The Sacred Beasts

by Bev Jafek

  She tried to justify herself, said Yukio Mishima and Gertrude Stein kept these hours. I am no Alice B. Toklas but I accepted it, though it was never my habit. I wanted plenty of sunlight and my work, another form of love. We did what we had to do. I had my work. She did what was necessary to write, even if it asked periods of time lying in the dark.

  The flood of memory has spent itself. I am hungry and eager to begin the day and my work. Katia has passed over me like a giant bird of prey, yet I did not cry out or shed tears. I am left whole, with energy. I am growing stronger by the day, as I am in my dreams. I know what this means: today is my morning to walk to the cemetery. I am ready for it and somehow, it will be a watermark.

  After breakfast, I am moving, alone with my disturbingly energetic and loquacious thoughts, ambient over the black-riddled dust to the quiet darkness of the cemetery surrounded by black cypresses. The ground’s meandering blackness is a mineral that accompanies gold and announces its presence. It gives a haunting, riddling strangeness to the landscape, a hint of phantoms, all the animals and Indians killed by the exploiters who came here for gold. Our history: excess of beauty raped by explorers, then exploiters, pirates and dictators, a crime punishable by death. It surely killed all the Indians, Onas and Yaghans alike. The few survivors now are mixed breeds.

  There was one exploiter greater and fouler than all the others were, Julius Popper, a mining dictator the right-wing Evangelicals in the States would surely admire. I heard of him as a child, for the Welshman had left one of his gold coins, called a Popper, in a desk drawer of the furniture we bought with the house. It says “Popper” across the front and has a pick and shovel on the back. Julius Popper began as the owner of one gold mine, then all, then he bought everything else, from sheep ranches to transportation lines. King of land and water, he was free to become a dictator with his own currency, stamps, army and system of justice. How brutally simple was his justice: he shot all intruders. The only exploiters more destructive were the missionaries.

  Among the myriad faces on my wall is a photo of the Fuegan Indians taken sometime in the cleft between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, just before their extinction blessed by missionaries. Here are faces of rough, dirty skin and hair a dull wildness, clothes that are animal skins barely sewn together, gathered about bent shoulders as they huddle together, seeking comfort that will never come. Their mouths are open in shock or closed in anger, their arms empty and impotent; their heads turned slightly to the side as though expecting a blow. Their eyes: here is the moment of revelation. To say that they reflect pain and desperation falls far short of the reality. No, their eyes are something between horror and astonishment. They know they are the end of their kind, a race that once filled a continent. No one who sees these eyes will forget: they follow, taunt, whisper, beg.

  My thoughts meander like the black mineral stripes in the dust. They seek a shape that eludes them and refuse to accept sorrow. Let them kindle and be. I am better for them.

  Yes, the Onas and Yaghans were stronger and fitter than the Europeans who killed them: they had survived in one of the world’s harshest environments for thousands of years. They always kept fires burning wherever they went, even in their canoes, and they could fall into freezing water and survive. Their harsh life was not, however, without intellectual subtlety. A nineteenth century priest compiled a dictionary of the Yaghan language startling in its richness and expressiveness, and it contained more than thirty-two thousand words at his death, which finished the project.

  I told Bear a few Yaghan metaphors that would surprise any zoologist with their clarity. Depression, for example, was described as akin to the seasonal phase when a crab sloughs off its shell and hasn’t grown a new one yet. The Yaghan word for adulterous came from a comparison with a small hawk called a hobbythat is known to flit about with great speed and little apparent purpose, then suddenly hover motionlessly over its next victim. Bear was silent a long while, then said they were powerful words that taught new truths. The art of their words died with them, as did Bear’s.

  No, my mind refuses to stop thinking about human violence, greed, and stupidity. I must run my course like the riddling dust.

  Popper had a hand in killing the Indians, too. He was disturbed by what he saw as their alarming Communist tendencies: they had the perversity to believe that their creator, Yaux, divided the land equally between families, an offense to the divine capitalist, Jehovah. Too, they displayed an inconvenient reverence for the land he pillaged, believing that spirits inhered in its rocks and mosses. To top it off, they were gentle and thoughtful, scarcely human traits at all. So, he rounded them up and sent them to the Salesian Fathers for re-education. The missionaries made so little sense to them, however, that they fled. This was punished by incarcerating them in a jail on Dawson Island. The missionaries then began the Yaghans’ course of re-education in jail, teaching them crocheting and petit point to instill moral vigor. At last, the world made so little sense to them that they laid down and died.

  The jail is still there on Dawson Island. Cut from stone and concrete, it is stronger and colder than its Siberian counterpart and stands as one of the cruelest fates in human history. In the 1920s, the socialists—those other immoral miscreants—were sent there to be killed. It was last used to house the ministers of the socialist Allende regime, who were sent there by the Americans. Allende himself would have ended up there, but for the more merciful fate of death.

  There seems to be no stopping my black thoughts. If not devoted to art or my beloved, their content is purely the murder and madness of human history, every bit as true as a hobby hawk devouring a mara. But, perhaps I should be painting a picture that is blacker still. The earlier Europeans were even more murderous than Popper—at least more efficient in their killing. They offered one pound sterling for each Indian killed, to be paid upon display of a brown severed ear. A Scotsman appropriately dubbed The Red Pig killed more than anyone else. He was wounded by a courageous Ona Indian, but had the peculiar strength of the morally unsound and lived. Eventually, he killed himself with whisky. In his last delirium tremens, he hallucinated being killed over and over again by Indians using knives and arrows. He was discovered attempting to hide in the forest, down on all fours, pretending to be a cow and even eating grass. A few hours later, he was dead, so in the excessive, trenchantly truthful way of this land, he did meet our monster of justice.

  I feel viciously better for my babble. Here I sit in the dust and scrub before her grave. The wind is low, murmuring. I could not bear fierce wind today. The black riddled dust is everywhere, even embedded in the marble of her tombstone. The black cypresses must breathe it, and so must I. The film reel of Bear’s death has been silent for days, replaced by art or anger. Now the anger of the first days and my dreams is returning.

  Anger at what? The loss of one so loved, unique, and precious? Not entirely. I am not that insightful and virtuous, not yet. This anger is for something small and stunted: her betrayal of me. I am furious that she left me with years, decades left of my life. She left the home I loved and offered her: the unspeakable perfidy of her response. I know she felt a pain too great to live, but she should have cried with me. I would have done anything to comfort her. She knew that: I had taken worse from her. I showed her the most beautiful things I have ever known—the creatures, the land, what I had devoted my life to—and she refused their beauty and would not let them heal and grace her life as they had mine. I can stand anything for their beauty, and I can stand her death, but not without rage. And forgiveness? Not yet for that. No, my art and anger sustain me. Even now, in fear and agony, I know I am healing. I could not have come here otherwise. I am floods, cascades of memory, the beautiful things I showed her . . . animals, mountains, colors, trees.

  Mountains, yes. When we were young and climbed high into the Chilean Andes, we shared the astonishing, breathless point at eight thousand feet in the Paine Mountains, together looking down on all of Patagonia and beyond, from
the Atlantic to Antarctica, into the Brazilian rainforests of the Amazon, all the way to the incandescent liquid blue topaz line of the Caribbean. We saw those exquisitely spectral shapes of peaks that were scoured and twisted into unpredictable forms by Ice Age glaciers. How much they seemed to be the strange, contorted sculpture of the beings and lives we knew, scoured by the passion of living, barely seen by one another, solely in such a rare, purified moment as this in its dazzling light; our very essence and truth living with endless secrets, known only by those with whom we share our passion and richness. These mountain peaks caused a sudden pain in my chest, an acknowledgement that the top of the world was at once so close to the infinitely varied beings of my species and others; scoured, contorted and spectral both from nature and the love and violence we do to one another and the earth, our mute, torn, majestic enclosure and source.

  That moment I shared with her, that piercingly beautiful sight and moment of the heart I gave to her, and she took it hungrily as nourishment for her art and then betrayed it.

  Trees, oh yes. When we came down from the peaks and saw the trees of the Argentinean pampas and steppes, often blown nearly to the ground by mountain winds, their rough branches and fibrous foliage a witch’s violent hair in the roar of the wind, here we found another living thing of scoured and spectral shape made exquisite by truth. I gave this to her, and she took it hungrily and instantly understood it as the nourishment and root of her art. Yes, that I gave her, that we shared, but only one betrayed.

  We saw the southern birch forests in Tierra del Fuego where the climate is most harsh. The birches have fewer branches and the smaller ones twist about the trunks and stunt their growth. The trees are then small enough to be covered with lichen, and the forests all have a hairy, ragged appearance, the ground littered with dead and graying branches that cannot even rot for the cold temperatures. They have a chaotic, forbidding look that seems frozen in time. “Fuegan birches,” I told her.

  “A gothic tale,” she replied. She took it, as she appropriated everything, for her art and then betrayed it.

  When we camped further north in the pampas, where the climate was balmier, the Antarctic birches had the thick, horizontal fullness of unimpeded foliage growth like great, rounded heads upon slender, tapering trunks. “Northern birches,” I said.

  “Degas dancers,” Katia replied, and I saw them as for the first time: the utter elegance of the tapering trunk like a dancer’s slender legs and thighs and the higher horizontal fullness of upper boughs, branches and leaves the arms, shoulders, and head of the dancer thrown forward in dance. Yes, the birches became dancers moving forward, one leg close behind the other. It was a landscape full of Degas dancers, advancing with elegance and majesty, ready to leap. In an instant, they had become her art, and she betrayed them as she betrayed me.

  That was when we visited the Moreno glacier, which plunges straight into the Antarctic birch forests. Things run riot here; there is always the unexpected, caused by the warm, heavy rainfall on the Chilean side of the Andes, resulting in perpetual drought and cold on the other side that becomes Argentinean steppe. Directly below the peaks, this inconsistency in temperature and rainfall has resulted in a petrified forest outside Sarmiento. We camped there, and she touched those cold, shining, impossibly slender and intricate stones that once were living branches and boughs. We could still see the grains of wood in the hard, frosty stone.

  Colors! When we camped at Cerro de los Indios, I remember a day of pure explosive color. It is a place where unicorns were once thought to exist in the eighteenth century. The immense black basalt cliffs are flecked with red and green figures. From the top, you can look down on Lakes Posadas and Pueyrredónand across to landscape that reaches from Argentina to Chile. The Indians regard it as a sacred domain, and in ancient times they painted the animals they hunted in red colors and themselves as energetic, jumping green stick men. There are always absurd votive offerings to be seen at the base of the cliffs—a doll, a tin of tobacco, streaks of melted chocolate bars. Walking around the cliffs, we found mesas and gulches with rocks in lilac, rose pink and lime green. The gorge that follows on the trail is bright yellow, with bones of extinct mammals. The dried lakebed at the bottom of the gorge is filled with purple rocks, and white cow skulls stick out of flaky orange mud.

  On Lake Argentino, we saw the full range of the immense, ten-mile-long Moreno glacier and its unearthly blue color, a tongue of ice thrusting itself out of the mountains and into the forests, hence made of chaotic surfaces, crushed and convoluted by their own weight erupting into an alien environment. Katia was transfixed by the infinitely varying shades of blue in the ice, and I told her it resulted from the compression of the ice under its own weight. So compacted, the ice continually forms crystals that absorb the red and yellow wavelengths of light, leaving only this chimerical blue, to be reflected in so many translucent shades.

  Stunned, she walked into the many tunnels and crevices of the fractured ice, watching the whirlwind of fluctuating blue colors. “There is a blue light mentioned in The Tibetan Book of the Dead,” she finally said. “A fabulous cosmic blue comes to the soul shortly after death. It is described as so startling that a soul unprepared by meditation chooses the much duller white light beside it, moving away from the expanse of the universe into the constriction and pain of rebirth. I think I have just seen that blue light.”

  She said that to me; we shared it, a beauty transcendent of birth, life. Even this light of cosmic power and beauty she betrayed, or am I just raving to myself? Does it mean, rather, that she was planning for her own death even then? It could be, and it could be I have been raving long enough in front of this tombstone. I showed her animals, mountains, colors, trees, my life, my love. She reciprocated and turned them into her own world of art. We found worlds of beauty and mystery together here, twice over. Love, imagination and the apprehension of beauty are the soil of our best human faculties, perhaps the only ones that undo our violence, carelessness, and greed. Goodbye my greatest, deepest love, most beautiful of all; the one for whom these animals, mountains, colors, trees almost seemed designed. Almost . . . and I see my next sculptures—one for the beautiful things she betrayed; another for the excessive, scoured and contorted, monstrous nature of the earth’s beauties, animate and inanimate; and more, more still, until a picture appears, an image, the only answer I will ever have of why she had to die.

  My walk home was empty of dark thoughts and full of unexpected delight in planning for my next creation. “Mediocrity” was huge, metallic, uncontrollable. The new sculpture must evoke the beautiful things I gave Katia and she could not embrace. My material must therefore be subtle, flexible, and delicate. At once, I envision an enormous montage of strange forms rising up over my lawn; they are made of old yogurt containers and plastic bottles glued together. These I cut and fashion as my material. I will paint their exteriors in fabulous colors and give them surface designs like the skin of the Argentinean frog, flowers like the gloriously pink pendant coicopihue. Other portions will be shaped like the contorted landforms swept by the Mara, and some will reflect the varied blue tones of Patagonian glaciers. Together, a jungle of colorful shapes, a riot of coalescent strangeness will rise up over my acreage, a land of the purest eccentricity mirroring my own, the end of the world. I close my eyes in pleasure at the vision of this creature.

  Well, it’s another trip to the dump and the Aussie’s tribulations. I will give my cases of whisky to that deserving notable and he will think his old mum’s risen from her grave to deliver his heart’s delight. I can haul the plastic away in my truck—no further visits to the Sooty Crane. A bark of laughter suddenly erupts from me. My sanity’s back and with it, a new draught of puzzlement and wonder. Who will come peering into my oddity next?

  When I arrive at the dump, my two cases of whisky riding congenially in the passenger seat, the Aussie is nowhere to be found. At last I find him deep inside the building, sitting at a bent, begrimed metal table behind crates
of refuse, his eyes red and swollen with tears. Perhaps the boy and I have both been disappointed in love. I haul my first case of whisky to the rescue, loudly thumping it down on the table before him and grinning like blazes. “I need sterile plastic cups and bottles of all kinds,” I say kindly and add, “I have another case of whisky in my truck.” I depart immediately so that he has a moment to get himself under control. As I thump the second case down, he has completely lost his mind, and tears of joy are streaming down his cheeks.

  “Oh, mum,” he can barely utter. “Y’ should’na. Y’ jus’ should’na.”

  “I’m only handing my rotgut to you. It’s no gift and needs no thanks.” He completely refuses to accept the implications of this.

  “Oh, but ther’s mod-i-rytion,” he offers in opposition. “Ye kan be sure I drink mod-i-rytely.

  “Only you know the truth, mate.” My moral duty ends here and he, with his bleary-teary eyes, huge red cheeks and drinker’s paunch, is too plainly delighted to have absorbed it.

  “Wha’ ye need agin’, mum?”

  “Plastic yogurt cups, pliable plastic bottles and containers of all kinds, lots and lots, hundreds, things I can cut and shape with a scissors and glue. Can you get them sterile since I’m technically hauling away another hazard?”

  “Oh, we sterilize here, yes, that we do . . . how to pack . . . I’ll think it through. Ye come back tomorra’.”

  “I’ll do that, mate. Take it easy on the rotgut,” I say and I’m off.

  At home, I take out a pad of large, yellow-lined sheets of paper I’ve previously used for mapping and sit on my porch, spending the afternoon drawing my new imaginary beasts. At sundown, I have a sense of accomplishment but not my usual physical fatigue. I am restless for the first time since my crisis began, and perhaps I am actually feeling the vast luxury of boredom. Oh yes, boredom is indeed welcome after what I’ve been through. I idly page through newspapers and books like a pampered husband, oblivious to the time passing, until it is dark and still throughout the house, the night wind rising softly. Poised upon sleep, I look out at the lawn, now populated by real and imagined creatures of magic. I wonder how they will look in the morning, at noon, under rain, under moonlight, as now. Will they continue to be art and, for that matter, can they possibly be art at all?