Dark Constellations

by Pola Oloixarac

  Cassio was still asleep; part of his face looked like it was immersed in a pond, with fluid circles moving about beneath his eyelids. The needle had done its work, sent the drug navigating silently through his waterways. For a few seconds he’d felt the skin of his face changing color: the veinlets shimmered yellow, then green around his red nostrils. It couldn’t be seen, was only a sensation. Now he snorted, took a deep breath. His face gleamed as if in the light of a faint green halo.

  He looked like a gigantic child there in the bed—or, better, like the carapace of a child enclosing an attractive man. Piera thought about smelling him while he slept, and the thought itself impressed her as the sort of thing that others would respect. She told herself that the impulse itself couldn’t be helped given how nervous she was about the experiment—but she didn’t want to unleash processes that she might not be able to control. It seemed ironic that her Victorian instincts would lead her to contemplate these details of fleshy desire right after she’d shot a virus into Cassio’s veins. The monitors showed that his condition was stable. And he was cute like this, asleep—he looked like he could be trusted.

  Even before I arrived, I knew that the ants here were bigger than the mammals. I knew that the evolutionary advances of certain local species shouldn’t be compared to those in parts of the world restrained by the presence of gods and men. Here, nature displays its brutality plainly. With no god to emulate or religion to follow, they confront their mirror madly . . . I looked at them, tried to choke back my disdain, and thought, What kind of god would want to live among them?

  The palace of Tartare d’Hunval was sunk in darkness. Something not entirely of this world had colonized his journal entries: I feel that when I am writing, a dose of the fog takes me over. And he wrote of a strange presence at the gathering the night before: a corpulent man whose face he never saw.

  Who could have stolen the glass chest? Absolutely anyone and everyone, but who? Tartare wrote, clearly irritated. He’d made a list of all those who were present. Could it have been Guillaume de Barbosa, the first to describe Stanhopea numinosa on Brazilian soil? He was there without a doubt, though no one can remember what he was wearing. Perhaps Arielus Languis and Karl Stu made off with it? No one had seen either of them leave. Or maybe the emperor himself? Everyone knew about his fondness for magical instruments—his collection of photographs rivaled the biggest in Europe.

  This morning Tartare had asked Zizinho not to touch anything or clean up. He didn’t yet have a name, but at least he and Niklas could do what they did best—they collected samples. They put everything they found in a wooden bookcase with glass doors:

  A very fine silk handkerchief stained with crimson lipstick; two reddish hairs; an invitation on which the smell of a perfumed hand could still be detected; scraps of cloth; and dozens of goblets from which people had drunk. To this day the collection serves as a reconstruction of life in their milieu. And considered together with the list of guests, it is clear testimony to Tartare’s interest in inner lives.

  The following morning, still disfigured with rage at the loss of the glass chest, Tartare analyzed the samples with chemicals he had harvested. Meanwhile, who was that girl with the white skin and the worms? Both Niklas and Tartare had seen her in the course of their hallucinations: extremely pale, the worms adorning her arm, entering her veins below the humerus.

  Then it was time for Tartare’s snail bath. Zizinho had gathered them earlier in the day, and placed them patiently all over his master’s tense visage. A few steps away, quite comfortable in his wooden armchair, Niklas ate an apple and read the journal of the local geographical institute. Most of the snails tried to find a way down off of Tartare’s face; a few of them nested contentedly beside his nose, leaving behind circular steles of themselves. With his eyes closed and one snail sliding across his eyelid, Tartare’s mouth never stopped moving. He proposed and then discarded several theories. He was certain that there had been nonhumans amongst his guests.

  After lunch, the two men headed upriver. It was like returning to the moment of Creation, when vegetation surged up all over the planet. Niklas once again sensed the outlines of his own hallucination: the overgrown meadows, the taste of the swamp in his mouth. The meadows dissolved at the banks of iridescent streams, and trees stood out like castles, lowering their branches only to raise them again, lines of dense liquid vegetal matter uniting the earth and sky.

  They pushed forward, and a cloud-like mist swathed the foliage; they could see nothing but a few trees that rose only to disappear like ghosts overhead, and a few rock pinnacles left behind as they descended toward the hidden crater. The law of mud reigned in all directions: wherever they looked they saw the swamp unfolding, a labyrinth of hidden hands, the forgotten hands of the enormous beings that shuddered beneath the river. Niklas closed his eyes to save the images, and his hand moved across the cover of his journal.

  Everything speaks until we stop looking.

  He noted the pink dolphins swimming alongside them; then for hours there was no other visible trace of animal life, only the towering trees rising up between the shadows and the clouds—terrifying. And suddenly they couldn’t see anything at all. The last sight Niklas would remember is that of Tartare descending slowly, knee-deep in the water, his pant legs pulled up to his thighs.

  They woke deep in the jungle. There was a musty smell, something like that of an abandoned library. They couldn’t believe their eyes. A palace rose above the trees in a cone of shadow.

  They entered through a wide hall that led to the crater, and followed a lit passage to a room carved out underground. It was a splendid palace, and at the same time it was a horror of decadence. At the edge of the crater there was a vast salon, the floor covered in ancient tiles of brittle stone where the roots of the trees and the pathways worn by rats now intertwined. There was a long wooden table that appeared not to have been used in centuries, and some silverware laid out for a banquet frozen in time. Blue ivy had found its way up and around massive chairs that looked like medieval thrones; the vines crossed through the air and united to form a dome above them. In the gaps between the vines, the sky opened out a shining white.

  They heard sounds coming from a softly lit courtyard, and made their way toward it. A small lamp circulated its light slowly over slabs of mica set like stone mirrors in the walls. A cumulus cloud of insects gave form to a dark network of hammocks. The laboratory. There were men smoking and talking amongst themselves. They didn’t seem to be paying any attention to the hammocks, where several naked women lay insensate.

  Strange sounds were coming from a contiguous room—a velvet-covered ball of murmuring, and a few sonorous laughs. A thin voice could be heard imploring the others: Enough, I’m begging you! More laughter followed.

  From back behind the hammocks there emerged a rotund and pale presence sheathed in a tuxedo and cape. The corpulent eminence. The mysterious collector who had visited Tartare’s majestic cabinet room. At first he looked to me to be six and a half feet tall; he had a glass of punch in his hand, and a captive audience.

  At times the man’s voice lowered slowly until it almost disappeared, like the eyes of a crocodile easing beneath the surface of a swamp. Half-hidden in the darkness, he let his voice glide humidly past the women, chivalrously blinding his other guests. His words turned divinely in the air until the whole room was thick with mud; he asked aloud if there had ever been a profession more violent and sublime than that of hunting and capturing orchids.

  Ever since the emperor decided to let zoologists, astronomers, ornithologists, and naturalists join the new imperial court, there’s always been someone like this around.

  Now Arielus Languis took the floor. He greeted Tartare and Niklas as if this was all merely a continuation of the gathering at Tartare’s house. He acted completely naturally; his voice showed a certain enthusiasm, though he kept the volume low. Perhaps he didn’t wish to waken the naked women w
ho appeared to be slumbering in the hammocks. He described his current research project to Tartare and Niklas, told them of places in the jungle that harbor snakes who enter the body through any given hole and respond to every stimulus. His slogan was, “They won’t leave you any deader than you already are.”

  Arielus and Karl Stu denied having anything to do with the glass chest. They were working on a book that was, in their words, fundamental, as it would provide revolutionary new inroads for natural history. It was a sort of biography of the orchid genus Mormodes, describing a key moment in its creative mutation. They claimed that Mormodes served as a hinge between insect and plant: some generations lived as insects, others as flowers, and at times it retreated to its former life as a mushroom, jumping hundreds of generations back in time.

  Tartare remained incredulous. According to information he’d received, these two men were less interested in documenting new species than in inventing them, in blending them together frenetically. They head into the jungle looking for ways to create creatures with extra anuses. It’s just another subterfuge, another way to fight off the darkness—every species does this.

  Nothing had prepared Niklas and Tartare for any part of this apparition. But they had heard tell of hordes of rats that wait until the world’s light dims, then head out to hunt, crawling through tunnels, through weeds. Their eyes are red, and the skin on the palms of their feet is pink, practically human in appearance. At times the groups include humans who wear the skins of animals they’ve killed and use art beyond language to communicate, to organize the attacks. But up to that point neither Niklas nor Tartare had ever witnessed any such thing.

  As if reading their thoughts, the eminence spoke again. Tartare transcribes his words as follows:

  I have become visible to you. Now leave behind the rainbow of pure venom, the black water.

  He smiled. His cape lifted a few centimeters off the floor.

  There are so many things that are watching us, things we can’t see.

  Niklas felt as though he were remembering thoughts he’d never had, thoughts that nonetheless formed part of him, as much a part as his very arm, or the hand that now held the bubbling glass of salep.

  That was hundreds of moons ago. Refined men such as yourselves will have heard of the rats who took your species by surprise, who abandoned the lowlands and now roar their ferocious aria amidst the jungle symphony.

  According to Niklas’s journal, this is the moment at which he began to draw and describe everything that he saw. What he saw, however, appears to have had no clear form. It seems more as if he were sketching the thoughts that cover things—as if he were describing a velvet mantle instead of the object it protects and delineates.

  There are species that don’t evolve as such. They only grow in power. They spread themselves widely, like stains conquering a surface millimeter by millimeter—not for them the verticality of great depths or aerial conquest. And in the same way, he himself had become acclimated here, had taught himself to resemble his new brethren.

  The eminence came a few steps closer. For the first time Niklas and Tartare could see his face clearly, though they couldn’t believe what they were seeing. The man was a rat six feet tall, who said, in perfect and derisive human speech:

  Most definitely, I did it for me and not for them . . . I never would have lowered myself to address such inferior beings face-to-face. I was a mint, the only mint that could create a certain golden coin, one that didn’t yet exist in this world and yet bewitched it. During my first seasons among men, they found me startling; they feared me, but what they feared more was the sight of my potential made manifest. They had everything they needed to make themselves a deadly race; they dug deep into the ground, mastered the terrible beauties of the underworld, and yet were bewildered to find themselves the closest thing on Earth to a transparent primate . . . loyal to their own instincts, surely, but febrile without ever having known fever. Do you understand? I believe that you do, that I can detect in you some small certainties about me—I won’t ask for proof, will be happy simply to believe you. I have spent my life among men procuring solace for my own species, and for the burning heat of the transformation for which I have come, a heat that creeps quickly along the fingers of those who seek darkness. Didn’t you hear the words of the strangers? The words you too should have said? Darkness reigns in this region, which is why we organize the stars, coterminous on our maps—the true map is dark, and full of the holes in our minds.

  Sometimes I see them draw near . . . I can smell the blood that they mistake for piety or knowledge. I feel them close to me, feel the rumbling tumult of their rags and commerce, watch them enter my lands . . . and then the black hole of the jungle swallows them. What did I know of them? you will ask. I can only say that wherever I went among them, the light of the moon had gone out. What did they see with those elemental eyes? They saw nothing before them but the mire, likewise elemental, and yet they sought distance . . . distance from all that makes sense in these lands. In their company, at times I thought of how fungi create themselves precisely by dissolving themselves in other species . . . they take what they can find, and disappear. The fact that on this side of the human world, atrocities bear lizard wings and yet crawl along the ground—this fact reveals something.

  His manners were indisputably refined, and as Arielus never stopped pointing out, his collection of specimens was unparalleled—it was in a completely different league from those of Europe.

  At that moment he stretched out his arm, and I saw his gaunt hands clearly, a sickly pink shade. He gestured toward the crater. His horrible rat teeth shone as he spoke, sealing his pact with the face of darkness under his command. I then thought that his life as a rat was only an instrument, a way to show us, like an emissary of light, the hidden evil, the death that stalks us, the shadows of the human heart.

  The rat was a descendant of the Bragança y Pombal dynasty. He had arrived on a ship from across the Atlantic, a stowaway in first class escaping vassalage under Napoleon. He’d then made his way by river, hiding in dark crevices at first, managing to meddle his way into high society on the basis of pure charm. His talent for handling hallucinogenic substances opened the heavy gates; the spell he cast would not have been complete without his strange potions, which allowed him to traverse the mud-choked rivers as easily as the lavish halls that outline the lives of the local aristocracy in darkness.

  We can’t look directly at it. We must infer its shape, seeing in the dark the way one does when looking at the night sky.

  The women of the aristocracy had never seen a being like this, and each kept the secret until all of them had enjoyed the novelty. The hallucinatory visions he gave them caused the women to forget about his appearance entirely. In a hundred years of appearing and disappearing, of sinking into the weeds and resurfacing amongst the humans of Rio, making and unmaking himself before their eyes, Hoichi had built an empire of darkness.

  Everything can become something else. That is the teaching of the jungle, my friends. You see, nothing prevents me from being human, or from ceasing to be one whenever I please. Your name is . . .

  “Tartare d’Hunval. And this is Niklas Bruun.”

  He took them to the small garden where he grew Crissia pallida inside the sleeping bodies. Tartare didn’t dare ask about the glass chest. Niklas thought that among the sleeping women he recognized the girl he’d seen as he lay dreaming in Tartare’s house. He closed his eyes, could almost feel her next to him.

  The entire system of caves and goblets is designed to allow us to hide from the light; the jungle itself is such a system, permitting worms to bury their heads.

  The rat exhaled the smoke from his cigarette little by little, and as it rose, it dissipated around his pink muzzle. This was his vision of humanity, the historiography of a group of worms spreading out across the landscape; he was the foreign species, but built his argument from a position
of disdain. This is how he had managed to construct his village, and one could already hear the rustling of his demonic motive for gathering these beings driven by their very nature toward wedlock with darkness. As the waters widened, they flowed along forested archipelagos. There were moments when the past reappeared, and Niklas once again saw the girl he’d known as he slept in Tartare’s palace; he realized that the past, or what he believed to have happened, only existed as impossible memories from a life he hadn’t lived, one to which he’d only aspired in his dreams.

  Niklas’s journal continues: I have seen the demons of botany, of the most esoteric and disordered research, of libraries aflame, but by Saturn and its moons! No natural history had ever prepared me for demons that were so soft, with such exquisite skin . . . and Hoichi had witnessed things I’d only heard about in flawed, thirdhand versions: hordes of rats with reddened eyes out hunting, wearing the skins of animals they have killed, driving humans before them, using art beyond language to communicate, to organize the massive attacks. These rodents ambushed the humans perfectly, have abandoned the slum of darkness and now rise up merciless, implacable, the voice of their hordes joined to those of legion warrior beings.

  According to Hoichi, still to come was the massive migration that would completely reconfigure the crust of the earth for humans and nonhumans alike. It would be the biggest mobilization of humanity since the Jews left Egypt, as if the slow hordes crossing the Pacific to take possession of the South American coastlines had sharply multiplied thousands of times over. Hoichi’s plan had been masterful, fully worthy of an animal Head of State facing a flood: for three consecutive years, the Portuguese clergy would proclaim throughout the kingdom that mass emigration to Brazil was God’s will. They would emphasize the importance of bolstering the Catholic faith in the region to confront the Protestant threat: the prospect of annihilating an evil, unholy enemy would encourage the most timid and excite the most fearful. The Portuguese population would be transported en masse to Brazil, and the territory of Portugal would be given to Spain, whose empire would spread across the European continent. Meanwhile, another empire of extraordinary grandeur and unprecedented size would form in the New World, where everything would be placed beneath the scepter of the house of Bragança. The New World would devour the fundamental lessons of the Old, and in the end would be master over it. The hordes of Hoichi the Dark would cross the Black Atlantic on a bridge made of all the dead slaves who lay piled at the bottom of the ocean, would build their capital on the bank of the world’s largest river.