Brother in Ice

by Alicia Kopf

  “You stay and do your artist stuff,” he said through clenched teeth before leaving.

  Doubt and loneliness are persistent. I don’t know if writing all this is worth the effort, or whether I have any right.

  “Worse / Even than your maddening / Song, your silence,” Sylvia Plath reminds me.

  I think about calling someone, but all my friends are away for the holidays. My mother, twenty years a single, met someone a few months ago on a dating site, and she seems happy. Her calls come less frequently. I tell myself that an hour of exercise will wipe it all away. For some of us, Christmas is a regression to our teenage years.

  Soon I’ll be back to my work routine. Then I won’t think about all that. But I’ll return to it occasionally: on holidays, on some weekend alone. Just when I’m about to shut down my computer, I get a rare call from my father. He tells me what his Christmas at the Arctic Circle is like. Sometimes I think we maintain a certain telepathy—which we had when I was a girl. Did he hear that I was thinking of him? He tells me about visiting Santa Claus with his wife’s nieces and nephews, the igloo hotels, and the tours in sleighs drawn by reindeer. It’s all really touristy, he says. I don’t get the chance to ask him about the aurora borealis because we get cut off. I don’t have a lot of coverage in the studio. I call it the igloo.

  M

  I’d have to go back one more generation to properly contextualize my parents (we really should go back a couple of generations to understand any of us), including why I have no grandmothers and only one grandfather when the other is still alive. Then there’s this thing with my brother, which no one knows the cause of. I don’t know if I can explain that story now. I don’t even know it myself.

  I have the feeling that my life began when M was born, seven years before me. My appearance was unplanned. When my mother found out she was pregnant, she cried. Later—she told me twenty years afterward—she thought that M would need a sister.

  There was risk of a miscarriage at first. It seems that with that warning, the doctor ordered my parents to be very careful and my mother, naturally active and energetic, was confined to bed. The pregnancy went on almost ten months, since in the end I didn’t want to come out—both my premature leaving home and my reluctance to leave the womb are typical of me, and probably understandable.

  A few days before they were going to induce labor, on January 5, 1982, the eve of Epiphany, the streets invaded by royal carriage floats with the three kings’ pages tossing candy to the children, I showed up.

  My mother says that I was born with my eyes open, and that I was looking at her.

  December 27, 2013

  Luminous night-time clouds in the Antarctic

  Data received from NASA’s AIM satellite shows that the luminous blue clouds that appear each austral summer over Antarctica are like large “geophysical lightbulbs.” They return each year as spring ends, and they are at their full intensity for no longer than five to ten days. As the month of December continues, a large bank of luminous clouds stops over Antarctica. It began this year on November 20 as a small electric blue cloud and quickly expanded to cover almost the entire continent. AIM is monitoring the clouds’ progress as they swirl and wave around the South Pole. “The clouds appeared over the South Pole earlier than usual this year,” says Cora Randall from Colorado’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, a member of the AIM’s scientific team. “Since AIM has been in orbit, the only earlier start was in the 2009 season,” she said. The luminous clouds are the highest ones on the planet. Sown with disintegrating meteoroids, they form on the edge of space 83 kilometers above the Earth’s surface. When light hits the tiny ice crystals that make up these clouds, they seem to glow with an intense, electric-blue tone. These blue clouds are most widespread and brightest during the austral summer. They light up over the South Pole from November to February, and move to the North Pole for May to August.7

  7 http://www.lavanguardia.com/vida/20131227/54397579936/aparecen-nubes-azules-sobre-antartida.html.

  ‌

  ‌Leaving Home

  The last year of high school I focus on studying; my motivation is the desire to escape to the capital. My mother asks me if my chosen major will allow me to teach, I answer in the affirmative and she lets me go. I do well in the university entrance exam and enter Fine Arts. In the early days of the twenty-first century, the Fine Arts building, tucked behind the Architecture Faculty, is a terrarium of strange species where the professors occasionally stick their heads in to see what’s going on. The Philosophy and Art History libraries stick out like temples above a Martian colony in the nearly barren wasteland where transvestites and transsexuals make their rounds in the evening, sometimes sharing the faculty bar. The libraries will be my home for the next few years.

  After two years at school, my father’s work situation improves, and I don’t have to work at the clothing store on weekends and holidays. I’m twenty years old and I think I can start fresh when and where it strikes my fancy. That summer I go to London to learn English with a travel grant from the Ministry of Education. On the lawn of Regent’s Park and reading A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf, I realize what conquering that room of my own—where I’d never yet written—will cost me. Searching for housing on a message board at the university where I’m studying, I meet S, a law student. His house has quite a few books and films and I decide to take the room. It’s the largest one I’ve ever had, with a window that looks out onto a garden in Camden Town. The brick house is nothing special by British standards. For me, it is paradise. Close to Primrose Hill, where a few years later Amy Winehouse would live. I fantasize about staying, but London is insanely expensive. The guy flatters me with gifts. Since the grant isn’t very generous and I don’t want to return home in debt, I take a job in a neighborhood shoe store to pay for the extra costs of the trip. I swap intellectual discussions on campus lawns for the store basement, for checking inventory, piles of unmatched shoes, and meetings to applaud the “salesperson of the week.” Each of our sales figures is ranked on the staff-room door and there are arguments over commissions when more than one person helped a customer. I have to go back and finish my last year of school. I get home in late August, relieved. After a few distant months, my friendship with S lasts many years. In Barcelona I return to the icy austerity of a shared student apartment in Collblanc, the border between Les Corts and L’Hospitalet. Despite having a relatively clean space, I don’t find the camaraderie I was imagining between four students from the sticks. I keep looking for an apartment—even now I’m still in the habit of looking at every bulletin board, even now that they’ve migrated to the internet. Anxiety and guilt over studying something that doesn’t promise a clear future. After studying the arts, many classmates will end up working as waiters and museum guards—jobs that seem to emerge as the only solution. I spend my days at the library, drawing, or practicing different techniques. I read a lot and don’t make many friends. I discover Proust. I imagine a middle-class woman trying to be Proust. How can you tell a story with that depth without the necessary time that a trust fund brings? Is wanting to be an artist and writer suicide? Common sense drops like a ton of bricks on these questions.

  The first years at university I discover conceptual art, even though it seems like something I can’t yet allow myself. I devote myself to learning how to paint, confusing technique with art. After all, when you are very young and have little to say, you can do one of two things: speak from your heart, which runs the risk of saying what thousands of people have said better before you, or focus on your references, mediums, and forms. In my case I’d already acquired prejudices about artistic techniques, so I chose the latter. I work in different styles at the same time, from the geometric abstraction of American painting in the fifties to the realism of British painting in the eighties, inspired by Lucian Freud. What I’m doing isn’t “fresh,” or conceptual, or interesting from a technological perspective, the three prevailing trends. But I don’t allow myself
to play; my clearest insights remain in my notebooks, as quick sketches, brief texts, and poems. Only later will I learn to recognize that material. More than anything else, those are years of learning the necessary discipline to create a project from zero, and finish it.

  I’m worried about creating things that only the upper class will be able to buy, and in most cases will leave those of us who produce them in a precarious financial state. We need to have a voice and it has to reach the right audience. Finding it is a much more costly path than the technical training, since it is so much about recognizing your own identity.

  Soon I become interested in creating artists’ books, a more accessible and reproducible format than paintings, to which I can also add text. Writing still seems like a privilege I haven’t earned and one I was denied during my high school years. My study habits are weak and all the classes I skipped show. We wrote little, and apart from editing for spelling and grammar, they didn’t give us much advice on style or structure. It takes me a couple of years to make the dean’s list in theoretical subjects.

  The book as object stops being of interest to me. I start anew, switching to Literature despite the skeptical comments of some of my classmates and the opposition of my family; there is a certain amount of prejudice against “the artist” as someone who cannot or should not adapt to conventional environments. Years later I think that it was the best decision I could take. As for the costs associated with it, now that my father is doing well, I ask him to help me to continue paying for the room in the shared apartment while I study. He is about to get married and buy a house. He accepts begrudgingly. He sends over money for the room and spaces out his calls. I take care of paying for the tuition and other expenses. My decision to study Literary Theory, which slows my path to economic independence and lengthens my material hardships, costs me a cold—and sometimes less cold—war with my paternal family, who feels he’s helped me enough. Other motives converge to create a prolonged campaign of exclusion from my father’s side of the family, motives that would unnecessarily extend this narration with explanations more or less justifiable if this were my own defense in a trial. I’m trying to allude to the complex sentimental origins of the conflict, which the reader, more attentive to the omissions—amid the snow—than what is explained, can interpret according to their perspective and intuition.

  Simultaneously I work as a cultural guide; I repeat six times a day, three days a week, in English, Catalan, and Spanish, the wonders of the Palau de la Música to an audience of fifty-five people. It ends up being a crash course in oratory, diction, and interpretation. I’m pretty good at it, judging by the tips I receive from the tourists. That is right before the scandal breaks over the management of that historical building by the Millet family; the Palau is a huge cash register that alternates all sorts of concerts—of dubious artistic selection and criteria—with guided tours every fifteen minutes. The groups of amazed tourists even interrupt rehearsals, silencing the orchestra. More than €8,000 a day comes in from visits, not including the profits from the concerts. This is 2008, the year the real estate bubble bursts. It is impossible to find another job. After two years, having explained the interior of the Palau de la Música more than a thousand times and about to go mad from an overdose of Catalan Art Nouveau, I finally find a part-time job as a teacher.

  Considering the subject and the state of secondary education in this country, teaching teenagers in the early evening kills off the few artistic airs I still had. Even when you are very young, teaching high school leads the people around you to assume that your artistic pretensions have gone up in smoke, and if you are a writer, you will soon quit. Perhaps that was a lesson in humility. Vanity, what little I still had then out of pure ignorance, is something that radiates out and stops you from seeing what’s in front of you. Like sadness or excessive introspection, two birds that sometimes pursue me and which I try to shoo away, even though writing in and of itself isn’t always the best antidote for them.

  ‌

  ‌The Gifts

  C and R are tuning-fork friends; they give the pitch for your voice. Tuning-fork people are intelligent (highly intelligent, although that isn’t essential), and above all it’s important that they be good. These are the type of people you need to bounce things off of. Amid giggles, we tell each other about the various misunderstandings and arguments with our partners over Christmas presents. In the end we are discussing the areas of conflict that arise when those romantic and economic currents intersect. The subject speaks volumes about the place we give to relationships, and particularly about the expectations, visions of the other person, and reciprocity in play. I remember having heard Essai sur le don (The Gift) by Marcel Mauss, a professor of anthropology, mentioned in this regard. Even though Mauss studied archaic societies, he said what we all know and understand: that giving an object (gift) enhances the giver and creates an inherent obligation in the receiver to reciprocate. I’ve heard a friend say the opposite, that accepting a gift honors the recipient: “I accept this gift, therefore I allow you to give it.” This point accentuates the fact that it is the recipient who has the last word, so their role is not passive. Even still, accepting gifts is not voluntary, but rather almost obligatory: refusing them creates conflicts. The way things have been in these recent years of recession, many of us found ourselves obligated to accept monetary gifts from family members once we were past the “official” age for receiving them. Perhaps the relative gave the gift with the best of intentions, and the only thing they wanted to do was help. But sometimes a condescending smile is involved, and the gift becomes charity.

  Giving something creates a bridge, a connection that is somewhat unstable, perhaps in the hopes of things balancing out in the future, or to compensate a past situation deemed “excessive” or generous on the other’s part, and not necessarily in a material sense. We sometimes want to give someone something because their presence and their friendship are or could become important to us, but without expecting any reciprocal gift. At Christmas, you can find justifications for the act of “giving” that are about the children’s happiness and about expressing love in the immediate family. Out of a pure spirit of contradiction I entertain thoughts of negative variations on the gift:

  Poisoned Gift: it creates a much larger or more valuable obligation than the cost of the gift. When it is accepted, it highlights the fact that the receiver is accepting it for some reason (see bribe).

  The well-known Regift: a useless, ugly thing that we’ve been gifted and we put back into circulation with relief and some fear of being found out. The most perverse thing about regifting is that the second giving transforms the initial giver’s good intentions into sarcasm.

  Betrayal Gift: a particularly flattering portrait made by our partner at a high point in the relationship, or a dress given by a lover, that is used after the breakup as an instrument in the search (on- or offline) for a new partner.

  Apology Gift: I’ll give you something so I don’t have to ask for forgiveness.

  Gift for Me (which is different than a Gift to Myself): that’s when I give you something because it’s in my best interests: X gives a television to Y, who doesn’t have one. (X likes to watch TV and wants to be able to when he visits Y.) The list is long, since gifts to others are often gifts for ourselves. That ties in to the next type:

  Greed: go shopping for gifts and only find gifts you give to yourself.

  Potlatch Gift: competitive giving between various members of a family or group. In this case the most expensive gift can create a conflict with the receiver, for not having corresponded in the same measure. This rarely happens among young people or families of meager means, but close sources assure us that these rivalries exist.

  No Gift: we said we don’t want a gift, but we really do (maybe we don’t want to be asked what we want). The giver takes us at our word. Here you get what you ask for.

  Crap Gift/Gift Crap: “Some gifts come wrapped in shit,” says a friend about a failed rela
tionship and the revelation he had when leaving it behind. “Some gifts can turn out to be shit,” I think about a relationship and the trauma left in its wake.

  The underlying question is: at what point does the verb to give intersect with the verb to be, in other words, what is it about “you” that is “given”? Because a relationship always involves this transit between one and the other, this coming and going that objects sometimes embody.

  ‌

  ‌Stalker

  I run into Iceberg at a concert. Or more precisely, he runs into me. When he greets me he’s unusually cordial. I’d be lying if I said I never google him. After an argument with your partner you can always find an ocean of information to wallow in: Twitter, Facebook, articles, images, and of course their blog, if they have one. I’m with two girlfriends. The concert starts and they pull me toward the front. I tell them I’ll catch up in a minute. Considering the chances of my getting lost in the crowd, I just showed excessive interest. Once we’ve covered our usual shared topics, I bring up The Topic—How’s your thesis going? My thesis is frozen and on the verge of shipwreck. I manage to seem stupidly interested in his stuff. I am stupidly interested in his stuff. The next day the question of whether or not to add him on the social networks gnaws at me. I could have done it before, made a friend request, like other classmates have, but he hasn’t shown any signs of friendship since we were in school together. Despite that, he was the one who came over to me, I tell myself, again stupidly. I could add him. Maybe that way—bringing him into my day-to-day—I’ll stop idealizing him.