People don't wait for permission; they go ahead and create what they need. Even African slaves in early America invented a profoundly subversive form of marriage called the "besom wedding," in which a couple jumped over a broomstick stuck aslant in a doorway and called themselves married. And nobody could stop those slaves from making this hidden commitment in a moment of stolen invisibility.
Seen in this light, then, the whole notion of Western marriage changes for me--changes to a degree that feels quietly and personally revolutionary. It's as if the entire historical picture shifts one delicate inch, and suddenly everything aligns itself into a different shape. Suddenly, legal matrimony starts to look less like an institution (a strict, immovable, hidebound, and dehumanizing system imposed by powerful authorities on helpless individuals) and starts to look more like a rather desperate concession (a scramble by helpless authorities to monitor the unmanageable behavior of two awfully powerful individuals).
It is not we as individuals, then, who must bend uncomfortably around the institution of marriage; rather, it is the institution of marriage that has to bend uncomfortably around us. Because "they" (the powers-that-be) have never been entirely able to stop "us" (two people) from connecting our lives together and creating a secret world of our own. And so "they" eventually have no choice but to legally permit "us" to marry, in some shape or form, no matter how restrictive their ordinances may appear. The government hops along behind its people, struggling to keep up, desperately and belatedly (and often ineffectually and even comically) creating rules and mores around something we were always going to do anyhow, like it or not.
So perhaps I've had this story deliciously backwards the whole time. To somehow suggest that society invented marriage, and then forced human beings to bond with each other, is perhaps absurd. It's like suggesting that society invented dentists, and then forced people to grow teeth. We invented marriage. Couples invented marriage. We also invented divorce, mind you. And we invented infidelity, too, as well as romantic misery. In fact, we invented the whole damn sloppy mess of love and intimacy and aversion and euphoria and failure. But most importantly of all, most subversively of all, most stubbornly of all, we invented privacy.
To a certain extent, then, Felipe was right: Marriage is a game. They (the anxious and powerful) set the rules. We (the ordinary and subversive) bow obediently before those rules. And then we go home and do whatever the hell we want anyhow.
Do I sound like I'm trying to talk myself into something here?
People, I am trying to talk myself into something here.
This entire book--every single page of it--has been an effort to search through the complex history of Western marriage until I could find some small place of comfort in there for myself. Such comfort is not necessarily always an easy thing to find. On my friend Jean's wedding day over thirty years ago, she asked her mother, "Do all brides feel this terrified when they're about to get married?" and her mother replied, even as she calmly buttoned up her daughter's white dress, "No, dear. Only the ones who are actually thinking."
Well, I have been thinking very hard about all this. The leap into marriage has not come easily for me, but perhaps it shouldn't be easy. Perhaps it's fitting that I needed to be persuaded into marriage--even vigorously persuaded--especially because I am a woman, and because matrimony has not always treated women kindly.
Some cultures seem to understand the need for feminine marital persuasion better than others. In some cultures, the task of vigorously enticing a woman to accept a marriage proposal has evolved into a ceremony, or even an art form, in its own right. In Rome, in the working-class neighborhood of Trastevere, a powerful tradition still dictates that a young man who wants to marry a young woman must publicly serenade his lover outside her home. He must beg for her hand in song, right out there in the open where everyone can witness it. Of course, a lot of Mediterranean cultures have this kind of tradition, but in Trastevere, they really go all out with it.
The scene always begins the same way. The young man comes to his beloved's house with a group of male friends and any number of guitars. They gather under the young woman's window and belt out--in loud, rough, local dialect--a song with the decidedly unromantic title "Roma, nun fa'la stupida stasera!" ("Rome, don't be an idiot tonight!") Because the young man is not, in fact, singing directly to his beloved; he doesn't dare to. What he wants from her (her hand, her life, her body, her soul, her devotion) is so monumental that it's too terrifying to speak the request directly. Instead, he directs his song to the entire city of Rome, shouting at Rome with an emotional urgency that is raw, crass, and insistent. With all his heart, he begs the city itself to please help him tonight in beguiling this woman into marriage.
"Rome, don't be an idiot tonight!" the young man sings beneath the girl's window. "Give me some help! Take the clouds away from the face of the moon, just for us! Shine forth your most brilliant stars! Blow, you son-of-a-bitch Western wind! Blow your perfumed air! Make it feel like spring!"
When the first strains of this familiar song start wafting through the neighborhood, everyone comes to their windows, and thus commences the amazing audience-participation portion of the evening's entertainment. All the men within earshot lean out of their apartments and shake their fists at the sky, scolding the city of Rome for not assisting the boy more actively with his marriage plea. All the men belt out in unison, "Rome, don't be an idiot tonight! Give him some help!"
Then the young woman herself--the object of desire--comes to her window. She has a verse of the song to sing, too, but her words are critically different. When her chorus comes around, she also begs Rome not to be an idiot tonight. She also begs the city to help her. But what she is begging for is something else altogether. She is begging for the strength to refuse the offer of marriage.
"Rome, don't be an idiot tonight!" she implores in song. "Please put those clouds back across the moon! Hide your most brilliant stars! Stop blowing, you son-of-a-bitch Western wind! Hide the perfumed air of spring! Help me to resist!"
All the women in the neighborhood lean out their apartment windows and sing along loudly with the girl, "Please, Rome--give her some help!"
It becomes a desperate duel between the men's voices and the women's voices. The scene becomes so pitched that it honestly starts to feel as though all the women of Trastevere are begging for their lives. Strangely, though, it feels like all the men of Trastevere are begging for their lives, too.
In the fervor of the exchange, it's easy to lose sight of the fact that, in the end, this is just a game. From the first moment of the serenade, after all, everyone knows how the story will conclude. If the young woman has come to her window at all, if she has even glanced down at her suitor in the street, it means she has already accepted his wedding proposal. By merely engaging in her half of the spectacle, the girl has demonstrated her love. But out of some sense of pride (or perhaps out of some very justifiable sense of fear), the young woman must stall--if only to give voice to her doubts and hesitations. She must make it perfectly clear that it will take all the mighty powers of this young man's love, combined with all the epic beauty of Rome, and all the brilliance of the starlight, and all the seduction of the full moon, and all the perfume of that son-of-a-bitch Western wind before she concedes her yes.
Given what she is agreeing to, one might argue that all this spectacle and all this resistance is necessary.
In any case, that is what I've needed, too--a clamorous song of self-persuasion about marriage, belted out in my own street, underneath my own window, until I could finally relax into my own acceptance. That has been the purpose of this effort all along. Forgive me, then, if, at the end of my story, I seem to be grasping at straws in order to reach comforting conclusions about matrimony. I need those straws; I need that comfort. Certainly I have needed Ferdinand Mount's reassuring theory that, if you look at marriage in a certain light, you can make a case for the institution being intrinsically subversive. I received that theory as a g
reat and soothing balm. Now, maybe that theory doesn't work for you personally. Maybe you don't need it the way I needed it. Maybe Mount's thesis isn't even entirely historically accurate. Nonetheless, I will take it. Like a good almost-Brazilian, I will take this one verse of the persuasion song and make it my own--not only because it heartens me, but because it actually also excites me.
In so doing, I have finally found my own little corner within matrimony's long and curious history. So that is where I will park myself--right there in this place of quiet subversion, in full remembrance of all the other stubbornly loving couples across time who also endured all manner of irritating and invasive bullshit in order to get what they ultimately wanted: a little bit of privacy in which to practice love.
Alone in that corner with my sweetheart at last, all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Marriage and Ceremony
NOTHING NEW HERE EXCEPT MY MARRUING,
WHICH TO ME IS A MATTER OF PROFOUND WONDER.
--Abraham Lincoln,
in an 1842 letter to Samuel Marshall
Things moved very quickly after that.
By December 2006, Felipe still hadn't secured his immigration papers, but we sensed that victory was coming. Actually, we decided that victory was coming and so we went ahead and did the one specific thing the Department of Homeland Security expressly tells you not to do if you are waiting for a partner's immigration visa to be cleared: We made plans.
The first priority? We needed a place to settle permanently once we were married. Enough renting, enough wandering. We needed a house of our own. So while I was still there in Bali with Felipe, I started seriously and openly searching for homes on the Internet, looking for something rural and quiet located within a comfortable driving distance of my sister in Philadelphia. It's a crazy thing to look at houses when you can't, in fact, look at any of the houses, but I had a clear vision of what we needed--a home inspired by a poem my friend Kate Light once wrote about her version of perfect domesticity: "A house in the country to find out what's true / a few linen shirts, some good art / and you."
I knew I would recognize the place when I found it. And then I did find it, hidden in a small mill town in New Jersey. Or rather, it wasn't really a house, but a church--a tiny, square Presbyterian chapel, built in 1802, that somebody had cleverly converted into a living space. Two bedrooms, a compact kitchen, and one big open sanctuary where the congregation used to gather. Fifteen-foot-tall wavy glass windows. A big maple tree in the front yard. This was it. From the other side of the planet, I put down a bid without ever having seen the property in person. A few days later, over there in distant New Jersey, the owners accepted my offer.
"We have a house!" I announced triumphantly to Felipe.
"That's marvelous, darling," he said. "Now all we need is a country."
So I set forth to secure us a country, damn it. I went back to the States alone, right before Christmas, and took care of all our business. I signed the closing papers on our new house, got our belongings out of storage, leased a car, bought a mattress. I found warehouse space in a nearby village where we could relocate Felipe's gemstones and goods. I registered his business as a New Jersey corporation. All this before we even knew for sure if he would be allowed back into the country. I settled us in, in other words, before we were even officially an "us."
Meanwhile, back in Bali, Felipe plunged into the last frantic preparations for his upcoming interview at the American Consulate in Sydney. As the date for his interview approached (it was alleged to be sometime in January), our long-distance conversations became almost entirely administrative. We lost all sense of romance--there was no time for it--as I studied the bureaucratic checklists a dozen times over, making sure he had assembled every single piece of paper that he would eventually need to turn over to the American authorities. Instead of sending him messages of love, I was now sending e-mails that read, "Darling, the lawyer says that I need to drive to Philly and pick up the forms from him in person, since they have a special barcode and cannot be faxed. Once I mail these to you, the first thing you need to do is sign/ date Form DS-230 Part I and send it to the consulate with the addendum. You will need to bring the original DS-156 document and all the other immigration documents to the interview--but remember: Until you are right there in the presence of the American interviewing officer, DO NOT SIGN FORM DS-156!!!!"
At the next-to-last minute, though, only a few days before the scheduled interview, we realized we had fumbled. We were missing a copy of Felipe's police record from Brazil. Or, rather, we were missing a document that would prove that Felipe did not have a police record in Brazil. Somehow this critical piece of the dossier had escaped our attention. What followed was a horrible flurry of panic. Would this delay the whole process? Was it even possible to secure a Brazilian police report without Felipe's having to fly to Brazil to pick it up in person?
After a few days of incredibly complicated transglobal phone calls, Felipe managed to convince our Brazilian friend Armenia--a woman of celebrated charisma and resourcefulness--to stand in line all day at a Rio de Janeiro police station and sweet-talk an official there into releasing Felipe's clean Brazilian police records over to her. (There was a certain poetic symmetry to the fact that she rescued us in the end, given that she was the person who had introduced us to each other three years before at a dinner party in Bali.) Then Armenia overnighted those documents from Brazil to Felipe in Bali--just in time for him to fly to Jakarta during a monsoon in order to find an authorized translator who could render all his Brazilian paperwork into the necessary English in the presence of the only American-government-authorized Portuguese-speaking legal notary in the entire nation of Indonesia.
"It's all very straightforward," Felipe assured me, calling me in the middle of the night from a bicycle rickshaw in the pouring Javanese rain. "We can do this. We can do this. We can do this."
On the morning of January 18, 2007, Felipe was the first person in line at the U.S. Consulate in Sydney. He hadn't slept in days but he was ready, carrying a terrifyingly complex stack of papers: government records, medical exams, birth certificates, and masses of other sundry evidence. He hadn't gotten a haircut in a long while and he was still wearing his travel sandals. But it was fine. They didn't care how he looked, only that he was legitimate. And despite a few testy questions from the immigration official about what exactly Felipe had been doing in the Sinai Peninsula in 1975 (the answer? falling in love with a beautiful seventeen-year-old Israeli girl, naturally), the interview went well. At the end of it all, finally--with that satisfying, librarian-like thunk in his passport--they gave him the visa.
"Good luck on your marriage," said the American official to my Brazilian fiance, and Felipe was free.
He caught a Chinese Airlines flight the next morning from Sydney, which took him through Taipei and then over to Alaska. In Anchorage, he successfully passed through American customs and immigration and boarded a plane for JFK. A few hours later, I drove through an icy-cold winter's night to meet him.
And while I would like to think that I had held myself together with a modicum of stoicism during the previous ten months, I must confess that I now absolutely fell apart as soon as I arrived at the airport. All the fears that I had been suppressing since Felipe's arrest came spilling out in the open now that he was so close to being safely home. I became dizzy and shaky, and I was suddenly afraid of everything. I was afraid that I was in the wrong airport, at the wrong hour, on the wrong day. (I must have looked at the itinerary seventy-five times, but I still worried.) I was afraid that Felipe's plane had crashed. I was retroactively and quite insanely afraid that he would fail his immigration interview back in Australia--when he had, in fact, just passed his immigration interview back in Australia only a day earlier.
And even now, even though the Arrivals board clearly announced that his flight had landed, I was perversely afraid that his flight had not lan
ded, and that it would never land. What if he didn't get off the plane? What if he got off the plane and they arrested him again? Why was it taking him so long to get off the plane? I scanned the faces of every passenger who came down that Arrivals corridor, searching for Felipe in the most preposterous of forms. Irrationally, I had to look twice at every single old Chinese lady with a cane and every single toddling child, just to make doubly sure that it wasn't him. I was having trouble breathing. Like a lost kid, I almost ran over to a policeman and asked for help--but help with what?
Then, suddenly, it was him.
I would know him anywhere. The most familiar face in the world to me. He was running down the Arrivals corridor, looking for me with the same anxious expression that I was surely sporting myself. He had on the same clothes he'd been wearing the day he'd been arrested back in Dallas ten months earlier--the same clothes he'd been wearing pretty much every day of this whole year, all over the world. He was a bit tattered around the edges, yes, but somehow he seemed mighty to me nonetheless, his eyes burning with the effort to spot me in the crowd. He was not an old Chinese lady, he was not a toddling child, he was not anybody else. He was Felipe--my Felipe, my human, my cannonball--and then he saw me and he barreled down on me and almost knocked me over with the sheer force of his impact.
"We have circled and circled till we have arrived home again, we two," wrote Walt Whitman. "We have voided all but freedom and all but our own joy."
And now we could not let go of each other, and for some reason I simply could not stop sobbing.
Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace With Marriage Page 27