Natural History

by Carlos Fonseca

  * * *

  You can read a cat’s insomnia in his eyes, Tancredo says. He says it as if he knew them, as if he secretly frequented their meetings, as if he belonged to the animal world. He says it and then he corrects himself. Cats, he repeats, inhabit an in-between world. Scientists have demonstrated it, he repeats, as if it mattered to me, and then he goes on to explain what he calls science: the fact that it’s been proven that feline brain waves are similar to those of human beings when they sleep.

  * * *

  Maybe that’s why, the day I decided to shave, I thought of Tancredo. Shaving, now that I think about it, was my way of marking a change: a before and after that simulated metamorphosis. I saw myself in the mirror: tired and old, fatter than I used to be, but still willing to fight the last battle. And there was the beard, the beard I’d had since I was twenty, full at times and at others timid, but always there, hiding much of my face. I thought about how, though it seems strange in retrospect, Giovanna and I had never talked about the beard, hair as a mask. That was ultimately what my beard had been: at first a way to hide my youth, then a way to hide behind the anonymity of the ordinary, until it became the mask that hid a premature old age. But something in me now was starting to resist: part of me wanted to be a child again. I ran my fingers over my beard, and, to the rhythm of a Dominican bachata, I saw the fuzz fall until there was no more hair on my face but a lively mustache. I laughed at the thought that I had become, at the end of the day, one of those cats Tancredo talked about, a kind of eternal watcher of the sleeping world. I laughed at the thought that a man could come to look like a cat. It was then that I understood the meaning the words I’d written would have: The Invisible Border was another name for the gaze. I thought about Hopper and the characters of his paintings, those men and women in broad daylight who seemed to look toward an outside that was forbidden to the viewer. I looked at myself in the mirror, with the peppy mustache in the middle of my face, and I played for a few seconds at becoming unrecognizable. I played at losing myself in grimaces, with the plastic joy of a person repeating a word until it’s deformed. Everything changed except my eyes. I felt a childish joy as I told myself that that was what The Invisible Border would be: an enormous exhibit on the animal gaze, a giant parade of eyes. I told myself this, and for an instant, while the razor removed the mustache, I forgot Giovanna’s eyes, the medical envelope, the anxious fingers. I forgot that I’d imagined her naked in the middle of the room, that I’d desired her, even if for a brief instant. With the last swipe of the razor, I stared at myself again in the mirror: I looked young and strange, a cat without whiskers, anxious and ready to wake up.

  14

  When I was little I was always fascinated by that instant in cartoons when a character runs off a cliff and hangs there, his legs moving over the abyss, until he decides to look down and becomes aware of his folly. It didn’t matter how many times I saw that scene, I was always hit by the same disappointment at witnessing the cartoon character’s foolishness, his always inopportune decision to give in to the world of gravity and thus of logic. Cunning, as I think about it now, was in suspending the time of reason, in becoming weightless: in seeing how long one could run across the void, refusing to look down. Like now, as I realize that I’m the one who refuses to look down, to break the spell of the joke that’s still growing now, past four in the morning. Outside, the night simply continues, while inside, I look at the envelopes again, the five points of the quincunx that now seem to want to take flight. “Tragedy or farce?” I remember then a question that Tancredo often asks: How long can a joke go on? Like in the cartoons, the jokester’s trick consists of not looking down: to look down is to finally give in to the inevitable tragedy, while to go on running in the void is to choose the foolishness of laughter and of farce. The jokester’s trick, says Tancredo, consists of keeping the audience on the edges of their seats, removing certainty, suspending them in a cloud of expectations, until he sees them emerge suddenly from behind a shared laugh. The jokester who doubts falls into the silent abyss. Now, after four in the morning, I start to feel like my time is coming, that the joke is reaching its end and the room for laughter is opening up.

  * * *

  Outside, in the house across the street, a light has come on, and I recognize, through the window, the silhouette of a woman making coffee. The day is here, I say to myself. The hour has arrived when people allow themselves to turn on the lights, make coffee, show themselves. Emerge from the anonymity of insomnia. I think of Hopper, of the strange light in his paintings, a shadow light, a silhouette light, and suddenly the image of an enormous fishbowl comes to me. I wonder whether there were fish in the fables Giovanna heard in that tropical hospital, and, if there were, what language they spoke. Through the now-illuminated window, the woman starts to read something that could well be a newspaper, but then I think it’s too early for the paper, the delivery boy comes by at five. I look at her again, the honed feminine shape behind the window. I wonder if I could come to love her. That’s how we private men are: we love what is behind windows. Closeness becomes unbearable for us.

  * * *

  Giovanna had an aquarium in her house, with many fish that she fed regularly. Fish of all colors. Orange ones with black-and-white stripes, blue ones and yellow ones, and my favorites: the catfish. Those creatures of the deep with the faces of grumpy little men, scavengers who spend nights cleaning the underwater subsoil, suctioning up the remains of their colorful compatriots’ diurnal lives. Giovanna would stop the conversation, open a drawer, and take out a little box; then, with her walk that was itself a little like a fish or a manta ray, she’d go over to the tank and feed her pets. I felt a strange alliance with those scavenger fish. The last crumbs of the night belonged to me, too, while the day was for others. I never knew if Giovanna had lovers, although if she did, I told myself, they must be daytime lovers. Maybe on one of those sudden trips that took her to Milan, Prague, Barcelona, she read verses to a man who had learned to desire her better than I did.

  * * *

  Again, I observe the scene across the street: the woman has stood up and slowly, as if she were still asleep, walked to the coffeepot. She’s poured a little more coffee and turned back to her reading. In one corner of the envelope I’ve written a phrase, almost a title: Scenes from a private life. And I’ve started to think about how Americans are really marvelous in those minor genres of private life. Suburban dramas, movies about hysterical men and women, tragicomedies about the malaise of the petite bourgeoisie. “What’s it to you?” The words of the woman in the Bowery have leapt up unexpectedly, and a little voice tells me that we’re all fish in small adjacent tanks trying to look at each other in the night, knowing there’s an invisible barrier between us. Giovanna desperately wanted to leave all this ordinary life behind, I think to myself. She wanted to become invisible and anonymous, to then leap out and encompass everything. Through the window, two houses down, I see another light go on.

  * * *

  Private catastrophes, Tancredo sometimes calls them, as he scarfs down a hamburger. Private catastrophes, he says, and in his voice I note that acidic irony that annoys and entertains me: it’s a way of suspending the truth, of offering words the way one hands over pieces of a puzzle, with the grace of the tightrope walker who bet everything on a simple metaphor. I sometimes feel, looking at Tancredo in his red-brimmed hat, the brushstroke of the solitary mustache across his pale face, that his strategy is to build a metaphorical world, a theory world: a strategy based on the future. Sometimes, though, his cynicism exasperates me, and I feel like his profile gives him away: a man at the end of times, a decadent man without a future who in a New Brunswick diner tries to dissolve the real in a giant net of kooky allusions. Private catastrophes, says Tancredo, and with that expression he tries to mock my theory of beginnings. According to him, there is no repetition or copy in the beginning, but rather a simple, small explosion that suddenly awakens something within a man. All this to say: the world
is kept moving by the common man’s hysteria.

  And it’s been precisely with the bravery of a common man, with the patience of an algae or a fish, that I have approached the envelopes and placed them all on the table. Three manila envelopes adorned with a red cord. I’ve placed the envelopes on the table, starting with that first one where I recognize Giovanna’s fragile handwriting: Notes (1999). I remember the parties on New Year’s Eve that year, the call from Giovanna after ten o’clock: she was in Rome and she already belonged to the next century. Drunk, she’d said things that I didn’t want to hear and that later I forgot or believed I’d forgotten, just like I forgot or pretended to forget about that doctor’s envelope. Notes (1999): the fears that were left behind, reduced to the ravings of the past century, and the fears that were only just starting to grow. Outside, a light in another house punctuates the still-dark scene, and I see a man in pajamas holding a small boy in his arms. I think of Giovanna, the medical envelope, and the ten-year-old girl. Moving closer to the fragile threshold that now separates night from day, I start to untangle the first knot of the cord.

  15

  After was after: days, weeks, months, years that started to pile up as Giovanna endeavored to disappear. Or maybe I was the one who, driven by a zeal for forgetting, finally started to emerge, thinner and beardless, from an even deeper neglect. Something in me seemed determined to do battle against that great farce of anonymity with a showy dramaticism. The museum had accepted my proposal, and the exhibition The Invisible Border was scheduled for the following year. Giovanna still called, but now nothing was the same: more than collaborators, we were like old lovers doomed to invoke the past and its now inaccessible nights of passion. Months would pass without a word from her, and part of me was relieved. Months during which I toyed with the little jade elephant I’d stolen from her. I fiddled with it just as she had, with unconscious worry, while I set to organizing the exhibition that was slowly starting to take on the shape of my ambition: I played with the order of photographs, switched out texts, I amused myself by sprinkling human gazes among that great parade of animal eyes. She disappeared for months and I swore she was headed for the jungle, that she was hacking through the weeds at night to reach the camp where an insomniac subcomandante’s eyes would receive her. I merely followed her travels from afar, tracked the path of the subcomandante’s poetic pronouncements, waiting for the day when the newspapers would announce the surprising meeting between a fashion designer and a leftist leader. I laughed at the thought of the barbarities the right-wing press would suggest: the love affairs they’d imagine, the perverse stories of corruption they’d weave around a simple and innocent image. Still, the months passed and nothing happened. She’d come back from her long trips thinner and more evasive, as if the project were now growing behind my back and the secret turning deep and unpronounceable. The idea, always present but ignored, that her destination in those months of silence could be another hospital ate away at me from inside. Our conversation continued naturally, but I felt that everything had ended some months ago, with Giovanna on the phone nodding yes. I felt that we were only there as part of a ghost story just reaching its denouement. What I liked most of all was to go out walking to the bar in the Bowery. I liked to sit there, and, freed now from curiosity but still accompanied by the newspaper reader, I worked on the exhibit with an absolute voracity, the same voracity with which, a few tables over, the woman devoured the news with a gaze I now knew was empty. I knuckled down over my red leather notebook and sketched out crazy ideas: bringing a live animal to the museum, creating an anatomy of the gaze, filling the hall with portraits of eyes until the gazes got confused and no one could tell which ones were animal and which human. I worked intensely until exhaustion or the image of a sick Giovanna came to me and stopped me in my tracks, and the idea of continuing became unbearable. Then I’d take the train, and when I got home, I’d fall deeply asleep as I hadn’t in a long time, placidly surrounded by thousands of eyes, faint and indistinct, that seemed to keep watch over my dreams.

  * * *

  We expected the end times and what we got was a pointless hangover, said Tancredo. I nodded, not wanting to contradict him, but inside I was thinking that finally my time was coming. Something had changed irrevocably, though it had nothing to do with the end of days. Something had mutated and the shell had broken. Spring could already be glimpsed, and while the bars were full of people drinking, I told myself that now was the time for sobriety, the moment to grasp the reins and finally take a risk. I felt at ease, at peace within that strange habitat I had managed to build for myself. I had turned into a rare bird, an insect that buzzed its wings incessantly to keep from falling, but that, little by little, had learned such speed wasn’t necessary; it was enough to keep up a moderate but practiced pace. Patience, I’d say to Tancredo, as I thought about how the metaphor was wrong, how it wasn’t that I had spent years unnecessarily flapping my wings, but quite the opposite. I’d spent my time in stillness, to the point of disappearing entirely from the landscape. Only now, slowly, with reptilian stealth, was I starting to emerge from that lair I’d constructed so carefully. Haven’t you heard of Gestalt psychology? asked Tancredo. Whenever one figure appears it’s because something else has disappeared into the background. Something in me fearfully intuited the consequences of my awakening.

  * * *

  Whenever one thing appears it’s because something else has disappeared, background and figure, repeated Tancredo, while in my mind the image of Giovanna returned me to a childhood memory. I thought back to the afternoons when my father took me to the zoo. I wasn’t interested in the marquee animals—I was bored by the elephants and lions, the zebras and monkeys. I was saddened at the sight of their supreme boredom, where, now that I think of it, I saw glinting a kind of vulgar portrait of the adult world. I loved, on the other hand, the vivarium: those visual Pandora’s boxes of hidden, living enigmas. I would stand fascinated before the boxes, and without looking at the name of the animal, try to decipher what it was all about. Life as a puzzle or a stereogram. In some cases, the answer was obvious: you could see the sinuous, damp shape of the snake on the dry trunk, the fluttering presence of the butterfly, the sinister tedium of the solitary iguana on the rock. But in other cases, you saw only absolute emptiness on the other side of the glass. As if the original animal had died and the zoo employees had forgotten to replace it with a new one. And I would hover in front of those apparently empty boxes, waiting for the figure that had been hidden to suddenly emerge: the singular butterfly that blends with the branches, the laborious ants in their heretofore unseen labor, the same iguana in whose stillness I now saw impudence instead of boredom. I loved those little captive tropics where nothingness at last became visible. And so I detested the impatient children who, seeing nothing behind the glass, dared to tap on it in a desperate attempt to make something show itself. I remember being in front of one of those tropical theaters where nothing seemed to be happening in spite of the other children’s impatient tapping. Positive that nothing was there, they soon went on to other boxes. But I stayed where I was, in spite of my father’s insistence; like the others, he thought nothing was there. Then I’d seen it slowly emerge: not merely the animal within the landscape, but the animal-landscape, the animal that was itself the landscape in which we’d looked for it. I turned to find out the precise name inscribed on the plaque: “Mula del Diablo (walking stick), Costa Rica.” Below that, a subheading that stayed with me long after, read: “Phasmid.” I had seen that small phasmid emerge with the impression that this was no typical camouflage, but rather something more sinister: an animal that, little by little, was devouring the landscape with the secret ambition of becoming the scene. Years later, in a book by a French philosopher, I would discover the concepts necessary to grasp what simply unfolded that day: the copy was devouring the model. But that would come later. The twelve-year-old boy who stood before the empty cage that afternoon had a different impression: that he was facing
an extraordinary animal, one more frightening than any other precisely because its ambition was not necessarily to survive, but to transcend life. A second discovery overwhelmed me as I got closer to the glass: this wasn’t just one creature, but rather dozens of tiny insects that melded together until they created a kind of collective body seemingly set on emulating an absent landscape. A horrible confusion kept me awake that night as I tried to understand exactly what it was I’d seen. What had become visible, and what had remained unseen? During that now distant spring, the image of a swarm of insects stayed with me as a kind of warning: what appears out of nowhere is always something close to nothingness itself. A terrible nothingness that still aspires to encompass everything.

  As I thought back to that day I was certain that Giovanna and I were something like those phasmids, a paired background and figure, our secret ambition to meld with absolute nothingness. And thus the spring lengthened out like a tightrope between all and nothing, while I tried to convince myself that the only way to truly keep Giovanna company was to learn to lose her. I saw her return from one of her enigmatic trips, thinner and paler, but I soothed myself by saying it was all pure illusion. Soon we would change perspective and the real image would emerge, masterful and precise: we would realize that her thinness was nothing but one side of another, more ferocious reality, one that impelled her to meld into the landscape with the strength of that elusive insect from my childhood. Whenever one thing appears it’s because something else has disappeared, background and figure, asserted Tancredo, while in my mind it wasn’t the real Giovanna who was disappearing, but the ten-year-old girl she’d been.