Guapa chica, they said—other men, on the streets. But he said nothing.
Who knows what he thought? I just know this: whatever he saw—whatever he thought he saw—it was enough.
So here it is.
Function VIII. The Villain Causes Harm or Injury.
I was punched. I bled all over my arms, my legs, my skirt, my shoes. I wasn’t crying. I was speaking. What was I saying?
I was saying: “I’m okay I’m okay I’m okay.”
I was saying: “There is so much blood.”
Propp says: “This function is exceptionally important.” He says: “The forms of villainy are exceedingly varied.”
Here are some of them: The villain pillages or spoils the crops, the villain causes a sudden disappearance, the villain casts a spell, the villain threatens forced matrimony, the villain makes a threat of cannibalism.
Here are two more: The villain seizes the daylight. The villain torments at night.
“The city is different at night,” Omar had said. “Everything is possible.”
Some functions describe villains stealing body parts. You break something and you steal the way it used to look. That never comes back.
“He took your wallet?” someone asked me. “And your camera?”
I nodded. I wanted to say: he took my face.
Here are some functions missing from my story: The Seeker Agrees to or Decides upon Counteraction, The Hero Reacts to the Actions, The Hero and Villain Join in Direct Combat.
These don’t apply to me.
This one does: XVII. The Hero Is Branded.
My nose was broken. The bones of the bridge got shifted. The flesh swelled like it was trying to hide the fracture beneath. This is how speech swells around memory. How intellect swells around hurt.
XIV. The Hero Acquires the Use of a Magical Agent.
Meaning what? The Nicaraguan police? The liquor I drank—shots and then more of them—to make myself feel all right again, to make myself stop shaking?
After the hit, I went to a bar on Calle Calzada. I knew the guys who worked there. They saw me right off and knew what I needed. They’d been in fights. This kind of injury wasn’t anything new. They gave me wet rags, ice, a beer. I kept putting all three against my face, very gently. I wasn’t sure if my nose was loose enough to push out of place. I couldn’t even look them in the eye. I was ashamed. I wouldn’t be able to explain this properly to anyone. It had something to do with being seen. Everything was visible to them—swollen face, bloody arms, bloody legs, bloody clothes. These were the only things I was composed of, and everyone saw them—everyone understood them—as well as I could. It was a kind of nakedness, a feeling of nerve endings in the wind.
The police showed up in a pickup truck with a large cage strapped to the back. There was a man inside the cage. I was sitting on the curb with my rags and my beer. The cop was smoking a cigarette. He pointed to the man in the cage: “¿Es el hombre?”
This wasn’t the man. This was just a man. I hadn’t even given them a description.
I shook my head. The cop shrugged. He let the man go. The man seemed angry. Of course he did.
That cop was nice, but he never expected things to go any other way than the way they went. He showed me huge leather volumes of mug shots, sepia-toned portraits of local street thugs with their nicknames written in spidery cursive underneath: el toro, el caballero, el serpiente.
None of them were him. I said: “No, no, no.”
I went to the police station the next morning. It was a ratty building with brown stains on the walls and a broken toilet you could smell from all the other rooms. Or someone could, at least. I couldn’t smell anything. There were old typewriters on most of the desks and a few broken ones stacked in the corner. The station was in a part of town I’d never seen. It wasn’t a part of town that tourists would have any reason to visit unless they were there to complain. I’d been living in Nicaragua for several months, and I’d never felt more like a tourist than I did right then, part of a story everyone had heard before.
The cops were eager to show off their new face-profiling software. I sat with one guy at a computer—one of the only ones, it seemed, in the whole station. He asked me questions about what the guy looked like and I answered them badly. “He had eyebrows,” I may have said—did I say? I was waiting for adjectives to offer themselves up. But none came. The sketch on the computer screen looked nothing like the man.
XXIX. The Hero Is Given a New Appearance.
Propp gets more explicit: “A new appearance is directly effected by means of the magical actions of a helper.” I got back to Los Angeles and saw a surgeon. There was something in my face that wasn’t right. Anyone could see that. I wanted it fixed. I felt sick with self-preservation. The surgeon looked at my face and said: “Something happened to you.”
“I know,” I said. “Can you fix it?”
He said: “I can’t tell from outside.”
So he went in. I went under.
I still get stuck on this one, a few functions back: XIX. The Initial Misfortune or Lack Is Liquidated.
Propp says: “The narrative reaches its peak in this function.”
What does this function feel like? I’m still waiting for it.
The surgery got rid of the break. Or else it got rid of the evidence. But I can still find the slant if I look for it, the diagonal remains of fist hitting bone.
You can find a program on the Internet called “Digital Propp.” I guess you’d call it a game. You click on the site and it says: “You have reached the Proppian Fairy Tale Generator, an experiment in electronic (re)writing and an exploration of the retranslation of modernist theory within the electronic environment.”
Here’s what you do. You check off the functions you want and it gives you a story. I check: absentation, interdiction, violation, villainy, branding, exposure. I pause, go back, check off: lack.
I don’t check: counteraction, recognition, wedding.
I click the little button called “generate.” The site spits back a story: something about a forbidden pear, and then some fight with a bird, some victory having to do with flying. I’m seeing signs of all kinds of functions I didn’t ask for: struggle, challenge, victory. There is some fighting and finally some winning: “The soil on my skin turned into sprinkles of gold dust. The people proclaimed me some kind of god.”
The materials of my life, as memory recalls and deforms them, will always involve him: the stranger. Maybe our union replaces my final neglected function: XXXI. The Hero Is Married and Ascends the Throne. I wanted a man to fall in love with me so he could get angry about how I’d gotten hit. I wasn’t supposed to want this. I wanted it anyway.
Months later I saw an ex-boyfriend in Williamsburg and he offered me a line of coke on someone’s steamer trunk. I imagined my nose dissolving right off my face.
I shook my head.
He said: “Why not?”
I told him why not. He stopped smiling. He got very upset. It felt like he wanted something from me. What did he want? I didn’t know what I could give him.
When I got back from Nicaragua and tried to explain what had happened to me, I felt like I was constantly shuffling together pieces of an elaborate puzzle I couldn’t see the edges of: violence, randomness, impersonality and swollen face, pure cash and tourist guilt. Guilt always sounded wrong—like I was trying to apologize for what had happened, or say that my status as a tourist somehow justified it—when I wasn’t trying to excuse anything, only to speak a feeling of culpability tangled with the other kinds of residue inside me: anger, fear, an obsessive tendency to check the mirror for signs that my parts were slipping out of place. I began graduate school and started writing papers about the practice of rereading. I read Propp. I looked back at my own life like text.
There is no function designated for this last part. This present tense, when the hero turns to some archaic work of early Russian Formalism to understand how her face was hurt, how something quiet
happened to the rest of her as well.
There is no function designated for how this essay might begin to fill the lack or liquidate the misfortune—replace the eyes, the heart, the daylight. Everything I find is stained by a certain residue: all that blood. My face will always remind me of a stranger. And I will never know his name.
PAIN TOURS (I)
La Plata Perdida
This is how you visit the silver mines of Potosí, the highest city in the world: First take an airplane to El Alto, where some people’s hearts collapse under the altitude as soon as they step off the plane. El Alto is at 4,061 meters. Potosí is higher. You take a bus to Ororu, and another one from there. You might share your seat with an animal. You might see a movie starring Jean-Claude Van Damme. These are popular on overnights: Van Damme fighting terrorists, killing bad guys, speaking the mouth-awkward language of another dubbed tongue.
When you get off the bus, Potosí will look like other Bolivian towns—old women roasting ears of corn over open flames, sidewalks full of skinny dogs and broken appliances—until it looks different: the pastel walls around its central plaza, the elegant balconies, the stately courtyards. Maybe you think it’s beautiful. Maybe you think it’s too much, too colonial, a little gauche. Maybe later, the memory of these buildings will make you feel a bit sick in the heart.
People come to Potosí to see the famous silver mines of Cerro Rico, so you will see them too. Take a tour. Smile politely when the man behind the desk tells you that the miners will get a cut of the money. Tell him, in your beseeching Spanish, that this is very nice. Put on your gear: boots and overalls, a bandanna over your mouth. Take a van to the miners’ market. Here, you will find severed goats’ heads sharing tables with Che Guevara ski caps. ¡Viva la Revolución! There are shiny white skins, unfurled, that are the long stripped interiors of animals’ intestines.
But you are here to buy presents for the underground men: bright sodas whose flavors are colors instead of fruits; sticks of dynamite; coca leaves in small blue bags. These are gifts for the miners but really, of course, they are gifts for the givers: you will give something back, as they say, and this pleases you. You will cover your subterranean tracks.
Listen carefully to your guide, Favio, an angry man your own age. He is barely twenty-five but he has three brothers in the mines and two young sons who will work here too, someday, unless he can pay their way out. Then he smiles slightly and says, “but you did not come to hear about my life,” and you did, of course, always greedy for other people’s lives, but first you must listen to the rest because listening is a gift too, or this is what you tell yourself: the tentative idea that this knowing can make a difference.
So ¡oye! Listen up. They call Cerro Rico the mountain that eats men because it already has, six million so far. Potosí conquistadores got rich on its silver and they built all kinds of pretty courtyards in town. But six million, my God. You glance sheepishly at your gifts: your lucky dynamite, your grape soda.
The mountain is full of mouths but you only visit one: a dark hole on a hillside littered with crusty old jeans, long discarded, dirty beer bottles and toilet paper, small mounds of human excrement. Here, you are told, is where the miners eat and drink and shit between back-to-back twelve-hour shifts. Oh, yes; yes, of course.
You find the mineshaft bearable at first, a cool dark hallway, until it absolutely isn’t: two-ton trolleys barreling down thin infrastructure, steep tunnels full of foul dust, all of them snaking toward the center of an unbelievable heat. Sometimes you have to kneel. Sometimes you have to crawl. Sometimes you pass miners, cheeks bulged with mounds of half-chewed coca, and someone gives them bottles of soda while the guide asks: “How are you?”
Favio gives you the scoop on President Evo. Everybody thought he’d make it better but then he didn’t. Evo calls the miners his brothers but still keeps raising their taxes. There have been strikes. There have always been strikes. Things are “under discussion” in La Paz. You nod. You know there must be questions worth asking but what you ask is: “How much longer until we get to level three?” You are having a little trouble breathing. Your bandanna is gummed with gray dust.
In level three, at the end of the ventilation tubes, you see two men standing at the bottom of a dark hole. “Let me tell you how we get through the day,” Favio says. “We miners, we are always telling jokes. These men were probably telling jokes just before we came.” They have been underground for five hours and they’ve got another seven left. Do they want some dynamite, as a gift? They do.
On the way out, you pass the statue of a demon. He is called Tío. The Uncle-Devil. He’s got a cigarette in his mouth, a beer in his hand, and a big wooden erection in his crotch. The miners are mainly Catholic but down here they worship the devil. Who else could possibly hold sway? They worship until they are thirty-five, or maybe forty, and then they die. They die from accidents or silicosis, a disease one calls “the uniting of dust in the lungs.” They leave their sons behind to work a mountain with a little less silver than the one their fathers worked, and their fathers before them.
At the exit, there is sunlight and clean air. This is something. But you catch sight of yourself in the darkened glass of your minivan—your cheeks black, neck black, lips black—and the truth is you look like a devil too.
Sublime, Revised
The warning, as ever, is also a promise: This program contains subject matter and language that may be disturbing to some viewers. It’s a promise the same way an ambulance is a promise, or a scar, or a freeway clogged around an accident.
The show is called Intervention, and each episode is named for its addict: Jimbo, Cassie, Benny, Jenna. Danielle lines up twelve prescription bottles on the coffee table while her eight-year-old says, “I know real mommy is just waiting to come out.” Sonia and Julia are anorexic twins who follow each other around the house so that one won’t burn more calories than the other. Everyone has a wound: Gloria drinks because of her breast cancer. Danielle takes her mother’s Percocet because her father is a drunk. Marci drinks because she lost custody of her kids because she drinks.
Andrea is twenty-nine. She hasn’t lived with her husband and children for nine months. She spends her days drinking rum carefully rationed by her mother. She takes a drink and tells her mother, “This one is because you never got me counseling.” She keeps a bottle of Captain Morgan in one hand and a liter of Pepsi in the other. She has bruises all over her body from where she’s tripped over chairs, fallen into door frames, landed on the floor. Excessive bruising can be a sign of compromised liver function, the show tells us. We are given scientists’ eyes. We can see the purpling damage for ourselves.
The camera work is an experiment in turning monotony into something interesting. The fatigue and stamina of addiction are kept electric by compression: time-lapse shots of a bottle’s sinking line of whiskey; a cancerous pile of empties in the corner; a time-line of photos that ticks off stations of the cross, sinner to martyr to corpse: smiling baby gives way to pockmarked meth ghoul gives way to sullen mug shot.
Sober Andrea talks about her responsibilities. Drunk Andrea talks about her afflictions. She toasts the twin nodes of trauma that constitute her life: an absent alcoholic father and a rape at fourteen. When she is drunk, she doesn’t believe she can do anything but hurt.
The structure of the show implicitly endorses her narrative of victimhood. It needs a story to tell, after all, and she’s fashioned one—a story patterned by the saving, satisfying grace of cause-and-effect: get raped, get silenced, get abandoned, get drunk. The television program needs a genealogy for her dysfunction. Getting drunk is more interesting when it can be read as a ledger of traumas rather than their source. Recovering alcoholics sometimes talk about feeling like they never got the Life Instruction Manual everyone else got. Here’s a substitute set of imperatives: lose a job, get drunk; lose a child, get drunker. Lose everything. Andrea has. So get sober. Maybe she will.
The father of her children, Jason, ba
rely greets her when she comes to visit the kids each month. She still calls him the love of her life. He says, “What’s up?” and keeps cooking lunch. He declines to be interviewed by the program. He doesn’t participate in the intervention. He’s given up. He’s not crying on the other side of the bathroom door, or yanking the bottle from her hands. He’s just gone.
We’re not gone, though, we viewers. We stay with Andrea after she tells her children good-bye. We see her get drunk, again. We see why it might have been hard for Jason to stay.
The shows takes care to emphasize, over and over again, that the participants have agreed to be on a reality TV show about addiction but don’t know they will face an intervention. Given that the biggest reality TV show about addiction in America today is Intervention, this is a bit difficult to believe. But the point is, people want to believe it. They want to know something the addict doesn’t. They want the intervention to be climactic, surprising, and powerful. They want to be in on it. Don’t throw your life away, Andrea, they’d say, if they were in the room. I think you can make it.
In his theory of the sublime, eighteenth-century philosopher Edmund Burke proposes the notion of “negative pain”: the idea that a feeling of fear—paired with a sense of safety, and the ability to look away—can produce a feeling of delight. One woman can sit on her couch with a glass of Chardonnay and watch another woman drink away her life. The TV is a portal that brings the horror close, and a screen that keeps it at bay—revising Burke’s sublime into a sublime voyeurism, no longer awe at the terrors of nature but fascination at the depths of human frailty.
The professionals who moderate the show’s interventions are called “Interventionists,” a title that seems better suited to a block-buster film about the Apocalypse. I imagine a slick troop of heroes, clad in black, giving an ultimatum to the world about its addiction to capitalism or oil. These Interventionists are mild-mannered grand-parents dressed in business casual. They almost always stress the singularity of the intervention—“You will never get another chance like this,” they say. They mean what they hope: this moment will divide the addict’s life into a cleanly spliced Before and After.
The Empathy Exams: Essays Page 9
