Natural History

by Carlos Fonseca

  * * *

  Instead, scattered haphazardly through the jungle, there are small plots of land marked off with barbed wire, weird plantations of green plants whose fruits, which resemble squash, the natives eat to get high. Drugged natives become a common sight deep in the jungle, sometimes alone and melancholic, other times celebrating uproariously. Rushed, never stopping but always alert, they cross those small delirious scenes as if it were all a play, or a dream. One day, at the edge of a river, they find a native proclaiming a hurried speech, tangled up in a language they don’t understand. He is a very short man, totally naked, with purple feet and crossed eyes. He stops his speech as soon as he sees them, and in a very poor Spanish, spitting more than speaking, he tells them they will not find what they’re after, that the land was stolen from his grandfather, that the man guiding them is known for his lies. They tell themselves that his accusations are all the product of the drug. He wades into the river and returns to his prayer, and they go on with their walk.

  * * *

  One morning, they see a propeller plane cross the sky. A sign that they’re close, some of them think. Two hours later, they cross a small village in ruins. Recently burned, sacked, and incinerated. Beyond a scorched mansion is an enormous garden with flowers of all colors, exquisitely arranged, small trees that are clearly foreign, a diminutive fountain. Someone, it would seem, left the house not long ago. They find the scene odd, but they don’t ask any questions. If they’ve understood one thing, it’s that their lot is to accept. They watch as the apostle stops in front of the garden, crosses himself, and enters the house.

  And they do the same.

  They think of all they’ve left behind. Among the ruins, they discover reliquaries alongside an enormous photo of an old colonel; a room full of maps of the jungle and dozens of small, intact statues like the ones they saw in the fat man’s village; a library partially eaten by termites, where the pilgrims sit down among the ruins to read.

  * * *

  Some of the books are of particular interest: the seventeen volumes of Strabo’s Geography, the five volumes of Baron Alexander von Humboldt’s Cosmos, the five letters Columbus sent to the kings after his second voyage. Travel almanacs, natural history catalogs, books that classify the world into arbitrary and beautiful categories. On the same shelf as an old German encyclopedia, the mother finds a History of the Wars of Independence interspersed with clippings from current magazines, photos of actors and actresses, the shell of a strange insect. She reads horrible numerical records that plot deaths like the coordinates of stars. She gets caught up in reading about the Realist Army, which makes her think of the opposing force, an Anti-Realist Army committed to the destruction of realism. Laughing, she thinks that if she ever had to take part in a war, she would take the side of the anti-real avant-garde, in determined battle against reality.

  Lost amid the broken shelves, the father finds a book for the little girl, written by someone who seems to be an apprentice of Jules Verne. It tells of a very long journey, one with a diffuse and ambiguous chronology, but in which the world appears complete, round, and navigable. There is a captain and a war, a catastrophe and a shipwreck; there is a flight and then long years of travel—London, Seville, Tangiers, New York, Calcutta, Havana, San José—in a voyage that then stretches southward, culminating in a long crossing. The protagonist, a Belgian sailor, travels across the South American wilderness. Thousands and thousands of words are devoted to the years the Belgian spends in Patagonia hunting rhea alongside Tehuelche natives. The story puts the girl to sleep, but it gives the father the unsettling feeling he is in a world with no way out. The Belgian marches with the Tehuelche over the Patagonian plains, while the Indians hunt the rhea by dint of patience, forcing their prey to walk themselves to a slow death.

  The father isn’t clear on whether the end of the book is a joke, a crock of nonsense, or simply a printing error. He keeps thinking about the Tehuelches’ nights out in the open, the desert mirages, the final days of the rhea on the Patagonian plains. He tells himself that endings should not be an abrupt break or an absolute resolution, not even the proposal of an open horizon, but a point one reaches in exhaustion.

  Beside him, immersed in a book, his wife is smoking.

  Endings, he says to himself, should be like a cigarette that burns down, little by little, until there is nothing more than a small stub burning your fingers. He imagines the long southward walk of the Tehuelche, and at the end of it the land he himself had chased for so many years, Tierra del Fuego. The surest thing is that the Indians will never reach the rhea, just as Achilles never reached the tortoise and his wife will never fully consume her cigarette. Defeated by exhaustion, the Indians will watch as the herd of rhea they’re following moves farther away against the metallic backdrop of the plain, marching south.

  He doesn’t finish the book. He refuses to finish it, immersed as he is in the infinite image of that great animal march, taking slow southward steps.

  * * *

  That night they camp in the garden, the jungle all around them. For the first time in a while, they remember the reason for their journey. They came in search of a garden, only to find the ruins of a jungle that no longer existed. Around them, the nocturnal sounds remind them there are only a few days left. They hear two more planes cross the sky, they notice sounds that strike them as vaguely human, sounds that make them think perhaps they’re in an ambush. They sleep little. They let the hours pass, hours that, lacking clocks or measurements, are lost in the darkness.

  Earlier that day, amid the singed ruins of the mansion, they saw a giant clock. An old grandfather clock that escaped the destruction. They had a perplexed feeling of displacement. They’ve spent twenty-seven days ensconced in a different time, a lunar time, and they remember one of the apostle’s first instructions: leave time behind. As they camp in the garden, they feel the density of time surrounding them, geological, heavy as that unusable clock. Sleepless, they think they hear the tolling of five bells; nervous, they tell themselves that madness is near.

  * * *

  Of all of them, perhaps the mother is the liveliest. She writes a new page:

  Power is expressed only in the capacity for destruction. One should think of destruction itself as a political category. Aesthetic as well. The creator creates by destroying. The politician creates a new world among the ruins. One should think of that initial relationship between art and politics, that initial violence that erupts as soon as the painter decides to mark the canvas with the first brushstroke. Think of the violence of the first line, the first stroke, the first verse. An initial violence that does not spill blood but rather opens spaces. A new world emerging from the flames like the Greeks imagined, a new world that comes from a violence full of mercy and passion like the gods imagined. One must think of that act of destruction as the very basis of all possible politics, as the very possibility of making the foundations tremble. To write a natural history of destruction as if it were a treatise on aesthetics.

  At night, while she sleeps, the father reads her entries with a terror that cuts to the bone. They make him think she is not the woman he once loved. He looks at her sleeping and thinks that at least she is sleeping, while he merely counts the hours of his insomnia.

  * * *

  The mother dreams again. She dreams she is in the middle of a war against the Realist Army. Halfway through the dream, she understands that it’s all a great mix-up. The battle’s stage is not the wide southern plains, but a museum with a mysterious name. The museum is empty and long, and in its main hall an enormous map stretches across the floor, where a man resembling the apostle is walking. As he walks he spills something, a sort of paint that turns into flames that run over the map’s surface. The man produces a flaming map as onlookers applaud. And in the dream she is there, clapping for a man she believes in, telling herself that the art of the future must be an undertaking against the world and against the world’s representation, a stifled cry in the middle of t
he ocean, heard only by the seaweed and fish. In the dream the fire devours the entire map and then, slowly, the artist. And she sees herself clapping, her wild applause bordering on hysteria, convinced that she is seeing her future.

  25

  They set off at dawn the next morning, leaving behind the garden, the house, and the incinerated village. They feel that something is lying in wait for them, that they’re caught up in an invisible trap. They see small shacks, recently abandoned, with yards separated by wire and sprouting patches of the hallucinogenic gourds. They come across drawings on the rocks of public figures and movie superstars, cinema icons and politicians painted in color. They find, painted on an enormous rock, the image of Marilyn Monroe, and next to her, Simón Bolívar. A hundred yards farther down, they run into a drugged native, singing happily.

  They walk faster.

  They cross a small ravine and then a field of ferns, where they find a reddish rock with another drawing, this time of a Spanish colonel next to Audrey Hepburn. In the coming hours they will see many of these odd pairings. Some, like the father, will laugh. Some, following the apostle, will ignore them. Some, like the mother, will try to find meaning in them. Some, like the girl, will merely remain bewildered.

  No answer will come.

  At noon they see a small mountain rise up, and along with it they hear the sound of a crowd. They hear its raucous approach, and then over the peak they see the first child’s mask appear.

  * * *

  With the sun high overhead, they find themselves ambushed by an army of a hundred children who come running down the mountain, their faces covered with white masks, their bodies brown, and their feet agile. They come running down waving a giant purple flag with a drawing of a white tree, and the pilgrims withdraw, startled. The apostle, however, is unfazed. He walks through the battalion, greeting them, fussing over them as if they were his own children, a herd of faceless offspring. The pilgrims watch and imitate him. The children crowd around and touch the pilgrims’ faces, hands, and arms, laughing behind identical masks. In the jungle nights, many of them heard a nocturnal whisper and imagined a native uprising. Never, though, did they think the revolt would be the laughter of a pack of kids.

  In the midst of this bizarre procession, the little girl forgets her illness for a moment. She has been the only child in the group, and now childhood is all around her. More than the age or number of the children, more than the unfamiliar language they speak, she is interested in their masks. She touches them the same way the children paw at her arms. When she was little she played with masks, and these aren’t so different: they are plastic masks like the ones at birthday parties, with a smile drawn on the face. She is the one to ask: And where did these masks come from? None of the pilgrims can answer her. They think they’ve reached the depths of the jungle, but at every step they take, modernity seems to play another card. They think they’ve reached an origin outside of time, but an army of children reminds them that the jungle wears plastic. And they keep walking up the slope, climbing the mountain from which the children descended. When they reach the top, the view clears, and they think they see what they’ve been looking for. They see a flooded plain between two mountains, small islands interrupting its surface, and they remember the apostle’s words. They remember how that man who now walks surrounded by children has spoken of a great city etched onto an archipelago.

  26

  What the pilgrims see then, or think they see, seems beyond belief:

  On an enormous plain nestled between two plateaus, hundreds of little islands seem to float. Among them, weaving seams into the landscape, small water channels draw onto the vast green carpet the unforgettable image of a great archipelago of islands. Each island, in turn, houses a small temple. Hundreds of temples dot the plain, all identical, all facing eastward. It looks like a city of temples rising up from the rain forest, a city that grows in a spiral until it reaches a central island, where the pilgrims think they see an enormous main temple, with five towers and many gardens.

  In the canals they see hundreds of small boats, and in those boats are hundreds of men moving slowly through the island city. The pilgrims have reached this place only to be reminded that they’re not the first—they are latecomers. A crowd of diminutive human figures moves around below. They see children moving through the canals. Children like the ones who now surround them, dark and small, an army of children like the ones who now take them by the hand and prepare to guide them down. Exhausted, they believe they have finally found the end of their journey.

  * * *

  The apostle welcomes them by announcing the seer’s latest prophecy. In two days, this city will be the epicenter of an earthquake.

  27

  What follows that vision, the frenetic whirlwind of events that come after the apostle’s pronouncement, becomes visible only in retrospect. In the ensuing forty-eight hours, the father sees a cruel circus, but the other pilgrims see a miracle: where he sees the grievous exploitation of hundreds of minors, forced by a handful of white men to work the earth, the others see an army of enlightened children. Where the pilgrims see utopia, he can distinguish the acts of a play put on for credulous eyes. Where the others see a diminutive seer, he sees a child lost amid his own lies. Where the others see resolution, he sees a farce that has spread like an epidemic. It’s in that second look that the city shows itself in all its cruel truth: he believes he sees that the temples are actually small factories full of tired and sweaty children, and that the imperial archipelago is merely the outline of an atrocious world whose facade hides the worst kind of abuses. He’s supposed to be photographing a utopian city, but all Yoav Toledano can focus on is the happiness and bewilderment of knowing that it will all be over soon. He has come to the edge of the jungle only to find that at the end of a journey, the traveler merely finds his own desire reflected back at him.

  So he’s not surprised when, at the prophesied day and hour, nothing happens—no earthquake, no fire, no grand finale. It is time to dismantle the fantasy, take the girl to the hospital, return to the life they left behind a decade before: watching TV, eating french fries. He is surprised, though, to see that in spite of the prophecy’s failure, the pilgrims rally around the young seer in frenetic excitement. He has reached the end of the journey expecting the moment of disenchantment, only to learn that defeat unleashes fanaticism.

  * * *

  When his wife asks him to take a picture of their daughter next to the young seer, for the first time, he feels not only sorrow, not even hatred, but a mixture of despair and impotence that makes him throw the camera to the ground. If he picks it up then and takes the photo it’s not because he’s changed his mind, but because he thinks that perhaps, in a distant future, the picture will at least be evidence of the void at the end of the journey. But the second he snaps the photo he knows better. He knows that he’ll find in it neither horror nor passion, only a rough, empty portrait: the face of a lost boy deep in a role, and, beside him, the pale, confused, and sickly face of his own daughter, the immediate reflection of his own confusion and distress. As he takes the picture, he understands that the moment has come; it’s time to leave.

  * * *

  That day, while his wife is listening to the seer, he takes his sick daughter and escapes. If anyone asked him later, he wouldn’t be able to describe the route that brought him back through the jungle to the fat man’s town. He wouldn’t know how to describe the animal instinct that guided him. But no one will ask. After leaving the girl in the village’s small hospital, he looks over an atlas until he finds, among the dozens of coal towns that punctuate the Pennsylvania map, the one adjacent to the ghost town the apostle has mentioned. If the fires ever decide to continue their march, they shall find him there. He kisses the little girl, leaves her a children’s book, and sets off, telling himself he will return as soon as he’s able to break free from the madness he has just seen.

  Fragment #317

  (The Great South, Viviana Luxembou
rg)

  I wish I could write these lines in a secret code. In a private language that only she and I would understand, my daughter and I. After all, isn’t that what life is—a long series of shapeless events ending in a figure in the sand that only two people can decipher? I saw what the others didn’t see, maybe because I never wanted to see what supposedly was there. Yoav didn’t see anything. I only had to look into his eyes to know he didn’t see what I did. All I had to do was listen to him breathe and I knew that all those years behind the camera had blinded him to the scene of injustice that we finally saw there. Seeing is believing, said my grandmother. But to see is also to know what one wants to believe. Yoav thinks I believed it all. He doesn’t realize, doesn’t want to realize, that I understood the farce of it all. I felt the sadness of seeing that boy exploited by a white man who had convinced him to act out that pantomime for all of us, in exchange for God knows how many coins. Seeing is understanding what’s at stake. I saw what others didn’t, maybe because they, in their selfishness, sought in that scene the reality they wanted. All of them, even Yoav, wanted to find a salvation that didn’t exist, and they couldn’t comprehend that in its place was a story of disenchantment and violence. They saw the boy, and behind him they saw nothing. They didn’t see the long line of children, past and future—black, indigenous, mixed—who were trying to survive in a world that expelled them from the start. They were searching for the end of the world, but didn’t know how to see it when it was right in front of them. I saw what the others didn’t. And I knew I couldn’t leave, that my story was there and that time had ended up separating Yoav and me, those two youngsters who broke with social expectations and crossed an invisible border. Everyone sees what they want to see, said my grandmother. I saw the scorched earth of my great-grandfather Sherman, and in it, I saw a reflection I’ll never forget, the lands that would be razed years later by Efraín Ríos Montt’s armies. I saw a child lost in a cyclone of history, acting out in a cruel historical play that obeyed no laws: not those of farce or of tragedy or of comedy. I saw what others didn’t see and I knew immediately that Yoav wouldn’t understand, precisely because only two people could. She and I. My daughter and I. I saw and I knew right away that my daughter would also see, even if years had to pass before she did. One day she would think back and she’d understand what I saw: the long chain of injustices that ended in mockery at the edge of the world, leaving a wake of disenchantment behind. I knew someday she would understand that behind that child there were many others. I knew she would understand my faithfulness to that vision, even if it was already too late, and that someday she would take it as her own. I felt an enormous joy at the realization. The joy of knowing that something would forever unite us, a secret language that only she and I would speak, from which her father had unfortunately been exiled. I knew that someday she would see the drawing in the wet sand of history, and, comprehending it, she would forgive me. That day, I believe, is today. And I repeat: I wish I could have written this letter in a secret language, in the secret language written by the tides and understood only by the pariahs of history, she and I, my daughter and I. You and I.