[Check the sidebar for where to begin, and the end of the entry called "Return of La Pionera And The New Mango" for a detailed, ongoing Table of Contents.]
by Jerome du Bois and Catherine King
I. Dillard's Crosses
You'll have bad times,
And he'll have good times,
Doin' things that you don't understand.
But if you love him, you'll forgive him
Even though he's hard to understand.
And if you love him, aw, be proud of him,
'Cause, after all, he's just a man.
--Tammy Wynette, "Stand By Your Man," the #1 Selection on Dillard Benlinederry's IPod
Saturday, May 28, 2005, North Scottsdale, Arizona, very late, in the study of the Benlinederry home. The picture windows are black, with a dusting of stars along their upper thirds, a thin necklace of city lights winking miles away below. Dillard Benlinederry sits at the Louis Quinze bird's-eye maple dining table that he and Heather share as a desk. He has his IPod earpieces on, and he is typing on his laptop. The three stacks on the left side are Heather's fat art books, bristling with bookmarks; research for the possible upcoming "hair" exhibition, Follicle! ("I'm going to blow Thelma Golden and SMoCA away." Privately, Dillard refers to it as Heather's Folly.) On the right, Dillard's stack of spiritual self-improvement tomes --Your Best Life Now on top. ("Where's your copy of The Porpoise-Driven Life?" she would tease him.) From Dillard's laptop diary:
I've lost a lot of friends since I accepted the Lord; supposedly sophisticated people who turned out to be surprisingly one-dimensional. All the urbane professors, curators, artists, and my fellow collectors, were simply stymied, open-mouthed, whenever I would (very briefly) share my faith, as if their overeducated heads (mine was one of them, remember) could not contain something that millions of others accept with ease. They came off like bumpkins, not the Christians.
It may look to others as if Heather is just indulging a phase of mine, but she knows me better. She knows about my struggling and seeking; she knows I am a serious person.
And it may look to Christians as if I'm not doing more to evangelize my wife. But they can keep their own counsel as well; I know what I'm doing. One of my favorite songs, #2 on my IPod as a matter of fact, is "Juxtapoz," by SuperFurryAnimals:
You've got to tolerate
All those people that you hate.
I'm not in love with you
But I won't hold that against you.
Not a bad statement of a modern believer's burden, which applies to my fellow believers as well. People are a trial; good thing I'm both patient and repressed.
And it may look to everybody in this town as if I'm just the rich born-again kook who keeps dropping little crosses and crucifixes into his wife's obscenely oversized (and overpriced) leopard-skin Hermés bag. Well, I am that man; I love my hard-hearted, ambitious woman. Heather works in a spirituallly hazardous profession --the art world, teeming with demonic influences-- and no matter how thick-skinned she thinks she is, she still needs protection. The problem is that when she's digging around in that purse --it's just a grab bag, no compartments-- for her cigarettes, or money, or a note, or her watch, or lipstick, she sometimes comes across one of the crosses, curses, and hands it to whoever is nearby. "Here. From Dilly. Jesus loves you." My crosses are now all over town, which I suppose is a good thing, and I don't care about the kook label; I don't care if they think it's hocus-pocus. I just want to keep Heather protected. Anyway, by now they know me by name at Christian Supply, and they whisper behind my back at art openings. I don't mind.
But I don't just serenely lay everything at the Lord's feet and keep my mouth shut. Heather and I have had a few screamers. This "hair" notion, for example, sounds innocuous. But Heather wants to include a piece called "China Shag" by Nadine Robinson. [Editor's Note: This is a real work of art.] In fact, she wants to buy it. No way; not while I'm alive. This six-foot square is made of long, black, thick, glossy human hair, voluntarily grown by Chinese girls and women, carefully tended for years and years, precisely so that it can then be cut off and sold --so the women can eat. It's an evil work of art, and I'd rather take a flamethrower to it than have it in my house. So we'll wrangle about that in the future, I'm sure.
And we've wrangled about the Insect Portraits before --or, rather, about exploiting Kiku Ybarra without her even knowing about it, no matter what she was creating in prison. The key word was "prison." How could Heather think only of the damned art? Because it was damned! How could she make money off of someone's pain? And she would respond with something like "Why doesn't God do something about Cuba!" And so on. I only acquiesced this last time because I have my own, secret reason for going there: I believe God is going to do something about Cuba; something serious.
So did that mean that I was exploiting Kiku's predicament now, too? No, because that would mean the Lord was, and that's not His way. Just look to His life. He has a plan --many plans, of course, nested, networked, or lined up side by side-- so why wouldn't freeing Kiku Ybarra be one of them?
Side by side . . . Juxtapose . . . an unusual word for an ordinary condition, of being side by side.
Juxtapoz
Just suppose
Just suppose
I juxtaposed with you--ooo-ooo-ooo-uuu
Heather was the "juxta" part, I was the "pose." Side by side. She was prickly and angular, I was quiet and smooth. And there was a cross, an x, like a constant crossroad, in the middle of our lives. But I'm determined to work it out, with His help.
Time for prayers and bed. I'll be praying for you, Kiku Ybarra. Stay strong.
2. Beny's Story
Saturday, Earth Date May 28, 2005. From Beny Manach's Time Capsule, recorded on microcassette in the basement of his father's house in Santa Clara, Villa Clara, Cuba, very very late:
The basement still has that hot-printer smell. The others have gone to their homes with their packages for the midweek distribution. According to the little feedback we've gotten, mainly from Yasmani's brothers and Flash No More, the first cards are not just being tossed away. We didn't think so: Habaneros vacuum up any novelty, no matter how small. You can bet they're thinking thinking thinking. What else is there to do except look for food? Also, Yasmani's brothers, the music producers, got a call from Distinto, who got a card, and now he wants to hire them to work on a song about our wonderful "fruit." The people we're after --the hungry ones-- they'll snap at anything promising.
Looking around the waterproofed block walls of our basement, I'm proud of what we've built with the money from the Seed Pool. It took forever because we couldn't just order what we needed over the internet with our platinum card and have DHL pull up in front of the house and start unloading. Oh, sure. Slowly, slowly, over three years, we built it, having to sneak almost every bit of it not only under the eyes of the authorities, but also our neighbors. People have gotten ugly and mean to go with their hunger and despair. Invasion of the Soul Snatchers. Some will turn you in for an extra ration of beans. So it was like that idea in "The Great Escape," where they scattered the dirt they were excavating through the holes in their pockets, down the pant legs, into the dirt courtyard. Two pocketfuls at a time. That's what we were doing, only with cement and blocks and rebar; and, later, printers and paper and ink cartridges. We didn't even know why, yet, but these would be basic needs for any political action.
Pinned to the walls are my modest reminder banners: PORTABILITY THE SEED; DENSITY OUR DESTINY; FASTER SMALLER CHEAPER BETTER; REMEMBER THE GUY BEHIND THE GUY BEHIND THE GUY; MAGIC IS DISTRACTION. And my favorite: A CUBAN ON MARS BY 2030! On the left side of the room a thick plastic curtain separates the lathes and grinders and other dirty machines from the computer, printer and supplies on the opposite side. Overhead, the fans and vents. Under the stairs, the growing supply of bottles. Next to them, in their neat, lethal bundle, the Forty Chocolate Sticks. Over there, the generator, battery chargers, and charging batteries. In the middle, the worktables where I make what I call my "chambers." It's a fancy name for "hidden compartments," but I use it as homage to my best friend Yasmani and his beloved nautilus, and because I just like fancy names. (We call Flash No More's tattoo machine The Whisper.) Yasmani says he learned a lot from the nautilus; I've learned a lot from the mango seed, and from fertilizer. Concentration, integration, density, portability: the keys. Also annealing, but I'll get into that later.
I've created sealed, secure chambers in loaves of bread and big fruits; in a long wooden cane; in a wagon wheel; in a slab of wood, a suitcase, even (once -- never again!) a stuffed rooster. Nobody outside our circle knows: the Oliva, O'Gorman, and Manach families --small, compact, isolated, our relatives dead, gone, or not discussed. Or protected by old religious networks, as my Dad was, with Abakua. Nobody bothers us much, and that's why nobody notices a secret of the nautilus that Yasmani's mother, Catalina Corona, discovered the night we all sat around looking at the two bales of marijuana that Yasmani had found on the beach. "The secret," she said, holding up a drawing of a nautilus that Yasmani had done recently, "is to grow so slowly that nobody notices the change, even after the latest chamber is sealed off." And that's how we began the Seed Pool.
[From an earlier entry, January 5, 2005:]
I never got used to going out into the canefields to swing the machete, because that's where they found my dead mother, before I was a year old. Eight years later, rattling out there every morning in the rickety trucks, jammed rib-to-rib with every other skinny, sleepy kid in the province, I would sit upright with my eyes open, left hand gripping my canestick, right hand wrapped around the scabbard, ready for anything. Actually, I think I was born that way.
(My father said, when I was five and he finally sat me down and told me -- he knew the other kids would descend on me soon -- that it was like looking at someone through red netting. She was checkered red. She had run right into the sugarcane field, plunging, stumbling, twirling, just days before the burning, when the sturdy stalks held up their stiff green blades. "She might just as well have run into a threshing machine." Even later -- just a couple of years ago -- he told me that when he bent to examine her body, he saw she had made sure that her wrists had been opened. My father knew from experience that I would hear someday, and he knew from even more experience to be the first one there with the truth -- or the story.)
My mother was Irina Renkova Manach, a Russian Jewish nuclear physicist who was invaluable to the Revolution -- until the Berlin Wall fell, when everything else fell, and fell apart.
My father is Baltazar Mariano Roa, who was a colonel in a special unit of the Army which regulated the whole nuclear development program -- also invaluable. (This last was always a whisper and a rumor, my father said after it was all over. "'Nuclear development?!' We can't even harvest the fucking sugar cane!") That is how he met my mother.
They fell in love and got married. With Army priveleges, and other, darker connections having to do with Abakuá, my father had been able to preserve his family's estancia [small farm] in Santa Clara, and that's where they moved, both of them important enough to commute to the city for their work.
When I was born they buried the placenta that came with me in a bare, dark plot at a sunny corner of the house. The neighbors -- we didn't have many relatives -- brought gifts. Abuela Hocabed Hatuey -- Marta O'Gorman's grandmother -- carried over a small burlap bag heavy with a rich, dark, soil. She poured it over the placenta spot and worked it in vigorously with her fingers.
"It's a concentrate, kind of like a starter," she said. "Like vitamins."
"I know about the Chthona, Abuela. I'm very grateful. But I didn't plant anything there yet," my father said.
"You didn't?" asked Abuela Hocabed Hatuey.
"Well --"
Then the Soviets pulled a gigantic rug out from under Cuba, and suddenly my mother was worse than useless and my father teetered on the edge of persona non grata. Over the years, my father and I put more pieces together -- he's always been honest with me -- and we believe that a combination of post-partum depression, shock at the Soviet Union's collapse and betrayal, shame about my father's disgrace, which was contingent on her very existence . . . All these drove her into that field.
She told him she was going into town late one afternoon, and disappeared. He spent the night cruising Santa Clara, poking his head in everywhere he could think of. She had been very moody lately . . .
With the morning came the news: she had probably run into the field the night before. As he shuffled home from the sugarcane field -- he had refused a ride, he was just walking stunned, that tangled, red-check image clicking in his head -- he came around the corner of the house and saw, in the placenta plot, the stiff green curve of some tree shoot standing up right in the middle of it, the sunlight, as he stopped and stared, suddenly turning it into a short golden blade.
After a moment he bent down on one knee. It didn't look like a palm shoot. He got up and went to the shed, where he found chicken wire and pliers. He fashioned a dome-shaped protector for the new shoot, anchoring it with stones so no pest could get at this . . . whatever it was. And he, and we both, nurtured it, until soon we knew it was a mango tree. My earliest memories are of being held in my father's arms, standing in the sun for endless minutes, watching that mango tree grow. But where did the seed come from? Did Abuela Hocabed slip a seed into the soil with her massaging? But why hide it? We never asked, though; we just ate the delicious mangoes.
My father was "retired" from the Army and would have suffered a lot more if it had not been for Abakuá. "I'm not a criminal," he told me in his candid way when I finally brought up the name, whispered in the fields and the classrooms. "I escaped that part. Abakuá has evolved branches, which respect and avoid each other. I'm not going to tell you details. First, it's dangerous, but second, for you, my beloved Beny, it's irrelevant! Abakuá, no matter how evolved, is about the past. You, like your mother -- you're about the future."
Then he said, "The third thing is, now that everything's gone to hell and I'm a farmer and mechanic instead of an Army colonel -- well, Abakuá is still a shield for us, Beny. MININT won't come around. Not even Carlos Lage. I don't even know why, but I know it's true. That's why we can do what we do."
So my father kept his head down as a petty farmer, mechanic, and crude machinist, and I grew into a prodigy with a talent for engineering, and the mango tree became big and green and thick, and bursting with the sweetest fruit in Central Cuba. When we dug out the hidden basement after Marta's scalping, during the beginning of the Seed Pool Plan, we came across some of the mango tree roots. Father installed a foot-square, very thick glass window (salvaged from the nucelar program, I think) into the basement wall, so we could always see the roots there.
3. Heather's Preparations
[Mantis here. As The New Mango Revolution was consolidating itself in the first few days, in the literal wake of F's departure, Heather and Dillard Benlinederry left the island as well, by plane, along with a lot of other tourists. Justo Oliva --AKA Fab Farmer, of the musical producer duo The Farmer Brothers, and Yasmani's oldest brother-- drove the Benlinederrys to the airport. Before departure, Heather opened her newly-acquired green plastic Cuban briefcase and handed to Fab her portable digital recorder, its two-gig memory card nearly full. She told him: "I didn't erase anything. I don't care what people know now. It's got some stuff in there from before we got here, from Scottsdale, but there's so much more in there --strange things, about what just happened here, at least to me. I'm not sure how it fits, but it's --well, it's just that I'm-- I'm not that Heather anymore." And she placed it in his hands. He listened to some of it; then, knowing of my contemporay history project, he donated it to me, and that's how I can transcribe what follows.]
[Sunday morning, May 29, 2005, in the Benlinederry study. Heather Benlinederry, at the fancy desk, fumbles through her giant leopard-skin Hermés bag for her digital recorder. While rummaging, she inadverdently activates it, so . . . :]
Where are you, what the hell, you little --no, you're a camera --oh! Okay, okay, here you are, good, and now --oh! you're already going! Hey, okay, hi, little diary, testing, testing, whatever yadda yadda . . . Where's the fucking lighter . . . All right! (sounds of clicking and puffing, exhaling) Ahhh, good . . . Dilly's at Mass, little diary, so I can relax. Oh, shit, better wind the windows open . . . Mass: sounds heavy. Boom de doom boom . . . I just can't figure out what's gotten into him . . . Anyway.
Notes to self:
One: Tell Juanita to get the Newfies boarded for June, at Poochies Paradise;
Two: Tell Juanita to scrub the mud room;
Three: Tell Juanita to tell José to drape and seal the mudroom.
What else? They know what to do with the rest of the house. Okay, the same wardrobe as for Bermuda; no changes there. Emailed Rosa and she got back already --she'll arrange something special, as usual, good little Cuban doobie that she is. Plus she likes our patronage, of course. I can ask her about the hair market when I get there.
Now, about the three plans, and who needs to know what, and who needs to keep what from whom.
I know Dill doesn't like the actual hair idea, but that's what can make or break an exhibition. It's time to make art out of real things. That's my insight. And I owe it all to this bag here [stroking the bag, made of real leopard skin, with its close-cropped fur, her voice softening into a meditative reminiscence]. . . I remember I was carrying it when I went to that wanky HairStories show at SMoCA; so much fakery --paintings of hair? McIver's barbershop piece? so that the real hair pieces --a couple of simple cap-headpieces, some forlorn dreads I wanted to rescue, and especially "China Shag"-- stood out like flags signaling to me . . . I remember stroking that bag so much, as if for comfort, until I made the connection. Real leopard-skin-fur; real human hair. Make it real, Heather.
Dilly will freak. But I do have my own career, after all. He's retired.
So, I have to make sure that Lisa and Rosa don't tell him about my plans: to commission at least three artworks there, in Cuba, made of human hair: a bigger-than-life hairshirt, a cat-o'-nine-tails whip made of human hair, and a floor-scatter piece of cut human hair so thick you can't see the hardwood for the floor. I know the hair's there, I have the contacts with Lisa and Rosa, and I know the artists need money, even the ropa de marcas --plenty of them work on commission . . . nobody'll see this coming.
With "China Shag" as the centerpiece, and only actual human hair artworks or anthropoligical works, this exhibition --Follicle!-- will be unique. Fucking A.
Note to self: Thank God I can trust Dillard not to tell Lisa about the Insect Portraits. One thing about that Christian trip he's on; he keeps his word.
Note to self (and Dill): Remember to not bring up the Insect Portraits, or even Kiku, in front of Rosa. These Cubans can be sooo emotional!
That will be the second coup, during the WLR period. Waiting for Lisa to Retire. Just one more year, then I get to be Curator --no modifiers, no Assistant this, no Associate that, no Development other thing, just: Curator of the Art Museum. And during that interim: Insected! A triumverate of multicultural insectoid investigations, with three artists: Damien Hirst, Kiku Ybarra --the real star-- and Yukinori Yanagi, recreating his 1990 World Ant Flag Piece, again with live ants.
I've already got three tentative promises on Hirst fly pieces, and that will build synergy --these egotistic collectors: "Well, if Tyler's going to lend his, I suppose Leander and I will have to lend ours"-- and the Japanese guy has already blocked out his schedule-- so it all depends on finding out where all those Insect Portraits are.
But that'll happen! It's an island --they're there somewhere-- and I've got lots of money, and plenty of time, and they all need the money.
(sounds of lighter clicking, clicking, then) Finally, the third exhibition, after Lisa retires. Still Life, which will be pure taxidermy. Cattelan, some of that crew from the Rocket Projects show, the Minneapolis chimera exhibition --but again, the key: commissioned pieces, and here the Cubans can help again. I'm sure I can get some Cuban artists going on some pieces, and then pick them up next year, when Lisa retires.
And after that, I'm thinking of something to do with tattoos . . .
[end of entry]
4. Carlos Lage's Second Soliloquy
[Mantis here. Late Sunday morning, May 29, 2005, I reported to Carlos Lage a small part of my experience at Guillermo's apartment. He respects what he calls my "oversensitivity" --because my psychic skin is so thin-- and, given his own recent experience with the diabetes meter --numbers don't lie-- he accepted my reluctance to open the portfolio after I felt such a strong jolt just from touching the cover. I told him nothing about the wind or the song, or the tears. And nothing about Guillermo's challenge: free Kiku.
Lage's healing experience had faded, and he was back on the insulin, but the good news was that he was actually keeping to his schedule since he stared at those uncanny prints. I was still surprised that he didn't want me to simply confiscate them. He mentioned, in passing, their effect on" the American bolo Zeitgeist," as he called her. But Lage never mentions anything in passing. Maybe he wanted to gauge their effect on others. In any case, he ordered me to keep close tabs on that portfolio. I had other duties --preparing caches for hurricane season, checking registrations, monitoring the proliferating dissidents, updating with informants and CDRS, monitoring my own cadres for corruption levels, and now this New Mango mystery-- but I didn't argue with him; I wanted to see what happened myself.]
[Sunday, May 29, 2005, 1:12 PM, Carlos Lage's office, Havana, Cuba. From F's digital files. Carlos Lage paces his office calmy and steadily, at first anyway, in a measured, almost military fashion, but comfortably, as if trying out an old uniform again.]
" . . . Do you believe in magic, Comandante? Stupid question, I know; backward and ignorant and unscientific; treasonous, even. But here, on this island, we both know, Comandante, that it's much more stupid to deny it. What did that composer say, back in 1959, just before we tried to silence so much? Abakua will last in Cuba as long as there are drums. What was his name? . . . Peneiro!
"Well, I don't know about you, Sir, wherever you are, wherever you go --what has it been, three months since I've shaken your hand?-- but every time I go driving down the street, or through the countryside, in every doorway, down every alley, and coming out of every window . . . I hear drums, drums, drums, the sounds of drumming, from radios or tapes or played live, on drums made out of anything to hand. Day and night, night and day. If you took all the tapes of people's daily household routines that Jeronimo and I make, and all the other Ears around Havana, and played them side by side by side all at once, the drums in the background would sound like a million hearts beating their own rhythms, but simultaneously, the pounding, pulsing, rushing blood --one can feel it!-- cleansed and purified of poisons by the heartbeats of the drums! . . .
"So . . . If the drums are alive, then so must be the magic. It happened to me. It could happen again. Jeronimo got spooked too, somehow. He didn't tell me much, but I know him. He acts calm, but he looks stunned; his eyes . . . he looks the same as he did the night that crazy artist climbed the walls. Was that magic, too, way back then, trying out its wings during a very Special Period?
"Are the vibrations of the drums making cracks in the Revolution, Comandante? I know you must read at least the summaries of the reports I send you. The grafitti, the disrespect, the impatience, the resistance to lawful government confiscations --I'm having to hire more stickmen, and send them out more often-- it's getting expensive, feeding and housing them. And we don't want them to get too numerous, do we? Then there's The Women in White, all these committees, the prisons growing way too crowded, the unauthorized assemblies in the churches, the foreign press barking all the time, the illegal satellite dishes, the cell phones, the internet!-- Comandante! Everything's cracking like the water pipes! And most of all, people's faith --in the Revolution and, it must be said, in you yourself. Their faith is tested.
Even mine. I don't mind being frank with you, Comandante. You must have forgiven me years ago for my own loud mouth --or, more likely, I'm too useful to be replaced at this late date-- otherwise I'd be bent over in a mine or prone before a paredon by now, leaking like a seive.
"But you must know I have no more Fidel worship left in my heart. You're just a man to me now, though you used to be, for me as for others, the second sun of my life. But I think there are too many gods, too many spirits in Cuba who won't tolerate a mortal god. Cuba has defeated them all, so far. Perhaps Cuba is done with Papas, with father figures, with the Great Guiding Hands, with those who know better. Perhaps it's something in the very soil, or the air . . . Claro, I know I sound crazy, Comandante, but what else can account for the continuing difficulties of the Revolution? I can't read these heartbeats anymore, though the drums come loud, the drums come close . . .
"I know you're worried, too, Comandante. Example: Tomorrow, I'm sending Rosa Blanca Azul out to see that student in Santa Clara, on your orders. One student! some loudmouthed punk, and you're diverting the energy of someone who could be . . . contributing more to the Revolution, shall we say. My people can certainly handle young Yasmani Oliva, but no! You --somehow you think he's important enough for a personal visit and report from La Pionera.
"I'm more worried about this New Mango thing. After three days, all the little white printed cards have disappeared. My people can't find a single one, or anyone who will admit knowing about them. The CDRs are no help. And just by asking around, which they must, my people keep the questions alive. The people will begin to think it's important. What is the New Mango? Who is Next? What does it mean? Why a mango?
"But to me the most important question right now is, What will the next one say? ¡Vamos Malo!? ¡Abajo Fidel!? Or maybe ¡Ya No Mas!? Because this is just the beginning, you must know, Comandante. These people --these sneaky counterrevolutionaries-- wouldn't go to all this trouble for just one --one what? Was that blizzard of little white cards an attack of some kind? Whatever you call it, it's part of a campaign, and one that has nothing to do with the Revolution.There will be more little white cards, Comandante, and soon. It's inevitable."
[end of transcript]
Posted by Jerome at August 5, 2005 08:15 PM | TrackBack