He talked about Emilia, about the injustice of the campaign that had been launched against her. And the hostility that the whole thing had sparked in the younger generations. Another symptom of an imbalance in the social body, he said. I didn’t like that he was describing something that was actually pretty normal like it was some kind of medical pathology. Since when did youth respect what their elders did? We certainly hadn’t, I reminded him. And anyway, what’s all this about a “social body”? Nothing gives us the right to think we’re part of something bigger than ourselves, much less a body. It’s a deceptive analogy. I learned something a long time ago: if you manage to save yourself, you do it alone. He sounded like one of those awful news shows, the kind that go on about the apocalypse and suggest group outings with bats and torches. And I told him so.
“Fine. But we can’t stand around with our hands on our hips while they push us aside,” he said, taking the last sip of the terrible coffee I’d served him (that was Frank: it didn’t matter if the situation wasn’t ideal, he’d drink it down anyway, to the last drop).
It was already hard to follow what he was saying that morning. At some point he jumped from the “social body” to nature, which also showed clear signs of an imbalance. He talked about the deer, about their unprecedented violence over the summer. He suspected that something in the woods was driving them mad. He cited a few medieval etchings or illustrations that showed them eating meat. Snakes. And the entrails of hares and other mammals. I told him that it wasn’t so unusual. That in Scotland they’d found a bunch of decapitated birds with no wings or legs, but with their bodies perfectly intact. The biologists studying the phenomenon had been bewildered (what kind of predator eats the worst parts of the prey?) until they discovered that the culprits were local deer. Seems like because of us—or because of the Scots, at least—the weeds that provide the minerals deer need for their antlers to grow had disappeared from the forest, and their instinct for self-preservation had taken over: the deer went down to the coast and ate dozens of pigeons and petrels—choosing the parts of the birds that contained the most calcium, and in the process exhibiting a wisdom few of us could ever hope to achieve.
Frank looked at me as if what I’d just said was the stupidest, most obvious thing he’d ever heard. He replied that he’d been talking about something else, about cultural symbols like the serpent-devouring stag. Which had nothing to do with that traditional idea about priests swallowing the sins of men but remaining as pure as the animal. That was a load of religious garbage. But it was also one of the early cultural signs of the final imbalance, of how the entire planet would eventually rise up against us. A bunch of Jung and the shadow. A bunch of years spent sad and lonely, I’d say. Then he reminded me that we’d seen a deer acting strangely back at Bridgend. True. But it had been Gabi’s deer, so I didn’t say anything. I didn’t want to give him the chance to talk about any of that. I preferred to let him “enlighten” me. Frank always did have a didactic streak; it had been one of his charms.
Not anymore. If he’s got a streak now, it’s a losing one. Nothing’s left of that tone of his, and all that knowledge, but the casing—just an old man with chafed skin lying in a hospital bed. If he’s lucky, some nurse might grope him a little now and then. There are people who talk to the comatose in the hope that some part of their brain can still hear. I’ve heard about parents who hooked their daughter up to a stereo playing her favorite album on repeat. And then there was the wife who got tired of praying, so she plugged her husband into one with religious chants. That way, all she had to do to improve his chances of recovery was pick up the phone and tell the nurse to press Play. Imagine if those patients really could hear. It would be hell. Fact: you’ll never find me sitting at anyone’s bedside, much less connected to some machine.
That Sunday, I decided to let Frank do the talking. I couldn’t have cared less about his theories of imbalances, symbolism, and signs. The deer had outnumbered us for a while already, and it just made sense to do something about it. But I hung on his every word, anyway. Not because of what he was saying, but because for the first time in years it seemed as if he needed me, and I was flattered. When he finished, I said to him, half joking, that if the deer were going crazy, the logical thing would be to hunt them. He didn’t accept the idea right away: as usual, he wanted to get to the root of the issue, to understand the reason behind the animals’ behavior. But I convinced him we didn’t have the resources for that. What could a bunch of old folks do in the face of something like this?
In the end, he agreed. He said it would give us a chance to show the rest of the world we still knew what was what, and that having a purpose would make us stronger as a group. Matter of fact, he was the one who suggested I teach the seniors at the community center to hunt. Just picture it, a bunch of rookies in their seventies and eighties! But he didn’t say that part right away. First, he took me to the zoo.
There was Emilia, sitting in one of the gazebos with a cup of coffee in front of her. Against the grays, greens, and browns of the cages, her orange dress looked like a scream. Smithfield pulled out a chair. It took me a few seconds to realize that it was for me. Emilia looked up at us without seeing us.
“That woman’s been drugged,” I said immediately.
“This was what I wanted you to see. It’s all any of us will have left before long: clonazepam heaven,” he replied in the voice, somewhere between didactic and paternal, that he always used with that handicapped assistant of his. It bothered me a little, and I wondered if I’d given in too quickly to his ideas, if I’d let myself get carried away in a moment of autoerotic weakness. But I didn’t say anything.
“I haven’t been drugged. I’m at peace,” Emilia interrupted, as if someone had pushed a button.
I wanted to slap her awake. To top it off, she smiled, and her teeth were perfect. Apparently, her pension was better than the benefits we got at the museum.
“Emilia, what they’ve done to you is bad.” Now he was talking to her as if she didn’t have a master’s degree in French, one husband six feet under, two exes in Florida, and a passport full of stamps.
“Of course it’s bad. But it feels good.”
“You see?” His eyes (their color was like no one else’s, brown with yellow flecks) bored into mine a little too intensely. But I didn’t look away. “Berilia, if we don’t do something, most of us are going to end up like that soon.”
“Us who?” I couldn’t tell if he was talking about all of humanity or just Barbie and Ken at the Old Age Home.
What he said next didn’t really clear things up. It nudged the catastrophe toward the global, with special emphasis on the hopes that hung on us active seniors. Performing a concrete service for our community would return us to the glory of our youth. Or something like that.
“All of us,” he continued. “I’m going to tell you a story.”
Where had this man come from, with his chivalry and his pointer finger raised in the air? His lankiness and his height had gotten more pronounced over the years, but what had made him seem hopelessly clumsy in his youth now gave him a knotty, conceptual appeal. Over the course of that morning and several later episodes, I concluded that Smithfield was also being visited by Dr. Alzheimer. That Sunday, though, my lady parts were happy and satisfied and thinking for both of us with admirable lucidity. What a relief it was to let them follow the explanations he gave in his blue blazer and khaki pants with one or two splotches of glue on them. They humored the string of incoherencies coming out of that man, who at least still had all his hair and his boyish smile.
Too bad Frank chose intellectual work. He would’ve made a fortune off the image of solidity he projected, even as his brain was turning into a sponge. Circuits I didn’t even know I had started working again down there. I could feel little currents of electricity I thought had run out a long time ago as he went on about signs and predictions, and we circled the aviary more times than we needed.
I really did try to follow t
he trail of his ideas. I think deep down I didn’t want to believe he’d only started calling me Berilia again because he’d lost all sense of time and his neurotransmitters were disturbed enough that I could be his friend again. But if, for once, a visit from Dr. Alzheimer didn’t mean offensive rearrangements of memories and relatives, pouting, uncomfortable silences, and conciliatory pats on the shoulder (“He doesn’t mean it, sweetie,” or “It’s just the disease talking,” or “Maybe she’ll recognize you tomorrow”), well, I certainly wasn’t going to get in the way.
Some people might characterize my attitude as criminal. It’s common knowledge that taking advantage of the elderly is illegal in most countries. But if dementia had suddenly erased all those years of guilt and resentment, and Smithfield really believed that nothing terrible had ever happened between us, I’d be the first to embrace Dr. Alzheimer’s cause.
The irony doesn’t escape me that it was our first date in more than forty years. We even bought and ate some animal crackers. Meanwhile, Smithfield was talking about senior citizens, deer, and the destruction of our planet. It wasn’t until he mentioned the Primevals that I began to suspect things weren’t all going to be rosy.
I already knew about Smithfield’s obsession. The one that had driven him to leave Bridgend, finish college, and travel in search of evidence until the world (in this case, three history PhDs who held chairs at a few universities) accepted the possibility that Smithfield, with no doctorate or reliable mental and physical health, had discovered a previously unknown tribe from the Caribbean that had reached our shores and mixed with the only ancestors we’d thought we had.
I’d followed the story in silence—my default for everything that involved him. His theory had gained traction for a few years. More than anything because it contradicted what we’d been taught about the founding fathers. Especially Förster, who had requested that a brigade of women be immediately assembled to seduce the settlers and make healthy new children because behind us there was nothing, just miles of empty land and forests waiting to be conquered. Now Smithfield was telling us that none of it was true. That the mystery of the Primevals could be our mystery, too. That maybe we also came, in an indirect but real way, from the animals and the woods, and not just from steamships, credit cards, and oil refineries.
The story of the tribe was published in a few research journals. This was back in the seventies, when it was still relatively easy to believe an account of benevolent ancestors in perfect harmony with a nature we’d lost sight of in the pursuit of comfort. People started to talk about returning to the woods, awakening age-old knowledge that had been lying dormant in our DNA. The Family financed archaeological digs at the outskirts of the city, hoping to uncover remains from this shattered genealogy. They didn’t find much, but a few arrowheads and tools were enough to land Smithfield a job at the museum, where he created an entire wing for the Primevals. Until the specialists showed up and started dismantling his theory stone by stone. It turned out that Frank had just one piece of evidence: a history painted on Comalli deer hides that turned out to be much more recent than he’d claimed and which, as he confessed after a long interrogation, he’d bought from an antiques dealer who proved impossible to track down.
The controversy was discussed in academic circles for a while. But the general population refused to accept that the theory of the unknown tribe was a fake. Sects of “new Primevals” sprang up on the other side of the Onlo River; people organized rock concerts and founded nonprofits to finance new digs. Lots of young folks refused to let a few historians turn them into white bread without a trace of mystery, just by asserting the real age of an urn. People rummaged around their attics and showed up at the museum with the strangest objects, demanding that they be included in the exhibit. Others tweaked their family trees, looking for ambiguities that would reveal the drop of blood that would make them darker, braver, fiercer.
Smithfield stopped appearing in public. He gradually became a stale joke in university hallways. The Family stood by him until the end, though. The proof is that the display takes up the entire east wing of the Hall of Man. He insisted on that, even though it contains only two figures. He said that the success of the composition depended on all the excess space. It was important to re-create the world as the Primevals experienced it. As white and wide open as albaria’s effect on the mind. As immeasurable as the woods and the mountains in the Northeast. Of course, the plaque changed over the years. Now it just says, The Primevals: Myth or Reality? Which seems to answer the question. That’s how things stand. And poor Frank knew it. He knows it now, in his hospital bed. Maybe it’s a better place for him than where he was. Always shut away in his workshop, delivering his lectures to his assistant, that poor little guy too big for his britches.
A few museum employees say that Smithfield never stopped collecting evidence and was working on a big book that would finally prove his theory. I imagine the undertaking ended up in Dr. Alzheimer’s hands. Now I understand that the tall, elegant man in the zoo that day, who got dates and events mixed up and called me Berilia, probably without even realizing it, wasn’t a tortured genius or a visionary. I’m the only one who can see the truth behind the wrinkles, behind the restless face the years gave him. And I don’t like it. Because it’s a truth full of pain. A pain not even an entire imaginary people was able to stop or even slow down. I’ve always known the Primevals had only one purpose in Smithfield’s life, and that was to help him forget Gabi. Those poor natives didn’t have any luck there, either. Even that day at the zoo, in the middle of all his plans and incoherent explanations, it was her name and not mine that sparked a glimmer of lucidity in his eyes.
* * *
The next day, her mother’s clothes cast new shadows over the apartment from where they lay strewn around the bedroom. She hadn’t been able to sleep in her own bed this time, either. She’d gotten into Emma Lynn’s, where she could keep an eye on the dolls. They’d never spoken before. Berenice stared at them for a long time, weighing the option of putting them away in a box. She decided not to. She straightened Baby Moon’s dress, put her in the middle of the circle, and took a few steps back. The scene was the same as always, but something twisted deep down in her stomach.
As she got dressed for school, Berenice decided she wasn’t going to lose hope after what had happened with Connie. The woman was clearly off her rocker. She liked that expression. Emma would use it all the time when she was making fun of the old-fashioned education drilled into her by her grandmother Cecilia, whose daughters held “gimcrack” jobs and dated “milksops,” while everyone else was always at least a little off their rocker. Emma had explained to Berenice what the phrase meant, but they didn’t use it the way the dictionary said. In the middle of some domestic chore, Berenice might announce that she was getting off her rocker, which meant she was going to stop being a good girl for a few minutes and had permission to scream, jump, and throw things at the wall, that is, to do all sorts of irrational things as long as it was only for a short period of time. Emma did it, too, sometimes, especially when she was frustrated with an experiment in the nursery. With the albaria, she’d needed to run through the hills of the cemetery barefoot, smash two or three flowerpots on the ground, and kick over their folding screen, until a single seed was intimidated enough to sprout in the land of the dead.
That was months ago. Emma Lynn had been obsessed with the seeds ever since she found them. Maybe because they were the only living thing that had belonged to Gabi. Berenice could tell that, more than success with some experiment, Emma was looking for her mother in that plant. That’s why she was so stubborn about the albaria. She’d tried countless techniques, but none of them worked: tapping and moistening that were meant to reproduce the humid conditions the plant supposedly came from; different kinds of soil and fertilizer. Nothing. She even sacrificed a few seeds to a process of double fertilization that ultimately didn’t take.
One afternoon, frustrated and pretty far off her rocker, Em
ma Lynn had run out of the nursery and straight for the cemetery. It was still cold, but she was barefoot and wore a green-and-white dress that skimmed her heels. Berenice followed her and the two ran without stopping until they reached Great-grandma Cecilia’s grave, where Emma Lynn opened her hand and threw the seeds she’d been carrying at the headstone.
A while later, after spring had arrived and the two of them had forgotten about the whole thing, they discovered a shoot of albaria growing among some rocks pretty far from where they’d thrown the seeds. Emma Lynn had recognized it by the smell its leaves gave off and by their color, a waxy blue over green. She left Berenice to guard the plant while she went back to the nursery for the tools she’d need to transplant it into a flowerpot. She needed to know its secret. And she could only do that by studying the plant, an undertaking she dedicated the entire summer to, and which also ended in failure.
Berenice, on the other hand, had a theory. She believed that the plant had grown there simply because it preferred the land of the dead.
“It’s not a magical plant for nothing,” she concluded.
The only thing Emma Lynn had told Berenice about albaria was the same thing her grandmother Cecilia had said: that the flower had driven too many people crazy, including Emma Lynn’s mother, Gabi Alicia Brown. It was best to stay away from it altogether.
“Everyone has the right to a minute of madness,” Emma Lynn had said one day that summer, as she stroked the white and seemingly inoffensive flowers of her first and only albaria.
“But not to four days in a row.” Berenice sighed, sitting at the kitchen table and making a list of people who might be able to pass for her relatives.
American Delirium Page 5