Speaking Volumes

by Bradford Morrow

  Something I always resented about Italy (at least the Italy I lived in as a young woman) was that if two couples went out, the men would sit together in the front of the car and the women in the back. God forbid a woman drive when a man’s available to do it better. No chance at all that you’d want to spend any part of the double date talking to your boyfriend. Less chance even that you’d want to spend it talking to your friend’s boyfriend. Obviously, if it was just the two of you alone, you always got to ride up front, and routinely as if he were engaging a parking brake, your boyfriend would stick one hand between your legs and drive, shift, and smoke with the other. Because Italy is like that (at least the Italy I lived in).

  One night we were out with Fulvio, who was an actor, and his date, who was English. Her name might have been Rose or Alma. Either name works because we only ever met her that one time—like so many of Fulvio’s passions. Rose and I gossiped together in the back seat because that was the friendly thing to do and Fulvio, the actor, who had briefly and uncharacteristically stopped talking, suddenly remarked that I spoke entirely differently in English. He insisted that based on the few moments of conversation that he’d overheard from the back seat, I was an entirely different person in English. I volunteered that I might be smarter in English, though maybe less precise, and he said he thought instead that I was softer, heavier somehow, more intense and a little scary. Not at all like a screeching cat. Because otherwise American girls the way they talked were all screeching cats.

  I often thought I was happier in Italian, because somehow there was less riding on it. I didn’t have to commit. At eighteen, nineteen, twenty years old, Italian was a costume I’d hide in for months at a time, smartassed and awkward, full of wonderful sounds that I disgorged as if they were the most sophisticated and viscous primal scream therapy. And when I was hiding in my Italian costume, English was transformed. It became my private refuge, the language of silent thoughts, puzzles of abstractions I never needed to solve because there would never be a need to express them. I said Ti amo to a man long before I could bring myself to say I love you. I was even able to say why I loved you in Italian, because, I said, it’s the only thing in my life I’m sure of.

  There are pictures in my mother’s photo album from when she was a young woman studying composition in Florence in the late 1950s, black-and-white photos of her and a beautiful young man on a bench in the Boboli Gardens. His short dark hair is putty thick and unruly, his big almond eyes cut back like knives along languorous cheekbones. My mother is glamorous, perfectly turned out in a trim little suit dress and patent leather pumps, her freckles standing out exotically against her pale skin, one eyebrow cocked ironically, her curly dark hair sleepily crooked as if she’d just woken up from a nap on a flower bed. My mother’s Fulbright grant went very far in postwar Italy, she felt rich for the first time in her life. She had clothes made to order and said sometimes she’d have four stuffed artichokes for lunch, just because she wanted to. For many years I thought the man in the picture was a boyfriend she called Claudio, who she said was always cross at her for being late.

  Everything untranslatable belongs to her—both young women in Italy, both shedding oppressive American selves, running a little, and flying a lot—we trespassed the same foreign refuge together decades apart. After she died, I sat for hours looking at those photographs, trying to conjure and consume the brilliant years of my mother’s youth by sheer effort of staring. And I suddenly saw for the first time the wedding ring on the hand draped around my mother’s shoulder and realized it wasn’t Claudio in the picture at all.

  Fragments from Lost Zoroastrian Books

  Eliot Weinberger

  There where the sun rises

  *

  The edge of a razor

  *

  Of knowledge, not love

  *

  The several kinds of wheat

  *

  All good thoughts I think willingly; all good words I say willingly; all good deeds I do willingly. All evil thoughts I think unwillingly; all evil words I say unwillingly; all evil deeds I do unwillingly.

  *

  The skin on the head

  [ … ]

  The head of a man

  [ … ]

  One bone of the skull

  [ … ]

  All the blows that [ … ] the skull are counted

  *

  One whose words are accepted

  *

  As much as the earth

  *

  Fifteen sheep, their hind feet

  *

  Libations offered by a liar

  *

  All the agreements in the world

  *

  The smallest of those stars is as large as the head of a man of middle size

  *

  He makes himself guilty of the sin of breaking a man’s leg

  *

  thwam khratus

  [Meaning unknown.]

  *

  A place that gives pleasure, though not absolute pleasure

  *

  The column of life made marrowless

  *

  From there they come to kill and strike at heart, and they bring

  locusts, as many as they want

  *

  The ox rose up, the land bore

  *

  Soon he changed this to death by the fault of his tongue

  *

  Of the same thickness

  *

  For the first time he comes near to her, for the first time he lies beside her

  *

  What is between the kidneys and the spleen?

  *

  The shortest hathra is of three words

  [Hathra: a measurement of both space and time.]

  *

  The dead shall rise up, life shall come back to the bodies, and they shall keep the breath

  *

  The man who [ … ] does not [ … ] anything, be it ever so little

  *

  badha idha afrasani danhubyo

  [Meaning unknown.]

  *

  It becomes more violent than that

  *

  Give lawful, well-examined wood

  *

  Another man, of a steady leg, [ … ] glory

  *

  stavano va puiti paidhi davaisne va

  [Meaning unknown.]

  *

  Even uncovered and naked he will chant

  *

  How many sorts of plants are there?

  *

  If their fathers at once

  *

  In such a way that death should not be produced by burning

  *

  As much as a fly’s wing, or of a wingless

  *

  He calls him

  *

  Let no man alone by himself carry a corpse

  *

  By two fingers, O holy Zarathustra!

  *

  Of the dog-kind

  *

  Than the nose is to the ears, or than the ears are to the mouth

  *

  For all of them shall a path be opened across the Kinvad Bridge

  *

  As large as the top joint of the little finger

  *

  He has made the good waters and the good plants

  *

  And Paradise, boundless light, undeserved felicity

  From the Dung Beetle’s Perspective

  Edie Meidav

  I grew up thinking there had been a war, and that our soldiers had gone to war to guarantee the democracy. And that there were no disappeared people, that it was all a lie.

  —Victoria Montenegro

  Think about becoming
a parent and you consider consequences. When you came into our life, we thought about what a world stretched and all we wanted to teach you: we must hold tight to the faith that this document I am now composing will stand the test of history’s reckless habit of making virgins out of everyone. Others call it amnesia.

  Never forget you were always our hope, your mother’s and mine. That your mother died when you were young, that she remains in your recall a shred beyond what you know from photographs is of course unfortunate, but who among us controls fate? Consider the strangeness of antibodies’ passage through a vein, and how dimly we perceive this, just as we see the stars, great and mighty: mere pinpricks. So much of our knowledge operates in this manner, tempting and as irreproachable as it is unreachable.

  Did you know dung beetles navigate by the Milky Way? They roll balls of dung before placing on their heads little dung caps that let them perceive the stars. So many things come down to this sort of magnetism and gravity. Equipped, the beetles make their way as best they can.

  From their perspective, family rites make perfect sense. And of course it also makes sense, in a fashion that remains eternal, that the young regard their parents with accusing antennae. It did not take Freud to invent this trick: generations increasingly turn on forebears with the rage of new life in them, the unbent grass using the decomposed dead from which to derive vigor.

  You are on your way toward becoming a mature young woman and are, moreover, with child, so I thought it important to hand you now, our faculties still intact, a sense of what might be most important as you continue forward to becoming a parent yourself.

  Once I had a lover. I hope this does not embarrass you, now that you are of age, since what child fails to cringe at what an old fuddy-duddy does with his unit after the military dress has long been retired, so to speak, becoming a jolly roger only brought out for special occasions, but I have always been proud of how you have conducted yourself, both as a student and at home, not to mention as a girl and a blossoming young woman. I believe I can speak honestly. Why? From early on I knew you were special, a prodigy, most especially at the harp but in so many other domains: you a daughter whom I could press forward to my associates and have you read aloud for them particular words, at one of the many parties your mother and I loved to have, parties filled with associates and colleagues—and what beautiful words those are, words that say that a person exists.

  To you, our colleagues and associates may have been insects stretching forth long scratchy arms from one of our many overstuffed armchairs, aiming to tug you close to their cobwebs—visuals of nose hair and an aroma of reminiscences tinged with wet dog scent—but to us they were our cherished company.

  For them, and blame me for this still, I would sometimes press you to play the harp. You say now you winced as your wrists turned one arpeggio after another. Yet to me you had the face of an angel, reminding us of better, simpler times. When no harp was handy, to our colleagues it is true I might say: Ah, look what sophisticated words our daughter can read, how proficient she is. Often, it is true, I’d pick up a random book and there you would be, a shock to the system. You told me years later you hated this, that I made you feel like a performing monkey, but who would not be proud of an eight-year-old pronouncing such difficult words in such a mellifluous voice, yours carrying such strange and great authority? It surprised all of us.

  Argillaceous. Autochthonic. Erumpent.

  Your eyes would flash afterward, rating your audience. Since you could read any word from whatever technical book I happened to have handy, it is natural you wished to gauge whether we were worthy.

  Were we? What I can tell you is that at a young age you happened to be proficient. I do not share this bit with you merely to inflate your ego. Of course not! Nor do I preach speed for its own sake, the burden of the prodigy. Of what use is it to arrive at an end sooner than others? Who are the leaders of today who appreciate speed because they do not wish to acknowledge their past? Nor should we disguise the fact that your mother and I were proud, I most especially, that you could read so young.

  Of course later you blamed us for having encouraged you to skip a grade, but what were we supposed to do with you when already in kindergarten you were reading? The teacher with the mole and slit skirts told me she often left the classroom with you in charge, reading to your fellow pupils. To that kind of child, what can something as mundane as first grade offer? You blame us for how you hold your pencil, never trained in mundane cantilevering. And for the shyness in your second-grade classroom that made you find it less embarrassing to sit in your seat and urinate, a small puddle spreading its shame, rather than leaving to sign your name outside the bathroom that both boys and girls used. That you were shy about signing your name surprised me. This was hardly a trait associated with my family line or the daughter I knew, the one with whom I now share so many fond memories. I never had any trouble with you. How surprising then to learn from your mother that you carried your wet balled-up underwear back and forth in your satchel for weeks before stowing it in the back of some drawer marked miscellaneous, a word you knew even back then how to pronounce, this a mark of your greatly advanced state.

  But to return to the point, once I had a lover, before I was with your mother, of course, for all that your mother liked to tell me I was often an admirer of other women, to which I would reply that women are set down around us so we may admire them. Would you tell someone in a rose garden to hold his nose? If someone walks on a beach, do you tell him to stop breathing the salty air? Everyone ends up with a particular menu of tastes. My own point here is that this woman, the lover to whom I am referring, liked me to slap her a bit and also to yank her hair when we were between the sheets. I suppose the direct phrase to use here would be when we made love, since in your current state it is quite clear you are at that unblushing stage where you have acquitted yourself with one of the young men with whom I have seen you disporting yourself, boys with such large Adam’s apples it is apparent you must have, as a girl growing up, appreciated one of your neighbors, one of those gangly boys for whom all energy seems to collect at the throat.

  To return to the point: I concur, making love is nothing to blush about. Of course in my era we were idealists. In folk songs, girls and women were flirty but during our meetings so impossibly near and earnest, and how hard it was to understand these two aspects living together: suture together a red-hot, wriggly bonobo bottom to the bespectacled head of Karl Marx and you can imagine how we boys felt. If we rookie surgeons managed the suture, we enjoyed what came of it, the fruits offered once we had executed enough healing on that pesky mind-body dialectic. All that consequent wriggling around seemed a healthy enough part of the new philosophies with which we stuffed ourselves.

  At such times, if one connected to a flitty girl who turned out capable of earnest delivery, one could feel oneself a lion of the nation, the loin of its future. This line of reasoning may be hard to understand if you didn’t live through our time. But our flutes and guitars, the fitful gyrating along with our chatter about the new world order, all of it a direct ladder toward the bedroom, made us know we helped a good system ascend toward its historically inevitable triumph.

  The funny thing, and not to linger on this point too much, is that if you are a man with full-blooded sympathies and you lie with enough Trotsky admirers, you do start to feel you form part of the national pride, so admirable and sporting in any moment that you need promise little to any female. The assurance made us was that one day each of us would find a fertile seedbed into which we would lay the pearl of possibility. Such patrimony we could bequeath, such a feast promised all of us. None of us thought seedbed or pearl could betray our good faith, none of us thought we’d have to take matters into our own hands.

  Of course you can imagine how hard it might have been for a young man like myself, on the cusp of full masculinity, who already guessed what sacrificing to the dedicated commi
tments of adulthood might mean. Grow older and all branches become more singular. As if to become older means you start climbing an upside-down tree only to realize you now cling to one hefty trunk: the trunk has become your fate and amor fati will be your limp consolation.

  So imagine that I was still early in my climbing, on one of the branches of that upside-down tree, still foolish in feeling this branch could lead anywhere, much as one begins a document like this, something particular to both writing and life: one begins and thinks the branches could lead anywhere only to find oneself on the trunk of a particular conclusion. I climbed since I was an ambitious corporal, to be sure, and I had a lover, a bit older than I was, more experienced, not that her flesh was any the less supple, only that her experience was so much greater than mine that I wanted to plant a flag in it, to conquer and swallow it whole. And she, too, wanted me to conquer, this woman who liked me to do her like a dog. Does this seem a quaint notion, now that people are into, as they say, so many different sorts of activities? She needed me to yank her hair back and then mutter words from our former dictator, the one from whom publicly we were happy to be free but who privately still ruled our bedrooms.

  I do not mention this to make you wish to throw down this guide in disgust, though I begin to realize that this might not be a story I should follow to its logical conclusion. Again, it is merely that as a man of advancing years it has become incumbent upon me to share with you the wisdom I have collected in my time, especially now that you find yourself with child and may need some advice about parenting, one of the horrible new words to which my generation has had to accustom itself. We did not know about parenting, we just became parents.