Tales of the New World: Stories

by Sabina Murray

  The seminarian silences his breathing.

  He uses his own stillness to better understand the rapidly expanding boundaries of time and narrative and domain. No breath, no movement, but he hears his heart—his clock—and remembers the marking of blood through his own tributaries: his personal periplus over which he has no control, that circulating, that wandering around, which will stay with him until his heart no longer marks the second.

  There was another young man once—a merchant sailor. Was it really he? He remembers being on a ship—his watch, he was quite alone—peering into the darkness in case something should appear. The world was rolling on beneath him as he bobbed atop it and he felt the rocking of the waves, but not the earth bowling under the ship’s prow, although that was his understanding of what was happening. The blackness was even, and the much-pierced veil of sky, the stars burning hotly through, presented a false stillness. He was the point of reference, the entry, the relevant word, the moment, the now: the circumvolving earth and greater clockwork of the heavens used him as fulcrum and center point.

  There was a thought: I am what makes it all happen.

  There was another: I am without meaning.

  Which was Sturm und Drang? Which rationalism?

  This is all very funny, and he laughs. He knows that while the fifties and sixties—with their attendant dances and tunes and sexual mores—play on outside, he is happy in his library. This is reprieve.

  On the wall is a painting—a respectfully muddied oil of Saint Ignatius relinquishing his sword, giving it up to God. He is no longer soldier, not yet saint, not yet founder of the Jesuits, not yet inspiration to the seminarian (yet to be born, yet to be inspired); he is merely a disillusioned soldier—receiver of injuries, survivor of prolonged recoveries—who is determined to follow in the path of Saint Francis, although Ignatius (or Íñigo) is not a big lover of animals and likes his shoes, as future Jesuits will like the occasional Mercedes-Benz. In the picture, Saint Ignatius has fallen on one knee; on the other, a sword is miraculously balanced. Something hidden behind a woolly cloud has caught his attention. The saint’s face is a confusion of awe and decision and duty.

  Did Ignatius, falling upon his knee, politely wait for God to appear and accept the gift of peace, inaction, and identity shedding: a gift of willful innocence (as if the battle and bloodshed had never happened) and a new man? Was this his destiny? Did destiny contradict free will? Free will, that gorgeous flawed and slippery cliff ’s edge upon which all men travel, defines both him and his relationship to God. There is a response to this that he should know cold, that should save him from having to parse out what is faith—not to be questioned—and what sits in the brain like sand in an oyster: the stuff of meditation and philosophy.

  Destiny. Is that something to fear or something to dream on?

  Our seminarian stares hopefully at the picture of Ignatius, as though the answer might exist within it.

  “This painting will not help you,” says Ignatius. “It is but a metaphor. A lot of good art and,” he looks around at the dun-colored sky, the static rendering about him, “even much average art is composed in such a way as to tell the story rather than present a specific moment in time. It would be unfair to restrict a painter in a way that a writer would never submit to—to submit to the reality. I never fell upon my knee like this. Our brotherhood of Jesuits was not formed with my arms flung wide, my mouth open. We were an intense lot and met in Saint Denis in Paris. It was a meeting of the minds . . .”

  All right. All right. No more daydreaming. Take the pencil.

  It is your destiny. Take the pencil.

  II. Influence

  Our seminarian writes “destiny” in the margin, and for one moment it stays upon the page until deemed irrelevant and erased. He writes:

  This account, which is extant only in its Greek translation, was originally engraved in Punic on a bronze tablet set up at Carthage, from where Hanno and his party set forth, probably about 500 BC, on a voyage of colonization and, most likely, exploration.

  He considers “most likely” and wonders if “unavoidably” would be more appropriate. He writes “hegemony” in the margin, and the word briefly asserts its influence upon the paper before he erases it.

  Hanno’s bronze tablet was installed in a temple dedicated to the god Chronos—Old Man Time himself—whom the Carthaginians rather liked. A bronze tablet ensured the words of Hanno a significant march into the future. Where is Hanno’s tablet now? No one really knows. Instead, we have various other people on Hanno. Pliny on Hanno. This book that informs so much of the seminarian’s paper: Ancient Greek Mariners, by Walter Woodburn Hyde. So: Hyde on Pliny on Hanno. And now him: Murray on Hyde on Pliny on Hanno. And somewhere down the road, someone else will jump on board—most likely, perhaps unavoidably, on a journey of colonization and discovery.

  III. Scholarship

  How has this young man found his way into this library? Man’s job is to find his way back to God, and perhaps a seminary is an obvious place—a place for an unsophisticated mind, let’s not forget his youth—to start the journey. Perhaps it was his grounding in the classics—all those A’s in Latin and Greek. This paper, if he could only make himself write it, will no doubt also be a success—a success unlike Carthage, which flowered in 500 BC, which is why he picks this vague, rosy-fingered chunk of millennium for Hanno’s departure, and then, in 146 BC, following the Third Punic War, was wiped from all but history.

  When was Carthage established? Well, Queen Dido, princess of Tyre, founded Carthage, and Aeneas found her sometime after the Trojan War. So if we look at the dates of the Trojan War we can approximate. Eratosthenes says Troy fell in 1184 BC, Herodotus 1250 BC, and Douris 1334 BC Let’s go with Herodotus, he thinks. Everyone else does.

  It was Book Four of the Aeneid that got him interested in Carthage in the first place. Aeneas must leave his lover, Queen Dido, because the gods have decided that he is to found Rome. “Leave now, Aeneas. Found Rome!” And in response, no doubt: “Can’t somebody else found Rome? And what’s the big deal if no one founds it? There are plenty of cities already in existence. What’s wrong with Carthage?”

  What if the gods had agreed? What would have happened then? Well, Book Four would have been the final book of the Aeneid, and Rome would have never been founded, which would no doubt have affected the history of the papacy, and Ignatius, and therefore our seminarian. What if the gods had said, “Quite right, Aeneas. Back to bed with you! Sorry for the bother.” Was all possibility and direction contained in Book Four?

  That was the book he almost knew by heart, but of course, come the final exam, the passage to translate had been something all together different: the passage on Laocoön. Was that from Book One? Well, it had to be one of the early ones because Laocoön’s tale is really that of the Trojan Horse, and his suspicion of it, and the gods yet again favoring Greece over Troy.

  Laocoön, high priest of the Trojans, does not trust the Greeks. After ten years of siege, why would he? He says:

  . . . equo ne credite, Teucri. Quidquid id est, timeo Danaos et dona ferentes.

  Which translates as, “Do not trust the horse, Trojans. I fear the Greeks even bearing gifts.” And we say something similar, although we trust horses and not Greeks. To underscore his justified concern, Laocoön throws a spear at the horse and Minerva (the Greek’s Athena, but this is Virgil), in a rather unsubtle cover-up, sends two serpents up the beach to strangle him; the result is that his “fillets soaked with saliva and black venom,” something our seminarian was understandably nervous about as he penciled his translation on the final, but this was quite correct. A few lines down, Laocoön’s cries of suffering are “like the bellowing when a wounded bull has fled from the altar/and shed the ill-aimed axe from its neck.” “Fillet” and “bull” and “horse” suggesting a metaphorical unity that trumps mere narrative, and indeed our translator was as on his mark as Laocoön himself.

  In another account of Laocoön’s strangu
lation by snakes, this of the Hellenistic poet Euphorion of Chalcis, the presence of the horse was coincidence: Poseidon had been waiting for Laocoön to present himself on the beach since he’d offended the god by having “marital relations” in the temple in front of an important cult statue. The snakes are payback for Laocoön’s wild ways, and Ulysses, who has just dodged the spear tip and now, peering past it through a narrow slit between tempered steel and frayed wood, sees the snakes in hasty slither and the ensuing struggle. He turns to his companions and says, “You won’t believe what just happened!” Since there’s nothing much to do inside the horse, the other Greeks listen, and they do believe, because they’ve been through quite a lot. Although, as we well know, they’re in for even more.

  IV. Departure

  Our seminarian taps the tip of his pencil upon the paper. “Leave, Hanno!” he wills his subject. If Hanno never leaves, he will have nothing to write about. And Hanno, lazy in his imagination, finally stirs. Our seminarian writes:

  The voyage took about thirty-seven days before Hanno decided to turn back at a point which has been greatly disputed, but which is now generally believed to be around Sherbro Island off Sierra Leone or Cape Palmas . . . There is no description of the return trip.

  In fact the details of the journey are vague to the extent that it has been suggested that Hanno intentionally confused them. This has to do with Carthaginian hegemony—and a desire to befuddle Greek competitors. Hanno, like Laocoon, knew not to trust the Greeks.

  The Greeks are powerful adversaries.

  The seminarian looks at the picture of the sculpture of Laocoön in his book on Pliny. He reads what Pliny has to say about it, “it was to be preferred to all that the arts of painting and sculpture have produced.”

  He remembers Father Tedeschi, an art historian now returned to Rome, speaking about Michelangelo’s first view of Laocoön and His Sons. The year was 1506, and some Roman citizen, while digging around his vineyard on the Esquiline Hill, had discovered the entrance to a long-forgotten niche. One can only imagine his amazement as he peered into the darkness, blinking against it, until the group of figures—monumental Laocoön and his struggling sons bound together by writhing serpents—thrust their unspent anguish upon the Renaissance. And Michelangelo, who no doubt standing there and processing Laocoön’s torqued torso and blistering muscles, the expression evident not only in the pained faces of the figures but in every finger digit and calf tendon, thought to himself, The Greeks are

  powerful adversaries. In this particular case, the Greeks being Agesandros, Polydoros, and Athanadoros of Rhodes, to whom Pliny attributes the sculpture.

  I would go further to guess that Michelangelo, sweeping back to Trastevere and the ongoing torments of the pope—who had enlisted the Florentine to paint his chapel ceiling—swung between elation and annoyance at this feat of marble. Gone was the eternal complacency of the Apollo Belvedere, which he had skillfully bested with his David’s prolonged internal struggle, balanced against the splinter of time before action. This Laocoön was a composition that spun under the force of gaze, that pitted man against monster, his best self against his worst, his spiritual against his physical, and all the while under the eyes of gods who, worse than indifferent, were determined to do him in. As is often the response of artists who admire the work of others, this sculpture—this Laocoön, by three dead Greeks—seemed to have been expelled from the earth to spite him. As surely as Minerva sent her snakes to snare the priest, so had his God chosen to reveal the statue, miraculously torn from this cleft of the earth, and—a miracle, considering the march of time—all in one piece, as torment.

  “Not to torment me,” thought Michelangelo, “to do me in!”

  What will he pit against this statue?

  What will the Renaissance have to stand against this work of ancients?

  How can the present engage its ticking, slipping second against all that has gone before it?

  “No wonder I have headaches and constipation,” says Michelangelo. “God damn those Greeks!”

  “And Carthaginians!” adds the seminarian. Why engage the classical world? It’s not as if the hegemony of the Greeks is still an issue, nor do we stare past the Pillars of Hercules with awe and ignorance. There is Morocco and Mauritania and just more. What was it like for Hanno, who with his bronze tablet addressed a section of world where land bled to water and water to sky?

  The seminarian’s eyes wander across the picture of Saint Ignatius again. He feels that he should fall upon his knee and offer his pencil. Would God take it if he stated, “Being scholar or saint is not my thing. I’d like to try soldiering”?

  But someone has entered the library and is shuffling on leather soles among the stacks. Our seminarian closes the picture of the Laocoön, snaps the covers upon its distracting influence, not wanting to be discovered so entranced by something other than his paper. He looks at his notes. The first section is the introduction—clearly a good place to start—but he’s not altogether sure what he’s introducing. Maybe he should move to the next section, Pliny on Hanno, which is—if nothing else—where the intriguing matter will be placed. Pliny, writing five centuries after the time of Hanno, writes of the Carthaginian explorer three times. Our seminarian glances over his notes, flips back to the history, and writes:

  In the final passage, Hanno, Poenorum imperator, is said to have reached the Gorgades Islands, where he came upon the people with hair all over their bodies, whom the Periplus calls —gorillas, but whom Pliny refers to as Gorgons.

  V. Monsters

  The seminarian is under the impression that these hairy people were neither gorillas, nor gorgons, but rather pygmies. Much of Hanno’s information came from the Lixitae, and their word, “gorel” was a broad term for describing diminutive man-like creatures. The term could refer to a baboon, or a pygmy, or maybe even a dwarf. It is a term based on size, probably refined by familiarity—or in the case of this term, the absence of familiarity. Of course, now he’s merely positing.

  But what if . . . of course, Hanno wrote in Punic. And he is translating out of the Greek into English in much the same way that, at some point, some like-minded Greek translated out of the Punic. But a Greek would not have used the word “gorilla” for what we now refer to as gorillas. Aristotle provided neat, fixed terms. For ape, he had , pithikos; for baboon, , kinokephalos; for monkey, , kivos. So why use “gorilla,” should Hanno not be encountering something new?

  But what if Hanno was making it all up? Hanno writes of rivers and tracts of land in constant blaze, islands within islands, a fire-spewing mountain that seemed to touch the sky. Pliny has his fanciful unicorn moments, and Hanno might too. The seminarian looks at the Periplus and reads:

  . . . and in this lake another island, full of savage people, the greater part of whom were women, whose bodies were hairy, and whom our interpreters called Gorillæ. Though we pursued the men, we could not seize any of them; but all fled from us, escaping over the precipices, and defending themselves with stones.

  This did not sound like a gorilla to him. Didn’t gorillas stand their ground, beat their chests, roar? Or was this a vestigial belief left over from his Saturday viewings of Johnny Weissmuller’s Tarzan as he subjugated leopards, lions, gorillas too, and the truth, in the admirable pursuit of firing up the imaginations of young boys and bored housewives? He returns to the text.

  Three women were however taken; but they attacked their conductors with their teeth and hands, and could not be prevailed upon to accompany us. Having killed them, we flayed them, and brought their skins with us to Carthage.

  Were they human or animal? Attacking with teeth and hands sounds human. Having hairy, flay-worthy skins does not. Can these characteristics stand side by side?

  The seminarian sifts through his stack of scholarship: the Frenchman who says that volcanoes appear and disappear in the course of history; the American woman who says that there might well have been gorillas in that region at that time: scholars searching f
or a possible reality to be—or to have been—reflected in the Periplus of Hanno. Hanno is undeniably vague. An infinite number of stories can be read into what he provides—extant only in its Greek translation—which has had its own wandering around: first brought west in the fifteenth century by a cardinal, most likely from Constantinople, in the decade after the city’s fall to the Turks, then passed from a Basel convent to a Protestant scholar during the Reformation, then—as a result of the Thirty Years’ War—carted off as Catholic booty to the Vatican, and now—in replica—before him on his desk in Shrub Oak, New York.

  How many people have approached this document of 630 words and found volumes within it? How many words wash up against that original telling—conceived to neatly fit upon a bronze tablet—approaching and approaching in hopeful, scholarly erosion? Could this ever lay bare the truth?

  Or are all these people, these scholars, attempting to find a reality to fit this tale? From this fiction, will they find a fact? Will they invent one? From this hairy gorilla, will they create a pygmy prototype or a migration of apes? A missing link? Is this scholarship? What is his paper trying to do?

  Is he also composing reality from art?

  “Mister Murray,” comes a voice. It is Father O’Donnell, himself an ancient, with one foot already in the afterlife. The old priest smiles benignly and possibly senilely, but if this is one of his earthbound days, he’ll be razor sharp. “How is your paper coming?”

  “It started out well,” begins the seminarian, “and now I no longer know the purpose of scholarship.”

  “Excellent,” says the old priest. He pats the seminarian’s head, then shuffles back to lurk behind reference.