In America

by Susan Sontag

  Everything spilled over in a tirade at the beginning of the second week, after her first Juliet.

  “And that dullard, the Guatemalan consul who comes backstage every night, and he’s not even Guatemalan, what’s his name, Hangs—”

  “Hanks,” said Maryna. “Leslie C. Hanks.”

  “Hangs is better,” said Ryszard. “You were flirting with him.”

  And perhaps she was. Every man seemed more attractive to her. Why couldn’t Ryszard understand that he had made her more alive to the attentions of men; it was because she was with him—but no, he was simply jealous, more and more jealous. Bogdan had only been amused when other men flirted with her and she flirted back. He knew she meant nothing serious by it. He knew it was part of the normal giddiness and hypocrisy and insatiable craving to be loved to which every actress is prone. But then, she thought, Ryszard is a boy, Bogdan is a man.

  And the next night, it was a stockbroker named John E. Daily, and the same scene all over again, with Ryszard storming about the parlor of Maryna’s suite and on the verge of going back for the night to his own room on the second floor, when Maryna began laughing at him, just after Ryszard shouted, “I’m going to kill them both.”

  But there was no need for such desperate measures, as a scarcely chastened Ryszard was soon to report. Several days later, out for a stroll on Market Street, thinking (as he assured Maryna) of nothing but his mouth between her thighs, Ryszard saw the stockbroker stride out of a building (it was, Ryszard learned, the office of his brokerage firm), red-faced, glowering, yelling over his shoulder at a man hurrying after him through the door, then turn up the street—he was coming toward Ryszard—whereupon his pursuer, whom Ryszard now recognized, the Guatemalan consul, pulled out a pistol and fired at Daily’s back. The stockbroker continued on a few steps, coughed, plucked at his collar, and fell dead at Ryszard’s feet.

  “Maybe I would have shot Dearly, if he kept on sending all those little billets-doux. Anyway, Hangs got there first.”

  “Ryszard, this isn’t amusing.”

  “The nuisance is,” he continued, “that now I can’t stray too far from San Francisco. As a witness to the murder, I shall have to testify at the trial, which is unlikely to take place before November.”

  “And has Mr. Hanks confessed the motive for the crime?”

  “No. He refuses to say. Doesn’t matter, he’ll hang for it. Unless he says that he’d just discovered that Dearly was his wife’s lover and had gone out of his mind with the shock. Apparently, they don’t hang you in San Francisco for killing your wife’s lover, as long as you do it as soon as you find out about him. The police assume it was some bad speculation in Nevada mining stocks that Dearly had talked him into—”

  “While you suspect they were brawling over me.”

  “Maryna, I didn’t say that.”

  “But it occurred to you.”

  And so they were having their first quarrel, which ended handsomely that evening in bed. “I’m only jealous of everyone because I love you so much,” explained Ryszard witlessly.

  “I know,” said Maryna. “But you still have to stop.” She was about to say, Bogdan wasn’t jealous of you back in Poland, but realized that she didn’t know if this was true.

  At the close of Maryna’s second week of San Francisco triumph, and two days before she went out on a three-week tour arranged by Warnock which would take her first to the phenomenally rich mining communities of western Nevada, Barton gave a farewell party. When asked to propose a toast, she put out her long arm, lifted her glass, and, looking into the blur of the candlelight, crooned, “To my new country!”

  “Country,” muttered Miss Collingridge. “Not coun-n-try.”

  Ryszard would be at her side, and Warnock, who had already gone ahead to make everything ready, and Miss Collingridge, who had happily agreed to take on the duties of Maryna’s secretary but said that she hoped Madame would call her by her first name from now on.

  “Of course, Miss Collingridge, if you really insist,” replied Maryna with a smiling shrug.

  “Collingridge,” said Miss Collingridge. “As it is one word. Not—”

  “I shall be delighted, dear friend,” said Maryna, “to address you as Mildred.”

  It was three hundred miles to Virginia City, home of the Comstock Lode, and the largest town between San Francisco and St. Louis. “But it’s not a normal town,” Warnock had cautioned before his departure, “and the trip’s quite an experience too.” Hairpin turns on the iron road banded to the face of the snowcapped granite wall, slim trestlework bridges strung over mile-deep canyons—the Central Pacific’s fabled crossing of “the Big Hill,” as he told her the Sierras were jocularly called, might seem spectacular enough. But the best would come when they were almost there, after they had changed trains in Reno. The remaining distance to Virginia City, seventeen miles if you were a bird, fifty-two miles if a passenger in one of the lemon-colored Pullman coaches of the Virginia and Truckee Railroad (another wildly profitable venture of the late Mr. Ralston), would take them along a track whose grade was steeper than steep, circling and recircling the treeless mountain to reach the fabled town near the peak. “But I know you have strong nerves, Madame Marina,” he concluded.

  “I do.” She smiled. How Americans love their wonders. “Thanks to you, Mr. Warnock, I am prepared for everything.”

  He guaranteed Maryna that she would forget the drama of the journey to Virginia City when she discovered the big-city scale of the town’s most famous theatre and the luxury of its six-story International Hotel, which rivaled the Palace in San Francisco in plush and ormolu, gilt and crystal, marquetry and cloisonné, crystal goblets from Vienna and richly brocaded bellpulls from Florence, all in gallant defiance of the occasional reminder that the town sat squarely on top of the mines. “You know,” he said. “Doors that suddenly don’t close, windows that you haven’t tried to open which all of a sudden, well, shatter.” Ryszard looked at him with unconcealed dislike. “Prepared for everything,” Maryna repeated dreamily. “Subsidence,” Miss Collingridge said crisply. “Exactly,” Warnock said. “Now and then.”

  She opened her week of performances in the tilted town with Camille.

  The manager in charge of the stage at Piper’s Opera House told Maryna not to expect that his stock company could offer her a supporting cast as expert as the one at the California Theatre. “But they’re good actors, mind you, and they’ve each got dozens of parts down line-perfect. The star can let us know at the last moment whether it’s Romeo and Juliet or The Octoroon or Richelieu or Our American Cousin or Camille, whichever, and we’re ready to play. And as I always tell my actors, the first rule is to give the star the center of the stage and keep out of his way. But if help is needed we can give that too. I remember the first time Booth came to do Hamlet here at Piper’s. I guess he thought, this being a rough kind of town, maybe we weren’t up to his standards. What seemed to worry him most was the fifth act, but I assured him that he’d have a practicable grave and whatever else he required, and we did a little better than that, we gave him something more lifelike, I’ll wager, than he’d had in all his long career. I had a section sawed out of the stage floor, hired a couple of miners from the Ophir to do valiant pick-work, and that night the gravediggers shoveled some interesting specimens of ore onto the stage before handing up Yorick’s skull, and when Booth cried out, This is I, Hamlet the Dane! and leaped into Ophelia’s grave to tussle with Laertes, he had a surprise, you should have seen the look on his face, when he found himself landing almost five feet down and on bedrock.”

  Of course the great thespian didn’t say a word of thanks, and luckily he hadn’t hurt himself, continued Piper’s manager in charge of the stage. “Lord, he’s a strange broody man. But geniuses are like that, I know.” He told Maryna he had recommended to Booth that, after leaving Virginia City, he stop at a special spring situated a mile west of Carson City, much frequented by persons afflicted with rheumatism and melancholia. It’s
a “chicken-soup spring,” so called because, with the addition of pepper and salt, the water acquires the taste of thin chicken soup and is actually quite nourishing.

  “And I recommend it to you too, dear Madame.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Tyler, but I am neither rheumatic nor melancholiac. At least, not yet.”

  Cameel, Cameel, people called to her on the street. One was a tall man with a wide neat bandage under his chin, whom Ryszard decided must be recovering from a slit throat. Each of the three plays Maryna gave during the week called on her to counterfeit death—as Adrienne she died in an excruciating delirium; as Juliet, in a sensuous swoon, falling across the body of her Romeo; as Marguerite Gautier, in a convulsive protest against the injustice of death—but it was generally acknowledged that her greatest success in dying was in Camille, during one performance of which, reported the town’s leading newspaper, The Territorial Enterprise, two members of the audience, in different parts of the thousand-seat theatre, were so transfixed with horror at seeing Marguerite spring from her couch and fall with a terrifying crash, dead, upon the floor, that both were struck with a rigidifying paralysis and remained unable to rise from their seats for a full hour after the performance had ended.

  How else could the Enterprise convey to its readers the enchantment of Maryna’s performances? Tall tales, hoaxes, and practical jokes were the paper’s much admired, trademark method of responding to a landscape of improbabilities. Virginia City was itself a tall tale—the chance discovery by several ignorant prospectors, some twenty years before, of a lode of silver-rich quartz just below ground near the top of the mountain then called Sun Peak, which had been turned, by magnates from San Francisco who knew how to exploit it, into the most lucrative mining venture in the history of the world. Only recently some miners had cut into a block of almost pure silver fifty-four feet wide and thirty feet deep. Sober-sided reporting had little chance of being heard as long as there were true stories like that.

  Toward the end of the week Maryna let it be known that she would like to see the insides of this fabulous mountain, and promptly received an invitation signed by Jedediah Forster, the superintendent of the biggest of the bonanza mines, the Consolidated Virginia. Arriving with Ryszard at the mine office, she was provided with a cap, a pair of breeches, and a cloak, and, after donning her costume in an adjoining storeroom, returned to the office to be greeted by a very tall, handsome man in buckskins and silver buckles, Forster himself. He would be honored—he bowed—to be Madame Zalenska’s guide, though he hoped she understood that the mine was ill-equipped to receive visitors, least of all so distinguished a lady visitor. Signaling one of the men in the office to follow with an oil lamp, he led Maryna and Ryszard outdoors to a brick shed housing an iron frame with a square plank floor, which he entered first. As the cage started its slow, clanking descent, the air thickened and the dampness acquired a sharp foul odor that pinched the nostrils and clogged the throat. They could hear water coursing down the shaft as they dropped lower and lower, and when the cage began to sway from side to side, Ryszard stretched out his arm to protect Maryna from contact with the rough wet wall. (What can this experience be good for, Maryna wondered, struggling not to give way to panic. One of those foolhardy adventures you get through by ignoring where you are and what you are feeling?) At last it stopped, discharging its passengers at the dim mouth of a low narrow tunnel. They began to walk, deeper and deeper still. The heat, unbearable, was being borne by miners stripped to the waist, wielding their pickaxes and shovels. Infernal work! “We are nineteen hundred feet under the ground,” said their guide, who, after asking permission from Maryna, pulled off his buckskin jacket, exposing an immaculate silk shirt.

  Ryszard determined not to remove his jacket, much as he would have liked to, even as he politely allowed himself to be taken off to look at the rising water in the next chamber and the new pumping machinery brought down to drain it. Con-Virginia’s elegantly garbed superintendent, who remained with Maryna, did not suppose a lady would be interested in being shown how anything in the mine actually worked. He was very pleased, however, to be in her company.

  “This is the second mine I have visited,” Maryna remarked, for want of anything better to say. “Some years ago I was given a tour of the famous salt mine that lies south of Kraków, my native city in Poland.”

  “A salt mine. I’m afraid people around here wouldn’t think that was much of a mine.”

  “Agreed, Colonel Forster”—all heads of mines, Maryna had been told, are addressed as Colonel—“salt is hardly as valuable as silver, but the mine itself is well worth visiting. You see, it has been in continuous operation since the thirteenth century.”

  “And they still haven’t extracted all the salt? They must work very slowly in your country. But there can’t be much incentive, considering what I guess the profit would be from salt.”

  “I can see, my dear Colonel, that I haven’t explained properly what this great mine, this royal Polish mine, includes. It’s not just a business, as everything is here in America. And you must not suppose our Polish miners are lacking in diligence. Their centuries of digging have hollowed out a vast underground world on five levels, with mile after mile of spacious galleries connecting more than a thousand halls or chambers, many of immense size. Some are supported by intricate lattices of timber, others by pillars of salt as thick as the great old trees of northern California, and several of these subterranean caverns, so long and wide as to appear boundless, are without any support in the middle. In two of the largest are grand lakes that can be crossed in a flatboat. But it is not only for these awesome Plutonic vistas that the mine has attracted so many distinguished tourists, starting with the great Polish astronomer Kopernik; even Goethe thought it worth a visit. Most interesting for the visitor is that, after the chambers have been bored and all the salt extracted, the miners carve life-size figures out of the salt to decorate the abandoned chambers.”

  “Statues,” said Forster. “They take time off, while they’re down in the mine, to make statues.”

  “Yes, statues of Polish kings and queens—there is a remarkable statue of one of my country’s founding martyrs, Wanda, daughter of Krakus. And of course religious statues in the chapels on each level where the miners worship every morning, the grandest and most ancient being the one dedicated to Anthony of Padua, which has columns with ornamented capitals, arches, images of the Saviour, the Virgin, and the saint, altar and pulpit with all their decorations, and figures of two priests represented at prayers before the saint’s shrine—all sculpted out of the dark rock salt. Here, once a month, a High Mass is celebrated.”

  “A church in a mine. Right.”

  Clearly, the Colonel did not believe her. He knew a tall story when he heard one.

  Maryna enjoyed regaling Ryszard with the story of how she had flummoxed their imposing guide when they were back at the hotel.

  “I know a story about another salt mine,” said Ryszard, “though, unfortunately, it’s not I who made it up but Stendhal. At the salt mine of Hallein, near Salzburg, the miners have the pretty custom of throwing a wintry bough into one of the disused galleries and then retrieving it two or three months later when, thanks to the waters saturated with salt which have soaked the bough and then receded, it is thickly encrusted down to the tiniest twig with a shining deposit of little crystals, and these rare pieces of jewelry are presented to the lady tourists who visit the mine. Stendhal claims that falling in love is something like this process of crystallization. Dipping the idea of his beloved in his imagination, the lover endows her with all perfections, like the crystals on the leafless bough.”

  “As you’ve done with me.”

  “With other women, for a week or three, I admit.” Ryszard laughed.

  “Not with me.”

  “Dearest, peerless Maryna!”

  “Why not me as well? Maybe I’m just a wintry bough. On a stage I scintillate and dazzle but—”

  “Maryna!”

&nb
sp; “I don’t understand why you’re telling me this story.”

  And Ryszard thought: I can’t understand either. How could I be so stupid? What am I doing? And surely it was inane, no, cowardly, to reply, “Please, darling, let’s not quarrel now.” Now? “Ever!”

  * * *

  LEAVING THROUGH Piper’s stage door near midnight after the final performance, Maryna and Ryszard and Miss Collingridge joined some two thousand people who, by bright moonlight and bonfires, were gazing upward as a woman clad in a short frock and tights stepped off the wrought-iron balustrade above the theatre’s entrance into the air; followed with the crowd down Union Street as she too went down the steeply angled street, high above their heads; and applauded with the crowd as Miss Ella LaRue walked off the rope with a proud stamp of her foot onto the roof of a brick building on the corner of D and Union. “Cheering sight,” said Ryszard to Maryna. “Immense across the hips, isn’t she?” he added, hoping to annoy Miss Collingridge. Then, in search of further entertainment, they strolled back up to C Street and through a pair of double glass doors into the Polka Saloon.

  As the mines were always working, so were the saloons. Miners arrived fresh from their shifts to wager their earnings at faro, monte, and poker (they distrusted fancy games and any sort of gambling machinery), and Maryna begged her companions to amuse themselves while she sat and watched the spectacle.

  Ryszard went to stand at the bar and was soon being regaled by a reporter from the Enterprise with the news of the discovery in a sealed mountain cavern of a “silver man”—some poor Indian trapped in the cave long long ago, whose body over the centuries had been changed by the nature of the earth, steaming vapors, and the transfer of metallic substances into a mass of silver; more exactly, the body having been sent for assay to Carson City, into sulphuret of silver slightly mixed with copper and iron. Meanwhile, Miss Collingridge had become entranced by the saloon mascot, Black Billy, who, unlike the many goats living in old mine tunnels and foraging for scant herbage on the slopes of Mount Davidson, was one of a more privileged or daring band who had the run of the city: Billy lived and chewed tobacco on C Street.