Natural History
Page 32
* * *
The images of that party were followed by a couple of quotes that made me think Giovanna had hidden much of her knowledge from me. Never in our conversations had she spoken of Sir James George Frazer, master of modern anthropology, much less had she cited the paragraph inscribed on the gallery walls under the title Like Produces Like. It was the famous quotation in which Frazer distinguishes two modalities of the magical. First, there’s the law of similarities, in which an effect resembles its cause; second, the law of contagion, which states that objects that have been in contact continue interacting even when distance is imposed between them.
Our story had something of that magic at a distance. Many years had passed since the last of our nocturnal meetings, but every one of the words uttered back then seemed to reverberate in the hallways of that colonial mansion. I remembered the panic Giovanna felt at human contact, her peculiar way of avoiding crowds, even in a city that called for collision above all. I kept walking, and in front of me appeared a visual story that the exhibition’s curator insisted on referring to, always in French, as the phenomenon of camoufleurs. Between the two world wars, a set of artists had emerged who were dedicated to creating camouflages for military use in the national army. According to the curator, the camoufleurs started with Abbott Thayer and continued with Lucien-Victor Guirand de Scévola, commander of the famous French Camouflage Section, which, starting in 1915, counted among its ranks artists like André Mare, Jacques Villon, Charles Camoin, Louis Guingot, and Eugène Corbin. Then the names—Paul Klee, Hugh Cott, Franz Marc, John Graham Kerr, Leon Underwood—multiplied with the irresponsible freedom of any series. Meanwhile, piling up alongside them, the various camouflage schools—in addition to France’s Camouflage Section, there was the Middle East Command Camouflage Directorate, in Britain, and the Twenty-Fifth Engineers in the United States—gave the impression that here, too, the fate of art had been entangled with that of politics. I thought of Virginia McCallister’s notebooks, and the memory of the defendant made me think again of the false white color of Giovanna’s dyed hair; she, too, had tried to become anonymous, taking on the colors of that natural background where she already intuited a great historical monster.
* * *
Tragedy or farce? I was asking myself again. I remembered something that Virginia McCallister had said during the trial: to understand modern art was to share the artist’s obsession. The true question, I thought, was whether obsessions could be shared, whether someday I would come to understand exactly the logic that had led Giovanna to visually trace this fragment of art history. Two little girls ran across the hall and pointed, laughing, toward the old multicolored hunting coat, which had been a gift to Thayer from William James. Tragedy or farce? Perhaps the difference lay in who was telling the story and in how many times it was told. Perhaps, I thought as I watched the girls play hide-and-seek, it was a matter of perspective.
* * *
I felt uneasy as I left the room. I finally understood that I didn’t know why I’d come, or what I had hoped to find. Perhaps I had only been looking for an excuse to return. I thought about going back to the inner patio, having a drink and socializing, but the remote possibility of finding myself forced to explain my own role in the exhibition pushed me on to the second room instead.
It was a room composed exclusively of cloth and photographs of cloth, reminiscent of Bedouin tents in the Middle East, insulated against the extreme desert temperatures. This room was called Network Theory, and it explored the invention, in the middle of the Great War, of a series of nets used to camouflage ground troops from aerial photography. I liked the metaphorical reach of the idea: covering territory with a blanket, a giant butterfly spreading its wings over the world. I thought of two artists I’d heard about whose art consisted of covering historical monuments with huge blankets. I thought of Borges and his story about the map equal in size to the land itself: a useless map true to size, the remnants of which still exist—according to the story—in the deserts of the West, among animals and beggars.
The inventor of the method was the aforementioned Lucien-Victor Guirand de Scévola, a renowned pastel painter and the director of France’s Camouflage Section. In 1918, he had established a system of factories that manufactured nets and employed over nine thousand workers throughout France. In one photo in particular, dozens of women appeared in a tangle of nets that looked like an undergrowth of bushes. The light seemed to filter through with difficulty, and it made me think of the Lebanese bar where the old woman read her outdated newspapers. There’s nothing more difficult, I repeated to myself, than sharing an obsession. Then I thought again about the photo of young Abbott Thayer with his stuffed owl, his tiredness and his eyes, and the way men become children again at the end of their lives, or perhaps never stop being children. Adults hidden from themselves, playing hide-and-seek with their pasts, clothing themselves in work and responsibility in a last grasp at anonymity, at forgetting the old photograph, lost among the drawers of the family house, that depicts them as they’ve always been: children gazing at their innocence. Before I knew it, I’d reached the end of the second room, my mind still on the photo of young Thayer. I was convinced that the exhibit’s only reason for being was to impose an invented order on a project that from the start had been nothing more than a childish whim.
* * *
The third room, titled Skin Theory, was on the second floor. At the entryway was a quote from Darwin: “Another most conspicuous difference between man and the lower animals is the nakedness of his skin.” I heard the echo of my footsteps and I realized I’d finally found myself alone. Perhaps I’d left the rest of the people behind; perhaps I’d lingered long enough that they had all advanced to the final room, earning me this space of silence. Then I realized that this was the room that corresponded to me. I saw, arranged over the walls like a constellation, photographs of dozens of animals that Giovanna and I had talked about on the long nights that closed the last millennium: Brazilian cholas, Sepia officinalis, Phylliidae, the arctic hare and the sphinx moths. It would be a lie to say I didn’t feel happy and proud when I saw that all those hours of work had not been in vain. Something of me had been inscribed on that exhibition from which I’d so far felt somewhat alienated. One detail surprised me: among the photos of animals, I found a series of photographs that depicted Abbott Thayer’s late-career fascination with indigenous cultures. According to the curator’s text, Thayer had alleged that in these cultures, clothing served the same purpose as camouflage: as a mimetic element, and as protection. The idea that indigenous peoples were closer to the animal world, so clearly absurd and wrong, surprised me, but I didn’t linger over it. There were dozens of photographs of indigenous mimesis, interspersed with studies of the practice of tattooing in those cultures. According to Thayer, western cultures had forgotten the mimetic effect of tattoos and dress, preferring instead monochromatic clothing and the simplicity of bare skin. I liked the idea and it made me think again of Giovanna’s pale skin and white-blond hair. The paleness of anonymity. A sound distracted me; a small, bald man had come into the room, breaking my precious solitude. Chasing seclusion, or perhaps a slowly arriving intuition, I left that room and went into the next, without caring about its name or reading the information written on the wall.
* * *
I was in a very long and somewhat dark hallway lined with more than two dozen masks. Among them, Giovanna had hung a series of quotations in illuminated frames. I walked slowly down the hall that now seemed to grow longer, reading those quotes where countless stories of violence converged: among isolated phrases from General Sherman and from bygone slavers, there were the sayings of runaway slaves, testimonies of indigenous people who had survived the scorched-earth genocide, from children who had seen their parents die in war. I remembered María José Pinillos reading Vallejo, trying to escape her pain through the Peruvian’s words, and I returned to that night when I saw Giovanna confront her fears. I saw again her pale fingers play
ing with the jade elephant and the envelope lying on the table.
I decided to go on walking, to read the quotations scattered before me like the pieces of that jigsaw puzzle we’d left half-finished. Finally, at the end of the hall, flanked by masks, I recognized the photograph that, years before, the prosecutor had presented as the final evidence in the trial of Virginia McCallister. I recognized young Giovanna’s tired, sickly face, her mother’s dry and determined look, and, between them, the ambiguous face of the child seer. I recognized a quincunx tattoo on that frightened face. A world where words for our discontents still exist, I told myself, is a world that can be redeemed. I looked at the photograph, the three pairs of eyes staring out at me, and felt sudden vertigo, as though I had reached that invisible border where gazes blend together in a shared pain that has little to do with tragedies or farces. A pain that abolishes genres, and that encompassed the empty gaze of the reader in the Bowery bar, old Toledano’s tired eyes contemplating the fluttering of orphaned chickens, the tattooed face of the stutterer and the imaginary William Howard, Giovanna’s exhaustion and the young seer’s confusion. I saw us all there, in that great march of insomniacs. Thinking of the image of young Abbott Handerson Thayer, I saw us all depicted in that absent gaze, and I decided that Giovanna had brought me here so I would find in that final photo a depiction of that man’s life, and in it, a mirror of my own exhaustion. I sensed that someone behind me was opening the door to the hall. Dreading being discovered in my secret knowledge, I left the exhibition. The next day, I was sure, the photo of mother, daughter, and seer would be analyzed in the press.
* * *
That night I walked. I crossed the old cobblestone alleyways of the colonial city, feeling unexpectedly light. In a small plaza facing the sea, I came across a group of old men playing dominoes. I sat down to play with them in the tropical heat, and I told them the story of how the Tehuelche Indians had stalked the flightless rhea to death in Patagonia. I finished the story, and when I saw they were all looking at me in shock, I understood that Giovanna had achieved her goal. She had made me into an incomprehensible animal.
Acknowledgments
Literature likes to rave and ramble with a base in what exists. This novel is no exception. In it I imagine a possible world starting from many actual facts: people, quotations, books, theories, and historical events. It would have been impossible to imagine the character of Virginia McCallister without the book The Trials of Art, edited by Daniel McClean, and even less possible without the intuitions of Jacoby, Costa, and Escari, whose “media art” inspired the protagonist’s conceptual project long before Donald Trump tried to appropriate the term “fake news.” Likewise, I wouldn’t have been able to imagine my book without the help of Hide and Seek: Camouflage, Photography, and the Media of Reconnaissance, by Hanna Rose Shell. Many real characters people these pages: from General William Sherman, whose scorched-earth strategy inspired the book’s historical reflections, to Subcomandante Marcos, whose words give hope in what would otherwise be a labyrinth with no way out. Here, reality—and I think the now-Subcomandante Galeano would agree—is an approach toward reflecting on the fictions that structure our political reality. Following that intuition, the book feeds off many others’ artistic projects, among which I should mention Óscar Farfán’s Tierra arrasada; the book Breviario, by Juan Carlos Quiñones; and the work of Edward Hopper, Michael Taussig, and Francis Alÿs, without whose sharp fables this book would not be possible. Equally important was the help of Gabriel Piovanetti and Jorge Méndez, whose talent as photographers offset my utter inability to work a camera. I must also thank Gabriela Nouzeilles, whose teachings echo throughout the entire book, as well as my Spanish editors Silvia Sesé, Jorge Herralde, and Ilan Stavans, for their clear-eyed readings, suggestions, and comments. I also want to thank Sandra Pareja at Casanovas & Lynch, Paula Canal and Andrea Montejo at Indent Literary Agency, and Devon Mazzone, Stephen Weil, and the team at Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Finally, I want to acknowledge two very special people without whom this novel simply wouldn’t exist: Megan McDowell for making me believe in translation and Julia Ringo for first betting on this book. They have both made it significantly better.
ILLUSTRATION CREDITS
here and here: Photograph courtesy of the author.
here: Subcomandante Marcos in Chiapas, Mexico, 1996. Photograph by José Villa (Creative Commons 3.0 License).
here: Abbott Handerson Thayer as a boy, ca. 1861 / Buckingham’s Inc., photographer. Abbott Handerson Thayer and Thayer family papers, 1851–1999, bulk 1881–1950. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
here: Camouflage boat. Photograph from the Bureau of Ships Collection in the U.S. National Archives (Creative Commons 3.0 License).
here: Abbott Handerson Thayer, Stencil Ducks, study folder for the book Concealing-Coloration in the Animal Kingdom, © Smithsonian American Art Museum. Gift of the heirs of Abbott Handerson Thayer.
here: Photograph © M. Puttnam, February 26, 1941.
here: Women working in a camouflage garment factory, 1917. Imperial War Museum, London.
here: Abbott Handerson Thayer, N. American Indians and Soldiers, study folder for the book Concealing Coloration in the Animal Kingdom, © Smithsonian American Art Museum. Gift of the heirs of Abbott Handerson Thayer.
ALSO BY CARLOS FONSECA
Colonel Lágrimas
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Carlos Fonseca was born in San José, Costa Rica, and spent half of his childhood and adolescence in Puerto Rico. At the Guadalajara International Book Fair in 2016, he was named one of the twenty best Latin American writers born in the 1980s, and in 2017 he was included in the Bogotá39 list of the best Latin American writers under forty. He is the author of the novel Colonel Lágrimas, and in 2018 he won Costa Rica’s National Prize for Literature for his book of essays, La lucidez del miope. He teaches at Trinity College Cambridge and lives in London. You can sign up for email updates here.
A NOTE ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
Megan McDowell is a Spanish-language literary translator from Kentucky. Her work includes books by Alejandro Zambra, Samanta Schweblin, Mariana Enriquez, and Lina Meruane. Her translations have been published in The New Yorker, Tin House, The Paris Review, Harper’s Magazine, McSweeney’s, and VICE, among other outlets. She won a 2020 Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and her translations have won the Valle Inclán prize and the English PEN Award for writing in translation, and have been short- and long-listed for the International Booker Prize. She lives in Santiago, Chile. You can sign up for email updates here.
Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Epigraphs
Part I. Animal Kingdom (1999–2006)
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Three Questions for Giovanna Luxembourg
Part II. The Ruin Collector (2007)
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Posthumous Notes
Part III. Art on Trial (2008)
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
&
nbsp; Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Letter to Luis Gerardo Esquilín, Esquire
Part IV. The Southern March (1976)
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Fragment #317
Part V. After the End (2014)
Acknowledgments
Illustration Credits
Also by Carlos Fonseca
A Note About the Author and Translator
Copyright
Farrar, Straus and Giroux