A Place of Two Brothers

by Asael Arroyo Re (Mexico)

A leap into the unknown Mexico

I read a strange newspaper article: two brothers who have lived in isolation in some caves in the Sierra de San Francisco for 15 years, in Baja California Sur; that even knowing which one is which is difficult, and talking to them is hard because they have developed their own Spanish. It seemed a fictional note, or a note of a very different reality. In addition, it was a time in my life where two things happened that rarely coincide: I had saved some money and I had time. From Ensenada, I descended 800 miles south of the peninsula. First I arrived at Bahía Asunción, a fishing community on the Pacific. There I met Aldo, with whom I had already had contact before. I told him why I was there. Aldo was not surprised and told me that he had a weird uncle who could help us get up to the mountains with his truck. “Weird?,” I asked. “Yes: you can see my uncle Rigoberto fishing in the sea with a cowboy hat on. He is the only one around here who besides being a fisherman is a rancher.” When Rigoberto —small, bellied, gray and scrambled hair— welcomed us he showed me delicately the horns of a berrendo. He wanted to make me understand something that I didn't know what it was. "The bones are pretty," I said. "It's not bones, it's compressed hair." We talked about the mountains, about finding the two brothers. "Yes, I can take you there," he said. ** In the mountains we looked for a trace of them, people who could know them. We met Melo, a rancher, who told us: "I wanted to help them once and it got worse: they killed my fattest goat. I told them to build me a water dam. And they did come. I gave them work. I gave them food. When they were leaving, I told them: there are two other dams, if you help me and behave well, I will bring you a roasted chicken, so you can eat at ease. They never returned. They already had seen my goat.” Then we visited the town of San Francisco, the place where the brothers were born, a place of only fifteen houses and a small peach-colored church. There we talked with Cuco, a distant cousin of the brothers, who sat astride a broken plastic chair, and compared the brothers to animals. They don't know how to ride a horse and can't ride a bicycle, he said. But they walk. They walk like lamber, one after the other, without separating, on the slopes of the mountains, on red volcanic stone, through arid or greened canyons. They walk, although they do not know the days or months in which they live, nor even of distance. Because if you ask them how much is from here to there, they tell you that close. But they don’t know. The truth is they don’t. Cuco showed us a number from the National Geographic magazine, from December 1989. Inside the magazine there was a photograph of the brothers, in which they are facing each other, on a white background, each sitting in a chair rusty metal, with open legs. We asked why the brothers had gone to live in the caves. Cuco did not know how to respond. Then he received a call where they told him where they had last seen the brothers. For eight hours we climbed the hill they indicated. We saw a hut of smoking rods and two skinny men outside. They did not startle. Both carried a long dagger on the side of the pants. "We've been looking for you for days," we said. They did not say anything. We asked so many things and so many things were answered with a yes, with a no, with a gesture that implied that there was no answer other than that gesture, but there was a question we insisted on. "Why did you leave?" They did not answer. Or they did with the stare in the sky blurred by the sunset, in a goat that slipped from one stone to another, in the land of volcanic red dust.