How they came to stare at him. The enemy, the phenomenon, the devil: after a long hunt, he is now caught and imprisoned. Like a wild animal that you can gape at, curious but also slightly shuddering. The better folk of San Antonio, Texas, put on their Sunday best when they head out to Fort Sam Houston for the weekend. The common people just crowd in front of the bars when “rotational display” is on. And Gerónimo stands seemingly unmoved by all this. The medicine man, advisor to the chiefs, strategist. And with him some of the 36 men who spent decades fighting attrition with the armies of Mexico and the United States in the 19th century. 36 of the original 500, more were not left.
But as is so often the case, imagination and reality diverge a little: “The Indians were not what Ellie had expected. They wore no feathers, did not look like savages, nor madmen, nor murderers. They were just a few men who were on the moved the earth as if it belonged to them.” Ellie, the wife of a young lawyer, shudders when she notices that Gerónimo’s gaze is fixed on her breasts, which “were only visible beneath layers of cotton, crinoline and silk”.
The children are fascinated. And the father, the writer, probably even more
Her husband, whose connections allow the couple to see Gerónimo up close and away from the usual hustle and bustle of visitors, also shudders. Gerónimo speaks to them, saying Ellie reminds him of Camila, a Mexican woman who once lived and died with the Apaches. “She’s a real woman.” After the strange encounter between his wife and Gerónimo, the lawyer “often wonders if Ellie was the woman he thought he had married. (…) He didn’t understand that it wasn’t Gerónimo’s body, but the proximity to fame , which made Ellie’s heart leap for joy. Nothing quite excites like the bearer of a name that stands the test of time.”
Another narrative thread in Álvaro Enrigue’s novel “Now I surrender, and that’s all” shows how strongly the name of the probably best-known Apache is still charged today: A first-person narrator, probably Enrigue himself, goes with his patchwork family on a road trip to places that bear witness to Gerónimo’s life and his people’s struggle for survival. The tomb in a remote part of a military fort that is accessible to tourists. A cottage far out in the semi-desert. A restaurant somewhere in a small town where a descendant of a well-known chief serves. The children are fascinated. And the father, the writer, probably even more.
Álvaro Enrigue: Now I surrender and that’s all. Translated from the Spanish by Carsten Regling. Blessing, Munich 2021. 560 pages, 24 euros.
The landscape through which the family drives is largely the same as Gerónimo’s ancestors rode through: plateaus and canyons, lots of stone and little water. The political topography, on the other hand, has changed drastically: Where there was simply land that was simply called Apacheria, the land of the Apaches, there are now states and borders. Mexico here. The United States there. And reservations.
Álvaro Enrigue himself crossed these borders, he was born in Guadalajara, Mexico and now lives in New York, USA. In his sixth novel, the 54-year-old made the war of annihilation against the natives, which both countries were waging, the subject of the subject captured by Apaches and cruelly made one of their own by their captors. It circles around the year 1886, in which Gerónimo speaks the eponymous sentence “Now I surrender, and that’s all” and goes into captivity – and it should actually have been everything, because the history of his tribe will soon be over. And it takes place in the present, from which Álvaro Enrigue looks back in many different ways.
There is no place for Winnetou romance here, the song of death whistles over the Apacheria
When he lets the Mexican lieutenant Zuloaga hunt down Camila’s kidnappers, that’s something like pure western. Zuloaga’s motley crew of conscripts and desperadoes – a shooting nun who isn’t a nun at all, a former tango teacher, two indigenous people from the Yaqi tribe who have been in prison for so long that no one knows why – allows for the tableau of a film Quentin Tarantino, as does the brutality with which both sides fight. There is no place for Winnetou romance here, the song of death whistles over the Apacheria. When fifty years later, in 1886, the aimless President Grover Cleveland in Washington and General Miles in Arizona corresponded by telegram, it is reminiscent of official slapstick that could be performed today in a similar way via e-mail or messenger. And when the first-person narrator from Mexico describes today’s culture of remembrance in the United States – “the only places where it’s only white people are on the backdrops and fake historical sites” – it’s also as brutal as it is funny.
Enrigue arranges his novel as Apacheria used to be before the colonizers came from Europe: largely without enclosure, without borders, as a wide area in which there is room for everything, everything flows into one another. At first, readers might be as clueless between the storylines as Lieutenant Colonel Zuloaga in the pathless stone desert. But just as the Mexican commander learns from his trackers to look for clues, readers also learn how to orient themselves in free text terrain.
One of the last feared chiefs was the Apache Gerónimo, who fought the whites for 30 years into old age.
(Photo: Süddeutsche Zeitung Photo)
Nonetheless, the story moves quickly. Another argument in favor of Enrigue’s book is that the time of the so-called “Indian Wars” has not really been worked through to this day. In the early morning hours of May 2, 2011 in Pakistan, it became apparent that the USA has not progressed much further in its perception of Gerónimo and his people than the lawyer’s wife Ellie, who was guided by a mixture of horror and fascination, and her jealous husband . Two military helicopters landed in a courtyard, and 38 minutes later an elite soldier shouted the code word for a successful operation into the microphone: “Gerónimo, Gerónimo, Gerónimo”. The enemy, the phenomenon, the devil – after years of hunting, he was now caught. But he shouldn’t be locked up for a “rotational display”: Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, who cheered on the live stream, watched as Osama bin Laden was simply shot.