Ilija Trojanow - The Lamentations of Zeno

I neither wanted to agree with his assessment nor decline the offer, so I took the folder with the instructions. From now on I’ll be spending far too much time using the radio and the PA system, keeping the passengers up to date on the weather, the route, our next destination. Each of the lecturers has a special field of expertise — oceanography biology climatology geology — and each of us knows how to talk about animals clouds cliffs both instructively and entertainingly. And each of us is a refugee in his own weird way: in the words of El Albatros, our Uruguayan ornithologist, “We’re really just a bunch of nowhere people.” He nods my way, “Mr. Iceberger”—he calls me that too, some of them have never used my real name, Zeno, and others aren’t sure how to pronounce it, whether Zen-know or Zee-no or Say-no (this from the mouth of our whiz kid Jeremy from California, who could practically be my grandson). These are minor matters to which I attach no importance, but I have the sneaking suspicion my colleagues use the nickname to disguise their belief that I’m some kind of misfit or freak. And it is more than a bit bizarre to be considered too passionate by people so passionately dedicated to their own pursuits.

Earlier that day Beate escorted a group of passengers to the national park, where paths wind along the coves and the sun’s rays angle down and settle on individual leaves like butterflies. We’ve all taken this easy walk through the virgin Patagonian forest at one time or another, but this year they’ve opened a new path and the ever-conscientious Beate has no intention of letting some tourist embarrass her by knowing more than she does, even if it’s just about a few new dots on a map and a path to a further cove. For that reason, as she explains at length, she took a bus past the southernmost golf course in the world, past the end of Pan-American Highway, to a wide, leveled parking lot where people land in the middle of nature like so many aliens, and where a small stairway of freshly treated wood leads up to the path.

“How many whales did you spot?” Ricardo asks jokingly.

“One,” says Beate.

“Just one whale, how is that possible? A loner? A juvenile?”

“A beached whale very much on land and made of stone with moss on top. A whale that children are allowed to ride on.” Beate pauses. “It’s sitting out there like a memento mori.” She pauses even longer. “The thing looks massive enough that it might actually stand the test of time, too. The new path has trashcans every two hundred meters and benches every two hundred meters: trashcan bench trashcan bench as you go stalking through the forest. Our guide was a creep in tall boots, a Buenos Aires porteño who likes the notion of spending his summer in the fresh air of the south, he spoke in a high falsetto voice as if to balance out his very low level of knowledge, he talked about the original inhabitants as though they were wild animals, didn’t even mention their name, ‘grass-chewers’ is what he called them, and he made stupid jokes like ‘we don’t know much about them, they were so shy, the minute they caught sight of a person they turned tail and scrammed and if you tried to approach them they hid deep in the bush like hedgehogs or burrowed underground like skunks.’ I couldn’t help myself, I had to teach him a lesson in front of the passengers: the people who once lived in this forest were called Yah-gan . He repeated the word as if he had to crack it open, ‘ Yah-gan —well that fits a primitive natural tribe just about as well as a fist fits an eye, it sounds foreign, like some strange species of spider.’ Did I mention his boots? They left deep prints, and some name or other, probably that of the manufacturer, got stamped into the earth with every step he took. Primitive natural tribe, can one of you tell me where a phrase like that comes from?” Beate stops speaking, and a hush falls over the table as though by some prearranged signal. Not everyone heard the question, but the answer will spread across the entire table.

“Because we wiped them out,” I say in a loud voice. “Because we destroy everything aligned with nature. We honor the people who are extinct, we put their masks on display and print their portraits in sepia, we show enormous care and devotion to those we have exterminated.”

The lecturers all start to sigh — here he goes again, they’re all expecting one of my diatribes, I’ve subjected them to an avalanche of rage on more than one occasion. They know from experience that whenever Mr. Iceberger waxes apodictic things will end apocalyptic. But it’s our first shared evening, so I bite my tongue and say nothing more as other conversations begin to rustle around the table.

All the others leave but me, I stay behind with the old man who spent the whole evening waiting on us in silence. That’s become a custom with the two of us, since the first time I sought him out. I had left my camera on one of the wooden benches in his bar and walked back through the cold. It was very windy and I was nearly frozen when I went inside, the old man was cleaning up, all by himself, he had to fix something to get me warm and on top of that grant me a conversation, which at first made us feel even more like strangers, but then sentence by sentence, shot by shot, we let down our armor to the point of showing our wounds. Since then we’ve never been far from each other in our thoughts. He quietly wipes down the table with circular motions, the veins on his hand look like glacial striations, his skin shows a number of liver-brown patches. With implacable anger he curses his fate to be born, grow up and grow old here in Ushuaia, which has always been a makeshift place, where every shop is called Finisterre and every apron is plastered with penguins, to live in this spot that shows no pity for anyone, not for those who once roamed barefoot over thorns until they were killed by adventurers seeking their fortune or by civil servants fallen into disfavor, not for those banned to the penal colony in heavy chains, whose yearning to escape cut deeper and deeper into their flesh and not for their descendants who grovel before the tourists as if they wanted to pick the dried bits of mud off their boots, as if the earth of Tierra del Fuego still contained gold dust. Does a place change for the better when people move away of their own accord? Does peat that has been drenched in blood still spread warmth when it burns on a homey hearth? The old man disappears for a moment and returns with two bulbous snifters of a drink that smells like vanilla and leaves a nice burn in the throat. The old man doesn’t stop moving, from the counter to the tables, from one table to the next, as if something needed to be tied down in every spot. I follow him to the window, the sparsely set streetlamps blur in the drizzle into muted trickles of light. We stand for a moment listening to the distant sounds. Suddenly he resumes speaking.

“As a child I used to spend the afternoons hanging around in front of our house — this place used to be our shack — and I’d gaze down at the town. Sometimes, when the sky was so overcast the clouds seemed to touch the ground I had the feeling the street might vanish with the fog. I’d race down the street full of expectation but every time I just landed in the filth of the harbor.”

Finally we sit down, and he refills our glasses as if there were plenty in stock. Long sentences of silence are punctuated by his pronouncements:

‘‘Whoever tries to live an honest life in this place is punished with a shot in the back of the neck.”

‘‘We paid homage to my murdered grandfather in fearful silence.”

“My mother warned me about men in uniform the way other mothers warn their children about mean alley cats.”

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