A Brief Theory of Travel and the Desert

by Cristian Crusat

  Contents

  COVER

  COPYRIGHT

  CAMPSITES

  FROM LENA TO THE READER OF HER STORY

  ALIEN

  MIDNIGHT SUN

  DUALITIES IN A THREE-STAR MEDITERRANEAN SUNSET

  A BRIEF THEORY OF TRAVEL AND THE DESERT

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR

  Hispabooks Publishing, S. L.

  Madrid, Spain

  www.hispabooks.com

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing by the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. Copyright © 2011 by Cristian Crusat Published by special arrangement with Meucci Agency, Milan

  Originally published in Spain as Breve teoría del viaje y el desierto by Editorial Pre-Textos, 2011

  First published in English by Hispabooks, 2016

  English translation copyright © by Jacqueline Minett

  Design © simonpates - www.patesy.com

  ISBN 978-84-944262-3-0 (trade paperback)

  ISBN 978-84-944262-4-7 (ebook)

  The European Commission support for the production of this publication does not constitute an endorsement of the contents which reflects the views only of the authors, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.

  For Rocío

  Ainsi l’âme va d’un extrême à l’autre,

  de l’expansion de sa propre vie

  à l’expansion de la vie de tous

  MARCEL SCHWOB, Coeur doublé

  (. . .) como el remolino

  de dos granos de arena (. . .)

  JOSÉ MORENO VILLA, Jacinta la Pelirroja

  Walked hundred miles of desert sun,

  To grasp the chance that I’ll be gone,

  Be one with you, yeah.

  KYUSS, Blues for the Red Sun

  CAMPSITES

  I wake up in a daze, drenched in sweat. To my left, Nola and Hazel are still sleeping side by side. Gradually I see them returning from whatever uninhabited zone they’ve been in, making little moaning noises and getting their revenge by landing me the occasional malicious, resentful kick in the crotch.

  “I think I’ve had that dream again,” I say, even though I know nobody gives a damn.

  I can’t see a thing. As I clamber out of bed, they sprawl and fill the space I leave vacant, like two sisters in their parents’ empty bed. I don’t know what time it is, but my dulled senses (right now, all my nerve endings lead to an armored bunker lined with thick sheets of cork) tell me that the hands on the clock must form some angle between three and five in the morning. Not bothering to button my shirt, I pat my chest to make sure that the pack of cigarettes is still there.

  I grope my way toward the door of the camper. The sheets, unnecessary in this stif ling heat, are lying in a heap on the floor. Since we arrived in the desert, my knees make a loud crack whenever I get up. I’m growing old, but I’m not resentful about anything—except for the nuclear accident at Three Mile Island, red mercury and asbestos. My still sleep-drugged sense of touch steers me around a couple of glasses lying on the floor. Using my back and my elbows I feel my way along the linoleum-covered walls, squeezing past the plastic chairs and table. For a moment I think I can see one of the girls sitting on the edge of the bed, her shoulders rigid as if she were sitting at a misty piano. But she isn’t. She never is.

  I don’t know how many days it’s been since I saw the sun, holed up in the RV every day until the early hours of the morning. It must be at least four days since Nola did her dance in front of the pyre of toothless animals.

  Outside, the peace and quiet of the place is a stark contrast to my fitful dreams, with their sudden free falls into the void, grim cattle markets, and members of my family in humiliating situations. I go out into the suffocating night air and walk around our site in the deserted campground; it’s about the size of a small barn. The night opens up before me like the rusty zipper on a pair of old 501 jeans. There’s nothing but scorched earth. And mosquitoes with their promise of impending doom in the hostile shadows. Getting my bearings, I stretch my legs and head toward the front of our camper. Before mulling over the night’s events, I decide to light up a cigarette. Leaning against the still hot vent, my eyes begin to make out the garbage that has been thrown at our vehicle. There are condoms strewn among the hanging laundry, others dangling from the rearview mirror, and even some on the side window, sticking to the screen. “They’ve been used,” I say to myself, blowing out the match. On the matchbox, I read the words ARMANDO’S FISH & CHIPS. Quickly glancing around me, by the meager light from the match as its glow fades in the darkness, I see that the lights in the other vehicles and campers are all turned off. A phosphorescent glow hugs the horizon of ridges, ravines, and hills. The counties to the east of our campground have vanished from view. Only the outline of the water tank stands out in the distance against the uniform blackness of the night, with its intolerable stench of gasoline and semen. It is so hot that I imagine campfires burning in this dark old southern sky.

  I sit down on the bottom step of the trailer. Inevitably, I think about the quarrel we had this evening, and about the way I behaved. I can’t say I’m proud of it. And I’d rather not remember the things I said: I don’t need any other women. I have enough with two of you. I’m no hero! When will you get that into your heads? By the time I got back, they were sprawled out fast asleep on the bed, leaving no room for me. And then there were those nightmares.

  I run the burning end of my cigarette around the latex rim of a condom that is clinging to a scorpionshaped rock still hot from the afternoon sun.

  “It makes great glue,” I think to myself.

  Suppressing the urge to throw up, I focus on my feelings of guilt about everything that happened tonight: fire rips through an undergrowth of vigorous, lush vegetation inside me, like a landscape in an old black-and-white photograph burning on contact with the invisible bonfires that fill the air.

  I hate these feelings and the way they transform into absurd nightmares.

  “Don’t worry, Olivieri,” says a voice to my right. It is a sexless voice, thin as a red-hot silver thread. Unable to see a thing, I’m startled and brace myself for some hideous object to be thrown at me. “It was one of those gangs of Cajun boys that did it—four or five little hoodlums with shaved heads.”

  After trying for a few seconds to adapt to night vision, I make out the figure of our neighbor sitting beside the trailer to the right of ours. It’s as if she has sprung from some dark recess of the nightmare that kept me awake tonight. She reminds me of those nocturnal beings who lie in wait at crossroads and borders, on wasteland and in dense forests, and are especially dangerous if they see you before you see them. She has been here ever since we arrived at the campground. She is always the first one here. Nobody—but nobody—talks to her. I stand and start to button up my shirt, still not seeing her clearly. My left sleeve hangs like an empty drainpipe.

  “Oh, yes . . . Good evening, ma’am.”

  Nola is a little frightened of her because she reminds her of her aunt in Denver, the one who is sick with pellagra. And Hazel thinks she is “as creepy as a jar of jam on a sports wheelchair.”

  She is sitting in a rocking chair, between a stinking diesel oil drum and that rickshaw contraption where animals go to hide away, languish and die. She doesn’t answer, so I say, “Is the heat keeping you awake, too?”

 
A small flash of light darts across my campsite and touches base between my neighbor’s legs. I can just make out its tail. It’s her disgusting, fat, crippled cat, heading home through the garbage piled up in front of our trailer. Carrying a banana peel in its mouth, it scuttles away to hide behind one of the four blocks of concrete supporting my neighbor’s camper: a tuna boat stranded in the middle of this stretch of the Arizona desert that has no zip code.

  “Fine night, ain’t it?” she asks in a distinctive southern accent, drawling her words the way I’ve heard some sheepshearers talk. “A welcome change after such a hot day.”

  I nod without knowing what to say. I’m used to not arguing with women. Everything is so dark . . . I recall that someone, somewhere, paid seven dollars for two pounds of wool . . . Every now and then, due to an optical illusion brought on by fatigue, I see sudden flashes on the horizon, like the faint glimmering of myriad knives and hatchets in the sky over this desert, as empty as an abandoned rooftop. I can only see a couple of yards beyond my neighbor, and then nothing.

  For no particular reason, I randomly think of a country—Tunisia. It has a desert, too.

  “At least people have stopped throwing trash at our trailer,” I say and immediately regret it before finishing the sentence. Except for those condoms, of course . . . all that withered, rancid life enveloped in darkness. “What I mean is . . .”

  “Yeah, I know. All those . . . things. I sure am sorry about that.”

  “It’s okay. We’re leaving tomorrow,” I say, clumsily trying to change the subject.

  “Will you be staying long?” I ask, sounding inquisitive without intending to be. So then I try to play it down (sometimes I forget my Jewish roots) by saying “Not in that rocking chair, of course, I meant the campground.”

  There’s nothing to suggest it. Or, then again, maybe there is . . . Those concrete blocks are like an accent or an asterisk earmarking her life, singling her out as a “permanent resident.” She must be about ten or fifteen years older than me. She might already be seventy, although she doesn’t look it. I couldn’t say for sure how old she is. She’s always sitting there in her rocking chair, as if she were convalescing, like everyone else here. And yet, I can see she has a good, firm bone structure, which tends to betoken at least a gradual, dignified decline.

  “Quite a while, I reckon. Quite a while.”

  I don’t pursue the matter. I think I can hear one of the girls calling me. Perhaps it’s Nola who can’t find the pee bucket. Or Hazel, who is feeling hungry or sick. I don’t need any other women. I have enough with two of you. I take a look inside the camper and light another of those matches from ARMANDO’S, fish and pancakes in the foothills of the Rincon Mountains. Fortunately, everything is quiet. Otherwise, the situation would get worse. Very gently, I close the door with its aluminum rivets running down each side. This silence (an empty, hollowed-out silence that contains neither echoes nor omens) emphasizes the lateness of the hour.

  “I was wondering if we disturbed you,” I begin to apologize quietly, too quietly, fearing the mere sound of my voice might push up the temperature. “If we did, I’m sorry . . . That is, all three of us are sorry. We’ve had a few disagreements.”

  “You’re pouring water into a bottomless pitcher,” comes her voice, out of the darkness.

  It goes without saying that I have no idea what she’s talking about.

  So I decide not to answer that.

  “I guess our walls are not very thick.”

  A bottomless pitcher?

  “No, they’re not,” she replies. Neither of us says anything for a moment.

  “Why don’t you move a bit closer?” she says, just before I start to feel really uncomfortable, which is when she says, “We’ll wake them up if we keep talking at this distance.”

  Nevertheless, I have to admit she’s right. In any case, I think to myself, I’m past feeling tired. It’s going to be another sleepless night. I figure I’ve gotten used to our nocturnal conversations—impersonal, anonymous, superf luous . . . puzzling. I remember living for a time with a woman called Serena who could talk until dawn. It was in Oakland, right above a car dealership. All the stories she told were about Irish bars and the evenings in those Irish bars. She used to chat away, and I would nod and look out the window at the hoods of the cars, while down below some prospective buyer pushed back the seat of a Mazda coupé or measured the trunk with a pink tape measure. Underlying all that was what we usually call time.

  I do as she suggests, true to the ritual of the last few days, like an unexceptional chess player sitting down opposite a stranger—a friendly, worldly-looking rabbi—and starting to play in some park or other, surrounded by yellowish ash trees and lesbian skaters jabbering in Russian. Stubbing out my cigarette against the scorpion-shaped rock, I stand up, trying to work out where I’m going to sit. Once I’m on my feet, I can’t decide between one of the concrete blocks, one of my folding chairs, or the hard ground. Through the beads of sweat on my eyelashes, I see the landscape not as it is, but as an enlarged, distorted ref lection of the landscape, like the image you see on the silvery surface of a bauble hanging from a Christmas tree. At last, I start to walk toward her, stupidly trying to delay making the decision. It’s a dumb move, I know, but it helps me as I work my way through these feelings that border on guilt. I stumble several times over two soda cans that I didn’t see. I lose my balance and lean my shoulders against something, I don’t know what. I think she is looking the other way so as not to embarrass me. Deducing that I pose a threat, the cat squeals, sounding more like a rat. I end up sitting, as I always knew I would, on one of the concrete blocks, the one nearest our RV, even though from here I can smell the stench of warmed-up spunk surrounded by a swarm of insects. I have rather long legs, and the position I’m sitting in is not very natural, to put it mildly. From our row of trailers on one of the highest points in the campground, I can make out the canopy of skylights, solar panels, and metal rivets that slope down to the neon arch in the shape of bull’s horns, its glow lighting up a small cloud of dust about three hundred yards away. The campground is surrounded by wire fencing. Beyond that (again, I note, without the slightest interest or concern), there is nothing. To tell the truth, I can’t imagine what nothing is.

  “They sounded very upset,” she says.

  Before answering, I resign myself to the fact that this is what fate has in store for me, at least tonight. Here I am again, talking to her in the dark, with the condoms, the heat, the bottomless pitcher . . . For a moment I forget the nightmare in which I see my father, clutching his oxygen tank and riding a pony on an old fairground carousel; then, hanging onto the animal’s amorphous dick—now it’s a real live pony, not a papier-mâché one—he spirals into the void. Considering my origins, these dreams are obviously my own small contribution to the Jewish guilt trip. I spit out the persistent, lip-cracking dust, parting my knees so that the gobbet of spit can pass between my legs. From the concrete block opposite, the cat has started to make low threatening noises. It’s staring at my left sleeve that flaps about as I move. So I strike a match to see where the animal is and ward off its evil designs on my person, but I end up lighting another cigarette.

  “It’s Hazel. She’s indignant about the way folks treat us on this campground,” I say.

  “I heard everything, Olivieri. There’s no need to explain.”

  “But that’s what it was all about,” I protest in an offended voice. “You just have to look at our site . . . Nola . . . she doesn’t even . . .”

  “Nola?”

  “The tall, blond one with the beekeeper’s mask. She’s just a girl . . .”

  “I’m not one to poke my nose in other folks’ business, but your caterwauling could be heard as far away as West Tucson. I reckon everybody between here and there must know about your doings. And anyway, you only have to look at the state of your campsite . . . It’s filthy .
. .”

  I’ve got my eye on the cat. It’s as if it were the cat talking to me through its whiskers. “The filth just keeps mounting up, like what you said about Rachel’s indignation . . .”

  “HAZEL!” I shout, wondering what the hell she’s talking about. If that cat comes any closer, I’ll kick it or stub my cigarette out on its slanting eyes. “Is it sick? Is there something wrong with it?”

  “I gotta hand it to you.”

  “Huh?”

  “I said, I gotta hand it to you. They’re real pretty. I know, because they always walk around naked.”

  “Oh yeah, thanks,” I concur.

  “As for you, you’re not getting any younger, and you only have one arm . . .”

  “Uh, yeah, well . . .”

  “Next time, I’d close your door, if I were you.”

  I say nothing.

  “What’s that thing for, that Nola wears on her head?” she pipes up again, not surprising me in the least.

  If we weren’t in the dark, I think I’d be offended. But it’s like I’m talking to the desert itself, I’m actually managing to put my feelings into words, and that makes me feel better.

  “It’s to protect her against radiation. Electricity, power lines, transmission towers, hidden radio waves . . . It saps her energy.” Fortunately, the cat has decided to call a truce—strange for a cat that literally thrives on our insults. “Cell phones are the worst of all.”

  Feeling calmer now that the animal is no longer a threat, I explain to her again that we have come here, among other reasons, because this square mile southwest of nowhere is one of the rare places where there is still no wireless phone service—a dead zone. Just one of the strange places we live in for a time. I’m no hero. I can’t even pinpoint the origin of all this, or put my finger on where it began. I also tell her that we don’t have a television, a radio, a telephone, or a computer . . . or any of the things that send Nola’s nervous system—and, by extension, Hazel’s and my own—into meltdown. Evidently, she and all the other inhabitants of the campground—most of them eaten up with greed, poverty, and AIDS (which makes their prophylactic ballistics even more sinister) are also cut off from the world, although in her case it seems to be because she likes it that way. All we wanted was gasoline and a place with no telephone signal before we continued our journey.