The Sea Dreams It Is the Sky

by John Hornor Jacobs

  Interstitial

  There once was a time when poets were famous

  and their words could set whole countries aflame

  Epigraph

  I have walked in the mountains,

  And beneath the shadowed trees.

  I have touched the altars of night

  And will always carry them within me.

  Should you seal me away for a thousand years

  I will still remain there

  Eternally revived, steaming in the dark.

  I am an eon rising in man,

  I am a thousand tomorrowless days.

  —Guillermo Benedición, Nuestra Guerra Celestial or Our Heavenly War

  The perception of time and the experience of being rooted in temporality becomes dilated during torture . . . Fernándes examines the relationship between spatial dissociation, chronological experience, and the subjectivity of memory. For those who experienced torture within the Pinochet regime, he explores not only how torture deconstructed the victim's humanity, but how it lessened the torturer’s humanity as well, and, acting as proxy, the state’s . . .

  —Cristiána Reyes, The Rivers Flow Red to the Sea: State Violence in Chile and Magera

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Interstitial

  Epigraph

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by John Hornor Jacobs

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  1

  Málaga, Spain

  1987

  I can recognize a Mageran in any city of the world. Violence leaves its mark, and horror makes siblings of us all. A diaspora of exiles, dreaming of home.

  On the streets, they called him “The Eye” for obvious reasons—the eyepatch, of course, but also his wary, sleepless demeanor. He would sit in the afternoons in the Parque de Huelin in the shade, a wide-brimmed straw hat on his head, a Bali cigarette hanging from his lower lip. The patch made him look like a veteran, and I guess we both were, though he was much older than I was then. I remember the scent of cloves around him, and the smell of the sea that we could hear but not see. It hissed and murmured at us from beyond the Paseo Maritimo. At the time, I was teaching writing and poetry at the Universidad de Málaga. In the evenings I would ride my Vespa down to the park to catch a breeze from the sea, to drink in the cafés and watch the young, bronzed women, happy and glowing, and forget about Magera. And Pedro Pablo Vidal, the cruel. And my family. I was young and very poor.

  We became used to the sight of each other. Him, a watchful yet benevolent Polyphemus, attired in rumpled linen suits and bright-colored shirts, ash-mottled at the cuffs. Me, a pale, bespectacled ghost, clad all in black despite the heat: dress, blouse, hat, hair, sunglasses. An affectation, I guess, toward the grave.

  For weeks, we engaged in what other people—other people who were not Mageran—might think of as a mating ritual. He would approach, face shadowed, newspaper tucked under his arm, and take a seat at another table, but always facing me—not too close, though never very far away. He crossed his legs and tilted his head so that his one good eye was directed toward me. He was a man who could make crossing his legs seem an outrageous indolence. When he would nod to me, it was as a king acknowledging a rival. Or a brother. There is very little difference between the two, after all. He seemed very familiar, not as if I had met him before, but as if I had seen him somewhere, in a play, or a television show. I resolved to speak with him and satisfy my curiosity.

  The night we finally spoke, though, it was not of my doing. Instead of observing me from afar, with only a nod, he approached and sat at my table without as much as a word of greeting, ordered a pisco and turned disgruntled when the waitress apologized that they did not have any. I was so used to the sight of him by then, it was almost expected. There are a million allowances and rudenesses even the most banal man will permit himself. And The Eye was most definitely not ordinary. I put down my book and gave him my attention.

  “Coffee and fernet, then,” he said to the waitress, a little peevishly, after she assured him they had no pisco for him to drink with his coffee. His singular gaze returned to me. “Santaverde,” he said.

  “No,” I said.

  “Las Palas, then. Most assuredly.”

  “No.”

  He frowned. I began to speak but he shushed me.

  “Concepción or nothing and nowhere.”

  “No. I am from Coronada.”

  “Ahh!” He raised a finger as if making a point in a philosopher’s salon. “I was very close!”

  “You were getting farther away with every guess.”

  “You are very acute,” he said.

  “They call you ‘The Eye’ around here. Did you know that?”

  He shrugged. “It is as good a name as any. Would you like to know my given name?”

  “I somewhat prefer ‘The Eye,’” I said.

  He laughed. I could see the silver fillings in his molars. When he was through, he gestured at my clothing. “Are you still in mourning?”

  The question startled me. I looked down at my garb and then back to him. “I didn’t think so, but—”

  “It was a trick question. As Magerans, we will always be in mourning.” He reached out and touched the cover of the book I was reading. It was Léon Felipe’s Goodbye, Panamá. “You are quite the bookworm, are you not? I always see you nose-down in some book or another.”

  I shrugged, used to intrusive men commenting on my studious nature. “I am a lecturer at the university.”

  “And what do you lecture about?”

  “Poetry. Modern South American writers. I teach composition to first-year students.”

  “Do you like your work?” The Eye asked.

  I might have been more taken aback if he had said “Do you have a lover?” but not by much. It was such an intimate question for someone I had known—and to be fair, not actually known other than to say we’d seen each other—for such a short amount of time.

  “It is work,” I said. “We all have to work, do we not?”

  “There is work that tunnels inward. There is work that tunnels outward,” he said. His choice of words was quirky. I wanted to write down “tunnels” for later and think about why he might have used it.

  “My turn, now, for the—” I almost said “interrogation,” but stopped myself. There was a real chance that might not sit well with him. “Questions,” I finished, lamely.

  He withdrew a Bali cigarette and lit it, pluming clove-scented smoke into the air. Cars and pedestrians passed on the street. A mother with a squealing child. Lovers arm in arm. The summer sun had set and the air had cooled, still smelling of salt and sea. Later, musicians and dancers would busk in the streetlights, hoping for a drunken coin and a laugh. The Eye took a sip of fernet, then of coffee, and then a drag from his cigarette. He remained quiet.

  “What happened to your eye?” I asked.

  “It had seen too much,” he said. “So I plucked it out.”

  “Plucked?”

  “Removed it.”

  “Surely you’re joking.”

  “Am I?” he said. “Do you like the cinema?”

  “Of course. But I rarely have the money for it.”

  “Would you like to go to the cinema with me?” He drank his fernet down and shifted in his seat—the motions of a man preparing to depart. “My treat.”

  It was a sharp turn in the conversation. Maybe due to the co
mplete and inadvertent honesty I gave to him when admitting my poverty.

  “Yes,” I said. I could not say I liked The Eye. I think I disliked him the way one dislikes a cousin or uncle. But he was interesting. And so familiar. We agreed on a meeting time.

  He stood, drained his coffee to its dregs. “I will be up all night now,” he said. He placed far too much money on the table. When I indicated it was ten times his share, he said, “Go, buy yourself a book. I’ve enough to spare. Allow me to spend my money on young women in ways that won’t get me chased out of town.”

  We were to meet at the same café the following evening, a Sunday. Throughout the morning, I couldn’t shake the feeling I had met him or had seen him somewhere before, not in Spain. We met at the Café de Soto then and wandered to the Calle Frigiliana where, at that time, there were many small cinemas and night clubs. I was interested in Almodóvar’s La ley del deseo, but The Eye sniffed and on his insistence, we walked on to the Cinema la Playa, a rundown venue that played only Mexican films, mostly luchador and horror. He chose Veneno para las hadas—Poison for the Fairies—and led me into the atrium, where he bought us both beers and popcorn. The movie was a disjointed story of two little girls becoming initiated into the powers of witchcraft, and it did not end well. The Eye laughed raucously at inappropriate moments, making me nervous. When one of the children locked the other in a barn and set it ablaze, he hawed like a donkey. I thought he might be choking.

  Afterward, we had drinks at “our” café.

  “Well, what did you think?”

  “Gruesome,” I said. “I don’t understand how you can enjoy such fare, with all we’ve been through.”

  He fixed me with his stare, surprisingly more powerful with one eye than two. For all that, I could tell he was in a good mood, but he did not intend to apologize or be cowed at his enjoyment of the film. “You do not know what I’ve been through,” he said. “And I do not know what you’ve suffered. There is a beyond to every woman and man. There is a beneath. There will always be misery in the world. Right now, countless children are dying.” He gestured at the city around us. “Some even here. Each night could be the end of all nights.” He looked up at the canopy of trees wreathing the café’s outdoor seating area. It was a faraway look with a faraway eye, like the Rolling Stones song that a girlfriend used to always sing me in broken English when I was in school in Buenos Aires. Marcia Alavedes, her name was. I had not thought of her in a long time. She had been a total disaster, but sometimes I missed her, as one does with fondly remembered mistakes. I missed her mostly at night or when I wanted to clean the smell of Málaga from my nose. She used to take me on long motorcycle rides in the countryside; in those moments, arms around her stomach as we barreled down Argentinian highways, head pressed to her strong back, cocooned in the sound of motor and wind, she was something wondrous. But when the movement stopped, she was a figurative wreck. The Eye simply looked up at the trees as if witnessing some dawning and not wholly welcome vista. “Misery is a condition that we are all promised,” he continued. “On the screen, painted in light, that misery is very small.” He made his fingers dance on the table. “Little witches! Next time, we will go see wrestlers fighting vampires and maybe you’ll understand.”

  We drank enough to be unsteady and I took my leave from him. The next Sunday, we watched a film about a musician who knew a song that could kill vampires. And the next, a masked wrestler fought a golem. The next, a story of an auditorium haunted by the ghost of a vicious luchador. And on and on, week after week. The Eye laughed through all of them. We had grown comfortable with each other. Our relationship—I cannot call it a friendship—grew. What lay between us was more than friendship. We were outcasts, together.

  It was only when he left his wallet at the table one night did I learn his Christian name. I took it and opened it and withdrew his Spanish driver’s license.

  Rafael Avendaño.

  2

  Rafael Avendaño is a name every Mageran knows. While no South American poet is more famous than Pablo Neruda, no poet is more infamous than Avendaño. A son of extraordinarily wealthy parents, he once stabbed his wife with a paring knife at a cocktail party when he discovered she had been having an affair. It being a paring knife, she lived to make him regret it. She took his daughter and forbade him to see her ever again.

  A tamer moment for him.

  Avendaño wrote of outrageous sex acts, French whores, and Indonesian courtesans. He drank heavily and smoked marijuana and loudly proclaimed the benefits of cocaine. He glorified boxers and the false masculine ideal. He admired American writers like Bukowski and Mailer and traveled to New York and Paris and kept the society of artists and bohemians. He dressed handsomely and was in the newspaper social sections. It’s reported that he once had a fistfight with two literary critics at a book event in Mexico City and beat them both soundly. They sued him as vigorously as he had assaulted them. He thumbed his nose at the Mexican legal system and in an interview in a Mageran newspaper—La Sirena—vowed never to return to Mexico, calling the whole country the “shit stain between the asshole of America and the cunt of Colombia.” In response, Mexican president Ordaz declared him an enemy of Mexico and banned him, specifically, from returning. Thousands of Mexican patriots vowed to kill him if he was ever seen in their country again. In a follow-up editorial, Avendaño reveled in his new status.

  For my part, I had never liked his writings very much. The poems were self-indulgent and misogynistic. If they did not celebrate drunken womanizing, then they were pensive and shallow explorations into the most rudimentary and puerile existentialism. I was conscious of the fact I did not claim him in my curriculum. My first thought at knowing his identity was if he would ask me of that omission—a completely irrational fear, on my part, but there nonetheless.

  A beneficiary of Esteban Pávez’s socialist programs—the hallmark agenda of our deposed Mageran president—Avendaño had reputedly committed suicide along with his friend on the day of Vidal and his junta’s coup.

  “You know who I am,” he said, after he’d returned from the restroom. He looked to his wallet. “I can see it on your face.” He smiled.

  Like many older men, he dribbled when he urinated, for there was a discoloration at the crotch of his tan linen suit. It was quite prominent. Avendaño did not seem to care. I half considered him as a Zorba that, through some alternate fate, became an artist and scholar. He loudly ordered another pisco and sat down, at peace with the world.

  “It was becoming hard to think of you only as ‘The Eye,’” I said.

  He nodded. “Of course. I would have just told you.” He shifted and lit a Bali. “I think I offered on our first night together.”

  Knowing his history, “our first night together” made me uncomfortable.

  “You did,” I said. “The world thinks you are dead.”

  He shrugged. “It’s a big world. I’m not, nor have I ever pretended to be dead.” He paused. “Well, except once, but that was dire circumstances.” He looked at me. “You are reevaluating me now. I am no longer the jolly old fool who pays for things because he’s smitten by your beauty.”

  “I’m not beautiful and you’re not smitten,” I said.

  He looked sad for a moment. “True.” Part of me had wanted him to say, yes, yes you are beautiful, but real life doesn’t work like that. “I pay for your drinks because you’re Mageran and friendless. Because you are young and very poor. And because my kindness is infinite.”

  Almost everything he said made me want to respond with profanity. Or laugh madly.

  A thought struck me. “Did you know who I was before we became friends?”

  “No,” he said. “But after El mundo de los vampiros, I visited the university, searched for Isabel Certa and read your writings. You are very good. A little dry for my taste. I especially enjoyed your paper ‘Neruda as Prometheus: The New Poets of South America.’ I liked the mention you gave me, but you seemed to not appreciate my genius. I hate aca
demic papers that get too pretentious in their titles. So . . . cheers.” He took a drink.

  I waved that away. “I don’t know what to think. About this. About you.”

  He shrugged again. He made it look so effortless. He was old, but for an instant, I could see what women might see in a younger version of him.

  “What really happened to your eye?” I asked.

  “I plucked it out. That is true,” he said.

  “That is shit.”

  “No, it’s not shit. It is the truth.” He paused, thinking. “Put out your hands.”

  “Bah,” I said.

  “Put them out.” He put out his. Their mottled backs were specked with liver marks.

  I put mine out. He took them in his.

  “When you throw a ball, which hand do you use?” he said.

  “The right one.”

  “And when you shoot a rifle?”

  “I don’t have a rifle.”

  “Surely you’ve shot a gun?” His hands were warm, dry. Like the cover of a cherished leather-bound book.

  “No.” I looked at the people in the café, certain they were all staring at us. They weren’t.

  “A bow and arrow, like Artemis?”

  “The right one.”

  “Ahh,” he said. It was an exhalation. A pregnant pause, signifying nothing except delay. He was thinking, his single eye shifting in its socket as he studied my face very closely. “There might come a time when your eyes see too much. Or too little.”

  I pulled my hands away. “This is nonsense.”

  He laughed, sitting back in his chair as if it were all a joke. “Look with the lesser eye.”

  “Both of my eyes are lesser. The ophthalmologist in Coronada said I have weak eyes.”

  Avendaño laughed again. It was a phlegmy laugh, thick in his throat. He often wiped his nose and eyes, hocked up wads of yellow sputum. He was like my grandfather in that way. Men of a certain age cease caring about the impression the fecundity of their bodies make on others. It’s a selfishness and privilege that has always rankled. Yet it was almost impossible to stay disgruntled with The Eye, despite his indifferent narcissism.