riven

riven (adj) fml split violently apart:  The whole community was riven by the strike, which some men had joined and others had not. (Longman's Dictionary of English Language and Culture)

4 a.m.


He goes willingly, at his time. My once-companion steps forward from the group, resplendent in red and white, light prisming around him, clamoring for his edges, unnoticed. Somber, dedicated, he moves with purposes equally hidden and seen. As it is with all of his actions. He was chosen to be first, but did he also offer to go before the others? How many others are leaving, through la puerta into the impervious darkness of the beyond? Our time here is finished. All has been decided. There is no turning back. There is nothing to return to. Every step now, from this point, is enacted with greatest care, with the near-tenderness of the leave-taking ritual that allows us all a profound detachment and so, mercifully, presence.

We wait in formation, at the entrance. La puerta has the appearance of a squarish cave in the smooth, pale volcanic rock face. The opening, about seven feet in height, seems to have been plastered with clay round its edges. There is nothing foreboding about its form. But its nature there is no mistaking:  that darkness is as gone as forever. The men stand side by side, closest to the shadow. The women sit in a line just in front of them, also facing outward toward the setting sun. We are six or seven in number. I sit at the left side. We are all close enough almost to touch, just short of contact, but the currents between us are palpable, as they must be for fellow beings who have endured so much together. The wan sun is let down gently, as if held in the palm of a hand, on the other side of the wide basin into which we face. The clean expanse of stone and sand in pale pink-orange-golds smoothes across to low mesas of dark grey and chocolate, holding us all as if in an earthen bowl. There is not a sign of anything green and growing, or that anything has ever grown here. This place has no fecundity; it is in essence emptiness. It is here to hold the essence of emptiness.

He looks around, signalling he is ready to begin. There is no sound; all from now on happens by unspoken agreement. Inhaling a deep, appreciative breath of the copal smoke, he accepts the clay platter that holds the single heavy fruit. Its round melon-sphere and lumpy nopal-ridges have already been broken apart, leaving a jagged and dripping parabola of a verdant green only ever seen in spring's most extravagant blush. Gelatinous seeds and algae-like, ruby-iridescent pulp spill over the edges of the soft rind. He gazes at it, and scoops out a spilling-over handful that takes more than half the fruit, although it it is to be shared among all those who go. We understand. The plant represents the sorrow of all once lost, the total solitude of silent passing, and the mercy that yet remains for that road. His passage will be the hardest, for where he has been and where he is going, and he will need its potent, calming toxicity to aid him on the journey.

Next he negotiates our group, exactly as prescribed, taking quiet farewell of each in turn. First, the two longest his companions in the struggle. Of each he takes their hand, and looks long into their eyes without a word. Then the one I would forget, the one who did not replace him but only filled my emptiness with rage and noise. These two also know each other in terms of battle: side by side they have fought, in realms I cannot comprehend. Grasping this one's hand my first companion says, with an odd mix of affection and irony, "mi hermano en la muerte". This brother will be the next to leave. To the right of the group, la sahumadora waits, tending the fire and its guiding smoke, her face a mask of serenity, her presence full of kind concern.

He straightens, looks toward la puerta, as if to step on through. But he has more yet to perform.  He drops to his knees in front of me, lays his hands on the object symbolic of offering/sharing which rests on another earthen plate on my lap. Murmurs phrases that at first are nothing more than required by the ceremony. Will he go, with no more than this? But then, at last, he meets my eyes, and speaks to me a few words arrowing so direct from the heart that they alter the angle of the light around us. Reality's current shifts now.  He offers his hand, and I take it as expected, but then I squeeze it in a crushing grip that breaks the calm of the ceremony. No one expects this: my one wordless act of profound negation and protest.  If he must go, he will not go without my part in his battle being written in collective memory as it is written on my body and soul. I will write it in the memory of earth itself: as I tighten my grasp of his hand, an irrational strength awakes in me, and a shudder rises from deep underground, through the soles of my feet, up through my spine, shakes loose all my bones and convulses the land around us like a tremor, almost audible, and then the quake finds voice in me, emerges as a sky-splitting cry from my lips that rips the light and momentarily disjoins the continuum. Earth-time's recoil reiterates itself as I cry out again, while behind me the others remain fully silent, in respect for what unfolds and for my place in it. The sun lowers visibly, alights on the razor edge of the highest mesa. At our backs the puerta is darker than any night. By the time my cries have stilled, he is utterly gone.


Later, others arrive to walk with me on my grieving circuit of the network of smaller caves that have been our home until now. I pace ceaseless, and do not stop the violent weeping that echoes echoes echoes between the pallid stone walls and their cool blue-gold shadows. The first to accompany me is a kindly teacher, arrived from some other place, well-intentioned but his words do not soothe me. Some time after that arrives the younger woman who was companion to that second one in my own history: her heart has quit the dimension with him, just as mine has flown with that one who left in today's dying light. Somehow in her own silent suffering, she has found a glimmer of compassion for me. She keeps step with me in the passageways, listens intently (do I speak, or does she hear past speech?), then stops suddenly and embraces me, sweeps me in a wave of sincere, almost childlike kindness. Startled, I return the gesture, wrapping around her slight shoulders these arms that have become filled with such unbearable strength I can scarcely control them. My embrace lifts her, unintentionally, off the floor, and my bone-racking sobs shatter the silence again, ricocheting off still walls of the near-empty rooms where our group has almost finished packing its posessions to leave. I would split these stones with my sorrow's unreasonable force, given a few more moments. Rend the peace of this place as I am riven and rip space-time's threads of continuity with the power unsought of my furious desolation. And yet, even through spasms of grief comes the awareness that the time of leaving nears.  And that this young woman's gesture of kindness allows just such a release, skims just such a surface off the sorrow that perhaps I can remember, and contain these forces enough to travel soon, without inadvertently destroying myself or my surroundings. The others who remain are waiting even now for me to rejoin them, with immeasurable patience in one of the adjacent spaces of stone. They wait for the time and the light to shift, for these seismic tremors once more to still, for our journey's next stage into all unknown to begin.