By age thirty most of us have found, and are perhaps confined by, the arc of our lives. We wander in the sphere of our idiosyncrasies usually unmindful of what a poet said: “Beware, O wanderer, the road is walking too.”
I gave up on my obsession with the language of living creatures other than human while staying the usual twenty-seven days in Reggio, in Italy. I had rented a bicycle and taken a long ride north to see the ruins of the eleventh-century castle of Matilda (I think it is called the Castle of Canossa and was owned by Matilda of Tuscany) who once owned northern Italy and saved the Catholic Church from the powerful Germans, a matter of minimal interest to me. I was intrigued by Matilda because she wrote poetry, practiced falconry, and hunted with hounds, in short, an ideal woman.
It was a cold day, wet and nasty, with the last mile up the mountain, which was enveloped in a cloud, quite arduous. As I’ve said I need to know the history, among other things, of any area I inhabit and in Europe it was quite a job compared to America where in many areas west of the Mississippi the history is of nominal content if it exists at all beyond the history of Native tribes and the unheroic efforts of those who stole their land to raise a limitless number of cows.
Anyway, in the cold foggy rain I was remarking to myself what discomfort my curiosity brought upon me, in short, what the fuck was I doing? The caretaker of the property was so obviously appalled by the weather that he didn’t come out of his attractive, tiny house. I made my way upward on a slippery, stone trail and hadn’t gone that far when I turned to discover that five of the gatekeeper’s chickens were closely following me. I stopped. They stopped, looking up at my face, the apparent seat of my being. Why follow me in the hideous weather up into a nonconclusive immense pile of rocks? In an almost flashing moment I perceived the vanity of my study of nonhuman communication. I wasn’t a scientist satisfied with drilling holes in a thin piece of board. Only that morning two ants had crossed the decrepit table in my little room in Reggio and had met in the middle, conversed, turned, and gone off in random directions. I decided looking down at my wet but friendly chickens that I’d never have a meaningful clue what they were clucking to each other, or what two tiny brown birds were saying to each other in the tree above me.
Riding back south toward Reggio in the intense rain I reflected on my first clue to a change the full nature of which I hadn’t yet comprehended. The day before on a pleasant, sunny October morning I had been sitting against a tree reading a book (Alberto Moravia) when a minuscule lizard crept down the tree trunk close to my head and I thought the contents of the novel were within my reach but the lizard wasn’t from its forked tongue testing the air to the tail that diminished itself into nothing. I thought it would be easy enough to identify the lizard but I would never understand its lizardness. After a few moments studying me the lizard followed its path back up the tree. What about my own path, I thought. It was only informed by chaotic unrest.
Three months before, I had landed in Milano but its large size unnerved me. I mean that while I had learned Chicago, Milano was a last-minute change of plans and I hadn’t studied its skeletal map. I was there a day and a half before I met my mother back at the airport when we picked up her clients, an elderly couple from Cincinnati I’ll call Robert and Sylvia. Robert was morbidly obese and only interested in eating, drinking, and sleeping. Sylvia was interested in Etruscan culture and medieval art though she was distressingly simpleminded about both. In the four days of driving them around they were never ready to go before eleven in the morning when the July weather was already overwarm. Robert barely looked out the car window so intently was he studying his briefcase full of food guidebooks.
Mother was pleasant but not overly warm, feeling bad as she was over the ill health of her elderly husband who was left behind in Milano when we drove south to Parma. Robert smelled poor despite his wealth which came from a well-known Cincinnati company that makes soap and toothpaste.
In Parma we had a few free hours after dropping Robert and Sylvia off at a grand hotel and checking into a simple pensione. While we were sharing a bottle of prosecco Mother said, “What horrid miserable fuckers,” referring to her clients. We laughed and she dug into her purse coming up with a letter from my first love Emelia which had been forwarded but which she had misplaced for several months.
“There’s something terribly wrong with you,” she shyly observed.
“Of course,” I said, adding a few details about complicated viruses.
“Do you have AIDS, dear?” she asked taking my hand.
“No, this is more complicated if possible.” I desperately wanted to read the letter from Emelia the thought of whom made my heart thump.
The point was, I would never be able to share my secret except with the doctor and even with him leaving out the core of the violence. My mother sat there puzzled and then I rushed up to my room to read Emelia’s letter, really just a note, which except in two small patches was banal. It was mostly a litany of unsuccess: marriage at nineteen to a country singer whose one small recognizable hit carried them for half a dozen years in small venues. They had no permanent home other than a traveling van, ending up as a house band in Reno where her husband had become a heroin addict. She tried to help him for a year then abandoned him to his drug. She returned home when her brother Lawrence died in a stock car accident. Her mother had collapsed mentally and she and her father tended her mother except he was gone a lot building pipelines. One day a letter from her father came from Falstaff, Arizona, saying he had “found another.” The bright spot was that Dicky had become an electrical engineer for Sandia and helped financially while she made her way through nursing school at the University of New Mexico from which she would graduate by Christmas. She still had dreams about our beautiful times at the water tank south of Alpine. She ended, “Your first girlfriend, Emelia,” adding as a P.S.:“I still haven’t lived in a tall building in New York City.”
I immediately became excited thinking about the water tank and Emelia’s bare bottom and ejaculating as I stared off across her shoulder at a group of shy Corriente cattle waiting to drink. I immediately moved my mother and myself to a fine hotel with reliable phone service though it was a full day before I reached Emelia at dawn in Albuquerque. She was petulant at being wakened but quickly became friendly. I wanted to send her a ticket immediately but she said it would have to wait until December when she graduated with her nursing degree which was five months distant and nearly unbearable. The point though was that I suddenly had hope of some sort. Here I was only a few days in Italy and something marvelous had happened. Now it didn’t repel me to take meals with wealthy Bob while Mother and Sylvia in disgust would eat lightly and take a walk. At a fine restaurant, Checci, in Parma Bob had three orders of zampone, a stuffed pig’s leg, and three bottles of wine. Other diners and the staff cheered as I managed to carry three-hundred-pound-plus Bob out the door and into a waiting cab. My own extreme hungers were centered around the periods when the infirmity in my blood would arise suddenly like fungi.
Now as I rode through the rain south from Matilda’s castle I was a scant forty days away from Emelia’s arrival in Bologna, forty more days of loneliness for her. The trouble was that a big moon was due in twelve days, and another for Emelia’s arrival. I had taken the drug three times and it had turned me into a vomiting zombie, two days of complete stasis wherein I could barely manage to reach the toilet. It was death-in-life which made me value pure unmitigated consciousness. Here I was pumping along the highway on my bike and now thinking of a literature-appreciation course for science majors at Northwestern. The course was normally taught by a kindly old man but then he fell ill in the middle of the semester and his substitute was a firebrand who had us read Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, surely the most mind-scorching piece of fiction extant. We science majors, perhaps less so me, were quite disturbed when we were asked to write a short paper on the sentence “I maintain that to be acutely conscious is to be diseased.” I was amused by this collegiate memory but then a large diesel truck beeped right behind me and I slid off the road tipping over into a huge mud puddle. There was a decided advantage to the canine in my system because I merely shook myself off like a dog and proceeded down the highway with my interesting burden of thoughts. I had long been resolved not to let my illness unduly affect my perceptions of reality. I had years ago learned to seek out stillness in wild settings and allow everything to be as it is. I had overstepped my boundaries in thinking I could ever understand the details of the language of creatures though their sense of reality must be added to our own for a complete picture of life on earth. I mean I could closely study their otherness and then let it go.
By sheer luck I swerved into a country restaurant parking lot where a few cars were parked. Near the entry two French girls were straddling their bikes reading the menu and arguing. Their bikes were laden with sodden camping equipment and they looked utterly woebegone. The shorter, pudgy one was counting the change in her small rubber purse and the taller, prettier one was crying. They were arguing about their lack of money. I made out that though it was Saturday morning more money was being wired to them on Monday.
“Allow me to buy you lunch,” I said impulsively.
They turned to me scowling as if I were the most repulsive dickhead on earth.
“I’m not a beast. I’m alone and it’s my birthday.” I lied on both counts.
“Fine by us, American pig,” the pudgy one laughed, determining the nationality behind my pidgin French.
My luck further intensified when the manager turned out to be a man who lived only a few doors down the street in Reggio and we had spoken several times about birds during early-morning coffee at a café. He set us up a table in front of the fireplace and we ate like hounds. I had three orders of pork braised with figs and the girls ate both fish soup and game hens. We drank three bottles of wine, laughed about nonsense, and became drowsy before the fire. One of them was studying art history and the other an ancient poetess named Gaspara Stampa and they were on a month-long trip through northern Italy, camping as they went, a clear impossibility in the weather of the day. They hoped to reach Modena, the neighboring city, by evening. I talked to the manager and he called a friend with a van taxi. I bought a bottle of wine and a bottle of grappa and we were off. My landlady at the pensione wasn’t happy with my visitors but I gave her twenty bucks in lire and begged her to be nice. I gave them dry T-shirts to wear after soaking in a hot tub. I went to sleep in my cozy sleeping bag on the floor and the pudgy one, Mireille, joined me in the late afternoon, enveloping me in her wonderful vise. When the tall, prettier one, Kristabelle, was wakened by our activity she hissed, “I would never fuck an American,” and I said, “Then don’t,” and they laughed hysterically. They drank the wine and I had several snorts of the grappa. We went out in the evening for more wine and pizza with them enjoying my baggy clothes and old western cowboy shirts. Kristabelle was rather sullen as pretty girls often are but we coupled briefly at dawn with all of us in bed in the coolish room. They were off for Modena on Sunday morning. I gave them some money and said I might see them on Monday as I had intended to visit Modena.
What a happy time it was. I had had scant love since helping out my mother in late July after which I’d visited Laurel in Madrid. We had a fine reunion with nights of love but then five days into my visit her father appeared and was definitely not happy to see me. Laurel became disconsolate because her father had been badgering her to have a baby. Laurel was the last of their particular family line. He was now in his early seventies and had none of the charm left that I had witnessed twelve years before. I asked late one night why he didn’t father another child and she said that he had tried but a doctor had told him after a test that his sperm count was too low. “What about you?” she suddenly asked. I was startled. It had never occurred to me that a man in my condition should father a child. The next morning I called the doctor in Chicago and he said, “Definitely not,” and that I shouldn’t even make love he now believed without my wearing a couple of layers of protection. Laurel took this poorly and it was the effective end of our love morning. She had kindly identified three areas in France that were relatively empty, what cartographers call “sleeping beauties,” and might give me refuge for the arrival of my seizures: the Morvan in western Burgundy, the Massif Central, and the Pays Basque. Galicia in western Spain was also possible. Not oddly I felt too much of the weight of Spain’s past which had been very alive for my Spanish-teacher lover back at Northwestern whose grandfather had been tortured to death by Falangists in Granada. Much of my basic orientation is in the sciences, especially in zoology and botany, and there is no real space for superstition but I curiously felt what the hippies called “bad vibrations” in Spain. Even a cursory examination of the Spanish Civil War reminds one deeply of the prolonged horrors of our own. The predominant shock waves in world history are the capacity of humans to kill each other for political or religious reasons, most often a combination of both.
Laurel and I decided to take a brief train trip to Seville, thence to Granada, and then back to Madrid but then her father had left early on the morning of our departure and he had utterly exhausted her with his badgering about her having a baby. She sat on a packed suitcase in her elegant apartment and sobbed for a full hour and I could do nothing to help. I couldn’t make a dent in her uncomfortable relationship with her father and what’s more I couldn’t offer her a baby for medical reasons. Consequently she asked me to leave and I made a brief tour to Granada and Seville and then to Barcelona, all by rather slow local trains which I love. Why be in a hurry with such a questionable future? I see in my journal later on that I was overwhelmed by the physical beauty of Spain but at the same time drowning in the melancholy of its history. As I’ve said I like to become intensely familiar with any country I visit by reading and study including the literature, which indicates the nature of a country’s soul life. With Spain this was a disaster because I was reading volumes of the poetry of Lorca, Machado, and Hernández in whose bleached bones you see Spain’s historical torment. Two days in the grandeur of Barcelona gave me modest relief but not quite enough for survival. I went to a ratty and smallish Gypsy club (the Gypsies are called gitanos) and an old lady began to scream, evidently sensing my true nature, and I fled. I took a slow train along the Costa Brava to Collioure in France where I stopped to visit Machado’s grave. I proceeded then along the Mediterranean coast all the way back to Italy, again by slow local trains. What is more pleasant than reading a book on a train and lifting your eyes so as not to miss the landscape? It was immediately pleasant to escape Spain’s spirit of murder and between Narbonne and Montpellier a girl student was curled up on the seat across from me revealing her miniskirted butt which I studied as if it were the true origin of the universe. The conductor took note, reddened, and shrugged as if put upon by gratuitous lust. I made notes to revisit the area especially the mountainous area north of the coast where I might seek the usual refuge.
Now in Modena in early November with Emelia’s visit thirty-five days away I am restless despite a fine room and minuscule kitchenette not far from the city square, cathedral, and the immense gorgeous market from which I buy food for meals. Yesterday I made a pasta sauce from three kinds of wild fungi and this morning I bought myself a middling-sized octopus. My Chicago doctor’s spansules have killed the wildness of my appetite for which I am grateful but then at least once a day I briefly miss that edgy fire in the blood which is as pure as sexual desire. The girl on the train with the exposed bottom near Montpellier grinned at her spectators on waking. That is us in our wild play.
This morning in a café before I went to the market the sound system was playing a group of arias by the Modena native son Pavarotti. My hair rose and my skin prickled at this voice of a god. I looked around and noticed that people had ceased reading their morning papers. I was reading a volume of poems by Ungaretti and the type blurred with my tears. Some music apparently returns us to the core of our being and this despite my unrest over finding a location for my seizure which was due in five days.
On the way back from the market I bought a battery-operated tape player and several tapes of Pavarotti thinking that I must study the voice. I even thought it might be best to study this voice in the city from which it had emerged. In my room I listened while laying out my maps and found myself drawn to the Morvan region of Burgundy. I had idly looked at a volume about this area of Burgundy while at Laurel’s apartment in Madrid but now rather than its Celtic or Roman origins I felt compelled by the dimensions of its forested areas. I had noticed that in the few days leading up to a seizure I felt an inevitable loneliness for forests, the odor of hardwoods in late fall. This was a kind of physiological sentimentality I had read in Proust in college. There were a few patches of fine hardwoods near Cincinnati that I could visualize from my earliest hunting experiences. I clearly needed a forest for my oncoming trauma.
I quickly ate my octopus and then went off and bought a small delivery van from a man who was giving up his produce stall at the market. After I paid him in cash he advised me that it would take days to get it properly licensed. I said, “Fuck ’em,” as they do out west. He was amused by this and for an extra twenty bucks left his plates on the van. He was on his way to Seattle in the U.S. to visit his daughter who was a chef there and felt rather carefree. Within an hour I was headed northwest toward France via Torino.
Nov. 7–Nov. 10. I reached a campsite west of Autun in three days in my pathetic putt-putt van that could barely reach 65 kilometers per hr. (40 mph). I was tempted by Mt. Beuvray as a campsite but there were too many visitors thereabouts due to its fame from Julius Caesar being there about 60 B.C. I was unnerved in Vézelay to see above the main door of the cathedral the sculpted figures of men with the heads of dogs. Startled at lunch in a bistro when a local man told me the Celts were here in about 4000 B.C. This man was goofy rather than the ordinarily cynical Frenchman and told me to be wary of forest spirits after I said I was camping. He went into a rant as a lover of horses as the mountain people used to kill and eat wild horses. Later in the afternoon as my vehicle was struggling up a mountain trail I indeed felt strange and it was an effort to resist the silly feeling. It had begun in Vézelay and Autun. In both places when I’d wandered around as a garden-variety sightseer stray dogs, shy and deferential, had followed me and I suspected my scent was changing more radically than it had in the past with the oncoming big moon. Three girls near the cathedral in Autun teased me about being part dog and I gave a mock but convincing growl. They screeched and ran. I thought it would be fine if they could camp with me tonight but then my conscience cautioned me into its “do no harm” mode. How culture struggles to make us think we aren’t what we are. I knew the Nazis had executed whole villages in the area. How could anyone kill a child? The other evening at a rest stop near Grenoble I’d tried to nap curled up in my cold van and a thief’s hand had reached in the back door which I hadn’t locked. I crushed the hand in my own feeling the thief’s bones grind and shatter in my grip. He howled. I stopped short of jerking out a few fingers. On the long drive I felt strongly the strange burden of my early life. I thought I had rejected my parents but I never went anywhere without my volumes of Virgil and Ovid and often Sappho, and also the patrimony of bird books. The most overwhelming memories during the trip were of Emelia. I was often more than a little frightened of her but after eighteen years the merest slip of an image of her body would engorge my cock. How can memory do this to the body? An idle question because it does. Emelia flipping out of the water tank, her bare butt in the air with the small hairs sprouting in her miniature crevasse, the chubby lips of her pussy and her tiny pink asshole, the conflicting odors of her Dentyne gum and Camay soap. Or sitting on the musty couch in my shed with knees drawn up so that the undersides of her thighs drew one down to her puffy pussy under the white cotton panties, and her face saying, “Go ahead and look, fool.” When I found a campsite in a thicket surrounded by shaggy and gnarled oaks I fucked a small patch of cold moss in desperation, then in the firelight I cut a spansule in half thinking that a partial dose would be enough in this remote place. I folded the rest of the spansule of powder in a square of notebook paper in the manner of the way I once bought a gram of cocaine in college and put it in my pocket. Well, the half dose wasn’t enough and eleven hours later dawn found me in a flatland forest that turned out to be thirty miles west with a dog laying a dozen feet away. I immediately vomited thinking I might have eaten part of it but then it awoke and I was happy that I hadn’t been cannibalistic. The dog approached and I petted it and then it trotted off as if it had accomplished its mission of protecting me, a joke indeed when I might have eaten it. I curled back up to sleep a little more then bounded to my feet when I saw a deer in the dawn mist through the trees perhaps a hundred yards in the distance. I was able to caution myself and quickly snorted the other half of the drug in its paper wrapper. I began to walk east toward the rising sun pausing now and then to fill my capacious jacket with the many boletus mushrooms I saw on the dense forest floor. I soon had found so many that I had to construct a makeshift sack out of my overshirt. I kept thinking of Professor Hamric back in college quoting Heidegger in my only philosophy course: “Living life is somewhat unfamiliar to us all.” I was quite tired from my long night’s run when the forest had seemed a broad river of moonlight. My fatigue was also from the soporific effect of the drug which at least controlled the savagery of appetite. I sat down against a tree to rest and not long after two men and a dog were standing before me. Their approach would have been impossible if I hadn’t taken the drug. Since he was at eye level I greeted the dog first. One of the men was very large and exclaimed, “Jesus Christ!” when he saw my big shirt-sack of boletus. The other man was tall and slender and looked at me with concern. He said, “You are ill,” quite accurately. I lamely explained that I used to run marathons and had run all night. I offered to give them my sack of mushrooms if they would give me a ride back to my campsite. The big man virtually yelled, “Yes,” and we were soon on our way in their large comfortable car, stopping at a village butcher’s where I bought a baguette and a kilo of fromage de tête, a large chunk of rough pâté made from the fat, cheek meat, and tongue of a pig. I literally wolfed down the whole two pounds in minutes. I could tell they were pleased when we reached the two-track to my campsite. I hugged and kissed their dog Eliot who had slept on my lap and with whom I had shared some of my snack. I was relieved to reach my campsite and unpacked the remaining mushrooms from my jacket pocket. I found a large human finger and its bloody stump which I tossed off into the trees. The finger jogged my pitiful memory and I recalled that early in my night run I had stopped at a country tavern and had drunk several glasses of both red wine and water. The owner of the tavern and a big farmer yelled at me to leave, obviously uncomfortable with my company. I was slow as if unable to understand human language. They grabbed me and hauled me out the front door. The farmer twisted my arm painfully and I overreacted, throwing them around the parking lot and coming up with a finger. I had hoped to cook my mushrooms with a skillet and olive oil over a campfire but quickly decided that I should leave the area.
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 circadian 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.
Before I finally slept well after midnight, and while listening to coyotes in chase, it occurred to me that Emelia might accept me despite what I’d told her because we were lovers so early in life. Embracing nude in the water tank with our tongues and limbs intertwined was a baptism that couldn’t be erased by dire language. The adolescent ache of two bodies for each other never failed to reenter my mind and body. It was the overwhelming rule of what was supposed to be.
I did a rare thing and slept through dawn as if I were part of the ground. The weather had changed and there was a slight warmish wind from the south. I made coffee from the small pot in my knapsack and the remnants of a bag of coffee from Modena so that as I drank there was the jarring feeling from the scent and taste that I was still at my breakfast café down the street. I was curious about a canyon far to the west and walked there rapidly, stopping to watch a huge flock of doves circling a water tank. This made me hungry. When I began hunting with my friend Cedric south of Cincinnati we’d shoot ten or so doves, start a fire, and pluck and grill them in the wire basket he’d detach from his bicycle. I had nothing to eat and hunger turned me back to the car. Something nagged at me and I remembered a short nightmare I’d had about the cluster of hummingbirds flitting around the raw wound on my throat in the rain. I stopped in Socorro and had two bowls of menudo, Mexican tripe stew, and headed north toward Emelia and Albuquerque stopping to pick up some decent wine as I had seen an empty bottle of wretched plonk on her counter, also a bottle of fine Herradura tequila.
When I reached her apartment she had just gotten home from her final exam. She was a pink-eyed, frazzled mess. I poured her a shot of tequila watching through the bedroom door as she stripped to her panties. I put a washcloth under the hot tap and wrung it out. She drank the tequila in a gulp and I knelt and put the washcloth over her eyes. I kissed a nipple with my heart in my mouth.
“I’m too tired to fuck but I will,” she said with a pained smile.
Afterward she asked me to go see Dicky, also to buy her a steak, barely getting out the words before she lapsed into a soft snore. On a desk mostly covered with medical textbooks and cosmetics there was a photo of her, Dicky, Lawrence, and me dressed up for Halloween so long ago. She was in a turban and I was in a cheap, loose-fitting Superman costume, a yard-sale special.
At the butcher shop I thought how strange it was to make love to someone you loved. I visited Dicky who was happy to see me, half-suspended in a hip cast. “Too bad Lawrence isn’t here,” he said, and then we were silent for a few minutes looking at the Jemez Mountains far to the north. I wondered if Emelia had told him anything about my condition but he gave no indication that she had.
“I’m glad you’re here for Emelia. She was a fucking mess four years ago. I think she was even taking heroin like her husband. I told that shitsucker that if he ever showed up in New Mexico again I’d have his throat cut.”
We talked for an easy hour and I told him I’d move Emelia out to his place in Sandia Park once I bought a pickup in the morning. She could take care of him and I’d drive up to Dillon and find a place to live. I didn’t presume to say “find us” a place to live.
When I got back to the apartment she had largely recovered. She didn’t have a grill for the steak but assured me she could do fine with an iron skillet. I had forgotten to take the price tag off the wine.
“I’m not going to tell you that you’ve had all the luck,” she laughed.
We had the best evening of my life and in the morning we shopped for a pickup. I told her that it was time for me to leave town for two days. She wanted to go too and take care of me but I said that maybe in the future we could do so once we created a “safe” situation. She was tremulous when she said, “You sure you’re coming back?” The world has created so many waifs.
I went back to the Plains of San Agustin and exhausted myself for two nights but had the minimal sense to move in a wide circle since I finally had a destination though I took a little more of the drug than usual in hopes of staying safe. When I got back I moved her out to Dicky’s house then headed north to Montana to find a place for us to live.
I looked around Dillon in wider and wider circles for nearly a week, constantly on pay phones with Emelia who always reminded me that we’d need enough space for a horse. She liked the idea of keeping up with me on my monthly jaunts. I finally found a place only a few miles south of Melrose which was about thirty miles north of Dillon. It was an old but spacious trout fisherman’s cabin that had ten acres on the Big Hole River and a shed I could convert into a stable. I’d have liked something a little more remote but the surrounding territory redefined the modern concept of remote. The local bar and restaurant already had a hitching post along the front for horses. I bought a pair of hip boots from the local fly-fishing shop and made my way across the river from the cabin to look at a triangular flat of pasture surrounded by fairly steep cliffs, one stained copiously by bird dung and far up you could make out a golden eagles’ nest. At the back corner of the flat there were sage bushes ten feet high, a phenomenon I had never seen before despite my years working in ranch country in the West. When you lifted the lid a bit the natural world, including ourselves, offered as much darkness in human terms as light. To look at it with any clarity you certainly had to attempt to look at it through the perceptions of a million-plus other species.