Hypothermia

THE EXTINCTION OF DALMATIAN

Fortune came to Tuone Udina on his rock, almost twenty years after he lost his hearing. Gnarled and dry, somewhere between green and gray, every afternoon while the good weather lasted he sat on a crest of rock that the biting iron air off the Adriatic Sea had stripped bare of life.

Night was settling in with imperial majesty when a man appeared, coming toward him, dressed with ridiculous formality for the rather rugged world of the island of Veglia. Barely protected by the jacket and vest of his tight, brown, woolen suit, it was obvious that he was freezing cold, but he gestured calmly and courteously, as if speaking to someone else. Udina didn’t have much basis for comparison, but the difference between his visitor’s almost excessively polite gestures and the rough manners of the man whose sheep he cared for was, at the very least, disquieting.

The stranger stopped and stood between Tuone and the valley, his back to the sea, looking up at the peak of the hill whose shoulders ran through the rock. Safe from the world in his deafness, the shepherd stared fixedly for a time at the man who moved his arms like a young woman while he talked: his marquesa’s fingers — fat, clean, childlike — pointing now and then toward one place or another, his eyebrows moving up and down precisely in time with the long, slow rhythm of the mustache bristling above his lips; every so often he pushed his eyeglasses up against the bridge of his nose. And then he’d stopped moving, was looking down; rubbing the sole of his small, finely tooled leather boot against the grass as if he’d stepped in some shit and his life depended on his scraping it off. Then he combed his mustache with the tips of his fingers, scratched his perfectly trimmed beard, or ran his tiny infantile index finger between his neck and the celluloid collar fastening his shirt.

Udina had never been able to guess the age of city people, for which reason he never knew who was respectable and who owed him respect; for that reason, and because he didn’t like the disconcerting looks they gave him while he talked, he’d stopped taking the ferry that carried the villagers to the better-stocked island of Rijeka. On Veglia, with patience and without opening his mouth, he could obtain the frugal sustenance a shepherd requires. Now he paid attention because his visitor was sure to be wealthy. Hands folded in his lap, nodding his head every so often, he kept on looking at the man as if he could really hear him. Conscious of the fact that his naked, purple, toothless gums looked revolting, he didn’t smile even once. After a while, however, he was distracted by a glimmer from out at sea, the last rays of sunlight glinting off the smokestack of the weekly steamer that connected Rijeka with the mainland port of Dubrovnik.

Tuone did not find his hermit’s life disagreeable: in fact, he considered himself lucky for having gained the protection of a Croatian landlord during the atrocious weeks of the War of the Brothers. No one among his family or friends in the town had survived the marauding bands of soldiers who purged the island of Dalmatians when the rumor spread that the government in Vienna was conspiring with them. Losing his hearing was the small price he paid for the privilege of being able to go on watching the glorious evening sky over the Illyrian islands: he wasn’t in the village during the extermination campaigns, but a sheep fell into one of the mines loaded with gunpowder that the partisans had buried in the fields atop the cliff. He was approaching to rescue it when it set off the detonator.

Coming to his senses a short while later — the sun had not yet reached the zenith — he checked to see if he was missing any body parts. He stood up and moved his arms and legs to make sure they obeyed him. He wiped the mud from his face and stood there a moment staring at the blast crater. Then he rounded up the sheep that had run off. The whistling sound that held on like the last lone dweller inside the passageways in his head gradually faded away to silence.

When he returned to the village many years later — the heir to the farm convinced him that he could do so without danger — no one understood him when he spoke. He figured that he’d lost his diction and his ability to properly modulate his voice. Without too much sadness he resigned himself to gestures — he’d never had much to say anyway.

A drop of saliva falling on the back of his hand brought him back to the stranger, who was looking with horror at Tuone’s open mouth. Closing it carefully to avoid hurting his gums, he wiped off the drool with his left sleeve and got up from his rock. He nodded his head and called the sheep with a whistle whose shrillness he could not hear. He was climbing the hill, his back to the orange horizon of the sea, when he felt the visitor’s hand on his shoulder. He turned around and looked at him with absolute patience. The man repeated the same series of gestures and, sliding his eyeglasses up to his forehead, took from his pocket a piece of paper with something written on it, which he then held out in front of Tuone’s eyes. Udina raised his arms to signify that he didn’t know how to read, then continued walking uphill. Now and again he turned around — upon reaching the highest part of the hill; as he changed direction to take the dirt track that separated the olive groves from the vineyards; when passing through the gate into the barnyard — to confirm that the visitor was following a few steps behind him, staring obstinately at the ground.

While he was checking the barn door he decided to confront the man, if he was, in fact, still waiting for him, so he strode out decisively to the edge of the barnyard and faced him with his arms crossed, either to extract an explanation, despite this being, after all, impossible — or perhaps to scare him away. The man pointed to his mouth. Then, opening it and closing it exaggeratedly, he made a rather grotesque show of the action of speaking. Udina calculated that the problem could be eloquently resolved with his fists, but the night had now fallen completely and he could just as easily slip away. He lowered his arms and walked off to the cave that he had lived in during the war. As he approached the woods he quickened his step and managed to lose the stranger.

Early the next morning, the shepherd emerged from the far side of the woods with feline caution. He followed the long path to the farm and took the risk of moving the sheep out through the gate that opened directly onto the main road: the young owner didn’t usually come up to visit the fields except on the weekends, so there was little chance of being caught breaking the rules. He followed the rocky path to approach the coastline pastures from the other side. Followed by the sheep, he climbed the flanks of one of the mountains that isolated the place from the rest of the island. From there he made sure that the stranger wasn’t waiting for him at the back gate of the field. He continued confidently toward the sea and spent the day in peace, avoiding his rock. Not finding an appropriate lookout from which to watch the declining afternoon, he returned early along his usual path. The stranger was waiting for him, red from the cold, leaning against the ancient stone wall that protected the vineyards. He was wearing the same clothes as the day before, except for his footwear: some army boots that stood out conspicuously beneath the cuffs of his pants. The consequences of the sheep getting into the vineyard or the olive grove were much more serious than putting up with the visitor’s gesturing for a little while. So Tuone kept on walking.

The man blocked his way and insisted on speaking with him; he pulled out the same paper, holding it up before Tuone’s eyes, and again pointed to his mouth and pantomimed speaking. Tuone waited for him to finish. Then he drew close enough for the man to smell his woodsy odor, and threatened him, shaking his fist before the man’s eyeglasses. Against the visitor’s face, his heavily lined and calloused hand looked, for a moment, like a tree branch. As if to ward off the blow, the stranger lifted his dainty hooves — rosy pink despite his fingertips bruised purple by the cold — took a step back and pulled out a wad of money from inside his jacket. The slightly ridiculous color told the shepherd right away that it was Italian money. He lowered his fist: perhaps now they could understand one another.

The visitor took one of the bills and held it out to Udina, putting the rest of the money into his pants pocket. The shepherd took the bill and studied it skeptically. He knew that in Rijeka they accepted both lire and marks, but he couldn’t distinguish between the different denominations. Then the man picked up a stone from the ground, pointed to it and mimed the action of speaking. As Udina didn’t react, he opened and closed his fingers, making the shape of a duck’s bill, and patted the outside of the pocket where he had put the other money. Tuone thought a little, then barely murmured the word “stone.” The visitor froze like a rabbit, his eyes open wide behind his glasses. A smile formed beneath his mustache, he took out another bill, gave it to the islander, and pointed again to the stone. Udina repeated the word a little more carefully; the man gave him a third bill and a pat on the shoulder. The shepherd pointed to the road leading to the farmhouse and the sheep that were already starting to wander away again. His visitor nodded and made a gesture that Udina interpreted as an invitation to meet there again the next morning. Neither one of the two was moved to touch the other to say good-bye: they both raised their hands, the stranger cordially and the islander somewhat clumsily, the branches of his fingers barely flexible in that moment of civility.

Between the third and fourth days of the Italian’s visit, Tuone Udina made more money than he had earned in his whole life. The professor pointed to some object and Tuone said a word, first as he remembered having pronounced it in his youth, and then slowly, sound by sound. Sometimes he had to repeat it several times, slowly or quickly. When the visitor felt satisfied, he made a note of it and gave away some more money. Then he flipped through his notebook — the pages fluttering in the wind — or laboriously wrote down the new term on the piece of paper that he had showed Tuone days before.

The lire and the shepherd’s good will came to an end at the same time. The visitor thanked him with exaggerated gestures and acted out a little play that was meant to signify his return in a few weeks with more money and a doctor who would heal his gums. The most challenging part of the message was showing the passage of time: in his pantomime, he slept and woke up several times in a row. Udina understood from the first moment but pretended not to so he could enjoy the twisted pleasure of watching a city dweller throw himself to the ground, clap his palms together and place them under his cheek like a pillow, close his eyes, open them, then get back up and do it all over again.

When he returned to his office at the Museum of Archaeology in Rome, Professor Spazzola took his time organizing the information he had gathered on the island. Tuone Udina, the last speaker of Dalmatian, was not only a biological disaster, he was also a mental disgrace. In the scarcely sixteen hours they’d spent together, the shepherd had systematically and diametrically varied the nouns that Spazzola, with seeming carelessness, asked him to repeat from one day to the next. Nothing, or almost nothing, in the few grammatically acceptable expressions that he managed to coax out of him, showed any consistency at all. The majority of the sounds Udina emitted were indistinguishable due to the atrophy of his vocal cords, the impossibility of articulating consonants through his swollen gums, and his basic stupidity. There had been no correspondence — however remote — between his vocal production and the few documents that the Dalmatian rulers produced in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, when they had the opportunity to govern the territory granted them by Rome. The professor had taken one of them with him, copied in modern script in the hope that the shepherd — about whose state of health he had not been notified before the trip — might possibly have learned the alphabet during his childhood in Veglia, which had then been the last bastion of that most defenseless of Romance languages.

Despite everything, the professor was able to resolve some of his doubts about the survival of Latinate vocalization in Illyria. A certain liberality of reflection permitted him to overcome the narrow limits of his frustration and so publish, with great fanfare, an article in a world-renowned Viennese philological journal. A round of conferences — with a decidedly nationalist focus — on the university circuit served him well by spreading through the newspapers the fear of a Romance language becoming extinct, and thus alerting the government. Under the auspices of a gala dinner, the Ministry of Antiquities secured the funds necessary to rescue the last living speaker of Dalmatian from Austro-Hungarian ignorance and oppression and bring him to the imperial city that had once, with greater wisdom, governed the lives of his ancestors.

Tuone Udina never in the least expected that his visitor would return to keep the promise of helping get his gums cured, for which reason he saved the lire for some special moment when he would really need them, and he forgot all about the matter. He put the money in a wooden box and buried it in the back of his cave.

One Saturday, after penning up the sheep, the shepherd saw that his boss was waiting for him outside the barn with a huge smile on his face and a letter in his hand. Tuone returned his smile, bowed his head, and tried to avoid him to go running back to his cave: rich people’s happiness had never brought good news to the island of Veglia. The owner caught up with him, took him by the arm, and showed him the letter, patting him on the back. It was hard for Tuone to believe that the letter was for him — he’d never received one before — much less that the professor was going to return and take him back with him to Italy. The idea that they had already set up a room for him inside the Museum of Archaeology in Rome was beyond belief. His boss didn’t tire of repeating the idea — although he knew that it would never get through to his servant — that of all the inhabitants of the Dalmatian archipelago, it was none other than Tuone Udina who was going to spend the rest of his days living in a palace. After letting the shepherd go on his way, he went into the farmhouse and wrote a reply, saying that they had received the news with pleasure, and that they would be happy to accept some reasonable compensation for losing their most loyal worker. He took care to add that, if it had not been for his father’s charity, the Dalmatian language would have become extinct during the internecine war of 1878.

For some time, Tuone continued to follow the routine of his shepherd’s life. Restricted by the vegetative condition of his fingers, he stayed in his cave until after the sun rose. When he summoned the energy to go and take out the sheep, the dizzying possibility of abandoning the island left him stuck on his rock, even in the scorching midday heat. By the week of the professor’s expected return he’d gathered the courage necessary to make his departure. Then, for the first time in twenty years, he decided to take a day off work. If he was going on a trip, it would be best that he cross over to Rijeka and buy himself some new army boots like the ones he’d seen his visitor wearing.

He dug up his lire, then left the cave and the woods along the little-used path that led directly to the coast. Passing by his rock, he crossed the sheep’s favorite valley. When he reached the promontory from which the coastline was visible, he saw in the distance that the stevedores were already loading the first ferry of the day. The prospect of waiting until the second trip, at midafternoon, without anything to do, impelled him to save the time it would take to go through the coves by cutting across the mountain along the cliff. He was certain that he was going to reach the dock on time when, crossing one of the fields that crowned the heights, he felt the earth give way beneath his feet. It took him a moment to realize that he had slipped into a hole. He couldn’t hear the sharp click of the detonator that was activated the moment he touched bottom.

ON THE DEATH OF THE AUTHOR

Some stories are, seemingly, impossible to tell. It must be at least ten years since I took a trip through California, and since then I’ve been trying to write, without the least success, the story of a particular grand finale: it’s the story of Ishi, a Yahi Indian who was discovered in his aboriginal condition in the remote ranching town of Oroville in August 1910.

I’d always wanted to take a trip that would begin in Cabo San Lucas, the southernmost point of the Californias, and wind up in whatever was its northernmost city, which turned out to be Oroville. On that trip, as I imagined it, my ex-wife and I would drive from south to north as if navigating some beat poet’s dream, and we would see amazing things, stop in impossibly sinister places, and talk to some free-spirited — and frankly bizarre — characters.

Unfortunately, things didn’t turn out that way. First, our trip by car through most of California began at the halfway mark — at the Los Angeles airport. Second, we weren’t cruising in a black Cadillac loaded with a stash of drugs, each more powerful than the last — instead we were driving an especially hellish minivan, in the not ungrateful, and hardly unbearable, company of my wife’s two grandmothers.

Although the diary of our trip doesn’t offer much in the way of literary fodder, it had its interesting moments, for example when we showed the grandmothers how to nullify some spicy chili peppers at a Chinese restaurant by dipping the tips in salt, or when one of them read a book of Ferlinghetti’s poems that I’d brought along to feel like a true beat, and said that she liked them. We also saw a photo exhibit about Ishi at the University Museum at Cal Berkeley.

The story of the last Indian in the United States living in a pure, untainted condition shouldn’t be a difficult one to tell, nor would it seem to conceal any unavoidable pitfalls for anyone ardently devoted to relating certain things while meaning others. But there’s something in the tale — or inside me — that makes it elusive: I’ve tried the pastiche technique, direct narration, diary entries, epistolary form, even the dreaded stream of consciousness, but the whole thing keeps slipping through my fingers like a fistful of marbles.

The facts are simple and transparent: early one morning, a group of workers found a man collapsed on the doorstep of a slaughterhouse, dying from starvation and exhaustion. They carried him inside the building and gave him water. Then they noticed that he was a wild Indian, something that made no sense, under the circumstances, but which their parents and grandparents had taught them to identify as an enemy. They tied his hands and feet — as if he were really capable of escaping — and sent for the sheriff.

The officer in question, perhaps the last Wild West cowboy still working for the government in that part of the United States, threw the Indian over the back of his horse, just as he was, and took him to jail, not because he wanted to make him suffer but because he didn’t know what else to do with him — at least that’s what he told the press. For the record, it seems that he dressed Ishi in his own clothes, and fed him food that his wife cooked especially so that the Indian wouldn’t die of hunger before he was turned over to the army, which was what the sheriff figured he was bound to do with him.

By midday, the news of the discovery had sped like a burning fuse through the whole area, so that a memorably tumultuous crowd gathered at the jail for a glimpse of the last savage in the United States. Among those that filed past his cell was a San Francisco newspaper correspondent, who dispatched a feverish wire describing the sheriff’s highly extraordinary negotiations between his own impassioned citizens — still nursing wounds from the long-ended Indian wars in that region — and the various owners of vaudeville shows that wanted to buy the Indian and add him to their slate of attractions.

Luckily for Ishi, who would’ve died had the sheriff been less honest or the army faster in coming to seize him and drag him off to a reservation, the story in the San Francisco newspaper was read by a professor. When the man noticed that nobody could understand the Indian’s language, he deduced that Ishi must be a speaker of Yana, a supposedly extinct language for which a friend of his was compiling a glossary.

The professor caught the first train to Oroville and, armed with his colleague’s notes about the Yahis’ language, went and rescued Ishi. Once back in San Francisco, he realized that, while saving the Indian, he hadn’t considered the problem of where to lodge him. So, although his own brand of logic seems even crazier than either Ishi’s or the sheriff’s, he obeyed what it whispered in his ear and brought him to the Museum of Anthropology.

In the days following these events, there was some discussion about what to do with Ishi, but finally everyone agreed that the best place for the last surviving aborigine in the United States was, ultimately, a museum. Ishi spent the rest of his life there, much more comfortable and seemingly more satisfied than if he had been out in the woods. At first he lived in the guest rooms, then in the staff quarters, and at last in the sunniest of the exhibition rooms. There they set up a bed for him so that he could die from tuberculosis in peace and comfort three years after surrendering to white people.

It’s probably true that this story’s power is located simply in the events themselves; trying to articulate its meaning always ends up making it seem like cheap sentiment, or, worse yet, a parable of virtuous political intentions; the lowest sort of affectation, guaranteed. To spin metaphors out of a story that means something on its own terms is like being in love with love: however powerful it might seem at first, it always turns out badly.

Whichever way you want to read it, the story of the man who earned his living as a museum piece always seemed fascinating and revealing to me, mostly due to the fact that, despite everything, despite all the good and seemingly honest friends he made among the community of doctors and anthropologists who studied him, the Indian never wanted to tell them his real name. Until the last day of his life he always asked them to call him Ishi, which in Yana means “Man”: apparently, when one is the last surviving example of something, the name of the species suffices.

I’m increasingly convinced that the problem with Ishi’s story is one of literalness: it means what it means and not what I want it to mean.

Three years ago, when I was still living in Washington, D.C. and had just turned thirty, I decided to take a Sunday off from the hellish move I was making to Boston, where I now live. It’s not that I was nostalgic, exactly, about quitting the nation’s capital; I’d spent some good years there but the last ones had been pretty depressing. I simply felt like saying good-bye to the city where I’d finished growing up, in which my ex-wife and children were going to stay with the vague promise that the four of us would live together again once our jobs permitted it, and that this time things would work out. During a pathetic evening out on the town — a sham of everything that we’d lost — we went to have dinner at our favorite restaurant and afterward to a place with a patio and French pretensions, which at that time served the best coffee in D.C.

We were eating cheesecake for dessert, each of us concentrating on playing our assigned role, when along came a redhead, striding between the tables with the self-assurance of an avenging angel. She was wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the word Redhead. When I saw her, I felt sure that such literalness could infect the world with the same type of metaphysical disequilibrium that dominates some novels by Eça de Queiroz: each time that redhead puts on that T-shirt which says Redhead, I told my ex-wife, an Indian in Mexico dies. I think she got my joke, or got it well enough, because on the last trip I made to Mexico, I’d brought back a T-shirt as a gag gift, which read: Eres un pendejo, “You’re an idiot.” Below that, in parentheses: (You are my friend).

Of course, I don’t really believe that a Mexican Indian dies each time the redhead wears her Redhead T-shirt, but it does seem to me that such literalness can end up being noxious, although I’m not quite sure for what.

Or maybe I do: noxious for oneself. I know from experience that the literal can be really bad luck. Not long after having made such a snide remark about that idiot (friend) in the T-shirt in that D.C. café, I went to give a series of readings in Berlin. I’ve suffered some memorable disasters thanks to these types of event: for one reason or another, some kind of weirdo always decides to attend the talk you’re giving, no matter how boring or unbearable the topic. If fame is what you’re after, reading a story or an excerpt from a novel in public is usually a lesson in why one shouldn’t be a writer.

Berlin consisted of three public appearances. The first was a roundtable on some of those open-vein themes that help Europeans and gringos of good conscience feel really fine about themselves but which make us Latin Americans who are invited to participate feel more like artifacts on display in a compassion museum. There were also two proper literary readings: one was in a theater, with something of an actual audience — it was free, it was raining, and there was wine — and the other was in a café that seemed like it must have been highly fashionable when East Berlin was still communist. The café was called Einstein, to which was added the strange qualifier Under the Lindens.

The name of the place stood out to me the first time I read it listed on my schedule of appearances in the German capital, but it left me with a sense of deep foreboding when, the next morning, while practicing the worst kind of tourism in the neighborhood around the Brandenburg Gate, I found myself right in front of the place. It turned out that its strange “subtitle” came from its indeed being located on a street — similar to La Rambla in Barcelona — called Unter den Linden precisely because it runs beneath some linden trees.

I was born in a city, Mexico City, where there’s an overgrown forest without any wild animals called “Desert of the Lions”; for this reason, the Adamic Teuton imagination, so very humorless, gave me the chills. My nephew, whose name is Jorge Arrieta, summed it up with all the crystal clarity of his eight years during an argument with one of my kids. It was last August and the three of us had gone to my parents’ house for a vacation that turned out to be so unpleasant we had to cut it short: That game, he spat, is about as much fun as playing Call Yourself Jorge Arrieta.

In any event, in that café called Einstein Under the Lindens I had the worst experience that one can have in such cases: it wasn’t a totally empty house; exactly two ticket holders showed up, so that the moderator, the translator, the actor who was going to read my story in German, and I all crowded round a table at the front of an auditorium that felt like the loneliest ship on the seas, inhabited as it was by only a young woman and her mother. Not only did we still have to read, we did the whole roundtable routine — complete with simultaneous translations — because the two women had paid, and in a city where a street that runs under linden trees is called “Under the Lindens,” you deliver the fifty-minute show that you promised.

Ishi never lacked for a public: four days a week he gave a presentation in the reception hall of the museum during which he sang some ritual song, kindled a fire by rubbing two sticks together, and showed the visitors how to fashion bows and arrows with materials brought from the canyons near Oroville. These things were delivered to him there in the museum — despite the anthropologists’ insistence, he didn’t want to return to his homeland. Two other days of the week he spent dusting and mopping all the rooms in the museum, except for one of them containing an exhibit of mummies and funeral offerings that Ishi always refused to enter. On Mondays he would usually head out early to take the streetcar down to the sea.

It wasn’t until the last summer of his life that he agreed, with great reluctance, and perhaps because he felt that he had little time left, to return to the canyons: in August of 1913 he went with his doctor and the museum director to recreate the life in the wild that he had led until the moment he’d surrendered at the slaughterhouse. The three of them spent several wonderful days living naked in the outdoors, eating whatever they could hunt in the forest.

The original idea was to stay there for a whole month, but Ishi insisted that they return to San Francisco; each time that they tried to convince him otherwise, he made it clear that he preferred the comfort of the museum over returning to live in the wilderness. Apparently, it never occurred to anyone to consider that returning to the forest might be depressing for the Indian. During what the doctor calculated to have been his first thirty-three years of life, Ishi hadn’t exactly been living in a rose garden.

The Yahi tribe was the last in the United States to be subjugated: unlike in the cases of the Apache or the Lakota, there was no formal surrender process because the Yahi were exterminated with singular viciousness: if the federal troops discovered them before the bands of trackers that set out from Oroville, they would take them to a reservation, but no white person from the area seemed to consider that punishment enough.

Ishi survived because he had the unheard of luck of not being present during either one of his tribe’s two fatal encounters with the enemy. In the first, the Indian hunters — relatively civilized family men when they were not scouring the hills — happened one afternoon upon the last remaining Yahi camp in the canyons. The tribe had already been devastated by five years of war and persecution — and the hunters waited patiently for daybreak to be able to fire on them from the hilltops. Ishi had gone to the forest with his grandmother who, it seems, was the tribe’s shaman, and they had spent the night there so the evening dew might bless the roots they had gathered. Upon returning, they found the camp destroyed. It took them some time to locate the rest of the tribe, who were left almost without any men: the women and the children had taken cover in the gullies while the braves sacrificed themselves to the ranchers’ gunfire. From their refuge in the mountains, the surviving Yahis went foraging and hunting by night.

One day, a band of white men, aware that some of the enemy had escaped them, found a trail of deer blood under the trees — which in all likelihood were lindens. They followed it and had no problem discovering the Yahis’ hiding place. According to a superbly written account by one of the hunters, the situation was ideal: having occupied the mouth of a dead-end cave, none of the Indians was able to escape. In one of the tale’s most shocking passages, the California gentleman relates that at one point during the massacre he decided to use his revolver because it made for a cleaner job: babies, he quickly learned, explode when you shoot them with a rifle.

I only found out that part of Ishi’s story later on — a part that he never knew well, or never with the same detail I now know it — in a book of chronicles from the period at my university’s library. For his part, he simply returned with his mother and his sister from the creek and found that, for the second time, they had to start burying their dead. Although he never spoke directly about that day, he alluded more than once to the terrible task of having to bury all of his people.

By the time I read that account I’d already tried five or six times, without the least success, to write a story about Ishi, and it always turned out to be too political: deadly literal with all its meanings exposed, or not all of them but definitely those that interested me least. What seduces me about Ishi is not his tragic condition and how clearly that reflects the fact that the American continent is the booming utopia of a gang of criminals, but the unimaginable loneliness of one who knows himself to be the last of something, for which no hope remains.

The version that I wrote at that time was the worst of them all, because by then I was loaded down with other humiliations, and consumed, as a result, with the sort of moral outrage that makes us find certain forms of hypocrisy preferable to others. That version of the story was called “Taking Democracy to California.” The title alone is bad enough.

There is another story, a very good one, by Bernardo Atxaga, who tells how one day, walking through a town in his native region of the Basque Country, he suddenly found himself facing an old man outside a door with a hole in it. They spoke a little bit and at last the old man asked him if he knew why there was a hole in the door. Atxaga says that he answered that it must be for the cat. No, the man told him, it was made years ago so they could feed a little boy who turned into a dog after being bitten by one.

The stories that I like, the ones that make me jealous and fill me with a wild desire to write ones just like them, have the same dazzling logic as the old Basque man; there’s a piece missing, and that gap transforms them into myth. They appeal to the lowest common denominator, which makes us all more or less the same.

If a dog bites a little boy and gives him rabies, the illusion of a universal rule of cause and effect is maintained; order exists, for which reason there are categories. If, on the other hand, the boy turns into a dog, the world is uncontrollable — like our affections, our inability to live up to our own standards, and our undeserved misfortunes, which is to say, almost all of them. Atxaga’s friendly old man would never wear a T-shirt that said Old Man; his words alone suffice, for the same reason that when writing literature or making movies, the best stories are love stories that go wrong: they’re preloaded with everything required for A to lead to B and from there to little children, but something gets fucked up without anyone knowing what happened, exactly, and so A leads to the cliffs of W and the S curve of suicide.

In spite of the fact that he lived almost his entire life in the most acute loneliness, Ishi always resisted the temptation of killing himself — but the silence of a museum is even worse than that of an unpromising professor’s apartment, so that reading about a solitude like Ishi’s, which couldn’t even derive any pleasure from the chic touch of being self-inflicted, makes me feel something similar to what I was made to feel by reading about the solitude of the boy who turned into a dog. It fills me with the hope that someday the futures that slip through my fingers like marbles will seem like a mythology.

Ishi’s third and final misadventure with white people before surrendering at the slaughterhouse in Oroville was the definitive one. Several months went by before he gave himself up, and it reflects what was going to be his final destiny: the lean-to in which he lived with his mother and his sister was discovered by a group of geology professors accompanying a mining expedition. Although they never met face to face, the disorder that the scientists left behind in their camp was sufficient to make the Indians decide to escape to save what remained of their skins. They scattered. Ishi never again saw either his sister or his mother, who probably died a terrible death during their flight, but who surely left this world with the epic aplomb of those who endure without surrender.

Ishi gave himself up because he was trying to find something to eat, thinking perhaps that if he was going to die one way or other, it was better to do so with a full stomach. Having made that decision paints him as weak, and for those of us who have tried to tell his story it brings us very close to the abyss of literalness. Being the last survivor of an entire world, who also happens to live in a museum, is meaning itself: there are no missing pieces, and without mystery there is no mythology.

It’s for that reason, I believe, it is better to imagine him in the days when, instead of being an Indian in a glass display case, he was only the densest of the museum’s custodians. One must think of him resigned to be the last of something, and thus mopping the hallways in a state of holy calm.

A few months after Ishi arrived in San Francisco, the problem arose that, because of museum regulations, he couldn’t live in the guest rooms forever. So they decided to make him a maintenance worker and pay him a salary so that he could live with the staff. To everyone’s surprise, he didn’t understand that it was all about solving the problem of his being the last of something and there being nowhere to keep him. The next day he put on some worker’s coveralls and asked for a bucket.

He used almost no money, except for buying a few things to eat, always simple: honey, corn meal, squash, apples, coffee: he was a very small man and notoriously frugal. He also spent some money taking the trolley car from Golden Gate Park out to see the ocean. He spent all his days off there: the sea is the place where we forgive ourselves for the marbles that slipped through our fingers without our understanding why. The rest of his wages he saved up in the safe at the museum: he kept the money in some boxes for medicine ampules that his doctor gave him, each of which had the exact size, shape, and width to snugly hold ten silver-dollar coins. At the end of his life he became fond of staring at them: he would ask the director to open the safe for him; he would set his boxes of dollars on a table and spend the afternoon looking at them, without ever saying anything or taking the coins out. As if they were something else.

If one is the last of something, his hoardings are not savings, but the balance of an entire universe: we find it there, in Ishi’s untellable story, when the bitten boy turns into a dog, the forest is called “Desert,” and the redheaded girl wears a T-shirt that doesn’t say pendeja.

Sometimes writing is a job: obliquely tracing the path of certain ideas that seem indispensable to us, that we have to set down. But other times it’s a question of conceding what remains, accepting the museum and contemplating the balance while awaiting death, asking forgiveness of the sea for whatever was fucked up. Placing our little boxes on the table and knowing that what came to an end was also the whole universe.