Talking animals, p.16
Talking Animals, page 16
Just the same, there is always something above, a tree branch, an overpass, a storm pregnant with rain, the ozone layer’s fragile mist. There is always more. We animals are held exquisitely between.
Alfonzo envisioned himself on a path wrapped along a mountain. To his left rose a cliff face. On the other side was space, and a long fall to the crashing sea. He didn’t know where the narrow path led, but there was no room to turn.
There was a story about his species. It was said that when the European animals came to South America to plunder, they forced llamas and alpacas into servitude. They made them carry gold and silver down from the mountains to waiting ships. Llamas, though anguished, bore their sacks. Alpacas, however, refused. No matter how much they were beaten and kicked by the invaders, the alpacas resisted, even to the death. They would rather be cut into a thousand pieces than move against their will.
What was his choice? What could he choose? Follow the path where it leads, freeze in place, or fall. If he must go toward the unknown, Alfonzo thought, it would be his choice. He wasn’t about to be pulled or pushed. He would walk himself.
That night, Alfonzo gave Mitchell his blessing and his dissertation. He said he needed to be alone to digest.
“Take all the time you need,” Mitchell said. “When you are ready, go to the café. Pamella will know what to do.”
Alfonzo promised. They both squirmed a bit with feeling.
“I want you to know that you are my brother.” Two big tears fell from Mitchell’s eyes.
“No matter what,” Alfonzo hummed.
“You’re a good boy.”
“Ha.”
“See you?”
“Sea you soon.”
Alone, Alfonzo smoked a cigarette for courage, and when there was nothing else to do he hummed a prayer and dialed the number for Viviana Lopez-Cuña.
BENEATH THE BEACH
23.
Viviana Lopez-Cuña came from a family of graceful shadows. They flickered even, or perhaps especially, in front of one another. The breeze of sadness never ceased.
In their youth, her parents, Nancy—called Naya by friends—and Adriano had helped found a dissident art movement called Zanistoism. It was really just a loose affiliation of artists and intellectuals who’d attended the Zana University of Science and Arts in Peru, but Adriano had penned a manifesto with his friends and the art world had latched on. A manifesto does a tidy job of defining the limits of an ism, which later scholars appreciate.
Vivi’s parents’ names appeared passingly in art books she read in college. She could never find pictures of them, though. It was only their friends and enemies who appeared in the photos, animals she’d heard abstract gossip about while she was growing up, animals who were now either old or dead. In the pictures they appeared as young animals leaping around doing dances before brightly painted abstract cloths strung up in fields, or gathered in a dingy warehouse practicing plays. Her parents were considered minor, background figures in their country’s art world. But that was still something. All the creatures in the photos looked so confident in their beauty and their good ideas.
A long time before Vivi existed, when Adriano and Naya were still renegade Andean artists painting rivers and staging plays about atheism and free sea love, Naya gave birth to Vivi’s brother, Silvio. Silvio was her parents’ darling baby when they themselves were just students. The three of them grew up together. All the wild fun seemed to have been had before her birth. By the time Vivi was aware, her parents and her brother were grown and serious. Her parents had teaching jobs; they debated politics, drank coffees, and shared the secrets of adulthood with Silvio. In retrospect, Vivi knew that Silvio was still an adolescent in those years, still a high school student, but Vivi always knew him as her parents’ beloved peer. They poured him small glasses of their wine and let him smoke on the balcony. They debated enclosures and grain riots and bird separatism while Vivi drank her milk and played with bits of string on the floor. Her father never condescended to Silvio the way he did to Vivi. She was the little girl who tripped over her own toes. Silvio was the genius son who excelled at chess and astronomy and won awards at school.
Silvio’s death was Vivi’s hinge. Before and after pivoted on that event.
One night when Silvio was in college, he went out and never came back. Her parents thought perhaps he had a secret love. The next day Vivi went to school and dance class as usual. When the second night passed, the anxiety overwhelmed her parents. They called Silvio’s friends. The next morning they visited the university and then the hospitals. They reluctantly got the police involved. She overheard her folks murmuring about car accidents, comas, predators, drowning in a well. They made Vivi keep going to school, though she cried to stay. When she returned the apartment was filled with the whole herd, every vicuña in Zana, and every member of the Zanistos, too, no matter the species, crowding, smoking, and fretting. Each time the door would open all heads would turn in concert, a flight of stares. The phone kept ringing, but the caller never had news of Silvio.
Like all vicuñas, Vivi and her family were skinny, large-eyed, and high-strung. Her father sometimes wore three shirts to make himself more formidable on the street, but the real effect was slightly absurdist. The family shared the same fine white-and-cinnamon coat. Ever after Silvio’s disappearance, her parents agonized over the possibility that he could have been killed for his wool. Shambling along a dark Zana alley, humming a chamber piece to himself, Silvio would have been an ideal target for those who looked at vicuñas and saw only profit.
The police never found anything, though no one expected that corrupt den of wolves to help. The university was plastered with posters of Silvio’s face for weeks.
Some months later, a friend of her parents’, one of the most prominent Zanistos, an artist-theorist bear in spectacles who had gotten a plum professorship in Upstate New York, wangled a fellowship for Vivi’s father.
Her parents never wanted to move to America. They would have stayed in Zana forever, waiting for their son to return. Their friends had to drag them to the bus station.
After a fourteen-hour bus ride during which her mother only cried and slept, they boarded a ship bound for New York through the Panama Canal. Vivi never again saw Peru. Silvio became a phantom from her lost world.
* * *
Her parents managed their grief by dedicating all their new work to their disappeared son. Naya typed out a book about Silvio, about missing sons and daughters, that Adriano had written on yellow legal pads. The absence came to define her parents’ minds. Though they never knew the circumstances of Silvio’s disappearance, their imaginings soon went beyond their original notions of robbery gone wrong or wool-murder. Maybe it was a political punishment; maybe he’d spoken up at school about the president. They linked Silvio to their own dissident art. Her parents’ pain made them even more eloquent than they had been before. After writing his second book—the famous one on animal rights and creative resistance—her father was invited to speak at other universities and art institutes.
Vivi was very withdrawn during high school. Her New York classmates voted her Most Ghostlike, and she joked to herself about the stupidity of voting anybody anything. She found her new country shrill. It deafened her. She tiptoed through her house and listened to phone calls through doors. She lost herself in dancing because it didn’t require speech. The first thing she appreciated about Alfonzo was his habit of leaning in and speaking softly. She had chosen Hapshire College because it was surrounded by majestic trees that muffled sounds. Vivi swaddled her body in layers: scarves and leg warmers and army surplus jackets. She threw herself into dance and psychology classes, and only saw Adriano and Naya at holidays. Only a few friends ever heard the story of Silvio. One, naturally, was Alfonzo, her first, truest love.
24.
Sometimes the vicuña whom an alpaca loved but rejected out of grief is not so lost. This era has so many air pockets. Extinct love might not be extinct. We can change our relationships. Sometimes the vicuña whom an alpaca loved but rejected is living only a few hours away, taking care of a rich dog’s beach house. Sometimes the alpaca can put aside his pride and shame and call the vicuña to talk about sea revolutions, and family wounds, and fights against corrupt mayors. It can even happen that the vicuña understands it all and invites the alpaca to visit. Trains to the shore leave every few hours from Atlantic Station. Animals smell one another’s emotional states. Many things are possible.
Viviana was living temporarily at the End of the World, a small island enclave off Long Island’s tip. To get there, Alfonzo would take the Ronkonkoma line to the last stop and then catch a ferry. She told him to meet her at the Red Clover Tavern.
He slept late and deep. He woke with a start, gulped a coffee, and did some version of packing by shoving a bottle of seltzer, a bag of kale chips, and a music magazine into a sack. He wound himself in a scarf, then set off toward the station. Afternoon sun beamed through half clouds, refracting billions of water droplets. This was no usual Friday afternoon. He felt giddy and wild. If this was what it could be like, he would take the layoff. A cold wind blew. He rushed down the sidewalk in an attempt to stay warm. He should have brought a coat. Stay calm. Act natural, he hummed.
Exhaustion and hurry gave the station a frantic odor. A group of birds shared fries on a bench, squawking at passing cats. A deranged goose and a maintenance possum hissed at each other. He trod carefully to avoid tails and feet.
He made a transfer at Jamaica Station. On the next train there were a few creatures. He eavesdropped on older trade union beavers, but then they got off at Yaphank, leaving him without distraction.
Once the train was clear of the city’s force field, suburban colors flickered by the windows. A red house sheltered beneath a tree of yellow leaves. He’d forgotten how grand trees could be. Then the train sped up, and the streets, yards, big-box stores, and flora smeared. The train paused at Deer Park.
Alfonzo drifted off, then woke with drool in his wool. Outside were boats in backyards, hints of the sea’s proximity bathed in pools of artificial light. He ate the whole bag of kale chips while staring into the dark. This was adolescent. He should have had a real dinner like a grown alpaca.
In the train bathroom he studied himself, tried to see himself as Vivi would. Older and chubbier. Lips still curled in persistent bemusement. He couldn’t help his cartoon softness, round nostrils, big eyes, the smattering of white mixed in with his brown curls in need of a trim. He saw the animal he was. What would it be like to look and be looked at by the one he loved but was no longer with?
When he returned to his seat, dark had fully fallen outside, so he took up his magazine. It was an issue of Slug and Lettuce containing a long interview with Akida Kombu. Now he realized it was a secret SERF message. It was revolutionary material in disguise by being totally undisguised.
DEEP ADAPTATION: AN INTERVIEW WITH SONIC LEGEND AKIDA KOMBU
“Viva, Comrade Animal, viva!… Long live the fresh air, long live!… Forward with the struggle for the purification and preservation of all the elements of nature, forward!”
—Piwe Mkhize, from “Back to Nature,” in Literature of Nature: An International Sourcebook
There was a photo of the musician, serious and fluffy, standing on the beach surrounded by homemade instruments. Ink-green seaweed twisted behind in this portrait of an artist as an eccentric sea dog. Kombu’s outlook was dark, mystical, and charged with discordant romance. He was famed for playing both above and below the surface of the sea.
The interviewer asked: How did you come to music?
“I was first influenced by aggressive sounds. I grew up close to a shipyard; many hours of rock and roll came from the radio where dock animals worked. It was always a mix of the Stones and waves. The ships brought goods in and out, and they did the same with music, musical cargo. I heard gazelle Dabke, Thai country, birdsong from Agadez, jungle slowcore, Sufi snake rock, and whale songs just by hanging around the port.
“I was also friends with many seals and seabirds. They were outcasts who knew the level of violence the land could unleash, but they also loved music from everywhere. We listened to the pulsations of radio pop as it distorted over the water. These friends were artists who first opened my ears to whole new levels of sound. These listening experiences alerted me to levels my rational mind could not perceive.
“But since the sea does not have the musical industry that land does, I only realized it was possible to be a musician professionally by looking around on land. I first tried playing drums with some land band, but that could not satisfy me, so I broke out on my own.”
Everyone would agree that your music is shattering, especially in terms of volume. Could you expand on your commitment to intense noise?
“I came to noise through a process of discovery. What could my body withstand, what could other bodies withstand? Could we find a still point in a storm? Almost technical. I wanted to reproduce street noise, machine noise, construction noise, but also trench noise, wave noise, and mesopelagic noise all at once. What I make becomes a space to meditate inside. A lost sphere or temporary autonomous zone.
“For the sea-bound, sounding is like breathing. The whole body is—and is in—sound. From the sea I learned that shattering sound could heal and that the whole body was sounding all the time. So, although those on land think I am always loud, those in the sea also know I have a whole level you would call silent. I think intense noise has become my way of communicating the plight of the seas to those on land. In that way, loud noise is more political, I suppose.”
Political in what way?
“You see, I have made my life with many seals. They taught me to swim, to be at peace in the water. I think they are my community, and I want to transmit their feelings or what I understand of their feelings into something those on land can comprehend. I can be both in sea and on land. One webbed paw in each realm. And the violence between them is unbearable. But really it is not between, it is one-sided. There is violence perpetrated by land against the sea. There are kinds of violence that flow through every part of the sea and yet remain almost invisible to those on land. There is the chronic noise of ships, propellers grinding, huge explosions of low frequency that create a bed on which we are forced to lie. This has been the case for generations, as the land has industrialized.
“But companies also use air guns to search for fossil fuels. They are six or seven times louder than ship sounds. Many companies are using these nonstop, every ten seconds, for months at a time. It starts as a big bang and changes to a reverberating fuzz. I think many on land imagine the ocean as a quiet place. Those in the sea are living through endless, shattering storms. So, what I try to do is return the noise land companies are imposing onto the sea back to those on land. This is my form of resistance.”
Do you need for your audience to get these ideas to understand your music?
“I have written many things about the sea struggle. I think that the curious will educate themselves. To communicate, one must take the indirect route.”
The train arrived. Alfonzo made his way to the ferry. Above was a cold, humid tarp of pearl-colored clouds and black sky. Sea and sky shone against each other in reflection. There were stars where there weren’t clouds.
The boat moved over the spangled sea through soft air. Was he inside or outside the bubble? Was this outer space? The delicacy overwhelmed him. The dense air was so fresh, Alfonzo needed a cigarette to breathe more normally. He bummed a smoke from an older sheep and puffed it into the dark.
They floated past a series of wooden posts sticking up above the water. A group of birds gathered, one perched on each post. The birds wore hats and were also smoking. Their little orange ember tips glowed. This was how shore birds relaxed together, he thought. All the animals of the world are so close, and yet we can be so ignorant. He thought of all the birds he’d crossed paths with. How little he knew of their aerial views, their feathers, and struggles. We are one another’s aliens, he thought.
25.
Vivi was at the Red Clover Tavern as promised, sitting beside an elephant named Krithi Devi. Krithi was from Kerala, India, but she was living in exile because her activism for other females had brought her death threats. Afraid for her elderly parents, she’d succumbed to pressure and gone abroad. She’d ended up stuck in Long Island, at the End of the World, because the boat she’d been traveling on had sprung a leak. She and her traveling companions were hanging around this off-season beach town, waiting for some parts to arrive by mail so the ship could be repaired. She and Vivi hit it off because they could sit with each other, talking sometimes but also letting silences exist. The elephant was accompanied everywhere by a yellow-and-red-beaked bird named Edith. Edith never drank or chatted; all she did was glare intently at anyone who came near Krithi. No one felt comfortable asking about the bird’s behavior.
That night the bar was full, perhaps because of the band. Vivi was anxious and ended up explaining her history with Alfonzo to her friend, who only wobbled her head sympathetically. All the while Edith pecked delicately at Krithi’s ear.
Alfonzo arrived. He picked Vivi out from the crowd right away. He was surprised by the atmosphere. There were a few cats and dogs, a couple of beavers, a deer chatting with a turkey, and an osprey in a baseball hat sitting alone with a newspaper and a beer. There was also the elephant beside Vivi. As he made his way through the long room, he passed a circle of seals and sea lions curled around a table in one of the dim recesses. Alfonzo didn’t stare, but he did steal a few glances. The sea creatures were so large and sleek. They almost disappeared into the dark, but then the light would catch on their oiled fur. Was it fur? Alfonzo wasn’t sure. He felt both puffy and bony in comparison to their aerodynamic contours. He rarely, if ever, saw seals.
