After spending ten years running away from her childhood home and being shuffled from a few more by love and war, Carrington finally found her place in the world in 1942. Joanna Moorhead describes Carrington’s wonder the best in The Surreal Life of Leonora Carrington:  “Everything, for Leonora, was new:  from the appearance and demeanor of the people, she said later, to the variety of foods, plants and animals, to the landscape and the contact with the dead….” (173). Even so, it wasn’t exactly a smooth transition. Her marriage to Leduc was nosediving pretty fast as he picked up his old social circle and left Carrington alone most of the time. While this dynamic was typical in New York City, she was able to distract herself with the French Surrealists living there in exile, including Max Ernst. Mexico held nothing but strangers.

Carrington wasn’t one to be thwarted, though, and soon located her own circle to revive. Surrealist poet Benjamin Péret had been in Mexico City since the end of 1941, and when Carrington reunited with him, she met his lover, Remedios Varo. Animal lover, mystic painter, and fiercely intellectual while intuitive, Varo and Carrington would become soul sisters, and Carrington found much strength in their burgeoning friendship, including leaving Leduc to go crash with Péret and Varo. There, Carrington met the other European expatriates, and also forged a lifelong important friendship with the Hungarian photographer Kati Horna.

The friendships with Varo and Horna were seminal to Carrington’s development during this period. For the first time, she had friends who supported her endeavors on equal grounding and without the competition and condescension of the Surrealist male gaze. As a result, the trio (both in their friendships and individualities) created a feminine artistic space built upon deconstructing religion and reconstructing alchemy, which has gone on to shape Feminism and the notions of the collective art sisterhood and mythos. These three women  would collaborate and synthesize their worlds together, and was the focus of Surreal Friends, exhibited in England during 2010, and also at the center of In Wonderland: The Surrealist Adventures of Women Artists in Mexico and the United States during 2012.

Carrington would also meet her second husband and life-partner, Chiki Schwartz. Unlike Ernst and Leduc, this marriage would be one of understanding and support, and enhanced for Carrington by motherhood. The Schwartzes had two sons, and Carrington was as devoted to them as she was to her canvases. Family and friends finally found, Carrington lived out the rest of her days in Mexico, painting her best and most complex work, and outliving almost all the Surrealists until she died in 2011 at the age of 94. (Dorothea Tanning followed in 2012 at 102. There’s a really crass joke about the resource of longevity of Ernst’s lovers, but I like to think in their study of the mystic and arcane maybe, just maybe, the source of the Elixir Vitae that kept them alive for so long came from their devotion to their work.)

This is a pretty terse summation for the longest and most enriching part of Carrington’s life, but these key points all culminate in the reoccurring themes in the last ten stories. In this final batch, Carrington’s preoccupation with storytelling during this period seems to fall into a few categories: fables and farces in and around Mexico, dark and mystical conversations with aging and mortality, and some good ole time absurdities that read more like children’s stories akin to Roald Dahl, such as “The Sand Camel?” and “Mr. Gregory’s Fly,” written somewhere around the 1970s.

Bird Bath (Baño de pájaros) by Leonora Carrington, 1974

Only two of the ten stories here are blatantly set in Mexico: “A Mexican Fairy Tale” and “How to Start a Pharmaceuticals Business.” The latter is a satire about a far-future Mexico deprived of worldwide communication and the resulting society’s enjoyment of this new wave of silence. It is a typical Carrington story in that it features a female narrator (in this one, Carrington identifies herself by name in the dialogue) given a task from a higher-up, and just sort of waltzes into a bizarre chain of events while trying to complete her mission that includes grave-fitting and lottery winnings. However, the prize was not a cash pot, but a tiny coffin containing the shrunken and stinking embalmed corpse of Joseph Stalin, or possibly Rasputin. In either case, a rando pharmacist feeds her a strand of hair from the homunculus’s mustache, which acts as a powerful and instantaneous pain reliever. She distills its secrets and opens the largest pharmaceutical business in Mexico.

“How to Start a Pharmaceuticals Business” is misanthropic, grotesque, and introduces a new theme that characterizes almost all of the stories from her later life: death, aging, and rejuvenation. These tropes weave in and out of the majority of stories like “The Neutral Man,” “Et in Bellicus Lunarum Medicalis,” “My Flannel Knickers” “The Happy Corpse,” and “My Mother Is a Cow.” “My Flannel Knickers,” and “My Mother is a Cow” stand out to me the most because of their ambiguous but axiomatic preoccupations with immortality such as: “Anybody over forty and toothless should be sensible enough to be quietly knitting an original new body, instead of wasting the cosmic wool.”

The most interesting and quintessential tale from this period is “A Mexican Fairy Tale.” She riffs on Quetzalcoatl, the MesoAmerican primordial feathered serpent God, and mythpunks it with the Western notion of the chemical marriage in 1940s Mexico. Quetzalcoatl is a hard god to pin down, but I believe the version that spoke most to Carrington has to be his form as a vegetation god. Her love of food expresses itself through this version, and the pages are scattered with mangos, melons, maguey, tortillas, chilies, and corn. In between the fruits and vegetables is a new bestiary filled with North American animals like pigs, jaguars, lizards, black moles, and tropical birds whose wings spin so fast you “could see through them.”

It’s one of the longer stories in the entire collection and diverges from her usual formula to depict the tale from two perspectives: pig-herder Juan, and Maria, the daughter of a surly man (Don Pedro), who loans Juan a ladder. Juan needs the ladder to investigate the mysterious crying he hears from the nearby ruins, but to gain Don Pedro’s trust, lies that it’ll be used to pick mangos. When Juan doesn’t return on time, Maria runs away from her father’s home to find Juan.

Two young people are lured by various circumstances to an ancient ruin, and there they find all sorts of anthropomorphic gods that ultimately capture them, bind them, and throw them into a flame together to transmogrify the couple into a conjunctio and unifies the narrative into one voice. Carrington calls these united souls Quetzalcoatl, and then transforms the entire, strange ritual into that of a chemical marriage in which to be truly in love two must become one. It’s a sagacious romance, and I think it is one of Carrington’s best tales.

Now that we’ve reached the end of this reading experiment, I have to admit that I wasn’t pulled in by each and every tale. At times, certain tropes like being invited into a house, or being summoned by a superior, or always just sort of stumbling into a bit of weirdness became redundant to me. Obviously, this method of manifestation must have been very important to Carrington, perhaps symbolizing how life is dealt by chance and favor. But it almost took on the same tedium as when a story begins with someone waking up from a dream. Sometimes the stories’ conclusions were unsatisfactory to me, and at other times I was indifferent to the zig-zag logic of the surrealistic visions, perhaps because the language was so clipped and dry. But maybe it’s just you aren’t meant to read Carrington’s work one after another in a marathon fashion, as I have done. In any case, what is charming, and made me ignore these personal pet peeves, is that these weaknesses are also her strengths.  When they are utilized to their full potential, as in “White Rabbits,” “A Mexican Fairy Tale,” “The Sisters,” and “As They Rode Along the Edge” to name a few, they are unforgettable and haunting masterpieces of the auto-imagination, and show just how far art can go towards reinventing and empowering the individual throughout her life.

So with the collected stories concluded, we have one more round in this read-along. Next up will be the novella Down Below and her children’s book Milk of Dreams, both published by NYRB classics, as well as a look at Joanna Moorhead’s seminal biography The Surreal Life of Leonora Carrington, which has been a valuable resource throughout these past three readings.  We will even have an additional giveaway, so stay tuned for further surrealistic explorations.

____

^[1] Just to be extra nerdy, I did consult Silver Press and have placed “The Sand Camel” and “Mr. Gregory’s Fly” as having been written somewhere around the 1970s. In contrast, “Jemima and the Wolf” was written around 1941, which explains why it seems to embody all of the characteristics and motifs of her earlier fiction.

The post Hyenas, Horses, and Rabbits, Oh My! Part III appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

The name of Alfonso Reyes reoccurs throughout any discussion of Latin American literature. In his native Mexico, he is considered a major 20th century author, and more than one street has been named for him there. Roberto Bolano referred to him in the short list of those writers he included in his own personal canon, Borges celebrated him as the greatest of all Spanish prose stylists. And yet, for all that, his work has gone virtually untranslated in English. As near as I can tell, “Major Aranda’s Hand,” published by Alberto Manguel in the second of his marvelous Black Water anthologies, is the only piece by Reyes in English.

After reading Bolano I became curious about Reyes and sought out his stories, largely in vain. So I decided to try translating some of his fiction myself, since I didn’t think it acceptable for me to remain wholly ignorant of him. The decision to translate “La Cena” was largely dictated by the preeminent place it occupies in Reyes’ corpus; “The Supper,” written when he was still a student and published in 1912, is a dreamlike story reminiscent in certain superficial ways to the work of some of the Continental decadents but, in its basic character, thoroughly original. Reading a later work, such as Carlos Fuentes’ beautiful novella Aura, echoes of “The Supper” return again and again. The ghostliness of Juan Rulfo’s novel Pedro Paramo likewise has a Reyes-like air to it. It may be that it was Reyes who made it possible for Mexican writers to adopt a less rigid idea of realism, and to escape the confines of a literary conservatism that endured well into Bolano’s time.

– Michael Cisco, Translator

***

Supper, which delights us and inspires love.

– San Juan de la Cruz

I was running through unfamiliar streets. My destination seemed to recede before my steps, and the appointed hour was already humming in the public clocks. The streets stood empty. Electric lights danced, streaking like snakes, before my eyes. Circular plazas were constantly springing up before me, their vegetation endowed with an unreal elegance in the night’s artificial light. I believe I passed an incalculable number of towers — I don’t know whether they were among the houses or the squares — flaunting to the four winds their four round clock faces, illuminated from within.

I hurried, egged on by a superstitious presentiment about the time. If the nine strokes of the bell, I told myself, surprise me before I get the door knocker in my hand, something bad will happen. And hurrying frantically, I remembered having hurried once before at this same hour to this place and with similar eagerness. When?

Finally the pleasures of this false memory absorbed me so completely that I slipped into my normal pace without noticing. And by and by, in the lapses of my thoughts, I saw that I was still travelling, and there unfolded before me new perspectives of electric lights, of small planted squares, of illuminated clocks … I don’t know how much time went by, it was as if I were asleep

and sick, struggling to breathe.

Suddenly, nine sonorous chimes slithered across my epidermis with a metallic chill. My eyes, even as my hopes failed, fell on the nearest door: this was my destination.

Then, pausing to compose my spirit, I reviewed my reasons for coming here. For yesterday, the postman had brought me a brief and suggestive invitation. In a corner of the paper there was written, by hand, the seal of a house. It was dated the previous day. The letter said only:

“Dona Magdalena and her daughter Amalia hope you shall dine with them tomorrow, at nine in the evening. Ah, if he does not fail us! …”

Not one letter more.

I always fall in with unexpected experiences. This case, besides, presented a singular attraction: the tone, familiar and respectful at once, with which this unnamed person was addressed by these unknown ladies; the morose “Ah, if he does not fail us! …”, so vague and so sentimental, that seemed suspended before an abyss of confessions, all combined to decide me. I went, anxious with an unnameable emotion. When, at times, in my nightmares, I evoke again that fantastic night (whose fantasy is assembled out of quotidian things and whose equivocal mystery grows from the humble root of what is possible), I seem to rush panting along avenues of clocks and towers, solemn as sphinxes lining the aisle of some Egyptian temple.

The door opened. I had been facing away, toward the street, when a square of light suddenly fell on the ground, and in it my shadow was joined by the shadow of an unknown woman.

I turned around: with the light shining behind her and into my dazzled eyes, to me this woman was nothing more than a silhouette, on which my imagination could paint various hypothetical physiognomies, without any one of them corresponding to her contour, and in this state I stammered some salutations and explanations.

– Enter please, Alfonso.

And I entered, astonished at hearing myself summoned as if into my own home. The vestibule disappointed me. Upon the romantic words of the invitation (at least, they seemed romantic to me), I had founded hopes of an encounter with an ancient house, full of tapestries, old portraits and huge armchairs; an ancient house, lacking in style, but full of respectability. But instead of this, I was confronted with a diminutive vestibule and with a flimsy, unelegant staircase; which foretold the cramped, modern dimensions I could expect in the rest of the house. The flooring was of polished wood; the few bits of furniture had the chill luxury of things from New York, and on the wall, covered in bright green paper, there grimaced, with unpardonable indications of impertinence, two or three Japanese masks. I even began to doubt … But then I raised my eyes and my calm returned: before me, dressed in black, slender, dignified, the woman who had come to guide me pointed to the door of the salon. Her silhouette had taken on a coloring of features; her face had no special significance for me, its only noteworthy aspect being a reverent expression; her chestnut locks, done up in a somewhat slack way, completed the formation of a strange conviction in my mind: it all seemed to knead and mold the suggestion of a name.

– Amalia? — I asked.

– Yes. — And it seemed as if I had answered my own question.

The salon, as I had imagined, was small. The decorations, which seemed to answer my previous expectations, clashed infamously with the decor of the vestibule. Here were the honorable tapestries and the massive armchairs, the bearskin on the floor, the mirror, the chimney, the vases; the piano complete with candlesticks and full of photographs and statuettes — the piano that no one ever touched –, and, beside it stood the prominent easel, with an enlarged and obviously retouched portrait; it showed a gentleman with a parted beard and a vulgar mouth.

Dona Magdalena, who was already waiting for me installed in a red armchair, was also dressed in black and bore on her bosom one of those colossal jewels of our ancestors’ time: a glass orb with a portrait inside, surrounded by a ring of gold. The mystery of the family resemblance took hold of me. My eyes shifted, unconsciously, from Dona Magdalena to Amalia, and from the portrait to Amalia. Dona Magdalena, noting this, abetted me in my investigations with some timely explanations.

It would have been more proper for me to have been awkward, expressing surprise, so as to prompt an explanation. But Dona Magdalena and her daughter Amalia hypnotized me, from the first moment, with their parallel gazes. Dona Magdalena was a woman of sixty; so she passed on to her daughter the bother of initiating me. Amalia conversed with me; Dona Magdalena watched me; I was completely exposed to the whims of chance.

It occurred to the mother — this was de rigeur — to remind us that it was already time for dinner. In the dining room the conversation became more general and topical. I ended by convincing myself that these ladies had wanted nothing more than to invite me to dine, and at the second glass of Chablis I felt myself overflow in the perfect egoism of a body charged with generous spirits. I conversed, I laughed and displayed all my ingenuity, inwardly trying to play down the strangeness of my situation. Up to that time the ladies had been making an effort to seem nice to me; from then on I felt I was striving to make myself agreeable to them.

The reverent aspect of Amalia’s face migrated, at moments, to her mother’s face. The entirely physiognomic look of satisfaction on Dona Magdalena’s face descended, at times, over her daughter’s face. It seemed that these two attitudes floated in the ambience, shifting from one face to the other.

I never could have anticipated the pleasures of this conversation. Although there were vague hints at I don’t know what evocations of Sudermann, with frequent recourse to the difficult terrain of domestic responsibilities and — as was natural with women of strong spirit — sudden flashes of Ibsen, I was enjoying myself as much as if I were visiting the home of some widowed aunt, in company with some friend of my early childhood, now becoming an old maid.

At first, the conversation concerned itself entirely with commerical matters, economics, in which the two women seemed to take pleasure. There is no better subject than this when one are invited to the table as an outsider in an unfamiliar house.

Later, things took on a different aspect. Everything we said seemed to fly away, like petitions dispatched into the distance. Everything moved toward an end that I could not foresee. In Amalia’s face there appeared, at last, a pointed, disturbed smile. She began visibly struggling against some inner temptation. Her mouth trembled, at times, so anxiously did she speak, and she ended her every phrase with a sigh. Her eyes widened suddenly, fixed with an expression of fright or abandon on the wall just over my shoulders, so that more than once, rattled, I turned my head to look myself. But Amalia did not seem aware of the alarm she caused me. She went on with her smiles, her frights and her sighs, while I shuddered every time she looked over my head.

Finally, between Amalia and Dona Magdalena, I was caught in a true colloquy of sighs. I was already getting tired of them. Near the center of the table, and, by the way, so low that it was a constant inconvenience, hung the lamp with two lights in it. And upon the walls it projected the faded shadows of the two women, in such distorted shapes that it was not possible to trace the correspondance between shadows and persons. A heavy depression invaded me, and a spirit of tedium was taking hold. Was that what drew from me this unexpected invitation:

– Let’s go into the garden.

The prospect of novelty revived my spirits. I was conducted across a patio whose cleanliness and sobriety put me in mind of a hospital. In the obscurity of the night I could make out a little garden plot, small and artificial, like those in cemeteries.

We sat beneath the arbor. The ladies began telling me the names of flowers that I could not see, relishing the cruel delight of quizzing me later about what they had told me. Ill-equipped to deal with such eccentric experiences as this, my imagination would not stop racing. They only permitted me to listen and gave me barely time enough to answer. The ladies were smiling (I guessed) and fully aware of the state I was in. I was beginning to confuse their words with my fantasy. Their botanical explanations, as I remember them now, seem as freakish as something out of a delirium: I believe I heard them telling me about flowers that bite and about flowers that kiss; of stems that uproot themselves and climb your body, like serpents, up to the throat.

The darkness, the boredom, the dinner, the Chablis, the mysterious conversation about flowers that I couldn’t see (and which I don’t believe they really had in that stunted garden), all conspired together to lull me to sleep; and so I fell asleep on the bench, beneath the vine.

– The poor captain! — I heard when I opened my eyes –. Full of illusions, going off to Europe. The light was taken from him.

Around me the same darkness still reigned. A warm breeze shook the arbor. Dona Magdalena and Amalia were still conversing with me, resigned to overlook my silence. It seemed to me that they had exchanged seats during my brief dream; that was how it seemed to me …

– He was a captain of artillery — Amalia told me –; young and handsome as they come.

Her voice trembled.

And at that moment, something happened that would have seemed natural to me under other circumstances, but which just then startled me and made my heart leap into my mouth. The ladies, until then, had only been perceptible to me by the murmur of their conversation and by their physical presence. At that instant someone in the house opened a window, and without warning the light fell on the faces of the women. And — oh heaven! — I saw them light up suddenly, automatically, suspended in the air — their black garments indistinguishable in the blackness of the garden — and with that reverent expression welded into their features. They were like the illuminated faces in the paintings of Echave the Elder, like stars, enormous and fantastic.

I jumped to my feet, unable to control myself any longer.

– Wait — Dona Magdalena cried then –; you have not yet heard the worst.

And immediately, speaking to Amalia: — My daughter, continue; this young man cannot go away and leave us now without hearing it all.

– All right — Amalia said –: the captain went to Europe. He bypassed Paris that night, for he was summoned to Berlin with the utmost urgency. But he yearned with all his heart to see Paris. In Germany he had to study something, I don’t know what, having to do with the manufacture of cannons … On the following day, a boiler exploded, and he lost his sight.

I was going crazy. I wanted to ask questions; what questions would you have asked? I wanted to speak; what would you have said? What was happening to me? Why had I been invited here?

The window was closed, and the faces of the women turned invisible again. The voice of the daughter resounded:

– Ay! Then, and only then, was he summoned to Paris. To Paris, that he had wanted with all his heart! Picture him passing beneath the Arc de Triomphe de l’Etoile: a blind man passing beneath the Arc de Triomphe de l’Etoile, guessing at everything around him … But you will tell him about Paris, won’t you? You will describe the Paris he could not see. It would do him so much good!

(“Ah, if he is not missing!” … “It would do him so much good!”)

And then they dragged me to the drawing room, carrying me by the arms like an invalid. My feet were tangled in vines and shoots from the garden; there were leaves in my hair.

– He is frozen here — they said, showing me a portrait. It was a soldier. He wore a helmet, a white cape, silver braid on the sleeves and cufflinks like three trumpet valves. His beautiful eyes, beneath the perfect wings of his eyebrows, held a singular pride. I looked at the ladies: the two of them smiled as if with relief at having completed a mission. I examined the portrait again; I looked at myself in the mirror; I verified the resemblance: I was like a caricature of this portrait. The portrait had an inscription and a signature. The handwriting was the same as the writing on the anonymous invitation I had received that morning.

The portrait fell from my hands, as the two ladies gazed upon me with a comical reverence. A noise sounded in my ears, something like a crystal chandelier shattering against the ground.

And I ran, crossing unknown streets. Rays of light danced before my eyes. The clocks in their towers spied on me, concatenations of light … Oh, heaven! When I reached, panting, the familiar boards of my door, nine sonorous chimes shook the night.

There were leaves in my hair; in my buttonhole, a modest little flower that I had not picked.

The post The Supper appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

The following story originally appeared on Palabras Errantes. Visit the Palabras Errantes page where you can also read the original version in Spanish.

***

A, of the many entrances: its walls are made of doors and the inhabitants all have a window to the front – whether painted or not we do not know.

B, which is mounted on vast wooden platforms and pulled back and forth across the plain by beasts of burden.

C, whose scholars have learned how to control light: citizens can dress in white and shine like a supernova, blend with the shadows on the darkest night, or be a rainbow.

D: the dazzling, the devastated, the divided, the darkling, the durable, the desperate or, more likely, the disappeared.

I

Horatius Kustos came in search of “the famous Latin Cities”. We welcomed him at the town’s only lodgings. I say we, because someone had to go with Septimus, my brother. He is the mayor, following family tradition dating back to the tenth century, but we only chose him and nominated him because he is shy and always avoids getting involved with or indeed speaking to anyone.

As a result, I took charge of the conversation. We sat at the table where Grandma Flavia used to sit until last year, that is until she fell into the ditch and broke her neck: her long-suffering face gazed out at us from the portrait of her that Valerius, the innkeeper, had framed and hung on the wall following the accident. We all knew that the two had been – vainly – in love since the sixties but since they had never even kissed (Grandma’s various guards all agree on this) the family honour was never in doubt and no action was taken against him. Septimus looked at the portrait in order not to look Horatius Kustos in the eye.

Now, I have made enquiries and am given to understand that Kustos – who is thin, and wears a beard and a nervous air – usually presents himself just as he did with us: as an explorer or investigator, a man dedicated to finding and recording the strange, bizarre, and unusual, in order to tell others about it.

“I have been in Mexico and Ulan Bator, in Hollywood and Shangri-La (which is not at all what they say it is, but never mind), and everywhere I have discovered something new, and returned with tales to tell.”

All I could think was that this must be the most absurd job there is, and I told him so. He began to explain something about the value of his discoveries, but I paid no attention.

Then, instead of shutting up, Kustos started going on about the mystery (as he called it) of the Latin Cities, which obviously are thousands of miles away from Italy, and which nobody admits to having visited. In these cities, Latin is spoken, “though it is a dead language, at least in the rest of the world”, and their names all begin with a single letter.

“Every time I found out a bit more information about them, I had the same thought: what must such places be like?”

***

The brothel city of E is so called by consensus of its governing factions: they first considered Ecstasy, Erotica, Eden.

In the city of F, all the names – of people, places, objects – are random strings of numbers and letters: formulas (hence the name) that only the gods know how to decipher.

G (they say) would be the city of the gophers (the animals or the messengers), who would govern without the grandees of the great houses and the government buildings realizing.

The city of H has just one inhabitant, whom no one has ever seen or heard: it is said he exists because he “throws rubbish or furniture at visitors” from the roofs of empty buildings.

II

“The tales of these cities are as laconic as they come. They look like they were written by an aphorist. I saw them for the first time on the internet…”

I told him that we don’t have those kind of devices here. That we are a conservative community and proud of it.

“What devices?” he answered. “Well, anyway. I’m used to finding myself in far-away or little-known places but this, I thought, is absurd. It’s not possible that there is nothing but these brief texts. So I said to myself: I have to go.”

Outside of the inn, the children from the One School were performing their daily exercises, marching first from north to south in a phalanx formation, and then from south to north in a legion formation (naturally, these were scaled-down formations, since we don’t have the thousands of children required to create a phalanx or legion like those of ancient times).

It has always moved me to see the tall crests on the helmets and the steel-tipped spears. This time I felt more overwhelmed than ever by the memory of my own pitched battles, the cries of victory, the firmness of the military calls, the smell of blood. Distracted by these recollections I was unable to interrupt Kustos, who carried on talking:

“Curiously enough, as well as the lack of available information, there was the fact that a strange group of cities seemed of no surprise to anyone in the circles I move in. That is, none of my colleagues displayed much interest when I asked them if they knew anything about the matter. Cities like these are nothing special, they told me. Still, I couldn’t take my mind off them. There is something different about them, I thought. And well, it is true: to start with, I am talking to you in Latin…”

“Not very well”, I told him, because his declinations were terrible.

“Is there somewhere that offers Latin classes for foreigners? It would be a great experience. I love language classes and I’m no poor student: as well as the usual languages I know Esperanto, Volapük, Arahuá, Tokipona, Tasmanian, Xulsolar, Bora-witoto…

***

I is, in fact, a very tall tower: each inhabitant resides on a floor measuring two metres square, which they must leave with great care if they want to make a visit.

J is a city with streets that curve like knives, where so many die. No one knows if the streets came before the murders, or if, on the contrary, the murderers refined their habitat over the centuries.

Every new-born baby in K is taken to the Registry Office where a judge puts on the record the secret cause of their arrest when they grow up.

L takes its name from the appearance from a distance of the city’s sole construction, the Wall, and of the Eleanos who live in its shadow.

III

“Here there are no schools for foreigners”, I said. “The fact is, and please don’t be offended, we don’t like them.”

At this point Septimus said something inaudible. He is incapable of speaking above a murmur (another reason why he is an excellent mayor: my brothers and I, I must admit, add to the arrogance and egoism of the family with our tendency to argue out loud, and we can’t tolerate anyone interfering in our discussions or affairs).

“What did you say?” Kustos asked him.

“Talk properly,” I told him.

It took us a while to understand him, however: the second time Septimus spoke even lower, the third he turned red and couldn’t even open his mouth, and so it went on for ten or twelve attempts. He has never been able to express himself normally. When we were at the School we studied physics for several years, and we took to calling Septimus “The Suspended Particle”.

I had to threaten him, saying I would get our cousin Plautus (now our chief of police) to beat him up, as he did almost every day when we were young. Septimus rarely says anything interesting, but Kustos seemed to have taken an interest in him… and, even though I was not particularly interested in Kustos, the rules of hospitality among our people have existed since the Circasian-Melanesian Invasion, and they have not been changed by the plagues of 900, 1324, 1558, 1789, 1925, 1977 or 2004, or the Edgarian Uprising, or the invasions from the outside world we have suffered since before all this. I won’t be the one to fail to follow the rules that have empowered my family, may Jupiter and God deliver me.

“So if you’re going to behave like a faggot or a pussy”, I yelled at him while I grabbed his shirt – though at bottom I was being quite kind to him – “and you’re not going to express yourself like a man…”

“I said”, Septimus whispered at last in an intelligible manner, his face red and swollen, “don’t be so rude to our guest.”

I felt my own face swell and turn red.

“What’s more”, Septimus continued, “I think you should tell him the whole story.”

***

The founder of M, perpetrator of terrible crimes, gave his name to the city. It will be a refuge for others, he said, where they can live in peace and follow their dreams.

M, the city of constant screaming.

No one knows if the city of N really exists or if it is perhaps a different city with a different name, but in disguise.

The city of Ñ isn’t where they say it is: at such-and-such a distance down such-and-such a road. Some believe it doesn’t actually exist. Others, that only its inhabitants exist and only recognize each other by the language they speak.

The city of O is populated, naturally, by fat and thin people: what unites them is their circular lives, which they begin and end as babies.

IV

“So there is a story too!” Kustos cried joyfully, and his poor Latin sounded to me like the voice of Hannibal at the gates.

I began to yell even louder, criticizing Septimus’ indiscretion. Then I gave him a good shake, dragging him from one side of the room to the other and knocking everything out the way. Three boys emerged from the next room and started cheering me on: it was Donte, Natalius and Justinus, grandsons of the innkeeper, who only stroked his beard and the few hairs remaining to him.

After a moment I recalled the rules of hospitality among our people, which have existed since the Circasian-Melanesian Invasion, etcetera, and I let go of Septimus. Kustos came to help him to his feet. His manner was so solicitous that something very strange occurred to me: that my brother actually inspired pity in him. I asked myself if this might be a general characteristic of Kustos’s countrymen (I don’t know where he is from; it appears no one knows) or an affectation peculiar to him. And to think that his name is of Greek origin!

Valerius the innkeeper brought a first aid kit (and Kustos used the word kit, in the barbarian tongue!) to treat a couple of minor scratches Septimus had suffered.

“Doesn’t being mayor mean I should get treated with a bit of respect?”

What an absurd question, I thought, but what he said next – in a weak voice but clearer than ever before – surprised me still further:

“I only accepted because I’m fond of you all. I didn’t expect you to treat me the way you do. I had other ambitions in life, you know?”

What lay at the bottom of such complaints? When had he ever received anything but affection from the whole family, despite who he was? Septimus did not continue because Kustos was finishing a couple of stitches his wound had required, so I took the opportunity to say:

“Since my brother can’t hold his tongue and since it is neither here nor there whether you know about these matters…”

And so Kustos understood that we would tell him more:

“The first thing I need to know is how you came to be here. You are closer to Kuchisake-onna than to Paraxiphos. Did you emigrate from Europe? Did you learn Latin from people who came from there? Did you wipe yourselves off the maps or were you never on them? I refer, of course to the… “official” maps, that is… those used in the “known” world… If you know what I mean?”

***

P has different reputations: good (prizes) and bad (perversions). The Peeans refuse to reveal the truth behind their heavy doors.

Some call Q a superfluous city, built just because, and wholly dispensable. Its skies, its cafés and its nightmares are unique in the world.

Other cities fear the people of R: they think of their red raiment, their rabid dogs, their raucous laughter, and their love of war.

Was the city of S founded by snakes, as they say? Instead of a central square they have a reptile house, which the people enter when old, never to emerge.

V

It was some time before Kustos tired of asking questions. What an insatiable character! I have never understood curiosity.

“We don’t know everything that you wish to learn”, Septimus began to reply, while Valerius cleared up the mess from my brief attack of annoyance and his grandsons served us wine, bread and cheese. I had signalled them not to serve the best, because that evening we had an event planned and we would be left short. “But there is more that you should know. Did you bring with you the information you read and that led you here?”

Horatius Kustos opened his traveller’s knapsack – of poor-quality but strong leather – and took out a sheet of paper folded in four. He unfolded it and read.

“It is really so little!”

“In the internet everything tends to be this short.”

“Is the internet a place, then?” I interjected. “Didn’t you say it was a device?”

“It is a little more complicated than that?”

“Is it a beautiful place?” asked Septimus. “An interesting one?”

“We can talk about this later, I promise”, said Kustos, and smiled. His smile seemed forced. Septimus made a face that to this day I still don’t think I can describe and (I’m certain) winked at Kustos.

At the time I didn’t think much of all this, because I was still appalled by the course taken by this meeting (which should have been nothing but a formality) and naturally I had no inkling of what was soon to come.

“First of all”, said my brother, “you need to know something that this information does not say. Did you notice that all these cities begin with a letter of the Latin alphabet?”

“Of course.”

“The classic, fundamental…”

“Except for the Ñ.”

“Yes, except for the Ñ, which is from a different language, if I am not mistaken”, said Septimus.

“Spanish”, I said. “A hybrid of Latin and some barbarian language or other.”

They paid no attention.

“The thing is”, said Septimus, “that Ñ also exists, but somewhere else: unlike the other cities, it is not to be found along the road to the south, the one you can see from here…”

“That should be my route?”

“Yes, but do not be distracted. Listen. Beyond the road to the south there are others. And there are other cities along the way. One is Ñ. Another is Ç.”

“Which one?” I said, and again they paid no attention.

“Ç?” said Kustos.

And others too, still more distant: Ŵ, Ĭ, Æ, many more. Several of them have their own collective name: they are called the Cities of St. Cyril…And further away still are the cities that arise from different systems of signs altogether. The Chinese Cities. The Japanese Cities. The Egyptian Cities. Do you understand, Horatius? This is the land of human writing, we might say, and it is vast. I don’t even know the farthest-off cities and, most likely, I can’t even imagine what they are like…”

***

T can only be reached by train and the service is designed to ensure no one arrives there. Those who do make it are despised, and called “Enlightened ones”.

From U it is only possible to return. What a mystery.

V has been having a party since the fifth century: no one now remembers what triumph is being celebrated. Everyone wears a paper cap except for the tourists.

W was constructed inside a cave: people awake to electric light and the howling of the creatures of the deep, which no one has ever seen.

VI

Not only did they continue talking long after that. Not only did they begin to exchange travellers’ tales of curious places from this and other regions, and to grow enormously enthusiastic about it all. Not only did Valerius and his grandsons leave off working at some point to listen to them.

But also:

“It is a fairly lengthy undertaking, then”, said Kustos. “Travelling the road to the south and all those beyond it. Seeing each and every one of the cities.”

“But it is a journey that is worth taking for someone like you, is it not?” said Septimus.

“Undoubtedly. It will keep me occupied for a long time.”

“It must be a great life you lead, right?” asked Septimus.

“Well…” began Kustos.

“It must be interesting”, Valerius added. “Plenty of opportunities for fun. A woman in every port, like a sailor…”

“Listen”, I said. Once again they paid me no attention.

“It has its ups and its downs”, said Kustos. “But I wouldn’t swap it for anything.”

“You are a curious figure”, said Septimus. “You seem moved by the desire to see the things you spoke to us of earlier. You seem to have no other purpose, that you could do nothing else. Have you met people like this on your travels? People who suddenly discover they do not wish to be where they are, that they want to go out into the world…”

He paused for a moment but then continued:

“If you had a guide to accompany you, who could put you on the right path as you head south…”

“That would be of great use to me.”

“When you are done will you return to the places you came from? Will you visit once again Mexico, Ulan Bator, Hollywood, Internet?”

“Internet is not a place”, said Kustos, very slowly. “Not like the others. But I can explain it to you later, if you like…”

By this point I had understood that I was missing something, but the anxiety about what it was annoyed me. I looked out the window towards the road, realized it was getting dark, and interrupted the conversation. Kustos had obtained all the information he needed to continue his journey, I said, and it would be best for him to stop wasting our time with idle, and perhaps even improper, questions.

“Although this town is much smaller than the Latin Cities, it is just as old: since it was founded it has been known as Comma. It is a modest name, but one not lacking in dignity… And you come here with your tales of other places to tell us that the whole world is greater than our own lands, and I only put up with you because of our laws of hospitality. It is plain to see that you have come with the malicious intention to sow dissent with these stories…

“What on Earth are you talking about, Theodorus?” Septimus interrupted.

I stopped short. I must admit I didn’t really know either and that made me angry. I told Valerius to find a room for Kustos and got up from the table. Septimus did likewise. I bad farewell and we left. Half an hour later we returned, since the party we had organized with our brothers, cousins and all the prostitutes of Full Stop was to be in the same inn. There was no sign of Kustos.

The next day, Septimus was missing. We waited for him at the town hall as usual, but he did not appear. Given we were all suffering from hangovers and didn’t arrive until after noon, we thought that perhaps Septimus was also feeling rough. However there was no sign of him all that afternoon and evening. We went to his house to look for him, but instead we found a letter from him in a sealed envelope. I will not cite it here.

Upon reading it we immediately ran to the inn, where Valerius told us that Horatius Kustos had made an early departure. For the road to the south, yes. With his knapsack and belongings, yes. In company, yes.

“He went on and on about these places with curious names”, Valerius said. “Internet and the others. And Kustos was smiling. The last thing I heard him say was that yes, he’d be glad to take him to one of them. When they returned.”

***

Some may find it strange, but X is the most famous of the monogrammatic cities. Tales of its variable towers and its Empty Square are ascribed to many other cities.

In Y, when someone chooses between two options he may opt for both at once. This causes the universe to bifurcate, at least in the vicinity of the city. Travellers who gaze upon it from afar describe the city – the collection of countless cities – as an immense and luminous tree.

Z lies at the edge of the Final Peninsula, before the Sea-that-Folds. Many people travel there to complete novels, or to die.

 [2013]

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