Four by Four

by Sara Mesa

  They lost the middle beat between yes and no. And thanks to this, yes grew; it became enormous. The same thing happened to no. Now they are two towers. Two tall, identical towers, at odds.

  The city’s inhabitants manage their words carefully. Their language is rudimentary, but effective.

  Deprived of nuance, everyone wins. Less misunderstanding, fewer misgivings.

  All of that has been forgotten, even by the old ones.

  THE METAPHYSICAL PARADOX of indisposability loops around itself, resulting in a de facto impossibility. The city’s inhabitants can dispose of things, they can even dispose of their own bodies, given that it’s always possible to kill themselves.

  And yet, the body itself is something that can’t be disposed of, in the absolute sense of the word, unless it is left in such a state that there is no longer any possibility of its disposal: in this case, its use.

  Therefore, this absolute disposal of the body actually comes down to putting it out of use. So the city’s inhabitants can commit suicide, but they cannot, strictly speaking, dispose of themselves.

  ROBINET, ROBINET, the girl whispers.

  This constant refrain returns her to an amorphous past that no longer exists.

  The girl is growing up and doesn’t know what her future will be. She doesn’t understand the notion of future.

  Several months ago she bled for the first time. No one explained to her why. It helps her measure the passage of time.

  She is being stripped of her words. She grunts, moans, becomes a beautiful, menstruating animal.

  She knows how to say robinet with a guttural “r.” That is all.

  BUT YOU, SIR, you believe that you could do without your body? That’s the part I don’t understand.

  What I believe, what I believe, I answer thoughtfully, is that I can’t do without my body, but I can do without the inability to do without it. Do you see the nuance?

  Nuance? Nuance, you say? What nuance? We’ve said language lacks nuance.

  It lacks nuance? But, why? Why?

  It’s much easier for us to understand each other this way.

  I see. We’re getting to the root of meaning.

  Not exactly. We’re not getting anywhere. There is no meaning. We’re trimming the edges. Serious pruning.

  IN THE BEGINNING, armed men oversaw the men who were building the wall, and they oversaw its insurmountability. Any threat they shot on the spot. There were deaths, many deaths. Some were justified and others were not.

  There are no watchmen. The wall wasn’t built to prevent people from crossing; it isn’t high enough to stop someone from jumping over. The wall only prevents one from seeing. Its opacity is its only purpose: there is no other. It creates a giant, compliant, orderly four by four.

  No inhabitant would argue that this wasn’t for the best. It isn’t that the threat was kept out. It’s even more effective: the threat dissolved and no longer exists.

  And yes, even the oldest inhabitants have forgotten.

  “The feeling of satisfaction—a kind of sensuousness—produced by having survived can become a dangerous, insatiable passion. It grows stronger every time. The higher the mountain of dead from which a survivor rises, alive, the more intense and tyrannical the need for that experience. The lives of heroes and mercenaries reveal a sort of addiction to it.”

  HEROES AND MERCENARIES command the most respect among the city’s inhabitants. The heroes are made up; one believes in them as one believes in the gods. By contrast, the mercenaries are contemptuously real: they are many and they are well regarded. They comprise society’s upper echelon.

  Several times a year celebrations are held in their honor. The mercenaries form a procession, bringing offerings to the heroes. The city’s inhabitants become devoted spectators. They feel an intense, internal satisfaction that is only explained in terms of survival. They feel chosen because they live in the city.

  IT IS POSSIBLE that sometimes a girl, or boy, dies. The girl doesn’t know this, because—as we’ve said—she doesn’t know that there are other children. But that’s the way it is: in the quest for gratification, there are games or practices that lead to death.

  The girl isn’t any more fortunate than the children who die. The girl simply lives, she grows, she develops breasts, hips.

  The difference cannot be understood in terms of fortune. Dying is not worse than living. It’s simply a different experience.

  Things happen and they are observed, not judged.

  And it isn’t just the girl: nobody considers an alternate viewpoint. No one imagines anything different from what is. Things are what they are, and they happen because they happen.

  And they’re more content this way.

  THE GIRL, TOO. Yes, she’s content in the basic, ordinary way caged animals are content.

  Full contentment, no room for doubt.

  The girl is animalized. She has forgotten all words except robinet and papi.

  She keeps track of time with the drops of water, the blood that runs down her thighs, the times she’s let out to give herself to papi and the mercenary who watches as she does.

  And yet, her nails are soft from lack of sunlight.

  NO ONE EVER CONTEMPLATES the possibility of suicide. To think about suicide is to think about a radically different possibility of existence. This is unthinkable in the city, in the same way that it is unthinkable to imagine a world on the other side of the long three-meter-high stone wall.

  A strange tale tells the story of a door in a wall, a door that leads to a differently textured reality. Not a paradise, but another reality, unimaginable and superior.

  No one in the city has read this story. No one discovers that in certain dream states with a simple wish the door will materialize.

  No one in the city knows that by renouncing control of their body, they create a new door through which they can pass through the wall.

  Not even the oldest inhabitants know this.

  THE CUSTOMS OF A PEOPLE can’t be judged from the outside. We are deeply affected by the cruel ways this city manages its sewers, but we also know that its inhabitants are happier this way.

  This includes the boys and girls confined to their four meters by four meters underground.

  To make them see things another way—to reinstate nuance, the difference between various words or the use of synonyms—would only contribute to the people’s discomfort and unhappiness.

  That sense of strangeness, of otherness, would be painful.

  Not even the mercenaries know this. They needn’t impose their power in any way. They are mercenaries because they were designated as such by mutual agreement.

  No one questions this agreement, given that it’s a plausible one they all can believe in.

  THERE IS A HIGH WINDOW in one of the walls that forms the perimeter of the four by four. Sometimes a shaft of light filters in.

  Not enough light to strengthen the girl’s nails, but the sun rises and sets each day nonetheless.

  When night has fallen, the cry of a bird also slips through the window. A screech owl, but the girl has practically forgotten about birds and she has certainly never heard the words screech owl in her life.

  A screech owl’s cry has a particular meaning: warning invaders that this is not their domain. Marking territory. A trilling whinny—hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo—sometimes answered by a sharp tu-whu.

  But no one in the city is aware of this meaning, or the meaning of the response. It is—to their ear—a completely inarticulate exchange.

  If no one knows, therefore, the meanings themselves have no importance and cease to be.

  In fact, the screech owl’s cry ceases to be the call of a bird at all. It becomes a sound without semantics, of doubtful origin. One doesn’t think about it; one hears it, but doesn’t listen. It’s forgotten before it even comes into being.

  And yet, this creature’s neck allows it to turn its head around completely, to better observe its observer.

  SOMETIMES, IT ALSO
HAPPENS that the man tires of a girl or a boy and takes a shine to a new one.

  It happens sometimes, but the girl doesn’t know this.

  It’s going to happen to her—and soon—whether she knows it or not.

  In such a case, a new transaction with agreeable terms is accepted by the parties.

  In the event that a new transaction is not established, they allow the girl or boy in question to die.

  Sometimes it happens. No one in the city knows this and therefore no one calls it into question. They can’t.

  THIS IS THE NEGATION OF BEING, I contend; the same process that nullifies the screech owl’s cry.

  ONCE, THE MAN GAVE THE GIRL a plant in a flowerpot. In those days, the girl was still young and unused. She was in her four-by-four incubator, being prepared for a promising future she naturally couldn’t grasp at the time.

  Through gestures the man explained that she had to water the plant to keep it alive. The man didn’t use words with the girl. He wanted her to forget the ones she knew so that the process of forgetting would be less traumatic.

  The man loved the girl: the proof was in the plant. The girl felt this and she did everything she could to take care of it.

  But the plant died, nevertheless. Not right away, not one day to the next. It was a long process. The girl observed, unfazed, as one by one the branches grew dry and brittle. She didn’t feel sorrow or pain. She recognized reality without even trying to understand.

  The girl didn’t know it, but she confronted her loss with the same cold acceptance that her parents had confronted theirs the day a mercenary selected her to live her life in a four-by-four cell.

  CERTAIN REBELLIONS are impossible to start if one doesn’t know what lies behind the wall.

  The past is erased (not even the oldest of the city’s inhabitants remember now); to rebel is no longer possible, except by negating existence.

  Here, no one recognizes that idea. Therein, its power.

  UN SILENCE PARFAIT règne dans cette histoire / Sur les bras du jeune homme et sur ses pieds d’ivoire / La naïade aux yeux verts pleurait en le quittant. / On entendait à peine au fond de la baignoire / Glisser l’eau fugitive, et d’instant en instant / Les robinets d’airain chanter en s’égouttant …

  Of the poem, only the word robinet remains.

  The rest is already dead.

  There is no naiad, bathtub, or fugitive water; there is no love or longing.

  The poem is hollow: a succession of sounds without meaning, just as the ululation of the screech owl is nothing more than a lost cry.

  In this story, a perfect silence now reigns …

  REFERENCES

  During the long process of writing a book, certain external stimuli come to reside in a work, without having been consciously sought. We become magnets, sponges when we write; we attract and absorb stimuli; we centrifugate material in a manner that might be disorganized, perhaps, but never coincidental. Sometimes, these influences are so diluted that it’s impossible to trace them, or they might belong to a personal realm difficult to transmit to someone else—images, memories, feelings. But there are others that are more obvious, and these notes are my attempt to acknowledge this second category:

  The book the Headmaster—Señor J.—refers to when recounting the story of the servant Gerasim is, of course, Tolstoy’s wonderful The Death of Ivan Ilyich, one of the best fables about the meaning of life, and death, that I’ve ever read.

  The disturbing novel Isidro Bedragare reads out on the bench is The Lime Works by Thomas Bernhard.

  Part of Ledesma’s final words to Bedragare are inspired in the scene of the “madman” Domenico’s speech in the Tarkovsky film Nostalghia.

  The paradox of the indisposability of one’s own body in relation to suicide that appears in García Medrano’s papers comes from Gabriel Marcel’s Metaphysical Journal.

  And also found in García Medrano’s papers, the quote about heroes and mercenaries is from Crowds and Power, by Elias Canetti, and the allusion to the fantastic tale refers to The Door in the Wall by H. G. Wells.

  Lastly, the poem at the end of the novel is by Alfred de Musset, chosen for both its lightness and extraordinary capacity to serve as counterpoint to the story told in this book.

  Seville, 2012

  SARA MESA is the author of eleven works, including the novels Scar (winner of the Ojo Critico Prize), Four by Four (a finalist for the Herralde Prize), An Invisible Fire (winner of the Premio Málaga de Novela), Un Amor, and Cara de Pan (forthcoming from Open Letter). Her works have been translated into more than ten different languages, and she has been widely praised for her concise, sharp writing style.

  KATIE WHITTEMORE is a graduate of the University of New Hampshire (BA), Cambridge University (M.Phil), and Middlebury College (MA), and was a 2018 Bread Loaf Translators Conference participant. In addition to her translations of Sara Mesa’s work, she has forthcoming translations by Aroa Moreno Durán, Nuria Labari, Javier Serena, Aliocha Coll, and Jon Bilbao.

  The publication of Sara Mesa’s Four by Four in Katie Whittemore’s translation was made possible thanks to a generous contribution by Dr. John and Kit Manhold. This contribution allowed for Open Letter to better fulfill its mission of introducing English readers to vital, important works of literature from around the world.

  A true renaissance man, Dr. John Manhold was born and educated in Rochester, New York. His serendipitous life began with further education at Harvard Dental, followed by service in WWII and Korea, then additional study in pathology and psychology. His extensive research propelled him to give lectures and consultations around the world. These visits, plus the couple’s love of travel, encouraged John to become certified in navigation (USCG) while his wife Kit studied marine engineering. They made a very notable journey, the “Big Wheel,” a 6,000-mile loop north from Florida, through the Great Lakes, down the Mississippi, the Gulf, and back to Florida. Both are medaled sports enthusiasts, and John has won numerous awards for his sculptures that reside in public as well as private collections in the U.S. and abroad. More information about his life, his awards, his texts, and his novels can be found on his website: johnhmanhold.com.

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