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I’d spent the previous week telling her that she was nuts, AK-47 crazy, but she paid me no mind. My mother explained that every individual dealt with traumatic stress differently and one couldn’t predict wartime behavior based on non-bombing personality. As the Israeli missiles hit, my father drank, my mother cooked, my brother brooded, and my sister shopped for diapers. During non-bombing she was probably as rational as any Lebanese, but with each missile she grew more and more erratic. Her pink room brimmed with disposable diapers, four distinct piles from floor to ceiling; one diaper bag at the top looked like it was suffocating because it couldn’t fit between the ceiling and its brother below it. My sister had stuffed a dozen bags under the baby’s cot and at least twice as many under her bed. She had enough diapers to ensure that her son would be wearing them until he was six years old, maybe seven. When I pointed that out to her, she shouted, “Well, I might get pregnant again. It happens.”
But then this morning, we turned on the diesel generator to watch the television news and the announcer informed us that the Israelis had bombed the Johnson & Johnson warehouse the night before, incinerating everything in it.
“Why?” my mother asked the television.
My father looked at the bottle of scotch, but it was still early in the morning.
My brother sipped his coffee. “I’m sure terrorists were hiding between the shampoo and the Band-Aids. No more tears.”
My sister beamed, seemed to have grown taller in her chair. “I told you we’ll run out of diapers. Just you wait, they’ll bomb the Procter & Gamble warehouse next.” She was talking to us but looked as if she were addressing a large invisible audience. She pursed her lips and blew on newly painted fingernails.
enjoyed this
After the rape & the bloodbath, the savage king
& his men retired to a long shed built in an open
field by a thin river fashioned for this lull in the pillaging
so the horses could rest. One by one, they scrubbed
blood off their fingers & faces & sat down to devour
a feast of rice & goat served by the villagers.
The legend remains only in the name of a lodge
built in the same place, which from the Bengali means
the King’s Feedery, where the king took his meal.
We say Death stays here when it visits someone
in the family. The time it came for Grandfather, it arrived
late. Not at the wolf’s hour between midnight & first
light, but late morning on the highway, siren blaring
all the way to the nursing home. As if punishing us
for what it botched, it hung around for a few
months at the Feedery, then came for my aunt. Young,
suffering in a marriage, she was taken straight by her weak
heart. I imagine them, father & daughter, sitting still
across a table, sharing a meal of steaming boiled potatoes,
& always in the afterlife that vague dream of salt.
Death takes in threes, they said. We feared it would
come for one of us. In the trashed room,
they found Death’s ledger full of illegible scrawls
in a dark meter no one could understand.
Grandmother’s devastation circled complete, that year
a channel of clear water began thrumming beneath
her skin. We heard it rumble whenever she opened
her mouth to speak. When I think of love,
I think of her weeping as I left, her swollen lip
grazing the back of my hand through the car window. Brief
& bright her long blurred life now summoned
with Death lurking at the borders again.
Married at thirteen, adolescence lost
weeping into a cauldron of chopped onions. She talks
of the flimsy wooden hovel perched on four
fraying stumps & in her telling it is always
how she saw it first, herself decked in gold
with that sinking dread: a preface. I think of love
& I think how when they lifted Grandfather’s bier
she called out to him crying My child
my god my child
Those mornings in the last days of December,
as the smog deepened over the mausoleum
& the ghost of the emperor’s first wife
lingered about the four gardens, weeping
over her dead child
until a solitary jogger tore the curtain of fog
with a flashlight, making her flee
through a chink in the heavy lid of the small red tomb,
I rose at dawn, washed my face with water
cold as needles & went to work, stomach taut
as deerskin stretched over the seat of a chair.
On the terrace garden above my office,
I drank coffee & smoked a long cigarette
as something unnameable loosened its grip on my neck.
I remember thinking then, This cannot be
the worst of my days, but mostly I remember
myself in some variation of afraid.
Why, I can’t tell.
I had a job, an apartment,
& a woman who claimed to be in love with me
less & less each day. The city’s gray tongue
licked the windows of our room & I knew
they would come for us soon,
that one of us would be called first
to initiate the slaughter, then later
led into a dim corridor to watch
through a one-way mirror the other
slipping on entrails, trying to clamber out of it.
At the parties, I got drunk & cursed everyone.
At home, I smoked anything the women
from the university brought me.
I wrote poems that went on for years into my sleep.
When we finally parted, the city shrank
down to the few bars, her dentist, the hospital
she drove me to where they treated
the third-degree burns from the hot oil
that jumped out of a pan one night
to grab the back of my hand.
The billboards outside the malls looked
vulgar, like my scarred hand in the yellow
light that fell on the pavement. But always
that serious joy in the drunken body
stammering home in the dark.
In the daylight I felt dizzy with fear
of running into her. This vast city
open to invaders & vagrants for centuries
now small for two.
A few things became clear to me then.
The body itself has no use for hope.
It hardens in grief to live beyond hope.
And the only real use of narrative is to cheat
that ancient urge inside us, pale animal
with its face resembling the inside of our death
masks, its long unheeded, persistent murmur
clearing into a deafening verdict: Leave.
The Teacher raises a glass to her friend the Engineer, who has been promoted. The Teacher can’t afford this restaurant, but the Advertising Executive will pay. She always pays. They crowd around a laptop, perfumes mingling, to watch her latest car commercial. The waiters weave around the obstruction. Someone asks about the Lawyer’s big case that has not been decided yet. The Other Lawyer handles lucrative but ethically disgusting cases that no one asks about. The Teacher knows how her friends imagine her in class, as sure as a mother goose, with students trailing obediently behind. Every gathering, she is sainted anew for her work. She regains a bit of purpose and savors it as long as she can, until it evaporates, processed into the air of the school.
so bleak
INTERVIEWER
So what, for you, is this connection between poetry and the novel? A quality of vision?
VILA-MATAS
Probably. That quality comes from some writers’ facility for what we might call perception, the art of perceiving what’s going to happen. It’s a skill, an art, that we see very acutely in Kafka, for example . . . Literature is a mirror with the capacity, like some clocks, to run ahead of time. But we mustn’t mistake perception for prophecy itself. Kafka loved that work by Flaubert, Bouvard et Pécuchet, with its assessment of how stupidity will spread, unstoppable, in the Western world. But Kafka went one step further than the rest. He went beyond his own sources of inspiration in that, unlike Flaubert, he described the very heart of the problem, the situation of total impossibility, of impotence, that the individual faces before the devastating machine of power, bureaucracy, political systems.
VILA-MATAS
I fully recognize myself in it! Today I know that the best thing about that whole experience was getting to know Duras. I arrived in Paris tired of “normal people,” and tired, too, of all the prim, proper writers that proliferated at the time—not to mention these days, today there are even more. In Paris I confirmed that the writers who appealed to me were those like Duras, the kind who don’t appear on school honors plaques and who are divisive, distinctly unedifying, full of defects, but show immense talent. I think that really terrible side of Duras—she was spectacularly brutal—had a great influence on me.
INTERVIEWER
Brutal?
VILA-MATAS
Brutal because her obsession with writing sprang from a genuine belief that she could transcend the words and reach another—inexpressible—reality. And in order to reach it she was prepared to do anything. She was, frankly, scary. To put it another way, she was a writer on a mission. If I remember correctly, she described this process of reaching “the inexpressible” as “piercing the black shadow,” an “interior” shadow. I also remember that, given her belief that absolutely everybody possesses an inner shadow, she found it strange that not everybody wrote.
[...] I’m not the kind of guy who believes in hell, or in a god who imagines a lake of fire. I just can’t see it—you have a mind that’s wider than the sky and that is what you use it to picture? [...]
I went home and cried on K.’s shoulder. It was both of us who pooled resources together to do what we could for my dad. For months, K. had been dipping his hand into his pocket for the man who almost made us impossible, the man who would hate him on sight. It was somewhere in that breakdown that I changed my mind. The next day, I took K. to my father’s bedside. My person stood by me, watching us. Where is she? my father asked, ignoring the obvious. I stared back my response, no words involved, just eye to eye, man to man. I saw it click. He swallowed and then opened his mouth to talk. Nothing came out. I repeated myself with a closed mouth, hands in my pockets, staring him down. I felt K. turn to stone in fear. The money we’d both spent bullied my father in front of me, its knuckles ready for his teeth. Do you understand? the money asked him. He shrank and I almost pitied him. I reached for K.’s hand, and feeling how much it had been sweating, I lifted his hand to my mouth and pressed my lips to it before holding his palm to my chest. Are you sure you understand, Dad? I asked. By then, my voice was hot iron. No one, I decided there and then, is allowed to kill me twice. Using my child-voice he said, Yes sir, and using his dad-voice, I said, Good boy.
INTERVIEWER
Does this relationship with absence remain the reason why you write poems?
ANEDDA
I write to intensify reality and at the same time to undermine it, as Emily Dickinson does when she says, “Bring me the sunset in a cup / Reckon the morning’s flagons up.” The miracle of this poem is the dislocation of the relationship between the domestic and the universal. The visible is there, but reimagined by the swerve from ordinary perspectives and scales.
INTERVIEWER
You’ve said that the reason both Hemingway and Fitzgerald wrote their best books in their twenties (they were twenty-seven when they wrote The Sun Also Rises and The Great Gatsby) is that they “pickled their brains.” Do you really believe that?
IRVING
Yes, I really believe that. They should have gotten better as they got older; I’ve gotten better. We’re not professional athletes; it’s reasonable to assume that we’ll get better as we mature—at least, until we start getting senile. Of course, some writers who write their best books early simply lose interest in writing; or they lose their concentration—probably because they want to do other things. But Hemingway and Fitzgerald really lived to write; their bodies and their brains betrayed them. I’m such an incapable drinker, I’m lucky. If I drink half a bottle of red wine with my dinner, I forget who I had dinner with—not to mention everything that I or anybody else said. If I drink more than half a bottle, I fall instantly asleep. But just think of what novelists do: fiction writing requires a kind of memory, a vigorous, invented memory. If I can forget who I had dinner with, what might I forget about my novel-in-progress? The irony is that drinking is especially dangerous to novelists; memory is vital to us. I’m not so down on drinking for writers from a moral point of view; but booze is clearly not good for writing or for driving cars. You know what Lawrence said: “The novel is the highest example of subtle interrelatedness that man has discovered.” I agree! And just consider for one second what drinking does to “subtle interrelatedness.” Forget the “subtle”; “interrelatedness” is what makes novels work—without it, you have no narrative momentum; you have incoherent rambling. Drunks ramble; so do books by drunks.