Conquest

– You came over. It had been years. How could I remember the features of you which recede into the recesses of me. The way you burrow your eye brows when trying to understand what has just been said to you? The way you press your palms together when you’re not certain about the next step in a recipe, an instructional guide on how to put together a kitchen table for two, or how to build a friendship after years have devastated memory, and the idols we build to the beautiful moments of our experience have shattered and become nothing more than the dust which clogs imagination, and after becoming disembodied and divided your soul has healed and come back together in the same way that Victor stitched together his creation from the results of many great tragedies. How could I have held onto these bits of you, which I had hardly noted as they are infrequent, and after I had gone through my own version of being stitched together? It was enough that I recognized you. There are victims of air raids standing too close to detonations who don’t recognize themselves after. Yet I recognized you. I did. As soon as I opened the door. I recognized you, and part of me wanted to reach out and embrace you, while the other part wanted to shut my eyes tightly and chant loudly until the city crumbled and the walls became ash and the ground under you eroded taking you with it. I did close my eyes, but not as long as I had envisioned. And when I tried to chant, I croaked and offered you a salutation. Something like what you would offer a stranger ahead of you on a trail. “Hey,” I said. You just came in. I couldn’t do anything then but watch.
It has been said the entire Aztec empire froze upon Cortes’ arrival. You didn’t respond, not with your own version of a salutation to a stranger, to a friend, a curtsy, a wave or even a glance back in acknowledgement. You simply walked in and weaved your way through my space. My tiny studio. The only place I could find, years before, when you left the space of our quotidian existence. This was my space, where I had imagined I would practice illustrations on the wall, and intersperse the words and thoughts that came to me. This had been years earlier. This had been a bit of the flood of imagination that unleashes in fracture. You walked in and were unimpressed by the blank walls. Not a single word about them. Not a word offered to me. You simply walked in, as if this was your space too, had always been your space also. As if you had never left the space we shared, and as if every space that was mine had also and would also be yours. I stood frozen. You there, my space, the idea of my space becoming muddled. This was not a version of reality I had ever thought possible. Not a version of reality I could readily accept. I stood frozen and speechless. It is said the indigenous tribes saw the ripples but not the ships, until long after the conquistadors had flooded their beaches and taken them captive.
It was the draft blowing in the prints you left behind, which prompted words. You turned to me with a smile which quickly dissipated, then turned to that pleading expression you had to reach back through years to find, and then to that sad frown you had always worn with goose bumps. I watched all of these expressions flutter across your face. They reminded me of the blank walls and the illustrations I had wished to practice. Even though I could not figure out the flow of time in that moment, as I watched the flourish of expressions succeed across the features of your face, I at least knew, I was not the only one. With that expression of mild suffering you asked if I could close the door. It was not an uncommon request from you, as you were prone to chills and the winter months were not your favorite. Still, in that moment, it was as if you were asking me to crawl backwards, and I did. I closed the door. You smiled. You sat there and increased your comfort by leaning back into the couch. I stood still there, still at the entrance to the space I had found for myself, when you left the space we had for us. I was frozen still, as my heart beat quickened. In a similar succession to the expressions on your face, the images of the seasons overlapped and faded in my mind. I counted how many times the tress branches had been weighted in green, how many times they had lost hope and become barren, how many times the jacaranda’s had been a bright infusion against the pale blue sky, and how many times they had let their sap and purple tears fall. And how did that bring you here where the seasons ended? “I’m over you,” you said, as you crossed one leg over the other and smiled. I stepped toward you. My quickened pulse warmed the rest of me. I stopped again, not frozen but perplexed.
It is said that as the indigenous tribes were bound and made to sit through readings of the gospels by the conquistadors, they would dig their fingers into the sand beneath them and draw what the Spanish considered pagan symbols. Many fingers were broken. It wasn’t until much later, when some in the tribes learned Spanish, that the pagan symbols were understood as pleas for clarification. The fingers had healed by then. “You left,” I asserted. You turned to that pleading expression and let it become that assured smile with which you’d maneuvered your way past so many disagreements. I used to think it was cute, but after so many years and after your leaving, I could only associate it with loss. These were the last expressions you had shared with me; a pleading for me to understand and the assured smile as you walked away. I looked at the walls. After so many years they remained blank. I had wished to practice illustrations and phrases on them. They remained blank in the same way the walls of our loft, over all the years we shared it, remained blank. You always claimed it was too permanent, drawing on walls. You sat there, comfortable on the couch. I wondered why I had recreated my space to be like our space and whether this was why you found your way there, after so many years. You shrugged as you waited for the argument to pass before it became one. “It feels like home,” you said. I looked at you and shook my head. “Not anymore.”
The indigenous people who still speak only their dialect, and continue the traditions that were intact before the arrival of the conquistadors are the descendants of those who fled during the initial massacre and enslavement, which followed the arrival. They had to leave home to not be destroyed and changed by the invasion. I turned away from you and made sure to close the door after me, as I left.