All art leads to trial. There is no art without judgment, just as there is no sport without an audience. The artist presents herself before the jury and tries to demonstrate that the logical categories under which the law functions are not sufficient. All art leads to judgment, all true art tries to demonstrate that the law is antiquated, insufficient, limited.
Without a doubt, thought the young lawyer, this woman seemed convinced that her only way out was to confront justice. Immersed in the notebooks’ theoretical madness, among drawings of circular cities and mathematical equations, he grew convinced that this woman had arranged for her own capture, just as she now was laying out the conditions of her defense. He left at five, convinced that the most logical choice was to plead insanity.
* * *
When, three days later, Sergeant Alexis Burgos recognized the face of the accused woman in the newspaper, he thought it was strange to see her like that, dressed as a prisoner. He remembered the peculiar way, outrageous but elegant, that the defendant had explained her art just a week earlier, and he felt that perhaps he’d made a mistake. That woman didn’t belong there. She wouldn’t survive prison. Nor, he thought, puzzled, did she belong in a home for the elderly. That day, overcome by a strange feeling of guilt, dressed in civilian clothes, he returned to the tower and walked around its floors, trying to understand what had led this woman to choose such a strange place to live. Shrouded in an anonymity that brought on an unexpected joy, he saw whole families living there, he saw boys playing basketball, he saw TV sets, restaurants, and barbers, and at the edge of all that he saw two older women in rockers. Deciding that they would be the best witnesses of what went on there, he approached them, and, taking the opportunity of a stray comment, started a conversation. Minutes later, he decided to pose his question:
“So, how about that gringa they caught?”
The old women looked at him in distrust and asked if he was a journalist—ever since the incident, they said, journalists had all but taken over the tower. When he assured them he was not, they told him that everyone had left the gringa to her own devices, almost as if she didn’t exist, or as if she were a ghost. She didn’t talk to them, they didn’t talk to her. Except for one person, Miguel Rivera, a withdrawn, possibly autistic boy who, they said, helped her with the shopping and sometimes spent hours in her apartment. Then they laughed that capricious laugh that lets you know there is gossip behind the story. The sergeant merely took note.
* * *
Miguel Rivera lived alone in an apartment on the twenty-seventh floor, the tower’s top floor. They called him El Tarta because of his stutter. They said that he’d moved to the tower after his parents died and that, furious with the world, wanting to get away from everything, he’d decided to settle where no one could find him. He had almost managed it. The motorcycles that the inhabitants used as an elevator only went up to the fifteenth floor; from there, you had to walk. Few people took the trouble to climb to the twenty-seventh floor. As Sergeant Burgos learned that day, it was no easy task. When he reached the boy’s floor after twenty-five minutes, he was sweating like a pig and felt he’d caught a glimpse of hell: dozens of heroin addicts occupied the upper floors, and among them scampered a crowd of children. He was surprised to find the walls covered with political posters and flyers, which on those floors hardly anyone would see, but he told himself that was island politics: a poster lost among rubble and syringes. He knocked five times, and when no one answered he felt like an idiot. To have climbed twelve floors on foot for nothing. He was starting to leave when he heard the door open behind him, and when he looked back he found the emaciated figure of a boy who greeted him with a tenuous, timid voice. A skinny and pale boy whose face didn’t show, however, any trace of addiction or of dementia, just the marks of prolonged insomnia. His skin was tattooed everywhere, little symbols whose sinuous shapes Burgos couldn’t decipher, but that grew over his small body like an enormous vine sprouting calligraphy, even invading his face. Seeing him up close, Burgos thought the boy couldn’t be more than twenty years old, but he seemed to have already lived sixty years.
In his police work, the sergeant had seen how drugs and alcohol devoured young bodies. Often, at the scene of an atrocious homicide, it was the thin, broken, disjointed voice of an addict that confessed to the crime. That was not the case he now had in front of him. The boy’s voice emerged fitfully, sporadic and tremulous, more violent than an alcoholic’s mellow voice. In answer to a question from that voice, the sergeant merely stated, “I’m looking for Virginia McCallister.” The result was that Rivera, clearly nervous, tried to shut the door on him. He stopped the boy with a spontaneous and terrible phrase: “I have news about her daughter.” He said it just like that, without further ado, with a will of unknown origin. “I have news about her daughter,” he repeated, when he saw the words had an effect. When the kid took a step out of the apartment and closed the door behind him, he understood he’d pressed the right button, and it was too late to turn back. With his memory on the pale, fragile girl he’d seen in photographs a few nights back, he imagined possible futures that could include her and he recounted them, one lie after another, until he thought the boy seemed to notice his deception. When Rivera opened the door and invited Burgos in, the sergeant felt the implacable shiver of one who believes he is committing a crime, though an accidental one. When he stepped inside, he felt that he was finally gaining access to the world of the tower. He thought about turning back, but it was too late.
What he saw then wrapped him up in a sheet of fear and cold. He saw a room that looked like a dark cave, with walls covered by an enormous mural whose shapes he couldn’t decipher immediately but that somehow made him think of a long night deep in a dark forest. A huge mural that sheltered the place like the arms of an abusive mother, with simultaneous love and contempt, in which he thought he could make out, on second glance, a kind of animal epic, an underwater kingdom that seemed to start with small organisms and slowly evolve to become an anarchic and violent world where humans, reduced to small serpentine cells, seemed to be struggling in a sacred orgy. He took it all in at once, and he didn’t know what to do. He thought he’d seen the image before, but he didn’t know where. Still enveloped in that cold shroud, he spotted three computers, and on their screens were the images of half a dozen faces. He realized they were the faces of children, young people, teenagers, and they made him think of the words he had just pronounced and that were now forcing him to speak.
“So, as you were saying—the daughter?” he heard the boy stammer with difficulty, repeating his words while, one by one, he turned off the computers, and with them, the faces. Instinctively, Burgos felt for his gun, but he realized he hadn’t brought it. It was his turn to speak. He looked at the boy and told a long, thin story, a lie that stretched out over decades and culminated at a Swedish beach resort where men spent hours waiting for the sun to come out. He told the story, swallowed hard, and waited for the boy to speak again.
* * *
Perhaps in an attempt to unmask the sergeant’s lies, or perhaps just wanting to propose a final tale that would banish the visitor, the boy told an even stranger story. A sharp, precise account. It was the story of a circular kingdom where children were the sovereign rulers, a kingdom full of temples looking toward the sea. He told the story in a slow voice, as if narrating a documentary, and Burgos couldn’t help thinking that this boy came from that kingdom of illuminated children, the magnificent land of a visionary boy. He told the story without pauses, in a perfect rhythm that accommodated interruptions from his stutter, and then, when fear started to show in Burgos’s eyes, he finished the tale and burst out laughing. His laugh was long and intermittent like his voice, and it made the sergeant feel like an idiot, and he understood that his own lies were surely just as laughable and unrealistic. Without a second thought, Burgos stood up, confused and humiliated, and walked out of that delirious apartment that now seemed to him a den of frauds. He went down the tower’s man
y floors, one by one, wrapped in an acute anxiety, convinced that the stuttering boy and the old woman had planned it all as a bad joke. When he finally reached the bottom floor, he felt a slight relief on finding the old man still there, stretched out on a leather sofa and watching horse races. Consistency, he reflected, overwrought, was a beautiful thing.
* * *
That night, again, he couldn’t sleep. He spent it thinking about the story he’d heard, tormented by the stutterer’s laughter, by the impossible image of a wild city full of children. In his career he’d seen atrocious crimes, drug murders and the like; he had participated in dozens of operations that had brought him close to a world of horror and violence. That night, however, he felt like the world that was now starting to surround him harbored a different horror, intangible and irrational, a horror that had to do with the tower that grew with the implacable will of the dispossessed. He took two pills and tried to sleep. The sedatives left him sunk in a strange half-sleep populated with brief, painful images: the half-dozen childish faces he’d seen on the screens that afternoon, the boy’s tattooed face, the forced and precise voice he had used to narrate that joke as if it were a true story. From within his drugged fog, he thought that perhaps the story wasn’t entirely false, that the boy had been trying to bury his own fears. He wished he hadn’t taken the pills. He wished he’d never gone into the tower or met the old woman, but he told himself it would all pass, that soon it would be five in the morning and the heat of dawn would make him sweat out his dread. Exhausted, he convinced himself the best thing to do was turn on the TV. He found only religious programs. Evangelical pastors, Baptists, Pentecostals, all caught up in endless sermons, all doing battle against tedium and desperation. Dozens of parishioners looked on in rapture. Faces full of desire and hope, faces capable of reconciling empty gestures with late-coming epiphanies. He wondered why the dawn so suited pastors and their sermons. He found no answer beyond the bored face of a little boy in the pews, a round, dark face like a ripe fig that made him think again of the children he’d seen on the screens that afternoon. He remembered how, as Virginia McCallister was explaining her odd art two weeks before, she had brought up the sacred mountain where children congregated around a small seer. He wondered if it all led to a solution, or just to more dreadful laughter. Unable to find the answer to the riddle, he surrendered to compulsively flipping through channels, jumping from image to image, until, hours later, with the first rays of sun marking a small square on the wall, he understood that it was all a waste of time. He wouldn’t sleep that night. Feeling the first tentacles of paralysis and immobility, he told himself it was time to act. He fixed the same black coffee that he’d drunk every morning for the past twenty years, took a shower as he always did, and went out for a walk. After an hour he returned home. He put on his police uniform and, without a word to anyone, without even checking in with the station, he headed for the tower.
* * *
That morning, the tower seemed like a dead world: calmer than usual, tireder, more ghost town than anything else. Seeing that the TV at the entrance was dark, he missed the horse races; consistency, he thought, was beginning to crumble. The sight of the two little old ladies in their rockers revived his hope. They greeted him with a kiss on the cheek, as if he were already part of their crepuscular world. When he didn’t find any motorcyclists who would take him up, he had no choice but to make the climb on foot. In spite of his exhaustion, he wasn’t willing to turn around. An hour later, after passing painful scenes of suffering that would stay with him, he reached the twenty-seventh floor. He reached the stutterer’s blue door and was about to knock when he was suddenly invaded by a fear he hadn’t felt since his first years as a cadet. He reached for his gun and was relieved to find that this time it was there. Then he knocked. He knocked once, twice, three times, then called out a few words. The silence only grew louder. Then he noticed the door was unlocked. He went in slowly, as if expecting an ambush. His fear grew when he saw the place was empty. In the past twelve hours, someone had removed everything: the bed, the shelves, the speakers, the clothing that he’d seen strewn about the room the previous day. He thought he must be going crazy. Too much work, too little sleep. Perhaps, he thought, he hadn’t even been there before, perhaps he had been sleepwalking, like his father used to do. But there was the mural, terrible as eternal insomnia, and even more imposing in the absence of furniture. The room was, without a doubt, the very same.
Now that the stutterer had disappeared without a trace, Burgos took the chance to look carefully at the mural. Something in the way it swelled over the four walls made him think that it told a story—he didn’t know what about, but its strength trapped him and forced him to look more closely. Thousands of little shapes populated the mural. Shapes that at first he’d thought were tadpoles, deformed marine cells that now, on a second, calmer look, became recognizable: hundreds of human figures were scattered over the first three walls, engaged in what seemed to be a divine orgy, a frenzied tumult that made the sergeant think of the hurricanes of his childhood. A termite’s nest, he thought. He was struck by the level of detail, the way the bodies mixed together without losing shape, each one frozen in a different pose. Some images caught his attention: an enormous ear from which a dark devil seemed to be pulling a naked man out by his own ears, a shipwreck around which men seemed to be struggling to stay afloat, a giant broken egg in which a group of animals-turned-men played cards. In the upper part of that wall, Burgos discovered an apocalyptic sky benighted by catastrophe: volcanoes, fires, and wars that made him think of the stutterer’s tattoos. He moved on to the second wall, adorned by a painting equally jumbled but lighter in color, a kind of lucid version of the previous wall, the same tiny human figures now strangely weightless. Somehow the discrepancy bothered him, something about how the darkness and utter pandemonium transformed into a lighter chimera. His eyes lingered on the only black man drawn among the multitude. A very tall man, elegant, surrounded by pale white women who looked at him as at a prodigy. He told himself that perhaps the painter had wanted to be that man, the only singular specimen in a motley and multiple landscape full of clones, like a terrible dream. Unable to bear it, he moved on to the third wall, where there were only two human figures, a man and a woman, beside a figure that seemed to represent the sacred. He thought then that the three-part story of divine ascension was being told, but he still didn’t feel he fully understood. He thought of Miguel Rivera, his stammering voice and tattooed face, and he told himself that this was not a story but the ruins of one, the broken reflection of what could have been a world.
* * *
He was about to leave when he saw what at first glance seemed to be a letter. Someone, probably the boy as he was leaving, had left it on the only piece of furniture that remained in the room: a small wooden desk placed in the corner farthest from the mural. Something told him that this was what he was really hoping for: a letter that would make him feel that all was well, that the artist’s arrest hadn’t been his fault. He found neither letter nor explanation. Just ten loose pages on which someone had written a story by hand. A story that was strange as any obsession, a story that entered into a simple logic, until it was reduced to its purest unreason. Burgos, who never read, who had thought since childhood that books were for girls and fags, read then, without a pause or a yawn, this story that seemed like something more.
* * *
It was called “A Brief Tale of Blind Construction,” and it told of a town whose architectural ambition led its inhabitants to the verge of madness. The construction of hell, he thought. Burgos kept reading until he came to a paragraph that struck him as beautiful, and he read it three times, trying to understand what the words were hiding:
Although I left the village some time ago, the nightmares have come back to plague me. Simple and contradictory things, my nightmares. Sometimes I dream of a desert, a long and silent desert that reaches out its arms of sand and covers everything. Other times I dream of a green
and undefined expanse, a nameless field where, before my eyes, the reddest rose I’ve ever seen is born. Then, just as red and intense, another one appears, and another, until the whole meadow is full of roses that cover all the green, as if the field itself were turning into an immense crimson rose. When I wake up, barely containing a scream, I can’t understand why a dream that could even be called beautiful would cause me such horror.
Burgos likewise couldn’t explain his own fascination, but something told him that true beauty was like that, a flower that grew in an immense desert until it became a nightmare. He reread the text, and without knowing exactly what kind of story this was, he felt it was one of violence: alarming, impossible, like the stubborn strength of ants. A useless, dystopian story, he thought. On the lower corner of the page, in the same rounded handwriting, some bibliographic information was written: Bruno Soreno, Breviary, 2002. Soreno: the name wasn’t common on the island. Bruno: it sounded like the name of a gringo’s dog, or maybe an Austrian duke, but it wasn’t Puerto Rican. Farther down, a little drawing seemed to depict a very long wall, like the Chinese wall that Burgos’s father told him about when he was little. It occurred to him that life was a project that men took on in order to pass the time, to hide the fact that the works of men, however magnificent, are useless as a pheasant’s beautiful feathers. Without thinking twice, he took out his lighter and set the pages on fire. A buoyant happiness overcame him when he saw that strange story reduced to ashes. Then, soundlessly, he closed the door behind him and walked down the twenty-seven floors, and when he finally emerged onto the street, he told himself that he would never go back to the tower again. It was a den of incomprehensible beasts. He intuited, however, that his fascination would betray him.
Natural History Page 15