Xanthoria elegans made me stay, stay while the others returned with their collectings to their labs in the States. It’s up there, I told them, higher, where the pines thin, where the Spanish thins, too, to Purepechan or something of the sort.
It’ll be high enough, but the rocks aren’t right here, they warned. Right for X elegans. You’ll waste your time. You’ll waste your grant.
Leanora, turned away like the bust of Alexander, looking to me so much like that bust of Alexander I want to put my hand to that neck (hers, the statue’s), said maybe and that she wouldn’t quite leave yet, would go to Morelia and wait, organize her newfound stuff there, in those quiet labs. Get a room. Watch street theater during her breaks, smoke into smoke rings those tiny habañas I made her love so much. She pulled around her shoulders the shawl I bought for her, one of those black and indigo striped peruanas the mothers and daughters weave together in their highland collectives, sitting, chatting in fire lit shacks, looms hanging and swaying above like insatiable jaws.
So I returned alone (but not so alone — that neck, her shoulders tucked around it) to the base of the ashy road leading up the mountain to Henares. Leanora, who collects legends along with her lichen, told me when the Conquistadores finally straggled through here, cutting the Tarascans with their swords and Priests, the captain and his missionary were swapping back and forth The Quixote (just out) and The Bible, and so renamed the conquered town for Cervantes’ own place of birth. We’ll give them a library, the captain told his Padre. He was a revised conquistador, spawn of Oñate, of the final desperate wave, armor creaking under the weight of the defeated armada, the Invincible Armada. We’ll win them with words, agreed his Padre. This time.
The Tarascans, like so many of Mexico’s nations, succumbed at first, in battle, then defeated the Spaniards through seduction and absorption, winning the war. They became something more because of it, something lasting, Purepechans.
Leanora warned me it would be dark up the mountain. They’ll probably have one electric pole, from which all wires, stolen and legal alike, run buried to the gray plank homes and tiendas. The cindercone to the east blocks a lot of the morning sun, she told me, and the naked mountain to the west swallows the evening sun early. And the equinox has long passed and we’re all curling in analemma toward longer nights. And they will be clearing the wilted marigolds from the graves, now that Los Dias de Los Muertos have ended, taking those precious dollops of yellow brightness away. A lot of darkness up there, for you to handle, mi maestro bajo, she said. Mi bajo.
I would have reached Henares in early light, but I had the taxi drop me midway up the ashy road at the weaving co-op, where the mothers and daughters gossiped and spun those shawls, always striped indigo and black, but made different with random figures of brightness. Those shawls that warmed Leanora’s shoulders, swaddled babies, carried firewood and groceries and water jugs, made elegant rough kitchen tables. Those shawls the Purepechan women had been weaving — the same thread, no? I asked L — for centuries long before Cortez. Before the mighty Aztecs tried their hand and failed (their only failure) against the Purepechans (called Tarascans back then). The planks of their weaving shack were the colors of moth wings, with the same muted hues soaked in. Their sliding barn door was open and so I stood there and watched them weave and gossip and sip orange Fanta.
The youngest of the adult women smiled and flirted, changing from Purepechan to Spanish as she spoke about me to the others.
“Another coleccionista,” she told the others sitting around the base of the loom. She mimed a person squinting over a microscope, adjusting the focus. She pretended she thought I couldn’t understand, so that they could share a laugh at my expense, exclude me from their chisme. But she did shift to Spanish. “Finally one not half bad to look at. What do you think he has in his pouch?” Saquillo.
With my hand, I guarded my saquillo containing scraping knives, chisel, a hand lens, ruler, pencils and notes.
“Not that pouch,” she said and they all laughed harder and the loom, slanting from the rafters, wagged its jaws.
From either side of the loom, the littlest girls were feeding an orange thread into the shawl the women were rendering. The shawl was stretched tight in the loom, like an animal skin, and the orange thread made its way in amoeba-like patterns through the black and indigo striping. “That,” I said, pointing to the orange plasmids. “What is that?”
The flirty one, the one who fronted all their sales, held up her orange Fanta.
“Este.”
I wagged my head. I knew the orange color in the thread very well. It was the unmistakably deep orange outlined in the globular patterns of Xanthoria elegans.
“Where is it?” I asked them, still pointing. “Las algas anaranjadas.”
“It died a long time ago,” said the flirty one. “Entonces… they did the only thing you can do when that happens.” She opened her arms as if all was obvious, as if to embrace me. A mountain breeze blew through the sliding door, whipping in ashy dust from the cindercone, causing the white-hot light of their Coleman lantern to flicker and sputter. The two littlest girls, sent with a nod from the eldest, moved quickly to new stations. One slung the door shut, cutting off the wind and sunlight, while the other tended to the lantern pump. The lantern continued to sputter as the girl fumbled with the pump. She almost lost the light completely, dropping us all into a sudden quiet darkness, only bits of sunlight worming through spaces between the wall planks. My fear, unwarned, rose quickly to my eyes. I saw the women, the busy little girls even, suddenly in different colors, different skins. They were no longer elegant brown, but the pink clay color of the hairless dogs of Colima. Their teeth, which had been so squared and white, rounded and yellowed. I pressed my back to the door, my arms stiff, hands spread and pressed to the wood. Their tongues lolled and they seemed to move into circle. My fear, as usual, welled as a hushing in my ears, like unseen night surf. And so I couldn’t discern what the hairless dog-women whispered through round yellow teeth, tongues lolling, circling. When the littlest finally succeeded with the lamp pump, the light brightened and the women returned to handsome, their hands austere around the loom.
“I want to buy that one,” I said quickly to cover any sounds of whimpering, pointing to the unfinished shawl in the loom. “Las algas anaranjadas.”
“You mean the soda one,” said the flirty one. “Sure. But the rule is, to buy one still in the loom, you have to buy another that is finished. Otherwise it’s bad luck. For us. For you.”
I handed her the pesos for two shawls.
“Pick,” she said, waving to the stacks of folded peruanas.
I chose the one that was a replica of the shawl I had given Leanora. The figures woven into the black and indigo striping were ash-colored grape vines with blood red tendrils. She wrapped it in brown paper for me and handed it over. “Be careful who you give that one to. Make sure it’s someone you want to love.” She smiled back to the others. “This kind of love,” she explained as she formed a pocket with the hand crumpling my pesos and thrust into it several times the phallus of her index finger. The other women laughed.
She held up my pesos. “We knew you had something in your saquillo. We’ll send the finished peru up to you. Up to the coleccionista.”
Part Two
The night I gave Leanora the first shawl, the one filigreed with ashy grapes and blood tendrils, she rode me. Our tongues were brown and tasted of Habañas, the bitter chewed ends. She called me mi maestro bajo, then moving faster, mi bajo, then finally could only manage bajo. The one underneath. And I was all connotations of the word. Low, base, below, that which is beneath. And then we went into the late Morelian night — I’m okay if I’m with someone I know, know just a little — and found the café that served the best Tarascan soup. It tastes like blood, I told her, but in a good way. And it’s the color of blood mixed with earth. But it has no animal in it, she told me. Leanora, a collector of lichen and legends, who had never eaten animal in her entire life, told me as she spooned the blood-earth color between her white teeth, my gift shawl lipped around her bare shoulders.
Things were okay as I finally crested the sagging plateau that cupped Alcalá de Henares. The sun was nearing the peak of the naked mountain to the east, but the shadows were short, short as they could be in Leanora’s analemma, the final twist of autumn. And the wildflowers between the rocks, prickly pear, and pipe organ cactus bloomed red, blue, purple and yellow, pulling even more light from the sun’s deep slant. Only in the far shadows of the thinning pines could I imagine the hairless dogs, curled and sleeping. I secured a place to rent behind the little tortilla factory, where I could listen to the beat of the tortilla press, the roll of its conveyor belt, the soft chug of its generator. All conveying daylight, afternoon, people about. And so I rested on the army cot they gave me, sipped hot manzanilla, and let the daylight thumps sooth me.
Rested — the climb! the altitude! — I explored the stony meadows surrounding the town. I chiseled five different stone types, none of them right for Xanthoria, nothing close to the limestone I needed. My colleagues were right. But there is something we’ve overlooked, I told them. Something too obvious. No? I asked, looking to Leanora.
I collected, for them, species of Cladonia, Parmotrema, Sarcogyne and Usnea. From the largest stone in the meadow, one that seemed a human-sized reflection of the naked mountain, I chiseled free a specimen of Usnea I had never seen before, a purple expression in the literal zone between the algae and fungus. Perfect for my colleague Magnus — doubting Magnus. But nothing close to Xanthoria elegans.
It was easy to track evening’s approach. As the sun dropped toward the naked mountain’s high arc, a parabolic shadow slid over the foothills and high meadows, approaching Henares. I kept to one of the two farm roads splaying from the little town square. I took the one that did not go into the pines and found myself passing tiny ranches and farm plots. Families worked in the fields and in the corrals laced by silvery wood planks. Children waved, finding me an excuse to stop what they were doing, put down the barrows they were pushing. Old men and women sat on porches, rasping dried corn from cobs, dried beans from pods. They also took me as excuse to rest their hands, wave, maybe smile or at least wrinkle their eyes at me. Coleccionista.
Some I showed a patch of orange linen I carried in my pouch to indicate the color of Xanthoria elegans. Have you ever seen this on stones? I asked. Alga anaranjada? But my English/Spanish meant nothing to them. They fingered the orange linen, smiled and nodded and said something polite in Purepechan.
Don’t act like a red-beard up there, Leanora warned me, using her favorite term for Conquistador. Don’t even try to win them with words, like that spawn of Oñate tried to do, with his library and his bestseller from Spain. Or they’ll wonder if you’re looking for their secret. The secret that allowed them — the only ones! — to hold off the Aztecs. How could they have done it, mi bajo? Think. A relatively gentle, artful empire, an empire of weavers and potters. Eaters of a soup that tastes of blood but has no animal in it. And the Aztecs wanted them badly. They were so close and the Tarascan lands barred them from their most direct access to the sea. What did they have, you think? she asked as she arched herself over me, naked except for the shawl she let drape around us. What power did they hold? she asked as she took hold of me and twisted.
I think that son-of-a-bitch spawn was looking for it, she hissed down to me. Like a pathetic Ponce de Leon. He and his padre, looking. Why else would they go up there? No gold. The conquering was over. Maybe a few souls for the padre to take. So don’t act like them. Find your silly orange lichen. But don’t act like them. I put my hand to the cords of her neck, that neck twisted away in passion like Alexander.
At a bend in the road, I rested on a cluster of stones. The stones were lichen-free and were smoothed by millennia of sitting and resting. Tarascans, dejected Aztecs, wayward conquistadores, frustrated Priests smoothed these stones. I sipped an orange Fanta I purchased from the tortilla factory. I ate a tortilla, almost fresh off the conveyor belt. What words could I possibly win them with? I asked the Leanora in my head. I fingered the word in front of me, the label of my warm, sticky soda. Este, the flirty one had claimed. They could not have thought me that stupid, that color blind. I thought for the first time — they scared me that much when the light fell and they turned into the hairless dog-women — that maybe the flirty one referred to the word, not the color. Fanta. Fanta — Fantasea — Fantasma. Then, the flirty one said, they did the only thing you can do when that happens. When that happens. When something dies.
I left the cluster of stones and hurried back down the road to the nearest porch. I asked the old couple sitting there, shucking dried beans and corn: Where is the cemetery? I could not breathe fast enough in the high, paper-thin air. Cementerio. They didn’t understand me and so with my chisel I scratched a pictograph into the hard dirt at the foot of their porch. I drew an arched gravestone and put a little cross on it. Ah! they said in unison, grinning. They said one word in their language and pointed me back up the road, back in the direction I had been heading.
Part Three
The cemetery was busy — for a cemetery in the Michoacán highlands. One girl and two boys were pushing wheelbarrows loaded with wilted marigolds, hauling the spent flowers from the gravestones to the bed of a truck parked outside the gate. They left a neat trail of fallen blossoms, a hard yellow facet of sunlight. To the side of the truck, the children had already piled the wood and chicken-wire frames that once held the marigolds in patterns over the graves; circles, triangles, crosses, arches, pyramids, the frames lay tangled together like friendly, even amorous skeletons. From my place at the gate, the entire cemetery was visible because the graves sprawled up a slope, the most distant plots seeping their way into the edges of the thin forest. The sun shone deep yellow between the pine shadows — maybe it was the marigolds which were everywhere, in wilted bunches and in sprinkles like sulfur amidst the graves. Their wet bread smell carried well in the cool thin air. The sprawl of the cemetery was larger than the sprawl of the town, which I could see in the distance below and behind me.
Here were the stones possible for Xanthoria. I could see slate, dolomites, limestone and marble, all pitching upward and sinking downward, coffins at sea, embedded like meteorites in the rocky, cactus-strewn ground. I stayed myself, took care to act like one visiting a grave, but felt hopeful among the stones. I looked back toward the town, toward the naked mountain to the west and gauged evening’s approaching parabola.
In addition to the kids hauling marigolds, there were two other people in the cemetery. Far up the slope stood a man in a white campesino hat holding what looked like a clipboard and peering through a surveyor’s transit. The sun shone gold off the brass of his scope. Nearer to me, coming to me, was a woman who wore jeans and a peruana. This shawl was looped fashionably about her shoulders, one length falling down her back, the other flowing down one side of her front, tassels catching in the V of her hip as she strode toward me. She, too, carried a clipboard, along with a compass for measuring curves. Her hair was as black as the stripes in her shawl, her cheekbones and eyebrows in upward parallels, lifting a Tarascan gaze. She smiled as she stopped in front of me, easing herself inside arm’s length.
“Come too late for Los Dias,” she said in English. She nodded to my pouch. “But in time for some good collecting. Cactus?” she guessed. A smear of marigold pollen glistened across her cheek, some in her hair, too.
“Lichen,” I answered. “Some stones have a lot. Some have none. Why is that?”
“Because once a year, right before Los Dias, the families scrub the stones of their loved ones. So those never get moss or lichen. Only the forgotten and unloved graves get those. And there are plenty of those. As you can see.”
She fastened her compass to the clipboard so that she had one hand free to extend toward me. “I’m Josefina.”
I shook her hand which was warm from working in the sun. I could tell mine felt cold and brittle to her.
“But everyone here calls me Sefi.”
“Everyone here?” I asked, motioning to the gravestones.
She laughed — a thick, humming laugh, full of thought. “Everyone in Henares. Everyone who knows me.” She nodded to the man peering through the transit. “We’re collecting, too.”
I peeked at her clipboard. “Collecting what? Numbers?”
“Yes, numbers. The curves of the stones. The sines and arcs. But I don’t exactly know what all for. You’d have to ask him.” She nodded toward the transit. “I just do the recording and collecting. And make sure those kids keep working. Make sure they earn their pay, you know.”
Sefi had a way of speaking while not facing me, then finally turning to me when her words were finished. Everything she said this way. Her arms and legs were long and elegant and the considering expression in her eyes and mouth constantly pulled toward embrace. She wore a small braid that was not the same color of the rest of her black hair. It seemed a tiny coif, an ochre gesture, too young for her, an artifact from an age she had left or was always in the process of leaving.
“You take care of this cemetery, too?” I asked.
“He does.” She nodded again toward the man at the transit. “He’s the grave keeper. And he’s their math teacher.” She looked at the kids pushing wheelbarrows, then at me, then away. “Kids here go to school and work at the same time. You know, shepherd goats and learn to spell. Learn Spanish, maybe English, too, and poke the pigs along. Everyone here does two things.”
“What two things do you do?”
“I measure the curves of the gravestones for Teo.” She shielded the sun with her hand, raising it between us, almost touching my forehead. “And provide him with other things.”
“Did he give you that shawl?” I gestured toward the mothy patterns of the grape leaves, the blood-red tendrils.
“I don’t know if this is the one he gave me. I have four others, just the same. All given.” She opened the shawl, spreading and lifting it like wings. It cast a deep shadow about her face, and her skin turned the color of pink clay, her eyes darkened and glazed like obsidian, bringing me into the dark enclosure of her wingspan.
I looked back toward the shadow of the mountain which had crept over the town and was probing its way to us. Sefi kept her wings raised, her smell the cake-y scent of marigold pollen. I found myself wanting to see her as a dog-woman, believing very strongly that she would somehow be desirable that way, too, feel like warm clay and skin together. Her teeth biting me. At the same time, I thought of Leanora the same way, her dog-woman form wrestling with me between these lichen-splashed gravestones, in the heat and marigold light of a campfire. Her clay skin would be warm, speckled terra cotta, rough like clay, soft like clay, curving then rasping beneath my push. Water from her tongue would drip into my eyes and mouth.
Sefi lowered her wings. She looked at me as though she could see my thoughts, or that pocket of vision between what I both feared and desired. She wrapped her shawl about her, looked toward Teo, who was now peering toward us through the scope of his transit.
She handed me her clipboard and compass. “Bring these to Teo. He’ll want to meet you — hombres de ciencia. I have to go tend to the kids. Make sure they’re doing their work and their math. Bark at them.”
She walked away in rhythmic strides, eyeing her path strategically among the stones, the bottom edge of her shawl arched just over her hips, the fringes on either side catching sometimes in the pinch of her jeans.
I brought her clipboard and compass to Teo, the grave-keeper and mathematician. On my way to him, I noted more variations of Cladonia, Parmotrema, Sarcogyne and Usnea spattered like gray, blue and green paint over many of the rocks and gravestones. I saw more of that purplish Usnea I would eventually deliver to Magnus, to ease his doubts.
When I reached Teo, I immediately recognized a scientist lost in the madness of private discovery. I had seen it before, in Magnus when he first began gene sequencing Sarcogyne pruinosa, and in Leanora twice; once when she became obsessed with the notion that there could exist a lichen symbiotic of three rather than two entities, another when she sought to challenge the paradigm of symbiosis in lichen altogether. Magnus emerged from his madness a doubter of everything, one who denied as first response, a damaged scientist. Leanora never emerged and instead cultivated her notions as one might come to accept the existence of two life-long mistresses. She could present herself, when she had to, as one faithful to her oath, but who could visit two well-kept apartments in the city.
Teo manifested the primary symptoms. As I approached him, his gaze fixed onto the clipboard I carried to him, filled with Sefi’s findings. His dark eyes appeared sharpened by sleep-deprivation, red-rimmed but focused. He remained within the tripod of his scope, not thinking to step out and greet me. He licked his lips as I lifted the clipboard to him, and he held up both hands, curled a bit like paws. His white shirt was buttoned neatly at collar and sleeve and its crimped stiffness matched his campesino hat, yet all to no avail in his attempt to disguise a disheveled state of mind and being. That’s how you feel in the madness, claims Leanora: that you are seeing everything anew, finding all the right data, but only gathering and not yet sorting or comprehending, everything coming into you whether you can take it or not. Like this. She took a full and sudden breath, her breasts thrusting against my skin.
Teo said nothing to me, appeared not to see me, until the clipboard was safely in his hands. And then suddenly the spell was broken, the elixir of data delivered, and he smiled big. His dark upper lip was pointed, continuing the downward hook of his nose. His black eyebrows were thick and shiny, muscular. His skin was Tarascan, that even earth-blood color.
He stepped from between the legs of his transit, poked the clipboard toward my pouch and greeted me in English.
“Let me guess.” He eyed me carefully, that sleep-denied wideness in his gaze rimmed like over-poured wine. “A mycologist?”
I nodded and started to speak.
“No. Wait. Let me guess more.”
“Beetles. Carrying spores. Yale? — no…” He flexed an eyebrow. “Princeton?”
“I once studied the beetles,” I answered (we all do, at one time or another). “But now it’s lichen. Among these gravestones, if you’ll let me. And it was Prague — then Salamanca. No Princeton.”
He nodded and clacked his teeth as though he had been right on all counts.
“And you?” I asked. “You collect numbers and curves. Among the gravestones?”
He widened his stare. “Lichen. Your lichen is making things difficult for me.”
“Difficult?” I asked.
“It — or do you say they? — eats into the arcs of the stones, obscures dates and epitaphs. Making exact measurement very challenging. Fortunately Sefi has the most delicate touch and can apply the compass without tremble, with exactness. She can lift impressions from the shallowest etchings. I have her doing battle with the lichen.”
“But some of the graves have no lichen or moss. The ones cleaned each year. The loved ones.”
“None of the ones in my findings are loved. So far. Which is only proving my theory.”
I raised my hand to begin another question, but he stopped me with a sweep of his arm. He proposed that we discuss things further, back in town. It was getting late and he had to get the kids back to their homes. School was done. Work hours were done. I gauged the proximity of the mountain shadow sifting its way toward us. It had reached the lip of the plateau. And so I agreed, feeling armed with some promised company against evening’s darkness.
Part Four
Teo and Sefi set a table for me on the cement of the town’s basketball court, which doubled also as a handball court with a single buttressed wall on one side. Within the concrete frame of this fronton, they set up a folding table and chairs, and made a fire for warmth in a clay belly stove. On a wire stand they hung the Coleman, which cast us in a white spherical light. While the lantern bobbed slightly above us on its flimsy stand — buoyed on some unfelt breeze — Teo explained his theory of the gravestones.
Magnus, in the throes of his sequencing, just before his fall from madness into doubt, wrote me a poem. Oddly, he gave the poem to Leanora, not to me directly, and so I heard it through her lips first. She spoke it to me, holding me from behind, her chin dug into my shoulder, her mouth at my ear. She recited it from memory, and so I thought it was hers at first. But I knew Magnus wrote poetry (all of us mycologists have to find something else to do, or to pretend to do, to separate ourselves from the mushroom, the idea of mushrooms) and I began to recognize his ticks and ideas early on in the stanzas. This isn’t yours, I interrupted. Leanora squeezed me harder, shushed me, bit my ear lobe — and continued with the poem, one of Magnus’ better compositions. Each stanza, I could tell, represented the next link in his gene sequence for Sarcogyne pruinosa, and each took him further away from the center of his origin, further from his port of departure. And the drift of his stanzas had almost no sense of tether, as though he were finding his way through the sequencing, through his poem, with nothing more than dead reckoning, the tossing of a log into still water.
Teo’s mathematical explanation of his theory of the gravestones seemed just as poetic, just as rapturous, just as lost. Sefi interjected rarely, but often flashed me a hard obsidian stare, whenever she sensed protest from me. She held a tumbler of wine to her cheek, the liquid in the glass dark as ink. So I followed Teo’s brimming explanation as best I could, the same way I navigated my friend’s poem once. I looked to Sefi when Teo’s triangulations — the dates, the codes in the epitaphs, the arcs of the stones — overwhelmed me, and her hard stare somehow comforted me, the way a sun-warmed stone can sooth an aching back. She delivered it whenever I needed, without fail, across our rickety table.
His discovery, he explained, was inevitable. As grave-keeper and mathematician, he could not possibly avoid it. The moment of discovery — Eureka! — struck while he was away at university, away from the stones and the town and staring at the bland ceiling of his lab, his thoughts in logarithmic spiral.
What better place to hide the secret of your ancestors? When you were done with it, when there was no hope to fend off conquest, no point in it, no advantage in it. When it was time to win through seduction and absorption like the rest of the nations of Mexico. To surrender Tarascan. To become Purepechan.
“But why the transit?” I asked. “Why survey the lay of the stones?”
With pencil on paper, Teo drew a figure and set it with some precision at the center of our little table. Sefi stood to pump the lantern, increase our white sphere of light. From over her shoulder, she glanced down at Teo’s drawing:
φ
“Phi?” I asked.
“What would it mean?” he asked. “To you. To me.”
To a mathematician, it would denote the irrational number of the golden ratio, 1.618…. To a mycologist, any biologist, it would refer to the dihedral angles in protein backbones; also, if like me you are seeking variations or possibly species, it refers to the free energy destabilization of protein mutants. Too, it would also denote the golden ratio observed in several natural growth patterns: mushroom gills, the angles of tree branches, leaf veins, etc. It is interesting that the difference between the two limbs of the letter represents the golden ratio itself. Or so I’ve always thought.
But where could all this take him, tracing Phi among the stones and arcs ? To what final number? What fountain?
Sefi, standing with the lantern dangling above her shoulder, angled me a look that stilled the questions on my tongue. Once, while trying to find some new manifestation of Xanthoria in the Mammoth Mountains, I cut my hands on obsidian shards. The cuts were at first painless, then bled and stung in the cold citric air. The lantern cast extreme shadows across Sefi’s face, and the Tarascan sweep of her cheekbones and eyebrows appeared elongated. She opened her mouth at me, as though preparing to taste something offered.
I told them I needed to call Leanora. I told them about my fear and how I would need escort to my room behind the maquilla.
“You can’t call from there,” Sefi told me. “Maybe from nowhere here. Depends. Sometimes you have to start climbing the cindercone to find connection. But I can take you to a spot where sometimes there is connection. In the open space of the cemetery. We’ll bring the lantern.”
On our way through the darkness, we stopped at my bunk. There I found that the weavers had delivered the finished shawl, the one with the plasmids of las algas anaranjadas. My two shawls lay neatly folded on the cot.
“Could I have one for the hike?” asked Sefi, holding the lantern at the doorway, looking at the shawls. Then at me. “It’s cold. I could use another.”
“Sure. Which would you like?”
“You pick,” she said.
Wanting to keep the new one pristine, I handed her the blood tendril one, the one that matched the peruana already wrapped about her shoulders.
“You sure this one?” She eyed the other.
I nodded. She wrapped the second shawl about her neck like a scarf. In the glow of the lantern she stood draped to her chin in black and indigo stripes, ashy leaves and blood red tendrils.
She walked me far up the road to the place in the cemetery where maybe I could reach Leanora, hear her voice. I had to walk close to Sefi, bumping shoulders like two beneath an umbrella, so as to stay within the protection of the lantern’s globe. Sometimes her hip would swipe mine and I could sense the draw of tendon and muscle. Sometimes she would playfully pull the lantern down and away and laugh at the begging look I gave her. “I love the dark,” she told me more than once. “I go into it as much as possible. Your fear puzzles me. Intrigues me. What would it do to you in the end I wonder.”
“Let’s not find out,” I said. I guided her hand that held the lantern, touching the soft pad at the edge of her palm, bringing the light between us again.
She took me to a circle of gravestones and natural outcroppings that formed a bowl. In the center was a small fire pit, which she brought to life with dry grass, kindling and her breath. I called Leanora, the cell almost weightless in my fingers.
I did get something, though I’m not sure it could be termed connection.
Leanora’s voice swam in my ear. Her words were burbling and sibilant, as though spoken into the surface of smooth water. They made coiling metal sounds. I heard a swirling kind of mi bajo. I could only assume that my own words swam back to her in the same way, soft metal sounds coiling across the surface, morphed into a language whose meaning was contained in inflection only. I felt Leanora’s words circle in my head, with Doppler-like hisses and hushes, as I watched Sefi work the fire into a blaze, pump the lantern, arrange the shawls around her form. I poured words, secrets, into Leanora’s ear, hoping they might come through in numbers, gather meaning somehow in multitude, a dark flock finding direction together, all at once.
“Stones from around the world are here. They brought them on the galleons. They dragged them up the hills. They hold all the secrets. I found a shawl, too. That holds X. elegans. I bought it for you. To wrap about you. All the secrets of the Tarascans. We will be able to fend off anything. All our fears together, Leanora. All our madness.”
I could feel my words being sucked and coiled, burbling and sibilant, into new beautiful sounds and trembles on Leanora’s ear. When the last of our whispers, webbed together like birthing stars, finally broke apart into quiet, Sefi thrust her boot into my lap. She dug the heel slowly but firmly into my crotch. She lifted the wings of her shawl, blocking the lantern and firelight. “Pull,” she demanded through wet yellow teeth, hard black eyes widening.
I worked my hand up inside her jeans, fingering my way past the rim of her boot, to the brush and heat of new fired clay.
She played the light and shadow and sometimes her teeth shone white and square, sometimes yellow and round. One shawl bound us neck to neck, so that when we strained away from one another our breathing was constricted while pleasure expanded (breath or rapture? life or ecstasy?). The other shawl she angled like bat wings about us, in moments cupping light around her breasts and torso as she twisted above or beneath me, then cutting light and shadow into triangles, parts of her speckled terracotta, parts smooth brown. We rolled in the volcanic dust and it stuck to our sweat in a second skin. I imagined myself as clay in kiln and that we were bound together as the hairless dancing dogs of Colima, laugh-growling with our tongues over our teeth.
Over me she whispered, “What do you get when you find it? You get to name it? After who? Yourself? Your Leanora? Me?” She thrust this word over me, herself over me. “You get to name it like the orange beards named our town. The weavers teach us that our town once had the most beautiful name.” She paused above me, letting the shawl slide away, whipping her black hair to one side so that the fire and lantern light bathed her, her skin earth-blood Tarascan with swathes of ashy dust stuck to her sweat. “The sound of it was so unique it cannot be recreated. Because the muscles of our tongues and jaws, the contours of our teeth and lips have lost the ability to produce the sounds of the name.”
She leaned into me, her breasts compressing against my breathing, her lips at my ear. “When you come, I am going to moan it into your ear. And into the other ear I am going to groan the real name of the new alga you will find in the morning. The one you will so proudly re-name. When you come. Get ready. Trabate.”
Part Five
It was Teo who woke me in the morning. He set a tin cup of hot manzanilla near my face and in the cold mountain air, eyes closed, I felt the small bar of warmth and smelled the chamomile. I lay driven into the earth, naked, partially covered with a shawl, my spine curled toward the cooling ashes of the fire. Piles of gray dust lay in drifts about me. Sefi had fashioned a pillow for me with my boots and one side of my face was mashed into the leather and laces. Teo stood over me and for a moment I feared he was about to kick me or piss on me. Then I saw that madness in his gaze, which glittered like the sun rising over the cindercone behind him, just above his shoulder. I saw the sunrise doubled that way, in his brimming dark eyes.
“Get up,” he said. “You should come find it with me. Come see it with me.”
“Where is Sefi?” I lifted myself to a kneel, one knee up, one down. I was painted in gray dust and could not wipe it from my skin. I dipped the corner of the shawl in the tea and used that to clean my face which felt sticky from the dust, dried sweat and Sefi.
“In my bed. Clean and warm. She didn’t want to come find it. She asked me to leave it alone. To leave you alone. To throw away all our equations and patterns and stay and spend the morning in the bed with her. She said if I didn’t, she would be gone when I returned.”
I dressed, pulling my clothes over my dust caked self.
“How does she know?” I asked. “How do you know? Where to find it?”
“Because of what you said last night.” He raised his hands as though he were holding an invisible sphere, shaking it. “About Phi. About its two limbs emulating the golden ratio. That was all I needed to realize. To know which way to pivot and swing the transit.”
He stepped very close to me. In his warmth I could smell chamomile and Sefi.
“You saved me a month of measurements and calculations.” He gripped my arms just above my elbows. He shook me a little, his eyes to mine. “Now we can go read the final name. The final number. Measure the final arc. And then know. Know what they knew. Find what they knew.”
I pulled the shawl about my shoulders, as a way of releasing myself from him and to try to get warm. I knew the importance of witness in scientific discovery. You do not want to make the discovery alone. You need someone to see you reach the peak, even if it’s just your assistant, your guide, your sidekick, your Watson. Leanora knew it — that’s why she waited in Morelia, just in case I succeeded. Sefi must have known it, too. Hoped Teo wouldn’t find me, wouldn’t want me, hombres de ciencas be damned.
I stood shivering, clenching the shawl about my shoulders but knowing I would not get warm. I felt a cold bar stuck through me, neck to scrotum. The ash caked to my skin chafed beneath my clothes, making me feel bound, wrapped within the juices of a chrysalis, another me in there. But I would need more warmth to get out, squirm free. The thought of Sefi leaving Henares, Teo, of Leanora abandoning Morelia, me, after hearing through our webby connection last night’s groans and howls. Leaving not out of anything petty — not from anger or jealousy (for she would have done the same with Sefi, and told me about it afterward) — but out of a deep and woven knowledge about legends and conquistadors with their books and swords. I saw the shawl I’d given her, it’s replica stained and scuffed about my shoulders, folded neatly on the cold granite table of her abandoned lab. I felt as though I were about to regurgitate ice, slush.
The black gleam of Teo’s eyes shifted from anticipation, to confusion, to betrayal. I put my hand to his smooth brown cheek, eased it down to his neck.
“Hurry back to her,” I told him. “Maybe it’s not too late. Maybe you can catch her on the road down the mountain. Catch her at the weaver’s shack. Tell her. Tell them. Tell them their secret is safe. Close your eyes before them and ask them to say, in unison, the beautiful name of this place. The beautiful name. The one we can’t say anymore,” I told him. “It sounds like hummingbirds,” I told him. “Hummingbirds so close to your ear and so high above you, too.”
He blinked twice, his eyes turning plain in the morning light, an austerity in the set of his shoulders. Maybe he was imagining the sound, remembering it, the way we recall a bit of a dream outside of time, not knowing if it occurred last night or decades before or sometime in the womb.
“That will be worth much more than any number,” I said. “Than any key. It’s where the key gets you.”
He gave me one hard look, the one the Tarascans may have saved for the Aztecs as they watched them retreat down the road, back to their own volcano. Then he hurried off through the gravestones, stumbling on a few. I thought at first he was heading for his transit, but then he veered toward his truck. The truck bed was still heaped with the spent marigolds cleaned from the cemetery, and the flowers spilled in clumps as he drove quickly away, leaving a saffron trail down the mountain.
It did sound and feel like hummingbirds, what Sefi moaned into me. One bird at my ear, hovering to suckle there, another high above somewhere, ready to dive. But that is a pale approximation, a sensory map at best. Imagine, too, a swarm of dragon flies suddenly around you, wings thrumming to form a word, a name, made of voice uncompassed by tongue taps, breath or throat, but still passed through soft lips. Try to imagine that before you judge anything I do. And you must imagine it just as your lover brings you to ecstasy, takes your breath, takes away your need to breathe. Imagine all that in your veins and then feel it suddenly removed, hidden away again, leaving you cold. And know that I am, like Leanora and Magnus, foremost a scientist, a collector of data and legend. It was not enough for me to be receiver to that sound and feeling, to be a vessel, subject to the whim of Sefi, the devotion of Leanora. I wanted to have it.
I walked to the transit and stepped within its tripod, very careful not to bump anything that might swerve the scope from Teo’s settings. I was toward the top of the cemetery’s slope, looking down I assumed from the point of convergence in the shape of Phi. φ Before peering into the scope, toward which value of the ratio (greater, lesser) I did not know, I examined the gravestone directly beneath the scope. Teo had run a plumb line from the apex of the tripod to the final number of the death date. Where the plumb line crossed the arc of the stone, he had measured the angle and labeled it with a piece of masking tape. The stone was covered in Sarcogyne pruinosa, a dream for Magnus. The dozens of anemone looked like black lips parted to reveal red tongue. Sefi had removed the lichen in a way that enhanced the etchings of the name, date and epitaph. The name was Spaniard — Mercedes Aguirre — and the final date was 1810. The Latin epitaph said, may All have mercy.
Careful, not even breathing, I peered through the scope at Teo’s final target. In the crosshairs was the back of an arched gravestone topped with a stylized pinecone or pineapple, about 100 meters distant. I plotted my course down the slope of gravestones and headed toward one end of Phi. I felt like an invited thief left to wander museum treasures. I picked up some fallen marigolds along the way, inhaled their bread smell, dusted my clayey hands with their pollen.
I found the stone easily among the others, the pinecone/pineapple crown unique among the plain arches and crosses. I would record all data, then bring it to Leanora and make the final discovery with her, ascend the final slope with her. If not her, if she wouldn’t have me, then Magnus. I could take him to the black lips of S. pruinosa first. From my pouch I had my paper and pencil at the ready. I could record everything, make an etching. Before circling to the front of the gravestone, I held my blank paper up to the marvelous sun hovering safely above the meniscus of the cindercone, letting the light filter through the parchment.
I stepped to the front of the stone, knelt to take my notes, my etchings.
At first I thought they were orange marigolds, fastened to the limestone by children to cover the face. Whenever you fall suddenly, you sense a rising first. That’s what flips you, stops your heart momentarily. Your mind recognizes the wrong thing, the opposite thing and fires an inappropriate synapse. That was the marigold. What hovered before me, on the delicate tremble of hummingbird wings, was Xanthoria elegans leanora. Its outer bloom was so heavy it resembled the crinoline petals of orange marigold. As in its variants, the mother and daughter overlapped, mimicking (honoring?) the golden ratio, the lesser nestled into the curve of the greater like amoeba at play.
All words and numbers were gone. Unlike the protruding anemone of Magnus’s Sarcogyne, it is the nature of Xanthoria to eat into the stone, to scoop an impression of sanctuary and to thread ochre roots into the microscopic fissures. Xanthoria effaces, then produces a one-of-a-kind fresco of orange, yellow and green. One etched curve of something remained uncovered by the lichen — a number, a letter, an icon, a slip of the chisel. I dug my fingernails into the papery rim of Xanthoria and pulled until I felt the needle pierce of limestone shards beneath the indifferent and unrelenting beard.
I heard the hum and stood quickly, turning my face to the sky, the cindercone. I tucked my bleeding fingers beneath my arms and listened. The hum sounded again, but it was cold and mechanical this time, coming from my pouch. I answered my cell.
Leanora or Sefi whispered in my ear, filling my skull with spinning, diaphanous murmurs that raced one another at the expense of my balance. I had to brace myself against the gravestone, holding onto its crown. I tried to fix my gaze on all the noble tombstones, but could see no pattern in them at all, not even a simple grid. They seemed fallen from the sky. Clicks and hisses and ahs spun into my ear, Leanora and Sefi together. Ah! they whispered together, faces pressed together, lips to ear, tongue to lobe. I could not pull the cell away from own ear. Their tongues were in there. Could you? Would you?
Trabate. Mi bajo.
