Sonora Read online

  "Jade is not pink." I hear you say. "Jade is green.

  Always has been."

  And again, all I can think of as an answer is, "You are

  wrong again."

  There are two types of jade. One type is jadeite. The

  other type is nephrite. Jadeite is rarer, and a little stronger. Nephrite is found in New Zealand, Russia, China, Switzerland, and Guatemala. Jadeite is found in Russia, China, and Guatemala. Nephrite is usually dark green to grey green, but it can be white, yellow, or red. The very darkest green jade comes from Canada. Jadeite can have all the green hues, but also white, black, brown, violet, and pink. There are many ideas as to what is the better stone, nephrite or jadeite, and what the best color is. The man I bought my crucifix from in Antigua said the best jadeite comes from Myanmar. But I disagree. The best jadeite comes from Guatemala, it is pink, and my lovely pink rosary is proof of that. If you saw it, you would only agree with me.

  If I am boring you please humor me. This is honestly what I thought of as I lay bleeding, and so I tell it to you. If you were full of hurt, and I thought you might die, I would listen to you if you wanted me to.

  I often think of my rosary as my "worry beads" and the crucifix itself as my "worry stone". During times of stress or anxiety, I retrieve the Salvador from His place of rest, and rub my fingers gently upon His form.

  You will probably think this sacrilegious, but ever since I grew tetas, I have liked the feeling of having Jesús nestled between them, as if I were his girl, and He lay His head there for comfort. But then, just above the pink jade crucifix of Jesús is His Madre, forged in silver, holding him when he was a pequeño infante. She keeps a watchful eye on him lest he grow up and become a little too fascinated with the carnal aspects of life.

  ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐<>{}<>‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐

  At some point I must have either fallen asleep, passed out, or died. At the time I wasn’t sure which. Since I saw the Virgen Maria, I assumed I had died. She talked to me for quite a while. She told me I wasn’t dead. It would be a long long time before I died. She said she had work for me to do. She said she was taking Rosaria with her, so not to be upset when I woke up and Rosaria was gone. She said she was taking Rosaria’s soul to a safe place, and that Rosaria would not need her body anymore, so she was giving Rosaria’s body to the lobos. When I started to cry, the Virgen Maria hugged me and begged me not to be sad. She said I would be much more upset if she let Rosaria’s body stay in the desert where she died. She said Rosaria’s body would live forever in the lobos of the desert, and that that is a good thing.

  She said when I woke up, there would be a large white lobo bitch, an alpha loba as she called it, near me, to protect me, to help me get better, and to help me survive in the desert. She said when I knew everything Alpha Loba knew, it would be almost impossible for anything bad to happen to me ever again.

  Then the Virgen Maria kept me company, and talked to me through most of the night. She told me things that made it hard for me to believe she was the Virgen Maria. I began to wonder if it was Diablo, tempting me in the desert, like he did to Jesús. And I worried because I was in no position to resist. The Virgen Maria must have read my thoughts because she said that the desert is where the devil tempted Christ, but it is almost always in the desert where divinity is born. It is very unlikely that Diablo would say such a thing, but then, devils can be very clever.

  The Virgen Maria knew my name. She called me la pequeña María. She said I was named after her. How would Diablo know that? She knew how old I was, 18, almost 19. She said she had given birth to Jesús when she was younger than I am now. She said she was a naïve young girl then, but she had wised up considerably about the world since.

  When I asked her if she had really been a virgin, she simply repeated that she had been a naïve young girl then. And then she told me she was here to help me wise up. She said after she watched what men did to her son, and no‐one helped, and no‐one did anything about it, she actually wondered if there really was a God. She said she was tired of intervening for men to gain favor with God. She said she was tired of hearing about how one should suffer gratefully to become a saint. She said she was tired of hearing about turning the other cheek.

  She said the oppressed, the persecuted, the victimized, the poor, the hungry, have every right to do something about their condition here on earth.

  “You don’t sound much like the Virgen Maria I learned about in church.” I tell her.

  “I am no longer the Maria you learned about in church.” The Virgen Maria said. Do you see that wall over there? It was built by men who are, as you would say, estupido. You know the saying of your people, no se puede arreglar estupido (you can’t fix stupid)? Stupidity is like a dilapidated house about to collapse on itself. One can be patient, and wait for the collapse. Or one can help it along. Every once in a while, when you can escape from the work you can come and remove one more "stupid block" from the foundation that holds up the dilapidated house of stupidity. You will live to hear the trumpets, and see the wall come tumbling down.”

  There is something very seductive about the way the Virgen Maria talks. I have never known anyone to use language so effectively, so seductively. Which is what makes me still wonder if it wasn’t Diablo posing as the Virgen Maria.

  I know English pretty well, but not as well as I know Spanish. I have noticed when I try to say things in English, I can never express my thoughts as well as if I use Spanish. Yet if I try to be technical about something, it seems that there are better words in English than there are in Spanish. I have often wondered such things as which language is the hardest to tell a lie in? Which language is the easiest to tell a lie in? It sometimes seems that languages that better communicate matters of the heart are the hardest to lie in. And the more technical, and more complex, one can make something, the easier it is to lie. I’m not saying one can’t outright lie in Spanish, but I think it is harder to deceive through complexity in Spanish. When one person speaks to another, it is an attempt to “communicate”. That is, it is an attempt to “commune” with that other person’s mind or soul. But there is also pseudo‐communication, which isn’t really communication at all, but a pretense at it. Formal speaking, ritual speaking, rhetoric used to induce a particular action in another, argument, subterfuge, these are all pseudo‐ communication. What pseudo‐communication does is immediately destroy all hope of real communication. And certain languages have much more developed and much more advanced vocabularies of pseudo‐communication than others.

  I honestly think the hardest languages to pseudo‐ communicate in are ancient Greek and Latin, and that is why they were used by learned men, universally, for so many centuries. But for some reason, civilized man decided to abandon persuasion through reason, and decided to go with deceitful rhetoric, and that is why the classic languages were abandoned. The thing is, Spanish draws pretty heavily from the classical languages, especially Latin. But then again, so does Law in most cultures. And if there is anything the Law is, it is pseudo‐communication raised to an art form, and then turned into code. It is basically the bastardization of what was once one of the purist of languages. I have to make myself remember that Spanish was the language of the conquistadores and the inquisitores. So maybe I don’t know as much about language as I think I do. I do know that Spanish doesn’t belong to the conquerors and torturers any more. It belongs to people like me. Can a language choose who it wants to belong to? I say yes.

  One thing I have learned in my brief time on Earth is that if something is easy to believe in, it probably isn’t the truth. And the Virgen Maria that appeared to me was making it pretty hard to believe she was the Virgen Maria. But, in the end, after all the doubt, after weighing all the pros and cons very analytically, after thinking about something til one’s brain hurts, we all do what everyone has always done. We kneel down at some altar or another, admit we are still fairly stupid, and put our fate in the hands of some higher power. We ta
ke that leap of faith. At least I do. Although, I must admit, and I’m doing this metaphorically (a Greek word) I always make sure the bungee chord is well connected to me, and to whatever I’m jumping off of.

  “You don’t believe me, do you?” The Virgen Maria asks.

  “I don’t not believe you.” I tell her.

  “Do you believe in God?” The Virgen Maria asks.

  “Yes.”

  “No you don’t.” The Virgen Maria says. “I can read your mind.”

  “I believe in God like I believe in truth and beauty. They are concepts that always come a hair’s breadth away from being objectively real. They always exist in some degree of magnitude that never quite reaches 100%. But as long as just one person believes in them, they exist.”

  “Someone’s done way too much thinking for such a young girl. Aren’t you supposed to be thinking of cute boys and pretty dresses?” The Virgen Maria asks.

  “I suppose.”

  “And what if that one person dies?” The Virgen Maria asks.

  “Then the concepts revert back to being memes, and start looking for the next person they can be hosted in.”

  “Now that Rosaria is gone”, the Virgen Maria says, “the memes will be looking for a new host.”

  “You are one of those memes, aren’t you?” I ask the Virgen Maria. “What is it you want me to do?”

  “I want you to send a memo to Diablo.”

  "What is it you want to say in the memo?" I ask.

  "The last laugh ‐ it is mine!" The Virgen Maria says.

  Now I ask myself, "Would Diablo himself say such a thing?"

  La Loba

  Sonora means “sound” in Spanish. People think

  of deserts as dead and quiet. And they can seem so, especially at midday. But a desert really is very alive and “sonorous”. And none moreso than the Sonora, therefore its name.

  Most of the sound is the vocalization of life. Animals do not use words like humans do. Animals do not use the sheer volume of rich and varied sound combinations that humans do to express the complexity of human lives.

  Words aren’t the concrete things we think they are anyway. The meanings of words change. We construct our belief systems on the building blocks of words. But words have a tendency to turn into mist and disappear. Our world is built on words, but then the words get yanked out from under us, and we find ourselves falling into the abyss.

  I feel the very surface of the earth open to swallow me. I float weightless as the crust of the earth closes above me, and cuts off the light. The fall makes me nauseous and dizzy. When I hit bottom, I open my eyes, and find myself back in the desert again.

  A wolf stands before me. The rest of the pack stands where Rosaria had been, but there is no longer a trace of Rosaria. The wolf that stands near me will not let the pack of wolves come any closer. The wolf near me does not snarl. It doesn't seem to me to communicate in any way that it does not want me touched, but none of the other wolves approach. It doesn’t need words. It doesn’t even need to make a sound. Imagine a human being not having to say anything to get any response out of fellow humans. This is true power.

  The Sonoran Wolf is really a Mexican Wolf that has managed to survive in the harsh extremes of the Sonora. The Mexican Wolf is the smallest Gray Wolf subspecies in North America. Supposedly. The wolf before me is enormous. Its right ear is slightly lacerated, and it has a scar on its face. It resembles a very well fed coyote more than a wolf, but it is wolflike in that it has a broader head, a thicker neck, and longer ears. And unlike the rest of the wolves that stand apart in the pack, the wolf near me is whitish grey. It is close enough for me to determine its sex. It is female. It is old. It is the alpha of the pack. I do not see an alpha male in the pack.

  The Mexican wolf once occupied the Sonora and Chihuahua Deserts, all the way from Mexico to Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, and even as far north as Colorado. Throughout much of the 20th century humans waged war on the Mexican Wolf. As men decimated the populations of mule deer and elk, wolves began relying on livestock for prey. Farmers, ranchers, hunters, trappers, and various government agencies were so successful in their extermination efforts that by 1960, the Mexican Wolf had all but been eradicated from the wild. Today, there are little over 300 Mexican Wolves, and most of those live in parks and preserves in both the US and Mexico. At least twelve still eked out a living in the desert, and their “reina”, their queen, stood before me.

  It is still dark, but light is beginning to come to the desert sky again. Reina Loba approaches me. The rest of the pack at a distance, settle down near the Saguaro where Rosaria had once been. Reina Loba sniffs at my wound. The fear I feel is all‐consuming. And what I fear is the possibility of being consumed while I am still alive. The wolf grabs at the bloody remnant of my blouse, and tears it away from my body. She begins to lick my wound where the bullet had entered. I submit. What else can I do? Then she lowers her broad head, rolls my body over, and begins to lick the exit wound.

  This brings back a memory from my childhood, of a stray dog that has befriended us, because we feed it occasionally. One day, it is hit by a car, and some of the skin on one side of its body is torn away from the flesh, a pretty good area about 130x130 millimeters. Though we can’t afford it, we take it to a veterinarian, and he disinfects the wound, and restitches the flap of skin back in place. It doesn’t heal, but begins to fester and smell awful. So my father takes a large knife and holds it over the fire. I started to cry because I think he is going to kill the dog.

  "Don't kill the dog, Papá!" I beg. "Please don't kill him."

  He wraps a belt around the dog’s muzzle, tells me to

  hold the dog as securely as I can, and he cuts the flap of skin loose from the dog’s side. It is the most disgusting thing I’ve seen up to that point in my life. We make a bed for the dog in a back shed, and leave it there with food and water. Occasionally the dog drinks. It hardly eats. It just licks its side, off and on, for days. And it heals. And the fur even grows back.

  “That’s what injured canines have done for millions of years.” My father says. “There is something in their saliva. It makes bleeding stop, and it kills germs. You wouldn’t think it to smell a dog’s breath, would you? But that’s the point. Think of the things dogs often eat, and they rarely get sick from it. I think there are enzymes, and acids, and certain good bacteria that kill bad bacteria.”

  When the wolf is done licking the wounds, she keeps nudging at my body. When I won’t move, she comes near my head, begins to nudge at my head with her nose, begins to lick my cheek. Still I will not move. It’s not that it hurts too much to do so. It does hurt. But I have now lain, almost motionless, for 12 hours. It’s like I have forgotten how to move. The wolf nudges, and licks, and then begins to whine. And then she nudges, and licks, and whines some more. I lift myself onto one elbow, with brave effort, and then fall back in the sand. Numb. I lift myself on my elbow again, and manage to balance myself on that arm. It takes forever, but with the wolf’s continued insistence, which seems to be getting more and more desperate, I manage to sit up. Then I kneel on one knee. Then I crawl on hands and knees a way. Then I shakily stand up. It hurts like hell, but I stand up. The wolf takes one of my hands in her mouth, and leads the way. This is why there are still at least 12 wolves in the Sonoran desert. They know the Consequence Delivery Boys will be returning at daylight with their rifles.

  Consequence, or “consecuencia” in Spanish, is a curious word. It means “with sequence” or “in sequence”. It means something which follows something else, or arises from it. It implies cause and effect. It has evolved to mean a penalty, or punishment or suffering, brought on by a person’s own actions. Yet not just anyone can deliver consequence. The ability to deliver consequence comes with power. A powerful person or group of powerful persons rarely suffers consequence for their actions. If a rich person steals something from a poor person, there is no penalty. If the wronged poor person tries to get it back, there is almost always so
me type of punishment that comes in “consequence”. Consequence is the one gift the powerful are willing to grant the powerless. It is the one thing the rich gladly give the poor in abundance. If someone on this side of a wall doesn’t have a rifle, and someone on the other side does, the person on this side is the one to experience consequence. The ability to deliver consequence is how one sets himself up as a God. God does not have to say “God damn this, or God damn that.” A God does not have to beseech a still higher power. A God has the power to deliver the damnation. A God can be the cause and effect of consequence. The wolves were very learned about consequence. The wolves don’t plan on being there when it is time for more to be delivered. Reina Loba isn’t about to leave me there either.

  Symbiotic Relationships

  I don’t know who first called the Sonora a desert. It isn’t as lush as El Salvador or Guatemala, but it isn’t exactly a desert either. Or, if it is a desert, it sure is one of the least dry deserts on earth, at least considering what I’ve learned of deserts. Maybe it’s because of its nearness to the Pacific. Maybe because it has two rainy seasons, Summer and Winter, whereas most deserts have only one rainy season, or none.

  There are plants everywhere. One of the first places the wolves stop is near a growth of Cardόn cactus. The wolves begin to eat the fruit of one of the large Cardόns. I sit in the shade of a large rock outcropping, as it is already getting quite hot. As I sit there I wonder about the shape of a cactus, and it occurs to me that in morning and evening, there is a lot of surface area exposed to sunlight. But when the sun is overhead in the middle of the day, and the sunlight is very intense, there is less surface area exposed on the cactus.