Death of the Black-Haired Girl by Robert Stone Read Free Book Online Page A

were also afraid. It occurred to her now, standing on the manicured hillside of the college, that she was assuming the same complacent expression.
    When the children had finished singing “Sora,” the speakers explained the situation, the big picture. The collectives the government had established on confiscated estancias were a cheat and a lie. The people must know this. When things had been explained to them, the judgment of the people was never wrong. No one could arrogantly pretend to be above or outside it. And only those whom history had summoned to leadership could interpret the people’s judgment. Why? Because only they understood history completely.
    Nor could that judgment be appealed, based as it was on absolute mathematics and philosophy. The knowledge commanded by the leaders’ chief was the opposite of lies. It was like the lines across the stars. They had been known to the people who had built pyramids all over the world. The lines led from a point near the Sea of Fat into the deepest desert, measured to a degree more correct than anyone on earth could perceive. Liars pretended knowledge.
    The night birds had begun their trills and flutings. Night came suddenly at that latitude. The week before in a nearby village a number of people, peasants and local grocers whom the leaders called “the rich,” had been boiled alive in rubbing alcohol after witnessing their children being eviscerated. They were accused of being spies for the auxiliary police, a charge that no one in the village really believed. After the killings, the army of the people had taken as much money as they could find and distributed it to the deserving poor.
    “We are Robin Hood,” shouted one of the people’s soldiers, who in his bourgeois life had gone often to the cinema. He would subsequently be denounced over his previous indulgences and murdered with what was, then, still unbelievable cruelty. “Look at the pictures of the rich on the money,” cried another. At a meeting at the edge of the village the people cheered, screamed actually, a sound that, like “Sora” and the speeches, Jo would remember for the rest of her life.
    So there she stood on the hillside listening to the flutes and pretending to enjoy the concert, all over again.
    Her experience in the valley had left Jo with variations on a recurring dream. Its setting was always the same, cobbled together out of recollections of the montaña and its valleys. Its contours were probably made partly from memories of what different local leaders of the movement had claimed life would be like after the only historically correct revolution in history. The dream was also composed of random images from the montaña, the villages, the Struggle, the visions of promise that the movement’s leaders laid out for the imaginations of its supporters, and of her own early denial and finally nameless dread.
    In the dream it is early evening, showing a quarter moon. The sky is far away. “So blue” was her dreaming thought. The clouds are transparent. Smoke from a dung fire rises to a point, the height at which the wind disperses it. The Four sound their flutes around a fire the color of the sky. “Sora.” She never learned the words. So sweet but their meaning is unspeakable. The breath of the fluting marks the four directions of the winds. On high is Sirius and the stars near it in Canis Major where the Sacred Lines meet. Also the stars of Pictor, called by Western astronomers the Easel.
    Canis Major was on the banner of the Struggle. The Spanish priests had believed that secret human sacrifices were made to Sirius and other stars. Surely they—practitioners of auto-da-fé—had also believed that the spectacle of ceremonial homicide was edifying. Everyone in Jo’s dream is smiling at the sky.
    In an empty space where some malefactor’s house had stood there are panels of light blue plastic around a square of the exquisite sky. It is a window with no house. A sign under it reads: