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By Aisling Walsh
A spiral of vultures, a gyre of mourning, descended from the sky, flew through the undergrowth, alighted on a flattened shack and began its festival of flesh…
The Vultures, Luis de Lión, Guatemala, 1966
A man with blazing white eyes makes his way down the stairs. His gaze penetrates, not just through the wall of my bedroom, but through the walls of my soul. I feel a thump on my chest and I wake gasping. My nightshirt is soaked through.
It’s dark in the room, nothing moves, there’s only the sound of my breath, short and shallow. There’s no one here, I tell myself, but I don’t really believe it. I can feel eyes fixed on me, more than one pair. Not the ones that seared through my dream only moments ago, these eyes belong to others. They are watching, waiting, expecting.
I slide my arm across to the other side of the bed, groping, hoping, for the warm body that can sometimes be found there. Tonight it’s cold and empty, no one there to curl into, to expel the demons conjured in my sleep. I think about turning on the light but I’m afraid the demons have slipped from my dream world into the real world, and it’s them lurking at the foot of my bed. I squeeze my eyes shut and think about sleeping again but those blazing white eyes await in my unconsciousness. I lie paralysed as my mind flips back and forth between these two possibilities, each one equally terrifying.
Three bells echo from the cathedral across the street, marking the hour. Shadows shift in the darkness skulking at the edges of my bed. The blankets stir as if under clutching fingers. A face begins to take shape through the and I recognise the stricken eyes of the boy I saw gunned down a week before. The spray hit him while he waited at a bus stop. I lay on the floor of a taxi fretting about stray bullets and wishing I had a God I could pray to for deliverance. I remember his cheeks streaked with tears, his look of terror. The same look he wears now.
I throw the covers off, push my way through the cloying air and grope behind the curtains to release window latch. The room fills with the city’s damp and fetid breath. My stomach lurches as I gasp through air thick with rot and methane, freshly released after a recent downpour. The sepia arches of the Cathedral, framing rows of dark, empty windows, rise from across the street. I usually keep the curtains closed against the real, or imagined, insomniac, black-robed, voyeurs skulking back and forth across its corridors hoping for a glimpse of flesh, or hint of sin, from their godless neighbours across the street. I imagine their morbid feasting on the joys, lusts and sorrows that they have willingly forbid themselves.
Shadows follow me to the window and press behind me. I feel an icy breath on my neck. I turn around but keep my eyes to the floor as I pull a hoodie over my pyjamas and slip on my boots. I grab my keys, run to the door and down two flights of stairs. I pause on the front step looking left and right. The cobblestones glisten vermilion under street lamps, throwing light out for no one, the street is empty. I’m not supposed to be out this late. No one is. The city’s nocturnal avenues belong to the dead and those chasing death, either for themselves or others. The living who venture out at this hour risk meeting death around every corner. I should turn round and go back upstairs but the shadows that filled my apartment have followed me down and are pushing against my back, urging me out the door. Retreat is futile, they have decided not to let me rest tonight.
They surge behind me and around me as my feet take me north, skirting around the back of the Cathedral. I hold my breath against the acrid stench of fresh urine. Junction after junction of traffic lights flick from green to orange to red and back again, maintaining their sequence despite the absence of traffic. The cackles of ladies loitering, waiting for clients, echo from distant corners. In another couple hours buses will begin to thunder into the city, chugging clouds of black smoke, herding human fodder from the plebeian fringes into the city centre for their allotted time in the metropolis to fill the street corners while flogging their cacophony of wares. They are the beating heart of a city that should have long since been condemned to ruin.
Three dry pops shatter the silence. I throw myself into the shadow of the nearest doorway, cover my head with my arms and wait for more. I hear a screech of tires followed by silence and then a wail of sirens. I keep going but pick up my pace.
A chorus of deep moans and low keening creeps along the street as I reach a white building emblazoned with red crosses. The weeping of live patients drifts over the walls, mingling with the laments of long dead inmates. The fragmented souls of the tortured and murdered, less than memories, forever trapped in clandestine graves behind the whitewashed walls. The procession of shadows behind me swells in number, throbbing with its own low lament. Out of the corner of my eye I sense a shimmer and curling of the air, like coal dust, but don’t dare turn round. I shiver and pull my hood tighter.
I’m almost running. I turn westwards, circling back to the main square. The Palace stands to the right, its three stories of ornate columns and balustrades draped in black, a dark shroud at the heart of power dissolving into the mist that has settled over the city. I’m drawn by a flicker of light from the middle of the empty square. A solitary candle glows at the centre of a ring of knee high iron crosses. Flecks of white paint resist the rust and each cross bears a tattered and sun-bleached crochet square. A handmade shroud, stitched with the name of a girl. 41 in total. No need to count them, I already know the number and their names by heart.
A red carnation has been threaded through the lattice work of each cross. Their heads are bowed and the wilted petals are already crisping from days under the unforgiving tropical sun. I feel ashamed of my own hands, empty of offerings. I bow my head and think of Achley, Griselda, Joseline, Myra and the others, wishing, once again, that I had a God I could pray to. Wishing that I could make the sign of the cross and mean it. Wishing that I had some words of comfort, the familiar and reassuring cadence of a Hail Mary, to offer up. Instead, I whisper some half-hearted intentions out to the universe, wondering, as always, if she, it, they, can hear me. But it’s not enough, it’s never enough.
One of the carnations reblooms crimson and I hear an anguished scream just as it bursts into flame. Fire engulfs the wool square and sparks catch from one carnation to the next. Within seconds the whole circle of 41 crosses is ablaze. My face burns red and my skin pricks as flames dance around me. I cough against the smoke that fills my lungs and hold my ears against the screams that fill the air, piercing my soul. I lurch backwards only to feel the wall of coal dusty shadows pressing me forward. My eyes sting and my cheeks are wet. “I’m sorry!” I whisper. The screams get louder. I scream harder, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” but words are lost in the mist. Their inadequacy mocks me, it mocks them. I turn and claw my way through the wall of shadows.
My feet pound over cracked cement, taking me down routes already well worn. The procession follows close behind, nipping at my ankles. I race past block after block of black and white papers peeling off the smooth colonial masonry. The impassive stares of the of the 45,000 follow my flight. Grainy headshots gleaned from moth eaten photos, found in rusting filing cabinets, turned into posters and pasted across the city resisting sun, rain, municipal cleaning squads and entrenched denial. Proof that they were people, who existed outside of the fading memories of their loved ones whose pleas for information were so long ignored. I keep my eyes to the ground, avoiding the gaze of the missing and the dead.
¿Donde están?
How should I know? I’m not even from here. There’s nothing I can do. I can only look away.
Three blocks down I stop to catch my breath on the corner of the park where they murdered the priest. Bludgeoned to death with a brick held aloft by a homeless man. Who put the brick in his hand? The soldier or the mayor? Doesn’t matter, they’re all dead now. Or at least that’s what the papers say. Another peacemaker turned martyr, turned poster-child of the righteous left.
This city is a monument to death. Every building and every block seeps human blood. Villages, no one even remembers the name of, crushed under the edifice of so-called civilisation. The ghosts of massacres past mingle with those of the present, while the living mingle with none, afraid they will be next. And as for the crimes, either past or present, there are too many to report, too many to document, too many to remember. Even I, a stranger, a blow-in, little better than a tourist, can construct a bloody inventory of the incidents that have grazed the edges of my own sphere of quiet caution: the homeless men cleansed off the streets, the girls taken out on their way to school, the migrants gunned down at a bus stop, the woman who sacrificed her life for the sake of her car.
This city is a graveyard. I feel like La Llorona wandering the streets, collecting lost children. Except that I have no children and I don’t belong here. I’m an outsider, a mere spectator of other peoples’ pain and other peoples’ tragedies. I can detach myself, pack up and leave whenever I want. Full suitcases sit at the foot of my bed, awaiting departure. It won’t be long now until I am safe in the comfort of another land, where I will write and wring my hands over the tragedies of this land, where I was never anything more than a glorified tourist.
I turn left onto 1st Street, my feet guiding me home. Not to my apartment, but to my real home, the one I should never have left. I walk head down, shoulders hunched, until I reach the park. I trail my hands along the iron bars that are meant to keep out the young lovers who, driven from their homes and without the price of pay-by-the-hour motel, come here to do their cositas. Tonight the benches are empty.
As I round the corner I see him standing under the jacaranda tree, the man with the face of a pig. His black trench coat is zipped from knees to chin and he holds a small leather suitcase in one hand. I bound across the road and finally come to halt a two inches from his snout. A slight twitch of his head is the only sign that he has registered my arrival and I resist the urge to throw my arms around him.
“What on earth are you doing out here at this hour?” The words come in short starts between breaths.
“I knew you were coming.” He shrugs.
A soft gloved hand slips into mine. I squeeze the black leather and lean in for a kiss. His lips soft and warm and familiar. The bristles of his snout brush my nose. I can taste stale beer and a hint of yerba.
He breaks contact and pulls me away from the house. “Come on, we haven’t got long.”
We’re home, I want to protest, hold him back. My plan had been to hide in his bed, under the covers, wrapped in his arms and wait for the shadows to get tired and move on.
Instead, I follow, “Where are we going?”
“I’ve something to show you.”
He leads me up 1st Avenue. I wonder if he too can see the multitudinous procession of coal dust shadows that have followed me here. He makes no comment, either unaware or unperturbed by their presence. I know better than to ask questions. Silence weaves a cocoon around us and I feel protected against the city that he knows better than anyone. He is the city.
I realise that I hadn’t been running home, I had been running to him. That house is not my home, it never was. He is my home.
We climb steadily up the avenue, block after block, past the flashing fairy lights of canteens where the last punter is slumped over a warm beer, the fluorescence of late-night pharmacies, the farcical grandeur of Guadalupe’s church, meeting no one until we reach 11th Street. The grey bars of the hospital’s perimeter fence emerge to our right and a bare bulb glows yellow from the window of one of the funeral parlours to our left. Capitalinos like to joke that this hospital takes you alive but spits you back out in a body bag, minus a few vital organs. Figures hang from the railings, more solid than shadows but fading to grey under the hospital’s flood lights. I can’t tell if they are queuing to get in or waiting for loved ones to come out. I pull a little closer to him but they take one look at the man with the face of a pig and hunch deeper into their hoods or hurry away down a side street.
Passing the hospital, the procession swells to fill the road. His pace quickens and we’re almost running as he leads us through alleys and side streets to the west. I see the yellow walls of the cemetery in the distance. He stops outside the main gate, the guard post appears to be empty, and lets go of my hand for the first time since we left the house. I consider bolting, but I’m more scared of negotiating my way back through the deserted streets alone, than going wherever he intends to take us. Pushing his suitcase in between the iron bars, he climbs up and over, landing softly on the other side and beckons me to follow. It looks impossibly tall and I’ve never been a good climber. He helps me get a foothold and catches me in his arms on the other side. We linger like this for a moment. I search for his eyes but the dark glasses reflect nothing except my own anxious gaze.
He picks up the suitcase, grabs my hand and heads towards the heart of the cemetery. The procession moves as we move, shimmering shadows gliding seamlessly through the gates, swarming across the paths and over the lawns and mausoleums. We pass pyramids flanked by sphinxes, the Doric columns of miniature acropolises and other monuments to the vanities of the nouveau riche, whose pretensions of grandeur have reached a tawdry absurdity in death. Just as in Egypt, these graves now lie empty. Robbed by their own descendants, who prefer to house their dead in more exclusive and salubrious surroundings, far removed from the invasion of plebeian niches, homes for the bones of the unwashed masses, left to crumble into the abyss along the cemetery’s edges.
The vultures perched atop the monkey puzzles begin to stir. Squawks pass from tree to tree, alerting their masses to our intrusion. They swoop down like black spectres over our heads. I cry out and shield myself with my arm to avoid their claws and the brush of their putrid wings. The man with the face of a pig remains upright, unfazed, and pulls me ever onwards. The vultures hop from roof to roof across the mausoleums along our route, a macabre guard of honour for our procession of death. I imagine their mouths watering as they follow our scent of carrion.
The further we penetrate into the cemetery, the closer we get to the gully where the city’s discarded trash and scrap is thrown out of sight and out of mind, to be sorted, reused and recycled by the city’s discarded people. The stench of rot and toxic gasses that has accompanied me since I left my apartment becomes almost unbearable. My eyes are streaming and my throat and nostrils sting. Bile rises to my throat. I cling tighter to his hand, but he betrays no hint of unease.
He comes to a halt at a point where the crumbling cement road disappears under a cascade of plastic. We survey the canyon of waste below us. Rivers of sewage wind their course around mountains of plastic, glass and metal, glinting under the light of the half moon. Hordes of rats scurry below. A an ever more frenzied cloud of vultures circles above. The multitudinous procession presses behind us, pushing us ever closer to the edge.
“This is the end,” he turns to me. “The edge of the world.”
He leans down for a kiss. It lasts two heartbeats. I feel my arm jerk as he pulls away and jumps off. Instead of letting him go, I hold on tighter. I don’t want to be left behind. I follow him, letting myself fall towards the abyss, his hand pulling me down. A silent wave of shadows flows over the and around us. His suitcase snaps open and white pages full of black scribbles flutter through the air like doves, cushioning our descent into Xibalbá. The last thing I hear are screeches, as the gyre of vultures descends. Their patience will be rewarded, they will have their pound of flesh tonight.
—
Aisling Walsh is a freelance writer and translator based between Ireland and Guatemala. She writes reports, features and essays on human rights and social justice for a variety of publications with recent bylines including: Entropy Mag, Pendemic.ie, The Irish Times, The Sunday Business Post, Open Democracy, The Establishment and Dismantle Magazine. She is currently a doctoral candidate in sociology at the National University of Ireland Galway, where she is researching healing justice processes in Guatemala.