Aware as I was that Jim and I had to respect our compulsory downtime in this search that at times governed our lives to an absurd degree, I contacted the hospital where years back I had met the first mastectomy patients, and the director, who remembered me fondly since she had been able to measure the positive effects of my dance sessions as part of post-op therapy, gave me the opportunity to visit the hospital and present the project again, together with S.
BUT THESE NEEDED MONTHS of respite weren’t going to last long. The same thing always ended up happening: when I finally caught my breath, this would trigger an internal mechanism and send me back to my efforts as part of the search-and-rescue team. During the first few days of reactivating our efforts, I would be able to see better, hear better, smell better, as if I really were a mother in whom nature had opened up channels of perception for better protecting her young. Searching again. Tracking, pursuing. I simply couldn’t last more than six months without setting out afresh on Yoro’s trail. Sometimes I behaved as though I were her real biological mother, whom not even Jim could tell me about, since according to him, the parents’ biological identity had always remained a secret. That feeling would come back from time to time, and I’d feel a prick of shame again; there I was, off chasing after a stranger’s child, when my pregnancy seemed so evident to me, as though I wasn’t satisfied with the daughter who was growing in my own womb. If I’d considered myself a maternity mendicant before I got pregnant, like someone obviously incomplete and formed only by crumbs of the crumbs, now I started to feel insatiable, a woman hungry for new children, her own, a sort of Saturn devouring her babies as she gave birth to them, hunting them down only to continue the search. That’s why I was very cautious about showing my feelings for Yoro even to Jim, the anxiety that overwhelmed me by the news of her ever more horrifying disappearance.
The next door to knock on was the lighthouse at the Ilha da Queimada Grande, an island off the coast of Brazil. Of all our trips, this one has been burned into my memory as a first descent into hell. The lighthouse was the only building on the entire island, and according to rumors there were five snakes per square meter, unique in the world, whose venom was so potent it could kill a person within an hour. The rumors also said that the wife and daughter of the last keeper had died after being bitten by these snakes and that he lived huddled up in their memory without leaving the tower, even though the lighthouse had been fully automated for safety reasons since the early twentieth century. Of course the dates meant that the man we were going to visit couldn’t be the same keeper, and yet the stories they told on the continent assured us that it was the same man. In any case there we were, on a Zodiac manned by two men from the Brazilian coast guard and a doctor who carried an antidote in case of an accident.
From our launch, Queimada Grande looked like paradise. Everything was green, and the lighthouse rose like the lone indicator of human presence. But the moment I touched that ground I felt as though my strength had been sapped—all my hopes, my desire to live, and even my libido, which I feel whenever I look at Jim and visualize a fantasy… gone. My body was drained of energy, not only to meet the new battery of frustrations in the lighthouse but even to take the least step forward. I felt distanced from myself, seeing everything from the outside as I walked, dragging my feet, apathetic. The first thing I noticed was the underbrush. If the first man in line didn’t cut a trail through the brambles and branches with a machete, it would have been impossible to move forward. We wore boots that reached our knees to avoid snakebites. But my attention was fixed on the trees. There were hundreds of snakeskins dangling from the branches. That’s how I felt, like the sloughed-off skin of a snake, skin whose soul had crawled nice and far away, just like my genitals; hadn’t I spent half my life asking myself where my penis ended up after the explosion? Though it was a part of me I had never wanted, the idea of losing that piece of myself, without knowing what had happened to it, whether it had been buried or whether it had disintegrated, continued to cause me anxiety. I think since I’d hated my penis and considered—when I had it—self-mutilation, there was a kind of guilt attached to its loss that might be similar to having abandoned a dog. I often recall the figure of Antigone, that beautiful young Greek woman who risked and lost her life trying to bury her brother, whose punishment had been exactly that: that he not be buried, but rot at the mercy of the wind and the vermin, the dogs, the vultures. The problem is that whatever we don’t bury or burn or even find is able to haunt us for the rest of our lives. The people who disappear never die; their presence haunts us. I would have preferred to find my penis, to be able to mourn over it, caress it one last time, bury it to know that it is truly dead; but this way, my penis continues to haunt me to this very day. I feel pity for that little lump of my flesh. So this island seemed painfully familiar to me, the empty skins reminding me so much of an image that has plagued me in my dreams since those hospital days: my penis searching for me through the ruins of Hiroshima like a blind lizard, like a legless dog. That repetitive nightmare, over and over: lizard, blind, ruins, dog. In Hiroshima.
THE SLOUGHED SKINS were so noticeable on the island that surely they diverted the attention of the live snakes stalking us from their hiding places. That’s right, I thought. In the boat they told us that the snakes hid in the trees because it’s there they found their principal source of food: the birds. That’s why there were skeletons of birds scattered all over the place—among the bushes, on the ground, in the trees.
When we reached the lighthouse, one of the men knocked at the door and shouted the name of the superfluous lighthouse keeper: “Flavio, open up! We brought some food, and there are some people who would like to see you.”
I wasn’t expecting anything. Not even that he would open the door, let alone that the man would be able to give us any information on Yoro. But the door opened slowly, heavily, with the loud screeching of salt-rusted iron scratching the floor. There stood another person before us, as sluggish as I was, who silently let us in. The five of us looked at him, checked around us. We were at the entrance of the lighthouse’s very narrow landing. Looking up, all we saw was a long spiral staircase leading up to some space from which little pieces of plaster would tumble every now and then. Each one of the lighthouse’s cracks or crevices was sealed with duct tape or cemented over to keep—I imagine—reptiles and rats from sneaking in. And there was garbage everywhere. Tons of garbage, mostly tins of food tossed around the floor. By contrast, Flavio seemed spruced up and tidy, tall, with an athletic build, but mute. My tongue was tied too, so it was Jim who asked about Yoro, moving a step forward into the refuge.