Forest

We hadn’t noticed, but a kind of water started trickling from the trees, from the branches to the leaves and onto us, our heads, our shoulders. It’s rain, and it may be powerful and thunderous up there, with bolts that light the crown of the boundless woods, but it reaches us as mere drops of mist. That’s how down below we are.

Soon it’s dampened everything. Contrary to what we believed, mud can get slicker, and the torn things disintegrating under our feet can rot even more. The smell climbs denser, heavier, into our nostrils. The air is made of water that envelops us.

Drops of something like sweat rise from my neck, which is a single mass packed with dirt and all kinds of waste and bits of fruit or bark, how can I be sure, spilling down from up above. The droplets seep from my head, mark furrows in my face. Maybe it isn’t sweat, maybe it’s water or some other exhalation of the plants, of unknown animals up above, watching us, regarding us patiently, following our progress, unnoticed by us.

My clothes are completely drenched, stuck to my skin. I’m constantly aware of my own stench and that of my fellows, and when I stop to think about it, about smells and what causes them, I feel even more lost, me in the middle of the woods, clumsy, useless. We’re warped, dirty beasts advancing into forbidden densities. We’ll never get out of here.

When had it crossed our minds to go in? After all, our place was a different one, a place where we could control things and calculate time. Here, by contrast, time is a ghost whose presence you feel when it moves, cold and invisible, but you can’t use it, or measure it, or name it. We have hands, but they’re ungainly around all these trees. What our hands can do out there is futile here; what we need them to do, our hands can’t do it. We have feet and they keep going, but we don’t know the route or where we’re bound. What’s the use of glancing around to prevent some tiger from attacking, why bother peering through the leaves. Do we even know how to look in this quivering world?

The holes in my boots are wider since yesterday, and now a knotty clump of dead leaves or a chunk of earth can slip in and scrape my socks, which are already chafing the soles of my feet, which are already rubbing against all the roughness until they bleed. The earth insists its way through the tatters of my clothes, forceful as claws, boring into the folds of my skin, piercing hour after hour into the red of my flesh. All you can do is not think about the pain. There’s a place in the mind that can silence harm, but the cost is sorrow seeping everywhere.

We make arduous headway and I’m on the verge of tears. I don’t care about the salty current trickling earthily down my face, I just wipe my eyes once I can’t see. Because maybe I don’t want to see. There’s no point. In any case, I won’t have time to figure out if that length of branch is a slithering snake, curling around my mud-caked ankles, climbing the legs of my foul-smelling pants. By the time the fangs have sunk, in the middle of everything, into my flesh, my eyes will be no good to me either. It won’t make sense to tear off a scrap of shirt, tighten the tourniquet above my knee, hurry, yell.

I think we’ve forgotten why we’re walking, why we’re still pressing forward. But why bother asking. Do any of us even know when we’ll arrive? We’ve emptied out our senses. It’s fate, we said, it’s divine punishment. Punishment for what? we asked. And then: Whose fault is it? And we thrash in the dirt, cursing each other. A kick to the side, a ruptured lip. We’ve rummaged in the belly of every question and nothing has come out. Everything is hollow.

Once in a while, a branch shudders and the leaves burst against my face; some scratch and quicken the pain, others stroke my lids and soothe them. But we say nothing. It’s possible that the one walking in front, the one whose name we no longer say aloud, still knows where he’s going and why. I catch glimpses of him through the green smudges. Sometimes he slips away among the trunks or vanishes into the foliage, but then his body appears again, or the rustle of his progress, or something undefined, the trace of his presence in the humid mist engulfing us.

My arms are crawling with ants, lured by the sweet, sharp scent of dying trees that have daubed me with their sap. Like the ground, I’m a receptacle for the waste snubbed by the trees. As the days pass, the forest coats us with its excess skin. We slowly cease to be this person or that, and we take on a resemblance to the density we’re trying to cross.

The one in front stops short. Then the one behind him, and he stumbles, dizzy. He grabs hold of a trunk, adjusts his aching body so he can rest his back against it. He pants and closes his eyes.

I look at the other one, the one who stopped first: he puts his hands on his hips, spits mud, and wipes his forehead with his arm. I stop walking and all the colossal plants suddenly fall onto me, crushing, endless. I try to lift my head, but the weight of the forest overtakes me. My veins are rivers of gravel in my legs.

Another man appears, though I’m not sure where he came from, maybe from behind or alongside me, I can’t be sure, I hadn’t sensed him there. Dried blood streaks his head from crown to ear, and he’s bootless. His filthy socks show his toes, his blackened nails, his bruises gone darker with dirt and scabs.

I want to call out to the one in front, to plead with him: we can’t stop, we won’t be able to keep walking again if we do, we’ll abandon our strength in the helpless appraisal of our wretched bodies. But there’s no use talking.

I listen. My heart beats slowly in my chest. Outside, the trees sound, the roots creep as silently as snakes, surrounding us. Where are those birds, those monkeys in the distance, how many are there, shrilling with rage.

The one with no boots stands there open-mouthed. His eyes look vacant, overwhelmed. I catch sight of a dark tongue behind his lips, a mass of flesh that drools and can’t still the trembling. He’s not bleeding from the head anymore. His hands are bruised like mine, like the one who rests against the tree and weeps, panting, like the one in front who turns his back to us now.

I hear the muffled sobs of the second one. He’s still leaning against the trunk, and there’s something dark in his face. Looking up, I strain to find the canopy of the tree he clings to, try to distinguish it from the others. Tiny droplets spatter my face. All I can see is a single green and shadowed thing, dense to the point of blindness. The man weeps and his body slumps away from the tree; his knees buckle and he lets himself spill onto the ground.

We’ll hunt in the woods tonight, Antonio had told us, I know a guy, everything’s ready. It was late in the afternoon and we were drinking under the eaves. We saw the path, the front gate of the house, the pasture in the open air. Beyond all that was the horizon of trees, and it looked easy to walk out there in our new boots, carry a rifle, a flashlight. Antonio had spoken to the tracker and he’d take care of everything.

Then we made our way single file, stopped to share a drink. We’d walked for about three hours and nothing had happened, we were angry, thinking that the tracker wasn’t as good as we’d been told. There’s nothing to hunt out here, he’s worthless. Maybe he isn’t even a tracker. Then we lost him. We felt our way forward for a little while, shouting his name, but we never saw him again.

The one in front turns around and looks at us. We’re numbers: he counts us. This morning, I saw that he still had his shotgun, but now it’s gone. His empty hands hang beside him, rub his eyes, drop down again, dangle motionless. There are four of us left, but we’re all tired. He tries to make out some sky, a scrap of dark cloud, but all he sees is the tangle, brown and yellow and green. The branches drip with a rain that isn’t falling anymore.

A mosquito clings to my ear. Now there are two, but I don’t care. My arm doesn’t move. My hand doesn’t pat. My ear doesn’t protest the wild sting as it spreads deep into my brain. The pain must be scattered.

Without looking at each other, we’re all thinking the same thing. It’s the density of the forest. There’s no free space here, no place where our exhaustion can spread itself out. We all hear the fear that reaches us like whispers through the trees, filling the hollow trunks, the eyes of wasps, the dead leaves. They’re the same sounds as yesterday, and before yesterday, and the day before, and the first day: the water’s steady beat, the branches trembling when they release a weight we never saw, the shrieks from somewhere not far off.

We listen to the insects roaming our blood invisibly, anticipating our decay. We listen to the wriggling of the worms, the beak of some bird cracking the tender flesh of fruit.

Nothing new crosses the ruthless wall, and the one in front, who has finished telling us, turns his sickened back once more and starts to walk away. The blood is sticking to my socks, but I follow. My pants are torn. The wound on my thigh starts to bleed again. Where are the eyes that hungrily track this slash in me?

I shake my head and a pair of yellowed leaves falls from my hair, drifting ponderous toward the earth. Everything rots and there are no words for it. The one with the dried blood on his head begins to walk.

I close my burning eyes, my feet advance, but I can’t go any faster. A trembling branch settles back into place, showing me where the one who tells us went, where I must go.

Slowly, I make my way toward the weeping man. He’s sitting on the ground, and if I reached out my arm, my open palm could brush against his jaw, stroke his cheeks, wipe them clean of dirt. I wouldn’t have to remember his name or any other words. I could console him beyond the beasts that crouch in wait for us among the leaves.

Coated in mud and sweat, streaked all over, he’s the same color as the one crumbling on the ground, and his head looks like a misshapen tree stump rising interminably skyward. I look at him as I pass. My body no longer has anything that could be his.

All he says is that soft whimper, like a dog’s, and his dry eyes. He doesn’t look at me, but of course he feels the nausea my body emanates. I think I should think of him, remember a time we did something together. What was his face like? We’ve all known each other since we were small, when the days were radiant. Once again, tears furrow my face. I wipe my eyes. I won’t stop, and maybe he already knows it.

When I press on, the branches will close behind me, the leaves will go still, and the air will halt again, as if nothing had ever crossed any path at all. The rotted leaves will swallow my tracks and all the stenches of my body will vanish in the damp. I’ll leave no trace that he might follow, no footsteps to track and decipher. Then he too will dissolve by that tree. Leaves will tumble down, and the waste will slowly cover his face and shoulders, and his bitter sobs will tangle with the roots, and they’ll creep over the ground together, until they jumble and meld and become one with everything.

It won’t be long before the night comes back again.

Translated by Robin Myers

The Trees is out now from Relegation Books.

In the glow of a hungry moon, the yellow dog finally shook off the ropes that tethered her to the post in a yard. Her desperate claws gouged at the hollow between the old wooden door and the adobe wall until she widened it. Squeezing her body flat, she wiggled through and emerged victorious onto the cold of the street, where the males had gathered.

They’d waited restlessly as she struggled, listening to her panting body, taking in her limbs a little at a time. When she was finally free, they jostled around her in an eager commotion, hemming her in. She could smell them, too, and they examined her fur, her ears, the scent of every leg, guessing the age of the blankets she slept on, the bones in her food, the dark footsteps of her masters.

The males knew each other from before. A couple of them shared a brother, forgotten now, and others slept in the same yard, or had once played or fought together or against each other. They were acquainted from the market or the sun in the square. They all lived on the street, had all learned to sense any hints of a brandished broom, a curse before the fist or the shout could cohere and arrive. They knew how to gauge their bodies and their strength at the sight of another male ahead or beside them, and they knew the changing seasons in their fur and in the fields.

They could wander the village at all hours, because they knew the streets, knew which houses had ferocious guardians; which had shoddy walls, where they could slip in to steal something or sniff around (attentive, too, to any advancing masters) in the trash. They also knew how to identify the generous doors that occasionally swung open to offer scraps from dinner or a bowl of fresh water, doors that would reveal a hand to scratch behind their ears before snapping shut again with the heat and safety trapped inside (because that wasn’t something they got as a matter of course, but something they spent days and nights seeking and sometimes finding but sometimes not, not nearly often enough, or just for a moment at a time).

But all of that was now on pause, as if it were only a dream and the scent of the yellow dog had jolted them awake, erasing their routine of survival. This was a different kind of time: it progressed in a constant spiral and whatever happened happened twice. First in their own bodies, as if they’d never had one before, and then suspended in midair, piercing, insistent.

The males could hear, for example, how her fluids burgeoned drop by drop inside her, feeding each other, and then they felt the dense charge of them, listened to the murmur as they thickened to a torrent and surged ahead, seeping into her muscles and her bones, these same fluids reaching, now hot, her snout and paws. They could sense, as if for the first time, the sweet fragrance of the pajarilla leaves along the sidewalk, the sting of ants hidden under rocks, the rain that would stop falling by daybreak, and the paws trotting along, striking the cold earth and rough pebbles.

Now, hovering ardent around her, the males too felt heavy waves ebbing and flowing deep inside themselves, in their growl-hungry throats rasping the air, luring the female, sovereign of the smell that drowned out all the others, until everything fell away but what radiated from that yellow body.

There she was, within reach, the yellow dog and her sweat, and the males turned their blind attention to whatever dared impose itself and demanded to be destroyed in a fierce and filthy way, with betrayals and merciless snaps of jaws. The codes of coexistence, which obeyed old, hard-earned, blood-defended hierarchies, had been fading as they’d approached the house. It was all that mattered to the males, the existence of the female and whatever she did, as soon as her penetrating, inextinguishable essence had summoned them from their different sanctuaries, all the way to this deserted street, this midwinter night.

They jockeyed around the yellow dog. Menacing, they seemed to grow larger from one instant to the next, as if in surges of rage: the male body suddenly halted, rigid, the fur raised on his back, his stiffened legs, his teeth bared, about to attack, seeking complicity with some against the others.

Safe behind their walls, nestled against their stoves and blankets, the masters didn’t hear any of these primordial rites, and she, with the agility of want, her body crackling with zeal, managed to slip right through them and trot away, the night wind spilling over her face, aimless.

Her claws hurt, but that wasn’t important. Her heart beat hard, and she could see the male dogs following her, navigating the alleyway she’d just managed to skirt, turning left where she’d turned a few seconds before, tense, waiting for them, letting them catch up, allowing them a whiff of her before she trotted off again among growls and threats, knowing they were close on her trail, the full moon fracturing in the shallow puddles her feet broke among the crooked cobbles of the street.

Everything was instinct for those dogs. Her light body moved for movement’s sake, farther and farther away now, conveyed entirely by itself, not feeling the cold, not tracking the distance home or worrying about it, not thinking about where she would stop. A strange strength bore her forward unafraid and all she knew was that she wanted to arrive, there was something she’d always longed for and it was about to happen.

Then the moon cast its light in a certain direction and the yellow dog could make out the roof of the house, an old, vulnerable roof, and all the rumbling stopped. That roof, those tiles… Her snout caught an ancient smell: the stove for baking bread, and a peach tree, right at the back of that yard she knew was there, even if she couldn’t see it. Something was there that had belonged to her a long time ago: behind the sagging wall bloomed an orchard, then another yard, the second; and all the way in the back, adjacent to the square, facing it, she sensed some rooms, a grapevine and its shadow, fresh water with a kitchen and a garden.

But all of this swept over her for only an instant, and it was more of a pang than a thought, enmeshed with the panting and the haste of the dogs behind her. She was about to trot off again, but then, dispersing more of the clouds, the moon insisted, illuminating the adobe. That adobe and none other. It was all very sudden. Unable to resist, her back paws pushed back on the stones of the street, and she leapt over the wall. Behind her, the males hesitated, but in a moment they were also inside.

The silvery light bathed everything, rebirthing the sounds and smells that had been lost until then, as if what no longer was could be anew, simply because she crossed the wall and entered that house. There she found the garden and the peach tree, persisting despite the barren plot and dry trunk, and she could smell the missing pepper plants, the manure spilled among the furrows, the flowers that had ceased to bless the ground.

Then she noticed that the earth was strangely hot under her claws. Her stinging feet, coming in from the stones of the night and the winter puddles, now felt a gentle warmth. In that backyard, in that patch of trees and vegetables long dead, the earth breathed and thrummed, as if it harbored something dying but still strong enough to sprout.

There was a rush of vertigo somewhere in her body, a muted stammer, which the dog called black and the dog called bear interpreted as weakness. They leapt at her, and she reacted with rage, sinking her teeth into the dark shoulder of the larger one. The black dog seized his chance and struck as well, gripping the throat of the animal under attack. It was the signal they’d all been waiting for. Their fangs gleamed, filling the yard with barks and claws that clutched and slit, kicking up dust, tumbling down, lost.

Squeals of pain and fury, but she sniffed through the chaos. Confident, she darted toward the heavy door she knew was on the other side of the garden, and she pushed at it, sensing it would yield, and when it yielded she trotted on, plucked from the circle of life, carried along by the will of the moon, and when she crossed a dark corridor, she smelled the corn that used to be stored in the loft but wasn’t anymore (not its grains or its husks or the sweat-scent of those masters who had carried the corn all the way up on their backs), and she continued into the second yard.

Arriving, she stopped for a moment. There was the clay oven and she sensed that the clay would still be warm, it too would pulse, and the dirt in this yard felt like the dirt in the previous one. She moved closer, sniffing. A cat and her huge-eyed kittens stared at her through the crack in a door, but she wasn’t interested in that. The currents clamored on inside her: and then, on the hot earth of the house, something else happened.

Before her eyes, the yard and everything in it parted and warped, receiving her, and the straight lines, the clumsy corners built by men, went hazy, soft. Now everything was curved and throbbing like a womb. The faraway moonlight shone down on this closed world, and what was made of earth (the oven, the adobe walls, the yard) seemed to stretch and open itself to welcome what was reaching it from above. Yes, she was part of the circle, too, which is why the concave world embraced her, and she let herself be there, astonished.

The yellow dog closed her eyes, feeling like she might fall. Then she opened them and took in the trail of the masters and their movement: a chair, broken on the ground, retaining just two of its legs and part of the back. There were pieces of things that no longer were, that lay irreconcilable in the grass, coated with spatterings of mud from the rain. On one side of the yard, against a dividing wall, she saw a row of three rooms with low ceilings and small shattered windows. They’d been uninhabited for years and there were gashes in the walls, sprouting shy weeds and climbers.

The moon showed her the shadows kindled by these plants against the battered walls, showed her the small shining eyes set on her, a concave world still pulsing, and the cracks in the old semicircle of clay, as if calling to her. The dog approached the warmth of the oven and her fur stood on end: there was the fire and the bread. She wanted to enter that womb, curl up beside the ashes (although there were no ashes anymore and she knew it), and sleep.

Yet the moon wasn’t alone, and there were cycles unleashed in the bellies of the beasts, which hurtled forth inexorable. Three dogs, freed from battle, had followed the female. The least-injured approached, wanting to thrust his body onto her. She tensed and bared her teeth, furious. An unfamiliar strength overtook her, not the strength of heat or pups, and the male withdrew.

Then the rest of the pack appeared. The males were inflamed, relentless, attacking each other.

She had to keep going. With two males in close pursuit, she took the narrow corridor out to the front yard. She advanced in darkness, silent, and as she neared the end she saw a hesitant light, summoning her, drawing her out into the center. There, gathered around this yard, was the heart of the house. She recognized the kitchen door, where the cooking pot would be, for boiling corn; the tank and its old lichen still licking at the base; the little garden with the grapevine, now dead, and the greenish, foul-smelling water, and the junk and tools, the walls and windows. The rooms continued, all in a row, identical, dark but still full of their scents, the routines she’d been able to identify a long time ago.

Following those who’d gotten there first, the other males appeared as well, mixing their rages together and waging a sick supremacy she could thwart in an instant.

They were all here by now, the beasts. They’d come from the mud of the street, crossing the yards from last to first. They charged in as a horde, but scattered as soon as they felt the stillness, wary, sensing the steps, the mouths, the silenced evenings. It was a house. Masters lived here. Their snouts sought wakes: some path, some lingering echo. They sniffed at the hollow trunk of the vine, scoured the dirt for the paths of insects, the dead yellowed leaves, listened for the wind that crept down and whirled cold against the walls and against the green windows that still resisted, whimpering.

Separate, the yellow dog searched beyond the growls that the males kept trading among themselves. Here too the cobbled path was still hot, resting in the lap of the earth that throbbed beneath it. Where is it hidden, where does it come from, this living breath?

Almost nothing smelled of people anymore: the nights, the wind, and the rain had gradually blotted out their voices. And the warmth abided all the same. It was as if some current, like a river or a sleeping blood, were still drawing sporadic breath. Within the walls, beneath the stones, in the heart of the abandoned flowerpots, in the very well of still water, and most of all in the ground, the earth, something waited, drowsy, heating things.

She tracked, she searched for the source of the palpitation, as if that source had called her there, on that cold night, now that the fertile time had come.

Up above, dark clouds thickened the sky, cloaking the light behind their waters.

But everything had been unleashed already. The bear, wild, tried once again to dominate her, and when he lunged and she made herself into a lance, she flung her body against a door, and that door, so often washed by rain and dried by sun, yielded with a screech, snapping a hinge, the yellow dog stumbling forward, suddenly in the room, inside, with the moon close behind her (hurried, dissolving the storm), brutal and full, finally irrupting, colossal, hungry for secrets, ruthlessly revealing all that had been denied to any gaze until just then.

Stunned animal-eyes found shelves and boxes (sensing within them the books, forgotten photos, a diploma, blind documents), weathered clothing (and their colors, the little arms inside, little mouths spilling soup), so many hushed years, the child’s bed (that child and no other after) still made, an empty jewelry box on the nightstand, and a scrap of bread, forgotten. Terrified by this world that had shattered in the light, the bear barked, frenzied, half crying, and the things that had been sleeping until then began to stir and tremble, jumble, whine. The beasts’ anguished bodies, clumsy, jostled nightstand and boxes.

What lay still under the small wooden chest was also knocked over and pitched, falling into the empty space amid the chaos: first the jewelry box smashing against the black, then the sweet bit of bread with its oven, the clay, the hands that shaped that clay, with the fresh water, the stored wheat and its flour, along with the yeast, the tray and the trunk it was made of, the sugar and the pantry where it was kept, along with the wood and the arms that chopped it down, the chalky walls, the hunger and the bed where that hunger had slept, in any case, along with everything, and the house in that everything, everything fell, splintering into hundreds, scattering everywhere.

The moon, round and full, revealed this fragility exactly as it was. It was just some old bread, like what we keep hidden, latent, that cracks and dies once illuminated, and so what it contained also began to crack and die.

The yellow dog, nest and thunderclap, never word, looked at all that was lit up and felt the ancient, faraway creak. Fear shot through the whole of her. The cold, freed, reached out its delicate fingers, invading corners, eliminating tiny remnants, crushing stones and earth, traveling the fur of the beasts, and in the yard the dogs began to howl, forgetting their hatreds and their impulses, longing to flee the silence that had begun to coat the windows and the shadows.

Now the beasts ran, frenetic, their backs rocking over galloping paws, their once-fierce tails now shrunken, their hides alert, passing through corridors and gates, tripping into each other, navigating broken chairs, seeking the wall they’d vaulted to come in. The yellow dog, ears pressed low, behind but fleeing too, looked skyward in search of the moon. But the moon, magnificent, forgetting her, satisfied at last, hid its face and loosed the night.

Translated by Robin Myers