SYMPATHY FOR THE WIFE
I stood at the window and watched the unsteady burning of city lights, the quiet streets, my reflection printed on black glass. This wasn’t the past and it wasn’t the future; this was São Paulo. The apartment was my apartment, our apartment; this was home. Planes, coming down through night, were suddenly at eye level with buildings, a controlled violence of metal and gears that from where I was standing looked like floating, like grace.
We have to live in the time we live in. Is there anyone—and I include myself—who doesn’t suffer the pangs of era anxiety, a feeling of being born at the wrong moment? My husband—my husband suffered no anxiety. He was happily in and of his time. He liked his Kindle Voyage, his Galaxy, his Venture rewards card, the frictionless pleasures of on-demand, the steam baths of Wi-Fi. A life as straightforward as switching to airplane mode, a life in which the important thing was to remember your passwords. I knew this about him when we married. He was consistent. This consistency was inherent to his appeal. I was at the start and for a very long time piercingly in love with him; I had dated my share of aspiring poets and artists, and he was different. He was a dependable creature. When he was unhappy, there was a floor to his unhappiness; he didn’t turn gloomy. His emotions were orderly, they didn’t swarm. I once imagined that his characterological consistency was something I could participate in, climb into, like a passenger in a sedan with a driver. That he would serve to balance out my not so dependable qualities. I had thought his uncomplicated happiness would make me happy, too.
At a point during my twenties I had stopped questioning the comforts of money. But then something changed; I no longer enjoyed the enjoyment. And so I was seeing the casualties of capitalism everywhere, the forces coming into play, the hidden currents that made my life easier and other people’s lives more difficult. I felt: discomfort. Discomfort—it’s the easiest political emotion in the world. You can grow comfortable with a lot of discomfort.
Most recent common ancestor refers to the last human being who was a genetic ancestor of all human beings living today. Complex mathematical modeling suggests that this man or woman may have lived between two thousand and five thousand years ago. People are surprised to learn that our most recent common ancestor might have lived within the imaginable past. Identical ancestors point refers to the moment in the past when everyone living was either an ancestor of all people alive today or an ancestor of none. This may have been seventy-five thousand years ago. Even that span is such a minor stain on time—dark, mindless time.
Every time I went to the church there were men and women I hadn’t seen before. New arrivals, émigrés. Others, whose faces I had come to know, were gone. It was a place of flux. Émigré—you only ever hear the term used in reference to the kind of refugee who has a violin case among his baggage; it has a connotation of nobility salvaged from disaster. I saw a man sitting on the floor, against the wall, opening an orange with his thumbnail. Two women were with him, one on each side, falling against his shoulders. The man ate the orange and, with the other hand, started texting on his mobile phone, its charger still plugged into the wall. I asked who he was texting. “La famille,” he said. Was one of the women his wife? Were they his sisters? “Non,” he said.
Padre Piero and I spoke with two brothers, Syrian. One had some English, and one had some French; a conversation of shards. Now and then the brothers consulted in Arabic, the father and I in Portuguese. They had a contact in São Paulo, a distant cousin, maybe. They wanted advice about papers. Every other sentence would begin: “Dans la guerre…” They were educated; one had been a medical student before the war. Their father was dead. It was becoming both more dangerous to leave and more dangerous to stay, they said. They had flown to Istanbul, and from there to São Paulo, a journey that marked them as lucky. They said they would never go back; they said eventually everyone was going to leave Syria. Everyone they knew was talking about Europe. They knew people who were talking about crossing the sea. It is so bad you will die to leave, they said. I listened and nodded. There was nothing to say. The future wasn’t supposed to look like this.
The protests were petering out. I had no news of Luciano. Claudia had dropped me as a tutor, or I had dropped her as a client; I’d dropped most of my clients. Everything was petering out. First it was about the twenty-centavo increase in the bus fare, and then it was about the insult of the transportation system generally, and then it was about the shoddy conditions of all public services, and the waste of public money, and the corruption of politicians, and the failure of institutions, and then it seemed to be about the sheer fact of politics, and then no one was sure what it was about. Autumn was coming, except it was really spring. It turns out you can’t protest everything at once.
We met at a party, Manhattan, someone’s apartment. He mixed us something with gin, and we got a little tipsy. This was a time when I still took moral instruction from the literature I read. I made a remark to the effect that Joan Didion was my favorite writer. I was embarrassed to have spoken in earnest. I told him it made me feel like a cliché to have the same favorite writer as so many other women like me. It felt like a choice of scarf. I said I thought Joan Didion’s collected essays were the Great American Novel. On our second date, I wouldn’t kiss him, but squeezed his hand to say good night, long enough to let him know what I was feeling, and only then did I realize how warm my palms were. They were sweating, I was so nervous.
Somebody a while ago pulled a stunt by submitting Pride and Prejudice to a publisher; the publisher rejected it. Proving what? Proving that Jane Austen wouldn’t write like that if she were alive today.
Once upon a time I dated a poet who didn’t own a bed. He slept on a mattress on the floor, in a half bedroom near Myrtle Avenue, and paid minimal, under-the-table rent to the friend whose name was on the lease. “It’s interesting as a white man to live in a neighborhood where you’re the minority,” the poet told me.
The man who would become my husband was a finance guy who read Joan Didion. If you haven’t dated in New York City you have no idea how rare that is. He was handsome, and charming, and he wasn’t insecure. He wasn’t nearly as well-read as the poet who didn’t own a bed, but he owned a bed; and, after more than one guy like the poet who didn’t own a bed, I believed that the man who would become my husband was what I wanted. No—I didn’t merely believe it. I was twenty-three. I wanted him so fucking much.
What I thought was a protest in our neighborhood turned out to be a religious procession. I went out to the balcony when I heard the sounds. It was evening. Several hundred people with candles in their hands moved slowly up our street, a street called Divine Savior, as a priest in ordinary clothes issued promises of God’s love through a megaphone, and two men played acoustic guitars while a woman sang a beautiful, haunting melody. We watched from the balcony, and saw our neighbors also watching from their balconies. They filmed the performance with their smartphones. I wondered if the parishioners thought of the procession as a performance. I asked my husband what the occasion was. On the Internet he learned that it was the feast day of Our Lady of Aparecida, the patron saint of Brazil, for whom our neighborhood’s church was named. Nossa Senhora da Conceição Aparecida was the name given to a statue of the Madonna fished out of a river—a statue of a Black Madonna, in fact, said my husband, now reporting from Wikipedia—by three fishermen in a small village north of São Paulo, in 1717, as they prepared a meal to honor the visiting governor.
The statue’s race was politically convenient in a country whose poor were descended from Africans. Local people gave the statue credit for a miracle performed on behalf of a young slave, and then they built a church nearby. From there the myth accelerated—my husband found more about the statue, as I read the screen over his shoulder, no longer watching the slow candlelight procession in the street, which really had been quite beautiful, the candlelight in the parishioners’ hands a surprisingly tender sight to behold. I subscribed instantly to the factual
ity of everything I was reading, even though it was written anonymously and described events in rural Brazil three hundred years ago, probably documented only sketchily even at the time. My husband scrolled down. Popes made decrees about the statue and its importance; the government declared a national holiday in the statue’s honor—if you want people to believe in something, give them a day off from work. The songs of the parishioners in the street reached the sixteenth floor and floated in through open windows, the voice of the priest from the megaphone. In 1980, Pope John Paul II came all the way from Rome to visit Aparecida—as the town inevitably became known—and to consecrate the church there as a minor basilica.
If I was thinking a lot in those days about the nature of time, the seemingly constant interpenetration of eras, a sense of time not as linear but as a confusion of folds, it was because I was at that point engaged in an excavation of my own past. Of, specifically, the past with my husband, my husband who now wanted a child, who always wanted a child, with whom I argued because I could not decide if I wanted a child. Memories surfaced. When a memory made me happy, I felt pain. For instance, the charm of my husband’s smile when we first met. It was the same smile he had now and it also wasn’t the same smile he had now: both statements were true. Although it was possible that I was transferring the image of his smile now onto the memory of him at a party in Manhattan years ago, at a time when I didn’t even know his last name; that more recent memories had overwritten older ones. It wasn’t as simple as saying that we were happy and then we weren’t. The early days, the middle years, of our relationship seemed to coexist with the different, more difficult situation we had now, they were folded in, and this made the situation even more troubled than it already was; I would open a newspaper in Brazil and read about a demonstration by an indigenous-rights group that turned ugly when men with painted faces shot arrows at policemen armed with semiautomatic weapons.
I stood at the window and watched the burning of city lights, the activity at the corner bar, the jets coming in for landing, the blue street signs hanging at intersections, the somber apartment towers. A city finds its most perfect expression at night; the lights are a proof of life. I heard the latch turn, my husband undoing the locks. Then he was standing behind me: I saw him as a reflection alongside my reflection, ghosts upon the city’s illumination. “I thought you were working late,” I said. “I thought so, too,” he said.
Helen wrote with news that she was seeing someone:
So. I am officially through the looking-glass of the first person plural. I say, “Oh, we enjoyed that movie.” It’s unnerving: I’ve never done that before. He works for the State Department, and in a year he’s moving to Madrid. Doesn’t that sound like fun. His Spanish is already very good. Vamanos.
We attended a performance by a German string quartet at the Centro Cultural. It was free. They played Schubert, Death and the Maiden. I forgot everything around me as they performed. Schubert has a depth, a velvet luxury, that nothing else quite matches. When the music ended, I took my husband’s hand. He turned to me. I could see that he had been lost as well. Nothing was so powerful as art.
I used to imagine that I could have a life made of art. I never wanted to be an artist, but believed I could have this ancillary thing, the life made of art. I had misread signs. I had made wrong estimates—of time, of other people, of myself. You could diagnose my problem as an affliction of vagueness: a life made of art. I didn’t know what it meant when I was younger, and I don’t know now.
Helen:
What’s become clear to me is that all dating is repetition. The fun parts and the shitty parts. The part where you tell somebody about yourself, discuss food preferences, allergies, talk about fucking Game of Thrones—it’s hideous. It’s like one of those video games where you die and start over, except every time you start over you’re older. I used to think of monogamy as the opposite of experience, the enemy of healthy variety, but now I see that I was wrong. It’s dating that’s monotonous. Every first date is the same: it’s either a bad one or a good one. All men fuck you the same way. I want to see what happens when I get past the parts I already know.
So. My husband was being transferred back to New York. He made it sound like the normal course of things; but I knew something had happened that he was trying to downplay. I asked, gently, a day or so later. “I was holding the wrong position,” he said. “A bet. A big bet. Two, actually, two related bets.” He added, “It cost a lot to bring us here”; he meant for the bank. “What did Marcos say?” I asked. He looked at me strangely: “Why Marcos?” “He’s the only co-worker of yours I know,” I said. He was going back to New York. We were going back to New York. I was going back to New York.
This was, as it always is, somebody else’s script, written long ago, acted out already countless times. The past anticipates the future, or the future plagiarizes the past, one or the other, or both.
The country would never be the same after the protests; everything was going to be different now. Or else the protests had come to nothing and nothing would change. The opinion writers were having it both ways. A judge ordered the release from prison of high-ranking politicians convicted of bribery, pending appeals. A cloth soaked in vinegar would protect you from tear gas. Information began to accumulate. Hundreds of people in Lapa waited in line ten hours to buy monthly bus passes. In the River of January, the military police were pacifying the favelas.
You and I makes we. He and I also makes we. We can easily become ambiguous. This hadn’t seemed like a problem before.
For my husband it was a time of personal crisis. His customary professional certainty was invaded by doubt. I wanted to comfort him. I didn’t want to miss the opportunity to comfort him. I wouldn’t have wanted to do that for anyone else, want so absolutely to be there for a moment of personal disaster. With anyone else, I wouldn’t have felt as though I would be missing out if I were absent during an unhappy time. I wanted to act in defense of this life, our life. I thought: If, in the end, we are together, all this will become a part of the story we tell ourselves about our marriage. I thought: A marriage is built on nothing so much as the story of that marriage. It felt as though I had come to the conclusion of a mathematical proof. And then I thought: Marriage is also a thing that happens inside your own head.
Mariology refers to the systematic study within the Catholic Church of the person and nature of Mary. We’re talking about centuries of effort to make sense of a single woman. The findings of the mariologists—men, you have to assume—are one source of the church’s infallible doctrine.
Another interest of mine is words that have no descendants. There are words that aren’t really the roots of anything—anagnostes, bucaeda. They are words that once appeared in the Roman vocabulary and then went out of use. They never evolved, never produced word children, at least not in English. And so they seem strange to us now. A word like latebricola sounds especially alien to the twenty-first-century ear.
Who remembers being a child? When you unhesitatingly touched the bark of a tree, because you had to know how it felt. When you lay on grass and hard dirt, facedown and peaceful, both hands pressed against the body of the earth, after running around for a while, and thought to yourself how solid and permanent it all seemed. Adulthood is less sensory, I think. I still look, but I don’t touch, or I don’t as much.
A gauze of pale light stretched around buildings after the rain. It was a city of liquor bottles, soccer matches, cheap motorcycles, boys in the road, businessmen. Sometimes it was beautiful.
Toward the end of a dismal time in Naples trying to sell a piece of family property, the English couple in Rossellini’s Journey to Italy, on the precipice of divorce, embrace passionately after they become separated amid the fever of a Catholic religious procession. The need they feel for one another in that moment is plainly the consequence of panic in an unfamiliar foreign place—the same foreign place that, for the entire film, they have blamed for exposing the flaws in their marriage. T
hey embrace out of fear, in other words, not devotion. At least that’s how I always saw it. I’ve watched it more than once. The husband is cruel, even brutish. He aspires to philander. The wife is sensitive, accommodating, intelligent. They tack between boredom and hostility. The wife’s dilemma seems to be a lack of self-knowledge, unless it’s too much self-knowledge. Rossellini, a man, appeared to have more sympathy for the wife, played by his own wife, Ingrid Bergman. But I can’t sympathize at all: the decision to embrace her husband at the end has always bothered me. It is obvious—or it was obvious to me when I first saw the film—that within days, even hours, they will begin to argue again. Their embrace is merely the postponement of something difficult; or it is confirmation that the wife doesn’t know how to escape a life of unhappiness. Apparently some people don’t see it this way—they see it as the miraculous return of love. That surprises me. I never thought it was supposed to be a happy ending. So.
Feast Days Page 17