Here are the songs to mark the thirtieth day since his funeral, a day when Jews generally gather and talk about the deceased.
1) Bob Dylan’s “I’m Not There.” A song from his Basement Tapes era. The title says it all and Dylan repeats, “I’m not there, I’m gone.” A recently rediscovered song that we listened to very often in the last few months. Coincidence?
2) T Bone Burnett “River of Love,” Alan really enjoyed that singer, better known as a producer and composer of film scores, like the Coen brothers’ O Brother, Where Art Thou? His songs are a kind of rock encyclopedia. His voice sounds a little like Elvis Costello’s. He was part of Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue tour in the seventies.
3) Merle Haggard “If I Could Only Fly.” It’s a Blaze Foley song. Foley was a singer from Texas who got shot to death at age fifty in 1989, while trying to save an old man from an attacker.
4) Neil Young “Helpless,” a song we’ve shared. Live version.
5) Danny O’Keefe “Pieces of the Rain.” A singer-songwriter of the seventies. Another song about rain. The rain on the day of the last lunch.
6) “Help Me” by Joni Mitchell, a singer Alan loved but I never really connected with.
7) “Second Lovers Song” by Townes Van Zandt, a very pretty Van Zandt song like most of his songs, and Alan played the recording at his wedding. Van Zandt died at fifty-two, of complications from an operation...
8) “Woodstock” by Matthews Southern Comfort. The most famous cover recording of this Joni Mitchell title. I don’t know if Alan knew it.
9) Satie’s Gymnopedie No. 1.
10) “Beside You,” Van Morrison, the last vinyl we listened to together, Astral Weeks Live at Hollywood Bowl. One of the last records I bought.
11) “Walk on the Wild Side,” Lou Reed.
12) “Sweet Dreams,” Emmylou Harris.
13) “Poet Wind,” David Munyon.
14) “Rain Falling Down,” Jimmy LaFave.
15) “No Frontiers,” Mary Black.
16) “Day is Done,” Nick Drake.
17) “Dream Café,” Greg Brown.
18) “Be Well,” Luka Bloom.
Friday arrives. On Friday mornings in recent years we used to sit and drink coffee, in my house or outside. A standing appointment around nine thirty. Then sometimes we’d go for a stroll, or to the supermarket and the post office to see if anything had arrived late in the week. It’s Friday and I’m more aware of the void.
But what I wonder is whether there’s such a thing as a capitalist death, if we decide to die or to take deadly risks with a capitalist mindset.
Let’s see:
Alan.
Age: 55
State of health: mediocre.
Illnesses: obesity.
Condition: heart problems, metabolic diabetes.
Salary: around $3,000 a month.
Mortgage: $130,000. Recent. Monthly payment: $800
Life insurance: $180,000.
Alan thinks about what would happen if his health gets worse, he’d be fired and lose his job. At his age it would be impossible to find another job. Unemployment benefits in Israel are 70% of your salary for seven months. After that he would be left with no life insurance and little Social Security. So maybe his wife would have to support him, something he couldn’t stand for even six months.
So death gives him more than three hundred thousand dollars (the mortgage is also insured) and eliminates all personal expenses. That’s around a hundred months’ salary, assuming he had been able to work till retirement.
Not such a bad deal, death.
This sounds like an absurd calculation to make, but it’s not impossible for such thoughts to cross your mind at a certain age.
Death is economical.
I think Alan chose the operation because he feared deteriorating, becoming dependent. As he said, “If I don’t do something now, in five years I could have a heart attack.” Well he had it sooner, but what meaning can age have after death? None, I think. Age is a necessary parameter for the living. The dead become ageless.
Alan is dead and my mother-in-law is still alive, she’s eternal. Alan is dead and Alan’s aunt is still alive.
Rage came, rage rage against the dying of the light, fury, over a pointless death, a modern death. We’re all to blame. Alan was sick, he shouldn’t have been working, but he was so afraid of being fired that he kept putting himself through an hour and a half of traffic jams every morning and another hour and a half every evening. They wouldn’t even give him a week off before the operation, he worked till the very last day and got home at 9 p.m.
Rage against the need to maintain a standard of living, against taking out mortgages to buy a more centrally located home, against the need to live in cities for better access to supermarkets and shopping and more shopping. Rage against relatives who urge you to live up to your potential, especially your financial potential. Rage against earning more and more.
Rage against a society that won’t let its artists create and improve the world. Alan was an artist, an artist forced to give up painting.
Yesterday I visited his widow. Her home was full of his paintings that had been stored at his aunt’s place, many paintings full of happy colors that I had never seen. It hurt to see them now. Alan’s paintings are hurting me.
Rage against the banks that won’t let us live our lives. Rage against the banks that went after Alan when his natural-products shop went bankrupt, that went after the little he owed them, when we’re the ones who always shoulder the debts that the big millionaires can’t afford to pay.
Rage against the world, the world. The world killed my friend. The world is also me, I am the world. The world that couldn’t convince him not to have the operation, that’s me. Because I knew, I knew he shouldn’t have the operation. I am the world that couldn’t convince Alan to live closer to work, or get him to take a vacation. Yes, Alan, they owe you a month and a half of vacation. You can take it now, in the other world.
You left behind five packages of Partagás Club, a hundred cigars, and two packages of Upmann minis, another forty. At a rate of four or five a day you could smoke them on your vacation. In your final weeks, you stopped smoking. I asked if you had any cigars left, you said you were saving them for after your operation. Yesterday your widow gave me the Partagás, now I’m smoking them for you. You, who are now smoke.
Rage against your wife and the doctors who tried to save you in the operating room that killed you. Rage against the weight-loss drugs that made you put on weight, one of them, the most expensive, Bayeta. Bayeta which sounds like the name of a handgun. In Hebrew, bullet and pill are one word. A deadly pill. A bayeta. A year of bayeta and me telling you that you weren’t well, you would come over for coffee and fall asleep mid-sentence, I would yell and ask if you could hear me and you’d say “Yes” and repeat the last sentence, you weren’t asleep, your eyes had drifted shut.
Rage, rage against literature, which says everything while saying nothing, and the more that it says everything the less it says in truth. Rage against words that can no longer do anything about your pointless death. Rage against the pretty words that make us think and even cry.
3.
But, the scarf from Seville was a goodbye scarf, that’s why the lover left it in the restaurant, after a cell-phone call in which he or she promised to think it over again and just needed more time. And I, with my scarf, was also heading towards a goodbye, a goodbye to a dream. How do you say goodbye to a dream? It’s like saying goodbye to a ghost, like saying goodbye to a brown scarf found in Seville and lost in Madrid, okay, enough with that image, but it’s what I was looking for there. An encounter and a goodbye.
The tour guide took us out one rainy, cloudy morning through the streets of Seville’s Jewish Quarter, and led us to the Alcazar palace. She told our group of thirty Jews about the Inquisition, the Reconquest, Ferdinand and Isabella, and about more and more Catholic monarchs, who wanted to build a castle in the Moorish style, an
unpleasant copy of the Alhambra where no one wanted to live now, until we reached the gardens in back, where she no longer explained anything. It never crossed her mind that for these Jews a tour of the Inquisition and the Catholic monarchs would be unpleasant. We’d have preferred hearing about how Jewish pirates used to attack the Spanish monarchs’ ships and steal all their gold along the Pacific coasts and near Morocco and Africa. And how the monarchs reacted to these former Spaniards who became enemies of the Crown. In the afternoon, at the Three Cultures Foundation, which had been the Moroccan Pavilion at Expo 92, I got a good look at the Moors’ architectural revenge for the imitations.
Then we had lunch at a restaurant in the Jewish Quarter, of which little survives although these days Jewish Quarters are popping up everywhere, and Spaniards think these restorations are what we are probably most interested in, though that is an internal matter that has little to do with the Jews. What interests me about Sephardim is their lives, not cemeteries and Jewish Quarters devoid of Jews, that’s the most macabre thing you can show a Sephardic Jew, but in the multicultural world we live in we not only have to swallow these Jew-free Jewish Quarters but applaud when they tell us about the enormous effort to recuperate them, and we have to look interested when they tell us how they expelled us, what the Catholic Monarchs did in our absence, and which Jew was accused of attending the synagogue of an alleged secret rabbi. Multiculturalism is the Western World’s and Europe’s new way to impose their view of reality, “Do you realize how much the Spanish government has spent renovating these Jewish Quarters?” Yes, but so what, it’s another inverted cross, another scarf that smothers more than it warms.
I’d rather they hear more Steve Young songs, the Spanish government I mean. Not Neil Young’s, Steve’s.
And after the obligatory fish lunch that Jewish groups always have, and after the strong Seville coffee, and after the purifying trip to the bathroom, I returned to the dining room where we’d had lunch and everyone was gone, they’d forgotten me, a poet is always forgettable, I went to get my raincoat from the brown wooden coat rack, which rose above the floor like a svelte ballerina, proud of her airy body, and behind her, a scarf. A scarf like the one that killed Isadora Duncan in 1927 in an accident when it got tangled in the wheel of her convertible, she was fifty, like me, she was famous and at the height of her fortune and fame. That scarf was a promise of warmth, of touch, I needed to be touched even if it was by a scarf and not a hand. And that scarf, there by itself, as I put on my raincoat, that scarf seemed like a hand calling me to contact, a gentle hand, of a woman or a man with a fluoric constitution, a fragile scarf, a scarf surrounded by loneliness, it was seeking me as much as I was seeking it, and it found me as much as I found it. I looked around, the waiters had gone, there was no one, just me and the scarf. I took it without much thought and ran to join the group, which had reached the end of the street and was about to step decisively out of sight. I stepped after them with the scarf in hand, not yet around my neck, and asked the last person in the line if the scarf was hers, and whether she knew whose it was. “No, it’s not mine, no, I don’t want that scarf.” Perhaps even the owner said that while everyone was saying “No, it’s not mine, it’s not mine,” until the last person, who suggested I return it to the restaurant, as maybe someone was out on that cold day with only a scarf, maybe in a suit and scarf, maybe because their spouse said just before leaving the house, honey, put on your scarf or you’ll catch a bad cold, or maybe someone set out to lose it that day, because they wanted to forget a gift from a lover.
The scarf, like one of those loves at first sight, the French coup de foudre, was now mine, I put it around my neck quickly, hoping no one would awaken from a mini-siesta and remember it was theirs, we were like lifelong friends, the scarf that would be mine for thirteen days, two weeks in November, thirteen days, from Wednesday to Monday, from Seville to Madrid. Great loves are short and are always found in one city and vanish in another. That’s what true loves are like.
4.
The raincoat. I bought it in Salamanca twenty years ago on a trip I took in another era, from Lisbon to London. The price: eleven thousand pesetas, expensive for the time. I wore it very seldom. It never seemed quite right for Jerusalem rain, and on this trip I left it in Madrid, it ended its journey there, too.
The umbrella. I put it in the suitcase at the last second. In Madrid, I left it in my room and it ended up raining. Again at the last second I stuck it in my backpack, on the way to Seville. It was useful here because it rained all day, on the bus the young man from the Three Cultures Foundation apologized for the weather as if he controlled it personally and as if the rain were a result of his carelessness.
I was walking with the umbrella open and each time that I asked whether the scarf belonged to someone, it became more mine, in stages, so after I’d asked fifteen people, half of the scarf was mine, after twenty it was two thirds mine, and so on till we got on the bus to go take a late Andalusian siesta and prepare for the evening program.
I’ll have to check into why the Spanish word for umbrella sounds plural, why we call it el paraguas and not los paraguas.
5.
On the second and final Saturday with the scarf, I went to visit my uncle and as I walked on the Paseo de la Castellana towards his place on the Paseo de la Habana, in that pedestrian-trodden stretch of La Castellana, I finally pissed on the Madrid soil, I couldn’t hold out any longer in that cold weather, and it wasn’t easy, between the four- and five-star hotels and the streets laid out carefully to minimize any hiding places, but just before I reached the Corte Inglés store at Nuevos Ministerios—where two of my books were!—I found a spot and pissed. If I meant to make Madrid mine during this trip, if I meant to take ownership of Madrid on this tenth journey to the city, my piss had marked my territory, my piss and the transient scarf. It wasn’t easy, but I couldn’t help it, so I found a small tree from which I could still see the endless boulevard, and I hope and think no one could see me and I did it fast, like a cat that wants to mark his territory and knows that at any moment someone could show up and scare him away but he has to do it.
I wore the scarf as I walked up the Calle Embajadores for what would be my first meeting with my publishers, Daniel and Talía, who’d gotten married a week earlier but disliked being congratulated, and there I discovered that the publishing house got its name because it’s four floors up from the street. Daniel asked if I wanted to go up or if he should bring down the books he was going to give me, I said I’d go up, of course, little knowing that it was an exhausting trudge up four flights of old, difficult stairs. Both editors were as I’d imagined them from our email exchanges, I don’t think we’d ever spoken till that moment, I think it had all been through characters and words sent through the web. A web of words. Perhaps poetry is disappearing, but the world is more and more filled with words and writings of all kinds.
The past is dead, and the future hasn’t been born.
In the subway station for the line that would take me to my uncle’s place, the green line, a man talking on his cell phone was saying, “Listen, don’t make the same mistakes as last week, cut off the animal’s head first to make sure it’s dead, or shoot it if you like, no, it’s not enough to put it under anesthesia it has to be dead, then you open its guts from top to bottom, right, at the thorax, and cut them all out, you take out the kidneys and heart and put them on ice in the cooler for me, starting with the heart, close it quickly, and move fast, then you can run the rest through the crusher, till hamburger comes out...” We reached the station and got out. On her phone, a woman was telling a man, “Well, your wife should go talk to the school principal since that’s a mother’s job and I want to see you this afternoon, we haven’t seen each other in a week and you see her every day.”
The world had died and we never even noticed.
6.
I reached the Casa del Libro bookstore on the Gran Vía, where I saw many books that interested me but I didn’t buy any,
I was afraid of the weight, of putting my luggage over the weight limit, from books that friends would give me, my own books if I didn’t manage to sell them or give them away, and after walking out into the street feeling so modern, so twenty-first century, I had a premonition that we were living in pure change, pure change, that in ten years the world will be a very different world. That’s logical enough, so far so good. But then my mind started wandering, and I tried to imagine the most radical change that could happen in the world, the most unexpected, the most implausible. And ultimately I pictured a world where bookstores sell millions of poetry books. Nothing could be more alien to the world we live in. Every bookstore window filled with poetry books, and if someone asked for a novel, they’d be told there are a few shelves of novels in the basement but nobody reads novels anymore, nobody buys them. Publishers would issue books of unpublished verse by once-famous novelists, the complete poetry of Faulkner and even Philip Roth, we have not the remotest idea that Roth writes poems.
I told my friend Adolfo about this at breakfast, and he said it could never happen. I told him about it at the Café Gijón.
“Of course it can’t, I know that. But it would be a change.”
On an empty seat on the subway, I saw an abandoned newspaper. I like to find things in public, especially when I need them, for instance often I’ll need a pen and I’ll find one simply by looking down, or even money, sometimes, scarves, music magazines, just when I wanted to know more about classical music I found six issues of Fanfare, each more than four hundred pages long, on a little backstreet along with another periodical, and now here was another newspaper. It was called ¿Y qué?, which means So What? And on the last page, in the lower right corner, was that day’s flash fiction, which, naturally, began with the person waking up. Here’s what it said:
Brown Scarf Blues Page 2
