In those days we thought nothing of walking to the slaughterhouse and the row of little cantinas with their oilcloth-covered tables then waiting for a meal of rice and meat sizzled on a grill while listening to the music that animals make when they are dying. We thought nothing of being the animals ourselves, flayed open on the spit of the everyday and still joking, still laughing, still grim and hungry or needing a smoke or a beer, our histories decorated by rose bushes and parks and man-made lakes, hand-painted signs with the names of people who insisted on wearing their boiled wool suits and top hats in this tropical country. We thought nothing then of the future and its crumbling remains, the scars on mountainsides that marked the veins out of which they drew copper and silver and gold. Our gums are the dusty color of agate and carnelian, our teeth stained with the beautiful darkness of the soil. We think all the time about the past; which is to say, now we remember the orchards we walked through without registering the conversation of ferns, the prophesying of birds of paradise.