ESP.LITERATURE

The search for the means to put an end to things, an end to speech, is what enables the discourse—Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable (1953)

ONE: Elsewhere

The sun does not rise; the sun does not set.

The story does not begin here; the story does not end elsewhere.

Individually, they are unremarkable. Two men and a woman who had managed, with modesty and discretion, to become anonymous; they are known by some in the small community of Mulegé, the name a Cochimi word that aptly describes the town’s disposition: the large ravine of the white mouth, a baranca cut by an unlikely river whose headwaters gather in the rugged Sierra de Guadalupe mountains to the east, where seasonal rains and hidden springs feed the watercourse as it weaves unobtrusively eastward to the coast. Occasionally, the younger man would eat with his wife at Las Casitas in the old town; often, the older man would walk the trail through the palm groves along the banks of the river; less frequently, they would paddle the languid stream in their old canoes. They might wave to any locals to whom they were known; they might nod at any tourists who presumed to chatter their hellos and how-are-yous; or, they might not. I’m just a plain brown sack, Octavio would say. How I describe myself. She’s so self-effacing she’s hardly there. And El Maestro, well, he doesn’t exist at all; a hermit, he is, a recluse, lives in his head. Her husband’s refrain, drawn from concern for the older man, his mentor, not from complaint, always amused  Lucinda. Your business is not here, she would say, it’s elsewhere: La Paz, Cabo, Mazatlan. He does his taiji every day, he walks to the point and back most days, or he walks down through town to the river; he is up early every morning, coaxing words from memory and muse, parking his butt in the chair and scribbling the blank canvas, as he would have it, mái tóu kǔ gàn. Octavio grins and echos her Chinese idiom: mái tóu kǔ gàn, buried in work, is he, laughing. You miss all that, she would say, as often as you‘re gone. Demurely, she turns her head. Soft spoken, of medium height, she had inherited her mother’s quick, eclectic intelligence, and her father’s features, the angular lines that formed her face evoking the people of China’s northern plains, as did the prominent cheekbones and almond eyes, and she is often mistaken for an Yumani woman, a people of northern Baja who were largely exterminated or euphemistically assimilated by the end of the 19th century. A radish, that one, Octavio would say, not a peach. His family had come from Los Mochis, fishermen, and settled in La Paz in the 1930s; his grandfather had worked for John Steinbeck, and books had become Octavio’s solace and inspiration when yet a shaggy haired, friendless boy. El Maestro, Matthew, a thin yet fit man of 78, had returned to Mulegé with the death of Octavio’s father, Antonio, reoccupying the casita on the south side of the house that Octavio had designed and built.

The audible flutter of quail wings marked the old man’s emergence on his patio.

If you don’t ask the right question, you will always get the wrong answer.

A morning of flat thirds, fifths, and sevenths after a night of lullabies and languor, the words no longer at his fingertips, just depression rising to anger, grief welling into eyes, despondency fading finally to head shake and hostile amusement. He listened to Miles Davis. Renunciation, torpor, fatal lethargy, afraid to get out of bed in the morning, fatigue makes cowards of us all, resorting to inane idiom, the trail from the house across the hillside, down along the wash, not eight hundred yards, more than he could manage, 800 meters to the lovely crescent of beach, a half mile, the seafragrant, salted air, the hawk above with its harsh, guttural call, flaunting its redemption, and him housebound with his sometime regret. Mái tóu kǔ gàn, indeed. There, the nascent sun greying the fringes of the dark eastern sky more than just a mere statement of fact: neither exposition nor prose; a poetic abstraction, that dawning, an aporia whose significance eludes both reason and intuition. He turns his head to cast eyes down along the barren coastline to the dots and blurs of light that were the town below, the river mouth, the still black greenery of the riverine gorge, the Rio Santa Rosalia, la santuzza, this Rosalia, in Palermo, the patron saint of fishermen, a hermit who had renounced her wealthy family, who had come here to this place of date palms and rounded stone, come here in the hearts of Sonoran women who sought the salvation of their seafaring husbands and sons. River and rock, gritty wind blown dust, scrub brush, mangrove and turbid brown water, a healthy dose of reality, waiting, watching, listening for the old Spanish bells to ring the Angelus. He had boiled yesterday’s coffee, added a finger of whisky, no ‘e’, and now stands shirtless on the patio recreating his once and future universe.