by Jim Harrison
I drove south to Lyon where hunger stopped me in the late afternoon. I met two sizable whores in a workingmen’s district and took them to dinner in a bistro. I was manic and barely aware that this was the second night of my seizure. The confluence of the rivers in Lyon was eating the moon so I ate a great deal at the bistro, including several portions of beef snout in vinaigrette and three portions of beef stew. I like the tough, chewy texture of the beef snout and recalled Liz, a Catahoula cow dog on a ranch I took care of in Wyoming who would sink her teeth into the nose of a recalcitrant bull and drop it on the spot. I don’t remember much about the whores except sensations of pleasure. At dawn the police fished me out of the Rhône River where I had been taking a swim. They assumed I was drunk and only said, “Go home.”
I headed back toward Torino sinking ever deeper by the mile in a fresh sort of melancholy, a hypothermia of the soul. I was bone weary and stopped now and then in the fierce mistral winds from the north to nap in any available forest in my sleeping bag. I was frankly suicidal to a degree I had never experienced before and it was only the arrival of Emelia in a few weeks that held me back. Not oddly I began to think of religion. Was Emelia my religion, a female I hadn’t seen since age twelve? In my current state she made as much sense as the thousands of bleeding Jesuses I had seen in the museums and churches of Italy. Who was I but a diseased soul who knew no one as well as the books he packed along? My mother’s religion were books and my father’s birds. As a child I was totally without any religious training. Perhaps my perceptual muse was the nature of nature but the more I studied it the more inscrutable it became. Was I built to truly understand a rat or a galaxy? For eighteen years I had been trying to run ahead of my disease, an act that might be called a will to live. If Emelia was keeping me on earth, how did I know I’d still care for her or she would care for me? This was a slight string to climb rather than a sturdy rope. My exhaustion was a vacuum the landscape couldn’t fill. All of this sheer beauty in Europe, man-made and natural, but perhaps only wildness could keep me engrossed between moons. I couldn’t bring myself to think that Emelia would want to live with me. There wouldn’t be a point in not telling her absolutely everything. I had no unknown God to pray to and the hundreds in mythology were no more reassuring than a rattlesnake or grizzly bear.
I turned south in Torino toward Savona and continued on down the coast thinking that the Mediterranean might console me, or at least absorb my poisonous mind. It did so only because the strong mistral winds made the water so implacable with their offshore power so that far out the dark water was rumpled. I suddenly wished I had packed an anthology of Chinese poetry called The White Pony which I had owned since my junior year in high school. There are no reassurances in Wang Wei, Li Po, Tu Fu, or Su Tung-Po which ends up being reassuring. You end up accepting that you live and die at ground zero but you also learn that your possible unhappiness or melancholy are only self-indulgent. I recalled that on the wall of the small adobe house of the woman, the curandera, who put a poultice on my cheek where the hummingbird had pierced the flesh, there was a black mask of a wolf with the figure of a nude woman draped across its nose. I’d pointed it out to Nestor who’d laughed and said it was just “part of life.” When I reached Modena late in the evening of my third day of the return trip in my wretched van I made a pot of coffee and stayed up all night reading about European trees, the Second World War in Italy, and a volume of poems Laurel had given me by a contemporary French poet, René Char. She had said rather lamely and ambiguously that Char “preferred the outside like you.” I read and read and thought it would be grand to know such a man but then I knew scarcely anyone on earth and my own story was scarcely tellable. I couldn’t very well mention that just the other day I’d found a finger in my pocket. It was altogether natural to try to compensate in my reading for the evident fact that I belonged as convincingly to the animal world as I did to the human. It has amused me that the other morning while I was napping on a cold Mediterranean beach two Bouviers which are normally guard dogs had curled up beside me perhaps thinking that I was their long-lost pack leader who would protect them in this vale of woe. Their owner, a florid Englishman, called them without success and came huffing up demanding to know my “trick” and I jokingly told him that I was part dog.
I made myself busy researching this and that while waiting the following weeks for Emelia. I took the train to Bologna and then to Florence to visit bookstores. This period of waiting for Emelia I absorbed as a purgatory prefatory to heaven or hell. I had no idea which it would be but cautioned myself against thinking in terms of polar opposites which are invariably moderated by reality. I only talked to her once a week at the most because she was studying for her final exams for her nursing degree. In her voice I caught again how difficult she could be. She said that because of her “dickhead” ex-husband she had certainly learned never again to be dependent on a man. She had always referred to her father as “the asshole bully.” I didn’t see it but heard about it later when on a December morning we had a rare half foot of fluffy snow and she had run out in her bra and panties and rolled in the snow. Lawrence told me, “Dad tanned her butt” and she hadn’t spoken to him for weeks until she got the new bicycle she desired as his penance. In a very real way she controlled her family. She had already warned me not to “jump her” when she arrived in Italy. She had taken several years of martial arts courses and I would be sorry indeed. If her arrival was to be my deliverance, almost a religious event, it certainly had the captious quality of what I had learned of organized religion.
My trip to Bologna, a beautiful city, was a flop because it was jam-packed with businesspeople at trade meetings. One has every right in our time to develop suspicions about those who wear suits and ties. My room was too small and it was right next to a bump shop so that while I was reading a history of World War II there was an incessant sound of sanders and hammers. I gave up and took the train to Florence chiding myself for my frugality. I had never spent more than half of my monthly check that came through the American Express office so in Florence I rented a room in a hotel facing the Piazza della Repubblica. I found a bookstore where there were many titles in English so that I could stop struggling with the slowness in my use of French and Italian dictionaries. I even bought a nonsense book of world facts to read at lunch and dinner when strenuous reading can ruin a meal. I learned while eating a huge Florentine steak (for two) three evenings in a row at Sostanza that we Americans had extirpated our buffalo to the tune of seventy million beasts in the nineteenth century while Chairman Mao had engineered the deaths of seventy million Chinese. What was I to make of this? I abandoned history of any sort. The bookstores didn’t have the Chinese anthology The White Pony but they ordered it for me and would send it on to Modena. I did, however, find Chinese translations by Burton Watson and Willis Barnstone wherein famine and war were only to be expected.
My nights were haunted to a manic degree by Emelia. I dozed off and on then got up and took longish walks in the nighttime city. I kept catching myself trapped in the abstraction of the future. Did I expect her to throw herself into my arms and stay with me forever? In our last phone call she had said she had accepted a job in a small hospital in Dillon, Montana, to start in January. She hoped to meet a rancher who would buy her horses. I was immediately jealous and said I could do that and in my years of overseeing ranches I had become knowledgeable about horses. This wasn’t quite true because I preferred walking but it wasn’t part of my love campaign to admit the truth. She grilled me on where I’d gotten the money and I said I had made a wise investment of five hundred bucks back in college. She said, “Oh bullshit, that’s not fair,” and I said nothing in world economics is fair. Our talk became inane because we only knew each other in eighteen-year-old memories.
Meanwhile it had become unseasonably warm so I took the train back north to Modena, really not that far in American terms, where it was also unseasonably warm. Suddenly I was homesick for cold as if in my circad
ian rhythms there was a craving for the cold in the northern parts of the West, or the violent cold of far northern Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan when I hunted up there when I was in college. It was just after Thanksgiving week back home and I was swatting flies in an overwarm room in Italy, imagining my snowshoes and cross-country skis in storage back in Chicago.
I became a severe insomniac walking Modena on cool nights in a thin shirt so I could become cold and then the iron shoe dropped on December first, a week from her arrival. My landlady woke me at five A.M. to say a woman was calling from New Mexico. Of course it was Emelia intermittently crying because she and her brother Dicky had been out riding near Mountainair and Dicky’s horse had thrown him crushing a hip bone and even now he was in surgery having a metal rod put in his hip. He’d be in the hospital for a week and she’d nurse him until she went to Montana in late January when he’d be back on his feet. She was both grief-stricken and pissed because she dearly wanted to come see me. “Are there water tanks over there?” she joked in her sniffling. I stood there stunned into silence until she asked, “Are you still there?” She pronounced Europe “Yerp.”
“If you can’t come here I’m coming there,” I finally said.
“Okay. See you when you get here,” was all she said and without a trace of romanticism. My mother used to say when we first moved to Alpine that Emelia’s was a very nice “white trash” family. I asked Mother to stop saying that and she eventually got along with Emelia’s mother talking about their perennial beds and drinking beer on the porch.
I moved at warp speed arriving in Dallas in thirty-six hours via Milano and Paris. Emelia’s plan had been for me to take her to Paris and up the Eiffel Tower, the singular thing she seemed to know about Paris. What with my bookish nature I was counting on the idea that opposites attract. The flight from Milano to Paris made me giddy but the very long section from Paris to Dallas was cast in somber guilt. The idea that my life was being changed radically by Dicky being pitched off a horse was confusing, I mean the sheer randomness. The fact that I had merged with Emelia in our hormonal puberty wasn’t a reassuring principle for seeing her eighteen years later. I was trying to read a book by Primo Levi when I wasn’t thinking about Emelia and the both of them gave me an unending lump in the throat. I recalled Professor Hamric telling us that ideas of ethnic virtue were inevitably destructive to whites, blacks, Jews, and American Indians. Who else? I had read that in the genetic defect of two-headed turtles the heads invariably fought over food. The plane held a lot of noisy exchange students so I went into the toilet and took a tiny pinch of my zombie dust which allowed me to sleep the last seven hours of the flight. Luckily it was Saturday afternoon so I didn’t have to deal with traffic jams in the hellhole of urban sprawl of Dallas. I angled up to Amarillo then over to Santa Rosa in New Mexico on Route 40 short of midnight. I called Emelia and she said not to expect too much company on Sunday because her biggest final exam was on Monday and between studying and visiting Dicky, which I should do also, she wouldn’t have much time.
In Santa Rosa I left the motel before dawn and drove up to the Variadero area where I once briefly took care of a property until the summer heat drove me back to Montana. I walked a half dozen miles along a ranch road in the very cold first daylight reveling in the vast juniper landscape. The jump from northern Italy to this emptiness was startling. Italy was as far as you could go toward beauty in a man-dominated landscape. I tried to imagine what those grasslands looked like before the juniper invaded which you could still see up north between Mountainair and Vaughn.
By the time I got back to the car I was beside myself looking at my body wondering just what this body was doing. I reached Albuquerque and Emelia’s apartment in a remodeled motel at noon. I was so remote I couldn’t feel my knuckles knock on the door and when she opened it I couldn’t visually put her all together at once but had to do it in sections. She was taller than I expected but my expectations were meaningless. I’d say about my height which was five-ten. Not surprisingly she still had an olive complexion and black hair from her father’s side which was named Gagnon out of Louisiana. I was having trouble putting her together but then I’d had so little solid contact with other people in my thirty years. I stupidly offered a hand rather than trying to hug her but then I was confused by the idea that she was handsome rather than pretty.
“You look like you haven’t had an easy life,” she said, massaging my hand.
“Not exactly,” I said, catching her slight lilac odor.
“I was up until five studying and now I’ve got to go see Dicky. You can stay here after I finish this exam tomorrow morning. Be a dear and make me scrambled eggs and grits so I can take a shower.”
She went through her bedroom and into the toilet and I could hear the shower running before I finally started to breathe. I began to make her breakfast with my heart still thumping. I had never had an actual all-out lover. I wouldn’t know what to call Laurel or Emelia for that matter when we were twelve. I had made love to dozens of prostitutes and the stray tavern tarts of the West in the vicinity of my property and ranch jobs but ultimately because of medical problems I kept distant. I had even kept distant from the idea of belief except in the details of aspects of the natural world. I could scarcely indulge my mind in anything the least bit mushy. Now making grits and eggs which I had done since childhood what with my mother being a late sleeper all I wanted truly on earth was a girlfriend. Whether we proceeded far enough that I would be obligated to fully admit my condition was another matter.
She came out of the bedroom about three-quarters dressed, barefoot in a green skirt and half-opened blouse. She stared at me a moment, doused her breakfast with Tabasco, and quickly ate it. She lit a cigarette and stared at me again then took my forearm coming out of my short-sleeved shirt.
“I’ve had a fair amount of training and I’m not stupid. I need to know what’s wrong with you. You look at least forty not thirty. You’re burning up and wearing out.”
I hadn’t thought of rehearsing but I had hoped to slowly work into this. I went for broke for want of any options and told her everything except for a few violent experiences I could barely admit to myself.
“Jesus H. Christ,” she fairly screamed. “Get out of here until noon tomorrow. I’ve got a thirty-eight but I hope I won’t have to shoot your sorry ass. I never was afraid of anything.”
“I remember that,” I said with a quaver in my voice. At the door she gave me a full kiss and she was amused that I was shaking.
I broke down in the car and wept, an alien act because I simply couldn’t remember ever having wept before. She must have been watching from her apartment because suddenly there was a knock at the car window. I opened the door and she drew me tightly to her breast saying, “Maybe I can take care of you.”
I drove south because I had to find a location for my oncoming seizure in two days. I turned right in Socorro and drove west far into an area called the Plains of San Agustin, again a place on the map cartographers would call a “sleeping beauty” relatively without the blemishes with which we have permanently scarred the earth. I decided to spend the night so had to drive farther to the edge of the Gila Wilderness Area to find firewood because I could see it would be bitterly cold, the kind of temperature I craved in Italy, and I doubted my sleeping bag would be adequate. I had bought a couple of burritos in Socorro which I could warm by the fire. What I most looked forward to was the full sweep of stars as ambient light tends to blind us to them in our populated areas and Europe.
I made camp at the mouth of a canyon not daring to go farther on the two-track in my rental car. I stacked quite a pile of firewood, mostly juniper, and started three good fires so I could sleep in the triangle’s middle, an effective ritual. There was about an hour of daylight left so I climbed the steepest slope I could find to try to exhaust myself.
It was a glorious night with the stars drawing almost too closely, or so I thought, stretched there in the cold air within the coals
of three fires. The stars helped me slow my mind before the moon rose with its inevitable enervating power. Emelia’s last embrace had lightened my mind to a degree I couldn’t remember. I suppose that my emotional response to the stars that were nearly creamy in their density came close to what others felt was their religion. It was interesting lying there that my mother as a classicist had given me the gods rather than a more theistic God and perhaps the errant and antic ancient gods offered a better explanation for our life on the planet. In the earth’s turning the sky became an endless river and even when the moon rose rather than be disturbed I thought of myself as only a child of gravity. I kept thinking of a poem my Spanish teacher had quoted to me several times when we were sitting on a park bench on a May evening looking out at a dulcet Lake Michigan. The poem was by a Portuguese named Pessoa:
The gods by their example
Help only those
Who seek to go nowhere
But in the river of things.
