Gringo

XXX

ONCE UPON A TIME...

THEY entered the Park. There were still real chestnut trees. Children played on a pile of yellowish sand, like an island. They were fighting: "But I tell you it's mine — it belongs to me!..." And the crowd, the crowd everywhere. Students on the benches were learning the secrets of Euclidean geometry, or the secrets of the glycogenic function of the liver — all the secrets, in short, for marching in the column.

— No! I tell you it's clonk-clonk, not cluk-cluk. The proof...

Gringo walked through all of this, looking for a bird in the chestnut trees. He held that hand in his. Ma was watching him from the corner of her eye.

— First of all, drop that abominably serious look of yours, my little one — that is the thickest magic of all. 

Gringo wrinkled his nose, tried a smile on the left cheek, a smile on the right cheek. It didn't work very well. Rani hopped about as if nothing were the matter.

— Smile at what? It's not funny.

— But my little one, if I transported you instantly to Amazonia with the beautiful trees and the birds... and the mosquitoes — you'd smile for three minutes, and then... it wouldn't be "funny," as you say; you'd go on asking the question: you'd pass through the trees as through the metro door or the park gate. Huh, who is it that passes here and who passes there — who?

— I'm tired of being a man.

— But you're not yet a man! You're just a clever little marmoset.

— That's not bad! said Rani, who knew nothing of the evolution of species.

— You only know all the little click-click-clocks they've put in your skull and your chromosomes. You see nothing — not in Borneo, not here. You see only a mirror of your click-click-clock. But that, my little one, is the old magic. Except from time to time, when your question burns a little too fiercely, you pass through it. Then you let out a small cry.

— Yes, but it all goes white. I want to pass through with my eyes wide open.

— But you can't pass through with your false eyes, little bird! If the canary passes through with its canary eyes, it will see only canary. Doesn't that make sense?

— Oh! as for me, you know — "visions"... I don't feel like St. Teresa, in any part of my chromosomes.

— But it's not a "vision," child! It is not seeing something other than what is there: it is THE vision — seeing what is truly there, without the little click-clocks of an invented geometry and an invented physiology.

— But one doesn't invent physiology! One is inside it.

— Exactly: you are inside it — you are all inside the invention.

— Get me out of the invention.

Rani was watching them both with a finger on her nose.

— Ma, tell us a pretty story, she said. Gringo, he is a bit...

Ma smiled. She drew them down an alley of the Park and they all three sat beneath a chestnut tree. She placed her hands in the folds of her white dress and closed her eyes.

— Once upon a time there was a pretty seagull...

Gringo looked up — and suddenly it was something so familiar, as if he felt the wind in his ears and smelt the seaweed. He smiled.

— ...She made her nest in the cliffs of the great fjord, up there, and she loved nothing so much as to plunge into the wind and suddenly open her wings, upside-down in the sky with a cry of wonder, or to float there on the soft wind, and then dive like a flash into the green waters where the little herrings glitter. It was so fresh, so delightful to feel the water, the wind on the smooth feathers — to swim or to fly as one embraces the azure sky or a myriad of small salty bubbles. And sometimes one stayed quiet, one feet in the white sands, listening endlessly to the naked lapping of the fjord, like a murmuring stream of light that stretches and creates a ripple of shells on the shore... She must have been an ancestor-seagull of Gringo's, because she began to "watch" the fjord instead of diving into its waters and drinking the fresh azure that smelled of lavender and foam. She was no longer the azure — she was no longer the green basin nor the light kelp floating between the craggy rocks. An invisible net fell over her wings... It was the world's first geometry and its first bird-cry caught in the net: the bird-Gringo, the bird-me — but never again-never-again the bird-bird, nor the seagull in one wing-beat into the wave.

— That doesn't surprise me coming from you, observed Rani calmly. Who would have thought...

— Then the pretty seagull, from gaze to gaze and from small cry to small surprised cry, found herself caught in a second net, a third net, heaps of small blue or rosy nets making colors — algae of her own and other seagulls out there. Then one day it was black with nets upon nets; she could no longer move — she was caught in a small pool of extinguished light, on one leg, and two turning round and round in the net. This was already a Gringo very advanced in the physics of the world: he knew all the stars that are measured through the meshes, and the cardinal points to replace the direct flight and the smooth glide through the great garrulous trade winds. And finally they put a great net over the world-map, and the earth was left planted on its ecliptic, like a stork on a roof. That is where they found Newton's law, the law of the pancreas, and all the little laws to measure the law of their net.

— It's a sad story, said Rani.

— It's only the beginning of the story. Now look — they invented the net precisely so that "someone" would look... At the end of the story, one day, one little Gringo, two little Gringos, a few lost little Gringos here and there began to remember the pretty fjord in the mists, and a seagull's cry echoing out there, beyond nets after nets, like the breaching of clouds by light over a winged space. They made a first hole in the mesh and it was dazzling and white because their cavernous eyes no longer knew the silver blade on the windy breakers, nor their two arms the joy of embracing so much of the world with a cry of rapture. And then all the wise ducks absolutely wanted to keep them sheltered in their reasonable net — but it was only a duck's reasoning, or reasoning for anything on two legs walking with trousers and geometry.

— And now it's time! cried Rani.

— Yes, it's time — look!

Then they opened their eyes wide and saw the prettiest fairy tale in the world. Only they were not fairies: they were little Gringos, little Ranis — perfectly natural... little humans on two legs who were finding their light memory again, and a world-map cut loose from its moorings.