We seemed to have run out of things to say. Then the young man put his hands on the table and announced resolutely that he wanted above all to avoid metaphor, to avoid allegory and metaphor. He looked at his hands as though he were about to lean down, stand up and leave—as though he were about to run out of the Mattatuck Museum cafeteria in Waterbury and leave everything behind—his writing, his research, his friends, his memories, everything. Earlier he had talked to me at great length about his doctoral thesis on these holy places, the American Holy Land. It was relaxing to listen to him talking about sources, structures, and annexes. Now he was struggling against some inner collapse, he was sick of himself, which actually made him rather likable. Behind him, and probably behind me too, large television screens were broadcasting yet another baseball game. He remained very focused, looking at his hands, shaking his head from time to time, saying how sometimes he had the idea that the Waterbury Holy Land was nothing more than an edifice of melancholy, a project whose very ruin was integral to its construction and therefore a testimony to the illusory and pitiful nature of all our undertakings, but then he said that we have to fight against that approach, that’s what people always say about ruins, he preferred to insist upon the socio-economic approach because with metaphors, he said, little by little you drift away—did I know for example that back in 1970, Holy Land made more profit than the brass-manufacturing industry, in fact everything indicates that this place, for some people a very poetic, or mystical, whatever you want to call it place, was a tightly run marketing operation whose purpose was to promote the illusions of the Christian faith at the height of the Cold War? I was only half listening. I was wondering how it is possible to hit such a small ball with a stick—I wanted to ask him, but he seemed anxious and wanted to keep talking. His research on Holy Land had led him to understand how Americans hate lies because they are themselves the subjects of a perpetual fiction. You only need to turn on the television to see how over here reality is so distorted that you mustn’t joke about the truth, he said. The most surprising thing about this Holy Land story is the desire to celebrate what they called revealed truth with clumsy copies and implausible and monstrously contorted recreations that John Greco and others passed off with their crude self-confidence as the real thing—that I can’t understand, he said. He looked exhausted. To distract him I asked how long you have to train to be able to hit such a small ball with a stick.
The truce only lasted Sunday. Now we see them again in a bedroom. Mr. Dennis is fiddling with something. Wanda comes in. She is pregnant. (But no, it’s not true, we will see in a minute that it isn’t, and I tell my mother straightaway, don’t worry, it’s not true, but for the space of a moment we think that months have gone by, calm has settled on them, perhaps even love.) Wanda comes in: she looks unhappy and ill at ease. She puts down her white handbag. He hands her a piece of paper on which he has jotted all the stages of the plan for her to memorize: she has to learn her part. She immediately says that she can’t. We don’t know exactly what she is talking about, I can’t do this, but we remember that these are exactly the words used by his friend who refused to take part in the hold-up. He looks up toward her, Come on, and shoves her in the belly. No, I can’t. There, she has said it—she feels more confident, calmer now. She pulls out the cushion that has been pressing against her stomach. He looks at her and suddenly—my mother starts with surprise—grabs her and shakes her violently, You can do it, you can, you can! She breaks away and runs to the bathroom, shuts the door, I can’t do it. He is furious, his face is twisted with anger then with worry, he stands in front of the closed door, and for the first time he says her name, flinging it, Wanda, Wanda, a muted, anxious interrogation, Wanda? Wanda? When he opens the door she is crying, afraid of botching things, I can’t do this, afraid of failing, I can’t do it, afraid to die of it.
He leans toward her a little as she stands facing the mirror above the sink. This guy could easily force her to do it, he could bark at her and she would obey, he knows she would. But he leans toward her, he leaves his own fear behind for a moment, and he speaks to her with a strange gentleness, listen to me, Wanda, he takes her by the shoulders, maybe you never did anything before, he looks at her in the mirror, maybe you never did, he draws her to him, but you’re going to do this, as if he were asking her to agree to live, maybe you never did anything, but you’re going to do this. Now we see them both in the mirror, facing each other. He holds her solemnly, tenderly, against him, as if he were showing her to herself, and in the same movement as if he were becoming himself. They are still and silent. It might appear that he is being manipulative, that he is being gentle in order to coerce, but there is something else. Now it’s the two of them. Perhaps it’s a trick, but maybe it is also love. It’s impossible to tell.
Anyway, the following scene is the story of two lovers preparing a hold-up. He’s lying bare-chested on the bed smoking a cigar in a dimly lit motel room while in the background she’s relaxing in the bath, her golden blonde hair pinned up in a knot, framed by the light coming through the doorway. They are studying the scenario that he has prepared for the attack the following day. First: arrive at the house. Second: go to the front door. She repeats and of course she gets it wrong, it’s too silly, these two bits of sentences. He corrects her—it’s his plan, he’s the one directing the scene here, this is what she has to learn, and she agrees, she is making a real effort to go along with the crazy stupid plan by this guy who is paying her some attention, but then she messes up again, she knows it’s totally dumb and it’s definitely going to go wrong. Third? Um …
Somewhere in a box in the archives of the American judiciary, there must be a crumpled scrap of paper that the police found in one of Mr. Ansley’s pockets, the man with whom Alma Malone was kind of happy. It is the actual list, carefully drafted by an armed robber who seemed to have a death wish contained within his desperation not to fail, published in its entirety by the Sunday Daily News of March 27th, 1960: 1. Go to the house. 2. Go up to the front door. 3. Neutralize the couple. 4. Talk about the bomb. 5. Leave the house. 6. Park the car round the back. 7. Go to the bank. 8. Neutralize the locks. 9. Wait for the doorman. 10. Speak to the doorman. 11. Wait for the personnel. 12. Get the safe opened. 13. Lock everyone in the bathroom. 14. Put the money in the bag. 15. Go to the car and leave. (Parenthetically farcical: the thief gets to the house but forgets that it would be useful to go up to the front door—he carefully checks his list; the thief presses his revolver against the bank clerk’s forehead but forgets what it is he has come for—a quick look at his list saves him: oh yes, get him to open the safe; the thief, hands full of dollar bills, goes to his car but then he hesitates—luckily it’s written on the list: leave.)
The next morning, daybreak, it’s time to go. Wanda vomits, she doesn’t want to go but she has stopped protesting. She is used to drifting, just letting things happen, but now she believes that she has no choice but to do the impossible; this woman, who was going nowhere, is now heading for the worst. Well, if we’ve got to go, let’s go then. She is weeping, and as he loads his pistol she vomits again. Wanda: her aptitude, and ours too no doubt, that crazed capacity for fear, the end of yearning, and, under the cover of consenting to love, consenting to boredom and belittlement, to shame, to death.
In the notice, the instinct for perfection expires. There I am, still unable to grasp the truth of this life in its official version, the version that is both overloaded and sparse. Born. Died. In the distance the barking of a dog and the sound of trucks maneuvering: the only illusion of reality, the only depth.
I walked along the former railway line, following the line of the express trains, past warehouses; I sneaked into construction sites plastered with signs warning “no entry”; I made my way past vast, towering slagheaps, mounds of excavated rock, stony craters, and along muddy tracks. Pennsylvania, where the first scenes of Wanda were filmed, is old mining country. Sometimes you persist in wanting to substitute an image for the reality, y
ou want to exhaust these places, to drain them of their power once and for all, to put an end to the almost imperceptible way the image vibrates at the mention of a name, as you try to find some resemblance, as you try to recognize a landscape, for want of a face or a memory. I searched for that face, that memory, that unformed event; I searched for it in highway service stations and motels, on potholed roads, in disused factories, deserted warehouses and derelict houses—goods and people squandered, the whole place wrecked, a country that was governed and yet neglected, as though it had been abandoned, Harlington, Sommerville, Mount Cobb, Throop, McAdoo, Pottsville, Yostville, dead forests, uprooted trees, route 81 lined with dead trees, burst tires, and roadkill, Hazleton, Lebanon, Lansford, on the road again, and suddenly in the dusk a gleaming Dunkin’ Do-nuts, people sitting at tables, massive old bodies outlined against plate glass windows like wounded Titans, gods after the apocalypse, ancient bodies neatly, silently gorging themselves. I thought of something I had heard on the radio: “The United States is another name for a dream.” I was searching for the locations where the first scenes had been shot, Wanda walking in front of a background of coal. I drove all over this mining country, the outskirts of Scranton and Wilkes-Barre, across Coaldale, Nanticoke, Red Ash, Carbon City, always the same lone main street, the same little wooden houses, three armchairs, always three, on the porch, a car parked in the backyard, and beyond, the pieced-together landscape, going on and on. All this because the first scenes of Wanda take place in this soot-stained country. On the radio, the whole of America: God, the blues, insurance ads. Sometimes, when I least expected it, a black hill would loom over the road, at the top of which, at the edge of the slope, trucks would be moving back and forth, or the enormous caterpillar tracks of a digger with a raised backhoe appeared and disappeared. In Carbondale I asked one of the waitresses at the diner where I had stopped for the evening how the mines work. Looking apologetic she beat a retreat toward the kitchen, disappeared and, like in the theater, another waitress simultaneously appeared and walked straight toward me, wiping her hands and offering only a sallow, smiling profile with the wordless invitation to pick up the conversation where it had been left off. She was older, she ought to know. Her daughter worked for the mines, in an office further south, near Frackville. She sat down opposite me and patiently explained how, when the overburdens are not too thick, the mine can be exploited by open cast mining. She spoke slowly, gesturing with her hands: you dig, you shovel, you sift, you extract, sometimes you use dynamite, you shovel some more, and each new layer of coal, each new seam, is uncovered, excavated, sifted, and shoveled aside, fashioning an itinerant landscape on the vast devastated terrain. That’s what I understood—the landscape is constantly being unmade in one place and reconstructed in another, and once the seam is exhausted it gets filled in with the waste that once formed a high, dark embankment, and is abandoned for another mine. I asked whether it would be possible for there to be no trace of a former pit. Laughing she answered—almost cried out—Thank goodness, yes!
Sky. The ocean floor. The outline of land masses. Rock, water, steam. The earth’s gravity field. Lines, measurements, a shape, a time. What experts call the figure of the earth. I don’t want to know any more. I allow myself to be guided; I don’t understand the organized collusion of data transformed into electromagnetic waves that come crashing mathematically into the rental car’s black box to dictate my itinerary. I’ve muted the sound; heading into this unknown country I rely only on the image of the infinite ribbon unspooling on the GPS screen. No obstacles, a marvelous, illusory continuity, the perfect representation of stupidity—what others might call an acceptable representation of reality. “The magic box,” the mechanic had said. I have heard that the GPS is altering our perception of our position in space and the way we travel from place to place. The very notion of an itinerary is problematic nowadays; some people go so far as to believe that everything, including time and emotions, can be localized. It seems to be becoming increasingly difficult to accept that we don’t always know exactly where we are, and by extension it is becoming increasingly difficult to know exactly where we are. The use of maps and legends, the manipulation of scale, sense of direction and the representation of the self in the landscape, all of that is now reduced to a pink or green line serenely unwinding, whose errors go silently unnoticed. For the last few miles I turn the whole thing off and concentrate. It’s here. I might actually have arrived.
Once more my mother tells me that she would have liked to see Ganagobie again, to go back to visit Aix-en-Provence and Neuvy-en-Mauges; she’s been saying it for years but I had only gradually understood, too slowly perhaps, that it was better not to awaken these desires, that they should be left buried, far from the risk of ever being fulfilled. I had done all I could to enable my mother to visit Ganagobie, to go back to see her family’s hometown and to visit the Festival of Aix—forgetting that I could merely offer her what’s real; whereas the thing that her dream, her grief-stained fantasy demanded, was to never be satisfied. She wants to know why I went to America—Why did you go so far away, what did you think you would find? It’s a serious question. I suppose I ought to answer it simply, conveying in an orderly fashion, two or three sentences at most, what a self-evident process it was. We aren’t looking at each other, and thankfully the movements we make as we prepare our lunch allow us to break off the conversation at random. I have to be brief but that’s not enough, I need to remain calm as well: ordinary words are not enough, it is tone, vocal range, reach that matters, slowness, scale of expression, detachment. She is shelling peas. You wanted to check something. That word—check. I’d need time to think about it. I don’t know whether by asking about my trip what she really wants is for me to explain what she once experienced for a few hours in a shopping mall not far from the sea. I don’t know whether she wants facts or feelings. Once again in the middle of her kitchen she sketches out the details of what we already know will be another unfulfilled plan to visit Ganagobie, and once again she concludes with satisfaction: “I would only have been disappointed.”
Seen from afar on Google Earth, it’s a dry trail, like the skeleton of an ancient animal petrified in sedimentary rock. A central axis crisscrossed with lines. This is all that is left of Centralia. I make a detour. I know this isn’t where they shot the film but I want to see the famous ghost town anyway. I have heard the stories. I enter the perimeter of what remains of the town. In 1962 a seam of coal accidentally caught fire—it was a landfill site that should have been filled in with clay but was instead set on fire, as had gradually become routine, this being both easier and quicker. The bowels of this little mining town, networked with veins of coal—one of the most active mines in the region—were set ablaze without warning. The fire spread underground, an inferno buried beneath the town that slowly, slyly devastated everything, engulfing gardens, swallowing cars, and sometimes apparently children too, a terrifying, concealed force whose lethal action indiscriminately consumed houses, the cemetery, a school. The fire could not be extinguished. Fifty years later it is still burning. People moved away, houses were demolished, roads were closed and others constructed farther away, the postcode was deleted—everything was sealed and buried in an attempt to forget. Welcome to Hell, the sign says when you arrive. In Carbon City, Nanticoke, and Carbondale I had seen nothing but glaring similarities between those places and the landscapes of the film—no more than a maddening familial resemblance. I had seen heavy machinery, slagheaps, trucks driving at speed through the dust, one after the other. I would think that I recognized the contours but I could never be sure: everything had shifted, the image was out of focus. But in Centralia, the image is fixed. The surroundings are immaculate, tidier than in other places—there are no cracks in the asphalt, the landscape is not blackened or wrapped in smoke, there is no sign of destruction, no trace of those terrible events. In the center, two roads cross at right angles to one another. The old town center is no more than an asphalt chessboard, not
hing but a sketch of the past. This is what hell must be: erasure. And down below, the fire rages on.
The story so far. Mr. Anderson hesitated because he didn’t like the way the man had thrust his foot across the threshold, he didn’t like the man’s manner—the way he managed somehow to be both shy and peremptory, like a loser, the kind of guy you just knew had clammy hands. He didn’t like that at all. But before he could make the right decision—a decision poised between decency and reason, that would have consisted (despite the fact that the man is clearly troubled and the woman pregnant, despite the precepts of the Gospels and the glorious splendor of the morning) of keeping the door closed—the two strangers have entered. We are inside a holiday home, walls clad in varnished pine, a rustic fireplace. From outside we can hear the laughter of the girls who have just emerged from a morning swim in the pond at the end of the garden and who are now running back up to the house. According to the newspaper article Mr. Ansley threatened Mr. Fox. And so it is in the film—Mr. Dennis points his .45 toward Anderson, who is well built, with a strong grip. Everything happens very fast. Taking advantage of a moment’s distraction, Anderson throws himself onto Mr. Dennis to disarm him. The revolver falls to the ground. They scuffle. Wanda hurriedly puts herself between them, hits Anderson, Let him go!, picks up the gun and, with surprising poise, points it at him. He lets go of Mr. Dennis. Wanda, calm and authoritative, is in control of the situation now—without her they would surely have been done for. Mrs. Anderson rushes in. Wanda tells her to sit down on the couch. Mr. Dennis, pulling himself together, picks up his glasses. The girls come in, laughing. Sit down on the couch! Now Mr. Dennis takes over. He adjusts his tie and looks at Wanda. Everything stops. He looks at her. He contemplates her. It lasts only a few seconds (astonishment, admiration, complicity, desire, extraordinary joy, utter terror—all in one look). Then everything starts up again but in a slightly farcical way—they’re such amateurs, dithering and conferring together in whispers. Wanda, suddenly self-conscious, looks like she has just remembered the List; she puts down her bag, takes out a long piece of cord, and ties the wife and daughters to the sofa. Mr. Dennis forces Anderson to stand with his back to them, holding his hands on the back of his neck, as he explains the mechanism of the fake bomb that he built in the hotel room, that’s a real-life bomb, he places it with exaggerated care on the mother’s knees, as she sits there bound to the sofa alongside her daughters, be careful, and so on. Eventually they leave with Anderson and climb into two cars to go and rob a bank.
Suite for Barbara Loden Page 6
