MARGOT KELLEY
Companion Species
Companion Species
Like Venice without water. As if such a thing could be.
Actually, there is water; we’re on an island, after all. It’s simply elsewhere, beyond the seawall, not lapping at the fraying edges of sun-blanched buildings. Here, crumbling stone and plaster dwindle into dust pelting cobbles.
Actually, there is water; we’re on an island, after all. It’s simply elsewhere, beyond the seawall, not lapping at the fraying edges of sun-blanched buildings. Here, crumbling stone and plaster dwindle into dust pelting cobbles.
*
We are in the oldest part of Havana, have just crisscrossed a square called Plaza de Armas, which I am pretty sure means “marketplace of weapons.” A tree-filled park in the middle is surrounded by a wood-bricked street, and vendors are setting up as close to the dappled center as they can. Not one of them appears to be an arms dealer. To the contrary, in stall after stall, tired-looking men are emptying cardboard boxes and arranging their contents into temporary displays of foxed, fragile volumes about—if cognates can be trusted—Cuban history, Cuban history, and more Cuban history.
*
Let me amend. Of course cognates can be trusted. But how to distinguish true cognates from false friends?
*
My almost total ignorance of Spanish does not stop me from skimming titles as Jean falls into conversation with a young bookseller. He insistently flips pages of an old hardback she has taken off the shelf, pointing her first to some pictures, then to a stamp on the frontispage, then to something in the text itself. I think the book is somehow related to a murdered medical student, or possibly to a large group of murdered medical students. But I don’t know how. Although Jean offers translated bits and asides, I missed too much at the beginning of their conversation to pick up the odd thread this far along.
Across from this vendor’s spot is a sign for “el Templete” and a neoclassical-looking building with Doric columns. El templete sounds familiar—more than just cognate familiar—and I wrack my brain to recall anything about a temple with revolutionary significance. Rob, my husband, mentions that that’s the name of the restaurant where we’re supposed to meet the tour group for lunch.
We head over to investigate anyway.
Across from this vendor’s spot is a sign for “el Templete” and a neoclassical-looking building with Doric columns. El templete sounds familiar—more than just cognate familiar—and I wrack my brain to recall anything about a temple with revolutionary significance. Rob, my husband, mentions that that’s the name of the restaurant where we’re supposed to meet the tour group for lunch.
We head over to investigate anyway.
*
I am decidedly not a tour group kind of traveller. It’s the breezy companionableness I can’t muster, the week’s worth of casual amity. But it’s hard to go to Cuba—legally—any other way.
Fortunately, Rob found an educational tour company that could bring Americans who met the criteria for a U.S. State Department “general license” (check) and that quite considerately intimated in its brochure that tour participants sometimes strayed from the group (double check). Jean, who’d been to Cuba years before and who actually speaks Spanish, came with, as eager as we to escape from Maine in February.
Fortunately, Rob found an educational tour company that could bring Americans who met the criteria for a U.S. State Department “general license” (check) and that quite considerately intimated in its brochure that tour participants sometimes strayed from the group (double check). Jean, who’d been to Cuba years before and who actually speaks Spanish, came with, as eager as we to escape from Maine in February.
*
Two plump women sit on folding chairs, chatting and laughing. They are in front of the temple, strategically positioning themselves within the shade cast by a nearby ceiba tree. They’re dressed alike in dour dark blue uniforms and riotously patterned black lace stockings. The doors to the temple behind them are open, and we try to peer past to see if we want to pay to go inside. Heavy curtains shroud the view.
While Rob and I stumble through the Spanish on a nearby plaque, Jean learns from Marta, one of the guards, that it costs $1 CUC (about $1 US) to go inside, so we say “sure.” Marta will apparently be giving us a private tour; she urges us up the stone steps and pushes aside the curtain. We all step into a stone-cool, dimly lit space. Think alcove. Vestibule. Antechamber. Except not ante, exactly, since there is no other chamber. Though the ceilings are probably two-stories high, the entire space is a remarkably shallow, building-width room. The three walls that do not contain the door hold one large painting each, all of them done in the early 1800s by the French émigré, Jean Baptiste Vermay. The largest, on the back wall, is so big it’s impossible to stand far enough back to take it all in at once. A small statue is tucked into one corner. And in the middle of the room is a marble cenotaph, which may contain the cremains of Vermay, who died in 1833 when the Asiatic Cholera Pandemic reached Cuba.
While Rob and I stumble through the Spanish on a nearby plaque, Jean learns from Marta, one of the guards, that it costs $1 CUC (about $1 US) to go inside, so we say “sure.” Marta will apparently be giving us a private tour; she urges us up the stone steps and pushes aside the curtain. We all step into a stone-cool, dimly lit space. Think alcove. Vestibule. Antechamber. Except not ante, exactly, since there is no other chamber. Though the ceilings are probably two-stories high, the entire space is a remarkably shallow, building-width room. The three walls that do not contain the door hold one large painting each, all of them done in the early 1800s by the French émigré, Jean Baptiste Vermay. The largest, on the back wall, is so big it’s impossible to stand far enough back to take it all in at once. A small statue is tucked into one corner. And in the middle of the room is a marble cenotaph, which may contain the cremains of Vermay, who died in 1833 when the Asiatic Cholera Pandemic reached Cuba.
*
Center for Disease Control (CDC)
Outbreak Notice: Cholera in Cuba
This information is current as of today, January 31, 2013 at 20:54 EST
Released: January 31, 2013
What Is the Current Situation?
On January 6, 2013, The Cuban Ministry of Health (MoH) confirmed an outbreak of cholera in Havana, the country’s capital. A total of 51 laboratory-confirmed cases of cholera have been reported in Havana.
In July 2012, the Cuban MoH confirmed the country’s first cholera outbreak in more than a century. That outbreak was in the city of Manzanillo, in eastern Granma province, and was declared over in late August. Cuba’s cumulative number of confirmed cholera cases since July 2012 is now more than 500.
What Is Cholera?
Cholera is a bacterial disease that can cause diarrhea and dehydration. Cholera is most often spread through eating contaminated food or drinking contaminated water. Water may be contaminated by the feces of an infected person or by untreated sewage. Food may be contaminated by water containing cholera bacteria or by being handled by a person ill with cholera.
Outbreak Notice: Cholera in Cuba
This information is current as of today, January 31, 2013 at 20:54 EST
Released: January 31, 2013
What Is the Current Situation?
On January 6, 2013, The Cuban Ministry of Health (MoH) confirmed an outbreak of cholera in Havana, the country’s capital. A total of 51 laboratory-confirmed cases of cholera have been reported in Havana.
In July 2012, the Cuban MoH confirmed the country’s first cholera outbreak in more than a century. That outbreak was in the city of Manzanillo, in eastern Granma province, and was declared over in late August. Cuba’s cumulative number of confirmed cholera cases since July 2012 is now more than 500.
What Is Cholera?
Cholera is a bacterial disease that can cause diarrhea and dehydration. Cholera is most often spread through eating contaminated food or drinking contaminated water. Water may be contaminated by the feces of an infected person or by untreated sewage. Food may be contaminated by water containing cholera bacteria or by being handled by a person ill with cholera.
*
Marta tells Jean about the paintings, the cenotaph, the history of this site. Jean tells me and Rob. We ask Jean questions to ask Marta. We all nod at one another a lot. Eventually, we absorb that this really is the whole of the museum, and that we’ve exceeded Marta’s pool of answers. Jean asks Marta if we can give her a tip, which seems to upset the good-will we’ve all been nodding hard to foster. Marta tells Jean that tipping is not allowed, but that if we enjoyed our visit, we could certainly give her a small gift and she would be honored to accept it.
*
*
Moments later, equilibrium restored, we all head back outside, where we squint in the bright sunlight at a stone pillar and the ceiba tree behind it. The monument represents the ceiba tree under which the first Catholic mass and first city council meetings were held on this spot in November, 1519. The stone column was erected in 1754 because a hurricane had felled the original tree. In 1828, El templete was added; and while some say it was built to honor Queen Josefa Amalia, the wife of Spain’s King Fernando VII, Marta disagrees. As she took pains to explain, everything inside the temple is about Cuba’s founding on this spot. The current ceiba tree was planted in 1959. Already, it is considerably taller than the monument. Each year, on November 16th, thousands of people come and circle the tree three times, tossing coins at its base, making three wishes.
*
Now might be the right moment to tell you about my internal cellphone narrative. When I’m in the car on my cellphone (hands-free, Bluetooth, extremely low risk), and the connection grows spotty, then fails, I cannot help but see it as a metaphor. That human yearning to connect, the deep need we feel to reach out to another person—to hear that person and be heard by that person—has, once again, in what seems for all the world like an unkind inversion of sacramental grace, become undone. The fragile connection is thwarted, not because of anything in particular that we are or have been or have done, but because the very conditions that make it so essential also doom it.
And, since I live in rural Maine, this narrative has ample chance to play itself out in self-confirming, absurd, echoic excess. The literal narrative, that is, the one in which an actual paucity of cellphone towers plays a meaningful role.
And, since I live in rural Maine, this narrative has ample chance to play itself out in self-confirming, absurd, echoic excess. The literal narrative, that is, the one in which an actual paucity of cellphone towers plays a meaningful role.
*
Back in front of el Templete, the ceiba whose term so far has coincided with the Castros’ is ample and lovely. While we are standing in its shade, it drops a pinky-salmon blossom onto the hard-packed dirt courtyard, the flower lolling so languidly we might have caught it in mid-air had we thought to try. Picking it up, I am surprised to find even this brief and gentle contact with the ground has bruised its petals.
*
In Cuba, I have no phone; American cell phones do not work here. Jean brought hers anyway, to use as a camera. I borrow it to photograph this lovely flower, but hit a wrong button and make a blurry video instead.
*
Though I did not know it at the time, the flower might not, strictly speaking, have been the ceiba’s. Ceiba trees are home to many orchids, bromeliads, and other epiphytes. In fact, they are famously welcoming to these companion plants. And the companions, in turn, make it a congenial place for insects, snakes, frogs, birds, even some small mammals. Particularly in the rainforest, a ceiba canopy can be an ecosystem unto itself, a deeply interconnected community of creatures who live far above the earth.
This makes me happy beyond reason.
This makes me happy beyond reason.
*
To Mayans (and many other peoples of Latin America), the ceiba tree is the axis mundi. Also known as the cosmic axis, world pillar, or simply the center of the world, the axis mundi connects heaven, earth, and underworld, providing a conduit by which the living, the dead, and their gods can communicate. It is the navel of the known world, its point of origin. The axis creates a sacred space, an organizing center, a still point in a turning world.
And el Templete itself is a cosmic rosetta stone of sorts. The new ceiba, the pillar celebrating the original ceiba, the temple building, and the paintings all reiterate one another. Translating from system to system and culture to culture, the various elements are meant to ensure that the special nature of this place will be evident to all.
And el Templete itself is a cosmic rosetta stone of sorts. The new ceiba, the pillar celebrating the original ceiba, the temple building, and the paintings all reiterate one another. Translating from system to system and culture to culture, the various elements are meant to ensure that the special nature of this place will be evident to all.
*
El Templete is not on a corner of the Plaza de Armas. I see that now. Rather, this important plaza (our tour guide said every Latin American city has a plaza de armas) was built here so that it would be as close as possible to the center of the world. I’d mistaken the relation between center and periphery, had gotten it not just wrong, but exactly backward.
And that’s not the half of it. I also seem to have completely missed out on experiencing the sacredness of the site. Or, if I did sense it, then I did so without realizing it, which is either the same thing or something far, far sadder.
It could be like the cellphone problem, writ really large: even with the various “repeaters” amplifying the cosmic connection, maybe this particular axis doesn’t offer access anymore; maybe el Templete is in a dead zone. Or, it could be that you need the spiritual equivalent of a phone on the local network to hear the signal. Though I have to say, that seems awfully unfair; would a world spirit really be so selective about who can tune in?
And that’s not the half of it. I also seem to have completely missed out on experiencing the sacredness of the site. Or, if I did sense it, then I did so without realizing it, which is either the same thing or something far, far sadder.
It could be like the cellphone problem, writ really large: even with the various “repeaters” amplifying the cosmic connection, maybe this particular axis doesn’t offer access anymore; maybe el Templete is in a dead zone. Or, it could be that you need the spiritual equivalent of a phone on the local network to hear the signal. Though I have to say, that seems awfully unfair; would a world spirit really be so selective about who can tune in?
*
When describing the axis mundi and sacred sites, Mircea Eliade took great care to point out that the venerated sacred object—like the ceiba tree—ceases to be that object and becomes, instead, sacredness manifest in the material world.
I grew up Catholic. The sacrament of the Eucharist for Catholics involves this kind of metamorphosis, as the bread is transformed into the body of Christ, and the wine similarly becomes His blood. Such a miracle triggered no end of questions for me as a child. I remember wanting to know if the process was gradual or instantaneous. Did the first words of the priest’s prayer begin the process of transubstantiation? Did the communion wafer imperceptibly waver, stuck because unstuck? Was there a period when it was neither bread nor body, but both and neither, a spiritual Schrodinger’s cat? What was its state, its fate, if the priest had a heart attack and had to stop mid-prayer (a heart attack being the only thing I could imagine diverting a priest from his prayers)? Or was it the final syllable of the last word of the consecration that effected the change, so that it happened all at once? And if that was the case, why so much preamble?
With seemingly undiminished relish, my mother still recounts the time one of my grade-school catechism teachers, exasperated by my search for exact answers (or, I suppose, concerned for my immortal soul), took her aside after a class to remind her that “there’s a fine line between curious and blasphemous.”
I kindly resist telling her these questions still seems perfectly reasonable to me.
I grew up Catholic. The sacrament of the Eucharist for Catholics involves this kind of metamorphosis, as the bread is transformed into the body of Christ, and the wine similarly becomes His blood. Such a miracle triggered no end of questions for me as a child. I remember wanting to know if the process was gradual or instantaneous. Did the first words of the priest’s prayer begin the process of transubstantiation? Did the communion wafer imperceptibly waver, stuck because unstuck? Was there a period when it was neither bread nor body, but both and neither, a spiritual Schrodinger’s cat? What was its state, its fate, if the priest had a heart attack and had to stop mid-prayer (a heart attack being the only thing I could imagine diverting a priest from his prayers)? Or was it the final syllable of the last word of the consecration that effected the change, so that it happened all at once? And if that was the case, why so much preamble?
With seemingly undiminished relish, my mother still recounts the time one of my grade-school catechism teachers, exasperated by my search for exact answers (or, I suppose, concerned for my immortal soul), took her aside after a class to remind her that “there’s a fine line between curious and blasphemous.”
I kindly resist telling her these questions still seems perfectly reasonable to me.
*
Kublai Khan does not necessarily believe everything Marco Polo says when he describes the cities visited on his expeditions, but the emperor of the Tartans does continue listening to the young Venetian with greater attention and curiosity than he shows any other messenger or explorer . . . . Only in Marco Polo’s accounts was Kublai Khan able to discern, through the walls and towers destined to crumble, the tracery of a pattern so subtle it could escape the termite’s gnawing.
…
“At times” [the Khan tells Marco] “I feel your voice is reaching me from far away, while I am a prisoner of a gaudy and unlivable present, where all forms of human society have reached an extreme of their cycle and there is no imagining what new forms they may assume. And I hear, from your voice, the invisible reasons which make cities live, through which perhaps, once dead, they will come to life again.”[1]
…
“At times” [the Khan tells Marco] “I feel your voice is reaching me from far away, while I am a prisoner of a gaudy and unlivable present, where all forms of human society have reached an extreme of their cycle and there is no imagining what new forms they may assume. And I hear, from your voice, the invisible reasons which make cities live, through which perhaps, once dead, they will come to life again.”[1]
*
On the day before we headed home from Cuba, Jean took a picture with her phone of Juan, a cab-driver whom she’d befriended, who’d befriended her. His dark face is unsmiling, but he is giving a thumb’s-up sign. He has on a purple NOKIA baseball cap and bright yellow rain gear, the colors at happy odds with the mottled graying stucco of the decaying walls behind. In the flat wet light, it’s possible not to notice, at first, that half the building is gone, that the upper section of crumbling stucco was once an interior wall.
Jean and Juan had spent the drizzly afternoon riding through Havana in his horse-drawn carriage, searching for three addresses that one of Jean’s friends in Maine had asked her to find. The friend had extended family—grand-aunts—who’d been refugees from Armenia, and had ended up in orphanages in Cuba after World War I. Though she knew the orphanages were no longer operating, the friend wanted to see where her mother’s sisters had lived.
Jean and Juan had spent the drizzly afternoon riding through Havana in his horse-drawn carriage, searching for three addresses that one of Jean’s friends in Maine had asked her to find. The friend had extended family—grand-aunts—who’d been refugees from Armenia, and had ended up in orphanages in Cuba after World War I. Though she knew the orphanages were no longer operating, the friend wanted to see where her mother’s sisters had lived.
*
*
Not "thumbs-up” but rather "this was the place."
*
In Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes' aching meditation on photography and loss, he notes
that “the photograph's immobility is somehow the result of a perverse
confusion between two concepts: the Real and the Live: by attesting that
the object has been real, the photograph surreptitiously induces belief
that it is alive, because of that delusion which makes us attribute to
Reality an absolute superior, somehow eternal value; but by shifting
this reality to the past ('this-has-been'), the photograph suggests that
it is already dead.”
Later, he concludes that “the photograph is literally an emanation… From a real body, which was there, proceed radiations which ultimately touch me, who am here; the duration of the transmission is insignificant; the photograph of the missing being…will touch me like the delayed rays of a star. A sort of umbilical cord links the body of the photographed being to my gaze: light, though impalpable, is here a carnal medium, a skin I share with anyone who has been photographed.”[2]
Later, he concludes that “the photograph is literally an emanation… From a real body, which was there, proceed radiations which ultimately touch me, who am here; the duration of the transmission is insignificant; the photograph of the missing being…will touch me like the delayed rays of a star. A sort of umbilical cord links the body of the photographed being to my gaze: light, though impalpable, is here a carnal medium, a skin I share with anyone who has been photographed.”[2]
*
In this photograph of missingness—of buildings and people long gone—a stranger gazes back. What, I wonder, is here figure and what ground? To what are we now being bound?
*
Light, though impalpable, is what makes the canopy of ceiba trees so appealing to orchids and bromeliads. The trees give the blossoms a huge advantage over ground-dwellers—better access to the delayed rays.
For their part, the trees—supposedly—get nothing. Scientists call the kind of symbiosis that occurs between trees and air plants commensalism. Unlike the harmful effects that a parasite has on its host, or the beneficial effects that mutualists have on each other, commensalists are thought to neither help nor hurt their hosts.
I appreciate this kind of distinction, but I can’t accept it. At least not in this case. How could a tree remain unaffected by plants whose whole lives are spent amid its branches? And what of the other creatures who choose the canopy because the orchids and bromeliads have made it their home? If they help or hurt the ceiba, haven’t these epiphytes acted as parasites—or mutualists—at one remove? Have not the orchids become a carnal medium?
For their part, the trees—supposedly—get nothing. Scientists call the kind of symbiosis that occurs between trees and air plants commensalism. Unlike the harmful effects that a parasite has on its host, or the beneficial effects that mutualists have on each other, commensalists are thought to neither help nor hurt their hosts.
I appreciate this kind of distinction, but I can’t accept it. At least not in this case. How could a tree remain unaffected by plants whose whole lives are spent amid its branches? And what of the other creatures who choose the canopy because the orchids and bromeliads have made it their home? If they help or hurt the ceiba, haven’t these epiphytes acted as parasites—or mutualists—at one remove? Have not the orchids become a carnal medium?
*
No amount of carefulness could protect us completely. Though we drank only bottled water and ate only cooked food, several in the group did become ill. Unlike our island hosts, we hadn’t enough time to cultivate commensal indifference to local pathogens. But our caution was not for naught: no one contracted cholera.
*
Institut Pasteur September 6, 2005
Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique For Immediate Release
Cholera: How Parasites Make Bacteria Pathogenic
Vibrio cholerae is the bacteria that causes cholera. Not all Vibrio cholerae are pathogenic. In order to become pathogenic, the vibrio must acquire the ability to produce the cholera toxin, which causes the lethal diarrhea of cholera. The ability to produce this toxin is transferred to the bacteria by a resourceful parasite, the CTX bacteriophage.
Bacteriophages are viruses that infect bacteria. In order to become a parasite of the Vibrio cholerae, the CTX bacteriophage integrates its entire genome in that of the bacteria, thus enabling it to use its host’s reproduction process to propagate itself. In “exchange,” the vibrio acquires the ability to produce the cholera toxin, which is encoded in the genome of the bacteriophage.
….
Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique For Immediate Release
Cholera: How Parasites Make Bacteria Pathogenic
Vibrio cholerae is the bacteria that causes cholera. Not all Vibrio cholerae are pathogenic. In order to become pathogenic, the vibrio must acquire the ability to produce the cholera toxin, which causes the lethal diarrhea of cholera. The ability to produce this toxin is transferred to the bacteria by a resourceful parasite, the CTX bacteriophage.
Bacteriophages are viruses that infect bacteria. In order to become a parasite of the Vibrio cholerae, the CTX bacteriophage integrates its entire genome in that of the bacteria, thus enabling it to use its host’s reproduction process to propagate itself. In “exchange,” the vibrio acquires the ability to produce the cholera toxin, which is encoded in the genome of the bacteriophage.
….
*
I can't help feeling a kind of pity for cholera now, knowing that it’s not even cholera, exactly, when it acts so badly. Rather, its ordinary self has been supplanted by an alien entity who changes its nature. Its very being is replaced, invisibly, from within.
Is it blasphemous to wonder how different this is from what happens at a sacred site, where ordinary space is breached by the extraordinary, and an actual tree or stone or column of smoke is replaced, invisibly, by the sacred?
Is it blasphemous to wonder how different this is from what happens at a sacred site, where ordinary space is breached by the extraordinary, and an actual tree or stone or column of smoke is replaced, invisibly, by the sacred?
*
On the day we left Cuba, Raul Castro announced both his second term as president and his intention that it would be his last. Five years hence, for the first time in more than half a century, someone who is not a Castro will be president.
*
One last bit from Mircea Eliade.
He describes a mythical pattern that he calls the coincidentia oppositorum, the coincidence of opposites. Many mythologies, he notes, include an account of a lost Paradise, "a paradoxical state in which the contraries exist side by side without conflict, and the multiplications form aspects of a mysterious Unity. The coincidentia oppositorum expresses a wish to recover the lost unity of the mythical Paradise, for it presents a reconciliation of opposites and the unification of diversity.”[3]
He describes a mythical pattern that he calls the coincidentia oppositorum, the coincidence of opposites. Many mythologies, he notes, include an account of a lost Paradise, "a paradoxical state in which the contraries exist side by side without conflict, and the multiplications form aspects of a mysterious Unity. The coincidentia oppositorum expresses a wish to recover the lost unity of the mythical Paradise, for it presents a reconciliation of opposites and the unification of diversity.”[3]
*
On the drive from Logan International Airport in Boston back to Maine, one of us realizes that our collective refrigerators are going to be pretty empty after so much time away, so we stop at a big grocery store just off the highway to get a few essentials. Right as we walk in, by the cool case of pre-cut fruit, is a hand-lettered day-glow pink poster advertising orchids on sale, a low-low price, today only!
We buy them all.
We buy them all.
[1] Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, pp. 5-6, 135 (William Weaver translation)
[2] Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, pp. 79, 80-81 (Richard Howard translation)
[3] Mircea Eliade, Mephistopheles and the Androgyne: Studies in religious myth and symbol, p. 114.
Margot Anne Kelley is a writer and photographer whose work often focuses on the relationships between people and place. Her books include Local Treasures: Geocaching Across America (2006) and A Field Guide to Other People's Trees (2015). She is currently working on a project about contemporary seed-savers.
