A Strange Country Read online

  Its irregular edges gave birth to a consistency of light that was striking and powerful. The creator had preserved the rough texture of the earth from which it was made, but the shape was extremely elegant. The sides were straight and tall, without tapering, nor were they regular, but sculpted with a jagged surface, slightly flatter where the lips would be placed. Touches of dull silver here and there conferred a patina of time, although, goodness knows how, it was clear to all that the bowl had been fashioned the day before. If someone had asked Alejandro and Jesús what they were seeing, they would’ve replied, a simple earthenware bowl, although they were conscious of the fact that they were gazing at the work of time, and not only the work itself but also the simplicity of feelings it commanded. What sort of art is this which incorporates the imperfection of wear and urges us to be modest and pure? wondered Alejandro. Beauty is caught in the trap of a voluntary erosion where we can contemplate our entire existence, to such a degree that all that is left to do is live on effacement, earth, and tea.

  “I saw this bowl in a dream a long time ago,” said Maria. “That very bowl, precisely.”

  “For as long as the pavilion can remember, the writing of the poem has been followed by the appearance of a bowl,” said Petrus. “They are all splendid but this one has something more that thrills the heart.”

  Tagore took it to each guest in succession. When it was Alejandro’s turn to drink from it, he thought he could feel the softness of Clara’s lips where she’d placed them before him, and he welcomed the faint, sweet taste of the tea on his tongue.

  The guardian went back to his place.

  They waited in silence.

  Life was flowing. Life was drifting. Life was expanding, about to burst its banks. What were those lights in the forest? The world had changed and they could no longer see a thing. Inside them, the river was swelling, heavy with jewels. Were these pale flowers? Stars upon the surface of the dark waters?

  Then the water flowed over the dark banks and, in a stormburst, Alejandro and Jesús discovered the world of the mists.

  In this mourning

  Liquid soul

  I sleep enclosed in clouds

  To the living the harvests to the dead the storms

  Then everything shall be empty and full of wonder

  Book of Prayers

  OTHER

  Every major story is the story of a man or a woman who leaves behind the distress of the self to embrace the dizziness of the other.

  For this journey, one needs the song of the dead, the mercy of poetry, and the knowledge of the four Books.

  The Book of Prayers.

  The Book of Battles.

  The Book of Paintings.

  And the fourth Book which, at this point in the story, we cannot yet name for fear it might be misunderstood.

  This is the story of a few souls who, in war, knew the peace of encounter.

  WRITINGS

  The world of the mists had several languages. The elves communicated among themselves through the modulations of streams and breezes, and those who had stayed at the pavilion in Nanzen could speak every language on earth. For a long time, they did not have writing, but when the desire came to them, they chose one form of writing in particular.

  There were two reasons for this.

  The first had to do with a human country where people wrote that way. Like the land of elves, it was surrounded by an emptiness of turbulent seas lost in fog, and it reflected the theory of the ancient poet who said that the land of the living was merely an island surrounded by mist or by the waters of a great dream.

  The second reason was more essential: not only was this writing beautiful, but in it one could admire the flight of dragonflies and the grace of wild grasses, the nobility of drawings in ash and the great whirlwinds of storms.

  Hence, one can understand why we were tempted to leave some writing upon the silk in Nanzen, since beauty, nature, and dreams are, if not our exclusive preserve, at least our daily bread.

  WHAT WE ARE LOOKING AT

  The territory of the elves unfolded before their inner gaze. Just as the perfume of the empty cup had opened the doors of the past to Alejandro and Jesús, the tea had transformed their mental space, and they were partaking of a vision that did not belong to them, but which caused the landscapes of the mists to parade through their minds with fresh new colors.

  “There is someone in my head,” murmured Jesús.

  The sky was blue or golden, the foliage was bursting with green and tawny colors, mingled with touches of orange and purple; the bowl had taken on a gray patina enhanced with veins of old copper—this renewal filled Alejandro and Jesús with joy, as well as an unexpected nostalgia for the black sky and white trees.

  “Once someone has seen the structure of beauty they can never look at things in the same way again,” said Sandro. “I still wonder whether it sharpens your vision or burns your eyes.”

  “Where have these visions come from?” asked Jesús. “I feel as if I am simultaneously here and there.”

  “From the tea and the good offices of the guardian,” answered Hostus, “who has the power to see what is far from him and to share that vision with us. We are together here and with him there. We can look at what is before us and inside us at the same time.”

  “Until now, the Guardians of the Pavilion came to us from the two high families, the wild boars and the hares, who are more powerful in contemplation and in prescience,” said Solon. “The lower houses of squirrels and bears, however, are more lively and agile in action.”

  “So squirrels and bears fight better than the others?” asked Jesús, looking at Tagore, who had closed his eyes and did not seem to hear them.

  “Not at all,” said Petrus, “wild boars and hares are great warriors. But they’re not great when it comes to their sentimentality, and with them, the urge to fight comes from reasoning, whereas with the squirrels it springs from the enthusiasm in their hearts.”

  “If they’re not busy drinking,” said Marcus.

  “Along with the bears,” added Petrus.

  And to Alejandro:

  “The high-elves are the aristocracy of this world, but it doesn’t mean the same thing as in your world. I was a sweeper for much of my life and I am as highly respected as a guardian of the pavilion.”

  “Sweeper?” said Jesús.

  “Moss sweeper,” said Petrus.

  “What makes an aristocrat, then?” asked Jesús.

  “He is responsible for others,” answered Solon. “He shoulders the burdens of the community. Having said that, history has shown that certain squirrels have more spirit than all the hares put together, and that they can shoulder burdens that would crush many a wild boar.”

  “Is it possible to see any place in the universe from here?” asked Alejandro.

  “Any place at all,” replied Solon. “And if you would kindly take a look at what Tagore is about to show you, I will try and tell you the history of the mists.”

  “Then, perhaps we could find out what role we have to play in it,” said Jesús.

  They all fell silent as yet another landscape unfolded in their minds.

  “Katsura,” said the Head of the Council.

  Until that moment, trees and mist had succeeded one another with monotonous grace. Now the guardian’s guests could intermittently glimpse wooden pavilions, the outline of high mountains, or even the contours of strange gardens. Then the vision broke through the fog and slowly came to rest at the foot of Katsura. It was a large city surrounded by peaks, with low dwellings set in terraced rows on what should have been the slope of a hill—however, despite their efforts to make what they were seeing conform with what they knew, they were compelled to face facts: Katsura, the capital of the elves, the chief town of the province of Snows, backed onto a void, clung to a flank of mist the way other cities cling to a
mountainside. As far as the eye could see, there was a similar magic of landscape and buildings poised upon layers of vapor. The world was afloat on an ethereal gauze and the vast city shone forth, even perched on a void. Never had human eyes gazed upon a more admirable panorama, for the wooden structures bathed in mist were humble and perfect, as in Nanzen, and floated between the sky and the light mists in a sanctuary of mystery and cloud. And also as in Nanzen, verandas ran around the gray-tiled houses, some of them tiny, others more vast and similar to temples. One in particular was striking. In front, there was a great rectangular courtyard covered in snow and planted with trees, their dark branches sprinkled with snowflakes as if at random. On these wintry boughs, twisted and knotty like those of old fruit trees, delicate flowers had bloomed, pink or red around their light stamens, with round petals braided with scarlet and white. And so, the blood of the corollas, the dark wood, the glistening of the snow: the fine season and the cold one sharing their love on the austere, bare branches, made these claw-shaped branches somehow necessary, so that one’s gaze, all along—leaving the heart to endure its ecstasy—could pick the flower that had emerged from winter. A gust came to die in the enclosed courtyard and the petals, strained, seemed to swoon. Then, as they rose again in a graceful arabesque, the wind transformed the air into a brush and gave the scene a brilliance and disposition that supplanted all preceding scenes by way of beauty.

  “What are those flowers that bloom in the snow?” asked Alejandro.

  “Plum trees flowers,” replied Clara. “An essence that yields no fruit, only perfume in winter.”

  “The headquarters of the Council of Mists,” said Petrus, pointing to the building with the rectangular courtyard. “It also houses a large library where I used to work as a sweeper. There is lovely moss beneath the snow, and sand walkways that are cleared daily of dead leaves.”

  “What do sweepers do in winter?” asked Jesús.

  “They read,” said Solon. “But that part of the story is for later.”

  Alejandro focused on the vast valley beyond the city. Now and again, stolen from a patch of mist, a handful of gray roofs could be seen hanging on the line of sky. Everywhere there was the same snow, the same purple flowers on barren branches, the same swaths of steep mountain—and from one summit to the next, one tile to the next, one flower to the next, a painting was created the color of the first Nanzen, a play of ink and blood between darkness and light. Everything floated, the mist coiled upon itself, and the world sparkled in successive facets.

  “Sometimes the mist decides to cover the universe, with the exception of a single bare branch,” said Petrus. “Sometimes it contracts and we see the greatest possible proportion of things. But we never encompass all of them.”

  “Everything rests on a void,” murmured Jesús.

  “There are islands of land suspended in the mist,” said Solon.

  Hostus brought the bowl to each of the guests for a second time. Alejandro was surprised by the new taste of the tea, strong and pungent, with the hint of an unknown spice against the perfume of a white flower.

  “Our tea opens and develops like wine,” said Petrus. “There are vintages and cellars for aging. The one you are drinking today is over two centuries old. With each sip, you move forward in time, in the secret of stones, in the life of the earth.”

  Alejandro looked at the light cloth where, earlier, the poem had been written, and it seemed to him that the writing had changed. Some characters looked like human figures, others like trees or even flowers, and he was beginning to get used to their strange shapes, to make out the gist of the meaning—but his hunches were fleeting and slipped away the moment he thought he was about to grasp them.

  It came stealthily, like a rustling of cloth or a ray of light. Was it around them? Was it inside them? A moment ago, they had been alone, now there were a multitude of them. When he used to haunt his cemetery, the young Alejandro heard the voices of the dead in an echo that seemed to come from the depths of the earth, but this time presences seemed to emerge from the mist in a way that is hard to describe, for humans are strangers to the community of the spirit, to the impalpable ties of those who, although they may not have their own body, do at least know the union of consciousness. Every existence in these lands acted in accordance with the mist, lives which, although they did not speak or appear to each other, could sense one another through osmosis.

  “The mist is alive,” said Jesús with a sigh.

  “Let’s just say it is the breath which brings the living together,” said Petrus.

  “It is by regulating the harmony of the mists from the pavilion that we assure the continuity of our world,” added Solon.

  “I thought natural phenomena were self-regulating,” said Jesús.

  “Our existence rests on an inhabited void, an osmotic medium we must alter so that it will answer the needs of our community. The mists are the web of eternity, and however slow our evolution might seem to humans, we live in time. And so, we transform the mists thanks to the properties of our tea, the power of temporal alteration without which the mists would ignore us. We drink our tea and the mists obey, the mists listen and we are together.”

  “How do the mists listen to you?” Alejandro asked.

  “The guardian greets the mist and retransmits its message to the community,” answered Solon. “The tea grants him this power to welcome and, in return, informs the mist of the elves’ needs.”

  “He greets the mist?” asked Alejandro. “I thought you altered it.”

  “Welcoming is already a way of altering,” said Solon, “it is even the highest possible level of altering reality. Few of us, however, are capable of this, to the level the mists require, and it is not by chance that the most powerful guardian the elves have ever had came to power during this era of total war. Without Tagore’s empathy, I think we would already have foundered.”

  “Without his empathy for the mists?” asked Alejandro.

  “His empathy for the whole, of which we are a fragment,” said Solon. “Everything is connected, everything is attuned.”

  “Not everything is transformed into its opposite,” said Alejandro. “Human beings do not become rocks.”

  “No,” said Solon. “But they can hear the sorrow of stones.”

  On seeing that Alejandro, disconcerted, had fallen silent:

  “Those who cannot hear the sorrow of the world cannot know themselves in their own sorrow.”

  “In that case, I wonder what your opinion of humans might be,” said Alejandro.

  “Most of you do not hear stones, or trees, or animals—our brothers, although they live in us elves the way we live in them,” said Solon. “You see nature as the environment you share with other beings; for our kind, it is the principle that makes them exist—not only them, but everything that has been and that shall be.”

  The effect of the second sip of tea was making the presence of the elves more intense. For Alejandro and Jesús a thousand impressions were leading to a cacophony of images—they experienced the sensation of a vertiginous plunge into a valley of trees, and they realized they were leaping from treetop to treetop, until they landed on a new branch. Before long, it became a breathless race through a pre-human forest where the light of the sun struggled to enter. Low to the ground, the race lasted a long time in the exhalation of dead leaves, borne on the delight that the sap beneath the bark was also that which flowed in their blood. Suddenly, everything was illuminated and they were above fields of shrubbery with tight foliage, trimmed in vague rows across gigantic expanses. From these undulating stretches of green dunes, where furrows of mist reflected furrows of crops, there came a perfume of the sacred, familiar to Alejandro from cemeteries and battlefields. As they flew for a while over these plantations, the presence of the elves from the community grew ever more intense. They are never alone, thought Alejandro—it was as if he could feel every one of
these foreign sentient beings without having met a single one, and deep in his chest he felt the piercing of a stake, both familiar and strange.

  “These are the Inari tea plantations,” said Clara.

  He looked at her and the stake caused his heart to bleed.

  “That is what the presence of those who do not suffer from solitude does to those who are alone,” she said. “The tea plantations carry the presence of the community.”

  “So tea is a sort of telepathic elixir?” asked Jesús.

  “There are two ways to drink tea,” said Petrus. “The ordinary method of each elf, which connects us to one another and keeps our bonds alive. And the extraordinary method, which takes place in the pavilion. It’s the same tea, but Nanzen grants it other powers.”

  Tagore’s vision changed and they saw a lagoon, above which the mist delineated a channel. Propelled by some invisible force, barges without sails drifted slowly across the lagoon, making their way between walls of fog that rose like high banks of clouds, and moved forward along the weave of the mists.

  “Circulation between the major islands is one of those powers,” said Petrus. “When the channel opens, the mist turns liquid and it is possible to sail there, like on a river. In peacetime, there are locks of mist that open and close at set times, but the Guardian of the Pavilion can change them as he sees fit. One of the great battles of this war has been over these shipping lanes. We have to intervene continuously regarding the configuration of passages, in order to bar the way to the enemy.”

  “I can’t see any oarsmen or sails,” said Jesús.

  “Everything in our world is propelled by intention and vision,” answered Petrus. “Through the tea, the guardian and his assistants visualize the destination, and transmit it to the boatmen.”