“Lady Matilde,” the man tells me, unloading boxes of fruit from a truck as if trying to avoid problems, “lives in one of those houses, with the other gods.”
The sky is a rosy pearl between clouds of fog and I hold my cell phone in my hand with Google Maps open. We face a mountain of Japanese-style houses that stretch backwards, piling on top of each other until it’s hard to tell where one ends and the next begins. The lips of the man unloading the fruit are purple and shiny. Maybe he notices I’m staring at his mouth, because he scrubs it with his shirtsleeve several times.
“I just really like blue chirimoyas,” he apologizes.
I ask him innocently if he lives in this neighborhood, but he shakes his head like I’ve said something outrageous.
“I’m just a worker, that’s all.”
“Which of these houses belongs to Lady Matilde?” I ask, showing him my phone screen. “My Google Maps is freaking out.”
“It’s number 36,” he says, worrying his still-purple lip. “That’s not going to be much help up there.”
“And which one is number 36?” I look towards the mountain of houses again.
The man smiles as if it were obvious.
“It’s number 36.”
I don’t ask anything else. I get a message from Sara as I’m about to put my phone away in my bag and I’m reminded of what she told me the other day after her shift. I stop stalling and slowly make my way towards the neighborhood of the gods. The sky above my head starts to show its first shadows.
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The neighborhood of the gods has an unpronounceable name that starts with “Ka” and ends with “baba.” Whatever’s in the middle can’t be repeated by those of us who don’t live there. Despite this, anyone can climb the hill and walk into the neighborhood – until a certain time of day – without anyone stopping them. (There are a few exceptions, of course. People from the southernmost outskirts of the city who don’t work in the neighborhood can’t enter, but I know how to go unnoticed). The streets are narrow and steep, made of gravel and the rhythm of merecumbé, and they smell like anise incense. By night, neon lights brighten small wooden stalls and markets that sell little fetuses in colorful jars. The furrowed, shrunken faces of the fetuses are suspended in gleaming amber. They’re made of dreams, a delight for the gods, like sweets or little pets. Some of them are covered in wax with a wick on top, meant to be sold as scented candles. They come in sage and citrus, sandalwood rose, balsam and cedar, orange blossom, black fig, myrtle mint, lemon lavender, vanilla and wildflower, sweet grapefruit, cucumber melon, and bamboo leaf.
The vendors at these markets are gods of vague countenance. Some of their faces seem to drool marmalade and have scales made of crystalline petals. Others are made of gigantic fruits– papayas, melons, and plums– with tongues everywhere. Others have their eyes sewn shut, their noses and mouths and entire heads made of thread and scraps of cloth. Others are little suns that you can’t make eye contact with (not because of possible damage to the retinas, but because they provoke persistent visions of nightmares and beheadings). Others seem to be made of carbon-black plants slathered in yogurt. Others are huge balls the color of gum with clumps of almond-sized eyes. Others are animal faces, bison or buffalo, made of opals, rubies and white pearls.
“Do you know how to get to Lady Matilde’s house?” I ask a bison god who gazes at me with his eyes glazed over, expressionless.
His gemstone skin gleams under the neon lights of the tiny market stand and I wonder, hoping this god doesn’t read minds, how much his head would be worth. The bison shakes his head no and the earrings on his glass ears clink slightly, so I move on towards the next stand.
The gods don’t smile, even those with many mouths. They scarcely gesture, and they move their heads slowly, deliberately. Some open their jaws to show off a set of acrodont teeth that stack back into the depths of their larynx (I envision their tracheas, deep as a well with no bottom, with a little light far inside signaling the possibility of an afterlife). I don’t know why they do it, but it intimidates me; it makes me feel like I’m not in the right place to ask questions if I’m not going to buy anything. I finally give in and pick one of the fetuses covered in scented wax to purchase. The tag reads Madera de Cítrico: Where the Soul Smiles, with the price written below it. I have to hold the tag up close to my face to double check the amount printed there. The gods value the fetuses highly, but even so the price seems exorbitant.
“Do you take Nequi?” I ask, resigned.
The god of the many-tongued face extends one of his tongues, holding a QR code on the tip of it. I buy the candle with my mobile payment app and examine it carefully. The fossilized embryo’s little mouth is open in an O; its hands are clenched close together as if hiding something important. It looks like it’s made of mud and gelatin, and its belly is swollen, though a few thin lines of its ribs are visible. I think about calling it Sami, for some reason, but I feel bad about it, as though that would be crueler than lighting the wick and letting the scent of citrus fill the air.
I stand in front of the kiosk, not sure how to proceed. The god still has no interest in me, I can tell, though his face is merely a cluster of tongues.
“My dreams are silent,” I decide to say then. The tongues move slowly, as if floating in water. “I dream of many white flowers, of blue quartz, and of turquoise eyes.”
The god tilts his head to the side.
“I dream of polycubes and polyhedrons, of a magenta pixel, and of a human brain falling onto an immense Tetris board.”
The god leans forward ever so slightly.
“And I dream of great empty spaces,” I continue, “of capuchin monkeys, and of androgynous darkness.”
His tongues start to drool and I know I’m reeling him in, as if I was now the seller and he the interested client.
“The capuchin monkeys play Tetris in a constant state of elasticity.”
The god shivers and straightens up in a flash. I’ve found the key word, the passcode that grants me access.
“Elasticity is a confounded city,” I add, “and I’m looking for Lady Matilde’s house.”
The god shakes his head. Thick drops of spit scatter over the candles and the wooden stand. His tongues move swiftly, tracing long circles and symbols I struggle to decipher.
“Christmastime silence is a wooded entity,” I make out. “Fiery silhouettes wreath themselves in their funnel through a street of rock and paper-mâché.”
I don’t add anything else. I continue on my way with a feeling of triumph in my chest. The sky turns salmon-colored, with hematite scales in a pattern so symmetrical it’s hard for me to believe it’s real. Even the sky looks different above the neighborhood of the gods.
_________________________
Hundreds of eyes watch me closely from keyholes and thin crevices as I follow a narrow street of stone and paper-mâché up the hill. They’re small eyes, sparkling and silent, pearls hidden between the sand and blue space of the ocean’s depths. The gods begin to sense they have an intruder in their neighborhood, but they can’t do anything about it, at least not yet. The street narrows like a funnel as I continue walking, and little moths flutter around the yellow and orange streetlights. Their leaf-like shadows trace patterns, spirals and sinusoids, and I make out a certain bluish tone on the ground. The street becomes blue.
It’s then that I think of Lady Matilde, of her butterfly wings, her bitumen wings. They enchanted me when I was a kid, when I would see her among the picture cards on my mom’s altar next to the rosaries and scapulars, or on the walls at school, or in the windows of taxis and buses. I remember the stories people told about Lady Matilde the saint, stories of apparitions and miracles, of premonitions, of great riches, and of blue fruit – before it became a commodity and was no longer exclusively for the chosen ones. Fruit that caused extraordinary visions.
I also remember, then, Samuel, a classmate I went to elementary school with. I remember his family, more devoted to Lady Matilde than anyone I knew. They claimed the saint had appeared to them in a burnt arepa, in a humidity stain on the roof, and in a puddle of dog piss. Three times, and then it all began to arrive: the money, the designer clothing, the precious gemstones, the magical ointments, the expensive cellphones and the blue fruit. All by the grace of Lady Matilde.
Samuel said, too, that the saint followed him wherever he went. He said he saw her reflection in windows, that she dressed all in white, clothed in coats and fine shawls, and that she passed a napkin across her mouth over and over. Her lips are blue, he confirmed, as we listened to him in awe. But what about her wings? we interrogated him immediately, her insect-like eyes? The black serpents? There isn’t any of that, he responded. The woman on the picture cards isn’t Lady Matilde. No? We replied. Who is it, then? The question floated in the air, suspended like a body in water, and Samuel didn’t know what to say (this was before we knew that the gods had moved to the city). I felt my fingers burn and I stared out the window at the scenery until night fell and I wondered how long it would take for my chest to be free of this feeling, this heavy melancholy feeling.
Samuel would bring his blessed fruit to school in his radioactive green lunchbox and unpack it in front of us. He held it like a communion wafer and it glimmered like a precious gemstone beneath the sun. He bit the oily flesh with his eyes closed like it was the most delicate, delicious thing in the world. He chewed and chewed, and a sweet smell filled his mouth that made us think of mermaids, of seahorses, or of a pretty girl’s kiss. We were sprawled on the grass, just one cloud in the sky. I thought about the color of the fruit. About normal fruit, covered in spots and stains, on the verge of spoiling or becoming as soft as purée. The blue fruit was eternal. They were like diamonds. They were gods.
But the visions Samuel had after eating the fruit weren’t what we expected. At first, they were about our own reality, about things that happened in the city, robberies or car accidents. They were particular visions, a kind of report about the specific events that were about to happen: “There’s going to be an accident at the intersection of Avenue 13 and 134. A motorcyclist will die.” “Shooting in Alcalá Trasmilenio station next Tuesday. Two injured.” “A sanitation worker will die after falling from a waste truck in Usme. There’ll be traffic in the area.” “There’s going to be a violent robbery attempt in the neighborhood of San Antonio, with firearms. One dead.” The teachers would go to Samuel when class was over so he could tell them how the traffic was, which was the best route home, or what areas to avoid so they wouldn’t get robbed. We would ask him questions too, drawing maps based on his visions and then checking the news to confirm what he’d said. He never got it wrong. We would imagine ourselves fighting against crime, thwarting every robbery attempt, every accident. Saving lives.
Samuel thought it was normal for the fruit to show him things that were connected to our reality while his body first adapted. He believed, though, that eventually he would have those ecstatic visions of Eden: a utopia, full of sakura trees, jasmine flowers, and slender white cranes, a place we’d read and heard so much about ever since we were little. Instead, his visions became stranger and stranger. They were ambiguous, indistinct, unreal.
He saw a city buried beneath our own, made up of complex webs of underground tunnels and inhabited by unknown communities, unregistered by any governmental entity. Someone entered those underground tunnels with a lantern in hand, their breathing agitated. Voices, steps getting closer. Bottomless catacombs, full of decomposing bodies, of people with no skin, people who were red, rosy, burgundy, ochre. Fetuses hanging like fruit, or like Christmas decorations. Altars of bone, made of fluttering breasts and vulvas. A laugh. Grunts, chants. A ceremony. Faces with hundreds of eyes or tongues. Bright, shriveled heads. An animal creeping out of the darkness, out of mud and ash. “Beneath everything there always lies another beneath,” said a voice. “Skin is an elastic organ,” said another: “dreams are the skin of the mind, covering the innards of its unconscious.”
Samuel no longer slept. He stopped eating the blue fruit, and then he stopped eating altogether. He seemed sick; he had two long violet shadows around his eyes and his skin was so pale you could see small blood vessels in his temples. He would often excuse himself to go to the bathroom and once he even vomited on a girl’s hair in the middle of biology class. We were learning about the parts of the eukaryotic cell and Samuel vomited bile, more than anything else, because he no longer ate. The girl screamed: her head was on fire, the stomach acid was burning her scalp, so the professor took them both to the bathroom. Samuel never stopped talking about the underground city, about the several scattered entrances that nobody knew about, about the rendings of flesh and other ceremonies that took place there. Over time, the veins in his head broadened until they looked like roots beneath his skin, sinister serpents.
The last time I saw him, he said the saint was growing closer to him every day. He said he saw her clearly in every reflection: in the windows of the bus, in puddles, or in the storefront displays at the mall. He saw her mouth, her thin blue lips, her small yellow teeth. He felt her breath, the scent of expensive perfume, of dry skin. The movement of gold earrings, the jingle of bracelets. “I can’t do anything,” he said, “she devoured all of my dreams and licked her fingers clean.” “I don’t see her,” I said, and although I didn’t admit it then, I was excited by the idea of being close to Lady Matilde, even if she was just a hallucination of Samuel’s. “When she leans in to kiss me,” he declared, “she’ll take me with her forever.” “Where to?” I asked. He looked upwards and then behind him, over his shoulder. “To Eden.”
His family explained that they had transferred him to a different school, somewhere out of the country, and that they were moving as well. The saint had given them enough money to go wherever they wanted. But at night, as I tried to sleep, I would think about Samuel’s visions and about Lady Matilde eating his dreams. I asked myself if there could be anything real in it, and if it was true what his family had said. And then I felt a presence in the darkness, as if someone was observing me from some corner of my room and wanted me to go to sleep once and for all.
_________________________
Eden had always inhabited a magical place in my imagination.
I liked to think that there were huge animals there, like bears or white tigers. That there were gods playing stringed instruments, and tentacled flowers, and little capuchin monkeys clambering to and fro between fruit trees. I saw the silhouette of a feathered dragon flying in a bamboo forest and a baby monkey stroking the tentacles of a yellow flower. I imagined the beak of a white crane nibbling berries from a towering blue tree, the water dewy at my feet, a lotus flower in the middle of a lake that sparkled like a smooth nipple. There were delicate ferns, rosy clouds, and eels wiggling through water and air. There were peacocks and sea stars, and beyond the gods a statue of Lady Matilde painted the sky with a moon, humble and serene.
Yet when the blue fruit became commodified and started appearing at fruit stands, in the marketplace, in local stores, and later in supermarkets and drugstores, I tried one– a few– but I never had a vision. No gardens, no Edens.
I felt what was typical. Relaxed muscles, slight drowsiness, a clearer mind, and an overall sense of comfort and serenity. My lips became soft and moisturized, and the city’s problems, like poverty, robberies or inflation, no longer affected me. I became obsessed with windows, and I could sit in front of one for hours without becoming bored. I felt like a seagull watching the fish in the water. If I stayed very still, I could imagine that feathers would sprout from my skin, that my eyes would become small and sharp and that I would fish for people with my beak. I imagined myself carrying off older women with their grocery carts, men in suits on their way to the office, couples linked at the arm, or overeager college students. I imagined swallowing them down in one bite or carrying them to my hungry little chicks. But no gardens, no Edens.
I started carrying around a bag of the blue fruit to eat when I needed to: sitting in a park, during a family gathering, in a waiting room, on a Transmilenio bus during rush hour, or in bed before going to sleep. I ate to forget about things, to avoid feeling anything, as if something were lying in wait for me in the corner of my mind. I particularly liked the chirimoyas, because they were the cheapest and the easiest to get. I also liked these salpicones they made at the station on the corner of Avenue 45 and Avenue Caracas, chopped fruit in juice with condensed milk or honey, which would keep me up for an entire night of partying without even needing to blink.
But then regulations were implemented and the price of the fruit increased. The color changed, too; they were more purple than blue, and they were sweeter than before. They made a version for children as well. They came in colorful packaging and were covered in sugar with a sour filling in the middle. Supposedly, they weren’t psychotropics or depressants, but every time I saw a kid in the street or the park I noticed something strange in their gaze. Their eyes were swollen and they seemed to be suspended in a dark pool, or lost on a distant planet.
“Maybe he is in Eden,” Sara said one sunny afternoon, sitting in the park, as we gazed at a child who was in the car with his mom.
Then she told me that her nephew, who was around the same age as the kid in the car, had shown her a drawing of Lady Matilde. Apparently, he’d seen her curled up in an alleyway between two buildings as he was on his way to school one morning, tucked among heaps of garbage. No one in his class believed him, so he drew her. The drawing was covered in bizarre blue splotches, with a circular form made only of straight lines and some squares floating around it. Even though Sara wasn’t a devotee of the saint, she explained to him that the goddess was a woman with wings, covered in snakes and dressed in all white, and she showed him photos of Matilde’s statues and scapulars. But her nephew shook his head, insisting that this was how she looked and that she had introduced herself as Lady Matilde.
“Maybe it was a vision,” I suggested, but Sara explained that her sister didn’t let her son eat that packaged junk.
By then, around the time Sara first came into my life, I’d decided to quit eating the blue fruit. They didn’t have a relaxing effect or make me feel good anymore. I was worn out, with my mind full of ants, my mouth full of sores, and my eyes swollen. I couldn’t eat or sleep well, and I felt anxious; it was like someone was following me around: hovering behind my back, over my shoulder, at the edge of my ear. I also realized that I no longer dreamed at night. Sara brought it to my attention when she mentioned that she’d started dreaming again as soon as she stopped eating the fruit. After two weeks without eating it, I slowly started dreaming again too. Where had they gone? I asked myself one morning, and I remembered what Samuel had said the last time I saw him, that Lady Matilde had licked her fingers clean after devouring his dreams.
“I’d like to see her, too,” I said then.
“Do you think she’d be here in Bogotá?” Sara asked me, and a bird flew very close by our heads.
She didn’t buy my theory that Lady Matilde was eating the dreams of everyone who consumed her fruit. Instead, she thought the sudden absence of dreams was because of some effect the fruit had on the brain. “Maybe it increases sensitivity to adenosine, like marihuana, which would make sleep deeper,” she said. It made sense.
Sara was interested in the way hallucinogens and other substances affected the brain. She was also interested in finding a rational explanation for mystical experiences. She had read about the yagé and the peyote, psychoactive plants, and had even read the hagiographies of sixteenth century Spanish saints. She had tried the blue fruit mostly as a scientific experiment, and she was disappointed, like me, when she received no extraordinary visions. Apparently, she concluded with a tinge of irony, visions were reserved for the chosen ones, not for people who bought the blue fruit in the supermarket. She had also noticed small veins appearing in her temples and a violet shade starting to color her lips, so she decided to abandon the experiment completely.
But I couldn’t stop thinking about Samuel.
As the mother and son left the park, we followed them with our gaze until they disappeared completely. Night was falling and a cold wind battered the backs of our necks. A girl cried on a nearby bench, her face buried in her hands, and some kids chatted animatedly on another. They carried a plastic bag full of the blue fruit and a speaker blasting music at full volume. One of them was rapping, but the others didn’t pay him any attention. He rapped about altered states of mind and about a gun fight in an area of San Antonio. Sara and I glanced at each other when he mentioned the saint, her sacred presence, and we both shrugged our shoulders upwards. Maybe it was the cold, or maybe it was something else.
_________________________
Things changed when it turned out that Lady Matilde and a caravan of gods had moved to the northwestern part of the city.
“Lady Matilde is a delicate woman, an azure angel,” said one of her devotees, invited onto a news broadcast. “Lady Matilde doesn’t close the door on anybody,” said another. “Everyone is welcome at her house on the hill.” People from other cities, even other countries, set off on pilgrimages to visit the saint. “Her house is filled with mountains and endless jungles,” a pilgrim from Buenos Aires claimed. “Full of the most beautiful sunsets, parrots and macaws, clouds like cinnamon pears, scents that take you back to childhood, to a lost love, to life itself, shit!”
Back then Sara worked as a dog walker and I led aerobic rumba classes. We both worked mornings and afternoons, so we had time to see each other in the middle of the day and have lunch. Almost every week, we would tell each other new stories about Lady Matilde that we’d heard out and about.
Sara would arrive tired and covered in dog hair from her morning rounds. Every day she had to walk through a street lined with mechanic shops. The men who worked there looked her up and down as they huddled together like a heap of frogs on the floor. They had handheld radios, and Sara told me that once, as she passed by, she overheard a testimony given by a taxi driver. He said that a miniature Lady Matilde had snuck into his mouth like an insect and that he had swallowed her down without thinking. “She’s in my stomach,” he said, “I feel her here with me.”
Another time, she told me she’d seen the mechanics crying one morning after hearing on the radio that Lady Matilde had been found dead by a school, surrounded by pigeons and dry leaves. A woman who was sweeping found the body. The place filled up with kids who wanted to touch her, to sink their hands into her flesh. But the next day they dispelled that rumor; apparently she’d been seen in a supermarket peeling bananas, invading the place with ground snakes and other red serpents that devoured every can of corn and carton of eggs.
For my part, I led rumba classes for well-off housewives in their gated communities or, if it was nice out, in the park. Some of them would invite me for coffee after class or give me their daughter’s numbers in hopes that I would take them out to eat or to some party. Sometimes they gave me gifts, long sleeved button-ups or leather belts, and they talked to me about their husbands as if I were their marriage counselor. They told me to take the piercings out of my ears and that I shouldn’t get any more tattoos, though they also said my tattooed arms were eye-catching. They messaged me outside of class hours: photos of sunsets on the beach when they went on vacation, photos posing with their husbands or their daughters or invitations to play tennis at their clubs.
One of them confessed she was sure she’d seen Lady Matilde the night before, sitting in the passenger seat of her husband’s truck when he got back from work, but that she disappeared swiftly. She glowed green and looked ghostly. Later, she told me that a worker at one of the construction sites her family business oversaw had seen the saint enter the half-standing building. She went up the stairs holding a little candle in her hands until she reached the top floor, leaving the place full of small eggs and the skulls of some unknown animals, like a ritual offering.
Another confessed to me in a Juan Valdez coffee shop that Lady Matilde had shown up in one of her ultrasounds. Apparently, the saint was attaching herself to her white blood cells, like an insect that stings its prey and won’t let go, and she had to start chemotherapy treatment because of it. As if she had a tumor. She told me, also, that one of her daughters had contracted an STD after a boy seduced her. He confessed to her, after they slept together, that Lady Matilde had appeared in his body in the form of a bacteria that spread through bodily fluids. He said he had never meant to infect her; the saint had forced his hand.
When Sara saw her, she kept her cool during their encounter. She had slept badly that night and she rose from bed with an uneasy premonition about the day running through her body. The mechanics in their shops glared at her with hostility as she passed through the street, and one of the dogs– a Chihuahua named Nugget– slipped from her grasp and went running, disappearing into a construction site. She looked for him everywhere while the other dogs yanked her from side to side and she found him, finally, in a little alleyway where someone had recently been stabbed. Nugget licked a small pool of blood incessantly and Sara sighed in relief as soon as she saw him.
“Nugget!” she tried to call out, but the words got stuck in her throat.
Lady Matilde descended in utter silence. Despite its size and geometry, her body seemed unaffected by gravity. The dogs disappeared. The pool of blood and the surrounding streets did, too. Everything disappeared except for the saint, who materialized in front of her.
For some reason Sara remembered then a night she spent in the hospital as a teenager. It was a dark hospital, its walls covered with humidity stains, its old cots hard as wooden planks. Her mother’s face was red, but Sara didn’t know if it was in anger or in sorrow, and she thought then of a fruit with dark, wrinkled borders. A steaming fruit, on the verge of exploding. A nurse gave her an IV and she heard the voices of two men talking in the hallway. They spoke so quietly that she thought for a moment it was two cats meowing or monks reciting brief “oms.” The only thing she made out clearly was “suicide attempt,” and her head felt like it weighed various kilos, so heavy that all she could do was lay it to the side and let her eyes close. In the darkness behind her eyelids, she saw a sky-blue sphere that trembled slightly like the reflection of a lake. Other little lights shimmered around it. She thought she heard the sound of a bell or of a motor driving away along a sunlit street, and with each passing minute she felt lighter and lighter. She felt leaflike, the green leaf of a newborn fruit.
The sphere, made of water and light, became a cube that came undone into smaller cubes only to assemble itself once again. It repeated the process multiple times, and each time it formed a different structure, a large L or a chiral figure. They looked like little Tetris pieces or a children’s puzzle. Sometimes, some of the cubes got bigger and the smaller ones filled them, forming tesseracts, four-dimensional cubes. Other times, they rolled themselves up and folded in on themselves, tracing patterns that looked like a large white and brown brain. “Elasticity is a living thing’s minimum capacity for survival,” she heard a voice say, “the ability to sustain life, memory, knowledge.” It was the brain that spoke, with its shifting geometry, and Sara was surprised by the number of shapes the material could appear in.
She watched the sphere move like a bubble again. It shone, surrounded by wooden scenery. It floated in silence, in sweet abstraction, and, finally, it burst.
When Lady Matilde disappeared, Sara had to sit down in the street and inspect her hands to reassure herself they were still her own. People passed her by and the dogs sat by her side, waiting patiently. The sky was clear and the shadow of the leaves on a tree moved gently over the pavement. But there were no trees behind Sara. She cried for a while until the owner of one of the dogs called her, irritable, and she ended her workday later than usual.
_________________________
I forge on between the Japanese-style houses, through the neighborhood of the gods, down a narrow blue street. The eyes multiply around me and I rub the fetus candle with my fingers as if it were an amulet. Each step seems to bring me closer to the saint’s house. I make out the silhouette of a bird on the roof of one of the houses. It isn’t native here. Its legs are as long as its neck and its feathers are white with a few black ones. It looks like one of the cranes I dreamt of as a kid. The bird tilts its head and takes two steps forward. I imagine it flying off into the sky and the image is so lovely I want to stop and admire it. But I know I have to continue on.
The houses narrow in around me as though ready to attack, and I realize that the floor beneath my feet feels more and more uncertain with each step I take, so much so that I have to double check that I’m still walking over something. I feel my brow furrow. My hands look blue, as do my feet as they walk, and the houses that surround me. It feels like I’m in an underwater world. I carefully study the fetus that I hold in my hands. It helps me to hold on to something so I don’t give in to this feeling that overwhelms me suddenly. I look at its furrowed face inside the candle and I ask myself if one of my dreams might have escaped and found a home here. Or one of Sara’s or Samuel’s dreams. The name Sami comes to mind again; I don’t know why it feels so right to me. What color are Sara’s dreams? I remember the man who unloaded the fruit from the truck at the edge of the neighborhood, boxes and boxes of it, and I suspect that not too far from here I would find the eternal trees and shrubs that give life to the seedless fruit, the fruit that never rots. I smell them. I can almost taste them. The scent makes me vaguely nauseous and I feel drunk in a way I’ve never felt before.
I look up and see the plumbing of the houses and the black tiles of the roofs. I hear a drop of water falling, over and over, but I can’t tell where it is. The houses aren’t lit, they seem uninhabited, yet they’re full of presences. My head starts to spin. I suddenly feel the urge to cry, or to fall to my knees in the middle of the street and vomit. I feel a tingling in one cheek and I realize that I’m no longer moving forward, that I’m walking in the fixed point of a great Cartesian plane. I want to close my eyes and beg the saint to help me, to give me the strength to go on. I don’t know where I’m going. I can no longer tell what is street and what is house, what is sky and what is not. I grip the candle in my hand and breathe deeply. I wait for the feeling to pass.
When I open my eyes again, I’m in front of a door. It’s a sliding door, made of paper, with a wooden frame. It’s so delicate that I could rip it with one fingernail. I don’t know how I got here nor where the door came from. There’s a yellow light behind it and now there are no other houses around me. I see only a bamboo flower in a crystal vase and the number 36 carved on a wooden plaque. Everything else has gone silent.
I see, also, someone’s shadow moving on the other side of the door. My discomfort fades away and so does any other recognizable feeling. I feel light as a leaf, featherlight, and I think I could float through the air if I just moved my arms. My mind has been emptied of thoughts and I feel like laughing when I notice that. I carry the scented candle in my hands as if it were an offering. I don’t know why, but it feels right. The scent is subtle with hints of citrus. The silhouette moves as if it’s noticed my presence. It straightens up and grows bigger as it approaches the door. But I don’t feel intimidated. I hear a metallic clinking and see a hand stretching upward to open the door. It’s a big hand, covered in bracelets and rings. I hold out my hands and offer her the candle. The hand takes it and disappears.
I wait. I hear a murmur, like a cascade of pearls falling into a glass container. The golden light that pierces the opening of the door illuminates me like a sun. I have to cover my eyes with my forearm. After a moment the hand appears again. I open my own and take the object she gives me. It’s an elastic thing, like a rubber band, but it pulses as well. It’s heavy and thick. It’s succulent and geometric. It looks like a heart, or another organ that I don’t quite recognize. It’s the size of a mango and it’s as blue as the fruit. The light in front of me disappears and, before the door can fully shut, I bury my mouth in my hands to eat it.