Suddenly it turned out that I had nothing more to do. Yet something was pulling me towards the Guadalquivir Gardens, so I saved three notices and set off in that direction. I pasted two of them up on the Roman columns along Hercules Avenue, under the statue of Caesar. Several people were carrying and laying Roman tiles along the length of the avenue, on both sides. They chipped them out of the other side of the city and carried them over to this one. Human madness.
I posted the final notice on Calatrava Street. I felt a certain relief, as one always does after finishing some job, even though I knew that many more things still awaited me. Many, many more things yet. But still.
I continued on ahead, now at a slower pace, crossed the bridge and entered the Gardens of the Guadalquivir. What gardens! Pelletier would have praised them in immortal verses. Medusa could hide here and disappear amidst the palms and orange trees, living in oblivion, left in peace among the rose bushes and rays of sun filtering through the tree branches. I went down to the banks of the river, which from there looked gigantic, gleaming in the sun, seemingly walled in by masts in the distance where the Port of the Indies lay. The bank there was strewn with tiny pebbles, like the seashore. I bent down and picked a few up, rolling them between my fingers — they were cold little stones, damp from the water, rattling against one another — and afterwards I gently threw them back into the river. That’s where they came from, after all. I climbed back up the bank and set off between the trees. I reached that enormous tree with the peculiar name — ombey, ombu, something like that — which Don Fernando Columbus had brought back from America in memory of his father. I leaned against its trunk and lit a cigarella. The soft sunlight of the late afternoon trickled through its leaves and covered my legs with light and dark patches like. . Like what? Like enormous lady-bugs. Even though Pelletier wouldn’t put it that way. But to hell with Pelletier! Pelletier would prattle something about the soul. But the soul is nothing, nada, niente. Even if it exists, it isn’t here. Take a look at Nature! Open your eyes wide, turn around in a circle, and take a good, long, slow look at her! See all the tiny movements behind the seeming stillness! Like a big cat in hiding, like a darting shadow beyond the bushes. Only she will live eternally. Only her ensnaring wheel will turn forever. Endlessly. While Dr. Monardes will disappear, back into the river. Perhaps at this moment he is halfway there, perhaps he is still descending to the bottom, falling slowly through the murky water, rolling on his sides worn smooth by the current, cold and cool once again, before quietly settling down on the bottom. Or perhaps the water will lift him again and carry him onward, who knows? In any case, I had to get going.
My heart was pounding wildly as I neared Dr. Monardes’ house. I had the feeling that the crowd would swallow me up as I shouldered my way down Sierpes. I had the feeling they didn’t notice me and that’s why they were walking right towards me.
I opened the front door and entered the doctor’s garden. Silence reigned, I didn’t see any carriages in the courtyard, no people in the house, no movement at all. I headed down the pathway. I heard my shoes crunching on the dried, sandy ground. My mind seemed stuck on it — crunch-crunch, crunch-crunch. I knew the noisy street was somewhere behind me, but I didn’t hear it. At the end of the pathway I suddenly came to my senses, as if jolted awake. I ran up the steps. I opened the door. Yes, the house was empty. I quickly went to the kitchen. I opened that door as well. Pablito’s red ribbon was lying on the table — it seemed so bright to me, such a deep red, as if glowing there like an ember. I laughed. I went over and tossed it over my arm, stomping with my heels on the wooden floorboards, as in flamenco. But this wasn’t the end, either. Far from it. Everything is only just beginning, I said to myself. But still.
I went back outside, sprawled out on the high steps in front of the doctor’s house, propped on my elbows. I crossed my legs, lit a cigarella, and looked through the fence at pitiful humanity.
“I will heal you,” I thought to myself. “I will heal you all.”
They look so tiny from far away.
I closed my eyes. The doctor’s image emerged in my consciousness, multiplied into dozens of shards like a rhinestone necklace, floating before my mind in a disorderly stream of scenes — I saw him in profile, head-on, from the back, how he bends over towards something on the ground, how he lights a cigarella, then standing up straight with his cane in his hand, lying on his deathbed, striding down some path, how he lights a cigarella, how he opens some door and looks back to see if I’m coming, how he, leaning in close, tells me something that I cannot hear, how he lights a cigarella, how he throws a book overboard the Hyguiene, how he smiles at me from the steps I am now sitting on. Dr. Monardes. Someday everyone will forget about him, not even a trace of him will remain, he will be washed away, he will sink and disappear forever into the dark swamp of Nature, into the deep night of Andalusia. Everything will fade away, Pelletier. Perhaps only tobacco, that great medicine, will carry the memory of Dr. Monardes on its mighty shoulders somewhere far ahead in the distance like a fleeting, useless shadow. It is so powerful that it can carry thousands of useless things wherever it wants to, without even noticing.
Well, well, I thought to myself, if I live long enough, I might end up the only person on earth who remembers Dr. Monardes.
But the doctor was truly an unusual man. Dr. Monardes of Sevilla, don’t forget him.
Author Bio
Milen Ruskov (1966), a Bulgarian writer and translator, graduated from Sofia University in 1995. He has written two novels: Pocket Encyclopaedia of Mysteries, which was awarded the Bulgarian Prize for Debut Fiction, and Thrown into Nature, which was awarded the prize for VIK Novel of the Year.
Working as a translator from English, he has translated more than twenty books, including Confessions of an English Opium-Eater by Thomas De Quincey, Novel Notes and The Angel and the Author by Jerome K. Jerome, Money by Martin Amis, and Transformation by Mary Shelley. In 2009, he won the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation’s Krustan Dyankov Translation Award for his translations of Money by Martin Amis and De Niro’s Game by Rawi Hage.
Translator Bio
Angela Rodel earned a B.A in Slavic languages from Yale University and an M.A. in linguistics from UCLA. In 1996, she won a Fulbright Fellowship to study Bulgarian language and culture at Sofia University. Among others, her literary translations include the play The Apocalypse Comes at 6 p.m. by Georgi Gospodinov, the novel Party Headquarters (winner of the VIK Novel of the Year) by Georgi Tenev, and selected stories from Tenev’s Holy Light, for which she was awarded a 2010 PEN Translation Fund Grant. She has also translated numerous stories, essays, poems, and movie subtitles. Angela Rodel has worked as a translator for the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation, as well as several English-language magazines in Bulgaria.