Life on Sandpaper

by Yoram Kaniuk

  A big, broad-shouldered man. He sat down and invited me to sit in a waiting room closed in with old, dusty drapes and he ordered himself coffee from an old, quavering waiter. He inspected me for a long time from the loftiness of his sad significance and sipped his coffee. I looked at his coffee. He noted my look. The king addressed his subject: Does the young gentleman need some coffee? I said I didn’t need it, but I certainly wanted some. He evidently liked my reply and called the waiter over who read Saroyan’s lips because he was hard of hearing, and said, Bring him some coffee, in a clean cup, and you know which kind. He told me, Since they only have one kind of coffee here! The waiter walked away, he hadn’t lip-read Saroyan’s last few words, and the king asked me: So you’re the Jewish Aram? Yoram, I replied. He made an effort not to hear me and repeated, Aram. Aram with a Y. It seemed he felt obliged to put me through some sort of humiliating ritual. That he was lowering himself to sit down with somebody like me, so I had to be put in my place. For me it was quite moving. In his books I had found the sad, dark glory of the human condition—something Saroyan’s work had in common with Edgar Allan Poe’s and James Thurber’s. He said some nasty things about his ex-wife, that she had ruined him and robbed him of his good name. He talked a lot about women. About publishers who’d rob their own mothers and make children into orphans. About agents who in any civilized country would be lined up and shot. He said they were all sons of bitches. That they all, without exception, were bloodsuckers. He said his own children were waiting for him to die so they could inherit. That all that interested them about Saroyan was his death. He said he was an orphan and knew all about being an orphan. He said he was alone because of the bastards all around him who just wanted to suck his blood. He said that he hated his children. I made so bold as to say that I didn’t believe what he’d said about his children. He said, Who are you to believe me or not? What, do you know them? Are you somebody whose opinion I should consider? Do you think you’re smart because you’re Jewish? Hollywood is the garbage can of the arts, and who controls it? Jews, just like that bastard Milestone. Elia Kazan and I are the only Americans in Hollywood, because anybody who fought the Turks and was beaten by those bloodthirsty despots knows a thing or two. I said that was probably true. He raised his voice and said, Don’t agree with me and don’t parrot what I say, Kazan and I are the only two Jews in Hollywood—if a Jew is Einstein and not that schmuck Mayer. And not that bastard Milestone and not his fucking friends either. They’re running my life. But the Jews and the Armenians are half brothers. Always against everybody and everybody against them. But you didn’t understand God’s gift when of all the nations he chose to give you His Son. You didn’t even understand enough to kill Him when you had the chance. No, you let Pontius Pilate kill Him so that He would die and you’d be able to keep your hands clean and exonerate yourselves. Saroyan ordered some sandwiches then and asked me to eat because I still had room to grow. There was background music, something classical, and as I ate he said, Tell Milestone he’s a sonofabitch. Tell Akim Tamiroff he’s a sonofabitch. Tell everyone you meet that Saroyan says they’re sons of bitches, and I don’t mean the same bitch. Humanity has no future. Once upon a time, people got married landing order to unite their territories, they got married for land. It was business. Today they want love. They spoil and blackmail their kids so in the end they just want your blood. Just want to kill their parents.

  I listened to him. His bitterness was mingled with a kind of desperation, a “cry for help.” This wasn’t the man who’d written The Human Comedy—and yet it was. He was angry. He was really angry. He wasn’t even angry, he was enraged. Not interested in me at all. He didn’t ask questions. He didn’t know why the hell I was sitting with him, and moreover, why he was sitting with me and wasting his time with me, and I could see he didn’t understand. Maybe it was just because I was there and wanted to meet him. Maybe he wanted to amuse himself. Maybe the boy in him that had written those magical stories was still hidden inside somewhere. He said, Just don’t try and be a successful young writer in America. America hugs them all to death. Then there was silence. He didn’t look at me again.

  I could see a sliver of sky through the torn drapes and a faint light came in. I wanted to get up and go. He said, You’re staying until I tell you to leave. And then he sank deep into his threadbare armchair, pulled out an old dog-eared book without a cover from his jacket pocket, opened it, and looked at me and in his eyes I could see that I no longer existed. He began reading aloud. In his eyes I could see that he wasn’t reading but looking and wasn’t seeing well but simply reciting. His voice became soft and pleasant. Filled with love for the words. He read from memory what he probably hadn’t read in years. He read from My Name is Aram. He probably hadn’t read the book for ages, but must have been in the habit of reciting and possibly rewriting the book aloud. Every now and then I saw a tear glistening in his eye, or actually rolling down his cheek, but he didn’t notice. I didn’t budge from my seat so as not to sully the moment, his voice was clear and every now and again he remembered where he was, he’d looked up in surprise but then carry on as though possessed, looking at me angrily for a moment before going back to the loveliness of his reading. I could hear his own amazement at the words he was speaking. The words he was recreating. Acuity, precision. An elderly man sitting and reciting—or guessing at—the fruits of his youth. He wanted me to understand something, apparently, something that I would perhaps repeat to Milestone, along the lines of: apart from Saroyan’s words, we were all merely sons of bitches. The words were inside him. Still with their old sound. He occasionally gave me a playful glance, because something that had astonished me had amused him. He had brought the book with him. He certainly didn’t walk around with it in his pocket every day. Perhaps he wanted the book to tell me about the man who had written it. When he finished and I saw the tears flowing down his face, I applauded. He turned gray and pale. He shot me an penetrating yet good-humored look. Then he turned serious and said, Everybody hates me, there’s not a single person who doesn’t hate me, and I hate everybody back, without exception. Only Aram doesn’t hate me. And nobody hates him either. I mean the real Aram, not my shitty son. You’re acting like an idiot when you flatter a pig like me. And Jews don’t applaud pigs, they only eat them in secret. You’re a bastard and you’re trying to buy me off, trying to get by me, trying to be sneaky with me, just like everybody else. Tell Milestone, no, tell Milstein who wanted to be as American as baseball and changed his name to Milestone, tell him to make a film about an aging man who turns love into hate. I’m a guy who knows what life is really made of, the way women know, especially witches—and what woman isn’t a witch? None of them are ever good, none of them are ever nice. There aren’t any nice witches. He suddenly got up and started to walk out. I said good-bye. He didn’t answer. He just looked at me. What a waste, he said, and left.

  Afterward I called Lee who sounded distant and scary with a kind of forced cheerfulness and I said I’d decided not to come back. Mexico had been good for me. Viva Zapata. I remembered the movie. Lee was like a gift from a different universe. I felt sad and lonely and didn’t want to hear Lee telling me we were through. Oved went away again. I drove with him for two days and then he continued on his voyage in the footsteps of the Mayans and their treasures, which were to become the center of his life for the next forty years and that story will be told in the annals of Oved. He went his way and I went mine, without a map, just like that, I went where my feet took me; the way, not the destination, interested me, as they say, and today I don’t remember where I got to, apparently Yucatán. It was desolate. I met Mexicans in remote bars and little villages and who gave me mushrooms and peyote and I had Technicolor movies in my head like Walt Disney’s. Lee was leaving me. The conceit was sweet because it hurt. Mexico was filled with forgetting, with mystery. In a small town I saw a matador in his glittering costume, but he wasn’t the real thing, and his outfit was a cheap sort of Halloween costume. He was a small
, jumpy man. When he stood facing the bull he didn’t know exactly what he was doing. When I got into town I went into one of the town’s two bars and drank tequila and licked table salt. An immense woman, who as far as I remember found me drunk in a bar near the town’s only gas station, and whose name was Maria, took me to her hacienda. She was saucer-eyed and despite her outrageous height, the legs that supported her huge body were slim. She didn’t know any English and we conversed in the little Spanish I’d picked up on the trip to Guatemala. Her priest, whose aunt was the stepdaughter of an English trader in Honduras and so knew English, told me that Maria killed her husbands. It sounded romantic and she told the priest to tell me that she was a lioness and I was a poet. What with the hallucinogenic mushrooms, the tequila, the Old Crow bourbon, and some other unnamed liquor straight from Kentucky, I became everything Maria wanted me to be, and our time together was deep, faraway, detached. The soil was sad, arid, and treacherous. All that grew there were churches on which God had turned his back and no longer frequented. He had been replaced by ancient gods with the names of Christian saints. When I asked Maria her name she didn’t want to tell me.

  The bartender spoke a bit of English to so I told him that Moshe Dayan used to tell a story about a guy who went into a bar in Mexico and there was a man sitting next to him and he ordered a tequila, drank it, and asked, What’s your name, and the guy didn’t answer and he asked again, What’s your name, and the guy still didn’t answer, so the first guy pulled a gun and shot the guy and said, I’ll get a paper in the morning and find out. The bartender, who managed a laugh, told me, There’s no paper here, but Maria, for whom the story was translated, thought it was cute. She was proud that the Mexican corridas were different from the Spanish ones: Here we don’t torment the bull. No lances stuck in the bull’s neck. The fight is fair: The matador against the bull. Nothing more.

  The corrida took place in an almost natural amphitheater in the center of town, and the church bells were ringing. Most of the matadors were local boys. The bulls weren’t all that big. The women swooped down on the murdered bull to cut off its testicles and crush them into a powder that would help them bring more children into the world and so that the ones born would not die in their cribs. They were all terrified of Maria who because of her height also served as the local weather forecaster because radio hadn’t yet reached them. On numerous occasions she was assaulted by the priests who tried to feel her up but she’d hit them with the black cane she always carried, pinch their balls, and they’d beat a hasty retreat, and as they ran you could see they were barefoot. A matador who several years earlier had moved to a bigger town—which wasn’t saying much, because a bigger town in that region meant a few more houses, another bar, another whore, Maria told me—had recently come back home to be a local hero. There were also visiting matadors sometimes who had gotten famous in the larger towns. Whenever they’d come, they were presented with suckling pigs stuffed with vegetables and mushrooms and rice—and, of course, some superior marijuana—as gestures of goodwill. The matadors were short, slim, dressed in their pretend outfits, nobody had the money to buy a real matador’s costume, but since the village women knew, from ancient times, and with no small help from their dreams, what a real matador looked like, they put together the matadors’ toy costumes themselves, leaving the men looking like chintzy scarecrows, all taking part in a corrida at once a religion, a ritual, and the national lottery.

  Maria never missed the corrida. The cheap glitzy materials, the mariachi music, the old phonographs playing New Orleans jazz, the barefoot priests standing around the arena and popping blown-up condoms they’d bought from traveling salesmen who had come in their dusty Fords to buy marijuana. Since blowing up the condoms was so amusing, nobody bothered to inform the priests that what they were popping weren’t exactly balloons. So the audience went wild, the matador tried to kill the bull, but sometimes the bull made mincemeat of him. In most cases, because of the bulls being so old, the toy matador would win. There were no perfume-drenched handkerchiefs. No lace scarves. No operatic cries. It was just a simple game played by matadors with sequins on their clothes that fell off the moment the corrida was over.

  I was at Maria’s hacienda for about a month. We growled at one another. There were servants who took care of me. They’d put me into a bath with dried flowers and massage me and dry and shave me and Maria would hit them. She was nice to look at and she had a body like Monique van Vooren’s but bigger. We liked charging at each other, playing corrida in a vast bed that looked like a football field, and once, when I fell out, I was bruised for two days. I no longer remember what exactly went on, because most of the time I was chewing mushrooms and walking through a colored paradise or else going right down to hell. I think she liked me, but I don’t know why. The whole village was crowded with suitors she’d rejected. She was the only wealthy woman in the region. The men were strong and handsome. One evening she and I were sitting drinking, earlier we’d watched the sun go down and now it was dark. She cried, but covered my eyes with her hand so I wouldn’t see. She gave a speech, or a groan, or recited poetry, or some sort of gospel, from herself to herself, she spoke nonstop for an hour and more, I sat there captivated, I understood very little but in her voice I heard a plea to God because she said, Dios, Dios, said it a lot; she asked him for a son so that there would be somebody to remember her after her death. I tried to understand the words I didn’t know from her intonation. I thought about Bird, how he would have understood her just from the music of her speech and I tried and tried, but I just wasn’t Bird who had such a way of understanding the worst, it was because of his great gentleness, Bird who knew how to read me even when I was walking down the street and he was too hopped up to listen to the words I was saying, but he felt the music in a person’s walk. I realized Maria might have been declaiming something like her last will and testament. She was nobody’s fool. She knew I didn’t understand. She wasn’t on drugs, wasn’t drunk. That day we hadn’t smoked anything and she hadn’t chewed any buttons.

  Ours was the longest affair I’d had since Lee and would be the longest I’d have before the final one, which was to be very long indeed. In the absence of language, what did we see in each other? I thought about the first woman I’d been with. In that small hotel in Tel Aviv. A new immigrant who hardly spoke Hebrew and with whom I’d had a long conversation almost without words. What did we give one another? For years thereafter, perhaps even now, I was positive that our strange coupling had produced a son or daughter. This was 1956. I sometimes wait for someone to knock at my door and for an adult man or woman to stand there and say, Hello Papa. Maria rode splendidly upright on her horse, which she called Yum-Yum, though I don’t know why. She loved sunsets and turned strong and predatory only when she had to deal with another villager. Everybody in the town and the district admired her and courted her and feared her. One day she asked me to talk to her in the language of La Biblia. So I talked. I told her what I thought of her. She listened attentively and brought flowers she picked in the yard and made me a garland and said Dios, Dios and I said—God, and she said amor, I said—love. There was no telephone and the world outside the town and the neighboring villages and the mountains and the desert and the cacti and the poverty and the Indians and a few Spaniards who remained from the sixteenth century and the churches celebrating ancient gods with Christian names—all remained mysterious and distant.

  A short time before I left, a tired elderly man arrived in town and in one of the two bars announced that he could fly. Everybody got excited and paid him something to see. Even Maria, who was rich, paid. We went out into the square, which wasn’t a square at all but was called the square because every town needs a square, and which was actually an open field bordered by the two bars and the five churches, which were all mainly empty. Everybody stood waiting. The man concentrated. He prayed. Everybody knelt and held hands and prayed for him. Maria pushed me down into a kneeling position and prayed on my behalf as well. Then
everybody got up and the old man looked at the waiting crowd. Maybe they didn’t really believe him but they couldn’t completely disbelieve either. There wasn’t much to do in those towns except dream. And sometimes because there was so little to do they wouldn’t even be able to dream for themselves, so they’d dream the dreams of their mothers and fathers who at least had seen the great revolutions. The old man pulled a package from his coat pocket, undid it, and took out what looked like a kind of folded kite. He spread it out, adjusted it here and there, and suddenly he had wings. He strapped the wings to his shoulders, raised his arms, and started flying. True, there was a strong wind. That can’t have hurt. But the fact is, he flew. No wind alone could have carried him up to the top of the steeple of one of the churches to scare off a flock of ancient pigeons that I would have thought an atom bomb would leave nonplussed. The man flew. Even Maria wept. The peyote in me was so strong that even I believed that he was flying. His demeanor afterward, the way he drank, his ludicrous desire to be a bullfighter, the way he touched the sequined costume of the bleeding matador at the very next corrida—that wretched costume made of cheap, thin material that some traveling salesmen had traded for marijuana—all that hardly gave me the impression that he was really capable of performing miracles. And yet, he’d set himself a challenge and made sure he was believed. And when the next matador came to town, his sequined costume like play clothes, and everybody turned out for the bullfight, and the bull did a turn that aroused great admiration, and the crowd applauded, but then it butted the poor matador and his outfit immediately fell to pieces, he was standing there in shorts and undershirt and the crowd held its breath, the bull gored the poor guy until he was almost done for, but then the flying man went up to the bull who was now already a little winded and tired of hurting people, and it waited for him quietly, like a trained dog. The old flying man picked up the matador’s torn clothes, his sword, took out his wings, jumped onto the bull’s back, the bull bellowed, and then he flew, he flew over the bull, the bull just stood there quietly, and people clapped because the flying man had won, but then he disappeared to another town. Maria wasn’t happy when I decided to leave. She’d learned a few words of English, had shown me gray fields that one day she would till, but I was already feeling suffocated and the monthly bus came by and I went to Mexico City and then flew to Los Angeles and then to New York to meet Lee and hear her verdict and be sentenced. Oved said later that in this case the man on trial maybe wanted to be punished more than the judge wanted to punish him.