4
So I could say that at first there is a voice that repeats on the machine: a hoarse voice that at times seems to wane but then rings out again. Then I see myself in a car (a green car like the one that stopped in the middle of my street today), crossing the snowy streets of that terrible winter, alternating lefts and rights, leaving New Brunswick without knowing exactly where I’m going, leaving the museum behind in the hope that the time has finally come to return to my ambitions. I remember passing abandoned factories familiar to anyone who’s ever been to New Jersey, those snow-covered ruins, a small chapel peeking out through the white. I watch as two trains catch up and pass us. Then in the darkness I see little more than car headlights, the driver’s face when he occasionally looks back in the rearview mirror, until suddenly that beautiful catastrophe of lights emerges: the city of New York as seen from New Jersey.
* * *
Sometimes I like to think that insomnia springs from a vision like that: a lucid and enormous vista that insomniacs can’t forget. They close their eyes and see it there, a magnificent canvas full of tiny points that shiver like stars. I remember crossing the bridge and reaching that city I’d been to often, but that now grew like the sponge of my ambition—the way sea urchins or coral reefs grow, with measured patience—pursuing an obscure voice that now belonged to the entire city. I see myself there in the same car that pulled up at my house tonight: we cross a snow-covered street and I feel the car turn right. Then I see an enormous, windowless building appear, and the car slows as the first cobblestones sound beneath us.
* * *
That first meeting was long, though it didn’t seem so. It was night, more or less ten o’clock, when the car stopped on that cobblestone street that I would later come to know so well, between that terrible edifice with no windows and a luxury apartment building that had once been an industrial factory. I figure it must have been ten because I later understood that with her, everything had a strange punctuality, a certain precision that was not of a fixed schedule or the common sense determined by calendars. Yes, it must have been ten because after that it was always ten, eleven at the latest, the kind of ambiguous hour when everyone is returning home for the night. I was greeted by a young woman whom for a second I confused with her, with the designer, but who I quickly realized was an assistant, one of many who would multiply almost anonymously, always a little on the margins, bothersome as they went about the strange labors of a glorified office worker. I introduced myself, and the next thing I knew we were walking through the halls of a building I would visit many times, but which, if I saw it again today, I would find foreign. It was marked by a desolate atmosphere, like an empty hotel or a forgotten factory; the doors were numbered inside. I remember I always had the feeling the doormen traded shifts with their brothers: the people who greeted me were always strangely similar, just a little different. I remember the assistant stopping at one of the doors and knocking with a lightness that bordered on fear. Then, when the door opened, I saw her for the first time: a woman in her youth, beautiful precisely because something in her refused to submit to another’s gaze. I remember she introduced herself, but what caught my attention was a certain nervous tic, a way she had of pausing halfway through her sentences, as if she’d forgotten to mention something and in the middle of a phrase she wanted to back up, only to realize she had no choice but to finish. I think she was wearing a blue scarf, and I felt like I had seen her before. The rest of her clothes were entirely black, as I soon found out was her habit.
I remember it was still cold in the hallway, and she invited me in. We sat in the middle of the room, very far apart, me on a sofa I found extremely uncomfortable, her in a wooden chair. Out of shyness or distraction, I started to look at the picture that rose up behind her, an image made of rags soaked in oil paint, until I heard her start that strange and hallucinatory monologue that I still feel I’d heard somewhere else: she started by mentioning the eyes of the Caligo brasiliensis, the butterfly that has two dots on its wings that make it look like an owl. Then she went on to discuss the famous case of the praying mantis, how the insect plays at anonymity in the jungle’s depths. I remember she mentioned something about rain in a tropical jungle, and then she stopped. She glanced distractedly at the painting, took out a little notebook, and started to sketch: butterflies, insects, marine figures, little doodles that barely communicated anything, but that she rushed to show me. Here are the Calappae, which look like rocks; here the chlamydes, they look like seeds; here the moenas, which looks like gravel: she said all of this with absolute seriousness, and then she started to laugh. I thought maybe it was all a bad joke, or maybe, worse, the monologue of a madwoman, but something in the tone of her voice made me think this was something else. Then, pointing to another drawing—a series of bell-shaped flowers I quickly recognized as Brazilian cholas—she finally got to the reason for her call.
“I’m tired,” she told me, “of doing fashion collections. Before my time runs out, I want to do a collection about fashion. Not just fashion, but something more.” Her finger, long and pale, pointed toward the notebook again. Something in her voice was left hanging in the air, and I thought back to the voice I’d heard weeks earlier on the machine, that first intuition that some part of her was being extinguished. Then we talked about more practical things, the city and the winter, my work at the museum and the quincunx, all that mundane fog that just then, at least, seemed disrupted. It must have been nearly two when I said my goodbyes. Somehow, almost four hours had passed. I remember that when I left, the driver told me he would take me home, but I refused on the pretext that I wanted to walk a bit. The snow, I told him, had warmed the streets a little.
* * *
I walked for several hours, a bit lost, while impressions from our conversation leapt up in my mind. Flashes, images of awkward moments, the echo of that laugh that seemed ever more ambiguous. I crossed the snowy streets unhurriedly, with the strange conviction that I was intuitively heading eastward, and soon the sun would appear and I could go home. I kept thinking about that hoarse voice I’d listened to with animal patience, and felt again the intuition that something in it was being extinguished. I passed Chinatown, then a strange street full of cats, and I remembered the odd way she had jumped right into the project with her sketches, and I almost convinced myself that all of it, the whole hallucinatory monologue, was copied from somewhere else. From a badly translated movie or some TV show. The strange thing was that when Giovanna spoke, something in her retreated, the way the original words in a foreign film retreat after they’re dubbed over in another language. I was distracted from my speculation by the neon sign of a nightclub. Some kids were gathered in front of it. I realized there was still some life left in the night and thought maybe it was worth going into a bar and having a drink. It was the word “Bowery” that had drawn my attention to the sign. I knew the name the way I knew the whole city, the way one knows things from outside: through other people’s stories, novels I’d read. I felt a newfound need to find out whether some ancestor of mine had been there, walked those same streets; I suddenly felt like that was the only thing that would give me the right to walk at those hours through unfamiliar neighborhoods. I remembered an expression that the designer had used that same night—“tropical animal”—and I thought that there wasn’t much of the animal about my own tropics, and that she was wrong, I wasn’t the right person for this project. Yes, thousands of Puerto Ricans had arrived in great waves of migration in the fifties and sixties, but my relationship with that generation was ambiguous and problematic. Perhaps that’s why I’d decided to settle at the margins of the city, in odd little New Brunswick, with its bars full of veterans who looked at me sideways, with suspicion. My relationship with the town I lived in asked for something deeper, not a matter of second or third generation, since people always looked at me with profound distrust. Something told me I would be safe only if I had an ancestor who’d once walked those same streets in the nineteenth centur
y. Then the root would be deep and strong and I could meet everything with a sense of right and inheritance. Somewhere I’d seen a photograph of the Bowery at the turn of the century: a crowd walked in the shadow of the first train lines, cobblestoned streets lined with storefronts inviting one to linger awhile—streets that invited one to vice. I imagined that precursor of mine amid the crowd, a man in a suit and hat—maybe the only ones he owned—laboring through those streets. Perhaps he felt the same sense of disquiet and confusion that now assaulted me, at the sight of how the old area of Manhattan vice had become, after a century, a timid shadow of itself. Perhaps in an attempt to forget the feeling of rootlessness that every photograph-inspired memory brings, I decided to go inside. Not the bar with the kids and the neon sign, but a quieter one I found a few steps farther on, down a set of stairs to a kind of hidden underground; on my way down, I passed a drunk couple playing at kisses.
* * *
There are places that give us the feeling of a mistake, and that bar was one of them. It was a Lebanese restaurant, full of hookahs and lit by a reddish light that gave it an air of false dawn. It must have been three in the morning when I pushed past the drunk couple on my way down the stairs, where the snow was starting to melt, and went inside. The place had a strange architecture that produced unexpected corners, where drunk young people were smoking and drinking wine at long wooden tables that would have been more at home in a rustic Italian restaurant than there, washed in the bar’s tired alcoholic breath. More than anything I wished I had a book, something to occupy my hands and my leisure, anything, a cell phone or a blank page. I could have, at least, assumed the anonymity that things bestow on us as they occupy our hands, a seeming industriousness that would have neutralized the feeling of being alone, completely alone among groups finishing off their nights with laughter. I ordered a glass of red wine, and I started to observe the strange fauna. I was surprised by the subtle way the waiters maneuvered around tables, cool and diligent. There was something terribly silent about it all, considering it was a bar at last call. As though some kind of black hole had settled among the tables, ready to devour any excess noise.
Then I saw her.
* * *
She must have been sixty years old. Her hair was dyed red and she had the gaze of an obsessive. She was taking up an entire table, over which she’d spread out countless newspapers. The scene reminded me of old war movies, the part where the general meets with his colonels to plan the final ambush. Something about her seemed outsize, or measured on a different scale. I ordered another glass of wine and went back to watching her. The waiters moved around her with a strange calm. I came to think maybe she was the owner of the place, but was convinced otherwise by the thought that no bar owner would be awake at that hour. Her face showed traces of beauty, as if she’d once been lovely and today had to bear the weight of that initial beauty. Her movements were unhurried, but I managed to distinguish, within her fundamental calm, a seeming eagerness to devour everything at once. Then, through memory or intuition, as though to shake off that specter, I went back to thinking about Giovanna. She also had something of the mocking oracle about her, the Egyptian sphinx, the actress desperately seeking anonymity. Now that I thought about it, I noticed how odd it was, the naturalness with which she seemed to reject everything that was hers. Maybe it had been the shock of the first impression or how fast she’d launched into the project, but only now did I dwell on the designer’s singularities. She had terribly blond hair, like Hollywood actresses in the fifties, and in the vibrant blue of her eyes I could discern a lie. I tried to imagine her in another key, with dark hair and brown eyes, but I couldn’t. Everything had seemed normal when I’d been in her apartment, but now the idiosyncrasies leapt into view: the way she’d refused to speak English, preferring a Spanish of unclear provenance; the subtle though absolute lack of family photographs in the house; the way the conversation had seemed almost to have been planned in advance. I tried to imagine Giovanna old, but I only returned to the image of that newspaper reader who was now struggling with matters far removed from her task. Two drunk girls, curious about her like I was, had gone over to talk to her. The woman, clearly a bit neurotic, had reacted with gestures that verged on violence—gesticulations that could have escalated if not for the waiters, who asked the girls for discretion, and then the woman sank back into her reading. The theory that she was crazy felt disrespectful and superficial. As Tancredo says, we have to understand crazy people according to their own laws. Perhaps that was why I ordered yet another glass, and after so many, I thought that maybe she was right, that newspapers should be read in the wee hours of the morning, when the next day’s news was about to arrive. When I looked at my watch, it was almost five. The sun would be out soon and I was far from home, far from New Brunswick and the museum, in a bar where a woman was obsessively reading newspapers at dawn. When I left the bar, two boys were fighting on the corner. I thought that the whole experience must have been a little like my false ancestor’s.
* * *
In those weeks, I told only Tancredo the details of the peculiar scene I’d witnessed in the bar. Even today, part of me thinks I accepted the project just so I could go back there, to that bar of reddish rock and strange calm. Perhaps, I tell myself, this whole matter could be summed up as a childish fascination with the woman reading newspapers at dawn. The thing is, every time I tried to explain my fascination to Tancredo over beers, I felt myself falling short: the description failed me, my tone wasn’t right, the words were rushed and ended up fading away before they reached their target. Tancredo, a little tired of so much ambiguity, tapped his cigarette into the ashtray and was quiet for a second, then pursed his lips and described a theory of his own. According to him, the Bowery bar was a little like what physicists call the “event horizon,” the border around a black hole where the escape velocity is equal to the speed of light. Any phenomenon beyond that horizon would be imperceptible to an external observer, and vice versa. Like an ants’ nest, Tancredo said, and for the first time I started to take a little pleasure in his crazy analogies. I remembered the stairs, and the neon sign of the nearby bar, the fight I’d seen on my way out. Later, when the project started to consume me, I thought how that borderline of ants could well describe, too, the strange, dead-end affair I’d gotten caught up in. But that was later. At first there was only that image of obsessive reading at dawn, and around it a routine of insomnia that repeated ad nauseam, until it left me exhausted over a beer across from Tancredo as he laid out his theories.
5
The calls usually came at three, always with different voices. The phone would ring, my coworkers at the museum would shoot me knowing looks, I’d leave my catalogs and go off to meet the usual: a soft-timbered voice informing me of the meeting’s time and place. It all had an air of false secrecy, of illegality. I just happily, robotically accepted the routine. Later, around nine, the same greenish car would come by my apartment, and I’d go down the stairs with some anxiety, but willing to go along with whatever this was. In that first winter I remember seeing all the variations the snow can create on the same landscape: the thousand ways in which, as it melts, the snow paints that landscape—already ruinous—with allegories of war. After a few months the trip became so ordinary a ritual that I would sleep the whole way, only to rouse myself when I felt the first cobblestones under the tires. Then I would confront that building of a thousand faces, where I would hold long conversations with Giovanna on a thousand different subjects: a theory about the silhouettes of birds on the wing, the nature of color, mimesis and its animal origin, Latin American anthropology. Conversations that always ended up turning into extended monologues by Giovanna, in which I would catch phrases I thought I’d heard somewhere else. We talked about a thousand things, and her helpers moved discreetly around us, in a continuous activity that mimicked the hallucinatory atmosphere of that bar where the waiters moved with tact and grace as they tried not to bother the newspaper reader. Giovanna sk
etched in a small notebook with a red leather cover while I looked on and wondered where this was all going. Hours later, one of her helpers would see me to the door, with the excuse that the designer was tired. Then I would go out to roam the streets. I’d wander for a while before stopping, as always, at the neon sign in the Bowery, at the top of the stairs that led to the Lebanese bar where a sixty-year-old woman obsessively read newspapers. I would sit down, order a glass of wine, and start to soak in my surroundings: the drunk young people chasing kisses, the waiters who seemed ever more like Giovanna’s helpers, and, in that ambiguous center that for Tancredo marked a borderline, the reader with her martial cartography of information.
I feared, in those first weeks, that I would be discovered in my fascination. I feared that one day, the woman would stand up from her own fixation and see me there, staring at her. She seemed to have a different sense of space, however: as if, outside the newspapers, her reality was limited to her immediate surroundings. So I watched how night after night the drunk kids drew close enough to bother her. Only then, as though feeling an annoying insect, would she shake herself violently and rebuke them. One of the waiters would come to her rescue and shoo away the drunks, and then she would sink again into that cloud of information. I could watch her spend hours like that, until, at five o’clock, I took my leave and caught the train home.
Natural History Page 2