by Barry Lopez
When Camilla and I were courting, I took images from the letters to astonish and impress her. I now believe this the only sin, the one failure of integrity that I persisted in with these letters. It filled me with such shame that I later confessed the sin many times, to be forgiven again and again.
One evening I will ask Camilla to go for a walk with me. I hope to direct us to some place along the Río Rímac, a spot where the other two might once have stood.
Mornings in Quarain
The two gentlemen behind me are speaking fervently of a mining venture, which holds for each of them a promise of long-sought wealth; but my attention is drawn, again, to the one hundred macaws in the garden. (Last night when I arrived at the hotel, I didn’t notice that change, not in the silence and darkness beyond the deserted lobby. When I came into the breakfast room this morning, the animated stretching of wings and bold display of color on the other side of the glass wall were unexpected, intriguing.) The two men are in such high spirits about the prospects of their enterprise that I turn to eavesdrop. Asterquerite is what they’re talking about, a rare compound found occasionally with other siliceous minerals on the peninsula. (I originally read about it in something my mother wrote. It has no industrial application, as I recall, so is of no commercial value.)
The macaws are a long way from home—the scarlets, perhaps from Venezuela, with their blue, green, and yellow wings and red tails, and the deep iron-blue hyacinths from the interior of Brazil. Their crisp, vivid dress seems an extension of the perfectly appointed table before me, starched linen, Royal Doulton china. A ripe casaba melon I’ve just begun is succulent as honeycomb. The coffee is dark and robust.
The birds, with their shank hook bills and long, tapering tails, appear regal in the limbs of young eucalyptus (the hyacinths roosting higher up), but they twitch and glare, as if puzzled by the precipitous disappearance of a familiar horizon.
It is becoming clearer from my companions’ ardent conversation that astequerite has a new-wrought, esoteric application at a mill in France. They concur that their profits could be considerable if they can perfect a route unencumbered by delay between the Arabian peninsula and buyers in France. The process will require many permits, perhaps a good deal of money.
The sun has risen over the hotel’s Spanish tile roof. In this more incisive light, the large birds are dazzling, garnets and lapis lazuli. They shift about crankishly, as if the thought of flight has now occurred to them.
I am savoring melted butter sunk in the lightly toasted texture of an English muffin when my two friends suddenly begin to wrestle with large paper maps, refolding them into manageable sizes, pursuing their conversation from one region to another. (The breakfast room is large but only one other table is occupied, two Arab men across the way, waiting for someone, I think.)
The waitress could hardly be more attentive, more polite. She asks, would I enjoy another piece of melon. Just a small slice? she smiles. I have eaten the first with such appreciation, I tell her, that to order another would seem crass. I ask, does she know anything about the macaws? No, she apologizes, she knows nothing.
One of the Arabs is scarfed in thick, languid smoke from his cigarette. He wears dark glasses, a short, black leather jacket, and for long moments at a time he stares either at his ashtray or the ceiling. The man across from him, dressed in a white jubbah, the white kaffiyeh on his head held in place with a maroon agal, has been speaking an unbroken aqueous stream of Arabic into a portable telephone, a muted harangue, which every so often breaks through the emphatic conversation of the men behind me.
“Monsieur? You have a question about the parrots?”
A young man in a dark suit and green tie steps aside with self-conscious formality to permit the waitress to place a bowl of Swiss muesli in front of me with a small pitcher of milk.
“Yes, you know about them?”
“A little, sir.”
“I was curious: it’s only hyacinths and scarlets?”
“Correct, just the two. Exactly one hundred of them, twenty-five each, male and female.”
“I see; it’s a stunning sight. I hope you won’t find this indecent, but I’m also curious, with all the freedom they have to fly, how—”
“Overhead, sir, we have—”
“Yes, yes, I see the net, I know they can’t get out, but what I’m wondering is, how do you manage with the swimming pool? And the lounge chairs? I mean, it’s very clean.”
“Oh, yes. Everything here is quite spotless. You don’t have to be concerned at all. You will want a swim this morning?”
“No, what I mean is, the birds, they don’t … you know.…”
“Oh! Oh, no sir, they don’t. That has been taken care of. They go to just one place for that.”
“How do you get them to do it?”
“Lights, sir. Do you see the blue light there, at the corner of the roof? And that one over there? Every twenty minutes those lights blink, and the birds that have a necessity fly to their place.”
“Which place is that?”
“Just behind there, sir.” He steps around me to point discreetly but sharply at a spot above a bamboo thicket. “No one can see.”
“Yes. I understand now. But birds this large, they also eat a lot of fruit. They carry it around. What do you do about all the rinds and pits?”
“Rinds and pits?”
“Do you have another place where they eat?”
“Oh, yes! I’m sorry! In those trees, you see that platform with the slanting sticks? They feed inside there—but to get out, they can’t take anything with them. It’s an ingenious quality built into the design. You will find the rinds and pits in there.”
“This has been very helpful. Thank you.”
“Not at all, monsieur.”
My mother once wrote a story for The New Yorker about a Saudi sheik who collected psittacine birds. He responded to her questions, she told me, in enraptured language, dwelling on the subtlety and brilliance of their coloring, lingering over the attractiveness of their movements. The way she conveyed his passion in the article made his interest seem erotic. He collected the rare, the colorful: rainbow lorikeets and turquoise parrots from Australia; Rueppell’s parrot from Namibia; plum-headed parakeets from India. He sent a private jet to retrieve the rarest ones, she wrote, a bronze phase St. Vincent parrot, once, from that Caribbean island. It was during this conversation with her, in fact, after the article appeared, that I first raised the issue of the style of her writing and the Muslim world. Her tone and her approach with the birds, I offered, might not sit well with some people.
She smiled, tolerant, a sardonic edge to the smile, and said, “They’ll never study what a woman has to say about birds and sand dunes, not in some foreign magazine.”
But, of course, they did.
My two friends with the maps, now on their fifth or sixth cup of coffee, seem close to agreement on a day plan, what each man’s responsibilities will be. The men at the other table persevere without change, one beclouded in dense smoke, the other speaking vehemently into his cellular phone and making abrupt, impatient gestures with his hands.
Yesterday, from Frankfurt, I called Faisal Abu-Said in Riyadh, confirming our appointment; now, pressing milk from the last spoonful of coarse muesli against the roof of my mouth, I feel a familiar doubt: I’m no more certain he’ll arrive this time than I was the others.
My neighbors are shaking hands, briskly reassuring each other, agreeing to meet in the lobby at six. (I look up at the blue light on the roof. It is flashing, about thirty macaws have taken wing. They flock, screeching, to an area behind a bamboo thicket.) At the second table the man on the phone has rung off. He sits frowning, looking distant, opposite his very grave and silent companion.
Sunlight cutting through the glass, the air like wool in the room, would have made me drowsy of an afternoon. This early in the morning I find the closeness, the light, auspicious. I ask the waitress for a large glass of fresh orange juice, and could
she serve it outside?
My mother first came to Arabia in the 1950s. She had been a friend of Bowles in New York. She visited him in Tangier, but was soon drawn away to the emirates of what was then Trucial Oman and to Saudi Arabia. She traveled to spectacular, remote places to write—the great salt lagoon at Umm as Samīm, south of Ibri, and up to the ruins at Petra. She was didactically romantic about Baghdad, that it had once flourished as a city of poets and scholars under Harun al-Rashid and was unrivaled as a settlement in the Muslim world in the ninth century, and she would say that she could never visit Baghdad because it would dismantle that illusion of civilization. She wrote a well-received biography of William Palgrave, a Jesuit and the first outsider to cross the Arabian peninsula. She wrote to Camus about his emotions over Algeria and kept up a correspondence with the Englishman Thesiger, the last explorer of Rub’ al-Khali, the Empty Quarter. She disdained, out of jealousy, the popular reports and impressions of Lady Anne Blunt, the first European woman to travel in the interior of Arabia, sometimes in native male disguise.
Mother wore long pants and traveled as a Christian. She had a scholar’s inclination toward detail and great passion for her subjects, also a physical longing for the desert I admired, though it never developed for me, nor my father. I read most of what she wrote with deference and fascination. When she was killed, in Basra in 1984, one of the first thoughts I had was for the safety of her manuscripts and diaries at her home in Riyadh. But her killers had gotten to them. She had moved overseas when my father died. Eventually she consolidated all of her work in the home in Riyadh. She lived an urgent, forceful life with that city as her base. It wasn’t until I visited her there that I could understand how she managed to gain trust, even affection, as an interloper. Muslim people, everywhere I traveled, appreciated her ingenuous interest—except, of course, the reactionary fanatics who rigged the gas explosion in her kitchenette.
Abu-Said ran to her house that same day, the moment he heard, but he arrived to find it ransacked. Her manuscripts, her books, all her notes—all the paper was gone. When I reflected later on what happened, I grew angry with my mother. I had reminded her pointedly, several times, of the fate of such well-meaning people as Ulrich Seetzen, an intrepid student of Arab culture murdered at Ta’izz. His journals were publicly shredded and burned on the spot.
Two years after she was killed, I got a letter from Abu-Said saying Mother’s papers may not have been destroyed. He had been contacted. It may take a lot of money, he told me, but it was just possible to get them back. I told him he must try. I had read a little in her journals, pages of curious speculation and glee, of marvelous coincidence, much less guarded than her essays. To me, the loss of her musings was a loss almost as great as her death. I raised some money from her colleagues and an interested university, and over the next six years Abu-Said negotiated. I kept a growing sense of frustration to myself. In 1988 I flew to Quarain for my first meeting with Abu-Said. I waited three days at the hotel before flying back to the States, where I found a letter saying it was an inauspicious time for us to get together, that he was sorry but he could not finally do so.
The letter had been delayed.
The next time, 1991, I waited for two days, again at the hotel. The garden where the macaws are now was then dense with hibiscus, jasmine, and frangipani. I was sitting in that nearly overpowering perfume finishing breakfast when Abu-Said approached and sat down. He was cordial and apologetic—and empty-handed. He reiterated what sort of people we were dealing with and promised not to give up. I wondered whether he and Mother had been lovers, if this was an added complication, and was then abashed at the narrowness of my imagination.
The man with the cellular phone has placed another call. He now seems calmer. His companion crushes out perhaps his tenth cigarette as I rise to find a seat in the garden. At that moment a nagging question is put away: the breakfast room is almost empty because it is Ramadan, the month of fasting.
Outside, the screeching and harsh cries of the disturbed macaws are no longer muffled by the double-glass wall. A difficult decision to have to make, I speculate, opting for the brilliance of these birds’ markings and their impressive size in spite of the scabrous grate of their calls. The soft warble and chatter of other types of smaller but still brightly colored parrots might have been more agreeable around a hotel pool, but someone has decided the overall image would be less striking.
The cold orange juice, thick with pulp, perpetuates an exotic sense of prosperity: fresh, chilled food eaten early in the day at the edge of Rub’ al-Khali. But the hotel is a peculiar oasis. Like everyone else at this Tiergarten, I expect an array of imported fruit each morning, the extravagance with water, with linen, the exaggerated courtesy.
I am taking a second sip from the sweating glass when I see Abu-Said emerge on a walkway from behind a screen of flowering oleander. He is carrying a leather case—much too small—but he is smiling.
After we shake hands lightly, he places the wallet on the table between us and asks if I have slept well. We exchange such perfunctory remarks until this object entirely fills our silences. The wallet contains a letter, he says. He tells me to have written it was dangerous, and very brave. It is addressed to me, to read, not to keep.
Abu-Said waves away the approaching waitress as I undo the leather ties and remove a sheet of heavy, cream-colored paper, folded once and written on one side.
“To the Son of Frances Amelia Desuedeson,” it begins.
We cannot console you or make explanations for what has happened but some among us also admired your mother for her humility and for her enthusiasm for Islam and our land. What she wrote was in certain places wrong and offensive to us, but the ways of Allah are complicated beyond our understanding. Some of what she wrote was indeed beautiful to our ears. We do not all of us agree but are now willing to make a gift of these papers to you. We ask you to go back to your home, not to come again to Quarain, and never to publish these papers. What inspires us we cannot explain to you, and you should not try to explain us to anyone. We do not live in the time you are living in.
The letter was unsigned. I read it again. I was afraid if I looked at Abu-Said, I would sense the years that had passed. I suddenly felt the selfishness of my errand, the inadequacy of my mission.
Abu-Said leaned over and said, “If you are finished, put the letter back in the case. When I go I will leave a room key on the table. In that room, tomorrow morning at ten o’clock, you will find two suitcases with your mother’s papers. At exactly two p.m. you are to take them to the Lufthansa cargo office at the airport. A man there will assist you in making arrangements to get the bags to Frankfurt. After that, you are on your own.”
At that moment it seemed I could not draw in enough of something, of the pungent odor of flower blossoms in the quivering air, the intense chroma of the birds’ hues, the density of the orange juice. I raised my hand to stay Abu-Said, who had started to rise. I wanted an explanation. I put the letter in the case and knotted the leather ties.
“It is not good for me to visit much longer,” Abu-Said cautioned.
“I understand,” I said. “I regret that I can’t make a copy of the letter, but I won’t ask you for that. I regret, too, that we cannot enjoy some of the day together before you go. I have no way to thank you for what you’ve done. You never gave up.”
“Nor did you,” he said. He waited.
“Did you love her very much?” I finally asked.
“I did, with my whole heart.”
“May Allah bless you every day.”
“And may you arrive home safely, if it be Allah’s will.”
We touched hands. He nodded once and walked quickly away. Somewhere, I felt, he had paid a price.
I finished my juice, signed the check, and took the key. I would spend the rest of the morning walking in the city before the heat became intolerable, looking in the shops. Tomorrow, before I went to the room, I would have breakfast at the same table. I would order the
same things and watch the macaws stretching their bright wings in the pale dawn air.
The Construction of the Rachel
What she said to me was “I’ve met someone.” What I heard was “I’m leaving.” She was correct, of course, from her side, but that’s what it came down to for me and soon I, too, was gone. I don’t know whether it was indecision or cowardice that, instead of quitting, led me to take a leave of absence from the firm in which I was a full partner; but I said so long there, closed the house and drove south out of Boise into Nevada, where I thought there would be enough space to work through the first layers of the injury. For long stretches in Nevada there are no towns, and I carried no cell phone or pager. I drove some roads where there was no fence to either side, no power line crossing the horizon.
The dog after me was grief, not bitterness. It had not worked; now that she had taken the first step, I would have to find my own path. I began to think through things I had been walking away from for years. One hour I felt like an utter fool, the next like a man given a legal reprieve. As I stared through the windshield or into the cottage-cheese ceilings of cheap motels or into cafe-counter mirrors, I saw with some clarity what had happened. My ruminations were not about blame or responsibility. Outside of the loneliness, the violent shivers of anger and general fury at the world, I traveled in peace. I could not bear to read anything and did not want conversation, only to get on with what was coming. If desperation was in me, it was to keep reminding myself on those rueful and sleepless nights of what was possible. And if I returned regularly to any single image, it was to that long arc of time and event from childhood to the present. What was in that I could depend on?
I was at this a few months, eating breakfast at five in some fluorescent-lit cafe with cattle ranchers and no women except those serving; smoking an occasional cigar on the lawn of some off-the-highway motel, gazing at the last direct rays of the sun sparkling high in a rampart of Lombardy poplars and hearing children shouting their glee and irritation from the motel pool. The desire to read returned as abruptly as it had left. One day I picked up a copy of John McPhee’s Basin and Range. I read it in the evenings, gaining his sense of deep time to understand the dynamism of a landscape that seems the quintessence of stillness. As I drove, I began to appreciate the geology I was traversing, the clines and faults, and to see its basins and ranges like the crests and troughs of a stalled ocean.