Chapter 17
'Who told you to take that baby outside? Who! You naïve fool.'
Huayta was pale, dishevelled, furious. Her arms were crossed with her left arm around her waist and her chin resting on her hand, tapping her face with her index finger. She stopped tapping.
'For what reason do you want all your children to die?'
Amaru and Maita were both looking eagerly at their sleeping child for she was in train doing something that was unattainable to them. Amaru disentangled herself from the view of a sleeping baby and walked over to the floorbed.
'Do not speak to me like that. It was my fever. I wasn't thinking clearly.'
She laid herself down, her exhale travelling through her body, a hot iron over a body racked with troubles. She however was beginning to feel the peace of resignation.
'Yes, go to sleep. Rest,' said her sister scathingly. 'A hard day's work requites good sleep.'
'Maybe it'll be alright,' murmured Amaru. 'We still have time to make people see -'
'No they will never see anything other than what they have already seen. They have seen with their eyes first. We should have made them see with their imagination before they saw with their eyes.'
'I didn't think it through. My fever…'
'We were fighting phantoms created by that execrable midwife with our own phantoms but once you bring a real person into it you've already lost.'
'Maybe she'll grow out of it and grow uglier.'
'No, she won't. Not ugly enough anyways. By that time they won't be able to see with their eyes anyway. All they will see is their first impression - unless something drastic happens.'
Huayta started tapping her cheekbone with her index finger like she wanted to whip someone.
'If she is a sacrifice then so be it,' said Maita in a low voice, his eyes looking heavier. The baby sleeping made him sleepy himself and mumbled: 'Let her spirit watch over us.'
Amaru moaned pitifully.
'That midwife did the same thing with Supay,' said Huayta, dismissing Maita. 'I just seen her granddaughter now and if she isn't a more fitting sacrifice, strike me dead! Breathtakingly rude too.'
'We should be happy with honour.'
'I've only recently been seeing her,' continued the dishevelled Huayta, on a train that could not be stopped or diverted. 'And every time she gives me disregard. Next time she does that I'll snatch her ponytail!'
'If that boy is dying from poison why don't they sacrifice him instead of Supay?' said Amaru, her voice breaking at the end.
The baby started to cry and Maita looked to his wife, mumbling:
'Because it's not a sacrifice if the boy's life is being taken already…. receive honour with grace.'
He walked towards his wife as Huayta went towards the crying baby, picking it up from the basket.
'A hideous looking boy, with the plague on him. A plague that would be a blessing here for…Urpi.'
The parents made no objection to the aunt naming her niece.
'If only it wasn't deadly we would have found a way to save her.'
Huayta was holding the crying child, bouncing it around, smiling a smile of love as she did so. She pulled out her breast and gave the child suck. Her own pregnancy with its miscarriage hadn't been that long before. She was almost always pregnant but had never given birth to a healthy baby. This meant that she was always lactating. The parents were lying side by side, with Maita setting his forehead on Amaru's shoulder, making it appear for all the world that their newborn was already sacrificed and them already in mourning. Huayta with the child at her breast walked over to them and spit on both their faces.
Chapter 18
The langor of oversleep was clinging onto Lana's senses. The only time he had ever slept to fulfilment was when he was a child, with a fleeting memory of expunged weariness when he was a teen, but those were near lifetimes ago, and never had he exceeded ten hours of unbroken sleep. He exhaled deeply and found a more exquisite feeling; of all his senses and nerves being drenched and having to be forced to operate again, resisting, clinging like a severing cloud to a peace so close to death that the body wanted to pass that threshold between these two worlds. He savoured the moment for all it could give him until his sobering mind started to press upon him. Why hadn't he experienced this before and why was he now able to do so? He felt his eyes contract and moisten from oversleep but wasn't able to penetrate deep thought. His body didn't want to do anything, his brain didn't want to do anything, he just wanted to go back to sleep. What was that future self again? Or was that just…a dream. How could he tell?
'What the fuck have you been doing? Get up, get up and get yourself a woman. Now is the best time!'
Lana really didn't want to do anything but lie down, drinking to oblivion 'the mead of the day's labour.' He opened his eyes and from its corners looked at the midwife. He found that the delectable feeling would not be dislodged, not from his eyes being open, his natural movements; nor his mother's voice, everything was padded, its harshness dampened. The man was life-proof.
'Huh?' he said languidly while stretching.
'What is this?' asked the midwife, staring at him. 'What have you been up to?'
'Nothing,' answered Lana and got up, pushing down with his arms.
'This is no time for sleep, boy, find yourself a woman. This is the time for taking advantage. Have a child.'
Lana laughed softly and said:
'Say that again?'
'A beautiful baby has been born. If you want a child and you want it to live a full life, now is the time to have one.'
'I don't want one.'
'For what reason? Last time you said it was because you couldn't sleep - when no one here can sleep. But I see you just slept - and slept well too. So?'
'Haha. I guess I can consider it. But only if Supay is the bride.'
'Be serious. A sacrifice for a wife?'
'Let her live long enough to give birth to my child and then sacrifice her. What's the problem?'
'She would be wasted by the pregnancy and birth. It's her beauty in her taintless youth that is required. You're too grown for empty philosophy.'
Lana exhaled deeply and again felt something delicious flow through him, squeezing his brain softly, playfully. He realised that he was exhaling the breath of sleep while awake, a state of calmness difficult to attain unless unconscious or you're a yogi at the height of their enlightenment.
'How did you sleep like that anyway?' asked the midwife. 'You don't see that unless it's induced by delirium like that boy stung by the fish. If he's not screaming he's sleeping.'
'What boy?'
'He got stung by a fish from the river. A crazy looking fish, looking like a stone.'
'Why did he fish it out? To eat it, build something with it or, maybe, to bury someone?'
'Who knows what he was trying to do. Most likely he wanted to keep it in his room to look at it and play with. Who knows the mind of a child. Keep a fish in your room to look at! One that looks like a rock no less. He got punished for that nonsense.'
Lana tried to inhale the breath of sleep again, trying to make his eyes water, but the more they spoke about their reality, the more the soothing, calmness receded. Lana started to breathe disjointedly, the breath of wakefulness, that of agitation, a jagged shorter breath, the same as the midwife's. What was it that made that feeling disappear and be replaced by this yoke, he asked himself. Was this something that naturally dissipated or was it something they had spoken about that did it, some reminder - a rebuke. But for what?
Chapter 19
Supay had been drinking yuca for a couple hours now. It was close to midday, and her face was flushed. She was trying to put dark contours around the lips of a grotesque candle whose face wasn't too far removed from Supay's own as she was pressing her lips together in concentration and frustration. She had just finished making ridges in the lips giving the appearance of cracked dryness which amused her drunken but artistically inclined mind. The candle face itself had its lips set wide but not in a smile, which was common. The cracked lips were a new thing however as were the dark contours. She wasn't the only one who decorated candles in this village but hers tended to have something different about them as she was a playful girl, someone who might have been a famous artist in a different life. She had been decorating candles since she was eight and took it as seriously as any lauded virtuoso of whatever period and felt that her masterpiece was at hand now that death was at hand too. She wanted to make a candle that would shake whoever watched its light burn and its wax melt but like any artist she had a short temper and low tolerance for imperfection. The contours were vexing her. Pisco, with her burgeoning eyebags, still struggling to keep up, was watching Supay delicately trace the lips with her hand softly holding the brush with her finger tips. The knuckles on her hand were black as opposed to the light brown of the rest of her body. Pisco was running late as usual but trying to improve despite the struggle and saw the jar of saliva coming her way and panicked as usual. She started chewing harder, making the cassava root in her mouth snap. This startled Supay and made her jerk her brush upwards, giving the candle a cleft lip. She let out a noise of pain like she had been struck and with shock stared at the deformed candle. She then looked up at the ceiling as at the heavens and furiously looked down at the candle again, snatched it and threw it against a wall. It made two thuds, one from the wall, and the second from the floor, splitting in half.
'What is wrong with me !' Supay wailed. 'I'm fucking everything up even on my last day!'
Pisco was emptying the contents of her mouth into the jar. Her mouth was so wide it looked like a salivating hyena, one that was in tears laughing.
'You think it's funny? Is my pain funny to you?' raged Supay. 'My last day alive and people are laughing at me!'
Pisco put one of her hands up, holding the jar with the other while looking at Supay with her pupils to the furthest upper reaches of her eyeballs, trying to express innocence through body language.
'Fine, laugh. Laugh. Laugh at a dead woman. Me, a woman who can't reach her peak even on her last day.' She was becoming drunkenly maudlin. 'If I can't find fortune and grace on my last day, it means I'm cursed. And you, all I am to you is comedy or…prey to make use of.' Her voice was high pitched and she took a swig from the liquor. She took a moment to let the fiery drink go down her throat and then gazed into herself with glazed eyes, touching the insides of one of her teeth with her tongue, a sensuous action which said that her body was getting hotter. Pisco was in the final throes of emptying out her yuca, still looking like a salivating animal as she eyed the ranting Supay.
'Maybe it's better if I did die before I give notice of my full potential,' she mused. 'To give an illusion.' She laughed softly at first and then burst into outright, delighted laughter. 'If you die before you had a chance to try and realise your peak no one will truly know what you would have been. You become the greatest by default - and no one will usurp you, because your unreached potential will always be better because it is achievement unrealised, without a chance to realise, because it won't actually...'
Her mood had switched from depression to elation. Pisco's mouth was empty and she was about to put a cassava root in her mouth when Supay said:
'Where is my sister? Tell them to bring me my sister. Pisco, go call my mother and tell her to come with my sister, now. Let me at least hold a baby before I die.'
