The great frustration, p.7
The Great Frustration, page 7
One of my men picks up the woman’s head and pitches it further into the woods. He lets out a loud grunt, and the head goes soaring in a long, easy arch. It drifts to the left and thumps against a tree, sending it into a slow spiral, fanning out its shock of lovely black hair that turns a burnt amber as it passes into the sunlight. The head continues on out of sight and eventually lands with a soft thud.
My arm around the waist of the young woman from the banquet. My hand still pressing the coin into hers. What will happen next? The noise of the river rising up around us. Some low branch dropping petals. Perhaps she struggles. To escape? To adjust herself? To achieve a position that will allow me more purchase? She turns from me abruptly as I attempt to kiss her mouth. The coin falls into the dirt. I take her face in my hand and pull her violently to my mouth, her lips soft and motionless. I lean over her, forcing myself against her. Almost falling. Finally she offers me a kiss. After which, without much prompting, her head comes off in my hands. The noise of the river still rising, the petals still dropping, I meet the startled gaze of her head with my own. Or perhaps her kiss slowly turns sour, until I am forced to turn away from her and vomit in the grass. Perhaps her teeth begin to come loose in my mouth. Perhaps her hair, once pulled, comes out in clumps. Whatever the case, the fantasy is never agreeable for very long. The only aspect of it that remains unspoiled is the image of the coin being pressed into the woman’s hand. I avoid dwelling on it for fear of eventually drifting to another one of those horrible kisses, the woman’s tongue turning to ash in my mouth—but on occasion I allow myself to relive the imagined sensation of that perfect coin against her palm, the weight of that relentless gold. Often, the sensation of the woman’s hand fades and in my mind, I begin to press the coin into nothing. I stand alone in the fantasy, forcing that coin vindictively into the palm of some void. Then I will come crashing back to the sight of some unhappy village as it burns or the steady progress of my men through the jungle from one place to the next, the idiotic clamor of their armor through the damp.
I fire a cannon into a line of native men. Three native men strain under the weight of a large chest filled with gold, while others on either side wave their arms in supplication, half dancing their way toward our large, white tents that pulse slowly in the low breeze. It is an effort to pay tribute by men who hope to appease what they still seem to misunderstand as a greed with limits. As if there could be a set sum of gold that would suffice, as if there could be treasure enough in that pitiful chest to induce our ships back to Spain. No such sum or treasure exists. Those men suspect that the gold rattling in their ridiculous chest will stay my progress. They assume that if I am presented with it freely, I will abandon all hostility. They assume I see gold as a justification for violence, when it is exactly the opposite. I see violence as a justification for gold. Practically speaking, my purpose is not to collect gold, but to collect gold with violence. After all, unless it is gathered in a way that requires as many men and resources as possible, gold itself is useless. If gold is to be worth anything, then the act of collecting it needs to involve shipbuilders, arms makers. It needs to involve the men who grind the gunpowder, the men who pour that powder into barrels, the porters who load those barrels to a ship. It needs to involve the men who rent those porters rooms, the men who sell those porters bread. It needs to involve the men who bake that bread, the men who grind that wheat. It needs to involve the farmers who stand grimly at the edges of those wheat fields, drenched in sweat. Gold is arbitrary. What is significant is the way in which it is seized and toward what end it drives the toil of many. If gold is going to be given up voluntarily, well, that is not sound. You see? What these weak-minded men fail to realize is that if I could take their gold without harming them, there would be no reason to want it. If I were sent here to collect the leaves off the trees, their plight would be the same. And so the cannon shot soars out over the field with a noise like ripping cloth, exploding the chest and scattering that particularly meaningless gold beyond recovery.
I am startled from my sleep. For reasons that are beyond me, I find myself standing in a field at a great distance from my men, asleep in their tents. I am holding my own sword to my throat. Wearing nothing but a helmet, I was no doubt woken by the coolness of the night air, almost a chill. Strangely, this seems to have been to my advantage, as—in my sleep—I had been working the sword against my throat. Already, there is a trickle of blood creeping along the blade. I throw the sword down, frightened—not at the possibility of having inadvertently lost my life, but at the possibility that posthumously it would have seemed an act of cowardice. I am frightened by the fact that, had it not been for the slight breeze rousing me from sleep, my legacy would have been one of weakness, and not (I look around and see that I am in fact standing among the splintered remains of that chest, that worthless tribute gold dispersed in the dirt) of strength.
In a dense wood, I kill a woman. She approaches me from behind with a curiosity that at first seems animal in its simplicity. Without a context, I must look odd. A suit of metal. My right leg turned inward. A posture suggesting weariness in a world that is otherwise a paradise. I groan slightly as I move my hand across the tree trunk. Who could approach such a bizarre creature without fear? Then again—despite my terrible appearance—perhaps I seem somehow marvelous to the woman, a spectacle. If I had turned to her without violence, maybe she would have continued to smile. Maybe she would have continued to regard me with her friendly curiosity. Yes. I am sure now. She would have tugged at my beard. She would have traced the outline of my damaged ear with her finger. She would have pressed her palm flat against my chest, slapping lightly at my breastplate and leaning in close in order to hear the dull reverberations. I would take offense at first—but before I would be able to become upset, the woman would step away. She would regard me from a short distance and then lean back in and continue to knock at my chest. Slowly, I would realize that she was admiring me, that in some pleasant way she was amused by me. She would begin to laugh, and I would laugh, too. After all, how ridiculous! Hearing her laughter, I would realize once and for all how preposterous it was. A man dressed in metal! I would begin to wonder how many different facets of my life were similarly absurd. I would sit on the ground with the woman and begin taking my armor off one piece at a time. I would hold up each piece in front of her, allowing the light to catch it, exposing swirls of dried polish and imperfections. I would hand each piece to her so that she would be able to examine it more closely. She would be visibly impressed by the design but would still wrinkle her brow, looking back and forth between me and each piece of armor, as if to say: how silly of you. After having removed it all, I would reassemble my armor and fasten it to the base of a tree, where it would stand eerily hollow and strange looking. The woman and I would take turns throwing stones at it or rapping it with sticks, the loud clangs frightening birds from their branches. For whatever reason, my misery would not be discernable to this woman, so it would simply disappear. Without being able to exchange a single word, we would enjoy one another’s company. We would be glad that we could not talk, as in silence, we would manage to prolong that childish excitement that cannot be put into words anyway, that sweet, slow grope for acquaintanceship in which every moment is the most precious failure. Instead, I strike the woman down. I kill her with a single blow. In a dense wood. Like an animal.
My men stand apart from me, gathered in a circle. They mock me as if I have already left. They take turns trying to imagine my hobbled body ravaging the woman. They make wild, grotesque faces and jerk their hips back and forth, one leg twisted and dangling. They laugh uncontrollably. They double over and drool. I unsheathe my sword, but they fail to notice. Maybe when they turn around, I will be charging to kill them. Maybe I will slice off their ears and their noses. Maybe, in the end, they will beg me for mercy. Maybe I will march them into the middle of camp and force them to eat piles of gold. Maybe they will kneel before me, bleeding, moaning, and eating gold while watching the edge of my sword as if it were the face of God. Maybe when they turn around, I will have opened a vein. Maybe they will watch me die a pale, gradual death as my blood mixes with the woman’s. Maybe when they turn around, I will be gone and all that will be left is a pile of armor glittering in the dirt.
THE GREAT FRUSTRATION
In the Garden of Eden, a cat steadies itself on a branch while quietly regarding a parrot. The air in the garden is heavy and mixed with the stink of all those animals resting below. No blood is spilled in the garden, and so the roles of most of the animals are greatly reduced. Though most of them are still, as yet, unaware of this fact. They linger in vague proximity to one another, marveling at their own bodies. The larger creatures recognize the strength in their new limbs, while others like the penguin and the guinea pig only wander clumsily from place to place, wondering whether or not they have been the object of some cruel joke. Near a small pond, the penguin waves the dull blades of its arms up at the sky, as if already protesting the existence of a dense and impractical God.
It has been said that the air in the garden is heavy with the smell of these animals. More than heavy, it is unbearable and oppressive. However, it is a smell that goes generally unnoticed by its originators, except perhaps in the form of an occasional swirl of dander, moved on a breeze not unlike the one that now rustles the fur along the cat’s spine, causing it to hunker low on the branch and flatten its ears as it keeps its eyes fixed on the parrot from a respectful distance. The cat cannot help but observe the parrot with a particular interest. The cat sees it as ripe, but with what?
Below, the lion does not lie with the lamb, but neither does it tear the lamb into a thousand pieces, neither does it eat the lamb’s head in a single bite, neither does it take the lamb into its jaws and, with all the force in the tremendous muscles of its neck, whip the lamb against a tree over and over again until the lamb is nothing but a skid of dripping slime on a tree trunk. Neither does the lion do any of the things that leap suddenly to mind whenever it sees the lamb. These fantasies confuse the lion because they are at once repellent and invigorating. They leave the lion with a number of questions regarding its feelings toward its fellow creatures. Why, for instance, should the lion feel a twitching in its paws when it sees the peacock? Why should the limbs of the lion jerk, as if it is being startled from a dream? Why when the peacock waddles past should the lion imagine a beautiful explosion of feathers, a cloud of dull greens and iridescent blues that pulse and churn to the rhythm of the lion’s heart?
At the same time, the peacock is deeply hurt by the cold stares it receives from the lion. It wants only to be liked and the apparent disdain exhibited by the lion is more than it can bear. It moves back and forth before the lion, deliberately fanning its feathers in the hopes of being acknowledged. But the lion only presses its claws into the dirt and closes its eyes, emitting a low sound from its chest. The peacock moves toward the lion, observing it closely. The peacock wants the lion to open its eyes. It wants more than anything for the lion to admire its magnificent feathers. It strains to fan them even further. The lamb, on the other hand, watches the peacock in disbelief. Having interpreted the gaze of the lion with far more acumen, the lamb tends to keep to the brush, sporadically poking out its head to watch the lion as if it were a great storm gathering in the distance.
The parrot is oblivious, which aggravates the cat. The parrot sits on the branch, happily looking off into the distance and occasionally stretching its wings as if it were in the middle of some imagined flight. This air of solitude and contentment is upsetting to the cat. After all, if it finds the parrot so fascinating, why shouldn’t the parrot at least acknowledge its presence in the tree? This presumed haughtiness on behalf of the parrot stirs up a desire in the cat to knock it from its branch, thumping the back of its head hard enough to send it spiraling to the ground. But the inevitable sight of the parrot on the ground, so far away, would surely only fill the cat with some new anxiety. Instead, it prefers to fantasize about the possibility of placing its nose against the belly of the parrot or of opening its mouth to the parrot’s throat, taking a small nip of flesh between its teeth and pinching it gently, lovingly. Some rich, phantom taste begins to fill the cat’s mouth. By some mysterious impulse, the cat’s jaw begins to quiver. From its throat comes a quiet chatter. Otherwise motionless, the cat remains on the branch, jealously guarding the parrot in its happiness.
And the parrot is happy. The parrot is desperate with happiness.
It reveres, with a profound joy, every aspect of its life in the garden. It considers its parrothood to be an unfathomable windfall of good luck, the very thought of which causes its heart to feel overfull. Though, it carries with it also a constant sense of unease. For while it holds the other animals of the garden in neighborly esteem, the parrot also regards them with a secret terror—terror in the sense that their very existence seems to serve as evidence that at some point there must have been a chance, or many chances, that the parrot could have been created as something other than a parrot. As satisfied as the parrot is with life, underlying each moment of pleasure is the frantic contemplation of all those possibilities that could have made things different. The idea that its own feathers could have been yellow instead of blue is enough to make the parrot hide its head in the crook of its wing and hold its breath, as if waiting for the alleviation of some incredible pain. The parrot cannot endure the thought of doing without any of the aspects of its existence that it likes—and it likes all of them. It likes the weight of its own body on the branch. It likes the sound of its own voice. Most of all, it likes flight. It prefers to spend its time flying out where the fields past the horizon are still under divine construction, where it can coast past the hard earth and look down into the sparkling void, its wings borne upward on fierce gusts of nothingness. The parrot likes to look back on the garden, shining by its own light, as it grows, slowly folding out and out. This view of the garden produces a sense of gratification so complete that the parrot feels almost burdened by it. At times, the parrot feels guilty toward the animals that are bound to the earth, toward all the other birds that are not bold enough to fly so far out. It pities them. Why should it alone have access to such wonder? The parrot senses that there is already a great inequity in the world. It takes as an example of this the poor cat that is now attempting to share its branch. It looks so awkward in the tree. And by climbing so high it is clearly trying to emulate the parrot in some way—an idea so pathetic that it sends the parrot into a deep and uncompromising despair. And look, now the cat’s jaw is trembling. It sounds as if it is trying to chirp. How clearly it wants to be a bird! The parrot realizes that of all the animals in the garden, this cat, by some special intuition of its species, is alone in its ability to understand fully how unkind the parrot’s advantage is. The parrot begins to understand that no matter what kind of world is created from this garden, it will be one in which birds are a plague and a misery to cats, one in which cats find themselves afraid of birds and the brilliant flapping of their wings. The indisputable nature of this fact depresses the parrot even further. The cruelty of the garden begins to wound the parrot, who adores it so much. The parrot begins to contemplate wild plans of flying out into the void and flinging itself down into it without stopping, in way of apology to all these wretched beasts chained to the earth. But, in love with life, the parrot cannot find it in its heart to act on this impulse. Instead, it only stares off into the distance, occasionally spreading its wings.
Elsewhere in the garden, a skin mite clings thoughtfully to an elephant’s crotch. From that vantage, it is decidedly underwhelmed by creation. The craggy skin of the elephant stretches out beneath the mite and offers the appearance of a saggy, gray wasteland. Repulsed by such grotesque surroundings, the mite turns inward and attempts to mitigate the harshness of its existence by arriving at a kind of philosophy. Having ascended a gray valley, it looks back down into the darkness and begins to construct wild, untestable notions of the world. The mite attempts to achieve a theory that would explain the unmistakable contrast between the base nature of the world and the sweet intricacies of its own spirit. Hanging upside from the elephant’s crotch, the mite looks up at the ground, which it understands to be the firmament. It observes the gigantic bodies of the animals passing below and tries to read auguries from them, the meanings of which depend primarily on the body’s size and shape, the direction from which it enters the sky, and by which it exits. The mite uses these movements to guess at everything from the shape of the universe to changes in the weather, to the quiet drift of its own fortune. In its more expansive moments, it imagines that those heavenly bodies are actually living creatures. Like itself, only on some immense scale. It imagines that the roof of the firmament is actually a plain across which these creatures are able to move. It imagines the existence of such creatures as being in some way analogous to its own. Though, this is where the mite’s spirits begin to fail, where the mite begins to feel dizzy and without center. The mite imagines a world in which such creatures could actually exist. It imagines all the magnificent things that would be possible in such a world and feels capable of none of them.
As these thoughts take place, the elephant holds up its trunk and squints at it, as if regarding it from a great distance. It notes the complexity of its own skin, the unending ruts and crosshatches. It is faced with thoughts, which, although the exact opposite of the mite’s, are no less disturbing to it.
Everywhere in the garden, there is a similar confusion and frustration. The monkey sits on the ground with its hands hanging loosely around the base of a tree. It wants to whip a stick at the back of the horse’s legs. Its body seems so perfectly tuned to skitter up the tree, and it wants only for something to chase it there. The pig roots aimlessly at nothing; the frog despises the fly; the fly falls in love with the donkey, and the giraffe stands awkwardly in a clearing, as if awaiting instructions.
