Gospel & Universe ⛱ Señor Locke
Aura 2
The Devil & the Deep Green Sea - The Stamp of Nature
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The Devil & the Deep Green Sea
Señor Jaguar refuses to stay in his archetypal forest, with its lush green foliage, greener than the limes of Oaxaca, greener than the jade earrings of the waitress with her hair the colour of dark mines. But my jaguar doesn’t care much for women (except they might be tasty), so there’s no use telling him that the green he sees in his forest is more green than the hypnotic eyes of any woman ever seen, deeper even than the small green dream-planets of Carlos Fuentes’ Aura, a feline version of my waitress, her eyes brighter than jade.
I watch my paperback cat like a figure on a Grecian urn, always moving, forever still. She slinks across the blue cover and into the black and white jungle of letters and esoteric symbols that I read in between bouts of writing poetry. I read three or four pages and then look down at the front cover, my neurons making an association between a black cat and a green-eyed cat-girl, a feline Mexican archetype named Aura who slinks through the jungle of men’s minds.
Aura: at once nymphette and grande dame, at once Devil and Deep Green Sea, or at least according to Fuentes, who won’t show her to us immediately. Instead, we start off with Felipe, a student of French, who just happens to read an ad for a French teacher-historian just like Felipe. It seems the ad was written just for him, and for you, cher lecteur, to draw you in, like a mouse, or a rat nibbling at the yellowed leaves of history in the trunk of an old lady’s room. There you find the documents that she will hire you to translate, from the French, which is appropriate since you are a student of French as well as a Mexican reminiscing longingly about your days at the Sorbonne.
Or was it at l’École Active Bilingue the year Franco fell? You can’t help but read yourself into the character of Felipe, although you’re hardly a historian. So maybe it’s just Felipe after all, in a book which recalls another history, something about Napolean III in Mexico, and French cheese, a confused little mouse, lured by a whiff of camembert beneath the green foliage several meters down the jungle path of that urban monster of Mexico City, itself built upon the fallen stones of Tenochtitlán, a stone’s throw from the buried ruins of the Templo Mayor and the Zócalo.
This is Felipe’s destination, yet it’s also yours, as you guard your wallet on the bus which rumbles over the stone street not far from Calle Jésus María de los Ladrones, with its open market, its Once upon a time you dressed so fine, and it’s silver knife flashing in the harsh afternoon sun.
You get off the bus and walk into the heart of Centro Histórico, where you find the apartment at 115 Calle Doncelles, lift the knocker, the bronze head of a dog Cerberus, and hear the voice of an old lady who says something about walking 13 steps to the staircase — oh, it’s always a staircase, to Heaven? to Hell? quien sabe? or it’s a platonic ladder leading upward or downward into a never-ending labyrinth. You climb the 22 steps in total darkness, upward it seems, toward a room with mice and a rabbit, a bed that’s almost on the floor, and a blinding altar of votive candles.
You open the creaking door and enter Consuela’s room with its trunk in time and its wardrobe of green eyes. Here the old lady starts to play a game, shifting between the aura of her past and the hallucinatory shape of a fifteen year old girl: Señorita Lolita, a slim figment of projection and seduction, the girl Consuela regenerates from her dreams and from the fantasies of Felipe, shape-shifting from this slim beauty to the phantom of the old lady’s future: a bed of bones, a vault of decaying mommies with a girl wandering through it, her mouth wide open, making the whole scenario very disturbing, and intriguing, especially for the Francophile Felipe (and all your other selves, mes semblables, mes frères), learned as he is in the fantasies of Baudelaire and his nymphe macabre, to mention but one of the bright flowers in that Garden of Evil, that dangerous, seductive underworld, French and Mexican, that drugs you like the question of death and love and makes you ignore the beauty of the world around you, even the green-eyed waitress.
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The Stamp of Nature
The black and white symbols stamped onto thin leaves of paper blind you to every woman except Aura, that fusion point of beauty for your set of straying eyes. The waitress is real, but she becomes an internal projection, a mere simulacrum wandering through the urban jungle of Fuentes old town. Locke’s world of senses doubles in upon itself into a secondary world of memory and desire, and fantasy and fiction, which may or may not be real, for what is reality but a mixing of space and memory, the present and the past, a green whirlpool of the mind, deep in the swirling beauty of memory of impression upon impression, an internal world of words and images leading ever backward to the neuron connections that make you who you are.
Of course, Locke couldn’t know what a neuron was, since it was only identified in 1899 by Santiago Ramón y Cajal, more than two hundred years after his Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Yet Locke got the basic point right: our minds are fed by our senses. We’re functions of time and space, of the way we exist physically from one moment to the next. David Hume, who largely follows Locke, put it this way in his 1777 Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding:
It seems a proposition, which will not admit of much dispute, that all our ideas are nothing but copies of our impressions, or, in other words, that it is impossible for us to think of any thing, which we have not antecedently felt, either by our external or internal senses (7.4)
External or internal senses. Backward, perhaps to origin and birth, or forward, toward infinite complexity. Who really knows?
In moments when we think we do know, we find the swirling miracle of memory construed into sense, creating images and meanings in our minds, caverns of philosophy and verisimilitude that open outward into the world.
So that while I’m still sitting here, outside Van Gogh’s Ear, I’m also sitting inside Van Gogh’s Ear, devouring Fuentes’ type-wrought hallucination and ignoring the world all around me. I can no longer see Plazuela San Fernando, Guanajuato and its 17th century charms, or the bright winter sunshine that drenches the stone square. These pastel colours, which only this morning reminded me of Granada and Verona, now only remind me of words and the transfigured memories of Carlos Fuentes.
Looking briefly toward the inside of the café, the buildings in my mind cast a queer light on the cornices and lintels and on the wall-sized painting of sunflower fields in the south of France and starry nights:
In a café called Van Gogh’s Ear, inside, sit I.
I may as well be wearing a green visor and green sunglasses, for even my own memories don’t haunt me anymore; even the bikini visions of Puerto Vallarta where I spent three days on the beach a week ago don’t torture me with the whiff of coconut oil on mestizo skin or images of Baudelairean escape, darkly glistening in the spray, girls arm in arm.
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The mind can be exposed to the most intense sensations, such as the ones I experienced in Cuba, and yet still carry on with its own internal agenda — while still watching a beautiful half-naked Italian girl dancing around a pool in Playas del Este; while still riding a horse and a motor-cycle over the red hills of Viñales; while still drinking mojitos with a red-bikinied drunken Italian girl on a beach at Puerto Esperanza;
while getting pulled into the tide of revelry in a Black Latino street-party in Santiago; while still sitting in a Centro bar watching male tourists get dragged into schemes that only fans and iPhones will get them out of; while still sitting with a plastic beer cup in hand contemplating the temptations of Caribbean islands and dark friendly eyes, half-drunk in a little ocean bar west of Havana yet still yet sober enough to realize that whatever the power of these present sensations, the more deeply-threaded impressions in my brain will tell my feet to get back to the hotel, and, eventually, back on a plane.
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Next: Cuba