A Ballad for Metka Krašovec

by Tomaz Salamun

  Kardelj’s cook – you said she was

  “nice, not at all what you’d

  expected” –

  and we

  danced to the Doors.

  Are you still that

  quick? When I

  saw you safely ensconced

  under nicely tanned

  muscles –

  hardened from digging

  with archeologists – I

  focused on

  Iztok. We’d gotten fairly

  warmed up and

  undressed. And you

  forgot about your prey

  and explored me.

  I giggled in

  bliss, but couldn’t get it

  up. You

  have to

  whine in my ear: I want to be your

  wife. My

  upbringing is

  at fault, so I have a cupboard full

  of wives and other

  corpses

  and keep collecting

  them.

  III

  Hey!

  When you get back from

  Japan

  I’d like to ask you

  something. How do you explain that

  just as I was

  pondering

  night and day whether I should or I shouldn’t –

  remember the Bakery? – up

  against my thighs there

  leaned this dark one, with tight

  curly hair, like some Styrian

  baroque

  Christ. Jesus, how I felt

  it. Was that your boyfriend

  Gregor? If you’re there

  together now, say hello to

  Kyoto.

  I am

  KAMI, come to visit you

  again.

  bob!

  At breakfast

  Kay Burford,

  Kathy’s mom,

  gave me

  “A Cloud in Trousers,”

  which you and

  Kathy translated in

  Iowa in 1972.

  Mayakovsky died at 37.

  I’m still alive and

  sing the world

  in gratitude. I’ve met

  some brighter circles

  for living.

  One of those is

  you. And you,

  Vladimir.

  If we’d made

  love in 1930,

  you wouldn’t have

  shot yourself. Why

  didn’t we?

  I stood between

  Gayatri and Lili

  Brik.

  thirty-seven and you twenty-one

  Still between life

  and death.

  My loves are

  terrible.

  The moon is full.

  I’m afraid I’ll spill my

  port on the terrace.

  I’m looking at you, Pavček.

  I want money

  for my books from you.

  My butler

  seduces me.

  A curse on the day when I decided

  to hire too young a butler in Mexico!

  Where are you now, my wives?

  Wounded? Heartless?

  I run out of

  fingers counting who all I’ve crushed.

  Like bread.

  I’m naked.

  But my time still hasn’t

  come.

  why do you tremble, alejandro gallegos duval!

  You’ve all been

  nice to me.

  My life has been

  straighter than my penis

  just now. I don’t know who has determined it and

  set it down. I thank you, though.

  When I’m in Mexico, I’ll love you to death.

  But you stay there for now.

  Don’t drink your wine too fast, boy.

  You’ve got to become a great painter.

  Shut out the noise from the street.

  Don’t complain I’ve made you

  lose weight, don’t show the dark

  circles under your eyes.

  I’ve enriched

  everyone who has seen me.

  Even a blind man would see the dew on the grass,

  the milk along my iron path.

  to pavček

  Perhaps I’ll come.

  Then again, perhaps I won’t.

  In any case prepare the

  money, since here’s my will.

  Everything goes to my children.

  I’ve paid Maruška to the

  end of October 1979,

  and if it’s

  less than 400 dollars a

  month, the Russians will

  occupy you.

  Study my life

  closely. This amount is the

  limit of your curse.

  Now, at this instant, I still

  see him. He’s still breathing, still

  twitching.

  We’re in a fleabag hotel

  called the Daniel.

  The other rooms are filled with

  American tourists chewing their dreams.

  The company I flew here with is called

  Liberty, and

  the agent who sent me the

  tickets from Albany to Yaddo, Betsy.

  I remembered that I hadn’t bought

  Metka that part for the

  cooker she used to

  fix me meat, until something

  burst and that

  safety plug hit the

  ceiling.

  gaza

  When I’m 37 years old, I won’t be

  bald. I won’t

  wear white dressing gowns with red

  innards bulging in the pockets.

  When I’m 37 years old, my

  mother won’t die. I

  won’t knock on my sons’ bedroom doors with

  idiotic questions on my idiotically happy

  face.

  When I’m 37 years old, I

  won’t exercise at five-thirty

  each morning and wheeze through my nose like a

  maniac. I

  won’t parade through country

  inns and insult good

  folk who barely survived the

  war. I

  won’t wear knickers. I

  won’t point to Haloze and all they took

  from us and say

  it’s fine.

  When I’m 37 years old, I

  won’t be on call, I’ll be

  free. I’ll grow a long beard and long

  nails, my

  white ships will sail all the world’s

  seas.

  And if some

  woman bears me children, I’ll fling them through the

  windowpane from the dining room’s

  left corner and I

  wonder what will hit the asphalt first,

  the curtain or the glass.

  my uncle jockey and the butcher in zone a

  And when we all

  returned, happy and windblown, from Montebello –

  we’d briefly forgotten the low

  prices caused by the disgusting competition of the Yugoslav

  border – we said, Uncle Mario didn’t just

  race, he also

  won!

  Then I stared at the tunnel

  from the window at Piazza Vico 6.

  Why don’t we have horse

  races?

  Why did Uncle Jakob sell his

  cafe?

  Why did grandpa smoke so much that he got

  cancer?

  And who will inherit

  the last wooded parcels?

  But soon it got

  dark

  and next morning the car wouldn’t

  start.

  I had to go crawling uphill in a

  bus full of squealing old

  women with lire stuffed under their

  bras from the chickens they’d

  sold. To gape dimwittedly into />
  my plastic bag. We’re going back to the

  country where my father’s director of coast

  region hospitals. He squeals with

  delight whenever some woman gives

  birth. He must think that way we’ll get more

  neon.

  the koper-saratoga springs axis

  Because my father was such a

  snob that he refused to be

  paid, one day, when

  I came home for ten

  minutes to shower after a

  match, it suddenly became clear

  that I would

  “just go to Ljubljana” for college.

  Serves your inflated ego

  right, the family said out loud.

  Just who do you think you are! You even

  lost to Karlovac. Up to a

  point! That’s right, we lost to

  Karlovac. Which is why I’m here. To

  wash up. Back then we all still used

  those sprays, I put a fresh

  shirt on and joined them at the

  table. Wow! I said. Has Mussolini been burning

  your banks again? You want to send

  me someplace where it’s perfectly

  clear all I can do is die, rot, become impoverished and

  turn gray? Where grandpa

  was so depressed at losing his

  horses that for five years all he could do was

  dream about opening a kaolin mine and collect

  stamps, then finally had to give up

  even his flat? Dear heart,

  we have four children in the house, the tablecloth

  whispered. I went pale. I never

  imagined anything this

  horrible could ever really

  happen to me. So, once among the Slavs

  I immediately gambled away Perspektive.

  To avoid having to stare at those torturous

  repeating episodes, when you first rent

  a room to Madame Scriabine, then another to

  someone who constantly

  bangs the door shut. Not to mention the third and

  fourth. The fifth one uses your cellar to chop up your

  wife, instead of firewood. And it’s clear

  you have absolutely no other

  choice but to sell

  your stamps, hire a

  cab, keep an eye on the

  packing and single-handedly scrawl

  Mitgepäck on the wood. Even now I can scarcely

  believe I could be such an idiot, trying

  for years to enlighten a

  country where since time

  immemorial everything was clear

  in advance, especially the fact that you

  deserved me! But let’s put aside

  History. I disappointed

  Zwitter with it long ago. This poem has a purely

  practical purpose, which is:

  to persuade my current wife, Metka

  Krašovec, not to forbid me

  the young thoroughbred creatures I

  race and bet on.

  Last night in three hours I lost 219

  dollars and won 240.

  Whatever I do! My balance comes out on the

  plus side!

  21 dollars!

  21 years!

  It all evens out.

  Whom did Lord Byron love?

  my bard and brother

  As the

  chauffeur silkenly drives me

  down to the city at four thirty, I

  worry that downtown will slit my

  throat. Thomas Smith, father of

  Tony, alias Antonio Smith, best friend of

  Goran and Boris, the twins and brothers

  of Sofija, who

  nearly became my

  wife in Mexico.

  Does my car

  really have darkened windows? I’m

  off to a bar where the drinks

  are cheap between four and six. What they call

  happy hours. Miss Miller is at

  Bled now, at the dacha. That’s also the name of

  my beer. Metka, is she a

  drag? And I drink:

  beer after beer, quarter after

  quarter lost to the

  juke box. Joe and Mary are both so

  beautiful I’m afraid they’ll break my

  shirt. And I think of

  Braco. I don’t even have his address.

  People! Why do you

  grow up!

  Then I think, when I get to

  Ljubljana, I’ll put out an

  ad. I’ve come back, Tomaž

  Šalamun, making books and children is my

  trade. I also want

  four, like my

  father. Call

  three two four two zero three.

  Joe has a different dog today and

  great luck at darts.

  Then a very strange, decidedly

  hysterical laughter pierces the noise and refrigerated

  air, like Fontana. Mary calls out:

  LAST CALL HAPPY HOURS!

  And I leap into

  the sun and then over

  Broadway back into the

  air-conditioned limo, which takes me back to the castle.

  chez les contents

  Hey, old Triestine love, whom I

  exported first to Brussels, then

  California, then Jersualem: they say

  you have a house on Mali Lošinj. Why didn’t you

  send me chocolates in Sarajevo?

  Slim told me. He knows everything, even

  all the dirt about my present

  life. Come to Male Srakane

  sometime with the boat. On the island I silently

  glide from sheep to sheep, and shine a flashlight in

  their mouths. And type in the shade under the reeds.

  Beside me sits a creature that’s lost its mind.

  He wears a baseball cap and is covered in a

  sheet. Slime oozes from his ears and eyes.

  The people here constantly inter-

  marry and abandon their offspring on the way.

  So why didn’t you send me chocolates in

  Sarajevo? I’d like to see how your

  son has grown up and if you still

  agree with the original design for Poker.

  small wonder that our old professor

  is now mayor of rome

  I sat on a wall and sketched Perugia.

  Argan also drops some coins in the almsbox.

  For lunch at the pensione they give us cat meat,

  at least that’s what they say. I get better.

  I’ll never pass that exam.

  Braco is in love with Vera, am I in love with Tatyana

  or with Vera? Or with Dunya?

  But not the Dunya who was in Perugia

  and is an opera singer now, rather the Dunya

  I was with at camp.

  Vera and I saw each other in Greece.

  Braco and I never saw each other at

  camp. The English woman says

  driving lessons here are practically free.

  Tone will be the cause of our breaking up. Don’t even

  know how to use an eraser. In

  Split Dikan stole Vera from me.

  My surveyor abandons me in Orvieto.

  I watch the people burning in hell.

  They’re naked and touching each other and then

  they are included in frescoes and then Western

  civilization clearly has nothing to point to

  but a brothel

  and in churches at that.

  dear metka!

  There are fresh flowers on my table every morning.

  Now they change them in their big vases

  every other day. For breakfast I sit at the

  Quiet Table, so I just raise a hand and

  wiggle my fingers to greet people

  because I’m afrai
d of losing my metaphysics

  if I say good morning. No one here

  suffers because of you or Alejandro.

  I’m always telling Trisha, Allan and

  Kathy I’m afraid you won’t get very

  much out of me, I’m just married –

  April 11 – and on the way to be with my

  Mexican lover. Everyone here likes you.

  I dance with Kathy, walk with Allan through the

  fireflies – we stroll through woods like a

  carpet – and admire Trisha enormously

  for her paintings. When I make love to her,

  I become a tree she’s painting. Don’t be

  sad if I repeat that I won’t

  be able to live with you “faithfully,”

  as people put it. I’ve tried, and

  changed my plans. I’ll be in Mexico

  from the twenty-second to the twenty-ninth,

  not from the twenty-ninth to the sixth.

  That way the week before I fly to

  Ljubljana I’ll be back here to rest and it won’t

  be like when I flew back for the

  wedding, when between the moment I

  knocked on the door on

  Dalmatin Street and the moment I

  good-naturedly shoved Alejandro out of bed on

  Salina Cruz only fourteen hours elapsed.

  I’m afraid it would

  scare you to death, same as then.

  liberty, blue folder

  My life is in a cage.

  Others look after me.

  Kansas has the same sort of dust as Pannonia.

  All the stalks have burnt out in my throat.

  I’d like to be modest and tiny and

  compressed. I’d like to be

  dead.

  I read a precise list of the tips and

  clothes my travel agent from Liberty

  requires.

  I can’t afford them.

  What is San Miguel de Allende like?

  I carry the flag at such high speed that you

  can’t even hear when it pops.

  Kings fall, shot down by mufflers.

  At the airport I always eat the last

  sandwich. I stare at its geological

  strata. My skin smells like an egg,

  golden. Why doesn’t that fountain in the castle stop? White marble putto, don’t ever wake up!