Claude’s own St. Julien was ravaged in 1545 by a swarm of greenish weevils, so the winegrowers brought legal complaint, while a lawyer, Pierre Falcon, defended the insects. The judge proclaimed: “Inasmuch as God, the supreme author of all that exists, hath ordained that the earth should bring forth fruits and herbs not solely for the sustenance of rational human beings, but likewise for the preservation and support of insects, which fly about on the surface of the soil, therefore it would be unbecoming to proceed with rashness against the animals now actually accused and indicted; on the contrary, it would be more fitting for us to have recourse to the mercy of heaven and to implore pardon for our sins.” The Host was carried around the vineyards at high mass, and people paid extra tithes. A testimony, signed by the curate, attests this was all handled pro forma.
Thirty years later, the infestation in St. Julien returned, and this time Pierre Rembaud, lawyer for the bugs, argued that the plaintiffs’ request of excommunication was unsuitable. He affirmed his clients were in their rights, since, as we read in the book of Genesis, the lower animals were created before man, and God said to them: “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the waters of the seas, and let fowl multiply in the earth,” etc. Now the Creator would not have said this if he hadn’t wanted these creatures to have sufficient means of support—therefore the accused, in living off the vines of the plaintiffs, were only exercising their rights. After adjourning a few days, the prosecution responded that the insects were created subservient to man, which was why they were created first, and their only raison d’être was to minister to man, “as the Psalmist asserts and Saint Paul confirms.” The trial took so long and was so continually deferred that the community finally offered an “insect enclosure” outside the village where the weevils might receive alternative sustenance. A vote was taken, subject to the approval of the insects, but their lawyer declined due to insufficient food on the proposed plot.
Tony dear,
I’ve sent you today a basket of pears; the ripest are on top, the least ripe beneath. Put them in a closet; they’ll ripen in order and will be good to eat in 8–15 days. In a few days I’ll send a basket of red and green grapes and some vine peaches, the trellis ones having already passed their prime.
Your aunt Jenny and her children came to spend two days visiting me … They send you hugs and kisses. Yesterday, I saw Mr. Chretien who lost his old Jeanne who you might remember. He sends his regards … It is extremely hot here; the fruit is all drying on the trees; the harvest will be better than last year’s, but will still be mediocre.
I send all my love, as well as to your sister.
Your affectionate father,
Claude Bernard
Saint-Julien, September 7, 1874
Wara Wara
Diana George
Body sat slumped, spine gone slack. The neck had drooped to horizontal and its lopped-flat surface, ringed with bleeding shreds and gobbets, faced the open door. Newly exposed to the problem of light, the neck stump, in time, might have learned to see: cement-block walls; chipboard desk; head.
The head lay sideways, tilted down. Nose was a chock stopping it rolling. The head, too, kept watch on the door.
From a distance came the chittering and shrieks of macaques; nearby, chirr of insects.
The lips moved against the desk. “Ada,” said the head of Sublieutenant Ada Quý Wara Wara, “you will have to take dictation for us.”
Behind the head, the seated stump, so addressed, said nothing.
“Ada,” the head’s lips murmured, “if only you and I had been partisans in the desert, in another era.”
Neck was a stump, but so, too, the entire body: a stump.
“Do not write this down,” said the head. “This part is just between us. We know from books what a desert battle entailed in times past. Camels, their coats patchy and pale under the gay bright riggings. Their segmented muzzles twitch when we tug at the reins. Caparisoned and all a-jingle, but lousy; even their long, pretty eyelashes swarm with lice.
“The camels heave themselves up on command, groaning as they get under way with their habitual, swaying gait, levering themselves down again at day’s end, hinge-wise, the way they do, obstreperous, the way they are, breathing their noisome breath at us, whipping green ropes of grassy slaver in our faces.”
Dripping. Lopped-flat neck-top poised like a face, as if still oriented, still looking.
“To dream of a herd of camels on the burning plain denotes assistance when all human aid seems at a low ebb. Or a sickness from which you will arise, contrary to all expectations. Will we live to see the dawn, Ada, do you think?”
Drip and ooze. Ada.
“I say ‘live.’ I say ‘see.’ Our executioners are coming back for us. They’ll grab me by my hair, they’ll swing me up and toss me into a burlap sack. You they will drag by the heels. Or, one at your arms and one at your feet, they’ll frog-march you out the door. I won’t see any of this. Inside my dark and lurching burlap sack I will feel only nausea.
“I say ‘feel,’ but where? In you? In the mind’s belly?
“They’ll fling us both onto the pyre. A burst of light, the reeking scorch and sear. Will that be the end of it, Ada?”
Oozing and cooling, dulling. Lopped-off throat-top a slab. Dead center, dead the slab’s center, a hole: eye or mouth.
Ada and Ada had freed the model hamlet of New Nebaj and they’d let what hamlet women would join their corps of guerilleras. Ada and Ada and corps had burnt the new garrison just outside San Gaspar Cotzal right back down to the ground. Ada and Ada, Ferminxta and Ferminxta, Barucha and Barucha. Not yet lopped. Into parts. Ada, Ferminxta, and Barucha; and the shootists Julia and Zulma María; and Encarnita the cartographix; and the tracker-girl; and Xoco the berserker. Rag-and-bottle brands alight in their hands. Razed San Gaspar Cotzal to ash.
Here, at model hamlet Chajul, soldiers had been waiting in ambush.
“It won’t be the end of it, Ada. They’ll write down what their journalists will say I said, what they’ll say they heard while tongues of flame lapped at the already lidless eyes and white steam poured from ears and mouth and nose, and the flesh of the face shrank to leathery panes that dropped from the skull and tumbled down the shifting city of embers. The head, they’ll write, the wretched smoldering head, in the long agony before thoughts and brain thickened to a single hot suet, the head shouted from the pyre that it, that I, longed to make still one more last confession. Drunken journalists who are even now lolling poolside on hotel rooftops will say instead that they were here, and they’ll write what the executioners said to say they saw: ‘Flames shot upward, tufts of jungle sphagnum blazed bright and were gone.’ Maybe tufts will not blaze up; maybe they’ll smolder and droop, like all the other too-damp fuel the executioners will have heaped up in their careless attempt at a pyre, wet logs of freijo-laurel and salmwood and the mildewed tops of cable spools and your own jumbled disarticulated arms and legs and torso. The head of Sublieutenant Wara Wara shrieked and moaned, their journalists will write; the head of Wara Wara cried out. At the last, straining all belief, they will say that I said that I now wish to speak in praise of bankers and latifundistas, and of water rights and femicide and hydroelectricity. They’ll take no risk, in saying I said this. Brazenness will be all their warrant.”
Thrumming: jeeps or trucks or tanks, and a buzzing sensation as of ley lines, within and without of stump.
“Our mistake was not to have foreseen the treachery of men; fragile, despotic, vindictive men. On the enemy’s side and on our own.
“Again and again, the situation met its limit in the figure of a husband. When not, then in the rape tactics of the terror squads.
“Write this down, Ada: All that long day we sent the enemy to hell one by one, and Death was seen stalking the red-dirt alleys of San Gaspar Cotzal behind us, muttering, ‘Today a Mondragón rifle in Ada’s hand is wort
h a hundred of my scythes.’”
Shorn plane of flesh atop neck-stump still dripped. Viscid. Did moths or bees alight and sup there, fluttering gore-splashed wings.
“I wish I knew that you were writing, Ada, but I’ve heard none of the sounds a headless body might make while it outfits itself with pen and paper, none of your scrabbling in desk drawers or fumbling in our pockets.
“I don’t see why you should fall still once separated from me, Ada. By rights, without a head atop your shoulders, you ought to be motion itself, restlessness in person. It’s only a head drowses and wavers, distractible, infirm of purpose, glozing our dark way to nothingness.”
Thrumming had stopped. Shirt-front was blood-sodden. Trouser crotch sodden. Desk’s edge pressed hard into low-slouching stump-body’s chest.
Pressure drop; approach of rain or night.
“Write this down, Ada.
“After San Gaspar Cotzal, we began the ‘long march’ to Chajul, as has no doubt already been reported, the ‘long march,’ during which, they’ll have written, we ‘cut a swath of terror.’ We cut no swath. The jungle was not the one they’ll have written about: all venom and hazard, trip wire stretched taut at boot level, scorpion poised in the well of a white waxen blossom. And they’ll have written, too, how coins of sun-spangle fell on broad green leaves and loamy earth, and the burgeoning tendrils unfurled, sticky pale and new. It wasn’t so. No sun, no spangle, only darkness and heat and the iron-hard ground snaked all about with massy, tangled roots. We did not march so much as clamber, root-clamber, our machetes good for nothing but to hack handholds in resinous boles.
“We would walk until nightfall. We ate meagerly and strung our hammocks at the foot of a kapok tree. Hard gray roots rose up like fins. Day’s clamor was louder by night: frogs and owls, rut-leopards and shriek-monkeys.
“Mornings, exhausted, we walked on.
“Other cadres, or some few of the burnt-out villagers who’d escaped resettlement, were to have left us stockpiles in jungle clearings: grease pencils and flashlight batteries, jerricans of molasses and sacks of maize or meal, wrapped up in tarps and buried underground or hung from trees like golondrinas’ nests. The cadres or the burnt-out were to have planted gardens in the clearings, too, against our arrival. But often as not the shoots of bean or melon had been trampled before we got there, all provender ravaged, the sacks split open and the grain flung out on the diesel-soaked ground. The enemy followed us from in front, laying waste.
“Xoco and the tracker-girl were to lead us to the next clearing. But those who’d gone ahead of us to bury food had also had to stumble over roots in the dark. The locations of the stockpiles were notional, like our progress. As well have brought with us a dowser, an augerer, to slit up sloths’ bellies and make haruspect pronouncement where next to turn.”
Pricking came over the back of stump-body’s left hand and up under shirt-cuff, up sleeve. Eight legs or six or many, pricking slow, not scuttling. Insect’s belly, stiff-haired, big as stump-body’s thumb, dragged along pricked along skin.
“We walked, halting and starting again, hindered by root clumps. Thready brown vinelets brushed against our faces. Above us, the canopy, tangled as a pleached orchard, blotted out the sun; and the humid air, with its smell of baked dirt and thunderclap ozone, sealed us in.
“Xoco walked the lead, bandoliered, machete in hand. Then came Ferminxta—called Ute in the country where she’d been born—singing a song about a bandit queen. Ferminxta was followed by Encarnita, tricked out in tatterdemalion: rings and bangles and a torn-sleeved khaki shirt over a muddied yucateco wedding dress. Behind her, the shootists: slight Julia, who favored pistols, and Zulma María, carrying a Mondragón, like me. The bandit in Ferminxta’s song hid her loot in the mountains; she crouched at the mouth of a mountain cave and gazed up at the moon. Lonesome victorious queen. I trailed behind the shootists; at dark of midday, I could make out only the hulking form of Zulma María, sometimes a pale flash of Julia’s arm or hand. Xoco cursed; she’d walked into a spider’s web spun just at face height, again. Ferminxta’s bandit queen ascended to her moonlit throne of lashed yew boughs, before a congress of moths and beetles. As usual, none of us knew exactly where the tracker-girl was. She said Ferminxta’s songs drove off the deer. Myself, I sometimes struggled to hear Ferminxta over the din of birds and monkeys. A breeze kicked up. Too high in the canopy to bring us any balm. Treetops swayed and rubbed, creaking. In solemn witness of the moon and beetles, the bandit queen took for herself a bandit bride, but it was not long before they parted again in sorrow. Barucha walked behind us, last of all.
“No tropic forest duff, no luxuriance of rotten life a-roil underfoot; the earth was hard and bare. No sun-dapple. Encarnita always thought she would be the one to tell our story, a story in which costumes would figure heavily, and the mere sight of us—crazed and gore-smeared in tattered finery—so terrified the enemy that one by one they dropped, gentle as fawns, without we fired a shot, and with a whispered word Encarnita dispatched each and all to the afterlife, there to bring news of conditions in the modern world. Her bloodless combat was a lie. Barucha knew it, Xoco knew it. I, too, talk of fires that razed garrisons without killing. Zulma María was indifferent to glory and damnation, was a good shot and a poor strategist, and she pretended the baffled pall Julia’s beauty cast her down into was love. When Ferminxta was still Ute a man waylaid her in a stairwell, and she fought until the light blackened and time’s processional slowed to its end. To this day Ute-Ferminxta does not know how or if she lived. And nor do we, Ada, know if she lives today, or if we will see her head propped beside us in the fire.
“One day we emerged at a loggers’ skid trail. A red-dirt gash of sawn-off stumps descended in steep defile. Before us lay the wide and undulate world, forested hill after forested hill receding to a horizon obscured by shreds of mist. Up a far hill the skid-trail opened into a road that ended at Chajul. The model hamlet’s tin roofs glinted. We could see no one in Chajul’s alleys and pig-cotes.
“The sunlight felt strange on our skin. Our guns and our bellies were empty; for days, we’d had nothing but water, and tobacco, and a searing liquor that tasted of toluene and orchids. Armed only with rifle butts and machetes, we began the descent to Chajul.”
The head of Sublieutenant Ada Quý Wara Wara fell silent a moment. The stump-body, too, was silent. The insect no longer crawled; it rested just above the stump-body’s left collarbone. Since the thrumming of jeeps or tanks had stopped, the stump had heard nothing more, if that could be called hearing, ear-less apprehension of nothing but percussion and rumbling.
“Do not write this down, Ada. They plan to say that I shouted from the fire that our revenge for Chajul shall be terrible, that whole armies shall be swept under the tide of our fury and our reprisals will not stop there. Saying so, they make of me a harpy, Ada, a vain and howling and impotent harpy, and of you they will say I know not what: that, denuded by flames and with your bones blackened to staves of charcoal, you seemed yet to gesture and mutely speechify? that, flames spent, onlookers dwindling, the rain came at last and washed you to nothing but clags of bone in black slurry? And of our compas, our guerilleras, they will spread still more lies.
“Ada, our testament must not sink to caviling and rebuttal.
“Put your pen down and I’ll tell you a story for nothing:
“Before Chajul, long before New Nebaj, it was just you and I and Ferminxta. We had no rifles yet, and only one pistol, Ferminxta’s, and we had no need of buried stockpiles, either—back then we could still enter towns and villages, not that we often did, the point of the hills was that they were not the towns. We were more like pilgrims, or mendicants. Mendicants who botanized and idled. Who spent most of their time lost.
“The jungle, so-called, was a dark wood. Everything looked like a path; wherever we turned, a way seemed to have been hacked clear for us: earth hard and bare as if hammered;
silvery and greened-up tree trunks ranged to either side like poplars along a country road. Turn just a few degrees, and it was the same illusion greeted us, another dark path receding to a vanishing point. Everywhere alleys, avenues, corridors. Everything drew away, nothing endured. Ferminxta said she knew better but I had been expecting a jungly thicket: flimsy serrated fronds and fat, bitter succulents and a press of viney, strangling growth pushing us back, thwarting us, claiming us. All was broad and dark and hollow.
“Ferminxta said, ‘Let’s climb one of these machinga trees and see where we are.’ The way she said it, I thought machinga was a curse. The tree trunks were too broad, I told her, and even their lowest branches too high.
“Ferminxta said, ‘Let’s play a game.’
“Her game was called William Tell. I voted it down before she could say which of us was to aim and which to be accidentally shot. We were already playing one of Ferminxta’s games, the one in which she harried me with her wishes and baited me into admitting I couldn’t make them come true. On any other day we might have gone on like that, Ferminxta mimicking an ignorance about the ways of the world that extended even to gravity, even to the passage of time, and my own objections taking on a more and more genuinely aggrieved condescension—but Ferminxta suggested another shooting game.
“We set a candle down in the middle of a path and lit the wick. We turned our backs and stalked away like honor-wounded duelists, except that, with only the one pistol between us, Ferminxta and I counted out our paces side by side, then pivoted as one and took turns shooting out the flame.
“Three shots went wide and churned up earth. A fourth, Ferminxta’s last, strafed the trees. Ferminxta claimed she was not defeated yet, she could still throw her dagger.
“It was my turn. I missed the wick but shattered the candle and that put out the light just the same, and at once Ferminxta and I began a new game, a game in which we pretended that with the extinguishing of the candle a darker darkness had fallen, although in truth the same greeny gloom obtained as before, but we made as if it were otherwise, and this new darkness we called liberty, or license, or what you will, as if this too had not all happened before.
Conjunctions 64: Natural Causes Page 26