Nikolski (14 page)

“What about you, what do you think?”

“I think it’s complicated.”

“What were the Royal Commission’s conclusions?”

“They ruled in favour of the Inuit, but that doesn’t mean anything. The whole thing’s very political. There could be royal commissions for all sorts of things that have happened in the south—the Mirabel expropriations, the cutback in services for outlying regions, the closing down of Schefferville … But the stakes are different when it comes to Whites.”

“Different in what way?”

“Traditional territory.”

Noah folds his arms with a skeptical look on his face.

“Okay, wait a second,” he says. “Before the arrival of the Whites, the Inuits moved around in step with the game and the seasons. Almost all of today’s villages gradually took shape around the Hudson’s Bay Company trading posts. Which means that when the families of Inukjuak were relocated, they had been sedentary for no more than two or three generations. So does it still make sense to talk about traditional territory, when the way that territory is occupied now is anything but traditional?”

“Of course! Territory isn’t measured in square kilometres. You also have to consider ancestors, posterity, the oral tradition, snowmobile trails, family ties, the seal hunt and the salmon fishery, lichen, legal actions against Hydro-Québec. Above all, territory is a matter of identity.”

Noah nods his head without speaking. The girl rubs her eyes and abruptly changes the subject.

“What about you? What’s your field?”

“Archaeology.”

“And you’re interested in the indigenous people?”

“Actually, I’m interested in trash, but …”

“Trash?” she says, surprised. “Why trash?”

“It’s all about traditional territory.”

“I don’t see the connection.”

“As a rule, archaeologists don’t take much interest in nomads. The more a population travels, the fewer traces it leaves behind. They prefer to study civilizations that settle down, that build cities and produce large amounts of garbage. There’s nothing more interesting than garbage. Garbage teaches us more than infrastructures, buildings or monuments. Garbage reveals what everything else tries to hide.”

“And how does traditional territory fit into all this?”

“The Inuit had no idea what a dump was before the arrival of the Hudson’s Bay Company.”

The girl nods her head and sizes Noah up with an approving smile.

Her name is Arizna Burgos Mendez, and that is all Noah manages to get out of her. For although she has no qualms about holding forth on the major Aboriginal issues, she immediately cuts short any discussion of a personal nature. This reticence arouses Noah’s curiosity, and he sets about deploying all the tactics of a Sioux archaeologist. From harmless discussions and trick questions, he manages to sketch a rough composite portrait.

Arizna was born in Caracas. She was raised by her grandfather, who currently holds an unspecified (but important) position at the Venezuelan consulate in Montreal. She left Caracas at a very early age, lived
by turns in New York, Paris, Brussels, Madrid and Montreal, depending on her grandfather’s assignments. After several years in Montreal, she returned to Venezuela to study at the Instituto Indigenista Autónomo, a small, little-known university in Caracas. She is interested exclusively in Indigenous studies, is quite willing to discuss the Zapatistas, often scratches her right eyebrow, likes her coffee very sweet and seems to subsist mainly on lentil salad.

Intrigued by this mysterious Instituto Indigenista Autónomo, Noah deepens his investigation. He searches through the library catalogues, combs the Internet, questions Thomas Saint-Laurent—to no avail. There is no mention anywhere of this enigmatic institution. Noah believes the university may be bogus. One morning he decides to broach the question head-on:

The last Q does not receive a satisfactory A. Visibly embarrassed, Arizna stammers a few incredibly vague sentences on indigenism, Venezuela’s domestic policies, and a certain Gustavo Gutiérrez—before finally claiming that the concept is hard to translate into French.

Convinced that the answer would be no clearer in Spanish, Noah refrains from asking for a translation. Instead, he slips off in the direction of the library’s computer terminals, where he enters:
“anthropology +liberation.”
No results. He scratches his chin and enters
Gutierrez, Gustavo.
The computer immediately produces about fifteen titles, including
Liberation Theology.
Noah memorizes the catalogue code and runs to the stacks.

Sheltered in a dark corner of Section B (Philosophy, Psychology and Religion), he leafs through the book without quite knowing what he’s looking for. He was brought up without the slightest concept of religion. He couldn’t say if his mother was animist, Roman Catholic or Seventh-day Adventist. As a result, he knows as much about religion as he does about the history of the Caucasus in the sixteenth century.

Gustavo Gutiérrez’s book makes no mention of indigenism. On the other hand, Noah does discover some
unexpected words, which glimmer like cactus needles:
struggle against the domination of the rich, permanent cultural revolution, radical commitment, opulence, injustice, break with society as it exists today, guerrillas.

Noah closes the book, more bewildered than ever. He comes to a decision: he must meet Arizna between nine p.m. and eight a.m., right in the middle of the Bermuda Triangle.

ARIZNA COMES LATE
, carrying an expensive bottle of rum under her arm, visibly thrilled at the prospect of taking part in one these
famous jututos.
She kisses Noah on the cheek and thanks him again for the invitation.

“I’m tired of always eating with my grandfather,” she explains with a frown.

Right from the first glass of wine, the model student turns into a fearsome polemicist. She takes control of the situation in the time it takes to peel a shrimp. Perfectly at home with familial chaos, she sparks a heated debate on the political future of the Caribbean. Around the table, the guests raise their voices, shake their forefingers and hurl crustacean shells at each other.

The supper is already quite raucous when, after the first bottle of rum has been opened, she stirs up a controversy over the
word jututo.
The term, which for years has been used to refer to this Sunday gathering without ever bothering anyone, suddenly becomes a bone of contention. Everything about the word seems to be
controversial, starting with its pronunciation. Cousin Javier asserts that in his village it is pronounced
f
u
tuto,
Cousin Miguel claims that among the Garifunas of Belize they say
b
ututo, and Arizna explains that in the Andean countries the preferred pronunciation is
p
ututo.

Leaving aside phonetics, they try to agree on the nature of the thing itself. Most of the guests affirm that a j(f/p/b)ututo is a trumpet fashioned out of a large shell (of the
Strombidae
family, Arizna specifies), but Cousin Jorge categorically maintains that it is a bull’s horn, and Pedro adds that one of his neighbours used a lowly bottle of Brugal which had been broken in half, a procedure he would demonstrate on the spot if not for everyone around the table rushing to stop him.

Which raises the question—as Arizna points out, for the obvious purpose of striking the debate while it’s hot—of what the connection is between a Sunday get-together of cousins and a trumpet (be it a shell, a horn or a bottle of rum). Cousin Gina claims the said trumpet once served to sound the village assemblies—hence the metonymy—but this piece of information does not bring them any closer to consensus, and the subject soon becomes the thousand and one potential uses of the
jututo,
each argument being shored up with a generous swig of rum.

After supper, Arizna installs herself in the kitchen, seemingly indifferent to the music, the dancing and the tropical cocktails circulating in the living room. Seated at
the table together with four cousins and a suspicious-looking bottle, she talks politics. Uppercut, left jab, hook—she easily demolishes the others’ arguments, counters the most complex analyses, makes unexpected assertions and then proves the opposite. When one cousin gives up, another jumps in, as if Arizna, alone against a legion of opponents, were defending her title in a boxing ring marked out by the tablecloth with the fish design.

“Say,” Maelo remarks as he brushes by Noah, “your girlfriend, she’s a feisty one! Where did you find her— at a karate school?”

“No,” Noah replies with a smile, “on the fifth floor of the library.”

Toward one a.m., Arizna wriggles out of a sticky discussion on the Organization of American States, wobbles over to the living room and puts her hand on Noah’s shoulder. Her voice is still strong, but her eyes are fogging over.

“Everything okay?” she yells over the music.

He nods yes and asks her the same question. Resorting to an inspired bit of sign language, she lets him know that she’s had a little too much to drink, and that the ambient blend of sweat, cigar smoke and multiple decibels of cheap
bachata
has given her a nascent twinge of nausea.

Noah guides her to his bedroom and closes the door behind them.

The room, which four years before Noah was afraid he could never fill, is now more crammed than a secondhand store. He has often thought of chucking everything in the garbage so that he could once again experience the delicious dizziness of those early days, but each time he has tried he has come up against the laws of entropy. Matter resists, struggles against, the void. Every bauble suddenly seems to fulfill a vital function, and if, despite this, you venture to throw it away, another bauble with an equivalent volume immediately appears in the empty space.

Noah cannot look at this mess without thinking of his mother. He pictures her in the middle of Saskatchewan, at noon, in a prairie more immense than even the Pacific Ocean. The three thimblefuls of disarray that he could remove from his room seem laughable in comparison with those vast spaces. But those three thimblefuls are all that is missing now for someone to be able to sit down.

Arizna looks around. The only chair is loaded with a pile of books topped with a half-empty cup of coffee and a fan whirling at top speed. She lets herself fall on the mattress, between a stack of
National Geographics
and an old laptop computer. She takes off her sandals, undoes her belt and taps her stomach.

“Ohhh! Everything is spinning,” she sputters. “What do you call that concoction?”

“Mamajuana.”

“The roots floating around in the bottle—are they hallucinogenic?” she inquires anxiously.

“No, they just add a bit of a jungle taste to cheap rum. Maelo says it’s supposed to be an old Taino recipe.”

He rolls up his sleeves and starts to clear the mattress. He stacks the
National Geographic
magazines on the laptop and tries to squeeze the whole lot into a corner of his desk. At the other end of the desk, various piles of papers are on the verge of toppling over. Noah rushes over and catches them just in time. He looks around in search of a few unoccupied cubic centimetres but finds only a glaring lack of cubic centimetres.

He kicks open the closet door, locates a narrow space on the upper shelf, between two cardboard boxes. He tries to push one of the boxes toward the back of the shelf. The box creaks but does not budge.