The Memory of Bones

When Marisol Mera de Silva was Seven Years Old, She found her father’s head in a metal bowl at the Leaving Place of Orellana. Like the fruit of a bromeliad, plucked and waiting to be washed. Beside the bowl on the riverbank were the heads of her five elder brothers, staked through the spinal columns with their eyes wide open, staring up at a yellow moon. She did not cry. She was not surprised. But she could not leave them to rot where they had been murdered, and so Marisol has been carrying their bones around in a bag, looking for a better place to put them down. There is a Leaving Place in each of the twenty-four provincial states of the country, and in ten years of searching, Marisol has been to all of them except for one. For ten years she has been carrying the bag of bones, trying and failing to leave them behind. The bones are heavy. They clatter against her back when she walks. Sometimes when the air is humid, she can smell the peculiar scent of her father’s bergamot cologne hanging around the bag, and she has to hold her breath until it passes.

Before the war, Marisol had loved bergamot because her father smelled always of citrus. A direct descendent of Simón Bolívar, he was intensely proud and had named her brothers Simón, José, Antonio de la Trinidad, Palacios Ponte, and Blanco. After her mother died in childbirth, Marisol was left the only girl among six, strapping Mera de Silva men.

By the time she was old enough to attend, the guerrillas had banned girls from school, thinking they were more likely to become anarchistic and destabilize the country if they were permitted to read. Instead of following their rules, her father had given her an encyclopedia and his old Polaroid camera.

“Start with A,” he’d told her. “You have to know what it is the world is made of.”

After dark, he’d take her out into the jungle surrounding their house and point at the glittering formations in the sky, at the shapeless moving things in the trees. He would quiz her on their spellings, test her memory with things she’d learned from the book. He’d cup tiny insects in his palms, catch birds and bats with mesh nets, and hold them up for her to see. Sometimes they’d spend hours plucking plants and stones from the forest floor, their hands dirtied beyond washing by the time they came home.

When the fighting broke out, he’d painted a sign on their outermost wall—resistencia! in bold red letters. Then he started holding meetings in their living room. She used to sit on his lap while he spoke to their neighbors, all the lights dimmed so that they could not be seen from outside. After the government closed his library, her father tried to file a petition with the international court. But the high judge refused to see him, and their neighbors told him to be quiet.

“Bernardo Mera de Silva,” they said to him, “you’re going to get yourself killed.”

One Day, She and Her Brothers and Her Father went out looking for anaconda eggs. She snapped photos and kept lists of the animals they saw. When she did not yet know their common names, she made them up. A bird with long, bulbous tail feathers was the turquoise cuckoo-clock. The cobalt blue tree frog with golden speckles was little lapis lazuli. And a tiny, common shrew she named the pepper-breasted toul-a-ree because of the way it chirped when looking for insects to eat. She spent most of her time trying to take photographs, holding the Polaroid to her eye to capture bursts of colored feathers as they flew.

There was a bright flash above the canopy, and then a rumbling. Rumboom. She dropped the camera in swamp mud, and as she bent to clean the lens with her sleeve, two more flashes showed. Rum-boom-boom...