The Sacred Beasts

by Bev Jafek

  The Sacred Beasts

  by

  Bev Jafek

  © 2016 Bev Jafek

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be

  reproduced or transmitted in any means,

  electronic or mechanical, without permission in

  writing from the publisher.

  978-1-943837-46-5 paperback

  978-1-943837-47-2 epub

  978-1-943837-92-2 mobi

  On the cover

  Huichol Indian art from the folk art collection of Bev Jafek,

  photographed by Elberta Lynn Gaither, 2016.

  Cover Design

  by

  Bink Books

  a division of

  Bedazzled Ink Publishing, LLC

  Fairfield, California

  http://www.bedazzledink.com

  Ruth, a brilliant zoologist and geologist, has just retired with her lover, Katia, to her family home in the southern tip of Argentinean Patagonia. Ruth conceives a unique way of dealing with her grief over Katia’s sudden suicide with the creation of an outdoor art garden made of cast-off objects and garbage. Sylvie, a young French artist, is drawn to the art garden and she and Ruth discover that they are kindred spirits. They travel to Spain’s Costa Brava and then on to Barcelona—Ruth filtering the world through her feminist political and zoological/environmental perspective, and Sylvie capturing the world around her with a vivid, penetrating artist eye. Together they discover a new concept of liberated women: sacred beasts.

  For those who come after us,

  when they ask why we did not leave them a world they could live in

  and always, for Constance.

  I

  THE END

  Ruth

  II

  The Beginning

  The Sacred Beasts

  III

  The Middle

  Secrets and Symmetry

  I

  THE END

  Ruth

  ONE ALCOHOLICALLY BLACK night, I held my seventh glass of whisky up to my eye, saw the walls of my living room and its amber lamps jiggling absurdly in a horrible greenish-brown ooze that inundated the world, drowning all but me, alone upon my ark. Then I shouted: “You want to know what killed her? Mediocrity! She was meant to be a marvel, a monster, to roar at all the idiots on this earth!” The sound of my voice shocked me back into sanity.

  I was very drunk, alone, shouting the answer to the question that had haunted me from the moment I read her maddeningly ambiguous note (“Swimming to Cape Horn. Don’t wait. Love.”) and then found her body dead from drowning, hypothermia or both on the ocean shore. I began shouting on the second night after her funeral, the woman who had been my lover for nearly forty years, Katia, the loved one I always nicknamed, simply, Bear. When the morning light—bald, blank, insomniac—sank into my marrow, I realized that I had found a purpose: to create an immense, outdoor sculpture revealing the omnipresence of mediocrity, that all-powerful aspect of human beings, a work of art suggesting both suffocation and infinity, made entirely of cast-off metal, plastic and glass from the city dump. Nothing less would do. That was how my garbage art garden and my unique form of psychotherapy began.

  I had plenty of room for mad projects—several acres of land and an old, roomy house in Ushuaia, the southern tip of Argentinean Patagonia, closest city to Cape Horn and the beginning of Antarctica. My house is an international white elephant, like everything else here, previously owned by an old Welsh sheep rancher who styled it in the architecture of Wales and the Welsh towns further north in Chubut Valley: thick bricks, windows sashes and the inevitable grandfather clock stopped forever in its tock. Just call Ushuaia the end of the world. All the Patagonians do. Old Pat always has plenty to say about the beginning and end of the world. It’s only the present that so bewilders her. But in that respect, I’ve always been different. As a retired university professor, a zoologist, geologist, naturalist, science journalist, and a woman on top of that, I am a total deviant who is rarely bewildered by the present. No, I am absolutely infuriated by it!

  “So Little Bear’s shouting to herself at five am now?” The door of my house, which I rarely lock during our December summer, opened and the full-cheeked, beguiling Hungarian face of Mariska, my closest friend and neighbor, looked into my living room and saw the chaotic, disgusting heap that was myself.

  “Don’t call me that ridiculous name again, or I’ll throttle you against the wall!” I shouted. At least, I was now shouting at someone else. Some of our friends observed the ridiculous custom of calling us Big and Little Bear, which revolted me. Katia was unique, another species, as astonishing as the giant marsupial monsters that lived in ancient Patagonia. More than legend, they had lumbered over the steppes and deserts during the Neolithic and been made extinct by early humans. Now enormous, awkward limbs stretched and shook the ground before my eyes: the elephant-sized mylodon sloth covered with vividly orange fur, an herbivore so gentle it was brutally penned in caves by humans until it died for the sole reason that such cruelty met no obstacle. The equally immense glyptodon armadillo, whose amazing skin was a cross between armor and fur, reduced to roofing over huts in which fires perpetually burned and vicious human eyes pooled orange and red demonically before them. Thus the name of our largest island of archipelagos, Tierra del Fuego, Land of Fire, courtesy of Magellan who, like all the exploiters, merely feared he might have found creatures so magically powerful he could not kill them. My species, my fellows, even then capable of such exorbitant, uncanny greed and destruction for the sole imperative of fools: that they could do it!

  How I would love to have shown Bear the sweet, shy monsters, gentle as doves. What could they have told us of the consequences of being larger than life? I can nearly see Bear walking beside them in the sunlight, caressing the sloth’s long orange fur. Could they have saved her?

  For I could not. No, I am no smaller, mirror image of Katia. She was intrinsically other: greater and truer than life, like all the women I have loved. She was a literature professor and a brilliant writer of fiction and poetry, and we lived in the U.S. for most of our time together. We had only been in Ushuaia, the home of my childhood, for a year in our mutual retirement. We left the States in 2004 because we could not bear what the country had become: a greed and corruption-tainted, dictatorial corporation of the wealthy, united to steal from the middle and lower classes; a war machine attacking pathetically weak nations to sell business contracts to millionaires; an oblivious killer and defiler of the planet; led by the least intelligent and competent, most immoral government the country had ever known. We felt a visceral disgust and horror of our nation, but I was the lucky one, citizen of two lands and, since we were retiring, I brought her to my ancient home. I thought it would be perfect for her—a wind, snow and light-leavened, open-air cathedral for worship of nature’s extremity, and the land, flora and fauna that so perfectly embodied its spiritual value. We had spent months traveling over the regions I visited many times in my professional life as an expert in the zoology and geology of Patagonia. I thought she loved it as I did: how fatally wrong.

  My mind turned inevitably to the last moments of her life. This imaginary scene had been playing in my thoughts, over and over, for two days. Knowing her so well, I thought I saw the only way she could have ended her life. She was one who could never stop fighting; she had the perfect hair-trigger response to enshrined human injustice and blindness. So, she would have picked a place she could never reach, that ugly black rock, Cape Horn. She entered the churning sea and began swimming toward it. Then she fought and swam and fought the water, the cold, the inevitability as the day, the light, fled the sky and still she went on fighting and drowning in the dark of her own exhaustion, escaping at last the fierc
e, demanding purity of her life, becoming the body that had washed back on the shore where I found it. The tears I myself was fighting began to fall uncontrollably from her dead eyes, which were closed. The camera only rewound itself. It would play again.

  “I suppose I’ll just pretend I’m not here,” said Mariska, who had been sitting for some time on the sofa opposite me, greeted by nothing but my black silence, her still-startling blue eyes, short, whitish-blonde hair and lovely smile a reminder of normalcy.

  “Do that. I’ll help,” I said, my hands with sudden, inexplicable need covering my face.

  “Ruth, you can’t help anyone now,” she said, her voice very tender.

  “I couldn’t help her. That’s what matters.”

  “No, now you matter. A great deal to me,” she said, again very softly. What a gentle, lovely thing she seemed. I wanted terribly to be less coarse and brutal but somehow, I could not, though my hands came down to rest on my lap.

  Looking away, I said, “Just tell me this: Do you think there’s a chance it was anything but suicide? Could it have been . . . any other thing at all? I thought I knew everything about her.”

  Now I could look her in the face, however naked my weakness and agony were. She held me with the piercing clarity of her blue eyes. “Yes,” she said at last, “she might actually have believed she could do it. She was like that. The words impossible and dangerous were not in her vocabulary.”

  “Oh my god!” I said and slumped over again. “I knew that! I’ve been thinking it all along and just letting it go. I told her the water could freeze even in summer down here. I told her the waves reached fifty feet . . .” Mariska was silent, though I looked at her in great agitation.

  “It could surely have been suicide, of course,” she said reasonably and in a carefully measured tone. “But . . .”

  Again I slumped into my sorrow. “But she could have decided that such things only applied to others, not to her. Yes, then I knew her. At least I have that.”

  We were silent for a long time, though now we looked freely at one another. “She was wonderful and terrible,” I said. “I lived with it and loved it every moment, even when I also hated it.”

  “She was all that,” Mariska said. “Will you come to hate Nadia and me for being, so to speak, merely normal?”

  At last, I could muster a ghost of a smile. “No, I intended for us to be like you. We would grow very old together, and our love would deepen and darken like amber and somehow we would find that remote island of peace or just a small, unexpected mirror that reflects a beauty in the world. I only wish I knew whether she intended to die or to live with abnormal magnificence.”

  “They are related.”

  “Yes, and tell me this: why do those who love life so intensely happen to be those who wish for death? Katia often quoted Keats and Shelley.” The question just hung there between us. Mariska only shrugged and shook her head as though to say don’t go there.

  Finally I asked, “Did you know how depressed she must have been?” I was now fascinated with her presence, as though the room now held a Voice of Truth and not mere fruitless sorrow and rage.

  “Yes,” she said, simply.

  “I didn’t, dammit! It’s happened so often and this time I didn’t even know!”

  “But you did! You were always trying to convince her she was right to come here with you.”

  “Could you see that?” I whispered in astonishment.

  “Oh, yes,” she said. “But has anyone changed Bear’s mind about anything since they changed her diapers?”

  I let out a long, exasperated sigh. “Oh, my god yes. You couldn’t do anything for her. She just was.”

  “And that’s what you loved,” she said, even more tenderly.

  It was suddenly as though I had swum the course and reached the black rock of Cape Horn myself. I could breathe again. “There’s something I must do now,” I said. “I have to get some important things at the garbage dump.”

  “What on earth will you get there?” She looked alarmed.

  “You’ll see. I don’t have the energy to explain or justify it, but it makes sense.” She seemed convinced, more by my sudden calm and determination than my words.

  “I’ve put a beef, cheese and tomato casserole and a fruit salad in the kitchen,” she said quickly.

  “Ah, food,” I said, apathetic. “Not yet for that.”

  “It’s been two days.”

  “Then maybe I’ll eat. Possibly. Whatever. I can do it when I’m back from the dump. But I must go right now. I am . . . inspired or . . . just certain. There’s something I can do and ach, it’s better than sitting here, drinking and shouting.”

  Now there was a spark of recognition in her eyes. “Yes, do it whatever it is,” then with a doubt, “but you really must do it at the garbage dump?”

  “Absolutely. Something about beginnings and endings. Old Pat can tell you.”

  “Old Pat? You mean the natives?”

  “Yes, aren’t we the natives, too? So it should be perfectly clear.” I smiled angelically and walked out the door.

  Outside, I fired up my pick-up truck, a foul old dirigible that had once clambered over all Patagonia, hauling my infrared cameras, portable chem labs and the other scientific sensors and equipment I had used in my studies of animals and landforms. It was a decent old barreling iron horse, like me. I had always felt an affinity for it. We both bore our burdens well without a trace of beauty, the sign of final, bitter maturity. The truck had the tires of a jeep, and Bear and I had driven and camped throughout Patagonia and the States with it.

  As I drove, I looked at the ocean, hoping that my mental film reel of Bear’s death would not begin running again. Instead, I saw beds of giant kelp that grew in vast, burgundy tangles for miles along the coastline. No, she didn’t enter the sea here. The wet, shining tubular arms of the kelp would have held her back with a force like love.

  Early morning in Ushuaia is a still, near-perfect calm that extends well into the sea. The southern Darwinian range of the Andes encircles the city, giving it some of their pristine, cold mountain air. The only sound is that of the eternal wind, invisible spirit of the Andes, the force called Mara, Broom of God that has sculpted many of Patagonia’s strangest landforms.

  I do not hate the wind, as many do, for I have heard it whistle, purr, moan, shriek, cackle, wail, and then sing like a drunken sailor on the steppes. On our camp-outs, we saw the wind whirl through deserts not of sand or gravel but a colorless white dust streaming off ancient saltpans and grey-green scrub with sharp thorns and bitter odors. At night, when we disappeared into our sleeping bags, only our eyes looking out at the moon glimmering over fossilized shells of oysters, for the steppe was once an ancient seabed, it was then I learned the tonalities of the wind’s voice: whirring through the thorns; whistling through the dead grass; then in full throat shaking the tiny, dry possessed bushes, making dervishes of them, in song! Rude, rough, barbaric song came from those wildly heaving bushes! Bear loved it, too, and pronounced them the crazed, curly heads of pagan warriors, shouting and singing at once in a battle without end.

  In the day, we walked over the desert that rose evenly into terraces like waves. Then the wind was a gentle, persistent hypnotist. The desert waves mesmerized us until we felt that hauntingly familiar, oceanic sense of ego loss, as though you had been taken there before by someone or something, or it was the universe, unveiled, that had always been holding you rhythmically, like a newborn swinging in a cradle.

  When I was a girl and first camped out alone on the steppe, I imagined that I could wander on and on and become timeless, even casting off my body when its needs became too insistent, but for the sudden intrusion of the bizarre: I always came upon curved, twisted, eerily shaped mounds full of holes, as though Mara the Sweeper suddenly had an artistic impulse, then quit in dismay at the strangeness of her creations. W.H. Hudson once wrote that he, mesmerized by these wind and desert waves, might have walked off into a similar et
ernity but for accidentally coming upon twenty-six wild boars, fast asleep, who were all using the same cow for a pillow.

  I could now see Hoste Island and Murray Downs leading to the Cape Horn archipelago. There, the huge, vile, lonely rock with its chaotic surface of black encrusted, horn-like protrusions, as though it was Satan’s head or the lid of Hell! I tried actively to suppress the film reel and found success. Perhaps it was good to talk with Mariska. She sees so much and describes it with such gentle precision. What a wonder they are, Mariska and Nadia, the eternal lovers living in grace, as we should have been.

  By noon, the ocean is a wall of vapor. Did she see beyond it? People pass me, looking silently at the ground. Their faces are grim, red and wind-blown at this time of year, then grim and blue during our June winter. Am I alone in loving this bleak land? Men are walking quickly to work in the crab canneries and navy yards. The town’s houses, unlike mine, are gothic, with iron gates, high-pitched gables and elongated windows. A square tower rises up on their street sides, the totality a cross between a fortress and a church. I see gardens with cabbages white as skulls. Old Pat prizes its gothic exterior, I its interior. It is all one to the cow used as a pig-pillow by twenty-six feral, snorting heads.

  I will not go to the cemetery today. Tomorrow or the next day, whenever I can eat and feel certain I will survive this, then I will walk over the black-riddled sands, under the black cypresses until I find her headstone of black marble. I would have thought she’d want cremation but no, she never said she wanted to go back into those awful waters. She didn’t speak of death at all, since it always seemed to live within her, the terrible price of intense feeling; the whole world a lover, caressing her senses until she shrieked like the Mara. There death, too, dwells, the reaper’s only welcome mat. She was like that, Mariska said, and then her admonishment, don’t go there. No, Mariska, I will not. I have a monument to create. There is still more to say, do, understand; the universe compels expression and meaning from those who can form and utter it, the sole imperative of genius; if a small, mad one of my own and yes, I am mad. Bear taught me the terrible beauty of madwomen.