Читать книгу A Thousand Forests in One Acorn - Valerie Miles - Страница 27

A THOUSAND FORESTS

FROM EL TESTIMONIO DE YARFOZ

(THE TESTIMONY OF YARFOZ)

[A NOVEL]

THE THIRD DAY OF NÉBRIDE’S JOURNEY INTO EXILE

Apart from the escorts provided by the king, our expedition was made up of ten horses: Nébride rode one, his wife Táiz another, on another rode Sorfos, and on a horse he had just been given by Mirigalla, rode Sebsidio; Fosco, the carpenter, and Anarino, his wife, rode their own horses, each carrying one of their children; on another rode Chano, Táiz’s lady-in-waiting, on another Quiarces, the Atánida of Ebna, who had come along as the head of the household; on another was Nerigreo, the agronomist, and, finally, on the last horse, rode Vandren and myself; then came eight cargo mules and a mule driver, lent us by Mirigalla, who would return with the mule train. Only Fosco’s children and Vandren were without their own mount, and the horse the king had gifted Sebsidio was far and away the best.

XXIX. The “Path of the Iscobascos” is described in the Grágidos as a passageway carved out of living rock, but we would never have been able to imagine the monumental construction we would encounter that morning. We had only traveled a distance of eight hundred horses—not along the path leading to the cliffs, but on a path running perpendicular to that one, heading west, through the lush coolness of cedars and yews—when turning to the south we saw the path start gradually to drop underground, as if burrowing into the rock. We descended to a point where the walls of rock flanking the path closed in a vault over our heads, forming an underground tunnel. My sense of direction led me to believe that the mouth of the tunnel was perpendicular to the line of cliffs such that, if it continued in a straight line, inevitably there would be a light at the other end. But this was not the case; instead it continued to drop, maintaining the same angle, through the heart of the living rock, banking slowly to the right. It got so dark that our guide lit a torch, by which light I saw the great craftsmanship of the stone carvers, no hollows or protuberances, and I could see a channel, about a foot wide and a foot deep along the right hand wall, coursing with clear, fast-moving water. Soon, however, a light appeared and the tunnel opened into a room with a circumference of at least two-hundred-and-fifty horses, positioned parallel to the vertical face of the precipice that we had encountered days before. The tunnel was the entryway to a ramp cut into the stone wall of the Meseged, forming a sort of lateral groove, so that not only the floor was stone, but the right-hand wall and the ceiling were stone as well; on the left, it was open to the air, but a thick stone parapet came up to a safe height. It was a kind of overlook cut into the wall but always descending, almost rectilinear, with only a few protrusions and recessions in the hard stone wall. The channel of water still coursed rapidly to our right. Soon we saw that at a distance of approximately one-hundred-and-fifty horses the ramp seemed to dead-end against a wall, on a landing that was either wider than the path, or cut deeper into the rock; but when we came up to the wall, we saw that at the landing another tunnel opened into the rock; this second tunnel also curved, but not as sharply as the first one, delving into the rock, and always descending, inscribing first three quarters of a helicoid to a point where, turning back on itself, it rotated a final quarter of a circle, arriving parallel to the cliff face once again, giving way to another ramp, identical to the first, but the inverse of it because now the stone was on our left and the emptiness on our right. Seeing this, we understood, in essential terms, what the so-called “Path of Iscobascos” was: if we had been able to look down at it from the plain, we would have seen a succession of zigzagging ramps cut into the stone, mysteriously connected at the ends by tunnels that penetrated the heart of the rock, always descending, inverting and dropping to the next ramp, emerging parallel to the cliff face thanks to the doubling back or inverse curvature of the last quarter of a circle. In the end, the totality was not structurally different from a great spiral staircase, but one that had been pressed flat, except at its extremes, against a single plane. The guide told us that the landings at the ends of the ramps, along with the square recesses that appeared here and there, greater in number all the time approaching the center, were pullouts for carts that crossed paths while descending and ascending, for resting mules, fixing malfunctions, or any other eventuality. Before long we saw water tanks, troughs, and even small gardens, jutting out over the luminous abyss. In places where the rock seemed unstable, the parapet extended in columns to the bridge that formed the ceiling, all of it carved out of living rock, not a single fabricated feature. Our admiration for that prodigious construction increased at each new ramp: I even thought I saw the melancholy dissipate in Nébride’s eyes, replaced by a glow of joy for the past and excitement for great public works. At a particularly lush overhanging garden, on a landing significantly larger than all the others, uniquely adorned with a small columned vista, Nébride stood out like a white stone in the middle of the dense foliage. “Is there, perhaps, a tomb here?” he asked our guide. “Yes, there is a tomb. The tomb of master Susubruz, who built this ramp and oversaw its fifty-two year construction.” The guide parted the foliage and showed us the tomb: the date read 317 of the Isobascos Era, which, accordingly, would mark the date of his death, the guide told us, less than one year after the completion of the ramp, corresponding to the year 232 of the Grágido-Atánida Era: the ramp of the Meseged was completed, then, some eighty years before the Barcial bridge. “So much glory,” said Nébride, “has come to Grágidos and the Atánidas because of the bridge connecting the eastern and western sides of the Barcial, even though the two sides already communicated via raft; and here we have the Iscobascos and this astonishing ramp, which eighty years prior connected the north with the south, upper Barcial with lower Barcial—no other connection between them existed apart from the long circuitous route through the region of the Sovereign Villages or through the Llábrides Mountains—and yet they never received any great recognition for it. Then the guide detailed for us the characteristics of the ramp: the precipice was five hundred vertical units, and as the slope of the ramp was about eight percent, every hundred horses the drop was twelve vertical units,² such that, to cover the five hundred units of the drop, the total length of the ramp was four-thousand-one-hundred-and-sixty horses. It necessarily had to be supplied with water; this came primarily from the stream that we had been seeing, but also from other springs that the carving of the rock had uncovered. It took a horse four to five hours to make the climb, it could take a cart fifteen to twenty hours, and men and animals had to be able to refresh themselves and to drink; so there were water tanks every six ramps, thirty-one in all; the water was also necessary to wash away excrement that was carried out through sewers to the cliff face. The excess water was used to vitalize the ramp with the cool, overhanging gardens that provided shade and moisture to the stone, burning in the midday sun. Water was such a necessity that when there was none, because of a problem at the source, cart drivers did not even attempt the climb, certain that at the very least their mules would perish, if not they themselves. Then we asked him about master Susubruz. The guide told us that he’d been the brother of the king’s mother, and was only slightly older than his nephew. That he’d begun planning the ramp’s construction even before his nephew took the throne. Some said he’d acted with excessive grace and flattery, hoping that when his nephew was king, he’d be allowed to carry out his project and that later on he’d take advantage of his nephew’s youth to exert his influence. But this was untrue; he was never disloyal nor did he mistreat the king in any way. His whole life had been driven by the desire to build that ramp and his behavior had to be understood in light of that singular passion. But in truth the notion that his passion was such that it robbed him of all human tenderness was refuted by his assertion that the greatest undertaking in the world was not worth a single human life, and by his consequent instructions that absolutely all of the work be done from inside and from above, never allowing a single scaffolding to be lowered over the edge of the abyss. He even managed to irritate his workers with the extreme nature of his precautions. The Sea-bounds, who were much wealthier than the Iscobascos, had supposedly offered significant financial assistance for the project, which would have required of the Iscobascos essentially only a symbolic contribution, such that the project might be finished in one half or one quarter of the anticipated time. But the Iscobascos cared little for this sort of intrusion—although it would alleviate a sizable expenditure for such a poor and austere people—and Susubruz threatened once again to resign from overseeing the project. That’s what he did whenever someone opposed him. And, of course, his departure had to be avoided at all costs; still, he was not always able to sway everyone with this threat, some quickly figured out what sort of thing would actually make him resign and when he was just posturing in order to get his way. The participation of the Sea-bounds would have actually caused Susubruz to abandon the project; so they had no choice but to reject the offer. The project, which lasted fifty-two years, ended without a single fatality and without any injuries more serious than a few men with hands or feet crushed by blocks of stone. Still, it was said, that in the last years of his life, already over eighty, his legs no longer permitting him to walk uphill and downhill, Susubruz commissioned a chair of wood and wicker in which, hanging from a rope and using a pulley, they raised and lowered him outside the parapet, suspended over the abyss, until on one occasion, seeing a strong wind lash him terrifyingly, scraping him and even causing his chair to slam into the rock wall, they’d had enough, and so they approached him claiming that he was not submitting himself to the same cautionary measures that he so harshly submitted the rest of them to, and he answered that the project could be finished perfectly without him and that he was old enough to be allowed certain whims and to satisfy them as he desired. To which the others were silent at first, but then someone even older than him said: “So you’re just an old egoist, because you know that it will be a death you won’t even feel, but it doesn’t even occur to you to think about how unpleasant it would be for us to have to go recover your body, shattered in a thousand pieces on the rocks down below. We can have a couple strong youths here everyday to take you up and down on a stretcher as many times as you like, even though it won’t be as much fun for you as the chair.” And with these words he was convinced to stop using the chair and pulley. [. . .] Because of the nature of the project, master Susubruz was given the nickname “woodworm of the Meseged.” When the guide stopped speaking, Nébride was thoughtful for a moment; then, removing a beautiful enamel pendant that he always wore around his neck, he said to the courtier: “Might I honor the memory of such a great man and great master, by leaving here, on his tomb, this pendant given to me by my grandfather Arriasco?” “Yes you may, and you can be sure that the Iscobascos will be grateful to you for the appreciation you have shown for such a deserving and so honorably remembered man.” [. . .]

XXX. It took us more than four hours, allowing for several stops, to descend the four-hundred-thousand horses of the Meseged ramp that comprised the fifty vertical unit drop of the cliff-face. Before us now opened a desolate territory of scattered whitish deposits formed by the accumulation of detritus that came, mostly, from the Meseged itself, with erosion ditches running through it, converging in sandy ravines that dropped to the banks of the Barcial. Here the path was not at all firm or stable, almost annually it was worn down or washed away, if not erased, by waters that, without a solid bed to retain them, continued to flow torrentially for some time after a downpour ended. Our Iscobasco escorts did not want to return without first seeing us through that desert—which extended a length of some three thousand horses—and putting us on the road to Gromba Feceria. Of course, that stretch was not without frequent traffic, it led to the Iscobasco ramp, which was the obligatory route to the north, because to the right was the path of Atabates, a people that traders generally avoided. That desert itself was vaguely considered an Atabate territory, although that consideration meant nothing. The Atabates populated an area to our right, on both banks of the Barcial, with only messenger rafts to communicate between the two sides, occupying an area of five thousand horses, downriver from the waterfalls. The Atabates were the only people at the bottom of the Meseged not descended from the Sea-bounds, and their bodies were no different than ours, nor those of the Atánidas, nor the Iscobascos. At one time it was speculated that the Atabates were the forefathers of all peoples and that, having previously occupied the lower Barcial much farther downriver, they had been pushed back by the invasion of the Sea-bounds, sending off successive emigrations that had gone into the Contrarrío mountains on opposite ends of the Meseged, and later returned, on opposite sides of the Barcial, as the Grágidos and the Atánidas. That the Grágidos and the Atánidas had descended, on opposite sides, from the high valleys and their tributaries to arrive at the Barcial was a recognized fact; but that their previous origin had been a divergent emigration from the banks of the lower Barcial was the new—and, for me, the ludicrous—part of this theory. On the other hand, a different theory proposed the opposite, that is: that the Atabates came down from upper Barcial and were the only people to have gone around the Meseged to settle at the foot of the great waterfalls. But the truly inquisitive did not trust either of these ideas, since it has always been the jurists of Esteverna who have advocated this sort of hypothesis, using them to establish juridical theses, all of which provoke distrust among the rest of the people. The Barcial emerged from the waterfalls perpendicular to the Meseged and followed the path of the Atabates, but then it began meandering and curving to the west at an obtuse angle, and at the height of Gromba Feceria it more or less came parallel to the ramp of the Iscobascos, such that our road to the city was perpendicular to the spot in the Meseged where we had emerged.

However, we would face a strange and profound sadness before leaving that desert and bidding farewell to our escorts. It was Vandren who, riding on the back of my horse, suddenly pointed out, on the profile of one of the whitish dunes, dappled with small dark shrubs, about five hundred paces away, the dark silhouettes of a pack of animals that I was unable to identify just then, running diagonally in the direction of the path, as if aiming to cross it up ahead of us. I didn’t know how they’d spotted us or what imperative of their nature had made us their apparent object of interest. An erosion ditch hid them from our view for a few seconds, but soon they reappeared, closer and at the exact point where our eyes expected them; now everyone else was waiting for them too; I was able to identify them as a tribe of monkeys. There were no monkeys in our lands, and we did not suspect that they lived anywhere outside the remote jungles of the Barcial delta. Our guide noted our surprise and without waiting for our questions: “They are the begging baboons,” he said, “you’ll see when we get up to them.” We had just arrived at the point of convergence. Now their group stood motionless, about ten or fifteen paces from the path, all of them facing us; there must have been about forty of them, males, females, and infants, horribly ragged, hairy and covered with scabs and filth; the largest male had come six or seven paces out in front of the others and, as soon as we stopped our horses, he broke into a feverish speech, garrulous, whining, gesticulating, more distorted than inarticulate and more discontinuous than articulate, but recalling without a doubt the intonations and sounds and inflection of human speech, above all in his mode of emphasis and the profiles of his elocution; who knows what infinite resolve had put the need in those eyelids covered with the whitish dust of the desert and in that red snout twisting imploringly, denying all the proud power and ferocity of those long baboon fangs; who knows what incomplete destiny had transformed those long and dark hands, born for pure and immediate prehension, identical to the primal appropriation, into instruments not made for gesturing, but for the gesture of a gesture, for the supplicating search for or simulation of a gesture. We were quiet, entranced, listening to him, just like his quiet, expectant tribe behind him, when the solitary motion of our second escort dismounting from his horse put an immediate end to his speech. His stillness and that of the others was absolute. The Iscobasco untied a sack from the back of his horse and carried it over, leaving it two paces from the largest baboon who waited for the man to return to his horse and then quickly approached the sack, expertly untied it, now emitting only the soft grunts appropriate to his species, and then grabbed it by the bottom corners, and with a single motion, dumped all its contents on the ground. In that same instant, the whole tribe threw themselves on the crusts, chestnuts, carrots, beans, apples, and, with total desperation and speed, but in almost total silence, they devoured everything in a few seconds. Even before it was over, Nébride had already turned his back on the spectacle and started riding off, but he thought he heard Sorfos laughing behind him and he looked back to see. The guides too prompted us to continue on our way, but I felt Vandren’s hands on top of mine, as if he wanted to detain the horse for another moment; I couldn’t look at his face to find out if his emotion and his interest came from curiosity or trembling compassion. In the end, I brought my horse up next to the guide’s and asked him: “What was that?” “Those are the begging baboons,” he said, “animals who’ve suffered a long and sad history.” He told me that breed had previously only occupied the forests along the Barcial delta. When a group of Sesemnesces farmers tried to colonize one of those areas, the baboons had apparently ravaged their crops, which had been planted in an area the baboons considered part of their own territory. Having no experience hunting them and not feeling it right to start killing a breed of animal they had never killed, and seeing that they were not unfriendly nor fearful, the farmers opted—in their words—to make an agreement with them, to the extent that you can talk about an “agreement” between men and animals, and to teach them how to gather food in designated areas, showing them how to maintain crops and take advantage of them. And that was the beginning of their domesticity; they ended up moving into the villages and even became laborers, thanks to their intelligence, in some collection jobs, in the use of waterwheels, transporting loads, and in a great diversity of tasks, tasks more diverse and difficult than those any other domestic animal, or all of them combined, are capable of doing. But around nine years ago, a sudden flood washed away the villages and drowned the majority of their inhabitants, while the baboons, numbering close to one thousand, had almost all lived, because they slept in trees and had superior survival skills. The survivors searched for their village and could not find it, they called for their masters, they wept, they grew desperate and ended up scattering. But a small group of some fifty or sixty found the eleven humans who survived the flood: two families and two men who had lost their families and joined the others. There was nothing left for the people to do there; they were too few to start over, and they had no desire to stay in that horrible place. So they left in search of a new life, but the monkeys did not abandon them; they went and begged in Sea-bound towns, but the people did not want them coming near the village with the monkeys because they claimed they carried diseases. To abandon the monkeys was unthinkable; they couldn’t even fool one of those animals, how would they be able to fool forty or fifty of them? So they decided first to separate the women and children, one of them at a time, so that when they had gotten away they would reunite with their husbands, one at a time as well, so the baboons would not notice, assuming they would stay wherever the greatest number of humans stayed, wherever they thought the center was. But before putting this plan into practice, they discovered, by fortuitous circumstance, that for the baboons the center was one of the men, the oldest of the eleven, that it was to him they were fundamentally connected and they would not go anywhere unless he went as well. So his companions, the two families and the other man, parted ways with him amid many apologies. They showed him the great need they had—fearing for the children, condemned to a life of begging, expelled from everywhere—for him to stay with the monkeys, the pointlessness of sacrificing all of them, and a thousand other things, offering the final hope that he might manage to escape from the baboons too if he waited for the right moment, and with many blessings, they left in search of another life. The baboons remained impassive seeing them depart and gathered affectionately around their master and protector. It was this man who came to settle where the two paths leading to the ramp of the Iscobascos came together, hoping to beg, since the monkeys grew weaker every day—many had died already, although others had been born—and their appearance was totally repugnant, which would keep him from approaching any city or village with them, he feared too that they might go into the countryside and steal, and he would be the one captured and held responsible for any damage they caused and be beaten or pardoned for their thefts, since everyone knew the monkeys were with him. So, always accompanied by the monkeys, he approached travelers passing through the desert, and asked for alms for the monkeys and for himself, recounting his unfortunate story in words and with a voice more and more the same every day until he only told a single identical tale. And they said that he was totally deranged, because although what he said sounded clear and intelligible, he could not answer a single question posed to him; he seemed to be mute and deaf to everyone else. Because of this man the history of the begging baboons was known, but three years ago he had died of consumption and sickness. The baboons did not know how to leave that place and now they came out to the path on their own to beg, and the speech delivered by the oldest male of the tribe was nothing but an imitation of that man’s tale, including his hand gestures, to the point where many heard that same tale or believed to recognize it perfectly in the senseless, inarticulate, and unintelligible harangue of the oldest baboon. At last the courtier told me how the Iscobascos, whenever they passed through that region, often remembered to carry provisions for those miserable animals, like the sack that he himself had brought on this occasion, although it wasn’t always guaranteed that they would come out to the path, because during some periods, at the foot of the Meseged wall, where the great curtain of rain that ran down cliff face kept the slope permanently damp, there grew a few nutritious plants that the baboons knew how to identify and collect. But they would end up extinct, in spite of the babies that were born, because the land and conditions were not adequate for their lives, and even more so because, having shaped themselves according to the teachings of man, they’d become more like children, less able to fend for themselves. This oldest baboon that today asked for alms for his own, imitating the role and even the mannerisms of the man who he’d known as father and protector, would perhaps pass down, upon his death, his incongruous speech to the oldest male who would succeed him, and the begging and the reliance on the aid of strangers would be perpetuated among the baboons, undoubtedly, like a human condition from which they no longer knew how to return, with a great reduction in the use of their own unique faculties with which they would be able to survive and prosper. And if, for example, those unhappy creatures would just travel a distance of six thousand horses to the west, along the wall of the Meseged, they would come to the lush and ample walnut groves that extended to the regions of the Aldeas Soberanas, whose production the Atabates or the Aldeanos de Soberanía, in whose territories the forests grew, were unable to exhaust; but the baboons found themselves inevitably tied to the desert and the path where their master, or more precisely, their father had given them a way of life that, as precarious as it was, continued to constitute for them an inescapable condition.

Translated by Will Vanderhyden

2 Each vertical unit equals 2/3 of a horse—measured lengthwise.