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[I still feel this way.]
Olin Memorial Library, 19-06-07.
This is the image of me attempting to craft, from nothing, a future. The image of a girl-woman seated in the great expanse of air and windows in a library reading room.
Her hair knotted ingeniously, sitting on her heels in the too-low chair, squinting and pulling faces as she peruses lists of requirements, demands, standards. She cannot hold herself against these lists, cannot compare with cold scrutiny some image of herself with the abstract of desirability.
She has sent off, already, one cry for help, one request for rescue, whose destinataire has either not received it or been unwilling to respond.
She turns to examine the summery cascade of freckles that spill down from her shoulders, the six bracelets of wooden beads on one wrist, the Touareg device in silver on her right index finger. She stands and stretches and walks away down to the ladies’ to examine her prototypical self in the mirror.
“What is this?” she would wonder aloud if not for the librarianess standing next to her. “What is this fleeting thing in this mirror, here?”
That figure has learned herself, over the years, she realizes. The woman in the mirror has learned to say “I”.
But what now? Now with this “I” tucked cleverly in her pocket, where will she go? And how will she get there?
She can no longer contemplate these long lists of demands, can no longer face the prospect of opening some line of communication for the sake of marketing a self she is not sure of. That it is there, this self, she is certain. At least there is that.
But what can it do? When push comes to shove or when the shit hits the fan or when simply it comes down to it, of what is this self capable?
There is, of course, no way to know. That is what she cannot face, today, as the wind outside the window fades and the trees on the hill grow still and silent. What she cannot face, today, in this library that has cradled her through all her mind’s misadventures and furious yearnings, is the possibility that it ends here. That the next step is too brazen and broad for her small form to manage, that the path may be not only meandering and twilight-obscure, but may also be simply not there.
Today:
I set to work at last on the rest of the applications. Still to go: University of Stillanother State, Dead White Man University, Notastate University.
I calculate that I have written precisely .5% of my term papers, due 14/01.
I get my hair cut.
I ponder the possibility of submitting not a paper on my More book, but rather a title, an epigraph, and a series of excellent footnotes.
A man in Pakistan shoots Benazir Bhutto in the neck and blows himself and twenty-odd others to smithereens. The Conscientious Orientalist is shocked. I, as usual, am not. I wonder, irreverently, if I would be able to call her brave if I did not think her beautiful. I wonder if I would be able to call her brave if she were not a woman.
My father outdoes himself, astonishes me, by referring to Pakistanis (all of them) as “barbarians.”
I watch a televised crowd carry Bhutto’s coffin, hundreds or thousands of people, yelling and weeping and shaking their fists. I wonder whether our American culture would not be improved by a greater proclivity for yelling and weeping and shaking of fists. I watch the fires and the crowds, and listen to my father’s voice, “fucking barbarians.”
Tomorrow:
Home to the 42nd Street library. Hope to get that word count up to, say, 15%. Polish that Stillanotherstate application; click “submit.”
To the Morgan Library, to gaze lovingly at old things, be overawed as I always am that it was once possible to obtain those books as a private collection.
Reunite with the Progressive Schoolteacher, the Rhetorical Tranny, the Foucauldian Bombshell, the Boy Lawyer.
Go, in general, about my business.
My life, by any standard, is a quiet one. My world, miraculously, is at peace. The universe is capable of astonishing incongruities.
The thing about doing a degree in early modern studies, reader, is that your life swiftly goes all early modern, all the time. I’ve no cause to complain — that is, after all, why I’m here, to bury my head in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and rarely to escape them. To attempt to dwell there.
The other day, loitering and smoking, I spoke with a nice young American man who told me he was studying in the Netherlands and urged me to travel there. I told him I had heard Antwerp was nice. He told me that Antwerp is in Belgium. I gave him a sweetly perplexed smile and said that it’s all the same thing, isn’t it, and anyway it belongs to Spain.
These things happen.
Another thing is that this term has organized itself, quite by accident, to be profoundly unqueer. One of my term papers is about Thomas More, for chrissakes.
I happen to like Thomas More. And I love things that are old. But I miss things that are queer, and I miss things that aren’t old.
This afternoon I went to a beautiful talk on Elizabeth Bishop’s Brazil poems in the New Yorker — reader, it was so squeakily modern! Modernists speak differently than their dustier counterparts do — they use a lot more theory-inspired jargon, for one, and they are relatively un-self-conscious about it. In a pleasant, refreshing way. They speak in longer sentences, and more abstractly.
The various programs within English, not to mention the various disciplines, tend to break down into territorial little groups here, so every time I attend a seminar not in early modern English things, I feel like an invading outsider. People look at me, going “who’s that?” They all know each other, they all speak the same language. It’s like observing a species kin to me, yet far removed in space and time.
Today, they were breathtaking, reader, these modernists. They were all so hip and pierced! Some of them weren’t white! Some of them were even American!
One woman with a beautiful accent spoke rapidly and fluidly about Marx and postcolonial economies, smiling through her wild grey hair and over her elegant scarf. They weren’t afraid of sentiment and they weren’t afraid of abstraction. A fight erupted over our positions as self-congratulatory readers looking back at “the past” through the lens of difference. The 1950’s, “past” and distant! Reader!
The print on the handout was in fonts and layouts I grew up with. The New Yorker, reader! It still exists! It takes its very life from a robustly industrialized, incipiently globalized capitalistic consumer society! It even spells things the same way I do! Shiny! Modern! Oh, brave new period!
Wow.
I need to get out more.
Now back to … uh, back to Marian production of the works of Thomas More. Right.
Reader, never mind that I am leaving for England/the United Kingdom/Britain/the burnt-off crust of Europe, or that I am doing so a mere twelve days from now. Never mind it, because we are not going to discuss it.
What we are going to discuss is this neophyte’s personal adage: “The key to loving a place is leaving it.”
Having left my little alma mater twice in the course of my time there, once by force and once by choice, I developed the original of this adage (“The key to loving the Petri Dish is leaving it”) as advice to people who were debating about going abroad, taking time off, doing a semester-long program somewhere else in the States, whathaveyou. GET OUT, I said, or you won’t ever figure out how to use this place, how to inhabit it in the best, most creative way you possibly can.
I have since discovered that this holds not only for crushingly-claustrophobic-unless-used-wisely liberal arts colleges, but also for nations of origin, beloved cities, regions known as “home,” family, and all sorts of other important locales.
The other day I was talking about how I feel about leaving, and realized that most of my American friends who are most down on the States, most likely to say things like “I hate this country” have never really left it. I remembered at that same moment something which I had entirely forgotten: I was an America-hater once, too. And it took the six months of Expatriacy, Round 1 – my semester in Paris – to stomp that out of me.
At this juncture I feel compelled to reassure you that this is not going to turn into a post about how I Wish You Crazy Idealists Wouls Understand That Everything Really Is So Much Better Here Because The American Dream Is Real, Our Freedoms Are Unique And Holy Because We Have Real Democracy, And Critiquing American Culture Is Selfish And Shows You Don’t Appreciate All The Great Things You Have.
What this is about is what it was like to feel, suddenly, the distinctly American identity taking on form and multiple dimensions throughout that first, entirely enchanted, habitation of la Douce France. It took Expatriacy, Round 2 – my more recent seven months in Toulouse – to really get me to enjoy that identity. No, I can’t identify exactly in what this identity consists, or what it means. But it is there, and I like it.
Now, to some extent recognizing this identity, recognizing it as American, and relishing it, makes me a nationalist. Not in the statist Might of the Race sense, but in the good old-fashioned Andersonian sense: because of the various cultural inputs my young brain has received throughout its life in the United States, I imagine that I belong to a community, and through this imagining both my belonging and that community become real.
Living abroad taught me to differentiate between my Americanness — the imagined belonging — and the nationalist-militarist rhetoric of Americanness spouted by the federal government, the religious right, the more general popular right, the liberal élite, and any number of other quaintly reductive categories whence ideological Americana seems to sprout fully formed.
This process of disarticuling my self from some kind of politico-cultural machine has redefined several key things for me. It has redefined my notions of what resistance means, of how acculturation works, of what it means to come from somewhere — the fundamentally historical idea that provenance is important and must be attended to, and sometimes even cherished. In order to come to this redefinition and this cherishing of my Americanness, I have had to leave behind the structures that gave birth to it. The simplest things — adopting the language and the gestures of a new culture, trying on the habits of a new lifestyle, electing to keep some and to discard some, have made clear to me how deeply fashioned I am, and how present and continuous the process of that fashioning is.
All this by way of saying that, yes, the key to loving this country is leaving it, and I am grateful for the opportunities that continue to allow me to do so.
1. A few weeks ago, my splendid friend from wayback, the Conscientious Orientalist, re-departed the United States for his adopted home in Cairo. We had the following exchange on his front porch:
Me: “Here are the 120 Egyptian pounds I’ve been carrying around since I was there in February.”
He: “Don’t you want dollars for them?”
Me: “Nah. Buy me a drink in Dubrovnik.”
Yesterday I bought a copy of Lonely Planet: Croatia and mapped out an itinerary that runs from Budapest through Sarajevo to Dubrovnik, up the Croat coast through Zagreb and back to Budapest. Later in the evening, the CO and I spent a while daydreaming about Dalmatia over Google chat and making our usual run of acidic jokes, projecting hilarious hours of learning Croat, pondering the insane prospect of the two of us hurtling through Bosnian country roads in some half-dead Fiat, already looking with warm nostalgia upon the old, drunk Balkan men with whom the CO will inevitably strike up conversations.
He is the only person in the universe with whom I could even begin to contemplate such a trip. Then he reminded me that I’ve promised to go to Beirut with him, and encouraged me by promising a trip overland through Syria and over the Syrian-Lebanese border (Mouse: “gulp!”), and further promising that should any thing go wrong (Mouse: “What could possibly go wrong…”), we could wait it out in great comfort, because there is (duh) a Dunkin’ Donuts on the Syrian-Lebanese border.
This sounded almost sane to me. Almost.
2. This evening, I reread this post. And then this one. And this one.
3. Today I finally managed to make the British consulate’s website understand that it really ought to give me a visa appointment. Wonder of Weberian Wonders, it fracking gave me an appointment! Take that, International Immigration Bureaucracy.
4. I am currently shopping for luggage. Bless you, L. L. Bean.
5. I’ve been listening to Emmylou Harris all day.
All of this by way of saying: I’ve got it again. The urge to go. That twitching, bouncy state — picture a young woman sitting on her heels on some dirty train station platform somewhere, smoking a cigarette, flipping her hair impatiently out of her eyes as she rocks on the balls of her feet tapping some rhythm on the cover of the novel in her hands, picture her looking over her shoulder and squinting down the long lines of diverging tracks, over and over, checking her watch, tap-tapping her book. The itching state of imminent, anxiously-awaited departure. The secret smile that comes when I think of something as banal as the distinctive look of a consular functionary. The way I can’t stop bouncing onto my tiptoes or clapping my hands every time I think of something I need to get, need to do, need to add to some list or remember to find. The state in which “I’m leaving” begins to sound like a declaration of triumph.
I’m leaving, reader. I’m really doing this. Again. Having done enough of it not to get blindsided, but not enough to be jaded, having had my misbegotten post-college adventure and ready to re-have it in a more sensible, thoughtful, structured way, I can dwell on the splendor and let the rest just wash on over.
One week ago, I stepped off a plane in Salt Lake City. Airport windows revealed awesome vistas of parched mountains. A higher density of white people than I’ve ever seen anywhere else (this includes southern Minnesota and downtown New Eden) surrounded me. I turned to my travelling partner, henceforth Meerkat, and held up my weathered passport. “Shouldn’t I be presenting this to somebody? Haven’t we crossed some border, here?”
We were greeted by the soon-to-be blissfully wedded couple and a little sister we were soon to adopt as our own. We were warned about altitude sickness and the importance of hydrating. I couldn’t stop saying “Everyone is white! Why is everyone white?!” As we waited for our bags, we were further warned about Grandma saying grace at dinner, which led to reminiscing about the various graces we sang at our various-degreees-of-Christian summer camps, which led to the only radical queers in the Salt Lake airport becoming the Kids Singing About Jesus In The Salt Lake City Airport.
“No, really,” I said, brandishing my passport, “are you sure I shouldn’t be presenting this to someone?”
The couple, Radical Schoolteacher and Ninja Poet, drove us through the Utah sunset, the dry, unforgiving landscape glowing rosily in the dying light, to a moutaintop (excuse me, hilltop) overlooking the glittering city lights. I turned to Little Sister and said, “I feel like I’m on the moon.”
You see, reader, my little heart grew up amid the woods and lakes and rivers of the midwest and the Northwoods. She came of age in New England’s creaky, aging hills. The world she slowly discovered in her youth is framed by the Mississippi and the Hudson, the Great Lakes and the Atlantic, the quiet splendor of the Adirondacks and of rolling farmland, the silence of islands and the crashing arrogance of the ocean. The cities she loves are bisected or cradled by great rivers, and she sings for sailboats and canoes. She has no frame of reference for the imposing aridness, for the haughty mountains of Utah.
Meerkat and I were welcomed into Schoolteacher’s home, where all were amused by our displacedness, and fell into a long sleep. My dreams were moonscapes, and when I woke I thought there could not be enough water in the world to dispel the scratches in my sealevel-dwelling throat. Mama Radical gave us directions to a lake in the Uinta moutains and the keys to her ancient LeSabre, accompanied by a warning about moutain driving that made me gulp. I took the wheel and Meerkat and I, armed with seventy-five times our weight in water, set off east on I-80 to see what we could do to understand this landscape so foreign to our Northeastern blood.
It’s strange to try to deliver up this experience in words. Rolling down a nearly empty interstate beneath cliffs at once forbidding and somehow kindly, the windows of that brilliant old car rolled down and various Utah radio stations playing Tim McGraw on a loop, that wild landscape rendered me entirely inarticulate. A steep ascent brings us to a wide and dusty vista that snatches the breath right out of our throats; around a bend and suddenly a descent into a canyon has my knuckles white on the steering wheel as my head spins with the adjustment to the idea of “altitude.”
All I can say to Meerkat as one unassimilable view follows another is: “This is serious fucking shit, dude. This is serious fucking shit.”
I am rarely at a loss, word-wise. It is those inarticulate hours that most bewildered me. As Meerkat and I continued our day, stopping frequently to gape, to scramble up and down a rocky “river” fall, to stroll around a little mountain lake, we began to adjust to the majesticness of it all, but still my head spun and still my heart could not find the thing she wished to speak.
We drove back through ranch country, past ski lodges and under those canyons, down a highway equipped with all the terrifying warnings proper to moutain regions. Images of falling rock, of trucks tilting on sloping curves, the horrifying sight of a truck escape ramp which had my eyes glued to my rearview mirror for the duration of the drive — this, I thought, is some serious fucking shit.
Mama Radical explained to us this sentiment in reverse, about how when she drove the Schoolteacher, her eldest daughter, out to her New England college for the first time, she kept saying as they drove up the Merritt Parkway, “But where is Connecticut? I can’t see Connecticut. All I can see are trees!”
She’s right: space works differently out West than it does in my cosy, manageable New England. From those moutains, you can see, or think you see, something you can call “Utah.” The landscape may warn of thirst and hardship, may dwarf your sense of your own magnificence, but it is visible. You can spatialize yourself, relate your little body to the vastness you see laid out before you. New England holds you close, envelops you in forests, and you take one step at a time, discovering space in small doses and only taking at each step as much as your body and your eyes can absorb.
How can this be? I wondered as our week progressed, as we wandered over mountains and through the wide unclaustrophobic spaces of the city and our skin changed color under the Utah sun. How can I claim this land, as I am meant to, as “my country”? This is and is not my America. I am a foreigner here and yet there are signs that I can read: the ranchers in their hats and mustaches, the wild mountain passes, the sunburned mothers with their weathered faces. I have seen these things in films and books and I am told that they are the stuff of “my country.” I can see this space and myself in it, I begin to feel the dust and the wind and the ache of the sun even in my riverish blood, and I begin to think that perhaps I might someday claim it.
But then of course there was the redeye flight and the aerial view of eastern lakes at dawn, of the glowing Hudson stretching far away north beyond sight, and the sweep of the Atlantic coming into view and the irrepressible smile and leap of my heart. A clear and cool and perfect New England morning swept across my tired eyes as I drove home, and the air felt heavy and dank and smelled of trees. I call this “home.”
In other news, I am moving to England in three weeks. Uh, what?!
I’m only marginally employed, hanging here on a hinge between adventures, and so to keep my brain and soul from total atrophy, I am beginning to devise ridiculous tactics.
These include, but are not limited to:
– Compulsive, if erratic, reading habits already noted.
– A newfound obsession with figuring out How Washington Works. It ain’t pretty, and I’m not sure I’m glad to know what I know now.
– A love affair. With my food processor. To the dismay of chickpeas everywhere.
– Utterly still, meditative hours of music. I currently have all the masses I possess lined up in iTunes. There are only ten of them, but something has grabbed my gut and is hanging on strong, and the loop — which runs from Ockeghem through Mozart — is haunting and mind-altering.
– Relatedly, going to church. Don’t tell, but I went to Mass on Sunday morning. There’s a church nearby that does the Latin thing. As usual, I was less shocked and awed than very simply, viscerally pissed off. And there was no music. Censers, but no music. So much for that effort.
– Discovering to my delight that Beloved Library allows Petri Dish alums to set up an account; abusing my spine with carrying of books.
– Compulsively studying for both GREs. Multiplying fractions late into the night. Hauling around my Nortons.
– Running a household. Learning the self-affirming value of the hard “I-slaved-for-hours-over-whatever” glare. Paying bills with other people’s money. Teaching my father where the dishwasher is.
– Writing. Writing and writing and writing. Translating Ronsard. No, I won’t share. What Sudoku and crosswords do for half the world, what chess problems do for crazy old men, tinkering with translation does for me.
– And, of course, daydreaming. Most of these reveries are visions of a rain-, tea- and gin-soaked, booksmelling life in the United Kingdom. Which leads me to my final, and most consuming, activity:
– Fretting. Staring at the ceiling, tapping my fingers on my belly, smoking cigarette after cigarette and fretting.
Qui serait assez insensé pour mourir sans avoir fait au moins le tour de sa prison? Vous le voyez, frère Henri, je suis vraiment un pélerin. La route est longue, mais je suis jeune.
– M. Yourcenar, L’Œuvre au Noir
“Inchoate” is one of my favorite words, and here I have an opportunity for it. I record the following here only because telling it all to my hard drive alone is depressing. So, some notes from the past few weeks.
As I slowly prepare to leave France, to return to the States, perhaps to leave again, I begin to accept the in-betweenness of my current life. There is here, there will be there, and third and fourth places that now merely glimmer dimly in the distance. I have said before that these feelings of disorientation, confusion, moderated chaos, are what I sought, after all, in coming to France in the first place, and I am at last learning to be grateful for them.
I cracked and bought a book. I told myself before I left for London that I was to make no more purchases — I haven’t room in my suitcases. But Tschann Libraire has mystic powers. When I am in Paris I make a point of spending at least an hour amid its splendid selection, its disheveled middle-aged white male clientele, its sour-faced, supremely knowledgable staff. And there in the corner on the bottom shelf in littérature française, my hands fell on an item I couldn’t resist. The superb smoothness, the fine, clean design of a volume from Gallimard’s Biblos imprint. The brittle, sweet crispness of a thousand pages well bound. Yourcenar’s memoirs. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I had to. I simply had to.
It is lovely to think that I may soon have this problem again. How, for example, am I to get my mammoth Longman Milton and Spenser across the ocean? Yes — what a lovely problem to have. We cross our fingers, we scribble our lines, and we wait.
I carry a warmth with me from this recent trip that somehow doesn’t wane. I am grateful for this travel, and I am grateful for friends and fine food and for tea and music and long walks and for sunlight and for the kind old bouquiniste in the rue St Jacques who indulged me though she knew I couldn’t afford her wares.
I am worried about Madame, about her pride and her age and her upcoming potential surgery. For the first time, the other day, she said “tu” to me. Sure, it was to berate me for berating her, but it brought tears anyhow.
I wrote in an e-mail three years ago, “Paris, c’est un conte de fée.” Remains true. I love it anyway and always will, but this city will never be wholly mine nor I wholly this city’s. I cannot stay here — there is something oppressive in this joy — I cannot stay here, it flees from me and I am forever fleeing from it, and for that I love it all the more.
And then, and then — surprise, shock, wonder, heart-pounding éclats que je ne saurais décrire — in a stairwell, this encounter. Two women, or a girl and a woman, or who knows, all but knock each other over — “oh, pardon!” and “excusez-moi!” — and then the sudden recognition — “you!” The heart-pounding, the sudden smile, the awkward bises, suddenly I am, yes, just a girl again and she touches my arm and she smiles “mais ça fait longtemps!” And oui, ça fait longtemps and qu’est-ce que tu fais là? And je vis en France maintenant, ou bien… Sérieux?! Sérieux. And she smiles again, and that awkwardness, et toi tu fais quoi? And let’s-get-together-sometime and oh, mais je n’ai plus tes coordonnés… [As I say it I can't help hearing "corps donné, je n'ai plus, je n'ai pas ton corps donné..."] And she writes me her coordonnés, corps donné, and I see her name written there in her hand and I stumble over the words trying to form, “Ça fait plaisir de te voir…” plaisir, plaisir, plaisir… I stumble on the “plaisir” and stare dumbly at her name, written there, in her hand. Bon, beh, à bientôt, j’espère! Oui, j’espère… bon, au revoir! Au revoir and goodbye and I stumble down the stairs and into the sunshine, my hand on my heart, clutching my beautiful Gallimard volume, goodbye and oui, ça m’a fait grand plaisir.
And so, flight to the closest possible refuge — the cimetière du Montparnasse. These dead have rescued me more than once, and they do again. They don’t talk, thank god, they don’t stumble over their words and they don’t give a damn about me or my girlishness or the fluttering of my little heart. Simone, salut, je me mets là un instant, si ça te dérange pas, juste le temps de respirer un peu. Reading in the sunshine in a cemetery, smoking though I oughtn’t, smiling suddenly in the sunshine in a cemetery. A young woman approaches, nods to me, salutes the tombstone, rolls a cigarette and leaves it as an offering. If only these dead could smirk — and perhaps, after all, they do.
Have I mentioned music?
Alchemical combination of book, cigarette, gin, music gives a sudden immediacy to the wonder and the simple joy of being young and free and with the means to do as I please. It is for the best, suddenly say the book and the cigarette and the gin and the music, this itinerant life. You are young and free and you are beautiful; you have language and space and time on your side; you are beautiful and young and the world you want is there and you will have it. And what’s more, you, slight and hardly apprehensible thing, transparent and fleeting and frequently fleeing though you are, you are loved.
It is good, however, that these moments do not last or they would crush us. And so I return and fall into a long and dreamless sleep and rise into a dreamless waking and that is that.
I’ve been avoiding posting here, since I know that the life of this blog is coming to a swift close, and besides am not feeling particularly thoughtful, reflective, or any of those other things that lead to thoughtful reflections on closure.
Also because the only thing I’ve done lately, aside from contracting a nasty cold, was go to Cairo. There is a lot I could say about that trip, but I have difficulty saying most of it.
Key points:
– Reinforcement of the idea that people who have not traveled outside their home countries really ought to. For one, and here I’m in agreement with Liam, frequently our liberal arts educations are not up to the task of interpreting these experiences for us. No amount of jargon can describe what it is like to be an unveiled white woman in cargo pants walking through the dirt-and-cobble streets of medieval Cairo, carrying a camera, meeting the eyes of the men sitting on their stoops, the men driving their donkey carts. No amount of jargon can help me to find a way of describing this that is not “stepping into another century”; nothing can explain this modernity to me; nothing in my course readers or scrawled class notes can close the gap between me and these men whose eyes I meet. I smile, that is all. I have so much to learn.
Furthermore, there is a delicacy with which a certain young, radical demographic treats not only the developing world but all the world that is not Anglo-America and Old Europe. This delicacy is frequently paired with acidic invective against Anglo-America and Old Europe. There are many problems here. Travel – conscientious, thoughtful travel – can solve some of them. This will be discussed at greater length elsewhere, when my head is not quite so stuffed.
– Re-realization of the strength of West-Colored Glasses. Can we ever take them off? Re-color them? Perhaps not. In any case, another reason to travel more frequently.
– A certain amount of irony is crucial to survival, especially when one is out of one’s native zone. It is a slippery slope from irony to disdain, from sardonic to patronizing, but as long as one remains conscious of this – as long as one is a conscientious traveller – laughter can be an excellent vehicle for experience.
– Perspective. Perspective, perspective, perspective. And the concrete realization that the problems with my life in Toulouse are not merely life-abroad problems, but the result of faulty planning. The notion that next time I will do this differently and do it well. Sudden thoughts of straying out of my Old Europe comfort zone (abbetted, of course, by Liam in his role as my rusty conscience): whatever happened to that oft-slighted dream of learning Russian and taking off for Moscow or Petersburg? I am only half-joking. Push me far enough in the right direction and I might just do it.
I’d post photos but teh internetz is putting up too much of a fight.
I promise thoughtfulness and reflection. Later.
I left the house this morning at 6:30 wearing tons of clothes and carrying a mugful of coffee since I don’t have a go-cup.
I waited for two and a half hours in the twenty-degree air outside the préfecture. I smoked a whole bunch of cigarettes, read Céline, listened to the laughter and ranting around me. Once inside, I had several outbursts. I got what I wanted and left, lighthearted and delirious with the joy of being done, done, done with immigration bureaucracy. I knocked on wood the moment I sat down at a café. The waiter, amused, filled my own funny green mug with the most delicious café crème I’ve ever imbibed. I read some more Céline. I counted the number of passers-by I found “attractive enough” (approx. 8.5). I studied the whirly velour upholstery of the chair across from me. Céline made me laugh.
I went baby-clothes shopping. I went into Hermès looking like a homeless person wearing all that clothing and my hair all floppy from my bureaucratic morning and smelling of cigarettes and the stares I got and the sneer of the doorman drove me straight out again. (Too bad for my mum, who’d have got a scarf otherwise.)
I went home and took a nap.
Then I talked to my (scarfless) mum.
– Antonio’s brain cancer is worse; he’s dying quickly. He’s 48. Patty married him after two disastrous, abusive marriages because he, after a lonely life, couldn’t stand not to marry the woman he worshipped. They adore each other, wildly. They got married in Vegas. He’s changed Patty’s life. They were happy. One year after their marriage, brain tumor. Radiation, chemo, he did all right. One year after that, Antonio suddenly grows an enormous, inoperable tumor. It’s Christmas and Antonio, who’s 48 and the love of Patty’s life, is going to die.
– Powerful, laughterful Debbie who recovered from brain tumors and seeming-happily renewed her vows with her seeming-splendid husband this summer filed for divorce on Thursday because the bastard’s been beating the shit out of her for years.
– The ex-parent of the two (more) golden retrievers Jeff’s adopted is a three-time breast cancer survivor. She finally got married to a wonderful man. She warned him that her health was chancy at best. He married her because he loved her. They had two golden retrievers. Then he dropped dead of an aneurism.
– Reflection: in the past month, my father’s estranged sister Jean died of an illness none of us knew about, and our very close Uncle Lou died of being 98 years old. Jean’s face was pockmarked. Uncle Lou drove small me around in his red-leather-upholstered Cadillac and knew about Shakespeare.
I told my mom about the préfecture to cheer us up. We laughed, we said I love you, we hung up.
I went out for more Christmas presents. I listened to the Nields and skipped happily across the Pont Neuf. The holiday decorations throughout the city are gaudy but warm, some are beautiful. The illustrated edition of Voyage au bout de la nuit that I wanted to get for Chris turned out to be hideous and cartoony. I flirted happily with the bookseller girl about it. I ate a pain au chocolat.
(This is a kind of delirium. A kind of insanity, a psychic disjuncture or a happy schizophrenia that I’ve caught over here.)
I wandered through the quartier des antiquaires and stumbled onto the place in front of St Etienne, where I’d just been, leaving the préfecture. I was struck. I went inside. It’s one of the most beautiful churches I’ve ever seen. Awe struck me into a pew to… kneel. I don’t know how to pray. So for the first time ever I lit a candle and for the first time since I was thirteen and went to Mass with my Nonna, I crossed myself and whispered something about healing and injustice and care for the weak. I don’t know how to pray and it came out as an angry hiss and by the look on her face the Virgin took it badly.
Suddenly I felt wretched and turned and all but ran back out into the sun.
Antonio is Catholic. I lit the candle for him.
I bought gloves for myself and for Lucile, and hilarious music boxes that play the Marseillaise for miscellaneous folks and failed for my parents and failed for others, too. So I paid way too much and in euros at that for a gorgeous dress which I have no occasion to wear but I look divine and a little diabolical too in that dress so I bought it, and besides it goes with my boots and maybe I should have a New Year’s party.
I bought some beers and came home and smoked some cigarettes and put on Tori Amos live and ate a yogurt.
I’m a legal resident of the Republic of France. Antonio is dying. I live a spectacular, almost-adventurous Life Abroad. Antonio is dying and Lou is dead and Jean disappeared one day and never came back. I look spectacular in that dress. Antonio is dying. Somebody on the radio is reading Verlaine to a hip-hop beat and I’m almost done with my beer; the phone is ringing and Antonio is dying. Lou is dead and Debbie’s husband beats the living shit out of her, and the vaults of St Etienne are so striking, and the tapestries, and the disrepair, but I don’t know how to pray. There was a choir practicing in the basement and the soprano just reached me as I stood in the nave gaping and trying to remember how to pray.
Lucile is cooking dinner and lighting candles. Cold and the smell of woodsmoke drift in through the open window.
