Beautiful Soul: An American Elegy (11 page)

Dear Elsa,

When I came back
down from the mountain I didn’t quite know what to do with myself. With time on
my hands, I found myself drifting further downward, until finally I was by the
sea, on the edge of the Piazza Unita, looking out at the long quay that pokes
like a thumb into the eye of the Mediterranean. The sky had turned gray and the
sea had a hammered look like it sometimes has on hot days, though it was cool
that morning. Cars went by. I looked back at the long piazza, hedged on three
sides by hulking buildings in the imperial style. There’s nothing Italian about
this city except for some of the people and the language (but that’s not quite
Italian either).
And the strikes.
But that’s what Papa
loved about it—he called it the quintessence of Europe, this strange city like
a hinge between east and west, forgotten but scarcely forgettable. His words,
you remember them. This was as close as he’d let himself come to the real heart
of things, the open wound, the city of his dreams and nightmares. It was like
home without quite reminding him of home. And it was the sea instead of the
river, the terrible river that flows only one way. In our year of retirement we
would stroll along the waterfront, which seemed frozen in amber then without
quite so many tourists as now. He never looked inland at the lights and buildings
but always out to sea, toward the south. But he never broke free of that other
city. Even in the hospital, when I opened my eyes and saw him standing at the
window, looking at the sea, I knew his thoughts were directed northward, to the
Danube, to the dual city of his heart. It was the week before his birthday and
I decided to surprise him.
One of the last good days when I
was strong.
We went to our favorite trattoria, a seafood place, and he
was drinking his coffee—never cappuccino like me, he used to make fun of me for
doing that, no Italian does that, it’s a breakfast drink he said. But as I like
to remind him, this wasn’t quite Italy, and anyway I had no interest in passing
as a European. The moment had
come,
he was in better
spirits than I’d seen him in since we came here. I didn’t want to ruin things.
But they were already ruined.

No more treatments,
I said. We agreed.

He sipped his
coffee as if he hadn’t heard me.

I’m done with them.
I’m ready.

You are ready, he
repeated. And what if I am not ready?

I took an envelope
out of my purse and put it in front of him.

What’s this?

It took him some
time to put on his glasses, and more time to produce the little penknife he
always carried and to make a neat slit in the short side. The single ticket
slid out onto the tablecloth, where he stared at it.

First class to
Budapest, I said to break the silence. And I got you a room at the Gellert. You
used to tell me about how you loved going to the baths there.

He looked at me. I
will never forget that look, over the tops of his reading glasses. Not anger,
or even disappointment, what he might show to one of his students. A measuring
look, I’d call it. The look you’d give someone that you suddenly discover has
become a stranger.

I kept talking. I
couldn’t stop myself. About how beautiful it was supposed to be in autumn, and
the stories he used to tell me about riding here and there on his bicycle—on
the flat side, Pest, when he was young and climbing the hilly side, Buda, when
he was older and something of an athlete. About how we could find the house
he’d been born in, and perhaps even that other house, in the old ghetto, and
his school—

He put his hand
down on the table, flat and hard, making the glasses jump. Eyes turned in our
direction and I looked into my cappuccino cup and blushed like a girl.

It’s not possible,
he said. And then: You should be ashamed.

It’s not me. It’s
my time. My time is up.

That’s not for you
to decide.

If not me, who?

You should go home
while you still can. See your cousins. Settle things.

I am not leaving
without you.

Yes, my darling.
You are.

He got up then,
blind as a bull, scraping back his chair suddenly. The other diners stared. He
put some money on the table and turned and walked out and left me sitting
there. I felt ashamed then. I knew I was trying to intervene in a personal
matter, the most personal matter of all,
my
own death.
I knew I had wounded him. But the real wound was outside and beyond me. What my
death represented. What I, his dying wife, had ceased to represent.

What we forget
about inside a marriage, Elsa, is at least as important as what we remember.
You ought to know that. There is a margin, call it forgiveness, or privacy,
that must be respected at any cost. And I had trespassed on that margin.

I gave the money to the waiter and went outside. It had been raining
but the rain had stopped, and I looked out at the Piazza Unita and it was like
a sheet of heavy black glass had been laid across the stone, and all the golden
lights of the double-headed eagle were reflected in it, and then came the
margin of the road where headlights were passing, and then the real blackness,
the tumbling broken monolith of the sea. I walked in that direction, carrying
my shoes in one hand to save them from the puddles, and found him at the
railing looking out. I came up beside him and touched his arm and felt it tense
under the sleeve. Then he lifted it up and over and settled it onto my
shoulders with a long sigh and I leaned into him and thought
We’re
safe now, for now we’re safe. Even then he was slipping away into that privacy
that my death was trying to take from him, that I wanted to save, even at the
cost of my own. He would leave me, as I left you.
Making it
possible then, somehow, for you to find us both.
Though you will not
write me back, though my time is over, still I know you will find us, in that
black margin. Find. Surrender.

Theory of the gaze:
no one’s in particular, anyone’s eyes borne on the back of a stranger the
camera selects for delectation, identification, man or woman. And when a woman
watches a man who watches, a man with eyes under hatbrim or behind sunglasses
prowling streets, pacing under windows, listening to a hotel phone with his
hand over the receiver, setting down his briefcase and picking up another
identical briefcase, asking for and receiving messages from the desk clerk,
standing absorbed in museums before Dutch masters, smoking cigarettes, dining
alone, pretending to read newspapers in railway waiting rooms, studying a sheaf
of photos and setting fire to them one at a time dropping each still flaming
into a metal trashcan, ambiguously wandering the red-light district,
encountering resistance, thugs, dead ends in alleys and apartments and
restaurants and graveyards. A man can be a search engine. A woman can see
through his eyes, can pay for his time sorting endless individual beads of
data, can follow his path on a map of Europe and see more deeply into the past.
A woman, cool as a blade, under crocodile tears, finds a sap, an agent, an icon,
to conduct an investigation identical with burial, and tamps down the dirt
around the body of her man. To look can be a way of not knowing, of bearing
down on mystery. A film by itself is evidence of nothing but your desire to
see. See without being seen, voyeur, collect the pieces of history that are
yours, that do not belong to you. The woman you won’t speak to is in back of
all this searching. She smiles wryly, enigmatically, from her seat in the front
row of the theater, so close to the screen that the images are almost
meaningless. Light, shadow, noise of a zither. Who made me and why. There has
to be a purpose. There has to be a story, in back or in front of this screen.
Another search term, another Boolean operator.
Trying not to read the subtitles.
Trying
not to feel the sticky human residue gluing your feet to the floor.
She
closes her eyes to be pulled forward forever. She opens them and falls back
into the page.

Pitiless sun
blazing on stone, a watery shimmer that reveals itself to be actual water, a
single trudging figure with suitcase rumbling behind him.
Pull back a little and buildings and awnings and jostling fringing
tourists appear: the center of the Piazza San Marco, with water pooling in the
center, a second layer to the image in which wavering man and campanile and the
cloudless sky appear and reappear. Refracted, dosed with lens flare, the camera
opens wide to convey the briny heat of summer in Venice, sun amplified by the
city’s long swoon of decay, heat that forces every unshaded eye to squint and
burn. Sprawled on the big screen the black figure at the plaza’s center ripples
toward us, but the lens must be long for he seems scarcely to move as he moves.
There is nothing on the soundtrack but the sound of lapping water and an
incoherent hum, as of voices, as of bees.

Eyes cannot adjust
so quickly: from the blinding rectangle with a spot of black at its center a
black room with a single lozenge of white, a window that gradually spreads what
can be seen before us: the tight little lobby of a penzione, sagging with dusty
velvet furniture. The man with the suitcase accepts a key from the bony,
mustached clerk, who speaks a few words of Italian to him. He nods in response,
then
begins the long trudge up the wooden stairs with
a worn strip of Turkish carpet for a runner. Cut to a shot from the top of the
staircase, looking down, mazy cored apple, with that hat and suitcase
occasionally slipping into view, breathing more harshly, thump and thump of the
rolling bag’s wheels as he drags it step by step. Cut to a simple wooden door
with an elaborate glass doorknob, which turns to admit the American and his
rolling bag to the sort of cramped, dingy room that bespeaks budget travel, so
small it must be a set with cut-away walls, there’s no room for the American
and his suitcase and our gaze in such a space, unless we peer in through the
window, let our body be the dazzling one and his the native of anonymity and
murk. There is a little brass bedstead and bed, a single chest of drawers with
a mirror propped on top of it, a half-folded plastic screen behind which a
combination toilet shower and sink has been ingeniously lodged, like something
you might find on a ship. Lamb drags in his case and closes the door behind him
and locks it with the key. He takes off the hat, moves to toss it on the bed,
thinks better of it,
hangs
it on a bedpost. He is
perspiring heavily. He takes off his suit jacket and loosens his tie. He wedges
himself into the little bathroom and runs the tap for a while
,
then splashes water on his face and washes his hands. He turns off the bathroom
light and sits on the bed with its threadbare lace coverlet; the springs groan.
After a while he gets up and goes to the window and opens the curtain. He leans
out and opens the shutter. The camera leans out with him and looks down into a
backwater canal, black water which only intensifies somehow the impression of
great heat. There’s a little marble bridge over the canal where a fat woman in
a tube top and short skirt smokes a cigarette. Shadows fall here and there, and
we can just glimpse the beginnings of an alley past the little square that the
bridge gives way onto. The ambient churning hum of voices suddenly and
violently returns.

Night shot of a
vaporetto churning up the Grand Canal, the San Marco campanile visible in the
background. Pulsing house music comes in heavy. Lamb in a courtyard surrounded
by elegantly dressed people holding slender flutes of Prosecco and Champagne.
Tiny white lights are strung on the balconies and balustrades, reflecting off
the large gleaming metal fountain streaming at the courtyard’s center,
streaming what looks like water but is actually paper-thin metallic streamers
animated by hidden fans, an effect somehow cheap and expensive at the same
time: some of the streamers are made from gold leaf, some are tinsel. The
camera can’t know this, like the caravan in the proverb it passes on,
circulating around the courtyard observing salient inhabitants and features. A
low stage against a far wall seemingly pocked with bulletholes, upon which a
short blackclad person of indeterminate gender with a tall plume of feathery
white hair and an enormous set of headphones is DJing—insistent, deafening
music to which no one is dancing except for a slender man in a white three-piece
suit and a black feather boa, his shaved head glistening, wineglass in hand,
right in front of the speaker stack to the DJ’s right. A long white
tableclothed table with two young men in black T-shirts and black jeans behind
it—the bar—visible occasionally as flashes of deft white hands and arms,
bobbing subdued faces, through breaks in the continual scrum. Ringing the
courtyard, as in an Escher drawing, a stone staircase with no handrail that
marches from one balcony to the next—four flights in all—and, contrasting with
the ancient stonework and the mottled, ruined plaster of the walls, a simple
black arrow on a dull gold background pointing upward at an angle. And the
arrow flickers, it’s actually an image on a flat screen TV anchored diagonally
to that wall, and becomes a woman in profile who steps forward to inhabit the
otherwise blank screen and purses her lips and raises a wand to them and blows
soap bubbles, and then walks off screen leaving scarcely visible crystalline
spheres in her wake, and the arrow returns. There are many such screens placed
at random on the walls, not all of them level, cycling through images akin to
road signs followed by men and women, of diverse ethnicities, all of them
beautiful, making repeated gestures that manage to appear childlike and
pornographic at the same time: a bare-chested Turkish man unwraps a candy and
pops it into his mouth; a European woman dressed as a Catholic schoolgirl jumps
rope in slow motion; an African man with a shaved head blows kisses at the
camera and smiles with heartbreaking guilessness. Passing the other people at
the party clustered in two and threes: the men in well-groomed middle-age, the
women young, showing lots of skin under expensively artless hairdos. The camera
seems like a stranger here, an outsider: it pauses for a few seconds at the
different groupings of people as if just long enough to ascertain that it knows
no one before passing on. Two men stand next to one of the screens holding
drinks: the image of a red circle with a white hyphen inside it fades into the
image of a heavyset man of Slavic appearance, nude, flaccid penis prominent in
its nest of pale blonde hair below his swelling gut, eating a chocolate bar and
smiling