City of God

by E. L. Doctorow

  Radios crackled with unintelligible speech

  I heard the cries and bleats and shrieks and cockadoodle doos

  Of predators and prey fulfilling their genetic destinies

  Beetles and wasps alighted on blood turned viscous under the sun and stuck to it

  Bird-size butterflies trembling to lift off the blackening blood pools of dying men

  Flights of yellow jackets driven to frenzy with the smell of rich-blooded human compost

  And oh the leeches how shrewdly they snuck into ears and urethras of the exhausted sleeping their watch through the blessed night beside the river,

  there to expand.

  One man took a machete to his cock

  Another living host I shot at his request.

  I was no angel, good buddy,

  I’d kill whoever needed to be killed

  I was an executioner, I lived in satanic bliss,

  I could break their skinny backs with my boot

  I could heave their tidy beings from the chopper a thousand feet in the blue sky

  This was not war, this was life as it is and was and always will be

  As God gave it to us

  as he gave us

  the violin spider

  chief arachnid of the satanic kingdom

  of the earth.

  You know about the violin spider, of course.

  The pure thin high-pitched tone it emits

  during the spinning out from itself of its web of a particularly thick calibration akin to the gut strings of the violin.

  This web is woven between tree trunk and forest floor

  where it is meant to trap not flying insects but large crawling pests and small animals.

  A man who unwittingly walks into the web of the violin spider

  finds that it folds to his weight as would a hammock.

  And then the spider itself is upon him, a furred creature with serrated legs who spins around him with incredible speed a tightly woven binding over which it simultaneously spreads a gluey impasto that conveys a burning sensation to the skin.

  In seconds the man, try as he might, cannot release himself,

  He is still holding his weapon but finds he cannot

  pull the trigger

  He cannot wield the knife in his hand

  He must struggle helplessly as the creature wanders over him, his hands and wrists, his face his neck

  Doing a bit of intelligent military reconnoitering before it chooses the tenderest place to bite into with its mandibles and begins to suck through its proboscis the blood, its food.

  What’s that you say? It sounds like no spider you’ve ever seen?

  Explain then the browned desanguinated bodies I found

  lying flat, like bladders, on the forest floor.

  Will there be a monument to the victims of the violin spider of Vietnam?

  How can there be—monuments are for wars

  And this was not a war, though we Americans thought it was

  But life objective, impartial, giving itself to everything that demands it, from woolly mammoths to the sulfide worm

  crawling on the fulminating stacks at the bottom of the deepest sea.

  When we consider the varieties of life on this Satanic planet,

  in what assorted shapes and colors, of what skills and blunt intentions to survive, we can hardly congratulate ourselves for being one of them,

  Can we, good buddy?

  —How does it work, I said.

  The question amused him: Well, Everett, it’s as you’d expect, they do it at dawn in the courtyard, you’re standing at attention, the drums roll, and in front of the priestly ranks the bishop steps forward, he yanks off your crucifix, tears off your collar, and bends your fingers back.

  I thought as much.

  It’s just an exchange of letters. You tell them what’s in your heart. They decertify you.

  Will I see those letters?

  I don’t know. Maybe. Why not? Not all that much to see.

  So what did you say?

  That they all know what I know, none of it holds up, the difference being the value to them of the symbolism and the church built around it—it’s there, it has a historical constituency, it’s a system that works for people. And as far as I’m concerned that’s no longer enough.

  So that’s that.

  There’s a committee supposed to try to talk you out of it. I told them not to bother. They were grateful.. . . I know what you’re thinking, Everett.

  You do?

  You’re feeling superior. Someone who read his Diderot in college and consigns these issues to the seventeenth century.

  I never read Diderot in college.

  Didn’t he say religion is the ignorance of causes reduced to a system?

  He said that?

  Someone said it.. . . The truth is I didn’t think life as an ordinary citizen would be this. . . enigmatic.

  Citizen Pemberton.

  Yes, it takes getting used to. There are odd little moments, peculiar problems.

  Like what?

  What to do with the vestments. Throw them in the garbage? Burn them? Leave them hanging in the closet? Pack them? Give them away? Nothing is quite right. And the books. The dear old texts. Makes me nervous to see them lined up on the shelves just where they’ve always been. But they’re books, for Chrissake, what am I afraid of? So it’s all that. . . My stuff.

  Your life.

  The stuff of my life. Thirty or so years of it. I’m having these sudden deferential dips of the intellect. As in. . . What have I done? Because there were certain advantages I think I will miss.

  Like what?

  Well, it’s a credential. The cross is society giving you permission to express concern for another human being. You wear the collar and people accept that you hang out in a cancer hospice. You can do that and not arouse suspicion you’re some sort of fetishist of suffering.

  Come on, Pem—

  Really. If you’re a priest, a rabbi, a nun, people know you’ve dropped out of the material culture. They accept it, they may not believe what you have to say, or care that much, but they listen to you, sometimes they talk. And of course there are the few who do believe in what you have to say—those are the ones I wouldn’t want to see me now.

  Why not?

  Well it’s like someone who wears glasses all the time, he takes them off, and what? the ears stick out, white circles under the eyes, he looks naked. And of course blinking, half-blind. That’s me as a secularist. And this poor child of God at death’s door, he realizes your promises weren’t worth diddly-squat.

  Poor child of God?

  I’m guess I’m still attached to some of the words.

  It’s natural.

  Not that I regret anything, I’m only talking about having to adjust. That takes a while. Especially for someone who’s never been able to come to a decision without replaying it a thousand times. But you know I have to wonder about all those years I put in. What could I have been thinking? Solemn processions, colors and collars and little charms.. . . Was I a broad-church Anglican—or an animist? I pick up my old paperback Augustine. City of God. Every page almost totally underlined.

  Well now, wait a minute, he’s a hell of a writer, Augie.

  You would like him, wouldn’t you? With his writer’s bag of tricks. All those doctrinal notions treated as if they exist, like characters in a Henry James novel. God’s Grace is my favorite. And that impassioned rhetoric. . . To know God, you must long for God. But then, what about Faith and does it come with, before, or after Longing, and so on. The voice makes it. Didn’t you once tell me it all comes of the voice?

  I did. It does.

  You trust this voice. . . speaking whereof it knows. You’re suckered right in. Even you, Everett.

  Well he loses me when he says babies are born damned to hell unless someone sprinkles water on them. He loses me there.

  All right then.

  But City of God, that’s a good title. I like
the image, don’t you?

  It does have a certain something you don’t get from green pastures.

  You can go for a walk, for one thing.

  Pick up the paper and a coffee at the Korean.

  Catch an afternoon flick.

  I guess I’ll keep this book.

  Why not keep all of them?

  Why the hell not. My collection in history of religion. After all, I haven’t given up God. Just the Trinity.

  —The Midrash Jazz Quartet Plays the Standards

  THE SONG IS YOU

  I hear music when I look at you

  A beautiful theme of everything I ever knew

  Down deep in my heart I hear it play

  I feel it start and melt away. . .

  Why can’t I let you know

  The song my heart would sing

  What beautiful rhapsody of love and youth and

  spring

  The music is sweet

  the words are true

  The song is you!

  THE MIDRASHIM ARE HONORED TONIGHT. . . TO HAVE IN THE AUDIENCE A LEGEND OF THE BUSINESS. . . IN FACT THE GREATEST OF THEM ALL. . . NOW THAT CAN MEAN ONLY ONE PERSON. . . AND IF YOU GIVE HIM A BIG ENOUGH WELCOME, MAYBE HE’LL COME UP HERE AND DO A LITTLE VERBALIZMUS OF HIS OWN!

  (prolonged heavy applause)

  Thank you, well why not, I’ll give it a try. . .

  Man here claims he looks at the broad and hears music. Says love is a song in his heart. What you’d expect of someone makes his living as a songwriter.

  (laughter)

  Little plug for the trade. Would a general say I hear war when I look at you? More like it. And he alone can hear this song of her? Why’s that? What can that mean other than he loves her even though she wears thick glasses and has a fat ass?

  ( whistles, laughter)

  And to top everything he’s got this problem he can’t let her know how he feels: What—he’s shy? Shy! Tell me who in this goddamn world is shy? Young, old, the lame and halt. Clobber you over the head with what they feel.

  Oh man I wish just once in my long fucked-up life someone had come up to me who was too shy to tell me what they thought of me. . .

  (happy, knowing applause)

  Like Fanny, the mother of all broads: You what? You want to be a singer with the band? An open-hand left across the ear. Like this Miss Pretty on the wall? Lookatim with his pipe and mascara’d eyes—this is what you want? Ma, I cry, that’s Bing! A right now follows, my both ears ringing, I am ducking, covering up, my arms taking the blows. A boy with the band? Like some cheap cunt standing up to sing her chorus? Whores her days through the saxophone section? Genderless, my ma. Ripping my hero off the wall, tearing him into shreds. Finding the 78s one by one, snapping them in half like hardtack.

  Or my father: I never learn to read, he says. You know what it’s like? (I can read, Pa, he doesn’t hear me.) Like you’re blind, you come to the corner a stranger takes your elbow. Everything, I’m the last to know. Is that what you want for yourself? (I can read, Pa!) You’re not listen you fuckn kid, come back here, I beat the shit out of you!

  The tough culture of my life in the house, in the street, it’s a broadcast you can’t turn off. Priests are the loudest, a church that doesn’t know the meaning of restraint, the word pealing over the neighborhood bong-abong-abong, the word abonging. Okay for the old ladies in black, in their minds they’re still walking to mass down the dirt roads of the olive trees, the widows crossing themselves in the votive darkness, dropping to their swollen knees, the knuckles of their hands like wood knots. But not for me such smells and bells, you put your money in the poor box and you’re out of there. Bullshit the father on the church stoop. Wonder what possessed him.

  I’m talking before the war, before the war after the war, a Jersey waterfront town. The streets sinkholing into the swamps they were built on. Slack-wired telephone poles leaning every way but up. Horizons of refinery pipes, navy airships disappearing in the yellow clouds. Sky lit at night by the chemical fires of the Meadowlands. And the people we were, breathing all this. Made who we were in our slums of assimilation. Shopping in our dark little stores, the lights turned off to save money. Snapping open the change purses to lift out the pennies one by one.

  Oh, I remember, my friends, and no thanks for the memory.

  But this kid, he’s making the Depression all his own, my thick skull the only strong bone of me, portable studio of my sound, resonant chamber of the voice. Secret of my success, my thick skull. My father shouting, We don’t want you here no more. My mother shouting, You fucking no-good bum. I was always running out slamming the door. When it was really bad, heading for the docks. A nickel ride, the streetcar banging around the corners, streets so narrow you could lean out the windows and touch the two-family houses on either side. Flat-roofed houses of wood. Kids staring from the porch. Up and down the hill streets, the river appearing and disappearing as you pointed up and dipped down, the spires of the alabaster city across the river rising and sinking like the band stage at the Paramount, letting you know you were noplace, that you were no one living in noplace, that the true life was over there, the other side. Last stop everyone off at the birdshit docks by the stinking river, coupla black men with fishing poles hoping for an oily perch for dinner, and you. Kid with no hips. So skinny had to belt his trousers up at the diaphragm. Sits on the splintered stinking river wharf and looks across the river at the city of white stone. The beautiful city. I’m sitting among the splotches of duck shit, the pecked-out crab shells, a kid without consolation. Chest of a begging bowl. Bones as thin as crate wood, the wired crates for oranges and grapefruit that you could twist in your hands and split lengthwise, that’s what his bones were like. What is he, fourteen, fifteen? Staring across the water at the city burning off in the sunlight. Hearing the back-and-forth nail clicks in the sky, guard dogs of the Depression.

  So now you know who the you of the song is?

  Man wants to write my biography what do I tell him? Can I tell him how when I shoveled the ashes from the furnace I only filled the tip of the shovel because I couldn’t lift any more than that? What’s takinim so long, Fanny’s dulcet tones down the cellar steps: You fuckin die down there? Taste of ashes in the basement, the things in your life you don’t remember till it’s time to die. Goddamn stuff on my tongue. Oilcloth with knife scratches, pattern of tiny yellow flowers over the kitchen table. Round-finned motor humming on top of the icebox, grease gummed with dust. And such historic layers of off-white paint jobs in the rooms, the walls were not plumb, the corners not squared, closet doors wouldn’t close. Pointless, pointless stuff.

  But other things you knew you’d never forget, indelible secret things that didn’t grow up with you but keep to this moment in the original feeling. Fanny in her nurse’s uniform, the big-mouthed mother of all women, midwifing slick newborns out of them, taking them in when they got beat up, giving them the operation for the unmarried, yes, the auxiliary doyenne of St. Francis doing this because she was not only my mother but the mother of all this world of women in my house.

  So early on yours truly knows what a girl is, I seen one through the keyhole undressing, the school uniform falling in folds over the wooden chair, a silken sound, and this ordinary girl in all her breathtaking sweet springing tautness climbing up on that kitchen table of little yellow flowers of the oilcloth. . . and she waits, and weeps, so lovely from the soles of her small feet, every soft-built inch of her making such sense, like God is giving me a look and I’m saying, Of course, of course, as if once seen it is not an introduction but a remembrance, of course, of course, there could have been nothing else but this as I’ve always known, they are calved and thighed, curved-assed and cunted. And as she lies back the high breasts broadening on the chest tremble as, staring at the ceiling light and knuckling her teeth, she cries so scared she doesn’t make a sound. What I don’t recall now is her name, that girl, she was from the neighborhood, I’d seen her with the others in her school uniform, a
n older girl, in a higher grade than me, familiar-looking in the dark green skirt, the white blouse, the kneesocks, all of it hiding in ordinariness the wondrous revelation of legs opening on command, the knees rising, till through the keyhole the broad nurse-white back of Fanny and the sheet she flings out save me from disaster.

  Not a song in the heart, you wimp, a roar in the loins, a screech in the brain, a blinding glimpse of God’s work, and that is it for you forever, you’re theirs.

  But fighting it, making that mistake of all stupid kids that this is what you can do to girls, this is how you handle them, the way of the world. Really knowing but not knowing how it is by leaving himself out, the longing going out of him as out of nothing, the awful drawing need unattached to him but like a weather, all around him, coloring the sky.

  Every one of my pals just as stupid. Why the jokes were told, why the cigarette in the corner of the mouth, why the two-handed crotch adjust, the raised-eyebrow sneer, the raucous applause at the burlesque, but swallowing on a dry mouth and feeling the heart in the crate wood chest banging in time with the drum vamp.

  The Fools of Song. That was the name we gave ourselves. In certain ears it was faintly Chinese. Like Tin Pan. Tin Pan say love is pop song in heart.

  What were the chances for any of us, what odds would you have given? Me, flexing my arm, show you my number-six-linguine bicep, or Vinnie who we call Slapsy because his brain works as if he’s been decked once too often, or maybe the stolid Mario who is called Brick or Shithouse because he is built like a brick shithouse, or Aaron aka Jewish, an alien from outside the neighborhood who hangs out with us because he likes our raucous Italian ways. I mean, the wit here is not of the playing fields of Eton. We filled our snowballs with rocks. We sang the hits on the corner in front of the candy store.

  Jewish, whose father runs numbers, has the scratch for our trips to the Union City matinees, he is in training for the rackets, Jewish, a sometime substitute bagman practicing his padrone-ship, though deficient in the crucial gift of self-importance, a terrible lack that means he will never make it in the wiseguy world. Besides, he has a touch of palsy it must be, one foot the toe drags, the heel doesn’t quite meet the ground. Gives him an unbalanced stride, like someone about to lift off. Threadbare corduroys and sneakers winter and summer and shirttails flying as he went down his runway. A sweet goony kid, an eager expression, mouth a perpetual smile, big front teeth. And to top everything, this silly high-pitched bray verging on the maniacal, and it was an embarrassment there in the cavernous theater of dreams, so loud and piercing that the stripper twirling her tasseled tits and bumping and grinding her ass to the drumbeat would actually stop what she was doing under the lights and glare in our direction.