A Lush and Seething Hell Page 4

  “I can find another man, very easily.” She cursed then, quite eloquently. “All you do is stare at those photos and that manuscript and drink yourself to death. I worry about your liver.”

  “Every night it is torn from me, and every morning when I wake it is renewed, whole once more,” I said. Ovid must have been weighing on me.

  Alejandra and I fought, and fucked, and fought again. She became unhappier, and it was only when her sister came to visit that her demeanor changed. They packed her things into a Volkswagen and drove north to Castuera and left me with my pursuits. I was not sorry to see them go. I drank too much rum and scotch and wine and ate too many tortillas and cheese and lamb dripping with fat, packing on weight, a Lord Byron at the shore. I did not sleep well, despite the ocean only paces from my back door. When slumber totally eluded me, I would go down to the waves and wade in, head full of desperate and dark images, hoping the old cure, salt and foam, would wash away my shadow. But the thoughts remained.

  Sometimes I felt abandoned on a vast, starless shore, waiting for the seas to rise up, or the sky to crack and distend, spilling forth the heavens to drown the world. I heard whispers at night, even when the house was empty. The weather changed. We were far south. For two weeks, bright autumn days became dark and stormy. I bought another woolen sweater, long johns to wear beneath my trousers. Still, I would swim in the sea, searching for the old cure. And fretted at the translation like a terrier with some dead thing he’s found in the forest.

  The more I read, the more I translated A Little Night Work, the more restless I became. I’d walk to the village and drink beer with the fishermen, home from the sea. The old men in the cervecería would discuss the weather, and the size of the swells of the ocean as if they were the breasts of a woman—the size of them! Their great bounty! It’s a thin, wind-scraped land, Santo Isodoro, with no real trees or growth until you travel miles inland, and this lack of biologic diversity is mirrored in the people. But they were attuned to the wind, and weather. The fishermen would say when the sky turned dark, “El mar sueña que es el cielo.” The sea dreams it is the sky. And I immediately decided it would be the title of the novel I was most obviously not writing.

  My days were filled with puzzling out sections of A Little Night Work. I kept returning to the photographs. The challenges the endeavor offered sparked in me a dogged and inexorable determination. My vision became clear in my mind and I thought the vision might meet the execution, if I was diligent.

  I wanted the translation to illuminate and expand upon the illustrations that sometimes felt like macabre ciphers. There was a man on a field with thirty coins and men with faces like wolves around a corpse where a crowned man wielding a sword climbed out of the body cavity. There was the figure of a man with his hand chopped off, and a great serpent made from a great conglomeration of human body parts, possessed of gleaming and intelligent eyes. All of the illustrations were executed in a rough, primitive style—but so very expressive!—that seemed like something from a stone wall at Lascaux, rather than an illustration on yellowed vellum. At night, in dreams, I could see myself holding the true object in my hand—the manuscript of A Little Night Work—and turning the pages. The fecund smell of the paper blooming in my nostrils. Eyes swimming with images drawn by a malevolent but genius child. Each photo, crooked Latin crowded around horrors in dark skeins. I ignored the Greek, the scribbles, the spatters of ink and intaglios of an unsteady hand. I pored over the drawings: a bird splayed open, suspended in the sky, swimming in what looked like leeches; a corpse rising from the earth, hollow-eyed, pointing an accusing finger at a small house on a mountain; a woman wearing a crown looking upon an infant’s desiccated corpse in a bassinet, a phial in her hand; a group of soldiers with spears, a black cloud with a wicked animalistic tail hanging above their heads. Brutalist cave paintings. Yet how close the translation came to poetry. I half fancied myself taking the passages and publishing them as The Sea Dreams It Is the Sky, my novel abandoned once and for all. This idea became firm in my mind. I began my real work then. How to not just translate this from Latin, but elevate the ancient words to art?

  I gave myself the answer: Through pride. Through ego. Night Work would become art by passing through the portal that is the poet. Me. And my genius would transform it. I burned then, I became incensed and electric.

  The photos became words. The words became poems. The poems became frameworks for elements of my soul. “The Revenant” and “The Severed Hand” were followed by “Reckonings and the Elements of Reclamation.” Through me the Latin scrawls became a window into the human experience.

  One passage—the passage nearest the many soldiers and the wicked-tailed cloud—became a poem called “On the Miasma of Soldiers and the Beacon of Cruelty.” It went:

  The soldiers come, without knowing,

  bearing the mantle of the unnamed:

  the vast prodigals, destroyers of heaven,

  and from their spear tips to sword hafts—

  from their ill intentions to their cruel thoughts—

  a rich smell rises.

  Blood calls to blood,

  bad calls to bad,

  and through pain and sacrifice,

  we draw the gaze of hidden eyes,

  of titanic movements beyond the stars.

  It is a lure, a sweet aroma,

  the killing and

  the letting of blood.

  The pain becomes an offering

  and sacrifice becomes a beacon.

  The beacon becomes a door.

  It was not half-bad. I would clean it up, fix the repetitions, clarify the muddy thoughts, and make it more applicable to the Mageran spirit. My focus would be on it, solely. The novel was, by then, totally forgotten. I was energized and excited for the future and what my new book of poetry would become.

  Except that I had bad dreams.

  Alejandra returned from Castuera, bid farewell to her sister Ofelia, and convinced me to put work aside. Now that I had some progress, I could breathe once more. We resumed our endless cycle of fighting and fevered lovemaking. I took her out on Perón’s skiff and down long walks on the beach. An old fisherman at the cervecería whom everyone called Ballo invited us to a festive New Year’s beach asado, where many of the young and old people of the town would be gathered for drink and dancing. We happily joined.

  Alejandra and I held hands near the fire where musicians strummed guitars. Laughing men filled our cups with wine. The sun set, the burning wood sent sparks swimming upward to the heavens. Torches and lanterns were lit and hung from poles. Young men and women laughed and kissed in the flickering yellow light. No one else acted surprised when Ballo casually led a sow forward, placed a pistol to her head, and fired. The pig thrummed and pitched over. The music stopped and all of the partygoers gave a great cry in exultation. Men and women rushed in, grabbing feet and rearranging the stiff-legged body of the animal.

  “It will take more than a popgun to kill her,” Ballo said to me, his grin showing great gaps in his teeth. The light from the torches and the bonfire, at such an inferior angle, shadowed the whole revelrous crowd’s features in a hellish cast. Ballo’s mouth seemed black, his eyes pools of oil, and his smile absolutely ravenous. “But thank Mary the Mother, no squealing.” From nowhere, he withdrew a knife and, hands digging into the jowls, cut the sow’s throat. Impossibly red gouts of blood rushed from the wound and nut-brown local women collected the blood in a tin. Ballo began singing “Noches de luna” as they raised the sow and tossed her body onto the fire to char for a few moments, and then dragged it off once more to scrape it with battens, removing all of the bristles. Afterward, Ballo’s real knifework began. Viscera spilled in blue-white coils and were placed in a large wooden bucket to be cleaned in the surf. Ballo took the liver, the stomach, the heart. The lungs, no one wanted—they looked like a drowned pink bird—and he waded out into the sea, lungs in one hand and knife in the other, backlit by moonlight shattered on the ocean’s wave, and tossed th
em as far as he could, washing his bloody arms and knife afterward in salt water.

  Alejandra watched avidly, afraid of nothing. Ballo returned, dripping, to stand over the now-empty body cavity of the pig, grinning, his avid expression mirrored in the men’s and women’s faces all around. I had this uncomfortable feeling. The pig lay splayed out on the rocks and pebbles of the beach, gaping, gleaming wet and red in the center. I could not look away. The terrible figure of a man, wearing a crown and bearing a sword, drenched in blood, wormed his way up out of the cavity, into the world of men . . .

  “Are you all right?” Alejandra asked, placing a cool hand on my arm.

  I broke from my reverie and led her away to leave Ballo to the slaughter. And to find something stronger to drink. I could not bring myself to eat any of the asado cooked that night.

  The translation was calling to me once again, seething in my subconscious, but now there was a reluctance to answer its call. Alejandra was my anchor. Alejandra Llamos, that was her name, I’m sure of it now. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw my hands, and in them was the manuscript of Night Work. My mind was a chorus, caught in a refrain of Latin phrases, Gregorian echoes—so similar to Spanish. Just reading the untranslated words, I felt I could ascertain their meaning. Alejandra took to slapping me during moments when I would fade away, thoughts bound up in ancient poetry. Or sinking to her knees and unbuckling my belt. Other days we spent on Perón’s fishing boat, drinking rum and casting metal-tipped lines and screaming when the silver, thrashing fish were pulled aboard. I grew a beard (then coming in white for the first time) and ate my weight in mackerel. Each night, I fell into bed stinking of sun and sea and fish. But I began seeing shadows moving, even in the day. No amount of sea and foam and drenching myself in the waves could make them go away. I began to take long walks to wear myself out, doing hundreds of push-ups and sit-ups to exhaust my body. Sleep eluded me.

  I was bleary. And worse, I was unaware of what was happening in Santaverde.

  I have tried to put it together, to assemble the puzzle of how they could have located me, since I was so far away in Santo Isodoro. My housekeeper? My publisher, who helped arrange the rental of the house in Estancia las Violetas?

  In the end, it does not matter.

  Four men found us one evening as the shadows were growing long over the beach at our backs, the sky bluing. They looked, in my mind, like American GIs from the movies Battleground and Tora! Tora! Tora! I thought of the soldier holding stolen eggs in his helmet, constantly whipping them to keep them from congealing. Van Johnson. But these soldiers called for me in Spanish.

  “Avendaño!” they said, outside the door. A man on the street told them in a tremulous voice that I was not there, I was fishing and far out to sea, but I was foolish and did not want any man to lie for me. I was no coward. I was racked with bad dreams, and no soldier could frighten me.

  I threw open the door, saying, “Here I am, what do you want?” The soldiers looked at each other, amazed at my brazen appearance. Then one of the men struck me in the face with the butt of his rifle. It happened so quickly, I had an impression of movement and something growing in my vision. A pain blooming in my face and the peculiar sensation of falling. Peculiar because falling has always been a weightless freedom punctuated by a harsh reminder of gravity. The descent of Lucifer writ small. The soldiers bellowed something, but I cannot remember what. I do remember Alejandra screaming, and them dragging me to a rattling truck and the smell of diesel. I passed out of consciousness then so I do not know what horrors they might have inflicted upon Alejandra. I never saw her again, at least not in the waking world.

  Once I became transformed, once I had the greater sight, I did not return to look for her. I did not fight to find her. Alejandra Llamos, I am sure her name was.

  I was, and remain, a coward after all.

  4

  Avendaño in prose was even more frustrating than Avendaño in person. I put aside his manuscript, tidied the kitchen and his Moorish bedroom, and left the apartment.

  The next day, I called Claudia from my office, leaving a hesitant message on her answering machine. This is the Clod, leave words after the beep. The machine chirped, an unforeseen stage call. Performance anxiety in the least likely of places, my own office.

  “Hey, it’s Isabel. I’m—”

  What does one say? Other people, people who just blithely wander from situation to situation, talking, laughing, interacting, would know exactly what words to give voice to. Like a confidence man, throwing out a convincing line of patter. We are animals and much of communication is just soothing vocalizations, soft glottals and plosives, that indicate to other animals we do not intend harm, we consider them part of our tribe. Any meaning layered on top of that is just . . . extra. I found I could not make those animal sounds. “Sorry I didn’t catch you. I wanted to talk,” I said, and then hung up. I gathered my notes and then went to class to lecture on Yesenia Pinilla and the pastoral imagery in her poems. Yesenia was from La Coronada, Magera. My home.

  Two days later I was reading in the Parque de Huelin, sitting at the bench where I first noticed The Eye. The day was bright and lovely, the scents of the sea fresh, and I felt at any moment Avendaño might stride right up and sit down, smoking a Bali cigarette, and begin a discussion of religious imagery in luchador films, or discuss the best part of a chicken to eat. (He says liver, I say thigh.) I watched mothers walking strollers, young men smoking. A guitarist busked somewhere out of sight, singing Elvis and Beatles songs in a very poor American accent.

  I was distracted. Two things warred in my mind. The first was Claudia. Our night together had been wonderful, and I wished I could talk to her without the complication of what I had begun to think of as a mating pressure. After sex, I had noticed (though I was not, essentially, a sex-driven person) that the other person in the equation often takes on a possessive demeanor, and something in that rankled me. Claudia, with her brazen ways, seemed brutish the morning after. I reacted instinctively, I think. I am a solitary being, though Avendaño would argue with me about that for hours. How did you know I was Mageran? How did I know you are? You’re part of a bigger fabric than you know, Isabel.

  And Avendaño’s testament kept popping up in my awareness during random moments. I might be on the beach, taking in sun, and look to the light shattering on its surface and think, The sea dreams it is the sky.

  When the sky dreams, what does it become?

  In quiet moments, I wondered what Alejandra might look like, how she walked or the sound of her voice. In my mind, she began to resemble Claudia. At night, in those moments lying in bed and desperately trying to sleep when the mind turns to every terrible thing you’ve said, or done, and every terrible thing said and done to you, I would think of his poem “The Miasma of Soldiers.” I would think of the Vidalistas who came to take The Eye from his idylls and labors. Blood calls to blood, bad calls to bad, and through pain and sacrifice, we draw the gaze of hidden eyes, of titanic movements beyond the stars. I did not know what it meant, or its significance, but part of me wanted to look at the Latin, and see if I could find a better meaning there than Avendaño did. I was exceptional in church, and school, and university—I was sure I could offer a better interpretation than The Eye.

  Such were my thoughts when Claudia appeared on the park’s far path, strolling along manicured flower beds and lush ferns. I raised my arm to hail her but stopped, seeing the woman she was with. A tall, gangly girl with bad posture but lustrous hair. Claudia spotted me, grabbed her companion’s hand, and dragged her forward.

  “Hello, Isabel!” Claudia said, entirely too bright. “Catching up on your studies?”

  When I was young, I spent weeks looking into the mirror, coaching reluctant muscles into arching my eyebrows. I thought, if they were going to be so prominent, why not learn to use them to great effect? “What else would I be doing? Football?” I knew Claudia had played at the Universidad de Barcelona on a scholarship. “Every week brings new cla
sses, with new lessons. How is your assistant teaching coming along?”

  “Wonderful! I have hammered home the Krebs cycle, and now we have moved on to aerobic and anaerobic pathways.”

  The woman with Claudia said, “Thirty-four ATP!”

  Claudia shook her head, frowning, and said, “No. Thirty-eight.”

  Ignoring Claudia, I put aside my Pinilla collection and stood. “Hello,” I said, extending my hand to the new woman. “I’m a friend of Claudia’s.” She was three, maybe four, inches taller than me, tall enough that I could look up her nostrils and see the fine cilia crossed in a weave like the crown of a leafless tree. A peculiar enough view. She smiled, which made her face soften and her whole countenance brighten. She had sad eyes and I could see why Claudia was in her company. I felt as if a radiologist had just laid a heavy leaden vest upon me.

  “I’m Laura,” she said, taking my hand and shaking.

  “We’re going to Manuel’s for drinks,” Claudia said, still holding Laura’s other hand. Looking dead at me, she raised it and kissed the back. “Would you like to join us?”

  “No, thank you,” I said. “I have to prepare for class tomorrow.” I hastily packed my book into my bag and fled, wandering down the streets and alleys until, before I knew it, I had returned to Avendaño’s apartment.

  When I opened the door, I saw the tomcat. He sat in Avendaño’s reading chair, one leg up, licking his balls. On my entry, he looked up from his testicular occupation and stared at me with one large, yellow eye. The other was milky white. There were notches on his ears—due to territorial battles with other males, most likely—and his fur possessed a latticework of bare stripes, more testament to his bellicose nature. His tail had been gone for years. He was quite large and I stopped in my tracks once I saw him.

  Eventually, he looked away and, rising, he stretched and hopped down from the chair and padded toward me. He brushed past my leg, pressing into me, his back rising to lean on my calf with his full weight. Silent. He circled me once and then walked back into the apartment, out onto the balcony. I followed, so I could keep him in view. He leapt up, onto the narrow cast-iron grating, and vaulted onto a nearby roof covered in red ceramic tile. The tomcat gave one last glance and then, with an absolute insolent stride, walked up the roof, out of view.