So they had come to Italy, combining their honeymoon with the world ecology conference in Milan, to which Jerry had been invited to give a brief address. They landed in Rome and rented a car and drove south to Pompeii and Herculaneum, where, as Susanna watched the adulterous couple cannibalizing each other at the next table, Jerry washed down his pasta with wine and said, “What amazes me is how people can go to these ruins and not take it personally. I mean, no one who died here or at Pompeii thought the big one was going to hit. It was just business as usual, reading the paper, baking bread…bingo. You’re history. These tourists trip through, acting like it’s someone else’s problem, and it never crosses their mind that they’re looking at Main Street a hundred years from now.”
Susanna said, “Jerry, give them a break. They’re tourists on vacation.” Sometimes she felt it was mean of him to want people to think like he did.
But why was the adulterous couple so tense and distracted and silent? Susanna wondered what they had left behind and how much time they had. She thought of the lovers of Pompeii, killed in each other’s arms. The lovers of Pompeii were charred to ash, the Herculaneans covered with mud.
“Vacation!” Jerry snorted. “They should see what I see.” He meant the statistics that crossed his desk: wildly alarming health reports and grim projections into the future. Susanna thought of paintings of St. Jerome with a human skull on his desk; most likely the saints of the future would have printouts instead of skulls. But would there be saints in the future, and who would paint their portraits to hang in the museums when there were no people left to go to museums and see them?
The farther north they traveled, the better Susanna liked it. She was glad when they left the South, where the dust and heat made everything shimmer ambiguously, like in spaghetti Westerns that don’t care if you follow the plot. She was happiest in Umbria and the spookier parts of Tuscany, where you felt the romance these people craved was not the romance of love but the romance of poisoning each other with undetectable toxins. She particularly liked Gubbio: so stony, so unforgiving. You could wait out the apocalypse in one of its thick-walled palaces; there your life would be hard and clean with no disturbing soft spots.
At first Jerry trailed Susanna up the steep cobbled streets, panting and making coronary jokes. But soon he was talking about how life here whipped you into shape: no wonder the old ladies had such terrific calves. Sometimes Susanna hung back and let him pull her uphill, but at the church doors she broke away and hurried in ahead. She didn’t like to watch him paging through his Michelin Guide, entering the churches with his head in a book. He approached each cathedral like a research problem; once she saw him peering into an empty confessional.
In Florence, at San Lorenzo, before an altar painting of saints, a British child was asking her parents how the different martyrs died. “That’s all she wants to know,” her father said to Susanna. “What happened to the poor blokes.”
Jerry pointed to the tray of eyeballs that St. Lucy was carrying. “Know what those are?” he asked the girl. “Marbles,” he answered for her, and the adults giggled nervously.
Jerry had no patience with martyrs; he said they were deluded and psychotically self-indulgent. He said, “Life is short enough without asking someone to shorten it for you.” His favorite frescoes were of people engaged in ordinary tasks, oblivious to the big moment: fishermen angling peacefully in the Red Sea while Pharaoh’s soldiers are drowning; gamblers dicing in the shadow of the Crucifixion. For Jerry, these had the relevance of the latest news—just transpose the sailors in the sea to the otters in the oil spill. And in fact, like so much of the news, these paintings made Susanna feel guilty.
She was starting to feel guilty a lot—guilty for being a tourist. How she envied the travelers who fought for their sightseeing pleasure against the fear of missing something and some greater unnamed dread. She even envied the retirees who knew they deserved a vacation. Was that more or less pathetic than envying the adulterous? Jerry said the best cure for guilt was taking positive action, but it was hard, in foreign towns, knowing what action to take. And really, had she ever? She’d known to go up and ask Jerry for a copy of his speech, but she was no longer sure that seducing him was a step toward saving the world.
There was a new thing Jerry liked in bed: pinning her hands above her head. It made her feel like St. Sebastian waiting for the arrows. Jerry was polite about it. Before he did it he stopped and smiled, embarrassed, asking permission. He didn’t take criticism well, he got quite pouty and sulky, so Susanna didn’t mention that it wasn’t her favorite thing. She just went passive, thinking, I’m the Gandhi of the bedroom, and feeling guilty for thinking of Gandhi in this debasing context. Gandhi was her hero; she and Jerry had that in common.
Her parents had feared that her worshipping Gandhi might be a warning sign of anorexia, though it should have been obvious how much she liked food. Jerry worried the opposite; sometimes he dissuaded her from a second helping of pasta. He encouraged her to wear clothes that showed off her skinny body, miniskirts and halters in which she looked about twelve. He especially approved of her dressing like that for his colleagues. She knew she was a trophy to him and felt guilty for liking that, too.
She also liked it and also felt guilty when they got to Milan and checked into the hotel where the conference was being held, and at the first night’s dinner-dance Jerry steered her through the room, and she felt her blond hair and tiny white dress dazzling the famous ecologists. On the street, with Italian girls around, she didn’t feel so dazzling—but most of the ecologists were middle-aged men, even older than Jerry. For them she was all youth and sex rolled up in one female body. This reassured her in a way she’d missed since she and Jerry met. She knew it was unliberated if what you were doing for the planet was making ecologists happy with fleeting moments of fantasy sex. But wasn’t even that better than doing nothing at all?
It was easy to feel pretty in the hotel dining room, amid the black enamel and chrome and pots of swollen white lilies. She and Jerry sat down and couldn’t very well get up when they found themselves sharing a table with three Politburo members. In fact, they were Bulgarian, or so their name cards said. They nodded at Jerry and Susanna and then stared grimly ahead. Sometimes they whispered to each other. Susanna thought of the couple at Herculaneum. Had she mistaken Eastern European social style for some special intensity?
All the waiters looked like male models with designer white jackets. Serving, they brushed suspiciously close to Susanna’s bare arms, and the space around her felt charged, a pleasing distraction from the strain of dining with Bulgarians. The dance band, five Malaysian kids, played a kind of modified swing. Susanna pulled Jerry out on the floor, where she pressed herself against him and spread her legs and bent her knees so her skirt rode up on her hips. Jerry jitterbugged well enough, and as he twirled her around, she threw back her head and closed her eyes and felt the eyes of the ecologists warming her arms and legs.
Outside the conference room they picked up earphones for simultaneous translation. The first speaker was a professor from the University of Milan, who welcomed the participants and expressed his hope that together they could solve their common problems and that this year, unlike last, the discourse would not bog down in petty nationalist grievances. The current crisis was everyone’s fault, no one country’s more than the rest.
One by one the ecologists made their way to the podium. Each spoke for ten minutes and took questions from the floor. Everyone chain-smoked feverishly in the audience and on stage; after every few speeches they took a coffee break and chain-smoked in the hall. Several of the speakers reported on particular rivers or mountains or forests. Meditating on the depletion of the earth’s resources had lined their faces and made them look brooding, unacademic, and Yves Montandish. The Europeans talked slowly and out of the sides of their mouths. The Americans were suffer, more boyish, and, like Jerry, more nervous.
Jerry’s speech was too close to lunch and did not go
well. It was very different from what he’d told Susanna’s class. Perhaps he should have asked them to look to both sides and imagine their colleagues with cauliflower heads. Instead, he dimmed the lights and projected a map his office had compiled showing nuclear dump sites across the U.S.: tiny death’s-heads speckled the screen like fly spots on a napkin. He said these sites would be uninhabitable for a million years. There were many death’s-heads, and the audience got silent. As Jerry ran through the statistics on radioactive sludge, Susanna fiddled with the headset and listened to him in French and Italian female voices.
When the house lights came back on, the ecologists blinked grumpily and lit up. “Questions?” said Jerry and someone called out, “What action is being taken?” But Jerry could only stammer and hedge like a White House press corps frontman, like someone who’d work for nuclear dumpers instead of struggling against them. “It’s difficult,” he said. “Mostly our work so far has been to identify sites, inform local residents, and begin to put pressure on the government. Otherwise, it’s hard to know just what action to take…” He smiled the same silly smile with which he asked Susanna if he could pin her hands behind her head.
A palpable dissatisfaction rose from the audience, mingling with the smoke from their French cigarettes. Susanna wished Jerry had told the stories he’d told in the college bar, the break-ins at his office, the hard disks mysteriously crashed, the secret reports sent through the mail that somehow never got there. That would convince the ecologists that he was already risking all, that what he did was critical and not just academic. And who were these professors to fault him for not doing more? Didn’t they know that what to do was the central question of Jerry’s life?
A professor from Madrid got up and said, “I’m sorry. You must forgive us if we find this…hesitance…hard to believe. Here in Europe we all grew up watching John Wayne, expecting this from America: instant cowboy justice.”
Everyone laughed and Jerry said, “That’s the difference right there. We all grew up thinking that John Wayne was a right-wing fascist. You know,” he went on, “I used to feel hesitant talking politics to Europeans, I thought you’d had so much sad history, what could I possibly know? But now in terms of suffering I think we’re pulling way out ahead of you guys.”
After that there was a silence. A lunch break was announced.
In the lobby the morning’s speakers were being congratulated and invited to repeat their presentations in glamorous-sounding cities. Susanna and Jerry stood all alone in a circle of dread. No one would make eye contact with them, people went out of their way to avoid them, so that when at last someone approached, Jerry and Susanna turned away and had to turn back awkwardly when the person started talking.
The tall young man before them was someone Susanna had noticed; it would have been hard not to, he stood out from the crowd. He was dressed in a leather jacket and jeans, with greasy shoulder-length blond hair and an earring; he looked like a movie villain’s psycho right-hand man. Perhaps he was an ecoterrorist—there had to be some of them here—and Susanna braced herself for his righteous attack on Jerry.
Instead, in a heavy accent he said, “I think you are very brave man. We all know your Pentagon and C.I.A. are vicious crazy killers. I am Gabor Szekaly. Greenpeace. From Hungaria. Forgive my English is not good.”
“Your English is great,” said Susanna. “I mean, compared to our Hungarian.”
“You speak Hungarian?” said Gabor.
“No,” said Susanna. “I just meant—”
“I don’t know about brave,” Jerry said. “But from time to time it does get hairy. My office gets broken into more often than Zsa Zsa Gabor’s hotel room.”
“Gabor?” said Gabor.
“An actress,” Jerry explained. “With lots of heavily insured diamond jewelry that keeps getting ripped off in Las Vegas.”
“Hungarian?” said Gabor.
“Originally,” said Susanna. “But no one you’d want to know.”
Gabor smiled and lowered his head and kissed Susanna’s hand. She noticed that his earring was a tiny Coptic cross, and felt guilty for finding his kiss so pleasurable and disturbing.
“Welcome to the conference,” Gabor said. “We will be seeing each other, okay?” He turned on his heel and headed across the lobby, a funny walk with elements of a swagger and a scurry.
“Great,” said Jerry. “Terrific. Wouldn’t you know Count Dracula would be the one guy who liked my speech?”
The conference became like the mother ship, feeding and sustaining them. After one day Susanna and Jerry stopped leaving the hotel. The ecologists warmed up to Jerry and flirted with Susanna. There were lots of internal politics which Susanna didn’t get but which lent the panels a buzz of tension; you felt you might be missing something if you didn’t go.
Susanna was acutely aware of where Gabor sat in the room. Already he seemed to have bonded with many conference members with whom he talked volubly, pounding their shoulders and arms. He’d brought a girl who appeared only at meals and sat with him, alone in a corner, always in total silence. The girl wore jeans and a denim jacket and smoked like a chimney. She was tragic and spectacular-looking with a mop of black curly hair, but she stayed on the edge of things and didn’t flash it, like Susanna.
Three days into the conference Gabor’s turn came to speak, and he ran up to the microphone like a boxer jogging into the ring. Susanna half expected him to vault the seminar table. Angrily he seized the mike and began shouting in Hungarian, rattling off the difficult sounds at the speed of Spanish. All the translation channels went dead; you could almost hear the translators wondering how to proceed—wondering did they have to shout to convey Gabor’s meaning? At last they fell back on their calm, expressionless translatorese.
“We are in a time of terrible crisis,” Susanna heard on the English channel, “a time that calls for immediate action.” Gabor pounded his fist on the table. “Terrible violence is being done to us and we must retaliate, lash ourselves to the back of the whales and wait for the terrible Japanese whalers; we must tie ourselves to the tracks of the terrible nuclear trains. Or better yet we must disable the trains and sink the terrible ships.”
Gabor went on for a long while, yelling and beating the table. Finally he finished and rushed out into the hall. After a round of wild applause the audience followed him out. While the others stopped at the coffee cart, Susanna and Jerry found Gabor, who was sweating profusely and making snuffling noises.
“I loved your speech,” said Susanna. “I mean I really loved it. It’s so important to remind people that we haven’t got time, that we must stop talking and act—” She stopped in mid-sentence because her face felt hot and also because her tone—and for all she knew, her actual words—were horrifyingly familiar. It was what she’d said to Jerry after his speech at her college. She thought, I am the lowest of the low. I am an ecology groupie. She glanced at Jerry to see how he was reacting. He was shaking Gabor’s hand. “Good work,” Jerry said.
“It is so frustrating,” Gabor said. “Who knows is anyone listening. To speak of these things is like giving dancing lessons to fucking corpses. I am sorry, I am when I get vexated all the time saying fucking. Even speaking to audience I say, fucking this, fucking that. How did they translate ‘fucking’?”
“‘Terrible,’” said Susanna.
“‘Terrible’?” Gabor laughed. “Oh, these Italians are too much. Always thinking the Pope is watching. You take your meals here at the hotel?”
“We have been,” said Jerry, “though the food isn’t great…”
“We have dinner,” said Gabor. “At seven.”
After her shower, Susanna put on her little white dress, then thought this was the wrong attire for lashing oneself to a whale, and changed into a black T-shirt and black jeans. “You’re wearing that?” said Jerry.
Gabor and the girl were in their usual corner. When he saw them he lifted his glass and toasted them from across the room. The girl was even younger t
han she’d seemed—a brooding Slavic teen. She stuck out her hand and solemnly pumped theirs, once each, up and down hard.
Gabor said, “This is my wife, Maritsa. She is Yugoslavian. Unfortunately she has no English.”
“She speaks Hungarian, no?” said Susanna. When had she begun framing sentences as if English weren’t her language?
“No,” said Gabor, smiling. “And I have no Slovenian.”
“But they’re similar languages?” said Jerry.
“Totally different,” said Gabor. “We have no common speech. But we are only married three weeks.”
“Obviously, that explains it,” Jerry said. “Not long enough to have to talk. Anyway, congratulations. And here’s an amazing coincidence—we were married three weeks ago, too.”
“Good! Very good!” said Gabor, and lightly punched Jerry’s arm. “The language is no problem—but food! Yugoslavians are the world’s worst cooks!” He pulled Maritsa to him: she let herself be pulled. Gabor said, “Before we are married we know each other only one week. It is so sudden—like this!” He grabbed his T-shirt over his heart and bunched it up in his hand.
Susanna looked at Gabor, then at Maritsa, then down at the floor. “Great shoes,” she said to Maritsa.
“Yugoslavian worker shoes,” said Maritsa. She had a deep voice and an outthrust lower lip that gave her a permanent pout. Her skin was geisha white and on each cheek was a harsh smear of rouge, like a bruise. “You do speak English,” Susanna said. Maritsa looked at Gabor.
“Everyone admire her shoes,” he explained. “So that much at least she learns to say in every European language. Come now. Sit down. We must order.”
Gabor stopped Jerry and Susanna from ordering the zuppa di pesce. “Mussels from Adriatic? Suicide!” he said.
Over their bruschetti and antipasti misti they talked about mutant algae. “We hear mutant,” said Gabor, who turned out to be not just an ecoterrorist but also a biology professor at Budapest University. “But who knows? Even science news is manipulated. Until now. Wonderful! Everyone in Budapest is falling in love and buying electronic equipment! But algae we know is big.” He held his hands out wide. “In Venice is big problem. This algae is big like—” He held up the hem of the tablecloth. “You say…?”
Peaceable Kingdom Page 3