Michael McGuire

Lying awake, the doctor realized he had never heard it before, absolute silence, that which the dead must hear, and then only with considerable effort.

At first, he thought his hearing was going, then he realized it wasn’t absolute silence after all.  He learned how to pick out individual sounds: a cricket; night birds, talking to each other, he supposed, in a kind of low mumble; a distant rooster who had mistaken the hour.  Even in the darkness of the least damp bed in the least damp room of his rented house, he was not among the many he had certified as, for this reason or that, gone.  Not yet.

The doctor had settled into his years of rural service.  There was a little different distribution of the ill and not so ill, but it wasn’t that different.  The old and slowly dying, the ill and quickly dying, those doomed to a fairly long life of suffering, the puzzled and mysteriously pregnant, the usually sound children, the accident victims, usually teenagers, the occasional hypochondriac.  There were the customary maladies, minor infections, viruses. 

The homemade cheese, queso casero, and the morning dose of milk, la pajarete, straight from the cow, often enough laced with tequila, added their problems, but the natives were used to their specialties, they had the antibodies and he was careful not to take either himself, though he sometimes had to accept the heavy square of cheese as a gift of the grateful who probably had only their own constitutions developed over time, not his contemporary skills, to thank for their survival.

The doctor had been twelve months in Pueblo Viejo when the dream came to him.  At first, he hypothesized, it must be in the walls of the house he rented, an old house that never dried out, not completely, not even in the dry season, one had been there since the wars swept the country early in the last century, but if that were the case, why hadn’t he dreamed the dream before, why did it only come to him after a year of living alone in it?  Perhaps, he speculated, for this was a little beyond a reasoned premise, he had to pass some kind of test before the walls would give up their version of what they’d seen.  And heard, and felt, though, the doctor had to admit, there weren’t the tangible scars of gunfights on his walls, within or without, such as he’d seen on public buildings in the distant city.

It began innocently enough, the dream, at first it seemed to be only of a street scene, some corner that seemed almost familiar, some still photograph of another time, horses, men with great sombreros, as if the sun had hit more forcibly in days gone by or men had just spent more time out of doors, all their time in fact but, with the weeks, the months…and very, very slowly at the outset…the doctor’s dream figures began to move. 

The horse that had been standing in the corner of the canvas in his head sidled from one side of the street to the other; his rider, amiably enough, went along with him.  The women in long skirts lugged their burdens; the children, dirty enough he presumed, probably illiterate, certainly ignorant, fended for themselves, though most, obviously, had their share of the work, had shouldered it as soon as they had shoulders and could, as expected, lift and carry.  This was the era in which every child who had his limbs, especially the boy, was an asset, another body growing muscle and bone, the only machinery available to bend to the hard hectares which surrendered, and then only grudgingly, the little taken from them year by year.

The wonder was that months had passed before the doctor’s street scene came to life, months in which, even lying awake, he had time to peruse the mural, in effect, the dated work that seemed to cover an entire wall, always the same wall, of the least damp room, the one he’d chosen to sleep in.  Even in the half light of his dream he could see the tans of the streets and buildings that, much of the year, were dusted with the dust of dry fields and dirt roads, that which drifted in and that which was carried in by man and horse, settled, stirred, and settled again. 

He saw the dusted people, the whites of their eyes, and knew they weren’t the people of everyday, the ones he saw now, clothed and unclothed, but soft, rounded representations.  A campesino was the idea of a campesino, a horse was the idea of a horse, a woman was the idea of a woman, for his mural was, in reality, a picture, a creation, even if, somehow, his own, for the doctor was the least artistic of men.

Interesting enough in itself, more so the night the images began to move, increasingly as, with time, the pace of their activities rose to normal.  The idealized pueblo, like the pueblerinos who occupied it, went about its business.  It was an ordinary day on the wall of his dreams, it wasn’t night, that much was certain but, the doctor wondered, was the day so ordinary?  There was tension in that dusted air.  Something, he couldn’t help feeling, had happened, was happening, or was about to happen.

In time, he learned from his older patients, the ones slowly dying, something of the history of his Pueblo Viejo, a history new to him, for it had not been that long, historically speaking, since he added his one to the population.  It was, it seemed, or had been, like this.  The wars, all of them, had passed over the village, not bypassed it, no, even though it had little of value, history, history on horseback and on foot, had ridden or walked all over Pueblo Viejo. 

Once upon a time the villagers, los pueblerinos, had posted men on the highest hills that overlooked their pueblo.  When the dust of a hundred hooves or more was spotted—it had to be dust moving more quickly than cows raised it, the rising dust of robbery, rape and rapine—the man on the hill would use his signal mirror to signal down to the man in the church tower that the horde was coming, coming fast.

And the man in the church tower would ring the bell, not violently, not enough to let los bárbaros, the barbarians, know they had been spotted, but a certain ring, one that told the men in town to hide their horses before they were taken, that told the women to get the girls into the ravines before they were raped; the boys too, for they would be taken as underlings at first, then trainees, and finally, riders and rapists themselves.

That done, the villagers could go about their business, yet brace themselves for having their meager supply of grain, even their seed corn, taken by the raiders of either side, for both took what they wanted, though, it was said, only one side took the sainted figures from the church and threw them in the street.  Still, there would be ravishment, rapine, and murder but, thanks to the alarm, to the quick action of the men with mirrors, the man in the bell tower and the women in the street, it would not be universal.

This information gleaned over time, the doctor went back to his lonely dinner, his lonelier bed and, in his recurring dream, nightly now and lasting all the night, the picture came once more to life, only now it was clearer than ever that the population was only pretending to go about its business, as if it might be spotted from the middle distance and did not want to appear as if it were rushing to hide its horses, its girls and boys.

And yet, that much explained, or partially so, evidently more was imminent, something more still hung over, or was buried beneath, the doctor’s pastoral. Yes, the mural moved as before, but it was clearly pretence, a make-believe everyday, construed, even by the artist who covered the walls of sleep with his idealized rural life, to whitewash…  What?

The doctor also took refuge in the everyday.  He cared for his patients, helping those he could, referring those he couldn’t.  He worked long hours.  He came home.  He ate the beans and chicken of everyday.  He enjoyed watching his cook and housekeeper work—she was a good worker—and would sometimes work her way a little closer as she served him, standing a moment longer than she had to, standing even stiller as he ran his hand up under her skirt.  A little more followed.  It wasn’t much, but it was something.  A little stockier than he liked, though soft, coffee colored and clean, the woman, Consuelo, was also kind.

As the nights passed, the doctor himself, though housed and fed and with a future slowly, reasonably, and safely, unfolding in front of him—he wouldn’t always be here unless, like one of his older colleagues, he “went native,” deciding the life of the village, in some ways, had it all over the city—he nonetheless began to feel something like the uneasiness the people of his dream were so carefully concealing, a touch of the fear that, he postulated, must somehow reside in his rented walls, behind the damp plaster, deep in the damp stones, in rotted passageways shared by rats and scorpions and God knew what else.

A mere uneasiness at first, hardly enough to wake him, transforming itself gradually into something somewhat worse: night sweats, kicking, swinging his arms, fighting the unseen enemy in the darkness of sleep and, finally, terror: running for his life, if only running to the dream switch on the dream wall for, as so frequently in reality but especially at that moment, the power was down, the lights were off.

The doctor sat straight up.  He must have been sweating for a while before the landscape of his dream released him.  His sheets were soaked.  He got up in the dark, left his bed to dry, showered in the middle of the night, something he’d never liked to do, dressed warmly and stepped out into the moonlight on his roof.

It was then he saw it.  Why hadn’t he seen it before?  The street scene, the “mural” of his dream, lay exactly as it was painted and repainted, nightly, by the gods, if not of the night, then of the walls themselves.  The view, the vantage point, was exactly that from the house he had rented, only this view really was peaceful, the village was not pretending to sleep, it was sleeping better than he was.  The horrors of history had passed Pueblo Viejo nearly a century ago, hopefully never to return.  There was little rape, less crime and rarely a murder, at least not that he knew of.

There were only the usual suspects: birth, hardship, old age, sickness and death; nothing to terrify a modern man, nothing to set him running for his life, sweating like a pig, if pigs sweat, his mouth open in a soundless scream that wouldn’t even be heard by his housekeeper for she returned to her own house when her work was done.  And now?  At this point in time, if there are points in time, for time, as has been suggested, may be no more than the deadly quotidian of our nights and days, the recurring birth and death with which he was all too familiar.  Now there was only the night sky, a deserted corner.  No men in oversize sombreros, no horses sidling from one side of the street to the other, no scrounging street children.

The doctor went back to bed, that is he lay, washed and combed and fully dressed on top of his covers.  He had seen many a body well after his certification, laid out, a corpse that despite the best efforts of the local mortician and/or beautician, looked worse than, he assumed, he did.  After a while, from the empty side of the bed, he drew his comforter over him, for the nights in Pueblo Viejo, when they weren’t actually cold, were cool, but it was little comfort.  When the night birds settled and one or two distant cocks who, for once, were not mistaken about the coming dawn, called across the still sleeping townscape, he realized he was afraid to shut his eyes, afraid to learn the secret of his village.

This would not do.  A doctor needs his sleep.  Memories flashed upon him of surgeons who had sawed off the wrong limb, even of one who, operating upon a child, an infant really, already rife with cancer, had removed the wrong eye, the one the child could still see out of.  More sweat followed, if not the silent, open-mouthed scream that seemed to be in wait for him.

Research, he decided, was the answer.  If Pueblo Viejo had a secret, someone, someone still living, if not, in fact, everyone but him, knew it.  If his rented house was part of the equation, if he was, in effect, trying to be dead, as they say, to the world, on the scene of an unimaginable crime, he wanted to know it.  The next day, after shocking the fatigue out of his face with cold water and emptying his waiting room on a lucky morning without too many emergencias, he went to inquire of his older colleague, the one who’d “gone native,” if the village had some sordid history he himself had not been informed of when he was hired.

“Well, some say…” began Julio.

Julio was white, most unlike the coffee colored patients they shared.  He had curly hair always falling over his forehead; he was the type of fellow least likely to go native.  His speciality was the illness of everyday, not the kind that got you sent to one of the hospitals in the faraway city, but it was not the preponderance of the ordinary, he informed his younger colleague, that had decided him to stay.  It was el terremoto, the earthquake.  He didn’t have to tell the doctor that he meant the one in México, not Guadalajara.

“Of course, I wasn’t there,” said Julio, in his usual self-deprecating manner.  “Friends of friends were, interning, friends of each other, more than friends, boyfriends, girlfriends, husbands, wives.  Three minutes in the year of our lord, 1985, and they were gone, maimed for life, or mourning.” 

He paused to recusitate the foam on his cerveza oscura.  Had Julio hoped, the doctor wondered, when he learned of his preference for dark beer, to darken himself a little?  If so, it hadn’t worked.  Julio was still whiter than white, curly haired as a newborn, and he looked at you through spotless, rimless glasses artfully ground, not the kind various bodies made available through various plans to the general populace.

“It was then I realized just how ingrown we all were, continued Julio, like toenails.  We were sons and daughters of doctors, we would marry doctors and ‘give the light’ to more of the same.  We dressed identically, we scrambled up the same stairs together, leaving the elevators to our patients.  We saw the same faces, going up, or down, every day.

“In short, doctor—Julio always called his friend ‘doctor’ as if he himself were something less—we were institutionalized, more than they were, our patients who either got better and left or found it simpler to depart this world.  In any case, with the possible exception of those on dialysis, one way or another, out the front door or the back, one day all would leave and we, the men and women in white, were there forever.  As I said, institutionalized.”

“Very interesting,” said the doctor, sipping at his own somewhat lighter beer so as not to rush his older friend, not to let him know how concerned he was about his own case, though he might be headed less for a distant surgery than for the madhouse, la casa de locos.  “Very interesting,” he said again, realizing he had learned nothing about the horrors of their adopted village and deciding on a more indirect approach.  “I certainly understand.  But, Julio, why did you come to Pueblo Viejo?  Sure, you did your rural service here, but then there were other clinics even further in the sticks.  You could have gone down into the barrancas, been the only MD in a hundred kilometers, doctor of medicine to many and father, like the priest, to more.”

The doctors shared a doctorly chuckle or the bachelors, los solteros, shared a bachelorly chuckly.  “In any case,” the doctor continued, “you wouldn’t have to wear white.  You could wear whatever you liked.  You wouldn’t climb the same stairs every day.  You could scramble up a different trail of loose stones every morning.  You wouldn’t have to fret about marrying a doctora or even the nurse you might have had, old, overweight and, really, only a nurse’s assistant.  You wouldn’t worry where to put your handful of pesos.  You’d have even less than you have now.”

“Oh, no,” said Julio, slapping his forehead like an Italian and rolling his eyes behind those spotless high quality lenses.

The friends carried on for a while, then Julio, sensing his younger colleague had a pressing question, pressed him for it.

“Come on, out with it, doctor, you’re leaving as soon as you can get out of your contract.  This is our goodbye beer.”

A couple of thin smiles.  Silence.

“Then it’s something more,” continued Julio.  “For whatever reason, you’ve come to borrow my gun.”

“You’ve got one?”

“Of course.  The permitted handgun for self-defense, defense of house and home.  The permissible caliber, a .380, had to go to México to get it, carried it back in a sealed box, sleep with it under my pillow, well, under the pillow next to mine, the one that would have another head on it if there were another head besides mine.”

“Why?  Why did you go to all that trouble to get a..?”

“I don’t know why.  I’m a city boy.  When I came here I couldn’t get used to the silence, the dark.  I’m comfortable with the blast of horns, the screech of brakes, sirens, the screams of the injured.  I’m accustomed to silence now, the dark.  I like them.  The gun is just a habit.  But, you were telling me you’re going to kill yourself.”

The doctor shook his head.

“Like you, I’m more inclined to self-defense.  In the heat of the moment, I’d have no hesitation.  Placing a bullet would be preferable to receiving one.”

“Then what..?”

Though Julio probed, he never did get the foreign body out.  It remained stuck in the doctor’s body and both men knew it.  The doctor also knew he would have to see una especialista, and soon.  Consuelo, his cook and housekeeper, one day suggested which.  He’d told her, he had to tell someone, that, in spite of her best efforts, he wasn’t sleeping.  In fact, he was sweating through the night, eyes wide, afraid of something, something that wouldn’t take a bullet even if he had one to fire.

They were sitting at the table, on the same side really, one side of the table against the damp wall.  The shared meal behind them, they sat knee to knee.  The doctor was ready to lower his head onto her soft lap, let her run strong fingers through his hair which wasn’t nearly as curly as Julio’s, for the doctor, like most mexicanos, had more than his share of indigenous blood.

“I know someone,” said Consuelo.

The doctor, a man who prided himself on the thought that he knew nonsense when he heard it, sensed he was about to hear some now.

“We’ll talk about it tomorrow,” he said.

“Why tomorrow?” asked Consuelo, who preferred to do things before she forgot to do them.

She looked at him with eyes that were, as always, wide, warm, dark and innocent.

“I want you to spend the night,” said the doctor suddenly.  “I want you to move in.”

There was no hesitation, no question, no delight, just that fatalism country people had to have for, as Consuelo knew as well as anyone, most things, for as many different reasons as there are stars in the night sky, didn’t work out, not for long.  However, even held, and with the good woman barely resisting the urge to give him her breast, to croon to him, the doctor had difficulty breathing, found his eyes wide, fixed on his wall, at times watching the historical scene unfold in front of him, waiting for it to come to life with its careful, calculated dissumulation of everyday life.

Consuelo was no virgin though, for some reason, she had no children.  She had always been daughter, sister and, finally, aunt, tía.  She did not resent her status.  There were not enough men to go around and she didn’t want to go where there were, to leave Pueblo Viejo.  She loved her pueblo.  She cleaned houses because that was the work that had fallen to her.  There was still the family house to live in.  She was not alone in it.  There were two sisters who shared her circumstances.  And, though her house was just as old the one the doctor rented, there was no horror festering in the walls.  Her walls were dry. 

Coming to live with the doctor involved no loss of face, no one was wondering which bed she slept in.  Consuelo enjoyed the doctor’s bed though and hoped she gave as much pleasure as she received, though she knew it wasn’t enough.  She wished it was more, enough to banish the demons who continued their nightly visits.  She did not see the mural he described to her in such detail.  When asked to look, she saw only damp plaster and her only comfort was the hope that his bed, now warm and even dry with their shared body heat, was some comfort to him.

La curandera, the one he was referred to by Consuelo, looked at the doctor and listened to him, then sat in silence longer than was comfortable for either.  She looked at the table in front of her which held no star chart, no crystal ball.  They looked at each other, the man of the modern world and a shriveled prune of a woman.  Plainly she knew better than to blow smoke, spray tequila or make the sign of the cross over a man of his profession.  Finally she spoke, matter of factly, using the familiar with him as if they were old friends.

“Tú sabes la historia de Pueblo Viejo.”

The doctor knew about the flashing mirrors, the wars, the robberies, the rapes, the boys and girls and horses hidden in the ravines, as well as the poor soil, the recurring battle with rain or the lack thereof.

“No, earlier, much earlier,” continued la curandura, rubbing old hands together, already relishing the tale she was about to tell.  “Perhaps, in your free time, for your health, you’ve climbed one or two of the surrounding hills, you’ve stood on the very vantage points from which the mirrors of tiempos históricos were flashed.”

“Yes.”

“There is also a time of prehistoria here, doctor, a time when events were not written down, or even passed on in so many words.”

“Then how do you know about them?” asked the doctor, who half expected her to swirl a rag of blue silk and sequined stars overhead.

La curandera ignored the doctor’s challenge and continued.  “Perhaps you felt a kind of…”  Here she looked for a word, but briefly.  “…aterradora….”   Having found the word, she seemed to relish it.  “Perhaps you sensed, however faintly, a kind of terror.”

The doctor didn’t answer.  He had and la curandera, seeing his face, knew he had.

“I will come to the point,” she said.

“Good,” said the doctor, who didn’t have the kind of time la curandera evidently had.

“We do not know for sure, but some of us suspect those were places of sacrifice, human sacrifice, of boys and girls, when the rains were late, you see.  Blood, blood and tears, for rain.  It made a kind of sense.”  She thought about that a moment, then continued.  “We have been tempted to dig down, and down, to know for sure, but then do we really want to know?”

“I want to know why I’m lying awake at night, why I sweat like a pig, why the mural shifting between my walls comes to life, why there is something deadly in the air, right there on the corner that was there long before I came here but considerably more recently than the times of rumored human sacrifice.”

A moment passed in which both pair of eyes met unblinkingly.

“I do not know,” said la curandera.  I cannot help you.”

They looked at each other a moment longer, then the doctor stood.  He didn’t have all day.

“How much do I owe you?”

“Nada.”

“Why nada?”

“I have not helped you.  I am not a fraud…doctor.  I do not charge whether I have helped you or not.”

The doctor squeezed a thin brown hand that was amazingly hot.  Then he was, as they say, out of there.

The doctor did not believe the crushed skulls of children, or even their gnawed bones, would haunt a hilltop for five hundred years.  That was nonsense.  He should have confronted the old girl more directly with the fact that his nightmare village was barely a hundred years old, not five hundred.  Nevertheless, his doctor’s mind told him to eliminate all possibilities and, the next day he hired the handyman who puttered around la clínica to bring a spade and a couple of burros by his damp house on Saturday.

The two riding out created no sensation.  The doctor was riding una burra.  So what?  He’d gone native like his colleague.  He would no longer inveigh against la pajarete; he’d be first in line at the sick cow; he’d chew a slice of queso casera right there in the office while searching the latest remedies on hiscomputer.  But, an hour on the quiet beast, Pueblo Viejo far behind, and below, and the doctor was feeling he was riding into the past, the decades were falling from him as the careful burra placed her feet, gaining altitude, carrying him ever further into el cerro.

He told José where to dig on the summit and sat and watched him.  It must have been a bad day for evil spirits though because, perhaps with so much company, a burro, una burra and a handyman, not to mention the sound of the spade, the doctor felt nothing resembling terror.  In fact, José soon enough revealed the secret of his general cheeriness, not to mention the secret of why the work of la clínica was never quite done, when he produced a bottle of, appropriately enough, Pueblo Viejo, 38%, which he didn’t feel he could raise without offering un trago to the doctor.

The doctor soon found himself the keeper of the bottle which, indeed, they shared, for José could not work thirty minutes without a swig.  More than an excavation of the dead or even a crime scene, the diggings were quickly becoming a kind of picnic.  José’s burro, the jack, didn’t particularly like the doctor and, when not enjoying the green grass of the hilltop, occasionally threw him a hard eyed look while the doctor’s burra, the jenny, could not take her eyes off him.  Obviously she had never had the privilege of carrying a real doctor into el cerro and was making cow’s eyes at him all the hours they were there.

But a day of digging produced no mangled children.  On the ride downhill, the doctor considered leading his expedition, in days to come, to one or two of the other hills that overlooked Pueblo Viejo, but it seemed pointless.  His dream was of the village, perhaps with its ghosts of raped girls and impressed boys—children, he knew from experience, usually got the worst of things—but not of sacrificed ones.

At night the childless doctor lay with, or upon, his childless housekeeper, but he could not say that, instead of little bastards they were birthing ghosts of any age, of any era.  Besides, Consuelo had never seen his mural come to life.  It, as well as the dissembling multitude of another time, had to be his, somehow his.  The doctor’s.  He didn’t even feel he could blame it on the damp old house, which was probably not without its own terrors.

That night, the night of the doctor’s exploratory expedition into el cerro, which he had soon learned was the talk of the town, was the worst of all.  He could not only see himself running headlong through his mural, he knew he was running for his life, mouth wide in what he hoped was a soundless scream.  Around a dusted corner of his mural, the doctor suddenly stood stock still in the dust.  He, brave man, would see what, or who, was coming around that corner after him and, sure enough, someone did.

“Consuelo!”

“…doctor, doctor…”

“What?  What?”

The doctor, after all, was in the darkness of his bed, not in the dusty mural of his dream and Consuelo, good woman, was holding him tight, rocking him, rocking him.

“You were screaming.”

“Silently, I hope.”

“It woke me up,” said Consuelo, who was a sound sleeper.

“Then it wasn’t silent.”

“No.”

That was the night the good woman did give him the breast and, in time, he slept.  The next day she herself came up with an idea.  It may not have been her first, but it was one of the first she shared with him, and she only had it and shared it because she was forced to by circumstance.  Perhaps, also, because she cared.

“Doctor.”

“Consuelo.”

They were seated at the table, on the same side as usual, facing the wall.  The beans and chicken—his cook and housekeeper had a limited repertory—were behind them, or at least within.

“I think, no matter what you say, I think the problem is here, in this house.”

Where? thought the doctor, raising his eyebrows.  The doctor, not being much of believer, believed that, if something was, it was somewhere, you could probably find it if you looked.

“We will have to look for it,” said Consuelo who might have been illiterate—the doctor would never put her on the spot to know for sure—but who could read his thoughts quite easily.

To make a long story short, the two spent the weekend searching, going over the old house from dusted roof angle to mouldy crawl space, but it was in the wall of the bedroom, the one they slept in, that they found it.  Within the very wall of the hyperactive mural.  There was, an oddity in the age in which the house was built, an inset doorless closet which sort of matched the inset doorless pantry of the kitchen on the other side.  There, at foot level, behind their hanging clothes, they came upon a small, plastered over door which time, in its wisdom, had very nearly revealed.

“I’ll get a knife,” said Consuelo, her practical intelligence asserting itself as the doctor clawed at the crumbling wall with his nails.

“Good idea,” said the doctor, who rarely said that to anyone.

The kitchen knife, more of a cleaver really, quickly revealed the hidden compartment as well as the package wrapped in oiled paper and placed within God knew when.  The doctor and Consuelo opened it at the kitchen table.  The manuscript was quite hefty, perhaps because of having been handwritten, but it was not illegible, and the doctor read the first few pages aloud to Consuelo.

It was an unsigned but very individual history of Pueblo Viejo.  It had, in its way, the doctor realized as he read, its own voice.  There was no horror or even an anticipation of horror in it, except perhaps the horror of every day, time passing as it always did, no matter what you did, at least not in the first few pages.  It was simply a story of a people, the age old human story, one that, apparently, would not be forgotten, one that needed to be told.