You Shall Leave Your Land Read online

  You Shall Leave YOUR Land

  First published by Charco Press 2023

  Charco Press Ltd., Office 59, 44-46 Morningside Road, Edinburgh EH10 4BF

  Copyright © Renato Cisneros, 2017

  First published in Spanish as Dejarás la tierra by Planeta (Perú)

  English translation copyright © Fionn Petch, 2023

  Poems translated by Robin Myers © Robin Myers, 2023

  The rights of Renato Cisneros to be identified as the author of this work and of Fionn Petch to be identified as the translator of this work have been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. This book is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publisher, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by the applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN: 9781913867300

  e-book: 9781913867294

  www.charcopress.com

  Edited by Robin Myers

  Cover designed by Pablo Font

  Typeset by Laura Jones

  Proofread by Fiona Mackintosh

  Renato Cisneros

  You Shall Leave Your Land

  Translated by

  Fionn Petch

  For Natalia and Julieta, my family

  In the beginning, a family’s energy usually springs from misery. And this misery often produces a family member’s drive to escape to a better life; and sometimes he paves the way for other members to follow. So you have a family on the rise, motivated and industrious. And within a generation this industriousness can produce wealth. And with wealth can come status, even nobility. And with nobility comes pride, and often arrogance. Arrogance is usually an element that leads to decline, and in time back to misery.

  Gay Talese, Unto the Sons, 168

  I have lived a hundred years without knowing these things: allow an old man to throw into disorder what has been written down, with what he knows.

  Enrique Prochazka, The Swineherd

  Now the Lord had said to Abram:

  ‘Get out of your country,

  From your family

  And from your father’s house,

  To a land that I will show you.’

  Genesis 12:1

  Who has not, at one point or another, played with thoughts of his ancestors, with the prehistory of his flesh and blood?

  Jorge Luis Borges, I, a Jew

  PART ONE

  CHAPTER 1

  Lima, 2013

  We went to the cemetery that day, resolved to confirm once and for all the truth of the story that great-great-grandmother Nicolasa was buried alongside Gregorio the priest. It was noon. The sun warmed the gravestones and dazzled the stray dogs, sending them off in search of shade. Little by little the silence of the Presbítero Maestro was broken, first with our breathing, then with the weary footsteps of the occasional people who came to commune with their dead at this time of day.

  The sunlight did little to disperse the gloom of the labyrinthine pavilions that seemed to form whole districts of buildings with bricked-up windows, withered flowers in planters, and gravestones painted with elongated black crosses like teardrops. Decrepit, ravaged edifices stuffed with cadavers whose spectres surely waited for nightfall to roam abroad, sharing forgotten things, their mysteries and their sorrows.

  Passing before the rusting gates placed at regular intervals, connecting the cemetery with the realm of the living, we noticed that the wardens had left their posts to get their lunch, or hadn’t turned up yet, or perhaps there weren’t even any wardens to occupy these faded booths that from afar resembled empty sarcophagi.

  With no one to ask, it took us an hour to locate the San Job quarter, not before making false starts in the San Estanislao, San Joaquín and San Calixto sectors, where we amused ourselves with the afflicted expressions of the stone angels crowning the crypts and mausoleums of certain heroes of the Republic.

  Once we’d identified San Job, guided by a new-found intuition, Uncle Gustavo strode with conviction towards the stones in the C sector and began a visual inspection, repeating three digits out loud.

  Two, five, three.

  Two, five, three.

  Two, five, three.

  He looked like a sleepwalker uttering the magic words that would wake him up.

  In no time at all he had identified the tomb we were searching for. Beneath encrusted dirt and ragged cobwebs, the lettering cut into the marble could still be read clearly:

  Here lies Doña Nicolasa Cisneros

  Born 10 September, 1800

  Died 3 January, 1867

  Beneath that, an inscription in Latin:

  Adveniat Regnum Tuum

  ‘Thy Kingdom Come’

  At the bottom, less an epitaph than an injunction:

  ‘Her children will love her always’

  I touched my forearm and felt goosepimples. I knew that there was nothing inside but a pile of bones, eaten away by worms, perhaps wrapped in a bundle of frayed rags that was once a burial gown. I knew this, but for a minute wanted to believe that something of the spirit of the woman who had been my great-great-grandmother, a presence still so close to our world, could seep through a crack in the mortar and express itself clearly, whether to endorse our visit or chase us away.

  Uncle Gustavo set out to clean the glass of the tomb with a cloth. He worked at first with delicacy and care, as if washing the hair of a dying man, and then with uncontained vehemence. Some force in him desired to crush or penetrate the mortar and profane that deposit, gathering up, however briefly, the debris of the woman who had left us her surname two centuries ago, and acknowledging in this detritus the material from which we too were made. Then he stopped abruptly, noticing the bas-relief sculpture in the middle of the stone. It showed the outline of a woman cradling a child in her arms.

  ‘Take a good look,’ he said, ‘it’s a mother and her child, alone – no father.’ I wrote down his observation in my notebook and continued to examine the details of the carving, attentive to anything that might suggest a hidden meaning.

  As I gazed at it, my eyes were drawn to the name on the adjacent tomb. Number 255. The surface was covered by wind-blown earth, which I brushed away.

  ‘Look who’s here,’ I interrupted Uncle Gustavo’s thoughts.

  Some of the letters had been worn off, but the words could be made out perfectly. When he turned around and read them, his eyes widened dramatically in surprise or fright.

  ‘You see! It was true!’ he exclaimed, referring to the papers we’d discovered just a few days earlier in the archiepiscopal archives, which gave us the idea – or the hope – that Nicolasa and Gregorio, in a final act of justice, had purchased adjacent tombs in order to share for eternity the closeness that had been denied them in life. Uncle Gustavo, his glasses perched on his head, peered closely at the slab to make certain of it:

  8 December, 1865

  Here lies Dr. Gregorio Cartagena

  Priest of Huácar

  There was no need to see his face to know what was happening inside him. Far from unravelling, I felt that at his eighty years of age he was coming back to life. As if this disco
very suddenly made sense of his decades-long excavation. Or as if someone had finally answered the question that as a child he had asked his father in the days of their Buenos Aires exile, a question the latter had always avoided: ‘Dad, who was your grandfather?’ Or as if he found himself once more in the body of the fifteen-year-old boy he’d been, recently arrived in Lima, who on a morning like this one, led by the hand of Agripina, his only aunt who didn’t keep secrets, came to this same cemetery – lusher and less gloomy then – and heard tell of these graves for the first time. ‘The tombs of the lovers,’ Agripina whispered, saying nothing more but planting in him a question that would grow and grow until it became unbearable, transforming into a memory that would remain buried for years.

  ‘I’ve been here before,’ stammered Uncle Gustavo, glancing around, as if he’d just had a revelation and recognised his surroundings. Contemplating it now, his entire life – toughened by the loss of his first wife, the departure of several of his children, his countless affairs, the money he’d enjoyed to the full, his subsequent bankruptcy – seemed suddenly justified before the wall of the dead.

  With our necrological expedition concluded, we departed in silence, leaving behind us the rancid aromas of the cemetery. We walked several long blocks parallel to the main avenue before climbing into a taxi to head for a Miraflores restaurant Uncle Gustavo said he knew. After a few minutes I realised he was still profoundly disoriented and struggling to identify the right route. Three times the driver complained at his erroneous directions, and was on the point of kicking us out of the cab.

  Halfway to our supposed destination, as if to certify what we’d found and remove it from the realm of fiction, Gustavo turned to me and said: ‘You see? I told you. Grandma and the priest were buried together.’

  In the rear-view mirror, the driver’s face darkened.

  We finally made it to the restaurant in Tarapacá, and took a table by a window with an expansive view over Arequipa avenue. From the other side of the glass came the ceaseless rumble of the street: the bustle of the small stores, the pedestrians clustered at the corners waiting for buses, flocks of metallic-hued birds fleeing from the car horns or the electric fences. The habitual bewilderment of the city. After the first of the many whiskies we would drink that afternoon, I placed my voice recorder on the table, set it running and asked Uncle Gustavo to repeat in detail the story he’d told me so many times, and that for several years now we’d been reconstructing together: he with scrupulous rigour, I with unruly obsession.

  ‘I’m ready to write about it now,’ I told him from behind my glass.

  His expression showed both satisfaction and caution: the look of someone who has resigned himself to abdicating and passing on his most prized endeavour, a project that deserves to survive and be appreciated by someone else, one that has inexplicably remained hidden and now lies in other hands.

  ‘If you don’t tell this story, no one else will,’ he ordained, not without sorrow.

  He soon began his tale, familiar to me yet new every time, of what happened in Huánuco two centuries back, when those men and women, who performed actions and took decisions without any awareness that they would become our ancestors, were still alive; men and women both spirited and fearful, of whose turbulent paths through the world only shards remain.

  CHAPTER 2

  Huánuco, 1828

  On the evening of Saturday, the twenty-ninth of March, after descending from the final pass, Nicolasa Cisneros and Dominga Prieto were skirting the flanks of the mountain, hoping to run into some traveller who could tell them where they were. There was no one. They spent almost an hour on tenterhooks, and just when the horses were beginning to flag, nickering and chafing at their commands, and just as the women began to wonder if death would meet them here on this rocky slope that darkness was beginning to devour, they made out a building in the distance and first hoped and then deduced it must be the Andaymayo hacienda.

  Four days earlier, on Tuesday the twenty-fifth, seeing that Nicolasa’s swelling belly could no longer be concealed, Gregorio Cartagena persuaded her to go to stay for a time in Huacaybamba, a tiny village in the Peruvian sierra, in the high puna region, three hundred kilometres north of Huánuco on the misty frontier with Ancash, where he owned a hacienda. There, he assured her, far from the civilisation of the provinces and above all far from the gossip and scandal that would surely arise, she would find an ideal place to give birth. Nicolasa accepted without thinking twice and left on horseback two days later, on Thursday at dawn, accompanied by Dominga Prieto, the black servant whose loyalty and discretion would be rewarded many years later.

  The packhorse trail to Huacaybamba was steep and winding, crossing mountain passes almost four thousand metres high, and so rough in parts that they were forced to lead the horses on foot. Whenever Nicolasa faltered and begged for them to halt, numb with exhaustion, Dominga Prieto would pass her a moistened handkerchief and say, ‘We can’t stop, child, Father Gregorio forbade it, you remember. Do it for the little one.’ And she rubbed her swollen belly. As the hours went by they grew accustomed to taking a rest to eat, judging the hour from the position of the sun, or to sleep a little in a spot of shade in the wood where the lichen hung from the trees, or for Nicolasa to curl up in the undergrowth to recover from the continual fevers, shivering and nausea that afflicted her. Each time they paused, Dominga Prieto would withdraw a few yards, murmuring Ave Marias and prayers of protection to St Christopher or St Turibius, and once she’d taken a seat on any suitable rock or rise, she would take off her shoes, which were too tight, burst her blisters, and gather her strength with a swig of aguardiente from the hip flask she hid in the same pocket of her pinafore where she kept her prayer cards.

  Three days and three nights it took them to complete this seemingly endless journey. Three days suffering the humid, ruthless heat that filled the air with swirling steam, and at night a dense fog that rose from the depths of the ravines. Three days at the mercy of the cutting late-summer wind, that turbulent summer of 1828, with the first great floods and mudslides caused by savage rains that fell like knives and made a quagmire of the path. Three days and three nights fearing the precipices and gullies, the poisonous fruits, the nests of snakes, the caves of bats, the soaked rats scuttling among the undergrowth, and attacks by pumas or skunks whose eyes glittered in the dark grottoes. Three moonless nights, guiding themselves by the succession of the mountains – the foothills of the cordillera proper – and by the thick, erect shadows of the acacias, the periodic migrations of the black-feathered hawks, and the sound carried up from the Marañón river, that dim roar like a wounded animal clattering in its cage.

  At the entrance to the hacienda they were hurriedly received by a slim, sunken-eyed woman of mixed black and criollo ancestry who could neither speak nor hear, but who quickly set down the trays and jugs she was carrying and led them to the most secluded room in the building. Only once she had helped them get settled did she light the fire, round up the fowl that had been disturbed by the visitors, and lay out fodder for the famished horses, before untangling their manes, brushing their hooves and pulling ticks from their ears. The woman, whose face, arms and belly were disfigured by chicken pox scars, was Isidora Zabala, the only servant Gregorio Cartagena ever had, and with her rudimentary sign language and guttural sounds she was able to keep him apprised of everything that happened in that region where nothing ever happened.

  After a week in this dungeon-like, windowless room, on the threadbare sheets of the iron bed, flanked by tin buckets filled with hot water, a collapsed mahogany wardrobe, two oil lamps, and Dominga Prieto as her midwife, and following twelve hours of labour, Nicolasa’s son was born. She was left so worn-out and weak that she sighed deeply and fell into a faint, and Isidora Zabala – who had stood by her bedside throughout the entire birth – began to moan in fright, and poked her shoulder to see if she was dead.

  ‘Leave her alone, she’s only
fainted!’ objected Dom-

  inga Prieto.

  Isidora Zabala managed to read her lips, nodded in obedience, and mumbled something.

  Cartagena arrived at the hacienda hours later, leaping from his horse and heading straight for the bedroom, where he found Nicolasa sleeping in a nightgown still drenched with sweat and the baby swaddled in a blanket, shivering in the soft arms of Dominga Prieto. The priest tiptoed forward to keep the floorboards from creaking, stood before his son, and scrutinised him without coming too close, controlling himself as if to practise the nervous distance that would later prove decisive. In that fragile, peaceful face still blank of defining features, he sought himself, and stayed there for several minutes studying the veined forehead, the tiny nose, the doll-like chin. Dominga Prieto held the baby out to him as if offering a candy, but he startled and shrank back, beating down the rush of emotion that had welled up inside him. His backwards step caused the wooden floor to creak, and the baby opened his eyes. ‘Is all well, Father?’ Dominga asked. Gregorio waved his hands, fumbled to open the door and muttered something about the work to be done in the hacienda before fading into the night like a restless ghost.

  * * *

  Two months later, on the eve of his return to his centre of operations in Huácar, Cartagena told Nicolasa what had troubled him since before the child’s birth.

  ‘Very soon, it’ll be time for him to be baptised and his birth registered in the church records.’

  Nicolasa nodded.

  ‘Care must be taken when it comes to recording the legal particulars,’ Gregorio observed, insinuating the awkwardness of his surname appearing on any such document.

  Before Nicolasa’s widening eyes, he laid out his proposal to alter the papers.

  ‘You don’t want to appear as the father, do you?’ she challenged him.

  ‘I can’t. You know that.’