Knock Wood

by Bergen, Candice

  Naturally, all this would tend to close in on a guy, put the squeeze on him, give him a cozy dose of claustrophobia. Now, this man who had wanted so much to take care of me, who was so enraged when I resisted—now when we talked, he was contemptuous of the dependent creature I’d become. And I was paralyzed. I knew I should leave—and lose Robin. I knew I could stay—and lose myself.

  What am I waiting for? An exit visa? What more does it take for me to leave? One night, I am in the kitchen; Robin is in the next room talking on the phone. He seems to be saying something about a woman. Yes, he’s talking about someone who is no longer the woman she was when he met her. Someone he thought was sure and independent, committed, an explorer. Now she’s lost her strength, become weak and vulnerable; one of her problems is—she’s hung up on her father… .

  Hung up on her father? Me?

  Robin and his friends with backgrounds in analysis from the East had been the first people ever to ask me pointedly what it was like growing up with a father like mine, with a dummy as a sibling. I was surprised by their interest and dismissed their questions lightly, cavalierly. I had never paid it much attention; it seemed normal to me. Psychological impact? Traumatic effect? A dummy? Weren’t they carrying Freud a bit too far? Frankly, I never paid much attention to him—ah, it.

  The point, I now saw, was not that I had grown up with a dummy; it was that I had grown up with a dummy and his ventriloquist—the very metaphor for manipulation. From those early mornings in the breakfast room, Charlie on one knee, me on the other, my father’s hand squeezing my neck, his voice putting words in my mouth … who better than Robin for a girl schooled so literally in manipulative relationships? Wasn’t he another ventriloquist in kind?

  In being a rebellion against my father, the relationship was all about him in the end. Beneath the rebellious daughter was the devoted and dutiful one. The little girl who longed to please her Daddy. The girl who was “her father’s child.” If I feigned indifference to, even provoked, my father’s disapproval, it was because I still needed it so deeply, and had turned to Robin for his in its stead. Robin, who brought me to life the way my father animated blocks of wood. Squeezed my neck. Pulled my strings. Supplied my dialogue. Grew impatient when I failed to perform. Everything short of putting me on his knee. But all he had to do was ask… .

  Our breaking up was anticlimactic in contrast to what had come before. There was no final decisive battle; we had been breaking up, skirmishing steadily, for the better part of two years. Our first few months had been idyllic, but it was not for nothing that I was sleeping under the rainbow when we met, adrift in a sea of dreams; and it was not for nothing that he was a brand-new bachelor, cresting the wave of change. Our needs were great and opposing, and had begun, after a few months, to overwhelm a relationship that sank beneath their weight. The battle had been lost in the beginning, but neither of us had wanted to admit we couldn’t win.

  I moved out and kept moving. I didn’t want to—couldn’t—look back, and to make it easier, I put as much distance as I could between us. The Aviary was too close for comfort; I put the house and most of its contents up for sale, and I never slept under the rainbow again. I wanted no things to tie me down, but to start fresh, free and clean, with not much more than I could carry. It was back to traveling light and traveling fast.

  It was no longer a problem of whether I would surrender myself in a relationship. Now I was faced with finding the self I had already lost, reclaiming it and establishing sovereignty over it, so that I would not be so quick to give it up again.

  Starthing Over

  13

  D. H. LAWRENCE once wrote to a friend about travel:

  It only excites the outside. The inside it leaves more isolated and stoic than ever. It is all a form of running away from oneself and the great problems.

  At the time I came across this quotation in a newspaper, it incensed me, and yet I clipped it out and carried it with me for years. Carried it to Nairobi, carried it to Cairo, to Dar es Salaam, Rio de Janeiro, Kyoto, Teheran… .

  The first ticket to cross my palm came courtesy of a travel magazine that assigned me two stories: a piece on Ethiopia, to include, if possible, an interview with Haile Selassie, and a report on the Masai tribe in Kenya.

  On the plane I watched, a little unsteadily, as L.A. disappeared below. Back to Africa, back on my own. How do I do it? I forget how you do it. Alone. I look at my ticket: L.A.—London—Rome—Nairobi—Addis Ababa … Addis Ababa? Am I insane?

  Then, softly, tiny whispers in my ear—oh yeah, oh yeah, it’s all coming back to me, right, I remember now. I forgot about all the options open out there. Traveling, exploring, nosing around on my own. Freedom. No commitments. Belonging to myself.

  Once in Addis Ababa, I applied for an audience with the Emperor, then went north to travel the country until my request was approved. The peak of the trip was Harar, straight out of fairy tales and fables. Behind its high walls, in the Moslem marketplace, were faces and costumes from every tribe—Gallas, Tigres, Somalis, Cottus: faces that gave you just a glimpse, each one more beautiful, more exotic than the last; costumes of spectacular color—magenta, emerald, crimson, tangerine.

  The women fascinated me most—Cottu women wrapped in black with dark, striking faces, amber at their throats; Galla women with ruby-studded nostrils, a Tigre woman who shone like the sun in a dress of spun gold. They wove colors into baskets and sold spices in brilliant pyramids of saffron and mustard.

  Down a cobblestoned street, Rimbaud’s residence crumbled like an old gingerbread castle; wiry, wizened men, delicately bearded and swathed in cloth, padded silently by, taking no notice of this romantic shrine, or of the blond American who gaped at it.

  Since there wasn’t a lot to do in Harar after dark, the entire night life consisted of going to the edge of town to watch the “Hyena Man”—a man who called the hyenas that lurked in the hills and fed them by hand. He was said to be the only man to succeed in getting wild hyenas to take food from a human being.

  The night before I was to return to Addis, I went to see for myself. About twenty huge hyenas skulked around him, casting furtive looks, and crept up edgily to snatch strips of meat from his hand. Their jaws were strong enough to snap an elephant’s leg in two. Suddenly he motioned to me and handed me a femur (of what? I wondered). I held it out to them—obviously a part of the floor show—until one came up and took it daintily from my fingers. And for the finale, one slunk up and gingerly took a bone the Hyena Man held between his teeth. Frozen nose to nose: a moment of trust between two creatures trying to make a living.

  The Emperor’s offices were in King Menelik’s old palace, built before the turn of the century; caged outside the entrance were two decrepit dozing lions who looked to be from the turn of the century as well. A faded tomato-colored carpet was unrolled and I turned to look for a dignitary, but it appeared to be for me. The tall doors opened and I was silently shown into the vast reaches of an office.

  Facing me were an elaborate carved desk flanked with flags and a marble fireplace banked with a huge polar-bear rug upon which quivered a tiny bat-eared Chihuahua. On the left was a cluster of chairs—one of which was grand, gilt and brocade, topped with a crown and the imperial insignia—apparently a throne. The Emperor was in it.

  His Imperial Majesty Haile Selassie I, Emperor of Ethiopia, King of Kings, Elect of God and Conquering Lion of Judah, silently and slowly rose to greet me. A little man with a lot of medals. A hero for millions of people around the world, a villain for millions of others, he was the last in a league of great world leaders, having survived his contemporaries: Churchill, Roosevelt, de Gaulle. We shook hands and I dipped into a shaky curtsy.

  His Majesty, who was eighty-two, had just finished meeting with all his ministers; his son, the Crown Prince, had recently suffered a stroke in London; Princess Anne was visiting Ethiopia. And some actress from America wanted an interview for a travel magazine.

  I plunged ahead guiltily
with the help of a translator in Amharic, stuck with the prosaic questions I had submitted for approval in advance: how he felt about the achievement of the Organization for African Unity, his personal project; were education and health care the primary thrusts for development? What was his attitude toward America at the present? I got the kind of programmed answers I deserved.

  He was very patient but seemed wooden and weary. His face was extraordinary, piercing and fierce, and I wanted very much to photograph him, but had the nerve to take only three shots. I felt my visit was a frivolous imposition on a tired old man trying to run a country; I thanked him for his time, shook hands and said goodbye.

  For the piece on the Masai, I returned to Nairobi, where I’d heard about a Masai witch doctor, a laibon, rumored to be the greatest of them all. Like many famous, successful doctors, this one was immensely wealthy—translating, in his case, to an eight-hut boma (or village) instead of a six-hut one, eight wives and many fine cattle.

  His village was a half-day’s drive from Nairobi, isolated in the middle of the vast Rift Valley. I carried with me, as instructed, bags of tea and sugar for the laibon’s wives, gallon cans of liquor for him, candy for his multitude of children, and, for myself, a young Masai named Paul to translate. Since I wanted to watch the witch doctor perform—casting spells, throwing stones—he had suggested I spend the night as, like so many creative people, he performed best when drunk.

  I arrived at midday and met the laibon—a striking old man with opaque eyes,-draped in a shuka and carrying a spear. We walked through the boma and, through Paul, he explained that there were good and evil laibon—altruistic witch doctors who helped people and malicious men who specialized in evil spells. He was of the former category, catering to a clientele whose most common requests were for health, wealth, popularity and fertility. Like most faith healers, he asked no fee. And like most faith healers, he had more riches than he knew what to do with. People paid what they could afford; in this case, cows were graciously accepted.

  A boma is a group of huts made of sticks and dried cow dung, arranged in a circle and protected by a shoulder-high wall of thorn-tree branches, forming a kind of corral. I spent a slow and fly-filled day in the boma and, at sunset, watched the tribesmen herd their goats and cattle back inside the compound for the night, carefully closing up the entrance to protect the herd from lions, cheetahs and other predators.

  Once the herds were safely inside, women and children, clutching pans and gourds, scurried around inside the compound milking the animals for dinner—usually two to three quarts of milk, sometimes mixed with cow’s blood. The laibon beckoned for me to join him outside his hut, pointing to a tiny tripod stool. I sat and he graciously gave me dinner: his personal gourd, or calabash, washed with cow’s urine and filled with fresh goat’s milk. Because of the arid land and lack of water, the Masai use cow urine to wash their utensils and as a preservative. I drank a little more than half the contents—Paul’s estimate of the minimum necessary to avoid offending the laibon.

  Next, a bunch of leaves appeared before me and Paul told me to chew them, explaining that they grew at the base of Mount Kenya and were called bhang. “They’re not strong,” he said. “They take away sleep and hunger.” We sat in the moonlight chewing twigs until my tongue withered and my teeth were full of bark.

  Eventually the laibon stood up and disappeared into his hut to drink the liquor I’d brought and get in shape to demonstrate some fancy spells. But perhaps I’d brought too much: he didn’t come out till morning.

  The women and children were now singing gaily, dancing gracefully as they do each night—tiny voices piping cheerfully off-key, everyone laughing and enjoying it all. I thought that I had never seen happier people.

  I threaded my way through sleeping cattle and watched the silhouettes of smooth, shaved heads bobbing rhythmically in the moonlight, sharp arcs of steers’ horns curving above them. When I sat down to rest on a rock that turned out to be a sleeping cow, the women burst out laughing and motioned for me to join them. They started me singing with them, stopping sometimes to check my feeble warbling, “Hi yee hi yo,” then collapsing in hoots, and urging me to try again.

  AT LEFT, the Laibon; ABOVE, the guest hut

  “Avoidance through adventure”: ABOVE, LEFT: with Kris off the coast of East Africa; AT LEFT: with Mary Ellen Mark and a street performer in Bombay; ABOVE: on assignment with animal behaviorist Jane Goodall in Tanzania

  Then one of the girls pulled me up to dance with her. I tried to imitate her smooth, swaying shuffle but finally showed her instead how to lead in a basic box step that brought the house down.

  They were insatiably curious about me, both women and children, running their hands through my long, light hair, comparing the tiny pierced holes in my ears to the elongated two-inch openings in theirs. They felt me all over my body, cheerfully unbuttoning my shirt and gently touching my breasts. For one so modest in movies, I felt curiously comfortable under their scrutiny.

  When all had drifted off to their huts, I guessed I ought to do likewise, but I had some apprehensions. To enter the hut, you had to crouch and crawl through a low, twisting tunnel; once inside, you had to stoop to stand up. There were no windows for ventilation, and the fire in the center had died out and now gave off smoke, not heat. It was like sleeping in a barbecue.

  I groped my way around the hut, through the fire, and finally felt the cowhide platform that was to be my bed. I also found Paul, a baby goat and an old woman curled up in a corner. I lay down on the skins, wedging my nose next to a tiny hole I found in the wall, and tried to suck in some air. Within minutes, my body was a festival of fleas. It was going to be a long night.

  I lay there in the pitch blackness trying to hold off a mounting attack of claustrophobia, struggling to breathe, concentrating on the sounds around me: the shuffling of some cows who couldn’t sleep either, the laughter and low voices of the warriors guarding the herd. The sound of Paul’s breathing next to me was growing heavier and was followed by the noise of a zipper opening.

  Sex among the Masai has little ritual; there is no dating period, no dinner and a movie. It is fairly straightforward; so was Paul. I suggested nicely that he spend the night in the unmarried women’s hut, and he apologized politely and crawled outside.

  I lay awake until finally, on hands and knees, I felt my way through the hut and back out the tunnel, rolled up on the ground in my hotel bedspread and fell asleep. I was awakened at sunrise by a calf licking my hair.

  Often, later, I thought of the Masai, and imagined what they must be doing. The herds are in safe for the night and the Masai have milked their dinner. The women and children are singing and laughing and the laibon and the elders are sitting and talking, drinking honey wine. There will be sleep, then sunrise. And the women and children will pray to Venus, the morning star: I pray to you who rises yonder to hear me. Keep my cows alive. Take care of my people.

  By the end of my magazine assignment I was not only reacclimated to the joys of travel, the stimulation of constant change, the simplicity of solitude; I was hooked.

  Next, Teheran, to Shiraz, Isfahan, Mashad, the Caspian Sea. The farther away from home I got, the more buoyant I became. Avoidance through adventure: the longer I stayed away, the more level my mood remained. Where once traveling had been exploration, it had now become an escape.

  It was the return trip I had trouble with. No sooner did I board the plane than my spirits abruptly sank; I became low and listless. They were the true symptoms of a travel junkie, and for the next two years there was always the rush of another assignment, another trip, another location.

  In the spring of ’74 I signed to make a film in New Mexico. Bite the Bullet was a Richard Brooks film co-starring Gene Hackman and James Coburn. It was a film about a crosscountry horse race, and the character I played was one of the contestants. I was confident about my riding skills.

  Not so about my acting skills. Here was a triumph of miscasting by any but athleti
c standards: I was to play a voluptuous, tough-talking, two-timing prostitute. But it was beginning to dawn on me that I might take some responsibility here—might at least try to remedy my insecurity about the role.

  I decided to ask a woman I knew slightly, a dedicated theater actress, if she would help me with my part. She came over to my rented bungalow and we read through the script.

  When I told her that one thing bothering me especially was playing a character whose main attributes were large breasts, she suggested an exercise in which I fantasized large breasts of my own, stroking them, caressing them so that I could experience voluptuousness. Walking around the living room, eyes half-closed, trying to ignore the gardener, who had stopped working and was staring at us through the French doors, I held my hands a foot in front of my chest, fondling my huge imaginary cones while she, with long, lacquered false nails, squeezed her real (and considerable) ones, moaning softly, “Feel your breasts, feel them, feel the fullness of them, their smoothness, love your breasts… .”

  Here my resolve abandoned me completely, easy victim to my embarrassment. The exercise over, I thanked her and locked the door behind her, sure there had to be a better way. So I left for New Mexico with the same old baggage—the same shaky attitude toward my work, the same insecurity about my acting ability, the same tendency to turn my terror into criticism of everything around me. It wasn’t, I implied frantically, that I didn’t know what I was doing, could not hold up my end, but that I had been undercut by bad writing, miscasting, overscheduling and underbudgeting; the entire production, it would seem, had conspired to sabotage my skills. It was not my fault if I could not bring a role to life; it was everyone else’s. Especially the writer’s. Since I had no idea how to analyze or break down a script, I criticized it instead, unconsciously trying to camouflage what I was sure would be bad work.