Who, Me?

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by Who, Me- A Memoir (retail) (epub)

How could I have forgotten my grossmutter? Well, I hadn't! In a sense I had become her, she was still alive in me, still is me as I write these words, walk down the street and feel the snow or wind or rain or sun on my face, still living her philosophy of ENDURE, CELEBRATE, TO LIFE, IN THE NOW, NO MATTER HOW BAD IT SEEMS, ENDURE, ENDURE, ENDURE . . .

  A lot more was to still to come out about her, a lot more mystery, more question marks, still with very few answers.

  In 1978 I got a Fulbright Professorship to the University of Santa Catarina in Florianópolis, Brazil.

  Southern Brazil, an island of the Brazilian coast, but close enough so that it was connected to the mainland by a gigantic Brooklyn Bridge-ish type bridge. Surrounded by beaches and lagoons. Tropical, but never too hot, never too cold. Florianópolis itself an old town going back centuries, old cathedral, the Praça Quinze (Plaza in Spanish, Praça in Portuguese), lots of old, old places, but lots new, too.

  I got a house from a Longi Taglieber in the English Department who was going to spend a year in the U.S.A. The house close to the university but still facing out on jungle, jungle, jungle.

  In fact the first day I moved in I went into the garden and saw this huge spider walking around that looked like a groundhog and that was the last time I went out there.

  Although I loved the luxuriousness of it all, God really singing in creation for a change, instead of whispering . . .Nona, Margaret, Alex.

  We put them in day-care centers, and they picked up on Portuguese with amazing alacrity and ease. They were our kids, after all, n'est pas? Played with the neighborhood kids after school, started really picking up on the lingo.

  And so did Nona and I.

  The differences in the languages interesting:

  Spanish Portuguese

  I------------- Yo Eo

  No----------- no não

  Can't-------- puedo posso

  Go----------- ir ir

  To----------- al ao

  The bathroom-baño banheiro

  A lot like Italian. I loved it.

  I started in teaching American Literature at the Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, and Nona started teaching at a local English school (everyone wanting to learn English, the big item everyone was interested in: the U.S., English, going to the U.S.), and among her students was this tiny, scrawny little M.D. who she invited to attend one of my lectures on American culture. You know, my books America Hoy (America Today) and Los Problemas de Nuestro Tiempo (The Probems of Our Time) that I had self-published in Caracas. They were based on lectures I'd given in Caracas, and now 14 years later I was delivering similar lectures. Only this time with a big, big, big concentration on the whole Beat-Hippy-Yippy Revolution in U.S. culture. I could really talk about contemporary American poets and novelists and magazines now, couldn't I? Hardly lectures at all but mainly reminiscing, remembering friends, and the whole literary world I was totally immersed in.

  Within a month I'd even started a little lit mag called Ilha do Desterro/Exile's Island, named after the old name for Santa Catarina, which used to be a prison colony. In fact the old prison was still there, off in the hinterland. Kind of fitting for me, I thought . . . kind of always wanting to be an exile.

  One of Nona’s students at FISK, a local English school, Maria Bernadete Costa came to my lecture the night I was talking all about New York and Harry Smith and the Smith Gang, Richard Morris in San Francisco, COSMEP. Came up and shook hands after the lecture.

  "Your wife tell me much about you. I study English with her. I understand/entendí about half/um mitade . . .”

  Kind of a boring little creature, all in white.

  "Well, thanks for coming. You're . . .?"

  "A surgeon. Reconstructive surgeon."

  "Sounds like fun."

  "Not fun."

  And that was that.

  But then, a few days later, Dr. Costa invited me and Nona over to her place, and big things happened.

  Well, it wasn't really her place. She lived there with another doctor, Dr. Carmen Berber, and Carmen had vanished for the evening so that it was all hers.

  She came to the door dressed in long, flowing kimonaish robes, lots of leg visible through slits in her skirt, wearing these soft, rope-soled wedge shoes with cotton ankle-straps winding up her thin, spider-leg legs.

  "Bem vindo/Welcome . . ."

  Strange food waiting for us. All kinds of sauces I'd never tasted before, whispering both jungle, jungle, jungle and Portugal, Portugal, Portugal . . .

  Wine.

  We sat on pillows on the floor around a low table in the middle of the room. The whole place very Alhambra-ish. Her explaining that Carmen had Middle Eastern ties.

  I'd never seen Nona happier.

  In fact she kept saying things like "I've never felt more at ease before in my life," and "I really feel at home," and "I think we're all soul-mates . . ."

  "We should become the closest of friends," said Dr. Costa—Bernadete, "I've always wanted to go to the United States. Perhaps I could visit you when you go back."

  "Or go back with us!" Nona came out with.

  "Or go back with you, whatever; I've come to a kind of . . . what's a good word . . .?"

  "Impasse?"

  "Não entendo . . .” (I don't understand . . .)

  "Barrera/Barrier," I suggested.

  "Oh Senhor fala bem o portages.” (You speak Portuguese well.)

  "Well, after decades of Spanish. They're close cousins . . . what kind of barrier have you come to?"

  "I'm as high as I can go. Good money, good position, I do surgery hours and hours every day. I'd like a little change; it seems so 'confining' here, if you know what I mean?"

  "I find it paradisal," I said (almost added, "And if this is paradise, you'd make a very special Eve.").

  But didn't.

  Felt, though; felt, felt, felt, felt. The music she had on in the background, all new and fresh for me . . . the whole rich Middle-Eastern-ish feel of the room, her own perfect little white face with all her black hair and eyes and eyebrows . . .

  And the way Nona reacted to her, too, sitting next to her—practically touching, but not quite—like sisters who hadn't seen each other for years, finally getting together.

  We started going out everywhere together, to plays, concerts, movies. We got invited over to her house, met her father (mother dead a few years now) and all her brothers and sisters, got invited to the houses of the brothers and sisters who were married and lived here and there all over the island and on the mainland.

  Like her M.D. brother who lived down south on the coast, Paulo.

  Joinville. Next to Blumeneau. Where all the Germans lived. So you'd go around and find German coffee and chocolate shops, restaurants, all the architecture Bavarian.

  And Paulo's place: this mostly-glass ranch that looked like a combination of Frank Lloyd Wright and Oscar Niemeyer, the wildman who had designed Brasilia.

  Video disks hadn't really arrived in the U.S. yet, but Paulo had one. Put on a record and there was your movie.

  Another sister, Nazaré (as in Jesus of Nazareth) was married to this real-estate developer, and they lived in this penthouse in this twenty story concrete palace right on the ocean (Beira Mar) so you'd sit on the balcony and have lunch and the sea would be spread out below you, the seabirds would be flying around, in the distance it would be all clouds and surf and islands.

  There was Bettinha, this wildly hippyish beauty, married to a professor at the University of Santa Catarina. Another beautiful apartment looking out on the ocean.

  Always little aperitifs, wine, a sense of belonging . . .

  About a month into our relationship with Maria Bernadete and one day Nona suggested, "Why don't you move in with us?"

  "Move in with you? But—"

  "Always ‘buts.’ Whenever anything good comes along, it's always 'buts,' isn't it?"

  "Maybe you could come back to the U.S. with us," I suggested.

  "Well . . ."

  And within a
week Dr. Costa (Maria Bernadete) had moved in with us, and the madness began . . .

  This big bedroom and big wooden bed looking out on the jungle.

  I had had screens put in the main windows in the house. The Tagliebers, like most Brazilians, had slept surrounded by a long white net curtain that reached down to the floor to keep the mosquitoes, flies and flying cockroaches out.

  Now we could leave the windows open, let the mysterious jungle-night sounds in.

  We started experimenting around.

  My Connie-self suddenly came very much alive. Bernadete enjoyed me as Connie, and she started having shoes made for me: beautiful black suede pumps and ankle-straps, found a dressmaker who started making clothes for me, too. There was a lingerie shop in downtown Florianópolis that had tons of large-sized bras and panties, pantyhose, slips, and we'd go down there all the time and load up.

  Slowly I became very elegant, started to let my hair grow, started dying it blonde, and Carmen Berber, Bernadete's dermatologist friend, began to do electrolysis on my beard.

  "Why not take a little estrogen?" I suggested one day, and Bernadete agreed, "Why not?"

  So I started taking Estrogen every day, was Hugh at the university, but at home I started being Connie more and more of the time.

  Even started going to parties as Connie.

  Like on New Year's Eve, the middle of Brazilian summer, the Florianopolitan painter, Vera Sabina, had a party and we got invited, and I went as Connie, black lace dress, black Lycra pantyhose, low-heeled black pumps, black wig, beautifully made up, looking very gorgeous, and Bernadete and Nona appeared in like outfits. We were three black lace cats.

  The belles of the ball.

  Bought a couple of pictures by Vera which still hang on the walls of Bernadete's bedroom in Lansing. Faces, faces, always weird-looking carnivalesque faces; that was her trademark.

  The three of us would make love together every night.

  It was like a lingerie-shop come to life, garter belts and black stockings, exotic shoes and bras with the nipples cut out.

  The girls put to bed.

  The windows open on the mysterious night.

  Nona got it in her mind that she wanted Bernadete to get pregnant.

  "It'll be our child. Ours, ours, ours . . ."

  I even made up a ceremony one night. Candles in the dark room, the three of us joining hands, my marriage ceremony written large on a piece of cardboard.

  "Together now!"

  And we read it together:

  ONE FOR ALL AND ALL FOR ONE, BEGIN AS

  THREE AND END UP ONE, A TRINITY OF LOVE TIL DEATH US DO PART, OUR COMMON GOOD

  THE CENTER OF OUR SHARED HEART.

  "Amen!' I said, and Nona and Bernadete enthusiastically amened, the three of stretching out on the bed and beginning our love-making game.

  Beautiful. Lots of interaction among all three, and then the insertion into Bernadete, and I'd be finished; they'd go on for another half an hour at least.

  ONE FOR ALL AND ALL FOR ONE.

  Only Bernadete didn't get pregnant.

  She'd had some abortions in the past and they seemed to have screwed up her uterine mucosa or something.

  But they were convinced it was me and I even was forced to go for a sperm-count test one winter day in Florianópolis.

  They put me in a cold (say 50 degrees) room and told me, "Masturbate into this tube."

  Masturbate into this tube?!?!?

  What about stimuli? I was all used to loving my own Lycra-sheathed body and the bodies of my Lycra-sheathed compañeras, lonnnnnnnng hours of fore-playing around. And there I was in this crumby little room being told to just make it happen instantly.

  I tried. Tried again. OK. Imagination: in a heaven of unholy whores, Bernadete and Nona swirling around me sucking and plucking, whispering . . . half an hour and it half-heartedly happened.

  Low sperm-count. So it must have been me. I was convinced that Bernadete wasn't getting pregnant because I'd run out of sperm. Nothing to do with her mucosa whatsoever. But . . .

  After we got back to the states, back to our little Victorian house on Forest in East Lansing, Bernadete was out shopping one afternoon and Nona and I were alone for some hours, it was summerish, the two girls were with Bernadete; we had sex and she instantly got pregnant.

  Nine months later Christopher was born.

  Twenty years later he's still living with me and Bernadete in downtown Lansing, and Nona for years and years has been living alone down in Kansas City.

  So it goes.

  Two years in Brazil, getting very much at home in Brazilian Portuguese, although I never really could "fool" anyone. Not like Spain. I mean if I went to Madrid tomorrow, after a couple of days there, getting back into the linguistic swing of things, people would begin to ask me if I was Spanish or Argentinean or . . .

  But in Brazil, even after two years, the minute I opened my mouth it was still be an instant identification that I was a Spanish speaker: "Argentino!/Argentinian!"

  But imagine: coming back to Michigan State as a trio now.

  Bernadete with a tourist visa that was fast running out.

  I called up one of my former students, architect Tom Lepasky.

  "Listen, Tom, you wanna get married?"

  "Sure. To whom?"

  "Bernadete."

  He knew her, liked her; so they got married. And that took care of the visa problem.

  Only no one had jobs but me.

  Nona finished her Ph.D. in English, but there was no job for her in the English department or my department, American Thought and Language. She didn't publish much. A little poetry here and there, but just a few articles, and publication was everything!!!

  And here I was with surgeon Bernadete without a job.

  She got a job sewing for a while. Kind of a sweat-shop in downtown Lansing not far from Old Town where Lepasky lived.

  They really liked each other and I was afraid that the marriage might end up consummated behind my back.

  Nona just took care of the kids for a while, and then this friend of hers from her local church, University Methodist Church, suggested that both she and Bernadete get lab jobs in the Department of Microbiology.

  Some kind of special project they were working on, not part of regular departmental goings-on, but research on placental cells.

  So they both started taking courses in microbiology and ended up working in a lab with a Ph.D. in microbiology from Australia, Beryl Cooper.

  Only Nona began to get jealous of me and Bernadete.

  Like one day I had sex with Bernadete (Nona out this time, shopping with the kids) without her around. Sin of sins!

  "How dare you have sex with her without me around. We have our vows, our pledges, All for One and One for All. Have you forgotten? Both of you!!! Maybe it's better if Bernadete and I just pair up and become a couple, and you, Hugo, go off on your own and find someone else to screw around with."

  "OK, I'm sorry, it was just one of those things—"

  "I think I'm going to go out and find another woman, maybe that's what I really want and need . . ."

  "Another woman?!?!? What do you mean? All for One and One for All."

  "We'll see . . ."

  And there was Beryl Cooper, La Lesbiana, just waiting for Nona.

  They started hanging around together almost full-time.

  I didn't like her from the word "go." Tall, string-beanish, sarcastic, bitter, greedy, tricky. But she really went for Nona once Nona told her about her problems.

  Nona moved in with Beryl. An apartment out on Okemos Road.

  They became very intense.

  It could have been fine, Beryl and Nona one couple, me and Bernadete another couple, Margaret, Alex, Chris, Cecilia, and Hughie living with me and Bernadete in our relatively ample house on Forest, you know one of those Victorians with the beautiful oak staircase going up to the second floor, oak columns as you entered into the living room, oak trim around the doorway into the dining room
, oak, oak, oak, oak . . .

  I'd had a bedroom built for Hughie down in the basement, Alex and Margaret shared a room, Cecilia was in a room off the dining room downstairs (with its own private bathroom), Bernadete had her room across the corridor from me upstairs.

  Bernadete and I would go over and see Beryl and Nona in their apartment. Bring Chris along. Lots of the time I'd dress like Connie. Just for fun. Like a lesbian among lesbians.

  I didn't worry about the effect it might have on Christopher, to see his father going around dressed in black lace all the time; figured it was better to be honest and open about it rather than hide it all.

  I'd been reading tons of psychology books and one thing that came out again and again was the schizophrenia and other problems were mainly produced by lying, hiding, deceiving, confusing . . .

  Bernadete started liking microbiology, had a good salary; after all, she was an M.D., nicht wahr?

  Nona and Beryl were doing fine; we were in a good neighborhood in East Lansing, the Glenn Cairn neighborhood, within easy walking distance from grammar school, middle school, high school, and college: Michigan State University.

  Hughie (Hugh B. Fox III) went to Michigan State, so did Marcella (who still lived with Lucia, which was only a few blocks away, so I saw her all the time, too, although she still hadn't forgiven me for my little pretending-I-was-going-to-strangle-her game that I'd played when I left Argentina to run off with Nona years, years earlier), Margaret and Alex went to the Glenn Cairn Grammar School, Hannah Middle School; Cecilia was fine through grammar school and high school, but then got "weird" when it came time for college. More about that later.

  I was forever going off to the COSMEP conventions and meetings, still getting published everywhere, piles of poetry volumes had come out, and critics were saying all kinds of good things about me.

  It was another up-period in my life, tutti bene, everything good . . . and then Beryl, Beryl, Beryl, had to start playing games.

  Beryl, Nona, and Bernadete were all working for a company started by a local big-money man, Alan Suits.

  The idea was to get fetal cells out of the blood-streams of pregnant women and use them to diagnose possible fetal defects.

 

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