Nocturnal Butterflies of the Russian Empire. José Manuel prieto

money I had hidden against my heart, dearer to me than my feelings for God. I didn’t have time to think, to ask any questions. They read some passages from Peter’s Epistle to the Romans, put their hands on my head, and from either side I received an imperious order, they shouted in unison, “Speak,” and my mouth opened and out came a mad rush of inarticulate sounds, blending with the incoherent phonemes of a speaker in tongues, and for I don’t know how long, I talked to God in words from my heart because onto me, too, had descended the Gift of Tongues.

      Shaken to the bottom of my soul, deafened by everything they had shouted in my ears, I thought I was waking from a dream when there was a sudden silence and Peckas asked something that made me think my program for deciphering human language had gone completely haywire. That getting converted, becoming a glossolal, too, had overwhelmed me, and with the many languages I would understand from now on, I had lost the ability to understand my own. Peckas asked me in Spanish, “Do you have clean underpants?” And since I just stared at him (unable to believe my ears) he realized how ridiculous his question sounded and explained: “to use as a bathing suit for your baptism. You have to get wet.”

      I still have the photo: I’m emerging from an Erickson bath that they had filled with running water from the fountain, supplied by the many lakes and glaciers of Lapland. I’m shivering with cold, in a well-worn bathing suit (no clean underwear) and an ill-fitting alb, which was supposed to symbolize the purity of the newly baptized, my sins running off into the gutter and to the Gulf of Finland, my heart cleansed of the stigma of the dollars hanging around my neck, between the glacial waters of Lapland and the pure water of the sea.

      And then to capture the moment for eternity. Next to me in the photo, Peckas, smiling slightly. It’s just possible to make out a faint filigree on the forearms piously crossed over his belly. In this holy gesture I have always thought I could see—examining the photo so many times—the many innocent throats those hairy hands had forced into silence in his shady past, long before he had decided, perhaps to atone for his guilt, to make as many others speak in garbled profusion. I could not send this photo to V. I looked, quite properly, like a hungry person, waiting for dinner. The end of the ritual consisted in recording my name, which would be included in an annual report, a missive they sent to His Holiness in Rome, as testament to the good works of their temple in this remote province of Christianity. The next morning, before leaving, I received a tape of sermons recorded in Spanish, English, and every Scandinavian language (glossolalia), all delivered in the same voice, the stentorous Peckas, speaker in tongues.

       3

       ST. PETERSBURG

      It was raining in St. Petersburg. The city was suspended from the sky by dark gray threads that melted onto its sidewalks and zinc-covered roofs. I caught a cab at the metro entrance, and we drove down Nevski, through raindrops spattering on the asphalt. I told the driver to let me out on Liteinaya, the booksellers’ street. I wanted to visit Vladimir Vladimirovich, an elderly gentleman always bent over a book, his back to the bookstore’s main room. Which was in a small cellar beyond the sound of the rumbling streetcars; you got to it through an arch that opened onto a patio with crude bars on the first-floor windows and drain pipes whose ends were cemented to the ground by silver icicles. The basement was in a second patio—there was also a third, through which you could exit, escape to the next street if necessary—behind a door covered with layers of pasted-up signs. They were the work of the girl who watched the cashbox, the girl I had discovered one afternoon passing a colored pencil over a plastic stencil of the alphabet. They ran because of the constant humidity in St. Petersburg, which soaked right through them and even dampened the pages of books that sat too long in unheated basements. Like the copy of Diurnal and Nocturnal Butterflies of the Russian Empire, for example, which I found on a shelf near the door. In the same room one afternoon I found a book that I didn’t dare return to the shelf once I held it in my hands and leafed through it, that I kept clutched to my chest, exultantly. I remember it perfectly well but won’t say what it was. This had to be the best bookstore in St. Petersburg, which at the time was called Leningrad, an ugly name. So when my new business interests forced me to embark on a preliminary study, following the trail of the yazikus through the Public Library and the used bookstores, I remembered this man, who spent hours—the time I lost sniffing around the shelves—bent over a book, like any other customer, even though he was actually the owner, the principal investor, so to speak, in the bookstore, and Liena, the girl with the cashbox, who colored a new sign for the door every few months, always switching the store hours. Later I learned that these changes reflected the hours she closed to meet her lovers, with their various occupations. She took me, for example, to her house, which was close by, in the Fontanka, from 1:30 to 2:25, and then closed at 6:00, even though it was spring, and the days were getting longer, so there were still customers at 7:00. The old man, I remembered as the door opened with a jerk and warm basement air hit me in the face, was named Vladimir Vladimirovich. I had never spoken to him, but Liena often complained about him after the short midday break in her room, half dressed, throwing on her clothes, pulling up her stockings, putting on makeup at the mirror, bra straps cutting into her back: “Vladimir Vladimirovich is going to kill me. I can’t go on like this, always getting back late, changing the hours. You know though?”—and she sought my eyes in the mirror—“He doesn’t even notice. He has tea and biscuits in his office, never comes out till closing time. God, he must be eighty years old.”

      I found him in his office sipping tea from a discolored cup that could have come from an imperial service.

      “Vladimir Vladimirovich! I don’t know if you … Look, I have a job. A Swede, a rich man, has hired me to capture a butterfly, a rare specimen. I’ll tell you the whole story if you have the time … Do you know that in Finland they still have stands of pine grown for masts, with thick trunks, no twists? Of course you know that: I’ve read it, too, actually, wait … Right, in a book I bought here a few months ago. Peter had them planted, but by the time they were big enough, fifty years later, there was no use for them. But no, that’s not true. They were still making ships with masts. Even today there are a few left, old-time ships … No, I had some before I left home … Okay, one cup … I was just considering a catalog of butterflies that you have. But maybe you know a better one. Yes, you’re right, a butterfly that’s almost extinct, what book would that be in? Thanks, Vladimir Vladimirovich. It seems I’m going to the Caspian Basin and from there to Istanbul. I have some books I’d like to leave on consignment, for you to sell. I’ll stop by before I go.”

      Talking to Vladimir Vladimirovich, into his big octogenarian ears, made me nervous. We had never had a real conversation. One day he told me that he was planning to write a book about Nevski Avenue, about a house on Nevski, number 55. The one that has some dancing birds, griffins, a pattern, you know, from Scythia. That’s right, was all he said. He never lingered on the salient points in my remarks, like he did on the winged griffin, the animal motifs of Scythia. I hadn’t told him what I did (at the time I was moving sides of beef in a packing plant on the edge of town, awful, terrible pay). I had never seen him outside this store, behind his stands. One afternoon, it’s true, I saw a very old man, in a moth-eaten greatcoat, crossing Liteinaya, just about caught between the tracks as two streetcars went by. He managed to get through first. Vladimir Vladimirovich had never asked me, like the police, for example: “And you, young man, where are you from?” That was a subject completely immaterial, irrelevant to him.

      On the same thin stiff translucent paper that he used for labels (writing the names of his butterflies on narrow strips in India ink) Stockis had copied down the distinguishing marks of the yazikus, in English, in the neat hand of a professional clerk. Wingspan: 30 to 40 millimeters. Wing pattern: dorsal, pale yellow background with a pattern of angry eyes, a defense mechanism, inspiring the concept of danger in its predators (this unnecessary explanation and the ticklish term “concept” puzzled me). The description I found in Diurnal and Nocturnal Butterflies of the Russian Empire, by V. V. Sirin, was less “psychological,” more nineteenth century (St. Petersburg, 1895). It agreed for the most part, but the ink drawing by Rodionov, S. V., illustrator, was clearly superior to the photographs