Freeman's

by John Freeman

  I spent some time repeating those words like a mantra, sipping my iced tea, feeling the sweat dry on my cold skin. Andrei was dead. The anxiety I’d just experienced on the street wouldn’t go away—on the contrary, I felt it was permeating me irreversibly, as though I were soil absorbing poisonous water. I looked at the glass in my hand, I imagined it transforming into hundreds of shards scattered about, and I thought there was something perverted and undesirable in that glass that remained intact, it was as though it were conscious of being a glass, something it definitely had no right to be. I squeezed the glass tightly, wanting and not wanting to break it, in an impulse similar to the cruel desire people sometimes feel to squeeze a puppy.

  Living with my parents at thirty-three, even under the circumstance of the medical problem that had nearly killed my father, brought the predictable sensation of an emotional step backward. I loved the things in that house, sure, but this didn’t stop them from generating a certain discomfort in me. I cast my eyes from the framed photos of Tatuíra, our deceased mutt with her tiger-stripe fur, to the violets in little vases in the kitchen to the collection of cookbooks with their faded spines, and I visualized the showerhead spitting out air when we took a shower, my father’s enormous library full of literature, the reference books my mother left piled on the floor of the little shed behind the house where she worked on her illustrations, the guest room that still preserved idiotic vestiges of the time it was the bedroom of an only daughter, a poster on the wall of Johnny Depp and Winona Ryder in Edward Scissorhands.

  The familiarity of the house intensified my fear of having left unguarded a strategic border far away from there, of having opened a flank for them to take my life away from me. The rent for my apartment in São Paulo was past due, more than half the lightbulbs needed changing, and my research about circadian rhythms in sugarcane plants was stuck in the wreckage of a petty quarrel that had resulted in my failing the qualifying exams for my doctorate. The next exam was scheduled for the beginning of April, and I had taken care to schedule it on a date that would force Professor Cesar, my nemesis, to send a substitute to assume his place on the examining board. This practically guaranteed that I would pass, but I trembled with rage and anxiety each time I remembered the humiliation that maggot had put me through. I was convinced I’d been the victim of faculty misconduct, but going that route would have been counterproductive. Cesar could have quashed me if he wanted.

  My fingers grasped the glass with such force they’d turned yellow. I asked myself what would happen if I simply left everything behind. If I didn’t return. Disappeared into the woods, ran away to Uruguay and stayed there listening to the distant echoes of civilization’s death throes. My weakness and my loss would follow me to the grave. Version One: I would experience freedom of a kind that I had never imagined existed. Version Two: The question was whether, beyond the narrow lens of our vanity, our ambitions in life truly became gratuitous, futile, and forgettable, as I sometimes, in secret, suspected.

  I relaxed the pressure in my fingers, swallowed the last ice cube, and set the glass down on the table. I needed to do something to escape the vortex of anxiety. Then I remembered my favorite way to pass the time in that house. The habit, which I developed as a child, of riffling through my mother’s visual reference guides, among them the illustrated zoology, botany, and anatomy volumes that had so fascinated me since I was a young girl. I walked out the back door of the kitchen. The heat outside, even during the few seconds necessary to cross the backyard to reach the shed, bore down on me with such cruelty that I asked myself whether those conditions weren’t hostile to human life. Man’s fragility was pathetic. Millions of years of evolution had led to creatures incredibly unadapted to the planet’s environment, as displayed by our suffering from lack of sustenance or the smallest changes in temperature, a humiliating vulnerability to all sorts of atmospheric conditions, to exposure to physical matter and other organisms, not to mention the still further humiliating vulnerability of our minds to any old nonsense, to anxiety, to hope. We were unfit for nature. It wasn’t surprising then that we wished to destroy it.

  Fortunately, my mother was working in her studio with the air conditioning at full blast, listening as she always did to Rádio Itapema, which at that moment was playing a Nei Lisboa ballad that took me back, who knows why, to afternoons when I would go drinking with my classmates in the open-air bars on Rua Doutor Flores, in the historic city center, after class during the college entrance exam course. My mother’s desk was wide and uncluttered, without any drawers, just a wooden top over tubular metal legs. The iMac, the scanner, and the digital drawing tablet seemed like technologies from outer space in comparison with the FM radio, whose antenna extended into the air. The devices shared space with several pencil holders full of pens, and sheets of paper covered with sketches. It had already been years since she began doing her drawings on the computer, but I could clearly remember the pre-digital era, when her desk was replete with enormous sheets of heavyweight paper with their creamy texture, cases full of colored pencils, rulers, utility knives, watercolors, and paintbrushes. Still a squirt, I would get sheets of tracing paper from her to copy illustrations from books using Chinese 0.5-mm ink pens. I was dead scared of breaking the tip of one of those pens. My mother’s specialty was technical illustration and what she called realist drawings. The delicate movements of her wrist gave birth to hearts and throats for medical textbooks, bowls of cereal encircled by ripe strawberries for boxes of granola, Amazonian birds for collector postcards tucked inside milk chocolate wrappers, tractors and harvesters for farm equipment catalogues. All she needed were reference photos. Once, seeing one of her illustrations on a bag of bread during breakfast, I asked why they didn’t simply use photographs instead of drawings so realistic they looked like copies.

  “I don’t copy photographs,” she responded. “I don’t draw things. Photos do that. I draw ideas of things. Imagine a perfect apple. I draw everything you imagine an apple to be—not the real apples you find in our fruit bowl.”

  In the majority of cases, her illustrations were near-identical reproductions of the photos, it was difficult to discover details that differed, as in a game of spot the differences, but there was no question that the images did differ in some deeper way. Her drawings were closer to Renaissance paintings than to photographs, imbued with an idyllic magnetism that the communications agencies, publishers, and companies that wanted her services certainly understood much better than I did. From an artistic point of view, the illustrations were of no value. In some cases, however, when the client briefing permitted greater liberty or allowed for a more uncommon direction than was usually the case, she was capable of creating images that were strangely poetic, less prisoner to labels and catalogues, and closer to hyperrealist painting, in which the presence of the technique employed and the nearly undetectable anomalies bestowed on expressivity what could easily pass for a documentary photograph. Among my favorite illustrations was a piece she herself was proud of to the point of having it framed and hanging it on her studio wall. It was an illustration of a brand of sunscreen for a magazine ad. A family at the edge of the sea, enjoying themselves—father, dog, young girl, a mother applying sunscreen to the young girl, who was playing near a sand castle. My mother used several different photographs to create this illustration, casual photographs taken with her own camera during the summer in a town called Shangri-La in southern Brazil, where we had a house on the beach that was later sold to pay off certain debts. The ocean in the background had neither blue water nor perfect waves capped with white foam. It was the ocean along the coast of Rio Grande do Sul, brown as chocolate milk with the rough and chaotic surface of floodwaters. Across the mother’s belly was the scar from a C-section. It wasn’t hidden or anything like that. The woman in the reference photo had a scar and my mother decided to leave it. To her surprise, the image was approved and printed. It had come out tiny on the magazine page and you could barely note the transgression, but ther
e it was. To me, the enlarged version hanging on the wall communicated a feeling of truth behind appearances, of the briny stench intoxicating the sunny day and the inconvenient wind that was always gusting along the coast.

  I walked quietly into the studio so as not to disturb my mother, but she turned her head at the very same instant.

  “Did you find the patches?”

  I told her that I had, that my father was still sleeping in the bedroom, and I noticed, as I drew closer, that she closed a window of her Internet browser where Facebook had been open, leaving within view the workspace of her drawing software, where she was working on an illustration of some inscrutable contraption. I asked her what it was. “A new type of fruit peeler. It’s a fad right now.” I wasn’t sure what to say and she added that she would finish working soon and heat up some lunch. Not wanting to interrupt her further, I walked over to the stacks of books scattered around the floor and among various bookshelves. A sudden recollection lifted my spirits.

  “Mom, remember how I left my Encyclopedia of Cryptozoology here?”

  She took a while to answer as she finished typing something, most certainly part of the Facebook chat I had interrupted.

  “It must be in the middle of the other books you left here. I think they’re all on the white shelf.”

  The shelf was a small Formica slab in the corner, nearly buried under the larger shelves and the piles of books and file folders. From a distance I caught sight of the yellow spine of the large hardcover book, too heavy to take to São Paulo when I moved there for my doctorate. I sat on the floor with the book between my legs and began turning to pages at random. “The Great Sea Serpent of the HMS Nestor.” In September 1866, in the Strait of Malacca, the crew of the steamship Nestor caught sight of a creature swimming in wavelike movements next to the ship. It reminded them of a frog or a giant lizard and had a tail more than fifty meters long. Its entire body had black and yellow stripes. “Lake Sentani, Indonesia.” At some point during the Second World War, as he and his troops set up camp in what would become Papua Province in Indonesia, anthropologist George Agogino threw a grenade into Lake Sentani in hopes of catching fish for a meal. A shark three meters long appeared dead, floating on the surface. There was nothing strange about the creature, except for its presence in freshwater, which was abnormal. One hypothesis was that the shark was in fact a sawfish of the species Pristis microdon whose sawlike nose had been destroyed by the explosion. “Diablito.” Between September 2000 and February 2001, residents of Pitrufquén, nearly four hundred kilometers west of Buenos Aires, sighted on several occasions a tiny humanoid creature that was given the nickname Diablito, Little Devil. The first reports of sightings came from children and weren’t taken seriously, but it wasn’t long before adults, too, began to hear the creature’s wailing—“a cry like that of a baby”—and to find their chickens and dogs mutilated. One farmer who said she’d seen Diablito described him as “a tiny little man with the wrinkled, hairy face of a pig.” Investigators noted several similarities between this case and various sightings of the chupacabra throughout Latin America since 1995. “(Blue) Tigers.” In September 1910, Methodist missionary Harry Caldwell, an unrelenting tiger hunter, came face-to-face with something extraordinary in Fujian Province, in southeast China. Caldwell described the specimen this way: “The beast’s fur was wondrously beautiful. Its base was a dark grayish-blue color, almost a navy blue in the belly region. Its stripes stood out and, as far as I could see, were similar to those of a regular tiger.” Bernard Heuvelmans, who created the term “cryptozoology” in the 1950s, also compiled reports of blue tigers in the same region of China in 1986.

  Jumping from entry to entry, I made the time pass and assuaged my anxiety, which began to give way to a sort of enchantment that was difficult to attain past childhood. I revisited giant owls, modern sightings of pterodactyls and other dinosaurs, legendary hominids like Bigfoot and the Abominable Snowman, and an endless series of sea serpents and other aquatic monsters. The majority of entries didn’t document terribly spectacular cases. The cryptozoology catalogue was composed in large part of unconfirmed species that featured only tiny variations in relation to known species, or of well-known species sighted in unexpected regions or habitats. It may not have been a science, but it had a scientific side to it. The Encyclopedia of Cryptozoology had no entries regarding supernatural events, UFOs, or anything of that kind. There was no space for werewolves, ghosts, zombies, or aliens. Those who witnessed the encyclopedia’s thousands of creatures believed they’d seen, not creatures from some other planet, but rather animals of flesh and blood, children of nature in the same way as pigeons, horses, and humans are—undiscovered animals, in strange shapes, at times fantastically bizarre, but still animals. The illustrations were numerous and, in nearly all cases, exceptionally crude. They were sketches done in a hurry by stupefied ship captains and naturalists, or composites drawn from reported sightings that suggested skepticism and derision, and were often based on indigenous tales shrouded in myth or on the testimony of individuals who inspired little confidence, such as inveterate believers in superstition and creationists going out into the field to obtain evidence of the divine origins of our planet and all its creatures. The encyclopedia did not endorse such sources and irrational interpretations; it merely recorded them with a critical distance, suggesting that, who knows, one day the truth behind such reports might be revealed. But it was exactly these rudimentary records and the lack of validation that had sparked my imagination when, at the age of ten or eleven, I grabbed the encyclopedia for the first time from a pile of my mother’s biology books. Those pages had revealed to me a capacity for invention that surpassed in every way religious and mythical explanations of the origin of the world, a capacity for invention that operated within Newton’s laws of motion and the process of evolution, in full agreement with the geologic, biochemical, and ecological sciences. After all, the existence of a giant anaconda thirty meters long, like that reported by Father Victor Heinz during a boat trip along the Amazon River on May 22, 1922, was unlikely and had never been confirmed, but it wasn’t impossible, and confirmation would hardly affect accepted scientific theories, even if it were then necessary to ask where the metabolism of fatty acids sufficient to support, in terms of calories, an animal of that size would come from. The first video images of a giant squid in its natural habitat had only recently been captured by Japanese scientists, in July 2012, bringing a whole lineage of legendary marine animals from the Kraken to the Leviathan of the Old Testament onto the unhallowed ground of digital documentation. Reports of dinosaurs surviving to the present day were certainly false, but in 1938, Western scientists discovered that the coelacanth, a fish presumably extinct for seventy million years, still swam in the waters off South Africa and was known to the region’s indigenous population. And, if the infinite varieties of sea serpents present in folklore and in modern tales the world over did not exist, they were at the very least a testament to the fascination and horror awakened in the human soul by the deep sea and its still mysterious inhabitants. The fact was that, thanks to that book, throughout my childhood I saw no reason to waste time with gods or ghosts, since I could instead imagine mega-sharks, Chinese monkeys trained to prepare ink for scribes, enormous eagles that snatched human babies from their mothers’ breasts, and bloody confrontations between sea serpents and sperm whales, like the one detailed in 1875 by the crew of the Pauline in Brazilian waters, near the Cape São Roque, a story that eclipsed even the wildest passages of Moby Dick—if not in its philosophical weight, at least in its power of suggestion of just what astonishing creatures the natural world might hold. What I read humbled and captivated me. The animal kingdom’s stranger members were more fascinating than the occult, than literature, than television shows.

  For a couple of years after I discovered the book, when people asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I responded in complete seriousness and with great conviction that I intended to become a cryptozoolog
ist, which to me in my naïveté was a perfectly normal, if hardly popular, profession. As if that weren’t enough, I also had a concrete goal: to find the white pampas deer, whose entry in the Encyclopedia of Cryptozoology described two sightings, one in 1940, another in 1946, of a pampas deer with a coat of fur that was almost entirely white. One of the eyewitnesses was a farmer in the region of Camaquã, in Rio Grande do Sul, who described the animal as “a full-grown pampas deer white as a cloud, with brown spots on its back and head, with antlers black as coal,” and who tried to subdue the beast with a bullet from his shotgun but missed the mark. The other white deer had been seen on the border with Uruguay by the staff and patients of a sanatorium by the name of Three Acacias. The creature may merely have been a mutation of Ozotoceros bezoarticus, the pampas deer, perhaps of the celer—or southern—subspecies, which could be found in the Argentine pampas and was practically extinct. The eyewitness reports could have been false, and some pampas deer were whiter than others. But there could also have been a rare and isolated species, seldom seen and never before captured. That’s what I believed at eleven years of age, and a life dedicated to confirming the existence of the white pampas deer seemed like a good life to have ahead of me.

  Much later, I realized that people had held back their laughter or reacted as though they were speaking to a young child when I explained the objective of cryptozoological studies, and one Christmas night an uncle of mine told me that soon deer would be extinct throughout Rio Grande do Sul because those who lived in the countryside, believing that these animals transmitted foot-and-mouth disease to their cattle, shot them on sight, rendering them impressive trophies for the walls of their homes. In the end the reactions of adults began to make me feel ashamed and I never again spoke of those things. I spent my middle school and high school years saying I would be an architect. It sounded more like a serious profession. When I graduated from high school, I decided to take the entrance exam for journalism school, in pursuit of one of those professions fetishized among teenagers who were more or less well-read in the late 1990s, the last time there existed something that resembled a job market for that profession. One year later, however, I had already changed my major to biology. The Encyclopedia of Cryptozoology was at the root of my latent desire to become a scientist. It was that book that made me see the world as a place of real mysteries that were worth discovering and investigating. The whole enigmatic aura surrounding fauna that were yet to be discovered—which gave me the feeling that each animal illustrated in the encyclopedia was something out of a fairy tale or the bestiary of some extinct people—dwindled over the years, though. The time came when it was more common for the distinctions between new species to be uncovered by means of molecular biology performed in a laboratory than through underwater expeditions to ocean trenches, the exploration of caves, or information gathered in remote villages. Then came the cryptozoology of DNA sequencing, which existed in abstract calculations performed by computers, a realm that was untouchable but paradoxically gave life to our conviction that we knew the world then more than we ever had, and that we were separated from the unknown merely by the time needed by a processor to remedy the situation. Part of me didn’t accept all of that. The era in which the unknown was “more real” than the known remained, in my memory, still a recent one. In my lost youth, I recalled as I sat there on the floor of my mother’s studio, I didn’t know what to do with all that desire to shed light on the most obscure corners of the planet and the universe. The whole thing was stimulating and at the same time hopeless, because I wasn’t sure where to begin. I would read each issue of Superinteressante magazine (my parents had bought me a subscription) filled with the desire to be like all those scientists who studied superconductivity and dug up dinosaurs, but I still didn’t know how to get there, I simply wasn’t sure what to do with my life, and that was good, it was stimulating. The years passed and, after a certain point, not being sure what to do with my life began to be a bad thing, and there was something much worse, which was the desire to no longer do anything at all.