Crematorium for Phoenixes (10 page)

Among them, walking in the park, arranged as
if by the experienced eye of an artist with ponds, water lilies,
reeds, and countless tropical flowers with a palette of colors, and
surrounded by colorful craters, were Takeshi, Akuma, and the
others.

In a single file line, they had pierced
their way through wildly grown forest, purified, as we have said,
of clay or sand-like vestibule farms. The structures were shaded by
strangling vines and lianas, oil or coconut palms.

Moving as trivial as it sounds, foot after
foot, the group progressed among the green twilight, breathing the
stale air of decay and paradoxically the enriched air from recent
photosynthesis, which came from the orchids that had been drenched
in a number of colors.

Sometimes, doubt grew because of the
waterproof roof of the forest. They thought they saw the outline of
strings of heather paths warped with arching bridges over rapids
and hidden among grassy logs that stood abandoned. Such things had
been gradually conquered by the jungle and were the last evidence
of human activity.

Therefore, among the plants that crept with
their ivy wrappings, it’s not difficult for a man to imagine that
at the next turn he will come across something like the granite
bell of a temple full of the nests of birds and dens of monkeys
cast by ancient builders.

Who knows what miracles here we’re looking
at in the ethereal, blue lakes that can be found on this island of
the Western Pacific Ocean, separated from human breath by the
creative genius of Asia.

Therefore, with this initial discovery and
passion, shouldering their packs and heavy-legged with primitive
muskets from Korea, the company traveled the roads in this
pristine, untouched paradise, seeking something wrong and
captivated by what was before their eyes.

On this occasion they bypassed (perhaps
mainly because of Takeshi) the rise of lampshade-braided huts and
Asian houses in which senile old men huddled around the outbreaks
of copper cauldrons to tell the swarms of shaved to bare skin
children stories of sudden happiness, which, as has said one great
man, never miss even the most unfortunate ones.

The men were among those clouds of flora
that we peer at only in our dreams. They started adventures in the
haze of the jungle.

Here seemed to be no evil or cruelty, only
that which nature with its infinite wisdom has allowed to be
reasonable. There had been created a microcosm of balance and
meaningfulness.

And life had been arranged like units in an
exquisite Chinese box with brass fittings. They landed on this site
and it left little room for doubt.

As we have mentioned, crystal blue beaches
with porcupine-like needles in the form of palms dotted the area
and cast shadows over the valleys. The combs were tucked like
glades of fairy tales.

Around them, as if adding even more to this
idyllic scene, a grain of crushed powder unfolded like a fan of
colors. Waterfalls flowed and fish jumped under them, stunned by
the outflow of gallons of water.

This was a site without care, which the
Almighty had prepared for His children to give them a piece of His
essence.

But sneaking up like the snake in paradise,
the evil, hour by hour, seemed to increase its strength and was
seducing people with the flattery of its tongue.

Thus, the group rushed even deeper through
this wilderness, leaving behind the grass and houses abandoned by
every living soul that had appeared here and there. These abodes,
as if still filled with peering eyes, hinted at the gazebos and
wells that also weren’t looking too friendly. Floating over them
and cheapening the view soared mysterious balls of blue flame that
people in later centuries would call “hitodama.”

The company, like in the fairy tales, delved
deeper and deeper into the scary forest that nobody had been able
to find their way back home from.

And the farmland, the smelled of the kettle,
disappeared, giving way to the wetlands. They kept an ashy green
haze and croaks from frogs could be heard like in those old movies
where the frame shifts and changes into a pastora background with
sad Celtic music suctioned from a symphony made of bones.

The company, like many others in life,
unloaded as if in a park in front of the hospital with iron hoops
stuck in alleyways. And despite the seemingly ambient amount of
life, they still got the sense that everything was simply saying,
“Get out of here.”

But as happens every day, they had no
choice. As if blinded by that fatality that remained as a stigma
that ulcerated the body and spirit, they moved on, pushed forward
to every action.

Because in life the big bad wolf is the
grief that played like a cat with us and then broke the backbone of
our dreams.

But even so, finding a clean place for our
hearts and dedicating it to what we like is the courage with which
we go into the forests of the beast.

The men remembered those terrifying moments
in which they waited with one another for death itself. This time
death encouraged them as they moved along the path of the jungle,
which implemented sounds that stretched out like a sleeping giant
for miles and miles.

Soon they began to encounter broken or
hollowed out gravestones. There were billions of stones, pieces
ground to powdered palisades until they reached a wall whose ruins
had tens of thousands of plants and shrubs that clung to it like
leeches.

It had been made of cyclopean stones,
stacked one after the other and designed to hold something both
inside and outside.

Although there were plenty of dissolved
holes covered with relegated material and loose vegetation like
ropes, it took the men awhile to climb the ruin, which was hundreds
of feet high. As we have said the plants had grown one over another
like baobab.

But, finally, after they had climbed it—a
task that would have hampered even the most experienced
climbers—they came to the rim and looked down across the green
jungle that spread out and away from them. A slope curved down like
an amphitheater crater, so they descended, breathing rapidly from
the height.

Then they were climbing down.

The men soon lost track of time. They were
careful not to slip on the slopes of the crater, which had been
carved by the incalculable strength of nature.

They rested, leaned over it, and marked the
trail so that they would be able to go back again. After three
hours, as measured by the sun’s rays, they had climbed down and
backed up several times with a piece of bread, salted meats, and
cheese, they came to the bottom.

There more greenery greet them. It gave them
a loose, open view of the almost vertical cliffs and a hidden
valley; it was practically impenetrable because of the stumbling
rhizomes and creeping shrubs.

Soon those plants disappeared, giving way to
unhealthy, burned straw-yellow grass that turned to powder with
each step and raised clouds of unusual shiny purple locusts.

Every step slowly seemed more difficult and
after a bit, unusual weakness—nausea and vomiting strains—made
themselves known. Then before the men’s eyes, but still in the
distance, a matte bismuth-colored, glamorous, half-emboweled, huge
spaceship laid in the sand.

Chapter
Sixteen

The corn reduced its stalks, making noise
with every gust of wind.

Its dotted yellow stems threw down lanky
shadows on the others, stooped plantation crops such as munched
beans that scraped by. Slide three hundred and sixty degrees and
pumpkins came into view. They had been mellowed by time with
potatoes.

Between them, overshadowed by the heaps and
perched on the accumulated stones where inclined plums were
growing, Victor Drake, Amos Oz, and the rest of the group were
walking. They thrashed like fish while stepping on sugar-white
pavement.

They had relaxed a little in the bars and
returned again and again to the cobblestones that gushed from the
heat like boiled wine. Then they would return once more to the
inns, exchanging their fashion for European clothes. And still they
moved forward.

They hadn’t spent a lot of time in Yucatan.
Only moments before, they had hidden in the firth, overgrown like
the hairy, reedy mouth of a river. They left their boat, and now
they were here, riding recently imported horses that prophesied in
the old ways the palefaces from the East, who would conquer this
piece of the globe and briefly name it “New Spain.”

Now oranges were hanging side by side with
other trees. The sweet fruits were in front of them and easy to
reach, mixed with the low, pudgy type of cocoas.

And nothing, it seemed, could threaten their
way. Their journey was facilitated by wearied cloth bags of gold
for the too talkative or suspicious strangers.

Therefore, the group walked forward and were
overtaken by caravans of Spanish mules. Their harnesses were lined
with animal sweat that soaked the cotton. They managed to sway the
leaders who were watching the goods of their masters: bales of
manipulated tobacco and raw lumps of sugar.

Thus, each arrival was an important
crossroads. Divided as armlets, they were built or had been built
as fabulous caravanserai, an arabesque inn with wide, square yards
that mushroomed cities in the late Middle Ages; they were layered
and offered amenities for people on the rush who choose them for
their good location.

Indeed, many farmers had given up the old
cultures and the rural life. They had instead welled up in these
centers, showing their skill and savvy in new goods and crafts.

And the soap factories were steaming from
the chemically scalded fat, while forges and farriery echoed in the
surrounds with the rhythm of their work. They were rivaled only by
the mills that were processing the wool from the barely decades-old
long wool of Castilian sheep. To top it all off, there were the
sawmills and copper shops where smoking mountains of timber could
be found in cubic meters.

It was not hard in this manufacturing boom
and brisk trade area to find transport. What they could have gotten
for penny went against a whole silver coin, which the men gave with
a smile, thinking that they were playing the receivers the
peasants. After that, the group climbed on bogies that carried them
through the agricultural lands of central Mexico.

Yet they were careful in their chats with
the country folk; the zeal of the Inquisition was something with
which they could not compete.

Those representing the Inquisition, like in
the Old Continent, had won the sinister and exclusive right to
“investigate” completely innocent, often sometimes mentally ill
people.

And the mercy that Jesus gave along with the
full right to choose had been replaced with that obscurantist force
that repelled many of the realm who were of faith.

Whether exaggerated or not, the structure of
this powerful institution was something that had to be taken into
account and the company presented itself as resellers and searchers
of healing herbs. They did not want to be accused of gadding about
by the vigilant civil authorities.

As they went from market to market and moved
further southeast, the loose areas driven by extensive farmed
lessened and the forests thickened, giving them only a brief
example of the upcoming impenetrable thickets of Central
America.

They often left missionary settlements
untouched. Such places were piled with straw and mud hamlets in
which, besides the healer resins, bark, seedlings and fruits could
be found. They carefully inquired numerous times about the scrolls
of eneken, which had been depicted by many of the old traditions as
ascending like fire from the banned chariots of gods of old times
and temples that were now forever forgotten in the jungle.

But this information was very, very
rare.

So this fellowship moved from one village to
another, going to the tucked away deposits that existed as slivers
of sugar cane plantations only to hear uttered talks of how the
pale conquerors had taken away thousands of the gems. In return,
they were offered oily, soaked rosaries that may as well have been
bathed in dirt. The real value of anything came with the gems,
although the locals swore (if they had somebody to hear them) that
their true treasures, still hidden, were real gems themselves.

The men diverted such offerings and secretly
gave a few coins to such people. They gave no more than would
predispose the old men who like all adults were lifted tales of
those times when they still had land and hadn’t forgotten what it
could produce.

In these interminable monologues, punctuated
by the hoarse cough, the elderly recycled the same descriptions of
ancient cities and cultures. That cliché, “No, no, they could only
be seen with the eyes,” was heard time and again.

So filled with the descriptions from dozens
of meetings, the group felt they were coming upon the old cities.
They expected them to be shining as white as unspeakable amounts of
poured silver, but more importantly, the roads were clearing up in
the jungle as they led them to their target.

And the men were taking them. They were
walking through the mottled shadows of vegetation and leaving
behind the brick-red civilization.

They spent the night under the studded
colorful sparks scattered across the sky, sleeping in porches in
front of the jungle, which like the forests of fairy tales grew up
and down into infinity.

They went on, oriented by the small
clearings that were entrenched with wooden prop mines. These places
were like badger holes that went into the river slopes and were
often surrounded by hundreds of locals. These people were
extracting the bars of wealth for their masters until they
themselves ripped and could not continue on.