In America

by Susan Sontag

  Salvador passed them plates of dried biscuits and beef jerky and pint cups of Japan tea sweetened with honey.

  Ryszard, grimacing, set his cup down on the blanket and shook out his burning hand. Maryna, he saw, was still holding hers.

  “You don’t find it too hot?”

  Maryna nodded and smiled. “I’m not sure that I don’t love you.”

  Ryszard felt stabbed to the heart. He reached for his cup, still intolerably hot, and quickly let go of it. “Maryna, put down your tea!”

  “Perhaps I do,” she continued. “Perhaps I could. But of course I feel guilty when I love someone I’m not supposed to love.”

  “Maryna, let me see your hand.”

  “When I was nine, right after my father died”—she set down the cup and shuddered—“I was put in a convent school for a year.”

  “Your hand.”

  She extended her hand, palm up. It was dark red. “Salvador!” Ryszard shouted.

  “Señor?”

  “Idiot! Idiot!” He jumped to his feet and got the jar of honey. “Will you let me put this on it?” He saw there were tears in her eyes. “Oh, Maryna!” He bent over her palm, blowing on it and applying the honey. “Does it hurt less?” When he looked up, her eyes were dry and glittering.

  “I had a teacher there, Sister Felicyta, whom I realized I loved more than my mother, more than anyone in the world. So I trained myself not to look at her face, ever. She thought I was very shy, or very pious, with my downcast eyes, and all the while I was burning with desire to press my lips to her beautiful face.”

  “Let me kiss you, Maryna.”

  “Don’t.”

  “So I will never hold you in my arms? Never?”

  “Never! Who knows what that means? What I do know is that the prospect of being in a … of having to hide, of having to choose, is unbearable to me. I need my life to be simple.”

  “You find marriage simple.”

  “Oh, that’s not simple! Bogdan’s not simple. But I suppose Bogdan is complexity enough.” They sat in silence for a while.

  “Maryna?”

  She stood. “I’d like to move on.”

  After they remounted, seeing that she was using her left hand to hold her reins, while holding the right, wrapped in a kerchief, close to her breast, Ryszard took her reins and walked both horses through a stony ravine and up a steep brambly slope. From behind him she was saying something about a special torment that made life difficult for Bogdan, something about not knowing (but she couldn’t explain) who he really was. Then they seemed to be arguing, which was the last thing Ryszard wanted to happen, especially after she had virtually promised that she would be his one day.

  “If my grandfather had been a staff officer under Napoleon and my wife were my country’s national heroine,” Ryszard had turned back to say, unworthily, “I suppose I might brood about who I was.”

  “You’re not being as intelligent as you usually are,” she had replied coldly.

  But she seemed to forgive him as the terrain leveled off and she took back her reins with her left hand and they galloped together for a time, lifting their faces to the radiant sun and a few white smudges of clouds in the faultlessly blue sky, while Ryszard mused on his joy and Maryna’s startling little lesson in how to endure pain.

  As night fell they camped on the far side of the mountain, and an anxious Salvador served them salt pork and bread on the tin plates, and once again babbled his apologies and excuses. “Señora, perdóneme, mil disculpas, perdóneme.” His hands were so calloused, he said, he hadn’t realized how hot the cups were. “Ahora no está caliente, señora, está frío!” Ryszard translated.

  “Not the meat, I hope,” said Maryna, laughing.

  Maryna was as delighted as a child with the bed Salvador made up for her of finely broken twigs of manzanita and ceanothus, spread with layers of dark moss and glossy ferns. Then, leaving Salvador by the fire with his gun, watching over the sleeping Maryna—he’d assured Ryszard once again that no rattlesnake could glide over the horsehair lasso he had laid in a circle around her—Ryszard removed himself from their camp to walk among the moonlit trees and smoke his pipe. The thought of Maryna asleep, under his protection, in the vastness of nature, beneath the boundless night sky, was the fulfillment of an old fantasy—they were two slender arrows passing through the largeness of the universe—and he was gripped by an exquisite sensation of triumph. He loved. He was loved. He was sure of that now. The wind had risen, and the silent forest seemed to thrum and whisper. Then his moment of rapt attention disclosed, to his dismay, to his fear, a sinister rustling noise. It could be, he reminded himself, the sound of ripe acorns breaking loose from their pedicels and rustling through the leaves as they fell to the ground. It could also be the stealthy approach of Ursus horribilis, about to jump from behind the tree and tear open his throat before he could utter a cry. And he had left his gun by the campfire. Lashed by fear, all his senses brought him fresh news. He could even detect, among the forest fragrances, a far-off stench of skunk. And the noises—hooting owls and another fainter rustling sound; and then … blessed silence, which he greeted with choking relief and gratitude, as if he had received a reassuring message from nature itself. All was well, all would be well. It was not that he entertained any fantasy of being invulnerable, Ryszard was too rational for that. But nothing could rout his immense feeling of well-being and self-approval. Even if my life ended now, he said to himself, I would still think, My God, what a journey I have made.

  * * *

  APRIL 24. Our community is like a marriage, M. says to me today, and suddenly I’m on my guard. I don’t mean our marriage, she says, laughing. I mean a marriage that’s matured by compromises and disappointments and abiding goodwill—obviously, I’m not thinking of Julian and Wanda either! An old dobbin of a marriage, one that the spouses find dispiriting to think will go on forever but impossible to imagine calling off. It’s a flash of the old M., the one I love best: restless, scathing, self-critical, autocratic.

  April 25. It seems so American that grapevines here are actually bushes. The local people think it most efficient: no fussing with trellises, etc. But all I can think of is: no mutual support, no clinging, no interpenetration. Every vine on its own. Striving, striving, to outdo its neighbors.

  April 26. If I find a good book about drying the grapes for raisins, I could put a few thousand dollars into our coffers. This afternoon Julian and I visited two drying houses in the village, both badly operated. Still, the local grapes are far better for raisins than for wine; moreover, the raisins sell much better. Gardiner told me he sold raisins from twenty acres for $8,000. Jacinto’s gleaming brown eyes.

  April 27. We could try to diversify further. Olives, and oranges, of course, and lemons, pomegranates, apples, pears, plums—all these pay well. Figs too, which are sold loose, rather than, as in Poland, threaded on a long string. It appears the soil is too dry for bananas, and while watermelons grow nicely they are quite useless—too cheap. People also plant a lot of tobacco here, but mainly for their own use. They don’t do much sericulture; although silkworms grow fast and the pods are wonderful, I’ve been told it is “too much work” for the American.

  April 28. In Poland I thought that I was what I had to be. America means: one can strive with fate.

  April 29. We were awakened during the night by our bed moving across the floor. A “small” earthquake, according to the villagers, and apparently common in southern California, though it is the first we have felt. Both M. and P. said they enjoyed it, M. claiming to have been warned in her dream. Just as she woke she heard the trumpet call from the tower of St. Mary’s! P. now lives in hope of a big earthquake, like the one twenty years ago, before the Anaheim colonists arrived.

  April 30. Our mare has been bitten by a rattlesnake, but it seems she will recover. As for me, I have been feeling resentful. M. knows I didn’t want this. Now I want it more than she does. Perhaps you’re having some doubts about your own sincerity
, I say caustically. Of what use is sincerity without wisdom, she answers in her most adorable, ripest tones. I am appeased, but not entirely. She thought she was affirming freedom and purity, not a household and housework. I don’t think she really wanted a home.

  May 1. That I don’t feel free to pursue my desire is surely not just because I am abetting the desire of someone else. Even in matters of the senses, I remain an amateur, a dilettante.

  May 2. Last week, near Temescal, an Indian laborer entered the privy while it was being used by the rancher’s wife and, she claimed, tried to assault her, though her screams brought rescue before “the worst” could take place. The poor fellow was tied up and castrated by the irate husband on the spot, and put in the barn, where he bled to death that night. We heard about it today. It seems vile to think, We didn’t have to hear this horrifying story.

  May 3. Jakub lectures me on the crimes committed here against the Indians. It seems that Indians were actually made slaves here after the Gold Rush, and this went on until about five years ago. He acts as if he were the only one among us with any moral feelings.

  May 4. It can fail. But I must not fail. I must not fail M. We don’t produce most of what we need. We don’t sell most of what we produce.

  May 5. 99°. The relentless success of these Californians gets on my nerves. I am bred to a distinctively Polish appreciation of the nobility of failure. (It seems vulgar to succeed, and so forth.) A plague of grasshoppers has descended on our fields.

  May 6. Wanda seems unwell and left supper early. Julian said she has a fever. We are all concerned. Danuta, predictably, proposed a diet change, reminding us that when one of the little girls fell ill she’d fed her only fruit and sprouted grains, and within two days her fever had gone.

  May 7. Cyprian took me to meet Doctor Lorenz. Slender, pale, with massive eyebrows overhanging penetrating eyes, a patriarchal beard, and a resonant powerful voice. The very model of the leader of a religious sect. Each member of the community has the title of Worker in God’s Garden, but I saw that their daily routines include no farmwork—the ranch is tended entirely by Mexican labor—which may explain why the colonists feel in need of several hours of strenuous exercises following their morning prayers. I had a tour of the men’s house and the smaller house where the children are lodged. These buildings, like the one where the women sleep, are perfectly round. Wives and husbands are permitted to spend Saturday night together. The principles of the Edenic Diet were explained to me, and we were invited to partake of a vile repast of wheat groats and barley, ground fine, moistened with fruit juice.

  May 8. M. tells me that Ryszard asked Julian why he and Wanda don’t have a child. It seems, according to Julian, that she can’t have children. M. is thinking of starting a crafts school for Indian girls.

  May 9. The people who settled Anaheim came here to live better than they had in San Francisco. Our settling here was mere happenstance, and we live worse than we did in Poland. If our community fails, it won’t be because of the impracticality of all utopian schemes but because we have renounced too much of what was gratifying. We wanted to create a life, not a livelihood; making money was not, never could have been, our main incentive. It’s rankling to know that if we give up, our neighbors will say we didn’t work hard enough—that after we planted our crops we expected to sit on the porch or lie in hammocks while things grew. It’s not true. If anything, we work harder than they do. But we are distracted. We lack a common sense that comes naturally to them.

  May 10. I rode alone to Anaheim Landing, almost twenty-six miles there and back, and felt much the stronger for it. One patch of shore was strewn with iron pyrites—fool’s gold they call it here—and I filled a pouch with it for P.

  May 11. Others have failed before us. Brook Farm. The Fourierist colony that Kalikst Wolski founded in La Réunion, Texas. We knew that. Indeed, it was while we were making our own plans for emigration that I read Wolski’s rueful account of his venture, published after he and his friends had returned to Poland. But even now I think we were right not to be discouraged by another group’s failure to sustain a cooperative community along Fourierist lines here in America. If everyone were so prudent, nothing would ever happen. It would be like losing faith in marriage because of Wanda and Julian. One has the right to say, My marriage will be different.

  May 12. Perhaps our venture will seem very Polish. I know the reputation we have abroad among those sympathetic to our nation’s tragic history. That we lack political wisdom—look at our insurrections, which never had any chance of success. That we are gullible—Napoleon had no trouble convincing us that our nation’s legions must shed blood for him; it was enough for him to wave the White Eagle in front of our noses, and off we rode into Russia in 1812, my grandfather in the lead. That our proneness to enthusiasm is childish, incapacitating; certainly not compatible with good management, cleverness, discipline, moderation, and other qualities necessary in the coming giant struggles of all nations for survival in an era of industrialization and militarism. That we can always be counted on for gallantry and acts of personal courage, but that there is a certain conceit in our high-mindedness. The most stinging charge: that we are a nation of dilettantes.

  May 13. Poland is full of monuments. We commemorate the past because the past is a fate. We are natural pessimists, believing that what has happened will happen again. Perhaps that is the definition of an optimist: someone who denies the power of the past. The past is not really important here. Here the present does not reaffirm the past but supersedes and cancels it. The weakness of any attachment to the past is perhaps the most striking thing about the Americans. It makes them seem superficial, shallow, but it gives them great strength and self-confidence. They do not feel dwarfed by anything.

  May 14. About five o’clock this afternoon Wanda attempted to hang herself in the barn. She failed to secure the rope properly to the beam and it must have held for only a moment after she jumped off the ladder, but the fall tightened the noose—she would have choked to death in a few minutes had Jakub not been upstairs in his eyrie, heard the crash, and arrived in time to pull the ladder off her and undo the noose and run for help. We carried her unconscious to our house and I rode to the village to get Higgins, who has made a poultice for the bruises on her neck, set her broken arm, and given her some chloral hydrate. It’s two in the morning; he has just left. Of course, she must stay here for several days. M. is still with her. Aleksander and Barbara have taken Julian in for the night. He was making a spectacle of himself outside the house, weeping and shouting that he was going to kill himself too, that was the only thing that would satisfy everyone, only he wouldn’t botch it. But now, according to Barbara, he only sits with his head in his hands. M. has forbidden him to come near Wanda.

  May 15. Wanda is still in great pain, unable to eat or even drink. Higgins, who came by today, says she is doing well, and urges us to keep her in bed for a few days. No one knows what to do. Julian is contrite, but how long will that last? “I know I’m not intelligent” was all she managed to say to me in a hoarse whisper. It is all so pitiable, but sordid and lowering, too. She has been pleading with M. to let Julian visit her.

  May 16. We have almost as much reason as Julian to feel remorseful. Living in community means assuming responsibility for others, not just for oneself and one’s family. Everyone disapproved of how Julian treated Wanda; as a community, we should have reined him in.

  May 17. Wanda has returned to Julian. After she left the house, M. was almost in tears. Now she is irate. I remind her, no one can know what goes on inside someone else’s marriage.

  May 18. Since Julian and Wanda are no longer coming to meals, M. has told Aniela to bring them their food. When we visited them this evening, Wanda spoke of an attack of nerves, probably brought on by hard work, and Julian agreed that she had been working too hard.

  May 19. Julian and Wanda will return to Poland at the beginning of next month. What has happened is so appalling that no one dares to urge
them to stay, although, God knows, it is unlikely to go better between them when they are home. Julian will have a new reason to blame Wanda, that they have left their friends, abandoned the great adventure, given up America, that he has been disgraced by her weakness. M. is very sad. Jakub may take their house. Ryszard prefers to remain in the barn. Nothing else has changed, but everything has changed, I can feel it. We are going to fail.

  May 20. I don’t feel like writing anything this evening.

  May 21. Nor today.

  May 22. In America, everything is supposed to be possible. And everything is possible here, abetted by the American inventiveness and the American talent for desecration. America lived up to its part of the bargain. The fault, the failure, is ours.

  May 23. Dinner today was acrimonious. Barbara mentioned hearing from a neighbor that there is a sick child at Edenica who is slowly starving to death on a diet of grated apple, rice, and barley water, and that no doctor has been summoned to visit her. Danuta and Cyprian insist there is a campaign to vilify the colony.

  May 24. Taking down a dead tree near the barn with Aleksander. At one end of the crosscut saw, I lost the rhythm and the blade buckled. In America it is hard to think that failure has its nobility.

  May 25. Don’t wait to be a setting sun. (I have read this maxim somewhere.) Prudent people abandon things before being abandoned by them. Wise people know how to make every end into a triumph.

  May 26. It can’t simply be that we had no experience: neither did the Germans who came to tend vineyards twenty years ago, who included an engraver, a brewer, a gunsmith, a carpenter, a hotel keeper, a blacksmith, a dry-goods-store owner, a hatter, two musicians, and two watchmakers. Surely we were no less capable of learning what was needed to make our venture a success. But their primary purpose was to succeed as farmers. We were willing to be farmers, in order to have a quiet rural life.