* * *
Reading Burgos’s missive, Esquilín had the feeling he had accidentally wandered into a tornado, at the center of which was a deeply confused and tired man. He missed the old days, when you had to only look at an envelope to know where your interlocutor was writing from. Emails, he thought, dissipate the sender’s voice through ambiguous zones. He had the strange feeling that the voice that addressed him was the voice of labyrinthine New York itself, into which the sergeant had disappeared. It was a cold and tired voice that scrambled chronology and introduced without preamble many topics Esquilín knew nothing about: a stammering boy named Miguel Rivera, an immense mural on which human history was sketched like a great divine nightmare, a screen crowded with young faces that Burgos said he’d briefly glimpsed. Burgos refused to pass judgment in his message. He merely listed a series of events that seemed to be strangely related. He mentioned the faces, then the mountain of enlightened children that the defendant had talked about on his first visit, and how she’d emphasized that what she was telling was an epic story about the end times. Finally, the email mentioned the text that Burgos claimed to have found in the stutterer’s empty room: a story without an ending, its laborious rhetorical twists only leading to other false endings in an infinite chain of detours that reminded Esquilín of Rube Goldberg machines. The memory of those machines made him think that maybe this whole enigma was about something very simple: nothing but a chain of tired men trying to impute meaning to a madwoman’s ravings. Burgos closed the message by admitting that he was drinking more than usual, and that he was writing from a profound exhaustion. Looking at the many typos that marred the email, Esquilín realized that the trial was one day away, and he didn’t even know whether he could believe his client or not.
* * *
That night he was unable to sleep, convinced he’d forgotten something fundamental. He got out of bed on tiptoe, trying not to wake Mariana, sat down at his desk, and spent the next half hour online, looking for the latest articles about the case. He saw photos of the defendant, the classic before and after pictures, the opposing photos of the actress and the accused woman, Virginia McCallister and Viviana Luxembourg. He felt a little disconcerted to see his name mentioned in more than one article, but he told himself that there was no time for distractions; he had to work. He looked for the papers he’d prepared for his presentations, and after a first reading, he told himself he had fulfilled his responsibility to the utmost; he’d carried his client’s logic to the limits of reason. He returned to bed telling himself that the show was ready, but Burgos’s email returned to cloud his conscience. Esquilín was sure that his knowledge of the notebooks, of which the police had given him copies, was better than anyone else’s. He could cite almost from memory the cases and annotations that populated the 174 notebooks that composed Art on Trial. Of the other 73 notebooks, he realized then, he knew very little.
Desperate, he got up again, went to the photocopies he’d made of the notebooks, and quickly found the first installment of the second project. On the cover he read, in uppercase letters, the title: THE GREAT SOUTH. Poetic title, surprising title, a good title, he thought. Then he dove into the notebooks, which he had already looked through on several occasions, but from which he felt strangely removed. The first time he read through them, he thought they were a previous project, belonging to the defendant’s esoteric phase. For the back burner, he’d thought. Hours from the trial, however, it all seemed to take on new relevance.
Among the many notable quotations, he found one that seemed to point toward a community of the disappeared, a story that made him think of Sergeant Burgos’s opaque voice as he described an infinite and useless text that disappeared within itself:
B. Traven, Hart Crane, Ambrose Bierce, Arthur Cravan: to disappear in the fearful South. To turn disappearance into the work itself. Antonin Artaud, Malcolm Lowry, William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac: disappear into the infernos and return, like Dante, to tell the story. The only true artwork is disappearance itself.
Esquilín, who knew his client’s rhetorical strategies better than anyone, immediately recognized the structure of the argument. Again, he thought, with the list of names. As if each arbitrary series suggested a theory of the cosmos. He thought about going back to bed, but curiosity won out as always. He searched for information about the life of B. Traven, the first name on the list. The initial thing that surprised him was the photo at the top of the Wikipedia page, a double image where the writer appeared in profile and head-on, his pose and face reminiscent of a mug shot. The lively mustache, the serious frown, all topped by a plaid beret, made him think that the man was laughing at the camera. That man, he thought, had the face of a dog, one of those good and loyal dogs that are mocking us deep down. It seemed like a joke, the opening to one of those ironic postmodern movies he and his girlfriend occasionally liked to watch. The story he read next didn’t let him down. It was a complex tale of disappearances and anonymities, a transatlantic picaresque that he found strikingly similar to his client’s. A carnivalesque game of masks that made him think that history was a great circus put on by a troupe of nutty artists.
* * *
Between 1925 and 1960, almost twenty books had been published by one B. Traven, an enigmatic author who claimed to live in Mexico but of whom little was known. Books of adventure mixed with anarchist ideas, books about wild native Mexico and capitalist exploitation, books published directly in Germany to favorable reviews. All by an author who had built his life as a maze of knotted identities.
From the austere peace of his small house on the outskirts of Acapulco, B. Traven managed to keep his anonymity intact for years, until the success of his novels attracted the attention of the press and the public. One afternoon, reading one of those books, a writer and journalist named Erich Mühsam thought he recognized in Traven’s style the turns of phrase used by Ret Marut, an old colleague from his years as an anarchist leader of the fleeting Bavarian Soviet Republic, in which, from April 7 to May 1, 1919, German socialists had placed their most lofty hopes. His friend, it was rumored, had spent the years before the revolution acting on the most remote stages of small German towns. He had debuted in the theaters of distant Idar, then moved on to those of Ansbach, Suhl, and Danzig, until he finally landed in Berlin. The strange thing was that, according to Mühsam, Ret Marut had been arrested and executed after the fall of the Bavarian Soviet Republic, on May 1, 1919.
A possible explanation arose years later, when Will Wyatt and Robert Robinson, two documentarians from the BBC interested in uncovering the Traven enigma, consulted the records of the U.S. State Department and Great Britain’s Ministry of Foreign Relations. They found something very interesting: after he escaped execution, Marut had reached Canada, only to be turned away and sent to the United Kingdom, where he was imprisoned in Brixton as a foreigner without a residence permit on November 30, 1923. When he was interrogated by British police, Marut confessed to being Hermann Otto Albert Maximilian Feige, born in the city of Świebodzin on February 23, 1882. According to Polish national records, after his brief military service, Otto Feige had vanished. The documentarians managed to follow his tracks, confirming that during the summer of 1906, a certain Otto Feige briefly acted as head of the ironworkers’ union of Gelsenkirchen. Following his artistic leanings, he would set off for Berlin in the fall of 1907, using the name Ret Marut.
* * *
In the middle of the night, totally wrapped up in the story he was reading, Esquilín thought it all—the anarchism, the multiple identities, the misleading moves—fit perfectly with Viviana Luxembourg’s profile. Every clue seemed to hide a story, even the names. When he read that Marut was an anagram of traum, the German word for “sleep,” and also of turma (“herd” in Romanian, “accident” in Finnish, and “horde” in Latin), he wondered if perhaps “Luxembourg” also hid something else, some linguistic twist that would bring it closer to the Norwegian word for “troop” or the Danish word for “plague.” When he trie
d to find more information, he learned only that if a country bears your last name, the name disappears behind the country’s history. Then he explored another detail that had caught his attention: the fact that many of B. Traven’s novels, especially the ones from the apparently famous series of “Jungle Novels,” explored the inhuman and exploitative conditions the natives suffered in the state of Chiapas, where they were forced to work the mahogany forests in concentration camps called monterías. Esquilín recognized Chiapas, mainly from stories of the Zapatistas, and remembered the masked face of Subcomandante Marcos, that great anonymous cowboy who, when he was a boy, had led him to believe that Mexico was a Latin American version of the old west. He remembered that when he was a child, the subcomandante’s image had revived the figure of the superhero: a masked, nameless man planning a new world from the jungle. He remembered how one day, when he was nine or ten and his parents had a table full of guests who asked him what he’d like to be when he grew up, he’d surprised them all by replying that he wanted to be like that masked Robin Hood who lived in Chiapas. He remembered how they had all laughed and how later, at bedtime, his mother had come to his room and told him that the man was no Robin Hood, and Chiapas was no place for decent boys like him. Suddenly the image came to him clearly: he imagined Viviana Luxembourg deep in the Chiapas jungle, conversing with the subcomandante about art, revolution, politics, and anonymity. He understood then that his client’s lists were a desperate attempt to become part of a story. Beneath those lists was a woman’s determination to earn a place in the great history of anonymity.
* * *
Traven’s story, however, didn’t end in a Brixton jail. His arrival in Mexico, his surreptitious transformation into B. Traven, and his establishment as one of the most acclaimed and translated novelists of the time still required an explanation. As often happens, one was found by people who weren’t looking for it. After the commercial success of Traven’s book The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, published in English by Knopf in 1935, Warner Bros. acquired the film rights and hired John Huston to direct. Huston started to exchange letters with Traven, and they agreed to meet at the Hotel Bamer in Mexico City. Predictably, Traven never showed. Instead he sent a translator named Hal Croves, who presented a notarized document authorizing him as the writer’s representative. Croves would appear again months later at a meeting in Acapulco, and would be present throughout filming, imposing his opinion on several occasions, which led many of Huston’s collaborators to think that this gaunt and taciturn man was, in fact, B. Traven himself. The movie’s three Oscars in 1948 were enough to make the writer a subject of public discussion. Warner Bros., understanding the commercial potential of the aura Traven’s persona was starting to take on, even started the rumor that there was a reward of five thousand dollars for anyone who found the real B. Traven.
A Mexican journalist named Luis Spota, following clues from the Bank of Mexico, came upon a posada on the outskirts of Acapulco where a man who gave his name as Traven Torsvan lived. The neighbors called him “el gringo” and said he’d been born in Chicago. Indeed, according to his papers, Torsvan had been born on March 5, 1890, in Chicago, had crossed the border into Ciudad Juárez in 1914, and had obtained his Mexican ID in 1930. Spota realized it was all a lie. He bribed the mailman and confirmed his suspicions: month after month, Torsvan received checks made out to B. Traven. Sure that he had enough information to incriminate him, he showed up one day at the posada, and face-to-face with that man who claimed to be Traven Torsvan, he presented his discoveries. The man emphatically denied being Hal Croves or B. Traven. Three days later, on August 7, 1948, Spota published his great discovery in the weekly journal Mañana. Two days later, Torsvan disappeared.
* * *
They called him “el gringo.” Just like my gringa, thought Esquilín as he poured himself another cup of coffee. He tried to imagine the posada in Acapulco, where that man who had been so many—first Otto Feige, then Ret Marut, then disappearing into the names Hal Croves, B. Traven, and Traven Torsvan—had finally decided to be himself. He imagined it pleasant but plagued by flies, hot and well arranged for boredom. He imagined it a bit like the tower where his client had hidden out without hiding for nearly ten years. Places where one can disappear under a false name, he thought. He took a sip of coffee and reread the quote that had led him to Traven’s story:
B. Traven, Hart Crane, Ambrose Bierce, Arthur Cravan: to disappear in the fearful South. To turn disappearance into the work itself. Antonin Artaud, Malcolm Lowry, William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac: disappear among the infernos and return, like Dante, to tell the story. The only true artwork is disappearance itself.
Convinced that his client saw herself in that long tradition of anonymity and invisibility, Esquilín picked up a pen and got ready to write the name Viviana Luxembourg in front of Traven’s, when he was assaulted by doubt: Which group did she belong to? Those who had disappeared, or those who’d returned to tell their stories? Then he felt that the defendant had planned this whole thing in an attempt to jump from one list to the other. He laughed—it was like pure religion. The death and resurrection of a messianic Marilyn Monroe.
* * *
Like all stories, B. Traven’s ends in death. On March 26, 1969, in Mexico City, Hal Croves died. In an improvised press conference, his widow, Rosa Elena Luján, confirmed his death and revealed that his real name was Traven Torsvan Croves. According to her, he’d been born on May 3, 1890, son of a Norwegian father named Burtoon Torsvan and a British mother named Dorothy Croves. Two days later, as specified in his will, his ashes were scattered from a plane flying over the Chiapas jungle.
* * *
When he finished reading the story, Esquilín felt that it was all a puzzle whose pieces fit together but formed a disjointed landscape, halfway between countryside and beach. With his wife’s help, thought the lawyer, Traven had played a final joke on the experts and the Mexican state. He finished his days as multiple as he’d lived them, having been born in both Świebodzin and in Chicago, surrounded by a dozen names and different personalities. Traven, thought Esquilín, had been many people so he could ultimately become none. He had liked one quote in particular: “The creative person should have no other biography than his works.” It’s a good quote, he thought. The artist as anonymous, a multiple being. The artist as one who renounces being one, and becomes many. Then he thought about the trial he would face tomorrow. The trial, too, was rather like a delayed joke.
* * *
He looked at the computer’s clock and found that it was already almost four o’clock. Five hours left until the trial started.
Outside, two drunk young men shouted that Sunday was the new Friday. Esquilín thought how a trial was a staging of the discrepancy between common sense and the world. Or at least a staging of the discrepancy between the pieces that compose the world.
11
The face of the woman entering the courtroom didn’t show any trace of her time in prison. Dressed like a dandy in a black suit, white shirt, and dark tie, she seemed utterly immune to her circumstances. Long gone was the fragile princess who had captivated American moviegoers half a century before, the pretty young girl, fragile and lovely. Now she wore an air of aloof maturity, as if, capable actress that she was, she’d spent years planning every detail of the promenade that was now her one last show. Escorted by two police officers, she walked to her bench and sat down without ever turning her eyes to the public or showing any sign of repentance or nervousness. She didn’t react to the TV cameras or the flashes that documented each of her steps. Once she was sitting beside her lawyer, she kept her eyes fixed on the judge, as if the whole thing were a conversation between them. Behind her, a wave of whispers rolled from left to right, in accordance with the geometrical logic of the room’s arrangement: the general public sat to her left, while to her right, the journalists watched her as though stealing confused glances at a sphinx. “The Beauty of Art Before the Law’s Merciless Eyes” read the headline in one
of the major papers, hours after the event.
Seated five rows behind the defendant, between a French journalist and a hungover New Yorker, Tancredo felt like what was happening there was actually the opposite: the law was finally being forced to position itself before the inclement eyes of art. There was no madness in the defendant’s eyes; quite the contrary, they showed a fearful lucidity that would lead more than one of his colleagues to later declare that the woman appeared bewitched. To his left, among the crowd, he recognized Gaspar. Next to him, some residents of the tower looked happy to be witnessing that televised spectacle. Then he thought he saw, hiding in the crowd, Sergeant Burgos. A second look told him the resemblance was pure fancy. Burgos, or what was left of him, was further away than anyone could imagine. In front of them, the defendant seemed to be calmly awaiting a pronouncement from the judge. The sphinx, thought Tancredo, always waits for the other to speak first.
* * *
Beside her, also dressed in a black suit, white shirt, and dark tie, Luis Gerardo Esquilín looked like a tender, childish copy of the defendant. At the sight of him, Tancredo thought that he’d never seen a lawyer so young, so defenseless, such a kid. He looked restless and nervous: he moved his hands a lot, and his face belied an eternal exhaustion. To his right, the burly, gray silhouette of the prosecutor depicted the opposite: the arrogance the law acquires over the years, the gray and decadent curls of mediocrity, the slow, complacent gestures of a man who has confused truth with power. Facing them, the judge, a brown-skinned man with white hair and a broad smile, looked bored as he listened to the clerk read the twenty pages of the prosecutor’s report, a truly incomprehensible jumble of legal jargon through which, from time to time, the familiar allegations could occasionally be discerned: the defendant’s transgressions and her falsified news, the effects on the stock market. Listening to it all, it occurred to Tancredo that the law was a private jargon invented by the learned to mock the rest of civil society, an incomprehensible and empty language that hid the law’s terrible arbitrariness. Looking at the judge’s bored face, Tancredo thought that after years of the game, this man seemed to have withdrawn from it. To his right, paying false attention, the jury were like actors in a TV trial: a certain discomfort and agitation seemed to force them to exaggerate their movements, to adopt the artificial poses of supporting actors. Observing the scene, Tancredo wondered whether the defendant might not find it all funny, accustomed as she was to real actors, real theaters.
Natural History Page 21