Into Darkness: Chapter 1, Section(s) 1 & 2

Into Darkness

   I will never forget the day I saw my first railroad track. I’ll also never forget the night I met my first white man. The rest of my consciousness remains jumbled in my head, though. I’m uncertain whether certain visions in my mind are real or even in sync with other memories. I begin to piece together certain moments from my time in Qurituba only to reach the final piece of the mental jigsaw puzzle and suddenly, I realize I’ve managed to squeeze moments into the wrong memory only to have to deconstruct and reconstruct all over again. It’s a fickle thing the mind. You never realize you’ve completely fuddled everything you used to know until you actually try to recall it at some obsolete moment later in life, like I have been for the last 15 years, son.

   I can barely recall the people from Qurituba. After all these years away from that jungle paradise I can only minutely recall the scenery of the place and certain conversations I’ve had with my family. I can’t remember the names of the elders who organized the citizens’ daily lives, I can’t remember who I used to climb trees with when I was a child and I can’t remember my family members’ faces, save for my father and my mother’s eyes.

   It’s scary, trying to remember something you lived but not being able to recall almost everything from that part of your life. It’s almost as if I’ve completely whitewashed those agonizingly painful and beautiful years from my memory. For a long time I wanted to keep those moments hidden from the world and myself. A few years ago though I began to unpack those memories while I lied in bed trying to convince myself you were OK, that you’d be coming home any minute now and that I was a fool to question your responsibility. That was then and I’ve only pushed even more so since my diagnosis. I don’t have much time left here on this planet and I want to tell you about me. You may think of me as a father by biology but not emotionally nor spiritually and I truly do apologize for that. It’s just that I wasn’t ready. It wasn’t until I realized how alike we truly were that I wanted to recount every detail I could remember to you but you left for a long time and I didn’t know where you were or even if you were alive. I just hope you can read this before I start to lose more than just my memories of Qurituba. And I really wish I could remember that place now as I near the end of my time on this planet.  

[2]

   They came in the night, as if to take us away to another planet. Aliens with beards and guns signaling to us they came in peace. They asked to speak to the leader of our community. He spoke Spanish. Although we were almost completely isolated from the world the elder leaders of Qurituba were allowed to speak Spanish for when they had to venture to other remote villages in the jungle and trade or seek spiritual guidance from the overflowing river. My father was one of the few people who wasn't esteemed in our village who was able to speak the language of the continent. He was banned from ever using in public by the elders who threatened him with severe punishment should they ever at least suspect him of disobeying their orders and teaching us the language. He defied what they said, telling us we had the right to speak any language we wanted. It was almost as if he sensed that one day one of his children might need to use it in a life or death situation. For me, it's what saved me during those years after I finally fled the jungle and entered a Spanish speaking society. Every morning when we woke up he would drill us on our Spanish and only speak to us in Spanish in the home. By the time each of us had reached the age of maturity, we had become more fluent in Spanish than we had in our own native language. In reality though, our knowledge of this language helped my brothers fight in Qurituba and helped me flee Qurituba. It made them braver and smarter while it made me more susceptible to run because I knew that beyond the rainforest, the never ending rivers and the glorious mountains, was a society that I could call my own, a society that I could actually conform to. It was beyond all of that that I believed was my true home and I longed to reach that destination. 

   The white men spoke broken Spanish, too. My family and I were able to understand the conversations between the elders and the white men and what my father heard severely frightened him. He wound up drowning those fears in a fearful embrace of worse things to come by drinking himself into a 12 hour coma that ended with him burning the left side of his face on a quietly burning piece of wood. They asked us where we were on the map, that they had not been told of a village in the inner-base of the Amazon. It was as if we had popped up out of nowhere, they being the discoverers of a brand new world. I’m pretty sure they were just as scared of us as we were of them. We had no idea what the next few years would have in store for us but that night, the possibility of an all-out war between our people and these railroad men was never pondered. We fed them and gave them shelter like proper hosts and we expected their stay to be short. 13 years and hundreds of dead bodies later we would realize those men were disguised in costumes of human flesh. They were demons sent from the fiery abyss of hell looking for fresh souls to take and we just so happened to be their marks. I’ll never know, though, why they chose us. After a few years of bloodshed and brutal tactics from both sides, I fled and never turned back.

   Not an eyelash of mine could be found in Qurituba after the massacre. I just wish I had left one.