Micah Muldowney: CONFESSIONS • Cleaver Magazine

Micah Muldowney
CONFESSIONS

It is a full moon tonight, but she has yet to clear the colinas of Salina Cruz. She might not crest at all; they are high and stark, almost walls, and the valley is very thin, almost a ravine except there is no river. In daylight, the colinas hang thin in the air like sheets on a line, almost weightless. The wind might catch them. But now that it is night, there is a weight to them, and their shadows welter in the streets.

Making my way through the dark, I think—and not for the first time—that Salina Cruz is a strange and unlovely town, pushed well beyond her natural limits by the appetency of her nation. I have been told that before Cortés, she was just a handful of palm huts in the thin strip of valley opening into the gulf. The region was generally considered inhospitable to human life due to the Tehuano winds that scour the coast through the wind gap of the isthmus, coloring the waters with algae blooms almost a hundred miles out to sea—winds so fierce I knew a man who died of them on the way to La Ventosa. He had been riding in the flatbed of a pickup, as is customary in these parts, when the wind took it and flipped it over seven or eight times, and of course, he was exposed. There is no protection from such a thing. There was no real way even of identifying the body, beyond what was left of the truck. People clucked their tongues when they heard, but no one was surprised. That was the way it was: the risk of living in such a place. But still, the shrimp fishery was rich in the tidal lagoons and there was salt harvest and trade when they were dry, and there was always skate and sea bass and mullet in the Pacific. Later, Cortés found the bahia convenient to build a shipyard and a lighthouse fueled by the oil flensed from the local sea turtles, and from there he launched his campaigns of conquest against Baja California, in what is now called the Sea of Cortés.

The worst came during the porfiriato when the Trans-Isthmic railroad was conceived and a major terminus constructed on the shores of the Laguna Superior so that a port could be built in earnest and grow apace with modern tastes for shrimp and shipping, along with an oil refinery and finally, a military base. From where I now stand, I can just make out where their floodlights pool down at the end of the low slope of the open carretera, huddled close against the arms of the hills and the vast and featureless dark of the gulf.

The modern city had been built all at once over the bones of the old by the notorious British contractor Wheetman Pearson, I am told, and it is charmless and unimaginative, all thrift and mathematics and ‘good functional engineering’ in ways only a colonial Briton could contrive, and with it there had poured in a host of engineers and journeymen and operators and deck-hands and boatswains and stevedores and yardmen and rail workers and servicemen from every corner of Mexico and beyond, and with them came saloons and day-laborers and prostitutes and panhandlers, and the city began to grow up the hanging slopes of the valley like the fruiting bodies of a climbing mold, sometimes on grades so steep that the front door of a house was two or more stories below the back, and the space was made up in any way the ingenious mind of a provincial albañil could imagine, chiefly through the use of cantilevers and then cantilevers upon cantilevers and an endless wrap of sheet metal, often with the branding of its original intended use imprinted upon it, be it jalapeños or beans or tomatoes or what have you.

I am on my way home now, and the city is a maze of every shape made to frighten a child in the dark. The heat is savage, even now, at night, and it is very wet and heavy when the wind blows off the gulf. Even so, the port and city are loud with life and the energy of labor, in all of which I have never taken part. It has been a bitterly disappointing day. Something must have happened at the border that I would not know about, or perhaps there was something in the paper about gente vestido de Sacerdote committing some excess or other, as the people have been curt or even abusive as I made my rounds. I am sure I would have been in a fight if I was not so much taller than the average Istmeño. I have also had to ration my water closely, as it only comes a few hours a week, and last time I was away for the whole of it. I stink of the heat and sun and unwashed clothes so that even I can smell it. I am ready to be home.

There is a word in Spanish for the darkness of the streets when there is no moon: tenieblas. A hellish sort of darkness, deep and black and predatory. I follow the lip of the street as discreetly as I can, closing my eyes to the small lights that would blind me to the dark and danger—the odd streetlamp and door lights and the tapers flickering for the ancestors in the windows. I feel people’s eyes floating on the periphery like the red eyes of dogs at the far edge of firelight, curious and hungry. I am on the outside, after all, and their lights are there so I can be discovered, not the other way around.

Cruzeros are a mixed lot, mostly from someplace else and utterly devoid of the sense of place or belonging you’d see further out in the pueblitos; a society of strangers, really, who only come together briefly and from time to time around odd scraps of cultural flotsam like cock-fight betting or drinking or complaints of neighbors or the infidelities of spouses. They will laugh over anything. The night air is strident with their voices, so much so that I cannot help but imagine the cries of Enoch’s fallen angels: the shouts of costermongers on their last and desperate turn and the clamor of trucks dragging cans and nails sparking across the pavement to advertise their wares, the barking of the street dogs which have grown restless and overbold with the setting of the sun, the voices of drunks drifting angry or ebullient from every cantina, always on about something and never alone, the piercing, nasal calls for Mat-IIIas RoMERRRRo, for IxtePEEEEEC, for Juchitan-tan-TAN, places where frankly I would walk safer and more at ease on a night as starless as this one, and the calls of “Ven, Papacita” from the crimped putos and nightwalkers pussyfooting behind their drab maquillaje and jacklit posterns. There are, it may be, so many kinds of voices in the world, and none of them is without signification. I shut them out, shut out all the world except the road ahead and the steps of my tired feet.

We might call this seething olla podrida ‘cosmopolitan’ in the States, except Salina Cruz is too small and provincial to allow for the broadness that word normally implies. ‘Eclectic’ might be a better word, or acomodaticia maybe, because life here is perfect for no one. We all must make our peace. I imagine it is a fascinating place to grow up—children love bluster and will find even a train yard beautiful—but I am not a child.

There are, of course, local people, Istmeños, mostly indigenous Zapotec stock who refer to the military and refinery set as ‘the others’ and speak their own language among friends or like a code before their enemies, and there are others, like the Ikoot, who preserve the memories of a hundred generations before when the Zapotecs themselves were the interlopers. The Zapotec word for them is Huave, which means ‘those who stink in the humidity,’ more or less, so you can see the same sorts of things have been happening in Salina Cruz for a very long time.

From these people, I have learned the history of this place, though mostly through complaints and reminiscences of older, more glorious generations. The general opinion is that things were better in some indeterminate time before they were born, before whomever it was had come. Cortés was a cruel one, and La Malinche as well, they would say, but at least they had brought the saints and their holy days. Las fiestas. What had these others brought, besides venereal disease? They are a minority now, but they make up a majority of my congregation because they are the ones who do not leave. I am touched that they do not speak to me like an outsider, though my blue eyes are more alien to this town than even the tall norteños on base, and they call me ‘blonde’ as if it were a name, though no one at home would ever have described me as such.

Outside of that small sphere things are different. Many here have never seen someone like me, at least not in the flesh, and I often hear mothers crossing themselves and muttering invocations against evil as I walk past or whispering overloud to a child that I am a witch and if they do not behave I will fly out at night and steal their eyes. Even now I can catch them darting behind a door or a low fence at my approach. I can hear them hissing at me. But that is only among the poorest and most superstitious. Anyone with a TV will know what I am and have opinions about it that have nothing to do with me. They will often stop me in the street to shout or deliver a comeuppance. I suppose I am uniquely suited to make them feel bigger than they are. Often, it takes the form of Albur, a wheedling verbal game that plays on cunning or secret double meanings that are either sexual or scatological in nature. Though I often understood at least the drift of their complex intimations, it is against the nature of my calling to acknowledge them, leading them to conclude I am either slow or stupid, or else from a finicky people, devoid of humor, and it pleases them either way. What do I have to be proud of, to think myself better than them? Nothing, I would tell them, but they need to see it for themselves.

I am tired, and not just in my body. The fatigue has settled deep in my person, even down to my soul, if you believe in such things, or to my bones, which I feel is the same thing. I am tired to death of hills and walking the soles off of my feet, tired of the smell of burning garbage and castoffs and gutter-rubbish after the rain, tired of junk-metal chabolas and dead-end roads with no way round, tired of looks and whispers and jibes and getting cheated or turned around and looking for another way.

He stops me at a corner. It is one of those awkward places where the road dips suddenly so that the sidewalk is maybe four or five feet high. The street is narrow, almost an alley, and there is no other place to go. I can tell he is Istmeño because he is very short, not even up to my shoulder, and though he is in his twenties he has scarcely more than a patch or two of beard and has grown out what he can of his sideburns and plastered them to the sides of his face in compensation. He is what the people here call a Prieto, which would be something like ‘swart’ according to their strange notions of colorism which I confess I do not fully understand. It is not a nice word. He is lank and has a rag tied around his head, and I can smell the drink on him even as he comes to head me off. Even if I could not, I would still know he was drunk, if only from the way he cannot hold a straight line.

He lurches forward and holds up his empty hand to stop me. It is covered in tattoos up to the elbow, and at least some of them are gang signs—I see the three dots of tres puntos at least in the crease of his thumb, and maybe others besides.

“Help me! For the love of God, me voy a matar!”

He is stammering and breathing heavily, the air coming in and out in short rasps, and now that I have stopped, he sits back on his heels, resting his face on his cauama, then on the adobe.

I step back and try to pass him and leave behind this ratty little back alley, to make my way home. You must understand, this is not an issue of compassion. Drunks always try to touch me and wheeze in my face and cry on my shoulder for money. Every drunk in Mexico thinks he knows some English and that I must owe him something for the pleasure of it. I am not such a fool that I would carry more than a handful of pesos with me, particularly not in the dark, and so I have nothing to give him. In these situations, I sometimes feel a secret urge to cry out, ‘silver and gold have I none, but such as I have give I thee.’ It would be satisfying, maybe, but also improper, and besides, nothing can be done with them. I have never been able to get one to know who I am the next day.

He grabs my shoulder and pulls me back. He is not violent yet, but I sense the potential for it if I do not hear him out, and while I am not afraid of a man in his state, I do not want to have to knock him down.

“Talk to me, hombre. Talk. TALK! Háblame pues, por el amor de Dios! You are a man of God, no?”

He gestures up and I nod. He blinks hard and falls back a pace, taking me in with his night-black eyes, glossed around the edges with the light off the streetlamp.

“You must talk…forgive me—pero tu, que sabrás? My sins…I’ve sinned against God, against projimo? Tu sola, Virgen Santísima!”

He is crossing himself slowly, over and over again. I am not interested to know, not like this, not right here, not the way he is now, and I tell him to find me tomorrow when he is sober, though I know he will not, but he insists.

“You must!”

He pauses profoundly, then extends his finger and places it square on my chest, and I can feel the smell of it mingled with my own sweat and dust in the air.

“You are hombre de Dios. My sins…my SINS! … I killed a man. Two men; but one was murder.”

And at that he stops for a minute, bending over to sob a while and bite his knuckles, sibilating, but the empty hand is still on my shoulder, crawling and working its way up and down my neck so that I still cannot pass him by. He is strong, even in this state, and I will have to check for bruising. At length, he lays himself down in the middle of the street, across its whole length, but he has grabbed hold of my hand so I cannot get away and is tugging it, begging.

“What do I do? Tell me… How am I forgiven hombre de Dios? Tell me! Save me hombre de Dios!

I try to prop him up, but he is stiff with grief, and his eyes are wild and rolling with incomprehension. I cannot save him. I cannot. I do not know how he is saved. There is none righteous, no, not one: There is none that understandeth… they are together become unprofitable. There is none that doeth good, no, not one. I am crying now, but silently and to myself so he cannot see it.

“You don’t understand: you didn’t feel how the knife entered his neck, opened it… you didn’t feel his sangre, his blood, how it spilled! How like a cochino! And where is his money? I don’t have his money! I am too tired and sick to live, too cobarde to kill myself…”

I realize there is blood on his shirt; he has broken his bottle somehow and cut his palms. I try to tie something over it but he refuses. He is screaming now, though not at me, maybe at God, maybe himself. I do not know if he remembers I am even there.

“My crime—you must talk to me—you must absolve my sin: you are hombre de Dios!”

Now he is whispering, first beating his chest as he turns little circles in place, little circles in place, his head bent with the grace of a weeping Madonna, almost to his breast, his eyes closed.

“Por mi culpa, por mi propia culpa.”

I try to say a word of comfort to him, something appropriate to the moment, but he is burbling now and cannot hear me, so I leave him there in the gutter—desperate, babbling: chewing his fingers—too terrified to confess to the police or to his priest, to abreact. All he can do now is suffer, self-flagellate, cut himself on the broken glass, embriagarse.

I am ashamed. The wind has dropped for the first time I can remember in weeks, and the night is suddenly quiet, as if appalled at what I have failed to do or else frowning its disapproval. I cannot shake the feeling I ought to have done something more but do not know how, or perhaps that I am too weak to take on the enormity of his regret and carry it for him as a good shepherd ought to do, and not a hireling. I know I ought not to feel this horror of him howling inside me like a wild thing caught in a trap, gnawing at its own leg—that it is my duty to lift and to help—but I do not know how to feel anything else, and can only fly before it like the winds over the gulf or the children of Israel before the face of Moses, at least until it is veiled again in sobriety. I am not old enough for this, I think, and it sounds like an excuse, even to me. There was given to me a thorn in the flesh, the messenger of Satan to buffet me, lest I should be exalted above measure. That was it. And that is my own guilt and the penance laid upon my back like a rail or a yoke or the beating of my breast: are we not two sides of the same coin, he and I? Both of us cowards, running away from what we must but cannot do, neither knowing truly how it is to be felt or said? Not knowing how we relate.

The city is large enough that I hoped I would not see him again, but I was wrong. The very next day he is there under the Jacarandas when I stop by Soledad’s place for a bite to eat and to meet with her husband on matters of doctrinal import. He is a cousin, she says, and she smiles. He is a sweet boy. She has always liked him. He is playing with her daughter, a little morrita, throwing her up in the air over and over and catching her, and she is squealing and laughing with him all the while and they are speaking quickly in Zapotec things that I am too slow and stupid to catch, sweet things, until she sees me and grabs my hand to pull me over to meet her friend and the air is shivering with heat and dust and the streaming wind and I can tell that he does not remember who I am, and for the first time, I am content to be left on the outside.

Micah Muldowney is the author of the collection Q-Drive and Other Poems (Finishing Line Press, 2022). His short fiction and poetry have been featured in The New England Review, Descant, West Trade Review, and many others. He currently lives in the greater Philadelphia area, where he is working on a novel.