2666 (120 page)

What
a nice pair we would've made in
Borneo
, writes
Ansky with irony. And then he recalls a joke that Ivanov told him long ago, a
joke Ivanov was told at a party at the offices of a magazine where he worked at
the time. The occasion was an informal reception for a group of Soviet
anthropologists who had just returned to
Moscow
.
The joke, half truth, half legend, was set in
Borneo
,
where a group of French scientists made their way into a region of
jungle-covered mountains. After several days of walking, the French reached the
source of a river, and on the other side of the river, in the deepest part of
the jungle, they found a tribe that lived practically in the Stone Age. The
Frenchmen's first guess, explained one of the Soviet anthropologists, a big fat
man with the bushy whiskers of a southerner, was that the natives were or might
be cannibals, and to be safe and avoid any misunderstanding from the start,
they asked them, in the different languages of the coastal natives and
accompanying their questions with explicit gestures, whether they ate human
flesh or not.

The natives understood and
answered emphatically that they did not.
 
Then the French wondered what they ate, since in their
opinion a diet lacking in animal protein was a calamity. When asked, the
natives responded that they did hunt, but not much, because in the highland
jungle there weren't many animals, and they also ate the pulp of a certain
tree, cooked in many different ways, which upon being examined by the skeptical
Frenchmen turned out to be an excellent alternative source of protein. The rest
of their diet consisted of a wide range of jungle fruits, roots, tubers. The
natives didn't plant anything. What the jungle thought fit to give it would
give, and what it didn't would be forever taboo to them. They lived in total
symbiosis with the ecosystem. When they stripped the bark from certain trees to
cover the floors of the little huts they built, they were actually keeping the
trees healthy. They lived like garbagemen. They were the garbagemen of the
jungle. Their language, however, wasn't crude like that of the garbagemen of
Moscow or Paris, nor were they big like them nor did they possess their
muscular torsos nor did they have the gaze of those men, the gaze of dealers in
shit, but rather they were short and fine boned, and they spoke in soft coos,
like birds, and they did their best not to brush against the strangers and
their conception of time had nothing to do with the Frenchmen's conception of
time. And it was due to this, most likely, said the Soviet anthropologist with
bushy whiskers, due to their different conceptions of time, that the
catastrophe was hatched, because after spending five days with the natives the
French anthropologists thought they had their trust, they were chums now,
comrades, good friends, and they decided to delve into their language and
customs, and they discovered that when the natives touched someone they didn't
look him in the face, whether that someone was a Frenchman or one of their own
tribe, for example, if a father embraced his son he tried always to look
elsewhere, and if a little girl curled up in her mother's lap, her mother
glanced to the side or up at the sky and the little girl, if she was old enough
to understand, stared at the ground, and friends who went out together to
gather tubers did look each other in the eye, but if after
a
lucky day
one touched another's shoulder, each man averted his gaze, and the anthropologists
also noticed and recorded that when the natives shook hands they stood sideways
and if they were right-handed they passed the right hand under the left armpit
and let it hang limp or gave only a slight squeeze, and if they were
left-handed, they passed the left hand under the right armpit, and then one of
the Frenchmen, said the Soviet anthropologist, laughing boisterously, decided
to demonstrate the greeting of his own people, the handshake of those who
hailed from beyond the lowlands, from beyond the sea, from beyond the setting
sun, and with gestures or taking another anthropologist as partner he showed
them the way men greet each other in Paris, two hands that grasp and pump or
shake, faces impassive or friendly or surprised, eyes that frankly meet the
other's gaze, while the lips open and say bonjour, Monsieur Jouffroy or
bonjour, Monsieur Delhorme, or bonjour, Monsieur Courbet (although it was
clear, thought Reiter, reading Ansky's notebook, that there was no Monsieur
Courbet present, or if there had been it was a disturbing coincidence), a
pantomine that the natives watched with good grace, some with a smile on their
lips and others as if sunk in a well of compassion, patient and in their way
polite and forbearing, at least until the anthropologist tried to test the
handshake on them.

According
to the man with the whiskers, this happened in the little village, if one can
call a cluster of huts half hidden in the jungle a village. The Frenchman went
up to a native and offered his hand. The native looked meekly away and stuck
his right hand under his left armpit. But then the Frenchman surprised him and
yanked him around by his hand, giving it a good squeeze and pumping it up and
down. Feigning surprise and happiness, he said:

"Bonjour,
Monsieur 1'Indigene."

And
he didn't let go of the native's hand and tried to look him in the eye and
smiled at him and showed his white teeth and still he didn't let go but instead
patted the native's shoulder with his left hand, bonjour, Monsieur 1'Indigene,
as if he really was very happy, until the native let out a bloodcurdling yell,
and then he spoke a word, incomprehensible to the Frenchman and the Frenchmen's
guide, and upon hearing this word another native hurled himself at the
pedagogic anthropologist, who still hadn't let go of the first native's hand,
and with a stone he smashed open the anthropologist's head, and then the
anthropologist let go.

The result: the natives rose up
and the French had to retreat hurriedly to the other side of the river, leaving
behind a dead colleague and in turn inflicting mortal losses on the native side
in clashes as they withdrew. For many days, in the mountains and later at the
bar in a town on the Bornean coast, the anthropologists racked their brains to
explain what could have suddenly plunged a peaceful tribe into violence or
terror. After much back-and-forth they thought they'd found the key in the
 

word uttered by the
native who had been "assaulted" or "degraded" by the
healthy and entirely innocent handshake. The word was
dayiyi,
which
translates as cannibal or impossibility, but also has other meanings, including
"man who rapes me," which, spoken after a howl, meant or could mean
"man who rapes me in the ass," or "cannibal who fucks me in the
ass and then eats my body," though it could also mean "man who
touches me (or rapes me) and stares me in the eyes (to eat my soul)." In
any case, the Frenchmen made their way back up the mountain after a rest on the
coast, but they never saw the natives again.

When
he was near despair, Ansky returned to Arcimboldo. He liked to remember
Arcimboldo's paintings, though he knew or pretended to know almost nothing
about the painter's life, which wasn't in a state of constant turmoil like
Courbet's, true, but in Arcimboldo's canvases Ansky found something that for
lack of a better word he called simplicity,
a
descriptive term that
would not have been to the liking of many scholars and exegetes of the
Arcimboldian oeuvre.

The
Milanese painter's technique struck him as happiness personified. The end of
semblance.
Arcadia
before the coming of man. Not all of the paintings, of course, because
The
Roast,
for example, was like a horror painting, a reversible canvas that,
hung one way, looked like a big metal platter of roast meats, including a suckling
pig and a rabbit, with a pair of hands, probably a woman's or an adolescent's,
trying to cover the meat so it won't get cold, and, hung the other way, showed
the bust of a soldier, in helmet and armor, with a bold, satisfied smile
missing some teeth, the terrible smile of an old mercenary who looks at you,
writes Ansky, and his gaze is even more terrible than his smile, as if he knew
things about you that you never even suspected.
The Lawyer
(a lawyer or
high official with his head made of pieces of small game and his body of books)
was also like a horror painting. But the paintings of the four seasons were
pure bliss. Everything in everything, writes Ansky. As if Arcimboldo had
learned a single lesson, but one of vital importance.

And
here Ansky belies his lack of interest in the painter's life and writes that
when Leonardo da Vinci left
Milan
in
 
1516 he bequeathed his notebooks and
some drawings to his disciple Bernardino Luini, which in time the young
Arcimboldo, friend of Luini's son, might possibly have consulted and studied.
When I'm sad or in low spirits, writes Ansky, I close my eyes and think of
Arcimboldo's paintings and the sadness and gloom evaporate, as if a strong
wind, a
mentholated
wind, were suddenly blowing along the streets of
Moscow
.

Then
come scattered notes about his flight. Some friends, two men and a woman, spend
a whole night talking about the advantages and disadvantages of suicide. In the
lapses and lulls in their conversation, they also discuss the sex life of a
well-known poet who has recently vanished (in fact he has already been killed).
An Acmeist poet and his wife, reduced to destitution and ceaseless indignities.
A couple who, amid poverty and isolation, come up with a very simple game. The
game of sex. The poet's wife fucks other men. Not other poets, because the poet
and therefore his wife are blacklisted and other poets shun them like lepers.
The woman is very beautiful. The three friends in Ansky's notebooks who talk
all night agree. The three know her or at some point managed to catch glimpses
of her. Stunning. An impressive woman. Deeply in love. The poet fucks other
women too. Not poetesses or the wives and sisters of other poets, because the
Acmeist is walking poison and everyone flees him. Also, it can't be said that
he's handsome. Not at all. Closer to ugly. But the poet fucks workers he meets
in the metro or waiting in line at some store. Ugly, ugly, but a sweet-tempered
man with a velvet tongue.

The
friends laugh. Yes, so good is the poet's memory that he's able to recite the
saddest poems, and the young and not-so-young workers weep when they hear him.
Then they climb into bed. The poet's wife, whose beauty exempts her from having
a good memory, but whose memory is even more prodigious than the poet's,
infinitely more prodigious, goes to bed with workers or sailors on leave or
with gigantic widowed foremen who no longer know what to do with their lives or
their strength and to whom the sudden appearance of this incredible woman is
like a miracle. They also make love in groups. The poet, his wife, and another
woman. The poet, his wife, and another man. Usually it's trios, but
occasionally it's quartets and quintets. Sometimes, guided by a presentiment,
with great pomp and circumstance they introduce their respective lovers, who,
after a week, fall in love with each other and never return, never participate
again in these small proletarian orgies, or maybe they do, who can say. In any
case, all of this comes to an end when the poet is arrested and never heard
from again, because he's been killed.

Then
the friends talk more about suicide, its disadvantages and advantages, until
the sun comes up and one of them, Ansky leaves the house and leaves
Moscow
, without papers, at
the mercy of any informer. Then there are landscapes, landscapes seen through
glass, shattered landscapes, and dirt roads and nameless country stations where
young tramps out of Makarenko gather, and there are hunchbacked adolescents and
adolescents with colds, trickles of liquid dribbling from their noses, and
streams and hard bread and a thwarted robbery, though Ansky doesn't say how he
thwarts it. Finally there's the
village
of
Kostekino
. And the
night. And the familiar sound of the wind. And Ansky's mother, who opens the
door and doesn't recognize him.

The
last notes are brief. A few months after he returned to the village his father
died, as if he had only been waiting for Ansky's arrival to plunge headlong
into the next world. His mother arranged the funeral, and at night, while
everyone was asleep, Ansky slipped into the cemetery and sat beside his
father's grave for a long time, thinking vague thoughts. During the day he
slept in the attic, blankets pulled up to his chin, in total darkness. During
the night he came down to the first floor and read by the light of the fire,
next to the bed where his mother slept. In one of his last notes he mentions
the chaos of the universe and says that only in chaos are we conceivable. In
another, he wonders what will be left when the universe dies and time and space
die with it. Zero, nothing. But the idea makes him laugh. Behind every answer
lies a question, Ansky remembers the peasants of Kostekino say. Behind every
indisputable answer lies an even more complex question. Complexity, however,
makes him laugh, and sometimes his mother hears him laugh in the attic, like
the ten-year-old boy he once was. Ansky ponders parallel universes. Around this
time Hitler invades
Poland
and World War II begins.
Warsaw
falls,
Paris
falls, the
Soviet Union
is attacked. Only in chaos are we conceivable. One night Ansky dreams the sky
is a great ocean of blood. On the last page of his notebook he sketches a map
to join the guerrillas.