Natural History

by Carlos Fonseca

  Part V

  After the End (2014)

  The absolutely useless is what I’m interested in revealing. It leads to nothing, that which has never led anywhere. Perhaps to brief exchanges within tunnel passages, leaps between attempted archetypal images. But the attempted transcendence of all of this is irrelevant. Just a dark fume that reports. Nothing.

  —Lorenzo García Vega

  Two years ago, in the middle of a terrible, snowy winter, when I had finally set aside that enigmatic family’s story, something brought it to mind again. Perhaps it was the long periods of snow and immobility, perhaps the feeling of exile that came over me with every winter. Looking out at the piles of snow in front of my house, I kept thinking about writing it all as a story, as if it had been a simple fiction. But then I remembered Tancredo’s question—tragedy or farce?—and my path was blocked by the impossibility of finding the right tone, and I was forced back. The story called for a chameleonic genre somewhere between the two, neither tragedy nor farce. My inability to translate my thought into writing left me, again and again, prostrate before the paper, motionless and unable to write a word. Then I would make a cup of black coffee to drink while I paged through the old notes and photographs from the ruinous archive of that once-happy family. Storytelling, in cases like that, was finding a way home. But I hadn’t gone home in over twenty years.

  * * *

  A couple of months later, at the end of May 2014—when I was still searching for the right tone and spent afternoons venturing futile beginnings—the news came out that Subcomandante Marcos had made an early-morning speech in the community of La Realidad, Chiapas, announcing the end of the person named Marcos and his replacement by Subcomandante Galeano. That night, I remember reading and rereading Marcos’s goodbye message. Like all his dispatches, it was poetic, full of intensity and passion; it began, “These will be my last words in public before I cease to exist.” That method of rhetorical disappearance made me think about Giovanna, old Toledano, Virginia McCallister, all those people who seemed determined to find the limits of the art of disappearance. I thought almost fifteen years back, to the corkboard collage of Giovanna’s attempt to appropriate a reality that was foreign to her. I remembered how at the time I’d looked at her with condescension, seeing her as meddling in matters she didn’t understand, and I couldn’t help feeling remorse. Then I went on reading Marcos’s message as it outlined a poetics of anonymity much clearer than what I or any of my colleagues could have given: “Our authorities, our commanders, then said to us: ‘They can only see those who are as small as they are. Let’s make someone as small as they are, so that they can see him, and through him, they can see us.’ Thus began a complex maneuver of distraction, a terrible and wonderful magic trick, a malicious move from the indigenous wisdom challenging one of the bastions of modernity: the media. And so began the construction of the character named ‘Marcos.’” Giovanna had gotten it right, even though our project hadn’t gone anywhere. Some part of her understood the strange magic trick that was Marcos, and she was determined to comprehend him according to his own rules. Then I copied out some lines that seemed enlightening, and that I felt limned the narrative tone I’d sought unsuccessfully for so long: “Perhaps at the start, or as these words unfold, the sensation will grow in your heart that something is out of place, that something doesn’t quite fit, as if you were missing one or various pieces that would help make sense of the puzzle that is about to be revealed to you. As if indeed what is missing is still pending.” The tone I was after, I thought, was one that gestured, not without joy, toward the eternally absent puzzle piece. I thought about the last night I’d spent with Giovanna, the jigsaw puzzle we’d left half-completed, the conversation we’d never finished.

  The subcomandante’s pronouncement ended with a categorical condemnation: “So here we are, mocking death in Realidad.” If someday I manage to write this family’s story, I told myself, it could be summed up as a long joke told to laugh in the face of death.

  * * *

  Two weeks later, on June 11, a small contemporary art gallery in Puerto Rico announced that it would be opening a posthumous show of the work of the deceased fashion designer Giovanna Luxembourg. The news was accompanied by a detail that struck me as significant: the designer had left precise instructions that the exhibit should appear exactly seven years after her death, along with specifications as to the venue, the organization of the pieces, and the texts that would accompany them. She had essentially curated her own posthumous show. To say that I felt betrayed would be a lie. I felt a strange sense of unease, a kind of déjà vu that I couldn’t shake off until, a week later, I received a personalized invitation. It was a small envelope with nothing but Giovanna’s signature on the flap. Opening it, I found the invitation elegant but generic, except for a detail that made me smile—a quincunx marked on the bottom of the page.

  * * *

  That night I dreamed that I was walking through the empty halls of an enormous museum, sure that I was late, and as I rushed along I looked for Giovanna, but couldn’t find her anywhere. I was convinced that this mausoleum-like building was the exposition: the museum looking at itself. I woke up sweating, the dream still alive. Something about it made me remember the anecdote about the theft of the Mona Lisa, how in the weeks after the robbery, thousands of curious people crowded into the halls of the Louvre to see the empty space where, up until a few weeks ago, they would have found the painting. I kept thinking about museums, about empty spaces and mausoleums, the way certain things only become visible when they disappear, until the image of Giovanna interrupted my thoughts and forced me to face reality. She seemed determined to make me to go home. I spent hours awake, thinking about Marcos’s sudden disappearance and the old photographer’s great journey, the final scene of Virginia McCallister facing justice, and the last memories I had of Giovanna, until early morning came and I fell deeply asleep. Five hours later, when I finally got up, I bought a ticket.

  * * *

  Eight days later a plane carried me back to the land I had left more than twenty years before. I heard the roar of the plane taking off while to my left, too close to my ear, a girl scarfed down a hamburger. Mine was the opposite of Ulysses’s epic homecoming. My return, I thought as I saw the clouds rise up, would have no Penelope or Telemachus; it was a vulgar return to a home that had given me everything, but that, after twenty years had passed, threatened to become a merciless mirror. Not even the dogs would recognize me, I feared.

  Four hours later I saw a postcard image that I had forgotten: the old walled city, and around it, the sea. Framed by the window, the image was stripped of nostalgia. I recognized the outline of the great lagoon, some government buildings; even the plane’s trajectory as it landed was familiar. I was returning full of nerves, afraid of not recognizing myself in the old poses, of seeming irredeemably foreign, of losing myself among the people. Of all beginnings, I thought as we approached the landing strip, the most difficult is the one occasioned by a return. Of all the objects of desire, the most seductive and fearsome is one’s own identity.

  I pretty much stopped thinking after that.

  I listened to the flight attendant as she welcomed us, and I let my attention drift to a conversation between two old ladies who reminded me of my distant grandmother. I let myself be guided by the rhythms of the memories that only reappear when you believe them forgotten.

  And maybe it was an attempt at evasion that I planned my arrival to coincide with the exhibition’s opening day. That way, I wouldn’t have time to surrender to reflection. My plan worked, at first. The plane landed at four, and at four-thirty I took a taxi to Old San Juan, well aware that I would have to be ready to leave for the opening at seven. While I looked out the window at the scene, familiar but altered by hotels and highways, signs and people, my mind was caught up negotiating—with a secretary’s precision—the succession of events that would have to occur for me to be ready at the appropriate hour: half an hour in the
taxi, fifteen minutes to check in, half an hour to unpack and shower, half an hour to walk to the gallery. Beneath that everyday arithmetic, however, memory was preparing its ambush. Even as I refused to give in to remembering, my past was laying its traps for me.

  Days later I would remember an Algerian poet’s line describing his nation as background noise, a sensation of place more than a series of memories. But that afternoon I thought I was safe from memory and the past, until the taxi took a right and the sea finally appeared, right on time. Only then, before that view so often seen and forgotten, I felt the blow of a battalion of confused memories, and a strange joy. I relived, in an instant, the hours that had passed since my departure, and my island returned to me with the same happy intensity of recognizing a forgotten melody. I couldn’t help smiling, and the taxi driver took the opening to start up a conversation:

  “The ocean’s nice, huh? Say, where you from? Venezuela?”

  That was all it took to return me to a place of touristic anonymity. I responded with a curt affirmation, afraid of being outed as an unrecognizable native. Then I was silent, while I watched unfurl before me the cobbled streets and colonial buildings, the tourist city that still keeps its secrets. Ten minutes later, when the taxi finally stopped in front of a small house that had been converted into a hostel, I paid without any more conversation. I recognized, just across from the hostel, an old bar I’d frequented as a teenager.

  * * *

  The exhibition was held in an old building that had once been—as the kid working its impressive wooden front door told me—the house of a slave-owning marquis. As I went in I thought of the many bags of gold that at some point had filled that luminous interior patio, and of the many nights when, in the shadows, men had stood there and negotiated the value of a life. I would have gone on thinking of such things, willing as I was to remain distracted, if it hadn’t been for a girl with green eyes and dark hair who, on seeing me enter, called to me by name from a corner full of people. I recognized her immediately as one of Giovanna’s helpers, a girl who had been very young back then, and whose face was now starting to show the marks of the passage of time. Time is tattooed on the face, I thought, remembering Giovanna’s epigrammatic phrases. Happy to see me, the girl explained that, following the designer’s directions, the exposition was made up of four thematic rooms through which I could move as I pleased, without worrying about the order. She tried to start up a conversation then, but another voice, this time calling her name, distracted her, and as she returned to the group I took the chance to slip away through the dozens of people crowding the main patio. I decided to start in the first room to the left, first reading a short quote that adorned one of the immaculate white walls of the inner patio, as an epigraph. I recognized it immediately as one of the many that Giovanna and I had discussed in our conversations. It said:

  I very well remember at the beginning of the war being with Picasso on the boulevard Raspail when the first camouflaged truck passed. It was at night, we had heard of camouflage but we had not yet seen it and Picasso, amazed, looked at it and then cried out, yes it is we who made it, that is cubism.

  —GERTRUDE STEIN

  Deciding that the best approach would be to escape from the crowd, avoiding recognition and chitchat, I moved into the first room, which had a title that I liked: Color Theory. On entering, the amount of material—quotations and pictures, notes and images, even a colorful old coat—made me think of my own archive documenting our long conversation. Today, two years later, when I think of the material spread out over the walls of the slaver’s house, I remember one image in particular: a portrait of a boy posing for one of those turn-of-the-century orientalist studies. On his left arm perched an owl that anyone would assume was real if the caption didn’t say it was stuffed. I thought the boy looked tired, maybe even anemic. The image was a perfect depiction of insomnia, I thought, and I remembered a photograph of Kafka as a child that I’d seen some-time before. I wondered about the boy’s parents; perhaps he was looking at them, just beyond the camera, and they would remain forever in that century in which, over three thousand miles away in the shadows of this old colonial house, slavery was still a reality. That boy, I thought, as I looked at the cracks that fissured the image, was a son of a new century that he was then glimpsing, a time of cameras. The same century Giovanna and I had seen gradually extinguished, leaving behind this strange exhibit now surrounding me.

  As I read in the long caption, the boy was named Abbott Handerson Thayer. He’d been born on August 12, 1849, in Boston, and his story was a puzzling mixture of tragedy and heroism. He had spent his childhood years in rural New Hampshire at the foot of Mount Monadnock, whose monumental landscapes had inspired him with a naturist zeal that he had gratified with forays into taxidermy and landscape painting. At fifteen, Abbott had moved to Boston, where he’d met an old painter named Henry D. Morse, who taught him the necessary rudiments to gain acceptance, at eighteen, into the renowned Brooklyn School of Art. There, under the tutelage of the famous Lemuel Wilmarth, he would consummate his career as a naturalist painter, and also meet Kate Bloede, his future wife. Those first happy years were followed by two decades of sadness, marked by three deaths that would leave the painter in a boundless melancholy: first his two children, William Henry and Ralph Waldo, followed by his wife, Kate, after she contracted a pulmonary infection in 1891.

  As I took this in, I remembered Marcos’s words that I’d read a few days before: “So here we are, mocking death in Realidad,” and I thought that that the rest of Thayer’s life could be an attempt to forget those three deaths through the art of anonymity and camouflage. After that photo of young Abbott with his taxidermied owl, I found a series of images that made me think of my work in the museum and of Giovanna’s interest in animal mimesis, her ability to envision death as the most daring camouflage.

  On November 11, 1896, five years after his first wife’s death, Abbott Thayer appeared before the annual convention of the American Ornithological Association, prepared to revolutionize the field of evolutionary biology. He claimed to have found an explanation for the nature of color in the animal kingdom: evolutionary protection. Each feather and each shade corresponded to the color that the animal had to take on in a moment of danger, to camouflage itself against the natural background. I was impressed by the list of notables who intervened in the debate that ensued years later, in 1909, after the publication of Thayer’s Concealing-Coloration in the Animal Kingdom: the philosopher William James, the codiscoverer of evolutionary theory Alfred Russel Wallace, Winston Churchill, and Theodore Roosevelt. Politics, I thought, always tries to follow art.

  Farther in, along with a series of sketches and drawings by Thayer himself, I found another interesting detail. Initially imagined as a purely scientific investigation, Thayer’s studies on mimicry and coloring had taken a new direction after the start of World War I, when the painter realized that the military could use his theories on color to invent new forms of camouflage.

  Whoever managed to make their soldiers invisible would win the war. Alongside that note—which ended by mentioning a fruitless visit Thayer made to Churchill in the war’s early stages—I found an image of a camouflaged British ship. The caption described the events of March 12, 1919, when the Chelsea Arts Club held what they called a Dazzle Ball, for which the guests were asked to wear black-and-white patterns like the ones that were starting to adorn the camouflaged ships of the British marines. I thought of the praying mantis, always dressed in its war attire, imperious and deadly, fearsomely invisible.