Heavens on Earth Page 2
Anyway, back to our bond with the men from the time of History, didn’t we leave their waste on the Earth so that we wouldn’t forget? Except for what was necessary to recreate the gardens, we haven’t removed any of their trash or debris. Instead, we’ve preserved them as a monument to foolishness and mismanagement. But why should we hold onto their mistakes and deny ourselves their greatest treasure? If we do, then we’ll forget the symbolism behind the junkyard of trash and debris and imagine that the Earth was never any different than it is today.
Right now the community is only interested in forgetting the past and imposing a communication code that will nullify language. But eventually things will get better. One day we’ll understand that to remember is to survive. Then language will regain its proper place and the memorious will be the soul of L’Atlàntide. Once again we’ll hear the laughter and fear the darkness. Then, my ethereal “writings” will turn into books. And I won’t change my name anymore. I won’t call myself Lear today and then Clelia or El Príncipe tomorrow. Then, I won’t be able to maintain this blindness that can’t distinguish the wolf from the lamb.
For now, I’ll write even though there isn’t anyone who can read what I’ve written unless they’re willing to travel back in time to learn the language—back to the time of History when humans lived in nontransparent houses cemented to the ground, surrounded by things. This will happen only when L’Atlàntide surrenders to the power of Nemesis.
I respect the past because I remember. But I don’t do so blindly; remembering the men from the time of History doesn’t mean singing their praises, lamenting their demise, or exalting ourselves. I remember them by writing for them, even though they don’t know it because they destroyed themselves. Remembering doesn’t make me a doe-eyed optimist or a slave to the past. I remember in order to stir my imagination and sharpen fantasy’s penetrating point.
My archeological work involves the recovery of books and manuscripts. I’m not interested in salvaging other objects—I don’t look for memories in things anymore—and it’s been centuries now since I’ve recovered anything other than a book. The works of art that had any value on Earth remain intact under an air-bubble connected to the surface that we call Das Menschen Museum, or the Museum of Man. But I don’t think anyone ever visits it. Sometimes when I remember the atmosphere burning, I think I feel what they used to call “melancholy.” But I’ve had enough of the sad, cadaverous footprints of things—dirtying the bottoms of the seas and lakes, the water of the rivers, and the surface of the Earth—dancing a macabre dance in cyclones full of man-made things.
So why books? I work with books because they survive across time. From the moment a book is written, it begins to interact with the past and the future. Books have always been the memory of other times—those that have been, those that will be, those that couldn’t be, or can’t be, or that should have been. L’Atlàntide, on the other hand, survives because the community is determined to hold tight to an isolated moment floating in stagnant waters that repel death.
I’m writing these notes before I begin to paleograph and annotate my most recent discovery, a manuscript I found in the Library of the College of Mexico. It’s not that I’m particularly interested in Mexico. I don’t “believe in you,” Mexico, as a hair-gelled poet once regrettably sang out. No, I don’t believe in you. On the other hand, I don’t see any reason to attack a place, ripping it up as if it weren’t a part of the Earth. I might not believe in you, Mexico, but I do love you in the way Ramón López Velarde, our divine national poet, wrote: “not the myth / but your communion bread of truth / as I love the young girl who leans over the rails / blouse buttoned up to her ears / skirt touching her delicate ankles.”
This is not the first time I’ve discovered material for my work at this site, but I’ve also searched many other places. Excluding Seville (with which I have a history that I’ve promised myself not to write about here because if I start, there’s no stopping me), I’ve found important texts in the British Library, in the national libraries of Madrid, Bogotá, Paris, Mexico, and in the John Carter Brown Library; not to mention those of the Arab world, Russia, China, India, and Tibet. I rarely work at the Library of Congress in Washington, however, because they left all their material in the form of microfilm (MF) inside a closed capsule that survived the chains of explosions. I don’t work with MF because it’s not my field of expertise. Those who work with MF work with intact objects. As an archeologist, I work with dust and extremely small particles, with the memory hidden in the material. In my work, I use particle magnetizers that I won’t describe here because they’re invisible like the memories they recover, and also because this is not the place to explain the science or the knowledge of my colony. Our science can’t really be communicated in words anyway.
The only memory of the past L’Atlàntide wants to preserve is that the men from the time of History destroyed the Natural World and caused their own extinction. The people in charge of MF have let themselves be convinced that all the teachings of the past are destructive and so now nobody works with microfilm anymore. Fortunately, before they adopted this position, they translated the MF into our reading code, the result of which is a basic universal library of two thousand volumes. According to those in charge, the men from the time of History selected these two thousand titles themselves, so even though the people in charge of MF are complete idiots, it’s not fair to blame them for the barbaric selection criteria. The Bible and the Koran were at the top of the list, followed by fifteen encyclopediae considered to be essential and some twenty scientific books, including Newton’s Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, Goethe’s Theory of Colors, and Leonardo da Vinci’s papers on the behavior of water in which he asserts that the surface of the moon and the center of the earth are made of water. Next come the classics, among which we do not find Quevedo, Plato’s Dialogues, The Iliad, or The Odyssey; but instead Gone with the Wind, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and an atrocity titled Jonathan Livingston Seagull. These are followed by another three hundred similar horrors, but no Faulkner or Rubén Darío. There are two frivolous, sentimental novels by Clauren, but nothing by Chekhov. On the list we find everything (even to the last word) written by Madame de Staël, but not a single word by Chateaubriand, Voltaire, or Rousseau. Having mentioned all these, I shouldn’t feel the need to add anything else, but I don’t want omit other examples. They didn’t save any part of One Thousand and One Nights other than some frankly horrific versions of a single story incorporated into tawdry anthologies, such as The One Hundred Best Erotic Stories and Adultery and Misogyny in Literature. The selection doesn’t have a leg to stand on; the entire list is vile and plain nonsense. Nothing can be said in its defense; it speaks for itself. But, there’s no reason for me to speak badly of it. After all, I dedicated myself to archeology because of my contact with this list. An annotated translation of Juvenal led me to Quevedo and Boccaccio took me to Homer, though sometimes I walked hand in hand with less reliable tutors, such as an insignificant little writer who led me to Octavio Paz.
I’ve recreated countless texts and transcribed them here in the Center for Advanced Research. In the process, I’ve learned how to appreciate the beauty of books, to recognize the incomparable craftsmanship of a few volumes, and to distinguish between one edition and another. Although they’re considered to be objects, books are not things. We survivors don’t want anything to do with things. The relationship man had with the things he made or altered only resulted in one mistake after another. In fact, every morning when I leave L’Atlàntide and descend, by way of the Punto Calpe (which is the name of the staircase made of solid air that we constructed to connect L’Atlàntide to the Earth), I’m confronted with the artificial mountain we made when we were establishing our colony. This mountain—a macabre monument to man’s love of things—is made of pieces of plastic, disposable diapers, bags, packaging, electronic equipment and appliances, furniture, clothing, etcetera. Because I very rarely descend any other way, I
’m faced with this reminder almost every day. If that weren’t enough to make me despise the love of things, this fact certainly is: when I reach the surface of the Earth I can’t admire the branch of a tree, a flower, or even a single leaf because in the places where the rubble might conceal these treasures, there are none left. We survivors have cultivated some gardens with the seeds or the memory of the remains that we salvaged from the destruction, but I almost never visit them. This is something else that the other survivors don’t understand—they say it’s foolish and unnecessary to dirty my feet among the ruins since we’ve created an earthly paradise in an artificial enclosure that replicates the natural world and is “untouched by the hand of man.” It’s as if they believe that they’ve succeeded in replicating the garden where still-innocent Eves and Adams stroll because they haven’t recreated the serpent.
Okay, enough. No more beating about the bush and avoiding gardens. On to the manuscript…I was coming from the Central Library of the city of Bogota, where I had just restored a beautiful herbarium from the Fondo Mutis, which I discovered by accident—a mistake I can always be proud of. Confused by the name “Fondo Mutis,” I came upon this lovely text that was hidden behind some work by the other Mutis (his relative and my poet) as I was pursuing such verses as these:
Each poem a bird that flees
from the site marked by the plague.
Each poem a suit of death
over streets and beaches flooded
with the lethal wax of the defeated.
Each poem a step toward death,
counterfeit ransom money,
target practice in the middle of the night,
riddles the bridges over the river,
whose sleeping waters travel
from the old city to the fields
where the day prepares its bonfires.
But as luck would have it, in confusing one Mutis for the other, I came across a beautifully hand-illustrated herbarium that actually had nothing to do with my poet, but is more closely related to poetry than the two authors were by blood. The scientist is also a poet, both pursue the same mystery. Unfortunately, the people of L’Atlàntide weren’t concerned with mystery when they constructed the gardens. For them the gardens were an end in and of themselves. They didn’t understand that the hand of a god (to give it a name) was on the vegetation or that an unfathomable mystery arose from that touch. The people of L’Atlàntide believe that the gardens belong to them, but in reality the gardens are foreign to them; they belong to the other, to the unknown enigma. And we can never approach this unknown mystery without words. Their foolish plan to eradicate all traces of memory will distance us further and further from the spirit their gardens need in order to be truly real.
As I was saying, I was coming from the National Library of Colombia, in Bogotá, after restoring the Herbarium Mutis (and then sending it to our good government in order to request its inclusion in the Menschen Museum), when I decided to continue my search in Mexico for the verses of the other Mutis, my poet. I chose to go to Mexico because in the course of my research I found confirmation—in the form of an issue of a Bogotá newspaper adhered to the back of the herbarium—that my Mutis was quite popular in Mexico. So why not look for some of his books there? Until then, I had believed that Mexicans didn’t read, period. The proportion of books destroyed per kilometer in Mexico (something I had previously researched) is frankly absurd. Not that there weren’t books; in fact, there were thousands and thousands of the most absurd titles stacked up in bodegas. I thought then that my appraisal of the reading habits of Mexicans was unjust, that they probably just read the books they found in the libraries. On the other hand, why not read in the cozy shelter and silence of a bodega? Given their atrocious living conditions, why wouldn’t they prefer to read standing uncomfortably in humid, semi-dark bodegas, ruining their eyes and damaging their lungs by breathing the unbreathable air? The notion that they read in bodegas makes more sense than the idea of their books squeezed together, uselessly decaying, for no reason at all. Moreover, why would they have printed so many books if they didn’t read? And anyway, even though it might seem to me that it would be uncomfortable to read in a foul, humid bodega, maybe it wasn’t for them. Perhaps it was better than being exposed on their hostile streets or crowded together in noisy rooms listening to the blaring television. Or maybe, like us, they were more interested in silence than comfort. Anyway, it was only because of my Mutis that I made my way to the Library of Mexico. And since I was there, poking around, I decided to translate a manuscript with a Mexican theme—but I repeat, not because I have any special interest in Mexico. In “The Death of Capitan Cook,” my Mutis wrote:
When they asked him what Greece was like, he spoke of a long line of convalescent homes built on the shore of a sea whose poisoned waters advanced, as slowly as waves of oil, over shallow sharply pebbled beaches.
When they asked him what France was like, he recalled a short passageway between two public offices in which some scabby guards were searching a woman who was smiling ashamedly and where splashing cables of water rose from the courtyard.
When they asked him what Rome was like, he described a fresh scar on his groin that he said was a wound he received while trying to break the windows of a streetcar abandoned on the outskirts of the city in which some women were embalming their dead.
When they asked him if he had seen the desert, he explained in detail the erotic customs and migratory pattern of the insects that nest in the porous pits of marble eaten away by the saltpeter in the inlets and worn down by the handling of the coastal traders.
But like I said, I don’t fantasize about the existence of nations. Anyway, I found this manuscript in the Library of the College of Mexico, which is located in the Pedregal de San Ángel in the southeastern section of Mexico City, where new endemic flora and fauna emerged after the area was covered in lava with the eruption of Xitle in 600 B.C. The Pedregal de San Ángel was ultimately consumed by the city; but even as recently as 1972, someone saw a puma around the Ajusco volcano and somebody else saw a lynx running in the Iztaccíhuatl mountains. But now the city has completely devoured its own beauty. My poet once lovingly described this region:
Upon my arrival in Mexico in October 1956, the generous hospitality of the painter Fernando Botero and his then wife, Gloria Zea, allowed me to live in their warm company during my first few months in exile. We lived at Kansas 7, apt. 2, in the Nápoles district. My first views of the city were unforgettable, and today I remember them with an incurable nostalgia.
When the evening light made it impossible for him to continue painting, Fernando and I used to stroll down the lushly tree-lined Insurgentes until we arrived at Reforma, where we would either go to into the forest or go see El Caballito. At that hour, a clear opalescent sky radiated a subdued violet light, the likes of which I have never seen in any other part of the world. A good number of fin de siècle French-style homes were preserved on Reforma, which lent the Paseo a gentle, peaceful feeling. Everything was enveloped in that incomparable light, in that purity of air that made the trees, the houses, and the people stand out with a precise and miraculous force.
Spellbound by the beauty of the city surrounded by green hills and watched over by the intense whiteness of the volcanoes, Botero said to me: “You need to stay and make this your home.”
I took Botero’s advice and here I am. But now nothing is left of the city that dazzled and bewitched me so much that I made her my second home. Even worse, we have succeeded in turning her into a hideous overcrowding of architectural horrors and a nightmare of lethal fumes that are killing us in a suicidal vertigo.
What have we done to deserve this punishment? Each person has his own answer. Speaking for myself, I would say that I didn’t know how to be faithful; I didn’t know how to maintain the exquisiteness of the city that I remember as the most beautiful in America.
Oversight and lack of consideration like that must be paid for with the highest price conce
ivable: life.
Once upon a time, the Pedregal de San Ángel was inhabited by coyotes, raccoons, cacomistles, badgers, hares and rabbits, arthropods and butterflies, as well countless birds of all kinds, including falcons, eagles, and hummingbirds. In 1902, Mexican novelist Federico Gamboa described this region in his novel Santa:
Still unexplored by what is assumed to be more than half, it is volcanic and immense, dotted with shrubs, colossal monoliths, and such sheer rocky inclines that not even goats can stand on. It has incredibly clear, serpentine streams of unknown origins that disappear into the ground only to reappear at a distance, or noiselessly fade away into cavities and clearings that seem to be maliciously concealed by grass. There are deep, black caverns and grottos full of mysterious brambly bushes with deformed leaves that are almost heraldic in shape. Fantastically twisted cacti adhere to the side walls of these profoundly deep abysses whose deadly interiors are so deep that a thrown stone causes corpulent, sinister birds to take flight but never touches the verdant and florid bottom…
It is covered with a thicket that tears at the clothing and the threat of a tarantula or a rattlesnake strike is ever-present. And whatever might be lurking in the distance is even worse: mountain lions, jaguars, and death…Legends of vagabonds abound, stories of apparitions, and lost souls who wander these lands as soon as the sun goes down. It is full of enchanted places with traditional names: Nest of Sparrowhawks, The Fountain of the Lovers, The Skull, The Stag…
If any of the other survivors in L’Atlàntide had snooped around in my archives, they would’ve discovered that I often stroll through the gardens I come across in my research.
The manuscript has two alternating (rather than consecutive) parts, one of which was written by Don Hernando de Rivas, alumnus of the Colegio de Santa Cruz de Santiago Tlatelolco. However, I didn’t discover his version in the original language, which was Latin, but rather in the translation done by the author of the second part of the manuscript, Estela Ruiz, who will introduce herself in the following pages. Just to be perfectly clear: I would have preferred to paleograph a more literary text than hers. This manuscript is not a work of fiction; or at least, fabrication doesn’t appear to have been the intent of either of the two authors. I came across the manuscript by chance and I brought it here myself, but I’m not going to pass judgment on it because “There is only one form of reasoning other than geometry: that of facts.”