Susana's Jaguar
by Siena Oristaglio
What do we guard?
I’m in bed.
It’s 7 am.
Light cracks through my window.
I blink into its honey gold.
I rub my eyes and exhale.
I reach for my phone and open my email.
A friend has sent me a video with a note:
“Performance with jaguars.”
Two performers, Asun Noales and Sebastian Rowisnki,
stand in a circle of small jaguar heads.
The heads are sculpted from pearl-white plastic
by an artist named Susana Guerrero.
The heads are perfectly identical.
Their mouths stretch agape, as if caught mid-roar.
Beyond rows of jagged teeth,
each throat swells with inky black.
The performers wear only underwear.
Their bodies are matted in dark gray clay.
They move, lock lips, spin, hold one another,
leap, wrestle, stalk, slither, sway.
Each time they touch, clay flakes off their skin
and floats to the ground.
They shed. They molt.
They trace patterns on the floor with
their outstretched calves.
There is no audience visible, only blackness
beyond the jaguar border.
The wild cats guard the performers,
unblinking.
Ready to pounce or bite.
I inhale.
One performer falls back into the other’s arms.
Both sweep their torsos across the ground.
I exhale.
.
What is a jaguar?
A beam of sunlight hits my eyes
and suddenly I can’t see.
I shift my head on my pillow and pause the performance.
It freezes on the line of jaguar heads.
The creatures are striking,
even more so in multiple.
What is a jaguar? I ask myself.
I open a new tab and search “jaguar live cam.”
One from a zoo in Milwaukee looks promising.
I hit play and absorb the scene:
The creature lies on an enormous rock,
cradled inside a bed of straw.
It breathes visibly.
Light cracks through its window.
It tucks a paw beneath
its muscular shoulders and
shifts its head slightly.
It settles.
My head shifts, too.
I settle.
I recall that jaguars have the most powerful
bite of all the large cats. Their teeth
cut clean through shells of turtles
and slice the hides of crocodiles.
They can take down prey up to four times
their own weight.
They go in for the kill
with a bite to the back of the skull
rather than the throat.
It’s strange to watch such a
deadly feline lie sweetly at
rest through a tiny phone screen.
It appears to be smiling.
Maybe it’s having a nice dream,
I think.
I imagine a satisfying
tear of flesh and
a blur of fresh water.
A pounding heartbeat.
A nocturnal meal.
Do jaguars dream?
I wonder, before drifting off.
.
How do we cleanse ourselves of fear? Of pain?
It’s 8:30am now.
The sun is up.
My curtains remain closed.
I’m awake again, watching the remainder
of the performance video.
The work is called Rito, which
translates from Spanish to rite or ritual.
One performer crawls atop the body of the other.
They crouch and gaze out past the circular border.
I examine their skin:
they are both nearly clean of the clay.
Only dust remains.
Is this a cleansing ritual?
I ask myself.
I recall my brother teaching me about
a Jewish ritual called mikvah.
To perform a mikvah, one must submerge themselves
naked in a natural body of water while reciting prayers.
The ritual is often performed after major transitions:
marriage, divorce, birth, death, illness, menstruation.
If one is trying to kosher a new home,
one bring all the silverware from that home
with them into the water.
The ritual is meant to take oneself from a place
of spiritual impurity [tumah] to a place of
spiritual purity [taharah].
Jaguars are known to hunt, play, and bathe in water.
They are strong swimmers and can ford wide natural rivers.
Unlike humans, jaguars need not pray to be cleansed.
They are cleansed each time they submerge in water.
I gaze around my dim bedroom.
I will shower soon, but for now, a slice of sun
bathes my abdomen in heat.
I prepare myself for a paltry few hours of daylight.
In a recent video blog, a woman who
lives on a remote Swedish island
describes just how precious a few hours of
sunlight can feel after weeks of utter darkness:
It’s almost a spiritual or religious experience
to see the sun, she says. It’s like seeing a miracle.
Something that should not be possible.
I understand this feeling.
Two nights ago was the longest night of the year.
Friends and I filled a room with candles
for my partner’s birthday.
Dozens and dozens of candles fluttered
long into the night.
The flames encircled our huddled bodies
like the jaguars in Rito, guarding us.
A boundary.
A cleansing of the pain of cold.
A cleansing of the fear of night.
A small miracle.
A rite.
A ritual.
.
What is a new year to a jaguar?
The two performers now grasp a long string.
They wrap themselves in it, hold it between their teeth
and hands like a cat’s cradle.
They turn into it and lean against it.
A boundary.
One pulls the other as if on a leash.
The other pulls back.
Both drop to the ground.
A new decade is days away.
We’ll cook food, dress up, celebrate,
promise to make new choices,
attempt to cleanse ourselves of the
previous year’s impurities.
What is a new year to a jaguar? I wonder.
Jaguars can live up to 15 years in the wild
and up to 23 years in captivity.
What is a new decade to the muscular wild cat
who lives, at most, for two decades on earth?
What is a new decade to a species endangered by
violence, border walls, corporate greed, and climate change?
To the jaguar, December 31st, 2019 at midnight
will simply be another moment to capture a
crocodile in the water,
drag it to a tree, devour it.
To survive.
Like the jaguar, we make new choices every moment.
The performers leap and fall, gleaming with sweat.
I pounce from my bed.
I tear open my curtains to the light,
ready to devour it, ready
to survive.
Siena Oristaglio (all pronouns) is an artist and educator. She co-runs The Void Academy, an organization that helps independent artists thrive. She lives in New York City.
