Emmanuel
In the beginning, I didn’t think of myself as a person, but as an extension of the wilderness in which I lived — an involuntary muscle contracting and releasing without self-consciousness or strategy. Then came Emmanuel. He also walked on two hind legs, had a smooth, hairless body, and no natural defenses. Lacking a common language, we gaped and stared, circling one another with handmade tools drawn, and for the first time in my life, I hesitated.
If he were prey I was tracking or a predator smaller than me, I would have killed him on the spot. But he looked like me. And because he looked like me, I was forced to consider the possibility that, just as I was able to take in elements of his appearance and presence and turn the thought of him around in my mind, he may also be able to do the same with me. Some dormant part of my mind stirred, branching and shooting through dark earth. A twig snapped. He had disappeared through the underbrush without making another sound.
Today, I think of my life as bisected in two — before Emmanuel and after. Neither the Jesuits who educated me, nor the villagers who shunned me, nor the merchant who wed me, nor the children who called me “mama” ever changed my very substance the way he did — my woodland brother, my only kin, the man with no name, named only in my memory, Emmanuel.