There Your Heart Lies

by Mary Gordon

  •

  A week passes before Marian continues where they left off. They are making grape jelly, squeezing the transparent green insides from the dark purple skins, dropping them gently into the lobster pot, speckled blue and white. Both of them thinking what they will not say: Marian won’t be alive when the jars of the preserves are opened. Preserves, Marian thinks. My life has been preserved, but not for much longer.

  “So, tell me about Spain,” Amelia says. “How did you decide to go?”

  “How did I get to Spain? Well, in a way it’s very difficult to explain, and in a way it’s very simple. So much happened by chance, the ones I happened to meet, the ones I happened to like, Luigi and his family, going to the Catholic Worker for a while, although I could never fully get on board: I knew I wasn’t a pacifist, among other things. And then I was afraid they wouldn’t approve of Johnny. Not to mention, the most important thing, the Depression: it made everything so clear, in some way. People devastated by it, losing everything, and my family carrying on as if nothing in the outside world could affect them. It was a time, Amelia, when everything seemed clear. Hitler and Mussolini, and then Franco, trying to overthrow everything progressive in Spain, all of them talking about democracy as if it were something to be wiped away, some clammy little excrescence under their great heroic boots. In a way it was so easy: the people I liked and admired were on one side, and people like my family, whom I no longer loved and certainly didn’t admire, were on the other. And then, of course, there was my brother’s death. I needed something that would allow me to believe there was more to life than his death. I was in so much pain from his death that, although I was too much of a physical coward to kill myself, I would have been happy to die. I used to make lists of desirable ways of dying: being struck by lightning was at the top of my list. Or an aneurism. Something quick and clean, nothing for anyone to dispose of.”

  Why is her grandmother doing this, speaking so flippantly about her own desire to die? As if it were an affectation she’d grown out of, like a cigarette holder or a fake English accent.

  “You were so young, Meme. Younger than I am now.”

  “Yes, younger, and, at the same time, more knowing and more ignorant. But, my God, if I had the fire in me now that I had then…I’m even amazed at myself, thinking of those years, how I just did what I thought needed to be done…wild things, like talking Russell into marrying me and talking the recruiters into taking me because I could speak Spanish and was an excellent driver and could fix cars. Of course, when I got to Spain, the men would almost never let me near one of the cars because I was a woman. How did I do it? I was nineteen years old, and I convinced everyone—Russell and the recruiters for the Spanish medical volunteers—that it was a good thing for me to go to Spain.

  “Despite everything, Russell was glad to have me, because, as I said, we loved each other, and also it gave him cover as a gay man. We were very close. We clung to each other after Johnny’s death. We believed in things, that we could change the world. Of course, we didn’t change it, not really…or maybe we did, but not in the way we thought, and probably much less than we hoped. There was so much we didn’t know. But it saddens me that people your age know so much that I don’t know. So much that it’s impossible for you to do anything.”

  Does her grandmother know what she’s saying, what her words might mean to Amelia? Wiping out a whole swath of the population, consigning them to irrelevance, to paralysis. She may be right. She probably is right. But how can she say these things so lightly, as if her words had no connection to the way Amelia is trying to live her life?

  “What can I say to you about Spain, about the war in Spain? I’ve forgotten so much. People think forgetting is simple, only one thing, that it’s remembering that’s difficult, that forgetting is just the opposite, effortless and natural. But no, I think forgetting must be a kind of labor, sometimes you have to will not to remember, so yes, it is a work, some kind of work, even if you don’t know you’re doing it. I don’t know, some labor of relinquishment. But it’s not as simple as people think.

  “And then, even if I work hard at remembering, things fly off or fly away, and no matter how hard I work, the forgetting takes over. That’s why I’m doing such a bad job at this. I begin the telling in my mind, and then it’s gone, the picture of what I wanted to say. And when the picture is gone, the words are gone. It’s as if I were on a horse—there I go with horses again—a pity I don’t like them, because they do come in handy as metaphors. It’s as if I were on a horse, feeling all right, secure even, and then I’m thrown, lying on the ground, and then another horse comes by and I jump on its back, and it’s okay, I think. I’m going to get there, wherever it was I thought I was going. But then I’m thrown again, and then there’s another horse and another, but I’m just exhausted and I get off. All I want to do is sleep.”

  Her grandmother seems to be growing agitated, and Amelia doesn’t know how to calm her down. To calm her down, but keep her going. And she, too, is agitated. Her grandmother has become a stranger talking, talking in this way about large ideas, about what can’t be seen or touched or smelt or tasted, her grandmother, who has always made a point of talking about what was to hand, or about political ideas that had nothing to do with abstraction, that were local and practical. Who is this grandmother whom she thought she knew? And she wonders if it’s possible to say we know anyone, are all of us keeping from sight the important things that make us who we are?

  “Do they still show slides? Do they still have slide shows? Well, I never liked them either, any more than I liked horses. Slide shows. They always seemed ‘educational’ to me, which is another word for boring, and you know how I hate being bored. Or boring because they’re too personal, too particular and too common at the same time: ‘There’s Aunt Tillie in front of the Eiffel Tower,’ and you haven’t the faintest idea who Aunt Tillie is, and you’ve seen the Eiffel Tower a million times.”

  Amelia is wondering whether it’s worth it to explain the new kind of slide show to her grandmother. She decides she won’t. Anything having to do with the digital world throws her grandmother into a kind of angry despair.

  “What I mean to say is that remembering and forgetting are kind of like slide shows, only not educational, because you can’t learn a thing from them, they’re just too fast, and I just want the projector to go off and the lights to go back on.”

  Clearly it disturbs her, this gap between the pictures and the words, and Amelia wonders if she’s being greedy, maybe she should just say, Never mind, Meme, it’s all too hard, just let it go, just let it go. But what if her grandmother wants to keep doing it, needs Amelia’s encouragement and support to go on? Is she, perhaps, being of help? She wants to believe that it’s a possibility.

  “You want to know what it was like, the war in Spain? It was like nothing because to say it was like something else would be, well, just wrong. It was only itself, terrible, terrible, terrible, don’t they say war is hell, everyone says it, even when they’re trying to talk you into another war; but I think it wasn’t like hell because everything that I’ve ever heard about hell suggests that it’s just one thing, just terrible despair and agony, but in the midst of all the terrible things that were happening, there were marvelous people doing things so selfless and so heroic you couldn’t even have imagined it, and moments when you felt more alive than ever, and then moments of complete nullity when you couldn’t even remember what it was like to think, you were just tending the overwhelming numbers of the wounded and the dead, you were a kind of machine, and then you were more exhausted than you can possibly imagine. And remember it was a civil war, half the country was on the other side, the fascist side, and it wasn’t even our country, and we were there for some ideal we probably didn’t even fully understand ourselves. I don’t know how much you know about that war?”

  “I did my thesis on Lorca,” Amelia says, and she hates the sound in her own throat. It sounds so juvenile, pathetic even, bringing up
her college work, written in the safe haven of the UCLA library, as a way of telling her grandmother that she has some understanding of what she went through on the bloody streets.

  “Well, isn’t that wonderful. Why did I never know?”

  “I didn’t think it was that interesting.”

  “Everything about you has always been of the greatest interest to me. You must always have known that.”

  “Well, Meme, everyone is terrified of boring you, you know.”

  “I guess I deserve that, and it’s probably a good thing. And I’m glad I don’t have to go into the boring details of all those initials: POUM, FAI, CDA, all that alphabet soup people were killing each other over, I don’t even remember what the initials stand for. And do you know I don’t remember a word of my Spanish?”

  “We could practice, Meme. You know I was a Spanish major; I can speak it pretty well.”

  “I wouldn’t dream of it. I’m sure my brain lost it for a reason.”

  Once again, Amelia is abashed at her own naive eagerness. But Marian has never liked apologies—they are high on the list of the boring—and Amelia doesn’t want to interrupt her grandmother, who now seems eager to go on.

  “Obviously, war is about death, it’s about inflicting death, but when you’re in it, you have a very strange relationship to death. You don’t believe you’ll die; you’re ready to die; you’re terrified of dying; dying seems like just nothing. And you’re surrounded by it, and the physical horror makes you wonder if anything in the world seems worth it, and at the same time, giving up seems unimaginable.

  “How funny I’m thinking about the smell of oranges on the hands of the Spanish girls who worked for us. They’d apologize for the smell, they’d just come from picking oranges for their family and when you said, ‘No, you smell wonderful,’ they’d think you were a crazy American who had no sense of what’s what.

  “ ‘What’s what’…What’s what. That’s a funny expression. But the words fit, because most of the time I didn’t know what was what, I was so distant from my own body, I would look at my hands and wonder whom they belonged to, or I would see my feet and feel as if I were looking at myself from the top of some barricade, some very high barricade, very far away. And at those times, I didn’t know who I was or whose hands were folding those bandages, or whose feet were taking those steps—they seemed to be doing things in some world I was very far from.

  “And there was another kind of being alive that made you understand what it is to be alive for most of the people who have lived on the earth. Being hungry, so hungry that you thought about food all the time, afraid you’d do something dreadful, something you’d be tormented by for the rest of your life, maybe you’d grab food from a child or kill someone because they took your hunk of bread. And being dirty, your sheets so dirty you almost couldn’t stand to get into your bed, even though you were so exhausted you thought it would be fine to die just there, and the way your hair felt when you couldn’t wash it, my hair, which I’d always been so proud of, became like some cheap, synthetic wool stuck to my head, like one of those dolls you see at Woolworth’s but couldn’t imagine anyone buying, those stiff bodies and that stiff, false hair. Oh, I forget you don’t know what Woolworth’s was. Woolworth’s, the five-and-ten, the five-and-dime, another thing you never thought wouldn’t be there forever, the red-and-gold signs and the slanted wooden floors smelling of awful candy and perfumes people like my mother had never even heard of, they kind of made you sick, they were so sweet, but the names were fascinating. Evening in Paris. Djer-Kiss. What did that mean? Was it supposed to suggest some kind of Scandinavian glamour, Greta Garbo or Ingrid Bergman, maybe? But, you see, you don’t even know what Woolworth’s was, so how can I expect you to understand?”

  The tone is growing wild again, and Amelia feels the need to rein her grandmother in. “I do understand. I promise I’ll tell you if I don’t.”

  “Well, you probably won’t, you’ll be afraid I’d think it’s boring to have to explain.”

  “I promise. And besides, you’re describing things very well. I can almost feel them in my own body.”

  “What I hope you never have to feel is being infested by lice. How can I explain the horror of that? Something crawling on you, tiny, insidious, and you can’t be swatting at yourself all the time, you’re working with the wounded and the dying. At night, Russell and I would go over each other’s skin and hair, raking each other’s scalps like monkeys. When people say, ‘It made my flesh crawl,’ I’m always tempted to say, ‘My dear, you have no idea.’

  “The sounds you thought you would never get away from. The sounds of people in agonizing pain, the sounds of different ways of dying. And the bombs, day and night. And the radio broadcasts.

  “Sometimes I think the worst thing of all—of course it wasn’t the worst, the worst was the endless wounded and dead that we could never keep up with—but something that made it all less bearable was the fighting among people you thought were all on the same side. The constant arguments, at first it seemed exhilarating that people would be so passionate about ideas, but then you had to come to terms with the fact that the people you thought were brave and fascinating were talking about it being all right to kill people who you might very well think were brave and fascinating. You thought all of us fighting fascism were comrades, but no, everyone was convinced that their way was the only right way, nobody agreeing about what they were fighting for. The anarchists said that society had to be changed as you were fighting the fascists, or even if you won, you would have won nothing; the communists said no, this is a war, social change will happen when we have won. That was Russell’s side, and I remember he’d get so impatient with the anarchists, I remember him saying, ‘Jesus, it’s not the time to question hierarchy when you have to obey orders, you’re in the business of people who are willing to follow orders to the letter without questioning, it’s not time to reorganize the factories when the point is to make enough bullets to kill your enemy.’ It was kind of a relief to hear him say ‘kill your enemy,’ because everyone was using other words, as if it weren’t all about killing. And everyone despised the people who tried to bridge the gap, people like Prieto, the defense minister, they rolled over his words asking people to forget their differences, they just rolled over them like some roller flattening a tennis court. The Russian secret police were everywhere, though you had to pretend you didn’t know what they were up to, and you had to pretend the anarchist’s romance of blood wasn’t blood lust, just a passion for justice.”

  Her grandmother goes silent, and Amelia feels she has to guard the silence. The silence is a relief, because the way her grandmother is talking frightens her. It is so strange, so unlike Meme. The word she uses most often is “terrible.” Terrible, terrible, terrible. Her speech is rushed and pressured, as if a wall of water had suddenly broken through, washing over Amelia, taking her up, rolling her, throwing her down, water full of boulders, filthy water you had to be afraid to swallow: what if the poison made its way inside you, what would happen to you then? And what if the force proved too great for her grandmother’s diminished strength, what if it killed her, talking this way? It would be her fault; Amelia would have to live with that forever.

  The silence, though, has slowed Marian down. Her voice is different now, slower, softer, more like the voice Amelia has always known.

  “I think you have never had a faith, so you can have no idea what it is to live through a loss of faith.”

  She needs to understand what her grandmother means by faith. Why faith is to her a word that matters, a word with heft and shape. Certainly, her grandmother knows Amelia has been brought up with no religion; she brought Amelia’s father up with none. The word “faith,” for Amelia, is only a relic, frightening or beautiful, insubstantial to the hand. Is it the same thing as belief? If it is, what is there that she can say she believes in?

  Of course she believes in things. There are things that she would not think to question. First and most
important, she believes she has been greatly, even extravagantly, loved. By three people: her father, her mother, her grandmother. That one is dead and one is dying has nothing to do with the power of it, that it—being greatly loved—is something she can stake her life on. But is there nothing larger than that?

  She believes that everyone should have enough food, clothing, and shelter to live a decent life. She believes that everyone should work to preserve the earth. She believes that no race is superior to any other race, and that no one should be discriminated against because of race, color, creed, or sexual orientation. She believes that men and women are equal. But she has never been able—this has been the problem—to connect these things with any actions that she thinks can change anything at all.

  Because she also believes there is darkness underneath everything, stronger than everything. That it is too late: the earth is doomed. That there is a hatred as deep in humans as the taste for meat, a hatred for anything different. That the wealthy will not share their wealth, that they would rather people starve and freeze than they should give up their luxuries. That between men and women, there is an unbridgeable wall of incomprehension at best, and at worst glass shards of mutual hate. And that nothing, nothing she could ever do is as strong as all of that.

  So, her grandmother is right, she is not a person of faith. Her beliefs have led to nothing. And yet her grandmother is speaking of a faith that she herself lost for good, that was not replaced, regained, or found.

  “After a while, after 1938, you’d have had to be a fool not to know that everything was hopeless for our side. But you had to go on because people were still fighting and dying, and no one wanted to give up, that would have been the worst, we all knew that, in the same way that we all knew that going on was hopeless.”

  —

  Something in the air changes; the charged, heated atmosphere has lifted and cooled. Her grandmother, lately unrecognizable because of her loss of equanimity, her grandmother who always seemed so clear, like a lake you could see to the bottom of, is now looking vague and dreamy; her sharp, sometimes piercing eyes are cloudy now, and she is focusing on some place Amelia knows is not quite here.