Into Darkness: Chapter 1, Section(s) 7 & 8

[7]

   I was around 13 years old when this all happened. Or so I believe. To be honest, I don't really know when my birthday is or how old I really am. Birthdays were never important in the village. There were other ways to signify a child's growth into adulthood. Like so many other societies, age doesn't truly speak as to how experienced someone is, rather, events in life that trigger certain emotions and responses that tell us how prepared someone is to become a leader in life. Hunting, surviving a fortnight in the Amazon by ourselves; true measures of how well each and every one of us children in the village had grown and could grow. Those tests determined whether we would become leaders or bystanders. All I can remember is that I was nearing my eventual forage into the jungle’s inner-depths, where the devil’s lived and feasted on the souls of the weak. The saying amongst the members of our community was “leaders feast while the weak weep.” I couldn’t push this phrase from my head during my preparations for my eventual trip into the rainforest I had respected with awe and reverie since birth. While most of the children I would play with dared each other to go in there alone, to take a fruit from the higher trees deeper in the rainforest, I would keep my distance. When most would run in and out of the rainforest, I would watch it, waiting for the slightest rustle in the bushes and high up in the leaves, for something to reach out and drag me into the rainforest with it. The rainforest was too strong for me. I knew I wasn’t strong enough to handle the psychological gnats that would latch onto my brain upon entrance. Soon those fears would become real as they dug further into my brain as I tried to repel them with the words of my community members. Those would die out quickly though and all I would be left with would be a spear and my brain, the thing that was trying its hardest to break me. But I had no choice; I had to enter the rainforest.  

   Luckily, my brothers had endeavored into the jungle with bravery. That gave me a slight bit of hope, if they could succeed in there, then surely I could. They had prepared me in many ways before by making me spend nights and days in the outer layers of the jungle. But I wasn’t like them. I couldn’t help but feel that the scary monsters that lied within would find my soul ripe for the picking. As much as I liked to convince myself that I was like them, I wasn't. For me, I would enter and never come out. I was scared, I wasn’t prepared. I wasn’t ready to become a man. But I had no choice. And, in a way, having no choice is part of becoming the man you want to become in the future. When you have no choice but to say “fuck it,” is when you realize that life isn’t as black and white as you would like it. I felt like running, in the darkest hours of the night. But where? Into the jungle? That’s exactly the place I was trying to avoid. And I was surrounded by jungle. The only option was that river. The blessed river that held all my hopes and dreams of escaping Qurituba. If only I had the chance to escapre via the river and not in a giant smoke cloud that led into the rainforest. 

   How I would love to lay by that river just one more time. Just one more time to feel that sun and the water splash every now and then on my bare chest. Those were the times where I truly was content in life, no matter the situation and the feeling of fleeing that remained in my heart. If life was as blissful as those precious moments spent next to that long river, I would never have even imagined leaving that little world we created. But that’s not how my life went and that’s not how most lives go.

   The hot afternoons were the best to lay there all day. On the most perfect days you could see snakes resting in the trees, sunbathing with their belly’s laid out for any predator to latch onto,  jungle cats foraging in the background, hidden from clear sight by their camouflage, the branches and never ending trees, the birds singing their lullabies and the river flowing as calmly as the suns’ rays baked our brown skin to a golden crisp. We felt like kings. Only little did we know that our reign of this land would soon end and with more blood being spilt into the river than our ancestors could have ever imagined.  

   That river is my madeleine. I can’t taste it but I can see it when I close my eyes and fall asleep. Some nights I dream so vividly that I wake up clenching my eyes shut so I can still try and imagine myself by that river for just one more second. I would keep them closed for as long as possible until I heard you had already woke up.

   Son, please don’t ever take the life you have, that you have crafted from your bare hands, for granted. One day you will be my age and you won’t be able to help yourself from thinking and overthinking, rerunning every moment that could have changed the outcome of your life. Please, please make sure you don’t have too many of those thoughts when your old and nearing your grave. Will you do me that one favor, please?  

   I was happy. But I also wanted to explore what was beyond Qurituba. I was still trying to figure out if life was good or bad in the jungle. I knew what was going on around us. The rest of the world was advanceing technologically, medically and socially; there were things being created that I had never even dreamed of. I remember hearing a passerby from another village tell the story of a machine that could take a person across the world, that it was powered by the gusts of the wind. He said that he had talked to people who had actually seen it. He recounted how they had literally turned to mush as the thing rolled towards them. But I also knew that this place was as peaceful as it could get in life. The ease of living here was only outweighed by the fact that we weren’t number one on the food chain. We had to fight no only the conditions of the rain forest but its other inhabitants. Sometimes we won, sometimes we lost. It’s how my brother, the second oldest, Juanfran, lost his right hand.

   I didn’t know if being surrounded by lush forests; clear, running streams of water and more importantly, the mountains to the north was better than sleeping on dirt, not having sufficient food and more importantly, being excluded from the rest of the world. Even at a young age I knew that we were dying out, we were the last of the native breed. It wouldn’t be long before my grandchildren’s grandchildren read about me, about how savage I was, how they had the internal propensity to do the same, be the same and sound the same. They would believe they came from monsters and they would harbor that belief inside their souls until one day it manifested itself into some ungodly deed that would make them worse than me.

   It has always been a long standing belief in my mind that it is better to know you are a beast than to have it fester inside of you until the ooze of a million hellish soul’s spills out of every orifice of your body. At that moment, it’s too late for anyone to live anymore. The most likely path you lead is straight towards death, if you’re lucky. But, like most who suffer from this unseen, unknown disease, you fight it. Every day. There is nothing you can do. It’s what I’ve struggled with since I left Qurituba that rainy morning so many years ago.

   You try and find the source of the problem but you can’t. It can’t be found, it can only be ignored. It’s an itch that can’t be scratched, you don’t even know where it’s coming from but you can feel it. Each moment passing by as you sweat and feel little knives poke the base of your skull. You sweat and feel irrational; you try to walk outside for some fresh air. You think deep breaths will help; they only make your lungs weaker and your throat dryer. Maybe a beer will help. It’s a cool drink you need. But the beer only makes the itch hotter and more real. For a moment you think you might have found the source of your pain. Then one more drink later you find something else. Something you thought you’d never look for again. Those memories of the bodies surrounding you as you wake up to the smell of burning carcass. Where those bodies came from you’ll never know but the looks on every face, the pain in every single eyeball, you will remember. Then you’ll see how you crept out of the hut only to hear pure quietness. That sound you’ll run from for every single day for the rest of your life. It’s a silence as loud as hearing a plane take off right next you, as loud as a stadium filled with thousands of spectators cheering on their favorite sports team, as deafening as a usually busy highway at night when all the cars have been tucked into their driveways and all that remains are blinking lights and you. That silence only brings back that feeling. It’s a cycle that’s hard to get out of. You can run, but you can’t fucking hide. 

   The moment you think you’ve found the source of your evil, another terrible thing unleashes itself in the basement of your soul and you succumb to the pressures of your ancestors. Don’t fight it, embrace it. Instead of purging, welcome it into your mind with open arms. For you may be part beast but you can always find someone who’s as beastly as you. And that is the best kind of love. It’s a love I thought I had found with your mother but then she passed away and I never truly got a chance to see what was past those misty eyes, so much like your grandmother’s that you never even saw a picture of. 

   Even at a young age I started to become aware of these types of things. It’s something that I learned growing up in such a “backwards” community, you could say. I see it in my children who grew up in civilization. You have a beast inside of you and I hope you let it loose. That way you can control it. You don’t view things the way I do. When I stop and stare at some bird flying into its perch up high, you look at me, wondering what the hell I could possibly be so interested in. It’s just a damn bird. But that bird could be a messenger from Qurituba. A bird relaying a secret message to me.

“Everything is OK,” the bird will tell me. 

   “The rest of them survived. It was glorious. You should have been there my friend. They fought with all they had and by some divine grace, they defeated them. Your honor is back and your father will be remembered forever. He is truly a man now.”

   Then I will just smile. I will stand there imagining my father’s funeral. The psalms laid on the sides of the railroad tracks. The people mourning on the invaders ashes. The caravan traveling on the derailed rails. The animals watching from a distance as my father’s body slowly moves down the tracks to the river, where they send him for one last ride. Women throwing their weeping faces on his hardened body as the rest of the men in the village consult on who will lead them now. Their greatest leader has died and direction is needed. If only one of his sons could lead the village. But their all dead. Or so they’ll think. A Vikings funeral fit for a true warrior. Just with a South American twist. My father’s name would be etched into history, right next to Simón Bolivar. A final middle finger being flashed to the invaders. A final warning to anyone else who would dare force us to assimilate without our consent. Then, we would dance and drink in his honor, in the memory of every single person who gave their lives, willingly and unwillingly, to the great cause of Qurituba and its survival. Everyone who survived would recount stories of their ordeals and how they managed to live. They would sit around a fire and talk with an openness that had never been imagined of since their arrival but was OK now that the white men had been defeated. They would laugh at the darkest humor, drink at the mention of a fallen warrior, smoke to remember the times before the Friends of Charleston even began their voyage to the jungle and into their lives, to remember the sunny mornings where the world felt so brand new and they were just happy to be a small part of this giant place. Then the night would near its climax and day would begin to creep into the sky just to prove that life did move on and that the fallen warriors of yesterday couldn’t do anything today, they needed to remain in yesterday if Qurituba were to survive and prosper like it once did. If only one of his sons were alive to lead them again, but they are all dead. 

   But I can only hope. I can only hope that’s what the bird’s say to me.  What all of them are trying to relay to me. That everything is OK. Yes, I’d like to believe that. 

  I see beauty in everything. You don’t. What is beautifully crafted you may see as waste. My life as a native taught me to be appreciative of the things no one appreciates. I was born with this in my head, stitched into my heart, never to be unwoven by cities of lights and flashy things. Sometimes all of this technology and the people who embrace it are more beastly than the people who lived in forests embracing the struggle to live because it made them strong and fortunate to be alive. There’s a certain chaos involved in living and I believe the “freaks” were better at it than the people in this country. It wasn’t until I was about 23 I saw my first clock. It was the worst day of my life.

[8]

   The beast inside of me yearns to go back home. My real home. Not here, never here. I’m afraid of what I’ll find, though. Will it still be there? When we left, when I left, the village was in upheaval. All I remember is bodies and fire. Destruction was all I saw and I just ran. I never looked back. I couldn’t look back for fear of seeing someone I loved being blown strait into the ground, my eyes being the last thing they would ever see again. Things were going from ugly to beastly and I didn’t want to be a part of it.

   Their troop wasn’t big. They were the first men to analyze every inch of land of Qurituba. They were the ones who determined our fate and eventually they became our overlords. They trudged into our village that humid night, 23 strong, 23 long. All they had were the gifts they’d been given from the neighboring villages and the guns strapped to their bodies.

   Those guns. I still remember those pistols strapped to their sides. They came into our village and all I remember is the wonderment on the faces of children my age at those mechanical snouts, not knowing their true force or the pain they would begin to cause those same kids in just a few months. They looked funny to us. What could those…things do? The elders simply referred to them as the white man’s way of technical laziness in the not-so-lazy theater of hunting and fighting.

   When they came, they met our leader. They drank, they ate and they smoked. Those men had never experienced the smoke we had used for religious rituals and special occasions. Most of the grown men in our village dared never smoke the magical plant without the permission of our leader. It was said that men who smoked it without permission would die before their second puff. The shame causing them to commit suicide, to drown themselves in the nearby river. I quickly learned to disregard that myth as my father had a secret stash hidden in the forest for his personal use. Those men laughed and gawked at our women. They tried to communicate with them offering drinks with unintelligible hand gestures. The women would simply laugh and walk away, uttering something foul that I can’t recall to their friends. 

   The awkward party lasted deep into the night until someone passed out, high out of his drunken mind on one of our new friend’s lap. His name was John Ford. I’ll never forget that name. Or what he said, in his broken Spanish-Southern accent, “Parece que necesitamos mostrar a ustedes como beber como nosotros!” This I still remember because his voice commanded those within earshot to listen, his voice was deep and reverberated against gravity. It shoved and kicked its way through the air and into my ears as I watched him push my father off his lap, a large puddle of drool staining his pants. 

   As we would soon find out, he wanted to teach us to do more than just drink like them. He wanted us to worship them and aspire to be like them. Only he didn’t know what kind of war he was going to begin and we didn’t know what kind of true monsters we were capable of becoming.