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    The Taiga Syndrome
    The Taiga Syndrome
    The Taiga Syndrome
    Ebook86 pages1 hour

    The Taiga Syndrome

    By Cristina Rivera Garza and Suzanne Jill Levine

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    About this ebook

    Fairy tale meets detective drama in this David Lynch–like novel by a writer Jonathan Lethem calls “one of Mexico's greatest . . . we are just barely beginning to catch up to what she has to offer.”

    A fairy tale run amok, The Taiga Syndrome follows an unnamed Ex-Detective as she searches for a couple who has fled to the far reaches of the earth. A betrayed husband is convinced by a brief telegram that his second ex-wife wants him to track her down—that she wants to be found. He hires the Ex-Detective, who sets out with a translator into a snowy, hostile forest where strange things happen and translation betrays both sense and one’s senses. Tales of Hansel and Gretel and Little Red Riding Hood haunt the Ex-Detective’s quest into a territory overrun with the primitive excesses of Capitalism—accumulation and expulsion, corruption and cruelty—though the lessons of her journey are more experiential than moral: that just as love can fly away, sometimes unloving flies away as well. That sometimes leaving everything behind is the only thing left to do.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDorothy, a publishing project
    Release dateOct 1, 2018
    ISBN9780997366693
    The Taiga Syndrome
    Author

    Cristina Rivera Garza

    Cristina Rivera Garza is an award-winning author, translator, and critic. Her books, originally written in Spanish, have been translated into multiple languages. She has won the Roger Caillois Award for Latin American Literature, the Anna Seghers-Preis, and the International Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize. In 2020, she was awarded a MacArthur Foundation Grant. She received her PhD in 2012 in Latin American history from the University of Houston, where she teaches.

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      Book preview

      The Taiga Syndrome - Cristina Rivera Garza

      I: The Same

      That they had lived there, they told me. In that house, there. And they pointed it out with an apprehension that could easily be mistaken for respect or fear. Their fingers barely peeked out from the cuffs of their heavy black coats. The smell of ash under their arms. Dirty nails. Dry lips. Their eyes, having discreetly moved toward where they were pointing, quickly returned to their original position, gazing straight ahead. What are you really looking for?—they asked without daring to say so. And I, who didn’t exactly know, followed their steps like a shadow, back to the village over snow-covered trails.

      It wasn’t really a house, I should say first. I would have described what I saw on that morning, at the beginning of autumn, as a shack, maybe not even. A hovel. In any case, it was a habitable structure made from wood, cardboard, and lots of dry branches. It did have a roof, a ridged roof, and a pair of windows covered in thick transparent plastic instead of glass. It had the air of a last refuge. It gave the impression that beyond was only open space, and the law of the wilderness, and the sky, so blue, so high, above the wild.

      I remember the cold. Above all, I remember the cold. I remember my clenched jaw, fists deep in my coat pockets.

      They had arrived there, according to my information, at the beginning of winter. I had come to that conclusion because their last communication came from a telegram office in a border town about two hundred kilometers away. The telegram, addressed to the man who had hired me to investigate the case, said briefly and somewhat obliquely that they were never coming back: WHAT ARE WE LETTING IN WHEN WE SAY GOODBYE?

      I took the case because I have always had an all-consuming weakness for forms of writing no longer in use: radiograms, stenography, telegrams. As soon as I placed my hands on the faded paper, I began to dream. The tips of my fingers skimmed the creases of the paper; the stale smell of age. Something hidden. Who would set out on such a journey? That couple, of course. Out of everyone, only those two. From what place, so far away in space, so far away in time, had this fistful of capital letters been sent? And what were the two of them hoping for? What had they let into their lives? That was what I wanted to know. From the start, that was what I wanted to understand.

      The man had made an appointment with me in a café downtown, at four in the afternoon. I had only met him a few nights before, in front of images of a forest or of many forests. Oil paintings, X-rays. Installations.

      Do you like them? he had asked me with an accent I wasn’t immediately able to identify.

      I told him the truth. I told him yes.

      Do forests intrigue you? he asked me again, placing a hand on the wall I was leaning against. Where the back of my neck rested.

      I turned to look at the painting to my right: oil on wood, wire, resin. A forest within a forest. Something primordial.

      They do intrigue me, I said, after considering it for a while.

      You don’t seem like the kind of person who would get lost in a forest, he said as he took me by the elbow and, with a dexterity that was pure elegance, led me from inside the gallery toward the terrace.

      You’re right, I told him. Nor do I like being taken by the elbow, I added.

      He laughed, of course. White teeth, Adam’s apple quivering, the hint of a beard.

      Your face says that too, he said when he returned with two flute glasses.

      I remember the toast, the first one. I remember laughing at a face I couldn’t see—mine, which I was imagining so clearly. Its suspicious expression combined with a tacit sense of distance. My brow furrowed, my chin raised. I remember having said: To the forest or forests. Glass clinking.

      But you must know about the Taiga Syndrome, right? he asked after he had finally stopped laughing, after taking a large sip from the effervescent liquid in his glass. It seems, he continued, almost whispering, that certain inhabitants of the Taiga begin to suffer terrible anxiety attacks and make suicidal attempts to escape. He fell silent, though it seemed like he wanted to continue. Impossible to do when you’re surrounded by the same terrain for five thousand kilometers, he concluded with a sigh.

      I remember the wolf. I saw him, an enormous wolf, gray against the snow. I saw his jaw: open. His eyes, his paws. I saw the red thread that extended from his tracks and slithered through the snow before momentarily getting lost in the trunk of a fir tree. I saw the fir, so majestic. Then it climbed, the red thread, through the warped branches, through the evergreen pine needles until high above it reached the green branches of another conifer. That was what made me look up at the sky, also gray, filled with thick jumbled clouds. What shade of gray? Ten minutes before a storm gray, of course. I didn’t hear anything, couldn’t hear anything, but I saw that the wolf was preparing to pounce. I saw his saliva, teeth, lips.

      The same, I repeated, attempting to rein in the threads of the conversation.

      The same, he said, recognizing my effort. If you don’t catch them, wrestle them down, like in rugby, they might vanish forever in the immensity of the Taiga.

      The same, I repeated. Sometimes seeing is just the confirmation of a fact.

      It is difficult to know for sure when a case begins, at what moment one accepts an investigation. I suppose that, although the exchange of information and the negotiation of my contract didn’t happen until days later, on a summer afternoon, in the downtown café of a coastal city, yet the case of the mad couple of the Taiga began right there, on the terrace of a gallery

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