Death of the Black-Haired Girl

17

JO WAS TRYING TO KEEP children’s voices from ascending through the cloud cover that eternally shadowed the rain forest. It seemed impossible. She had forgotten all the sorcery of the place. To gather up the silver voices was like trying to gather the tiny fish at the edge of the river when your fingers would not close, like trying to gather tree and bird spirits in your mind. The effort made her whimper in her sleep. The glittering voices were above her as she rose out over the jungle’s brown cloud and saw that they were drawing her to the base of the cliffs. She had always felt a thrill of fear encountering the cliffs on a trail.

The gorges loomed high and deep beyond measuring. Their rainbowed waterfalls and vast green shadows stifled effort or your pleas, reduced them to birdcalls. Never yielding, the gorges had the eagle’s mercy, crushed and ripped your tiny beating heart. Voices drew her, and when they came against the rock they never broke but were changed and became a living cloud of harmonies, so sweet, so delicate, but so terribly queer, so alien. The cloud of voices then drew her up, not gently — violently, as in a fall, stopping breath again, up into canyons, past the last of thick-fleshed leaves and over the wall. The fear of it!

And there to her horror were the black lava meadows and the cruel blue sky and the thin clouds on the edge of the world. The disk of the sun, having risen to light silver fountains in the canyons below, to command a blazing moon, was disappearing now. The enormous thing the voices had become raced to the blackness overhead and the flash of the stars.

She thought it woke her but it was still the past, always the past. He was there. Around him only for a moment stood a ring of bronze children whose wary gemstone eyes were fixed on him. They sang to him and then were gone. She knew she was in her room and he was there. He sat on the edge of her bed and spoke to her in a mixture of Spanish, the languages of the montaña, luscious Portuguese, Papiamentu.

“What do you want?”

“To mourn.”

Finally awake, she thought. But when she looked across the room she thought she could see him in the darkness. His face was drawn and bearded, as in the conventions of cheap religious art. His eyes seemed teary and dull but wetly reflected a wall lamp near the door.

“I’m the Mourner. I hear the silent screams.”

El Doliente.

Her first and only experience of him had come at the beginning of her time in the montaña, when she was still in a state of revolutionary exaltation. By now she had come to understand the situation well enough to be very frightened of him.

“Call me Father Walter,” he had used to say. He had been the pastor of a Devotionist missionary parish in a province under siege by the True Revolution. Little by little he had gone over to them. Nor was it out of fear, although there would have been reason for that. For a while, during his moderate-radical phase, some in the English-speaking press, usually in North America, referred to him as the People’s Padre. Father Walter had found that description congenial.

She remembered that he was once obsessed with sacrifices, blood on the thorns, the power of the Infant of Prague, El Niño himself. The Milky Way. No one could expound on the ideology of the True Revolution more effectively. Even those who failed to comprehend dreaded him. “Let them,” he said, “who are afraid of me be afraid for themselves.” The People’s Padre. Now El Doliente, the Mourner, who heard the silent screams.

Her own trembling truly woke her. She cursed and went to turn on the bathroom light and wash away her tears. In the mirror her youthful face. In the waking world outside she heard sirens not far away. By now they were to her an almost reassuring sound.