the faralito

The Faralito
Orlando Lujan Martinez
In Malcolm Lowrys novel U,nder the Volcano, written in 1938, Godfrey Fermin, a former American Consul, living in the town of Cahnahauca Mexico, is spending his last day on earth in The Faralito, a sordid dark tavern next to a deep barranca. The barranca's steep incline is an tangle of thick jungle, at the bottom a sluggish stream flows toward the sea.
The consul is an dipsomaniac and on the terminal end of a monumental mescal drunk His slow tango with mescal is about to be concluded. The consul is going to be assassinated and thrown into the deep barranca because, in a drunken stupor, he naively mentioned, to the bar owner, he was in Madrid; a stronghold of the Spanish Republicans, Communists, Trotskyites and the International Brigades, who were the first to fight fascism, during the Spanish Civil War.
A number of Federal soldiers are huddle together, in dusty uniforms, at the far end of the bar voices dropped to a inaudible murmur talking about Fremin because the Faralitos owner had told them about his causal conversation with Fermin, and they are now beginning to suspect the consul is either a Troskyite or a Communist or a former member of the International Brigades. Poison words to the militaries who supported the dictator of Mexico during the 1930s. Occasionally one of them turns to look at the Consul, sitting at a table drinking mescal and reading the love letters of his wife
Fermin is the prisoner of mescal and is familiar with delirium tremens and its world of hallucinations, the late night crys of animals being slaughtered in the kitchen of his house, and the hundreds of dead cattle now posed on the slope of a hill opposite The Faralito. But the consul, despite these apparitions, and the months of submersion in mescal, still manages to think of love. He is reading the love letters of a wife he is separated from, not as the source of a possible revival-which is impossible because his life has been taken by mescal- but as a love dead of true lovet and the dismal memories of a lost soul.
Yet, he is still able in his sodden mind to think about the wonder of love. “What is there in life besides the person who one adores and the life one can build with that person?“ his wife writes. But he is no longer a participant in the pageant of love. There is nothing left of life to build on.
Across the world, thirty years later, in 1968, in the steaming jungles of Vietnam an American soldier is killed by North Vietnamese solders, now silently running down a path. They are numb from fatigue. The death of the American was done with courageous determination, but without hatred.
The soldier will never see his wife in the Sangre De Cristo Mountains of New Mexico again. And spring, summer and winter will pass again and again without him. When he died his life and love became memories that live on in the family picture album. The picture with his unforgettable smile is the one his wife will remember when decades later with her tearful face reflected in the black granite, she tucks a letter to her enternal lover into the crack between the granite slabs of the Vietnam Memorial Wall. The letter says, in part,: “You made my small world shine and my life count for something good. I finally understood for the first time, that love is greater than death. I will remember you forever.
She still believes one beautiful sunlit summer day he’ll walk in the back door. and call her name in such a wonderful tone of vioce that tears will fall.
When the Federales came to an agreement they rose slowly, scraping chairs, and walk silently, in the gloom of The Faralito, towards the Consul: the Troskyite or Communist and former member of the International Brigades.
The barranca next to The Faralito, carved into the earth by 500,000 years of the streams erosion, waits patiently.