Savage Theories

by Pola Oloixarac

  The Montes de Oca Colony (founded in 1915 as the Coeducational Asylum-Colony for the Retarded) is located in the district of Luján approximately eighty kilometers from Buenos Aires, and its grounds cover two hundred thirty-four hectares. The patients live in a group of buildings surrounded by vast green spaces—woodlands of elm and acacia, of cypress, of river oak and eucalyptus—interspersed with immense open meadows that stretch to the horizon, on the edges of which are a series of bogs and pits into which the patients sometimes fall to their deaths. Days and even weeks can pass before the scavenger birds begin to circle above the site; at other times it is the asylum’s guard dogs who suddenly appear chewing on shreds of clothing and human bones. In either case the proper form is promptly filled out to document the disappearance.

  It was in the course of a stormy night here at the Colony that young Augusto, while reading in his pajamas on the cot in his small bedroom in the infirmary, first understood the implications of Van Vliet’s theory. The realization coursed through his body like an electric current. Far too excited to sit still, Augusto threw on a shawl his mother had knitted and walked out onto the porch, which lay half in ruins. Rain filtered through the slats of the overhang; a sludge of water and splintered wood dripped down his face. He thought of Van Vliet’s visage, of the pointy tip of the man’s nose, of the flaring nostrils, a face more similar to that famous portrait of Hobbes than Augusto’s own genetic corpus could ever have mustered, and now the Dutchman’s shade watched him from the core of the night, both maw and wolf. The theory was practically unprecedented, and long misunderstood; more importantly, it had the sound of a precursor to Augusto’s own fantasies. The raindrops kept falling, and he opened his mouth to drink them in. He had in his hands the fetal tissue of intuition. Now he had only to flatten it against the throat of his beliefs, to beat down all other voices, to submerge, to expunge the outside world from his mind until his mission was complete. A flash of lightning set the sky aflame; the rain curtained his vision in all directions. Augusto dried his face, then let out a shout. A spectral figure was coming toward him up the gravel path.

  The infirmary was set somewhat apart from the rest of the asylum’s buildings (labeled Incontinent, Oligophrenic, Violent, Catatonic, Gerontological, Crippled, and Women, respectively); the evening curfew applied equally to patients and doctors, forbidding them from leaving their buildings unaccompanied at night. Lightning seared Augusto’s vision, and his imagination’s soliloquies bore him into space. The specter was now within meters of the porch on which the horrified Augusto stood: scrawny legs and pointed skull, some random John Doe drenched to the bone and white against the dark, still drifting toward him. The man’s brain couldn’t have weighed a whit more than 104 grams, the weight of Prévost’s brain as described by Paul Broca in his study of murderers executed by guillotine (“Le cerveau de l’assassin Prévost,” 1880, Bulletin de la Société d’Anthropologie de Paris, pp. 233–244). Augusto opened his mouth, but no words came out. The shawl slipped from his right shoulder; he stretched out his hand as if to control the man telekinetically. It was only Titín, one of the microcephalics. The rain washed down through the rags in which he was clothed; his filth-matted hair hung stiffly along the sides of his face. His eyes shot wide open, and a flash of horror lit Augusto’s face; Titín screamed as his Pavlovian conditioning kicked in and he began to remove his clothes. Augusto slipped quickly back in through his door, locked it, and double-checked all of the shutters to make sure they were properly latched. Outside, the storm raged ever stronger, lashed at the fields and graves, sent bolt after bolt down into the trembling trees.

  The ideas that sprang into being as a result of this meeting of the three agents required of all theories (viz. the Precursor, the Theoretician, and the Victim) remained comatose for most of the twentieth century. Then, though no clear connection had yet been made between them, the hypothetical possibilities that had been created by their proximity to one another found, like the spirit gods of the Fon, the perfect body in which to make themselves manifest.

  3

  Beginning around age eleven, Kamtchowsky suddenly found herself in a series of classroom discussions wherein the teachers wished to know if the boys were masturbating yet, and whether anything milky came out when they did. The classes were co-ed, and everyone enjoyed them. The teachers, all women in their thirties, were careful to keep their expressions serious.

  Thanks to some cosmic scheduling wisdom, sex ed and civics were part of a single course that most often came right after biology. The classroom slogan “Ask anything you want to know!” attempted to clarify the relationship between happiness and knowledge by tying the concept of “body” to that of “communication,” an associative bundling that led in turn to the concept of “sexuality.” The abstract notion of pleasure presented itself as the subset of thought contiguous to the action of estrogen and testosterone upon the students’ bodies, as evidenced by the accumulation of fat in the girls’ buttocks and busts, and the swelling growth of the boys’ scrotal sacs. Sooner or later (and everyone knew it was coming) nervous laughter would be followed by a furtive glance at a classmate, who would nod in turn, and from that point on it was simply a matter of “letting oneself go,” especially for the girls, though there were no instructions given for the procedure in question.

  It was only natural that anxiety would permeate the classroom. Given this diagnostic, instead of cutting the students’ vulgarities short, the teachers hardly even registered them; for the most part they merely furrowed their brows a bit, discouraging such comments while also dispensing a dose of sympathy, and even complicity. Punishment was left programmatically vague, as if it were some evil gas that prevented oxygenation from occurring within the pulmonary alveoli, and its absence thus allowed everyone in the room to breathe freely. The occasional loss of control or outbreak of violence could be foreseen, but not completely avoided. When necessary, the problem child would be asked to step to the front of the class; ever so sweetly, the teacher would make the student look like an idiot, thereby taking the royal scepter back in hand without feeling dictatorial. One teacher did however make the mistake of pushing a student too far. “All right,” she said, “if you’re really so fond of talking about your wiener, why don’t you pull it out and show it to us?” The boy obliged, then peed in the face of a female classmate, whose giggling became a horrified gasp. (At the next PTA meeting, several parents were visibly upset; they spoke of a similar case that had resulted in post-traumatic stress disorder, the victim now incapable of drinking apple juice.) During recess that same day, Kamtchowsky went to the restroom and found her panties stained with blood. It was viscous, and dark, and difficult to rinse out. Back home, she put off telling her mother for several hours.

  Night came, and with it her mother’s reaction, wherein she mentioned that they hadn’t named her Carolina because they were afraid that her classmates would call her Caca. Little Kamtchowsky’s skin was indeed relatively dark, but it wasn’t because of that, her mother hastened to add. The ominously empty hallways of the girl’s mind began to fill with thoughts harboring the somber intuition that there was something repulsive, something really repulsive going on with her, and she had to hide it any way that she could. She suddenly understood that she’d known this since she was very young, because there was simply no way not to be aware of it, even if she couldn’t quite explain what it was, not even to herself.

  That same year, Kamtchowsky’s mother decided that she was at last old enough to begin typing up the handwritten notebooks of her Aunt Vivi, which she—little K’s mother—was hoping to get published. She believed that aside from their indisputable historical value, the journals were possessed of a fundamental authenticity evident in their use of the present tense, the untidiness of the hurried handwriting, and a certain lack of structural coherence. She asked her daughter to correct nothing but spelling errors. Kamtchowsky’s suggestion that the project be accompanied by a raise in her allowance bor
e no fruit whatsoever.

  Not long after Kamtchowsky’s mother had gotten married, Vivi, her younger sister, had been kidnapped while handing out pamphlets in an Avellaneda factory. Rodolfo Kamtchowsky had accompanied his new bride as she made all relevant inquiries, but in truth there was little to be done. Vivi never reappeared, though there were rumors that she’d been seen in the Seré Mansion, a secret detention center in Morón. She left behind a few flowery dresses, a broken Winco record player, and this multi-volume diary written in first and second person, wherein she described the events of her life right up to the week she was kidnapped. From the age of seventeen or so, most of the entries in her diary consisted of letters to Mao Zedong, heroic leader of the Red Army; she hid his identity by changing a single letter of his name.

  The hardback, folio-size notebooks had been hidden in a leaky basement; they smelled pretty bad.

  Dear Moo:

  There’s some weird kind of tremor in the streets, a sense of disturbance, of madness and the future. Life, it must be. They’re not going to silence us, those sons of b------! These are some fucked-up days, Moo, black days. Both personally and politically. Things aren’t going well with L.; it’s hard not to feel like we’re growing apart. I also think he’s seeing another girl. I know that we’ve got an open relationship, and I feel like a hypocrite because it’s not like I ever told him I wanted us to be one of those little bourgeois couples—if anything, I wanted the opposite. I always supported his militant opposition to the putrid values of society. We both reject bourgeois repression, and together we’ve chosen a new path, unswerving and brightly lit but full of thorns. I know that if at some point I can’t stand it anymore, then all I have to do is get out of his way, and it will be over. But I can’t, Moo. The truth is that I love him, and it hurts me, the way things are right now. I realize that there isn’t much I can do to change things, and that if I really want us to stay together, what has to change is my way of seeing the situation.

  For example, the other day he came over, and we were getting along great, drinking mate and talking, mostly about him. He told me that in his Local Party HQs he’d been reunited with a bunch of comrades from the Tendency, and everyone was very excited. I noticed that he was acting kind of weird, as if there was something he wanted to tell me, but didn’t dare. I told him that he could trust me, that I would always be here to support him—I know, maybe it sounds a little cheesy, but that’s how it came out. He took a wrinkled piece of paper out of his pocket, and read it to me:

  But what kind of Argentina is this?

  The people came out to defend the government they’d wanted

  and the police swore at them, sent them running with tear gas, flew

  after them on motorcycles and in squad cars.

  Not even Lannuse ever dreamed of this.

  The magnificent youth poured into the streets

  to show that spilled blood was non-negotiable,

  that the most loyal Peronists could never be prisoners,

  that the people, victorious on March 11th

  and September 23rd, could not be

  forced to put up with all this, the officers

  who’d repressed the people for eighteen long years

  promoted for treating the people as if they were the enemy.

  The people regrouped and advanced once again.

  The facts speak for themselves.

  When L. stopped reading, he seemed overwhelmed with emotion. I spoke gently, said that we shared the same feelings of powerlessness. (It wasn’t long ago that the crowds were chased out of Plaza Once—I hadn’t gone because I was having my period, but L. went.) He interrupted me, saying, “No, baby, it’s a poem, a poem that Silvina wrote. Boy, I shouldn’t show you things like this—they’re too intimate.” I felt myself growing red with rage, Moo, I swear. I wanted to kick him right in the you-know-what. Why in the world would he show the poem to me if it was so intimate? Then he said, “I found out her real name by accident. But nobody else knows that I know, so don’t tell anybody I told you anything.” I could feel my face burning, as if I’d just eaten a whole bag of hot peppers. He calmly put the piece of paper back in his pocket. I was furious, but hid it by speaking as fast as I could:

  “So, but why, why shouldn’t you know her real name?”

  “Because of our roles in the cause, Vivi, why else?”

  He was dead serious this whole time. Then he got impatient with me, and a little while later he left. Forgive me, Moo, but what he read me was no poem. That the girl wrote the thing herself, fine and dandy, with any luck it doesn’t even have any spelling mistakes (here’s hoping, anyway—I swear to god, most of these Peronists, it wouldn’t surprise me to see them carrying signs urging us on to “Bictory”) but where is the poetry in it? Okay, I get it, you’re going to say that I’m judgmental, that I’ve got no feel for artistic freedom, the formless form, whatever, that I’m afflicted with that typical bourgeois blindness. (I’m happy to admit that the poem’s lack of actual poetry could in fact be a good thing, like with the music of Stockhausen, which isn’t, shall we say, all that musical.) But all of a sudden my mind was full of doubts. I bet if L. had stayed, I would have stared at him with absolutely no expression on my face.

  I was in such a bad mood by then that I couldn’t sleep, couldn’t think, couldn’t do anything at all. I was so depressed that I actually started paging through a copy of Siete Días that we had there at the house. What a terrible magazine! But if that other thing was a poem, then this jeans ad in Siete Días is also a poem. (In the photo there are two guys and a girl, all wearing jeans with huge bell-bottoms, their makeup like something out of Nosferatu.)

  The ghosts

  were seen appearing, luminous spirits

  in the penumbra of nightfall.

  They were young, and they laughed at the cold.

  Because they felt the caress of their Levi’s.

  Soft as the light of the stars.

  Warm as the glow of a campfire.

  The ghosts were possessed

  by the magical joy of life.

  They had Levi’s.

  And they sang.

  But the gray ones—those who believe that joy has no place in this

  world—they did not understand.

  “Phantoms,” they murmured.

  And locked their doors tight.

  The ghosts hadn’t seen them,

  had already disappeared,

  singing, into the night.

  Kept warm by the spell of their Levi’s.

  I’m not one of the gray ones—never was, never will be. I’ll risk everything for the things that matter. I believe in my own inner world, and in my fight against the closed-off hearts of the bourgeoisie. I’m not about the individual as a solution. I’m all about the causes that affect the Third World, the poor and the working class, those who fight back day after day. I will not stand motionless beside the path, as Benedetti puts it, and no I will not calm down. Oh, Moo, I swear I’m trying to get my head around it, trying to accept the idea that L. and I are in an open relationship, but it’s just so hard. Fine, we’re all as free as you please, but it pisses me off, nothing I can do about it. The other day I went by the unit—mine, not L.’s, because if I’d gone by his we’d have ended up in a fight. So, they told me to sit down and wait, and a little while later a guy came in, dark-skinned, super cute, long curly hair, big mustache. I was glad I was sitting down so he couldn’t see that my backside’s a little flat (I told you that already). He told me his name was Fernando—I wonder if that’s his nom de guerre or his real name. “Hi, Fernando,” I said, “I’m Vivi.” Well, in ten minutes it felt like we’d known each other all our lives. I felt so strange, Moo, as if the logic of my footsteps and the cipher of my days (the signs in my dreams) had carried me there, to that little desk, once and for all. Or maybe I’m being too dramatic about i
t—I was reading Borges at the time and his way of thinking about how events unfold is really contagious. Later I told L. about it over the phone, and he hung up on me—he didn’t even believe me.

  All the same, I don’t hold grudges—I went to see him, and gave him a copy of Libro de Manuel, because we’d both always loved Cortázar, who’s like some kind of talisman for us. I remember one time we went out for dinner at Pippo, and L. started calling me “Maguita,” as in La Maga from Rayuela, then we went back to his apartment and made love and it felt like I was floating up in the clouds, loved for the way I am, cherished by the one I loved. Moo, just so you see the difference: this time L. tore open the gift paper, looked at the book, and said that it was garbage. That in this exact book Cortázar had lost his way politically, and even more so artistically. Or vice versa, depending on which matters more to you. But how can you know that if you haven’t even read it, I said. L. is very intuitive but it’s not like he’s clairvoyant. “Well, you know, I was hanging out with Pelado Flores, and he showed me a couple of passages—totally pathetic,” was the best lie that imbecile could come up with. I realized that he must have read that article on Cortázar in Crisis, because he was just repeating the author’s taunts—he spent the whole afternoon making fun of Cortázar and calling him a bullshit firebrand, acting like such a bully, as if he were lord and master of revolutionary truth.