One Saturday, after penning up the sheep, the shepherd saw that his boss was waiting for him outside the barn with a huge smile on his face and a letter in his hand. Tuone returned his smile, bowed his head, and tried to avoid him to go running back to his cave: rich people’s happiness had never brought good news to the island of Veglia. The owner caught up with him, took him by the arm, and showed him the letter, patting him on the back. It was hard for Tuone to believe that the letter was for him—he’d never received one before—much less that the professor was going to return and take him back with him to Italy. The idea that they had already set up a room for him inside the Museum of Archaeology in Rome was beyond belief. His boss didn’t tire of repeating the idea—although he knew that it would never get through to his servant—that of all the inhabitants of the Dalmatian archipelago, it was none other than Tuone Udina who was going to spend the rest of his days living in a palace. After letting the shepherd go on his way, he went into the farmhouse and wrote a reply, saying that they had received the news with pleasure, and that they would be happy to accept some reasonable compensation for losing their most loyal worker. He took care to add that, if it had not been for his father’s charity, the Dalmatian language would have become extinct during the internecine war of 1878.
For some time, Tuone continued to follow the routine of his shepherd’s life. Restricted by the vegetative condition of his fingers, he stayed in his cave until after the sun rose. When he summoned the energy to go and take out the sheep, the dizzying possibility of abandoning the island left him stuck on his rock, even in the scorching midday heat. By the week of the professor’s expected return he’d gathered the courage necessary to make his departure. Then, for the first time in twenty years, he decided to take a day off work. If he was going on a trip, it would be best that he cross over to Rijeka and buy himself some new army boots like the ones he’d seen his visitor wearing.
He dug up his lire, then left the cave and the woods along the little-used path that led directly to the coast. Passing by his rock, he crossed the sheep’s favorite valley. When he reached the promontory from which the coastline was visible, he saw in the distance that the stevedores were already loading the first ferry of the day. The prospect of waiting until the second trip, at midafternoon, without anything to do, impelled him to save the time it would take to go through the coves by cutting across the mountain along the cliff. He was certain that he was going to reach the dock on time when, crossing one of the fields that crowned the heights, he felt the earth give way beneath his feet. It took him a moment to realize that he had slipped into a hole. He couldn’t hear the sharp click of the detonator that was activated the moment he touched bottom.
ON THE DEATH OF THE AUTHOR
Your face is inscribed in my soul.
And how much I long to write of you.
GARCILASO DE LA VEGA
Some stories are, seemingly, impossible to tell. It must be at least ten years since I took a trip through California, and since then I’ve been trying to write, without the least success, the story of a particular grand finale: it’s the story of Ishi, a Yahi Indian who was discovered in his aboriginal condition in the remote ranching town of Oroville in August 1910.
I’d always wanted to take a trip that would begin in Cabo San Lucas, the southernmost point of the Californias, and wind up in whatever was its northernmost city, which turned out to be Oroville. On that trip, as I imagined it, my ex-wife and I would drive from south to north as if navigating some beat poet’s dream, and we would see amazing things, stop in impossibly sinister places, and talk to some free-spirited—and frankly bizarre—characters.
Unfortunately, things didn’t turn out that way. First, our trip by car through most of California began at the halfway mark—at the Los Angeles airport. Second, we weren’t cruising in a black Cadillac loaded with a stash of drugs, each more powerful than the last—instead we were driving an especially hellish minivan, in the not ungrateful, and hardly unbearable, company of my wife’s two grandmothers.
Although the diary of our trip doesn’t offer much in the way of literary fodder, it had its interesting moments, for example when we showed the grandmothers how to nullify some spicy chili peppers at a Chinese restaurant by dipping the tips in salt, or when one of them read a book of Ferlinghetti’s poems that I’d brought along to feel like a true beat, and said that she liked them. We also saw a photo exhibit about Ishi at the University Museum at Cal Berkeley.
The story of the last Indian in the United States living in a pure, untainted condition shouldn’t be a difficult one to tell, nor would it seem to conceal any unavoidable pitfalls for anyone ardently devoted to relating certain things while meaning others. But there’s something in the tale—or inside me—that makes it elusive: I’ve tried the pastiche technique, direct narration, diary entries, epistolary form, even the dreaded stream of consciousness, but the whole thing keeps slipping through my fingers like a fistful of marbles.
The facts are simple and transparent: early one morning, a group of workers found a man collapsed on the doorstep of a slaughterhouse, dying from starvation and exhaustion. They carried him inside the building and gave him water. Then they noticed that he was a wild Indian, something that made no sense, under the circumstances, but which their parents and grandparents had taught them to identify as an enemy. They tied his hands and feet—as if he were really capable of escaping—and sent for the sheriff.
The officer in question, perhaps the last Wild West cowboy still working for the government in that part of the United States, threw the Indian over the back of his horse, just as he was, and took him to jail, not because he wanted to make him suffer but because he didn’t know what else to do with him—at least that’s what he told the press. For the record, it seems that he dressed Ishi in his own clothes, and fed him food that his wife cooked especially so that the Indian wouldn’t die of hunger before he was turned over to the army, which was what the sheriff figured he was bound to do with him.
By midday, the news of the discovery had sped like a burning fuse through the whole area, so that a memorably tumultuous crowd gathered at the jail for a glimpse of the last savage in the United States. Among those that filed past his cell was a San Francisco newspaper correspondent, who dispatched a feverish wire describing the sheriff’s highly extraordinary negotiations between his own impassioned citizens—still nursing wounds from the long-ended Indian wars in that region—and the various owners of vaudeville shows that wanted to buy the Indian and add him to their slate of attractions.
Luckily for Ishi, who would’ve died had the sheriff been less honest or the army faster in coming to seize him and drag him off to a reservation, the story in the San Francisco newspaper was read by a professor. When the man noticed that nobody could understand the Indian’s language, he deduced that Ishi must be a speaker of Yana, a supposedly extinct language for which a friend of his was compiling a glossary.
The professor caught the first train to Oroville and, armed with his colleague’s notes about the Yahis’ language, went and rescued Ishi. Once back in San Francisco, he realized that, while saving the Indian, he hadn’t considered the problem of where to lodge him. So, although his own brand of logic seems even crazier than either Ishi’s or the sheriff’s, he obeyed what it whispered in his ear and brought him to the Museum of Anthropology.
In the days following these events, there was some discussion about what to do with Ishi, but finally everyone agreed that the best place for the last surviving aborigine in the United States was, ultimately, a museum. Ishi spent the rest of his life there, much more comfortable and seemingly more satisfied than if he had been out in the woods. At first he lived in the guest rooms, then in the staff quarters, and at last in the sunniest of the exhibition rooms. There they set up a bed for him so that he could die from tuberculosis in peace and comfort three years after surrendering to white people.
It’s probably true that this story’s power is located simply in the ev
ents themselves; trying to articulate its meaning always ends up making it seem like cheap sentiment, or, worse yet, a parable of virtuous political intentions; the lowest sort of affectation, guaranteed. To spin metaphors out of a story that means something on its own terms is like being in love with love: however powerful it might seem at first, it always turns out badly.
Whichever way you want to read it, the story of the man who earned his living as a museum piece always seemed fascinating and revealing to me, mostly due to the fact that, despite everything, despite all the good and seemingly honest friends he made among the community of doctors and anthropologists who studied him, the Indian never wanted to tell them his real name. Until the last day of his life he always asked them to call him Ishi, which in Yana means “Man”: apparently, when one is the last surviving example of something, the name of the species suffices.
I’m increasingly convinced that the problem with Ishi’s story is one of literalness: it means what it means and not what I want it to mean.
Three years ago, when I was still living in Washington, D.C. and had just turned thirty, I decided to take a Sunday off from the hellish move I was making to Boston, where I now live. It’s not that I was nostalgic, exactly, about quitting the nation’s capital; I’d spent some good years there but the last ones had been pretty depressing. I simply felt like saying good-bye to the city where I’d finished growing up, in which my ex-wife and children were going to stay with the vague promise that the four of us would live together again once our jobs permitted it, and that this time things would work out. During a pathetic evening out on the town—a sham of everything that we’d lost—we went to have dinner at our favorite restaurant and afterward to a place with a patio and French pretensions, which at that time served the best coffee in D.C.
We were eating cheesecake for dessert, each of us concentrating on playing our assigned role, when along came a redhead, striding between the tables with the self-assurance of an avenging angel. She was wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the word Redhead. When I saw her, I felt sure that such literalness could infect the world with the same type of metaphysical disequilibrium that dominates some novels by Eça de Queiroz: each time that redhead puts on that T-shirt which says Redhead, I told my ex-wife, an Indian in Mexico dies. I think she got my joke, or got it well enough, because on the last trip I made to Mexico, I’d brought back a T-shirt as a gag gift, which read: Eres un pendejo, “You’re an idiot.” Below that, in parentheses: (You are my friend).
Of course, I don’t really believe that a Mexican Indian dies each time the redhead wears her Redhead T-shirt, but it does seem to me that such literalness can end up being noxious, although I’m not quite sure for what.
Or maybe I do: noxious for oneself. I know from experience that the literal can be really bad luck. Not long after having made such a snide remark about that idiot (friend) in the T-shirt in that D.C. café, I went to give a series of readings in Berlin. I’ve suffered some memorable disasters thanks to these types of event: for one reason or another, some kind of weirdo always decides to attend the talk you’re giving, no matter how boring or unbearable the topic. If fame is what you’re after, reading a story or an excerpt from a novel in public is usually a lesson in why one shouldn’t be a writer.
Berlin consisted of three public appearances. The first was a roundtable on some of those open-vein themes that help Europeans and gringos of good conscience feel really fine about themselves but which make us Latin Americans who are invited to participate feel more like artifacts on display in a compassion museum. There were also two proper literary readings: one was in a theater, with something of an actual audience—it was free, it was raining, and there was wine—and the other was in a café that seemed like it must have been highly fashionable when East Berlin was still communist. The café was called Einstein, to which was added the strange qualifier Under the Lindens.
The name of the place stood out to me the first time I read it listed on my schedule of appearances in the German capital, but it left me with a sense of deep foreboding when, the next morning, while practicing the worst kind of tourism in the neighborhood around the Brandenburg Gate, I found myself right in front of the place. It turned out that its strange “subtitle” came from its indeed being located on a street—similar to La Rambla in Barcelona—called Unter den Linden precisely because it runs beneath some linden trees.
I was born in a city, Mexico City, where there’s an overgrown forest without any wild animals called “Desert of the Lions”; for this reason, the Adamic Teuton imagination, so very humorless, gave me the chills. My nephew, whose name is Jorge Arrieta, summed it up with all the crystal clarity of his eight years during an argument with one of my kids. It was last August and the three of us had gone to my parents’ house for a vacation that turned out to be so unpleasant we had to cut it short: That game, he spat, is about as much fun as playing Call Yourself Jorge Arrieta.
In any event, in that café called Einstein Under the Lindens I had the worst experience that one can have in such cases: it wasn’t a totally empty house; exactly two ticket holders showed up, so that the moderator, the translator, the actor who was going to read my story in German, and I all crowded round a table at the front of an auditorium that felt like the loneliest ship on the seas, inhabited as it was by only a young woman and her mother. Not only did we still have to read, we did the whole roundtable routine—complete with simultaneous translations—because the two women had paid, and in a city where a street that runs under linden trees is called “Under the Lindens,” you deliver the fifty-minute show that you promised.
Ishi never lacked for a public: four days a week he gave a presentation in the reception hall of the museum during which he sang some ritual song, kindled a fire by rubbing two sticks together, and showed the visitors how to fashion bows and arrows with materials brought from the canyons near Oroville. These things were delivered to him there in the museum—despite the anthropologists’ insistence, he didn’t want to return to his homeland. Two other days of the week he spent dusting and mopping all the rooms in the museum, except for one of them containing an exhibit of mummies and funeral offerings that Ishi always refused to enter. On Mondays he would usually head out early to take the streetcar down to the sea.
It wasn’t until the last summer of his life that he agreed, with great reluctance, and perhaps because he felt that he had little time left, to return to the canyons: in August of 1913 he went with his doctor and the museum director to recreate the life in the wild that he had led until the moment he’d surrendered at the slaughterhouse. The three of them spent several wonderful days living naked in the outdoors, eating whatever they could hunt in the forest.
The original idea was to stay there for a whole month, but Ishi insisted that they return to San Francisco; each time that they tried to convince him otherwise, he made it clear that he preferred the comfort of the museum over returning to live in the wilderness. Apparently, it never occurred to anyone to consider that returning to the forest might be depressing for the Indian. During what the doctor calculated to have been his first thirty-three years of life, Ishi hadn’t exactly been living in a rose garden.
The Yahi tribe was the last in the United States to be subjugated: unlike in the cases of the Apache or the Lakota, there was no formal surrender process because the Yahi were exterminated with singular viciousness: if the federal troops discovered them before the bands of trackers that set out from Oroville, they would take them to a reservation, but no white person from the area seemed to consider that punishment enough.
Ishi survived because he had the unheard of luck of not being present during either one of his tribe’s two fatal encounters with the enemy. In the first, the Indian hunters—relatively civilized family men when they were not scouring the hills—happened one afternoon upon the last remaining Yahi camp in the canyons. The tribe had already been devastated by five years of war and persecution—and the hunters waited patiently for daybreak to be able to
fire on them from the hilltops. Ishi had gone to the forest with his grandmother who, it seems, was the tribe’s shaman, and they had spent the night there so the evening dew might bless the roots they had gathered. Upon returning, they found the camp destroyed. It took them some time to locate the rest of the tribe, who were left almost without any men: the women and the children had taken cover in the gullies while the braves sacrificed themselves to the ranchers’ gunfire. From their refuge in the mountains, the surviving Yahis went foraging and hunting by night.
One day, a band of white men, aware that some of the enemy had escaped them, found a trail of deer blood under the trees—which in all likelihood were lindens. They followed it and had no problem discovering the Yahis’ hiding place. According to a superbly written account by one of the hunters, the situation was ideal: having occupied the mouth of a dead-end cave, none of the Indians was able to escape. In one of the tale’s most shocking passages, the California gentleman relates that at one point during the massacre he decided to use his revolver because it made for a cleaner job: babies, he quickly learned, explode when you shoot them with a rifle.
I only found out that part of Ishi’s story later on—a part that he never knew well, or never with the same detail I now know it—in a book of chronicles from the period at my university’s library. For his part, he simply returned with his mother and his sister from the creek and found that, for the second time, they had to start burying their dead. Although he never spoke directly about that day, he alluded more than once to the terrible task of having to bury all of his people.
By the time I read that account I’d already tried five or six times, without the least success, to write a story about Ishi, and it always turned out to be too political: deadly literal with all its meanings exposed, or not all of them but definitely those that interested me least. What seduces me about Ishi is not his tragic condition and how clearly that reflects the fact that the American continent is the booming utopia of a gang of criminals, but the unimaginable loneliness of one who knows himself to be the last of something, for which no hope remains.
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