A Strange Country Read online

  The spectacle shifted yet again, and the slow procession of ships vanished, to be replaced by a peculiar garden. Can we even refer to it as such, something that contains neither flowers, nor trees, nor earth? Devoid of the charm of verdancy, it was an enclosure consisting entirely of stones and sand. On a flat expanse furrowed with parallel lines, a few rocks of varying shapes and sizes formed isolated summits in the sea. On the horizon of the shore other rocks rose in a miniature range of peaks, sculpted by the powers of earth and time. Everything was motionless, but the sound of the surf could be heard; everything was inanimate, but one sensed that the landscape was alive. I cannot imagine a more peaceful spot, thought Alejandro, and he felt a sense of relief that eased the lacerating pain of the stake. He turned to Jesús; stunned, he saw a tear flowing down his major’s cheek.

  “The stones are liquid,” said Jesús, almost beseechingly.

  “What do you mean?” said Alejandro, failing to understand.

  He looked closely at the stones and suddenly he saw it, too. A few tongues of mist billowed over the garden, and wherever they had been, the rocks had turned liquid: they preserved their form by passing from solid granite to a quicksilver lava. All around, the sand was becoming a lake, shot through with the sparkling of gems before it returned to its hard mineral surface—thus, the sand and the stones not only represented the water and the mountains, but also incarnated the solidarity of states of matter, and Jesús Rocamora, gazing at the scene, was taken back to his early life.

  “We are a world of incessant metamorphoses,” said Solon. “We are transformed into horses and animals of the earth and sky but, in the past, beyond the three essences, we were every species at once.”

  “Vapor turns solid, rock turns liquid, and you will also see plant life becoming fire,” said Petrus. “This is only possible because we live at the heart of the mists.”

  “What is this garden called?” asked Jesús.

  “The garden of heaven,” answered Petrus.

  “Heaven,” murmured Jesús.

  Another tear trickled down his cheek.

  “In heaven, then, everything is changed into its opposite,” he said.

  “The opposite is still the same, but in its extreme form, for everything proceeds from one and the same matter, with multiple facets,” said Solon.

  The garden of stones disappeared and an indistinct shape appeared on the horizon, perhaps a terraced city or a high cloudbank—what are we looking at, wondered Alejandro. But they went closer and it was indeed a city of wooden houses, surrounded by undulating fields where more tea was growing, although the plants did not undulate as gently as in Inari, and the leaves were colored gray, and cold.

  “Ryoan, the city of the enemy, surrounded by its plantations of gray tea,” said Petrus.

  It was as vast as Katsura, with the same buildings surrounded with verandas, the same tiled gray roofs, the same trees with red flowers. There was the same beauty in the snow, the same encounter of seasons on the hospitable dark branches but, despite this, it was a horrible sight.

  “There aren’t any mists,” whispered Jesús.

  “There are no longer any mists,” Solon corrected him. “They were once the most beautiful on earth and I don’t know a single one of us who wouldn’t have given his life for such glory. But Ryoan was crushed by the enemy and now you see the sad result. Everything has become rigid, the void is being filled, we are losing our life force and our connections, we cannot breathe and the community is disintegrating.”

  They stood for a moment facing the fallen city, picturing its erstwhile splendor, while once again, Alejandro felt his life spin upside down. The discipline he’d imposed upon himself in order to speak for his dead on the battlefield, his enduring solitude in spite of friendship, his castillo crippled with murder and poetry, the war and its abject processions—in the end, everything was being borne along on the flow of an unknown river that released an uninterrupted outpouring of debris inside him. If the sobriety of ink and whiteness in Nanzen seemed familiar, and if the humility of the earthenware bowl had transported him, it was because they’d made the bare structure of his life visible to him; and so, through the magic of feeling the impalpable presence of the tribe of elves all around him, the inhabited mists had offered him the pathway to the other—when he went deep inside himself and accepted his own destitution, he received in return the sweet delight of the encounter. Was it the presence of the elves that served as a balm and healed his grieving heart, or was it that his love for Clara had opened him to the possibility of receiving? I ask the question, but it hardly matters, for great power is a chimera inside us that either elevates us or kills us, since living is nothing more than being able to forge ahead in life by telling oneself the right story. The presence of the community of elves was, to Alejandro, a stronger remedy than the sufferings of the past, and Clara’s smile completed the transfiguration. The stake was plucked from his heart and borne away on the waters of the river.

  Jesús, too, gazed at the enemy city. With the strength of the mist, his faith had taken on a new dimension. The fact that the mist brought the breath that turned the stones to water made it the messenger of his redemption. The liquid rocks could change dishonor into honor, betrayal into a gift, and damnation into salvation, while this alchemy required the barrenness of the void. Moreover, we know that Major Rocamora, although he was not a man of words, was nevertheless a soul whose behavior could be affected by three lines of verse, and we weren’t surprised that he was open to the grace of moving stones. Might I add, as I have an undeniable affection for these men, that the young General de Yepes and the young Major Rocamora, driven by their renewed hope that suffering might be transformed into fervor, had just ventured onto a path rarely used by humans. It has been marked out by the breathing of the void, which removes the mess that burdens us—however, we must not simply feel it in ourselves, but also discover it all around us, in the erasures in which true beauty is born, through the unique branch of a world engulfed in fog or through an earthenware bowl more spare than the trees in winter.

  “What does the new poem say?” Alejandro asked Clara.

  “I cannot read their language,” she said, looking at the light cloth.

  “The last alliance,” said Petrus, who had turned toward the wall where the ink inscriptions were glowing faintly.

  After a pause, he added:

  “Separation is an illness, union is our way of life and our only chance. That is why we are founding our wager regarding this war upon new alliances.”

  He gave Solon a questioning look.

  “We will speak of the prophecy later,” said the Head of the Council.

  Petrus remained silent and Alejandro said:

  “So you are doomed to drink tea until your last breath.”

  The elf gave out a long sigh.

  “That is the entire question of this war,” he replied. “You have seen the color of the tea plantations around Ryoan. That ash gray comes from a noble rot which is eating at the leaves through an entirely natural process. All it will take is one degree more of humidity and a fungus will develop on the tea plants. You have something similar with wine, do you not, and it yields magnificent vintages? Simply, here, the consequences are fatal, and it is unfortunate that we did not realize this earlier. But this blindness, like all the rest, is due to the powers of gray tea.”

  “Fatal?” said Alejandro. “Everything we have seen of the tea up to now is that it makes drunkards sober and opens the door to humans to enter this world.”

  “Those are simply a few pleasant side effects,” said Solon. “It is because of the power of gray tea that the enemy built his bridge and his pavilion and kept them invisible for a long time.”

  Tagore’s vision rose in altitude and they discovered Ryoan’s bridge and pavilion on the other side of the city. The construction was similar to the ones in Nanzen, except that the wo
od had been coated in gold leaf. The arch had the same curve and the same elegance as the red bridge, the pavilion had the same appearance of chaotic openings and immemorial verandas, but there was no more mist to be seen there than in the town of Ryoan itself, and everyone gazing upon this gilded splendor was cloaked in a feeling of deepest dissonance.

  “The bridge can be crossed thanks to the power of the gray tea,” said Petrus. “It is thanks to the tea that Aelius is conducting his war and accelerating the decline of the mist he claims to be saving. You will note that the enemy’s strength resides in a substance that is easier to produce than any weapon on earth.”

  There was a moment’s silence.

  “That is why we have made a radical decision,” said Solon.

  The images vanished. Tagore opened his eyes and Alejandro felt a pang of anguish. Without knowing why, he recalled the words Jesús had uttered long before, the evening after the battle when they sat conversing on the shady little plateau. The best strategist, he had said, will be the one who looks death in the eye and sees what he must not be afraid of losing.

  Tagore nodded his head.

  “We will destroy the tea plantations,” he said. “All of them, down to the last one, at dawn on the coming day.”

  Who knows what we are looking at

  The Book of Paintings

  TEA

  Though elves loved poetry, they didn’t make up stories. Those who are on good terms with the world have little need of works of the imagination, particularly as the tea served the same purpose as wine and human fiction—that of rooting the community in its earth and in the spirit of its members.

  Can one conceive of a life without fables, or novels, or legends? One would have to endure, relentlessly, the burden of being oneself; there is no distance between consciousness and dreams, no way to escape from the naked truth; but in return, how great the ecstasy of living in the intimate glory of things.

  However, when the elves began to notice the decline of their world, this gave rise to renewed resolution. That is surely how the temptation of Ryoan was born, whereas others came to think that an alliance between tea and wine could perhaps save them from disaster.

  VOID

  It is said that everything came into being from the void, the day a paintbrush traced a line separating earth and sky.

  Poetry is the proper balance of earth, void, and sky; murder comes into being when it is forgotten.

  One must travel light, said the ancient poet. Humans are weighed down with so many burdens! The mists of Nanzen could be so beneficial to them!

  GENESIS

  1800–1938

  PREAMBLE

  The practice of storytelling is a strange thing. The day before the great battle of this time, in the sixth year of the deadliest war ever endured by humans and elves, at a turning point between epochs, the likes of which only two have ever existed in the history of the humans of the West, I must take a shortcut in order to continue the tale. Just as the earth never appears so vast as after the tide, stories and fables require the ebb and flow of the seas—and so, just as the waters are changing, a simple shell is revealed which on its own knows how to embrace the entire cosmos. It is our eyes, our ears, our feelings and our knowledge, and it is to that shell that we must turn for light in the darkness.

  Here it is, then, slightly less than a century and a half ago: our lonely shell at the moment when the great tide of kingdoms is ebbing.

  TO THE LIVING

  1800

  There were not many elves as modest in appearance as Petrus, nor many destinies as brilliant as his. In fact, it seemed at the outset his fate was to remain as obscure as the woods and the good family of squirrels into which he was born. The Deep Woods, to the east of Katsura, were a region of mountains and forests inhabited by terraces of thorny pine trees, whose branches reached skyward from their twisted trunks, to form a sort of parasol, so elegant you could weep. Nature had created them in great number, then planted them one by one in the rocky surface, choosing each location as if it were the setting for a jewel. Then the entire scene was cloaked in mist, and as it emerged from the void it revealed a landscape of peaks crowned with pine trees that seemed to be writing upon the sky. The Deep Woods were highly valued by the community of elves and, bathed in the majesty of high-altitude fog, they went there to admire the rising and setting of a sun that glorified every branch and every engraving of foliage. From one summit to the next the elves proclaimed the beauty of the sight, and Petrus grew up with these dawns and twilights that rustled with sounds and poetry. The ridges stretched beyond space, against a golden backdrop sketched with the curve of pines.

  There are many mountains worthy of such moments of wonder, but none can compare to these. Fortune had decreed they would be vertiginously high and narrow, and wherever one looked, the slender mass of summits bathed in an ocean of clouds. At times, the trees, set on a single salient peak, were as delicate as lace in the great mossy void. At other times, the entire range rose above the cloudbank and offered up its succession of peaks. But what ultimately enthralled one’s vision was not the unending succession of undulating summits, but the fact that they overlooked a vaporous mass that seemed to give birth to each slope before leaving it with the kiss of a pine tree. Once lost in the sight, where the mystery of creation seemed to have found refuge, it was to encounter simply one’s own self; as if one were a mountain in a storm that turned the world on its head then restored it to the hollow of its own consciousness; and this was what the elves of every province came to seek in the Deep Woods, traveling great distances to stand in the morning to face the mystery above them. Later they would recall the hard rock, which was smooth and affable in places and sharp as a blade in others, and again they would see the landscape of the Deep Woods, the velvet mists, and the beauty of the mountain range, as if it were their own internal landscape.

  Quite logically, the province was largely inhabited by elves that were also squirrels, bears, and eagles, who feared neither the steep crags nor the dizzying heights. The villages seemed to have been transported through the ether before being deposited on their high plateaus; and then all was hidden, revealed, and so on, to infinity. And so, everything that was true for the world of elves in general was true here a hundredfold, given the fact that these colossal spires reaching for the sky reserved for the mists valleys that were no less colossal, gigantic expanses where the hand of the elf could not be seen. From Mount Hiei,2 all you could see on the horizon were three needles floating on the magma until, suddenly, ten more broke through the surface, and you felt reborn. The mountains, rising out of nothing, hovered suspended over this absence; through the force of the void, spirit and rock sketched a pas de deux on the summit of existence before turning back to the original nothingness; and these games of hide and seek, of incessant birth and dying, gave the mountain in return the shape of consciousness that it had lacked until then.

  It was in such a land that Petrus—who was not yet called Petrus—was born and grew up. He retained a sincere affection for the realms of mountains and the poems of dawn. Lulled by the affection of his family and the favor of the great mists, his first decades were filled with enchantment and love. Far from the sound and fury of the rest of creation, the squirrel elves made up a peace-loving house. They didn’t write poetry, but they gladly partook of the poetry of others and, although they thrilled to the speed of flight, they could remain motionless for long stretches of time. While they were frugal in nature, they knew how to entertain extravagantly, and even though they were far away from Katsura, they were never the last to reply to a summons from the Council. The surrounding landscape described them as well: as obscure as their woods and as noble as their mountains, they wandered in peace there, among treetops and cliffs, and didn’t suffer from either metaphysical dilemmas or from any longing for unknown horizons.

  Despite the idyllic landscape, Petrus’s youth had been quite turbule
nt. Among his numerous relations he was unique because, ordinarily, all elves are identical: their human form is handsome and dignified, their horse is noble and thoroughbred, their third animal is ideally proportioned, but here we must face facts: our hero doesn’t correspond to the norm of the species. Shorter than his brothers, he also had more padding, which had grown, by adolescence, into a little belly, the likes of which had never been seen on any local lads, and, year after year, he grew chubbier, and the fine features of his kin melted into a round mug. It’s true that he had the most remarkable eyes in all the Deep Woods, and his mother had eventually come to believe that Petrus could be summed up by a pair of silver pupils. In reality, it was not only his eyes, but above all his gaze that was so striking, and the contrast between his chubby face and the pensive twinkle of his eyes meant that everyone around him grew irresistibly fond of him, so much so that the only elf in the mists who had a perfectly ordinary appearance had a special gift for arousing the affection of his peers. But others followed him not only because they loved him, but also because they wanted to protect him during those adventures where he oughtn’t go on his own, for fear of losing his life. The mists had never seen a clumsier elf: he had almost lost his tail by getting it caught between two boulders, something which in all the memory of the Deep Woods had never happened, and it had earned him the torment of remaining trapped in his squirrel essence until his appendage was completely healed (and he was forced to nibble hazelnuts which—another oddity of his nature—he only moderately enjoyed, and this added to the pain he felt in his poor crushed tail). It must be said that his rescuers, once the fear that he might be seriously injured had been set aside, had some difficulty in restraining their laughter as they set about moving the boulders. Three days earlier, the same Petrus had almost killed himself, about to take a squirrel leap just as he’d decided to change into a horse, and he’d only been saved thanks to the thick carpet of fresh pine needles, where he landed with a stunning lack of grace. Icing on the cake, for no apparent reason he often tripped over his own tail. To slip on his own tail! For an elf, this was as unthinkable as turning into a cauldron. In short, the patent conclusion to be drawn from all this—even if one couldn’t really understand why—was that Petrus would go from one disaster to the next, but his lucky star would save him, every time.