Motion Sickness (6 page)

There is no progress, there is repetition. John the New Zealander was very fond of saying that, but I wouldn’t tell Zoran because then he’d ask me about John and get possessive and jealous in the most so-called reactionary way.

A long time ago a young woman from France or Germany or Great Britain arrived here on the start of a journey. She left home to travel when travel was hard and when few women traveled alone. Or at all. I can see her. In a long brown skirt of durable material, a dark jacket, sensible shoes, a broad-brimmed hat and a scarf, she is tall and solid, short and slight, blond, dark. She does not fall in love with anything but adventure. Adventure is to her what Jesus is to nuns—the true marriage partner—and she dedicates her life, her being, to this fascinating mate. Remarkably resilient, carrying a map and compass, and only one leather suitcase, she enters Tangier on the beginning of a journey that will be her life and over many many years she loses touch with everyone she ever knew. Or her father dies, her brother marries, her mother dies, her friends marry, her lover gives up hope of her coming back and marries her cousin, and one girlfriend, who teaches school, lives out her life as a spinster, a woman with a secret, and only she keeps in touch with her. Or, no one reaches her, she breaks off relations completely, and were she to hear that her father died, it would not touch her. She ends in the desert, knowing the ways of the Bedouin, or she ends near the jungle, or she uses her inheritance to buy a large house where she lives simply and learns to fly a plane and becomes a mail carrier. Or she is desperately poor, having given her money away, and exists as an oddity in the village or town that tolerates her eccentricity. Or she trains chimpanzees to follow her as she walks around the grounds of her estate. She is Freya Stark, the writer and traveler, who urges you to “let yourself go on the stream of the unknown.” Or she is Isabelle Eberhardt who dresses like a man, and is hungry for love, for adventure, always hungry. Or she is a character like Kit Moresby in Paul Bowles’s
The Sheltering Sky
who goes mad and wanders in the desert forever, forever untethered.

She is eager to begin her trip. The future was the desert, as the future now is outer space, a future that science-fiction writers long ago colonized and have been waiting impatiently for us to enter. Perhaps going into the desert would be going backward since time might be curved, and anything can be the present, past or future. If this is true then my not going into the desert—to lose myself, my mind—is not just a matter of cowardice or lack of adventurousness. I may have already been there or will be going there. Still, I think about it often. Losing myself in the desert. Abandoning everything, being abandoned. Taking up residence in a small town in Iowa where no one would know me. I’d cut off all ties to my past, I’d use the frontier, I’d become a frontier. I’d be known as that woman at the edge of the real last frontier. I’d have a front porch in my frontier version of reality. I’d sit on that front porch and gaze out at limitless skies and pastures. Relativity would be as close as I came to relatives. Not that I have many, just my mother really. I owe her a letter.

From the patio I stare at the azure and pink sky, the sky sipping at the sun the way I sip at my whiskey soda whose two ice cubes have melted. Melted ice cubes under melting suns, days melting into nights, transient often indistinguishable moments, and why Irish Pete, Pete of Amsterdam, should walk into this scene now, walk in from nowhere, why he does and where he’s come from is just one more of those boundaryless moments. I’m glad I’m drinking Irish whiskey, I think, and close my book, Philby’s
My Silent War
.

Like Sal he recognizes me immediately, and like Charles he is wearing different clothes, a different fashion, which offers a very different image from the one Pete struck in Amsterdam. A newly coined image, a newly minted stamp. In any case Pete’s got on a linen jacket, baggy trousers and is carrying a small men’s pocketbook. He is, he tells me, here on business but the business is clearly not my business. Import/export, I ask good-humoredly. ‘Course, yeah, Pete answers. The call for prayer sounds and reminds me of Istanbul, of Mr. Yapar and the minarets, of a hailer of images. I ought to send a postcard to Cengiz. I suppose Pete didn’t meet Cengiz, or Charles, but I won’t ask. He and I order more to drink and sink deeper into our chairs. He didn’t go east, to Istanbul, or if he did that’s not what he’s telling me. He went south to Barcelona with some friends, then came here and is staying with people in the Socco. A rich German’s house, he says. Which may account for his new clothes. He doesn’t mention Olivier and neither do I, a lesson I learned from the English brothers. Pete may tell me in time, I content myself with that, leaving him on the veranda or patio, picking up my keys from Mr. Mrabet, the urbane concierge who, I’ve decided, has a developed sense of the ridiculous. I’m not sure why I think this.

My simple room has a remarkable view of the harbor. Like Pete, the English brothers might appear on the horizon out of nowhere, and I’d be happy to see them. Though they wouldn’t come by boat. And no Madame Butterfly is watching for them. If one of them were to dock, though, it’d be Paul, I think. Jessica might show up. She must be well into her pregnancy, by now. Unless she’s miscarried or had an abortion. Perhaps the birth was extremely premature and she had three tiny babies, triplets. What would happen if all three looked into the mirror at the exact same moment?

In the distance the green-blue water moves toward and away from land, a gentle rolling motion that in a second could become roiling and rocking. Still water runs deep but constant movement assures one of continuity though this is against, always against, one’s better judgment. I choose a postcard for the English brothers, my mother and Charlotte. The same one, of the hotel patio.

I lie on the bed and look out the window then at the room’s whitewashed walls with their message of past and faded glory. Faded glory isn’t failure. This room is a palimpsest, hiding many layers of lives, which can be counted by the number of times the room has been repainted. Like a tree’s rings. The hotel was once owned by French people, but is now in Moroccan hands. Mr. Mrabet may be an owner or an employee. If an owner, a small businessman, he’d be subject to, as my father warned, the fluctuations of the market. Which must be worse than the banal vagaries of love. Mr. Mrabet, responsible for all this, or Mr. Mrabet, a Willy Loman, subject to all this.

The hotel’s past elegance is an oasis, a fantasy. It produces delicate troubling thoughts as does looking into the face of a very very old man or woman. Reading faces, reading walls. Some friends say it’s easy to read me, the involuntary expression on my face. The only recourse might be plastic surgery but if I had it done this young I’d have to do it every five or ten years and end up with no epidermal elasticity at all, with no ability to smile. Or with a fixed smile. A forehead much too high, not necessarily noble like Bette Davis’s as Queen Elizabeth, or it’d be unearthly like Peggy Lee’s. And I’d be permanently dissembled.

From my window, the people at the tables below are flat, and if I were to draw them they’d lack any true proportion and I wouldn’t know where the vanishing point would be. I don’t have that kind of perspective. It could be anywhere. As in those old cartoons by Fleischer where the character jumps out of the ink bottle and draws himself, then jumps back in at the end of the story, leaving a blank screen.

“Today only exaggeration can be the medium of truth.”

—Theodor Adorno

Gregor’s loft is in an abandoned factory on a narrow sheet in a worker’s section of town that’s being modernized. But in a good way, he tells me, not like in New York. The old and poor won’t get pushed out. It will be better here, with more services. He hasn’t been back in Germany—he’s from Cologne—in several years. I’m not staying with him; I didn’t want to. There’s an inexpensive hotel in the center of town, a sliver of a building on a sheet across from an impressive church whose bells ring on the quarter hour. Its bell tower can be seen from my window.
A Hunchback of Notre Dame
setting. It suits me better. Gregor’s generosity can easily be abused. I don’t want to be one of those to do it. The hotel manager, Mr. Del Rio, speaks no English and what I speak to him is a combination of German, Spanish and French, a few words of each, and he finds this amusing. At least I hope he does when he doesn’t find it frustrating. I’m reading Highsmith’s
Ripley’s Game
.

Gregor reads voraciously and keeps a diary that he writes in scrupulously each day at a desk surrounded by small fileboxes in which are stored annotated comments about what he’s read. He’s disciplined, a vegetarian, and his home is nearly bare, except for the vast wall of books which I’ve referred to as his Berlin Wall. Irony, yes? he asks. All of Freud, in German and English, Melanie Klein, Christa Wolf, Hegel, Marx, Handke, books on Hollywood film, Dickens, Stendhal, Flaubert, Resnais, Duras, biographies galore. He tells me he sometimes is transfixed in front of his books, awed and dismayed. He has put money into a few films, acted in some, written a play about, he says, his alienated generation, and receives monthly checks from his father. Guilt money, Gregor calls it. Though he doesn’t like to see people—he is, he insists grimly, compulsively counterphobic—he knows many and keeps a stack of notebooks near his telephone, with names and addresses of the interesting people he’s met. All over the world, I suppose, or at least the Western one.

That’s how I meet Clara, or Clare, as she was called in the States. Gregor thought I would find her appealing, this elderly but still youthful woman who has livid everywhere and done everything. A “classic” was his way of designating her. There is no one quite like her, he says. Gregor brings us together for dinner at a small restaurant that serves excellent octopus which Clara can’t eat and neither can L You have a sensitive stomach, she says, like me, except when I was young I could eat anything. She is trim, about my height, not short or tall, and speaks English infected by her native German.

Clara came to the States before the second war, a young woman just able to escape alone and with no possessions. I guess she’s in her early seventies, but has no gray hair, like my mother who is years younger. Clara offers to take me to the Picasso Museum the next day, always a pleasure for her, and so much more now that Generalissimo Franco is dead and one can be in Spain again and even Picasso can be in Spain again.

I meet Clara at her apartment house. She’s waiting in the lobby, looking at her watch. She takes my arm and leans against me with a presumption of intimacy that I appreciate. We walk like this to the museum. Clara claims each stair cautiously as we climb to the room where, she tells me, Picasso’s versions of Velázquez’s
Las Meninas
hang. She puts on her reading glasses to see the dates of the Picassos. The Velázquez, she remembers, was 1656. The Picassos were done in 1957. Velázquez’s triumph challenged Picasso, Clara explains, and so the little man—she speaks as if she had taken his measure firsthand—had to take it up, for the father must be slaughtered by the son. To illustrate Clara wrings the throat of an imaginary father.

Clara gestures to the paintings on the four walls. She thinks the Velázquez has a quiet movement, but that the Picassos show a frantic mind. Velázquez was in favor at the time he painted, while Picasso was in exile. “His are nothing like the original, the original doesn’t matter. This shows what a different time we live in. For that alone it is important work.”

Clara stands resolutely in front of one of Picasso’s portraits of the Infanta Margarita Maria. A detail from the Velázquez. It’s the figure Arlette humorously compared herself with and, for me, becomes another coincidence. Clara standing there is a superimposition, one that removes the scene for a moment of private contemplation, a moment I don’t want to make too much of. Anyway Arlette was Velázquez’s version, not Picasso’s. Still I can almost see Arlette rolling her big eyes from side to side, ruminating aloud about dark backgrounds or negative space, her feet curled under her on the couch in her living room. She might like Clara, at least admire her will and politics, I think, if not agree with her approach to art. Clara’s body is still rigid with attention. She turns to me. Shall we go? she asks, taking my arm. Nowadays museums depress me.

I can hear Gregor in her voice, the way she thinks, as if he were her son. We drink coffee in an outdoor café in the center of the city, with trees and plants encircling us rapturously. The hours pass. Clara holds me in the grip of her narrative. She tells me she is an artist, a Communist and a lesbian, what she calls a triple threat. Clara married twice in New York, both times to a sympathetic man, another homosexual. She doesn’t use the word gay and articulates each syllable of homosexual distinctly, proposing it as the proper formulation, the more complicated one commensurate to the position. She tells me that in those days, the thirties, the forties, even the fifties, that’s what they did, marry each other. She describes our time as a crueler one. She moves from one cruelty to another. During the McCarthy era even though like many others she had torn up her Party membership card years before and wouldn’t be directly implicated, not asked to testify, she was out of the U.S. more than in it, establishing residence in Paris and Rome. Her last husband was rich and today she is a well-heeled widow—she first says high-heeled, then corrects herself—maybe a contradiction, she confesses wryly, for a lesbian Communist, but one she carries with dignity.