The Sacred Beasts (5 page)

She tried to justify herself, said Yukio Mishima and Gertrude
Stein kept these hours. I am no Alice B. Toklas but I accepted it, though it
was never my habit. I wanted plenty of sunlight and my work, another form of
love. We did what we had to do. I had my work. She did what was necessary to
write, even if it asked periods of time lying in the dark.

The flood of memory has spent itself. I am hungry and eager to
begin the day and my work. Katia has passed over me like a giant bird of prey,
yet I did not cry out or shed tears. I am left whole, with energy. I am growing
stronger by the day, as I am in my dreams. I know what this means: today is my
morning to walk to the cemetery. I am ready for it and somehow, it will be a
watermark.

After breakfast, I am moving, alone with my disturbingly energetic
and loquacious thoughts, ambient over the black-riddled dust to the quiet
darkness of the cemetery surrounded by black cypresses. The ground’s meandering
blackness is a mineral that accompanies gold and announces its presence. It
gives a haunting, riddling strangeness to the landscape, a hint of phantoms,
all the animals and Indians killed by the exploiters who came here for gold.
Our history: excess of beauty raped by explorers, then exploiters, pirates and
dictators, a crime punishable by death. It surely killed all the Indians, Onas
and Yaghans alike. The few survivors now are mixed breeds.

There was one exploiter greater and fouler than all the others
were, Julius Popper, a mining dictator the right-wing Evangelicals in the
States would surely admire. I heard of him as a child, for the Welshman had
left one of his gold coins, called a Popper, in a desk drawer of the furniture
we bought with the house. It says “Popper” across the front and has a pick and
shovel on the back. Julius Popper began as the owner of one gold mine, then
all, then he bought everything else, from sheep ranches to transportation
lines. King of land and water, he was free to become a dictator with his own
currency, stamps, army and system of justice. How brutally simple was his
justice: he shot all intruders. The only exploiters more destructive were the
missionaries.

Among the myriad faces on my wall is a photo of the Fuegan Indians
taken sometime in the cleft between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,
just before their extinction blessed by missionaries. Here are faces of rough,
dirty skin and hair a dull wildness, clothes that are animal skins barely sewn
together, gathered about bent shoulders as they huddle together, seeking
comfort that will never come. Their mouths are open in shock or closed in
anger, their arms empty and impotent; their heads turned slightly to the side
as though expecting a blow. Their eyes: here is the moment of revelation. To
say that they reflect pain and desperation falls far short of the reality. No,
their eyes are something between horror and astonishment. They know they are
the end of their kind, a race that once filled a continent. No one who sees
these eyes will forget: they follow, taunt, whisper, beg.

My thoughts meander like the black mineral stripes in the dust.
They seek a shape that eludes them and refuse to accept sorrow. Let them kindle
and be. I am better for them.

Yes, the Onas and Yaghans were stronger and fitter than the
Europeans who killed them: they had survived in one of the world’s harshest
environments for thousands of years. They always kept fires burning wherever
they went, even in their canoes, and they could fall into freezing water and
survive. Their harsh life was not, however, without intellectual subtlety. A
nineteenth century priest compiled a dictionary of the Yaghan language
startling in its richness and expressiveness, and it contained more than
thirty-two thousand words at his death, which finished the project.

I told Bear a few Yaghan metaphors that would surprise any
zoologist with their clarity. Depression, for example, was described as akin to
the seasonal phase when a crab sloughs off its shell and hasn’t grown a new one
yet. The Yaghan word for adulterous came from a comparison with a small hawk
called a hobbythat is known to flit about with great speed and little
apparent purpose, then suddenly hover motionlessly over its next victim. Bear
was silent a long while, then said they were powerful words that taught new
truths. The art of their words died with them, as did Bear’s.

No, my mind refuses to stop thinking about human violence, greed,
and stupidity. I must run my course like the riddling dust.

Popper had a hand in killing the Indians, too. He was disturbed by
what he saw as their alarming Communist tendencies: they had the perversity to
believe that their creator, Yaux, divided the land equally between families, an
offense to the divine capitalist, Jehovah. Too, they displayed an inconvenient
reverence for the land he pillaged, believing that spirits inhered in its rocks
and mosses. To top it off, they were gentle and thoughtful, scarcely human
traits at all. So, he rounded them up and sent them to the Salesian Fathers for
re-education. The missionaries made so little sense to them, however, that they
fled. This was punished by incarcerating them in a jail on Dawson Island. The
missionaries then began the Yaghans’ course of re-education in jail, teaching
them crocheting and petit point to instill moral vigor. At last, the world made
so little sense to them that they laid down and died.

The jail is still there on Dawson Island. Cut from stone and
concrete, it is stronger and colder than its Siberian counterpart and stands as
one of the cruelest fates in human history. In the 1920s, the socialists—those
other immoral miscreants—were sent there to be killed. It was last used to
house the ministers of the socialist Allende regime, who were sent there by the
Americans. Allende himself would have ended up there, but for the more merciful
fate of death.

There seems to be no stopping my black thoughts. If not devoted to
art or my beloved, their content is purely the murder and madness of human
history, every bit as true as a hobby hawk devouring a mara. But, perhaps I
should be painting a picture that is blacker still. The earlier Europeans were
even more murderous than Popper—at least more efficient in their killing. They
offered one pound sterling for each Indian killed, to be paid upon display of a
brown severed ear. A Scotsman appropriately dubbed The Red Pig killed more than
anyone else. He was wounded by a courageous Ona Indian, but had the peculiar
strength of the morally unsound and lived. Eventually, he killed himself with
whisky. In his last delirium tremens, he hallucinated being killed over and
over again by Indians using knives and arrows. He was discovered attempting to
hide in the forest, down on all fours, pretending to be a cow and even eating
grass. A few hours later, he was dead, so in the excessive, trenchantly
truthful way of this land, he did meet our monster of justice.

I feel viciously better for my babble. Here I sit in the dust and
scrub before her grave. The wind is low, murmuring. I could not bear fierce
wind today. The black riddled dust is everywhere, even embedded in the marble
of her tombstone. The black cypresses must breathe it, and so must I. The film
reel of Bear’s death has been silent for days, replaced by art or anger. Now
the anger of the first days and my dreams is returning.

Anger at what? The loss of one so loved, unique, and precious? Not
entirely. I am not that insightful and virtuous, not yet. This anger is for
something small and stunted: her betrayal of me. I am furious that she left me
with years, decades left of my life. She left the home I loved and offered her:
the unspeakable perfidy of her response. I know she felt a pain too great to
live, but she should have cried with me. I would have done anything to comfort
her. She knew that: I had taken worse from her. I showed her the most beautiful
things I have ever known—the creatures, the land, what I had devoted my life
to—and she refused their beauty and would not let them heal and grace her life
as they had mine. I can stand anything for their beauty, and I can stand her
death, but not without rage. And forgiveness? Not yet for that. No, my art and
anger sustain me. Even now, in fear and agony, I know I am healing. I could not
have come here otherwise. I am floods, cascades of memory, the beautiful things
I showed her . . .
animals, mountains, colors, trees.

Mountains, yes.
When we were young and climbed high into the Chilean Andes, we
shared the astonishing, breathless point at eight thousand feet in the Paine
Mountains, together looking down on all of Patagonia and beyond, from the
Atlantic to Antarctica, into the Brazilian rainforests of the Amazon, all the
way to the incandescent liquid blue topaz line of the Caribbean. We saw those
exquisitely spectral shapes of peaks that were scoured and twisted into
unpredictable forms by Ice Age glaciers. How much they seemed to be the
strange, contorted sculpture of the beings and lives we knew, scoured by the
passion of living, barely seen by one another, solely in such a rare, purified
moment as this in its dazzling light; our very essence and truth living with
endless secrets, known only by those with whom we share our passion and
richness. These mountain peaks caused a sudden pain in my chest, an
acknowledgement that the top of the world was at once so close to the
infinitely varied beings of my species and others; scoured, contorted and
spectral both from nature and the love and violence we do to one another and
the earth, our mute, torn, majestic enclosure and source.

That moment I shared with her, that piercingly beautiful sight and
moment of the heart I gave to her, and she took it hungrily as nourishment for
her art and then betrayed it.

Trees, oh yes.
When we came down from the peaks and saw the trees of the
Argentinean pampas and steppes, often blown nearly to the ground by mountain
winds, their rough branches and fibrous foliage a witch’s violent hair in the
roar of the wind, here we found another living thing of scoured and spectral
shape made exquisite by truth. I gave this to her, and she took it hungrily and
instantly understood it as the nourishment and root of her art. Yes, that I
gave her, that we shared, but only one betrayed.

We saw the southern birch forests in Tierra del Fuego where the
climate is most harsh. The birches have fewer branches and the smaller ones
twist about the trunks and stunt their growth. The trees are then small enough
to be covered with lichen, and the forests all have a hairy, ragged appearance,
the ground littered with dead and graying branches that cannot even rot for the
cold temperatures. They have a chaotic, forbidding look that seems frozen in
time. “Fuegan birches,” I told her.

“A gothic tale,” she replied. She took it, as she appropriated
everything, for her art and then betrayed it.

When we camped further north in the pampas, where the climate was
balmier, the Antarctic birches had the thick, horizontal fullness of unimpeded
foliage growth like great, rounded heads upon slender, tapering trunks.
“Northern birches,” I said.

“Degas dancers,” Katia replied, and I saw them as for the first
time: the utter elegance of the tapering trunk like a dancer’s slender legs and
thighs and the higher horizontal fullness of upper boughs, branches and leaves
the arms, shoulders, and head of the dancer thrown forward in dance. Yes, the
birches became dancers moving forward, one leg close behind the other. It was a
landscape full of Degas dancers, advancing with elegance and majesty, ready to
leap. In an instant, they had become her art, and she betrayed them as she
betrayed me.

That was when we visited the Moreno glacier, which plunges
straight into the Antarctic birch forests. Things run riot here; there is
always the unexpected, caused by the warm, heavy rainfall on the Chilean side
of the Andes, resulting in perpetual drought and cold on the other side that
becomes Argentinean steppe. Directly below the peaks, this inconsistency in
temperature and rainfall has resulted in a petrified forest outside Sarmiento.
We camped there, and she touched those cold, shining, impossibly slender and
intricate stones that once were living branches and boughs. We could still see
the grains of wood in the hard, frosty stone.

Colors!
When we camped at Cerro de los Indios, I remember a day of pure
explosive color. It is a place where unicorns were once thought to exist in the
eighteenth century. The immense black basalt cliffs are flecked with red and
green figures. From the top, you can look down on Lakes Posadas and Pueyrredónand across to landscape that reaches from Argentina to Chile. The Indians regard
it as a sacred domain, and in ancient times they painted the animals they
hunted in red colors and themselves as energetic, jumping green stick men.
There are always absurd votive offerings to be seen at the base of the cliffs—a
doll, a tin of tobacco, streaks of melted chocolate bars. Walking around the
cliffs, we found mesas and gulches with rocks in lilac, rose pink and lime
green. The gorge that follows on the trail is bright yellow, with bones of
extinct mammals. The dried lakebed at the bottom of the gorge is filled with
purple rocks, and white cow skulls stick out of flaky orange mud.

On Lake Argentino, we saw the full range of the immense,
ten-mile-long Moreno glacier and its unearthly blue color, a tongue of ice
thrusting itself out of the mountains and into the forests, hence made of
chaotic surfaces, crushed and convoluted by their own weight erupting into an
alien environment. Katia was transfixed by the infinitely varying shades of
blue in the ice, and I told her it resulted from the compression of the ice
under its own weight. So compacted, the ice continually forms crystals that
absorb the red and yellow wavelengths of light, leaving only this chimerical
blue, to be reflected in so many translucent shades.