by Frank Wynne
A story my mother-in-law told me
caguama: the biggest known species of marine turtle, weighing in at up to forty stones, though its meat is inedible.
Cuba on Hand, 1936
When I first met my mother-in-law she was called Carmela, but she hadn’t been born to that name. At the age of four she went missing for several days and her mother made a vow to the virgin of the Carmen: if she were found alive, Carmen would be her name. On the third day they found her on an island the other side of the river, where crocodiles still swam. As a child I had seen manatees in the same river and it was as wild as ever. Carmela now swears she was carried across the river by a lanky, long-haired man who walked on water. The whole family thought it was no lesser a person than Jesus who had put her safely on the island. Ever since my mother-in-law’s been Carmen, Carmela.
She told me another story that was no less incredible. It happened before her tenth birthday. A village boy had fallen in love with a local beauty and his love did not go unrequited. They wanted to marry but he was very poor. And so was she. Everybody in the village was poor. But he didn’t even have a job. Despite their hopelessness, they lived on hope. Not knowing what to expect, they had their expectations. One day he realized there was no future in a village which lived in the past and decided, with his best friend, to go in search of fame and fortune. Ironies of fate, he found one but not the other, although for a moment he believed he had really found both. The only source of life the village knew was the sea – and off to the sea he went.
But he didn’t take to the sea. He suggested to his friend that they should explore the coast and together they headed for Los Caletones, in the opposite direction to the bay and the river. On the then deserted beach of Los Caletones an enormous whale had appeared one day, become beached and had died. When discovered it was already putrefying (people learned of its existence from the large gathering of vultures, a strange sight, because scavengers don’t usually venture seawards) and the village entrepreneurs braved the stench and managed to extract from the carcass a great quantity of spermaceti which fetched a good price in the capital. Los Caletones seemed full of promise.
But they scoured the whole beach and found only flotsam and jetsam. Despondently they decided to go back to the village, the boy who wanted to marry more downcast than his friend who didn’t want to get married. (Or, at any rate, not immediately.) On their way back to the village, scrambling out between two sand dunes, they saw a caguama. They already knew something you don’t know about caguama.
The caguama is a reptile and like the crocodile moves well in water (rivers, seas) but poorly on land. It is in its element in the sea, where it can spend hours underwater, coming up for air very occasionally. Once a caguama, the Indian name for a giant turtle, reaches the sea, after making an ungainly exit from its shell, only the female returns to dry land, to lay her eggs. The male – it is known – never returns. The caguama moves slowly on land because her feet have turned into flippers for swimming and because she can tip the scales at two thousand pounds. Others measure two yards by three. A zoologist once said, ‘carrying her shell as armour’, the caguama has no need to be as swift as Achilles, or to furrow the waves like Ulysses. But the caguama continues swimming even when she is out of the sea and flaps her way over the few metres of beach to her nest. That is how she makes the return journey from and to the sea. Like all reptiles, the caguama practises internal fertilization and detecting her sex is no easy matter. In many species, on the other hand, it is possible to make out the sex of an adult animal. When the caguama has laid her eggs, her sex assumes a strangely human aspect. The belief has always been that the caguama sees little and hears less, though some species do have a voice, particularly when on heat. Those who have been in close contact with a caguama say it possesses an intelligence that is only possible in a mammal.
Both saw her at the same time and thought the same thoughts at the same time. The two boys bore some comparison, except one was good-looking and the other wasn’t. But both were equally strong and often did identical press-ups, wrestled and executed other trials of strength for their own enjoyment. They were, in fact, the strongest boys in the village, only one was clever and the other wasn’t. Now the cleverer of the two conceived an idea which he didn’t have to tell his friend (they often had the same thoughts at the same time) but just resolved to put it into practice and his friend was only seconds behind in coming forward. He tried to get hold of the huge animal who was heading laboriously seawards. They would make a fortune from selling her meat (that was all but inedible), its tortoiseshell (though it wasn’t a hawksbill) and the fat stored underneath her carapace, well known to be (only they knew this) better than chicken grease. ‘Caguama fat, can cure all,’ went the refrain which they knew and took to be truly axiomatic – although they didn’t know what an axiom was.
*
The frightened caguama stopped in her tracks, not because she could make out one of the boys but because her feet had felt the vibration of the shoes running towards her. As often on her journey, the caguama sighed, not because she sensed the end was nigh (a caguama lives to be a hundred), but because she is a marine animal who always sighs on land. (Some people believe it is the release of breath left over from the energy needed to move over the sand, when she finally comes to a halt.) Be that as it may, in their excitement not one of the boys heard this land-locked siren’s muted song. (Or perhaps one of them did.) They closed in on the caguama, shouting excitedly, enthusiastically, and at once got to work turning over a turtle paralysed by the hullabaloo. We know that a caguama on its back becomes helpless and requires help to recover its quadruped state. An upturned caguama is a dead caguama. Better than dead for the two boys: she is worth a fortune. Shouting each other on, with much heaving, more misspent heaving than ever before, they managed to turn over the animal, which flapped its legs in the air, as if air were water. The caguamas, they thought, aren’t as intelligent as we are. Although only one of the pair was intelligent.
One of the boys or perhaps the other (they were indistinguishable) suggested going to borrow the travois from his uncle who lived in the nearby hillocks. Now you know what a hillock is when it’s not being a hill, but perhaps few of you know what a travois is. It is a vehicle used by the Plains Indians and takes the place of the wheel they never knew. Though simple, it is a great invention. You need only to find three long poles, two act as converging axles where force is applied, and the third pole becomes a crossbar which can also carry a frame. The travois is pulled from the other end and can take a considerable weight. The uncle owning the travois apparently lived nearby. The other youth walked off through the sand dunes.
Meanwhile, the first boy watched over the caguama. He knew she was immobilized for ever and wasn’t afraid she would roll over, though he wasn’t sure she mightn’t be stolen in that state of stasis. While he watched, the lad was thinking of the endless quantity of combs, clasps, jewel boxes and other luxury items to be made from such a specimen. The caguama would be a source of untold wealth in the village. If getting her there was a matter of muscle, selling the caguama required grey matter. His friend could drag it along by himself but only he could sell it, get rich and get married.
With these thoughts running through his head and feeling bored, he decided to take a close look at the caguama. The skin on her chest and belly seemed hard but was pale, almost white, and gave the already vulnerable animal a soft, silky aspect that belied its dark carapace. The lower covering ended in the flippers that were very strong and still plying the air, as if the animal didn’t realize it was immobile in its armoured shell. Caguamas are stupid, thought the boy. Then the caguama stopped pawing to puff out air in an even louder sigh. The boy was alarmed by this almost human sound, this mixture of despair and resignation. But curiosity is stronger than alarm and he carried on inspecting. You stupid, stupid bitch. Then he made what he thought was a wonderful discovery.
The caguama’s sex had suddenly come into sight
. After her egg-laying, according to one naturalist, it is common – the result of the effort of laying dozens of eggs very, very quickly or perhaps down to a natural reaction – the caguama’s vagina is left exposed. In this case to prying eyes. The caguama was now showing her sex that appeared virgin (turtles, unlike manatees, have hairless pubes) and the lad felt curiosity giving way to dour desire. He decided (or intuited) that he had to penetrate the caguama, a female for the taking. There and then. He took one shamefaced look round. Saw nobody. Los Caletones were always deserted and it would take his friend some time to drag the travois that distance. The youth walked once more around the caguama and the animal stirred a little as she sensed him, but then quietened down again. The boy returned to her pudenda that now moved in what he took to be a strong sucking movement. The softest areas of the depilated (or girlish) sex trembled. Driven by his own sex, the boy opened his rustic flies (no need to drop underwear poor people don’t wear) and took out a big, fat penis whose darkness contrasted with the female whiteness (though next to the animal, his penis seemed puny.) He got close in, lay almost horizontal atop the caguama. With one hand (his left, being a left-hander) he clung to the carapace and, with the help of his right, inserted an anxious penis into the vast vagina, which swallowed it whole. He felt a pleasure that seemed extraordinary, perhaps because till then he had known only masturbation, but also because it was an animal pleasure: he was committing bestialism but he didn’t know it. Ecstasy occurred a second before he in turn was penetrated, apparently, on all sides at the same time.
When a caguama is on heat (and the combination of egg-laying followed by sudden penetration had now created within her conditions similar to being on heat) she is subject to opposing but equally peremptory forces. One force is paralysis: the passivity of the female before her male attacker. The other is action to secure a coitus that is underway. Fornication always occurs out to sea, where the couple is weightless yet at the same time under tons of sea-pressure per square metre. Sometimes caguamas couple out in the Gulf Stream and are visible from the beach. Copulation is, then, often threatened by adverse elements. But nature, evolution or whatever has endowed the caguama with mechanical aids to union. The female of the species is equipped with an appendix of the same material as her shell, a sharp, curved point that she uses to hold on tight to the macho during coitus. This hook remains hidden as the male mounts the female and tries to maintain a penetrating position on the slippery, wave-tossed carapace, a precarious state the female immediately makes secure. The hook (or rather harpoon) is launched from its secret place within the female to catch its prey. The female literally nails the male from below and behind. Only the roughness of its carapace prevents the caguama, like the male praying mantis, from being killed by the female during coitus.
The other boy, meanwhile, was returning to the beach cheerfully pulling his heavy travois behind him, proving how strong he was. He was almost singing. When he left the hills and cleared his way through the overgrown coast, he saw in the distance what became an increasingly intimate couple as he drew near. He stopped suddenly not out of prudery but fear. He will never forget what he then saw. He moved nearer. He knew a caguama is a passive animal (tame was the preferred word) and although he didn’t know what you know, he did see what he did see. The other boy, his friend, was rigid on top of the turtle and bleeding on all sides from under and over his trousers: from buttocks, legs, feet and calfskin shoes. A summary inspection revealed that the other boy had fainted (he wasn’t dead yet though he had reason enough to die several times) and when he got as close to the other boy as fear, horror and the flow of blood making a puddle on the sand allowed him, he finally saw the unheard of weapon (or fragment thereof) with which the caguama had hoisted his friend. Had there been an autopsy, it would have shown how the animal’s shaft had penetrated the intruding fornicator just above the coccyx, how the harpoon’s curved action had transfixed the anus from top to bottom, twisted its hook into his rectum and drilled through it crossways, before shredding the prostate and obliterating both testicles (or just the one) until the end came to rest like another duct within a penis which was doubly rigid.
*
The other youth realized his friend was badly injured and certain to die if he stayed on the beach. He didn’t try to extricate him or even to move him. Not from any intelligent inhibition or sense of pity, but because he was increasingly terrified. Now he wasn’t sure whether to fear the inevitable death of his only friend or the dangers of the caguama, which now seemed an awesome apparition. He had an idea that in other circumstances would have been his salvation: the travois would do the job it was intended for and drag his friend and the caguama to the village. With more strength than skill he pushed the two axles of the travois over the loose, soft sand and inserted them under the sides of the beast. When the artefact was in place, he secured it with the ropes he had brought with him. He tied down the caguama and his friend, who was now livid, a deathly pale. The pallor emphasized the perfect features that now seemed etched on his rustic face. Unhappily he began to pull his happy burden.
How the other boy managed to drag the couple the eight leagues to the village is as extraordinary as the tragedy inspiring his feat. He finally reached the village after midday and was met by the usual indifference. But as ever in villages, the extraordinary presence immediately assembled a public that was too shocked to react to the horror confronting them. It was like a fairground. But among the last to arrive was the would-be fiancée, on a day whose horror had its limits. Obviously she immediately recognized her boyfriend. What she didn’t see was him half-opening his eyes at the hue and cry.
Nobody saw that because right then the caguama, immortal like all turtles, let out a kind of scream that seemed to emerge not from the beast’s mouth but from the open lips of the fiancée before her betrothed. Still atop the turtle, the boy closed his eyes and for a moment imagined he was dreaming of his wedding night.
THE CRIME OF AN INNSBRUCK SHOPKEEPER’S SON
Thomas Bernhard
Translated from the German by Martin Chalmers
Thomas Bernhard (1931–1989). An Austrian novelist, playwright and poet, Bernhard is considered one of the most important post-war authors writing in German. His novels and plays offer a bleak view of human folly compared by some to Strindberg. His unsparing portrait of his native Austria as “a country that is rotting away, falling apart, run by the political parties in an unholy alliance with the Catholic Church” earned him little appreciation in his home country, and his last play, Heldenplatz, led to public demonstrations and a dispute about censorship. Bernhard suffered from ill health throughout his life, requiring constant medication as a result of childhood tuberculosis, and his continuing ill health caused him to seek assisted suicide at the age of fifty-eight. In his will, Bernhard forbade any new stagings of his works or publication of unpublished writings in Austria, though his decision was later overturned by his heir in 1999.
Even after a brief acquaintance with him I had extremely revealing insights into his development, into his childhood above all: sounds, smells in his parents’ home, now many years behind him, he described to me again and again, the eeriness of a shopkeeper’s gloomy house; his mother and the grocery-stillness and the birds trapped in the darkness in the high vaulting; the behaviour of his father, who in the shopkeeper’s house in Anichstrasse constantly gave the orders of a ruthless master of properties and people. Georg always talked of his sisters’ lies and slanders, of the devilish tricks with which siblings can often proceed against siblings; sisters have a criminal craving to destroy brothers, brothers to destroy sisters, brothers to destroy brothers and sisters to destroy sisters. His parents’ house had never been a house of children, as are most of the other houses, parents’ houses, especially in better areas, better atmospheric conditions, but a terrible adults’ house, furthermore a huge and damp one, in which children have never come to the world, but right away dreadful arithmeticians, big-mouth infants with a nose
for business and for the suppression of altruism.
Georg was an exception. He was the centre of attention, but thanks to his worthlessness, thanks to the scandal which he represented for the whole family, always frightened and embittered by him, not least where they tried to cover it up, a horribly crooked and crippled centre of attention, which they wanted out of the house at all costs. He was so greatly and in the most dreadful way deformed by nature that they always had to hide him. After they had been disappointed down to the depths of their faecal and victual detestableness by the doctors’ skills and by medical science altogether, they implored in mutual perfidiousness a fatal illness for Georg, which would remove him from the world as swiftly as possible; they had been prepared to do anything, if he would just die; but he didn’t die and, although all of them together have done everything to make him fall fatally ill, he did not once fall dangerously ill (neither in Innsbruck, where, separated by the River Inn, he had grown up a couple of hundred yards away from me— neither knew of the other—nor later, during our Viennese studies in a room on the third floor of a house in Zirkusgasse); among them he had only grown larger and larger and ever more ugly and frail, ever more worthless and in need of help, but without his organs being affected, which functioned better than their own … This development on Georg’s part embittered them, above all, because at the very moment at which he had been thrown by his screaming mother onto a cornerstone of the washhouse floor, they had come to the decision to revenge themselves in their way for the horrible surprise of the birth of an initially huge, damp and fat, but then, even if ever larger, then ever more delicate and healthy unsightly ‘cripple son’ (as his father called him), and to compensate themselves for an injustice that cried to heaven; like conspirators, they had decided to get rid of him, of Georg, and without coming into conflict with the law, even before he, as they ruminated, could deal them a possibly fatal injury through his mere existence; for years they believed that the point in time at which they would no longer have to put up with him was close, but they were deceived, had deceived themselves, his health, his lack of illness—as far as Georg’s lungs, Georg’s heart, all the other important organs were concerned—were stronger than their will and their shrewdness.
