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 Weathered
Undying Souls

Paloma Robles

    The village struck me for its brownness: brown sand paths and brown dust.
    It was the second day of the Lunar Year.
    The streets were empty.
    It was cold.
    A man wearing a blue windbreaker suddenly came out of a narrow alley. He waved his hand at us and screamed something we couldn’t hear. From the backseat, and as the car veered off, I saw a cloud of sand dust swirling up in the air.

    The road that led up to the first village houses was narrow, stretched, rectilinear, flanked by a row of vertical trees. I have never seen such trees, so tall, and so straight, reaching up to the skies. Solitary figures were plowing the corn fields left and right. Besides the pervasive brownness, there was also the dazzling transparency of the sky. It was blue, violently blue, ice-cold, glaring with anger. There was something dead in the stillness of it all. It was not as if life was slow, but as if there was no motion, no breath, no pulse. A frozen and totally paralyzed village. Not just as if nothing was happening, but as if nothing would ever happen again. As if everything had happened already. Everything. Ever-a-thing.

    Eight people were waiting inside Miao’s house, a beautiful courtyard with green door frames and empty flower pots resting on window sills.
    “You used to have plants in here” I said to Miao, not sure about whether I was asking a question or making a statement.
    “Used to” He replied.
    It was as if everything belonged to the past: life, the flowers, the voices of Chinese songs on the gramophone.
    “My family. They all left when they found out I had HIV.”
    I shook his hand, coarse, sunburnt, brown like the sand paths and the village dust.
    It was four years ago when they told him he had HIV.
    We were in 2008. The year of the Olympic Games. The Olympic pride. The building of a new China.
    Miao grabbed a document from one of his drawers. It was written by the local government.
    I read: “Letter to the people infected with HIV: You were infected with HIV in 1995.” The letter said he would get free medication and free medical check-ups every six months.
    It was dated October 2003.
    I looked up to him, questioningly.
    “2003?”
    He smiled to me, a half-hearted smile, apologetic, as if he was sorry for all the things he couldn’t explain.
    “In 1995, they warned us about an outbreak of low resistance to disease in the village.”
    He mentioned the word immunodeficiency.
    It was a word he had heard, a familiar word, a word he didn’t dare use, unsure of its real meaning.
    The government warned them about low resistance to disease, but they didn’t mention anything about AIDS.
    Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome.
    There was strain and ageing in his face, and a similar expression, half grief, half expectation, in all of them.
    Miao walked up to the sink and came back with a glass of hot water. I stamped my feet on the ground. I was freezing. The sunlight pouring in from the windows was blurry, its radiance shielded by a thick layer of dust.

    Miao was a very attractive man. He looked more like a film-star than like a peasant. I couldn’t understand how anyone could leave him.
    He laughed. A boisterous laugh which bounced against the walls of the empty courtyard, suddenly recalling the emptiness and bringing back the voices of those who were no longer there.
    Departed.
    But unforgotten.
    “A lot of people died” He said.
    There was a silence.
    His face resumed its graveness.

    “Do you really think I’m attractive?”
    “It seems really stupid to me to want to run away from someone like you.”
    He burst out laughing.
    And I laughed with him. Laughed to tears.
    He said it was like the skinny boy with glasses who knows he can’t compete with his tall and attractive classmate to win the girl he likes.
    “They both ran away, my son and my wife, to live with someone else. I can’t really compete with a healthy man, someone who is not living with HIV.”
    “Compete?” I said. “Is it really about competing?”
    He shrugged.
    He became serious again.
    Maybe it was.

    At that time, selling blood was a quick way of earning some extra cash. They were poor, and poverty was the one thing that had remained. All the rest, their memories and their pasts, had been brushed off, replaced by grief, different layers of grief, stacked up, locked up inside their looks, like heaps of trash.

    They didn’t know where the money went. Miao said that every year the municipal government of Hebei Province was allocated a considerable amount of funding by the Global Fund.
    “But nothing has changed. We don’t’ know where the money goes.”
    There was a silence.
    “We only see the van from the Global Fund. They must have given the money to government officials. Where does the money go?”
    He fixed my eyes, as if I had the answer.

    The local government building was a shabby white-walled construction in the middle of the village. A dead place, buried under the dust, like a lazy cat sprawled out in the sunlight.

    “The premises where the local government has moved... that used to be the blood station” Miao explained.
    Miao found it hard to explain it all.
    Their history.
    The reasons why they didn’t do the things they could have done.
    The reasons why they did the things they could have not done.

    “It is hard to change the past” He said.
    He probably often wondered about the ifs.
    What if.
    What if they hadn’t been poor.
    What if they hadn’t sold their blood.
    But that was the wrong way of thinking.
    Because anyway, everything was already written.
    Carved in the walls and the buildings and the looks of the village dwellers. Just as if everything had already happened. As if life had been lived. As if nothing would ever happen again.

    “They don’t understand” Miao said.
    The government officials, he meant.
    That was the way he always referred to them: they.
    As if everybody knew, as if there was no one else to talk about.
    But it was not only them, “they”, who didn’t understand.
    It was beyond understanding. No one, absolutely no one would ever understand. They were alone in the same boat. A crew of stranded sailors.

    Miao explained.
    Sometimes the doctors from the Center of Disease Control refused them a glass of water for fear of contagion.
    Sometimes they were declined changes in medication.
    “Second line treatment is not available.”
    And they had to put up with side effects and resistance to medication.
    A whole world in itself.
    Sometimes, the neighbors would simply slam the door in their faces.
    There was fear.
    And stigma.
    Miao described government officials gulping down huge bowls of sticky rice.
    Killing time.
    Smoking cigarettes and pacing up the yard outside the premises.

    There was only one woman.
    With curly hair and eyes wide apart. A vacant stare.
    In the neighboring village, most of the people infected are women, she explained. Here, it was mostly men. She was not infected, but her husband had passed away a few years ago.
    “I took him to all the hospitals in Beijing. Nobody was able to tell me what it was.”
    “Because they didn’t know? Or they didn’t want to tell you?”
    She shrugged.
    Her husband had died in the arms of a doctor in one of the most prestigious hospitals of Beijing.
    The only doctor who had been able to tell them about the disease.
    She remembered a turmoil of anxiety: unremitting fevers, diarrhea, herpes, hemorrhage. A final unspeakable struggle against death. An obscenity of pain. She described it to me, in a matter-of-fact way, as if she had told the same story too many times, to different people.
    “The government finally agreed to build a house for me. After many complaints. And it’s where I live now. With my kid.” She said.
    “Besides that house, they didn’t give us much.” She paused and reflected. “At least not enough.”

    Someone opened the door. Her name was Hong. She was wearing jeans. She grabbed a chair and took a seat next to Miao. He gave her a glass of water. Their fingers touched, and their hands remained there, motionless, skin to skin.
    For an instant.
    Unnecessarily long.
    Unnecessarily close.
    Nobody noticed, I thought, or maybe everybody knew. Hong was living at the other end of that narrow rectilinear road flanked by tall vertical trees. They were separated by that straight line, a one-way path which could only lead to each other.
    “I traveled thousands of miles to the South of China to have a medical check-up”, Hong explained. “I started having fevers, it crossed my mind that I might have that thing, AIDS, which had been discovered in Henan Province.”

    They confirmed she had HIV, and she told the rest of the village. She was threatened and bid to shut her mouth by government officials.
    “It was hard in the beginning” She said with a smile. “It meant death at the time.”
    She presses Miao’s hand affectionately. She won’t abandon him like his wife and his son did. It is clear from her smile and from the way she gently presses his fingers. It is a faithful, honest, affection, unshaken.
    Love.
    It is not because they are on the same boat, and it is not because he looks like a film star.

    A Chinese song is playing on the gramophone.
    They were all silent, as if they had said everything that was to be said.
    Some of them stand up and leave.
    “We have to get lunch ready” They say, and disappear behind the dusty yard.
    Only Miao and Hong remain, hand in hand, more comfortable in the intimacy of the empty room. They smile at me. The song is still playing. Miao stands up. He rests his arm around her waist, pulls her from her chair gently.
    They dance.
    They move swiftly, dangling shadows, unreal, like undying souls.



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