The next morning my dog didn’t recognise me, making it very difficult to take him for a walk as he kept running away from me. I had a strange sensation of being distanced from the world. I felt tired and was nostalgic for the hill. Sometimes I just wanted to sleep, that same feeling you get when you have depression, although I have never suffered from it myself. The second night after entering the cave, I woke up screaming. My parents spent a good deal of time by my side because I was unable to move about and again the voice, you’re here. I felt quite unwell. Dogs barked at me, terrified, the neighbour's cat bristled with fright when it saw me, and I noticed several shadows that were hovering around me.
The voices and noises under the bed continued, causing such desperation that I cried because my head hurt. I continued to have that feeling of not belonging to this world, of being taken little by little to somewhere I didn’t know. I didn’t eat. People who saw me said I was pale. I stopped seeing my friends with whom I had gone to the hill. I wasn’t myself or at least I had stopped being myself.
I was never superstitious, but in the condition in which I found myself, I began to believe that something had “stuck” to me, but what? It was contradictory, because in answering my question I would have to assume that there are beings, spirits or other things that go around doing evil, that there is life after death, that there is a whole, hidden world that can harm people. That confused me, but I still felt awful, and each day more I heard voices that whispered complete sentences to me. In places with light, I was afraid. I was terrified to look under the bed because there was a noise, a most chilling noise. I had the sensation that from that cave, several kilometres from me, someone had control over my life.
As the days passed, the nightmares continued. I saw shadows. I never saw their faces, but they told me to go with them. Then I began to see them while I was awake. My dog bit my hand because he was frightened to see me. I couldn’t sleep well, I was always restless, my hands were sweaty, and my body trembled.
I was taken to the hospital because it was getting worse day by day, but the pills didn’t work. It was unbearable to continue like this. Several times I tried to kill myself or kill what was inside me, which would be the same thing, but I failed. “Why?” they all asked me: when the world is uninhabitable, you will all understand why I think about suicide. They make me feel crazy when they are crazy. That’s why they took me to the psychologist, but he became bored with me; the voices in another language didn't convince him. My despair, my desire to stop this suffering caused him to distance himself from me. He ended the sessions and I continued in the same vein, between the shadows, anguish, and voices.
As it did not improve, they took me to a man who they said was healer. Upon entering his house, I was surprised by the number of jars and bottles, the smell, his clothes, his face. He made a circle of fire and there he began to ‘heal’ me. He told me that I carried four evils with me, one for each corner of my body, they were taking over me, making me disappear. But just at that moment, his trousers were set alight by a flame that had reached him from the fire. He told me that what I had brought with me was very strong and that it was starting to take over my body. He asked me to return because he had done well so far but he still needed to expel that evil; I had to go back at least four times.
I felt a little better, but at night that voice came again: There is no way out, you are one of us. And then, as if someone forced me, I went to the kitchen, opened the cutlery drawer, and took the first knife I found: Do it, don’t be afraid. I saw how the knife pierced my skin and opened a groove in my flesh. I felt no pain, but the blood ran all down my arm. Then it was the other wrist; I felt nothing. The floor had been painted red: You summoned us, here we are, fuse with us.
When I opened my eyes, I was on a bed tied up by my hands and feet. Everything was white, but it was not a hospital, it was a makeshift room with white sheets. Surely they would declare me crazy, suicidal, an incurable invalid. There was a lady next to me. She happened to be passing along the street just at the right moment and from there she saw what was going on inside. Along with my family, she stopped me from causing myself further harm and bandaged up my wounds. Before leaving she told me, "Go on now and bring a few flowers from your garden." She gave me an address and left.
I found myself in such a bad state that the next day they took me as far as they could to the place they had told me about. To our surprise, the same woman opened the door, but on greeting us we noticed her voice was different. She asked me to sit down on a wooden chair, just under a ray of light, the only light that entered the small room. From there, it was possible to see the hill in the distance, the one with the cave. She addressed me with a voice that was not that of the previous day, nor of this morning. She told me that she had spoken to the hill and it told her that I ignored it. That voice was his, don’t summon them, please, then he put several plants in my path to escape from the evil, but I didn't do it and that's why I found myself like that, because there were bad things in that place. With another voice, she told me that the hill where we found the cave, Xicuco, was willing to help me and that they had called upon neighbouring Elephant Hill to have more force in the battle.
I can’t exactly describe what happened. I was in a trance; everything was very confusing. Around me the shadows passed, the noises came and went, those voices didn’t stop, they either screamed expletives at me or begged. I lost all notion of time, nor did I know at what moment I stood up and repeated what the lady told me.
The last part of the healing process was the flowers I had taken from my garden. She brushed them over my body, again and again, and when she finished, she told me to throw them into the river. When I left that place, everything was different; I felt refreshed, I could walk alone, and I had no pain. I went to the river and there, in the flowing water, I left the flowers. When I raised my head, I saw the three elders who had healed me disappear in a flicker, only the hills were left. In my mind I heard, come, but don’t summon them.
Tláhuac, Mexico City
16 March 2016
Nothing Happens Around Here
To Claudia for opening our eyes to what we see
The story I’m going to tell you began when Claudia saw that person standing between the laundry sink and the fig tree, wearing a white t-shirt, blue jeans and carrying a black backpack. My neighbour can’t remember seeing any feet. She called me so that I came out to see who had said to her, “Good afternoon.” We found no one. We looked in the courtyard, down the stairs, to the rooms at the end, in the small, run-down bathroom, up the tree, but nothing. Nobody came out of the big door, but someone had definitely been there. We had that strange feeling of being watched, but of not seeing anyone.
The tenement block we live in is very old, comparable to any you might find in the city. Because of the rain, the walls are green with moss, and lack a fresh coat of paint. There are age-old cracks, caused by the many tremors, and a large, quite unkempt courtyard. In short, it is falling apart. No one really knows who the owner is. The person who rents it to us says that the owner is a widow, who must be very rich because this isn’t the only tenement block she owns. Digging deeper into the origins of this place, someone once told me that where we live now, many years ago, something bad had happened, but they didn’t give any further details.
Life in the tenement block remained the same, busy, people coming and going at all hours. It was quite common to see new people who only came in to visit someone or have a look at what could be stolen.
Another neighbour told me that just yesterday she had invited her friends over to have a few beers - a common occurrence. There were five friends gathered in her room: three men and two women plus my neighbour. She has only been living here for a month and therefore does not know all the neighbours yet. She still hasn’t settled into the pace of life, because the majority of us who rent here are from the middle of the country and we arrive alone to the city, looking for a totally new life.
They were already several beers in when one of their friends went to the bathroom which was only a few steps away. He found the light on, a sign that someone was inside and waited for it to go out, wanting whoever was inside to hurry up. The