Guerra had disguised himself as a cabinet-maker living in Indonesia. He claimed to be a connoisseur of Venezuelan art forced to retreat to a more stable market by the country’s political troubles. He collected ivory virgins, blood-drenched figures of Christ and giltwood depictions of heaven, but his real weakness was for processional statues.
Octavio said nothing. Guerra held out his hand to seal the deal, and Temístocles felt a sudden surge of friendship towards him.
‘I’m amazed you came such a long way for a simple wooden statue, Señor Paz. Jakarta, was it?’
‘It’s where my business interests are,’ he replied completely naturally. ‘You see, I’m sentimental enough to be rather attached to this statue. It reminds me that wherever we are in the world, we Venezuelans remain the children of myth.’
‘Of myth?’
The side room was minuscule; their mouths were practically touching. Pointing at the damage from the accident, he explained: ‘Yes, of myth, absolutely. Every people has its original wound: ours is the collapse of our history. In order to rebuild it, we’ve had to turn to myth. More or less what happened to the Greeks too, I might add.’
‘I’m an architect,’ Temístocles replied, enjoying the exchange. ‘I don’t know much about the Pyramids.’
Guerra smiled and made to leave, but the architect, reluctant to let the conversation drop, was moving on to more general reflections on Antiquity. Determined to continue the discussion, he raised his game, opening the conversation out to encompass how stone was formed and the likely age of civilisation.
‘You’re an architect,’ Guerra cut in. ‘You know perfectly well that the Pyramids weren’t built by us. Our kings didn’t create states. Our princes didn’t build walls. Historically, Venezuela has merely been a country for empires to pass through. A “por ahora” country, a country for the time being. Colonial structures, government buildings, military academies: none of them were built for the future, none carry any memory of the past. It was all put up por ahora … The conquistadors moved in por ahora before carrying on down to Potosí where the richest mines were … stopping by por ahora before founding the viceroyalties of Colombia … before opening up the countryside to the multinationals.’
Temístocles Jerez showed his assent with ‘exactly’ and ‘that’s right’, captivated by the political turn the discussion was taking.
‘Nothing has ever been properly finished,’ Guerra went on. ‘This is a bivouac country. I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know. Didn’t you just destroy a church? So of course we had to turn to myth, make up a story instead of a history. And what’s come of it?’
‘Theatre!’ cried Temístocles.
He followed his remark with a throaty laugh that echoed off the vaulted ceiling. Guerra merely smiled.
‘No, Señor Jerez. What has come of it is this.’
He pointed to the statue.
‘That’s our pyramid. That’s our Greeks. No regime, no occupation, no show of riches can take it from us. When we carry that statue, we carry the earth itself.’
On the architect’s orders, Octavio took the Nazarene to the back of a pick-up truck that Guerra had parked outside the church. Its head stuck out above the cabin. He attached the arms, stood it on its stand and rolled up the purple mantle to protect it from the building dust. The truck drove off. For the last time, Octavio glimpsed the outline of the saint through the exhaust fumes. Tall and sturdy with a strong back and thick hands, it left the theatre bound and gagged like a pig in a pushcart, feet scraping against the wheels as it was dragged through the middle of a faithless age.
XVII
When the struts and scaffolds began to come down at the beginning of August, for the first time the dazzling new theatre was revealed to everyone. Perhaps some who saw it understood the building’s historic importance. A government delegation came to see how work was progressing. Temístocles Jerez proudly showed off the roof renovations and the new flooring in the passageways backstage.
The stage itself had been fitted with a mechanism which, like the capstan of a ship, could make the wings retract and be replaced with others. There was a removable white screen at the back for film showings. The tiles in the entrance area had been replaced with a marble floor leading to a set of three steps. The cross-shaped transept had become the auditorium, with seats arranged in a horseshoe and little red and gold stucco decorations on the pillars. All the doors were self-closing. The ceiling was covered in dried teak and the discreet and respectful soundproofing diminished vocal sounds only to make them go further. Temístocles explained with false modesty that he had given the whole theatre an ‘intimate feel’, stage and auditorium both sharing a Franciscan sobriety.
‘Of course it’s closer to art than architecture,’ he concluded.
The delegation inspected every detail. The leader of the group complimented Temístocles and, remembering the burglars, made a few comments about vandalism. He claimed to be a lover of buildings, a proponent of progress, a man of ideals, and declared he would have thrown himself into the study of the art of buildings if politics, duty, affairs of state, that whole other architecture had not, alas, taken him along a different path. They broached the subject of the grand opening and, without naming a date, Temístocles assured them that the work would be finished on time.
The only person unable to celebrate this new page in the nation’s history was Don Octavio. Hidden away in silent, devoted solitude, he was busily screwing together upturned maplechairs. Sitting cross-legged like a hermit in his shack, with a long beard and hair down to his shoulders, he was writing history in his own way. His body was covered in marks, formed one by one like the letters of a story. Writing was expressed in his heart by varnish and acid, paint and wood, gold and lead. He sanded, scrubbed, carved out space, created a new grammar. A watering can made his rivers, a golden frame his mountains. He recorded light with an eyeglass and loupe.
Yet his arm became stiff. When he tried to stretch it out, it no longer extended fully. The handkerchief tied around it began to come loose, and he gently undid it.
One by one, shreds of cloth fell in ribbons onto the floor, landing among the sawdust and straw from chair seats. No blood, no scars, no scab. The fabric was clean and there was no sign of injury to his arm. But when he held it up to the light, Octavio saw that a layer of grey bark both bound and unbound its own skin to his.
The wood looked like alder, very dry, not resinous. A dense, almost brown cluster of thick, finely grooved layers that became more supple at the elbow to allow it to bend. The wrist was tattooed with knots. The arm sounded hollow when Octavio knocked on it, so he leant it on the table, picked up a handsaw and cut into his palm. At his core was solid wood. Gone were the bones, muscles and veins: autumn lay inside him.
Not wishing to be seen, he no longer left the side room. He came alive at night, fasting during the day and roaming the empty theatre during the evening, nibbling discarded crusts of bread. Outside, workdays were easy now, spent drinking beer and playing dominoes; idleness reigned. Soon the labourers were replaced by skilled workers, and there were no more men in blue overalls. Standing in the shadows, Octavio heard the directors’ discussions in their offices, the swish of the actresses’ costumes, the footsteps of guards on patrol. The fabric of the building was changing around him, too.
Within two days, the wood had gone beyond the elbow and had almost reached the shoulder. Its surface was so smooth that he used a chamois cloth soaked with linseed oil to polish himself. He dusted his four fingers with a brush and groomed himself with white vinegar. He found candle wax too gritty and used soapy water instead. Rather than sand himself, he buffed himself with a toothbrush. There he was, bent over, his ablutions now akin to the work of an antiquarian, as if cleaning a relic. After a week, there was ivy creeping from his feet to his knees and he realised he was growing like a tree that sprouts on a hill or in the middle of a building site, fading in the same spot where it took root.
; Temístocles Jerez had agreed to let him stay at the theatre until the day after the official opening.
‘After that, you’ll need to find somewhere else,’ he had told him amicably. ‘You can’t sleep here any more.’
Octavio had hidden, still, in the darkness. He smelt the musty odour he now gave off. His sweat, his breath, everything was covered in dust. Like the effigy of a forgotten world, all that was left of him was a smell of plaster and light.
*
The sky cleared on the morning of the opening day, but by the afternoon it had clouded over again.
Watching through the little window at ground level in the side room, Octavio saw the procession arrive with ministers, heads of institutions and the official press at the front. Next came, in order of importance, general secretaries, a few public figures and, in the middle of this phalanx, the mayor, dressed in red with a military helmet on his head. And finally, bringing up the rear, were the plodding ranks of the masses, the inhabitants of San Pablo del Limón.
Having taken his place in the dress circle, the minister began heaping compliments upon the architect. He wished to know the subject of the play. Someone referred to it as a bedroom farce, to much laughter.
They talked of the age of the governor Don Manuel González Torres de Navarro and the first theatres in the city, when Caracas was represented with a book in her hand and a lion at her feet. The mayor told a story about Baron von Humboldt, who had come to study satellites and discovered stars in Venezuelan melodramas that he had failed to spot in the sky. Someone else brought up the 1812 earthquake. They all agreed that theatre was the only thing that could survive natural disaster and colonisation.
When the curtain went up, everyone fell silent.
The play began in the port of La Guaira, on 20 August 1908, when a ship from Trinidad dropped anchor off the Venezuelan coast, unaware that it was offloading a plague which would trouble the country for half a century.
Beneath the roof of the new theatre, the company acted out a ferocious epidemic. With great commotion, a gang of sailors appeared on stage, and twisted columns and side panels were mechanically manoeuvred into place. Women in crinolines surrounded men in suits. The whole auditorium was filled with the smell of orchids. Beneath a row of streamers attached to the balconies, four musicians played a tragic Joropo. When the cardboard lemon tree arrived on stage, it was met with applause.
Temístocles went to find Octavio in the side room. Finding it empty, he searched the whole theatre, looking down all the corridors and everywhere backstage. The costume designer told him he was by the box office. At the box office, they said they had seen him in the wings. But as he made his way behind the stage, Temístocles saw in the footlights four men lifting the statue of the Nazarene of St Paul, sparkling with its legends.
The statue was carried in a procession across the stage, right to the edge of the orchestra pit. At that moment, the orchids, the songs, the lemon tree, everything the tired century had forgotten seemed to come back to life. The people were not celebrating a victory or anointing a king. Today, they were celebrating the birth of a city, a story not found in any book but built on tradition, whose invisible actors are worthy of honour.
Temístocles Jerez gave up his search. Perhaps he alone understood that beneath the wood of the statue, Octavio’s heart continued to beat.
About the Author
Miguel Bonnefoy was born in France in 1986 to a Venezuelan mother and a Chilean father. Octavio’s Journey is his first novel. It has won several awards and was shortlisted for the Prix des Cinq Continents and the Goncourt First Novel Award.
Emily Boyce is in-house translator and editor at Gallic Books.
Copyright
First published in France as Le Voyage d’Octavio
by Éditions Payot & Rivages
Copyright © Éditions Payot & Rivages, 2015
First published in Great Britain in 2017
by Gallic Books, 59 Ebury Street,
London, SW1W 0NZ
This ebook edition first published in 2017
All rights reserved
© Gallic Books, 2017
The right of Miguel Bonnefoy to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
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