by Anne Raeff
One of these days, I’m going to write music based on Goya’s Black Paintings. Maybe I would call it An Ode to Ugliness. In general, I think people spend too much time on beauty. It seems to me that if we spent more time on ugliness, we wouldn’t be so easily fooled into believing in God, and we would come to understand the arbitrariness of everything, that there is no explanation for the fact that I was born during times of peace in a prosperous country to a prosperous family, while at the very moment that I came onto this earth, someone else was born in a tiny village in Burundi, the entire population of which would, a few years down the line, be brutally massacred. Just as there is no explanation for the fact that once, on my way home from class in Madrid, a Doberman pinscher followed closely at my heels the whole way home only to jump on me from behind right in front of our building, straddling me like a child clinging to his mother’s back in a flood. I felt its dog breath on my neck and was sure it was going to bite me, but I kept perfectly still and after a few seconds, it jumped off me and retreated. I watched it ambling placidly down the street as if this frenzy had been merely a figment of my imagination. But it wasn’t. When I got upstairs, I found that my clothes were covered with the dog’s menstrual blood. Now why did that dog choose me to follow and attack?
These days my mother would probably say the incident with the dog had been an omen. She started talking about omens in Madrid. Not that she ever actually used the word omen, but that’s what she was saying. She was always describing strange people she saw on the streets, like an old man who was missing both ears whom she saw in different parts of the city one day as if he were following her. And she got very upset about a young heroin addict who wouldn’t stop pounding on the door of the telephone booth my mother was making a call from. I think people have a tendency to mix up symbols with omens and then the next thing you know, the symbols become the reality. That doesn’t make the symbols any less frightening, though. I still have dreams about that dog mixed up with images from my days at the Prado—large-headed dwarves and dancing witches and sinners burning in hell, their impaled bodies being raped by giant insects or lizards. I wonder if my mother dreams about the old, earless man. I think I saw him once too, but only once. It was at one of the bars on the Plaza de Tirso de Molina, which are favorite hangouts for old men who drink too much and live in boarding houses run by widows. I liked going to those bars because they had the greatest tapas—grilled pigs’ ears, lamb intestines, gizzards, barnacles, blood sausages, all the weird stuff that I love despite, or perhaps because of, my ethnic background.
George Liddy liked those places, too, because he didn’t stick out so much in them, the lone drunk at eleven in the morning. Tirso de Molina was his daytime haunt and, on my way home from the Prado, I often swung by there just to have some company. George Liddy was always happy to have it if he didn’t have a young man in tow, which he usually didn’t, especially at that time of the day. But if he did, I just stayed for one glass of beer and then I would leave him on his own. I never saw him with the same companion more than once. I didn’t get it, though, why these young guys went with him, although I never asked him about how they arranged things, if money or gifts were involved. I’m sure he would have told me if I had asked because he wasn’t at all embarrassed about what he called his adventures. In fact, he talked about them a lot more than I would have liked, including all the gory details. He probably thought he was freaking me out, but he wasn’t. His tales neither disgusted nor excited me the way that Goya’s paintings did.
One evening just when I was about to leave George Liddy to his own musings about how he would stop drinking and marry me the day Ireland became whole again, Marisol walked into the bar. I pretended that I had no idea who she was, but she came right over to us.
“What are you doing here?” she asked me as if I didn’t belong there, when I was the one who had been spending practically every afternoon of that week standing at the exact same spot at the bar.
“Eating pigs’ ears,” I said, offering her a nice juicy one.
“I don’t eat pork,” she said and lit a cigarette.
“What are you, Jewish?” George Liddy asked, tittering into his Cointreau.
Marisol ignored the question. Instead she ordered a beer and squeezed in beside me. George Liddy turned the other way, laughing, but Marisol ignored him. She took a long gulp of beer while I tried to think of something to say to her, but all I could think about asking her was why she didn’t eat pork, and I didn’t want her to feel that I too was making fun of her.
“You look like your mother” was what she said when she finally decided to speak. I didn’t respond because I don’t think I look like my mother. My mother has black, black hair and dark brown eyes and a long elegant neck, and I’m what a Victorian novelist would have called plain. I don’t really know how I ended up with almost blonde hair and blue eyes since both my parents and all my grandparents have pretty dark, typically Jewish complexions. The twins used to call me Isolde, like in the Wagner opera, but then they stopped. I wonder if my parents told them it wasn’t funny.
George Liddy came to my rescue then. He had finished laughing about the pork. “It seems we’ve met,” he said very gallantly.
“Perhaps,” Marisol said, but she turned to me again. “I haven’t seen your mother in days. Is she all right?”
“She’s fine. She’s working on a poem.”
George Liddy turned to Marisol and said, “I once published a slim volume of verse. It got me a job at a mediocre university in Sheffield, of all places—world capital of cutlery. If it hadn’t been for those few hundred lines, I would be at home now, wrapped in a cozy blanket by the fire. Perhaps a man not too much younger than I would be preparing a roast for us in the kitchen. I certainly wouldn’t be here. That much I know for sure, not that I mind so terribly being here in your company, but it does get so very repetitious, I’m afraid.”
“You don’t write anymore?” Marisol asked.
“I have nothing to say except that there is nothing to say, which has been said before too many times.”
“So your book was about having nothing to say?” I asked, trying to avoid further conversation with Marisol.
“When I was a young man, I was duped into believing that you could never say there was nothing to say too many times. It’s quite overrated really, my slim volume, but since I don’t plan on having any heirs, I needed something to leave behind. I suppose my thin volume of prose poems is neither inferior nor superior to any child I might have had. Children are just as overrated as art, I’m afraid. Do you know why I wrote poems in prose?” He laughed.
“Why?” I asked.
“Because there are fewer of them. How many prose poems have you ever read? How many are famous? The odds were better working in prose. Perhaps five hundred years from now my work will be read as an example of late-twentieth-century prose poetry. It’s like having a dwarf for a child. People are more likely to notice a dwarf child than a regular one.”
“But people don’t admire dwarves. They gawk,” I said.
“Gawk,” he said very loudly so that the people at the table behind the bar turned to look. “What a wonderfully ugly word. I have always had a fondness for it and if I were still writing little poems in prose, I would write an ode to the word gawk and to dwarves. But, Deborah, don’t you think there is any admiration in gawking? Don’t you think people admire the trials and tribulations of a dwarf’s life? As a matter of fact, sometimes I wish I were a dwarf myself, don’t you?” He turned to Marisol.
“What is the theme of your mother’s poetry?” Marisol asked very seriously, ignoring George Liddy’s question.
“Theme?” I was disappointed that she didn’t answer George Liddy’s question about wanting to be a dwarf, and I tried to steer her back to the dwarves again, but she wasn’t interested in discussing them. Instead, she asked me what the topic
of my mother’s poetry was and I remembered the few lines my mother had shown me about Judith and Holofernes. “She’s writing an epic about Judith and Holofernes, but I don’t know what the theme is. I think she likes the idea of a woman killing a military hero in his own bed.”
“It’s not such a great accomplishment, when you think about it,” George Liddy said wistfully, as if he had briefly entertained a similar heroism.
“Your mother never said anything to me about writing poetry,” Marisol said.
“She doesn’t talk about it much. I just know she’s working on it since she showed me the first few lines.”
“Isn’t the whole story about Judith and Holofernes apocryphal anyway?” George Liddy continued. “There’s no actual proof that Judith even existed and what was much more likely was that the Jews lived under the yoke of the Assyrians (or was it the Babylonians?) for centuries. Wasn’t that how it actually went?”
“I’m not sure,” I said. The Bible is one of those books I have read and reread. I’ve even read the New Testament, and when I was younger, my father used to give me little quizzes on all the stories in the Bible. He is one of those people who thinks you can’t be an educated person if you don’t know the Bible inside out. But I can’t ever seem to remember all those stories. I forget the most basic details about the most famous people like Naomi and Ruth and whether King Solomon lived before or after David. They just don’t come alive for me, so I can’t remember them. I can’t picture them walking around the desert, eating and singing and going about their daily tasks. I can’t picture their faces or their clothing. I’ve tried, but the Bible is kind of like Leaves of Grass—I want to feel it, want to feel each blade of grass growing and every hair on my body tingling from the smells of a meadow, but it’s just a lot of overly long lines of poetry to me, just like the Bible is a bunch of stories that I can never keep straight.
“I’m quite sure of it,” George Liddy said very emphatically. “The actual Bible doesn’t allow for women killing men in their beds.”
“It doesn’t really matter, does it, whether it’s apocryphal?” Marisol said, and that was the end of our conversation about my mother’s poem, which I don’t think she ever wrote, although I’ll probably never know. Maybe she’s still working on it. Maybe she’s lying up there under the covers, spinning couplets in her head about some Jewish heroine who saved the world from the Assyrians. I guess someone must have defeated them finally since there are no Assyrians left today. The one thing I do remember about the Bible is that it’s all about how the Jews are constantly avoiding obliteration. I wonder what will happen to us if the world starts leaving us alone. I suppose we’ll die out then—stop passing on all those obsolete traditions. Somehow that doesn’t scare me. We’d be like the Assyrians then with no claims to greatness—just a tribe of people whose men all had long beards (or was that the Babylonians?) who used to roam the earth fighting with its neighbors. Still, there’s something almost comforting in thinking that maybe there was a long-forgotten Assyrian who composed the most heavenly music or had a voice sweeter than an entire boys’ chorus. Maybe my mother is writing a poem more beautiful than Leaves of Grass. Maybe she has it all in her head like the memory of a long walk through Manhattan.
“No, I suppose it doesn’t matter,” George Liddy said, looking like he was going to cry, but instead he ordered us all a round of beer and a huge plate of little snails that you have to eat with a pin. “Do you eat snails?” he asked Marisol when they arrived.
“Yes, thank you. I adore snails,” she said.
“Isn’t that a little extreme?” he asked Marisol.
“Extreme?” she asked very seriously, as if she weren’t sure he had meant to use that word.
“Are snails really worth adoring?” he explained.
“It’s a manner of speaking,” she said.
“I see.”
Somehow the day has come and gone. I guess I slept most of it away. I feel refreshed. It’s that feeling you get when a hangover finally lifts, when the sun is going down and the pressure of the day and activity weaken and you can settle into the quiet of the evening. My father came home before it got dark. He was twinless even though it’s the dead of winter and their mother won’t be coming home from Florida until March. I didn’t ask him why they hadn’t come back with him, why they had left all their stuff in the basement and not come back, because I didn’t really care
“How’s your mother?” he asked, and I told him I had no idea since she hadn’t emerged from her room all day. He didn’t ask me where I had gone last night or how I could know that she hadn’t come out of her room if I had been in school all day.
“I didn’t feel like going to school today,” I said when he was already halfway up the stairs. I’m sure he heard me, but he didn’t respond. I heard him knocking on their bedroom door and then I heard the door open and close again, really quietly. I dialed Mercedes’ number, but luckily the machine answered, so I didn’t have to talk to her. I didn’t realize that I didn’t really want to talk to her until I felt that relief when the machine answered and I knew I was off the hook.
When I was younger, I liked to keep the door to my bedroom open at night so I could hear my parents talking quietly as I fell asleep, but now I hate hearing their low whispers coming from their bedroom, my father’s slightly high, gentle tones playing the melody to my mother’s monosyllabic answers, so I closed the door, put on some music, and fell asleep only to be awakened by my father’s furious typing. When I was young, I liked to listen to his typing, which sometimes lasted until dawn, but this was a different kind of typing, not steady and soothing, but clamorous and frantic without a single pause. It sounded as if my father were bashing out letters indiscriminately, without even hitting the space bar, just running words together the way the Romans did. He typed relentlessly, not stopping for a breath. “Stop!” I wanted to scream. I wanted to barge into my father’s study, grab the stupid old Olympia typewriter from under his fingers and throw it out the window, watch it bounce down the driveway until it came to a mangled halt. But then I imagined my father sitting in his reading chair, his head in his hands, sobbing softly, mourning the death of his beloved typewriter, and all I could do was get the hell out of the house, which I did. I thought of calling Mercedes again just to see if she was going to Florida or not because if she wasn’t, I thought maybe we could go somewhere together, someplace closer. But there’s a big difference between thinking about doing something and actually doing it. Instead I found myself the only passenger on the last bus to New York, wondering what I was going to do when I got there.
INTERMISSION
What Simon Gelb Was Writing
on the Old Olympia
My Dear Clara,
I thought, for some ridiculous reason, that if I sent the twins home, I could convince you to come out of your room or, if not something so drastic, to agree to sit up in bed, eat some toast or noodles with butter the way we used to after coming home from one of our all-night walks around the city. And why can’t we take an all-night walk now? We are far from old. Our legs are good; our hearts are strong. If only it were about walking, I would strap you to my back and we would walk to Philadelphia. We have never been to Philadelphia. But I don’t know if I would be up for such a long hike. There is something comforting almost, domestic in a nineteenth-century sort of way, about knowing that you are in the room across the hall, knowing that in the morning I will coax you into eating a soft-boiled egg, and you will drink some tea with honey and I will feel as though you are doing it for me. It could be much worse. You could be lost again, missing, walking aimlessly around these suburbs or, worse still, wandering through the most dangerous neighborhoods of the city or you might, at this very moment, be boarding the A train on your way to Far Rockaway. What on earth is in Far Rockaway? And then I would have to go out into the cold to look for you. I would not be
able to settle into my armchair with a book and wait until you returned, or didn’t return.
You were so angry that morning in Madrid when you finally came home after I had spent the whole night following you from bar to bar and made that awful scene in the end. I’m sorry for that. I suppose I was behaving horribly. It reminds me of the waitress we met in that beastly hot Moroccan town Beni Mellal. She had left her husband because he followed her everywhere. He was a retired bus driver and we both found that very meaningful. I can’t remember why now, but we thought it was important, the fact that he was a bus driver. He followed her when she went to visit her mother three blocks away and when she went to visit her sister six blocks away. She had a heart condition, something she said would kill her eventually. They had met because she used to ride his bus to and from work. She had had a sewing job in one of those sweatshops where they pay by the piece. She said her eyes were shot from it. And she had married him because he was too old to want children and she dreaded being a mother—all that chastising and coaxing. She wanted a quiet life. He let her sit for hours on the roof of their house. She liked it up there because the noises from the street came to her, rose up to her like the smell of something good cooking, quietly surrounding her, letting her know that life was still going on down there while she sat in the shade.
He wasn’t bad at all, she had said. Not too ugly for an old man, not too hairy. He enjoyed spending the afternoons and evenings in the café with his friends. Many of his friends were retired bus drivers. They stuck together, it seemed. But she couldn’t stand being followed. Still, there must have been something else about him, or perhaps it was about her, that made her give up her quiet spot on the roof and move so far south to that horrible town Beni Mellal. Did she just pick it randomly on a map? Someplace very far away where no one would look for her? Or had someone told her there was an odd French spinster who was neither young nor old, neither fat nor thin, living in Beni Mellal, running a small, clean hotel? Did she think that perhaps such a woman would take pity on her and give her work and her own room with her own bidet?
