You Will Never Stop Shaking

Earthquakes, in my younger years, were a distant problem.

I suppose this notion comes from my dad, who liked to twist the words of an old Mexican president to say that if Mexico was far from God, then Baja was untouched: “Leave it to the cities and towns north and east to suffer; enough human misery was created down here!”

The unscientific maxim stayed with me, and when our family moved north across the border, I thought the worst would happen immediately, a violent shaking, the destruction of at least two major California cities, and the rupture of the Earth. Years of a nonevent shook away the worst of the concern, and when I let my guard down, when a major one struck across both sides of the border, I finally confronted my poor perspective.

“You know they can happen anywhere,” Jonatán said to me over the phone.

“I guess I do know that; I just didn’t think they would happen there.”

“Surely they happened somewhere in the area before. What then makes this one in San Paz so special to you?”

“In short: parts of the town leveled. Homes ruined. Lives displaced. It isn’t a city; it’s a town. It doesn’t just rebuild.”

“These things happen, and they’ll keep happening. You probably just never heard about them because they didn’t make the news. Search far enough back, and I bet you earthquakes happened in Baja all the time.”

“I just think I would have known.”  

“Don’t be so certain. I’ve read somewhere about an earthquake that lasted over thirty years. Near Sumatra, maybe? It triggered something awful at the end. Can you imagine that? The ocean shaking, and you think it’s just the tide until you realize it’s not.”

The reference stole my attention. Could the Earth have moved under my feet without my knowing? Could my consciousness have just ignored it, pretended that the world was always stable? All my life I lived along California, its American and Mexican counterpart, along the fault lines, where the world sometimes slipped into a rage. The forces to this violence were underneath me, and it might have behooved me to stop and notice.

Jonatán’s voice pulled me back.

“I don’t understand why you’re so fascinated, anyway.”

I had not told him where I was, or why his voice on the phone sometimes sounded unclear. But I arrived in San Paz for the week, a short stint to work at restoring a hacienda that touched the shore. Its owners, Pita and Beatrice, cleaned the place and set their eyes on hosting foreigners, attracting artists, and above all, earning money for helping these visitors look west toward the ocean and away from the poverty east.

The earthquake that ripped through San Paz spared the hacienda, where the damage was quickly itemized: a cracked floor containing the shape of a disturbed line touched the outdoor entry path and ran through the courtyard, stopping short of the main building and rooms. At worst, the red and orange Saltillo tiles spilt out and scattered.

I was to stay there as a worker, to investigate the place and ensure its readiness. Along the path to the hacienda, I kept questioning: was the Earth still shaking, or was it as still as possible?

*

“There was something that came from the earthquake,” Lazaro said. He was the manager, and, in a long blue sleeve button-up despite the heat, he led me to the hacienda’s center courtyard. Sweat dripped from his forehead to the ground where he bent down and pointed to the cracks. “You can’t see far now, but I was up there—upstairs—when it happened. Me and a maid were talking. We grabbed onto the railing to steady ourselves. And we prayed the ceiling would hold. During that prayer I saw something move. A hand. I first kept this thought to myself. It was small and covered in fur.”

I looked where he was now pointing, to the crack in the ground, and found the dirt had collapsed so there was no way to see deep down.

“It was there, I swear. You can ask her too if you don’t believe me.”

“I haven’t been back home in years. I don’t know what to believe here. What do you think it was?”

He stood up. New patches of sweat growing near his arms made me think I should bring him inside. The story, though, had to go on. Acting from vivid memory, he walked around the rubble like it was a stage. He was the type of man who needed to give a performance as he spoke.

“The maid and I put our heads together. We both saw a curved tail. She saw a white belly of fur. I saw dark patches and four legs. We agreed then—a monkey—like the ones in Frida’s self-portrait.”

“A monkey came from the ground?”

I said this perhaps a bit too slow for Lazaro’s taste because he stopped to study me. I hoped he blamed it on my inexperience in the country again and I quickly added several more words to show I cared:

“Where is it? This place is far enough, we should have seen it or watched it run off by now.”

“That’s the thing. We haven’t seen it since. It’s in the house. We hear it. We tell everyone about what we saw. It’s up to them to avoid or help it.”

“Do the owners know?”

“We have just a few days to keep it a secret.”

*

The first day was a simple matter of greeting each worker, learning names, and remembering the hacienda.

The building, as Lazaro, showed me, was less a maze than it appeared from the outside. It operated like the outline of two squares. On the outside line, there were the important rooms, mostly empty but preserved and well-kept for the day when guests could come. Stairs could be found at each corner to take you to the second floor where one could find the reading room, library, office, and patio. For now, we were allowed into the space to do more than clean.

“It’s the one time you might live like a colonial bastard, so take it up,” Lazaro said.

The main square, which faced the courtyard, contained our quarters and spaces—the kitchen, the laundry room, and closet. I said hello to each passing worker and promised myself to never ask for directions. At the end of the hurried tour, Lazaro brought me to my room. The window, too high to see through, was open and bare, though one could hear the ocean from it. As he prepared to leave, he stopped, and his question has remained largely unanswered upon reflection.

“Why return to this country after years away?”

I reached for inconclusive words, excuses, and generic lines about identity and home. Speaking and mumbling aloud this poor verbiage left Lazaro dissatisfied.  

Unafraid to question the haze in my vague answer, Lazaro stopped to add:

“Surely, this country is less yours than our neighbors’ to the north. You spent a lifetime up there and barely a childhood down here. Was there something to come back to?”

“No. I don’t think so. There’s just a child’s memory, and you know how that is. It is mostly unreal.”

“I can imagine.”

When he left, I had the day to settle in on account of my having arrived early. Don’t expect extra payment, Lazaro warned, Pita and Beatrice will not let a penny free they don’t have to give up. They could feed me dinner and provide the bed—so long as that generosity remained unspoken.

After unpacking my clothes into the one small chest, I brought a Juan Rulfo novel up and read a page or two. It seemed a shame to speed through such a short book, and I simply rested it on my chest as I laid back.

That was when I first heard the noise.

It sounded like a loose dog running on the floor above me. Only, this was more calculated, less sporadic, and more deliberate. Hushed steps rang from the old floors until they didn’t. Do spider monkeys speak to make noise or howl? I didn’t know and the noise stopped. All night I wondered if I would hear it again.   

*

“Oh, I hate that thing,” Natalie said.

About my age and a generous speaker, she was a lifelong resident of San Paz. Whereas I stumbled into this job to return to the country, she found her way here to hopefully escape.

We were in the upstairs library. Organizing books from unopened boxes to the empty shelves, she slowed down her cleaning to continue speaking.

“You saw it with Lazaro?” I asked.

“No. That was Carmen. It hopped past them and through the rooms. I was here, putting my back to that shelf so it would not crush me. You see that window there. Once the world stopped shaking my body did too. In the window, arms at one end and its legs at the other, I saw the face staring at me. When I couldn’t hold it any longer, I let out a breath and it vanished.”

“Are those sightings common?”

“No, but they happen. You should tell Lazaro too. All of us like to know it’s still here.”

To avoid helping people craft gossip about the new worker and the maid, Natalie left downstairs to the next task. A shelf finished and another box to unpack, I paused to check my back, and, when I was sure no one was around, I stood on the library’s chair to peek through the window.

Nothing.

The bright ocean was visible. An indistinguishable color from the sky, only the waves and their passage forward signified that there were distinctions still in the world. 

Returning to work, I finished emptying the boxes. The shelves were complete. Now, any person could find unread copies of Bolaño, Borges, and Braschi together as easily as they could see their Chabon, Chandler, and Chopin. It was an easy task, and once done, I wished I had saved it for when I had the time to spy more readily, to question and wonder what two proprietors assumed was the taste or visual preference of their customers.

“Natalie told me!”

Lazaro called from the stairs and flashed up them before continuing.

“She told me you heard the monkey last night.” Lazaro might have put his hands on his knees if he was alone. As it was, his breathing could stun a horse. It shuddered and rang along the room.

“I heard something when I was in my room. It came from the room above me.”

“Carmen heard something too. Its steps on the stairs. You’re sure? Right above you?”

There was a new sensation to Lazaro’s asking. While his eyes bolted to the different corners of the room without my answering, I began to think this wasn’t simply a matter of catching the monkey or getting him out. No, Lazaro had something further on his mind.

“If so,” Lazaro said, “then that’s this room. He was here.”

“Natalie told me she saw him here once too.”

“That was after the earthquake. He’s starting to get comfortable. Listen…” Lazaro, in mid-thought, stopped his sentence to go to the window and stick his hand out, like a reminder the world out there was real. When he brought it back he clasped it together with his other. “Come with me.”

Had I known his plan I could not have kept to his side. His pace outmatched mine. Bursting into a main room, two maids I had not spoken to jumped from the sudden intrusion, and the three of us watched Lazaro step out into the room’s inner patio. Toward the courtyard, he started to shout:

“Everyone! Meet in the center! Now!”

Whatever his audience was I knew the order would be shared and carried out. Unsure if I should continue to follow, I shook my head to the maids and ran out to catch up. Along the square he announced his plan with increasing brevity.

“Meet in the center!”

“To the center!”

“The center!”

“Come!”

Downstairs, the crew was already mostly assembled. Lazaro had only to pause a minute for the final workers from the gardens outside to arrive. How they heard the news is beyond a guess.

For the first time, I got a solid look at the amount of us here. Fifteen in total I counted; fifteen including myself. Without guidance we arranged ourselves by teams: the maids stood together, the handymen, the gardeners, and I to myself at the side. I looked down once and noticed the cracks from the earthquake acted as a natural divide between workers and manager. Lazaro started:

“We must act. Any news, any sighting, any noise, and anything about that monkey we must share and report it. Come to me immediately. Even if it wakes us. It is a week till we open. Just two days until Beatrice and Pita arrive. We cannot have anything bother this place.”

*

The following day on high alert brought in two reports. The first came from a gardener who saw the monkey rush inside as he happened to look up from the outer walls. The second came from Carmen, who had the unfortunate luck to be the first to see the monkey twice.

“I don’t know how much longer I can take this thing hanging over our heads,” she said.

“I know, Carmen,” Lazaro said. “I know. I know.”

It was all that could be said then, and the rest of us carried on with our work. The day brought me to a corner room, where I played with a newly arrived back-up generator to ensure the place could not lose power. Such was a common occurrence in town after the last earthquake. Let’s never let this place suffer, Beatrice and Pita wrote and signed on a note near the machine.

At the day’s end, I walked to the courtyard to enjoy dinner with Natalie. Cool air from the ocean came into the courtyard like an invited guest. Dim lights used to preserve energy turned on.  

Natalie sipped a tea and listened to how this return to the country was not what I imagined.

“This hacienda is a world onto itself. It can survive and endure once it’s running. But it’s not the country, is it? It’s secluded and distant. I thought in coming here I would walk down to San Paz to remember places from childhood, but I don’t even know if they are there, and I don’t know if I should when my memory is so pure. It’s too worrisome, to lose a place that never really existed.”

“This place is distant, until it’s not,” Natalie said. “It survived a single earthquake. Don’t be surprised if the next one spares the town and takes this place. It isn’t the House of Usher, but it’s a testament to a past that we don’t know what to do with.”

“Does anyone know what to do with the past?”

Natalie leaned over, her shoulder nearly touching mine as she spoke, half to the air and the other to my ear, and she spoke less a secret than a personal truth.

“Before I worked here, when I could, I would wake in the middle of the night. San Paz in the dark is hardly a town, barely even a cemetery trapping its people. In the night there were no avenues or streets, and I could see nothing until I stared for a dozen minutes. Up here, on this cliff, I could see a few lights, like eyes belonging to the dark. The shape of this place was invisible, as was everything else. Yet I pictured, days before it happened down here, the Earth falling apart. It destroyed what the Revolution missed. I imagined those eyes closing shut and disappearing to the waves.”

*

One night I made a mistake.

And, like the worst mistakes, I would only realize its effect later.

Leaving Natalie to her room and going to mine, I stayed up part of the night. Rulfo’s novel remained untouched though the light stayed on. Natalie occupied my attention as she did another’s. It happened like this.

I stood to turn off the light, the cord to do so at the corner of the wall. Hands on the cord, I froze. There, in the window—like Natalie had seen him—was the monkey. Head turned one way and then the other, examining me from eyes surrounded by fur that resembled a white bandit mask.

“You aren’t from here?” the monkey said. Except for the tail that swung through the shape of various letters of the alphabet, he was smooth, his deep voice akin to the caution within his gaze. He brought his legs and arms straight to sit at the windowsill almost like an aware cat. There was something else though, he was trying hard to maintain this composure. Careful with his words, but too thoughtful, too deliberate.

I let go of the cord but stayed across from him.

“I was born here. My family and I moved up north when I was five or so.”

“I guess that explains it.”

“Explains what?”

“People always carry a piece of where they are from with them. I see something else on you. It’s colorful, confused, and uncertain.”

“You really see that?”

“Of course. You don’t believe me.”

“I just don’t like it. I wanted something definitive.”

“It doesn’t happen. You heard Natalie.”

“Heard? Were you listening?”

“I wasn’t too far. Hey, don’t give me that look now! Act like I’m some freak, eh? I ain’t going to do a thing.”

Here was the shift. Loss of his initial patience revealed more of who he really was. I left the corner to sit on my bed. Suddenly, I was looking up to him as we spoke.

“I don’t know a thing about you,” I said.  

“That manager has made up his mind, though. Lazaro, is it? Don’t be too shocked I know his name. Chased me around and out.”

“He says you came from the earthquake, that he saw you appear from a fault line in the courtyard.”

“He’s not wrong.”

“But how? I don’t understand.”

“You don’t need to. I came in because I saw the book you were reading, and I heard what room you worked in, and I wanted to talk shop. There’s a wealth of material in that library now that you finished it. I hid in there earlier to read Cervantes.”

“Don Quixote? Isn’t there something funny about reading a Spaniard’s novel here?”

“It is foundational. So don’t start!”

“Then you came here just to talk?”

“What else did you expect me to speak about?”

“The earthquake? Your purpose? This hacienda?”

“It happens. You don’t want to know. The new owners have no right to the place. There, we’re done.”

“I don’t want to know what?”

“Look, how about this. I see you’re halfway through the Rulfo book. Let’s meet tomorrow night to discuss it. Get your head on straight.”

“Beatrice and Pita are supposed to arrive tomorrow night. I’m not sure we’ll be able to see one another. We don’t know what they want or if they’ll have us work.”

“Eh, capitalists, huh? Don’t worry about it. We’ll find time to talk. And hey, before I go? What’s this with you and earthquakes? I heard that too.”

“They level and disrupt a place. They’re always waiting to happen—if they aren’t already.”

“They’re natural. You can’t hate something like that, you know. You can only wait for it to happen.”

The monkey started to stand. He used his arms and hands to hop below to the door. The tail reached up and found the doorknob, and he walked out. Just when I thought he’d disappeared, he came back and waved, a promised goodbye.

*

I didn’t tell anyone about that night. Not Lazaro, not even Natalie. The why of that action was unclear to me, other than that I wanted to know about his purpose and I, admittedly, wanted to hear him speak about literature.

Jobs that morning were a matter of putting my head down and working. In an untouched guest room, I finished installing a bathtub, a large object that could easily fit two, and from where each person could look out a clear wall and watch the waves. More opulence to fit and inspect by evening awaited.

In the fourth room the day’s goals ended. On a wooden patio built to accommodate another fantasy, the monkey stood and stared. I moved toward him and stood on the same ledge.

“Isn’t this all disgusting to you,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“This. Bad enough this place represented something obscene in the past. Now it has to be something obscene for the future.”

“It’s what the owners want.”

“Listen. You’re about to hear something. Don’t believe it.”

“What do you mean?”

“I should go. Your friend is coming.”

On cue of his vanishing, the door behind me burst open. Natalie was there with a worried expression.

“Come. It’s Carmen. Lazaro says she’s been hit.”

I followed her down to the courtyard, running to where the crew was again assembled. We assumed the same spot from two days earlier. I, as before, stood alone. Lazaro was there sitting beside Carmen, who held onto a red towel over her left eye.

It wasn’t a red towel, I realized. Not initially. Similarly colored drops started to fall to the ground.

Lazaro stood to tell us the news.

“She had no idea he’d be there. She couldn’t sleep. She tried and tossed in bed. She needed to get out of her head. She goes upstairs to the library, thinking it safe. She finds instead the monkey. She tries to shoo it away. Nothing. It leaps and hits her. It could have been worse.”

At first, I wanted to doubt the story. The monkey spoke to me last night. Would he hurt someone?

Then I remembered how he asked me not to believe it.

Words pleading disbelief typically hide a lie.

“Beatrice and Pita will still be coming. There’s no stopping that. They will be here tonight. I’ll have more when I know. For now, we all make the monkey priority.”

*

Other than a single sighting from another maid, he escaped notice. I did my part to inspect the upstairs and the guest quarters. Part of this was a dance, part of me knew where to look and knew I was avoiding it. At my first break I went to my room.

There, on the edge of my bed, holding onto my book, the monkey was reading.

“Hey,” he said, “you didn’t make much progress.”

“And you didn’t have to hit that woman.”

“I asked you not to believe it.”

“That doesn’t make it not true.”

“Eh, I saved the old woman. She didn’t know what hurting me would do.”

“What does that mean?”  

He must have thought we were chatting about the weather because his eyes stuck to the book’s page until he turned it. Another moment passed and he finally put the book face down.

“There are certain places to stop.” He touched the book with his tail. “You can’t just break anywhere.”

“Beatrice and Pita are coming soon and Lazaro’s having us do nothing but find you until it happens.”

“Mhm. So much for seeing this place flourish. Looks like we’re both stuck now in places we don’t belong.”

“What do you mean?”

“You and me. We don’t fit here. You especially don’t belong. How can you claim a place without real memories to back it up? I heard you. You don’t even trust them.”

“Enough. Each time we talk you wiggle out of a question.”

“It’s ’cause I need time. You really think I’m hanging around here for no reason. Got to learn a place first. I’m just happy to end something I dislike for once.”

The monkey looked at me and smiled, baring clever white teeth. He started back and jumped to a corner post of the bed frame. The whole time his tail moved. It had the effect of making me feel played with.

“How about this?” he said, continuing to make this feel like a game. “Tell me now why you haven’t gone to town. Tell me and I’ll say.”

What I wanted was an answer, and, because I can never let things lie, I put my back to the wall beside the door and started to speak.

“San Paz was where I was born and it’s where I grew up. About three months ago I overhear a woman at the bar mention the name. Against instinct, I tell her I’m from there. ‘No, you’re not,’ she says. The certainty in her voice surprises me. I ask her why she is so certain. She tells me, ‘Because every San Pazian you meet on the road our age and older starts with the same thing.’ She smiled because I did not know. ‘They start: do you remember the earthquake in 1998?’ Too small to remember, I couldn’t elaborate. I couldn’t tell a story about it. And I couldn’t change her opinion. She started to distance herself like I was lying.”

The monkey jumped to the window. Quiet enough, I might have missed it during the story if not for a needed breath.

“It’s not all because of her,” I said. “I didn’t know what to do with the news nor my memory. The earthquake? I tried to find it in books and online and found nothing. Whenever I broached the subject with my parents, they laughed it off. Call it odd or strange, I just wanted to know what it was and if I was there. I wanted to know if I experienced San Paz shaking.”

“That’s a solid story,” the monkey said. “I can see the hesitancy. Did you know for years people thought animals could predict earthquakes? They’d see rodents fleeing, their dogs acting strange, hell—at least this is what my friends overseas say—they’d see elephants trembling. Scientist says it isn’t true, though who are they to doubt what we see? Don’t hear too much about monkeys fleeing. Ain’t that funny? It’s because…”

Someone pounded on the door, sending it open, and causing us to jump.

“Carmen is out and…” Natalie froze.

Too slow.

The monkey screeched and I saw it was because Natalie had grabbed onto his tail. He was out near the window holding on, his own fist came down hard on his back and, with the sound of an awful cry, he was gone.

 “Are you okay?” Natalie asked. In her hand, a small part of the tail dripped blood to the floor. After it formed a small puddle, she dropped it on the spot.

“Yeah, I’m—”

“—We need to tell Lazaro he was in your window.”

She was off. I paused for the monkey to return. Several minutes passed and I did not think he was coming back. I picked up the book and placed it on the window.

Done, I left and joined Lazaro and Natalie in the courtyard where she’d evidently caught him up on the monkey’s recent location.

“Is it true?” Lazaro asked. “He was in your room?”

“Yes, and Natalie nearly had him. She…”

Something fell somewhere in the distance. Whatever it was had cracked and shattered. It was the first alert that something was not quite right. The noise happened again. A drop then boom.

There was little rest. The world caught up to the noise. Circling around in my spot, I could see the columns vibrating. The floor too began to thwart my balance. It wasn’t long before I fell to the ground. Natalie was there too. Lazaro had somehow held on to crouch under a table.

Where the tiles had cracked in the last shock, the seam started to split.

What I remember now is cowering with Natalie, picking ourselves up and running under a column’s door frame arch, having heard before that it was the strongest part of any house, and also having heard that this may not be true. Praying for safety, we watched the opposite corner of the hacienda, an area where I had slept the previous several nights, fall apart.

Here, my imagination fused with the intensity of the quake. I could picture the library shaking and the wall with the open window collapsing. The shelves would slide—a slow descent at first—the bookcases would bend, and the books would splash into the ocean. Tiny drops at first and then all at once. My room would be next. Then more of the hacienda. This restored history had no chance.

For only the second time in my life, I was aware I had lived through an earthquake.

In the end, Natalie held on tight, and we waited. When enough time passed that we thought we could break apart, we hurried to Lazaro who was leaving his hiding spot under the table.

“Three minutes,” he said. “It took just about three minutes to destroy half this place.” He sighed. His hands covered his face and ran through his hair. This was not a man who could live without a plan for action. “Alright, I’m going to start with the damage. Listen for voices though, and I’ll do the same. We pray this whole time that no one was hurt.”

Neither of us could speak yet and he was off to his new duty. Natalie and I surveyed the damage from the same spot and both of us, tired of standing still, thought to follow the command. Prior to vanishing to separate corners, though, Natalie pulled me in.

“Don’t tell anyone what I said last night. It’s almost a shame the way I predicted it.”

Natalie was off before a reply could emerge. Plus, there was something new to think about. I waited for her to step away, to get out of ear shot, and I proceeded to the original crack in the courtyard. This new earthquake had added to the fault line, shaken more tiles out of their spot and unevened the ground. In front of one spot, the monkey sat, broken tail in one paw, and waited.

“Did it help?” he said. “Jog anything in that head of yours?”

“What do you mean?”

“You said you couldn’t remember the one here years back. Sometimes a good shaking of the head is all one needs.”

“No. Not at all.”

“Oh well, then. You ought to be happy. Nothing too bad done. This place—hell—it should have been wiped years ago.”

“You act like this is all your doing?”

“Did you ever think about why you don’t remember it? Maybe it’s because it hadn’t ended. Did you ever hear that an aftershock can last for years?”

“You want to know something funny? I had a friend tell me something similar.”

“Even now, the earth could be shaking, a quiet trembling like it’s a shy thing.”

“Could you tell me if it is?”

“There’s no fun knowing,” he said. “Sometimes, you have to just assume the floor’s collapsing beneath you.”

That was the end of our conversation. Three of the gardeners, safe from the event, came in and pulled open the main doors. Two low beams stuck out despite the day’s sun hanging above us. Pita and Beatrice had arrived, just in time to see the collapse of their money dream.

*

I stayed the whole day to help clear the hacienda. No one was hurt. Without the possibility of cleaning and restoring the place, the two women wanted us out. I was there when poor Lazaro closed both doors and placed a silver lock between them. No one asked where he was going or what he planned, and he left without telling us where to find him. Carmen, who first found the monkey, told everyone it was a stroke of fortune to have avoided the rooms that day.

Natalie was kind enough to let me use a room in her family’s home. After Lazaro left, the two of us were the last to leave, and we strolled down the path to see dusk come and the town restore its power and the hacienda remain dead behind us. I did not look back because I knew I would only notice the ocean.

In the room that night, alone and quiet, I could hardly sleep. When I awoke, I would see San Paz finally, I would awake to see my childhood town.

But there was something else, and it worried me. I wanted the monkey to arrive at the window, to ask if I was reading anything else. More than that, I wanted to ask him about the floor. I wanted to know if San Paz was shaking as we spoke. I wanted to ask because I could not lay still, and each memory of the place, and each place I hoped to revisit, kept crumbling in my mind.

Anthony Gomez III is a PhD student at Stony Brook University and is based in Brooklyn, New York. An emerging writer, his most recent pieces have appeared, or are forthcoming, in Shenandoah, 3Elements, Gone Lawn, The Acentos Review, and others. Read more at https://www.anthonygomeziii.com/

Published February 7 2022