Summary
XXXI. TANGO
Geryon is sleepless in his hotel room at 3 AM. He pictures lava moving underground, and tries to remember what Heidegger wrote about moods. He leans his face against the hotel room window and cries. Then he abruptly decides to leave the hotel, and plunges out into the dark streets of Buenos Aires. He walks west along the black harbor, wondering what kind of shop would be open at 4 AM, and gets pulled into a tango bar called Caminito. There are three ancient musicians playing piano, guitar, and accordion on the stage. Geryon is mesmerized by how they play as if they’re one person in a “state of pure discovery.” He is annoyed when the next act begins—a woman in a tuxedo singing a typical tango song. Geryon claps when everyone else claps, and as she sings song after song, he falls asleep and has intense dreams full of “burning, yearning.”
When he wakes up, the tango bar is empty, except for the woman who was singing and the “gnome” who is sweeping the floor. She joins him at his table, asks him where he’s from, and if he’s a spy, to which he replies, “yes.” He wonders if she’s waiting for him to compliment her singing, and struggles to do so; she says, “Tango is not for everyone.” Geryon is plunged into a memory of a dance he went to in high school in the gymnasium: how he stood and watched the dancing for hours, listening to the pounding music. When he returned home that night, his brother was making a stack of sandwiches in the kitchen. He asked Geryon about the dance, and Geryon said he just watched. His brother left the room, and Geryon cleaned up after him and then said to his reflection in the kettle, “Shall we dance?”
When Geryon suddenly awakens from this memory, it’s daylight in the tango bar. He tries and fails to remember a line of a poem. He asks the tango singer if she ever wonders about beluga whales; what they think about all night floating there in captivity. She points out that he’s projecting his guilt for their captivity on them. Geryon asks if her father was a psychoanalyst, and she replies that she’s the one who is a psychoanalyst, since she can’t make a living singing tango. She says that tango is a fossil, and he replies, so is psychoanalysis. Then she tells him he’d better leave, and he sweeps out the door.
XXXII. KISS
It is Saturday night in Buenos Aires. Geryon is sitting on his bed in his hotel room, pondering the volcanic terrain of his inner life, realizing that he doesn’t want to become one of those people who only thinks about their pain. He tries to distract himself by reading Philosophic Problems but gets distracted by a feeling like “tons of black magma boiling up” inside him. He returns to the beginning of the page, which reads, “To deny the existence of red/is to deny the existence of mystery. The soul which does so will one day go mad.” He thinks, “I’m not the one who is crazy here,” and rushes out of his hotel room.
Geryon walks the streets, looking at everything, reading the headlines of the newspapers at the newsstand and browsing the magazines, embarrassed by the pornographic content. He finds a book store with English-language books, cracks open a book by Walt Whitman, and reads a snippet of poetry, which ends: “Nor is it you alone who know what it is to be evil.” He puts down the book and opens a self-help book called “Oblivion the Price of Sanity?” A sound distracts him from reading—a man making a kissy noise each time a bird swoops down towards his face. Geryon thinks that kissing makes them happy, and feels heartsick. He turns away, only to bump into the man next to him. He is startled to discover that the man is Herakles.
XXXIII. FAST-FORWARD
Later in the day after Geryon bumps into Herakles, they go to Café Mitwelt, where they’re joined by Ancash, Herakles’ current lover. Herakles and Ancash are traveling around South America recording volcanos for a documentary on Emily Dickinson. Geryon listens to Ancash’s tape recorder of Mount Pinatubo erupting in the midst of a monsoon. He hears the sounds of birds falling to the ground. Ancash fast-forwards to a recording of a tsunami in Japan, and tells Geryon about tectonic plates. Geryon takes off the earphones and starts getting ready to go. The effort to pull himself away from Herakles’ gaze “could have been measured on the scale devised by Richter.” Herakles tells Geryon to call them at the City Hotel. Geryon agrees to do so, and then rushes away.
XXXIV. HARRODS
It is two days after Geryon and Herakles reunited, and Geryon has restrained himself from calling Herakles. He’s sitting in his hotel room, staring at the blank TV, willing himself not to look at the phone. He remembers what it was like to make love to Herakles, and tries not to think of what Herakles and Ancash are doing. He takes a cold shower as a line from an Emily Dickinson poem about taking a peach in hand darts around his brain. In the middle of Geyron's shower, Herakles calls and invites him to breakfast at Café Mitwelt.
While Herakles buys a newspaper, Geryon and Ancash sit together in the café and talk about Peru, where Ancash is from. Ancash speaks Quenchua, an indigenous language of Peru, and his mother is from Huaraz in the mountains, but she lives in Lima as a live-in cook and Quenchua teacher for a gringo anthropologist. Herakles sings a song in Quenchua that Ancash taught him, which makes both Ancash and Geryon uneasy. Ancash interrupts Herakles’ translation of the song lyrics to say he needs to go to the post office. They all head out onto the street, Herakles in front and Ancash and Geryon trailing behind. Geryon feels a growing affinity for Ancash. They both stare at two “women in furs” that turn out to be men, feeling a kind of “hunger.” Geryon asks Ancash what his name means, but before Ancash can answer, they arrive at Harrods to use the bathroom. On the deserted second floor there is a circus carousel with six wooden animals. Herakles decides to steal the tiger from the carousel. Geryon asks Ancash if he can photograph him later. Herakles cuts the tiger’s reins with his pocket knife and hits the fuse box, plunging the store into darkness. Geryon feels an inward fury at the fact that Herakles and Ancash are about to run away to Peru together with this painted tiger. But then Herakles yells, “Vamos hombres!” And all three of them go to Peru together.
XXXV. GLADYS
On the plane to Peru, Geryon ends up in the humiliating situation of feeling both hungry and aroused, sandwiched between Herakles and Ancash. The book he bought at the airport turned out to be a pornographic story about a woman named Gladys, whose name Geryon loathes. He turns off the reading light and shoves the book out of sight. He pretends to be asleep so that he can lean on Herakles’ shoulder. Then Herakles puts his hand on Geryon’s thigh and kisses him. Full of bliss, Geryon feels a sudden fondness for every passenger on the plane, and even the loathsome Gladys.
XXXVI. ROOF
The three men have arrived in Lima, and spent the night in sleeping bags on the roof where Ancash’s mother lives, since it apparently hasn’t rained in Lima since 1940. On the roof there is a whole arrangement of furniture—sofas and a bookcase and a reading lamp on an extension cord; a greenhouse where Ancash’s mother grows marijuana for selling and herbs for cooking; a cot piled high with blankets. Geryon watches the sea and the activity on the street below, observing that Lima has a different, more languid pace from Buenos Aires. Everyone seems to be waiting. Herakles appears, dripping with papaya juice, asking if Geryon has seen the parrots. He reports that the parrots have been accused of killing the cat of the American woman downstairs, and so she might have to get rid of them. Ancash says that once the guerillas killed all the cats in the city to show that they have control of the city, after the president with his cat in his lap reported on TV that the police had the terrorists under control. Ancash and Herakles go to help Ancash’s mother with her sparking electrical cord, and Geryon, cold and hungry and alone in the room, wonders why he came to Lima.
XXXVII. EYEWITNESSES
Geryon walks along the seawall in Lima, observing how everyone he passes seems to be waiting. He wonders how to best photograph the city, but his mind is as blank as the white sky. In the park, two llamas are tethered beside a giant bronze statue of a head with an open mouth. Geryon sits in the mouth and realizes how bored he is. He returns to the roof as night approaches, and it becomes too cold to move. Ancash tells Geryon that he can wrap Geryon in blankets so that he can stay warm overnight. Herakles says suggestively that he can show Geryon “some ways to stay warm for the night.” Ancash warns him to let things be.
Herakles leaves, and Ancash tries again to wrap Geryon in blankets. Geryon resists, because he doesn’t want Ancash to see his wings, but eventually he takes off his coat and lets Ancash see them. Ancash is shocked, and tells Geryon about the Yazcamac, a legendary people believed in by the residents of Jucu, a volcanic region near Huaraz where Ancash’s mother is from. The Yazcamac are said to be eyewitnesses of the inside of the volcano: people who were thrown into the volcano but survived, and returned as immortal red people with wings. Herakles returns, and tells them that Ancash’s mother has agreed to take them to Huaraz. Ancash tells Geryon privately that he’ll need to be careful in Huaraz, because there are still people looking for eyewitnesses. Ancash says that Geryon can stay warm by sleeping with him if he wants—but just sleeping. Geryon thinks that immortal or no, he needs to get out of this place.
XXXVIII. CAR
Geryon, Herakles, Ancash and his mother are driving through downtown Lima on the way to Huaraz. Geryon watches Herakles’ face, and remembers his dream of young dinosaurs crashing through a thorny forest and ripping their hides. They drive for hours through the suburbs, into the fog, emerging on a highway surrounded by fields of sugarcane, which becomes a mountainous road of bare rocky switchbacks. Ancash sleeps, and everyone else is silent. Geryon wonders what Herakles is thinking, and remembers how it used to be in their relationship: Geryon would ask Herakles what he was thinking, and Herakles would answer something random. Herakles would never ask what Geryon was thinking. Geryon realizes that he can’t return to the “dangerous cloud” of their old relationship. The drive becomes difficult, a dirt road full of steep turns. Just after sunset, they finally arrive in Huaraz.
XXXIX. HUARAZ
The altitude in Huaraz is so high it can make one’s heartbeat irregular. They spend the night at the Hotel Turistico, where they seem to be the only guests. They get served a local recipe at breakfast: coffee with cow’s blood. After breakfast, the four of them go exploring the town, which lies at the base of a snowy peak in the Andes. They walk through the market, observing all the stalls. Ancash and his mother speak Quenchua to each other and Spanish with Herakles. Geryon keeps quiet, feeling like he’s disappearing, but that the photographs he gets to take make it worth it.
XL. PHOTOGRAPHS: ORIGIN OF TIME
The photograph described is of four people sitting at a table with their hands in front of them. Geryon is stoned, and moves slowly to set up the camera because of how cold it is, which also makes time feel slow. Each thought he has feels profound: that he is too naked, that he wants to be in love, and that everything is all wrong. It feels like centuries have passed when someone at the table asks him, “What was that?”
Analysis
XXXI. TANGO
The tango bar in this chapter is rife with symbolism. First, there is its name—Caminito—which translates to “narrow lane.” After Geryon’s musings in Chapter XXV about travel being like going through a tunnel, we see him follow the “white neon” light of the Caminito sign and descend into the “black interior” of the tango bar. The tango bar becomes a tunnel-like liminal state in which he moves through time while he sits in the dark, observing the low stage lit by a single spotlight. On this stage, there are three ancient musicians who “played as one person,” which evokes the three-headed monster of ancient Greek mythology, Cerberus, also known as the hound of Hades, who guards the underworld and keeps people from leaving it. Not only is Herakles in Autobiography of Red supposed to have grown up in Hades, but Herakles kills Cerberus in his twelfth labor—two labors after killing Geryon. The presence of these ancient musicians signifies a partial return to the ancient context of the Geryoneis, and in this moment, Carson’s interweaving of ancient and modern mythos becomes visible. If the ancient musicians are redolent of Cerberus, then the tango bar is suggestive of the underworld, which explains how difficult it becomes for Geryon to leave—he falls asleep twice in the bar, and by the time he finally makes his exit, it is already the next day.
When Geryon falls asleep a second time and dreams of attending a high school dance, he remembers standing against the wall watching everyone dancing, and how “his eyes ached from the effort of trying to see everything without looking at it.” Why would Geryon want to avoid looking at anyone directly, while trying to take in everything? He is afraid of looking at someone specifically and having them look back at him: he fears being seen. He wants to be anonymous, not a specific isolated person but an invisible part of the crowd. He wants to fit in seamlessly. As Carson writes at the beginning of the chapter: “Under the seam runs the pain.” Seams in clothing are where two separate pieces of fabric are stitched together; in medicine they are sources of pain (cuts, incisions) and sites of healing (scars). The imagery of the seam is evocative of Geryon’s interest in the interface between inside and outside, self and other. The friction where they meet is a source of pain for Geryon. In the conversation with the tango singer, Geryon takes the beluga’s pain of being trapped in a tank upon himself; the tango singer points out that he may be projecting his own pain onto them. In the line “under the seam runs the pain,” Carson points out that both may be true—if the seam is the interface between Geryon and the beluga, then the pain of entrapment belongs to them both, and is magnified by the “seam” of their encounter.
XXXII. KISS
In keeping with the previous chapter’s themes of the individual and Geryon’s longing to be indivisible from the world, in this chapter Geryon reads a quote from Philosophic Problems which asserts: “I will never know how you see red and you will never know how I see it./But this separation of consciousness/is recognized only after a failure of communication, and our first movement is/to believe in an undivided being between us.” This passage communicates that the initial state of human consciousness, as children, is to think onself indistinguishable from the world around one. The revelation that one is a separate being, not one with the world, is made clear by the first misunderstanding between oneself and others: when someone fails to understand you, it makes you feel lonely, and that is how you come to see yourself as different from others. The emphasis on people seeing “red” differently is especially poignant for Geryon’s loneliness: he has always been torn between fearing being seen (as red and monstrous), and wanting desperately to be seen (as red and lovable). Herakles never showed interest in what Geryon was thinking (XXXVIII), and when Herakles associates Geryon with the color yellow, Geryon despairs that Herakles never knew him at all (XXIV). The misunderstanding between Herakles and Geryon is the rupture that proves they are not an “undivided being,” and that is the source of Geryon’s loneliness.
The other passage from Philosophic Problems which Geryon reads in this chapter is equally poignant. It states: “To deny the existence of red/is to deny the existence of mystery. The soul which does so will one day go mad.” In this philosopher’s context, “red” becomes a stand-in for the incommunicable differences between people—the proof that we are separate beings, with different experiences of the same world. If we deny the differences of our perceptions, we deny the “mystery” of other people. The philosopher believes that if we deny others their mystery, we will “go mad,” presumably from the deep confusion and sense of betrayal that results from believing oneself continuous with others, and yet continually being misunderstood by others. If you don’t realize that you’re a separate person, then other people’s misunderstandings of you would communicate that you are not in fact who you know yourself to be. Though Geryon fears at times that he is going mad (XXVII), we know that he is not the type of person to deny other people their mystery. When in Chapter XXVIII the yellowbeard describes the “erotics of doubt” as a precondition of the search for truth, “provided you can renounce…the desire to know,” Geryon asserts that he thinks he can renounce the desire to know. Geryon does not deny the existence of red, or of mystery. Thus we understand why he shuts the book and declares: “I am not the one who is crazy here.”
In the book shop, Geryon opens Walt Whitman’s bilingual collected poems. Carson gives us two snippets of the same line in English and Spanish: “Nor is it you alone who know what it is to be evil,” and “tu solo quien sabe lo que es ser perverso.” What is notable is that the Spanish version of this line leaves out the words “Nor is it,” which changes the meaning of the line and makes it condemnatory: “you alone who know what it is to be evil.” This clever linguistic pivot by Carson explains why Geryon takes this line of poetry so seriously. After reading this line, he “put evil Walt Whitman down/and opened a self-help book.”
XXXIII. FAST-FORWARD
When Herakles and Geryon and Ancash are sitting at the table in Café Mitwelt, Herakles brings up the Emily Dickinson poem, “On My Volcano Grows the Grass,” which Geryon says he likes for the “way she/refuses to rhyme sod with God.” This is the poem “On My Volcano Grows the Grass”:
On my volcano grows the Grass
A meditative spot－
An acre for a Bird to choose
Would be the General thought－
How red the Fire rocks below－
How insecure the sod
Did I disclose
Would populate with awe my solitude.
Geryon’s memory is accurate: the anticipated rhyme scheme ABCB – DEFE is broken by the final line, which doesn’t rhyme with line “E” or any other line; her rhyme scheme becomes ABCB – DEFG, which is hardly a rhyme scheme at all. Instead of rhyming “sod” with the obvious poetic choice of “God,” Emily Dickinson chooses the unwieldy word “solitude.” This cryptic poem seems to be in conversation with the Dickinson volcano poem used as the epigraph to Autobiography of Red, poem #1748 about the “reticent volcano” who refuses to tell its secrets to humanity. Poem #1748 ends: “Admonished by her buckled lips/Let every babbler be/The only secret people keep/Is immortality.” The volcano’s secret in poem #1748 is its immortality, but the way that Dickinson structures this line makes it seems as though some people may be in on the volcano’s secret of immortality, and they keep that secret from other people too. This foreshadows the events of later chapters, when Ancash tells Geryon about the immortal red-winged people who are said to have emerged from volcanoes.
What is the secret which the speaker in “On My Volcano Grows the Grass” considers disclosing? We don’t know the secret, but we know that if she were to “disclose” that secret to the insecure male listener, then she would “populate with awe my solitude”—he would be amazed and perhaps frightened, and she would end up alone. There is something of an erotic undertone in “On My Volcano Grows the Grass”: the line “How red the Fire rocks below” has been interpreted as the burning passion felt in the lower half of her body. Dickinson here may be intimating that if she let a man know the extent of her sexual desire, he would be too intimidated and run away. The secrets of volcanoes in Dickinson’s poems are immortality and sexuality, and are accompanied by solitude and silence, qualities which match the volcanic metaphors used to describe Geryon. The lines of Dickinson’s poems sprinkled throughout this novel serve to provide a metaphoric language that connects Geryon’s erotic life to volcanism, and foreshadows the revelation of his immortality.
XXXIV. HARRODS
When Herakles, Ancash and Geryon are walking down the sidewalk, Herakles is “jumping ahead like a dog/smelling everything” while “Ancash and Geryon came behind.” This choreography draws the connection between Ancash and Geryon as similar not only in their attraction to Herakles, but in their personalities. Both men are reserved and attentive, while Herakles is exuberant and careless. Walking together, Geryon asks Ancash if he’s cold, and he says “No…. Well actually yes.” This kind of equivocation is similar to how Geryon would have responded, and we see that Geryon feels an affinity for Ancash; he “would have liked to wrap his coat around/this feather man.” Indeed, a few chapters later, Ancash asks Geryon, “You were not cold?” And Geryon replies “Oh no just fine,” when “in fact he had never been so cold in his life.” Both men seem to struggle with honesty because of their impulses to please others, and not to cause difficulty. The description of Ancash as a “feather man” also points out their resemblance, given that Geryon has wings.
When Ancash and Geryon notice while walking down the street “two women in furs…. Swaying on their heels/like big gold foxes,” and then realize that they’re men, they feel a kind of “hunger.” This gendered performance is attractive to both of the young men, and the potentially predatory nature of the “hunger” they feel is complicated by the association of the men they desire with big foxes. Foxes are both predator and prey—humans hunt foxes, while foxes hunt smaller prey. This versatility is latent in the men’s complex gender performance, and what appeals to Ancash and Geryon about their self-presentation may be precisely that multiplicity of signification.
In the context of Herakles’ “freedom dream” in Chapter XXIV in which a drowned yellow bird comes alive and flies away, which Herakles interprets to mean that he wants Geryon to be free, we understand that Herakles’ attempt to liberate the painted tiger from the carousel, cutting the reins that “bound the tiger to its circus habits” with his pocketknife, is part of Herakles’ character. Herakles takes it upon himself to liberate others, even when that liberation is risky, unnecessary, or even unwanted. In keeping with the pointlessness of liberating a toy tiger, Geryon didn’t want to be liberated by Herakles, and even when Herakles granted him freedom by breaking up with him, Geryon remained painfully bound to Herakles by his heartbreak.
XXXV. GLADYS
The eroticism in the Dickinson poem “On My Volcano Grows the Grass” in Chapter XXXIII, in which Dickinson’s line “How red the Fire rocks below” evokes a burning passion felt in one’s lower body, carries over into this chapter, where Geryon’s attraction to Herakles “sent a wave of longing as strong as a color through Geryon./It exploded at the bottom of his belly.” Volcanic metaphors for sexual attraction in Dickinson’s poems are adapted by Carson for Geryon’s condition, exacerbating his constitutional “redness.”
When Herakles finally kisses Geryon on the plane to Peru, “Geryon’s/head went back like a poppy in the breeze.” As discussed in the analysis of “Red Meat: Fragments Of Stesichoros,” Carson’s translation of Stesichoros’ Geryoneis fragments preserves Stesichoros’ original poppy analogy for Geryon’s death when she describes how the arrow splitting Geryon’s skull “Made/The boy neck lean At an odd slow angle sideways as when a/Poppy shames itself in a whip of Nude breeze.” A conjoining of erotic and violent imagery was always the dual character of Stesichoros’ poppy simile. The violence and the sensuality of Herakles and Geryon’s encounter in Autobiography of Red dates back at least to Stesichoros’ Geryoneis, and has precedent as well in the eroticism of battle in Homeric epics, where metaphors of battle as fatal intercourse—a deadly marriage—were a part of the epic poems’ adjectival tradition. Here, the consummation of Herakles and Geryon’s desire is, through the poppy metaphor, linked to a kind of death. Yet that death functions as a kind of liberation for Geryon. It is after Herakles and Geryon finally have sex again in Chapter XLIV that Geryon realizes their relationship is over. The consummation of their desire after so many years of pining allows Geryon closure, and the lucidity to realize that their love is dead.
XXXVI. ROOF
Geryon’s observation that everyone in Lima “seems to be waiting” leads Ancash to ask, “Waiting for what?” Geryon agrees that that’s the important question: “Yes waiting for what.” This snippet of innocuous dialogue foreshadows the revelation in the next chapter that Geryon may be one of the Yazcamac, a people of local legend who emerge from volcanos “as red people with wings,/all their weaknesses burned away—/and their mortality.” Ancash tells Geryon that there are people still looking for the Yazcamac people, and that he’ll have to be careful. The return of the Yazcamac may be what these people are subconsciously waiting for. It isn’t clear how much of a revelation his own potential immortality is to Geryon, but what is clear is that he feels uncomfortable being the subject of their desires: “I have to get out of this place,/he thought. Immortal or not.”
Herakles’ crass humor, which set him apart from Geryon when they were teenagers, is on display in this chapter. Herakles blithely reports that one of Ancash’s mother’s parrots, a “big/motherfucker who’s totally gold,” is going to have to be killed because he killed the cat belonging to the woman downstairs. Geryon and Ancash are united in their push-back against Herakles’ casual mention of the parrot’s death sentence, and Ancash argues that it’s only “conjecture” that the parrot killed the cat, as no one saw it happen. This encounter reveals the contrast in personality between Herakles and other two men: where Herakles is careless, Ancash and Geryon are careful; where Herakles is callous, Ancash and Geryon are sensitive. This is the fissure along which troubles erupt in the three men’s relationship. Ancash and Geryon’s unwillingness to accept the parrot’s disposability also has bearing on the events of the next chapter, when the revelation of Geryon’s wings is an opportunity for intimacy between Ancash and Geryon. Ancash’s sensitivity to the parrot’s plight proves his ability to be an ally for Geryon, foreshadowing Ancash eventually urging Geryon to use his wings.
XXXVII. EYEWITNESSES
When Ancash discovers Geryon’s wings, he gently runs his fingers “down the red struts that articulated each wing base,” and Geryon shivers, wondering if he’s going to faint. Geryon’s wings are symbolic of his inner self and his vulnerability, as when in Chapter XV Geryon’s wings turned “in, and in, and in.” His wings require protection and restraint; he hides them from view, and prevents people from seeing or touching them. This is the only scene in which we see someone look at and touch Geryon’s wings directly. It is remarkable that this intimate action occurs between Ancash and Geryon. While there is an erotic undertone to this scene, the overwhelming feeling is that of tender recognition. Ancash is seeing Geryon as what he is, and that is what makes Geryon react so strongly to his careful touch.
The similarity between Ancash and Geryon is sharpened when Ancash comments that Herakles is a “difficult man.” This is also how Geryon experiences Herakles. What prevents Geryon and Ancash from a comfortable solidarity in their shared attitude towards Herakles is Herakles’ renewed interest in Geryon. Herakles isn’t emotionally invested in a relationship with Geryon, just physically attracted to him, but Herakles’ casual suggestiveness—“I could show him some ways to stay warm for the night”—drives a wedge between Herakles and Ancash, who tells Herakles to “let things be.” Ancash obviously wants to preserve the delicate equilibrium of the relationship between the three men, but Herakles, selfish and inattentive to others’ emotions, lets his desires dictate his actions. Being caught in the middle of this tension makes Geryon feel numb and nervous as a “hare in headlights”; even while the evening “gives off a soot of desire,” and the streets are full of “small twined couples,” Geryon “wished he could envy them but he did not.” Geryon is finally discovering his own disinterest in the messy dead-end of his relationship with Herakles, but it takes their sexual encounter in Chapter XLIV to realize that he’s actually ready for it to be over.
XXXVIII. CAR
Geryon dreams of “young dinosaurs” who are “strangely lovely,” crashing through a forest of thorn trees and tearing their hides, which “fell behind them in long red strips.” This dream is transparently about himself, and the danger he finds himself in. The revelation that these animals, though large beasts, are “lovely,” signifies his burgeoning willingness to acknowledge his own desirability. This is key to Geryon’s emotional arc throughout the novel—he goes from being convinced that his monstrousness makes him unlovable to recognizing that however “monstrous” he is, he is lovable, and deserves to be free. The thorns that tear the red bodies of the dinosaurs are a symbol of a present danger in Geryon’s life, likely the thorny situation in which he finds himself caught between Ancash and Herakles, about to embark on a pilgrimage with them to a volcano. He is anxious about emerging unscathed from this journey.
In the car on the way to the volcano, Geryon wonders what Herakles is thinking, and then realizes that wondering such a thing is returning to the pattern of their old relationship. “Even when they were lovers/he had never known what Herakles was thinking.” Whenever Geryon asked what Herakles was thinking, Herakles would say something random. And Herakles never asked what Geryon was thinking. This rupture in their communication and understanding of each other created a “dangerous cloud” between them. The forest of thorns and the dangerous cloud are symbolic of the same thing, as Geryon realizes on this car drive: “He must not go back into the cloud./Desire is no light thing./He could see the thorns gleam/with their black stains.” The symbolic language of this dream returns triumphantly in Chapter XLV, when Geryon leaves Herakles: “Thorns all around him black and glistening / but he passed through unhurt.” Surviving the thorns means emerging intact on the other side of his love for, and loss of, Herakles.
XXXIX. HUARAZ
In Huaraz with Ancash, Ancash’s mother, and Herakles, Geryon recedes into the background. Ancash and his mother speak Quenchua to each other, and Spanish to Herakles. Geryon speaks little, but carries his camera with him everywhere. In this context, Geryon feels like he’s “disappearing,” but decides that “the photographs were worth it.” The kind of disappearance he is experiencing is disappearing from the conversation—they’re speaking in languages he can’t understand, and he’s not speaking to them in the language they share. Yet he’s carrying around his camera, which has always been a primary means of communication for Geryon. His photography has also always been autobiographic in intention: he makes photographs of the world as he sees it. So what makes these photographs worth it, if he is otherwise severed from communication with the people around him?
The answer that the chapter provides is the chance to photograph the volcano. “A volcano is not a mountain like others. Raising a camera to one’s face has effects/no one can calculate in advance.” What’s interesting here is that for the first time, Geryon’s photography isn’t being used as a method of communicating about himself, and the things he sees, with another person. His photography here facilitates a communion between himself and the volcano—the subject of his photographs. But as we’ve always seen, Geryon photographs himself through photographing the world, and so the importance of these volcanic photographs may be the chance to elucidate the relationship between himself and the volcano through photography.
XL. PHOTOGRAPHS: ORIGIN OF TIME
This chapter is the first in a series of seven chapters which are purportedly “photographs.” After the first line stating what the photograph is of, the rest of each chapter describes the moment in which the photograph was taken. After thirty-nine chapters describing Geryon the photographer, we are now given the photographs first, and Geryon’s life as seen through their prism. What initiates this change in narrative perspective is a line at the close of the previous chapter, in which “Raising a camera to one’s face has effects/no one can calculate in advance.” We are told that the photographs Geryon gets to take on this uncomfortable trip “were worth it,” and now we are given the photographs as proof of their value, though only as described in words. What this narrative choice suggests is that what’s “worth it” about these photographs” is not the images themselves so much as the experience behind them, and how these photographs capture moments in time.
In the moment captured by the photograph described in this chapter, Geryon has “never been so stoned in his life.” The experience is deeply surreal, and tinged with a kind of unreality. In prior chapters, we’ve seen Geryon experience life—and the passage of time—as a kind of tunnel. In this photograph, which Geryon calls the “Origin of Time,” the shock of how cold it is gives him tunnel vision—his vision reduced to a “narrow canal”—and he moves slowly to take the photograph because “enormous pools of a moment kept opening around his hands/each time he tried to move them.” Again we see Geryon transfixed by the materiality of time: he experiences time in the space around him as a medium enveloping him. It isn’t clear what about this experience of time reminds Geryon of time’s origin, but his attentiveness to the visceral experience of time suggests that the concept of time may have originated out of someone paying attention for the first time to what was already there.
