Unforgiving Years

by Victor Serge

  “A psychiatrist would say that Noémi is schizophrenic, or that she suffers from manic depression, loss of touch with reality, personality breakdown, and the rest. Yet my feeling is that she’s made contact with a reality she finds more acceptable than the version of it commonly held. And as there’s no psychiatrist within a thousand miles, she has nothing to fear from superfluous diagnoses …”

  Bruno seemed glad to be talking. Daria guessed he was releasing himself from a very long silence. Bitterness flooded up to Daria’s brain. She was restraining herself from crying out: “So that’s how you lived while … while … ! Doing nothing for anyone else in the world! And you didn’t even take your part in …” Bruno Battisti looked at her with the knowing eyes of the old days: “I know what you’re thinking. I confess that I suffered over it. That was unfair and useless. Come have supper.”

  He asked her no questions. Whenever she brought up the war, he appeared to be listening merely out of friendship, as though he already knew everything. She was starting to tell him about the bombing of Altstadt; while listening, he led her over to a banana tree and pointed out its violet turgescence, the intense sexuality of the ripening fruits. “Beautiful, isn’t it?” The terrible events and their train of anxious thoughts began to lose their sharpness. After a few days, Daria succumbed to a lucid somnolence. “We’ll speak of all this again,” Bruno Battisti said, “when you are delivered. But for now, look at the mountains. Look at the baby chicks …”

  “Thought must be delivered,” Daria assented suddenly.

  “If it’s possible.”

  * * *

  Solitude shrouded the world in a light yet impenetrable veil. The excess of luminosity became blinding, erasing whatever was not this dazzle of sunlight, this reverberation of sunlight, this burning sunlight on the platinum lake, this humid jungle warmth under the tall sweet-smelling foliage of the eucalyptus trees. Noémi’s white silhouette appeared crossing an avenue of trees or crossing the terrace, present-absent, real-unreal. A cat sprang after a lizard. Doña Luz was glimpsed prowling among the coffee plants, a black silhouette with abundant white hair tumbling over the shoulders of a little girl — who might be a hundred — with bright eyes … Wide-brimmed hats appeared and disappeared atop heads of burned clay whose eyebrows, mustaches, and eyes were intensely black; white rags floating over brown bodies … Fishermen called out from one dugout canoe to another across the glassy lake — a call, a response — and that single voice seemed to reverberate through the stillness long after it died out. The fruit on the mango trees was being impregnated by the sun. Other enormous fruits were ripening inside hard spiny casings. Beautiful black spiders, their abdomens adorned with a scarlet symbol, hung suspended in the architecture of their shining threads. Under the shadow of the trees, orchids revealed their delicate, fleshy complexions. There was no imaginable finality to any of this: only a riotous disorder, stable yet changing, a mayhem of primeval voluptuousness and innocent cruelty, which, swelled by the surging of sap and blood, spilled over exultantly into the plantation and lay surrounded by the desert. No human notions retained their customary meanings.

  “So there’s really nobody, nobody to talk to?” Daria asked one evening, as they sat on after supper in the low-ceilinged dining room, watching the cat play with her kittens.

  Noémi raised her pale irises whose pupils were always too large.

  “Talk, what for, Dachenka?”

  “Nobody,” Bruno Battisti said placidly. “We are alone. Like stones being stones. The thing is to wait.”

  “What do stones wait for?” Daria thought.

  “You’re bored,” said Bruno. “Would you like to play a game of chess? Harris is probably coming over tomorrow.”

  * * *

  Harris came over two or three times a week. This young American lived in a solitude even greater and more parched than their own, a good hour’s trek from the plantation, in the heart of the forest, where he occupied a big, tumbledown adobe dwelling hemmed in by ferocious, resplendent agaves. “As far away from two-legged creatures as I can get,” he’d say. Harris was generally a man of few words, but when in a philosophical mood he might explain: “Man, attempting to change his fate, has come up with only one liberating invention: scotch whiskey!” This gave rise to commentaries verging on the profound, allowing one to recall that the ancient barbarian civilizations, in this land so close to the present, made their liquor by fermenting the milk of the agave plant. “Scotch is better,” Harris declared, “but if that’s the only proof of the white man’s superiority, it’s a feeble one …” Harris was a steady drinker who never lost his self-control. But until he was loaded with “the right dose of gunpowder,” all you saw of him was a big brute with ruddy-brown hair — a rather mournful, listless lout who yawned a lot and sometimes bit his nails. Having been a sailor, he nursed a grudge against the sea, like an old betrayed lover. “A big wet desert, right? The most inhuman place in the world, along with factories. And every ship’s a floating prison or a floating cathouse. Or else a floating fortress, packed with poor dumb suckers. And not easy to sink!” Their being hard to sink seemed to have left him with malevolent regrets. He had fought “honorably” in the Pacific Islands, but whether he had come home with medals or a warrant for his arrest, he did not say. “The sea and the war: two big piles of shit …” You could easily imagine him, with his hard, fleshy face, his round boxer’s shoulders, his cynical expression and clouded eyes, in some mobsters’ dive, as ruthless as the worst of them and as snappy a dresser, with that slightly louche elegance; then later dressed like them in a striped suit breaking up rocks on a chain gang. All purely imaginary, of course, since flipping a coin would be the best way to decide whether his past was ordinary or adventurous … He read nothing but hard-boiled thrillers, the kind with lots of killing, where at the end they’re going to hang the seductive heroine who for three hundred pages seemed to be the most mysterious, the most desirable, the most tantalizing young woman in distress … But on page 287, when her wickedness has emerged beyond any reasonable doubt, the detective gives in and kisses her on the lips, gently takes her hands — and brings out the handcuffs … She’s been had, the vixen, and so have you, dear reader, since only then did you understand that the roots of crime lay here, in this melting gaze, this soft disarming flesh … Harris reveled at the idea of the pleasure he would have kicking in the teeth of that detective or of the author, that dirty “son of a bitch!”1 When he was finished reading, Harris would toss the book onto the little heap of paperbacks, each offering a detective puzzle to be deciphered for twenty-five cents. This library gathered dust in a corner; the hens pecked around it sometimes, attracted by — what? What could these birds find to peck at in or under all these nasty stories? Harris poured himself a shot of tequila. Harris called out: “Monica! Mon-i-ca!”

  Monica showed herself in the doorway, framed between the radiant space without and the shadows within; a beautiful tall girl with a long pleated skirt down to her toes, hair piled on the back of her neck, a Polynesian face with open, level brown eyes. She was scrubbing an earthenware vessel with sand. “¿Qué quieres? What do you want?” In Spanish, the verb querer means both to want and to love, with no possible confusion between them, so that a man might as easily answer “Te quiero” as “Bring me a glass of water.” But Harris often answered nothing at all and simply gazed pleasurably at her, thinking something wordless like: “You’re an adorable creature, Monica, but my god, what real difference is there between you and the jungle flowers who open their crimson vulvas?” In Monica’s eyes he was ugly, as the male ought to be: ugly, brawny, serious, never too drunk, and never violent toward her, with never more than a passing glance for the other girls from the few hovels scattered around here … And rich, because there was never a shortage of maize. To ensure his lasting love, Monica spiked his tequila with pinches of a white powder that was a specialty of Doña Luz. It seemed to do the trick! Harris undressed her when the heat went down (it didn’t take long,
she wore only a loose blouse, a loose skirt) and made a charcoal sketch which he soon crumpled and threw into the corner of the “son-of-a-bitch’s library.” Then he was upon her in two short bounds, the naked amber girl as she stood against a slit of window with the mountainside still blazing beyond. He was more magnificently ugly then than at any other time, this laughing, furious white man with the muzzle of a sorrowful beast. Almost all men were like that, according to the girls of San Blas, but none of the local men were acquainted with the drawing ritual, which must therefore have a hidden meaning. Was it an appeal for vigor, for sweetness? For joy? Monica questioned Doña Luz, and she, from the height of her sixty years of experience, handed down an incomprehensible but favorable judgment: “Your man is an artista, my child.” “What’s an artista, Doña Luz, madrecita, little mother?” “I know many secrets, child, but not that one. I can’t be expected to know everything. An artista is an unbeliever, but he is not usually a bad man. Better than most gringos, God have mercy!” Harris had a way of kissing and caressing that the men around here don’t know; it must be another custom of his country, an easy thing to submit to and not a sin to emulate, for you see, Virgin of Wonders, Holy Queen of Heaven, Our Lady of the Lake, you see that he is my man and that I love him! He possessed her on the hard mat with a long, leisurely passion. While they were tangled up in lovemaking, a distracted hen might wander in, or Nacho, the gleaming purple turkey-cock, whose hard, coral-ringed eye made Monica uncomfortable. Rising above the fire of blessed fever within her, she would call out, “Nacho! Nacho! Shame on you! Scram!” The wicked old bird would mince off with the utmost dignity, swinging his purple crop as though he didn’t understand, but he’d be back, the sneak … And when Monica reappeared in the yard he would spread his cartwheel of a tail at her, lifting his feet in a little jig … “Yes, Nacho, you’re beautiful, you are …” she crooned, still smiling at the sweet giddiness inside her. Harris had paid the price of a fine horse to Monica’s parents; he had laid on a fiesta for the whole community, a memorable event enlivened by ten bottles of pulque and two hundred firecrackers; the padre of San Blas, Don Maclovio himself, had been good enough to attend.

  Harris was no artist, if truth be told, for all that most artists are frauds. He drew like a schoolboy, for the enjoyment of tracing the shape of a woman or the lines of a landscape; for the humiliation of failure, for the pleasure of destroying what he had made and of making it expressly to destroy. The earth behaves no differently: it makes plants and sentient beings and destroys them, only to start all over again, right? He drew when he was slightly drunk and destroyed when he was sober, pained by the limits of his own lucidity. He hunted hares, quail, wild ducks; if luck was on his side he might kill an iguana, that big blunt-nosed lizard with a sumptuously green skin, which Monica turned into a feast, dressed with hot spices. “In my country,” Harris told her, “there are people who never saw a hare take off from under the rocks, can you understand that?” “Poor people!” said Monica, eyes shining with pleasure because he was talking to her. “They buy their hares ready-skinned in big stores which sell hundreds at a time …” “Hundreds!” Monica repeated, incredulous. “Stores as big as that?” “And the people are bastards, most of them!” Harris concluded, in opaque laughter.

  Equipped like an Indian with a machete to clear the way, wearing sandals with thick rubber soles cut from tires and a conical sombrero, Harris would set off along the mountain trail that led to the plantation. It took him past the abandoned gold mine, a bald hump topped by a single candelabra cactus which might be one or more centuries old, nearly forty feet tall, raising its phallic spars above a monstrous trunk in two tones of green: silvery olive and midnight emerald. “You feed off the seams, eh, candelero! But it’s hard to live like that, you get as thirsty as the next guy and you’re even uglier.” Wandering prospectors had tried to chop the monster down so as to delve between its roots, but they soon gave up, leaving the trunk deformed around the base. Some gold mine! A mine of schemes! By dynamiting the rock and sluicing through the sand and clay and god knows what else, you might get a thimbleful of gold dust worth twenty crates of scotch, si caballero! Unless you happened to land plumb on the jolly seam that’s mocking us six inches under this track here. You might just as well send away to Mexico City for lottery tickets, after consulting Doña Luz on the numbers to choose, or choose them for themselves, because the good numbers aren’t necessarily the winners, this being a matter of fate, not of money — Doña Luz is surely right on that score — which means that the losers can be lucky all the same.

  Harris’s route now took him past Las Calaveras, the Skulls. Following the lure of the ruins, he deviated from the main track to take a look at them. Did time humanize these anguished stones, or did it dehumanize them? First you walked through a stretch of dry, prickly undergrowth, bristling with dead needles. The rock-strewn slope dipped toward a granite cliff, tinted blue or gold, according to the time of day. If you turned around you had a vista of the lake, calm as a mirror, a divine mirror of water resting on the earth. All that was left of an altar was a base of reddish-gray andesite, the color of dried blood, the appropriate color. Crudely carved skulls protrude from the earth on both sides of worn stones that once might have formed steps. Schematic skulls with clenched stripes of teeth, eye sockets that seemed still to cast a baleful stare into the horizontal sky. Harris felt his life-beat slowing. Expectant, he listened for the thud of drums in the distance, the mesmerizing, muffled tattoo of the forest. To regain his aplomb he always said the same words, aloud: “These cannibals sure knew how to choose their sites!” Twenty paces farther on, a broken column lying half hidden in the brush offered up to the face of the sky another huge face with geometric eyes contemplating the zenith indefinitely. This god of an unknown race, assumed to be Mongoloid, did not present the features of that race but features more refined, European or Malaysian, hybrid in their abstraction. His diadem was broken into pieces. Harris bowed his head, absorbed by the problem of human duration, the problem of … of what, man! You’ll never be able to put it into words, but the problem remains. The sudden appearance of a lizard, gray with emerald spots, startled him. “Well, well,” he muttered. Whistling, he continued on his way. The Battistis and the Harrises sometimes met up here for an evening picnic. Bruno, stimulated by a swallow of rum or by the proximity of the unknown god, told stories about the ruins of Central Asia, the Roof of the World, Pamir’s … Harris would slap his thigh, booming: “Roof of the World! And on top of that, another roof?” There can’t have even been a sky, if it was really the Roof of the World! He laughed even louder: “A stratospheric sleight of hand!” Monica and Noémi discussed the embroidery stitches of Los Altos and the Tarascan country. They understood each other well.

  On this occasion, an amusing encounter awaited Harris at Las Calaveras. He found two Indians squatting on their heels, having a smoke. A bald gent, masked by large sunglasses that made him look like a skull himself, sportily clad in a combination of beige and brown, was measuring the unknown god’s nose with a compass. “Hello there!” cried Harris. “I’ll bet you’re half a millimeter off!” Startled, the man jumped up — “How do you do” — and put on a toothy smile like a dog’s. Harris strode nearer, swinging his machete so that the light bounced off its blade. “Who do you think you’re kidding, Mister, with your little compass? The venerable god, yourself, everybody else, or mathematics?” The erudite tourist appreciated the joke. Repressing the giggles, Harris became quite sociable. “These are difficult measurements,” the man said, “but take it from me, they’ll be accurate …”

  “Accurate?” went Harris, brimming with ironical glee. “So you’re an archaeologist?”

  “Oh, just in my spare time,” the other said modestly. “And you, an artist?”

  “Amateur, old pal, like yourself.”

  “Care for a drink?” proposed the amateur archaeologist.

  Harris brightened. “What are you carrying in the way of bottles?” The expedition
’s supplies turned out to include a first-class brandy, and Harris in mounting good cheer became cordially insolent. “So you go around measuring idols’ noses, and probably their backsides, in godforsaken holes like this? Funny! And where d’you come from in the first place, Mister?” “Actually, I’m from Wisconsin …” He was priceless, this archaeologist, amateur or otherwise: the panama hat with the crimson ribbon, the coffee-colored silk necktie over the khaki shirt, the pink skin, the fastidiously clipped blond mustache, those dark glasses which must be hiding the eyes of a learned rabbit … “I’ve been working on my book on pre-Colombian sculpture for the past eight years.” Harris poured himself another brandy.

  “If that means carrying around brandy this good, I guess you’ll be forgiven upstairs … Just think, in those eight years you might have slept with a thousand women of all different colors, committed a whole string of crimes, at a profit or at a loss, lost and re-made a dozen fortunes, spent years cooling off in Sing Sing or San Quentin or someplace — no lack of good spots! You could have gone around the world on a bicycle! Crossed the ocean in a rowboat! Got yourself killed eight hundred different ways in the war!”

  “Certainly,” said the archaeologist. “Except for getting yourself killed, even once, in the war, I hope you’ve done a fair number of those things yourself …”

  “I beg your pardon! I even got myself killed in New Guinea!”

  “Congratulations. Life feels so much grander after that, doesn’t it? Well, in exceptional cases it does …”

  “Obviously.”

  The archaeologist, Mr. Brown, spent every night in his car, which was parked four or five miles away. He invited Harris to partake of his cold chicken, whiskey, and wines. “I have a weakness for fine wines, Mr. Harris …” Harris agreed that fine wines were conducive to the study of old stone carvings. “Take me, for instance. Me who’s never read a single book on the subject — god forbid — well, once I’ve enough of the noble fluid in my belly, I could tell you the authentic history of this old god and describe the dances the young Olmec girls, if there were such girls, used to dance around him on carpets of flowers and decapitated birds …”