The truth is no one knows when they are making their biggest or most significant decisions. No one understands their own decisions. The woman danced with him; this was what the man from the coast had told me, in a café surrounded by windows that opened to the ocean.
I remember the salt. I remember the linen curtains that gave shape to the ocean wind. Someone said that when we open windows wide, the salt helps us remember who we are. Or how.
The desire between one thing and another. The desire of bodies and, at the same time, the desire to narrate bodies.
Reading The Taiga Syndrome, by Cristina Rivera Garza, is like walking through a dream, or rewatching Last Year at Marienbad, or rereading a book of fairy tales, the dark kind, where all the pages have been reassembled in the wrong order. Like Paul Auster's City of Glass, if New York were a forest, and Auster were a woman and had more depth.
I had no ideas who the others were. But my morbid fascination thrilled me. Who can resist observing the original body? A body without a social context?
A woman is contracted by a man to track down his second wife who had left or disappeared or been led astray, but I cannot shake the feeling that she may be tailing a woman who may or may not be herself, a past self she is struggling to find her way to.
Their last communication came from a telegram office in a border town about two hundred kilometers away. The telegram, addressed to the man who had hired me to investigate the case, said briefly and somewhat obliquely that they were never coming back: "WHAT ARE WE LETTING IN WHEN WE SAY GOODBYE?"
I took the case because I have always had an all-consuming weakness for forms of writing no longer in use: radiograms, stenography, telegrams. As soon as I placed my hands on the faded paper, I began to dream. The tips of my fingers skimmed the creases of the paper; the stale smell or age. Something hidden. Who would set out on such a journey? That couple, of course. Our of everyone, only those two. From wat place, so far away in space, so far away in time, had this fistful of capital letters been sent? And what were the two of them hoping for? What had they let into their lives?
Hoping to find a way out? They had let in the end, and the beginning of what comes after the end, clearly.
[My friends and I had joked that my employment should have been terminated by telegram. It was a last-minute "townhall" meeting, silent while we waited for the number of attendees to climb, then grimly silent as we realized the number wasn't expected to climb much more. "If you're on this call, today is your last day." But a telegram! In all caps. IF YOU'RE RECEIVING THIS TELEGRAM, YOUR EMPLOYMENT HAS BEEN TERMINATED. Or more ominously, TODAY IS YOUR LAST DAY. But what is the end of employment compared to the end of love, the end of a life you thought you were living in love? It's trivial. Coincidentally, a few days ago, I came across a telegram while going through my mother's papers, a telegram from Poland on the occasion of my father's death in 1977, "words of compassion" (rather, "condolences"). Or "today is your last day." In all caps. Maybe every telegram sends the same message: "WHAT ARE WE LETTING IN WHEN WE SAY GOODBYE?"]
Let me note, I love how prominently "body" features. Elbows. Spit. Cartilage. Vomit.
The picture showed that the skull, a cave of bones, looked strong enough to offer refuge. There, a body or the image of a body could curl up comfortably.
I wish I could sculpt these images, these noises:
I remember the movement of jaws, constant and dreadful. Opening and closing. Chewing. Swallowing. I remember how the voracity of my own chewing made me close my eyes. Sometimes pleasure is like that. Above all, I remember the sound of lips, gnawing and talking at the same time, and the grease shining on those lips. And how my food slid down my esophagus, slowly, before falling into the cruel mechanism of my stomach. All those liquids. All that acid. I remember the noise of gold chains around forearms and wrists. How the metal sparkled at that time of day. What time? What day?
There's a playlist. Presented as a chapter, or maybe an appendix to the narrator's report, I rather wish I'd known about it before the end.
In other readers of this short novel is evoked Anna Kavan's Ice, Tarkovsky's Stalker. It's Borgesian and Lynchian. It performs weird things with language. It tells the truth.
But what's it about? Walking into the forest. Following a trail of breadcrumbs into the forest. Going through the forest. Maybe this is how you find yourself when love leaves you.
But what, really, is the end of falling out of love?
[. . .]
"Even falling out of love finally ends." Had I really told him that? My voice softer. Placating someone is also a spiritual exercise. Look at this: your knees. They are used for kneeling upon reality, also for crawling, terrified. You use them to sit on a lotus flower and say goodbye to the immensity.
See also
LARB: The Intense Atmospheres of Language: Cristina Rivera Garza’s "The Taiga Syndrome"
