The Five Acts of Diego Leon Read Free

still bled. Elva said he would be lucky if he lived to see another day.
    A week later, Diego’s mother told him to stay away from the other children. When he asked why, she said they were sick.
    “How many of them, Mama?”
    She hunched over the mortar and pestle, grinding cloves of garlic. “Enough to make me worry.” She turned to him now. “Promise me you’ll be careful. I don’t know what I’d do if you got sick.”
    “I’ll be careful,” Diego said.
    “Of course you will.” She reached out and stroked his face; her fingers carried the scent of garlic and onion. “I never have to worry about you.”
    Diego did as she said and stayed away from the other children. He kept close to her side. But the next day, he began to cough, and that night, he woke shivering, his teeth chattering so loudly thatthe sound woke his mother. She covered him with blankets and lay close to him, blowing on his hands and feet with her breath, but nothing helped. He was so cold. By morning, his forehead burned, and it hurt his eyes when she carried him out into the bright sunlight of the cookhouse. Elva insisted she had seen this before. She shook her head and sighed. Those men, she said. The troops who were just here. They reeked of disease. No doubt they brought this.
    “I tried keeping the children away from them,” she explained. “But no one listened. They think an old lady doesn’t know anything.”
    Some said it was the mosquitoes that swarmed around the nearby lakeshore, especially during the warmer months. Smudge pots had been brought in and placed around the perimeter of the church grounds to keep the bugs away. Still, by the end of the week, more children fell ill, and the sickness spread to some of the adults. By then, the rash had appeared on Diego’s chest and soon it covered his arms and his legs.
    The fever was so high that it caused him to sweat and see things, strange shadows lurking in the corners of the house and outside in the meadows, crouching behind trees and bushes, circling about in the cornfield. Hands passed over his body. He saw threads of white smoke. He caught the scent of burning herbs. A red feather brushed across his hands, eyes, and the back of his head. He could hear his mother’s voice, far off, distant, her cool lips against his forehead when she kissed him. Then her voice faded and fell away and the sound was like a pebble cascading down the side of a well, the tapping growing fainter and fainter until it was no more, until it was only Elva’s voice that he heard, breaking through the wall of the fever, as she placed damp cloths on his forehead.
    “Listen to my voice,” she said. “Stay here with me. Listen to my voice. Please.”
    There was nothing else to do but lie there, drenched in sweat, his head throbbing from pain, his body aching at the slightest move or twinge. When Elva tried lifting his arms up to towel his back, hecried out. When she placed cloths soaked in alcohol and marijuana on his stomach, he writhed. She stayed with him. Day and night. Elva never left Diego’s side. He watched her shadowed face. The wrinkles and folds etched into her skin appeared as if they’d been carved from stone.
    “Can you hear me?” she asked. “Diego? Can you hear me?”
    He nodded, tried speaking, tried looking up at her, but everything spun. The ground rocked and quivered. He watched the shadows grow and move across the walls. They took the shapes of jaguars, snakes, eagles in flight.
    “Look,” he said to Elva, pointing. “A toad. There. On the wall.”
    “And a monkey,” said the old woman, smiling. “Swinging from a branch. Look at his long ch’éti.”
    “Ch’éti?”
    “Tail,” said Elva. “Ch’éti is tail in P’urhépecha. The language of your ancestors.”
    Because they were P’urhépecha, it was in their blood to tell and to recall, Elva told him, to see and to imagine things beyond, past that and into eternity. In between sleep and waking, she told him stories