City of God

by E. L. Doctorow

  At a discreet distance, Louis Slotin’s colleagues hunkered down in their trenches awaiting the dawn.

  —Oh, Lord, our Narrator, who made a text from nothing, once more I dare to speak to You and of You and inevitably from You in one of Your own inventions, one of Your intonative systems of clicks and grunts and glottal stops and trills. But truly how can this be different from the macaw’s cry, from the broad-leafed fronds ticking with green snakes, or from the sun splotches on the riverbank appearing as swift, elusive jaguars.

  I remember the village people with their laughter, how they refilled my gourd with more of the fermented manioc. They were familiar with my scholarly circumspection, my prudery, the importance of my notebooks, but gently led me to the thatched hut where she waited, childishly singing, where she waited to be made serious and attentive to herself. And around the camp now they danced, with their innovative system of clicks and grunts and glottal stops and trills, it was a glorious language, speech that was sung, speech that was danced and drumbeaten, powerfully evocative of You, my Lord, plashing and eddying like the swift river while I untied the nuptial skirt, unfolded it to a squared marriage cloth of the finest weave washed for generations in the flood tide of the surging rivergod, upon which she lay back in the ritual fashion, all limbs reaching outward to the four points of her lateral heaven, and when I touched the insides of her thighs the soft skin prickled, her feet arched and pointed, her fingers curled, and when I smelled her skin it was the smell of the sweet tubers and roast plantain, the cocoa of the earthen riverbank washed in the water of the fresh rainbowed fish. And her hands lighting on my shoulders were of the infinite wife’s understanding, she was blind to me in all but her hands, I was blind to her in all but my lips upon her lips, the village spins with the dance, we rise on the singing system of grunts and trills, we whirl about, the great trees bend, all life flies off the broad fronds sparking through the black celestial universe, the jaguared stars, the star elephant, the hanging monkey of the lit heavens, falling endlessly outward, voluminizing the vault of the universe forever. . . yet absolutely fixed, silent, peaceful, and motionless.

  You will understand my impertinence, Lord. I beg this because we are so ritualized in our faiths: You are a special concern, and we think to address ourselves to You only in special ways, at prescribed times in architecturally induced states of mind. Usually we wear our best clothes. We sing our hymns of desperate expectation. We appoint one of us to petition You without embarrassment, on behalf of all of us. I have petitioned You from my office: Speaking to You from a pulpit is deemed appropriate, whereas speaking to You unhoused, unshaven, at an ill-chosen time, everyone rushing by on business, is a piteous form of madness. We must have a title, a pulpit, a day, to speak aloud, my Lord, to You.

  And months later the community gathered to help her love me. She had turned inward, lost her vitality, as if my love for her were a slow poison. She sat about, she could not stir herself. Her mother came to sit with her, her father, her aunts and uncles. She is possessed by a demon, they counseled. Do not put her from you, it is an illness, it is not her true soul speaking. I will not put her from me, I assured them. In fact I wanted to confess to them my aching adoration of her moment-by-moment existence, that I adored everything about her, that her being was in every moment of its life appropriate and to be worshipped. She was thoughtful, withdrawn, and I loved her for that too. I imagined the purity of her thought, I knew it was incapable of anger or guile, this was the season of the rains and I knew her thought was as truthful as the rain. I would stand in her thought as I stood in rain. But the affronted husband does not say such things. The affronted husband folds his arms across his chest.

  She could not love me, she tried but was dry for me, she was so small, she wept, but her pale brown body was intransigent, with a will of its own, and you cannot in love force into her, not in love, and I loved her, she was my completion in this life on the wide river, she was of my ultimate concern, excluding from my mind everyone not living on the wide river in the shade of the tree vaults with families of monkeys passing by like puffs of wind in the leaves, passing like clouds, like rain showers, and the tree snakes embracing the tree trunks, and the birds of primary colors inquiring, always inquiring, step by step, each branch a proposition to be tested, a doubt, till they dropped, clawed to my hand.

  She had such dark eyes, rounded to the brim with their brown blackness, ripe as fruit waiting to be bitten, to be tasted, but the shadows curved under them and set them back in her broad, troubled brow, her hair hung lank, she did not wash her hair in the river until her mother led her there, she preferred to go every day where the children were and sit with them and play and sing their songs. I think I missed most her laughter, she laughed with a deeply melodious helplessness, her voice breaking like water on rocks in a New England brook.

  By this time I had mysteriously received a letter from one of my teachers at Yale, how our letters make their way, smeared, torn, crumpled, lost, found, and then quantum-delivered eight thousand miles, the final mile by the hand of someone who does not read. Come home, all is forgiven, a gentle ecclesiastical joke. But the community had been busy. In my sorrow I was called to ceremony. She was there. She removed her girdle cloth and danced around me, she was high-breasted, unchilded, long-waisted, round-calved, and where the parts of her joined, as where the buttocks met the backs of the thighs, the junction was uncreased. Oh my, oh my. I have seen bodies like this only in the Hermitage, on the three dancing Graces sculpted in white marble by Canova, with their arms entwined, their lovely looped arms, and their slender hands arched from the wrists.. . . Her straight black hair swung out behind her, her arms led the way, the fingers swimming ahead into the night, it was a raucous dance, a nightclub hooch of a dance, I found myself laughing, I knew more of her now, if she was not just my incredibly beautiful native child bride but funny, there was a moral adulthood I hadn’t perceived, I was learning, my heart like the drum beating and the whole town chanting her to health. And all of it was prelude to the removal of my shoes and kneesocks, my walking shorts, my underdrawers, my shirt, neckerchief, my hat, and, going around me dancing, the manioc sweet fermented milk of the jungly mother flowing from the gourds and drowning my blushing protests. The stars came out over the wide river, the light of our fire lit the sides of the great trees, the fibrous vines ran up, ran down, and piece by piece she donned my clothing, strutting around with greater and greater assurance, until finally, galumphing in my shoes to the great merriment of us all, she was me, a cartooned white prudish would-be missionary American Peace Corpser with anthropological pretensions, every gesture perfect, excoriating, and when she imperiously removed from my face my precious spectacles and placed them upon her nose, the lenses resting on her nostrils, her head lifted and the corners of her mouth turned down under my stained and lanyarded sun hat, and she stroked her imaginary red beard, great drunken waves of revelation came over me, blowing up the flames of the fire, and she fell on me and kissed me on the lips and we were laughing through our kisses, she was so relieved, so happy, that I knew her at last, and we sat naked side by side and ate with our fingers the roast wild boar and sweet yam paste, drank the jungle milk liquor and sang their song of deliverance. And then the shaman raised his arm in blessing and declared her soul no longer possessed, and wished everyone a good night, and everyone wished him a good night, and repaired to their huts for a great bout of communal lovemaking like the chattering monkeys of the forest, like the uhn-huhnking green hyenas and the snake ticking slithers of your forest, Lord. And she, when I slid lubriciously into her, took my demon and bit my lips and swallowed my blood, I became her heaving screaming demon, we clashed like warriors in their armor, I killed her and she killed me. We were never again who we were on that night, neither my missionary love, unlettered, not the future Reverend Pemberton, B.D.

  . . . oh, Tommy, telling these dirty stories, confessing life’s momentous fucks. Augustine doesn’t go into details, but he had that gir
lfriend of the lower class, his consuetudo, Latin for habit, who was bad for his career. The sex is in the disparity, from the fourth-century olive-eyed slave dancer of the dusk to the little bought Victorian girls of the working class thrown across the madam’s bed eeyowing to have their hymens torn with the shirttailed gentlemen’s shilling clutched in their moist hands. Lord, we cannot begin to account Your injustices. The numbers are exponential, we examine them one by one and they crush us in waves, and if we let them hurl us over ourselves crashing and turning with their incredible breathtaking multiplicative fury we find only one at a time available to our comprehension quietly sitting there like a gravestone. The quantum of the unjust dead of the earth is given to our study. Can it all be as simple a mechanical law as we have in our depth of need attributed to You—our best, most famous, never to be duplicated one and only original sin?

  . . . now she really is possessed, this story has a moral of sorts. I have in front of me on my desk her packet of letters going back years, some with color photographs. I did not attend her ordination. Here she is in her whites before the island altar, the silver cross upon her bosom, the collar around her neck, the hair cut short for propriety, the black shining hair. The lovely tan face, heavier than I remember. Serene, blissful. She wears rimless glasses, eight-sided, very fashionable. The church wall behind her is the curved, corrugated steel of a Quonset hut. She holds the staff aloft with Jesus crucified, my native wench, who took everything I had to give, the Reverend Tonna mBakita, missionary plenipotentiary to the disfigured, lymphomaed Tobokovo Islanders of the A-test range. She writes me every Christmas in my own language: Father Pem, she calls me. Dearest colleague, Father Pem. I look at her handwriting and think of letters addressed to country-music stars asking for the meaning of life.

  —Movies began in silence. The early filmmaker learned to convey meaning without language. The title card that was dropped into the sequence only nailed down the intelligence given to the audience nonverbally. (Young couple on porch swing at night. He removes a ring from his vest pocket. He gazes into her eyes. Title card: “Milly, will you be my wife?”) That is true also of sound film today, where the dialogue is like the old cards—needed only for the final touch of specificity. When sound came in, talkies were more talky. Screenplays derived heavily from theater and books, and so films of the thirties and forties, even action films, swashbucklers, noirs, are more talkative, endlessly so, than they are now. Now films work off previous films, they are genre-referential, and, with the possible exception of come-dies, talk less. After the set is lit, the camera is positioned, the actors have taken their place, costumed, their hair dressed to indicate economic class, education, age, social status, virtue or the lack of it—ninety-five percent of the meaning of a scene is established before anyone says a word.

  Thus the term film language is an oxymoron. The literary experience extends impression into discourse. It flowers to thought with nouns, verbs, objects. It thinks. Film implodes discourse, it de-literates thought, it shrinks it to the compacted meaning of the preverbal impression or intuition or understanding. You receive what you see, you don’t have to think it out. You see that lit and dressed scene, hear the music, see the facial expressions, bodily movements, and attitudes of the costumed and hairdressed actors—and you understand. Moviegoing is an act of inference. In the profoundest sense, films are illiterate events. This may be why some of the most fanciful prose written today is written by film critics, who assiduously address themselves to films that are hardly worth the attention. Why? It may be the dreariest, stupidest of movies—it doesn’t matter. You get from the critic a full and cogently articulated reaction. However unconsciously, the critic is defending verbal culture, subjecting the preliterate or postlit-erate filmgoing experience to the extensions of syntactical thought.

  Fiction goes everywhere, inside, outside, it stops, it goes, its action can be mental. Nor is it time-driven. Film is time-driven, it never ruminates, it shows the outside of life, it shows behavior. It tends to the simplest moral reasoning. Films out of Hollywood are linear. The narrative simplification of complex morally consequential reality is always the drift of a film inspired by a book. Novels can do anything in the dark horrors of consciousness. Films do close-ups, car drive-ups, places, chases, and explosions.

  —In today’s E-mail:

  Everett: The desert is where Pike went wrong. It’s here in Metro-Diaspora. Whatever it is, it’s in this bloody, noisy, rat-ridden, sewered, and tunneled stone and glass religioplex. Isn’t that what the sign says? But therefore visible only to the unhoused derelict mind. So I’m quitting the church.

  God bless

  Pem

  —You say all history has contrived to pour this beer into my glass

  and given the mirror behind those bottles its particular tarnish,

  But I notice your war stories are secondhand your father’s bio, your brother’s, but not yours.

  You’re one of the lucky bastards who seem to have slipped the formation

  that has marched quick-time to this moment.

  Hey, good buddy, you see this chair?

  Let me roll back a moment from the table— you see it now?

  I come here because of the dark blue light, morning or noon it’s permanent night in here.

  The regulars, they know what I look like, they don’t stare

  I’m just another rummy with his reasons.

  The bartender, he’s used to me

  Not many people come in off the street to stop and make me feel pitiful

  I rev myself up with booze and attitude

  And the sad, jeaned lady at the bar’s end smoking her Marlboros,

  She don’t care, she gives me a smile,

  There’s times if she is feeling sorry enough for herself

  she will get down from her bar stool and wheel me to that room in back and kneel before me

  and perform her sacramental deference in the way of women from time immemorial.

  And for a few moments there is no goddamn history, which if you think about it

  is an infinite series of befores and afters, as in before, when I had legs, and after,

  Or when I still had a spleen and then didn’t,

  Before I was gut-shot and lay rotting in my own shit in the elephant grass in the sun, and after,

  And so on, including when I still had an asshole and now don’t.

  But this last time that she was kind to me I thought of the little whores of Saigon who laughed as if they really liked whoring and who fucked as if they liked fucking

  And who we thought of as meat, who were meat War meat, like us.

  And now I don’t know if it will work anymore this good lady’s back-room act of grace

  Any more than morphine when you can’t do without it.

  I mean my history may finally have found me out here hiding in the blue bar of my illusory freedom.

  Oh man you want a war story. . . I don’t know.

  I don’t know how to tell stories

  I can try to tell you how we lived over there but if I speak of it in words and sentences I will be lying.

  I should speak in tongues

  So that it will be God recounting what I have done and have had done to me.

  Maybe He can make a story of it, maybe He can make it His story.

  All suffering is distinctive

  It does not cross, there is no synapse firing soul to soul,

  Christ or no Christ,

  And the best we can come up with is compassion.

  Fuck compassion.

  I know the Second World War was no picnic

  But the G.I.’s, the worst off, who’ve spent their lives in V.A. hospitals

  Maybe they’ve found solace, justification, having fought for a cause, having won,

  Which gives them a means of forgiveness for the state they’re in,

  And that by this time no one gives a shit.

  As a grunt I can’t find that in myself.

  Not my ho
nor, but my sanity,

  what’s left of my mind,

  depends on my not forgiving.

  I think I hate the ones who now apologize for sending me in there

  Almost as much as I hate the righteous ones who won’t apologize

  for their realpolitikal fantasies

  that sent me in there.

  It is wrong to think we fought a war.

  That was no war, it did not begin as wars begin it did not end as wars end

  Everything that made military sense was irrelevant

  Who lived, who died, who won or lost the day changed nothing,

  It did not matter, there were no conclusions to be drawn

  No victories that stayed victories

  No advances that were met with retreats that weren’t advances.

  The worst inflictions of overpowering armaments

  Left a temporary stillness in the dunned hills some phosphorescing blue and green bird feathers rising on the smoke

  No it was no war, no organized animosity of the social states

  It was just some of us dropping in travelers condescending

  to the satanic realm of the earth

  Where the trees were armed,

  and the runners of the colonies of ants drummed the ground

  and the naked children crawled under the dazed water buffalo

  to drink the blood dripping from their teats.

  We shot the monkeys down from their green canopies and like panthers

  Crawled slung between our hunched shoulders through their tunnels

  to catch them and kill their pretty faces.

  Meanwhile parts of me were being shot away and no sooner was a piece of my flesh plopped in the grass

  than some hairy rat had clamped on its bloody morsel.

  Sometimes the earth heaved up and rained green salads of forest flora bats and cricket crisps and mantis heads.

  Spumes of yellow rice shot up like fireworks,