Skip to main content
Outdated Browser

For the best experience using our website, we recommend upgrading your browser to a newer version or switching to a supported browser.

More Information

Fiction

On the Death of the Author

By Álvaro Enrigue
Translated from Spanish by Anna Kushner

Written on my soul is your face And when I write about you it is you that I desire -Garcilaso de la Vega

There are stories that seem impossible to tell. It must be at least ten years since I traveled through California and since then, I’ve been trying to relate, without much success, the story of a great ending: that of Ishi, a Yahi Indian who was found in a state of nature in the remote cowboy town of Oroville, in the month of August 1910.

I had always wanted to take a road trip that started in Cabo San Lucas, the southernmost tip of Baja California, and ended in California’s northernmost city, which was, exactly, Oroville. On this journey, as I had envisioned it, my ex-wife and I would drive north as if we were living a hippie dream and see extraordinary things, stopping in impossibly sinister places and talking to free spirits who would be, frankly, eccentric.

Unfortunately, it didn’t turn out that way: first of all, our road trip started in the middle-in the Los Angeles airport-and not aboard a black Cadillac with a trunkful of hardcore drugs, but rather in a minivan reminiscent of hell, and in the not-unpleasant-but-just-short-of-terrible company of my wife’s two grandmothers.

While the chronicle of this trip doesn’t quite lend itself to literature, it had its interesting parts, like when we showed the grandmothers, in a Chinese restaurant, how to counter the effects of chili by rubbing salt on the crown of your head, or when one of them read a book of poems by Ferlinghetti that I carried to pass myself off as intense and found that she liked it. In addition, in the University Museum at Berkeley, we saw an exhibit with Ishi’s photos.

The story of the last wild Indian in the United States shouldn’t be a hard one to tell, nor would it seem to present any knots that someone fond of saying one thing and meaning another couldn’t cut through. But there’s something about this tale-or about me-that turns it to mercury: I’ve tried pastiche, straight-forward narrative, the abominable stream-of-consciousness, diary entries, epistolary narrative and still it slips through my fingers like a fist-full of marbles.

The facts are clear and simple: in the small hours of a certain day, a group of workers found, lying at the doors of a slaughterhouse, a man at the brink of death from malnutrition and exhaustion. They carried him inside the building and gave him water. Later, they realized they were dealing with a wild Indian, something which none of them had ever had the opportunity to behold outside the circus, but that their parents and grandparents had taught them to treat as the enemy. They bound his hands and feet-as if he would have been able to escape-and called the sheriff.

The official, perhaps the last cowboy of this bygone era that still reigned in this part of the United States, pulled him up over the rump of his horse just as he was and took him to jail, not because he wanted to mess with him-as he told the press-but because he didn’t really know what to do with him. To his credit, it must be said that he dressed him in his own clothes and fed him with food his wife prepared so that he wouldn’t die of starvation before they could hand him over to the army, which was standard procedure in those days.

By midday, news of the find had already spread like wildfire across the whole region, so that there was practically a stampede to go see the last wild Indian in the United States. Among those who lined up in front of the jail cell was a correspondent for a San Francisco newspaper, who telegraphed a human interest piece in which he described the sheriff’s very odd negotiations with the inflamed passions of the locals -the memories of the Indian wars were still fresh in that area-and the various vaudeville show promoters who wanted to buy the Indian to include him among their attractions.

It was lucky for Ishi, who would have died if the sheriff had been less honest or if the army had been quicker to come after him to march him off to a reservation, that the article in the San Francisco paper was seen by a professor who, upon reading that there was no one who could understand the Indian’s language, sensed that they were dealing with a speaker of Yana, a language that was supposedly extinct and of which a friend of his was compiling a dictionary.

The professor took the first train to Oroville and, armed with his colleague’s notes on the language of the Yahis, went to rescue him. He was in San Francisco already when he realized that he hadn’t considered the problem of where to put the Indian up while he saved him, so he did what his logic, seemingly wilder than Ishi’s or the sheriff’s, dictated: he took him to the Museum of Anthropology.

In the days following these events there was some discussion over what to do with him, but in the end everyone was more or less in agreement that, at the end of the day, the best place for the last aborigine in the United States was a museum. Ishi spent the rest of his life there, much more comfortable and seemingly more satisfied than if he had stayed in the wild. At first, he lived in the guest quarters, then in the administration’s rooms and finally, in the sunniest of the exhibit halls, where they put a bed so he could pass away from tuberculosis three years after his surrender to the white man.

It could be that the story is most significant just as it happened, and that trying to retell it will only make it corny or a morality tale, which is always the worst form of sentimentality. To turn a story that is significant in and of itself into a metaphor is like loving love: however intense it may seem at the beginning, it always ends badly.

Whatever the case may be, the tale of a man who earns a living as a museum piece always fascinated me, more so due to the moving fact that, despite making good and apparently sincere friends among the community of doctors and anthropologists that studied him, the Indian never would tell his real name. Until the last day of his life he asked that they call him Ishi, which in Yana means “Man”: apparently, when one is the last of anything, gender is enough. The problem with Ishi’s story, I am more and more certain, is of literalness: it means what it means and not what I want it to mean.

Three years ago, when I was still living in Washington DC and had just turned 30, I decided to take a Sunday off from the nightmare of my impending move to Boston, where I live now. I wasn’t exactly nostalgic to be leaving the country’s capital, where I had spent some good years–the most recent ones had been, quite frankly, bleak. I was simply bidding adieu to the city in which I had finished maturing and in which my ex-wife and my children would stay with the vague promise that the four of us would live together again when our work commitments allowed and things would really work out then. We went out to our favorite restaurant, a pathetic expedition by virtue of aspiring to be something it was not, and afterwards to a place with a terrace and a French air which made the best coffee in DC.

We were eating cheesecake, each one of us concentrating on playing out his role, when a redhead wearing a t-shirt proclaiming: “Redhead” passed between the tables with the certainty of an angel of death. Upon seeing her, I was sure that such literalness could produce in the world a sort of metaphysical imbalance like the plots of certain Eça de Queiroz novels: every time the redhead puts on that t-shirt that says “redhead,” I told my ex-wife, a Chinese person dies. I think she mostly got the joke, because on my last trip to Mexico, I bought her a witty t-shirt as a gift. In Spanish, it said: “Eres un pendejo” (You are an asshole), and below, in English and in parenthesis: “(You are my friend).”

Naturally, I don’t think a Chinese person dies every time the redhead puts on her t-shirt that says “redhead,” but it does seem to me that so much literalness could end up being harmful, although I am not sure to what.

Or maybe I do: to oneself. The literal, I’ve proven, can bring the worst luck. Not long after having gotten myself into a bad mood over the pendeja (my friend) with the t-shirt in the DC café, I went to do a series of readings in Berlin. I’ve experienced memorable failures in these types of events: even if there is no shortage of obsessive types who in one way or another decide to attend the conferences one gives no matter how unpalatable the topics, to read a story or a piece of a novel in public, is almost always a lesson in why you don’t have to be a writer if what you aspire to is fame.

The Berlin experience consisted of three public appearances. The first was at a round table with one of those open-veined topics that make socially conscious Europeans and gringos feel really good and those of us Latin Americans invited to present more like display items in the museum of compassion. In addition, there were two readings that were more properly literary: one was in a theater that had somewhat of an audience-it was free, it was raining and there was complimentary wine-and the other one was in a café that seemed to have been very stylish back when East Berlin was still a communist plaza. The café was called “Einstein,” followed by the strange qualifier, “under the linden trees.”

The name of the place seemed memorable to me when I read it for the first time in my schedule of appearances in the German capital, but it left the taste of the worst kind of premonitions when, the next morning, I found myself in the vicinity while partaking of the worst kind of tourism around the Brandenburg Gate. It turned out that its strangeness came from it being on a street more or less like Barcelona’s Las Ramblas, precisely because it was under some linden trees.

I was born in a city, Mexico City, in which there is a very dense and lifeless forest called “The Desert of the Lions”, so the imagination of this Teutonic first man, so humorless, gave me chills. My nephew, whose name is Jorge Arrieta, said it with the southern clarity of his eight years in an argument with one of my children when the three of us took such an awful vacation to my parents’ house last August that we had to cut it short: that game, he sneered, is as much fun as making believe your name is Jorge Arrieta.

So, in the end, it was in the Einstein Café Under the Linden Trees that the worst thing that could happen to someone in one of these scenarios happened to me: not a completely empty room, but rather, the attendance of two people, who had bought tickets, so that the moderator, the translator, the actor that was going to read my story in German and I, packed a table at the bow of an auditorium that was the loneliest of all seas, populated as it was by only a young woman and her mother. Not only did we have to read, we did the round table-with simultaneous translation and everything-because the two women had paid and in a city in which a street under the linden trees is called “Under the Linden Trees,” one delivers the fifty minute show that was promised.

Ishi was never lacking an audience: on four of the seven days of the week, he did a presentation in the museum’s receiving hall in which he sang some ritual song, lit a bonfire by rubbing two sticks together and taught visitors how to make bows and arrows from the materials brought to him from Oroville’s gullies. They brought these to his museum because he didn’t want to go back to his native land despite the anthropologists’ insistence. The other days of the week he devoted to mopping and dusting all of the museum’s halls, except for the one which exhibited funeral offerings and mummies, which he never wanted to enter. On Mondays he used to take the cable car early and go see the ocean.

It wasn’t until the last summer of his life that he accepted, against his will and perhaps because he knew he had little time left, to return to the glen: in August of 1913 he went with the museum’s director and his doctor to recreate the wild life he had led until surrendering at the slaughterhouse. The three had a stupendous time living naked out in the open and eating what they hunted in the woods.

Originally, they were to stay the whole month, but Ishi insisted on returning to San Francisco, noting, every time they tried to convince him to the contrary, that he preferred the comfort of the museum to that of the return to nature. Apparently, it didn’t occur to anyone that the return to the forest could be depressing for the Indian, who hadn’t exactly lived in a rose garden during what the doctors believed to be his first thirty years of life.

The Yahi tribe was the last to be subdued in the United States: there was no formal surrender process as in the case of the Apaches or the Lakotas because they were exterminated with singular cruelty: if the Federal Army discovered them before the bands of trackers coming out of Oroville did, they took them to a reservation, which didn’t seem like enough of a punishment to anyone among the white men.

Ishi survived because he had the unprecedented luck of not being there during his tribe’s two fatal encounters with the enemy. During the first one, the Indian hunters, who, when not scouring the hills, were people with families who were more or less civilized, one afternoon found the last Yahi settlement remaining in the glens-the tribe had already been decimated by a period of war and persecution-and waited patiently until the next morning so they could shoot at them from the hills. Ishi had gone to the forest with his grandmother, who apparently was the tribe’s shaman, and they had spent the night there so that the night watchman could bless the roots they had collected. When they returned, they found the settlement razed. They took a long time to find the tribe, which had barely any men left: the women and children had run towards the caves in which the warriors sacrificed themselves to the cowboy’s fires. From their refuge in the mountains, the remaining Yahi hunted and gathered by night.

One day a party of white men, conscious that a part of the enemy had escaped them, found a trace of deer blood under the trees, which most probably were lindens. They followed it and found the refuge without any difficulty. According to a chronicle-brilliantly written-by one of the members of that party, the situation was perfect because having occupied the mouth of the cave and it being closed at the back, none of the Indians could escape. In one of the most hair-raising paragraphs of the tale, the Californian gentleman tells about how, in a given moment of the massacre, he decided to use his revolver because, while it has to be reloaded more often, it does a cleaner job: as he learned very quickly, babies explode when shot at with a rifle.

This part of Ishi’s history, which he never knew very well, or at least not in the detail that I know it, I found out later, in a book of chronicles of the period that I found in the library of the university where I teach. He simply returned from the creek bed with his mother and his sister and found that they had to, once again, bury the dead. Although he never spoke directly of that day, more than once he alluded to the terrible task of burying all his people.

By the time I read that chronicle, I had already tried, without any success, to write a story about him five or six times and it always turned out too political: literal to the death with all its meaning exposed, or maybe not all, but at least the part I was interested in: what intrigued me about Ishi was not his tragic condition and the clarity with which it shows that the New World is the successful utopia of a group of criminals, but rather, the unprecedented solitude of one who knows he’s reached the end of something with no way out.

The version I wrote in those days was the worst of them all because back then I was weighed down with shame and full of the moral prurience that causes us to reject certain forms of hypocrisy in favor of others. That version of the story was called “Taking Democracy to California,” and with that I don’t need to add that it was the worst one.

There is a story, one that is quite good, told by Bernardo Atxaga. He says that one day, while walking through a village in his native region of the Basque Country, he suddenly found himself by a door with a hole in it and an old man. They talked a little and finally the old man asked him if he wanted to know why there was a hole in the door. It must be for the cat, Atxaga says he responded. No, said the man, they made it years ago, to feed the boy who became a dog after a dog bit him.

The stories I like, the ones that drive me crazy with desire and envy to write that way, have the same blinding logic as the old Basque: there’s a piece missing and that absence transforms them into mythology, calling upon a common denominator that makes us all more or less the same.

If a boy is bitten by a dog and gets rabies, the illusion of universal cause and effect is maintained; there is order and thus, categories. If, instead, he turns into a dog, the world is uncontrollable like our affections, our inability to live according to our own standards, our unwarranted misfortunes, which are almost all of them. Atxaga’s brilliant old man would have never worn a t-shirt that said “Old Man”; what he said is good for the same reason that, to create literature or film, failed love stories are better: there’s every reason for a to lead to b and from there to the offspring, but something gets screwed up without anyone really knowing what happened and a leads to the abyss of the w and the s curve of suicide.

Ishi, despite having lived almost his whole life in the sharpest of solitudes, always resisted the urge to kill himself: the silence of museums is even worse than that of the department of an old and unpromising professor, so a solitude such as his, that doesn’t even have the chic air of being self-inflicted, does something to me that seems like what the boy who turned into a dog does. It fills me with hope that one day the futures that slipped through my fingers like marbles will feel mythological.

His third and last misencounter with white men before his surrender in Oroville’s slaughterhouse was the definitive one. It occurred several months before the submission and reflects what would be his ultimate destiny: the tent in which he lived with his mother and sister was discovered by a group of geology professors accompanying a mining expedition. While the scientists and the Indians never saw each other face to face, the mess the first group left behind in the second group’s settlement was enough for them to decide to escape and save whatever was left of their skins. They disbanded. Ishi never again saw his sister or his mother, who must have met a terrible death in their flight, but who certainly left this world with the epic aplomb of those who suffer without surrendering.

Ishi gave himself up in order to get a little bit of food, perhaps thinking that if he was going to die anyway, it was better to do so with a full stomach. Having taken that decision leaves him little fighting spirit and brings those of us who have tried to tell his story closer to the abyss of literalness. The survivor of an entire world that also lives in a museum is pure signified: no parts are lacking and without mystery there is no mythology.

It’s because of this that I think it’s better to imagine him in the days in which, instead of being a wooden Indian, he was just the densest of the janitorial staff of an institute. You have to imagine him resigned to being the last of something and serenely mopping the halls.

When, a few months after Ishi arrived in San Francisco, the problem arose that he couldn’t live in the guest rooms forever, they decided to name him maintenance worker and pay him a salary so he could live in the personnel rooms. To everyone’s surprise, he didn’t understand that it was a solution to the problem of there being nowhere to keep him since he was the last one of something and the next day, he donned worker’s overalls and asked for a bucket.

He barely used money, more to buy modest things to eat: honey, cornmeal, pumpkins, apples, coffee; he was a tiny man and notoriously frugal. He also spent his money on taking the cable car, which he rode to see the ocean from Golden Gate park. That was how he spent all his days off: the sea was the place at which we forgive ourselves for the marbles that have slipped through our fingers without our understanding why. He stockpiled the rest of his salary in the museum’s safe: saving it in vials his doctor gave him that had the exact circumference and height to safeguard ten silver dollars. At the end of his life, he loved to contemplate them: he asked the director to open the safe, he put his packets of dollars on a table, and he spent all afternoon looking at them, without saying anything or taking the coins out, as if they were something else.

If one is the last of something, what he has held onto doesn’t make a saving, but rather the sum of an entire universe: it’s there that in the untellable tale of Ishi the bitten boy becomes a dog, the forest is called a “desert” and the redhead wears a t-shirt that doesn’t say “pendeja.”

Sometimes writing is a job: to obliquely trace the path of certain ideas that seem essential to put on the table. But other times, it’s to grant what’s left, to accept the museum and contemplate the sum while waiting for death, to ask the sea for forgiveness for everything that got screwed up. To put our little boxes on the table and know that what ended was also an entire universe.

English Spanish (Original)

Written on my soul is your face And when I write about you it is you that I desire -Garcilaso de la Vega

There are stories that seem impossible to tell. It must be at least ten years since I traveled through California and since then, I’ve been trying to relate, without much success, the story of a great ending: that of Ishi, a Yahi Indian who was found in a state of nature in the remote cowboy town of Oroville, in the month of August 1910.

I had always wanted to take a road trip that started in Cabo San Lucas, the southernmost tip of Baja California, and ended in California’s northernmost city, which was, exactly, Oroville. On this journey, as I had envisioned it, my ex-wife and I would drive north as if we were living a hippie dream and see extraordinary things, stopping in impossibly sinister places and talking to free spirits who would be, frankly, eccentric.

Unfortunately, it didn’t turn out that way: first of all, our road trip started in the middle-in the Los Angeles airport-and not aboard a black Cadillac with a trunkful of hardcore drugs, but rather in a minivan reminiscent of hell, and in the not-unpleasant-but-just-short-of-terrible company of my wife’s two grandmothers.

While the chronicle of this trip doesn’t quite lend itself to literature, it had its interesting parts, like when we showed the grandmothers, in a Chinese restaurant, how to counter the effects of chili by rubbing salt on the crown of your head, or when one of them read a book of poems by Ferlinghetti that I carried to pass myself off as intense and found that she liked it. In addition, in the University Museum at Berkeley, we saw an exhibit with Ishi’s photos.

The story of the last wild Indian in the United States shouldn’t be a hard one to tell, nor would it seem to present any knots that someone fond of saying one thing and meaning another couldn’t cut through. But there’s something about this tale-or about me-that turns it to mercury: I’ve tried pastiche, straight-forward narrative, the abominable stream-of-consciousness, diary entries, epistolary narrative and still it slips through my fingers like a fist-full of marbles.

The facts are clear and simple: in the small hours of a certain day, a group of workers found, lying at the doors of a slaughterhouse, a man at the brink of death from malnutrition and exhaustion. They carried him inside the building and gave him water. Later, they realized they were dealing with a wild Indian, something which none of them had ever had the opportunity to behold outside the circus, but that their parents and grandparents had taught them to treat as the enemy. They bound his hands and feet-as if he would have been able to escape-and called the sheriff.

The official, perhaps the last cowboy of this bygone era that still reigned in this part of the United States, pulled him up over the rump of his horse just as he was and took him to jail, not because he wanted to mess with him-as he told the press-but because he didn’t really know what to do with him. To his credit, it must be said that he dressed him in his own clothes and fed him with food his wife prepared so that he wouldn’t die of starvation before they could hand him over to the army, which was standard procedure in those days.

By midday, news of the find had already spread like wildfire across the whole region, so that there was practically a stampede to go see the last wild Indian in the United States. Among those who lined up in front of the jail cell was a correspondent for a San Francisco newspaper, who telegraphed a human interest piece in which he described the sheriff’s very odd negotiations with the inflamed passions of the locals -the memories of the Indian wars were still fresh in that area-and the various vaudeville show promoters who wanted to buy the Indian to include him among their attractions.

It was lucky for Ishi, who would have died if the sheriff had been less honest or if the army had been quicker to come after him to march him off to a reservation, that the article in the San Francisco paper was seen by a professor who, upon reading that there was no one who could understand the Indian’s language, sensed that they were dealing with a speaker of Yana, a language that was supposedly extinct and of which a friend of his was compiling a dictionary.

The professor took the first train to Oroville and, armed with his colleague’s notes on the language of the Yahis, went to rescue him. He was in San Francisco already when he realized that he hadn’t considered the problem of where to put the Indian up while he saved him, so he did what his logic, seemingly wilder than Ishi’s or the sheriff’s, dictated: he took him to the Museum of Anthropology.

In the days following these events there was some discussion over what to do with him, but in the end everyone was more or less in agreement that, at the end of the day, the best place for the last aborigine in the United States was a museum. Ishi spent the rest of his life there, much more comfortable and seemingly more satisfied than if he had stayed in the wild. At first, he lived in the guest quarters, then in the administration’s rooms and finally, in the sunniest of the exhibit halls, where they put a bed so he could pass away from tuberculosis three years after his surrender to the white man.

It could be that the story is most significant just as it happened, and that trying to retell it will only make it corny or a morality tale, which is always the worst form of sentimentality. To turn a story that is significant in and of itself into a metaphor is like loving love: however intense it may seem at the beginning, it always ends badly.

Whatever the case may be, the tale of a man who earns a living as a museum piece always fascinated me, more so due to the moving fact that, despite making good and apparently sincere friends among the community of doctors and anthropologists that studied him, the Indian never would tell his real name. Until the last day of his life he asked that they call him Ishi, which in Yana means “Man”: apparently, when one is the last of anything, gender is enough. The problem with Ishi’s story, I am more and more certain, is of literalness: it means what it means and not what I want it to mean.

Three years ago, when I was still living in Washington DC and had just turned 30, I decided to take a Sunday off from the nightmare of my impending move to Boston, where I live now. I wasn’t exactly nostalgic to be leaving the country’s capital, where I had spent some good years–the most recent ones had been, quite frankly, bleak. I was simply bidding adieu to the city in which I had finished maturing and in which my ex-wife and my children would stay with the vague promise that the four of us would live together again when our work commitments allowed and things would really work out then. We went out to our favorite restaurant, a pathetic expedition by virtue of aspiring to be something it was not, and afterwards to a place with a terrace and a French air which made the best coffee in DC.

We were eating cheesecake, each one of us concentrating on playing out his role, when a redhead wearing a t-shirt proclaiming: “Redhead” passed between the tables with the certainty of an angel of death. Upon seeing her, I was sure that such literalness could produce in the world a sort of metaphysical imbalance like the plots of certain Eça de Queiroz novels: every time the redhead puts on that t-shirt that says “redhead,” I told my ex-wife, a Chinese person dies. I think she mostly got the joke, because on my last trip to Mexico, I bought her a witty t-shirt as a gift. In Spanish, it said: “Eres un pendejo” (You are an asshole), and below, in English and in parenthesis: “(You are my friend).”

Naturally, I don’t think a Chinese person dies every time the redhead puts on her t-shirt that says “redhead,” but it does seem to me that so much literalness could end up being harmful, although I am not sure to what.

Or maybe I do: to oneself. The literal, I’ve proven, can bring the worst luck. Not long after having gotten myself into a bad mood over the pendeja (my friend) with the t-shirt in the DC café, I went to do a series of readings in Berlin. I’ve experienced memorable failures in these types of events: even if there is no shortage of obsessive types who in one way or another decide to attend the conferences one gives no matter how unpalatable the topics, to read a story or a piece of a novel in public, is almost always a lesson in why you don’t have to be a writer if what you aspire to is fame.

The Berlin experience consisted of three public appearances. The first was at a round table with one of those open-veined topics that make socially conscious Europeans and gringos feel really good and those of us Latin Americans invited to present more like display items in the museum of compassion. In addition, there were two readings that were more properly literary: one was in a theater that had somewhat of an audience-it was free, it was raining and there was complimentary wine-and the other one was in a café that seemed to have been very stylish back when East Berlin was still a communist plaza. The café was called “Einstein,” followed by the strange qualifier, “under the linden trees.”

The name of the place seemed memorable to me when I read it for the first time in my schedule of appearances in the German capital, but it left the taste of the worst kind of premonitions when, the next morning, I found myself in the vicinity while partaking of the worst kind of tourism around the Brandenburg Gate. It turned out that its strangeness came from it being on a street more or less like Barcelona’s Las Ramblas, precisely because it was under some linden trees.

I was born in a city, Mexico City, in which there is a very dense and lifeless forest called “The Desert of the Lions”, so the imagination of this Teutonic first man, so humorless, gave me chills. My nephew, whose name is Jorge Arrieta, said it with the southern clarity of his eight years in an argument with one of my children when the three of us took such an awful vacation to my parents’ house last August that we had to cut it short: that game, he sneered, is as much fun as making believe your name is Jorge Arrieta.

So, in the end, it was in the Einstein Café Under the Linden Trees that the worst thing that could happen to someone in one of these scenarios happened to me: not a completely empty room, but rather, the attendance of two people, who had bought tickets, so that the moderator, the translator, the actor that was going to read my story in German and I, packed a table at the bow of an auditorium that was the loneliest of all seas, populated as it was by only a young woman and her mother. Not only did we have to read, we did the round table-with simultaneous translation and everything-because the two women had paid and in a city in which a street under the linden trees is called “Under the Linden Trees,” one delivers the fifty minute show that was promised.

Ishi was never lacking an audience: on four of the seven days of the week, he did a presentation in the museum’s receiving hall in which he sang some ritual song, lit a bonfire by rubbing two sticks together and taught visitors how to make bows and arrows from the materials brought to him from Oroville’s gullies. They brought these to his museum because he didn’t want to go back to his native land despite the anthropologists’ insistence. The other days of the week he devoted to mopping and dusting all of the museum’s halls, except for the one which exhibited funeral offerings and mummies, which he never wanted to enter. On Mondays he used to take the cable car early and go see the ocean.

It wasn’t until the last summer of his life that he accepted, against his will and perhaps because he knew he had little time left, to return to the glen: in August of 1913 he went with the museum’s director and his doctor to recreate the wild life he had led until surrendering at the slaughterhouse. The three had a stupendous time living naked out in the open and eating what they hunted in the woods.

Originally, they were to stay the whole month, but Ishi insisted on returning to San Francisco, noting, every time they tried to convince him to the contrary, that he preferred the comfort of the museum to that of the return to nature. Apparently, it didn’t occur to anyone that the return to the forest could be depressing for the Indian, who hadn’t exactly lived in a rose garden during what the doctors believed to be his first thirty years of life.

The Yahi tribe was the last to be subdued in the United States: there was no formal surrender process as in the case of the Apaches or the Lakotas because they were exterminated with singular cruelty: if the Federal Army discovered them before the bands of trackers coming out of Oroville did, they took them to a reservation, which didn’t seem like enough of a punishment to anyone among the white men.

Ishi survived because he had the unprecedented luck of not being there during his tribe’s two fatal encounters with the enemy. During the first one, the Indian hunters, who, when not scouring the hills, were people with families who were more or less civilized, one afternoon found the last Yahi settlement remaining in the glens-the tribe had already been decimated by a period of war and persecution-and waited patiently until the next morning so they could shoot at them from the hills. Ishi had gone to the forest with his grandmother, who apparently was the tribe’s shaman, and they had spent the night there so that the night watchman could bless the roots they had collected. When they returned, they found the settlement razed. They took a long time to find the tribe, which had barely any men left: the women and children had run towards the caves in which the warriors sacrificed themselves to the cowboy’s fires. From their refuge in the mountains, the remaining Yahi hunted and gathered by night.

One day a party of white men, conscious that a part of the enemy had escaped them, found a trace of deer blood under the trees, which most probably were lindens. They followed it and found the refuge without any difficulty. According to a chronicle-brilliantly written-by one of the members of that party, the situation was perfect because having occupied the mouth of the cave and it being closed at the back, none of the Indians could escape. In one of the most hair-raising paragraphs of the tale, the Californian gentleman tells about how, in a given moment of the massacre, he decided to use his revolver because, while it has to be reloaded more often, it does a cleaner job: as he learned very quickly, babies explode when shot at with a rifle.

This part of Ishi’s history, which he never knew very well, or at least not in the detail that I know it, I found out later, in a book of chronicles of the period that I found in the library of the university where I teach. He simply returned from the creek bed with his mother and his sister and found that they had to, once again, bury the dead. Although he never spoke directly of that day, more than once he alluded to the terrible task of burying all his people.

By the time I read that chronicle, I had already tried, without any success, to write a story about him five or six times and it always turned out too political: literal to the death with all its meaning exposed, or maybe not all, but at least the part I was interested in: what intrigued me about Ishi was not his tragic condition and the clarity with which it shows that the New World is the successful utopia of a group of criminals, but rather, the unprecedented solitude of one who knows he’s reached the end of something with no way out.

The version I wrote in those days was the worst of them all because back then I was weighed down with shame and full of the moral prurience that causes us to reject certain forms of hypocrisy in favor of others. That version of the story was called “Taking Democracy to California,” and with that I don’t need to add that it was the worst one.

There is a story, one that is quite good, told by Bernardo Atxaga. He says that one day, while walking through a village in his native region of the Basque Country, he suddenly found himself by a door with a hole in it and an old man. They talked a little and finally the old man asked him if he wanted to know why there was a hole in the door. It must be for the cat, Atxaga says he responded. No, said the man, they made it years ago, to feed the boy who became a dog after a dog bit him.

The stories I like, the ones that drive me crazy with desire and envy to write that way, have the same blinding logic as the old Basque: there’s a piece missing and that absence transforms them into mythology, calling upon a common denominator that makes us all more or less the same.

If a boy is bitten by a dog and gets rabies, the illusion of universal cause and effect is maintained; there is order and thus, categories. If, instead, he turns into a dog, the world is uncontrollable like our affections, our inability to live according to our own standards, our unwarranted misfortunes, which are almost all of them. Atxaga’s brilliant old man would have never worn a t-shirt that said “Old Man”; what he said is good for the same reason that, to create literature or film, failed love stories are better: there’s every reason for a to lead to b and from there to the offspring, but something gets screwed up without anyone really knowing what happened and a leads to the abyss of the w and the s curve of suicide.

Ishi, despite having lived almost his whole life in the sharpest of solitudes, always resisted the urge to kill himself: the silence of museums is even worse than that of the department of an old and unpromising professor, so a solitude such as his, that doesn’t even have the chic air of being self-inflicted, does something to me that seems like what the boy who turned into a dog does. It fills me with hope that one day the futures that slipped through my fingers like marbles will feel mythological.

His third and last misencounter with white men before his surrender in Oroville’s slaughterhouse was the definitive one. It occurred several months before the submission and reflects what would be his ultimate destiny: the tent in which he lived with his mother and sister was discovered by a group of geology professors accompanying a mining expedition. While the scientists and the Indians never saw each other face to face, the mess the first group left behind in the second group’s settlement was enough for them to decide to escape and save whatever was left of their skins. They disbanded. Ishi never again saw his sister or his mother, who must have met a terrible death in their flight, but who certainly left this world with the epic aplomb of those who suffer without surrendering.

Ishi gave himself up in order to get a little bit of food, perhaps thinking that if he was going to die anyway, it was better to do so with a full stomach. Having taken that decision leaves him little fighting spirit and brings those of us who have tried to tell his story closer to the abyss of literalness. The survivor of an entire world that also lives in a museum is pure signified: no parts are lacking and without mystery there is no mythology.

It’s because of this that I think it’s better to imagine him in the days in which, instead of being a wooden Indian, he was just the densest of the janitorial staff of an institute. You have to imagine him resigned to being the last of something and serenely mopping the halls.

When, a few months after Ishi arrived in San Francisco, the problem arose that he couldn’t live in the guest rooms forever, they decided to name him maintenance worker and pay him a salary so he could live in the personnel rooms. To everyone’s surprise, he didn’t understand that it was a solution to the problem of there being nowhere to keep him since he was the last one of something and the next day, he donned worker’s overalls and asked for a bucket.

He barely used money, more to buy modest things to eat: honey, cornmeal, pumpkins, apples, coffee; he was a tiny man and notoriously frugal. He also spent his money on taking the cable car, which he rode to see the ocean from Golden Gate park. That was how he spent all his days off: the sea was the place at which we forgive ourselves for the marbles that have slipped through our fingers without our understanding why. He stockpiled the rest of his salary in the museum’s safe: saving it in vials his doctor gave him that had the exact circumference and height to safeguard ten silver dollars. At the end of his life, he loved to contemplate them: he asked the director to open the safe, he put his packets of dollars on a table, and he spent all afternoon looking at them, without saying anything or taking the coins out, as if they were something else.

If one is the last of something, what he has held onto doesn’t make a saving, but rather the sum of an entire universe: it’s there that in the untellable tale of Ishi the bitten boy becomes a dog, the forest is called a “desert” and the redhead wears a t-shirt that doesn’t say “pendeja.”

Sometimes writing is a job: to obliquely trace the path of certain ideas that seem essential to put on the table. But other times, it’s to grant what’s left, to accept the museum and contemplate the sum while waiting for death, to ask the sea for forgiveness for everything that got screwed up. To put our little boxes on the table and know that what ended was also an entire universe.

Sobre la muerte del autor

Escrito está en mi alma vuestro gesto

Y cuanto yo escrebir de vos de vos deseo

Garcilaso de la Vega.

Hay cuentos que, al parecer, son imposibles de ser contados. Debe hacer cuando menos diez años que hice un viaje por California y desde entonces estoy tratando de narrar, sin ningún éxito, la historia de un gran final: el de Ishi, un indio Yahi que fue encontrado en estado salvaje en la villa remota y vaquera de Oroville, durante el mes de agosto de 1910.

Siempre quise hacer un recorrido que comenzara en Cabo San Lucas, la punta más meridional de las Californias, y terminara en la que fuera su ciudad más norteña, que resultó ser, precisamente, Oroville. En ese viaje, tal como lo pensaba, mi ex-mujer y yo manejaríamos de sur a norte como navegando el sueño de un hipster y veríamos cosas descomunales, nos detendríamos en lugares imposiblemente siniestros, y hablaríamos con espíritus libres y francamente irregulares.

Por desgracia no fue así: en primer lugar, nuestro viaje en coche por casi toda California comenzó a medio camino –en el aeropuerto de Los Ángeles—y no fue a bordo de un cadillac negro y plagado de drogas cada vez más poderosas, sino en una miniván muy parecida al infierno, y en la compañía no ingrata, pero escasamente terrible, de las dos abuelas de mi esposa.

Aunque la crónica del viaje no se presta mucho a la literatura, tuvo sus partes interesantes, como cuando le enseñamos a las abuelas, en un restorán de comida china, a anular el efecto del chile untándose sal en la coronilla, o cuando una de ellas leyó un libro de poemas de Ferlinghetti que yo llevaba para hacerme el intenso y opinó que le gustaban. Además, en el Museo de la Universidad de Berkeley vimos una exposición con las fotos de Ishi.

La del último indio en estado de pureza de los Estados Unidos no debería ser una historia difícil de contar, ni parece que albergara ningún tropiezo imposible de ser librado por un aficionado a decir unas cosas mientras cuenta otras. Pero hay algo en el relato –o en mi—que lo transforma en mercurio: he intentado el pastiche, la narración directa, el abominable flujo de la conciencia, las entradas de diario, la narración epistolar y se me sigue escurriendo entre los dedos como un puñado de canicas.

Los hechos son simples y transparentes: una madrugada cualquiera un grupo de trabajadores se encontró, tirado a las puertas de un rastro, a un hombre bordeando el filo de la muerte por malnutrición y agotamiento. Lo cargaron hasta el interior del edificio y le dieron agua. Luego notaron que se trataba de un indio salvaje, algo que a ninguno de ellos le había tocado contemplar fuera del circo, pero que sus padres y abuelos les habían enseñado a identificar con el enemigo. Lo ataron de pies y manos –como si se hubiera podido escapar—y mandaron llamar al alguacil.

El oficial, acaso el último vaquero de la época brava que quedaba en funciones en esa parte de los Estados Unidos, lo subió tal como estaba a la grupa de su caballo y se lo llevó a la cárcel, no por ganas de joder –o eso fue lo que le dijo a la prensa—sino porque no sabía bien qué hacer con él. Hay que decir en su honor que consta que lo vistió con su propia ropa y lo alimentó con la comida que preparó su mujer especialmente para que no se les muriera de hambre en lo que se lo entregaban al ejército, que era el procedimiento de rutina.

Para el mediodía la noticia del hallazgo ya se había corrido como pólvora por toda la región, por lo que se armó un tumulto memorable para pasar a ver al último salvaje de los Estados Unidos. Entre los que desfilaron frente a la celda estaba el corresponsal de un periódico de San Francisco, que telegrafío una nota de color en la que describía las curiosísimas negociaciones del alguacil con las pasiones de su propia gente –todavía estaban frescas en la zona las heridas de la guerra indígena– y los varios dueños de espectáculos de vaudeville que le querían comprar al indio para incluirlo entre sus atracciones.

Para fortuna de Ishi, que se habría muerto de haber sido menos honesto el alguacil o más rápido el ejército para ir por él y llevárselo marchando hasta un reservación, el reportaje del periódico de San Francisco fue leído por un profesor que, al notar que no había nadie que pudiera entender la lengua del indio, intuyó que se trataba de un hablante de yahna, un idioma que se suponía extinto y del que un amigo suyo estaba preparando un vocabulario.

El profesor tomó el primer tren a Oroville y, armado con las notas de su colega sobre la lengua de los yahis, fue y lo rescató. Ya en San Francisco se dio cuenta de que no había considerado el problema de dónde poner al indio mientras lo salvaba, de modo que hizo lo que su lógica, al parecer todavía más silvestre que la de Ishi o el alguacil, le dijo al oído: lo llevó al Museo Antropológico.

En los días posteriores a estos hechos hubo alguna discusión sobre qué hacer con él, pero al final todo el mundo estuvo más o menos de acuerdo en que, a fin de cuentas, el mejor lugar para el último aborigen intacto en los Estados Unidos era un museo. Ishi pasó ahí el resto de su vida, bastante más cómodo y al parecer más satisfecho que si se hubiera quedado en los bosques. Vivió primero en los cuartos para invitados, luego en las habitaciones del personal de intendencia y al final en el más soleado de los salones de exhibición, dónde le pusieron una cama para que bienmuriera de tuberculosis tres años después de su rendición a los blancos.

Probablemente sea que la historia es tan poderosamente significativa tal como sucedió, que tratar de reformularla siempre acaba por transformarla en una cursilería o un dechado de buenas intenciones políticas, que es siempre la peor forma de la cursilería. Elaborar metáforas de una historia que significa por sí misma es como amar el amor: por intensillo que parezca al principio, siempre acaba mal.

Como quiera que sea, el cuento del hombre que se gana la vida en calidad de pieza de museo siempre me pareció fascinante y reveladora, más por el hecho conmovedor de que, con todo y que hizo buenos y al parecer sinceros amigos entre la comunidad de médicos y antropólogos que lo estudiaron, el indio nunca les quiso decir su verdadero nombre. Hasta el último día de su vida siempre pidió que lo llamaran Ishi, que en yahna quiere decir “Hombre”: al parecer, cuando se es el último de lo que sea, el género basta.

El problema con la historia de Ishi, estoy cada vez más seguro, es de literalidad: quiere decir lo que quiere decir y no lo que yo quiero que diga.

Hace tres años, cuando todavía vivía en Washington DC y acababa de cumplir los 30, decidí tomarme un domingo libre del infierno grande que representaba la mudanza que emprendía rumbo a Boston, donde vivo. No es que estuviera precisamente nostálgico de dejar la capital del país, donde había pasado algunos años buenos pero otros, los últimos, francamente negros. Simplemente estaba en son de despedida de la ciudad en que había terminado de madurar y en la que se iban a quedar mi ex-mujer y mis hijos con la vaga promesa de que volveríamos a vivir los cuatro juntos cuando nuestros compromisos laborales lo permitieran y esa vez las cosas sí iban a funcionar. Fuimos a comer, en una expedición patética por lo que tenía de representación de lo que no era, a nuestro restorán favorito, y luego a un sitio con terraza y aires franceses en el que por entonces preparaban el mejor café de DC.

Nos estábamos comiendo un pastel de queso, cada uno concentrado en actuar su papel, cuando pasó entre las mesas y con seguridad de ángel en plan de exterminar, una pelirroja que llevaba una camiseta en la que se leía la leyenda: “Pelirroja”. Al verla tuve la certeza de que tanta literalidad podía producir en el mundo alguna especie de desequilibrio metafísico como los que gobiernan las tramas de ciertas novelas de Eça de Queiroz: cada que la pelirroja se pone esa camiseta que dice “pelirroja”, le dije a mi ex-esposa, se muere un chino. Creo que entendió el chiste, o cuando menos hasta cierto punto, porque en el último viaje que yo había hecho a México, le había llevado de vuelta como regalo una camiseta genial, también estampada con una leyenda, que decía en español: “Eres un pendejo” y abajo, en inglés y entre paréntesis: “(You are my friend)”.

Naturalmente que no creo que se muera un chino cada vez que la pelirroja se pone su camiseta que dice “pelirroja”, pero sí me parece que tanta literalidad puede acabar siendo nociva, aunque no sé para qué.

O sí: para uno mismo. Lo literal, lo he comprobado, puede ser de pésima suerte. No mucho después de haberme malhumorado tanto con la pendeja (my friend), de la camiseta del café de DC, fui a hacer una serie de lecturas a Berlín. He padecido fracasos memorables en ese tipo de eventos: si siempre hay maniáticos que de un modo u otro deciden asistir a las conferencias que uno dé por más intragables que sean sus tópicos, leer un cuento, o un pedazo de una novela en público, es casi siempre una lección sobre por qué no hay que ser escritor si a lo que se aspira es a la fama.

La experiencia berlinesa consistía en tres apariciones públicas. La primera era una mesa redonda con alguno de esos temas de venas abiertas que hacen sentirse muy bien a los europeos y los gringos con buena conciencia y que a los latinoamericanos que somos invitados a exponer nos hacen sentir más bien piezas del museo de la compasión. Además había dos lecturas propiamente literarias: una era en un teatro en el que hubo algo de público –era gratis, estaba lloviendo y había vino de honor–, y la otra en un café, que al parecer había estado muy de moda en la época en que Berlín Oriental era todavía una plaza comunista. El café se llama “Einstein” y luego se agregaba el extraño calificativo de “bajo los tilos”.

El nombre del lugar me pareció memorable cuando lo leí por primera vez en mi agenda de apariciones en la capital alemana, pero me dejó el sabor de los peores presagios cuando, a la mañana siguiente, me encontré con el local mientras hacía turismo de la peor ralea en las cercanías de la puerta de Brandenburgo. Resultaba que su extrañeza venía de que está en una calle más o menos equivalente a la rambla barcelonesa que se se llama “Bajo los tilos”, precisamente porque que está debajo de unos tilos.

Nací en una ciudad, la de México, en la que hay un bosque tupidísimo y sin fauna que se llama “Desierto de los leones”, de modo que la imaginación adánica teutona, tan sin chiste, me dio escalofríos. Mi sobrino, que se llama Jorge Arrieta, lo dijo con la claridad meridional de sus ocho años durante una discusión con uno de mis hijos, cuando el pasado agosto fuimos los tres a unas vacaciones tan desoladoras en casa de mis padres que tuvimos que acortarlas: ese juego, espetó, es tan divertido como jugar a llamarse Jorge Arrieta.

Total que en el café de Einstein bajo los tilos me pasó lo peor que le puede pasar a alguien en esos casos: no un vacío total, sino una asistencia de dos personas, que habían comprado un boleto, de modo que la moderadora, el traductor, el actor que iba a leer mi cuento en alemán y yo, atestamos una mesa en la proa de un auditorio que era el más solitario de los mares, habitado como estaba únicamente por una joven y su mamá. No sólo tuvimos que leer, hicimos la mesa redonda –con todo y traducciones simultáneas—porque las dos mujeres habían pagado y en una ciudad en la que una calle bajo los tilos se llama “Bajo los tilos” uno cumple con los cincuenta minutos de espectáculo que prometió.

A Ishi nunca le faltó el público: durante cuatro de los siete días de la semana, hacía una presentación en el recibidor del museo en la que cantaba alguna canción ritual, encendía una fogata frotando dos maderos y enseñaba a los visitantes a hacer arcos y flechas con los materiales que le llevaban de las cañadas de Oroville. Se los llevaban hasta el museo porque no quería volver a su tierra a pesar de la insistencia de los antropólogos. Los otros dos días de la semana los dedicaba a trapear y desempolvar todos los salones del museo, excepto uno en el que se exhibían ofrendas fúnebres y momias, al que nunca quiso entrar. Los lunes solía tomar temprano el tranvía e ir a ver el mar.

Fue hasta el último verano de su vida que aceptó, a regañadientes y acaso porque ya sabía que le quedaba muy poco tiempo, volver a las cañadas: en agosto de 1913 fue con el director del museo y su médico a recrear la vida silvestre que había llevado hasta rendirse en el rastro. Los tres pasaron días estupendos viviendo desnudos a la intemperie y comiendo lo que cazaban en el bosque.

La idea original era quedarse durante todo el mes, pero Ishi insistió en que volvieran a San Francisco, señalando, cada vez que trataban de convencerlo de lo contrario, que prefería la comodidad del museo al retorno a la naturaleza. Al parecer a nadie se le ocurrió pensar que la vuelta al bosque podía ser deprimente para el indio, que no había vivido en un jardín de rosas en lo que el médico calculaba que habían sido sus primeros treinta años de vida.

La tribu de los Yahis fue la última en ser sometida en los Estados Unidos: no hubo un proceso de rendición formal como en el caso de los apaches o los lakotas, porque fueron exterminados con encono singular: si el ejército federal los descubría antes de que los encontraran las partidas de rastreadores que salían de Oroville, los llevarían a una reservación, lo cual no le parecía suficiente castigo a nadie entre los blancos.

Ishi sobrevivió porque tuvo la fortuna inaudita de no haber estado durante los dos encuentros fatales de su tribu con el enemigo. En el primero, los cazadores de indios, que cuando no estaban oteando los cerros eran personas con familia y más o menos cultivadas, encontraron una tarde el último campamento de yahis que quedaba en las cañadas –la tribu ya había sido diezmada por un lustro de guerra y persecución– y esperaron pacientemente al amanecer siguiente para poderles disparar desde los cerros. Ishi había ido al bosque con su abuela, que al parecer era el chamán de la tribu, y habían pasado la noche ahí para que el sereno bendijera las raíces que habían recolectado. Cuando regresaron se encontraron el campamento arrasado. Tardaron en encontrar a la tribu, que se había quedado casi sin hombres: las mujeres y los niños habían corrido hacia las grutas en lo que los guerreros se ofrecían en sacrificio al fuego de los vaqueros. Desde su refugio en las montañas, los yahis que quedaban recolectaban y cazaban de noche.

Un día una partida de blancos, conscientes de que se les había escapado parte del enemigo, encontraron un rastro de sangre de venado bajo los árboles, que muy probablemente fueran tilos. Lo siguieron y hallaron sin problema el refugio. Según cuenta una crónica –estupendamente escrita—de uno de los miembros de aquella partida, la situación fue perfecta porque habiendo ocupado ellos la boca de la caverna y estando ésta cerrada por su parte trasera, ninguno de los indios pudo escapar. En uno de los párrafos más estremecedores del relato, el caballero californiano platica que en algún momento de la matanza decidió utilizar el revolver porque, aunque se descarga con más frecuencia, hace un trabajo más limpio: según aprendió rápidamente, los bebés estallan cuando se les dispara con rifle.

De esta parte de la historia de Ishi, una parte que él nunca conoció bien, o no con el detalle con que yo la conozco, me enteré más tarde, en un libro de crónicas del periodo que me encontré en la biblioteca de la universidad en que doy clases. Él simplemente regresó con su madre y su hermana del arroyo, y se encontró con que tenían que ponerse, otra vez, a sepultar muertos. Aunque nunca habló directamente de ese día, hizo más de una vez alusión a la tarea terrible de enterrar a toda su gente.

Para cuando leí esa crónica, ya había tratado sin ningún éxito de escribir un cuento sobre él cinco o seis veces y siempre resultaba demasiado político: literal a morir con todos sus significados expuestos, o no todos, pero sí los que menos me interesaban: lo que me seduce de Ishi no es su condición trágica y la nitidez con que refleja que América es la exitosa utopía de un grupo de criminales, sino la soledad inaudita del que se sabe al final de algo que ya no tiene remedio.

La versión que escribí por esos días fue la peor de todas porque para entonces estaba cargado de humillaciones y repleto del prurito moral que nos hace rechazar unas formas de la hipocresía por otras. Esa versión del cuento se llamaba “Taking democracy to California”, con eso ya no tengo que anotar que era la peor.

Hay una historia, esa sí muy buena, que cuenta Bernardo Atxaga. Dice que un día, caminando por un pueblo de su región natal en el País Vasco, se encontró de pronto junto a una puerta con un agujero y un viejo. Hablaron un poco y al final el viejo le preguntó que si sabía porque había un hoyo en la puerta. Será para el gato, dice Atxaga que respondió. No, le dijo el hombre, lo hicieron hace años, para darle de comer a un niño que se convirtió en perro después de que lo mordió un perro.

Los cuentos que me gustan, los que me vuelven loco de ganas y envidia de escribir así, tienen la lógica deslumbrante del viejo vasco: les falta un pedazo y esa falta los transforma en una mitología, apelan al mínimo común denominador que nos hace a todos más o menos iguales.

Si a un niño lo muerde un perro y le da rabia, el espejismo de la causa y efecto universales se mantiene; hay un orden y por tanto categorías. Si, en cambio, se convierte en perro, el mundo es incontrolable como nuestros afectos, nuestra incapacidad para vivir de acuerdo con nuestros propios estándares, nuestras desgracias inmerecidas, que son casi todas. El viejo genial de Atxaga jamás se habría puesto una camiseta que dijera “Viejo”; lo que dijo es bueno por la misma razón por la que, para hacer literatura o cine, son mejores las historias de amor que fracasan: hay todo para que a conduzca a b y de ahí a los hijitos, pero algo se jode sin que nadie sepa bien qué fue lo que pasó y a conduce a los precipicios de la w y a la s curva del suicidio.

Ishi, a pesar de que vivió casi toda su vida en la más angulosa de las soledades, se resistió siempre la tentación de matarse: el silencio de los museos es todavía peor que el de los departamentos de profesor viejo y sin promesa, así que una soledad como la suya, que ni siquiera tiene el toque chic de ser autoinflingida, me hace algo parecido a lo que me hace la del niño que se convirtió en perro. Me llena con la esperanza de que algún día los futuros que se me escaparon entre los dedos como canicas parezcan una mitología.

Su tercer y último desencuentro con los blancos antes de la rendición en el rastro de Oroville fue el definitivo. Sucedió varios meses antes del sometimiento y refleja el que iba a ser su destino final: la tienda en que vivía con su madre y su hermana fue descubierta por un grupo de profesores de geología que acompañaban a una expedición minera. Aunque los científicos y los indios nunca se vieron la cara, el desorden que los primeros dejaron en el campamento de los segundos fue suficiente para que decidieran escapar para salvar lo que les quedaba de piel. Se dispersaron. Ishi nunca volvió a ver ni a su hermana ni a su madre, que habrán encontrado una muerte terrible en la huida, pero que seguramente dejaron el mundo con el aplomo épico de los que aguantaron vara sin rendirse.

Ishi se entregó con tal de conseguir algo de comida, pensando tal vez que si de todos modos se iba a morir, estaba mejor hacerlo con la barriga llena. Haber tomado esa decisión le deja poca garra y a los que hemos tratado de contar su historia nos acerca al abismo de la literalidad. En tanto sobreviviente de todo un mundo que además vive en un museo, es puro significado: no le faltan piezas y sin misterio no hay mitología.

Es por eso que creo que es mejor imaginárselo en los días en que en lugar de un indio de vitrina, era solamente el más denso de los empleados de limpieza de un instituto. Hay que pensarlo resignado a ser lo último de algo y trapeando en calma santa los corredores.

Cuando, a los pocos meses de que Ishi llegó a San Francisco se presentó el problema de que no podía vivir para siempre en las habitaciones de invitados, decidieron nombrarlo trabajador de mantenimiento y pagarle un salario para que pudiera vivir en las del personal. Para sorpresa de todos, no entendió que se trataba de una solución al problema de que por ser el último de algo no había donde guardarlo y al día siguiente se puso un mono de obrero y pidió una cubeta.

Casi no usaba dinero, más que para comprar cositas de comer siempre modestas: miel, harina de maíz, calabazas, manzanas, café; era un hombre mínimo y notoriamente frugal. También gastaba en tomar el tranvía, en el que se iba a ver el mar desde el parque del Golden Gate. Ahí se pasaba todos sus días libres: el mar es el lugar en el que nos disculpamos por las canicas que se nos escurrieron entre los dedos sin que hayamos entendido por qué. El resto de su salario lo acumulaba en la caja fuerte del museo: lo guardaba en unos paquetes para ampolletas que le regalaba su médico y que tenían la circunferencia y la altura precisas para guardar sólidamente diez monedas de un dólar. Al final de su vida se aficionó a contemplarlos: le pedía al director que le abriera la caja de seguridad, ponía sus paquetitos de dólares sobre una mesa, y se pasaba la tarde viéndolos, sin decir nada ni sacar nunca las monedas, como si fueran otra cosa.

Si uno es el último de algo, sus guardaditos no son un ahorro, sino el saldo de todo un universo: es ahí cuando en la historia incontable de Ishi el niño mordido se convierte en perro, el bosque se llama “Desierto” y la pelirroja porta una camiseta que no dice “pendeja”.

A veces escribir es un trabajo: trazar oblicuamente el camino de ciertas ideas que nos parece indispensable poner en la mesa. Pero otras es conceder lo que queda, aceptar el museo y contemplar el saldo en espera de la muerte, pedirle perdón al mar por lo que se jodió. Poner en la mesa nuestras cajitas y saber que lo que se acabó era también todo el universo.

 

Read Next

january-2015-kacper-kowalski-nanning