Guadalupe Nettel - Natural Histories - Stories

“I think it’s wonderful what you’re doing, and I’m sure Michel does too.”

I only smiled to show I supported her.

Friday morning, when Dad went off in search of his past, I took the jar of poison and asked my mother for the study key. She reached into her pants pocket and took it out. I realized that she had been expecting me. She watched me unlock the door but this time she didn’t cross the threshold. As soon as she saw me approach the terrarium she ran back downstairs. The first thing I did when I went in was read the page of the I Ching that my father had left open on his desk. It was on hexagram number twenty-nine. The unfathomable, the abyss. I read the following: “In man’s world, K’an represents the heart, the soul locked up within the body, the principle of light enclosed in dark — that is, reason. The name of the hexagram, because the trigram is doubled, has the additional meaning, ‘repetition of danger.’ If you are sincere, you have success in your heart, and whatever you do succeeds.” It felt like the text was speaking to me more than to my father. I heard the sound of the gate. It was too early for him to be back but I thought he might have forgotten some document, so I looked out of the window to check. I saw my mother leaving, as she always did, to go to the local market that took place every Friday morning. One of the lines of the hexagon was underlined in pencil on the page. “Six in the third place means: Forward and backward, abyss on abyss. In danger like this, pause at first and wait, otherwise you will fall into a pit in the abyss. The nobel son should not behave badly.”

I stopped reading and sat down on the chair where Dad sat every evening watching his Daboia . I told myself that keeping an animal like that was the same as keeping a loaded gun in a drawer: a means to escape the world within arm’s reach. The animal seemed more alert that morning than usual. I noticed a dish of water in the habitat that I didn’t remember seeing the last time, and determined it was the perfect place for me to empty the jar of poison. But before I did, I decided to wait a little. The words of the I Ching were still dancing around in my head. It was then that I heard my father’s steps on the stairs, giving me just enough time to hide the jar under the seat.

He didn’t ask me what I was doing there. Nor did he seem upset. He looked at the Oracle open on his desk and hazarded:

“I gather you’ve already read the response.”

There was something about him that bewildered me in a way I cannot describe. The man standing in front of me had my father’s voice and face; he smelled like him and made many similar movements, but at the same time, something about that person made him a complete stranger to me.

I felt like I should justify myself; I don’t know exactly what for, perhaps for my intrusion or for what he’d read about me in the pages of the I Ching . “The noble son should not behave badly.”

“Mom told me you have a lover.”

“That’s exactly what I wanted to talk to you about.”

With those slow steps he had been taking ever since he’d come home, Dad walked over to the desk and took out two printed photographs. The same ones my mother had found in the trash folder.

Written on the back of the image were the girl’s name, mailing address, phone number, and e-mail.

“That’s her. Look at her closely.”

She was indeed a very beautiful woman and several years younger than him.

He told me he had fallen more in love with that woman than he’d ever been before, so much so it made him feel ridiculous because of the intensity as much as years that separated them. Zhou Xun wasn’t even eighteen. He also told me that it had been impossible for him to resist.

“It was an emotion as lethal and sudden as a snakebite,” he confessed to me. “I think of her every second of the day. However, what your mother said is not true. We are not lovers. We were for five weeks, while I was in Beijing. She was counting on me to get her out of China, but since I’ve come back I’ve given her no sign of life. According to your own ancestors, the only way to get rid of a demon or an afflictive emotion is to face it. That’s why I bought this animal, that’s why I decided to separate it from its mate, to observe its pain as a reflection of my own.”

“And what about your marriage?” I asked.

“Your mother is also my own,” he answered. “I’ve returned to her because I belong to her, but I’m not who I used to be, and thus I cannot give her what I did before. I don’t know if I’ll always be like this. Right now I feel like this animal you want to poison: a lifeless life.”

I thought again of my father’s grave. If what he said was true and it went on indefinitely, the second inscription on his headstone could read: Beijing, 2012 . In which case Paris, where he had lived for most of his existence and I want to say the most important part of it, would be left off his grave. Dad himself told me that in China the snake is a symbol of healing and the continuation of life. In the spring it sheds its skin and it is as if it’s been reborn. Adult children fulfill this same function. They ensure the continuation of the story that began with their parents.

“I know it was your mother who asked you to destroy my snake. You owe her your loyalty and I will not stop you. In exchange, I want you fulfill my obligation to Zhou Xun. Choose the moment you want to, but do it. It is nothing less than a debt, what I left unfinished with her.”

Dad went over to the sofa and picked up from the floor the jar of poison I’d hidden. Not even looking at me, he poured a little of the dark liquid into the habitat, drawing the shape of a triangle. Then he asked me to leave his study.

My mother never found out about that conversation. When she came home I only assured her that the poison had been given. Several days went by before the snake stopped moving, and when at last it did my father still did not remove it from his pagoda. The Chinese symbol of renovation remained motionless in his study for many months until the day Mom took it out, without warning or rationalization, terrarium and all. Despite what she’d firmly believed, getting rid of the snake was not enough to resuscitate her marriage. My father never saw another springtime. Instead of regaining his liveliness or at least returning to his old ways, he sank deeper into the grief that defined the final years of his life. The Daboia that he brought home never did harm us. The snake from Beijing, however, left him with a wound that no home remedy was able to heal.

One of the most talked-about writers of new Mexican fiction, Guadalupe Nettel has won the Radio France International award for best new writers from non-French-speaking countries, the Gilberto Owen National Book Award and the Antonin Artaud Award for her collection of short stories Pétalos ( Petals ), and the Premio Heralde and the Anna Seghers Prize for her novel El huésped ( The Guest ). For years she has contributed to a number of French- and Spanish-language literary magazines such as Lateral, Letras Libres, Paréntesis, La Jornada Semanal, L’atelier du roman , and L’Inconvénient . Her books have been translated into French, Portuguese, German, Italian, Dutch, Czech, Slovak, and Swedish.

In June 2013 Granta featured Guadalupe Nettel in their “Best Untranslated Writers” series. Natural Histories , for which she won the 2013 Ribera del Duero Short Fiction Award, and her novel The Body Where I was Born (Seven Stories Press, 2015) are her first books to be published in English. She lives in Mexico City.