Later Yoro did tell me who brought her first to the refugee camp in Goma after our daughter died, and then to the zoo, where she wasn’t just a tourist attraction, the giraffe woman—something she imagined and accepted. You probably remember, my love, how upset we were over what they did to Sandy, our orangutan in Borneo. Yoro’s conditions were similar. So you’ll understand what I’m going to do and you’ll approve. Luckily, Yoro had recovered her strength a few days later and could point out for me the blue-helmeted peacekeeper who tricked her into the cage.
But that’s a few days hence. She could hardly speak when we first met, and all she did was sob for the animals that had died in the final battle. We slept together in the cage that first night. Two women in a cage, with another cage that had a cricket inside. I remembered that ancient Chinese custom. The concubines used to sleep to the song of a cricket in a golden cage. I thought a giraffe woman’s neck rings were also made of gold. But Yoro had her neck set in tin, and the cricket’s cage was made out of little sticks. When you took me to Thailand, the people there said they raised crickets because this insect had an aggressive nature. Do you remember? They used them to fight so people could gamble on them. You gave me a losing cricket as a gift. Its leg was bitten and it couldn’t fight anymore. We kept its cage in the backpack. The first night the cricket sang. My love. The first few nights it sang, and when I heard it, I took Yoro’s hand in mine so as to sleep with the feeling of your embrace for the first time since you’d gone.
I have no idea where the words in this letter will go, but I know that finding Yoro isn’t the end of the journey, as we had thought. I couldn’t put the end in writing; it would be an unnecessary risk, taking into account that you can’t read it. You must know that the risk I’m referring to isn’t to Yoro, who is now being looked after by S, my faithful friend. The risk I’m referring to is that I destroy the ending I want for this story. But if everything comes together as planned and if you survived death and you’re there somewhere above, there’s a good chance I’ll be able to tell you all about it myself. I love life. But losing it is a possibility that grows plumper and plumper the farther I move forward on this journey. And you know I’ve never been good with diets.
SIR, YORO AND I WAITED a few minutes in a tiny hole beneath the barbed wire surrounding the refugee camp. You, of course, didn’t realize that. Yoro knew the place well because that’s how they passed food to her from the outside when she lived in the camp, without having to report it to the authorities. Once a week, around midnight, a whistle sounded, and together with five other refugees she would sneak through the hole to fetch the aid some stranger would pass through. I imagined the group of six in the middle of the night—like hungry cats, eagerly answering the call of a voice no matter whose it was. That anonymous charity seemed more appropriate for animals than people, I thought. We heard footsteps a few minutes later and remained in the hole, noiseless. My hand brushed against something hard, coarse; I thought the worst, a cold body, but it was only the root of a tree. I looked above me and didn’t see a trunk or a treetop, nothing. I remembered the legend of the baobab, the tree that was punished for being too beautiful, forced to grow downward, underground. There I was with Yoro, in the same stratum as the root of a tree condemned to the blindness of a hedgehog. The most beautiful things in this land never seem to rise above sea level; instead all of it—the moon and the stars, even the birds and the clouds—is underground, buried, and afraid. The dead man and the mountain climber are both underground. How is it possible that someone who in a show of determination, muscle, and the strokes of his pickax reaches the top of a peak, aiming there to find freedom, is never able to see beyond what a dead man sees? When was this continent, over which life runs, flies, and cries out in pleasure, buried so deep? It’s important for you to know these things that run through my mind before the end. It’s not that you’ll understand me any better because of it, but I want it to go on the record that I love life, because it’s what places me above you.
While we were waiting in that hole for the people standing close to us to move on, it started to rain. The drops were small, but it was a hard rain. The earth began soaking it up and my hand sunk in a little. I felt another part of the root. Suddenly I was very cold. For a second I was afraid I myself was dead. Then I thought how coldness is a feature of death that only the living can feel. That’s when I realized I was alive. At times being dead and being alive seemed only a question of one’s deciding whether one was dead or alive. I kept evaluating my state: though we hadn’t eaten anything all day, I wasn’t hungry. I wasn’t thirsty either. I’d had my last meal the day before, a bowl of rice that I shared with Yoro. The last water I drank was also several hours earlier. My mouth was dry, but without thirst. My stomach was empty, but without hunger. It’s as though this dryness and this emptiness were destined to remind me that living things need water and food; yet I, feeling their absence, didn’t need anything. Nothing. So was I dead? I looked at Yoro and all my doubts evaporated. We were alive. Or maybe that’s all it was, a question of deciding that we were alive.
When the people next to the barbed wire left, I saw that Yoro’s head was resting sideways on the ground. I didn’t want to wait any longer, but she grabbed me by the arm and held me there in the hole. She said the spiders made music when they wove their webs, that the larvae made a sort of purring sound when they grow, like lounging cats. She assured me that these tiny sounds are beautiful and that she had learned how to discern them in the mines. She appreciated these souls that for years were her only company, lives that nobody paid attention to, which were squashed under a foot or simply ignored. Then she told me she was afraid. And something happened then, sir, which I will never be able to forget. Yoro stretched out a hand and I saw what she wanted to show me by the light of my tiny lantern. A flying ant had opened its wings in the palm of her hand, in the form of a cross, and it’s not that I’m Christian or believe in many things, but I had to think it was nature’s way of sharing our circumstances. A snail left its shell, and after leaving a slippery trail, like a long, continuous kiss, it returned to its shell with its antennas down. A lizard egg cracked so that Yoro could see—and it seemed such an obvious, generous gesture—the spectacle of the creature’s premature birth. All these minimal lives were with Yoro. Not a single one of these creatures was on my skin. They were all on Yoro, caressing her in their own way. I think that if Yoro had been able to walk she would have gotten up; thousands of tiny backs would have held her and carried her faceup, looking at the starry sky. But I was there to move her, and after delicately brushing off all that life that had settled on her skin, I finally helped her up, and we moved to the other side of the fence.
It was the dead of night, and the area had become a boggy pit from all the rain. We had to walk with special care so our footfalls didn’t make noise splashing in the water. Luckily, the tent we were looking for wasn’t too far away from the hole we’d entered and, anyway, in the worst-case scenario, it wasn’t likely that anyone not in uniform would be bothered by our presence. Flies don’t generally bother other flies—they prefer to bother people, and there weren’t any people there because anyone who entered that place was transformed into a black insect that fought over the world’s garbage with other black insects. You might think that in the case of a refugee camp, the fence is there to protect those inside from what is on the outside. But that wasn’t the case. As I have already explained, many of the refugees were faced there with a war inside of a war, where humanitarian aid was sold at a premium, much higher than on the outside.
Once I spied the pavilion and before Yoro said anything, I knew it was the one we were looking for. It wasn’t hard to figure out. It was all lit up, and from outside we heard the sounds of laughter and jolly music I could identify only once we were a little closer. Good old rock ’n’ roll; the great Jerry Lee Lewis singing “Great Balls of Fire.” That’s what was choking me up. You know something? I really did feel like dancing. I don’t know i
f you’ve ever heard or remember the song. I recall the image of that beautiful man, Jerry Lee Lewis, with his shirt open, his chest young and brawny, playing the piano and shaking a long blond curl to and fro across his forehead, throwing it straight up every time he said “Kiss me baby,” a sentence that would cause him to break into a bout of laughter in front of thousands of fans screaming his name. I would have scratched my face over Jerry too. What an irony to find that music coming out of such a filthy tent, the energy of a colossal talent celebrating the gorgeous petulance of youth, of eternal libido, of rock ’n’ roll’s no to making war. That was the genius of rock stars, the key to their condemnation and commitment, a sort of sportsmanlike spirit that didn’t understand differences before the collective euphoria of the mind and body moving to the rhythm.
Yoro pointed to a little soldier who was with two others. It was a grotesque sight, them playing cards with their blue helmets on. Maybe the other two were good guys. To tell you the truth, it didn’t even cross my mind. I just felt more and more rage, and the music filled me with a vigor that together with the indignation morphed into a kind of violence I’d never experienced before. Every time I heard one of those three soldiers giggle, another ball of fire dropped into my stomach from the collection of them already accumulated in my throat. You’d be surprised how many balls of fire fit in a person before they explode. Obviously, I wasn’t going to blow myself up. I didn’t want to be the one who exploded. I was joyful; I held my daughter’s hand in mine now, just in time, at the end of my life. The rain had died down a while back. Yoro’s eyes reflected the light in the tent. Another ball of fire was burning inside. I released Yoro’s hand and walked the perimeter of the tent, dousing the base of the tarp with fuel. I kept listening to the music: “Kiss me baby, woo-oooo, feels good.” I returned to the spot where I had left Yoro. I took the weapon from the bag. You may remember I told you that my friend S gave me the weapon. It was an exact plastic replica of a Mesolithic dildo, an eight-inch-long penis some primitive man or woman must have used around eleven thousand years ago. I found it extraordinary to think that sexual split away from the other had taken place a hundred and ten centuries before the so-called feminist revolution. So I asked S to make a replica before I ever thought of shoving a wick up its urethra. Positioning the wick, I thought back to years earlier, on Thanksgiving, when I launched the Molotov turkey during a Harlem rebellion. I had been repeating over and over again:
Launch it at an angle somewhere between thirty (so it splatters wider) and forty-five degrees (so that it travels farther).
I lit the wick in front of the tent. I watched the fire moving toward the glans, the inflammable material, and before it reached the foreskin, I threw that Mesolithic penis inside the tent where the three soldiers were playing cards and the whole thing went up in flames within seconds. Jerry Lee Lewis’s music went dead before the screams of the cavemen had ended.
Consider now the first page of my testimony. You already knew that was the fire, but what you didn’t know was everything that happened in my life between the fire that both opens and now closes my testimony. Here it is. Flames devoured the tarpaulin with the voracity of synthetic fiber. I was holding Yoro’s hand. I could feel her trembling, almost keeping time with the roaring fire. As if her shuddering could bestow the flames with something sound alone couldn’t: substance. Yoro and the flames were like the sternum and spine of a single creature, two integral parts of a whole, like a drum and its stick. With her hand in mine, I could feel the swan-song hiss of a table’s soul, of a tin cup, of the metallic tubes that sustained the tent. Though my attention was fixed on these delicate particulars, I wasn’t without feeling for the people and things being consumed before us, but I’ve trained myself to contain the instinct to flee in dire situations, not to cry or try to fix what’s beyond solution. I avoided blinking too much. It’s like hyperventilating. Keeping the movement of my eyelashes steady saves oxygen, energy, and helps keep my knees from buckling. That’s how I could remain standing. That’s how I’ve always been able to hold a person’s gaze. Of course I was scared. Of course I felt compassion. But I held myself in check, not only because if I fell, others would consume me, but also because I promised never to move a muscle out of rage or despair. Not a single one. I had promised Jim that. Dwelling on these thoughts helped me keep my promise, observing the heat from a distance when it was so close to my skin. I found serenity in my own way, in the string of memories I tug at whenever I need to salvage some experience that helps me keep my composure. I found it. The string. The string was the death of Quang Duc, the seventy-six-year-old monk who immolated himself in front of me and several other monks on a street in Saigon. He torched himself to find freedom, incinerated himself without altering his meditative posture; not even when the flames had engulfed him entirely did he allow a slightest movement. The other monks and I cried; some sobbed over him without opposing his will; others asked for help to rescue him for his sake, at the same time against his will, because he was meant to burn to put an end to the persecution, to achieve peace for his brothers, and for others who, like me, have to measure the blinking of their eyelids before a fire. Slowly but surely, I found serenity. The heat of the flaming tarp led me to a distant place, far from the here and now, and rekindled the heat of the monk I had watched immolate himself in Saigon, and the more the tarp burned in the refugee camp, the further away I withdrew, without stirring, toward the moment of Quang Duc’s death. Just as Yoro’s trembling seemed to give a body to the sound of the flames, so the sobs of we who loved the monk seemed to give sound to the silence, since the burning man said nothing, not a cry, not a hiss to express complaint or pain or reproach.
So without complaint, without pain, without reproach, I ran away from the refugee camp with Yoro, who by that time had learned how to give me kisses and hugs and had called me grandma several times, and other times grandpa.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Ana Laura Santamaría and Alejandra Toro for giving so much love. To Gloria Noriega, who rescued turtles on a Florida beach and sent me the sounds of the sea while she was doing it. To her I also owe several of the images of beautiful blood that envelops a pregnancy. I am also grateful to María José Villegas Arévalo for always being there and, more important, for always being true. To Sandra Medina Lozano for our friendship since childhood and because she dares to tell me her fears, and her loves, deeply and in detail; she’s aware that it’s her compassion that protects her. To Isabelle Champaney, who survived getting bit by a snake and thereby gave me the opportunity to thank her for all her help during my French sojourn. To Ana Carmen Martínez, who spent many hours researching the marvelous passageways of someone who is neither a man nor a woman. To José María Cabeza Laínez, who, one night on a Chinese steppe, listened to a father whisper the name of his firstborn son and recounted it to me as if it were something sacred.
To Felipe R. Navarro and Ernesto Calabuig for helping me through the training process that allowed me to swim across the Gibraltar Strait, a crossing without which I would never have been able to write this novel, which I thought up as I was swimming and during the long months of aquatic discipline.
I also want to mention some of the books that I’ve referenced as I’ve written this novel, and highlight my gratitude to their authors.
The phrase “the Venus de Milo’s impossible embrace” is a verse by Rubén Darío taken from the poem titled “Yo persigo una forma,” which is included in Antología Poética (Edaf, Madrid, 1988).
“Not exposed, but behind a veil / are breasts desirable” is the translation of a line by Daniel Ingalls of the poem “Rhetoric” by Vallana from An Anthology of Sanskrit Court Poetry.
Whenever I mention Project Orion, I’m basing my information on an article published in Science on July 9, 1965 (volume 149, number 3680). Titled “Death of a Project,” it was written by Freeman J. Dyson.
I also cite excerpts throughout the novel or use data from Herculine Barbin lla
mada Alexina B. (Talasa, Madrid, 2007); Nagasaki: Las crónicas destruidas por MacArthur by George Weller (Crítica, Barcelona, 2007); and Hiroshima by John Hersey (Vintage, New York, 1989).
About the Author
MARINA PEREZAGUA is a Spanish novelist and short-story writer known for her powerfully visual and mind-bending narratives. She has published two short-story collections and two novels in Spain, and her stories have been published in outlets including Electric Literature and Granta. She has a degree in art history and is currently completing her PhD at Stony Brook University. She practices free diving and has swum across the Strait of Gibraltar in less than four hours.
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Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
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