Natural History

by Carlos Fonseca

  Two weeks after her visit to the museum, her voice surprised me on the phone. A blond coworker who’d been at the museum for only three weeks had interrupted me in the middle of a tour, and I’d slipped away from that troop of noisy kids thinking it would be the same as always: the soft voice of one of the helpers, whom I was now starting to recognize. Instead I was startled by Giovanna’s voice, this time speaking in English. She spoke her mother tongue so rarely with me, usually only in search of some word whose Spanish equivalent she’d forgotten. That’s why I knew from the start that it was urgent. I was right. She wanted to see me a little earlier this time, and not in the usual place. Without thinking much about it, I agreed and wrote down the address she gave me. It was in the Bronx. It had been a long time since I’d been there, maybe years, ever since I broke up with a woman who had a job writing obituaries, who lived there. I was pleased at the thought of returning, and I ended up telling her sure, I’d be there as soon as I finished work. So when I got rid of that quarreling crowd, I put on my sunglasses and went out to look for the driver. He and I had built a sort of friendship on a foundation of short conversations, so I didn’t think it was out of place to ask him something about Giovanna’s personal life. It seemed to make him angry, as if my question had crossed some unspoken boundary. He frowned in silence. Ms. Luxembourg, as he called her now with false decorum, greatly valued her privacy, and she never confided in him about her personal history. I felt bad at the thought that I’d committed some invisible transgression, so I decided to keep quiet for the rest of the drive. I worked a little on the classification of a series of Patagonian animal fossils that the museum had acquired recently, part of a large, anonymous donation that would allow us to add three more halls and even put a dinosaur in our main gallery. I sensed Giovanna hiding behind it all, but I chose to say nothing.

  Two hours later, I felt the car come to a stop, and through the window I could see a kind of old warehouse hidden among ancient garages that were something like a used-car slaughterhouse. What was Giovanna doing there? Wasn’t she afraid of dirty places? When I got out, I was met by a peculiar scene: there was a pile of dismembered mannequins in the middle of the street, tossed out like garbage. As I was taking in the spectacle’s apocalyptic mood, I felt a pedestrian collide with me, and when I turned around I saw a man in a black collarless shirt, whom I briefly thought I recognized as the man I’d seen dining with the newspaper reader weeks earlier in the Bowery bar. Only when I saw Giovanna’s radiant face was I able to brush off the shock of recognition. She called to me from a glass door that opened into the warehouse, again with the warm texture her voice took on when she spoke in Spanish. I left the mannequins behind and went into that old storage space whose door opened onto a view that even today strikes me as beautiful: an enormous space where dozens of bent figures were cutting, sewing, and measuring cloths that would later adorn another dozen mannequins. Giovanna took my hand and led me farther into that deliciously artificial world. As we crossed the space, I felt amazement that she would take my hand that way, as if we were children playing, and she went along talking about things I didn’t quite understand, until we came up to a cork wall where I thought I recognized some of Giovanna’s sketches. I quickly realized I was wrong. They weren’t sketches of dresses, but something stranger: photographs, clipped from newsprint, in which a masked face appeared over and over. With a happiness that had little to do with our surroundings, with an eagerness that bordered on insipid, Giovanna asked me if I recognized him. Furious, feeling the joke was growing more absurd, I dropped her hand.

  * * *

  Obviously I recognized him. The news had exploded five years earlier, accompanying the New Year like fireworks. A group of indigenous guerrillas had leapt from the jungle to declare war on the Mexican government. In the first hours of the New Year they’d taken control of the main municipal seats. From there they had read a manifesto in which they asked for equality, declared war on the state, and swore to march as far as Mexico City. I remember how when I read the manifesto for the first time, I said to Tancredo that the whole thing seemed orchestrated by a raving poet. What fascinated everyone, however, were the masks: ski masks, like the ones that Mexican aristocrats themselves used on their weekend ski trips to Colorado. Those masks seemed to re-cloak the jungle in its own anonymity. Still, looking past it all, past the masks and manifestos, past the high-level resignations and the newspaper headlines, the public had started to recognize the eyes of this man I now saw before me in a kind of photo collage, over which my friend had drawn red marker lines of possible connection.

  Obviously I recognized the figure of Subcomandante Marcos, that bandolero of the last stages of the twentieth century, that Latin American cowboy, that Marxist John Wayne. I recognized, in fact, the central photo: the subcomandante on a horse, jungle behind him and the horse’s imposing head in front, his eyes a little tired as he smokes his famous pipe. I had always been curious about it, about that photo, the fact that some kind of necklace seemed to be tied around the subcomandante’s neck, a kind of amulet whose origin I never managed to decipher. I glanced at that enigmatic amulet and then got lost in that crazy collage. Finally, when my eyes were exhausted and the sound of the tailors’ incessant labor behind me seemed to grow louder, I turned toward Giovanna and admitted that I knew his story. Giovanna looked at me eagerly, as if we were on the verge of a breakthrough, and she told me that just a week before, on a trip to Milan, she’d met a very interesting woman. A woman who had come to New York very young, wanting to start a career as a dancer, and after a few years, she’d done just that: she had performed with the most prestigious companies, until her body had failed her a decade later, and an injury forced her to reconsider her career. Then she decided to take up writing and journalism. Giovanna had talked to this woman about the history of masks. She then pointed to a couple of photos, one of a masked man who could well be the subcomandante and, next to it, close enough to force a comparison, a photo of a man with light skin and a well-trimmed beard. She said this journalist had been at the press conference when the Mexican government had tried to unmask the subcomandante. A very serious man had stood before a group of journalists with two enlarged photographs, one of a ski mask and the other an enlarged copy of this photo I had before me now. With a mechanical movement he’d superimposed the enormous cutout of the mask over the photo of the face, until everyone had seen appear, as if by magic, the initial image of that masked man who could well be the subcomandante. If she’d learned anything from that, the woman said, it was the strange power of masks. The government believed it was taking away the subcomandante’s power by unmasking him. The result was the opposite. A week later, thousands of masked citizens protested in Mexico City under the cry of “Todos somos Marcos” (We are all Marcos). Giovanna’s eyes lit up when she told me all this, as if she were finally understanding something. Then she went on with the story: her friend the journalist had convinced the newspaper to let her go to Mexico to see the subcomandante. And just like that, apparently convinced she could just dance her way through the jungle, she’d hacked through the underbrush to reach the camp where Marcos was said to be staying. She waited nearly twelve hours for him, until at dawn a masked man appeared. His eyes revealed no indigenous heritage. No, the journalist said, his eyes were marked by the perpetual energy of the insomniac. That mention of insomnia made me think of the woman in the bar, and I couldn’t help looking at Giovanna with a certain distaste. Excited as she was over what seemed to be her great discovery, she apparently didn’t notice my irritation. She had decided, she went on to say, that the new show would be a re-elaboration of the subject of masks. Tired, a little annoyed by the false theatricality, I moved my head in a vague sign of approval, while inside me I felt a confused indignation grow. Behind us, the tailor shop hummed.

  * * *

  I must admit that if I didn’t leave the project then, if the cliché of a fashion designer’s sudden obsession with Latin American politics didn’t se
nd me running for the door, it was because of my own strange fixation on Giovanna and her past. That was what kept me from turning away from the beginning of a story that, twenty years later, brought me exhausted to that wall full of photographs. I kept looking at the portraits of a masked man I knew of and perhaps admired, as one always admires people shrouded in mystery, but who, perhaps because of my own cowardice, I regarded as other. I looked at Giovanna with a coward’s contempt, but in her I saw only the face of a ten-year-old girl, the marks of a deep-rooted passion that now had the soundtrack of a minimalist sonata of sewing machines. I looked at her resentfully, the way a soldier would look at the general who has led him into war under some false pretense, but I suddenly understood that everything about her was real, even her innocence, and that I would follow her even into the jungle. I thought of the story she’d just told me: the dancer-cum-journalist hacking her way through the jungle, afraid of the death she felt all around her, making her way through a forest that surely smelled of fear, only to find, at the end of a long wait, the eyes of an insomniac. Thinking of Tancredo, I told myself that the joke was flourishing like the jungle itself, and the saddest part was that I would never learn to dance. At the end of it all I’d find myself looking into the insomniac eyes of a William Howard, who would tell me the story of an island where a group of insomniacs risk their lives to become other people.

  I thought about saying all this to Giovanna. I thought about telling her of the fear hidden behind Tancredo’s jokes, behind my conjectures about her past, and the strange way that something in me was starting to love her, little by little and without passion, as the timid do. Still, something held me back. Perhaps, now that I think about it, it was the monotony of the machines. Terribly tired, finally ready to sleep, I kissed Giovanna’s cheek, congratulated her on her evident achievement, and excused myself by saying I was needed at the museum. I practically stumbled past the machines to reach the door. As I left, I thought I saw the strange man again, but I assured myself it was a simple coincidence, just as it was, perhaps, a sad coincidence that I’d answered a certain phone call just past five in the morning.

  * * *

  I never slept better than I did that night. For the first time in a long time I let the driver take me straight to my apartment in New Brunswick, and when I got there, I felt something I had sensed for years but hadn’t had the strength to articulate: that time passes stubbornly, even when there is a Manhattan bar where an old insomniac reads newspapers as if eternity were in play. The realization didn’t last very long, however. After a few minutes I was sound asleep. They say that it’s in that kind of deep sleep when the brain lets loose the most. Maybe that’s why I had a kind of multiple dream. There was a mirror, and over the reflected image was a newspaper. I tried to read it, but suddenly the newspaper was covered with ants and I had to drop it. Then the man with the collarless shirt appeared and picked it up. He read something aloud, a few lines of something like a furniture assembly manual or a legal text, and I stood there without understanding, waiting for the man to reveal his identity. Nothing happened. And then, just when he stopped reading, a brief, precise sound started to repeat in the background, a bit slow and very quiet, but growing until it drowned out everything else. I stood there, waiting to finally understand the meaning of this dream image that was becoming long and evasive like a fish in the ocean. Some part of me accepted that that was the point, and sleep had to be a bit like an extended joke to which one could only surrender, accepting that understanding would come only at the very end. Something tells me that even today, seven years later, something in me is asleep, and something, finally, is waking up.

  12

  A week ago, when I found Giovanna’s obituary in the paper, I felt tempted to write another one for her—anonymously, in the name of the museum—and then send it to the national paper of a country where no one knew her: a Puerto Rican or Dominican or maybe even Cuban newspaper, an island paper, in memory of all those islands she always talked about. To leave it there, a little lost amid all the other deaths, adrift as she said she’d been in the tropics. To leave it there like a message I knew no one would read. Then I remembered that old girlfriend of mine, a woman with dyed red curls and a mischievous expression who lived in the Bronx, heir to an intimate tropical battle—she was half Dominican and half Puerto Rican. Her job had been precisely that: to write other people’s obituaries. It seemed that sometimes families, defeated by grief, couldn’t gather the strength to write obituaries for their family members. So they tasked strangers with the terrible job of telling the world their loved one was no longer with them, but how very loved they’d been. One only had to call a number that appeared in the paper, and give the name of the deceased. A serene voice would offer condolences and assure them that everything would be taken care of. I always found it odd to imagine my girlfriend, who was so playful and saucy, modulating her voice to achieve an absolute serenity, assuring the stranger who could only sob on the other end that everything would be okay and that the world would know of their sorrow.

  Several times, when I’d arrived after the long trip from New Brunswick to the Bronx—a trip that involved an infinite series of trains—I’d find her sitting at her desk, writing obituaries, while at her back rose the sound of a salsa whose rhythm she followed with slight head movements, making those curls that so enchanted me dance tenderly. And I’d wrap her in a spontaneous hug, and suddenly we were an enormous two-headed monster bent over a paper reading an obituary that to me seemed awfully sincere. She wrote with an intimate style it had taken her only a week to learn. I asked her if she wasn’t caught off guard sometimes by the emotion of her work, the pathos in her labor, but she answered with the briefest of smiles that there was no better job in the world. And in her laugh there was a spark of morbid fascination that grew and melded with the salsa and became joy. Thinking of her, perhaps infected by a morbid happiness that itself was a strange form of mourning, I decided not to write the obituary and resigned myself to a humbler task: gathering the ones others had written for Giovanna—all I could find, print and digital—into a posthumous collection born of desperate mimicry.

  Like those animals, Giovanna would have wanted to add, who see a predator coming and bury themselves in fallen leaves in a last-ditch attempt to escape. I compiled all the obituaries, one by one, until I was buried in a mess of papers that only pointed to her fatal absence. Among the dozens of obituaries I found, not one mentioned her parents. There were museums and institutions, private collectors and celebrities—one article was even written by Tancredo—but that was it. Then I remembered the boards where Giovanna used to unfurl the strategy of her madness, those boards where the photos built up, the sketches and press clippings, in a kind of megalomania that wasn’t unlike the quiet frenzy—in a totally different kind of room, stripped of all luxury—of my old girlfriend as she went about her job writing death notices. Then I took Giovanna’s obituaries and hung them up, one by one, on the corkboard I’d bought that summer. And then, briefly, I thought I loved her a little.

  * * *

  I look at the clock: three in the morning. I think how it could all be so easy, even easier than fire. As easy as finally setting my cowardice aside and opening the envelopes, looking at what I think I already know is there, the sketches and annotations, the papers that remained after those long conversations between two obsessives in the middle of the night. Even easier than writing an obituary. Open the envelopes and find everything that she, very much in code, had warned that she would leave to me. Arrive a little late and find it all laid out already, like the time I went to her house and there was no Giovanna, just a book open in the middle of the room. On closer inspection I found images and sketches of masks, with a word—nahual—underlined in red, followed by a very strange quote from a certain Díaz de Arce, a summons to listen to the voices of the children and women, because that’s where true prophesies were found. I would only have to sit down the way I did that night, read the notes, and lie down
to sleep. Swallow whatever dreams came and wake up again, ready for a new life.

  * * *

  But, as Tancredo says, distraction is our modern art. Something always opposes us, diverts us from our course. With that thought, a little tired but still charged with the strength of my last cup of coffee, I’ve returned to looking out the window, and I’ve noticed a young woman, maybe around thirty, walking her dog through the neighborhood in the wee morning hours. It’s three o’clock, I say to myself. To say the “wee hours” is perhaps not to understand that in two and a half hours, at exactly five-thirty, the sun will rise and workers will spring into action, while the rest of us let ourselves sleep in two more hours. It’s already Friday, I say to myself. Today I have to be at the museum by nine at the latest. But there is the woman, brown hair, tall, and thin, walking a dog that at times seems to emphasize her airiness. Then I repeat the phrase that always ambushed me on the trip from New Brunswick to New York: In this city there are no stray dogs. I repeat it, and nothing changes. Everything stays the same, hard as a rock in the middle of the night. And I say to myself, it may be three o’clock, but someone has to be awake to take in a scene that would otherwise be lost.

  The early-morning hours, I think, set images to trembling. Everything takes on ambivalence and an oneiric shading: as if the false light from the streetlamps suspended time and lent reality an aura of possibility. I think of Giovanna, the enthusiastic tone of voice she reserved for conversations about fireflies and their playful relationship with light. I always wondered in what colors the ten-year-old girl saw the world as she lay convalescing, while beside her a foreign voice read her fables of the ends of the earth. I wondered what the ten-year-old girl would do when, as night fell, the lights went out and all that remained was her parents’ absence, the silence without fables or fireflies marking the rhythm of the scene. I never found any answers, other than Giovanna’s insolent enthusiasm as she threw herself into a political reality that was terribly foreign to her.