litlinks 2019

The Last of Diego Hernandez

by Monique Eaton, Canberra College

Valentina Hernández recalls the day her son was to be sacrificed with an unsettled expression. “Diego,” she tells me, “was often late.” That morning, he had slept dreamily through no less than four alarms, and only arisen with the pounding of his mother’s fists upon his bedroom door. Valentina, as hard in appearance, and often in thought, as stone, finds herself unable to overcome the sight of her son’s head disappearing down the pebbled steps of their front porch, so many years previously. “He did not have time to collect a raincoat, you see,” she says, describing with increasing pause the image of Diego’s oil- slick hair bristling with rain on that fateful Thursday. She never saw him again.

The gathering crowds, arriving to celebrate Colombia’s independence day, slowed Diego further as he wrestled to reach the bus. Flora Rojas, who ran the cafe down the street famed for its delectable coffee, vehemently denies any rain, instead recounting with pleasure the sight of Diego passing her window with sunlight splashing at his feet.

“He was a good lad, that one,” she smiles at me. “Never mind what happened to him.”

Diego did, indeed, make it to the bus on time, flinging his body at the door just as the driver began to move off. He was admitted with a grumbled curse, quickly soothed with one of the sugared smiles that so enchanted those of the feminine nature. I can see him in Flora’s memory, with his head nestled against the glass of the bus window, chest heaving up and down, and flowers blooming in his eyes. Outside, the festivities were just beginning; rainbow-clad men and women spinning through the streets, the enchanting perfume of ajiaco and bandeja pasa settling like a warm embrace across the city. It smelt of his childhood.

The slow and delicate passage of the bus through the city was, Diego knew, his hearse-ride, and the groaning of elderly metal at each bump of the road was his funeral hymn. Mina Castillo tells me now of her recollection of that final day, nestled into an armchair and surrounded on all sides by the unwanted offspring of an unwanted marriage. She was seated to Diego’s right, three rows ahead, and was bursting with the fanciful infatuation of a 14-year-old girl in love.

“He looked like an angel. A dark silhouette outlined in the white of falling snow.” She insists upon the fact that snow fell that day, like virginal fairies tumbling to earth. “I could see his wings peeking over his shoulder.” Mina watched him, as the bus deposited her at her street and continued its winding trundle up the hill, until she could see no more.

I cannot help but wonder what ran through Diego’s mind in the 40 minutes it took to arrive at his destination. Perhaps he thought of his mother, training him for this moment his entire life, of the men who had decided he was worthy. I hope he thought of me. I hope he recalled us as children, running on stunted legs throughout the city as the sun fell below the horizon and bathed us in reds. Tiny heads bound together by as yet unvarnished hope for the future spread before us; the naivety of children yet to feel the yoke of propriety settle across our backs.

Julián Martinez recalls sighting Diego as he stepped off the bus and began the well-trudged path to the cliff edge. Diego was but one of many, uniform in their dark hair and olive skin, in their youth and the hard-edged jaws of their masculinity. They stretched into the distance, ants marching in orderly rows to a metronome none could hear. Their excitement thrummed in the air, pulsing and beating, and fireworks erupted in their hearts. “I noticed him because I thought it was odd,” Julián says of Diego, “that he was not smiling.”

And so Diego had marched, a part of the whole and yet wholly apart. Each step weighed like lead, and I can almost taste the grit of sand and smoke on his tongue. As they neared their final destination, they accepted the proffered helmets, clipping them tightly under their chins. Julián, watching on as a Witness, recounts to me the way Diego had stumbled upon cresting that final hill, the way he had reached up to fumble at his helmet, readjusting as he took in what lay below.

When I ask Julián what he had been thinking at the time, from where he sat watching with the other Witnesses, he simply shrugs, “Well of course there was some inkling of doubt, but there was nothing to be done, as I’m sure you understand.” This was the way it had always been, the way the Men in Black had decreed it must always be.

Diego had known from the moment he awakened what awaited him that day – indeed, from the moment he left his mother’s womb. He had been prepared. Yet each step closer was slower than the last. The sky had seemed to press in on him, until he could no longer hear the call of bird or feel the warmth of the bodies beside him. Dust grew from the trampled earth, obscuring his vision. Still, the lines of men pressed steadily forward, with no pause or respite, until suddenly Diego stood, with the ground opening at his feet, and no one in front of him. Before him, the cliff ended, reaching out in a great crust of earth to clasp hands with the sea so far below, and from this crust, Diego’s fellows leapt. They tumbled in neat rows, smiling and laughing to each other even as their feet left solid ground. Julian laughs when I question him. “Well of course there was no chance of survival, helmet or no.”

Valentina Hernández has listened to a recount of that day only once, for the very thought of it makes her blood boil. “I did not raise my son to shirk his responsibilities,” she says, and will say no more.

For Diego had paused, that afternoon, heels pressed defiantly into solid ground and toes dangling in nothing but air. The Witnesses watched on; Rafaela Rivero, as limited in stature as she is in emotion, tells me of the impatience in the air. “We could all see Death pushing at his shoulder. We were ready to go home.”

The seconds cartwheeled past, the boys gathered like sheep behind Diego, grumbling in their exasperation and craning to see past the heads in front of them, and still Diego did not move. To his left and to his right, the sheep stepped joyously to their deaths, smiles etched on their faces until the final second, when the ground leapt up to swallow them.

Diego stepped back. The grumbling became catcalls, muttered insults, but he did not seem to care. The others watched on as the chain at his ankle shattered. I like to imagine the grin that stretched his face, ear-to-ear, as he turned and walked away, pushing his way through the crowds of hostile boys eagerly anticipating their turn to die. I like to imagine the tremble of his fingers as he awaits his bride at the altar, as he holds his child for the first time. I like to imagine the crinkle of his smile as he holds a diploma, as he handles the joystick of a plane, as he dances to the beat of a song only he can hear. I like to imagine the bonfires in his eyes as the sky cracked open before him and revealed the possibilities of a life lived without man’s expectation.

That was 52 years ago, and I have not seen Diego Hernández since.