by Naomi Holoch
It’s then I look up and see Pilar, the girl from the intersection. She’s framed by a pair of couples whose deliberate moves make them look as if they’re orgasming in slow motion on the dance floor. She is across the room, standing in a thin funnel of light, her shirt loose around her candied shoulders, barely damp, but her full lips glisten, even at a distance. Her eyes are bright and she’s smiling, free and open. She waves at me, as if we’re old friends. I feel something loosen and drop inside me.
I jerk away from my dancing partner, who falls back, disoriented by my sudden determination. The disco ball spins aquamarine, like water or bile.
Pilar’s eyes open widely; she’s laughing now, her head tossed back languidly against the wall. She mouths something to me. I have no idea what language she’s speaking. But, wet and feverish, I slowly begin to make my way toward her.
Nicole Brossard
In her novel Mauve Desert (1987)—the first pages of which are included here—the Quebecois writer Nicole Brossard uses the voice of a sexually aware fifteen-year-old girl to explore the arid and dangerous world of the nuclear-haunted 1950s, represented here by the shadowy form of Longman—Robert Oppenheimer, a leading figure in nuclear development. The novel, written in three sections, is structured to explore the relationship between a text and its reader. One of the founders of the theories of l’écriture féminine (writing in the feminine), Brossard combines both feminism and literary innovations, interweaving detailed storytelling and poetic language to achieve a provocatively playful mix of experience and ideas.
from MAUVE DESERT
The desert is indescribable. Reality rushes into it, rapid light. The gaze melts. Yet this morning. Very young, I was already crying over humanity. With every new year I could see it dissolving in hope and in violence. Very young, I would take my mother’s Meteor and drive into the desert. There I spent entire days, nights, dawns. Driving fast and then slowly, spinning out the light in its mauve and small lines that like veins mapped a great tree of life in my eyes.
I was wide awake in the questioning but inside me was a desire that free of obstacles frightened me like a certitude. Then would come the pink, the rust, and the gray among the stones, the mauve and the light of dawn. In the distance, the flashing wings of a tourist helicopter.
Very young I had no future like the shack on the corner which one day was set on fire by some guys who “came from far away,” said my mother who had served them drinks. Only one of them was armed, she had sworn to me. Only one among them. All the others were blond. My mother always talked about men as if they had seen the day in a book. She would say no more and go back to her television set. I could see her profile and the reflection of the little silver comb she always wore in her hair and to which I attributed magical powers. Her apron was yellow with little flowers. I never saw her wearing a dress.
I was moving forward in life, wild-eyed with arrogance. I was fifteen. This was a delight like the power of dying or of driving into the night with circles under my eyes, absolutely delirious spaces edging the gaze.
I was well-acquainted with the desert and the roads running through it. Lorna, this friend of my mother’s, had introduced me to erosion, to all the ghosts living in the stone and the dust. She had described landscapes, some familiar, some absolutely incompatible with the vegetation and barren soil of my childhood. Lorna was inventing. I knew she was because even I knew how to distinguish between a Western diamondback and a rattlesnake, between a troglodyte and a mourning turtledove. Lorna was inventing. Sometimes she seemed to be barking, so rough and unthinkable were her words. Lorna had not known childhood, only young girls after school whom she would ostentatiously arrange to meet at noon. The girls loved kissing her on the mouth. She loved girls who let themselves be kissed on the mouth.
The first time I saw Lorna I found her beautiful and said the word “bitch.” I was five years old. At supper my mother was smiling at her. They would look at each other and when they spoke their voices were full of intonations. I obstinately observed their mouths. Whenever they pronounced words starting with m, their lips would disappear for a moment then, swollen, reanimate with incredible speed. Lorna said she liked molly and salmon mousse. I spilled my glass of milk and the tablecloth changed into America with Florida seeping under the saltshaker. My mother mopped up America. My mother always pretended not to notice when things were dirtied.
I often took to the road. Long before I got my driver’s license. At high noon, at dusk, even at night, I would leave with my mother yelling sharp words at me that would get lost in the parking lot dust. I always headed for the desert because very young I wanted to know why in books they forget to mention the desert. I knew my mother would be alone like a woman can be but I was fleeing the magical reflection of the comb in her hair, seeking the burning reflections of the blinding sun, seeking the night in the dazzled eyes of hares, a ray of life. “Let me confront aridity,” and I would floor the accelerator, wild with the damned energy of my fifteen years. Some day I would reach the right age and time as necessary as a birth date to get life over with. Some day I would be fast so fast, sharp so sharp, some day, faced with the necessity of dawn, I would have forgotten the civilization of men who came to the desert to watch their equations explode like a humanity. I was driving fast, alone like a character cut out of history. Saying “so many times I have sunk into the future.”
At night there was the desert, the shining eyes of antelope jackrabbits, senita flowers that bloom only in the night. Lying under the Meteor’s headlights was the body of a humanity that did not know Arizona. Humanity was fragile because it did not suspect Arizona’s existence. So fragile. I was fifteen and hungered for everything to be as in my body’s fragility, that impatient tolerance making the body necessary. I was an expert driver, wild-eyed in mid-night, capable of going forward in the dark. I knew all that like a despair capable of setting me free of everything. Eternity was a shadow cast in music, a fever of the brain making it topple over into the tracings of highways. Humanity was fragile, a gigantic hope suspended over cities. Everything was fragile, I knew it, I had always known it. At fifteen I pretended I had forgotten mediocrity. Like my mother, I pretended that nothing was dirtied.
Shadows on the road devour hope. There are no shadows at night, at noon, there is only certitude traversing reality. But reality is a little trap, little shadow grave welcoming desire. Reality is a little passion fire that pretexts. I was fifteen and with every ounce of my strength I was leaning into my thoughts to make them slant reality toward the light.
And now to park the car in front of the Red Arrow Motel. Heat, the Bar. The bar’s entire surface resembles a television image: elbows everywhere leaning like shadows and humanity’s trash repeating themselves. I have a beer and nobody notices I exist.
CHAPTER ONE
Longman puts his briefcase on the bed. He has been hot, he loosens his tie. He heads for the bathroom. He thinks about the explosion, he thinks about it and it’s not enough. Something. He knows some lovely little footpaths, delicately shaded areas. He hesitates in front of the mirror. He washes his hands. He thinks about the explosion, he thinks about it and nothing happens in his head. He removes his jacket, throws it on the bed. A ballpoint pen falls to the floor. He does not bend down. He lights a cigarette. He fingers the brim of his felt hat, which he almost never takes off. He thinks about the explosion. For the pleasure of sounds he recites a few sentences in Sanskrit, the same ones that earlier delighted his colleagues. He paces the floor. His cigarette smoke follows him about like a spectral presence. Longman knows the magic value of formulas. He thinks about the explosion. The slightest error could have disastrous consequences. Longman stretches out with white visions then orange ones then the ground beneath his feet turns to jade—I / am / become / Death—now we are all sons of bitches. Longman rests his head on the equation.
I had the power over my mother to take her car from her at the most unexpected moment. My mother had the unsuspected power to arou
se in me a terrible solitude which, when I saw her in such closeness to Lorna, devastated me for then there was between them just enough silence for the thought of their commingled flesh to infiltrate me. One night unexpectedly in the obscurity of their room I came upon my mother, her shoulders and the nape of her neck braced like an existence toward Lorna’s nakedness.
I’m driving. Howling, rock-jaw’d, mouth full of lyrics I sing to the same beat as the woman’s voice exploding the radio. A voice of doom interrupts the song. I howl. I lean on the announcer interrupting the music until the earthquake ebbs into the distance, tidal wave, resorbs into the Pacific blue. The desert is civilization. I don’t like leaving my mother at night. I fear for her. Mothers are as fragile as civilization. They must not be forgotten in front of their television sets. Mothers are spaces. I love driving fast in my mother’s Meteor. I love the road, the vanishing horizon, feeling dawn’s fresh emptiness. I never panic in the desert. In the middle of the night or even in the midst of a sandstorm as the windshield slowly covers up, I know how to be isolated from everything, concrete and unreal like a character confined to the steering wheel of an old Meteor. In the dark of the dust I know how to exist. I listen to the dreadful sound, the roar of wind and sand against the car’s metal body. I yield totally to blindness. I lightly press two fingers against each eyelid and look inside the intimate species, at time going by in the back of my mind. I see seconds, small silvery scars, moving along like creatures. I recognize the trace of creatures who have passed through there where seconds form pyramids, spirals among the remains, beautiful sandstone chevrons. Only once words I was unable to read. And their form soon faded as if it were a partial transcription of light deep in the mind.
I was driving avidly. Choosing the night the desert to thus expose myself to the violence of the moment which propels consciousness. I was fifteen and before me space, space far off tapering me down like a civilization in reverse, city lost in the trembling air. In my mother’s Meteor I was exemplary solitude with, at the tip of my toes, a brake to avoid all disasters and to remind me of the insignificance of despair amid snakes and cacti in the bluest night of all ravings.
I am my mother’s laughter when I pale in the face of humanity’s distress. Never did my mother cry. I never saw her cry. My mother was unable to imagine that solitude could be like an exactness of being. She trembled when faced with humanity’s noises but no solitude really reached her. In the worst moments of her existence my mother would conclude: “This is a man, we need a bed; this is a woman, we need a room.” My mother was as obstinate as a man struggling with the desert. She did not like men but she defended the desert like a feeling leaguing her with men. She was a woman without expression and this frightened me.
Every time I think of my mother I see girls in swimsuits lying by the motel pool. This motel, purchased in 1950, my mother renovated it and spent fifteen years paying it off with polite gestures, discipline, and energy repeated in the heat of Tucson afternoons. But before Lorna’s arrival, everything is vague. Vague and noisy like the to-and-fro of travelers, of suppliers, of the chambermaid.
Lorna’s presence will always be linked in my memory with my first years of school and especially with learning to read and write. I liked to read but don’t remember reading otherwise than in Lorna’s presence. She would watch me, static watcher, monitoring every blink of my eyelids, spying any flutter of sensation, the slightest sign upon my face liable to betray an emotion. I would follow her little game with a discrete eye but when I happened to look up, it was my turn to follow upon her lips the strange alphabet that seemed to constitute a dream in her gaze. I would then invariably ask the question: “What are we eating?” as if this could keep her at bay or protect the intimate nature of what I had experienced while reading.
One day when looking for some blank paper to draw on I saw, at the far end of the kitchen, Lorna and my mother sitting on the same chair. My mother was on Lorna’s lap, who was holding her by the waist with her right arm. With her left hand Lorna was scribbling. Their legs were all entwined and my mother’s apron was folded over Lorna’s thigh. I asked Lorna what she was writing. She hesitated then spun out some sentence to the effect that she was unable to read the marks her hand had drawn. I was about to exclaim, to say that … it made no sense when I noticed the ease of Lorna’s hand in my mother’s hair.
Yet that night. Very young I learned to love the fire from the sky, torrential lightning branched out over the city like thinking flowing in the mind. On dry storm nights I would become tremors, detonations, total discharge. Then surrender to all the illuminations, those fissures that like so many wounds lined my virtual body, linking me to the vastness. And so the body melts like a glimmer of light in the abstract of words. Eyes, existence give in before that which comes forth inside us, certitude. The desert drinks everything in. Furor, solitude.
In the desert there is the pursuit of breaks clouds sometimes make. Sometimes they are like little lead pellets the sun shoots toward the horizon to signify tomorrow’s coming future. I am well acquainted with lead, copper, cartridges, and all weapons. I know weapons. Any desert girl learns at a very young age how to hold a weapon and to drive a car. Any young girl learns that what glitters under the sun can also hurt or excite feeling so utterly that shadow itself turns to crimson.
Translated by Suzanne de Lotbinière-Harwood and the author
Gila Svirsky
Gila Svirsky, an Israeli author and peace activist who lives in Jerusalem, creates a political and emotional triangle in her story “Meeting Natalia” (1996). This triangle, composed of two women and the city of Jerusalem, symbolizes the challenge of historical loyalties. The narrator in the story finds herself drawn to a German non-Jewish woman, a desire that leads her into unexpected territories. Even though Jerusalem is a fragmented world, the city becomes a familiar and comforting lover whom she refuses to betray. Svirsky, like many Israeli feminists, is searching for a land in which differences can find a home. In this story, the search is historical, immediate, and sexual.
MEETING NATALIA
I did not invite her: I would never have brought a German-accented guest into my home. But Natalia needed a place to stay in Jerusalem and had been sent by a mutual friend. So, like a true, hospitable Jerusalemite, I opened to her my home, but not my heart. I would sculpt and she would sit writing as I studiously ignored her, letting my fingers capture in form and substance the dense texture of these evenings together.
One night I came home late and found Natalia tending the fire. No, my house is not warm in the normal course of winter.
My fireplace is beautiful but holds only the promise of thaw to numb limbs. So I feed it and stoke it, carry in fresh wood, and carry out old ashes—small flickers of hope in a world where small flickers of hope are all that keep one warm sometimes. But this evening, Natalia was taking care of the fire.
“You do that well,” I said, watching her move the logs around.
“It is something we must learn to do where I come from,” she replied. “In my village the snow lies on the ground all winter long, like a quiet carpet.”
In Malha, my section of Jerusalem, fallen almond blossoms form a quiet carpet of their own in spring.
I sat down and watched her turn the logs. Perhaps it was her reticence that finally caused me to speak, a reticence that proclaimed indifference to my hostility.
“Tell me about your village,” I said at last. Natalia continued to shift the wood. When she was finished, she carefully hung the tools and then sat down.
“I did not come to talk about Germany,” she said. “You tell me about Jerusalem.”
I looked across at her curled into the couch, her expression expectant, and considered talking to her about this place/presence that is Jerusalem. We inhabitants of Jerusalem do not easily share our thoughts with outsiders. But something in her compelled me to answer.
“Jerusalem is not just a city, it’s a state of mind.” Could she grasp this at all? “Jerusalem
is an attitude of intense religiosity garbed in modern clothing. It’s a spiritual outlook on all matters, even those not ordinarily in the realm of the spiritual.”
The words sounded stilted. Natalia waited for me to continue.
“The spiritual can be very primitive sometimes. In the center of town there’s a building under construction—near the shuk—that came under the curse of a kabbalist rabbi. People were so afraid of the curse that workers didn’t show up, suppliers stopped deliveries, the apartments couldn’t be rented. And why did the rabbi curse it? Because the height of the building cast a shadow on his courtyard.”
“You do not mind if I interrupt while you are speaking?” she asked.
“No, I don’t mind,” I said, thinking that I had started the wrong way.
“I make hot wine so that we can be more easy on the subject.” She smiled. “Is this all right?”
Her smile disarmed me. I watched her as she stood up, no longer quite so aloof as she prepared the wine. Her dark hair fell onto her thin shoulders. She brought two mugs to the table and set them down gently, as if afraid of breaking the fragile thread between us.
“Tell me more,” she said.
I sipped the wine and tried not to concentrate on her eyes as they watched me over the rim of her cup. I looked into the fire and began to tell her about Jerusalemites—a people set apart. The old men who live their lives as ascetics—in sackcloth and ashes, still mourning the destruction of the ancient Temple. The women who shave their heads once they have married, to prevent themselves from being attractive to other men. Adolescent girls who swaddle their bodies to conceal the biological life beneath. Young men who spend all their waking hours in tiny yeshivas: memorizing, interpreting, chanting the archaic arguments of the Talmud.
