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Cayman

Posted on by sterlingbennett

Cayman

“It takes me about ten minutes to get inspired.” This was my typical lament at Collin’s house, where the men gather to write. And so, I took my notebook and went outside for a short night stroll, figuring that darkness was more suggestive than indoor lights. I eased the screen door shut, crunched down the driveway past the four plastic flamingos on the lawn and climbed the footpath and turned left along the dike road that held the swamp back on one side and the Pacific on the other. I crossed the old, riveted bridge, still painted here and there, now closed to cars for safety reasons. Below, beside the black water of the swamp, there against a bank of sand lay–I counted them–seventeen caymans with their narrow snouts and fat bellies, one twice the size of myself, two more only slightly shorter, yet still heavier than me.

I stumbled down the path at the end of the bridge and approached from downwind so they would not smell me. They lay facing the west, listening, I assumed, as I was, to the rumble and thunder of the Panamanian surf. I lowered my profile and crabbed my way toward them, my notebook on my belly and my penmanship pointing skyward. But when I let myself down with a little bump, my legs out straight, with speed that defied vision, there was a thrashing splashing, enough to induce a limbic tingling up and down my spine that they had not come straight at me. When the water settled and my heart slowed and I thought to breathe again, and now with sufficient inspiration, I found my pen and began to write.

I wrote about the Caymans, their eggs, their cousins the crocodiles and alligators and iguanas and lizards, and then acquaintances and colleagues at the university. I wrote as medieval poets do, about chastity and unrequited love.

“Oh horn-browed beauty with yellow teeth,”I wrote, “what is this longing to dance with you in your fetid keep, if only I knew you wouldn’t clamp those shapely jaws on me the bard who sings your scaly charm?”

As I wrote, I noticed bubbled brows watching me from just above the surface, gliding toward me.

“I will write of your belly white like mine,” I murmured on, as I wrote. “But never about that place nearer your tail. What about breasts? Some sort of rounded form that poets love?”
Still silent—to be expected—she drifted closer, rose out of her slimy sink, and dripping waddled up the sandy bank until I thought it wise to back away.”

But something kept me in my place. Was it the look she gave me? It must have been a she, I thought, because I saw some sort of softness below her neck.

Something held me by the left foot. Or was it just the poet’s mood? I read her my poem. She closed her eyes. I like to think she wept.

My audience had grown. Now all seventeen lay at my feet, the moon rose full from behind the bridge.

I thought to sing them an ancient Nordic lullaby. The mood seemed right. We stayed that way until I at least was chilled by the salty mist and decided I should leave and return to the men’s writing group. But when I started to rise, she the Big One opened her eyes, and, with expression, refastened her grip on the tip of my left boot and held me there, as if to say, “One more,” and so I invented something on the spot, “O great beauty of this miserable swamp, the moon thy mother warms thy snout, and even if you now let me go, I would not leave, I love this so.” And with that, she let me go, snapped her teeth in a triple clack. With this signal I saw I was free to go. But since love is fickle and poets, not always honored, I kept looking behind to be sure she had not changed her mind and was considering dragging me back into her murky muck to eat. I climbed up to the dirt road, crossed back over the bridge, and followed my lunar shadow toward the house. Looking back down, I saw the sand bank beside the bog was clear and not one of the seventeen Caymans had thought to linger. The men’s cars were gone, the house was asleep, still guarded by Collin’s four flamingos who never slept. My forty-year old Land Rover Defender growled up a start. My notebook rode beside me, my penmanship facing up, largely unreadable from the speed with which I had written. It was the only evidence of my inspiration. That and a slight tingling in my boot.

A Homage to Writer and Rebel Gerry Haslam

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Gerry Haslam and I used to huddle in his or my office located in the new gym at Sonoma State College, before it became Sonoma State University. It might have been his first year. I know it was mine. That was 1967. I was overwhelmed. I was the single parent of two little boys, 5 and 2, Markus and Dylan. I was still writing my PhD thesis for the stuffy German Department at UC Berkeley, where Thomas Mann’s son Golo was teaching. Whom I hardly registered and never spoke to. The Vietnam War was raging, and I was trying to find my place, without much success in the Age of Free Love. And so, in this weakened condition, I was susceptible to Gerry Haslam’s satanic whispers that he would write literature rather than be a fussy critic of other people’s creations. To me, this was a daring heresy that I could scarcely take in. I could only see that he was a rebel, and that part stuck. And so, easily influenced, I started to write, little stories here and there in German and English. Without really noticing it, I had joined the creative conspiracy, instigated for me by this kind and clever man. He had taught me the alchemy of S + W = L. storytelling plus work to make literature. One day, twenty years later, in Weimar, East Germany where Goethe and Schiller had written, I asked my mildly Marxist professor of Germanistik (pronounced with a hard g) the Faustian question, “Why analyze literature to death instead of creating literature?” The young woman was speechless and now had another reason to be suspicious of me. At age 70, I published my first novel and, in a month or so , at almost 85, I will have published my fourth novel , plus a collection of short stories—all of it historical fiction set in Mexico where Dianne Romain and I have lived for the last twenty years.

All of this, aside from the Dianne Romain part—who is also a novelist—may not have happened without those early heretical whispers from that kind and loving academic rebel, my friend and fine writer Gerry Haslam.

The Men’s Writing Group

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The Men’s Writing Group

 

They approach the house in one’s and two’s. Some of them have been coming for fifteen years or more. Still, there is fear, the urge to pee. Instead, they reach down, gather up loops of dirty blue intestines, their own, pieces they have dragged along behind them for years, the result of encounters with other men. They draw in half-breaths to ease the tension, so their wounds can recede like so many snails’ heads. They smooth a hand over a place on their stomachs, just above the other vulnerable place, which rides along shriveled and apprehensive. They knock, open the door, shake off the rain. Like small boys, their eyes are wide and alert, and they hope for the best. They talk in short bursts. They want to feel affection and gentleness directed at them from the other men who are already in the house. But they themselves, the new arrivals, are not accustomed to offering affection, and so little of it is passed forward in either direction. They do not know whether to shake hands, whether to stand up from the sofa for the greeting, whether to proffer a hug, and with what intensity, and for how long, and how close to bring their heads or their already stricken stomachs where there is now no feeling whatsoever. Because there is something profoundly off-putting about a gathering of men, if you are a man, and if you are not an up-and-at ‘em kind of fellow, triumphant in card playing, business, sports and war, or some other kind of plotting and trouble.

 And how is it even possible to gauge openness, if we have not ever really mastered the art of openness, not in the course of forty-five, fifty, sixty or two million years? And why should we really, when we sense, just behind it all, the hidden carcass that one of us may have placed in a cave or the crook of tree or under a heavy rock before entering the house? Meat that will not be shared. And isn’t that the smell of woman that someone has carried in on his clothing, the scent that narrows eyes, flares nostrils and evokes the question: In exactly what place have I left my sling and stones, my obsidian knife, my Navy Colt.45, and am I sure that all seven chambers are oiled, and primed with cap and ball?

 But still, we ease ourselves into our chairs. The smiles seem inviting, but is it just the tendency to over-compensate? At intervals, there is wheezing laughter, snorts, sweet moments of more than a little letting down, when abruptly something changes, and we are brainless beady-eyed chickens again that have spotted a weakness and we begin to peck at the one who through too much exposure and brief forgetting has called attention to himself and immediately becomes the recognizable sacrificial runt.

The boundary between concerned inquiry and beaked irony is obsidian thin. The self-revealing phrase is met with a response that drips with cleverness and irony. And so, it is safer to say nothing. Nothing real like doubt, worry or sadness that afflicts the stomach and the sad little boy place below it. And so, but for an obsidian syllable or two, this time blood was not spilt, because none was offered.

 And when we trundle home and crawl into our dark warm beds and meet our mate’s sleepy inquiries, we are at a loss to explain how our male companions were that night. Was so and so healthy? she asks. Did he mention his woman friend? Did you talk about hope, dreams, fears, illness, death? Sexual tenderness, the miracle of touching, success or failure in closeness with this or that companion, lover or wife? And when our mate begins her deep breathing, a soft engine re-starting at our side, we lie awake and run through the evening again, like old bears who have come back from lumbering through cold forests, where we smelled scat and urine, took in scratch marks on fifty trees and pondered the prints and tracks and sweep of tail of countless other lonely co-dwellers who also wander across hollow, ridge, and swale, looking for food and meaning. We squint out into the bedroom’s darkness and re-measure what we thought we had measured the first time. An unnatural increase in volume, a sudden unexplained movement, a missed inference, the possible intent of all the words uttered. We noted exhaustion, boredom, isolation, pinched souls, perhaps a lover’s bloom. The whole time, behind them we’re sure we see flickering images of their dogs watching us, for now, leashed, but also showing curled lips and yellow teeth and eyes dark with fear. Like us, seeking soft longing in their masters’ generous hands, and in the hidden pulse of hearts beating out, each in a different rhythm, what remains of the five billion heart beats each of us is granted.

 And as we wrote, at the men’s group, we forgot for a while the meat, the scent of the carcass placed in the crotch of a tree, the stiffening hunted flesh that will belong to the strongest of us in the end. But still, I have to say what I am thinking. I do not trust these men. We hunt momentarily together, as if in a truce required by nature, so that we do not die of starvation and loneliness. If the conditions were right and we were fishermen and our boat was sinking, would I give up my survival suit for any of them? Or they for me? I would for either of my children. I would give it up for my mate – the one who sleeps on, leaving behind for the moment her amazement at how little men know about each other.

 Or would I give it to one of them as well? Since each one may be as kind as he is dangerous, as generous as he is treacherous, as much soft as competitive. Then, when the steel plates pop, in the middle of an icy night, as my mate sleeps warmly on beside me, and sixty tons of trawler roars and moans and plunges out of sight, nearly sucking me and one other writer down with it in exactly ninety seconds, you have one survival suit between the two of you, and you say to your companion: No, you take it, your children are young. And he says: No, you take it, you are older than I am and not as strong. And in the end one of us holds the other in his arms, and when he can no longer keep his gaze on you and eyes start to break, you hold his face close to yours, and you say: O my dear friend, I love you, I love you. I have always loved you.

The Fence and the Sadness of Men

Posted on by sterlingbennett

 

The Fence and the Sadness of Men

 

I was standing by the fence on the morning of the stillest day of the winter. Frost clung to the ground, the eucalyptus were mute and dying, their outer branches at least. I saw him at some distance. John Burrows on his 1949 John Deere row tractor, the high ping ping of the engine carrying across the cold fields.  It was the A model with the close-together front wheels and the overall tricycle look. Its twenty-five or thirty horses were geared down to make a powerful ploughing machine and an unstoppable widow-maker when one of the two rear wheels climbed a stump or dropped into a hollow, tipping the tractor over sideways and pinning the driver under too much weight for him to breathe.

I imagined him smoking but had heard he’d stopped since Alice had died. The one thing he treasured most he gave up as a way of being with her when he normally would have been with himself. A neighbor said he also wore his wife’s scarf, a cream-colored Angora sort of thing that farmers did not wear and felt uncomfortable about even when their wives wore them. But John had changed, and he was dangerous to laugh at. At least, no one dared to and wouldn’t have anyway.

We talked about him in Booth’s Cafe. How he wore the scarf, and the pipe in his mouth, upside down because of the rain—except that it wasn’t raining, therefore some sort of half-mast gesture. We talked about his farm and how it needed painting and plumbing and tanks that needed to be cleaned and cows attended to. Gary the vet had come of his own accord finally, with an excuse that the county required it of him—an inspection for sleeping sickness, or something like that. But we all knew that Gary had come because of John’s grief and had spent as much time watching his friend as feeling cows’ udders and the veins in their necks.

 

The whole time Gary was there, John drove the tractor out across the corn stubble and frost, leaving herring-bone tractor tire tracks, crisscrossing the fields enshrouded in frost and cold and bereft of meaning, navigating this way and that with no discernable pattern. That was what worried Gary, whose father had walked across his own fields with a shotgun and blown off an ear out of desolation when Gary’s mom died. Gary had come after him, found him, and led him home, the old man not being able to hear a thing, weeping, and laughing about how he’d missed and what a goddamn fool he’d been and how much he loved Gary. And then he had stumbled, and the two of them went down, fell and then got up on their knees and held each other for the first time in their lives and wept and held each other the way the frost held the fields.

Gary couldn’t keep inventing reasons to watch over John. He’d made four long veterinary visits that same week, and his receipts were showing it. He called and suggested maybe I should find something to do up by the fence, that John would come by eventually—and so I’d just gone straight over, driving the pickup up the gorge road, stopping briefly to see if I could see trout in the black icy water beside it, then on up to the ridge that separated the Burrows farm from ours.

I could hear the tractor long before it came up over the horizon. Then I could see him. There was purpose in his life again, at least enough to have him follow the line of the fence and not just make crisscrosses all over the fields. I tapped the fence post in front of me as if it needed something, banged on the top strip of the barbed wire a few times, testing for tension. I walked around the pickup, kicking the tires, checking the pressure. And then it occurred to me what needed to be done. I opened the hood and pulled one of the distributor wires off and dropped it down through the engine onto the ground and continued bending over the engine, poking around at nothing.

I heard the tractor stop. That was a good sign. John sat looking at me, and I watched him, gazing into his sad eyes, looking for some indication of what his intentions were. He sat for a long time, his Alice scarf hanging down like a college boy’s, his pipe inverted, his hands red and blue from gripping the iron steering wheel. I said nothing. No greeting seemed appropriate. And he—I hadn’t required anything of him—he just sat there, the engine running, the white sun above us sailing slowly toward the dying eucalyptus grove to the west.

“My truck won’t start,” I managed to say eventually. His face remained as before. With just the hint of a smile appearing at the edges of his mouth, as if he saw through my ruse.

His lips moved.

“What?” I shouted. But not that loud. His mouth opened further. I wanted to say, “How are you?” But I already knew how he was.

“I miss Alice,” he said.

I was unprepared for that. He reached up and took the pipe out of his mouth. I mounted the wire fence, jumped down on the other side and approached the tractor. He handed me his pipe, stem-first but didn’t let go when I took it. His eyes brimmed and filled so much I wasn’t sure he couldn’t see me. The pipe trembled and I continued pulling him by the pipe, at the same time taking another step toward him, pulling him past his tipping point, until he came away from the tractor, slipping down onto the field, and I knew what to do, although I had never done it before and held him while he cried and then couldn’t hold back myself and let loose, the two of us howling like two sad dogs, Gary said, who had returned for the fifth time that week and had followed the most recent herring bones across the field and along the fence until he saw us. He stopped his truck a little way off and shut off his engine and listened to the cries and howls, he said, coming across the dark field, the ping ping of the tractor swallowed up by the silent clinging frost, and the cold white sun curving westward.

The next day, at the Booth’s café, where the town’s most silent farmers—all of them my friends—met for coffee late mornings after milking, feeding and mucking, someone asked Gary how John Burrow’s cows were doing, as if Gary might have veterinary information that could be useful to all of them. The question was slow and neutral. And so Gary began to tell the story. Everyone stopped talking. Even fierce Agnes Booth stacked dishes in slow motion so she wouldn’t miss a word. Not a farmer met Gary’s gaze as he spoke, he said later. He told about telling me to go up and wait by the fence, that John would come along. How he had let himself in the field and had followed the most recent herring bone tire track until he had seen the John Deere and me standing beside it. He said he couldn’t tell whether we were talking. That I was just standing there, and John was holding out what appeared to be his pipe. A farmer stirred sugar into his cup, clinking the spoon against porcelain. A big red hand came out from the man beside him and calmed the stirring. Someone else blew his nose quietly into a red bandana with his eyes closed. One or two others rubbed at something in their eyes with their forefingers. Men folded the flap of an ear forward to hear better. Gary told how I had pulled on the pipe until John had swiveled around in the steel bucket seat and come down into my arms. That was when Agnes Booth, without a sound, and with her head down, withdrew through the swinging door to the kitchen, easing the door shut behind her and studying the farmers for a moment through the round window, as if realizing the gathering had suddenly become something very private and foreign. Then Gary told them about John and me howling like sad dogs. Which is when the men gasped, coughed, sniffed in mucous, and said “God!” to explain why they were crying and suppressing the tears with heels of their powerful hands, trying to recover with deep, deep breaths.

A week later, in a soft voice, Agnes told me she had thought a dam was about to burst and that that was the the reason she had left the room, that she hadn’t known whether it would be water she would be able to swim in. A week later, I was there when John Burrows walked into Booth’s Cafe without the scarf, sat down, ordered Agnes’s coffee and lit his pipe.

 

 

Storytelling:Why Now?

Posted on by sterlingbennett

STORYTELLING. Why now? I recently decided to use the pandemic to share my stories. I had been lamenting to my love that local writers here in Guanajuato could no longer get together and read to each other and their friends. So I am going to “read” by posting stories in the style of 14th Century Boccaccio with his collection of short stories contained in Decameron when the context and setting was the Black Death. The advantage is that I resuscitate and share what might entertain. It forces me to continue to perfect my craft, honors earlier efforts and encourages new ones and accepts the challenge of drawing eyes away from Netflix, maybe by suggesting that we all have stories that need telling. So maybe get out your quill and ink and pull together that yarn that you keep seeing and hearing at different moments, from different angles, through the years, so that a daughter, granddaughter, or great-granddaughter will have some bearing on where she came from or may be heading, thanks to you. So she has something to peg her stories to, so she can be connected to a history of storytelling.

Foreground

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Foreground

The first two weeks of June in Paris were so cold and rainy that I had to go to the flea market at the Place d’Aligre in the 12th Arrondissement to replace the short-sleeved high-desert shirts I had brought with me from Mexico. I paid two Euros for a heavy cream-colored wool sweater that zipped down to my solar plexus and made me look like a small-boat captain at the evacuation of Dunkirk exactly seventy years earlier. I bought a faded green Levi jacket stiff with mildew, which – from too much Marais district Orthodox strudel – barely buttoned over my English sweater. Thus equipped, I went to the Seine to paint. I wanted to see which part of the mystique of Paris I could be part of, to see what lay below the surface of things French.
I had been to the top floor of the Orsay and seen the exhibit of P. H. Emerson, who drew with ink pen over original Heliographic negatives in the 1890s. The ink additions were hard to distinguish from the ghostly landscape backgrounds, especially in my favorite: “Marsh Leaves, Feuilles des marais,” London, 1895. I found it mildly disturbing, this process of super-imposing new representations on older ones, with a different medium.
There is more information you need to know. My great great-grandfather was born in Rouen, in the Haute Normandie. One recent Sunday morning, I had begun chatting with a woman sitting next to me at the Turenne Café, near the Place Des Voges. She was taking her café au lait with a group of neighborhood friends. The conversation turned to where I was from. I said I was from Mexico. But where are you from? they asked. Well, before that, California. But before that? I realized this was a question of origins. Perhaps my flea market sweater was showing and that was a clue. And so I told them about my great great-grandfather being born in Rouen.
“Then you are French,” they exclaimed, in unison. And then in fun: “Champaign all around!” And when I left, one of them pointed to the west and enjoined: “Be French!”
At a certain bench, beside the Seine, on the Ile Saint-Louise, I moistened my squares of color and considered what I saw before me. A dredger, its filling barge and a tug sat under the Pont Louis Philippe, the bridge that crosses to Ile de Cité at the Notre Dame. The dredge itself was what we used to call a steam shovel. This one was diesel, orange, and sat on rubber wheels, on top of it own barge. Six hydraulic arms bent down to the top of the barge to give the machine stability. From the barge, two massive black stilts extended down into the river bottom, to hold the whole floating assemblage in place: the dredge barge, the filling barge, and the tug – the vessel closest to me.
Before I go on, I should mention that I took my friends at the Turenne Café seriously and decided to know more about being French. I went to Rouen in search of Edouard Dupré and stayed a week. I made many phone calls. I knocked on doors. I walked through graveyards and looked at church records. I spent many hours at the Internet site Cercle Généalogique Rouen Seine Maritime.
George Edward Dupré was born in Rouen, France in 1798. He emigrated to Kentucky and owned fifty slaves. He chartered schooners and traded his goods in the Caribbean for tree crotches of sandalwood and mahogany for ship’s knees. On his third voyage, in 1838, his ship, ravaged by a great storm, broke its back against a reef on the coast of Florida. While most of the crew drowned, he and his idiot cabin boy clung to wreckage and drifted ashore, where they were killed by Seminole Indians. He was survived by my great-grandmother Sarah.
He had a brother Clément who stayed in France and produced generations of Cléments, the last of which fought the Germans in Normandy with the Communist branch of the French Resistance: The Front National. French Gestapo agents, a group called the Bonny-LaFont, arrested his love Marie Lambourne and said they would execute her if Clément did not give himself up. An exchange was arranged. Marie went free. Clément was tortured in the basement of 93 Rue Lauriston in the 16th Arrondissement, along with countless others. He gave up no information. Depressed, broken, and alone – with the image of Marie the last thing he saw behind his closed lids – he was guillotined one winter dawn in the building’s courtyard.
I found Marie in Rue Francs Bourgeois, in the Marais, near the Picasso Museum. She was 87 years old, five years older than me. She has a daughter and a granddaughter. Both of them are called Clémentia. I showed her all of my notes. She taught French to foreigners at the Sorbonne for many years. She spoke slowly and clearly, so I could understand. She was gracious and warm. The second bottle of wine – a Mosel – was covered in dust. She said we would not wash it because we were dealing with all aspects of the past. She brought out sheep’s cheese and three-quarters of a prodigious baguette she had purchased in that morning. She said we were cousins of some sort, and she would tell me anything I wanted to know.
I asked her about Clément. He was brave. And very funny, she said. He could blow up trains. He could also make up riddles, if we woke up anxious and afraid, early in the morning. We had a brass bed. She looked me straight in the eye, as she continued.
“There were four things then. Him, me, the brass bed, and the wonderful love we made in it.” I felt I should look away when she said this. But I didn’t.
She paused. Night had fallen. It was cool in the room. She got up slowly and turned on the electric wall heater. Then she sat down at the table again. She poured the last of the dusty wine into our glasses.
“This is the best wine I have ever tasted,” she said. “And I know it is because you have come to hear my story.” I took a sip and put the glass down.
“You probably want to know what happened to the bed,” she said. I said I hadn’t really thought about it. What I had thought about was a young woman with her eyes, together with a young Frenchman who might have looked a little like me, naked and clasped in love.
“When he died, I could not bear to lie in it alone,” she said. “I gave away the springs, and even the mattress. Then I enlisted a friend to carry the brass head frame to the river. I went with him. The Bonny-Lafont never gave me his body. The agent I dealt with said I should look for it in the Seine. I didn’t know whether to believe him or not. Sometimes the bodies of resistance fighters turned up in the river. So did the bodies of German soldiers.”
She stopped. She took her glass and poured the last inch of her wine into my glass. She smiled, with a face full of a joy I didn’t understand. “I can’t drink anymore,” she said. There were tears in her eyes. She got up. She said she was very tired. She kissed me on both cheeks. She said we were family. She said I was indeed French and that I should take that very seriously. She said she would call me soon.
Two days later, a letter arrived. “I know you are wondering – if you are who I think you are – what we did with the bed. We walked out onto the Pont d’Acole, I think it was, and threw it into the river. Very, very early in the morning when it was still dark. I cannot explain exactly why but it made great sense to me then. Remember we are family. Come visit me soon.”
I know I have kept you sitting, for too long, on the stone bench beside the Seine, waiting to see what I would paint. Also, let me defend myself by telling you that I do not believe in straight connections. It was cold. But I had my Dunkirk sweater and my Levi jacket. The dredge worked under the Pont Louis Philippe. Its steel bucket had four large teeth for rooting and tearing on the river bottom. Over and over, it swiveled and dumped the captured silt into the filling barge along side, swiveled back, dipped in again, like a great mechanical swan feeding on the bottom, and this time – jammed in its teeth – brought up the metal head frame of a bed. The machine swiveled. It shook the bucket over the filling barge like an angry animal, and the bed fell down out of sight into the collected silt.
I know what you are thinking. And I agree with you. It was not the right bridge. The river bottom had been dredged for seventy years. Most of us are not big on miracles. Jung would have called it synchronicity – two events connected by an overly attentive mind, but not connected in actual fact.
At the same time, the main barge – the dredger – raised its two black stilts, and everything drifted twenty feet closer, with the current.
I held my brush in midair. The matter of P.H. Emerson’s heliograph negatives was coming up. The barge drifted toward me, intruding into the foreground I had constructed on my painting. It brought the mud-blackened bed frame closer. And I began to wonder who or what was becoming the dark ink accent on a ghostly Emersonian background.
I could not believe it was Marie and Clément’s bed. But I did have to believe it had been someone’s bed. The same kind of question drifted closer: Who had thrown it from the bridge, and why? What blurred negative lay behind?
When I got back to my apartment – the size of a matchbox – I found another letter from Marie, the handwriting shakier.
“I believe it was the Pont d’Arcole. Very, very early in the morning – when it was still dark. I thought the bed would find him and give him comfort.”
Below these few lines there was a different handwriting.
I am a friend of Marie’s. I do not know what these words mean, but she had already addressed the envelope, and they lay next to each other on her desk. I am assuming they are connected. Marie died peacefully in her chair with a book of war-time photographs on her lap. I am including my phone number, if you would like to know more. Sincerely…
And then there was a name and the date, from two days earlier. I called the phone number, and Clémentia, Marie’s daughter answered. When I told her who I was, she said she already knew and she would like it very much if I would come to her mother’s memorial service; that she knew quiet clearly it would have been her mother’s wish.
At the service, I was warmly received in both word and gesture. Two weeks later, I sent the daughter a narrative similar to the one I’ve just told you, describing everything – except for P.H. Emerson. Two days later, she phoned and asked if I would do her a favor. She said she wanted to see the spot where the dredge had brought up the bed. I reminded her that her mother thought the spot was below the Pont d’Arcole. She said she had already made a decision. And so we met at three in the morning at the north end of the Pont Louis Philippe, where the dredge had been positioned. With the Notre Dame as ghostly background, Clémentia poured her mother’s ashes into the Seine. She held the empty urn – an old tea tin – in her right hand, slack at her side. The other hand, the one nearest me, held the tin’s lid. On an impulse, I put my arm around her waist. She put her lid hand around my waist, and I held her close against me as she sobbed.

Tail of Horse, Hair of Corn

Posted on by sterlingbennett

I follow my translator’s recommendations in all matters. He says drink teas of pelo de elote, hair of corn and cola de caballo, tail of horse. These are common Mexican folk medicines sold in bulk at any outdoor market, as well as by poor people in the alleyways of my small colonial city Guanajuato, Mexico. This is for my kidney infection, which, it appears has grown worse and invaded other areas. Possibly the hippocampus, where trauma is often recorded and rarely forgotten.

Translating what? you may ask. My first novel, Playing for Pancho Villa, from English to Spanish, now with the redoubtable title of El Pianista de Pancho Villa. I know. I have asked myself the same question. If English was good enough for Jesus Christ, why not leave the book alone?

But then there is the kidney infection. Did someone spit on my kidneys? Or sneeze on them? Or is it something far more sinister? Like some kind of design flaw? Having to do with this thing called la próstata? I have to say it in Spanish to gain distance. But that’s like trying to gain distance from an adolescent python that has wrapped himself around your urinary canal and forced the liquid up into the brain.
It is hard for me to talk about these things. My sense of privacy and all that. This is why I have turned to Hair of Corn and Tail of Horse, seeking some sort of resolution short of Death. I believe I have maintained a positive attitude. I listen to Antonio Vivaldi. I practice writing English in the hope of someday being included in a Writer’s Quotation Book like the one edited by James Charlton. Something for beaten down writers to keep in a little homemade shelf beside the toilet. To give relief. I also follow actor Michael Cain’s advice. 1. Change your weakness into your strength. In my case, starting with urine on the brain. And 2. Never compare yourself with other writers, artists, painters, or actors. And I might add, never compare your kidneys with anyone else’s.

You could argue that writing is a kind of infection of both the hippocampus and at least one kidney. And so I also take white pills of some weight and heft at 12-hour intervals. Pill of kidney, tail of horse, horse, as in Greek hippos, kámpos, as in Greek, sea monster. I’m not sure which, but one of them produces a roaring between the ears, as if I am standing too close to an angry sea.

“Have you taken you pill?” my wife asks.

“Of course, I have,” I snap, and pull the straight–grained fir tiller toward myself with all the force I can muster. The lead-weighted rudder, levered against the passing water, plows a boiling white furrow behind us. A cat boat mast is placed too far forward. The rigging is unbalanced. It makes her want to flee into the wind and, at the same time, drives the leeward gunnel under water.

“Are you alright?” my sweet wife asks.

“Yes, fine,” I say. “It’s just a problem of balance. And urine.” But I do not say the last part. Because I know she will reflexively seek a solution.

“Do you have your life vest on?” she asks, wisely.

“Yes,” I lie. And I’m amazed at her prescience.

I can hear Vivaldi too. The piece is Nisi Dominus. RV 608. Don’t worry, I also don’t know what the numbers mean. R and V. Perhaps: “Return to Village and dry your nets.” Or, more likely: “Return to Village and Vacate the bladder.”

Nisi Dominus means, “Unless with God, you’re screwed.” Being open minded, I ask myself whether I’m with God, or whether God is with me, and which is better. Meanwhile, the tip of the boom, pushed too far out by the force of the wind, is dragging in the greenish water and pulling us toward our tipping point. And so, now there is no choice. I push the tiller away from me, the bow slews up into the wind, and we heel over even more. I leap to windward side to counterbalance, but I am not quick enough. The wind catches the exposed raised side of the hull, and over we go. The mast goes under first, then the sail, and then the rest of us—and we begin to sink.

It’s all a metaphor for death, one that, like urine, has been forced up into the hippocampus.

My wife asks, “Have you taken your pill?”

I say I have.

“What about side effects?”

“Not really,” I say, but I can tell by the way she’s looking at me that she doesn’t believe me. The water is cold and I want to pee. The mast points straight down, and I claw my way up onto the bottom of the capsized catboat and cling to the exposed center board. The old tub appears to have trapped some air, and we stop sinking. A thick, warm rain drums down on us. The air smells of salt and mud flats. I hear something approaching. The thump–thump of pistons. It’s the Boston-Nantasket steamer and she hasn’t slowed down in the least and is navigating blind through the fog of heavy rain and is coming straight at me.

“Are you going to have an egg?” my wife asks me.

“Nisi Dominus,” I say.

She frowns. She puts the eggs back in the refrigerator without giving me one. I get to my knees on the upturned hull. The bow of the steamer, copper-plated and blunt, throws water out ahead of itself, hissing as it comes like an oversized Costa Rican Ctenosaur lizzard. And just when I’m about to dive away from it like Huck and Jim, it sheers off, missing me and my catboat by about—I want to say—twenty próstatas. The bow wave and hull wave, mountainous, raise us up and throw us down into troughs that come at intervals too close for recovery. But the old tub refuses to sink. A line of portholes on the steamer rushes by. One of them is open. A boy about eight peers through, staring at me open-mouthed and wide-eyed. The great hull shields me temporarily from the wind. It’s like a Melville moment of mother whales and calves circling below in a quiet green deep. I see a man, close up, standing at the stern of the steamer, out of sight from the other passengers. About my age, in his middle 80’s, that is, his sea legs braced, trying to keep his balance, at the same time trying to pee down into the angry sea. He looks at me. I look at him. As he goes by, he releases one hand and points toward the sky, saying, I assume, “Just a second, it takes me a bit to finish. Then I’ll sound the alarm, and we’ll circle back to get you.”

But more likely it’s a kind of admonition. Something to do with Vivaldi and Nisi Dominus. Something like, “You can’t sail a catboat in a gale and expect to come away un-drowned, if you have not honored God.” Or: “The unauthorized mixing of Tail of Horse and Hair of Corn with Bactrim—the latter without a doctor’s prescription—”And you will reap the wind.”

The sailboat begins to sink again, and I hear no thump–thump of pistons from the returning steamer.

I feel my wife touching my right kidney, from the outside of course. A soothing stroke. Tender. Nisi uxor, I think. “Without wife, there is no hope.”

And I am glad that I have, it appears, honored her sufficiently. And do not need the Nantasket steamer. Nor an unbalanced catboat to keep me from drowning.

High Voices and Maritime Pines

Posted on by sterlingbennett
I am sitting in a table-wobbling Bohemia café in a colonial Mexican town recognized as a UNESCO Heritage Site, listening to Andreas Scholl sing Bach cantatas in his counter-tenor voice, which sounds like a castrato but isn’t, yet prompting my friend, a retired officer of the British Royal Navy, to make silly, limp-wristed gestures with upward turned eyes as if appealing to God to join him in rejecting this kind of music, while of course the whole time the real target of his ridicule, his gentle jab, is someone close to me, if not identical, the one who loves listening to Andreas Scholl, about whom I know nothing at all except that he has a long and distinguished career in the music world and is surely one of the most talented in his field, again about which I know very little, except for one experience in an ancient abbey on the French Coast near Montpelier when a another friend and I—he had painted the abbey many times in wonderful studies of light and dark, as if the building, surrounded by Maritime Pines were a ship of lesser tonnage, not English, approaching through a thinning fog, backlit by a weak sun that had forgotten that it was a Mediterranean sun—were sitting in the middle of the empty pews, when a similar voice, carried on perfect acoustics, filled the abbey for several minutes, followed by a silence during which I waited for the mezzo-soprano to emerge from somewhere above and behind the altar, which happened but as one of three young men, not a woman, grinning at their daring contribution as they passed by, and we, marveling, smiled right back at them, enchanted that a male voice could sound like that, in an abbey surrounded by dark Maritime Pines that had survived Roman shipbuilders—I’m talking about masts—all of which made me wonder whether the Roman soldiers, sitting around their campfires, wiping heathen blood off their broadswords, had asked their own castrato or falsetto warrior to get up and sing a tune to relax his exhausted comrades, whose eyes would have been a mixture of Germanic Blue and Mediterranean Brown, or Cow-Eyed Limpid—Homer’s phrase—if they were of Greek descent, and who didn’t think for a second of their singer as menso, zafado, loco, missing a wooden screw, or someone whose goats had gone to the mountains, hence Mexican for whacky, but just singing with vocal cords designed differently from yours and mine, hence completely undeserving of ridicule of any kind, least of all by me toward myself for going on like this without the usual punctuation, since Andreas Scholl, surely not dressed in a leather Roman battle skirt, was stringing me along, as well as allowing me to make whatever I wanted to of his voice and the mystery surrounding it, as well as of Maritime Pines, in rich darks, made into tall masts, approaching off the coast of Montpelier, ghosting toward me, carrying a delegation of people I wouldn’t know but who are mezzo-sopranos and Hermaphrodites who can sing like Andreas Scholl and have been hoping for some time to find a writer wanting to write to their sonatas, which also go on and on, as their voices caress first the abbeys, then the Pines, and finally the mountains where my goats have gone when I listen to this music, which, as far I’m concerned, I wish would never end.

Life Imitating Art

Posted on by sterlingbennett

Who knows where stories come from. My novel Comandante Ibarra, the first book in a trilogy of three love stories, was about a Mexican rural policeman, or as they say in Spanish a Rural. He had had had a stroke from which he had mostly recovered. But it changed his thinking about the Mexican constitution of 1857 which had not granted many rights to the Yaqui Indians of the Mexican State of Sonora just below Arizona.

For hundreds of years the Spanish crown and then the governments of Sonora in Mexico had been trying to wipe out the Yaquis and take their rich farmlands and water for themselves. And they are still at it, the state and the federal governments. Then a few years passed and I began a sequel to the second novel in the trilogy: Playing for Pancho Villa, called Himari Likes Water. Frank Holloway, the protagonist from Playing for Pancho Villa, returns from WW1 gassed and wounded. Again, he rides down into the Mexican State of Chihuahua to recover in the mountains he loves. There he suffers a stroke and topples off his mare Himari. He falls in with a fifteen-old girl who has fled from her abusive father’s circus train. A train that also carries war surplus French 75mm cannons which he sells to factions in the ongoing Mexican Civil War. The girl Fátima escapes with her best friends, a camel and a white Bengal Tiger. Fátima is damaged, but so is Frank. He hopes to dump them. She helps him cope with his stroke and war damage while looking for a good father. It is 1920 when this strange family finds its way through ancient Apache land to Mogollon , New Mexico and the silver mine his father runs and where Frank’s extraordinary wife Rosa Marta waits for him. Not too much later after starting this novel, my fourth, I the author suffered a stroke here in Guanajuato, Mexico in 2020, 100 years after protagonist Frank Holloway and some 120 years after protagonist Comandante Ibarra.