BASIC
BLACK WITH PEARLS
HELEN WEINZWEIG
Copyright © Helen Weinzweig 1980
© Daniel and Paul Weinzweig 2015
Introduction © John Frizzell 2015
First published in Canada in 1980 by House of Anansi Press
This edition published in Canada in 2015 and the USA in 2015 by House of Anansi Press Inc.
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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Weinzweig, Helen, 1915–, author
Basic black with pearls / Helen Weinzweig.
Originally published by Anansi, 1980.
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-1-4870-0047-9 (pbk.).—ISBN 978-1-4870-0048-6 (html)
I. Title.
PS8595.E45B37 2015 C813’.54 C2015-902089-1
C2015-902090-5
Library of Congress Control Number: 2015943209
Cover design: Adapted from the original cover design by Joss Maclennan
We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund.
I asked him to take off his mask, but this is all I have, he replied. Take it off I commanded. He did so. It’s no use I still cannot recognize you — put the mask back on — there that’s better now that I know I don’t know you we can talk more easily.
Ann Quin, Passages
INTRODUCTION
by John Frizzell
I’VE FOUND THE connection between certain novelists and myself surprisingly engaging and profound. A conceit, but somehow after reading their work I’m certain I know them intimately. Upon devouring Helen Weinzweig’s Basic Black with Pearls, I felt just such a connection. The novel was so forward-thinking, unexpected, and unique. I developed a mad crush on its protagonist. Shirley Kaszenbowski was “my kind of woman.” Styling herself “Lola Montez,” she carries us along on a fantastical, erotic mission, searching for her lover, Coenraad, an international secret agent. She also searches for herself. Cryptic messages from Coenraad direct her every step, though they rarely meet. She keeps memories of their nights together on a stack of worried postcards. She sees him everywhere; he’s a waiter, a bum, a salesman in Tangier. Or does she? He is a master of disguise. On her journey, she meets a young girl imprisoned in a painting by Bonnard. She muses over a letter discussing white slavery. She has an impassioned contretemps with a bakery owner, snatching and scattering cash from the woman’s prized register. Finally, she returns home to her cold, withholding husband Zbigniew, and the dull, undemanding woman who’s replaced her. The three share a bed, if nothing else. This whimsical search for identity informed my reading and triggered a quest of my own. Who was Helen Weinzweig?
The Helen I intuited naturally shared much with her heroine, but was, never the less, quite distinct. The women were both brave and adventurous, though neither was particularly fearless. Both were hostage to idealizations of love and family, and neither suffered fools. I envisioned Helen as savvy, chic, and cool, a long-limbed drinker of martinis, a riot at a dinner party. Her writing was so controlled and authoritative. Her observations: clear, steely, and precise. She was pithy, and occasionally grand, but never sloppy or sentimental. Clearly, Helen Weinzweig was both a dame and a rebel.
Her manuscript landed on the desk of James Polk, a new editor at House of Anansi, and Polk recalls “It was an amazing stroke of luck for a beginner.” Polk told the Globe and Mail’s Michael Posner “Not only was the author smart, kind, wickedly funny, and articulate; she had a fine literary talent, which brought a modernist European voice into Canadian fiction.” Her writing thoroughly eschewed traditional notions of structure, character, and temporal elements. As Helen wrote in an autobiographical sketch in Canada Writes, (membership directory of the Writers’ Union), “[T]he freedom of dispensing with strict chronology, plots, omniscience, gives me a way of dealing with what has become a personal preoccupation — the slippery footwork required of all of us to stay balanced in the crazy, or if you’re lucky, funhouse of appearance and illusion.”
In 1980, Helen won the Toronto Book Award for Basic Black with Pearls, her second novel. Quite an achievement so early in a career, especially for a career begun so late. Although Helen had only begun to write at forty-seven, she’d already made a significant contribution to the nation’s culture. As the wife of celebrated composer John Weinzweig, Helen was an instrumental support during John’s co-founding of both the Canadian League of Composers and the Canadian Music Centre. As Ruth Panofsky points out in her profile, “A Sense of Loss,” Weinzweig’s fiction reveals the influence of her composer husband’s music. It was marked by “clarity of texture; economy of material; rhythmic energy; tight motivic organization . . .”
Helen found the crafting of her spare, exacting, prose demanded considerable re-writing. She was extremely particular. Ultimately, she published only three works: her debut novel, Passing Ceremony, in 1973, her second novel, Basic Black with Pearls in 1980, and finally, a collection of short stories, A View From the Roof, which was shortlisted for the Governor General’s Literary Award in 1989. The reach of her works is extensive, in addition to the awards, and the radio and stage adaptations, they’ve been translated into German, French, and Italian. Basic Black is also in development as a theatrical feature. Helen Weinzweig was, and remains, a cause célèbre.
Helen Weinzweig’s lifelong addiction to reading and literature began while she was seeking refuge from the battleground of her parent’s marriage. In literature she found escape, and an effective preparation for life’s harsher realities. At seventeen, she travelled to Milan for a brief reunion with her estranged father. Once there, he effectively kidnapped her. It was months before she was allowed to return.
I have been standing in front of a Bonnard for some time, how long I cannot tell, lost in its colors, yet my eyes are drawn again and again to two long casement windows through which a clear, blue sky is visible. I cannot move. At the bottom of the frame on a little gold plaque I read, Pierre Bonnard, Dining Room on the Garden, before 1933. I absorb into myself the brilliant red and purple and orange until I can contain no more. There is a cloth the color of lilacs over the table. I eat fruit from white-stemmed golden bowls; I drink from a white pitcher. The sun, not seen directly, is reflected on the left wall in an oblong of gold. I advance into the canvas towards the windows which I intend to open to the perfume of the garden below. Suddenly I come across a wraithlike form, barely discernible in the right-hand corner beside the window. I draw back. I had not noticed her, as she has been painted into the background, her face the same reddish-brown as the wall, her figure obscured by a tall blue vase of red roses. As I stare at her, surprised she is still there, I notice that her mouth is tight with pain, and her eyes, which are averted, are slits beneath swollen lids. She is visibly dist
ressed.
— Help! she cries in a whisper, I am a prisoner of my mad father!
Helen had learned to examine and transform her agonies through the crucible of prose. Like many women of her generation she existed with a high level of contradiction, torn between a commitment to family, and a very real need for freedom and experience. Among Helen’s papers, in the archives at the University of Toronto, is a cache of letters written to a lover of many decades. It’s no surprise then that Basic Black can be read from many perspectives, among them an exposé of the emptiness of traditional marriage, yet simultaneously a cry for family love, its strengths and support. She believed that every trauma presented a choice: either paralysis or the psychic energy to move forward. “Helen likened the energy of trauma to a cobalt bomb. Perhaps that’s how she lived so long,” her son, Paul, told the Globe and Mail’s Michael Posner.
A challenging life had taught her many things, and she was extremely generous in passing the information on. Among Helen’s many influential aspects were the desire and ability to mentor. She was a role model, and given an irreverent wit, she taught easily, and without preaching. Consequently, her circle was extensive and included actors, playwrights, novelists, filmmakers, and musicians, many of whom will be forever in her debt. An avowed feminist, she was a woman other women loved, related to, and learned from. Quite simply, hers are words from the wise.
John Frizzell is a writer and filmmaker living in Toronto.
BASIC BLACK
WITH PEARLS
NIGHT COMES AS a surprise in the tropics. There is no twilight, no preparation for the disappearance of light. One moment the eyes must be protected from a merciless sun and the next, it seems, all forms vanish into the black night. I was sleepless in Tikal. As soon as night fell the pariah dogs began their barking, which went on all through the night until the first flush of dawn, when they ceased as abruptly as they began. That morning, early, I took a tour of the ruins. I was in a group of tourists, pretending to be one of them, all the while hanging about the edge of the little band, ready, at a signal, to leave them. I listened carefully to the native guide, whose English was remarkably good. Was he my lover? I moved along with the rest, all the while alert to the possible signs memorized from the National Geographic, Volume 148, number 6, The Maya.
Coenraad and I have a code for our meetings, taking the printed word and interpreting it according to mathematical formulae. Our safety lies in the regularity inherent in the systems of pages and lines following in simple numerical sequence, such as page-two-followed-by-line-two, page-four-followed-by-line-four, or, sometimes, odd-numbers-in-sequence. These simple arrangements, together with a degree of imagination, can put the most astute agent off the track. No one is prepared for the obvious. The code also permits me to check out whether I am in the right place on the right day; and also whether circumstances are propitious for our rendezvous. To cite an example: in Washington two years ago in the Mayfair Hotel I was handed Volume 144, number two, of the Geographic. On page 246, in an article on the Common Tern, reading between lines three, five and seven, that “courting pairs weave zig-zag patterns,” I deduced that I must exercise caution because of the “comintern” in the capital city, and that my lover would have to zigzag, as it were, to join me. The code works most of the time.
I observed the guide more closely. He was the same height and shape as my lover. The fact that he had brown eyes, whereas Coenraad’s are a steely gray, did not discourage me. Hair, skin and eye colors are so readily altered these days, they no longer serve as clues to identity. When we reached the top of the broad stone stairway to the Temple of the Giant Jaguar the guide turned to make a head-count of his little troupe. He said that his Mayan ancestors were skilled in the science of numbers. I became alert.
To them, he added, past and future were indistinguishable.
Was this said for my benefit?
Back down in the Great Plaza the tour ended where it had begun — at the tomb of the mighty Pacal. The guide pointed to a huge stone slab in front of the sarcophagus. He said, And when the shadow of Kukulcan falls diagonally across the altar, a virgin will be ravished by the high priest. The others straggled into the cool shade of the bar. I remained behind. But he wasn’t Coenraad after all: he didn’t stand the way my lover stands, foursquare, with an obstinate attachment to the ground. When I see that stance of Coenraad’s all fears disappear: babies don’t die, cars don’t collide, planes fly on course, muzak is silenced, certitude reigns. That is how I always recognize my love: the way he stands, the way I feel.
The old impossible longing in the night. I cannot bear it. Often I turn over onto my left side, since I have found that lying on my left erases the searing pictures inside my head. The left side must be the one which deals with the possible, politics of the left side where illusions vanish and facts become irrefutable. Prices were up in Tikal. I should have counted my money. But my left side failed me. All about me insects were making dry scratchy noises and I began to think of that time in Celya when we soon outwitted the cockroaches by sleeping in a hammock. After we had mastered its hazards by lying across the width, that night became one of the most satisfying nights of my life. Now I faced the realization that the message which brought me to Guatemala must have been the penultimate one and that the ultimate message was yet to come. I was tempted to turn back on my right side and not deal with the problem. Instead, I rolled on my back in the hope that this position would allow a compromise between desire and reality. It came to me that while waiting for Coenraad, the practical thing to do would be to study the handicraft of the region.
All at once the dogs became quiet, the insects stopped their scratching. They knew something was about to happen. And when the knock came on my door, I leapt and ran to answer it. A skinny boy had come for me. He was too young to be a night clerk. But his resigned dark eyes were ancient. In the tiny lobby downstairs he pointed to the telephone, its receiver on the Formica counter, and returned to his iron cot in the doorway to the street. He was sound asleep before I said Sí? into the phone. The operators had a great deal to tell each other in excited Spanish before Coenraad and I were permitted to speak to each other.
– Listen carefully, forget the message.
– What’s wrong, have they cracked our code?
– No, my superior wants it.
– Let him get his own, it took us years to perfect it.
– He’s my boss, I have no choice.
– I won’t give it up.
– It’s out of my hands.
– What does a man in his position want with a second-hand code?
– He met a second-hand lady.
– We are not amused.
– No offence . . .
– We had it down to a science.
– I’ll put in for a transfer to The American Scholar.
– Too parochial.
– If you’re going to be fussy . . .
– No, no, I’ll take anything in print.
– You will find instructions in pocket in back of seat in front of you on the next plane to Toronto.
– Toronto! I can’t go back there.
– It’s just another city.
– But that’s where I live.
– Take it or leave it. That’s my next assignment.
On the plane I examined the contents of the pocket on the back of the seat in front of me, but no matter how long and how hard I stretched my imagination, I found no hidden message in the booklet on the use of the oxygen mask; nor on the card showing locations of emergency exits; nor inside an empty paper bag. The magazine En Route in French and in English had beautiful photographs of Lake Louise and of skiers in Quebec and of perfume bottles for duty-free purchase. I kept turning the pages until I came across a leaflet, loose, between pages 25 and 26. Since this was the 25th of November, my hopes rose: after all, Coenraad had never failed me. It was a pamphlet, a poli
tical tract, titled “Canada First!”, printed on cheap paper by the Canada First Committee. The opening statements were about Canada being treated like a kept woman, and the word “abdicate” was used three times on the first page. To my mind this was the message, pointing to King Edward VII and his kept women and King Edward VIII who had abdicated, and, by inference, pointing to the hotel in Toronto called the King Edward. I continued to read further, in the knowledge that Coenraad and I would disagree about nationalism, to which he is opposed. My pulse quickened when I visualized that first moment of our meeting: the shutting of a door behind him, the removal of disguise, the fierce kisses, the passionate embraces, the first quick climax.
At Malton, or any other airport for that matter, it is impossible to evoke images of Coenraad. For one thing, the air is turgid with other people’s emotions; their thoughts take up all the available atmosphere. Moreover, airport routines leave me stupefied. I line up, get ticketed; line up for customs, for security inspection; I line up to sit in the lounge and wait; and if I’m lucky and there is no unexpected delay, I line up and board. At airports my senses leave me: I no longer hear muzak; faces float as if in water. For hours I read, I don’t read; I eat, I can’t eat; I drink tea, coffee, gin. In the air, confined and crowded, I am prepared for disaster in two languages.
Once I asked Coenraad how he stands it — the time changes, the long hours of imprisonment. It’s the power, he replied, that surge of power that pulls the craft away from the ground. And as the earth tilts and the plane begins its long, strong pull upward; and cars and houses diminish until they disappear altogether; and we soar above the clouds under a flawless sky — that power is mine. Then it is that I feel the throb of the motors; the vibrations begin at the soles of my feet, travel up the backs of my legs, up into my spine; and unless I do something to distract myself, unless I make out my expense account or concentrate on Fortune magazine, I am ready to attack the woman sitting beside me. I want to pump like the engines.
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