In general, nothing is ever said of those who suffer most. Or something is said, but always glossing over the facts, never mentioning the truly horrific part of their story. One of the photographs illustrating the history of the transcontinental railway carries a caption that reads: “Chinese railroad workers perform their duties in the snow.” They could have put this in the form of a haiku: “In the snow-white snow, black against the grey grey sky, see the Chinese work.” That would have seemed more palatable, on a par, for example, with what the visitor can see at the History Museum in Carson City: a miniature Chinese village, a sentimental scene in which the children play, the old people tend their caged birds, the women cook and pick flowers, and the men stroll up and down the now completed railroad.
The truth is quite different, though. The ice that freezes the fir trees freezes people too. Chinese-American novelists like Hong Kingston are producing a revised version of the history of the American West, and, according to them, many, many railroad workers lost noses or fingers to frostbite. Harsher still, workers were forbidden to speak to each other, even in English. No-one cared, not even the socialist parties and trade unions, because the Chinese were considered a human subspecies as evidenced by the Exclusion Act of 1867.
Beau comme le premier jour, as lovely as the first day of the world, of creation. That is the thought that comes to mind when, at last, after climbing for more than an hour, the landscape opens out below, and you see Lake Tahoe. The fir trees conceal the roads along its shores: beyond its blue waters stand the snow-capped mountains. It could be considered just a perfect picture postcard, but it’s not that either: the space it occupies is immense, and mere cameras cannot do it justice. Initially, you think that what you will remember is its sheer size, but, no, it is that first impression that makes you sigh and say beau comme le premier jour. It seems so innocent, so primordial, as if crossing the mountains were like crossing a frontier in time and stepping back into paradise.
This is not exactly an illusion, but it is only a fleeting reality. As soon as you leave behind you the mountains and enter Incline Village, you join the road that skirts the lake, and then you become aware, over and over, of the world’s soiling presence. A hoarding warns you of bears and mountain lions. Another tells you that you’re not far from the Ponderosa ranch, where the television series “Bonanza” was shot. Then come the mansions built along the lake shore, and later, after a few miles of uninhabited beauty, the small prefab houses with third- or fourth-hand pickups parked outside. Further on, there are the housing developments that spread up the slopes of the mountains and disappear among the fir trees.
This soiling presence becomes still grimier when you read about South Lake Tahoe. A kidnapping took place there in 1963, when Frank Sinatra Jr was snatched from his room in Harrah’s Hotel, and wasn’t freed until a few days later, when his father paid the ransom money. In 1991, there was a second kidnapping. Eleven-year-old Jaycee Lee Dugard was waiting for the school bus when a man forced her to get into his van. Her adoptive father, who wasn’t far from the bus stop, realised what was happening and ran to save her, but the van sped away and disappeared from sight.
On the day of Sergeant Timothy Smith’s funeral, 18 April, 2008, there were still a lot of posters bearing the little girl’s photograph and a note stating that she had disappeared seventeen years earlier. I knew about the case, because it had been mentioned in connection with Brianna Denison’s kidnapping and murder.
It took me a while to find the Sierra Community Church because it was quite small and hidden among trees, and by the time I did find it, the funeral was almost about to begin. At the crossroads, the firemen had formed an arch of honour with the ladders on their fire-trucks. Large numbers of policemen in dress uniform were present. Even more numerous were the Patriot Guard Riders standing next to their Harley-Davidsons, each bike flying the American flag. Outside the main entrance to the church a line of cadets formed a guard of honour.
Along one side of the church stood a long table full of photographs of the deceased, and there the congregation were waiting, some sitting on folding chairs, but most standing. I counted about a hundred people. Apart from the occasional crying baby or the grating cries of the blue jays, not a sound could be heard. The loudspeakers in the porch on that side of the church had been turned off.
A white limousine drove slowly under the arch provided by the firemen. Behind it came another stretch limo, equally long and equally white. The police stood to attention, the Patriot Guard Riders formed a neat line. A very tall man, dark-haired and dark-suited, walked into the middle of the road sobbing and waving his arms about. He seemed utterly distraught. A woman took him by the arm and drew him back into the group.
The coffin was removed from the first limousine. The family emerged from the second limo: parents, brother, sister, wife and son, the son could only have been about two years old. The cadets outside the church gave a military salute, and the cortège entered the church. From inside came the notes of a harmonium. Then a melodious voice: “We are gathered here today to say a final farewell to an American hero, Sergeant Timothy Michael Smith.” Various eulogies followed, first, from his school friends who spoke almost incomprehensibly, sobbing hysterically; then his brother and sister, who were both, understandably, deeply moved; after them came a colleague from the same battalion, who had travelled from Iraq in order to attend the ceremony; he spoke very serenely.
The tall, dark-haired, dark-suited man continued to sob and kept going over to one of the loudspeakers as if to drink from that chalice, from the sorrow in those voices. This must have been annoying for the rest of the congregation, but no-one stopped him.
The priest with the melodious voice spoke again, repeating over and over, like a refrain, the three key words of the service: Honour. Duty. Sacrifice. Sometimes, like one melody superimposed upon another, he was accompanied by the harmonium. This was followed by more voices and more eulogies, among them one by a general. However, because of my imperfect English, I found it too tiring to listen to every speech and decided to go and look at the photographs on the table.
In many of them, Timothy Smith was shown standing beside his mother, who was attractive and surprisingly young. Quite a few showed him as a boy in the family pickup, beside the lake, at a Christmas party or dressed as Father Christmas. He only looked genuinely happy in two of them: one in which he was pictured hugging his mother, and in the only photograph of him and his wife. However, the main picture on display showed him on the day he graduated from Military School.
I picked up a couple of memorial leaflets. One contained copies of some of the photographs and a poem entitled “Through the Eyes of a Child”: “There comes a time in our lives when we must face the facts and look at ourselves, because there is no going back. We can all learn a lesson from our little ones. When they seem to know nothing, that is when they are beginning to know everything. They have wonderful faces. So when things aren’t going so well, take a look at life through the eyes of love, through the eyes of a child.”
The second leaflet was the official one and included Timothy Smith’s military record, his medals and mentions in despatches, and, on the back, in a larger font, a text entitled “The Soldier’s Creed”:
I am an American Soldier.
I am a warrior and a member of a team.
I serve the people of the United States, and live the Army Values.
I will always place the mission first.
I will never accept defeat.
I will never quit.
I will never leave a fallen comrade.
I am disciplined, physically and mentally tough, trained and proficient in my warrior tasks and drills.
I always maintain my arms, my equipment and myself.
I am an expert and I am a professional.
I stand ready to deploy, engage, and destroy, the enemies of the United States of America in close combat.
I am a guardian of freedom and the American way of life.
Every ceremony presupposes a caesura, a break, an interruption to the flow of life. The hours which, generally speaking, seem so similar, the monotonous hours which, point by point, form a geometrical line, dull and unsurprising, undergo a sudden transformation, and then everything is different. An anonymous person becomes the centre of attention, a hero, a superior being, an empty being, an unreal being. Around him the world changes: the clocks move more sedately, more slowly; words and silence meet to create something new. “Honour,” says the priest, then pauses. “Duty,” he says. Pause. “Sacrifice,” he says. Pause. And then there are the white limousines, the policemen and firemen in dress uniform, the Patriot Guard Riders’ gleaming Harley-Davidsons, the boyish cadets with their weapons. Outside time and space. The distraught man with his dark suit and dark hair isn’t strong enough to bear the situation and so he sobs. But he is not the only one.
I was thinking how false the poems were. The first was sentimental and set off along a supposedly consolatory route that didn’t console at all. “So when things aren’t going so well, take a look at life through the eyes of love, through the eyes of a child.” But the real child, Timothy Smith’s son – Riley according to the same memorial leaflet – would become a constant, living symbol of the tragedy. Besides, how do you look through the eyes of a child when you are no longer a child? Those words could only make sense in the unreal time inhabited by the funeral ceremony.
As for the second text, it spoke proudly of violence and death. “I stand ready to deploy, engage, and destroy, the enemies of the United States of America in close combat,” it said, and added: “I am a guardian of freedom and the American way of life. I am an American Soldier.” Those words were like the limousines parked outside the church – big, white, elegant – but, like those limousines, they were usually filled with corpses and suffering.
I put the memorial leaflets in my pocket, left the church and made my way to the car park. And there, next to a special bear-proof trash can, was an enormous sign telling you how to behave if you should happen to meet said plantigrade: “Don’t panic! Don’t approach it! Leave it alone! If the bear hop-charges toward you, clacks its teeth, sticks out its lips, huffs, woofs, or rushes a few steps toward you and slaps or scratches the ground with its paws, you are too close! Back away!”
More advice and explanations followed, but I stopped reading. I had suddenly remembered a poem I had read out on a radio programme after the terrorist attacks on March 11, 2004 in Madrid: “Life is life / And not its results. / It isn’t the big house / High up on the mountainside, / Or the cups or medals / (gold or fake) / that fill the shelves. / Life isn’t only that. / Life is life / And the most precious thing of all. / To lose a life is to lose everything.”
I felt proud of those lines. They seemed to me truer and more realistic than the soldier’s creed or the sentimental poetry in those memorial leaflets. Suddenly, though, I felt my legs go weak. Not because I had seen a bear, but because I had just imagined myself reciting that poem at Timothy Smith’s funeral service: “Life is life / And the most precious thing of all. / To lose a life is to lose everything.”
What would happen when the loudspeakers broadcast those words? They would cause real consternation. Another image came into my mind: the distraught man, tall, dark-haired and dark-suited, who had not stopped crying throughout the ceremony, would hurl himself at me and punch me. Then the policemen in dress uniform would arrest me and lead me away under the stern gaze of the Patriot Guard Riders.
I thought: “They would be quite right too.” Regardless of whether my poem was true or not, its only effect would be to increase their grief, while not increasing their knowledge one iota. “Life is life and the most precious thing of all. To lose it is to lose everything.” Timothy Smith’s family would have said: “We know that. Everyone knows that. It’s obvious, so why say it again?” A member of the Patriot Guard Riders would have hammered in the last nail: “You know what I think? A poem that can’t be read at a funeral shouldn’t be read anywhere.” The distraught man, tall, dark-haired and dark-suited, would have come over and said: “Look, my friend, a poem written for a particular occasion may not be worth including in a book, but a poem that has been included in a book should be suitable for all occasions.” Then a policeman in dress uniform would arrive and say: “Perhaps you should find a different job.”
I felt bad. Not because of what could have happened if I had read the poem out in that small church in South Lake Tahoe, but because I suddenly became aware that I’d already recited the poem over a loudspeaker a hundred thousand times more powerful, on a radio programme with a big audience. Perhaps I had been seduced by a desire to be forceful and emphatic, perhaps the poem was filled, as a tyre is filled with air, by the flippant, foolish arrogance of someone who is convinced he is right.
A round of gunfire wrenched me from my thoughts. It was the salute fired in honour of the fallen soldier. There was no applause, only perhaps a bugle call or a short piece of music. I saw that the funeral procession, headed by the four cadets carrying the coffin, was making its way into the car park, and so I stepped back into the shade of the trees.
The cadets put the coffin back in the white limousine, having to relinquish a little of their stiff military rigour as they did so. From close to, they looked to me even younger than when I first saw them at the door of the church. They would have been at most eighteen or nineteen. Two of them were extremely fair, with very white skin, as Mormons often are; the third had Latino features; the fourth was red-haired like Timothy Smith.
The various family members were standing next to the second limousine, their arms about each other, weeping. All except one, because Riley, the little boy, wasn’t crying.
Then came the roar of the Harley-Davidsons, and the Patriot Guard Riders filled the street to form the guard of honour for the two white limousines. Someone gave the command, and the procession set off, flags flying as if it were a military parade, then they drove back under the firemen’s arch and disappeared.
In the silence surrounding the church, the prayers and tears and words from the funeral hung in the air like dust motes. A woman started collecting up the photographs and memorial leaflets from the table. Two men took charge of folding the chairs and taking them out to a truck. One of the men was the distraught fellow, dark-suited and dark-haired, who now looked as bent and weighed down as an old man. Two maintenance men in orange hi-vis vests came out from among the trees. When they passed me, the older of the two pointed to the sign warning about bears and asked jokingly: “Seen any yet?”
I left South Lake Tahoe unable to clear my mind of the priest’s velvety voice, and I kept hearing over and over those three words: Honour. Duty. Sacrifice. And hearing, too, even more loudly, his pauses and his silences. If he was a man who, as Stephen Spender wrote in World Within World, “had made the return journey’, a man who had taken a stance after a voyage into the very depths of life, depths that teach you not only the value of birdsong – even the “song” of the blue jays – but also show you the monstrous soul of human predators, kidnappers of children or young women, then he surely must have realised the absurdity of repeating those three words at the funeral of a twenty-five-year-old man, father of a two-year-old boy, a soldier killed in a war like the Iraq war, which many deemed to have been an immoral war. If he did, if he knew the truth and, despite everything, had decided to keep that refrain – Honour. Duty. Sacrifice – then that was a problem I could not resolve.
I stopped for a moment at the top of Incline Village. The sky was blue, as was the lake. Just then, the white tourist boat, the only one, was setting out from the jetty at South Lake Tahoe.
Once I was behind the wheel again, I tried to find some way of repairing what now seemed to me a bad poem. I considered changing “To lose a life is to lose everything” to “Whoever takes that life takes everything”, but that didn’t work either. A poem wasn’t like a dog that comes to whoever whis
tles for it or gives it a biscuit. That change would have been interpreted by the congregation as a reproach to the insurgents in Iraq who had taken Timothy Smith’s life; in a very different context, read in some city in Iraq, it would have been interpreted in exactly the opposite way. It would have been seen as a reproach to Timothy Smith and the other American soldiers, in short, a poem-that-comes-when-whistled-for.
The steep slopes and bends that had overheated the car engine hours before made driving difficult and they were, besides, a metaphor for what was happening to me and that poem: bend to the right, bend to the left, look out, a precipice ahead, a pothole, bend to the right again. I braked, or, rather, I reached a decision: I would delete that poem the moment I got home and turned on my computer.
When I came down from the mountains and rejoined the Reno highway, I remembered a song I’d learned in a village in Castile: “Last night I went to a dance to dance, but never danced; I lost the ribbon from my hair as well, what a waste of a day.” It pretty much expressed what I was feeling, and so I came up with my own version: “I crossed the mountains to write a poem, but wrote nothing; indeed, I lost a poem I had written earlier, what a waste of a day.”
FUNERAL FOR A BASQUE SHEPHERD
The main park in Reno is called Rancho San Rafael, although the ranch itself is long gone. There’s an arboretum, a couple of playgrounds, some ponds and picnic areas and wild areas too, and, on a small hill, there’s a sculpture by Néstor Basterretxea dedicated to the Basque shepherds – Bakardade, “Solitude”. The monument also serves as a memorial with bronze plaques recording the names of hundreds of Basque shepherds who lived and died in the American West.
Nevada Days Page 28
