5
Chess is a futures game, says the old man, while around him the dogs doze as if resting atop the tedium. Doesn’t matter. With the aura of a tired elephant, patient and immemorial, he moves a piece, then another, and the sound of the canaries abruptly falls silent. Then I start to think about the numbers I’ve read: the four thousand people who lived in the town in 1962, the thousand people who remained in 1979, the two hundred left in 1985, the nine in 1997. I think about those figures, and the resulting image is of a city that slowly emptied of people so it could be filled by canaries.
My friend John told me the story. He’s told me how, when the town’s inhabitants found out about the fires, they decided to turn to the old trick of the canary in the mine. Over half the town went out and bought a canary. They brought them home and set them to singing, he explained, afraid that one day a canary’s silence would indicate the end was nigh: methane, carbon monoxide, any of those gases whose presence foretold death, one way or another. As John told me on one of those long walks we took through the ghosts of the absent town, the canaries lasted longer than the townspeople. Month by month, week by week, day by day, you heard of another family who’d decided to leave town. And they left behind, as a legacy of catastrophe, their little mine canary. They’d leave it with a mother, a brother, a friend: someone in whose character they detected fidelity and permanence. And that’s how the canaries began to pass from hand to hand, until one day the townspeople all understood, not without surprise, that the only one who would stay to the end would be the foreign photographer. They started to come to his house, canaries in hand. People who had never even said a word to him. People who had maybe heard of him once or twice. People who one day found work in a nearby city, and, in the bustle of the move, decided to resolve the matter of the canary with an expression equal parts unexpected and conclusive: “No problem, we’ll leave it with the photographer.” The town was emptying out, but his house filled up with feathers and song. The canaries would be, so to speak, his inheritance, just as mine would be that series of envelopes full of photos and articles, newspaper clippings, and half-drawn clues that would end up returning me, unwittingly, to the imagined scene of a young Giovanna lost amid the empty alleys of a remote mining town.
* * *
And so, in the evenings, while the old man works on his models and I hear the creak of wood coming from the garage, I open the envelopes and find Toledano’s writings among the legacy of orphaned papers. Then I sit down, putting the novel aside, and read. I read the occasional phrase out loud. For example, this sentence of his that I like so much: “A photograph, like a cloud, is never a thing in itself, but rather the sign that something will happen.” I repeat the words until they no longer mean anything, and then I sit and watch the clouds go by, the passing tedium, and hear the strange way the canaries have of spacing out silences between their songs. I repeat the words until suddenly I understand that this man bet it all on an empty future. His wager is on leaving no legacy. Farther on in the same article I find an encyclopedia definition of the phenomenon of combustion. A terribly boring definition that I think Toledano must have copied out feeling that the future was a thing that could be consumed bit by bit, a substance as flammable as the lands that surrounded him. A canary sings again and I read:
Combustion (from the Latin combustio) is a chemical reaction of oxidation, in which a large quantity of energy is obtained in the form of heat and light, manifesting visually as fire and other phenomena. In all combustion there is an element that burns (fuel) and another that produces the combustion (oxidant), generally oxygen in the form of gaseous O2.
Farther down is the chemical equation of combustion. I sit thinking about it all, that strange intersection of poetic and scientific language. In this story, I think, it’s not clear what was fuel and what was oxidant, what set fire and what burned. Then I stop reading. I approach the garage slowly and stop to look at the old man as he builds his models, until he realizes I’m there and stops working. I don’t say anything. Nor do I look more closely. It scares me to think that in those models lies the key to the story. I’m afraid to see what I already know. I’d rather listen to him talk. That’s why, as soon as I realize the old man has noticed I’m there, I go back to bed and stretch out to go on reading my novel, knowing that in a few hours I’ll hear another whistle, and when I go outside I’ll see the chess pieces arranged over the exact shades of this provincial dusk. Chess is a game of futures, I’ll think then, just as the old man said.
6
They grow together. She as a model, he as a photographer. That same night, after they flee the party, she makes him repeat three times that he’ll delay his departure. Not only that: she convinces him that he deserves a more respectable job. That’s the end of the faits divers, the three-line stories, the journalistic epigrams beneath photos. From now on he will dedicate himself only to his two great passions: her and photography. Virginia McCallister says it like that, decisively, with character, and young Yoav Toledano can only accept the all-consuming strength of this girl who hasn’t even come of age. That night they escape together. Sick of champagne toasts, tired of the anemic conversations of the rich, they take a taxi and head south. Half an hour later the night finds them sitting outside a small bodega on the Lower East Side, listening to the drums of a couple of Caribbean musicians. They’re enjoying a little taste of what in less than ten years will become salsa music. For them, however, the future holds little interest. That night, they’re interested in the intensity of the present, the precision of voices and kisses. They’re interested in being complements to each other. From then on, that’s what they’ll be: two opposing worlds in conversation, the photographic negative that Toledano had sought. Northern, rich, and sedentary versus southern, poor, and nomadic. In the years to come, growing together will mean, more than anything, sharing a two-way highway: one that will lead them, always, from the Upper East Side mansions to the bohemian underworlds of the Bowery, and from Warhol’s SoHo to the Upper West Side of Virginia’s parents. Growing together will mean, above all, repeating every once in a while the initial act of rebellion.
* * *
One week later, Toledano quits his job at the newspaper and starts to work as a photographer for an art gallery owned by a friend of Virginia’s parents. Two months later, Virginia herself, tired of not having him nearby, convinces the editors of a prestigious fashion magazine to hire the young Israeli. From then on, they are only seen together: in the studio and out, at rich people’s parties, and in downtown taverns. They share everything: reading, a bed, obsessions, and even the drugs that are starting to be consumed in those days at the parties of New York bohemia. Their ascent is meteoric. After two years, they are both fashion-world darlings. New contracts come in. Virginia films her first movies, while Toledano makes a name for himself in fashion photography. Never, though, do they forget the first night. In the glamorous world where they live, it’s well known that they take excursions to southern Bohemia, that they’re aficionados of Caribbean rhythms, and it’s even rumored that they share a house in the Bowery with dozens of Puerto Ricans. The rumors are part of their glamour and charm: a couple living outside the rules of society. A magical couple, able to combine luxury with an incendiary private life, from whose secrets the press is necessarily excluded. Perhaps that’s why no one, not even their parents, is surprised to hear, from third parties, that the couple has begun to travel—to Atlanta, Florida, Tennessee, to Haiti and Cuba—to the south they find so seductive in its intensity.
* * *
Then other rumors start. Word begins to spread that they’re caught up in red networks—Communist groups. Those are the years of the Cuban revolution, they’re McCarthy years, and although their southern trips happen just before the embargo is declared against the Cubans, the coincidence only increases the story’s morbid appeal. Nor does it help that, after meeting some Cuban leaders on a brief visit to New York, Toledano has stayed in touch with them. Even less that he�
�s taken a photograph or two of Cuban leaders, a certain portrait that as the years pass will take on iconic weight. People start to label them Communists, they’re branded as witch doctors, people associate them with esoteric beliefs. The strange thing is that for once the tabloids are not wrong. They may have unsound sources, they may exaggerate when they say the couple was spotted drinking crocodile blood, but the truth is that those who know them also know that they’ve traded in their old friends for new ones. They seem to be called, so to speak, to act in the service of some strange illumination. They turn up to fewer showbiz parties, they’re seen with different groups of friends, and those who do see them notice a peculiar spark in their eyes. And what they see, more than anything, is a quest: Yoav Toledano and Virginia McCallister seek, with the fury of the worst kind of fire, a way out of the whirlwind growing around them. First they escape into fame, then into religion, then down the path of politics, only to end up mixing all those routes together in a hallucinogenic cocktail that, toward the middle of the decade, begins to soak their days.
* * *
Now that he’s telling his story of the pilgrimage that ended when he came to this empty town, he doesn’t remember the moment perfectly, but he conjectures that it was in those drugged-out days when a crazy idea started to rattle around in his mind. He doesn’t know if it was the drugs, but it was during that time when he started to glimpse the idea that would eventually bring them to the middle of the jungle, in search of a lost city that few had ever seen. The idea, fixed and absurd like all obsessions, was this: Just as at the end of history the beginning was to be found—divine justice, angels, and God—likewise, the end of the left’s political journey would be the right: the divine point where violence would coincide with itself and opposing political forces would stare each other in the face. A sort of angelic epic poem. He spent his days thinking about his theory, searching for books that would confirm it; he even remembers having outlined his ideas in a new little red leather notebook on whose first page he had scrawled a memorable title: Notes on Beauty and Destruction. A perfect title for the couple and for that pack of beautiful beings with whom they spent their mornings, among cameras of all kinds. A title under which Toledano composes, over the course of two years, an impressive theory around what he calls the end of history. A compendium of examples that include reflections on the atomic bomb, the burning of the Library of Alexandria, the years of Jacobin terror, his own family history. He makes his notes in secret, convinced that someday they will explain the political turn he is taking during that time. One day, in 1966, Toledano stands up and proclaims there is nothing more beautiful than destruction. Two days later, his wife wakes him with unexpected news: she is pregnant. That day, Toledano anxiously looks through his notebooks in search of a reply. He can’t find any answer other than the face of horror.
* * *
After a long conversation that stretches into dawn, they decide to have the child on the condition that Virginia cuts down her drug use. From that moment on, Toledano seems like another person. He sets aside the drugs, submerges himself in the world of Santeria, tries to distance himself from the theories that have brought him to the edge of Nazism. It’s Virginia McCallister, on the other hand, who seems to take up her husband’s conceptual delirium. One day she finds his notebook tossed onto the bed, and what she reads there enchants her. It occurs to her that this is the only way to explain her lifelong fascination with a certain family anecdote: During the civil war, her great-grandfather had marched his men southward, and they burned everything in their path. This is the only way, the model says to herself as she reads her husband’s notes, to explain her strange fascination with her great-grandfather William Sherman and his infamous March to the Sea. Starting that day she makes notes of her own, and she decides to take up old Sherman’s lost tradition—finding there, perhaps, the euphoria she needs to replace the energy of the drugged nights. Perhaps. What is certain is that from that moment on, the red leather notebook is hers. It’s where she jots down her ideas, where she imagines, during the long and tedious nine months of her pregnancy, another possible story. There, in the margins, she starts to draw little maps, trajectories outlining alternative histories, pilgrimages to the south, just what her husband is trying to forget by throwing himself into work. But she doesn’t want to forget: quite the opposite, she wants to remember, just in a different way. She writes frenetically, without pause, even when they tell her she’s carrying a girl, even when, months later, they tell her the girl could be born deaf, even when she knows she’ll give birth any day. The first contractions, in fact, catch her with pen in hand, sketching the routes of destruction that her forebear took, trying to forget that in a few hours she will bring her first child into the world. Even twenty hours later, when she’s presented with a tender little pink-and-white blob named Carolyn, Virginia smiles briefly, caresses and kisses her, but minutes later she returns to her writing and reading, as if her life depended on it.
* * *
These are misleading years. On the surface, nothing seems to change their careers’ upward momentum. The projects multiply, the movies, the photo shoots. They’re seen along with the little girl in recording studios, at this or that movie premiere, in fashion magazines. A model family, that’s what anyone would see in those ubiquitous photos—and yet it’s precisely during that time when Virginia McCallister’s esoteric theories turn their most hallucinatory. It’s during those days that she returns to Toledano’s premise about the end of history, and she combines it with her own theories of destruction. Starting then, behind a facade of normalcy, she becomes obsessed with an idea: of finding the way out before it’s too late. Those years pass quickly, in a whirlwind of ideas and conjectures that end up returning her to the world of hallucinogenics she thought she’d left behind. Breakneck years that lead up to the night when, for the first time, she hears about the commune.
* * *
Now that he’s telling the story, Toledano doesn’t remember exactly who first mentioned its existence, but he does remember that they first heard about the commune at an entertainment-industry party. There, amid acid and mushrooms, someone first made mention of an anarchist commune deep in the jungle, where a young seer said he’d had a vision, in a divine revelation, of a vast fire devouring the tangle of trees. And that same boy, an indigenous child just seven years old, had predicted the end of times and the dawn of a new era. From then on he was surrounded by a large community of enlightened hippies, art house celebrities, people seeking to build a new society around the child, awaiting the foretold end of times.
Now that he’s telling the story, Toledano seems to notice how ridiculous the thing sounds, how ridiculous it all must sound to a forty-something like me, who never lived through anything like that historical euphoria. Still, he doesn’t hold back. He tells the story the same way he tells everything else, with a cold and objective tone, as if he were talking about chess moves. He tells me that, starting that night, Virginia McCallister never stopped talking about that commune, or researching the child seer. For her, commune and seer came to symbolize a divine omen, one that fit perfectly with the theories she had been elaborating, and with the mythical figure of her incendiary ancestor, William Sherman. After that, she started to frequent secret meetings, meetings that Toledano never seemed to be invited to or that he preferred not to attend, dedicated as he was to raising the little girl who was growing in leaps and bounds, still unaware of her mother’s delusions of grandeur. That little girl who grew, pale, fragile, and fearful, in the arms of a mother who told her bedtime stories of a faraway land where a boy, young like her, had seen the end of the world.
Now that he’s telling the story, the sound of the canaries in the background, Toledano can’t help feeling the pathos of his confession. And without knowing why he tells it, or what he gains in the telling, he relates how one afternoon his wife came home with a ticket in hand, a ticket that would carry them, finally, to that commune and that jungle, to come face-to-face
with the seer. That afternoon, with the cold of the New York winter just around the corner, Yoav Toledano told himself that perhaps this was the only way to shake off her obsession: give her a trip and dismantle her fantasy. Looking at the tickets, he remembered his youthful obsession with reaching the infamous Tierra del Fuego. He knew he wouldn’t be heading for the south he so longed for, but he told himself that if he agreed to go, it was precisely in order to remain faithful in some way to the stubborn boy he’d once been. Beside him, little Carolyn wants to know, where is that jungle they talk so much about?
7
I listen to the old man’s anecdotes and I say to myself that telling stories, much like playing chess, is the act of proposing false futures. Like the chess player, the narrator produces false expectations. Then I think again of Giovanna, her strange way of punctuating time with silences, of leaving the conversation always on the verge of an inconclusive revelation. Revelations are always a bit vulgar, says Tancredo, and maybe he’s right. Art is just the opposite, producing half-seen subtleties: imagined dioramas in the middle of the desert. As the old man starts talking again, I can only think of the sequence of events that have led me to this empty town: Giovanna’s first call, her always opaque proposal of collaboration, my walks through the New York metropolis, the hours I spent imagining stories that would end with the image of an insomniac woman, reading. I’ve remembered the happy period of silence and peace that came after that strange project, Giovanna’s partial disappearance, and then the arrival of that dreadful archive that has brought me here. The trick, I tell myself as I go back to listening to the old man, is to propose images and futures as though proposing a life.
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