"Hybridae" -- A Short Story By Cesar Torres

8/14/2019 "Hybridae" -- A Short Story By Cesar Torres

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Hybridae

Cesar Torres


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HYBRIDAE

CESAR TORRES

August, 1899

The train came to a full stop. The station sign beyond the window read Ciudad de

Mexico. Harvey De Castille picked up his two suitcases and slung his camera

equipment over his shoulder. He made his way to the exit of the car, where several

families and a handful of lone male travelers filed out of the steam locomotive.

The people the hundreds and hundreds of people struck his eyes and ears. There

were so many of them, radiating in their own skin like glowing bronze statues come to

life. Most were a deep tan that gleamed under the white sunlight, but there were others

too, who were shaded in red, perhaps yellow like the Chinamen he had once seen in San

Francisco, but one fact remained: None of these people was anything at all like him.

Many men opted for the modern fashion of the day, with long, fitted waistcoats, narrow

britches and the high collars of the privileged. The wax in their mustaches shone glossy

and dark like otter fur, yet it was redundant on these men, because their natural luster

needed no pomades. The womens corsets and petticoats, and their square-heeled shoes

might have been the same that walked the streets of his own native Philadelphia, perhaps

even Paris, but the soft golden skin and deep brown eyes on parade before him were of a

different and exotic hue. Ah there a man with a beautiful and compact ebony

toothpick case. And the toothpick itself what a marvel to behold, like a needle of pure

gold. Yes, Harvey wanted to believe this was just like Paris, or New York, or maybeBerlin.

Except it was not. It never would be. Only men with shallow pockets came to a dank

corner of the world such as this one.


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His nose absorbed the thousand smells of poverty, disorder, and the unknown. He

smelled the earth, the clay and the horse dung, as well as the grit of coal, which workers

dressed in plain white shirts and pants carried in wheelbarrows down the street. He could

smell food too, and his stomach grumbled, though with doubt. The thick and sweet scent

of corn wove itself into his nose, but foreign smells came with it pig blood, innards, and

herb scents cloaked in mystery.

Faces glanced at him for brief moments, taking in his black wool suit, his thick cravat, his

youthful face, and then, as if they had never seen him, as if he had never existed, they

turned away.

He walked toward the city center in hopes of renting an inexpensive room. As he turned

the corner and walked down a street that housed churches, the jewelry makers, the watchrepairmen, the cobblers and the cabinet makers, he brushed his shoulders against the

bulk of a much taller man, who stopped Harvey in his tracks with one raspy word.

Alto, the man said, behind a thick warbling voice and the red-faced mask of alcohol.

He teetered as if suspended by marionette strings. His sway was graceful, yet in an queer

way, mechanical. The mans toothy grin was out of proportion, filled with even white

teeth that somehow shouldnt have been. The thick chest hair that sprouted his filthy

white shirt revolted Harvey.

Before he had a chance to regret his encounter with the knave, Harvey unbuckled his

shoulder bag, deftly handling the black steel and glass equipment of his camera inside.

His first chance at a shot; He did not want to miss it. The drunkard rolled his eyes toward

the sky, laughing to himself, curling his ragged hair with his fingertips like a child,

oblivious to the world spread before him.

Harvey De Castille snapped a photograph.


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From the Journal Modern Latin American Photography, Year 3 Vol. 2, 1909.

Photograph, Mexico City

Untitled, Gelatin Print

Untitled is one of the least known examples of De Castilles photography, but it proves to

be most indicative of the directions the artist would take on in later years. Close friends

and other scholars generally dismiss this singular piece as banal and somewhat

amateurish, but a closer look reveals more complexity than can be expected of a young

man of twenty three years of age with only self-taught skills with a camera. Official

records show De Castille entered Mexico just two days earlier via railroad, but his ability

to capture the essence of a subject, within mere hours after his arrival in a new city, is

unprecedented.

The subject, a derelict, hands and eyes lifted toward the sky, posed naturally against a

street corner amid the foot traffic of the metropolis synthesizes the Mexican sensibility of

the ordinary and the divine, as he takes on a pose most often seen in the religious icons of

Catholic saints in the thousands of churches and chapels throughout the country. The

whitewashed wall behind the subject stands in direct contrast to the ornate blue and

white tiles and classic architecture of the city, and the shadows that permeate the facial

features of the subject are nothing if not saturated with a deep shade of black, achievable

under only optimal lighting (or dark room) conditions.

Despite the remarkable intensity of the shadows, Untitled lacks finesse in its composition,

but de Castille cannot be faulted. He is a young artist, exploring his own limitations and

possibilities at this stage in his life. The Argentine art criticMiguelangelo Cezanne

commented in his critical 1902 essay Dimensions in Sides that Untitled cannot escape its

fate as the prime example of the mediocre touch of an artist who cannot yet be called an

artist. Besides, Untitled lacks De Castilles phantoms. Without them, the work is

negligible.


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De Castille is best known for phantoms, but they dont appear until September of that

same year.

September 1899

Every time he walked down to the city centre, El Zcalo, its main square, the monstrosity

of El Palacio Nacional, the National Palace, wanted to swallow Harvey whole.

Like a swarm of yellowjackets, the multitudes of vendors, city officials, beggars and

families grew denser, thickening around

him, as the shadows from the east

shortened in the midday sun. The

Emperor Maximillian had named it the

Imperial Palace just three decades ago,

but the rule of the Daz presidency had

reclaimed the name National Palace. The

vast fortress of granite, marble and wood

housed the Mexican government elite,

including the president, and the throngs

of people in the Zcalo radiated from it asif the country knew only how to look

towards its own center. There had to be

hundreds, maybe thousands of men and

women filling the square this morning.

How could a city center such as this fill with so many people, every single day, without


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succumbing to chaos? Its other sides were also fenced in by the imposing heft of the

other colonial buildings, including the titanic cathedral that overlooked the main square.

The sun was gone, and a thick wash of slate blue and dense gray obscured the mountains

in the distance. He had arrived just four weeks earlier, but he was settling into routines.Every day he walked with his camera tucked under one arm and a short tripod under the

other. Doing this repetitive task was what he was probably most good at. It certainly

wasnt being a doctor. Hed let his brothers fill that role. Every day, a new letter arrived

from the United States, calling for his return to a life whose possibilities he knew were

slipping past him like a wind draft. He had yet to correspond with his parents, much less

his siblings.

Ahead of him, standing with his hands clasped behind his narrow back, stood a familiarfigure. At first Harvey wasnt sure it might be the same person, but as he walked around

and saw the unmistakable profile, the flat brow and unusually white teeth, he realized the

man he had seen on his first day in Mexico City, was standing before him again. The

overripe smell of pulque, the milky fermented drink made from the maguey cactus, rolled

off the scarecrows tongue. It reeked of decay, as far as Harvey was concerned. The

whole country reeked.

The light is strange here, Harvey said, in his heavily accented Spanish, which hadimproved dramatically in a mere month.

The light has always been strange. But not uniformly so. If you were to walk toward the

northeastern corner of El Zcalo, youd see the light is as yellow and warm as God made

it. But if you were to walk in the opposite direction, youd find spots sprinkled

throughout this square where the light is simplyincorrect. How does your device

work?

Well, I let light into this box, as so, and then the image from the outside is imprinted

onto a plate, here, Harvey said, pointing to the corresponding parts of his camera.

Then I use a chemical process to reveal the image, in a room without light. To protect

the image on the plate, of course.

And you think you can capture Mexico in a box, as such? said the drunkard.


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Well, yes, of course. Its a scientific process.

The man adjusted the crusty collar, as if he might be about to give a rousing speech. Not

so long ago, I was faculty at the National University, but also a politician housed just a

few offices down from the Presidents, right in there. He pointed a filthy black nailtoward the national palace. I was the head of the ministry of education. And then one

day, no longer. Thats a story for another day. But in my time in the National Palace, I

knew that this square is unlike others.

Is that so? Harvey said.

Its all down here, the drunkard said, and he pointed his crooked finger toward the

ground. The world, the invisible world, it lives down there like a hungry worm. Its a

black and silver world, with sharp edges and angles and shapes that are beyond

comprehension. It is the world of the infinite cosmos, the cosmos that preceded the

Aztec, and before them the Teotihuacans, and the Toltecs. If you look from the right

angle, you can also see the invisible world, and the beings that live there. Sometimes they

come to the surface. Over there, friend.

Harvey looked at the spot on the southeastern edge where the drunkard pointed to. The

sidewalk, as well as the ground where the carriages trod over the earth, remained

ordinary as ever. At least until Harvey noticed the pool of liquid smoke. Under the shoe

of one of the businessmen who was about to cross the street, a thin, liquid shadow drifted

out of the ground, as if a cloud of black steam were solidifying, forming itself into a solid.

Harvey turned toward the drunkard, who smiled a grin wide enough to put two fists

inside. The grimy man laughed in his sandpaper baritone.

The rituals of the Aztec and others before them were the bridge between this valley and

the things the deities they called by names like Tezcatlipoca and Huitzilopochtli.

Beings so powerful they could only be seen through symbol. Our own naked eyes might

burn to cinders if we could look directly into the nature of the gods. But the invisible

world is older, and far older than the empire of the Aztecs. All the Aztecs could do was

ascribe god-like qualities to them. But I have seen the silver beings myself, friend. And


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ever since I gazed into their unknowable faces, well, I no longer walk among the men of

society.

Through the viewfinder, his eye swallowed the washes of muddy clouds and the thick

opacity of the human crowds before him. The soft notes of La Golondrina, a folk songthat was quickly burning itself into his permanent memory, danced through the air from

an organ, and children chased each other through the square, spilling pepitas from their

paper sacks, the boys brushing the ribbons in the girls hair while their black leather

shoes clicked on the grid of stones that comprised the square. In the foreground, an

Indian woman no older than twenty years old, swaddled in the bright red purple flows of

her shawl, bent down to the ground to pick an object. Perhaps it was a coin. Harvey could

not see from where he stood. Though no longer in the frame, the policemen, students,

housewives, elders and teachers of the metropolis gathered in a dark patch toward the lip

of the square, where the horse carriages and cars circled the plaza. Through a narrow

crevasse amid the rows of buildings, Harvey could see a black tram inch its way across the

city.

And then he shuddered in fear, washed away by his own sense of isolation at the sight

before him. At the southwest corner, where the edge of the National Palace provided

shade to the pedestrians, he could see the liquid shadow rise and grow bigger, thicker,

rising out of the corner of the square, now the size of a mule, taking a shape, extending

its form into limbs. Harveys stomach knotted, and he felt himself go cold. No one else

but Harvey could see the thing. He readied his camera to take a shot.


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Title: The Essence of el Zcalo, Gelatin Print

Date: September 1899

De Castille's unusual techniques are more firmly set in place by the time he begins his

millennial series, so dubbed by the critics and other artists posthumously. Yet we know

for certain De Castille never considered the photographs of the Zcalo a series, and

certainly much less a series he might label. Until his death, De Castille rejected

classification and the roving eye of art movements. According to an interview he gave to

the newspaper El Sol during his years of reclusion in 1945, the millennial series was

nothing more than an accident, a jar of spilled ink over a tablecloth.

The shapes the critic Cezanne named the phantoms appear for the first time in Essence

of El Zcalo. These phantoms were also named the chimeras, by ardent collector

President Porfirio Daz, and named the shadow nymphs by De Castilles friend Carl

Wilhelm Kahlo, father of painter Frida Kahlo. These chimera, as this journal will opt to

call these darkroom wonders, show up clearly for the first time in this first of the series.

Imposed over the composition as if made of black, translucent smoke a shape

identifiable as some sort of animal on three, or possibly four legs, lumbers through the

center of el Zcalo, towering above the famous figure of the stooped Isabelita, the young

peasant woman in a rebozo or shawl. The chimera can be seen stepping behind the

woman and in front of the groups of playing children.

The Essence of El Zcalo is the first photograph by the expatriate American that shows

his darkroom technique in fulll. It transgresses against the naturalism of photographers

of the time through the use of his unconventional dark room methods. There are no


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sources of information on how De Castille manipulated the chemicals or the plates to

create the unusual shapes of the chimera. Even in his last few interviews, he refused to

reveal the inspiration for the creature in the photograph, though countless stories of

dubious credibility relate an anecdote of a drunk De Castille at a New Years party

celebration in 1937, where after countless questions, he conceded that the shape in The

Essence of El Zcalo had not only the head of a snake, but talon legs of a predatory bird,

and perhaps even multiple appendages (like hands) over its thick torso. Like my mother

in law, he is supposed to have said. However, close inspection of the print offers no real

details. The shape, though clear enough to identify as a silhouette, does not offer shading

or even smaller details to the eye. It is believed De Castille might have in effect etched

directly onto the plate with a metal brush, or some sort of fiber, working under meager

light in order to sketch and render his chimera over the image while preserving the

integrity of the plate. His estate, to this day, remains the sole owner of what remains of his

dark room, so the secrets of his technique are buried with De Castille through posterity.


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August 1900

He could see them now, coming at him, from every direction, the way flies swarm to a

piece of dead flesh.

He sweated, even on a winter day like this one, when even at midday, collars werebuttoned and overcoats were draped over shoulders at El Zcalo. So strange, he thought,

I am in one of the sunniest cities I have ever been to, yet every time I return to its center,

the sun fades behind the gauze of the sky, and the light dims ever so.

An old woman, hunched like a dry salamander, wrapped in bright pink swatches of fabric

and carrying a vast basket of pepitas, chili peanuts and pecans, shuffled towards him. Her

shoes, thin as eggshells and scuffed so badly they resembled the patchy skin on her legs,

dragged along the street.

Her brown eyes lay flat on her face like opaque crescents. He unfolded his camera case

and began to set up a shot.

"It's funny," he said. "I've been here close to a year, and this place, this monstrous

city. I don't understand the customs, much less your food, with hundreds - no --

thousands of flavors dancing simultaneously on the palate...This place, your city, this

square. Deplorable."

He had been coming here to el Zcalo, almost everyday, and he snapped at least one or

two shots (sometimes a dozen) every single time. The developing process revealed to him

the smoky silvery beings that appeared only in the photos. Though obscured by shadow,

these shapes contained animal limb, head or body, and they appeared of their own accord

across his silver and gelatin prints. That morning, he had developed two more photos he


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had taken of the creatures, the shapes he had come to call the "Hybridae," in honor of

the naming conventions for myriad species he had read about in Charles Darwins work.

He kept their name secret. He told no one about the Hybridae. And if he kept their name

sealed behind his lips, locked in his mind, no one would ask any questions.

Though he could never predict how they would surface on his compositions, the

Hybridae only appeared in photographs he took here, in el Zcalo. Their shapes were in

the air, and in the ground like mist. And he was sure they were beings, though only his

only alibi was his camera. He feared sleep sometimes, because he sometimes dreamt of

their multiple limbs, and of their thick black shapes, outlined as if by a soft sheen of light,

like silver dust.



Title: Fuga, Gelatin Print

Year: 1900

FugaorFugue, is the first photo in the millennial series that De Castille titled in Spanish.

This piece kicks off his most prolific period, and his idiosyncrasies begin to meld with his

interest in the city and the nature of the national identity of this newly adopted home. It is

at this time that he met Maria Elena Lpez, the daughter of a railroad entrepreneur andhis future wife, though we know he continued working mostly in solitude this time; he did

not marry her until 20 years later, when he was already in his mid-forties.

The photo at first seems poorly composed, because it is shot an angle that seems to cut off

most of its subjects in foreground and background. The woman selling nuts is halved by


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the edge of the photo, slicing her from head to toe; the edge of a tree (at the time the

landscaping included trees; they are since gone), is nothing more than a severed image.

Even the horse-drawn cart in the distance is seen halved. Careful inspection reveals an

image that not only contains objects cut in half, it revels in the dual nature of these halves.

Everything in the composition is severed as if the artist were dissecting, or vivisecting El

Zcalo, searching for meaning, or answers.

Fugaalso shows the largest and clearest addition of a chimera thus far in the

photographers body of work. A dog-like shape with a long tail ending in a human hand

saunters near the edge of the pavement, also bifurcated by the architectural girth of El

Palacio Nacional. The animals countenance is ferocious and savage, and it is almost

possible to see smoking silver eyes in its face. The chimeras unusual shape corresponds tothe mythical folk creature Ahuizotl, which was said to have lived in the valley of Mexico,

right in the heart of El Zcalo, drowning men in the waters of the lake that once used to

exist here. It should be noted that we do not know whether De Castille was aware of this

legend, which also tells us that just the mere sight of the Gorgonic beast was enough to kill

its beholder. Perverse critics mark this photograph as the first time De Castille begins to

comment on the nature of photography itself, to address the viewer directly. The effect is

quite literal. The viewer is immersed in this halved environment of the composition, and

the dog faces forward, on its haunches, as if looking to strike. If the Ahuizotl is so

fearsome to behold, what better place to put it than looking straight at the camera, at the

viewer?


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August, 1904

While he rode a train, Harvey De Castille reflected on the years that had passed.

In his travels he had seen things no other man from his country had seen. He had seen

giant sinkholes in the Yucatan big enough to swallow a city block, filled with crystalline

water more beautiful than Niagara. He had seen the Quetzal bird, bathed in glowing

shades of blue and indigo, flying through the jungles of Mrida. He had witnessed the

awesome sight of a whole forest covering several square miles where orange butterflies

came to mate. He had tasted the earthy flavors of something called mole, which he

discovered was the turnkey to his palate. He had passed out drunk in a saloon on a vile

drink named tequila, and the following night he had gone back to the saloon to punch the

barman in the face for poisoning him, and to ask for several bottles to take back with him

to Mexico City. He had fallen in love too, with Maria Elena, but he still remained shy,

unsure of the right protocol or social norms on how to ask her father for her hand. He

had no father to ask for this advice.

In his five years of traveling, he kept looking for the Hybridae. He looked under his hotel

room beds, as if he might find them scurrying like ants. He looked in the dark corners of

the churches and chapels in the smaller towns, where the crucifixes were still adorned

with gilded gold melted down from Aztec treasure from ages ago. He had visited Chichen

Itz, home to the Maya, but he had only received stings from strange red mosquitoes. He

had visited Toluca, home to giant pillar statues of titans, or gods, or men. When he had

come close to them, his camera had captured only the drifting specs of flower pollen

flowing in the wind. Every print outside of El Zcalo came back clean. It seemed the


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center of the country was the only place he could get glimpses of the monsters of smoke

he dreamt so much about.

His gaze drifted as the railroad car moved south along the mountains of Chihuahua,

closing off five years of travel. He must return to Mexico City.

He was about to drift off into a hazy nap, when he saw a shape near the mountains in the

distance, exactly where Mexico City awaited in its deep valley. His eyes grew wide, and

he felt fear slip into his heart and lungs like icy water. He gasped and sat up.

Sitting at the edge of the car, by the window, he took out his portable camera, and he

propped the thing on his lap, hoping the jostling wouldnt disturb his shot. He had but a

split second to take the photo.



Title: Horizons

Year: 1904

Horizons remains a wonder. It was taken with amazing skill on a moving train, as it

headed toward Mexico City, punctuating the first of De Castilles many in-depth travels

through the country. The effects and consequences of the Industrial Revolution are now

evident. Though Mexico City is not visible in the frame, the valley where it rests shows its

future legacy a vast cloud rising from it like a spewing volcano. This cloud is composed

of soot and the smoke from its new factories, and it fills the sky with ominous, thick

presence. It is difficult to know for sure if the shape is pollution or one of De Castilles

darkroom chimeras. The cloud forms itself into a gigantic bird whose talons are

replaced by serpents with mouths agape. Tendrils of black matter spread out like a


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nimbus, or thick hairs. By the scale of the photograph, the beast might easily measure two

miles across and a mile high, towering in a terrifying pose over the city of millions.

Though the milennium series continues for several years after, De Castilles answers to

questions about the nature of his compositions continued to be vague, elusive. As the

years went on, he withdrew from the public eye even further, even during his marriage,

though his prolific output continued at a steady rate. The depth of interviews he gave

magazines and newspapers from this point forward, were at best, superficial.

Mexico City, 1947

Time withered Harvey De Castilles face and hair, but not his hands. Their skin remained

elastic and unlined, just like it had looked when he was a young man and he had barely

perceived the Hybridae. If he was careful not to exert himself, he could walk with his cane

along the length of El Zcalo without the burning pain of his arthritic joints. The square

looked wider, especially now that the trees had been cleared away. Above, the sky

dampened his skin with its icy light. He knew he was close to the Hybridae now, much


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He chipped away at the stone, making a dent the size of a hand. No one seemed to notice

the kneeling old man chipping at the ground.

They always said I had a secret technique, he said to the stone, and around him beasts

that fused the features of a spider and a dove filled the sky like a cascade of needles, butI never did. None. I developed my photographs just as anyone else would. In fact, I was

careful to leave the image as pristine and natural as could be. There never were any

darkroom tricks.

The light remained grey that afternoon, and he was unsure if the sun was setting, because

he worked for what seemed like hours, determined to chip away at the ground, to find the

door that led to the realm of the Hybridae, beneath the ground, like intuition told him it

would be. He hunched over and picked at the stone, and the flecks flew away from hishands as the night-black Hybridae glided through el Zcalo.

There was a tiny hole in the ground now, and he knew that this spot was the entry point

to the invisible world. It just simply had to be. He took a short break from his work, and

he took out his camera, for a brief second unsure of what to do. He prepared the shot and

took a photograph.


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From the Nueva Luz: Fotografia Moderna, Year 3 Vol. 2, 1959.


Title: Mundo Gris

Year: 1947

Mundo Gris, orGrey World, is the closing note to De Castilles body of work. Shortly

after he took his final shot, De Castille experienced a heart attack, and he was rushed to

the hospital, where he died the following day. The single photograph he took at El

Zcalo closes out the last of the 200 photographs that are part of the millennial series, and

it captures the best of the Zcalo: A long ancient history of more than a dozen cultures

and peoples melded into a single place, living in organized chaos. Though the lighting

conditions were unnaturally low, his composition captures the joy and life of his adoptive

country, and its people. His estate developed the photograph, though it is not known

exactly if he gave any instructions on how to develop the print. He was dead long before

developing, and no one knows exactly how someone else an assistant, a secretary ,

perhaps an unnamed colleague could have reproduced his trademark black creatures,

dubbed the chimera by the Journal of Latin American Photography in 1909, into the

print. For this reason many collectors eschew Mundo Gris and call it a forgery, though at

the time of press, this journal considers the photograph to be legitimate. Its hallucinatory

shapes in the background are most striking, perhaps the most memorable of the

millennial series. Hybrid dove and spider creatures float in the sky above Mexico Citys

square as if in formation to strike as if at war, and several hulking shapes, easily thirty

feet tall, move toward De Castille, with their humanoid and animal limbs extended, as if

to claim him, or perhaps to claim the other people present in el Zcalo that day. There are

at least four hundred chimera present in the photo, though the way they burst forth from

a stone in the corner of the square suggests there may be thousands of them that simply

have not emerged from the ground yet. De Castilles legacy of love for his adopted


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country is juxtaposed one last time, in this final tableau that hints at the magnitude of his

unusual artistic vision and ability to express himself through symbol (or perhaps, for

symbol to express itself through him).


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Authors Note

I hope you have enjoyed Hybridae, which I wrote in 2008 and was first published in the now

defunct Steampunk literary magazine The Willows. I wanted to make it more widely available and

with new art. If you enjoy this work, I encourage you to contact me with your thoughts and

feedback. I thank you, Gentle Reader, for spending your hard earned money on this small piece

of fiction. If you like what you read here, do let others know that you enjoyed it through word of

mouth or online. Hybridae is dedicated to my father, who shares my passion for Mexico City,

or as we call it, El De Efe.

About the Author

Cesar Torres is a Chicago-based fiction writer, specializing in

speculative and literary fiction. He studied print journalism at

the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University,

and he has worked in the fields of online journalism,

information architecture, and theater. He writes the Urraca

Blog to chronicle his writing process at

http://cesartorres.net.You can also follow him on Twitter at

@urraca. For more information, email him at

[email protected].
mailto:[email protected]:[email protected]:///reader/full/twitter.com/urracahttp:///reader/full/twitter.com/urracahttp://cesartorres.net/http://cesartorres.net/http://www.medill.northwestern.edu/http://www.medill.northwestern.edu/http://cesartorres.net/blog/http://cesartorres.net/blog/


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"Hybridae" -- A Short Story By Cesar Torres