"Enemy of Man" by J E Suárez
It's hot here. I don't get high anymore; I don't need to. The perpetual heat and the laziness do about the same; out here every afternoon on the tower, feet dangled over the edge, in the haze, and that column of smoke out there in the distance, that's Perú already. The borderline lies somewhere down there in the valley between me and the burning mountain, past the town of which I can only see the edges, tucked in as the rest is under the slope I'm on. The people in the town all live off smuggling petrol over the border, smuggling a too-romantic word for that tame occupation: loading the pickup truck with as many gallon-tanks as will fit, driving five blocks, making the routine sale to the buyers that line the bridge on the other side, then driving back and again; twenty, twenty-five passes in a day. The violent stuff, the contraband as truly merits the term, guns and drugs and people, all that goes through Huaquillas or the Amazonian crossings. You can hardly tell this is a border town, it has none of that frantic slave-market feel—the passing of meat from hand to hand—but it is still, though more subtly, some kind of point of transit.
In the mornings there is an eruption of birds. A large, reddish, pheasant-like creature that exhibits its saurian ancestry like few birds do, blueish skin where the feathers leave it exposed, reptile jowls and slitted iris, shrieking at one another from the tree branches they hang from at weird angles. It is a birdwatcher lodge I am staying at, as it turns out. A specialized place where the staff don't seem to quite know what to do with someone who isn't here for that purpose. I am, as I am everywhere, a harmless alien, not precisely a gringo but a similarly foreign creature, to be left to his own devices and habits. The only other guests are a British couple that only show their faces at dinner. They come in, set their binoculars down, and then sit there tallying species, silent except to bark the name of a bird or a set of coordinates at each other. I do not see them again until they return at night, the guide always bright and apologetic, the Brits, or the husband at least, even more anxious, drawn, tauter-faced each day. The wife is an Indian woman whose face is as blank as the white safari clothes she leaves with every day and which, every night, return just as inexplicably, impossibly stainless. The guide tells me they've been in a bad mood because they haven't been able to see the one bird they're looking for, the one that this place is apparently known for amongst the birdwatching community. I ask him if he's seen it. He shrugs and waves his hand. Almost every day. Pero no se encuentra lo que se busca, ¿no? He shows me a picture of the bird; it is a pigeon-like, unremarkable thing, squat brown and short-beaked. I can hear the couple leave their cabin at about four in the morning, the dinosaur-pheasant things just then rousing me into a three hour limbo of dreams. I wait out the dawn hours as they rustle out into the forest, and in the room the slats of curtain-shadows pass lethargic before my eyes like film slowed down to where the single images resolve, and in between, sea cliffs at night and gangways over the apertures of silos; always vast and dark spaces. Then I go out onto the balcony and contemplate my next move.
The water here all tastes like blood. It is safe to drink, but there's an excess of iron in it which translates into a blood taste so clear, the feeling when you swallow is like the first moments after a nose fracture—the welling before it spurts, a coppery tide in the sinuses. When you wash your teeth, it is a flush as though from gums bleeding; no wounds, the blood just squeezed out through the exposed flesh.
The tower is a birdwatching tower, of course, but the birdwatchers are not interested in the eagles that can be seen taking flight from the canopy up there, so I have the platform to myself. In the valley below, in this obscene dry heat, there are rice paddies, and Chinese farmers who do not speak a word of Spanish. I have no idea how they irrigate the fields. Then there is an oil tanker crawling along the road, then the town, and then finally Perú, a wasteland that seems to spill out at my feet like a bucket of the earth's paint kicked over, the dry seibo-engorged forest ending and the vast Peruvian desert beginning in almost perfect alignment with the national border. The earth spreads thinner there; everything larger, emptier.
Yesterday the guide came up here, and as his head emerged from the trapdoor he put his finger to his lips to indicate that I should shut up. The gringos were tucked safely away scrutinizing a bramble down below. He handed me the binoculars, crouched next to me to align my sightline with the arm he extended, pointing out across the valley, and my eyes followed—
Nothing.
Then, a slow roll. Almost a breeze, but subterranean. Something pushing itself through the undergrowth at once muscular and sleek, and I never see the whole thing, but like a myth, an image of death insinuates itself in sections of flank, haunch, and socket half-seen through the foliage-windows. It stops. Below the leaves, something the colour of desert sand shifts. Shadows appear in the depressions of flesh as a limb uncoils. Amidst the dusty greenery, something glints; either a leaf catching the sun, or the puma's eye that has sensed mine and stared back. Across a kilometer or more, I hear inside me a soft growl. An utterly calm disdain.
Below, the woman calls out for the guide. I look back at him for a moment, then lift the binoculars to my eyes again. It is gone. I ask him later if these, too, are common to see around here, and he shakes his head forcefully, though still smiling. No, no. Digamos, quedan pocos. People kill them if they can, sabe, to protect their cattle and so on.
I went into the town the other day. It was bleached, like a western, like reality itself was overexposed. Gorged on more light than it could process. In the coffee shop labeled Café Colombia, the owners are in fact an exceedingly beautiful, but furtive Colombian couple with a very young son. In the public square, the children bathe in the fountain jets, and two adolescent girls half in irony stretch themselves out in mermaid poses over the hot rocks, the water evaporating almost as it hits their skin. The young men who are their only audience, aside from myself, all regard me as I pass. When I nod they say, in chorus, Buenaas, like schoolchildren.
In Huaquillas the air was thick with crime and burning fat smoke of tripe, palpably heavy. There was an inexplicable red glare and the alley I walked down funneled us all helplessly into the crossing bridge; it was undoubtedly hell. The red was from the huge Bienvenido a Peru sign, the light it reflected drenching the whole causeway. Cops grinned from their stand. A woman in rags with a destroyed face pawed at me and rattled a plastic bag, jibbering, Take it, papi, llévalo al otro lado! The bag slapped me in the chest, and whatever was inside it was wet and heavy. Everything was trying to get across. I imagined an organ in that bag; a heart, a kidney, an abortion, perhaps. Here it is more the hangover after a crossing than the crossing itself. The people tired now, the feet bloodied, and the body still alert in the mornings, unconvinced it is safe when it wakes.
I sit by the gas station and watch the smugglers refilling their hauls, the trucks sloshing away. A man squints in the sun. His hand has the distance between each tank nozzle memorized, so he just stands there in an apparent heat stupor, staring at the sun with a drugged face. Every once in a while the hose jerks in his hand, and he moves on to the next one without looking down. For some reason, that fact strikes me as the most curious—that this is his existence, just as mine is mine. I think about how easy it would be, to just drive up and stand in the queue behind that car, load up with gas tanks, give everything up and start driving petrol across the border, taking up this one possible existence as my own. Or not easy—nothing is easy—but possible. A life, no more or less unbearable than whatever the plotted-out course of this one is set to be. The only difference is that to choose that life would mean to break with the script, so to speak; to go for something just as beautiful and unbearable as this present life, just as radical in the infinite decisions needed to make it actual, but—and this is the crucial thing—they would not be my own difficulties and struggles; it would be beautiful and unbearable in a way meant for someone else. An arbitrary distinction, perhaps, but it cannot be denied that there are certain courses of life that present a more definitive rupture than others, relative their own starting points, nor that, even if it is an illusion, we do at least feel as though there is a certain life, or certain parameters of a life, within whose bounds we are doomed to exist. It is this sensation that makes all other paths somehow inconceivable.
I see the man; in a sense, I long to try his existence on like a suit, spend my life lost in this haze, in this town at the edge of the country and somehow also at the edge of the world—for a memory to someday bleed through from behind the sun and remind me that another life that had once been mine, that I had been something else and the texture of my days another, but for the sunlight to engulf it again and life, as it has turned out, to resume itself—but of course, I will not do it. No, of course not. But then again someone does. Someone, amid all the infinite forking paths, in all the iterations of self, not only takes that step that to me is only a passing thought, but will take it again, and again, will continue to take it every day until that, and nothing else, is their reality; until they have forsaken all other lives. A Colombian family winds up selling coffee on the Ecuadorian border with Perú, constantly looking over their shoulders. A Chinese farmer waters his rice paddy on the edges of the desert. In a certain beach in Esmeraldas province, there are no permanent residents save a Montubio man and the Russian wife with whom he shares not one mutually intelligible word, and their two enormous brown children. I wonder if the fact that these lives are not our own makes them easier to bear; if they seem less real, and less agonizing for it.
I tell the hotel staff tonight that I am ready to leave. The receptionist, who is also everything else except guide, tells me the only bus leaves town at six, so she'll organize a ride to bring me down to the town at five. As I leave the common area I catch a last glimpse of the Brits. Two thick lines have set in running down from the male birdwatcher's temples to his jaw, as though his face were boxing him in within its own folds. He has no skin to spare, so the wrinkles look unnatural, as though it must be peeling away unseen somewhere else on his body in order to cover this expenditure. It is eating him alive.
The day is still essentially night. The car arrives to take me down, already loaded with petrol gallons. It continues swaying from the liquid's residual quiver as it comes to a halt. The driver is an old man with densely-scratched glasses and a mouth that can only smile on one side, as though the strings that pulled the other half up had been cut. It is the hour of the birds; the pheasant things and others, each with their strange cry—birds that sound like cats; birds that sound like women in pain; birds that sound like birds.
We are driving down and, at my insistence, he is happily telling me the details of the smuggling business. I see the snake before he does, a beige coral bluing in the dawn; mostly coiled up on the right margin of the highway, just the head and some two feet of its length lolled out on the road. I open my mouth and start to point to it, but he nods and smiles to indicate he's seen it already. He makes a very slight adjustment to our course.
The adder's skull bursts beneath our wheels like a grape against my soft palate. Like chewing on eggshells, I feel, more than hear, the crackle of a thousand tiny vertebrae popping; feel it in the back of the skull and the back of the throat. A sound I would not have detected had I not known to listen for it: the delicate hiss of air and pulp as the animal explodes.
I ask him why he did it. Because you have to, he says. That's what you're supposed to do, así dicen. Whenever I see one, even if I'm on foot, I just get a rock or something—y ¡toma, chucha! Every last one I see. I go out of my way, you know. He turns his face from the road to look at me and his half smile smiles, and one eye squints as the sun begins to come in from the left side, and One time, he says, I found a lion.
A lion?
Ajá, ese que le dicen el león de montaña. Una leona, era, big female and her two cubs. Drove straight at them. I didn't even stop to see who was coming. She ran off the road and I drove right off after her, nods at the precipices all around, Straight down the mountainside. She would have outran me, cause this car's old, except she didn't realize she was running out of space. Se le vino encima el acantilado, y paf—he completes the sound effect with a slap on the steering wheel. Chased her off the edge of the cliff.
Así es. He nods to himself for a moment, then looks back again and his expression is almost complete, the grin large enough it is nearly everywhere now. I went back, but I couldn't find the cubs anymore. Shrugs. Maybe someday. Así he sabido yo, ¿no? That you've got to kill them. Que ese animal es el enemigo del hombre.
I say nothing, so he reaffirms himself in mutters for a while more, then we are both silent. The day begins; in the east, the sky that will be scorched white in an hour enjoys its moment of blue. A wave of heat slaps me as I open the door. Even before the sun has had time to warm anything, it is already too much. I pay the man five dollars for his troubles, and as I walk away, four squat Peruvians run toward the car brandishing a mix of dollars and soles, loudly haggling over the price of petrol. As they elbow past and clear away I see beyond them to the dirt-paved street that only carries on a block or two before the houses give way to the wasteland, and the desert opens up before me. Two days drive before you reach anything at all, and that column of smoke, out there in the distance, is somewhere else and another life already.
J.E. Suárez is a bilingual writer and translator from Quito, Ecuador. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Virginia. He writes fiction, flash fiction, and essays, and his work has appeared in 3AM Magazine and Líneas de Expresión. His translation of the poetry collection In The Lateness of the World, by Carolyn Forché, is forthcoming by Valparaíso Editions.
