Natural History

by Carlos Fonseca

  6

  Ten days before the trial began, while reading one of the notebooks, Luis Gerardo Esquilín came across a loose paper crumpled up among the other pages, the faded ink almost illegible. He was surprised to see that it was written in a different color and on a different kind of paper, but he did recognize the defendant’s haughty, minuscule handwriting. Without thinking much about it, he copied on his computer the string of names and notes that appeared on the paper:

  Baudelaire, Flaubert, Wilde, Joyce, Pound, Brecht, Burroughs, Nabokov, Brodsky, Onetti, Pasolini, Bernhard. In each of those cases, literature before a judge. There is also a dispute there, in literature, between art and law. Always remember young Kafka, who at twenty-seven wrote in his diary: “We are outside of the law, no one knows it and yet everyone treats us accordingly.” Always remember Kafka, the great launcher of impossible parables.

  Beneath the entry he recognized a series of drawings. On more than one occasion he had come across similar doodles among his client’s writings, but he still didn’t know exactly what they were meant to depict. He did have a few hypotheses: he thought the figure could be a stealthy walker, a private detective, or a Russian gymnast. When he showed it to Mariana one afternoon, her response was immediate: it was a little man dancing on his toes. This time, though, Esquilín found a date under the drawings: March 22, 1978. The date caught his attention, perhaps because it reminded him that his younger brother’s birthday was one day later, on March 23. He opened his computer and searched for the most important events of that day. He found little: the birth of a renowned marathon runner, the ending of an Asian war, some events that involved then president Jimmy Carter. When he was about to give up, he found an article that struck him as more relevant: the death of Karl Wallenda, which had occurred on the island on Wednesday, March 22, 1978. He spent the next hour collecting information about the Wallendas, about the patriarch’s death and his family’s stubborn but vaguely poetic decision to continue risking everything on the tightrope. He remembered having heard the story before, from his mother, but even so he found the anecdote singular. It seemed odd that someone like Wallenda, as experienced as he supposedly was—a man who had even walked a tightrope over Niagara Falls—had died crossing between nearby buildings. He told himself that if this were a detective novel, the story would start there, to then weave a transatlantic conspiracy around Wallenda’s death. Then, he said to himself, it would be a matter of connecting the threads of this story, watching it cross the decades until his own arrival: he, the lawyer Esquilín, would be the one to solve the secret crime. He thought that if one day he ever wrote that story, he even had just the right title: The Wallenda Conspiracy. The idea made him burst out laughing.

  * * *

  These notions didn’t come to Esquilín out of nowhere. They were based on a rumor that was starting to spread through the media: that the defendant was merely the visible face of a much broader network. Virgina McCallister, said the tabloids, was one member of a broad activist collective, the visible face of an anonymous network that was just beginning to show itself. It wasn’t, thought Esquilín at first, such a crazy idea; in those days, anonymous networks of hackers were becoming more common: invisible activists, cybernetic collectives. Even the most conservative American media outlets warned of an army of traitors led by the ex-model. When he finally dared to discuss the subject with the defendant herself, Esquilín was met with a great peal of laughter. “Poor guys, they clearly don’t understand anything. All art is already a collective act.” Feeling himself defeated again, humiliated for his weak theoretical understanding, he spent the next days planning his reply. Three days later, when he found the Wallenda doodles in the defendant’s notebook, he felt tempted to hand over his idea about the conspiracy to the press. He laughed at the thought that he would be reenacting the defendant’s own crime: he would bring the reporters to that bristling border where reality and fiction mix together.

  * * *

  Three days later, wearing a suit and tie, he made his first visit to the tower. He was surprised by that social microcosm where even misery seemed to have its appointed place. He went down hallways teeming with grimy, cheerful children, until he reached the defendant’s old apartment. On several occasions he’d tried to find out why his client had decided to live there, in that underworld where not even the police dared to tread, but he’d received no answer, either from the notebooks or in his conversations with the woman who claimed to be Viviana Luxembourg. Nor did he find a clear reply that afternoon, when he went into that apartment, now perfectly empty. It’s true, though, that once he was in the building he saw that this world was much more normal than he’d imagined: normal kids, typical apartments, old people who whiled away their hours just as they would anywhere else. A perfectly normal world that obeyed, nevertheless, a logic of its own. Sweating through his shirt, he felt a strange calm as he passed through the space the defendant had occupied for almost a decade. The space where she had schemed. He found it larger than he’d imagined, better lit, airy, and welcoming. Exhausted, defeated by the heat, he loosened his tie and went over to the window. The urban panorama of roofs and streets, the concrete maze that opened up before him, made him think that his relationship to the case was like a painted landscape, a wide, colorful landscape where the artist swears she has hidden an image, but before which one could stand for hours without finding the slightest hint of that secret figure. The defendant’s trick, he thought, had been to place herself at the exact point where her crime became wide and omnipresent as the city itself. To place herself at the precise point where the image of the crime started to be confused with the landscape of the law, with its most genteel heart.

  He went back to his apartment without asking any questions or interrogating any witnesses, unable to admit to himself that something was starting to eat away at his conscience: the feeling that he was standing before a strange image whose meaning fled at the same speed he tried to catch it. He spent that afternoon lying in bed, looking at the ceiling with a child’s mischievous expression, searching for shapes in the sea of irregularities woven into the concrete. Then he remembered the game he used to play when he was a boy: every night, unable to give in to sleep, he imagined drawing maps and constellations on that false sky. He found islands, white archipelagos lost in vast seas, small continents, worlds that made him feel protected by a network of secret meanings. That afternoon, defeated by the heat and the humidity, he realized that his confusion came from a mistake in his perspective: for over three months he had sought the key to the case in his client’s psychology, when really it would be found somewhere else. Then he remembered the defendant’s phrase: “All art is already a collective act.” He thought back to those words and felt that they hid a much larger story in which the trial he was so caught up in was just the tip of the iceberg, Overwhelmed and sweaty, he fell deeply asleep before he could deduce where it would all lead. He woke up five hours later, unable to tell if it was day or night, if it was still today or if tomorrow had already come.

  7

  That same afternoon, while Esquilín was sleeping, Tancredo went to the tower to find Sergeant Burgos, planning to ask some questions about his encounter with Miguel Rivera. He wanted to corroborate a hypothesis that had come to him in his sleep: that Rivera was the true author of the whole mad project of fake news stories. He was surprised not to find him prowling around the lower floors. Nor did he find him higher up. In the barbershop, Gaspar confirmed his worst fears: Burgos had been seen drunk, rambling around the top floors among the heroin addicts. Then he’d disappeared. Worried about his new friend, Tancredo headed to the police station and learned that, after a month of odd behavior, the sergeant had quit his job. Tancredo was about to leave when a secretary, unable to keep quiet, whistled to get his attention. Then she told him, with a furtiveness that struck Tancredo as odd, something she claimed to be the only one to know. Two days after he quit, Burgos had boarded a plane for New York. Tancredo tried to ask if she knew
what he was doing there, if he had friends or family. The woman just replied that everyone on the island had someone there. Then she said goodbye and went back to her office.

  That afternoon Tancredo mulled over Burgos’s disappearance. First the stutterer, then Burgos. Before long he had a clear idea: it was all part of a longer series, a great chain of sudden disappearances that hid, without a doubt, the true story of the crime. Sitting in a nearby café, he imagined a great exodus to the north, a tremendous progression of sleepwalkers setting off in the opposite direction from the one in the defendant’s notebooks. A great pilgrimage in which the Caribbean seeks to disappear into a diffuse north. He tried to shrug off the weight of the image by doodling a picture. Ten minutes later, when the waitress came to pick up his empty mug, she found, sketched on the napkin, an impressively detailed drawing that looked like a great march of penguins toward the sea. Thinking the drawing would make her son laugh, she saved the napkin.

  * * *

  That night, hours later, I received a message from Tancredo. A message that started out by relating the latest events, Burgos’s disappearance and the growing media coverage of the trial, but then took on a strange tone—strange for Tancredo, at least. I had always thought that irony and theory served as shields to defend himself from the hostility of a cannibal world, and that his system worked pretty well for him. The somber, shaken tone of his latest message made me feel that wasn’t true: it seemed like reality was finally starting to infiltrate his theories. He told me he spent nights thinking about Burgos, Giovanna, me—all those who, he said, had fallen prey to Virginia McCallister’s madness. He spoke of a great conspiracy that originated not in a human mind but in a cosmic figure that grew steadily. I recalled my first months with Giovanna, months of exhaustion and delirium, and understood why my friend was starting to rave. Too much rum, too much heat, too many theories. I thought again of that scene I’d recovered years earlier: my father taking me to the vivarium, those afternoons when I stood before the glass and waited for a seemingly invisible animal to awaken, before I suddenly understood that the creature was precisely the landscape in which I was searching for it. Those animals, I thought, devoured the landscape just as Virginia McCallister seemed to devour any story that tried to neutralize her. I thought about Giovanna, about old Toledano, I thought about Tancredo, about the hours I had lost trying to find the pattern behind Giovanna’s project. I told myself that Tancredo was right: it wasn’t clear just what was unfurling before our eyes, which story was becoming visible and which was hiding, where we might find the legible pattern behind the enormous web being woven by an elderly model in a Caribbean jail. Tragedy or farce? I felt a sudden shiver and thought that for some stories, the old categories aren’t enough.

  8

  In the days leading up to the trial, the tabloids’ conspiracy theories took off, with claims of invisible networks and anonymous collectives. Two prestigious writers, one Chilean and one Californian, wanted to write profiles of the model-cum-artist, and whispers even spread that a U.S. movie producer was preparing a film about her life. Also during those days, perhaps thinking that it was all a staging of the eternal division between art and life, between art and society, a group of Norwegian artists calling themselves Konsept began a social media campaign to defend this artist who, according to them, was recovering the vital avant-gardism of Duchamp.

  Everyone wanted a piece of her story.

  There was no lack, either, of speculation about her mental state: the word bipolar was mentioned, as were dissociative identity disorder, Alzheimer’s, and dementia. A newspaper from South Florida mentioned a less well-known illness: a strange disease called noncontinuous dementia, in which the patient, though fully self-aware, is unable to comprehend her life as a continuous present. For Luis Gerardo Esquilín, the matter of the defendant’s identity had become an obsession. He found her oddly determined in her refusal to talk about her past, her family, that journey they’d taken in 1976. Often, during his long conversations with her, he’d tried to convince her that she would avoid prison only if she explained to him just how Virginia McCallister had become Viviana Luxembourg. His client refused to answer, and Esquilín was again convinced that his strategy was misguided: solitude and prison could matter little to a woman who seemed determined to devote her life to art and contemplation. Esquilín thought of the notes he had found in her notebooks, about Ustica, the solitude in which Antonio Gramsci had outlined his political theories. He became convinced that there was no way out. He, an obscure supporting actor, had no choice but to accept his auxiliary position with dignity and pride.

  * * *

  Sometimes, during the sweltering afternoons of the tropical summer, lost among his papers, Esquilín felt boredom closing in on him from all sides. He seemed to be sinking deeper into the world conjured by a phrase he’d found in the margins of one of the notebooks: “If sleep is the apogee of physical relaxation, boredom is the apogee of mental relaxation. Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away.” Written like that, without a name or a source, without much relation to the nearest phrases, the sentences had seemed arbitrary at first. Still, something made him copy it into his own notebook. After a few months, perhaps imitating the process of incubation they suggested, the words became a sort of talisman that the lawyer carried with him everywhere. He just had to wait, give in to boredom as one surrenders to solitude. One day the egg of experience would be incubated and the truth of the case would be revealed, exact, buoyant, and weightless, like a dream one rises from happy and forgetful. One day he would fall asleep, and when he woke up the case would be just a distant, half-forgotten nightmare, a whisper of what could have been his greatest glory. Every day, when six in the morning rolled around, the alarm went off and Luis Gerardo Esquilín again faced the proof that night only erases the slightest of sins. There was nothing for it then but to brush his teeth, return to the notebooks, and keep going.

  * * *

  Tancredo, on the other hand, also obsessive, bored, and sleepless, felt lost amid a clutter of talismans and clues. He spent his afternoons collecting all the material that had been published on the defendant: local and foreign articles, TV reports, rumors and speculation. Nothing was excluded from that archive: the photos documenting the young model’s rise at the start of the fifties, her first movie appearances, the brief mentions of her gradual political radicalization, her entire career, until he reached the final photos that showed her wearing a cream-colored prison jumpsuit, aged but still elegant and beautiful. He spent hours watching black-and-white movies she’d starred in, thinking about how the world and its people had changed, convinced that within those movies, in the gestures and laughter, was hidden the solution to the strange enigma that would occupy so many people years later. He found nothing but the image of fame and glamour regarding themselves in the mirror: the flirtation typical of the cinema of the era, the easy dialogues and precise stagings. Everything fell into place, everything seemed to be according to fashion. In those moments he found it impossible to think that this woman would one day come to live in the tower, toiling away like a monk.

  Still, he didn’t give up. Though he didn’t know the whole story like I did, he tried to put together the pieces, both political and personal, as if it were all a giant jigsaw puzzle that only revealed his own confusion. Meanwhile, he turned in breezy columns to the newspaper that employed him, articles that only summed up the general feeling among the public, drawing from the old men he visited at Gaspar’s barbershop, some conversation he’d had with Burgos before his inexplicable flight, anecdotes he heard from university students in the bars near his hotel. Still, Tancredo being Tancredo, every article ended with a crazy theory that he managed to slip in among trivial details: on the nature of art, its eternal battle with the law and with beauty, or about the island’s role in a great continental conspiracy. He would publish an article and the next day, at eleven in the morning, after a quick round of
local bookstores, he would hop on the bus that an hour later would drop him off three blocks from the tower. Once there, he took three turns around the lower floors, looking for signs of the disappeared Sergeant Burgos or the enigmatic Miguel Rivera, knowing he would end up in Gaspar’s barbershop, savoring the tedium with half a dozen retirees. Hours later, when he tired of their conversations, he shyly took his leave and again walked the five blocks full of rubble and dogs between the tower and La Esperanza. Once at the café, already under the the locals’ protection, he imitated the defendant’s ritual to a T, ordering a coffee with milk and starting to read. From his disparate readings—books on history, literature, and art theory, but also on quantum mechanics, topology, and even comics—he extracted quotes that he included in the messages he sent me in the evening. Then, once the caffeine’s effect had waned, he asked for the set of dominoes and spent the next hour making figures, little towers and mazes, quincunxes and marine forms that he copied from an old catalog of natural history he’d stolen from me before he left for the island. Swearing to himself that he would follow the ritual just as he’d heard it described, he played until boredom got the better of him. Then, finally ready for thought and reflection, he ordered another coffee with milk and started writing: minimal notes, random thoughts, the kind of crazy aphorisms that can come from an agile mind unafraid of the absurd. He even tried to imitate the defendant’s minuscule handwriting. He tried to find, through vulgar imitation, the exact place where two souls commune. He was trying, so to speak, to become Viviana Luxembourg. To understand her motives, her actions, her tics and manias. The idea wasn’t his: he’d read an art book that talked about a Uruguayan, an unusual artist of noncreativity, who’d spent the last twenty years of his life perfecting his copies of a single Van Gogh painting in an attempt to understand exactly what the Dutch artist felt as he painted those flowers. Every afternoon, unable to understand the defendant, Tancredo remembered the Uruguayan’s failed project, and a cold, deep pain swelled in his chest, forcing him to leave.