Sebastian Zuniga woke with a jolt. He thought it was Chalina. Her ghost visited him occasionally and she hadn’t come for a while. But it wasn’t her. It was only the clock in his head that told him it was time.
He glanced over his shoulder to look at his wife, Graciela. His scarred neck crackled like a thick rope being twisted between two powerful hands. Graciela’s face, bathed in moonlight from the open window, looked like a ceramic mask. She’s as undisturbed as the dead, Sebastian thought. He brushed his finger across her cheek. It was smooth and cool. He watched her chest until he saw it rise. He could get up now, knowing she was alive.
If you had the patience to look hard enough, and long enough, you could read Sebastian’s whole life in his weathered face. His forehead was creased with deep furrows. They were there as reminders of the times that he worried. Like the time when he was seven and he tried to wake his mother. No matter how much he shook her she wouldn’t move. When you see such a thing as a boy, it sticks with you your whole life.
There was the time in second grade in Boquete when the nun pushed him to the front of the class to recite his part from the Bible without practice. His mother usually helped him with his verses by firelight while under the stars, smoking tobacco. He missed her very much.
The time when he saw a young girl floating in the Rio Boquete and the adults, all drinking and laughing, didn’t hear his frenzied cries and he dived into the cold, mountain water, not knowing how to swim.
The time he ran away from his father and left on a ship from Colon. The destruction he saw during the Second Great War, and the abuses he endured. The first time he saw someone die violently with the blood of his friend wet on his face. The time he looked through his sights and lined up his target and knew he had a good shot, except on this occasion it wasn’t an ocelot. It was a man. He held his breath and squeezed the trigger and watched the soldier fall. He ran forward and searched the body but he didn’t find any maps or secret enemy reports. Only a wallet with pictures of a woman and three children. That night he slipped away from the perimeter and in the darkness he hid his face and wept until he was empty. Then he shivered, and the shivering never stopped.
Buried deep in those furrows was the birth of his first child, Francisco.
After Graciela went through twenty-six hours of labor that ended in a last minute caesarian, the doctor pronounced her and the baby dead. Sebastian didn’t give up and his will resuscitated them back to the living as he pounded on her chest.
The lines of worry deepened every day as he worked, wondering if he would make enough money to feed his growing family. And if his past could truly be forgotten.
Around his mouth and eyes were creases that looked like crows feet. They were small reminders of happiness when he laughed and his eyes twinkled with joy. He felt guilty that the last time he truly felt like that was not his wedding day. Not even the birth of his children. It was when he saved a young villager named “Butti” Bellido from certain death after a ruthless army officer had shot the boy in the stomach. Once he knew for certain that Butti would live, his whole body shook with elation. He ran outside the cabin into the cold rain and stood on a hilltop near Volcan Baru. He laughed uncontrollably, the first time in years, without having to cover his mouth. The tremendous pressure of years of bloodshed and hiding in the mountains rolled off his back and into the mud below his booted feet. He knew at that exact moment he would give up fighting and the War of the Flowers would end, no matter what the personal cost to himself.
There were always thoughts of Chalina, even though she had been dead for over twenty years; secret thoughts that Graciela would never know about. Chalina held a special place in his heart and always would.
The old man carried with him this and more. Every trait, every characteristic handed down by his ancestors. He carried them as a testament to who they were, who he was, and what those younger than him could become.