The Sacred Beasts

by Bev Jafek

  “Actually, my life seems to alternate between grief and farce, and it may be the only way I can ever learn to accept what has happened.”

  Her intense blue eyes pierced me slowly, almost languorously, then she got up swiftly and walked out the door, slamming it. This gave me a shock, goosebumps. What on earth had she refused to say? Yet, after a moment, I decided that I should not worry about her. It was an old, unresolved problem—her possessiveness toward me. We had grown up in Patagonia together, after all. It was only another mystery between two human beings, as frequent as clarity. How horribly, magnificently, noisily, beautifully strange the world is, I continued to think as I got a cup of coffee and looked out the window at my ruckus. I can neither save nor abandon it. Perhaps that is the last thing my sacred beast meant to tell me. Or, I needed to tell myself.

  MORE THAN A year of farce, grief, energetic agitation and careening inspiration has passed, a pilgrimage of perpetual astonishment. If a year can be a sacred beast, so has this been. My garden of sacred beasts now covers much of my acreage. It is apparently so startling as to have become a tourist attraction. I am now in the travel guidebooks, likened to the madwoman who built the Winchester Mystery House in California. The sign I have put over it, “A Garden of Art from One Who has Lost Everything but Her Mind,” has only fueled speculation that I have done just that. But in truth, I am irrelevant. The interest is the garden itself, now virtually a living thing, one that speaks and perhaps even roars if we could only hear the sound of spirits.

  “Mediocrity” stands impressively at the beginning, the opposing force that necessitates the strangeness and ferocity of the beast garden. From there on, you can’t predict what you will see: it is virtually beyond chance. I began with metal for “Mediocrity” and it is still the heaviest sculpture. To capture the forgotten beauty of Patagonia that Katia should have both seen and felt, I have continued to use more supple and flexible materials, beginning with plastic and light metal for the plants, then graduating to the use of junked clothing and chicken wire which, with cloth molded to wire, allowed me to add plaster to the brew for larger, more detailed and subtly modeled animals and landscapes.

  By cutting, pasting, molding and painting, I have assembled a giant bouquet of flowers, ranging from the astonishing pink blossoms of the coicopihue shaped like tiny, frail angels to the white ulmo blossoms of the eucryphia tree, with petals and stamens that remind me of exploding stars, to the sumptuously rounded Pan del Indio, fungi that grow on southern birches and were once food for the Onas of Tierra del Fuego.

  From the Argentinean frog, I progressed to the vividly lapis and sun-yellow zigzagged skin of the Galapagos horned toad and from there to many of the animals I have photographed and studied over the years. In early morning and late evening, ourakas, night herons and other big birds still alight upon them, and children have stolen the family of tuco-tucos twice now. I gave my latest version of them to Sylvie, who seems to feel something like mother love for them. The Neolithic giant beasts are prominent—the mylodon sloth, with orange fur made from abandoned brooms, and the glyptodon armadillo, its warrior-shield skin made of warped metal sheets from old discarded ovens.

  In time, many other sacred beasts came loping into my garden: the wild and rough Yaghans and Onas in their animal-skin blankets as well as the TehuelcheIndians who once thrived in Northern Patagonia. The latter were very tall, with high furred and peaked headgear; red and yellow painted faces, and glittering eyes, all of which I have tried to capture. I have also made them as large and fierce as is proper, since they were known to have been friendly to whites initially but then, upon experiencing the inevitable perfidy, violence and exploitation of the explorers, flayed them alive and sucked their hearts.

  The enemy is not forgotten: an immense Popper coin is here, with “Popper” written on one side and a swastika on the other. Beside it are sculptures of northern beeches and Degas dancers, dancing into the dune-like dust of the northern steppes, the dunes raised to vortices by the Mara and covered with claw marks from occasional torrential rains. To this scene, I recently added a bit of the northern Patagonian desert of black stones near Comodoro Rivadavia. The Moreno glacier thrusts its giant blue tongue of ice close to the beeches, the unearthly color that horribly and paradoxically may have given Katia the inspiration and will to kill herself. I do not concern myself with contradictions. Here all is monstrous, sacred and profane.

  Two male rheas are here, their necks entangled in combat. An American flag stands beside them since the winner, as Katia observed, will strut into the White House, leaving the other in hopelessly dazed confusion, rejected by the other rheas.

  The Holocaust is here as a conjoined unit, comprised of elements in the memory of a very young child. Tiny skeletal figures are surrounded by a sphere of barbed wire and a ceiling of white, cloud-like shapes. A sculpture of Bear’s black marble tombstone stands beside it. Both frequently blow over in the night wind and must be turned upright in the morning. Near them, I have created the bogs of Tierra del Fuego, dull yellow and reddish smears that cover our valley floors with lumpy beds of moss oozing water. The Yaghans, in their wonderful lost language, used the word for these bogs as a synonym for a wounded man, the color and liquid suggesting suppuration, my mind of a year ago.

  In another landscape, I have sculpted a towering surface of intricate greenish-brown leaves, poles, hands and other shapes embodying the infinite density and impenetrability of bamboo thickets in northern beech forests. When Bear and I encountered them, we always found our campsite because we could go no further. The thickets and mist perpetually shrouding them and the forest beyond became an inconceivably detailed wall of vegetation and climate that resisted intrusion all the way to the Andes. When we camped there, I dreamed that I tried to cut my way through and was assailed by shrieking, tendril-like hands that could pull me into their endless green maw if I continued.

  Early in my artistic endeavors, I glued soda cans together to join the sculptures into patterns, some octopus-like, some suggesting shadows of lumbering ancient beasts. But, I realized that the garden had generated its own design and unity. Like the earth, it was alive and self-defining, and I was its gardener and translator. Children love to play here and the big birds, herons and cranes, to alight and take a look at what might be called an exhibitionistic spectacle or a mirror. I have watched my garden during wind and rainstorms and felt vulnerable before it, as full of love as a young girl. It heaves and nearly gallops then, though it is held down by stakes in the ground. One day, it will all run away from me, and it is only proper that it should rejoin the wildness and eternity of its provenance.

  I have envisioned a future sculpture of the landscape of Paso Roballos, but it may be entirely beyond my powers. I will try, though, as I have discovered that attempting to execute the impossible expands one’s range and depth as an artist. In this region, where Bear and I camped several times, four mountain peaks meet. Within this circle of jagged, snowy towers are green rivers running along volcanic walls of pink and green. Lake Ghio has turbulent waters that roil into turquoise. The surrounding cliffs are blindingly white in any weather, and the shoreline has lagoons of sapphire blue. Thousands of black-necked swans roost in the lagoon, and the shallows are pink with flamingos. Many historians think the region may be the origin of the “golden cities” legends that drove the explorers to pillage the land and its inhabitants.

  To the adults of Ushuaia who do not know me, I am regarded with suspicion, though it is occasionally tempered with a smile. By the youth, I am revered as the city’s most outrageous rebel and because it annoys their parents. By the children, however, I am loved. It astonishes me that the garden is always full of them, playing and laughing, when they are offered so much by video games, satellite dishes, the Internet and all its excrescent, downloadable glory. I have placed more and more plaques throughout the garden describing the dangers posed by global warming and the earth’s sixth mass extinction. I have told all viewers that it is as muc
h a danger to them as to the beasts of the garden.

  I created the garden to tell me, in an image or story, why Katia had to die. Like all art, it has grown, transmogrified and become much more: a mirror of the viewer and the world in continual transformation. I am delighted and honored to be the gardener and translator of this process. The garden’s answer? It begins with an ancient Indian myth. The Indians in many parts of South America including Patagonia once believed that the earth was peopled by a race of giants. As punishment for the crime of male homosexuality, the giants were reduced to the size of human beings. My life with Katia, however, reverses and modernizes the myth: women who love women grow larger than life. Katia was one of these, a sacred beast to match the ancient giants. She was too brilliant, talented in too many ways, excessive in thought and feeling, for her unhappy moment in time; resulting in physical and mental frailty that infuriated and shocked her. She did not have the strength and freedom, ultimately, to express her enormous gifts and thus feel at peace with herself.

  I am reminded of a part of my last dream with the white animal. There was a moment, just before it jumped from the rock and swam away, when we roared together in pain and rage. To participate in the sound was thrilling despite its pain. When I awoke, I thought that if she could have roared like that, vented her fury at the paltry, selfish, greedy world of smaller beings who were murdering the earth and her own utterly unique spirit, then I might have saved her.

  I am sitting on my perch again, the sofa, observing it all like the night heron, one of my favorite companions. From this vantage, I see many changes yet to occur in my life: more additions to the beast garden, travel, new friends, a sense of novelty and freshness, all inconceivable before my pilgrimage. Sylvie and I have had many long conversations late into the night. One night, I told her that America, in absence of responsible leadership, is governed by the Internet, and she immediately challenged me to go back and continue my Internet activity and protests. I doubt that I will do this, but I will write books on the subject of mass extinction and global warming. Sylvie also wants me to take a camping and auto jaunt down the coast of Spain with her next summer in the Northern Hemisphere, and I am going.

  I often see Mariska and Nadia for evenings of candle-lit music, wine and the incantation of dense, mysterious words they have written and call poetry. I have less and less sense of their witchery and unusual abilities, though. They say that this is merely because I have become a witch myself. I am much too polite to tell them what I think of that.

  As a local celebrity, however mad, I have so many visitors that I now lock my door at every opportunity. I don’t like crowds and superficial conversation any more than the night heron. Our perches are sacred and deserve their solitary mental play.

  Something immense has both been added and taken from me, and I often sit on my sofa and look at the photos on my walls. I return again and again, visually and in memory, to the Onas at the cleft between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when they huddled together in complete consciousness of their extinction. They are our past and perhaps our future, another secret whispering to us from the morning of the world. I see their eyes—feverish, horrified, enraged, agonized, lost. Even in the dazzling heat and light of Spain, I will see them. I look again. Look.

  II

  The Beginning

  The Sacred Beasts

  WE ARE LYING on our backs, stretched full-length like children, on the banks of Lake Santa Olalla, directly below a flock of herons that is landing on the water. At once, hundreds of birds block out the sun and completely fill the sky with their finely sculpted bodies and primeval cries. We see nothing but immense dark wingspans and astonishingly slender and delicate aerodynamic breasts and torsos, incandescent diamond-white, all swaying in contact with one another as though engaged in the subtlest dance, the perfect shape for worldwide migratory flights. By flying as high as airplanes and floating on thermal air currents, these huge birds can circle the earth in eight days, and this flock has probably just arrived from Scandinavia.

  Many years ago, Katia and I conjectured their mental state as something both sharp and continuous like Tibetan mindfulness, though I may be the only zoologist inclined to imagine their sentience. It is very natural to do so, however, and Sylvie groans in awe and follows in this direction almost immediately. After the great altercation and the herons are in the water, she says, “I have never seen them from below in a flock . . . I have never seen anything like it.” She whispers as though we were before a sacred altar and a goddess might look at us askance. “They must fly over the earth like that, the wind lifting their wings . . . Do they feel . . . some wonderful . . . powerful . . .”

  “Does the heron feel the beauty of its flight over the earth?”

  “Yes. It was breathtaking.”

  “The question may be too beautiful for an answer.” It is the eternal question nagging the quantitative. The god’s eye view is inherently that of flight, a floating caress of the earth by an eye. We would, in all our restlessness, our quick frustrations and resentments, lose all sense of the flight’s beauty, were we the bird. But what of this perfectly shaped dancer of the air, wings dexterous and sensitive beyond our marble angels: does it forget the earth so easily? Something invisible passes over me, a sense somehow beyond my thought, perhaps the secret I am always seeking. I see the bird gliding over these tranquil waters, its reflection a phantom doubling its size and agility, the flock now endless white water lilies descending from the sky, and the sun’s ray breaks through, falls in a shaft of sunlight all the way to the lake bottom; the bird’s eye gleams with it and it sees an undulant, swaying world of blue-green-gold. Does it feel the beauty of its flight then? I cannot doubt it.

  I turn to look at Sylvie and am doubly struck by beauty. She watches me in wonder for what we have seen together and looks like a woman about to make love. This would have flustered me years ago when I discovered her, but I am now old enough to be a child of the universe, profoundly at play. With her dark hair, now very long and her colorful, deep-necked tunics, the exoticism of her face is striking. Her beauty has only grown in the time I’ve known her. There is a wildness to it, yet it continually startles, glistens. In every landscape, she is the most beautiful presence, though I do not tell her so.

  “My god, is this what you do with your life?”

  “Oh yes,” I say. “This is exactly what we are here for.”

  Sylvie has just graduated from the Sorbonne, and I have accepted her invitation to spend several months traveling together in Spain. We have repudiated our cell phones for the entire summer, and they are locked in the glove compartment of my jeep, to be used only in an emergency. I planted my sensors, cameras, and other equipment all over Doñana, Spain’s historic wildlife preserve, a month ago; then we spent the month camping down the Costa Brava. Now we have returned for my data, which will take a week or so for me to gather. After this, we will go on to Madrid and Barcelona. It is spring, the nights still tingling. Full of youthful idealism, Sylvie says that she will draw and paint Spain, then the world, perhaps the universe. Nearly every moment when we are awake, she is drawing either in color with chalk or with charcoal—animals, flowers, trees, landscapes, often me. In her drawings, I may look like a young girl, then a man, then a distinguished old bear. I may well be all of these things, and her portraiture is as perceptive as it is unpredictable. She amazes me and I apparently amaze her, so we are the best of travel mates.

  My own pendulum has swung to science again, and I have received permission from the Spanish government to study the effects of climate change on Doñana’s wildlife and flora. In the 1970s, I carried out zoological studies in Doñana with Katia. The effects of global warming and climate change here are devastating. We have only been here for a few days, but I already know that bird clutches are smaller here than those in other parts of Spain. This preserve is no longer preserving its wildlife. The flock of herons we have just seen is an order of magnitude smaller than the ones I saw in the
1970s.

  Doñana is now a chaotic, shifting region either flooded or parched by drought, and we entered in a jeep. This alone is radical change. In the 1970s, people could live year-round in Doñana with no more than a canoe to sleep in and a horse to pull it over perpetual wetlands. We are camping beside the lakes and marshes while I gather my data. I will study the animal life in scrublands, marshes, lakes and dunes all the way to the Guadalquivir River before we leave, and Sylvie will draw whatever inspires her.

  Now, I am fascinated to see the drawings Sylvie finished today. I am as captivated by them as I am with the wildlife here. She drove off in the jeep this afternoon, and I have no idea what she found. She smiles as I pick up a drawing of a tamarisk tree growing in a lake. She must have gone to Lake Tarje where they are abundant. Her charcoal rendering displays the convoluting, almost convulsive form of this tree that rises from a tiny island in the lake (created by the mud adhering to its exposed roots) and dramatically bows down to the water with the endlessly intricate pattern of its fibrous, twisting branches. Katia said these trees made her think of ancient, longhaired madwomen, throwing their wild hair and arms into the water again and again, as though they had lost something unutterably precious there. Sylvie has captured the strangely passionate appearance of this tree.

  I take up another drawing, which I see is based on an image of an Iberian lynx’s head that I took from my cameras, one of the thirty or so animals still alive here, saved by a conservation program. Sylvie has captured, in colored chalk, the terrible beauty of this feral face; its contraries of elegance and destruction, nobility and terror. Its large, upraised curving ear tufts look like a primitive crown; and its kingship is perfectly realized in the pitiless, intensely focused eyes that combine both golden light and shadow, the vision of a creature stream-lined for predation. This wild face has thick dark lines about its eyes like an Egyptian pharaoh, yet added to this are the shapes of symmetrically jagged black bolts of lightning on its forehead as well as the symmetry of black stripes on the cheeks, altogether suggesting Indian war paint. Its face is framed by a pirate’s pointed black beard.