the brief jubilation of living
by Douglas Messerli
José Eustasio Rivera The Vortex, translated from the Spanish by John Charles Chasteen
(Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2018)
Events in the early pages of Rivera’s significant fiction begin vaguely
when he meets up with an apparently charming con-artist, Casanare, and, almost
like something out of a surrealist dream, he soon discovers that most of the
gauchos have left their lands and the cattle they previously brought to market,
lured to go to work for Casanare and others in the Amazonian wilds in the new
industry of collecting rubber from the trees.
Cora, with the confidence of an outsider, notes:
The hair-raising stories about Casanare did not frighten me. My
instincts
impelled me to defy the dangers of the wild frontier. I was certain that
I
would survive to tell the tale and later, amid the civilized comforts of
some
city as yet unknown to me, look back on the dangers of Casanare with
nostalgia.
Even when his girl-friend suddenly disappears from the ramble shack
house in which they are staying, evidently lured by Casanare’s men with the
promise of great sums of money, he seems almost dreamily to follow after her,
quite strangely, since he has already admitted that he is now “bored of Alicia”
and is ready to return to Bogotá.
His decision to follow her down the Amazon into the dark forests wherein
rubber has now become king, begins to shift everything from the dream-like
world in which the fiction begins into a horrific nightmare of great
specificity. If he previously suffers from insomnia, the “hero” if he might be
called that, now falls into a deep “moodiness”:
My moodiness has subjected me to various nervous crises, in which logic
and
my brain sue for divorce. In spite of my physical exuberance, my
over-active
imagination constantly saps my strength, a chronic problem, because the
visions are unremitting, even during sleep.
Somewhat like Marlow’s voyage down the Congo river in search of Kurz in
Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, the
further Cora travels into the Amazon jungle the more horror he encounters, a
world where the formerly dreamy gauchos and their families have now become
slaves, not only to Casanare but to numerous other businessmen and their
shills, drawing in anyone who enters their net, the vortex of a hellish voyage
into death that the work’s title invokes.
Beatings, gambling, drugs, fevers, and even imprisonment follow, between
brief escapes, strange messages left on the trees that produce the rubber, and
the continued perception of the ecological desolation of a once pristine world
all follow. Mad visions are not uncommon in this totally hellish world:
The voyager’s visions were bizarre, indeed. He saw processions of
alligators and
turtles, flowers that shouted, swamps full of people. He reported that
the trees
of the forest were paralyzed giants that talked and gestured to each
other in the
dark. The trees wanted to fly away with clouds, but the earth held them
firmly
by the ankles, so that we could never go anywhere.
Roll
over Baudelaire, Breton, Ginsburg, Bowles—so many others! Rivera does it
better, and with an ecological twist:
Pipa had heard the trees’ appeal to occupy pastures and follow fields
and
vacant lots until a single, great canopy of interwoven tree limbs could
cover
the surface of the entire earth. One day, all would be, again, as it was
in
the beginning—the age of Genesis, when God floated like a mist over the
endless sea of green.
A dire prophecy, indeed.
You might almost think that Rivera was
predicting the earth after all mankind had died from the changes in climate we
are now beginning to suffer!
The
more the poet-hero encounters the terrors of the jungle, the greater becomes
his sense of nature left alone to make itself over: after describing the
“trillions of devastating bachaquero ants,” the “termites that sicken and kill
the trees like some kind of galloping syphilis.”
And yet, each death renovates the earth. The decay from fallen giant
the newly open canopy combine to encourage germination and sprout-
ing. Pollen swirls in the miasmas of decomposing organic matter. The
smell of ferment is in the breath of both purification and procreation.
Our
now more obvious hero sends letters off to leaders in both Columbia and Brazil,
demanding that something be done to save the interior, with little response.
Even today, the new Brazilian leader just elected would probably side with the
rubber barons. And Cora’s attempt to return to “civilization” is a disastrous
one, ending in the fiction’s final lines “God help us!”
Yet, Rivera’s passionate plea to save that world is as powerful as any
fiction I have read: as opposed to “enraptured nightingales,” the poetic
flowers and babbling brooks of the romantic world, the author’s central
character argues for another kind of beauty:
Here, in the night: unknown voices, phantasmagoric lights, funeral
silences.
Hear the thump of fallen fruit that bursts open to fulfill the promise
of its
seed; the whisper of tumbling leaves that offer themselves as fertilizer
to the roots of the tree that bore them; the sound of jaws that eat
hurriedly
to avoid being eaten; the echoing belch of the satiated predator; the
call of
danger and alert; the noisy agony of prey that did not escape; the
echoing
belch of the satiated predator. And when dawn finally sprinkles the
leaves
with its tragic glory, the clamor of the survivors, the keening of the
birds,
the chatter of the monkeys, the thrashing of the wild pig—all for the
brief
jubilation of a few more hours to live.
I
am so excited to have read this writer, working in the tradition of the great
German naturalist, Alexander van Humboldt, and the important French naturalist
writer Jules Michelet, and I admire Duke University Press for publishing
it—although I must admit I am shocked by their exorbitant prices of $95 for the
hardback version and $25 for the paperback for 218 pages, all in a time when
printing costs have gone down significantly. Better that they might have
printed it on-demand only.
Los Angeles, November 25, 2018
Reprinted from Rain Taxi (Volume 24, no. 1, Spring 2019).
