POROCHISTA KHAKPOUR is a novelist, essayist, journalist, and professor. She is the author of the forthcoming memoir Sick, and of the novels Sons and Other Flammable Objects, which was chosen as the 2007 California Book Award winner in First Fiction, one of the Chicago Tribune’s Fall’s Best, and a New York Times Editor’s Choice, and The Last Illusion, named a 2014 Best Book of the Year by NPR, Kirkus, Buzzfeed, Popmatters, and Electric Literature, among others. She has had fellowships from the NEA, Yaddo, Ucross, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Northwestern University, the University of Leipzig, and many others. Her writing has appeared in Harper’s, Bookforum, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, Al Jazeera America, Slate, Salon, Spin, The Daily Beast, Elle, and many other publications around the world. She is currently Contributing Editor at the Offing, a channel of the Los Angeles Review of Books, and Writer in Residence at Bard College. Born in Tehran and raised in Los Angeles, she lives in New York City.
Hunting Nanda
DBC PIERRE
I strode over the tarmac at Dublin airport on a wind-lashed November day, trailing a glow of new authorhood. After two years of writing, five months of rejection, and a ten-day bender when I finally snagged an agent, one lunchtime brought a flurry of bidding, then sales to publishers. One of them was in Italy.
Now I was off to that book launch, my first.
The Italian publisher, from a prestigious old house, had decided to beat the English market to the post by hosting the novel’s world premiere. Looking back, it was a risky first novel, a gamble for a publisher, and the premiere may have been meant as a hedge for its added publicity value. But I hadn’t read so far into the situation. In fact, I hadn’t thought about it at all. I was going to Rome full of the heady altruism known to first-time authors and astronauts, the feeling best described by Mario Puzo after selling The Godfather – ‘almost like not having to worry about dying.’
I’d travelled before, to Rome as well, so it was nothing more than an exotic twist to what I foresaw as a celebration and fait accompli. Arriving in Rome, I was happy to be ripped off by the airport taxi, pleased to marvel again at just how wrong leather can be as a material for trousers, nostalgic to ask myself where the ancient Romans had really found the models for their statues. I checked into the Hotel Raphael beside the Piazza Navona, and after coffee went to meet my publisher.
‘So here’s the problem,’ he said after pleasantries. ‘This book will not be accepted in Italy unless we can get one lady in particular to write about it. We actually thought we had an appointment with her – but now we’ve lost contact and her trail’s gone cold.’ After a moment he shrugged in that Italianate, che sarà kind of way. ‘She’s very unpredictable. We’ll just keep trying.’
So there was to be no fait accompli. No automatic celebration. Reality intervened at the first hurdle, making me calculate the power of this mystery person against Italy’s diversity and size. It was some power.
Her name was Fernanda Pivano; everyone called her Nanda. She was the mother of American literature in Italy, and had famously been the muse – maybe more! – of Ernest Hemingway. She was an intimate of Kerouac, Corso, and Vidal, of Ferlinghetti, Burroughs, Bukowski, and Ginsberg. She had been imprisoned three times by Italy’s fascist government for importing their liberal literature. And after such a formidable history she was now old – and grumpy.
‘Well,’ I ventured as she took shape in my mind, first as Helen of Troy, then Gertrude Stein, then Eleanor Roosevelt, ‘in fact it’s not an American book. I’m not American; I wrote the thing in London.’
‘Forget it,’ the publisher waved. ‘In Italy it’s American literature. We need Nanda or nobody else will take notice. For half a century she’s been the patron and gateway for this kind of book. She has to meet you.’
And so the mythical doyenne ate the rest of the trip, became its tapestry. She roamed the shadow of every introduction, was behind the gaze on every face. She became the book’s only chance. Pitched in my mind against visions of who she might be was a sober reassessment of this whole book game. It was more precarious than I’d thought. And failure here could only knock-on to the rest of the world. More weightily still, as the hours of my visit passed, a date with Nanda grew to imply much more than media approval; it became the approval by proxy of Hemingway and Kerouac themselves.
We had three days to find Nanda. In the meantime the publicity department spread her dust over every interview: ‘Nanda is very interested, you know, she definitely wants to meet him. She’s probably going to write something.’
But Fernanda Pivano, legend, keyholder of Fate, was nowhere to be found. On a rooftop overlooking Rome, I attended the first literary party of my new life, and her seed was already planted, her name travelled like a rumour of sex. She might even show up there! Why not? She’d been seen in Rome just that week, surely she could make an appearance. Looking around, it became clear that we were persons in waiting. Waiting for Nanda. All the assembled authors and publishers were not enough to carry the night.
They were only enough to ramp up the legend.
‘She doesn’t suffer fools, believe me. If she doesn’t like you, forget it. If she doesn’t like you, you may as well pulp the book and leave town.’
Day three approached and we not only had to find her but now she had to like me. All the intelligence I’d garnered was no help at all: it stretched to knowing who she really liked, and that was Hemingway, Kerouac, and Ginsberg. Hard acts to follow. What’s more, unlike many salon legends, this wasn’t bullshit. Nanda Pivano had translated most of her American friends into now classic editions in their own right, and had written, edited, criticised, and reported her own significant post-war and Beat works in step with them. She had not only been Hemingway’s acknowledged confidante, she said she was the last person ever to hear from him.
Hemingway sought out Nanda before death.
‘She was scheduled to appear at a venue on Thursday,’ the publicity crew hissed. ‘But she cancelled. Now she’s not answering calls.’
‘She was seen at an event! But she vanished.’
‘We just heard she’s moving house! But nobody knows where.’
‘Someone answered her phone! Apparently she’s not well.’
So came the cries from the jungle of my trip. Then on the day before the last, having enjoyed some old balsamic while adjusting to life as a reject of Hemingway: ‘We found her – she’s in Milan!’
I snatch an afternoon flight to Milan where I’m met by Chiara, my guide for the hunt’s climax. She’s a lively philosophy graduate from the publisher’s local office, and presents with the right mix of realism, anarchy and hope.
‘When’s our appointment?’ I ask.
‘What appointment?’ she smiles.
It remains a commando mission. Chiara has met Nanda before, and as we hunker down to strategize over coffee, she pulls a few more tales from the archive of Nanda’s stubbornness, caprice, intelligence, and charm. And she repeatedly calls a local number, one we’re assured is Nanda’s, but there’s no answer. Meanwhile information filters in that says the number connects to an apartment just around the corner – which must be the one Nanda is in the process of leaving.
Coffee turns into prosecco until the number finally answers. Its not Nanda but another lady, an assistant or friend, who says Nanda may or may not see us – but we can approach the apartment and take our chances. We walk to the address and try the bell, but no one comes. The building is an elegant low-rise over a gated garage with a restaurant built in alongside it. After loitering around the gate for a while, we retreat for more drinks and try the phone again.
Prosecco turns into grappa. Night begins to fall.
As a final shot within the hours of decency, we return to the darkened building and ring the bell. This time a lady comes to the gate and lets us in. Just like that, as if she’s always there, and always lets callers in. She says Nanda is upstairs, and leads us to an apartment stacked high with b
oxes and furnishings. In one central room, once the living room, a sofa and an armchair still sit in place. And from deep in the armchair a pair of eyes sparkle up. They follow Chiara and me to the sofa. Behind the eyes a small round woman begins to smile. Her hair is short, still brunette, framing a Genoese face with the beaming cheeks and handsome radiance of a boy on the cover of a raisin box. She watches me for a few moments, then says in English, ‘Take off your clothes.’
I grin. She beams. At eighty-five she has not only the face but the mischief of a schoolboy. Chiara, realising she’s sat between urchins, flaps at me not to do it. She later tells me Nanda has used the gambit before, that it was a trick, because someone once actually undressed and she wasn’t impressed. More playful gambits follow, and I roll with them until Nanda leans from her chair to say that she’s read my book. That she loves it. This is the Mario Puzo moment I would’ve undressed for. In the buzz that follows, she invites us to invite her to dinner at the trattoria downstairs. Chiara and I take an arm each and manoeuvre her down to the place, settling at a large wooden table and ordering red wine. Nanda sits facing me, scrutinising. She wants to know about me, but my brief history – recent move to a forest in Ireland, upbringing in Mexico City, father running projects out of New York – makes her stop me.
‘Do you keep animals, in this forest?’
‘Not as in livestock. But there are creatures around the house, foxes and such. There’s even a fox who comes to be fed every night.’
‘And your father died in New York?’
‘He didn’t die there. Though he was treated for a time there, when he fell ill.’
‘Foxes, New York,’ her eyes glisten over my face. ‘Listen to me: if you’re going to write like this, you mustn’t face the world as yourself. You need a figura. If you show them yourself, they’ll destroy you!’
‘But part of the soul of this work is that it’s the first really honest thing I’ve done,’ I say. ‘It’s not in that spirit to hide.’
‘No, no,’ she says. ‘Don’t show them yourself. Look at Hemingway, look at all his friends. Those were deeply strange men. If anyone knew how they really were, they would’ve destroyed them. Deeply strange, all those boys. Do you think they would’ve survived without their figura? I was imprisoned for some of their ideas. Imprisoned three times, under fascism. And let me tell you something – I can smell it coming again.’
The words settle heavily between us. ‘Except, Nanda,’ I start, ‘it presumes that I’m also deeply strange...’
‘Spanish liar!’ she squeals. ‘You’re a Spanish liar! You need a figura! I’ll make one for you, and I’ll introduce you to all my friends in America...’ and through my cigarette smoke, over wine by the light of her gaze, the night becomes a kind of arrival. A docking at the wharf of great spirits, hearts, and minds. Of human turmoil and its answers in art. That Trojan intellect empties me out and pumps me full of the substance of art and life, makes me feel for the first time like a writer. She gives Hemingway’s blessing, speaks to me of him and his cohorts as of mutual friends we’d just been with. Then we kiss goodnight through the bars of her gate, and she is gone.
Sometime later a sketch of the article she was writing arrived at my place in Ireland. It was a poetic piece on me and my book, to be published in an Italian daily.
And there was my new figura – I’d virtually been raised by foxes in the wilderness, after my father’s suicide in New York.
I wrote to Nanda about it. Raised by foxes is one thing; suicide was a little strong.
‘Spanish liar!’ she wrote back.
We corresponded in handwriting for a time before her death, her last letter to me from a summer house in Portofino. And thinking about it now, I should have taken her advice. She not only passed on secrets and tips, she handed me a baton and a challenge. Still today my mind hunts Nanda and her advice.
But maybe it’s not too late to follow what she gave me.
After all, a suicide in the family can leave you confused.
And foxes are no example for a growing boy.
DBC PIERRE is known as much for youthful scandal as for books. Australian-born and Mexican-raised, DBC Pierre was an artist, photographer, and designer before writing his first novel in 2001. His debut, Vernon God Little, became the first book to win both a Booker and Whitbread prize, and went on to be published in 43 territories, leading to a further two novels – Ludmila’s Broken English and Lights Out In Wonderland, in a loose trilogy of comedies. Petit Mal, a `picture book for grown-ups’, followed in 2013, and the novella Breakfast with the Borgias in 2014. When not travelling, Pierre divides his time between the UK and a mountainside lair in County Leitrim, Ireland.
Swami Sand Castle
FRANCINE PROSE
Once, over lunch, I told an editor at a glossy travel magazine that I wanted to write a piece about the experience of not understanding a place, of being intrigued – but bewildered – the whole time I was there and leaving with no clear idea of what that place had been about. I’d said I’d noticed that the essays in his magazine were always written by travelers who seemed to know everything about their destinations long before they got there, or by writers who had a charming local friend who explained the region’s many appealing customs and attractions, preferably over dinner at a villa, and provided introductions to nearby Michelin-starred chefs and gourmet-food providers. Was I the only person who had ever gone somewhere, been confused, and felt that I’d never figured anything out? From across his plate of micro-greens, the editor stared at me as if I’d suggested writing a piece about the nicest places on the planet in which to catch bubonic plague.
So here is a story about one of those mysteries of travel that has remained in my mind as a succession of somewhat dreamlike events, and a series of questions.
For years I couldn’t remember the name of the village. I’d search for it on maps, but all I knew was that it was somewhere on the coast of the Arabian Sea between Cochin and Trivandrum, in the southern Indian state of Kerala. Then one morning, not long ago, I woke up and thought: Varkala! I googled the town, which turns out to have developed (surprise!) dozens of luxury and middle-class resorts along its gorgeous beach. But nothing remotely like that existed when Howie (now my husband, then my boyfriend) and I arrived in the winter of 1978.
Over time I have become the sort of traveler who likes thick towels, flat screen TVs, reservations made long in advance. But this is how we traveled then: We had an open-ended plane ticket back to the United States. We planned to spend four or five months in India and go home when we got tired or homesick or when our money ran out. We took the bus from Cochin to Trivandrum, with the plan of getting off and staying if we found a beautiful place.
Varkala was beautiful. We could see the palm trees and the clean white beach from the narrow road that ran through the peaceful little town. We assumed there would be somewhere to stay the night. After a day at the beach, we would continue on our trip across South India, through which I had traveled a few years before; I’d loved it and longed to return.
The bus left us in beautiful Varkala, where, as it turned out, there were no hotels. But a helpful man at the bus stop told us that a young fellow, very respectable, actually his nephew, was building some houses on the beach. One of these houses was nearly finished, and for a small fee the landlord-builder would probably let us stay there.
The house was easy to find, and the landlord spoke perfect English. He said we could stay on an air mattress in the mostly finished house, which had working plumbing, and he would bring us breakfast – some yogurt and fruit – and a vegetarian dinner, all included in the price. The fee, in fact, was amazingly small. We decided to stay for two nights.
That first afternoon at the beach we met some fishermen and their wives. The women gave me betel to chew, and tried to teach me how to spit, with something like panache, the red saliva that betel produces and that tourists in India sometimes mistake for blood, on the sidewalk. They laughed delightedly when red
slime dribbled off my lower lip. The men tried to persuade Howie to go ocean fishing on what was basically a carved-out log, and when I begged him not to, they thought that was hilarious too. Anyway, they were probably joking. Testing us, I imagine.
For the rest of that day, and all the next, we sat on the beach near our house and watched a sadhu – a wandering holy man – perform a ceremony that was in more or less constant progress and consisted of various sorts of work on the beach, not far from where we sat. Because some of that work involved raking the sand and patting and piling it up into ceremonial circles and lingam-like sculptural shapes, Howie and I began referring to him as Swami Sand Castle.
The first thing that needs to be said about Swami Sand Castle is that he was extraordinarily handsome and that all his movements were assured and graceful, and fascinating to watch. He was tall and thin, and though he seemed to be in his early thirties – not all that much older than we were – his long hair had already turned silver. His eyes were so shockingly blue that we could see them from the polite and comfortable distance at which we sat. He was bare-chested, his skin was golden brown, and he wore the long wrapped white skirt the Indians call a dhoti, which gave him a Hindu Jesus effect. I liked the idea of a holy man who could have been a rock star back home.
For a long time he didn’t notice us, or didn’t appear to. And then he did. He nodded once and acknowledged us, and we smiled back. After that his manner changed a little and became, intermittently, a performance. He knew we were there, but he had work to do. Our watching gave the experience an ever so slightly voyeuristic edge, and – given how striking he was, and how young and in love and attractive we were then – an ever so slightly erotic aspect.
In addition to raking and patting the sand, he ministered to a steady trickle of people, men and women, old and young, families and solitary pilgrims, who came to him to receive a blessing, a dab of paint on their foreheads, and a packet wrapped in a leaf. They gave him money, then took the packets down the beach and threw them into the sea. When the stream of people slowed he would kneel and either make things out of sand or prepare more packets, small scoops of rice and spices wrapped in banana leaves.
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