Guide to Animal Behaviour (17 page)

I have seen these — at San Ildefonso, Tesuque, Santo Domingo — it is like seeing the cave paintings at Lascaux, it is like seeing the animal masters calling their prey.

They dream of the day when the buffalo will return.

In the mountains between Santa Fe and Taos, I have driven through picturesque run-down Spanish villages with names like Cordova, Truchas, Ojo Sarcas, Chamisal and Las Trampas. Each village has a morada, an unprepossessing chapel (adobe, with no windows, strangely prison-like) where Los Hermanos Penitentes, Los Hermanos de Luz, the Brothers of Light, hold their cruel medieval rites, whipping one another (at Easter especially), and at night marching through the streets carrying wooden crosses.

In days gone by, it is said, they would crucify a man, taking him down from the cross before he died, in commemoration of the passion of Christ.

A human Cristo, image of Christ.

I am fascinated by these believers. I think particularly of the men chosen to act the part of Jesus, the ones who are crucified.

Once Larry (an indefatigable and promiscuous lover) met a Spanish boy who invited him to a Penitente Easter service. He sat with his friend, amid the congregation, listening to the strange hymns and litany, the eerie pitero pipes. In the next room, hidden from the worshippers, the brothers were whipping themselves with yucca cactus spines. Larry could hear the sound of the whips falling. At the instant of tenieblas, when the candles were snuffed and a shout rose and the sound of whirling bull-roarers (metracas) filled the air, Larry observed an old woman fall to the floor in a fit or a swoon.

The rest of the congregation ignored her. Larry had no idea what he should do. For all he knew, she could have been choking to death or having a heart attack. He knelt and felt her pulse, then grasping her wrists, dragged her into the darkness outside and gave her the kiss of life. Just as shouting and roaring subsided and the brothers relit the candles inside the morada, the woman began to spit up and moan.

Faces (chalky white, he says, with eyes like coal or chips of obsidian) appeared in the doorway. “A devil!” they shouted. “A devil!” Larry's friend tried to lead him away by the hand, but he stood there a moment, confused and unnerved, while Los Hermanos railed at him, shoving him with their fists and whip handles. When they began to collect stones to throw, Larry fled, racing through the streets after his lover, with shouts of “Devil! Devil!” following him and stones clattering on the pavement.

Larry says Los Hermanos thought she was dead. They thought only the devil or some powerful sorcerer could bring that woman back to life.

I think of Larry bringing the dead woman to life and being stoned for making miracles and the man who becomes Christ on the cross. I think of Ramon in the hills fleeing his walled Jerusalem. I think of the Indians dressed in animal skins and the transformations of the atom. (Hiking in the Bandelier Forest, Esmé and I picked up shards of pottery a thousand years old and, at the same moment, heard muffled explosions from nearby canyon test sites.)

I think of Ramon, who is me, stumbling into a Penitente village, finding himself petted, healed and fed. Perhaps they bring a young, beautiful girl for him to lie with. Then in the night, the Brothers come for him with their nails. The man who has escaped the hell of the prison (Jerusalem) finds himself spread out upon the boards. Screaming, he feels the spikes spread the bones of his hands, the flesh tear. He did not kill the man, he shouts. He is innocent.

The Brothers shake their heads sagely; their expressions are passionate and beatific. They pound the nails and whip themselves in a frenzy. The bull-roarers whirl. The yucca thorns dig into Ramon's scalp and forehead.

Screaming, he goes out of himself. His soul goes up to the stars.

His atoms recombine in new ways.

Huge amounts of energy are released.

A mushroom cloud rises above the spot (Trinity).

Hymns rise to the heavens.

The world is transformed.

It becomes worse.

Somewhere his sister wakes from a cruel sleep, feeling the wounds in her hands and feet and side. She wakes screaming. She prays to the Baby Jesus. She thinks a miracle has occurred.

Carreta del Muerto

I sleep with Esmé, the Angel of You Know What.

It's not so bad.

Perhaps the holy mud from the Sanctuario has worked its rude magic. I remember a verse from a Penitente hymn.

Esta vida es un ungano,

Y nos tiene con desvelo,

Y los eres invertidos

Para sustentar el duelo.

In bed we talk about the impossibility of freedom in the industrial age. I hazard the opinion that my sexual ambiguity, my love for Larry, my moods, caprices, depressions, neuroses and suicidal tendencies are signs of moral worth in an age ruled by technocracy.

The bed smells of saffron, death and vaginal secretions. The sheets rustle as we move. In the bathroom, I smell the stale rubberiness of enema bags.

Esmé (a.k.a. Death, Dona Sebastiana, Hecate, the Virgin Mary, Clytemnestra, Cassandra, Jocasta, Isis, the Wicked Witch of the West and my mother) crouches above me in a kind of triumph, touching herself with fingers she moistens on her tongue. I close my eyes and let my hands explore the alien contours of her breasts, the corrugations of her rib cage, the mysterious angles of her belly. I touch the hand touching herself, wondering where her mind is (her eyes are closed), what her pleasure is like.

I think all love is this solitary riding, and we never touch each other.

I think (of course) of Ramon's sister, with her black velvet gloves, the stigmata and her starved, waxen body (I conjure her from old lovers and books), a hot ventricle for the reception of my (arrow) cock. She is so thin; she is all eyes and hands and feet. Her turgid nipples, black like eyes in the moonlight, scrape against my chest and draw blood. Her body smells of rubber. (The invisible woman is the real woman.)

The death cart in the museum at Taos is a low wooden wagon with solid wheels like the old ox-carts. Dona Sebastiana is a small, rubbery figure, clothed in a black dress, with staring, coal-black eyes and a chalky face. In her hands, she holds a drawn bow and arrow. It is said that sometimes, as the cart is dragged through the streets, the jostling of the wooden wheels causes the bow to release; the arrow flies and whoever it touches dies.

Concealed about the cart under Death's skirts and petticoats are other primitive instruments of execution — an ax-head, a stone hammer, a heavy rock.

Sometimes Death's eyes are covered to symbolize her blind uncertainty.

When the Indians dance, they wear skunk-fur anklets to ward off evil spirits. Everywhere their feet touch the ground, it is sacred soil.

Los Hermanos de Luz have their Campo Santo.

The physicists of Los Alamos are said to sublimate their fears in wife-swapping orgies and sado-masochistic sex games. All this comes out whenever there is a divorce; Los Alamos divorces are notorious in Santa Fe legal circles. No one wants to settle out of court. Spouses can't wait to get on the witness stand and divulge their dirty secrets.

The physicists at Los Alamos are trying to transmute elements; they are trying to build engines that make their own fuel; they are trying to travel in time and render themselves immortal.

Like them, I do not know where I am safe.

All this is alien to Ramon who has escaped, fled, translated himself out of culture, who has died (albeit symbolically). It is night (the night of our visit to Chimayo, an indeterminate number of nights after his disappearance from the prison) and he has acquired an immateriality which renders him invisible.

Nights, his sister waits anxiously for a call, her car loaded with food, medicine, money and our monkish disguises. Just as now, during the Feast of Easter, wives and lovers pack their cars with food and warm clothing and drive along the highways to succour the pilgrims marching toward Chimayo with their Cristos, Madonnas and Santos.

This immateriality has its own terror; Ramon travels barefoot in the mountain snows with his hair perpetually on end. He has left the hell of his prison, which at least possessed a certain interior logic, for a hell of the spirit, the shocking emptiness of his freedom. He craves food, love, sex, wine, pain, birth and death. He feels a crushing nostalgia for the certainty of desire and walls. But that's all gone now. He lives on pinyon nuts left by the squirrels or maize cobs abandoned in ancient pueblo warehouses. He tries to kill a coyote, but the animal twists its back like a trout and disappears through his fingers.

To survive, in order not to succumb to the elements, he needs a new vocabulary.

Esmé comes with a sigh. She crosses her hands over her belly and rocks with pleasure.

Her preoccupation with death repels and fascinates me. I do not know if what I feel for her is love (I am certain with Larry, for example) or if I am merely attracted by her oddity, her history. Dona Sebastiana.

I put my hand down there and smell my fingers. Everything smells of old, rotten rubber. I lock myself in the bathroom, rip the shower curtain from its rod, upset the medicine shelf into the sink and tie an enema tube around my neck so that the bladder flops against my chest. I smash the mirror with a jar of Noxema. Esmé weeps in the hallway. I take a shard of glass and examine myself in its incomplete and inaccurate reflection.

My feet are bleeding.

I realize that I am prey to dualisms, diagrams and allegories which are only masks for the truth, that my truth is nothing but an obsessive topological assault upon reality.

My feet are bleeding.

This is what I think: failure reveals intention. Certain questions cannot be asked, let alone answered. We kill what we love, we love what we cannot have, we destroy ourselves pursuing illusions we cannot live without.

Jornada del Muerto

I am feeling a little on edge.

I have used a shard of mirror glass to slit a hole in the shower curtain, which, draped over my shoulders, forms a kind of poncho, ideal in case of rain. I wear the enema bag like a neck-tie. The other two enema bags I have fastened around my ankles where they drag as I walk.

My bandaged feet no longer fit properly inside my shoes. It is difficult (a combination of sore feet and tangled enema bags) for me to operate the pedals of Esmé's car. There are shooting pains in my palms. I can't get the image of the dead man with his head between his legs out of my mind. He is like some mythic constellation placed in the heavens as my guide.

Certain things begin to make sense to me — for example, Edwin Hubble's discovery in 1929 that the galaxies are moving away from each other and the abrupt extinctions at the end of the Triassic period.

I drive to Larry's place, having some trouble with the manual stick-shift which turns out to be automatic.

Ramon has been here before me.

The window next to the corner fireplace in Larry's room has been smashed inward. Shards of glass, smashed pottery bowls, Larry's sketches of Mimbres pot designs and broken kachina dolls litter the floor. Rocks the size of grapefruit are everywhere. I think of the word
erratics,
which geologists use to refer to stones bulldozed and left in odd places by glaciers. Larry is naked on the bed, his body a pattern of blackened welts, bruises and lesions, his eyes open and his jaw slack. Cold air blows in through the window. The air smells like stale rubber. Larry's arms are stretched out at his sides, one foot covers the other, one knee is slightly flexed. His anorexic torso seems carved from wax. His gray rib bones look as though they have worn right through his skin.

I am relieved to see no signs of stigmata.

Snow blows through the open window. My shower curtain poncho is no protection against the cold. My feet leave marks on the floor. The enema bag anklets drag behind me, defining the zone of safety.

A! que penosa jornada,

Que camino tan atros!

Me voy para la otra vida

Lo determina mi Dios.

Nothing surprises me.

Only the week before, worshippers at the little church in Mora claimed to see Jesus' face outlined in the adobe plaster of the nave wall.

I have heard tales of a renegade Charismatic priest who travels through the remote Spanish villages healing the sick with his hot hands.

I can think of only one possible ethical rule: live with the maximum intensity.

On a mountainside not far off, Ramon lifts his head and howls. He is a soul in torment. His pace quickens as he rushes toward the place of assignation. He has (of course) lost all sense of direction. His bare feet go slap-slap along ancient Indian trails worn deep into the soft tuff-rock, leaving little bloody toe prints.

I pick up a crumpled piece of paper from the floor. It's a mailer from a gay group Larry belongs to. The publishers profess to have started a homosexual religion. The paper is printed with a depiction of their man-god: a bearded male, seated in the lotus position, with a huge, erect phallus rising from his lap. His palms are pressed together as if in prayer. He has antlers growing out of his temples. I recognize in the man's face the lineaments of my own.