The moon passed upward through the top of my window. I heard Donna sleeping in New York. I heard Cindy listening to the river in Wisconsin. I heard myself breathing in and out or out and in. I raised a hand upward from the moonlight on the bed and into the darkness until it waved across Spain. I forced myself to believe that I was more than I had written. It was very hard and took until two A.M. when I won and slept.
A sense of a plan was afoot though without particulars. I awoke at five A.M., left a modestly loving note for Martha, unloaded my briefcase of ten pounds of Eisner notes and three pounds of Humanistic Botany, replacing them with a few volumes of bilingual poetry anthologies with their precious (seriously) Penguin colophons. I drifted out of the house quietly like a large cat burglar, well dressed and confident for no particular reason, thinking there might be a way to fence my life.
I made Indianapolis in time for a feeder connection to Chicago, and caught a lucky booking for New York at American’s Admirals Club, a name I have loved, not ever having seen myself as an admiral. I still felt miserably full, not with Martha’s excellent food but from eating too much of the world and with a particular, monstrous appetite for the world’s garbage. There was an urge to make notes on how to vomit up these thirty years of garbage but I didn’t want to write anything down before I could make full sense of it which might take God knows how long. I once heard on NPR a bright man describe how you can chat to God but those Hubbell space photos withered my tongue. If the afterlife is so wonderful why did Jesus bother bringing Lazarus back from the dead? To show us the dead are really dead, or the dead aren’t really dead? How would I know? The question was certainly a reason to call Donna in addition to holding her gracious, glorious butt in my arms again with the night-light making it improbably beautiful. Butts and Lazarus, not a far reach actually.
O’Hare Airport is our silly, unimaginative hell. In the Bible they were always telling stories about a rich man who had three cows, two camels, and a granary full of grain. What the fuck could we mean by rich nowadays? What month is it? Early to mid-May? In the lounge a man salutes my Marine boots on his hurried trek to his plane.
In the cab from LaGuardia I reached in my briefcase for a notepad, then seized my own hand with a Frankenstein gesture. The last fucking thing I needed to do at the moment was to write anything down. When we crossed the Queensboro Bridge at Fifty-ninth Street into Manhattan, which never looked fairer, I thought of traveling to a truly far-off and exotic place then decided that the exotic would ill prepare me for the rest of my life. I asked the cabdriver why the traffic was so light and he said, “Because it’s Sunday, sir,” in a lilting West Indian accent, grinning into the rearview mirror as if accustomed to carting the daft around the city.
At my apartment I looked at the wine stains with the fondness that a young man might have looking at his first poem. I called Donna who wasn’t there. I called Rico who wasn’t there, but then why would anyone be in an apartment on a fine Sunday afternoon? Why should anyone be there when you called, as a matter of fact? I called Don the Whiz, as the office girls called him, but his wife in Greenwich said he was playing golf for the day in North Carolina. I told her that I resigned and she said, “It’s Sunday but I’ll give him the message tonight,” a mysterious answer. I threw away the perishable contents in the refrigerator, carrying them down to the stoop. I nearly opened my mailbox but discarded the thought. I called Air France and managed to trade in some of my three hundred thousand miles for a seat on an evening flight. I packed a sturdy bag, then slept sitting up on the couch for a couple of hours, head lolling, drooling on my shirt, dreaming that there were dogs no bigger than my fist hiding in the apartment and they were trying to tell me a vitally important secret. When I awoke this dream was not too absurd to give serious consideration, but then how was I to comprehend dog language?
At Kennedy I bought a half dozen maps of Spain and France to give my nearly empty briefcase some important contents. There seemed to be no real crisis other than that I had had the wrong job and needed to create a new one. I just couldn’t sit there and deliquesce like the “boulevardiers” who circulate from bistro to bistro on a schedule that depends on the luncheon specials. I needed to get rid of the timid fibber that wrapped around my spine like the dread green mamba. On the plane I remembered a bold but fraudulent move I had made in the month before I gained my dubious M.F.A. My “creative thesis” wasn’t quite long enough so I added ten poems by a young Spanish woman poet I claimed to have met in Bilbao and whom I was translating into English for the first time. Of course I hadn’t been there and she didn’t exist but the poems had been written faster and slicker than goose shit. One was even about how to cook codfish cakes with a white, cream garlic sauce. My professor-adviser liked these faux translations very much, thinking them much better than my own more serious work. This man had once been thought to be an “exciting” formalist in the early fifties but teaching us “clods” had struck him dumb. Unfortunately he asked for the originals, but a two-day trip home and Martha’s expertise with Spanish did the job. She was a bit goofy at the time and thought I might be “many people” like Joanne Woodward had been in a particular movie.
High above the Atlantic I had the idea that I might carve out a modest career writing poems, and perhaps novels, in the personae of a number of different people. After eating a piece of sole that was a lesser experience than the Wisconsin catfish, not to speak of drinking two full bottles of wine, this writing project for a new life seemed admirable indeed. Why be one person when you could be several? I was not disturbed by the apparent fact that novelists were already doing this because my version was obviously fresh and original in ways that would momentarily rise to the surface. My names could vary from Alberto Dorado to Monique Senegal.
There was a problem or two at the luggage belt at De Gaulle that made me lose a little cabin pressure. There had only been one other passenger in first class, a dour New York banker with loose facial skin. Despite our “priorité” stickers our luggage was the last to emerge from the dark hole in the floor, doubtless a prank of leftist baggage handlers, a political persuasion of which I had always half-seriously numbered myself. During the hour wait I had called Claire and reached Oliver, a friend of hers I had met several times, a young man so thin he appeared to be made of Tinkertoys. Oliver had spent two years at Oxford, spoke excellent English, but had the irritating habit of calling me “old chap.” The upshot was that Oliver had been subletting the apartment from Claire who had been in Prague for the past four months. She had called me a few times and the connection had been a bit Balkan though she had never said where she was. Claire had neglected to send the landlord any of the money Oliver had been sending her for rent. She was thus consuming a double dose of money, Oliver’s and my regular bank draft. Oh well. Anyway, Oliver said, he was being kicked out and I was liable. How so, I asked? Oliver had seen my signature on the lease. Since I had never signed any lease this meant my signature had been forged.
This wasn’t exactly what I had in mind for the start of my new life. It was reality in the form of the kick in the balls Dad had so accurately described. One reason to make money is to buy your way out of such soul-crippling bullshit. Before I hung up Oliver suggested that the way out was to pay up the remaining six months of the lease and sublet the apartment directly to him, at least that is what the landlord suggested, refusing to have anything more to do with Claire. With quaking head I told Oliver I’d get back to him soon.
Luckily there was an Air France attendant loitering nearby. With luggage in hand I asked her if there was a flight to Barcelona fairly soon and she said yes, and directed me to another terminal. When safely on this plane my spirits rose with somewhat manic fuel, feeling the plane lift off and head in a direction far from the problems of Claire. There was even a lunch of codfish fritters somewhat similar to those in my poem so many years ago. My aforementioned leftist sympathies did give me a troubling thought that if I hadn’t concentrated so hard on the work that yi
elded big money, I would have had the wit not to get involved with the wretched bitch Claire in the first place.
And one more perilous fuckup awaited me before I could properly start my new life. I rather liked the light red Rioja served me on the plane in some quantity. This admittedly caused a little grogginess and when I disembarked I merely floated along following the other passengers, all of whom were decidedly European. Suddenly I was out in front seeing a few palm trees in the hot afternoon sun and not having passed through customs, an obligation for Americans and others, but not Euro passengers. “Give no thought for the morrow, because the morrow will take care of itself,” Jesus had said, so I stood there until I found the driver to take me to my hotel, both arranged from De Gaulle by phone.
Unfortunately my own neglect began to bother me by the time I flopped on the bed in my splendid hotel room, after first looking down from the balcony at the busy crowds of the Ramblas. I was sure my customs fuckup might cause problems, hopefully not including the dread Guardia Civil rousting me from my bed with cocked truncheons. A well-composed, intelligent American citizen would merely have called the consular office for advice. I took a nap. On the way in from the airport I hadn’t seen any peasant poets leading donkeys but I was, nonetheless, very happy to be here. As I dozed off my brain played me some favorite Carlos Montoya riffs.
* * *
My first trip to Spain lasted only forty-nine hours, which at least was seven times seven, and seven had always been my lucky number. To my credit I didn’t shit my pants or lose my wallet. That first evening I walked for several hours until the chafe sent me back to the room for my pine-tar salve. I saw innumerable beautiful dark-haired women, and spent a full hour in a market looking at all of the food possibilities. I could even tell that most people were speaking Catalan rather than regular Spanish. In short, I had myself firmly in hand, but still knew that my foreboding midwestern back-story would make me continue to probe at my airport error. I’ve often noticed that natives of our East and West Coasts are less likely to have envisioned a perfect world, thus are more generally forgiving of their own mistakes. When I re-enacted my airport departure I could even remember the neglected signs.
Before I went out for a late dinner I took a shower, and after the shower I walked into a hall closet rather than back into my bedroom as intended. The closet was large and I was well inside it before I realized my mistake. This frankly wasn’t a funny experience but it was an immediate help in making me understand that I wasn’t in Spain yet despite my physical presence there. Actually being in Spain would take days and days, if not weeks and weeks. Right now I was in the middle of a collapsed accordion like any tourist where time rolls cinematically past the viewer with scenes that can’t be digested.
Help came in the form of an Irish bartender in a pub a few blocks from the hotel. The proprietor of the restaurant told me on entering a dense crowd that despite my reservation it would be better if I came back in an hour, thus I cooled my heels in an uncrowded pub that was convincingly Dublinish. After a single drink I told the bartender my problem which he kindly considered with high seriousness. He said that if I was just an American tourist fooling around for a few days there was no problem, but if I wanted to rent a place for a while and settle in I’d best take a bus back into France, say to Narbonne, have lunch, and come back into Spain with a properly stamped passport. Barcelona had friendly officials but there was a chance I might run into an unfriendly bureaucrat elsewhere.
At a simple dinner of cod stew with tomato and garlic, and a portion of roasted piglet, the bartender’s advice, however possibly misinformed, put me at ease. I was packed to the hilt with misinformation but this item was relaxing. And by coincidence I had seen Narbonne’s lights from my balcony in Montpellier, a fine experience if you somehow detached Claire from the trip.
The next morning I became miserably lost for an hour, ducking into alleys and holding my city map sideways, right side up, and upside down in an attempt to get perspective. The only consolation was watching the crowded sweep of sidewalks with millions of heads tilted forward on their way to their jobs. By ten in the morning when I re-found my hotel, I was drenched with sweat, hastily cleaned myself up, and got myself a car and driver for the day. Again, was I really there as I made my eight-hour city tour in an air-conditioned Mercedes? A little bit but not much. Once the leaving and coming solution to the customs problem had been resolved Claire’s apartment came into being like the dog shit you can’t quite get off your shoe. The driver, actually Pedro by name, was excellent in every respect but the only sights that penetrated me worry free were the works of Gaudi. Even the mighty power of my various neuroses couldn’t withstand this genius. Gaudi made Claire’s apartment disappear into the shimmering heat and smog above the city. Gaudi easily excluded himself from any sense of the travelogue what with personifying the most attractive aspects of our imaginations.
Sad to say the city tried to carry me away but couldn’t quite do the job, my fault not the city’s. I simply had to turn around and clean up my little messes, however bourgeois the notion. At that moment of realization I was at a Basque tapas bar making a pig of myself. I was very much like the geese I had seen in a courtyard of Barcelona’s grand cathedral. I was a goose in grand surroundings but still a goose. I was also a little embarrassed when the owner of the tapas bar shook my hand for so obviously enjoying his food. It turned out I had eaten twenty-one tapas, another multiple of seven which did not make my eighth seven coming up, age fifty-six, a more understandable prospect.
By mid-morning I was back at De Gaulle and went directly to Claire’s apartment where I woke Oliver, and then to the glorified delicatessen owned by the landlord where he was braising some leeks for leek vinaigrette. This in itself was disarming. He noticed I was staring at a tray of Bismarck herring and quickly whipped one on a plate with onions and a piece of bread. Back in his cramped office, Oliver was forced to stand up looking all the while like our mid-western bug the walking stick. We all had a cup of coffee, also a glass of white wine for our digestion. The white wine made me feel agreeable and I had the immediate fantasy of commuting back and forth between Paris and Barcelona on alternative weeks and learning French and Spanish at the same time. Why not?
Meanwhile, the landlord showed me the lease. My signature was forged but it was an excellent forgery. For a minute or so the world came down on my head and not lightly. The landlord’s position was that though Claire was clearly banished I was still liable unless I wished to call in the cops and go to court. Oliver was in a state of anguish and I gave him my chair where he sat with his face in his hands. There was a definite possibility that this scene had been rehearsed. I knew Oliver was studying to be a doctor but I doubted that he intended to imitate Albert Schweitzer. The banality of it all threatened to become suffocating. I took out my checkbook and paid up the entire year until the lease ended, an amount equal to five pages of my Bioprobe of William Paley who had said near the end of his life when fatally ill, “Why do I have to die?” as if he might somehow be exempt. On the way out Oliver said, “I’ll send you a monthly check, old chap,” and I said, “I won’t hold my hand over my ass,” a piece of midwestern slang.
That evening I had dinner at Recamier with the French tutor I had found. She was my dumpy counterpart in age and I had only intended to have coffee with her in the lobby of my hotel on Rue Vaneau, the Hotel de Suede. She was originally from Auvergne and had briefly been married to an American when she was a graduate student at the University of Chicago. I invited her to dinner because she appeared to know more about the history of American literature than anyone I had ever met. She told me frankly that my intention to study French and Spanish intensively at the same time was “utterly stupid.” Certain aspects of her character made her an older version of Donna. After dinner I put her in a cab. We had agreed to meet in eight days after I’d had my first full week in Spain. The silliness of it all made us both a little breathless and I gave her hand a courtly kiss as she got
into the cab.
I walked over to Rue de St.-Jacques to a jazz club where I frequently have a nightcap while in Paris. I felt jaunty and pleased not to be with Claire, a nightly chore I had faced for the past few years while in Paris. Modern jazz is lonely and strident, perfect for a middle-aged white male who has cut the tethers with which he has tied himself. It’s sort of metallic and blue but it’s still music. I didn’t expect, after all, to become one of those men who can enter a bar, throw his hat, and hit the hat rack every time. As a matter of fact there are no more hats and hat racks. You might wonder what listening to Miles Davis tunes at midnight in Paris has to do with anything but the question emerges from our vain effort to make everything fit together. Hopefully I was heading elsewhere.
Jim Harrison, The Beast God Forgot to Invent
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