This is the town where stories begin. This is the town where they first come before they vanish to the place where they’re called. The Star even rested here for a while. When it did the whole town froze frightened for a day, we all kept our children inside and when the three men came with gold paint on their fingernails and the rubies and sapphires embedded into their teeth, we all held our breath. Then even my husband, Don Augustín, went up to the hills with the other men to wait with the cattle and the sheep for music or for some bright thing to fill up our sky. The three men stayed in Don Humberto’s pension where they drank his black coffee, ate ceviche, fritada, and mote while they waited there, under the Star, for a crowd, the girl on a mule, or even a baby. But one midnight under the red moon, they too disappeared and slipped through our fingers, again, with the fog as the good stories always will.
I say this is where the good stories begin. They are conceived here, and they swell in their rich blood and one night disappear back through the hills. It is only the bad stories, the unpleasant ones, that we watch end. We are that mythical harbor where whales come and die—where killer whales cross and cross at the door, at the mouth of our faded land.
And we, the people of this village, are the first and final witnesses to God and to this dust which is always becoming flesh around us. And we try, as good mothers must, to keep our children out of the way of the huge wheel, the huge mill, out from under the feet of this fat, story spewing God. Here the children must not get in the way of the fiction or they will be burned up not knowing better than to stare, to look it in the face, to believe in it as the young ones will, reaching their open hands toward it as they do toward me or my open fire. Then they are burned, consumed, gone as fast as they’ve come, leaving only voices behind to play on our porches or to fall with the orchids from bending trees.
This is how our town differs from the rest: Death here steals bodies but leaves the voice behind. You can always tell a murderer here by the voices that pulse in his pocket or weave like horses through his dark hair.
We all play the extras in the stories. When the Magi came, I hoped that they’d stay and play out the whole tale in our town. I might have been allowed to play Elizabeth then or one of the women at the tomb, or maybe the one who pulled at his robe and was healed of her bleeding in the crowd. I would have been perfect for that part. My belly has swollen with the poison of age, and I have practiced how to lower my eyes and say, “Master? It was my hand that you felt tugging.” But when the Magi left that night, we saw that they’d come like the Star, to the wrong place. That somehow, again, the information has gone awry.
My husband, Don Augustín, is always cast as the drunk; the one out cold on the bench for that long, slow, casual scan of the sordid plaza or a shot of the morning after a big and violent night. It’s a frustrating thing, him playing the drunk, as then he always has an excuse not to reform, not to stop beating the children. There are always roles, he tells me, for the town bum and if he moved on, then who could ever play that part? Then, without him, where would all the stories be? I tell him he must be careful. He forgets how high the death rate is. One slash of a pencil and he could find himself insensible on some rail track while the train bears down roaring like bison and the beautiful girl prepares to scream out of some bright flashing window.
Even in this story, my husband is cast as the misplaced fool. Lucky, though this time, as he is the vehicle that uncovers the final part of the tale. It’s the best role, I think, that he’s likely to get.
But the story doesn’t start with my husband. Instead, it begins with Don Lucífero and his daughter Lourdes, a spindly waif of a girl maybe nine, hardly ten, who rode into our village one day on the proverbial white mule. (I know, the main character is too obviously named—but our lives mirror our names after all! And in life, as in fiction, I can never tell if we are named for the deeds we engender before death, or if because of our names, we match our acts to the part.) So Don Lucífero and the girl rode into town on the twenty-first day of some March. And the girl looked so much like him that she could have been his daughter twice over.
Now whenever the new people come, we, the witnesses, sit on our porches with our elbows propped on the railings, holding our whole beings up and in place. We watch the new ones straggle in, and we place bets on them and the story they are likely to carry. When Oedipus came, for example, we were all so excited about him killing the Sphinx that we thought that for once a good tale had come to rest, like the ravens, in our town. Though even as I put my money down on a happy ending, I felt that strange, vinegar taste in my mouth that I have since learned to pay attention to—to swallow like an omen and wait while it boils in my belly.
It is a terrible thing, this vague sense of memory when the Old Stories come. I always have the sense that I am in some dream running, though my feet don’t move, screaming, though I have no sound, trying to warn the central figure of something awful, some horrible thing, some ominous, low flying news—but I never know what it is or what it is I should say until the pillow is in hand and the black man is already repeating, “Put out the light.” By then it is too late to run in as the maid or as some sad lady-in-waiting to tell him how exactly it was that Cassio came by that handkerchief.
So, when Don Lucífero rode into town, I hardly even noticed his name and my only thought was for the girl who trailed at his side. He came carrying a bundle on his back that we took at first for sticks and we tried to remember all the stories we knew about woodsmen. But then Luz María, Humberto’s only daughter, noticed with the quick eyes of the very young that the sticks on his back were moving, slowly, swaying at each of his steps and sometimes what looked like a diamond would zip out and hiss for an instant and then disappear back into the seething mass.
Immediately Luz María knew they were snakes though we—because we are adults and have yet to see such a thing—had to wait for the pair to come closer and then pass. Then, when only his back was in view, could we tell that he carried a thousand or more serpents that eased in and out of the brilliantly tangled pack. Their beautiful skins glistened under our morning sun. Luz María wanted to run up to the little girl and invite her to play, but Doña Zelda, her mother, caught her just in time and held her back. It is difficult for our children to stay with us on the porches when the new stories arrive.
The next week when Doña Zelda came to my tienda to buy rice, she told me that Luz María had seen the snake man and his daughter at the old Valdez finca two kilometers down the road. There’s a tiny stilted house there with bougainvillea skittering across the roof and down the rotting walls. The path from the road to the house is mud-filled and at every step, the black liquid earth reaches up to swallow you boot first. Whole children have been lost there and in lines along the mud path stand rows of blooming gardenia. I warned Zelda to keep Luz María away from the other girl. But, as I said before, the children in our town grow so lonely.
Then I heard from the wind or the rain falling or from the dust that paints our faces so old every day, that Don Lucífero had come from the North. He was a circus man there, which of course would explain the snakes, and that one night in some small town he was drinking late with the clown, the man with the three extra eyes at the base of his neck, and the juggler and for some reason (a fight, I think, about the small girl) the four of them pulled out long knives mirroring the flames in the shimmering lamp. Don Lucífero was caught in the center with the three other men circling around and around and the man with the extra eyes three times more dangerous than each of the rest. Then, by a miracle, Don Lucífero managed to kill the clown and the juggler swiftly and was left wrestling alone with the many-eyed man—all of his eyes blinking on and off in the fury, in the slippery sweat. By luck, Don Lucífero managed to poke each of the eyes out with a pop, but the man found Lucífero’s ear just in time to bite down hard and actually slice it off and swallow it quick. When the autopsy was done, they found part of an ear deep in the dead man’s belly.
All of this would explain why three voices hummed around Don Lucífero’s head or slipped with the snakes through his pocket whenever he came to my tienda to buy flour, tuna, or eggs. He never brought the little girl with him, and though I was curious I only asked how she was doing and if she didn’t miss her mother much. Don Lucífero laughed and said she’d never had one to miss and that I should keep my old warted nose out of his business. (“His business. His business. His business,” the three dead voices hissed.)
So then when I went down to the river to wash all of the clothes, I’d pass by the Valdez finca. You had to be careful. There were snakes all over the place. Luz María always wanted to come with me. She was so small: her face always a dark mask of dirt, her slick eyes blaring through the sweet mess of her tangled black hair. Such a beautiful, burning girl that I always said no in the hope of keeping her far away from that particular fiction.
The snakes were beautiful there, wrapped around the porch, hanging with the purple and orange blossoms from the roof. There were poisonous and safe alike. There were patterned purple boas, emerald and white palm vipers, brilliant corals and bushmasters with their golden warning X, grass snakes, black snakes, and even the Anaconda, ten meters long, had come up to the house from the river to breathe softly in a dark coil under the porch. And always a slender cobra danced in the middle of the mud path, daring me to walk toward it and to call for Lourdes to come out.
Then other things began to happen in our town, and I forgot, for the moment, Don Lucífero and his wisp of a daughter. So it may have been years actually before Zelda and Humberto came running to our house carrying their frantic screams through the air. Luz María, they said, had disappeared. And what could I do but raise my useless hands to the clouds about to explode over us? I’ve lost, after all, eight children to these careless tales and one never has time in this town for the full right year of mourning.
They were inconsolable of course and Augustín, drunker than the ferryman to Hell, told them they should be glad because now they were eligible to play childless Abram and Sarai. Zelda, thank the author, was crying so hard she didn’t hear, and she told me through loud scattered sobs that it was the fault of the snake man and his daughter. I knew that of course. I had, after all, stood with the rest of them on the porch and witnessed Luz María’s initial fascination with the story of the snakes.
Zelda told me that Luz María began to spend whole days at the gate of the finca. She would stand there, her tiny elbows propped—as the watcher on the wood. She would watch the snakes for hours and the cobra dancing in the path and Lourdes staring out from that small window. At night she would run home to supper chased by the words that whirled like birds around Don Lucífero’s head. Lourdes, she said, was often crying and sometimes Don Lucífero would go into the crumbling house and Lourdes would leave the window. The circus voices would hush, and through the hypnotic hiss of the snakes Luz María would hear a moaning deep within the house and the house would shiver in the heat and the brilliant snakes would drop slowly from the roof.
Luz María must have spent hours by that gate, and one day she ran home in horror, eyes darker than slate. “Mamá! Mamá!”
Her thin voice raced ahead of her. It reached the house, slid down the hallway to the kitchen where Doña Zelda baked her bread. The sound of terror alone prompted Doña Zelda to cross herself before she wiped her hands on her apron and caught the small, solid force of her daughter’s body running to meet her.
“What is it?” Doña Zelda asked the child in her arms.
“The snakes,” Luz María said through sobs, “Don Lucífero has killed all of his snakes.”
Then Doña Zelda went with her child firmly in hand to the finca and saw with the eyes of her girl the horror of the snakes flayed open, still bloody and dripping, hanging in long strips from the porch and from the branches of the gardenia, and the Anaconda split wide open and stretched all of its glorious length like a bloody path. Don Lucífero was rocking in his chair on the porch. The voices buzzed, slow flies around his neck. Lourdes was not in the window.
“What have you gone and done now?” Doña Zelda asked.
“The maldita snakes,” he said, “snuck in one night while I was gone and raped my daughter. She’s pregnant now. Ruined, poor thing. And what do you think I can do with the monster when it’s finally born?”
Then Doña Zelda and Luz María could hear Lourdes in a back room crying before they scurried away through the clinging dark.
This next part I can only imagine because I am old and have lived so long in this town. I have seen too many of these stories played out. The plot with the father, daughter, and snakes feels vaguely too familiar. Maybe months passed at the Valdez farm and Luz María still waited by the gate for some glimpse of Lourdes. Then one day what she waited for happened. She heard Lourdes screaming in pain, giving birth to a daughter so like her father that she imagined the strands of blood on that tiny wet body to be snakes.
Don Lucífero watched the whole thing in silence and then took the newborn from Lourdes’s arms. He left her lying on the mattress, shredded into strips by her pain. He walked out of the rotting house with the baby in his arms and the voices circling in laughter around his one good ear. He walked down the mud path. Luz María moved, terrified, out of his way. He walked through the gate and then out of our town. And Luz María, finally alone, knowing that Lourdes lay huddled in some black corner of that house, began to run down the pathway over dark liquid earth that opened up toward her like so many starving mouths.
Sometimes I hear her voice, I think, on my front step, but that is years ago, or yesterday, how can I ever be sure in this town? Now we are waiting for some big event since a meteor just fell from our sky and landed in a black burst of flames in our plaza and even consumed the statue of Bolivar and the bushes of hibiscus that once danced so gracefully at its feet.
But have I told you? There’s a house on a finca two kilometers down the dirt road, a tiny stilted house with bougainvillea slithering in bright streaks across the roof, digging its lean branching fingers through the rotted mahogany walls. The path toward the house is mud-filled, a black liquid earth that will swallow you boot first. Whole children have been lost there. Doña Zelda’s daughter, Luz María, disappeared there and was found only last month by my husband, Don Augustín, who had been waiting on the road for a bus or a pick- up to take him into some town. He was going to sell our red hen as she had only recently stopped laying eggs. Somehow, while Augustín sat on a rock by the road drinking from his last bottle of aguardiente, the hen managed to twist its claw out of the rope that tied it and, with a cackle, it skittered down the mud path through the thick bushes that surround the farm. My husband, of course, took after it. He heard it cackling there and because he is a very tall man, he bent over to spot our hen pecking at something on the ground. Only then, when he bent way down like that, did Augustín see it—a tiny white hand barely reaching up out of the black mud, its fingers clutching desperately to the roots of the gardenia.
It took three men two hours to dig her up and by then, of course, seeing as she’d been gone for six months or six years, Luz María was dead. Not quite rotten though. The worms had not quite finished her up. In fact most of the flesh of her face still stuck together in a white seething mask and the green sweater Doña Zelda had knit her only the month before she was lost still clung, loosely gathered, to her thin gray bones.
You must learn, long ago, if you want to survive in this town—not to care too much for the fiction, not to let it pour through the chambers of your heart. Your tears when you play roles must always be false and when, at the climax of the best parts in the night, you make love and you hear your lover whisper wondrous things to you through the dark, you have to remember that his sperm is only air.
Story was previously published in Lullwater Review 1993-1994 Volume V, Number 1
Raised in the Amazon and Andes among volcanoes, Lisa María Madera is an Ecuadorian-American writer and public scholar whose work explores the intersections of religion, nature, myth, and history in South America. She has an MA in Creative Writing from SUNY Binghamton and an interdisciplinary PhD from Emory University. She is a Charlotte Newcombe, Woodrow Wilson Fellow. Her scholarship has been published in The Encyclopedia of Religion, Nature and Culture, the Journal for the Study of Religion, Ecopsychology, Minding Nature and is forthcoming in Kinship: Science and Spirit in a World of Relations, edited by Gavin Van Horn, Robin Wall Kimmerer, and John Hausdoerffer. Madera lives in Quito on the flanks of the volcano Guagua Pichincha. Her unpublished novel, Bury Me at Dawn, is currently hibernating, tunneled underground, waiting to rise and sing with the 15-year cicadas.