Marco of Izmir (short story)

He dreamed him in his real form

Not as he was seeing by everyone

The horizon drawn its last line and the stars began to watch the infinite desert of Africa. Marco Jossef of Izmir kicked the no-ending planes, where long and experienced groups of Tuaregs had left their bones, for being forgotten by any unlikely creature of the sea of sands.

Another night came over his old and grey tunic. His steps marched on the rhythm of his fading breathing. His last companion, Argos, abandoned him near by Gibraltar, many years before.

In Marco’s mind, every step was the same than the other. A day wasn’t different from the previous one. There wouldn’t be more sand grains under his feet that years in his cram full memory. Only the oblivion relieved him of the weight of being an immortal.

For a long time, too much, Marco of Izmir and his friend Argos roamed through the north of the continent. Since his birth to his new life, close to the place now known as Al Jizah, where is the, now subterranean river, of black waters. The river that provides the immortality and witch fame has reached, even in the antique times, to the Indostán, Hispania or Yerevan.

Many people went after it. Just a few came back. They say that the father of The Iliad was one of the seekers of the magic river and that he never was seeing again. Others are sure that the old city, which is raised at the side of the river, is an absurd labyrinth made by the immortals after centuries of living in that vain place. This is not lack of sense, because we, who are aware of our own endness are forced, conditioned, using the word of the austrian, to accept that every moment, every act, can be the last one. Anything that we can live, will return in the same way. Every instant is unique and precious. But for Marco and his equals, everything is full of futility, of nothingness. Anything, terrible or ephemeral, even the most unlikely will be repeated sooner or later. For us, the horizon is the death. And our greatest value, the life. Those are the measures of our beings. And our best philosophies are settled over them. But, how could it be for an immortal? Some body said: “they must to search the end of the physical pain, because the dead can’t reach them.” It does make some sense, if we think the values scale is the same for both species. After the fear of dead, the fear of pain should continue.

In the city where Marco drunk from the river of the life, there were a plenty of creatures of human shape and animal habits. Or I should say vegetal ones. When they were sure that there is no new thing under the sun for them, what kind of enthusiasm could they have? They stayed there, lying in the ground, naked, eating some snake from time to time, to bring relief to a stomach used to work. Snakes easily catch because, for some strange reason, animals use to ignore the immortals. One of them, remembered Marco, had a bird nest over his chest. There was one of them, who tired of being hungry and thirsty, jumped from a crag. He broke some bones and he stayed during days asking for help. Surely he healed himself. But he must to wait seventy years until someone dropped him a rope. Not even the mercy attacked them. After that, he could be seeing walking with a leg with the shape of an S, because their bones bended in a bad position.

We could assume that the pleasure would take a relevant place in their lives. Let’s see. It’s very common to feel pleased by something, or in a better way, that we desire something. After the satisfaction of that desire, it starts slowly, its fading. Behind every interest and every act from a man, it’s hidden a wretched appetite of a desire satisfaction, for the feeling of that pleasure. Just like the madman Nietszche said, there is no other engine for the human than the search of pleasure. It has it sense, too. But here we find and interesting matter: the pleasures exhaust with the act. The strawberries are delicious, but after a half of kilo they began to be a suffering. It doesn’t to be likely there could be something that doesn’t start boring and disgusting after some time. And the kinds of Marco had all the time at their hands. It could be seeing as a logical conclusion that, when they left the labyrinth city, it was because they were after the chase of the other river. The one witch completes the symmetry. One of them gives the eternal life, the other grants the possibility of dying. – “don’t get sad for something as trivial as the dead of an old woman” Said a lady to her grandson, moments before she passed away. I could assure that life, just as the most exquisite fruits, began to cloy, to be boring for any man or woman.

An old torture or punishment has been to deny the presence of company to a convict. Letting alone somebody is one the ways to make suffer to even the toughest people. To be locked and lonely it’s a kind of life that it’s not much a life, it seems. What had encouraged many people to resist from these situations has been the hope of escape. Even the lifetime prisoners have hopes: to run away, the visit of some relative or the dead. They all are small or big escapes.

From that jail was running Marco that night. Sick of travelling thought his entire known world. Dozens of times he encountered some village or city. He learned several languages, witch were mixed and forgotten with great talent. He met and saw the death of so many persons in so many places. Many times, tired and exhausted of a location, he left that place. Always with a walking stick and a bag with some food and memories from the ones he refused to forget. When he reached the point we call the Red Sea, he stayed there for a moment. Then he dropped his bag, took off his clothes and plunged into the waters. He swam for a while until he considered the stream will not bring him back to the shore. And there he stood, at the will of the waves. Under the destiny they wanted to provide him.

He travelled for weeks like a lost log on the ocean. Crowned by seaweeds and with some shells in his feet, those ones witch like to find their home at the bottom of the ships. A fish was his meal. One morning he woke up at a beach.

The bark of a tree calmed his hunger.

He stayed for some years in Mitsiwa, near the Africa horn. Then, the towns of Barentu, Teseney and others witch fallen in the grace of oblivion were tired by the feet and walking stick of Marco. Some months later, a day like any other, he took his memories bag and he went towards the desert. After some time he reached the shore of a river, its people called it Nahr an Nil. The bag, witch had his former wife necklace, touched the ground. His clothes and stick after it. The roman soldier Marco of Izmir jumped into the powerful river. After some strokes he proceeded to sleep for a while.

Several times he saw the sun moving over his head. From his nautical condition, he could watch at one of the shores, astonishing and giant human figures sculpted in the side of a mountain. At first, he felt so amazed that man, small in the time, used his life for something as useless as a huge self representation. It would be natural from beings with an eternity ahead, but not from these endness creatures. One of the figures had his foot over the other, but not the rest sculptures. It was curious indeed.

Near the mouth of the Nil river, he took his ground animal condition again. He passed through the mythical Al Iskandariyah and marched west.

And here is when we reach the night itself.

When our ex roman soldier, twice widowed and friend of Argos of Ellás came to that night, witch one was different to all the rest of his nights. The stars had not presaged anything. The air didn’t show different either. As while Marco walked through the sands, one of the few dry pits, witch are random in the desert, went into his path. He realized of it when his legs and head hit the rocks of the inside. He heard a puff from his lungs when he reached the unwanted bottom. The sounds and the terrible pain told him he had several bones broken.

A tiny light in where the entrance of the pit should be, shown him it was day time. He remembered the unfortunate who fell from the crag. He didn’t want a leg with the shape of an S. Among shouts only heard by a scorpion, our soldier arranged his battered bones. Two days later he stopped bleeding and his legs didn’t hurt that bad. But the hunger and thirsty made him wish that the arachnid he ate would had the ability to stop his suffering. He thought in eating his fingers, maybe only those from his feet. But it didn’t see like a good business: a trade from a stomach’s ache to a finger’s ache.

After five months, a forgotten feeling came back: desperation. He was in the hugest known desert and far away from any path used by the Tuaregs. He was trapped in an anonymous pit without the possibility of escape by him self. His only unlike chance was that somebody passed over him and dropped him a rope.

After two years there, a stone hit his head. It took a couple of minutes to him to realize what happened. Then he began to jump and shout. For a long while he was calling to that one who dropped that stone. Nobody answered. –Somebody was out there. - He thought or said. And it was possible that another person passed by and it was also possible that he passed at night and fall down to the bottom like him. It would be a companion if he didn’t kill him self. Of course, among the possibilities, and let’s remember that any possibility is inevitable for him, there was the big chance that another immortal fall down with him. It would be just a matter of time.

He already tried, maybe, all the known hobbies. To remember every day of his life; to count the number of hairs, always with different results, even when he tied them a hundred by a hundred for not being confused; to eat sand and then shitting them. To sing and then to invent new songs; to recite every known word; to invent new words. We know that the name of God will give a special power to the one who discovers it. That’s why he was for more than fifty years in the industry of its knowledge. But after pronounce them and asking to go out of there, he was still there, into his eternal shadows and loneliness. He got an idea, he died when he fall and that was the death. But the everlasting feeling of hunger and disgusting smell made him think that dead should be more stylish.

Maybe a bit before or perhaps after of his falling into madness, he recalled his travel through the great river. Some vessels passed by him. People didn’t understand what this barbed man was doing in a river plagued with crocodiles. One image returned to his mind, those fabulous, monstrous statues. And this time he didn’t find it uncompressible. Even him self felt the sorrow of not leaving anything to the world of humans, and to contribute with his voice in the chorus of the specie.

That’s the way Marco did surrender to the constant agony fate. He wasn’t dead, but he wasn’t among the living either.

He was a pariah among men, he was among the immortals and then he was from the nature itself. Witch looked ashamed of giving birth to such a pitiful creature, and it was kept hidden into its guts. And he was kept for centuries.

The mind and body of Marco remained absent from the history of men. The born and falling of great empires were done without the knowledge of the roman. And it’s in here where we have our great void in his life. And where we only can theorize.

We know from Borges that Marco Jossef of Izmir, died on the high seas when he was towards his mother land and that he was buried in Ios around the year 1930. We also know that he worked in an antique house in England during those years. The part without data on his biography (also unknown by the Britannica Encyclopaedia), is the way of the escape from that impossible prison. It’s really unlikely that somebody rescued him in the few centuries he was kept by the Sahara. The only possible explanation I have (and not the humblest one) is that, as while he was wandering through letters and sounds, after years and centuries, of small and big variations. Among adverbs and declensions, verbs and nouns never heard; this roman soldier could finally, to find and to make use of the secret and powerful name of God.-

Comodoro Rivadavia, Argentina

October 2003