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  ORNAMENTAL

  ORNAMENTAL

  JUAN CÁRDENAS

  Translated by Lizzie Davis

  First English-language edition published 2020

  Copyright © 2015 by Juan Cárdenas/Editorial Periférica

  c/o Indent Literary Agency, www.indentagency.com

  Translation © 2020 by Lizzie Davis

  Cover art and design by Tree Abraham

  Book design by Sarah Miner

  Author photograph © Federico Ríos

  First published by Editorial Periférica as Ornamento, © 2015

  Coffee House Press books are available to the trade through our primary distributor, Consortium Book Sales & Distribution, cbsd.com or (800) 283-3572. For personal orders, catalogs, or other information, write to [email protected].

  Coffee House Press is a nonprofit literary publishing house. Support from private foundations, corporate giving programs, government programs, and generous individuals helps make the publication of our books possible. We gratefully acknowledge their support in detail in the back of this book.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Cárdenas, Juan Sebastián, 1978– author. | Davis, Lizzie, 1993– translator.

  Title: Ornamental / Juan Cárdenas ; translated by Lizzie Davis.

  Other titles: Ornamento. English

  Description: First English-language edition. | Minneapolis : Coffee House Press, 2020. | “First published by Editorial Periférica as Ornamento, © 2015”—Title page verso.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019028582 (print) | LCCN 2019028583 (ebook) | ISBN 9781566895804 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9781566895880 (ebook)

  Classification: LCC PQ8180.413.A72 O7613 2020 (print) | LCC PQ8180.413.A72 (ebook) | DDC 863/.7—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019028582

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019028583

  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

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  GRACE

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  ECONOMY 1

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  ECONOMY 2

  CROOKED SYMMETRY

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  TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

  Funder Acknowledgments

  The Publisher’s Circle of Coffee House Press

  Every age had its style, is our age alone to be refused a style? By style, people meant ornament. Then I said: Weep not! See, therein lies the greatness of our age, that it is incapable of producing a new ornament. We have outgrown ornament; we have fought our way through to freedom from ornament. See, the time is nigh, fulfillment awaits us. Soon the streets of the city will glisten like white walls. Like Zion, the holy city, the capital of heaven. Then fulfillment will be come.

  —ADOLF LOOS, Ornament and Crime

  In the garden, the trees were upright, rhetorical,

  the avenues upright, the ponds rhetorical …

  rhetorical,

  and the owls in rows, upright, rhetorical, rhetorical …

  —LEÓN DE GREIFF, “Ballad of the Mad Owls”

  ORNAMENTAL

  GRACE

  1

  Today they finally brought in the participants: four middle-aged women whose unremarkable medical histories show no record of addiction or criminal activity. The only peculiarity is that they all had children at a fairly young age, but that’s not unusual for women from the inferior classes. I called them to my office one by one for a final screening and some blood samples. None of them appeared nervous, with the exception of number 4, who asked too many questions and seemed hesitant to undress. Subsequently they were taken to their rooms for the first oral dose. 1, 2, and 3 fell asleep within twenty minutes of ingestion, so observations have been reduced in those cases to the monitoring of cerebral activity. Number 4, however, has stayed entirely awake and hasn’t stopped talking since the drug took effect. I thought it useful to transcribe what she said:

  My mom’s husband meets us at the door, he pays for the taxi. Their house is huge, two stories with a yard out front. My mom waits for us upstairs. I’m glad you made it, honey, she says when we come through the door to her room. The kid runs to the bed and climbs up to kiss her. My mom is naked on the floral quilt, opposite a fan, reading a magazine by lamplight. She has the curtains closed. She likes to receive us this way so we can admire her. My grandma is so pretty, says the kid, my grandma is like a doll. And it’s true, my mom looks like she’s just come out of the box. Last year she had laser hair removal, and not a single spare fold of skin is left, she routinely has them trimmed off by a very good surgeon. The problem is, after so many surgeries, god knows why, she’s developed a very rare skin allergy and has to be slathered with creams twice a day. Her husband is supposed to handle this, but he does the job reluctantly, nearly gagging the whole time, as if it’s some great sacrifice. Apparently he can’t stand the ointments—their greasy consistency, the coconut scent they give off. So my mom takes advantage of every one of my visits by making me do the bullshit treatment instead. Who do you think is prettier, she asks, your grandma or your mom? The kid pauses, thinks, shoots me a sly look. I wink to signal that she can respond as we’ve agreed. My mom’s prettier, says the kid, but only because she’s your daughter. The grandmother praises the clever remark.

  Soon, the kid’s absorbed in cartoons while I coat my mother’s body with creams. How’s the septum, Mom? I ask when I see her wrinkling her nose. Is it healing O.K.? She gropes for it with her thumb and middle finger, and my hair stands on end. It’s getting there, she says. My mom had another septoplasty a while ago, and I guess this one scared her. At night she dreams of her nose falling off and the skull underneath showing through. Sometimes it feels funny when I touch it, she says, like someone else’s nose. It occurs to me then that my mom’s nose belongs to someone else, that it’s the nose of a dead person. And just in case, I touch mine discreetly and tell myself: you’re right here, calm down.

  When we’re finished with the damn creams, my mom puts on a floral robe and we all go down to the living room so she can show us the new figurines. This time, there’s a group of characters with wigs and livery and embroidered dresses, tiny glass courtesans she buys on the internet. The characters form a circle around a life-sized red crab. The scene is called Voltaire and his friends, my mom says. Who’s Voltaire, the kid asks. My mom says he’s a French philosopher. The kid wants to know which of the figurines in the circle is this Voltaire guy. Oh, no, my mom says, Voltaire is the crab. The kid’s delighted by the little scene and asks if she can open the glass cabinet, touch the figurines. Then my mother grabs her arm hard, digs in with her nails, opens her mouth, and holds up a finger, but she can’t say anything, the words won’t come out. She wants to, but she can’t. And I see the shape of her skull, pronounced around her ears and temples. I’m forced to intervene to free my daughter’s arm from her nails. Dammit, don’t touch them, I say. The kid lowers her head in
a gesture of false submission. My mother lets go of her. I grab her by the chin, and the kid looks at me, her pupils like two fake coins. Do not touch, I say, really raising my eyebrows so she understands I mean it. Respect means looking without touching, says my mother, having finally found the words.

  After a while I join my mom’s husband in the office at the end of the hallway. Sit down, the old man says from behind his desk. Around him there’s a mountain of diplomas in accounting, statistics, and economics from garage universities, a bookcase with books bound in dark-green leather, and a picture of my mom in front of the Twin Towers. And I can’t believe this man was my first, my first love, and now when I look at him all I see is a filthy old geezer drenched in cologne, gray hair dyed red like a squirrel’s, and those shockingly shiny pretty-boy shoes.

  I’m not sure if it’s a memory or a senseless, drug-induced invention.

  Outside, the dogs bark for no apparent reason. I look out the window just in case, but there’s only the familiar nocturnal serenity of the garden, the pine forest, and, farther afield, the electric fence that shields us from the city.

  2

  The next day I show number 4 the transcription of her monologue, and she identifies the text as a detailed account of what happened at her mother’s house a few weeks ago. Regardless, the sensation of well-being induced has been satisfactory, visible in both the patients’ neural activity and in their survey responses. All four claim to have experienced a high degree of sustained pleasure. Number 4’s description reads, “An electric purring that arises in the groin and circulates in exquisite waves through the arms, legs, and neck.” Number 4, unlike the others, is no ignorant woman. She seems to have received some type of education.

  Before the afternoon session, we go for a walk in the garden. I try to draw something out of her but only learn that she’s having financial trouble, that she owes her mother a large sum of money and needs the stipend we’re paying her. But her real concern seems to be her nine-year-old daughter. What I gather from her talk of finances and the precarity of single motherhood strikes me as so sordid that I stop asking questions altogether.

  Three hours after lunch, the patients are transferred to their rooms to receive the day’s dose. 1, 2, and 3 once again fall asleep the moment the drug takes effect. 4 falls into a second discourse:

  The peasant is on her knees praying fervently. Adoration of the young shepherdess. Beside her, a courtesan bows in official reverence before the Apparition. The bear will soon eat the Virgin Mary’s living image alive, blue mantle and all. It’s a spectacled bear, Tremarctos ornatus. At the end of the hall, you hear panting: the nanny and Sextus. It’s pitch-black except for the light of the half-open fridge spilling onto the kitchen floor. The fridge’s stomach growls. My mom shouts at someone upstairs. Fireflies swarm the patio and the guava tree. I cross myself, afraid they’ll find me hiding there, and fiddle with the pom-poms on my socks. All my socks have pastel pom-poms. The cold tile makes me want to urinate.

  When I’m finally able to turn away from the little scene, I look out at the patio, where the gelatin sun greens the guava tree. Downstairs, the nanny sings a tender ballad about the famous battle between head and heart.

  The dogs are barking again; there must be something agitating them. I look out the window and confirm that everything’s in order. The colored lights of the city’s tallest buildings shine in the distance, in very poor taste. Here, at least, the thrum of the forest is audible, and the fountain casts its dying splendor through oversized leaves, bringing to mind an enormous set of false teeth.

  3

  Another walk in the garden with number 4. When I bring up her last bout of prattling, she explains that her mother uses porcelain miniatures to stage “little scenes” in a pair of glass cabinets. What kinds of scenes? I don’t know, she says, it depends, could be anything. When I was little, she’d throw a fit if she caught me touching the figurines. I ask if it’s some kind of family tradition or a folk custom I’m not familiar with, something like the assembly of nativity scenes. No idea, she says, my mom’s been doing it forever, for as long as I remember. And as far as I know, there’s no one else in the family doing the same. My curiosity surpasses mere medical interest, she notices at once and goes quiet, the conversation is over.

  In the afternoon, when it’s time for another dose, 1, 2, and 3 sleep deeply (though they occasionally writhe with pleasure and their brain activity mirrors that observed during intercourse). 4 presents a similar profile, but at no point does she fall asleep, and her discursive output is constant:

  When you see me again, I’ll be in the same suit. Open the door so the eloquent image appreciates: one hundred eighty-eight typewriters heaped at the back of an empty room, untouched except for the cool, seeping silhouette of the herd, on an empty floor in an empty building, a once gleaming and beautiful rationalist building, built in the image and likeness of once gleaming and beautiful rationalist buildings in rational cities. One hundred eighty-eight typewriters amassed at the back of this irrational city once clacked away on one hundred eighty-eight sheets of Tequendama Group letterhead, a harmonious, rational discourse to be devoutly recited in offices and corridors in the Ministry of Destitution: when you see me again, I’ll be in the same suit, and I won’t be millions, I’ll be the one exception, the broken mold, the inimitable example, and hear me now, paper compatriots: the character most notably absent from all the old farces is the anonymous one, that Nobody with no physical form, no soul or reality, declares Laureano Gaitán-Gaitán, wearing the very same suit and not so much as a miserable mask—Laureano, that fantastical entity now huddled under a box spring, under the body of a poisoned policeman, under all the camouflaged military poems, on a pile of buzzard feathers, to serve as witness in an anecdote invented by jungle radio dispatch, he’s already on the phone, on the coco-phone, summoning forth his great vision for the UPN, the OMD, the RRP, the TRS, and other secret acronyms, or seizing the vestments of priestly animals and going by night to pain’s door, threatening pain with extortion, or, on another occasion, signing imagined telegrams of dried monkey meat, Laureano declares, which anticipate charges that haven’t been made, or, in the end, it’s the engineer who whispers in the Cordillera’s ear, of the technical and economic functions of the cold, against the administrative management of an ill-fated Minister of Restitution of the Dispossessed, but without a degree in revictimizing expropriation, declares Gaitán, which Gaitán later confirms. But so much time had passed since then that the typewriters had already come to a halt on the brink of rationalism, and miraculously, all those prodigious, lost-era buildings stayed standing, though none of the roughly one thousand rational windows lit up anymore, besides two or three less-rational ones, which, on occasion, did, and that’s how someone in a nearby irrational building, let’s just say me, was able to assess the broken windowpanes, the old office furniture, the one hundred eighty-eight typewriters clacking away in the yellow light of the ministerial bulbs without the apparent intervention of any incorrupt fingers, which were busy with sensitive secretarial duties and feeding the teeth a nail now and again, each with one of the secret acronyms painted on in green polish.

  After today’s session, when the participants are back in their rooms and I’m settling in to prepare my notes, I get a call from the clinic. My wife has been admitted with extreme tachycardia, they tell me. It’s the second time this month.

  4

  Luckily, the doctor attending my wife is an old classmate of mine, the discreet type. She must have consumed a great deal of cocaine, the man explains coolly, without a trace of moral condemnation. I think about our superior training, the professionalism instilled in us at school, the same attitude that kept us from forming close ties with our cohort. The only signal of humanity, buried deep within his words, is the faintest suggestion of triumph: he’s pleased to have eliminated an old rival. I grant him victory in exchange for discretion. He accepts and, grateful, leads me to my wife’s room, even going so far as
to take my elbow as we continue down the hallway. My wife has been sedated. That’s what my colleague, who’s turned out to be a rotten winner, says. She’ll wake up soon, he adds before leaving us alone.

  I watch my wife sleep. I get bored and can’t stop thinking about the things number 4 says when she’s on the drug. What about that last discourse? Was it also inspired by her mother’s little scenes?

  My wife begins to wake up. She smiles. But the smile quickly sours on her mouth. I have to get back to work, she says, take me to the studio.

  She puts on a gray dress, which goes very well with her black shoes and matte red purse. She brushes her pitch-black hair, and it shines like a raven’s wing. Before long my wife’s elegance has resurfaced in spite of our surroundings, which, thanks to her, seem slightly less sordid. The yellow gleam of the municipal lighting and bits of dead night seep in through the window.

  We sign some papers, endure a final triumphant look from my colleague, and flee the clinic.

  In the car, neither of us says a word. My wife is nervous because her new exhibition will open in a few weeks. She hasn’t shown in the city for a few years, and she’s under a lot of pressure, which I suppose makes her exempt from advice or disapproval.

  Suddenly, she sees a spate of large graffitied walls. What garbage, she says, more to herself than to me, that should all be removed. Frankly, I have no thoughts on the matter, but since she’s the authority on all things aesthetic, I can only agree and confirm: they should leave the walls as they were, clean, free of monstrosities. Many of the murals carry political messages, tallies of the dead or disappeared. “Gaitán is Coming,” reads one, the colors lurid in the streetlight’s yellow glare. I wonder what number 4 is doing now.

  5

  Upper management pays us a visit. The directors barge into my office, their two rabidly masculine aftershaves vying for control of the closed system. They’re twins who’ve done everything in their power to hide it, with relative success. A very well-groomed bald man accompanies them. He’s the architect who designed the building. A few years ago, after seeing the bald man’s name assigned to the impressive expansion of a famous museum, the directors contracted him to design our lab. An unusual task, since the modern facilities had to be functionally adapted to the original structure: an old colonial hacienda acquired in an advantageous deal with the historic proprietors, who had fallen on hard times and were willing to sell for pennies.