The Savage Detectives (53 page)

Felipe Müller, sitting on a bench in Plaza Martorell, Barcelona, October 1991
. I'm almost sure it was Arturo Belano who told me this story, because he was the only one of us who liked to read science fiction. It's by Theodore Sturgeon, or so Arturo said, although it might be by some other author or even Arturo himself; the name Theodore Sturgeon means nothing to me.

The story, a love story, is about a hugely rich and extremely intelligent girl who one day falls in love with her gardener or her gardener's son or a young tramp who just happens to end up on one of the estates she owns and becomes her gardener. The girl, who's not only rich and smart but also headstrong and a little impulsive, lures him into bed the first chance she gets, and without quite knowing how, falls madly in love with him. The tramp, who's nowhere near as smart as she is and who doesn't have a high school degree but who makes up for it by being angelically pure, falls in love with her too, though naturally not without a few complications. In the first phase of the romance, they live in her palatial mansion, where they spend their time looking at art books, eating exquisite delicacies, watching old movies, and mostly making love all day. Then they live for a while in the gardener's cottage and then on a boat (maybe the kind that cruises the rivers of France, like in the Jean Vigo film) and then they roam the vast expanse of the United States on a couple of Harleys, which was one of the tramp's long-cherished dreams.

As the girl lives out her love, her interests continue to prosper, and since money begets money, she gets richer by the day. Of course, the tramp, who's generally clueless, is decent enough to convince her to devote part of her fortune to good works or charity (which is something the girl has always done anyway, through lawyers and a network of various foundations, though she doesn't tell him so, in order to make him think she's doing it on his account) and then he forgets about it all, because ultimately the tramp has only the vaguest idea of the mass of money that trails like a shadow behind his beloved. Anyway, for a while, months, maybe a year or two, the girl millionaire and her lover are indescribably happy. But one day (or one evening), the tramp falls ill and although the best doctors in the world come to examine him, there's nothing to be done. His health has been ruined by an unhappy childhood, an adolescence plagued with hardships, a troubled life that the short time he's spent with the girl has barely managed to ease or sweeten. Despite all the efforts of science, he dies of cancer.

For a few days the girl seems to lose her mind. She travels all over the globe, takes lovers, immerses herself in dark pursuits. But she ends up coming home, and soon, when it becomes clear that she's more obsessed than ever, she decides to embark on a project that in some way had already begun to take root in her mind just before the tramp's death. A team of scientists moves into the mansion. In record time, the house is doubly transformed, the inside into a sophisticated laboratory, and the outside, the lawns and the gardener's cottage, into a replica of Eden. To shield it all from the gaze of strangers, an extremely high wall is erected around the grounds. Then the work begins. Soon the scientists implant a clone of the tramp in the womb of a whore, who will be generously compensated. Nine months later the whore has a boy, hands him over to the girl, and disappears.

For five years the girl and a team of specialists care for the boy. Then the scientists implant a clone of the girl in her own womb. Nine months later the girl has a child. The laboratory in the mansion is dismantled and the scientists disappear, replaced by teachers, the tutor-specialists who will keep watch from a distance as both children are raised according to a plan previously drawn up by the girl. When everything is set in motion the girl disappears. She travels, she attends society parties again, she plunges headfirst into perilous adventures, takes lovers: her name shines like a star's. But every once in a while, cloaked in the greatest secrecy, she returns to the mansion and observes the children's progress, unseen by them. The clone of the tramp is an exact replica of the man she fell in love with, his purity and innocence intact. Except that now all his needs are met and his childhood is a peaceful succession of games and teachers who instruct him in all he needs to know. The female clone is an exact replica of the girl herself, and her teachers repeat the same successes and failures, the same actions of the past.

The girl, of course, hardly ever lets herself be seen by the children, although occasionally the clone of the tramp, who is never tired of playing and is a bold child, spots her through the lace curtains of the mansion's upper floors and goes running after her, always in vain.

The years pass and the children grow up, becoming more and more inseparable. One day the millionairess falls ill, with whatever, a deadly virus, cancer, and after a purely symbolic struggle, gives in and prepares to die. She's still young, forty-two. Her only heirs are the two clones and she leaves everything ready for them to inherit part of her immense fortune the moment they're married. Then she dies and her lawyers and scientists weep bitterly for her.

The story ends with a meeting of her staff after the reading of the will. Some, the most innocent and farthest from the millionairess's inner circle, ask the questions that Sturgeon guesses readers might ask themselves. What if the clones refuse to marry? What if the boy and girl love each other, as seems indisputable, but their love never goes beyond the strictly fraternal? Will their lives be ruined? Will they be condemned to live together like two prisoners serving life sentences?

Arguments and debates break out. Moral and ethical questions are raised. The oldest lawyer and scientist, however, soon take it upon themselves to clear up all doubts. Even if the boy and girl don't agree to marry, even if they don't fall in love, they'll still be given the money they're due and they'll be free to do as they like. No matter how the relationship between them develops, within a year the scientists will implant a new clone of the tramp in the body of a surrogate, and five years later they'll repeat the operation with a new clone of the millionairess. And when these new clones are twenty-three and eighteen, no matter what their interpersonal relationship might be-in other words, whether they love each other like brother and sister or like lovers-the scientists or the scientists' successors will implant two more clones, and so on until the end of time or until the millionairess's immense fortune is exhausted.

This is where the story ends, with the faces of the millionairess and the tramp silhouetted against the sunset, and then the stars, and then infinite space. A little creepy, isn't it? Sublime, in a way, but creepy too. Like all crazy loves, don't you think? If you add infinity to infinity, you get infinity. If you mix the sublime and the creepy, what you end up with is creepy. Right?

Xosé Lendoiro, Terme di Traiano, Rome, October 1992
. I was no ordinary lawyer.
Lupo ovem commisisti
or
Alter remus aquas, alter tibi radat harenas
: either could be said of me with equal justice. And yet I've preferred to adhere to the Catullian
noli pugnare duobus
. Someday my merits will be recognized.

In those days I was traveling and conducting experiments. My practice as a lawyer or jurist afforded me sufficient income so that I could devote ample time to the noble art of poetry.
Unde habeas quaerit nemo, sed oportet habere
, which, simply put, means that no one inquires as to the source of one's possessions, but possessions are necessary. An essential truth if one wants to devote oneself to one's most secret calling: poets are dazzled by the spectacle of wealth.

But let us return to my experiments. At first, these consisted solely of traveling and observing, although I was soon given to know that my unconscious intention was the attainment of the ideal map of Spain.
Hoc erat in votis
, such were my desires, as the immortal Horace says. Naturally, I had a magazine. I was, if I may say so, the funder and editor, the publisher and star poet.
In petris, herbis vis est, sed maxima verbis
: stones and grass have many virtues, but words have more.

My publication was tax-deductible too, which meant that it was little burden. But why bore you? Details have no place in poetry. That's always been my maxim, along with
Paulo maiora canamus
: let us sing of greater things, as Virgil says. One has to get to the marrow, the pith, the essence. I had a magazine and I headed a firm of lawyers, ambulance chasers and sharks, a firm of not undeserved renown, and during the summers I traveled. Life was good. And yet one day I said to myself, Xosé, you've been all over the world:
incipit vita nova
. It's time for you to tread the pathways of Spain, though you be no Dante, time for you to tread the roads of this country of ours, so battered and long-suffering and yet still so little known.

I'm a man of action. What's said is done: I bought myself a
roulotte
and off I went.
Vive valeque
. I traveled through Andalusia. Granada is so pretty, Seville so lovely, Cordoba so severe. But I needed to go deeper, get to the source. Doctor of law and criminal lawyer that I was, I couldn't rest until I'd found the right path: the
ius est ars boni et aequi
, the
libertas est potestas faciendi id quod facere iure licet
, the root of the apparition. It was a summer of initiation. I kept repeating to myself, after sweet Horace:
nescit vox missa reverti
, the word, once spoken, cannot be withdrawn. From the legal point of view, the statement has its loopholes. But not for a poet. By the time I returned from that first trip, I was in a state of excitement, and also somewhat confused.

Before long, I separated from my wife. There were no scenes and no one was hurt, since fortunately our daughters were already grown and had the sufficient discernment to understand me, especially the older one. Keep the apartment and the house in Tossa, I said, and let that be the end of it. My wife accepted, surprisingly enough. We put the rest in the hands of a few lawyers she trusted.
In publicis nihil est lege gravius: in privatis firmissimum est testamentum
. Although why I say that I don't know. What do wills have to do with divorce? My nightmares are getting the better of me. In any case,
legum omnes servi sumus, ut liberi esse possimus
, which means that in order to be free, which is our most precious desire, we are all slaves before the law.

Suddenly, I was overflowing with energy. I felt rejuvenated: I stopped smoking, I went running every morning, I participated diligently in three law conferences, two of them held in old European capitals. My magazine didn't go under; on the contrary, the poets who drew sustenance from my largesse closed ranks in manifest sympathy.
Verae amicitiae sempieternae sunt
, I thought, along with the learned Cicero. Then, in a clear instance of overconfidence, I decided to publish a book of my poetry. The printing was expensive and of the four reviews it received, all but one were negative. I blamed everything on Spain and my optimism and the unchanging laws of envy.
Invidia ceu fulmine summa vaporant
.

When summer came I got in the
roulotte
and set out to roam the lands of my elders, or in other words verdant, primeval Galicia. I left in good spirits, at four in the morning, muttering sonnets by the immortal and prickly Quevedo. Once in Galicia I traveled its
rías
and tried its
mostos
and talked to its sailors, since
natura maxime miranda in minimis
. Then I headed for the mountains, for the land of
meigas
, my soul fortified and my senses alert. I slept at campgrounds, because a Guardia Civil sergeant warned me that it was dangerous to camp along back roads or country highways, especially in the summer, because of lowlifes, traveling singers, and partygoers who wandered from one club to another along the foggy night roads.
Qui amat periculum in illo peribit
. The campgrounds weren't bad either, and I was soon calculating the wealth of emotions and passions that I might discover and observe and even catalog in such places, with an eye to my map.

So it was while I was at one of these establishments that what I now regard as the central part of my story took place. Or at least the only part that still preserves intact the happiness and mystery of my whole sad, futile tale.
Mortalium nemo est felix
, says Pliny. And also:
felicitas cui praecipua fuerit homini, non est humani iudici
. But to get to the point. I was at a campground, as I've said, near Castroverde, in the province of Lugo, in a mountainous spot abounding in thickets and shrubs of every sort. I was reading and taking notes and amassing knowledge.
Otium sine litteris mors est et homini vivi sepultura
. Although that may be an exaggeration. In short (and to be honest): I was dying of boredom.

One afternoon, as I was walking in an area that would doubtless be of interest to a paleontologist, the misfortune that I'm about to describe took place. I saw a group of campers coming down the mountain. From the looks of shock on their faces, one didn't need to be a genius to realize that something bad had happened. Gesturing for them to stop, I made them tell me their news. It turned out that the grandson of one of them had fallen down a shaft or pit or chasm up the mountain. My experience as a criminal lawyer told me that we had to act fast,
facta, non verba
, so while half the party continued on its way to the campground, I scaled the steep hill with the others and came to where they claimed the misfortune had occurred.

The chasm was deep, bottomless. One of the campers said that it was called Devil's Mouth. Another said that the locals claimed it was really the dwelling place of the devil or one of his earthly incarnations. I asked what the disappeared child's name was and one of the campers answered: Elifaz. The situation was already strange, but with his answer it became frankly ominous, because it isn't every day that a chasm swallows up a boy with such an unusual name. So it's Elifaz, is it? I said or whispered. That's his name, said the one who'd spoken. The others, uncultured office workers and government clerks from Lugo, looked at me and didn't say anything. I'm a man of thought and reflection, but I'm also a man of action.
Non progredi est regredi
, I remembered. So I went up to the rim of the chasm and shouted the boy's name. A menacing echo was the only answer I got: a shout,
my
shout, returned to me from the depths of the earth, turned into its blood-chilling echo. A shiver ran up my spine, but to hide it I think I laughed, telling my companions that the hole was certainly deep, and suggesting that if we tied all of our belts together we could create a makeshift rope so that one of us, the thinnest, of course, could go down and explore the first few feet of the pit. We conferred. We smoked. No one seconded my proposal. After a while, the people who had continued on to the campground returned with the first reinforcements and the necessary equipment to make the descent.
Homo fervidus et diligens ad omnia est paratus
, I thought.

We roped up a sturdy young man from Castroverde as well as we could, and with five strong men at the other end of the rope, he began his descent, equipped with a flashlight. He soon disappeared from sight. From above, we shouted: what can you see? and from the depths came his ever-fainter reply: nothing!
Patientia vincit omnia
, I advised, and we kept calling. We couldn't see anything, not even the light of the flashlight, although the walls of the cave closest to the surface were sporadically lit with a brief splash of light, as if the boy were pointing the flashlight over his head to check how many feet deep he was. It was then, as we were remarking on the light, that we heard a superhuman howl and we all moved to the edge of the shaft. What happened? we shouted. There was another howl. What happened? What did you see? Did you find him? No one answered from below. A few women started to pray. I wasn't sure whether to be appalled or to let myself be swept up in the phenomenon.
Stultorum plena sunt omnia
, as Cicero points out. A relative of our explorer asked us to haul him up. The five men who were holding the rope couldn't do it and we had to help them. The shout from down below was repeated several times. Finally, after tireless efforts, we managed to get him to the surface.

The young man was alive, and except for tattered jeans and a few scrapes on his arms, he seemed to be all right. To make sure, the women felt his legs. He hadn't broken any bones. What did you see? his relative asked him. He wouldn't answer and covered his face with his hands. That was when I should have taken charge and stepped in, but my position as spectator kept me, how shall I say, bewitched by the play of shadows and useless gestures. Others repeated the question, with slight variations. I may have recalled aloud that
occasiones namque hominem fragilem non faciunt, sed qualis sit ostendunt
. This young fellow was clearly a weak character. Given a swallow of cognac, he offered no resistance and drank as if his life depended on it. What did you see? the group repeated. Then he spoke and only his relative could hear him. The relative asked him the same question again, as if he couldn't believe what he'd heard. The young man replied: I saw the devil.

From that moment on, the rescue group was seized by confusion and anarchy.
Quot capita, tot sententiae
: some said that they had called the Guardia Civil from the campground and the best thing we could do was wait. Others asked about the boy, whether the youth had gotten a glimpse of him or heard him on the way down, and the reply was negative. Most asked what the devil was like, whether the youth had seen all of him or just his face, what he looked like, what color he was, etc.
Rumores fuge
, I said to myself and gazed out at the surrounding countryside. Then the camp watchman and the bulk of the women appeared with another group from the campground, among them the mother of the vanished boy, who hadn't heard what was happening because she'd been watching a game show, as she announced to anyone who would listen. Who's down there? asked the watchman. In silence, someone pointed out the youth, who was still lying in the grass. The mother, helpless, went up to the mouth of the cave and shouted her son's name. No one answered. She shouted again. Then the cave howled, and it was as if it were answering back.

Some people turned pale. Most backed away from the hole, afraid that a foggy hand might suddenly shoot out and drag them down into the depths. More than one person said that a wolf must be living down there. Or a wild dog. Meanwhile, it had gotten dark, and the gas lanterns and flashlights competed in a macabre dance, with that open wound in the mountainside for its magnetic center. People were laughing or speaking in Galician, a language that, uprooted as I was from my origins, I no longer remembered. They kept pointing with trembling hands toward the mouth of the pit. The Guardia Civil hadn't shown up. It was imperative that a decision be made, although everything was in utter confusion. Then I saw the camp watchman tie the rope around his waist and I realized that he was preparing to go down. His behavior, I confess, struck me as admirable, and I went over to congratulate him. Xosé Lendoiro, lawyer and poet, I said as I shook his hand effusively. He looked at me and smiled as if we'd met before. Then, amid general expectation, he started down into that terrible pit.

To be honest, I and many of those gathered there feared the worst. The watchman went down as far as the rope reached. At that point we all thought he would come back up, and for a moment, I think, he pulled from below and we pulled from above and the search stalled in an ignoble series of misunderstandings and shouts. I tried to make peace,
addito salis grano
. If I hadn't had courtroom experience, those angry people would have thrown me down the pit headfirst. Finally, however, I seized control. With no little effort, we managed to communicate with the watchman and decipher what he was shouting. He was asking us to let go of the rope. So we did. More than one of us felt our hearts stop to see the remaining length of rope disappear into the chasm like a rat's tail into a snake's jaws. We told each other that the watchman must know what he was doing.

Suddenly, the night got darker, and the black hole got blacker, if that was possible, and those who minutes before were making brief forays around the edge of the hole, carried away by impatience, stopped, since the possibility of tripping and being swallowed up by the chasm was manifested as sins are sometimes manifested. Fainter and fainter howls escaped from within, as if the devil were retreating into the depths of the earth with his two freshly caught prey. It goes without saying that the wildest hypotheses were making the rounds of our group on the surface.
Vita brevis, ars longa, occasio praeceps, experimentum periculosum, iudicium difficile
. There were those who couldn't stop checking their watches, as if time played a crucial role in this adventure. There were those who were chain-smoking, and others who were attending to the fainting fits of the lost boy's female relatives. There were those who cursed the Guardia Civil for taking so long. Suddenly, as I was watching the stars, it occurred to me that all of this bore an extraordinary resemblance to a story by Don Pío Baroja that I'd read in my years as a law student at the University of Salamanca. The story was called "The Chasm," and in it a little shepherd boy is lost deep inside a mountain. A lad with a rope tied securely around him is lowered in search of the boy, but the howls of the devil scare him away and he comes back up without the boy, whom he hasn't seen but whose moans of pain are clearly audible from outside. The story ends with a scene of complete powerlessness, in which fear vanquishes love, duty, and even the bonds of family. No one in the rescue group (made up, it must be said, of uncouth and superstitious Basque shepherds) dares to go down after hearing the stammered story that the first would-be rescuer tells, in which he claims to have seen the devil, or to have felt or sensed or heard him, I forget.
In se semper armatus Furor
. In the last scene, the shepherds go home, including the boy's terrified grandfather, and the whole night long (a windy night, I suppose) they can hear the boy's cries from the chasm. That's Don Pío's story. A youthful effort, I think, in which his glorious prose hasn't quite taken wing. A good story, nevertheless. And that was what I thought as behind me human passions roiled and my eyes counted the stars: that the story I was living was just like Baroja's story and that Spain was still Baroja's Spain, in other words a Spain where chasms weren't barricaded and children were still careless and fell into them, where people smoked and fainted in a rather excessive way, and where the Guardia Civil never showed up when it was needed.