ALSO BY RICHARD RODRIGUEZ
Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez
Days of Obligation: An Argument with My Mexican Father
Brown: The Last Discovery of America
VIKING
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First published by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) LLC, 2013
Copyright © 2013 by Richard Rodriguez
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Hell by Kathryn Davis. Copyright © 2003 by Kathryn Davis. Used by permission of The Wylie Agency LLC.
“The Crack-Up” from The Crack-Up by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Copyright © 1945 by New Directions Publishing Corp. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.
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For the Sisters of Mercy of the Americas
Contents
Also by Richard Rodriguez
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
A Note to the Reader
one
Ojalá
two
Jerusalem and the Desert
three
The True Cross
four
Tour de France
five
Darling
six
Saint Cesar of Delano
seven
Disappointment
eight
Final Edition
nine
Transit Alexander
ten
The Three Ecologies of the Holy Desert
acknowledgments
A Note to the Reader
All the chapters within were written in the years after September 11, 2001—years of religious extremism throughout the world, years of rising public atheism, years of digital distraction. I write as a Christian, a Roman Catholic. My faith in the desert God makes me kin to the Jew and the Muslim.
Throughout, and especially in the chapter “Darling,” I have altered many names and fictionalized some events and locations.
Hugo House, a writers’ workshop in Seattle, solicited the chapter called “Tour de France”; it was reprinted in the Kenyon Review. The Wilson Quarterly published the chapter on Cesar Chavez, “Saint Cesar of Delano.” California, the alumni magazine of the University of California, Berkeley, first published “Disappointment.” “Final Edition” appeared in Harper’s Magazine. Harper’s also published an earlier version of the chapter that appears here as “Jerusalem and the Desert.” A two-page sketch of the final chapter, “The Three Ecologies of the Holy Desert,” was first printed in Image.
one
Ojalá
One summer evening in London, many years ago, I was walking through green twilight in Hyde Park when I attracted the gaze of a large woman who was wearing several coats; she was tending to two children, a girl and a boy—her grandchildren, I surmised. As I passed, the woman posted a radiant, recognizing smile. “Arabie?” she asked.
I smiled, too. I shook my head, as though sadly. No.
Now I am not so sure.
• • •
In the predawn dark, a young man is bobbing up and down behind the pillar of an airport lounge a few yards from my departure gate. I watch from behind my newspaper. The man turns in a circle before the floor-to-ceiling window, beyond which an airliner lumbers upward like a blue whale to regain the suspended sea. The young man cups his hands behind his ears, then falls out of sight.
One other passenger sees what I see. “Someone should call the police,” the woman says out loud, not to me, not to anyone—a thought balloon.
To say what? A Muslim is praying at Gate 58.
• • •
In the final months of my parents’ lives—months of wheelchairs heaved into the trunks of cars, months of desperate clutchings at handrails and car doors—I often drove them to the five-thirty Mass on Saturday evenings.
One Saturday in mid-September 2001—a day without fog, a warm evening sky—I steered my mother’s wheelchair out of the church, careful of the radius of the thing, careful of her toes. All of us at Mass felt a need for congregation that evening. In the interval between last Saturday and this, we had learned something terrible about the nature of religion.
Several women of the parish leaned over my mother’s wheelchair, as they often did. A few months hence, when my mother could no longer leave the house, these same women would ring the doorbell of my parents’ house to bring Holy Communion to my mother.
Terrible times, the women murmured among themselves, all of them in tropically colored blouses. Terrible, terrible times!
Something had happened in the sky. In a way it was more extraordinary than a mystic’s vision—the vision, for example, of Caryll Houselander, the English artist, writer, bohemian. London, 1918: Houselander, a young woman of sixteen, was on her way to buy potatoes for her family’s dinner. She knew she must not tarry on the way home. Suddenly, above her, as she recounts, “wiping out not only the grey street and sky but the whole world,” was an icon of Christ the King crucified. Houselander goes on to explain, as all mystics must but never can explain, that she saw with her mind’s eye.
We of the congregation had not seen with our minds’ eyes, but through our television screens. We saw people—they were so far away but we knew they were people, they were not cinders or the leaves of calendars; we saw people who had no alternative but to consign their bodies—their bodies, I say, but I mean their lives—to the air, people who are loved, I believe, by God, even as I believe their murderers are loved by God. Falling.
A friend of mine, a Jew, called at about that time to ask if there was ever a time when I did not believe in God. My answer was no. Her answer was no also.
It was in the weeks following the terrorist attacks of September 11 that I came to the realization that the God I worship is a desert God. It was to the same desert God the terrorists prayed.
The cockpit terrorists believed, furthermore, that God is honored by violent death, by the violent deaths of the hapless people who worked in those towering buildings, or who were visiting there, or delivering something on that particular da
y, at that particular hour.
I do not believe what the destroyers believed—that God is honored by a human oath to take lives. I do not believe God can be dishonored. The action of the terrorists was a human action, conceived in error—a benighted act. And yet I worship the same God as they, so I stand in some relation to those men.
• • •
I long have assumed, as a Christian, a Roman Catholic (by the favor of colonial Mexico), that I am a younger brother to the Jew, because the Jew and I worship the same God, and the Hebrew Bible is mine also, though less mine—cf. Jesus Christ: Salvation is from the Jews. For most of my life, though, I have scarcely regarded the Muslim—despite centuries of Muslim rule of Spain, a country to which (by the favor of colonial Mexico) I am related; and despite the fact that Brother Dennis, classroom 119, Christian Brothers High School, Sacramento, 1962, famously opined that Islam is, indeed, “a true religion”; and despite the fact that the Muslim claims Abraham as father, as does the Jew, as do I.
As increasing numbers of Muslims declare war in their hearts against “Crusaders and Zionists,” I endeavor to put away my ignorance about Muslims. War is one of the most intimate human behaviors. Soldiers know it. Boxers know it. Schoolchildren know it. Adversaries grow as preoccupied with one another as do young lovers. The general must try to imagine the battlefield the other way around, like a hairdresser working in a mirror. Thus am I drawn to the customs and thoughts of the one who threatens me. I strain to hear what he is saying about me among his confreres.
The first Arabic word I learned in the aftermath of September 11 was jihad.
Despite the suspicion with which Americans regarded Jewish and Catholic immigrants in the nineteenth century, despite the persecution of Mormons, Americans are unaccustomed to thinking of a religious war as having anything at all to do with us. Religious wars happen elsewhere. Religious wars happened long ago. Saracens and so forth. Albigensians. And yet the legend of our nation’s founding concerns Puritans seeking refuge from religious persecution in England and finding that refuge on the shore of the North American continent.
At the dawn of a worldwide religious war that Americans prefer to name a war against terror, I feel myself drawn to Islam, drawn to read the Koran, even to kiss the Koran—melodramatically, but sincerely—as I did one evening recently in front of a university audience. I meant to honor Islam. I meant to convey that, as a Christian, I consider myself a loving brother to the Muslim, as I am to the Jew, by the favor of Father Abraham.
In the months after September 11, at various international airports, I found myself facing security officers in glass booths who fastidiously turned the pages of my passport, as though they were reading. But they were not reading. Their eyes did not leave my face.
Don’t look evasive don’t look steely don’t look sly.
The inked tongue of the stamp machine was held suspended over my passport all the while, but then it was put aside. I was directed to accompany another officer to a no-man’s-room for a second scrutiny.
• • •
I am looking at a photograph of members of the bin Laden family of Saudi Arabia. They are on holiday in Sweden. It is 1971—nearly ten years after Brother Dennis’s ratification of Islam—a bland, sunny day. The young men and women in the photograph are smiling; they pose in front of a pink Cadillac limousine; they are dressed in the mode of Carnaby Street. These young bin Ladens are, for the moment, at ease in a jolly old world.
But one among the bin Laden heirs is missing from the photograph; one has a spirit that wants to concentrate, to contract, rather than to absorb.
Thirty years after the Sweden photograph, the face of Osama bin Laden appears on every television news show, every magazine cover, every newspaper, in the world. Bin Laden smiles benignly. His brown eyes observe the mechanics of my nightmare from the obverse, as a choragus would. He sees all the props. He sees bindles of hundred-dollar bills; he sees passports, airline tickets, box cutters. He watches as Internet commands burn through fiber-optic cables; he sees a peerless blue sky. He foresees his own smile, holy jubilation, dancing brothers, brothers dancing. He anticipates the pleasure of Allah.
The young terrorists whom Osama bin Laden dispatched into the twenty-first century had some acquaintance with the West. They knew several languages, foremost among them the language of technology. At some point in their lives, they had discovered a wish or an imperative to separate themselves from their own human desires. They were trained to move between the snares of the devil and to maintain their resolve to kill the people they passed among. (Look them in the eye. Do not look sly. Smile.)
Hi.
September 10, 2001. Imagine the heartsickness of these young men, imagine the leaky bowels, the frequent swallowings, the swollen tongues, the reflexive yawns. Imagine the bathroom of a Days Inn as your chapel of vigil, where you sanctify yourself through the “Last Night.” Imagine the sickening ablutions you are instructed by your captain to make: the shaving of hair from your body, the cloying scent of cologne, the prayers whispered into the palms of your hands and then applied to your secret body, like the blessings your mother long ago placed on you. Imagine the wish to flee.
When you emerge from your hotel room at dawn, you will be a crusader, impersonating a Crusader. Become what you hunt.
• • •
I send for a language course in Arabic because I want to hear what they are saying. I want to hear their quarrel with me. I want to taste their curses on my tongue; I want to imitate the posture of their prayers. I yearn to hear the strange heckling voice of God. Anyway, the software is incompatible with my computer. I call the number for technical support. I am connected to an aural hive that sounds like a train station in Delhi. I talk to a succession of optimistic young men in a room full of optimistic young men, all named Sayyid, all schooled in patience.
I realize I am unable to learn Arabic because I am unable to learn computer-ese. The power the young have over the old is the spirit of an age. In our age, technology is optimism. Technology is a new kind of democracy, supplanting borders. Nothing to memorize, only connect. I doubt if Sayyid would be able to afford the complicated computer system my computer quack has set up for me. But Sayyid understands it, which I never will.
Because I am unable to follow the simplest instructions over the phone, Sayyid asks permission to “enter” my computer. “I will set up a chat line so you can ask me questions while I work.”
I do not avail myself of the chat line. Files appear. Bars race across the screen like bullet trains. Files topple into the trash. Ding. A message from Sayyid:
THERE YOU GO.
WHAT DO I DO?
CLICK THE ICON AND GO TO LESSON ONE.
Lesson One: Bintoon. A girl. Waladoon. A boy.
The power the old exert over the young is the power to send the young to war—flesh in its perfection dropped into a hellish maze of stimulus and response in order to defend an old man’s phrase. A phrase! What? The American way of life? Yes. It galls me to say it, but yes. This paragraph costs me nothing. And yet I know it cost the life of a boy or a girl with a ready body and a mind not ripe. No one will come to question me this evening.
Often young American soldiers from Kansas or Arizona, upon being dispatched to the desert, speak of entering into the Bible. The terrain they mean. The tribal dress. Away in a manger.
We six-o’clock newsers have become accustomed to hearing the distant voices calling to us from the craters of bombed cities—Allah akbar, the voices cry. We understand what they are saying, young men writhing on gurneys. They are saying: Mama! Help me! Save me! Kill them! God have mercy!
In the no-man’s-room at the Toronto airport, an old man—probably younger than I am—murmured Salam Ahlaykom when I sat beside him on a yellow plastic chair facing a blinded window.
I suppose I do look Arabic. No, you know what? I don’t look Arabic—not if you know wha
t you’re looking at. In the eyes of border guards, my features are kind of floaty. Indeterminacy is possible grievance in the eyes of border guards.
The Muslim terrorist with his backpack slung on one shoulder arrives at the gate at Logan International Airport. He is an American college student en route to California, where, perhaps, it will be sunny and warm later today.
Hi.
• • •
During America’s notorious sixties, I remember hearing some young Mexican Americans righteously foretell the Mexican reconquista of the southwestern United States. It was only a matter of time, these young people said, and sincerely believed, before history would bite its own tail; before ascending birthrates in Phoenix or Dallas would herald a just conclusion to the Mexican-American War.
Such a prediction was soon trampled by increasing numbers of immigrants arriving in the American Southwest, fleeing the civic failure of Mexico, certainly not seeking to perpetuate Mexico’s influence in time or territory.
The dream of reconquista assumes that history revolves, that historical patterns are circles, even that a certain narrative point can be applied to history, like poetic justice, karma, Pyrrhic victory, irony. I think the circular clock face encourages us to think roundly—a finite numerology (Roman numerals, Arabic numerals) of 12 or 24; the tilt of Earth, the revolving seasons, the orderly succession of the sky. In the Digital Age, the age we have entered, time is no longer counted as recurrence but is cast forward to the unmaking of glaciers, the starvation of continents, the extinction of species.
I was sitting—beneath a clock, as a matter of fact; an old-fashioned pendulum clock with Roman numerals—in a student café near the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. I listened as a North African student predicted to me the Muslim reconquest of Europe. And his prediction, too, seemed a kind of circularity. He cited ascending birthrates of Muslim immigrants and declining birthrates of native Europeans. Europe is disappearing, he said. He foresaw a Muslim Paris, a Muslim Vienna, a Muslim Madrid—Muslims sleeping in the cradles, Muslims warming themselves at the firesides, Muslims filling the boulevards of a faithless, childless Europe. The earnest young man imagined the interrupted era of Muslim influence in Europe, a medieval golden age of tolerance and algebra and clock making, would be restored by the will of Allah. The young man’s Spanish was better than mine.
Darling Page 1