With no one around I can consume myself properly. A creature tongues her chapped paw. A woman wishes her mouth were a healer. Here, slouched against the moonlit soil, lips wet with cleaning, I can indulge in these imaginings.
Perhaps there’s a universe where my palms lay on shoulders and right their aching bow. Or, there’s a world in which the grounds of my coffee prophesize the rebels winning this sick war. Maybe it’s a reality where you are bedridden and ill, and I spoon hot broth down your throat until you are better. There could be a life where I have visions and ceremonies, where I cure the suffering and comfort the dying. I am imagining a place where I can rub mud in your eyes and bring you to see.
In these imaginings I am not me, meaning I am not ultimately out for a life of great brooding, a life of swallowing everything down and never being full enough. I am a healer, a layer of hands, a voice crackling through the sky with the conviction of a thousand cries.
In 1967 Noé León painted a jaguar eating a Jesuit missionary white knuckling a crucifix. The jaguar draws scarlet blood from the missionary’s chest. The blood drips down the jaguar’s chapped paw. The missionary lies motionless on the mossy ground, eyes closed as if in acceptance, as if out of respect. The other animals look on indifferently.
(Misionero Comido Por Tigre, Noé León)
Often, I am these animals, the blue-feathered parrots and by-standing chimps, the anteater pretending not to see, the butterfly, flitting past, light and beautiful as before. Often I take the long way around the bloodshed, build up towering fences to blind myself from it, bury my proverbial head in the proverbial sand. Often my guilt can be too loud for the room I am in.
Sometimes I am the jaguar, altogether violent and seething, desperate to sink my teeth into something, to rid the taste in my mouth, to bite down on the hand that hurt me. This is when the rage, as you must know too, becomes too much to bear in this soft body of mine. This is when I must transform into something muscled and slick, something irreverently hungry. Though, sometimes I am starving.
Many times, I have been the missionary: a sordid mix of self-pitying and self-aggrandizing. I have laid down to the consequences of the things I have done. I have been uninvited and uncouth in the worst of ways. I have convinced myself I know what is best for you. I have built myself up in my head. I’d like to think that some God speaks through me. I’d like to think these oceans I’ve crossed are not for nothing.
Maybe I’m León brushing oil on the canvas until you believe what we’ve been telling you for 500 years. I am repeating the words See Me, See Us until it becomes a prayer you can hear. I’m painting jaguar fangs to eat away at the hideous past. I’m delivering her jaguar cubs and placing them to feed at her breast, to learn the art of hunting missionaries.
In my imaginings I get to live all of it. In my imaginings I have all of the answers to all of my questions. This is what I meant about the swallowing and the never being full enough. This is what I mean about consuming myself — choking down strands of hair, chewing on fingers, gnawing on a whole arm, another arm, a leg, swallowing and swallowing down past the reality where my body exists at all, and into one where I am nothing but a mouth and infinite stomach. After I consume all that I can, I’ll eat the rest of myself — my mouth, my stomach. I’ll be nothing then, and finally satisfied.
As a teenager I’d walk cemetery rows, reading tombstones, wondering if the bodies could somehow feel the pressure of my feet against the earth between us. I’d wonder if I could recognize a face under all that dirt, or if the worms already dug through the flesh and moved on. I’d swear I could hear a voice floating up from some grave, or maybe just the sound of the animals talking amongst themselves, placing bets on the rates of our decomposition.
With no one around I can admit to myself that I’m not the best caretaker of this body I’m in; I can confront the places that it has been. I can wage bets with the animals.
With no one to watch me, I open my hands like the waxy petals of the dogwood tree. I press them into the shallow of my chest and hold them there. I decide this reality must be the one where I am a healer. I decide that maybe the most healing thing I can do for this world is simply to eat and be eaten. I decide that one day, like the jaguar, I can be full enough.