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Fiction

The Witness

By Israel Centeno
Translated from Spanish by Valerie Miles
Israel Centeno’s disgraced detective comes to a shocking fairy-tale ending.

He rested in wildflower-whelmed cemeteries in the yards of wooden churches.

—José Antonio Ramos Sucre, “El peregrino de la fe”

When I chanced upon a weblog, whose text was also written out longhand in John Alejandro’s notebook, I discovered how the circumstances surrounding the strange case of María de los Ángeles could be reconstructed, or an idea put forward of what might have happened, by applying the speculative techniques of certain gothic circles devoted to archetypal analysis.

John Alejandro was one of the detectives expelled from the Judicial Police’s technical unit when the oil strike came to an end. He went on to work as a security consultant for a group of private companies for a while, till a talk-show anchor accused him of promoting terrorist activities; he took the precaution of not trying to defend himself, and avoided all contact with his old colleagues despite receiving expressions of solidarity and offers of support. He declined every one. He was a good detective, he knew the ropes: somehow they would be judged complicit in the lie, and would end up detained if not dead, so he would wait just long enough, then pack his suitcases and take off.

He ended up in Kemah, Texas, a small town near Galveston. He started again from scratch, sidestepping all assistance from his fellow countrymen in exile, he didn’t like to think of himself as an expatriate, just that life had delivered him there, to this place, since life moves people around of its own free will, and God moves in mysterious ways. After working as a hotel waiter and helping in the administration of a few small businesses, he finally revealed his sleuthing skills. He had been an excellent investigator; he did a few favors for his boss. Typical things, like exposing the truth about a gold digger, or corroborating what had been perfectly obvious from the start regarding the two-timing wife of a used-car auctioneer. Since then, he’d begun living a kind of semiretirement in that quiet town of fairs and marinas, walloped on occasion by a passing hurricane.

María de los Ángeles was a Venezuelan journalist living in south Houston who disappeared one day, “just like in the story of Little Red Riding Hood.” That’s how Matthew had described the bizarre incident. The old shrimper brought the case up one afternoon while they were sitting at their usual watering hole, where they went to play darts and throw back a Jack Daniel’s or two. His weird story about the fairy tale was all it took to awaken in John Alejandro a kind of primal need to go after something big, track down some intrigue that would help him recover his self-respect; he was tired of solving puerile cases about mundane things. No good could ever come of retiring at thirty, and the dart games, this bar looking out over the marina, a few routine hookers, all spelled a gloomy death.

Immediately, he verified the specifics on the woman who had followed the path of a fairy tale. It was the first enigma to crack, how does a person follow the path of a fairy tale? Yet, come to think of it, isn’t life itself—and its forks in the road—just another story with its plotlines?

“People have always followed the paths of stories: they baptize them with names that are either religious or ideological, they tag them as love, decorate them with adjectives,” he said to a Jungian analyst in an interview at the start of his investigation.

“She chose to follow a very complex archetype,” the woman acknowledged, sporting a fleshiness that was anything but naïve. “Little Red Riding Hood represents a vast symbolic universe. Oedipus, Diana, Gilles de Rais, and Elizabeth Báthory are all there. In Yoruban cosmogony, that’s where you’ll find the mother of Shango.” John Alejandro jotted these things down in his notebook and continued his investigation into archaic archetypes, comparing them to the life of María de los Ángeles, a married woman. The police had eliminated the husband as a suspect, despite his having been their principal focus for a long time. But they weren’t able to gather a single piece of evidence, not even circumstantial. John Alejandro asked to meet with the husband through a journalist who worked in one of the Latin television stations; the journalist was a sociable man, the founder of a network of used-car auctioneers and a partner in a law firm specializing in immigration issues.

María de los Ángeles’s husband sold construction materials in San Antonio. “I don’t see how I can add anything new to what’s in the file,” he said. He was young, gaunt, and remarkably tall, with a swimmer’s broad shoulders and the face of a fool, or maybe of a saint, John Alejandro thought. Either a colossal chump or a good ol’ boy. “Maybe if you ask the standard questions, we can sniff out a few new angles.”

The ex-detective, taken off guard, scrutinized the husband’s equine face without revealing his surprise. He hadn’t expected the question. He hadn’t really expected anything. “And what do you think constitutes a standard question?”

“You know, did she have enemies, lovers, receive threats, that kind of stuff.” He poked his jaw out a little further and repeated slowly, “that kind of stuff.”

“Tell me about her routine, what did she do, I’m sure they’ve already asked you this, but I’d like to go over it again.”

“So this is your idea of an exceptional question?” the husband asked, taking on the pious expression of a Christian martyr or maybe more of a mafioso. “She took care of the children. Well, no, no, not really, I mean she supervised the people who took care of the children. She oversaw their activities, made sure they got to karate lessons on time, swimming, French classes, you know, she went to the gym, shopped, met up with a girlfriend for coffee every once in a while.”

“But wasn’t she a journalist?” John Alejandro asked.

He noted the husband stifled an incipient smile.

“She wrote opinion columns for some pamphlet they distribute in Katy.”

“So she did nothing.”

“Does it seem like nothing to you?”

“Tell me about her friends.”

“Another one of your exceptional questions?” he repeated. “She had a few friends from school in Venezuela, two or three contacts on Facebook, or something like that.”

“Were your wife’s friends married?”

“And this is your idea of an exceptional insinuation?” It was all the detective could do to keep himself from spitting in the man’s face. The man whistled. “Look, my wife and I have an open marriage. I didn’t patrol her comings and goings. Our lives were like open books, she knew what I was up to, but preferred to keep her own things to herself. I figured it was better not to know.”

“Since curiosity is what killed the . . . ” he wanted to state for the total idiot, the good ol’ boy, the bonehead. He paused. “Look, curiosity always wins out in these kinds of open affairs. You’re telling me you never cared to know her goings-on, to read, to try and find out?”

“I believe we’re talking about two different things. How about we drop the insinuations. Or better yet, you know, let’s drop the entire conversation.”

The man stood up abruptly, clumsily, and made his way through the dark restaurant, banging tables, leaving behind a wake of scattered chairs like some gangling elephant with a horse’s face. John Alejandro called to the dwarfish waiter to bring him a shot of Jack Daniel’s and the bill. He sat there a while ruminating. He might have been more diplomatic—the meeting could have lasted longer and he might have lucked into some unexpected clue to follow up on, but the fellow was like a vitrine; he showed too much and the truth got lost somewhere among all that stuff; the purloined letter.

The reference to Edgar Allan Poe’s story made him think of María de los Ángeles’s correspondence with her old schoolmates from Venezuela and the “friends” on Facebook. Scattered around the world, most of them spent their time posting on social media sites with their asses glued to their chairs, cursing the bad times, the bad moments, the bad country.

His hotel in San Antonio stood opposite the church of Inmaculado Corazón de María church. He was given a room on an upper floor, it was wintertime, he drew back the curtains and surveyed the great edifice before him, its brown tower, an old building; feeling slightly dizzy, he closed his eyes, and when he opened them again, caught sight of the roiling clouds advancing along the far horizon. Heavy, snow-laden, they spread over the small city that lay crumpled before him like the ruins left after the Battle of the Alamo. The moon swelled in the mantle of fog, and he heard a siren wail in the distance, or a coyote—he couldn’t tell which—that set his heart racing. Trembling, he made his way to the computer, and began randomly surfing, despite being perfectly informed, with state-of-the-art detail, about the mechanics of the virtual universe. Yet John Alejandro was a conservative man. He still recorded things in his notebooks. He placed his pad of paper to one side of the desk, and got started cracking passwords, violating codes, and entering María de los Ángeles’s sites. He came across the typical things, the horizontal tedium in a chaos of novelty, the predictable anarchy of cyberspace: greetings, pageantries, pictures, people flirting, making comments, complicities, sarcasms, political activism, mystical reveries and certain knacks for originality, over and over again like a monotonous image in the mirror, wherein all social media accounts could have been folded into her own. The reiteration made them all so nauseatingly alike.

The coyote bayed again, a howl that rose up from the center of San Antonio, at a time of year when so many people were out walking around, a barbaric yawp that hovered about the towers where the skeletons were kept, the Indian burial mounds, the mass graves; the cemeteries. He exited the social networks with a click, and as he did so, chanced upon an e-mail account; he opened a window, nothing there: an empty blog: María de los Ángeles’s blog. It was titled The Wolf Ate My Grandmother. John Alejandro let out a quick laugh. The woman really did follow the story of Little Red Riding Hood!

“For Christ’s sake, even ‘swallowed’ might’ve been a better choice of words,” he joked. It might make it seem a little less absurd.

He went on talking to himself as he clicked, performing three or four different combinations (binary provisions and that sort of thing) to access the blog’s control panel, where he discovered a clandestine link to a page meant for the account holder’s eyes only. It was some kind of log, with a list of revelations. He went in. One step, then another, and a third, and he left behind the bizarre sound of the coyote howling in San Antonio, in its graveyards. He walked into the labyrinth. Its grid of words and string of horrors brought him back to Kemah feeling completely isolated, his notebook crammed with scrawled script. He should take advantage of his retirement, he thought, and resolved never to leave that town again, not even when ordered to evacuate during a hurricane.

2

“This is the most interesting game anyone’s ever proposed to me, to be cast inside a story,” she had written.

My grandmother left for Boston years ago, but disappeared. They searched several days for her; she got lost in the woods outside the city, lost in one of its frozen parks. Years ago, when I was still single, I used to visit my grandmother. Years ago, unutterable things happened, things I would never dare transcribe on these pages that nobody will ever read. Now the story has returned to me after watching it mutate outside, moving among the fugitive shadows in the graveyards that are hidden beneath the city’s streets, the parks, the canals, the buildings. I was married to a Great One, a weak offspring of the Great Old Ones, the architects of life, I was married and I forgot everything, once I took part in the rite of the cave . . .

The church had a beautiful cellar where I used to play when I was a little girl, before dwelling in this strange body; I used to play there before the church was built, and before the church was built, there was the cave . . .

Unfastening the angels from this unsuspecting woman was difficult, introducing the devil was child’s play. Children play while holding hands, they form circles and chant as the sun goes down. They’re innocent; they play near the woods, and there are woods in many unforeseen places. It was difficult to detach María de los Ángeles, to introduce the idea of remembrance of the forgotten, the day she went to visit her grandmother in Boston. Children play in the woods along the roadside, children play there now that the wolf has gone; they know that Grandmother has lost her way, they sing verses and say, Grandmother vanished along the shorter path, the shorter path that leads back home, back to the cave, to the place where María de los Ángeles must be given in matrimony to the lowly ancestral beast.

The tale is the following: once upon a time, María de los Ángeles’s grandmother goes out in search of her granddaughter, and takes a shortcut through the woods. The fall turns to winter, and the north to a city in Texas, San Antonio. She is initiated into the rites of the brothers of the cave, and charged with preserving the memory of the graveyard where the Great Old Ones are resting. She undertakes the enterprise as a spiritual exercise of charity, spending the fall in Illinois, the winter in Arkansas, and arrives in Texas holding the hand of a monstrous, hunchbacked creature. She had nourished it through the desert with fresh coyote milk. They followed a different route back through Louisiana in the spring, North Carolina in the summer.

Everyone was convinced that Grandmother, joyful and estranged, barely sentient, had lost her way inside her own mind. According to my sisters, the shortcut through the woods led to the mind’s deeper trails, she hadn’t fallen victim to a predator, but had lost herself along the way, they said. Wrong. I took those same roads a long time ago: the shortcut through Oklahoma and Colorado. The Poplar Trail in Montana; the Evergreen Trail in Colorado. My grandmother is lost in the forest, now that the wolf has gone away.

Years ago, when I went to see my grandmother before sundown, we girls strolled through the woods, we played hide-and-seek behind great dry tree trunks and stole our first kisses, we were restless, joyful girls, all of life’s roads seemed brief and pleasant to us, we were prepared to pay the price to take them, but none extended as far as I did. I saw a small deer in New Mexico as the fall came to a close and decided to follow its tracks in the damp earth. The orange-tinged sky above me spilled into the twilight like blood over the Appalachian woodland. The first time I caught sight of it was in that very landscape. It sped feverishly before me on four legs, thick hair standing high along its back, dancing atop the tree trunks, along the low hills and high cliffs; suddenly it froze in place and fixed me with the burning glare of its blue eyes set on fire, his tongue lolling and fangs biting into the wind, as if to say: just follow the right path, and soon I’ll be in your belly.

Twilight in San Antonio, the decomposing leaves bob along the canal, shop walls bead with sweat, the bars and restaurants lose their solid quality and split into mirrored reflections on the water’s surface. Below the canals, the dead sleep in four graveyards, behind the towers, near the Inmaculado Corazón de María church, in the ruins of the Alamo.

I can see now, as I write, the shadow of the coming night, and I sense the spark of that original afternoon in Boston, when the she-wolf gave birth to the boy who carried my grandmother. Time has passed since then, that boy is now in the storehouse of an abandoned granary lost somewhere in the desert, huffing or puffing, he’s weak, he returned, I know, and now he wants to die in the same place his ancestors went before him. I hear the call, the night is falling, there is nobody following me. My husband’s shadow is witness to these savage encounters in the fallow fields, in the churchyards . . .

I was invited to come out and play . . . to participate, to rewrite the story. Leaving behind these notes, this diary, is part of the game, of life, or of the dream, this legacy of ancestors, of caves; the ancients who erected the graveyard, the pilgrims, the forest prowlers. I’ll deliver the last pages and then set out on the shortcut like my grandmother before me. Nobody who takes an active role in stories returns unscathed. I’m familiar with their ellipses, their silences, the omissions that would terrify anyone capable of deciphering them; I know all the possible endings, I know there’s no alternative for me, I have to write this message, bear witness, follow my calling, cross through winter to reach Kemah in the spring, and wait for the summer, when the fury of the elements in the Gulf reiterates the Caribbean cycle of hurricanes; we believe in freedom blindly, but when we are part of a story, John Alejandro, we cut like a dart straight toward a single end point.

“El testigo” © Israel Centeno. By arrangement with the author. Translation © 2014 by Valerie Miles. All rights reserved.

English Spanish (Original)

He rested in wildflower-whelmed cemeteries in the yards of wooden churches.

—José Antonio Ramos Sucre, “El peregrino de la fe”

When I chanced upon a weblog, whose text was also written out longhand in John Alejandro’s notebook, I discovered how the circumstances surrounding the strange case of María de los Ángeles could be reconstructed, or an idea put forward of what might have happened, by applying the speculative techniques of certain gothic circles devoted to archetypal analysis.

John Alejandro was one of the detectives expelled from the Judicial Police’s technical unit when the oil strike came to an end. He went on to work as a security consultant for a group of private companies for a while, till a talk-show anchor accused him of promoting terrorist activities; he took the precaution of not trying to defend himself, and avoided all contact with his old colleagues despite receiving expressions of solidarity and offers of support. He declined every one. He was a good detective, he knew the ropes: somehow they would be judged complicit in the lie, and would end up detained if not dead, so he would wait just long enough, then pack his suitcases and take off.

He ended up in Kemah, Texas, a small town near Galveston. He started again from scratch, sidestepping all assistance from his fellow countrymen in exile, he didn’t like to think of himself as an expatriate, just that life had delivered him there, to this place, since life moves people around of its own free will, and God moves in mysterious ways. After working as a hotel waiter and helping in the administration of a few small businesses, he finally revealed his sleuthing skills. He had been an excellent investigator; he did a few favors for his boss. Typical things, like exposing the truth about a gold digger, or corroborating what had been perfectly obvious from the start regarding the two-timing wife of a used-car auctioneer. Since then, he’d begun living a kind of semiretirement in that quiet town of fairs and marinas, walloped on occasion by a passing hurricane.

María de los Ángeles was a Venezuelan journalist living in south Houston who disappeared one day, “just like in the story of Little Red Riding Hood.” That’s how Matthew had described the bizarre incident. The old shrimper brought the case up one afternoon while they were sitting at their usual watering hole, where they went to play darts and throw back a Jack Daniel’s or two. His weird story about the fairy tale was all it took to awaken in John Alejandro a kind of primal need to go after something big, track down some intrigue that would help him recover his self-respect; he was tired of solving puerile cases about mundane things. No good could ever come of retiring at thirty, and the dart games, this bar looking out over the marina, a few routine hookers, all spelled a gloomy death.

Immediately, he verified the specifics on the woman who had followed the path of a fairy tale. It was the first enigma to crack, how does a person follow the path of a fairy tale? Yet, come to think of it, isn’t life itself—and its forks in the road—just another story with its plotlines?

“People have always followed the paths of stories: they baptize them with names that are either religious or ideological, they tag them as love, decorate them with adjectives,” he said to a Jungian analyst in an interview at the start of his investigation.

“She chose to follow a very complex archetype,” the woman acknowledged, sporting a fleshiness that was anything but naïve. “Little Red Riding Hood represents a vast symbolic universe. Oedipus, Diana, Gilles de Rais, and Elizabeth Báthory are all there. In Yoruban cosmogony, that’s where you’ll find the mother of Shango.” John Alejandro jotted these things down in his notebook and continued his investigation into archaic archetypes, comparing them to the life of María de los Ángeles, a married woman. The police had eliminated the husband as a suspect, despite his having been their principal focus for a long time. But they weren’t able to gather a single piece of evidence, not even circumstantial. John Alejandro asked to meet with the husband through a journalist who worked in one of the Latin television stations; the journalist was a sociable man, the founder of a network of used-car auctioneers and a partner in a law firm specializing in immigration issues.

María de los Ángeles’s husband sold construction materials in San Antonio. “I don’t see how I can add anything new to what’s in the file,” he said. He was young, gaunt, and remarkably tall, with a swimmer’s broad shoulders and the face of a fool, or maybe of a saint, John Alejandro thought. Either a colossal chump or a good ol’ boy. “Maybe if you ask the standard questions, we can sniff out a few new angles.”

The ex-detective, taken off guard, scrutinized the husband’s equine face without revealing his surprise. He hadn’t expected the question. He hadn’t really expected anything. “And what do you think constitutes a standard question?”

“You know, did she have enemies, lovers, receive threats, that kind of stuff.” He poked his jaw out a little further and repeated slowly, “that kind of stuff.”

“Tell me about her routine, what did she do, I’m sure they’ve already asked you this, but I’d like to go over it again.”

“So this is your idea of an exceptional question?” the husband asked, taking on the pious expression of a Christian martyr or maybe more of a mafioso. “She took care of the children. Well, no, no, not really, I mean she supervised the people who took care of the children. She oversaw their activities, made sure they got to karate lessons on time, swimming, French classes, you know, she went to the gym, shopped, met up with a girlfriend for coffee every once in a while.”

“But wasn’t she a journalist?” John Alejandro asked.

He noted the husband stifled an incipient smile.

“She wrote opinion columns for some pamphlet they distribute in Katy.”

“So she did nothing.”

“Does it seem like nothing to you?”

“Tell me about her friends.”

“Another one of your exceptional questions?” he repeated. “She had a few friends from school in Venezuela, two or three contacts on Facebook, or something like that.”

“Were your wife’s friends married?”

“And this is your idea of an exceptional insinuation?” It was all the detective could do to keep himself from spitting in the man’s face. The man whistled. “Look, my wife and I have an open marriage. I didn’t patrol her comings and goings. Our lives were like open books, she knew what I was up to, but preferred to keep her own things to herself. I figured it was better not to know.”

“Since curiosity is what killed the . . . ” he wanted to state for the total idiot, the good ol’ boy, the bonehead. He paused. “Look, curiosity always wins out in these kinds of open affairs. You’re telling me you never cared to know her goings-on, to read, to try and find out?”

“I believe we’re talking about two different things. How about we drop the insinuations. Or better yet, you know, let’s drop the entire conversation.”

The man stood up abruptly, clumsily, and made his way through the dark restaurant, banging tables, leaving behind a wake of scattered chairs like some gangling elephant with a horse’s face. John Alejandro called to the dwarfish waiter to bring him a shot of Jack Daniel’s and the bill. He sat there a while ruminating. He might have been more diplomatic—the meeting could have lasted longer and he might have lucked into some unexpected clue to follow up on, but the fellow was like a vitrine; he showed too much and the truth got lost somewhere among all that stuff; the purloined letter.

The reference to Edgar Allan Poe’s story made him think of María de los Ángeles’s correspondence with her old schoolmates from Venezuela and the “friends” on Facebook. Scattered around the world, most of them spent their time posting on social media sites with their asses glued to their chairs, cursing the bad times, the bad moments, the bad country.

His hotel in San Antonio stood opposite the church of Inmaculado Corazón de María church. He was given a room on an upper floor, it was wintertime, he drew back the curtains and surveyed the great edifice before him, its brown tower, an old building; feeling slightly dizzy, he closed his eyes, and when he opened them again, caught sight of the roiling clouds advancing along the far horizon. Heavy, snow-laden, they spread over the small city that lay crumpled before him like the ruins left after the Battle of the Alamo. The moon swelled in the mantle of fog, and he heard a siren wail in the distance, or a coyote—he couldn’t tell which—that set his heart racing. Trembling, he made his way to the computer, and began randomly surfing, despite being perfectly informed, with state-of-the-art detail, about the mechanics of the virtual universe. Yet John Alejandro was a conservative man. He still recorded things in his notebooks. He placed his pad of paper to one side of the desk, and got started cracking passwords, violating codes, and entering María de los Ángeles’s sites. He came across the typical things, the horizontal tedium in a chaos of novelty, the predictable anarchy of cyberspace: greetings, pageantries, pictures, people flirting, making comments, complicities, sarcasms, political activism, mystical reveries and certain knacks for originality, over and over again like a monotonous image in the mirror, wherein all social media accounts could have been folded into her own. The reiteration made them all so nauseatingly alike.

The coyote bayed again, a howl that rose up from the center of San Antonio, at a time of year when so many people were out walking around, a barbaric yawp that hovered about the towers where the skeletons were kept, the Indian burial mounds, the mass graves; the cemeteries. He exited the social networks with a click, and as he did so, chanced upon an e-mail account; he opened a window, nothing there: an empty blog: María de los Ángeles’s blog. It was titled The Wolf Ate My Grandmother. John Alejandro let out a quick laugh. The woman really did follow the story of Little Red Riding Hood!

“For Christ’s sake, even ‘swallowed’ might’ve been a better choice of words,” he joked. It might make it seem a little less absurd.

He went on talking to himself as he clicked, performing three or four different combinations (binary provisions and that sort of thing) to access the blog’s control panel, where he discovered a clandestine link to a page meant for the account holder’s eyes only. It was some kind of log, with a list of revelations. He went in. One step, then another, and a third, and he left behind the bizarre sound of the coyote howling in San Antonio, in its graveyards. He walked into the labyrinth. Its grid of words and string of horrors brought him back to Kemah feeling completely isolated, his notebook crammed with scrawled script. He should take advantage of his retirement, he thought, and resolved never to leave that town again, not even when ordered to evacuate during a hurricane.

2

“This is the most interesting game anyone’s ever proposed to me, to be cast inside a story,” she had written.

My grandmother left for Boston years ago, but disappeared. They searched several days for her; she got lost in the woods outside the city, lost in one of its frozen parks. Years ago, when I was still single, I used to visit my grandmother. Years ago, unutterable things happened, things I would never dare transcribe on these pages that nobody will ever read. Now the story has returned to me after watching it mutate outside, moving among the fugitive shadows in the graveyards that are hidden beneath the city’s streets, the parks, the canals, the buildings. I was married to a Great One, a weak offspring of the Great Old Ones, the architects of life, I was married and I forgot everything, once I took part in the rite of the cave . . .

The church had a beautiful cellar where I used to play when I was a little girl, before dwelling in this strange body; I used to play there before the church was built, and before the church was built, there was the cave . . .

Unfastening the angels from this unsuspecting woman was difficult, introducing the devil was child’s play. Children play while holding hands, they form circles and chant as the sun goes down. They’re innocent; they play near the woods, and there are woods in many unforeseen places. It was difficult to detach María de los Ángeles, to introduce the idea of remembrance of the forgotten, the day she went to visit her grandmother in Boston. Children play in the woods along the roadside, children play there now that the wolf has gone; they know that Grandmother has lost her way, they sing verses and say, Grandmother vanished along the shorter path, the shorter path that leads back home, back to the cave, to the place where María de los Ángeles must be given in matrimony to the lowly ancestral beast.

The tale is the following: once upon a time, María de los Ángeles’s grandmother goes out in search of her granddaughter, and takes a shortcut through the woods. The fall turns to winter, and the north to a city in Texas, San Antonio. She is initiated into the rites of the brothers of the cave, and charged with preserving the memory of the graveyard where the Great Old Ones are resting. She undertakes the enterprise as a spiritual exercise of charity, spending the fall in Illinois, the winter in Arkansas, and arrives in Texas holding the hand of a monstrous, hunchbacked creature. She had nourished it through the desert with fresh coyote milk. They followed a different route back through Louisiana in the spring, North Carolina in the summer.

Everyone was convinced that Grandmother, joyful and estranged, barely sentient, had lost her way inside her own mind. According to my sisters, the shortcut through the woods led to the mind’s deeper trails, she hadn’t fallen victim to a predator, but had lost herself along the way, they said. Wrong. I took those same roads a long time ago: the shortcut through Oklahoma and Colorado. The Poplar Trail in Montana; the Evergreen Trail in Colorado. My grandmother is lost in the forest, now that the wolf has gone away.

Years ago, when I went to see my grandmother before sundown, we girls strolled through the woods, we played hide-and-seek behind great dry tree trunks and stole our first kisses, we were restless, joyful girls, all of life’s roads seemed brief and pleasant to us, we were prepared to pay the price to take them, but none extended as far as I did. I saw a small deer in New Mexico as the fall came to a close and decided to follow its tracks in the damp earth. The orange-tinged sky above me spilled into the twilight like blood over the Appalachian woodland. The first time I caught sight of it was in that very landscape. It sped feverishly before me on four legs, thick hair standing high along its back, dancing atop the tree trunks, along the low hills and high cliffs; suddenly it froze in place and fixed me with the burning glare of its blue eyes set on fire, his tongue lolling and fangs biting into the wind, as if to say: just follow the right path, and soon I’ll be in your belly.

Twilight in San Antonio, the decomposing leaves bob along the canal, shop walls bead with sweat, the bars and restaurants lose their solid quality and split into mirrored reflections on the water’s surface. Below the canals, the dead sleep in four graveyards, behind the towers, near the Inmaculado Corazón de María church, in the ruins of the Alamo.

I can see now, as I write, the shadow of the coming night, and I sense the spark of that original afternoon in Boston, when the she-wolf gave birth to the boy who carried my grandmother. Time has passed since then, that boy is now in the storehouse of an abandoned granary lost somewhere in the desert, huffing or puffing, he’s weak, he returned, I know, and now he wants to die in the same place his ancestors went before him. I hear the call, the night is falling, there is nobody following me. My husband’s shadow is witness to these savage encounters in the fallow fields, in the churchyards . . .

I was invited to come out and play . . . to participate, to rewrite the story. Leaving behind these notes, this diary, is part of the game, of life, or of the dream, this legacy of ancestors, of caves; the ancients who erected the graveyard, the pilgrims, the forest prowlers. I’ll deliver the last pages and then set out on the shortcut like my grandmother before me. Nobody who takes an active role in stories returns unscathed. I’m familiar with their ellipses, their silences, the omissions that would terrify anyone capable of deciphering them; I know all the possible endings, I know there’s no alternative for me, I have to write this message, bear witness, follow my calling, cross through winter to reach Kemah in the spring, and wait for the summer, when the fury of the elements in the Gulf reiterates the Caribbean cycle of hurricanes; we believe in freedom blindly, but when we are part of a story, John Alejandro, we cut like a dart straight toward a single end point.

“El testigo” © Israel Centeno. By arrangement with the author. Translation © 2014 by Valerie Miles. All rights reserved.

El Testigo

Descansaba en los cementerios inundados de flores silvestre en el ámbito de las iglesias de madera.

—José Antonio Ramos Sucre, “El peregrino de la fe”

1

Leyendo una bitácora descubierta al azar en la red, y recogida también en el cuaderno de notas de John Alejandro Ruiz, se podría reconstruir las circunstancias, o suponer lo ocurrido –fuera de las especulaciones de algunos círculos góticos de analistas arquetipales- en torno al extraño caso de María de los Ángeles.

John Alejandro fue uno de los detectives expulsados del Cuerpo Técnico Judicial al finalizar la huelga de los petroleros. Por un tiempo se dedicó a brindar asesorías de seguridad a un grupo de empresas privadas pero fue acusado de promover actividades terroristas por el conductor de un programa de opinión; él tomó la previsión de no defenderse, evitó cualquier contacto con sus antiguos compañeros, sin embargo recibió expresiones de solidaridad y ofertas de ayuda que declinó; era un buen detective, tenía experiencia y sabía que de alguna manera todos quedarían involucrados en la infamia, terminarían presos o muertos; era mejor bajar el perfil, hacerse el desentendido, esperar lo suficiente, armar sus maletas y marcharse.

Se fue a Kemah, Texas, un pueblo cerca de Galveston. Comenzó desde cero, evitó cualquier ayuda de sus compatriotas en exilio, no le agradaba pensarse a sí mismo como un expatriado; la vida lo había colocado allí, en este lugar, la vida mueve a las personas con liberalidad y los caminos de Dios son inescrutables. Luego de trabajar de camarero en los hoteles y de ayudar en la administración de pequeños negocios, dejó conocer sus habilidades de sabueso. Había sido un excelente investigador, hizo un par de favores a su jefe. Asuntos comunes, desenmascarar a una cazadora de fortunas y poner en evidencia el asunto más evidente, según él, la infidelidad de la esposa de un rematador de autos usados. Desde entonces, comenzó a vivir una especie de retiro, en aquel tranquilo lugar de ferias y marinas, azotado cada tanto por los huracanes.

 

-María de los Ángeles, una periodista venezolana residente en el sur de Houston, un día desapareció siguiendo el cuento de Caperucita. De esta manera John Alejandro conoció por boca de Mattew la extravagante historia. El viejo camaronero le hizo referencia del caso una tarde en la barra del bar donde solía jugar dardos y tomar un par de copas de Jack Daniels. Aquel desbarre sobre el cuento de hadas fue suficiente para despertar una necesidad básica, deseaba ir detrás de algo sustancial, un asunto que le devolviera la estima, estaba harto de develar intrigas sobreentendidas y pueriles. El retiro a los treinta años no le hace bien a ninguna persona, los dardos, el bar frente a la marina y par de putas habituales le regalarían una muerte triste.

De inmediato rastreó a aquella mujer que se fue tras un cuento. Ése era el primer enigma a resolver, irse tras un cuento. ¿Acaso la vida y sus bifurcaciones no eran un cuento en sí mismo con sus tramas?

-Siempre la gente se ha ido tras un cuento; le ponen nombres religiosos, ideológicos, etiquetas de amor, adjetivan las historias- le dijo a una analista arquetipal a quien entrevistó al comienzo de sus pesquisas.

-Ella se ha ido tras un arquetipo complicado –afirmó la mujer exhibiendo una obesidad para nada naif. –Caperucita guarda un universo simbólico, inabarcable. En ella están Edipo, Diana, Gilles de Rais y Elizabeth Bathory. Y si busca usted en la cosmogonía yoruba encontrará a la madre Changó. John Alejandro tomó varias notas en su libreta y continuó con su investigación sobre los arquetipos arcaicos y los contrastó con la vida de María de los Ángeles, una mujer casada. La policía había descartado al marido, a pesar de haber intentado mantenerlo como sospechoso principal por mucho tiempo, pero no tenían pruebas, ni siquiera circunstanciales. John Alejandro había conseguido una cita para conversar con él a través de un periodista de una de las televisoras latinas; un hombre amable, fundador de una red de rematadores de autos, y socio de un bufete de abogados especialistas en asuntos inmigratorios. El esposo de María de los Ángeles era un vendedor de artículos de construcción en San Antonio.

-No creo que pueda agregar nada a lo que usted ya ha leído en los expedientes -dijo. Era un hombre joven, macilento y de una altura poco normal, de espaldas anchas, de nadador, tenía cara de bobo o de santo, un enorme santurrón o un gran marico, pensó John Alejandro.

-Quizás si nos hacemos las preguntas acostumbradas podríamos husmear otros rincones.

-¿Cuáles son las preguntas habituales? –el ex detective sorprendido miró sin asombro la cara de jamelgo de su interlocutor. No esperaba la pregunta. De hecho, no esperaba nada.

-Bueno, usted sabe, enemigos, amantes, amenazas, esas cosas.

-Esas cosas –repitió el hombre con lentitud, alargando la mandíbula.

-Me gustaría saber su rutina, qué hacía, eso se lo deben haber preguntado, pero quisiera repasar.

-¿Esta es una pregunta extraordinaria? –Se esbozó en su cara el gesto de un mártir cristiano o de un mafioso –Se encargaba de los hijos. No, no, no –corrigió- Usted sabe, se encargaba de las que se encargaban de los hijos. Dirigía las actividades, llevaba las agendas para ser puntual en el karate, la natación, las clases de francés, usted sabe, iba al gimnasio, iba de compras y a veces tomaba un café con una amiga.

-¿No era periodista? –preguntó John Alejandro.

Notó que el esposo contuvo una sonrisa.

-Escribía artículos de opinión para uno de esos pasquines que circulan por Katie.

-¿Entonces no hacía nada?

-¿Le parece poco?

-Hábleme de sus amigos.

-¿Esas son preguntas extraordinarias? –insistió el esposo. Unos ex compañeros de estudios en Venezuela, dos o tres contactos en Facebook o algo así.

-¿Las amigas de su esposa eran casadas?

-¿Estas sugerencias son extraordinarias? –El detective se contuvo para no soplarle un escupitajo en  la cara. Silbó. –Mire, mi mujer y yo tenemos un matrimonio abierto. No la celaba. Nuestras vidas eran transparentes, usted sabe, ella conocía mis cosas y había decidido reservarse  las suyas. Usted sabe, no me interesaba saber.

-Porque la curiosidad mató al … -quiso decir al idiota, al marico, al gafo. Hizo una pausa. –Mire, la curiosidad rebasa estos pactos liberales. ¿Nunca le gustó saber, leer, enterarse?

-Creo que hablamos sobre cosas distintas. Dejemos los supuestos, mejor dicho, usted sabe, acabemos esta conversación.

Torpe y brusco se levantó el hombre, se movió entre las sillas del oscuro restaurant, dejando una estela de torpezas, encontronazos con las mesas, con las sillas; era la imagen de un elefante flaco con cara de jamelgo. John Alejandro pidió a un mesonero enano un trago de Jack Daniels y la cuenta. Estuvo un rato pensando, pudo haber sido más diplomático, haber alargado el encuentro, ir de veras tras lo impredecible, pero aquel tipo era una vitrina, mostraba demasiado y entre todas aquellas cosas se perdía lo verdadero. La carta robada.  

Esta referencia al cuento de Edgar Allan Poe lo llevó a pensar en la correspondencia que María de los Ángeles había sostenido con sus ex compañeros de estudio en Venezuela y sus “amistades en Facebook”. Todos desperdigados por el mundo, la mayoría en las redes sociales con el culo pegado a sus sillas, maldiciendo la mala hora, el mal momento, el mal país.

Se fue al hotel, frente a la iglesia María, en San Antonio. Le había tocado un piso alto, era invierno, descorrió la cortina y miró frente a él un gran edificio, una torre parda, una construcción vieja; sintió un leve mareo, cerró los ojos y al abrirlos de nuevo vio las nubes desplazarse vertiginosamente en el remoto horizonte. Estaban cargadas de nieve y venían sobre la pequeña ciudad que se derrumbó ante él como en los días de la contienda, cuando fue devastada tras la batalla de El Álamo. La luna crecía entre la niebla, y una sirena lejana o el aullido de un coyote -nunca pudo discernir- golpeó con fuerza opresiva su corazón. Temblando llegó hasta la computadora, comenzó a navegar a pesar de saber al detalle y con pericia y de haberse actualizado en el universo virtual, John Alejandro era un hombre conservador. Llevaba las notas en sus cuadernos. Colocó la libreta a un lado del escritorio y comenzó su tarea de descifrar claves, violar códigos, y entrar a todos los sitios de María de los Ángeles. Encontró lo acostumbrado, el tedio horizontal de la novedad caótica, la anarquía predecible de las dinámicas virtuales; saludos, reverencias, fotos, coqueteos, comentarios, complicidades, ironías, activismo político, desdoblamientos místicos y competencias de originalidad se repetían en un espejo monótono, todas las cuentas de las redes sociales podrían ser su cuenta. La multiplicación las asemejaba hasta la náusea.

Escuchó de nuevo el aullido del coyote, un aullido en el centro de San Antonio, por aquellas fechas, con tanta gente en la calle, un desgarrador aullido sobre las torres que cubrían las osamentas, túmulos indígenas, fosas comunes; los cementerios. Tras un click dejó las redes sociales y por azar, con un movimiento nervioso, entró en una cuenta de correo electrónico, abrió un vínculo y nada: un blog vacío: el blog de María de los Ángeles: A mi abuela se la comió el lobo. John Alejandro largó una carcajada nerviosa. Aquella mujer realmente se había ido tras el cuento de Caperucita.

-Pudo haber dicho tragado, carajo. –Refunfuñó. Eso compensaría un poco este absurdo. Hablaba consigo mismo cuando, luego de hacer otro click y tres o cuatro combinaciones (arreglos binarios, cosas de ésas) entró al escritorio del blog y descubrió una página oculta, un lugar sólo para ser leído por la dueña de la cuenta. Estaba sobre una especie de bitácora, una lista de revelaciones. Entró. Dio uno, dos, tres pasos, dejó afuera en San Antonio el aullido absurdo del coyote y todos sus cementerios. Caminó por un laberinto, una red de palabras, una serie de horrores que lo condujeron ensimismado a Kemah con el cuaderno garabateado de notas y la firme decisión de tomar su retiro, de no abandonar aquel pueblo ni siquiera cuando fuese conminado a desalojarlo al paso de los huracanes.

2

Este es el juego más interesante que me han propuesto, ser parte de un cuento. Hace años mi abuela fue a Boston y se perdió. La buscaron durante varios días; se perdió en un bosque cercano a la ciudad, se perdió en uno de sus parques helados. Hace años yo estaba soltera e iba a visitar a mi abuela. Hace años sucedieron cosas imposibles de narrar, imposibles ni siquiera de poner en estas páginas que nadie verá. Ahora la historia vuelve a mí luego de ver a las sombras moverse sobre los cementerios cubiertos por la ciudad. Yo fui casada con uno de los primordiales, un engendro débil de los grandes maestros, arquitectos de la vida, fui casada y olvidé todo, luego del rito en la caverna…

La iglesia tenía un hermoso sótano, allí jugaba cuando era niña antes de habitar este cuerpo extraño; allí jugaba antes de que construyeran la iglesia y antes de que construyeran la iglesia existía la caverna…

Sacar los ángeles de esta mujer incauta fue difícil, meter al demonio, un juego de niños. Los niños juegan agarrándose de las manos, haciendo ruedas y cantando mientras cae el sol. Son inocentes; juegan cerca de los bosques, en cualquier lugar impensado hay bosques. Sacar a María de los Ángeles de sí misma fue difícil, meterle la idea de recordar lo olvidado, el día aquel cuando fue a visitar a su abuela en Boston. Los niños juegan en el bosque a la vera del camino, los niños juegan ahora que el lobo no está, saben que la abuela se ha perdido, cantan estrofas y dicen, la abuela se perdió por el camino corto, por el camino corto se llega a la casa, a la caverna, a ese lugar donde María de los Ángeles debe contraer matrimonio con la débil bestia ancestral.

El cuento es el siguiente: un día salió la abuela de María de los Ángeles a buscar a su nieta, tomó el camino corto por el bosque, pasó del otoño al invierno, del norte a una pequeña ciudad en Texas, San Antonio. Se inició en los rituales de los hermanos de la caverna, encargados de resguardar la memoria de los cementerios de los primordiales. Ella tomó aquella empresa como un ejercicio espiritual de caridad, pasó en otoño por Illinois, en invierno por Arkansas, y llegó a Texas de la mano de una criatura contrahecha y monstruosa. En los desiertos la alimentó con leche de  coyote. Regresó por caminos distintos, por primavera de Luisiana, Carolina del Norte y verano. Alegre y extraña, apenas mantenía la lucidez, todos creyeron que la abuela comenzaba a perderse en su mente. Mis hermanas afirmaron  que el camino corto del bosque llevaba a los profundos caminos de la mente, que no fue víctima de un predador, se perdió a sí misma, dijeron. Falso. Desde hace tiempo tomé los mismos caminos, el camino corto, Oklahoma y Colorado. El camino de los grandes álamos, Montana; el camino de los pinos. Mi abuela se perdió en el bosque, ahora que el lobo no está.

Hace años, cuando fui a visitar a mi abuela antes de que oscureciera, las niñas paseábamos por el bosque, jugábamos a las escondidas tras los grandes troncos secos de los árboles y nos robamos nuestros primeros besos, éramos niñas inquietas y felices, todos los caminos de la vida resultaban cortos y placenteros, estábamos dispuestas a pagar el precio por recorrerlos, pero ninguna llegó tan lejos como yo. Vi a un pequeño venado, finalizaba el otoño en Nuevo México y decidí seguir aquellas marcas sobre la tierra húmeda. Sobre mí el cielo anaranjado se derramaba antes del ocaso, como sangre sobre una floresta en los Apalaches. En aquel paisaje lo vi por primera vez. Corría sobre sus cuatro patas con furia delante de mí, la espalda llena de pelos danzaba sobre los troncos y alcanzaba las pequeñas lomas o los altos riscos; se detenía, volteaba su cabeza, me miraba con los ojos encendidos de azul, quemaba con su mirada, las fauces mordían a los vientos, le colgaba la lengua, parecía decirme, sólo tienes que tomar el camino indicado y pronto me tendrás en tu barriga.

Cuando cae la noche en San Antonio, sobre el canal flotan hojas podridas, muertas y las paredes de los comercios sudan, los bares pierden materialidad, se desdoblan, espejados en las aguas. Debajo de los canales reposan los muertos de cuatro cementerios, detrás de las torres, cerca de la catedral en la iglesia María, en las ruinas de El Álamo.

Veo ahora, mientras escribo, la sombra de la noche que vendrá,  siento la llama de aquella primera tarde en Boston, cuando la loba parió al niño que trajo mi abuela. Ha pasado el tiempo, ese niño está en el cobertizo de un granero abandonado en un lugar del desierto, gime o resopla, es débil, regresó, lo sé, y quiere morir en el lugar donde murieron sus ancestros. Escucho el llamado, la noche cae, nadie me sigue. La sombra de mi marido ha sido testigo de estos encuentros salvajes en los descampados, sobre los cementerios…

Me han invitado a jugar… a participar en el proyecto, a reescribir el cuento. Es parte del juego, de la vida o del sueño dejar estas notas, este diario, es el legado de los ancestros, de las cavernas; los antiguos constructores del cementerio, los peregrinos, merodeadores del bosque. Haré la última entrega y cogeré el camino corto como antes lo cogió mi abuela. Nadie participa activamente en un cuento y regresa impune. Conozco sus elipsis, los silencios, esas omisiones que aterrarían a quienes pudieran leerlo; conozco todos los desenlaces posibles, sé que no tengo alternativa, debo dejar este mensaje, pasar el testigo, debes cumplir tu destino, cruzar el invierno y llegar en primavera a Kemah a esperar el verano, la furia de los elementos; podemos creer ciegamente en la libertad, pero cuando estamos en un cuento, John Alejandro, volamos como un dardo hacia un único punto final.

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