Gabriela Jauregui

The Saddest Creature (work-in-progress)

The walkie-talkie lights up. After some classic white noise, my daughter’s high-pitched 8-year-old voice:

-Mom! There’s a lion! There's… a…. lion!!!

We live in a house that’s part of a local farmworker’s communally owned land next to a river in the State of Mexico and my daughter has a walkie-talkie so she can go walk around by herself and stay in touch. The only instructions: she can’t go in the river without adult supervision and walkie-talkie is for emergencies only.

-What have I told you? Emergencies only. Lunch is ready, come back.

While we eat little spaghetti nests she insists there’s a lion inside the half-built house near the river. I tell her a shortened version of The Boy Who Cried Wolf and how it would suck for the modern version to be Lena and the Lion. 

-Let’s go check that “lion” out after lunch. It’s probably a stain or something.

Lena and I walk down to the house and I head straight for the picture windows.

-Mom, I think you’re way too close, she says.

I’m so rational and adult I’m sure that the closer we are the better we’ll see it’s a shadow or stain or whatever. I notice tracks on the cement floor inside the house, but nothing too convincing. What would a lion be doing in a small town in the State of Mexico? Then a few seconds later, between the wall and the next bay window I see a tail belonging to a lion or some kind of large feline that I don’t stop to observe carefully because I almost fall off the ravine I’m so scared.

-A fucking lion!

-Told you.

My daughter folds over, laughing. 

*

Acatitlán means the place of reeds or place amongst reeds. It’s not Acatitlán de Santa Cecilia in Tlalnepantla, but San Mateo Acatitlán, peopled with pines, sacred firs, oaks, Texas madrones, and a few reeds. It’s also inhabited by roosters for fights, who, as Joao Cabral de Melo Neto writes, weave the morning with their song. Inhabited by self-exiled cityfolk, and of course by the first inhabitants: peasant farmworkers, now employed in luxury ranches. And yes, also by animals, guardians of other altars, beings displaced by other wars. All kinds of fauna can be found here.

*

A week ago a private dam broke and overflowed. The dam is in the ranch belonging to the owners of Starbucks. It measures 96000 square yards and … –just the dam, not the ranch– and it filled up with rain and water from the river they partially and illegally diverted and which waters the town. When it collapsed it destroyed over 750 thousand square feet of forest and didn’t kill anyone miraculously. We lost all power at home because the water managed to wash away several power lines. Several people lost their crops. 

*

There’s a local WhatsApp chat for the town neighbors where someone shares this picture: a zebra, saddled but with no bit, looking straight at the camera. After that, a long conversation follows–ranging from the punitive man who demands that this should be taken up with the state environmental protection agency authorities, to whether the zebra should go back to Africa and the impossibility of this proposal, to what the zebra’s natural habitat is since it’s been domesticated until someone says that perhaps we should leave the zebra be as she looks happy in the photo. They almost broke the internet.

If it is happy, someone suggests, then we shouldn't denounce it since the authorities will take her to a zoo where she will be unhappy. Some economist deduces that the zebra and its saddle provide means of sustenance to some family and generates well-being in the community so its happiness is secondary to its utility. Someone else is indignant: “How could she be domesticated and happy! With a saddle on its back and a load and tied up? These animals roam free in their habitat. We can only suppose.” And someone answers “But she was in terrible shape in a circus, this is so much better.”

The conversation ebbs and flows, he says, she says, some of the back and forths are less unfortunate than others and they keep going. Some people start defining what can and cannot be said in the chat and which are legitimate subject matters to be addressed until someone else argues that the chat shouldn’t be a dictatorship–social media in all its twenty-first-century dialectic splendor. A Doubting Thomas interrupts to ask for proof, very Biblical. He asks if it’s not a painted horse since so many artists live in the community. The conversation reaches its end when, after a plethora of emojis and hyperbolic punctuation, someone  inadvertently reaches the point: “We will never know if the zebra is happy until she speaks.” Aside from artists, apparently Nietzsche is alive and well and living in Acatitlán.

*

The patron saint of artists, specifically musicians and poets–not the kind who might paint a horse as a zebra– is Saint Cecilia. Like the other Acatitlán. She is usually represented with a harp or guitar, because before being martyred, during her wedding legend has it she sung to God with her heart. She was decapitated. This Acactitlán bears the name of saint Matthew, the word-made-flesh guy. What flesh do lions eat? In ancient Rome, they fed them martyr meat, amongst other things. And here? 

*

Aside from the water running from the businessman’s dam, the river that runs next to my house is filled with water that comes from Amanalco, a village that, before bearing the Nahuatl name “near a lake” used to be called N’dabi in Hñhäñhu. From what I gather, this means “place of floating logs.” According to El Sol de México, N’dabi was declared a “village with charm” in 2008, which means it aspires to be declared “magical village,” a moniker that is synonymous with tourism and gentrification.

*

There are other words that homemake here, nest-words: ocojal, mullido, egullir. In this place close to where logs float, in this place where reeds move in the wind and become green in the rain, when I walk, my feet sink in the mud or the pine needles.