Senselessness Read online

  Horacio Castellanos Moya

  SENSELESSNESS

  Translated from the Spanish

  by Katherine Silver

  A NEW DIRECTIONS PAPERBOOK ORIGINAL

  CONTENTS

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  TO. S.D.,

  who made me promise I would never dedicate this book to her

  ISMENE: My lord, the good sense one has at birth

  never abides with the unfortunate

  but goes astray.

  Sophocles, Antigone

  ONE

  I AM NOT COMPLETE IN THE MIND, said the sentence I highlighted with the yellow marker and even copied into my personal notebook, because this wasn’t just any old sentence, much less some wisecrack, not by any means, but rather the sentence that astonished me more than any other sentence I read that first day on the job, the sentence that most dumbfounded me during my first incursion into those one thousand one hundred almost single-spaced printed pages placed on what would be my desk by my friend Erick so I could get some idea of the task that awaited me. I am not complete in the mind, I repeated to myself, stunned by the extent of mental perturbation experienced by this Cakchiquel man who had witnessed his family’s murder, by the fact that this indigenous man was aware of the breakdown of his own psychic apparatus as a result of having watched, albeit wounded and powerless, as soldiers of his country’s army scornfully and in cold blood chopped each of his four small children to pieces with machetes, then turned on his wife, the poor woman already in shock because she too had been forced to watch as the soldiers turned her small children into palpitating pieces of human flesh. Nobody can be complete in the mind after having survived such an ordeal, I said to myself, morbidly mulling it over, trying to imagine what waking up must have been like for this indigenous man, whom they had left for dead among chunks of the flesh of his wife and children and who then, many years later, had the opportunity to give his testimony so that I could read it and make stylistic corrections, a testimony that began, in fact, with the sentence I am not complete in the mind that so moved me because it summed up in the most concise manner possible the mental state tens of thousands of people who have suffered experiences similar to the ones recounted by this Cakchiquel man found themselves in, and also summed up the mental state of thousands of soldiers and paramilitary men who had with relish cut to pieces their so-called compatriots, though I must admit that it’s not the same to be incomplete in the mind after watching your own children drawn and quartered as after drawing and quartering other peoples’ children, I told myself before reaching the overwhelming conclusion that it was the entire population of this country that was not complete in the mind, which led me to an even worse conclusion, even more perturbing, and this was that only somebody completely out of his mind would be willing to move to a foreign country whose population was not complete in the mind to perform a task that consisted precisely of copyediting an extensive report of one thousand one hundred pages that documents the hundreds of massacres and proves the general perturbation. I am also not complete in the mind, I then told myself on that, my first day of work, sitting at what would be my desk for the duration, my eyes wandering aimlessly over the tall almost bare white walls of that office I would be using for the next three months—its only furnishings were the desk, the computer, the chair I was digressing in, and a crucifix behind my back, thanks to which the walls were not completely bare. I must be much less complete in the mind than all of them, I managed to think as I threw my head back without knocking myself off balance in the chair, wondering how long it would take me to get used to the presence of the crucifix, which I couldn’t even consider taking down because this wasn’t my office but rather the bishop’s, as my friend Erick had explained to me a few hours earlier as he was leading me toward it, even though the bishop almost never used it, preferring the one in the parish church, where he also lived, so I could use this office as long as I wanted, but I wouldn’t be able to get rid of the crucifix and replace it with something else, something to hang on the wall that would lighten my spirits, something that would have been as far removed from any and all religions as I was myself, even though at that moment and for the coming weeks I would find myself working there in the archbishop’s palace, situated precisely behind the cathedral, another sign that I am not complete in the mind, I said to myself with real concern, because that was the only way to explain the fact that a depraved atheist like myself had agreed to work for the perfidious Catholic Church, the only way to explain that in spite of the hearty revulsion I felt toward the Catholic Church and all other churches, no matter how small, I found myself now precisely in the archbishop’s palace facing one thousand one hundred pages of almost single-spaced text that contained the horrific stories of how the armed forces had decimated dozens of villages and their inhabitants. I am the least complete in the mind! I thought with alarm as I stood up and began to pace like a caged animal around that office whose only window facing the street was walled up so that neither the passersby nor anybody inside would succumb to temptation, I began to pace around as I would frequently do each and every one of the days I spent within those four walls, but at that moment, on the verge of going mad after realizing that I was so not complete in the mind that I had accepted and was starting a job with the church, a job that had already put me in the sights of the armed forces of this country, as if I didn’t already have enough problems with the armed forces of my own country, as if the enemies in my own country weren’t enough for me, I was about to stick my snout into somebody else’s wasps’ nest, make sure that the Catholic hands about to touch the balls of the military tiger were clean and had even gotten a manicure, because that was what my work was all about, cleaning up and giving a manicure to the Catholic hands that were piously getting ready to squeeze the tiger’s balls, I thought as I fixed my gaze on the bulky stack of one thousand one hundred pages that lay on the desk, and, momentarily stopping my pacing, increasingly in a stupor, I understood that it was not going to be easy to read, organize, and copyedit those one thousand one hundred pages in the three months my friend Erick and I had agreed on: Shit! Having agreed to edit that report in just three months proved that my problem wasn’t that I was not complete in the mind but that I was completely unhinged. All of a sudden I felt trapped in that office with those high bare walls, a victim of a conspiracy between the Church and the armed forces in a foreign country, a lamb being led to the slaughter thanks to a stupid and dangerous bout of enthusiasm that made me trust my friend Erick when, one month earlier—as we sipped Rioja in an old Spanish bar near police headquarters—he asked me if I would be interested in copyediting the final report of the project he was involved in, a project that consisted of recovering the memories of the hundreds of survivors of and witnesses to the massacres perpetrated in the throes of the so-called armed conflict between the army and the guerrillas, if I would be interested in earning five thousand dollars for spending three months editing about five hundred pages written by well-known journalists and academics, who were turning in a text that was almost finished, I would only have to look it over, a final proofing, it was really a great gig, five thousand dollars just to put the final touches on a project that dozens and dozens of people had participated in, beginning with the group of missionaries who had managed to record the oral testimonies of the Indians, witnesses and survivors, most of whom didn’t even speak Spanish very well and who were afraid above all else of anything that had to do with the events they had been victims of, followed by those in ch
arge of transcribing the tapes, and ending with teams of distinguished professionals, who would classify and analyze the testimonies and who would then also write up the report, my friend Erick explained to me in detail, not very emphatically, very calmly in fact, in that conspiratorial tone so typical of him, knowing that I would never refuse such an offer, not because of the enthusiasm a good Rioja might awaken in my spirit but rather because he perceived that I was so not complete in the mind that I would accept his offer and even get excited about the idea of being involved in such a project without weighing the pros and cons or negotiating, which is just what happened.

  I flung open the door, terrified, as if there were no air in that closed room and I was about to pass out in a frenzied fit of paranoia; I stood in the doorway, probably with my eyes popping out of my head if the way the two secretaries turned and looked at me was any indication, determined to leave the door open while I got used to that place and my new job even though the open door would undoubtedly affect my ability to concentrate on what I was reading. I didn’t care, I preferred any distraction, even if it interfered with my reading of those one thousand one hundred pages, to suffering new fits of paranoia provoked by such close quarters and my sick imagination set off by one not even very ingenuous sentence—just one among hundreds I would have to read in the coming weeks—which had sent me into a tizzy that could only paralyze me, as I confirmed now when I returned from the threshold to the chair, where I soon sat down and stared at the aforementioned sentence, I am not complete in the mind, and which I intended to skip over immediately in order to get to the one that followed without stopping to digress as I just had, in order to avoid the risk of getting dangerously bogged down in the job I was only just beginning, but my intention was thwarted a few seconds later by the appearance in my office of a little guy with glasses and a Mexican mustache, the guy whose office was right next to mine and whom my friend Erick had introduced me to about an hour earlier as he was leading me to my place of work, a little guy who was nothing less than the director of that entire complex of offices devoted to monitoring human rights, the second in command under the bishop, Erick explained to me as I was offering him my hand and peering at the framed and very prominently placed photographs of him standing with Pope John Paul II in one and with the president of the United States, William Clinton, in another, which immediately alerted me to the fact that I wasn’t shaking hands with any old little guy but one who had given that same hand to the pope and President Clinton, an idea that almost managed to intimidate me, given the fact that the pope and the president of the United States were the two most powerful men on the planet, and the little guy who was now entering my office had had his picture taken with both dignitaries, no minor accomplishment, so I immediately stood up and asked him solicitously what I could do for him, to which the little guy responded just as kindly as possible, asking me to please excuse the interruption, he was aware that I was facing an arduous task, he said, as he pointed to the one thousand one hundred pages that lay on the desk, but wanting to take advantage of my having opened the door to enjoy what was surely my first break, he had taken the liberty of coming to invite me on a tour of the whole building so that I could meet the rest of the staff, a tour my friend Erick, always in a rush, had omitted when he led me directly from the reception area to what would be my office, stopping only at the little guy’s office as I already mentioned, an invitation I immediately accepted and that carried me to each and every office in that building, which, truth be told, wasn’t a building so much as a colonial structure attached to the back of the cathedral with the typical layout of an archbishop’s palace: two stories of solid stone with wide corridors surrounding a square central courtyard, where we found several employees enjoying their morning break, and who, seeing me with Mynor, for this was the name of the little lay director of that institution, greeted me effusively and with some fawning, as if I were a new seminarian, while the little guy extolled my professional virtues thanks to which the report about the massacres would end up being a first-rate text, and I told myself that the good-looking girls had to be hiding somewhere, because the ones the little guy had introduced me to were not only not complete in their minds but also in their bodies, devoid of even one attractive feature, an observation I did not share with my guide and, as the days passed, I discovered to be intrinsic to that institution and not only to the extreme left, as I had always thought—that ugly women were an exclusive attribute of extreme left-wing organizations—no, now I understood that they also were intrinsic to Catholic organizations dedicated to monitoring human rights, a conclusion I reached later, as I said, and at no time did I share this with the guy who had posed for photographs with John Paul II and Bill Clinton, the little guy who took me all around, from one office to another, until finally he left me alone again in front of the one thousand one hundred pages awaiting me in my office, not before asking me if I’d like him to close the door, to which I responded that it would be better to leave it open as we were in the quietest corner of the palace and there wouldn’t be any annoying interferences to distract me.

  TWO

  IN ORDER TO CELEBRATE my first day of work as God intended I arranged to meet my buddy Toto at noon at El Portalito, the city’s most legendary cantina, fortunately located a mere two hundred yards from my office, close enough to prevent the onset of anxiety in someone who is afraid, above all else, of failing to be punctual, as is the case with me; someone who requires a drink to calm the nerves at the strangest moments, as is also the case with me, which made me consider the proximity of the archbishop’s palace to El Portalito well-nigh miraculous, like a wink from the heavens that would enable me to do my work without faltering, as I explained to my buddy Toto once we were sitting down at a table in the cantina awaiting the voluminous mugs of beer, looking over the faces of the other clientele: the certainty of having a cantina so close by, right at hand, no matter what kind of office I am stuck in, lays the groundwork for a certain degree of spiritual peace, I was explaining to him at the very moment we picked up our mugs to make a toast, which Toto took advantage of to show off his peculiar sense of humor: “May you come out of this shit alive,” the wiseguy pronounced in solemn tones, a joke that immediately made me suspicious of the men sitting at a nearby table, knowing as I did that all kinds of thugs hung out at that dark and squalid cantina, including informers and torturers who belonged to the so-called Presidential High Command, torturers who usually drank alone, almost never looking up from the table, their eyes bloodshot and their grimace sinister, who could be recognized by the scent of the dense, ghastly aura surrounding them. “Don’t worry, take it easy,” my buddy Toto told me, unsheathing his equine teeth from under his Pancho Villa mustache, then right away asking me about my impressions after my first morning of work, how had the priests treated me, I should tell him all about it, but at the precise moment my story was about to begin, a marimba thundered deafeningly from a raised dais next to the door, a marimba played by two very old men, the notes sweeping all conversation away from the tables, especially those closest to the door, like ours, and we would have had to shout in order to hear each other, which my buddy Toto then did to tell me that this music was a kind of welcome march, that he had no doubt it was dedicated to me, he shouted with a mocking grin, knowing that if there is anything I despise with particular intensity it is folk music, and especially the sad, mournful music of the marimba, an instrument only a sad and mournful people can idolize, as I have said many times. “Cut the shit, man, and tell me all about it,” he said, laughing at my expense, because I didn’t have much choice, given the fact that the marimba was just beginning its serenade, and I would have to shout to be heard over that sad and mournful music, something that truth be told wouldn’t be difficult for me, much less now that we had ordered a second round of beers, but also I had to forget about the marimba and its irritating music in order to concentrate on telling him my impressions after my first morning of work, a story that I could begin only b
y describing the strange sensation I’d had when I knocked on that enormous wooden door located behind the cathedral, as if I were asking them to open the doors to catacombs I had long feared and abhorred but whose bowels I was now destined to penetrate, that strange sensation of being about to enter a forbidden and undesirable world I’d had early that morning while I waited for them to open the enormous wooden doors on that stinking filthy street already infested with street vendors and suspicious-looking characters, like the ones who also hung out at this cantina, where the marimba finally finished its first song and the waitress brought us our second round of beer. Once I’d made my way past the enormous wooden door following a porter who looked like an old sexton, I hastened to tell my buddy Toto, taking advantage of the interregnum of silence between one song and the next, I was led into a cold and intimidating waiting room, like the anteroom of a convent, where I remained alone for too many minutes while the porter went to find my friend Erick, sitting on a bench where only the prie-dieu was missing and where I could appreciate in all its dimensions the fact that I was entering a world ruled by the laws of Catholicism, which had always produced in me the greatest revulsion, which made me consider the possibility of rushing out of there at that instant, although I was immediately overwhelmed by an even stranger sensation, as if I had been there before and now had come back to relive the same experience all over again, and that it would affect my life in some definitive way, I told my buddy Toto at the very moment the marimba started playing a new song, a chilling sensation, by the way, as if I were about to live out a destiny in which my will barely counted and whose principal feature was danger.

  Before continuing I should state clearly that I felt especially safe with Toto, not only because we were in his city and he knew his way around easily, but also because he looked like a landowner—the wide-brimmed hat, the military boots, and the loose-fitting jacket—thereby commanding a certain respect, who knows why, and he probably was carrying a loaded pistol on his belt—forewarned is forearmed—and Toto defined himself as a farmer and a poet, a fact I alone knew, given our close friendship, but to the rest of the cantina’s clientele he would look like just a landowner, a feared species in this country due to its aggressiveness and the little consideration it showed for other peoples’ lives, as might be gathered from reading the one thousand one hundred pages that lay on the desk in the archbishop’s palace and about which my buddy Toto now started to interrogate me. I told him that my friend Erick had stuck it in me crooked and without lubrication, the clever asshole. Instead of the five hundred pages we had agreed on, I would have twice that amount of text to edit without Erick showing any willingness to also double my remuneration. He was confident that at that stage I wouldn’t change my mind because three hundred of those pages were lists of massacres and victims’ names and the other eight hundred were very well written, as I was soon to discover, and as he assured me, so my job was to only polish and touch up the final version, although of course I had carte blanche to change anything I thought necessary, without of course altering the focus—and his trust in me was such that it wasn’t necessary to go into much detail, he said. And the truth was, I admitted to my buddy Toto, that the fifty pages I had read this morning were very carefully written indeed, I would even say they were impeccable, in spite of the antiseptic and slightly academic style of the psychiatrist who had written this first part of the report, a Basque by the name of Joseba, whom I didn’t know and who was now out of the country, whose method consisted of proposing several theses about the effects that the specific and generalized drawing and quartering had had on the physical, mental, and emotional health of the surviving population, only to then support his theses with the testimonies of some of those survivors, carefully chosen out of hundreds and hundreds of cases that were in the archives, some of which, read this morning, had unsettled my sick imagination, I admitted to my buddy, who drank his beer a little too quickly, or rather drank while I was talking and so got ahead of me, for example the case of the village deaf-mute, I continued, I don’t remember in which far-flung village up in the highlands this happened, I read it just before leaving the office, I was even mulling it over on my way as I crossed the city’s main plaza, known as Parque Central, in front of the cathedral, because the poor deaf-mute had the misfortune of being interrogated by soldiers who didn’t know he was deaf, the misfortune of being beaten to make him spill the names of those who had collaborated with the guerrillas, in front of the other inhabitants of the village and without saying a word the deaf-mute was beaten without saying a word after each question the sergeant who commanded the unit asked him, without anybody in the village daring to tell the sergeant that the deaf-mute couldn’t answer even when they tied him to that tree in the plaza and the sergeant began to make incisions on his body with a saber to his shouts of “Speak, you Indian sonofabitch, before I really get pissed off!” but the deaf-mute just opened his bulging eyes so wide that it looked like they were going to pop out of his sockets from terror, unable to answer the sergeant, who, of course, interpreted his silence as defiance and unsheathed his machete to get him to spew out words as fast as a sports announcer and so that this herd of horrified Indians watching the scene would understand that the worst thing they could ever think of doing was to defy authority, a sergeant who was pretty stupid if we consider that he cut the deaf-mute to pieces without even realizing that his screams were not just screams of pain but also the only means for the deaf-mute to express himself. “What a stupid deaf-mute, why didn’t he make signs with his hands?” my buddy Toto commented as he picked some potatoes and onions off the plate the waitress had just brought to the table, as if he had no idea that the first thing the soldiers do is tie a victim’s wrists to immobilize him and as if I hadn’t explained that with the first swing of the machete the god-damn hands of the deaf-mute went flying, tied and all, and that at that point nobody was about to start giving explanations with hand signals; therefore, after the deaf-mute every single other inhabitant of the village was worked over with the machete even though they knew how to talk and said they were willing to denounce the people who had collaborated with the guerrillas, but it didn’t do them any good, the orgy had commenced and only a couple of them managed to survive and come and tell about it twelve years later, I said at the same moment my buddy Toto ordered his third beer while I still had half of my second one, which seemed wise, I must confess, given the fact that it would have been quite inappropriate for me to arrive drunk and disorderly at work on my first afternoon, to pound on the enormous wooden door so that they would let me in to keep reading stories like the one about the deaf-mute or to pick through the testimonies to find sentences like, I am not complete in the mind, just one of the many that astonished me as I went through the pages, I explained to Toto, powerful sentences spoken by Indians for whom remembering the events they told about surely meant bringing back their most painful memories, but also meant entering the therapeutic stage of confronting their past, bringing out into the open those bloody ghosts that haunted their dreams, as they themselves admitted in those testimonies, which seemed like concentrated capsules of pain and whose sentences had so much sonority, strength, and depth that I wrote down some of them in my personal notebook, I said at the same moment I took my little reporter’s notepad out of the inside pocket of my tweed jacket, realizing that my buddy Toto had stopped paying attention because the cantina was filling up and some not-so-bad-looking girls were sitting at a few of the other tables. You’re a poet, just listen to this beaut, I said before reading the first sentence, taking advantage of the marimba having just ended, and in my best declamatory voice, I read: Their clothes stayed sad . . . and then I observed my buddy, but he in turn looked back at me as if he were waiting, so I immediately read the second sentence in a more commanding tone of voice, if that were possible: The houses they were sad because no people were inside them . . . And then, without waiting, I read the third one: Our houses they burned, our animals they ate, our children t
hey killed, the women, the men, ay! ay! . . . Who will put back all the houses? And I observed him again because by now he must have fathomed those verses that expressed to me all the despair of the massacres, but not to my buddy Toto, more of a landowner than a poet, as I sadly discovered, when I heard him mumble something like “Cool . . . ,” to be polite, I guessed, because then he stared at me with that your-money-or-your-life look in his eyes and said that I should take it in stride, that editing one thousand one hundred pages of stories about Indians obsessed with terror and death could break even the strongest of spirits, infect me with malignant and morbid curiosity, the best thing for me to do was to distract myself, counter the effects, and, according to him, I should forget about my work as soon as I was out of the office, pointing accusingly at my notebook, I should be grateful that for security reasons they didn’t allow me to take the manuscript out of the palace, because living with a text like that twenty-four hours a day could be fatal to someone as compulsive as I was, it would ratchet up my paranoia to truly unhealthy levels, you shouldn’t take that out of the priests’ quarters, and he pointed again at my notebook—just think of it as any other office job, my buddy Toto said and pointed with his chin to the table next to us and behind me, where a couple of damsels were conversing with some jackass, as if this were the appropriate moment to start flirting, as if I had read him those sentences out of my notebook to convince him of the righteousness of a just cause I was committing myself to, when what I really wanted, as I told him now a little pissed off by the circumstances, was to show him the richness of the language of his so-called aboriginal compatriots, nothing more, assuming that he as a poet might have been interested in their intense figurative language and their curious syntactic constructions that reminded me of poets like the Peruvian César Vallejo, and I proceeded to read, now with more resolve and without letting myself be intimidated by the marimba that again started up, a longer fragment so that Toto could have no doubts whatsoever: Three days I am crying, crying I am wanting to see him. There I sat down on the earth to say, there is the little cross, there is he, there is our dust and pay our respects we will, bring a candle, but when we bring the candle, the candle there’s nowhere to put it . . . And this sentence, tell me, I rebuked him, now decidedly more pissed off, if this isn’t a great verse, a poetic jewel, I said before reciting it with greater intensity: Because for me the sorrow is to not bury him myself. . . . That was when I detected alarm in my buddy Toto’s eyes, as if I were shooting my mouth off and some informer were taking down notes without my realizing it, which sent chills up and down my spine, and I had the reflex to look nervously at the customers sitting at the tables around us, some of whom could well have been military informers, it wouldn’t even have surprised me if many of them were, given the state of affairs in that country, more reason for me to put my little notebook away in my jacket pocket and motion to the waitress to bring me my third and last beer. “To not desire, this alone I now desire,” my buddy recited with a mocking smile, wiping the foam off his mustache, then said, “Quevedo.”