Nocturnal Butterflies of the Russian Empire. José Manuel prieto

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      I had decided suddenly to change the course of my life, to take to the sea. I had spent nights in railway stations, covered thousands of kilometers by train, made five plane trips in a week. Now I found myself steering a yacht through the maze of islands around Stockholm, at the invitation of this great big man, a Viking with a gold hoop dangling from his ear. We were headed to his house to discuss a subject that needed a place like this, covered with pines and completely surrounded by water: an island.

      We docked off a narrow pebble beach: water quietly lapping against the rocks, wind whispering in the pines. I jumped down from the yacht. Stockis had a proposal, he had said, something that might interest me. And while we went up some wooden steps to a terrace overlooking the beach:

      “On dark nights I come out here and keep an eye on my yacht with the goggles you sold me …”

      “Are the dogs yours?” I shot back quickly, because my English wasn’t up to the circumlocutions of normal conversation, forcing me to latch on to a subject directly, like a mute. The blunt question stood for this long speech: “You have two mastiffs, don’t you, the spotted ones you had in the plaza, so why do you need night-vision goggles to guard your property? You may be fabulously wealthy, you certainly seem it, but isn’t that rather extravagant?”

      Stockis had been to China (and in China, to Manchuria); I mean, he’d been around, all over the world, and he obviously knew how to carry on a conversation, however rudimentary the English. He came back with an explanation.

      “You can’t even see your hand in front of your face some nights here in Stockholm. It’s dark by three in the afternoon in the winter. I don’t think you could have picked a better place to sell these goggles. I have a yacht and don’t sleep well. Sometimes I get up early and watch the sunrise from this terrace. But come, we’re not here to talk about that …”

      We went into the house. Through a service door in the back. On the kitchen table I saw food-caked dishes, a half-eaten box of chocolates, candy wrappers all over, as if there’d been an explosion. We went to the study, down a hallway littered with beer cartons, stepping over ads for pizza parlors with Swedish names, with the mastiffs (which did belong to Stockis) nipping at my heels. The mess suited me fine, I’m the same when I’m home alone and end up drowning in magazines, pants, shirts I can wear one more day, clean enough, hung on the backs of chairs, glasses still holding the dregs of tea, but on top of it all anyway. I know what it’s like to let myself go, to slide down that slippery slope of slovenliness. Between trips I often find myself watching television, which I detest, until four in the morning, a book open in my lap, bored by whatever’s on, knowing the bad cop will betray the good one several dull speeches before it happens. And never anything about smuggling, there’s almost never a show with anything about smuggling, much less smuggling bugs or butterflies.

      “Russia has several rare butterflies, extinct in the West …” he began. “There is one type in particular, the yazikus, which lives only from the end of May to mid-September. I would give everything to possess it.”

      “Everything is not anything,” I replied, and then, to his broad chest, “How much?” because I do not believe in a numerical infinity, which I consider an intellectual concept, nothing more.

      “Stockis is also a trade name,” he said, as if confident this would add some weight to his proposal, but not explaining why. I had followed him into the study, preceded by the panes of the plaid lumberjack shirt stretched across his broad back. When he turned to see what effect this revelation had on me, I climbed up on tiptoes and peered over his shoulder, to expand my field of vision. My gaze slid along glass display cases hung from every wall. There was just one window, in the north wall, and, on both sides of it, innumerable cases full of butterflies, glowing with a soft light.

      Sure, we were here to look at butterflies, and for him to propose some deal with butterflies, I knew that, but he could still have some other field, and I said, “So, you have a business … that sells … ?”

      He stopped in front of a case and tapped the glass, answering me without saying the word “butterflies.”

      “I will be sailing to Istanbul at the end of May, on the Vaza. I have clients in the Middle East who are going to meet me on an island, on Crete, but before that we can look around Istanbul, you and I. Have you ever been to Istanbul?”

      I had not been to Istanbul.

      From floor to ceiling, up to the rafters, the study walls were covered with cases full of butterflies, which were held down, I noted, with round-headed pins, easy to get hold of. I did not know a thing about butterflies at the time, on that day near the end of winter.

      “No questions until they make the first offer,” he lectured. “That way, you’ll know what kind of number: tens, thousands, tens of thousands. There are innumerable orders of butterflies. If a collection has specimens from a single order, it’s no good. It’s worth much more if it contains examples from various orders, organized lowest to highest…. By the way, there’s a forest in Finland, near Carelia, planted by the Russian army СКАЧАТЬ