All Tomorrow's Parties

by Rob Spillman

  After we dropped Fiona off at the airport, we decided to stay an extra two nights and found a cheap hotel room whose windows rattled when the trams passed right below. I have a clear memory of the moment I realized I had the thirty pesetas in my front pocket stolen; it was after dinner at an open-air café in an ancient square packed with late-night revelers. Yet even having our last pesetas pickpocketed couldn’t dampen my joy; it was a small tax to pay for being in such an alive city.

  “Why don’t we live here?” I asked Elissa as we stumbled around the bustling postmidnight streets. This is how you are supposed to live—exuberantly. I pictured us on our own Vespas, going native. This was her kind of city—warm, vibrant, where people’s emotions were wild and uninhibited.

  “It is fabulous,” Elissa said, veering us toward a fountain of nymphs.

  “We could be fabulous,” I said, squeezing her hand.

  “What’s this ‘we,’ white man?”

  “Okay, you could be fabulous.”

  “And you would make money so that I could be fabulous?”

  “We’d take turns.”

  “Deal,” she said, then sat on the edge of the fountain, took off her shoes, and swung around to dip her feet into the cool water.

  “But first Berlin,” I said.

  “Berlin,” Elissa said, as if she could love my city as much as she loved Madrid. The way she held open that possibility . . . that is why I loved her.

  17

  “Experience is what you get when you’re looking for something else.”

  —Federico Fellini

  Soundtrack: Giacomo Puccini, “Vissi d’arte,” from Tosca, 1899

  AT THE END of the school year in Rochester my father and I drove the three hours to Lake Chautauqua, where he was the director of musical preparation for the opera program at the 130-year-old music festival, which, he said, hadn’t changed in that time, certainly not since he was sixteen, when he first attended as a student. In the passenger seat of the Hornet, I stared down at the hole between my feet, watching the road blur below, my mind drifting to the past winter when we had driven to Lansing, Michigan, through Ontario, in a subzero squall, a blue-checked blanket over the rusted-out hole, me reaching my left foot over onto the gas pedal so that my father could stomp his numb foot.

  This was my favorite time with my father, just the two of us in the car, mostly quiet (he never listened to music in the car or at home, getting his fill at work), sometimes playing word games, both of us pointing out trees, barns, and other aspects of a landscape that were fixed, permanent, and timeless, markers of our transience. “Nice willow tree.” Nod. “Pretty lake. Let’s build our cabin there, Pa.” Nod.

  I loved Chautauqua, but was in no rush to get to the creaky gates of the “compound,” as the natives called the private, fenced-in community. Once we were there, my father would be back to work and I would have to share him with the young musicians and faculty, who grumbled about having to “go off the reservation” for a drink, the more effeminate men feeling like they had to rein in their flash, and most everyone believing that Chatauqua’s permanent residents lived in a McCarthyite’s dream of how Victorian America should have been.

  With its ancient wooden houses and laws prohibiting noise, cars, and alcohol, which were strictly enforced by private security, Chautauqua felt frozen in the 1920s, or even the 1890s. The natives were ancient and cartoonishly stodgy, and could be overheard earnestly saying “Things must be done in the proper fashion” when talking about how the Welch’s Grape Pavilion should dispense hot grape sundaes (the hot grape syrup should be spooned on lovingly from a dignified tureen versus ignominiously splashed out from a spigot).

  Yet for me, Chautauqua was a sanctuary. Once you passed through the gates, the “real world” was barred. Vietnam, the Cold War, OPEC, Watergate—things I didn’t understand but knew were scary from overhearing their threats repeated on the nightly news my father watched—didn’t have IDs to get in. Opera seemed to thrive in this ahistorical vacuum. I had grown up behind and on the Chautauqua opera stage. When I could barely walk, I was an extra in Aida. If there was a kids’ chorus, I was in it. I could sing on key and follow instructions, not to mention that I was always around. I loved being part of the giant spectacles. I loved the big, messy operas, like Tosca. When the bad guy, Scarpia, comes into the church during the Te Deum, singing about how he’s going to kill the revolutionary and steal his girlfriend, I got the hell out of the way, one time scraping my knees bloody on the stage’s hard pine planks, not acting at all but genuinely scared that Scarpia was going to kick me if I was in his path.

  The whole opera scared me: Tosca and her lover, a painter, try to help an escaped political prisoner. The painter is caught by the Roman chief of police, Scarpia. Tosca tells Scarpia that she will sleep with him if he frees her lover. After Scarpia tells Tosca that she has arranged for the painter’s mock execution and safe passage from the fortress for herself and the painter, Tosca stabs Scarpia to death. But he double-crosses her from the grave—in front of Tosca the police really shoot and kill the painter, and she jumps off a turret and kills herself. The end.

  As a kid, I was always destroyed by the melodramas no matter how many times I saw them. I was repeatedly heart­broken when Madame Butterfly was abandoned by her American sailor lover, and was crushed by La Bohème, the Paris garret full of starving artists who pool their resources, the writer burning his manuscript to keep them warm on a cold night. The poet falls in love with the housekeeper, Mimi, who is, of course, consumptive: There is nothing he can do; his love for her isn’t enough to save her, and she dies.

  I loved these operas in a distant, safe way, the way I loved seafaring novels and Westerns, with their lone, manly heroes and their rugged landscapes, onto which I could project an idealized version of my future self. Still, though I embraced conflict and emotional messiness onstage, in real life I did everything I could to avoid it. But now, at age ten, I wondered for the first time how opera fit in with the frightening present. Before, I had been swept up in the romantically tragic plotlines and had let myself get lost in the spectacle of the elaborate productions, happily transforming myself into a nineteenth-century Roman choirboy. Now I couldn’t fully let go of myself, and found this semi-alienated self staring out past the footlights to the comfortable audience watching an opera about doomed nineteenth-century Italian revolutionaries.

  Self-awareness in a ten-year-old can only mean sadness. How I wished I were less self-conscious, both onstage and at the Chautauqua Boys and Girls Club, the hokey old summer camp that I had always loved. Past summers I’d paddled in long Indian war canoes, made ceramics from the gray lake clay, and wrung out my bathing suit between the same pitted wooden rollers that kids had been using for a hundred years. I looked like them in my shorts and Charlie Brown striped shirt as I rode to the camp on my purple banana-seat Sting-Ray and briefly stood out during interclass competitions, where I excelled in chess, and then quickly and happily blended back in.

  That summer started with me losing myself in communal activities, but one day the counselors announced that the campers would have a tug-of-war against each other. Overcoming the older and stronger campers a year ahead of us was daunting, but I liked playing the doomed hero. That is, until I learned that the losers would face a “spanking machine,” a crawl through a tunnel of the winners’ legs, each boy smacking the asses of the losers. My peers laughed and whooped, but I was all business, pulling on the thick, dingy white rope so hard I yanked one of my own classmates off his feet, stalling the inevitable for a few seconds. Afterward my classmates dutifully marched into formation for the spanking machine. I couldn’t believe they were letting themselves get spanked—that, in fact, they seemed to be enjoying the prospect.

  I took off in a dead sprint. After a hundred yards I looked back at the three surprised, swearing counselors, but they were far behind. I squeezed through the wooden fence separ
ating us from the neighboring public beach, dashed across the sand to the entrance where I parked my bike, then pedaled madly across the compound toward a smaller, rockier beach, which was rarely used, especially early in the day. I glanced back, but the counselors didn’t have bikes and so they had stopped chasing me. Yet I kept riding as fast as I could until I was on the empty beach, alone except for the bored teenage lifeguard, my pulse pounding in my head, loud and fast, then slowing until it was in sync with the lazy waves.

  Freedom. I didn’t care if I ever saw the counselors or my fellow campers again. I was dizzy with the realization that not only could I flee, but that I had acted upon this possibility, ­turning fantasy to reality. I had vanished. It was a moment of sweet perfection. I threw off my T-shirt and ran into the chilly water, dove down under the waves, and felt the murky green darkness envelop me. Pure nothingness. Bliss.

  I lost myself. I would chase this feeling for years, running thousands of miles, year after year. I got good at catching and holding on to this nothingness for hours on end, but here, this first time, my bubble was easily burst. As Proust wrote, “The anesthetizing influence of habit having ceased, I would begin to have thoughts, and feelings, and they are such sad things.”

  The specific sad thought that brought me back from nirvana was that my father was going to kill, or worse, banish me. I could remember only one time ever when my father had been truly angry and disappointed with me. It was almost two years before, in late October, when Berlin briefly sheds its gray coat, the sun shines, and orange, red, and green leaves fill the clear air. With two friends I’d skipped religion class and gone to the neighboring park, where we spent the afternoon jumping in piles of leaves. We would have gotten away with it, but the grounds­keeper was upset that his neat piles of leaves were scattered by us hooligans. The principal told us that we each had to write a confession and have it signed by a parent.

  The thought of disappointing my father was crushing to me. Instead, I came up with a scheme: I told my father that we were working on a writing assignment and that I needed his signature. This was believable, since they were always having us work on our handwriting, and in addition I transposed my German and English words, and mixed up English words like “their,” “there,” and “they’re.”

  I couldn’t find a clean piece of paper, so I grabbed the cardboard backing that was at the end of one of my father’s used yellow notepads. He signed the cardboard without question, and I wrote my confession. The principal scoffed at the cardboard and said that it needed to be on real paper. I went back to my dad, and when he guessed that I had done something wrong, I told him the awful truth. After a terrifying silent minute, he said that he was very unhappy with me, not for skipping some stupid religion class, but for trying to trick him. He looked sad and wounded. And confused.

  “I’m going to have to really punish you,” he said.

  “It’s okay, Dad, I understand,” I reassured him.

  “I’m afraid that I’m going to have to spank you, like I was spanked when I did something seriously wrong,” he said.

  “Okay.”

  I lay across his lap and he gave the back of my jeans a few halfhearted whacks with a spatula. There was no pain, just humili­ation for me, embarrassment for him. As soon as my father put down the spatula, he cheerily said, “Let’s go downtown to the international food fair.”

  I blinked away the start of tears and nodded; my father looked blurry, but I could clearly make out his wounded, disappointed look—the worst punishment possible. It burned right through me. On the U-Bahn, walking through the food-laden isles of the massive International Green Week pavilions, I was sick with regret. I vowed never to elicit that disappointed look from him again. In the U.S. pavilion there were huge pink grapefruits from Texas. The bittersweet pink flesh was the most exotic and flavorful thing I’d ever tasted. But even now, when I smell grapefruit, it triggers a memory of pure anxiety.

  That day I ran away from camp, I swam back to shore, then stared out at the waves for I don’t know how long. I didn’t try to run when a counselor finally tracked me down. He was seventeen or eighteen and kept brushing back his shaggy blond hair. I was surprised that instead of displaying anger, he showed fear. While I was horrified that my father would be disappointed with me, I was also thrilled with the new knowledge that I could cause fear in an adult.

  At the end of that long, long afternoon, when my father came to pick me up, the counselor took him aside and explained what had happened that morning. As we walked back toward the house, my father looking serious, thinking hard, I thought I was going to faint or vomit or both. A minute of silence stretched into two, then five. “Sounds like you’ve outgrown camp,” he finally said.

  18

  “Art is the highest form of hope.”

  —Gerhard Richter

  Soundtrack: Sonic Youth, “Spirit Desire,” 1988

  AFTER MADRID, we decided to tilt at one more expat fantasy: the running of the bulls at the Festival of San Fermín. Pamplona! What could be more romantically clichéd? On the hot, gritty drive into the Basque hills, I pictured Pamplona to be like an opera set, as if Hemingway had just exited and now it was our turn on the stage. And I wasn’t that far off base—the inner, old city was very much as it was when Hemingway was slinging his wineskin through the narrow, cobbled streets.

  We parked Dusty on the outskirts and hiked into the old city, where we came upon six or seven black-clad older men gathered in a semicircle around a hefty, middle-aged German or Dutch man who was passed out in the middle of the street. A young Spanish woman was slowly sliding a fat wallet from the tourist’s back pocket. The old men silently watched her skill and nodded their approval when she succeeded. The collective wisdom appeared to be that if you were stupid enough to pass out in the street, you got what you deserved.

  The town was coming to life with the fast-approaching five o’clock bullfight, the daily centerpiece of the weeklong festival that honors Saint Fermín, martyred by being dragged by bulls through the city streets. This is reenacted each morning, when all the local men—in white pants and white shirts, with a red kerchief fastened around their necks with a pin denoting the particular Basque region they are from—gather in the quarter-mile corridor leading from a pen on the outskirts of town where the bulls are released to the bullfighting arena in the center of town. Before the bulls are released, the men casually stand around, engrossed by the pink-tinted morning paper, which features, on the front page, pictures of the previous afternoon’s action in the ring, and on the back page, photos of those gored or trampled the previous morning.

  At exactly 8 A.M. a priest comes out onto his balcony and blesses those about to honor San Fermín. Bells signal the release of the bulls, and as the enraged, terrified animals clatter through the narrow, twisty corridor, the men roll up their newspapers into wands and start sprinting. To be blessed, you need to run up close to the passing bulls and tap one with your wand while avoiding flying hooves and well-aimed horns. This frenzy usually lasts all of two minutes. Those foolish enough to follow the bulls into the arena are doused at the gateway with leftover sangria and flour, and then quickly dragged away before the bulls can get to them.

  After the running of the bulls, everyone disperses and collapses wherever they can find a comfortable bit of ground. There are very few hotels in Pamplona, which are mainly filled with foreign tourists, and the faithful sleep on anything horizontal and relatively clean; no one bothers the visiting Basques, the true pilgrims. In the afternoon, when the sun begins to bake the cobbles, the city stirs back to life and the eating and drinking begin again.

  After the five o’clock bullfights, the stadium emptied out into the already packed streets and all of the Basques danced behind small bands of musicians. We jumped into a group trailing two tubas, a snare, and a smattering of horns, and marched and danced and drank sangria with them until we joined up with another band, forming a larger
band which shifted from a danceable tune to a traditional Basque nationalist song that everyone around us sang full throat. This would go on and on until shortly before eight in the morning, when the running of the bulls happened yet again. Seven straight days.

  All night we danced and drank dirt-cheap sangria from bottles that street vendors refilled, eating egg sandwiches on crusty bread when we got hungry. But at five in the ­morning I couldn’t march another step. I nodded toward a bar and Elissa and I ducked in off the crazy, raucous street as the Basque ­marching band continued on without us.

  The long, brightly lit bar was packed with Basques, half of them drinking at the brass rail, the other half on the dance floor. Elissa and I squeezed up to the bar and I ordered beers.

  “How can they keep dancing like this?” I asked as we watched the whirling, elegant dancers.

  “We’re so JV,” Elissa said as she plopped down on a vacated bar stool.

  “We’re not doing too badly.”

  “I can’t believe we’re really here.”

  She had pressed The Sun Also Rises on me shortly after we met. I had ripped through it, Elissa hovering. We pressed books on each other as tests, me dropping Naked Lunch on her to see if she could be shocked (and her instead processing it more fully than I had). She asked what I thought of Hemingway’s ending, and I said I thought it was kind of lame. It turned out that the cheap paperback she had given me was missing the last page, so I never got to the gut punch of “Isn’t it pretty to think so.”

  In one gulp I drank half my tall glass of cold beer, and as I put it back on the bar, a broad-shouldered Basque scowled down at me, then at my beer.