The Parable of the Disappeared Man
I’d been alone a long time on the rotting pier when an old man finally came upon me.
And with my first mouth, this is what I offered him: the story of a soldier who spent six months repairing a beat-up tractor in the crumbling plaza of a forgotten town. I offered the town’s bright murmur of children as they came out in twos and threes to watch the soldier bang at the relic and crawl about it with a rusted c-wrench. And then I offered all the bells the soldier stole to adorn the tractor, the ten-foot spire of wire and mesh he erected on the back of the tractor to accommodate the bells that wouldn’t fit on the tractor itself. I offered the old man the day the soldier drove the tractor around the plaza. I offered the children who chased him and the air about that plaza simmering with chime.
The old man didn’t laugh but he gave me a pair of feet, and though they fit me well, he said I couldn’t yet leave.
So I put the shoreline of the east in my second mouth and offered the old man this story of a boy who ate his own caca and grew to be taller and stronger than anyone in the village, taller and stronger than the tallest and strongest men in the surrounding villages, how he grew so big he bruised his mother’s tit when he suckled, and this is how he grew up to be ashamed and only spoke when the whole village was weeping or asleep.
The old man didn’t laugh at this either, but he gave me eyelids, and though they suited my face, he told me I couldn’t yet shut my eyes.
I put the battered cities of the north in the third of my mouths and told the old man next about the dog who saved the rooster from the blade and the story of the seven identical violins and the story of the bullet that struck the stone for wine and the naughty old women who carried that wine nine miles in their mouths to bring it to their lovers. And I went on like this for days, offering stories until the old man gave me ears, knees, the nerves of my left hand, everything I ever had before I was first human.
And then I put an archipelago on my last tongue, and what I couldn’t hold there, I kept in mismatched hands also given me by the old man. I held out the archipelago and its excess like this, so the old man could see all its islands, and I told him the story of the lieutenant who packed all the families of seven barrios — the rich, the poor, the vagrant — into a mansion, clothed them, fed them well, and when the people were done feasting in the cavernous salon, the lieutenant told them to stand together at the mansion’s massive front windows. They were to face the road. They were not to speak or move. They were not allowed to cry or else the lieutenant’s boys would shoot them.
And the lieutenant tied the conductor of the choir to a hefty post in the road so that all the citizens crammed against the glass could see, and the lieutenant pricked the man of music three times with no more than the tip of a corporal’s bayonet. His squadron followed, pricking, for hours, the choirmaster with no more than the points of their bayonets. And the people of the barrios didn’t turn away. They held their children still, gagged them with their fingers still reeking of pork and rum. They didn’t cry, even after the choirmaster fell slack.
By the time I finished the last story, the sun had come up on a Tuesday on both the old man and me. I looked at the old man with my only eyes, and the pupils of the old man on the pier widened. They grew and grew. They grew until his head burst open, and he reached inside the skull, through the throat, and into his thorax, and from the grotto of his chest, he pulled out a sad red bird still beating, and gave that to me last. I knew then he meant for me to go out and tell the story that begins: A long time ago, there was a man who gave a stranger a fat red finch to carry in his bosom, and in those days, you should know, that was all the sadness in the world.
