Natural History

by Carlos Fonseca

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  Table of Contents

  A Note About the Author and Translator

  Copyright Page

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  To Ricardo Piglia, for his incomparable generosity.

  To Atalya and Rafael, as always.

  We keep inventing folk tales of the end.

  —Don DeLillo

  The unknown is an abstraction; the known, a desert; but what is half-known, half-seen, is the perfect breeding ground for desire and hallucination.

  —Juan José Saer

  Part I

  Animal Kingdom (1999–2006)

  If we were to disappear, would the barbarians spend their afternoons excavating our ruins?

  —J. M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians

  1

  For years I remained faithful to a strange obsession. No sooner would someone start talking to me of beginnings than my mind would turn to the childhood memory of an old painter I used to watch on TV, who painted dozens of nearly identical landscapes. I’d flash on the image of that bearded old man, his solemn voice that could have been real or put-on, I never knew. On the heels of the image would come the moral, corny but efficient: the best way to avoid a new beginning was by imitating one that had come before. Inadvertently, I ended up taking that postcard wisdom to heart. The same way the old painter set to sketching yet another picture full of little trees and mountains, I would copy some other beginning stolen from my memory: a dribble of the ball, a first line that floated to the surface, an expression that would start a conversation. That repeated inauguration encompassed everything. For years, I thought that was the way to protect myself from the horrible anxiety that overcomes us all at the thought that we’re doing something new. The old guy started painting another landscape, and I went on with my life, repeating it forward.

  Maybe that’s why tonight, when the package arrived past ten o’clock, I had the feeling that it wasn’t something happening, but repeating. I heard a car pull up outside, looked out the window, and saw it all: the old, elegant green car; the driver taking something from the trunk; the curious faces of the teenagers who stopped on their bikes to watch. I understood immediately what it was about, but even so it took me a few minutes to answer the door. I decided instead to pour myself a drink, turn up the music a little, and wait until the last possible moment. Only when I felt that the driver was about to leave did I set the drink on the table, go downstairs, open the door, and confront what I’d been expecting: the familiar but now almost forgotten face of a man who handed me a package. I accepted it, hinted at a gesture of condolence, and closed the door on the attentive and slightly judgmental faces of the kids and one or another of their parents. Then came the sound of the engine roaring down the street, and my mind flashed on the distant image of that car making the same trip back to the city, only in the middle of the night and with me in it. I’ve relived everything as if it were seven years ago, not night but early morning, not a package but a phone call, and then I remembered the old painter and his landscapes. The strange thing, I told myself then, is this: in the beginning there’s no sudden cut, no catastrophe or collapse, only a slight sense of repetition, a package that arrives just after ten, when no one is expecting it but one is still awake. Something that would have been more appropriate at eight arrives at ten, and suddenly the rules of the game are different and the onlookers’ gazes have changed. Still, I accepted the package, felt its weight, and once inside I dropped it on the table. And like that, in the warm summer with the window open to the street that then really did seem empty, I started to think about that call that came seven years ago, just after five in the morning, an hour when no one expects their sleep to be interrupted. Then the package became heavy, real, a little bothersome, and I had no choice but to open it and face what I’d foreseen: a series of manila envelopes that would have been anonymous except that, on the last one, I saw a short note in her unmistakable handwriting. My suspicions confirmed, I’ve still not despaired. As Tancredo says, every dog will have his day.

  * * *

  Tancredo has his theories. He’ll say, for example, that it was all a conspiracy, then take a sip of his dark beer and smile. For years now he’s done nothing but criticize my decisions one by one, take them apart on the basis of humor and beer. Tancredo is my own little perplexity machine, my refutation device, not to say my friend. He tells me, for example, that accepting that call was unacceptable. Unacceptable not because I knew what was behind it but because I should have been asleep. Plus, he says, who was I to think I knew anything about that world? He says such things to me, then sips his beer, smiles, and tosses out another theory. I think, he says, that the key here is something else: they’ll be back one day, and you’ll realize this was all a big joke. A minor joke that grew and grew until no one had the courage to tell you it was a joke and you were left not knowing if the thing was tragedy or farce. He sees that I’m not interested in his theories and he changes tack. He knows I prefer anecdote to theory, and maybe that’s why he asks, Do you know the story of William Howard?

  I shake my head. With Tancredo you never know where he gets his stories, but there they are, always within reach, like a pack of cigarettes to be divvied up. And so he tells me the story of this William Howard, a gringo he met in the Caribbean. He tells me he met him on the street, when the guy approached him in rags, stinking and drunk, to ask him for money. Every day it was the same: he’d go up to Tancredo without recognizing him, and in his terrible Spanish he’d ask for alms. The thing is, Tancredo says, after a couple of months, this character started to fascinate me: Why was he there, how had he gotten there, why had he stayed? So I asked him for his story. You know what that scoundrel replied? He told me he’d come to that place because he collected islands. At first I thought it was a linguistic mistake, but then it became very clear that the man believed it all: he thought that islands were something you could collect, like coins or stamps. I always wondered who had ever convinced him of such nonsense. But there the guy was, in the middle of an island, and I had the feeling someone had forgotten to tell him the punch line of the joke. Tancredo smiles, slaps me on the back, and ends by telling me, Take it easy, the dog will have its day.

  * * *

  And so, when I discovered the newspaper obituary a week ago, I remembered Tancredo’s words and the story of William Howard, island collector. I don’t know why but the gringo’s words came back to me, and suddenly the conviction grew that it was necessary to compile all the obituaries, printed and digital, absolutely all of them, as if they were islands. I started to gather them, one by one, with a collector’s mania, until tonight, when I heard the car pull up and I knew what it was about. Since then, for a good hour now, I’ve been thinking about that first early-morning call, until a brief intuition began to hover over my stupor and forced me to confront the weight of evidence: the envelopes piled up like islands are making me think that, during all that time, she had a secret purpose for those notes. Tragedy or farce? For now I refuse to open those folders, which Tancredo swears hold nothing but a long practical joke.

  * * *

  Three manila envelopes, wrapped with a fine red cord tied in a bow, like a gift. Along with the envelopes, there’s an obituary announcing the death, with that brief but pointed style they do so well: “Giovanna Luxembourg, Designer, Dead at 40.” Farther down there’s a photo of her dressed in black with a little hat on her head, her eyes staring off into the distance. The o
bituary talks a bit about her work, mentions certain exhibitions, references an eternal legacy, and that’s it. Regrets over a death at such an early age. A way of displaying a secret, I tell myself, or maybe of wrapping her in enigma. Stupidities of the press. The envelopes, however, are more real: they lie there, closed. Even without opening them, it’s clear they contain a great volume of papers. Strange that they aren’t numbered; it makes you think they’ve been compiled recently, without method. Something about the strange punctuality with which they’ve arrived in the car today suggests otherwise. Apart from that, the only distinctive thing at first sight is the little annotation that serves as an improvised title: Notes (1999). And that’s where I stop. I recognize her handwriting, the way the letters bump into each other and consume themselves until they’re thin and indistinguishable. Then, when I move the title envelope over the others, I see a figure that seems to have been sketched in the corner of one in a moment of distraction.

  It looks like a domino. No doubt about it, it looks like the five in dominoes, but it isn’t. Now that I notice it, I think that doodle was put there to remind me of how everything started. I linger again over the obituary: “Giovanna Luxembourg, Designer, Dead at 40.” If Tancredo had been here, he wouldn’t have missed a beat. He would have said, Note that your esteemed designer was only thirty-three, the age of Christ, when she sent for you. He would have stopped for a brief moment to rub that beard of his, which makes him somewhat resemble a dragon, or a Don Quijote with a good share of Sancho Panza, and he would have gone deeper into his nonsense. An apostle with no clear cause, he would have said, like the ones Napoleon met leaving Waterloo. They stuck with him and adored him, illiterates no one wanted anywhere, ignorant people who didn’t yet know they were following a defeated Moses. He would have said that and he would have laughed, he would have told me more stories about islands and everything would have lightened up. But Tancredo isn’t here, the clock is striking eleven, and the symbol that now reemerges is clearly recognizable: it’s the quincunx that once so fascinated me. The obituary has reminded me that, in just a few months, I will also turn forty.

  2

  In my college years, when the plan was still that I would become a mathematician, a bearded friend with the aura of a false philosopher mentioned a text in passing, a text that had tried to demonstrate that behind every natural variation, behind any difference, a single pattern existed. A kind of primary form. For a while I forgot his comment, until two winters later when a different friend—my roommate, a terribly hygienic man who wouldn’t travel without a bar of soap in his pocket—mentioned to me that a certain Thomas Browne, a melancholic man who was born and died in the baroque seventeenth century, had suggested in a posthumously published work that nature and culture came together in the repetition of a five-pointed shape called the quincunx. It reminded me of my first friend, his beard and his airs of a false prophet, and I headed for the library. It took me a while to find the book I was looking for. Someone had put it in the wrong place and it had ended up in the cartoon section—the librarian told me—alongside Mickey Mouse and Tom and Jerry, lost among Walt Disney’s first sketches. So I went to the cartoon section and there, among those little drawings that have given so much fodder for conversation, I found an old edition of the book. The work in question was The Garden of Cyrus, originally published in 1658, twenty-four years before the author’s death. My friend had been wrong: it was the author’s last book before he died, not a posthumous publication. However, both of my friends had gotten one thing right: the idea of the prevalence of the quincunx pattern in nature as proof of divine design. On the cover I found the portrait of a small man with deeply large, red, and sad eyes; a pointed beard; and long hair. I remember thinking that Thomas Browne himself was a little like a blend of my two friends painted from memory. I didn’t linger, though, over that impression. I paged quickly through the old edition until I found the shape. It was a kind of starfish, a geometrical butterfly that instantly awakened my interest. I picked up the book, checked it out with the librarian, and took it back to my dorm room. I remember how my roommate denied any resemblance to the melancholic Englishman.

  * * *

  Fifteen years later, after much reading and an unexpected career change, my obsession would end up producing a series of articles that I was more satisfied with than proud of. Among them, the least well-known was a history of the permutations of the pattern in tropical butterflies, a brief article called “Variations of the Quincunx Pattern and Its Uses for Tropical Lepidoptera,” of which the British journal The Lepidopterologist had published a short excerpt under the more exotic title “The Quincunx and Its Tropical Repercussions.” I remember that I started the article, solely on a whim, with a beautiful quote from Browne himself: “Gardens were before gardeners, and but some hours after the earth.” Even today, when I read that article, I’m surprised to find that quote there, like a superfluous translation lost inside another one, necessary and relevant. For some reason I still haven’t figured out, it was that little article that managed to catch the attention of a fashion designer whose name I knew in passing but of whose work I knew little. Even without opening them, I know: the three envelopes I now have in front of me are a kind of testament to a collaboration that started with a simple phone call.

  3

  The call had come at five. Usually I wouldn’t have answered at such an early hour, but the night before I’d gone out drinking with friends and the heartburn had hit me right at four, leaving me prostrate in bed in a kind of doze that refused to decide between lucidity and sleep. Now I see it clearly: the call was just the excuse I needed to get up at that uncertain hour. But that’s not important. The call had come at five, and on the fifth ring I answered, using that distinctive expression I had adopted in the face of the uncertainty that takes over the tongue abroad when the country speaks one language and your friends another: a kind of amorphous child of the North American hello and the Latin American hola, a flapping alo alo that had something of a desperate tortoise about it. In that strange language that’s all of them precisely because it’s none, I answered the phone on the fifth ring. A masculine voice confirmed my name in English and then, as though to give some indication of his intention, asked me, “Are you the author of ‘The Quincunx and Its Tropical Repercussions’?” I replied that I was, that it was one of the texts I had published as a student, and I added that I no longer worked at the university, but at a small natural history museum in New Jersey. For a moment I felt that I had lost him, that the line was dead, but then I heard him again as though he were coming back from somewhere. The rest of the conversation flowed as if I were still sleeping: he told me about a project whose nature I didn’t entirely grasp, he mentioned a name that somehow reminded me of a board game I used to play as a child, he talked about the importance of discretion given that we were dealing with a person of some public renown. In the early dawn I merely said yes, without knowing exactly what I was acceding to. I was possessed by a strange feeling of loss, a little like the one some people suffer on the open seas when they suddenly become aware that they’ve left behind all the equilibrium of solid land. I don’t remember how the call ended, but I do remember that after the guy hung up, I sat there, unable to sleep but also not awake, an early-morning insomniac with last night’s acid reflux in full force. I cooked some eggs with onion and started to search my computer for a copy of my old article, of which I remembered almost nothing. I read it once, twice, three times, while my mind played a movie of the past ten years of my life, a trajectory that many people would call a free fall toward failure, but that I had come to accept with a certain noble joy. I saw a thousand variations of the quincunx on Cuban butterflies, Costa Rican ones, Dominican, Puerto Rican, until there were no quincunxes or butterflies left, only my face as a fifteen-year-old boy, looking at a chalkboard covered in symbols. The sun was coming up, and I could see the white landscape out the window. It was winter.

  * * *

  I had recentl
y stopped taking anxiety pills, and sometimes my reality seemed to jump a little. Nothing strange, no hallucinations or anything like that, just little slipups of perception that seemed more like appeals to lucidity than anything else. Something like that happened with the phone call. Not that I forgot it or rejected it, just that it stayed there, latent, and slipped through the cracks of life. During those weeks I ate in the same New Brunswick restaurants, had beers with Tancredo and my friends, went to the museum and returned home, all without mentioning the incident once. But without my realizing it, wheels were turning in my unconscious. What I did notice was the return of a certain interest in form, a perception of patterns. The return, so long delayed, of my interest in the quincunx. Maybe it was the many times I read the article with my gaze on something else, but suddenly the shape came at me from every direction: it was in an ashtray, in the marine fossils at the museum, beer bubbles, the configuration of passengers in the middle of the train station. It stubbornly appeared everywhere, it floated to the surface and then hid, only to emerge hours later in some other unexpected place. Just when I was starting to believe I was finally free of obsessions, one little phone call had made me haul up a forgotten passion. After a week it started to feel like a curse, like a weight that threatened to sink the raft of my everyday world. So I didn’t wait—one afternoon I came home from the museum and started to look through the papers by the phone until I found one with a distracted scribble alongside a New York City number. I dialed it and the phone rang three times, but no one answered. I don’t know why, but I thought that meant I’d written down the number wrong. Something in me associated that number with total authority: an all or nothing. So I didn’t try again until two days later, after I read my article for the fifth time. The phone rang three times, and on the fourth, a masculine voice answered; it was similar to the one from the first morning but slightly different. I identified myself and mentioned the previous call, but, after a silence, he told me no one there knew what I was talking about. So I sat down to watch TV. Same stuff as always: earthquakes on the Chilean coast, polemics from corrupt politicians, absurd programs meant to bury boredom. When they called back, I was half-asleep, and for some reason I let the call go to voice mail, and that’s how I heard her voice for the first time. It was a bit hoarse, and it sounded to me like it was fading.