1492 began a history of torture in Europe and in the Americas. Victor named it the Unfinished Conquest. He didn’t escape it. He probably always knew he would be its victim. He watched it come at him from all sides. If he had a prayer, it might have been that his writing would be sufficiently successful to cast him as one of the final victims. We did not know or understand what he knew. It seemed to us that there was a great divide between his work in Guatemala and his connection with his past and his Sephardic roots. What he had been trying to tell us was that they were the same. The conquest had merely cut down another pear tree but this time in Guatemala. When he died, we didn’t understand that he had become just another victim of an unending Conquest. What was acknowledged was that anxiety, political anxiety, can raise blood pressure and as he hated his meds and often refused them, he had fallen victim but to his own recalcitrance. 

But when people asked: “How is your blood pressure?”  You would answer, “Rios Montt.”

Non-compliant is a term suited to blaming victims. Victims are blamed for the suffering others contend they should have been able to avoid or overcome. We called his torture, a stroke, and afterwards many of his friends chastised him for the delusion that he could control his blood pressure with his mind, or for preferring his mind as he knew it, for being resistant, for not recognizing medical authority, for being unwilling to endure side-effects, for being naïve and choosing inadequate and untested natural remedies, for being stubborn, for taking unnecessary risks. For choosing his way of suffering and its consequences in lieu of the medically prescribed way of suffering ­– side effects – and their consequences. His friends had predicated their lives on the belief that could define and choose their destiny, that they had the right, that they could and should outwit death at a young age, that death, at the height of one’s vitality might be a sign of an inner failing. Victor had betrayed them. 

Perhaps the projection of our own concerns for our own lives, being marooned in the defining territory of our own anxieties, allowed us to miss the threat that was coming toward him.  Such threats didn’t exist in our lives.  They belonged to other lives and other countries.  We read about them.  We were responsible; we watched the news.  We watched serious movies on such subjects. 

The privilege of an expanding universe. Ease, privilege, power created the ever increasing space between ourselves and our fears, between ourselves and danger to us. Then our universe reached its zenith or its nadir, choose as you will, and began contracting. We were living closer, increasingly, to what we feared. But we didn’t know it yet. Blue, an expanding universe,  had turned to red, contraction. We were color blind to that transformation.  

Those who may have known something of the crises firsthand, buried alarm the way one buries toxic waste. If someone other than Victor testified, issued warnings, we responded as one does to literature. Another country we can enter but also leave at will. Close the book. 

I say we. I didn’t want to look away. And … I didn’t know I was looking away. 

We don’t know what injured Victor. Medical diagnosis can’t reconstitute his life.  Maybe it was a direct physical attack by other men on a lone man swimming in the lake at the end of the day when the darkening sky and shadows merge so that all things, beings, actions, motives can be hidden.  Or maybe it was brujerîa, an invisible attack, launched by the current agents of the conquest, or launched five hundred years ago and still traveling.

What was the truth of his affliction and death? He could never say. He couldn’t speak of it having spent his lifetime seeking it out. Twenty years earlier, a dream had taught me that gaining information, the alleged purpose of torture, is actually a means of silencing a population. Of course, Victor had helped me understand the dream and the reality it described.  We both hoped we would never yield to being silenced though we didn’t pretend we could possibly know what it was like to be dismembered, one limb at a time, or thrown into a pit or forced into a latrine with rats while the guards laughed at our confinement, at our inability to escape, at our bellowing and crying out.   

The direct cause of his affliction was the Conquest.

When he was found, he was lying, face down, unconscious on the small stretch of sand alongside the lakeshore. He had no papers on him. He was identified days later when the police were able to match the seemingly abandoned locked car in the parking lot to the unknown man in the hospital. The doctors said, he would never speak and never walk again.  Massive stroke, they said. They did not believe he would survive, and no one suspected that violence had been done to him. The causes they were seeking were directly related to the treatment, as if the ultimate causes were unrelated to his prognosis and so were best categorized as acts of God. This is the kind of understanding that sits best with unbelievers. 

But Victor had learned about the gods in the God house, drinking Balché with Chan Ki’n the Lacandon elder whose story he told in The Last Lords of Palenque, and though he knew the gods do not protect us from suffering, as it seems the gods had not been able, or authorized, were unwilling or without desire to save the Lacandon or the esteemed Chan K’in, even the great mahogany trees or the milpa unless … unless … we…? Even so, Victor also knew the gods do not authorize the violence attributed to them by so many of their alleged followers.

We enter thus into the eye of the mystery. What are we called to understand and become? If Chan Ki’n played his part and Victor played his, what parts are we being called to play in this game that is so much greater than the sum of the parts and the players?

I want to sit down again with the physicians who were attending Victor and were drawn ineluctably into the circle of concern that surrounded him and our determination that he would live, that he would walk, that he would speak. We got two out of three. It was not enough. What we got was the exquisite on-going torture. We got the pit. We got the tongue cut out.  In retrospect, not anything we could characterize as victory or healing.  I want to sit down with the physicians and ask them to backtrack and begin again. I want to say, you didn’t have the diagnosis right. The direct cause of his affliction was the Conquest. Now, what treatments will you prescribe? How can you call yourself a physician, if you don’t have a protocol for the Conquest?

Secretly, some of us have speculated that another aspect altogether of the story of the Conquest had been activated and was implicated in Victor’s suffering. If that was the case, then how was that segment of the story to be met? What amends were he and his party called to be made and to whom? Were they made? What has been left to us though we are barred from knowing truly what had occurred? 

Victor had been guiding a small group through the mythic landscape of the Lacandon. They had visited Chan K’in, had stood alongside some of the few standing mahogany trees, had gone down the Usumacinta river, bearing witness to the threat to dam it, and were stopping at Chichen Itza, the great Maya ruins. The teenage boy who was with them wanted to swim in the cenote, in the deep turquoise and lapis pool of clear water that formed when the hidden calcium bones of earth dissolved and collapsed leaving underwater caves to shelter the dead maidens sacrificed for the sake of war and to feed the hungry sun. Against all warnings and restraints, the boy found an opportunity to escape the eyes of the adults, raced to the cenote and dove into the water. How could he expect an undertow in such a pool that looked to be absolutely still water? They say he dove, and surfaced, swam toward the edge, began faltering, and then sank, slowly, disbelieving, one hand reaching up, grasping air, disappearing as invisible hands pulled him down.

Or he escaped his friends altogether and no one saw him dive. Or they felt the undertow even before he reached the water and had held onto him as best as they could against forces they couldn’t possibly understand, forces that had been set in motion in 1492 against which, not having identified the cause and taken action against it, not having made amends, they were helpless.  

They searched the waters as best as they were able. They never found him.  The local police and army officials hesitated before the prohibitions of the dead; they would not themselves go into the water. They said the cenote is bottomless.   

Was it the maidens calling the boy down to them or was it all the warriors, hundreds, thousands, that the Spaniards speared and threw into the waters that were waiting for their revenge, waiting to enact a common fate on those who consider peering into these depths, or deaths? Was it revenge upon those who do their sightseeing at gravesites and charnel grounds? It could have been something simple, a gold cross on a thin gold chain around the young man’s neck. A gold school ring. A gold bracelet. It is said that the Spaniards lusted so strongly for gold that once they saw it, they wanted to drink it, they wanted to eat it. It became their holy communion, and no one no thing would stand in their way of making it their own.

In order for the dead to become ancestors and serve the living, they have to do one thing – they have to admit their mistakes. When they do this, the doors open for the rains to come. The living cannot thrive without the assistance of the dead. The work of the dead is to become worthy, or capable of serving.