Natural History

by Carlos Fonseca

  She didn’t have to wait long. That very night, after leaving María José Pinillos with Porras and Collado, Esquilín returned home and began to consult his papers. He opened to the page marked by Mariana’s Post-it, and, accustomed as he was to the defendant’s lists and doodles, at first he didn’t notice the drawing’s importance. Then he understood why Mariana had left her grandmother’s old magnifying lens on his work desk. He picked it up and held it over the drawing, and was surprised to find the perfect scale drawing of a city composed of small quincunxes. Unsettled, he closed the notebook, threw the contents of his mug into the sink, and decided he needed a rest. He went into the bedroom and found Mariana asleep with the dog.

  He got up six hours later, at dawn, convinced he’d heard a gunshot. He found nothing but his anxious dog clawing at the edge of the bed. Unable to fall back asleep, he got dressed, reheated the pot of coffee from the night before, put the leash on the dog, and went out for a walk. The animal calmed, he went back to the apartment, poured himself another cup of coffee, and then picked up the magnifying lens.

  There was the map; the night hadn’t changed a thing.

  He set aside the magnifying glass and was about to call Agins, when in the cloud of names surrounding the map he recognized that of Maribel Martínez, the pseudonym the defendant had used to sign her first false news item. One by one, then, he copied out the other names on that page. He thought he vaguely recognized some of them, but he didn’t know from where. Then he did call Agins to describe his newest discovery, sure the old man would have more clues, but he was surprised to hear that throughout their correspondence, the defendant had never mentioned the quincunx. He hung up without an explanation and headed for the police archive, where the evidence record was kept. Each one of the names written on the minuscule map corresponded to one of the fictional identities the defendant had used to disseminate her false rumors.

  * * *

  That day, the prosecutor presented a second false news item as evidence, this time related to an American oil company in the Middle East and its relationship with certain ultra-right-wing groups in Australia. Attributed to a Jeremy James, the article appeared in a Guatemalan newspaper, where it began its pilgrimage through southern lands before taking the leap to the United States. Once it infiltrated the U.S. media, it was reproduced around the world. The same logic, the same blueprint, the same crime. Luis Gerardo Esquilín sat next to his client, silent, showing no sign of his suspicions. No one could imagine that an image was eating away at him: the map of the colony in miniature, and along with it, the list of names that no doubt included Jeremy James. No one could detect a thing, not even the slightest disquiet, perhaps because not even he knew exactly what he felt.

  * * *

  When the session was over, Luis Gerardo Esquilín asked to meet with his client alone. He found Virginia McCallister as calm as ever, satisfied with how the trial was going, with the witnesses’ testimonies, the lawyer’s arguments. They discussed their final strategies, the possibilities that remained to them. He again had the feeling that the defendant cared little about the actual result of the trial, the years she could spend in jail, a slow death behind bars. She seemed to be making a different play.

  Restless and sweaty, he opened his briefcase, searched among his papers until he found the one he wanted, and placed it on the table. There was the real evidence: the photocopy of the small map and the list of names. On a separate paper, he drew a small quincunx and asked:

  “What does this shape mean?”

  At first he thought he could see a tremor in the defendant’s eyes, but her voice emerged terribly collected and serene:

  “Nothing.”

  Esquilín thought about telling her he knew the whole story, about Pinillos’s scorched earth and Agins’s anarchist colonies, the whole underground story the defendant seemed to be hiding, but the attempt suddenly seemed futile. The old bag can rot in jail, he told himself furiously. He stashed the papers, stammered some insult in English, and left the room without a goodbye.

  17

  Since her arrival on the island, María José Pinillos had not tired of claiming that the only reason she’d agreed to be a witness in that absurd trial was that she wanted to see the infamous tower where the defendant had lived. Knowing that the end of the trial was approaching, the Guatemalan’s complaints had multiplied, and now she added an impossible promise: if someone would take her to the tower, she wouldn’t consume another drop of alcohol. Overwhelmed by work, exasperated by Pinillos’s immature entreaties, Esquilín had managed to put off the request for weeks. But when he got home the day he confronted the defendant, he soon tossed aside his work papers and told his girlfriend he was fed up with the trial. He dialed the number of the mobile phone Porras had bought for Pinillos, and promised her that he would show her around the tower. When he went to pick her up the next day, he found her sitting in a plaza full of pigeons, reading Vallejo and smoking an electronic cigarette. Seeing her like that, anyone would have thought she was a soul at peace.

  * * *

  Pinillos’s first impression when she saw the tower was that it was a modern building even in its incompleteness. Any Guatemalan would have been happy living there, but its luxury was stunted. She liked its atmosphere of precarious modernity, the musical whisper of its ruinous hallways, the labyrinthine feeling of being in a world that followed its own rules. They were ready to start the climb to the defendant’s old apartment when a whistle caught their attention. It was a man with a lively mustache whom Esquilín rushed to greet. In his office, with the noise of the horse races in the background, Pinillos—a little bored and tired—watched as Esquilín and the man talked about the trial, about the defendant and the tower. According to this man, things were stacked in the defendant’s favor. How could someone be put on trial for such a silly thing? How could someone conceive of a simple game of telephone as a crime? Esquilín tried to change the subject, saying that the cards had been dealt and it would all be over very soon. Still, the man returned to the subject, this time recounting the defendant’s strange routine: her extreme hermeticism, her visits to La Esperanza café, the sketches she used to draw on any paper napkin she had at hand. Then, when he finally got bored with the subject, he went over to the radio, turned up the volume, and said goodbye, adding, “Your gringo sidekick is around here somewhere.”

  Esquilín was stupefied. He didn’t know what gringo the guard was referring to; as far as he knew, he had no sidekicks. And then, as Pinillos disappeared down the hallway, he started to ask around. An old man in a flowered shirt told him that the gringo had left for La Esperanza half an hour ago. Not much caring where Pinillos had gotten to, the lawyer followed the old man’s directions to the café. Ten minutes later, disgusted by the crowd of mangy dogs he met along the way, he finally saw the sign; trepidatious, he took a step inside. Two boys looked at him defiantly, and across from them he saw a fat man with blond hair who was playing with a domino set.

  “Gringo,” he said. The two boys rose anxiously from their seats, ready to tell him off. A brief gesture from the fat man—a gesture that struck the lawyer as particularly Latin—seemed to save him.

  * * *

  Cornered by the lawyer, who seemed to have aged ten years in a couple of months, Tancredo explained everything: his job as a journalist, his attempts to copy the defendant’s strange routine. Incredulous, sure that Tancredo was part of the conspiracy growing behind his back, Esquilín asked to see the napkin drawings that the old man had mentioned. Neither of them could contain their laughter as they looked at the old napkins where, every afternoon, the defendant had sketched the same comic strip of Wallenda walking the tightrope.

  * * *

  They sat down to talk. According to Tancredo, after three months of imitating the defendant’s routine, he’d only managed to confirm what he already knew: you couldn’t copy a life. They talked about the tower, old Gaspar and the barbershop, the building’s upper floors, and Sergeant Burgos. Tancredo wa
s surprised to hear that Esquilín had gotten a message from his old friend, a message in which, as the young lawyer explained, the policeman mentioned a stutterer named Miguel Rivera, as well as a mural and a strange mountain where children were kings. Tired of keeping secrets, Esquilín confided in his new acquaintance the details of his latest discoveries: the anarchist colonies in the shape of the quincunx, the defendant’s interest in scorched earth, the map drawn in miniature. Feeling a sense of déjà vu, Tancredo remembered a conversation he’d had with Burgos two weeks before he disappeared, when Burgos had talked about the correlation between the defendant’s stories and those of the stutterer. According to Burgos, the afternoon when they’d discovered the defendant, she had mentioned a false article about a strange mountain inhabited by enlightened children, the same mountain that Miguel Rivera would mention mockingly two days later. That repetition still hounded Burgos long after, every time he remembered the series of young faces he had seen on the stutterer’s computers the day of his unexpected visit. Tancredo said he had tried to follow up on that detail but that it hadn’t led anywhere; he ordered two beers and they spent the next hour in a simple game of dominoes. In the end, they both swore to follow that clue until they found out where it led.

  18

  “If one thing is clear in this story,” Tancredo would write me a week later, “it’s that meaning always comes too early or too late, never on time.”

  Two days after meeting with the lawyer in La Esperanza, Tancredo watched as the prosecutor presented his final piece of evidence. Soon he recognized the story as the one that the defendant, in an attempt to explain her art, had mentioned to Burgos that first afternoon: he recognized the mention of an anarchist colony in Latin American lands, the supposed participation of a person who later would be an upper executive of a U.S. company, the strange role that children played in that colony. He even came to suspect, very briefly, that Esquilín himself had passed on the story to the prosecutor as a secret form of revenge on his client, but what he heard next made him think that it was, rather, the defendant’s final trick.

  The story had been published in a small newspaper in Costa Rica just two weeks before the defendant was detained. The piece seemed to fit the typical profile of articles the defendant had infiltrated into the press: the same process of circulation, the same strategy of insertion, the same absurd pilgrimage through the media.

  Then the prosecutor explained that the article was attributed to Marie Sherman, a clear alias of Virginia’s, whose middle name was Marie and whose mother’s maiden name was Sherman, as the state archive confirmed. Just as the defendant had inscribed a quota of reality on the news item by leaving traces of her old name, the article itself was not entirely false. It was, even, in a certain sense, true. There was a record of such an anarchist colony, it was known that the future businessman had participated in it; there were even rumors about the unusual role that children had played in the colony. Unable to process so much information at once, we all watched the prosecutor call the defendant to testify.

  * * *

  We watched her climb up onto the stand with her usual elegance, answer question after question with the same aloofness as always. Until—to our shock—we were witness to how, bit by bit, the prosecutor managed to chip away her layers of coldness and indifference. We all watched as he presented her with a simple date—April 15, 1966—before asking if it reminded her of anything special. When she replied what we all already knew, namely, that the date signaled the beginning of her twenty-year amnesia, he repeated the question and added, “Isn’t this also the birthday of someone special?” After her shaken silence, we heard him press further: “Isn’t this the birthday of your daughter, Carolyn Toledano?” It was then that we felt that the varnish had finally worn down, leaving exposed the throbbing, nervous face of the mother we’d all seen in the family photos, the human face of that woman who’d spent nearly thirty years searching for anonymity.

  The prosecutor called for his last piece of evidence to be brought in. Two men dressed in black entered carrying a large poster that they placed in front of the defendant and facing the jury. At first, as it was turned away from us, no one—not the spectators in the courtroom or the TV viewers at home—could see what it was.

  The prosecutor asked if the defendant recognized the image. Finally stripped of her theories, she started to tremble, and then burst into tears. I think no one present in that room will ever be able to forget those tears. No one will forget the defendant’s broken, weepy voice as she confirmed that she recognized the image, or the stubborn coldness with which the prosecutor, glimpsing his triumph, merely took the poster in hand and showed it to the jury, then the viewing public.

  It was a family photo like any other, a photo that wouldn’t have seemed particularly noteworthy were it not for the indigenous little boy standing between the girl and her mother; on the boy’s face, we could all see the tattooed shape of a quincunx. This photograph, the prosecutor concluded, had been taken during the first months of 1977 by Yoav Toledano, the defendant’s disappeared husband, during their stay in the infamous anarchist colony. Once the defendant had recovered, the prosecutor went on with his interrogation, but it mattered little. No one would forget the sight of her weeping over the image that had finally forced her to confront the past she’d tried so hard to escape.

  * * *

  That day, as I watched the image zoom in on the photograph again, I thought about how everyone would remember it as a painful but abstract picture of a family pushed to the limit by passion. I, on the other hand, was doomed to remember it as a private story, a past that led directly to the face I recognized in the photo I now saw incessantly on-screen. Giovanna. I looked at the picture again and imagined her in her living room, telling stories of insects and jungles, of the tropical journey that in the end would fill her with opaque silences. Then I remembered the photos I’d seen in old Toledano’s workshop, and I asked myself where this story would end. That day I received another message from Tancredo, a single line: “Tragedy or farce?”

  19

  Three days later, when the sentencing hearing began, the prosecutor returned to what happened the day he confronted the defendant with the photo. He alleged that this was clearly a woman fully aware of her actions, who had found in art the perfect way to evade responsibility. According to him, knowing that she would soon be caught, Virginia McCallister had prepared those notebooks as a final escape route, hoping to receive from the jury a compassion she didn’t deserve. The tears had made it clear that behind the lies was hidden a real story whose consequences the defendant refused to accept. Art, like life, he added, has repercussions. It was up to the law to regulate the consequences. One could put a lie into circulation, but one could not live a life under a lie, he said. He left it to the jury whether they wanted to imagine for their children a world where art was more important than family.

  * * *

  Convinced that his work was done, Luis Gerardo Esquilín merely summarized the arguments he had outlined throughout the trial. Then, in a voice that gave him away as a finally matured man, cynical and disbelieving, he cited B. Traven’s line he’d so admired: “The creative person should have no other biography than his works.” He repeated the phrase in his own Spanish translation: “El artista es aquel que no ostenta más biografía que sus obras.” If anyone should speak, he concluded, it was the defendant, and he gave the floor to her.

  * * *

  The face of the woman who walked to the stand that day bore no trace of the emotional calamity she’d suffered when confronted with that family photograph. Her fortitude recovered, she took the stand with her customary elegance, as though the previous session had been nothing but a nightmare. If we hadn’t all witnessed, just three days before, the devastating sight of her moral collapse, no one would have imagined that this blond, blue-eyed woman was keeping a secret. Still, the damage was done: we’d seen her cry, and the memory of her collapse helped us intuit the cracks, deep and quaveri
ng, in a speech that to all appearances was as flawless and infallible as a medieval castle.

  She started by talking about the temporal discrepancy between art and law. How could it be that artistic discourse was more advanced than legal discourse? How could we accept that what in the world of art was seen as absolutely valid was seen by the law as a criminal gesture? How should we think about this discrepancy between the discourses that made up the world? Then we listened to her talk about the speeds of the world, about the slowness of the law in catching up to art, about the separation of the world into thousands of private languages. According to her, contemporary society ran the risk of catastrophically repeating the ancient myth of Babel, the dissemination of the divine language into millions of private ones, specialized and incomprehensible. Art was the route of possible return to unified language and a real political community.

  Before the stupefied gazes of the audience, the jury, and the judge, she went on to read a list of almost four hundred names, a list that included many of the artists who had had to confront the dictates of the law. She read the list in a monotone, as though emphasizing that there was no escape from this story whose memory she now salvaged as a kind of homage.

  Then, without asking for compassion or understanding of any sort, Virginia McCallister walked to the defense’s bench and sat down next to her lawyer. Luis Gerardo Esquilín had listened to it all, but all he could think about was the family photo he’d seen three days before.