“As I Was Lost There Also, the Two of Us Did Meet”

Javier is a man of very few words. He communicates in other ways; for example, if he has to tell me how he’s feeling, he does it with his thoughts first. I’m attracted to Javier, but he’s afraid of me ’cause if he’s a strawberry tree that’s almost a bush, I’m a sequoia. I’m the tallest conifer in existence, a sequoia whose trunk never breaks and that gives o! a scent, and though I might not know anything about scents, I imagine mine to be like a sequoia with a thick trunk and smooth bark. Well, I’m that tree and I believe that I’ve always been too big for Javier; even though I know that he’s fond of me and we’ve kissed, he doesn’t have the courage to love and desire me the way I’d like to love and desire him.

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You see, sir, nobody’s loved and desired me that way yet. I mean the way couples do. I’d like to learn about that with Javier ’cause I like him; I’ve liked him since he sniffed me when I was a newborn baby. And the strange thing is that we have this inner bond; we have the same gestures and ways of being that regular couples have, but when I say, “Javier, I really, really like you,” he doesn’t say a word. The point is that Javier is a man who communicates in other ways. Like wolves, sir. Do you know about wolves? When they’re going to kill, first they say what they’re thinking and then they kill. They say it by showing their teeth. And after they’ve done that, they kill. Or they leave a mark on you. Javier’s like a wolf; first he shows me his teeth, then he finds a soft spot and leaves his mark on me. Javier only talks when the wound is already stinging. One day he looked at me differently and I knew he had something to say. “What is it, Javier?” I kept asking: when he doesn’t speak, I always insist. And he ran his tongue over his teeth. Then he looked into my doe eyes and that’s where he left his mark, saying that he’d been seeing his father at night. His dead father, sir. The father he never loved much ’cause his father wasn’t really his father. I don’t know if you believe in such things. In small places we do; but that’s ’cause we have to find reasons for so many noises, and in town they say the ones who disappear into the forest are watching us while we sleep.

The man looks at me as though he understands small places perfectly.

“Tell me another, Javier?” I said, and that laugh burst from my throat and echoed as far as the houses in the lower part of town, the ones that get flooded when the river overflows. “Yes, yes, I’m not kidding. I see the man who was my father, but I don’t speak to him ’cause I’m scared he’ll never go away,” Javier answered. Sometime after he’d told me that, a nanny goat appeared in his house and Javier was convinced it was his father come to see him. The father he didn’t love. The father—who wasn’t his father—had come back to the world’s end that way ’cause he thought maybe his son—who wasn’t his son—would love him better as a nanny goat. And the goat—it was already old when it arrived—lives in the yard of our house now, next to the hens ’cause Javier said his house was too small and the nanny goat’s no trouble at all. I sometimes stroke it, but if you touch a goat too often, the smell sticks. Did you know that? A while later, I asked Javier if he was still seeing his father and he said he wasn’t.

I’m telling you this ’cause, even if you don’t believe in ghosts or dead people who hang around a place, I want you to lie to me; I’ve never asked anyone to do that before. But I’d like you to lie and say that people do hang around after they’ve died. When I’ve told you what I’m going to tell you next, I want you to tell me that lie. Can you do that?

The man looks at me with a mix of tenderness and something strange I can’t quite get a hold on. I look back at him, knowing that I’m most likely asking too much.

Like I was saying, while I was walking along the cobbled street to my house, ruminating about wanting to leave town, the clock struck twelve noon and the bells rang to signal the minute’s silence for the end of the world. The hubbub of the townsfolk chatting near Jimena’s house died down and my shoes on the cobbles were the only sound in the square. And when there were just a few seconds to go before they all started up again, the neighbor’s dog began to bark and, as it raced toward me, you could hear its paws too. I frowned and thought Nora must have shit herself again. But the dog met me halfway home and barked so loud, so very loud, sir, that it hurt my ears. “Quiet, dog, quiet down. I’m coming.” But I’m pretty smart and my intuition is like a dart to the center of the target, so I started to run home, and those yards seemed like miles.

Then suddenly, sir, Marco’s arms were around me, bringing me to a halt. And he held me so tight I couldn’t breathe and said, “Don’t go there, Lea.” “What are you talking about, Marco? Let go of me.” “Don’t go there, Lea.” “Marco, I can’t breathe. Let go of me.” And I began to wriggle, and with Marco’s body blocking my way, I felt like I was set in reinforced concrete. “He’s dead, he’s dead.” But Marco didn’t let go and held my head like a vice. Then I said I hated him, said he was suffocating me, told him to let me go.

And Marco said no, no. And the neighbor’s dog kept barking. And if anybody attacks me, I’m like a brown bear, so I sunk my teeth into Marco’s arm so deeply that when he let go and I saw my father lying dead outside his own home with a wound in his head, I had a slight taste of blood in my mouth.

Sir, I know all anyone needs to know about death. I know all anyone needs to know about mourning. Death, sir, death is just a few days of tears. But I can’t deny that it’s essentially an end of the world, a brief explosion that upsets everything and gives rise to a tremendous desire to flee from where you are.

Javier’s story is that my scream was audible as far as Pueblo Grande and Catalina says that when she heard my shriek, the scar on her leg started to hurt as though it had never healed. I don’t know about that, but I guess I know about other things. Anyhow, that screaming made my mother drop the basket just as she was approaching the outsiders’ front door and the apples went rolling across the square, the chocolates stuck to the ground, and the eggs . . . oh, the eggs! All broken on the cobbles. And Catalina called to my mother, “Wait for me, Big Lea! Wait for me!” And neither of them realized that the shock had caused Esteban to shoot himself in the left foot and a trail of blood was tingeing the fallen green apples a dark, deep red.

Don’t look at me, sir. Don’t look at me that way.

My father might not have known about other things, but, I can tell you, he certainly did know how to love. When I was small, he’d take me to the river and hold me so I didn’t slip on the wet, mossy stones. He’d inspect my hands for cuts. Then he’d carry me home in his arms and if Marco, Catalina, or Javier was with us, he’d carry them on his back. My father was a horse, but people treated him like a mule.

The sight of my father’s dead body brought to mind the time he told me to choose one of the rabbits he kept in the yard. After I’d made my choice, he set it to one side and that rabbit lived apart from the others and I was allowed to play with it, stroke it, and give it a name. He killed the other rabbits one by one. First he’d feed them up and then later they’d feed his family. I always felt bad about choosing a rabbit ’cause I wanted to save all the ones that were skinned.

And the man’s expression is serious as he looks at me, the kind of expression people put on when they notice grief in others.

Well, the fact is that when I saw my father lying there dead I remembered the lucky rabbits that died of old age, with their faces all sharp and narrow. And my dead father was just the same, but with his head smashed in ’cause he’d tumbled down a hillside on the Dolores farm when he was trying to catch a rabbit. Marco picked him up and carried him home on his back. Marco has always been a pack animal, not a horse. After my scream, the only sound was Nora’s teeth chattering like castanets.

The man looks at me and I look at the man. Like I said, sir, I have a backstory. And the man looks into the forest.

My father’s vigil was held at home that same evening and the Dolores family took care of all the arrangements and paperwork. Their kindness had an ulterior motive: they wanted to stop us speaking out about the labor conditions on their land. I wish I’d known about such things, but I know nothing about struggles and exploitation, and neither does my mother or Marco, much less any of those good-for-nothings crying for my father around the house. Because all the townsfolk gave up watching the newcomers and moved their chairs to surround my dead father. Catalina—who cried so hard that she soaked the kitchen floor—was saying that this, that this, this misfortune was just another proof of the end of the world and I—with few feelings and fewer words—ended by agreeing that the world was ending and she hugged me like you’d hug . . . I don’t know who. Outside in the yard, I searched for my father’s face among the live rabbits while I was thinking no, no, it can’t be true that my father has died today but our lives will continue tomorrow. I was trying to convince myself, sir. And my father’s face wasn’t among the rabbits.

It’s my belief, sir, that the end of the world is the perception that time—I mean the hands of the clock—no longer has the meaning we’ve been giving it up to now. And that’s what I felt at my father’s vigil. My father, who just a few hours before had been alive and working on the land he hoped to buy. I felt that the present, the past, and the future were there together in that house with people and rabbits all around the empty body of the man who had been my father just a few hours before. And I felt that my gut was burning ’cause time had ceased to have any meaning. The suspension of time is a signal that the world is killing itself, sir.

“Take your sister out of here. I can’t bear it when she grinds her teeth,” my mother ordered. “Mom, you look lovely in black,” I said. Her expression didn’t change but she replied, “My Little Lea, we’re alone now.” And, sir, you can’t imagine how my gut burned. And I felt like I was the rabbit she’d chosen to save. I asked Marco to put my sister in her wheelchair and wait for me outside. I squatted down to look the rabbits in the eyes one by one and then I opened their cage. “What are you up to, Lea? You’ll fill the house with rabbits,” said Catalina and I told her that those animals had almost more right to be mourning my father than so many boring neighbors.

My father was always reciting these lines to me: “In a forest in China, the Chinese girl got lost, and as I was lost there also, the two of us did meet.” He’d say them when he put me to bed at night or when he was giving me my breakfast. Or sometimes he’d come to meet me from the school bus and greet me with that song. Then I grew up and my father taught me that when you plow the soil, when you’re faced with the immensity of the countryside, you leave yourself open to death without giving it a second thought. Life is so marvelous, he’d say, the earth, the mountain, the forest, or the countryside could gobble you up at any moment. And my father was killed by the earth he walked on, the countryside ate him the way he ate the rabbits. My father was a good man who always dreamed of recovering his land. The land he worked his whole life was his, it was his family’s land, but he sold it to the Doloreses to buy a wheelchair for my sister. My father taught me that even though our life had its hardships, we didn’t belong in that part of the world with a right to cry. And that’s why I save my tears for my pillow. And I’ll show you the sort of man my father was: one day he took my hand and said, “If I die early, I’ll gift you the years I haven’t lived.” And now what, Dad? Now what? That’s what I keep asking myself.

Marco, Catalina, and I were sitting on the bench across from the church rolling a joint when I looked at my sister in her chair and suddenly said, “Nora, I think that if anyone had to leave us, it should have been you.” And Catalina said, “Lea, you have a heart of stone.” Then Marco repeated, “Your problem is you don’t cry enough.” But I’m the sort who tells it like it is, and if Nora doesn’t understand much about life, it’s about time she had something to chew on. “Nora,” I went on, “Dad has left us, he isn’t coming back, and when he told you this morning that he’d sing to you—my father used to sing her ‘As the boat was passing, the boatman said to me’—that was a lie. He isn’t coming back.” Nora, who knew more than she let on, opened her mouth and I thought she was going to scream, but she just sat there looking at us with her jaw hanging loose. “I’m sorry, Nora. Really sorry.” And then I dug my nails into her forearms, and though the neighbor’s dog—it was there too—began to bark real loud, thinking I was attacking my sister, I went on digging my nails in ’cause Nora needed to cry, but she doesn’t spill any tears over death or absence. And then the tears flowed almost of their own volition, the way they flowed on that Sunday in summer when Esteban killed the dog.

I’m quiet for a moment and the man takes advantage of my silence to say, “Yes, those who leave us hang around.” I say thanks but tell him I don’t need him to say that just yet. And the man looks at his feet and I continue my tale.

Javier is a man who walks tall and takes a long time doing things. I, on the other hand, go wherever I’m headed quickly. When I was small and the neighbors saw me around town, they’d call out, “Here comes the flying gazelle! The flying gazelle!” That was ’cause I was always running. And when I was going to Catalina’s house, I’d race along the paths ’cause you can enjoy the greenery better going fast. And more than once I came home with my legs scratched and my mother would fill the bathtub, wash me, and put peroxide on the cuts. And when it stung, I didn’t say anything, ’cause Mom was always gentle and slow. You see, I’m the favorite of her two children, I’m the healthy one, the one with a future. So when Mom was cleaning my scratches, she did it as though I was a porcelain vase and she’d talk to me about the flowers she imagined growing in the forest we weren’t allowed to enter. She’d tell me that Madonna lilies are as lazy as snails, which is why they don’t grow fast, and that fuchsias are flowers that are always looking down, asking why their stems grow and carry them so far from the earth. I’d be spellbound, observing my mother’s unhurried way of doing things and speaking. And it’s that same pace, the same easy rhythm, I see in Javier when he’s walking. Or when he’s carving wood, ’cause he’s been doing that since he was very young. His father—who isn’t his father and is now a nanny goat—taught him to carve. And that’s why he makes those delicate borders on tables and decorates pieces of furniture with endless spirals that take him days and days. Javier’s house has the prettiest furniture in town; everyone says so. And whenever I sit and watch him carving the wood with more patience than I’ve ever possessed, I feel all emotional, sir, like when I hear the song that goes, “My lonely soul, forever alone.”

In this town, sir, we only have deaths once in a blue moon so I don’t know much about mourning or people who stop being here. When someone dies, Antón rings the bells at the wrong time so we all know that the person who was going to die has passed on. And then he posts an announcement on the corkboard in the church. There’s nothing nice about our church. The one in Pueblo Grande is huge and beautiful and even if you don’t believe in anything, it’s a pleasure to be in there, an emotional experience, but what you feel when you see our small church, dark as the forest, is the desire to head in the opposite direction. When someone dies here, the usual people turn up, the usual people cry, and, if we’re lucky, a relative comes from somewhere else. Marco has been our gravedigger since Jimena died two years ago, and he also takes charge of finding a space in the funeral plots, ’cause although very few people die here, sir, we’ve already got a whole history of others that are dead and buried. And Javier sees to the coffins. Another thing Marco’s responsible for is the nameplace. I don’t know who decided to call it that, but it’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard, particularly as that’s the one place where there aren’t any names.

And I can tell you, sir, if you hadn’t listened to me and had gone into the forest, you’d have ended up in the nameplace; it’s the plot at the back of the graveyard dedicated to all those who’ve gotten lost in the woodlands. A wooden post is planted anyhow in the ground for each person who disappears, and now we have almost five hundred yards of them. Antón keeps the tally and whenever there’s a burial he takes advantage to have posts planted for those who have disappeared since the last funeral. I remember that along with Jimena—before my father’s death—ten poles were put up ’cause the year before a whole group of climbers from the city by the sea was lost. The nameplace is a way of reminding ourselves that there’s an absence here, but in this small town we don’t forget. I was sorry it was Marco who buried my father, but no one could have done it better. Not that there was anyone else. What hurt me like a trap does a rat was that my father’s coffin was buried unadorned. Javier refused to do it. That’s right, sir; he said that carving a loved one pained his soul. “No one’s soul is more pained than mine,” I retorted. But Javier—I’ve already told you he doesn’t say much—didn’t open his mouth and my father went unadorned to the hole Marco had dug for him.

Our burials here are in the old style, sir. I don’t know how they are where you live, but here the rituals aren’t new. And that’s even more true these days, with all this about the end of the world. Now, in 2&’2, we’re still parading our dead through the streets with the family weeping behind. Then, during the wake, the first person to speak is Antón, followed by the mayor. But when we buried my father, the mayor wasn’t present. I’m certain he didn’t come ’cause he’s afraid of me; he knows I speak my mind, even when the death is my father’s. If he’d turned up, I’d have called him a liar to his face or said, “A person herding lambs is just another sheep.” And he’d have gone so red he’d have had to put some money behind that walk-in clinic he promised us. But the mayor didn’t come to my father’s wake, nor did his wife and six children.

I pushed Nora’s wheelchair during the funeral procession. When we were passing Jimena’s house, the outsider put his hand on my arm and I stopped dead ’cause the burning in my stomach and the desire to leave flared up again. My eyes went all backcountry, I mean really back, backcountry, sir. I didn’t say anything, but he immediately asked what was going on, who’d died, and why we were parading him like that. “It’s my father. He took a tumble chasing a rabbit,” I replied. He looked surprised ’cause dying from a tumble wasn’t a death that his limited understanding could deal with. Or maybe he was thinking it was a bad omen to be settling in when a funeral was going on. I told him we were all going to the graveyard and that we paraded our dead here in town. He offered lukewarm condolences and before starting to push Nora’s wheelchair again, I turned and said, “In this town, things come in pairs: when one child is born, another soon follows; when someone gets lost in the forest, a dog without an owner appears; when a cow behaves strangely, the end of the world comes along, and when outsiders turn up, my father dies.” And I went on pushing Nora’s chair and that burning—it was my grandmother Jimena filling my stomach with flames; it was my dead father saying, “Get out of this town”; it was the end of the world—vanished like the cold in summer.

We don’t have a family plot or anything like that, so Marco had dug a hole in the ground. Antón began to speak and I didn’t take my eyes o! my mother, who had a veil over her face. I watched her ’cause I’d never before seen her su!ering that kind of grief. Like I said, I know very, very little about mourning sir. Will she ever sing again? I thought. But I watched her carefully ’cause she reminded me of the wooden statue of the Virgin in the church. And that face has always scared me. I looked at my mother and her face reminded me of the Virgin’s, with tears—wooden too—that seemed to be clinging to her cheeks. When we were kids, Antón used to tell us that if we touched the Virgin’s eyes, we’d be saved from all life’s misfortunes. Catalina was always stroking them, and Javier, and Marco. But I never touched them. What if the lids closed and left me with my finger stuck in the Virgin’s eye?

And the man laughs but I don’t so much as smile.

“As the water of a lake dries up or a riverbed becomes parched, so he lies down and does not rise; till the heavens are no more, people will not awake or be roused from their sleep,” read Antón. And the thing is that I don’t know what was going through my head at that moment, I really don’t know, but you wouldn’t believe just how loud I laughed. That explosion of laughter rose from deep in my belly and boomed out to the very edge of town. It was some laugh, sir. Then my sister, who has no notion of laughter or anything else, started to make a sound that we’d heard from her before, at home. Because at one time, sir, my sister used to make a kind of bellowing noise that I’ve always thought must issue from that empty space she has in her head. And she bellowed and I laughed. Everyone was alarmed and Marco stopped lowering my father into the grave, and when I saw the old folk, all shocked and upset by the weird sound Nora was making, I laughed even harder, the sort of laugh that makes your eyes water and you feel your stomach contract from the effort. And my mother, who was a Virgin at that moment, frowned at me so hard that I could read in her eyes the phrase she used to say when we were little, “What a pair of laurels I’ve been given.” And no matter how I tried to stop myself, I laughed again and you could see my sister couldn’t stop bellowing either. I think that’s what death is too: uncontrollable laughter. Laughter that is born of itself. And then Antón said, almost screamed, “Make them stop, this minute,” in that priestly tone he uses to get on his high horse, to say I’m the one who knows, not you. That was when Javier took us away. And what happened after that stopped my laughter and made the burning return.

Javier and I are sitting on a bench in silence, not looking at one another; he has one hand on my thigh and Nora is beside us in her chair, with her wasted body and her loose jaw like a pail dropping down a well. That image, sir, has come to me night after night. And the thing is that it’s an image that has been with me my whole life; it’s a preordained future that I’ve always lived with and even desired. For many years I’ve longed for Javier—almost a shrub—and me—a strong tree—to sit that way, tired of saying “I really like you” so often, ’cause in this town, what I’ve learned about love is exactly what I’ve learned about life: just how long-lasting feelings are. But at that moment, when time—I’m talking about the hands of the clock—was a mishmash of yesterday, today, and tomorrow, that image of the two of us with Nora made the burning return, and it flares up again whenever I bring that image to mind. And sitting on that bench, I began to understand that they were my end of the world, that what the people who knew the world was ending were referring to was those two people, sitting either side of me in some strange, timeless time.

I look into the forest and tell the man it’s time. Time to lie to me. Lie to me, sir, tell me that my father is still hanging around here, that the dead stay with us and the gap they leave is nothing but a mist that soon evaporates. And, still looking at his feet, the man says convincingly that the dead do in fact stay with us and I thank him. The world, sir, has killed itself so often that it makes no difference now. I want to think that life breaks every one of us at some point. I want to think that some day a nanny goat will turn up at the door of my house and that goat will be my father. I want to believe that one night, wherever I am, I’ll go to the kitchen for water and find my father there, looking at me. I want to believe that he’d have supported my decision to leave ’cause once, a few years back, when I dropped out of school, he said, “Lea, set your sights far from here.” My father believed in the end of the world and the world came to an end for him. What I believe is that finding my father dead at our front door was one more sign that my life is not, definitely not, here.

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From That’s All I Know by Elisa Levi, translated by Christina MacSweeney. Used with permission of the publisher, Graywolf Press. Copyright © 2025.