She keeps up her marathon until she is driven out by the closing bell at eight forty-five p.m., at which point she disappears from the surface of the planet, apparently sucked into the void, only to be returned to the real world the next morning, when the library reopens. The lapse between nine p.m. and eight a.m. is the Bermuda Triangle.
The days roll by. Noah and the girl still share the big mahogany table. Little by little, the boundary lines between their territories have blurred. Their books mingle and a tacit familiarity arises, made up of silences, rustling sounds and discreet glances. After a week, Noah finds it natural to ask her, “So, what are you working on?”
The girl lifts her nose out of her book and glances around, blinking her eyes as though she were taking her first break in six months.
“The relocations in the remote Arctic.”
Five accents are interwoven in these six words: the haughty tone of the Caracas bourgeoisie, the diphthongal speech of Montreal, the haste of Madrid, the nasal intonation of New York and some traces of a recent visit to Chiapas. Where could she be from?!
“Relocations?” Noah asks, with the deliberate aim of hearing that indefinable accent once again.
Arching her back, she yawns slowly.
“Does Inukjuak mean anything to you?”
“It’s an Inuit village on Hudson Bay, isn’t it?”
“Precisely. In 1953, the Canadian government relocated a number of families from Inukjuak to two artificial villages: Resolute and Grise Fiord. Near the seventy-fifth parallel. So far north that in December the sun stops coming up.”
“Why were they relocated?”
“Because of famine. That, at any rate, was the official reason. Last year, the Makivik Corporation filed a complaint with the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples. They claim famine was a pretext. The government only wanted to shore up its sovereignty in the Far North … What is it? Why are you smiling?”
“It’s nothing.”
“You have an opinion on the subject?”
“It seems like the deportation of the Acadians in reverse.”
“That’s a funny sort of opinion.”
“What about you, what do you think?”
“I think it’s complicated.”
“What were the Royal Commission’s conclusions?”
“They ruled in favour of the Inuit, but that doesn’t mean anything. The whole thing’s very political. There could be royal commissions for all sorts of things that have happened in the south—the Mirabel expropriations, the cutback in services for outlying regions, the closing down of Schefferville … But the stakes are different when it comes to Whites.”
“Different in what way?”
“Traditional territory.”
Noah folds his arms with a skeptical look on his face.
“Okay, wait a second,” he says. “Before the arrival of the Whites, the Inuits moved around in step with the game and the seasons. Almost all of today’s villages gradually took shape around the Hudson’s Bay Company trading posts. Which means that when the families of Inukjuak were relocated, they had been sedentary for no more than two or three generations. So does it still make sense to talk about traditional territory, when the way that territory is occupied now is anything but traditional?”
“Of course! Territory isn’t measured in square kilometres. You also have to consider ancestors, posterity, the oral tradition, snowmobile trails, family ties, the seal hunt and the salmon fishery, lichen, legal actions against Hydro-Québec. Above all, territory is a matter of identity.”
Noah nods his head without speaking. The girl rubs her eyes and abruptly changes the subject.
“What about you? What’s your field?”
“Archaeology.”
“And you’re interested in the indigenous people?”
“Actually, I’m interested in trash, but …”
“Trash?” she says, surprised. “Why trash?”
“It’s all about traditional territory.”
“I don’t see the connection.”
“As a rule, archaeologists don’t take much interest in nomads. The more a population travels, the fewer traces it leaves behind. They prefer to study civilizations that settle down, that build cities and produce large amounts of garbage. There’s nothing more interesting than garbage. Garbage teaches us more than infrastructures, buildings or monuments. Garbage reveals what everything else tries to hide.”
“And how does traditional territory fit into all this?”
“The Inuit had no idea what a dump was before the arrival of the Hudson’s Bay Company.”
The girl nods her head and sizes Noah up with an approving smile.
Her name is Arizna Burgos Mendez, and that is all Noah manages to get out of her. For although she has no qualms about holding forth on the major Aboriginal issues, she immediately cuts short any discussion of a personal nature. This reticence arouses Noah’s curiosity, and he sets about deploying all the tactics of a Sioux archaeologist. From harmless discussions and trick questions, he manages to sketch a rough composite portrait.
Arizna was born in Caracas. She was raised by her grandfather, who currently holds an unspecified (but important) position at the Venezuelan consulate in Montreal. She left Caracas at a very early age, lived by turns in New York, Paris, Brussels, Madrid and Montreal, depending on her grandfather’s assignments. After several years in Montreal, she returned to Venezuela to study at the Instituto Indigenista Autónomo, a small, little-known university in Caracas. She is interested exclusively in Indigenous studies, is quite willing to discuss the Zapatistas, often scratches her right eyebrow, likes her coffee very sweet and seems to subsist mainly on lentil salad.
Intrigued by this mysterious Instituto Indigenista Autónomo, Noah deepens his investigation. He searches through the library catalogues, combs the Internet, questions Thomas Saint-Laurent—to no avail. There is no mention anywhere of this enigmatic institution. Noah believes the university may be bogus. One morning he decides to broach the question head-on:
Q: So, you’re doing your doctorate?
A: No, not really. My university doesn’t grant diplomas.
Q: Well, which program are you in exactly?
A: There are no programs as such. The students follow a general curriculum of variable length. Once that’s completed they join a research group.
In my case, for example, I’m a member of the G.E.T.: the Grupo de Estudio Tortuga, which is simply referred to as la Tortuga.
Q: And what’s the focus of your research?
A: Liberation anthropology.
Q: Meaning what?
The last Q does not receive a satisfactory A. Visibly embarrassed, Arizna stammers a few incredibly vague sentences on indigenism, Venezuela’s domestic policies, and a certain Gustavo Gutiérrez—before finally claiming that the concept is hard to translate into French.
Convinced that the answer would be no clearer in Spanish, Noah refrains from asking for a translation. Instead, he slips off in the direction of the library’s computer terminals, where he enters: “anthropology +liberation.” No results. He scratches his chin and enters Gutierrez, Gustavo. The computer immediately produces about fifteen titles, including Liberation Theology. Noah memorizes the catalogue code and runs to the stacks.
Sheltered in a dark corner of Section B (Philosophy, Psychology and Religion), he leafs through the book without quite knowing what he’s looking for. He was brought up without the slightest concept of religion. He couldn’t say if his mother was animist, Roman Catholic or Seventh-day Adventist. As a result, he knows as much about religion as he does about the history of the Caucasus in the sixteenth century.
Gustavo Gutiérrez’s book makes no mention of indigenism. On the other hand, Noah does discover some unexpected words, which glimmer like cactus needles: struggle against the domination of the rich, permanent cultural revolution, radical commitment, opulence, injustice, break with society as it exists today, guerrillas.
Noah closes th
e book, more bewildered than ever. He comes to a decision: he must meet Arizna between nine p.m. and eight a.m., right in the middle of the Bermuda Triangle.
Jututo
ARIZNA COMES LATE, carrying an expensive bottle of rum under her arm, visibly thrilled at the prospect of taking part in one these famous jututos. She kisses Noah on the cheek and thanks him again for the invitation.
“I’m tired of always eating with my grandfather,” she explains with a frown.
Right from the first glass of wine, the model student turns into a fearsome polemicist. She takes control of the situation in the time it takes to peel a shrimp. Perfectly at home with familial chaos, she sparks a heated debate on the political future of the Caribbean. Around the table, the guests raise their voices, shake their forefingers and hurl crustacean shells at each other.
The supper is already quite raucous when, after the first bottle of rum has been opened, she stirs up a controversy over the word jututo. The term, which for years has been used to refer to this Sunday gathering without ever bothering anyone, suddenly becomes a bone of contention. Everything about the word seems to be controversial, starting with its pronunciation. Cousin Javier asserts that in his village it is pronounced fututo, Cousin Miguel claims that among the Garifunas of Belize they say bututo, and Arizna explains that in the Andean countries the preferred pronunciation is pututo.
Leaving aside phonetics, they try to agree on the nature of the thing itself. Most of the guests affirm that a j(f/p/b)ututo is a trumpet fashioned out of a large shell (of the Strombidae family, Arizna specifies), but Cousin Jorge categorically maintains that it is a bull’s horn, and Pedro adds that one of his neighbours used a lowly bottle of Brugal which had been broken in half, a procedure he would demonstrate on the spot if not for everyone around the table rushing to stop him.
Which raises the question—as Arizna points out, for the obvious purpose of striking the debate while it’s hot—of what the connection is between a Sunday get-together of cousins and a trumpet (be it a shell, a horn or a bottle of rum). Cousin Gina claims the said trumpet once served to sound the village assemblies—hence the metonymy—but this piece of information does not bring them any closer to consensus, and the subject soon becomes the thousand and one potential uses of the jututo, each argument being shored up with a generous swig of rum.
After supper, Arizna installs herself in the kitchen, seemingly indifferent to the music, the dancing and the tropical cocktails circulating in the living room. Seated at the table together with four cousins and a suspicious-looking bottle, she talks politics. Uppercut, left jab, hook—she easily demolishes the others’ arguments, counters the most complex analyses, makes unexpected assertions and then proves the opposite. When one cousin gives up, another jumps in, as if Arizna, alone against a legion of opponents, were defending her title in a boxing ring marked out by the tablecloth with the fish design.
“Say,” Maelo remarks as he brushes by Noah, “your girlfriend, she’s a feisty one! Where did you find her— at a karate school?”
“No,” Noah replies with a smile, “on the fifth floor of the library.”
Toward one a.m., Arizna wriggles out of a sticky discussion on the Organization of American States, wobbles over to the living room and puts her hand on Noah’s shoulder. Her voice is still strong, but her eyes are fogging over.
“Everything okay?” she yells over the music.
He nods yes and asks her the same question. Resorting to an inspired bit of sign language, she lets him know that she’s had a little too much to drink, and that the ambient blend of sweat, cigar smoke and multiple decibels of cheap bachata has given her a nascent twinge of nausea.
Noah guides her to his bedroom and closes the door behind them.
The room, which four years before Noah was afraid he could never fill, is now more crammed than a secondhand store. He has often thought of chucking everything in the garbage so that he could once again experience the delicious dizziness of those early days, but each time he has tried he has come up against the laws of entropy. Matter resists, struggles against, the void. Every bauble suddenly seems to fulfill a vital function, and if, despite this, you venture to throw it away, another bauble with an equivalent volume immediately appears in the empty space.
Noah cannot look at this mess without thinking of his mother. He pictures her in the middle of Saskatchewan, at noon, in a prairie more immense than even the Pacific Ocean. The three thimblefuls of disarray that he could remove from his room seem laughable in comparison with those vast spaces. But those three thimblefuls are all that is missing now for someone to be able to sit down.
Arizna looks around. The only chair is loaded with a pile of books topped with a half-empty cup of coffee and a fan whirling at top speed. She lets herself fall on the mattress, between a stack of National Geographics and an old laptop computer. She takes off her sandals, undoes her belt and taps her stomach.
“Ohhh! Everything is spinning,” she sputters. “What do you call that concoction?”
“Mamajuana.”
“The roots floating around in the bottle—are they hallucinogenic?” she inquires anxiously.
“No, they just add a bit of a jungle taste to cheap rum. Maelo says it’s supposed to be an old Taino recipe.”
He rolls up his sleeves and starts to clear the mattress. He stacks the National Geographic magazines on the laptop and tries to squeeze the whole lot into a corner of his desk. At the other end of the desk, various piles of papers are on the verge of toppling over. Noah rushes over and catches them just in time. He looks around in search of a few unoccupied cubic centimetres but finds only a glaring lack of cubic centimetres.
He kicks open the closet door, locates a narrow space on the upper shelf, between two cardboard boxes. He tries to push one of the boxes toward the back of the shelf. The box creaks but does not budge.
Noah feels he is losing control of the situation on all fronts. Above him, the box refuses to move. Under his arm, the pile of paper is gradually sliding away. Behind him, Arizna is fighting with the zipper of her jeans and mumbling unintelligible statements about indigenous technologies. He feels he is the prisoner of a concentric series of enclosed spaces: a cardboard box stored in a closet built into a bedroom inside an apartment filled with Dominicans in the process of emptying bottles of rum.
All at once, something cracks dramatically and the box spills its contents onto his head.
“Case closed,” Noah mutters, as he brushes the dust from his shoulders.
Arizna, her hand clamped over her mouth, is bursting with laughter. The box’s contents have spread at her feet.
“What’s this?” she asks, picking up one of the books with her toes.
“Let me see. Oh, that. The Book with No Face. I haven’t seen it in years.”
“What’s it about?”
“Pirates,” he says succinctly, dropping down on the mattress beside her. “The same old story. The Spanish steal gold from the Native Indians. The English steal the gold from the Spanish. The Dutch steal the gold from the English.”
“How does it end?”
“The Dutch are shipwrecked and the gold ends up at the bottom of the sea.”
Her curiosity aroused, Arizna peruses the book. This is the first time Noah has seen her interested in anything but the Indian Act, numbered treaties, the Inuit or the Oka Crisis.
“Interconnected issues,” she explains. “Remember, your pirate story begins with the Native Indians’ gold.”
“That’s where their part in the story ends. Native Indians have never been great seafarers.”
“Wrong! Have you read Moby-Dick?”
“A gap in my education.”
“Well, for your information, in the nineteenth century the success of whale-hunting expeditions depended on the skill of the harpooners that got hired on. And the best harpooners were indigenous. There are three in Moby-Dick: one is a Native Indian, another is from Oceania and the third is African. They were the most
respected members of the crew and they earned the biggest share of the profits. Next to the captain, of course …”
She sighs and pops a few more buttons of her blouse while fanning herself with the Book with No Face. Noah wonders how many buttons it takes for a blouse to no longer constitute an enclosed space.
“Moby-Dick was written in 18 51. That was the golden age of whale oil. After the introduction of fossil fuels, the whaling industry became mechanized. These days, the harpooners of the Pequod would be underpaid sailors on a container ship registered in the Bahamas or Liberia.”
“That sounds a lot like a pirate story.”
“Yes, it does. Can I borrow your book?”
Noah makes a little gesture with his hand as a sign of consent.
On the other side of the wall, the muffled pulsing of the bachata diminishes and stops. All that can be heard now are the faint noise of dishes and sporadic conversations. Arizna puts the Book with No Face down on the floor, stretches slowly and looks at her watch.
“Well, that’s it,” she notes, her voice imbued with implication. “I’ve missed the last Metro.”
Deluge
MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 3, seven-thirty in the morning. Rain is falling for the first time in months. The parched earth refuses to drink it all in and the drains spew back the overflow.
Noah is completely unaware of the weather. He is floating over a field of grain somewhere in Saskatchewan. It is hot and the breeze carves out waves in the barley. After a time, he sinks to the ground, plunges among the golden ears and wakes up in his bed.
He taps the empty space on the port side of the mattress, pokes his head out from under the sheets. Arizna’s clothes have disappeared, along with Arizna. Not surprising. Not once since she became a regular at the jututo has he managed to wake up beside her.
Resigned, he starts to get out of bed. But when his foot touches down, he discovers to his astonishment ten centimetres of brownish water covering the floor. He rubs his eyes, shakes his head. But the little waves continue to slap against his ankles.
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