Alejandro Seta
trans. Gabriel González
Jesus, when he had cried again with a loud voice, yielded up the ghost.
And, behold, the veil of the temple was rent in twain from the top to the bottom;
and the earth did quake, and the rocks rent . . .
— Matthew 27: 50-51
On Trígonus, the green planet, Ame and Rodri play under the light of one of its three moons.
They live in one of the citadels on the shores of a great sea, where trees have overtaken mountains, rivers, houses, and even the streets themselves. In Trígonus, trees matter more than people.
No one would think of hurting a tree because trees offer protection. Protection from the winds, from the suffocating heat, from the chilling cold, from the storms, and from bad feelings.
In fact, there are houses on Trígonus that perch on trees, not because anyone built them there, but because the trees continued growing and lifted the houses into the air with the strength of their enormous roots. The inhabitants of those houses, upon seeing themselves taken higher and higher, simply built stairs to climb down, grateful that the trees had decided to offer their protection.
What game do Ame and Rodri play under the light of one of the three moons? The game is that they manage to escape from their own shadows—the two of them, hand in hand, or sometimes separately, performing a spectacular dance of hands and legs and laughter, all of which are like music to accompany that strange, silent dance.
“Ameee!” calls Ame’s mother. Ame stops dancing-playing with Rodri (is dancing any different from playing?), and they say goodbye. Rodri goes home, where his mother is waiting at the door. His house is right across from Ame’s.
At her table, Ame finds vegetable soup, which she loves.
“What were you two playing?”
Ame’s mother is like a small, feminine angel who constantly goes around straightening out the house and who reads books from the hundreds of books that are in the library, books she reads from time to time, between meals and setting things in order and seeing after Ame’s responsibilities, which include putting away her clothes and toys.
“Shadow games.”
When they finish eating, they head out the door and look at the three-mooned sky. Suddenly Alexia, the mother, holds out her hand in the air, and it projects three shadows. Ame gives her mother a sideways glance but does not stop staring up at the sky. Such things can be done, as Ame knows.
“Where is Terra?”
Alexia knows that Ame has been concerned about that for some days now.
“Really far away,” she answers. She tries to point to some place in the sky, but she doesn’t exactly know where either. “So many stars! Perhaps one of them is Terra’s sun.”
Ame tries to understand what Alexia is saying. She closes her tiny eyes and squeezes them as if that helped. But she cannot quite understand. She saw in The Book (someone read it to her) that Jesus died there. The first time she saw him hanging from two crossed beams, bewilderment completely overcame her and seized her tiny heart. “What did He do wrong?” she asked herself out loud, in a muffled voice. And when they said that nothing, that He had never done anything wrong, it became even more difficult for her to understand.
“Are people that bad over there?” she now asks her mother.
Alexia did not know until that moment that being a mother also meant answering questions of this sort.
“Yes, but people are really that good too.”
“How do you know?”
“Because if not, Terra would have disappeared. They would have torn each other to pieces. That never happened nor can happen on Trígonus. Terra survives because some beings over there have a goodness that makes humanity persist in ongoing belief. It’s like this . . . .”
Alexia picks up a stick from the ground and makes it stand on her left index finger. The stick then begins to fall, but she moves her finger slightly, and the stick continues to stand in place.
Ame understands.
She tries to understand evil, even if only for an instant, what it is, but she cannot. She does not ask about it, and simply tries to forget.
“And how come we don’t need the stick in Trígonus?”
Alexia thinks for a few minutes. More than two answers come to her mind.
“Because we learned.”
A few years later, Ame is now a beautiful, adult woman with two children called Rodri and Bed. She has married Rodri, her eternal friend, as the two of them love to say. She is 84 years old, according to how years are counted on Trígonus. It must be said that this planet is three times smaller than Terra, so its days go by as fast as arrows. People here get up at night and go to bed at sundown, always beat tired, because they have only a short time to do the things that would take many more hours for anyone on a larger planet.
They say that on Terra people waste their time because they have so much of it.
Alexia now watches Ame sweep the porch to the house, which has always been her house, and she knows that it will soon be her time to leave. She knows (believes) that over there her husband, Ame’s father who inexplicably passed away when Ame was only one day old, is waiting for her.
Despite his life being as short as time is on Trígonus, Evaristo was always present in the stories of Ame’s imagination. Alexia had taken care to tell Ame all of them. The stories were dressed with hardly believable episodes, told with twinges of emotions which in reality may not have been so intense, but seasoned with abundant love for that person she was in love with always, even many years after his death. Even now, as she watches Ame sweeping the porch of the house and little Bed and Rodri playing a game where they cover their shadows and run under the radiant light of the Great Star.
“The Book,” says Alexia, “says that they waste their trees too.”
Ame still cannot quite understand it. She cannot understand Terra’s strange people.
Ame now reminisces about the times when her mother would recount, by the fireplace at night, the stories of Evaristo, her father. That he was beautiful, that he was outstanding, that his joy was contagious. That, before getting married, he walked the circumference of Trígonus three times, for very many days and years. That he kept everything there, in his head, and in his writings, which are found in the thirty books with songs and poems he had collected from the peoples among whom he had walked. He had done so to remind them of their commitment to read The Book, because it contained a promise that if Jesus died on Terra, he would also return to Trígonus.
On Trígonus, no one doubted this.
“What is this quake, mom?” three-year-old Ame asked Alexia.
Alexia looked up at the sky and knelt.
“The stars are trembling.”
Ame had noticed, before Alexia could, that the planet’s surface had begun to tremble, frightened, ashamed in the knowledge that in some place in the Universe a species of Man had been capable of killing their own God.
“They are killing Jesus,” Alexia said.
Ame innocently stated that it had happened thousands of years ago. That’s what The Book said.
“It’s happening now. In some way that I can’t understand, it’s happening now.”
Alexia bowed her head. Ame followed suit. Many, everyone, in Trígonus, knelt and shrunk their head between their shoulders. That day the ground trembled all day, but this trembling was barely noticeable to the senses, an invisible tremor almost.
For many hours the stars performed a dance similar to the game Ame and Rodri would play. Briefly, the three moons shuddered almost imperceptibly. But over there, over there, very far away, some people were fine with stoning and trying to take the life of One who had given His all for them.
Ame cannot quite understand evil.
And she never will.
Alejandro Seta enjoys being with his three children and six grandchildren, spending time with his wife Cristina (with whom he launched a puppet theater), doing yoga and tai chi, and teaching creative writing workshops. He has written plays, published three poetry collections, two novels, and a research book (along with two coauthors) about poetry in the Buenos Aires metropolitan area. His short stories and cultural journalism articles can be found on his webpage www.alejandroseta.com. He was born in Buenos Aires in 1956 and currently lives in the city of Alejandro Korn (Province of Buenos Aires).
