Politics is different for him than for other people. He is uninterested in elections or current events. His commitment is to those great historical manifestations that he senses beneath the day-to-day. His political history, so to speak, started with the big bang and continues to the present in a game of correspondences only he understands. Politics, for him, is a private code, but he finds the key in a U.S. history book. Among dozens of irrelevant facts, a name leaps out: William Tecumseh Sherman.
* * *
First of all, the name surprises him: Tecumseh. It sounds prehistoric, mythical, ancient. It sounds like fire. Then, there’s the story: the father, a successful lawyer from Ohio, dead when the future general is only nine years old. The mother, without an inheritance, must support eleven children. The young general-to-be goes to live with a neighbor, the lawyer Thomas Ewing, a distinguished member of the Whig Party who would one day be the first secretary of the interior. It is an American story wrapped in a family tragedy that will be repeated years later when, in the midst of the Civil War, General Sherman receives a telegram informing him that his son is deathly ill. Little Willy dies days later in a Memphis hospital, consumed by typhoid. The young son is dead at the same age the general was when he lost his own father. The rest of the story, he thinks, is shrouded in the pain of that loss. General Sherman’s famous southward march, the merciless burning of Atlanta, the “total war” that made his name, the fearful fires: everything is stained by that decisive initial loss.
He reads the story of how, once Atlanta was taken, that man with drooping shoulders and an anxious gait ordered his soldiers to burn it all, the houses and the livestock, the trains and the churches. He reads of a scene he will never forget: while a terrible cloud of smoke rose above the city, the general ordered the band of the Massachusetts Thirty-Third Battalion to play one final song. He reads about Sherman’s scorched-earth strategy, and suddenly he believes he has the key to the whole matter, the key to that natural history of destruction he has mapped in his living room. The history he has been searching for found its most perfect incarnation in General Sherman.
In the following weeks, he thinks endlessly about Sherman’s March to the Sea. He’s attracted by the image of a battalion of men willing to leave everything for an ideal that perhaps they don’t even believe in. He finally decides to name his three dogs. The first is William; the second, Sherman; the third, no doubt his favorite, gets the name Tecumseh, the leader of the Shawnee tribe. He draws the trajectory of the Union forces on the map, their passage through Atlanta and then farther south, until one day, high as can be, with a clarity he won’t achieve again for many years, he sees that the fires, like the general, move slowly but gloriously southward.
* * *
Then come months of great concentration, months in which the boy does nothing but accumulate information: about General Sherman, about total war, about the South, about the scorched-earth strategy. He fills notebooks. He traces parallel narratives and conjures up possible connections, and even starts to imagine a political conspiracy. He stores up the names of mining companies, oil companies, names of political leaders. But nothing gives him the final image. He thinks he has found the direction of the story, but he’s missing its body. Frustrated, he surrenders to alcohol. His dogs watch as he drinks bottle after bottle of cheap bourbon and rereads the information in front of him. He gives up, even though he tries to tell himself that his hero never gave up, even when his son died in the middle of the war.
* * *
They are lost years, years when the young man tries to forget. They’re years of opioids that leave him sprawled on the sofa, lost in a fragile calm that the dogs make sure, from time to time, to interrupt. His father dies, his friends go looking for work in other mining towns. His peers get married, graduate from college, stop painting their nails black. They’re the first years of the hippie era, of Vietnam, years that foreshadow the coming student protests and the progressive politicization of old Sherman’s country. For him, however, they are years that pass wrapped in a soft fog, a stupor that hides a deep disquiet.
One day, he wakes up to his dogs barking. On the living room TV he sees a great flame. Soon he understands the more macabre truth: what he sees, what he then can hardly believe he is seeing, is a man burning himself in the middle of the street. That day, the news replays the scene over and over: Thích Quἀng Đú, c, a seventy-six-year-old Vietnamese Buddhist monk, burning himself alive. He remembers Sherman’s great march, the underground fires, the map of the world forgotten behind him, and he tells himself it’s time to return. He tells himself that this is the sign he was waiting for. He remembers his dream: a burning forest, and in the middle of it, the voice of a child calling to him.
* * *
He gives himself over to searching for that voice he thinks he’s heard, a voice that he now believes must come from the South, Sherman’s ruined South. He spends afternoons at the library among books of history and geography, convinced that there he will find the boy he has heard in dreams. The image of the burning monk has reawakened in him that feeling of dread that he had the day he understood his town would end up becoming a ruinous heap. Many of his friends, now in other towns, are called in those years to participate in the war. Not him. He’s spent the war’s first years embalmed in alcohol, overlooking the draft notices. He doesn’t intend to change now. Vietnam: the name sounds decisive and distant, befitting the contempt he feels for a country that has forgotten its people.
In red Profile notebooks, he develops a series of notes that he decides to call A Brief History of Destruction. It is a natural history of fire. Destruction, for him, constitutes a politics. He writes the only way he knows how: cutting and pasting anecdotes from different books, writing commentaries around them in the style of old natural histories. He catalogs, stores, writes, until one day, looking through some newspapers, he comes across an article with the headline “A Prophet Child in the Southern Jungle.” Without a second thought, he cuts it out and sticks it in his notebook. He doesn’t need to read it to know that for him it promises the beginning of another march. It’s the middle of the night, but he goes out for a walk with his three dogs, certain that the article will know how to wait for him.
* * *
He opens a bottle of bourbon as he walks, traversing the ruinous silhouettes of that town that is no longer. Driven by a fateful will, he crosses the spaces of what once was—the church, the barren town hall, the old school. He goes on walking until he enters the nearest town, feeling oddly light. He leaves his dogs at the entrance to a bar. Inside, three women look at him, ready to get down to business. They approach and he asks them how much, and when he hears the amount he chooses two, a skinny redhead who talks nonstop and a newly arrived Italian who speaks almost no English. He downs one last bourbon and lets the women lead him into a room with a classic decor, in the middle of which is an unmade bed. Strangely lucid, he asks only if he can choose the music. So he turns off the insufferable Elvis song on the jukebox and puts on something that the girls didn’t even know was in the catalog, music with strong, deep chords, dark and chilling, music that portends his own fury and longing as he penetrates them that night, the fury of a man using sex as a cure for a suffocating memory, a man who knows he is close to the truth he’s been searching for but refuses to look it in the face. They watch him close his eyes, and for a moment they fear he is deathly ill. This man, they think, fucks like someone with nothing to lose, like with a man who has decided to laugh in the face of death and surrender to one last pleasure, dark and remote.
* * *
Three hours later, he is roused by the barking of his dogs. Beside him, naked and sweaty, the two women lie in a half embrace. He finishes his whiskey, gets dressed, collects his dogs, and retraces his steps. Stripped of desire, he finally feels prepared to face what is coming. The buildings lit by the first light of dawn, he again sees what’s left of the church, the rubble of what was once the town hall, his school, and finally the silhouette
of his house. And he goes inside and finds, open on the table, his notebook with the newspaper clipping, which includes a photograph, distant and a little blurry, of a boy with indigenous features, his arms raised toward the sky.
He learns that he has spent three years looking in the wrong place. He never thought that the south and the forest could be so far away, much farther than Alabama, in a world whose language he doesn’t understand. He knows little of the lands that stretch out south of the Rio Grande, little of their language, less of their people; he knows almost nothing about the country that holds the jungle where, the article says, in the midst of a great felling of trees, a boy has heard a sacred voice.
* * *
A very young boy, he realizes, looking at the photograph. Just a child, who swears he has heard a voice that told him the end was near, and would arrive in a tornado of fire. A boy without parents, orphaned in the jungle, he has apparently convinced dozens of people that the end is coming in the shape of giant tongues of fire that will devour the trees.
* * *
In the story there is a journey. A very long journey taken by a boy who believes he has finally understood. A voyage in which that boy, now a man, is determined to reach the south. An odyssey that gradually stretches out, from motel to motel, train station to train station, that grows in leaps and bounds, like the man’s conviction. He sees up close things he never expected to see: a black man dying in the middle of the street, desolate landscapes and magnificent ones, a prostitute crying in an alley, an enormous bear eating red fish as they fall over a waterfall, a Mexican worker falling exhausted at his feet and pleading for help, a blind man playing the accordion, a ten-year-old boy spitting up blood, landscapes ablaze and in ruins, men collapsing in the sun, men leaving for war and returning from it dead, a dog barking at the sky, a turquoise-colored horizon under which a long line of tired people files northward while he insists, stubbornly, on making his way to the south.
In the story there are churches and pastors, biblical stories that feed his theories. He hears sermons that teach him, for the first time, the value of the voice, of oral histories, that sow in him the belief that his true role will be that of an apostle, of spreading the word of that boy who dreams of the end of the world in a distant jungle. In the Protestant churches of the south, in black communities that look at him with confusion and a spark of contempt, he finally learns to speak. Prisoner of an inner fury, a man who had always preferred to keep quiet, whom many relatives had believed mute, he now learns the value of the homily. He dedicates himself to practicing speeches that one day he will recite before a church of his own—deep and dark, he imagines, like the jungle itself. He practices, learns, memorizes, until one day, feeling he is ready, he packs his things and tells himself the time has come to set off on his true journey. He walks, first westward to California, and then southward, to that unknown region that intimidates and seduces him. Though he cannot speak Spanish, he crosses the border without looking back.
The rest of the story proceeds like a dream. A months-long crossing over a continent that trickles down through serpentine lands. He rides in trucks full of chickens, trips on hallucinogenic drugs, has unexpected meetings and detours. Months that pass like a dream, without a clear path, floating on a current that guides him blindly until it deposits him, on a day he will never forget, in a jungle where, some say, the tree and the boy he has dreamed of can be found. The rest is history, says the apostle, but under that history there’s another story.
* * *
There’s a story beneath history, the apostle concludes. And though he hasn’t mentioned any names, all the pilgrims believe he is that boy who became that man; the apostle is the product of that story and its excesses. They believe they understand him a little, even when his voice once again becomes a pastor’s, as he commences one of his high-flying sermons that they’re starting to find tiresome. Even then, the pilgrims remember the story of the boy and the burning town, and they know they are looking at a man trapped in mute fury within a story that holds him like a straitjacket.
14
Listening to that story of underground fires and deep histories, the father remembers the biography of Nadar, the years the photographer spent in the Parisian catacombs. The images that made him lose sleep years ago rise to the surface. He remembers a picture of Nadar himself in the catacombs, sitting in front of an illegible epitaph, surrounded by bottles like a drunk. He remembers the image of a man carrying a load of bones on his back—a thin, pale man who was not even a man but a wax statue that the photographer had created as a model: back then, a single photo took hours. When he read that book long ago, the idea that Nadar—the first photographer to depict Paris from the sky, the inventor of the aerial photograph—had decided to descend into the Parisian underground had made him wander, indecisive and unsettled, for hours. He tells himself that if he makes it out of this jungle alive, he will find one of the apostle’s burning towns, and he will dedicate himself to photographing the underground fires. He’ll sit down to watch time pass, to find a true escape.
15
Three days later, at the edge of a river, they come upon the cadaverous trunk of an immense mahogany tree. On its bark, delicate as handwriting, the tunnels of termites trace the map of a funeral march. It isn’t the tree the apostle has told them of, but even so, they’re fascinated by that miniature epic on its bark, the way the termites inscribe on the jungle’s skin a secret text only they understand. The apostle is the first to stop in front of the tree; he kisses it, then lets the other pilgrims approach. One by one they carry out a private ceremony. The tree is upright, elegant even in its own funeral procession, defeated by an enemy that ate away at its insides. The little girl approaches fearfully until she can see the termite paths from up close. Sick though she is, she will never forget the image of those tunnels made by tiny creatures capable of conquering a giant. To her, the termites will mean the possibility of a world beneath the world, an underworld where powers are shifted and size is no longer important.
The father, too, will begin to ignore the sublime landscapes, the swelling rivers and the mahogany trees, to focus his lens instead on those landscapes hidden on the tropical floor. The majestic waterfalls and sublime volcanic peaks will give way to a subterranean world, a humble atlas that his lens will find hidden in any corner. While the apostle speaks, father and daughter search the surface of the visible for traces of the other reality that pulses within, secret, silent, and fearsome.
16
One day they reach a town full of luxuries. They haven’t seen anything like it on their trek. Five red jeeps stop them. Two natives with tattooed arms carrying machine guns ask for their documents and look them over until they’re distracted by a distant whistle. A sweaty, shirtless fat man, a white local toasted by the sun, signals to his men that the apostle’s people are welcome. A murmur of fear runs through the group, and it only grows when the apostle gives the fat man an effusive greeting. They have reached this place wrapped in an aura of unreality, of distance, lightness, of dreams, but now their eyes are opened. Two men keep silent watch over them from a nearby shack. Farther along, a group of men moves boxes with an urgency they haven’t witnessed in these latitudes. Finally, the pilgrims sense, reality is catching up with them. This stubbornly real village lies beyond the apostle’s hallucinatory speeches. They see it all clearly: the hustle of soldiers loading trucks, the men in the shack who seem to be mocking them, and they understand, for the first time, that their journey is secondary to another reality of trucks and machine guns, of cynical and greedy men.
After a few minutes the apostle returns, accompanied by the fat local. They’ve never seen him like this before, cheerful and chatty, friendly. Almost a regular guy. In the two men’s laughter they think they hear the complicity of years. The fat man speaks. At the back of the encampment, he says, they will find five roomy shacks where they can sleep and bathe. He tells them they have nothing to fear. Today they will be guests of honor; they wi
ll have food in abundance. This village isn’t like the others; here there is food and conviction, food and work. His voice has the timbre of a power different from the apostle’s. An earthly power, unbelieving and mocking, which suits him perfectly. They see how the men acquiesce to him, fearful. And they understand that it is also their lot to accept without question, to walk with their heads down, feigning disinterest, until they reach the promised shacks. This is the sinister face of the jungle where they thought they’d find salvation. This is the human and vulgar side of their unfinished journey, and the apostle’s laugh continues, dragging lies down into the village, intertwined with the fat man’s guffaw.
17
A small bamboo door opens into the shack: an immense room with seven mattresses, seven mosquito nets around them, and five small windows that look out onto a yard where a dirty dog harasses flapping chickens. A wooden table and a wooden floor. And a small, seemingly magical electric light hanging from the ceiling.
* * *
Since the pilgrimage began, they’ve encountered almost no electricity in the villages. They remember with amazement the life they’ve left behind. That terribly normal life, full of mundane dangers, reemerges with the insistence of the radio murmuring in a nearby lean-to. In that hum of voices they think they distinguish the weather report, sporting results, the most recent changes in the Catholic Church. They remember that they’re only fifteen days away from the bus that left them at the brink of the jungle, just two weeks in a sleep from which they now begin to awake, hollow-eyed and stinking. They are tired, no doubt about it. But within the exhaustion, like a hornet, buzzes the feeling—which no one dares to articulate—that they have been ushered into a conspiracy.
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