Unforgiving Years

by Victor Serge

  “You’re way off,” answered Mr. Brown, shocked. “These monuments don’t belong to the Olmec culture!”

  “They don’t? What do you know? Not that I give a damn.”

  Mr. Brown was unaware of the existence nearby of a hospitable plantation, owned by an Italian, Bruno Battisti, “a nice old fellow who’s traveled all over. Now he knows the history of the Olmecs and the Tarambiretls and the rest. His wife is a charming woman too, only she’s out of her mind …” Harris invited the archaeolo-gist to go along with him. Mr. Brown was tempted, but hated to be indiscreet … The word “indiscreet” made Harris guffaw as he twirled his machete. Mr. Brown accepted the invitation.

  * * *

  Two or three times a year, the Battistis were visited by tourists on their way to take pictures of each other at Las Calaveras and under the picturesque candelabra cactus on the Cerro de Oro. They had even received copies of such snapshots in the post: sunny girls seated with grinning skulls between their knees, a young sportsman with movie-star looks. “You are a sage …” wrote the prettiest girl to Bruno, with news of her engagement … And yet he was disturbed by Mr. Brown’s dusty automobile the minute he saw it drive up. Harris alighted first. Then the archaeologist appeared, removing his sunglasses and glancing about like a dazzled white rabbit.

  “Where did you pick up this specimen?” growled Bruno to Harris.

  “A weirdo. He was camped out by the idol, measuring its nostrils. With a hamper full of choice bottles. He’s a complete idiot.”

  Nothing abnormal in any of this.

  Mr. Brown complimented Mr. Battisti: “Sir, you live in an absolute paradise …”

  Mr. Brown placed a pair of blue-tinted spectacles over his gray, anemic eyes. He admired the coffee bushes, the euphorbia, the calabash grove, the mangoes, the eucalyptus, the tall royal palms … He had the gift of inarticulate appreciation. He brought out his field glasses to inspect Green Island, where there were pyramids, one of which was semicircular, a rare and probably very ancient design, between fifteen hundred and two thousand years old. The Cuicuilco pyramid was reputed to be older still …

  “Ten thousand years!” declared Harris, all jovial.

  “No! Really? I find that hard to believe …”

  Harris gave him a vigorous thwack on the back, so friendly that the fellow pitched forward.

  “We’re not even close by five thousand years, joker!”

  Mr. Brown gave the stuttering laugh of the shy man, slave to erudition, who doesn’t realize he’s being made fun of. Daria found him repellent. “A machine for quantifying calaveras and pickling their statistics in useless file cards …” His magazines, with their recent American fashions, interested Noémi. In the course of a friendly chat skillfully managed by Bruno Battisti, Mr. Brown emerged as the owner of a business in Wisconsin; raised as a Presbyterian but personally an atheist, “scientific” as he put it, though deeply respectful of religion; rather conservative but with liberal leanings. When he completed his study of Mexican antiquities, he looked forward to lengthy sojourns in Peru, where the ruins of Tiahuanaco, in particular, merited close and conscientious description as the first phase of an investigation that would embark in an entirely unprecedented direction, taking account of … Mr. Brown spent several days at the plantation, happy to sleep in a comfortable bed and to lose at chess against Daria or Bruno, in serious games which he began cleverly and usually muffed toward the end, as though some inhibition prevented him from winning. He let fall something relevant to this, one day. “I went toward science because I was intimidated being successful at business … My father was extremely wealthy. Brown and Coldman, you’ll have heard the name?” “Nobody, in these mountains, has ever heard of it,” said Daria maliciously.

  “Really?” said Mr. Brown with the look of a marionette that sometimes came over him.

  Before the evening meal, he invariably changed into a dress shirt adorned by a floppy cravat the color of dead leaves.

  * * *

  The air at the end of an oppressive afternoon was supercharged with electricity. A ceiling of clouds weighed down on the place. All day, the plantation had been full of the sounds of restless animals; two peons had fought without being drunk. Flocks of lowflying birds enlivened the sunset, swarms of bats fluttered on the fringe of the night, but the immobility of the trees remained vaster than everything. For a second, outlined against the purple glow of the sunset, the tops of isolated palm trees looked like huge, black, curiously unhappy spiders … Daria and Noémi set the table with the maid, Melita, who was clumsier than usual tonight and broke two Jalisco pottery plates. Harris had left. Mr. Brown and Bruno Battisti were sprawled in deck chairs, exchanging desultory scraps of talk. Only the lightning seemed alive. It flashed and sheeted through the clouds, almost unceasing but erratic and freakish, there a stealthy glimmer, here a blinding flash, illuminating with lifeless whiteness a vast, sharply etched panorama void of color and movement. “This landscape,” said Bruno, “seems to be only the memory of itself …” After requesting a repetition of that sentence, the visitor gave a passive “Ah, yes.” With each crackling flash the two men glimpsed their own forms bleached white from head to foot, as though they had been turned into stone. “The storms won’t break for two or three days yet, you’ll see,” Bruno said.

  “Ah, you think so?”

  “It would be best for you, Mr. Brown, to go to the pyramids at first light tomorrow and return by midafternoon, to avoid being caught in a gale over the lake. The Indian canoes are very well built, but it’s a risk nonetheless …”

  “Tomorrow at first light,” the visitor repeated apathetically.

  “It’s no more than three hours’ rowing,” Bruno said, vexed by the groundless irritation he felt. “And one hour’s walk as far as the teocalli …”

  “I’m thirsty,” said Mr. Brown. “Could you ask for a glass of water, please? I find this bath of electricity enervating.” A splintering glare exposed his livid countenance, mouth wide open gasping for air. Don Bruno reached for the little bell made of volcanic ash, and a gay tinkle rang out. Bare feet padded quickly over the tiles, a swarthy girl was illuminated, like a dancer in the jungle, by a flash of lightning. “A glass of water, Celia, for the señor …” “Thank you,” said Mr. Brown in a satisfied voice. “This tropical climate …”

  “A climate of cosmic vigor,” Bruno said. “When you get used to it, you love it. A climate of destruction and fertilization …”

  The archaeologist attempted a laugh. “I think we’re getting a darn sight more destruction than fertilization!”

  “The opinion of someone who’s impotent,” thought Bruno, who was still beset by an old virility which sometimes tortured him and sometimes exalted him when in contact with young dusky flesh exuding a savage fragrance of sweat. “I disagree,” he said with effort. He was beginning to feel an unreasonable antipathy toward this guest.

  The glimmers succeeded one another noiselessly in the sky; stars were coming out, and a distant grumble of thunder was heard. “Ah,” said Don Bruno. “I love this. The storms here are magnificent …” Mr. Brown lit a cigar; his austere profile shone in the yellow glow of the lighter.

  It was a relief to both men when Noémi came out to announce that the table was set. Noémi had dressed up and looked ravishing in a long native dress, dark with leafy patterns. The material swished around her hips, her movements seeming to reveal her body’s hidden harmony. Her eyes bathed in lightning shone blue as phosphorus. Mr. Brown took her arm. “I love storms! They terrify me …” she said. “You have a lyrical nature,” he intoned, which made her laugh. “Can’t you find something sillier to say?” “Not really,” Mr. Brown replied, with his self-deprecating smile.

  Dinner was a grand affair. Daria carved the turkey by the light of six candles ranged along the mahogany table on which little brightly colored napkins looked like square flowers. Orchids stood in amber goblets from Guadalajara. Safely away from the lightning, Mr. Brown recovered his good humor
. “Allow me to fetch the last and best of my bottles …” Bruno offered to go with him. They came back from the car with a California red which was undoubtedly a treat, imitating the most alkaline and yet softly rounded of Andalusian vintages. Noémi apologized for not drinking it because Doña Luz had forbidden her. Her magnetic eyes met the benevolent eyes of Mr. Brown. “You don’t know what you’re missing!”

  The first spoonful of soup made Mr. Brown seem almost perky. His voice rose in pitch; his hands, rather overlarge but delicate, traced tiny gestures as he complimented the ladies on everything: the needlework on the linen bought at a pueblo market, the matchless cuisine which would put the best hotels to shame, the coral necklace hung with tiny silver fish which Daria was wearing, the wonderfully barbaric string of chunky clay beads and a jade figurine which so suited Noémi; how young they both looked, and how artful the lighting of the room, positively Rembrandt! “Here we go,” thought Bruno. “The marionette is on the loose.” Bruno preferred silence to the inane chatter that does nothing but add a bit of noise to a bit of vanity. He was so annoyed that toward the end of the meal, lest his contempt get the better of his manners, he drained two glasses of wine in quick succession and felt better at once. Mr. Brown was explaining the many pitfalls involved in transplanting delicate European vine stocks to the New World. No laboratory has yet succeeded in unraveling the secret chemistry, or should we say the wondrous alchemy, of wine. Its components are: the quality of the plant, its health, its capacity for regeneration; the characteristics of the soil; the type of sunlight and the angle of exposure of the vines; one would also have to study the nature of solar radiation and, beyond that, the effect of radiations from the night sky, as well as the nature of the microscopic fauna and flora that assist in fermentation; then of course there is the related science of volcanism, for Mr. Brown was convinced that a thousand subtle emanations are at work above volcanic subsoils, and thus, since Burgundy, Champagne, the Rhineland, or Andalusia are geologically stable, they must benefit from a telluric environment quite different from that of California, with its proximity to the volcanic plates of Mexico … The host was becoming perceptibly moody again. He reached for a bottle. “No, enough of that one, my dear fellow,” said Mr. Brown. “You must sample this other, which is by far the best.” This other was not the best — rather the opposite — but Bruno allowed politely that it was excellent, because he couldn’t care less.

  * * *

  Noémi was the first to retire, toward ten o’clock. Mr. Brown excused himself shortly thereafter. Daria and Bruno wandered out onto the terrace. From the horizon to the zenith the flashing ballet continued. Daria was fighting down tides of dizziness. “I drank much too much, Sacha. What a learned animal he is, of what fossilized erudition! This world mass-produces marionettes and fossils … Elsewhere they turn out automatons, with the instinct for torture and destruction loose in their mechanism … The same stars everywhere. Sacha! But where is hope?” “Everywhere,” Bruno answered evasively. “Remember the beach at Feodossia?”

  Myriads of insects, drawn by the light, imprisoned by the light, were lying on the stone sill around the oil lamp that had been burning all evening. “Are they all going to die, having thrown themselves at an incomprehensible light?” “No. Most survive, saved by the sunrise … The banality of daylight. Insects have a strong grip on life.” “Feodossia … I’d forgotten. Do you know, I imagined in those days that I was in love with you, that’s why I was always pushing you away. You couldn’t understand, and I didn’t want to love again, after so many necessary and needless massacres … In another sense, I didn’t understand either. What have we understood since then?”

  “Just what remains essential, it seems to me,” said Bruno.

  It almost seemed that they might easily touch on some great and simple truth together, but too many lightning flashes surrounded them, passing through brains split between excitation and torpor. “Oh, how sleepy I am!” said Daria. At the door to her room, he gave her a brotherly kiss.

  Bruno slept in a spartan bedroom next to Noémi’s, separated by a glass-bead doorway. He was dreaming as he put on his pajamas. He was young, entering a palace. There were smooth-faced soldiers and bearded soldiers, asleep on the marble staircase. He must wake them for this night’s duty, the march along frozen canals, the danger at dawn. Tomorrow some of these men would look the same as they did now, except that they would be asleep forever … “We have achieved justice,” Sacha told them. “We have changed one of the faces of the world, enough to make living and dying worthwhile. Let us consent to everything!” Did they hear him, understand him? They were swearing and grumbling. “We’re coming, Comrade!” What happened after that? One should never consent to everything, there are always non-consentments, refusals to be maintained … Our failure to admit this was the great error, or one of them … What happened after that? A red fox rolling in the sunlit snow — shivering, shivering! I’m frozen to the bone — a brown fox scampering through the sand toward the ruins. Shivering! I’m hit bad … “N’ga! Are you sleeping?” The young Uzbek glided in, as beautiful as a girl. “The water is pure, master, you drink …” Where were the secret papers? The most secret, in the briefcase, the briefcase in the strongbox, the nightmare in the strongbox, the death warrants in the strongbox … Dead, all of them, dead, the greatest, the purest and best, the builders, the lost, the fanatics, the knowing, the unknown, the humblest, in their thousands, their millions, absurdly, iniquitously dead. Why? How did we — insurgent, united, uplifted, and victorious — bring about the opposite of what we wanted to do? Reread the texts … But what use are old texts in the afterglow of cataclysms … ? A young woman who resembled N’ga sidled up to the last customer in a café on place Wagram, showed him her pretty hands; he touched her hands with a kind of panicky desire … Troubled, he asked, “Did you pour the poison — the poison into the texts?” Autumn yellowed the Bois de Boulogne, the atrophy of life, everything is lost, everything is sullied … No! No, because I still possess consciousness, sovereign, useless, silent consciousness, tranquil consciousness … Rhetoric or truth? Noémi, Noémi, the ocean …

  Had he been sleeping? Feverish, belly knotted with the urge to vomit, cardiac anxiety rising, Bruno called softly: “Noémi … N’ga!” From the next room Noémi answered, “I’m all right, Sacha, are you?” “I’m fine, don’t worry …” He groped for the important objects: flashlight, revolver. Hairy beasts blundered about in his head, predatory ideas with dripping muzzles … “What’s happening, for godsake?” He hadn’t drunk that much! He managed, unsteadily, to get outside. Lightning split the sky. Welcome, comets! Fall, comets! Bruno was trying so hard to think that his facial muscles cramped painfully. A lightning flash revealed the bougainvilleas covered with spume, and he realized he had just vomited. His bare feet dragged over the cool flagstones. “Where did we go wrong?” His heart thundered in his chest, crushing his lungs, hurting the back of his eyes at the place where the true eye lay, the eye that saw into the black chamber of the retina; how does it see without erring? “Check to the queen, checkmate! Be hard, never give in, believe, believe-know! Will! Everything will be transformed … This sick and crazy world …” A flash of relief. I vomited, that’s good, I may be all right. These eternal lightning flashes … What I need is an emetic and there isn’t one in the house … In a flash he understood: it was as clear as the sparkling vision of the lake in an upside-down world, with the sky below. The veins on his hands were hardening.

  The door to Daria’s room cracked open at a blow from his shoulder. The advantage of having worm-eaten doors! He entered, shining the flashlight in front of him. “Do you remember Feodossia?” Chestnut-and-ash hair spread around her exhausted face, her head encircled in a halo of light, Daria was smiling, a convulsive smile. There was no mistaking that smile! “Daria, are you dead?” “Yes I am, Sacha …” She was icy. Bruno took her hand; it fell back with rigid finality. With an uncertain forefinger, he eased back her eyelid, observed the motionles
s eyeball, its sclera yellowed with tiny dark veins. The lid closed back slowly of its own accord. A bluish glimmer of lightning lingered on Daria’s forehead … Bruno’s legs gave way and he sat down abruptly, head bowed, still holding the revolver and the flashlight in dangling hands. The light shone a white circle at his feet. A bug crawled aimlessly in the circle. Was it sleep or did he faint for a moment? When he came to, back from the brink, he shone the flashlight once more onto Daria’s waxen face. Not a hope … He spat a thread of greenish spittle into the circle of light, stood up, and left the room. The lightning flashes were moving off, barely perceptible on the horizon. An illusion! They were all around, playing among themselves, making the gold beads of the stars vibrate, eternity’s chant. Nothing but that chant remains. No more error, no more doubt, only a flickering consciousness about to be extinguished, reabsorbed into lightning, stars, and darkness … Bruno felt a rush of exasperation. Ah! That murderous marionette with his fine wines, not such a marionette after all, not such a learned fossil, Mr. so-called Brown, it’s the end of you, you little bastard, if I have ten more minutes to live … Which I have, because I threw up, I might be saved! The sonorous gongs beating in his heart answered: No.

  A ray of light filtered under Mr. Brown’s bedroom door. Good old worm-eaten doors! This one too gave way at the first shove. The guest, clad in a stylish dressing gown, started up from the pillows, one hand under the sheet where his weapon must be. “I say, you gave me a turn, Don Bruno! You don’t look so well … What’s wrong?”