by Clark Blaise
She slept on the long ride to Pisa. She slept like a child, no deep breathing, no snoring. I wished she’d turned her head towards me. I would have held her, even embraced her. It was the first time in years that I’d felt such a surge of protectiveness.
There is very little good I can say about Pisa. I’m of two minds about the Leaning Tower. It is iconic, but ugly. It’s a monument to phenomenal incompetence, and now the world is invested in a medieval mistake. Actually, I’m not of two minds. It is an abomination. Preserving the mistake is a crime against the great Italian tradition of engineering. In the wide lawns around the Tower, various bands of young tourists, mostly Japanese, posed with their arms outstretched, aligning them for photos in a way to suggest they were holding up the crippled Tower.
We walked towards the Tower, past stalls of souvenir-sellers, most of them, if not all, Bangladeshi, hawking Leaning Tower T-shirts and kitchen towels. They called out to us in English, but I could hear them muttering among themselves in Bangla, “It’s an older bunch. Put out the fancy stuff.”
I stopped by, drawn in by the language. We may be one of the pioneering languages of Silicon Valley, but we are also the language of the night, the cooks and dishwashers and hole-in-the-wall restaurants and cheap clothing stalls around the world. Then they studied me a little closer. “Hey, brother!” This came in Bangla. “Something nice for your girlfriend?” They held up white T-shirts, stamped with the Leaning Tower.
“What kind of gift is that?” I answered back. “She’d have to lean like a cripple to make it straight.”
They invited me behind the stalls. Rose came closer, but stayed on the edge of the sidewalk. I felt a little guilty — this was my call from the unconscious, the language-hook. I remembered my uncle, who had brought his devotional tapes to California, and many evenings I would return from work and the lights would be off, and he would be singing to his Hemanta Mukherjee tapes, and I would keep the lights off and brew tea in the dark.
Behind the display bins, the men had stored trunks and trunks of trinkets and T-shirts and towels and tunics, nearly all of them Pisa-related. On each trunk, in Bangla, they had chalked the names of cities: Pisa, Florence, Rome, Venice and Pompeii.
The three stall-owners were cousins. They introduced themselves: Wahid, Hesham and Ali, cousins from a village a kilometer from my grandparents’ birthplace. They knew the town well, and the big house that had been ours, the zamindari house, the Hindu’s house. Maybe their grandfathers, as small children, had worked there, or maybe they had just stolen bananas from the plantation.
“Then you are from the Ganguly family?” they asked me, and I nodded, bowing slightly, ”Abhishek Ganguly.” Hindu, even Brahmin: opposite sides of a one-kilometer world.
The buried, collective memory forever astonishes. Nothing in the old country could have brought our families together, yet here we were in the shadow of the Leaning Tower of Pisa, remembering the lakes and rivers, the banana plantation, my great-grandfather’s throwing open his house on every Hindu and Muslim feast-day. In the olden days, in the golden east of Bengal where all our poetry originated, the Hindus had the wealth, the Muslims had the numbers, and both were united against the British.
My ancestral residence (which I’ve never seen; after Partition, my parents even tore up the old photos they’d carried with them), I learned, is now a school. The banana plantation is now a soccer field and cricket pitch. Wahid, Hesham, and Ali, and three remoter cousins — what we call “cousin-brothers”, which covers any degree of relatedness including husbands of cousins’ sisters — have a lorry, and when the tourist season is over in Pisa they will strike their stalls and go to Florence and sell Statue of David kitsch, or to Venice and sell gondola kitsch. In the winter they will go to southern Spain and sell Alhambra kitsch.
But think of the distance these cheap but still over-priced T-shirts have traveled! Uzbek cotton, spun in Cambodia, stamped in China and sent to a middleman somewhere in the Emirates, to be distributed throughout Europe, matching the proper Western icon to the right city and the proper, pre-paid sellers. For one month they will return to Bangladesh, bringing gifts to their children and parents, and doubtless, enlarging their families.
The cousins had come to Italy four years ago, starting out by spreading blankets on the footpaths and selling China-made toys. Now they have transportable stalls and in a couple of years the six cousins will pool their money and buy a proper store, somewhere, and bring their wives and children over. Right now, they send half of their earnings back to their village, where the wives have built solid houses and the children are going to English-medium schools and want to become doctors and teachers. Their wives have opened up tea-stalls and stitching-shops. “We are Bengalis first, then Hindu or Muslim after,” said Wahid, perhaps for my benefit. “If anyone says he is first a Muslim or a Hindu, I give him wide berth. He has a right to his beliefs, but I do not share them.”
All of this I translated for my girlfriend, Rose. Then we sat at a sidewalk café and drank a glass of white wine, looking out on the Tower and the ant-sized climbers working their way up the sides, waving from the balconies. I was happy.
“I think you’re a little too harsh on the Tower,” she said.
We reached Florence in the dark. There seemed little question that we would spend the night together, in her hotel or mine. Outside the bus-park only one food stall was still open. I bought apples and a bottle of wine. The young man running it did all his calculations in Italian, until I stopped him, in Bangla. “That’s a lot of taka, isn’t it?” and the effect was of a puppet master jerking a doll’s strings. He mentioned the name of his village, this one far, far in the east, near Chittagong, practically in Burma. His accent was difficult for me, as was mine to him. “Bangla is the international language of struggle,” he said.
The unexpected immersion in Bengal had restored a certain confidence. It was the last thing, or the second-last thing, I’d expected from a trip into the wilds of Tuscany. I was swinging the plastic sack of wine and apples, with the urn tucked under my arm, and Rose said, “Let me take the urn.” I lifted my arm slightly, and she reached in.
“Oops,” she said.
My religion holds that the body is sheddable, but the soul is eternal. My uncle’s soul still exists, despite the cremation. It has time to find a new home, entering through the soft spot in a newborn’s skull. I felt he was still with me, there in Italy, but perhaps he’d remained back in California. The soul is in the ether, like a particle in the quanta; it can be in California one second, and Kolkata the next. But he’d wanted to find an Italian home, and now his matter lay in a dusty, somewhat oily mass on the cobblestones of Florence, amid shards of glass and ceramic. It will join some sort of Italian flux. It will be picked up on the soles of shoes, it will flow in the gutter, it will be devoured by flies and picked over by pigeons. If I am truly a believer in our ancient traditions, then it doesn’t matter where he lies like a clot of mud while his soul still circles, awaiting its new house, wherever that house might be.
“It’s all right,” I said. In fact, a burden had been lifted.
Her hotel was near at hand. This was an event I had not planned. It had been three years since any sexual activity, and that had been brief and not consoling. In the slow-rising elevator, she squeezed my hand. Sex with a gray-haired lady, however slim and girlish, lay outside my fantasy. How to behave, what is the etiquette? She’d taken off her glasses, and she was humming something wordless. Under her University of Firenze sweatshirt, I could make out only the faintest mounds, the slightest crease. Even in the elevator’s harsh fluorescent light, I saw no wrinkles in her face.
As we walked down the corridor, she slipped me her key-card. My fingers were trembling. It took three stabs to open the door. The moment the door was shut, and a light turned on, she walked to the foot of the bed, and turned to face me. The bedspread was a bright, passionate red. It was an eternal moment:
the woman’s smile, her hands closing around the ends of her sweatshirt, and then beginning to pull it up. I dropped the bag of wine and apples. So this is how it plays, this is how people like us do it. Her head disappeared briefly under the sweater, and then she tossed the University of Firenze aside on the red bedspread and she stood before me, a thin woman with small breasts, no bra, and what appeared to be a pink string looped against her side.
“Now you know,” she said, and began kissing me madly. “Come to my bed of crimson joy.”
What I knew was this: she was bald. Her wig had been caught in the sleeve of her sweater. The pink string was a fresh scar down her ribcage, then curling up between her breasts. But we were on the bed and my hands were over her scalp, then on her breasts and the buttons of her jeans, and her fingers were on my belt and pants.
There is much to respect in this surrender to passion. After sex, there is humor, and honesty. I poured the wine and she retired to the bathroom, only to reappear in her red “Shirley MacLaine” wig. With her obviously unnatural, burgundy-colored hair, there’s a flash of sauciness atop her comely face and body. And so passion arose once again. “I’ve got more,” she said. There was a black “Liza Minelli,” and a blonde.
When we sipped the wine, she told me she’d been given a year, maybe two. But who knows, in this world miracles have been known to happen.
It is overwhelming, the first vision of The David, standing a ghostly white at the end of a long, sculpture-lined hall. An adoring crowd surrounds him, whatever the hour or the day. Viewed from afar, in profile, he is a haughty, even arrogant figure. His head is turned. He is staring at his immediate enemy, Goliath.
“That pose is called contrapposto,” Rose whispered. She was wearing her red Shirley MacLaine wig, and she looked like a slightly wicked college woman. David’s weight is supported on the right leg — the left leg is slightly raised — but the right arm is lank, and his curled hand cradles a smooth stone. The left arm is bent, and the biceps bunched. The leather sling lies on his shoulder and slithers down his back. Yet when I stood at his side, looking up directly into his eyes, the haughtiness disappeared. I read doubt, maybe fear. It’s as though Michelangelo were looking into David’s future, beyond the immediate victory. If I remember my Christian schooling, David would go on to become a great king and poet, the founder of a dynasty leading eventually to Jesus Christ, but he will lose his beloved son Absalom in a popular uprising against him and he will send a loyal general to his death in order to possess his wife. In the end, for all his heroism, he will grow corrupt in his pride and arrogance; his is a tattered regime. All of this I felt at that moment, and tried to communicate.
There is so much tragedy in his eyes. He knows he will accomplish this one great thing in the next few minutes, but regret will flow for the rest of his life. David is a monument to physical perfection, the antidote to the Leaning Tower.
And what about us? I wonder. She took my arm as we walked down the swarming sidewalk outside the Accademia. We passed through a great open square, near the Uffizi Palace. Crews were setting up folding chairs for an evening concert of Renaissance music.
“Will you come with me?” she asked.
Of course I would. I would see her mandolinist. We would get there early and sit in the front row. I would stand behind her after the concert, assuming she could make her way to the stage against the press of admirers, and she would ask him, “remember me?”
Maybe she would wear her gray ponytail wig. He would be more comfortable with that, more likely to remember her. In some way, I would learn more about her. “Oh, Rose!” he might exclaim. Or he might dismiss her with a flick of his fingers.
“If I’m still above ground next year, and if I came to your house, would you welcome me in?”
And I can only say, “I will open the door.”
THE QUALITY OF LIFE
1 . I WAS IN THE HOTEL BATHROOM, brushing and flossing, with CNN on loud. “We’ll call this another story about undocumented aliens in south Texas. But a story with a twist.” Undocumented aliens get my attention. South Texas doesn’t, much.
“Every week, Jacinto Juarez, known in this hot and humid corner of southeast Texas as JJ, and his son, Junior, known as Three-J, do what responsible farmers always do: take a tour of the property, check and mend the fences, inspect the livestock, take moisture readings and measure the growth of crops. Since they know every square inch of their two hundred and forty acres, some thirty-five miles southwest of Corpus Christi, they also check for the little things. And two weeks ago, JJ and Three-J noticed a very significant little thing: this.”
That brought me out from the bathroom. This appeared to be a large hole in a small bluff.
“JJ’s property dips down to San Fernando Creek but the rich bottomlands are soft, not easily inspected. So, he planted some trees and even a stand of bamboo, and tended to leave it alone. But two weeks ago, right here, he noticed a recently excavated burrow, leading out to what he calls his private ‘wetland’.”
Mr. Juarez took over. “This here crick empties into a big estuary, then into Corpus Harbor. Just about any animal in the world could be hitching a ride on a tanker and if they jump ship there’s no way they’re leaving. My granddaddy used to organize jaguar hunts out here. I’ve seen more coyotes than I can count, and armadillos and javalinos by the thousands, but I never seen a burrow like this.”
“I set a trapline around it,” said Three-J, “and I baited it with some real smelly rabbit. Got a coyote pup about three hundred yards downstream, but it didn’t come out of that burrow.”
“So,” CNN broke in, “JJ borrowed a night-vision camera. It took two weeks, and he’s finally got his answer. But it’s an answer that leaves us with a bigger question. Barring the possibility of its being an escaped exotic pet, or being fattened for a feast, did this mystery guest hitch a ride on an oil tanker from Venezuela — or did he make it all the way on his, or, I should say, on her own? Or is this another instance of global warming pushing fauna out of ancestral environments and forcing them north?”
And then, through the green, vaguely fluoroscopic footage of night vision goggles we watched the emergence of something truly new on our continent: a hundred and fifty pounds of aquatically adapted rodent, a pot-bellied pig-sized South American capybara, an immensely inflated guinea pig with slick hair and long skinny legs.
“Say hello to Cappy. And goodbye. Not knowing the nature of the beast, Jacinto Juarez instinctively reacted as a farmer, and shot it. In its native Venezuelan habitat, capybaras are ravenous browsers. Failure to find suitable grasses and aquatic plants might well drive him — or in Cappy’s case, her — to pillage beans and corn. Doctors at the University of Texas-Brownsville who performed the necropsy confirmed that Cappy was pregnant with three near-full term offspring. She had been impregnated five months ago. Tonight in these lonely Texas barrens, there might be a male capybara searching wetlands for a mate.”
I returned to the bathroom, sick with a kind of empathy. To die in such a way, in such a place, after the great adventure of her life: oh, Mother!
2. This starts in cool and leafy Bangalore, a town where many trinkets of Empire have run their course. Long before the things we read about today, Bangalore was just a dowdy old army cantonment, the base of the Southern Command of the British, and then the Indian Army.
Bangalore’s boulevards are wide enough to channel military parades, caissons, battle camels and ornamental elephants. It’s a pleasantly situated, high altitude town of year-round salubriousness — dry in the monsoons, cool in the summer, warm in the winter, devoid of mosquitoes — sprinkled with parks, golf courses, military academies, imposing administrative buildings of red and yellow sandstone, and in the old days, whites-only clubs with cheap liquor. Its sole international raison d’être had to do with the British Army. Even after Independence, Bangalore did not destroy its Victoria statues.
Back in th
e 1870s, my enterprising great-great-grandfather, Mohan Nilingappa, recently arrived in Bangalore from our ancestral village up north, purchased a spacious bungalow, “Primrose Estate”, from a departing Englishman who’d lost his family in an epidemic. It was situated in an outlying community called Murphy Town. Anticipating a large family, Mohan added a north and south wing. “Primrose Estate” became “Nilingappa Bhavan.”
Nilingappa gospel has it that my g-g-grandfather never suffered a single humiliation at the hands of our colonial masters; was never mocked or excluded for his faith, his accent, or the color of his skin. Obviously, the Nilingappas, even in the 1870s, were so worthy that they alone, among the hundreds of millions of Indian subjects, avoided the abuse — official, and ad hoc — of colonial arrogance. My father loved the British. He’d studied in Edinburgh and he wore his pre-War Scottish tweeds right up to the minute of his death.
I doubt that the British have ever been capable of extending equal treatment to Indians. At most, the early Nilingappas might have profited from a certain indulgence for one simple reason: they were brewers. An army might march on its stomach, but it fights on its liquor, and Mohan Nilingappa held the purveyors’ license to the cantonment.
During the Raj, satellite communities like Fraser Town and Murphy Town ringed the city. The old officer corps — the various Frasers and Murphys — built splendid residences behind high stucco walls. Christian hospitals, white clubs and Anglican churches followed. The Bangalore climate encouraged English-style gardening; hence, their horticultural societies and garden tours. Some of the retirees even stayed on in their cool and shaded bungalows and married young or recently widowed Indian and Anglo-Indian women. There was no reason to go back to England so long as loyal servants, English-trained cooks, golf foursomes and cheap liquor were easily requisitioned, and thanks to their off-colour wives and children, they couldn’t go back anyway.