Victor Serge - Unforgiving Years

Equipped like an Indian with a machete to clear the way, wearing sandals with thick rubber soles cut from tires and a conical sombrero, Harris would set off along the mountain trail that led to the plantation. It took him past the abandoned gold mine, a bald hump topped by a single candelabra cactus which might be one or more centuries old, nearly forty feet tall, raising its phallic spars above a monstrous trunk in two tones of green: silvery olive and midnight emerald. “You feed off the seams, eh, candelero ! But it’s hard to live like that, you get as thirsty as the next guy and you’re even uglier.” Wandering prospectors had tried to chop the monster down so as to delve between its roots, but they soon gave up, leaving the trunk deformed around the base. Some gold mine! A mine of schemes! By dynamiting the rock and sluicing through the sand and clay and god knows what else, you might get a thimbleful of gold dust worth twenty crates of scotch, si caballero ! Unless you happened to land plumb on the jolly seam that’s mocking us six inches under this track here. You might just as well send away to Mexico City for lottery tickets, after consulting Doña Luz on the numbers to choose, or choose them for themselves, because the good numbers aren’t necessarily the winners, this being a matter of fate, not of money — Doña Luz is surely right on that score — which means that the losers can be lucky all the same.

Harris’s route now took him past Las Calaveras, the Skulls. Following the lure of the ruins, he deviated from the main track to take a look at them. Did time humanize these anguished stones, or did it dehumanize them? First you walked through a stretch of dry, prickly undergrowth, bristling with dead needles. The rock-strewn slope dipped toward a granite cliff, tinted blue or gold, according to the time of day. If you turned around you had a vista of the lake, calm as a mirror, a divine mirror of water resting on the earth. All that was left of an altar was a base of reddish-gray andesite, the color of dried blood, the appropriate color. Crudely carved skulls protrude from the earth on both sides of worn stones that once might have formed steps. Schematic skulls with clenched stripes of teeth, eye sockets that seemed still to cast a baleful stare into the horizontal sky. Harris felt his life-beat slowing. Expectant, he listened for the thud of drums in the distance, the mesmerizing, muffled tattoo of the forest. To regain his aplomb he always said the same words, aloud: “These cannibals sure knew how to choose their sites!” Twenty paces farther on, a broken column lying half hidden in the brush offered up to the face of the sky another huge face with geometric eyes contemplating the zenith indefinitely. This god of an unknown race, assumed to be Mongoloid, did not present the features of that race but features more refined, European or Malaysian, hybrid in their abstraction. His diadem was broken into pieces. Harris bowed his head, absorbed by the problem of human duration, the problem of… of what, man! You’ll never be able to put it into words, but the problem remains. The sudden appearance of a lizard, gray with emerald spots, startled him. “Well, well,” he muttered. Whistling, he continued on his way. The Battistis and the Harrises sometimes met up here for an evening picnic. Bruno, stimulated by a swallow of rum or by the proximity of the unknown god, told stories about the ruins of Central Asia, the Roof of the World, Pamir’s… Harris would slap his thigh, booming: “Roof of the World! And on top of that, another roof?” There can’t have even been a sky, if it was really the Roof of the World! He laughed even louder: “A stratospheric sleight of hand!” Monica and Noémi discussed the embroidery stitches of Los Altos and the Tarascan country. They understood each other well.

On this occasion, an amusing encounter awaited Harris at Las Calaveras. He found two Indians squatting on their heels, having a smoke. A bald gent, masked by large sunglasses that made him look like a skull himself, sportily clad in a combination of beige and brown, was measuring the unknown god’s nose with a compass. “Hello there!” cried Harris. “I’ll bet you’re half a millimeter off!” Startled, the man jumped up — “How do you do” — and put on a toothy smile like a dog’s. Harris strode nearer, swinging his machete so that the light bounced off its blade. “Who do you think you’re kidding, Mister, with your little compass? The venerable god, yourself, everybody else, or mathematics?” The erudite tourist appreciated the joke. Repressing the giggles, Harris became quite sociable. “These are difficult measurements,” the man said, “but take it from me, they’ll be accurate…”

“Accurate?” went Harris, brimming with ironical glee. “So you’re an archaeologist?”

“Oh, just in my spare time,” the other said modestly. “And you, an artist?”

“Amateur, old pal, like yourself.”

“Care for a drink?” proposed the amateur archaeologist.

Harris brightened. “What are you carrying in the way of bottles?” The expedition’s supplies turned out to include a first-class brandy, and Harris in mounting good cheer became cordially insolent. “So you go around measuring idols’ noses, and probably their backsides, in godforsaken holes like this? Funny! And where d’you come from in the first place, Mister?” “Actually, I’m from Wisconsin…” He was priceless, this archaeologist, amateur or otherwise: the panama hat with the crimson ribbon, the coffee-colored silk necktie over the khaki shirt, the pink skin, the fastidiously clipped blond mustache, those dark glasses which must be hiding the eyes of a learned rabbit… “I’ve been working on my book on pre-Colombian sculpture for the past eight years.” Harris poured himself another brandy.

“If that means carrying around brandy this good, I guess you’ll be forgiven upstairs… Just think, in those eight years you might have slept with a thousand women of all different colors, committed a whole string of crimes, at a profit or at a loss, lost and re-made a dozen fortunes, spent years cooling off in Sing Sing or San Quentin or someplace — no lack of good spots! You could have gone around the world on a bicycle! Crossed the ocean in a rowboat! Got yourself killed eight hundred different ways in the war!”

“Certainly,” said the archaeologist. “Except for getting yourself killed, even once, in the war, I hope you’ve done a fair number of those things yourself…”

“I beg your pardon! I even got myself killed in New Guinea!”

“Congratulations. Life feels so much grander after that, doesn’t it? Well, in exceptional cases it does…”

“Obviously.”

The archaeologist, Mr. Brown, spent every night in his car, which was parked four or five miles away. He invited Harris to partake of his cold chicken, whiskey, and wines. “I have a weakness for fine wines, Mr. Harris…” Harris agreed that fine wines were conducive to the study of old stone carvings. “Take me, for instance. Me who’s never read a single book on the subject — god forbid — well, once I’ve enough of the noble fluid in my belly, I could tell you the authentic history of this old god and describe the dances the young Olmec girls, if there were such girls, used to dance around him on carpets of flowers and decapitated birds…”

“You’re way off,” answered Mr. Brown, shocked. “These monuments don’t belong to the Olmec culture!”

“They don’t? What do you know? Not that I give a damn.”

Mr. Brown was unaware of the existence nearby of a hospitable plantation, owned by an Italian, Bruno Battisti, “a nice old fellow who’s traveled all over. Now he knows the history of the Olmecs and the Tarambiretls and the rest. His wife is a charming woman too, only she’s out of her mind…” Harris invited the archaeolo-gist to go along with him. Mr. Brown was tempted, but hated to be indiscreet… The word “indiscreet” made Harris guffaw as he twirled his machete. Mr. Brown accepted the invitation.