Galindos

The first one has a raven in his name.

They say he was called Galindo Belasko, which is to say: the little crow who lent his name to a valley where the wind never decided between Christian and Moor, somewhere in the folds of old Navarre, where the Pyrenees have the shape of a clenched fist. I imagine him leaning on a stick, watching sheep, watching soldiers, watching the way the fog would come climbing out of the ravines like a patient army. Behind his back the old Basque words curled around stones and springs; in front of him, priests recited Latin and kings signed charters with quivering quills. In the middle, like a bridge the earth had invented, stood Galindo with his black little bird-name, which would someday be a thread pulled taut across oceans.

From him the name steps forward, clumsy and luminous, into Sancho Galindo. The scribes in the monastery write his name as if it were a fence-post: Sanctius Galindus, and the ink dries unevenly on the vellum. He is a frontier man, a watcher. In one version of the story he holds a lance; in another he merely walks the line of some poor king’s frontier, taking note of streams, orchards, and the forbidden houses of heretics. The priests talk about souls, the captains talk about land, but in Sancho’s head there is only this thought: the world is an ambiguous hill, and my children will live further down that slope.

His son Martín Sánchez de Galindo tilts the hill a little more. The old raven feathers are still in the blood, but the language around them begins to change. He hears Aragonese, Castilian, Latin, a long slow crush of consonants. He marries a woman who pronounces his name with a softer “l” and he doesn’t correct her. The war with the Moors is a rumor that comes and goes like a bad winter; sometimes Martín marches in a column of men, sometimes he is back on his plot of land, pushing seed into the soil. The land is a god who doesn’t talk but remembers everything, including the feel of their heavy boots.

Then Lope Martín de Galindo, born in the Ebro valley where reeds whisper against the current and the river has eaten so many corpses it no longer bothers to distinguish them. Lope is one of those men who always seems to be on the road. He carries wheat, salt, messages. He follows the rumor of land grants the way bees follow the idea of a flower. Monks draw his name on thin parchment: Luppus Martini de Galindo. He hears that somewhere far away, beyond Toledo, beyond Sevilla, there are ships that will cross a sea that never ends. He doesn’t know that his blood will board one of them, centuries later.

Generations thicken, like paint on a wall that no one ever strips. Íñigo López Galindo, García Íñiguez Galindo, Pedro García Galindo—they plow, they breed, they fight in wars whose causes they never fully understand. Kings change like cloud patterns. Famine visits the poor; plague visits everyone. The name Galindo drifts between them like a small black boat on a flooded plain. The accents shift. Basque edges soften, Castilian vowels harden. The mountains remember the first raven but no one else does.

In Juan Pérez Galindo, Domingo Juanes Galindo, Ferrán Domínguez Galindo, the family folds more completely into Castile. The frontier is further south now. Moorish villages become Christian by decree and remain Moorish by smell, by spice, by the way the old women mutter over their pots at night. The Galindos live near Toledo for a while. They learn to fear tax collectors, inquisitors, and bad harvests in that order. In one dark year an official accuses a cousin of Judaizing; the cousin disappears into a prison whose stones are older than all of them. The name survives. The cousin does not.

Diego Ferrández Galindo hears about Andalucía as if it were a dream: vineyards, olives, white towns plastered against a sky so bright it cuts the eyes. He follows that brightness south. Now there are gypsies on the road, and poets, and cutthroats. His children are born under a harsher sun. They grow up on stories of the Gran Capitán, of Granada taken, of banners unfurled over the last red walls of the Muslims. Diego does not care about banners. He cares that there is meat in the pot, that the landlord’s men do not come for his eldest boy with pressed papers and smooth threats.

And then this boy, Hernando Díez Galindo, stands one day in the port of Sevilla and looks at the river as if it were a question. The Guadalquivir carries ships fat with silver, saints, weapons, diseases beyond counting. The city is a throat through which the New World passes. Hernando watches men come back from across the ocean with missing arms, with gold rings, with nightmares that leak out of their eyes when they drink and stare at the wall. He is too late, too tired, perhaps too afraid. He does not cross. But his son will.

Alonso Hernández Galindo is the first to risk it. He is not a grand conqueror. No one writes his name in the chronicles of Cortés. He is one of the anonymous multitude, a man with a small inheritance and a larger hunger who signs his name in a cramped hand at the Casa de Contratación and boards a ship that smells of piss, salt, and the future. In the belly of that ship he dreams of Andalusian olive trees as the Atlantic roars around him. The crossing takes weeks, then months; the sea re-sculpts his mind. By the time he reaches Veracruz, something in him has gone flat and shining, like hammered silver.

The New World is not new; it is merely indifferent. Jungle breath pushes in from every direction. The mosquitoes write their own genealogy on his skin. Alonso works where he can—as a minor clerk, as overseer, as a man who knows how to get people to sign their name or mark an “X”. He writes Alonso Hernández Galindo at the bottom of papers that will outlive him. In the evenings, he recalls the way the Pyrenees must smell at the end of winter, although he has never seen them. Blood remembers places the body has never walked.

His son, Rodrigo Alonso Galindo, grows up speaking a New World Castilian, thickened with Nahuatl and Otomí sounds, without Basque or Aragonese in it at all. Rodrigo lives in Veracruz, where the sea is a restless wound and the docks are full of men who curse God fluently in six dialects. Rodrigo believes that the ocean is a god whose only sacrament is repetition. Every wave is the same name mumbled forever. He marries a woman from Puebla. The name Galindo crosses mountains on a mule’s back, in his pocket, in her blood.

Cristóbal Rodrigo Galindo is born in Puebla de los Ángeles, a city that pretends to be a piece of Spain planted on another planet. The churches rise up with all their painted angels, but beyond the walls the indigenous fields continue their own calendar. Cristóbal works between these two realities. He is a carpenter, or maybe a minor official. He writes down the measurements for doors that separate priests from penitents, Spaniards from Indians, legitimate children from the others. But at night he hears talk of the south: a sprawling jurisdiction called Guatemala, a captaincy general whose tendrils reach down into humid valleys and coffee-smelling uplands. And so the line turns again.

Mateo Cristóbal Galindo travels south with a caravan of traders and officials. The road is a long vertebra made of dust and accidents. They pass Chiapas, reach Guatemala, where earthquakes and sermons alternate in the plazas. Mateo settles in Antigua Guatemala for a while. The air there is different. Volcanoes squat around the city like patient, dangerous gods. The name Galindo appears in church books written by ecclesiastical hands that will never know Basque or Andalucía, only Latin and smoke and ash.

But the line is restless. The same nameless hunger that pushed Alonso onto a caravel now pushes Francisco Mateo Galindo eastward, toward rougher country: Chiquimula, perhaps, or the mosaic of villages where the borders of today’s Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador are still fluid, still merely rumors. Francisco lives in a world of mule trains, indigo vats, small wars. His children hear K’iche’, Ch’orti’, and old Castilian in the same marketplace. The name Galindo is pronounced strangely now, stretched over tongues that were made for other syllables.

José Francisco Galindo drifts further, a little south, a little west. Maybe he follows a river; maybe he follows a woman. He ends in a place the Crown calls the Intendencia de San Salvador, a place the local people still know by older names: Cuscatlán, Sonsonate, Izalco. Indigo is king in this time, and king means: a plant that stains your hands blue, that takes your children’s eyes when they stir the vats all day, that builds fortunes for men whose names will be carved in stone. José Francisco is not one of those men. He is a small planter, a hired hand, a man who knows the shape of poverty in three different currencies. But he carries that raven-name intact.

Juan José Galindo is born where Guatemala frays into El Salvador like the edge of a torn flag. He is the first of the line who can truly be called salvadoreño, though no such nation yet exists. The sky is full of omens he doesn’t know how to read: revolts, sermons about equality, rumors of a French general named Bonaparte who walks across Europe like a plague. What Juan José knows are the fields, the debts, the weight of the landlord’s gaze. On Sundays he listens to the priest speak of a Kingdom of Heaven and thinks bitterly that it must be very far from Sonsonate.

After him comes Miguel Juan Galindo, born around 1730 into the indigo economy that will later rot from within. He is alive when Spain begins to weaken, when the Bourbon reforms squeeze and modernize and suffocate. He hears that the King cares about distant men named Voltaire and Rousseau, but no one named Galindo ever appears at court. The family is a line of handwriting in parish archives: baptisms, marriages, burials. Between these sacraments, hunger.

Then José Miguel Galindo opens his eyes around 1765 and watches the whole scaffolding begin to tremble. The United States declares itself; Haiti burns; French heads roll; priests in New Spain begin to murmur about independence. In the Captaincy General of Guatemala, the ideas arrive like badly translated dreams. José Miguel does not read Rousseau. He reads the sky: longer dry seasons, locusts, the sullen resistance of indigo plants. He marries a woman from the interior, maybe somewhere near what will be called Santa Ana. Two lines of blood merge; both of them carry small ancestral birds in their names that no one remembers.

Pedro José Galindo, born around 1795, lives through the end of Spanish rule. He is there—on the margin, among the invisible—when the Central American provinces declare independence in 1821, transfer their allegiance, flirt with Iturbide’s ephemeral empire, and then attempt their own fragile federation. He hears presidents’ names like Iturbide, Arce, Morazán, Carrera, but they might as well be weather systems. What matters is that the patrón remains, the land remains, the lash remains. The flag changes its colors and leaves the fields exactly the same.

Pedro José’s son, Francisco Antonio Galindo, comes into the world around 1830, when the Federation breaks apart like a clay pot dropped from a church tower. Now the small republics sharpen their knives against each other. Francisco Antonio is salvadoreño by decree and tenant by practice. Coffee begins to creep down from the highlands, a dark green wave that will drown the old indigo. Laws change to favor coffee. Communal lands disappear into the mouths of a few oligarchic families. The countryside grows full of ghosts who have lost their plots and gained rifles.

Francisco Antonio moves. Maybe from the west to the central plateau; maybe from a nameless canton to the outskirts of San Salvador. He follows the new crop; he sells his labor to the fincas where coffee trees are lined up like disciplined soldiers. The smell of roasting coffee becomes the smell of the future. He sees a telegraph line for the first time and thinks it is a kind of spider the government has stretched across the country to catch words. The name Galindo has now traveled a thousand years and thousands of kilometers to stand, small and stubborn, in this narrow, volcanic land.

And then, somewhere between 1890 and 1910, in a house whose walls may have been of bahareque or brick, under a roof of tiles that had seen too many rainy seasons, a child is born and they name him Roberto.

We could say: Roberto Galindo, grandson of coffee, great-great-great-grandson of indigo, descendant of maize older than all books, inheritor of the raven that once nested in the Pyrenees. The midwife’s hands are brown and practiced. Perhaps outside, a volcano is emitting its thin column of smoke, a finger raised to remind everyone who really decides. The priest writes Roberto on the baptism register and then Galindo, and does not know he is pinning down a thousand-year journey with that stroke.

Roberto grows up under the dictatorship of the coffee republic, under generals whose faces stare down from schoolroom walls. He walks along roads that his ancestors could not have imagined, lined with telegraph poles, maybe crossed by the tram of a newly installed railway. But other things have not changed at all: the imbalance, the whispers in the cantón, the way the poor learn to make themselves invisible when soldiers ride by. The land has swallowed each generation and given back another.

He is my grandfather, but he is also a corridor. When he laughs, someone in Navarre laughs with him across eight hundred years of stone and mist. When he curses in Salvadoran Spanish, a Basque vowel sometimes stirs in his throat and dissolves before it can be born. His blood has crossed the Atlantic once and Central America twice. It has gone from pagan rites under mountain trees to Catholic mass to skeptical silence; from Gothic lances to machetes in the cane fields; from shepherd paths to ship routes to railways to bus lines rattling toward the capital.

For the Galindos, El Salvador is a kind of culmination: the point where the raven, the spear, the indigo plant, the coffee tree, the volcano, the soldier’s boot, the bureaucrat’s signature, and the child’s soft, uncomprehending eyes all meet and recognize each other for a moment. The family name hangs in the air like a fragile bridge: Galindo, a sound that has been hammered into different shapes by centuries of tongues and still keeps its dark little heart.

If we were to open Roberto’s chest—not in surgery, but in the merciless, tender way of memory—we might find not only the rooms of his own life (his work, his loves, his errors, the way he walked), but also narrow corridors leading back through time. Here a room opens on Veracruz, the hot breath of the docks; here another on the quaking streets of Antigua Guatemala; another on a Pyrenean slope where a boy watches a raven and doesn’t yet know that the bird is his heraldry.

The story does not end with Roberto, of course. The name goes on, broken and mended, carried now by others who do not know any of this. The wars of the twentieth century engrave themselves into the family like new, violent surnames: Martínez, 1932, the disappeared, the war that comes later with helicopters and doctrines imported from the North. El Salvador grows sharper, more unreal, more like a sacrificial altar at the edge of history. And still, everyday life persists in kitchens, in markets, in tired buses. Somewhere in that persistence, someone says Galindo aloud, and the raven flutters once more, invisible, correcting the pronunciation.

We might say that history is a kind of prostitution of the past, that we use the dead to prop up the stories we think we need. We might also say that each ancestor is a black wing beating in the darkness, trying to escape the cage of our own skull. Both are true. This lineage is an invention based on facts, and a fact built out of inventions. The only indisputable thing is that my grandfather Roberto Galindo stood somewhere in El Salvador at the beginning of the twentieth century, breathing, not yet a ghost, not yet a story. The rest is this: a long line of footsteps leading to him across continents, each one leaving a small print shaped like a bird’s foot in the dust.

 

The Sand Does Not Ask

We were eating in San Francisco, my mother opposite me, Lydia to my left, the Galindo family on the right, all of us arranged like a little altar around bowls of chow mein and plates of steamed greens that we would never finish. Market Street was its usual river of bodies and buses, a marching band of advertisements and the soft clatter of utensils, a starling chorus of shoes on tile, the city’s private weather. I remember thinking that the steam rising from my bowl made a cloud that drifted toward a ceiling lamp and dissolved in a halo, and that I could almost pretend I believed in perfect circles again. My mother was telling me about a cousin who had lost a tooth to a walnut, but had gained, she said, “a new smile that shows their courage,” and Lydia, who has always been both skeptical and tender, pursed her lips as if to hold an idea steady between them.

I looked up all of a sudden and I said, “Look.” It was not a shout, more the tone you use when the horizon shifts one millimeter and you aren’t sure if the sun has slipped or your eye has caught a new disease. No one looked. The conversation continued its pleasant scuttle. I said it again, louder this time, “Look.” They turned, almost reluctant to be called back into the immediate world around them. And this world—obedient, extravagant—unfolded itself for our inspection. A building across the way was falling. Not from an earthquake; I know the sound and movement of earthquakes, the way they first write their presence in the bones and only later spell out their cracked syllables on the streets. There was no grammar here, only an uncaused effect: the building across the wide street, as if admitting to a quiet exhaustion, simply divided itself in two like a loaf of bread, and the top portion exhaled forward, becoming a brown-red rain of bricks and splinters and glass confetti.

There were screams as precise as measurements. People filmed with their phones. Some people ran, and some did not. The upper stories—those rooms where people had slept and made soup and spoken into telephones—tumbled to the sidewalk, and all the air lit up with the friction of the falling. The corner awning fluttered, then vanished under a wave of matter. I heard a plate shiver on our table. My mother’s hand went briefly to her chest, Lydia’s fingers flexed on my sleeve, and I understood, not for the first time, that anything which stands is a little miracle pretending not to be miraculous.

Everyone seemed paralyzed, as if the film had been paused to force us to examine a single frame—bricks mid-fall, a woman with a dog mid-turn, a bus driver in mid-expletive. I stood. Then I ran out to the center line of Market street to see whether this was an isolated event or a general policy, whether the city had suddenly remembered something elemental, and if so, whether it would now proceed to remember everything else. Another building was bending forward, modestly at first, like an old man preparing to kneel; then not modestly at all. I ran back. “We have to go,” I told them. “This is going to be big. Don’t sit here waiting for a polite explanation. Move!”

They moved. I have never been a general, but that day I felt a brief sense of authority from the world. We crossed the threshold of the restaurant into a light that had sharpened, as if a hidden technician had dialed the saturation one notch too high. Dust whirled in the air. An officer shouted instructions. The city made the gestures of a city that has rehearsed disaster and now, startled, discovers that rehearsal has become performance. My mother clutched her purse as if it contained directions back to the past; Lydia’s jaw set, and I loved her for that. We angled across Market toward the side street where many people were jammed shoulder to shoulder. Then the road itself changed its mind.

A circle opened without rhetoric. A mouth of asphalt. A sinkhole is a word that sounds rural, a word that belongs to limestone caverns and warning signs near fences, yet here it was in the city, a coin of absence minted by whatever bureaucrat of gravity rubber-stamps these sudden permissions. We watched a parking meter tilt and vanish like a periscope slipping into the harbor. “Avoid the small sinkholes!” someone from the National Guard shouted. “They may become larger sinkholes!” It was the kind of tautology that carries the authority of truth: what is small wants to be large, what is quiet wants to be thunder, what is stable wants to remember its first instability.

We skirted the hole as if it were an animal scenting us. More police. More Guard. A woman in a bright jacket was pointing us toward a green corridor, a stitch of green park, some old veredas you could follow out of the downtown grid, veredas I had never noticed before. “This way,” she kept saying, meaning: any way that is away. The buses loomed; the wires above us looked suddenly delicate as spider silk. A man with a rolling suitcase stood and cried; his suitcase—the little house of his immediate life—tipped toward a fracture in the pavement but did not fall. “Keep walking,” I told my mother, who is brave in small steps and brave in large ones too.

As we walked, as the city behind us made new decisions about its contour, I remembered something as cleanly as a blade scraped across glass. My cousin Roberto and my aunt Gladis had visited us once. We had put them in a motel downtown because that seemed both generous and central, generosity’s geometry often following convenience. They had a car during the day but only went nearby. The desk clerk, a man afflicted with a sense of vague authority, had asked questions about their excursions. Roberto told me later: “He seemed bothered. Like: why did we go only around the block? Who knows why!” He laughed; but it was a laugh with the respect you give petty gods, petty guards. The city expects a certain theatre of movement; if your pattern is too small, some spy of normality marks you down.

We moved now in what the city would consider the opposite error: a movement too large, too decisively away. A sinkhole lipped open in the crosswalk ahead like an ugly rose. We cut left, then left again, threading between stalled cars. The Guard woman steered us to a path. The word vereda came back to me from El Salvador, where I had driven alone at night once upon a different kind of trembling. The moon had been bright that night, and I had taken the little pathways through fields the way a fox might, trusting the lacquered logic of the moonlight. Far off I had seen a tree luminescent, one of those grand ceibas that hold the sky like old servants. “El árbol de Dios,” I had said aloud, not to be pious but to offer a name: when you are small and afraid, even your metaphors crave a ladder with no top.

“Keep walking,” Lydia told me now, as if she had been the one driving that other night, and I obeyed. The path fed us into a strip of grass, then dirt. We moved farther from the geometric pitch of downtown. We saw a pod of small sinkholes that had not yet decided whether to hatch. We stepped over them the way you step over the memory of an insult: gingerly, with more ceremony than maybe they deserve. A child asked if the whole city would one day be a hole. His father said, “No,” with the ferocity of love, which is to say, a ferocity that knows it is lying a little for the sake of the hand it is holding.

Behind us: sirens in layers. The dust lifted its skirts and danced a little. My mother did not complain. She has known buildings that fall and voices that do not answer. She has known the stiff etiquette of official fear. When we reached a ragged strip of sand—some accident of landscaping or an old memory of shoreline preserved by municipal laziness—we stopped. The ground was soft here. Sand does not open like asphalt; sand only takes and gives as if by agreement. “Here,” I said. “Here we are safe from holes.” I said it to persuade the hours ahead to take their shape gently.

The sand reminded me of that other sand, the existential kind. We were in the middle of the city and also not. Market Street was a parable behind glass now. The buildings, those tall teachers, had changed their lesson mid-sentence, and we had walked out into the yard where the school’s chalk dust becomes evening. We stood there with other evacuees, a congregation of the temporarily reprieved, and I thought: it is always the same story. You are at a table. You have a mother, a lover, a cousin somewhere who cares too much about the wrong approval and too little about the correct insolence. You are famished and the plate is ordinary and this is grace. Then something topples, unreasoning. You are initiated into the thought that all reasons are after the fact. You walk. Your feet learn a new alphabet. The city tells you that walking is a sin and a cure.

We crossed the sand as if it would carry us all the way to a desert. In our mouths, the grit of the sand became theology. The Guard woman said something about buses; another officer mentioned a staging area; someone else handed out masks against the dust the city was producing as fast as it unbuilt itself. I watched Lydia tie the elastic around my mother’s ears, the tender clumsy act of fitting safety to a face. “You look like a small bird,” I told her, and my mother rolled her eyes and kept the mask on.

There is an intemperate exposure to sand. It receives you; it abrades you. In that sense the desert is honest: it will not pretend to offer coordinates unless you give it a star or persuade yourself of the presence of a god. The veredas we followed had not been made by municipal planners, they looked older than any plan; they looked like they had been worn into the city by the feet of people fleeing the various devils that take turns wearing uniforms. Desert is what remains after the map resigns. “This is not a geographic trip,” I told Lydia; “it’s existential.” She laughed because she knows when I get philosophical, the wind picks up inside my head. “It’s both,” she said. “And either way, let’s keep walking.”

In the days of my youth—when I believed that everything could be cross-referenced with everything else until the web of words made a net strong enough to catch the meaning that always jumped away—we would have seen the building’s fall as a symbol, and we would have written it down: bricks in the street, no earthquake; the way the light leaned on the dust, the way the bus driver’s hands stayed on the wheel like a prayer; the officer’s confident tautology about small holes becoming large. We used to say that the future changes the present, and so we wrote our omens forward to be remembered backward. I felt that tug in the sand: we were already recalling this hour from some later hour that might never come.

My cousin Roberto—this is how the mind works; it obeys a logic older than the city—waved to me across an imaginary street, laughing about the motel clerk’s disapproval. There is always a clerk that is not happy. There is always a desk that gives him authority. There is always a place where the world of symbols insists on a signature. There is always an index card where your name does not fit exactly. “A saber por qué,” he had said, and we had shrugged, and I had envied his cheerful refusal to be shrunk by invisible rules. I thought then of Aunt Gladis in the doorway of a room that smelled like old coffee and disinfectant, their luggage open like nervous suitcases whose mouths cannot close without biting something tender. The city watches you; the city wants you to be legible. It never quite trusts a pilgrim who circles the block like a satellite around an illegal moon.

The sand made conversation soft. People murmured oaths. From time to time we heard a distant metallic wrench as something else agreed to become rubble. A raven coasted over us, arrogant as always, a little priest in glossy vestments. The Guard woman talked into her shoulder and then told us there would be shuttles. My mother shook her head. “No,” she said with that particular Salvadoran refusal that is unanswerable by official doctrine. “We’ll walk.” She looked to me and Lydia, and we nodded. The city was inventing a temporary geometry; we would be our own guides.

We picked a bearing the way sailors once did—by unspoken story more than instrument. Through a belt of grass, across a second narrow beach of sand that did not know what ocean it belonged to, over a low rise where the wind braided itself into our hair. From that vantage point, the skyline looked broken but not humbled. I have never believed in punishment. I have believed, intermittently, in harsh lessons. The buildings, like us, had learned that balance is not an entitlement. “Do you think it was sabotage?” Lydia asked. “Or stress failure? Or just that the world has had enough of hard angles?” I told her I thought it was the most ordinary miracle: that the unseen workings, tired of being unseen, came out to make themselves known.

Some boys were playing in the sand because boys will play anywhere. One of them jabbed a stick into the grit and said, “This is the tower, and this is what it does,” and he pulled the stick free and left a hole that collapsed gently into itself until it was just a shadow. His mother called him away from our adult sadness. He ran gladly, because the world is catastrophic and glad, and the two qualities are not particularly opposed.

We rested on a lip of concrete that had no purpose other than to be a lip. From here I could see, not far away, a little stand of trees. One of them—taller, patient, lanterned by the light—looked like the brother of that Salvadoran tree, the one I had named God without humor. I told my mother. She squinted. “It will do,” she said. That is her theology: sufficiency elevated to devotion. We walked there. We stood under that green roof and let our eyes adjust.

If the desert is an exposure, the tree is an interlocutor. It does not close the world against you; it opens you to a moment of shade. The leaves made their private arithmetic of wind. Lydia leaned her forehead against the bark as if listening for a pulse. My mother took off her shoes and shook sand out of them and laughed, not because anything was funny but because something had been given back to her—some small piece of the child who once ran across yards barefoot and learned which patches of earth remembered the sun most keenly. I closed my eyes. For a moment I was driving again on a moonlit vereda, the ceiba rising ahead of me with its arms like a mnemonic of heaven. I thought: the machine sleeps, but sometimes it dreams us toward a kind of mercy.

When we opened our eyes again the tree was only a tree. That was also mercy. A helicopter stitched the blue sky. Far off, another siren drew a line under the paragraph of the hour. We were together. We were alive. We were the recipients of a borrowed instruction: avoid the small sinkholes, because they envy you your size and will become large as a kind of vengeance. We were disciples of a borrowed instruction: keep to the veredas, and if the map fails, you still have your feet. We were citizens of an interval in which eating with your mother could change without warning into a rehearsal for exile that is not entirely a rehearsal but is not yet the end.

Later, I would write it down in the language of my tribe: We crossed a zone of sand, and there the danger was diminished. There were no sinkholes in that granular expanse. It was a passage through the desert and the desert signified exposure. It was not a geographic journey, though our bodies insisted upon miles; it was an existential crossing in a country of grains without coordinate, a country where the compass is not wrong but obsolete. I would add: We kept moving until the city’s voice softened, until the brick-dust tasted less like iron and more like the mineral fact of sand, of being here, now, uncollapsed. I would add: a building fell the way a promise sometimes falls, for no announced reason; and we, who have lived among promises all our lives, did the one thing we could do worth doing. We walked out into the open, where the map ends and the tree waits, where the sand does not ask who you are, only whether you can stand and keep on moving.