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  • • •

  At this point he shouldn’t let her cross the threshold, the taxidermist says in greeting as soon as he hears her open the door to his cabinet. The horses are like brides, they shouldn’t be seen once they are ready for the ceremony. They’re resplendent, Mara sees, not without a certain pang. She puts on her best room-guard expression and says that she’s willing to leave whenever he’d like her to. The taxidermist swings his whole body around to look at her. With rage, with disdain, it seems to her, as if her comment were impertinent. Then he immerses himself once again in something that he seems to be obsessing about on Mancha’s left temple. They’ll emerge when it’s time, he says. This shadow always hovers at the end, this threat of having betrayed the original. Always at the end, like a trial by fire. He asks her to hand him the portraits. Mara hands him the file that contains the only reproductions that her boss deemed valid when he started his work: two are photos taken during the celebrated journey and the third is a watercolor by a traditionalist painter who was fairly well known in his era. When he was young he drew a lot, he says. He couldn’t wait until the teachers at school and his parents would leave him alone to draw in peace. But he was never interested in inventing, he always worked from a model. He would choose it, prepare it, then hold it in his mind, and then he’d let the pencil do its thing. Already then the only thing he wanted to do was return to the original, as far as he’s concerned his work is a return trip. This has made him very perceptive in guessing people’s pasts. And he doesn’t know exactly why, but if he had to taxidermy her, Mara, he wouldn’t find inspiration in a museum guard. Maybe she can explain why, he says, and turns to look at her. She answers with the first cliché that pops into her head, though she has to admit that her surprise detracted from her precision. She can’t avoid a certain nervousness. Nor must she forget one of the types of silence, the sixth: “A stupid silence is when the tongue is stilled and the spirit numb, and the entire person appears to be so deeply taciturn that it means nothing.” She wonders if she talked too much during her walk with Tal, if everything will be ruined right when she’s ready to take the pivotal step. She wonders how she can feel panic now, right now, right here. She needs to remind herself what she was capable of: in comparison to the previous sabotage, this is child’s play; or it should be. She sits on her assistant’s stool and tries to calm down. She opens her mouth to say that she forgot something, she’ll be right back, but at the same instant her boss looks at her, enlightened, as if he’d resolved the problem with the horse’s temple that had obsessed him, or as if the temple had offered him a truce, and then he tells her that now, right now, they’re going to go to his house where Talvikki Ranta is waiting for them.

  • • •

  They’re sitting on the ground, shielded by the trees in the park. It seems like an excess of caution to Ringo, who reminds her that they didn’t sign on for an Indiana Jones escapade, but Mara orders him to not move a muscle until she tells him to. The night is mild, a peaceful summer night, which seems to her to be a good omen. A group of totally self-absorbed teenagers walk by. Perfect, nobody should see them there. Mara made sure to find one of the least transited spots for this obligatory wait. The sleeping pill will take effect in forty minutes, the pharmacist said, and that’s what they’re waiting for. This isn’t so hard, or at least less hard than the previous step, the barbecue she just shared with the security folks and that she’d imagined would be simpler, or less uncomfortable. Maybe because by this time she has really started to like them. The exact dose at exactly the right time, the pharmacist repeated, with a kind of visionary certainty that combined the licensed professional and the witch doctor. She remembers her long fingernails, painted a metallic color, and the way she moved them to emphasize her words. Moreover, it’s very important to take the personality of the patient into account, she added, a piece of information to which Mara paid particularly close attention. At first she thought that since the more introverted of the security guards sleeps there, in the guard house, where they just had the barbecue, his dose should be lower, but after that warning she thought that his organism would absorb the sleeping pill with the same reticence as he absorbs everything going on around him, so she settled on identical doses for both. There, waiting in the shadows and under the strict order of silence that she imposed on herself and Ringo, she has only that to mull over, the conversation with the pharmacist. Or to imagine what her friends in security might be doing minute by minute, at what point in their nightly routine they will succumb to a deep slumber, but something blurry between sorrow and pride dissuades her from continuing down that path. Infallible, the pharmacist repeated, accompanied by a metallic bang on the top of the bottle. Mara had made sure to look for someone far away in space and time so that her purchase would not raise the slightest suspicion. Ringo had been a great help in this, as well: he remembered that woman, that goddess and provider of unmarked blister packs, thanks to which he had managed to survive the last three summers with his family, and he also drove Mara to that small town in the mountains. She looks at her watch; still fifteen minutes to go. Something that puts you to sleep and the next day you perceive as nothing more than a deeper sleep than usual, that’s all, that’s what Mara asked for before inventing a very complicated story the pharmacist did not pay the least attention to, as if it were common practice to put somebody else to sleep. Age of patient, weight, required hours of unconsciousness, she asked; she seemed to be following a protocol long established by some powerful government agency. Mara looks at her watch again and jumps up. With Ringo walking about ten steps behind her, just as they had practiced, they reach the guard house. Also as planned, she enters through the bathroom window and walks over to the wall where the keys to the rooms and workshops are hanging. She puts the one to the taxidermy cabinet in her pocket and stealthily walks back to the window. After an initial sense of relief, she is now worried that she didn’t see the security guard passed out on the way. She stands there paralyzed for a few minutes, to see if she hears anything, or to recover from the nervousness she didn’t expect. Nothing. She would get on her knees and kiss those silver-painted nails, she thinks, as she jumps into the park out of the same window she entered. She motions to Ringo. The next step seems simpler to her: she knows the workshop perfectly and, as far as she knows, there is no possibility that a taxidermied horse will trot away in the middle of the night.

  • • •

  From the Notebook:

  “We feel proud to be a National Race, the only one born and bred in this land and by us, the only one to be found throughout our nation, contributing day in and day out to the flourishing of our livestock. It is the only race that can survive the conditions on the Patagonian steppes, in the Chaqueña jungle, in the dry and arid North, and throughout the Iberá Wetlands. This same one that crosses the vast distances of the Pampas, and the same one that neighs proudly throughout all of America.”

  (From the brochure of the Association of Criollo Horse Breeders, Buenos Aires, circa 2012.)

  • • •

  At the last minute, the lawyer decided not to speak. His name appears as one of the speakers on the program they printed for this long-awaited opening of the exhibition, but he has now retreated, his jaws tenser than ever, as he watches the public relations person for the Association. The young man is doing his job impeccably well, Mara admits. Not even two hours have passed since the workmen opened the doors and discovered that the emblematic horses were in ruins, a bloated mess, in even worse shape than they had been in before this last taxidermy, worse than they’d ever been, and he’s now performing a high-wire act in order to keep to the same speech he’d prepared for this great homage, even though the subjects of the homage aren’t here. Or rather, they are, but they’re unrecognizable. That was the exact word the museum director used when she found herself obliged to mention the subject in her introductory remarks. Afterwards, she skillfully insisted on how paradoxical it was that precisely as a result of this lamentab
le and surely temporary impossibility to exhibit Mancha and Gato on this day and at this time, the horses were more present than ever to this lovely audience gathered here today, which showed how deeply they have permeated our collective memory and the hearts of each and every person, and at the same time how this flings open the doors of the future to new specimens of the breed, who were also there with them on this gorgeous sunny day. And she went on in that vein. Now, while somebody is talking over the loudspeakers to remind the audience what time the horses the Association brought for the homage will begin to participate in the equestrian events, the director gives the microphone to the taxidermist and assures the audience that he, as a specialist, will be able to give a concise report about what happened and even venture certain strategies for the future of Mancha and Gato, who will surely soon once again be what they once were. He takes the microphone in a state of evident shock and clears his throat. He’s livid, shrunken, much more distressed than his pieces. He opens his mouth, as if he is finally going to say something, but he only clears his throat again. His silence does not provoke in the audience the curiosity that’s described in Mara’s manual of rhetoric, an increased interest from the sudden absence of word and movement, as described in her favorite passage, but instead creates a charmless void wherein everybody’s attention turns to the goings on in the plaza: children running, street vendors hawking, riders and grooms preparing the horses for the equestrian events. It could almost be said that nobody besides the organizers seems very upset over the absence of the famous horses. On stage, the taxidermist keeps struggling and finally manages to stammer out a sentence that seems to make reference to a chemical attack. He hesitates before each word, as if his discomfort and the need to find the appropriate euphemism overwhelm him, as if he were overwhelmed by sorrow. He indicates that in the next few days specialists will come from the university to determine the specifics of this attack, which has clear signs of terrorism, and then he begins another sentence that he doesn’t manage to finish. He stares at a distant spot in space, like those actors who are suddenly overwhelmed by stage fright because of a line they can’t remember. Mara is certain that he knows perfectly well what destroyed the horses. She has no doubt that when he touched that gelatinous mass the hides had become, he knew exactly what had caused it. Even the few people who seemed interested in his speech begin to wander away. The sun is increasingly intense, and this must remind them of the number of activities that have already started without them. The function continues, because the director was very clear in her decision to not allow any changes to the opening program. Now a breeder of Criollo horses is speaking, or the owner of a pharmaceutical company where they clone horses like these, or both at the same time, Mara doesn’t manage to understand though she does perceive the lack of subtlety with which the speaker invites the listeners to focus on what he calls future options. Or something like that. The taxidermist stands there, not even daring to leave the stage.

  • • •

  From the Notebook:

  “A breed is born and persists in the market for as long as it efficiently meets a need. The breeders of Criollo horses have had the enormous virtue, throughout the years, of constantly selecting for the demands of the market. In the nineteen forties they developed a short, compact biotype with a solid frame and a back of steel in order to meet the demands of intense cattle ranching throughout the country, producing stallions fit for widespread interbreeding with general biotypes. Its strength also allowed it to fill the need for draft horses, necessary for transportation at that time. Time and mechanization led to the need for a lighter biotype, almost exclusively suited for riding and, through selective breeding, a taller and more agile profile emerged. Entering the market as a horse suited for recreational activities was an enormous challenge for the Criollo. The range of competitive equestrian games allowed for selection for docility, agility, strength, courage, speed, and total obedience to the rider. Today we are firmly embarked on that path and fully solvent, working day in and day out and investing our time and capital to adapt, once more, to the market in order to guarantee our survival.”

  (From the brochure of the Association of Criollo Horse Breeders, Buenos Aires, circa 2012.)

  • • •

  Mara tries to find Talvikki among the dwindling audience, but nothing, not a trace, which worries her; she knows that the course things take will depend on her reaction, in part. She wonders if she’s already heard about what happened to the horses, or if she is shut away in her house, wearing an astronaut suit, absorbed in her remains and her toxic materials. That afternoon when Mara went to visit her, supposedly in order to see her work, she managed to get her husband rather than her to expound upon the ways the chemicals Tal works with decompose his discards in different ways. He even stopped to comment on specific pieces, somewhere between disturbed and enchanted by the kinds of transformations they bore witness to. Mara wonders if the taxidermist would really be capable of suspecting his wife. That day, she took the opportunity to ask him more than a few questions, and he answered all of them, fundamentally those related to the decomposition of fur and hides. Maybe some of the materials Talvikki uses are the same that he uses, maybe not. How to know with a boss who always made sure to camouflage his solutions. That day, she remembers, Talvikki listened to everything as if she were merely another embalmed piece; it was difficult for Mara to reconcile that image with the woman she’d met at the station, with the artist spoken about on innumerable websites. On the other hand, it wasn’t difficult at all for her to stuff a couple of flasks in her backpack without anybody seeing.

  • • •

  From the Notebook:

  Some common ground between embalmed and taxidermied pieces: the meticulousness, the perfect composure. A tribute for posterity. The soothing encapsulation of memories. Good manners perpetrated ad infinitum. Embellishments, trophies, fetishism. Pride. Fears appeased, the void abolished. The fantasy of subduing not only the dead, but death itself. Nevertheless, all of these facets are abolished in Fragonard’s figures. Not only abolished: banished, subverted, even ironized. Fragonard’s technique: to flay cadavers—of animals and humans—and inject a metal alloy into the arteries to solidify them. Something like that. I don’t know much else, apparently there’s not much else to know: Fragonard and another secret carried to the grave. What is known, what can be seen in the few pieces that survive in the museum outside Paris, is the terrifying dimension he was able to give to his technique. Embalming as a corrosive critique, a devastating mockery. It’s difficult to get those figures out of your mind, your retina. More than figures: visions. More than visions: nightmares. The gaze, the madness of “Buste d’homme.” The devastating laughter of “Le cavalier,” his most famous piece. It’s difficult to look at that piece. To see it, see it in the most literal and all-encompassing sense of the word, look straight at the perverse smile he placed in this world for us. Not a divinity or a huge explosion but rather a smile, a smile like the one on the flayed figures of Fragonard. In the middle of Illuminism, a smile of outrage. According to a website that quickly vanished, the human figure in that work is Fragonard’s beloved, who committed suicide when her family forbade them from marrying. Anybody would think it is the cadaver of a man, and the museum asserts that it is, but according to the vanished website it was a woman. Fragonard’s beloved, to be more precise. Not a trace of this, in any case. Museums and their publishing machinery. This piece, “Le cavalier,” for example, is exhibited mutilated: only the rider—the Amazon suicide?—on the horse. Missing are the other pieces that, in Fragonard’s original version—in his theatrical version, in the pieces he liked to assemble—accompanied the rider/Amazon on her last, triumphal ride: an entourage consisting of embalmed horses and human fetuses riding on rams. I look in the dictionary to confirm that “carnero” is a kind of sheep, and the definition reminds me that in addition to meaning “ram,” it also means the place where they throw dead bodies.