The Savage Girl - Alex Shakar [48]
“You really think so?”
“Open your eyes. Look at the food on their tables. The dishes are getting simpler. Fewer sauces and garnishes. More nuts and berries. Tropical fruits, too. Fish served whole rather than filleted. Meat on the bone.”
The waiter arrives, and Javier politely asks him to bring them everything that’s popular this week. Ursula thinks the waiter will just laugh at this, but instead he responds with an efficient nod and vanishes.
They listen to the conversations going on around them. He instructs her about what to listen for. Adjectives are often a reliable indicator. Javier is surprised to hear a nearby tableful of portfolio managers using the words good and bad to describe everything from investments to golf courses to political candidates. A year ago the adjectives were more guarded—sensible, inadvisable, and the like. People are growing less afraid of value judgments, he tells her; they are feeling nostalgic for a simple, moral universe. At another table a middle-aged woman with long, frizzy hair in a lilac suit is telling a story about a business trip she took to India, the day when a squatting beggar in the street smeared his feces on her shoes. She’s gained enough distance from the event to laugh about it, though it’s obvious the memory still disturbs her. What catches Javier’s attention is the highly descriptive way she tells the story, pantomiming the beggar’s posture and motions, fanning herself to convey the infernal heat and the stench of waste, savoring the warbling timbre of native words in her mouth. It’s quite clear, he whispers, that the woman actually envies the beggar somehow, envies his intimacy with his own shit. The three younger women at the table listen eagerly. For these few minutes the frizzy-haired woman has become their village elder, Javier suggests: a communal storyteller, keeping the oral tradition alive.
Ursula watches Javier’s performance with wonder and unease as the corporate lunchers around them transform into toucans, orchids, and flying dragons wherever he points his magic wand. She feels like Wendy in Never Never Land, a place continually and effortlessly conforming to the shape of people’s dreams. Well, perhaps this is the way things work, she thinks. Perhaps we really do live in a world where imagination and reality merge. Where a pair of silver boots is all the pixie dust required to set in motion the colonization of Mars. Where a humanity clad in sparkling pink jumpsuits may one day strike the national boundaries from the maps, pave the Moon with mirrors and Earth with colored lights, and proceed to boogie the nights away till the end of time. Why not? Culture, much like nature, is subject to chaos. And poor Ivy, afraid even to stir the air by brushing her hair, is onto something, isn’t she? After all, the brushing of a model’s hair in Middle City might cause a hurricane in Polynesia, where in turn the storm-appeasing dance of a savage could cause a heat wave in Middle City.
And the savage girl? Ursula thinks. What changes could she bring about?
As Javier talks on, she squints her eyes again, putting the impressionistic blotches of color together in new ways, bringing off a world of savage girls, their moccasined feet communicating with the earth, their far-seeing eyes peering into the ether, a world of people committed to authenticity, people with no interest in buying or buying into anything that commercial culture has to offer. The thought is crazy, but she can’t get it out of her mind. Could she really sell Cabaj on the savage girl? Could she use his ads for a useless product to spread the savage girl’s message of autonomy from consumerism? Could it turn out to be her message, and not his medium, for which people would ultimately find use?
It wouldn’t be any kind of death blow to consumerism, of course—most likely it would barely register at all—but it just might be the beginning of something, she thinks, something a little bit meaningful, a little bit exciting, even a little dangerous. A kind of guerrilla campaign, waged behind enemy lines.
A