Chapter five
Not long after Maita had left his house, a figure came through the red damask curtains that made up his door. An ochre coloured woman with red spots on her cheeks that livened her face up with dark semi circles under her eyes. These circles gave her a heroine chic attractiveness even when she was almost plump, with eyebrows that were perpetually raised. This was Amaru's sister who checked her entry as soon as she saw the midwife. She then turned to the new mother who was holding the baby.
'Good. I see. Hello,' she said disdainfully to the midwife and went over to Amaru.
The midwife felt the frost, hostility, considered herself no longer necessary and said her goodbye's, promising to come soon to check up on the new mother.
'As you wish,' said Huayta, Amaru's sister, under her breath, like she whispered incantations for her death.
She had a problem with the midwife ever since her first child had died during childbirth with the midwife proceeding. Since then she has had nothing but miscarriages and stillbirths and blamed the midwife for her fertility issues. The midwife having been chased out of that house with cries and curses took it as part of her burden as childbirth naturally comes with accusations.
Huayta took her niece, held and appraised the child, hissing with disapproval, while the new mother looked on with sadness and helplessness. Should a new mother with a healthy child look on like this when her sister holds her?
'I don't know why none of the children look like us,' Amaru said with a slight sob. 'Why do they always come out like someone's else's…the midwife said she was beautiful!' she added with a wail.
'A woman like that should not be anywhere near the womb. Even her own womb needs to be cut out.'
'I swear it's just me. It's me! Again and again.'
'It's outrageous that we don't have a new midwife yet.'
'Huayta!'
She looked at her sister lying on the bed disconsolate and went to sit by her. The baby was silent and looking all around until it caught the eyes of her aunt staring at her. She was struck too by its beauty but said:
'I don't think there's anything special about this girl. She's regular. Like any other here. In fact, I think Cusi's is far more beautiful. Even Inti's. This little girl is plain as a sackcloth!
And I'm getting bored looking at her, how dreary she is, against all expectations! And I think people will see how mundane she is too, don't you worry. We will make them see it. All we have to do is tell them so before they lay eyes on her.'
Chapter six
The priest had his house on one of the upper ledges. This house was specifically built for the incumbent priest and as such was reminiscent of the tomb where his remains would lie. It didn't have much in the way of a house like the others in Heaven's Bridge with only one room where he would do his priestly duties and nothing more. But it was a comfortable room with soft pillows and a low feather bed because his transportations had to last as long as possible. The lives he would experience were holy even if he could barely remember them afterwards, and this was because the tools he would use were narcotics and the experience itself would be lived in stupor. Not long before the men would walk up to his house, he started the ritual.
There was a mushroom that grew near the foot of this mountain that they would gather and chop into pieces for this priest. He had some ready for him in his bowl which never was empty and he took some, a couple strips, and washed it down with yuca, an alcoholic drink. He leaned back watching the shifting verdant green curtains waft in a slight breeze thinking someone might come in but then he realised the curtains weren't shifting at all and that he wasn't looking at curtains but something that he couldn't figure out. He started to blink, breathing so evenly, so slowly and deeply, catching and holding the breath of trance when he reached his future self.
His future self was holding something long and hard, harder than wood and they were performing a circular motion in front of something that took him a moment to see was a giant pot, one that came up to his navel. He could feel the heat that the pot exuded but he also felt that it didn't bother his future self, preoccupied with the contents. This was a greyish sludge where one could see clumps in the liquid and they were trying to get rid of the clumps to make it smoother by stirring, constantly stirring.
There was a whole line of pots all with the same substance and he was managing all of them, stirring one with a metal stick and then moving to the next stirring that and so on until he got to the last one, stirred that, and went backwards to stir the other pots again.
The priest didn't have the power to control his future self but could only experience what that person was experiencing at that time. He wanted the person to look up so he could see his surroundings but had to wait till the future self chose to do it themselves. By now he was in the deepest of trances akin to a coma and couldn't wake if he wanted to.
This stirring continued for a while until someone came up with a bowl. This future self looked up and greeted the person. This was a mundane act for the future self, something he had done many times that day, and in his life, so he experienced nothing but the joylessness of repetition, which the priest also experienced to his detriment. He grabbed the woman's bowl, scooped the contents of the pot and handed it back with words of farewell. The priest surveyed her appearance: a dark skinned older woman with a red dot on her forehead. Her hair was tied up with untidy strands popping up everywhere. Her dress was loose and blood red. The place itself had a similar monochrome but more brown than anything while the path on which the woman walked was dark brown like it had just rained. There were other things there that he could not make out, many other things, and maybe he could have figured it out if he had more time to study them but the future self wasn't so intrigued by his every day surroundings as the priest was and turned back to stirring the pots.
The priest was dying for the future self to look up for someone to come, and get some of that liquid or for them to get tired and stop altogether so he could look around leisurely; but the stirring continued, amid the joylessness of repetition, and he felt himself coming out of the trance back to his own time and his life. But as he came back to his own time he went into a different trance - that of sleep which always happens to him after he returned. That's how the men found him, in the dead of sleep, when they entered his house, waking him up as they did so.
Chapter seven
The priest did not look like the others in Heaven's Bridge. He was a twenty something year old man who was slightly plump with long hair like every other person in the community but it was unbraided, always looking like the braids were just taken out, cascading, wavy. He was fairer skinned than them too, his skin cloud white. But the most striking thing about him was how fresh he looked, how clear his eyes were, how boyish his youthfulness was. No one in Heaven's Bridge looked like him with the peacefulness of innocence exuding from him something he himself was unaware of.
'Ah,' the priest said, yawning. 'You guys finished?'
'Yes,' Atoc answered, as they stood around the priest. 'We have finished your tomb.'
They had left the curtains of the door open so light could enter the room. The priest looked at this light mildly resentfully and yawned again. Some vestiges of his transportation remained and he stretched his arm a little, not because he had just woken up but because he felt the tenseness of overworked muscles like he had been stirring something for a very long time.
'Good, good. I suppose I'll be there soon. If you guys say so.'
'How was your transportation?' asked Lana, fixing his eyes on him attentively. 'Was it…holy?'
The priest shrugged.
'I don't even know. Pleasant - spiritual, I believe I feel something.' He yawned again. 'Soreness.'
A couple of the men, including Maita, were displaying damn near unseemly covetousness as they looked at him yawning, oblivious sleep within distance at any time for a man like this.
'I can't understand how you keep forgetting what you experienced,' said Lana, smiling. 'How can you forget something like - a new world? You're doing something reserved only for you and you have only nonchalance for it. I feel like this should be -'
'Take some,' said the priest, suddenly extremely sharp and awake, pushing the bowl forward. 'Be my guest.'
Lana looked at the bowl with its strips of psilocybin mushrooms and moved back aghast.
'No sir. No thank you. I'm not part of that…class.'
'Suit yourself,' said the priest, sinking back into his cushions and languor. 'As long as you know I'm not begrudging you anything. Has your child been born, Maita? Someone was saying she was in labour.'
Maita stiffened and answered in the affirmative. His child was born healthy.
'Good good. A long life beckons her then, as it does for all healthy children.' Maita's lip trembled. 'Maybe,' the priest said through another yawn. 'Maybe I'll get to see her soon. Before -'
The priest's head dropped on his shoulder as he fell into deep slumber. No one was surprised. It was this nodding off that happened constantly that made the people think he had something wrong with him, that he was not long for this world because the same thing had happened to all the priests before them, being unable to control when they would sleep and sleeping a lot. And yet despite this apparent sickness they watched with envy and longing as the red strokes of their own eyes deepened, bleeding from the lashings of judgement given to the inhabitants of Heaven's Bridge.
