Preface
The Tale of the Unborn
Child of many mothers,
I dance on the lip of creation.
From here, the view is clear. Map of earth and time unite.
For centuries now I trace the currents leading to conception.
I spin.
Hover at the edge.
They draw me in; pull me towards that cold unbending world.
Light. Oxygen.
I have spent days there.
Blind and hungry.
Vast horizons reduced to one unyielding breast.
Child of the rainbow, born to sorrow again and again.
Hear my tale.
I dance on the lip of creation.
From here, the view is clear. Map of earth and time unite.
For centuries now I trace the currents leading to conception.
I spin.
Hover at the edge.
They draw me in; pull me towards that cold unbending world.
Light. Oxygen.
I have spent days there.
Blind and hungry.
Vast horizons reduced to one unyielding breast.
Child of the rainbow, born to sorrow again and again.
Hear my tale.
Chapter 1
La Cocodrila
October 5, 1999
Ordinary as this moment was, Oscar held on to it like the rain might never return. For the last five years he had lived in cities scattered across the American West—Albuquerque, Las Vegas, Santa Fe, and most recently Phoenix. He had spent his days transforming sand and rock into tropical spas. In the midst of the desert, he built hot springs and icy waterfalls. Now, home again after his exile, Oscar savored the cold Andean rains. He stepped onto the porch and watched as the thunderstorms pressed toward the town. He waited for the lightning and the sudden flash of water. The rain held him transfixed in its fury long enough to soak his clothes clear through.
Since his sister had died, he hadn’t been able to concentrate. Only these rainstorms held his attention. Clarissa had loved all that water and today, the day of her funeral, it was pouring. The ditch Oscar had dug with his cousin Luchito had filled with water before they could even bury her. His Tía Carmen had found Clarissa’s burial wishes insulting—no relative of hers was going to come to a final resting-place in the middle of a cow pasture in driving rain. But Oscar took comfort in the thought of his sister soaking in mud. His first memory of her, after all, painted her chin deep in the tub threatening him with her crocodile impression. He remembered screaming in terrified delight, frightened by the way she slanted her eyes and opened her mouth into a semi-toothless grin.
Glued in her scrapbook a photograph of them both naked in the bath aided his memory, the caption lettered in his sister’s careful misspelled script: Clarissa, La Cocodrila. Oscar, El Olifont.
She must have been seven at the time. He would have been four.
Since the moment Oscar returned home to Baños, he had had to navigate his way past the public opinion broiling up around the tantalizing topic of his sister’s burial. It began the instant he stepped out of the taxi at Villa Isabel and greeted Clemencia, the family housekeeper and childhood nanny whom he still called Mama Miche. Even as Clemencia hugged him and reached for his bags she began pleading for him to disregard his vow to his sister and bury her properly like a Christian beside his parents, his grandparents and the rest of the family. By all rights they should take her to lie in state overnight at the Chauffeurs’ Union, then carry her coffin to the basilica for mass and then up Calle Ambato past the stone cross of Golgotha to the cemetery so that they all could rest in peace.
Oscar gently patted Clemencia, her cheeks wet with tears, “Mama Miche, I made a sacred vow to my sister the day our mother died. I sealed the vow on my mother’s grave. It cannot be undone.”
“Ay, Niño Oscar, that promise should never have been made!” Clemencia moaned as she dabbed her handkerchief to her throat, “May Taita Diosito protect you my son. You’re going to need it.”
It was true that five years ago had Oscar known the extravagance of his sister’s macabre imagination he would never have agreed to the vow. But at the time he was young, barely nineteen, and their mother’s death was still fresh and he had been overcome by what now seemed an inexplicable compulsion to stick close to his only remaining family.
Clarissa had stood beside him at the cemetery, leaning on him for comfort while the mourners sang by their mother’s open grave:
Yo quiero que a mi me entierren I want them to bury me
Como a mis antepasados. the way they buried my ancestors.
Yo quiero que a mi me entierren I want them to bury me
Como a mis antepasados. the way they buried my ancestors.
En el vientre oscuro y fresco In the dark fresh belly
De una vasija de barro. of a pot made from clay.
As they listened to the familiar words of the old Andean song, Clarissa’s body began to slump and Oscar worried that she might faint again. Instead she rested her head on his shoulder and said, “Oscar, promise me when I die you will bury me under the jacaranda tree. Promise me you will follow my wishes down to the last detail.”
“I promise I will, Clarissa,” he had said.
Five years after his mother died, to the very day, Oscar received a phone call at 7:30 on a Friday morning. When the international operator asked him to hold, Oscar expected Clarissa but instead he heard Mama Miche’s ragged voice, “Señor Osquitar, my dear boy,” his old nanny said, “A terrible thing has happened.”
Later Oscar realized that on some level he had always expected this call. Since childhood Clarissa had spoken freely of dying. She would say mysterious things like, “I shall never live past my youth!” And, “Oli, when I die and you are left alone, remember that I always loved you!” And sometimes she would pat him on his cheek, tears brimming in her eyes, and say provocatively, “Pobre guaga, such a future awaits you….”
Oscar had always found his sister’s romantic fixation on death cloying. Her comments irritated the foundations of the calm, upbeat, rational persona that Oscar had consciously cultivated for as long as he could remember. Clarissa, however, was a different matter. Emotionally erratic, superstitious, sometimes unstable, her imagination always spun out of control.
True to form, over the passing years, Clarissa’s funeral desires expanded exponentially from the simple wish to be buried in the family pastures beneath the jacaranda tree, to a long, intricately detailed description of how her body should be prepared for burial. While Oscar made a point to call his sister on Christmas, on New Year’s, on her birthday, and on the Day of the Dead, Clarissa only called Oscar once every year. She would air mail her instructions a few weeks before and then, on the anniversary of their mother’s death, Clarissa would call him from the telephone cabin at Andinatel and shout through the static demanding that Oscar read the latest version of her wishes aloud. She always asked him to voice any questions that he might have regarding the clarity of her directions. Every year he was too dumbfounded to respond. At the end of the conversation, Clarissa would insist that her brother reiterate his unwavering commitment to his promise and every year, out of exasperation, Oscar would use the exact words he had chosen at his mother’s grave: “I told you I would, Clarissa.”
“Good,” she’d say. “Nice talking to you,” and then she’d hang up.
Consequently when Clemencia called with the news of Clarissa’s death, Oscar felt unusually relieved until he was overcome with insidious waves of guilt. All that day as Oscar prepared for the international flight he tried to reframe his relief and once he arrived in Quito after a sleepless night, he tried to repress the guilt.
For the next four hours in the cab Oscar succeeded by chatting with the taxi driver over the extraordinary disaster of Ecuadorian current affairs: the frozen banks and currency collapse; the death of the Sucre and dollarization; the national strikes and massive marches; CONAIE and the multi-nation Indian alliance Pachakutik. And as if that wasn’t enough, even the earth had revolted. After eighty years, the volcanoes Pichincha in Quito and Tungurahua in Baños had woken from deep slumber and begun to spit out ash.
Given facts, there was no question: at the turn of the millennium, at the center of the planet, Ecuador stood in the cross-hairs of a divine blast, suffering in turn the unceasing and merciless wrath of God.
“Pachakutik?” the taxi driver joked, “Pachakutik! After 500 years that old Incan prophecy has come true. The world has indeed turned over. The earth has found balance once again and bloody justice has been served: only we’ve all been wiped out—Indians and whites, rich and poor alike.”
Pachakutik. The Quichua word meant earth shaker, transformation, cataclysm, rebirth, the coming of a new era…. It was the name that the second Inca Cusi Yupanqui adopted before expanding his massive Incan empire turning the Andean world upside down. Pachakutik was an Incan legend festering for over 500 years only to surface mid-earth in geo-political morass. 500 years post colonization the new Indian alliance waved an Incan rainbow flag and named their party Pachakutik in the desperate, furious hope that Ecuador would finally recognize itself as an inter-cultural, multi-nation country.
Long ago in high school history, Oscar had studied the wiphala, the checkered flag the Incans used as a battle standard. They’d had a test and ever since he had always remembered: red, the color of earth and Andean man; orange, the color of society and culture; yellow, the color of energy; white, the color of time; green, the color of natural resources; blue, the color of the heavens; and violet, the color of Andean government and self-determination.
Andean self-determination.
In that history class they had studied the chakana, too, the Incan cross. The Quichua word chakay meant “to cross” or “bridge over” and like the wiphala, the chakana represented the universe, the Southern Cross and Incan civilization as a whole. Made up of a three-stepped symmetric cross with a hole in the middle, the four arms of the chakana represented the four cardinal stars, the four directions, four elements and the four branches of Tihuantinsuyo, the Incan Empire. The four branches joined together around a circle representing the center of the universe and Cuzco, the center of the Incan world. Each of the steps on the four arms represented the three tiers of the world. The upper world, Hanan Pacha, included the stars, celestial beings and gods. The middle world, Kay Pacha, represented the world of earth and human life, and the lower world, Uqhu Pacha, represented the underworld and death. Each tier, in turn, was associated with different powerful animals. The condor represented the upper world, the puma represented the middle world, and the snake that lived in holes underground, represented the underworld. The Incan Empire was long gone but indigenous groups across the Andes still claimed these Incan symbols as part of their current identity and a potent expression of their cultural past.
Andean self-determination. To Oscar the idea sounded absurd. It was one thing to conjure up the vast organized past of the Incan Empire and another to imagine this shit-for-country run by the rag tag group of uneducated peasants that now clamored for power.
They drove up towards Cotopaxi through bleak páramo where spiraling clouds scarred silver sky. Oscar watched the vultures wheeling. Below smoldering fires roamed through rambling hills of garbage. Modern world transmuted into Andean ravine. Quebrada. Broken earth.
Oscar leaned back and shut his eyes, “Bienvenidos a mi madre fucking tierra.”
It was like the condors—Incan totem for sky, for Hanan Pacha, for stars and gods and majestic celestial beings—now those condors were all but gone. The only thing that claimed the heavens now in these high Andean plains was the condor’s vulgar cousin.
Vultures.
Yes, years ago Oscar had left this country for good reason. Now only death had power enough to call him back. While Oscar hadn’t discussed Clarissa with the taxi driver, their conversation served to underscore the ways his sister’s burial wishes coincided with cultural confusion on a national scale. For Oscar the chaos made it clear: when he arrived in Baños he would follow Clarissa’s instructions down to the last detail. Then, at long last, he would be released from this country. He would be released from his vow.
So it was that when Oscar arrived in Baños and his old nanny Clemencia met him weeping at the taxi door, he didn’t hesitate. He took his suitcase out of Clemencia’s hands, set it on the ground and then listened to her plea to bury Clarissa in the cemetery. After a moment, he lost patience with her tears and cut in abruptly, “Mama Miche, where’s my sister?”
Clemencia stuttered unintelligibly.
Short tempered and exhausted, he cut in again, “Where is she, Mamiche? What have you done with Clarissa?”
His old nanny looked at him blankly.
“You didn’t tell anyone, did you? You haven’t let them take her to the sindicato, have you? I told you on the phone. You wouldn’t dare….”
Wincing at his tone, the elderly woman looked down at the ground, “No sir,” she said.
“Then where is she?”
Clemencia pointed to a window in the old decaying house. “Upstairs. She’s in your mother’s room.” Clemencia began to weep again and grabbed at his suit. Impatient, Oscar set his hands on her shoulders. “Mamiche, now you stop worrying. You stop crying now. Take this cab. Go to town. Don’t come home until after dark. If you feel nervous, go to mass.” As an afterthought, Oscar pulled a coin from his pocket. “Here, light a candle for my sister. She’s going to need it.”
He pulled out a roll of bills and paid the driver. “Take this woman into town for me, won’t you?” He opened the door, waited while Clemencia adjusted herself on the seat and then shut the door. He bent down and spoke through the open window.
“Don’t you worry now, Mamiche, I’ll take care of everything.”
As the taxi pulled out of the drive Oscar picked up his bags, turned around and faced the house.
Built by his grandfather as a vacation home after the 1949 Pelileo earthquake on the site of the original colonial building, Villa Isabel had once been the delight of the Guerrero family. Abandoned to Clarissa’s care over the last nine years, the house had begun to crumble. Ferns and orchids broke through buckling eaves. Long cracks fractured the walls. On the steps, stones slipped from their cement moorings.
Oscar gingerly climbed the stairs and stood on the covered landing looking out towards his family’s fields. Framed by the blue of cabuya paths, the rectangular fields varied from green, to yellow, to rich brown. Fields of new corn glimmered in emerald rows. Brilliant bursts of orange, purple, white and yellow ricocheted through fallow fields overrun by wild flowers. On the upper slopes blue pastures disappeared beneath creamy clouds. Behind these clouds, the volcano Tungurahua smoldered.
Oscar sighed. In five years everything—and nothing at all—had changed. He turned to the immense carved door, set his hand on the knob and slowly pushed it open expecting to see his father’s landscape photographs gracing the white entry walls.
Instead, through the dusty gloom eerie faces of fantastic creatures peered out at him from dozens of canvases. Miniatures to mural sized brightly colored paintings covered the hallway walls from floor to 10 foot ceiling. There were elaborate paintings of saints and mountains with faces and whirlwinds of birds and bare breasted women whose bodies looked like the land. Behind the canvases the walls had been painted in bright pink and strange phrases in Spanish, English and Quichua had been scrawled in red crayon--the earth is alive the earth is alive the surface of the earth is her skin gringa pacarina me llaman la desaparecida la virgen la virgen andariega our bodies rise like needles from the land. And over and over, the question, “Tell me, where in this huaca world has she gone?”
The words formed lettered vines that wound around the paintings. Sometimes the words crawled from the walls across the frame onto the painted canvases. There the words crossed naked bodies and faces, wound up the trunks of trees, spiraled through the leaves and then wandered like bird tracks across cerulean skies only to disappear on the gold leaf edges of the frame again and reappear in bold against the cool expanse of the pink adobe wall.
Then the words faded in the face of a snaking collage layered with sketched images of Tungurahua in full eruption—the giant perfect cone spewing roiling clouds of ash, bright lava splashing through darkness, immense landslides of mud devouring the mountain while the naked roots of trees clawed through the air. Articles about worker’s strikes, postcards of thermal springs, images of golden Incan statues, carved Andean masks, chopped up slices of their father’s landscape prints woven with images of the family when they were all children, pictures of their father’s bulldozer pushing car sized boulders off the road, a newspaper article with a photo of a bus hanging by a tire on the edge of a cliff, pictures of morphos, humming birds, rhinoceros beetles, condors, anacondas, jaguars, botanical drawings of orchids, and image after image of the Virgin of Agua Santa—all cut and pasted into an immense sinuous snake whose cold diamond eyes had been formed by their father’s photograph of the Salado pools. The Bascún River formed the snake’s weaving tongue and balanced on the forked tip hovered a tiny perfect image of a red paper boat.
Oscar set his suitcase down at the door and walked slowly down the hall warily eyeing the paintings and the intricate collage. Irresistibly, his fingertips reached toward the wall and slowly traced the slick, curving surface of the snake that disappeared at times behind the canvases. Without warning, a biting current shot through his arm with a cold so intense that he immediately began shivering. Oscar pulled back his hand and rubbed his heart. Eyes fixed on the mural he stumbled on a buckled floorboard. After all these years termites had devoured the floor and now the wood crumbled softly beneath him.
At the end of the hall lay the living room and to the left a staircase curved upwards to the bedrooms where Clarissa lay on their parent’s bed. Oscar hesitated and then stepped, instead, into the living room. The lace curtains in the windows fluttered. Even in the half-light Oscar could see immense, eerie canvases rising on either side of the hearth.
Oscar knew that Clarissa painted. He remembered scraps of odd sketches from their childhood and a colorful canvas or two, but he had never seen or imagined anything like this. According to the dates on the paintings, most of the canvases had been painted in the years since Oscar had last seen his sister. He wondered if she had ever taken any of the paintings to a gallery or if they had all remained hidden behind locked doors.
He set his hand on the well-worn banister and began to climb the stairs.
Clarissa’s childhood bedroom was on the right and their parents’ lay at the end of the hall. His sister had moved into their parents’ room after their mother died and according to Clemencia, this was where she now lay. At his parent’s doorway Oscar reached into his pocket and pulled out the envelope with Clarissa’s instructions and then slowly pushed the door.
Normally bare, the white walls of the room had been filled floor to ceiling with their father’s black and white landscape prints. Some of the prints were familiar to Oscar, as they had hung throughout the house, but most of the images he had never seen before. And then, there—floating like a desolate island in the middle of an abandoned sea—stood their parent’s bed perfectly made with a white coverlet spread tightly over a long lumpy form.
Clarissa was alone.
While Oscar had asked Clemencia not to call relatives with the news, he still imagined that someone was sitting vigil with his sister, no matter how hapless her life. But now, confronted by the empty chair in the corner he found himself unable to imagine what person he had expected to find sitting in this gloom reciting prayers or reading psalms or weeping. His Tía Consuelo or Tía Carmen? Surely. Luchito, his cousin. Of course. Clarissa’s childhood friend, Soledad? Maybe. Her childhood sweetheart, José Gabriel. Perhaps.
But no, who Oscar really imagined sitting in that chair was his mother. And no. Of course not. His mother wasn’t there.
Instead the floor had been swept immaculately, the curtains in the room had been drawn, and the bed carefully made up with all the sheets and covers pulled over his sister’s body as if she were absent.
So strange—the long hilly lump of her body in the middle of the perfectly smooth bed. Covered in the white bedspread Clarissa’s body lost its person shape and resembled a ragged range of peaks.
Snow lined.
Antisana, perhaps.
Or El Altar….
Oscar took a deep breath. While he had always been very practical, he had never been very brave and he didn’t like this feeling of being caught alone in this room with his sister’s inert form. But it wouldn’t be over until it was done so he took a deep breath and grabbed at the corner of the bedspread closest to him and yanked it off.
The sheets still covered most of Clarissa’s body but now Oscar could see her swollen face clamped in anguish. Her brows bore deep furrows and teeth marks cut into her lip. Still, Oscar couldn’t make sense of what he saw. Beneath the sheet, on top of her abdomen, someone had placed a ball.
Oscar tugged the sheet and now Clarissa lay before him in her nightgown.
His sister was pregnant.
Clarissa had not mentioned a child when they had talked a few months before and when Clemencia called she had circled vaguely around the circumstances surrounding Clarissa’s untimely death.When Oscar had pressed Clemencia for details she simply said that Clarissa had suffered an accident. She used the word “desgracia.”
Now Oscar found himself with the detailed list of burial instructions in one hand and the unexpected reality of his sister’s bulging belly before him. Oscar had imagined that she had fallen somehow or, God knows, eaten poisonous food. Something. Clarissa had always been unlucky. An accident. A common desgracia. Not death in childbirth. Not this fatal fall from grace.
So where was the father of this unborn child? Why wasn’t he sitting here with Clarissa? Where was he? Who was he? Surely he must be called to account?
And where was the doctor? Why was Clarissa dead in this bed and not hooked up to I.V.’s in the hospital with an incubator by her side and a maternity nurse hovering at the door?
It made no sense.
And while it made no sense, Oscar suddenly returned to the paper bunched in his hand. With his dead sister before him, he could see only one task ahead.
Let her rest.
He would bury her as she asked and be done with the vow.
Oscar unfolded the paper and, out of habit, read the first paragraph aloud:
If you find me before I am stiff, open my mouth slightly. Place, between my teeth, one large very red strawberry from the garden with the tip resting on my tongue. Leave in the ring of green leaves at its crown. Arrange the leaves so that they lie flat and neat across my lips. If you should reach me after I am stiff and you cannot open my mouth, then slice the strawberry thinly right below the green crown and affix the fruit directly to the skin.
Oscar reached out his hand and touched Clarissa’s forehead. The skin was as smooth as a candle. Gingerly, he wrapped his fingers around her wrist and lifted her arm.
Her body rocked in the bed.
“Strawberries, Clarissa?” Oscar whispered. “Did you ever consider what I have to go through so that you can rest in peace? Strawberries?”
“You’re gone. Dead!” He snapped the paper against his palm, “This burial plan is pointless.”
But then he heard her voice. At least he thought he did.
“Oli.”
He jumped.
He swore and heard her voice again.
“Oli.”
The window was open. Oscar stood up, crossed the room and pulled back the curtain. It had started to rain, wisps of fog clung to the tangerine trees.
He began to read again.
… dress me in scarlet. (There should be an evening gown hanging in my closet. It may be a little tight. If so, cut the back of the dress with scissors.)
Bury me barefoot—feet to the North, head to the South. (But first, have Elena come in and do my nails. She usually charges $20,000 sucres for hands and $20,000 for feet. Given the circumstances, see if you can get her down to $15,000 each. She’ll know the color I want.)
These instructions had been written before the Sucre crashed in March. Now all had dissolved into dollars.
And finally, “Bury me beneath the jacaranda tree. Oli, you know which one.”
After all these years of reading this list Oscar finally faced the reality of performing these unsettling tasks. He pulled the blanket back up over his sister’s body and straightened out the wrinkles on the bed. Magically the white nubby bedcover once again erased his sister’s form and the mountain shape of her body obscured the anguish of what lay beneath.
Oscar tucked Clarissa’s letter back in his pocket.
He would need a drink.
Downstairs he found whiskey and a glass.
At the bar stood a black and white photograph in a silver frame of his father and the Governor in hard hats shaking hands in front of the Agoyán dam. His father’s crew and his foreman, Don Cesario, stood in a solemn row at his side.
Oscar remembered how his father used to pick up the frame, thump the picture and pronounce, “M’ijo, this is technology. This is the future. Give me a bulldozer. Give me cement. I’ll remake the world for you.” Then he would laugh, he’d throw back his head and exclaim, “By God, I’ll even give you light!”
If Oscar had learned anything in life, it was that everyone had their own peculiar dreams.
Over the years he had watched his sister’s baroque vision of her own burial expand, so much so that her written instructions no longer surprised him. Except for the things that she left out: Pin the rainbow ribbon to the skin above my heart. Take the key, tie it to a kite and, in the first really good lightning storm of winter, let it go. Let it fly away.
He had always wondered about that key and the secret it guarded. A year ago, last time Clarissa called, she had included instructions about the key. “I will die,” she had told him, “with this secret. They will bury me and no one will dig it up.” Odd that in this latest edition mailed to Oscar only a few weeks before instructions about the key remained absent.
Absent, too, were any comments about the photograph. It had always puzzled him though he never thought to ask. Clarissa had carried the photograph with her throughout her childhood. Every morning she would take it out and set it on the bathroom counter by the mirror and talk to it while she washed her face and brushed her hair. Every night, before going to bed, she would do the same. From first grade on she tucked it into the front pockets of her school notebooks and would pull it out and set it beside her on her desk whenever she took her exams. After high school she bought a small leather folder with a clear plastic pocket that would protect the picture. She kept the leather folder in the top drawer of her bedside table. Then, after their mother died, when Clarissa abandoned her childhood bed and moved to their parent’s room, the photograph went with her. She pulled it from its case and tacked it to the headboard where it stayed until the night she died. When Clemencia found her that next morning, the photograph lay crumpled in Clarissa’s hand.
Tattered and gritty from handling, the photograph showed three children sitting on the bank of a stream. A smiling seven-year old girl with a fat baby boy on her lap stared intimately into the camera. Beside her a smaller girl of four lifted a paper boat toward the photographer. Only the baby gazed intently at the boat both hands reaching toward it.
Originally in black and white the photograph had been partially colorized. The grassy bank, the swirling stream, the rosy baby, the red boat, and the rainbow ribbon in the older girl’s hair all came alive under the photographer’s brush. Despite careful attention to subtle hues, however, the putty gray faces of the two girls remained untouched save for two sudden points of green that filled the four year-old’s eyes.
The photograph had been so extraordinarily important to Clarissa in life that Oscar found it strange that she didn’t include it in her plans for death. In fact the image remained inseparable from Oscar’s memory of his sister and for this reason alone he had decided that he was going to bury her with it even if Clarissa had failed to instruct him accordingly.
Oscar poured himself another drink and let the whiskey burn slowly across his tongue. Then he smiled bitterly. He could almost hear her voice.
Do not place me immediately in my coffin. Carry me instead on your shoulders. Let me wander one last time through my fields. Let my red silken skirts wipe your tears as you bear me away to the tree.
Bury me at sunset or bury me at dawn.
Bring along the rooster. I want to hear him crowing at the setting and the rising of my sun.
When the show is over, before you close the lid, spread across my body silver eucalyptus leaves, jacaranda blossoms if in bloom and some of those bright yellow flowers they call Palo de Luz. And then, scatter across my chest a handful of sand from the banks of the Río Pastaza and a handful of dirt from my garden.
Oh, and don’t forget my stones—the ones that snake like a path through my garden. You will recognize them by their white, red and black markings. Take them and ring them around my body. I want to be buried with my dreams.
Since his sister had died, he hadn’t been able to concentrate. Only these rainstorms held his attention. Clarissa had loved all that water and today, the day of her funeral, it was pouring. The ditch Oscar had dug with his cousin Luchito had filled with water before they could even bury her. His Tía Carmen had found Clarissa’s burial wishes insulting—no relative of hers was going to come to a final resting-place in the middle of a cow pasture in driving rain. But Oscar took comfort in the thought of his sister soaking in mud. His first memory of her, after all, painted her chin deep in the tub threatening him with her crocodile impression. He remembered screaming in terrified delight, frightened by the way she slanted her eyes and opened her mouth into a semi-toothless grin.
Glued in her scrapbook a photograph of them both naked in the bath aided his memory, the caption lettered in his sister’s careful misspelled script: Clarissa, La Cocodrila. Oscar, El Olifont.
She must have been seven at the time. He would have been four.
Since the moment Oscar returned home to Baños, he had had to navigate his way past the public opinion broiling up around the tantalizing topic of his sister’s burial. It began the instant he stepped out of the taxi at Villa Isabel and greeted Clemencia, the family housekeeper and childhood nanny whom he still called Mama Miche. Even as Clemencia hugged him and reached for his bags she began pleading for him to disregard his vow to his sister and bury her properly like a Christian beside his parents, his grandparents and the rest of the family. By all rights they should take her to lie in state overnight at the Chauffeurs’ Union, then carry her coffin to the basilica for mass and then up Calle Ambato past the stone cross of Golgotha to the cemetery so that they all could rest in peace.
Oscar gently patted Clemencia, her cheeks wet with tears, “Mama Miche, I made a sacred vow to my sister the day our mother died. I sealed the vow on my mother’s grave. It cannot be undone.”
“Ay, Niño Oscar, that promise should never have been made!” Clemencia moaned as she dabbed her handkerchief to her throat, “May Taita Diosito protect you my son. You’re going to need it.”
It was true that five years ago had Oscar known the extravagance of his sister’s macabre imagination he would never have agreed to the vow. But at the time he was young, barely nineteen, and their mother’s death was still fresh and he had been overcome by what now seemed an inexplicable compulsion to stick close to his only remaining family.
Clarissa had stood beside him at the cemetery, leaning on him for comfort while the mourners sang by their mother’s open grave:
Yo quiero que a mi me entierren I want them to bury me
Como a mis antepasados. the way they buried my ancestors.
Yo quiero que a mi me entierren I want them to bury me
Como a mis antepasados. the way they buried my ancestors.
En el vientre oscuro y fresco In the dark fresh belly
De una vasija de barro. of a pot made from clay.
As they listened to the familiar words of the old Andean song, Clarissa’s body began to slump and Oscar worried that she might faint again. Instead she rested her head on his shoulder and said, “Oscar, promise me when I die you will bury me under the jacaranda tree. Promise me you will follow my wishes down to the last detail.”
“I promise I will, Clarissa,” he had said.
Five years after his mother died, to the very day, Oscar received a phone call at 7:30 on a Friday morning. When the international operator asked him to hold, Oscar expected Clarissa but instead he heard Mama Miche’s ragged voice, “Señor Osquitar, my dear boy,” his old nanny said, “A terrible thing has happened.”
Later Oscar realized that on some level he had always expected this call. Since childhood Clarissa had spoken freely of dying. She would say mysterious things like, “I shall never live past my youth!” And, “Oli, when I die and you are left alone, remember that I always loved you!” And sometimes she would pat him on his cheek, tears brimming in her eyes, and say provocatively, “Pobre guaga, such a future awaits you….”
Oscar had always found his sister’s romantic fixation on death cloying. Her comments irritated the foundations of the calm, upbeat, rational persona that Oscar had consciously cultivated for as long as he could remember. Clarissa, however, was a different matter. Emotionally erratic, superstitious, sometimes unstable, her imagination always spun out of control.
True to form, over the passing years, Clarissa’s funeral desires expanded exponentially from the simple wish to be buried in the family pastures beneath the jacaranda tree, to a long, intricately detailed description of how her body should be prepared for burial. While Oscar made a point to call his sister on Christmas, on New Year’s, on her birthday, and on the Day of the Dead, Clarissa only called Oscar once every year. She would air mail her instructions a few weeks before and then, on the anniversary of their mother’s death, Clarissa would call him from the telephone cabin at Andinatel and shout through the static demanding that Oscar read the latest version of her wishes aloud. She always asked him to voice any questions that he might have regarding the clarity of her directions. Every year he was too dumbfounded to respond. At the end of the conversation, Clarissa would insist that her brother reiterate his unwavering commitment to his promise and every year, out of exasperation, Oscar would use the exact words he had chosen at his mother’s grave: “I told you I would, Clarissa.”
“Good,” she’d say. “Nice talking to you,” and then she’d hang up.
Consequently when Clemencia called with the news of Clarissa’s death, Oscar felt unusually relieved until he was overcome with insidious waves of guilt. All that day as Oscar prepared for the international flight he tried to reframe his relief and once he arrived in Quito after a sleepless night, he tried to repress the guilt.
For the next four hours in the cab Oscar succeeded by chatting with the taxi driver over the extraordinary disaster of Ecuadorian current affairs: the frozen banks and currency collapse; the death of the Sucre and dollarization; the national strikes and massive marches; CONAIE and the multi-nation Indian alliance Pachakutik. And as if that wasn’t enough, even the earth had revolted. After eighty years, the volcanoes Pichincha in Quito and Tungurahua in Baños had woken from deep slumber and begun to spit out ash.
Given facts, there was no question: at the turn of the millennium, at the center of the planet, Ecuador stood in the cross-hairs of a divine blast, suffering in turn the unceasing and merciless wrath of God.
“Pachakutik?” the taxi driver joked, “Pachakutik! After 500 years that old Incan prophecy has come true. The world has indeed turned over. The earth has found balance once again and bloody justice has been served: only we’ve all been wiped out—Indians and whites, rich and poor alike.”
Pachakutik. The Quichua word meant earth shaker, transformation, cataclysm, rebirth, the coming of a new era…. It was the name that the second Inca Cusi Yupanqui adopted before expanding his massive Incan empire turning the Andean world upside down. Pachakutik was an Incan legend festering for over 500 years only to surface mid-earth in geo-political morass. 500 years post colonization the new Indian alliance waved an Incan rainbow flag and named their party Pachakutik in the desperate, furious hope that Ecuador would finally recognize itself as an inter-cultural, multi-nation country.
Long ago in high school history, Oscar had studied the wiphala, the checkered flag the Incans used as a battle standard. They’d had a test and ever since he had always remembered: red, the color of earth and Andean man; orange, the color of society and culture; yellow, the color of energy; white, the color of time; green, the color of natural resources; blue, the color of the heavens; and violet, the color of Andean government and self-determination.
Andean self-determination.
In that history class they had studied the chakana, too, the Incan cross. The Quichua word chakay meant “to cross” or “bridge over” and like the wiphala, the chakana represented the universe, the Southern Cross and Incan civilization as a whole. Made up of a three-stepped symmetric cross with a hole in the middle, the four arms of the chakana represented the four cardinal stars, the four directions, four elements and the four branches of Tihuantinsuyo, the Incan Empire. The four branches joined together around a circle representing the center of the universe and Cuzco, the center of the Incan world. Each of the steps on the four arms represented the three tiers of the world. The upper world, Hanan Pacha, included the stars, celestial beings and gods. The middle world, Kay Pacha, represented the world of earth and human life, and the lower world, Uqhu Pacha, represented the underworld and death. Each tier, in turn, was associated with different powerful animals. The condor represented the upper world, the puma represented the middle world, and the snake that lived in holes underground, represented the underworld. The Incan Empire was long gone but indigenous groups across the Andes still claimed these Incan symbols as part of their current identity and a potent expression of their cultural past.
Andean self-determination. To Oscar the idea sounded absurd. It was one thing to conjure up the vast organized past of the Incan Empire and another to imagine this shit-for-country run by the rag tag group of uneducated peasants that now clamored for power.
They drove up towards Cotopaxi through bleak páramo where spiraling clouds scarred silver sky. Oscar watched the vultures wheeling. Below smoldering fires roamed through rambling hills of garbage. Modern world transmuted into Andean ravine. Quebrada. Broken earth.
Oscar leaned back and shut his eyes, “Bienvenidos a mi madre fucking tierra.”
It was like the condors—Incan totem for sky, for Hanan Pacha, for stars and gods and majestic celestial beings—now those condors were all but gone. The only thing that claimed the heavens now in these high Andean plains was the condor’s vulgar cousin.
Vultures.
Yes, years ago Oscar had left this country for good reason. Now only death had power enough to call him back. While Oscar hadn’t discussed Clarissa with the taxi driver, their conversation served to underscore the ways his sister’s burial wishes coincided with cultural confusion on a national scale. For Oscar the chaos made it clear: when he arrived in Baños he would follow Clarissa’s instructions down to the last detail. Then, at long last, he would be released from this country. He would be released from his vow.
So it was that when Oscar arrived in Baños and his old nanny Clemencia met him weeping at the taxi door, he didn’t hesitate. He took his suitcase out of Clemencia’s hands, set it on the ground and then listened to her plea to bury Clarissa in the cemetery. After a moment, he lost patience with her tears and cut in abruptly, “Mama Miche, where’s my sister?”
Clemencia stuttered unintelligibly.
Short tempered and exhausted, he cut in again, “Where is she, Mamiche? What have you done with Clarissa?”
His old nanny looked at him blankly.
“You didn’t tell anyone, did you? You haven’t let them take her to the sindicato, have you? I told you on the phone. You wouldn’t dare….”
Wincing at his tone, the elderly woman looked down at the ground, “No sir,” she said.
“Then where is she?”
Clemencia pointed to a window in the old decaying house. “Upstairs. She’s in your mother’s room.” Clemencia began to weep again and grabbed at his suit. Impatient, Oscar set his hands on her shoulders. “Mamiche, now you stop worrying. You stop crying now. Take this cab. Go to town. Don’t come home until after dark. If you feel nervous, go to mass.” As an afterthought, Oscar pulled a coin from his pocket. “Here, light a candle for my sister. She’s going to need it.”
He pulled out a roll of bills and paid the driver. “Take this woman into town for me, won’t you?” He opened the door, waited while Clemencia adjusted herself on the seat and then shut the door. He bent down and spoke through the open window.
“Don’t you worry now, Mamiche, I’ll take care of everything.”
As the taxi pulled out of the drive Oscar picked up his bags, turned around and faced the house.
Built by his grandfather as a vacation home after the 1949 Pelileo earthquake on the site of the original colonial building, Villa Isabel had once been the delight of the Guerrero family. Abandoned to Clarissa’s care over the last nine years, the house had begun to crumble. Ferns and orchids broke through buckling eaves. Long cracks fractured the walls. On the steps, stones slipped from their cement moorings.
Oscar gingerly climbed the stairs and stood on the covered landing looking out towards his family’s fields. Framed by the blue of cabuya paths, the rectangular fields varied from green, to yellow, to rich brown. Fields of new corn glimmered in emerald rows. Brilliant bursts of orange, purple, white and yellow ricocheted through fallow fields overrun by wild flowers. On the upper slopes blue pastures disappeared beneath creamy clouds. Behind these clouds, the volcano Tungurahua smoldered.
Oscar sighed. In five years everything—and nothing at all—had changed. He turned to the immense carved door, set his hand on the knob and slowly pushed it open expecting to see his father’s landscape photographs gracing the white entry walls.
Instead, through the dusty gloom eerie faces of fantastic creatures peered out at him from dozens of canvases. Miniatures to mural sized brightly colored paintings covered the hallway walls from floor to 10 foot ceiling. There were elaborate paintings of saints and mountains with faces and whirlwinds of birds and bare breasted women whose bodies looked like the land. Behind the canvases the walls had been painted in bright pink and strange phrases in Spanish, English and Quichua had been scrawled in red crayon--the earth is alive the earth is alive the surface of the earth is her skin gringa pacarina me llaman la desaparecida la virgen la virgen andariega our bodies rise like needles from the land. And over and over, the question, “Tell me, where in this huaca world has she gone?”
The words formed lettered vines that wound around the paintings. Sometimes the words crawled from the walls across the frame onto the painted canvases. There the words crossed naked bodies and faces, wound up the trunks of trees, spiraled through the leaves and then wandered like bird tracks across cerulean skies only to disappear on the gold leaf edges of the frame again and reappear in bold against the cool expanse of the pink adobe wall.
Then the words faded in the face of a snaking collage layered with sketched images of Tungurahua in full eruption—the giant perfect cone spewing roiling clouds of ash, bright lava splashing through darkness, immense landslides of mud devouring the mountain while the naked roots of trees clawed through the air. Articles about worker’s strikes, postcards of thermal springs, images of golden Incan statues, carved Andean masks, chopped up slices of their father’s landscape prints woven with images of the family when they were all children, pictures of their father’s bulldozer pushing car sized boulders off the road, a newspaper article with a photo of a bus hanging by a tire on the edge of a cliff, pictures of morphos, humming birds, rhinoceros beetles, condors, anacondas, jaguars, botanical drawings of orchids, and image after image of the Virgin of Agua Santa—all cut and pasted into an immense sinuous snake whose cold diamond eyes had been formed by their father’s photograph of the Salado pools. The Bascún River formed the snake’s weaving tongue and balanced on the forked tip hovered a tiny perfect image of a red paper boat.
Oscar set his suitcase down at the door and walked slowly down the hall warily eyeing the paintings and the intricate collage. Irresistibly, his fingertips reached toward the wall and slowly traced the slick, curving surface of the snake that disappeared at times behind the canvases. Without warning, a biting current shot through his arm with a cold so intense that he immediately began shivering. Oscar pulled back his hand and rubbed his heart. Eyes fixed on the mural he stumbled on a buckled floorboard. After all these years termites had devoured the floor and now the wood crumbled softly beneath him.
At the end of the hall lay the living room and to the left a staircase curved upwards to the bedrooms where Clarissa lay on their parent’s bed. Oscar hesitated and then stepped, instead, into the living room. The lace curtains in the windows fluttered. Even in the half-light Oscar could see immense, eerie canvases rising on either side of the hearth.
Oscar knew that Clarissa painted. He remembered scraps of odd sketches from their childhood and a colorful canvas or two, but he had never seen or imagined anything like this. According to the dates on the paintings, most of the canvases had been painted in the years since Oscar had last seen his sister. He wondered if she had ever taken any of the paintings to a gallery or if they had all remained hidden behind locked doors.
He set his hand on the well-worn banister and began to climb the stairs.
Clarissa’s childhood bedroom was on the right and their parents’ lay at the end of the hall. His sister had moved into their parents’ room after their mother died and according to Clemencia, this was where she now lay. At his parent’s doorway Oscar reached into his pocket and pulled out the envelope with Clarissa’s instructions and then slowly pushed the door.
Normally bare, the white walls of the room had been filled floor to ceiling with their father’s black and white landscape prints. Some of the prints were familiar to Oscar, as they had hung throughout the house, but most of the images he had never seen before. And then, there—floating like a desolate island in the middle of an abandoned sea—stood their parent’s bed perfectly made with a white coverlet spread tightly over a long lumpy form.
Clarissa was alone.
While Oscar had asked Clemencia not to call relatives with the news, he still imagined that someone was sitting vigil with his sister, no matter how hapless her life. But now, confronted by the empty chair in the corner he found himself unable to imagine what person he had expected to find sitting in this gloom reciting prayers or reading psalms or weeping. His Tía Consuelo or Tía Carmen? Surely. Luchito, his cousin. Of course. Clarissa’s childhood friend, Soledad? Maybe. Her childhood sweetheart, José Gabriel. Perhaps.
But no, who Oscar really imagined sitting in that chair was his mother. And no. Of course not. His mother wasn’t there.
Instead the floor had been swept immaculately, the curtains in the room had been drawn, and the bed carefully made up with all the sheets and covers pulled over his sister’s body as if she were absent.
So strange—the long hilly lump of her body in the middle of the perfectly smooth bed. Covered in the white bedspread Clarissa’s body lost its person shape and resembled a ragged range of peaks.
Snow lined.
Antisana, perhaps.
Or El Altar….
Oscar took a deep breath. While he had always been very practical, he had never been very brave and he didn’t like this feeling of being caught alone in this room with his sister’s inert form. But it wouldn’t be over until it was done so he took a deep breath and grabbed at the corner of the bedspread closest to him and yanked it off.
The sheets still covered most of Clarissa’s body but now Oscar could see her swollen face clamped in anguish. Her brows bore deep furrows and teeth marks cut into her lip. Still, Oscar couldn’t make sense of what he saw. Beneath the sheet, on top of her abdomen, someone had placed a ball.
Oscar tugged the sheet and now Clarissa lay before him in her nightgown.
His sister was pregnant.
Clarissa had not mentioned a child when they had talked a few months before and when Clemencia called she had circled vaguely around the circumstances surrounding Clarissa’s untimely death.When Oscar had pressed Clemencia for details she simply said that Clarissa had suffered an accident. She used the word “desgracia.”
Now Oscar found himself with the detailed list of burial instructions in one hand and the unexpected reality of his sister’s bulging belly before him. Oscar had imagined that she had fallen somehow or, God knows, eaten poisonous food. Something. Clarissa had always been unlucky. An accident. A common desgracia. Not death in childbirth. Not this fatal fall from grace.
So where was the father of this unborn child? Why wasn’t he sitting here with Clarissa? Where was he? Who was he? Surely he must be called to account?
And where was the doctor? Why was Clarissa dead in this bed and not hooked up to I.V.’s in the hospital with an incubator by her side and a maternity nurse hovering at the door?
It made no sense.
And while it made no sense, Oscar suddenly returned to the paper bunched in his hand. With his dead sister before him, he could see only one task ahead.
Let her rest.
He would bury her as she asked and be done with the vow.
Oscar unfolded the paper and, out of habit, read the first paragraph aloud:
If you find me before I am stiff, open my mouth slightly. Place, between my teeth, one large very red strawberry from the garden with the tip resting on my tongue. Leave in the ring of green leaves at its crown. Arrange the leaves so that they lie flat and neat across my lips. If you should reach me after I am stiff and you cannot open my mouth, then slice the strawberry thinly right below the green crown and affix the fruit directly to the skin.
Oscar reached out his hand and touched Clarissa’s forehead. The skin was as smooth as a candle. Gingerly, he wrapped his fingers around her wrist and lifted her arm.
Her body rocked in the bed.
“Strawberries, Clarissa?” Oscar whispered. “Did you ever consider what I have to go through so that you can rest in peace? Strawberries?”
“You’re gone. Dead!” He snapped the paper against his palm, “This burial plan is pointless.”
But then he heard her voice. At least he thought he did.
“Oli.”
He jumped.
He swore and heard her voice again.
“Oli.”
The window was open. Oscar stood up, crossed the room and pulled back the curtain. It had started to rain, wisps of fog clung to the tangerine trees.
He began to read again.
… dress me in scarlet. (There should be an evening gown hanging in my closet. It may be a little tight. If so, cut the back of the dress with scissors.)
Bury me barefoot—feet to the North, head to the South. (But first, have Elena come in and do my nails. She usually charges $20,000 sucres for hands and $20,000 for feet. Given the circumstances, see if you can get her down to $15,000 each. She’ll know the color I want.)
These instructions had been written before the Sucre crashed in March. Now all had dissolved into dollars.
And finally, “Bury me beneath the jacaranda tree. Oli, you know which one.”
After all these years of reading this list Oscar finally faced the reality of performing these unsettling tasks. He pulled the blanket back up over his sister’s body and straightened out the wrinkles on the bed. Magically the white nubby bedcover once again erased his sister’s form and the mountain shape of her body obscured the anguish of what lay beneath.
Oscar tucked Clarissa’s letter back in his pocket.
He would need a drink.
Downstairs he found whiskey and a glass.
At the bar stood a black and white photograph in a silver frame of his father and the Governor in hard hats shaking hands in front of the Agoyán dam. His father’s crew and his foreman, Don Cesario, stood in a solemn row at his side.
Oscar remembered how his father used to pick up the frame, thump the picture and pronounce, “M’ijo, this is technology. This is the future. Give me a bulldozer. Give me cement. I’ll remake the world for you.” Then he would laugh, he’d throw back his head and exclaim, “By God, I’ll even give you light!”
If Oscar had learned anything in life, it was that everyone had their own peculiar dreams.
Over the years he had watched his sister’s baroque vision of her own burial expand, so much so that her written instructions no longer surprised him. Except for the things that she left out: Pin the rainbow ribbon to the skin above my heart. Take the key, tie it to a kite and, in the first really good lightning storm of winter, let it go. Let it fly away.
He had always wondered about that key and the secret it guarded. A year ago, last time Clarissa called, she had included instructions about the key. “I will die,” she had told him, “with this secret. They will bury me and no one will dig it up.” Odd that in this latest edition mailed to Oscar only a few weeks before instructions about the key remained absent.
Absent, too, were any comments about the photograph. It had always puzzled him though he never thought to ask. Clarissa had carried the photograph with her throughout her childhood. Every morning she would take it out and set it on the bathroom counter by the mirror and talk to it while she washed her face and brushed her hair. Every night, before going to bed, she would do the same. From first grade on she tucked it into the front pockets of her school notebooks and would pull it out and set it beside her on her desk whenever she took her exams. After high school she bought a small leather folder with a clear plastic pocket that would protect the picture. She kept the leather folder in the top drawer of her bedside table. Then, after their mother died, when Clarissa abandoned her childhood bed and moved to their parent’s room, the photograph went with her. She pulled it from its case and tacked it to the headboard where it stayed until the night she died. When Clemencia found her that next morning, the photograph lay crumpled in Clarissa’s hand.
Tattered and gritty from handling, the photograph showed three children sitting on the bank of a stream. A smiling seven-year old girl with a fat baby boy on her lap stared intimately into the camera. Beside her a smaller girl of four lifted a paper boat toward the photographer. Only the baby gazed intently at the boat both hands reaching toward it.
Originally in black and white the photograph had been partially colorized. The grassy bank, the swirling stream, the rosy baby, the red boat, and the rainbow ribbon in the older girl’s hair all came alive under the photographer’s brush. Despite careful attention to subtle hues, however, the putty gray faces of the two girls remained untouched save for two sudden points of green that filled the four year-old’s eyes.
The photograph had been so extraordinarily important to Clarissa in life that Oscar found it strange that she didn’t include it in her plans for death. In fact the image remained inseparable from Oscar’s memory of his sister and for this reason alone he had decided that he was going to bury her with it even if Clarissa had failed to instruct him accordingly.
Oscar poured himself another drink and let the whiskey burn slowly across his tongue. Then he smiled bitterly. He could almost hear her voice.
Do not place me immediately in my coffin. Carry me instead on your shoulders. Let me wander one last time through my fields. Let my red silken skirts wipe your tears as you bear me away to the tree.
Bury me at sunset or bury me at dawn.
Bring along the rooster. I want to hear him crowing at the setting and the rising of my sun.
When the show is over, before you close the lid, spread across my body silver eucalyptus leaves, jacaranda blossoms if in bloom and some of those bright yellow flowers they call Palo de Luz. And then, scatter across my chest a handful of sand from the banks of the Río Pastaza and a handful of dirt from my garden.
Oh, and don’t forget my stones—the ones that snake like a path through my garden. You will recognize them by their white, red and black markings. Take them and ring them around my body. I want to be buried with my dreams.
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