the brief jubilation of living
José Eustasio Rivera The Vortex, translated from the Spanish by John Charles Chasteen (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2018)
Events in the early pages of Rivera’s
significant fiction begin vaguely, and, despite his “confidant,” Insomnia,
almost like something of a surrealist dream, when they meet up with an
apparently charming con-artist, Casanare, and soon discover that most of the gauchos
have left their lands and the cattle they previously brought to market, lured
to go to work for Casanare and others in the Amazonian wilds in the new
industry of collecting rubber from the trees.
Cora, with the confidence of an outsider,
notes:
The hair-raising stories about
Casanare did not frighten me. My instincts
impelled me to defy the dangers of
the wild frontier. I was certain that I
would survive to tell the tale and
later, amid the civilized comforts of some
city as yet unknown to me, look
back on the dangers of Casanare with
nostalgia.
Even when his girl-friend suddenly
disappears from the ramble shack house in which they are staying, evidently
lured by Casanare’s men with the promise of great sums of money, he’s seems
almost dreamily to follow after her. After all, he has already admitted that he
is now “bored of Alicia” and is now ready to return to Bogotá.
His decision to follow her down the
Amazon into the dark forests wherein rubber how now become king, begins to
shift everything from the dream-like world in which the fiction begins into a
horrific nightmare of great specificity. If he previously suffers from
insomnia, the “hero” if he might be called that, now falls into a deep
“moodiness”:
My moodiness has subjected me to
various nervous crises, in which logic and
my brain sue for divorce. In spite
of my physical exuberance, my over-active
imagination constantly saps my
strength, a chronic problem, because the
visions are unremitting, even
during sleep.
Somewhat like Marlow’s voyage down the
Congo river in search of Kurz in Conrad’s Heart
of Darkness, the further Cora travels into the Amazon jungle the more
horror he encounters, now a world where the formerly dreamy gauchos and their
families have now becomes slaves, not only to Casanare but to numerous other
businessmen and their shills, drawing in anyone who enters their net, the
vortex of a hellish voyage into death that the work’s title invokes.
Beatings, gambling, drugs, fevers, and
even imprisonment follow, between brief escapes, strange messages left on the
trees that produce the rubber, and the continued perception of the ecological
desolation of a once pristine world all follow. Mad visions are not uncommon in
this totally hellish world:
The voyager’s visions were bizarre,
indeed. He saw processions of alligators and
turtles, flowers that shouted, swamps full
of people. He reported that the trees
of the forest were paralyzed giants
that talked and gestured to each other in the
dark. The trees wanted to fly away
with clouds, but the earth held them firmly
by the ankles, so that we could
never go anywhere.
Roll
over Baudelaire, Breton, Ginsburg, Bowles—so many others! Rivera does it
better, and with an ecological twist:
Pipa had heard the trees’ appeal to
occupy pastures and follow fields and
vacant lots until a single, great
canopy of interwoven tree limbs could cover
the surface of the entire earth.
One day, all would be, again, as it was in
the beginning—the age of Genesis,
when God floated like a mist over the
endless sea of green.
A dire prophecy, indeed.
You
might almost think that Rivera was predicting the earth after all mankind had
died from the changes in climate we are now beginning to suffer!
The more the poet-hero encounters the
terrors of the jungle, the greater becomes his sense of nature left alone to
make itself over: after describing the “trillions of devastating bachaquero
ants,” the “termites that sicken and kill the trees like some kind of galloping
syphilis.”
And yet, each death renovates the
earth. The decay from fallen giant
the newly open canopy combine to
encourage germination and sprout-
ing. Pollen swirls in the miasmas
of decomposing organic matter. The
smell of ferment is in the breath
of both purification and procreation.
Our now more obvious hero sends letters
off to leaders in both Columbia and Brazil, demanding that something be done to
save the interior, with little response. Even today, the new Brazilian leader
just elected would probably side with the rubber barons. And Cora’s attempt to
return to “civilization” is a disastrous one, ending in the fiction’s final
lines “God help us!”
Yet, Rivera’s passionate plea to save that
world is as powerful as any fiction I have read:
as
opposed to “enraptured nightingales,” the poetic flowers and babbling brooks of
the romantic world, the author’s central character argues for another kind of
beauty:
Here, in the night: unknown voices,
phantasmagoric lights, funeral silences.
Hear the thump of fallen fruit that
bursts open to fulfill the promise of its
seed; the whisper of tumbling
leaves that offer themselves as fertilizer
to the roots of the tree that bore
them; the sound of jaws that eat hurriedly
to avoid being eaten; the echoing
belch of the satiated predator; the call of
danger and alert; the noisy agony
of prey that did not escape; the echoing
belch of the satiated predator. And
when dawn finally sprinkles the leaves
with its tragic glory, the clamor
of the survivors, the keening of the birds,
the chatter of the monkeys, the thrashing
of the wild pig—all for the brief
jubilation of a few more hours to
live.
I am so delighted to have read this
writer, working in the tradition of the great German naturalist, Alexander van
Humboldt, and the important French naturalist writer Jules Michelet, and I
admire Duke University Press for publishing it—although I must admit I am
shocked by their exorbitant prices of $95 for the hardback version and $25 for
the paperback for 218 pages, all in a time when printing costs have gone down
significantly. Better that they might have printed it on-demand only.
Los Angeles, November 25, 2018
Reprinted
from Rain Taxi (Volume 24, no. 1,
Spring 2019).
No comments:
Post a Comment