The Invented Part

by Rodrigo Fresán

  “Hiriz is the name of an Egyptian goddess,” Hiriz continues and Penelope, who knows a great deal about a great many things, thinks “Horus, falcon head, considered the founder of civilization, version of Phoebus and Apollo in the Valley of the Nile.” And she wonders why such a Catholic family (as Maximiliano had once warned her) gave its offspring the poorly spelled appellations of pagan divinities. But better, just in case, not to say anything. And that “better, just in case, not to say anything” will become, immediately, one of the various commandments for Penelope to live by during her stay in Abracadabra. On Mount Karma, more than speaking or talking, one recites or one proclaims. Not high poetry, but innocuous statements, seemingly bottled in absolute emptiness. Clichés. The Karmas communicate among themselves with phrases prepared and practiced and repeated many times. Tribal slogans that flail about like someone walking through quicksand or across a bridge made of glass. Nothing that vibrates, nothing that causes cracks or helps you sink. Talking about what they see, but not about what they think. But, for Penelope, saying nothing, often, is the same as thinking everything. And soon Penelope—who doesn’t talk much; because when she talks she gets the uncomfortable feeling that she’s talking to herself, which doesn’t bother her, she’ll realize, with two or three drinks more inside than on top of her—will discover that she can’t stop thinking about Hiriz. Is it because—as will become obvious—Hiriz can’t stop thinking about Penelope? Sure, that’s part of it. * But, also, there’s something else: writers tend, as an occupational hazard and occupational habit, to categorize everyone they meet the moment they meet them, to synthesize them into a possible character. Those who aren’t writers but who so badly want to write (Penelope’s case) are even worse in that sense—they don’t categorize, they judge. They spend their time taking notes for possible novels and hypothetical stories. Loose phrases, more or less detailed descriptions. But such an activity and reflex isn’t an easy thing to exercise in Abracadabra, among the Karmas. The Karmas are all the same, they say and think and do the same things. They’re of an absolutely unique and original uniformity in their instinctive discipline. Resembling each other makes the Karmas invincible among themselves, because nobody wants to slander their double, their triple, their quintuple. In this way, if all of them are unpunctual (because the Karmas’ perception of time is really more elastic, making their favorite verbal conjugation the gerund: to say that something is being done without implying that it has to be finished, and in that way to float in an eternal during) then none of them are unpunctual and the whole idea of punctuality annuls itself. The myth of the eternal beginning. To be beginning all the time; because it allows them to avoid the frustration or disenchantment of an ending that failed to live up to their expectations, that will never correspond to the infantile fantasies of “Once upon a time . . .” Delaying for a year what is done in a week, or a day. Taking years to quit or get fired. And feeling forever young—you age little when a minute stretches out for months—suffering the paradox that their adult problems always retain a childish though increasingly wizened air. The Karmas know nothing about the crises of the thirties. Or the forties. Except when it serves as justification for the occasional outburst or passing madness. The fifties—in terms of age or marriage—are nothing but the perfect excuse to board another cruise ship. The Karmas are residents of their own private Shangri-La. To leave it—establishing a kind of comparison with the deadlines and obligations and defeats of the other mortals—is to dissolve, to lose everything gained, to not be special. All the better . . . Penelope will meet Karmas (Hiriz will be one of the most bizarre mutations of this syndrome) who studied—or so they claim—law, nuclear medicine, odontology, political science, oceanography, astronomy, and even gave themselves to the priesthood with the ambition of becoming Pope, without earning a single diploma to certify it or accredit them. Karmas who tell you, automatically and courteously, “at your service,” knowing perfectly well they’ll never do what you ask. Karmas who tell you “in a little bit” meaning they’re not prepared to do something anytime soon but at some point, who knows when, maybe in a future incarnation. And, always, in a diffuse plural. Saying “We should do . . .” but not doing it and, automatically, implicating everyone in their nothing. And Penelope—who had previously mistrusted people who used too many augmentatives in their speech, exaggerating everything and overstating importance and size—soon discovers that there’s nothing more dangerous than diminutives. Diminutives that endow everything with a false humility and childish flair; but that are nothing more than the jaws of a shark with multiple rows of teeth out of which emerges a little voice that says things like “But what a goody-goody you are.” The exception being Mamagrandma, who seems to spin around on top of herself, tirelessly, like a force of nature, like a whirling dervish (Penelope will ask herself more than once if Mamagrandma might not be some indefatigable species of vampire, feeding on the fluids and energies of her descendants), the rest of the Karmas move as if in slow motion, like the happy prisoners of the golden amber of their comfort and privilege. “But a group portrait makes no sense,” Penelope thinks. So Penelope chooses a single Karma to encompass all of them. Penelope chooses Hiriz. “Good material,” thinks Penelope, like everyone who wants to write but isn’t a writer thinks. But Hiriz is really good material. Hiriz is a Karma, yes; but she’s also a Karma on the edge of something. Hiriz is unstable; as if her obligatory satisfaction with who she is and where she comes from is balanced atop a fault line in a tectonic plate that trembles in the night, when it thinks that nobody can perceive and calibrate it. Hiriz lives in that eternal moment that precedes an earthquake that only the birds and dogs perceive. So Penelope will sketch her the way maps were sketched in antiquity: not like now, from above and with satellites, but from the edges and along the shores, from outside moving inward, step by step and stone by stone. In her own environment. Up close. Penelope—like a faithful cartographer who’s also a daring adventurer—will follow her and film her and record her and portray her. And describe her in detailed and exhaustive dispatches that (at the request of her brother, who, insatiable even at a distance, was always demanding fresh “doses of H,” will soon declare himself Hiriz’s “number one fan”) she’ll send in digitalized files through the air and across the waves. * And, yes, sometimes he—here above, everywhere and nowhere, center of an electromagnetic storm of quasars—imagines that he was still down below, writing, tempted and attracted by the power emanating from Hiriz, whom he might turn into his provincial Emma Bovary, into his starry-eyed Anna Karenina or, better yet, into the less-remembered but equally powerful and oh so frivolous Gwendolen Harleth Grandcourt. Hence the repetitions, the persistence, the more or less subtle variations—time and again, without apologies for those who deserve them—of the way that Hiriz acts or doesn’t act or the way the Karmas think or don’t think. Hence too the single perception of one Karma, transmitted first by Penelope and then received by her brother, who made and continues to make adjustments, now that he has eternities at his disposal to find le mot juste, to trap the precise instant, in the blink of an eye, that might stretch on for years. Maybe this way, thinks Penelope, time passes faster, time passes and life goes on. Hiriz is Maximiliano’s older sister. “So now you’re my little sister,” she tells Penelope, who doesn’t entirely understand the logic of this new relationship, but, once again, better, just in case, say nothing. Penelope, to begin with and even though she speaks her language, doesn’t really understand anything Hiriz tells her. Hiriz talks the same way doctors write—her letters and words are incomprehensible. It’s as if Hiriz’s voice * (exceedingly sharp and with an accent that’s odd, almost but not entirely foreign, like a remote-controlled telephone operator that you ask for the time and date and that responds with clipped diction, as if each word and number were complete sentences or ideas) were a few seconds delayed in making it from Penelope’s ears to her brain and, once there, it took a few more seconds to get translated into the same language. * (Hiriz h
as even managed to transfer and translate the sonic quality of her voice into writing: her emails and tweets—of which you might end up receiving thirty or forty a day—are plagued, as often happens with illiterates who remain illiterate though they’ve learned to read and write, by emphatic caps, by ????, and by !!!!, and by exceedingly personal orthographical errors and implausible consonant abbreviations that adhere to the invisible and microscopic language of gnawing coleopterans.) Hiriz—Penelope understands right away that nothing could be more fitting than her name being derived from Horus and can’t look at her without superimposing over her face the feathers and beak and aquiline look of a bird of prey that’s impossible to satisfy—must be forty-some years old, though various plastic surgeries have already given her a much older and more worn out look. Hiriz evokes one of those houses with an uneven floor that someone has tried to domesticate/decorate with modern DIY furniture. Massages and peelings and oh so many nautical miles accumulated on countless health cruises, and so many meters of altitude in alpine spas, and so many hours of folding and stretching herself according to the latest variety of yogaerobics, have given Hiriz’s body and soul the texture and the color and the mannerisms and the stupid but limitless evil of a perpetual cheerleader, determined to execute the best and most spectacular pirouettes only to, always, sooner or later, fall down in front of everyone at the worst possible moment, in the decisive instance. Hiriz isn’t happy, because to be happy first you have to relax. And all her “spiritual journeys” to India or to the East or to Africa haven’t done her any good either, journeys that Hiriz always returns from loaded down with photos where she appears embracing—with certain tension—exotic and hungry children (if there’s such a thing as “loving racism,” Hiriz has discovered and patented it, Penelope thinks when she sees them) and with suitcases full of tunics and dresses to sell to her cousins and sisters-in-law. In a situation where many women in her position would choose to take a lover (ideally a tennis instructor or singing coach; someone to have on the payroll), Hiriz, due to fear of what’ll be said if she’s found out, or due to demented bravery, not caring what anyone thinks, has decided to madly love herself. Which, of course, isn’t easy. So, Hiriz lives in a state of constant tension and it’s more than likely that, on the day of her death, she’ll be struck by an unbreakable rigor mortis in the second of exhaling her last breath. At some point, Hiriz will confide in Penelope and, in a fragile voice, she’ll confess that there was a horrible childhood incident she never recovered from. As Penelope prepares to receive a terrible flashback of rape at the age of seven or something like that, Hiriz bursts into tears and tells her “one time Mamagrandma told me my haircut didn’t flatter me. It was my nineteenth birthday. And I swear I’ve never been the same since.” Penelope decides not to tell Hiriz that she thinks childhood and its tragedies would be hard pressed to reach the age of nineteen. That that wouldn’t be a childhood so much as—the noun suddenly turning into an adjective from fatigue—childish. But Penelope decides to stay quiet, to refill her glass, and to keep listening, hearing as little as possible. The truth is, Hiriz’s childhood was as perfect as it was unsatisfactory, she could almost swear that one time “I had an orgasm,” and she’s certain that she’s recently suffered multiple “emotional traumas.” Like when, kinetic and obsessed with losing weight, she chained herself to a stationary bicycle at the country club gym when they tried to make her to go home. Or when an excess of weight loss pills convinced her for a few hours that Jesus Christ had appeared to her and asked her to plan the menu and choose the guest list for the last supper. Hiriz is also someone who couldn’t be described as dull (a condition) because she’d lacked the means for cultivation and development and had grown up under fixed environmental conditions; but yes, she could be written off as ignorant (a choice). And Hiriz has embraced her total lack of culture as if it were a summa cum laude distinction. So Hiriz’s brief and elementary educational trajectory * (and that of the rest of the Karmas, who have always traded in the idea of general culture for that of particular culture: for obsessive and increasingly complicated specializations in themselves that leave no free time for anything else) has been garnished with honorary degrees, awarded in exchange for donations to the schools. Hiriz always circles all the options on multiple choice tests (“I was always taught that you have to get along well with everyone,” she explained) and it’s impossible for her to concentrate on Renaissance Florence, on Waterloo or Hiroshima, or on the Big Bang, because “not a single Karma appears in any of those stories.” Now, Hiriz doesn’t know what to do with her life; but Hiriz thinks she can do everything. Penelope has known attenuated versions of the same species on the other side of the ocean: those unconditional Madonna fans who devoutly love and adore and envy her as a role-model for her firm body, for the fantasy of her young lovers, for her choreographies that are strenuous but easy to imitate in some future wedding, and, in a subliminal and shameful way, for giving them the hope that someone that artistically mediocre, if they learn to claw and scheme, can become a world-famous artist. But Hiriz’s case is much worse. It’s not that Hiriz is pursuing eternal youth, she’s pursuing something that’s even more impossible: Hiriz wishes she’d been born male; because, if she had, her life would’ve been so much fairer, so different, other. * (The Karma women don’t work. Or, better, they work at trying, in vain, to convince everyone that they do work. Or, best case scenario, that they’re engaged in exceedingly protracted and theoretical and not at all practical university degrees, where they knock off only a class or two each year, just so they don’t end up without a major or with someone insisting on giving them a degree that, of course, isn’t good for anything but work.) Hiriz is convinced that she knows more about everything than everyone. Her areas of expertise go from baking to building cyborgs, passing through trade law and the import of heavy machinery. But she has never—Hiriz thinks and a few times even says in a very quiet voice—been given the space she deserves and requires (a space, in her mind and on her map, more or less the size of a thousand soccer stadiums lined up one after another), all because of her sex, nothing more and nothing less, because of her condition as a woman in a world supposedly governed by men. An exception is made for Mamagrandma, who rules over everyone, regardless of gender or species or whether they’re vegetal or mineral or animal. So, only her, Hiriz alone, convinced of her own polymorphous genius, similar to that of Leonardo Da Vinci. But, actually, Hiriz is more like the desperate Connie Corleone in The Godfather III, but with very little common sense. Hiriz is a secondary character with a longing for a movie of her own, which has almost turned the power of her frustration into a kind of achievement. Her successive defeats function like the antimatter of a victory that only she believes in. Hiriz is an exceedingly successful professional failure and—desperately seeking the favor and approval of Mamagrandma, dreaming of being her successor without daring to admit it even to herself—has done nothing but triumphantly fail, in a big way, better all the time. Hiriz has founded, alternatingly, a daycare for the children of friends and relatives and another one for poor and orphaned children (but these are suspiciously happy and nice poor children, always with a melodious song on their lips, as if they’d escaped from a local production of Annie, to whom Hiriz suggests games like “Now let’s imagine what it’d be like to play with that toy that we’re never-ever-ever going to be given, okay?” Hiriz’s own children, for their part, dress up for Halloween not as zombies but as “little beggars, because they’re scarier”); a store for interior décor (to furnish the houses of friends and relatives); a delicatessen warehouse (to supply the parties and lunches and dinners of friends and relatives); a boutique where she tried to sell her own designs (and to dress her friends and relatives); a travel agency in order to make friends and make peace between family members. And her brief stint in local politics—thanks to the one decisive boon of a famous last name—ended with the suicide of the mayor she was working for as “personal assistant.” Before hanging himself from a rafter
in his office, the poor man left a brief note—where it read one single word: “Unbearable”—that led many to believe that he could no longer bear the guilt or dishonor or extortion related to some embezzlement or corrupt dealing or secret life. But those who were close to him and knew him well were perfectly aware what and whom he was referring to. None of the preceding has prevented Hiriz from designating herself as absolute consigliore of her family, as someone who tirelessly gives unsolicited advice, hurling it at you aggressively and with terrible aim, like a knife or grenade, never hitting the target. And the advice Hiriz gives is always related to one of Hiriz’s own flaws. Example: if she has problems with her children, she’ll immediately start giving you advice about how to avoid problems that you must, surely, also have with your children; even if you don’t, it doesn’t matter. If you avoid Hiriz, it isn’t, for her, something personal—because she can’t even conceive of the possibility that someone doesn’t want to be around her—but a perverse generalized misanthropy, or, in her words “one of those people who likes to be alone so they can do who knows what when no one is watching.” So, Hiriz—who after every trip, on the pretext of dizziness and vomiting and even visions that she tries to decode, goes to see a friend who she’s designated as an expert “but very Catholic” Tarot card reader—doesn’t hesitate to recommend to the recently landed Penelope that there’s nothing better for cramped joints after a long flight than “filling the hot water bottle with water . . . but, careful, the trick is to use mineral water.” So, Hiriz knows how to do everything you don’t know how to do; but following her imprecise and complex instructions always results in destructions that are oh so simple in their precision. Her inexhaustible talent for ruining everything she embarks on and, subsequently, sinks, has made it so the Karmas—who defend each other just so they can attack each other; the Karmas are enough and more than enough on their own, like the Montagues and Capulets, but with the same last name and without the deaths, because there’s no external or extra-familial enemy worthy of their attention and blood—consider Hiriz a kind of beneficent spirit, restless and enterprising, though all her good, in theory, enterprises don’t take long, in practice, in her lack of practice, to end, and to end badly. Hiriz—to define her militarily—is collateral damage and enemy fire. And her most recent “achievement” (because Hiriz’s disasters, somehow, end up being flexible conversations at tense dinner tables) has had something to do with her thinking that she can develop a special food for cattle. A diet that, she swears, would make them bigger and more productive. It makes no difference that Hiriz knows nothing about cows, or bulls, or about what they eat, or even what they are for and what they do. Hiriz invested “a little funds, a little savings” in a hundred head of cattle (Penelope hears about this on the way from the airport to Mount Karma, Mamagrandma’s matriarchal mansion) and created, all on her own, a race of colossal mutant bovines the color of emerald fluoride. A fierce and anabolic breed that reproduce at a vertiginous rate and have developed an insatiable carnivorous appetite, prompting them to slaughter each other with raw bites and eat each other in a revelry of bovine cannibalism. Not embarrassed, but still, trying to make sure nobody finds out, Hiriz released the cows into the fields of an abandoned ranch. And they’ve since turned into a regional menace and multiple horses have been found decapitated and raped; “In that order,” specified a local veterinarian. At first it was all blamed on the Chupacabras or some other rural superstition; but before long a few children from poor families (who are now threatened with a “If you don’t clean your plate, the Giant Green Cow will come get you”) went missing. Before long, a rival rancher (who almost ends up getting lynched by his humble ranch hands) is held responsible, and the Karmas organize hunting parties every weekend to go out and kill “mad cows,” they laugh. There’s only one left, apparently. One gigantic and totemic and mythic green cow. A mythic green cow like a symbolic white whale. They tell Penelope, floating in jet-lag, all of this (Penelope thinks it must be a joke, or some kind of legend, more rural than urban) and a lot more besides, as if she were being incorporated, on the spot, in the role of guest actress with opportunities to earn the spotlight and improve her standing, into a melodramatic novel that’s been being written for centuries, into a telenovela with no end in sight. But it’s kind of strange, something far away but suddenly so close: Penelope has the sensation of having traveled not to another country but to another world. A place where they speak her language, but she doesn’t understand anything they say. Or maybe it’s that her planet has been invaded. Someone hands her a stack of something like five hundred photos, so she can “Get up to date and learn everyone’s nicknames and relationships.” * (And Penelope is amazed by the quantity of grandfathers/grandmothers and sons/daughters and grandsons/granddaughters who have the exact same names and, when asked why that is, they say that they’re already accustomed to those names so they might as well go on using them and “that way you don’t have to embroider the nuptial trousseau and the towels again, and it saves you time because when you go out to the lawn between the houses and call the family together for a general meeting—you only have to call two or three or four names.”) Someone else gives her a gift (Penelope will find out soon that the Karmas are constantly giving each other gifts to publicly demonstrate how much they appreciate one another despite the fact that they secretly detest each other). It’s a dress. Something she’d never wear, two sizes too big; and Penelope starts to get worried: what class of organism is capable of giving clothing to a person they’ve never seen or met? The atmosphere in this new world is breathable, yes; but Penelope is short of breath even though her head weighs as much as one of those specially designed suits for descending to the bottom of the sky or the bottom of the ocean. Bright fluorescent fish brushing against her as she sinks or shimmering dead star dust getting in her eyes as she floats weightlessly: too many people around her, too many people simultaneously talking and breathing inside this powerful dual-traction pickup truck and inside the other seven pickups—all seemingly ready for a safari, with multiple accessories hanging from the roofs and sides—and inside the futuristic ambulance carrying Maximiliano, all following her, at medium velocity; because at the head of the caravan rides Mamagrandma on Horse, releasing little yips, across the asphalt and dirt, heading “home,” they tell her. Mount Karma * (a gigantic construction where colonial Spanish architecture seems to meld, hysterically and syncretistically, into the baroque lines of Italian courts and the posterior faux Bauhaus inlays; Penelope is startled by an ominous wrought-iron K above the entrance gate before a long zoom to a window) is surrounded by an intimidating number of small replicas of the main mansion, where the rest of the family reside. Like small satellites orbiting a sun, more dictator than king. The houses are always full of people, the doors always open, and it won’t take Penelope long to ask herself if they might not all be connected by a secret network of tunnels and passageways. Mount Karma is the belly button of the world and any departure—if it’s not to one of Mount Karma’s outposts, at sea or on the mountain—becomes a complicated affair, even attaining heights of absurdity and physical comedy and slapstick. For the Karmas, just the act of getting into vehicles to be taken outside their sphere of influence turns out to be somewhat disorienting. So they spend hours and days and weeks deciding where to go, moving around like blind, headless chickens. And once outside, somewhere foreign, they only feel comfortable going in and out of stores with names of big and expensive brands, held up by more than holding enormous shopping bags that keep them, with their weight in gold, fixed to the floor. The possibility of visiting and touring cathedrals and palaces, of contemplating museum pieces and landscapes that don’t belong to them, just provokes dizziness and fear and the sneaking suspicion that there’s an entire foreign—possibly better and more interesting—world outside their own. * So, better, Paris is Chanel. London is Burberry. New York is Donna Karan. Only Rome is, yes, the Vatican, where flocks of Karmas confess at prepaid papal audiences in order t
o emerge, clean and pure, as if levitating, heading off toward Valentino. Which isn’t to say that the Karmas are a migratory species. The Karmas opt to move as little as possible, never alone or in pairs, and always as close together as they can. Never getting too far away. Never losing sight of each other. Never feeling unknown in the multitude or the desert of the metropolis. Mount Karma as Acropolis and Great Pyramid and Great Wall of China. In Mount Karma’s central hall, above a table so long and with so many seats that it seems like an optical illusion (a table that fits the most intimate and closed and pure nucleus of the Karmas, the brothers who married sisters, the cousins who married cousins), there is, as if levitating, a painting. A painting, three meters tall and two meters wide, the portrait of a man with the air of an enlightened biblical prophet, dressed half killer-cowboy and half bullfighter, his eyes flaming, a smile burning on his lips. “It’s Papagrandpa,” they tell her in a sacred and reverential whisper, as if they were scared the painted figure could hear them. “Ah, where is he? Is he here?” Penelope asks just to ask something, because she remembers Max having made some mention of the mysterious Papagrandpa. And different Karmas offer her different answers: Papagrandpa died helping put out a fire in the convent, or in a train catastrophe, or a hunting accident, or from a heart attack on the sixth hole. The most audacious, in low voices and with cactus-juice breath, risk insinuating something about a young second-rate movie star (the most extreme versions, in whispers even more whispered than usual, speak not of an actress but of an actor), about an escape to Monaco, or about a problem with a local gangster and a new face and something about the FBI’s Witness Protection Program. One of them, almost speaking in tongues, claims to have seen Papagrandpa ascend into the heavens spurred on by a herd of zebus. It doesn’t matter, it’s all the same, true legends are only legendary if nobody agrees on them, on what might have happened, on what what happened might come to mean. * Penelope looks and looks at the painting and it reminds her of something, it recalls something, and then it dawns on her: in his portrait, Papagrandpa is dressed just like Napoleon Bonaparte in that portrait where he appears, imperial, crowning himself. Which reveals, in an indirect way, the inferiority the Karmas feel confronting the fragility of their roots in the Old World. Almost nonexistent. Better not to talk about that. A pack of outlaws who came to that foreign shore to seek their fortune. And so the Karmas—especially the females, suddenly Penelope’s stepsisters and stepmothers—instinctively faint in the presence of any two-bit European aristocrat, and dream of marriages, titles, castles, and coats of arms. But no luck yet. All attempts to plant a Karma girl—including Hiriz, hence her time in a Swiss boarding school—in the bosom of some diminished yet respectable family have so far been fruitless. But they haven’t lost hope. And, if the Karmas had an insignia and family crest, it’d bear the motto that sustains them: “None against None, All against All.” A foolproof survival technique: the impossibility of sudden and fatal face-to-face and out-in-the-open duels in exchange for an eternity of slander, like fetid subterranean currents concealed by liters of perfume and flowers and incessant cordiality and, consequently, there’s very little that gets said that Penelope and anyone who isn’t a Karma can trust. It’s never entirely clear where this feeling comes from and why it is felt.