Unforgiving Years (45 page)

Harris was no artist, if truth be told, for all that most artists are frauds. He drew like a schoolboy, for the enjoyment of tracing the shape of a woman or the lines of a landscape; for the humiliation of failure, for the pleasure of destroying what he had made and of making it expressly to destroy. The earth behaves no differently: it makes plants and sentient beings and destroys them, only to start all over again, right? He drew when he was slightly drunk and destroyed when he was sober, pained by the limits of his own lucidity. He hunted hares, quail, wild ducks; if luck was on his side he might kill an iguana, that big blunt-nosed lizard with a sumptuously green skin, which Monica turned into a feast, dressed with hot spices. “In my country,” Harris told her, “there are people who never saw a hare take off from under the rocks, can you understand that?” “Poor people!” said Monica, eyes shining with pleasure because he was talking to her. “They buy their hares ready-skinned in big stores which sell hundreds at a time …” “Hundreds!” Monica repeated, incredulous. “Stores as big as that?” “And the people are bastards, most of them!” Harris concluded, in opaque laughter.

Equipped like an Indian with a machete to clear the way, wearing sandals with thick rubber soles cut from tires and a conical sombrero, Harris would set off along the mountain trail that led to the plantation. It took him past the abandoned gold mine, a bald hump topped by a single candelabra cactus which might be one or more centuries old, nearly forty feet tall, raising its phallic spars above a monstrous trunk in two tones of green: silvery olive and midnight emerald. “You feed off the seams, eh,
candelero
! But it’s hard to live like that, you get as thirsty as the next guy and you’re even uglier.” Wandering prospectors had tried to chop the monster down so as to delve between its roots, but they soon gave up, leaving the trunk deformed around the base. Some gold mine! A mine of schemes! By dynamiting the rock and sluicing through the sand and clay and god knows what else, you might get a thimbleful of gold dust worth twenty crates of scotch,
si caballero
! Unless you happened to land plumb on the jolly seam that’s mocking us six inches under this track here. You might just as well send away to Mexico City for lottery tickets, after consulting Doña Luz on the numbers to choose, or choose them for themselves, because the good numbers aren’t necessarily the winners, this being a matter of fate, not of money — Doña Luz is surely right on that score — which means that the losers can be lucky all the same.

Harris’s route now took him past Las Calaveras, the Skulls. Following the lure of the ruins, he deviated from the main track to take a look at them. Did time humanize these anguished stones, or did it dehumanize them? First you walked through a stretch of dry, prickly undergrowth, bristling with dead needles. The rock-strewn slope dipped toward a granite cliff, tinted blue or gold, according to the time of day. If you turned around you had a vista of the lake, calm as a mirror, a divine mirror of water resting on the earth. All that was left of an altar was a base of reddish-gray andesite, the color of dried blood, the appropriate color. Crudely carved skulls protrude from the earth on both sides of worn stones that once might have formed steps. Schematic skulls with clenched stripes of teeth, eye sockets that seemed still to cast a baleful stare into the horizontal sky. Harris felt his life-beat slowing. Expectant, he listened for the thud of drums in the distance, the mesmerizing, muffled tattoo of the forest. To regain his aplomb he always said the same words, aloud: “These cannibals sure knew how to choose their sites!” Twenty paces farther on, a broken column lying half hidden in the brush offered up to the face of the sky another huge face with geometric eyes contemplating the zenith indefinitely. This god of an unknown race, assumed to be Mongoloid, did not present the features of that race but features more refined, European or Malaysian, hybrid in their abstraction. His diadem was broken into pieces. Harris bowed his head, absorbed by the problem of human duration, the problem of … of what, man! You’ll never be able to put it into words, but the problem remains. The sudden appearance of a lizard, gray with emerald spots, startled him. “Well, well,” he muttered. Whistling, he continued on his way. The Battistis and the Harrises sometimes met up here for an evening picnic. Bruno, stimulated by a swallow of rum or by the proximity of the unknown god, told stories about the ruins of Central Asia, the Roof of the World, Pamir’s … Harris would slap his thigh, booming: “Roof of the World! And on top of that, another roof?” There can’t have even been a sky, if it was really the Roof of the World! He laughed even louder: “A stratospheric sleight of hand!” Monica and Noémi discussed the embroidery stitches of Los Altos and the Tarascan country. They understood each other well.

On this occasion, an amusing encounter awaited Harris at Las Calaveras. He found two Indians squatting on their heels, having a smoke. A bald gent, masked by large sunglasses that made him look like a skull himself, sportily clad in a combination of beige and brown, was measuring the unknown god’s nose with a compass. “Hello there!” cried Harris. “I’ll bet you’re half a millimeter off!” Startled, the man jumped up — “How do you do” — and put on a toothy smile like a dog’s. Harris strode nearer, swinging his machete so that the light bounced off its blade. “Who do you think you’re kidding, Mister, with your little compass? The venerable god, yourself, everybody else, or mathematics?” The erudite tourist appreciated the joke. Repressing the giggles, Harris became quite sociable. “These are difficult measurements,” the man said, “but take it from me, they’ll be accurate …”

“Accurate?” went Harris, brimming with ironical glee. “So you’re an archaeologist?”

“Oh, just in my spare time,” the other said modestly. “And you, an artist?”

“Amateur, old pal, like yourself.”

“Care for a drink?” proposed the amateur archaeologist.

Harris brightened. “What are you carrying in the way of bottles?” The expedition’s supplies turned out to include a first-class brandy, and Harris in mounting good cheer became cordially insolent. “So you go around measuring idols’ noses, and probably their backsides, in godforsaken holes like this? Funny! And where d’you come from in the first place, Mister?” “Actually, I’m from Wisconsin …” He was priceless, this archaeologist, amateur or otherwise: the panama hat with the crimson ribbon, the coffee-colored silk necktie over the khaki shirt, the pink skin, the fastidiously clipped blond mustache, those dark glasses which must be hiding the eyes of a learned rabbit … “I’ve been working on my book on pre-Colombian sculpture for the past eight years.” Harris poured himself another brandy.

“If that means carrying around brandy this good, I guess you’ll be forgiven upstairs … Just think, in those eight years you might have slept with a thousand women of all different colors, committed a whole string of crimes, at a profit or at a loss, lost and re-made a dozen fortunes, spent years cooling off in Sing Sing or San Quentin or someplace — no lack of good spots! You could have gone around the world on a bicycle! Crossed the ocean in a rowboat! Got yourself killed eight hundred different ways in the war!”

“Certainly,” said the archaeologist. “Except for getting yourself killed, even once, in the war, I hope you’ve done a fair number of those things yourself …”

“I beg your pardon! I even got myself killed in New Guinea!”

“Congratulations. Life feels so much grander after that, doesn’t it? Well, in exceptional cases it does …”

“Obviously.”

The archaeologist, Mr. Brown, spent every night in his car, which was parked four or five miles away. He invited Harris to partake of his cold chicken, whiskey, and wines. “I have a weakness for fine wines, Mr. Harris …” Harris agreed that fine wines were conducive to the study of old stone carvings. “Take me, for instance. Me who’s never read a single book on the subject — god forbid — well, once I’ve enough of the noble fluid in my belly, I could tell you the authentic history of this old god and describe the dances the young Olmec girls, if there were such girls, used to dance around him on carpets of flowers and decapitated birds …”

“You’re way off,” answered Mr. Brown, shocked. “These monuments don’t belong to the Olmec culture!”

“They don’t? What do you know? Not that I give a damn.”

Mr. Brown was unaware of the existence nearby of a hospitable plantation, owned by an Italian, Bruno Battisti, “a nice old fellow who’s traveled all over. Now he knows the history of the Olmecs and the Tarambiretls and the rest. His wife is a charming woman too, only she’s out of her mind …” Harris invited the archaeolo-gist to go along with him. Mr. Brown was tempted, but hated to be indiscreet … The word “indiscreet” made Harris guffaw as he twirled his machete. Mr. Brown accepted the invitation.

* * *

Two or three times a year, the Battistis were visited by tourists on their way to take pictures of each other at Las Calaveras and under the picturesque candelabra cactus on the Cerro de Oro. They had even received copies of such snapshots in the post: sunny girls seated with grinning skulls between their knees, a young sportsman with movie-star looks. “You are a sage …” wrote the prettiest girl to Bruno, with news of her engagement … And yet he was disturbed by Mr. Brown’s dusty automobile the minute he saw it drive up. Harris alighted first. Then the archaeologist appeared, removing his sunglasses and glancing about like a dazzled white rabbit.

“Where did you pick up this specimen?” growled Bruno to Harris.

“A weirdo. He was camped out by the idol, measuring its nostrils. With a hamper full of choice bottles. He’s a complete idiot.”

Nothing abnormal in any of this.

Mr. Brown complimented Mr. Battisti: “Sir, you live in an absolute paradise …”

Mr. Brown placed a pair of blue-tinted spectacles over his gray, anemic eyes. He admired the coffee bushes, the euphorbia, the calabash grove, the mangoes, the eucalyptus, the tall royal palms … He had the gift of inarticulate appreciation. He brought out his field glasses to inspect Green Island, where there were pyramids, one of which was semicircular, a rare and probably very ancient design, between fifteen hundred and two thousand years old. The Cuicuilco pyramid was reputed to be older still …

“Ten thousand years!” declared Harris, all jovial.

“No! Really? I find that hard to believe …”

Harris gave him a vigorous thwack on the back, so friendly that the fellow pitched forward.

“We’re not even close by five thousand years, joker!”

Mr. Brown gave the stuttering laugh of the shy man, slave to erudition, who doesn’t realize he’s being made fun of. Daria found him repellent. “A machine for quantifying
calaveras
and pickling their statistics in useless file cards …” His magazines, with their recent American fashions, interested Noémi. In the course of a friendly chat skillfully managed by Bruno Battisti, Mr. Brown emerged as the owner of a business in Wisconsin; raised as a Presbyterian but personally an atheist, “scientific” as he put it, though deeply respectful of religion; rather conservative but with liberal leanings. When he completed his study of Mexican antiquities, he looked forward to lengthy sojourns in Peru, where the ruins of Tiahuanaco, in particular, merited close and conscientious description as the first phase of an investigation that would embark in an entirely unprecedented direction, taking account of … Mr. Brown spent several days at the plantation, happy to sleep in a comfortable bed and to lose at chess against Daria or Bruno, in serious games which he began cleverly and usually muffed toward the end, as though some inhibition prevented him from winning. He let fall something relevant to this, one day. “I went toward science because I was intimidated being successful at business … My father was extremely wealthy. Brown and Coldman, you’ll have heard the name?” “Nobody, in these mountains, has ever heard of it,” said Daria maliciously.

“Really?” said Mr. Brown with the look of a marionette that sometimes came over him.

Before the evening meal, he invariably changed into a dress shirt adorned by a floppy cravat the color of dead leaves.

* * *

The air at the end of an oppressive afternoon was supercharged with electricity. A ceiling of clouds weighed down on the place. All day, the plantation had been full of the sounds of restless animals; two peons had fought without being drunk. Flocks of lowflying birds enlivened the sunset, swarms of bats fluttered on the fringe of the night, but the immobility of the trees remained vaster than everything. For a second, outlined against the purple glow of the sunset, the tops of isolated palm trees looked like huge, black, curiously unhappy spiders … Daria and Noémi set the table with the maid, Melita, who was clumsier than usual tonight and broke two Jalisco pottery plates. Harris had left. Mr. Brown and Bruno Battisti were sprawled in deck chairs, exchanging desultory scraps of talk. Only the lightning seemed alive. It flashed and sheeted through the clouds, almost unceasing but erratic and freakish, there a stealthy glimmer, here a blinding flash, illuminating with lifeless whiteness a vast, sharply etched panorama void of color and movement. “This landscape,” said Bruno, “seems to be only the memory of itself …” After requesting a repetition of that sentence, the visitor gave a passive “Ah, yes.” With each crackling flash the two men glimpsed their own forms bleached white from head to foot, as though they had been turned into stone. “The storms won’t break for two or three days yet, you’ll see,” Bruno said.

“Ah, you think so?”

“It would be best for you, Mr. Brown, to go to the pyramids at first light tomorrow and return by midafternoon, to avoid being caught in a gale over the lake. The Indian canoes are very well built, but it’s a risk nonetheless …”

“Tomorrow at first light,” the visitor repeated apathetically.

“It’s no more than three hours’ rowing,” Bruno said, vexed by the groundless irritation he felt. “And one hour’s walk as far as the teocalli …”

“I’m thirsty,” said Mr. Brown. “Could you ask for a glass of water, please? I find this bath of electricity enervating.” A splintering glare exposed his livid countenance, mouth wide open gasping for air. Don Bruno reached for the little bell made of volcanic ash, and a gay tinkle rang out. Bare feet padded quickly over the tiles, a swarthy girl was illuminated, like a dancer in the jungle, by a flash of lightning. “A glass of water, Celia, for the señor …” “Thank you,” said Mr. Brown in a satisfied voice. “This tropical climate …”