Brother in Ice Read online

  First published in English translation by And Other Stories in 2018

  Sheffield – London – New Haven

  www.andotherstories.org

  First published as Germà de gel in 2015 by L’Altra editorial, Barcelona.

  Copyright © 2015 Imma Ávalos Marquès

  English-language translation copyright © 2018 Mara Faye Lethem

  This edition is published by arrangement with L’Altra Editorial c/o MB Agencia Literaria S.L. through Corinne Chabert Literary Agency.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transported in any form by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher of this book. The right of Imma Ávalos Marquès be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or places is entirely coincidental.

  ISBN: 978-1-911508-20-5

  eBook ISBN: 978-1-911508-21-2

  Editor: Stefan Tobler; Proofreader: Gesche Ipsen; Typesetting and eBook: Tetragon, London; Cover Design: Pablo Marfá; Line-drawing artworks: Alicia Kopf.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  This book has been selected to receive financial assistance from English PEN’s “PEN Translates” programme, supported by Arts Council England. English PEN exists to promote literature and our understanding of it, to uphold writers’ freedoms around the world, to campaign against the persecution and imprisonment of writers for stating their views, and to promote the friendly co-operation of writers and the free exchange of ideas. www.englishpen.org

  This book was also supported using public funding by Arts Council England.

  ‌

  Contents

  I. Frozen Heroes

  Poles

  Symzonia

  Matryoshka, or the Hollow Narrator Theory

  Research Notes I

  Honor and Recognition

  Man in Ice

  Cook

  Below

  Cook, Peary, and the Truth

  S.O.S. Eisberg

  The Frozen Explorers

  Research Notes II

  Zeppelin

  Research Notes III

  Atlas Crystal Works

  Shackleton

  Artificial Snow

  Man in Ice II

  The Heroic Age

  Research Notes IV

  Miss Boyd Land

  The Continuity of Pools

  The Icebreaker

  Research Notes V

  The Method

  II. Library Atop an Iceberg

  The Fault

  Research Notes VI

  Ping-Pong

  Research Notes VII

  Leaving Home

  The Gifts

  Stalker

  The Coldest Place

  In Front of You

  The Basement

  Polar Vortex

  Stagnation, Freezing, Rupture

  April

  R

  Northward

  July

  October 21, 2014, Letter from the Antarctic

  F

  Searching for an Answer When the Uncertainty of it All Weighs Heavily

  Advantages

  After-Dinner Conversation

  Spoiled Children

  R’s Closet

  The Prize

  Objects

  Berglust

  Black Mirror

  A Trip to Antarctica

  The Illogic of Arco

  The Choreographer

  Ice Blink

  Paris

  Rage and Thaw, Pyrenees Mini-Break

  Mountain Refuge

  Pills

  Geyser

  Did You Sleep Well?

  White

  Auditing

  Ultima Thule

  III. Iceland, Inner Geology

  Lost Luggage

  The Golden Circle

  Thursday, August 27, Jökullsárlón National Park

  Friday, August 28

  Saturday, August 29

  Sunday, August 30

  Monday, August 31

  Tuesday, September 1

  Postscript

  Selected Polar Bibliography

  Acknowledgments

  ‌

  To my brother, who isn’t of ice

  ‌

  I want to be there, looking out, instead of out here looking in.

  Louise Boyd, Arctic explorer

  It’s an ambition of mine, which I never seem to get around to realizing, to spend at least one winter north of the Arctic Circle. Anyone can go there in the summer when the sun is up, but I want to go there when the sun is down, I really do, and so help me I’m going to do it one of these times.

  Glenn Gould

  After the martyrs of the faith, those of science are the most admirable, and among them, the most heroic are the sailors of the polar seas … In the history of journeys there are no more curious episodes, no more impressive images, no more event-filled dramas than those of the winters in the ice-fields.

  Jules Verne

  It wasn’t until 1930 that the American chemist and bookseller William Barrow discovered that, to keep paper from degrading and yellowing, it had to be treated with a base coat during the production process (of calcium or magnesium bicarbonate) to neutralize the acids found in wood pulp, and prevent the formation of additional acids.

  Lorenzo Dávalos

  What was silent in the father speaks in the son, and often I found in the son the unveiled secret of the father.

  Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

  Men wanted for hazardous journey, small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger, safe return doubtful, honour and recognition in case of success.

  Ernest Shackleton (attributed)

  Buenas noches, señores y señoras. La primera pregunta es … Qué es más macho, iceberg or volcano?

  Laurie Anderson, Drum Dance & Smoke Rings

  … snow comes in through my shoes when Luis María dances with me and his hand on my waist rises in me like midday heat, like a tang of pungent oranges, of thrashed cane, and they hit her and it’s impossible to resist and then I have to tell Luis María that I’m not well, that it’s the dampness, dampness in the snow I don’t feel, that I can’t feel and that is coming in through my shoes.

  Julio Cortázar, from “The Distances”

  There is no more a method for learning than a method for finding treasures.

  Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition

  Inveniam viam aut faciam (I shall find a way or make one)

  Seneca

  ‌

  ‌I

  Frozen Heroes

  ‌

  ‌Poles

  First it was the tabular icebergs, which appeared floating in the local pool. Narwhals got in through a crack in the tiles at the bottom. In the chlorinated water, I squeezed a bit of white ice in my hand, making a game of sinking it and letting it resurface. A dream. Later, at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, I saw icecaps in the blue tutus of Degas’s ballerinas.

  I began to study. I learned that “arctic” comes from the Greek word árktikos, “near the bear,” and “Antarctic,” from antárktikos, “the place with no bears,” but rather penguins. I learned that compasses are useless at the poles, rotational axes with shifting magnetic fields; north, the quintessential cardinal point, is actually not even an entirely stationary point of reference. At the poles even the ground moves. The early-twentieth-century polar explorers were mystics in search of the Holy Grail. Joseph Conrad s
aid that their aims were as pure as the air at the high latitudes they surveyed. But those explorers were more like regular folks than we think—setting aside the fact that they risked their lives for a mission—because, as their journals show, they were also envious, and made mistakes, and told lies. Many explorers died trying to get to regions others erroneously claimed to have reached. The controversy over who discovered the North Pole is a fascinating chapter in polar history; more than just improbable feats taking place at a vague location, it is the story of one man’s word against another’s.

  I am also searching for something in my white, unheated iceberg studio. An imaginary point that is completely unknown—and therefore absolutely magnetic. Sometimes I lose my way; I’m-cold-it’s-late-still-waiting-on-a-paycheck.

  a) I return home.

  b) I return to the anchorage point, the word pols (poles) and its range of literal meanings in Catalan:

  pols, el, n. masc: the steadiness of hand needed to carry out certain acts, such as writing or holding a weapon.

  And then, when you swap the masculine article for the feminine one, you arrive at more meanings of the word, which veer off in an unlikely direction yet could possibly link to my research:

  pols, la, n. fem: fine, dry powder consisting of tiny particles of earth or waste matter lying on the ground or on surfaces or carried in the air. Also, a type of snow: powder snow.

  ‌

  ‌Symzonia

  In the first few decades of the nineteenth century, Captain John Cleves Symmes defended the theory that the Earth had two holes—one at either end—that went right through it. Like matryoshka dolls, he claimed, the Earth housed the entrance to seven worlds that were nestled inside each other. Enough sunlight came in through the holes to sustain some sort of life, something that the captain aspired to demonstrate with complicated calculations and diagrams. If man could reach the pole, he would have an entire inner universe within reach.

  This theory was a very fertile one for literature; from Symzonia, a novel by Symmes that recreates an underground world, to The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket by Edgar Allan Poe. Those works inspired An Antarctic Mystery and Journey to the Center of the Earth by Jules Verne. Many people believed that seas of ice at the poles led to Symmes’s inner worlds, until the poles were finally conquered.

  It was Sir John Barrow, in the nineteenth century, who awakened interest in the Arctic when he went in search of Sir John Franklin and the members of his expedition, who had disappeared trying to find the Northwest Passage. Following his example, the more ambitious nations embarked on various expeditions to conquer the two most extreme points of the Earth, hidden behind the mystique of storms and ice.

  According to polar historian Fergus Fleming, the Arctic furor reached such heights that it was the subject of jokes in Europe and the United States. Was there a pole at the Pole? Was it made of wood? Did it have stripes like a barber’s pole? The Inuit called it the “Great Nail.”

  The fact that the conquest of the North Pole entailed a group of individuals confronting the elements was incomprehensible to many. The strategic, economic, and scientific justifications were vague. Great Britain was hesitant, while other world powers had already decided that reaching the poles was a question of national glory.

  If only the moral advantage derived from these expeditions be considered, I believe that it would suffice to compensate for the sacrifices they demand. As men who surmount difficulties in their daily struggles feel themselves strengthened for encounters with yet greater difficulties, so should also a nation feel itself encouraged and stimulated by the success won by its sons to persevere in striving for greatness and prosperity.

  These words were written by the Italian aristocrat Luigi Amedeo Giuseppe Maria Ferdinando Francesco di Savoia-Aosta, Duke of the Abruzzi, leader of the first Italian expedition to the North Pole.

  ‌

  ‌Matryoshka

  or the Hollow Narrator Theory

  As in Symmes’s theory, the narrative voice of this novel takes the form of seven different figures. The first one heads toward the city center dressed in black. She is so young that her features are fuzzy:

  If you actually walk on a moving walkway, you go twice as fast. Some hundred meters ahead of myself, I proceed along the walkway, turn the corner without rotating my body and arrive at the store. I leave my bag in the closet and stand behind the counter. My hologram always arrives punctually. It’s a shame the supervisor doesn’t notice.

  One right turn and a hundred meters further back, my physical self rushes to make it in on time. Once there, after straightening the piles of pullovers and reorganizing the items on hangers, when there are no customers I amuse myself by watching, through the store window, seconds in the lives of people passing on the street. Inside, my gaze stops on each of the images that fill the shelves. The first photograph is a portrait, on foam board backing, of a couple in front of a horse. I imagine their real lives before and after the photograph. The man smiles with a triumphant air beside his girlfriend. Their pastel-colored polo shirts are prominent in the scene. She doesn’t need money. She’ll marry an important pharmaceutical executive, a friend of the family. Ten years later she has four children, she’s gained weight and her husband is cheating on her with a younger woman. She decides to go back to school, etc. The game requires avoiding clichés. Sometimes I’m better at it than other times. The brown-haired guy with classical features is from a Belgian suburb, he was discovered by an agent at twenty-one, working behind the bar at a nightclub; now he earns much more than he’d ever dreamed of. Sometimes he is asked to escort ladies or gentlemen to parties. He’ll be raped by a casting director. Eventually he’ll be adopted by a businessman twenty years his senior, who unexpectedly makes him happy.

  I continue playing the game of reverse-characters, from photo to photo, until my gaze lands on the cotton Oxford shirts in shades of blue. The customers who buy them aren’t like my father. My parents don’t come into the store. I wouldn’t either, I’d feel self-conscious. I started working for the company one year wrapping Christmas gifts in its discount store and a couple of months later I was transferred to the flagship store. The job offers more opportunity to let the mind wander than the restaurant business, where I had a boss who yelled at me when there were a lot of customers and I didn’t run my tail off bringing out the dishes. To the left of the counter is the women’s clothing, more colorful and varied in shape and texture. The more original pieces, the ones I would buy if I could afford them, rarely sell. Here people want to be cookie-cutter members of the happy club, filled with folks who go sailing or play golf; “If you want to be one of us, you must buy us,” the polo players sewn onto the shirts whisper in chorus. The owner ignores my scant enthusiasm for sales because of my skill at dressing mannequins. After the four-hour morning shift and the four-hour afternoon shift, when I get home I will wait for everyone to have their dinner so I can use the kitchen table (the one in my room is too small, in the dining room the TV’s always on). After wiping it down, I lay out my art-theory books. Zeitgeist, Weltanschauung, words with tiny footnotes. After a little while my eyelids grow heavy.

  Opening up that first figurine by its narrow waist, the next one appears. Its features, ten years later, are now well-defined:

  I am teaching behind glass walls. Through them influential parents, foreign teachers, and businessmen worried about the future of their family businesses, observe me, all of them paying close attention to the quality of service in a privileged, hothouse environment. This sort of atmosphere is prevalent uptown where, from kindergarten age, languages and future technologies are spoon-fed at breakfast. In this setting, egos—endowed with applause and medals for even the slightest achievement and from the earliest age—generally grow up with a very well developed sense of personal pride concerning themselves, even though not always toward others. Because—I thought—if we changed the rules of this game and we all were dealt the same cards, or if at least there were rules
that evened out the unequal distribution, if the playing field were neutral; if affection, the most highly valued asset in expensive schools (where all the rest is paid for with money) and all the other resources were available to everyone, perhaps then those who can’t play now would play better—she taught in various schools in less privileged areas, before finding a steady position at that school. She had seen a lot of talent wasted because it hadn’t found the appropriate conditions, talent which that country seemed to only recognize early in the case of soccer players. Teaching according to new methods based on teamwork and projects, she saw how creative students were sometimes hampered by group negotiations monopolized by more dominant or extroverted students. Teamwork is misunderstood—I concluded after a time—each student should be evaluated both for their ability to collaborate and for their individual contribution, which is made possible by the living dead who comprise the Canon; prior knowledge and the individual’s contribution directed at the Contemporaries in a never-ending conversation: the reader collaborates; the group is made up of the reader, the author and author’s influences that allowed him or her to create the work. What can emerge from that dialogue is also for others, perhaps not now, but maybe in the future it could take the shape of an artwork, or the ability to communicate in writing, or the development of a critical sensibility toward your surroundings, an ability that fuels the oft-trumpeted “innovation.”

  I thought about all that, kept quiet and did my job the best I could in a competitive work environment because deep down, after some twisting to release it, figurine number three was still me: