La noche boca arriba (part 2)

The conclusion to a work ("The night face up") by this Argentine.  You can read the original here.

Then came a cup of gold filled with marvelous broth and scents of leeks, celery, and parsley.  A little piece of bread, more beautiful than an entire banquet, was chewed bit by bit.  His arm no longer hurt any more, and only on his brow, where they had sutured his wound, he felt at times a hot and rapid piercing.  When the large windows opposite swerved back to spots of dark blue he thought that it would be rather easy to fall asleep.  A little uncomfortable there on his back, but when he passed his tongue over his dry, hot lips he felt the taste of the broth, and he took happy and carefree breaths.

 

At first there was some confusion, an attraction for an instant of all the dull and confounded sensations towards him.  He understood that he was running in total darkness, although the sky above, crossed with treetops, was less black than the rest.  “The road,” he thought. “I’ve gone off the road.”  His feet were sinking into a mattress of leaves and mud, and he couldn’t take another step without getting his torso and legs whipped by the shrubbery’s branches.  Panting, he realized that that he was cornered despite the darkness and silence, and he crouched down to listen.  Perhaps the road was nearby; were things different, he would have caught sight of it at daybreak.  But now nothing could help him find it.  The hand which had instinctively clung to the hilt of the dagger now rose like a swamp scorpion up to his neck where it seized his protective amulet.  Hardly moving his lips he mumbled the prayer of the corn which bore the happy moons, and the supplication to the Most High, the dispenser of Moteca goods.  Yet at the same time he sensed that his ankles were sinking slowly into the mud, and the wait in the darkness in the unknown chaparral made it unbearable.  The war of flowers had begun with the moon and had already lasted for three days and three nights.  If he continued to take refuge in the depths of the forest, abandoning the road more in the region of the swamps, perhaps the warriors would not be able to pick up his trail.  He thought about all those prisoners who could have done that.  But it was the sacred time, not quantity that mattered.  The hunt would continue until the priests gave the signal to return.  Everything had its order and its end, and he was in the sacred time on the opposite side of the hunters.

 

He heard the shouts and stood up straight, his dagger in hand.  Just as if the sky were burning on the horizon, he saw torches moving between the branches very close to him.  The smell of war was unbearable, and when the first enemy leapt upon his neck he almost took pleasure in sinking the stone blade into his chest.  Now lights and happy screams had already surrounded him.  He managed to slice through the air once or twice before a rope caught him from behind.

“It’s fever,” said the man from the bed beside him.  “The same thing happened to me when they operated on my duodenum.  Drink some water and you’ll see that you’ll sleep well.

Compared to the night from which he returned, the lukewarm darkness of the room seemed marvelous.  A violet lamp kept vigil at the top of the wall in the back of a room like a protective eye.  He heard coughing, heavy breathing, at times a dialogue in low voices.  Everything was pleasant and safe, without this harassment, but … He didn’t want to keep thinking about his nightmare.  There were so many things to keep himself occupied.  He began to look at the plaster on his arm, the pulleys which so comfortably held it in the air.  At some point during the night they had placed a bottle of mineral water on the table next to him.  He drank gluttonously from the neck of the bottle.  Now he was able to discern the shapes in the room, the thirty beds, the glass display cabinets.  His fever had to be lower now, and his face felt so fresh.  His brow hardly hurt at all, as if it were just a memory.  He pictured himself exiting the hotel and getting his motorbike.  Who could have thought that things would turn out this way?  He tried to concentrate on the time of the accident, and it really annoyed him to notice that it was like a gap that he couldn’t manage to fill.  Between the collision and the time they lifted him off the ground either his fainting or whatever it was didn’t let him see anything.  And at the same time he had the feeling that this gap, this nothing, had taken an eternity.  And not even time, but more like he had passed through something and traveled across great distances. The collision, the brutal hit against the pavement.  In any case, getting out of that cesspool he had almost felt relief while the men got him off the ground.  Considering the pain of his broken arm, the blood from his brow that was split open, the contusion in his knee, considering all of that, it was certainly a relief to return to daylight and feel taken care of and helped.  And it was strange.  He would have asked any time for the office doctor.  Now sleep began to take him over again and slowly pull him down.  The pillow was so soft, as was the freshness of the mineral water in his feverish throat. Perhaps he really could have rested if it hadn’t been for those damned nightmares.  The violet light of the lamp up high was starting to go out little by little.

Since he was sleeping on his back, the position in which he came to didn’t surprise him.  But instead the smell of humidity, of stone oozing with leaks, forced him to close his throat and understand the matter.  It was useless to open his eyes and look all over the place; he was enveloped in total darkness.  He tried to stretch out straight and felt the ropes on his wrists and ankles.  He was tethered to a floor on a cold and humid slab.  The cold had taken over his naked back, his bare legs.  His chin searched awkwardly for contact with his amulet, and then he knew that they had ripped it off him. Now he was lost, no prayer could save him from the end.  From a distance, as if oozing between the stones of the dungeon, he heard the kettle drums of the celebration.  They had brought him to the teocalli.  He was in the dungeons of the temple.  And he was waiting his turn.

He heard screaming.  A hoarse scream that reverberated within the walls.  Another scream ending in a moan.  He was the one screaming in the darkness, screaming because he was alive.  His whole body was defending itself by screaming about what was about to come, the inevitable end.  He thought about his companions who would fill other dungeons, and about those who were already ascending the steps of sacrifice.  Suffocated, he screamed again.  He was almost unable to open his mouth.  His jaws stiffened as if they were made of rubber and opened slowly with incalculable effort.  The squeaking of the bolts shook him like a whip.  Convulsed and writhing, he struggled to free himself from the cords which were sinking into his flesh.  His right arm, the stronger of the two, kept pulling until the pain became intolerable and had to stop.  He saw the double doors open, and the smell of the torches reached him before the light.  With the loincloth of the ceremony barely clinging to their bodies, the acolytes of the priests approached, gazing upon him with disdain.  In their sweaty torsos and black hair full of feathers he saw the lights reflected.  Hot hands, as hard as bronze, replaced the slackened ropes; he felt that he was being lifted, his face still up, and pulled by the four acolytes who carried him through the passage.  The torchbearers were walking ahead, vaguely lighting the corridor of wet walls and a ceiling so low that the acolytes had to bend their heads.  Now they were bringing him, bringing him, it was the end.  His face up, a meter from the ceiling of living rock which at moments was illuminated by the torches.  Once stars emerged instead of the ceiling and he was raised up the burning stairway of screaming and dancing, it would be the end.  The passageway had not ended yet, but was about to end, and suddenly he would smell the free air full of stars; but not yet, they walked carrying him endlessly in the red darkness, pulling on him brutally, but he could not want for the center of life, because they had ripped off the amulet which was his true heart.

 

He exited with a start into the night of the hospital, into the sky, the high and sweet open air, the soft darkness which surrounded him.  He thought he might have screamed, but his neighbors were sleeping in silence.  On his night table the bottle of water contained something bubbly, a translucent image against the bluish darkness of the large windows.  He panted seeking to relieve his lungs and forget those images which continued to stick to his eyelids.  Each time he closed his eyes he saw them form instantaneously, and terrified, he straightened himself while enjoying the fact that he was now awake, that being awake protected him, that it would soon be dawn, as well as the good deep sleep that one has at this hour, without images, without anything … Now it was hard to keep his eyes open, he was no match for his sleepiness. He made one last effort: with his good hand he sketched a gesture towards the bottle of water.  He couldn't reach it, his fingers were trapped again into a black emptiness, and the passageway continued endlessly, rock after rock, with sudden reddish flashes, and face up he moaned lifelessly because the roof was about to end.  It rose, opening like a mouth of darkness, and the acolytes stood up, and at that altitude he was struck by the light of a receding moon which his eyes did not want to see.  He closed and opened them desperately trying to pass to the other side, to rediscover the open protective sky of the room.  And each time that they opened it was night and there was the moon as they lifted him up the stairway.  Now his head went downwards, and at this height there were bonfires, red columns of perfumed smoke, and suddenly he saw the red rock, shining with dripping blood, and the swinging of the feet of the sacrificial victim whom they were dragging in order to hurl him down the stairways of the north.  With one last hope he squeezed his eyelids together, moaning in desperation.  For a second he thought he’d done it because once again he was in his bed, unmoving apart from the swaying of his head downwards.  But he smelled death, and when he opened them again he saw the bloodied figure of the sacrificer who was coming towards him with a stone knife in his hand.  Once more he closed his eyelids, but now he knew that he wouldn’t wake up, that he was awake, that his marvelous dream had been his other state, absurd like all dreams, a dream in which he had ridden through the strange avenues of a darkened city with green and red lights which burned without flame or smoke, on an enormous metal insect that hummed between his legs.  In this dream's infinite lie they had also raised him from the ground, someone had also approached him with a knife in his hand, and he had remained face up, his face up with his eyes shut between the bonfires.

La noche boca arriba (part 1)

A translation of the first part of a famous story ("The night face up") by this Argentine writer. You can read the original here.

And in certain epochs they would go to hunt enemies; they called this the war of flowers.

It had to be late, he thought in the middle of the hotel’s long corridor, and hurried onto the street to the motorcycle in the corner where the concierge next door had allowed him to park.  In the corner jeweler’s he saw that it was 8:50; he’d arrive where he was going in more than enough time.  The sun filtered through the tall buildings downtown and, because he needed no name to think, he got on the machine savoring the excursion.  The bike purred between his legs and his pants succumbed to the whips of fresh wind.

The ministries in pink and white went by, then a series of stores on Central street with brilliant shop windows.  Now he entered the most pleasurable part of the commute, the true journey: a long street lined with trees with little traffic and huge villas which let their gardens come up to the pavements, hardly marked by low hedges. Somewhat distracted by perhaps, but keeping to the right side as was proper, he let himself go to the smoothness, to the light tension of that day hardly begun.  Perhaps his involuntary relaxation prevented him from avoiding the accident.  When he saw that the woman standing at the corner was rushing onto the road despite the green lights, it was already too late for simple solutions.  Straying to the left, he braked with his foot and hand; he heard the woman’s shouts, and with the collision lost his vision.  It was as if he had suddenly fallen asleep.

Having fainted, he woke violently.  Four or five young men were pulling out him from beneath his cycle.  He felt the taste of salt, the taste of blood, his knee hurt, and he shouted once they lifted him out because the pressure on his right arm was unbearable.  Voices that didn’t seem to belong to the faces suspended above him tried to encourage him with jokes and assurances.  His only consolation was hearing someone confirm that he had had the right of way crossing that corner.  Trying to control the nausea stirring in his throat, he asked about the woman.  While they were taking him face up to a nearby pharmacy, he learned that the reason for the accident didn’t have anything more than scratches on her legs.  “You hardly grazed her, but the collision made your bike jump sideways.”  Opinions, memories: lay him down slowly; yes, like that; and someone in a workcoat gave him a drink which relieved him in the shade of a small neighborhood pharmacy.

The police ambulance arrived within five minutes.  They put him onto a white stretcher where he could lie comfortably.  In all lucidity, but knowing that he was still under the effects of a terrible collision, he gave his address to the policeman accompanying him.  His arm, he said, almost didn’t hurt him any more.  Blood was pouring out onto his whole face from a cut in his brow.  He licked his lips once or twice to drink some.  He felt good: it was an accident; bad luck.  A few weeks not moving and that’d be that.  The guard told him that his motorcycle didn’t seem to be too damaged.  “Naturally,” he said, “since the whole thing landed on top of me.”   They both laughed.  Then the guard shook his hand as they arrived at the hospital and wished him good luck. His nausea was already coming back bit by bit.  They took him by gurney to the back building, passing under trees full of birds.  He closed his eyes and wished he were asleep or chloroformed.  But they kept him for a long time in a room with that hospital smell filling out a form, taking off his clothes and putting on a grayish, stiff shirt.  They moved his arm carefully without causing him any pain.  All the while, the nurses were telling jokes.   And if it hadn’t been for the contractions in his stomach, he would have felt very well indeed.  Almost happy.

They took him to radiography.  Twenty minutes later, with his wet sheets still clinging to his breast like a black gravestone, he went on to the operation room.  Someone tall, slim and dressed in white came up to him and began examining the charts.  A woman’s hands made his head more comfortable, and he felt that he was moving from one gurney to another.  Smiling, the man in white approached him again with something shiny in his right hand.  He placed his hand on his cheek and signaled to someone standing behind him.

A strange dream, this, because it was full of smells and he had never dreamt of smells.  First, there was the smell of a swamp, there on the left side of the road where the marshes began, those moving bogs from which no one ever came back.  But this smell ceased.  It was exchanged for a fragrance both composite and dark like the night in which he moved, fleeing the Aztecs.  And all of this was so natural: he had to flee the Aztecs because they were hunting man, and his only chance was to hide in the thickest part of the jungle and to try not to budge from that narrow road of which only they, the Motecas, knew.

But nothing tortured him more than the smell.  It was as if, in absolute acceptance of the dream, something unusual had been revealed that contradicted that dream that then later had not been part of the game.  “Smells like war,“ he thought, instinctively touching the stone dagger across his sash of woven wool.  An unexpected sound made him duck and keep still, apart from a slight shiver.  There was nothing odd about being afraid: his nightscapes teemed with fear. He waited, covered by the branches of a shrub and the night without stars.  Very far off, probably on the other side of the great lake, there seemed to be campfires; a resplendent reddish tint filled that part of the sky.  The sound did not occur again.  Something like a snapped branch.  Perhaps an animal who, like he, was escaping the smell of war.  Smelling the air around him, he straightened slowly.  He didn’t hear a thing.  But fear persisted there like a smell, that sickly sweet incense that belonged to the war of flowers.  He had to keep on; he had to reach the heart of the jungle while evading the marshes.  Feeling his way forward, crouching at every opportunity to touch the hard ground of the road, he took some steps.  He would have liked to take off running, but quivering sensations beat at his side.  In the path in darkness, he found the course.  And then he got a whiff of the smell he feared most.  And desperate, he leapt forward.

“He's going to fall off the bed,” said the patient in the next bed.  “Don’t hop about so much, buddy.”

He opened his eyes and it was evening.  The sun was already low in the large windows of the long hall.  While he tried smiling at his neighbor, he almost physically peeled himself away from the nightmare’s last vision.  His arm, in a plaster cast, was hanging from a device with weights and pulleys.  He was thirsty, as if he had run for miles, but they didn’t want to give him much water, hardly enough to wet his lips and take a mouthful.  His fever was rising slowly and he could have fallen asleep again, but he savored the pleasure of remaining awake, his eyes half−closed, listening to the conversation of the other patients, responding now and then to a question.  He saw them bring in a small white trolley and place it at the side of his bed.  A blonde nurse then wiped the front part of his thigh with alcohol and stuck him with a thick needle connected to a tube that reached up to a bottle filled with an opaline liquid.  Then a young doctor came over with an apparatus made of metal and leather and adjusted it to his good arm to check on something.  Night fell, and his fever dragged him blandly into a state where things began to assume forms one might find on the other end of opera glasses: they were real and sweet and at the same time slightly repugnant, as if watching a boring film and thinking that it was even worse outside, and then staying put in the theater.

The English Patient

This succulent film, winner of a considerable number of awards, is probably one of those few cinematic adaptations which rise above their literary sources.  An unsurprising assessment given that the whole premise is standard modern novel fare: shortly after the Second World War, a severely burned patient (Ralph Fiennes), English only in manner and mastery of the language, lies in a hospital bed in an Italian villa and tells a tale of love lost.  His nurse (Juliette Binoche) indulges him knowing all the while that even in these pacific surroundings he will not last more than a month. The narrative unfolds in pieces, flashbacks of moments that mattered to the Patient, points of emotions and thoughts that seem now, in death’s proximity, essential to understanding his personality and soul.  There is nothing original nor offensive about such a premise, which is ultimately a diary composed by a mystery writer with aesthetic pretensions. The payoff will not nearly be as scintillating as the telling, but that we already know as well.

Over time we come to see that the so-called English Patient is really a Hungarian, Count László de Almásy, and that the love of his short life was a married woman called Katherine Clifton (Kristen Scott Thomas).  Katherine’s fate can only have been tragic in light of the apathy with which the Count faces his final days, but this again is no surprise.  Something so designed for disaster can only be redeemed by art, beautiful prose and ideas woven into lush scenery that spread like nymphaeaceae across a lake.  Speaking at length pains the Count, a devoted student of this Greek historian; so in good literary fashion he shrouds his desires and thoughts in paradigms lifted from books more real to him than the life he is about to relinquish.  In this type of situation even poems, the most touching that his mind could retain, would not be out of place.  But we do not get poems.  The film’s late director smartly substitutes pictures for scenes, especially between Katherine and her lover, and allows his talented cast to improvise on the standard forbidden wartime love theme that in lesser hands could easily have succumbed to some of cinema’s most tedious clichés.  Fiennes and Thomas are not only superb, they are convincing both as a couple (which is easy given their chemistry) and as individuals who will themselves towards doom all the while persuaded that what they have cannot be anything less than right.  The scenes in North Africa, where the real Almásy spent years researching ethnographic obscurities, are gorgeous and filled with just enough chiaroscuro to reinvent the patterns they loosely follow.  Predictably, Katherine’s husband (Colin Firth) is a pitiable creature who is the Hungarian’s inferior in every way; but Almásy is not without his faults.  For all his talent and culture he cannot see how destructive love can be when it becomes a matter of concealment and adventure.  You have nothing when you are not ready to or simply cannot show the world in whose arms you truly wish to die.  And he and Katherine, so in love yet so aware of how unfair life has been, have barely more than that.

Without huddling another work under this review’s shade, I should add that the strength of the film, Katherine and Almásy, is watered down in the book to an affair parallel to another love story, as if mimicking the quartet format made popular by this famous man of letters.  The nurse, whose name is Hana, spends a great deal of the novel intertwined with the sapper Kip (Naveen Andrews), an Anglo-Indian who provides a convenient postcolonial touchstone for the novel’s themes.  Kip is a wise and thoughtful figure, often brooding so that his mood matches the color of his skin – a horrific cliché which should tell you exactly how little effort was put into making him original.  Moreover, as a sapper, it is his task to remove the mines placed beneath the good earth by the barbarian Europeans whose languages he speaks and whose women he has loved.  I should and will leave the matter at that.  There is also another character of considerable force bearing the name of an Italian painter (Willem Defoe).  If the film were an engine, he would certainly be the wrench that derails the whole exercise and makes a few decisions that can only be described as cowardly.  The agenda of this Caravaggio, like that of art itself, is gain.  But while an artist wants to gain in talent and experience to achieve self-perfection, this Caravaggio has no qualms about selling people off for a handful of silver.  And maybe he keeps his hands stretched out towards the sky just a bit too long.

In der Strafkolonie

A translation of this story’s title, which may be rendered as “in the penal colony,” seems inappropriately mild.  And not only because some people believe the word “colony” to have been derived from this man’s name.  It turns out that a colony is only one of the Romans’ many legacies; but colonies have assumed another, very distinct meaning in the years since the fall of Rome.  They have come to signify hamlets or isolated settlements for people united in a joint purpose.  That purpose may be practically anything from religion to drug use to nudity.  In other words, what was once repayment to retired soldiers for years of killing and mayhem is now often the only place where persecuted, ostracized or downright bizarre minorities may enjoy the freedoms they espouse.  A penal colony, then, would be a place where people believe in punishment, in both inflicting and receiving it, although probably not in equal measure.  Those who rule the colony must be willing to act as examples for those who do not meet the specifications of the enterprise.  Maintaining the compound of the Germanic word for punishment and the Latinate borrowing superimposes ideas as alien as the cultures of subjugator and subjugated.  What is more, any derivative of “penalize,” despite its implications, remains soft and almost schoolmaster−like, and in the modern day reminds many of cheating and roughhousing millionaires castigated by sports officials for not playing by the rules.  The hellhole in this tale is about pain, gruesome and infinite pain, and, to be frank, little else.

On an island quite removed from the influence of “European views,” a Traveler ("neither a citizen of the penal colony, nor of the state to which it belonged") is taken by an Officer to inspect a machine.  The machine is a mechanical wonder, the pride and joy of the colony’s Former Commander and now of his last adherent, the Officer.  So unpopular were the methods of this erstwhile taskmaster that his modest grave is now concealed underneath a teahouse table with the inscription:

Here lies the Former Commander.  His followers, who may not be named, dug him this grave and above it placed this gravestone.  It has been foretold that after a certain number of years the Commander will rise from the grave and lead his followers to recapture the colony. Wait and see!

Originality notwithstanding, a better epitaph for the Devil could probably not be written.  The contraption which this Commander devises also suggests unrepentant evil in the form of justice.  Justice, mind you, under the auspices of a harrow that takes twelve hours to kill.  The Traveler is presented with these facts and then invited to witness the judgment in action.

Much has been made in Kafka criticism of the diabolic nature of the torture rack.  There are numerous parallels to modern torture devices, although the Middle Ages, owing in no small part to their inefficiencies and paucity of universal human rights concepts, were far ahead of today’s monsters.  A man in chains, “an obtuse, wide−mouthed person with a shabby face and hair” who looked “so loyal, like a dog,” has been sentenced for “disobeying and offending a superior.”  The Officer relates the exact circumstances of the crime:

This morning a Captain reported that this man, who was assigned to him as a servant and sleeps in front of his door, was asleep on the job.   His duty was to stand and salute in front of the Captain's door at the stroke of each hour.  Doubtless no hard task, yet a necessary one as he has the obligation of being fresh for both service and surveillance.  Last night, the Captain wanted to check whether he was fulfilling his duty.  He opened the door at two o'clock sharp and found the man curled up in a ball.   The Captain retrieved his riding crop and hit him in the face.   Instead of getting up and asking for forgiveness, the man grabbed his master by the legs, shook him, and said: 'Lose the crop or I'll eat you whole.'

What hope is there in a world like this?  Should we then be surprised to learn that the Condemned knows neither of his punishment nor that he is to be punished at all?  All this will become clear in the course of twelve hours, his last half−day in this life.  For twelve hours the harrow will cut into his naked body and write "with many a flourish" the exact commandment of the island that he has violated.  Only then, says the Officer, does the extent of his crime dawn on him and, in a way, grant him redemption.       

Yes, this looks, sounds and feels like an allegory, but all great art is an allegory for itself.  Feeble critical attempts have been made to compare the writing on the back of "hundreds of men" who endured unfathomable pain for varying degrees of insolence to the agony of devoting oneself to letters.  This attempt and many others that seek simple ciphers to machinations of genius may smirk at a detail or two, especially at the endless zeal of the Officer that cannot be human.  Yet he is very human.  He believes that his justice is divine and that only he may mete it out.  He even goes so far as to mistake himself for his old Commander in speech, so strong is his commitment to righteousness and discipline.  And on this modern−day Devil's Island, he is the last of his kind.    

Borges, "Luke XXIII"

When I first encountered this sensational poem, this author's interpretation of a Biblical verse, I found it even more beautiful because I mistakenly placed an indefinite article in the twelfth line.  Whether its omission really detracts from our perspective, I shall leave to the readers.   The original is here.  

 

A Gentile, Jew, or simply man,

Whose face would fall in sands of time,

No silent letters of his name

Oblivion allows to chime.

 

What of forgiveness could he know,

This thief Judean nailed to a cross?

To time elapsed we will not come

Today or ever, all is lost. 

 

One last task left, to crucify,

And from the crowds and taunts he heard

The man by him in death allied

Was God, to Him then blind he stirred:

 

Remember me when Thou will come

Into Thy kingdom.  And in eyes

Beyond the fearful cross, Our Judge

Incredible spoke Paradise.

 

No more was said before death's door,

But history will not forget

Or fail to paint that afternoon

The final sun that on them set.

 

O friends, innocent was he

Whom Jesus Christ would call a friend!

His candor sought, against disgrace,

Just Paradise at earth's broad end.

 

This candor fed both blood and sin,

Until he saw that time would win.