Fireflies. Luis Sagasti

the earliest shamans knew, just by looking at the stars.

      In all this, the knitting needles and the resulting scarf or pullover don’t look particularly great in the end. Who’d want to try them on? Some god freezing to death in the vastness of space, or some god who is space at 270 degrees below zero, immobile, frozen, who observes how every now and again phosphorescent insects – something like fireflies – appear on the revolving ball of yarn, on one side and then the other, as if they could move through it. Traverse it, yes. From side to side. Except these fireflies seem to flee ahead of the needles. Or perhaps they are the needles.

      Outside it’s cold; up there it’s cold. It’s true, the stars in the sky burn at hundreds of millions of degrees Celsius, but the voids drawn between them are at absolute zero. The straight line formed by the stars of Orion’s belt is an icy needle held at 270 degrees below zero. All the constellations are threaded by icy needles in the image of vast animals hidden somewhere on this planet-like ball of wool.

      Among people, we should seek out only the fireflies; the rest are simply animals whose frost is reflected in the heavens.

      Should we become fireflies?

      Ever since people raised their heads for the first time to observe the stars and began telling them apart by nothing more than the invisible threads of frozen silver that link them, they also began to tell stories. About why the ball of wool revolves only to return to the same place each year; about who the great weaver is, the great animal, the great reindeer, the great bear, the great hare that knits its pullover with those icy needles in order to warm up those who pass that way once their skin has become as cold as their bones. Those who sleep a dreamless sleep and become, naturally, the dreams of others. Or at least provide source material for their insomnia.

      Up there it’s so cold. Perhaps that’s why the people huddled around the fire tell the story of the great pullover. Time and again. And from up there, sitting on the edges of those icy needles running from star to star, is it possible to see the fire crackling? The light of the caves?

      Insect-men, curled up in a ball, gathered around the firefly that illuminates the night with its tale.

      It’s cold out there. It’s always a good idea to start where it’s cold, or where there’s liquid. That’s the point of the ball of wool. To be able to return, later in the story, to the warmth of the good earth.

      Where to start, if we can’t find the end of the strand and we don’t want to break the yarn?

      Start with the open mouths of those by the fire listening to the story of the ball of wool, for example. Or the open mouths of those who fall into the cold.

      The mouth opens whenever it’s the first time. It imitates the frozen abyss that separates the stars.

      In the beginning and in the end the breath stops. Always. The mouth opens wider. Or the eyes, those two mouths that swallow everything. The world fits into the body and once it occupies it completely, it explodes against the ground or emerges in a shout. Or a sigh.

      One, two, three and the four that’s left unspoken, the band holds its breath, and there, the music of the spheres begins to play.

      2. Haikus

      In the winter of 1943, one of the cruellest in living memory, perhaps because no one had anything in their bellies, the Stuka being flown by the officer Joseph Beuys was hit by a Russian fighter plane after a brief combat in the skies above Crimea. Beneath them, the cold was turning the pine needles into crystals, transforming the trees into a translucent forest of blue mirrors that smash the aircraft into hundreds of pieces before it even reaches the ground. Beuys’ face, already shattered, streaks past the tiny mirrors of ice hanging from the branches. Mirrors of ice like perfect, diminutive haikus. Everything takes just a few hundred years that somehow fit into the blink of an eye. It has been snowing steadily for almost two days, scattering particles of silence over the branches and across the ground. The snow absorbs part of the noise of the plummeting aircraft, but the sound of thousands of breaking mirrors reaches the alert ears of the Tatars. The pilot’s skill or luck meant the plane didn’t land on its nose and explode. Officer Beuys, gravely wounded, unconscious and near-frozen, is rescued by a group of nomad Tatars who know nothing about the war. They’ve come to understand that when there’s thunder above but no storm, it’s best to take refuge beneath the biggest trees. The co-pilot has broken his neck. His name was Karl Vogts. His body is never found.

      For a period of time Beuys cannot calculate, he is stalked by death, which is only kept at bay by the Tatar shaman who smears the pilot’s wounds with animal fat and wraps him in felt. Hare skins are the best choice when it comes to protecting someone from the cold. He recites the prayers he’s learnt on one of the three nights when the moon disappears. Days pass, and death leaves to maraud elsewhere. When he regains consciousness, the aviator starts to speak in an unintelligible language made up of words born of fever, inseparable one from the other, even for the shaman, who knows the tongue of the animals. The man who fell from the plane has blue eyes and full lips. He is too dazed for fear to express itself in his face. The Tatars keep him awake for most of the day, always wrapped tightly in the felt blanket, like a mummy. He lies trembling before a hearth where the fire is never allowed to go out. He is not sure when he is dreaming and when he is awake, if it is cold or if it is warm. He thinks he wakes up in the middle of the night. He sees things. Or perhaps he sees nothing. It is more likely he sees nothing. His mind is a burning pot. Neurons like thousands of still mirrors reflecting without judging – this is their fidelity. The Tatars pass in front of him, blurs of light. The faces come from above, as if falling before his eyes. Some smile, others look at him in amazement. The shaman appears when night falls and Beuys sees that his head is on fire. Years later, he would recall being inside a large tent. The roof was faded blue and he could make out a series of – painted? embroidered? – yellow and white stars.

      ‘I tried to identify a constellation but I couldn’t: the stars shifted every time I looked at them.’

      Once, the shaman points to an empty space between the stars and says something Beuys is unable to pronounce. But this word, which the shaman repeats again and again, pointing to the empty space between the stars, calms him.

      What they give Beuys to eat is also a mystery, but the strength gradually returns to his body. One day he gets up, leaves the tent and is able to walk a few steps unassisted. The Tatars follow him with their eyes. A little boy hides behind his mother, peeking out at the pilot. Beuys turns around, and the shaman smiles back at him.

      Two or three days after this, he is rescued by a German patrol. Beuys completes his convalescence in a field hospital. The man who a month later returns to the front is a changed person, who will be successively decorated for bravery, demoted for rebelliousness, captured by the British and finally repatriated to Germany once the war is over. The scars on his head will be covered by a felt trilby hat. Long leather coats, and sometimes fisherman’s vests, complete his outfit. Very few pictures show him without this uniform. Twenty-five years after the events in Crimea, Joseph Beuys had become one of the most influential artists in the world.

      In 1969, Kurt Vonnegut published Slaughterhouse-Five. The flagship of my little fleet, he declares in a news item. However we read it, and there are many ways of doing so, it will always be counted among the top five candidates for the Great American Novel of the twentieth century. In 1944, Vonnegut was taken prisoner by the Germans following the Battle of the Bulge. He was transferred and locked up in slaughterhouse number five in the city of Dresden.

      The beauty of this city was a magnet that attracted the Allies’ wrath, and the Florence on the Elbe, as it was known, was destroyed by bombs in February 1945. The Germans had shown no mercy with Coventry a few years earlier, and now they would learn their lesson: never touch the crown jewels. Vonnegut was one of seven Americans to survive. One week before the bombing, his mother committed suicide in Chicago. Vonnegut would make his own attempt, without success, in 1985. The cocktail of pills and alcohol he prepared was the same as that his mother had taken. After the war, Vonnegut settled in New York. More than a cynic, the war had turned him into a chronic depressive, who drank and smoked to excess.

      The