“I have it right here, over in that portfolio,” he said, pointing toward the counter. Berenice went into the shop and came back with the book.
On the way, her eyes had landed on the spine of the gray notebook, partially hidden under the receipts and invoices piling up on the counter. The notebook was so much a part of her mother she didn’t understand how it could be there while she wasn’t.
“‘We begin to grow weary,’” Mr. Müller read, “‘of so much jungle, so much green, of so much grandiose, monotonous, and savage beauty. The truth is that we long for the ugliness of Man, the kind that reaches its most elevated expression on the old continent. What I would give for a bridge or even a mere fence to break up the landscape on occasion. I cannot but affirm that green is the most depressing of all colors. Two days ago, we climbed the eastern face of Mount Conception, in the direction of Topehya, where—I’d been assured—there lived a tribe known to the other natives as “those who came from the sea” and who had remained isolated from the rest of the country for centuries. When we finally arrive, I see a few huts barely standing around a muddy pond. There’s smoke, some kind of chickens or wild turkeys running around, and bodies strewn across the dirt path. The first thing that comes to mind is that a fire or some natural catastrophe must have caught the residents by surprise; I think of Pompeii, but am immediately informed that this people always leaves a fire burning because they believe the sun will be extinguished one day and it is man’s responsibility to illuminate the earth for all living creatures—this being the only way they, in their uselessness, can be of service. Keeping the flame and raising poultry are the only two occupations of this people, aside from collective divination. The Topehya do not have shamans. “They’re all witches,” my guide tells me in a whisper. I realize then that the residents—the elders, the adults, and the young—have collapsed wherever the end of the party caught them, and are now deep in a hallucinatory sleep. A man as wrinkled as a desert apricot has his arms wrapped around a gourd rattle. His family, two women and three children, lie beside him; they all have their left hand tucked into their armpit, and their forearms are bandaged in such a way that at first glance they appear to be missing. A few are, in fact, missing fingers or ears; others merely wear bandages over the latter. They are not all asleep: some have their eyes open and are smiling up at the sky, while others crawl around on their bellies. The smell of sweat, vomit, and excrement, of humans reduced to their bodily functions, is unbearable. As I approach one of the huts, I hear barking. Next to the opening that passes for a door I see a man sitting on his feet and digging a hole in the ground with his bare hands. He seems to be the only one awake. When I speak to him, however, he answers me with a growl and bares his teeth. My companions laugh and tell me I’m looking at a criollo who betrayed a rural leader from the area. His punishment was that they made him think he was a dog. Apparently the man has been like that for years. I understand in that moment how the people of Topehya have survived: by receiving clothes, animals, and other goods in exchange for their knowledge of albaria and other substances and, above all, for administering justice on behalf of their neighbors.’
“I should have warned your mother about this, about the power of suggestion in some hallucinogens,” Mr. Müller said, closing the book. “But I skipped over that passage, too. It seemed too theatrical, an exaggeration that only showed Lund’s fascination with the primitive. I focused on the pages where he describes the plant. Now that I’ve tried it, though, I can see it was a warning. Yes, I think so. I think the Dane knew very well what the consequences of consuming the plant were, which is why he described those scenes in such detail.”
“I’m hungry,” said Berenice, maybe because she didn’t know what else to say, maybe because she was tired of keeping up the appearance of serenity and understanding for a world that didn’t deserve it.
What Mr. Müller had just read to her sounded like a story, and she couldn’t see the connection between the dog man and whatever had happened to her mother. But she did know one thing: it was about time someone let her act like a little girl.
9
Once she’d wrapped herself in the towel, the woman returned to the closet. Vik remained in the bathroom doorway, still playing his nebulous role of something between a guard and a butler. She reappeared a few seconds later, wearing another dress of coarse fabric, simple and white, just like the last one. A purse hung from her shoulder, though she didn’t seem ready to go anywhere. She closed the closet door, leaned back against it, and stood there staring at him with drops falling from the tips of her hair, looking neither defeated nor defiant, more like someone who had just completed a mission and was waiting for a new one, or else had simply decided to dissolve into wet spots on the carpet.
Sitting at the kitchen table, she did nothing but eat (some bread and a few pieces of cheese). Vik tried the standard questions; he couldn’t even get her to tell him her name. He had already passed through the different stages of anger (what most people called patience, Vik thought, was one of them, a kind of antechamber where rage collects before exploding). The friendly and vaguely ophidian tone that his father used at family gatherings had no effect, either. She responded by calmly crumbling a piece of bread, hunched over the table with her head nearly grazing its wooden surface, completely absorbed in the operation of pressing the crumbs into perfect little balls, which she lifted to her mouth one after another as he spoke. He abandoned the personal questions and tried with albaria, this time with a much more neutral tone, trying to avoid the word “addiction.” He said things like “trip,” “dream,” and his favorites, the ones he’d heard throughout his childhood, “fake dawn” or “false light.” He asked the woman how long she’d been using it and where she got it, since it was unlikely that the flower could grow naturally in that climate. Nothing. In the end, he pulled out a chair and sat in front of her. She hadn’t stopped playing with her little balls of bread.
The story spilled from his lips without his meaning it to, filling the emptiness between them. Vik was surprised by how well he told it. It was the story of his first animal. But it was also the story of his brother, and Tania, and of life on the island of Coloma, in the city of Kent, where his parents had a mansion and their own train car for all the luggage they moved to their second house in the mountains on tracks the family had laid. His mother claimed it wasn’t as hot there, that there weren’t as many tourists, and that the polluted air of the capital was filtered by the garden’s vines and ferns.
Life in Kent was divided into rain and sun, which for Vik meant hours either wasted at school, church, and the club, or won for excursions to the beach or the jungle. Prasad didn’t mind the hours spent inside. He had more patience for adults. Vik, on the other hand, preferred useless collections and long walks on which he’d disappear for days with his maps marked with dead animals. In the end, those would determine his trajectory.
He also went with Prasad to his Ping-Pong matches. It was one of the few things they did together. There was something about his brother’s personality that came out in the sheltered environment of the club: a natural talent for social interaction and an ability to fill, with an anecdote or an anodyne joke, those awkward pauses in adult conversation that settled in between commentary on international events and complaints about the government, young people, or temporary workers. Prasad always provided the phrase the others needed in order to go on talking, the one that convinced them they were resolving major international issues from their tiny island. Vik could sense the contradiction even then.
The club was a stone building that had been part of the fortress and then the missions. Over the centuries, it had been a school, a convent, and a municipal building, until the British turned it into a gentlemen’s club. But the spirit of the monks remained: in the symmetry of the arches and the extravagant wood, in the hallways of cool stone. Anyone could see that the terrace with a view of the sea, where the older members read the newspapers or watched badminton tournaments, wa
s a recent addition that contradicted the buttonhole windows on the second floor. Vik liked to imagine the barbaric scenes those windows must have concealed. Not that he believed any of it. But he preferred any vestige of the old dominion to the measured style his father’s family had brought to Coloma nearly a century ago, which replaced opinions with long-winded excuses.
The Spaniards hadn’t thought much of the island. Columbus had passed it by on his second voyage, though he did note in his diary (in a passage all the children of Coloma learned by heart) the presence of “an island in the form of a bird, set apart from the others to the south of Redonda, which appears amply fertile, but upon which we did not disembark, finding the wind against us and given intervening small and middle-sized ones which appeared better.” It would take them more than a century to reach the shore. When they did, it was only to hunt men who would die working the mills on the neighboring islands.
To Vik, the history of Santa María de la Coloma had the same perverse quality as the building that housed the club. Half volcanic rock and half tropical forest, before the conquest the island was called Koreli (smoke), so named by the indigenous peoples who came from other islands and eventually settled there. Of its original inhabitants (who were there long before and had no proclivity for building), there were no survivors. Nor did they baptize the landscapes—all that remained were a few tools used for fishing and navigation and paintings in the caves that opened onto the bay. There were many theories and legends about the tribe’s disappearance, and all of them involved the flower.
It was said that the natives killed one another off in a hallucinatory war.
That they had eaten human flesh and angered their god, who had in turn upset the evolutionary balance of his followers.
That they’d lost the ability to speak.
That they’d let themselves die off as they lay on their backs in groups and stared into the false light, their blood slowing until it no longer reached their arms and legs, which were lost. That they’d become a tribe of enlightened cripples whom the inhabitants of other lands worshipped like gods, sending tribute on rafts and consulting them like oracles.
That they’d eventually lined up in a long procession and cast themselves into the volcano that gave the island its name. Or that they’d set off in their canoes to establish a nocturnal world on the continent, a world where they would never again be blinded by that hallucinated dawn.
When he was a boy, Vik had imagined them as dark, dismembered men and women, creatures who had decided to abandon their human form, as if to distinguish their race or species from the rest of the planet’s inhabitants. In his mind, the Primevals were no more than those torsos propped up on trees or monstrosities composed half of flesh and half of wood—always enveloped in the smoke of the volcano or of albaria—that had become synonymous with horror and mutilation in the minds of Coloma’s modern inhabitants. As a form of drug abuse prevention, mothers would tell these stories and others, in which merely touching the flower meant losing a finger or an entire hand. Two different colonial governments ordered incinerations to wipe it out; the albaria would come back strong with new strains, the worst of which—Albaria syphilitica—had soft blue or green veins on the underside of its petals.
At this point in the story, the woman in Vik’s kitchen lifted her head and looked him in the eyes for the second time. She seemed to be enjoying herself. Outside, it had stopped snowing and noon was creeping up.
She lowered her eyes and stared at her hands.
“Your story doesn’t frighten me, if that’s what you’re trying to do. Losing an appendage doesn’t seem like such a high price to pay, considering what you get in exchange. I’d be willing to do without these two fingers, for example. I wouldn’t even notice they were missing. I never really liked rings, and believe me, I never dreamt of a wedding band.” She laughed, waving her left hand in front of Vik’s eyes. Her teeth were very yellow. The laughter produced a fit of coughing.
“All I’m trying to do is understand why you’ve been in my house for so long.”
“It hasn’t been so long. Six days, exactly. I spent the ones before that training in the street. Choosing you and watching you. There’s a nontransferrable kind of wisdom that comes from living without a roof over your head. Everyone should try it sometime. It’s a real feat of disappearance. There were days when just the thought of separating myself from the wall, of sitting up and smoothing the wrinkles in the blanket wrapped around me up to my ears seemed more than I was capable of. That’s how it is with the cold. It settles into you little by little during the night and you don’t even notice. First it curls your toes, then your fingers, then your whole back, which gives in and suddenly you’re inside a cocoon. Then the cold becomes a vacuum. Inside and out: nothing. Until moving is like forcing your body to transform. It takes incredible concentration to wake each fiber, each muscle, each hair until—thanks only to its moldable resolve—that mass of aches and pains decides to have flesh again, limbs, orifices, a vagina. The surprise is that it chooses to be a woman every morning, and not something else.”
Vik nodded, though he wasn’t sure he understood what she was saying. Was she talking about a kind of meditation or an altered state of consciousness that could only be reached by subjecting the body to the most extreme circumstances? All his anger collected in his right fist, which he clenched hard. He was careful to keep it under the table. He looked at the young face in front of him. How many catastrophes had touched her life? A case of acne, maybe? Years of waiting for that boy she liked to notice she was alive? And yet, this person saw losing everything as a wonder. A revival of the worst Christian saints. At any other time, the comparison would have made him smile. But now he stifled that gesture, too, and limited himself to clenching his fist.
“A little more and it all would have been over,” she went on. “It was the condition for moving on to the next phase. Being as small and silent as the spiders that live with you in this house. We’d already done it in other houses, but not for as long. It’s part of the program. Total invisibility. Most people never find us. When I started my training I spent two whole days in a woman’s house. She was a manager at some multinational who spent all day away from home. I got bored: it wasn’t enough of a challenge. But you had to go and ruin everything, didn’t you? For the love of Christ or whatever god appears to you … who goes and puts cameras in their own house?”
Vik lowered his eyes, feeling the heat rise to his face, take it over. His body was betraying him, again. He was silently grateful that the color of his skin protected him from this added humiliation. It was true. He was ashamed to be taken for one of them, one of the Bobs or Toms who sacrificed all on the altar of private property.
Nearly whispering, he said: “No god appears to me.”
He wasn’t prepared for the intelligence of her retort, which cut him deeper than the insolence of her tone.
“Maybe that’s your fucking problem. Maybe that’s why you use a cane, get yourself prescriptions so you can drug yourself legally, and surround yourself with dead animals. Did you ever think of that?” She stuck two balls of bread in her mouth as she spoke. “You’re just as crippled as your Indians. The trick is to be as enlightened.”
She wasn’t looking at him this time; she had her eyes fixed on Rabbit with Watch, which was partially visible through the arched doorway that connected the kitchen with the living room.
“You said you were going to tell me the story of your first animal.” Her gaze abandoned the Ploucquet and ran across the clock on the wall. It wasn’t noon yet. “Go on. We still have some time.”
Why did he obey her? Why didn’t he throw her out right that very moment? And what did she mean when she said they “still had some time”? Had she been studying him closely enough to know when his body gave out? It sounded like she was having trouble breathing, as if the air reached her already polluted with noise, but it didn’t seem like she was under the effect of albaria. Vik wondered what his chances we
re of using his phone before she stopped him, or of stabbing her with one of the knives on the kitchen counter, but he knew all too well that he’d lost the advantage.
The memory of the strength and agility she’d brought into play a few hours earlier stifled those calculations and, along with them, the final reproaches of his conscience. He sighed, feeling the morphine take leave of his back. Anything to keep her talking, to not fall back into silence.
He went to the stove and put the kettle on, then reached into the cupboard and pulled out the wooden box where he kept his teas. He chose jasmine, counting each second of the interval. At least there were some things he could still choose. He clung to those choices, those advantages. To tea, of course. And also to words.
* * *
Smithfield had his stroke two days after our third class. A few hours later, I sat down in front of this camera for the first time. Fact. Even though you don’t know it. You told me to talk about whatever came to mind. When I stopped at your table and took a sip of that lavender-flavored tea you had there, I noticed that you were just as surprised as I was. But you pulled yourself together right away. You saw that distant look in my eyes, saw how it took the cup an eternity to reach my mouth, saw that I was walking as if my skeleton had turned in its letter of resignation and left this mass of limp flesh to fend for itself. You had the good taste not to ask questions. You pointed to the video-memory room and told me to talk. I started with the deer and the hunting club, when I really should have started with Frank and the things he said and did before he was visited by Dr. Alzheimer, when we were young and, no, we didn’t want to change the world like you suggested once; what we wanted was to blow its thousand and one locks.
American Delirium Page 14