Include Me Out Read online

  • • •

  From the Notebook:

  Five toes, like all of us: the first horses of the Americas had five toes. They called them Phenacodus, and they lived in North America millions of years ago. Millions of years, more than forty million. So it’s a common mistake to think that the first horses came from Europe. So says Carlos Rusconi, a paleontologist because at an early age he read Florentino Ameghino, the man who defended the hypothesis that the most ancient human in the world was born on Argentine soil. Rusconi wanted to be an artist, they didn’t let him. As a paleontologist and geographer, he said that the Criollo horse could be a descendent of the North American Phenacodus. He also said that, just as there were horses in North America more than forty million years ago who later spread to the south, there were also camels, but they didn’t spread. Why the one and not the other? If they had both spread, fixation on the patriotic equine would have dissipated, there would have been a bifurcation, an alternation, a cohabitation of quadrupeds capable of carrying us at high speeds as well as performing other functions, among them the symbolic one, and this perhaps would have led to a more diverse, more cosmopolitan cultural configuration. The nation would have been different if the camel had also spread. But it didn’t, only the horse did, according to Rusconi, who wanted to be an artist and they didn’t let him. Why did one spread and the other didn’t? Instead of those equines with long faces, we would be surrounded by camelids, those animals with a serpentine mouth, two humps, a perfect anus. Bruce Chatwin, appreciated for having the eye—that talent to appreciate art that made him famous among London gallery owners and collectors—said that he had never seen anything more perfect than the anus of a camel.

  (After Carlos Rusconi, Animales extinguidos de Mendoza y de la Argentina, Mendoza: publisher unknown, 1967.)

  • • •

  She measures six fingers and makes a mark in the dirt, another six and another mark, and so on. What Mara finds interesting about her garden experiments is that they allow her to do one thing while she thinks about other things. Now she plants rows of Four O’Clocks, whose flowers open only after the sun sets, according to the Boutelous. She will be able to enjoy peaceful insomnia: she’ll come out to the yard and there will be flowers, open for the sole purpose of calming her spirit, a thought that brings anticipated relief. Everything indicates that the season of insomnia that began with the interruption of her new job won’t end either soon or easily. It will not end, in fact, until she thinks of something, until she finds a way to respond, react, attack, defend, some way to interrupt this interruption, some variation on this gesture of hers that goes against the grain. Then she makes a small hole in each of the spots marked in the dirt and plants fistfuls of seeds. She bought them at the town nursery according to the Latin name. Or what she thinks is the Latin name of the Boutelous’ flowers, which in turn she needs to translate into the Spanish of a rural town. She didn’t ask the salesperson anything at all: she doesn’t want anything to come between her and the Boutelouian instructions. According to them, in addition to the six fingers between plants, one must also keep in mind “timely waterings, weeding, and the light labor of almocafre.” Mara hasn’t the slightest idea what “almocafre” is, and she doesn’t want to find out. She prefers to stick with the “light labor,” which sounds quite good to her. “In northern climes, where these plants die due to the severity of the cold, they are stored in sand in a sheltered spot during the winter.” The approach of spring puts her senses as well as her phobias on high alert: she would give anything to live in a country where cold prevails, as well as long nights and clothes that are barely distinguishable from blankets, hats an absolute necessity, quick steps, an accidental encounter on the street addressed with a mere nod of the head. Instead, she’s chosen this path that leads to the tropics. How sad is our Russia, as Honoria says. Mara knows where that quote comes from, but she prefers to ascribe it to this woman who—she hasn’t yet figured out why—made such a good impression on her.

  • • •

  From the Notebook:

  Two volumes and almost seven hundred pages: nobody, it seems, was as devoted to writing about their own garden as Alphonse Karr. Writing about it and cultivating it, wherever and however. On the French Riviera, where he moved in 1855, and before that in Paris, in his tiny apartment in Montmartre, where he and his monkey could barely fit, but where there was enough room for a garden with plants and a grotto and a fountain. And in his house on rue de La Tour-d’Auvergne, where he lived with a mulatto servant dressed á la oriental. And in a seventh floor apartment on rue Vivienne, where he created a garden on the balcony, one of those spaces stolen from the cement, from the association, from the surveys and the regulations. Clandestine gardens. The connection between those places stolen from the commons and the crime pages of the newspaper: the little girl who disappeared in her own building and the concierge who kept swearing till the last moment that it was her pet that she had buried on her terrace on the top floor (Milan, 2009); the thieves convinced that money was hidden under the squares of sod and who forced the retired man to lift them up one by one until he had a heart attack (Buenos Aires, 2007); the attendant at the gas station with a far-away look in his eyes who managed to bury in his green and lush parcel up to twenty-three pinkies of the teenage boys he had murdered over a period of fifteen years (Minneapolis, 1997). It’s true what Karr stated implicitly in his seven hundred pages: a great many things happen in gardens. His Voyage autor de mon jardin was written in parallel with the journey of a friend of his around the world, expending energy and obliged to take notes, while he, on the other hand, could imagine. “Travelers claim they have seen Cyclopes; those who travel around their room, on the other hand, describe spiders as Cyclopes”: one of Karr’s good sentences. Then he wrote others, an endless number, and became a coiner of aphoristic phrases and a propagandist, which is sometimes the same thing. The deep malaise one of those sentences provoked in José Martí in 1871, when he was a law student in exile in Madrid. The notebooks in which Martí articulated ideas, laid foundations, imagined. In one of these notebooks, published posthumously, all the clues needed to reconstruct the furious polemic he established with “that Karr,” who never knew about it. But not necessarily because he was one of those characters whose addiction to his garden should be translated as escapism or isolationism, as abstention from the ways of the world. Far from it, Karr was very active in his era: today he would have been one of those pundits with little substance but a great number of followers.

  (After Bernd Stiegler, Traveling in Place: A History of Armchair Travel, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013)

  • • •

  When she opens the door, she sees her boss from behind, squatting as he works, just as she left him yesterday. As if anticipating Mara’s question, he explains that without breaking at night it would be impossible for him to continue, no matter how enthusiastic he is, and he quickly moves on to a recitation of his renovation process. If she had seen the shape those horses were in after the flood, the one in the eighties: totally ruined. The whole museum under two meters of water for months. Months, he insists. At that time he was still assisting his father. Things floated by in the most unpredictable directions, garbage bags got snagged on the canopied beds, hats bobbed aimlessly like restless spirits, some pieces took on lives of their own and shot forward like projectiles. Months like that, months under water. And there were the horses, what a mess. Until one day, yes, they exploded. And it’s a good thing they did. That absurd structure wasn’t right for them. Iron, straw, and plaster had been used for the first taxidermy, an atrocity, indiscriminately monumental, each piece almost five hundred kilos, an impossible weight, the taxidermist emphasizes with unexpected violence, as if knowing his argument is coming too late. They had to mount the horses’ hides on top of all that, somehow or other. And they did it badly, of course, very badly. Fortunately, they then exploded. Though she is still looking at him from behind, Mara would swear that the taxidermi
st is laughing under his breath as he says that last bit. The same thing happened to the mules at the Museo Güiraldes just a few years ago during a different flood, they exploded, he continues, and now a laugh can be heard. Mara wonders if it’s only impudence or if his irrepressible laughter might be the effect of some of those chemicals taxidermists use to treat the horses’ hides; she knows he uses them even though he doesn’t want to reveal which ones. The problem, he says in an emphatic tone directed at the disciple that she is not, was that they did not take measurements of the bodies before flaying them, a basic problem, impossible to fix. They simply built a structure based on a typical specimen of the Criollo race, not specifically on those two horses. Madness, he asserts, and he tilts his head toward them. Mara doesn’t turn to look at them. She had enough to deal with the day before when she entered and saw the two horses dismembered, taken apart. The bodies, so to speak, the body-mannequins, were in one corner, the hides spread out in another, and, on his knees on top of those hides, those pelts, the taxidermist was applying his formula like one of those murderers who play with the remains of their victims. There was not, as Mara had assumed all this time, anything like the body they had throughout their life, but rather a mannequin, a dummy. And who knows why that absence perturbs her even more. As if she could tolerate the good intentions implicit in embalming, but not the staging of a taxidermy. No, not that. What was truly disturbing was to realize that all this time she had confused one technique with the other, she had thought of one when she heard the name of the other and vice versa. She had confused the words: she realizes that there was a time when that kind of confusion would have propelled her into a major crisis, and she still doesn’t know if this is the kind of transformation that she should also include in the protocol of her detached life. But this is not the moment to think about it, because her boss continues talking about cases and procedures, and if there is something she understands clearly by now it is that the taxidermist’s verbosity, which she couldn’t tolerate before, which even caused her paroxysms of introspection, has been flipped on its head, has become completely useful to her plans, a mother lode of possibilities. She still doesn’t know what form her counterattack will take, but she is certain that whatever it is, it must directly incriminate the taxidermist. Her year of detachment has not been ruined, as she came to believe for a while, it is merely experiencing a hiatus. Incriminating her boss not only guarantees her revenge but also—knowing how local bureaucracies work—a peaceful end to the experiment. Months, years will pass before they find a replacement, if they find one at all, and who knows where she will be by then. The only inconvenience is that from now on she will have to listen to him, because it is clear that nobody is more likely to give her the idea. To go from assistant to undercover spy will force her to give up one of her recently acquired luxuries, that of being permanently heedless of her surroundings, one of the main goals of her experiment. But no need to despair, it’s just a hiatus. For a short time, that’s all, for a short time she’ll have to remain very attentive to everything the taxidermist says in order to hear what she needs to know, or to ask the question, make the appropriate remark at precisely the right moment. To think, this degree of attentiveness to other people’s words was among the things she most wanted to leave behind.

  • • •

  Once in a while, almost in spite of herself, she walks faster. She attempts to imagine the exact moment a horse, a donkey, a polar bear, a leopard, any animal, any taxidermy explodes. Actually it’s probably more of a slow process, an almost imperceptible swelling, which within a few days becomes a deformity, and then something indefinable, almost menacing, until finally, yes, it bursts. At one of those moments when you’re busy doing something banal—getting a glass of water, brushing your teeth—something that later becomes meaningful, overvalued, because there’s always the suspicion that if you’d just managed to change something imperceptible about that banality, then things would have turned out differently. She’s certain that it can’t be something spectacular or cathartic: she figures it has to be more like an implosion, that the creatures break up from within. Or they surrender to a crackling of sorts, a collapse. But she isn’t convinced that an explosion as a counterattack is the right thing. Now she knows she’ll commit sabotage, but she hasn’t formulated a plan. She keeps walking, she keeps imagining explosions in spite of herself. She wonders how it came about in the specific case of those horses, or the mules in the Museo Güiraldes. She walks faster. Berenice, Berenice, how long it has been since she’s thought of her. She wonders how she is, if she’s still alive. She assumes she is, hopes so, but she doesn’t have any idea what the average lifespan of a mule might be. Berenice was very young at the time, a baby. A baby who practically saved her life during those fatal weeks when she was working in the south of France. A meeting of ministers. Her then boss had taken ill at the last minute, and they sent her instead. Mara grew weary of telling her that she was not sufficiently trained for that assignment, that she had never mastered the subject of terrorism, that she needed to read a lot before going, that it could end up being a total failure, but her boss wasn’t interested in her excuses. The only thing she did was mutter comforting prefabricated sentences, sentences that are applicable to any person in any situation. For security reasons, the exact date and place were not specified in advance, so she was required to travel ahead of time in order to be there ready to begin forty-five minutes after they called her on her cell. She was not James Bond, she was simply a novice simultaneous interpreter, she repeated, but her boss opened her mouth only to say, in a litany that seemed to have derived from the use of narcotics, how many people would give anything to spend a few days in the south of France. She had to agree and travel the following day. For more than a week she slept four hours a night, or less. She got up at dawn and downloaded information from the Internet, she wrote to specialists, read newspapers from all over the world, from now and from before; frankly, she was terrified. It was, she is certain, the only time she was afraid because of her job. The other times it was just a matter of adrenaline, or certain levels of rage, but never real fear. When she couldn’t stand it any longer, when it seemed to her that there was not a single additional lexical component of geopolitics and terrorism that her mind could retain that day, she wandered around the town, a small town, a few square blocks, to tell the truth, full of English and French retirees who were more or less peasants, more or less reactionaries. By then, she already couldn’t stand her work, already by then. Her only solace during those weeks in the French heartland was, first of all, a handful of junkies who had gone there to hang out, people determined to die whenever and however they felt like it. One of them, Melanie, a sixty-something former costume designer, asked her on the first day if she could take a shower at the hotel where Mara was staying. Other days followed that first one. While she was stuck staring at her computer, her guest spent hours soaking in the bath, punctuating the soak with quick showers for the spa effect, an equation she had no problems with until the day Melanie fell asleep and not only flooded her room but also the one below. Again, a flood, two during the same walk: Mara thinks that someone who plays the lottery would make something of this. She recalls the complaints of the manager, the subtle xenophobia, the still unconfirmed conference, the panic she felt the day they did confirm it, how badly she performed. That same night she called her boss to request an urgent replacement; she didn’t care if she had to return what they’d paid her till then, she didn’t care if she had to travel back on a container ship. Her boss answered that all this ran contrary to what the minister had said about her work, and that’s why she had to stay with him for the committee meetings that would be held the following days, and she was so young and so inexperienced that she believed her and stayed. But by this time she could no longer stand Melanie’s whims or her friends’ tired jabs at the bourgeoisie, so she avoided all public places and left her room only to take walks along paths that might have still been in the town or already
out in the countryside, she wasn’t sure. One day she met a local and asked him a few questions; another day, she met a gardener who was working at the house next door to Berenice’s. He said that the family of the mule lived in Toulouse, and they visited this, their country house, once a month, sometimes less often now that the girls were older. Berenice spends a lot of time alone, he said. For the rest of her stay, which turned out to be much longer than the seventy-two hours forecast by her boss, Mara brought bread to her every day, and while the mule chewed, she settled accounts with the committee, her boss, the absurd meetings, the world geopolitical situation, and French provincials. She told her that she, Berenice, should join the junkies and rant about all the systems that had reduced animals to the humiliating role of pets. Abandoned pets, to top it off. But not while Mara was still there; she should join them afterwards, because the two of them had a better time alone together.

  • • •

  She decides to get up and take something for her headache. And eat, eating something always calms her nerves, gives her ideas. She has to think of something; it’s hard to believe that she hasn’t come up with a plan and it’s already been more than a week. She looks to see if there’s something left in the box of vegetables Ringo brought her and doesn’t find much. She decides to improvise a stew with the bits she has. She chops the vegetables with unnecessary frenzy. While they’re cooking, she starts to organize some things that have been piling up on the table for months, but then she reconsiders. Better to sit for a while, settle down in the kitchen. The box of vegetables is still on the floor, almost empty. She sees that it’s lined with pages from a magazine: a packaging material that Ringo’s father prefers to sterile materials because it seems more authentic, more down-to-earth. She pulls out the pages and reads them, with more urgency than curiosity. A young entrepreneur reveals the secrets of his success. Mara suspects that Ringo’s father must have given his son the magazine to motivate him, and his son must have used it to line the boxes without even looking at it. The entrepreneur being interviewed says that he started his project in the family garage, and now he spends his life sitting in airplanes, his company is publicly traded, and he is happy that he can provide jobs for so many people. He says he likes to go out to eat in Silicon Valley because nobody there bothers anybody because they’re rich and famous. He says that he’s married and has three children and, considering that his family is his pillar of support so that he can do what he does so well, he gives them a lot of quality time. Mara tries to imagine the system: the young entrepreneur taking time in the morning to measure out the quality of the hours while he is breakfasting on something light but also healthful, and deciding which of all the slices is of the highest quality so he can then give those to his wife and children. How does he do it, might there already be a device to measure the quality of time, of life, something that’s sold in the kiosks in Silicon Valley? Of course, in those places there aren’t any kiosks. She goes outside to get a breath of fresh air in the garden and, for the first time in years, she’s dying for a cigarette. But there aren’t kiosks open at that time of night in this remote town, either. That sustained discourse about quality and excellence reminds her of the philanthropist at that conference, the one where she chose to carry out her previous sabotage and to thereby say goodbye to her job and her colleagues and her temporary bosses and her promisingly profitable life and the variations on her productive life and achievements and stories about her achievements and her generalized boredom. If she really thinks about it, compared to the statements by the entrepreneur, she prefers those of the taxidermist, because at least he dispenses with euphemisms and openly admits that he is working to improve a race. Her head hurts even more; she’s entering one of those invincible and inexorable spirals. She is distracted by a strong odor coming from the kitchen. She goes back inside and sees that her attempt at a stew has been reduced to a dark layer, uniform and dry. She stares at it, as if it were a layer of coffee grounds capable of revealing something to her.