I never knew a river could be in a state of apparent death. I learned about it recently when I read that the Atoyac was declared clinically dead, and for the past 30 years, efforts had been made to rehabilitate it to no avail.
Don’t ask why, but I imagine the river as a person being wheeled into a hospital on a stretcher, paramedics shouting at the emergency room doctors: “Code Blue!” But the truth is, she is not a beautiful Bollywood actress personifying the Ganga from the Vedas, nor is he an athletic son of Oceanus and Tethys. The Atoyac is a poor bastard reeking of shit and urine; he convulses and foams at the mouth, cursing every single one of the children he has conceived, barking like a rabid Xoloitzcuintle. And there are many names he screams in his own unintelligible tongue, a language older than Proto-Totonaco-Tepehua and Proto-Yuto-Nahua.
The river suddenly falls silent, letting the emergency room be flooded with the high-pitched beep and the flatline of the electrocardiogram. Someone shouts, “Clear!” and places the defibrillator paddles on his chest. The body arches for a second, as in death by tetanus. A male nurse—yes, a man—puts a respirator on the river’s mouth and presses the air pump a couple of times. “Clear!” Again, another shock. The ECG pretends to come back, but soon the line flattens again.
Is the Atoyac watching his life pass by like a movie?
A drop of meltwater in the Sierra Nevada, a spring in the rock, the streams become tributaries, and soon a single channel, rapids, waterfalls, rock eroded into gravel, all that potential energy contained in the Valsequillo dam.
Or rather, he remembers how they stripped him of everything he had and outraged him, mocking him for warming his bare feet with the warm water that came out of the drain. He swallows whatever they put in his mouth because hunger can always overcome dignity.
The doctor pounds on his chest, the male nurse squeezes the respirator pump, someone else shouts a curse, and out of nowhere, a heartbeat emerges, fragile as a tadpole’s tail.
There are no more vital signs.
There is no knee-jerk reflex when tapped with a hammer, nor do the pupils dilate in the light. Perhaps he hears what they say, and maybe he is conscious but cannot open his eyelids or respond to stimuli. Is he in a coma, catatonia, or catalepsy?
‘Clinically dead’ can be misinterpreted. The water flows; it preserves some flora and fauna, although ‘healthy’ doesn’t describe it well either. Just look at the oxygen levels, the pH, the foam, and the taupe color, between brown and grayish . . . .
Doctors take the patient out of emergency room and send him, as John Doe, to the Intensive Care Unit. There is no family member to watch over him. Who would care about an old, useless being? Certainly not the governor or the king of denim, those bastards who for years raped his daughters, marking his smallest tributaries with dyes and acids. Nor the grandchildren who profit by bringing pipes from far away, drying up the lagoons of Totolcingo, El Salado, and Alchichica.
Outside the San José specialty hospital, it rains; it may be due to hurricane season in the Atlantic or perhaps a north wind tempest in Veracruz, but the bottom line is that the storm here in the Puebla-Tlaxcala valley is more lightning and thunder than anything else, a tromba. Hailstones fall furiously, denting car bodies and shattering windshields; ice melts on the asphalt, drains overflow, and suddenly Red Cross boats appear on 5 de Mayo Boulevard rescuing the unfortunate who climb onto the roofs of their cars through the windows.
The stranger has an occasional spasm; it’s not his only proof of life, as there is also the rapid movement of his eyes, the beta waves on the electroencephalogram, the accelerated pulse. The vital fluid flows through his veins and arteries, but what good will it do if it is black and thick?
Does he remember when, in 1963, he was confined in solitary? Tubed and channeled at the Xonaca stream and the San Francisco section, from the Xalpatlac ravine to the corner of 5 Sur and 49 Poniente? There, where everything around stinks of rotten eggs.
Enough with the misery porn! Some treatment will be equivalent to hemodialysis, and, for the most fundamental rights, industries will be forced to treat wastewater. The government will have to invest in a trans-sexennial plan and mandate the drinking water concessionaire to contribute to basin sanitation.
Universities and civil society will also be forced to act by the water crisis; ecological engineers will seek methods to reverse the damage, and environmental education will be taught in schools, entrusting that the new generations will be more aware.
Thus, the patient will one day be able to move a finger, perhaps his left pinky, although no one will see him do it, just as they will not know if he was listening to what they were saying about him while he was in a coma and they were doing physiotherapy—words that were not kind. Nor will they know how he managed to escape from the hospital barefoot, with only a gown covering his chest but not his buttocks, and literally ‘slipping’ away from security guys.
Who is that old man walking at night down the boulevard, almost naked, with the rainwater up to his waist? Why do the trees, palm trees, and even the light poles sway, paying homage to him while the turn signals of abandoned cars blink under the water?
Rain washes the long gray hair from his beard and his mane, sticking his clothes to his chest. Then the black of the old man’s pupils lights up orange like molten iron, the Atoyac brings his arms together and, with all his might, extends his fingers. In that gesture of Kame-Hame-Ha, each molecule in his body becomes a tsunami that carries garbage, mud, and filth until it bursts the pipes that contain him, overflows the riverbed, and even ruptures the old Valsequillo dam, purifying itself in water that becomes crystal clear again, revealing the roots of the reeds and even some fish among the pebbles.