Beautiful Soul: An American Elegy Read online

  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 forc
es 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

  What is that? the first man asks, and the second man answers, definitively, It’s brilliant.

  Names swirl and circulate as the camera makes its rounds: Hockney, Emin, Chapman, Hirst. Faces montaged in varying conversational attitudes: laughter, raised eyebrows, squints, protruding tongues, scowls, lidded glances, bland smiles.

  Lamb climbing the stairs, passing more screens, some with viewers, most without. The bass diminishes and faint strings make themselves heard as he climbs, getting louder and cleaner as the other sounds fade: a Schubert string quartet playing in one of the brighter neighborhoods of A minor. The camera pushes past him in a sudden urgent rush, up the stairs and straight up dizzily into the pearlescent evening sky, swivels down to capture a pattern of rooftops, dotted here and there by lights, and then two blazing strips with the black ribbon of the canal dividing them, a ripple of negativity, water by night, lined with crumbling, brilliantly illuminated landings and palaces. The rooftop erratically lit by a few colored Chinese lanterns where a few people term and team while the Schubert carries on without a source. Coming up to the back of a woman in a short sharply cut cocktail dress looking out over the city. Lamb’s voice folds into a conversation already in progress.

  It’s like thinking about the piece is more interesting than the piece itself.

  Yes, of course.

  The woman, one arm folded across her chest, the other holding a highball glass, with a large Louis Vuitton bag dangling from one shoulder. Sharp angles and planes to her face, which has a Mediterranean cast; thick coarsely curled black hair with a white streak at the right temple, wearing a hip-hugging black dress with green horizontal stripes that not very many figures could pull off.

  I just don’t see why we can’t think and feel at the same time, that’s all, Lamb says. Art is physical, I am physical. You are physical.

  They are leaning on a railing, looking out over the Grand Canal, beyond the Palace of the Doges where the lagoon begins and history, from which the city stands recused, resumes its course.

  We are divided between pleasures, and all pleasures are of the flesh, the woman says. Riot and renunciation, there’s really no difference, no difference between multiplication and subtraction; either way you lose sight of yourself. If I taste, suckle, supple myself to another, that is pleasure. And astringency, denial, abstraction, diets, refusing sweets, that too is pleasure, though of a higher sort.

  What’s higher about it?

  Because denial is always itself and also the thing denied. It
is the pleasure of anticipation deferred.

  I think you just enjoy feeling superior. Isn’t that what the Biennale is about? What Venice is about? All of fucking Europe, actually.

  But the other sort of pleasure is purely positive, the woman continues. It is mortal. It leaves no trace. The only thing it leaves behind is itself. The deadliness of repetition. One needs higher and higher doses. The law of diminishing returns takes effect.

  He has her, she has him. They are alone at the center of the party.

  One must continually increase the level of stimulation, she says. Finally the organism can no longer take it. Something breaks down. The capacity for pleasure, for living, breaks down.

  You could say the same thing about denial. You can get addicted to it. It works backwards, doesn’t it? Needing less and less until you’re hardly there at all?

  She’s throwing herself at him. Is it all words? Bought and paid for?

  It depends on what you deny and why, she says. Denial can be a secret fullness. I go to a restaurant—a charming café. I sit outside, it’s springtime. There are lovers and baby carriages and lecherous old men in beautiful bespoke suits. The waiter is a dark lean and handsome young man from the East, Greek or Estonian, Turkish perhaps, an immigrant, but cocky, with a long fall of straight black hair curling at his collar. He doesn’t hand me a menu, he knows me, he brings me an espresso without my having to ask. I ask for a pastry to accompany it, he smiles knowingly and withdraws. The people pass. The pastry, something slightly vulgar, let’s call it an éclair, is brought to the table with a folded linen napkin, a fork, a little glass of water. I pick up the napkin and spread it across my lap. I pick up the fork, and press its edge into the rich chocolate, it splits and the cream comes out. I raise the fork to my lips and extend my tongue, I take a single taste—not even a lick—of the bit of cream and chocolate adhering there. Then I put the fork down. I do not take a bite. I do not pick up the pastry with my hands as I did when I knew nothing of pleasure. I sip my espresso. The world goes by. I open my purse and take out a single bill, I spread it flat on the table. I use the laden plate to weigh it down so that it is not carried away by the breeze. I stand up and I walk away. Do you understand?