In America

by Susan Sontag

9 September

  In haste. The start of our trip was a fiasco. The Colón was very small—we would have been more comfortable sleeping in tents on the deck than in its fetid tiny cabins below—and maintained with shameless negligence. After two days at sea, the main steampipe exploded: it took us twice as long to crawl back to the Hoboken docks! You can imagine the dismay of our party, and the reproaches of Danuta and Cyprian, who long to arrive as quickly as possible. It seems that some of the others also wanted to take the train, but no one had the courage to oppose me. I should feel a little guilty. Perhaps I do. No, I think not. You know how I hate to change my mind, to give up something once I have decided to do it. We were pledged to going by sea.

  Each day I commit to memory at least twenty new English words. Seaworthy—isn’t that a lovely word?

  After a brief wait in Hoboken we departed again on another paddle steamer, larger and better fitted, the Crescent City. The trip passed without incident. At sunset the passengers would gather on the deck for the unison singing of folk songs such as “Darling, I Am Growing Old” and “In the Sweet Bye and Bye”; it was soothing to the nerves to join them. Until the last days, when the ship veered eastward to pass between Cuba and Haiti, we were never out of sight of one of the American states.

  This morning we disembarked at the port on the Caribbean side of the isthmus, which is on a little sand-covered island about a kilometer long and connected to the mainland by the railway embankment. I expected a town. It is a village with only one street, or rather one long row of houses mostly occupied by stores whose thuggish-looking proprietors all wear flat straw hats and white pajama suits—and is unspeakably ugly. As for the heat, forget my earlier complaints; this is beyond anything we endured before. N’en parlons plus!—one must simply surrender oneself to it. For a while it was raining and we were obliged to take shelter in a sinister grogshop, where we learned from an inebriated old Negress that the rainy season here, which begins in April, lasts nine months! The rain has stopped for now, and we have come outside to dispose ourselves on wet chairs in what passes for a café. Everything is wet. The air is wet. The beetles—there are beetles everywhere—are wet. It is so humid that I could wring out my blouse and deepen the puddles at my feet. Plump dusky women, beautiful in purple and red garments, promenade up and down before our shy gaze. And vultures too, strolling and flopping about with impunity: because they eat the dead rats and the refuse everyone throws into the street, it is forbidden to shoot them. I don’t know where the other passengers have put themselves. Bogdan and Cyprian have gone to fetch water and tropical fruits for our two-hour train ride through swamp and jungle to the other side of the isthmus.

  So, imagine me sipping a glass of tea laced with rum at my rusty table, looking with impatience and amusement at my charges. Wanda sitting across from me, sighing loudly. Barbara and Aleksander, their heads down on their table, too weary even to complain. Danuta off somewhere with the little girls, who have diarrhea. Jakub and Piotr at another table, both drawing. Jakub says this is a painter’s paradise—now he will wish to linger in Panama! Piotr’s drawing is a map: he has just announced that when he grows up he will dig a shipping canal across the isthmus. He seems already grown up to me, Henryk. You would be astonished to see how changed he is by this trip, less babyish, indeed quite the little man. Now it is he who takes Aniela by the hand and tries to comfort her. The poor girl is terrified. Our friends are more stoical, but I know they are shocked by how exotic everything is. Barbara has just inquired in a tremulous voice if there are many Africans in California! I shall transcribe for you what is being said right now.

  Piotr (jumping up): “No, Indians!”

  Barbara: “But aren’t they black?”

  Piotr: “No, red!”

  Barbara: “Red?”

  Aleksander: “Don’t be silly, Barbara.”

  Wanda: “I’m covered with mosquito bites!”

  Jakub: “And don’t forget the yellow people.”

  Barbara: “Yellow people!!”

  Jakub: “Yes, Chinese. And the men have a long black braid down their backs.”

  Aniela (wailing): “Oh, Madame, are we going to China? You didn’t tell me we were going to China!”

  Now I shall have everything to do to calm her.

  Later

  Bought a parasol and a pair of sandals. Blister. See Bogdan and Cyprian far away, arms laden, coming toward us. Starting to rain again. Danuta’s girls are crying. A hideous giant brown cockroach ambling across the table; Wanda shrieking. Owner of the café laughing at Wanda. Cucaracha! he shouts, hurling himself at the table, brandishing a towel. My first word of Spanish. Henryk, it’s just flown away. Flying cockroaches, Henryk.

  Train about to leave.

  11 September

  aboard the Constitution

  Henryk, I have written you a letter of truly American proportions.

  And now I can’t think of anything to say. The coast of Mexico is— No, you don’t want guidebook descriptions from me.

  But is it I, your Maryna, who is writing to you? I boasted to you of my desire to change, but I was not prepared for the change the trip itself has already wrought on me. I swim in vacancy. The rigors and distractions of traveling are my only theme. I see why neurasthenics are advised to travel. I scarcely think about myself at all anymore. There are only practical questions. My inner life is quite evaporated. Poland, the stage, seem very far away.

  The next time I write will be from California. Henryk, can you imagine that?

  Your

  M.

  Five

  CALIFORNIA. Santa Ana, the river; Heim, home. Anaheim. Germans. Poor German immigrants from San Francisco who came south twenty years ago to colonize, to farm, to prosper. Stolid, frugal German neighbors. Surprised to see we are so many, and not all related to one another, to share one small house on the outskirts of their town. They ask how many guns we have. They ask if we are a religious sect. They ask if our men can help with the digging of a new irrigation ditch. They ask if Piotr will be attending the school, or will we be keeping him at home to help with the farmwork. Of course he’ll go to school! The house, of banal sycamore boards instead of adobe bricks, is too small—what could Julian and Ryszard have been thinking!—with every floor except the kitchen completely carpeted, apparently an American custom. Yes, we are here to make this new life together, yes. But with all this adjacent emptiness—America is nothing if not spacious—it’s absurd that we should be so crowded …

  They have a rousing view of the Santa Ana range to the east and the San Bernardino Mountains farther north and east. To the back and sides of the house are tamaracks, pepperwood, fig trees, and a live oak. Beyond is a field of tall grass where shocks of hay and maize are drying in the sun, and a vineyard that stretches on and on—everything that looks away from the house is splendid. Closer views are more deflating. The fenced-in front yard with its cypresses, shaggy grass, and scatter of roses looked, Maryna said, like a poorly kept small graveyard.

  “A graveyard, Mama? A real graveyard?”

  “Oh, Piotr,” she said, laughing, “you mustn’t listen to everything I say.”

  But they were listening, all of them, they were waiting for her to cue them, remind them, overwhelm them, steady them with her unwavering intentness. It was her certainty, compounded by her powers of self-absorption, and her impatience with their occasional lapses into faintheartedness, her barely concealed exasperation with their frailties, her never being wholly satisfied with their best efforts, above all her silences, admirable intimidating silences, her standing aside from the common chatter, not responding to a trivial observation or conventional social nicety or an unnecessary question (for that’s all it was), probably not even hearing what had been said, that made them want to please her, made them feel they would not want to be anywhere else on earth than here with her, acting out her vision.

  But how to create the utopian household on so cramped, so ungenerous a stage? First, by making do and putting u
p with—skills Maryna had mastered during the early years of touring in Heinrich’s troupe throughout small-town Poland (those bare-bones theatres, those tumble-down lodgings); and the present discomforts would soon be allayed. Yes, Maryna assured everyone the morning after their arrival, there would be a second, adobe house: she and Bogdan would ask around in the village for Mexican laborers to help them build it. In the meantime … Danuta and Cyprian and their girls must have the large bedroom, she and Bogdan the second bedroom, Wanda and Julian the smallest of the three bedrooms. Piotr would sleep on the parlor sofa; Aniela on a camp bed in a nook in the kitchen. Barbara and Aleksander gamely accepted assignment to a storage shack not far from the corral; lumber, ladders, barrels of nails, paint buckets, lathes, hammers, and saws into the barn. Maryna wished she could sleep in the barn, just for the first days, alone. The space she coveted, quite separate from animals and farm equipment and hayloft, was cozily furnished with rugs, saddles, mattings, harnesses, and coyote skulls … but, no, she could not do this to Bogdan. Our two bachelors, Ryszard and Jakub, in the barn.

  Leaving the unpacking and the care of the three children to Aniela, the newcomers had been shown about the land by the family renting it to them and toward the end of the first day felt they had taken possession of it with all their senses. They had welcomed into their nostrils a rich assault of barnyard and plant odors, they had tramped the amply watered earth, fingering its bounty of vines laden with Mission grapes, they had knelt at the edge of a ditch and passed their hands through the water. Just beyond the vineyard was nature in a more armored, truculent mood: a vast solemn plain dotted with cactus and scrub, steeped in silence. They gazed out at the deep-blue sky and, as the sun hovered nearer and nearer the mountain’s crest, feeling the need to absorb in quiet their surfeit of new impressions, with no more forethought than precedes sinking into a chair and staring at the ceiling or taking off for a stroll in a leafy park, they drifted apart, and one by one wandered into the desert.

  No landscape, not even the swampy jungle of the Isthmus of Panama, had struck any of them as this awesomely strange. And they were not being borne through it, receiving it as a view, but walking in it, on it, for it was all pale surface, the sky so lofty and the ground so level, and they had never felt as erect, as vertical, their skin brushed by the hot Santa Ana wind, their ears lulled by the oddly intrusive sound of their own footfalls. Pausing, they could hear the hiss of skinny desert-colored creatures scurrying along the pebbly surface. Slithery fanged creatures (a snake!), but down there, speeding off. Hardly anything is near anything here: those slouching braided sentinels, the yucca trees, and bouquets of drooping spears, the agaves, and the squat clusters of prickly pears, all so widely spaced, so unresembling—and nothing had to do with anything else. Each alone, each separate. The sense of jeopardy that couldn’t altogether be stifled (was that a scorpion?) quickened their pace for a while, as if they thought they might soon be arriving somewhere. In the clear air the mountains looked deceptively near. And how small, when they turned around for a moment to see how far they’d gone, their little green world. They walked on, lost in the brightness of their sensations, walked and walked: the mountains came no closer. Their fears had long since subsided. The purity of the vista, its uncompromising bleakness, seemed first like a menace, then an excitement, then a numbing, then a different arousal. Their real initiation into the seductive nihilism of the desert had begun. The soundless, odorless, monochrome landscape, so drastically untenanted, had the same effect on everyone: an intoxicating impression of aloneness, which gradually gave way to a more active assent to the experience of solitude. All were visited by a yearning something like Maryna’s—to be alone, really alone (what if I, what if she, what if he…?)—and allowed themselves to imagine the disappearance, without drama, without guilt, of those nearest to them, somewhere out here, too. And isn’t to imagine to desire? The surrender to the desiccating of feeling was swift but it palled almost as rapidly, as something, a deeper fear, made them pull away from it, purged, chastened, and then it was time to turn around and walk back to dampened land and their moist lives.

  Only one among them, wandering about in the same empty-headed daze, had excluded herself from the tapering off of this delicious, subversive fantasy, for despite the warnings to everyone by Ryszard and Julian to stay clear of the cactus plants, Wanda had been unable to restrain her curiosity about what it would feel like to touch one, and chose the downy-looking pad of a beaver-tail. “It doesn’t have any spines,” she wailed. “How could I know it would have these horrible—” she whimpered. “But both hands, Wanda? You had to use both hands?” Julian fumed. He had brought her to the porch, to the tweezers and the candle. “Nobody on earth but you would think of touching a cactus with—” Wincing and sighing, he stood behind her, holding her shoulders, as Jakub and Danuta picked for an hour at the hundreds of tiny hairy needles embedded in her fingers and palms. When over Wanda’s moans they heard an unmistakable shriek from somewhere nearby, everyone’s first thought was of another cactus disaster. “Madame! Madame!” Maryna hurried to the rescue. But it was just the three huge purple eggplants Aniela had stumbled across, lolling like fat bombs dropped behind the house, and had then tried to pick up, only to discover that each was closely fastened to the stony earth. Ryszard, hacking at the cord-like vine with his hunting knife, freed them.

  While they were jubilantly preparing the first meal of their new life—the eggplants, roasted over a fire in the yard, supplemented by provisions bought in the village—the luminous severe sky darkened into night, a blackness holding brighter stars than they had ever seen in Zakopane. Stars set in ebony, Jakub said. Danuta and Cyprian went indoors, Cyprian to fetch one of the telescopes Bogdan had brought from Poland and Danuta to put their little girls to bed; Piotr, feeling neglected as well as pleased at not being sent to bed, too, stationed himself on the porch and practiced answering the coyote’s howl. Soon everyone was driven indoors by big-bellied mosquitoes which could bite through clothing and made sleeping that first night (and for weeks after) a torment. But even without mosquitoes they could hardly have slept well when they were so excited by their own intrepidness, and were being pulled in and out of sleep by such vivid dreams. Julian of Wanda’s bleeding hands. Ryszard of his knife. Aniela of a mother she had never known, who looked like the Virgin Mary in the orphanage chapel; she often dreamed of her mother. Piotr of dead people crawling out of their graves and besieging the house. Bogdan that Maryna had left him for Ryszard. And Maryna of Edwin Booth, whom she had finally seen, just a week ago. For only hours after the Constitution docked in San Francisco Bay, Maryna had learned that the great Booth was performing there, at the California Theatre, and the very next day she saw his Shylock and two days later his Mark Antony. She was not disappointed. She had wept with admiration. In her dream, he bends toward her. He cups his palm on her cheek. He is telling her something sad, about something that cannot be undone, someone who has died. She wants to touch his shoulder; his shoulder is sad, too. Then they are on horseback, riding side by side, but there is something wrong with her horse, it’s too small, much too small; her feet scrape the ground. He is swathed in the Oriental draperies he wore as old Shylock, he even has on the reprobate’s soft yellow cap and the pointed red shoes, though he is really Mark Antony. They dismount near a giant cholla. Then he flings his cap to the ground and, to her horror, seizes a spiny branch of the cactus with one bare hand and hoists himself up with the agility of a young man. Don’t do that! she shouts. He continues climbing. Isn’t he being martyred by those horrid needles? Please come down! she cries. She is weeping with fear. He is laughing. Was it still Booth? He looked a little like Stefan. But no, it cannot be her brother, who is back in Poland, no, who is dead. Holding on to the topmost branch of the cholla, he begins the great speech of reproach and incitement, declaiming to the lofty air and then to her when he comes to

  O, now you weep, and I perceive you feel

  the dint of pity. These are gra
cious drops.

  But there was something novel, no, unfamiliar, no, familiar, in the words streaming from his mouth. She had understood him perfectly in San Francisco, she understood him now, though the speech didn’t sound the way it had at the theatre. Could he be saying it in Latin? Antony was a Roman. But Shakespeare was an Englishman. Then is this how English should sound? If so, all her studying and practicing had been in vain. That was what she was fretting about as she awoke and realized, laughing to herself, that she had dreamed Edwin Booth into acting in Polish.

  * * *

  ONE OF THE REASONS Julian and Ryszard had chosen this site was its proximity to a community—German-speaking to boot, so there would be no language barrier—of first-generation farmers, who once knew no more than they of the grape and the cow, the plough and the irrigation ditch.

  Only twenty years ago these fertile fields and thriving village were twelve hundred acres of waste, sandy land, a mere corner of a vast ranch whose Mexican proprietor, convinced that this patch couldn’t support a goat, was glad to sell off. It took European immigrants, to whom the desert was not only alien but a kind of mistake, correctable by the introduction of water, to think that southern California, with more or less the same climate as Italy, had to be propitious for growing grapes.

  The land rented with Bogdan’s money had been worked by its owners (now relocated to a ranch in the foothills) right up to their arrival in early October, near the close of the vineyard cycle: most of the grapes had already been picked and sold. It seemed a fortunate moment to begin their tenancy, to ease into their stewardship.

  They refused to allow that their inexperience was an insuperable obstacle. All that was needed was industry, stamina—humility. Maryna arose at six-thirty each morning and instantly seized her broom. Ah, Henryk, if you could see your Desdemona, your Marguerite Gautier, your Lady Anne, your Princess Eboli now!