Matías Ariel Chiappe Ippolito translated by Andrea Rosenberg

日々旅にして旅を栖とす。 （松尾芭蕉）

“Every day is a journey, and the journey itself is home.” –Matsuo Bashō, tr. Sam Hamill

I’d been told I should get in touch with Hideki, whom everybody calls “the sensei.” I thought I was prepared for my visit to the city of Nikkō—I’d asked a number of people and looked at a bunch of websites; I’d even acquired a tourism pamphlet about Tochigi Prefecture that I hadn’t gotten a chance to read yet. I knew about the surrounding area: Kegon Falls, the Shinkyo Bridge, Mount Nantai. I knew that the main attraction was the Rinnoji Temple and the shrines of Futarasan and Toshogu, the latter of which houses the tomb of Ieyasu Tokugawa, the first shogun of the Edo period. I knew I was about to ... Read More »]]>

Matías Ariel Chiappe Ippolito
translated by Andrea Rosenberg

日々旅にして旅を栖とす。
（松尾芭蕉）

“Every day is a journey, and the journey itself is home.”
–Matsuo Bashō, tr. Sam Hamill

I’d been told I should get in touch with Hideki, whom everybody calls “the sensei.” I thought I was prepared for my visit to the city of Nikkō—I’d asked a number of people and looked at a bunch of websites; I’d even acquired a tourism pamphlet about Tochigi Prefecture that I hadn’t gotten a chance to read yet. I knew about the surrounding area: Kegon Falls, the Shinkyo Bridge, Mount Nantai. I knew that the main attraction was the Rinnoji Temple and the shrines of Futarasan and Toshogu, the latter of which houses the tomb of Ieyasu Tokugawa, the first shogun of the Edo period. I knew I was about to enter an ancient, magical place whose buildings were decorated with carvings of dragons and cats and, most famous of all, one with three monkeys covering their mouth, ears, and eyes, respectively. A place suspended in mist and crisscrossed by a million lantern-lined paths.

Each of these elements has a story. One of the lanterns, for example, is known as 化灯籠 (Bake-Doro), the Ghost Lantern. This lantern is famous because, thanks to its particular design and the properties of the materials it’s made from, the shadows it casts are unusually dense. The samurai of centuries past, believing that the lantern was invoking ghosts and spirits, would attack the shadows, never making contact with those illusory menaces. You can still see the marks of their swords, born of paranoia or a bad trip, on the lantern’s lattice-work. People were so terrified of the lantern that even today it’s lit only once a year, from April 13 to 17, during the Yayoi Festival, when the place is packed with people who could come to one’s aid in case of a spectral assault.

“You’re into that crap?” Hideki asked me when I said I was going there next, describing my intention to follow in Matsuo Bashō’s footsteps on a trip that would take me through all of Japan. I stared at him for a second. Then I looked down. I felt like a tourist, a dupe; I sensed that the man before me knew a great deal and carped about the same things Ariel Rodó had objected to in Rubén Darío’s imitations of Loti: the novelty of appearances; frivolity; easy, amusing puerilities. “I guess,” I said, like an idiot. He laughed and told me all those things were only interesting on the surface. “So what’s the best thing in Tochigi, then?” I asked. Telling me to hang on, he got up from the futon, went over to a little bookcase to fetch a book, and opened it in the middle. He showed me the image, which filled the entire page.

“Tochigi is the land of Japanese marijuana,” he said, showing me other photos from the book: hemp fields, ukiyo-e woodblock prints of weed, lacquered smoking pipes in every shape and color. Then he added, “It’s grown other places too, like Nagano and Okinawa, but nothing as potent as what we have here.” He continued in the tone of somebody giving an academic talk: the material produced from the marijuana plant (commonly known as hemp, he clarified) was used in countless ways on the Japanese archipelago starting in the Jōmon period, a thousand years before Christ. Later it was used in the manufacture of clothing and baskets, to make writing paper during the Heian period, to tie coins together in the years of the feudal lords, in performing dohyō-iri (when a sumo wrestler cleans the combat area wearing a hemp rope around his waist), and, because of its durability, for soldiers’ hats during World War II. In addition, cannabis has long been a symbol of purity in Japan’s native religion, Shintoism, and is used for rituals and ceremonial clothing.

“But in 1948 production was outlawed during the US occupation of Japan.” Apparently, General Douglas MacArthur thought marijuana was closely linked to communism, politica non grata after the war. It was also associated with the black musicians who’d ruined real American jazz. As his homeland was wont to do, he established a prohibition in Japanese territory. “Yukio Funai, the author of this book, says it was because of military factors—a way of reducing Japanese military power, which had been running a vibrant, profitable industry.” Whatever the case, that prohibition remains in place today. Politicians have even been reluctant to loosen (I mean, update) the penalties or even consider allowing medicinal marijuana, Hideki added. Again I stared at him in silence. On this topic, it seemed, Latin America and Asia, or at least Japan, shared a history of imposed Yankee hypocrisies.

At any rate, Tochigi became the epicenter of a countercultural resistance, reclaiming the country’s long tradition of cannabis use. “So that lantern thing doesn’t have anything to do with the lantern’s design or materials. The samurai, honoring customs from our most ancient traditions, were high as a kite, and they’d just go whacking away at the metal pole with their swords.” The image of a Rastafarian samurai flitted through my mind. This meant that one of the most important centers of so-called “Japanese culture” was actually a pot paradise. “Did you see the movie The Beach?” “Of course, I’m obsessed with the ’90s.” “Well, kind of like that, but with Japanese scenery.” How many other cultures could explain themselves through their use of sacred psychotropic plants? I recalled that Albert Hofmann and Robert Wassan proposed something similar about Greek culture when they analyzed the concoction consumed during the ritual to the goddess Demeter; they concluded that the mixture of wheat and barley was an excellent medium for the fungus Claviceps purpurea, from which a precursor of LSD can be derived.

“This is all I have left from then . . .” Hideki said, opening a little box decorated with an image of a smoking geisha. While loading a pipe, he asked me if I’d ever thought about the connections between marijuana and poets like Bashō, who “were actually the hippies of their time,” he noted. A counterculture that resisted first the imperial aristocracy and then the military elite. “That’s why they had such an impact on the beatniks.” Haiku poets as forerunners of stoned hippies? It was true that the beatniks had taken Bashō and his disciples as models. Not just in terms of pilgrimage, escape, and vanishing lines, but also by adopting Zen Buddhism as the core of their philosophical project. “Exactly,” Hideki said, bringing the flame up to his face.

One poet who exemplifies these unexpected connections was Dom Sylvester Houédard, a Benedictine monk at Prinknash Abbey, who translated the Bible while exchanging letters with Ginsberg, Burroughs, and others. Like the beatniks (or, rather, like Saint John of the Cross and Sor Juana Inés), Houédard was seeking some kind of mystic revelation, which he found both in Catholicism and in haiku. Unlike the beat poets, however, he chose to write visual poetry, so-called “concrete poetry,” and especially calligrams. In fact, he wrote a number of pieces of literary criticism, each of them in a different calligraphy. He also translated Bashō’s famous haiku about a frog:

frog
pond
plop

The original (古池や蛙飛びこむ水の音 Furu ike ya kawazu tobikomu mizu no oto, which can be translated literally as “Old pond / a frog leaps / sound of water”) has been the object of hundreds of versions, with greater and lesser degrees of embellishment: “The old pond / a frog leaps in, / and a splash” (Makoto Ueda); “Un vieil étang / une grenouille plonge / le bruit de l’eau” (Joan Titus-Carmel); “Un viejo estanque / salta una rana, ¡zas! / chapaleteo” (Paz and Hayashiya). But I think Bashō would have liked Houédard’s (even more) minimalist version. Or at least found it amusing. Maybe it would have confirmed for him that there are coincidences in this world, in this universe. After all, one of his contemporaries had experienced a similar revelation. Bashō observed a frog jumping into a pond and—splash!—a moment of mystical enlightenment. Meanwhile, in England, an apple fell on Newton’s head and—thump!—a moment of rational enlightenment.

Hideki reached out and handed me what from that moment on I began to think of as a basic and even necessary element of “Japanese culture”—if such a thing exists, if it is necessary to qualify it in national terms. Then he stretched from the futon without getting up and moved his fingers on the touchpad of his computer. Scroll up, scroll down, and, with a little tap like a leaping frog, he selected a song from a playlist. “These guys do a mix of folk, ska, and reggae, all in the Ainu language spoken by that ethnic community in Hokkaido.” I looked over and managed to see the name of the band: Oki Dub Ainu. Hideki told me about other similar groups: the rapper Oni and his band Still Ichimaya; the singer Likkle Mai; Cicala Mvta, who’d done a cover of Víctor Jara’s “El derecho de vivir en paz.” It was a brief, fascinating trip through stoner music in present-day Japan.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ByiXt0TUr0&list=PLN8jn1rpcIHCCDsH3_Tg5rO2_4x3-_JI1

After a while, I couldn’t get my eyes to focus anymore. Hideki was telling me about the trees around the Nikkō shrine. “Out in those woods, I had the best . . . the most intense trip of my life.” He told me he’d gotten so high on a joint of Toshigi marijuana that he didn’t even know where he was. At one point he got lost in the music in his headphones and started wandering aimlessly through the trees, along a creek, and past some waterfalls—walking for two, three, who knows how many hours—and came to a clearing with a cabin, through whose windows he thought he spied naked bodies in bizarre sexual positions; he kept going and ended up in a little town right out of the American Old West, with horses and barrels and the inevitable sign reading “Saloon”; and then he got the feeling like somebody was after him and took off running, and only then noticed that there were some ninjas with swords behind him. “ほんとだ！” he added. He said he managed to escape that nightmare—he doesn’t know how, but he reached a train station, where he boarded a train and slept the whole way back. “Like I say . . . the most potent ganja in Japan.” His story seemed so wild that I never for an instant doubted it was true.

We said goodbye and he told me, “Have a good time in Nikkō. Next May we’ll go to the legalization march together.” I left. In the train on the way back, I rummaged in my backpack and found the same items as always: my collapsible umbrella, that Pynchon novel I can’t seem to finish, the kanji flashcards that by now I think are going to be with me for the rest of my days, as if they were prayer cards or some kind of talisman. Way down at the bottom, I came across the tourism pamphlet. I opened it. There, among other things, I found information on the Kinugawa Sex Museum; the Old West–themed amusement park; the ancient village of Edo, where they still do ninja shows . . . Even all about a “Marijuana Museum.” “Tochigi, Japan’s most amazing prefecture,” the pamphlet declared. I thought back to the pyramids at Chichén Itzá, swarming with vendors; Notre-Dame Cathedral, where they sell souvenirs during mass; the section of the Great Wall of China where they installed a slide for visitors to ride down on little carts. I sat staring straight ahead, eager to get home. When I left Koenji Station, the wind blew a ticket out of a woman’s hand and down a storm drain. It was a moment of revelation, a trip: I was suddenly filled with the words I’ve just written here.

*   *   *

Bibliography

船井幸雄 [Funai Yukio].『悪法! ! 「大麻取締法」の真実』[¡Damn law! The truth about the marijuana prohibition in Japan]. Tokyo: Business-sha, 2012.

Mitchell, Jon. “Cannabis: The Fabric of Japan.” The Japan Times. Accessed 21 Nov. 2016.

長吉 秀夫 [Nagayoshi Hideo].『大麻入門』[Introduction to marijuana]. Tokyo: Gentosha, 2009.

*   *   *

Images courtesy of the author.

Juan Gómez Bárcena Translated by Andrea Rosenberg

You go to the window to watch the Neighbor leave. He’s accompanied by two men. They’re wearing hats pulled down tight over their ears and a sort of kerchief or scarf that leaves only their eyes exposed. But you recognize them anyway: you’ve seen them many times under this very window, carrying their portfolios and their leather briefcases. They look like they’re in a hurry, and the Neighbor is practically dragging his leg as he limps along. You watch them head down the street toward the river.

They disappear.

From the other side of the wall, the voice of the Girl again. She switches from world capitals to multiplication tables, where she seems more self-assured and more mechanical, and from there to the right and left tributaries of the Danube, and finally to a long ... Read More »]]>

Juan Gómez Bárcena
Translated by Andrea Rosenberg

You go to the window to watch the Neighbor leave. He’s accompanied by two men. They’re wearing hats pulled down tight over their ears and a sort of kerchief or scarf that leaves only their eyes exposed. But you recognize them anyway: you’ve seen them many times under this very window, carrying their portfolios and their leather briefcases. They look like they’re in a hurry, and the Neighbor is practically dragging his leg as he limps along. You watch them head down the street toward the river.

They disappear.

From the other side of the wall, the voice of the Girl again. She switches from world capitals to multiplication tables, where she seems more self-assured and more mechanical, and from there to the right and left tributaries of the Danube, and finally to a long recitation of Great Moments in the Labor Struggle. She rattles off the publication date of the Communist Manifesto. The martyrs of Chicago. The Odessa uprising. The Winter Palace. A pause, and in that pause, the sound of the door. Guadalajara. Stalingrad. Berlin. The Korean War. Another sound, this time in the hall. It’s the Wife. You’d recognize the tapping of her heels anywhere. She stops on the other side of the door, as if she were about to come in. But why would she, when you’ve still got water, and food, and cigarettes, and the bucket almost untouched—there’s still a while to go before another of those endless days finally comes to an end. That’s when you hear the Girl stop reciting. Or, rather, you stop hearing her, because the sound of water has filled everything. The water, again, lapping at the cold, white surface. The Wife’s sigh. Her clothing coming loose, garment by garment, almost reluctantly, in pauses pervaded by steam and tile. Her bare feet padding toward the water. You hear it all with a new, almost terrifying precision that soars above the sounds issuing from the other side of the window. You realize that the bathroom door must be open. And why wouldn’t it be, since yours is, as usual, closed? You press your ear to the wood to confirm that the Wife has started her bath—her heels ring on the ceramic for a moment, her hands gripping the edges of the tub with a noise like a cephalopod sucker or an amphibian. And then, just as you’re about to hear the rest, all the damp and heat of her body, the voices start. A rising chant. Fevered cheering that seems to come from across the river, with whistles, clapping, and shouts of approval. You attempt to unplait the voices that arrive woven into a uniform murmur, waves that surge and ebb. Voices calling for resignations, voices calling for calm, voices calling for international assistance, voices calling for weapons. They all want the same thing: a country free of Russians and a Russia free of Soviets. That’s what they repeat in a frenzied ovation, and there are so many mouths, and they are shouting so loudly in all directions, that you have no doubt they’ll achieve their aim. Underneath the repeated words, you hear many others that do not repeat. You hear a little boy whose molars are aching. You hear a taxi driver who is honking his horn and the crowd that isn’t moving aside. You hear a dozen radio broadcasts reporting live in different languages and one that is stubbornly repeating the same military fanfare. You hear the ripping sound of a pair of hands tearing up a Party membership card and the swish of scissors slicing through a flag’s hammer and sickle. You hear a soldier loading his weapon. You hear the rustle of a man taking advantage of the crush of the crowd to brush his lover’s waist. You hear seventeen lighters lighting seventeen cigarettes in different spots around Bem Square. You hear one voice that’s cursing God and nine others praying to Him. You hear the poems that a student is reading from a rooftop or a dais. You hear an agent of the secret police who’s asking if it’s time to intervene yet and his sergeant who doesn’t answer or answers with a gesture. You can hear everything. Everything but the Wife’s body. And so you’ve reached out your hand to grasp the door handle, the door handle that seemed all this time like it would burn you but doesn’t.

You open the door.

And then there she is. First her hand, resting on the edge of the tub. A hand that from time to time moves, seems to vibrate, maybe trembles.

A hand shaken by the touch of a thought or a nightmare. The hair loose, tumbling softly. The motionless profile of her face. The closed eyes. You look at those eyes and realize she’s crying. Crying soundlessly. And it’s strange, maybe even impossible, because though you seem to hear the fragile breeze of her respiration, even hear her pulse, muffled through the water, you cannot make out her weeping. Maybe she’s not crying. How could you even discern her tears from here? You see her crying because you think she should be crying. Maybe she’s simply taking a bath, while out on the street everybody is shouting and demanding things you don’t understand.

Slowly she rises from the water, suddenly presenting you with the sight of her naked body. She offers herself to you as if glimpsed through the fog of a dream. A heat spreading through the steam and the hallway: the warmth of her body. And then, when you see her, you suddenly realize that the Wife is no longer the Wife. She’s not that girl who once opened the door to you. She is a woman. A woman who’s gotten her first wrinkles and maybe even her first gray hairs. A woman who is afraid. A woman who cries or who perhaps does not cry. Who has needed all those trays, all those newspapers, that endless ferrying of buckets, to become what she is now. Because you never looked at her—at least not till this moment. You accepted her mugs, her bowls, her basins of water, but you didn’t look at her. You saw her fossilized smile, a smile made of fatigue and time. And now yes, you look at her, now you see her as the woman she’s become, and you even seem to see the man you’ve become. A succession of images and thoughts that flit past in the time it takes for her to reach out her hand and grab the towel. The instant between that movement and the insignificant movement of lifting her face to look at you. Suddenly, her gaze.

And with that gaze, no movement at all. The Wife bears up under the weight of your eyes, her face utterly motionless. As if all her focus were on the other movements: wrapping the towel around herself, drying her hair, shaking first one foot and then the other. She looks at you for a period that seems neither long nor short but simply incomprehensible, almost mineral, like the passing of geological eras. And her gaze, too, seems to be made of stone, looking at you without seeing, without expression, without judgment, and even so it still doesn’t shift away, it remains fixed on you while she dresses slowly, while she adjusts her bra unhurriedly, untrembling, while she pulls up her skirt and almost blindly her hands gather up the garments scattered across the floor. She looks at you as if you were the one made of stone. Perhaps with a hint of curiosity, of the sort aroused by a mute’s first spoken word, even if it is an unforgivable curse or insult that is forgiven all the same. That is how she looks at you during this instant that doesn’t last, this during in which time runs aground, and which nevertheless comes to an end—she slips on her other shoe, turns out the light, and moves off down the hallway without looking back, as if you didn’t exist or as if it were only now that you had begun to exist.

She disappears. And yet she is still there before you, still standing and still naked in the empty bathroom. She is young again. Five, ten, maybe even fifteen years ago. You see her just as she was when you first arrived at the house—though you feel as if no time had gone by, as if that first day had never ended. She is still naked, but she’s no longer standing in the bathroom door. The door isn’t even there yet. Only the steam from the tub or something akin to the steam from the tub remains, plumes of mist rising from the frozen earth. And she is lying on the snow. She is naked and she is also, most certainly, dead. You picture her like that, eternalized in the act of opening her mouth, fossilized by the frost. She’s not alone. All around her are other bodies, women who are naked and dead like her, heaped up on the snow. Suddenly, a sound. A cart approaches, rocking back and forth: two men in prison uniforms are laboriously pushing it. They stop, glance at each other, and walk over to the first body, leaning on their walking sticks. Rising from their mouths is the heat of their breathing, in quick puffs that dissipate in the air. They bend over and start lifting the corpses. Except they’re not corpses—that’s what they’ve been taught. You have to call them shit, dolls, garbage, scarecrows. If anyone messes up and says the word deceased, the word victim, the soldiers flog him with their whips. So that’s what they’re doing now: picking up scarecrows. Later they’ll drink a dish of mud and call it water; they’ll chew a patty of black clay and call it bread. Because they’ve learned that surviving means, above all, knowing the right name for things. They know, for example, that organizing a shirt means stealing it; that you should avoid the prisoners with a green triangle sewn on their uniform but that the ones with a pink triangle or a yellow star are easy to take advantage of; that being chosen in the selections means becoming a scarecrow yourself; that you have to sleep on top of your bowl and spoon to keep others from organizing them in the night; that working in the Kanada section extends your life and shoveling coal shortens it. What they’re doing now has a name too. It’s called cleaning the field, and you have to do it quickly, before the kapo comes over. They’ve also been around long enough to learn the word kapo.

The prisoners—because wearing a striped uniform means being a prisoner, in this language and in every language on earth—start dragging the garbage toward the cart. Each of them takes his own load, just as the soldiers have taught them: all they have to do is place the handle of their walking stick under the chin—the chin of a scarecrow—and pull, pull hard. The heels cut shallow furrows in the snow, which sometimes becomes tinged pink. The dolls seem faintly blue when they’re still lying on the snow, and white when they load them one by one onto the cart. They do it carefully, with something that is akin to consideration or respect, or that maybe is just exhaustion. Five, ten, twelve, twenty scarecrows arranged the way you pile up railroad ties: one going one direction and the next going the other way. Making the most of the space. Those men know what they’re doing, and the cargo seems infinitely light in their hands—forty, maybe thirty-five kilos each. As if they really were stuffed with straw. It’s not a lovely sight: the dolls are broken and dirty, and the men try not to look at them. There’s one that looks like an old woman—with coarse, wrinkled skin—and another that looks like a little girl and a third that’s pregnant like a Russian matryoshka, and also a doll that seems to be missing pieces or to have extras: blotches like dried blood gleam against her white skin. They’re all ugly. They’re all smeared with crusts of mire and ice and have shaved heads. The men lift them as quickly as they can, and when they hoist them into the air, the emaciated arms dangle heavily, slack as a disjointed marionette.

Only the Wife’s body seems unblemished. Only hers seems, in fact, like a body, and one of the prisoners stops short just as it’s her turn. She has her head shaved too and is glowing like plaster, but she doesn’t look like a doll. She is a woman. A beautiful woman, in that contradictory and unbearable way that a corpse can be beautiful. She looks like an actress, a model, a ballerina, with long, sculpted legs hanging in the air: a young bride delivered into her groom’s arms, and the groom hesitating to step over the threshold. Her body is fleshy, inviting, with no cuts on the feet or splatters of mud. Against her white skin, only her nipples stand out, quite red and quite hard, like berries shining in the frost. Seeing her up close, it turns out she’s not the Wife. She can’t be, of course, but even so it’s easy to confuse them. You could say she is the Wife if time were able to run backward. The Wife if, rather than taking a bath, she’d instead expired in the snow. She doesn’t seem to have worn wooden clogs either, or wielded a shovel, or endured a single lash on her back. She’s simply dead, and the prisoner, still hesitant, lifts her into the air. Maybe he thinks she’s too pretty to be a doll, a piece of garbage, a scarecrow. Maybe he’s calculating whether he can load her on top of the others or if doing so will cause the pile to collapse. His uncertainty is almost touching. And she is practically a girl still, with unmarred hands made for embroidering tablecloths or grasping fountain pens. She was young and beautiful in some very distant place, in Greece or Norway, in Spain or Yugoslavia, in France or Russia or Italy, and now there she is, nestled in a stranger’s arms, as if waiting to continue her journey. She must have been a virgin still. And it’s inevitable to imagine the immense effort it required to care for and feed that body for so many years, all her life covering it in dresses and blankets, nightgowns, skirts, stockings, shawls, garters, bracelets, underskirts; warm baths in the tub and Sundays with rouge and perfume. Her mother wrapping her daughter day after day like a gift so that one day she’d find a good husband who’d unhook the clasp of her bra, like a boy tugging on a piñata’s rope. And later discovering that the only thing men wanted was to take her from her village—and maybe that was her very first journey—and pile her into a too-small cart the way you pile logs. Hers is a story that cannot be told, that must not be told, because it ceases to make sense. How could they understand it, those anonymous boys who became men while dreaming of undressing her with their hands, who hid one night below her window to peer in at her in the darkness and catch a glimpse of a breast, a thigh, an ankle, any minuscule portion of her flesh laid bare. Now she’s there, held indifferently aloft, with the secret of her beauty revealed at last and ultimately useless. That nakedness preserved for so long for nobody, now transformed into garbage that everyone avoids looking at or touching. A useless thing that only perplexes the prisoner, who’s wondering whether to pack the cart a little tighter or make a second trip. He, too, is very young. Sixteen, at most seventeen years old, weighing forty-five or a maximum of fifty kilos. Perhaps he, too, is a virgin. This could be the first time he’s touched a naked woman. Maybe he feels disgust or maybe he’s aroused—who knows. Because it’s the first time he’s touched a naked woman, and maybe it’s also the first time he’s touched a dead body. Or maybe he isn’t thinking, isn’t feeling anything. A moment of hesitation, and then a sudden decision: they’ve got to fit in the cart, all twenty-three of them. Let’s cram them in as best we can, or the kapo will punish us for the delay.

Image: “Bricks, Budapest” by Marina Salles

Pablo Maurette translated by Andrea Rosenberg

In the winter of 1904–1905, in Beijing, a bodyguard named Fuzhuli was accused of killing his master, a Mongol prince, with a butcher knife. The punishment set forth by the Qing code[1] for crimes of such a serious nature (regicide, patricide, matricide, and other “enormicides”) was the infamous execution by lingchi, which had been practiced in China since the time of the Liao dynasty (tenth century). Lingchi, commonly translated as “death by a thousand cuts,” consisted of tying the condemned man to a post and cutting him into pieces. On that winter morning in the Beijing vegetable market, before a silent crowd, the executioner began carving large slices of flesh off Fuzhuli’s chest, biceps, and thighs; then cut off his limbs; and finally decapitated him. Once the process was over, the executioner ... Read More »]]>

Pablo Maurette
translated by Andrea Rosenberg

In the winter of 1904–1905, in Beijing, a bodyguard named Fuzhuli was accused of killing his master, a Mongol prince, with a butcher knife. The punishment set forth by the Qing code[1] for crimes of such a serious nature (regicide, patricide, matricide, and other “enormicides”) was the infamous execution by lingchi, which had been practiced in China since the time of the Liao dynasty (tenth century). Lingchi, commonly translated as “death by a thousand cuts,” consisted of tying the condemned man to a post and cutting him into pieces. On that winter morning in the Beijing vegetable market, before a silent crowd, the executioner began carving large slices of flesh off Fuzhuli’s chest, biceps, and thighs; then cut off his limbs; and finally decapitated him. Once the process was over, the executioner uttered the standard declaration: “Sha ren le” (“This person has been executed”). Lingchi did not involve an interminable torture session; it generally lasted only a few minutes, and usually the executioner, after making a couple of cuts, stabbed the condemned man in the heart to put an end to the nightmare. Contrary to what a scandalized Europe chose to believe, the cuts numbered not a thousand but only a few dozen. It was also customary to offer the prisoner large quantities of opium so he would not suffer. Soon after Fuzhuli’s execution, which was photographed and circulated in Europe thanks to a book by Louis Carpeaux (and later thanks to the morbid aestheticism of Georges Bataille in The Tears of Eros), China abolished lingchi.

Despite the misapprehensions of the Norwegian, English, French, and Spanish chroniclers who attended these executions and were fascinated by the idea of “Chinese torture,” the purpose of lingchi was not the infliction of inhuman suffering but instead dismemberment. Lingchi was the form of execution reserved for the most aberrant crimes in the Chinese penal code because its objective was to dismantle what one Sinologist and legal historian called “somatic integrity.”[2] The human body is a collection of parts—limbs, organs, muscles, tendons, and so on—that make up an organic whole. The perception of that wholeness is owed in large part to propioception, a type of haptic perception. Humans perceive themselves as being a sum of parts, but that perception is enforced by a fundamental undergirding experience: that of being an indivisible and inalienable unit. Lingchi is an assault on that fundamental experience, revealing it to be only a belief, an act of faith. The process of dismantling the body exposes its true nature—divisible, fragile, and contingent—by transforming the person, the “human being,” into a pile of pieces of flesh. The fact that the condemned man was given opium to anesthetize him is all the more revealing. Protected by the poppy’s magical narcotic and analgesic powers, Fuzhuli becomes numb to the agony: it is intangible. Before the executioner makes the first cut, Fuzhuli has already ceased to be a sentient body and has become a heap of flesh to be cut into pieces. Touch is the only sense we cannot lose, because losing it means ceasing to be a person and becoming mere flesh. Fuzhuli, drugged and tied to a pole, is like a cadaver on the table in an anatomical theater: a didactic spectacle. Anyone who observes the execution, who observes the ease and speed with which a person is reduced to a pile of lumps of flesh, returns home not just with a brutal memento mori but having learned a valuable lesson about the true laws that govern human life: the laws of physics. If everything is the body and the body is, fundamentally, divisible, pieces and textures are all that remain.

I read about Fuzhuli’s execution for the first time during a break at the National Library in Paris. I had been awarded a scholarship to spend a month comparing Renaissance editions of Lucretius’s On the Nature of Things, which I would use in the first chapter of my thesis. On occasion, while waiting for the librarians to retrieve the books I’d requested, I would browse the stacks in the basement. It was thus that I came across Louis Carpeaux’s book and the chilling photo of Fuzhuli. The subject of my research was the discovery of Lucretius’s work in Renaissance Italy, and especially its influence on the writings of a pioneer of epidemiology named Girolamo Fracastoro, who lived during the first half of the sixteenth century. As tends to happen when one is totally immersed in a topic, a powerful monothematic (if not monomaniacal) tendency led me to associate the history of capital punishment in China with that of the rediscovery of the Roman poet and philosopher in Italy. The more I thought about Fuzhuli’s execution, the better I understood the forbidden fascination that Lucretius aroused among Renaissance intellectuals. To prevent this unusual association from running aground on the shoals of absurdity, we must begin our discussion at the relevant moment.

In the summer of 1549, Giambattista Bussini, one of the innumerable humanist clerics who abounded in Rome under Pope Paul III, was present at a curious event. It might be going too far to declare it emblematic of the secularism that was to characterize modernity, but what happened in the meeting that Bussini described to his friend, the art historian Benedetto Varchi, is manifestly a postcard from the future of science and Western culture; a future that the church itself, which had organized the meeting, did not even suspect and about which it doubtless would have been scandalized. During that 1549 meeting, attendees discussed which new works to include in the infamous list of banned books that would be formalized a decade later under the title Index librorum prohibitorum. Faced with the growing Protestant threat, and only four years before the Council of Trent began, the intransigence of the Catholic church had reached its apex. The list of forbidden books written by atheists, heretics, Lutherans, antipapists, and pagan sympathizers grew ever longer, and someone at the meeting suggested including De rerum natura (On the Nature of Things), the philosophical poem in dactylic hexameter by the ancient Roman poet Titus Lucretius Carus. The nomination was hardly unjustified. Lucretius was an Epicurean who believed the universe was eternal and infinite and that the human soul was material, divisible, and therefore perishable. As for the divine, he was little interested in its existence and claimed that, if the gods did exist, they too were material beings, but composed of such delicate atoms that it was impossible for their actions to affect us. For Lucretius, concepts such as providence, rewards and punishments from beyond the grave, and divine intervention were lies cooked up by priests and theologians to keep the masses fearful and subdued. Lucretius’s verses are dazzling; his arguments, solid: Lucretius is convincing. De rerum natura may be the most virulent and beautiful anticlerical manifesto in the history of the world. The work had already been banned in the schools of Florence by 1517, and the term “Epicurean” was synonymous with “atheist” in the sixteenth century. And yet, when someone suggested including Lucretius among the forbidden authors at that meeting in 1549, incredibly, miraculously, absurdly, the suggestion was not well received. Cardinal Marcello Cervini argued that banning the book was unnecessary, as the pagan myths it contained were utterly harmless.[3] In the decades and centuries that followed, Lucretius’s work in particular and atomist materialism in general would profoundly influence and shape the thinking of figures such as Giordano Bruno, Francis Bacon, Galileo Galilei, Pierre Gassendi, Thomas Hobbes, Isaac Newton, Denis Diderot, Charles Darwin, Thomas Jefferson, Karl Marx, Albert Einstein, and Erwin Schrödinger, among others. Antiprovidentialist materialism and the conviction that nature conceals within it the keys that can unlock its secrets are pillars of atomist thinking and helped lay the foundations of modern science. Though Cardinal Cervini’s pragmatic attitude did not increase the importance or influence of the work—Lucretius had already been an influential author among the Italian pioneers of the new science for more than a century—it is a clear demonstration of the inevitability of the secular path that modern thought would take. And this secular turn was in great measure inspired by ideas disseminated by Lucretius, a poet and philosopher for whom the cornerstone of existence and perception was the sense of touch.

The second book of On the Nature of Things begins with the image of a man on a cliff watching a storm rage over the sea. The poet reflects on the strange sensation of satisfaction and fear experienced by someone witnessing a catastrophe from the safety of shelter. Lucretius explains that the pleasure that person feels is not the product of someone else’s suffering (Schadenfreude) but simply the consequence of knowing himself to be momentarily safe from harm. Similarly, reflects the poet, drawing an analogy, a person who is able, through philosophy, to elevate his knowledge beyond that of all other men will understand the nature of things and loses irrational fears that govern his life—in particular, two of them: fear of death and fear of the gods. Observation from a distance produces pleasure. The adjective that Lucretius uses, and that guides this, the fundamental book of On the Nature of Things, is tactile: suavis—that is, “smooth” or “pleasurable.”[4] Here we have the famous pleasure exalted by the Epicureans, the pleasure of avoiding suffering through knowledge, the pleasure of distance and detachment, a smoothness that caresses every atom of the body and spirit. So that young Memnius, to whom Lucretius dedicated the poem, will learn to enjoy this Epicurean smoothness, the poet devotes the second book to untangling the complex ontology and epistemology of atomism. Both center on an idiosyncratic notion of haptic perception.

Lucretius composed his poem sometime in the mid-first century BC. We know that the work enjoyed fame among his contemporaries. Cicero and Virgil read and admired it. In the first centuries of the Christian era and for the whole of the Middle Ages, however, the poem was almost entirely forgotten. In 1417 a humanist adventurer, rare book hunter, and explorer of forgotten libraries, Poggio Bracciolini, happened across a manuscript of Lucretius’s work in a German monastery. He knew at once that his find would capture the interest of his friends in Italy. He was not wrong. Not only did Lucretius become part of the classical canon, but also, surreptitiously, his ideas ended up shaping the discourse of secular science. This is the Lucretian miracle: despite its staunch anticlericalism, its dogmatic sensualism, its denial of the afterlife, its ideas on the eternity of the universe and the infinity of worlds, On the Nature of Things is rescued from censorship. Two of the greatest poets of the late fifteenth century, Angelo Poliziano and Giovanni Pontano, revere it. Pontano says, “Lucretius takes his readers where he wants to go”[5]; Ficino, Machiavelli, and the editor Aldo Manuzio, among others, succumb to the contagion of Lucretianism as well. They are not only captivated by the poetry but also galvanized by the ideas. Pious Ficino, fascinated by the text, writes a commentary that he later burns in a fit of guilt. “I offered it to Vulcan,” he tells a friend, with combined embarrassment and relief.[6] Sometimes, Lucretius explains, the doctor must sweeten the cup that contains the bitter medicine so that the child will drink it and be cured.[7] Poetry is the honey that sweetens the cup of knowledge. Human beings are like children who are afraid of the dark: to help them lose their fear and become free, one must explain how nature works, convince them that the supernatural does not exist, that everything is material, atoms falling for ever and ever through the void. Lucretius uses an unusual verb to confess that he has infused his cup of knowledge with the honeys of epic poetry: the verb is contingo, a compound of tangere, “to touch,” and the preposition cum, from which the word “contagion” is derived. Contagion is a touch that brings something with it, that leaves something behind, that transforms and influences. Equating the emergence of Lucretius with the spread of a contagion is fitting because his poetry and his thinking—which are inseparable, almost indistinguishable from each other—entered the bloodstream of European humanism like a disease that upheaves and transforms. Europe was infected by Lucretius, by his haptic poetry and his philosophy of the tangible, the way one is always infected: without realizing it.

* *

El sentido olvidado (The Forgotten Sense) was published by Mardulce Editoras in July 2015. 

Image via the Charmet Archives of the National Library of France.

Mario Bellatin translated by Andrea Rosenberg

1- BLACK BALL RELOADED

Author’s first look at the bande dessinée Black Ball

Yesterday I received some information about the Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal. I replied that toward the end of his life he’d seemed unable to bear the too loud a solitude in which he lived. So he’d climbed out onto a window ledge on an upper floor of the nursing home they’d put him in and leaped into the void. The response I received said that during his last years he’d been obsessed with the bustling pigeons he could see through the windows of the ward as he lay in bed. Maybe he wanted to turn into a bird, said the message. Maybe that’s why he’d attempted to fly, as if he were one of them. The person writing to me was my psychoanalyst. ... Read More »]]>

Mario Bellatin
translated by Andrea Rosenberg

1- BLACK BALL RELOADED

Author’s first look at the bande dessinée Black Ball

Yesterday I received some information about the Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal. I replied that toward the end of his life he’d seemed unable to bear the too loud a solitude in which he lived. So he’d climbed out onto a window ledge on an upper floor of the nursing home they’d put him in and leaped into the void. The response I received said that during his last years he’d been obsessed with the bustling pigeons he could see through the windows of the ward as he lay in bed. Maybe he wanted to turn into a bird, said the message. Maybe that’s why he’d attempted to fly, as if he were one of them. The person writing to me was my psychoanalyst. I’d had countless sessions with her a few years back. I remember I paid for the therapy not with money but with pieces of writing. Indeed, my lack of money was the very symptom that had brought me to her in the first place. My complete inability to pay for goods or services. Perhaps because of who my correspondent was, I started thinking about pigeons after that. Wasn’t it actually possible instead that they’d annoyed Hrabal so much that he was eventually driven to suicide? Couldn’t it have been because of their constant cooing that he’d come up with that phrase too loud a solitude, which appeared so often in his writing? Today my dogs killed a pigeon. In the park two blocks from my house, a wide pool had formed after last night’s heavy rains. People were lingering beside the water, next to a woman who sells breakfast from a cart in the mornings. A few pigeons were eating scraps that the people were tossing them. I’d left the house with my dogs just a few moments before. When I got to that area, Isaías and Manga caught one of the birds and fatally injured it, then left it floating in the pool. The people breakfasting protested loudly. I fled. When I saw what was happening, after a few meters I turned back. The dogs followed me. As we walked, they kept looking toward their fallen prey. They probably wanted to keep tearing at it. Or maybe bring it to me like an offering, a trophy. I heard someone yelling behind me, ordering me to pick up the dead bird and put it on a tree branch. It seemed like an odd request. Maybe the person believed it was more dignified for a pigeon to die on a tree branch than in a murky pool. I thought about the increasingly complicated relationship between men and animals. About current modes of thought. About the obligations we face these days. About norms that just a few years ago would have struck us as ludicrous. For example, adopting animals instead of buying them. Neutering males and females alike. Abandoning the custom of pointlessly mutilating them or giving them haircuts to meet obsolete standards of animal beauty. I also thought about the insects all around us. About how damaging they generally are, except for the ones we eat. I just now traded the books I’m currently working on for a bunch of giant ants. I also thought about the rats I sometimes hear under the floor of my study. I received another call today, too. In it, they informed me that the dog I’d given to my editor eight years earlier had just died from biting a poisonous toad. My editor is heartbroken. She’d taken the dog out to her country house, where the accident occurred. There’s no antidote for that kind of poison. When my editor calls, she’s in the waiting room of a pet crematorium. I haven’t yet gone out to walk the dogs. After the incident in the park, I return home. The dogs are all worked up. I’m not sure whether it’s because of the pigeon or because they haven’t gotten a full walk. Perezvón and Manga and Isaías and Abelardo keep circling endlessly around me. I ignore them, thinking I’ll take them out again at midmorning, and then settle in my study and open the book Black Ball, a project the artist Liniers has been working on. I admire its green cover. The ball—yes, black—in the center. The green that fills most of the space looks synthetic. I don’t think of nature at all when I look at it. Somehow it seems like the right green for the kind of trance experienced when diving into a book like Black Ball. The ideal green for, among other things, describing the artificiality of a half-wild pigeon hunt in a pool formed after a nighttime rain. The leaves of the tree where the breakfasters asked me to place the bird’s battered body must be that color. And it is, no doubt, the hue of that poisonous toad. From what she told me, my editor’s dog was carrying the toad’s corpse in its jaws. The black ball reminds me of a bowling ball. Of an iron ball chained to prisoners on death row in the United States. It could also represent the interior of the universe. I’m one of the few people who knows it’s a sort of food bolus. The same kind that both the insect discovered in the jungles of Africa and described in the text and the entomologist who found it turned into. For the moment, though, I try to pretend I don’t know what it’s from. When I turn the page, I realize it’s actually the ball from which my most terrible nightmares emerge. There I am, standing behind a lectern on a stage. One of my arms is missing. There seems to be a sizable audience in the auditorium-like space. I become aware once more that I’m missing an arm. I’m surprised by it. In the first scene of the book Black Ball by Liniers, we see the writer Mario Bellatin without his right arm. The void where it would have been is rigid and empty. It’s very strange to see him that way. Without his right arm. Could he have left it backstage? Is it some sort of joke he’s playing on his audience? His head is bald as usual, setting off perfectly the cut of the clergy shirt he wears when he’s not in a black tunic. I’m nervous. It is becoming reality, the worst thing that could befall that kind of writer. I don’t think he can stand up there and face an auditorium without his arm. But the awful scene is already set down in Black Ball. Mario Bellatin remembers how in the book Flowers there’s a similar character. Though unlike the one in Black Ball, the character in Flowers finds himself in front of a packed theater, naked and missing a leg. I think in that book, Flowers, it’s a writer who’s having a similar nightmare. A bad dream that began when he suddenly felt as if he were living inside a violet that his mother was growing in a flowerpot. As the dream continues, he is forced to dance naked on his single leg. It’s the opening number, the one that introduces the heroes of the evening. The Kuhn Twins. Two brothers who were found in a basket at the bottom of a ravine. And who were immediately handed over to the city orphanage. A line of women formed, eager to play their mother, and indicated both the type of child with which they hoped to perform their role and the schedule that suited them best. As soon as the little boys arrived, the women fought for temporary custody. One of the twins didn’t have any arms. The other had no legs. Many years later they choreographed a dance that fascinated and frightened everyone who saw it. The twins’ fame spread rapidly. They were so successful that they were even incorporated into the chapter in Flowers that Mario Bellatin was remembering at that moment. I look at the book Black Ball more closely, and then I see my teeth. They appear right at the point in the story when I wind up in front of a microphone and start to read Black Ball out loud. The entomologist Endo Hiroshi decided one morning to stop eating anything that other people might consider sustenance . . .

2- The teeth don’t look like that anymore. Here they are spaced apart, prominent, demonic. Now they’re worse. They were filed down two days ago and are now jagged and yellow. They’ve become the teeth of an old man. On Monday the dentist convinced me he could fix the ones I’ve had since childhood, employing a number of strategies to obtain my consent. Most persuasive was when he suggested how embarrassed I must be to appear in press photos with such gapping, quadrangular teeth, like the ones Liniers drew in the book Black Ball.  I’m not sure how the dentist heard of that book. Nor do I know how he has become familiar with the images it contains. I wonder these things primarily because the book has not yet been published. It disturbs me to think that there are dentists who find about their patients’ teeth that way—even if those teeth are only imagined from hundreds of kilometers away. I have no choice but to accept. The dentist gets to work. He files down the tips. He keeps sharpening them one by one until it seems to me they have become little guts. They become a row of stalactites through which the outside air comes whistling in. An hour later the dentist hands me a little mirror so I can take a look. I’m horrified. I’m gripped by a sensation similar to the one I felt this morning as I watched my dogs killing a pigeon or when I found out that my editor’s dog had just died from a poisonous toad. Maybe it’s the same thing audiences experience at Kuhn Twins performances. Not only have my teeth become sort of individual shards, they have also lost any trace of color. I find myself gazing at utterly lifeless fragments. They are of a shade that is not quite deep black, but dark—dark like the Black Ball on the book’s cover must have been at some point. If the morning’s breakfasters had been present there in the dentist’s office, they would no doubt have urged me to hang the wreckage in my mouth from the branch of some tree. I imagine it hanging there. To be able to appreciate it like that, it would first have to be extracted and made thousands of times larger. Those stalactites I had in place of teeth would have to swell and expand. And become flexible. One of Bellatin’s giant polished teeth would rest upon each branch of the tree, each adapting to the shape of the surface that cradled it. Like those exhausted, drooping clocks we’ve all seen. Holding the little mirror, the dentist looks satisfied with his work. He keeps asking me if it hurts. It’s true. There’s pain. I realize then that the horror I feel comes not just from what I’m seeing reflected in the moon but also from the pain my teeth are causing me. He tells me the effects of the anesthesia are wearing off now. At that moment I realize those sharp pains I felt were the shots he gave me during the process. He adds that I shouldn’t worry. He tells me I can’t go out on the street like that. He claims he’s got everything ready. He’s going to put on some veneers that will function as temporary false teeth and prescribe some painkillers. In the end he does what he’s promised. For a few interminable moments, he leaves me alone. Then he goes to work inside my mouth. Coming and going. Prodding my jaws open and shut. Making molds of my teeth. When he finishes, I look at myself in the mirror again and see other teeth. Not like the lugubrious gappy teeth in Liniers’s Black Ball. Which we see right when I mention the existence of the entomologist Endo Hiroshi. But not like the pointy, blackened teeth I saw a few minutes ago, either. Bellatin has some strange teeth now. They’re not the ones he had with him this morning. The dentist adds that they’re not the ones he’ll be keeping, either. The teeth in Bellatin’s mouth will be his for only three days. This very Friday they’ll be switched out for permanent ones. I’m alarmed to think what might happen after Friday to the initial image of the author’s mouth that appears in Liniers’s book Black Ball. What can I do to show that Bellatin’s teeth are no longer Bellatin’s teeth? It’s not even just a simple matter of having dentures—which are really the same teeth. Thus, Bellatin is denied not just the option of removing his arm and leaving it backstage but also the option of removing his teeth and leaving them to slumber in a glass of water that some distracted houseguest will probably gulp down in the middle of the night. As he leaves, Bellatin discovers he’s spent eight hours sitting in that dentist’s chair. He finds it quite extraordinary to have put himself through such a thing and allowed himself to be manipulated in such a manner just because the dentist has seen his teeth in Liniers’s book Black Ball. For Bellatin, the day is already over. He has no desire to do anything in the hours that remain. He heads out into the street, and in the chill of the wind he feels a sharp pain. He also feels like the temporary teeth he’s got aren’t attached securely. He has to twist his mouth a certain way to keep them from falling out. At that moment he would have liked to belong to the Caravan of Toothless Souls that appears in the book Black Ball. To be one of those unlucky creatures who, when they feel their last tooth fall out, know that they must depart toward death. As a child, Bellatin heard that story over and over again. His grandmother told it to him. For her part, she had heard it from the mother of a Japanese family that moved in next door, fleeing one of the waves of famine that were always engulfing the Orient. His grandmother told Bellatin that the story of her neighbor’s life hadn’t seemed to end that way at all. She wasn’t convinced that her neighbor had been forced to make a decision after discovering that she had lost the last of her teeth. According to his grandmother, the story of the Caravan of Toothless Souls came to a close the night government forces rounded up Japanese immigrants to ship them off to concentration camps in the United States. The neighbor and her husband committed suicide that very night. My grandmother told me that they’d asked her to look after their young children just a few hours before. The little boy was very fat and the little girl very skinny. She also told me that an hour later they heard a gunshot, and then another. The husband first killed his wife and then committed suicide. The neighbor had asked her to hide the children well. The fat one and the skinny one. To care for them as if they were her own. But my grandfather turned the children over to the police shortly after the shots rang out. I think it was partly by way of excusing him that my grandmother sometimes told me how hard times were back then. That I shouldn’t condemn my grandfather’s actions or those of the rest of my family. I think it is because of their actions that I understand all the better Bohumil Hrabal as he clambered out on that ledge, saying he was going to scare off the pigeons. They say that his fall was deafening. That he showed not a trace of the elegance with which a bird executes its final flight. Actually, birds die huddled in some remote corner of nature. I remember seeing some of them dying on the southern beaches. I used to think, when I was a boy, that the seagulls that could no longer fly were staying still because they’d decided to make friends with human beings. As soon as I spotted them, I’d chase after them. I tried to feed them. I didn’t notice that many of them were hobbling. Others stayed still, allowing my hand to stroke them. Hours later I’d find them dead. They’d lie there motionless, staring into nothing. They wouldn’t eat even a crumb of bread. They seemed to be atavistically rejecting anything other people might consider sustenance. Just like Endo Hiroshi, who declared one morning that he was going to stop eating anything other people might consider sustenance. Then Mario Bellatin put his hand on the sheet of paper resting on the lectern where he was reading Black Ball aloud. An enormous fly appeared in front of the microphone. A fly like the ones that buzz around corpses when they start decomposing. Like those that certainly had circled the corpse of the pigeon placed on a tree branch by the breakfasters who’d watched in horror as my dog Isaías broke its neck in an instant. Or looped above the violets that the mother of the legless writer was growing in a flowerpot. I was even more terrified of the fly than I was of standing armless in front of an audience to read the text of Black Ball. A text in which an entomologist suddenly decides to stop eating anything other people might consider sustenance.

3- The entomologist Endo Hiroshi decided one morning to stop eating anything other people might consider sustenance. He made the decision after a night of insomnia—brought on, perhaps, by the memory of the household’s old cook leaving for the Caravan of Toothless Souls after his parents’ wedding reception.¹ All that night he had felt, as he hovered between sleep and wakefulness, his arms and legs disappearing, consumed by the unrestrained voracity of his own stomach.

That organ was so aggressive, in fact, that in the first light of dawn Endo Hiroshi already felt like one of those people who eats only to destroy it. Who try to turn it into a near-useless appendage. Endo Hiroshi had seen them up close and personal, young people who died stick-thin because they’d suddenly refused to eat even a grain of rice. Some said that many of those vanishing appetites had been wiped out by a romantic disappointment of some sort, and others that they were the result of a slavish adherence to Western fashions. On the other hand, he also knew of men and women who stuffed themselves with food, their fleshy bodies in the grip of their uncurbed desire to represent the whole universe within themselves.² Both situations had occurred at one time or another in his own family. There had even been twin cousins, a girl and a boy, the former of whom had succumbed to anorexia while the latter became a champion sumo wrestler.³ Endo Hiroshi also remembered stories from the war years that he’d heard as a boy, stories of a scarcity so dire that people had killed each other for a scoop of rice or a piece of fish.⁴ He’d also heard tales of elegant sushi made with rodent meat, and of children who caught flies and ate them like millet.⁵ It seems that the effect of these stories was that the entomologist Endo Hiroshi had acquired, from a very young age, a sort of mingled revulsion and reverence toward food. That’s why he never really agreed with that foreign saying that his country’s food seemed to be made more for visual appreciation than for eating.⁶ In his grandparents’ house, where he spent a good portion of his childhood because his parents were not allowed to live together as long as the cook was still alive, they never let anything edible go to waste. Often—based mainly on the teachings of the prophet Magetsu, of whom the whole family were devotees—they had engaged in a peculiar way of preparing food, which involved burying the ingredients for several hours among stones heated with wood or charcoal. The prophet Magetsu, a monk who is said to have died not once but many times, conceived of the creation of the universe as an offering from mother earth to the universe’s constituent elements, which of course include humankind. Once when he was invited on a long trip to Africa by his entomologists association, Endo Hiroshi had to eat all sorts of packaged foods, which he bought in a shop near his house recommended by the organization’s members. He made that trip with his suitcases loaded with plastic jars and boxes containing different types of dehydrated foodstuffs. Endo Hiroshi just had to add boiling water to the containers to achieve a sort of food that at least vaguely resembled that originally consumed in his country. The entomologist Endo Hiroshi himself dubbed that trip “the long journey of boiling water” because teapots and hotplates were so essential en route, allowing him not just to eat but also to drink tea in the traditional manner. Endo Hiroshi could have easily gone without food for several days, but it was practically impossible for him to give up drinking tea for more than four hours at a time. A few entomologists advised him to take advantage of the trip and sample one of the many edible insects incorporated into the diets of the regions they were visiting. Everything from your everyday ants, which were coated in honey and served in a paper cone, to the flesh of a species of blue-legged tarantula that lives only in the crown of certain trees.⁷ As they ate these specimens, the members of the expedition often talked about insects’ nutritional properties. Some years back, led by the scientist Olaf Zumfelde from the University of Heidelberg, a number of experts had drawn up a table showing the quantity of protein from invertebrates that was absorbed immediately by the human body.⁸ And yet Endo Hiroshi ate nothing but the prepackaged food he’d bought back home. He continued his journey with his dehydrated foods, his tea, his teapot, and his little battery-operated hotplate at his side. He was working with his usual diligence, only a few days from the end of the trip, when he found a strange specimen that had been thought extinct. A theretofore unknown subspecies. The only one on record, the Newton camelus eleoptirus, was a different color. He stored it in the best conditions he could and, without mentioning it to the rest of the expedition, carried it back with him on the return home. Once he’d disembarked, he headed straight for the lab he’d set up in the rear of what would later become his parents’ house.⁹ At the time, his parents were still unmarried and lived apart. Nevertheless, the family members came together every night in that house, where Hiroshi had lived since childhood, to recite the prayers of the monk Magetsu. Endo Hiroshi knew that his find would be the making of his career as an entomologist. His name, Hiroshi, would forevermore be used to refer to the species he’d captured. The insect already identified had been blue, not red like the one Hiroshi had found. The new subspecies would bear the name Hiroshi camelus eleoptirus. But to his surprise, when he opened the plastic box he found only a tiny black ball instead of his insect. The ball was so miniscule, it was strange that he could make it out at all. The box had been specially designed to transport specimens of this sort—that is, small and medium-sized insects. They were made exclusively for the members of his entomologists association and were constructed in such a way that the insects could live inside them a long time. The eleopter he’d found last week couldn’t possibly have escaped. Endo Hiroshi had seen it in the Nairobi airport before he’d boarded his return flight. He’d taken another peek on the plane, and just yesterday, as soon as he was home again, he’d gazed at it for a long time through entomology glasses.¹⁰ On that last occasion, he’d been comparing it not just to the Newton camelus eleoptirus that appeared in an illustration in an insect book he always carried with him but also to a number of specialized tomes that filled his library. He was so startled by the absence that he didn’t notice the arrival of his parents, ready to resume prayers in the living room now that their son was home safe and sound. For the weeks he’d been away in Africa, they’d had no choice but to pray in the temple of the Prophet, which perched on the slopes of the highest mountain. It was an exhausting climb to get there, but they had no other option. The parents were not just forbidden to live together before the cook’s death would allow them to marry, they were unable to be in the main house for even a minute without their son’s physical presence. Hiroshi heard them call to him—they wanted to say hello, of course, but more importantly they wanted to begin the religious rites, which they could not perform without him. Just then Shikibu, the old servant, finished preparing a large pot of white rice that would be passed around after the ceremony. Ever since he’d turned fifteen, the bowl of rice served after prayer was the only food that Endo Hiroshi ate all day. Rice and, as mentioned earlier, several liters of tea. Anyone would have predicted that such a diet would make him grow thin and weak. But his vitality proved otherwise. Just as it had been for the old monks, even the prophet Magetsu himself, a bowl of rice a day was enough food for a lifetime. On a related note, it is said that one of the prophet Magetsu’s deaths—to all appearances the definitive one—occurred when the Prophet decided to allow his body to feed off his body.¹¹ To bear witness to the process, during which his flesh gradually disappeared, curiously transformed into the traces of his own flesh, he relied on his disciple, Oshiro, who wrote on a large rice paper scroll, still available to anyone who wishes to consult it, the words dictated to him by his master during the process. Curiously, the final word could be translated as “peace.” It seems strange that a being as spiritually advanced as the prophet Magetsu, having carried out such a complex process of dying, would utter a word whose meaning for many people would seem quite obvious. Before beginning the ritual of devotion to the Prophet, Endo Hiroshi and his parents had to check the teeth of the wizened cook. His parents were always more interested in that inspection than he was, as they would only be able to marry and live together when the woman had lost all of her teeth. The day that she could no longer eat, the cook would starve to death on her lonely journey—an endless road that would start at one of the many roads encircling the highest mountain—which she would be forced to begin the night the man and woman of the house were finally married. The moment a dental inspection revealed the total absence of teeth, the preparations for the wedding would begin. Two days later, it would all be over. Man and woman would now be husband and wife. During those two days, the old woman would not be allowed to eat even a crumb from the wedding banquet, ensuring that on her journey toward death, things would proceed as quickly as possible. A few minutes later, after the usual greetings and paying their respects to the image of the prophet Magetsu, the inspection of the cook’s teeth began. It was not yet time to begin the prayers: in order to achieve the proper intonation, it was important to know whether or not the cook still had teeth. On this occasion, though he carried it out to the letter, Endo Hiroshi paid no attention to the ritual he was leading. He was baffled by the insect’s disappearance. Nevertheless, a loyal devotee, he hid it as well as he could. He’d put on his traditional tunic and, after greeting his parents as any son recently returned from a long journey should, he started sprinkling the water—which he scooped out of a small wooden bowl—over their prone bodies. After the greetings, his parents had stretched out face-down on the floor. Once that part of the ritual was over, they noticed the cook was gone. The parents sensed it immediately, in fact. The raced to the kitchen, where they found the old woman hiding behind the firewood for the stove. As they’d guessed, when they pried open her mouth they discovered that the last molar, which had had them on tenterhooks for the last few years, had vanished. The old servant pleaded, refusing to open her jaws again. Endo Hiroshi, who had followed his parents to the kitchen, suddenly understood what had happened to his insect. He realized that the tiny ball he’d found in place of the exotic specimen was a sort of stomach of the insect. Actually, it looked like the bug had simply swallowed itself. He didn’t find such a theory at all bizarre. It was not for nothing that he’d spent practically his whole life, every free moment his career as an entomologist permitted him, leading the rites of the monk Magetsu. It seemed to have repeated itself, there within his entomologist’s box, that process the monk had undergone before dying for good. That ball must be a formless mass made up of the elements that had composed the little bug. The old woman was emitting heartrending screams.¹² His parents would not bend. At last she fell quiet—a sudden silence that seemed to suggest a full acceptance of her fate. His parents could then discuss the wedding plans in peace. They talked mostly about the banquet. They’d serve traditional foods. No modern touches, except the sea bream served to the couple before the ceremony began. They’d have to find a cook skilled enough to prepare the ghost bream,¹³ the recipe for which consisted of cutting up the fish until it was fleshless but still alive and then placing it in a fish tank in the center of the happy couple’s table. The couple would eat the flesh while the animal kept swimming, dying, its internal organs exposed for all the world to see. As a good omen for the marriage, the meal should last exactly as long as it took the fish to die. That evening, the entomologist Endo Hiroshi confirmed his suspicions. After they’d sentenced Shikibu and performed—with more intensity than usual—the Prophet’s rituals, he went back to his room and with the help of a microscope found that, in fact, the insect appeared to have consumed itself. For no apparent reason, he felt a wave of nausea. He vomited. Meanwhile, downstairs, his parents were still making plans. Not only could his mother now arrange the house as she wished, but she could also paint her teeth black. In addition to starting to give orders around the house, his father now had the right to go to the dentist to have his front teeth removed once and for all. These characteristics—the blackened teeth and the missing front teeth—were symbols of having a full life. Reflecting on the transformation undergone by an insect that might have been called Hiroshi camelus eleoptirus, a name that would have instantly made him famous around the world, he decided that after his parents’ wedding, the end of his own life would consist in reducing as far as possible the normal functioning of his stomach. He would seek to neutralize it in a manner similar to the liver atrophy suffered by those geese that are obsessively overfed by their owners, or by the ducks that in some countries are raised in tiny cages and fed with chemical-soaked corn. When the sun shone in through the window the next day, illuminating the plastic box that still contained the insect’s supposed stomach, Endo Hiroshi decided to eat not only that black ball but also a bunch of weevils and other bugs that he’d collect later that morning. In the armoire in his room, practically brand-new, he still had the outfit he used to wear for the caterpillar hunt that took place every leap year. The last time he’d participated, he’d gone with his cousin, the excessively slender girl who’d died of slenderness, and with his other cousin, the obese sumo wrestler.

*

Notes

1 Archaic custom that must be followed by citizens who have lost all of their teeth.

2 Popular belief, primarily among the Assyrian Chaldeans, that the whole of the celestial spheres is contained within the human body. Thanks to recent psychological studies, it is believed that men retain remnants of this conviction as a symbol of social superiority.

3 Type of martial art that celebrates times of harvest or abundance. It is especially prevalent in regions governed by the solar calendar.

4 The fish that has provoked the greatest number of murders is the sole.

5 Even today newspapers occasionally run stories about merchants who are selling toasted flies instead of edible seeds.

6 See Newsweek magazine, no. 234, p. 56.

7 They were phosphorescent Larpicus tarantulas, found only in eastern Namibia.

8 Consult the Zumfelde Table, available from the Berlin Nutritionists Society.

9 According to the tradition of the prophet Magetsu—which the Western world found incomprehensible—a man and woman were not permitted to marry until the eldest of their female servants had lost the last of her teeth. This prohibition did not impede their right to have children.

10 He used a pair of Stewarson glasses imported by the Tenkei-Maru department store.

11 See the Hiro-Sensei sect’s book of the Holy Catechism.

12 It is said that some of the neighbors were unable to sleep that night.

13 Teachers of this technique tend to be found on the country’s southern coast.

* *

Images: Ben Rodkin, with Mario Bellatin and David Shook, for Barú. Text first published with BAR in November 2013.

Natalia Brizuela on Nuno Ramos translated by Andrea Rosenberg

“No sé.” “I don’t know.” That’s the response Tintin and Captain Haddock get from the inhabitants of the Andean country—vaguely reminiscent of Peru—where they’ve traveled in search of their friend, Professor Calculus, who has been kidnapped and taken there by the last descendants of the Incas. Whenever Tintin and Haddock encounter someone—all of them with indigenous features—and ask if they’ve seen their friend, the natives respond, “I don’t know.” That “I don’t know” is the resistance of the colonial subject. That negation is the power of the powerless: “You can arrest me, you can interrogate me, you can torture me, you can exterminate my people, but you can’t make me talk.” Today the phrase arrives on the shores of the Río de la Plata in the form of an embodied echo: ... Read More »]]>

Natalia Brizuela on Nuno Ramos
translated by Andrea Rosenberg

“No sé.” “I don’t know.” That’s the response Tintin and Captain Haddock get from the inhabitants of the Andean country—vaguely reminiscent of Peru—where they’ve traveled in search of their friend, Professor Calculus, who has been kidnapped and taken there by the last descendants of the Incas. Whenever Tintin and Haddock encounter someone—all of them with indigenous features—and ask if they’ve seen their friend, the natives respond, “I don’t know.” That “I don’t know” is the resistance of the colonial subject. That negation is the power of the powerless: “You can arrest me, you can interrogate me, you can torture me, you can exterminate my people, but you can’t make me talk.” Today the phrase arrives on the shores of the Río de la Plata in the form of an embodied echo: we might, with that phrase, trace a lengthy genealogy of resistance and struggle in Latin America, from the colonial period through the terror of the dictatorships of the twentieth century to today.

Here, a few pages of Tintin serve as a springboard for Nuno Ramos’s installation of sound and performance. Tintin, the young Belgian reporter and explorer who took his readers along with him on adventures in the Congo, Latin America, Egypt, China, India, and dozens of other places, was, through the numerous translations produced, a childhood fixture for millions of children in the last century. Tintin’s travels and adventures around the world are the product of a Europe in self-aware decline, a Europe whose centuries-long period of colonial control and exploitation of vast swaths of the earth was beginning conspicuously to fall apart. For that Europe, Tintin offered a sort of fantasy of its own life after death, the transformation and translation of the most brutal and violent legacy of modern times into “child’s play.” While no adult can doubt the imperialist ideology behind Tintin, for millions of children he offered History in the form of a fantastical adventure. For Nuno Ramos, philosopher-artist-writer, Tintin is not just a reminder of childhood but one of the quintessential sites of reading, of imagination, of exploration, and, in this case, of an activation of and movement toward the political realm through art.

“Passage,” “poetic simultaneity,” “latency,” “constitutive vacillation,” “a hybrid form,” “my art as an everything”—thus did Nuno Ramos himself describe his multifaceted artistic practice a few years ago. Films, sculptures, installations, paintings, performances, music, literary works that all echo one another. A single title, a single name, a single figure, or a single idea that is repeated, in passage from one medium to another, from one material to another, in an artistic endeavor that has since the end of the 1980s been necessarily hybrid.

Nuno’s art is never a single object, a single material, a single instance. Everything he does remains in a state of latency, ready to be retrieved, to reappear, to live again. Hence the title of one his most paradigmatic books, Ensayo general. Everything in Nuno is a rehearsal; we never view the definitive version. This is also the case with our “No sé”: it was first presented in Guatemala in mid-2014; now, we are witnessing a new version, revivified by the rich texture of the local context. The performance will be recorded, and at some future date this material will be turned into a film—probably one with the same title. As the days pass, the sound-filled garden will be transformed into a passage toward death.

The material of the world enters Ramos’s universe as if it were in an alchemist’s laboratory: thus, the mutation and transformation of the material and, closely linked, abandonment and death are two of the core themes of his poetics. Some of his favorite materials are:

Lime

It was at the end of the 1980s that Nuno Ramos, then a young painter, took his art beyond the pictorial frame and began to explore space, matter, and mutation in installations of what we now clearly know to be the expanded field of contemporary art. The vehicle or material that allowed him that departure and expansion, the instrument of his shift toward another artistic practice, was lime. This happened in a show called Cal in 1987 in Rio de Janeiro: the gallery space was shared by a series of constructions of lime: a heap of lime and canvas; wooden columns 1.8 and 2 meters tall, filled with lime; a “sail” made with lime and canvas. Into the early 1990s, lime was one of Ramos’s favorite materials in his alchemical laboratory: mixed with other materials such as cotton, paraffin, and tar, it created shapeless masses of matter that spread across the floor as grime, mounds very reminiscent of garbage [Pele 1 (Homenagem a Carlos Parana)) and Pele 2 (Para Frida)]; as words, a sort of writing in lime, to literally give body to the poetic and exploratory words of Nuno the artist, who is also a writer [Canoa]; and as a title for installations that explored the mutation and transformation of material without using lime as one of their materials [O pó da cal queima o pó do corpo].

Here, in no sé (El Templo del Sol), the body leaves its mark on lime, as the artist had already done in the series of photographs included in the book Minha fantasma. A white, ghostly body: a body that straddles the boundary between being a body and ceasing to be one, a threshold between living and dead matter.

Films

All of Nuno Ramos’s films, including the three being shown at the Parque de la Memoria, have a correlate or “poetic paraphrase” in visual art: Luz negra and Casco were exhibitions, and Illuminai os terreiros an installation. In a sense, it is easy to think that they function as a documentation or record of visual work, because in effect they are. In them we see the work’s process, its staging, its drift, its transformation. But we should not think of Nuno’s films as documentaries: they are not there merely to instruct the spectator on how Nuno Ramos’s art comes to be. The films are films; they are works of art themselves.

Let’s take Casco, for example. The first sculpture with that name is from 1999. An enormous mass of laminated wood, with a shape analogous to that of a ship’s hull, embedded in a large rectangle of burned and compacted sand. That first hull has a subtitle: the name of polar explorer Shackleton, whose ship, The Endurance, became trapped in the ice. In 2004 Casco returns, but it is different now. It began as a performance on the beach in which three characters recited texts written by Nuno as the tide rose. As they spoke, the characters also cut up small wooden fishing boats and fit one boat inside the other, destroying and reconstructing the hulls. As the tide rose, the ships and their destroyed hulls looked like the remains of a shipwreck. All of this was video-recorded, and the film was made based on this material. Later, some of the shipwrecked hulls served as sculptures for the exhibit Cascos at the Banco de Brasil Cultural Center in São Paulo. These wrecked hulls were covered in tar, emerged from sheets of tar. Others, made of compacted sand, were not included in the recorded material for the film.

The films are the last mutation, the final iteration in the alchemist’s laboratory, so that the substance returns eternally as a filmic image, as a ghost of itself. They are the continuation after the end. They are what survives. What continues to arrive afterward.

Sound

With the arrival of the new millennium, sound—like music, like noise, and like song—appeared in Nuno Ramos’s art. In this exhibit, sound emerges from the bowels of the earth, issuing through underground speakers, forming an interrogation whose questions are simultaneously both meaningful and meaningless, banal and metaphysical, concrete and abstract, and their goal is to apprehend the body, to restrain and expose it. In Ramos’s 2002 sound installation Luz Negra (Para Nelson 1), the sound issued from a series of graves, now covered and filled with earth, that contained massive speakers that reproduced the voice of Nelson Cavaquinho singing “Juicio final.” In that first sound installation, as in this one, it is soil—as an organic material but also as a metaphor for the world—that speaks, or questions, or sings. In both, the voice is disembodied, obscene in that it is literally off-scene and also sublime. Soil, haunted by the dead, composed of dead and decomposing matter—which allows it to regenerate and gives it life—speaks to us, will not leave us be. Sound, in Ramos’s work, emerges from an earthly beyond, from beneath the material—sometimes, as here, from soil, but also from salt, from water, and from hay [Vai, Vai] or from within furniture and statues [Grave, grave; Tenho sede]. The voice in particular, and the sounds in general, return from the beyond. They survive all destruction—that destruction that is so constant and fundamental in Ramos’s work. They are what remains and what always is. The return of the voice from death and, in that sense—but also in other senses—the voice once more.

Language and Writing

Nuno Ramos is an artist and a writer, and the two undertakings are inextricably linked in his work. He is, then, a writer-artist, or simply a contemporary artist, for whom the material or the medium in which he works cannot be identified. This became quite clear with the publication of his first book, Cujo, in 1993. Reading that text is like being in the artist’s studio, which by that point already more closely resembled an alchemist’s laboratory. In his installations and in his writing, Nuno, like those philosophical pseudoscientists of old, investigates the material composition of the world, the transmutation both of matter and of the soul. In no sé (El Templo del Sol), we hear a dialogue or an interrogation between an absent voice and the voice of a body that is in the process of being transformed into a ghost made of lime. I distinguish between words—language—and sound because words are important in both their material and their sonic qualities. That is why we hear “No sé” and see it written in charcoal on the wall. That is why the words of that first book, Cujo, appeared as material things before becoming mere symbols, in installations in the early 1990s: forms written with lime, with petroleum jelly, on the floor, on the walls. Words acquire bodies. Words in Nuno’s work always have bodies: they are objects and they are symbols.

It is the verge or the boundary, the place where materials mingle and blend together. That same boundary appears in Nuno’s most recent work. It is perpetually in motion, resisting clear demarcation, preventing the viewer from clearly distinguishing between one material and another, between one state and another. It is the boundary of the indistinction that marks today’s aesthetics. It is also, and perhaps primarily, the far boundary of the world.

* *

Image: from the video “Casco” (2004) dir. Nuno Ramos, Eduardo Clima, and Gustavo Moura.

Iosi Havilio translated by Andrea Rosenberg

And in the middle of the day came the night . . . Down the hill, all made of shadows, the Protagonist strides along the paving stones, midway between the cordon and the buildings, left, right, left. The past approaches and he gives in to it: all those moments of afternoon and freedom festering in the open air, consuming down the block, amid zombies and doormen. Nearer by, businesses, those tender galaxies of cheap hankerings, of good rates, of infinite love for the craft, record shops, discount stores, lottery ticket sellers, lingerie boutiques, all crammed together, embracing him to recall those aimless hours . . . unhurried, unhurried, ly: the syndicalist girlfriend with a satellite phone, the boy with the acid feet, the ardent interlocking of tall glasses wet with Criadores whisky, the ... Read More »]]>

Iosi Havilio
translated by Andrea Rosenberg

And in the middle of the day came the night . . . Down the hill, all made of shadows, the Protagonist strides along the paving stones, midway between the cordon and the buildings, left, right, left. The past approaches and he gives in to it: all those moments of afternoon and freedom festering in the open air, consuming down the block, amid zombies and doormen. Nearer by, businesses, those tender galaxies of cheap hankerings, of good rates, of infinite love for the craft, record shops, discount stores, lottery ticket sellers, lingerie boutiques, all crammed together, embracing him to recall those aimless hours . . . unhurried, unhurried, ly: the syndicalist girlfriend with a satellite phone, the boy with the acid feet, the ardent interlocking of tall glasses wet with Criadores whisky, the invasion of African fleas, the blow jobs in mirrors, the slashes on cheeks, and the one-night stand. And bam. Bam. Footsteps that left marks on the parquet like hydrochloric splashes, that gave off smoke, never seen before, ever. Godzilla feet toughened by the neighborhood. The same day a well-aimed chunk of ice split open the skull of a bald and probably deceptive workman waiting for the bus to Flores. The same day the Girl Saint with the burned face showed him her little breasts while dressed as a ballerina before tossing the wartime newspapers into the void, thinking them too old. Some were saved, paradoxically, a selection of the goriest front pages.

A new stoplight, three-sided, confusing even to the most competent, now has him pausing perplexed on the corner in question. The green is taking forever and the Protagonist instinctively looks up to see an enormous airplane land on the avenue, a plane, a bird, a paper condor, a fake fighter jet, and others trailing in its wake, forming a V that passes over the tall wrought-iron fence of the church and alights almost delicately, like dancers, before the pointed-arch gate. The Protagonist doesn’t need to look up; he knows the person throwing them is Himself, four stories up, twenty-two years back, in an endless succession, in search of perfection. It is his own hand, imploring, that pokes out between the railing and the abyss, fishing for applause, but how did he do it, he wonders: How did he manage to stay crouched there this whole time, who took care of feeding him, how many new owners and tenants have passed through since then, through the concentration, ever since the storage trunk, the Russian yuans, the bunk bed, the lighted display cases, and the pocket illustrated raskooooolllnikov…  He now, He then, had calculated badly, had let himself get swept up in the round number, it was many more years, and he’s not sure how it has ended up coming back to delight him, in top form, with such skill, his best weapons now an expert wrist, superpowered, bam, bam, bam, thirty planes a second, a range of throwing styles, gauging altitude, force, and direction, knots and atmospheric pressure, taking into account the positioning of the stars, the power of the winds: Had he chosen to specialize, or had he had no other option? The Protagonist on high no longer questioned it, he had mislaid talking up there, nobody ever scolded him for his behavior or asked about the newspapers that were gradually disappearing—the tenants were swept up in the idea of a natural recycling process, others had problems in the bosom of the family, with love, with drugs, with money, at work, too many worries to think about yesterday’s news. Meanwhile . . . He remained imperturbable, crouched behind the large planter, working on his holds, out in the chill of that parched land, but he didn’t live so badly there in secrecy, no cyanide pill clenched between his teeth, and it’s no big deal. It’s A Consecration like so many others, an interruption—the Protagonist has nothing to feel guilty about, taking the craft to the very pinnacle of practice, isolation, a bit of mystery, to enjoy deeply and calibrate the organic scales in daylight, so that the nighttime illuminates the ailerons and the engines and the cabin crew. And now that his mind is wandering back to the walkway outside the church, the atrium has turned into a runway covered with paper machines that do not touch or overlap, so much alike in the apparent chaos.

*

The Protagonist had risked moving to the middle of the avenue to admire his work from the median. And today, more than ever before, his Young Self up above was going to great pains to ingratiate himself. It was then that he saw how an infinite number of airplanes of different sizes, colors, and weights sketched out in the air, as if it were a work of art, Three Lions (two awake, one dozing).

But not just any Three Lions, chosen at random in the jungle: Three Lions that make sense, modeling their manes to make themselves known, Three Lions that named him gutturally, amid roars they named Him, Three Lions that greet him with smiles, though the sleepy one does so through gritted teeth; his mouth falls open too late, no time to be surprised, these Three Lions are beyond prowess, those manes exist, those gleaming fangs interrogate him, they are all too familiar with the Catalogue of His Virtues, Defects, Vices, Calluses, Weekly Horrors, they know Him by heart, have seen Him cry, masturbate, look up at the stars a massive fool, tear up at songs as the year draws to an end, hug strangers on the beach, party hard, say stupid things; they know he’s one-eyed, a poet, affectionate, and dead, Three persistent Lions, which he carries within like the fingers of the three moments he’s lived so far, his entire hermeneutics—Nothingness, Almost Nothingness, and Great Nothingness again—they saw him tan his wounds in the dry plaza, weep along the corridors of a hospital on strike, insolently stand firm before A Composer and not come out victorious, they know that one of those snooty-rich-girl dogs pissed on his shoulder while he was sunbathing and he couldn’t assert himself, played the game of nature, they were there the evening he hurled a cat against a wall, unable to endure the caterwauling of his conscience any longer, they swept up its remains with a broom and dustpan the night he said: This is my weakness . . . ! but they don’t judge or scorn him, they know how to forgive. How many times had they seen him happy? Truly happy, replete, satisfied with everything. Seven? Eleven? Thirty-six? The figures vary according to the criteria. The image begins to move. These Three Lions that he’s created now show their half-open maws, their eyes sweet, impish, terribly knowing, as if saying: Trains don’t go by carrying the same nectar twice . . . The changes pick up speed and things begin to disintegrate, manes for snouts, snouts for claws, claws for eyes—the oracles vanish without warning of a danger the Protagonist does not understand or perceive. In an instant, the show becomes too showy: immense emptiness, pure skill, virtuosity: the sadness of the year; the clamor so as not to end up denouncing what he had so often mocked on the way out of a theater, at the entrance to some concert under the bridge, listening to altered standards, that little speech he’d developed and that he knows is old but that fits him effortlessly, that pap for dimwits prepared each day by those devoted to functions and strategies. . . the result: a blow thunderous like a yeti’s slap; but after the fervor and the inflation had passed, after the grimace of irony, there was no other option; and so the Protagonist, King of the Dilettantes, shuffles across the avenue and lets some of his own inventions trail in the ether behind him as if it were no big deal: An Indian woman giving birth at the edge of a canyon; A pedophile priest killing himself on the Internet; The critical mass leaving at dawn.

The Protagonist thought: That’s the way the past is—it strives to look like shadows of brilliance, strokes of paper genius that drift away on the breeze. He took one last look; a coven had taken over everything. And he’s already starting to forget, the way you forget juggling as soon as it’s over, and he heads to the front in his daytime night, and he’d go far, except that resentment produces imponderables when the Self appears. The attack begins so subtly . . . Who would have thought a pawn would head up the onslaught? A twinge in the back of his neck pricks him, yes, but it might be nothing. A sting lost in the aura. But straight away another one. And another one. Ow, and one more. Ow ow ow. They’re backstabbing the nape of his neck. He turns to look and a thousand planes are coming at him, a brutal offensive with him as its only target, perfectly aimed as there’s no one else on the runway. He already knows, no need to check: the hand firing on him is always the same one, his hand, larger and hairier, clenched and angry, reflecting his art of vengeance, all those years sunk in that foul activity, pigeon of doom, and now this footbath indifference, but there’s no time for dialogue or considerations, those killer birds stop being made of paper, shift, grow claws, wings, predatory beaks . . . The Protagonist has no choice but to flee through a bottleneck, frantically waving his right arm as if splitting the air, the fingers of his other hand shielding the gashes on his bloody neck. And he’s bleeding, yes he’s bleeding. He’s not hallucinating—it’s what’s actually happening.

* * *

“Lions” is an excerpt of Havilio’s upcoming nouvelle, La Serenidad (Entropía, 2014) 

Mario Bellatin translated by Andrea Rosenberg

1- BLACK BALL RELOADED Author’s first look at the bande dessinée Black Ball

Yesterday I received some information about the Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal. I replied that toward the end of his life he’d seemed unable to bear the too loud a solitude in which he lived. So he’d climbed out onto a window ledge on an upper floor of the nursing home they’d put him in and leaped into the void. The response I received said that during his last years he’d been obsessed with the bustling pigeons he could see through the windows of the ward as he lay in bed. Maybe he wanted to turn into a bird, said the message. Maybe that’s why he’d attempted to fly, as if he were one of them. The person writing to me was my ... Read More »]]>

Mario Bellatin
translated by Andrea Rosenberg

1- BLACK BALL RELOADED
Author’s first look at the bande dessinée Black Ball

Yesterday I received some information about the Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal. I replied that toward the end of his life he’d seemed unable to bear the too loud a solitude in which he lived. So he’d climbed out onto a window ledge on an upper floor of the nursing home they’d put him in and leaped into the void. The response I received said that during his last years he’d been obsessed with the bustling pigeons he could see through the windows of the ward as he lay in bed. Maybe he wanted to turn into a bird, said the message. Maybe that’s why he’d attempted to fly, as if he were one of them. The person writing to me was my psychoanalyst. I’d had countless sessions with her a few years back. I remember I paid for the therapy not with money but with pieces of writing. Indeed, my lack of money was the very symptom that had brought me to her in the first place. My complete inability to pay for goods or services. Perhaps because of who my correspondent was, I started thinking about pigeons after that. Wasn’t it actually possible instead that they’d annoyed Hrabal so much that he was eventually driven to suicide? Couldn’t it have been because of their constant cooing that he’d come up with that phrase too loud a solitude, which appeared so often in his writing? Today my dogs killed a pigeon. In the park two blocks from my house, a wide pool had formed after last night’s heavy rains. People were lingering beside the water, next to a woman who sells breakfast from a cart in the mornings. A few pigeons were eating scraps that the people were tossing them. I’d left the house with my dogs just a few moments before. When I got to that area, Isaías and Manga caught one of the birds and fatally injured it, then left it floating in the pool. The people breakfasting protested loudly. I fled. When I saw what was happening, after a few meters I turned back. The dogs followed me. As we walked, they kept looking toward their fallen prey. They probably wanted to keep tearing at it. Or maybe bring it to me like an offering, a trophy. I heard someone yelling behind me, ordering me to pick up the dead bird and put it on a tree branch. It seemed like an odd request. Maybe the person believed it was more dignified for a pigeon to die on a tree branch than in a murky pool. I thought about the increasingly complicated relationship between men and animals. About current modes of thought. About the obligations we face these days. About norms that just a few years ago would have struck us as ludicrous. For example, adopting animals instead of buying them. Neutering males and females alike. Abandoning the custom of pointlessly mutilating them or giving them haircuts to meet obsolete standards of animal beauty. I also thought about the insects all around us. About how damaging they generally are, except for the ones we eat. I just now traded the books I’m currently working on for a bunch of giant ants. I also thought about the rats I sometimes hear under the floor of my study. I received another call today, too. In it, they informed me that the dog I’d given to my editor eight years earlier had just died from biting a poisonous toad. My editor is heartbroken. She’d taken the dog out to her country house, where the accident occurred. There’s no antidote for that kind of poison. When my editor calls, she’s in the waiting room of a pet crematorium. I haven’t yet gone out to walk the dogs. After the incident in the park, I return home. The dogs are all worked up. I’m not sure whether it’s because of the pigeon or because they haven’t gotten a full walk. Perezvón and Manga and Isaías and Abelardo keep circling endlessly around me. I ignore them, thinking I’ll take them out again at midmorning, and then settle in my study and open the book Black Ball, a project the artist Liniers has been working on. I admire its green cover. The ball—yes, black—in the center. The green that fills most of the space looks synthetic. I don’t think of nature at all when I look at it. Somehow it seems like the right green for the kind of trance experienced when diving into a book like Black Ball. The ideal green for, among other things, describing the artificiality of a half-wild pigeon hunt in a pool formed after a nighttime rain. The leaves of the tree where the breakfasters asked me to place the bird’s battered body must be that color. And it is, no doubt, the hue of that poisonous toad. From what she told me, my editor’s dog was carrying the toad’s corpse in its jaws. The black ball reminds me of a bowling ball. Of an iron ball chained to prisoners on death row in the United States. It could also represent the interior of the universe. I’m one of the few people who knows it’s a sort of food bolus. The same kind that both the insect discovered in the jungles of Africa and described in the text and the entomologist who found it turned into. For the moment, though, I try to pretend I don’t know what it’s from. When I turn the page, I realize it’s actually the ball from which my most terrible nightmares emerge. There I am, standing behind a lectern on a stage. One of my arms is missing. There seems to be a sizable audience in the auditorium-like space. I become aware once more that I’m missing an arm. I’m surprised by it. In the first scene of the book Black Ball by Liniers, we see the writer Mario Bellatin without his right arm. The void where it would have been is rigid and empty. It’s very strange to see him that way. Without his right arm. Could he have left it backstage? Is it some sort of joke he’s playing on his audience? His head is bald as usual, setting off perfectly the cut of the clergy shirt he wears when he’s not in a black tunic. I’m nervous. It is becoming reality, the worst thing that could befall that kind of writer. I don’t think he can stand up there and face an auditorium without his arm. But the awful scene is already set down in Black Ball. Mario Bellatin remembers how in the book Flowers there’s a similar character. Though unlike the one in Black Ball, the character in Flowers finds himself in front of a packed theater, naked and missing a leg. I think in that book, Flowers, it’s a writer who’s having a similar nightmare. A bad dream that began when he suddenly felt as if he were living inside a violet that his mother was growing in a flowerpot. As the dream continues, he is forced to dance naked on his single leg. It’s the opening number, the one that introduces the heroes of the evening. The Kuhn Twins. Two brothers who were found in a basket at the bottom of a ravine. And who were immediately handed over to the city orphanage. A line of women formed, eager to play their mother, and indicated both the type of child with which they hoped to perform their role and the schedule that suited them best. As soon as the little boys arrived, the women fought for temporary custody. One of the twins didn’t have any arms. The other had no legs. Many years later they choreographed a dance that fascinated and frightened everyone who saw it. The twins’ fame spread rapidly. They were so successful that they were even incorporated into the chapter in Flowers that Mario Bellatin was remembering at that moment. I look at the book Black Ball more closely, and then I see my teeth. They appear right at the point in the story when I wind up in front of a microphone and start to read Black Ball out loud. The entomologist Endo Hiroshi decided one morning to stop eating anything that other people might consider sustenance . . .

2- The teeth don’t look like that anymore. Here they are spaced apart, prominent, demonic. Now they’re worse. They were filed down two days ago and are now jagged and yellow. They’ve become the teeth of an old man. On Monday the dentist convinced me he could fix the ones I’ve had since childhood, employing a number of strategies to obtain my consent. Most persuasive was when he suggested how embarrassed I must be to appear in press photos with such gapping, quadrangular teeth, like the ones Liniers drew in the book Black Ball.  I’m not sure how the dentist heard of that book. Nor do I know how he has become familiar with the images it contains. I wonder these things primarily because the book has not yet been published. It disturbs me to think that there are dentists who find about their patients’ teeth that way—even if those teeth are only imagined from hundreds of kilometers away. I have no choice but to accept. The dentist gets to work. He files down the tips. He keeps sharpening them one by one until it seems to me they have become little guts. They become a row of stalactites through which the outside air comes whistling in. An hour later the dentist hands me a little mirror so I can take a look. I’m horrified. I’m gripped by a sensation similar to the one I felt this morning as I watched my dogs killing a pigeon or when I found out that my editor’s dog had just died from a poisonous toad. Maybe it’s the same thing audiences experience at Kuhn Twins performances. Not only have my teeth become sort of individual shards, they have also lost any trace of color. I find myself gazing at utterly lifeless fragments. They are of a shade that is not quite deep black, but dark—dark like the Black Ball on the book’s cover must have been at some point. If the morning’s breakfasters had been present there in the dentist’s office, they would no doubt have urged me to hang the wreckage in my mouth from the branch of some tree. I imagine it hanging there. To be able to appreciate it like that, it would first have to be extracted and made thousands of times larger. Those stalactites I had in place of teeth would have to swell and expand. And become flexible. One of Bellatin’s giant polished teeth would rest upon each branch of the tree, each adapting to the shape of the surface that cradled it. Like those exhausted, drooping clocks we’ve all seen. Holding the little mirror, the dentist looks satisfied with his work. He keeps asking me if it hurts. It’s true. There’s pain. I realize then that the horror I feel comes not just from what I’m seeing reflected in the moon but also from the pain my teeth are causing me. He tells me the effects of the anesthesia are wearing off now. At that moment I realize those sharp pains I felt were the shots he gave me during the process. He adds that I shouldn’t worry. He tells me I can’t go out on the street like that. He claims he’s got everything ready. He’s going to put on some veneers that will function as temporary false teeth and prescribe some painkillers. In the end he does what he’s promised. For a few interminable moments, he leaves me alone. Then he goes to work inside my mouth. Coming and going. Prodding my jaws open and shut. Making molds of my teeth. When he finishes, I look at myself in the mirror again and see other teeth. Not like the lugubrious gappy teeth in Liniers’s Black Ball. Which we see right when I mention the existence of the entomologist Endo Hiroshi. But not like the pointy, blackened teeth I saw a few minutes ago, either. Bellatin has some strange teeth now. They’re not the ones he had with him this morning. The dentist adds that they’re not the ones he’ll be keeping, either. The teeth in Bellatin’s mouth will be his for only three days. This very Friday they’ll be switched out for permanent ones. I’m alarmed to think what might happen after Friday to the initial image of the author’s mouth that appears in Liniers’s book Black Ball. What can I do to show that Bellatin’s teeth are no longer Bellatin’s teeth? It’s not even just a simple matter of having dentures—which are really the same teeth. Thus, Bellatin is denied not just the option of removing his arm and leaving it backstage but also the option of removing his teeth and leaving them to slumber in a glass of water that some distracted houseguest will probably gulp down in the middle of the night. As he leaves, Bellatin discovers he’s spent eight hours sitting in that dentist’s chair. He finds it quite extraordinary to have put himself through such a thing and allowed himself to be manipulated in such a manner just because the dentist has seen his teeth in Liniers’s book Black Ball. For Bellatin, the day is already over. He has no desire to do anything in the hours that remain. He heads out into the street, and in the chill of the wind he feels a sharp pain. He also feels like the temporary teeth he’s got aren’t attached securely. He has to twist his mouth a certain way to keep them from falling out. At that moment he would have liked to belong to the Caravan of Toothless Souls that appears in the book Black Ball. To be one of those unlucky creatures who, when they feel their last tooth fall out, know that they must depart toward death. As a child, Bellatin heard that story over and over again. His grandmother told it to him. For her part, she had heard it from the mother of a Japanese family that moved in next door, fleeing one of the waves of famine that were always engulfing the Orient. His grandmother told Bellatin that the story of her neighbor’s life hadn’t seemed to end that way at all. She wasn’t convinced that her neighbor had been forced to make a decision after discovering that she had lost the last of her teeth. According to his grandmother, the story of the Caravan of Toothless Souls came to a close the night government forces rounded up Japanese immigrants to ship them off to concentration camps in the United States. The neighbor and her husband committed suicide that very night. My grandmother told me that they’d asked her to look after their young children just a few hours before. The little boy was very fat and the little girl very skinny. She also told me that an hour later they heard a gunshot, and then another. The husband first killed his wife and then committed suicide. The neighbor had asked her to hide the children well. The fat one and the skinny one. To care for them as if they were her own. But my grandfather turned the children over to the police shortly after the shots rang out. I think it was partly by way of excusing him that my grandmother sometimes told me how hard times were back then. That I shouldn’t condemn my grandfather’s actions or those of the rest of my family. I think it is because of their actions that I understand all the better Bohumil Hrabal as he clambered out on that ledge, saying he was going to scare off the pigeons. They say that his fall was deafening. That he showed not a trace of the elegance with which a bird executes its final flight. Actually, birds die huddled in some remote corner of nature. I remember seeing some of them dying on the southern beaches. I used to think, when I was a boy, that the seagulls that could no longer fly were staying still because they’d decided to make friends with human beings. As soon as I spotted them, I’d chase after them. I tried to feed them. I didn’t notice that many of them were hobbling. Others stayed still, allowing my hand to stroke them. Hours later I’d find them dead. They’d lie there motionless, staring into nothing. They wouldn’t eat even a crumb of bread. They seemed to be atavistically rejecting anything other people might consider sustenance. Just like Endo Hiroshi, who declared one morning that he was going to stop eating anything other people might consider sustenance. Then Mario Bellatin put his hand on the sheet of paper resting on the lectern where he was reading Black Ball aloud. An enormous fly appeared in front of the microphone. A fly like the ones that buzz around corpses when they start decomposing. Like those that certainly had circled the corpse of the pigeon placed on a tree branch by the breakfasters who’d watched in horror as my dog Isaías broke its neck in an instant. Or looped above the violets that the mother of the legless writer was growing in a flowerpot. I was even more terrified of the fly than I was of standing armless in front of an audience to read the text of Black Ball. A text in which an entomologist suddenly decides to stop eating anything other people might consider sustenance.

3- The entomologist Endo Hiroshi decided one morning to stop eating anything other people might consider sustenance. He made the decision after a night of insomnia—brought on, perhaps, by the memory of the household’s old cook leaving for the Caravan of Toothless Souls after his parents’ wedding reception.¹ All that night he had felt, as he hovered between sleep and wakefulness, his arms and legs disappearing, consumed by the unrestrained voracity of his own stomach.

That organ was so aggressive, in fact, that in the first light of dawn Endo Hiroshi already felt like one of those people who eats only to destroy it. Who try to turn it into a near-useless appendage. Endo Hiroshi had seen them up close and personal, young people who died stick-thin because they’d suddenly refused to eat even a grain of rice. Some said that many of those vanishing appetites had been wiped out by a romantic disappointment of some sort, and others that they were the result of a slavish adherence to Western fashions. On the other hand, he also knew of men and women who stuffed themselves with food, their fleshy bodies in the grip of their uncurbed desire to represent the whole universe within themselves.² Both situations had occurred at one time or another in his own family. There had even been twin cousins, a girl and a boy, the former of whom had succumbed to anorexia while the latter became a champion sumo wrestler.³ Endo Hiroshi also remembered stories from the war years that he’d heard as a boy, stories of a scarcity so dire that people had killed each other for a scoop of rice or a piece of fish.⁴ He’d also heard tales of elegant sushi made with rodent meat, and of children who caught flies and ate them like millet.⁵ It seems that the effect of these stories was that the entomologist Endo Hiroshi had acquired, from a very young age, a sort of mingled revulsion and reverence toward food. That’s why he never really agreed with that foreign saying that his country’s food seemed to be made more for visual appreciation than for eating.⁶ In his grandparents’ house, where he spent a good portion of his childhood because his parents were not allowed to live together as long as the cook was still alive, they never let anything edible go to waste. Often—based mainly on the teachings of the prophet Magetsu, of whom the whole family were devotees—they had engaged in a peculiar way of preparing food, which involved burying the ingredients for several hours among stones heated with wood or charcoal. The prophet Magetsu, a monk who is said to have died not once but many times, conceived of the creation of the universe as an offering from mother earth to the universe’s constituent elements, which of course include humankind. Once when he was invited on a long trip to Africa by his entomologists association, Endo Hiroshi had to eat all sorts of packaged foods, which he bought in a shop near his house recommended by the organization’s members. He made that trip with his suitcases loaded with plastic jars and boxes containing different types of dehydrated foodstuffs. Endo Hiroshi just had to add boiling water to the containers to achieve a sort of food that at least vaguely resembled that originally consumed in his country. The entomologist Endo Hiroshi himself dubbed that trip “the long journey of boiling water” because teapots and hotplates were so essential en route, allowing him not just to eat but also to drink tea in the traditional manner. Endo Hiroshi could have easily gone without food for several days, but it was practically impossible for him to give up drinking tea for more than four hours at a time. A few entomologists advised him to take advantage of the trip and sample one of the many edible insects incorporated into the diets of the regions they were visiting. Everything from your everyday ants, which were coated in honey and served in a paper cone, to the flesh of a species of blue-legged tarantula that lives only in the crown of certain trees.⁷ As they ate these specimens, the members of the expedition often talked about insects’ nutritional properties. Some years back, led by the scientist Olaf Zumfelde from the University of Heidelberg, a number of experts had drawn up a table showing the quantity of protein from invertebrates that was absorbed immediately by the human body.⁸ And yet Endo Hiroshi ate nothing but the prepackaged food he’d bought back home. He continued his journey with his dehydrated foods, his tea, his teapot, and his little battery-operated hotplate at his side. He was working with his usual diligence, only a few days from the end of the trip, when he found a strange specimen that had been thought extinct. A theretofore unknown subspecies. The only one on record, the Newton camelus eleoptirus, was a different color. He stored it in the best conditions he could and, without mentioning it to the rest of the expedition, carried it back with him on the return home. Once he’d disembarked, he headed straight for the lab he’d set up in the rear of what would later become his parents’ house.⁹ At the time, his parents were still unmarried and lived apart. Nevertheless, the family members came together every night in that house, where Hiroshi had lived since childhood, to recite the prayers of the monk Magetsu. Endo Hiroshi knew that his find would be the making of his career as an entomologist. His name, Hiroshi, would forevermore be used to refer to the species he’d captured. The insect already identified had been blue, not red like the one Hiroshi had found. The new subspecies would bear the name Hiroshi camelus eleoptirus. But to his surprise, when he opened the plastic box he found only a tiny black ball instead of his insect. The ball was so miniscule, it was strange that he could make it out at all. The box had been specially designed to transport specimens of this sort—that is, small and medium-sized insects. They were made exclusively for the members of his entomologists association and were constructed in such a way that the insects could live inside them a long time. The eleopter he’d found last week couldn’t possibly have escaped. Endo Hiroshi had seen it in the Nairobi airport before he’d boarded his return flight. He’d taken another peek on the plane, and just yesterday, as soon as he was home again, he’d gazed at it for a long time through entomology glasses.¹⁰ On that last occasion, he’d been comparing it not just to the Newton camelus eleoptirus that appeared in an illustration in an insect book he always carried with him but also to a number of specialized tomes that filled his library. He was so startled by the absence that he didn’t notice the arrival of his parents, ready to resume prayers in the living room now that their son was home safe and sound. For the weeks he’d been away in Africa, they’d had no choice but to pray in the temple of the Prophet, which perched on the slopes of the highest mountain. It was an exhausting climb to get there, but they had no other option. The parents were not just forbidden to live together before the cook’s death would allow them to marry, they were unable to be in the main house for even a minute without their son’s physical presence. Hiroshi heard them call to him—they wanted to say hello, of course, but more importantly they wanted to begin the religious rites, which they could not perform without him. Just then Shikibu, the old servant, finished preparing a large pot of white rice that would be passed around after the ceremony. Ever since he’d turned fifteen, the bowl of rice served after prayer was the only food that Endo Hiroshi ate all day. Rice and, as mentioned earlier, several liters of tea. Anyone would have predicted that such a diet would make him grow thin and weak. But his vitality proved otherwise. Just as it had been for the old monks, even the prophet Magetsu himself, a bowl of rice a day was enough food for a lifetime. On a related note, it is said that one of the prophet Magetsu’s deaths—to all appearances the definitive one—occurred when the Prophet decided to allow his body to feed off his body.¹¹ To bear witness to the process, during which his flesh gradually disappeared, curiously transformed into the traces of his own flesh, he relied on his disciple, Oshiro, who wrote on a large rice paper scroll, still available to anyone who wishes to consult it, the words dictated to him by his master during the process. Curiously, the final word could be translated as “peace.” It seems strange that a being as spiritually advanced as the prophet Magetsu, having carried out such a complex process of dying, would utter a word whose meaning for many people would seem quite obvious. Before beginning the ritual of devotion to the Prophet, Endo Hiroshi and his parents had to check the teeth of the wizened cook. His parents were always more interested in that inspection than he was, as they would only be able to marry and live together when the woman had lost all of her teeth. The day that she could no longer eat, the cook would starve to death on her lonely journey—an endless road that would start at one of the many roads encircling the highest mountain—which she would be forced to begin the night the man and woman of the house were finally married. The moment a dental inspection revealed the total absence of teeth, the preparations for the wedding would begin. Two days later, it would all be over. Man and woman would now be husband and wife. During those two days, the old woman would not be allowed to eat even a crumb from the wedding banquet, ensuring that on her journey toward death, things would proceed as quickly as possible. A few minutes later, after the usual greetings and paying their respects to the image of the prophet Magetsu, the inspection of the cook’s teeth began. It was not yet time to begin the prayers: in order to achieve the proper intonation, it was important to know whether or not the cook still had teeth. On this occasion, though he carried it out to the letter, Endo Hiroshi paid no attention to the ritual he was leading. He was baffled by the insect’s disappearance. Nevertheless, a loyal devotee, he hid it as well as he could. He’d put on his traditional tunic and, after greeting his parents as any son recently returned from a long journey should, he started sprinkling the water—which he scooped out of a small wooden bowl—over their prone bodies. After the greetings, his parents had stretched out face-down on the floor. Once that part of the ritual was over, they noticed the cook was gone. The parents sensed it immediately, in fact. The raced to the kitchen, where they found the old woman hiding behind the firewood for the stove. As they’d guessed, when they pried open her mouth they discovered that the last molar, which had had them on tenterhooks for the last few years, had vanished. The old servant pleaded, refusing to open her jaws again. Endo Hiroshi, who had followed his parents to the kitchen, suddenly understood what had happened to his insect. He realized that the tiny ball he’d found in place of the exotic specimen was a sort of stomach of the insect. Actually, it looked like the bug had simply swallowed itself. He didn’t find such a theory at all bizarre. It was not for nothing that he’d spent practically his whole life, every free moment his career as an entomologist permitted him, leading the rites of the monk Magetsu. It seemed to have repeated itself, there within his entomologist’s box, that process the monk had undergone before dying for good. That ball must be a formless mass made up of the elements that had composed the little bug. The old woman was emitting heartrending screams.¹² His parents would not bend. At last she fell quiet—a sudden silence that seemed to suggest a full acceptance of her fate. His parents could then discuss the wedding plans in peace. They talked mostly about the banquet. They’d serve traditional foods. No modern touches, except the sea bream served to the couple before the ceremony began. They’d have to find a cook skilled enough to prepare the ghost bream,¹³ the recipe for which consisted of cutting up the fish until it was fleshless but still alive and then placing it in a fish tank in the center of the happy couple’s table. The couple would eat the flesh while the animal kept swimming, dying, its internal organs exposed for all the world to see. As a good omen for the marriage, the meal should last exactly as long as it took the fish to die. That evening, the entomologist Endo Hiroshi confirmed his suspicions. After they’d sentenced Shikibu and performed—with more intensity than usual—the Prophet’s rituals, he went back to his room and with the help of a microscope found that, in fact, the insect appeared to have consumed itself. For no apparent reason, he felt a wave of nausea. He vomited. Meanwhile, downstairs, his parents were still making plans. Not only could his mother now arrange the house as she wished, but she could also paint her teeth black. In addition to starting to give orders around the house, his father now had the right to go to the dentist to have his front teeth removed once and for all. These characteristics—the blackened teeth and the missing front teeth—were symbols of having a full life. Reflecting on the transformation undergone by an insect that might have been called Hiroshi camelus eleoptirus, a name that would have instantly made him famous around the world, he decided that after his parents’ wedding, the end of his own life would consist in reducing as far as possible the normal functioning of his stomach. He would seek to neutralize it in a manner similar to the liver atrophy suffered by those geese that are obsessively overfed by their owners, or by the ducks that in some countries are raised in tiny cages and fed with chemical-soaked corn. When the sun shone in through the window the next day, illuminating the plastic box that still contained the insect’s supposed stomach, Endo Hiroshi decided to eat not only that black ball but also a bunch of weevils and other bugs that he’d collect later that morning. In the armoire in his room, practically brand-new, he still had the outfit he used to wear for the caterpillar hunt that took place every leap year. The last time he’d participated, he’d gone with his cousin, the excessively slender girl who’d died of slenderness, and with his other cousin, the obese sumo wrestler.

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Notes

1 Archaic custom that must be followed by citizens who have lost all of their teeth.

2 Popular belief, primarily among the Assyrian Chaldeans, that the whole of the celestial spheres is contained within the human body. Thanks to recent psychological studies, it is believed that men retain remnants of this conviction as a symbol of social superiority.

3 Type of martial art that celebrates times of harvest or abundance. It is especially prevalent in regions governed by the solar calendar.

4 The fish that has provoked the greatest number of murders is the sole.

5 Even today newspapers occasionally run stories about merchants who are selling toasted flies instead of edible seeds.

6 See Newsweek magazine, no. 234, p. 56.

7 They were phosphorescent Larpicus tarantulas, found only in eastern Namibia.

8 Consult the Zumfelde Table, available from the Berlin Nutritionists Society.

9 According to the tradition of the prophet Magetsu—which the Western world found incomprehensible—a man and woman were not permitted to marry until the eldest of their female servants had lost the last of her teeth. This prohibition did not impede their right to have children.

10 He used a pair of Stewarson glasses imported by the Tenkei-Maru department store.

11 See the Hiro-Sensei sect’s book of the Holy Catechism.

12 It is said that some of the neighbors were unable to sleep that night.

13 Teachers of this technique tend to be found on the country’s southern coast.

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Images: Ben Rodkin, with Mario Bellatin and David Shook, for Baru
Coming soon… the Bellatin dossier from BAR