The Dragon Griaule

At the last an elderly woman brought a gasoline can and emptied its contents upon his corpse, which had been rendered unrecognizable as life of any kind, like a red meal that had proved indigestible and been spat forth by the thing that consumed it. She lit a twist of paper and dropped it thereon. The flames yielded were low and of a ruddy translucence in the decaying light, and were whipped about by a cold north wind that soon would bring the storm. An oily smoke arose and was quickly dispersed. All the women of the village had come forth, and those of the pink house as well, and they huddled together in small groupings, somber and silent in that shabby, inglorious place, occasionally exchanging whispered comforts and assurances. When the blaze had burned down some retreated to their homes, but more gasoline was brought and many stayed to watch a second burning, and to stir the coals now and again so that a wisp of transparent flame licked up, signifying the immolation of a crumb of intestine, a scrap of cartilage. The sky darkened. Drops of icy rain began to fall, yet the women covered their heads with shawls, violent nuns at a ritual observance, and kept to their sentinel stations until they were shadows and the wind stiffened, carrying the taste of grit to their mouths, and all that survived of the dragon Griaule and his human avatar were nuggets of charred bone, which they would later collect and grind into meal for a mystical supper, and a cinereal residue indistinguishable from the dusts that had blown across those hills since time was in its cradle and the sky still bright with creation fire.

VI

 It was raining steadily by the time they drove out from Tres Santos in the late afternoon, heading for Nebaj and the north in one of the battered yellow mini-trucks. The women of the village expressed no interest in having them join their celebration. They wanted a swift return to normalcy, to their traditions, and they treated Snow and Yara, despite their service, with disdain, there being no place amongst them for a gringo and his pale, crippled woman. As for Snow, he had no desire to linger in Tres Santos a second longer than was necessary. He suspected that these women would be forever at their burning, whether in dreams or by means of some surrogate or effigy. Their new husbands, if husbands they took, would be lucky to survive such passion.