Include Me Out Read online

  (After a visit to the museum of l’École nationale vétérinaire, Masions-Alfort, France, 2013.)

  • • •

  She still can’t find Talvikki among the crowd but she does find the director, who is walking toward her and intercepts her. The lawyer also approaches with a grave expression on his face. To think that you took care of them so well for so many months, the director says, and she places her hand on Mara’s shoulder. Now, because of her boss’s breakdown, she has to ask her a favor, a very special favor: to accompany the lawyer to the cabinet where the horses are. Or what’s left of them, she says, glancing fleetingly at the floor. She’ll wait for him afterwards in her office, she tells the lawyer when she lifts her head, then starts to walk away. But she takes two steps and stops. She calls to Mara with an interjection because her name escapes her or she never knew it and tells her to take as many photos as necessary, as many as the lawyer asks her to. This business of returning so soon to what is called in a detective novel the scene of the crime causes Mara a certain amount of grief; she also is afraid of running into one of her guard friends so soon, but she admits to herself that she is trapped. She walks dutifully and without speaking, as is fitting to her status as a museum guard turned guide. The cabinet: the usual semidarkness. She let’s the lawyer enter first. Before entering, he arranges his poncho, which now, without horses and without an exhibition, looks even phonier than before. Then, when they approach the pieces, Mara confirms how perfect, how irremediable, the attack has been. Their backs look like they were ridden by the Devil himself. She imagined a different effect, something more gelatinous, something very different from this scorching, these black gashes, these marks of having been pulled too late out of a fire. She looks out of the corner of her eye at the lawyer, who is livid. Even in the semidarkness, ostensibly livid. Mara approaches the taxidermist’s table and pretends to be straightening things up, as if she were carrying on with her habitual tasks in spite of everything, as if her modesty prevented her from bearing witness to this scene. The lawyer takes out his cell phone and calls the taxidermist. He wants an explanation, an idea, any idea, but above all, an explanation. He knows he’s in a state of shock, of course, but he also knows how he works, who he is. He is not at all convinced by the museum director’s explanation. That he made a mistake with the chemicals he used; impossible. That pencil-pusher is trying to incriminate him, destroy his career, dodge the problem, but she’s not going to get anywhere with such an absurd theory. What’s his explanation for what happened, that’s what he wants to know? Now, right now. He doesn’t care about his state of shock, this can’t wait till he sees him. Now. This is going to cause serious problems, as he knows. Not to mention losses. Until that moment he’d thought that the taxidermist understood much more clearly that this restoration and the first clone will swing open the doors to a multi-million dollar market. Multi-million. He can’t pretend he doesn’t understand, he’s been a member of the Association for a long time, even longer than him. He thought the taxidermist clearly understood the symbolic importance of his work, the symbolic power of those horses that now aren’t horses and aren’t anything. He needs an explanation, now. Now. The December heat can be felt inside the cabinet. The lawyer takes off his poncho with a surprising lack of elegance and is finally quiet, listening to what the taxidermist is telling him. His jaws are tighter than ever, it seems that what he is hearing from the other end of the line is making him even more upset. He interrupts and tells the taxidermist that if he is not willing to see it with his own eyes, then he will have to tell him: there is no doubt at all that this is the work of his wife, his crazy wife and her obsessions, sticking her nose into what he does, into those dead bodies that are no good for anything. How many times has he told him that he married a madwoman, how many?

  • • •

  The buzzing of rumors can still be heard up and down the hallways of the museum. It’s already been a week and they haven’t gone down even one decibel; on the contrary, they’ve gotten louder and moved in even more unexpected directions and incorporated fantastical elements. They’re being fed to a large extent on what the newspapers as well as the local and national radio stations are saying about the incident. Three days ago the director called an emergency meeting and forbade all employees from making any statements until justice had been done, but Mara hears from Luisa about the tricks her colleagues are using to leak information. They just happen to run into a reporter in the bakery or in line at the bank, they just happen to have a journalist among their online friends. Thanks to these spontaneous acts, they throw into disarray the communication strategies of the Association and its members, of whom there are many. From her seat, finally recuperated, Mara no longer hears them, neither the ones nor the others; the serenity her sabotage has given her is inversely proportional to the general chaos. She managed to rid herself of interruptions and take revenge on the characters who embodied them, she is firmly in her rights to finish her hiatus in peace before returning to her experiment. As the afternoon heat enters, attenuated by the high ceiling, she is happy she chose this place. She finds that the lumbar contact functions perfectly; she is certain that she will begin without much effort to reintroduce the protocol of her experiment in detachment, it will simply happen on its own. If she knew the techniques for talking to horses that she recently saw in a documentary, she would go into the locked cabinet and whisper in their ears how grateful she is to them, how beautiful they are, in all their ruin. The only consequence she regrets concerns Talvikki, about whom nothing has been heard since the day of the sabotage. Nothing. Not at the museum and not on the internet; she checked. And not anywhere else, Luisa assures her. She seems to have been swallowed by the Earth.

  • • •

  From the Notebook:

  At the end of the twentieth century, an English scientist studies telepathic phenomena and other forms of extraordinary communication between some people and some animals. When he talks about horses, he mentions the abilities of so-called horse-whisperers, among whom an Irishman named Daniel Sullivan was a pioneer. He would approach the wildest horses and manage to tame them as if by magic. He seemed to talk to them, his contemporaries said. The only thing he said was that a gypsy had taught him. But one day in 1810, when he was already called Daniel Horse-Whisperer Sullivan, the Irishman died and carried his secret to the grave. The secret formula, the secret method (the return of the secret: an anachronism in the age of the end of privacy). On the other hand, one of those who carried on his work, John Solomon Rarey, a boy from Ohio who became famous for taming the most untamable horses without resorting to any form of violence, described in minute detail his own method and published a book in 1862 with a predictable title. Emerson admired him, seeing him in some way as a revolutionary. I suppose Thoreau did as well. The revealing details don’t matter here; what does matter is the fact that his method was simple, silent, and solitary. No bombast, no diatribe.

  (After Rupert Sheldrake, Dogs that Know When their Owners Are Coming Home: And Other Unexplained Powers of Animals, London: Hutchinson, 1999.)

  • • •

  As soon as she steps outside, Luisa tells her that her aunt decided to join them for lunch, it was impossible to say no, she knows how she is. The detachment that Mara is so sure she has been recovering over the last few days is suddenly threatened by these words. She says nothing, they keep walking. They are still at that time of year when crossing the plaza under the noonday sun reminds her of a trek across the desert. Inside, Mara is grateful for the certainty that by next summer she will be in a different place. She doesn’t know where, but definitely somewhere else. Honoria is already there when they arrive, at a table, not the one she and Luisa usually choose on Fridays. She is wearing dark glasses: without them she can’t go out in the glare of January, she says. She wants to know if Mara is satisfied with her plan, with the direction things took. She doesn’t beat at all around the bush, as Mara predicted. Fortunately, the waiter interrupts them. Mara asks a c
ouple of questions about the items on the menu she already knows by heart. Then she finds a way to say that she hadn’t thought about it in those terms, not in terms of results. She can’t think of any other strategy to avoid what will follow, nor does she know if what follows is a threat of being exposed or a new humbling lecture. She thinks she prefers the first. Luisa makes a comment in an attempt to change the direction of the conversation, but she fails. It’s a pity, a big fat pity, Honoria says. She thought that Mara had listened to her, had understood her that day. That she would have known how to wait, as she advised her. Wait and organize. That she would have avoided wasting her indignation and unease, her revolutionary energy. But no, she was wrong. Mara was wrong and she herself was wrong to have believed that she’d finally found someone in this place she could work with to rebuild a movement, an efficient organization. Mara doesn’t know, Honoria continues, the extent to which she could have counted on her if she’d listened to her, the extent to which she would have contributed to her struggle, not only against the taxidermist but also against every single traditionalist and reactionary front that gathers in this town, those enemy strongholds against which her husband did battle his entire life. But she couldn’t, she has to abstain, because no worthy battle can be waged in collaboration with an isolated act, an act that is without a doubt nothing more than an expression of decadence, a childhood malady.

  • • •

  From her happily recuperated chair, Mara observes the pieces in the room and notices that she no longer cleans them very well, though nobody else seems to have noticed. Things have come together so well that they don’t even notice her anymore. In the last two months she has almost not had to utter a word, it still surprises her how easily one can manage in this world on the basis of a handful of onomatopoeias and affirmations. These last, often only corporal. They work perfectly. That’s all that’s needed for them not to interrupt her, allowing her to sink deeper and deeper into her lumbar contact, the drifting of her mind. She didn’t even get back to her experiment in the garden. The truth is she doesn’t miss it, she hasn’t even looked closely enough to see what’s growing, to try to see if there is a difference between the species that she planted and the weeds. She doesn’t miss it at all. More recently, she has instead been focusing on her next chapter, her next act that will go against the grain. She never imagined the effect Honoria’s baroque accusations would have on her. What she had at first heard as an obsolete discourse has shown her, in the last few months of her return to detachment, another vision, a new perspective: her flights from the redundancies of the world transformed into solitary resistance. From revulsion to anarchism, not bad. She still doesn’t know if she will keep that perspective in mind only to use as an alibi in a court of law, or if she will incorporate it into the theoretical framework of her future escapades. There will be time to think about that. For now, she is interested only in rereading Talvikki’s letter. Sent from Italy under a false name to the museum. When they handed her the envelope she had the impression, for a split second, that someone from her old life might have managed to find her, but no. It is terrifyingly reassuring to discover how easy it is to dispense with the surroundings that at some point seemed to be so omnipresent, so inexorable. Talvikki says that she simply wants to thank her. If Mara had not destroyed the horses, she would still be there, wondering how and when she could leave. Her Gauguin-among-the-savages period had ended long before, she knew it all too well, long before the two of them met, but she hadn’t found a way to end it, hadn’t found a ritual to bid farewell. Until Mara managed to steal that compound she was using, and then things took their own course. Unexpected, really. That afternoon, when she saw her hide the bottle in her backpack, she thought that her work had inspired her, and that perhaps she wanted to experiment with BioArt in her spare time. She has to admit that Mara managed to surprise her. The truth is that to this day she cannot figure out why she did it, though she doesn’t care, much less now that her lawyer has taken charge of the problem. She just wants to thank her, she repeats. She moved to Italy, a country where she always wanted to spend some time. If she’s ever in the neighborhood, she should not hesitate to get in touch with her. Then, the closing formalities.

  MARÍA SONIA CRISTOFF (Trelew, Patagonia, 1965) is the author of five works of fiction and nonfiction, including False Calm and Include Me Out, and lives in Buenos Aires, where she teaches creative writing. Her journalism can be found in Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Perfil, and La Nación. She has edited volumes on literary nonfiction (Idea crónica and Pasaje a Oriente) and participated in a series of collective works. Her work has been translated into six languages.

  KATHERINE SILVER is an award-winning literary translator and the former director of the Banff International Literary Translation Centre (BILTC). Her most recent and forthcoming translations include works by César Aira, Julio Cortázar, Juan Carlos Onetti, and Julio Ramón Ribeyro. She is the author of Echo Under Story (What Books Press, 2019) and does volunteer interpreting for asylum seekers.

  Transit Books is a nonprofit publisher of international and American literature, based in Oakland, California. Founded in 2015, Transit Books is committed to the discovery and promotion of enduring works that carry readers across borders and communities. Visit us online to learn more about our forthcoming titles, events, and opportunities to support our mission.

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