It is secure that, so far as goes impartial evidence and testimony, El Vilvoy never acknowledged his heroism in this matter, merely giving a slight jesture and a «grunt» and a movement slightly of the mouth whenever asked of it. How this proves his essential Modesty, that of the Gentleman of Nature, too educated even to deny what his interlocutter has enquired.
“Well indeed,” commented the Spanish Priest (in a former time not yet so very far back at all, priests did not go about in casual dress ever, and with what dignity, too!) “But it now seems quite evident that those heads had probably nothing to do with the so-called Invasion, the Las Bonitas Incursion. Scientists tell us that probably they were the heads (if they existed at all) of pre-Columbian Indians, there on the Islands for mysterious and uncertain reasons.” And it is true that the Heads appear to be entire heads, unlike those prepared by the Jivaro Indians rather on the principle of a stuffed olive: this the priest conceded. Then he said, “But modern science has determined that organic matter stored, so to speak, well within a cave at the well-known and naturally-maintained ‘Cave Temperature,’ cool but not freezing-cold, well may last forever in its original form. Witness,” he said, “the hide of the megatherium in Patagonia, and the deposits of sloth-dung in the cave in North America.
“—The Vilvoy led the president and Dr. Macvitty to the cave where the heads were? Well, perhaps he did, but that in no way proves that he had put the heads there, let alone removed them from the shoulders of the soldiers of Las Bonitas.” The others there in the garden of la Villa de Murphy, moved just a bit restively at this statement, but perhaps all were too polite to dispute, or even to deny. The rural-looking young man said nothing; he seemed, if anything, politely a bit bored. Whiffs of memory, like faint scents of some aromatic plant growing not within sight, began to be perceived by me. Had he been, perhaps, the man with the gun and the gamebag, who had nodded to us from the berm of the road near the forest as we slowed down to avoid a mud rut? I could not be sure. Or was he one of a couple of people considering a bogged-down piece of equipment in a field just before we stopped for water?
“Perhaps, sir, you will give us your opinion,” suggested licenciado Huebner, politely.
The young man seemed to consider the question for a second, then he said, very calmly and equitably, “No.”
And as though the attorney had asked her: “To me,” said la doctora, after a moment, “the evidence upon the shell of the great tortuga is a most remarkable thing.” There was a murmur of agreement; and, seeing that I knew nothing of these things, two or three people recapitulated for me a conversation back there on Great Enchanted Island. Imagine! they directed me; imagine that black soil composed of volcanic origins ground so very fine, and the black rocks scattered around, almost a terrain of the inferno; here and there, going infinitesimally slowly, the giant tortoises, moving their flipperlike legs and making so little distance with each step that one might walk alongside them as they did so. And in fact, walking exactly so, is President E. Gaspar de la Vara, and so is capitan da Costa. One points out to the other curious and atypical markings on the giant carapace of one huge crawler. “¡Mira. MAP and VYP! Are these not the initials of the explorer-brothers Martin Alonso and Vicente Yáñez Pinzón?”
“Indeed, indeed! What else? And examine this set carved on the other side!”
“JPdL. Juan Ponce de Leon! Ah, that great pilot; señores, we are in the presence of history!”
And of those there in the garden of the villa in that suburb of that southern South American city, several look directly at the young priest to see if he is not impressed. “Why,” he asks, “should I doubt that they saw such initials? And why should I not doubt that they saw what had been put there by hoaxers, or shall we say, ‘jokers’? Giant tortoises may live long, but—that long? On Santa Elena there is a great tortoise, said to have been there in the time of Bonaparte. Said. And on Tonga, in the Pacific, there is another one, said to have been brought there by capitan Cooke. Said. Humanity continues to divert itself with fables, and meanwhile it continues, largely, to refuse to accept the truth. Therefore we all suffer.” He said this with a certain intensity, low-keyed but emphatic. Said the attorney, dressed in that meticulous black and white, “But … Father Juan … it does not follow does it, that because we believe that certain tortoises may live to be old, very very old, surely it does not follow that we deny the One Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church?” And the young priest answered, slowly, almost I would say, reluctantly, that, No, it did not follow.
But although El Vilvoy made no further, as it were, public appearances in the Capital and Port, he continued to be seen from time to time by visitors from there to his almost-native Island (after all, he had been very young and small when his parents made their landing). From time to time parties of such visitors, it depended always upon the weather, at least, and sometimes also upon other conditions—in time of prosperity perhaps a bit more often, in times of civil unrest certainly somewhat less often; parties of visitors would make what one might call a cruise, one might call it an excursion. Few indeed made the trip, which had to be made by foot, all the way from the shore to the farm. For one thing it was not easy, for another it was known that the senior Kielors did not favor such visitations, interruptive of their private schedules and their private peace; also they said that visitors brought colds. It became the custom for one of the landing parties to fire three shots when they had landed. And, eventually, usually while they were eating their picnic lunches, silently out of the wilderness there would appear upon the upper edges of the shore, El Vilvoy. What exclamations! What risings to the feet. What, one might say, clamors. Cheers! And always, always … or anyway, usually, or at any rate: often … someone would level a camera.
“Ah, Toño,” the skipper would say, casually (imagine speaking casually to someone so remarkable.); “Toño, here are the things ordered by your Papa. [aside] Here, you, fellow, pile them well back from the tideline.”
And so on.
Sometimes, as the visitors were returning to whichever small ship by row-boat or by motor-launch, sometimes they looked back, El Vilvoy raised a hand in farewell, abruptly let it fall. What a waving of handkerchiefs! What cries of Luego, Vilvoy! et cetera.
But when they looked back again, always he was gone.
Full-page spread in La Voz. Headline: El Vilvoy, Does His Natural Life Keep Him Youthful? Is it his total revulsion of the semi-artificial foods of the civilized living which maintains the Vilvoy in his youthfulness? Is it the conditions so devoid of stress or pressure, in complete harmony with the rhythms of the tides and the cycles of the Nature, which is preventing him from showing the signs of inevitable decay? Has his metabolism thus been slowed? Is he indeed, so to speak, un pieter-pan? Let us regard these incontestable photographical evidences … And there they were, each captioned with the names of the photographer and the date of the photograph, an entire series of pictures of el vilvoy, over a period of I forget how many years, numbers do not settle well in my mind. Sometimes his hair was a little shorter and sometimes a little longer, sometimes he was wearing such and such a garment, sometimes another: but always, always, not “usually” but always, really, the same face. And it did not really seem that he was any older in the last one than in the first one.
“I believe that it is the fruitarian diet,” said la doctora, emphasizing that this was her opinion, with slow, deep nods of her handsome head. “I have known really remarkable results to occur with the fruitarian diet. I would observe it myself, but my family will not allow.”
But the other señora, señora Alvarado? was of a different opinion. “It is because he knows of a certain yerba which grows in a hidden vale there on that island, or, some say, on another of those Islands. Twice a year he goes there, secretly, and he eats that secret yerba. And it purifies his blood. Once in January and once in June he purifies his blood with the substance of this secret yerba. And it is that which prevents him from the aging.”
Mrs. Phlux
said, “How very selfish of him. I am sure that we would all love to know the name of this herb! Why don’t we?”
Said the señora, “Because it is a secret one.” She said this very mildly, conscious of no artifice herself, and she nodded two or three times, not very deeply but somewhat less than rapidly. Clearly, to her, that was all the explanation needed.
Said the Spanish priest, “Old Padre Lizarraga, of the Botanical Gardens,” everyone nodded at this reference; afterwards I learned that it was not that they all knew Padre Lizarraga, but that they all knew the Botanical Gardens. Or knew of the Botanical Gardens. “Told me that he had spent forty years investigating the native herbal medicaments, so often said to be so good for this ailment and for that; and the result of his studies was that he found that ninety-five percent of them were purgatives.”
I felt that he expected that this statement would make some certain effect, but none was visible. Only the usual polite nods. After a moment, he went on. “Surely we have all heard of the Deception Theory?” And the attorney said, “The malice of the press of Las Bonitas is almost beyond belief. Conceive with what effort this theory must have been compounded.”
So now I heard, if only in faintly greater detail, for the first time more about Old Kielor’s other sons than the sole fact of their existing. Old Kielor’s sons had been named, one after the other: Washington, Bonaparte, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Masaryk … called informally, Tony, Bony, Sony, Cony, and Max. Either History had ceased to supply Old Kielor with Immense Liberator Figures, or Time had changed the angle of the telescope. Or else Old Kielor had been simply consistent, and it was we who had underestimated Masaryk. And the Deception Theory was, simply, that the entire Kielor family (prompted, so it was implied, by the government of Ereguay) had conspired to deceive the visitors to las encantadas by replacing each brother, as he grew older, with the next youngest brother. That is, the tourists or trippers, the visitors, had only seen the real Tony for an unnamed period of time; after that, the one who came down to the shoreline and was photographed would have been Bony. And, when his own inevitable maturity would have become obvious, the one who was introduced as El Vilvoy was actually Sony. And so on, down through Cony and Max.
And here one heard certain other variations in the conventional legend. Bony would make a patriotic speech. Cony performed a certain dance, presumably of his own invention. Sony would hang from a branch of a tree by the shoreline and swing back and forth. Max brandished a machete and demanded assurance that the party was really from Ereguay, and not las Bonitas.
Mostly I had just looked and listened. Now I asked a question. Had anyone here ever been to Grand Encantada?
“But one does not go there anymore,” said the señora whose husband was un burócrata. “Because it is uncomfortable the voyage, and on the Island there is no retrete, and nowadays one has the cinema.”
The youthful stranger had rolled himself dexterously a cigarette in what looked like a leaf of pale tobacco, and now he lit it and sat forward in his chair, watching the smoke. It was not rank, merely somewhat strange. I thought that perhaps it reminded me of the small puro being smoked by the man, his face I did not see, who had brought the side of venison to the ristorante where Diego and I had eaten the morning before our arrival in the Ciudad. Only, perhaps I did see his face.
—But when had these visitations left off? Opinion was divided. And how many years had separated the brothers Kielor one from the other? No one had any idea. There were, however, any number of ideas involving such reference-points as the Revolution of the Year of Drought, and the Interim Presidency of the Very Sad Leap Year, and the Battle of Apostolo Santiago: events clearly as significant to those others present as The Bonus March or Pearl Harbor was to me; but of which we, all of us in the Northern Continent, were but utterly ignorant. Every Latin American republic has its own Alamo, its own Gettysburg, and we have never heard of any one of them. Nearer to us than to Ereguay is a country once convulsed by a great civil war during a period which we remember chiefly for the wearing of sleeve-garters, and funny female hats.
It was, however, where I now tarried, absolutely a matter of national belief that on the Islas Encantadas lived El Vilvoy, who had (a) come to the rescue of an innocent young girl, daughter of a national hero, who was once menaced by a thug; he immediately bit off the thug’s ear, thus causing him to flee into the night with his bleeding ear in one hand; (b) this same wild but inestimably praiseworthy young vilvoy had upon a subsequent occasion rescued none other but the President of the Republic from a gang of invaders intent upon depriving Ereguay of the sovereignty of the Islands, and (c) had cut off the heads of twenty-seven of them and hidden the heads in a cave; and (d) he—
Mrs. Phlux said, “In a way it rather reminds me of Arthur and the Island of Avalon, or of Barbarossa in his cavern asleep with his beard still growing … and, of course, of poor young King Sebastian, who didn’t really die in battle five hundred years ago was it? and will of course some day return. My. I do rather like it.”
The priest, Padre Juan, had taken up his cup of chocolate, and now he put it down again. “We have all heard,” he said, “of something which was done in another country, which should not have been done,” and again he took his cup, and again he put it down. And it seemed that there was now a bit more interest displayed; could it be that people had been just a bit restive at hearing their own legend put down, and were now pleased to be hearing of some other nation being blamed for … for what? “I refer,” said the priest, “to the Julio Castillano forgeries.” People were being, definitely, more interested. I was certainly even more interested, for I had never heard of the matter.
“What was that?” I asked. Julio Castillano, it was explained to me, had been a well-known journalist in Nueva Andorra; perhaps he was at least as well-known for his candid camera as for his candid commentaries. And in a celebrated series of news articles he had supplied, I did not learn exactly how many photographs, of a Leading Political Figure in the company of a Leading Theatrical Artiste who was not his lawful (or even unlawful) wife. To make the matter very short, if not indeed curt: the photographs were revealed, exposed as we might say, as forgeries, hoaxes … of a sort … that is, they had all been taken of the two people involved in entirely different pictures, and the clever scoundrel had somehow joined the two together. Indeed, there was no real evidence that they had ever been together at any time in any place. Sought by the law and by the outraged husband of the Leading Theatrical Artiste, Julio Castillano had fled the country for another: and there he had shot himself.
“What do you suggest, then, Father?” the attorney asked. “That the photographs showing the vilvoy were all hoaxes? In what way?”
Padre Juan hesitated for a moment. “What proof do we have,” he asked, “that all or most of those pictures had not been taken in the course of, say, one or two years? with fictitious date subsequently ascribed to them? Or what proof do we have that the dates may have not been let us say confused?”
Asked la doctora, “But what proof do we have that they were?”
It was, he said, a deduction, a theory, not an accusation. The press was almost everywhere of a sensationalist tendency, ready to manufacture exciting news when that happened to be in short supply. It would not have been difficult to assemble a collection of photographs and to misascribe, or even to confuse, their dates. “Thus gratifying,” he said, “he jaded tastes of a public unnaturally eager for, always, more novelty more and more novelty. Even when it involves an interference in the natural law, whereby all men are mortal, and whereby all who live an age must become aged.”
The attorney made a gesture which foretold a comment, then for a moment he withheld his comment. Then he said, “I believe, reverend sir, that you wish to remind us that the Church cautions us against accepting a miraculous explanation for anything as long as a mundane explanation is acceptable.” He did not put it in the form of a question.
And the priest slowly nodded his agreement that this
was, indeed, just what he meant. A murmur was heard, as that of several people all saying Mmmm at once.
While the latter part of the conversation had been going on I was aware of a figure walking very slowly around the other end of the gardens (it was a large garden and might very well have rightfully deserved the plural form), but this had not been in the forefront of my mind. Presently the figure came gradually nearer, and I saw that it was an old woman. Whoever said that in passing through life (or however does it go?), be sure to pause and smell the roses, would have been pleased with this elderly person. Stopping, stooping, bending her face to the blossoms, almost she seemed to be stroking the plants; and perhaps she was. “What a shame you had not been here even a few years ago,” the attorney said to me. “You would have been able to meet the former President Gaspar de la Vara, who was tragically killed whilst driving his motor car, when he was ninetysix.” And the señora said, “Ninety-seven.”
The Other Nineteenth Century Page 29