A Forest Under the Earth
BY GUADALUPE NETTEL TRANS. ROSALIND HARVEY
In my parents’ garden, there lived for many years a monkey puzzle tree. Its colossal size for this piece of land gave it a somewhat monstrous, supernatural appearance. In some remote age, the house had belonged to my great grandparents, who I never met, so the tree was already a feature in the black and white photographs Dad kept in a box in his study. Its leaves had always formed an important part of our family landscape and of my life. Perhaps for this reason, although also for its imposing presence, I saw it as the grandfather I had never known, or at any rate as a kind of ancestral, protective being. Trees like this live for over a thousand years. My father loved to say this, always in the same tone of wonderment. In reality no one knew exactly how old ours was, nor, of course, when or in what circumstances it had been planted, but Dad liked to think that this monkey puzzle was the healthiest member of his family. According to him, it had far more time ahead of it than any of us did. The truth is, given that no one knew its age, I don’t know how he was so certain about this. I have heard that one year in the life of a dog corresponds to seven of human existence; no one, however, has been able to tell me how to compare the age of a person with that of a tree like this. What is certain is that if there was one place in the world where I was able to feel safe, it was up in its branches. Ever since I was a very young girl, I learned to climb so high that no one could reach me. Sometimes when we visited a park or the gardens of family friends, I would try to climb other trees, but the experience was totally different: I could clearly feel their discomfort—their resistance, even—under the soles of my feet. My monkey puzzle tree, however, always welcomed me. Whenever I felt unhappy, I would hide up in its highest branches and there I would find consolation. I wasn’t the only one. Members of a diverse range of species would meet up there: birds, mainly, but also squirrels and stinging larvae, which, if your attention wandered even for a moment, would burn your skin with a red-hot acid. Each of these creatures had its habits and its needs. Some fed off the leaves, others the wood. To them the tree was a source of life; to me, an emotional crutch and a hiding place.
With my family, conversely, I was far less close. I exchanged barely a word with them all day, perhaps a few over breakfast or before going to bed. Each of us seemed to be living in a different film. Laura, my older sister, was the protagonist of a romantic comedy in which hairstyles and clothes were of paramount importance. Sergio, the middle child, seemed like a teenager in a Jim Jarmusch film, while my mother was one of Fellini’s matrons: she was permanently exhausted if not in a bad mood. When she did speak to us it was to shout at Laura to turn down her music or to order me to go and have a shower. My father’s film took place outside of the house, either in his office or one of his frequent social activities. Mine, in a private forest where no one, apart from me, ever dared to go. High up in the monkey puzzle tree, I observed everything: the neighbours coming and going, my sister and her pathetic dance steps in front of the mirror, Sergio with his head buried in his computer for hours, and my parents shouting at each other in their bedroom. Seen from up there, everything that overwhelmed me seemed smaller, more ephemeral, insignificant, even.
Age poleaxes us all, it shuts off our senses. Perhaps this is why, as I grew older, I gradually distanced myself from my tree. School, my friends, the distractions of everyday life separated me from its branches. It’s not that I had stopped needing it; rather that I didn’t notice it anymore. I no longer climbed its trunk, and my adventure film set in the forest transformed into a silent drama, shot mainly indoors, principally in my bedroom. From my bed or the living room sofa, I would stare at the monkey puzzle tree without seeing it. Only occasionally, some visitor to the house—one of those female friends of Dad’s, as short-lived as mushrooms in the rainy season—would make a comment about how beautiful it was, and then we would notice it, too. This outsider’s gaze would allow us to marvel, to feel proud, even, as if having a monkey puzzle tree at home was our own achievement and not some kindness from fate. I wasn’t the only one who changed in those years. Laura finally began menstruating and going to parties, always accompanied by the same male friend. At home we were all so absorbed in ourselves that it took us a while to understand what was happening: the tree, seemingly so unchanging, had begun to age, too. The first thing I noticed was the absence of birds on its branches. I realized one morning before school that I couldn’t hear them singing and I fell back asleep. When I looked out of the window, I saw in astonishment that its leaves, usually green and flexible like rubbery needles, were now a dull, indistinct brownish colour. I poked my hand out underneath the glass to touch them, and they fell to the ground, utterly withered. The trunk, once robust, had acquired a fragile, brittle appearance.
The insects were the only creatures that continued to frequent the monkey puzzle as assiduously as before. Some even seemed to have proliferated. But this did not last long, either. One morning, as I left the house to go to my 8 a.m. class, I discovered a creepy crawly graveyard at the base of the tree. They looked as shrivelled as the trunk that had served to sustain them. I left my rucksack on the ground and set to giving them a decent burial, first beneath a layer of damp topsoil, then some gravel and a few bigger stones. I gathered up my books and headed off so that I would at least make the 10 a.m. class. After dinner, as the Channel 40 news was being broadcast on the TV, my brother asked me about the tree. He wanted to know how long it had been like this for, and what all the insects I had found in the garden looked like.
‘You shouldn’t have covered them with earth,’ he said. ‘Now we can’t catalogue them and find out if one of them is the reason the tree’s like this.’
I began to describe the victims to him as best I could, one by one, mentioning their colour, shape and size, what they had looked like before and after they were dead. Sergio wrote it all down in a notebook. Laura and Dad listened to the conversation in silence. We sat around the kitchen table and speculated for over an hour, until Mum’s voice boomed out from the bottom of the stairs, informing us that it was 11.30 p.m.
On Saturday my father decided to call an expert. It was the first time, as far as I recall, that a gardener had been to our house. We all came out to greet him. As soon as he entered the garden, the man examined the monkey puzzle tree from top to bottom. He bent down and, with a little metal rod, tapped the roots and the base of the trunk where large quantities of a thick, whitish resin were oozing out. There was something harrowing about this thick liquid, as if it were tears or a cry for help. The gardener cut off a leaf, folded it in half, looked at it closely and sniffed it several times before pronouncing his verdict.
‘It’s practically dead. It’s going to be hard to save it.’
Despite our insistence, he was not able to explain the source of the disease, nor to give us any kind of advice to fight it. He took his fee and left leaving us perplexed and at our wits’ end. That night I couldn’t sleep and went to hide out in my brother’s bedroom. Sergio showed me a piece of paper on which he had printed out images of some insects just like the ones I had described to him, along with others I had never seen. Underneath their names appeared in Latin. He told me that the velvety beetles were called Nemonychidae, the ones with a little snout, Curculionidae, and the copper-coloured caterpillars, Lepidoptera psychidae.
‘They’re all species that are symbiotic with monkey puzzle trees. They exist across the whole continent. I don’t think these are the creatures making it ill.’
For over a month, we observed the tree’s decay without knowing what to do. I would like to say we tried hard to save it, but it wouldn’t be true. What we did, chiefly, was to bemoan the situation and speculate about possible blights and parasites we had no idea about. My brother continued to investigate online without finding anything compelling. It was April, and the nights were so warm it was hard to fall asleep. Even so, I avoided opening my window to stop the stench of rotting from coming in. Instead, I would leave my bed and go downstairs to the living room where the temperature was more bearable. Once, I found my father reading on the sofa. In front of him on the coffee table there was a large pile of notebooks stacked up. I sat down next to him without a sound so as not to interrupt him. When he saw me, he put a hand on my leg.
‘These are your grandfather’s diaries,’ he explained, looking directly into my eyes. ‘I’m trying to find out if he ever saw the tree ill, too.’
‘The gardener said it was almost dead,’ I reminded him, fearful I would make him even sadder.
‘That man knows nothing. All living things get ill from time to time. It’s normal that one that’s destined to live for centuries will suffer at some point in its life, don’t you reckon?’
The months went by, and the tree became as shrivelled and lugubrious as the ones that appear in Nosferatu. It was then that the matter went beyond the limits of our family. The neighbours started talking of how dangerous it was to keep it there, listing all the possible scenarios. They said that, even if internally it was just a carcass, at its centre there was a terrible infestation lying in wait, which could spread to all the plants in the neighbourhood. As if that weren’t enough, it was situated opposite a streetlight: if at some point it fell down, the dry wood could start a fire. One afternoon, Mrs Meyer, our next-door neighbour, came and knocked at our door. She was a very pleasant woman, and so my mother—who most certainly wasn’t—showed her into the dining room where Laura was finishing some drawing homework. As she took sorrowful little sips of her chamomile tea, Mrs Meyer began talking about the monkey puzzle tree. After beating around the bush for a while, she at last came clean and requested, straight out, that we chop it down. We were stunned.
‘If you don’t cut it down, this tree is going to fall and destroy all our houses,’ she said, in the tone of someone trying to get you on their side. But it was in vain.
My mother was furious. Cursing, she kicked the neighbour out and told her, as Laura opened the door, that they would have to kill her—my mother—first before they could chop down the monkey puzzle. It would stay there for as long as we lived in this house, and moving was the last thing we planned to do. Mrs Meyer must have assembled a committee of neighbours because from that day forth, someone would call at our house every afternoon to insist upon the topic, until we stopped opening the door.
One Saturday, my father came home with a couple of sun loungers and a set of garden table and chairs, which he set up near the tree. The following week, he invited a couple of friends round. My brother got the barbecue out and helped Dad roast the meat, in the same place where weeks earlier I had buried the insects (it was impossible not to think of them when I saw the sweetbreads and chicken livers cooking on the coals). Even my mother agreed to come down for a few minutes and join the guests. That day my family began the custom of eating in the garden on weekends. My father would cook, as Laura came in and out with trays of snacks that I would help prepare in the kitchen. Again and again, we would drink to the tree’s long life, surrendered to a kind of longevity ritual, which surprised our guests. We were all trying as hard as we could, and I’m sure that more than one person left thinking we were a united family. Only occasionally would one of them venture to ask if it wasn’t dangerous to live so close to such a dry tree trunk. Whenever this occurred, the names of these people would immediately go down on our blacklist. Even amongst each other, it was prohibited to speak ill of the monkey puzzle. We carefully monitored the number of green leaves on its branches, as if they were the vital signs of someone with a terminal illness hoping for a miraculous recovery. Very rarely would new leaves appear. The quantity of dead ones was far greater. Every night I would fall asleep with my eyes fixed on the window. In my head, the voice of Mrs Meyer repeating over and over again her diagnosis of putrefaction.
When autumn arrived, we stopped raising our glasses beneath the monkey puzzle. The resin diminished with the cold, but now the wood creaked every time the wind blew or the temperature dropped, and these groans went deep into our souls. It was from that point on that we began to avoid going close to it, and to keep away from the part of the house that was threatened by the listing trunk. Without actually agreeing on it, we established alternative routes to get around, routes that corresponded to our own, unconfessed predictions about where the tree might fall on the day that it did finally come crashing down. One night Sergio took the computer from the study up to his bedroom. No one admonished him. Another day, my mother packed up the best dinner service which for years she had kept in the parlour, and put it in the back of the kitchen cupboard. And I moved my bed into Laura’s room, where without complaint she gave me two drawers in her wardrobe so I could keep my important things there. Hardly any of us went out into the garden now, where the cold had taken control of the territory. This was why I was so surprised the night I found my brother sleeping out on one of the abandoned sun loungers by the monkey puzzle tree. The moonlight gave his grey suede jacket a dangerous, attractive look, like the hide of a young werewolf. Sergio signalled for me to come over; I lay down beside him. He put his arm around my shoulders and asked if I felt sad about the tree. I nodded.
‘Me too,’ he said. ‘But I’m glad you’ve come down. I’ve not seen you here before. The monkey puzzle didn’t want to let go of you.’ His comment made me feel even sadder. That night my brother told me that trees as tall as ours take years to put out shoots above the earth. Before they do so, they make sure that their roots are deep and strong enough to sustain them.
‘The roots,’ he stressed, his tone serious, ‘that part hidden beneath the soil that nobody thinks about and that nobody wants to see—that’s the part that sustains us all.’
I asked him if he knew what had happened to the tree. Sergio took a moment before replying. He said it was probably a fungus, an invisible parasite that got in via the soil and was poisoning our tree with incredible speed. He told me that years ago, one such parasite had killed off an entire forest in New Zealand.
‘I don’t think it’s possible to cure it. It’s dry all the way through. But don’t be fooled: the tree’s not completely dead yet.’
He must have seen my sceptical expression, because he immediately started talking again about that infinite network that spreads out beneath the soil of the whole continent, and of which our own tree formed a part.
‘The roots are connected down where we can’t see them. A tree isn’t just one tree, it’s also its entire species. And then there are the seeds—dropped and dispersed far and wide for so many years—which are now reproducing.’
As my brother spoke, I gradually drifted off. I later found out it was only for a few minutes, but it was enough time for me to have a long dream about what I had heard him say: the roots of the monkey puzzle spreading out along the passages and the rooms in our house, the bodies of all my family members, including those of my grandparents. They entered through the soles of my feet and went up along my legs and torso, and then came out again through my eyes and mouth. They formed an intricate labyrinth, invisible but real, a kind of subterranean forest that connected us all.
I was woken by the sound of leaves being blown by the wind. It was very cold now, and there was an unusually strong breeze. I felt my brother’s suede jacket covering me. Sergio and I got up from the lounger, our arms and legs stiff, and went and settled down in the living room where Laura had lit the fire. That night there was a storm with strong winds that lasted for over ten hours. Shut up in their room, my parents argued. From time to time, we heard the sound of something being thrown against the wall or of someone kicking the wardrobe door. This time, however, the row was overshadowed by the racket made by the hurricane. The news, which my siblings and I followed live on Sergio’s phone, brought reports of the havoc being wreaked across the different neighbourhoods in the city. By nightfall there were reports of more than thirty trees having been brought down. Two streetlights fell a few feet from us, on Avenida Miguel Ángel de Quevedo. During this whole time, we watched our monkey puzzle resist, displaying a dignity I had never appreciated before. In the morning, the sky was completely clear. As soon as I opened my eyes, I ran out into the garden to check on the state of things. I found my father sitting on the steps outside the door, his head between his knees. His eyes were bloodshot and his expression grave. Had he spent the night out here, waiting for the tree to fall down? I couldn’t even bring myself to say good morning to him. In the end, he broke the silence.
‘I always felt as if this tree was the one that kept our family together. Now that it’s like this, I’m scared about what’s going to happen with us,’ he said, giving me a sad, questioning look.
All that remains of our tree these days is a piece of hollow trunk in the middle of the garden. Over the next few months, it gradually lost its leaves and its branches, but it never did fall down, as the neighbours had prophesized. Last year, Laura started studying at a design school in Italy, and moved to live there with her boyfriend. Sergio left high school to study gardening. He is still obsessed with monkey puzzle trees, and says that at some point he will go to see the ones in Chile and New Zealand. He is saving up to do this. There are times when I too would like to go somewhere far away, to escape from the house, from my parents and the hollowed-out trunk, but I don’t even attempt it. I’m sure that, no matter how hard I try, it would be impossible. The roots tying me to this house grow stronger and further-reaching every day and, although I cannot see them, I feel them holding fast inside me.
