Hugo always came to the bar Sonia served as a waitress at. They had once been an item until he left her. He was a big man, from a distance he seemed to be in his fifties, but up close one could see the shapes of his face were much too boyish and he may be at least a decade younger. Unfortunately, the sun and the alcohol and the bitterness had taken their slice out of him. His chin was biased to the left and gave his face the appearance of not being quite equal on both sides. People would often tilt their head ever so slightly as they listened to him, but Hugo never realized that it was the fault of his face, he always got the impression that people didn’t understand what he was saying and that they may just be dumber than he was. His eyebrows were wide and sparse and seemed to disappear into his large protruding brow. The largeness of his brow was misbalanced with the smallness of his eyes. His eyes were fixed stiffly in his stern face and overall they had a hard time showing expression. His shirt was missing two buttons but it did not matter because he always wore it open, exposing his wide chest that was always tanned to the effect of looking salmon pink. On his right wrist was a large silver watch that told the day and month with an engraving that read ‘love Sam’. The watch was a gift from his daughter who died 6 years ago. Last year it had stopped working and cost an eye of the face to repair. Now it worked fine except that the days would go backwards, and Hugo would often wake up with the impression that he had too much time.
He met with a lot of girls but he never had girlfriends. He liked to brag to his friends that Sonia was another jaña, girls that were not official girlfriends. Nica girls were all the same: they were quiet, religious and family oriented with little ambitions in life, and most of all, scared to the core. Sometimes they protested at being put into the jaña status, but it wasn’t hard to get them to accept their fate. He preferred to date a few at a time to keep himself distracted from the discomfort that he felt when he did nothing for too long. To make a point, he still met with another girl while he had been with Sonia, while they lived together. When she found out he felt bad and took her on a little trip around the country, but in the end they never made it. She said that they were better off friends.
Hugo swatted at the flies that collected on top of his Toña bottle. He watched Sonia intently from across the room. Her hair was recently cut and rested right below the chin and had a clean straight line from the soft round curve behind her neck to her wide jawline. Her hair danced and glided as she made her way around the bar. In the evenings, she would come and chat with him a little when he asked her to. They talked about people they knew or things that happened in the news or just about some happenings in their life. She was not the prettiest woman Hugo had ever seen but she smiled in the moments when he didn’t expect her to. He had grown to depend on their chats, to him they were like food that sustained his life in Nicaragua.
Today she was wearing the simple but pretty red skirt he liked. It was tight at the waist but loose at the bottom, loose enough to skim her thighs and sway with the humid air when she walked by.
“Que tal?” Sonia spun lightly on her feet towards him. Hugo breathed in as slowly and quietly as he could to savour her scent that wafted towards him. She smelled fresh and undeniably young. Like mornings or the skin of an unripe mango. She smiled, her attention shining on him like the heart of the sun.
‘Can I get you something?’ she asked him.
‘uno mas,’ he said and lifted his bottle. He scanned the room to see who was watching, if they were getting the message that she was his. None of the heads faced their direction. ‘Come sit with me,’ he said.
She nodded, her break was always at a quarter past 11. They had their routine. He liked routines now that he was getting old.
He started his familiar rant. He spoke about the church choir sounding different now. He used to be a conductor at the youth group in his church. He knew how to make real music then. Those were the days before he joined the army but they discharged him early for the blackouts he had. Mom never knew what was wrong with him but he always had the feeling she didn’t trust him. She would sleep with the door locked. She never really accepted him as her own. His father had him in an affair with a prostitute but forced his mother to take him in. The prostitute had died in childbirth, he claimed. She never forgave his father, but she was afraid of her anger. She channelled it all into Hugo instead.
He wanted to say he was tired. It’s not just the music, it’s the food too. The chicharron used to have more salt. More flavour. Sonia nodded and his mind rested on hers like a hanger on a clothes rack. He complained about the farmer next door always visiting him asking for money to fix broken machinery. They think because I’m a foreigner that I’m made of money. How he started having an affair with his wife because he deserved it. It started when she started coming over with an excuse to use his pressure cooker, but even if her husband found out he’d probably do nothing because they were all scared of him. How he didn’t get any pleasure from it all and was disgusted by how easy and corrupted everything was here. He was so bored with himself he wanted to shoot himself sometimes. She smiled in a way that was comforting to him. She had the warmth of a woman who suffered too much, that’s what he liked about the people in this country. They suffered too much.
When he had finished talking, Sonia looked at him with her dark round eyes. She seemed nervous. She put her hand on his forearm, and it looked like the hand of a child on his dark leathery skin. Her lips curved in a smile that was intentionally muted. I met someone, she said.
The bar smelled like sweat that was cooled and dried out with the evening breeze. The men did intense physical labour during the day and were almost all farmers, and sat huddled in small groups in dirt and sweat stained clothes. Many worked without modern machinery and still relied on manpower and horses. They drank quietly and solemnly facing the open street. The street was quiet too. Dust covered motorcycles and several old horses were stationed on the road, some with handmade wooden carriages. Ribs on the horses’ belly were visible and their untrimmed manes were matted and frayed. Dogs with missing patches of fur and open infected skin roamed near tables where food was being eaten and stared longingly up at their patrons. Framed paintings of idyllic rural life hung on the pale blue walls. The lack of modern technology, for example the chopped wood stoves at bus terminal diners and use of horse and carriage porlancas in place of cars, even the archaic names parents gave their children, like ‘Esmerelda’ and ‘Juaquin’, gave one the impression that they had time travelled to a previous century. Finding a modern invention from the 1900s onward was oddly unpoopular. The whole country seemed to be trapped in memory, as if trying to ignore the violent socialist revolutions of recent times. Nicaragua was once a country of serene lagos and Volcanoes, leyendas of powerful witches who turned people into animals, petroglyphs that decorated mountains. A country so rich in resources and culture was choked by brutal communism like caught between the fingers extinguishing a flame. People existed in a frozen way, unable to obtain a business loan, buy property, to take a step without the fear of being noticed by the wrong people and having their rights taken away. People were unable to complain or say the wrong thing around one of the powerful individuals that lived among them like feudal lords. In effect, there was something always missing inside you when you stayed in this country that wasn’t obvious until you went somewhere else. If you stayed long enough, the lacking of it seeped under your skin and convinced you not to search for it. It bothered most people, and they would leave. Many, many Nicas had already left. But for one reason or another, it was not something that Hugo missed very much, and he was the only foreigner living in this town for as long as anyone could remember. People treated him with a reverence that had long since bored others in the place he came from.
We are going to be married next month, she said. I love him very much.
She tried to say something else, but a man came up behind and interrupted them. His face and eyes and lips were wet and hot with liquor. His yellow teeth stretched across his dark face in a smile that made one feel more nervous than anything else. He was claiming that his daughter married someone important and wanted to salud and celebrate with him. My beautiful daughter made her father so proud, he said. Every father hopes for a day like this, he said.
‘Tapudo, I slept with your daughter,’ shouted a guy two tables away. The bar roared with laughter. Valdino scowled and turned towards the heckler, but had a difficult time finding the origin of the insults. He glared at the crowd while his face turned more red. He seemed to be searching for a response, but finally gave up and took a long swig of his beer. Sonia gave Hugo a quick look and walked away. He wanted to reach for her, but the old man put his arms around Hugo and spilled his beer all over his right side. Lukewarm and sticky beer dripped uncomfortably down his shirt and down the length of the serpent tattoo on his arm.
‘Chele, when I was young I used to be a great painter…’ He reminisced into his ear, unaware of his little accident. Annoyed, Hugo shoved him away with force. The old man fell against the side of the table, with a hard noise as his arm hit the wood. The man got up, his face red with surprise and anger. He started swearing at Hugo, telling him how he was another American parasite and that he ought to leave the country. One of the bar owners came and tried to hold Hugo back. Hugo was easily a foot taller than everyone else, he was the one they were afraid of. Hugo reached over the head of the man trying to control him and grabbed the old man by the back of his shirt, like a puppy, and threw him across the floor.
The bar owner took out his gun and pointed it at Hugo and told him to get out. He obliged but shattered his beer bottle on the floor with an arrogant disdain. They left the bar and Hugo felt the excitement of the fight drain away. This was idiotic, he thought. He didn’t have to explode like this. He almost regretted the slip of emotion. But, he decided, it was good to remind them that he could still fight, despite his age. He had cultivated a careful reputation of authority based on self-mastery and on some occasions like this, physical domination, two qualities that the men here did not appear to have. It was too bad he was in such a terrible mood. The old man and Sonia’s announcement. Hugo reflected on the past few days. It was a horrible week of a horrible year of a horrible decade. It was no surprise, he should have seen it coming. He took count of the last time he felt decent. He knew things were getting worse, he was feeling worse every year. Waiting for something good to happen, for some feeling to give him hope but it never came.
The streets were quiet. Men without homes curled up and slept in ragged blankets along the side of the street. Even their silhouettes looked lifeless, like emblems of human weakness. Alcohol made his body feel warm and light as if he was on fire. The dim lights of the street blurred out of focus too easily. The electricity was patchy in this neighbourhood and the way home had long sections of darkness, and only a few meters of light every so often, spilling from the lit houses or comedores, restaurants built out of regular homes that hosted guests in the front and had living quarters in the back. As he walked his path would at times be covered in pitch blackness. In the dark anyone could be attacked for petty theft, just for carrying a decent backpack, especially at this time of night. The old man straggled behind him, still holding a beer in his good arm, still loud and making empty threats to Hugo. His heckling echoed and bounced around the walls of the empty street. Hugo thought about all the things people said about this man. Drinking and lying and gambling away everything he owned. He was so disappointing. It was no better than the life of an animal. Hugo was starting to get mad now. He thought about how all the Nicas were hopeless. Under communism it degraded one into a savage survival. People acted like dogs, pissing themselves in the streets, killing each other over twenty dollars and doing every kind of drug. The old man was just like the rest, in his whole life he didn’t do a single decent thing, never tried to, and never would.
Hugo came to the dark part of the road. He was engulfed in total darkness. He stopped walking. The old man started to catch up. His steps were uneven as he placed one uneasy foot in front of the other. In a few minutes, the scent of liquor and a sickly sweet body odour of an aging man reached his nostrils. Hugo felt his heartbeat slow down. He wasn’t exactly present in his mind or his body, it was as if he was not standing there at all. Valdino murmured ‘hijuela verga’ and some other slurred profanities. The old man tried to grab onto Hugo’s arm but he swiftly stepped aside, and turned around to face the small man. His eyes glimmered in the darkness and the hollows of his ancient face looked paler and darker than before. His wide mouth stretched thin, distorting to make incomprehensible sounds and revealed browned teeth with gaps. Hugo looked down at the half-man with a mix of disgust and pity. He felt his knees contact the side of the man’s body. The last thing he remembered was the sound of tender rib bones snapping, like well-cooked chicken. The old man fell quietly on the gravel road in the darkness.
Hugo woke up in his bed with a terrible hangover. His head felt like a vacuum. He made an assessment of his familiar surroundings. The interior of his bedroom was crudely unfinished, with exposed plywood beams along the walls and cieling. There was a fabric curtain that was used as the bathroom door, and he could see out the kitchen window from the entrance to his room. Everything was covered in a thin veil of grey dust. Dust got everywhere and was manufactured on the road outside. As vehicles and carriages went past, the bone-dry dirt would pulverize and explode into clouds of thick dust. The flora around the road was sand brown. The dust often carried inside homes, appliances, underneath clothes; it was inescapable.
He took account of the night before, shuddering with pleasure at the thought of Sonia’s touch on his arm but with great panic remembered her announcement. He quickly regretted remembering anything at all. She won’t go through with it, she’s just trying to hurt me, he thought. He grabbed his shirt and headed for the beach.
The morning was dull and cloudy. The water from the lake reflected the grey sky as if all color was taken out of the world. Empty beer bottles decorated the shore, along with rusted fish hooks and vultures breakfasting on rotting fish. He had a flashback of something Sonia said long ago. She said people don’t really mean to neglect things, they just forget easily while being busy with something else. Hugo felt busy, sure. He spent most days doing nothing but there were holes in his shirt from the moths he didn’t bother exterminating. The truth is he didn’t know what he was busy doing.
A man wearing clean Reebok shoes, a clean polo shirt and a visor jogged by. He paid no attention to Hugo and looked straight ahead as he listened to music from his headphones. He seemed like a regular professional going for a jog in any metropolis in America, but was absurdly out of place here. One of the few privileged Nicas who could have a normal life because they were in favour with the government. Hugo watched his face in fascination. He looked arrogant. Hugo curled his face in disgust. As he passed, he glimpsed the whites of the man’s eyes turning their gaze. Had he seen Hugo’s expression of disgust? He wasn’t as careful as he usually was, what was the matter with him? He wiped the sweat of his palms on his shirt then wiped them again. He didn’t dare look back. This could get him in real trouble. Hugo clutched his abdomen and feigned a pain in his stomach. Keeping his head down and back bent, he walked home.
He took the main paved road that connected the lake to the town center. Between the demolished hotel and the small cafe, there was a crowd forming around the middle of the road, blocking oncoming traffic. Men sat patiently on their horse porlancas, their expressionless eyes under the cast of baseball caps. Others on bikes and entire five-person families packed onto single motorcycles were trying to edge around each other to get in front and have a better look. Cars were honking in the blocked road and a young child was crying loudly despite many efforts to calm her. The crowd drew an opportunity for others who repeatedly advertised their fruits on sale from their trucks. ‘Provecho…’ their booming voices echoed from grainy loudspeakers. Some serious looking men arrived and were trying to keep order among the crowd of people standing in the road with morbid curiosity. Hugo wanted to see as well. The body of a small and thin man lay on the ground. Hugo’s stomach turned over. Images surfaced in Hugo’s memory. The anger, insults, and the sensation in his knuckles as they hit soft flesh. A dreadful realization crossed his mind: he had killed a man.
He had killed a man. So what? It wasn’t likely that there would be any kind of investigation. The police here were as corrupt as can be and are paid by local families. Unless he was related to anybody important, there would be no investigation. Good, thought Hugo, proud of his unintended planning. He always had sharp survival instincts. He shuddered at the thought of going to prison in Nicaragua. The old man wasn’t any good anyway, no one would miss him since he did nothing for nobody.
A few of his local aquaintances recognized him and started to approach him, but he instinctively wanted to run and hide. He crossed the road and took the long way home to avoid running into anyone else. Once he reached his house he frantically searched for the leftover bottle of rum. He brushed off the mud and the dead flies and he drank the burning warm liquid. He was overcome with a feeling of tiredness, but couldn’t rest. How long had he been this tired? He tried to lie down and rest but his mind wouldn’t stop talking. Drunk and paranoid he lay in his bed. The light, he thought. They could see me through the light. He closed the blinds. He lay in darkness for a good few hours. Got up only to piss and eat some hot dogs from the fridge.
He couldn’t get the old man out of his mind. He was a weak man anyway, he thought. The strong have a right to survive, simply for being strong. Strength was the will to live, the essence of all that mattered. Would he ever be a great man? No, but he never wanted to be. He had no ambition to be a hero. Live and let live, he thought. He tried to reassure himself but the worry never left his head. He thought about writing a letter to Sonia that he was leaving the country. He could leave it under her door. That would make her feel sorry. He wondered if it would work. It was true that he was an ugly man, he accepted it. But women don’t care about those things, do they? They care about protection and the willingness to take what he wanted by force. That was what a real man was, he pondered. He tried to say it as a statement, but it always sounded more like he was asking a question. He finished the bottle and fell asleep.
Two young men knocked on his door. One was much taller than the other, as tall as Hugo. Both were obese. Their shirts and jeans stretched tight over round pillows of flesh rolling along their body. We are collecting donations, they said. They are part of the community church. What for, he asked. A man died on the streets and the community wants to collect donations to give him a proper funeral. They explained the tragic way in which he died. He was alone and he was very old and sick. Even a man who is nobody in the eyes of other men, is our brother in the eyes of God, he said.
The short one reached out his hand. His nails were yellow and outlined with dirt that lined his nails. He carefully offered a small prayer card with a photo of the virgin Mary. To save your soul, he said to Hugo, in a voice so quiet he could hardly hear. This filled him with rage. He threw the card and his bottle at them, missing the tall one by an inch. Alarmed and terrified, they scattered off the property, running in a pathetic way. Hugo felt impatient. It felt like something needed to be done and done quickly. He found his gun and went to the place where the man was dead that morning.
He arrived to find a cleared road where the crowd in the morning had been. Aging cars rolled by, their wheels complaining about the uneven road. A young woman walked her child home from school. The woman looked young enough to merely be the child’s sister. When she made eye contact with Hugo she walked faster, trying to get out of his way. Two boys played with a nearly destroyed soccer ball across the street. They had thin long legs, and were too small for their clothes. Their shirts seemed to be made asymmetrically and hung on the thin boys’ shoulders awkwardly. When they saw Hugo they stopped and stared for a few minutes, then ran away too. Hugo walked slowly, his eyes drifting to the space on the dirt road where the man had been this morning. The heat from the sun was unbearable. Unforgiving hot rays touched walls and sidewalks and roads and fences and skin and threatened to burn and expose everything to the bone. Something agitated him from inside. A kind of rage and nervousness, as if he was trying to reprimand a child that he had no control over. Something in him boiling up and over, to the point that it would spill.
The figure of the old man’s weak and bent frame, the gait of his drunken walk and his silhouette in the darkness followed his mind as he had followed him that night. With physical pain he remembered the moment of that blow. He wanted the man to stop following him and he couldn’t stop it, not even now. He wished he could return to that night and walked home without stopping. Why did he do it? Suppose someone had a reason to investigate? Anyone from the bar could have remembered their fight, he could be an obvious suspect. In all his time here, he was continuously paranoid if anyone ever really liked him. Anyone who had animosity towards him could easily get to him now. He had heard the horror stories of prison, where torture is a routine practice. One man returned home without both his legs. Afraid for the first time in his life, he lamented at his situation, lashing himself with horrible imagined consequence after another.
He wandered the street without thinking about where he was going. He felt himself being drawn by dark instincts he had never had before yesterday. They pulled him into certain alleys, told him to take a left, then a right. He felt tired and wanted to lie down but that felt like a pathetic thing to do right now. The street was empty. Dust blew in small cyclones as the wind curled into corners where the road met the walls of the narrow street. Then suddenly there were sounds of footsteps behind him, crushing the pebbles on the gravel road. They scratched the ground slowly, in a slow humming rhythm. Hugo turned around but no one was there. He tried to see past the last row of houses down the street, or in any of the connecting alleys, but there was no one. He held is breath to listen harder, but there was no more sound.
He found himself on a road he did not recognize. A large tree darkened the sky and hundreds of brown vines hung lifeless from its branches like a dirty beard. The tree was so effective at blocking out light that on the ground beneath the massive tree grew nothing. Its trunk and roots sprawled in every direction, twisting and rising from the ground like a sea monster. Beneath the tree was a house, small and constructed poorly with a single door and window. The floor and walls seen from the doorway were covered in dust. Random and ordinary items lay across a small table. Matches, scissors, toilet paper. At the center was a small alter with candles and faded portraits of christian saints. There was a porcelain cross and plastic flowers that were once a vibrant blue but now looked pale green. Next to the alter was a decent-looking stereo and various bottles of ointments. It didn’t look different than other houses except for its messiness, for it seemed comfortable with falling apart. A woman sat stationary on a dark brown rocking chair and was watching Hugo.
She had dark black eyeliner around her eyes that were misshaped and folding with age. The eyeliner was done crudely in the shape of an ancient Egyptian. Her face had a weary expression.
If your woman leaves you for another man, I can help with that, she said.
How?
I have made an agreement with my boss, the devil, to give me special powers, replied the witch.
Hugo said nothing. He had no time for the superstitions of desperate and uneducated people. The witch continued to stare at him, her eyes looking intensely through him, burning. Her lips were painted dark pink and feathering around the wrinkles of her mouth.
The witch narrowed her eyes. You are aware of the spirit following you?
Hugo’s eyes widened and he swallowed hard in nervousness.
Do you believe the spirit wants revenge? That he is angry?
Hugo nodded.
The witch looked away, as if to speak to another. Her fingers played with the orange lace flowers decorating the hem of her apron. She often closed her eyes and breathed long sad breaths, as if disappointed and hurt.
He is not angry. He pities you.
When there was no response she spoke again. Do you believe in the devil?She asked.
Hugo shrugged to show his indifference
It’s impossible to help you if you don’t believe in him.
With that final advice, she stood up and brushed down the wrinkles of her skirt and walked inside, leaving Hugo alone.
Hugo stood for a moment watching the doorway. The shrill voices of birds echoed from a distant place.
The sky had already started to darken when he arrived at Sonia’s house. The dirt road curled gently around a field of plantain. A cluster of houses appeared, the same material and color as tin cans. The variety of colors danced triumphantly in the periphery of the eye before detail set in, and one realized they were just various shades of sheet metal and rust, not an intentional design. Lights began to appear from in the homes where the light of day started to weaken and fade away into night. He could see Sonia’s house just at the very end of the cluster. Clothes hung from a thin clothesline across the small plaza of the house like parade flags. A shadow inside moved languidly to and fro inside the room. He recognized the tempo of Sonia’s pace. The distorted sounds of radio music drifted from the house. A male voice echoed in a proud vibrato.
Now he wanted to confess everything: the murder and his feelings for her. He wanted to make excuses and tell her the things she wanted to hear. He wanted to apologize, but he knew it was too late. Strange how he suddenly felt like a great man. He felt older and wiser and yet his body became more numb and lifeless than he had ever felt. It was as if his body was a castle and the castle walls stretched out longer in every direction so that it was harder to reach the outside world beyond himself. At the same time, his mind receded even deeper into the center, deep into a spiraling tower, locked and hidden away, ever searching for an insatiable security. The growing distance between himself and everyone else had grown so far in just a day that it truly began to frighten him.
He went up to the door and knocked. Sonia’s face appeared in the window. Surprised, but not very. One moment, she said, and there were sounds of water and washing hands. When she came to the door she said, this isn’t a good idea.
I need to talk to you.
What is it about?
You can’t marry him, Sonia, I love you.
I know you think you do.
Sonia, I need you. You’re different from the other women. I know that now.
I know you think that Hugo. But it’s not me you’re looking for.
I don’t understand.
You’re lost and you don’t even realize how much. You act like any person out there could be your long lost mother in disguise. And if this one person could love you–yes that would be the solution. If they could love you it would be enough. But it’s never enough. You have to run away further and further, meet people more distant and strange than from where you came from. Your mother is always somewhere out there and it would be impossible if anyone disliked you, rejected you. If they tried, or didn’t obey, they must be coerced and forced to love you. Yes, in this way you go on the charade of living. On the surface of a child’s fantasy. A child still crying about losing the one person to tether them to this world, a child living outside of the singular reality that is love.
Well, I helped you search for her. Even in this little country with its poverty and corruption that makes you feel better to see people as desperate as you are. Even when we’re your equals you love to play superior. I helped you search along the coast and in the jungle and for miles and miles of country roads. At first I was hopeful. I believed in your dream as you painted it. A future utopia. Along the way I started to realize what we were really doing, and I saw, from the way we started to fall apart, I saw your true intentions, your true delusion. How you wouldn’t listen to the truth from me, or the truth that life tries to tell you over and over again with your so-called tragedies. And I can’t hold your hand anymore and keep this delusion of yours from collapsing.
Yes you can, you’re the only one that can.
I don’t want to be your savior. I don’t have that kind of arrogance.
That’s not what I mean, I’m not saying what I want to say. I just want a chance to make it work.
Two people coming together requires at least one rule, one common idea of agreement between them. But you only have chaos. You live and eat and shit and smoke and drink chaos. And whatever rule we have agreed on like, let’s respect each other, you always need to rebel against it. You rebel for the sake of rebelling. Your life has no purpose you say. You say you shouldn’t have been born. What can I say to that?
If you’re such a free spirit, if you’re so happy with your nonsensical pleasures, what do you need me for? I am quiet, I don’t ask for attention. I want to think, study, I want to be serious. I am so different from you.
But you love me, but you couldn’t stand the uncertainty. You’ve grown up with the singular identity of the boy that wasn’t wanted. This is who you are. Every moment with every person you will ever try to receive love from—real love, not the one you tricked them into—every moment you try to receive love you will face the entire mountain of losing her over and over again. Every moment of love, for the rest of your life, will push thorns into your flesh, and you will have to choose either to face the truth, or fade away forgotten and alone without no one ever having known you and you never having really known anyone.
They looked at each other in the fading light. Hugo looked at her as if for the first time. She was so different from the way he had believed her to be, and yet he had always been afraid of this moment between them. There seemed to be rings of fire around her eyes, behind which she remained untouchable to him.
Deciding there was nothing left to say, she went back inside. He stood in front of her house until it became completely dark. He waited until the very last ray of light had gone from the sky. He laughed to himself, and his eyes fell in defeat. Just at the moment of some kind of real salvation, it’s already too late to save your soul. Such was the humiliation of God. Then with great sadness he turned away and walked down the dark road, the opposite direction of which he came. He walked all night and did not stop for many days.
SUBLIME COURAGE 
Leave a comment