Dead Awake: The Last Crossing (12 page)

“
There can’t possibly be
anything wrong,” I said, “I just feel this way because I haven’t
seen her in a few days; but nothing’s the matter with her. Don’t be
silly, Mr. Finch. Get a grip.” I said this to myself as a comfort,
yet I couldn’t help to imagine something terribly wrong. It was the
feeling of certain doom. The kind that could only be resisted a
short while. It was amazing that I even lasted a minute before I
found myself running towards Noelia’s small straw house.

The speed only made the
dread greater; fortunately, for my sanity, it made the arrival
faster. Her mother was standing in front of the house, and had seen
me coming from a distance. She was waving her hands in the air,
signaling me to come quickly. My fears of being seen left, but all
the rest remained. Could I have been right? Was there truly
something wrong with Noelita? I got to the front of the house and
already the tears of despair had begun to run down Higinia’s
face.

She grabbed me and pulled me
inside. There was an outpouring of words, of which I caught only a
few. Part of it was because I had only begun to understand Noelia’s
native tongue; the other part was because of how fast and jumbled
the explanation came. I understood enough though.

She thought I’d come because
I had heard the message they had sent to me. Apparently they had
already taken the initiative and had sent word to me, but I told
them that I had not received such message and had only come because
I had felt there was something wrong. “I would have come sooner,” I
said, “but I thought she didn’t want me here.”

My heart dropped to the pit
of my stomach as I found out what was happening. Her mother, with
tears streaming from her eyes, said that it had happened because
Noelia had missed me so much that her heart had broken. She took me
over to the place where Noelia was laying and placed my hand on
hers. Higinia was hoping that my mere presence would revive her
daughter again.

Jose Luis was there also and
he was shaking his head at that ridiculous idea. He shouted to his
wife, trying to explain what he’d probably tried to explain many
times before: that it was not lovesickness, but something else. I
didn’t understand what that something else was because he was using
words I had never heard before.

It was all too much for me.
The strength seemed to drain from my feet as I knelt down beside
Noelia’s bed. There she was lying, dark and cold. I held her hand,
and it was obvious to me, at that point that she was dying. I was
no doctor, but I could almost swear she had no pulse. I was scared
and tried to point it out to her father, who was the most rational
of the house that day.

I looked to see if I could
feel her breathing, but I could not. Tears were already pouring
down my face, and I didn’t realize I was asking him in English: “Is
she dead?”

All the darkness and fright
returned telling me that I had lost forever my time with her. Never
again would we walk through the forest, where I could hold her hand
and promise all my love. Everything was lost, and never would I
find another in the world to fill her place. All the agony came and
swept the strength from me. For a moment I did not breathe. Her
father must have thought that I was asking what was wrong with her,
instead of “is she dead?” for he certainly would not have thought
that a smart city guy like myself would have asked such a stupid
question. Her abdomen was moving up and down, which was her
breathing, and she definitely had a pulse; it was stronger than
usual.

Ah, the things one can
imagine while one is frantic. It’s astonishing. You can even change
the way reality is in front of your own eyes, if you’ve already
convinced yourself to think a certain way.

In broken fragments of
Guarani, I understood what was really the matter with Noelia. She
had contracted a rare fever from a mosquito, for which there was no
cure at this time of the year.

“
She will die,” said Jose
Luis with a hint of human frailty. His tough heart had finally
given way to tears as he spoke. A jumble of questions poured out my
mouth. Among them were: What was this fever all about, and what
exactly did he mean by “no remedy at this time of the year?” (It
seemed to me that what I’d heard was an expression in Guarani that
really meant there had not been a cure found yet, but I was willing
to cling to any straw.)

My mind thought out the
questions, but my mouth only spit them out in fractions. It was a
miracle that he even understood (if that was what really happened).
I think he only answered because he could guess what I wanted to
know. “Why no remedy now?” was the best sentence I produced. I
shouted it several times, even as he tried to explain. But he did
his best, and eventually the explanation filtered through the
layers of my gibberish.

The cure, he said, was a
thick substance the natives made from the petals of a certain
flower that grew high up in the peaks of the island mountains. The
area was always covered with ice and snow. Very inhospitable; and
yet the only place the flower ever bloomed.

It was a seasonal flower
that began to grow early in June, and stopped growing altogether in
July. I couldn’t comprehend his explanation on exactly why they
couldn’t just pick enough of these flowers and store them
throughout the year, except that something about their magical
qualities only lasted for a very short time after the flower was
picked. Since it was early May, there was no way a flower of its
kind could be found anywhere in the country.

Not until June – and by then
she would be dead. It was a strong fever that doubled itself in its
intensity almost daily. No one had ever survived its effects
without drinking the remedy. The most they could hope for was two
weeks, and it was now her third day since she had first become ill.
There was no hope, he said. She would die.

“
But there is a cure!” I
protested, “I thought there was no cure... and there is!” I clung
to that. It was great to understand something in their tongue. Now
there was something to be done.

I wondered what sort of drug
it was that was active ingredient in the flower, for there had to
be some real medicinal properties to it, other than magic.
Something had to make the infection go away. Was it anti-viral in
some way, the same way penicillin is used to fight off infections?
Back in the States the doctors would have most likely known what
was wrong with Noelia and fixed it by now. Instead we had to be
here, in this forsaken place, where there was no hope of
that.

It wasn’t the time for it,
but I couldn’t help playing with the fact that this was the kind of
place she had been so immovable from, and that I was right to have
asked her to go with me. “This place is backwards, and I am right,”
I said to myself.

Jose Luis spoke again. He
seemed to be insistent on the fact that there was no way to save
her, and that she would die. It was as if he needed his perception
to be the right one, and that I was wrong to think there was a way.
His statements got me mad at all the island and its dim-witted
mentality. It showed up again and again, this irrationality about
magic and voodoo. That’s all these people ever talked about: magic
and voodoo. If it wasn’t about their lovely Gauchito, spoken from
every corner, it was about witchcraft or magic, and potions made
from magic. I was sick of it!

So what could this sickness
possibly be? If we could just take her to a clinic, I was sure they
could help her. This place had to have a real hospital somewhere!
Of course there wasn’t, but I shouted my questions to Jose Luis,
just the same. “Hospital! Hospital?” but his head shook in reply,
answering again that it was “impossible,” “incurable,” and that the
only way was the flower of which there was none of this
month.

“
Incurable? What kind of
disease can you get from a mosquito that is incurable?” I was angry
with him. Of course he didn’t understand the word “mosquito”
because I shouted it in English. I thought about it for a moment,
trying to figure out what kind of disease it could be. Maybe
malaria, but that was treatable, wasn’t it? What about this tsetse
fly? No, that was in Africa. Either way, there had to be a cure for
both of those.

I couldn’t bear to have it
end this way. In frantic search I turned to her father and tried to
get more out of him. “What was this flower?” I asked, “And what did
it look like?”

Again, he only shook his
head. “There is no flower. It is too early; we will not find it
now.” It wasn’t that I believed in the flower, but he was so
irrational; I was sick of it. These people would rather die than
try. I shouted again to him, salivating like a mad dog with rage
right to his face.

“
I will find the flower! I
will find the damn flower; give me the name!” (Asking for the
flower’s name was, once again, all that I could come up with in
their tongue, but he understood that what I wanted was for him to
describe it to me.)

He described what they
called a “Fire Flower.” He told me what it looked like and where I
had to go to find it. That is, where it grew in season but “where I
would not find it now”.

It was preposterous for a
man like me to take sides with this magical flower; but the more I
heard the negatives (could not, and would not), the more I took a
stand and became enraged with a determination to find it. I asked
Jose Luis to tell me how I would know that it was the right plant,
once I found it. He said that (“if I found it”) I would know when I
saw it. So I made my mind up, and determined to go after
it.

* * *
Word of my quest spread like a forest fire and burned into
everyone’s ears. Before I set off, on this task to a magic nowhere,
the whole island had come to see and say their part; eager to
provide me with as much knowledge and experience as they could. It
was funny how quickly they came. I had just decided to leave that
very day, and not two hours later most of the island had come to
see me off. When I was ready they pointed me in the direction I
should go (a mountain far away on the other end of the island) and
gave a cheer for my cause and me. I had the entire island’s
support, backing me on my crusade. The vast majority of them didn’t
actually believe I’d find the flower. They were just invigorated by
the show of my valiancy. The other few, a petty minority, hoped but
still doubted.

Indeed, I became very
popular amongst everyone: a hero, and the topic for all
conversation. I wish that I hadn’t become so popular, because that
recognition would later prove my downfall. For now, however, it was
very useful to my cause.

They gave me a backpack made
by the women out of a remarkably light fabric. Inside were
provisions: water, a compass that would help me reach the top, a
lamp, and some light blankets that they forced me to take. They
also made me dress as if I were going to the North Pole, saying
that it got really cold up in the mountains. Cold? Ha! How could it
get cold on an island where the temperature is constantly at 85 F
and the humidity is always 100%? But they made me wear the clothes
anyway, and so I humored them.

I was lost almost from the
start. I wasn’t even on the mountain slope yet, and confusion had
set in. All directions seemed the same. It was as if I had been
spun inside a giant top and then been placed in the woods. The
villagers would have laughed, had they seen me now. Nothing looked
right. I wasn’t familiar with any of these slopes or valleys, and
the island was much bigger than outward appearances would
indicate.

Going with Noelia to a
nearby waterfall was a long shot from being placed with no guide in
the middle of some unknown country, and then having to find some
place that was proportionately pin-sized in the middle of an
island-sized haystack.

The directions they had
given me were awful, as are usually given by someone who is not of
your own country. Why was that? People always give bad directions
when you’re traveling. Do they mean to do it? It seems to me that
they try purposefully to confuse you when you are already confused,
and leave you worse off than before.

Panic set in. I was in the
thicket of this impenetrable forests and certainly no one would
ever find me! Like a frightened goat, I ran through the trees
searching for a path. And then finally, I came upon an opening
where some huts had been built and the trees had been cleared to
make room. They were the same village huts I had been used to all
the time. In fact, I hadn’t even left the edge of the town yet. I
recognized the huts and I’d even been there before. How silly of
me, I thought. All the shrubbery had confused me and made me panic.
They made everything look the same. Not looking hard enough, any
one of the scattered huts could have been Noelia’s, for all I knew.
Everything was built the same way. Clay and adobe for walls,
covered by hay and wire for a roof. No one could tell the
difference.

After that it didn’t take
too much more wandering about for me to find a path towards the
right mountain. Once I reached the bottom of its slope the stress
of the whole situation lessened. Hiking had always been enjoyable
for me. Something about the great outdoors and the feelings of
freedom that it gave made me feel at home. Back in New York there
was hardly any time for that. The air or something here, unlike the
toxic gas chamber of the New York streets, gave me new life and
power. Even my muscles breathed it in. So now, the opportunity for
a hike became therapeutic. I still felt the despair because of
Noelia, but it was much better here than it would have been
anywhere else. I felt guilty for enjoying it.