Most of the time someone assures me that with their life I could write a novel, I’m suspicious. They generally insist that it would be a novel, not a short story, not an essay.
However, on one occasion, invited to speak with students and teachers in a rural school, in a village in a coastal province, after learning the story of my host’s father, I asked permission to tell it, without naming names or establishing with precise dates or places. The most moving stories I have heard in my life have arisen spontaneously and even mysteriously, devoid of anticipation and expectation.
When I had finished my multiple commitments – conversations with four courses, with the city choir, with the teachers – one of the organizers, my host in the strict sense, made the old quarter of his generous hacienda available to me so that I could stay overnight. It was a house with a fresh smell, in the middle of the field, of the kind I see when I drive through the streets at dawn, on the side of the shoulder, wondering in which hermitage I can sleep at night in such desolation.
When I woke up, ñá Mónica and Don Díaz, the couple of hosts, served me with fresh milk and warm bread, freshly baked dulce de leche and warm butter. It was heaven. They lent me a horse, and after a fearful ride – the matungo, gentler than a nap, graciously took me and carried me – I asked about the strange vegetation and promontories which had attracted my attention in the terrain, much more varied than extensive . My host, whom I will call Anatoli, informed me, rather than explaining, after asking me for a reservation, that it was the body of a woman, in disarray.
“I don’t understand,” I replied, before thinking; and then I tried: – Was the woman messy?
“Aside from that,” Anatoli answered. I mean that if we ordered the different vegetations and promontories, the body of a woman would be formed. Seen from above, of course; from an airplane. But my father wanted to hide it from outside eyes. He didn’t resign himself to losing it: he hid it in the cafeteria.
-Like Guernica? -I guessed-.
“I never understood Guernica,” confessed Anatoli. It’s a woman’s body, messy.
“Beauty breeds disorder,” I ventured.
“That’s true,” agreed Anatoli. In the beginning there was chaos.
“But also afterwards,” I added.
He invited me to walk through the nearby fields. The difference between hers and the others was unmistakable.
“My father was called the cartographer,” he summarized. Maybe he was just a cartoonist. He worked for foreign contractors: he had a unique gift for portraying land features, marshes, estuaries. He could draw a map with no more resources than his airplane, his quill and his glass oval in Chinese ink. That’s what he lived on.
“A noble profession,” I thought aloud.
Anatoly agreed.
-He also drew philanthropically -he continued- for the schools in the area: maps on request. Universities, small businesses. Some official he liked. Until the arrival of Marfilina.
“The woman with the messy body across the field?” -I consulted-.
Anatoly agreed; without surprise.
“I want you to draw a map of my body” Marfilina proposed.
The cartographer looked at her in amazement. She was of a superb beauty, barely hidden by a city dress, a kind of kimono, which had something both rural and ancestral at the same time.
“I don’t do those jobs, miss,” the cartographer apologized.
“You haven’t heard about the pay yet,” he insisted.
“I do a lot of work for free,” explained the cartographer. But others, not even for all the money in the world.
It was his last word on the matter. Then Marfilina dropped her dressing gown. The whole woman, in her crepuscular charm, shone like the orange of the horizon, but without her calmness. Says Kissinger, I don’t remember if in his Memories: history knows no inn or rest.
The cartographer, without diplomacy or fighting, accepted his defeat. A sports brand said: that from defeats you only learn the opposite. But the forewarned man knows that defeat is inevitable at some point in his experience; therefore it is better to learn, not only from his drift, but to recognize him at his dawn: in order not to waste time resisting the impossible.
He prepared the oval of Chinese ink, moistened the nib slightly, told him to choose the pose and began his work. He just stated that he came from such-and-such a time, because of the light. But they both knew it was an imitation of a negotiation; Marfilina could come and go when she wanted. You accepted this simulation of a rule, Churchill-style: in victory, magnanimity.
The ordinance – the price had not been established in advance – contained many tacit and even verbal clarifications: every relevant part of Marfilina’s body appeared as a town, province, natural accident or relief; with his name, its population, its political and social system, its flag. Some do; others not.
The cartographer had relied all his life, as a livelihood skill, on his unerring intuition, his raw talent, devoid of qualifications or legitimacy. They paid him for what he drew. That map responded to a secret logic[1], which the man and the woman understood perfectly, but could not convey. Marfilina’s expressions as the man mapped her were of a serious but not solemn sensuality, a vertigo that could be added as a reminder of the foot, the slopes and the visible valleys; and which the cartographer preferred to draw, as a shaded reference separating two different directions on the same map. When she finished her work, the farewell was said.
“I’m getting married in a few days,” he informed Marfilina. I wanted to keep my body map as it is now. There will be no copies or souvenirs. Only the original that I will take with me.
“I can’t erase it from my memory,” the cartographer said.
“You will be paid so that those memories never come to light,” Marfilina conditioned.
“No need to pay me for this,” instructed the cartographer.
“But dad couldn’t go back to work after that,” Anatoli concluded, running his hand along the back of a wandering cow, looking for its hoof. His inspiration, his energy, whatever had given him his talent up to that point… vanished. He received a fee for his silence until the last day of his life, which he would have kept for free anyway.
He fell silent, perhaps an allusion to what his father had done, and sighed:
-She left only the map of her body exposed on the ground, indecipherable for any other human being, except her, him and me.
– And his mother? I heard myself ask. Did you know this garden?
“I didn’t know my mother,” Anatoli replied in his strangest tone ever. According to my father, she left us as soon as I was born. How to get there is a map that he never drew for me.
[1] Menem, his secret logicbook by Pablo Giussani, 1990.
Source: Clarin
