The Things We've Seen, page 2
I felt like I was looking at two identical rivers, each flowing past me at a different rate.
The talks threw up nothing unexpected. The ideas proposed, most of which were to do with managing the online aspect of businesses, didn’t interest me. Thousands of people did indeed send in messages via Twitter. I remember thinking that people ought to have some idea what they’re talking about before deciding to tweet about it. Thinking my silence might be making the organizers uncomfortable, I decided to offer something up about times when communities, whether human or animal, are isolated for long periods – though not long in the evolutionary scale of things – and a tendency that has been observed whereby the larger animals shrink in size and, by contrast, the smaller animals, everything up to rabbit-size, grow larger. This is what had happened on Flores Island, near modern day Java: the resident humans and elephants had shrunk over time, while the various rodents had begun to grow far larger, gigantic in fact, eventually reaching sizes we in the present day would find shocking. The reason being an innate survival mechanism that’s shared the world over and results in the balancing out of different species. The most disconcerting thing to the anthropologists who found the fossils on which these discoveries were based, I continued, was that though the humans’ brains had shrunk, this did nothing to diminish their intellectual capacities; only their will had been affected. A point came when they began to neglect the most basic aspects of survival, coitus included, ultimately paving the way for the group’s extinction. Everyone listened as I spoke, but when I finished, they sat saying nothing, as though expecting me to go on. A tweet appeared on the screens, written in unmistakably Argentinean Spanish: ‘Go, chavón! So with you on all of that.’ I said all of this, I added, with regards to the isolation that sometimes occurs in certain networks, for example in private groups on Facebook, or on networks used exclusively by the military or financial corporations. I think this was my only contribution to proceedings that afternoon. The truth is, I found it intimidating being watched on the internet in that way. Speaking in front of an invisible audience is not something I’m used to. There’s a golden rule: eye speaks with eye (with screens intermediate or not), voice speaks with voice (telephone), text speaks with text (letters, other kinds of written messages), but the mixing and crossing over of different channels is not a thing to be entertained. And in that place, everything was mixed and crossed over. There was a view through the window of the estuary and the mainland beyond. The boats moored there were a single, indistinguishable mass of colour; the one that had left us on the island would have been among them, I thought – phrasing it to myself, I noticed, as though the boat were never coming back. I spent the rest of the time studying the other participants’ faces; I could discern no sign of plastic surgery, either on lips, cheeks or elsewhere, or indeed any of the habitual characteristics you’d expect to find in a sample of twenty-first-century humanity chosen – as this one supposedly was – at random.
There was still a little daylight, and it wasn’t yet time for dinner, so I decided to take the book on another walk round the island. This time I went in the opposite direction. Leaving the complex, I climbed a steep slope, bisected by what was referred to as the myrtle path: an avenue not more than a hundred yards long, overhung by the myrtles, the tops of which joined overhead, though the early evening sun broke in at ankle height and lit the way. I became aware of layers upon layers – dozens of layers – of matter beneath my feet. I knew there were hundreds of bones and hundreds of teeth below me, hundreds of knives and forks, items of clothing and photographs and weapons, and a great many more objects besides that I’d never set eyes on – some that anyway would be unrecognizable to me – but the sensation I had was not of each of those objects singly, but rather the sum of them, a rusty, incandescent magma, a kind of San Simónian earth’s core, a generator of its forward propulsion, or something along those lines, anyway. The myrtle path brought you out at a bandstand whose circular platform led to a set of granite steps, which in turn wound down to a path that sloped away to eventually skirt the edge of the island. Descending the steps, I opened the book and found another match. I took my phone out and took the photograph. I went back to the hotel. It was almost time to join the others for dinner, but I went on my blog and uploaded the photo from the book alongside the one I’d just taken, supplying each with the same caption: ‘Flesh.’
And I don’t know why I put that. What I really wanted to say was: ‘The disappearance of flesh.’
The subject of the disappearance of flesh was on my mind during the dinner, most of which I spent not saying anything to anybody, while everyone else, fewer geeks among them now than at lunch, put down their smartphones from time to time and spoke to one another. I looked at the menu: vegetable tart, veal cheeks with potatoes, fruit salad, red wine, coffee – a list that led me to reflect on the special nature of eating, a process through which it was as though the food, dead when you bought it at the supermarket, came back to life in being cooked. A kind of ritual in which, by the act of eating, we made something sacred disappear forever. I went outside to smoke. I marked out a circle with my toe in the gravel. Through the high windows, I saw the others drinking wine, lifting forks to mouths, gesticulating, checking Twitter, and all this that I now see, I said to myself, will also disappear in a matter of minutes, never to return again. When I went back to my seat, they had already brought dessert. Picking up my cutlery, I noticed a folded piece of paper poking out from under my plate. Opening it, I found something written inside: ‘I need help.’ Instinctively I glanced around: nobody seemed to have noticed. I looked behind me. One of the male waiters, quite fat, hair cropped almost to a zero and a trace of the indigenous Latin American about his features, nodded in such a way that I knew for certain it was from him. I neither smiled nor returned the nod, glancing along the table: a heated discussion was taking place about trolls on social media. I put the note in the inside pocket of my jacket and went on eating. When the waiter came over with the coffee, neither of us made any allusion to the note’s existence.
After dinner, everyone went back to the hotel. Somebody, I don’t remember who, had gone to the effort of bringing gin, tonic and lemons, and gin and tonics were being prepared in the former cafeteria. I was too tired to start drinking, and just had tonic water. To one side, a group was discussing the internet. I said to them that in my view the important thing about the internet was its bodilessness – the fact of it being, in a manner of speaking, one gigantic brain that drifts around the planet without ever encountering the fat, muscles and bones that would tether it to the earth, and that as it drifts it projects all manner of different shadows, which, paradoxically, don’t come about through contact with any kind of body either. Hence the confusion, I continued, concerning everything to do with the net: it’s a primitive organism, still only half-finished, in a phase similar to that of the microorganisms that one day clambered out of the water, millions of years before they became the amphibians that were the precursors of the humans of today. Judging by the group’s silence, I don’t believe my intervention convinced anyone in this case either.
I decided to go for a walk. The breeze carried hints of eucalyptus and the sea. I went in the direction of the chapel, and once I got there kept on going. I soon came in sight of a small prison building, three storeys high. I was approaching it over a rise, putting me at eye-level with the third floor, two of the windows in which had lights on. I was surprised to find myself creeping forward as quietly as I could, before stopping and squatting down. At the nearest window to me, one of the waiters and the waitress were locked in an embrace by the bed, her very large belly hindering their proximity. She closed the curtain, and a moment or two later the shadow play showed the man taking her from behind. In the next bedroom along, the waiter who had left the note for me was sitting on his bed gazing down at the floor, head bowed, elbows on his knees; his head, with the very short hair, resembled the surface of the moon – I looked up at the sky, the moon was full up there as well. I stayed put for several minutes, nothing changed. The sex proceeded so quietly it seemed like a scene from a silent movie; I got up when everything was over. Thinking to go on past the building, I started down the steep slope that led to it. Turning towards the main entrance, I found the waiter I’d seen sitting on his bed moments before, in the same posture but on a small stone bench, and still as porcelain. This stopped me in my tracks. I said hello; I could hardly just ignore him. He offered me a cigarette, which I refused. He apologized for the note, saying that I struck him as a person to be trusted, the only one on the whole island, he said, and that he had to tell someone, had to tell someone that he couldn’t take it any more, it was driving him mad, and that if he were to end up doing something he regretted, I could always say he’d warned me, and the note would be my proof. I asked him to be a little clearer, what did he mean exactly, and he pointed at the building behind him, again saying he couldn’t take it any more, that if they went on like this he’d end up doing something he regretted. ‘She’s my wife. You’d be hard-pressed to tell at the moment, but we are married. The very first chance she had, she got it on with that guy. We’ve been here over a week, making the place ready for you lot, and she and him have been at it constantly.’ He started telling me how much he liked his job, serving the food, laying tables, checking dishes, cleaning the limescale off the glasses before putting them out, and cooking and making bread; in Uruguay he had been a first class baker, he knew how to make all different kinds of breads, he said, and at this calmed down somewhat, before coming out with certain things I found unsettling, such as: ‘Life is a layer of soil no bigger than a dirty napkin,’ and ‘God is a dishwashing machine, the big dishwashing machine,’ then adding that in Argentina he’d worked as a pastry chef, and that ‘intelligence is the final barrier to be demolished,’ and that he sometimes felt afraid, very afraid, and that at that particular moment he was ‘on the very cliffs of fear,’ and even these latter statements, though including no mention of dirty napkins or God or dishwashing machines, unsettled me all the same, and then, suddenly addressing me more formally, he said he’d seen my remarks on the Net-Thinking panel, well, he hadn’t seen them directly, but in the kitchens while watching the talk on his tablet as he cooked dinner. ‘It was me who sent the tweet, “Go, chavón! So with you on all of that.” Remember, mister? I thought you really hit the nail on the head there. I never knew that about large animals in isolated communities shrinking, and smaller ones growing gigantic, and all because of survival, you could have said “getting bigger” but you said “growing gigantic” and that’s just perfect, perfectly put, the exact same thing’s happened to me, back in Argentina my wife and I had a very active social life, we were always going out with friends, going to dinner, family barbecues, but when the crash happened and we had to emigrate to Spain, leaving all our friends and family behind, we came to form a kind of island together, a big island, because as you know when it comes to people, the smaller an island, the harder it is to inhabit, and in the end, just as you, sir, said during that talk, the strong grow weak and the weak grow gigantic. In the same way, my wife, who was the weak one back in Argentina, is gigantic now, while me, I’m wasting away. The things you said during the talk, sir, made everything clear to me. I’m sorry, I’m crying now, I just don’t know how it’s come to this, would you like a cigarette?’ Again I said no. ‘I met my wife in Uruguay, in Cabo Polonio, which is this beautiful place by the sea, I was twenty-two and had a summer job in a hotel, the only hotel still going there, I was trying to put a little money aside. Paula – that’s her name – who can’t have been more than sixteen at the time, showed up one day with her parents and her younger brother, great little guy he was; I remember taking their bags up to the suite on the top floor, and then seeing Paula go straight through to the living area, picking up the remote control and flicking through till she came to the Savage Nature channel, at which point she takes out a box of felt-tip pens and a sketch pad buried at the bottom of a holdall with their swimming costumes in it and, leaving the TV on, she goes down to the pool, finds herself a lounger and puts her headphones in. I go over to her, ask if I can bring her a soft drink, and she, without a word of reply, opens the pad – a big one, A3 – shoves her little brother away, who’s been tugging on her bikini bottoms non-stop to get her to go in the water with him, takes the lids off the pens and starts drawing the hotel. I ask her what she’s drawing, and she doesn’t answer at first, but then, taking out the right headphone, says to me she draws whatever she feels like drawing, and what she feels like drawing at this particular moment is a dream, an eternal dream, that’s how she puts it, “I’m drawing an eternal dream,” and I, having had express orders from the boss to look after these people because they happen to be relations of his, decide to bring her a soft drink, and then Paula goes on to spend the whole rest of the morning and afternoon not moving an inch, immersed in her drawing, and when it comes time for supper and I go up to take their orders, the mother says to me that Paula still hasn’t come back, she must be down by the pool still, and that I should take her a sandwich, and on the TV in the living area I see some animals, similar to reindeer, and they mate very briefly before going their separate ways, and I take Paula her sandwich and see she hasn’t touched the drink, I don’t know what she drank that whole day, nothing I suppose, the pens are scattered all around the lounger with the lids off and her fingers are covered in ink, and I step on one of the pens, a red one, it splits but this doesn’t faze her in the slightest, I know it was red because the ink went all over the sole of my shoe and I spent the next few days going around leaving red marks on the hotel floors, one of the cleaning ladies pointed it out to me and the boss made me go and buy new shoes, the hotel only gave you one pair of shoes with your uniform, you had to just get on with it, and so, like I was saying, I take the sandwich out to the pool, music’s still blaring out of her headphones, I don’t know what she’s listening to, something light and very orchestral, probably one of those Sinatra knock-offs, where I come from they’re everywhere, and, taking the plate and putting it on the low table next to her, she smiles at me and, taking out her headphones, says: “I’m going up to watch the birds migrating on the Savage Nature channel,” and leaves her sandwich right where it is. That night the mother calls down to reception asking for a light breakfast to be brought early the next morning, at eight, and so there I am the next morning at eight sharp, and I go in, and the parents and the brother are asleep but not Paula, Paula’s in the living area, sitting in the dark watching TV, the Savage Nature channel, face bathed in the metallic-blue light you get from old Uruguayan TV sets, she looks like she hasn’t been to bed, and some birds, says a voice off-screen, are undertaking a transcontinental migration, they migrate without knowing why they do it, the experts don’t understand it either, there are disagreements over whether climate change is to blame, in reality nobody understands anything, and Paula doesn’t notice me come in, I go away again and not long after that she’s out by the pool once more – see what I’m saying? – she was always out by the pool, there on that same lounger, drawing with all those different felt-tips, and she goes on drawing the outside of the hotel, an ‘eternal dream’, as she’d called it, and inside each of the windows she draws these intricate scenes, but when I take a closer look I see they aren’t domestic scenes, and they aren’t your usual kind of summer scenes either, they’re set exclusively on the moon: each and every one of the rooms has the surface of the moon inside it, and an astronaut, the same one, hitting a golf ball, and that’s all, and I say to myself this girl is lo-co, and off I go again, and come evening, when I take them their supper, they’re all sitting together at the table and I witness a family fight, the mother tells Paula she doesn’t want her watching the Savage Nature channel any more, there’s been quite enough avian migrations for one holiday, and that the title itself says it all, that channel is for sa-va-ges, and Paula bursts out crying and runs out of the suite, I finish serving them, it’s a few more minutes before I’m all done, and then I go out and find her on one of the landings, the one between second and first floor, she’s sitting there crying, I ask if she’s okay, though she obviously isn’t, and she tells me she can’t stand her mother any more, calls her a tyrant and says that on top of that she’s had breast implants, more than anything in the world she hates these new breasts of her mother’s, she had nursed at a pair of breasts that didn’t exist any more, they were simply something else now, it was like those new breasts had been a way of blotting her out, the daughter, forever, like a way of blotting out her birth, her first words, her first steps, and, in short, everything that made her the person she was today, and that, truth be told, her mother had done it because she hated her daughter too, and I have no idea what to say to this, the things she’s saying are hardly normal but that doesn’t mean they don’t make sense, eventually I get her to come down to the kitchens with me, I cook a steak for her, one of the staff steaks, not quite the same quality as the food we served guests but, you know, acceptable, and she wolfs it down before asking for a glass of milk, drinking milk with your dinner is for gringos or little children, I say, but that’s what she wants, a glass of milk to wash her steak down, fine, no problem, I go get the milk, and then pull up a stool and sit next to her, behind us the frying pan is sizzling, there’s smoke coming off it, I tell her it’s steam dropping into the oil from the extractor hood though in fact it’s cockroaches clambering up the side of the pan and then having no way to get back out again and getting fried, and when she finishes eating I say why doesn’t she come down to my room in the basement, nobody’ll bother us there, and she says, Okay, and the first thing she does when we get there is to turn the TV on, again hammering at the remote until she finds Savage Nature, she then asks me to turn the light off, and we sit in silence watching the birds migrate across the screen, and she says: See, these birds don’t get it either. Don’t get what? I say. They don’t get why they migrate, she says, but they do it all the same, and then she says that what she wants to do is leave, go away, away from her family, and then we kiss; it’s intense, her initiating the whole thing, and we spend the rest of the night making plans for our joint getaway, like the birds, she says, and keeps on saying, like the birds, and this all happened four years ago now, and look,’ he gestured to the building once more, ‘now here I am on this island, getting smaller all the time, shrinking while she and that other rat are growing gigantic, and,’ he says, ‘she’s pregnant, to top it off she’s pregnant, we’re due to have a baby girl in just over a month’s time.’
