I sighed. I felt as if a great weight had lifted. Surely, Sartre had it right. Hell is other people. I found myself holding Avendaño’s secret manuscript.
I opened it and began to read.
Avendaño
I was sleeping with a student activist at the time. Alejandra Llamos, I think her name was, though it has been so long and, as they say, so much water underneath that particular bridge. I suspect I’ve blocked full memory of our relationship and her, purposefully. And I was not with her for her name—I remember her hair, her silhouette backlit by sunshine and lamplight. Her form is indistinct, but the taste of her skin still burns on my tongue, when the salt-sea air would cool upon it. The flavor and feel of her body, soixante-neuf. I vaguely recall, like a boy at his mother’s bosom, her breasts. They were modest. I recall the timbre of her voice raised in anger. She reminded me of Nivia, my wife. My ex-wife. Which is probably why I treated her so poorly. If I were a moral man, and not Avendaño, I might feel bad about admitting that. But there it is. Her name, though. I’m sure it was Alejandra Llamos. It’s what I shall call her, anyway.
Do not think poorly of me. You will see.
I could say that it was my relationship to her that brought Vidal’s men to our door. That is what they said. But it wasn’t true. The Vidalistas were always going to come for me. Because Pávez was my friend and patron, as he was to all poets and writers. I never bought, wholesale, the socialist agenda though my sympathies tended toward that direction, but they at least respected the written word, and knew writers, poets, journalists were a part of the fabric of commerce, of culture. My mistake was that I had praised him too highly in op-ed pieces in La Sirena and La Trompeta. Pávez was a man strong enough for dissent, though he and I did not agree on routes for the common man’s empowerment. I praised the arts, and education, and while he supported them, his focus was on industry and the collective power of men unified against the interests of the wealthy. Now, in the remove of years, I know how this drew the attention of Nixon, and even worse, Kissinger, and their minions, their money, their influence. The whiff of Communism distasteful to them. Their noxious pressure moved in vast, invisible arteries in the atmosphere. They plotted to overthrow my homeland.
And they were always going to come for me.
Because I open doors without knowing why.
I open doors without understanding the possible consequences.
My publisher had just paid me for my last book, and I had taken a house for the summer in Santo Isodoro on the southern Magera coast, near Chile, in a small fishing village called Nazaré near a little river of the same name. November to April, through the temperate summer months. I was to write my novel, the one I had been planning. The great novel of Avendaño! Oxblood prose, steaming in the night air! My Argentinian publisher was excited. My lover was happy, if lonely for the company of other students, adrift without the firebrands to whom she preached Marxism and the Gospel of Guevara.
It was heady . . . but for me, the words would not come.
The distractions were too easy, or too intriguing, to pass up. When Ángel Ilabaca, my predecessor as the chair of history and literature at the Universidad Católica de Santaverde, died unexpectedly—and since he considered me his protégé—he left me the lion’s share of his books, many of which were rare and very old. His widow brought them to me in Santaverde, crying. I took them solemnly, promising to uphold his legacy. She did not know what to do, telling me if I found something valuable, to please bring it to her children. I said I would.
The boxes of books came with me south, to the shore, and at night I found myself preoccupied with reading and indexing their contents, instead of writing. During the days, Alejandra and I would sleep in, eat sardines and drink the rich, dry Argentinian wines and smoke the reefer we had bought in Santaverde before our three-day drive south.
And then I’d read.
“He loved Neruda,” Alejandra said, the second night in Nazaré. She flipped through a box of books.
“Who does not?” I said. “He is a treasure and the father of us all.”
She shrugged, sniffing. “He’s an imperialist puppet.”
I said, “There has never been a greater voice for South America!”
“For Chile, maybe. But not for everyone.”
She closed the box, and moved to sit by me, relighting the joint we had partially smoked earlier. Living with Alejandra was like living with a big cat—loving and playful one moment, biting and clawing the next. She handed the joint to me and I inhaled the smoke, holding it in as long as I was able. She pulled a book from the box I was rummaging through. “Tomás Lago.” She flipped it open, riffling through the pages. She tossed it aside and withdrew another. “Nicanor Parra. I have always loved him.” Also tossed aside. “The Magus. Dune. Cosmicomics. The Cherry Orchard. The Death of Artemio Cruz.” Each book tossed on top of a growing pile. “Odd. This one is unmarked, as is this.” She flipped the first open, wrinkling her nose at the smell of mold. “I can’t even read this shit. The Lesser Key? What nonsense.” She took up the other volume, holding it as she might an occupied rat trap. She opened it with a look of pure disgust on her face. “Something something, Eibon,” she said. She tossed it on top of all the others and wiped her hands on her thighs. “It’s a whole lot of rotting wood pulp.”
“Look at this,” I said, withdrawing a thick leather-bound portfolio.
Opening it caused Alejandra to snicker. “Now we get to the good stuff.”
Pornographic photography, developed in a home darkroom, judging by the irregular sizes of the prints. Black and white. Men fucking women, women fucking women, men fucking men. The letting of blood. The consumption of bodily fluids. Buggery, sodomy: men and women going back and forth between god and the devil. A long series of photographs featuring a hermaphrodite fornicating with all sorts. Aesthetically, all of the photographs were poor examples of composition and lighting, except for those prints that focused on sexual organs or seed spilled on face, chest. Judging by their wear, most of the photos had been well-loved, and pored over.
Alejandra placed her hand on my crotch.
“Your reputation precedes you,” Alejandra said, rubbing. “This must be why he left you his books.”
“Most likely,” I said. “He knew I could be relied upon to not be outraged. Or make any noise about it at the university.”
“Maybe a little noise,” Alejandra said, her mouth close to my ear.
“Look at this,” I said, holding up a photo.
“It’s a picture of what?” she said. “A book? That’s hardly stimulating.”
“A manuscript, I think. Many pages,” I said, shuffling through the photos. There were fifteen to twenty photos, roughly eight by ten inches, each featuring a relatively well-lit manuscript. The mottled appearance of the paper or vellum seemed to indicate a great age. “Written in Latin and Greek. Why would he hide them within a trove of pornography?”
“He either wanted them found desperately, or never found at all,” Alejandra said, her hand insistent. “I prefer the fucking.”
After our lovemaking, later that night, I drank wine and examined the photos of the manuscript without distraction. In a pocket of the leather portfolio, a sheaf of typewritten pages contained Ángel Ilabaca’s beginning passes of a translation of the manuscript. Notes on Latin words, their definitions. Like me, he possessed no Greek, though I found in his notes references to three scholars that could assist in translation to Spanish.
Ángel’s work was hastily begun and shoddily pursued and followed for only a short time judging by the dearth of research. I went to find my spectacles and returned to the photographs. Holding them near the glossy surface of the first image, the glasses functioned as a makeshift magnifying glass. I began copying the Latin for translation later, working late into the night. When my eyes finally grew so weak as to become blurry, I joined Alejandra in our bed, the sound of the Atlantic a soft hush beyond the stucco walls.
It was days before I
had taken down all of the original text and once that was complete, it felt extraordinarily good to begin typing my handwritten copy on the Underwood. From there I would begin a translation. It had been many years since my youth, when the abuses of the Catholic clergy were fresh, as were their lessons: where the streets of Rome and antiquity seemed immediate; the declensions of verbs sprang easily to mind. Once as a young man in a single fevered summer, I had translated Ovid’s Metamorphoses to Spanish, whole. It was my first attempt at verse, listening to a ghost’s echoes from millennia before.
Other creatures crawl the earth on all fours, looking downward, only Man lifts his head, majestic, and raises his eyes to the sky and the bright stars above.
But I am Avendaño! I am an inveterate poet, drawn to the mystery of language. I would never be content to remain simply a translator of verse. I would become a master of it. I would storm heaven and supplant Ovid himself.
I was precocious and so very young.
That was then. Now the novel did not budge and this manuscript gave me some satisfaction. Of progress. I was a vehicle mired along a muddy track, taking a different road for progress’s sake. I ignored what Ilabaca had written and started anew, something wholly my own. From everything I could tell from his notes and the photographs the manuscript was titled Opusculus Noctis, which I translated into Spanish as A Little Night Work.
When I puzzled it out, I laughed, reminded of “Eine kleine Nachtmusik.”
I do not know what the mental block was that made me focus on this rather than my novel, but I would have gotten in far less trouble in my life if I understood exactly what drove me toward action and inaction. I am a mystery, even to myself.
Weeks passed. I spent the nights in the study, nose down, and the days either sleeping or drinking. Alejandra became short.
“You’re manic,” she said. “And smell terrible. Let’s visit Buenos Aires. Or Rivadavia. Someplace with a nightclub and a restaurant. I’ve grown tired of cooking for you.” It was early evening, when the shadows began to lengthen toward the sea. She stood in the study door, light behind her, so I could see the outline of her body in her peasant’s dress, but not her face.
“I’m sure you can take any lover you might wish,” I said, gesturing to the door. “Even one who knows how to cook.”
“I can find another man, very easily.” She cursed then, quite eloquently. “All you do is stare at those photos and that manuscript and drink yourself to death. I worry about your liver.”
“Every night it is torn from me, and every morning when I wake it is renewed, whole once more,” I said. Ovid must have been weighing on me.
Alejandra and I fought, and fucked, and fought again. She became unhappier, and it was only when her sister came to visit that her demeanor changed. They packed her things into a Volkswagen and drove north to Comodoro Rivadavia and left me with my pursuits. I was not sorry to see them go. I drank too much rum and scotch and wine and ate too many tortillas and cheese and lamb dripping with fat, packing on weight, a Lord Byron at the shore. I did not sleep well, despite the ocean only paces from my back door. When slumber totally eluded me, I would go down to the waves and wade in, head full of desperate and dark images, hoping the old cure, salt and foam, would wash away my shadow. But the thoughts remained.
Sometimes I felt abandoned on a vast, starless shore, waiting for the seas to rise up, or the sky to crack and distend, spilling forth the heavens to drown the world. I heard whispers at night, even when the house was empty. The weather changed. We were far south. For two weeks, bright autumn days became dark and stormy. I bought another woolen sweater, long johns to wear beneath my trousers. Still, I would swim in the sea, searching for the old cure. And fretted at the translation like a terrier with some dead thing he’s found in the forest.
The more I read, the more I translated A Little Night Work, the more restless I became. I’d walk to the village and drink beer with the fishermen, home from the sea. The old men in the cervecería would discuss the weather, and the size of the swells of the ocean as if they were the breasts of a woman—the size of them! Their great bounty! It’s a thin, wind-scraped land, Santo Isodoro, with no real trees or growth until you travel miles inland, and this lack of biologic diversity is mirrored in the people. But they were attuned to the wind, and weather. The fishermen would say when the sky turned dark, “el mar sueña que es el cielo.” The sea dreams it is the sky. And I immediately decided it would be the title of the novel I was most obviously not writing.
My days were filled with puzzling out sections of A Little Night Work. I kept returning to the photographs. The challenges the endeavor offered sparked in me a dogged and inexorable determination. My vision became clear in my mind and I thought the vision might meet the execution, if I was diligent.
I wanted the translation to illuminate and expand upon the illustrations that sometimes felt like macabre cyphers. There was a man on a field with thirty coins and men with faces like wolves around a corpse where a crowned man wielding a sword climbed out of the body cavity. There was the figure of a man with his hand chopped off, and a great serpent made from a great conglomeration of human body parts, possessed of gleaming and intelligent eyes. All of the illustrations were executed in a rough, primitive style—but so very expressive!—that seemed like something from a stone wall at Lascaux, rather than an illustration on yellowed vellum. At night, in dreams, I could see myself holding the true object in my hand—the manuscript of A Little Night Work—and turning the pages. The fecund smell of the paper, blooming in my nostrils. Eyes swimming with images drawn by a malevolent but genius child. Each photo, crooked Latin crowded around horrors in dark skeins. I ignored the Greek, the scribbles, the spatters of ink and intaglios of an unsteady hand. I pored over the drawings: a bird splayed open, suspended in the sky, swimming in what looked like leeches; a corpse rising from the earth, hollow-eyed, pointing an accusing finger at a small house on a mountain; a woman wearing a crown looking upon an infant’s desiccated corpse in a bassinet, a phial in her hand; a group of soldiers with spears; a black cloud with a wicked animalistic tail hanging above their heads. Brutalist cave paintings. Yet how close the translation came to poetry. I half fancied myself taking the passages and publishing them as The Sea Dreams It Is the Sky, my novel abandoned once and for all. This idea became firm in my mind. I began my real work, then. How to not just translate this from Latin, but elevate the ancient words to art?
I gave myself the answer: through pride. Through ego. Night Work would become art by passing through the portal that is the poet. Me. And my genius would transform it. I burned then, I became incensed and electric.
The photos became words. The words became poems. The poems became frameworks for elements of my soul. “The Revenant” and “The Severed Hand” were followed by “Reckonings and the Elements of Reclamation.” Through me the Latin scrawls became a window into the human experience.
One passage—the passage nearest the many soldiers and the wicked-tailed cloud—became a poem called “On the Miasma of Soldiers and the Beacon of Cruelty.” It went:
The soldiers come, without knowing,
bearing the mantle of the unnamed:
the vast prodigals, destroyers of heaven
and from their spear tips to sword hafts—
from their ill intentions to their cruel thoughts—
a rich smell rises.
Blood calls to blood,
bad calls to bad,
and through pain and sacrifice,
we draw the gaze of hidden eyes,
of titanic movements beyond the stars.
It is a lure, a sweet aroma,
the killing and
the letting of blood.
The pain becomes an offering
and sacrifice becomes a beacon.
The beacon becomes a door.
It was not half bad. I would clean it up, fix the repetitions, clarify the muddy thoughts, and make it more applicable to the Mageran spirit. My focus would be
on it, solely. The novel was, by then, totally forgotten. I was energized and excited for the future and what my new book of poetry would become.
Except that I had bad dreams.
Alejandra returned from Rivadavia, bid farewell to her sister Ofelia, and convinced me to put work aside. Now that I had some progress, I could breathe once more. We resumed our endless cycle of fighting and fevered lovemaking. I took her out on Perón’s skiff and down long walks on the beach. An old fisherman at the cervecería whom everyone called Ballo invited us to a festive New Year’s beach asado, where many of the young and old people of the town would be gathered for drink and dancing. We happily joined.
Alejandra and I held hands near the fire where musicians strummed guitars. Laughing men filled our cups with wine. The sun set, the burning wood sent sparks swimming upward, to the heavens. Torches and lanterns were lit and hung from poles. Young men and women laughed and kissed in the flickering yellow light. No one else acted surprised when Ballo casually led a sow forward, placed a pistol to its head, and fired. The pig thrummed and pitched over. The music stopped and all of the partygoers gave a great cry in exultation. Men and women rushed in, grabbing feet and rearranging the stiff-legged body of the animal.
“It will take more than a popgun to kill her,” Ballo said to me, his grin showing great gaps in his teeth. The light from the torches and the bonfire, at such an inferior angle, shadowed the whole revelrous crowd’s features in a Hellish cast. Ballo’s mouth seemed black, his eyes pools of oil, and his smile, absolutely ravenous. “But thank Mary the Mother, no squealing.” From nowhere, he withdrew a knife and, hands digging into the jowls, cut the sow’s throat. Impossibly red gouts of blood rushed from the wound and nut-brown local women collected the blood in a tin. Ballo began singing “Noches de Luna” as they raised the sow and tossed her body onto the fire to char for a few moments, and then dragged it off once more to scrape it with battens, removing all of the bristles. Afterward, Ballo’s real knifework began. Viscera spilled in blue-white coils and were placed in a large wooden bucket to be cleaned in the surf. Ballo took the liver, the stomach, the heart. The lungs, no one wanted—they looked like a drowned pink bird—and he waded out into the sea, lungs in one hand and knife in the other, backlit by moonlight shattered on the ocean’s wave, and tossed them as far as he could, washing his bloody arms and knife afterward in saltwater.
The Sea Dreams It Is the Sky Page 3