Rui Zink – Tourist Destination

Thursday, October 20, 2011 — Damian Kelleher

Rui Zink – Tourist Destination

A businessman, entering the country, carries on to the plane a semiautomatic weapon. The guards, when they discover it, wearily explain that he cannot bring the weapon into the city. They don't, we note, seem all that outraged that he flew with the weapon, or that the businessman has, as he indignantly claims, a license both to carry the weapon and to kill. The treatment of confiscating the weapon is handled with much the same aplomb as a security guard might today handle the disposal of a canister of spray deodorant: A tiresome business, but part of flying.

The narrator of Portuguese author Rui Zink's Tourist Destination observes the altercation dispassionately, with the implicit indication that he has seen all of this before. It's nothing, in the way that walking through a metal detector today is nothing. But for us, the reader, we know we have entered unfamiliar territory. Added to that, the place where the narrator has arrived is described as:

It was a known fact that the country was just a fragment, that it wasn't even a country, only a zone, a zone of death, a savage, brutal hunting ground, so what where they up to pretending to be great defenders of order?

On the way to the hotel, the narrator notes the crater holes from mortar shells, the ruined buildings, the guards with weapons, the abandoned streets, the lines of tanks. Again, dispassionately. And then, a clue - “[e]ven stable countries were dying on their feet”. Other clues: there are hints of a worldwide war, and perhaps a famine.

Something is wrong.

But the “something” that is wrong is wrong for the reader, not the narrator. Zink has us off balance from the start. Part of reading involves determining the time and place of the narrative, as well as the author's ideological standpoint, their sense of the aesthetic, their approach to characterisation. The narrator is calm and collected within this world; the ruins and violence of “the zone” is something to chronicled in the daily recordings of one's life, but it isn't anything special. For us, something is amiss. We gradually discover that the story is set in the future, but we aren't sure how we got there or what it means.

They were crossing a kind of grubby brown desert interrupted by occasional houses, mostly shacks, a few bodies walking through the void with bundles on their heads, and others just standing, watching the world pass by. A shepherd, tall, thin, and almost naked, crook in hand, leading his scrawny flock. And the carcasses, lots of them, of what had once been vehicles. The burned-out bodywork of tanks, jeeps, SUVs, vans, ordinary cars, even helicopters. A cemetery of carbonized metal bones, except that it seemed unlikely that any diamonds would emerge from that particular mine.

Zink understands that the reader must struggle to piece together the clues provided by the story. Part of the fun of science fiction is to connect the dots from “there” to “here”, particularly when the “there” is present as a form of social/political criticism. In this case, while Zink has provided hints, the history of Tourist Destination's future remains opaque.

The narrator, “Greg”, has come to the country to die. He reasons that, in a land of violence, death comes easily to the foreigner as much as the native. It is suggested that perhaps he will pay someone to kill him, but as the story progresses it becomes clearer that Greg simply wishes to become another casualty in the endless war, collateral damage.

The story shifts tone when Greg arrives at his hotel. Matters become satirical, echoing the altercation between the businessman and airport security. Greg is informed he will be forward-billed for any amenities he may (or may not) use - “hospital treatment, emergency transport, personal services, detox, prosthesis, casino bills...”. Their motto, he learns, is “In the midst of barbarism, civilization”, and he is helpfully informed that:

”If you've forgotten anything, bathing trunks or tennis shoes or swimming goggles or any other piece of sports equipment, we will be happy to provide you with them for a modest charge.”
“You're not telling me there's a tennis court in the hotel?”
“I'm pleased to say that there is. Naturally, the use of the courts depends on the waiting list or on the need to sweep up any bits of mortar shell, but that's relatively rare now.”

Greg acclimatises himself to the zone. He goes for walks and, though he is escorted by the hotel guards wherever he goes, he enjoys his time alone. The effect of constant death, destruction, and the menacing expectation of further violence, has served to clarify his mind by reducing the superfluities of ordinary, middle-class life. While Greg never achieves anything as banal as a revelation from his time in the zone, he certainly manages to gain a sense of humour about it all. Even a woman walking with a child, the small body shredded from an exploded cluster bomb, fails to dent his good feelings. Later, he calls his wife and speaks to her answering machine:

Did she understand the beauty of the cluster bomb concept? Yes, exactly, to do as much damage as possible to human flesh, by spraying out thousands of nails, an instantaneous zap-zap-zapping. Like a harpooner, not of whales, but of sardines, who, when he throws his harpoon (it doesn't matter in which direction), releases a thousand mini-harpoons, each going off in search of its sardine or its baby.

Tourist Destination toys with the concept of the rich foreigner (European) visiting a place of poverty and violence (somewhere in Africa) by exaggerating the primal aspects to the point where they become caricatures. This unnamed, unknown land, this “zone” is an absurd extension of the problems variously affecting any number of nations in Africa at any one time; Greg's detachment and then amusement serves to link the story better to the reader than if he were dramatically affected.

To return to a theme mentioned earlier: Zink knows that the reader must come to grips with the terminologies and conceits of a story in order to understand it. Thus, we often tend to examine with more detail the information provided to us than the narrator themselves. In Tourist Destination we are forced into the uncomfortable realisation that, for Greg, and likewise for us, the excursion into the zone is just that – an excursion – and even a person arriving in order to be killed is, in fact, an outsider who will never properly understand. It is telling that the only individuals Greg deals with are people providing a service – taxi driver, hotel manager, security guard – until he sees the lady and her baby. And then the matter of the zone becomes real, and then he realises that he can return home and then – and only then – do we learn that he has a wife. So he calls her, he leaves a message, and we suspect that, instead of dying, he will probably return home, back to bourgeosie comfort, and away from all this. In ten years it will be another story to tell over dinner and wine.

Tourist Destination by Rui Zink is a short story from the Dalkey Archive Press' anthology, Best European Fiction 2012

Author	Rui Zink
Title	Tourist Destination
Translator	Margaret Jull Costa
Nationality	Portuguese
Publisher	Dalkey Archive Press
Availability: ---Amazon (US) ---Amazon (UK) ---Fishpond (AU)

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Rui Zink – Tourist Destination

Rui Zink – Tourist Destination

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