From Here To There
by Luisa Valenzuela
Translated by Jonathan Tittler
Feline Itinerary
I
was a shipwreck on Lake Titicaca - Nicanor Parra
Forgiving everything I shall go out and
populate the world with deathcats. That's certainly required in Rome,
for example, or in Chucuito: there people don't die they morph eternally
like flies they morph. In Chucuito I saw an old lady turn into a stone,
a stone into an old lady, old lady into stone, and so forth until all
the ruins were human beings and the human beings, ruins. As it always
goes. But I will be magnanimous and making the enormous sacrifice I
will take the cats to Chucuito so they eat the fish in the lake, which
are dead, and fulfill their destiny.
I wonder if the cats will be affected
by the altitude. Cats crazed like birds that take flight for lack of
oxygen and lose their notion of night and confuse the lake with a piece
of liver. Titicaca is not for everyone: souls resuscitate there, that
may well spoil my deathcats.
One place I won't take them is Buenos
Aires, they'll fight with my mother's cats. They'll hunt down the sparrows
bequeathed by Sarmiento, they'll work to promote the divorce laws.
I'm not averse to alien dramas or leaf
storms. But I don't want them to touch my poor little country and produce
catastrophes. A single cat would be adequate for the distinguished task
of stopping the wind. The things that happen there can't be seen in
the street, they're secrets strung together of silence with an invisible
warp and a mysterious weft. You see nothing at the corner of Suipacha
and Corrientes even though everything is happening and Argentina is
burning. A city of turned backs, growing cautious, in a country that
is starting to disarm in order to discover its form. The moment to take
my cats with their tenacious eyes has not yet arrived. The danger of
these beasts is not in death, as their name would appear to indicate,
but in something subtler and more damaging: clairvoyance.
Some are here, others have alrady gone,
few are those that know about the subterranean strings being pulled
in order to shape our lives. Underground there flow rivers of lava,
a little constricted until they find an opening, that minimal crater,
and the eruption begins, with fire and brimstone, if only of short duration.
But the sediment remains, the river keeps running, and I don't think
it's a good idea to open the floodgates yet for the deathcats' mad onslaught.
I know the secret of dormant volcanoes: they need to take their time,
with plenty of heat and some tears. I also know about the other side:
the magnificent fertility after the cataclysm, the primordial power
of ash.
You have to leave them alone so they discover
their eyes and all their rights. Just imagine if I arrive with the cats:
they'll put a roof over Buenos Aires. From the storm sewer openings
will arise a most thunderous music and you'll see light shows of hunger
and misery, of living protoplasm and parturient women. Imagine me arriving
with my cats, the people aghast if it all turned dark and the colored
lights went on. I don't want to see images cast on the Bank of London
or the white walls of City Hall. Even though they'd be absolutely beautiful
projections, scenes of the sugar harvest in Tucumán and Salta,
brushfires in Mendoza. Everything that is about to be, that is being,
that is desired by some and counter-attacked by others, visible on the
walls. Cats are like that, they unleash fury, they reveal motives and
then nothing is to be gained by keeping still. Which is to say that
we would be deafened by music, and a heap of reflectors would hurt our
eyes by changing colors or by their erratic interplay. Stroboscopic
lights for you, Buenos Aires, to a beat that is not the tango, pretty
foreign movements. And faithful pedestrians would lose their sense of
distance and at last there would be a longed-for closeness among men.
Or among women. Or among men and women unfurling the sacred banners
of good manners.
Buenos Aires does not deserve such a psychedelic confrontation. It has
done nothing to deserve it: neither as a recompense nor as some sort
of punishment.
That's why the deathcats will catch the
jet for Chucuito, they'll cross the lake to their kingdom of death in
Tihuanaco. And later they'll forget about America in search of other
paths no less fascinating or unknown. And me always herding them with
an umbrella, with a long shawl and a red cat o'nine tails which they
ignore.
* * *
But,
as we all know, it's not easy to travel. Moving means discovering the
truth behind landscapes, smashing laboratories to see what's inside.
* * *
Attention,
attention, the voice shouted in the park. The percentage of DDT in mother's
milk is on the rise. I am happy to have come to this place that has
announcements for my delectation. From now on there will be no nursing
cats; the only ones allowed to nurse will be fleas for we must do away
with all bloodsucking beings, bloodsuckers, the few and unnamable that
learn to nourish themselves on life-giving serum instead of dying.
Blood only serves to let you move about
fancy-free in the world, gushing and running unfettered by veins and
arteries.
I like it bubbling, I love it like a useless friend. Uncoagulable, yeah,
eschewing scabs: those great isolators.
Isolators I need, but in the sense of
insulators: an epidermic layer so the wind doesn't irritate my unfleshed
nerves - at the level of my flowery self, concupiscent but very haughty.
Not like some others who, skinned alive, go around squawking.
* * *
APOLOGY OF TRUE FLIGHT
At
night I hear drums, the noise of the street deafens me. A loud ringing
calls me to a hanging. It's nice to feel yourself accompanied like that,
cradled by the sweet drums of the noose.
I'm going to bet against another aspect
of my identity. The everyday part of myself that is afraid of suffering
and death. The part that is scared, perhaps that which is most alive
because it's cowardly. It must be that the drums are coming to get me,
it must be I needed them at some time; in some corner of the house,
in any part of the world, the gallows are erected and await me.
One shouldn't be fatalistic. If I hear
drums at night I may as well take to the streets and make as if I were
searching, fleeing.
Running away isn't always an act of cowardice,
at times it takes great courage to put one foot in front of the other
and move forward. No one runs away backward as one ought to flee, so
no one knows what retreat is, the ignoble pleasure of retreat: to hurtle
backward in time in order not to have to confront the unknown.
No one really flees, it's not a matter
of saving your life to keep on dying.
I can attest to it, your job is just to make up the tribunals.
I've painted my face for the effect, my skin is now white as chalk.
But you must hurry: don't forget I'm running against time, my race is
backward. Somewhere the gallows await me, the drums are beating.
* * *
1970 - Iowa City, NY,
Mex. D.F., Buenos Aires - 1971
1998 - Auckland - 1999
(Translated by Jonathan
Tittler, from the novel Deathcats)
