Murmullo de Paloma

One

The names on this map tell the history of the country: Atrocity Lane, Avenue of the Dead, The Street of Phantoms, Massacre Passage. The streets are lined with rotting flowers where the dictator passed with his entourage of soldiers and assassins and whores. A window bangs open in the breeze and a trio of birds sit and stare from a roof – three magi in black cloaks. The streets are empty, the dictator dead.

Two

The captain is lost at sea. His crew is starving. They’ve already eaten the dogs and now they’re eyeing the cook. The captain stands on the bridge, looking through the telescope. He sees nothing but prairies of salt, canyons of water. The first mate sits in the cabin, bent over a map he bought from a sailor in Guadalajara in 1762. His fingers move over the paper like spiders. He is trying to feel his way to land. 

Three

The child walks in the labyrinth. She turns a corner and trembles in fear of meeting the Minotaur or the ghosts of other trapped children. As night falls, she lies on the narrow path of dead leaves and gazes up and sees a constellation of stars. She is looking for the North Star. Cassiopeia. The Little Dipper. The Big Dipper. Names her father read to her when she was a princess in a golden kingdom and the world was young.

Four

The woman is a cartographer. She is one hundred years old and wanders in the jungles of memory. She sees her husband, dead thirty years, in suspenders and shirt sleeves digging up Wyoming with a shovel. He turns and smiles and disappears. She sees her twin daughters as babies, tiny curled things asleep half the day, screaming the rest. She sees in the map of her mind a lattice of paths all leading one way in the unending rain.

Five

Three boys in Fortaleza keep a ball in the air. They are barefoot in the sand and move like acrobats, brown skin glistening, in virtuosic choreography. Beside them, the ocean bellows. As the ball rises and dips on its parabolas, it makes a map in the air of all the journeys of all the balls on all the beaches in all the pueblos and towns and cities of Brazil in which three barefoot boys have ever kept a ball in the air. 

Six

The conquistador sheathed in metal—breastplate and helmet—lies on the shore like a broken toy, his sword abandoned in the shallows. He is bleeding from the neck. With his index finger he begins to draw a map in the sand, a map that shows the way to El Dorado. Even as the waves wash over him and the sun roasts his face, he continues to draw. Soon the people will strip him bare of armor and leave his cadaver to the crabs and crows.

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