Natural History

by Carlos Fonseca

  9

  That night I dreamed. Afraid my bender would break my will for silence, I left the bar earlier than usual and managed to catch the last train of the night. A no-man’s-land of two hours stretches out between the last train of one day and the first train of the next. By then I had become an expert in those indistinct hours. I knew to perfection that it’s during those hours when Penn Station takes on its true density, when the drunks and bums commingle with dreadfully tired upright citizens. Then there are the accidentals: tourists in transit who would rather sleep in the station for a few hours than pay for a night in a Manhattan hotel. But that night I got there early enough to catch the last train. I slipped in among the drunk young people and finally found a seat across from an older woman who gave me the side-eye. Rarely have I felt tireder. The drunken shouting did not matter, nor did the swaying of the train. I fell asleep in a few minutes. That’s when I dreamed I was little—not just young but truly small. I dreamed myself diminutive among a throng of soft-timbered voices, all nearly identical but slightly different, all demanding something from me. I stuffed my hands in my pockets as if desperately searching for something, but there was nothing there. In the background I heard Tancredo’s laughter grow louder, until suddenly there were no more voices or laughter, just some kind of Caribbean music, salsa or son, and a man appeared and introduced himself as William Howard. His beard was overgrown and he reeked of beer, but I still tried to hug him. Impossible, however, to hug a drunk in a dream. The bearded man pushed me away and showed me a newspaper with a date long past. He was laughing as he showed it to me, and then he set it on fire. Then there was nothing left, no drunk or island or music, just a bunch of ants crawling around, impatient and teeming, on a sidewalk dotted with gum.

  * * *

  I was woken by a train whistle just as we were approaching New Brunswick. I looked around and saw some young people who were still keeping the party going, and then there was the ticket collector stamping tickets. The scene was full of anachronistic shadings: the ticket collector’s clothes, the mechanical sound of the stamp, the swaying of the cars. An old loudspeaker blared the names of the next stations in a voice so fuzzy it was no help at all. I adored the train with all the intensity of a love for final things. I realized it was stopping, and caught a glimpse of my station in the distance. From so many early-morning trips my body had learned, even tipsy as it was, to track the distances. The station at that hour was almost empty, except for the usual drunks and a few dealers on the prowl. One of them approached me and I tried unsuccessfully to dodge him. He said a bunch of words to me that I didn’t understand, and then he cursed me in a deep and serious voice. The truth is that I was still a little under the influence of all the alcohol, and when I saw him, the only thing I felt was the unexpected return of the dream I’d had. I hardly ever remembered dreams, and when I did they were always like a strange fog from which sudden, solitary images would emerge. But this time was different. Maybe it was the drunkenness, but I felt the whole dream in living flesh. I saw myself there, in that same station, tiny like an insect in the Amazon, listening to a bum who was none other than Tancredo’s William Howard. In the dream I’d been surprised to see that the man whose story I’d heard so many times wasn’t white, as I’d always imagined him, but a black man with imposing muscles. I saw myself there, in the middle of the station, listening to stories of islands while the ants crawled around us, invisible but real. Only then, when the fear reached its highest point, like a helium balloon about to burst, did the ticket collector wake me up to ask for my ticket, and I was able to breathe as I realized New Brunswick was still a ways off, more than four stations away. I can’t remember any other time when my dreams ensnared me like that. I thought the insomnia was starting to take a toll and I should try to get more sleep. Outside, framed by the train car’s window, the night ran by fast and dark, to the beat of that train rushing and shaking southward. Drunk, I felt a loss.

  * * *

  Giovanna called me again the next week. She had an odd request: she wanted to see me on my home court, at the museum. I didn’t know how to say no to her, so two days later, in the afternoon, all my coworkers watched that strange parade of assistants followed by a woman dressed in black. It all had something circus-like about it, something of a children’s pageant gone astray. I sighed at the thought that at least to a certain extent this would legitimate the strange attitude I’d had toward my work over the past year, my cold and distant mien as I’d set the catalogs aside to devote myself to perpetual insomnia. My appearance had changed. I had terrible circles under my eyes and at times I practically fell asleep in the middle of the exhibition hall, right onto an informational plaque. So that afternoon, when I saw the first assistants enter, I felt a little relieved, a little proud. That circus parade confirmed the few stories I’d told my coworkers, just when they were all starting to look at me with worried faces. I watched the helpers pass one by one, their faces young and ambitious, and something in me felt like I belonged to that race of impatient beings. Someday, we seemed to all be saying, our turn would come. She crossed the main hall of the museum, hugged me, and asked to see the gallery of tropical butterflies. Our museum was humble but extensive and twisted. I guided Giovanna through that odd maze until we reached the butterfly hall. Beyond the glass dome was a sunny day that shone in brightly. In the full light, her face, as she leaned over the multitude of butterflies on display, looked soft and delicate. Her false blue eyes reflected the butterflies’ shades in an interplay of doubles where I briefly thought I saw something illuminated. She looked at me happily and said that she rarely went to museums—the crowds—but that she was grateful to me because my museum was a very hygienic place. I’ll never forget that word, “hygienic,” placed there like bait. Then, offhandedly, she mentioned a story that I didn’t fully grasp. It was the story of a French poet who had edited a fashion magazine in the nineteenth century. Though I forget his name, I remember a quote that Giovanna assured me the poet had applied to the greatest fashion designer of the age: “He knows how to create dresses as fugitive as our thoughts.” Though I didn’t understand it, it struck me as a beautiful quote, befitting that gallery, which after so many years I finally saw in its true splendor. Giovanna went on with her anecdote. There, in that magazine whose name, La dernière mode, contained the key to the profession, the poet devoted himself to outlining, under crackpot and aristocratic pseudonyms, a theory of the fleeting: he tried to describe the relationship between thought and analogy, image and metamorphosis, clouds, seasons, and the reflection of the perfumes of thought. It all sounded a little cheesy to me, interesting but unsuccessful. I remember, however, that Giovanna closed with a withering, fatal phrase: “In sum, fashion is the art of prophesy, and thus of meteorology.” She had that allegorical and epigrammatic way of speaking, as if she were leaving clues that one would have to think about later, once night had fallen, in a Bowery bar while watching a woman read. I felt it was all coming from somewhere else, from a place that was just starting to show itself from behind a series of stories that could well be false. That was the interesting thing with her, that feeling that everything could very well be fake, a kind of world in scare quotes, an immense joke that would end up falling on my head just when I least expected it. During that time she started to use a phrase that today has become terribly relevant. She’d come out with one of her epigrammatic phrases or stories, look at me tenderly, and then say: “One of these days I’ll show you the papers.” She’d say that and then go quiet, with the ability all great seducers have of proposing something and then showing you their empty palm. I’d be left there, a little tired and puffy-eyed, thinking of the mysterious cloud of papers that hid all of that woman’s thoughts. Just like that, sentence by sentence, she was winning the game as if it were a chess match. Maybe that’s why today, when the driver arrived with a package in hand, I thought about her strange way of speaking, as if it were all going to take on meaning in retrospect.

  10 />
  “One of these days I’ll show you the papers”: seven years later, the cipher is finally starting to unravel and show its seams. With the envelopes in front of me, scattered in childish disorder, I start to think about how easy it would be to burn it all in an absolute gesture. Get rid of the problem. Brush off this legacy that doesn’t belong to me. A series of images from epic scenes of destruction come to my mind. The most famous and most often cited, the destruction of the Library of Alexandria; then I thought about the 1501 burning of the Arabic manuscripts under orders of Cardinal Cisneros, until I turned to less historic but equally disastrous burnings, like the ones perpetrated during the Chilean coup in 1973, when it’s said that more than fifteen thousand copies of a novel by García Márquez were burned. Then my mind turned to Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, in which a fireman’s job is to find and burn books. Another image, however, brought the epic list to a halt. I’ve been assaulted by the idea that, even if I burned it all, everything would stay the same. Surely she anticipated such a gesture and asked someone to photocopy all the documents before giving them to me. I’ve pictured myself receiving a slew of emails with copies of those documents after I thought I’d destroyed them, and the idea, though comic in a way, has struck me as dreadful.

  * * *

  Once, Tancredo and I tried to come up with a total and irreversible gesture. I suggested setting fires. I liked those final scenes in novels or movies when one of the protagonists, fearful that a secret will be discovered, burns the house with the enigma inside. Tancredo’s reply was short and dismissive: fire is only good for lighting cigarettes and cooking stews. Now that I think about it, he was right: the copies of copies would win any race against the fastest of fires. Then I remembered another story of fire and manuscripts. An American friend told it to me during my first days as a student: the story of a literary critic who, during the war, literally smoked an entire manuscript. He didn’t have papers, so he found himself forced to roll cigarettes with the pages of his manuscript. Supposedly it was a fat book, around five hundred pages of a bildungsroman. Poor guy, I say to myself now. A few years later and he could have photocopied that book all he liked, and smoked double. Then I see her, Giovanna, just as I saw her smoking in our meetings. She had a very strange way of doing it, without style, or with a very clumsy style, almost as if it were her first time holding a cigarette. Far removed from the chic gestures that distinguished the divas of French cinema. It was all more awkward with her, as if she wished she were smoking in secret. She’d stop in the middle of the conversation, take out the pack of cigarettes, and suddenly dart toward the door. You’d follow her without really knowing where she was going, and suddenly find her at the bottom of the steps with a cigarette in hand, shivering a little from the cold or sweating in the heat, her gestures evasive, as if her life depended on smoking that cigarette. She never finished one. She always stopped halfway through, when you least expected it, and stubbed it out. Then she’d halt the conversation and hurry back up the stairs like her lungs hadn’t suffered at all. Once inside, we’d start talking again as if there’d been no pause at all.

  And after I imagine her smoking, I also have to wonder whether she knew even then that her time was running out and that she needed to organize the matter of her legacy. “One of these days I’ll show you the papers,” she’d say things like that and then leave you hanging. No, I say to myself, fire won’t be enough. I look at the envelopes. Even from the worst fires, some butterfly makes it out alive.

  * * *

  Thirty-three, the age of Christ, said Tancredo between chuckles. And then I added, bored: Christ died to leave a testament, twelve apostles, and a church. Tragedy or farce? It all depends on whom you ask. It’s all about belief. He who believes sees tragedy, and he who doesn’t sees a farce; the tale is the same, though it’s told in a different voice. The protagonist bets it all on whether his story will provoke laughter or tears. I remember that while she smoked, she liked to speculate about the weather: looks like it’s going to rain tomorrow, she’d say, while we looked up at an absolutely clear sky. And I’d sit there, a few inches from her, wondering if she was joking, whether I should laugh or not. Few things are as difficult as humor.

  11

  The image of young Giovanna, sick in some tropical hospital, increased its hold over me until it became an obsession. It was a strange thing, a minor irritation like the one the quincunx caused me as a student, only this time the story seized me emotionally. I could spend whole afternoons re-creating that scene, when I’d heard only a few circumstantial details. The pieces of an invisible chess game moved in my mind, placed the father to the left and the mother a little behind, in a wooden chair. In front I placed the nurse with her book of fairy tales. Something, though, didn’t work. If the parents were there, then why was it the nurse who held the book? Why read in that foreign language if the parents were there to tell it all in English? Then the pieces of my chess game moved again and the scene emptied out to the minimum: the nurse and Giovanna in a shared solitude. But if the parents were dead, how had Giovanna reached the hospital? Something didn’t fit. Deep though I was in a world of butterflies and fossils, I recalled my childhood years, when I could spend hours before a puzzle, turning the pieces until suddenly I saw something that had been hidden, the game’s internal sequence, and hours later I’d start to recognize the image: a historical map, a watercolor of a flowery landscape, a little boat on a sunny day. One of my coworkers would wake me from those reveries. They’d notify me that a new collection of fossils had been delivered to the museum, that a group of elementary school students was just arriving, that someone was asking for me on the phone. Then I’d stop the puzzle for a while, knowing I’d return to it later on.

  Those were the months when I obsessively searched online for biographical information about Giovanna. The dates progressed and all the newspapers talked about was the end of the millennium and the possible cybernetic catastrophe. There were retrospectives of the century: Einstein was everywhere, and then Hitler, Michael Jordan, and the fall of the Berlin Wall. I thought about the cybernetic bugs and laughed a little. Then I’d throw myself into a search for something that would give me an explanation for my own private bug: some allusion to an inheritance that would explain the parents’ absence, some mention of her trajectory that would explain the unusual success she’d had at such a young age, something that would clarify the enigma of that scene that was expanding for me with the momentum of the jungles that grew in other latitudes. Giovanna had come, Tancredo said, to supplant my obsessions. She’d seen that I was obsessive, and she’d set out to change my fixation for me. To give me clues so I would create a false world on my own. I think Tancredo even started to worry about me. At first he thought maybe I was hallucinating, that there was no designer or project; after Giovanna’s visit to the museum, he calmed down a bit. But even so, he worried about something else. He thought I was in love and maybe it would be best to put a stop to it right away. I remember he even came to suggest that we hire a detective who could clear the whole thing up. I laughed a little and went on with my search. In a way I had turned myself into a sort of private detective, with my visits to the Bowery, the feeling I was following in the footsteps of an imaginary ancestor, my little notebook where I dreamed up the possible lives of that red-haired woman who spent her time reading newspapers in a Lebanese bar. I searched and searched online, but the internet wasn’t what it is today, and I found very little: details about Giovanna’s most recent collections, some information about her early years, but nothing truly revealing. There was no mention of her family, not even of where she was from.

  Sometimes the call came and sometimes it didn’t. I still worked on my collection of notes, the Reading Hypotheses where I sketched out possible scenarios; I took the train to New York and wandered until I reached the Bowery. I’d see a girlfriend of the moment, or some school friend or another who’d moved to the city, and then, when the right moment came, I’d head to the Lebanese ba
r. I’d sit down, order a glass of wine, and feel enormous relief when I saw, reliable as ever, the same woman reading her newspapers. The scene, however, would start to mutate, and after a few hours the reader and the newspapers would be gone, replaced by the voice of that nurse who made the animals speak so tenderly. Beside her, a young Giovanna would be starting to understand those words that her mind turned over with the agility of a master chess player. Learning a language was like deciphering a riddle. I thought of Giovanna in the Hamptons, her neutral Spanish that betrayed no accent, and something told me the moment of illumination was near. Patience was the trick.

  * * *