Jakarta

by Rodrigo Márquez Tizano

  58.

  From Morgan’s notebook:

  “Our Lady of the Chrysaliđs healing lepers, photocopy of original manuscript: Gospel of Federico the Moor.

  Emperor Obdulio as a leper, reproduction of fresco: Chapel of Saint Atillus.

  Saint Damian distributing alms among poor and sick, copy on canvas of original on slate.

  Our Lady of the Chrysaliđs with trio of beggars. Attributed to Holbein the Elder. Lithograph??”

  59.

  We didn’t bury it but we made sure not to use up all the gasoline either. Let’s save some, said Morgan, for when we find more. More what? More animals, fag. We placed what remained of the carcass in a plastic bag and left it in a corner of the lot. Every day I’d take a detour on my way home from school to go and have a look: lots of flies at first, then fewer. It shrank in size, became progressively paler. And one day disappeared completely.

  60.

  That was our last year at school. A year of quiet. Even the old nun didn’t say much. She had a hip problem and would fall asleep halfway through class and wake with a start at the sound of the buzzer; she was so close to being dead she reminded us of a stuffed animal. I remember one time when she started nodding off and Birdface tore all the pages out of his notebooks, put them in a wastepaper basket next to the bookshelves and put a match to them. Everyone jumped up and started running about, kicking things over, until soon the room was thick with smoke. At first we thought the nun hadn’t noticed because she was so out of it: a stuffed owl, her false teeth hanging half out of her mouth. In fact she was awake the entire time, even as the flames began to lick her wooden chair. A couple of boys with sleepy faces got up and dragged her out of the classroom. The fire alarms went off and the school was evacuated. We spent that afternoon playing football in a field out back of school. Next day, as soon as we arrived at school, the Mother Superior made us all line up in the yard. The nun had been admitted to one of the charity’s clinics—in a state of shock, the Mother Superior said, as if we cared. As punishment, and until the guilty party owned up, we were all given detention in the shape of having to stand out by the flagpole from seven in the morning until two in the afternoon, two whole weeks outside in the blistering sun, and given nothing to eat until one of our number wilted—a little pansy fag bitch of the kind that proliferate in prisons for impoverished children (which was what our school was), one of the ones who become sponges for everyone else’s anger, especially when we caught a glimpse of the men the pansy fag bitches were going to become, and in that saw more clearly the malignant beings we were going to become and whom time and boredom would make only more malignant: the wilting little pussy Neto, poor fucker, who at some point passed out. Fine. He wilted. The problem was that Fatty Muñoz broke too, moved by the sight of Neto hitting the ground but mainly moved by the pangs in his empty stomach, and, tears streaming down his face, gave Birdface up. After that the novice was never spoken of again. It was like she ceased to exist. Birdface was expelled, and that was the last we officially heard of him as well, though the rumor about the provincial military school did gain currency. Morgan said we were all morons. Birdface’s stepfather knew about the novice, he said, and to prevent police involvement, he’d requested a transfer and slung Birdface in a mental hospital for good measure. Not just that, but it was the stepfather himself who’d started the military school rumor, as a way of protecting his name—his and that of Mirasol. None of us believed a word of this. Morgan was forever making things up, convincing himself of the truth of his tales. We were playing tetherball one afternoon when he came up with a plan to break Birdface out. He’d established his whereabouts, an institution on the outskirts of the city, on the Dos Bocas road. We just needed to do exactly as he said (of course): set up a rotation for each of us to go over there on weekends and get friendly with the guards, who did eight-hour shifts on Saturdays and twelve-hour shifts on Sundays. The hard part would be getting inside; for that we’d need to create a distraction. That’s where Zermeño would come in. Then what? None of us knew how to drive, and Morgan, after obsessing over the plan for a while, simply forgot all about it. As for Fatty M, poor, poor fucker, he started catching a beating every single recess for the rest of that school year. Then he moved schools as well. The nun came back to work a few days after the incident, and that was also when she stopped with the recital of foreign capitals. The register became a numbered list like in everyone else’s classes; in places like our school nobody ever learns your name. You’re a number, a capital city if you’re lucky. I was almost always Jakarta, but I don’t remember the number I was then given. In any case, the new dispensation didn’t last long. The nun hung on till the end of that school year then died.

  61.

  I bet on Vakapý and Clara makes guesses over the date when the stone may have landed on earth. There’s no great difference, she says, between such numbers games and the extinction of the world as we know it. I disagree. For starters, Vakapý is more than just a numbers game. Yes, it can be boiled down to the flight of the ball throughout each match, a series of trajectories that in turn may be made into a series of digits, which in turn may be stored and interpreted in such a way as to expand a database whose function is to regulate and administer the prices that then dictate the gamblers’ moves, but there are so many other factors that the overall mathematics of the game depend upon, factors that in turn depend upon mathematics in order to affect the game. Plus, the fact that we survived the epidemics suggests we are condemned to stick around—against all odds, against all prognostications—though not in perpetuity. The stone will outlive us all. Of this she is convinced, pointing to many ancient manuscripts that support the idea. The Fifth Sun of the Mayans. Small explosions. Cosmic radiation. Electromagnetic phenomena. The stone is merely material evidence of her theory. She’s written out the equation for me with her finger in the air many times. Don’t you see, she says? So simple, so devastatingly simple: assign a value to each object in the room. Whatever happens to be in the room. Now, if we could focus our attention on each of the elements comprising this small space, she says, distributing our focus across each little thing in equal measure, each would necessarily decompose—in the mathematical sense, separate into simpler constituents—and these in turn would demand closer, or deeper, inspection. And each could in turn be broken down in a succession that would lead to the ultimate clarification or illumination. Like little boxes, one inside the other. And would some vestige remain, some cipher at least? The remainder I have already synthesized, she says, pointing at the red and blue dots she’s been painting on the walls these past months. See? She believes that the end will come in the shape of a stone identical to hers, only larger. I’ve tried to make the counter case: that it’s impossible to establish an end for the same reason it’s impossible to know the nature of the beginning, that the end will not be a thing to fit in words, or stones, or numbers, that the end is not ours to know, and that should such a time come when we are able to name it, that will be the very moment in which our powers of description fail, break down, in every sense decompose. We will have become dust, or a vase, or the distant sound of barking. This is what dust is: all that is yet to be. That was my thought, and I told Clara. She giggled. I spent nights unable to sleep, observing her. I’ve now become certain that the end will come from within. Even an earthquake is a matter of a body—the continent—contracting, pushing down on itself, disappearing into itself … And yet it is an earthquake, something we can name. There are even instruments for measuring it, and a specific measure for quantifying those tektonik shudders.

  62.

  There weren’t any more animals. We never went back to the lot.

  63.

  “Many different aboriginal cultures held that it was in the bones that the vital energy lay. Bones are the toughest, longest-lasting parts of the body. Flesh and blood are the houses for soul and spirit, but they are essentially volatile, and may and do pass away. Whereas the soul contained in bones transmutes.
—R. Velásquez

  Who saved the world in ’58? Who were the heroes? It sure as hell wasn’t any of us.”

  64.

  In order to become a master carpenter what you need are patience and years of practice. Certain skills can be acquired only over time. For example, the rosewoods native to this region, in spite of their apparent hardiness, can very easily split from within and must be handled with utmost care. All the kind of rowan one finds on the islands, unlike the European varieties, have barely any sapwood and can therefore be polished almost endlessly. It’s usual to lose a certain amount of volume when you come to plane the wood—sometimes as much as four to eight centimeters—which is why a good grasp of your materials is essential. Whether because we couldn’t be bothered or because we were cursed, it didn’t matter, we regularly got it wrong, and any materials we squandered out of cack-handedness or simple negligence—again the end result was the same—was taken out of our wages. To say we weren’t cut out for the job would be about right, and no amount of sawdust in our hair or splinters in our fingers could hide the fact. We weren’t hugely taken by the prospect of the kind of work that meant being shut inside, particularly in the summer months, sawing, planing, and sanding furniture for other people to relax on, drinking the kinds of cold beers we’d never be able to afford. And so our inauspicious carpentry careers ended before they had begun, specifically on the day Morgan had the bright idea of plundering the workshop, a workshop in which we would later meet again, quite by coincidence—or very nearly by coincidence. Four years is a long time. A very long time, at that point. A fifth of our lives to date, a succession of days and nights whose forward march had been interrupted only by sleep, vacations, our games of arson, games of Vakapý, or the discovery of those 2-D female forms to which we commended our astonished semen. Similarly it takes time to learn the trick of scavenging your past for details, though one can never become a master in it. Possibly I wasn’t always interested in doing so; imagining the incomplete future kept me more than busy enough. Nowadays, though, I stockpile the details that seem to me equivocal, ambiguous, the conjectural and the open to discussion, moments that I have learned to look upon as part of an interminable network of variations or even variability, the bone house of memory—directly adjacent to the mound of rotting corpses, the arms, fingers, legs, and heads. It certainly came in handy in the Ź-Brigađes. People I had known. Fatty Muñoz, for example, I thought of him: had I really known him? We’d been in the same class for the entirety of my school career, and I never knew anything about his life. He was just a punching bag, even for the most cowardly among us, even for the puniest little bastards—for the cowards and the puny bastards especially, those of us who inflicted pain on others so that no one else would inflict pain on us. Suffering is a kind of mother tongue, an umbilical cord with our own humanity: if you’ve hurt someone, or in the moments when you yourself are being hurt, you’re not alone. I suppose the opposite also holds: there’s company in castigation, but the tension that constitutes pain can also suspend it, bringing in a harsher kind of emptiness still, plunging you into a void that is even less traversable. A feeling that is liable to go on for months, years even, incubating inside you. Strange to think how we all eventually disappear, and how our place is in a sense taken by other people’s diffuse memories of us. A shadow of the pain. Because one day people cease to exist. We ourselves cease to exist, we vacate ourselves. So: Morgan quit school and went off to become a boxer. He had no more time for pussies like us anymore; his new cohorts were older, bigger, and way more streetwise. At some point we saw his name on a poster in the Talabarteros truck terminal; it turned out he’d been training at a gym on Cordillera Hill and was now down to take part in a night featuring twenty separate bouts, making him one of forty guys wearing boxing gloves that were complete strangers to us. After that he vanished. Zermeño was the last to go. He took up the family trade, had no more time for teen pranks and foolishness. So it goes. I went down to the docks on my own. I stole from Grandma, I sold this and that, bought this and that. Same as ever. As it turned out, life without Morgan was also a kind of life.

  65.

  From the notebook:

  “The old coat of arms for the Noble Empire of Jakarta, used during the days of the Vice Royalty, comprises two scenes: the first, in the upper panel, depicts Our Lady of the Chrysaliđs, wellspring of all Reason and Justice, with right hand extended in blessing of a man whose skin is covered in welts and sores. He has a horn attached to his back to announce his affliction. Then, in the lower panel, we see him cured, smiling, dressed in new clothes: postmiracle. He’s holding a stone, dark in color, gleaming, and the size of an Adam’s apple: a postal vote for the Virgin, perhaps, or an offering. In the background, beaming with emotion, stand a farmer and his wife, and a pair of sheep. The representation of Our Lady of the Chrysaliđs, with her virtue manifest in a pupae halo and the clasped hands of prayer, is the same posture of mercy all the great masters opted for.”

  66.

  Morgan. Morgan. Morgan. It wasn’t in the carpentry workshop that we saw each other next, but in the queue at the military recruitment office. His dandruff mixing with mine. Or so it might have been, were it not for the fact his buzz cut and new nose (flat as a pancake) meant I barely noticed whether any scaly dead skin adorned his head. And actually I didn’t recognize him at first; but he recognized me, and a smile instantly bloomed on his face. I stepped back and took him in properly, and what a sight: he was cadaverously thin, with a taut covering of skin stretched across his bones, and that was about all. He was holding a vaccination card and, in the same hand, a transparent baggy containing the passport photos stipulated by the recruitment office for the paperwork. He held out the other to shake. A tentacle, I thought. I found it difficult to believe it when he said he’d carried on boxing.

  67.

  We were queue mates till we got to the front and had to hand over the documents to the officer, along with our birth certificates, the photos, and a couple of pieces of paper with stamps from other less important but equally inefficient official bodies. This was still in the days when it was forbidden to go walking around in public like the unfortunate souls of the very early phases of the Ź-Bug—unfortunate, stupid, or convinced this was the only patriotic thing to do. It was summer (just like it is now). There was public dismay at the widespread flooding and the utter uselessness of the drainage efforts. The devout were gearing up for spawning season at the Saint Bartolo pools. Akuâ II had just broken the record for matches unbeaten at the new Vakapý courts. The Źocalo was being occupied in protest at the closure of the Anguĵa. Those days. Documents duly handed over, as Morgan and I left I realized how little we had spoken in the two hours together. Our shared past aside, there was nothing to distinguish us from that miserable peloton of acne-covered losers. We’d never talked much anyway, it then struck me. I wanted to tell him about the dog, about the way it had shrunk so gradually and eventually faded to nothing; I wanted to know if he’d gone to look at that carcass turned fly swarm turned void as well. I wanted to talk about the novice. But at the same time, I wanted to watch him walk off and never come back. We waited outside the office as the draw was prepared, leaning against a wall on which a mural read, “The astronomers were wrong.” A couple of cigarettes later we were called inside, and we both pulled black balls out of the hat: it was the reserves for us; they’d call us. As we went to leave, just as I was getting ready to be alone once more, to vanish, to go back to happily keeping myself to myself, Morgan told me about a fight he was taking part in on the outskirts. He said I should come along.