While some of us hid like seeds in the winter, above ground, cloth, flags, garments, vestments were torn apart. We left behind songs, high-heels, notes, stories, stucco, beads, and toucans from Tijuana. Below, we took off our shirts; we peeled off our shells. We shed our leaves so that someday we could sprout. We, the ones hiding underground for years on end, remain stubborn even after the war and the disease, the war and the heat, the war and the draught… the war took so many from us ––so many women and so many men–– until reality faded from our memories like an ancient painting. We forgot what light was. We forgot, too, what shadow was because, in our world, everything was shadow. Only then did we begin to sprout.
In that swollen world of flames, fires, and fevers, we had to forget what it was to drink water; we became heavy, like blood that seeks the dark, like blood that drenches the roots. We learned to harvest moisture with our tongues against the stone. We ate moss and albino fern. We ate fungus and mud. Now, we––Those who Seek, Those who Sleep, Those who Watch, and Those who Dream––have learned that this world had to burn for us to sprout green, tender, fresh, brand-new.
In the world above, humanity had become an oyster that slips down one’s throat until one realizes, too late, that it’s rotten, poisonous, pure evil. We learned to be something other than human. We buried ourselves. We proliferated in the humus; we became foam; we turned into a swarm, together. We turned minimal; we became furtive, crawling, and we survived that world that did everything to erase, everything to forget. Even though not many, but enough, years have passed, today, from these tunnels, from these caves, from these lairs and mines, some of us have decided that we must safeguard that world. The others call us the Secretaries of Death. They also call us Guardians of Memory, Trackers of Remains, Scavengers. They are Those Who Seek, Those Who Sleep, Those Who Watch. We've caught the fever of memory. We fumble around rescuing documents from that past, expired world––testimonies of collapse, apocalyptic palimpsests, memories of resistance––to understand how we got here and to be able to sprout someday like young corn, like tender buds, like intoxicating flowers.
In a box, we keep the crest of the final flag: drawn in threads, there is a girl with a raised fist, and beside her, a hooded woman, another woman wears a red huipil, a mother seeks her children with a helmet and tools. That’s the last flag of that world––the one we called “real” until this shadow world became the real one, and the other was transformed. That flag, says one of the Seekers, represents worlds converging like clusters of galaxies in space. Those Who Sleep, Those Who Dream, and Those Who Watch also call us snaketongues. We enjoy counting again and again. We go over things time after time. We travel through tunnels, searching for anything and everything. Our rescue expeditions consist of exploring galleries, caves, holes, underground passages, and corridors close to ours. We map them in the same way we’d trace the arteries of a robotic arm. Over there, in G-7, we found bones, expired canned goods, and coal; in Q-15, there were notebooks, photographs, cellphones, batteries, computers; on W-1, we identified clothes and more clothes. We accumulate, transcribe, convert dust into data, fangs into files, and look for the needle in the haystack to see if we find ourselves in its reflection. “We search to keep from thinking,” we exhale between the sighs that have become our song.
Those Who Sleep are in metamorphosis. While they ––the stubborn larvae–– remain in their chrysalis, we, in parallel time, continue to store, archive, arrange, organize, transcribe, and transform. The method is that of madness, of fever, of song. And in those codices that we put together––papyrus made of polyester, trash, and perseverance––we leave snail slime traces of our dance. It is impossible to avoid leaving our comments in the margins, glosses, and glitter. We embellish their stories with our graffiti––veni, vidi, vici; we interrupt their sentences with our hiccups; we chase their memory like a dog chases its tail. For a few days now, we’ve been busy with the lives and deaths of four friends. We found their testimonies, diaries, papers, clothes, and keepsakes a few months ago in Cave A-Tunnel 5. The find was interesting because we noticed from the remains that at least two or three people had lived there for several months or up to two years, and they’d carefully safeguarded their belongings. We detected that they were telling their story and saving it in hopes that it would survive time, and thus, we found it. We give it a permanent shelter and encrypt what is left in our seed archive because we know that someday, Those Who Sleep will be reborn; they’ll sprout brand-new, and they’ll need to know how they got here.
There are times when this memory fever hurts to the bone. There are days when we don't want to go on, and the connective tissue that we are swells up. But we know that in order to heal, we must gather the petals of these accounts, of these songs of red rainy weather. We are amphibious, and we crawl through the lives of others to see if we can learn to breathe better in the new world above. Between the bones and hollows, the words and remains, only fever and fire, amber and blood, teach us what can survive.
Those Who Watch calculate the risk because sometimes we can run into them, but not many of us or them are left. Nor of anything. Only the part of a whole remains, and we never get the balance right in the subtraction. But that's why we still count: to see if someday the balance is settled and the debt with that world mutates into a gift––as Those Who Dream say, generously.
Gabriela Jáuregui is the author the poetry collections Many Fiestas, Leash Seeks Lost Bitch, and Controlled Decay, and the short story collection La memoria de las cosas. She holds a PhD in comparative literature from USC, an MFA in creative writing from UC Riverside, and an MA in critical theory from UC Irvine.
Lia Galván is an emerging translator from Mexico City. She earned her BA in English from UNAM and an MFA in Literary Translation from Boston University.
