Austral, p.1
Austral, page 1
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For Atalya, Rafael, and Ari
Sick of those who come with words, words but no language, I make my way to the snow-covered island.
—TOMAS TRANSTRÖMER, “From March 1979”
A dream: a man who unlearns the world’s languages until nowhere on earth does he understand what people are saying.
—ELIAS CANETTI, The Voices of Marrakesh
He has never been in a desert before, but he has imagined them often.
That’s why every time he looks at the postcard he now holds in his hands, his first instinct is to see in it a portrait of the arid plain. Little does it matter that the photograph is in black and white. He imagines the tons of sand, the atmosphere of tedium, the feeling of emptiness. It seems there is no one in the image, just a dozen meticulously arranged lines that his eyes transform into the empty streets of an old mining town. He sees the white drifts at the edges of the postcard and tells himself they are clouds. But then he starts to doubt.
On a closer look, the white splotches lose their lightness and start to resemble heaps of salt. Just like that, the desert becomes a giant salt flat. The lines on the plain mark paths the cars full of saltpeter would travel along in this abandoned plant that reminds him, in a last twist of fancy, of the wrinkled lunar surface, with its craters and valleys, its archaic geometries. Only in that moment, when his imagination is exhausted, does he remind himself of what he knows: this is just a photograph of a dirty window, and where he’d thought he saw a desert landscape, a salt flat, or the moon, there is only dust.
* * *
The first time he saw the image, he remembered a documentary he had seen some months before. A feature on contemporary tourism that he’d put on by mistake, but which had drawn him in with its closing images. The ending sequence, with voice-over narration, was a drone shot: the landscape of the golden plain around the Uyuni train cemetery. The camera slowly crossed the expanse until you saw ruins of what was once the first line of the Bolivian railroad. Four thousand skeletons of abandoned locomotives that hearken back to a glorious past, but today are piled up and rusting on the altiplano like the dry wind’s captive junk. Strings of ghostly wagons that stretch for more than two miles, sporting graffiti that the documentary’s narrator read out in a slow voice, not without irony: “Such is life.” “Here lies progress.” Moving through that monumental junk heap like ants over sand were the hundreds of tourists who visit the place every day. The camera captured the scene of the pilgrimage, flying over it and then leaving the cemetery behind. The voice fell silent, and the documentary came to an end. The credits rose up but the video continued, and behind the typography you could still see how the ocher shades slowly gave way to the white of salt flats.
* * *
Now he is there, in the desert, but he keeps on staring at the same postcard. Lying in bed, his back to the night, he turns the card over. The name of the piece and its photographer—Elevage de poussière, Man Ray, 1920—are crossed out with a fine red line. In their place she has written: Humahuaca, Argentina. A simple gesture that transforms the work. And he thinks how strange it is to imagine a landscape when you finally have it in front of you.
PART ONE
A Private Language
No, there was no way to judge the depth of the silence that followed that scream. It was as if the earth existed in a vacuum.
—JUAN RULFO, Pedro Páramo
1
Perfectly lucid to the very end, she had written in her letter, and she said it again now, out loud.
* * *
The words, coming from the kitchen, crossed the living room on that December morning to reach Julio, who had sat in one of the armchairs farthest from the door to try and escape the freezing breeze that periodically slipped in. Recognizing the expression, he stopped rolling the cigarette he had in his hands and looked up. He saw no one. Olivia had excused herself to make more coffee, and the only thing that moved in the room was the Italian greyhound that had jumped up into the chair she’d just vacated. He had the impression that they were acting out a previously rehearsed scene. Just last night, in fact, they’d been right here, sitting in these old leather chairs with three small lamps lighting the scene, telling the story that today she was recounting with variations. It was as if she were afraid he’d already forgotten it, or maybe she thought repeating it was a way of understanding it. Two strangers who were seeing each other’s faces for the first time, united by the trust placed in them by the fragile ghost of the mutual friend under whose roof they were speaking. Just like this, they’d settled in with a couple of beers from seven in the evening until well past ten, though now the morning exposed what yesterday had been only shadow.
* * *
In the daylight, the house became more human, and the space took on a texture that before had gone unnoticed. The light entered obliquely from the west and shone on the wall where a pair of large black-and-white photographs hung. A picture of the Momotombo volcano yielded to the combative but endearing face of a young Sandinista in the early eighties. There were few personal photos, but the objects that were there managed to convey a stamp of idiosyncrasy: two reddish rocks were displayed in frames beside an old grandfather clock, while farther down, in a corner beside the dog food bowl, a dozen books on natural history were heaped in a patiently concocted disorder. Aside from a somber arrangement of white daisies, there was nothing to suggest that anything had happened here. Under the flowers, placed between several terrariums, there were vinyl records, an impressive collection of old British rock LPs adorning the shelves that covered the rest of the wall until they ran up against the record player beside the window. Then, your gaze could relax and turn toward the outside.
There was the landscape, just as Olivia had described it. At the fore, the twenty houses of the artists’ commune and a couple of rusty bulldozers near the corral. Farther on down the hill, you could glimpse the place where the Río Grande intersected with the Calete and the Cuchiyaco. A couple of freight trucks, probably on their way to Bolivia, were headed north on the highway, drawing the gaze toward the village of Humahuaca, beyond which towered the magnificent multicolored mountains he’d seen before only in photos. Who would have thought the desert would be so colorful and cold? Accustomed to the screen-saver idea of the warm, horizontal monotony of golden dunes, suddenly he was confronted with this: a mountain range where colors alternated vertically, beguiling as a child’s painting.
Poking up through the fog, the mountains displayed all the splendor of their strata, while higher up in a clear, light sky, a sparrow hawk made its rounds, unwittingly imitating what had been happening since yesterday in that house that had again fallen briefly silent. He and Olivia, too, seemed to move in a spiral, approaching the heart of the story only to back away once more, perhaps aware that the truly important thing was to re-create, in that cold morning air, the absent shapes summoned up by the words Olivia had just uttered.
“Imagine. Lucid in spite of everything,” she said.
At times she seemed to be translating into Spanish thoughts that had come to her in English. It was in those moments that the story’s voice finally managed to blend with its subject, and he felt that the person speaking was not Olivia Walesi but rather his old friend Aliza Abravanel. The same British inflections projected onto the Spanish, the accent masked but still there, the same will and the same momentum. Then emerged the exact tone of the pages he had sat up reading until past midnight, in that manuscript that now lay tossed on the breakfast table.
“More coffee?” she asked, interrupting his thoughts.
The evocation dissolved with the question as she refilled his mug and he, observing the tattoo that stretched over her forearm, understood the size of his error. He could not be hearing his friend’s voice, not only because she had died ten days earlier, but also because what was at stake in the story they now returned to was precisely the loss of that voice.
“Extraordinary, isn’t it? Sick as she was, and still working,” added Olivia, squeezing in beside the greyhound.
Backlit, dressed in the same olive-green jacket that had warmed him the night before, Julio nodded with a smile and returned to his half-rolled cigarette, first touching the pocket where he kept the letter that had brought him to this place.
The letter had arrived a week ago, along with the snow. Autumn had lasted longer than usual, and winter dawdled until well into December. But it finally showed its face mid-month, and along with the cold came that envelope capable of interrupting Julio Gamboa’s useless ramblings. He was sitting before a paper on which the word arctic was underlined, biting his pen in search of associations, when he heard three knocks at the door that woke him from the absurdity of his task. Why did he make those lists? Perhaps because, having reached that point where others might seek a new beginning in lovers or alcohol, he had come to think that lists were his way of maintaining order in a world that was escaping him.
“If I’m going mad, at least I have a method,” he said to himself as he saw the secretary enter his office with the mail in hand.
Same as always: letters from the dea n’s office, magazines he’d never read, bills, account statements. Among so much routine, however, he distinguished an unusual envelope. Humahuaca: the address sounded so foreign, as distant and enigmatic as the sender’s name, Olivia Walesi, which appeared under a postage stamp depicting a ravine full of cacti.
“I’m sure they got the wrong Gamboa,” he said with a laugh, not realizing the secretary had already left.
And he continued under this assumption as, sitting in his office facing the university campus where he’d spent the past twenty years, he read the beginning of the letter, in which Walesi introduced herself as a member of an artists’ community in the northern Argentine desert. The next lines, though, finally dispelled his confusion. He recognized the name Alicia Abravanel with the kind of muted emotion we feel when we greet our childhood home after years away: a mixture of joy, wonder, and nostalgia. But he didn’t want to give in to the games of memory. He put the letter aside and let his attention wander toward the students outside as they welcomed winter. It can take a long time for cycles to close, but sooner or later they come to their end with the most terrible precision.
* * *
Alicia Abravanel. He picked up a pen, crossed out the i, and changed the c, which had always sounded so strange to his ears, back to a z. For the past thirty years, he had done exactly the same thing every time he came across that name in some cultural supplement or newspaper. He didn’t feel as if three decades had passed since their adolescent adventure. Time couldn’t extinguish his urge to restore the name by which he had come to know her. Aliza herself, when they’d first met, had pointed out that detail, in an accent that only later would he recognize as distinctly British.
“Aliza, yes, without the second i and with a z, not a c.”
So, years later, when articles about her books began to appear and they all talked about a certain Alicia Abravanel, he couldn’t help but feel it was all a simple journalistic error. No matter that he later read an interview in which Aliza reflected on her decision to change her name, explaining that in her case the latinization went hand in hand with another, more important decision: to adopt Spanish as the language of her novels. To him, she was still the same girl who had interrupted him one afternoon in the bookstore to ask for a copy of the book that would come to be the talisman of her youthful crusade against the world.
“Do you have Under the Volcano in Spanish?” she had asked, and then added, “By crazy old Lowry.”
More than thirty years had passed since that day. Remembering her by her original name was his way of preserving an intimacy that had been born under the aegis of books and that now continued thanks to them, even as a letter composed in a remote Argentine province informed him that Alicia, his Aliza, had just died after more than a decade fighting an illness that had ultimately left her nearly mute, but that had failed to deter her from writing.
* * *
Perfectly lucid to the very end, Olivia had written in the middle of her explications of the writer’s final project, and that was the phrase that finally managed to provoke in him the thrill of memory. That mention of lucidity, strange in reference to a patient with aphasia, unearthed another expression he and Abravanel used to steal from Lowry when they were teenagers: perfectamente borracho. That was how the protagonist of Under the Volcano chose to describe himself to the authorities—perfectly drunk. The phrase reminded him of how, at first, his alliance with the young Brit had been, more than anything, a rebellion and an escape. A way of fleeing his fear of not living up to his parents’ expectations.
His father had never had much. Just a humble grocery inherited from a distant uncle, and a paranoia magnified by his precarious livelihood.
“One of these days the gringos are going to forget about us, and then we’ll really be fucked,” he used to say when the alcohol heated his blood.
“So you study hard, kiddo,” his mother would add with a half smile.
Convinced that cataclysm was nearing, certain that Central America would soon sink into the deepest chaos, they had pinned all their hopes on their two sons. His brother, six years older, was the first to disappoint them. Realizing that school was not for him, he’d sought opportunities in the street that the classroom couldn’t give him, and had the misfortune to be caught by the cops mid-stickup as he and some friends were robbing a tourist bus.
Julio was only ten at the time, but the sight of his brother in handcuffs was a humiliation he never forgot. Having reached the age when children start to abandon childish things, he sought refuge in books. Timid by nature, he found a haven in their pages, never imagining that someday those same books would grant him an opportunity. Seven years later, when he received the letter offering him a scholarship to study in Michigan, he didn’t know exactly how to feel.
“You should get out while you can, son,” his proud father would say. “Things are falling apart here.”
* * *
For Julio, though, it sounded less like an escape and more like chasing someone else’s dream. He was only a teenager, but it was already becoming clear that his timidity hid the ambition of one who seeks to bend straight lines. A week later, he met Aliza.
If Michigan represented the world, Aliza embodied another possible world, far removed from his parents’ expectations. For Julio, this young music fan who told of seeing the Sex Pistols and the Ramones live in concert, who swore she had kissed Sid Vicious, was the lighthouse that illuminated an unknown and frightening universe. She was a blue blood who at the age of seventeen had run away from home and the obligations that came with her last name to disappear in the dark streets of a Central American country, where the first strident chords of punk were only just starting to sound.
* * *
Among the pages, attached to a postcard with a paper clip, Olivia had included a photograph of Aliza. A profile shot of that face he had seen depicted in the press over the years, a face that gradually grew into the severity, character, and confidence that could already be discerned in adolescence. Her aquiline nose, exacting gaze, dark hair that stood out against the white flatland behind her. On the back it said: Salinas Grandes, Argentina, 2008.
Julio turned back to the blank page before him. Aliza, he wrote, without much thought. Below that, he started one of his lists: Thomas, Cardenal, Williams, Parra, Truffaut, Naranjo, Bernhard.
He saw her again, young and indefinable, on the sofa at his house in the middle of a Stan Brakhage movie marathon. He remembered her in a dive bar, reciting poems by William Carlos Williams while everyone around her watched, entranced, though they couldn’t understand exactly what she was saying. He called up an image of her face from one long-ago evening when she sat at the wheel of his father’s old Jeep, crossing borders as if they didn’t exist. They were heading for Guatemala, he recalled, and he tried to explain to himself why they had separated at the end of the trip. As he remembered it, the road trip had lasted longer than expected, and as the start of the Michigan semester loomed near, he’d had to return to Costa Rica in spite of Aliza’s protests. He didn’t think he had talked to her again after that. Their paths had overlapped for a moment, but after that youthful adventure he had set out down the road that would ultimately deposit him in this office, looking out at the northern snows, one professor among many, while she wrote novels about southern lands.
* * *
Much had changed in those thirty years. The anxious boy he’d been had managed to establish himself in a world that had once seemed terrifying. His first year in the United States had been hard: he felt terribly foreign and out of place on that campus, in spite of the scholarship and his academic success. He had suffered a deep depression, and only a French student he met at the start of his second year had managed to pull him out of it. Marie-Hélène, a freckled girl very different from Aliza, had made him see that when a person is a long way from home, nostalgia and memories don’t matter much, and he had heeded her words, finally deciding to carve out a path by dint of forgetting. Now, almost three decades later, this decision to only look forward was the foundation on which his comfortable life was built—a bedrock that had been set trembling by the letter’s arrival.
