The Sacred Beasts (9 page)

Feeling very weak, I walked down my stairway to the living room
and found that I was not alone: Mariska was sitting on the sofa. “Good
morning,” I said. “You continue to remind me that I should change my ways and
lock the door.”

Her face was strangely flushed and cold, unsmiling. “Don’t joke.
You know why I’m here.”

I settled into my armchair, stretched and roared in frustration.
“I do
not
have the foggiest notion of why you are here! I have just
awakened from a recurrent nightmare and seem to have instantly walked into a
farce.
Why
on earth are you here?”

“I’ve seen you with that girl! I’ve seen the way she looks at you.
You, old enough to be her mother!”

“If you mean Sylvie, I’m probably old enough to be her
grandmother.”

“She looks at you as though she could eat you up! Like Katia.”

“Yes, like Katia. Both artists, they stare as voluptuously as
animals. Of course, an animal wants to devour you literally; an artist,
figuratively. It is really quite wonderful, the most harmless form of love.”

“You are in no condition for this! Why have you taken up with her?
When will you sleep with her?”

“With
you
watching?
Never!
Never for other reasons,
too. You are right that I am in no condition for this. Besides, I hate the idea
of December-May relationships. It would be an eternal reminder that I am
living, after all, in December. I decided long ago that I would never sleep
with a student.”

“She’s no student! She’s a very attractive woman.”

“Now you sound envious! I have a question for you: Why are you so
possessive of me? You always have been.”

That silenced her. The moments crept by, then perhaps a
quarter-hour had passed in stony silence. It wasn’t coming out of her, whatever
it was, so I felt obliged to relieve her. She was suffering for reasons unknown
and had surely done me no harm. “Nothing will ever happen between Sylvie and I
but friendship and art,” I said. “Art can look like love and in a limited sense
it is. But, it is friendship I need, a new friend or two. I will be alone now,
and I must adapt to it.” I reached over and held her hand, and it was like
electricity passing.

“I really am confused and inappropriate,” she said. “I should not
have come.”

“I’m delighted you’re here! You have saved me again. I would
otherwise be thinking of nothing but that nightmare, and now the morning light has
dispelled it. Let me get you some coffee.”

“No, I am all right now. I see more clearly. Thank you for
accepting this little explosion.”

“My life is now one explosion after another, and if I miss one, it
will just be waiting for me in my dreams.”

“Of course, you are grieving.”

“Actually, my life seems to alternate between grief and farce, and
it may be the only way I can ever learn to accept what has happened.”

Her intense blue eyes pierced me slowly, almost languorously, then
she got up swiftly and walked out the door, slamming it. This gave me a shock,
goosebumps. What on earth had she refused to say? Yet, after a moment, I
decided that I should not worry about her. It was an old, unresolved
problem—her possessiveness toward me. We had grown up in Patagonia together,
after all. It was only another mystery between two human beings, as frequent as
clarity. How horribly, magnificently, noisily, beautifully strange the world
is, I continued to think as I got a cup of coffee and looked out the window at
my ruckus. I can neither save nor abandon it. Perhaps that is the last thing my
sacred beast meant to tell me. Or, I needed to tell myself.

MORE THAN A year of farce, grief, energetic agitation and
careening inspiration has passed, a pilgrimage of perpetual astonishment. If a
year can be a sacred beast, so has this been. My garden of sacred beasts now
covers much of my acreage. It is apparently so startling as to have become a
tourist attraction. I am now in the travel guidebooks, likened to the madwoman
who built the Winchester Mystery House in California. The sign I have put over
it, “A Garden of Art from One Who has Lost Everything but Her Mind,” has only
fueled speculation that I have done just that. But in truth, I am irrelevant.
The interest is the garden itself, now virtually a living thing, one that
speaks and perhaps even roars if we could only hear the sound of spirits.

“Mediocrity” stands impressively at the beginning, the opposing
force that necessitates the strangeness and ferocity of the beast garden. From
there on, you can’t predict what you will see: it is virtually beyond chance. I
began with metal for “Mediocrity” and it is still the heaviest sculpture. To
capture the forgotten beauty of Patagonia that Katia should have both seen and felt,
I have continued to use more supple and flexible materials, beginning with
plastic and light metal for the plants, then graduating to the use of junked
clothing and chicken wire which, with cloth molded to wire, allowed me to add
plaster to the brew for larger, more detailed and subtly modeled animals and
landscapes.

By cutting, pasting, molding and painting, I have assembled a
giant bouquet of flowers, ranging from the astonishing pink blossoms of the
coicopihue shaped like tiny, frail angels to the white ulmo blossoms of the
eucryphia tree, with petals and stamens that remind me of exploding stars, to
the sumptuously rounded Pan del Indio, fungi that grow on southern birches and
were once food for the Onas of Tierra del Fuego.

From the Argentinean frog, I progressed to the vividly lapis and
sun-yellow zigzagged skin of the Galapagos horned toad and from there to many
of the animals I have photographed and studied over the years. In early morning
and late evening, ourakas, night herons and other big birds still alight upon
them, and children have stolen the family of tuco-tucos twice now. I gave my
latest version of them to Sylvie, who seems to feel something like mother love
for them. The Neolithic giant beasts are prominent—the mylodon sloth, with orange
fur made from abandoned brooms, and the glyptodon armadillo, its warrior-shield
skin made of warped metal sheets from old discarded ovens.

In time, many other sacred beasts came loping into my garden: the
wild and rough Yaghans and Onas in their animal-skin blankets as well as the
TehuelcheIndians who once thrived in Northern Patagonia. The latter
were very tall, with high furred and peaked headgear; red and yellow painted
faces, and glittering eyes, all of which I have tried to capture. I have also made
them as large and fierce as is proper, since they were known to have been
friendly to whites initially but then, upon experiencing the inevitable
perfidy, violence and exploitation of the explorers, flayed them alive and
sucked their hearts.

The enemy is not forgotten: an immense Popper coin is here, with
“Popper” written on one side and a swastika on the other. Beside it are
sculptures of northern beeches and Degas dancers, dancing into the dune-like
dust of the northern steppes, the dunes raised to vortices by the
Mara
and covered with claw marks from occasional torrential rains. To this scene, I
recently added a bit of the northern Patagonian desert of black stones near
Comodoro Rivadavia. The Moreno glacier thrusts its giant blue tongue of ice
close to the beeches, the unearthly color that horribly and paradoxically may
have given Katia the inspiration and will to kill herself. I do not concern
myself with contradictions. Here all is monstrous, sacred and profane.

Two male rheas are here, their necks entangled in combat. An
American flag stands beside them since the winner, as Katia observed, will
strut into the White House, leaving the other in hopelessly dazed confusion,
rejected by the other rheas.

The Holocaust is here as a conjoined unit, comprised of elements
in the memory of a very young child. Tiny skeletal figures are surrounded by a
sphere of barbed wire and a ceiling of white, cloud-like shapes. A sculpture of
Bear’s black marble tombstone stands beside it. Both frequently blow over in
the night wind and must be turned upright in the morning. Near them, I have
created the bogs of Tierra del Fuego, dull yellow and reddish smears that cover
our valley floors with lumpy beds of moss oozing water. The Yaghans, in their
wonderful lost language, used the word for these bogs as a synonym for a
wounded man, the color and liquid suggesting suppuration, my mind of a year
ago.

In another landscape, I have sculpted a towering surface of
intricate greenish-brown leaves, poles, hands and other shapes embodying the
infinite density and impenetrability of bamboo thickets in northern beech
forests. When Bear and I encountered them, we always found our campsite because
we could go no further. The thickets and mist perpetually shrouding them and
the forest beyond became an inconceivably detailed wall of vegetation and
climate that resisted intrusion all the way to the Andes. When we camped there,
I dreamed that I tried to cut my way through and was assailed by shrieking,
tendril-like hands that could pull me into their endless green maw if I
continued.

Early in my artistic endeavors, I glued soda cans together to join
the sculptures into patterns, some octopus-like, some suggesting shadows of
lumbering ancient beasts. But, I realized that the garden had generated its own
design and unity. Like the earth, it was alive and self-defining, and I was its
gardener and translator. Children love to play here and the big birds, herons
and cranes, to alight and take a look at what might be called an
exhibitionistic spectacle or a mirror. I have watched my garden during wind and
rainstorms and felt vulnerable before it, as full of love as a young girl. It
heaves and nearly gallops then, though it is held down by stakes in the ground.
One day, it will all run away from me, and it is only proper that it should
rejoin the wildness and eternity of its provenance.

I have envisioned a future sculpture of the landscape of Paso
Roballos, but it may be entirely beyond my powers. I will try, though, as I
have discovered that attempting to execute the impossible expands one’s range
and depth as an artist. In this region, where Bear and I camped several times,
four mountain peaks meet. Within this circle of jagged, snowy towers are green
rivers running along volcanic walls of pink and green. Lake Ghio has turbulent
waters that roil into turquoise. The surrounding cliffs are blindingly white in
any weather, and the shoreline has lagoons of sapphire blue. Thousands of
black-necked swans roost in the lagoon, and the shallows are pink with flamingos.
Many historians think the region may be the origin of the “golden cities”
legends that drove the explorers to pillage the land and its inhabitants.

To the adults of Ushuaia who do not know me, I am regarded with
suspicion, though it is occasionally tempered with a smile. By the youth, I am
revered as the city’s most outrageous rebel and because it annoys their
parents. By the children, however, I am loved. It astonishes me that the garden
is always full of them, playing and laughing, when they are offered so much by
video games, satellite dishes, the Internet and all its excrescent,
downloadable glory. I have placed more and more plaques throughout the garden
describing the dangers posed by global warming and the earth’s sixth mass
extinction. I have told all viewers that it is as much a danger to them as to
the beasts of the garden.

I created the garden to tell me, in an image or story, why Katia
had to die. Like all art, it has grown, transmogrified and become much more: a
mirror of the viewer and the world in continual transformation. I am delighted
and honored to be the gardener and translator of this process. The garden’s
answer? It begins with an ancient Indian myth. The Indians in many parts of
South America including Patagonia once believed that the earth was peopled by a
race of giants. As punishment for the crime of male homosexuality, the giants
were reduced to the size of human beings. My life with Katia, however, reverses
and modernizes the myth: women who love women grow larger than life. Katia was
one of these, a sacred beast to match the ancient giants. She was too
brilliant, talented in too many ways, excessive in thought and feeling, for her
unhappy moment in time; resulting in physical and mental frailty that
infuriated and shocked her. She did not have the strength and freedom,
ultimately, to express her enormous gifts and thus feel at peace with herself.

I am reminded of a part of my last dream with the white animal.
There was a moment, just before it jumped from the rock and swam away, when we
roared together in pain and rage. To participate in the sound was thrilling
despite its pain. When I awoke, I thought that if she could have roared like
that, vented her fury at the paltry, selfish, greedy world of smaller beings
who were murdering the earth and her own utterly unique spirit, then I might
have saved her.

I am sitting on my perch again, the sofa, observing it all like
the night heron, one of my favorite companions. From this vantage, I see many
changes yet to occur in my life: more additions to the beast garden, travel,
new friends, a sense of novelty and freshness, all inconceivable before my
pilgrimage. Sylvie and I have had many long conversations late into the night.
One night, I told her that America, in absence of responsible leadership, is
governed by the Internet, and she immediately challenged me to go back and
continue my Internet activity and protests. I doubt that I will do this, but I
will write books on the subject of mass extinction and global warming. Sylvie
also wants me to take a camping and auto jaunt down the coast of Spain with her
next summer in the Northern Hemisphere, and I am going.

I often see Mariska and Nadia for evenings of candle-lit music,
wine and the incantation of dense, mysterious words they have written and call
poetry. I have less and less sense of their witchery and unusual abilities,
though. They say that this is merely because I have become a witch myself. I am
much too polite to tell them what I think of that.

As a local celebrity, however mad, I have so many visitors that I
now lock my door at every opportunity. I don’t like crowds and superficial
conversation any more than the night heron. Our perches are sacred and deserve
their solitary mental play.

Something immense has both been added and taken from me, and I
often sit on my sofa and look at the photos on my walls. I return again and
again, visually and in memory, to the Onas at the cleft between the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries, when they huddled together in complete consciousness of
their extinction. They are our past and perhaps our future, another secret
whispering to us from the morning of the world. I see their eyes—feverish,
horrified, enraged, agonized, lost. Even in the dazzling heat and light of
Spain, I will see them. I look again. Look.