And of Clay
Are We Create
 |
| Isabel Allende |
By Isabel
Allende, translated by Margaret Sayers Peden
BACKGROUND
This selection by is
fictional, but it is based on a real event. In 1985,
a volcano erupted in Colombia. The heat of the volcano melted sheets of ice, resulting in
mudslides. More than 23,000 people
were killed. The media focused much attention on a thirteen-year-old girl trapped in the mud. In
this story, the girl is called
Azucena, and her rescuer is named Rolf Carlé.
1.
Azucena (AHSOO SAY NUH): Spanish for “lily.” 2. Rolf Carlé (ROHLF KAHR LAY).3.
subterranean (suhb tuh RAY nee
uhn): underground.4.
seismographs (SYZ MUHGRAFS): instruments that measure and record earthquakes and other tremors.
2.
They
discovered the girl’s head protruding from the mudpit, eyes wide open, calling soundlessly. She
had a First Communion name,
Azucena.1 Lily. In that vast
cemetery where the odor of death
was already attracting vultures from far away, and where the weeping of orphans and wails of the
injured filled the air, the little
girl obstinately clinging to life became the symbol of the tragedy. The television cameras transmitted so
often the unbearable image of
the head budding like a black squash from the
clay that there was no one who did not recognize her and know her name. And every time we saw her on
the screen, right behind her
was Rolf Carlé,2 who had gone
there on assignment, never
suspecting that he would find a fragment of his past, lost thirty years before. AFirst a
subterranean3 sob rocked the
cotton fields, curling them
like waves of foam. Geologists had set up their seismographs4 weeks before and knew that the mountain
had predicted that the heat
And
of Clay Are We Created249Copyright © by Holt,
Rinehart and Winston. All rights reserved.of the
eruption could detach the eternal ice from the slopes of the volcano, but no one heeded their
warnings; they sounded like the
tales of frightened old women. The towns in the valley went about their daily life, deaf to the moaning
of the earth, until that fateful
Wednesday night in November when a prolonged roar announced the end of the world, and walls
of snow broke loose, rolling
in an avalanche of clay, stones, and water that descended on the villages and buried them beneath
unfathomable meters of telluric5 vomit. B As soon as
the survivors emerged from the paralysis
of that first awful terror, they could see that houses, plazas, churches, white cotton plantations,
dark coffee forests, cattle
pastures—all had disappeared. Much later, after soldiers and volunteers had arrived to rescue the
living and try to assess the
magnitude of the cataclysm,6
it was calculated that beneath the
mud lay more than twenty thousand human beings and an indefinite number of animals putrefying
in a viscous soup.7 Forests and rivers had also been swept away, and
there was nothing to be seen
but an immense desert of mire.8When
the station called before dawn, Rolf Carlé and I
were together. I crawled out of bed, dazed with sleep, and went to prepare coffee while he hurriedly
dressed. He stuffed his gear
in the green canvas backpack he always carried, and we said goodbye, as we had so many times
before. I had no presentiments.
I sat in the kitchen, sipping my coffee and planning the long hours without
him, sure that he would be back the
next day. AHe
was one of the first to reach the scene, because while other reporters were fighting their way to
the edges of that morass9 in jeeps, bicycles, or on foot, each
getting there however he
could, Rolf Carlé had the advantage of the television heli-copter, which flew him over the avalanche.
We watched on our screens the
footage captured by his assistant’s camera, in which he was up to his knees in muck, a
microphone in his hand, in the midst
of a bedlam10 of lost children, wounded survivors,
corpses, and devastation. The
story came to us in his calm voice. For years he
had been a familiar figure in newscasts, reporting live at the scene of battles and catastrophes with
awesome tenacity. Nothing could
stop him, and I was always amazed at his equanimity in the face of danger and suffering; it seemed
as if nothing could shake his
fortitude or deter his curiosity. B Fear seemed
never to touch him, although he
had confessed to me that he was not a courageous
man, far from it. I believe that the lens of the camera had a strange effect on him; it was as if
it transported him to a different
time from which he could watch events without actually participating in them. When I knew him
better, I came to real-ize
that this fictive distance seemed to protect him from his own emotions. CRolf Carlé
was in on the story of Azucena from the begin-ning.
He filmed the volunteers who discovered her, and the first persons who tried to reach her; his camera
zoomed in on the girl, her
dark face, her large desolate eyes, the plastered-down tangle of her hair. The mud was like quicksand
around her, and anyone attempting
to reach her was in danger of sinking. They threw a rope to her that she made no effort to grasp
until they shouted to her to
catch it; then she pulled a hand from the mire and tried to move, but immediately sank a
little deeper. Rolf threw down his
knapsack and the rest of his equipment and waded into the quagmire, commenting
for his assistant’s microphone that it was cold
and that one could begin to smell the stench of corpses.“What’s your name?” he asked the girl, and
she told him her flower name.
“Don’t move, Azucena,” Rolf Carlé directed, and kept
talking to her, without a thought for what he was saying, just to distract her, while slowly he worked his
way forward in mud up to his
waist. D The air
around him seemed as murky as the
mud.It was impossible to reach
her from the approach he was attempting,
so he retreated and circled around where there seemed
to be firmer footing. When finally he was close enough, he took the rope and tied it beneath her
arms, so they could pull her
out. He smiled at her with
that smile that crinkles his
eyes and makes him look like a little boy; he told her that everything was fine, that he was here with
her now, that soon they would
have her out. He signaled the others to pull, but as soon as the cord tensed, the girl screamed.
They tried again, and her
shoulders and arms appeared, but they could move her no farther; she was trapped. Someone
suggested that her legs might
be caught in the collapsed walls of her house, but she said it was not just rubble, that she was also
held by the bodies of her brothers
and sisters clinging to her legs.“Don’t
worry, we’ll get you out of here,” Rolf promised. Despite the quality of the transmission, I
could hear his voice break,
and I loved him more than ever. Azucena looked at him, but said nothing.During those first hours Rolf Carlé
exhausted all the resources of
his ingenuity to rescue her. He struggled with poles
and ropes, but every tug was an intolerable torture for the imprisoned girl. It occurred to him to use
one of the poles as a lever
but got no result and had to abandon the idea. He talked a couple of soldiers into working with him
for a while, but they had to
leave because so many other victims were calling for help. The girl could not move, she barely
could breathe, but she did not
seem desperate, as if an ancestral resignation allowed her to accept her fate. E The
reporter, on the other hand, was 252And
of Clay Are We CreatedCopyright
© by Holt, Rinehart and Winston. All rights reserved.determined to
snatch her from death. Someone brought him a
tire, which he placed beneath her arms like a life buoy, and then laid a plank near the hole to hold his
weight and allow him to stay
closer to her. As it was impossible to remove the rubble blindly, he tried once or twice to
dive toward her feet, but emerged
frustrated, covered with mud, and spitting gravel. He concluded that he would have to have a pump
to drain the water, and
radioed a request for one, but received in return a message that there was no available transport and
it could not be sent until the
next morning. A“We can’t wait that long!” Rolf Carlé
shouted, but in the pandemonium11no one stopped to commiserate.
Many more hours would go by
before he accepted that time had stagnated and
reality had been irreparably distorted. BA military
doctor came to examine the girl, and observed that
her heart was functioning well and that if she did not get too cold she could survive the night.“Hang on, Azucena, we’ll have the pump
tomorrow,” Rolf Carlé tried to
console her.“Don’t leave me
alone,” she begged.“No, of
course I won’t leave you.”Someone
brought him coffee, and he helped the girl drink it,
sip by sip. The warm liquid revived her and she began telling him about her small life, about her family
and her school, about ow things were in that little bit of world before the
volcano had erupted. She was
thirteen, and she had never been outside her
village. Rolf Carlé, buoyed by a premature optimism, was convinced that everything would end well: the
pump would arrive, they would
drain the water, move the rubble, and Azucena would
be transported by helicopter to a hospital where she would recover rapidly and where he could visit
her and bring her gifts. He
thought, She’s already too old for dolls, and I don’t know what would please her; maybe a dress. I
don’t know much about women,
he concluded, amused, reflecting that although he had known many women in his lifetime, none had
taught him these And
of Clay Are We Created253Copyright © by Holt, Rinehart and Winston. All rights
reserved.details. To pass the hours he began to tell Azucena about his travels
and adventures as a newshound, and when he exhausted his memory, he called upon
imagination, inventing things he thought might entertain her. From time to time
she dozed, but he kept talking in the darkness, to assure her that he was still
there and to overcome the menace of uncertainty. CThat was a long night. Many
miles away, I watched Rolf Carlé and the girl on a tele-vision screen. I could
not bear the wait at home, so I went to National Television, where I often
spent entire nights with Rolf editing programs. D There, I was near his
world, and I could at least get a feeling of what he lived through during those
three decisive days. I called all the important people in the city, sena-tors,
commanders of the armed forces, the North American ambassador, and the
president of National Petroleum, begging them for a pump to remove the silt,
but obtained only vague promises. I began to ask for urgent help on radio and
television, to see if there wasn’t someone who could help us. Between calls I
would run to the newsroom to monitor the satellite transmis-sions that
periodically brought new details of the catastrophe. While reporters selected
scenes with most impact for the news report, I searched for footage that
featured Azucena’s mudpit. The screen reduced the disaster to a single plane
and accentu-ated the tremendous distance that separated me from Rolf Carlé;
nonetheless, I was there with him. E The child’s every suffering hurt me as it did him; I felt his
frustration, his impotence. Faced with the impossibility of communicating with
him, the fantas-tic idea came to me that if I tried, I could reach him by force
of mind and in that way give him encouragement. I concentrated until I was
dizzy—a frenzied and futile activity. At times I would be overcome with
compassion and burst out crying; at other times, I was so drained I felt as if
I were staring through a tele-scope at the light of a star dead for a million
years.I watched that hell on the first morning broadcast, cadavers of people
and animals awash in the current of new 254And of Clay Are We CreatedCopyright © by Holt,
Rinehart and Winston. All rights reserved.rivers formed
overnight from the melted snow. Above the mud rose
the tops of trees and the bell towers of a church where several people had taken refuge and were
patiently awaiting rescue
teams. Hundreds of soldiers and volunteers from the Civil Defense were clawing through rubble
searching for survivors, while
long rows of ragged specters awaited their turn
for a cup of hot broth. Radio networks announced that their phones were jammed with calls from
families offering shelter to
orphaned children. Drinking water was in scarce supply,
along with gasoline and food. Doctors, resigned to amputating arms and legs without anesthesia,
pled that at least they be sent
serum and painkillers and antibiotics; most of
the roads, however, were impassable, and worse were the bureaucratic obstacles that stood in the
way. To top it all, the clay
contaminated by decomposing bodies threatened the living with an outbreak of epidemics. AAzucena was
shivering inside the tire that held her above
the surface. Immobility and tension had greatly weakened
her, but she was conscious and could still be heard when a microphone was held out to her. Her
tone was humble, as if
apologizing for all the fuss. Rolf Carlé had a growth of beard, and dark circles beneath his eyes;
he looked near exhaustion. Even
from that enormous distance I could sense the
quality of his weariness, so different from the fatigue of other adventures. He had completely
forgotten the camera; he could
not look at the girl through a lens any longer. The pictures we were receiving were not his
assistant’s but those of other
reporters who had appropriated Azucena, bestowing on her the pathetic responsibility of
embodying the horror of what
had happened in that place. B With the first light Rolf tried again to dislodge the obstacles that
held the girl in her tomb, but
he had only his hands to work with; he did not dare use a tool for fear of injuring her. He fed
Azucena a cup of the cornmeal
mush and bananas the Army was distributing, but she
immediately vomited it up. A doctor stated that she had a fever, but added that there was little he
could do: Antibiotics were being reserved for cases of gangrene.12
A priest also passed by and
blessed her, hanging a medal of the Virgin around
her neck. By evening a gentle, persistent drizzle began to fall.“The
sky is weeping,” Azucena murmured, and she, too, began
to cry.“Don’t be afraid,” Rolf
begged. “You have to keep your strength
up and be calm. Everything will be fine. I’m with you, and I’ll get you out somehow.”Reporters returned to photograph Azucena and
ask her the same questions,
which she no longer tried to answer. In the
meanwhile, more television and movie teams arrived with spools of cable, tapes, film, videos,
precision lenses, recorders, sound
consoles, lights, reflecting screens, auxiliary motors, cartons of supplies, electricians, sound
technicians, and cameramen:
Azucena’s face was beamed to millions of screens around
the world. And all the while Rolf Carlé kept pleading for a pump. The improved technical
facilities bore results, and National
Television began receiving sharper pictures and clearer sound; the distance seemed suddenly
compressed, and I had the
horrible sensation that Azucena and Rolf were by my side, separated from me by impenetrable glass. I
was able to follow events hour
by hour; I knew everything my love did to wrest the
girl from her prison and help her endure her suffering; I overheard fragments of what they said to
one another and could guess the
rest; I was present when she taught Rolf to pray, and when he distracted her with the stories I
had told him in a thousand and
one nights beneath the white mosquito netting of our
bed. CWhen
darkness came on the second day, Rolf tried to sing Azucena to sleep with old Austrian folk
songs he had learned from his mother, but she was far beyond sleep. They spent
most of the night talking,
each in a stupor of exhaustion and hunger, and
shaking with cold. That night, imperceptibly, the unyielding floodgates that
had contained Rolf Carlé’s past for so many years began to open, and the torrent of all that
had lain hidden in the deepest
and most secret layers of memory poured out, leveling before it the obstacles that had blocked
his consciousness for so long.
He could not tell it all to Azucena; she perhaps did not know there was a world beyond the sea or time
previous to her own; she was
not capable of imagining Europe in the years of the war. So he could not tell her of defeat, nor of the
afternoon the Russians had led
them to the concentration camp to bury prisoners dead from starvation. Why should he describe to
her how the naked bodies piled
like a mountain of firewood resembled fragile china? How could he tell this dying child about
ovens and gallows? Nor did he
mention the night that he had seen his mother naked, shod in stiletto-heeled red boots, sobbing
with humiliation There was much he did not tell, but in those hours he
relived for the first time all
the things his mind had tried to erase. Azucena had
surrendered her fear to him and so, without wishing it, had obliged Rolf to confront his own. A There,
beside that hellhole of mud, it
was impossible for Rolf to flee from himself any longer, and the visceral13
terror he had lived as a boy suddenly invaded him.
B He reverted
to the years when he was the age of Azucena, and
younger, and, like her, found himself trapped in a pit without escape, buried in life, his head barely
above ground; he saw before his
eyes the boots and legs of his father, who had removed his belt and was whipping it in the air with the
never-forgotten hiss of a viper
coiled to strike. Sorrow flooded through him, intact and precise, as if it had lain always in his
mind, waiting. He was once again
in the armoire14 where his father locked him to punish him for imagined misbehavior, there where for
eternal hours he had crouched
with his eyes closed, not to see the darkness, with his hands over his ears, to shut out the
beating of his heart, trembling, huddled
like a cornered animal. Wandering in the mist of his memories he found his sister Katharina, a
sweet, retarded child who spent
her life hiding, with the hope that her father would And of Clay Are We Created257Copyright
© by Holt, Rinehart and Winston. All rights reserved.forget the disgrace of her
having been born. With Katharina, Rolf crawled beneath the dining room table, and
with her hid there under the long white tablecloth, two children forever
embraced, alert to footsteps and voices. Katharina’s scent melded with his own
sweat, with aromas of cooking, garlic, soup, freshly baked bread, and the
unexpected odor of putrescent15 clay. C His sister’s hand in his, her frightened breathing, her silk hair
against his cheek, the candid gaze of her eyes. Katharina . . . Katharina
materialized before him, floating on the air like a flag, clothed in the white
tablecloth, now a winding sheet, and at last he could weep for her death and
for the guilt of having abandoned her. He understood then that all his exploits
as a reporter, the feats that had won him such recognition and fame, were
merely an attempt to keep his most ancient fears at bay, a stratagem16 for
taking refuge behind a lens to test whether reality was more tolerable from
that perspective. D He took excessive risks as
an exercise of courage, training by day to conquer the monsters that tormented
him by night. But he had come face to face with the moment of truth; he could
not continue to escape his past. He was Azucena; he was buried in the clayey
mud; his terror was not the distant emotion of an almost forgotten childhood,
it was a claw sunk in his throat. In the flush of his tears he saw his mother,
dressed in black and clutching her imitation-crocodile pocketbook to her bosom,
just as he had last seen her on the dock when she had come to put him on the
boat to South America. She had not come to dry his tears, but to tell him to
pick up a shovel: the war was over and now they must bury the dead.“Don’t cry.
I don’t hurt anymore. I’m fine,” Azucena said when dawn came.“I’m not crying
for you,” Rolf Carlé smiled. “I’m crying for myself. I hurt all over.”The third
day in the valley of the cataclysm began with a pale light filtering through
storm clouds. The President of the Republic visited the area in his tailored
safari jacket to confirm hat this
was the worst catastrophe of
the century; the country was in
mourning; sister nations had offered
aid; he had ordered a state of
siege; the Armed Forces would
be merciless, anyone caught stealing
or committing other offenses
would be shot on sight. He
added that it was impossible to
remove all the corpses or count the thousands who had disappeared; the entire valley would be
declared holy ground, and
bishops would come to celebrate a solemn mass for the souls of the victims. He went to the Army field
tents to offer relief in the
form of vague promises to crowds of the rescued, then to the improvised hospital to offer a word of
encouragement to doctors and
nurses worn down from so many hours of tribulations.17AThen he
asked to be taken to see Azucena, the little girl the whole world had seen. He waved to her with
a limp statesman’s hand, and
microphones recorded his emotional voice and paternal
tone as he told her that her courage had served as an example to the nation. Rolf Carlé
interrupted to ask for a pump, and
the President assured him that he personally would attend to the matter. I caught a glimpse of Rolf for
a few seconds kneeling beside
the mudpit. On the evening news broadcast, he was still in the
same position; and I, glued to the screen like a fortuneteller to her crystal ball, could tell that
something fundamental had changed
in him. I knew somehow that during the night his defenses
had crumbled and he had given in to grief; finally he was vulnerable. The girl had touched a
part of him that he himself had
no access to, a part he had never shared with me. Rolf had wanted to console her, but it was
Azucena who had given him
consolation.I recognized the
precise moment at which Rolf gave up the fight
and surrendered to the torture of watching the girl die. BI was with
them, three days and two nights, spying on them from her thirteen years
no boy had ever loved her and that it was a pity
to leave this world without knowing love. Rolf assured her that he loved her more than he could ever
love anyone, more than he
loved his mother, more than his sister, more than all the women who had slept in his arms, more than
he loved me, his life
companion, who would have given anything to be trapped in that well in her place, who would have
exchanged her life for Azucena’s,
and I watched as he leaned down to kiss her poor forehead,
consumed by a sweet, sad emotion he could not name. I felt how in that instant both were saved
from despair, how they were
freed from the clay, how they rose above the vultures and helicopters, how together they flew above
the vast swamp of corruption
and laments. How, finally, they were able to accept death. Rolf Carlé prayed in silence that
she would die quickly, because
such pain cannot be borne.By
then I had obtained a pump and was in touch with a
general who had agreed to ship it the next morning on a military cargo plane. But on the night of
that third day, beneath the
unblinking focus of quartz lamps and the lens of a hundred cameras, Azucena gave up, her eyes locked
with those of the friend who
had sustained her to the end. Rolf Carlé removed the life buoy, closed her eyelids, held her to his
chest for a few moments, and
then let her go. She sank slowly, a flower in the mud. You are back with me, but you are not the
same man. I often accompany
you to the station and we watch the videos of Azucena
again; you study them intently, looking for something you could have done to save her, something
you did not think of in time.
Or maybe you study them to see yourself as if in a mirror, naked. Your cameras lie forgotten in
a closet; you do not write or
sing; you sit long hours before the window, staring at the mountains. Beside you, I wait for you
to complete the voyage into
yourself, for the old wounds to heal. I know that when you return from your nightmares, we shall again
walk hand in hand, as before.
With affection,
Ruben
