The Conversations (New Directions Paperbook) (5 page)

Then, by simply applying a well-known fact, algae that made their home in the depths of the sea should also be found on the mountains peaks. With this, their existence was definitively confirmed.

Here my friend quickly shifted gears and launched right into the next subject, eager as he was to arrive at “my Rolex,” which he must have by now sighted on the horizon from the crest of the argumentative wave he was riding:

Señorita Wild Savage —

But I cut him off sharply with speech and gestures. I threw myself back in my chair and shot both hands in the air, as if I were climbing a wall.

Just one moment!

I sighed deeply, and upon remembering it in bed, I couldn’t resist sighing more weakly, in a kind of mock-up of the one I had released in the café.

How could you keep going, I asked, by using such a crass parody of a syllogism as a bridge? I was sorry to have to disillusion him, but as far as I was concerned the mountains still did not exist.

He retraced his steps without his feathers getting the least bit ruffled: didn’t I know that geologists had deduced important information about the planet’s past from fossils of marine animals found on high mountain peaks?

Of course I knew that. But that didn’t make mountains rise!

I agree, he said, it didn’t make them rise . . . in reality. But we had already made clear, or better said, I had made clear, abundantly and effectively, if not excessively, that there is a difference between fiction and reality. And we were in the realm of fiction, right? I myself had said as much, he wasn’t inventing anything. In any case, he had merely fine-tuned it: the terrain on which we were moving was not that of fiction already made and consumed like a bowl of popcorn, but rather of its generation. And in this terrain, which now was becoming metaphoric, the mountains did actually rise out of what I scornfully called a “parody of a syllogism.” Above all, I should kindly remember that the fiction genre we were discussing was that of entertainment for mass consumption. Even children know the fact about marine fossils on mountain peaks. Moreover, it is the kind of information that, outside the restricted world of professional geologists, holds interest
only
for children. But adults were once children, and they remember. The popular culture industry is built on such memories.

I continued to resist. While remembering the conversation, I already knew what came next: Señorita Wild Savage. In the conversation itself I probably also knew, because he had already spoken her name, but in my memory, Señorita Wild Savage rose up in me like a tide of magnetized currents that swept me away into adventure, youth, the world of passions.
Th
is is why I paused with particular complacency on the objection I now presented, and on his response:

How is it possible, I asked him, that the inopportune mutation of algae could have been contemporaneous with fossils that must have been millions of years old?

Another “little anachronism,” right? he replied with an astute smile that indicated that he had been expecting that objection and was grateful for it. In effect, it was another one of those errors that required the labor of verisimilization. The fact that the algae had recently mutated did not mean that they hadn’t existed since ancient times; rather, since then they had contained, latently, the very mechanisms that would make the mutation possible. For an experienced paleobiologist, those mechanisms would be visible in the fossils, and studying them would not only lead to a greater understanding of genetic history but also help deal with the threats posed to life forms in the present day.

But this was a very narrow, very functional verisimilization. There were other, better ones, and if I had the patience to listen, he would elucidate the situation.

Aria was a beautiful young Tatar woman, secretary of the Pig-Iron Foundation, whose president the sinister Forion Larionov had become after the death of the previous president, a kindhearted gentleman and Aria’s uncle. She suspected that the accident that had taken her uncle’s life had not really been an accident at all but rather the result of Larionov’s machinations, and she was trying to find some proof of this in the little time left to her, for the new president was replacing the personnel with his supporters, and her days as secretary were numbered. When she found the proof (all she had to do was stay late, enter her boss’s office, and open a drawer, with that ease so typical of the movies), she realized that she could not use it, for the people implicated in the crime included high officials in the government and the armed forces. What’s more: she discovered that she herself had been targeted as the next victim.
Th
at night, she did not return to her house, which was probably already under surveillance. She had no choice but to flee. Because of her years working at the Foundation, she knew the vast resources this complex and powerful institution had at its disposal, and she decided to use one of them in an act of daring that would be much more cinematic than taking a train: she took a taxi to the Foundation’s private aerodrome to board one of the airplanes that flew every night to Moldova loaded with pig-iron. Her personal identification allowed her passage. But once at the airport, the darkness and the rush of some last-minute furtive maneuvers that took her a while to understand created a mix-up between her and someone else, and she ended up boarding a small jet plane that was departing immediately. Just before takeoff, she hid between the last seat and the back wall of the cabin; once it was airborne, she peeked out to get a look at the other passenger: it was the young and beautiful Varia Ostrov, Larionov’s lover, who looked almost identical to her (they were both played by the same actress). Varia was also fleeing, but for a different reason: she was carrying valuable documents she had stolen from her lover, which she planned to sell to the Moldovan secret service.

The small fugitive airplane was caught in a storm as it flew over the Coal Mountains, and it crashed into the dark heights. The wind was so furious that the airplane rolled down the rocky mountainside, its wings broken off, until it stopped, caught between a couple of crags. Miraculously, Aria was unhurt. She dragged herself through the twisted tube that the airplane had been reduced to, looked with horror at the dead bodies of Varia and the pilots, and emerged. Once outside, she walked away quickly, fearing an explosion. Because of the ruggedness of the terrain, her hurried escape was treacherous: she tripped, fell, tumbled downhill, the wind swept her off her feet, she sank into the snow, the darkness prevented her from seeing where she was going. It was a second miracle that she didn’t die that night; finally, she happened upon a dry refuge of sorts, where she collapsed and lost consciousness.

There she was found, the following morning, by the handsome goatherd, who, like every morning, was on his way with his goats to the healthy watering places near the peaks. He picked her up, carried her to his hut, tended to her cuts and bruises (few), wrapped her in coarse blankets, and when she woke up, still in shock, he gave her hot soup to drink. Aria recovered with remarkable speed. Therein began one of those relationships, so typical in the movies, according to my friend (and I agreed with him), between two different worlds that are bridged by love.
Th
e vast differences between these two worlds were made even more pronounced by the fact that they could not communicate through speech. She assumed that he spoke one of those uncouth dialects that in fact have nothing in common with Russian. The language barrier was that much more impenetrable because she, like everyone else, spoke English, this being a North American production. Even so, they understood each other. Or, at least, she understood a few practical details, the main one being that they would be isolated in the mountains for a predictably long time because below them the mountain passes were covered in ice and snow, which made their descent impossible until the spring melt. There in the highlands, a tectonic combustion of the coal inside the mountains created an ideal temperate microclimate for the wintering of the goats. This explained, by the way, the goatherd’s isolation.

He, in his superstitious ignorance, believed that the beautiful stranger was Señorita Wild Savage, a legendary character from the mountains of Ukraine. This traditional yarn was not ancient, though it had been around for many years, sixty or seventy at least; it dated from the beginning of the Bolshevik beauty contests, which became a popular craze and were encouraged by Moscow as a means for channeling national identity and encouraging Communist eugenics. According to the legend, the first of these contests to be held in Ukraine in the 1920s had two finalists — Miss Wild Savage and Miss Civilized — after representatives from the provinces and various ethnic groups in the country had been excluded. In the highly contested final vote, Miss Civilized won, and Miss Wild Savage, driven to despair, fled into the mountains, where she lived from that time on, alone and untamed. (The change from “Miss” to “Señorita” was a result of the movie being dubbed so it could be shown on television in Argentina.) Of course, nobody with a minimum of sophistication gave any credence to this fable, which could be explained as a nationalist metaphor: the eternal confrontation, which took place at the birth of every national entity, between Civilization and Barbarism.
Th
e triumph of Civilization was inevitable, even if the people were not at all optimistic; even when optimism was maximized, Barbarism remained latent, whether in a state of fiction or possibility.

Then followed some scenes that portrayed the daily life of these two young people in the mountains, an accidental idyll, a necessary lull in the plot but also an excuse for a photographic display of the magnificent landscape under a variety of lighting conditions.
Th
ose vague sequences with aesthetic content, enhanced by the musical score, gave the audience time to reflect (wisely prompted by certain details in the shots) on the great distance the erotic bridge had to span.
Th
ese two could not possibly have come from more distant worlds — he, from wild nature; she, from the culture of global corporations and high technology. The inversion in reality of these attributes added an extra zing to this contrast, for he was being played by a Hollywood star and she by a novice Ukrainian actress.

Aria was attracted to the goatherd’s self-reliance, his simplicity, his primitive vigor, qualities that shined in an even more favorable light when compared to those of the men she had known at work and in her social interactions — egotistical, ambitious, and superficial — not to mention that the goatherd was much better-looking. Deep down, she must have suspected that this nascent love had no future: she could not renounce her career as a secretary in exchange for goats and crags, and he could never adapt to urban life. No matter, she let herself be swept off her feet. Or, feelings were stronger than reason; or, Aria anticipated the sweet sadness of separation, which showed that the frivolity of her past life ran very deep. In the meantime, she learned to milk the goats, was enraptured by the night sky, and discovered the secrets of the mountains.

For his part, he continued to believe that he had found the Señorita Wild Savage of the stories, and he was overjoyed. It was the fulfillment of all his wishes. Though primitive, he was a dreamer and had the soul of a poet. The fugitive of the legend had lived in his fantasies ever since he was a small boy, and this had been the reason he had chosen, when he was an adolescent, the solitary and unrewarding work as a hiemal goatherd, disappointing his father, who hoped he would become a blacksmith like him. There in the mountains he felt closer to his ideal of womanhood, ideal even if he knew deep down that she didn’t exist. And now, against all hope, he had found her.

In a precarious high-wire act, the couple was balancing on the fragile spiderweb with which fiction clings to reality. Aria, who was on the side of reality, understood her lover, but did not tell him the truth. She not only knew the legend but it touched her very personally. Her great-grandmother had been the first Miss Ukraine, during the Stalinist era.
Th
e documentary details were lost in the successive ideological purges and the fraudulent rewriting of History, which were the trademarks of the Soviet regime. Hence the proliferation of fictional accounts that filled the need for genealogical explanations, which every nation has. And one of the versions of the story claimed that the winner had not, in reality, been Señorita Civilized but rather her rival, for the night before the finale the two had switched identities (they looked very much alike). Whereby the real Señorita Wild Savage had stayed in Kiev representing civilization and modernization and planting within them the seeds of savagery that had prevented Ukraine from joining the chorus of Sustainable Development.

The very hazardous return of this woman’s descendent to the Coal Mountains, Aria thought, smacked of the culmination of Destiny. She was having a firsthand experience of poetic justice, one of the pillars on which sits the art of film. She felt this justice that much more strongly because she knew that if it were a movie, she and her great-grandmother would be played by the same actress (they always do that). But in this movie, in particular — my friend said, raising his voice in a triumphant finale of “I told you so” — she knew it was a movie!

While I was reconstructing these words, in bed, I realized that the images had joined hands with the words, as always happens when films are invoked. But I had to remember, I reminded myself then, in retrospect, that words, not images, were what we had; that it was with words that we were going to solve our little puzzle; the images that overwhelmed me in the mental fog of semi-somnolence could only further distance me from the solution. I ascertained this at my own expense when I saw that I had not grasped the meaning of my friend’s last statement. Thinking about it a little, I realized that I didn’t understand it because it could not be understood. It was obviously absurd, and with it, we were returning to the point of departure. I knew what reductio ad absurdum was, but for the moment I still could not grasp that a statement could be affirmed through the absurd. The only remaining possibility was that after tracing a large circle, my poor friend would return to his initial confusion — now from a psychological standpoint — and believe that after all he had convinced me that the actor was the same as the character. Which meant that he
was
an idiot, and that I would have to relapse into my previous fears and sorrows.