* * *
Three hours later, after pleading not guilty to each of the twelve crimes she was accused of, Virginia McCallister left the courtroom as remote and haughty as when she’d entered. Beside her, the young lawyer appeared happy to have survived his first round. Above them, flying over the long chain of camera flashes, a whisper spread through the audience: this trial would be short and simple. Between the legal jargon, the judge’s boredom, and Esquilín’s exhaustion throbbed an inarguable truth: the defendant was determined to dig her own grave. She refused to negotiate with the prosecutor, refused to plead insanity, refused to have a dialogue. A real nutjob, commented a French journalist with a half-smile. Tancredo, however, thought it was magnificent: a dialogue between two fools who refused to speak the same language. A dialogue between deaf people, in itself a perfect metaphor for a world where no one understood each other anymore. The defendant, he thought, wanted to make clear not only her own innocence but also her absolute illegibility. Her laws were something else, her traditions as well. That trial would be her final work: casting the world as an orchestra of deaf parrots.
12
The following months passed in a whirlwind, a cloud of last-minute news stories trying hard to offer novelty where there was only a tedious, absurd process. The prosecution was focused on two points: proving that the defendant was in full command of her mental faculties when she committed the acts, and demonstrating that said acts were illegal by means of an exhaustive presentation of three specific cases. Regarding the first objective, the only obstacle they seemed to face was, paradoxically, the tenacity with which the defendant herself boasted to the psychiatrists of her mental health. More than one of the psychiatrists who saw her opined that a person who finds herself in that situation and doesn’t doubt her mental state for even a second must be crazy. The rest of their notes confirmed what some people had already guessed: Virginia McCallister suffered from a mental disorder that forced her, on the one hand, to dissociate from her past identity, and on the other, to adopt a new one—the one under which, she said, she had carried out the actions she was being tried for. According to three psychiatrists who saw her, the defendant’s case was not a clear-cut amnesia but something more complicated; her change of identity was a decision: she had decided to be Viviana Luxembourg. She told the examining judge and would repeat in court that she remembered her American childhood perfectly, her early years in North Carolina, the period of her media ascent, first as a model and later as an actress. She even remembered the first years at Yoav’s side, their initial trips to Cuba, a handful of other memories from the time. There was a specific date that marked the break: her memories reached April 15, 1966. The rest, the long period that stretched from then until April 15, 1987, belonged to an absolute oblivion from which she claimed she could salvage nothing. She said she’d gotten up one day without any memory at all of the previous twenty years, convinced that a new life project lay behind a new name: Viviana Luxembourg.
Then the story reemerged. Now under her new name, she remembered having spent almost ten years backpacking around Latin America. A couple of years in Buenos Aires and its provinces as a member of an experimental circus troop built on the tenets of Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed. That was where she said she’d heard, for the first time, of Jacoby, Costa, and Escari and their anti-happenings. Then she remembered a long stay in Montevideo, of which she primarily recalled the neighbor’s cats, the silent dusk, and the sad cries of gruff men. After that came a solitary period in the Atacama Desert. A magnificent time of which she said she remembered reading only one book, a strange volume of almost a thousand pages about Tehuelche rhea-hunting practices in Patagonia. A very odd book, she added—though no one had asked—within whose pages the sense of the desert became sharp and defined as an illusion. She remembered, as well, the aloof irony of the llamas, the aristocratic pose of flamingos on a lake, and the constellated sky of the salt flat where she had finished reading that sublime book. Then she remembered a trip to the north. Years in trucks full of men with rough and violent voices, long conversations on subjects she would later forget, dreams conceived under the open sky. Years of reading during which she crossed Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, always with a book in hand. As she told it, it was during those years that she started to imagine her artistic project. Years of intellectual euphoria and intense readings, years full of projects and sketches she later erased, convinced that every artist must have a single obsession and just one project. Years in which her very idea of art was reformulated constantly until it was buried behind the terrible intuition that art was nothing but art history. The idea came to her clearly, one summer afternoon of unbearable humidity, as she sat in front of a colonial fort in Cartagena de Indias. Art was nothing but its own story, the story that led to the present moment and that asked for—cried out for—the emergence of the new. That illumination was followed by years of intensive labor, years of notes and readings that would end the day when, floating on the windy waters of Lake Atitlán, the image of the Panajachel volcano finally offered her the missing piece: all art involves judgment. Art was the history of the judgment of art, she thought then. Two days later, she heard a news story on the abandoned tower, and she knew that was where she would set her project into motion. The next day, carrying a very small suitcase, she headed for Puerto Rico with the happy conviction that her years of wandering were finally reaching their end. It was time to sit down and work.
* * *
Lively, savage, epic—from afar, the picaresque tale of the defendant’s life could awaken the enthusiasm of the most blasé reader. The press—always focused on the obvious—jumped all over the description of that journey, mostly trying to bring back some color to a trial that from the start had seemed like a series of expert monologues. The defendant employed all her artistic jargon, and the prosecutor seemed determined to cite as many boring legal documents as possible. The trial had been going on for only three weeks, the witnesses were still to come, the crowd in the courtroom had shrunk, and TV ratings were plummeting. What was left, then? The story of her travels and the gaping abyss between two dates: April 15, 1966, and April 15, 1987. The press tried hard to extract any possible conclusion from a journey that in many ways recalled Che Guevara’s mythical travels through southern lands.
To Esquilín, many of the details of her travels didn’t fit together. He found it impossible to believe that the defendant had gone unnoticed for so long; it seemed strange that she’d come to the island without a passport identifying her as Virginia McCallister. He found it astounding that so far no one had questioned the most obvious thing: the date of the rupture. What had happened on that April 15, 1966? Esquilín had only needed to read the defendant’s file to learn the obvious: on April 15, 1966, in a small New York hospital, Carolyn Toledano was born. He found it odd that neither the date nor the information seemed to catch the attention of the press or the prosecutor. He imagined that the prosecutor must have a different strategy, and that perhaps, with the years, he himself would learn that the law cared little about private lives.
Still, he couldn’t shake an intuition. Since the night of Burgos’s message, he’d become obsessed with the idea that, hidden among the pages of the second series of notebooks, written in a private code, there was a second, secret story, the weight and pain of which the defendant was trying to bury under the scene of an absurd trial. Every evening as the case progressed, he dedicated several hours to those secondary notebooks that the defendant herself disparaged as meaningless scribbling. He searched for the secret code, analyzed dates, compared trajectories. No one disappears without a reason, he said to himself, thinking of B. Traven and his anarchical pilgrimage to anonymity. No one disappears without a reason, he repeated, while the date—April 15, 1966—blinked on his computer, like the beginning of another story that might have been better to forget.
* * *
On one of those nights, as he was paging through one of the notebooks of The Great South, he cam
e across a list of places whose names he didn’t recognize: Topolobampo, Colônia Cecília, Canudos, Nueva Australia. At first he thought the defendant must have made them up. After giving them a second glance, he thought that maybe they were small towns that she had visited during her long pilgrimage through Latin America, where perhaps she had loved some salt-of-the-earth drunk or local poet. What he found on the following pages, however, gave the lie to his theories.
Written with a copyist’s diligence and discipline, organized as precisely as encyclopedia entries, were historical, geographical, and political descriptions of the listed colonies. The towns weren’t towns, or even hippie settlements, but small anarchical colonies that a handful of crackpots had built almost two centuries ago during the fever of utopian socialism. A small, five-pointed drawing appeared at the top and bottom of the page, seemingly sketched in a moment of distraction.
Topolobampo (1886–1894). First Mexican colony founded by utopian socialists in the United States, under leadership of Albert Kimsey Owen, the famed civil engineer who would try to finish construction of the Chihuahua–Pacific Railway. He would also attempt a failed project called the Great Southern, which Owen imagined as an interoceanic railway that would start in Norfolk, Virginia, cross all the southern states, and then head into the Tarahumara Mountains in Chihuahua, until it finally reached the bay of Topolobampo. Today, after its failure as a utopian colony, Topolobampo is a port on the Gulf of California, located in the municipality of Ahome in the state of Sinaloa, Mexico. In the old train station you can still see a steel plaque with its original route: Ojinaga–Topolobampo.
Colônia Cecília (1890–1893). Experimental colony founded in 1890 according to anarchist principles. Located in the municipality of Palmeira, in the state of Paraná, led by the Italian journalist and agronomist Giovanni Rossi. Rossi, encouraged by the Brazilian musician Carlos Gomes, went to speak with Dom Pedro II about the possibility of founding a community based on anarchist ideals. After he received a promise of land from the monarch himself, the Brazilian Republic declared its independence, and Rossi’s only choice was to buy the very lands he’d been promised. A year later, the colony had almost 250 inhabitants, practitioners of free love. Poverty and the inability to efficiently distribute work, however, would end up forcing many of the colonists to set out for new lands. Two years later, in 1892, barely twenty colonists remained.
Canudos (1893–1897). Political-religious colony founded in 1893 in the Brazilian state of Bahía, under the messianic mandate of the preacher Antônio Vicente Mendes Maciel, who would later be better known by the name Antônio Conselheiro. Under his ideological command, a motley crew of social pariahs—including freed slaves, indigenous people, cangaçeiros, and farmers stripped of their lands—managed to build a community of around thirty thousand inhabitants, and were even able to wage war against the newly formed Republic of Brazil. Its independent and communist nature, along with the monarchist ties of some of its members, forced the Republic to declare war on Antônio Conselheiro and his followers. The national army’s first three invasions were bravely fought off by the villagers, but they were conquered in the fourth, when the settlement was burned to the ground. Today the region is underwater as a result of the construction of the Cocorobó dam, by means of which the state intended to bring water to a region battered by drought. When the water level is low, the ruins of the old cathedral poke up above the surface.
Nueva Australia (1893–1894). Paraguayan colony founded under the pretexts of utopian socialism and directed by William Lane, a prominent figure within the Australian worker’s movement. Following Lane’s ideas, the colony was governed under certain basic precepts: a mixture of communist ideals with policies of racial separation and abstention from alcohol that eventually brought the colony to the verge of dissolution. In 1894 two hundred new colonists arrived, but the colony collapsed soon after, when fifty-eight members, including Lane himself, decided to flee and form a new colony they called Cosme, thirty-eight miles south of Nueva Australia. William Lane would die more than twenty years later, converted into a defender of the ultra-right wing, writing conservative newspaper columns under a series of pseudonyms.
As he read the entries, Esquilín imagined a ghost town where dozens of white men walked slowly by, singing sad songs. He thought of William Lane at the end of his days, now a recalcitrant right-winger. He thought that a name as dazzling as Giovanni Rossi didn’t belong in the Brazilian jungle. He thought of the underwater ruins of Canudos, which struck him as the perfect symbol for the great catastrophe that was modern history. This old gal, he thought, likes her temples in ruins. He remembered the strange acoustics of the churches of his childhood, the way the preachers’ voices turned to echoes, and the boredom that washed over him when the homily began. He was distracted by the sound of the phone, but he told himself there was no need to answer. He reread the passage that his client had underlined in blue pen, the part about the Great Southern, that immense railway Owen had dreamed up in a delirium of modernity. He printed a map of the American continent and tried to follow the train’s imaginary route through southern lands. From east to west, as if doing battle against the sun. Again, the shrill ring of the phone distracted him, but he promised himself that he wouldn’t answer until a third call.
* * *
Half an hour later, just when he was starting to realize that there was no more story beyond the one apparently projected by his own neurosis, he found himself drawing in the margins of his notebook the five-point figure he recognized from many of the defendant’s notebooks. It looks like a five in dominoes, he thought, but another look refined his impression. It looks like the silhouette of a butterfly drawn in points, he corrected himself. He started to look in the notebooks for an example of the figure, but the phone rang again. This time he answered. From the other end of the line, a bartender’s hostile voice informed him that María José Pinillos had come into his bar sloppy drunk, aggressive, and shouting. A young man had gone to the bathroom minutes later and found her lying in her own vomit. When they asked her who she knew on the island, she’d handed them a slip of paper with the lawyer’s name and phone number.
Esquilín confirmed that he knew her, then put on a shirt and headed out. Half an hour later, he encountered a lamentable scene: a sloshed woman trumpeting the destruction of history and the end of days.
13
When she entered Bar 413 and ordered the first rum, María José Pinillos had gone two months without alcohol and had been on the island for three days. She flew from Miami on the same plane as Marcelo Collado and Guillermo Porras, although none of them had any way of knowing that the others were also involved with the defendant. When they arrived, all three took their places in the taxi line, but they didn’t speak. Pinillos, who was first in line, asked the taxi to drop her off at the address the lawyer had given her, 205 Calle Luna. The old town, quaint and touristy with its cobblestone streets and pastel-painted houses, reminded her of the years she’d spent living in Antigua, Guatemala, when she was young; that was where, in front of the beautiful San Francisco church, she had burned a dozen sacred statues and landed in jail. Putting an end to beauty, she thought, is no easy thing. Three minutes later, in her room on Calle Luna, she opened her suitcase and took out the only book she’d brought—an old volume of poems by César Vallejo. She read two pages of the book and wrote down the first ideas that came to her, then she took out a pen and drove it hard into her left leg. Then she returned to her notebook to record once again her reasoning for this ritual: “Alcoholism is the desire for self-destruction. Driving the point of a pen into my leg is a homeopathic remedy for this desire that will end up annihilating me.”
That night, after cleaning the dot of blood that the pen had drawn, she went out to walk along the cobbled streets. She saw drunk young people and lost gringos, dark streets and clubs spilling music, narrow alleyways with small bars that two months ago would have tempted her to perdition. She kept walking until the temptation passed. Af
ter a while, tired, she sat down in a plaza. She took out the Vallejo book and started to read a poem whose title, “Epístola a los transeúntes,” seemed appropriate for the situation:
Epistle to the Pedestrians
Natural History Page 22