* * *
A Polish girl, skinny and careworn, with tattooed arms and a light spirit, cuts the tension by telling a story. It’s the first time they’ve heard her voice, airy and shy. She tells of how Alexander von Humboldt came upon a singular man while crossing Venezuela in search of electric eels. In the middle of the plain, he discovered a magnificent electrical machine with cylindrical disks, electrometers, and batteries, all well assembled, a machine as complex as those he’d seen in Europe, or maybe more. Humboldt asked after the gadget’s owner, and some lounging plainsmen pointed him toward a simple cabin where a fat man with an impressive mustache was drinking coffee. His name was Carlos del Pozo, and he claimed to have built the machine based on what he’d read in Traité by Sigaud de la Fond and Benjamin Franklin’s Memoirs. A plainsman all his life, he had never left that vast territory, never traveled to Europe or the north. Humboldt spent the afternoon with that marvelous man, fascinated by the fact that in those vast solitudes, where the names of Volta and Galvani seemed to be unknown, a common man had built an exact version of the Electric Machine that had set the Europeans dreaming. The next day, Humboldt left at dusk and a twilight settled once more over the southern plain and over that lonely genius named Carlos del Pozo.
After the Polish girl’s story, the atmosphere in the shack is left heavy with half-formed dreams and impossible conjectures. Lying on their seaweed mattresses, protected by mosquito nets, the pilgrims feel that this isolated town is a reminder of their own old world. Better, they tell themselves, to give in to their exhaustion and leave off all these stories.
* * *
And the little girl has been watching as they all collapse into bed. For her, the Polish girl’s story has brought on a peculiar anxiety. She remembers the greasy face of the fat man who received them, and in a brief flash she imagines that he must be the very same Carlos del Pozo. Caught by curiosity, concentrating her remaining energy, she pulls away from her sleeping mother, passes by her snoring father, and when she opens the door she again hears the murmur of the village. She hears a labored muttering, the vulgar shouts of a foreman disciplining a group of natives. Farther on, surrounded by five mestiza women passing around half a dozen bottles of beer, she sees the fat man talking with the apostle. A fist of blue iron hits her body when she sees the scene, and she runs through the village in search of an escape. She feels fear and happiness all at once as she loses herself in the jungle, dodging mahogany trees and ferns, muddy rocks and thorny plants, in search of the river, the hiss of which seems to grow until it’s everywhere. She passes men and women who look at her pale skin in surprise, she hears voices she doesn’t understand, but nothing stops her. She chases that whisper of river and only stops when she’s right next to it. She sees its furious waters and then, sensing that it marks an invisible border, a white line like sleep, she hears a voice behind her. When she turns, she’s looking right into the face of that man she thought she’d left behind.
* * *
The face of the man before her holds tenderness and compassion, a rocky hardness over which a subtle kindness grows like a wild vine. Now that she is finally seeing him from close up, far away from the nightly rituals, she thinks she sees his real face for the first time. Seen up close, the apostle’s face takes on a provincial sweetness, a touch of childhood and innocence. He seems like someone else: a younger man, simpler, closer, far removed from the apocalyptic figure of his sermons, from the figure that drove her to flee.
“Where are you going, my dear?” he asks her in English.
And in his voice she briefly finds a home.
Then the apostle gestures to a branch and says, “Do you see him? Do you see the little animal?”
And she looks at the branch without seeing anything but that: a jungle branch. But after a while, the girl thinks she can distinguish an animal movement among the leaves. Then she sees it: a little creature playing an imitation game, an animal made of sticks camouflaged among the branches, halfway between death and life. She immediately feels that she herself is like a little creature playing hide-and-seek in the middle of the jungle, playing a game of masks. A sick animal whiling away the hours. She feels this but doesn’t understand it, and then she hears the apostle’s voice.
“Es la mantis religiosa,” he tells her, returning to that language she is just starting to intuit. And she sits looking at the animal with the peculiar name. After a few minutes, a small insect lands on a nearby branch, and the mantis, in a sudden leap, devours it greedily. Startled, she turns in fear, expecting to find the apostle’s embrace, but she finds only her worried mother, weeping, scolding her for running away. She is left thinking then about the disappearance of that man, whom she will see with different eyes from now on.
* * *
That night she doesn’t sleep. Again and again, she’s assaulted by images of the creature that appeared among the branches, the awful scene of depredation, the apostle’s voice behind her, her mother’s sudden appearance. She relives what she’s seen, growing convinced that the whole matter has been nothing but a hallucination and that tomorrow, reality will go back to what it’s always been: the visible backdrop. She thinks about that little creature with the prayerful name, and in her mind it all mixes together and grows confused: the apostle’s voice, his sincere face, her mother’s arms, the mantis’s leap. And suddenly the girl senses that the world is more than the visible, that small animals lie in wait for their moment to leap out, that there are asymmetrical and invisible worlds. She’s reached ten years of age without fears, without ghosts and spirits, but a brief scene in the jungle has been enough to resuscitate an unconscious dread. Behind everything there is something else, she tells herself, the possibility of a world behind the world. She is learning a fundamental lesson: there is nothing more treacherous than peace.
18
Stormy days. Endless rain and thunder. The murmur of the apostle’s prayers, and beyond him, an indigenous woman who spends all day carving small figures of a saint. Between attacks of coughing and feverish hallucinations, the little girl peers at her, perplexed. She observes the woman’s caution as she palpates the wood in search of the perfect starting point. This repeated gesture becomes central to the girl’s universe. Everything seems to be sustained in it, just as the old myths rest on Sisyphus’s stubborn determination to carry out an impossible task.
The father watches the scene too: every figure the woman carves is exactly the same. The saint has indigenous features, and in his palms, reaching toward the sky, a small bird perches. Curious, impressed, the father picks up a couple of the little figures and confirms that there are almost no differences. He remembers the story a Mexican friend told him about a painter who spent his life creating various views of the same volcano. After ten years the old man had made more than two thousand sketches and paintings of that incipient volcano. Those who met him during that time said that he had a lucid madness etched into his face, like a disguise he’d put on one day and never taken off. Those who met him in his later period, when he was living as a bum in an abandoned hotel in Cuernavaca, said that he had the precise lucidity of the great obsessives. In the afternoons, in the monotony of the rain, the father tells himself life should be like the stubborn repetition of an empty gesture, the unconditional deliverance of a lie.
* * *
They spend two days empty like peace itself, stormy days heavy with the vague sense that soon something will happen. A few times, the apostle sets his prayer aside and spends a couple of hours in the world of mortals; he sits down to listen to the stories the pilgrims tell. He interrupts very little, and when he does his voice sounds different, softer and more sincere, like a light breeze. The little girl thinks she sees the man she saw at the river’s edge, a normal, tender man who sometimes sits down to play chess with her father in the afternoons. Yet he is the same man who, on other days, gets drunk with the fat man; the same man about whom rumors start to spread among the pilgrims. It’s said that the whole pilgrimage is nothing b
ut a way to hide his dirty dealings; that he owes the fat man money; that he’s been seen lying with an indigenous man; that there is no seer, no tree; that he’s nothing but a drug addict who’s given up, a link in a long chain that now, inevitably, includes them.
Sometimes, they even forget his title. They start to call him “the gringo,” like the natives do. Then the rumor starts to spread that the gringo could be a secret agent. As that rumor grows, so does the fear of being mixed up in other people’s plans, of being pawns in a game whose logic escapes them. They are willing to participate in the end of history, to believe in a seer with apocalyptic revelations, but they are horrified by the idea—everyday, vulgar, real—that they are caught up in a network of illegal commerce. For the pilgrims, anxiously looking for a new world, there could be nothing worse. Some of them want to end the whole thing, turn back and live in blind belief, rather than find themselves lowered to the level of a fat, drunk drug trafficker. To distract themselves from rumor, in the afternoons of rain and gale, they sit down to tell stories beside the attentive shadow of the woman carving saints.
19
A storm blowing over the story like a great kite. A great catastrophe, the mother says to herself, that gives birth to nature itself, a kind of nature that is the result of catastrophe instead of its opposite. An enormous dumping ground of small, ruinous stories over which grows the moss of a time to come. In her mind, dreams, stories, and memory grow confused. She remembers the cabin lost in the rain forest, and the man inside, old and withered, writing an encyclopedia, unaware of the approaching storm.
The mother refuses to face the obvious: that they are in a village of mundane evil, guests of a man who earns his living through wicked means. She refuses to see the trucks that drive in and out of the village.
20
On the third day they awaken to peace. Rays of sunlight, tangled in the mosquito nets, are the first sign that the downpour is over. What remains is a slight hangover of storm, interrupted by the clamor of trucks again flooding the village. The father looks for the saint carver but sees only a few little statues she has left behind, saints that must not have met her standards of perfection. He gives one to the little girl, who is in better spirits, free of fever and unusually energetic.
Disconcerted, the girl says, “Look, it’s a statue of the apostle.”
Suddenly he sees it all through her eyes, sees the monstrous logic they’ve caught her up in, sees her there holding an idol of the man who, arguably, is causing her illness, and he feels furious. Furious at himself, and when that becomes too unbearable, furious at the apostle. The father looks around for the apostle with an eye to revenge. He looks for him everywhere, until he realizes he simply isn’t there.
Their leader is gone. They look for him in the town, at the fat man’s house, around the river, but find nothing. They imagine the worst: desertion or death. They imagine him floating downriver, his body the fat man’s final message; among the wild branches, bitten by some viper; poisoned by a furious pilgrim. They think they would rather he be dead than to have cut and run like a coward when they’re halfway to their destination, with no way of getting out of that shithole town.
* * *
Seven hours later they find him in the village, in a monumental fight with the fat man, which they try unsuccessfully to decipher. They all know it’s time for them to go. Three hours later, one of the fat man’s trucks leaves them at a cabin in the middle of the jungle, full of spiders and snake eggs. In one corner, a native sleeping off his booze seems to be having a nightmare. They will rest there, too, and depart at dawn. A week, the apostle says, another week of walking and they will reach the seer. And though they say nothing, they feel dread at the thought that in seven days they’ll reach that place that inspired them to leave everything behind. They are hounded by the image of the fat man and the real, vulgar village they just left. They promised to leave history behind, but history—sweaty and common—is coming for them. One week, they tell themselves.
21
That day, to distract the pilgrims, the German actor performs the play with which he sometimes entertains the natives. It is from the seventeenth century, written in an old German none of them understand, but to which they surrender, intrigued. It reminds them of silent cinema and mime, the paradoxical fragility of horses’ legs, and the silence of monks. It is a monologue of a stammering voice that trips over itself again and again, a very old play behind which they sense a modern awareness. And they laugh, because there is a great deal of comedy in the play, and comedy is what they want. Comedy is what they need to dispel the grotesque image of another laugh in a nearby village.
22
Dark nights follow, static and silent, in which the father distracts the daughter by telling her stories about the constellations. The girl, again feeling tired and weak, just listens to her father’s allegories; every constellation holds a new story, another myth, a new way of muffling the fear and bringing some familiarity to the world that now surrounds her like a nightmare. The shy little girl intuits that behind all those words hides a crouching, deep-seated horror, but she is shielded by her faith that her father will tell her stories until there are no more stories to tell.
* * *
And the thing her father doesn’t know is this: she likes the night, its darkness and silence. In the night, everything is possibility, universes lay coiled. She entertains herself by cataloging the murmurs that she hears: the croak of the frogs, the grunting of pigs, the hiss of the rain, the cicadas’ whir, the tired steps of an anteater, the buzz of a lost hornet, the incessant rushing swell of a nearby river. She is disturbed by the thought that if she paid close enough attention, one day she would be able to distinguish, among all those sounds, the termites’ military tread, the punctual steps of ants, the lethal drag of the snake, the tarantula’s mortal dance.
At nightfall on the river’s edge she has seen the red, expectant eyes of insomniac caimans, eyes that remind her of the apostle’s deep and tired gaze.
Then she feels a little afraid.
She’s seen him at night. While the others are asleep, he moves away from the group and sits out in the open on nights of rain, exposed and alone, his torso bare and his head down. Static and magical like the insect he showed her in the jungle, a creature halfway between vegetable and animal, between death and life. “Mantis religiosa,” he called it, in that language she’s only starting to understand. She thinks of the nights, when everyone gets up to watch the others sleeping.
* * *
They don’t know that she knows. That she sees everyone wake up in the early morning, contemplating the scene with worried eyes. Like a little jungle animal she likes to feel unseen, to be invisible and motionless as she keeps watch. She’s seen them all in their nocturnal tasks. She’s seen her mother write her dreams in the notebook she carries with her everywhere; she’s seen her father rise in the morning to watch her sleep; she’s seen the apostle wander through the night sunk deep in his insomniac prayer. She’s seen the drunk British man who spies on her mother’s body as soon as she’s asleep, the German who tosses nervously in search of a sleep that won’t come, the California girl who, every night at three o’clock, looks around like she’s searching for her family. She’s seen them all, immersed in their dreams and their fears, awake in a seemingly endless vigil. Her gaze has tripped up, uncomprehending, against a couple of men entwined like vines. The odd feeling has come over her that if she could stay terribly still, like the little insect she saw, everything would go back to normal and one day she would wake up at home.
* * *
Throughout the long walks that make up their days, her parents have tried to explain the reason for the trip. Only one thing has become clear to her: they all want to see more, to see better, with the same desperate insomnia with which at night they look for the dawn. Her parents have told her that at the end of the road there’s a boy, very young and much like her, and that he’s also very wise. He is a child like her who woke
up one day and saw a different world, and now he is waiting to tell them what he’s seen. They have talked to her about underground stories and ancient fires, which strike her as pure fantasy—and that should interest her, at her age, but for some reason it all leaves her cold. Whenever she thinks of that boy, she imagines him pale and tired, a prisoner of his visions. Then a shiver runs over her body and she feels a deep sadness for that boy and for all children, but also for her parents. They all want to see. But she is determined to become invisible.
23
As soon as the father says “The end,” she always asks the same question:
“And after the end?”
Her father hugs her, warms her up. Then he tells her another story and everything is okay again. But he keeps thinking about the question she has asked him.
“And after the end?”
24
Arduous days of long walks and little rest. A week, the apostle said, and they follow him. Days of crossing furious rivers full of trees and garbage. Lush, dark jungle. They cross through small villages where they start to recognize signs: natives who use the same rosaries as the apostle, light the same candles, wear the same jewelry. The people in those villages also seem to recognize them, but still, no one stops them. They feel they’ve been there before; they feel they have forgotten something. But they tell themselves that it’s only a week. The father refuses to take pictures; he is thinking constantly about the apostle’s story of fire, of old Sherman marching his men southward. Carrying the sick little girl, the father fights to shake off his disquiet at his wife’s passion for their absurd pilgrimage. When this is all over, he reminds himself, he will find a mining town and dedicate his days to photographing the underground. The problem, though, is that the days pass, the walks grow longer, and the promised land doesn’t appear.
Natural History Page 29