Natural History

by Carlos Fonseca

  * * *

  Today, sitting across from the town mayor, I felt a sudden consternation, and I understood that I was annoyed by the same question as always. The question that has led me here and toward whose reply old Toledano’s story seems to be heading, but of which only today I realized also implicates me: How does one end up in an empty town? The question hit me suddenly, while the old mayor, an ex-miner almost ninety years old, was trying to tell me the town’s story year by year. For this old man, I thought as I watched him struggle with his memory, there’s nothing left: his life was written here. His life would end here because that’s how men live and die. Then I asked him about Toledano, and I noticed his hesitation. I thought his memory was failing him again, but after a few seconds John interrupted to ask who I was talking about. The photographer, I replied, and the mayor corrected me, insisting: “Ah, crazy old Roberto Rotelli.” Only then did I understand the obvious: the old man was never Yoav Toledano to them. Then I remembered that in one of his last articles, Toledano started with a citation I’d always liked, attributed to a certain R.R., that said: “In 1912 I decided to be alone and to move forward without destination. The artist must be alone with himself, as in a shipwreck.” Perhaps, I said to myself, it was this R.R. who inspired the old man’s decision to become Roberto Rotelli. But I didn’t say anything out loud. As always, I simply listened as the mayor told the story I’d already heard, but that he tells better than anyone: the story that for him ends the day the highway that led to the town split in two. That day, he repeats patiently, he realized he would die in a ghost town, unable to betray the memory of five generations. He tells it to me straightforwardly, and I start to think of old Toledano’s many masks. In learning to tell a story one must self-impose a shipwreck, I tell myself, thinking again of the epigraph. We stay for coffee and then, when we see that the mayor is falling asleep after half a cup, we take our leave. Outside, I start to tell my friend about the game of names, but I immediately realize I would be betraying a man who has wagered everything on becoming anonymous.

  8

  The rest belongs to fantasy. On November 23, 1976, with nothing but a couple of suitcases, the family takes a plane toward the south that they’ve never seen but on which they’ve placed all their hopes. Two days later, with little Carolyn showing the first symptoms of the illness that will accompany her throughout the journey, the old bus they’re riding in arrives at a jungle, imposing and lush. Then comes a Latin American journey that is a kind of photographic negative of the great adventurers’ classic voyages. Where Humboldt found a wild and sublime America, they meet a ruinous nature brimming with garbage. Where William Walker found the total absence of the state, they encounter the signs of state power all around. Where Franz Boas found the nature of the unknown, they encounter what seems to be a sinister mirror of their own selves.

  Everywhere he goes, Toledano feels that his voyage is, more than anything, a repetition tinged with farce. Perhaps that’s why after the first night, while his wife and daughter are sleeping, he takes his wife’s notebook and copies in two fragments from the diary of one of his favorite philosophers. Two dreams that, according to Toledano, suggested that at the end of any voyage there is nothing but a laugh of disillusionment. The first, which Toledano underlines with red ink, is called “Mexican Embassy,” and it goes like this:

  I dreamed I was a member of an exploring party in Mexico. After crossing a high, primeval jungle, we came upon a system of aboveground caves where an order has survived from the time of the first missionaries till now, its monks continuing the work of conversion among the natives. In an immense central grotto with a gothically pointed roof, Mass was celebrated according to the most ancient rites. We joined the ceremony and witnessed its climax: toward a wooden bust of God the Father fixed high on the wall of the cave, a priest raised a Mexican fetish. At this the divine head turned thrice in denial from right to left.

  He feels morbid fascination with the idea that, at the end of the jungle, he will find a mirror image of western misery. He feels morbid fascination with the thought that this trip to the end of the jungle is nothing but a voyage toward the malaise of his own culture. It pains him, however, to think of how, in search of that farce, his wife has impelled a sick child to cross a jungle, one with very little of the natural about it. In those first days, when he finds himself facing these doubts, he returns to the fragment he wrote and tells himself they must go on: they must reach the end of the dream and learn how to laugh on waking. Beside him, the little girl coughs again in her sleep.

  * * *

  They are long days. Led by a tattooed man who calls himself the apostle, a group of pilgrims crosses a jungle full of strange noises, animals, and smugglers. Long days in which Toledano comes to comprehend that his wife’s madness knows no bounds. Days when Toledano intuits that only by maintaining his sanity will he manage to return home with the girl alive. One idea keeps him sane and soothes him: the thought that on reaching the end of the road, his wife will understand the futility of her project, the uselessness of her passion.

  * * *

  Because of his profession and prestige, he’s been given the task of photographing the trip. Acting as witness. Still, as he tells me about that trip now, he doesn’t remember taking all that many photos. He remembers, instead, the insect buzz, the croaking of the frogs, the ever-present sound of the rivers, the little girl’s cough that grew with astonishing alacrity as their trek advanced. As he recalls walking with slow steps toward the decisive moment that will mark his life, he remembers the tedium of the nights they spent under mosquito nets, nights when the little girl asked him when they could go home. He remembers the apostle’s proclamations, his wife’s passion, the disconcerting feeling of having wandered into a maze with no way out. He remembers a town full of smugglers; a crude, fat man; a German hippie who acted out eighteenth-century plays for the natives; and a young Polish woman who spent her leisure time telling stories about the pampas. Then he stops, as if, finally glimpsing his destination, his memory has refused to bear witness.

  * * *

  Later on I came to understand that the true history of that unusual family lay in those silences. My grandfather used to say that a story’s silences will show you the doubts and fears at play within it. Its meaning too. If Toledano paused then before going on with his story, it was precisely because there, in his silence, lay its direction and its meaning. But that realization would come later. That afternoon, sensing the end was close, I merely listened to the story stretching out before me, untamable and strange, with the disquieting feeling that I’d heard it before—in those silences I’d shared for two years with Giovanna.

  * * *

  In the story, there is a family and a journey. There is a sick child and a man who at night recites prophesies before a bonfire. There are pilgrims and smugglers, there’s a little girl who learns to play hide-and-seek from the animals. There are long nights when the father consoles the girl by charting constellations and stories, while the mother sketches theoretical fancies. It’s a story of expectation and disillusion that culminates the day when, after climbing an enormous mountain, the pilgrims see a startling city appear before them. And in that city there is a boy who says he has dreamed of the end of time, the arrival of the fires, and the inauguration of a new time. There is a long, prophetic wait, a kind of Advent anticipating a sacred event. There is a man who understands he is starring in a farce but who decides not to abandon his wife, believing that after disillusion will come reason. But to Toledano’s disappointment, not even at the end of the journey does his wife recover her sanity. Rather, she asks him—a request he will remember for the rest of his life—to take a photo of the little girl beside the young seer. In the story there is a final photograph, and it’s that absent image that depicts the journey’s meaninglessness, the innocence of the age and the feeling of nakedness and exposure that was to come. After he takes the picture, Yoav Toledano decides to depart from the city. He leaves the girl in a
small provincial hospital, kisses her, and promises he will see her again in no more than one month.

  * * *

  That day, looking at his sick daughter, Yoav Toledano tells himself that it’s time to go, and that there is no place for a child where he’s going. Remembering the figure of Nadar that so tempted him in his first years, he says to himself that only one profession would be appropriate for a man who has seen what he has: photographer of mines. Remembering Nadar in the Parisian catacombs, he tells himself that only there, underground, will he find the right place to bury his secret. In the grade-school library of a small town on the jungle’s edge, he finds an atlas; after a few hours of inspection, he locates a small mining town. Three days later, the town’s post office clerk sees him enter carrying a couple of suitcases and a bag full of what seem to be old cameras. He is beautiful and tall, she thinks; he has the air of an English gentleman and the lost gaze of those foreigners who, having seen it all, are content to withdraw one day to their own little plot of land. That afternoon, after he asked about a nearby hotel, she sees him talking with Marlowe’s widow. Two days later, when the mayor goes to see him and learn his intentions, all he finds in the house is a heap of old cameras on a wooden table. Yoav Toledano is already out, desperately seeking the oblivion he will find two years later, when he reads, in a local newspaper, about the initial sightings of smoke.

  9

  Between turns, without changing his pace or his tone, with the monotony of the resigned, he tells me everything: he tells me about the bus that dropped them off at the edge of the jungle, he tells me about the little girl’s illness, he describes the mother’s fearful fascination. He tells me everything as if I knew nothing: the interminable nights of insomnia, the days spent crossing the jungle on foot, the sounds and the dreams, until they reached that luminous moment when he was asked to take a photo, and, at the precise instant he presses the button, he realized he would never be the same again. He tells me everything and then cries checkmate, as if the game had to end when the story did. Then, without showing the slightest consternation after his apparent confession, he stands and says we’re short on beer, and the store is closing soon. He says this, gets into his old, green jeep, and heads to town without even asking if I want to go with him.

  * * *

  Only then, once the story is finished, knowing that my time here is coming to an end, do I store the novel I’m reading in my backpack and finally dare to venture into the old man’s private world. With slow steps, the dogs’ eyes heavy on my back, I step into the garage with its smell of sawdust and beer, aware that I don’t belong. Outdated newspapers, beer cans, old tools, and an empty birdcage or two. Then, as I leave the canaries’ song behind, I see them. Over twenty models: all identical, all different. Models that seem to depict a small city in the shape of a quincunx. Identical models that the old man has tried to erase in different ways, perhaps trying to understand the nature of forgetting. One of the dogs licks my hand and I start in fright. Maybe that’s why I don’t linger. I continue to the back of the garage, driven mainly by fear, until I’m facing a door I open without hesitation. There, perfectly arranged on a shelf, are over a hundred old cameras, from the Polaroid Pathfinder that Toledano had when he left Haifa to the Nikon F that Larry Burrows used to depict Vietnam. A great parade of devices where photographic history accumulates like a junkyard of brands: the Canons alternate with Nikons, then Olympus, and then back to the Polaroid that started Toledano’s career, which today seems to be ending in an emptied-out town. Along with the cameras, distributed in half-closed drawers, are thousands of photos. Pictures of all kinds. Fashion portraits the old man must have taken during his New York years, still lifes that maybe he took in his very first forays, photos of a lush jungle that is perhaps the one he’s just been telling me about. The idea gives me a thrill. I’m intrigued to think that among those thousands of photos is the very one that depicts the end of the story as Toledano has just told it to me. I investigate. I search among those thousands of images to find the one that shows Giovanna’s tiny face, her confusion and resentment. The one that shows Giovanna lost deep in the jungle, prisoner of her parents’ hallucinatory passion. The one that shows her the way I knew her, timid, distant, and fragile. But I only find a jumble of impassive faces, a snarl of cold and remote gazes that refuse to look back at me.

  Posthumous Notes

  (Letter from Giovanna Luxembourg, never sent)

  I’m tired. Tired of wills, doctors, and so much funereal red tape that only returns me to the image of my own death. Maybe that’s why, in my few free moments, I shut myself in my studio where no one dares to disturb me, and I prepare the papers I plan to send you one day. I don’t say anything to anyone and I come here to feed the fish, to listen to a music that’s pale as the night, and to prepare this file. There is our project just as we imagined it years ago, reflected in a future I will no longer be a part of. It will be your small inheritance. But tell me: What is an inheritance? I, who believed myself an orphan, who changed my name to lose a family whose history I didn’t understand, today I inexorably return to that family. I never told you, but that night when you came to my house and saw the medical envelope on the table, a man had just told me that something inside me was preparing to betray me. That afternoon I chose not to tell you, even though I could see how you were looking at the envelope and your face gave away your discovery. I chose not to tell you what I’d heard that day: the story of the genetic mutation, the illness that was starting to eat away at me, the long road ahead. I, who believed myself an orphan, who changed my name to lose a family whose story I didn’t understand, didn’t want to tell you my inheritance was returning in the form of a mutating gene, a gene that was turning into something else, something lethal that now seemed determined to annihilate me. Ironies of life. Inheritance, I said to myself then, was an incurable illness that one day leaves us terribly tired, contemplating a pile of papers that describe an unfinished project. After you left that night, I thought about my parents again, and I started to organize that posthumous project of which you are now a part. No one chooses their inheritance. More than once I thought about telling you everything, leaving the pieces fitted together, the puzzle complete, the intrigue resolved. Then I understood that if I did, you would never come to understand me as I am. You would lose focus on my story if I didn’t force you to relive it, just as I had lost focus on the inheritance whose echo was now invading me from inside, transforming my body into an enormous theater of death. Perhaps that’s why, tired as I am, I’m sitting here to write this letter that I know full well I’ll never send you, aware as I am that it’s always best to leave the image half-assembled. Like that final night when you came over and I didn’t want to talk. We just sat down to put together a boring puzzle, and halfway through, sorrowful at saying goodbye, I pretended to fall asleep. And I watched you struggle with the pieces, knowing you wouldn’t find the image you wanted there, only the banality of a lake covered in flowers. That night I realized you would know how to navigate your inheritance, as I had struggled to navigate mine. My inheritance, which today is forcing me to sign estate papers with a name that isn’t even my real one, aware that my body is mutating and betraying me. Aware also that this letter will not reach you, and that somehow you will have to intuit it for yourself. Inheritance is a bit like that: a letter written from the past that never reaches the present. And your task is to reconstruct that absent conversation.

  Part III

  Art on Trial (2008)

  If a rumor strikes a place at just the right moment in history, if it manages to materialize a fear or expectation, only then does it grow. It starts to spread only if it touches a nerve.

  —Francis Alÿs

  1

  It was Tancredo who gave me the newspaper clipping. We were in a New Brunswick bar one afternoon in the fall of 2008, just when the financial crisis was starting to become a topic of conversation. The central image was of two photos. The first was of an older woman a
round seventy years old, dressed entirely in black. Dark turtleneck sweater, solemn expression, few wrinkles. In spite of her age, her face projected a certain atemporal elegance, a beauty that seemed to be repeated in the next photograph, which showed a model in the kind of bikini that was in fashion in the United States in the sixties. I recognized that face immediately, but decided not to show any emotion. Instead, I traced the similarities between the two photos, the way a face changed over the years, crossed half a century and emerged again, now marked by the passage of time. Above, a headline, a brief sentence completed the news: “Missing Ex-Model Found Alive, Accused of Multiple Crimes.”

  * * *

  The article took up barely half a page. It began by outlining the strange disappearance in 1976 of the famous model Virginia McCallister, then delivered the shocking news: after thirty years, the actress had been discovered by the authorities, who accused her of being responsible for more than five hundred cases of interference in the stock market, crimes they said she’d been perpetrating from the beginning of the eighties until she was discovered early this month. In those thirty years of supposed disappearance, while the authorities were trying to track down both McCallister and her equally disappeared husband, the photographer Yoav Toledano, she had been falsifying more than three thousand events whose movement through media outlets had cost the stock market millions of dollars. Three thousand events that never happened, but that the actress, shrouded by a series of pseudonyms, had managed to circulate in the media, in some cases shifting market trends.