La Siguanaba

I hear them talking about me in the mountain towns, out the windows of the chicken buses, along the cobblestone streets of the city, where I now walk. Women warn their husbands in chiding murmurs. Mothers counsel their betrothed sons in desperate pleas. Old men speak to the youth in hushed, lingering whispers.

The woman in white. The woman of great beauty turned hideous by the gods. The woman I became centuries ago on the pyre.

I’m sorry you are here with me, I had said in our mother tongue. I stood tied to a post with the man I loved. He grabbed my hands with his, though we were bound to the post. The men in helmets approached us with their torches. Their cloaked shamans clutched their holy book and mumbled a language I would never learn. The man they called my husband watched from a satisfied distance as I screamed my final words.

I did this.

The fire burned me to death, but I rose to life with the smoke. During the day, I am like the whisps of humidity that float above the mountain jungles. By night, I become a vision of myself from all those years ago, destined to be clothed in that day. I am embodied in a phantasmic form, but my vengeance is corporeal.

And tonight, it will surely happen.

The heat has been oppressive of late. Alcohol pours from brown bottles in place of the rain that has not come for weeks. Men stumble from buildings intoxicated and seeking adventure.

Men.

Time has changed culture, history, language. But men are still conquistadors at heart.

“Ay, bonita. Quieres mi verga grande?”

The only things big about him are his belly and his machismo. I know he will not leave his front porch. There’s no confidence in his jeers. They are the sad song of a fragile man—too weak to be faithful to his wife, too flaccid to act on anything that doesn’t fall on his lap. But maybe some night he will muster enough foolish courage to follow me.

I walk into the city. Night has not dulled the bustle along the narrow sidewalks. Locals and tourists jostle against each other, practically bouncing off the yellow and white colonial walls. The volcano called Fuego steadily spews its fire and smoke in the distance.

“Of course, babe. Nothing to worry about. I’ll be home in a couple of days.”

I realize I am being followed. A younger man. Not quite middle-aged. Khaki shorts and a colorful shirt. Leather shoes. Cheeks and neck the color of the erupting volcano. He’s the color of those helmeted men and their brown cloaked priests. Those men were hungry with judgment, but this man…

His eyes savage my figure—the one I put on at night covered by my white dress. His face is that of a hungry jaguar.

“Yes, yes.” He matches my pace, step for step. “I’ll be back Monday.”

I twist down a lonely street, letting the image of my thin dress flutter seductively in his eyes. As we move from the city center, he follows. The hunt begins.

“We’re going to sign the deal tomorrow—”

I move briskly. Not with the fearful scurry of the vulnerable. But with the confident stride of the predator.

“Yeah, we get the whole thing. The land, the plantation—”

The streets become thin of human activity. The storefront lights are replaced by sporadic streetlamps. Buildings are spaced out now. And yet, he is unaware of the looming desolation.

“Yes, babe. Sorry. Out of breath. Headed to the hotel—”

He hovers over my shoulder, five or six strides away. I turn. He winks his jaguar eyes, bares his jaguar teeth. To him, I am just an unattended animal—a loose rabbit, a grounded bird…

“Early night. Yes, I will. Uh huh—”

A docile horse far away from her master.

“Love you too—”

I had said that too. To the man I loved. In his arms, the color of mine. In the place where the man they called my husband found us.

For a moment, I wish I could weep.

“Sweet dreams, my love.”

His words are thrown carelessly into the air, but I grab them and hold them near me.

I’ve led us to the outskirts of the outskirts. Trees surround the gravel road. Stray dogs move in packs, yet they avoid us. A boy sits under a dim porch light outside the lone house in this stretch. He sees me and tilts his head toward the man behind me. A warning.

I smile, nod at his concern, and wave it away.

The boy shrugs and stands up. He parts the curtain between his home and the world, giving it one more glance before disappearing inside. There’s a possibility I will see him again as a man.

But I hope not.

As I turn the bend, we are now perfectly cloaked in the moon. I dip into a field of waist high grass, darkened from a night choked by clouds. The field will wind down into the ravine where the river flows.

“Where are you headed, bone-ee-tah?” my pursuer says at last.

I can only speak but one sentence. My voice was not fully given back to me in the afterlife. In reality, it was stolen long before the fire, back when the helmeted men showed up. I like to save my sentence for the end, anyway.

Still, I turn so he can just see the corner of my smile, swaying my hips in that lusty way men like. Enough to chain him to me. But he moves in his own freedom—unlike me, all those years ago. Unlike the man I loved, who followed me to death. 

In the distance, the river cries softly as it runs from the mountain, bubbling mournfully against the valley rocks. Down here, it loses its strength and pools at the bend where the ceiba tree sits. Where the water sleeps in tranquil sheets between the earth-lined beds.

The same waters where I had first seen him, my love, who burned with me. My feet ferry me there.

I step through the thicket. The mud would squish between my toes with its viscous coldness if I were alive. And the river would cool my warm body on a night like tonight. Still, I float into the water. It covers me as if I were alive. Behind me, I hear the man curse the branches that try to hold him back.

“Where are you going, beautiful?”

The white dress I wore throughout my death journey hangs from a body shaped as when I was alive. Young, supple, curving with vitality like those river trees around me now. I was told I was beautiful. That’s why they gave me to the helmeted man they called my husband.

The jaguar-man’s clothes rustle as they are pulled from his body and cast aside on the bank. The water sloshes as he wades out, like my love did when I called him to me, that first night we were awash by passion.

The helmeted men’s shamans told me the fire would clean me of my transgressions. Instead, the flames ripped my clothes, picked clean my flesh, leaving me a skeleton. And my sin? It was very much alive then, abiding in the very hearts of those who burned me.

“I said, where are you going?”

And because it still lives, so must I. Destined to carry the fire to those who would turn it on me.

I free my shoulders from my dress, then my arms, then my breasts. The moon, too, sheds its nebulous cloak. All around me, whiteness hugs my waist, clinging desperately to my hips. I slowly turn.

“You made me work for it, but now you’re mine—,” he says in triumph at first, but quickly his voice turns to terror.

The glow from my eyes, the color of the flames that consumed me, pierces the darkness, rippling across the water like streams of lava. For a moment, I see fear mold his face before his flesh burns away into the water, leaving us standing across from each other—two skeletons, one in a white dress, the other aflame.

His bones collapse into the river, and float past me. I see his skull, like mine, is open in a scream. I can almost hear him.

But it is only my voice echoing in the dark. This time, it is triumphant and mocking.

I did this.