Nikolski

by Nicolas Dickner

  Noah felt it was not the best time to abscond, but, after all, what could a lowly postgraduate student do when a gang of big shots were plotting to lynch each other? Not having any better ideas, he fired off three letters. The first was sent to the student papers in support of Thomas Saint-Laurent. The second went to Thomas Saint-Laurent himself, to assure him of Noah’s unconditional moral backing. The third, to Sarah, was intended to let her know that he was once again changing his address.

  Everything had happened so quickly that he had barely had time to unpack his bag from Stevenson Island. He washed his clothes in a rush, shook out the layer of lichen at the bottom of the bag, threw out the half-empty bottles of DEET and sunscreen. By harassing civil servants, he managed to secure his passport in forty-eight hours, at an exorbitant price. There was no time for him to get the battery of recommended inoculations, but Arizna—who called the injections “gringo insanities”—told him he could have them administered in Caracas, if it was important to him.

  He shoves the plastic bags into a corner and surveys the room with satisfaction. The drawers and shelves are empty, and all that’s left to be done is to sweep up so as to leave the room just as he found it five years ago: thirty cubic metres of virgin space. He hooks his pack onto his shoulders, goes out of the room, and closes the door behind him without making any noise.

  In the hall he bumps into Maelo, who has had a great vacation, thank you very much.

  “How is your Grandmother Úrsula?” Noah inquires.

  “She’ll bury us all. But what are you up to, with your baggage? Just come back from the North Shore?”

  “No, I’m going away.”

  “Going away?”

  “To Venezuela.”

  “Venezuela?!” Maelo exclaims, in total shock.

  “When are you coming back?”

  “In about ten years, maybe.”

  The Marvellous Adventures

  of Charles Darwin

  THE VAST BURGOS FAMILY RESIDENCE was built around 1679, during the same period as the small fort of Santa Rosa. The two buildings, lost in the heights of La Asunción, share the same massive design, meant to withstand the frequent pirate raids to which Margarita Island was subject at the time.

  The house is said to have been commissioned by a businessman from Nueva Cádiz, who had made a fortune in the pearl trade and from the enslavement of Guaiquerí Indians. The sudden depletion of the oyster stocks forced him to sell the newly built, never inhabited mansion. Thus hastily disposed of, the troublesome property passed from hand to hand without ever belonging to anyone for very long. It was owned in turn by a general of the Spanish army, a businessman, an architect, five notaries, a member of the National Assembly, a former Brazilian prospector, an English industrialist, a Greek shipowner, and two dentists.

  Legend has it that in 1816, during the War of Independence, the mansion was requisitioned for the overnight billeting of Simón Bolívar.

  Don Eduardo became the house’s fifteenth owner in 1961. He had bought it with the intention of transforming it into a summer home, a rather astonishing idea in light of the building’s dimensions. A huge family would be required to occupy the vast patio, the three drawing rooms, the enormous dining room and the ten bedrooms, some furnished with two double beds.

  Despite the house’s gigantic proportions, no family reunion ever took place there. In fact, it remained practically empty between 1961 and 1995. Don Eduardo’s children never came to stay for more than three days a year, and they carefully planned their visits to avoid running into each other. There were no strong bonds among them, and most of them had already absconded to the United States when, in 1976, Arizna’s parents died in obscure circumstances off the coast of Trinidad. The assumption was that there had been an explosion on their yacht, but no one was ever able to confirm that hypothesis, least of all Arizna herself, as she was only three years old at the time. She was found the next day, the only survivor, suffering from shock in a half-deflated Zodiac.

  This mysterious accident put an end to the family’s unbroken presence in South America. Don Eduardo, who was then working at the Venezuelan consulate in New York, immediately took Arizna under his wing, and began in short order to put all his real estate up for sale, except for the house in La Asunción.

  Noah’s fascination with this imposing colonial mansion is boundless. Due to his altogether North American naïveté, he believes that Don Eduardo plans to spend his last days on Margarita Island. In fact, the old man rarely turns his thoughts to Venezuela, let alone to the prospect of dying, and has no intention of coming back to live in this house, which he keeps strictly for the arcane tax benefits he derives from it.

  At six-thirty on Monday morning, María slips through the small back door, noiselessly crosses the house and, putting the water on to boil, takes command of the kitchen. Hiss of propane, scrape of lighter, clatter of kettle: the music of everyday objects.

  The family residence entirely owes its salvation to the presence of this energetic island-dweller who scrubs the floors, dusts the family photos, beats the rugs, scours the dishes, cooks the best parrilla on the island, sends overzealous tourists packing and fills the air with her limitless repertoire of Caribbean songs. Without her, this ridiculously large house would in no time sink into gloom and chaos.

  Just as she does each morning, she spreads a big red tablecloth over the patio table and sets out plates, preserves and a basketful of bread.

  Simón appears around seven o’clock, half-awake, wearing an old Pokémon T-shirt full of holes. María wishes him good morning and combs his hair with a domineering hand. He protests on cue, musses his hair back into its usual tangle and sits down to his bowl of cereal with a yawn.

  While María pours him a glass of orange juice, he tilts his nose toward the sky. Not a cloud in sight. A tiny emerald-green hummingbird drones into view, tastes one plant after another as it goes round the patio, then vanishes as swiftly as it appeared. Simón tries to make eye contact with María, seeking in another’s wonderment the reflection of his own, but she has gone back to the kitchen, unaware.

  Arizna soon comes down, showered, combed and wearing an impeccable suit. She kisses her son on the forehead and sits down with an inaudible sigh of annoyance to the bundle of newspapers just airdropped from Caracas. She pours herself a coffee and starts to peruse the Meridiano, turning the pages with a crisp, expert hand. After ten minutes, she checks the time, drains her coffee and goes upstairs for her luggage.

  Just as she is leaving the patio, Noah, always last, comes in and shuffles barefoot over to the table. Before he even sits down, Simón breathlessly tells him that a hummingbird no bigger than this (he delineates a microscopic bird) flew in to draw nectar from the banana tree.

  “¿De veras?” Noah asks, making a show of total amazement.

  “Where do the hummingbirds come from?”

  “No idea. From the neighbour’s garden?”

  “¡No!” Simón protests. “Do the hummingbirds come from monkeys, like people do?”

  Living with a four-and-a-half-year-old allows a person to tap into unsuspected talents. Noah has discovered he has a gift for fabricating nonsensical stories. Last night, when Simón demanded a bedtime story, Noah improvised the first instalment of The Marvellous Adventures of Charles Darwin on the Galapagos Islands, an evolutionist tale alive with giant tortoises, fabulous gastropods and “our cousins, the monkeys.” Simón’s brain has stored away every detail of the story.

  Pouring himself a cup of coffee, Noah explains that the hummingbirds are of course descendants of the diplodocus …

  “… and the chicken we ate last night was the great-great-great-grandson of a Tyrannosaurus rex.”

  Simón bursts out laughing. He likes this peculiar genealogy. Now he needs to be provided with some books on the subject. As he chews, Noah wonders if somewhere on this planet there might be a publisher who has thought of putting out a children’s book on dinosaurs and hummingbirds. It won’t be long befor
e Simón learns to read, and Noah has no intention of letting him decipher his first words from an old road map.

  Arizna returns to the patio with a frown, her flight bag slung over her shoulder, already looking exhausted even though the day has hardly begun. The truth is that despite a difficult start—and thanks to the financial backing of Don Eduardo—the Tortuga publishing house has become a going concern, such that Arizna’s responsibilities have grown tenfold. She is now director and public relations officer for Editorial Tortuga, editor-in-chief of the El Pututo quarterly, conference organizer, researcher and lecturer at the Instituto Indigenista Autónomo—positions that involve travelling to Ecuador, Bolivia and Peru for meetings with other researchers of indigenous peoples. She is also writing a manuscript on the history of Aboriginal women in South America from 1492 to 1992, in her spare time.

  She crosses the patio, leans down to Simón and whispers something in his ear. The child smiles and nods his head while hollowing out little craters in his cereal. Arizna kisses him and goes toward the main door. Noah accompanies her, coffee in hand.

  “When are you due back, exactly?”

  “Tomorrow night. If you need to, you can always call me on my cell.”

  She walks through the garden, pushes open the gate and steps out onto the sidewalk. She flags a passing cab with a regal wave. Squeal of tires and rattle of rusted metal. Arizna leans into the window and negotiates the run to the airport. The driver feigns indignation, on cue, before making a little sign of agreement with his hand. Arizna opens the door, throws her bag inside and points a mock-tyrannical finger at Noah.

  “You take good care of Simón!”

  Noah bows in comic reverence. The next moment, the taxi fades away in a billow of smoking oil.

  The Distressing Saga of the Garifunas

  THE NOTION OF PATERNITY has always been an elusive one. Unlike maternity, which is legitimated de facto by the spectacular nature of pregnancy, paternity is difficult to put one’s finger on. No eyewitness can be called to testify on the genitor’s behalf, no birthing can prove his blood ties with the child. The status of father did not truly come into its own until the introduction of DNA tests, an ultimately inglorious consecration since, in resorting to this, shall we say, legal procedure, the genitor admits his inability to have his status acknowledged through traditional diplomacy. In making public the test results, he establishes his biological paternity but thereupon sacrifices his social paternity.

  That is the reason why Noah never tried to lay claim to the title of Simón’s father. He would have preferred a simple avowal from Arizna to the crass materialism of DNA. But in the face of his many queries on the subject, she steadfastly denied, contested and refuted any involvement of a Chipewyan gamete in the conception of her little boy. “Simón is 100 per cent Venezuelan,” she affirmed. The child’s eyes forcefully contradicted this assertion, but Noah chose not to press the point. Arizna jealously protected this strange independence of hers, and he was bound to respect it, at least insofar as he wished to avoid being deported to some far-off Aleutian island. One day Simón would be in a position to understand certain things—in particular, that despite its complex workings, the machinery of sex remains the simplest aspect of that great piece of handiwork so pompously referred to as Our Civilization.

  In the meantime, Noah preferred to piece together a small, quotidian paternity comprised of knowing winks and smiles, lazy breakfasts, and days at the beach. To do this he had to stay on Margarita Island, and to stay there he needed a pretext, a complicated pretext if at all possible, with numerous detours and dead ends, so as to fend off questions.

  He remembered an article he had read several years before, in an old National Geographic that he’d found behind the refrigerator while cleaning up. He discovered in that article a story so complicated as to be perfectly suited to the circumstances, a story that could have been titled:

  THE DISTRESSING SAGA OF THE GARIFUNAS

  It all began in the year of grace 1635, when a Dutch slaver, sailing in from Africa with its human cargo, ran aground in the Grenadine archipelago.

  The slaves took advantage of the mayhem to wipe out the ship’s crew and escape. They found refuge on the nearby island of Yurumein (subsequently renamed St. Vincent) and threw their lot in with the Caribs. The tribes stemming from this intermingling, neither wholly Amerindian nor entirely African, soon took on the name of Garifuna, although, depending on the circum stances, the location, and the subtleties of the prevailing grammar, they were also known as Garinagu, Carifuna, Kalypuna, Garif, Karif, Caberne, Cabre, Calino, Calinya, Calinyaku or Callinago, these being nothing more than an ongoing deformation of the name Carib.

  The Maroons of St. Lucia and Barbados soon joined the Garifunas, drawn by the prospect of living in freedom on this island that was still unoccupied by Europeans. But it was a tenuous freedom, for ever since the massacres of St. Kitts in 1626, the French and British had been embroiled in an intense rivalry over control of the archipelago. During the next two centuries, the Lesser Antilles became the theatre of countless battles, associations, betrayals, invasions, uprisings, treaties, edicts and other more or less diplomatic altercations.

  The Garifunas would surely have remained on the periphery of this conflict if not for the signing of the Treaty of Paris in 1763.

  When France ceded the island of St. Vincent to the British, it placed the islanders in a delicate position, especially the Garifunas, whose ambiguous historical situation must not be forgotten: neither wholly Aboriginal nor entirely descended from the African slaves.

  Political uncertainty put revolt back on the order of the day.

  The Garifunas wanted to expel the British from the island, and to this end they made the mistake of allying themselves with the French. For its part, France, which had never been weaker, had been reduced to fomenting insurrections among the local populations as an inexpensive method of driving out the British. The manoeuvre turned out to be futile since, in the absence of solid French bases elsewhere in the archipelago, each island won in this way would subsequently be returned to Great Britain under the next treaty.

  The last insurrections took place in February 1795, when the French attempted simultaneous landings in Grenada, St. Lucia and St. Vincent. The results were disastrous, and by 1796 only the Garifunas continued to resist. British troops overran the island and succeeded in crushing the rebellion in St. Vincent, thus putting an end to two hundred years of war in the Caribbean.

  In January 1797, the administration of St. Vincent ordered the deportation of the insurgents. The operation was carried out with devastating efficiency—Acadia had clearly provided the British with a prodigious training ground. They burned the pirogues and the crops, and more than four thousand islanders found themselves crammed into a processing station on the minuscule island of Baliceaux, where they were left to starve for a month. The survivors were then classed according to skin colour. The fairest were sent to St. Vincent (where cheap labour had suddenly become scarce), while those with darker complexions—that is, the Garifunas—were once again herded into the holds of ships and deported.

  On the night of April 12, 1797, after several weeks at sea, they were abandoned on Roatán Island, off the coast of Honduras.

  Enfeebled by their living conditions over the recent months, the deportees were bound to die of exhaustion, mosquito attacks or the onslaught of the Spanish colonists. That, at any rate, was what the British believed. Against all odds, they survived, crossed the continent and spread out from Nicaragua to the British Honduras. Two centuries later, the Garifunas still inhabit Central America. They continue to fish, cook cassava, speak their ancestral language, and mistrust the spirits haunting the river mouths, where the fresh water and the salt water mingle.

  And no one, not even the greatest ethnologists, can properly explain the intricate mechanism that allowed these orphans, though uprooted and exiled, to hold on to their identity.

  Noah’s life on this island essentially
boils down to telling stories. At night he invents evolutionary fables about Charles Darwin, while during the day he claims that the reason he is in Margarita is to write a doctoral dissertation on the Garifunas.

  To the inquisitive, he states that he is interested in the relationship between the Garifunas’ oral tradition and the colonial archives. And, he asserts, many early archival holdings have remained on Margarita Island, more precisely at the National Archives of La Asunción, barely a ten-minute walk from the Burgos residence, which, fundamentally, provides him with an ideal pretext to live under the same roof as Simón.

  Arizna has taken the bait. She precisely remembers their first discussion on the fifth floor of the university library in Montreal, and it makes perfect sense to her that Noah would be interested in issues of relocation, traditional territories and identity. She has even asked him several times to write an article on the Garifunas for El Pututo, but each time he has cleverly managed to push back the deadline.

  He has developed a genuine talent for storytelling.

  So long as a bona fide Garifunas expert does not alight on Margarita and unmask Noah, he can enjoy life to the fullest. He pretends to study, earns a little money teaching English and French, basks in the sun. And whenever he has the chance, he takes Simón to the beach.

  Keratin

  HALF-PAST MIDNIGHT. In the space between the skyscrapers, clementine-coloured patches of cloud drift by. A few snowflakes flutter through the air. The atmosphere is that of a Japanese animated film, five minutes before the end of the world.

  Joyce adjusts her scarf. Standing in the entrance to an underground parking lot, she feels strangely indifferent as she observes the scene bathed in a yellowish light. This garage is truly an Ali Baba’s cave, with its inadequate surveillance, plentiful trash bins and the treasures that can often be found here. Tonight, however, all she sees is an icy crypt that reeks of concrete and motor oil.