I have the wooden body of the saint before me; the wood has cracked down the middle of this doctor who looks straight ahead of him without seeing anything in particular.
During his physical life, the great man divided his time into three known parts (or his known time into three parts): the poor and sick, science, and God. Later, after he died and his fame slowly grew as a protector, a guardian of health, and even a healer, he abandoned science and protected the not so needy as well with his spiritual gift. The wooden figure is some eighty centimeters tall and carries in its arms a child that clings to the doctor’s left front side, as if seeking to flatten itself against his body. The child turns out to be the Child, no further introductions necessary. The black frock coat the doctor wore all during his physical life also accompanies him here; the coat sheathes his body, as is almost always true for this doctor, invariably calling to mind the urbane, cosmopolitan elegance he practiced with habitual discipline, to which end he had his suits tailored from patterns sent from Paris. As I said, the wood has cracked. It seems, however, a benevolent wound, or at any rate an obliging one, because it gets confused with the line of buttons on his coat. As the crack ascends, it runs alongside his black tie and proceeds less unnoticeably into his neck, where it dies out in a sudden cleft. There is another crack, disconcerting because it looks violent, that splits the right ear in two and rises toward the parietal bone until vanishing, or erasing itself, under the hat, also black, that covers his head. That hat is another of the characteristic elements; and in practice there is no scenario in which the great man fails to wear one. Lower down, the crack in the middle takes leave of the coat and divides the groin badly. In this area the body has been forgotten, no bulk is suggested, and that makes the fissure look deep, more private, perhaps alluding to a latent nakedness, or rather, to an innocent nakedness.
It is curious to note the slight twist in the doctor’s left shoulder, a movement that bespeaks the act of holding up the child. When I’ve observed how other people react to the figure, I’ve found in their eyes, and in certain of their almost imperceptible gestures, first surprise, and then admiration at this fact. And I also found, among those who had perceived nothing of the kind, an active interest, a sort of curiosity they found hard either to satisfy or to ascribe to something in particular, and which was no doubt due to the nature of this artistic, or dramatic, inspiration assigned to the body of the doctor. A body liberated from the priestly mien that generally accompanies him in the millions of figures of all types in which he looks stiff, like a small tutelary deity. I have another variant of the saint’s body; I could describe its unusually active pose—and I say unusual because it’s a bit dynamic: one leg is poised to walk, and the back leans forward, as if climbing a hill—but I won’t do so now, perhaps later on.
The Child clings to the body of the saint, for a moment he seems entirely devoted to listening to the heart of his protector. His left arm embraces the doctor, and the right one, imprisoned between the two bodies, has no choice but to aim upward; then the arm flexes and the Child puts his hand on his head, as if he were resting, adopting a forced posture that expresses both calm and discomfort at once. He looks up at the face of the saint, and on his red-painted lips one discerns a smile of satisfaction, or rather of relief, as if beside the doctor he had found the refuge denied him until then by the rest of the land and its people. This might sound like an exaggeration, there’s no way to prove the Child indeed lacked shelter, but still it is a truth that leaps from the figure. In the meantime, the saint’s imperturbable gaze says, or so I believe, “Don’t worry, now you’re safe,” or something like that.
Despite his monumental bearing and his striking attire, the doctor tends toward absence wherever he is placed. It’s a dispassionate air, not very forthcoming, and one doesn’t know whether to attribute it to disorientation or rigidity. For this same reason, he could be a literary hero, one of those who are always submissive, contemplative, indifferent, absorbed by endless meditations. The child is dressed in a tunic that comes down to his ankles; I have no better way to describe it than to call it Biblical or pastoral; it is sky blue and at its waist one can hardly detect the golden ribbon that girds it. The child’s bare feet peek out, with their tiny toes and their frankly microscopic toenails painted red, barely a thin line. These feet, too, cleave to the doctor’s body, they even seem to clutch it, and might be another way of showing the child’s forlornness, the need for comfort that inhabits every inch of his skin. The saint, so citified, and the child, so rural. There’s a detail on the child’s skirt of a tropical bird, wrought at the height of his shinbone. It’s a small blue and red macaw, with some yellow as well.
Rafaela Baroni includes one of these birds on every piece she makes. She calls them “little parrots”; for her it’s a matter of adding a parrot, which is always more or less the same animal in a renewed presentation. When we spoke by phone once, she told me she’d had no room for the parrot on the now damaged saintly doctor, and so thought she’d have to content herself with painting one on. It would not be long before I finally saw the figure; moreover, as I’ll probably explain later, it was a piece of information she’d already given me; but I’m recalling the comment now because of the familiarity with which she spoke of these immovable characters. Baroni, however, succeeded in making a not merely superficial parrot, because she ended up carving it in relief on the child. Life is related to volume; superficiality is a subterfuge, a mere representation, or better yet, a coverup. The parrot becomes bodily real if it appears in three dimensions; if not, it serves as a simple euphemism.
The other piece by Baroni that is in my power, that is also “mine” (later perhaps I’ll explain what I mean by the quotation marks), shows a woman leaning against the trunk of a putative tree that has only two short, thick limbs, actually, a roughhewn piece of wood in the form of an irregular cross. The work, as I remember, is called the woman on the cross or the crucified woman—Baroni, for her part, is not indifferent to the two names; she prefers the second; I, for an obvious reason, prefer the first. This piece has its parrot: it looks ahead from one of the stubby limbs of the tree. The woman does just the same, she looks ahead of her. Like the saintly doctor, she gives the impression of being in a dispassionate ecstasy, the sort of absent mien that in fact seems like a dramatic or actorly gesture, the pose the character has taken in order to display herself. It’s that, at a certain moment, Baroni’s figures tend to come to life. This is not reflected in any unlikely movement, of course, but instead above all in their equilibrium and restraint: they adopt a quiet, ambivalent life, similar in certain respects to that of stones or objects, but also to that of those beings who inhabit borderlands, lethargic, unmoving and paradoxically omniscient. The Brazilian Cabral spoke of stones, of their unemphatic presence. Baroni’s pieces possess something of that irresolute expression, settled into time and condemned not to change, I mean, exposed to their own immobility.
The woman on the cross is one of the few figures made by Baroni that has an anonymous source, or at any rate an undefined one, and lacks a proper name. The others, when they are women, are Virgins, and when they are men they are saints (either recognized by the Church or popular ones, like the doctor). I’m acquainted with other pieces as well, but these don’t exactly represent people, or at least, entire bodies; one of them is a shoe; the other, a cranium or bare head. And as always, the everlasting parrots, which I sometimes think are affixed to the bodies so as to defend their own changeless world, safe and sound and keeping a sharp eye on the evolution of saints and people. Baroni’s wooden shoe stands out as a curious thing, maybe aberrant as well, because it isn’t merely a shoe that she carved with lesser or greater commitment, but instead it accompanies, or rather contains, a foot (also of wood). A shoe in name only, because actually it’s a woman’s sandal, high- heeled, with two or three leather or cloth straps. I imagine Baroni must have foreseen the challenge—or for her, the unclear sense—that lurked in the act of carving the sandal empty, and must have thus decided that it would contain a foot with its toes and toenails, chiseled broadly, which at the top exhibits a smoothness that at first looks cosmetic, something closer to wax. To me that shoe has often seemed the excuse for the foot, the subterfuge or pretext for making it, of course, but also so as not to show it undefended.
As far as I know, the cranium and the foot conceal no individual, there’s no one behind those pieces of wood turned into an isolated physical presence and incomplete bodily form. That’s why these works prove a bit unusual, because Baroni is not an artist in the habit of offering general arguments, I mean, abstract or conceptual propositions: at most, she indicates, describes, at most enunciates—her main goal being the virtuous glorification issuing from the world of religion, beyond that never making any objection to or critique of anything that could be considered negative. The world of Baroni is large but circumscribed, conscious of its limits, and always populated by good and clear intentions. The shoe and the head also draw attention for another unexpected circumstance, the austerity of the composition: coloration is nearly absent, nor do the typical features of Baroni’s costumes appear, there are no vivid colors, no added artifice or ornamental minutia, etc. I imagine that by her own creative logic—by that which took the lead as she made these two pieces, at least—whatever is not for some reason strongly determined must be exaggeratedly indeterminate, with no gradations possible. At the same time I also think that for Baroni every human figure calls for a definition, the bestowing of a name, first of all, and secondly, the playing of a role: something that grants existence to that piece of wood. That being the case, the only way for her to avoid this injunction of totality was the partial representation of the body—abstraction as a loan of the parts. One can thereby see how artists naturally gravitate toward indeterminacy, it’s a force that draws them beyond their expressive consciousness, even in those cases when their nature—as in Baroni’s case, for instance—dictates the opposite.
That is why the woman on the cross seemed rather singular, and that thought occurred as soon as I saw her. And also owing to a further detail, which makes her kindred with the sizable entourage of Virgins made by Baroni, all highly stylized and in appearance far removed from the blessedness or grace of virginity, their mouths in a rictus that is neither of compassion nor indulgence, but instead of indifference or even outright disinterest, as if they were constantly distracted, focused on their solitary condition, and therefore alien to any possibility of human or spiritual interchange. That other detail resides in the fact that each female figure carved by Baroni is a representation of herself. They are self-portraits with different designations (which, again, as I may describe later, are translated in turn into only a handful of names, I mean, the habitual characters of Baroni’s iconography); not to mention that the male figures as well nearly always seem to have her face, as is the case of the saintly doctor that stands before me. The contoured hair and sparse mustache adhere to the conventions of the figure, and if you disregard the devotional image as accepted by the faithful and imagine the saintly doctor hatless and with long hair, you’ll discover Baroni, ready to be a Virgin, rapt with anticipation. On occasion I’ve placed the woman on the cross and the saintly doctor side by side, and I’ve always been astonished by the similarity of their faces, at first with surprise and then, to some degree, with uneasiness.
That hasn’t happened only to me, but is the opinion of many other people on seeing the two pieces side by side. For instance, one morning when the sun was hiding every now and then behind medium-sized clouds in constant motion, which brought about moments of bright sunlight and of fainter brightness, it seemed to me that the figures had swapped their clothing and accessories and had each assumed the other’s pose, and without further ado assumed the role of its partner. So similar did the faces become that the change in light made them even more identical; or rather, the variations showed that the difference was in the end insignificant, that the faces were right there, available, and that either could have been the face of the other. Children, of course, are the exception. The child in the saintly doctor’s arms bears no resemblance to Baroni, nor does any other representation of a child that I recall at the moment, generally speaking also in the arms or on the laps of Virgins or angels. During his physical lifetime, the doctor would pinch the cheeks of children so hard that they feared him, or would hide immediately when he entered their homes. That was one of the darker aspects of his incorruptible goodness, which was praised by all. The children couldn’t understand why he pinched them so hard. But since faces generally lose their chubby cheeks after toddlerhood, these cruelties of the saintly doctor were an experience that left no physical trace on the individuals themselves, and so in most cases ended up watered down into an object of individual memory.
There could be a materialist explanation for that indistinguishability, or, rather, permanent likeness of the faces: Baroni refined her manual technique so as to resolve, almost always in the same way, the human countenance. The first time she did it, probably owing to a bout of discouragement that placed her at the limits of her powers, she perhaps chose to depict herself in the role of a pious person, suffering and stoic, as a type of release and expiation. Then the custom became ingrained, or rather, the conviction that her own image was the most natural and obvious one, for it was unquestionably the face that took shape with almost no deliberate intervention; it was skill alone at work, much like automatic speech. We can see that in this respect the materialist explanation approaches the other, let’s say, spiritual hypothesis, according to which moral inspiration reaches its highest degree of certainty at the moment of artistic execution, when it asserts itself as technical intuition. In this case it is most likely an unconscious replication: striving to represent an individual’s most characteristic trait, which is to say the face, Baroni obeys an order over which she has no control, under whose guidance she keeps refining the features (foreseeable but each time original) of the new figure. One question would be the following: when is a character more true to life, or best achieved—when it is given the materialist explanation, or the spiritual one? Many will regard this question, which springs from the belief that the two explanations prompt different outcomes, as impertinent.
It is quite likely Baroni would show no interest in this kind of commentary; she might incline toward a third option, more or less free- floating, which would play different roles depending on the circumstance, and in which the artist, in the sense of creator, would emerge sometimes as a character and sometimes as a real person (understanding her to be someone capable of extracting herself from the constructed world, whether real or fictional). Baroni’s creations thus derive from the changeable character she has created, one that coincides intermittently with her own persona. Something perhaps a bit similar to those stones takes place; Baroni at times chooses an unemphatic presence, hidden behind the figures she has worked on for weeks, and at other times acts as an administrator of identities, distributing attributes and virtues among the creatures she’s made. This ambiguity is latent in the inanimate, much as the poet Cabral noted; when he referred to unemphatic stone he underscored that what is inert in nature intrigues the most, for it conceals a code whose value is the world’s permanence. (In another poem he speaks of the hen’s egg, and says among other things that at first sight it exhibits the autistic inadequacy of stones, with no inside or outside, or in any case with no relevant inside or outside; but, he adds, whoever hefts an egg is amazed by its complex condition as finished form and living organism.)
I met Baroni when she was recovering from a respiratory ailment that had kept her in the hospital for two weeks and left her barely able to speak. When I introduced myself, she began, without preamble, to tell the story of her convalescence. She told me among other things that I’d found her at home by chance, for the doctors had predicted she’d be staying in the hospital for a third week; but the day before, without much of an explanation, they had authorized her discharge. So Rogelio packed up her hospital garb in the same sports bag they had arrived with, and shortly past noon they left the hospital, walking slowly under the sun, straight to the taxi stand. Baroni was hoarse, the irritation of her larynx had caused her to lose her voice, a state to which she had by now become sadly accustomed. To hear her one had to bend down and bring one’s ear a few centimeters from her lips, which turned the conversation into an arduous chain of repetitive motions; not to mention the times Baroni had to repeat her words, which contributed to her fatigue, or the times one had to draw closer to her yet again, as if her mouth were a broken- down oracle that by a defect or from overuse was unable to do its job. It proved almost impossible for me to understand anything coherent; I missed a great deal of what she said, and that led me to respond with generalities or to agree in a vague fashion, all of which meant that the most arduous part of the conversation had to be carried on by the person least able to do so.
The overwhelming presence of nature, as I said earlier, with its typical buzzing but with its fullness as well, weakened Baroni’s voice still further. No particular category of noise—crickets or the more or less distant barking of other dogs, quite audible nonetheless, or the repeated laboring of a faraway motor—brought that effect about; it was instead the entire surround, which by virtue of the exact weather conditions and time of day, as well as the underlying sounds, not to mention the dominant scents at that moment, revealed itself as a deep crackling, a fairly slow murmur, which deigned to tolerate our presence but in return expressed itself as, so to speak, a latent threat, one excessively on edge. Thus in Baroni’s garden I verified once more that the supposed equilibrium of the wild seems instead like a final countdown; nature instills fear in us. And this despite its being a well- regulated nature, as I’ll probably describe later on, though varied and profuse enough to demonstrate the full scale of the wild, and above all, to serve as a reminder or a warning of its original strength.
The garden parcel was surrounded by areas of uncultivated growth, and at moments Baroni spoke of future expansions as if physical limits didn’t exist and it were a question of a vast terrain belonging to her, endless, at least on two of the three visible sides. She would gesture toward something with her arm outstretched, and keep it raised while describing in her inaudible voice the flowering path she’d open up, or the plantings intended for those corners; that’s how she described the themes of future plots. In the region where Baroni lives, the backs of houses abut on open space; the impression is that the mountain ends there, and each inhabitant can decide, according to whim or need, how to arrange that border. As you arrive, you notice instantly that Baroni’s house is at the epicenter of an ever-expanding area, as I just said, where different notions of a garden nevertheless coexist. I’ll perhaps describe this later on, but for now I’d like to point out that the idea of a profuse, even self-replicating, garden, one that nonetheless requires a human hand, Baroni’s in this instance, to spread and fulfill its purpose, as it were, whether soothing or shady, depending, also applies inside the house, invading floors and walls, and at times transforms it into something ambiguous, an anteroom to or longing for what grows outdoors.
When you go in, the first area you discover is given over to the display of Baroni’s carved figures. It’s an austere room, like the rest of the house, and on the sky-blue walls you can see several vines painted with occasional flowers, their undulating stems arising from or putting out roots in the lower part of the wall, where they entwine; at times these garlands twist into single tendrils higher up on the wall, with, I think, a still more precious intent. Baroni has painted those vines outside the house, too, both on the exterior walls and on the columns fronting the veranda, also on several medium or large garden stones, and even in some corners, that at first sight go unnoticed; vines otherwise identical to those on the “tree” against which the woman on the cross is leaning, a few paces from where I am now. In the right-hand corner of the room that day were two tall Virgins, one green and another yellow, keeping an eye on the opposite corner with the habitual silence of their kind. To one side of them was the woman on the cross, smaller and of course much less ostentatious, her gaze lost in the same fixed point as always. Behind the wood carvings rose the vegetal- and floral-garlanded wall, as I said, and at eye level, in the center of the wall, a variety of pictures were hanging. Some were photos, the majority diplomas or commendations, and there were a few strictly decorative or commemorative paintings of a landscape or a religious figure; apart from that, on one tiny shelf or another there were a few decorative or personal objects, most likely endearing. There was another wall, off to the side, small and set apart by a beam, that held a greater number of pictures and diplomas. I began examining the diplomas, many of which had that decorative, sometimes vividly colored trim that makes the written testimonial stand out, and I noticed that the entire wall of this room was similarly arranged, with painted vines surrounding the central area, where the diplomas were.
The newcomer felt the impact of this austere atmosphere, which despite the many signs of the outdoors, represented a space that was too empty and for long stretches of time, one might suppose, perhaps often forgotten. Yet it revealed more than its stripped-down state promised, because in its economy (the scattering of objects, and also the handful of decorative motifs that were nonetheless fairly repetitive, the vacant corners) it exposed Baroni’s delicate situation, planted between nature and art, on the one hand, and permanence and transience on the other. Even what little of the house that I managed to see later confirmed for me the impression of encountering something brief or provisional, ready to quit the premises in a few short hours and in that case, to leave behind traces of the recent occupants that, however well-defined, were at the same time completely mute, or rather, suddenly silenced. Yet this wasn’t a mere attribute of the house, I think, but instead a quality intrinsic to the objects Baroni makes, meaningful and mute at once, eloquent and inexpressive.
Perhaps owing to that stripped-down atmosphere, in which everything was conceived for contemplation and in some cases, depending on the object, for worship or celebration (the wood carvings, the small religious prints, the painted garlands), one immediately felt cloistered, or out of place, despite being surrounded by a great deal of unoccupied space. The emptiness became more obvious because of the ornamentation, which absorbed the attention, great or small, that one might have. That attention would come back to anyone at all, to me in this case, as intrigue or bewilderment, because a struggle was being staged between different ways of seeing. The visitor would thus receive contradictory signs, some arising from the idea of a museum or gallery (the artworks on display) and others from the image of scarcity represented in that room with no furniture.
I stood in silence for a while, amid the artworks and the walls. The smallest frames contained honorable mentions of the most varied sort, but all done in calligraphy; Baroni would comment at times on this diploma or that; she was proud of every one of them. At a certain point I noticed that she had left, I hadn’t realized it at the time, but in the end I saw her come in with a book in her hand, a few pages long. As far as I know, it’s the only one she’s written to date; it’s entitled Message of Love. I began to look through it; on the cover appeared an angel garbed in yellow, flanked by blue and white wings and two parrots perched on flowering branches. I now have the copy at hand and every so often I reread it, as I might describe later on, though I’m not sure.
Thinking perhaps of resuming the tour, once she’d finished talking about the book Baroni said, “Here’s my workshop,” or something like that, and headed toward the left-hand side of the room. She proceeded with short steps, tired and hurried at once, her shoulders hunched forward as if she wanted to arrive quickly, most likely pushed onward by some uneasiness. Though she was convalescent, her movements seemed urgent; so that I wondered if that manner, or inclination, wouldn’t reveal a condition difficult to control and which led her to move in a somewhat disjointed way; taking weary steps because of her illness, yet faithful to her body’s involuntary habits. I was also struck by a sort of eagerness or pressing need on Baroni’s part to seek in her interlocutor some confirmation regarding what she said or did. This became more conspicuous to me when I saw much later, in a museum screening room, a documentary filmed in her house, where she needed to confirm the good or bad tenor of her answers in the interviewer’s reactions. But it would be an exaggeration to put it like that, first of all because Baroni isn’t an insecure person; on the contrary, I’ve known few people of stronger and more lasting convictions. As I observed her gestures in the film I relived several things I’d noticed on my visit, and it all made me reflect that perhaps the pleasantness or dependency on her interlocutor’s mood came from the dramatic circumstances of her past, on the one hand, and from being an artist of humble origins, on the other.
Then, somewhat abruptly, Baroni opened the door that led to the workshop, and we entered a long, narrow room with windows facing the front of the house and one of its sides. I should say that she didn’t actually open any door, she simply had me go in. But in doing so, she made a gesture of such simple theatricality that I felt I was stepping onstage, as if she had effectively opened the way with a practiced protocol, or better, as if Baroni had revealed to me a secret entrance, invisible in the room’s dimness, beyond which the true action would begin. Behind us we had the rest of the audience, made up of the two Virgins and the woman on the cross. But that’s not entirely how it was. What lay before us seemed more like a frozen stage set. In the workshop I saw first of all how the signs of manual, even physical, labor stood out; for instance, tools and tree roots or odds and ends of wood in various sizes. But I could also see her work had been sporadic, at least in this most recent and perhaps prolonged interval.
I stood like that, observing and making a mental note of my impressions, most likely mistaken, when Baroni seemed to read my thoughts. She spread her arms wide, wanting to take in the whole workshop, to explain inaudibly that lately, because of her illness, she hadn’t been able to work on a regular basis. She didn’t need to tell me, I saw it, but from that moment and for the rest of the day I no longer anticipated her words, or her silent expressions and gestures either, which would instantly assert themselves without my realizing it. One could attribute the change in atmosphere to inactivity; not an air of abandonment but, rather, of a sudden and unexpectedly prolonged absence. An identical layer of dust blanketed objects and corners without distinguishing between the closest and the farthest off. Here were the tools, waiting in the same random spot where the unfinished job had decreed they be left, the pieces that were half-done and yet a bit aged, etc. I imagined that without much effort an attentive gaze could reconstruct the unfinished tasks. But of course, not as much what was still to be done as what had been done already.
Pieces of wood were spread out in different corners, some of a considerable size, thick stumps or logs, as Baroni calls them, from old and, I suppose, worthy trees, and there were several more or less twisted giant roots, giant, that is, given the dimensions of the space, and there were also some thin laths, much like ornamental molding. Apart from that, one could see a number of items, now difficult for me to pin down, and which I remember as occupied spaces and fluctuating shadows, I’d say almost interchangeable. Boxes of different sizes or piles of things, objects stacked and hidden in the semi-darkness of the place. Otherwise, and also I’m unaware of the reason, the tools seemed to me, the visible ones at least, scarcer than I would have expected, and rudimentary, too, hardly specialized or specific, and above all I was impressed, though I don’t know why, maybe because of the contrast with the few hand tools, I was impressed by the great quantity there was of brushes and tubes of paint, of small jars, tins or containers, for mixing pigments, I suppose, and wooden boards or surfaces of all sorts of materials on which to try them out. And lastly, as I said, I saw a good number of half-made figures; not only unfinished, but discontinued as well, hardly blocked out and, one noticed, abandoned far longer than had been originally foreseen.
In the workshop there were practically no decorations, in contrast to the room by the front door. Here Baroni had decided to cut herself off from the vegetal landscapes on the walls and from the finished works, so that she could be alone with those that were embryonic, imagined, or incomplete. Given these signs of absence, it surprised me that Baroni’s entrance had an immediate effect of turmoil, as if silence and motionlessness had been redeemed on the spot, translated into an inclination, into a sort of friendliness toward her on the part of the objects. I recalled those cartoon series for children, in which inert but always useful things—utensils and tools in general (plates, spoons, pencils or pitchers)—took on life and human behavior and began to sing and dance, ready to start on some task, displaying their solidarity with the work of people. In this sense, I thought, Baroni also created intermediate beings, relatives of those dancing figures.
It was at that moment of confusion, as I was pondering the ideas of abandonment and of activity (for a moment I fantasized I’d discovered a secret in this situation, a sort of ideal attained, although attained a natural way, an ideal I might have sought for a long time, without success of course, and was now seeing achieved, bitter over its belatedness, but it was tangible at last); anyway, it was in that moment of confusion that Rogelio appeared, emerging from the depths of the workshop, most likely through a door concealed in so much semi-darkness. In Baroni’s life there have been various saviors, one of them being Rogelio, perhaps the only person who measures up to that category, Baroni’s savior, ever since he literally picked her up and offered to help her when she was on the run from her parents’ house, after abandoning her young children and hiding out in the cemetery of Boconó. As I’ll most likely explain later, Baroni spent several days there, sleeping among the tombs. People began to notice her and christened her, since she wasn’t known in the area, in keeping with her new abode. They also accused her of desecrating graves and went after her for that reason. In reality, Baroni had nowhere to live, but she’d established a more routine connection with death than anyone in Boconó could have supposed. Some time after those days in the graveyard, Rogelio appeared. It’s likely that in the cemetery she found a tranquility not only denied her by her family, but abolished ages before from the past, present or future of her simple existence. For as one can understand, Baroni’s was a life that didn’t demand too much; and yet the little it asked for was in the end denied. As she says to anyone who wants to listen, and as I could confirm on seeing the documentary, Baroni decided to leave her children in the care of her mother and sister for fear of doing them harm, nor did she rule out being capable of killing them, so awful were the attacks of despair that made her weep without cease or consolation.
Rogelio paused in front of us and Baroni spoke in her thin whisper, of which I understood nothing, except for what was predictable, perhaps, the fact that she was introducing us. There was a ceremonial moment and Rogelio said some sociable words, few in number and probably infrequent, I thought, given the effort he was making to overcome his reserve. In that area around Baroni’s house, and also in that town and in the neighboring cities and villages, I’d almost say in the whole winding land of Trujillo state and the other Andean states, Táchira and Mérida, everyone I met up with always proved reticent; or at least seemed subject to a kind of reserve that consigned people to a language of measured gestures and half-spoken words, from which they were clearly reluctant to depart. At most, someone might seek out a greater communication, and in that case would attempt another sort of dialogue, but sooner or later there would be a relapse (a sort of reality check) and the person who had been so bold as to say those not absolutely necessary words would in the end be defeated by some secret qualm or an unpleasant association, I don’t know, and would then retreat, would resume the usual flow, saying only what was essential, it was a sort of verbal restraint, almost always looking down at the floor, a gesture that also meant taking back what had been said up until then with limited talkativeness. And whenever someone departed from that behavior, it was because they did not belong to this local world, to the terrain. By what they say it’s the Andean temperament, the influence of the elevation, the desolation of the high plains, etc. Whatever the case, Baroni would thus be an exception, maybe the only one in that vast territory. At one point, during the brief exchange with Rogelio, Baroni stepped a few meters away and, behind our backs, began coughing over and over again. I hadn’t realized it before, it was only on rehearing her cough and watching her body shuddering that I became aware of this woman’s weak constitution, similar in its fragility to the little sticks or small staves she had scattered about or bundled in the corners of the workshop, with an equilibrium at the mercy of the slightest movement or any breath of air, and which often embellish her figures by forming cloaks or dresses that seem, and only seem, to be moveable. In reality, this respiratory ailment was a small thing if one compared it with other episodes in the troubled history of her health.
I said good-bye to Baroni before mid-afternoon. At that hour the temperature still, or once again, appeared to make things quiver. Those spells of intense heat which lead one to trot out descriptions of hazy outlines, refractions of light, objects in slow motion, etc. Yet I was struck by the inverse, speed; as if the temperature, exerting some form of terror, had a disintegrating effect, and reality itself, in its multiple articulations, had been startled and wanted to flee from this situation immediately. You’d hardly gone out to the garden, and without even taking the first step or feeling the impact of the heat yet, you would already notice the anxiety—nature, free-flowing and crushed at the same time. You’d know that beneath that stillness a combustion was throbbing in which all the elements took part, and which revealed itself through isolated and spontaneous reactions. The smell of the mangos embedded in the ground, clearer than before, saturated the air, making them indivisible from the presence of any object in particular. I walked the thirty meters to the entrance gate, once more crossing through the distinct areas of the front garden, the oldest of them already established and dominating their sites, I mean proving less attention-grabbing, the novelty having adapted itself to the space, and I went out to the street, where I was naturally struck by the minimal difference between inside and outside, an irrelevant nuance, one could take that portion of the street to be the preamble or the coda to Baroni’s garden. But obviously the same could perhaps be said of any space neighboring this property. Some years ago, the municipality of Betijoque christened that street with Baroni’s name, as a way of paying homage to its most illustrious figure. And yet there is little else that I remember about this almost deserted lane, as though beside its probable lack of distinction, only the house, first, and the street name, second, would absorb the visitor’s complete curiosity. The rest of the streets in Betijoque were empty as well. It was the moment for my return trip, I could have taken the quickest route, but I preferred to go back to Boconó taking the long way around, so as to acquaint myself with the western part of that territory.
At that hour Betijoque had lost the peaceful bustle of midday. No buses or cars could be seen, the stores were closed. A solitary person might appear, walking slowly, only to instantly vanish from view at the first corner. At that moment the avenue seemed excessively broad to me, I thought the desolation highlighted dimensions that at first glance were unnecessary. I don’t know how to put it, the avenue demonstrated itself to be an obsolete and disused artifact, a deserted esplanade that was only the memory of what before and after Betijoque recovered its typical highway breadth. The façades of the houses, of the same concrete-gray as sidewalks and pavement, along with the gentle sloping of the terrain, brightened the transparent light of the highlands. In any case, a few minutes later, after a three-block stretch, this principal avenue petered out near the town limit, to turn once again into highway, the road of the outlying area. The contrast between city and country is always spoken of. The emptiness, the density, the prolonged uncertain border. Yet on leaving Betijoque that afternoon I was struck by another type of contrast, which at that moment I experienced as more obvious and definitive because it was lacking in nuances. It was radical, like turning a page; in a minuscule fraction of time one was already surrounded by silence and nature. In this way, almost without realizing it, I found myself once again surrounded by the vast elevations, which revealed themselves by turns, whether one looked behind or looked ahead.
The road proved to be of dirt for nearly its entire length; there were sections, now impassable, that had been paved long ago, and others in better shape, especially when reaching a destination. While going up or down (for which the road etched a permanent zigzag on the slopes), or while proceeding through the winding area of the valleys (which followed the watercourses), one had the impression of being close to something that in reality was beyond the immediate surroundings, at an insuperable distance—the mountains, various and overlapping. What was distant drew closer perhaps owing to a purely visual effect, to the clearness of the air or to the uneven height and depth of the different elements of the landscape, whose relative positions were always in flux. The afternoon had clouded over. At times I drove into areas of low-lying clouds, where an incandescent cloudiness hid everything; banks of mist, thicker or less so, in the process of disintegrating. Without it raining, or through a rain made up of air saturated with dew, one discovered that all things, even the sheltered ones, were soaked and were dripping.
Every now and then there would be a break in the clouds, and through a breach in the peaks I could see the sun, peering out only to hide immediately behind another mountain or another cloud. I’d already read somewhere about the condensation effect produced by the region’s arbitrary orography, which traps hot air inside the mountainous perimeter. I kept leaving behind dormant hamlets, places where everyone seemed to have retreated indoors or moved away. I came across no other vehicle, and since at times the track of the highway would disappear or overlap with the rocky bed of a watercourse, or turn into a hardly visible trace that was difficult to verify, I occasionally wondered if I were really still on the route and if I might not be advancing without any kind of route at all. At those moments one could take any direction, with nothing to obey. It was this thought about the chance nature of the road that led me to think about chance in general—its ineffable combination of destiny and causality—and about the complicated matter of having met Baroni. Not the circumstances that had made me seek her out and meet with her, but about the influence, at that point unknown, that meeting her would in the future have on me.
Sergio Chejfec is an Argentine writer of narrative and essays who lives in New York City. He teaches at NYU in the Creative Writing in Spanish MFA Program. He has published several books, including novels, essays, and short stories. Some of them have been translated Into English: Notes toward a Pamphlet, Ugly Duckling Presse, New York, 2020; The Incompletes, Open Letter, Rochester, 2019; Baroni, A Journey, Almost Island, New Delhi, 2017; The Dark, Open Letter, 2013; The Planets, 2012; My Two Worlds, Open Letter, 2011.
Margaret Carson translates fiction, poetry, essays and drama from the Spanish. Her translations include Sergio Chejfec’s My Two Worlds (Open Letter, 2011), Mercedes Roffé’s Theory of Colors (belladonna* books, 2005) and José Tomás de Cuéllar's The Magic Lantern(Oxford University Press, 2000). Other translations have appeared in Asymptote, Aufgabe, EOAGH, e-misférica, BOMB, Music and Literature and Words Without Borders. She is currently translating the dream journal and other writings by the Spanish surrealist artist Remedios Varo (Wakefield Press, forthcoming). A former cochair of the PEN America Translation Committee, she teaches at City University of New York, Borough of Manhattan Community College.