Natural History

by Carlos Fonseca

  I resume my rabbit day

  my night of an elephant in repose.

  And to myself I say:

  This is my immensity in the raw, in bucketfuls,

  this is my delightful weight

  that looked under me for a bird;

  this is my arm

  that on its own refused to be a wing;

  these are my scriptures

  these are my alarmed balls.

  Lugubrious isle will illuminate me continental

  while City Hall leans on my intimate collapse

  and the assembly closes my parade in spears.

  She read the poem a few times out loud and pictured an Italian street, where a small man with an imposing mustache embraces a horse that has just been whipped. Then she returned to the lines: “This is my immensity in the raw, in bucketfuls, this is my delightful weight.” She thought of Giacometti’s sculptures of spectral walking men, the elegant fragility of horses, the contours of fire that she found so seductive. Afraid of being taken for a crazy woman, she looked around again. There wasn’t much to see: a family crossing the plaza, two boys riding skateboards, a giant totem pole statue that struck her as excessive. “Lugubrious isle will illuminate me continental,” she read again. How strange the sober world could sometimes be, intoxication always just around the corner. How strange islands could be, always hidden within themselves. Only then did she think—for the first time since she’d arrived—of the defendant. She remembered the woman whose letter had meant salvation, and thought that everything was starting to make sense. They were both, unconsciously, trying to redeem a past full of ashes. Both of them were struggling with a cursed inheritance. When she looked around again, the boys on skateboards and the family had all disappeared. She thought about buying a drink, but Vallejo came to her rescue again.

  * * *

  Two days later, when Esquilín finally managed to make his way through the crowd of punk kids crammed into the 413, he found Pinillos in the midst of a diatribe against the gods. “Fucking Vallejo let me down,” she babbled. Esquilín thought this Vallejo must be a former lover, some old and painful loss. Or a current, abusive lover, he thought when he saw the dozen bloody red dots that punctuated the drunk woman’s left thigh. While she rambled on, he brought her a glass of water, wiped up the vomit, and apologized to the bartender. Once she was cleaned up, he patted her hair and said, “Easy now, let’s go home.” Only then did he see the book of poems under her and realize that Vallejo was just a poet. He asked the bartender to put the book into the artist’s bag and got ready to walk her to the car.

  Once María José Pinillos was asleep on his sofa, Luis Gerardo Esquilín, now stinking of rum and vomit, gave in to his curiosity. He opened the artist’s purse, took out the book of poems, and started to read, when a dozen loose pages fell from the book. Filled with shame, cowardly but nosy, the young lawyer closed the door to his room and sat down to steal a look.

  At first he thought they were just a series of photographs of mountainous landscapes, spaces that were green but empty. Each photograph was captioned with a series of names that sounded indigenous: Pexlá, Cocop, Ilom, Vicalamá, Cajixay, Amajchel, Jakbentab, Xix, Chemal, Xexocom. Farther down, toward the end, he found a title and a name: Scorched Earth, Óscar Farfán. Then he noticed that on the back of the last page, copied in pen, there was a quote written in an incomprehensible language:

  Tuyab’e 1982 kat uluq’a Chaxi’chalanaje’ tukukoome’ anikitza katchanaj tuvidestacamentoe’ tu xemak, Perla tetz tx’avul. Katulitz’esachanaj uq’aku kab’ale’ tulkatq’ab’i vatulchanaj katojveto’ jaq’tze’. Kat tze’kajayil, kuchikoje’ katitz’ok chanaj, katiyatz’chanaj talaku txokob’e, askat itz’esajchanaj q’oksam. Kat atinchanaj tukukoome’ oxval okajval ch’ich’, katchit itxakchanaj kajayil uq’aq’etze’. Unb’ie’ Kul tetzik akunb’ale’ ukab’ale’ vekat tze’i (Nicolás Cobo Raymundo).

  He made no attempt to translate. He turned back to the photographs and began to sense a certain absence becoming evident in them as he looked closer. He contemplated the way the weeds grew over that absence with the heavy lethargy of grass overtaking abandoned cemeteries. Then he remembered having read something about scorched earth in the notebooks of The Great South. Online, he read:

  The policy of burned or scorched earth is a military tactic consisting of destroying absolutely everything that could be of use to the enemy when an army advances or withdraws across a territory. The historical origin of the term “scorched earth” surely comes from the practice of burning grain fields during wars and conflicts in antiquity. However, it is not limited at all to harvests or provisions, but rather includes any sort of refuge, transport, or supply belonging to the enemy.

  Below, two historical examples caught his attention. The first linked the tactic of scorched earth with the military strategies of General William Sherman and his famous March to the Sea. The second clarified the relation between Pinillos and his client: the scorched-earth policy had been used mercilessly by military forces during the Guatemalan civil war. Drawing no further conclusions about the connection, Esquilín flipped through the photographs again. Empty photos, images of mountain weeds, photos where history became a great mausoleum, to be devoured by nature and oblivion. He opened the door, returned the book and papers to the bag, turned off the lights, and lay down to sleep.

  * * *

  When he woke up the next day, he found the artist reading beside the window.

  “Why you?” he asked. “Why do you think she chose you, out of all the radical artists—why you, precisely?”

  María José Pinillos sipped her coffee before answering, unequivocally, “Because my family history is also full of fire.”

  * * *

  That afternoon, after appearing in court, Esquilín visited the apartment shared by three other witnesses. He asked them the same question.

  Marcelo Collado, hungover after a night on the town, redolent of marijuana and alcohol, thought Esquilín knew something he didn’t. When he realized the lawyer was not going to spill any secrets, he answered, “How should I know? Maybe because no one else has written about the role of law in the writings of Macedonio Fernández. What do I know? Maybe she got up one day, saw my face on some academic portal, and thought a guy with a face like mine would go along with her dumb game.” Esquilín’s silence only intensified his fears, and Collado started in on a tirade against law and the system, against governments and capital.

  “Easy, Collado,” said Esquilín. “Truth is, I think the old lady’s madder than a goat.”

  The Venezuelan finally took a breath. “Still,” he said. “What this world needs is more madmen like Macedonio.” He poured himself a glass of pear juice, turned up the volume on the radio, and sank back into his reading.

  Guillermo Porras, on the other hand, shy and insecure, thought the question was an attempt to call his credentials into doubt. He had asked himself that same question more than once. Why that strange honor for someone like him, who had decided to retire from art before even starting? Unable to find an answer, he mentioned his studies at the Rhode Island School of Design, his coursework on the history of conceptual art, the names of his most distinguished professors. He didn’t find the confirmation he was seeking in the lawyer’s eyes. He asked permission to light a cigarette, and only then, as billows of smoke wafted around his fragile frame, did he finally let himself talk about his thesis on monetary mutilation and art history, about the imaginary artist and his mural of U.S. dollars.

  He was about to recite his grade point average and his résumé when Esquilín stopped him: “I already know everything you’re telling me. What I’m asking is, do you think there’s some personal reason why my client thought to recruit you in particular, and not others?”

  Porras held his cigarette in midair. He had confronted the trial as a professional, as cold and objective as the letters the defendant had sent him. The idea that a personal story could be the reason he was summoned struck him as remote
and daring. “To tell you the truth, mae, I hadn’t even thought to look at it from that perspective,” he said as he took another drag.

  Esquilín showed him the part of the file that mentioned how the last information they had on the defendant before the trial was her November 23, 1976, ticket from JFK to San José, Costa Rica. Surprised, Guillermo Porras said that Viviana Luxembourg had never once mentioned any such trip to the land of the ticos.

  * * *

  Then the three of them sat down to organize their strategy. Halfway through the meeting, Esquilín commented on the absence of Arthur Chamberlain, who should have also been staying in the apartment. Then Collado remembered a letter they’d found when they arrived at the apartment. It was addressed to the lawyer and sent by a certain Constanza Saavedra. Esquilín, recognizing Chamberlain’s wife’s name, hurried to open and read the letter.

  Saavedra wrote that after several medical tests, Chamberlain had been diagnosed with a neuromuscular disease—but the diagnosis had come too late. After giving a speech at a gala in honor of a group of young artists, Chamberlain had suffered a grand mal seizure that had left him paralyzed from the neck down. That was two months ago. Chamberlain had been in physical therapy since then, and it was starting to show positive results. He could move his hands a little, he could take a few steps. He could, in sum, dream of someday painting once again with the frightful exactitude of before. Saavedra closed her letter by expressing the sadness they felt at not participating in the great trial, and wishing them all the best in what was to come. She included one of Chamberlain’s drawings.

  It was true: the degree of detail he achieved was striking. It looked exactly like a dollar.

  * * *

  Near seven in the evening, they finished their preparations. Complaining about how light the local beer was, Porras took out three cold ones and they toasted to the madness of Viviana Luxembourg. Then, when Collado started to roll the first joint, Esquilín excused himself. He had to meet with the final witness, Gregory Agins. Porras swore he’d read something by the man, though he didn’t remember the title exactly. Collado swore he’d never heard of the retired professor.

  Esquilín packed up his things and left just as the Venezuelan was taking the first hit. After crossing two streets teeming with cats, he reached the corner where Gregory Agins was staying. From the second-floor balcony, a man with a disheveled appearance and clear-framed glasses greeted him as if he’d been waiting for years.

  Face-to-face with the man, Esquilín thought that he could well be the defendant’s lover. He carried his years with the shabby ease that comes only with risk and a life well lived, that balance of experience and care that only comes to a man who has nothing to lose. For a brief second he thought he was looking at the disappeared Yoav Toledano, but he knew that was impossible. Esquilín tried to remember how old the man was, and decided he had to be over sixty but under seventy. Agins, in perfect, Mexican-shaded Spanish, invited him in. Without asking, he set a cup of green tea in front of the lawyer.

  They spent the next two hours discussing the case, trying to cross the impossible bridge that separated theory and law, while between them, serpentine and restless, a golden cat kept watch. When it climbed up onto the table without the slightest murmur from Agins, he understood that the cat was no stray but another visitor from California. Gregory Agins called it Wittgenstein. All cats, said the old man, are much like philosophers, skeptical and silent, gruff and distant thinkers. Esquilín merely nodded, while he thought maybe this was why he preferred his animals dumber, more loyal, and oafish: he was a dog person. An unexpected doubt suddenly disturbed him. In his relationship with the defendant, was he a cat or a dog?

  * * *

  Two hours later, defeated by the old man’s intellectual intensity, he knew that his mind could go no further. They had discussed judicial precedent that existed around the subject: the case of Michelangelo and the Council of Trent, when the artist was forced to admit that the nudes in his portrayal of the Last Judgment were not worthy of the Sistine Chapel; Paolo Veronese facing the Venetian inquisitors, trying to explain why, in his representation of the Last Supper, Jesus Christ was accompanied by two turbaned Turks, a man bleeding from his nose, and a dwarf with a parrot. Over cups of green tea, with the cat snaking around them, they discussed the famous article on Brancusi v. United States that had consecrated Agins’s intellectual career, and the 1955 destruction of the Portrait of Winston Spencer Churchill at the hands of his wife, Clementine. Esquilín couldn’t help thinking of María José Pinillos when he imagined that scene. What would she be doing right now? Reading poetry, or walking drunkenly down the streets of Santurce? What did it really mean to be an iconoclast, if not that one was willing to self-immolate?

  Agins’s intellectual speed left Esquilín no time to speculate. When he returned to himself, the Californian had already moved on to a new case. The lawyer, in search of a way out, asked the old man the same question he’d put to Pinillos, Collado, and Porras: Why do you think that, out of everyone, Viviana Luxembourg chose you in particular?

  Gregory Agins leaned forward in his chair, thoughtful, before giving the same reply as the others: a timid “I don’t know.” Then he seemed to rethink his response.

  Agins mentioned his political adventures during the seventies, with a special emphasis on his participation in the socialist commune Los Muchis in the Arizona desert. Los Muchis: Esquilín thought he’d heard the name before, most likely in the defendant’s notebooks.

  “Maybe we’re united by a political commitment, a certain interest in alternative societies, alternative histories,” noted Agins. Then he told a long story: the story of the commune at the edge of the desert, a story that the young lawyer found heroic, even though ultimately it was little more than a plagiarized utopia.

  * * *

  The story started on the mountainous campus of the University of California, Santa Cruz, during the spring of 1972, and it ended on the edge of the Arizona desert in the summer of 1975. It began with a redheaded woman who interrupted her friends one day to suggest a spontaneous trip to Mexico, the Mexico of Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady, the Mexico of the beatniks and the peerless heroin addict William Burroughs—to the Mexico of that little group of gringo poets her friends loved, and about whom she, despite not having read their work herself, knew every story. It ended three years later, when the penultimate member of the group, high as could be on peyote, asked young Gregory Agins to tie him to a horse—a ritual begun by Antonin Artaud, another poète maudit, on the plains of another desert and under the watchful eyes of other Indians.

  * * *

  Between the young redhead’s first innocent suggestion and the penultimate man’s madness was an incredible chain of events and experiences that made Esquilín think he hadn’t lived enough. He had never even left the island, not even to visit his father’s family in the Dominican Republic. He had certainly not set foot in that furious Mexico Agins spoke of between peals of laughter, a Mexico where a drunk named Burroughs murdered his wife in a William Tell act gone horribly wrong, and later said that otherwise he never would have become a writer; a Mexico where crazy old Artaud got high and finally disappeared among Indians and peyote. Gregory Agins and his friends went there twenty years later to see what remained of the site where the avant-garde had reached its apotheosis, only to find an empty corner with a small sign that read: MONTERREY 122. That was where the same brave redheaded girl, when she read about Albert Owen’s Socialist colonies, suggested founding a colony of their own, fueled by sex and alcohol. An anarchist colony, not on the outskirts of Sinaloa, as Owen had wanted, but in the desert itself, as an homage to that demented Frenchman her friends talked about so much.

  * * *

  The redhead—whose name was Alexandra Walesi—had an idea that was no less brilliant for its simplicity: all avant-garde art, according to her, was the strategic copy of a previous avant-garde. There was no such thing as originality, only the pleasure of repetition. And so, they
would be the first avant-garde artists to boast of their plagiarism. And just like that, as Agins told it, they began to prepare for a utopian community that blended the ideals of all their old idols: Albert K. Owen and Antonin Artaud, the beatniks and Herman Hesse, the pill and Che Guevara. The friends strolled through Plaza Garibaldi dreaming of their anarchist commune, vowing not to return to Santa Cruz for a long while. All they were missing was a name.

  Gregory Agins, who had also been reading about Owen’s utopian projects, suggested Los Muchis, a variation on Los Mochis, the name of the notorious Sinaloan colony.

  Over the following weeks, running on alcohol and hallucinogens, they dedicated themselves to building models of their colony. One afternoon, high and walking through the Hotel Casino de la Selva, between murals by Meza and Siqueiros, they decided that the colony needed a precise shape, a geometry that would tell the stars that they were there to stay. Agins proposed the famous rhodonea curve, discovered by Luigi Guido Grandi around 1725. Walesi imagined a city drawn as the Seed of Life, a figure she said symbolized the seven days of creation. Then a fragile blond girl with a timid voice mentioned that she had heard once about a secret society of Hollywood hippies who tried to build a commune in a Latin American jungle in the shape of a five-pointed figure. According to her, the figure was called a quincunx, and it was said to be the building block of all other natural forms.

  * * *

  Esquilín thought immediately of the five-pointed doodle that he had started to absentmindedly draw in his own notebooks. Ever polite, he waited for the old man to finish his story, and then asked if Agins could draw a map of Los Muchis. As soon as he confirmed it had the same shape as his doodles, he gathered his things, excused himself, and left.