The News from Spain

by Joan Wickersham

  Having mentioned my good friend Casanova, I will end this digression by relating to you an amusing story that concerns him, and myself, and our respective (and, if I am honest about the way I regard it, competing) voluminous memoir series. The astute and indulgent reader may perhaps remember that in the third volume of my memoirs (which, I again assert, deserve to be, though have inexplicably not been, as widely read and celebrated as his) I spoke of a visit to my old friend, who was then living near Prague. My wife and I were on our wedding trip; she was fascinated to meet Casanova, and he, having of course an eye for female beauty and charm, both of which my wife exhibited in abundance, was extremely taken with her.

  Writing of this visit in my memoirs, I refer to this gracious lady as “my wife,” which she was. But I have heard that Casanova, recounting the same incident, speaks of a visit I made to him near Prague with my mistress.

  What accounts for this discrepancy? Faulty memory? The shifting quality of experience, which allows the same scene to appear differently when viewed by different eyes? In this case, reader, there is no need to ponder these solemn questions about the inherent and treacherous pitfalls of memoir. The answer is much simpler. While I had intended to present my wife to Casanova with pride in my new married state, the sight of my old friend and fellow libertine made my courage falter. I remembered the many nights when he and I had gone out hunting together, the many conquests, the many mornings when we would stagger back to an inn or slip out through a back door, loudly assuring each other that we were two of a kind. I opened my mouth to request the honor of presenting my wife, and instead uttered words as far removed from matrimony as the devil is from heaven. Casanova was charmed; and my wife, who possesses not only beauty but also wisdom and humor, did nothing to disabuse him of the impression I had, in that moment of cowardice, conveyed to him. I invite you to laugh with me.

  5

  One night Rosina and Elvira went together to a dinner party given by a couple who had just bought two of Elvira’s architectural paintings.

  With the main course, the conversation turned to inheritance. A tall woman—an anesthesiologist who herself seemed sleepy—said that her cousin had just died without leaving a will, and that it was a mess. “His children are squabbling with the second wife, everyone wants everything, they’re fighting over the paperbacks, over table linens. It’s unbelievably ugly.”

  The man sitting next to her said that he dealt all the time with people who were trying to figure out how to allocate their estates. He was an archivist; he worked for one of the university libraries. “Famous people—writers, politicians, but also people who just have ordinary lives. We’re interested in all of it—all the papers, all the artifacts. Even the things that don’t interest us now may prove interesting in the future. If people aren’t sure what to give us, I say, ‘Give us everything. Just put it all in boxes and we’ll take it.’ ”

  “I have things in a box that I’m not sure what to do with,” Elvira said. Rosina was startled: they had known each other for many years by then; it was the first time Elvira had ever mentioned this box. And the first time she’d spoken since they’d sat down to dinner.

  “What kind of things?” the archivist asked.

  “When my mother died my father got rid of all her things,” Elvira said. “Very quickly. Everything. Her clothes, her books. He threw out all her papers. She was an artist, she did water-colors. He got rid of everything in her studio, and he gave all her paintings away. I think he was so afraid of the pain of seeing any of her stuff that he just tried to erase her completely.” Elvira picked up her glass and drank more wine. “But I would have liked to have kept some of it. I wish I had some of her paintings, or even little things. The china animals she had on her dresser, her gloves—they smelled like her perfume. He didn’t even give us kids a chance to say if we wanted anything.”

  “That’s terrible,” the hostess said.

  Elvira shook her head, her face creased. She could get into these intense moods, Rosina knew, where she tried too hard to make herself understood. “I’m not saying this to be critical of him—not after all this time. But it started me thinking about: What happens to all those little things? The ugly china animals—”

  “The shells you picked up on the beach,” the hostess cried.

  “Who cares?” her husband said. “Who remembers? You’re dead. Someone comes in afterward, sees a bunch of shells, and throws them out.”

  “But what if you picked them up when you were walking with someone you loved?” his wife said.

  “Who cares?” he said again. The other guests looked away from them; something was happening between them that was too much for the dinner party.

  Elvira ignored it. “So I started to put some things into a box. I’ve had it for years. I wouldn’t show it to anyone, there’s nothing in it that would mean anything to anyone else. But my question is, what do I do with it?”

  “Bury it,” the anesthesiologist said. “Take it out in the woods somewhere. Or leave instructions to have it buried with you, when you die.”

  “Give it to us,” said the archivist.

  “Leave it to someone who you know will treasure it,” said the hostess, speaking softly but managing somehow to convey an air of miffed defiance of her husband. “Do you have any nieces and nephews?”

  “If you give it to us, you know it will be preserved,” the archivist said.

  “But I don’t want to try to make sure it will be treasured, or preserved,” Elvira said. “I want it to go to someone, but where I won’t have any idea what will happen to it. It needs to be a risk. I want to make a decision that somehow ensures the box just has to take its chances.”

  6

  Here is the rest of what Rosina knew, by now, about Elvira and Johnny.

  They had not seen each other again for sixteen years, after she found out about the first wife and the second wife and the future wife and all the other women. Then they ran into each other at an artists’ colony. “Well,” he said when they first saw each other the day he arrived with a script he wanted to revise, “I’ve been wondering when this would happen.” He reached for her hands and she automatically gave them to him.

  What had he said next? She couldn’t remember. She remembered that the conversation had been very brief, that he’d been warm and confidential, that she’d been laconic almost to the point of sarcasm, and that she’d had a confused sense that he was evading her—her knowledge of him—by being direct. You see? his manner said. I am exactly what I appear to be. I’m not hiding anything. No tricks. “I follow your work,” he told her. “I send away for the catalog when I know you’re having a show. And whenever I’m in L.A., I go and visit your picture at LACMA—the one with the—well, I don’t need to tell you which one it is.”

  Oh, come on, she thought, while at the same time unwillingly thawed by the flattery. Just as she was warning herself to be careful, he squeezed her hands, deepened his smile, and then let go of her and walked away. Don’t you dare try any of your shit with me, she said silently to his receding back. She was amused to realize that if he didn’t try any of his shit with her, she was going to be annoyed. Annoyed is okay, she told herself, just don’t let it get anywhere near despair.

  All that first week, she watched him operate. At dinner he would sit between two women and somehow manage to gaze into the eyes of both of them. He had lost most of his hair; he had thickened and creased and roughened some, so that what had been tender and melting now looked tough and weary. But the eyes; the smile; the hands; the voice; the warmth; the keen, energetic, happy sympathy with whatever was said to him; the quick, jumpy humor—all his deadliest weapons—were the same.

  It was interesting (more than interesting, intoxicating almost) to watch all this with detachment, to realize that after all this time she really was just a spectator. But he was making mincemeat of the women in the colony. One told her boyfriend from home, who had been planning to visit, not to come; she needed time to think. Another
spoke of leaving her husband and small son. Whenever Elvira walked through the colony’s main living room, there were women draped on couches, crying; women hunched in the phone booths; women asking if anyone had any pills for a migraine. Elvira spent a lot of her time, when she should have been working, giving these women tea in her studio and trying to warn them, to explain Johnny to them. “I knew him a long time ago, we were together …,” she would say. The women listened to her eagerly, with tears in their eyes, wanting help; but the story didn’t help them, it didn’t stop them. The more she told it, the cheaper it felt.

  “Johnny,” she said to him one night, “you have to stop this.”

  They were standing outside together on the terrace, smoking. It was the one time Elvira allowed herself to smoke all day, and the one time she allowed herself to be with Johnny—these little moments after dinner, in the darkness, when he came up to her and asked to bum a cigarette.

  “Really,” she said, when he didn’t answer. “You’re hurting people.”

  How had that led them back into each other’s arms? Elvira couldn’t remember, she told Rosina.

  But it was very gentle, rueful. It was older-but-wiser sex. It was two old opponents laying down their arms. It was the unicorn putting his head down in my lap. It was me being immune to all the old bullshit, and falling for a whole new set of bullshit. It was believing I knew him through and through, and that that would keep me safe. It was thinking that out of all those women, I was the one who had endured for him, and that maybe it had been my job to endure all the others. It was loving him, even though there wasn’t much about him that I could respect or admire.

  In the end I did get hurt again. Not as badly, it wasn’t as violent as the first time. I had been curious to see: Can I do this? Will having my eyes open make it possible to do this? And in the end the answer was no, not really.

  I’m not sorry, though, that we tried again. We tried for about a year. I know what he’s like. But I’ve never been happier than I was when I was with him.

  Here’s something else, something I have never talked about and don’t like to think about. While I was there, at that colony, I did paintings of some of the women, the ones Johnny was fooling around with. I was fooling around, too, just experimenting with these little portraits. (Although I did sleep with two of the women—another experiment. And another story.) It made me remember, though I hadn’t thought about it in years, the pictures I’d done of Johnny’s wife and that actress. Those two I had painted in a rage, in despair, wanting to confront those women, to own them, to swallow them, to take them over—I don’t know what it was; it was crazy. The portraits I did at the colony came out of something quieter, more deliberate. Curiosity. Still obsessive, I suppose—in some way I was trying to see through Johnny’s eyes, to be Johnny, to find what animated each of the women. The tough little performance artist with the dyed-black hair. The nervous young playwright. The eighty-six-year-old sculptor—Johnny kissed her in the laundry room while she was moving her clothes from the washer to the dryer; she had a serene, lively face, and such lovely, smooth skin.

  Anyway, when I got home, I kept doing little oil sketches of women’s faces. Sometimes if I’d been with Johnny and noticed him looking at a waitress or someone we walked past on the street, I’d paint that person. Or friends of his, actresses he’d worked with, anyone I thought he might have made a pass at. But mostly I just painted anonymous women, from life or from photographs in magazines. The point after a while wasn’t Who had Johnny slept with? It was Who might Johnny sleep with? Who would he want to sleep with? In other words, all women. Each woman. What would Johnny see, if he looked at this one, or this one?

  It sounds crazy, I know. But I was happy, doing those paintings.

  It didn’t keep being about Johnny. After a while the work wasn’t about him anymore; I barely thought of him when I did it, except as a kind of joke: Hey, Johnny, your horrible friend gave me your big catalog of women; well, here’s mine. But I was in love with the pictures themselves, the fun and interest of doing them, all those women.

  The next time I had a show, I planned it as usual around the architectural paintings. Those have always provided a living for me—good in some years, in others pretty scant. But there is a long alcove off the main space in the gallery where I show my work, and I decided to fill it with some of these small pictures of women. The show got only one review, a short one, which praised the large paintings but referred to the portraits as “trite, solipsistic wallpaper” and suggested I stick to painting buildings.

  I should have a thicker skin by now, but I guess I don’t. Those were thin-skinned pictures.

  7

  And what Elvira knew by now about Rosina: A few years after she and her husband had divorced, she had fallen in love. The handyman, who had adored her all those years ago, had returned from the army. He looked her up, and came to visit her in the apartment where she was then living in Seville. She began the affair out of a kind of tired, residual, martyrish spite toward her ex-husband, even though they weren’t in touch anymore. You thought this is what I was doing? Fine, then, I’ll do it.

  But the young man was kind, loving, steadfast.

  They had never married, but they’d been happy together for ten years. Then he’d been killed in a skiing accident, and she had moved away, with their son.

  8

  Friendly reader! Though why I begin this chapter with these words I do not know, as I am fairly certain that what I write here will be crumpled up and thrown into the fire before any reader, friendly or otherwise, has been permitted to see it.

  Given the voluminous size of my memoirs, and the frequency with which further installments have been issued by the publisher, the reader may perhaps doubt my ability to view any of the words I write as less than indispensable. But I assure you: as much as there is, there could have been more. I add, remembering and inventing; and I subtract, when in the rereading something strikes me as unworthy: too small, a private memory that would only be diminished, were I to publish it. The story I am about to recount here may be excised later not because it is too sensational but because I may judge that it is not sensational enough.

  It concerns a night spent in Mozart’s company. I have written elsewhere of the second opera he and I wrote together, and of the disappointing reception it received in Vienna, after its initial triumph in Prague. In Prague they cheered; in Vienna they yawned and caviled. I have written that Mozart responded to the emperor’s remarks on the occasion with great poise—that when the emperor said that the Viennese did not seem to have the teeth for this music, Mozart suggested equably that they be given a little more time to chew on it. In truth Mozart said nothing of the kind. I wasn’t there to overhear whatever he said to the emperor. I was in the alley behind the opera house, parting company with my dinner. I’m sure that Mozart’s actual conversation with the emperor was perfectly polite and innocuous, if perhaps less pithy than the exchange I invented for publication. I am equally sure that it had nothing to do with Mozart’s real feelings on that night.

  What Mozart said to me, when I told him that the emperor had opined that the Viennese hadn’t the teeth for the music, was, “Then they can eat shit.” We were sitting up late that same night in my lodgings, and we had sent the servant out for punch, once, twice, and a third time. We went over the performance, the glory of the music, the grandeur and buffoonery of the drama. We recalled the delightful time we’d had writing the opera in Prague, with my old friend Casanova looking over our shoulders and providing unnecessary but vivid advice on seduction techniques and the strategies a rake might employ to escape from a tight corner. We dwelt bitterly on the inexplicably chilly reception our beautiful creation had that night received. Vienna’s indifference felt like cruelty, mockery.

  The conversation began to wander. I told him of the occasion when I was young and first began to write verses, and a boy who was my friend came up behind me as I sat at my desk, snatched away the paper on which I was writ
ing, and read aloud my ode in deep, overwrought, satirical tones. I was angry at my friend—whom I ceased to call by the word—but even more I was humiliated. He had caught me in a moment of tenderness and passion, doing something I was proud of and wanted publicized but which was also deeply secret to me, deeply serious in a way that did not require anyone’s approval but could ill withstand anyone’s mockery.

  Mozart, in turn, told me that when he was little more than a boy he had fallen in love with a beautiful young singer who returned his feelings. He left for a period of several years, to travel and give concerts. When he returned, not much richer but as much in love as ever, he went to a gathering at which he knew the young lady would be present. He wore his best red coat, thinking as he donned it how grand it would make him look in her eyes. But while he had been gone, she had become a celebrated singer and had been taken up by a protector who had both enriched and hardened her. At the soiree she ignored him; when he approached she was too haughty to talk to him, but turned instead to her cavalier and made fun of Mozart’s red coat.

  He laughed a little, after he told me this story; and I laughed too, to remember my despair when my treacherous boyhood friend was dancing around the room, declaiming my verses and waving the paper out of my reach. We drank more punch. We noted with philosophical wisdom that these hurts go deep, but he had loved again and I was still writing. What we did not say was that with these hurts an edge is worn down. It happens out of necessity—it would not be safe to carry a knife that sharp. But something is lost too: that early, perfect, impractical sharpness, which is so beautiful but which cannot survive being seen.