Lucio launches the Argentinean version of Perón by paying two no-name graffiti artists to cover the walls of the Palais de Glace in Peronist slogans denouncing the piece—without consulting me. I find out from the evening news, like the staff of the Palais and the Peronists. Without the slightest glimmer of remorse, Lucio waits for me to ask why he did it. My shoulders slump. I tell him I applaud his antics, but it would have been more daring to take credit for the graffiti as part of the installation.
I’m looking at three photos from the show’s opening. In the first, Lucio and I stand alone, hands hanging around us. The Palais is about to open its doors. Lucio points to my bandaged left hand with almost deplorable pride. The corners of his mouth are turned down, his chin juts forward, and his eyelids are stiff at half-mast. My face is frozen in an expression of vindication and pain: the sacrifice is mine.
The second photo is a close-up of me or Lucio posing with the two-headed baby and his father. In the background, nearly in focus, is the man in the tweed suit who will have a fistfight with Lucio in front of the TV crews twenty minutes later, but not before ruining the picture my parents try to take with me by tripping and falling in front of the camera. My father observes his misfortune with a faint smile.
My mother is looking at my ring finger, which hangs with the hands from a wire outside the frame of the image. She wonders if her maternal rights over my body extend to an amputated finger; whether she now has less son to love and protect; whether she actually feels bad about it, considering the success the maneuver has brought me. These questions stamp on her face an expression that is new to her repertory, and it is captured in the picture.
I don’t know what part of me is lost with that finger, Lynda, but I am forged in the experience.
4
When I say I lost my finger, what I mean is that someone stole it on the last day of the show, an amusing detail that Lucio seems to have forgotten, and which might provide a colorful footnote to your dissertation.
In the period following the Mexican installation of the piece, I’m struck by all the things I can buy at twenty-four, by the studio Lucio and I set up together in Buenos Aires, and by the solicitous speculation of the jealous. The bar for vicarious ambition is apparently set quite low.
Lucio plans. He says it would be a good idea to include dead matter in our next installation. He’s too taken with continuity, the excitement of having an artistic program, and the mythos of the Pampas. I insist on avoiding bones and gelatin. Lucio accepts in part. I let myself be taken out to the country in search of a cow that can be “plasticized in the act of grazing.”
The incomprehensible language of the farmhands contributes to the expedition’s failure. There are thirty cows. Night is falling. Lucio’s face is deep in the mud. He’s just taken the most clumsy and complicated spill of his life, which has left his leg tangled in a spiral of barbed wire. Laughing uncontrollably, I push his terrible frustration from center stage. This is how I show my love.
The closest thing to science around there is a veterinarian in a half-buttoned lumberjack shirt who asks me to hold Lucio down while he tries to remove the barbed wire. In a thin voice, Lucio declines. He tries to get the wire out himself, but it’s stuck deep in the flesh. He believes, I think, that his humiliation will be less humiliating if he courageously withstands the pain that crowns it until we reach the sanatorium some twenty miles away. I watch him hop a quarter mile across an open field to reach the car. The veterinarian tells him to lie down in the back seat and stick his injured leg out the window. To top it all off, it’s raining.
The timeworn grounds that separate Temperley Sanatorium’s main gate from its three pavilions provide the last phase in the martyrdom of Lucio’s leg. A man follows us: he has remarkably long arms, and the fly of his pants is stuck open. Hunched over, he inspects the problem. He came out from behind a tree.
The place follows the standard design of hospitals from the nineteen hundreds—unpleasant at night, confusing—but despite the darkness and the fact that he’s looking down, the man doesn’t make a single false step. I don’t look back again, so I’m spared the sight of his face when he runs out of patience with his zipper. He follows us to the door of the main pavilion and then keeps going toward the garden.
Lucio stains the carpeting of the deserted reception area with the mud from his shoes. We catch a glimpse of the receptionist at the far end of a long hallway. She has her back to us and seems lost in the contemplation of a nearly perfect circle of ants on the wall. I ask Lucio not to call to her just yet; I want to see how long it takes her to snap out of it. The nearly thirty seconds that she lasts coincide precisely with my lack of consideration for Lucio’s injured leg.
The receptionist comes trotting toward us.
I hear him squeal like a pig inside one of the rooms. The receptionist offers me a coffee and asks if we’re there on purpose, by accident, or because of some extraordinary circumstance. Whichever I choose, I’ll be expected to supply a few details, and details lead to conversations. Not to mention the coffee, which already sets the stage for an exchange of confidences. I reply, “On purpose.” Luckily, the wall opposite the reception desk is covered with memorabilia, which allows me to keep my back to her.
I see an official certificate embellished with the face of Eva Perón, an English or Irish coat of arms, a craniometer, a row of ceramic jars, photographs of each of the original medical staff of the sanatorium—the same pointy mustache on every face—and an oil portrait of the owner and founder, Mr. R. Allomby, proudly displaying a burn that disfigures his mouth.
“That friend of yours sure has a set of pipes on him,” says the receptionist, passing me the coffee. “Since you don’t seem to want to talk to me, maybe you should go keep him company.”
I trust I’ll be able to find my way to him by just following the screams, but the high ceilings mangle the sound. Every door around the perimeter is closed. There is a tiny sign with an arrow that says Security. At the end of the hall, I see a door ajar and the man with the long arms peering in, hunched over as if the most interesting part of Lucio’s treatment were happening in the bottom three feet of the room.
My footsteps don’t frighten him. As I get closer, I notice his fly is still open. It’s Sebastian. His sunglasses have left dents in his temples. He asks, his eyes duller than I remembered, if Lucio is me a hundred pounds lighter, and who I am.
Sebastian’s sunglasses are covered in sweat, his pants chafe, it’s too bright. His break at the side of the road gives him a good view of the other cyclists riding into the distance. It’s the perfect opportunity to disappear from my life. He doesn’t feel stifled by me yet, but decisions don’t require much of a rationale at nineteen.
That night he meets some guy who takes him to Chile. After three more relationships, he’s saved enough money for the classic trip around Latin America. He’s invited to a yoga retreat in the shadow of an Incan temple aligned with the solstices, where he’s bitten by a snake. The swelling from the venom puts pressure on his eyes, making them even more sensitive to light. By twenty-four, he’s back in Buenos Aires as a low-earning night owl.
He doesn’t talk about his mother. From his grandfather César he inherits: a collection of photographs and documents from Temperley Sanatorium, a notebook full of minuscule writing and obscene drawings (penises, a bidet, a diminutive vagina on the last page) signed by his great-grandfather, one Doctor Quintana, and more than ten ceramic jars labeled “comemadre,” the dark and seemingly ancient contents of which remain enigmatic until he reads the notebook.
He offers the empty jars and the photos to the new owner of the sanatorium, which will now have a history to boast. In exchange, he negotiates a temporary stay in an unused room in Pavilion Three and helps tend the garden.
Sebastian guides me to the reception desk to show me the photos of his forebears. It’s a sweet gesture. “This is the original owner of the frogs that left me blind,” he says. “He gave them to my great-grandfat
her, who’s this one here. The one on the right was his enemy. They both wanted her.”
There she is, straight as a rod and poised to receive an order, in a 1907 advertisement promising a cure for cancer. Clearly, the current owner of the sanatorium would rather have a dubious history than none at all.
Lynda: I’m attaching a reproduction of Doctor Quintana’s manuscript. It might complement your study nicely. What follows is what Sebastian told me—it’s not a summary, but rather everything he knows about the subject.
Quintana believes a modest existence is enough for her. He often asks her what she does when she’s alone, what rituals bind her to the world when he can’t see her. Just in case, he removes the bidet from her bathroom before the move and forbids her from working or smoking, though she may have been the first respectable woman to smoke in Argentina. Without this trailblazing gesture or her position as the head nurse, Menéndez is nothing to write home about. There’s no information about what form her love for him took.
Quintana quits his post at Temperley Sanatorium one month after the fire, and his colleagues throw him a farewell asado. His senses sharpened by alcohol, he notices that all of them have magnificent scars from the blaze—while he does not. He draws an ephemeral conclusion about the nature of heroism.
At some point, Menéndez finds Quintana’s notebook and reads it cover to cover. She says nothing. Shortly thereafter, she gives birth to a freckled baby they name César.
Quintana attempts to blow his brains out in 1932. He locks himself in the bathroom, shouting about what he plans to do. Menéndez asks the cleaning lady to break the lock for her. Nothing more is said of the incident. He retires that year. Sebastian still has a photo of him on his first day as a pensioner: he’s hunched over, his hands resting on the counter beside the teller window.
César, a loudmouthed and spoiled child, develops bad skin, a problematic attitude, and a fondness for prostitutes and Mussolini—attributes that turn him into a colorful figure who lives on in family lore in the form of outrageous anecdotes.
Lucio tells Sebastian where to wash his hands, where to sit, what he shouldn’t touch; right now, he’s handing him a stick of deodorant. It’s his (extremely) vulgar way of keeping him at a distance. Sebastian talks about us, about how fat I was, how he fell in love with me right away. Every now and then he breaks through Lucio’s perimeter, touching his shoulder or bringing his face in close enough to graze his nose as he calls him by my name, either because of his poor vision or because he doesn’t remember me well. He must think we want sex. Lucio’s after something much worse: inspiration.
It’s a black powder with an irregular texture. Its name in Spanish, comemadre, died out with the Patagonian crop eighty years ago, but it lives on in England as motherseeker or mothersicken. The last remaining plants are held by the English mafia, which uses the larvae to dispose of evidence. This is according to Sebastian. The rest of the information comes from a dead doctor’s notes. With water? Just like that? After a whole century? Seeds have stayed dormant longer. It pushes the limits of credibility, but Lucio wears the placid expression of a true believer.
He wants the installation to be a circle of guillotines constructed according to the description in Quintana’s notebook, and he wants the larvae to eat something, live. In his verbal incontinence, he even goes so far as to mention video screens. I tell him I find his idea arbitrary and insipid but invite him to keep digging around in my past to see what he finds. I give him permission to use Sebastian, Sebastian’s ancestors, the finger I lost, and the two-headed baby from my solo show. He says I can keep the baby: shining the spotlight on an anomaly is a license that can only be taken once—in a rookie piece meant to stir up trouble, like mine. I remind him that the amputated finger did the same. His reply: “We owe that finger almost everything: it’s as effective as a fart joke in geography class. Your part in it, though, would’ve meant more in the nineteenth century, without anesthesia.” I ask him what cheap brand of romanticism led him to view pain as a form of artistic honesty.
I see our physical differences blurred by daily use: my head is less round, my lips are fuller, I use different facial muscles to express anger; his face is as smooth as a baby’s, and I shave once a week.
Years after Liberace plows into a rhinestone piano and thinks to have his boyfriend undergo surgery to look just like him, but before Orlan wonders what she might gain from going under the knife, the first true monster was made in Buenos Aires, fully aware of itself and of the art world that would watch it grow. “That’s what we’ll do, because we have the means, and because we were the first to think of it.” A point of pride, the mark of our vanity. Some critics (Lynda included) assume the piece can be traced back to the dictatorship, to the mutilation of Evita’s body, and—yet again, ad nauseam—to Esteban Echeverría’s “The Slaughter Yard.”
Confirmed: droplets of water administered to the black powder revive the comemadre. The plant loosely resembles a cactus. After eight weeks the larvae appear; they reach their maximum density per cubic millimeter in week ten.
We have the idea for a real human leg injected with comemadre larvae dissolving onstage and leaving a black residue that quivers with mouths and legs under the microscope. Lucio wants several legs doing a cripple’s can-can, which the public would direct by administering electric shocks. I’m seduced by the can-can and the interactive element, but not by revisiting the mechanization of our last piece. Anyway, I don’t want to go through the whole thing with the morgue again. One leg is enough. I propose that we use one attached to a living person.
We need to find someone suggestible and desperate for money who can sit perfectly still on a bicycle (it must be a bicycle) while the larvae eat through his leg below the knee. Common sense dictates that the leg should be sectioned off beforehand so the larvae don’t work their way through the whole person.
The surgeon who performs this procedure will also be in charge of erasing any differences between our faces, however minor. We’ve already gotten good exposure from our names; now we can add a single, unmistakable face. Lucio Lavat thinks the gesture is redundant. I bet my life on its mediatic power.
Lucio asks which one of us will be the model. He argues, in his favor, that it’s easier to remove hair than it is to make some appear where it doesn’t naturally grow; as such, I’ll need to reduce the size of my lips and earlobes, start taking hormones to control hair growth, and file down a few sections of my skull. “Sounds juvenile,” Dag says over the phone. A week later, he’s landed our first investors. The fact that someone is willing to finance the project throws us off, as if we’d been betting all along that failure would protect us from our decision.
Lucio has an almost-stolen Beardsley on his résumé, but I have a finger amputated by choice on mine, and we’re not talking about irreversible changes. I offer up my body for the surgery. “You’d like to cut me out of the piece,” Lucio says.
Dag suggests it would be healthier for both of us to use a third party, imaginary or real, as the model. The imaginary candidates (Bette Davis, Mantegna’s Christ, Perón) fall to the wayside for being too referential, and because no surgeon could fashion those faces for us without degrading them. Our model needs to be real. Lucio adds a degree of difficulty by pointing out that it should be the person who gives up a leg in the name of art.
The air of historical significance lends itself to an easy yes. Sebastian looks at the numbered grid we’ve just drawn on his face. The most challenging sector to reproduce is the nose, which starts out quite narrow but then widens down at the nostrils; for our surgeon, this means filing down bone at the top, filling in the base, and inserting a counterbalance. The best option for getting his square forehead is a titanium implant held in place by the natural tension of the scalp. Lip reductions are in order. Luckily, his jawline is similar to ours. The rest is just a matter of losing weight, learning to slouch at the correct angle, and getting his skin tone right, with the help of a professional makeup artist.
The process takes three months, including time for healing and rest. With each strip of gauze that is removed, a new section of Sebastian’s face appears, imprinted on our own. The multiplication of his face leaves him satisfied, relaxed, as if he could finally set his life on the path toward something extraordinary.
In the film record of Cartesian Doc: Pathos and Method, we sit on the operating table, watching Sebastian exercise on his stationary bicycle. Sebastian watches the comemadre larvae hollow out his leg from inside on a monitor attached to an electron microscope. His foot remains on the pedal when it detaches from the ankle. We imitate Sebastian’s expressions of pain with the one-second delay we’ve rehearsed.
Because of some problem with the medium, we don’t look as identical in the digital video of the piece.
Dag returns to Argentina with Lucio’s mother and organizes a dinner for the four of us. At the last minute, he invites Lucio’s father. They haven’t spoken since the wedding in Norway.
Lucio’s father is wearing a flawless gray suit. Dag, in sweatpants, gives him a long hug. He thinks Argentineans give each other bear hugs.
The father starts a conversation about the price per square foot of New York City real estate. We talk about that. Then he tells us that a hotel maid cornered him in an elevator and congratulated him on his three identical sons, then added that she was very sorry about the leg. From this, he deduces that the piece must be quite popular. He congratulates us.
Lucio’s mother reminisces out loud about the day she discovered her first husband was missing a testicle. The funniest part, according to her, wasn’t its absence, which she never minded, but the fact that she only found out after fifteen years of marriage, thanks to an EMT who’d revived him after a heart attack.
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