Jakarta

by Rodrigo Márquez Tizano

  From Morgan’s notebook:

  “On Lachtman’s observations:

  In the British Kaffraria the dead were left in the open air to be devoured by wolves, birds of prey, and insects. (Barrow, London, 1797)

  In Hyrcania, street dogs would pick the flesh from the bones of the dead.

  The Bactrians thought it acceptable to feed the infirm and the aged to the dogs. Hence mounds of bones rather than tombs have been uncovered in Bahl.

  Zoroastrianism holds that bodies become contaminated when they die. When the body rots, that is an entry point for demons wishing to access the world of the living. To ward off such invasions they practiced excarnation: they built circular, raised structures known as Towers of Silence and placed dead bodies at the highest points, to be exposed to carrion birds. Once the birds, along with the elements, had scoured the bones, the bones would be taken out into the desert.

  The Callatiae consumed the bodies of their dead parents. The Persian King Darius I asked a Greek attendant at his court for what price his people would eat their fathers’ dead bodies. He answered that there was no price for which they would commit such a vile act. Darius then summoned the Callatiae and asked how much they would need to agree to burn their forebears’ bodies on a pyre. The Callatiae cried aloud, saying such a thing would be sacrilege.”

  31.

  I am going to meet up with the boys. I am going to try and find them. The stone tells me I must. First thing is to establish the exact stops, one by one, avoid any possibility of going wrong: really know the stops. I’ve memorized the numbers. But I’m not going from here—not in the slightest. In the vision-images, it seems like I am, but that’s only the turbulence of Clara’s mind. For all that the stone may seem like a lens or a portal, it is only a stone—hence the impossibility of resisting its commands. Everything before this journey that I’m now undertaking on foot is, or seems to be, part of an alien existence. Or at any rate like a beginning, but somehow tacked on, incompatible with this current moment—a period of time with the obvious whiff of fabrication, more a premonition than my actual history. This is the effect the stone has, breaking everything down and realigning it. The images solidify with surprising clarity, and not on the wall anymore but in midair: together they comprise the merest breach, a miniscule aperture, the tiniest rupture in the prehistoric physiognomy of the mineral. And what will happen, I ask. But nobody answers. Clara takes a deep breath, and she and the stone join in a long, slow exhalation. Her hands tremble, or seem to tremble. The heat makes us see things that aren’t there.

  32.

  There are few surviving manuscripts that describe the native inhabitants and the adversities they faced. And these live in the vaults of the National Library. The west wing of the Palace of Congress bears a mural—fruit of a memorial project organized many years ago by the Department for Education and the National Office for Artistic Creations. The idea was to commemorate the painful chapters in our history, events that, according to an undersecretary in the Tourism Department, “saw us sift out, like gold prospectors, all the weakness inherent in these peoples.” Unsurprisingly the project was plagued by friction among the union members who toiled (on double pay) to complete the noble work—they did not in fact complete it. While the bureaucrats and filing clerks accused the artists both of laziness and of trying to alter the historical accounts, the artists claimed censorship. The result: half-finished murals, later reworked as collages, daubed with religious messages and graffitied cocks: “Hardly was it possible to sow grain, given the great dearth even of seeds after so many bad harvests … And the tribes that paid us tribute were found to be so stubborn and so fond of their unruly ways, so attached even to the endless hunger and hardships that afflicted them, that our karaý-guazú was obliged to delve into the grain stores for food-stuffs put aside in former years, yet when the stores were examined they were found empty, for the terrible weevil worm had got there first … Yay foreign barbarians came from the North and razed all in their path, and fire fell from the sky and men’s bodies were full of cankers … As our persecution continued and as winter came on we, too, set out on a journey to colder lands … The young men were charged with transporting the stone and did work tirelessly in this for the pursuers were swift and traveled without effects … By and by the elderly were left behind, and the sick and womenfolk also, as all of these were like a heavy weight around the necks of the stone-bearers … And our hearts pounded, like the rubber from the trees, and the dwelling places were left bare of people and in the land we came to the plants gave off rank malodorousness and the fruits were not good to eat, but there was nothing else, so eat them we did, and our distress was great, we had no furs to protect us from the cold, we had nothing that we needed … Our spears served only to scratch us on the backs … And then the stone gave out its augur: saying unto us that the flesh of men would be eaten, and that there would be no blame in this.”

  33.

  From Morgan’s notebook:

  “And once a place was found the first misfortune came down upon us, the first of many … for the land was barren and the seeds sown there yielded naught but misery, and this in spite of the temples we built wherever the stone commanded, and many went away to consult with demons, but the demons gave more grievous answers still, for the men had shown little patience and less faith. Then the heavens sent down torments and there were droughts also … The karaý-guazú decided to alter the year, for the year of the rabbit had been one of woe, and so a new year was added to the calendar … The time for planting seeds came and there was a plague of locusts and the people went hungry … They were driven to consort with the settlers, who had created dwelling places for themselves, and even sold their children into bondage or promised to sell the children they were yet to bear … and the next year there was a plague of rats and the next a plague of gophers, and the next year there was great sickness, and the next year there was flooding throughout the lands … Those men still remaining went into neighboring regions to find provisions and into the forests, too, but very often they did not return and their lives were consumed by great weariness and by hunger and misery.”

  34.

  People want to know about the rats. About the days and nights we spent underground. I say to them: the sounds emitted by rats are part of a complex system of signals that the human ear cannot properly decipher. One of the leaders of the Ź-Brigađe, Kovac the Albýno, said that a long and detailed study would allow you to analyze the creatures’ language, and that even if such a study weren’t possible, and although many of the sounds they made were inaudible to us, you could still discern direct links between the alpha’s squeaked commands and the activity of the group. Avalanche! Kovac would suddenly cry, his ear to the bunker wall, trying to make out those rodent signals, warped somewhat but amplified, too, by the drainage pipes. Then the walls would rumble and shake, and the rest of us would hit the deck, always too late. Listen, Kovac would hiss. You can understand them, you just need to become part of them, you just need to feel them. But none of the rest of us could, partly because none of the rest of us were Albýno: employed for so many generations as miners, their sensitivity to auditory stimuli has been altered by hundreds of years’ proximity to the earth’s magnetic fields. This meant it was incredibly useful to have Kovac in the unit, though any time we went above ground the sun also made him something of an impediment. He had played Vakapý in his younger days: he was one of the first Albýno ever granted a license to play at the Anguĵa. He had a couple of good seasons before an elbow injury forced him into early retirement. He kept a trading card inside his locker: a streak of white leaning against the front wall of a court, aħaka in his right hand and a smile bringing the color down a few notches. His was a generation in sepia, skin versus stone: epic stories of the greats putting down the aħaka and challenging each other to glove throws and, once the sponsors had paraded past, the balls had been selected, and the court sanctified, sweating out the previous night’s wine, and the wine f
rom all the nights before: 190 BPM on a court measuring just 62 meters in length. Bullshit, I say if anyone asks me. Give me the stats, I say. On a rest day once, Kovac told us that after his retirement, having by then spent many years drinking himself into what looked likely to be an early grave, someone from a TV channel came to see him and offered him a part in Strains, a miniseries to be produced by the State Channel, aimed at raising awareness about the Albýno. And he did end up taking part: who better to demonstrate the sporting successes of his race and thereby validate their rise to social acceptability? And the series, more a sitcom than anything, was popular. For instance, there was an Albýno woman who used to wash my family’s feet, and after the first few episodes, Grandma, having spent several afternoons in tears at the iniquities of our ancestors, started addressing her by her first name. Public spirited, and networked at prime time. Kovac, dear Kovac: the pain is real if the ratings say it is. And you, who said so little about yourself, and far too much about the rats and the musical-gnawing notations. Kovac was the only one who, when the Ź-Bug entered its final stages, saw (heard) that it was in fact still active: only he had learned to appreciate the nuances in the silence that the rest of us had little time for, or feared, or failed to notice altogether, a silence without any drumroll that he himself would have disregarded had he not been immersed in it, up to his neck in the muddy slime of it. I don’t know how he ended up in the Brigađes, but I suspect solitude had something to do with it. Solitude, the education system, the Cređit system, the judicial system. And yet, no, there’s no blame to assign, only systems. It has become the fashion to renounce life as merely one more system, though all that really achieves is to put life and system in the same breath. I find these terms the most useful when thinking about Kovac as well: implacable will to survive, unsullied by mutations or the betting life, suffering both from the purity of his race and the attendant ocular difficulties, capable of going out on exercises over and over, again and again, filling up the sacks, emptying out the sacks. The same goes for each of the bodies decomposing along the coast, every pinkie finger and arm and bodiless head we collected, every rat’s tail: I consider it all part of a force that had no purpose other than to impose itself, trampling the supposed obstacles of bodies, of bones, of spirits, broken all of them, broken and drained of blood and nameless, and because nameless therefore belonging to us all, or to those who came before us and who are also now part of us. A systematic solitude. It was Kovac who surmised that, once the Ź-Bug was rampant, it prompted the colony to begin operating like an automaton. Not the scientists, not the government, not the petulant bureaucrats or scholars, but one of us: this rum-soaked, more than half-blind Vakapý veteran, in debt to everyone, expected to pay for all manner of things, even his five minutes of fame when a public TV channel used him in their cack-handed attempt to suborn the nation’s past. Kovac said: We’ll stop hearing them now, they’ll be at a lower ebb and will stop moving around so much, they won’t even be hungry now because only the living experience hunger … Morgan had his own take on the importance of distinguishing the long screeches from the short, considering it a given that the sickness normalized the noises, made them all sound the same. A deeper pitch, a sharper tone: all were part of one single thing, one conglomerated mass, of which we were also part. But once the Ź-Bug had begun to affect their motor skills and their brain functions had all but shut down—those shitty little brains, impelled by untold electrical impulses—the rats, too, fell silent. At times all we’d hear of them would be the clicking together of teeth somewhere in the depths, luring their own prey. That sounded different, someone would say, and a shiver would run through us—shiver after shiver. We longed for the way things had once been: more violent, but at least not so unbearably quiet. In the beginning. Which beginning? At least the rats were a way of measuring the passage of time.

  35.

  As the National Archives show, for all that the “progressives” tried to argue otherwise, the country was on the slide. Largely this was down to the fact that the bodies we inhabit have a unique capacity for generating new and ever more complex fermentation methods—something the priests never bothered to tell us much about. The native inhabitants had some strange ideas on this count. Their view was that any deviation from the natural order was the work of noncorporeal agents who acted according to divine will. These were seen as operating within a pyramidal hierarchy not dissimilar to the one governing our society, with the lowest caste, those with physical disabilities and skin conditions, required to purge their own bodies by self-flagellation. The Bug, in its earliest instances, arrived from another continent, but it was here that it found its optimum environment. We should be honest about this. Mestizo thinking commonly blames our plight on barbarians, savages, outsiders. Our city may nowadays overflow with corporate offices, police stations, and Vakapý stadia, and that may well be unhealthy, but it suffered afflictions long before the first settlers showed up: we know that every winter the indigenes went up to the cordillera to try to shake off whichever treponema was troubling them at the time. We call it Cordillera Hill now, it’s got its own zip code as well as semidrinkable water and a “sanitation” system, but it was once known simply as the cordillera: a few blackish mounds of earth slightly higher than sea level, scattered with unprepossessing boulders. Formerly a site of sacrifices, former rites: attempts, in other words, to keep longstanding barren spells at bay, to avert sicknesses and other endemic catastrophes.

  36.

  Beasts of burden were routinely sacrificed, but if the countryside refused to yield crops or if there had been a plague, they would have little objection to dispatching the occasional first-born child or virgin, whichever there happened to be more of. It needs to be understood that among the great nations (and we Atlantikans have always labored under the illusion of greatness—no less weighty for being a total fiction) virginity has never been held in particularly high esteem, and there are always more than enough children to go round. Burnt offerings in the shape of minors could even be seen as a noble gesture, given the high esteem in which the very young, along with the fat, were held. (Any individual born with what we would consider mental disabilities, or with a wizened face, would also be revered.) The ritual, carried out with the utmost gravity and extremely demanding for all involved, unfolded over the course of several days. Report on the Southern Lands, “a most faithful account of the discovery, conquest, and conversion of the Indians,” written by Doctor Don Antonio Funes y Almanza, Count of Traslomita and Senior Judge and Census Keeper on behalf of the Royal Court of New Seville (the guy on the ten CRĐ note), describes it in the following way: “And here is the Truth of how these Men were able to live more than one life: they painted their bodies using indelible inks and spent great effort in the Decoction of certain plants that the karaý-guazú or headman spent many days brewing and preparing, and the imbibing of it was aimed at no other thing than to acquire Powers of Divination, to hear the Song of the Spheres and divers other Deceptions … And the Herbs being ground together and heated over fires, the Elders and those couples joined in most unholy matrimony came and took their places and sought to drive hence their vexations by the burning of bushels of the Copal tree and of Ephedra … Next came forth the Men whose office it was to tup the maidens and this Atrocity they carried out, maddened in the great billowings of heady smoke and Ignorant of civil ways and the existence of the Lord and Ignorant of the paths of reason they henceforth drank the Decoctions and in this wise did abandon the World … When the Imagination is as it were decollated from the Body it may commit most irresponsible Acts and range into Deliriums and it is well known by all who fear God that no form of good fortune nor yet of Grace may bring them out of the darkness then, for their Bodies, as it were void of thought, began to mount one another in great writhing piles, and their Humors were all mixt ere the vile carving and chopping up of their bodies commenced.” Quite the feast: palm hearts, yucca, corn, sugarcane, bananas, tejocote seeds, the flowers of the spiky bizn
aga, leg of tapir, and, as the main course, a child whose body had been torn up and scattered around. The limbs, flesh, and viscera would adorn the ritual space and the slope leading up to it, and the celebrants would pick them up and dance around with them, swinging the bloody remains in time to the frenzied rhythm of drummers brought in from the area nowadays known La Collera. The general idea being that it was better to be ingested by one of your kin than become an incubator for maggots. The Albýno were yet to make an appearance at this point. They doubtless would have been added to the sacrificial mix, but before the migrations, we were strictly people of the sun. A shame. Albýno children and fat kids: surely an offering any god would be hard pressed to ignore.

  37.

  We waited for them to group together. We were a tiny crew at first. Kovac, Morgan, one or two besides. People think it was an easy job. Evacuating buildings. Going around in Day-Glo outfits. Maybe that was why they treated us like plumbers. We collected their dead children. We cleaned their dead children. We numbered, arranged, and made a final resting place for their dead children. Plumbers, they called us, dogsbodies, handymen. True, if a place is infested, you fumigate using sodium cyanide and sulfuric acid. OK, so why the fuss? Our instructions were simple, but carrying them out was far from it: first evacuate, then wait two days to see if the chemicals have an effect—any harmful excess will dissipate in that time—and the tenants or workers may then return to their homes or places of work. The training Morgan and I received was old school in the extreme. Patience isn’t for everyone, but nothing beats it for effectiveness. You don’t need much of a brain to carry out a massacre, but that isn’t extermination: extermination takes skill. Apart from anything, the dead pests have to disappear completely, quickly followed by you. Your average José doesn’t much like to ponder death—hence the Ź-Brigađes. It was possible to think of ourselves as a community service, a group charged with keeping the mental peace, with keeping the Noble Empire (the economy) humming along. Of course: massacres are no good for business.