by Susan Sontag
“Neither is the real story,” said Bogdan. “We haven’t heard whether the posse has found them or not.”
Ryszard went to fetch his manuscript from the barn and read his tale aloud.
Anaheim in all its robust quaintness: cowboys on snorting mustangs, farmers from outlying settlements tethering their buggies to the hitching posts; local blond beauties, black-tressed señoritas from Los Nietos, farmers’ wives crowding the milliner’s shop to buy bolts of calico and gingham and examine patterns from the fashion books; gossip, flirting, boasting, haggling; the buzz of anticipation over the circus arrival. The procession of Brandt’s menagerie along Orange Street. Introduction of the hulking strong-man and petite aerialist. Orso’s feral resentments tamed by unavowable love, Jenny’s childish innocence troubled by burgeoning love. Brandt’s explosions of jealous rage. Orso’s fortitude during these terrible beatings. Putting up with any mistreatment, fearing only dismissal and separation from his darling Jen. The performance under the tent. Orso’s feats of strength. Jenny’s grace and daring. Admiration of the crowd. After the performance: the two youngsters lingering on a bench in a corner of the darkened tent. Jenny’s maidenly expressions of pity at the brutalities visited on her circus comrade. Orso evoking his daydream of leaving the circus and taking Jenny to a free beautiful life in the Santa Ana Mountains. Jenny leaning the back of her little head against Orso’s barrel-like torso; Orso gripping the edge of the bench with his meaty hands. Sighing. More sighing. The first avowals of their true feelings for each other. Orso timidly reaching up to touch Jenny’s hair. Brandt in the shadows spying on them, then rushing forward. Orso offering no resistance and allowing himself to be slashed with the whip. Brandt turning to Jenny and for the first time raising his whip to her. Orso hurling him to the ground. Brandt’s head hitting the corner of the monkey cage. Orso gathering Jenny in his arms. Fleeing together in the night, across the desert and into the foothills, the posse following. A few hours of chaste sleep. Jenny’s terrors. Orso’s tender protectiveness. Continuing their flight into the blue mountains. Cold, wild animals, hunger, exhaustion …
Ryszard looked up from his sheaf of papers. “And that’s as far as I’ve got.”
“Very engaging,” said Bogdan. “Vivid. Rather touching.”
Ryszard didn’t dare ask Maryna what she thought. To write a love story and read it aloud in her presence before Bogdan and the others seemed bold enough. And he didn’t want to hear anyone else’s opinion. He was evading Julian’s mocking stare.
“One small detail,” said Julian. “The mountains here. I suppose you could say they’re blue.”
“And I do, you … scientist!” roared Ryszard. “Just by writing the word ‘blue’ I make them blue, that’s what a writer does, and you, my reader slave, have to see them as blue.”
“But they’re not—”
“Whereas a painter,” Ryszard continued triumphantly, “if he thinks the mountains are blue, must put it before your eyes, must make a color out of his pigments which maybe, though it doesn’t matter what we say, we’d call blue—”
“Or violet or lavender or purple,” said Jakub gaily.
“And how will you end it?” Cyprian asked.
“Heartrendingly, I suppose,” said Ryszard. “Either lento, with more on their hardships and sufferings until, eventually, they take shelter in a mountain lion’s cave and lie down to perish of hunger and exposure in each other’s arms. Or, allegro, allegro feroce, with the posse running them down in one of the canyons, on the edge of a ravine. You should see it now”—he silently added “Maryna”—“the chaparral up there is still green: what gives them away would be the sequins on Jenny’s frayed pink tunic and tights glinting in the sun. As the posse closes in on them, the Aerial Angel takes Orso by the hand and they leap together into the ravine to their deaths.”
“Oh,” sighed Barbara.
“I hate unhappy endings,” said Wanda.
“Ah, the voice of the uncultivated reader,” said Julian.
“Actually,” said Ryszard, as embarrassed as everyone else by Julian’s inveterate scorn for his wife, “I have doubts about the double suicide, too.” From chivalry to a dollop of inspiration: “Yes, maybe they shouldn’t be captured.”
“Yes, yes,” said Wanda.
“Can you believe this woman?” Julian said.
“They could elude the posse and remain in the mountains. The bruise-blue mountains, Julian. Beauty and the beast settling down in a remote canyon where no one ventures except the most intrepid trapper.”
“But how do they eat, stay warm, defend themselves against wild animals?” Aleksander asked.
“He’s an Indian,” said Cyprian. “He knows such things.”
“Half-Indian,” muttered Jakub.
“But Jenny isn’t,” Danuta said.
“Don’t shy away from an unhappy ending,” said Bogdan, “if that seems more truthful.”
“Readers, readers!” Ryszard exclaimed. “I just want to tell a good story. What’s more truthful? What makes you feel less sad? Don’t load this dreamer’s shoulders with too many responsibilities! You’d think the ending I decide could influence what actually happens to the poor wretches!”
But he was starting to feel just that; so, honoring the superstitious feeling, Ryszard consulted one of the Mexican women who tell suertes, or fortunes, about their fate. Her prediction—that they would be hunted down and killed—decided it for him; the end almost wrote itself.
Orso spotted going up a steep hill carrying Jenny in his arms; the guns blazing and thundering; the sound crashing back from the canyon walls, a bullet tearing into Jenny’s head, Orso appearing to fall; the posse finding him on the ground, howling with grief, cradling the dead Jenny in his arms, the lariat that went flying toward Orso and sizzled around his neck; then they—
No! No. Lose the posse. Save the children. Invent an old squatter living in reckless solitude—years since he’d last seen anyone in his forbidding stretch of mountain—who would welcome them to his campfire and prove as lavishly benign as the circus owner had been cruel. They were terrified, he would hearten them. They were famished, he would feed them. Raking in the ashes he set on the grill a fine haunch of venison, and as he watched them eat—perhaps he had once been a father—his eyes filled with tears. “Since then these three have lived together,” went the last line of the story. This is America, Ryszard thought, where the maudlin happy end is as appreciated as a bout of self-righteous, gleeful slaughter. When, two days later, the posse did catch up with the fugitives and opened fire, hitting Matilda in the spine (she would be paralyzed for life), and then strung up Zambo, Ryszard had no regrets about the dénouement he had chosen. What is the point of turning real events into stories if you can’t change everything, especially the end?
* * *
AND WHAT IS the point of telling stories, if not to stir up the longing everyone harbors for an alternative life?
Further, Ryszard was not in the mood to relate the story of an impossible love that turns out to be … impossible. Writing is conjuring: Ryszard wanted to show impossible love to be possible. His own love for Maryna had become an endless, unfinished story he was constantly revising, embroidering, sharpening, finding more fluent ways to describe to himself. Here he was, living side by side with her but not daring to approach her less puppyishly for fear of a definitive rejection. He suspected that she counted on his attentions, his burdensome attentions, that she would be sorry to see her ardent, infinitely patient suitor become, simply, resigned. But the role was harder to play without the décor in which it had been devised. There were no dressing rooms (he had loved looking at her while she looked at herself in the mirror), no smoky gaslit corridors, no darkened carriages. The bordellos of Los Angeles had mirrors, there were mirrors in San Francisco and not only in the theatres, but what use could an outward-looking village like Anaheim have for the beguiling play between surfaces and what lies behind them? Their new life had no mirrors. Only views.
Maryna, dismounting, unceremoniously tugged at his collar. This journey to a liberating vacancy for which Ryszard offered himself as chaperon, call it the shadowless desert, call it the uninhabited mountains—she was already there.
“Oh, Maryna,” he groaned. “Is there no hope for us?”
“Us?”
He bowed his head. “Me.”
“I think,” she said, “there is hope for you.”
“And you, Maryna? So bent on becoming posthumous! Have you really changed that much? Is it possible, Maryna?”
“More than possible.”
“And this”—he flung out his arm to the land that surrounded them—“is the only passion that engages you now?”
She didn’t answer.
“But couldn’t you be deceiving yourself about what you really want? Don’t you ever feel stranded? The scenery is beautiful, our Arden, but it doesn’t change. Don’t you ever feel impatient with everyone—Julian, poor Wanda, Danuta, Aleksander, Cyprian, Barbara, even Jakub … no, I won’t exclude myself. How can you stand us?”
“Us?”
“And the animal and human roughness, and heavy mud-caked boots and rank clothes, and the reddened rough skin on your own hands, and Aniela’s boils, which you lanced with the heated blade of a razor (I was watching you, where did you learn to do that?)—this isn’t you. The muck and the ooze and the dryness—you’re made for velvet. And all the race hatreds stirring in these new Californians, just below their reconciling greeds. It’s hardhearted and empty here. It will make us hardhearted and empty, Maryna. Wait, don’t say ‘Us?’ again, it will make you, even you, hardhearted and empty.”
“I’m sorry you find me cruel, Ryszard. But I don’t mind being empty.”
“You never feel sorry for yourself?”
“I felt sorry for myself in Poland. Now I don’t even understand why. But here? No, never. Surely you see that I’m thriving on being stripped of almost all that made me distinctive to others and to myself. It makes me, now you’ll really think me cruel, it makes me laugh.”
Absences: plush, relics, dimness, corridors, one’s own history. How could she explain to Ryszard? Here every story emerged freestanding, without roots in long genealogies of concern and obligation. The sudden drop in the volume of meanings in the new life worked on her like a thinning out of oxygen. She was feeling giddy. And yet it was all so familiar. Groups subdued by difficult routines and impetuous leadership were Maryna’s natural element: the communal impulse is strong among theatre people. And this newly rooted life hardly differed from the life of traveling players. If some of the simplest tasks of farm life still eluded them, no wonder, they had prepared hastily, conning their parts as farmers at the last minute, just off stage. For a time they would be “winging it,” as actors say, until they had mastered their roles.
In the evening, gallantly ignoring their pulled muscles, aching backs, scraped shins, painful sunburns, they gathered in the living room to pore over their pamphlets from Washington and the books on farming brought from Poland and discuss fertilizers and fencing, the planting of an orange grove, the repair of the henhouse, and the hiring of a few Indian or Chinese laborers to help them. Pacing about, Bogdan outlined his plans for the new dwellings. He spoke in clipped rapid phrases, his hand clenched around a near-empty glass of tea and its clinking spoon. A hand Maryna hardly recognized, with its blackened thumbnail and the fat vein crawling from tanned knuckle to wrist; a Bogdan she had not known before, no longer entirely absorbed by her, doing all this for her. Sinking into the collective—for her.
Everyone was supposed to participate in these discussions. In fact, the women—except for Maryna—hardly spoke, as if they assumed they had nothing to say, or were going to be criticized, or that making decisions was a man’s job. Farm life organized the women for new docilities, dictated to everyone new menus of incompetence. And knowing how their neighbors saw them, as coddled impractical gentlefolk, made them shy about asking for help. Herr Kohler had sent over one of his young Mexican farmhands to show them how to care for the vineyard, whose cycle was starting over. The men watched somberly as he demonstrated the way to cut back the large shoots, to apply fertilizer, to pack soil against the base of the vines. And it was kind of Kohler, who was selling them milk, cream, and butter, to tell Pancho to give milking lessons as well; but none of the women had strong enough hands or the right technique: they felt they were torturing the cows. After a few days they started buying milk from another nearby farm.
It was not in Maryna’s nature to be charitable to herself, ever, or forbearing with others. But how petty it seemed under this unrelenting sun to be fretting that Barbara and Danuta made reluctant milkmaids.
Fatigue and the drone of communal preoccupations seemed only to fatten her immense sensation of physical well-being. More absences: words, self-dramatization, amorous energies. Healing absences. Carnal presences. The piercing reek of fresh dung and their own sweat. Panting over the kitchen range, at the milking stool, behind the wheelbarrow, and the harmonies of collective fatigue exhaled at the end of a day, in silence, at the dining-room table. All sonorities reduced to this: the sound of breathing, only breathing, theirs, her own. She never felt so attached to the others as then, feeling herself enclosed in a cube of noisy breathing; never felt so optimistic about the life they were laboring to build. Easy to say: it will not last. Every marriage, every community is a failed utopia. Utopia is not a kind of place but a kind of time, those all too brief moments when one would not wish to be anywhere else. Is there an instinct, a very ancient instinct, for breathing in unison? The ultimate utopia, that. At the root of the desire for sexual union is the desire to breathe more deeply, deeper still, faster … but always together.
* * *
IN NOVEMBER, Maryna and Bogdan received a letter from a compatriot who had been living in San Francisco for almost twenty years, Bruno Halek, a shrewd impertinent old man of indeterminate occupation and, plainly, some means. He had befriended Ryszard and Julian when they were first in San Francisco in July, and had shown the larger group about when they arrived in late September.
Halek asked if he might pay a visit to his friends in their wine-producing Rhineland village in the desert. He had not stretched his mighty legs for a time, he said. He would not have dreamt of making such a long trip if the only transport for his admittedly large self were still that pokey side-wheeler—three days of dried beef and parboiled beans!—as far as the harbor near Los Angeles, and choo-choo-choo only for the last thirty miles. And picture this, he said. When the Germans went south in 1859 (he had met some of them then, hardworking dullards all; it would be amusing to see them now), their ship had gone right past Los Angeles, anchoring three miles off the coast where Anaheim was going to be, and the colonists had been taken by rowboat near the shore, where a party of Indians hired by those two clever Germans with the wine company in Los Angeles in which the San Francisco people had bought shares were waiting for them waist-deep in the water, poor devils, and then each German man, woman, and child had been lowered onto the shoulders of an Indian and carried to land. But
those epic days were past (though he’d like to see even the brawniest brave with the strength to carry him!), and since there was now a train to Los Angeles he was eager to make the trip, not that he meant to impose on them, he was not one for sleeping in a tent or a log cabin, he expected to stay in a hotel, but come he would, dear Madame Maryna permitting. If only, he added jovially, to sample the wine.
And could he bring them anything from San Francisco?
Out of the question for their guest to stay at the Planters. Maryna and Bogdan had the sofa removed from the parlor and replaced by a bed; during his visit Piotr would sleep in the kitchen with Aniela. Despising that part of herself that wished to impress Halek (more exactly, not to disillusion him), while convinced that it would bolster everyone’s self-esteem to participate in the effort of making their new home as attractive as it could be, Maryna took his arrival as an occasion to goad the others into some long-postponed tasks. The henhouse must be repaired (their large guest would undoubtedly ask for four eggs at breakfast); the house repainted, furniture polished, more books unpacked—farm work was put aside and everyone drafted to make the house fit to be visited. And their larder was to be properly stocked, and bottles of the good aguardiente and tequila available in the Mexican settlement laid in (Halek would certainly turn up his nose at Anaheim’s profusion of German beers). Then, a week later, leaving Danuta and Barbara to arrange the cut oleander in pretty Cahuilla baskets, Maryna went off with Bogdan in the buggy to the depot. Their visitor descended from the train, even larger than they remembered and further bulked out with a clutch of packages tied with brown twine containing newspapers from Poland, books, kerchiefs and scent cases for the women, a lace mantilla for Maryna, lead soldiers for Piotr, dolls and lollipops for the little girls.
“I’m ravenous,” he said as he entered the house.
Aleksander laughed. “We’re always hungry, too.”
“That’s because you’re working too hard,” cried Halek. “I’m hungry”—he slapped his immense belly—“because I’m hungry.” And then he made a sound, something like a bark, something like a groan. “I remember that,” said Piotr happily. The sighting of sea lions roaring on rocks from the terrace of a cliffside casino outside San Francisco was an obligatory pleasure for every visitor to the city. “I can do a coyote, Mr. Halek. Listen.”
