My Venice and Other Essays (9780802194039)

by Leon, Donna

  This was August and I still had three weeks of summer break before I had to resume teaching at the university. My parents were happy to have me extend my visit, I had my books, and so why not?

  The rhythm was an easy one to fall into: at dawn I was in the fields, where I worked for an hour or two, swatting mosquitoes the size of bumblebees and surprising the odd field mouse, but always increasing the number of baskets until the back of my Volkswagen Beetle sank down on the axle under their weight.

  By this time word had spread about the tomato stand and I’d already acquired some regular customers. Some asked if the tomatoes were grown in my own garden and I would self-righteously point back to my mother’s garden, where the plants thrived and could be seen to be doing so. Others asked if I used pesticides and I would give a scandalized, “Certainly not,” though God alone knew what Mr. Vreeland poured, pumped, or sprayed upon them when no one was around to see.

  Occasionally, when I got bored with it, I’d leave a cup on the table for a few hours and ask people to help themselves and leave their money. Very few people took the possibility to steal, though most of them did switch the tomatoes in the boxes to suit their taste in size and ripeness.

  And then came Harry. My best friend and her husband, who lived in New York, had recently gotten a Scotch terrier puppy, Harry, who was in the ball of fluff stage of his development. But then they decided to go on vacation, and where oh where could they leave Harry? Thus Harry joined the firm, sleeping or rolling around with his tennis ball under the table, occasionally following customers to their cars and trying to jump in with them, never lifting a paw to help with either picking or packaging but still a great public relations asset to the corporation. Soon I had to make it repeatedly clear that, though the tomatoes were for sale, Harry was not. He kept me company for two weeks, always cheerful, always ready to chase a ball or have his stomach scratched: of how many employees can that be said? Though he was happy to see his owners when they came to pick him up, I like to think he regretted the separation.

  University classes resumed and I returned to Massachusetts. Perhaps it was the sight of my contract and that distressingly low sum I was to be paid that had me back in New Jersey on the second weekend of classes, returned to my tomato empire, earning on a weekend what the university paid me in a month. Or perhaps it was nothing more than my heritage, the Protestant work ethic.

  My Mother’s Funeral

  My mother died of cigarettes. She smoked for more than sixty-five years, usually a pack a day. She came from a family of smokers; three of her siblings died of cigarettes. But she also came of sturdy stock for, even with a diagnosis of emphysema, she played tennis well into her seventies and swam every morning into her eighties. Toward the end of her life, I once brought her home from the hospital after a small stroke put her there for a week. While we were on the way back she asked me to stop and get her a pack of cigarettes. It was only three months before she died that she stopped smoking. One day she simply lost the desire and never smoked again.

  She was, as well, a woman with a wry sense of humor and an affection for the absurd, much given to joking and, as far as I remember, usually in good spirits. People liked her and trusted her, often confided in her, and for the last decades of her life she was pretty much the unappointed center of our very large extended family. She was a woman of extraordinary generosity and, I suspect, the silent helper of many of my aunts and cousins. God, the woman loved a joke, loved a drink, and, yes, loved to have a cigarette with it.

  When she died, she chose to be cremated, as had my father, decisions that my brother and I greeted with some surprise. There was a lapse in time between her death and the consignment of the urn, so I had to return from Italy for that cere­mony. It took place on a late winter day, dry and sunny, in an immense cemetery in New Jersey, acres of uniform gravestones planted at regular distances, the grass cut to the height of a marine’s scalp.

  For what seemed a limitless distance around us, the grass and those identical stones ordered in straight lines marched off to the distance: all the same, all the same, all the same. The grass looked more like it had been vacuumed than mowed; nothing was out of place and not a single flower could be seen.

  She loved flowers, had always filled the gardens behind the houses we lived in while I was growing up, and after, with vast open patches of wildly colored flowers. There were no neat rows, all was confused beauty, and one of my enduring memories is of her kneeling in the dirt, digging.

  As we walked across this orderly field, my brother and sister-in-law and I, he carrying the urn and the minister in the lead, memories of what a silly thing my mother was kept coming back. I remembered her waking me up one night to help her go and steal cow manure from a farmer’s manure pile. I remembered her returning from an afternoon lawn party at the home of a wealthy aunt carrying a handbag filled with violet plants she’d dug up with her hands when no one was looking. And I remembered that she always insisted on getting our dog a Christmas present and on dressing it in costume for Halloween. When we were about two meters from the niche in the wall where the urn was to be placed, I noticed a cigarette butt on the grass, the only speck of disorder in this vast expanse of well-tended everything. Without thinking, I pointed to the cigarette and remarked to my brother, “Oh, Ma would be so pleased. They didn’t put her in the No Smoking.”

  Even as I write it, I realize how awful it must sound. Certainly the minister could not disguise his disapproval of our laughter, the three of us, the people who loved her most, holding her ashes and laughing like loons. But then it occurred to me that it was exactly the sort of remark she would have made in similar circumstances, and I realized how funny she would have found it and how much she would have laughed. It seemed somehow right for the occasion and, even now, conscious of how risky it is to admit to such a thing, I think it was the send-off she most would have liked.

  Fatties

  One of Thomas Wolfe’s novels is titled You Can’t Go Home Again. Perhaps a better title, for those of us Americans who have spent decades living away from the United States, would be “You Shouldn’t Go Home Again.” Even though I have no intention, ever, of living there again, I continue to take an interest in America’s many peculiarities and cannot shake the habit of referring to it as “home.” Perhaps this is no more than language and the sense of union with the place where one’s mother tongue is spoken, perhaps it’s nothing more than a shared sense of humor, though it might well be nothing more than a habit of speech.

  Each time I go there, however, I am struck by an ever stronger sense of having landed in the wrong place, for I find myself surrounded by members of some other species, as though the body snatchers had invaded while I was away and left replicants in place of the people who were there when I left. My native language is still spoken there but formulaic slogans, relentless friendliness, and endless repetitions of “like” and “I mean” delay the realization that Americans’ words are too often devoid of any genuine content.

  But my sense of alienation grows strongest when I am faced with their size. Americans are fat, but fat in a way that is peculiar to them, as though a race of hermaphrodites had been squeezed out of a pastry bag and badly smoothed into shape with a giant spatula, then stuffed into low-crotched jeans and tent-sized ­T-shirts before being given bad haircuts and sent on their way. I am haunted by the fear that, were I to touch one of them, my fingers would sink in up to the second joint and come out oily.

  The early fathers of the Christian church devoted much of their time and argumentation to the doctrine of “transubstantiation,” and it is this concept that comes to mind when I view these acres of flesh: from what source has all of this mass been transubstantiated if not from what they eat? And what would one have to consume, and in what quantities, to produce this apparently endless bulk? A quick run through a supermarket, however, shows miles of shelves holding fat-free, low-fat, ­cholesterol-free,
hi-this, low-that products, stretching out toward the ever diminishing horizon of slenderness, and restaurants have taken to printing the calorie or fat content of items on the menu. It must, then, be in the other aisles that the raw materials of this bulk lie lurking and in the perpetual grazing that is visible wherever Americans foregather. Imagine my surprise, in a country where adults blanche at the idea of putting cream in coffee and where “no sweet” and “sugar free” are part of a child’s basic vocabulary, to discover the new sizing system for clothing, where the potential embarrassment of a large number, which might suggest large size, has been replaced by the letter X, repeated as often as are the numbers after the decimal point in pi.

  It is their obsessive interest in and praise of thinness that makes the size of Americans such a paradox. Were it socially desirable, even acceptable, to be fat, then their eating habits and girth would make sense. But what public figure wants to be fat? Indeed, which of them is? Travel beyond the anorectic canyons of Manhattan shows that rich people are thin and poor people are fat. But how can this be true in a country where poverty is believed to have been eliminated?

  “Denial” is a term currently popular among American speakers of psychobabble. As best I can make out, it means doing one thing while believing you are doing the opposite. A more ­serious-minded or better-qualified observer than I might suggests that Americans are in denial—ah, what an unpleasant phrase—not only about their size but also about their politics, their place in the world, and their economic future. These, however, are not subjects upon which I find it pleasant to comment other than to say that magic thinking is often a large component in every nation’s idea of its place in the world. Perhaps it is because Americans are a practical, literal-minded people that they have chosen to give the world such a visible example of the way they think, the way they are.

  Thomas Wolfe’s best-known book is Look Homeward, Angel. I think not.

  We’d All Be

  Hamburger, Ma’am

  It was fear of embarrassment that led me to return to the U.S. Air Force base where I once worked, though this time I went not to lecture on the novels of Jane Austen or the poetry of John Donne, as I had for fifteen years, but to talk about bombs. Toward the end of a book—one I was writing, not reading—I began to wonder if the explosion with which I had begun it had any relation to actual explosions. I’d caused a swimming pool to burst open, sending thousands of liters of water flooding across the land, and it was only as I approached the end of the book that I began to wonder if the explosive charge I’d imagined would have been able to do the damage it did.

  And who better to ask than men who worked every day with bombs? Years ago, I’d had a student who worked at defusing bombs, and I still remember the furtive glance I occasionally cast at his fingers to see if they were all still there. Surely the squadron would be there, and so they proved to be, and more than willing to talk to me.

  The meeting room where I awaited the soldiers was small and welcoming in the American way, which means it had a Coke machine and a friendly mascot dog. In the center of a round table lay a rectangular block of what looked like the sort of rough green clay we played with in kindergarten. Dominos came in a box that size, I remembered, and didn’t Sprüngli have a box of chocolates just about the same shape?

  The three soldiers who worked in bomb demolition came in and shook hands, all friendly guys, much like the students I taught for years and of whom I’d grown very fond. One of them was tall and lanky, the other two shorter and thicker. As we stood talking for a moment, I looked more carefully at the two stocky ones and noticed something odd about their bodies. From the waist down, they were perfectly normal: thin-hipped and straight-legged. But their upper bodies seemed strangely disproportionate to the rest of them, almost as though someone had pulled their belts very tight and then blown air into the upper part of their bodies, inflating them to twice their normal size. They looked, somehow, padded. Were they wearing bulletproof vests under their uniforms?

  Turning down the offer of Coke, I joined them at the table and explained my purpose. I needed to know how big a charge it would take to blow out one entire end of a swimming pool.

  “Swimming pool in the ground, ma’am?” one asked.

  “Yes.”

  They engaged one another in technical talk for a minute or two, after which the sergeant said that it would take a bomb about the size of a fire hydrant. “A big one,” one of the others volunteered, holding his hand about eighty centimeters above the ground.

  Since the character in the book would have had to carry this bomb a considerable distance, and since at this point in the book the person who did it might still have been one of the female characters, I recognized the monster I had created.

  “And if the pool were raised up on a platform?” I asked.

  “Much easier,” one of them said and pointed to the green rectangle. “That’d probably be enough.”

  “Ah, yes,” I said, adjusting my glasses and propping my chin on my hand in an attitude I worked at making very casual. “Just what is that stuff?” I made it sound as though I’d been meaning to ask but had been so distracted by all this talk of charges and force that it had just been driven out of my silly little head.

  “That’s plastique, ma’am,” the sergeant answered with a smile, one of those American smiles with the perfect number of perfect teeth. No doubt observing the close attention I gave to the two electrical wires protruding from the end of the green rectangle, he added, “But it’s not real, ma’am. It’s something we use in training sessions.”

  Much relieved, I gave in to my curiosity and asked, “If it were real, and it were to go off in this room, what would it do?”

  The blond one, one of the inflatable ones, who had been silent until now, said, “We’d all be hamburger, ma’am.”

  I pursued this and learned that, even if someone had been behind a desk, a filing cabinet, or under the very table at which we sat, the only difference in their fate would be the nature of the ingredients mixed in with the hamburger: metal, wood, or plastic.

  They had answered my question, and I knew I would have to change the book, but something—curiosity at its most perverse, perhaps—kept me there and led me to ask more questions about subjects that had no relation whatsoever to my work at hand. They were more than happy to explain and then to show. They brought out a briefcase, popped open the lid, and showed me the various ways it could be rigged to explode: by means of a simple timing device, or when it was opened, or picked up, or even nudged carelessly by someone walking by. Then here was the workman’s tool kit, similarly rigged and similarly filled with those soft green rectangles that now seemed nothing more than a part of the furniture.

  We’d had the overture and the first act, and now one of them did a bit of coloratura on the contents that lurked beneath my kitchen sink. Mixing baking soda, ammonia, bleach, and other ordinary cleaners, the creative bomb maker could take out whole buildings. Add a little Vaseline and you had the arsonist’s dream. And all as easy to call up on the Internet as kiddie porn or tantric sex.

  Curious about their daily tasks, I asked if they ever worked with land mines, and that led to talk of the land mine industry, thriving in both Italy and the United States, neither country signatory to the ban on production. The United States, I learned, manufactured only defensive mines, that old standard the claymore, which was designed to be put around the perimeter of U.S. military installations and, they seemed to believe, was used exclusively for that purpose.

  Seeing how avid my interest was, the tall lanky one offered to show me the robots, who slept in a room down the corridor. Made of steel, about the size of, well, about the size of a wheelchair, they were propelled by steel treads with a steel prosthesis in front that could clamp onto and lift bombs weighing up to fifty kilos. Next to them lay the packs containing the suits of body armor, weighing about forty kilos, complete
with gloves, face shield, and protective boots.

  By now I was swept up by the momentum of curiosity, and so when he offered to show me some bombs I agreed. We went outside to a long, low shed, a kind of converted garage, where samples of different sorts of bombs were stored. There were long ones and thin ones and fat ones and ones with tail fins like antique Cadillacs.

  “And this is a bomblet,” he said, holding up something that looked like a metal tennis ball, though a bit smaller.

  “A what?” I asked, my imagination catching on that seductive diminutive -let. What would it be in Italian? Bombina? In German, Bombden? So small, almost cuddly, a dear little thing you’d want in your Christmas stocking. Cutlet, bracelet, the Rockettes.

  The bomblet, I observed, was covered with curved, hinge-like flanges that looked as though they could snap free of the bomblet. I inquired as to their function, only to learn the whole story of the bomblet. No doubt because of their insignificant size, scores of bomblets must cluster together in a larger canister, which can be dropped from an altitude of ten thousand meters. The canister, upon impact, disintegrates, setting the dear little bomblets free to roll merrily where they will. As they are spinning over the ground, they toss out their flanges, each of which is attached to a trip wire. The bomblet does not explode: it waits. And when a foot, regardless of what manner of leg that foot might be attached to, touches the trip wire the bomblet does its job and explodes. “Guaranteed to kill everything within two hundred meters, ma’am.”

  I looked around me, measuring off what I thought to be two hundred meters. “Everything?”

  ‘‘Yes, ma’am. It’s filled with metal pellets.”

  “Ah,” I replied and suggested we go back inside. Back at the table with my three Virgils, I asked if things like the bomblet ever created in them any sort of intellectual dissonance between the name and appearance and what the bomblet could do. When my question was greeted with smiles of polite, albeit confused, inquiry, I tried to clarify things by asking if they found it in any way unusual that they could kill everything—everything—in a radius of two hundred meters and do this from an anonymous distance of ten thousand meters.