False Papers

by André Aciman

  When you look at The Villas of Bordighera, Strada Romana in Bordighera, The Valley of Sasso, Grove of Olive Trees in the Moreno Garden, Impressions of Morning, Under the Lemon Trees, Small Country Farm at Bordighera, and Palm Trees at Bordighera, if you have the least thalassotropic instinct, you’ll immediately intuit, as if all of them were being intentionally coy with you, the indelible presence of the sea. What Monet has done is allow the viewer to suspect that if he peeked in between these villas, or through the foliage in the villa of Mr. Moreno, or turned left or right along the Roman Road—as though he himself were out on a Sunday errand to buy a paper or fresh milk—he would, without fail, perhaps without meaning to or showing much interest, be met by a breathtaking, stunning vista of the sea, where, to quote Aeschylus, the “ocean dropped waveless and windless to his noonday bed.”

  All this may explain why I was so disappointed when I did go back to Egypt. Early one afternoon I was given a car and a driver. I asked him to take me to where I remembered our beach house was located. We couldn’t find the beach house. Instead, as we drove by the coast road, passing the spot where for ten years, almost forty years ago, I had spent every one of my summer days, I felt the usual disappointment one feels on what are supposed to be momentous occasions. Could this really be the beach I had so yearned for on those train rides back and forth between Paris and Rome?

  The beach was totally empty and unusually clean on this warm late-October afternoon. After school, we used to come and swim awhile here before heading home to do our homework. Another person might have rushed to the shore and had himself a good swim and gotten the whole thing out of his system. I tried, once again, to take the sea in—with my eyes, with my breath, seeking out words when all else failed. But this was not a Joycean “day of dappled seaborne clouds.” Nothing came in. I was, in fact, doing the most normal thing in the world: I was not experiencing anything. Instead, I was comparing. Comparing this beach with the one in Italy, with another in East Hampton, with the one I had dreamed of finding that day a few years ago when I strolled into MoMA and, looking at Matisse, allowed my mind to drift to Alexandria, thinking to myself that, now that I was in Alexandria, perhaps the time had indeed come for me to ask, however diffidently, a question that always humbles me and always comes back to me: What do you do with so much blue once you’ve seen it?

  Shadow Cities

  On a late-spring morning in New York City four years ago, while walking on Broadway, I suddenly noticed that something terrible had happened to Straus Park. The small park, located just where Broadway intersects West End Avenue on West 106th Street, was being fenced off. A group of workers, wearing orange reflector shins, were manning all kinds of equipment, and next to what must have been some sort of portable comfort station was a large electrical generator. Straus Park was being dismantled, demolished.

  Not that Straus Park was such a wonderful place to begin with. Its wooden benches were dirty, rotting, and perennially littered with pigeon droppings. You’d think twice before sitting, and if you did sit, you’d want to leave immediately. Also, it had become a favorite hangout for the homeless, the drunk, and the drug-addicted. Over the years the old cobblestone pavement had turned into an undulating terrain of dents and bulges, mostly cracked, with missing pieces sporadically replaced by tar or cement, the whole thing blanketed by a deep, drab, dirty gray. Finally, the emptied basin of what used to be a fountain had turned into something resembling a septic sandbox. Unlike the fountains of Rome, this one, like the park itself, was a down-and-out affair. Never a drop flowed from it. The fountain had been turned off decades ago.

  Straus Park was, like so many tiny, grubby parks one hardly ever notices on the Lower East Side, a relic of a past that wasn’t ancient enough to have its blemishes forgiven or to feel nostalgic about. One could say the same of the Art Nouveau-style statue of what I took to be a reclining Greek nymph lost in silent contemplation, looking inward, as it were, to avoid looking at what was around her. She looked very innocent, very Old World, and very out of place, almost pleading to be rescued from this ugly shrub that dubbed itself a park. In fact, the statue wasn’t even there that day. She had disappeared, sold no doubt.

  The thing I liked most about the square was gone, the way so many other things are gone today from around Straus Park: the Olympia Restaurant, the Blue Rose, the Ideal Restaurant, Mr. Kay’s Barbershop, the Pomander Bookshop, the Siam Spice Rack, Chelsea Two, and the old Olympia Theater, drawn and quartered, as all the theaters are these days, plus the liquor store that moved across the street but really disappeared when it changed owners, the flower store that went high tech, and La Rosita, which went from down-and-out to up-and-coming.

  Why should anybody care? And why should I, a foreigner, of all people, care? This wasn’t even my city. Yet I had come here, an exile from Alexandria, doing what all exiles do on impulse, which is to look for their homeland abroad, to bridge the things here to things there, to rewrite the present so as not to write off the past. I wanted to rescue things everywhere, as though by restoring them here I might restore them elsewhere as well. Seeing one Greek restaurant disappear or an old Italian cobbler’s turn into a bodega, I was once again reminded that something was being taken away from the city and, therefore, from me—that even if I don’t disappear from a place, places disappear from me.

  I wanted everything to remain the same. Because this, too, is typical of people who have lost everything, including their roots or their ability to grow new ones. They may be mobile, scattered, nomadic, dislodged, but in their jittery state of transience they are thoroughly stationary. It is precisely because you have no roots that you don’t budge, that you fear change, that you’ll build on anything, rather than look for land. An exile is not just someone who has lost his home; he is someone who can’t find another, who can’t think of another. Some no longer even know what home means. They reinvent the concept with what they’ve got, the way we reinvent love with what’s left of it each time. Some people bring exile with them the way they bring it upon themselves wherever they go.

  I hate it when stores change names, the way I hate any change of season, not because I like winter more than spring, or because I like old store X better than new store Y, but because, like all foreigners who settle here and who always have the sense that their time warp is not perfectly aligned to the city’s, and that they’ve docked, as it were, a few minutes ahead or a few minutes behind earth time, any change reminds me of how imperfectly I’ve connected to it. It reminds me of the thing I fear most: that my feet are never quite solidly on the ground, but also that the soil under me is equally weak, that the graft didn’t take. In the disappearance of small things, I read the tokens of my own dislocation, of my own transiency. An exile reads change the way he reads time, memory, self, love, fear, beauty: in the key of loss.

  I remembered that on summer days many years earlier, when I was doing research on my dissertation, I would sometimes leave the gloomy stacks of Butler Library at Columbia and walk out into the sun down to 106th Street, where I’d find a secluded shaded bench away from the drunks and sit there awhile, eat a sandwich, a pizza, occasionally smiling at some of the elderly ladies who sat, not in the park, but along the benches outside, the way they did on Saturday afternoons around Verdi Square on Seventy-second Street and had probably learned to do on sunny, windy summer days in Central Europe, and as they still do in those mock-English spots in Paris that the French call petits squares, where people chat while their children play. Some of these ladies spoke with thick accents. I pictured their homes to myself: lots of lace, many doilies, Old World silverware, mannered Austro-Hungarian everything, down to the old gramophone, the black-and-white pictures on the wall, and de rigueur schnapps and slivovitz.

  They made me think of 1950s pictures of New York, where it seems to grow darker much sooner in the evening than it does nowadays, where everyone wears long gray overcoats because winters were always colder then, and when the Upper West Side teemed with people who had
come from Europe before the war and then stayed on, building small, cluttered lives, turning this neighborhood into a reliquary of Frankfurt-am-Main—their Frankfurt-away-from-home, Frankfurt-on-the-Hudson, as the old joke goes, but not an inappropriate name for a city which, in Germany today, dubs itself Mainhattan, and which is, ironically enough, a far stranger city to them, now that it imitates Manhattan, than their adopted Manhattan imitating old Frankfurt. There I met old Mrs. Danziger with the tattoo on her arm. Eighty-three-year-old Kurt Appelbaum, a concert pianist in his day, was sitting on such a bench; we spoke; we became friendly; one night, without my asking, he offered to play the Waldstein Sonata and the Rhapsody in Blue for me. “But do not tape,” he said, perhaps because he wished I would, and now that I think of it, I wish I had, as I sat and listened on a broken chair he said had been given to him by Hannah Arendt, who had inherited it from an old German colleague at the New School who had since died as well.

  That was the year I rediscovered the Busch Quartet’s 1930s recordings of Beethoven, and I imagined its members playing everywhere in those Old World, prewar living rooms around Straus Park. And by force of visualizing them there, I had projected them onto the park as well, so that its benches and the statue and the surrounding buildings and stores were, like holy men, stigmatized by Beethoven’s music as it was played by a group of exiles from Hitler’s Reich.

  I would come every noon, for the statue mostly, because she was, like me, willing to stand by in this halfway station called Straus Park. She reminded me of those statues one finds everywhere in Rome, springing on you from their niches when you least expect them in the evening.

  It is difficult to explain what seclusion means when you find it on an island in the middle of Broadway, amid the roar of midday traffic. What I was looking for, and had indeed found quite by accident, was something that reminded me of an oasis—in the metaphorical sense, since this was a “dry” fountain—but an oasis of the soul, a place where, for no apparent reason, people stop on their various journeys elsewhere. Straus Park, it seemed, was created precisely for this, for contemplation, for restoration—in both its meanings—for retrospection, for finding oneself, for finding the center of things.

  And indeed there was something physically central about Straus Park. This, after all, was where Broadway and West End Avenue intersected, and the park seemed almost like a raised hub on West 106th Street, leading to Riverside Park on one side and to Central Park on the other. Straus Park was not on one street but at the intersection of four. Suddenly, before I knew why, I felt quite at home. I was in one place that had at least four addresses.

  Here you could come, sit, and let your mind drift in four different directions: Broadway, which so far uptown had an unspecified Northern European cast; West End Avenue, decidedly Londonish; 107th Street, very quiet, very narrow, tucked away around the corner, reminded me of those deceptively humble alleys where one finds stately homes along the canals of Amsterdam. And 106th, as it descended toward Central Park, looked like the main alley of a small town on the Italian Riviera, where, after much trundling in the blinding light at noon as you take in the stagnant odor of fuel from the train station where you just got off, you finally approach a cove, which you can’t make out yet but which you know is there, hidden behind a thick row of Mediterranean pines, over which, if you really strain your eyes, you’ll catch sight of the tops of striped beach umbrellas jutting beyond the trees, and beyond these, if you could just take a few steps closer, the sudden, spectacular blue of the sea.

  To the west of Straus Park, however, the slice of Riverside and 106th had acquired a character that was strikingly Parisian, and with the fresh breeze which seemed to swell and subside all afternoon long, you sensed that behind the trees of Riverside Park, serene and silent, flowed an elusive Seine, and beyond it, past the bridges that were to take you across, though you couldn’t see any of it yet, was not the Hudson, not New Jersey, but the Left Bank—not the end of Manhattan, but the beginning of a whole bustling city awaiting beyond the trees, as it did so many decades ago, when as a boy in Alexandria, dreaming of Paris, I would go to the window, look out at the sea at night, and think that this was not North Africa at all but the Ile de la Cité. Perhaps what lay beyond the trees was not the end of Manhattan, or even Paris, but the beginnings of another, unknown city, the real city, the one that always beckons, the one we invent each time and may never see, and fear we’ve begun to forget.

  There were moments when, despite the buses and the trucks and the noise of kids with boom boxes, the traffic light would change and everything come to a standstill, and people weren’t speaking, and the unrelenting sun beat strong on the pavement, and then one could almost swear this was an early-summer afternoon in Italy, and that if I really thought about it, what lay behind Riverside Park was not just an imaginary Seine but perhaps the Tiber as well. What made me think of Rome was that everything here reminded me of the kind of place all tourists know so well: that tiny empty piazza with a little fountain where, thirsty and tired with too much walking all day, you douse your face, then unbuckle your sandals, sit on the scalding marble edge of a Baroque fountain, and simply let your feet rest awhile in what is always exquisitely clear non-drinkable water.

  Depending on where I sat, or on which corner I moved to within the park, I could be in any of four or five countries and never for a second be in the one I couldn’t avoid hearing, seeing, and smelling. This, I think, is when I started to love, if “love” is the word for it, New York. I would return to Straus Park every day, because returning was itself now part of the ritual of remembering the shadow cities hidden there—so that I, who had put myself there, the way squatters put themselves somewhere and start to build on nothing, with nothing, would return for no reason other than perhaps to run into my own footprints. This became my habit, and ultimately my habitat. Sometimes finding that you are lost where you were lost last year can be oddly reassuring, almost familiar. You may never find yourself; but you do remember looking for yourself. That, too, can be reassuring, comforting.

  On a hot summer day I came looking for water in a place where no water exists, the way dowsers do when they search for trapped, underground places, seeking out the ghost of water, its remanence. But the kind of water I was really looking for was not fountain water at all, Roman or otherwise. I remembered my disappointment in Rome years ago when, dunking my feet in the turtle fountain early one afternoon, it occurred to me that these surreptitious footbaths in the middle of an emptied Rome in August and all this yearning for sunlight, heat, and water amounted to nothing more than a poor man’s simulated swim at the beaches of my childhood, where water was indeed plentiful, and where all your body could bathe, not just your toes..

  At Straus Park, I had discovered the memory of water. Here I would come to remember not so much the beauty of the past as the beauty of remembering, realizing that just because we love to look back doesn’t mean we love the things we look back on.

  There is a large fountain in Rome at Piazza Navona, where the four great rivers of the world are represented: the Ganges, the Nile, the Plate, and the Danube. I knew it well, because it stood not far from a small bookstore where, years ago, as a teenager, I would go to purchase one Penguin book a week—a small, muggy, and sultry shop, of which I recall the sense of bliss on first coming out into the sun with a new book in my hand. As I surveyed these four rivers, the question was which do I splash my face in?

  There is no frigate like a book, says Emily Dickinson. There is nothing I have loved more than to take a good book and sit somewhere in a quiet open spot in Rome with so many old things around me, open up to any page, and begin traveling back sometimes, as when I read Lawrence Durrell and Cavafy, thinking of time, of all that retrospection—to quote Whitman—or eagerly looked forward to the New World, as when I learned to love Eliot and Pound. Does a place become one’s home because this is where one read the greatest number of books about other places? Can I yearn for Rome when I am finally standing where I
longed to stand when I was once a young man in Rome?

  All this, if it hadn’t already, begins to acquire absurd proportions when I realize that, during that dissertation summer of many years ago, I had applied for and gotten a job to teach in an American high school in Rome. So that as I sat there in Straus Park, going through my usual pickup sticks and cat’s cradles of memories, I had discovered something rather unique: I didn’t want to go to Rome, not for a year, not for half a year, not even for a month, because it finally dawned on me that I didn’t very much like Rome, nor did I really want to be in France, or Egypt for that matter—and though I certainly did not like New York any better, I rather enjoyed my Straus Park-Italy and my Straus Park—Paris much more, the way sometimes I like postcards and travel books better than the places they remind me of, art books better than paintings, recordings better than live performances, and fantasies more than the people I fantasize about—some of whom are not only destined to disappoint but can’t even be forgiven for standing in the way of the pictures we originally had of them. Once in Rome, I would most certainly long to be in Straus Park remembering the Rome where I’d once remembered the beaches of my childhood. Italy was just my way of grafting myself to New York.

  I could never understand or appreciate New York unless I could make it the mirror—call it the mnemonic correlative—of other cities I’ve known or imagined. No Mediterranean can look at a sunset in Manhattan and not think of another sunset thousands of miles away. No Mediterranean can stand looking at the tiny lights speckling the New Jersey cliffs at night and not remember a galaxy of little fishing boats that go out to sea at night, dotting the water with their tiny lights till dawn, when they come back to shore. But it is not New Jersey I see when I watch the sunset from Riverside Drive.