The Toltec Art of Life and Death. Barbara Emrys
Lala flared.
“Yes, indeed!” said the man. “Let it be the first of many such events—events that describe the life of my grandson!”
“And the next event?” pressed the old woman, grabbing her bag.
“I have an idea,” said Leonardo with a glint of inspiration in his eyes. Over Lala’s grumbles of protest, the room seemed to spin, turning bright and then dark with each revolution. The sound of a woman moaning continued, becoming sharper and more urgent as another room lit up, this one with fluorescent lamps and shiny metallic objects.
“A hospital?” muttered Sarita, leaning against a glistening wall. “I need to sit down again.” As her father pulled up a metal stool for her, the moaning stopped. They looked at the scene in front of them. It was not the death of her son she was witnessing now, but the moment of his arrival.
“Why the silence?” asked Leonardo. “Has he emerged? Has he been born?”
“He has,” said Sarita, remembering. The conversation in the room had stopped with the mother’s last push. All that remained were a few anxious whispers, as a nurse fussed over the newborn, coaching him to take a breath. The doctor busied himself with Sara, who lay still on the bed, pale as death and too exhausted to listen for the sounds of her infant son.
“They thought we would both perish that morning,” the old woman recalled.
There was the feel of tragedy in the room. The needs of the mother had become urgent, so the nurse holding the baby was called to help. She laid his lifeless little body on a metal table, an offering to fate.
“I smell fear,” Lala remarked. “Lots of it.” She moved from the far wall and stood at the center of the room, her elegant nose in the air. “Yes, fear . . . mixed with blood.” She backed away, repelled.
“Not to your taste?” the old man goaded.
Lala ignored him and cast her eyes around the room disapprovingly. Blood was everywhere. It covered the bedsheets, the inert mother, the anxious doctor. It had splashed onto the white-tiled floor and smeared the metal surface where the body of the child lay, cold and silent. It smelled, yes. It smelled of copper mines and manure. It smelled of fertile things—secret, undiscovered things. It smelled of life.
“Not to my taste, no,” she conceded. “I prefer my world of named things over the world of oozing, writhing things.”
“Yours is no world at all, my dear.”
“It is exactly the same world you once occupied—but without the detestable mess.”
They regarded each other suspiciously, and the silence in the room grew heavy.
“Father,” Sarita exclaimed. “I can’t bear the horror again! He doesn’t breathe!”
“Wait, hija,” said the old man. “Here it comes . . .”
Don Leonardo stretched his right hand toward the lifeless infant, palm open, and there was movement, then the unmistakable signs of struggle, as the baby’s frail lungs billowed and contracted, sucking in air. With the next gasp came shock, then sound, as the boy announced his existence with a vigorous scream. Half-conscious, his mother cried out and lunged toward the sound, almost tumbling from the bed. The nurse dropped her tray of soiled towels and shrieked in alarm.
“Ah, no. He wasn’t going so easily!” said Leonardo with a laugh. “Nor will he today, my daughter.”
“This is a waste of precious time,” Lala said, raising her voice in a show of authority. “Am I in charge of this expedition or not?”
“Please, yes,” Sarita replied. She collected her nylon bag and rose to meet the woman in the center of the busy room, where doctors and nurses celebrated the miraculous resurrection of mother and child. Sarita had a mission, and very little time. If this mysterious woman had the answers, she must be obeyed.
She nodded to her father, and the three spectral guests walked out of the room, the older woman taking the lead. Leonardo gazed back at the operating room, marveling at the chaotic wonder of it. He thought he saw someone familiar standing by the wall, but before he could get another look, he was pushed abruptly from the room. Lala followed close behind him. She, too, hesitated by the door, and turned.
Miguel Ruiz was clearly visible, standing in the light of an operating lamp. He was a grown man, radiant though dressed in a hospital gown, just as Sarita had last seen him—a man whose recent heart attack had hurled him out of the human play and into a world between two worlds. His gown showed flecks of blood, the blood of his own birth. He bore the stains of humanness that Lala so abhorred. She suspected that he had come here to feel the invitation. He had come to remind himself of the thrill—of the fearless daring a newborn feels as he launches headfirst into the human dream, taking a sharp breath and crying out in delirious exultation. He had come to watch, and to imagine.
Miguel and Lala looked at each other wordlessly. Each recognized the other, as any person might recognize himself in the mirror; but there was something more to the way they regarded one another. In Miguel’s eyes shone the full expression of love, without fear or doubt. In her eyes lay suspicion and the expectation of loss.
It was hard to say in that moment whether either of them could sense an opportunity for union, for laughter, or for the sweet submission to desire. It was hard to imagine how many directions this journey might take. Lala seemed as capricious as any woman, and just as eager to steer the events of the dream her way. Hearing Sarita’s call, she offered Miguel only the slightest of smiles, and then she was gone. Miguel stayed where he was, watching the hospital doors swing shut behind her, and let his imagination carry him gently into another dream . . . a dream of times forgotten and feelings exchanged.
It gives me comfort to watch Sarita now . . . with her esteemed father again, and so present within my memory. When I was a small child, my mother was the only woman I really knew. I had older sisters, but they were already married and remote from my everyday life. I adored my mother, and respected her above all other beings. She was beautiful, wise, and pure. She was the Virgin, as every woman was in my young imagination; and as I matured, I would hold all girls to the same standard.
Growing up, I saw how my older brothers acted with their girlfriends, and I envied their cool, their gift with the opposite sex. I was amazed by their apparent confidence—it seemed they had special talents and rare insights into the minds of women, and I hardly hoped to achieve their success in romance. Well, hope is a trickster. It feeds illusions to hungry hearts, much as my great-grandfather Eziquio did. It seduces the mind with promises it cannot keep. As it happened, though, it wasn’t hope that made me a success with women; it was action.
My romantic life began at six years old, when I spontaneously asked a pretty classmate to be my girlfriend. Her immediate response was to laugh in my face. A few days later, when she reconsidered the offer, it was my turn to laugh. I rejected her. Yes, already I had learned to reciprocate the pain, a typical stratagem for emotional survival.
It seemed like a lifetime before I had the courage to try my luck with the opposite sex again. Before I turned twelve, however, my brothers had experienced enough pain of their own to sympathize with me. Jaime, the one closest to me in age, insisted that I try again. He gave me a motivational talk one morning, explaining how I was sure to get one girl if I was brave enough to ask ten or twelve. Whoever accepted me wouldn’t be the most desirable, of course, but my confidence would be restored. So, with borrowed courage, I asked a shy little friend at school to be my girlfriend. She said yes immediately. I was stunned. On my way home from school, still delirious with excitement, I asked another girl. She also said yes. By the end of the week, I had eight girlfriends and no idea what to do with any of them. They all seemed