by Molly Gloss
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For Ed kamarado
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Esperanto is an artificial, international language favored by many Peace churches for its facility at clearing the way.
There are no silent letters; every word is pronounced as it is spelled.
Vowels are sounded ah, eh, ee, oh, oo—as in “Are there three or two?”
The semi-vowel ŭ is like the English w, and combines with a preceding vowel to form a diphthong:
aŭ = ow (landau)
eŭ = ew (euphemism)
Consonants are sounded as in English except for these:
c = ts (prince)
ĉ = ch (cello)
g always “hard” (goat)
ĝ always “soft” (gypsy)
j = y (hallelujah)
ĵ = zh (Taj Mahal)
r always trilled
s always sibilant (sensible)
ŝ = sh (sugar)
-j is the plural ending.
Among some Esperanto speakers, female children take the family name of the mother, and male children the family name of the father.
Questions asking whether a thing is true or not (yes/no questions) are formed by the use of the particle ĉu. Here, that usage is suggested by the colloquial English interrogative, “eh?”
Verano
Darest thou now O soul,
Walk out with me toward the unknown region,
Where neither ground is for the feet nor any path to follow?
MY FAMILY ONCE considered themselves Tico, but the old Hispanic tradition of community has so long ago disappeared from this continent, subsumed in the monoculture of the west, that I consider my only culture to be Quaker. Still, the Friends who are joining us in this migration have Japanese names, English, Norwegian—these Friends are strangers to me. Moreover I don’t speak Esperanto very well, and maybe I’m too old to learn it better, or maybe too tired. Esperanto is a language without much grace: In the rainy season, who would want to give up saying invierno, which lies sweetly on the tongue, in trade for the crabbed little sound of vintro?
I am sixty years old, and afraid the arthritis in my knees, which is a new thing, may before long make me no use to anyone—or worse, an encumbrance, which would surely be a vaster problem in that young ship than here on this old land.
It might be, the matrix that’s been used is too diminished after all for species survival. With the first of these toroids it was something like that, the one named Crommelin, built for the rich man, Jon Crommelin, a scrupulously beautiful, flauntingly private refuge put to circling the earth just above this poisoned sky, every grain of dirt disinfected, every person and object sterilized, unpleasant insects and reptiles shut out. In a year, less than a year, there was a collapse of the organic life, and the dead construct was abandoned. It was sects of the counterculture—Carsonites and bird-watchers and Rodale farmers, Quakers and Mennonites—who understood the microbial needs of a closed system, guessed the conceit that must have killed the life there, and joined in bargaining for the Crommelin and attempting its renascence, as a kind of public proof of the connectedness of all life.
A decade of seeding and reseeding, trials of species-packing and of minimalism, emending and remodeling the nexus, and now there is a modest proliferation of these small forged moons, these hollow wheels with their interior, tubular landscapes. I, for one, had thought every isolationist party from Aryan Nation to Doomwatchers would soon flock up to the sky, but what has been proven by these toroids is only the absolute unmindful benightedness of the greater part of the human race. The very difficulties and economics of a closed circle of recycle and reuse have kept the stations, against all expectation, in the hands of the patient and whole-minded; our Miller is the only one yet to make preparations for casting off moorings—setting sail for the farthest shore. What if, in ten years or twenty, when we are too far away to get back, all the trees and the birds begin to die?
The toroid takes its plain Quaker name, Dusty Miller, from the reflective sail’s whitish aspect in the sun’s transparent light, and I have lain awake and imagined it; the small circle of raft—the houseboat, as people are saying—at the center of its great circle of flimsy sailcloth, moving soundlessly across the blackness of space like a moth, a leaf, a little puff of pollen adrift on a solar wind, which is an image that sits well with me. But I shall not see it thus except in my mind’s eye; I shall live within its ceiled and narrow view, in a circumscribed world lying under fields of lamps. Never to see the sky! The stars!
The closed circle of the hollow torus can be walked round in fifteen or twenty minutes, a bare two thousand meters from starting point round again to starting point. Big as some islands, people say, and they tell me of balance and proportion, scale and siting, the compact order of a Japanese garden. But other people have said there is a melancholy that gets into the soul of an island people—and, indeed, into the souls of migrants, for among the pilgrims of the Mayflower, and at Plymouth, there was black discouragement and suicide. There still are mornings in the Fourth Month rains when I get a yearning to tramp out to the horizon, a wanderlust so palpable it makes my breast ache. Where, on the Dusty Miller, would I tramp to?
Quaker people have endured on this old estancia on the Pacific slope of middle America for 240 years, steadfastly practicing love and faith in the midst of chaos and wars. My parents are buried in this soil, my sister, my sister’s daughter, I always had thought I would one day be buried beside them. Who would have thought it would come to this—sitting among the boxes of my possessions waiting to be taken up from this house, the house in which I have lived the whole of my life until now? Who would have thought I would one day be sitting on the floor of my house in the oppressive heat and drought of the verano, indulging myself in qualms and skittishness, thinking and now writing about the forepart of my life and the after, on this day that separates them?
• • •
I always have considered myself strong-minded, someone who would act on her feelings without faltering, and it has been a surprise to realize: I have been thinking of changing my mind, and hiding the thought from myself in this flurry of last-minute, agitated misgivings. Tonight, the last night for sleeping under this roof, I have been thinking of changing my mind, and looking for peace or clarity or certainty by trudging round in circles, sleepless, through the dusty night.
Tonight I walked along the cart road across the Rio Pardo and through the east-side fields and houses up onto the rocky ridge of the Ojo de la Luna, and home again by way of the goat-paths—a long looping tramp. The cart road is a rutted track; we have deliberately kept it poor and unpaved to discourage non-Quakers from coming onto the estancia,
a tactic that has been only a little successful. There have been killings, crazy wildings, here as everywhere, but we have gone on using the road after dark on Quaker principles, bearing witness to peace, trusting in the unknowable justice of God. What happens, happens, people frequently say, meaning not only murder and rape on the roads but death by plague or by cancer, which seem in these days to be distilled from the very air and water. I went along the road through a breathless darkness, slapping my sandals down briskly in the dust.
My old house stands alone, but a little way up the road the houses of my neighbors stand in the manner of Friends, gathered up in a hamlet, and there I was kept company by the voices of people who know me, calling my name from their porches. Children were playing in the road in the still night, and some of them made me a little escort as far as the edge of the river where the road drops down in the rocky channel and begins to follow the low water. The air was darker there, cooler, more silent, a comfort of another kind: In the daylight the Rio Pardo is a grief, scummed yellow along its margins, but in the darkness tonight the sound it made was soft and easeful, and there was only the grayish bulk of the boulders against the colorless blackness of the water.
The heavy forest has been shorn from the steep slopes higher on the watershed, and in the flood season the river is every year more ravaging. Where a bridge had once spanned it, I waded across following the cart tracks between the old concrete footings, pushing my bare ankles through the dead and tepid water. Afterward, on my skin, the slime itched and stank, and finally I had to stoop and rub my sticky legs with handfuls of dust.
Where the track climbs from the gully of the river and turns east toward the rocky arista, the houses are scattered among their fields in the old Hispanic manner. People have been moving up to the Miller for months, and many houses are vacant, abandoned. Tonight even the occupied homes stood dark and mute, seeming to ghost the landscape. I imagined people lying inside their houses in the hot, torpid darkness, asleep or awake, measuring their breaths on the still night.
We are at the height of the dry season; no rain has fallen for weeks. The ground is fissured, the grasses brown, shrubbery stooped and withered. At this time of year, the verano, it is easy to imagine the death of the Earth, easy to believe in its imminence. Walking along the road, my sandals raised a fine pale powder that hung in the night, and I remembered suddenly, it had been in the verano the year before, when I had said I would go onto the Dusty Miller. It had been in the verano that I had become afraid I would live long enough to see the end of the world.
Species are extinguished by the hundred a day in the name of hungry people; wholesale obliteration of human cultures has been the history of the world for dozens of generations, in the name of human rights. By the time governments and corporations, those grindingly complex and malignant machines of human culture, have finally broken down under their own weight and can no longer deal destruction on the Earth, what of value will be left? It was in the verano that I began to dream the Dusty Miller’s dream of a world in which people respectfully take part in their landscape, and go on doing it generation after generation.
But tonight, walking up the road through the fields of empty houses, I thought: If I see the end of the Earth, I see it. And I wondered why I had been afraid. “Now I am clear. I am fully clear,” the prophet George Fox was supposed to have said when he died. It might be, there is only so much that can be learned from life; perhaps then one has to wait for what will be exhibited by death.
I never have married, have no children to persuade me. Quite a few people I know are staying behind—some of them consider themselves too old for this change, and some are frightened. Some people see a moral imperative in standing against government oppression of the Peace churches. Or they say this emigration extends a frontier mythos whose legacy is destruction and exploitation. I haven’t any compunction that way. Quaker principles have been proffered to the world for many hundreds of years, and indifferently spurned or actively expunged everywhere. I am weary of trying to live a moral and religious life against the persistent oppression of an immoral, irreligious world. It has become a terrible, exhausting struggle. How much longer can we few go on sustaining a society based on joy and authenticity—defining success as an internal process in a world that defines it by power and wealth? What is the mythos that propels the Dusty Miller, if not Wholeness?
No, my qualms are secular, personal, banal. This weather they have made to be inside the metal skin of the houseboat: Will there be the Fourth Month rains? What if I want to go on calling the dry season verano and not have to call it somero?
While I was turning over these worries in my mind, a shape reared up in the darkness alongside the road-cut, and my heart sprang against the cage of my ribs. I stood up straighter and made a swift plan for escaping through the taro field, back to the last lighted house. The person looked toward me and lifted both hands in a peaceful or inquiring gesture—there was something familiar in the way he stood. In a moment, I came on along the ruts.
“Arturo?”
“Dolores!”
“You gave me a start. Were you just sitting there by the road?”
“I been walking but my feet got hot. I need a drink, you got one?”
Arturo Remlinger is a slow-witted man whose mother died in the rainy season this past year. He frequently goes walking up and down the roads looking for her. He understands as much as a five-year-old, maybe, and what do five-year-olds understand of death? Oh my dear, what does anyone?
“No, I haven’t got water, Arturo. But come on with me, we’ll walk up the road and get you some.” Arturo’s brother has taken on his care. The brother’s house wasn’t far off; probably Arturo had padded out the door after everyone there had gone to bed.
I took his soft hand and led him. He has a big, doughy body, a round face without angles. He is prone to unpredictable storms of temper—he wheels his big arms and stomps his feet, rolls his head on his thick neck. The sounds that come out of him then are rageful and wordless, terrifying, heartbreaking. Neighbors come when they hear him, and help his brother as they used to help his mother, gently press him out-of-doors where he isn’t as likely to hurt himself. The house his mother had lived in was bare of ornament; she had learned to give up breakable things. The brother has a wife who is a clay artist, and two young children. I wondered: What hangs on their walls, what sits on their tables now?
We walked along the road together. “What do you think? Is the dry season about finished?” I asked him. One of his interests is the weather. He likes to repeat and repeat the accounts he hears on the satellite radio stations, of weather in Lithuania and Botswana, Kampuchea, Greenland, Chile.
He swung his head back and forth heavily. “No. Not finished. But we’ll get some rain someday, ha ha.” He grinned softly and used the hand I was holding to gesture for both of us, vaguely overhead. “Rains every night, just about, on the houseboat. I like raining. Hey, Dolores, I’m going to live up there, how about you?”
I had been present when someone at a New World Planning Committee Meeting had wondered aloud: Should impaired and disabled people be kept from joining the emigration to the Dusty Miller? The way of Friends is to think quietly and to listen. We ask the question, we consider how the answer is made by different people, we ask again, answer again, change our minds; we reach an understanding. The Meeting evolves this way, not by shouting each other down, not by the weight of the majority, but by the capacity of individual human beings to comprehend one another. So there was a pondering silence and then someone stood and said, “What is impairment, I wonder. Is it arthritis? If one eye is blind but not the other, is that disabling?” People considered this. After a while someone else, a surgeon, said, “There won’t be the resources to treat serious health problems. No microtechnology for prosthetics, for the metered administering of insulin, for synthetic laryngeal voicing.”
People went on in this way for quite a while—not back and forth but circling around. There was a
Japanese woman sitting at that Meeting, a young woman who had come over from Honshu to talk to our Farms Committee about the growing of kenaf and cilantro. This woman stood up after a long, listening silence and said what everyone there already knew—one of the four cardinal principles of the Religious Society of Friends: “Something of the inner light of God lives in every human being.” I remember the precise pitch and cadence of her voice, her precisely correct Spanish, and the way the air felt at that moment, charged and vivid. And afterward there was no further questioning about the disabled.
“Yes, I’m going too,” I said to Arturo Remlinger, before remembering I had been walking along the road doubting it.
“Hey!” Arturo said. “You know they got a hurricane in the Philippines, and floods killed 82,056?” He went on telling me about the weather—hailstorms in Azerbaijan, drought throughout Africa, tornadoes in the delta of the Mississippi River. He remembered or invented numbers of dead, rainfall statistics, the projected paths of storms. I walked beside him silently, holding his clammy, pulpy hand. I was thinking of what I had said to him, and considering whether I had told the truth. I’m going too. Well, if I didn’t go, no one would be angry. No one would ask me for an explanation. The heavy lift launches always were deliberately overbooked, allowing for the five or six who could be counted on to draw back at the last minute. Some few people have even gone up and then come down again. There isn’t any shame in it. No one would want people living on the Dusty Miller who weren’t sure they wanted to be there.
“Here, you’re home,” I said softly to Arturo when I led him up on the porch of his brother’s house. The door stood open; Arturo had left it ajar, going out, or the family had left it open to release the built-up heat from under their roof. I wouldn’t have gone inside, I didn’t want to frighten anyone who might wake and see me standing there, but Arturo kept stubborn hold of my hand and brought me with him into the dark front room, where there were shapes of things—cupboards and tables and low cushions—but no shapes of people, who must have been sleeping in the second room.