My name is Victor Ocampo. My name is actually much longer than that, my parents having continued the Spanish tradition of including names from both sides of the family and names that memorialize beloved relatives. I live in a small village of artisans here in the mountains of northwestern New Mexico, not far from the Jicarilla Apache Reservation.
Today the sunlight is strong and pierces the dry, thin air like microwaves, invisible but burning my skin even a few shades browner than my winter skin. The only sounds are the wind in the ponderosa pines that feel like they will spontaneously combust at any moment, and the call of bluebirds and chickadees. In the air is the scent of mesquite and juniper.
      I am a weaver of Mexican blankets, but long ago I abandoned the Navajo-inspired motifs of zigzag lightning bolts and diamonds and scenes from mythology, like the Holy People dancing and the sacred plants, corn, beans, squash, and tobacco… I found them all increasingly distracting, as dazzling as our high-altitude sun.



      I began to weave with traditional vegetable dyes — dock and sorrel for green, goldenrod for yellow, the shells and twigs of walnut for brown, mountain mahogany and prickly pear for red. Depending on my mood and the season I wove bars of color into rainbows and more somber compositions. Tourists who wandered in to my studio, perhaps attracted by the clacking of the loom or the stacks of indigo and red blankets, were drawn, in those long-gone days, to the traditional motifs, finding them somehow comforting and comprehensible. Then as I shifted to a more abstract style the tourists became fewer and fewer, and those who did brave the entry into my studio did not linger long. My customers were more and more collectors in New York and Europe. I perfected a technique in which the bars of color bled into one another, an effect that made the whole design vibrate. I was condemned by the purists, but at the same time I could not weave fast enough to keep up with demand.

But of late I have become more austere. More austere.
      In these scattered settlements what is there for young people to do? Their normal instinct to explore and seek social contact is swallowed up in the vast distances, the sameness, the scale of mountain and desert that dwarfs the most energetic and confident character. In a landscape that is more amenable to hermits and meditators, to lone wolves and outcasts, to mystics and fanatics, our young people in their desperation turn to alcohol and drugs, and to driving at 120 miles an hour, as if the speed were their ravenous hunger to eat up the miles of emptiness, the miles of loneliness, as if by reaching another settlement, even though it is virtually identical to the one they left, they had somehow accomplished a worthwhile task. When they reached the next settlement, the next outpost really, they decelerated, drove up the main, and only, street — deserted since dinnertime — and made a U-turn, drove back down the street in the direction they had come from, looked at the same stores and same fast-food joints, the same churches and dreary gas stations, and headed back home along the narrow two-lane road that cut straight as a knife across the alto plano. Off in the endless distance they could see storm cells dropping their rain here and there in an otherwise starry sky, as if they were watching earth’s weather from outer space.
      Bored with their repetitious patter and stale jokes, they drink and take drugs, and the young man at the wheel has lost his sense of judgment on a road that is unforgiving of error. A bridge over an arroyo narrows to one lane. The warning sign is covered with dust and bent in half by vandals. At 120 miles per hour the car hits the bridge abutment, and the girl in the front seat is not wearing a seat belt and she shoots through the windshield like a projectile, spinning as if from a rifled bore, and hits the desert floor, making a small crater. It will be hours before anyone discovers the wreck.
My son was at the wheel. With him died his friends, with him died my hopes for him, with him died all that he would ever be. All taken away in a fraction of a second.
      But I wove. The mechanical movements, requiring no thought, for my hands acted autonomously, anaesthetized my mind. I rose with the sun, worked until it was too dark to see, and fell asleep, often without eating, if that can be called sleep, that numbness like a living death. Was this the Nirvana of the Buddhists?
      Somewhere in my thoughts loomed a crushing guilt. I was heir to my son’s carelessness, his culpability in the destruction of five young lives. Not since the Great War had a small population suffered such an enormous loss. I could not face the boys’ parents. I could not bring myself to visit the girl’s mother, a Jicarillo Apache woman on the reservation. Formerly I lived in a world where the horizon receded the longer I stared at it, the way new galaxies appear in telescopes as their light finally reaches us. Now my world was confined to my studio, my language to a few necessary phrases, my thoughts to a mathematical point.
      But I wove. I wove blankets not seen since the beginning of the nineteenth century: bars of blacks and greys, and in between a thin, oscillating line of red, as if I were witness to a sunrise on a distant dead world of basalt and ice. Tourists occasionally wandered in, cameras strapped around their bright flowery shirts, their legs red below their baggy shorts, and their faces red beneath straw hats, the wives clutching huge straw bags with their red nails. They chattered and I envied their emersion in life.
      Behind the studio I erected an airy pavilion and on its walls suspended my blankets composed of black rectangles. If it is possible to imagine, some rectangles were blacker than others; some lighter blacks melded into blacker blacks, like a day of black clouds blackening with the onset of night; and some — and this is my swimming with bursting lungs toward the surface — have the thinnest but brightest sliver of white between the black planet and the black sky. I have put benches in a tight circle at the center of the pavilion. Tourists come, and now neighbors come, to sit at eye-level and stare into the blacks and single ray of white. Many find themselves weeping but do not leave. Most go through the yard and around my studio to get to their cars.
      An Indian woman with raven-black hair purchased the one with the single sliver of white. I refused to accept her money. I folded it as if it were an American flag at a military funeral, folded it the same way, in a triangle, and handed it to her. She took it with both hands, bowing slightly, and I felt the gentleness with which held the cloth.

II

      My name, or rather names, are many, each from a different layer of my personal, and my tribe’s, history. To the boarding school in far-off Carlisle, Pennsylvania, I was Lucy, a name I always liked because of its associations with light and the Swedish Christmas celebrations on the longest night of the year, when we await the gradual lengthening of the days. To our Mexicans neighbors I was Bonita, and to my own tribe, the Jicarilla, I was Son-si-a-re, Morning Star Takes Away Cloud, and to my family and village I was Hides-in-Corn, from my childhood habit of disappearing into the corn fields when they were searching for me. I am like the country I live in: almost every place here has at least three names: an Apache name to begin with, then a Spanish name, and finally an English name.
      When Saint Lucy, according to medieval legend, was being martyred, her eyes were gouged out; hence, she is often portrayed as holding a golden plate on which her still-seeing eyes stare at us. A nun gave me a holy card of this scene with golden and silver flecks in the colors. The card was printed in Italy. I thought the medieval people  of Europe were not so different from the Apaches: both had their myths. Some of my classmates thought the picture gruesome, but to me it was no more so than any number of Apache myths, or Navajo or Hopi for that matter. No, it was not gruesome to me; instead, I made it into a myth that helped me cope with being two thousand miles away from my family and friends, my mountains and deserts and blue sky. In my myth I took my eyes and cast them up into the heavens: one eye rose with the sun, like my Apache name for the morning star, and the other eye set with the sun as the evening star. Through these eyes I saw my parents herding sheep and watering the corn; I saw the rains coming in winter, and watched coyotes howl at the moon and wolves crawling toward flocks; I saw uncles working silver and aunts baking corn tortillas.
      But I watch closely what my hands create with clay, for that is truer than what words I could speak. Of late my pots are alabaster and covered in triangular points, like those on a stylized pine cone, very much like towers in Manueline architecture. But to me they are not lovely pine cones. Rather, they are the defenses of a dinosaur or an alligator, with which I surround my body, to protect me from the intrusions of people and the blows of misfortune. I was never like this before, I enjoyed people’s company and the rhythms and joys of conversation. But that ended when my daughter died in an automobile crash. My nerves were exposed, as if I had been flayed. People’s consolations and commiserations felt like acid. After a while, people stopped coming by to check on me and ask if I needed anything.  Even the most obtuse of them recognized I needed solitude to grieve.
      Our Apache country is made for grieving. I stand at the foot of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, and what am I in my grief? The vastness swallows my grief, it swallows me, in fact. Were I to scream my grief for hours, howl and pull my hair, I would end hoarse and spent, but the wind and the mountain range and the desert and the mesas of piñon diffuse my grief, until it is like the water vapor in wispy clouds that glide at a great height and then move on, never collecting the mass needed to bring rain.
      Of course, I thought her death was due to my failure as a mother, especially in a fatherless family. I could never forgive myself for the times when I lost my temper with her, despite my best intentions. Partly it was my fault, but also partly hers, with that adolescent instinct for the words that will wound deepest. But I was the mature one. I could not control her, and what arguments could I produce to counter her frustration with reservation life? The alcoholism, the child abuse, the beaten wives, the pettiness, the sheer boredom, the enormous distances, the aridity, the extremes of heat and cold, the silence — what could I offer her to compete with the world outside, the one seen on television, in movies and on the Internet? In her hand she held a cell phone, but it was more than a telephone. It was a window onto a world as alien as Africa. Who was on the other end of the line? What words was she laboriously yet rapidly spelling out with her thumb? Why did the computer screen go black whenever I walked by?
      We had lost trust in each other, my daughter and I. Little by little, the way after each snow melt the arroyo changes course. I could not interest her in the satisfaction of molding wet clay and firing it to create something. My enthusiasm fell flat. I was reciting poetry to an audience reading newspapers and chatting with one another and yawning conspiculously. I used to think, one day she will regret this inattention and will come back to me, begging for an apprenticeship. Wherever she is, she is beyond regretting anything.
      The poor man who is the father of the boy who drove the car — at first I wanted to blame him, for parental negligence, and I thought of words like negligent homicide and manslaughter. Indeed, it was a slaughter, five young people gone from a small population. But my heart was not in it. A son would be even harder to control than a daughter. And he was alone, a widower who never remarried. His loom was the answer to my potter’s wheel. He must have thought of the Fates weaving our lives from birth to death, just as I thought of the wheel turning in endless generations.
Her room is untouched, and the house is filled with her hair clips and schoolbooks and toys and photos and posters and even her smell. Over the back of a chair is one of her blouses. Every now and then I even recharge her iPod and look at the thousands of songs she downloaded from God only knows where. Her favorite cereal is in the cupboard. In a drawer are her birthday cards and in the bathroom her lipsticks and eyeliner. The silence goes beyond anything in nature. Maybe Antarctica is this silent.
      I have stopped making armored pots. Now I am making simple clay pots which I paint. I have painted a special pot. It shows the sunrise, and hovering above the horizon is me, in the form of the morning star. The brown man before me is opening the box and gently removing it from its excelsior. He turns it slowly in his hands and admires it, and then he comes to the morning star and smiles in recognition, for he knows the meaning of my Apache name. He goes to a shelf and brings back a blanket, which he unfolds and holds up. It is black with a sliver of the brightest white I have ever seen. He folds it in a triangle and hands it to me. I take it with both hands.