The day I moved to the city, I realized I’d spent my whole life in a place cut off from the rest of the world, as if it belonged to another reality. I grew up in Santa Rosa, though I wasn’t born there. We moved to the village after someone shot my old man while he was driving his pickup, carrying goods for the village store. I was only five. After the incident, my father came home pale, asking for a shot of tequila to calm his nerves. By sunset, the little we owned was already loaded onto his truck: a wooden table with one leg shorter than the others, three white Coca-Cola plastic chairs, dried out from years in the sun, a bed whose springs you could feel, and sacks filled with clothes and dishes. That was our entire livelihood. My mother explained that he’d been shot because someone wanted to steal the goods he was carrying. He told me it happened after a barroom argument, when he beat a local gangster at cards. Only when I was an adult did I learn the truth: he’d gotten involved with the wife of the rural police chief.
Six hours from our old home, between the dense jungle and the river’s constant murmur, lay the village of Santa Rosa. Its only two paved streets ran the length of the village, crossed by dirt roads that wound between houses made of wood and palm thatch. Along the dusty roads, stray dogs sought shade beneath the fruit stands, while turkeys and chickens strutted proudly among the people. Agile, curious iguanas peered out from the leaves of fruit trees, startling passersby when they accidentally tumbled down and hit the ground with a dull thud.
At the rooster’s crow, the people of Santa Rosa began their day. My father, now a farmer, would join the rest of the village in setting out to cross the river at four in the morning and tend their plots of land. They carried nothing but a bottle of water and a small ball of pozol, just enough, as my father put it, to “fool the hunger.” By noon, everyone was back home, driven in by the relentless sun and summer heat, which reached fifty degrees Celsius. The humidity wrapped around you, enclosing you in a bubble of hot air that slowly cooked you from the inside. At five in the afternoon, the village came to life again as the sun began to fade.
We children spent our time playing soccer as long as the sun allowed. When the heat became unbearable, we went swimming in the river. My friends Miguel and Juan and I would race to see who could swim from one bank to the other the fastest. We also charged the women one peso to carry lunch across the river to their husbands and sons working in their plots on the other side.
Every so often, something interesting happened in Santa Rosa. Once, some men who came to the village paid each of my friends and me one hundred pesos to place cans of chili peppers, each stuffed with oil-soaked rags, in a clearing near the village. Other adults cleared the brush and leveled the ground with makeshift tools. We laid out two parallel rows of cans, about ten meters apart. That night, sometime before dawn, we heard a small plane flying very low overhead. The next morning, people in the village said that some Colombians or Hondurans had landed a plane in the clearing where we’d left the cans. Some neighbors said they were carrying drugs; others said they had brought a cartel boss; still others said they were immigrants. We never found out what had really happened.
The television antennas in Santa Rosa picked up only two channels, and all they showed were the news and soap operas, so dying of boredom was a real possibility. Luckily, the walls of my house, like those of many other homes in Santa Rosa, were made of wooden planks and poles that often left gaps between them. If you got close enough, you could see inside through the cracks. Sometimes we were lucky enough to catch something interesting. One hot night, when I couldn’t sleep, I watched from my bed through a gap between two boards as my neighbor, Don Esteban, came home drunk. The door was shut. He dragged a machete along the floor as he threatened his wife, demanding that she let him in. Neighbors, including my father, had to come out and calm him down. A week later, his wife left the village with their two children. He had beaten her during one of his drunken rages; I think he broke two of her ribs. She never came back. A month later, he moved in with another woman, whom he beat too.
Whenever all hope of finding something fun to do had faded, we could always count on Don Ignacio. He was already an old man. To my eyes as a child, he looked a hundred years old, though he was probably in his sixties. He raised animals in his yard: chickens, goats, turkeys. But the one that drew the most attention was El Prieto, a magnificent bull he kept in a small pen with a covered shelter where the animal could escape the sun and rain. Don Ignacio made a living from his animals, but he earned most of his money doing witchcraft for the village’s superstitious people.
Sometimes we would sneak into his yard when we saw he had visitors. We ended up seeing most of the village come to Don Ignacio. There was Don Armando, for example, who was certain his brother Luis had put a spell on him. He went to Don Ignacio to be “cleansed.” We would peer through the gaps between the planks and watch Don Ignacio light white, red, and black candles, burn palo santo, and pass an egg over his client’s body. Just like that, the spell his client had fallen victim to would disappear.
Sometimes the rituals were more interesting. When someone came to Don Ignacio with a specific request, like Doña Irma, hoping her husband’s cattle would sell, or Doña Cande, hoping her son would arrive safely in the United States, he prepared a mixture of herbs and corn. He poured oil into the bowl where he had ground the mixture, then set it alight for a few seconds while the client made their wish. The smell of charred corn and fragrant herbs drifted to us through the gaps between the boards. Then Don Ignacio and his client went to El Prieto’s pen and approached the bull. The client held the bowl while El Prieto ate the scorched mixture, and the client whispered their request into his ear.
That was how we found out Ana wasn’t Don Esteban’s daughter, that Doña Ester’s husband beat her, and that the storekeeper’s son kissed the butcher’s son, along with other bits of gossip that have grown blurry in my memory. I remember coming home and telling my mother what we’d heard that day. She listened closely and even asked for details, then scolded me and said I shouldn’t spy on people.
It was unusual for people to stay in Santa Rosa once they turned eighteen. Most left the village to seek their fortunes in the capital or even “el gabacho”, the United States. Maria, the only unmarried nineteen-year-old woman in the village who wasn’t a single mother, had decided to stay and care for her mother, who suffered from epileptic seizures. Maria was beautiful, with copper-colored skin and thick black hair. Her teeth were straight, and she could charm anyone by draping her braid over her shoulder and carefully combing it.
When Juan told us he’d found the perfect place to spy into Maria’s room, we didn’t wait another night before setting out to invade her privacy. Juan and Miguel had been my friends since I arrived in Santa Rosa. So seeing a naked woman for the first time, together, felt right, like a pact. The shared memory of Maria’s bare breasts as she changed brought us together like brothers. That night, we went home laughing, smug, as if we’d accomplished some great feat. We felt we were no longer children. A few months later, Maria left the village to get medicine her mother needed. We never saw her again.
Death and tragedy were no strangers to Santa Rosa. One morning, Miguel and I were on our way to Juan’s house when we heard gunshots. It wasn’t the first time, so we quickly took cover beneath Don Ignacio’s old pickup. We heard women screaming, then two more shots. Within seconds, it was over. We came out when people began leaving their hiding places. A crowd was gathering at the end of the street. Miguel and I went closer; Juan was already there. Doña Cande’s twenty-year-old son was lying on the sidewalk, leaning against a post and clutching his throat with both hands. It wasn’t like in the movies. The blood didn’t gush out in violent spurts. It welled steadily between his fingers like a fountain, while we could hear it gurgling in his throat. He didn’t say anything memorable or show the courage of a hero dying on screen. Instead, I watched fear take hold of him as he tried through tears to call for his mother. I saw him resign himself to the fact that his life was ending. I saw his shock and desperation as he realized that, though surrounded by people, no one would help him. Everyone knew how these things worked: if you helped him and he survived, whoever had done this would come back for him, and for anyone who had helped him. He died within minutes. Doña Cande’s scream when she saw her son dead in a pool of blood carried across the whole village. The police never came.
Spying on people in their homes had become a pastime for us. It thrilled us to catch sight of women undressing or even couples being intimate. One night, we noticed light slipping through the gaps in the boards of Don Ignacio’s shed. He didn’t usually see clients at that hour. Bored, we headed to his house, hoping to find some good gossip.
We approached slowly and quietly, not really expecting to see anything interesting. But Don Ignacio was outside, in the pen. We saw him talking to someone, though the wall of the shelter kept us from seeing who. We crept closer, hidden in the darkness, until we reached the wall. That was when we heard it: whispers, clear words mixed with snorts, spoken in a language we didn’t recognize. It seemed to blend clicks made with the tongue and palate with guttural sounds and snorts. But Don Ignacio wasn’t the one speaking. Peering through the gaps between the boards, we discovered it was El Prieto who was making those unholy sounds. “Yes, yes. I’ll do as you say,” Don Ignacio said, his voice servile and submissive, before the animal sensed us and slowly turned its head toward us, as if it had all the time in the world.
It looked like El Prieto, without a doubt, but it wasn’t the one we knew. This was a grotesque fusion of human and animal. Taut veins stood out beneath the rough, dark skin of its skull, which seemed to absorb the light itself, casting deep shadows across its face. Its nose was broad and prominent, flanked by flared nostrils that exhaled a heavy, stale breath. Its tight, thick lips curled into a threatening grimace. Its eyes… its eyes were large and dark as caves. It didn’t have the dull gaze of an animal. No. Its eyes judged, calculated, reflected a primitive intelligence. Its deep breathing echoed through the empty space.
We stood frozen, staring into the abyss in El Prieto’s eyes. “Who’s there?” Don Ignacio called, his voice firm, snapping us out of our trance. I remember losing control of my body. My legs seemed to move on their own, carrying me away from danger. The world shook with every stride. I could feel the stones in the dirt road through the worn soles of my sandals, yet it seemed I wasn’t moving at all. The street felt endless. It seemed I ran for miles before I finally reached home.
That night, the night terrors began. In my dreams, I peer through the gaps in my old house in Santa Rosa and find El Prieto staring back at me from the other side. I still wake in the middle of the night, drenched in sweat. Sometimes I get out of bed and look down at the street from my apartment balcony, just to confirm what I already know. There, in the middle of the road, El Prieto watches me with that gaze no animal should have.
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