’d mostly written under the influence of peyote. He was four years older than Xavi, who was twenty.

The days seemed endless. They would ride the bus for a lifetime, and it wouldn’t even be noon. They’d stop in the middle of nowhere to pick up a woman covered in rags, her face an ancient labyrinth of lines and unwritten stories. Tomas sat and talked to her, and she spoke a language neither of them knew, or she spoke nonsense. Tomas wrote a poem about the woman’s face and the desert that he titled ‘The labyrinth,’ because, he said, the desert was its own maze, a labyrinth of elision, of languages and souls forever lost. Xavi didn’t know what elision meant but he was too ashamed to ask.

They’d stop so the driver could take a piss. They’d form a line on the bus’ side and piss like school kids, laughing and crossing streams. They’d write their names in the sand, they’d write the names of women they loved, of parents long dead, of hometowns abandoned.

They’d ride for another lifetime and suddenly they’d be dropped alone in an oasis town where the women smelted copper jewelry and the men drank mescal and trained horses. Or they’d be alone in a valley village surrounded by mountains whose peaks swam in cloud-shadow and basked in sun. Or they’d emerge on the edge of a farming commune surrounded by agave fields so vast that they rolled against the horizon like ocean waves.

Sometimes they would turn off the highway and follow dirt roads that were barely roads. They were more like dried stream beds or animal trails. They came upon desiccated mining villages where the townspeople talked of mysterious screams that haunted the mountains in the deep of night. Xavi wrote a poem about these towns called ‘The Songs of the Dead.’

Sometimes they stopped at roadside stands to eat sloppy, delicious empanadas laced with local chilies. They drank them down with cold beer or with local tequila. They spoke to the cook about the Judgment that he swore was coming, and how it would arrive in the form of a gleaming white horse and a tall white man with the mane of a great plumed bird. They spoke to him about his mother, bless her soul, waiting for him in heaven, and his father, damn the scoundrel, rotting in hell.

Tomas ordered another round of beers and asked the cook what he imagined heaven was like.

The cook thought for a long time. Xavi scanned the horizon, watched the clouds skim the surface of the sky like ethereal ice bergs.

“It’s a great city full of beautiful temples, and instead of roads, there are canals. And everyone there lives forever as their most beautiful self. As they were when they were young and unburdened with regret and sin,” the cook said, opening another ceramic jar of homemade tequila.

“What is hell like?” Xavi asked.

“Like this place,” the cook said, laughing until he was red in the face and nearly choking on his own tongue.

Xavi read books about Mexican history. He wrote a poem about the cook and titled it ‘Quetzalcoatl.’

Tomas called Xavi ‘hermanito’ and this filled Xavi with pleasure.

Sometimes the sloppy empanadas and local chilies gave them horrible spasms and they were awake all night shitting themselves dry.

They saw vortexes of sand dance across the desert floor like graceful ghosts. They watched storm clouds tower on the horizon like skyscrapers and then march silently over the earth like a conquering army. Torrential rain fell and carved vermiculate patterns that spoke to Xavi in a mysterious language that he almost understood. Tomas wrote a poem called ‘Light and rain,’ and Xavi thought it articulated everything he’d wanted to say but couldn’t.

Sometimes black SUV’s tore past them on the highway, streaking like sleek, muscular jaguars.

Xavi remembered his father. He tried, many times, to begin a poem about his father but found that every time he started, it was like his hand became severed from his mind. He didn’t recognize the words on the page as his own, and this filled him with a deep, irrevocable sickness.

Tomas told him about the women he fucked in France. Tall, skinny women with long legs and shaved cunts. “Not like here, hermanito. There, they don’t believe in the spirit. They believe in the body.”

Farmers told them about the big conglomerates, about how their neighbors had to sell their homes and their land, had to uproot their lives and work for the American companies that bought up all the small farms and paid laborers like dirt to work the land they‘d once owned. The farmers talked about making half the money their fathers did despite working twice as hard. They listed the names of sons and daughters who had fled to San Rafael or Tijuana hoping to find work in the maquis or a coyote to lead them into the States.

Tomas told him about a girl. He saw her reading at a party and said it was the most erotic poem he’d ever heard. He said she wasn’t beautiful, but everyone was in love with her anyway. He called her the poetess of the Sonora and said she had the voice of the moon.

“What does the moon sound like?” Xavi asked.

“Like her.”

Tomas wrote a poem about the flora of the Sonora and about the moon, but really it was about the girl, whose name, he confessed, was Octavia Luna; Xavi didn’t particularly care for the poem, but he lied and told Tomas it was beautiful anyway.

They returned to San Rafael in the late hours of the night or the early hours of the morning. The city sprawled into the desert like an enormous scrap yard. If they came from the west, they were greeted by the voluble Santa Theresa cemetery, where Xavi imagined the impoverished dead conversing like in a Dostoevsky story. If they came from the south, the city greeted them with the oil drum fires and emaciated dogs of Sangre del Toro, the city‘s most unruly slum.

For a few days they would attend parties in the basements of cafes or in the abandoned mansions in the western mountains. They would read their newest poems. They would smoke pot and listen to others read their poems. Tomas would find Xavi’s eyes from across the room, and they would smile. No one in the city was as good as they were.

Xavi lived alone in a small rooftop room in Colonia Canto de los Pajaros. It was a neighborhood of cafes and writers, but also clubs and malandros. Xavi would masturbate and write and wait for letters from his half-sister that never came. He stole books from bookstores where he knew the owners and flirted with the cashier girls. His room was a forest of books, or a city of books. There were pools of cigarettes, and skyscrapers of books. He lounged in his underwear and wrote and jacked off, and then he would show up at a party and read his pastoral poems, and sometimes young girls would approach him and tell him how beautiful his writing was. He knew what this meant, but he hated to use his writing for sex. So he thanked them and went home alone while Tomas went home with one of the young girls.

Then Tomas would show up unannounced, at one A.M. or at three P.M. or at nine A.M., and soon they were on a bus again, plunging further into Mexico’s heart. As they were leaving San Rafael, Xavi looked to the west, to the mountains that enclosed the city. The religious fanatics had a commune in the hills and they erected great white letters on the mountainsides condemning the city and its people.

The Lord will judge the wicked and save the good.

Xavi slept on the buses because he almost never slept at home. The stench while riding was often unbearable: all those mile-weary bodies pressed together beneath the soldering desert sun. The heat was so insidious and rancid it approached transfiguration. They were pilgrims and exiles and saints. Whole journeys passed like dreams. Eight or ten hours lost to sweat and wastelands and forgettable poems and fantasies about girls seen riding in the beds of passing trucks, women with melancholy obsidian eyes bound for the border. Other journeys were as vast and indistinct and varied as entire years. At some point during the summer, Xavi decided that time was an absolute lie: that lifetimes could pass in seconds; that road trips could last for millennia; that a night lost in bed with a woman could last for the entire life of a universe; that some hours were like an impassable ocean and others were like a dried up stream bed. He wrote a poem about the fallibility of time, and Tomas clucked his tongue with delight while reading it.

“Every new effort is your best,” he said, but Xavi knew it wasn’t true; there were many poems he abandoned midstream, or hid from Tomas in shame. The praise made Xavi’s whole being expand with pride and a feeling of importance and meaning. But, inevitably, the pride swallowed itself, like a cannibalistic animal. He had no idea what he was doing when he wrote. He was following dark trails into a foreboding wilderness. He had no idea where they led or where they even originated. He was inadequate to lead anyone down those trails. So why did they follow him? They would only become lost.

They moved further and further south, into the lower depths of Chihuahua and into Durango. Xavi had never been this far from San Rafael except for the summers when he would ride out on horseback into the desert with his father.

The first time either of them heard of the Boar they were in a mountain town in Durango. It was a town for tourists and expats. They ran into Rafael Ferrer, a musician from San Rafael. His father was a semi-famous poet living in Mexico City; Xavi liked the man’s work, which was impressionist and associative and reminded him of a river in France flanked by slender poplar trees that shimmered like silver under a warm wind, even though he’d never been to France; Tomas didn’t care for his work, and told Xavi to give it a few years, and then he’d understand.

Rafael’s band was playing a bar in Lugar de los Vientos Salvajes, which was the town’s main square. During the day, it was crowded with tourists, and with Indians selling crafts and teaching classes in basic pottery. At night, the tourists and expats turned the square into a lively arena where casual sex was always a possibility.

The bar was open air and had a broad terrace that looked down into the oblivion of the valley below. Garlands of Christmas lights were wrapped around the terrace‘s iron work. Rafael’s band didn’t begin playing until very late, by which point everyone had been drinking heavily for hours. Tomas and Xavi were sitting with a table of girls. They’d joined them incidentally, the way groups in vacation towns spontaneously ebb and form and part without greeting or good-bye, like they’re part of one insistent, free flowing conversation. The girls were discussing an unimpressive lover. He was a guy who pushed money for El Hermandad, which was a cartel that almost no one in San Rafael had heard of. One of the girls teased her unsatisfied friend: “If you aren’t careful, he’s going to send the Boar to get you.” The others laughed nervously.

Xavi was the one who caught the name; Tomas was preoccupied with one of the girls, a chubby girl with exceptionally dark hair. Xavi was beginning to understand that he was the more observant of the two. Tomas was more flamboyant and confident. He gained them access and he got the girls. But his details were careless and rash.

“Who’s the Boar?” Xavi asked. It was probably the first thing he’d said all night, and it was drowned beneath the strong tide of the girls’ laughter.

Later, after Rafael’s band began to play and the group paired off, Xavi was alone at the table with the oldest woman of the bunch. What good looks she’d possessed were already withering and pruning. Xavi was quite drunk, and she hadn’t drank at all, and they mostly sat in strained silence. Then Xavi remembered the name from earlier. He leaned in close to the woman’s ear; it was a gesture of delicate intimacy that belied their strangeness to one another. He cupped a hand around her ear and asked who the Boar was. She looked disinterested, and smelled like poppies. “Just some myth,” she said. “Just some paranoid Mexican myth.”

Rafael’s band played until nearly dawn. They played corridos that brought the Mexicans in the bar to their feet, their voices raised with childhood nostalgia. They played popular rock for the tourists and expats. Late in the night, or early in the morning, depending on one’s constitution, they played blues: rich, sultry, sensual songs that rambled and roamed. Xavi danced with the leathery, disinterested woman for a time. She touched his wrist when she lit her cigarettes.

That touch would return to him many times over the course of the summer and fill him with an implacable loneliness that could only be cured by writing. So he wrote, and he wrote, like a man taken by a religious fervor, or like a man captured by the current of a fast flowing river.

At some point Tomas abandoned books about Flora and fauna and started to read books written by a reclusive Argentine novelist named Suarez. The first book he read was ‘My Year With The S.S.,’ and then he read ‘The Songs of the Disappeared,’ and then he read ‘In The Mists of the Coca Mountains.’ Xavi read the pulp crime novels that were ubiquitous to that part of the country, brutal tales by writers like Gabriel Trujillo Muñoz and Luis Humberto Crossthwaite.

Tomas told everyone they were writers from the North. In Durango and Sinaloa people were anxious, even desperate, to talk. They invited the two friends into their homes to drink glasses of mescal, to share rich dinners of pork and spicy chili sauces, to sit and discuss the violence that was ensnaring their towns.

A horse rancher told them about how his brother found five mutilated bodies on his property.

“A storm is coming,” an avocado farmer told them at a roadside stand where he was selling his rancid fruit. Later, Tomas mocked the man for his triteness and melodrama, but whenever Xavi thought of the words, it gave him shivers. That night the moon struck Xavi as grave and foreboding, as if it were in mourning.

Xavi found he could no longer write in San Rafael. His days there were infinite and restless. He paced his apartment smoking cigarettes, or he walked down to the crafts market that was swarming with tourists and tried to lose himself in the labyrinth of hand-hewn blankets and horse rags and carpets, the way he once had as a child. But he was too old and he knew the maze by heart. He couldn’t lose himself there. So he walked west into Centro Commercial where a few dilapidated, squat skyscrapers rose like stunted children. He sat in Parque Independcia, across from the Governor’s Mansion, and watched young mothers try to corral their unruly flocks. An old, ruined carousel languished at the park‘s center. Most of its carnival lights were broken like the rotted teeth of old men. Many of its animals had been salvaged or stolen, but a few giraffes and horses and rhinoceros remained, their mouths contorted into grotesque and horrifying grins.

By then, Xavi was the one showing up at Tomas’ door, goading him back into the bleary eyed desert.

The furthest south they went was a town in Durango where the police chief had been murdered. El Hermandad had driven a truck into the station, and then beheaded the chief in front of his lieutenants. Xavi and Tomas stayed an extra day in town because Tomas contracted a stomach virus and spent the night vomiting into a ditch. The next morning, while Tomas visited a clinic, Xavi hiked to the top of the mountain that stood sentinel over town. The road was steep. Because it was nearly noon there was very little shade. He was alone on the road, and he stopped often to gaze down upon the town, ever smaller, below him. At the summit there was a monastery built of faded brick. Many of the bricks had fallen out, and pigeons roosted in these miniature caves. Xavi sat on a bench beneath a lemon tree. Below, church bells sang. Somewhere unseen a rooster cackled. Xavi closed his eyes. The pigeons’ cooing was incessant, a steady threnody that reminded him of prayer.

A bum sat down on the bench. He told Xavi that, in the very ancient days, the Aztecs had considered this mountain to be home to the mother of the gods. When the Spanish arrived, a priest had a vision of the Virgin while standing on the mountain‘s summit. He built a shrine and a monastery. The bum, who stank of liquor, said that there were still nineteen monks living in the monastery, and that they had taken a vow of solitude and silence. There was one monk, however, who could speak, and who cooked for the others. He also baked pastries, and there was a door around the side of the building where outsiders could put money through a revolving door and receive a platter of pastries.

“I can show you where it is, if you’d like,” the bum said. Xavi was reluctant to follow; the man’s crepuscular eyes glittered with instability and violence. He was afraid to go with the man, but even more afraid to rebuke him. So Xavi followed him around the monastery’s eroded side and through a grove of lemon trees. The corridor between the trees grew narrower and narrower. At one point, the bum looked back and smiled a vicious, rotten smile. Xavi imagined his body decomposing in the grove. But he continued to follow, driven forward by a mortal curiosity, the same vertiginous curiosity that drives men everywhere to climb mountains and explore caves and ride motorcycles and take hallucinogens.

Then they emerged at the door. It was heavy and wooden. Xavi knocked twice, and waited. A moment later, a voice answered. It was calm and attractive. It was a young man’s voice.

“May I help you?”

“Excuse me, sir, I was wondering. I was wondering, do you have any pastries for sale, father?”

After a few moments, the door revolved like a pantry. On it were three aluminum tins of pastries. Each was priced at five pesos.

“Can I have the ones with powdered sugar? The cross ones,” Xavi said. He put his money down and took the pastries. The door revolved again and then closed.

“Father, can I ask you a question?” Xavi said, hoping he wasn’t too late. “Why have you decided to live in solitude? Is God’s glory that great? What kind of man shuts himself up on a mountaintop, squanders his beautiful youth on myths and prayers, spends his whole life forgetting the look of another man’s eyes?”

The voice was ponderously silent for a long time. Xavi was afraid he‘d missed the man, or worse, offended him. But then the voice responded, equitable and soft and clear. “God’s rewards are great and beautiful. More beautiful than anything in the tangible world.”

“But didn’t God make the rewards of the tangible world? If these aren’t his rewards, then what are they?…Father.”

Again the voice was silent for what seemed an eternity. “Not everyone seeks the same rewards. And not everyone should. What’s the worth of the rewards of solitude if there’s no sacrifice involved? At some point in life you might decide it’s worth forsaking easy pleasure, which is also a kind of Godliness, for something more astringent and difficult. The glories of those rewards aren’t often visible, or even understandable. And that’s why so few seek them out. It’s also why I have.”

“I wish you luck. Father.”

Xavi walked ahead of the bum through the lemon grove. The trees were blossoming and smelled sweetly in the dry, intense heat.

“You shouldn’t ask him questions like that,” the bum said, trying to keep up.

“Why not?”

“I’ve been inside once,” the bum said. “It’s an immense labyrinth of caves, and there are bones everywhere. They live and walk and breath amongst the dead. Most of the interior is ruins. The broken stones are impossible to tell apart from the broken bones.”

Xavi dug around in his pockets. “How much do you want?” he asked the bum. “I’m sorry but I don‘t have much. I’m a writer. I’m quite poor.”

“I don’t want your money,” the bum said, offended. “All I wanted was to talk. If I’d wanted your money, I would have killed you.”

Before walking back down the mountain, Xavi noticed an open window on the third floor. He thought he heard music drifting out, but it might have been his imagination. On the way down the mountain, he ate the pastries. They were overdone and not sweet enough.

That night he lay outside on the bare earth and looked at the sky. The night was acute and cold, but the ground retained the day’s warmth and Xavi splayed himself open as a child would while lying in snow. The stars seemed to be moving gradually towards the horizon, or the earth seemed to be visibly wobbling along its axis, but really both were illusions and slender wisps of clouds like gauze meandered slowly across the vast night. His whole body was limp, but then he put his hands out in front of his face, also like a child, and they were as distant or as close as the stars when judged by his limited human perception. How unfair it is that we must die, he thought, the night mostly silent. A far away train echoed slowly across the inside of his skull, tunneling through.

The buses north were always more crowded.

“A migration is underway,” a young man told them. “They are coming into our towns and homes.”

“Who?”

“Who knows? The police, the federals, the cartels. I can’t tell the difference.”

“What do they want?”

He shrugged. He was an indistinct boy, neither attractive or ugly. He could have been anyone, and he was no one.

“What are they doing?”

“Killing us, killing themselves.”

Tomas talked at length about Suarez, and how he was the great Latino author of the new millennium. He tried to convince Xavi to read his novels. “They’ll change your life, Hermanito.” Xavi tried, but they were erudite and abstract, and he found he had to read every sentence four times only to barely understand it. Soon he went back to the crime novels, which he felt captured more of the truth about humanity, anyways: the gristle and the depravity, the desire for gore.

In the wilderness outside of Rodeo, in the state of Durango, they attended a horse race. Two railings, each about a quarter mile in length, one slightly longer than the other, had been set down in a gully, and a rickety gate had been erected at one end. The gate was festooned with cheap advertisements for beers and cigarettes. Crowds gathered on both banks of the gully. Some sat on blankets with picnic baskets and coolers of beer. Other parked their pickup trucks atop the two moraines, beneath the thatched shade of cottonwoods. The crowd was mostly families, but there were some teenagers, too, rowdy kids who blasted loud music and drank liquor and created a ruckus. There were old men, too, huddled in small clusters closer to the rail.

There were two horses: a chestnut colt that was a little undersized in the chest, but whose hindquarters suggested enormous strength; and a grey colt, slender and tall and regal, like a thing stepped from a conquistador dream. The riders rode them bareback, two squat young boys. The horses often came together, lolled off one another, their hides laved and glistening under the spectacular sun. The groups of old men watched the horses intently, studying them the way young men study women.

Tomas started talking to one of the men. He was mostly bald, paunchy, with a face that reminded Xavi of a heron, startled and about to take flight.

“All the horses in this country are descended from one horse,” the old man said. “That grey colt is of very pure blood.”

The jockey atop the grey colt opened him into a languid, effortless stride. The horse rolled like quicksilver in the sun. The rider atop the chestnut colt watched admiringly, and then he chirped with some of the old men, grinning, talking trash. He laughed, pursed his lips in a smirk that seemed to say, “I’ve beaten more beautiful odds than that.” He circled his runt and raised his right arm to the crowd, which roared with pleasure.

“Who’s that?” Xavi asked the old man.

“El Jinete,” the old man said, smiling like a proud father.

As the colts were loaded into the gates money exchanged hands. This was the domain of the old men. They pulled out small pads of paper, took their notes, marked their tallies. The youngsters came down to place their bets; the husbands, too.

“Twenty on the silver one.”

“You’re going to let me have El Jinete?”

“Look at his ride! It’s like a fat spraddle legged girl! The kind of girl your mother was!”

“I’ll put forty on El Jinete.”

“That silver one has Cordoba blood in him, I’ll tell you. A hundred on the horse royalty.”

“Who but El Jinete? Who but El Jinete? A hundred on El Jinete!”

“He’s riding a parched sorrel! Give me the elegant horse. Forty on the silver one.”

Mostly, they bet man against man, brother against brother, cousin against cousin, old friend against old friend. They crushed down against the rails then, throwing their communal weight against the fragile barricades. In some places the rail broke and they spilled onto the track, like water infiltrating a levee. Money changed hands. Men shouted and taunted. A thousand conversations merged into one somnolent din. They cascaded down the banks of the gully into the flush sunshine of the horse track, men carrying their sons on their shoulders, young boys roaming in malicious packs.

Xavi strained to see over them. The jockeys negotiated their mounts into the gates. A bell sounded and they shot out of the gates like demons. The swirl of people parted at the last moment, and the horses tore through the gully like a flash flood, a torrent of muscle, sinew, sweat. They were ancient streaks of flesh glinting in the sun. Their hooves roared and the earth shivered. The crowd barely had time to exhale and exhort their mount; the race was over in a few electric heart beats. El Jinete had the Cordoban by a head. As quickly as they parted, the crowd swallowed the two horses, and then the vestigial cloud of dust swallowed them all, horses and men, blotting out the day.

El Jinete pranced his parched sorrel through the swell. From up close he was just a boy with ambitious, cruel eyes. Grown men reached for him with their hands. They handed babies up to him.

On the long, dusty ride home Xavi tried to write a poem about the man called ‘The Rider,’ but the images seemed all wrong, the cadences too stilted; his verbs lacked any fluidity or motion. He got frustrated and ripped the paper from his notebook and tore it to shreds and let them flood like lachrymose confetti into the desert.

“I’m sick and fucking tired of watching other people create beautiful things,” he said, his body electric with a static rage, something fiercely contained and noxious, “while all we can do is watch them dumbly and consume whatever it is they’ve produced, just eat it up and use it as some cheap, meaningless fuel.” His skin felt like it was crawling with flames. “When is it my turn? Why can’t I say what it is I’m meaning to say? Why can’t I find my form?”

Tomas didn’t answer, and Xavi fell into a petulant silence.

“I don’t understand it, Hermanito,” Tomas said out of the blue.

“Understand what?”

“Why I keep doing this with these women. Why I keep coming back to them. These women I can’t stand. Women who don’t have anything to say, women who don’t have ambitions or morals, women who haven’t thought a second about literature or philosophy or anything beyond their very small lives.”

Xavi didn’t know how to respond. Tomas didn’t seem to be talking to him, or to anyone. He seemed to be musing aloud an inner monologue that he struggled with on a daily basis.

“And that’s what drives me: that they’re vapid and shallow and barely there. That they don’t have anything to say. Their absence drives me into a fury. The fact that they have nothing to say makes me want to destroy them, in a sense. That anger is what I like. I‘d never want to speak to these women. And that makes me want to fuck them. I don‘t think I‘m a violent man, Hermanito. You know me: I‘m the first one to run from a fight. But then there‘s this side of me, this ravenous side.”

Xavi thought, while his friend talked, of the confluence of beauty and horror. He wondered how a just world could allow one man to write such beautiful verse and yet treat so many women with such violence and hate.

“I try to stop, Hermanito. But I can’t. Something drives me, something greater than any strength I possess. I see this women, and I have to have them. If I can’t have them, it ruins me. It brings down the wrath of loneliness and self doubt, and I think my life is meaningless. But when I have them, the wrath is even worse. Because I’ve failed to be a good man.”

Xavi thought of men who killed for a living, either those in the cartels or those who killed for sport. He wondered if they were driven by something akin to sexual desire, and decided that they probably were. What difference was there between the desire to fuck, or to kill, or to write? What were the origins of these desires, and why were they so hard to escape?

That night Xavi had a dream about his father. They were walking through an exotic bazaar where Indians were selling magic elixirs and jewelry made of glittering stone, where women were selling their daughters to the highest bidder and where men were fighting one another to the death. Around them were enormous, monolithic buildings whose facades repelled light. His father was wearing a mask so that he didn’t resemble his father. He told Xavi that humanity, as a species, beseeched God with the wrong questions, and that that is why God didn’t answer. Xavi wanted to ask what the right questions were, but he was too afraid. He was overjoyed to see his father, even masked, after all these years.

When he awoke they were passing the massive industrial parks that surrounded San Rafael like capitalist fire. It was nighttime, and the city’s heart was mostly darkened but the maquiladoras blazed against the inked sky. Tomas gave Xavi another poem about Octavia Luna. Halfway through, Xavi threw it out the window.

“How can you write about this one woman with everything we see? With everything in this country?”

“Because I love her, hermanito. Look at us. We’re surrounded by shit. Who wants to read about shit?”

“Because you have to wade through the shit first. You can’t just ignore the shit in favor of grace. That’s too easy. It’s cheating.”

Tomas smiled like he was psychotic and Xavi thought for a minute that his friend might strangle him.

Back in San Rafael they went to a party in an abandoned maquiladora. Tomas got very drunk anticipating Octavia Luna’s arrival and passed out in a corner before eleven o’clock. Xavi read his poem about the malleability of time to a small crowd. Afterwards, a girl approached him. She was plain looking; her only remarkably quality was her deep garnet eyes.

“You’re a beautiful writer,” she said.

“Thank you.”

“Why are you still here?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that San Rafael is no city for writers. A storm is coming, and it will sweep all of you away.”

Then she kissed him on the cheek and sublimated into the larger, convulsive crowd. Later, he saw the woman holding forth near an old conveyor belt that had once been used to shuttle automobile mufflers to border-bound trucks. She was reading a shapeless poem about jaguars and plumed birds and masks. It was erudite, nearly impenetrable, but the men around her listened, enraptured. The woman was sweating profusely, swaying to some internal rhythm, and occasionally stopped to smile coquettishly at the crowd. She’d stripped down to a tank top and a pair of black panties. It struck Xavi as a burlesque act.

“Who is that?” Xavi whispered to one of the men.

“Octavia Luna.”

After she finished reading, she accepted the plaudits and effusions with humility and grace. She bowed once, then lariated her right hand above her head while the men shouted with transfigured lust. She was caked in sweat, the arm pits of her tank top soaked clean through. Everyone wanted a word with her.

Later she found Xavi outside. He was sitting on the edge of the road listening to the city, smoking a cigarette. She took the cigarette from his hands without a word and sat beside him. Her legs were still bare, and latticed with burst veins.

“Did you like my poem?”

“I didn’t understand it,” Xavi said, honestly.

“I don’t think I understand it either.”

“Do you know that everyone is in love with you?” he asked, surprising himself.

She laughed and it was a plangent sound, the kind that could slice a room in half and bring a crowd to its knees.

“No they aren’t,” she said. “They think they are. But really, they’re in love with a mystery, and with what they can’t have. Men never love reality. They’re always trying to bend it and manipulate it into some ideal. But they don’t even know what that ideal looks like.”

She curled her knees into her chest and looked at him sideways, her head resting on her knees. It was an honest, melancholy look that seemed to say many things all at once: that she would someday break his heart, that he would be wise never to talk to her again, that he would betray his best friend, that it didn’t matter whether he fell in love with her or whether he never fell in love in his whole life, that we were all seeking some convergence in this lifetime and that we spent our days hopelessly searching a deconstructed world for something that didn‘t exist, that there was no difference between a writer or a prostitute or a malandro or a lawyer or a politician, that every search was the same in its futility.

The summer was waning. The days were shorter and they seemed gilded in gold. The towns they rode through were preparing for El Grito by hanging scaffolding and bunting. In a village situated on a volcano’s flank, they stayed up all night drinking with three mestizo girls in a breezy cantina. It was hot and dry, and the wind rose from the valley like a song. Tomas danced with the girls, and then the girls danced alone, and then Xavi danced with the girls. There was one with a long, slender face and a large mouth. She wore a straw hat, and she peered at Xavi from beneath its brim in a way that convinced him he could spend his life with her. They walked into the valley and kissed, and then she took him back to her parents’ house where they made love quietly in the room she shared with her little brother.

“Hermanito, Hermanito,” Tomas chided lovingly. “Corrupting the youth.”

Xavi liked to watch the older couples on the buses. They were men and women with grizzled faces and few possessions. They seemed to be the only thing the other had in the world, and they clung to one another with an earnest desperation that spoke of a deep human terror. The women would sleep on their husbands’ shoulders. The men would cling to their wives’ arms when they stopped in wasted towns or in the middle of nowhere. Xavi was too ashamed to speak with any of these older couples. He wrote a spare, simple poem about these couples in which he compared them to the buttresses of a ruined cathedral. He called the poem ‘Vestigial.’ Tomas thought it was his finest poem yet. “You’re finding your style, hermanito. I better watch out. Soon, you might be better than me.”

Xavi watched a thunderhead roll across a full moon sky, the clouds’ innards synapsing like he imagined the nerves of his brain synapsed. Or maybe he dreamt he watched such a thunderhead. Later he decided there wasn’t any difference, whether he saw it or dreamt it. In memory both were the same ambiguous thing.

They spent a weekend in Readondeados, in the basin of waterfalls, and on the edge of the zone of silence. They followed an overgrown dusty road into the hills and the dells. The scrub grasses flickered like pale flame beneath a soft wind. They found the clear, warbling streams where the Jesuits and Mennonites baptized Indians. The days were scalding, and they swam naked in the cold water. Xavi cupped his hands and watched the crystalline water fill them, shot through with light, and he drank it.

“Hermanito, what are you doing? Who knows what’s in this water?“

The nights were cold, labyrinths of stars. Xavi wrote a poem about water coursing ineluctably over stone, the way it had since the time of the conquistadors, since well before the conquistadors. The scour and skirr of a limpid creek in the desert highlands. The silence to their south. He burned the poem with his lighter and thought of Tibetan monks who construct mazes out of sand, and then let the wind slowly destroy their work. He watched the ashes of his poem fall into the creek and disappear.

The trip home from the zone of silence proved the existence of purgatory. By the drive’s fourth hour, Xavi was certain they’d thrice passed the same mottled collection of tin roofed homes and apple orchards. It was the village of Maconda. After the fourth passage, Xavi gave up hope of escaping. He’d lost faith in time and had resigned himself to ride the sweltering, rank bus until he was delivered into heaven or descended into hell. He’d never been a man of faith, so he started to pray prayers of atonement. He recalled sermons his father had preached, and recited whatever lines came to him. The shambled junkyards that lumbered past were really just one shambled junkyard; the desert scrub was a hallucination of the damned.

He must have fallen asleep and died.

Tomas was still sleeping at his side. All the passengers were the same as when he’d been alive. Slowly, he started to lose his mind. He got up and asked the driver to let him off.

“Are you out of your mind? Sit down.”

Tomas awoke. “Hermanito, what’s wrong? Your eyes look like the eyes of a wild dog.”

“We’ve passed Maconda five times,” Xavi said as the village rolled by again. An old woman sat out front of a cantina, fanning herself and drinking a bottle of coke. She raised a hand, and Xavi realized that she was the matron of the dead. “We must both be dead and in purgatory.”

“Don’t be crazy, Hermanito.”

But soon Xavi had convinced his friend they were dead. The loveliness of the world was suddenly veiled by the knowledge of their deaths. Xavi mourned for his father, whether the man was dead or alive. He mourned for his half sister somewhere across the border. He hoped he would meet his mother in one of the villages; perhaps she was waiting for him in Maconda. He regretted that he had never been in love, that all the sex he’d had was empty and vacuous and forgettable. He lamented all the poems he’d never written, and that he’d never read Borges. Mostly he was angry that his faith in his writing had never been tested: he’d never discovered whether he loved it enough to die for it.

Tomas looked sullenly out the window and brooded about Octavia Luna.

Then they both fell asleep and when they awoke they were at the bus terminal in Centro Commercial and the city was oneiric beneath an imposing, hazy sky. Xavi walked through the city uncertain whether he was in a purgatorial dream, or whether he’d descended into hell, or whether he’d dreamed his own death. Distant sirens moaned like an old woman remembering the weight of all the love she had lost. The city plunged to life from nothingness, and his mother was dancing in traffic with a man like the memory of his father. They moved to the rhythm of the street. They substantiated as curriers of the dusk. They were a half step off beat, as always. He lead and her head was cradled into the leathery nave of his neck.

There was a murmur rising from the city like mist from a swamp. It was the timpani of bullets, the choral lament of grief stricken mothers, the exasperated sighs of veteran police officers as they sipped stale coffee and watched the sun crawl to life, the anonymous prayers of the fossilized women in their church pews, the blather of politicians while cash whispered in their pockets. They converged to form a terrible requiem.

No, he was very much alive.

They visited the sites of pre-Colombian societies. The valley of the caves and Paquime.

They drank tequila with a textiles worker who lived in a small shanty along the river behind the factory where he worked. His town was mostly industrial parks that were built on a wide plateau. Small houses spilled like waste into the vast surrounding basin. A pewter river frothed like a rabid beast through the town’s heart and stank of sulfur. Old, oxidizing fuel drums littered the river bed like boulders. Phosphorescent runoff from the factories cascaded into the streets and into the river.

“When it rains, the streets are filled with debris,” the worker, whose name was Alvaro Careno, told them. He was a tall, lissome man with epicene features that reminded Xavi of a crane or stork.

Young boys played barefoot with horses in the river’s shallows.

“Unmarked vans will drive through sometimes in the middle of the night, shining bright searchlights. Every so often men will stop and talk to the fathers or mothers of boys approaching puberty. Then the boys disappear, and the parents live more comfortably for a time. When the boys come back, they’re dressed in jewelry and fancy clothes and their eyes are like dead stones.”

“Dead stones?” Xavi asked.

Alvaro Careno thought about this for a while. “Maybe that doesn’t make sense. Their eyes are very cold, like a rich woman‘s earrings.” Alvaro had a wife who looked much older than he did. She was a hunched woman of furious activity who appeared to be twice his age. They had three sons and a daughter; another daughter had drowned in the river, and outside their front door was a large shrine devoted to her memory. The oldest of the boys was approaching puberty.

“Where do the boys go?”

“To be soldiers for El Hermandad. Or sometimes for the Zacatecas. Whichever one controls the highways around here. It changes a lot. Last summer they had a big shootout in a town not far from here. My cousin lives down there, and said it was like being in a war zone. He told his boys, who are younger than mine, that the gunfire was fireworks for a big party.”

“Are you afraid for your own sons?”

At this, Alvaro’s wife stopped cleaning. “No, no. We won’t talk about this. Get out,” she said, moving towards them with a broom. “Get out, get out of my house! Take your questions elsewhere. We don’t want any problems.”

Later Alvaro Careno found them. They were wandering the streets and smoking cigarettes, waiting for the bus.

“I’m sorry about my wife. It’s a difficult time for her. I’m very scared for my sons, especially my oldest. He’s beginning to become a man. He sees how poor we are. I see it in the disgusted way he sometimes looks at his mother, who works so hard.” He sighed and wiped his brow. “She was a gorgeous woman when I met her. She was the first woman I ever loved,” he said, throwing Xavi and Tomas a mischievous stork’s smile that suggested he had many stories he would like to tell them if only time permitted. “Now she’s become a crone, hasn’t she?”

Neither Xavi or Tomas had the temerity to lie, so they stayed silent. Again the textiles worker sighed.

“It’s a son’s duty to atone for his father’s mistakes, isn’t it? We all feel the weight, whether we love our fathers or hate them, whether we knew them like brothers or whether they were complete strangers. I see this weight already in my oldest. It’s like a nightmare that he’s realizing is reality. He doesn’t spend much time with his brothers anymore. He’s outgrown them. He stays out until after dark and comes home with black eyes and with ripped clothes. They seduce these boys when they’re old enough to desire but too young to know any better. Do either of you have children?”

Tomas couldn’t stifle a laugh.

“No, of course not. You’re young men yet. Maybe you don’t understand what I’m talking about. But you had fathers once. So you must understand my boy’s shame and his guilt. Would you have resisted glory and redemption if you were fourteen and grew up in a place like this?”

Alvaro gave Xavi a firm handshake and a look of catastrophic sadness. Xavi knew that he would never see the man again, and it struck him, hardly for the first time, how cruel the world was. He wanted to become friends with Alvaro Careno. He wanted to sit in a cool bar beneath the whorl of a ceiling fan drinking tequila and coke, eating beans and rice, listening to tales about the other women in Alvaro’s life, listening to memories Alvaro carried from his children’s childhoods like talismans against the meaninglessness of the world.

“Why haven’t we heard about El Hermandad before?” Xavi asked Tomas on the bus ride home.

Tomas shrugged. “Because they’re a bunch of derelict punks that will be swallowed by history and forgotten like all the combatants of irrelevant wars. That‘s the fate of all the cartels,” Tomas said, spitting out the open window in disgust. Xavi thought of all the irrelevant wars in human history. He thought of the beautiful speeches that were given and the men who died for causes that had been long forgotten.

The first weekend of September, Arturo Belano threw a large party to celebrate the new school year. Belano, a friend of Tomas’, was a middling poet from Chile, and professor emeritus of the University of San Rafael’s nascent poetry and ethnicity department. His face bore the elongated, melted sadness of an ex-pat and a man whose promise long ago vanished. He smoked aggressively. There was a pugnacity in his mannerisms that betrayed his ego. He stabbed the air with his cigarettes. He wore a perpetual, lupine smirk while he listened to someone that was not himself speak. His laughter was cruel and truncated. Together, all these actions showed his spirit: he believed his work would be vindicated, and his reputation refurbished, upon death. He was the kind of man who kills himself for art instead of a woman. He viewed his continued survival as a moribund joke. The girls at the University called him the Python.

The party was in the basement of the Ticker Tape Taqueria, a tacky Gotham themed diner two blocks from the University of San Rafael. A large crowd showed up. Classes had resumed and students were eager to show how much they’d matured over the summer. The low-ceilinged, dingy room was charged with fervent insecurity and braggadocios grandiloquence. Many of the students stood on a small dais to read what they’d written over the intervening months. Belano watched from the back of the room with his lover, a boring but pulchritudinous student named Sofia Rincon. He smoked diffidently, dismissively, almost flamboyant in his disdain. If one did not know Belano, they might have mistook him for a homosexual. He was drinking from a flask given to him by Octavio Paz, and as he grew drunker and drunker, he began to heckle the readers that he thought no good. Many of them were students of his; many were ex-lovers.

Tomas commanded a large, boisterous reaction. He read with the insouciance of a master. Mostly he read poems from early in the summer, before the madness of Octavia. But he closed with one of his moon poems. Xavi listened with a mixture of shame and pride and wounded affection; like a younger brother who finally saw his elder brother clearly. He saw Octavia across the room. He tried to catch her eye, but she was engaged in Tomas’ performance.

The main festivities concluded with Belano drunkenly cursing out Rincon and declaring that the future of Mexican poetry, nay world poetry, was utterly fucked. He tried to fight a student of his, a young boy who’d been in love with Rincon before she started dating Belano. Tomas and a group of older boys restrained their professor and took him upstairs. Xavi found them sitting beneath a portrait of King Kong ascending the Empire State Building, laughing and drinking tequila as if nothing at all had happened. Mostly they were older friends of Tomas’, and younger girls hoping to be noticed. Tomas regaled the girls with stories from France. They were stories Xavi had heard probably a dozen times, and he found himself sundered by melancholy: the summer was ending. He didn’t know what came next. He watched Tomas preen for the young girls. If even poetry fell prey to facades and grandiloquence, what hope was there? The dirty orange vinyl booths, the faded art deco paintings, all of it symptomatic of a world lost in a labyrinth of corruption and greed, a world of impoverished taste and benighted expectations.

Octavia Luna approached the table, her presence momentarily lost in forced laughter. Then Tomas looked up to see her. Xavi suspected he wasn’t the only person at the table who noticed Tomas’ posture go rigid, his hand retracting from the knee of one of the young fawns. His eyes were the eyes of a man confronting death: shot through with ice.

“I’d like a word with the poet,” she said.

“Yes?” Tomas replied.

“Not you,” Octavia said without malice. “You.” She looked at Xavi.

Tomas let out an ugly, pollarded laugh. “Hermanito? You want to talk to Hermanito? He didn’t even read tonight.”

Octavia smiled benignly. Xavi could hear the soporific din from other tables: cheap silverware clinking against ceramic plates, ice cubes rattling, a coffee mug settling into a dish that was puddled with spilt coffee, a woman laughing, a man’s tenor drone, the throb of the florescent lights and a bell ringing somewhere in the kitchen. He wondered how it was we survived a moment on the earth.

“He’s never been published, you know,” Tomas said. “I was just telling everyone here about my reading tour in France.”

That cut through the flat plane of Xavi’s ennui. He felt like his stomach had been butchered. He followed Octavia because he didn’t want to be seen crying at the table. They went through the kitchen, the air thick with pork grease and steam, cigarette smoke and the perspiration of barrel bellied men who leered at Octavia. The emerged onto a back alley fetid with garbage and stray dogs. Xavi stood against a dumpster, crying softly to himself. Octavia didn’t try to console him. She looked away from him, down the long, dark passageway. Far off were the sounds of a larger street. A few vents exhumed smoke into the alleyway; it resembled the set of a noir film. He’d made a mistake coming with her, and worse, she’d made a mistake asking him to follow her. He was crying for the first time he could remember. The summer was behind him, and what was there to show for it? A few poems. And what of them?

“I want to give you something,” she said, still averting her eyes.

“Ok.”

She pulled a folder from her purse and handed it to him.

“What is it?” he asked.

She shrugged. “Something I’d like you to read. I think you’ll appreciate it more than anyone else here. I think we have similar sensibilities.”

He slipped a glottal, muccal laugh.

She finally looked at him. She was honeycombed through his tears. She almost smiled. He was clutching the folder, wrinkling it. She wiped his cheek bone with her thumb. “Don’t cry, my dear boy,” she said, kissing him gently on his left eye. When he opened his eyes she was sublimating into the alley mist, moving like a shadow towards the bright, searing lights of the distant avenue.

When he went back inside, Tomas and Belano were gone. The Taqueria had cleared out. Napkins and pieces of trash littered the floor. The tables were strewn with half finished plates. A few stragglers still talked quietly amongst themselves. The party had dispersed, everyone gone home.

He, too, went home. He slept for two days, getting up only to piss, and once to shit. He jacked off once, but it might had been a dream. His dreams were scattershot and dim, like an old film strip whose colors had faded beneath a relentless desert sun, and they mixed seamlessly with the sepulchral shapes of his room, the books stacked like indecipherable monuments from a long extinct civilization. Outside it rained a soft melody.

When he finally got out of bed he opened the envelope Octavia had given him. It was a poem that was a dream or a hallucination (really, what was the difference?). The narrator was in a pyramid and trying desperately to reach the pyramid’s top. There was something there for her to find or she was running from something and that was the only safe place. She didn‘t know which it was, but in the end, she decides they’re the same thing, aren’t they? The desperation was always the same. She was running and yet never arriving.

The poem/pyramid was broken into levels. The first level of the pyramid wasn’t populated. The first level, which was actually subterranean, was wholly mechanical. It was laundry machines and cars and oil refineries, all humming a wordless song that the narrator described as a ‘haunting mechanical whir.’ Next was the level of politicians where they spoke in fallacies and platitudes and all of them were horribly malformed, like the survivors of a nuclear disaster. Then was the level of poets. After that, the narrator said the levels became indiscernible from one another; they bled together in that filmic way of dreams. There was a level for copper workers and a level for basket weavers. There was a level for glass blowers, and a level for potters. There was a level of women who made wind chimes in the desert. Somewhere near the top there was a level for the maquiladora workers, but only the women. There was a level for clergy, and one for hunters. Some levels would be observed as through a window. But others would trap the narrator, would hold her hostage, and she described the terror as ‘totally constricting, like an immense snake squeezing away my life.’ She would have rather died. She wanted to die. She could understand suicide, the seductiveness of total nullity. It made so much sense to her. It was like a revelation she wanted to share: she could understand death then. But just when she thought the terror would overwhelm her, she would materialize on another level in that wonderful, transition-less way people move in dreams. There was a level of silver miners, and a level of revolutionaries. Later in the poem the lower levels of the pyramid start to disintegrate. They started dropping away so that the narrator was suspended on a giant rock in the middle of the sky, a rock that had no apparent end, and she was frantically climbing as the levels started to fall away faster and faster.

And then the poem ended, and he wasn’t sure if Octavia had intended it to be the end or if she’d lost her way. He sat for a while smoking and then he went for a long, ethereal walk through the perpetual, scarlet dusk of nighttime in San Rafael. He could feel desert winds gnashing the tops of small trees whose names he didn’t know. He remembered Tomas reading about flora early in the summer. Fremont’s Dalea. Peniocereus’ cerise. Desert willow. All around him were objects and people whose names he didn’t know. A nameless world.

He ended up at Tomas’ apartment and he knocked on the door and then waited for a very long time. He started pounding on the door but no one answered. He picked the lock and went inside. The room looked hastily abandoned, like it had been torn apart in a furor or in a dispute. The books had been knocked off the shelves and scattered around the room with the randomness of fallen leaves. He picked through them and noticed that all of his Suarez books were missing.

Tomas had vanished.

Two days later Xavi caught a bus into the desert. He went alone. He rode for hours, or perhaps days, maybe even weeks. The desert rolled past, unyielding, unchanged. He got off in the village of Maconda when the loneliness became unbearable and he feared he might plunge into a despair so total that he might never return. He drank a tequila and coke at a small café and an old woman talked nonsense to him: about bones in the desert and the anti-Christ returning dressed in a silk three piece suit and about her husband who had left her to be an opera singer and how she was traversing the world on foot, from one corner to the other, trying to find this man so she could spend eternity with him. Xavi felt a little less lonely.

The bus home was crowded with old wizened women who all seemed to be seeking out the great lost lovers of their youths. They carried heavy trunks and wore rags and might have been five thousand years old. The windows were down and the hot desert air rolled in and at some juncture on the long, dreamy journey through the vast and empty heart of their country, the women began to sing. The started softly, barely audible, so that the melodies were easily carried away on the wind and torn into nothingness. But eventually their voices built, first to the level of prayer, insistent and grave, and then into a full throated chorus, their voices edified against the torrential wind. The old women led, and then the young women joined in so that they were singing rounds. They sang simple childhood songs. They sang so harmoniously that it was like they’d been singing together their whole lives, these strangers on a bus in the desert. Maybe they had, he thought. They were children’s songs but they were serious and graceful and full of a deep human strength. They were hymns. He had no idea how long they sang for. Just as suddenly as they started, their voices began to fracture and fall away until only one woman, the oldest woman on the bus, was singing very quietly to herself, and only the faintest traces of music survived the wind to reach Xavi near the back of the bus. And then her voice failed, too, and they rode along in utter silence, listening to the howling of the desert and waiting for the first signs of their great, sprawling, horrible city to emerge on the horizon.