At times, in the landscape’s crowded calm, the only sound is the camera as it flashes. For that brief instant all that exists is him, the camera, and the impression that will be left to a future he still doesn’t know, but on which he has bet it all. For that brief instant, nothing exists but him and his belief. Him and his future. Then, subtly, he is interrupted by that quick sonata that returns him to the middle of the jungle: the background sound of the roiling tropics, the cacophony of birds, the fluttering of uncaged chickens, the snore of a tired native, the hiccup of some drunken Englishman. Still further off, in a terribly singular and painful space, the sobs of the daughter whose plaints he only now hears again.
Only then does he take his eye from the camera and look at her.
Barely ten years old, she has an insomniac’s heavy gaze and a terrible paleness that makes him think of Nordic latitudes he’s never seen. Beside the girl, a thoroughly beautiful woman uses a left hand he knows well to soothe the girl’s sobs. With her other hand, his wife labours over notes she makes in a small, reddish leather notebook. The same notebook in which she had written, ten days earlier: ‘Day 1, beginning of the trip.’ Ten days since that inaugural meeting, and already the trip is starting to seem drawn out, weighty, routine. Ten days since a rusted-out bus left them on the threshold of what they now tentatively call jungle, but that at times seems like nothing more than a giant garbage dump dreamed up by an absent god.
The grunting rumble of a pig as it delves back into the garbage distracts him. And then he sees the panorama in its totality: the couple of drunken Brits on a corner finishing off the bottle of gold rum, the atmosphere of lethargy and siesta over which nature’s everyday tyranny seems to loom, the drugged-out German again staging his monologue for a group of natives who, laughing, seem to enjoy the show. The rest of the pilgrims sporadically punctuate the scene of that brief comedy, resting under small tin roofs where the last drops of water drum monotonously. And beyond, in a background plane presaged by a faint soundtrack, a man with tired eyes and unusual strength returns to his indecipherable prayer. Ten days have passed since this same man, with his rough voice and unplaceable accent, promised them that at month’s end they would reach the little seer.
They call him the apostle. His arms are tattooed with allegories of war, and over a dozen plastic rosaries hang around his neck. His voice is hoarse but withdrawn. His speech has something of the delusional monologue about it, a private and endless prayer with which he fills out the empty hours. Just looking at him, it’s clear he’s not from here. Gringo maldito, the natives call him behind his back: the cursed gringo. He, meanwhile, refuses to say a word to them. Even so, everywhere he goes, five of them go with him. It’s rumoured that he came to find drugs and stayed when he found the trip back was impossible. It’s rumoured he comes from a moneyed family, and that when he was young he showed promise in theatre. It’s rumoured that illumination came to him decades ago in the midst of the jungle, in front of that immense tree he claims to be guiding them towards. They call him the apostle because that’s what he calls himself, but sometimes, when they look at him, the pilgrims have the feeling he’s no more than a tour guide, a drugged Virgil on an absurd pilgrimage. A postmodern Virgil for credulous gringos. Still, all it takes is a second look, or just listening to him, immersed in his endless prayer, to know that he, at least, believes he is everything he’s promised. Around him, three stinking pigs meander through the mud, while further on the natives play cards to win out over boredom. All of them wear shirts with gringo brands, and the ironic expressions of unbelievers. They call him the apostle because he promises things. Ten days ago he promised them, for example, that at the end of a month they would come to an enormous archipelago in the middle of the jungle, and that there, at the foot of an enormous fallen tree, the seer will show them the way. In his eyes, halfway between belief and madness, an entire era plays its hand.
Ten days have passed since they set off on foot, five since the little girl started to get sick. The whole time, the jungle has done nothing but contradict their expectations. Where they supposed they’d find naked natives, instead there are men wearing rock-band T-shirts. Where they expected to find the exuberance of nature, there are garbage dumps. Where they thought they’d find the absence of power, there is the omnipresence of the State. Everywhere they go they encounter police, solemn border agents who fight boredom by assiduously checking travel documents. Far from being the dreamed-of garden, the jungle is trying its best to show its most modern face: its ruinous, border-town face.
And nevertheless, they well know: nature is there, latent like a sleeping scorpion. They sense it at night, in the utter darkness that envelops them. They hear it before they see it: in the whisper of nocturnal animals, in the fluttering fowl, the croak of those frogs that seem like nocturnal birds, the murmur of the insects always poised to wage war against the mosquito net. He, however, has been brought along specifically to make nature visible: they’ve asked him, as a photographer, to document the trip. That’s his place: halfway between participation and observation, halfway between belief and irony. Only five years earlier, he had earned a living taking photos of Broadway’s most coveted models. Today, he is following a man who has promised an impossible thing. Two years ago he earned his living taking pictures of the most visible figures in showbusiness, and today he is chasing behind a drugged man’s invisible dream.
During the day, they cross villages full of sleeping natives and women who kill the hours in infinite conversations. Villages lost in the jungle, wrapped in the climbing vines of tedium. Insomniac villages where the men just watch them with utter indifference as they go by, as if the pilgrims have been invisible for a long time now. Indifference, the private form of contempt. They cross entire villages where they find only ruins of the peace they’d all thought they would find. On the third day, they understand that in these forgotten cities, tedium is the rule. In them, peace lies in the image of a mother who diligently whiles away her hours removing lice from the hair of a dozen sleepy children. They cross scenes of tedium with the distinctive steps of those still seeking something. The natives recognize them, and with a mocking gaze, let them pass. They cross the day like that, one village to the next, until the afternoon finds them and they stop in a place where the drunks seem jollier, and the tedium ebbs away. In those villages, they’re ushered in with greedy eyes, since the natives know that at the end of the day, that’s what these strange men bring: money. Then the hustle begins. Some policeman who gets up from his drunken stupor or chronic exhaustion to ask for their entry papers, his sole idea to interrupt these strange men’s passage. The apostle, however, they don’t touch. And that’s the odd thing. How in these villages, too, the apostle seems to radiate an aura that makes him untouchable. They all present their papers and then he, beyond reach and age-old, crosses the scene as if he were the very leader of the tribe. He crosses the scene and disappears into the village, while the rest of the pilgrims return to their most vulgar pastimes, alcohol or drugs, yoga or prayer, sleep or sex.
And that’s how they spend the day until the sun sets, when the apostle emerges from his penance and finally raises his voice in supplication. Usually he is accompanied by an indigenous woman, much younger than him, who takes care of feeding the fire’s arabesques. And they all gather there around the night-time fire, waiting for the apostle to pronounce the first words. Sometimes hours can pass. Long minutes when the man refuses to say a word and during which only the moths fluttering over the fire can be heard. Sometimes hours can pass and he says nothing, but there they are, united by a dark belief, gathered around the fire of an unknown passion. It’s a strange group they form. Drugged Europeans, Americans with shaved heads, Central European women with long braids who smile happily when they see the natives go by, young girls whose faces bear the traces of a tired illusion. Frayed shirts, one or another face painted, plastic rosaries and candles lit to saints. A great sect of tired men, credulous hippies who, as the evening falls, gather in an insomniac country to imagine a different world. And there, among the stinking pigs and the third-world garbage, there they are: an everyday family – father, mother, daughter – lost in an immense version of jungle, waiting for the prayers of a man whose arms bear tattoos of an inconclusive story: cataclysm and fire and a great tree amid a false landscape. They, however, believe. And that belief drives them to wait a little longer, to seek out the keys of the dazed monologue the apostle takes up again day after day, as soon as the sunset opens the way for night.
There they are, a postcard family – deluxe, straight out of a magazine – inscribed into the jungle. They, the same ones who five years earlier had appeared in all the fashion rags, the same ones who one day decided to shake off fame and delve into the labyrinths of pagan beliefs. They have managed to get rid of fame, to wrap themselves in the anonymity that the jungle confers, but they haven’t been able to divest themselves of another, much more primitive layer that is beauty. That’s why, while the pilgrims are congregated before the fire awaiting the apostle’s words, as if hushing to hear the oracle, they shine like stars in an opaque constellation. A beautiful family, a model family, wrapped in a crepuscular world.
Maybe that’s why when the apostle starts to talk, he begins by looking at them. He lets out a slight word that he leaves swinging in the air, and his eyes land on that girl with chestnut hair and dark eyes who now coughs again as she leans, with a shyness that seems ingrained, behind her mother. The girl has her mother’s fragile elegance and her father’s hushed conviction. And like that, looking at the girl who tries to hide behind her mother, looking at her as if his words were directed at her, the apostle begins his sermon. With his naked torso facing the flames, the fire lighting up that impressive tattooed torso, he speaks of a final storm in the jungle, a last whirlwind that will reduce everything to a single point. He speaks of endings and he cites, with a fluency far removed from his usual silence, the sacred scriptures. He finally takes his gaze from the girl, and with his eyes fixed on the fire he speaks of islands and prisons, of underground worlds and millenary disasters. Then he returns to his prayer, the pilgrims around him listening patiently, immersed in a belief that seems to devour everything in its path. He speaks in his invocation of a great fallen tree and a small seer, and his face takes on an unusual expressiveness, a terrible happiness that has something of madness in it. Then, the indigenous woman who has spent the afternoon with him brings a little bottle, and the apostle drinks something. After a few minutes his eyes become flexible, and his gaze is lost beyond the fire. Only then does his laughter begin, an enormous peal that rings out in the night. Then the pilgrims, on seeing him laugh, laugh too. They laugh as men rarely do, without reason or direction to speak of, while the night grows, fearful, cold, distant, around that ten-year-old girl who now coughs again like one interrupting a party.
From the novel Animal Museum