Samuel Solleiro
Civil War
Translated from the Galician by Jacob Rogers
Everything is different now. Now the punks and daddy’s boys get into knife fights every Saturday night at the doors to clubs. But in the late nineties Tui was a stagnant pond with mud at the bottom.
There was never anything to do. Marijuana molded, arranged all of our thoughts. It still does, I think. From semen we come, and to semen we return. I don’t really know why I just wrote that. It’s like an image: to semen we return. The idea of returning to an off-white stain is nice, is poetic. Not pure white like fake semen made of milk, lotion, things like that.
There was never anything to do in Tui. In 1998, Cerviño bought a video camera. Or, Cerviño’s parents bought him a video camera. We were, I don’t know, in the area, when Cerviño brought out the video camera for the first time. We were always in the area, and we were also in the area when Cerviño showed up with his video camera. We filmed the things people always film in those moments: ourselves making grotesque faces, stretching our mouths as far as they could go, and folding back our eyelids. Then I filmed Carlos sitting on a bench and then I told him to get up from the bench and I filmed the bench again but without Carlos, and we laughed as we watched Carlos disappear from the bench on the screen. And by then we’d smoked so much weed that Cerviño began to film a tree, and he filmed the tree until the tape ran out.
I think back on those times with a strange mixture of shame and fondness. If I think about them for a long time straight, I might even start to get nauseous, but I really have to think about them a long time for that to happen. Another day, Cerviño came to my house and showed me what he’d filmed that afternoon, and it was something pink, something indefinite, and I didn’t know what it was at first; then I saw that it was a pair of open thighs with something between them, a penis, Cerviño’s penis. Cerviño had filmed his own penis: he’d wrapped his testicles around his penis like it was a hat, and like the penis itself was a huge nose, and the pubic hair sprouting out every which way was a curly head of hair. Cerviño had made a head with his penis. A gypsy’s head. This is Mr. Willy, he said. And Cerviño talked in the video, he talked in a voice that was like it was Mr. Willy talking, with the accent of the mythical Castile that gypsies are from, but since Cerviño was behind the camera you couldn’t understand a word. Cerviño’s penis was long and thin and had been circumcised because of phimosis. From the video you could tell it had a relatively smooth texture, with some rougher spots towards its base, near the scrotum. The way the video reflected the textures was immediately way more interesting to me than Mr. Willy’s adventures. You couldn’t understand a word Mr. Willy said.
What a time, what a stagnant pond, puberty. Everything like a stagnant pond. Masturbation and marijuana set the rhythm for our existence the way reaping and sowing did for old people, for people from way back when. I would sit in front of my computer sometimes after making an inhuman effort to get up from the couch or was already sitting there because I must have been playing something like PC Basket or Alone in the Dark, and I would write things. I wasn’t afraid of the blank page, of the new document in a word processor, because I had faith in the potential of automatic writing. I don’t know if it was faith, it was just the way my head worked, the poor thing. It kind of still does. I write one thing and a little while later I write the same thing because I’ve already forgotten the thing I wrote before and such. It’s sad how badly we treat our inner teenage selves and how little it matters. But the time passed greener than ever. Green and happy. It matters so little, regardless of how much faith (not to mention energy) I put into writing methods that didn’t work. Now, in hindsight, it’s all clear: those writing methods didn’t work. It was like not knowing how to play piano but trying anyway because you feel like it. There was always that legend about the black man who once played something on the first piano he’d ever touched. A black man or Mozart. There was no planning, there was no order, and still I don’t think I’ll ever be completely free from the vampires of spontaneity, the zombies of spontaneity. In Tui, in the late nineties, everything worked by electrical impulses; really, nothing worked.
The idea of making our own porno was also born in a cloud of smoke and its seed was our shame-filled afternoons at the video store, concealing from our friends’ mothers the true nature of the VHS’s we picked out. That was the root of it all: mothers patrolling the area like pterodactyls. There wasn’t always much time for reflection. We grabbed the first cassette where the women on the cover had tits big enough for us, hid it between a Tarantino or Cronenberg case, and we were good to go. There were misses. Cerviño insisted that any movies we brought him had to have a plot. The plot, the plot, he insisted. Do me a favor: forget about the tits and take half a minute to read the fucking plot. Generally there was a well-deserved private screening for whoever had rented the movie, and then a collective screening before we went back to the video store, left the cassette face-down on the counter, and ran out with a stitch in our side. During the private screening, most of us would jerk off once or twice with whatever we’d fished up; it was during the collective screening that dotted the I’s, debated the quality, and finally made our determinations about the criteria (which were almost always completely random) of whoever had rented it. Cerviño always got pissed off when the movie turned out to be a sad compilation of sex scenes without any context: he stormed out of the room, slamming the door, and left us all looking fully ridiculous with our pants around our ankles. That was the meaning of failure to us (it’s not anymore, I wish it were). Then, though much less often, there were the tragedies: the time we tried to watch a scrambled porno on TV and, once we were all good and hard, we realized it was a boxing match, or the time that Carlos ejaculated blood onto the biscuit, or the time we inserted the cassette and The Lion King came on because it was Carlos who’d rented it and he couldn’t do a private screening because his dad practically lived in front of the TV. Carlos. Poor Carlos: he works in a factory canning shrimp preserves now.
But there was one movie that stood out from the rest. It was called CKP and was directed by some Italian guy named Mario Salieri. I rented it without giving it much thought, but it ended up exhilarating Cerviño. It wasn’t that CKP had a plot: it was porn, and we all know that when a porn has a plot it’s to excite hypercritical minds like Cerviño’s. The interesting part was that it was set at a refugee camp in the Bosnian war. I’ll say this: that’s what the movie was, setting. It was pretty tame in terms of sex scenes and the women weren’t all that impressive. But during the collective screening we all witnessed the breathtaking spectacle of Cerviño coming three times onto the cracker. Three times. Luckily the cracker was a prop, and none of us had to eat it, or we only had to eat it on a symbolic level. Cerviño ended up recording CKP straight from the TV on his video camera. The technology to do it any other way wasn’t there. We’d heard that the uncle of a friend of someone’s had a dual-deck VCR. I never encountered anything like that. We watched CKP tons of times: if the movie we rented wasn’t up to scratch, Cerviño lost his patience and put on CKP, a CKP that was by nature dark, deformed, and voiceless, but with the beating heart of the Bosnian War in there somewhere. It was Cerviño who decided whether a movie was up to scratch, and before long, none of them were. Our hangouts were a pretext to watch CKP over and over again. To play back this scene or that. Look at how she opens her legs. Look now, when she talks to him. Look at how the Serbian soldier enters the shot. And so on. We put the crackers (somewhat hesitantly) back in their container because no one was coming anymore. No one comes more than three times with the same movie, and that’s in the best of cases. I don’t know, at most I probably only ever came twice from CKP. The women weren’t all that impressive. Carlos stopped coming by the house, he said he had to study. I guess it wasn’t worth the shame of renting something at the video store only to watch ten minutes of it (we almost never got past the first scene: oral sex), and then switch to the same thing as always. But Cerviño really got pleasure out of CKP. There was never anything to do in Tui, and that’s why our lives back then always involved a ton of repetition. Things gained meaning when we did them a lot. If you did things a lot, the spark of the unexpected could appear one day, a flash of lightning, a good idea. If you didn’t, it wouldn’t. Masturbation and marijuana set the rhythm of our lives. I think marijuana more so than masturbation: it was thanks to marijuana that I managed to get anything out of the CKP screenings. But where Cerviño was interested in the shots and the characters and the sequences, all I cared about were the textures. The horizontal lines, the otherworldly light projecting things that had been recorded on one screen onto another. There was something diabolical and something beautiful to it. It was porn, but it could have just as well been field hockey. My penis rested; I was masturbating my eyes.
If you did things a lot, a good idea could appear one day. Or an average idea. One time, Cerviño said we should make our own porno about the Spanish Civil War. It was a stimulating, fucked-up idea, on top of being highly improbable. We were, I think, seventeen, in our third year of the Unified Polyvalent Baccalaureate, and were studying the civil war in history class. Luís Troncoso knew the civil war by memory. Every single thing. He would tell us about the civil war in class like it was a story. No, not like a story, more like a novel, a nineteenth-century novel. From military strategies to the worries of the soldiers in the trenches, or what he guessed might have been the worries of the soldiers in the trenches. He also liked to quote some Chinese guy: in war, he said, or I think he said, the ideal in war should be to instill so much fear in your enemy that your side is victorious without ever going into battle. I don’t know why he was always quoting him. More than anything, Luís Troncoso’s main characteristic was that he was a son of a bitch. He beat his wife, Luís Troncoso did, but that’s something I know now, someone told me that, though I can’t remember who, and I’ve never seen the woman in my life, and I never paid attention to whether he wore a ring or not, but it was a well-known fact years later. I don’t know if he would have been retired, or if he retired since. I don’t know if he’s in jail or something now. I don’t know if you go to jail for beating your wife, I guess not if isn’t murder or something. There are a lot of things in this life that I don’t know. Son of a bitch, motherfucker. But at the time Luís Troncoso was the only authority on the civil war that we knew, so he fascinated us as much as a secondary school teacher can fascinate his students, which isn’t much. He was the only authority on the war, on war in general. Some Chinese guy he was always quoting talked about war in general, or some war in Ancient China, definitely not the civil war, anyway. Wars back then were huge tragedies that spread all over the world, over some parts of the world, without much apparent logic: Iraq, the Balkans, Rwanda. It was maybe a bit random. That was maybe all there was to it.
Our movie about the civil war was probably the beginning of a habit of starting projects that were never finished. Or maybe it wasn’t, and there were unfinished things before it that I don’t remember. Unfinished projects are the story of my life. The story of a lot of people’s lives. It sounds terrible but people get used to worse things. Like wars in places where there are wars. The main obstacle to us shooting a porno was that there were no women. I think in our excitement it just didn’t occur to us until a few days later. The women in pornos obviously do it because they get paid. Paid a lot. I guess the men too. For us it was an honor to do it for free. We even started divvying out the male parts: I was Durruti and Cerviño was Líster. We both wanted to be Durruti because Líster seemed too stuffy with his flabby neck and his uniform, and because Durruti had been dead for over sixty years and had never been old, whereas Líster had just recently died. Carlos was Franco. He was completely against being Franco, but he was the last to pick, and someone had to be the Generalissimo. He said he’d rather be José Antonio than Franco, that way at least he’d have hair and no mustache, but we didn’t budge because the movie would be impossible without Franco. I haven’t seen Carlos for years. He cans shrimp preserves at a factory. I hope he doesn’t vote for the People’s Party. I guess he probably votes for the Socialist Workers Party or doesn’t vote for anyone. Nowadays the punks and daddy’s boys get into knife fights every Saturday night, but in Tui in the late nineties it was almost impossible not to want to be apolitical or not know how not to be apolitical.
The women never materialized. We had some ideas, but they were too farfetched. We obviously didn’t ask anyone, though. There were no women in Tui in the late nineties. Cerviño never finished the script anyway. He wrote five pages on the first day, but I don’t think he ever worked on it anymore. Marijuana was taking its placebo toll. We were artists not making art, or artists making unfinished art. When we met up we hashed and re-hashed the same exact things. The argument over who would be Líster and who Durruti arose almost every day. Franco had to be in it, there was no getting around that. But then came the appearance of, or our first encounter with ethyl chloride. It’s a local anesthesia that you could inhale for the sake of a wild minute and a half where you totally lost control of your body and your senses. It was unbelievable that a drug could act so quickly. They said it killed brain cells and also that it temporarily froze either the medulla oblongata or some other part of the brain. I don’t know if that was true. But during the months we could get our hands on this chemical, it was hard to focus on anything else. The thing is, after a hit of chloride, you didn’t feel much like making a movie. You didn’t not feel like making one, you just didn’t feel like doing much of anything at all besides being. Being there. I don’t know. The movie project gradually faded out of our minds. At some point, we also stopped watching CKP. Cerviño had a sexual experience. Luís Troncoso finished with the civil war and began with the post-war, which was way more depressing. We failed a few classes. Etcetera.
We were in our year three of the baccalaureate, or year two, or year eight of General Basic Education. School years are, were, too indistinguishable to fit neatly into your memory. Everyone knows, puberty is stagnant pond after stagnant pond. I don’t know why I wrote that puberty is stagnant ponds. Every time I write it, I’m more convinced. The image appears in my head. Puberty there, and then the stagnant ponds. I have an urge to write it over and over. It’s my way of going about things. I write before I think. First I write, then I think. Sometimes I think. Tui was always a bit disgusting, and the time passed green and happy, it passed green and happy, or relatively happy. One day we bought a Confederate flag at a music store. I don’t know why. We didn’t think the flag was from anywhere in particular. It looked like no less than a banner of rock’n’roll, or authenticity, or electrical energy. It hung in my room for a good long while until someone told me it was a flag with a terrible racist history and then I took it down in shame and years later my mother cut it up for some curtains. Now, though, I can see some significance to that Confederate flag. Tui’s got something of the Old Dixie in my memory. If you know where to look, it still maintains its essence even though it appears entirely different in some ways. The deep south. Epic, nostalgic. A fucking stagnant well with mud at the bottom.
* * *
Another time, we found a Portuguese man drowned in the river. We were just doing our thing, and then some spam-looking thing appeared on the surface. Something white and pink like it was spam. Cerviño waded in the river up to his knees and tried to pull in the hunk with a branch. The Portuguese man’s body was revealed bit by bit, swollen, enormous. Carlos vomited. It didn’t smell particularly bad. He must have vomited from the sight of it, Carlos. Film this, Cerviño said. I didn’t feel like filming. Film it, he said. I grabbed the camera and filmed. I waded in the river up to my knees too and slowly panned the camera along the Portuguese man’s body. At the time, we didn’t know he was Portuguese. I filmed the concentric waves rippling from his body, I filmed the plaid squares on his shirt, the threads of his jeans, his boots. He was wearing black boots. He had a keyring with lots of keys attached to his belt. I filmed. I filmed his purple hands. I filmed his hair fluttering carelessly with the river currents and a tiny drop of blood trickling out from his brain. Cerviño ordered Carlos to grab him by the boots. Carlos grabbed a boot, gagging the whole time, and Cerviño spun the body around with the branch. The operation made a ton of noise and then silence began to take hold again. The Portuguese man’s face had been ravaged by the eels, newts, and river snakes. It was a massive wound, a crater. We dragged him onto the bank. I filmed it all. The immense, muck-covered corpse motionless on the marigolds, face-up, his huge rubber boots. Cerviño said we had to call the police, but not yet. We rolled a few joints. We took off our wet pants and smoked in our boxers, with death at our feet. I remember going off to pee and thinking about peeing on the Portuguese guy’s face. About directing my stream into his empty, gaping eye sockets. It wasn’t out of cruelty, and I didn’t do it out of fear that someone would think it was. I guess it was for the texture again. To see if chunks of flesh would come off, to see if my piss would turn red when it splashed onto him. But I peed in the river. I filmed the jet. Cerviño came to pee beside me and said he’d never seen a dead body before. I got the feeling that I still hadn’t, because I was seeing everything through the viewfinder. It was a bit like a death on television. It was a bit like a zombie movie. Like not seeing anything. Then I noticed that Cerviño was staring at my penis and I peed a bit on his leg and then he peed on mine. I filmed that too. His penis was long and thin and had been circumcised because of phimosis. Mine was shorter and uncircumcised. He’s a lawyer now, Cerviño, a lawyer, or an attorney, something along those lines. He got ahead in life or is getting ahead. We talk some, but never for long, and never about the Portuguese man’s body. It was the crest of an overly dark period of time. I’m not getting ahead in life, but I have no complaints. I’m happy. In Tui in the late nineties I was euphoric plenty of times but never happy. Nowadays I’m almost never euphoric. Later that day we called the police from a bar and had to answer some very obvious questions. They didn’t ask any questions about the marijuana, and they fed us Toblerone chocolates and orange juice. My parents weren’t at all amused that we’d pulled the body out of the water. The police didn’t seem to care. The next day’s paper said that the Portuguese man was named Rogélio Souza and that he was a drug trafficker. We got a brief mention in the Faro de Vigo. Then we started to forget about the Portuguese man. At the worst, I might occasionally have a hard time looking at ground beef or chicken livers at the butcher’s but nothing too intense. They aren’t moments of terror. I wouldn’t call it terror. We forgot about it. People always forget things. And then life is like sailing, sailing through vast oceans of ethyl chloride.
I’m not sure where the tapes are. The Portuguese man’s tape. I’m not saying I would watch it if I had it, but I don’t know where it is. Or any of the others. I think I would watch it. I don’t know. But Cerviño had a habit of recycling the tapes. He only had one or two, I think. He’d recorded CKP on the third, and I don’t remember seeing anything we’d filmed a second time. I guess the same probably happened to the Portuguese man tape. I have my own video camera now, a Panasonic. I walk around my neighborhood and film the neighbors walking their dogs and the cars driving by. Things like that. One day I’ll wrap my testicles around my penis and film them. Cerviño did it once, and it was pretty funny. It was a head with a big nose. Mr. Willy, he called him, and said he was a gypsy, though I don’t really know why. I have it all stored on a one-terabyte hard disk, but I almost never watch the things I’ve recorded. Nowadays everyone records everything, and it seems like we see things five thousand people have seen before us, if that makes any sense. Tui in the late nineties was a pile of shit, a steaming pile of shit, but absolutely everything remained to be done.
Recently, I was headed back home at seven o’clock on an extremely cold Friday morning. I stopped in a bar to have a hamburger. Actually, it wasn’t so recent, maybe three or four years ago now. It doesn’t feel like a long time. I was chewing my hamburger. The TV was re-broadcasting Saddam Hussein’s execution. Some men in hoods were placing the noose around his neck. The noose had a rougher texture than anything I’d ever seen. The images cut out before the instant of his death. But it was enough. The hamburger felt distant to me, strange. I thought, maybe under the influence of the gin tonics sloshing around in my stomach, that something very important had ended there, that morning. In that bar, with that hanging. With that hamburger in front of me. It felt like the chapter of something was coming to a close. Then the next day everything was back to normal, and it was the same with the next day and the next day and all the days after it. But there’s a strange heartbeat to things. As if everything is there, and before you look away, it shifts slightly, thweep, to one side. I think I’m coming back from somewhere. Coming back, that’s what it is, from somewhere. Shame and fondness, shame and fondness. I’m going to stop writing.