by Susan Sontag
They could sigh and sigh, had they been willing to surrender to a rueful feeling. Easier, more intimate, to project it onto those they had left behind.
Did you sigh, Henryk, when you received the photograph? I see it hanging in your consulting room above your desk in a fine walnut frame. Scrutinizing our faces and quaint clothes with your loupe, as you must have done, did you, even for a moment, imagine yourself in the picture? Don’t you regret not having come with us? By now the sun would have baked all that gloom out of you. You can still be one of us, dear friend. Come! And, later in the same letter: No, I never have headaches in California. How transforming it is simply to feel well, entirely well. But everyone feels different. I haven’t told you that some of us even have new names! Piotr answers only to Peter, Bogdan is addressed by the locals as Bob-Dan, Ryszard has abandoned himself to Richard, and Jakub is toying with Jake. We are all flourishing, and none more than my wonderful little boy. New Piotr, Piotr as Peter, Peter tout court—he’s another child. Taller, hardier, less fearful. He has made friends. He can ride bareback, as the Mexicans and Indians do. He takes piano lessons from a young lady in the village. Henryk, you would not recognize him! Maybe we should all change our names!
How could she complain, even to Henryk? Tell him that they were not all changed for the better? Cyprian and Aleksander seemed somewhat dulled by chores and cares, and Julian, though as propulsive as ever, was still persecuting poor Wanda. Tell him that she missed female friendship? Wanda could only be an object of sympathy, and Maryna had realized that she hardly liked Danuta and Barbara, who were blessed with amiable husbands, much better; they too were so, so, how would she have said it politely, tractable. Tell him that she was in revolt against the very state of coupledom, her own special marriage excepted? Only importunate, clever Ryszard and gentle Jakub, their bachelors—and dear Bogdan, of course, tense and overprotective as he was—didn’t get on her nerves. Tell him that she feared she was becoming stupid, for want of enough mental stimulation, and that it was becoming harder to summon up the forbearance even more essential to life in a community than to a marriage? No, she would tell him none of these things.
But, yes, she told Henryk, she missed him.
Loyalty to an imperiled group enterprise was a virtue rooted in her professional life. You accept the leading role in a new play, you go into rehearsal, and then realize that, for all your efforts and those of the others, it’s not working, the play is less good than you thought; but it’s not bad, either, and who understands better than you its virtues, you love it as you love a thankless child; and perhaps it will work after all: everyone is trying so hard to salvage it, cuts and changes have been made in the text and livelier staging devised and the scene-painter has a new idea for the last act, it would be wrong to give up hope; and so with your fellow actors you close ranks, you defend it, no, you praise it to everyone outside your community of effort. You say that all is well. There is often no insincerity in this. You believe in what you’re doing. You must believe in it.
Whether the others complained in their letters, she could not know. She only knew how much it depended on her to keep them harmonious, roused, forward-minded: she accepted that responsibility. For she had powers she could not relinquish. Hers was still a transforming presence, lit by the afterglow of all the heroic and expressive roles she had played. The woman churning butter and baking bread and guiding Aniela through the preparation of a dinner had once gone bravely, regally, to the beheading ordered by her cousin Queen Elizabeth of England, piously awaited the strangling hands of the demented Othello, hastened to put an asp to her bosom upon learning of the death of Mark Antony, expired in a lonely bedroom, a reformed courtesan, bereft even of her dear camellias. Done all these final things: majestically, poignantly, irresistibly. She might not look exactly as she did in Poland. But coarsening toil had not changed the way she walked, or turned her head to listen, or kept silent, or, most alluringly, spoke. In the vibrant cello voice urging them to remonstrate more forcefully with the neighbors whose cattle had devoured their winter barley crop they heard the cadences of the voice that had proclaimed the excellence of mercy to Shylock, denied the coming of dawn to the fugitive Romeo, raved with Lady Macbeth’s guilty dream and Phaedra’s lustful longing for her stepson. It would be a long time before these nested auras of nobility faded.
A queen who has abdicated will always be a queen to those who knew her on the throne. But Maryna had vowed not to explain here in California who she had been; who she was now, an immigrant, needed no explanation. Their arrival (their clothes, their nationality, their ineptitude) had caused something of a stir. But after six months, a long time in California, whose plenitudes accommodated an even faster rate of change than the rest of America, their presence was almost taken for granted. The sharpest impression of singularity Maryna could make on the villagers was to turn up with her husband and friends for Sunday Mass at St. Boniface’s, overdignified as ever, in a new hat.
They were no longer the newest interlopers; they were almost old-time residents. There were even Chinese now, who did laundry and labored in the fields, as well as more families with American, that is, British yeoman, names. In February, a community of twenty-seven adults and nineteen children calling itself the Societas Edenica moved onto a hundred-acre ranch north of Anaheim. The gossip in the village was of odd sleeping arrangements, strange group calisthenics, a repulsively spare diet. And it seemed that all these novel coercions were designed to generate both holiness and health. The buildings they put up were round, supposedly to promote a better circulation of air. As the circle was perfection in a shape, so health was perfection, the only attainable perfection, in a body and a soul. Alcohol and tobacco were banned, along with meat, any food touched by fire, whatever else would not have been eaten in Eden’s garden. Our fallen state, preached their leader, a Doctor Lorenz, is nothing but our departure from the healthy life of our original progenitors. Adam and Eve, you know what that means, said the villagers, who, whenever they found pretexts to trespass on the colony’s property, were frustrated never to come upon anyone Eden-naked.
This was a venture in ideal living not at all to Maryna and Bogdan’s liking. But the militant regard for health being enforced at Edenica had some attraction for at least two members of their own undoctrinaire community. Danuta and Cyprian had gone off meat before the arrival of the Edenists, and more recently had requested that their food be cooked separately, salt-free, and that bowls of grated apple, chopped almonds, and pounded raisins be set out at every meal for them to fill up on while the others persisted in compromising their digestions with fatty stews and greasy roasts.
Food being a medium of fellowship, it was felt that Danuta and Cyprian had broken some tacit compact with the community by these stark renunciations.
“I expect you’ll soon be eating mashed acorns like the Indians,” said Alexander.
“J’apprécie votre sarcasme,” said Cyprian sourly.
“Peace, friends,” said Jakub. “As they say in Rome, vivi e lascia vivere.”
But Danuta and Cyprian refused to consider themselves mocked, and earnestly continued to press their new strictures about diet on the others. Danuta showed Aniela how to make a dessert that Maryna was sure came from the kitchen repertory over at Edenica, a kind of custard of flour and water flavored with strawberry juice.
“Delicious, isn’t it?” said Danuta.
“I wouldn’t say it’s as good as shoofly pie,” said Wanda.
“Really?” said Julian. “Not as good as shoofly pie, Wanda. Are you sure?”
“Quite inedible,” said Aleksander. “But as you see, mon cher Cyprian, I’m eating it.”
They had pooled energies, resources, hopes, a relaxed idea of comity and self-fulfillment. They were sure, Bogdan was sure, it did not seem farfetched to suppose, that the farm would soon realize a profit. They had not given up when it was truly hard, in the first months, and by now tasks that had seemed so daunting, from milking the cows to t
ending the vineyard, had become routine. The dormant vines had begun showing signs of life, and the soil had been turned to get air to the roots. Arriving as late as they had last autumn, they had found only one buyer for their vineyard’s yield—they had sold the grapes for two hundred dollars—but there was reason to think they would do much better this year. Lacking the goad of their own incompetence, they had settled into a wry appreciation of the slowness of the agricultural cycle.
How different for their artists: Jakub, who had completed a cycle of paintings on Indian subjects in the last months, and Ryszard, whose writing had produced some extra income for the colony—he contributed two-thirds of the money earned by his newspaper articles on America, now coming out in Poland as a book—had finished enough stories to make another book, was nearly done with a novel set in a mining camp in the Sierras, and had begun in his head a long novel set in ancient Rome in the time of Christian persecutions under Nero. When not writing he was off hunting—the meat-eating majority still depended on his forays—and had recently acquired a steed of his own, a Mexican horse, for which he’d paid eight dollars; overpaid in fact, since these could be had in Los Angeles for five, while an American horse, good for work or carriages, cost anywhere from eighty to three hundred dollars.
It was a three-year-old, dappled grey, rather tall and strong, and ill-natured like most mustangs. Disregarding the advice of neighbors, Ryszard had not trimmed its long mane and overgrown fetlocks: what he wanted was a wild horse that would be tame for him. At first Ryszard could control the animal only when virtually strangling it with his lasso, but a month of patient struggle, during which the horse learned to tolerate being caressed first while being fed, then while being cleaned and brushed, had turned it into the most responsive, spirited animal companion its owner could desire. Ryszard enticed Maryna into the stable to watch him saddling his Diego, as he’d named the horse, and fitting the bridle to its shaggy muzzle.
“And how many pages this morning?”
“Twenty-three. The last twenty-three pages of The Little Cabin. I’ve finished the novel.”
“Bravo.”
“Finished. Done. And it’s good, Maryna, it really is. And what do you think has been spurring me on to work so well?”
“Ah, you want me to guess what I know,” said Maryna. “Ambition?”
“I’ve always been ambitious. Ambition is only one of the four affective passions according to—dare one still invoke his name?—Monsieur Fourier. No, Maryna, it’s not ambition.”
“Friendship?” She was smiling. “Yours for me?”
“Maryna, really!”
“Family feeling?” she said, patting the mustang’s bristling mane.
“It’s the passion you haven’t mentioned. Or,” he added boldly, “have forgotten.”
“I haven’t forgotten.”
“Because I won’t let you forget!”
“And because I’m waiting for you to allow this infatuation to subside. That should be easier here.”
“So you think I’m in love only with the actress.”
“No. I don’t think so little of myself.”
“Or of me, I trust. Maryna, don’t you know I really love you?”
Sighing, she leaned against the mustang’s head.
“What are you thinking?” said Ryszard gently.
“Now? I’m going to disappoint you. I was thinking of my son.”
* * *
MARYNA, MARYNA, began the letter Ryszard slipped in her pocket. Yesterday’s conversation in the stable. What must you think of me? Ryszard the lovelorn, Ryszard the graphomaniac—I badger you with my hopes, I am far too caught up in my writing. Even Jakub will turn from a long stint at his easel to shovel manure off the barn floor, whereas I, I seclude myself to write, I gallop off with my gun (which is hardly work for me). You have proposed that this be a time of common purposes, and I stay separate.
It is obvious that I am not cut out to be a farmer. Were you meant to be a farmer, Maryna? To be a materialist, forever bound to the routines of ploughing and profiting? Were any of us meant to be farmers? I confess it makes me groan to see Bogdan sowing corn or pruning the vines, his mobile face with its sarcastic smile habitually at the ready recast in a stern frown of exertion. And you nearby, your translucent stain of discontent gleaming in the California sun. Are our souls being purified by physical labor, as Russian writers preach? We thought we were choosing freedom and leisure and self-cultivation. Instead, we have committed ourselves to day after day of repetitious agricultural duties. And it will always be like this, Maryna. And even when life here becomes less strenuous, as the farm becomes profitable and we can employ local laborers to do most of the work—is that the life we had envisaged? For it is not rest we want, Maryna. Do you really want to rest?
People like us should not settle in this country—least of all in a village, I warrant they are all like our prosaic Anaheim, and not in New York or San Francisco either: any of our middle-sized European cities is handsomer and more civilized than an American city will ever be. No, one must stay on the move to have the best that this country can offer. As a hunter does, here where hunting is far more than a recreation: it is a necessity, not only practical but spiritual, a unique experience of freedom. Beyond the boundaries of what is called civilization here, where land is divided up and constitutes private property, lies territory that can only be frequented by those with the skills of a hunter. It starts just beyond our river. There everything is on a scale you cannot imagine—the deer are twice as big as the deer in Poland, the American grizzly bear is bigger, stronger, more ferocious than every European variety of bear. And the sky, Maryna, the sky is even blacker, more filled with stars than it is in our valley; and one has dreams and visions that are twice as large as life. Oh, I shall not conceal it from you, I have drunk a bitter concoction made of jimson weed which the Indians use for their sacred ceremonies. But no drug is needed to be plunged into a Bacchic mood. At the close of a day spent with my hard-featured hunting companions, when we carve up our prey and then recline around a campfire feasting on pieces of pink steaming meat, I feel in savage unity with all of creation. And afterward, in an enchantment of satiety, I crawl into my tent, a piece of canvas hung on some low branches with room under it for one person (there could be room for two), and being alone (alas), fall straight down, as after a draught of laudanum, into sleep.
I have watched you blissful at an incendiary sunset seen from our valley and at the sight of the heaving great Pacific after a gallop to the coast. I promise you an elation no less keen in the high, dangerous mountains. When you are with me, we shall be characters in some romantic opera, I singing the baritone role of an Alpine brigand and you my mezzo inamorata, a princess traversing the mountain on her way to a loveless state marriage, whom I have rescued from the avalanche in which all the other members of her party perished. And if you like, we could go farther, we could descend on the other side, into empty pale land presided over by cacti thirty, forty feet high. Moon country, Maryna. With sand verbena that covers the desert floor in pink. And when night fell, we would ride full tilt against the stars.
I don’t plan to introduce you to any of my companions, unless you so desire. But you will not be disappointed if you do meet them. Their life, edged with danger and free of banal conviviality, has bred a remarkable race of solitaries. They will not remind you of our shepherds from Zakopane who, throughout their long months alone in the high Tatras, remain cocooned in the securities of ancestral place, of family, of religion. The American is someone who is always leaving everything behind. And the void this makes in his soul is a matter of astonishment to him, too.
I am thinking of a squatter named Jack Goodyear—don’t you like this American name?—with whom I’ve stayed several times on my longer trips into the mountains. Though by nature he is little inclined toward headwork, his Robinson Crusoe way of life has fostered a touching habit of introspection. I remember once resting on bare planks inside Jack’s small hut; it
was late in the evening, a long time had gone by without either of us saying anything, and he had just thrown another bundle of dry laurel on the fire. Then without any prologue he broke the silence to tell me that it sometimes seemed to him as though there were two Jacks: one who chopped down trees, hunted the grizzly bear, tended his apiary, hoisted a new roof on his hut, carried a discarded white beehive inside to use as a chair, cooked his cornmeal and doused it with honey; and the other—“By God,” he kept interrupting himself, “by God”—the other who was doing nothing but just gazing at the first. He told me this very simply.
Two Jacks. Two Ryszards. Two Bogdans, I do not doubt. And two Marynas, I am sure. Tell me that you don’t feel you are acting in a play. Tell me there isn’t one Maryna who is kneading dough for bread, washing clothes in the round wooden tub in the yard, weeding the vegetable plots, and the other, standing beautifully tall as only you do, who gazes at herself with amazement and incredulity. Tell me. I’ll not believe you.
Maryna, ride with me …
* * *
MARCH 22. Visit to the dentist, Herr Schmidt. Not incompetent. Upper left molar extracted. Agitated when I awoke. Did I say anything while under the ether? I was having a tender dream about ________. But surely I would have been speaking Polish, and therefore wouldn’t have been understood. But what if I just kept calling out his name?
