by Jim Harrison
It was a very long night. My bedroom faces east but this soon after the winter solstice it is vain to anticipate the rising sun with the mind’s “Hurry up, please.” On the wall to my left is a grand eighteenth-century map of Mexico, enough askew in its design to make it more interesting. I prefer maps to suggest rather than tell me where to go, and I could easily see that a topographer had a more pleasurable life before highways and railroads. They could concentrate on important things like mountains, valleys, rivers and oceans, villages and cities without all those lines drawn toward them to suggest the easiest way to get there. If I traced all my travels in Mexico as Nelse did of the western United States it would look like a giant, randomly constructed bird’s nest.
Next to the map is a small painting by my father’s friend Davis who fell to his death from a cliff near El Salto not far from Durango. I took the painting from my father’s bedroom the day after he died. I liked that part of my father’s memoir. Two young men from Nebraska out to paint the world with their soaring hearts. I’ve spent a good deal of time in Durango on mining business, a somewhat eerie place to me, far off the tourist byways, the vast wealth that has been sucked from the local earth. It has always been a city with a specific purpose. I loved the place for the famous and peculiar splendor of its clouds. It is somehow a purer form of Mexico. It was there a few years ago I read the best possible book about Mexico, Octavio Paz’s The Labyrinth of Solitude. While I read there was music out in the garden behind the hotel, and a welter of voices arising from an outdoor Sunday buffet. When I turned the last page of the book I went down to dine and watched the most unimaginably beautiful young woman eating from a spit-roasted pig on her family’s table. She was so beautiful that I instantly lost my appetite. A guitarist played and sang quite nicely directly behind her but she continued chewing away, then became embarrassed and brought her napkin to her face. Her father, a wealthy man who looked like he had murdered a thousand of the less fortunate, dismissed the guitarist with a glance. An older brother joined them and waved at me, a young mining engineer I had met several times. When they had coffee and dessert he came over and asked if it were possible for me to join them. The father was interested in American politics and I did the best I could with barely an opportunity to glance at the daughter who dozed in her chair with her large eyes wide open. I stole a foolish look and missed my lips with my coffee. The father and brother laughed very hard, saying that everyone does that when they look at her. She became fully awake at their laughter and gave me the wide-open but terrifyingly blank look that one receives from zoo animals.
The painting by Davis brought this all back rather simply though it was of a mountain wall suffering from the sun, with the rocky crags losing their edges as if melting in the shimmering heat. It took me years to comprehend this painting, not with my mind but my senses. There was the troubling idea of how many other fine paintings are out there by curious hands that are never justly comprehended. And how could I not feel a total, searing empathy with my father over the death of his friend, the talented, somewhat crazed Davis. But when I look closely at the painting the girl at the Sunday buffet also reappears. That was a number of years ago so I was in my mid-forties. Never have I felt more mortal than when I returned to my room and looked down at my coffee-stained shirt. I laughed but the laughter had a sodden, haunted edge. I went to the window and watched her leave through the garden with her family. There was an obtuse urge to call a helicopter to get me the hell out of there. I supposed that we got older, more fragilely mortal, in terms of unavailable time, time that has fatally passed away from us, and that the ultimate level of beauty had dumbfounded me into seeing mortality in the terms of those rare suicides who stand between the tracks before an oncoming train. The humor came from the idea “Of course, how could you think otherwise.” It was a wonderfully cruel and sensual lesson and I am still daily absorbed in it.
Sleep came and went in the smallest of doses, and I countered raw thoughts and memories with last summer’s vision of swimming with Naomi late one evening in the Niobrara. We had had a bit more dinner wine than usual and jumped around in a state of frolic as if we were teenagers, then made love awkwardly in the car. A smart teenage boy would have brought along a blanket.
There had been a troubling sequence of thoughts of late, most of them just over the lip of consciousness, centering themselves on the notion that if it took a lifetime to understand yourself this certainly must adumbrate my comprehension of those I know. This is not the less troublesome for being so obvious. For instance, I can say I “leaned” toward my mother. I suppose many children favor one parent over the other, and to some extent organize an imaginary war between the two if there’s not an open one going on. I then readily assumed since I favored her I was more “like” my mother but with age this is somewhat less apparent than I had thought for years. I had tended to see my youth as a diorama of us protecting each other but from what? How do you protect a moderately wealthy woman whose only true enthusiasms seemed to be books and alcohol? She had already constructed a rather impermeable shield between herself and the world with these two enthusiasms.
It opened my eyes more widely talking with Nelse who had similar complications with his own mother, at least on the surface. But then he had been quite resistant and combative with his adoptive mother, and his experience appeared to be far less melancholy. It is a strange feeling indeed to become a little angry with your mother only after she has been dead for over forty years. By the time I was fourteen I was her obviously platonic gentleman friend. Like Nelse I had accompanied my mother to France in my mid-teens. She drank an amazing amount of wine though unlike Nelse’s mother her behavior never dissembled. I could never finish a Henry James novel because my mother was a definite throwback to his period, and James’s uncanny perceptions about such women were disturbing to me. Just the other day I recalled the hush with which she subdued my enthusiasms, the elegant irony with which my girlfriends were dismissed. Some women exude great power in their weaknesses. When she was drinking too much in an evening back home John Wesley would take his bed roll, a sack of grub, and head out on horseback if the weather was vaguely permissible. My father would escape to the bunkhouse which he referred to as his office. The art studio of his youth became his land-and-cattle office! But I’d stay in the house enduring her bitter and laconic witticisms when she looked up from a book. I had to wonder how my father’s decorum excluded such difficulties, also the girlfriends he turned to, in his memoir.
I turned on the light, got out of bed, and looked at the first mineral collection my mother gave me one winter in Tucson when I was about seven. It was in a fine, glass-covered mahogany case, including small samples in rows of sedimentary rock, metamorphic rock, various crystals and native elements, sulfides, sulfosalts like the incredible proustite, oxides, including the woeful uraninite, haloids, the improbable sulfates such as barite, and then phosphates, vanadates, uranates, arsenates, and so on.
The problem with this little collection from a half century ago only occurred to me in the past year. At about the same age, probably seven, my father would let me look at the large collection of art books in his den that he had so long ignored. The only stipulation was that I scrub my hands first. It was a preoccupation for rainy days. What I speculated over is that there was some association in my child’s mind between the brilliantly colored and shaped collection of minerals and the hundreds and hundreds of paintings in the books. In the den there was also a painting I loved by the certifiable Charles Burchfield of distorted flowers that owned the colors of a conglomerate of minerals. It was a bit close for comfort to believe that my attraction to geology had begun as basically aesthetic and not unlike my father’s early calling to art. Oh Christ, will it never end, I had thought, and the transparent answer was, “No it won’t,” excepting in the way it ends for everyone.
All insomniacs know that this kind of thinking isn’t the kind that induces sleep. Good sexual memories can turn you into a drowsy mammal
if you exclude the major events. For instance, when sixteen I had accompanied my mother to France under the title of “protector.” Neena spoke fluent French, and was an experienced and somewhat imperious traveler. She was educating me in matters of food and wine though at the time I didn’t care for the grogginess produced by the latter. She’d get up quite late, take a short walk and then there was lunch (too much wine) after which she’d take a long nap, another short walk and dinner (too much wine) after which she’d read herself to sleep. She’d map my own daily itinerary which included long walks, museums, the neighborhoods she had enjoyed at my age. We were staying at the Georges V and since it was June the sky stayed light until late. Her single stricture was that she hoped I wouldn’t leave my adjoining room after we returned from dinner, usually just before dark. Paris at night was a dangerous place, she insisted, though I later figured she meant the “women of the night,” or prostitutes who might harm her vulnerable son. I didn’t really chafe at this as our dinner wine and my extremely long walks made me sleepy enough. Then one day along the Quai des Grands Augustins I bought a risqué book of photos that raised my neck hairs, popped my skull and shortened my breath. I listened to her sleeping through the door, then headed out though not all that adventurously. I had only made it to an adjacent street, Rue Marbeuf, when I was approached by an attractive women in her thirties wearing dark clothes but with sparkling eyes. Her price was quite high as it was a good neighborhood, but I used the money I had reserved for John Wesley’s present. It was quite simply wonderful. When I left her room, likely only a half hour later, I shed tears of happiness. John Wesley would be thrilled by the story and I’d give him the book of photos that had urged me out into the night, but then the next day my mother had evidently entered my room while I was out because the book was gone.
This fond memory produced the wakefulness that comes after touching an electric fence so I got up, put on my glasses and studied my wall map of Mexico. I had preferred smaller cities like Durango and Zacatecas to the larger, though I did care for Guadalajara, Oaxaca, and Veracruz, the latter reminding me of a brief trip to Cuba just before their revolution. I was eighteen when I first visited the National Geological Museum in Mexico City, and caught the disease of wandering this country though it became a core part of my livelihood. Before the Mexican Revolution the American presence in mining in that country was dominant, less so afterward. I often regretted that I hadn’t had the adventures of the early exploratory sojourners like the great gentleman Morris Parker but so far as I know no one had ever adjusted to the age in which they live. Gem minerals like opal and agate interested me minimally compared to the thousands of less obvious varieties. I was a true goner when I saw the caves of selenite crystals, some eight feet long, at the Naua mine in Chihuahua. I was also thrilled to see the aftereffects of the great Paricutin volcano soon after it began erupting. People in general have little knowledge of critical metals but I doubt this is very important. Once at a dreary geological convention which I was obligated to attend I was amused that our group, drowning in its own obsessions, was to be followed by the Aluminum Extruders of America, who doubtless had their own blind spots. I suppose I was a bit of an exception for a geologist in that the human, also the flora and fauna, landscape eventually fascinated me more than what was to be found underground.
A friendly, somewhat overeducated twit once told me that the reward of patience is patience. On the surface this isn’t a very appealing or interesting idea. The man himself complained bitterly when his dessert came tardily, but the thought itself was quite valuable during thousands of hours of legal proceedings and hearings concerning whether or not a deceased person’s mining claims or stock have any value in the settlement of an estate. Of course the pleasure was visiting the mine itself. Most swindles occur when people don’t transcend the paperwork and see the reality it supposedly represents. I eventually learned through patience not to waste these endless hours of legal babble. The original barrier was the ability to reduce the plethora to the teaspoon of gruel that was the actual measure of its content. There can be a wonderful substratum of thinking going on beneath the banal tonnage of human behavior. Perhaps our real uniqueness is that our minds can escape the zoos we’ve built but other creatures’ minds can’t, though who knows what mental devices they use to endure the suffering we visit upon them? The mind by itself must discipline itself to open wide enough to allow the soul to clap its hands and sing. The dark comic aspect is in our resistance to the nature of our minds, pretending we have no more freedom than a train on its predestined tracks.
Now it’s four A.M. and Carlos on his dog cushion wants me to turn off the light and go to sleep. Both his father and grandfather were what Jewish folk call “kvetches” and Carlos takes it to another level. A simple tiny lizard near his water bowl out on the patio defiles and enrages his sense of order. His eyes are dark and glittery now looking at me, saying night is the time to sleep, that’s why it’s dark, or as they so often say in New York City, “Give me a break.” I tell him that long drives don’t lead to sleep but then he refuses to ride in a vehicle. His lifelong job is solely to keep an eye on the property. He has never bitten anyone but his appearance is such that he’s never had to. He’s baleful as a marble Gorgon.
I turn off the light and organize my memory around the best sleeps of my life: dawn on the boulder-strewn beach near Anconcito, Ecuador, when I drifted off staring upward at a great gyre of frigate birds (they fish at sea but if they fall into or inadvertently land on the water they die), or tailing a lovely but obtuse heiress from her hotel in Paris to a country house in the Morvan region of Burgundy, where Caesar had decided that Gaul was divided into three parts, finding her too drunk in the evening to sign a paper that said I had explained to her that a family mine near Lampazos in Coahuila was worthless but inhabited by countless millions of arachnids, what we call daddy longlegs spiders. We walked country lanes for hours until we were quite lost and there were no houses, and no passing cars to flag down, and we slept away the rest of the warm June night in a meadow adjacent to a forest, waking up covered with dew and surrounded by a profusion of wildflowers, a farmer driving us back to the manor with us standing awkwardly next to him on his tractor. She died the following October in a sports car going over a hundred miles per hour out in Brittany, like the death of the genius Camus. And then the best sleep of all with Naomi on her spring vacation when we flew to Mexico City, thence in a rental car to Patzcuaro near Uruapan in Michoacan to see the forested mountainside carpeted with what they said were over twenty million monarch butterflies readying themselves for the long flight north, and the way we slept back at the simple pensione with the susurration of the millions of butterflies still audible in our ears, an imponderable gift like the moonlight itself.
But then I stopped just short of burying some dreams when my consciousness floated back to Loreto and my niece’s late-night call from Key West saying that Duane had committed suicide. I made my way down the patio steps and across the sand to the Sea of Cortez, lit dimly by the thin slip of the new moon now as distant as my only possible son. I never admitted to Dalva that twice in the years just previous to his suicide I had had him traced, first to Cypremort, Louisiana, and then to Biloxi. I even had photos from Biloxi of Duane in a very old pick-up and a battered horse trailer, and one coming out of a convenience store with a six-pack looking like a fearful version of death itself. The private detective, also a veteran, had managed to strike up a conversation with Duane in a shrimpers’ bar where Duane had said how much he had enjoyed his several tours of fighting in Vietnam and had “felt sad” when he became too shot up to continue. It is not widely known what enthusiastic and valorous soldiers the Sioux had been for this nation in the wars of this century. If you allow it, the irony here will pound on you with the subtlety of a sledgehammer.
When Dalva had arrived in Loreto I was trying to get over the worst year of my life which had included the garden-variety illnesses of a severe kidney infection, a gal
l-bladder operation and, by far the most painful, a severe depression. The first two I could endure like any sick dog but the last, as many know, was akin to losing your mental feet and hands. The effort of trying to prop up a madwoman for a month when I had so miserably lost my way was the most difficult thing I had ever done. Oddly, when she was somewhat recovered so was I, which comprises a not impenetrable mystery. She was a version of my beloved dead brother turned into the loveliest of young women. Several times when she came weeping to my bed and I held her, there was a primitive ambivalence that made the brain roar so that I bit my lip until it bled to stop myself from furthering the insanity.
It was now six A.M. and this didn’t bring sleep any more than a rifle being fired outside one’s bedroom window by an unknown hand. I rechecked my addled mind for the time zone and dialed Naomi in the dark, not to further addle poor Carlos though he growled when I began talking. The conversation was wonderfully simple and consoling at the onset. In the Sandhills it was seven A.M., a Sunday morning, a slight thaw had arrived and she could hear water dripping from the icicles hanging from the eaves, and her crow was calling out from the garage. She was going to make herself potato pancakes as she always did on Sundays, take a long walk, then go to church. She had played a lengthy, competitive game of double solitaire with Dalva the night before and Nelse was returning from Lincoln in time for dinner with some fish if he managed to remember. I mentioned my insomnia and she suggested a long walk, as always. I said that as I had gotten older I had lost my inclination for night walking. She laughed and said that she had always felt there were more ghosts afoot in the daylight, another, she said, of Lundquist’s convincing theories. My breath shortened and I said that partly because of local difficulties I was thinking of spending eight months in her neighborhood, say from April to December. There was a mutually breathless pause, and then she said she would be pleased to shock the whole area by having me live with her. I could even tend her garden if she was away, but then we better think this over. I said that I had already thought it over for far too long. She said a schoolteacher couldn’t very well “live in sin” in her area but it would be fun to test the waters during the last two months of her career. We agreed once again that though we were technically older at least our brains didn’t feel that way. I asked her to meet me in Denver, our old trysting place, the following weekend to talk it over. When we said good-bye I impulsively said, “I love you,” and she replied after an awkward pause that she’d have to learn again to say that to a man after so many years.
