The Spirit of Science Fiction Read online

  Warmly,

  Jan Schrella

  Before we move on to more important matters, I should talk to you about Dr. Huachofeo. He isn’t an important figure, but he is indispensable. And ornamental. He’s like the coat of paint on a crossbeam. I don’t know if you follow me. A ray of light, a pocket-size Joselito for our pains . . .”

  “Is that a tear in your eye? Young as you are, you remember Joselito, too?”

  “Yes, but never mind that. Instead you should ask me what was in the academy file cabinets.”

  “Go on, then, tell me.”

  “The cabinets were full of the potato lectures that the caretaker broadcast over the radio or delivered personally when there were still students who came to the grain shed. None of the papers had dates. There were no names. Just the courses taught, filed by trimester, several three-year cycles’ worth of them. To judge by the papers, the old caretaker was responsible for the education of several classes of experts on the potato as staple.”

  “I hate potatoes. They’re fattening.”

  “Ask me what books were in the grain shed.”

  “Let’s hear it.”

  “If we exclude the manuals and textbooks, all relating to the world of the potato, we are left with just one: The Paradoxical History of Latin America, by Pedro Huachofeo, B.A. in economics and M.D. in veterinary science, both degrees obtained at the University of Los Ángeles in the province of Bío-Bío. A five-hundred-page tome, lavishly illustrated by the author himself and full of stories, half of which don’t take place in Latin America.”

  “The name sounds familiar.”

  “Huachofeo, I should say, was the pseudonym of a scion of one of the richest landowning families, which disinherited him, of course. He was killed in a raid at a brothel down south.”

  “Ah, always the violence. And the machismo. Why do our intellectuals have to be such creeps when it comes to sex?”

  “You’re wrong. Huachofeo was there to receive a message. His contact didn’t show up, and the poor guy sat for a while talking to a pimp and sipping some tasty house red. Pure bad luck.”

  “Uh-huh. The caretaker was a friend of Huachofeo’s, I suppose.”

  “No—an admirer. Or a student of his work, if you prefer. The caretaker believed that the meanderings and ponderings of The Paradoxical History of Latin America were really signals in code. But let’s leave Dr. Huachofeo in his grave. As you’ll see, there are many coded messages. I’m telling you all this because the soul of the dead author, present in this book—the only nonacademic book read by the caretaker—roamed the academy, along with other ghosts. It was one of the guardian spirits of the academy. And that’s all. That’s the Potato Academy. Where Boris studied.”

  “I’m going to get myself another vodka.”

  “Bring me a tequila or whatever while you’re up.”

  “Wonderful. Now you look happier.”

  The name of the author of “Eros and Thanatos” was José Arco. Before the night was over, we were friends. The kids from the workshop asked me out for coffee, and José Arco came, too. I rode in one of the poets’ cars; he rode behind us—but also beside and sometimes ahead of us—on a black Honda. I was surprised: in those days, more and more motorcycles were turning up in poems, but there weren’t many poets on real motorcycles on real streets; also, as I could see from the car window, he rode in a particular way. Hardly the inscrutable biker, he made his presence known with hand signals and waves and cries, attuned not just to the nocturnal landscape but also, I could have sworn, to the ghosts—half vision and half apparition—that appear behind trees and on cracked sidewalks in the old neighborhoods of Mexico City. Later, when everyone had gone and he and I were still eating and drinking, he confessed that his motorcycle had broken down and that he was actually happy about it, since he was a walker by nature. I asked no questions until we left the bar. The motorcycle, in fact, wouldn’t start, and we decided to leave it parked in front of the house we liked best. Actually, it was he who asked me if I liked the looks of some houses that he pointed out not entirely at random as we pushed the motorcycle along, while at the same time begging me to be honest and not weasel out and choose any old house. The fourth received my nod of approval. This is where Teresa lives, he said with a smile. The street, José Arco, the motorcycle, me—together we formed a strange unit. Our shadows, too dark, stretched to a wizened and nearly leafless oak; from the distance came snatches of a song. I whispered, happy: Who is Teresa?

  “A friend.”

  “Let’s go see her and tell her we’ve left the motorcycle here.”

  “No,” said José Arco, “she’ll realize in the morning, when she wakes up.”

  “Call her on the phone, then.”

  “No, it’s too late, let’s go.”

  It didn’t take a genius to realize that he was in love and that the motorcycle parked in front of the house was some kind of offering. I didn’t say anything, and we walked away. Deep down I was incredibly happy to have chosen the house of the only person he knew in the neighborhood. From where we were in Colonia Coyoacán, it was blocks and blocks to my rooftop room, and there would be plenty of time to talk. At first José Arco wasn’t very communicative, or rather he was semicommunicative: he muttered incomprehensible things, assumed that you knew what he was talking about, had trouble explaining his stories, talked as if desperation and happiness were the same thing, a single territory, the site of his Language Academy and his homeland. And so, little by little, on this walk and later ones, he gave me a summary of his life. We were the same age, twenty-one. He had studied sociology and philosophy and hadn’t gotten a degree in either. An illness, which he didn’t like to talk about, had caused him to drop out of school. He had spent four months in the hospital. One morning a doctor told him that he should have been dead two weeks ago. José Arco said that then he leaned on one elbow and struck the doctor with a right cross, the first time he’d punched anybody. When he went back to school, his friends, who by now were in their second year, explained in some disappointment that all this time they’d thought he was in the mountains with the guerrilla troops of the Party of the Poor. He stuck it out for two days, and then he decided he’d had enough. At the time, he was living in a house in Satélite with his mother and his little brother, Gustavito, a six-foot-tall giant of a kid. I’ll have more to say about his mother later. There’s not much to tell about Gustavito: I think he wanted to study law, and maybe he’s a lawyer by now, though José tried more than once to convince him that he was the great hope of Mexican heavyweights, the avenger of Pulgarcito Ramos, just what Satélite needed to come out swinging and shut down the competition from Tepito and La Bondojito. His brother, benevolent and patient as only a two-hundred-pound adolescent can be, laughed and let him talk. I think José Arco loved his family much more than he let on. (His father is the invisible man in this story.) Then he enrolled in the philosophy department and began to go to class again almost every day. Like so many others, he hung out at film clubs and went to parties thrown by the heroes of the day. He found work as a proofreader at a publishing house and stopped going to class; this time he and the university parted ways permanently. He left home at nineteen, almost twenty, and spent his time rolling around Mexico City dreaming up weird projects, planning swift and meticulous scenes that left him suddenly exhausted, racked, straddling the motorcycle pulled to a halt wherever he happened to be, gripping the handlebars so as not to fall off. Thanks to him, I got to know the dens of San Juan de Letrán, the neighborhoods around Garibaldi where we sold Virgin of Guadalupe lamps on the installment plan, the chop shops of Peralvillo, the dusty rooms of Romero Rubio, the shady photography studios of Avenida Misterios, the hole-in-the-wall eateries behind Tepeyac that we reached by motorcycle as the sun was beginning to rise over the neighborhood, which looked just as cheerful and unsavory to us as we did to the women who served us pozole. Back then he was king of the frogs and I wa
s ambassador of the rats, and our friendship and our schemes were in full swing. Many were the nights we spent in the rooftop room with Jan, whom he loved from the start. Sometimes he came by late, at three or four in the morning, waking us up with a long cry, like a wolf, and then Jan leaped up from his mattress, went over to the window, and said: it’s José Arco. Other times we were awake, reading or writing, and he came up with a bottle of tequila and three ham sandwiches, with Posada and Remedios Varo postcards for Jan’s correspondence, with poetry books and little magazines, with reports on the cloud, the eye that was advancing on Mexico City. Don’t scare me, I said. Jan laughed. He loved José Arco’s visits. José Arco sat down on the floor and asked me what article I was perpetrating for the Doll, and then he talked science fiction with Jan. The sandwiches, wrapped in brown paper, were enormous and full of everything: beans, tomato, lettuce, sour cream, avocado, chile pepper, and two slices of ham. The little bottle of tequila was finished before the sandwiches, and we would end the evening drinking tea, playing some radio show with the volume turned way down, reading poetry, Jan translating poems by Daniel Biga or Marc Cholodenko, whom José Arco would meet many years later, but that’s another story; at six thirty or seven, he said good-bye, took the stairs one by one, got on his Honda, and disappeared down Insurgentes. We went back to our mattresses and fell asleep, and sometimes I dreamed that José Arco was gliding on his black motorcycle along a frozen avenue, without a glance at the icicles that hung from the windows, shivering with cold, until suddenly, from a sky that was also white and frozen, came a blazing red lightning bolt, and houses and streets split apart, and my friend disappeared in a kind of hurricane of mud. When I woke up, it was usually with a sharp headache.

  Yesterday I dreamed about Thea von Harbou. . . . It woke me right up. . . . But then, thinking about it, I realized that I dreamed about her because of a novel I read recently. . . . It’s not that it was such a strange book, but I got the idea that the author was hiding something. . . . And after the dream, I figured it out . . .”

  “What novel?”

  “Silhouette, by Gene Wolfe.”

  “. . .”

  “Want me to tell you what it’s about?”

  “All right, while I’m making breakfast.”

  “I had some tea before, when you were asleep.”

  “I’ve got a headache. Are you going to want another cup of tea?”

  “Yes.”

  “Go on. I’m listening, even if my back is turned.”

  “It’s the story of a spaceship that for a long time has been looking for a planet habitable by the human race. At last they find one, but it’s been many years since they set off on the voyage, and the crew has changed; they’ve all gotten older, but you have to realize that they were very young when they set off. . . . What’s changed are their beliefs: sects, secret societies, covens have sprung up. . . . The ship has also fallen into disrepair—there are computers that don’t work, blown-out lights that no one bothers to fix, wrecked sleeping compartments. . . . Then, when they find the new planet, the mission is completed and they’re supposed to return to Earth with the news, but no one wants to go back. . . . The voyage will consume the rest of their youth, and they’ll return to an unknown world, because meanwhile several centuries have gone by on Earth, since they’ve been traveling at close to light speed. . . . It’s just a starving, overpopulated planet. . . . And there are even those who believe that there is no life left on Earth. . . . Among them is Johann, the protagonist. . . . Johann is a quiet man, one of the few who love the ship. . . . He’s of average height. . . . There’s a hierarchy of height; the woman who’s captain of the ship, for example, is the tallest, and the privates are the shortest. . . . Johann is a lieutenant; he goes about his duties without making too many friends. Like nearly everyone, he’s set in his ways; he’s bored . . . until they reach the strange planet. . . . Then Johann discovers that his shadow has grown darker. . . . Black as outer space and dense . . . As you probably guessed, it’s not his shadow but a separate being that’s taken cover there, mimicking the movements of his shadow. . . . Where has it come from? The planet? Space? We’ll never know, and it doesn’t really matter. . . . The Shadow is powerful, as we’ll see, but as silent as Johann. . . . Meanwhile the sects are preparing to mutiny. . . . A group tries to convince Johann to join them; they tell him that he’s one of the chosen, that their common fate is to create something new on this planet. . . . Some seem pretty loony, others dangerous. . . . Johann commits to nothing. . . . Then the Shadow transports him to the planet. . . . It’s a vast jungle, a vast desert, a vast beach. . . . Johann, dressed only in shorts and sandals, almost like a Tyrolean, walks through the undergrowth. . . . He moves his right leg when he feels the Shadow push against his right leg, then the left, slowly, waiting. . . . The darkness is total. . . . But the Shadow looks after him as if he’s a child. . . . When he returns, rebellion breaks out. . . . It’s total chaos. . . . Johann, as a precaution, takes off his officer’s stripes. . . . Suddenly he runs into Helmuth, the captain’s favorite and one of the heads of the rebellion, who tries to kill him, but the Shadow overpowers him, choking him to death. . . . Johann realizes what’s happening and makes his way to the bridge; the captain and some of the other officers are there, and on the screens of the central computer they see Helmuth and the mutineers readying a laser cannon. . . . Johann convinces them that all is lost, that they must flee to the planet. . . . But at the last minute, he stays behind. . . . He returns to the bridge, disconnects the fake video feed that the computer operators have manipulated, and sends an ultimatum to the rebels. . . . Whoever lays down arms this very instant will be pardoned; the rest will die. . . . Johann is well acquainted with the tools of falsehood and propaganda. . . . Then, too, he has the police and the marines on his side, who’ve spent the voyage in hibernation, and he knows that no one can snatch victory from him. . . . He finishes his communiqué with the announcement that he is the new captain. . . . Then he plots another route and abandons the planet. . . . And that’s all. . . . But then I dreamed about Thea von Harbou, and I realized that it was a Millennial Reich ship. . . . They were all Germans . . . all trapped in entropy. . . . Though there are a few weird things, strange things. . . . Under the effects of some drug, one of the girls—the one who sleeps most often with Johann—remembers something painful, and, weeping, she says that her name is Joan. . . . The girl’s real name is Grit, and Johann thinks that maybe her mother called her Joan when she was a baby. . . . Old-fangled and unfashionable names, banned by the psychologists, too . . .”

  “Maybe the girl was trying to say that her name was Johann.”

  “Possibly. The truth is, Johann is a serious fucking opportunist.”

  “So why doesn’t he stay on the planet?”

  “I don’t know. Leaving the planet, and not going back to Earth, is like choosing death, isn’t it? Or maybe the Shadow convinced him that he shouldn’t colonize the planet. Either way, the captain and a bunch of people are stuck there. Listen, read the novel, it’s really good. . . . And now I think the swastika came from the dream, not Gene Wolfe. . . . Though who knows . . . ?”

  “So you dreamed about Thea von Harbou . . .”

  “Yes, it was a blond girl.”

  “But have you ever seen a picture of her?”

  “No.”

  “How did you know it was Thea von Harbou?”

  “I don’t know, I guessed it. She was like Marlene Dietrich singing ‘Blowin’ in the Wind,’ the Dylan song, you know? Weird stuff, spooky, but very up-close and personal—it’s hard to explain, but personal.”

  “So the Nazis take over the Earth and send ships in search of new worlds.”

  “Yes. In Thea von Harbou’s version.”

  “And they find the Shadow. Isn’t that a German story?”

  “The story of the Shadow or the man who loses his shadow? I don’t know.”

  “And
it was Thea von Harbou who told you all this?”

  “Johann believes that inhabited planets, or habitable planets, are the exception in the universe. . . . As he tells it, Guderian’s tanks lay waste to Moscow . . .”

  Boris Lejeune?”

  “Yes.”

  The voice interrupts breakfast like a bomb, long anticipated but still capable of triggering surprise and terror. The caretaker jumps, drops his cup of tea, turns pale. Then he tries to stand, his feet tangling in the stool where he’s sitting. On all fours, his gaze pleading, he crawls to where the tapes spin silently. He waits. He wonders, biting his lip, whether the voice that upset him just a moment ago was an auditory illusion. Finally, as if it were a prize for perseverance, though it isn’t that at all, he hears a distant voice repeating a name from the speakers, which he has connected as quickly as he can. Cavalry Lieutenant Boris Lejeune. Then a laugh. Then static, magnified by the speakers, spills across the third floor of the academy, the second floor, the first floor, until it disappears into the yard, through which a girl is creeping. She’s about seven years old, and her name is Carmen. Under her arm, she’s carrying some tubes that she’s “stolen” from the piles of junk in the grain shed. The noise stops her in midstride . . .