* * *
If he is here, it is for her, old Sherman’s distant heir, seeking to atone for a sin by repeating a journey.
6
Halfway through the journey, one of the pilgrims recognizes her.
“Aren’t you that actress?”
Assuming the first of the many masks that she will wear over the decades to come, the mother merely frowns:
“I don’t know who you mean.”
And the pilgrim accepts it, not so much because she believes the response, but because she understands that everyone is here to forget, to leave aside an undesirable past and begin a new life. Over the years the question will repeat, and on each occasion the answer will be the same.
7
Their trek, of course, is not the only one, much less the first. They find the remains of previous journeys all around. In each new village they’re reminded of the fact that their pilgrimage is not unique and that others have come before them. Ungrateful men who left everything behind to venture out into the jungle, tired people who one day decided to follow a story that maybe they didn’t even believe in.
There are traces everywhere: the shirts adorning the natives’ chests, and the plastic refuse they find between villages, in the atmosphere of false expectation that hangs over their crossing. This invisible presence makes them think they have arrived too late, that the pilgrimage could have been sincere only if it had been made ten years ago, when conviction still throbbed intact over history’s fire. In every one of their gestures they sense a forgotten repetition. They soothe themselves by saying it’s only déjà vu, a tired illusion that in no way stains the authenticity of their journey.
One rainy day, after five hours of arduous walking, they come upon a small shack in the middle of the jungle. Zinc roof, structure made of wood and straw, a hair’s breadth from collapse. The open door leaves the interior exposed. There, among old newspapers, a white man, prematurely aged, lies on a pile of rags with a pen in his hand, reading a book that the mother recognizes: the complete works of Heinrich von Kleist in the original German. The pen is very small and so is the book, which makes the man seem huge, a Visigoth warrior lost in the jungle. He’s surrounded by empty liquor bottles. And the old man never pauses his reading; he merely lets them know, with a measured gesture, that they can pass.
Something in the scene—perhaps the apostle’s melancholic slowness as he stops in front of the shack, or the way he seems to emerge from his perpetual prayer—makes them think he recognizes the old man. He gives no greeting, however, just exhibits a certain deference, seeming to delegate his authority, if briefly. The journey’s true goal could well have been to make it to that place. And then the old man begins to speak, very slowly, as if it had been years since his last human interaction. He speaks in a very correct German, as if hallucinating a Bavarian winter.
* * *
They let him speak, let his tongue loosen. No one thinks his words hold meaning, no one trusts his narrative power. They think to themselves that they could well turn into him, wizened old men lost in reverie. They let him speak, not just out of pity but out of a much deeper fear: that, in fact, he is what they are now, already. Perhaps at the end of history there is only a withered old man narrating a tale no one understands, a story as fragile and elegant as an old horse. That’s why they let him speak. To find out how the story they’re now living, without understanding, will end.
* * *
Hours later they’ll learn from the only German in the group that all those stammered words did form a story. Florian, a young actor who reenacts old tragedies for the enjoyment of the natives, will reconstruct it for them just as the old man told it.
It is the story of a French duke from the seventeenth century who decides to spend his entire fortune on a grandiose but simple project: he will build a magnificent mansion in the middle of the jungle, then sit in a humble shack and watch its gradual decay, its slow walk toward ruin.
Accompanied by the best architects, he spends his days drawing up the perfect design for that magnificent monument, that future ruin. While around him the money flows in ships loaded down with gold and slaves, while the continent trembles in the fear of new wars, the image of his ruinous palace in the jungle brings the duke satisfaction and joy. Soon he understands that this is no mere project: his construction becomes, as years pass, an allegory of all possible architecture. All architecture, the duke comes to believe, becomes the image of a future that was not, a future ruined by a present always striving to imagine new possibilities. The idea consumes him. He spends his days thinking about its variations while the ideal of the project is depleted at the same feverish rate as his own fortune. He will die poor, terribly alone, besieged by the countless models of an impossible project he will never carry out.
* * *
They think of the old man they’ve just seen. The ancient newspapers, his worn face, the solitude of his eternal reading. Their whole journey is a bit like an empty pilgrimage that is gradually drained by its own senselessness. A long, slow walk toward a void, led by another lost madman who doesn’t understand that his time has already passed.
8
In the afternoons, when the fever goes down and she is herself again, the little girl pesters her mother.
“Mom, Mom,” she says while her mother writes. “If I close my eyes, I’m invisible.”
Then she closes her eyes again in an attempt to prove that her theories are true.
“Can you see me?”
She goes on, but to little effect. In silence, the mother goes on writing, diligent and obsessive.
9
In her free hours, the mother sits down to read. While her husband teaches some bored native to play chess, while her sickly daughter coughs beside her, the mother continues the review of anarchism that has brought her to this corner of the world. She will, she tells herself, reach the end of the world carrying the books of this idealism that refuses to give way, even when everything indicates it should.
* * *
She has made note of three groups in her notebook: the Lazarists in the south of Tuscany, the Andalusian anarchists, and the Sicilian peasants. Farther down, she has outlined the story of their precursors, the Taborites and the Anabaptists. Then, in her unmistakable handwriting, she finished writing the hypothesis that has brought her here, the conjecture that the apostle repeats again and again, as if turning it into truth:
The end belongs to the south. Unquestionable: look at Davide Lazzaretti, the messiah of Mount Amiata, look at the Andalusian laborers, look at Piana dei Greci. Even if the northerners deny it, there’s nothing else: hope lies in the south. They were wrong, though, to look for the south in Europe. Aguirre knew it well, and my forebear crazy old Sherman knew, the true south is in America.
Farther down she has written a list of dates: 1820, 1837, 1860, 1866, culminating with the day when the apostle has promised they’ll reach the seer. During the nights, while she’s asleep, her husband reads the pages she has written and wonders if deep down she believes, or if she is secretly trembling behind this fiction.
10
Five days later, when the path starts to become more rarefied, long and repetitive like a dream, they find another lost traveler, this time at the edge of a gorge. They find him there between a giant rock and the purest emptiness, high and apparently in a trance. A lost vestige of another, now-forgotten pilgrimage. But where the German had told a story of the impasses of architectural ambition, this man has a frenetic monologue on an imagined American genealogy. There is room for everyone in his whirlwind story: Christopher Columbus and Baron Alexander von Humboldt, Hernán Cortés and Moctezuma, the natives of Cipango and the fearful Aguirre. American history comes to a stop there, scrambled by the man’s belief that he’s descended from Jefferson but also from the first Incan, from Washington but also La Malinche, from Joan of Arc but also from Evita.
The apostle sends two of the pilgrims to tie the man up. Once he is immobilized, the apostle halts h
is monologue with a simple question: “What is your name and where are you from?”
“My name is Maximiliano Cienfuegos and I come from the whore who birthed you.”
He says it with contempt and arrogance, and he follows up by hocking a great gob of phlegm at the apostle’s feet. Motionless, his anger reflected in his light eyes, he looks like the enormous caimans they’ve seen at the edge of the river—tired but still hunting. Then his diatribe starts up again, this time directed against an entire system, against capitalism and the omnipresent and terrible north, against capital and markets, against himself. The apostle gives the order to continue their journey. And they keep walking, willing to refuse everything in order to reach the end they long for, while behind them Maximiliano’s voice becomes more distant and fearsome, a vestige of the dread that is growing into a great nightmare that includes them all. The little girl, sick, weak, and scared, turns her head for one last look at an image she will never forget.
11
That night, the mother dreams again. She dreams about the man they’ve just seen, but he’s skinny and pale, sickly like her daughter sleeping next to her. She meets him in the middle of a plain, and he’s obsessed with the construction of an impossible machine. She approaches him, trembling, and tells him how he’d told them all the history of America as if it were a dumping ground of names. And in the dream the man is different, a peaceful and sober version of himself, a kind of gaucho who pauses his work to tell her another story, about an archipelago that extends to the south. And the mother looks around, and then she sees that the plain isn’t a plain, but a constellation of islands separated by small rivers all flowing toward the luminous, warm south. In the center she sees this sickly gringo lost among the islands, and now he repeats the word that so intrigues and pleases her: archipelago.
* * *
She wakes up to the sound of water dripping inside the shack. Her husband sleeps peacefully beside her, his arms around the little girl, who seems sicker all the time. “Only a few more days,” she tells herself. Around her she sees the other pilgrims sleeping, along with the three natives who act as their guides. Outside, framed by the doorway of that minuscule shack, she makes out the sleepless silhouette of the apostle in front of the fire. She looks back at her daughter and repeats: “Only a few more days, no need to worry.” Then she sees the image from her dream again, with total clarity. She sees a multitude of islands without center or end, adrift in the eyes of a man who doesn’t sleep, a man who refuses to sleep.
12
Two days later the father gets up and sees his daughter reading her mother’s notebook. He wonders what the girl will think of her mother’s annotations. What will she think when she sees those sketches of millenarian megalomania, her mother’s totalizing zeal? He lets her read, thinking perhaps it’s better that way. Let the girl read and decide for herself if her mother’s theories make sense. We all, he tells himself, have to grow up with a familial madness, our parents’ private ravings. We all have to face, at some point, the legacy of a generation that was only fumbling around in the dark.
13
There’s a story underneath history, says the apostle, a universal story that proceeds at a geological, inhuman pace. He speaks in the style of a sermon, but with a scientific shading that disconcerts as much as it comforts the pilgrims. He says: There is the time of man and the time of the gods. Then there’s the time of the earth. This story is written at the speed of underground currents, written on the rocks and the bark of trees. It is a history of gradual destruction that finally rises to the surface. One day a man gets up and sees smoke rising from the earth: that is the other story.
* * *
Then, as if his personal story were blocking his way, he stops. He scrunches up his face, and, staring off in the distance, he tells the story of the fires.
* * *
There’s a boy and a town. An American boy exploring with his friend one day when they come across a cave. Plumes of smoke waft from its mouth, but this does not deter them. A common boy with reddish hair and pale skin, timid but reckless, he follows his friend into the cave, only to watch as he is devoured by the earth. The boy runs to the precipice that his companion didn’t see, but it’s too late, the child is gone. After that, the boy grows up full of an inner rage that he doesn’t entirely comprehend. In the story, the boy grows up as plumes of smoke start to appear throughout the town, he grows up with a fury contained like the fire spreading under the earth. His first girlfriend’s parents decide to abandon the town and take her with them; his own cousin decides to move; slowly, slowly, the town empties out of people and fills up with smoke. His father, still unemployed, refuses to leave the town where he himself was raised. The boy grows up furious, but doesn’t know where the rage comes from.
One day he dreams that he is in the middle of an immense forest. He thinks he hears, amid the roar of a great fire, a child’s voice giving him directions. That day he tells himself that if he ever leaves town, it will be to find that boy and that forest.
* * *
In the story there is a town that one day stops being a town. It becomes something else: a ruin, emptiness, nostalgia. It survives as a ghost. In the story the town is slowly covered by fields, until all that remains is a cemetery in the middle of the prairie, smoke plumes all around. Lost tourists and the occasional journalist come to question the last ornery holdouts refusing to leave. The town burns down slow as a cigar, until only ashes remain. The town wakes up at its own funeral and recognizes itself in each of the mourners’ gestures. In that town, among the mourners, there’s a boy, and that boy refuses to think that everything is mere coincidence. He rejects the thought that the fire is simple coincidence. At sixteen years old, the boy tattoos a flame on his chest and swears on the town that is no more that he won’t leave until he discovers the secret reason why everything is conspiring to keep him from dying in the place that saw his birth.
* * *
In the story, the years pass slowly, following a geological tempo unrestrained by the calendar. Time passes in a great plume of smoke. The caterpillar town finds itself light and crepuscular as a moth. Time passes in the apostle’s story, but it hardly matters, since behind human time spreads the awful shadow of that other time, before which human chronology curls into a ball and disappears. Everything passes until one day the boy reads a news article that pulls him from his solitude: other towns also have fires, underground flames that for years, decades, centuries, have been burning in discreet silence.
His town is not alone. From the famous Burning Mountain in Australia to the German Brennender Berg, from the steppes of Xinjiang to the Canadian Smoking Hills, the list appears to him like a gesture of solidarity. Some of these fires have been active over a thousand years, a detail that terrifies him. Suddenly he intuits that the false solidity of the ground hides a subterranean history, with conflicts and resolutions, passion and sadness, rhythms and routines. A geological story like the underworld of Greek mythology, of ancient Hades and diligent Charon. But something doesn’t fit. The story is not myth; it is real, hard, fleeting but tangible like fire.
That afternoon he runs through town like he did as a child. He runs with a new eagerness, and he feels growing under his feet the power of history, unknown and fearful, that nevertheless relieves him of the burden of believing he is alone. He runs until he reaches the cemetery and sees the smoke rising up, and he tells himself that the story doesn’t end there.
From that day on his belief in the universal, subterranean story grows. Like the emergence of the fires, this story is dictated by far-off reverberations. He starts to alternate reading with the business of life, marijuana with medieval philosophy, cocaine with Renaissance treatises on natural history. He buys a bulletin board and tacks up a map of the world, where he marks the fires and the dates when they emerged, convinced that he’ll be able to find the logic behind those sporadic appearances. The boy becomes a man who spends his hours in books and marijuana, observing the cons
tellation that blooms on the wall of his room. He decides to buy three German shepherds, enormous dogs that follow him everywhere and lend him a mountain-man air. He lets his hair grow long, paints his nails black, starts to hang out with the goths in a nearby town. He slowly becomes a weirdo, with theories no one understands, consumed by a terrible fury. Even so, he reads, philosophers and mathematicians, scholastics and physicists, expecting something like an answer. The language of the future, he says to himself, will be the product of an prodigious blend of science and art, history and philosophy.
But all he finds in his books is an inverted image of his own will, a world of private fantasies, traced by a causal logic only he understands. Spurred on by the cups of coffee he drinks one after another, he imagines that the map he’s tracing on his wall holds an internal dynamic, a political and historical sense. He writes equations in search of the formula that would explain the map of catastrophes. Cocooned by the paranoia that will mark him for years, he imagines that it’s all a conspiracy. He becomes politicized, in his own way. He starts to travel, he goes to all the political marches that happen in New York, New Jersey, Boston, and Philadelphia. Always with his three giant dogs, alone or with friends as strange as he is, always dressed in black, always spouting an incomprehensible discourse.
Natural History Page 27