Gaudi's Lizards
I’d come out of the jewelry store late one afternoon and the heat was coming down like the king of Spain had died. I was off work. I booked it for my flat. To get near a fan, into the shadows. I could still see the bonfire of horror in Sascha’s face. They were cleaning the Cascada Monumental, gold horses stomping into eternity and the scaffolding gave. I fell. My body twisted like a flag in the dying wind. I would have dashed my head on the waterfall if I hadn’t caught a beam.
The doctors said give the injury rest, give it time. They didn’t know what they were taking about. I was in two bands, maybe a third. I tried new techniques, playing left. I took solitary walks to loosen something, maybe become a great Ecuadorian poet — a great Kichwa poet; try that on — but I read too much science. Even my tattoos started to feel pointless. I stood before the Sagrada Familia one afternoon, the cranes dangling idiotically, and imagined that when workers placed the final cross on that final spire, the whole monstrosity would crash to the earth. People would worship among the rubble, just as Gaudí planned it. I sent a small ceramic version of Gaudí’s lizards to my father, the first time I’d sent anything home.
I became addicted to this. It cost a small fortune but I didn’t care. I did it every month. I never got any response but I imagined my father setting them on the shelf lining the inside of the house, the Amazon would thunder outside and he’d sip his chicha as they glittered beneath the candles. Boats would arrive from villages donde nace la lluvia to see the colors. And then one day he sent me a picture, him grinning in a hammock and all the lizards were positioned beneath him in a ring. That was it. No message. The river ran a bright orange behind him and I could make out two kids on the banks and I remembered, I still remember a dream, a dream, oh the stars beneath my dream, as my mother supposedly sang, where I was walking that same bank, a mist covering the space of air just above the earth, and a jaguar drank from the opposite shore, she looked at me and I stepped across to her and we touched foreheads and said if you leave the forest I cannot protect you, and leapt into the brush.
I returned to Ecuador in a posture I can only describe as defensive. ¡Viva Ecuador! Viva what? What are we living for? The world frozen in a state of accusation, consumed by faith and screens, who can care about Ecuador darting in the background? I tried every treatment I could find for my hand. Powders, crystals, the latest fashion in plants. Sickening calisthenics, vitamin shamans. I carved the brachial plexus in palo santo and almost burned my home down. Do you know the only treatment that helped? Drinking. I know that sounds ridiculous. But my palsy returns without it. I know you don’t believe me. You earlier said alcohol is too small, too sharp, it cuts everywhere, and why you don’t drink. I am secure in my decision.
But not long after I returned to Ecuador two friends and I started sabotaging oil camps. The details aren’t important. We never took a life. I should say that. But they were smarter than us, the oil companies. They never complained, never made a story, never created hope. But once we were approaching a gas station. Oil companies own so much of Ecuador they build their own gas stations to keep their private road systems working. We were going to cut the lines and destroy what we could. No one ever lived at these stations. But here was a yellow tent. I still remember the way it looked against the trees. And we heard a man yelling behind the garage. A maniac. We came around the corner and found him with a jaguar.
You asked whether I’ve seen a jaguar in the wild and I said no. But I have seen a dead jaguar. This man had trapped one. From his screaming the jaguar, a jaguar had killed his dog. And do you know what this man had done? He shot her apart, hung her hind legs from a branch and dunked her head in a bucket of turpentine. I could smell it. I imagine he wished the station had barrels of oil to complete his symbolism. He was lecturing in this unhinged tone, that she was going to be an example for other jaguars, he’d hang her deep in the forest so jaguars would learn not to attack. This kind of thing. Where do you think he was from? An American? A broken Ecuadorian? The most arrogant Argentinian in South America? Spain of course. He was yelling at the jaguar in the most luxurious Castilian Spanish. The king’s Spanish! It was a Spanish oil company!
Bufón ridiculed me for taking this connection so seriously. That I’d been chased from Spain only to find a Spaniard murdering my forest. Well what did you do? he’d asked. You would not do anything, I said. With a man speaking like this. Bufón cried, You could have done something more compelling than creep away!
We were at my bar. Above the river. On the patio. He’d come over a few minutes before. I threw water at him but he got out of the way and it splashed along the stones.