Balsamera

This selection, a continuation of Pedro Juan’s search for an explanation for the racial and political strife in his country, is also from Catleya luna, chapter 8, pp. 169-172.

Balsamera/Forest of Balsam Firs

            Deep and fragrant forest of balsam firs . . . steep and prickly sloping down to the blue sea that sleeps, resting from such tumbling and rolling in sad coves and inlets, while the waves chase each other like children in the sand.  Deep balsam forest! The air is charged with a mystical fragrance, the heart abandons itself to joy!

            The eastern sky was opening like a beehive. Silence, with gloved hands, held the golden combs up to the light and honey spilled through, delicately staining the smooth face of the sea.

            But a dense shadow still draped from the top of the forest in striped curtains of foliage, drawn aside capriciously by thick, snaking vines that transformed the tropical hillside into the head of an octopus.

            The tall fir trees appeared like a long procession of ragged, sleepwalking phantoms, their skeletons barely swaying in the early morning breeze, their hair and nails roughly clipped, their torsos bound with scraps, the only trees in the world that dress like men.

            They were all crosses without arms, Christs with holy wounds in their sides, their blood taken to heal the wounds of others, good thieves who steal the wealth of the soil of Cuscatlán.  The wandering wings of lavender-feathered tropical angels flutter above them.

            The talapo has seen the treetops turning blue and knows that dawn is near.  His song is like the sweet, hollow sound of the marimba.  Soon the sun will light up the forest and myriads of birds will sing.  For now the mountain is a closed temple whose portals and columns, recesses and drapes are softly illuminated by blue and green stained glass windows, tall windows that awaken and brighten with a premonition of dawn between sleep and watchfulness.   

            In the center of a wall of gray, moss-covered stones a spring trickles like a wound from a lion's flank. Near the spring is a pile of rocks and a wooden cross in whose silent embrace is a name written in crooked letters: Higinio Naba, November 2, 1931.

            Higinio Naba, a dead Indian or, more accurately a murdered Indian.  Leaning on their rifles, the deer hunters, who have been up all night and have not killed the deer who comes to quench its thirst at the spring, gaze inquiringly at the small green cross and try to make out the barely legible name.

            "Who's buried here?" asked the patrón.

            "Higinio Naba was the old man who owned these woods.  They say he was a shaman, but some say he was a saint.  All the Indians around here obeyed him and they called him Hoisil."

            "Why?"

            "Who knows!  Old Genaya, the weaver, who was alive back then, says that hoisil means balsam, the sap of the fir tree.

            "That's strange.  And how did he die?"

            "A patrol, with machetes. Nobody knows what he did.  They said he turned himself into a deer.  That they shot him when he was drinking at the spring and when he tried to run away they cornered him against the wall and cut him up and that when he died he became a Christian.  I think he had some powerful enemies and they had him hunted down because they were afraid of him.

            The serpent who lives in the wind woke up and began to unwind.  Frightened shadows fled like field mice, scattering and hiding.  The sky lay like a small pink and blue carpet over the damp and yielding forest.  Then a ray of sun entered a clearing between trunks and branches, majestic, like a golden tree felled by the ax of day.  Irises and bellflowers sparkled and insects and butterflies fluttered in the light that was like fiery dust.

            Here the story divided in two.  The scene was the same but it was the hour of wandering souls.

            It was getting dark.  Hoisil was sitting on a stone beside his cross.  His straight gray hair fell in bangs over his clay-colored forehead, deeply furrowed by the plow of forbearance.  His smile was a yellow corncob that nourishes like a kindly father.  Nana Genaya, startled, stopped in her tracks, dropped her wood-ax and made the sign of the cross, praying in dialect.

            "Are you alive?" asked the frightened woman.

            "Yes, I'm alive, you're looking at me, Genaya, but what you're seeing is the soul of me.  They planted me here in the ground, just roots, now I'm the flower, do you know what I mean?  The flower doesn't die, even if you pick me now I would still be around. 

            He smiled weakly and almost fell over when he tried to stand up. A tremor of fear ran through the old woman's bones, but the mysterious shadow didn't come toward her but just watched her.  He looked at her and smiled.

            "So, why did they kill you?"

            "Because I insisted on following the law of the Lord.  They rewarded me, they didn't kill me; it was a reward the Lord sent me, my dear, for serving Him."

            "What service, Hoisil?"

            "His bread and wine; his flesh and blood."

            "What blood, my friend, what bread are you talking about?"

            "Ours, the blood and bread of our race.  The sap of the fir tree is our blood; the flesh of the deer is the bread of our body.  I was their leader, the secret leader, the magician.  They went against me, they came to me for permission to rise up and seek vengeance because they had become impatient, the harsh treatment had made them unwilling to endure any more.  I refused because I know the law of the race of Cuscatlán, it was entrusted to me and it is written: "The race of Cuscatlán will have the forbearance of the defenseless deer and they will give their blood as the fir tree of the mountains gives its sap."  But they were possessed and they betrayed me.  They were lying in wait for me here when I came to drink at the spring.  I knew it would happen and I accepted my fate.  I came to drink in the body of the nahual, the animal spirit, to teach a lesson.  They shot me and then they cut up my body with their machetes like they cut the trunk of the fir tree.  Let it be a lesson to the race that I was sacrificed for them.

            Then the soul of Higinio Naba moved to one side and disappeared in the first shadows of the night.

            Nana Genaya stood there motionless for a long time, then picked up the bundle of firewood with her shaking hands and walked slowly down the path.  The new moon shone on the trunks and branches of the fir trees, turning them to silver, sad, ragged, mysterious fir trees, bunched together, covered with fragrant scars, the only trees in the world that dress like men.

            The forest of fir trees went on until it was lost in the distant hollow.