B0040702LQ EBOK (34 page)

Translated by Margaret full Costa

Emilia Pardo Bazan (La Coruna, 1852-Madrid, 1921) was
a prolific writer of novels, short stories, essays, literary
criticism, history and travel books. In Spain she knew all the
famous writers of her time and even exchanged love letters
with Perez Galdos, the great nineteenth-century realist
novelist. Her books deal unusually boldly with the position of
women in Spain and with sexuality. Her most famous novels
are Los Pazos de Ulloa (1886; The House of Ulloa, tr. P. O'Prey
and L. Graves, Penguin, 1990) and La Madre Naturaleza (1890).
She also wrote hundreds of short stories on all kinds of
themes: tragic, fantastic, patriotic, historical, religious and
allegorical, some of which are available in The White Horse and
other stories (tr. R.M. Fedorchek, Bucknell University Press,
1993). This story is taken from the collection Cuentos trdgicos
(1912).

The holocanth is a tree that walks, a very dangerous tree with
terrible, destructive instincts, for its favoured victim is man
whom it attacks using a swift, retractable goad about three
yards long. It was discovered by St Jerome one very hot day
when he was doing penance in the desert, and then it seemed
like a blessing from heaven to find a little cool, refreshing,
rustling shade. Recently, the writer John Wyndham took
advantage of the holocanth's hitherto unknown existence and
appearance and, in his novel, The Day of the Trds, created the
fantastic, outlandish figure of the `triffid', a plant which he
humilatingly dubs `industrial', but which, nonetheless, comes
to dominate the world. We wish to reject this vulgar invention
and re-establish the true origins of this great plant or tree
whose historical name, as we have said, is the holocanth.

Very early Byzantine accounts state that Simon the Magus
owned a holocanth for his private use and kept it tethered to a
pole considerably longer than the botanical beast's stinger.
According to these accounts, Simon the Magus had terrified
the emperor Nero with it, indeed the first time Nero saw it,
he was so frightened that he swallowed the stone of the cherry
he was eating, and would have died a wretched death by
choking had it not been for the Greek physician Philoctetes,
who quickly and skilfully unblocked the royal throat. Nero, as
you know, was not only refined, he was also sexually
repressed - for this information I am grateful to Father Jordi
Llimona - and he swore to avenge himself with extreme
delicacy and elegance when the opportunity arose.

However, as I said at the beginning, it was St Jerome who,
for the first time, came face to face with a holocanth wandering absentmindedly about the desert of Chalcis, where the
saint was living as an anchorite. The surprise was mutual. The hideous plant, which walked on three roots-cum-feet in a toand-fro motion, first forwards, then back, a truly abominable
sight, stopped in its tracks and, presumably sensing something
unusual about the saint, grovelled humbly at his feet. St
Jerome held out a bowl of camel's milk which it ingested with
precipitate delight. Then the holocanth disappeared rapidly
over a hill, having first bowed politely three times. This
strange apparition gave St Jerome much food for thought and
the experience marked him for life, as one can see in his
Altercatio luciferiani et orthodoxi and especially in his polemic
with Rufinus about Origen, recounted in his De principiis, and
in the famous letter of rebuttal that he sent to Rufinus, calling
him a liar, a dissembler, a perjurer and even a heretic.

According to reports in our possession, the holocanth then
proceeded to Antioch, where it was responsible for a horrific
killing with its death-dealing stinger. Scholars maintain that
this is the catastrophe referred to by the poet Pontius Mero-
pius Paulinus, better known as Paulinus of Nola, when he
writes:

Ecce repente mis estrepitum pro postibus audit et pulsas
resonare fores, quo territus amens exclamat, rursum sibi
fares adfore credens ... ser nullo fine manebat liminibus
sonitus ...

It seems that many evil wizards have used the holocanth
for abominable ends, for example, committing efficacious
murders, sending people berserk, etc. One thing is sure, the
holocanth appears only very occasionally, at most in groups of
three, and in locations far distant from each other. We know
almost nothing about their character, except that they like
music and, in modern times, football, for in 1932, the top of a
holocanth was seen rising above the stands at the San Siro
stadium in Milan during the match between Arsenal and
Inter. The police looked everywhere for it, but in vain, and the
international press meted out harsh criticism to the fascist
authorities, whose lack of foresight and diligence could easily
have caused a disaster. No doubt the holocanth disguised itself in a garden or a public park, while the police patrols passed by,
along with the firemen, the blackshirts and members of fascist
youth groups lustily singing `La giovinezza', until night fell
and it could escape into the country.

In addition to certain historic sallies (the fall of the Western
Roman Empire, the sack of Rome by Charles V, Napoleon's
defeat at Waterloo, etc.), a few days ago, the holocanth's
presence was felt again in Paris, following the strikes and
demonstrations. It made its horrific appearance in the areas of
Menilmontant and St Germain des Pres, doubtless prepared
for anything. There were no casualties thanks to the joint
action of students and police - a rare moment of collaboration
- which put the murderous trees to flight. However, one
holocanth, apparently of a sensitive, melancholy nature, was
found in the foyer of the Boul'Miche cinema staring at the
lewd stills from a sexy Japanese film. There was a great
commotion during which the holocanth managed to escape
disguised as a policeman. Some say it made off with a police
van in which it drove through the barricades. If that is true, we
have proof that the holocanth is not only dangerous, it is also a
creature endowed with an alarming and superior intelligence.

© Joan Perucho 1998

Translated by MargaretJull Costa

Joan Perucho (Barcelona, 1920) writes in both Catalan and
Castilian and is one of the few Spanish writers to have written
solely in the fantastic vein. His work is erudite, funny and
highly imaginative. He has also written poetry, as well as
books about art and gastronomy. He published his first book
in 1947, but his best-known works are Libro de caballerias
(1957), Les histories naturals (1960; Natural History, tr. David H.
Rosenthal, Minerva, 1990), Rosas, diablos y sonrisas (1965),
Dietario ap6crifo de Octavio de Romeu (1985) and Teoria de
Cataluna (1987). This story is taken from Botanica oculta
(1969).

All those years inside? ... How on earth did you manage?
they ask me. You'll have to sort out your papers. And they
look at me and I see the ghost of a smile playing around their
lips. Come back, they say, come back. But when I do come
back, they get annoyed: call in tomorrow, we still don't know,
call in the day after tomorrow. And one of them, the one with
the moustache, holds out his hand with the first two fingers
close together and makes a gesture as if to turn a key in a lock
and he gives me a nasty look and says: If you don't come in to
pick up the papers you know what will happen ... He repeats
the gesture ... And I'm carrying around with me a sadness
that is killing me, but nobody knows that. What happened,
happened, and there were no witnesses. And I'm not
complaining.

The sea was all groans and gusts and ragged waves and I was
trapped and thrown, thrown and trapped, spat out and swallowed up and clinging to my plank. All was dark, the sea and
the night, and the Cristina went down, and the cries of those
dying in the water could no longer be heard, and all I could
think was that there was only one person left alive, and that
was me, because I was lucky enough to be just a rating and up
on deck when it all started to go wrong. I saw dense clouds,
though I had no wish to see them, then, stretched out on top
of a furious wave, with all those clouds above, I felt myself
sucked in, much further in than the other times. I went down,
amidst whirlpools and frightened fish that brushed my cheeks,
down and down, dragged by a great torrent of water within
the water, down a great cliff, and when the water grew calm
and gradually subsided, the tail of a fish larger than the rest hit
my leg, and after that, I could not see the clouds, but a darkness deeper than any man born of woman has ever seen, and the plank saved me, for without the plank I would probably
have ended up in the same place as all the water that was
swallowed. When I tried to stand up and walk on the ground I
slipped and, though I thought I knew where I was, I preferred
not to think, because I remembered what my mother told me
as she lay dying. I was by her side, feeling terribly sad, and my
mother, who was gasping for breath, found the strength to sit
up, and with her arm, long and dry as a broom handle, she
fetched me a tremendous clout and shouted in a voice that
could barely be understood: Stop thinking! And with that she
died.

I bent down to touch the ground with my fingers. It was
slippery and as I touched it, I could hear very close by a sort
of trumpeting groan which gradually became a roar. And
between roars and groans, which were like the hoarse breath
of old, tired lungs, the ground reared up, and I fell down,
clinging to my plank. Half-stunned, not quite sure what was
happening, all I knew was that I had to cling on for dear life to
my plank, because wood is stronger than water. On rough
water, a flat plank is stronger than anything else. I was curious
to know where I was, exactly, and when one side of my brain
began to hurt less I tried to go forward; everything was black
as the ink from a frightened octopus, and the groans had
stopped and all that could be heard was a glug-glug, glug-glug.
The ground under my feet, for I was now standing up again,
was of soft rubber, like the sap that flows gently from the tree
trunk, rubber that is gathered, shaped and dried and then
softened using heat, although in here it was cold and my teeth
were chattering. Distracted, I found myself on the ground
again gripping the plank between my legs. I stretched out an
arm and touched the wall with the palm of my hand and the
whole wall was moving like a never-ending wave, like an ageold disquiet. I picked up the plank from between my legs and
slammed it into the moving wall, and both plank and I flew
through the air and fell once more onto the muddy floor.
That's it, I could use the plank! I stuck it in the ground and,
when it was steady, I took a step forward, and in this fashion,
struggling wearily onward, with many a fall on the way, I finally managed to reach a strange place: dark, and yet full of
colours, which were not exactly colours, ghosts of colours,
blue and yellow and red flashes that appeared and disappeared,
that approached and retreated, colours that did not seem like
colours, that were a fire yet not fire, which I can't explain, that
were changing and elusive. There was a glimmer of thin,
sickly light, and I went towards it and I saw the moon out
there through a grille, made of bars, like railings. Clinging to
my plank I let many hours pass. I think. Because who knows
where time had got to. And when the moon went down the
colours grew slightly iridescent, and it was then I realised that
I wasn't breathing and that water was coming out of my ears, a
little stream running down each side of my neck. And it was
not water but blood, because my ears must have burst inside
and, as I was running a fingertip over my neck, still warm with
the blood, I felt a tremor coming from the depths of the place
where I was and with that tremor came a surge of water that
stank of half-digested fish. The water came up to my neck,
and I was lucky that it stopped and gradually began to go
down, but I was left stinking of fish. Blood was no longer
running from my ears: air was going in them, for the path my
air took had changed. I banged hard on the ground with my
plank and nothing happened, not a groan, not a tremor. I
walked on, clinging to my plank, amidst coloured lights,
whether the same ones I had seen earlier, or different ones, I
don't know, but they were slowly fading and between the bars
on the grille came the light of the coming dawn and I felt the
peace of the calm sea, something I can't explain, as if my world
was about to vanish or something ... I stopped and through
the air that went in and out of my ears, I felt a mighty breathing amidst the lapping of the water. Then I seemed to be
walking over stones, but it was the granules on a tongue, and
then, suddenly, both plank and I went flying through the air
again, and I felt myself captive in a giant embrace. One of
those embraces that leave you breathless. I had nearly been
expelled with a jet of water from the blowhole of a whale, and
my plank had saved me from shooting out altogether, like a
bullet. And I saw things I had seen many times before, but from such a different viewpoint! It was the largest whale on
the seven seas, the glossiest, the most ancient. I had spent the
whole night inside. Dawn was slowly breaking. I had my jaws
trapped in the blowhole, and they were already beginning to
ache, and I still hung on to my plank on the other side of the
blowhole, my legs dingle-dangling, then I saw two rivers flowing into the sea, each very different from the other. The waters
of these rivers were two different colours: the waters of one
were crimson from red earth, the waters of the other were
green with seaweed. And those two colours danced a slow
dance of mingling and separation. Dancing, dancing, the
dance of the two colours. I'm red, I'm all green. First, I'm
putting in the red, now I'm rinsing out the green. The green
penetrates below, then below that hides the red ... And as I
watched, the sun rose, the blowhole opened wide and I
plummeted downwards like a stone. Then I could see what
there was inside. At my feet, rocked by the water and the saliva,
was a sailor. Lying on the tongue, not an arm's length from me,
his tie knotted with a cord, the anchor on his sleeve, his trousers clinging to his legs, his face purple, his eyes open and
empty. Three fish were nibbling at his hand. I shooed them
away, and they left, but then obstinately came back. I was
hungry myself, but I resolved to put up with it, and still clinging to my plank, I greeted the dead man and sang the national
anthem. I spent three days chasing fish and running all over
the place and, from time to time, a lash from the whale's
tongue would slam me against her cheeks. Until ... I hate to
say it ... I spent those three days trying to throw the sailor out.
She clenched her baleens, and I clenched my teeth, and tightened my belt to increase my strength. The more I tightened
my belt, the hungrier I grew, and I began to nibble bits of the
sailor. He was hard and full of gristle. I was glad I was eating a
sailor I didn't know, rather than having to eat one I did. Some
big fish had emptied him of his insides while he was still
floating in the water. He was all there, except for his eyes and
his insides. That helped to preserve him, so I was able to make
him last longer. I threw the little bones in amongst the ribs,
but kept the bigger ones. The ribs on the right side were scraped clean. Those on the left were a jumble of seaweed,
seashells and molluscs. Rather than eat sailor all the time, I
sometimes ate seafood. The worst thing was the thirst. But
there's a solution to everything. One day, miraculously, a
saucepan floated in. I immediately thought of rubber trees,
and without a moment's hesitation I thrust the handle of the
saucepan into the whale's cheek. The next day it was full of
juice, and I could drink. Sea water, although salty, makes the
flesh of fish sweet. I thrust the saucepan back in. I kept having
to make new holes, because the wounds made by the saucepan closed up immediately. From time to time, if my concentration slipped, she would slam me against the roof of her
mouth and keep me there for hours and hours. We sailed
slowly on. By this time, I had cut seven marks on the ribs with
the tip of my knife. Seven days. One morning, I charged the
ribs to see if I could force a way through and everything
started to whirl, and I was tossed all over the place, sometimes
on top of the tongue, sometimes below, sometimes to one
side, sometimes right up to the roof of the mouth, but up
there I had the sense to shout: Stop, Cristina! I found myself
sitting on the ground, with my plank across my chest. So it
was then, without noticing it, that I christened her.