The moon rabbit

 

1

 

Dad was sitting on my bed. I looked at him with eyes so sad, so profound, that more than filial love, my love seemed like a kind of prophecy he could clearly read in my gaze. That's why he raised a hand, pointing to the window, through which a very faint moonlight entered. We were almost in the dark, with only the nightstand lit, with a lampshade printed with Disney characters. It was so opaque that those figures on my father's face were distorted, taking on aspects that not even Edgar Allan Poe would have imagined. But wasn't all this just my speculation? I wondered later. Although I was very young then, I wasn't so young that I couldn't understand what I considered a definitive turning point in my life. I was eight years old, and my father was going on a very long journey, much longer than the previous ones, when he traveled to and from strange lands he sometimes called Africa, and at other times Asia. This time, my father's destination was the moon. And it wasn't just my father who was leaving, but the man known in the world of anthropology as Claudio Levi. At forty, he had the prestige that others couldn't achieve in a lifetime. At thirty-five, he began his astronaut training. The next space voyage was his goal as the most qualified scientific companion available at that time.

I looked out the window, in the upper right corner of which the moon was visible, powerful and gentle at the same time, ethereal yet concrete like a mass of stones about to fall to Earth. There are those who feel the faint warmth of the lunar rays on their faces almost as much as the rays of the sun; I have never experienced it. That night before my father's trip, its light dimly illuminated the back of my father's neck, so between the figures on the screen on his face and the luminous shadow of the moon behind him, I saw his body as if I were at the movies. They'd shown me the documentary films he'd shot on his study trips: desolate, sandy landscapes, tropical jungles, towering mountains, immense, lonely beaches, erupting volcanoes. And in the midst of all these places, the body of Claudio Levi emerged triumphantly, his boots and pants soiled with mud, his classic jacket already torn from years of use, and the African hunter's hat that so closely linked him to Ernest Hemingway's photographs. But in my father's hands, there wasn't a gun, but rather a camera case and a video camera, and in his backpack, who knows what other things I was never able to see until many years later: compasses, pencils, notebooks, and several very small glass containers, perhaps containing chemicals he used as reagents for geological surveys.

"What do you see there, Roger?" he asked me that night.

I looked out the window, observed the moon, and knew what he meant.

"The rabbit," I replied, smiling, and the moisture in my eyes betrayed me.

HowWhen I was even younger, he would stay in my room telling me about his travels, about animals and people, about elements of nature that I found as fascinating as if he were talking about outer space. I had mentioned this sensation once before, and he showed me the moon through that same window and told me that one day I would go there. That opportunity had arrived. The next morning, the space shuttle would take him to the moon along with two other crew members.

"What would you like me to bring you back from there?" he asked.

He always brought me some special object from his travels. The closet in my room was full of objects that over time lost their surprise and later also their meaning. Small, colorful clay pots with fantastic figures, necklaces with human handbone beads, exotic bird feathers, tribal masks, stone spear points, even pieces of baked clay that remained untouched in a dry corner of my room. My room had become a museum, which at the time made me feel strange and isolated. That's why my friends didn't come to visit, I thought, but really it was me who didn't invite them. I didn't know if it was shame, or pride?

"Whatever you can, Dad."

"I want you to look closely, what's the rabbit got next to it?"

I looked closely, and I knew what he meant.

"The bat and the ball."

My father smiled with a kind of happiness that stayed with me for the rest of my life.

"I'll get you that ball, Roger."

Then he turned off the nightlight, and only the moon illuminated him. He was at her mercy, in that room, next to me, but forever away. Now he belonged to the moon; she had absorbed him and taken him from my family and me. Many times I heard my mother complain about my father's absence, saying that the earth and his old bones had stolen her husband. But later it would be the moon that would steal him back for good, because after all, Mom was also another kind of rock illuminated on one side by the sun. The moon was a sporadic lover, hiding on cloudy days, growing slowly over the course of a month, and making herself desired by her very unreachable distance. The best lovers are those who cannot be touched, I've told myself many times. My experience with women has been so superficial that I believe it has been a means of defense to avoid feeling hurt. The moon is too big and cold, like a demanding mother, like a possessive mother. She has taken away from me the sweet memory of summer mornings on the beach and left me with the dreadful feeling of loneliness on humid urban autumn nights. It has granted me contrast, it's true, which increases the value of what I love, but the bitter taste of grief doesn't erase the possibility of what is lost forever.

The moon, then, began to envelop my father with its influence in that darkened room. He left through the door, with the light from the hallway now in front of him, and the dead light of the moon at his back, pushing him forward. Then he closed it, and I stayed with it. Loving it and hating it, with no curtains to part it, only the silence of the room to simulate the darkness.

 

At that time, imagination took the place of sad reality, and seeing a rabbit with a bat and a baseball on the uneven surface of the moon was a reality that distanced me from the pain of seeing my father leave on his journey once again. Because truly, that night, although the feeling of not seeing him again was very intense, I didn't let it dominate my mind, and the farewell was like any other of his many journeys. That's how I explained the serenity with which I accompanied Mom and my brother in the car to the base from which the shuttle would take off. My father had left home many hours earlier; an Air Force vehicle had come to pick him up at four in the morning. I heard the truck engine I'd heard so many times in those last few years, and then I fell asleep again. I don't know why, but in the ensuing half-dream, that engine came to mind as that of an airplane, one of the many that had taken Dad on his trips to other continents. That, I think, was one of the reasons for such serenity: my father wasn't leaving forever, and like so many other times, he would return in a few weeks.

At that time, we lived in the District of Columbia, which was the most appropriate location for my father's many activities. From there he could set off on his travels and return with his luggage full of rolls of photographs and film, with notebooks already full and without any blank pages, and with a variety of objects that he would later give to museums or keep in his studio for research. In addition, there were his sporadic classes at the university. University, and his books and documentaries. I was born in Buenos Aires a year before my parents moved to the United States, when Dad had to begin his training for the trip to the moon. That didn't stop him from writing and traveling, but for six months of each of the following years, he lived practically cloistered at the air base where he trained.

On the last morning, we were allowed to watch the takeoff. The three families were in rows in the amphitheater in front of the screen with the images transmitted from the launch pad. We watched the shuttle ascend with its billowing smoke, slow as if at any moment it could stop and collapse under the effect of its own weight. What forces, I asked myself, must be in those engines? I knew that the higher it reached, the lighter its weight would be, and it would only need a slight propulsive force to travel in a vacuum. I felt my mother's hands holding my brother's and my hands, one on each side, as the plane climbed and climbed, finally becoming a tiny tiny thing in the blue sky of March 25th. She cried when she couldn't see it anymore, looked at each of us, and hugged us. I felt that from that moment on, she would never let go of us again, and a kind of claustrophobia would overtake me every time I felt my mother's gaze or voice. I thought of the moon at that moment, white and faint in the daytime sky, a seemingly harmless stain on the skin of the universe, but perhaps the beginning of cancer.

 

Ten days later, they called us from the base. I heard my mother's voice on the phone, with cold tones, then sad, sometimes desperate, and I sensed tears in her eyes. I knew exactly what her face looked like, even without seeing her from my bed, the dress she was wearing, the position of her body in the chair next to the telephone table, the way her fingers held the receiver and the slight distance she held it to her ear, the gestures with which she brushed her hair from her face or wiped her tears, the choreography of her fingers as she spoke. And from all this, I knew what they were telling her. Minutes later, I saw her appear at the door of my room exactly at the moment I expected her, after hearing her slow, hesitant footsteps toward me.

"I have to go to the base, Roger. Dad's coming back soon."

I didn't fully understand. I searched for hints of answers on her face, or to read behind what she was saying.

"But Mom, there are two weeks left..." I thought I was being selfish by not showing joy at my father's early return. Then she came up to me and, hugging me, began to cry.

"I want you to come with me. I can't take him alone."

I knew then that my brother and I would have to be her support from then on; she was too dependent on us and my father. My brother was on a school trip, so I got out of bed and got dressed, while she watched me as if I were her husband, admiringly, but also with an anxiety bordering on the incomprehensible. Her eyes were like two moons, I told myself at that very moment, and from there my father fell like two simultaneous abysses, one mirror next to another mirror.

The Air Force truck came to pick us up. We left the house. Mom locked the door, slowly, as if in doing so she could keep a bomb about to explode calm. We got into the vehicle, sat in the back seats, and drove through the city in complete silence, looking out at the streets of the outskirts on a cloudy day. I looked at the sky through the window, in case I saw the shuttle capsule, but the clouds hid everything, even hope, degrading the very need for hope into a fluid that spread across the asphalt like the vilest of secretions.

Hope is a merciless killer, I tell myself now, after so many years. She is a well-dressed old woman with clear eyes who promises and promises without ceasing, encouraging with that neatness typical of the helpless, of those whom not even mercy can tolerate. And with the hypocrisy of hope, I got out of the vehicle with my mother when we arrived at the base. A couple of soldiers escorted us, protecting us, to the conference room. There were countless journalists at the door, we made our way through them, but they couldn't prevent the flashbulbs from capturing us for posterity, nor could they prevent me from hearing stray words and phrases: the family of the anthropologist Levi, the first civilian on a study trip, a thwarted mission, tragedy... and the shorter they were, the more sensationalist and prone to melodrama, and for that reason, perhaps, the more true. But in life there is an element that those fictions could not simulate, the element of tragicomedy, the mixture that frustrates the plans of the gods, the only truly human element: vain hope.

We advanced toward the conference room, with high ceilings simulating the Heavens to explore, the walls covered with photographs of scientists and astronauts, generals, presidents. We sat and waited in the green corduroy armchairs. From time to time, Colonel Sánchez, my father's friend, said something to Mom, but I couldn't hear him. Then, the projection screen was lowered and images of the shuttle capsule appeared. A voiceover recounted the events: at this moment, the capsule is accelerating, we see how the rescuers are ready to recover the crew as soon as it hits the water. The capsule would fall into the middle of the Pacific Ocean, a thousand kilometers from the west coast. We saw it descend at an incalculable speed, but in the immense distance, it seemed to be falling slowly, and it was at that moment that hope began to deceive itself within each of us. I know Mom saw my father inside that capsule, probably asleep, but alive, ready to wake up when the atmosphere began to dangerously heat the surface and he would have to be rescued upon reaching the ocean. Finally, it fell with an explosion of water that seemed to splash us with amazement and joy. I hugged my mother, and we both cried with joy. We watched as the boats rescued the crew members and headed toward the capsule, which refloated after sinking on impact. They opened the door and entered. The wait was long, and when they emerged, only one of the three crew members was there, wearing his suit and helmet, so we couldn't recognize him. There was a scuffle in the area, many men stood in front of the cameras, and the transmission was interrupted intermittently several times. We stood up, frightened, and they sat us down again with reassuring words. In the second-to-last image we received clearly, we saw the crew member take off his helmet: it was Captain Williams. Shortly after, behind the gray patches of intermittent light, the capsule appeared alone, its door open, letting in the water that would slowly sink it if the helicopter prepared to lift it out didn't arrive first.

Later, when we were both home, our lawyer and legal advisor arrived. Mom was sleeping, but he woke her up. Colonel Sánchez was with him, and since he was the closest member of the family, he helped Mom get up. I sat in the armchair in front of the television, which broadcast the images of the crash over and over again. The lawyer gathered us all in the living room, darkened by the lowered blinds, to hide from the harassment of the press. The phone was off the hook, and Mom asked me to turn off the television in a voice I'd barely recognized since that day. The lawyer, Dr. Vicent, was Spanish, and when we were home, he spoke to us in our language.

"Mirna, Captain Williams's report says that Claudio went missing on the fifth day after they landed on the moon. They lost contact with him both visually and by radio. It says he strayed too far exploring the terrain, collecting samples, you know how he was, stubborn as can be..."

Mom looked at him angrily.

"What do you mean he was..."

"But Mirna..."

"Where is his body?"

"He's considered missing..."

"But why did they return without him? They should have waited for him..."

"How long? The captain says Colonel Berg died looking for Claudio. He was gone for two days, and when Captain Williams went to look for him, he found him suffocating due to a malfunction in his oxygen tank. The entire mission was aborted, of course, so he returned, and alone as he was, it was a display of extreme skill and great luck on his part."

Mom lowered her head and hid it in her hands. She was wearing a black T-shirt and a skirt of the same color. Sánchez tried to comfort her, but she pulled away from him and hugged me. I was crying too, more scared than understanding all of this. What had happened to my father, where was he, why didn't they bring him back? In reality, I didn't understand anything, and as the minutes passed, everything was summed up in a single word that symbolized and abbreviated everything complicated into something understandable. The problem with death is that it is a mystery we can all intuit, the understanding of which is a kind of consolation. We are so accustomed to the effectiveness of death that we don't demand explanations about what lies beyond, and we accept it as an act of faith. That is why death contains the greatest faith any atheist or agnostic is capable of feeling. For the inevitable, there is only acceptance, and that is faith. But what had happened to my father was beyond the realm of the inevitable.

 

2

 

At that time, the legal process my mother decided to pursue against the government began. There was practically no precedent for anything like this, and Dr. Vincent advised her time and again not to do it. He finally resigned, and many lawyers, one after another, took over the case. After five years, the case was still ongoing. The government had closed the entire investigation into the same. ion if there hadn't been a trial involved, and my mother wanted to file a lawsuit against Captain Williams for criminal negligence. She said he should have at least brought Colonel Berg's body, if he really hadn't been able to go looking for my father due to life-or-death issues.

One day, in the seventh year of the investigation, the captain arrived at our front door. I was painting the garden fence, and my mother looked out the kitchen window. At first, I simply heard an old man's voice calling my name. I turned around and saw a bald, very thin man in a neat but oversized suit.

"What can I do for you, sir?" I asked, suspiciously.

"Your father spoke to me a lot about his son Roger during the voyage, which is why I can still recognize you after all these years."

By the time I realized who it was, my mother had already stepped out and was standing a few feet away from us, wearing her kitchen apron and holding a dish towel, which she was twisting angrily.

"Don't talk to him, Roger. There's a restraining order. You know all communication must be between our lawyers, Captain, if they haven't already demoted him, which they should have done a long time ago."

The man looked around at the overgrown yard, the run-down house. The lawsuit had consumed all our savings, the ones Dad had left us, even the loans from my mother's family. My brother was working in Florida, had dropped out of college, and I had no choice but to stay and take care of Mom, studying and working part-time in the city. The captain had gotten out of a long Chrysler, and although the man's body betrayed a somewhat terminal illness, he tried to hide it with luxury and neatness. Therefore, the contrast was painful for us, and my mother couldn't help but feel irritated by that reality.

"Mrs. Levi, I've come to speak with you unofficially..."

"If you came to buy us, don't bother continuing the conversation. We know what we lack, but it's not exactly dignity..."

"I'm not so sure about that, ma'am. Over time, stubbornness takes its place, and dignity turns into ridicule."

My mother laughed.

"What nerve, Captain! A murderer who speaks of dignity to me..."

The captain took two steps forward, just before the first of the four steps that separated him from my mother. Suddenly, he began to untie his tie and unbutton his shirt, then I stepped forward and looked at his thin chest, covered in cancerous spots.

"I'm dying, Mrs. Levi, of skin cancer that started on that trip. Radiation, viruses, who knows." You can be happy if what you want is revenge...

"What I always sought was the truth, Captain." My mother was on the verge of tears, but she didn't stop scrunching up the dishcloth.

"I told her the truth since I returned. If I had to die with them on the damn moon to make it right, I'm sorry. One of the primary duties of our training is not only survival, but prioritizing a mission's objectives; your husband knew that very well. Didn't you wonder why he went so far beyond his orders, risking our lives if something happened to him? Maybe he was the murderer, Mrs. Levi, Berg's murderer, and mine, if I hadn't decided to return."

Mom thought for a few seconds; I already knew that all this had crossed her mind many times. It wasn't a new question; the lawyers had raised the same issue. All of that would have been enough to exonerate Williams and close the case definitively, yet it remained open, as if someone were waiting for some other information to emerge.

"I came here, Mrs. Levi, to see if I can get you to give up your efforts. Claudio won't be returning, and you can't continue to bear the costs. I can do it until the day I die, but this trial is like a wound I can't heal no matter how hard I try."

"Poor Captain Williams, he's surely eaten away by remorse! God knew what he was doing when he got this illness. Now I feel calmer, even if the judgment is against us. There has been some justice, at least." Then she looked at me and said, "Roger, let's eat."

We both entered, and the kitchen door closed in front of Captain Williams, his shirt open, revealing his diseased chest. But before that, I noticed his hands trembling as he retied his tie, hands with brittle, stained skin. He returned to the car, climbed into the back seat, and rolled down the window. Briefly, like a flash, I saw him lift something from the seat, something that stood out for its dull age amid the glare of the sun on the glass and the car's bodywork, as the driver pulled the car toward the road. Then I couldn't see it anymore.

That afternoon, I walked into my father's study. Everything had beenpreserved exactly as he had left it the day he left. On the desk were dozens of letters that were never answered, and in a drawer, those that arrived after news of the trip, from all over the world, from friends, scientific societies, anthropological institutions, and universities where he had work commitments for the following years. My mother put them away without opening them in that drawer; the same one in his father's he would leave them before answering them. The room wasn't very large, and the very clutter of furniture and things provoked an intimate warmth in anyone who entered. The library occupied all four walls, and the only window and door seemed to squeeze through the shelves that reached to the ceiling. There was no set order; only he knew where to find what his studies or research required. It wasn't the first time I'd entered since his disappearance, but I still wasn't attracted to those things, at least at first. Back then, they represented just a way to stay in touch with him, to smell the unmistakable scent he had left on the books, on the wood of the desk, on the leather of the chair. Like a diver, I probed the warm air with the aroma of a mild tobacco he had once brought from India.

I was about to turn fifteen, and I already knew that my father had experimented with drugs, but always as a method for his studies. His soul was a force incapable of stopping or being afraid of anything. The first time I was invited to take drugs, I thought of my father. I lay on the floor of my friend's room, dreaming of space travel in capsules that exploded before takeoff. My mind descended into mud-filled darkness, in which I probed for the moon. The moon on Earth, I told myself later, trying to analyze those dreams brought on by hallucinogens. I felt so much pain later, such an emptiness of doom, such irrevocable bitterness that I knew would last forever every time the effect wore off, that it wasn't hard for me to stop when my mother found out and forbade me. It was one day when I came back under the influence of a substance, and she saw it in my eyes and began to yell at me. And as she did, I smelled the alcohol on her breath. I slept dreamlessly for many hours. When I woke up, Mom was lying on the floor next to my bed, asleep. I woke her up, and she went into the bathroom. I heard the shower running for a long time. Then I saw her leave and go to her room. I went into the bathroom and saw the remains of her vomit in the toilet, the underwear scattered on the floor, the smell of alcohol that was undoubtedly coming from the mouthwash bottles. I emptied them into the toilet and flushed the toilet. I undressed and showered. With my hands over my face and my elbows resting on the tiles, I let the hot water wash away the remnants of death from my body, the corpses of unfinished dreams. An unexpected erection surprised me, and without thinking, I masturbated to destroy the sordid body my being had become, expelling sordidness for the sordidness already acquired, and to touch the depths of bitterness. Without my father, we were nothing, and my father was still in the study, almost sealed shut since his absence. That morning was the first time I entered that room in several years, and I couldn't stop doing so. When I was a child, I was almost never allowed inside while Dad was home, because on those rare occasions, he had to use the time to do everything he couldn't on his travels: answer letters from high schools and universities, catch up on the magazines he received monthly, talk on the phone, and, above all, write articles requested by those same magazines and make progress on some book he had promised to a publisher. When I left the room, I would glimpse the dark interior, lit only by the desk lamp. Then Dad would pick me up in his arms, pulling me away from the toys I no longer cared about, and take me to the basement where he kept the artifacts or relics he had brought back from his travels. There, he had a large worktable where he spread out his maps, and I could see the paths of long rivers, jungles, deserts, or ancient cities. I would ask what this or that thing was, pointing with my finger on the map, and he would explain, and then he couldn't help but tell some anecdote that had happened to him there. To me, all these stories were fascinating, and I believed them to be true in their entirety. But later, my mother laughed when I told her what Papa had told me, and she remained silent as if it weren't worth pursuing the matter further. I realized, even then, that she felt abandoned and alone during her husband's absence, and she found no alternative to comforting herself but to snub and belittle what my father did.

On the afternoon of the day Captain Williams came to see us, II entered the library and sat in the same chair that belonged to my father, leaned on the desk and rummaged through the old yellowed letters that had been sent to him. I began to read:

….Dear Dr. Levi…thanking you for your invaluable collaboration…we hope you obtain the benefits commensurate with your research…the university and its students await you…we regret the loss of the mask during the landing at Cape Esperance…the authorities of Ceylon have granted you permission to visit the ruins…in Mexico, they will take you by jeep to the pyramid…is what you told me about the god of Tenochtitlan true?…in Cairo, the consul will receive you, my esteemed professor…the inhabitants of the tribes in Senegal have fallen into disgrace, being attacked by their more powerful neighbors, supported by the military government…there are gold mines involved…diamond smuggling…they are exploited as labor…they threaten their families…the famine is terrible…the epidemic is advancing, and we await shipments from the United Nations, but they were promised to us months ago…

The images flashed through my memory as if I had lived them, and I remembered what my father had said so many times about genetic memory. He said that bones preserve the memory of generations, and it was an easy way to explain to me, at my age, something much more complex. But he said that in the bones he displayed on the table in his workshop, which he painstakingly cleaned with a delicate brush, he discovered more than with the carbon-12 method. He was able to determine their age almost precisely by simply cleaning them of detritus and observing them under a microscope. He did the same with the rocks he had brought, some of them with colors that attracted me like precious stones, but which possessed nothing more than the virtue of their ancestral years in the geological layers that had fused within them.

I got up and went to the section of the library where the tapes of the films he made on his travels were. He had already shown some in recent months, but he tried to avoid those in which he appeared directly, filmed by one of his collaborators. He preferred those he had filmed alone, which he also preferred, as he had once told me. I scanned the shelves with my eyes, my fingers brushing the spines of the film boxes, reading the titles. Sometimes the information was just the place or the year. I came to one that said: Mozambique, April 1967.

It was the exact month I was born, which is why it caught my attention. I'd never seen it before. My mother told me many times, with clear resentment, that when I was born, he was on a trip he'd planned even though he knew the date I was due. In their many arguments, I heard him say that the birth was expected in May, and I had gone ahead. According to Mom, she suffered from the displeasure of his absence, and that's why I gave birth early. I never knew what the truth was. My father always lost the battle with my mother, most often due to abandonment, and he left sooner or later, on another study or exploration trip, as if rocks or old bones were easier to understand or live with. I took the tape out of its case and put it in the player. I turned on the screen and sat down in the desk chair. I waited for the video to begin after the usual wear and tear. It had been many years since anyone had projected it, so the tape seemed to be waking up like an old man in the early morning. There were no titles, of course, just the hour and minute numbers in the upper right corner. It was 3:30 in the afternoon when my father had started recording. The footage was in black and white and began with a shot of a valley next to a mountain. The camera moved with the filmer's steps on a stony and uneven surface. In front of them passed many men from the tribe, some wearing loincloths, others naked, almost all carrying spears, their long, mota-haired hair adorned with stone beads, rings around their necks and ears, and pierced noses. They passed in front of the camera and greeted my father with a friendly nod. The video audio was terrible, but enough to hear the sound of the drums, whose monotony became hypnotic and rhythmically pleasing as the minutes passed. My father walked, sometimes the recording was interrupted, only to continue many meters ahead, when he reached the valley where the tribe lived. Trees were scarce, and a drought seemed to have dominated that valley for many months. There were animal skeletons in the surroundings, ramshackle huts where women came and went with children in their arms or hanging from their necks like monkeys. The camera moved from hut to hut, and the men went to shake my father's hand, who then appeared partially before the camera. And I thought about whatThat same hand had stroked my hair the night he promised to bring me the gifts of the moon. The hand with dark hair on the back, prominent veins, and strong tendons.

Then he reached an arid area without huts. A vast desert where the dust rose in the wind, which could be heard in the audio like a whistling sound. The drums continued thundering, but were now more distant. From either side of the chamber, the men of the tribe appeared in two lines, trotting and chanting a kind of prayer. Both lines grouped around a pit that grew larger as my father approached, until they were very close, and therefore in the center of the circle of men. They had sat down and continued chanting the prayer. Then the camera panned until it focused on the man who must have been the tribe's witch doctor. He was old, with long, flowing gray hair that covered his torso. He wore a white loincloth, his legs and arms encircled by concentric ribbons, his neck elongated by the rings that had been placed on him year after year since he was a child as he grew. His earlobes were pierced and enlarged with large-diameter hoops, and his nose had rings piercing the septum. But what caught my attention most was what he was carrying in his arms. It was a corpse, and he carried it like someone carrying a recently deceased loved one, someone he mourned and carried to their final resting place. He walked slowly, ignoring the camera. My father followed him on the path to the well. The old man carried the corpse as if it weighed nothing; he made strange sounds, and the prayer of the circle of men began to swell alongside the drums, which trembled louder, undoubtedly getting closer, even though they were out of sight. Then the witch doctor dropped the body into the well, which must have been very deep, because the camera approached right at the edge, and nothing could be seen but darkness. The old man remained by the edge, now on his knees, imploring the gods with gestures and shouts, rocking back and forth, so much so that he seemed about to fall into the well. A long line formed behind the witch doctor, with men carrying vessels that the old man emptied toward the bottom. The liquid was dark, but impossible to guess what it was. It was a ceremony that lasted almost half an hour, then the old man stood up and turned toward the camera, raising a hand signaling my father to stop. The camera paused, then started recording again, but the lens was positioned much lower, at the level of my father's hips. Evidently, I had tricked the witch doctor, because he wouldn't be able to stop filming right at the most important moment of that rite. Before the recording stopped again, I heard Dad's voice: "It will probably be two or three hours. I should stop recording. Maybe they'll notice, and I shouldn't take any risks. This is incredible, something wonderful is going to happen. I'll be the first to film it. I must speak quietly; the witch doctor is resting by the well..." The recording restarted at ten at night, the almost total darkness slowly being overcome by the bonfires around the well. Dad's voice attempted to describe what had happened in the interval, but was interrupted as soon as the witch doctor jumped up abruptly, as if waking from a nightmare. He leaned into the well and uttered some incantations in the local language. Then he turned to the crowd that had begun to surround the well—not just men but women and children—raised both arms and said something like this: nei ambé.

A strange sound began to come from the well, like a roar. The crowd fell silent, almost as vast as the sky that hung above them all, threatening and empty, so like nothingness, so like the beginning of everything, I thought. Because in that room was the well, too, within the walls of the library, an enormous deserted space seemed to have been created, filled with the shining eyes of black men and women. I felt the cold of the night in the Mozambican desert, and the drums thundering mercilessly for my death and that of everyone else. From the well rose again the now incessant, growing roar. And behind the sorcerer, the figure of a lion rose, holding onto the edge with its claws, and when it was safely on the ground, two more lions began to emerge from the well. Then I thought: one man for three lions. And my father had been the first to bear witness to it and leave it engraved forever.

 

3

 

Fifteen years after the failed project, the government would resume the plan to colonize Earth's moon. Although I didn't know it, preparations had begun the very day Captain Williams was the only one to return from the previous voyage. Finally, fifteen years later, everything was ready to be announced to the public: the next launch would take place in two years.

I was already twenty-three, and I was about to finish my studies atAnthropology and Social Sciences. I would graduate the following semester, and I planned to begin my residency to write my final thesis. The subject would be none other than the one that had obsessed my father. From the day I saw the recording of the ritual in Mozambique, I couldn't stop going to the library and reading every book I could get my hands on, and watching all the films preserved on the shelves. Old tapes, some already ruined by humidity. But those that dealt with that African ritual were carefully stored in plastic boxes, protected from the deteriorating factors of the environment and time. When I played them again and again, trying to understand a little more each day, particularly in the early stages of my dazzle, they seemed with a perfection bordering on the real, as if I were in that distant place and time, next to my father. Because I felt like he was speaking to me at that moment. His voice, sometimes cracked, hoarse from the humidity, tired of making itself heard over the rumble of the drums, sometimes frightened, but always enthusiastic, fascinated, became increasingly pleasing to my ears. I hadn't heard him since I was eight years old, and everything he said in the films now was new to me, so it felt like he was still alive, and I was discovering new facets of his complex personality. Expressions on his face that I would never have discovered even if he had remained with us many more years. On one occasion, in one such recording, he is heard saying something in dialect to a native speaker standing in front of the camera. The man smiles and nods his head. Then the camera turns off for a moment and turns back on, focusing on quick, vague images until it stops on the image of my father, young, disheveled, bare-chested and tanned, wearing his usual hat, a beard several weeks old, Bermuda shorts, and sandals made by the natives. That time, when I saw him, I pressed the pause button and stared at him. I think I fell asleep with his image, missing him, realizing how much I envied him, trying to feel anger and hatred for having left me alone in that library with mere books and tapes that brought no love except when opened.

When I woke up, I saw my mother standing in the library doorway. Who knows how long she stood there before I realized. She had one hand on the doorknob, bracing herself to keep from falling, and in the other a bottle. I stared at the screen as if entranced, penetrated by the image of my father, the man I had never been able to stop loving, despite not understanding him, despite feeling overwhelmed by that intelligence I couldn't follow, and which, unwittingly, sowed in others a resentment that couldn't grow in its own soul. And in exchange for hatred came frustration and anger. Many times she yelled at me for locking myself in the library, threatening to burn down the house so that all memory of my father would finally disappear. But this time she said nothing; she looked at me as if saying goodbye, and left without closing the door. I heard her locking herself in the kitchen and shuffling pots and dishes to prepare dinner. Dr. Vicent no longer communicated except by phone, very occasionally. Our case remained open, on appeal, before the Supreme Court. Colonel Sánchez had given up trying to comfort her. I knew he was in love with her, and he tried to reach out after my father's disappearance. Nothing came of his attempts, and he never visited the house again.

It was just my mother and me, with the brief, obligatory visit of my brother, who came from Florida to tell us about his prosperous life in the casinos, to tell us about his large family, which he never brought. I saw on his face, as we ate dinner in the dark dining room of our old house, the shame that dominated his soul. My mother, an alcoholic, and I, an unclassifiable imitation of our father. His body was beginning to gain weight with prosperity, his clothes were flowery shirts, Bermuda shorts, and his hair was beginning to thin. In some ways, he resembled my mother when I was a boy, but now they were diametrically different. She was wasted, so far from the beautiful refinement she had possessed when my father met her in the halls of the Natural History Museum in Buenos Aires. I saw photographs of the two of them together at that time, beautiful and intellectual, against the backdrop of ancient skeletons. And that was what ruined them, the past, which gradually took center stage in every memory, becoming as real as the present. And that's what I saw in my brother's eyes, the same kind of incomprehension as in my mother's.

Not long after, about six months, maybe, she died. I found her one morning, in her bed, with an overturned glass on the nightstand, and her body covered by the messy, dirty sheets. I entered the room, touched her hand, andSeeing that she was no longer alive, I uttered what appeared in my mind every time I saw her since I'd heard those words in the first film, and which I wouldn't have tolerated hearing from my own mouth, even if I didn't know what they meant.

"Nei ambé," I said, and repeated it several times, hoping like a child that something would happen, that somewhere in that room, somewhere in the house or the world, something would be reborn.

After the funeral, to which my brother came alone, with the shadow of his phantom family in his mouth, we stayed at home, alone and almost without speaking.

"What are you going to do?" he asked me, sitting in front of a glass of whiskey at the dining room table.

"Stay in the house, keep studying."

"Are you going to do the same thing as the old man? Travel and bring back bones?"

I looked at him angrily.

"If you're trying to sell the house and keep half..."

Now it was he who looked at me angrily.

"What I'm trying to tell you is to sell the house, but I don't want anything. It's just so you can get rid of all the shit from the past and come with me to Florida."

"To work at what?"

"Some business, I don't know. You're not going to tell me you're fascinated by the same thing as the old man. Yours is pure sentimentality, not vocation..."

We remained silent while I thought about what he had said. I stood up and poured him another whiskey.

"I don't know what this feeling is, but it's what I feel. Leave me alone, and go be with your family."

I said this in Spanish, and I heard the porteño accent he had used, trying to imitate my father's. He looked at me and laughed; in Florida, he must have been more accustomed to the Cuban accent. He left the next day, and we might never see each other again. Neither of us would have bet a crumb of bread on each other.

 

Like those coincidences that never happen, except through ignorance of the hidden machinations of the petty gods of the shadows, I received a call from Colonel Sánchez.

"Williams is dying," he told me. Then I answered:

"So?"

"He wants to see you."

"I don't want to, Colonel. Years ago he came to my house to make excuses we didn't ask for. If he now expects my blessing, he'll have to die without it."

"Roger, for your father's sake, at least, he would have wanted it that way."

"And who says that?"

"I was his closest friend for many years. Anyway, Williams says he needs to see you; it'll only take a few minutes of your time; he's on his last legs."

That night I went to his house in the suburbs of Washington. A dwelling that was once a model of those built during the 1950s. Williams lived alone, except for a black maid who cleaned the house. When I entered, she greeted me, and I sensed she looked more distraught than someone who's merely an employee should be. She escorted me to Williams's bedroom door, knocked, and opened it. He was sitting on the bed, feet flat on the floor, trying to get up. The woman ran to stop him, and the two began arguing like an old married couple.

"Behave yourself, dear old man, here's Mr. Levi," I heard her say, then he looked up over the woman's shoulders and looked at me in fear. I saw such sadness on his face that all bitterness and resentment seemed futile, and I felt ashamed. Williams wasn't half the man I had known.

"Claude," he said. That's what she affectionately called my father when they were young.

"No, he's his son, Roger," she said, and lifted his legs to accommodate him on the bed, as easily as if he were a feather pillow. When he left us alone, I stood, and he looked at me, pointing to a chair. I shook my head and sat down on the bed. He smiled, and it was more of a toothless grin than a smile. He was naked under the sheet. His once hirsute chest was hairless, and his skin oozed a smell that filled the room. The cancer stains oozed fetid fluids, and I imagined he was looking at maps of unknown lands.

"Son, I wanted to see you. Your father and I, that day we took off..."

"Mr. Williams, let's not talk about it anymore..."

"No, please, I must tell you. I should have done it years ago, but your mother wouldn't let me get near you or speak, and I know my letters never reached you..."

I knew nothing about those letters, but I wasn't surprised by what I heard.

"The day we took off, your father gave me something." He told me to give it to you if he didn't return from the trip...

"But then he knew..."

"No! It was pure sentimentality, that's what I thought at the time. Everything will be fine, I told him, but he insisted, so I accepted what he entrusted me with. Then all that happened..."

"What happened?" I asked, sensing that perhaps the long-awaited confession was coming.

"What everyone already knows, his disappearance... nothing more. Now that I'm dying, I must give you what he entrusted me with."

He raised an arm, pointing to a drawer in the cabinet across from the bed.

"In the last one, there's a box." Ja blue.

I got up and went to the furniture, opened the drawer and saw the box. I went back to bed and sat. He told me with his head to open her.

Inside there was a baseball, and remembered our conversation the night before his departure.

-Your father explained to me what it was, that promise he made to you. He told me that if I did not return home, I gave you that ball as a gift brought from the moon. I had to do it when you were little, of course, but with everything that happened, at first I forgot it, and then I considered it already useless.

Take the ball spin in my hands. I felt carefully with my fingertips. I took her under my nose and sniffed the smell of old leather. And that aroma brought me a reminiscence of images that I had never seen. The desolate landscape of the moon, the rocky aridity and the lightness of the body when walking on the surface. The capsule several meters behind me, moving away because I was moving away. I was my father, I had been in that distant place full of fear and astonishment, with the shadow of Mother Earth as an obstacle of coldness on the road.

-You don't get angry with your father, Roger, he just tried to stay in illusion.

I smiled at the dying old man, because that was what he needed.

-Was something when he moved away from the capsule?

-The technical, the usual, and ended up saying something that I did not understand, like a wink even among scientists, but I was always nothing more than an astronaut.- And an almost naive smile illuminated his face for a moment.

He died two days later. I brought the baseball at home, and during those two days I kept thinking that when I said goodbye to Williams forever that night of my visit, I approached his ear and said: Nei Ambé. His face had acquired the expression of fright, and I am sure that when he died, he was buried with that grimace.

 

 

 

4

 

My father's papers were so many, that I suspected that I would not reach life to read, and above all, in deciphering and understanding everything I had written. Sometimes I had to resort to the bibliography that I cited, which took me a long time looking for the corresponding books, then the chapters and the pages. Sometimes it was not the right edition, or because the book had been lost and had been consulted abroad. However, it was essential to me if I wanted to understand what the original text said, so I went to the public library to consult the computer files.

At home, I read their articles for anthropology and geology magazines, I had even written for some scientific societies that were dedicated to the subject of the paranormal. So it was that I reviewed the handwritten notes related to the filming in Mozambique. On this subject I had not managed to publish anything. I wondered the reason for such carelessness, or if perhaps it was due to external pressure, or mere discretion before being sure of their conclusions or hypotheses. My father was not a simple journalist who had limited himself to transmitting a real and amazing rite. If he did not find pure logic based on the mentality of the tribe he studied, he never exposed it to the criteria of the public or his colleagues. His constancy amazed me, but above all it made me feel exhausted by force of reasoning and constant tests and counter -tests. Not a small rock was out of its rigorous analysis, or a bone that could suspect the slightest possibility of being fraud. Therefore, when it came to the tribes and their pagan rites, it was even more extreme in its rigorous methodology. He knew that what he had witnessed was something too strange and controversial, too close to yellow sensationalism if he had published it in his virgin nature. I needed to explain it, check it experimentally in many more opportunities, and the problem was how to do it. This was what he wondered in the note of his agenda of the year 1967. I looked on that same agenda, in subsequent annotations, but there were references to that episode only sporadically. He must have been looking, asking each man and woman in that tribe and in the surroundings, gaining their confidence to speak to that rite. But I just realized that if they had allowed him to witness the entire ceremony, it was because they already had enough confidence. Therefore I looked for the filming before filming, and in a one -year note I found the first retrospective event. Since then, in notes taken on different occasions, since he was younger, almost a student recently graduated in his initial field studies, there were already multiple references to those episodes. I didn't know where they started, so I read in reverse, as if listening or saw a tape at the same time that I rewind her. Each of the appointments mentioned in parentheses a number corresponding to an audio recording. Among those tapes I found the ones thatthat survived the humidity, and I could hear nothing but sounds bordering on gruesome, or at least that's what my imagination found. My fin-de-siècle mind was too tainted by fictional influences created by Hollywood or bad horror literature. I had no choice but to return to my father's sources, notes, and books.

In the 1967 entry in Mozambique, he had attempted to offer a tentative theory of the tribal ceremony, actually the product of several others he had already witnessed without being able to film. The pit where the native's body had been thrown was a lion trap. At first, I thought it was simply some kind of pagan sacrifice in which they gave carcasses to the lions to appease their hunger. But my father explained that on that occasion, as on many previous occasions, the pit was empty. Other tribes that didn't even have contact with each other did almost exactly the same thing. In many, the rite leaders varied; one or more witches participated; others shortened or postponed the ceremony, sometimes lasting for several days. In one of them, the witch doctor even threw himself into the well in despair, and after each of these rites, a new one had to be chosen. Some tribes used more elaborate music than simple drums, with flutes and other very varied wind instruments. I remembered hearing something similar on recordings, a kind of sound emanating from an instrument that struck me as long, like a kind of narrow trumpet. My father had made sketches, of course; he wasn't a very talented draftsman, but he had gained great skill with the necessary practice. I found the drawing of the instrument, and playing the recording again, I could see, as if I were there, the native playing his curious, extremely long flute, resting one end on the floor, from which a curved beak extended to emit a sound that imitated the real wind, but more harmoniously, as if he were a god-man commanding the forces of nature. I felt a cold breeze in my father's library and looked toward the windows. They were all closed, and I shuddered. My God, what am I getting myself into, I said to myself. Then I looked down at my father's notebook, and in a marginal note I'd never seen before, was written the very thing I had whispered.

I looked around the dim, warm darkness of the room and heard a kind of shattered silence as the recording stopped. Anything was possible, I thought. If man was capable of reaching the moon, why wouldn't he do what, according to my father, the ancient tribes, far from the taboos of reason, religions, and laws, had managed to do? It was, after all, nothing more than an extension of a capacity that man possesses in his nature, that is, the likeness to the gods determined by his very nature. A capacity that animals also possess, but which, due to their lack of understanding, they are incapable of ritualizing. It requires the middle ground in which these tribes found themselves: uncontaminated by the rational psychology of Western man, and above simple animal instinct.

Apparently, it was all about the transmigration of souls. A man's soul was transmitted to one or more animals. A dead body could be used, which went to a living or recently dead animal, or even to someone who was dying. The possibilities, my father told himself, could be many. And as he reached the end of the page in his 1971 notebook, he wondered if it would be possible to concretely transform one body into another, without loss of matter, without using anything other than the man's original mass.

In his 1973 notebooks, after suffering a bout of beriberi that nearly killed him and interrupted all research and notes for more than a year, he began to ask himself questions without order or logic, as if something were trying to break through the chaos of his mind, still clouded and affected by fever and altered metabolism. When he sat down to write again—and I remember my mother frequently commenting on this as a reproach, as if it had been the last, now forever lost, opportunity for him to leave that profession that distanced him from her—he had already recovered physically, but his gaze remained lost in thoughts that he tried to transcribe in his notebooks. These were the notes I had begun to read, and I noticed the change in his handwriting after the illness, clearer in his spelling but more incoherent in the methodology of his logic. One of the most frequently asked questions was the possibility I mentioned earlier, that of the transformation of bodies. He arrived at the following reasoning: if the soul is energy, and if the transmigration of the soul gives life to the body, then body and soul are an amalgam, Something that cannot be divided without both dying. The tribal healers had told him that the time in which the soul migrates from one body to another is limited not only by the consequent degradation of corpses, but also by the life of the soul in the ethereal. The soul loses strength and identity, becoming confused with the homogeneous disparity of the collective, with the great unity to which it is drawn like a magnetic force.

In one of those notebooks, I found a reference to an episode that occurred in Tanzania, very shortly after the one whose recording was my first encounter with the subject. I searched the shelves for the tape from the aforementioned date. In the notes, my father only indicated that it had been an important experience, but given his mental confusion during his convalescence, he implied between the lines that it had in fact been more than transcendental. This was evident in his disordered handwriting, trembling as if he were under the influence of fear, even if it was nothing more than the effect of a drug. But just as mescaline worked for some writers, sparking the imagination, the drugs my father took to recover, and I imagine some others he brought or learned to take on his travels, plunged him into a state of dullness that significantly diminished his imagination. Therefore, during those notes, I had to assume that everything he said fell short of the reality he had experienced.

I turned on the player and waited for the recording to begin. Suddenly, a jungle landscape appeared, dense as only the African jungle can be in its virgin places. The camera moved, resting on my father's right shoulder. You could see the right side of his face and his left hand pointing at trees, small animals scurrying by on their way, an uncut path he carved out with machete blows from time to time, interrupting the recording only to resume later. He pointed out ancient formations on tree trunks, parasites under rocks, and the vines that covered the ground. A few snakes hung from the branches, peering into the camera lens, and my father was careful to avoid them by moving with a slowness that simulated slow motion. As he continued on his way, he explained that he was heading toward the settlement of a tribe he'd heard about. The Hamba say that this tribe I'm addressing has no name. They've lived in that practically inaccessible region of the jungle for as long as they can remember. They survive on what they hunt, nothing else. And this hunting can be of animals or humans, it makes no difference to them. They don't fish, they don't farm, they don't produce medicine. Anyone who falls ill dies, unless the tribe's witch doctor can save them with his spells, and this happens very rarely, because according to the Hamba, such cures are only for mental illnesses. For them, a body that falls ill is no longer useful, and that's why they replace it. I asked them what they meant by that, because I suspected they were practicing the same ceremony I had already witnessed with the Hamba. They nodded, but refrained from clarifying what their longing gazes conveyed: their rituals are more sophisticated, more transcendent.

With these words, their story was interrupted, and the road, after a dark pause in the recording, turned into a small clearing dotted with rudimentary huts. There were completely naked men around, children running around, and women coming and going with wicker vessels under their arms or on their heads. When my father came a short distance from them, some stopped to look at him, leaning closer, examining him from head to toe. They were thin but stocky, their faces completely bare of any adornment or paint, their thick lips revealing large, very white teeth. For a moment, forgetting his entire life since that event, I feared for my father's life. The camera betrayed a slight tremor, and I knew he was afraid at that moment. The men didn't have weapons on them, but they did have their hands, and above all, their teeth. If cannibalism is your custom, it may be the last thing I ever record, he had said a few minutes earlier, in a very low voice, just as they approached to take him by the arm and examine the camera. My father didn't turn it off. The lens showed disjointed, confusing images of the ground, of the sky between the tall trees, of the faces and bodies of the men who were touching the camera, passing it from one to another. Then it returned to my father's hands. The men said something, he answered in the same dialect. Some stood behind, others in front, and he walked among them toward one of the huts. The children surrounded him, touching his clothes, jumping to touch the camera. They entered the dark hut, full of insects around a clay pot in which a woman was mixing something that smelled very bad, because my father put a hand to his mouth, makingIn the other, the camera moved. Only fire illuminated the place. Then he left the camera on on the floor, far enough away to provide a long shot of the circle that had formed around the pot, in which he was standing. They began to speak in dialect for a long time, so I couldn't understand anything. But the men's gestures were friendly. The woman took food from the pot and served it on a platter, which she passed from hand to hand. When it reached my father, he smelled it first, which didn't sit well with the others, judging by their faces. Then he brought the rim of the platter to his lips and swallowed. There was no expression on his face that conveyed disgust or pleasure. I admired my father then, with silent satisfaction, as if the Native Americans in the library of my North American home could see my joy.

Apparently, the conversation had revolved around the subject that had brought my father to that place. It seemed strange to me that they had accepted him so quickly, even that they were willing to let him witness the ceremony. But besides the fact that my father arrived with knowledge of their own language and was practically an envoy from the neighboring tribes, perhaps these men didn't consider their rites to be anything especially supernatural. Lacking any Western taboos founded on religions that repressed any thought or action that strayed from their canons, for them the material was irremediably fused with the spiritual. The nature in which they live transforms everything, and they see it daily. They coexist with the dead; they are in their flesh, and their spirits in the bodies of other men and animals. Spirits they recover by hunting and consuming them. This is the theory I imagined, at least until this moment when I saw my father stand up and undress. He was wearing only his pants and boots; he usually traveled bare-chested because of the unbearable heat, even at night. When he had stripped off everything, they led him toward the hut's exit. The camera remained on the ground, focusing on the pot on the fire and the woman. I heard voices, and again the camera was raised on my father's shoulder. He had been authorized to carry it, and who knows if they knew or even imagined the true purpose of that device. Perhaps they thought it was like a charm for my father.

When they left, it was already dark. The chirping of birds and the shrieks of children could be heard. An authoritative shout from one of the old men scared them off, and they disappeared, scattered through the huts or the jungle. The group leading my father continued along a path cut through the trees. I could see the swaying bodies of those in front, clearing the way when necessary. Naked and barefoot, they moved with the dexterity of apes, but at the same time their erect backs and intelligent movements demonstrated a methodology studied through trial and error. The way they would take a branch and study it carefully, conversing among themselves, then the way they cut the leaves, in which they found parasites that they perhaps used for their rituals. They seemed to be searching for something in particular, and finally found it in a bush at ground level. Two of them bent down, and my father's camera peeked out over their shoulders. They were digging in the earth, until they unearthed some kind of torture shell, but it was more like a soldier's helmet. I thought I was hallucinating, but a moment later, they turned around, facing the camera directly, and I confirmed what I suspected: it was a soldier's helmet. Was it possible that they had devoured one of the many soldiers who had fought in Africa? A soldier lost in the middle of the jungle that no one had ever visited before. The helmet passed from hand to hand, being cleaned of earth a little at a time, until it reached my father's left hand. He turned it over, peering inside. Daylight was dim, but he could see a name, and he brought the camera closer to the plaque where it was engraved. The surname was Berg.

I remembered that was the name of the astronaut who had gone in search of my father when he left the capsule on the surface of the moon, and who had died searching for him. At least that was what Captain Williams had always stated in his report and in his subsequent statements during the court proceedings over the years. My father returned the helmet, and they continued on their way. If it had been the grandfather or father of Colonel Berg, who would later accompany him, the subject might have come up in some conversation during the months of training. But all this was my conjecture, of course. Nothing in my father's attitude led me to suspect anything more than scientific curiosity about what he was witnessing.

It was already deep night when they arrived beside a narrow stream, whose current sounded faint yet very clear. The shadows of bodies in the shadow of the night. They gathered around the chamber, watching the red light that shone like a fixed star fallen from the sky. That's probably what they thought, and my father took the opportunity to make his authority felt. He spoke at length, and the men looked at him and listened after lighting a fire. They then stood up and began to move around, carrying things back and forth. The chamber remained still, and deigned to move when my father considered everything ready. It was a kind of low altar, with branches and a pile of objects that must have belonged to dead men and women. The group consisted of ten men, and except for the two who began to lead the rite, the others limited themselves to singing a litany similar to a motet. It was like being in an immense church, with the water from the stream running like sacrificial blood, and the objects on the branches the tithes that the congregants offered. The leading man stood and stood by the shore, raising his arms and hands to the sky, his legs spread. His companion approached, carrying the helmet, and handed it to him. The officiant placed it on his head and began to sing the same litany as the others, but raising his voice until he led them, singing in a voice of intense anguish, as if reciting a tragedy by Euripides, with the words "nei ambé, nei ambé, nei ambé" repeated over and over again. So many times that it became another sound of that place, a song that was earth and water at the same time, a penetrating song of the flesh, like syllables of bone and sounds that flowed with the liquidity of blood. Then the head with the helmet lowered abruptly, as if in sorrow, but it was really an affirmative gesture, a saying yes to the sacrifice that was already consummated a second later. The companion next to him pierced him with a flint stick and threw him into the stream. A faint phosphorescent light seemed to rise from the now stagnant water.

And the body, which seemed dead, moved again. It raised its head, still wearing its helmet, its torso supported by its hands resting on the mud of the bank, and then its legs, allowing it to stand upright in front of the campfire.

It was a white man.

In his dirty face, I recognized Colonel Berg.

 

5

 

Not long after watching that recording, I received news about the new lunar project. Colonel Sanchez immediately came to mind. I didn't even know if he was still alive, and where. But like everyone in that city and with that profession, they couldn't stray too far from Washington. Military personnel never cease to be drawn to politics, and even if they lack the intelligence to navigate that jungle of appearances, they always hope for someone to lend a hand, through thick and thin. Sánchez, as a military man and as a member of a community that continued to be marginalized despite so much progress, was one of them. I called him at his old number on Benjamin Franklin Street. His voice, which I remembered so well, answered: slow, mellifluous, sometimes languid, so inappropriate for a military man, in my opinion. I think he was surprised to hear me want to see him, since we, my mother and I, had practically kicked him out of the house due to his constant insistence on helping us. We didn't realize, at that moment, that perhaps we were the ones helping him. He was a lonely man who had lost his only friend, and whose wife he was platonically in love with.

He showed up at home the next day. He was old, gaunt, dressed in rather shabby civilian clothes. He had lost his hair, and his dark complexion and sparse white hair made him resemble an old Indian from a now-vanished tribe.

"How are you, Roger?" he said in Spanish.

"Fine, Colonel, thank you for coming."

He entered the house, looking at the living room where he had spent so many hours. He sat down on the old sofa, on the exact same cushion. His face seemed to be renewed with joy, and he looked toward the kitchen door, as if he expected to see my mother emerge.

"This house brings back many memories, and I've become a melancholic old man."

"Forgive me for bothering you, Colonel, but I read about the new lunar project, and I immediately remembered you."

He looked at me questioningly.

"I have some questions to ask you about my father's trip."

"Not again, Roger. That trip killed your father and destroyed the lives of many since then, including mine..."

"Actually, I wanted to ask you about Colonel Berg. I'm interested in learning more about him...what he was like, how he got along with my father..."

"Well, Berg was stubborn, but his stubbornness wasn't due to intelligence, but to hide his inability. He had a hard time with physical training because he was the grandson, son, and brother of soldiers, even the women." His family members were the first to join the forces when they accepted women's enlistment. It made it difficult for him to understand how what was then a new technology worked...

"And why did they accept him then?"

"Because of what I already said, because of his family. His father, above all, was a hero in World War II, winning more than one medal for valor in Europe and Africa."

"Was he in Africa? In which country?"

"I don't remember, Roger, but he fought there when the Germans invaded that continent for a while."

"Did he die then?"

"No, he returned home safe and sound, telling anecdotes about the Black people who saved his life. Of course, no one believed him; everyone praised him as the greatest hero, almost comparing him to MacArthur. Women threw themselves at him, and when he finally married, he lived a cloistered life in Washington, devoted to his family."

I remained silent for a while, thinking, putting things in their place.

"What did he look like?"

"Which, father or son?"

"Both," I answered, knowing what was emerging in my mind at that moment, but I couldn't expect Sánchez to understand.

"Well, typical Americans, of medium to tall height, almost blond hair, slender, and toned bodies. Almost like Robert Redford, if you'd seen him in the movies. Perfect beings, but arrogant. In the son's case, that arrogance was unfounded; he was a simple office soldier who rose quickly through the ranks thanks to his grandfather's influence, since his father died after being admitted to a hospital, where no one was allowed to visit him, due to pneumonia, as they said later. They held a military funeral with all the appropriate pomp. I was at the funeral, and I saw the son standing next to the coffin as it was lowered into the grave with the American flag draped over it." A worthy son of a soldier, with all the elegance and pomp expected of him. It's strange, but now that I think about it, he was so similar to the old man that it was like seeing him standing over his own grave. He even seemed to have aged a little since his father's sudden illness.

Colonel Sánchez stayed for dinner. During the meal, we continued talking. I felt sorry for him, I felt the affection my father must have had for him. He had always been a helpless being, even as a young man. He was dependent on my family, on what we did, on what we thought. Now he did the same to me, and it was my crime to take advantage of it to obtain the information I needed.

"How did he and my father get along?"

Sánchez put his cutlery aside, wiped his lips with his napkin, and looked at me as if he were seeing them right then and there in my eyes.

"I accompanied your father many times during the months of training. I admired him for his ability to overcome difficulties." He had more endurance than I imagined, not being a military man, but those trips to such remote places had seasoned him admirably. He equaled Berg in that, but surpassed him in technical training. They got along well at first, but with a month to go before takeoff, I saw them argue several times, and Captain Williams would leave the scene. "He could have made the entire trip alone," he said. "When the captain asked for Berg to be replaced due to his ineptitude, it was your father who intervened on his behalf."

"And why were they arguing?"

"I don't know. They always lowered their voices when they saw me coming, but the strange thing is that despite that, they were closer than before, although always angry with each other, murmuring and competing. I wanted to find out what was wrong with your father, but I couldn't get him to tell me anything. Then came the trip..."

Colonel Sánchez left after offering him a whiskey after dinner. He hugged me before walking away along the sidewalk well into the night, brushing the walls of the houses with his old raincoat, the same one he wore over his military uniform when he visited my mother.

 

Several months passed, and it was almost a year later that I received acceptance for a postgraduate course at Cambridge thanks to the thesis I sent along with my resume. My father had taught there as a visiting professor for several years, and that undoubtedly had an influence, but above all, the thesis, which I must confess, was a variation on one of the unpublished studies among the papers I found in the library. Both my mother and I had refused the insistent requests for unpublished material from the universities, institutes, and journals with which he regularly collaborated. The advances on contracts for two unfinished books were taken to court for a couple of years, then settled by mutual agreement. All unpublished material, handwritten or filmed, was first defended by my mother, who would have wanted to burn them if she had not recognized the value they had for the economic future of our small family in case we needed help to sustain the process againstto the government; then I was the one who kept him within these four walls.

When I had everything ready to travel to Cambridge, the house already locked, my suitcases packed, and my passport in good condition, I got a call from the US Congress. The letterhead was already intimidating. I wondered if the reason was the lunar flight that had ended two months earlier, with relative success. I had heard from the press and television about the takeoff, the days spent on the moon, and the astronauts' return to Earth. One of them had been Captain Williams's nephew. The day I sat in front of the television to watch the live broadcast from the moon, seeing the three identical figures of the astronauts enclosed in their suits, I imagined what I hadn't been able to see when I was so young: Williams, Berg, and my father. Now one of them had the same last name as one of the others, and the moon was the same, and the technology almost the same. The emptiness of space didn't change, nor did the inner emptiness of the men traveling. Perhaps that's why Dad had wanted to make that trip, not out of professional ambition, not even the most valid scientific curiosity, but out of an imperative and desperate need to fill the emptiness he had already observed in his ancestors. If, therefore, he couldn't find the soul in the countless bones he had rescued from the Earth, at least he could try somewhere else in the universe, in some lunar rock, in the atmosphere whose different conditions might conceal something different, projecting within it a hint more akin to the divine than the human. He had seen how certain factors, sterile in certain parts of the world, are fertile in others depending on the conditions. Life develops unexpectedly in the most unexpected places. In that respect, my father had never ceased to be an idealist until the day he died.

I showed up at one of the offices in Congress. The room smelled of history, antique furniture, with paintings of well-known and unknown politicians on the walls. Everyone waiting for me greeted me warmly. There were three men, and the secretary, who obsequiously offered me whatever I wanted.

"Mr. Levi, I'm the district attorney, and those accompanying me are Captain Scott Williams, who just returned from the trip to the moon, and General Nichols, in charge of the original project."

I shook hands with each of them, and they invited me to sit down. I sensed something wasn't right.

"You look worried, Roger, and excuse me for calling you that, but I see you as a son to me," the general said. "I knew your father, and I admired him greatly."

I nodded and thanked him. The district attorney spoke again.

"We know you've decided to pursue the same field of study as your father, and that's why we called you, because we want to show you a recording that Captain Williams brought us from his trip."

I looked at the captain closely for the first time. He didn't resemble his father, not so much in appearance, but in demeanor. He seemed shy, scared.

"But there are many eminent figures in the discipline; I'm just starting out..."

"Roger," said the general, "what we want to show you concerns only us... It goes without saying that when you leave here, you must maintain confidentiality."

I looked at the prosecutor.

"That's right, Mr. Levi. That's why I'm here."

Then the general stood up, went to a closet, and opened the doors. Inside was a large screen and video equipment. He took the remote control and returned to the table.

"This footage was taken by Captain Williams twenty-four hours before his return, while he was exploring the surface of the moon. He was alone, so the other two crew members know nothing about what he filmed."

He pressed the play button, and the screen was filled with images of the moon. The camera must have been on the helmet of Williams' suit, since it moved with his steps across the uneven surface. At first, there was nothing but a region of gray rocks and black sky. At one point, it stopped, turned, and the capsule could be seen on the lunar surface, along with the other two crew members exploring the surroundings. As they returned to the vaster, emptier area, the footsteps became monotonous, so much so that the few minutes of footage seemed to last much longer. Then Williams stopped. Something appeared on the ground, still far away, something small that seemed to be moving in jumps. The captain approached, and suddenly he was just a few meters from an animal.

It was a white rabbit with a slight grayish tinge. An ordinary rabbit that moved its ears and snout, sniffing at the stranger from a distance. The recording seemed to pause because it didn't move for several seconds; the captain's astonishment must have paralyzed him. A rabbit on the surface of the moon, it must have been said, was dreaming or under the psychological effects of trauma. to an unknown person. The rabbit then hopped several times in front of the camera, several meters away, moving away in the opposite direction, and Williams then began to chase it.

For a moment, I thought I was watching a black-and-white silent film from the early twentieth century, a comic fantasy film, perhaps by Lumiere. I looked at my companions in case I saw evidence of a practical joke on their faces. But I was in the United States Congress, and everything that was happening to me was real.

The camera and Williams chased the rabbit, which was quickly escaping, and suddenly the captain fell to the floor and the recording was interrupted. General Nichols turned off the screen, and the three of them looked at me.

"What do you think about that, Mr. Levi?" the prosecutor asked me.

More than astonished, I was perplexed, and although I didn't want to admit it, moved for reasons still unclear.

"Special effects, no doubt."

"Nothing like that. We've already checked with the experts. Besides, now you'll see something else."

The general stood up and left through a side door. A few seconds later, he returned with a box in his hands. He placed it on the table and said:

"Captain Williams brought this. He caught it after several attempts."

He removed the cloth covering the box. It was glass, and inside was a rabbit, undoubtedly the rabbit they had found on the moon. I was standing right in front of it, a few inches from the glass cage with the animal inside. I circled the table, circling the cage, while the rabbit moved slowly, scared, perhaps on the way to death from the confinement or the uncertain atmosphere.

"We have it in that cage with a proportion of gases similar to those on the moon; otherwise, it would die."

I knelt on the floor, resting my arms on the table and my chin on my arms. I gazed at the animal in ecstasy, and the rabbit approached the glass wall I had approached, and I gazed into its small, black eyes. But I recognized the look I had last seen more than fifteen years before.

It was my father, I told myself, and I thought I was going completely mad. Because it was beautiful to feel this way, being in the right place at the right time for the first time, with the person I finally needed to be with.

I imagined his last minutes, walking away from the capsule, to meet with Berg later, in keeping with the meeting they must have planned before takeoff. We'll meet on the moon, somewhere far from the capsule's cameras. We'll talk, and you'll tell me the secret. Perhaps that's why I had insisted that Berg be one of the crew, a kind of extortion in which Berg would keep his deal: reveal the secret of the resurrection in exchange for my father's silence. Berg's body had died, and yet there it was after all this time. The African tribe's ritual still hid its secret, and my father needed to know it.

Had they fought alone on the surface of the moon? I wondered. What would that final confrontation have been like between two types of ambition, one intellectual, in tune with the desperation to find the meaning of life, the other with the fear of dying again? Two kinds of knowledge fighting to prevail.

I contemplated my father's eyes in that animal that watched me still, recognizing me, calling me. My father had finally learned the secret, and yet he couldn't enjoy the merit of his discovery. I wondered if that was what he was seeking, or simply knowledge, the immeasurable knowledge of his avid, never-satiated mind.

I saw that he was suffering, and would suffer even more locked in that glass cell.

So I grabbed the paperweight from the table and smashed it against the cage. The glass shattered, and the rabbit darted out and jumped onto the carpeted floor. Those with me grabbed me, but they didn't prevent me from seeing the death of the rabbit, as it suffocated in its death throes on the carpet. Its small eyes looked at me, and I uttered the pair of words in the Hamba dialect that would never again have any effect on my father, a pair of words that were like two stuffed museum pieces.

 

Ilustration: George Boorujy