Of Beasts and Fowls

There was no telephone in Betania. So no calls. No messages. No greetings or inquires or total availability for any idea implying an exhibition, a lecture, a debate, or transfer by train or plane. She had started making a scarf—thinking of Zinaida and her ball of yarn—as she walked the hall, sat in an armchair, and stood back up. She leaned in a doorway, went down to the cellar to check on how everything was going, and returned upstairs, listening for the sound of an electric saw, even though they’d told her it was prohibited to cut down trees in the area. She followed the downward-sloping path in the direction of the lake, planning her next step, stunned by the blue sky, no one paying her any mind now that circumstances had changed. Still, she must continue to watch what she was doing, even if not as strictly. The insects hidden under leaves. The metal objects glinting on the boundaries of the property, beside the posts and wire fencing. This activity, she believed, was indicative of her good mental state. Solid evidence to demonstrate that if she’d decided to remain there, if she’d stopped looking for an escape—a phone or a car with gas—it wasn’t because of a fit of depression or delirium, but because she had opted to stay strong and wait for a new sign. Because there was a before and there would surely be an after. But above all because, at the moment, what she wanted was to repeat the encounter. Not let anyone down.

            What good would it do her to spend hours before a painting or at a keyboard when what she needed was to be submerged, to learn how to turn water into nutrients and produce oxygen. A lifetime of training, lessons, work, only to reach her age and discover that all that mattered in the world was water, to live in it. To produce oxygen.

            She had shown up to what was to be her last public show inhabited by grace, but no one seemed to notice. The ochre stone pigments had begun to show on her skin, maybe because she hadn’t showered in days. Though showering wouldn’t have done much. Brushing her teeth. Washing her hair. Conditioning her hair. Dyeing her hair. Changing her clothes. The others would say she had walked through there, among and before them, like a beast, in a savage state, a primitive creature. With an appearance that was unnecessarily unkempt and made clear that she wasn’t well. That she had relinquished responsibility for her own behavior. That she needed help but was still refusing to admit it. And that was before she put the paintings in the trunk of her car. And that was before she had put on the cotton sack with pockets she was dressed in now, as easy to make as unmake. And that was before she left her phone at home or started driving down the highway at 130 kilometers per hour, 90 on the back roads. Consuming seeds, roots, insects, plant leaves, and berries. It was easier to possess mental strength when she was rested, when she was decently fed and her mind stopped insisting that her sanity hinged on her resolve when it came to disposing of a few portraits she herself had painted. Then it was easier to not fear the canvasses or the stories she told on them.

            Fear of the paintings, of what her own paintings represented, could only be the consequence of an exhaustion leading toward obsession and mania. But everything was different now. And it would be even more different when she once again sank into the grey-wrapped water. The veil that would evenly coat her body and ultimately transform into green. Ashes and grass.

Now she was there, in a house at the end of a dirt road that ran the whole length of the so-called Betania stretch (though there were some who remembered it as the Colono stretch) and which was still besieged by ants, despite the lateness of the season. If she was okay there, she should just think that she was okay and not feel guilty. And she was fine there now. With her feet on solid ground. After having lived in a state of alarm, of never letting down her guard. Never trusting. Caution. Care. Instituting adequate and ongoing discipline. Because she never got far enough. Never. And she had to be prepared. Get out of bed every day without losing her patience and allow the hours to pass without wavering, going up and coming down, dismissing all suspicion from her imagination.

            All of that would change. It was changing already. After all, that could be her place. Sometimes it did happen that one found their own space, the place fated for each person. The corner of dirt, mud, and trees where one might let oneself go. From window to window. To the kitchen, the fireplaces. Taking penciled notes. Going onto the porch to observe the part of the property around her, the passing of time and its shadows. Repeating to herself, I am compassionate. I am universal. I am absolute. I am compassionate. I am universal. I am absolute. A reaffirmation linked to ritual. To the celebration of a ceremony in which the same formula was reproduced, like a hymn or poem. Without stopping to consider its meaning. Without reflecting on the relationship that could exist between the words. Without straining her memory.

            That is how one of the women of Betania behaved. The one called Coro.

            Although she was also called Mag. And Mae. The consequence of her parents giving her several names to address by different means one of the girls who had arrived in their universe in order to make it a little more decorated, to fill it with different material. Intending that she should answer whenever she was called, they referred to her as Coro, as Mag, as Mae. Depending on the day. Depending on how they woke up. On what was for breakfast and what they had to celebrate. Depending on the father’s mood. On whether or not he came out of his study. Or how the mother sang in the plant room. On the varying states of the various people who moved around her. With their own reasoning and their own codes.

            Sometime Coro. Sometimes Coro Mae. Sometimes Coro Mag.

That afternoon and evening, she and Tresa would make jam, now that they boasted kilos of tomatoes. Now that they were reinstating the routines of the house. They had settled on land that could prove itself generous, and they would not let anything to go to waste.

            Eat: good. Walk: good.

            Rest: good. Sleep: good.

            Draw: good. Dive: good.

            And at all costs, avoid conflict. Imbalance.

            “You’re not thirsty?” Tresa was asking her.

            The ivy. The round stone table. The flowerpots all lined up in a row.

            Now she was there, too, sharing the house with the others. Making tomato jam and decorating the three mugs she planned to finish soon with pictures of fruit, tree leaves, and the silhouettes of insects. Three of twelve. All different. The rim defined by a fine black line that would be easier to draw using the pottery wheel they’d placed in the corner for her. Shut away in the room they’d converted to her studio, with fine paintbrushes for the legs of some round-bodied invertebrates and their wings, intensely red and spotted with black. Matching contours and tones. Letting herself go with the knowledge that no one was going to admire her work. No critic would analyze or judge it. No one was going to buy it and nobody but her or one of the women in the house was ever going to use any of those mugs, on which she drew dragonflies of green and blue, close-set eyes almost touching, two pairs of horizontal, transparent wings and an elongated abdomen. To later fill its insides with chocolate they would also make themselves.

            “Some change, eh?” she asked.

            Talking to herself out loud.

            “What do you smell like?”

            To which she might look surprised.

            “The smoke, I guess.”

            “What smoke?”

            “From the fire. The fireplaces are lit.”

            “No. It’s something else. You smell like something strong. Like an herb.”

            “Two herbs.”

            And she laughed.

            A laugh that might seem false. Forced. Because—physically—she was alone. But the laughter was natural. As effusive and cordial as she felt herself to be those days. Knowing she wasn’t alone. And that water was the basic principle. That everything resided there. The essence. The most important thing in life. And there, in that house, they could count on quantities of water more than sufficient enough to provide for the people who had stayed in Betania. Now she was part of the land. She was on it. And when she paused and closed one eye to trace, with her index finger, the profile of the rock that, like a two-dimensional figure, broke the blue of the sky at its summit, she told herself that she must finish what she had started. It was her responsibility. Because now she belonged to the land and she lived on it from the break of day until the sun went down and it was no longer possible to see anything. Though even then she walked among the fallen branches, the dry leaves, the wooden remnants of fence posts, excess wire mesh, trying not to cut her skin, not to fall.

            At first, she kept track of the hours she’d been at the house. Without a shower. Without helping in the kitchen or washing the floors. It was her lot to analyze every incident as if it were unique. Every day like it was the only day. Every arrival and every departure. Every word. Every attitude when facing the most trivial occurrences. But all she knew then was that she had to draw. That was what was expected of her. But she didn’t draw those first days either. Her wrist hurt. As if, in that place, she had started to malfunction. She looked at the objects and the objects looked at her. She looked at a mug. She looked at a pitcher. A piece of fruit. And the mug, the pitcher, the fruit looked back at her. She asked herself where all the minutes used to go. All the seconds. What did she waste her time on. What had been her previous existence. “I have to leave,” she would repeat. Though perhaps she only thought it, because the others didn’t turn when she spoke, they kept talking as if they didn’t hear her.

            She had received no premonitory message. Nothing that would have warned her of what was coming her way. Painting mugs? Knitting, just now when her hands were shaking?

            “You have to wash,” they told her.

            On her way to the kitchen, from where they were returning with a dessert, a fresh napkin, or a clean utensil to replace one that had been dropped.

            “If you don’t wash, your hair will start hurting.”

            What could she say to that?

            Coro said nothing because by then she spoke little. She simply observed them and listened to what they said so as to try and understand what was happening. She focused on her plate. She got lost in the conversations. The damp vegetation, the dry vegetation. The girl’s voice mentioning that someone in the house was able to anticipate storms and predict the hours of sun. To seal up the holes animals got in through without leaving the tiniest gap. As she said this, she looked at her, at the new arrival, who failed to grasp the girl’s intention. To make her see that she was among exceptional beings or that she would find nary a crack through which to escape. Maybe she said it just to say something. Plants that concealed the traps and rocks. Where caught mammals flailed in their bonds, waiting for one of the women to come and take them by a snagged foot. To deliver the coup de grace with a stake. To tie the prey to her belt and carry it home to the waiting and hungry women who would scarf down pieces of kidney and heart, with rice.

            “Did you know Beethoven preferred a tree’s company a thousand times over any person?” the girl asked.

            “You don’t have to answer,” said the woman called Tresa.

            Then they told the girl to stop fiddling with a piece of lettuce.

            “How many times must you be told not to play with your food? Eat it or leave it on the plate, but stop messing about.”

            She’d injured her wrist and they’d bandaged it for her, but that would be temporary. Any day now she’d have her wrist fastened back in place as if nothing had happened and it wouldn’t hurt. The house was testing her, they said. Like it had already done to the others, to all of them. Its little obstacles.

            “A wasps’ nest fell on the twins.”

            “I got my hand crushed trying to fix a table.”

            In her case, it would be the dizzy spells.

            And the fever.

            But she would come through it. And as soon as she did, everything would start to flourish. The house will have accepted her.

            “I was stung by a chickadee,” the girl claimed.

            Centipede, she meant. Although she hadn’t been stung by anything, they explained, neither one nor the other.

            “She’s going to be a zoologist.”

            “She sees insects that don’t exist. And she looks after the geckos.”

            Coro looked down at the ground, toward the dogs, and brought a hand to her forehead. Disconnected from her real dimension, her own identity. Taking heed of the stories they told. Like the one about the wooden cross they stuck in the ground near the lake years ago, after one of the women drowned while her dog waited on shore.

            When she didn’t gather with them in the living room or on the porch, she returned to the room they’d assigned her and went to the window, carefully, not touching anything, not raising the blinds, and peeked through the slats in the green wood to watch the happenings below. To see what they did, how they behaved. To hear their conversations about dogs, the sieved dirt, the mulch. Alert to their plans. Aware that, at the moment, she was where she was and where she was, whether she liked it or not, determined her conduct. Did her understanding of reality happen to be so radically opposed to theirs?

            That was how she felt at the time. Expectant. Unable settle down.

            “In June we go out to collect flowers to make Hypericum oil.”

            “We gather the blossoms at dawn on the Eve of St. John’s. You missed it this year.”

            Along the paths. For scrapes, back pain, burns.

            “The wasps don’t come out at night,” the girl was saying.

            And she saw she could not find an explanation for her seclusion among a group of women she did not know, women who had imposed themselves on her, circled her, spied on her, let their heads fall forward as they explained:

            “The days here can be very long.”