by Jim Harrison
“No, this is more complicated if possible.” I desperately wanted to read the letter from Emelia the thought of whom made my heart thump.
The point was, I would never be able to share my secret except with the doctor and even with him leaving out the core of the violence. My mother sat there puzzled and then I rushed up to my room to read Emelia’s letter, really just a note, which except in two small patches was banal. It was mostly a litany of unsuccess: marriage at nineteen to a country singer whose one small recognizable hit carried them for half a dozen years in small venues. They had no permanent home other than a traveling van, ending up as a house band in Reno where her husband had become a heroin addict. She tried to help him for a year then abandoned him to his drug. She returned home when her brother Lawrence died in a stock car accident. Her mother had collapsed mentally and she and her father tended her mother except he was gone a lot building pipelines. One day a letter from her father came from Falstaff, Arizona, saying he had “found another.” The bright spot was that Dicky had become an electrical engineer for Sandia and helped financially while she made her way through nursing school at the University of New Mexico from which she would graduate by Christmas. She still had dreams about our beautiful times at the water tank south of Alpine. She ended, “Your first girlfriend, Emelia,” adding as a P.S.:“I still haven’t lived in a tall building in New York City.”
I immediately became excited thinking about the water tank and Emelia’s bare bottom and ejaculating as I stared off across her shoulder at a group of shy Corriente cattle waiting to drink. I immediately moved my mother and myself to a fine hotel with reliable phone service though it was a full day before I reached Emelia at dawn in Albuquerque. She was petulant at being wakened but quickly became friendly. I wanted to send her a ticket immediately but she said it would have to wait until December when she graduated with her nursing degree which was five months distant and nearly unbearable. The point though was that I suddenly had hope of some sort. Here I was only a few days in Italy and something marvelous had happened. Now it didn’t repel me to take meals with wealthy Bob while Mother and Sylvia in disgust would eat lightly and take a walk. At a fine restaurant, Checci, in Parma Bob had three orders of zampone, a stuffed pig’s leg, and three bottles of wine. Other diners and the staff cheered as I managed to carry three-hundred-pound-plus Bob out the door and into a waiting cab. My own extreme hungers were centered around the periods when the infirmity in my blood would arise suddenly like fungi.
Now as I rode through the rain south from Matilda’s castle I was a scant forty days away from Emelia’s arrival in Bologna, forty more days of loneliness for her. The trouble was that a big moon was due in twelve days, and another for Emelia’s arrival. I had taken the drug three times and it had turned me into a vomiting zombie, two days of complete stasis wherein I could barely manage to reach the toilet. It was death-in-life which made me value pure unmitigated consciousness. Here I was pumping along the highway on my bike and now thinking of a literature-appreciation course for science majors at Northwestern. The course was normally taught by a kindly old man but then he fell ill in the middle of the semester and his substitute was a firebrand who had us read Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, surely the most mind-scorching piece of fiction extant. We science majors, perhaps less so me, were quite disturbed when we were asked to write a short paper on the sentence “I maintain that to be acutely conscious is to be diseased.” I was amused by this collegiate memory but then a large diesel truck beeped right behind me and I slid off the road tipping over into a huge mud puddle. There was a decided advantage to the canine in my system because I merely shook myself off like a dog and proceeded down the highway with my interesting burden of thoughts. I had long been resolved not to let my illness unduly affect my perceptions of reality. I had years ago learned to seek out stillness in wild settings and allow everything to be as it is. I had overstepped my boundaries in thinking I could ever understand the details of the language of creatures though their sense of reality must be added to our own for a complete picture of life on earth. I mean I could closely study their otherness and then let it go.
By sheer luck I swerved into a country restaurant parking lot where a few cars were parked. Near the entry two French girls were straddling their bikes reading the menu and arguing. Their bikes were laden with sodden camping equipment and they looked utterly woebegone. The shorter, pudgy one was counting the change in her small rubber purse and the taller, prettier one was crying. They were arguing about their lack of money. I made out that though it was Saturday morning more money was being wired to them on Monday.
“Allow me to buy you lunch,” I said impulsively.
They turned to me scowling as if I were the most repulsive dickhead on earth.
“I’m not a beast. I’m alone and it’s my birthday.” I lied on both counts.
“Fine by us, American pig,” the pudgy one laughed, determining the nationality behind my pidgin French.
My luck further intensified when the manager turned out to be a man who lived only a few doors down the street in Reggio and we had spoken several times about birds during early-morning coffee at a café. He set us up a table in front of the fireplace and we ate like hounds. I had three orders of pork braised with figs and the girls ate both fish soup and game hens. We drank three bottles of wine, laughed about nonsense, and became drowsy before the fire. One of them was studying art history and the other an ancient poetess named Gaspara Stampa and they were on a month-long trip through northern Italy, camping as they went, a clear impossibility in the weather of the day. They hoped to reach Modena, the neighboring city, by evening. I talked to the manager and he called a friend with a van taxi. I bought a bottle of wine and a bottle of grappa and we were off. My landlady at the pensione wasn’t happy with my visitors but I gave her twenty bucks in lire and begged her to be nice. I gave them dry T-shirts to wear after soaking in a hot tub. I went to sleep in my cozy sleeping bag on the floor and the pudgy one, Mireille, joined me in the late afternoon, enveloping me in her wonderful vise. When the tall, prettier one, Kristabelle, was wakened by our activity she hissed, “I would never fuck an American,” and I said, “Then don’t,” and they laughed hysterically. They drank the wine and I had several snorts of the grappa. We went out in the evening for more wine and pizza with them enjoying my baggy clothes and old western cowboy shirts. Kristabelle was rather sullen as pretty girls often are but we coupled briefly at dawn with all of us in bed in the coolish room. They were off for Modena on Sunday morning. I gave them some money and said I might see them on Monday as I had intended to visit Modena.
What a happy time it was. I had had scant love since helping out my mother in late July after which I’d visited Laurel in Madrid. We had a fine reunion with nights of love but then five days into my visit her father appeared and was definitely not happy to see me. Laurel became disconsolate because her father had been badgering her to have a baby. Laurel was the last of their particular family line. He was now in his early seventies and had none of the charm left that I had witnessed twelve years before. I asked late one night why he didn’t father another child and she said that he had tried but a doctor had told him after a test that his sperm count was too low. “What about you?” she suddenly asked. I was startled. It had never occurred to me that a man in my condition should father a child. The next morning I called the doctor in Chicago and he said, “Definitely not,” and that I shouldn’t even make love he now believed without my wearing a couple of layers of protection. Laurel took this poorly and it was the effective end of our love morning. She had kindly identified three areas in France that were relatively empty, what cartographers call “sleeping beauties,” and might give me refuge for the arrival of my seizures: the Morvan in western Burgundy, the Massif Central, and the Pays Basque. Galicia in western Spain was also possible. Not oddly I felt too much of the weight of Spain’s past which had been very alive for my Spanish-teacher lover back at Northwestern whose grandfath
er had been tortured to death by Falangists in Granada. Much of my basic orientation is in the sciences, especially in zoology and botany, and there is no real space for superstition but I curiously felt what the hippies called “bad vibrations” in Spain. Even a cursory examination of the Spanish Civil War reminds one deeply of the prolonged horrors of our own. The predominant shock waves in world history are the capacity of humans to kill each other for political or religious reasons, most often a combination of both.
Laurel and I decided to take a brief train trip to Seville, thence to Granada, and then back to Madrid but then her father had left early on the morning of our departure and he had utterly exhausted her with his badgering about her having a baby. She sat on a packed suitcase in her elegant apartment and sobbed for a full hour and I could do nothing to help. I couldn’t make a dent in her uncomfortable relationship with her father and what’s more I couldn’t offer her a baby for medical reasons. Consequently she asked me to leave and I made a brief tour to Granada and Seville and then to Barcelona, all by rather slow local trains which I love. Why be in a hurry with such a questionable future? I see in my journal later on that I was overwhelmed by the physical beauty of Spain but at the same time drowning in the melancholy of its history. As I’ve said I like to become intensely familiar with any country I visit by reading and study including the literature, which indicates the nature of a country’s soul life. With Spain this was a disaster because I was reading volumes of the poetry of Lorca, Machado, and Hernández in whose bleached bones you see Spain’s historical torment. Two days in the grandeur of Barcelona gave me modest relief but not quite enough for survival. I went to a ratty and smallish Gypsy club (the Gypsies are called gitanos) and an old lady began to scream, evidently sensing my true nature, and I fled. I took a slow train along the Costa Brava to Collioure in France where I stopped to visit Machado’s grave. I proceeded then along the Mediterranean coast all the way back to Italy, again by slow local trains. What is more pleasant than reading a book on a train and lifting your eyes so as not to miss the landscape? It was immediately pleasant to escape Spain’s spirit of murder and between Narbonne and Montpellier a girl student was curled up on the seat across from me revealing her miniskirted butt which I studied as if it were the true origin of the universe. The conductor took note, reddened, and shrugged as if put upon by gratuitous lust. I made notes to revisit the area especially the mountainous area north of the coast where I might seek the usual refuge.
Now in Modena in early November with Emelia’s visit thirty-five days away I am restless despite a fine room and minuscule kitchenette not far from the city square, cathedral, and the immense gorgeous market from which I buy food for meals. Yesterday I made a pasta sauce from three kinds of wild fungi and this morning I bought myself a middling-sized octopus. My Chicago doctor’s spansules have killed the wildness of my appetite for which I am grateful but then at least once a day I briefly miss that edgy fire in the blood which is as pure as sexual desire. The girl on the train with the exposed bottom near Montpellier grinned at her spectators on waking. That is us in our wild play.
This morning in a café before I went to the market the sound system was playing a group of arias by the Modena native son Pavarotti. My hair rose and my skin prickled at this voice of a god. I looked around and noticed that people had ceased reading their morning papers. I was reading a volume of poems by Ungaretti and the type blurred with my tears. Some music apparently returns us to the core of our being and this despite my unrest over finding a location for my seizure which was due in five days.
On the way back from the market I bought a battery-operated tape player and several tapes of Pavarotti thinking that I must study the voice. I even thought it might be best to study this voice in the city from which it had emerged. In my room I listened while laying out my maps and found myself drawn to the Morvan region of Burgundy. I had idly looked at a volume about this area of Burgundy while at Laurel’s apartment in Madrid but now rather than its Celtic or Roman origins I felt compelled by the dimensions of its forested areas. I had noticed that in the few days leading up to a seizure I felt an inevitable loneliness for forests, the odor of hardwoods in late fall. This was a kind of physiological sentimentality I had read in Proust in college. There were a few patches of fine hardwoods near Cincinnati that I could visualize from my earliest hunting experiences. I clearly needed a forest for my oncoming trauma.
I quickly ate my octopus and then went off and bought a small delivery van from a man who was giving up his produce stall at the market. After I paid him in cash he advised me that it would take days to get it properly licensed. I said, “Fuck ’em,” as they do out west. He was amused by this and for an extra twenty bucks left his plates on the van. He was on his way to Seattle in the U.S. to visit his daughter who was a chef there and felt rather carefree. Within an hour I was headed northwest toward France via Torino.
Nov. 7–Nov. 10. I reached a campsite west of Autun in three days in my pathetic putt-putt van that could barely reach 65 kilometers per hr. (40 mph). I was tempted by Mt. Beuvray as a campsite but there were too many visitors thereabouts due to its fame from Julius Caesar being there about 60 B.C. I was unnerved in Vézelay to see above the main door of the cathedral the sculpted figures of men with the heads of dogs. Startled at lunch in a bistro when a local man told me the Celts were here in about 4000 B.C. This man was goofy rather than the ordinarily cynical Frenchman and told me to be wary of forest spirits after I said I was camping. He went into a rant as a lover of horses as the mountain people used to kill and eat wild horses. Later in the afternoon as my vehicle was struggling up a mountain trail I indeed felt strange and it was an effort to resist the silly feeling. It had begun in Vézelay and Autun. In both places when I’d wandered around as a garden-variety sightseer stray dogs, shy and deferential, had followed me and I suspected my scent was changing more radically than it had in the past with the oncoming big moon. Three girls near the cathedral in Autun teased me about being part dog and I gave a mock but convincing growl. They screeched and ran. I thought it would be fine if they could camp with me tonight but then my conscience cautioned me into its “do no harm” mode. How culture struggles to make us think we aren’t what we are. I knew the Nazis had executed whole villages in the area. How could anyone kill a child? The other evening at a rest stop near Grenoble I’d tried to nap curled up in my cold van and a thief’s hand had reached in the back door which I hadn’t locked. I crushed the hand in my own feeling the thief’s bones grind and shatter in my grip. He howled. I stopped short of jerking out a few fingers. On the long drive I felt strongly the strange burden of my early life. I thought I had rejected my parents but I never went anywhere without my volumes of Virgil and Ovid and often Sappho, and also the patrimony of bird books. The most overwhelming memories during the trip were of Emelia. I was often more than a little frightened of her but after eighteen years the merest slip of an image of her body would engorge my cock. How can memory do this to the body? An idle question because it does. Emelia flipping out of the water tank, her bare butt in the air with the small hairs sprouting in her miniature crevasse, the chubby lips of her pussy and her tiny pink asshole, the conflicting odors of her Dentyne gum and Camay soap. Or sitting on the musty couch in my shed with knees drawn up so that the undersides of her thighs drew one down to her puffy pussy under the white cotton panties, and her face saying, “Go ahead and look, fool.” When I found a campsite in a thicket surrounded by shaggy and gnarled oaks I fucked a small patch of cold moss in desperation, then in the firelight I cut a spansule in half thinking that a partial dose would be enough in this remote place. I folded the rest of the spansule of powder in a square of notebook paper in the manner of the way I once bought a gram of cocaine in college and put it in my pocket. Well, the half dose wasn’t enough and eleven hours later dawn found me in a flatland forest that turned out to be thirty miles west with a dog laying a dozen feet away. I immediately vomited thinking I might have eaten part of it
but then it awoke and I was happy that I hadn’t been cannibalistic. The dog approached and I petted it and then it trotted off as if it had accomplished its mission of protecting me, a joke indeed when I might have eaten it. I curled back up to sleep a little more then bounded to my feet when I saw a deer in the dawn mist through the trees perhaps a hundred yards in the distance. I was able to caution myself and quickly snorted the other half of the drug in its paper wrapper. I began to walk east toward the rising sun pausing now and then to fill my capacious jacket with the many boletus mushrooms I saw on the dense forest floor. I soon had found so many that I had to construct a makeshift sack out of my overshirt. I kept thinking of Professor Hamric back in college quoting Heidegger in my only philosophy course: “Living life is somewhat unfamiliar to us all.” I was quite tired from my long night’s run when the forest had seemed a broad river of moonlight. My fatigue was also from the soporific effect of the drug which at least controlled the savagery of appetite. I sat down against a tree to rest and not long after two men and a dog were standing before me. Their approach would have been impossible if I hadn’t taken the drug. Since he was at eye level I greeted the dog first. One of the men was very large and exclaimed, “Jesus Christ!” when he saw my big shirt-sack of boletus. The other man was tall and slender and looked at me with concern. He said, “You are ill,” quite accurately. I lamely explained that I used to run marathons and had run all night. I offered to give them my sack of mushrooms if they would give me a ride back to my campsite. The big man virtually yelled, “Yes,” and we were soon on our way in their large comfortable car, stopping at a village butcher’s where I bought a baguette and a kilo of fromage de tête, a large chunk of rough pâté made from the fat, cheek meat, and tongue of a pig. I literally wolfed down the whole two pounds in minutes. I could tell they were pleased when we reached the two-track to my campsite. I hugged and kissed their dog Eliot who had slept on my lap and with whom I had shared some of my snack. I was relieved to reach my campsite and unpacked the remaining mushrooms from my jacket pocket. I found a large human finger and its bloody stump which I tossed off into the trees. The finger jogged my pitiful memory and I recalled that early in my night run I had stopped at a country tavern and had drunk several glasses of both red wine and water. The owner of the tavern and a big farmer yelled at me to leave, obviously uncomfortable with my company. I was slow as if unable to understand human language. They grabbed me and hauled me out the front door. The farmer twisted my arm painfully and I overreacted, throwing them around the parking lot and coming up with a finger. I had hoped to cook my mushrooms with a skillet and olive oil over a campfire but quickly decided that I should leave the area.