Austral: A Novel

PART ONE

A Private Language

No, there was no way to judge the depth of the silence that followed that scream. It was as if the earth existed in a vacuum.

—JUAN RULFO, Pedro Páramo

1

Perfectly lucid to the very end, she had written in her letter, and she said it again now, out loud.

The words, coming from the kitchen, crossed the living room on that December morning to reach Julio, who had sat in one of the armchairs farthest from the door to try and escape the freezing breeze that periodically slipped in. Recognizing the expression, he stopped rolling the cigarette he had in his hands and looked up. He saw no one. Olivia had excused herself to make more coffee, and the only thing that moved in the room was the Italian greyhound that had jumped up into the chair she’d just vacated. He had the impression that they were acting out a previously rehearsed scene. Just last night, in fact, they’d been right here, sitting in these old leather chairs with three small lamps lighting the scene, telling the story that today she was recounting with variations. It was as if she were afraid he’d already forgotten it, or maybe she thought repeating it was a way of understanding it. Two strangers who were seeing each other’s faces for the first time, united by the trust placed in them by the fragile ghost of the mutual friend under whose roof they were speaking. Just like this, they’d settled in with a couple of beers from seven in the evening until well past ten, though now the morning exposed what yesterday had been only shadow.

In the daylight, the house became more human, and the space took on a texture that before had gone unnoticed. The light entered obliquely from the west and shone on the wall where a pair of large black-and-white photographs hung. A picture of the Momotombo volcano yielded to the combative but endearing face of a young Sandinista in the early eighties. There were few personal photos, but the objects that were there managed to convey a stamp of idiosyncrasy: two reddish rocks were displayed in frames beside an old grandfather clock, while farther down, in a corner beside the dog food bowl, a dozen books on natural history were heaped in a patiently concocted disorder. Aside from a somber arrangement of white daisies, there was nothing to suggest that anything had happened here. Under the flowers, placed between several terrariums, there were vinyl records, an impressive collection of old British rock LPs adorning the shelves that covered the rest of the wall until they ran up against the record player beside the window. Then, your gaze could relax and turn toward the outside.

There was the landscape, just as Olivia had described it. At the fore, the twenty houses of the artists’ commune and a couple of rusty bulldozers near the corral. Farther on down the hill, you could glimpse the place where the Río Grande intersected with the Calete and the Cuchiyaco. A couple of freight trucks, probably on their way to Bolivia, were headed north on the highway, drawing the gaze toward the village of Humahuaca, beyond which towered the magnificent multicolored mountains he’d seen before only in photos. Who would have thought the desert would be so colorful and cold? Accustomed to the screen-saver idea of the warm, horizontal monotony of golden dunes, suddenly he was confronted with this: a mountain range where colors alternated vertically, beguiling as a child’s painting.

Poking up through the fog, the mountains displayed all the splendor of their strata, while higher up in a clear, light sky, a sparrow hawk made its rounds, unwittingly imitating what had been happening since yesterday in that house that had again fallen briefly silent. He and Olivia, too, seemed to move in a spiral, approaching the heart of the story only to back away once more, perhaps aware that the truly important thing was to re-create, in that cold morning air, the absent shapes summoned up by the words Olivia had just uttered.

Imagine. Lucid in spite of everything, she said.

At times she seemed to be translating into Spanish thoughts that had come to her in English. It was in those moments that the story’s voice finally managed to blend with its subject, and he felt that the person speaking was not Olivia Walesi but rather his old friend Aliza Abravanel. The same British inflections projected onto the Spanish, the accent masked but still there, the same will and the same momentum. Then emerged the exact tone of the pages he had sat up reading until past midnight, in that manuscript that now lay tossed on the breakfast table.

More coffee? she asked, interrupting his thoughts.

The evocation dissolved with the question as she refilled his mug and he, observing the tattoo that stretched over her forearm, understood the size of his error. He could not be hearing his friend’s voice, not only because she had died ten days earlier, but also because what was at stake in the story they now returned to was precisely the loss of that voice.

Extraordinary, isn’t it? Sick as she was, and still working, added Olivia, squeezing in beside the greyhound.

Backlit, dressed in the same olive-green jacket that had warmed him the night before, Julio nodded with a smile and returned to his half-rolled cigarette, first touching the pocket where he kept the letter that had brought him to this place.

The letter had arrived a week ago, along with the snow. Autumn had lasted longer than usual, and winter dawdled until well into December. But it finally showed its face mid-month, and along with the cold came that envelope capable of interrupting Julio Gamboa’s useless ramblings. He was sitting before a paper on which the word arctic was underlined, biting his pen in search of associations, when he heard three knocks at the door that woke him from the absurdity of his task. Why did he make those lists? Perhaps because, having reached that point where others might seek a new beginning in lovers or alcohol, he had come to think that lists were his way of maintaining order in a world that was escaping him.

If I’m going mad, at least I have a method, he said to himself as he saw the secretary enter his office with the mail in hand.

Same as always: letters from the dean’s office, magazines he’d never read, bills, account statements. Among so much routine, however, he distinguished an unusual envelope. Humahuaca: the address sounded so foreign, as distant and enigmatic as the sender’s name, Olivia Walesi, which appeared under a postage stamp depicting a ravine full of cacti.

I’m sure they got the wrong Gamboa, he said with a laugh, not realizing the secretary had already left.

And he continued under this assumption as, sitting in his office facing the university campus where he’d spent the past twenty years, he read the beginning of the letter, in which Walesi introduced herself as a member of an artists’ community in the northern Argentine desert. The next lines, though, finally dispelled his confusion. He recognized the name Alicia Abravanel with the kind of muted emotion we feel when we greet our childhood home after years away: a mixture of joy, wonder, and nostalgia. But he didn’t want to give in to the games of memory. He put the letter aside and let his attention wander toward the students outside as they welcomed winter. It can take a long time for cycles to close, but sooner or later they come to their end with the most terrible precision.

Alicia Abravanel. He picked up a pen, crossed out the i, and changed the c, which had always sounded so strange to his ears, back to a z. For the past thirty years, he had done exactly the same thing every time he came across that name in some cultural supplement or newspaper. He didn’t feel as if three decades had passed since their adolescent adventure. Time couldn’t extinguish his urge to restore the name by which he had come to know her. Aliza herself, when they’d first met, had pointed out that detail, in an accent that only later would he recognize as distinctly British.

"Aliza, yes, without the second i and with a z, not a c."

So, years later, when articles about her books began to appear and they all talked about a certain Alicia Abravanel, he couldn’t help but feel it was all a simple journalistic error. No matter that he later read an interview in which Aliza reflected on her decision to change her name, explaining that in her case the latinization went hand in hand with another, more important decision: to adopt Spanish as the language of her novels. To him, she was still the same girl who had interrupted him one afternoon in the bookstore to ask for a copy of the book that would come to be the talisman of her youthful crusade against the world.

"Do you have Under the Volcano in Spanish? she had asked, and then added, By crazy old Lowry."

More than thirty years had passed since that day. Remembering her by her original name was his way of preserving an intimacy that had been born under the aegis of books and that now continued thanks to them, even as a letter composed in a remote Argentine province informed him that Alicia, his Aliza, had just died after more than a decade fighting an illness that had ultimately left her nearly mute, but that had failed to deter her from writing.

Perfectly lucid to the very end, Olivia had written in the middle of her explications of the writer’s final project, and that was the phrase that finally managed to provoke in him the thrill of memory. That mention of lucidity, strange in reference to a patient with aphasia, unearthed another expression he and Abravanel used to steal from Lowry when they were teenagers: perfectamente borracho. That was how the protagonist of Under the Volcano chose to describe himself to the authorities—perfectly drunk. The phrase reminded him of how, at first, his alliance with the young Brit had been, more than anything, a rebellion and an escape. A way of fleeing his fear of not living up to his parents’ expectations.

His father had never had much. Just a humble grocery inherited from a distant uncle, and a paranoia magnified by his precarious livelihood.

One of these days the gringos are going to forget about us, and then we’ll really be fucked, he used to say when the alcohol heated his blood.

So you study hard, kiddo, his mother would add with a half smile.

Convinced that cataclysm was nearing, certain that Central America would soon sink into the deepest chaos, they had pinned all their hopes on their two sons. His brother, six years older, was the first to disappoint them. Realizing that school was not for him, he’d sought opportunities in the street that the classroom couldn’t give him, and had the misfortune to be caught by the cops mid-stickup as he and some friends were robbing a tourist bus.

Julio was only ten at the time, but the sight of his brother in handcuffs was a humiliation he never forgot. Having reached the age when children start to abandon childish things, he sought refuge in books. Timid by nature, he found a haven in their pages, never imagining that someday those same books would grant him an opportunity. Seven years later, when he received the letter offering him a scholarship to study in Michigan, he didn’t know exactly how to