Synopsis

Of these stories, portraits “of many selves,” the author writes: “In Hokusai’s One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji, sometimes you see the mountain, sometimes you don’t, depending on where you are standing. Like mountains, these self portraits too may be visible or invisible—or sometimes positioned at the edge of the picture. And, like mountains, they are meant to be experienced not understood.”

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Excerpt

Preliminary Report

N.B.: Pablo Müller-Wessely’s name is little known outside arcane coteries specializing in South American indigenous cultures, and even there he has always been somewhat of an exotic footnote – perhaps because his sublime, lyrical works were composed in a language and for a culture so obscure as to be practically unknown even to ethnologists. For this reason, the stubborn rumor about the existence of a substantial poetic corpus in his native German may seem even more esoteric – though as some readers know, just recently that assertion has been corroborated by Witkins (cf. “Invisible Bards”).

The vague possibility that there might be something to those speculations is what motivated us to set out on our own expedition to Yaoqui. The following report briefly summarizes the results of that investigation. [ag]

He has been described as “the man who almost never was” (op. cit. Witkins p.16). In 1889, buttressed by a sound secondary school education and a modest inheritance, he hired himself out as a cabin boy and set sail on a merchant vessel from Bremerhaven to Salvador de Bahia. From there, he snaked his way down the Amazon deep into the interior, occasionally finding an opportunity along the way to post long, tightly crammed letters to his mother in which for pages on end he extolled, half philosophically, half mystically, but always seriously, the soul of the trees and the scrub, the marriage of heaven and earth and the consciousness of tropical rain. It’s easy to imagine the bewilderment – and consternation – his family members experienced. The photograph he enclosed in one of those letters is the last known image of him. It portrays a lanky youth with round, wire-rimmed eyeglasses, seen towering over a group of naked Indios. In the sepia half-tones all parties resemble soft, sandstone statues, staring, as if down a long tunnel, into the faraway camera. Pablo is wearing knee socks, a pair of sensible shoes, knee-length pants, a polo shirt and a pith helmet (v. Witkins pp. 18-21). “I can speak their language pretty well, tu-i na tu-i na, ” he printed in neat letters on the back of the photo, his passion for exotic languages clearly manifesting already then. The language quoted has still not been identified.

It will probably remain a mystery how he got from the Amazon basin to Yaoqui, the village on the Pacific at the foot of the high Andes that he was to call home for the rest of his life. In those days, the only known route across the Andes was the treacherous Santa Benita Pass that cut across some of the most hostile mountain crests in all of South America. In an Ahuete song whose authorship has been unequivocally attributed to him, he invokes the “plunging dragon of the clouds, swallowed by no crags” (“ihua katumi bahuaru pilata ka nue”). Various researchers, J. Reaves, for example, have long surmised that this verse is based on a concrete observation made during that dangerous trek across the pass.

Whether or not he settled in Yaoqui immediately upon arrival is still a moot issue. There is credible evidence that he may have spent some time in Taua, a Huayati village, still extant today and located about thirty kilometers north of Yaoqui. This claim continues to be hotly contested however, its veracity exacerbated by the absence of any reliable witnesses. Notwithstanding, certain elements typical of his style are found in various traditional Huayati songs. The image of nocturnal billows depicted as bat wings eclipsing the moonlight is often cited as an example (cf. “aupi kehuaupi ni lomo”). Of course, alternative explanations have been posited for these stylistic congruities, the most persistent being that songs of his may have been adapted and translated into Huayati at a subsequent period, or that Huayati songsmiths may have copied the author’s lyric style. In preliterate cultures, emulating the works of a rival is commonly considered the highest compliment. Another possibility: the strong kinship between the Huayati and Ahuete dialects may indicate that Pablo Müller-Wessely was fluent in both languages and composed in both.

His grass hut in Yaoqui still stands, located on the outskirts of this hot and humid, and, I might add, mosquito-infested Ahuete settlement within hearing range of the sea. One of his grandchildren, Viktor Mulauesseli (he printed this spelling of the family name on a page of my spiral notebook), is the current inhabitant. Over a cup of “ue-ue”, a bitter and, in my opinion, unpalatable beverage derived from the sap of the guata trees that surround the house (very beneficial as shade trees, he remarked), he spoke to us about his grandfather, in particular about his final years, which is to say, the period concomitant and subsequent to his great crisis.

From: “The Lost Works of Pablo Müller-Wessely”

In the short story collection:  Self Portraits by P.J. Blumenthal (Sagging Meniscus Press, October 2026)

About the Author

P.J. Blumenthal is an American writer living in Munich, Germany. He is the author of the novel Winston Hewlett’s Impotence (Sagging Meniscus, 2024), a nonfiction book on feral man, Kaspar Hausers Geschwister (Kaspar Hauser’s Siblings), as well as a German-language blog, “Der Sprachbloggeur.” Three volumes of his poetry have appeared in the USA so far: A Lusty Romance, Poems for Readers and Slow Train to Cincinnati.