The Best Travel Writing, Volume 11

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The Best Travel Writing, Volume 11 Page 22

by Rolf Potts


  “We fought and I knew then that the relationship wouldn’t last, that I would leave. I didn’t think he would be that kind of a man. And eventually I left.

  “I’ve never put down my book for a man. I have friends who set down their books when they are asked, and these women have nothing for themselves. Their husbands are uninterested, their children grown and gone. You can only give so much until there’s nothing left. When these women are alone they don’t know how to be alone, they know nothing about themselves. It’s as if they throw out their person when they set down their book.

  “Remember what I tell you, so if you find yourself in a similar situation you can think, ‘This is what the old spinster in Atrani told me!’ Remember, a woman experiences herself as a person first and then as a woman. Whereas men think a woman is first a woman and second a person. It feels good to be a woman, but no woman wants to be a woman all the time. Many women are married to a life that only supports one half. I hope this will change.”

  The soft mattress of Grosdana’s bed was unlike any I had slept on in the hostels; the downy pillows and comforter surrounded me as I stayed up to read and write in my journal. Her heavy breathing from the couch downstairs deepened into snoring that sounded like a chainsaw cutting through the apartment. I supposed, because I was paying, this bed was mine, but I didn’t feel I deserved it. Grosdana’s experiences towered over me. Against the wishes of her family, she had left Croatia when she was young, had adventures, and regretted nothing. And here she lived alone in the twilight of life, not indulging in loneliness or debilitating self-pity.

  Grosdana’s experiences had created a towpath through long grasses. Not even in books had I come across a character, a female character, I could hold up as an example, who had journeyed away from home as I had, tossing away family expectations like the maps of cities already traveled. Before I told my family I was leaving the country, I had dropped out of university so I could save money for my journey—first one shock and then the other. I drew strength from Grosdana, and I think she sensed it.

  Grosdana’s life was replete with domesticities and rituals that bound it together. Today, as she had done every morning, she made Turkish coffee and served it in porcelain cups so thin that the light shone through like lace. She said: “Don’t think during your first cigarette and coffee. The best way to start the day is with an empty mind.”

  When only a sludge of coffee grounds remained at the bottom of her cup, Grosdana bemoaned the climb up the steep hill to the hotel—owned by a friend—where she worked. I lingered at the kitchen table after she left, but without her the apartment was lifeless.

  I went out, taking the path to the right. It ascended back and forth past the stacked white houses of Atrani, arched over a ridge and finished down the hill in Amalfi. At the top of the ridge the wind blew in from the sea and I leaned my elbows on the low wall overlooking it. Wind played with my hair and I held it down. At the bottom of the hill, I passed through Amalfi and its shop displays of bottles of bright yellow limoncello, to the trails that led me up through the Lattari Mountains.

  Grosdana never asked what I did with my days on the coast in the off-season, but if she had, I wouldn’t have known what to tell her. I sat in the sun when it shone or walked in the forest that climbed the cliffs of the coast. I sought unobstructed vistas where the cloudy sky and gray Mediterranean were a blurry, two-toned painting, the horizon barely a line.

  I thought about where to go next. I was supposed to leave Grosdana’s in three days. My ex had finally emailed me, inviting me back to Rome, and I turned over the idea. If I went back to Rome, it would be the first time I saw him since our relationship had ended in the States.

  Part of me wanted to know if he still liked me. Part of me wanted some familiar conversation. And another part of me wondered if I could keep on going without it.

  In the evening, I returned to find the aroma of bread baking filled the windowless studio. Grosdana was sitting at the table smoking when I opened the door, nothing before her but an ashtray, a distant look in her eyes. At first I thought I had interrupted her, absorbed in the practice of one of her maxims, but she smiled warmly and stood, pushing back her chair. “Just in time,” she said. “Let’s check if the bread is ready.”

  For dinner we ate pieces from the tan wreath of bread. Its soft texture was broken up by toasted hazelnuts, and the butter I spread on melted immediately. The outside was a perfect layer of crust. As I ate, I asked for the recipe.

  Grosdana’s eyes betrayed pleasure while she continued to chew. “I thought you would like it. I’ll show you how to make it,” she said. “The best part about this bread is it’s cheap. And if you add nuts or olives or whatever you like, it tastes different every time.”

  On my last day in Atrani, in the narrow hall that was Grosdana’s kitchen, she taught me how to make her spinster’s bread. I had decided I would go back to Naples for the night, call my ex and then probably catch the train to Rome. After she had deftly kneaded the lump of dough, Grosdana peeled off the scales it left between her fingers and brusquely rubbed them together under warm water. She dampened a tea towel and draped it over the pallid ball. “Now, leave it to rise in some warm place,” she said.

  We waited on the couch for the bread to rise and, later, to bake. Grosdana lit a cigarette and, leaning back into the couch, picked up her monologue from the previous nights. “I’ve been thinking again about the man I was telling you about. I almost married him. When I first met him I never thought he would get so upset over my reading in bed.

  “When we were first in love, he invited me to go with him on a business trip to Tunisia. He went a few days earlier than me. During our days apart, I had the most intense daydreams, him and me in a foreign country, palm trees, exotic foods, a luxurious hotel room, the clothes I would wear, the sleepiness his eyes got after making love, how we would walk hand-in-hand through the dusty streets.”

  Grosdana’s laugh shook her body and lit the gold in her eyes. “Sometimes it’s like these things happened to me in another life, like I was another person. As I tell you about them, the time doesn’t seem so far past. I can picture everything so clearly. When you’re my age, you’ll see.

  “Life is a mystery,” she added. Her voice had dropped in sudden seriousness.

  “When I stepped off the plane in Tunis I entered my dream. As I rode in the taxi to the hotel it was as if I were drunk on the strange city. From the windows, I saw men dressed in traditional robes, the deep blue of the doorways and shutters. I smelled street food and spices mixed with dust.

  “The taxi stopped at our hotel. While it waited before the big glass doors, I was to get ready for dinner and even though I knew it was waiting, I took my time. In front of the full-length mirror, I changed into one of the most beautiful dresses I’ve ever owned. Long and black, it caught the littlest light and shimmered. I prepared myself slowly. It’s good to leave a man waiting, to build his anticipation.

  “The taxi driver opened the car door for me and as I stepped into it I became nervous for the first time. But as we drove through Tunis’s streets, through the blur of city lights, my nervousness left me. I opened the window and let in the warm, fresh air. I was being driven through a foreign city, wearing a beautiful dress, going to see the man I loved. I don’t know what happened to me during that moment, but it was as if everything was perfect and right, beautiful in a way I cannot explain. I fell in love with the country.

  “At the restaurant, nothing was what I expected. The man put his arms around me and kissed me, but not with the passion I had imagined. I had completely forgotten about his business partners. After introductions, my lover pulled out my chair where I sat and we ate dinner as the men had a boring conversation. The best parts of the trip were the taxi rides through Tunis, when I had been alone.

  “Of course, the man couldn’t be who I wanted him to be. I was smart to fall in love with Tunisia. Since that trip I have gone back many times. Have you ever been to Tunisia?” />
  I shook my head and told her I had never thought about going to Tunisia. But as she talked about the country and showed me the things she had bought there, the pastel tunics and the pail of blue paint, my curiosity was piqued.

  “You must go if only for the color blue. It’s the most beautiful blue I have ever seen. In a city not far from Tunis, Sidi Bou Saïd, there are whitewashed houses with doors and windows painted this blue. You must go there. I don’t have many years left, but I want to live some of them in Sidi Bou Saïd. I am drawn there. Some days I think of nothing else.”

  Grosdana stubbed out her last cigarette of the night and pushed herself off the couch to get ready for bed. I remained there until she was done, picturing a Tunisia where villages looked almost Greek, scattered between the desert and sea.

  Early the following morning, I stood on the main road waiting for the bus back to Naples. From Naples I would take the overnight train to Palermo in Sicily, stay a few days, then go to Trapani, where I would catch the ferry to Tunis, as Grosdana had explained over breakfast. In Palermo I could sort out the details online at an internet cafe. Rain fell while I waited for the bus. The only other faces passed alone in their cars. Tires pulled up rips of water, windshield wipers oscillated frantically, and headlights smeared white on the wet pavement.

  When the bus came, I tossed my dripping backpack on the floor and rested my head against a steamed window. I felt crazy pushing on like this, going to a continent I knew nothing about. North Africa made Europe seem easy, similar to the States, familiar. I thought of Grosdana and the pride in her voice when she said that word, crazy. I felt it, too.

  Amber Paulen is currently finishing her bachelor’s degree in Creative Writing at Columbia University in New York after a fourteen-year break in her education. During that time she lived, traveled, and worked in and out of Europe, and spent nearly a decade in Rome, Italy. “The Spinster of Atrani” was previously published in Front Porch Journal and nominated for the Pushcart Prize.

  TANIA AMOCHAEV

  Ma Ganga

  There are many ways to say good-bye.

  A corpse wrapped in gold foil—lightly balanced on the shoulders of a group of men—jostled past me. Its bare soles bobbed as they disappeared into the dark crowded alley leading down to the river. I stared briefly while skirting the cremation ghats—burning fires and dense smoke—and barely avoided falling on the twisting cobblestones of Varanasi as I caught up to Raju.

  “You don’t allow women at cremation rituals here in India because you are afraid they might still throw themselves on the fire?” I asked, knowing the old custom of sati—widows practicing self-immolation—had been illegal for years.

  “Oh, perhaps it started for that reason,” Raju replied, politely oblivious to my cynicism, “but now it is part of our culture. Our brothers, fathers, and husbands perform this sacred ritual.” Without interrupting his effortless weaving through the crowd, he continued, “And who performed your own good husband’s cremation?”

  Saved from an immediate response by another jostling corpse, I stopped to watch a skinny, nearly naked black man weighing large pieces of wood for the pyres that were lit hundreds of times daily in this most holy of places.

  I was spending several weeks on Ma Ganga—Mother Ganges—the heart and soul of India’s Hindu culture. For days we floated on small boats covered by old cloth canopies, each rowed by two young, gently muscled dark-skinned men wrapped in lungis—the six-foot-long cloths that cover, from the waist down, most Indian men in all but the centers of large cities. Often the banks of the river were quiet, just oxen mingling with night herons, an unexpected perspective on this vibrant land. But during the Sonepur Mela celebration in Bihar, near the confluence of the Ganges with the Gandak, we joined over 1 million people bathing in the river at this auspicious moment—the November full moon.

  Moments—like snapshots—imprinted themselves:

  A small boat floats along a placid channel, the water pale blue, the sun gentled by constant haze. We—three startlingly white women—relax against colorful pillows, facing oarsmen who lie asleep in the prow while the minimal current does their work. Beneath our idle gaze a group of large black birds—crows or ravens—alights on a body-shaped floating object.

  Smoke on a garbage-strewn rocky bank clears to show three sinewy men cremating a young family member. A brother reaches quickly into the fire to pull out remaining shards of bone and throw them in the river. Water is splashed onto the flames in the final step of the ritual.

  Our boats approach the night’s campsite—a broad expanse of sand that forms an island in the low post-monsoon river. I jump ashore, avoiding a round white object. Our oarsman says it is a skull, but a fellow traveler laughs and assures me it is an old piece of styrofoam. Tents are extracted from beneath boards that were softened by our bed pillows during the trip on the water; dried cow patties are quickly set on fire for our afternoon tea.

  Beneath a quiet alcove a holy man setting up his morning gratitude ritual invites me to sit. In an intensely personal ceremony he steers my soul to my deceased husband and welcomes him to the circle of the blessed. I chant along and toss bunches of seeds, gripped with my thumb and middle two fingers, onto the fire in time with his rhythm. A sense of peace and a decorated forehead testifies to my participation in this puja.

  I walk during the Mela with increasingly dense crowds towards the broad river, lined by cement ghats—the ever-present stepped platforms full of life along Indian waterways. A barber snaps his scissors overhead advertising his availability for a child’s first ritual head shaving. This day many parents cannot reach the river for the density of the mob, so bald babies are trustingly passed above the crowd, assuring their dunking before the rising sun flashes on the water. Even in this intense swarm people save a smile for my visibly foreign face.

  The Ganges flows for a thousand miles through India, its life-giving force evident all along the way. In death, people aspire to bring their loved ones to sacred spots like Varanasi and Haridwar to assure peace for their souls. Tourists also flock to Varanasi—at sunset the river is full of twenty-passenger boats rowing up and down between the two large cremation ghats, visitors staring in rapt amazement at the fires. The evening religious ceremony there is now performed under glowing neon lights. Seven priests in gold, in a carefully staged performance, swing flames to loudly broadcast chants. Prosperous Indians fill the front sections, and, in spite of the strong tourist presence, it is believers who crowd the banks.

  Standing above this melee, I watched a hawker entice a baby with a poodle-shaped balloon—the father too polite to chase him away, the hawker intent on getting the child to demand the toy. The whole scene could fit somewhere between St. Mark’s Square and a country carnival.

  I headed for the cremation ghats where work continued into the night. Each body is allocated a large amount of hardwood straight from some diminishing forest. The flame is brought from a perpetual fire—lit by Shiva thousands of years ago, they say—and the fee for its use is based on the wealth of the recipient.

  The men in the family stay the three to ten hours it takes to complete the cremation, having brought the body on their shoulders through the town. The government, concerned about conservation, has built a sophisticated modern crematorium that sits ignored. People wish their loved ones’ ashes to enter Ma Ganga in a traditional manner, and the ceremony is a joyous time in which the soul is freed.

  The intensity of India keeps pulling me back, and I feel protective of experiences that touch me in unexpected ways, often dissipating disbelief. When I later share stories of the trip, questions about dead bodies in the river dominate conversation, seconded by awe over the intensity of the cremations and revulsion over the crowding, filth, and chaos. It is in this revulsion that I recognize how far my own perceptions have moved.

  My mind returns to that one question, innocently asked by a young Indian in the alleys of Varanasi: “And who performed your own good husband’s cremation?” At t
hat moment I was horrified to realize I had no idea. Complete strangers—men—took my husband’s body away from my home.

  I later received his ashes in a polished wooden urn that I had selected in the sterility of a crematory along the freeway not far from my house. The beautiful small mortuary in the heart of my small town of Healdsburg, California had been torn down and replaced by a lively restaurant. In our society the real estate was simply too valuable to waste on the dead.

  The moment I seriously considered the question about Harold’s cremation, I saw my world through the eyes of my Indian hosts. Their rituals of death, the normality of corpses and skulls, the belief that a river can ease the passage to the afterlife—these are all ways in which people accept the unacceptable—the loss of a loved one. Our ways might seem as impersonal and foreign to them as dead bodies floating in rivers are unimaginable to us; our horror might be perceived as callously judgmental.

  The floating object with black birds on it did in fact turn out to be a dead body—a lost corpse. The styrofoam ball really was a water-smoothed human skull. The boatman who drank river water from his fingers moments after we passed a corpse was vibrantly alive at the end of our trip. My friends ate river fish at our campsite and suffered no ill consequences. I didn’t choose to dunk myself in the river but I did fall in and survived unscathed. No one drowned on the packed ghats of the Mela in spite of intense crowding and shoving. And the water and air around Varanasi—subjected to the burning of hundreds of bodies daily—mysteriously has no unpleasant odors.

  I could not leave Ma Ganga, unchanged. An old fear of crowds dissipated. Faith and fantasy cohabit with greater ease in my scientific Western mind. Death harmonizes more naturally with life today than it did before those weeks I spent on her, and Harold’s spirit roams more freely.

 

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