Include Me Out Read online

  • • •

  She uses a napkin as a bookmark and closes the manual of the Boutelous—brothers, father and son, cousins? To follow word-for-word the instructions in a manual from a different place and remote era seems a lot like a literal translation, now that she thinks about it, and it’s possible that the outcome of her garden will end up being the same sort of gibberish, but she couldn’t care less. Thanks to this method she will establish a relationship with the flowers that will be utterly devoid of the customary connotations of a garden: ladies at leisure, eccentric gentlemen, magazines with shiny covers. But first she has to keep pulling the weeds. She brings a pitcher of cold water for her and Ringo, who’s helping her. That morning, when he came with her order and she asked him if maybe he knew someone who did that kind of work, he offered to help. Not the next day and not later, at that very moment. He made a phone call and invented a problem with his truck that would prevent him from continuing with his deliveries, and his father believed him or pretended to. The yard work is exhausting, but that doesn’t dissuade Ringo from continuing to recount to her in detail how he has advanced his strategy. Mara thinks that it’s much better than watching a telenovela. She also thinks that she doesn’t know if it’s right to pull out all the weeds, some of them are quite attractive. She’d never looked at them up close before. One thing is the infuriatingly straight lines of a well-kempt lawn, another quite different is these weeds with patterned leaves and yellow, blue, and purple flowers. Still, she keeps pulling them out, and she finds something addictive about this repetitive act. When Ringo tells her that he’s going to need to leave she realizes that it’s getting dark. They sit there looking at the future garden, their backs against the cold wall that surrounds the yard. Ringo removes a bottle from his backpack and takes a few quick sips, like a mountain climber. She opens the manual again, this time to the chapter on Tenweeks Stock. “The stems of Tenweeks Stock grow to two feet, they are thick, branching, and with oblanceolate, hairy leaves that are sometimes alternate and sometimes opposite, and are often whorled. The flowers bloom in dense clusters, or racemes, which are fragrant and composed of four long-clawed petals. The seedpods are long, round, pointed, and scored, each containing numerous round, flat, and pubescent seeds.” She would not tolerate this kind of baroque gloating in any other text, but here, in the Boutelous, it works particularly well: without being able to explain precisely why, something about this prose indicates to her that she should understand the descriptions as forecasts, so she reads the Boutelous as if they were tarot card readers whose every adjective predicts that she will have a lush, amnesic garden.

  • • •

  She should wait for him today in the museum workshops, outside the door, the taxidermist specified. He wants to speak directly to those two maintenance men who are supposed to move the horses to his cabinet, he doesn’t understand why there are still delays. According to the director, the internal paperwork is complete, and the instructions are clearly spelled out, even she doesn’t understand. This is not the first job he’s done for the museum, he knows how to get things done around here, he says as he arrives, then walks away with a resolute step. Mara follows at a certain distance. At a particular moment, in fact, she loses sight of him. When she finds him again, he is sitting on one of the forsaken wooden benches in front of the door to the workshops. He motions with his head to indicate that she should sit down, too. They will wait until the workers arrive, they left for lunch, according to what he’s been told. They won’t move all afternoon, if necessary. Never, not in any of the many times Mara has come into this area to change her uniform without anybody seeing has she paid any attention to the garden she now has in front of her. She decides to recall at least ten names of species she can see, a trick that’s not easy to pull off. She’s on the third, she thinks, when the taxidermist gets up from the bench and starts pacing back and forth. With long strides, with bombastic gestures. He leaps from the workers taking a lunch break to the deterioration of the country. His voice is too loud, as if for a large audience. Mara manages to recall one further plant species, and then another. She decides to check that very night if they are described by the Boutelous. The taxidermist wants to know if Mara realizes to what extent this delay negatively effects not only the horses and his own work but the lives of each and every person in this country who wants to do things well. He should have left when he had the chance, if she only knew the offers he received from abroad, but no, always letting himself be carried along with that hope, that illusion, that sense of responsibility to make sure that the work of the few before him wouldn’t vanish into thin air. His own grandfather—this is something she needs to know—was one of this country’s pioneers, someone who never hesitated to risk everything for that ideal, one of those pioneers who penetrated into the deepest and most challenging regions of Patagonia. Right after he reached legal age, he enlisted in Ramón Lista’s expedition. Those were truly brave young men, he insists, his stride now more relaxed. That’s when his grandfather met Polidoro Segers, the expedition’s doctor and the main reason why he as well as his father have devoted their lives to taxidermy. Better said, why they established the foundations of the profession of taxidermy here in Argentina. His grandfather helped Segers and also worshipped him, this in spite of the fact that the man was preceded by a story that didn’t show him in the best light, but that’s irrelevant now. He doesn’t admire him at all, he simply knows how to proudly carry on the family profession. Mara considers this the perfect last sentence of his soliloquy, and in some way so does he, because he remains quiet for a few minutes, though only to change the subject and gather momentum. She should know, he says, that not only those workers who must be eating an entire deer judging from how long they’re taking, not only those specific workers who will hear a piece of his mind when they deign to return, but each and every worker and employee who doesn’t do his job, who is always trying to take advantage, is betraying all those people, everybody like his grandfather who believed that this could one day be a serious country. She needs to know this, he repeats, now without moving, on the verge of delivering a reprimand. Then he sits back down. So calm, so learned, he says. Never, not before or after that expedition, had he ever met anybody like Segers, his grandfather would repeat, and he followed him everywhere. He followed him everywhere, working as his assistant without anybody asking him to. She will soon see, by the way, what this job as assistant they’ve given her can teach her, or rather, offer her, allow her to see. Mara finally gives up, at least for the day, the game of naming plant species so that her mind can summarize, with precision, the eighth on the list of ten kinds of silence as defined in her manual of rhetoric: “A silence of contempt is one that does not deign to respond to those who speak to us or who expect us to give our opinion on a particular subject, and looks with as much coldness as pride at everything that comes from them.” At Segers’s side his grandfather saw a corpse for the first time, an incident that always remains in a child’s memory. She surely remembers the first corpse she saw. In this case, it was a question of mortal remains. His grandfather described the scene to him only once, but he never forgot it. It could almost be said that the first corpse he himself saw was the same one, his grandfather’s, that is, the one his grandfather saw, which was of a small Indian, a youth who had fought to the bitter end when his group confronted Lista’s forces. To Segers, his grandfather told him, that death seemed like an act of the utmost cruelty, totally unnecessary, and so, when the men of the expedition went to sleep, Segers told him that the two of them were going to get up early the next day, much earlier than everybody else, and before setting out he was going to bury that boy with his own hands, he wasn’t going to leave him to be eaten by scavengers. That whole night neither of them could sleep, and not only due to remorse but also because of the howls of a dog, the Indian’s dog, a howl like the flaming of souls, something not of this world. For the rest of his life, he would hear that howl in his worst nightmares, his grandfather said
. Identical, exact. They thought it would never stop, then suddenly, in the middle of the night, they ceased to hear it. Segers was worried: he assumed Lista’s men had killed the dog as well, which meant that they’d gotten up before him, which in turn meant that there was no way they would be able to bury the bullet-ridden youth. He got up in the dark in an effort to try anyway, along with his grandfather, and that was when he saw the boy’s corpse for the first time, or rather what was left of it. The dog, who wasn’t dead as they had assumed, greeted them with a fierce glare. They say that he was eating every part of his owner that he possibly could, as if not wanting to leave even his dead body in the hands of those savages. Or maybe he was just hungry, says the taxidermist, and laughs to himself.

  • • •

  From the Notebook:

  In order to confer greatness on the nation, the Institución Mitre planned a “Biographical Dictionary” and in 1932 called a competition to pick its author. Out of all the candidates, they chose Udaondo, who wrote less of a dictionary and more of a “Who’s Who” in the style of what had been published in England for more than fifty years. An institutionalized entre nous. A few years previously, Udaondo had written a book that catalogued the trees of Argentina, now he’d do the same with the characters. Among the 3,200 names is Polidoro Segers, who is portrayed in overblown prose. Seggers, with double g. A distraction? An added emphasis for a last name that seemed somehow lacking? According to this Who’s Who, Dr. Polidoro was born in Belgium to a family of noblemen and heroes, arrived in Buenos Aires as a very young man, studied medicine, traveled to Patagonia with Lista’s expedition as a surgeon, spent a long stretch of time in Tierra del Fuego, discovered the disease that caused a plague among the Ona Indians, found a way to cure it, returned to Paris, worked shoulder to shoulder with the famous Dr. Doyen, became a seminarian in Rome after his wife died, returned to Buenos Aires, completed his ecclesiastical studies there, and founded the laboratory of the History of Pathology. But it doesn’t mention that he was a pianist, that he arrived in Buenos Aires for the first time as a member of a classical quartet based in Paris, and that he chose to remain behind when they finished their tour and the others returned. He was already a concert pianist, not an amateur, but he stayed. Nor does this dictionary say anything about his experiments with the embalming of dead bodies. The inevitable association Dr. Polidoro/Dr. Polidori: might there be implicit shame in some names? The only interesting part of a biography are those black holes—or whiteouts: the color scheme doesn’t weaken the metaphor—but that is precisely the material that any Who’s Who dismisses. As ceremoniously as in the entries that follow, Udaondo asserts in the “Notice” at the beginning of the book that it took him five years to write it, that he consulted the widest possible range of archives and witnesses, and that he devoted the time “we had free from other occupations.” First person plural as a gesture of erasure, false modesty, a convention of the era, undoubtedly. But just before closing the book, before apathetically scanning a few entries, right then and there, like a flash, a suspicion, a ghost, some kind of associative mechanism leads me to Leiva. Rosendo Leiva, the scribe who was responsible for the daily operations of the museum, the reports, the gazettes, the accounts, the daily minutiae. The painstaking penmanship of his letters, the patience of a detective that he exhibited in that accumulation of data. I go back and leaf through this tome and that’s what appears before me, what I see, traces of Leiva. Not the least sign of Udaondo’s performative eloquence. The first person plural is also a wink, an expression of gratitude to his faithful scribe, that’s how I read it, independent of dates and other kinds of assertions.

  (After Enrique Udaondo, Diccionario Biográfico Argentino, Buenos Aires: Coni, 1938.)

  • • •

  Mara takes her time reading the options on the menu. What she likes about this restaurant is that it doesn’t try to disguise the junk food or, even less, emphasize it in order to make the popular seem eccentric, an overused act of chicanery she knew from her previous travels. Luisa insists that she tell her all about her new job as assistant. Not much more than she’s already told her, she mumbles, a sentence Mara always knew how to wield when she was perfectly aware of having said nothing, or almost nothing, about whatever it was. She’s just waiting for it to end, for these months to go by quickly, she adds. She sees the door to the restaurant open: again, the taxidermist, his wife, and the lawyer. Again, her boss wearing a hat, this time some kind of panama. He greets her with a smile and approaches her table. He wants to tell her that the day before, when she had to go to her room and those workers still hadn’t appeared, he had a brilliant idea: he went down to the river, found a couple of bums who are always hanging around there, and arranged for them to move the horses to his cabinet in exchange for a couple of bottles of cheap wine. He snaps his fingers and says that in a split second, in the blink of an eye, he’d arranged everything. He seems to doubly enjoy this rudimentary process, as if in this way he is more blatantly exposing the ruinous state from which he is rescuing those pieces and restoring them to perfection. He is still addressing her formally as usted, but for some reason that Mara can’t quite put her finger on, the taxidermist wants to suggest in front of his wife or the lawyer a camaraderie they don’t actually share. This results in the total shut-down of her stomach, so she orders the special without even bothering to find out what it is. Luisa says that up close he’s a lot nicer than she thought, though the same does not apply to his wife. Recently she saw her at the hardware store buying plaster and other materials, and she paid special attention to her. She’s not exaggerating when she says that it’s the first time in years that she’s seen her do anything on her own in town. Either she’s not seen at all for months on end, or she’s with him, but only to run errands like that, she has never run into her at the supermarket or getting a manicure or anywhere else. She seems like a captive. But not a suffering captive, rather a pedantic one, an imperious captive. If it weren’t for Mara, she would have almost forgotten about her and the taxidermist. He was away for years, more than ten for sure, then one day he returned with this woman. He left on bad terms with his family: with his father because they do the same work, and with his son because he doesn’t do anything, that’s all she remembers.

  • • •

  Now, finally, yes, finally, he mutters as he paces around the table. He rearranges, searches, classifies, takes notes, all while constantly humming. Mara and the two horses watch him, all three immobile. It’s so good she can work on weekends, so good, he says, so they can spend these two days preparing the room. To think that in less that forty-eight hours he will be starting his real job, finally. His work, he corrects himself. Now, finally, yes. She is a lucky one, he doesn’t know if she’s realized that yet. Apprentices from all over the world line up to watch him work, yes, they line up. He’s already received messages from several applicants who heard that he’ll be working on the famous Mancha and Gato. But he doesn’t want one of those pretend assistants, whiners who are just waiting for when they can claim some of the credit, that’s why he asked for a museum guard. And her boss especially recommended her, congratulations, he tells her. Thanks to his own wisdom about the human animal, she has reaped the rewards, she has made an inconceivable leap. What they call a stroke of luck, the kind that happens only very rarely. He hopes he doesn’t have to explain that everything related to this job must remain strictly between them. She’ll see, she’ll see with her own eyes the transformation those horses will undergo, and one day she’ll be able to tell her grandchildren that it was due to her, in part. To think that they were poor beasts of burden, handled by Indians, gauchos, everybody, and they are now broadening their range, evolving. Now people pay to see their dexterity, he asserts, and he makes a gesture that reminds Mara of a concierge at an expensive hotel. He shows her three mounds of various sizes and asks her to check the aniline dyes. One by one, and she should write down the date of fabrication and expiration. Then he very carefully opens a can with a
faded label and takes out something wrapped in layers of paper, something Mara can’t quite see. With those horses, we really see that not all is lost, there are still ways of avoiding the decay that surrounds us, he continues. And he is more than proud to contribute to this cause: in this taxidermy, in fact, he will be working in a direct line from Tschiffely. No, not really that wayward gringo, but rather Don Emilio Solanet. Thanks to him the Criollo race stopped roaming wild or working in the fields, being ruined by lazy peasants. When she’s finished with those pliers she should start counting the tacks, he adds, without lifting his eyes from what he took out of that can, a piece he seems to be working on. Mara goes over to the pile of tacks and embarks on the task of organizing them. From this angle, she verifies, the horses look bigger and more exhausted. The idea of returning to her post and leaving them there, at the mercy of the taxidermist, gives her an indecipherably uncomfortable feeling, or something worse than uncomfortable, though she couldn’t say what that is. From where she sits she sees that the taxidermist is working on a bird; probably another project, one of those small orders one usually takes to work on during the down time that often occurs, which is often even required, while working on a bigger job. The taxidermist is talking about how he learned everything he knows through observation. His father did and he watched. Then come a string of afternoons spent in a ramshackle old shed his mother had to drag them out of to get them to come eat. Mara wonders if the inevitable correlative of this practice might be verbosity, the sound of one’s own voice acting as affirmation that one is alive even while working all day with dead bodies. In her previous mental construct, taxidermists were solitary, taciturn, silent people. Of course she had never come across one in the flesh, not even on one of those temp jobs she used to do while she was studying. A cell phone rings, the taxidermist goes outside to the museum patio. The semidarkness returns along with the silence. Mara sighs with relief and looks up at the high window, the only one through which a little light enters. It seems odd to her that the suicidal bird hasn’t appeared even once that afternoon.