Dark Constellations

by Pola Oloixarac

  In sum, there was a great deal to do, and Carrales proposed that they get together for coffee more often. After she met João Fernando, however, Sonia dodged messages from Carrales for weeks, and finally sent him a letter of resignation.

  João Fernando took her to live with him in São José dos Campos, in the state of São Paulo. The leading companies in the air and space industry were settled there; the couple made their home in one of the most exclusive jardims of São José, where the engineering elite of Embraer, the Institute of Aeronautics, and the National Institute for Space Research all lived. The beach, a paradise lined with coconut palms, was two hours away by car. Eager to adapt to her new ecosystem, Sonia hired an architect to help decorate her spacious apartment in the eco-minimalist “fazendeiro urbano” style that was all the rage. She learned to cook Bahiana meals, and put dendê oil in everything. It had been Sonia’s independent ways that threw her into this immeasurable country in the first place; she soon saw her life reduced to sexual encounters with her husband, nightly dinners, and café da manhà.

  Her social life consisted of outings with the “Embraer wives,” the spouses of her husband’s colleagues. These gatherings took place in magnificent apartments stacked in graceless concrete cubes with ample covered parking. São José was a very ugly city; the newest buildings were covered with tile, like the interior of a massive bathroom open for all to see. Sonia would have preferred to live in a house with a yard, to take personal ownership of the feral promise of a life in Brazil, but she too had to get used to living indoors. At the time, the Brazilian bourgeoisie on the rise was still a small, endangered creature, a species that had to be nourished and protected in paddocks surrounded by electric fences and watched over by armed doormen. In spite of herself, Sonia quickly adopted the notion that she formed part of a threatened white minority, a professional ghetto still in its cradle, surrounded by savages; though São José was two hours away from the city of São Paulo, the state as a whole was a violent, dangerous place. When she and her husband visited friends—all high-ranking engineers at Embraer—Sonia stayed tight up against his back as they entered, letting drop a timid and sulky “Olà, tudo bem?”

  She later realized that these friends didn’t expect anything special from her—that love was simply understood in Brazil, was in fact taken for granted, much as everyone assumed in Argentina that Sonia’s husband would never abandon the basic principles of life as a male in exchange for quiet intervals of pussy-whipped pleasure. The idea of starting a family that was completely her own, one where she could invent her own rules of discipline and adoration, fueled Sonia’s sexual marathons. Sex was much more interesting when the risk of procreation was real.

  João Fernando’s job became more and more demanding, with constant trips to São Paulo and the Embraer offices in New York. Alone in her spotless apartment, Sonia gave herself over to nostalgia for her childhood in Argentina. She listened to the music of El Nano Serrat, María Martha Serra Lima y Los Panchos, and the magnum opus of Julio Iglesias (El Amor, 1975) on cassettes that she rewound with ballpoint pens, returning again and again to “Mi Dulce Señor” and “Algo Contigo.”

  Though she did everything she could to block them out, she couldn’t always keep her thoughts from returning to scenes from the jungle. The disgusting taste of those strange orchids (she’d only tried the labelli) and the weeks of fever, the friendliness of the natives, which made everything seem aberrant and fake, the boredom she felt among the Indians, the trips out to collect those fleshy plants, Rattachi’s shouts in the middle of the night, and the tense evenings spent watching the Jê watch them, thinking that the natives had poisoned them and were calmly observing the results of their dark magic. And after that, nothing. She couldn’t remember anything, except one memory filtering through the others: images of day inside images of night.

  One morning she’d woken with rope marks on her hands. Her head ached; her bed was stained with sweat and strewn with loose grass and soil. She was completely exhausted, as if the night had kidnapped her, carried her away to the fever’s center, and the fever itself had rubbed grass all over her. She could barely stand. She stuck her head outside of the tent and saw a group of rats disappear under a bush; farther away, the natives were cooking something, and laughing. In this world, she remembered, the deities came together to feast in celebration of each death. To be, to exist, is to walk about between two worlds in a half-devoured body; stalked on both sides by death, there was no way to escape.

  Sonia never filled out her research reports. She also avoided going back to Argentina, and gave the university no explanation; her files and fieldwork were eventually added to a folder labeled “Nonexistent.” Within her immediate human perimeter, the women began reproducing so as to give their husbands what they desired: little engineers with whom to build Embraer Mini model airplanes and visit their respective soccer tribes (Corinthians, Santos, and São Paulo were the most popular teams). Sonia’s trip to Brazil had coincided with her first professional experience, the grand opening of a world based on intellectual training, but she had chosen another path without hesitation—one spent in the apartment wearing lingerie, madly biting João Fernando’s ear, whispering that she loved feeling his pole in all its splendor, piercing her vulva ao natural. When the research team’s two months were up, they returned to Buenos Aires without her.

  The trip had completely transformed her, she knew it. She never learned what had occurred during those weeks in which her mind went dark, had no interest in reading anyone’s reports. Gustavo had tried to see her one last time, but only managed to get ahold of her by phone. He’d insisted: she was abandoning her research career! But appealing to her ego via her profession was very much the wrong approach.

  She slides across the surface of the water, a blue dart in the blackness. The water iridescent. The world below in silence, estranged from the sky.

  The foam comes in waves, covers the meadows of violet seaweed. The sea stretches out above the sky, hides the black creatures. Far away, the horizon glows lime green.

  A sound sends a shudder through her body; blows of incandescent light come from within. She trembles, moves faster and faster. She feels drawn to the tunnels’ dark holes. The fearsome abyss ends in an undulating cave of fresh black water in which to shelter, its shape reminiscent of a skull.

  There are others awaiting the signal as well.

  It’s said that the Yacana make their way through the waters of a river. It is truly a very large river. It comes from the sky, becomes blacker and blacker. It has two eyes and a very long neck. It comes walking down from the sky covered in mud.

  They’d never been described. The human gaze had never fallen upon them. The LatAm project harbors these beings inside.

  In the afternoon, Sonia changed Cassio’s diaper and called a taxi. She hadn’t seen her husband in two weeks; all she knew was that he was on a trip to the New York office. She made her way down to the landing, her hand guiding the stroller jangling with gold bracelets. She wasn’t sure they’d let her take the child out of the country without the father’s written consent, but she was determined to try. The driver got everything loaded in; water poured down the tiled walls of São José. A grayish fog descended over the valley. The child started to cry.

  At the airport in Guarulhos, she went up to the line of pay phones. When she managed to get through to Embraer New York, a feminine voice informed her that Mr. Brandão da Silva was in a meeting; she called back, and the voice said that he’d just stepped out. Sonia hung up. Her long eyelashes panned across the noisy airport; in the line for customs, a man insulted two women in uniform, attracting the attention of a few others, curious and bored. Abstracted from the world of men, little Cassio slept peacefully in his stroller.

  As she boarded the airplane, Sonia allowed an elegant executive from Rosario to carry her coat. She was still a beautiful woman with fine, delicate features; while waiting to board, several men had bee
n monitoring her movements. At the baggage claim, the executive from Rosario came over to wish her a pleasant stay and give her his card; she could call him if she needed anything, in Buenos Aires or anywhere else. Sonia extended her neck, let him kiss her on the cheek. There would always be loves in her life—there was nothing to fear. Her father was there in the Ezeiza airport to pick her up; he hugged her with tears in his eyes.

  That night, an underwater cloud of jellyfish crossed the formidable mud banks of Río de la Plata. This whirlpool of tentacles entered the viscous depths of the port of Buenos Aires in a display of destructive potential hidden beneath a lightning storm.

  Many moons since she last went to the surface. Iridescence and scale, she bites at her own immobility. The lime green light climbs up toward the stones that bow before her. She can breathe, exist within herself, can fall toward the abyss she holds deeper still. A carapace begins to form inside her.

  She impregnates herself with parts others have left behind, her scales growing ever harder. When she emerges—if she ever does—she will be much stronger. She doesn’t yet know what form she’ll take.

  She has come from a river that is too warm, ever warmer, came in search of cool black water. She once watched a subterranean continent travel slowly far into the air, then bury itself entire in the caves.

  She awaits the signal. The thunderclap comes soon enough, the distant light flashes across the sky, unites with the lymph, feels itself explode.

  Science was not yet prepared for such cadavers.

  Before his genetic trajectory began to delineate itself like a laser—before the fringe activities that would catapult him to underworld glory amongst the primeval hacker groups—Cassio revealed himself to be a really good kid. He was interested in the things of the world; he liked reading newspapers, liked Página 12. He was fat, soft, and pale, and he was capable of detecting the pain of others, and once he had localized it, was able to show interest in ameliorating it. The phase of enjoying control over other living beings wouldn’t manifest itself until much later.

  Every afternoon his grandfather would take him to the botanical garden in Palermo: small shady green hills, zigzagging trails, and old greenhouses of iron and glass. The Botanico was the green space closest to his house, and home to the largest community of cats in all of Buenos Aires. When Cassio learned that the felines had adopted the area as their permanent residence, that they were in fact his neighbors, the thought fascinated him to the point of stupefaction. He watched them cavorting in the sun, chasing one another around or simply depositing themselves like pastry buns in the grass; at times he threw himself down in the gravel and extended his fat little fingers toward them. The cats watched him impassively, or fled, leaping like rabbits.

  He wasn’t sure how it all began, didn’t know how his mind had begun to fill with thoughts of nocturnal patrols, couldn’t trace the origins of the mysterious process by which his mind had penetrated the darkness for the very first time. But a few blocks from his house, the reverse of the city was undergoing spasms of malignant behavior. Cats young and old were stuffed in bags and loaded into trucks, which took them to unknown locations, quagmires beyond the reach of law and morality. The police reports couldn’t confirm the whispered rumors: that the cats were taken all the way out to the Warnes shelter, thrown onto the heap of trash at the bottom of an empty elevator shaft. Gasoline and human cruelty did the rest.

  It was later learned that the Warnes shelter had been demolished to make room for a Walmart. But the story of the kidnapping and disappearance of felines had made its way from the mouths of doormen and old ladies to the vegetable stands and newspaper kiosks, where the children were infected; the image of the kittens mewing desperately, scratching out one another’s eyes as they tried to escape, sent Cassio into action. He took a ream of white paper and a thick marker; on each page he wrote no to the feline holocaust and added a drawing of Toulouse, Marie, and Berlioz, the main vectors of tenderness in The Aristocats (Disney, 1970). He pasted the posters up on the walls of his school, the prestigious Scholem Aleichem, and quickly organized a protest amongst his little classmates.

  The principal couldn’t comprehend the redemptive nucleus that moved Cassio and his henchmen to action, and threatened them with suspension for making jokes about the Shoah. The young protestors didn’t balk; their sobs and screams were explosive missiles directed at the adult nervous system, and they began a sit-in “of indeterminate duration” to commemorate the dead animals. It was Cassio’s idea to make cat silhouettes, drawing profiles on the school patio like the chalk outlines of murder victims. Without realizing it, he had both deduced and put into practice one of the most resoundingly effective PR strategies of the Mothers and Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, a movement that protested the government-run kidnapping of children under military rule previous to the country’s return to democracy. The chalk cats filled the patio in a variety of colors.

  To calm him down, Sonia gave Cassio an actual kitten. It was a tabby, with yellow and orange tones morphing subtly into black stripes. From a distance it was a bit of a redhead, like Cassio himself, who baptized it with the name of Axl Rose. He quickly indoctrinated it in the concepts of goodness and mercy; in the language of felis catus, these are rendered as steady purring and conscientious licking.

  However inadvertently, Cassio was moving counter to the instincts of other children his age, wherein ferocity walks hand in hand with the discovery of hatred and physical strength. Terrified hamsters dangled out over balconies and gerbils saddled with firecrackers are of course often the first witnesses to youthful experimentation with fury. Crouched in the swimming pool at the KDT club, where Sonia had sent him to learn how to swim, Cassio watched kids playing Submarine—the larger children attempting to drown the smaller ones.

  He had read about aliens who came to Earth to be born among humans, anonymous beings inoculated against the drama of mankind. Some of this had been confirmed by Donatello, the Ninja Turtle with the purple mask. Donatello was the engineering genius among Cassio’s favorite chelonians, adoptive sons of Splinter, an extremely intelligent mutant rat who had learned the techniques of his ninjitsu master—his beloved human—and returned to live among his own kind. The secret of the turtles’ mutations made them part of an enlightened, shadowy caste, but in one terrible episode, Splinter, who had taught them both science and combat, was forced to submerge into the depths in search of Donatello. Hypnotized by the evil enemy, Donatello rejected him, calling him, most painfully, a rodent. Born rebels, the Ninja Turtles and their leader lived happily in the sewer system until their mission was finally made clear, and they at last made contact with the world above.

  Back then, Cassio was experiencing his own precocious submersion: he had discovered the Viking and Voyager space missions, whose photos and documentation he obtained by writing letters to NASA. His missives were simple but heartfelt, scribbled and rescribbled until he’d managed a legible draft—his handwriting was deeply deformed. The 1990s phase of the Clinton Pax Americana had not yet begun, and the Reagan administration spared no expense creating propaganda to foment the cosmic anti-Communist dreams of children all over the world. The reports arrived in a language that he didn’t understand very well, so he focused on the mission photographs, which could have been taken straight out of Cosmos, Contact, and Comet, the three burnished masterpieces of his hero, Carl Sagan. His constant companion, little Axl, served as a feline Buddha amongst the posters of outer space.

  Several years later, onstage to receive top honors at the Interscholastic Mathematics Competition, Cassio would stammer through a remembrance of his furry companion, who was always between one thing and another, licking himself or simply incarnating a form of intermittence; Schrödinger demonstrated that he’d understood something important about felines when he decided to involve them in his illustration of quantum physics. If Cassio focused on his memories of the prize ceremony, he could see it all again—everything
streaming down at him, the anxious parents and bespectacled teachers, boxes of croissants and clusters of children, each entity fitted into its spatiotemporal slot—and was once again certain he’d been surrounded by robots. This feeling had solid foundations: he’d also begun to sense the presence of spectacularly sordid powers nesting in his very being, a sensation his instinctual prudence counseled him to keep secret.

  His mother hadn’t let him take Axl Rose along to the school, and poor Axl, whose reproductive apparatus had already been rendered inoperable, got used to a life of stalking scraps of paper and peeing on the plants on the balcony of their neighbor in 5B, and he got away with it for a couple years, until the cat was fatally poisoned. He spent the final hours in agony beneath an armchair, and that’s where Cassio found him, already stiff. The wake Cassio held consisted of Appetite for Destruction played at top volume: for three days the music was audible five floors down and out into the street, but not even those songs at that volume could hide the thunder of his sobs.