Natural History - Carlos Fonseca

Excerpted from Carlos Fonseca's novel Natural History, newly translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell.

The rest belongs to fantasy. On November 23, 1976, with nothing but a couple of suitcases, the family takes a plane toward the south that they’ve never seen but on which they’ve placed all their hopes. Two days later, with little Carolyn showing the first symptoms of the illness that will accompany her throughout the journey, the old bus they’re riding in arrives at a jungle, imposing and lush. Then comes a Latin American journey that is a kind of photographic negative of the great adventurers’ classic voyages. Where Humboldt found a wild and sublime America, they meet a ruinous nature brimming with garbage. Where William Walker found the total absence of the state, they encounter the signs of state power all around. Where Franz Boas found the nature of the unknown, they encounter what seems to be a sinister mirror of their own selves. 

Everywhere he goes, Toledano feels that his voyage is, more than anything, a repetition tinged with farce. Perhaps that’s why, after the first night, while his wife and daughter are sleeping, he takes his wife’s notebook and copies in two fragments from the diary of one of his favorite philosophers. Two dreams that, according to Toledano, suggested that at the end of any voyage there is nothing but a laugh of disillusionment. The first, which Toledano underlines with red ink, is called “Mexican Embassy,” and it goes like this:

I dreamed I was a member of an exploring party in Mexico. After crossing a high, primeval jungle, we came upon a system of above ground caves where an order has survived from the time of the first missionaries till now, its monks continuing the work of conversion among the natives. In an immense central grotto with a gothically pointed roof, Mass was celebrated according to the most ancient rites. We joined the ceremony and witnessed its climax: toward a wooden bust of God the Father fixed high on the wall of the cave, a priest raised a Mexican fetish. At this the divine head turned thrice in denial from right to left.

He feels morbid fascination with the idea that, at the end of the jungle, he will find a mirror image of western misery. He feels morbid fascination with the thought that this trip to the end of the jungle is nothing but a voyage toward the malaise of his own culture. It pains him, however, to think of how, in search of that farce, his wife has impelled a sick child to cross a jungle, one with very little of the natural about it. In those first days, when he finds himself facing these doubts, he returns to the fragment he wrote and tells himself they must go on: they must reach the end of the dream and learn how to laugh on waking. Beside him, the little girl coughs again in her sleep.

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