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  THREE

  SHE PICKS UP HER PACE, wants to arrive before it gets dark. Now that she has drawn up her sabotage plan, she reviews it: she already knows the schedules of the security guards, she already knows their preferences, what wine they like to drink, she already knows where they keep the key that the taxidermist returns to them every evening and that she will need at a particular time. It’s important that she use that key: in this town nobody loses track of what others do, much less if those others are newcomers, and she fears that if she takes the risk of making a copy, a single word from the locksmith will ruin everything. And, given the level of control over all the minutiae that her boss as well as the most introverted security guard have shown, she can’t take the risk of removing it for a few hours to make a copy somewhere else. Collecting the basic information she needed to plan each step took a lot less time than she had thought, which shouldn’t surprise her after years of devoting herself to a profession that in the final analysis does not consist of speaking two or three or several languages well, as one might think, but rather of grasping quickly what someone really wants to say whenever they say anything. Her pronunciation of the languages she translated wasn’t brilliant, she has to admit, but she also has to admit that in the art of perceiving that nucleus, she was infallible. And, since her perceptions were very quick, she had a lot of time shut away in her booth to observe the infinite number of discursive strategies and detours the orators used in order to present that nucleus at precisely the right moment, or to hide it, or to allude to it, or to elude it. She had a lot of time, in short, to understand manipulative discourse. So much so that during the free moments she had in her booth and in hotel rooms and at airports, she began to write her own manual of rhetoric. A manual of manipulative discourse, replete with linguistic examples, prototypes, and digressions. The part about well-documented examples and prototypes, she still believes, is what made everybody so nervous that day she decided to stop translating what was being said at the celebrated summit and instead started to read one of the chapters from her own manual. Though, as it turned out, she was able to read very little, because after exactly seven minutes, the security people removed her by force. Not even a colleague or one of the organizers, but rather the most blatant forces of law and order. A real pity because without a doubt those seven minutes figure among the happiest of her life. Unforgettable the stunned expressions on the faces of well-known journalists, international delegates, key figures, and the few other people who had been allowed into the hall that day when the great philanthropist of the day would finally make a presentation, and not because Mara, instead of translating the first few sentences, chose to read that passage from her manual, the one she’d been writing for all those years, a text that implicated everybody, starting with herself, who was excitedly reading inside her booth, which for the first time ceased to feel like a suffocating box, a chicken coop, and turned into a space ship, a mobile stage, slightly off kilter. Nevertheless, and in spite of how interested some appeared to be, they didn’t let her continue, and moreover, afterwards, they went to the trouble of making sure she was expelled from both interpreter associations, the international one and the local one. What they failed to do was assert that she had lost her mind; they found no way to prove that her behavior was the result of a nervous breakdown, so common in her profession, and she preferred it this way despite the advice of her lawyer. It was clear, and continues to be in any case, that her manual errs in the opposite direction: it is the product of balanced, attentive observation; it examines, scrutinizes, dissects, and exposes to what extent conversations and negotiations and debates are vacuous, and to what extent the isms of etiquette in international relations are simulacra, and to what extent, independent of the topic being discussed or the pretenses of communication being employed, everything can always be reduced to guessing as quickly as possible what the interlocutor wants in order to move on to vanquish him. At that moment she was truly surprised to what extent the simple description of what was so obvious, even redundant, could generate such incensed reactions. Not anymore: we all know that our hearts beat but not many can tolerate a meticulous description of the tangle of arteries and other mechanisms involved; we all know that on one specific day it will stop beating but we also don’t want to know precisely when or how.

  • • •

  Ringo wants to bring her up-to-date on the last chapters of his escape plan. Mara is making a recipe Luisa gave her and doing so requires every last drop of her concentration. But she has to put her best foot forward: tonight Ringo is going to find out that he’s not the only one with plans, and he’s also going to find out that she needs his help, his collaboration. In addition to this menu specially prepared to win him over, she needs to make an effort to answer him with something more than onomatopoeias—at this point she knows how much he values her advice. Articulated advice, lines of reasoning, eyewitness accounts, countervailing examples, well-substantiated hypotheses: the conversational demands of her new friend cover a wide spectrum and have undoubtedly been trendsetters of this general tendency to undermine her protocol of silence. But she hasn’t failed, she has to remind herself, she is simply experiencing a momentary interruption. Made up of more and more moments. While she waits the twenty minutes stipulated in the recipe, she sits at the counter and finally does ask Ringo a couple of questions, gives him a couple of pieces of advice, and tops it all off with a hunch. The sequence also sounds like a recipe, but she doesn’t care. The timer goes off, the twenty minutes have passed. Mara returns to her risotto and, while watching the artichokes change color, she explains to Ringo the motivation and logistics behind her plan to sabotage the taxidermist’s work, and she explains the role he will play.

  • • •

  From the Notebook:

  One of the obituaries for César Milone lamented the fact that the doctor carried his secret to the grave. Milone—chief of surgery at the Faculty of Medicine in Rome, a disciple of the renowned embalmer Costanzo Mazzoni, hired in Argentina by the Minister of Public Education Eduardo Wilde, professor of Topographic Anatomy at the Faculty of Medicine in Buenos Aires, chief of dissection on the board of the university, participant in the embalming of Pope Pius IX and Garibaldi—died without revealing any information. Impossible to know the composition of the formula he used to preserve his pieces. Just like Ruysch, the great Dutch anatomist; just like Fragonard, the great French anatomist/artist. “He practiced embalming successfully using a chemical compound the ingredients of which he kept secret.” That’s what the obituary for Milone, published on September 30, 1904, said. Why carry the secret all that way? Megalomania? Stinginess? Likely more of an occupational hazard that leads one to not believe in death, neither one’s own nor that of others. Embalmers have the tics of children: they believe in eternity, they converse with those very serious figurines they see in their display cabinets, they don’t want to share their dolls. They preserve corpses, they preserve knowledge. They keep, hold, hide, retain: they are terrified children. Just then, at Milone’s death, the Gutiérrez brothers decided to counteract all that mystery and wage war from their newspaper, La Patria Argentina. Buenos Aires was under siege by the plague, and cremation not embalming was required; the corpses needed to be gotten rid of to prevent them from spreading the disease post mortem. They asserted something to that effect in their newspaper while cholera and the yellow plague wreaked havoc on the city and while the Catholic sectors were advocating for the preservation of corpses. A few months after the first official cremation in Buenos Aires, La Patria Argentina recommended a continuation of this practice rather than burial. And embalming, even less, which is what Dr. César Milone, along with his associate, Polidoro Segers, was doing. First target of the Gutiérrez brothers: Segers’s text—promulgated by his company with headquarters at Lavalle 736, along with affordable prices for any mortal—that defines embalming as the perfect synthesis between hygienic practices and religious beliefs, a practice that neither spreads disease nor p
itches our loved ones into the flames. Next target: the exhibit of Segers’s embalmed pieces in the Buenos Aires Amphitheater. The newspaper of the Gutiérrez brothers suggested they analyze the formula used in that exhibition as a final flourish against the embalmer. They looked for, asked, insisted, and hunted until they found their informant. Eduardo Retienne, the chemist who prepared the chemicals for Segers, confirmed to them that it was neither the preparation used by Sucquet, so widely employed in this region, nor the one used by Lemaire, nor the one used by Gannal nor by Dupré; instead, Segers used Jean Wickersheimer’s formula, which he imported from Berlin and which promised, as opposed to the previous preparations, to maintain flexibility and color. Retienne knew because he was the one, following Wickersheimer’s formula word-for-word, who mixed one hundred parts alum, twenty-five parts table salt, twelve parts potassium nitrate, sixty parts potash, and ten parts arsenic acid in three thousand parts boiling water.

  (After Irina Podgorny, “Recuerden que están muertos” [Remember that they are dead], in Espacios y cuerpos en la Argentina del siglo XIX y comienzos del XX, Buenos Aires: Ediciones de la Biblioteca National/Teseo, 2009.)

  • • •

  Her boss, sitting on one of those stools used by meditators or in nursery schools, is working on Mancha’s left ankle, adding hairs onto the hides that he has finished restoring. Light enters through the upper window of the cabinet. Mara figures that this is why the fur has that special sheen and thinks again about the suicidal bird who never showed up again. The taxidermist looks more serious than usual. She assumes it’s because of the phase of the work, the concentration required. All the better: this afternoon Mara has planned to somehow look once again through all the papers and files; it’s difficult for her to believe that the chemical formula the taxidermist uses on the hides exists only in his head. Not even in his father’s, he assured her a few days ago, because it’s been some time since they took different paths and began to follow different protocols. And he doesn’t use a computer, so he doesn’t run the risk of somebody stealing random data or a password in an attempt to discover it. Deplorable, unacceptable, unbelievable the state those horses were in, he now says, a few minutes after seeing her. Luckily, at least, that first deplorable taxidermy was done in winter. The coat in winter is longer so it has a greater chance of lasting and protecting the hides. Pure luck, or divine intervention. If it weren’t for that, they would have also had to redo the horses’ hides, the only truly original part of Mancha and Gato that remains. If it weren’t for that intervention, if it weren’t for that winter, not the slightest trace would have been left of this identity that he is now bringing back to life. Not the slightest trace. At most they’d have a couple of wrapped polyurethane dolls. But that’s not it, this is not a toy factory, gentlemen; this is an art, a higher form of art, so much higher that it is capable of restoring life. He gets up from his stool and starts to pace back and forth. This startles Mara, but she manages to conceal it. She continues to organize the items on the table/desk, just as is stipulated in the week’s work schedule. Nails, nails, who could have guessed that in these hides that are now becoming what they were before, somebody would have stuck so many nails, he says, and he keeps pacing around as if he were in a trance, or sleepwalking. Mara puts aside the papers where she believes she can find part of what she is looking for, some new clue at least, then goes back to looking through them more carefully as soon as her boss returns to his stool. For her sabotage she doesn’t need to find the complete formula; knowing the ingredients, or at least some of the ingredients, is enough. It’s important, very important, her boss warns her, not to forget to call back the fur bank, because if he doesn’t receive that material by next week, he’ll be in trouble. Now, call right now, and he sits back down. He only deals with the best fur banks, he insists, now almost talking to himself. From what Mara manages to see, he is adding new hairs to the already treated hides. She tries to find the cordless phone, which, she is certain, must be somewhere on that table, but instead her hand happens upon a cold, inscrutable object, a cold object that looks at her, or something like that. A glass eye, she thinks. Yes, Gato’s eye, the taxidermist explains, and this time he does perceive how she startles. In fact, he is particularly concerned because the next order should also include the hair he needs to reconstruct the eyelashes. Those ocular prostheses belong to the first taxidermy, the one done in the forties, he adds, parts that have historical value in themselves, and from there he launches into another episode of verbosity, though in this particular case Mara doesn’t listen to him because it seems the perfect moment to look over the papers more thoroughly. She employs her skill at reading upside down, acquired after years in her profession. Again, nothing. She has the impression that the loose eye is watching her. She looks over at the taxidermist and notices that his loquacity does not interfere in the slightest with the steady hand he needs for this very meticulous stage of his work. She calls the fur bank and then pretends to keep organizing things while she waits for the right moment to ask the right question.

  • • •

  Luisa arrives late at the agreed-upon street corner and as soon as they greet each other she starts to tell Mara a story that Mara has difficulty focusing on. She manages to understand only that it has something to do with a couple of colleagues she doesn’t know and a conference that is being organized. She should pay attention: the activities at the museum in the next few days could determine the success or failure of her plan. They walk toward Luisa’s house, where Luisa has arranged for her to meet Honoria. The streets are empty, not even stray dogs go out at this time of day. They walk by one of those shop windows where a shopkeeper has dressed a manikin with such painstaking care that this is the only thing one notices, not the garments themselves. According to what Mara was finally able to wheedle out of her boss, in addition to the funds for the restoration of the horses donated by the Association, an insurance company had demanded that the formula used for the restoration cease to be the exclusive secret of the taxidermist and be recorded in some other place in order to guarantee that the excellence of the final product be protected in case of any personal mishap. It had been difficult, in these days of airborne information, to fight to not upload or share; it had been difficult, he repeated, but he had finally managed to reach an agreement that the only other place his formula would be stored was in a safe in the museum library. The taxidermist said this with derision. Mara heard it with gratitude. And then, without even a hint of pressure, Luisa arranged a meeting with her aunt. Honoria seemed key not only because of her access to the information in the library but also because of her animus toward the museum’s mythos, which she thought she perceived that day at her gathering, because of her predisposition to put up a fight.

  • • •

  From the Notebook:

  A fox smoking a water pipe, a flying cat, another cat as a coffee table, a mouse playing the guitar, two squirrel monkeys having sex, a lamb giving birth to a duck, a meditating monkey, a cat with the front legs of a large bird, maybe a flamingo’s. Taxidermies of this sort gathered together on a website. So far, a joke, a wink at the bizarre, I suppose. Unremarkable. There are others, however, in and among the photos in this sensationalist line: a polar bear with a smashed head, a dog with the facial expression of a lost lunatic, a cat with electrified ears, a cross-eyed monkey, a variety of pets with twisted limbs and lolling tongues, as if they’d had a stroke from which they’ve never recovered. From a bad joke we move on to what goes wrong. Precisely this, the power of what goes wrong, this must be what generates a certain amount of discomfort as I scroll through these other pictures. There is no intentionality, just error. But error isn’t the point, either. It’s the unexpected course of events. Not that, either. Rather the wretched course of events. Things went well until an expression turned into a grimace, a sneer, and there was no turning back. The discomfort settled in, froze. Not discomfort: wretchedness. Right when it seemed as if a bounty of virtues had settled in forever�
��the ultimate goal of taxidermy—something interfered, erased the bounty, and, also, forever, installed the grimace, the oppression, the panic, the wretchedness. What went wrong: eternally paralyzed. Taxidermies that defy all credos, all disciplines, all self-help narratives: sometimes things go wrong forever, sometimes there’s no possible fix. That’s what some of these taxidermies are saying, even if they are disguised as a joke.