Sergio De La Pava - Personae

7 He hears nature being disturbed about fifty meters away and quickly moves to where he can’t be seen. He soon draws the conclusion that, incredibly, just one person returns. This is the kind of refuse he is dealing with that will allow one man to move alone in the middle of what they like to claim is a military operation. He sees then the reason for the overconfidence. The guerillero is holding a very significant piece of killing machinery, as capable of making a bullet rapidly follow another as any such machine in the world.

8 He needs to think well now. In his left hand he holds his gun. It is not a good one but he can still shoot a lentil out of a grasshopper’s grasp with it. His right hand holds the machete. The guerillero looks for his gun among his victims.

9 The time for reflection has passed. Silence is required and the gun cannot provide it. He moves into the proper angle, steps forward with his left foot and, just as the degenerate killer looks up, swings his right hand over the top to throw the machete at an unfathomable speed into and through his neck. A small part of the blade comes out the back of his guerillero neck as he falls lifeless to the ground inches away from the gun he returned for.

10 When his surroundings fail to react he walks over to the body. At first he is almost sickened at the sight of what he has done. Then he remembers he has rid the world of a pestilent rat. He pulls out the machete without looking then wipes it on the uniform of the guerillero . He tells him << Nos vemos en el infierno, hijueputa, y te hago lo mismo>> then he takes the automatic, straps it over his shoulder, and walks away.

11 Except he then hears breathing. It is a labored and dwindling breathing and it fills him with no fear just dread.

12 It is inhuman, the breathing. A bush dog lies heaving on the edge of the clearing. Through its fur he sees an open chest, one that inflates and deflates, the interior organism threatening to spill out.

13 Whether caused by human or fellow animal the injury is irreparable and incapable of being overcome no matter the will involved.

14 He is supposed to take his machete, he has done it before, and end this suffering. This is something that is taken as given.

15 He walks to the dog and places the machete just above the wound. The dog looks at him with just his dim eyes.

16 What’s the delay? Push it down.

17 It is a thought that has occurred to him often but he is not yet the type to have ever painstakingly set it down. The thought is more like an intuition that every living thing has a required allotment of suffering that must be met before allowing its release. Why seek to artificially terminate suffering when it’s the undoubted way of the world? So the danger here is not that the dog is suffering too much but rather that after a life of relative ease it has not suffered enough. Lowering the blade may upset the natural order in a way that has to be repaid.

18 He pulls the blade away and goes back into the jungle in continued pursuit.

* * *

HER entry may not have felt miraculous but her nearly every moment since had. The world is full of certain people like that and don’t let their relative infrequency detract from this fact’s significance.

2 For it is simply put a miracle of this world that someone like Selena ever enters it. The default expression on her face: smile. The wild tempest of her hair with its roiling black curls. The blushed circle of cheek on each side of the perfect nose.

3 But more on the smile is needed. It was a smile could be placed atop a lighthouse to illume troubled seas. One of those smiles that seems to form from the very soul of the person as if an innate palliative substance had excitedly overflowed its excess. A smile, in the final analysis, that seems less a property of the person than that person itself.

4 And if her soul itself were visible you might marvel as well at its flawless beauty. That such generous and optimistic kindness could emanate so consistently from such an adorably chubby package gave lie to the often popular notion that what prevails in this world is dark despair.

5 Understand also that these are not observations made following detailed analysis of a finished product. Rather these are truisms about a person that began to manifest themselves within mere minutes of that person’s birth.

6 — Acaba de nacer una sonrisa— the midwife had said and it was his audition of the feminine form of smile after the preceding harrowing events that began to cheer him.

7 And the world little appreciates how much the heartening the Man felt then was less a product of palpable events then present than it was a form of intuition. Because that’s all intuition is: the temporary release of a person from his restrictive spacetime prison to where he can in some sense experience what will be true and how it will make him feel and that amorphous and ineffable insight makes him feel a diluted version of what will later wash over him.

8 Selena often wore miniature versions of what her mother wore. Not in general either, at the same time. The result was as if the same person were being simultaneously viewed from wildly disparate distances.

9 Surround the hardest man in the world with love in this manner and the love is not repelled to die, not when the recipient is eminently aware of his undeserving nature. Instead it burrows in to erode the hard stone from within. And once it comes to the surface and is made tangible in the form of acts in the world it is then eligible to spread like a contagion.

10 For at the continued sight of his wife and daughter Man changed his relation to the world. Where before he’d viewed life as a constant succession of contests for limited resources he instead began to absorb the truth that the world is more our product than it is an unfeeling location for displays of enmity.

11 The soil surrounding their home for instance. Before Selena he viewed it as dirt, something to be brushed away before it could sully the clean. After the change, however, he saw for the first time its life-generating potential. The revelation struck him with the force of lightning and drove him to his hands and knees where in what looked like supplication he would diligently remove by hand the ground’s many stones, twigs, and anything else inhospitable to lively growth.

12 Once cleared the earth was ready for seeding, and meticulous care was employed in selecting and interring just the right combination of seeds which were then tended to in a painstakingly vigorous manner until the result was a colorful bounty of idyllic fruits and vegetables that nourished him, his family, and because the excess was sold at minimal cost, the loose collection of people that formed their community.

13 Nor was this the entirety of his such activities. For he did not altogether abandon his practice of the metallurgic arts, notwithstanding the decided change in the focus of that practice. So from where blades and instruments of blunt force once emerged more than one observer noted the sudden predominance of tools for cultivation and cooking.

14 The contagion part of this is the external effect his internal change had on those around him. The helped are more likely to then help, the fed to feed. A spirit of cooperative harmony is not created then used to animate actions; it is actions that create the spirit.

15 Whatever the source, the spirit permeated the area and one could say it was embodied in the rounded form of Selena who moved through her world like she owned it, laughing and spreading laughter as if such were mankind’s natural state.

16 And because her father once jokingly said it was the only part of his body that didn’t permanently hurt, she often gently rested her head on the spot just above his heart.