Gilda Trillim

by Steven L. Peck

  In the end, Abel does escape the island by a bit of luck, a daring decision, and a continued resolve to find his way back to those he loves. But just as he escapes he is taken by a cat:

  Abel realized that the cat had to do what she did. She was being a cat. It was up to him to be the mouse.

  And he was playing his part very well. A little smugness crept into his attitude. He seemed to be saying, “It’s your move.” (p. 112)

  Determinism. Playing a part. Making a move. Resolving on a stratagem to escape (which he does). All in a mess of choice and causality. None of it clearly free. To me this gets at the heart of what Phil was saying. It’s not in the simple choices of this or that that makes freedom real, it’s in navigating these perplexities on a scale above that. A scale with existential weight.

  And where does this freedom reside? I think it is fundamental to the nature of the universe. One of its givens. I am reminded of the French Natural Philosophers trying to sort out gravity. They claimed that any explanation should be an explanation of why bodies attract. Why when you drop an apple does it fall? So resolved to understand the fundamental attraction of things they created a system of vortices that spun like whirlwinds creating the gravitational tug with which we all are familiar. Newton’s genius was to shrug and say, who cares why, let’s catalog and quantify its effects. And so today, why two things attract is just a thing matter does in the presence of other matter. Why? Who knows?

  To me freedom is similar. We look for it bubbling out of the stuff of matter and in something akin to Descartes’ vortices want it describable in terms of causes and explicanda. Yet perhaps, since it is so necessary to our understanding of everything that happens, like Newton we have to accept that there it is, sitting in us. It just is. Apples fall on our heads. We must make choices.

  There is one more thing I notice. Freedom, if it emerges like magic from consciousness (like the conjuring of consciousness itself!) seems best recognized in the choices made for love. Those acts of love (or acts of choosing not to love) seem to create the most powerful evidence that freedom lives in the world; or at least to me that is where it is most clear. And those things I believe about God Mother and Father, that They are love, seem to be the best use of agency for the three of us. I could entertain that that is the most necessary place for freedom to hide, and maybe the only place it does. If so, it is enough.

  Vignette 7: Gilda Reflects on Her Melancholy. Circa 1962

  After her return from the Soviet Union, Gilda seems to have fallen into depression. Her friend Babs Lake took her on an Atlantic Cruise to break her from its chains. During that time, her spirits lifted significantly. She was reading Moby Dick, and this was found folded in her hardback copy of the book. It is a fascinating peep into the things she was thinking at the time and that later would inform her fiction. It is believed by most Trillim scholars that this was written about two days into the voyage.1

  Here on a hollow deck. Of a hollow ship. On a hollow ocean. Gracing a hollow planet. Circling a hollow star. Secondary qualities without substance. Appearance without essence. Surface without depth. Is it real, or just me—falling into a slippage of self, a dysfunction of my brain, twisting reality into a caricature of a line drawing abstracted from something richer into which I cannot tap?

  What if it’s not me? What if this deep melancholy is natural? A response to a disease of sorts. Not something deviant or masking realities, but rather something embracing them? Attending to them with clarity? What if this depression of spirit is not a sickness of self, but of community? What if this deep detachment is a call to others, to draw the community’s gaze to that one member who can no longer carry her self-imposed load? Like a fever. A signal to the village that something is not right within. A muster! A trumpet blast to rally the tribe. Quick. Run to her! Grab her. Hold her with your strong arms. Convince her by your swift attention that she belongs. That she belongs whether she can carry her load or not. Tell her: You are ours! The community calls, we will not let you go! What if in her struggles to get away she were told, you cannot go away, for you are ours. You are ours. I am unworthy, she weeps and pulls away, runs away whispering, I cannot carry the load. It is too much. But the village comforts, we will carry both you and your load. See our arms? Are they not strong? Come one. Come all. There! Heave ho. Shoulder her burdens. You are ours! You are ours! See! We have your cargo. It is light for we are many and we can hoist it with ease. All your loads are secure. We will not drop them. Rest your mind, for we’ve got them, and we are holding all that you love tight. Do not worry; we will not let them fall. They are yours, and because they are yours, they are ours. Let me go, she cries. I no longer belong. Leave me alone. Leave me to be. Alone.

  But we will not. We will not. We cannot. She is ours.

  What if melancholia is natural? What if it is not broken brain chemistry, but broken networks of care? In a mythical time, call it the time of the cavewoman, call it tribal, call it the age of awareness, when we walked with others more closely, when we could read another’s mood and contribution and tune ourselves to their comportment and disposition, could we then heed the call more keenly? Could we sense the community’s ailments and disarrangements with more regard? Apply what medicine was needed with more fine-tuned dosage? Granting the magic necessary to attend to the broken community, in which a despondent member is but a fever of sort? A signal. A broken pulse beat in networks of care?

  See my neighborhood now. Compartments of the lonely. We dwell alone, or in island families, staring through singleton houses lined up like rows of prison cells carved from the landscape, masking and dividing what community is still not ravaged by the sharp blades of modern life.

  Or this metaphor. Our modern networks are like a spider web blasted with a stream from a garden hose: the shreds of the web remain, creating a mere semblance of the structure that once stood securely. Networked with solid moorings and tightly moored joints that could withstand what winds blew in the night. Not now. Now under the pressure of the focused liquid beam from the water hose, it has been shred to the point that the lattice is a sparse and threadbare rag.

  We boast about our individuality and hold up our independence like a plucked bird bragging that now without the weight of all those feathers it will be able to soar higher than its fellows. And the sickness grows. For what individual can carry the weight of existence? And in a thousand lonely isolation chambers we scream for help. We wander in a depressive fog and shout for aid, waiting for a community to rescue us. Yet like fledglings whose mother has fallen broken from the shot of a hunter’s gun, we peep in the deserted branches waiting for a sustaining worm that will never appear.

  And so in darkness we lie on the analyst’s couch while he plies us with pills manufactured as blunt alternatives to the arms in which we long to be carried and think it natural to return to the individual cell, or our family’s individual cell, to the hive of fragmented connections. We have become corporate. Industrial in our individuality—filled with efficiencies that care less, or sloppily Band-Aid severed relations, and ignore the organic roots that once nurtured and healed us.

  Grab her? Hold her? For she is ours? We’ve forgotten how. And the we-will-not-let-her-go is lost in a palliative of duty, casseroles, and platitudes.

  Vignette 8: Letter from Babs Lake to Her Mother Mathilda Lake. June 1962

  I offer this without comment. I believe this letter found in the Archives gives us a deeper window into Trillim’s soul than even her own writings.

  Dear Mom,

  How are you doing? Have your classes ended? How did your teaching go? I hope things are settling down for you a little, that your grading is over and you are relaxing. Although, I’ve never seen you relax, I think it might be possible in theory so I keep hoping one day you’ll slow down. Ha ha ha. I like to picture you sitting by the fire with a volume of George Eliot in your hand, your granny reading glasses resting low on your nose and a smile on your face.

  We have just arrived off the co
ast of Sardinia and in the morning we’ll take a landlubbers’ excursion. We spent two days in Montpellier and it was as lovely as you described. The winding streets, the wondrous cafes lining the Mediterranean docks (and yes we did have the octopus stew as you recommended). Since leaving New York the trip has been uneventful as far as the things you were worried about are concerned (hurricanes, icebergs, unscrupulous rakes trying to seduce me away to a life of passion and crime, etc.). As it always is with Gilda, however, it’s been a wild and keen inward adventure. And yes she managed to get us into trouble. I think it has helped her spirits immensely and she seems to be more like her old self.

  It started poorly though. The first few days she would come out to the deck with me to repose on the recliners, but seemed to take no notice of the surroundings. She would ask one of the deck waiters to bring her an apple and a paring knife. She would then slowly whittle away the pulp, eating not a bite, until she had extracted the seeds from the core. Then after a few minutes of staring at the pips she would begin to weep uncontrollably and nothing I would say could coax her from her dour mood. Whatever had happened in the USSR continued to linger and haunt her. And she refused to talk about it despite my many pleadings. However, the sea breeze and the ocean air seemed to steadily lessen these bouts of melancholy until finally one day I persuaded her to pick up a novel. You know Gilda, so what light and easy romance do you think she picked up? Of course, Moby Dick. It did seem to relax her, so I tried not to influence her away from it.

  Shortly after this, two undergraduates began to scope us out. They would pretend to be circumnavigating the ship, but it was clear that we were the objects of some intense scrutiny. Finally, they stopped and dared ask us what we thought of the cruise and inquired as to whether we were enjoying ourselves. They wore white letterman sweaters and spoke in a most affected and nonchalant manner as they casually passed by. They were obviously silver-spoon-in-your-mouth frat boys, but get this (and you say there is no such thing as coincidence! Ha!), they were both on the badminton team at UC Berkeley! (I can see you saying in your Karl Jung voice, “Ah, synchronicity, perhaps.”) At this Gilda’s ears perked up, but she said nothing about her being the former women’s world champion. At least she closed her book. We chatted awhile and finally one of them said, “I say, how would you two ladies like to play a round or two of badminton? We could give you a couple of pointers if you are interested in the game.” I looked at Gilda, but she demurred and said maybe another time. We left on pleasant enough terms and it was delightful to see Gilda at least engaging in a measure of social intercourse. I know since her injury in the world championships, and her disappearance into the wilds of Soviet Russia, she has had a dark black cloud resting over her. This was the most positive sign I’d seen in weeks.

  They were both humanities majors and the next day and the day after that too they stopped by to chat. They were both enchanted with some, as Gilda called him, Nazi philosopher1 who had captured their loyalty despite the horrific connotations. Just to test them I told them I was Jewish to gauge their reaction. I was ready to heave them over the rails if they showed any distancing. They did not let a single shadow pass over their face, but seemed anxious to redeem their philosophical hero and rambled on about him for almost an hour. Gilda seemed intrigued (you’ll remember she was a lit major), but my only comment was, “By their fruits ye shall know them.”

  The next day they loaned Gilda one of his books with some things marked to read. That night she laughed at it and handed it to me. I waded through some of the most dense and impenetrable text I’ve ever read. Finally, I gave it back to her and said, “Pure Nonsense.”

  She agreed but spent most of the night reading it anyway.

  The next day the frats (as we started calling them), asked what she thought. She laughed and said, “He almost gets it.”

  “What do you mean, ‘almost?’” they asked, genuinely concerned.

  Gilda answered, “Ready-at-hand, he thinks the tool disappears when it’s in use and only appears when it’s broken or not working.”

  “You don’t believe it? You don’t think it disappears?”

  Gilda laughed (and Mother you know how sweet her laugh is!), and said, “No. I disappear. The tool is the only thing that’s left. He’s got it backwards.”

  The frats began to protest, it being unthinkable that their Kraut could be wrong about something, and they started using all the words their Kraut had invented to explain his thought. Mostly this was done by hyphenating words. But Gilda would have none of it, but rather than argue she asked if they would like to play badminton.

  They jumped at the chance. We walked to the upper deck where there was a court. While the crew set up the net, the boys asked if we would like to play doubles, with one of them on a team with each of us, but Gilda said we would face them together. They smiled knowingly at each other and said, “Sure, but if you change your mind after a couple of rounds we can do it the other way.”

  The racquets were of poor quality and almost toys, but in Gilda’s hands I knew they would be lethal. They served first, an easy lob to me, which I returned. They were lazy and when I lobbed it back, they didn’t even try and it went to the ground. Gilda served, it was a wicked drop and both guys rushed forward but missed it. They looked surprised. Really surprised. She served again, a killer, but they managed clumsily to return it short and Gilda rallied forward and did a hairpin that dropped like a sock right next to the net. Now they looked at each other with unabashed surprise. This was a game!

  It was amazing. Every time Gilda would do some remarkable smash or stunning drive one of them would mutter, “I say!”

  Pretty much I just watched while Gilda trounced them 15/7 and 15/5. They demanded another match. They were getting the hang of it and they managed a 15/9 in the first game, but a disappointing 15/3 in the second. I think Gilda was wearing them out.

  In the end, they came up to her and shook her hand and said, “Who are you?” When they heard they had just played Gilda Trillim, they laughed and shook their heads and said, “Well done, my dear. Well played.”

  On the way back down, she tilted her head slightly and asked, “Did you notice?” And they asked, “Notice what?” And she said coyly, “It was not Gilda and a racquet being used reflexively to some purpose. It was not Gilda using a racquet. It was one thing, maybe you could call it a Gilda-racquet-court-net-game-situation-two-other-players-wind-sunshine object. But there was only one thing there. To separate us out would be to miss the reality.”

  They said that yes that is what their German says. That understanding is in the world. Not in the brain.

  Gilda, laughed and said, “Understanding is in the brain. He’s wrong again. When those things I see and hear and smell and feel combine with memory and construct the world, I understand. It’s just that I’m a really big object. I’m composed larger than I am.”

  You should have seen the strange look they gave her, but in that strangeness was a kind of fear and admiration. We agreed to all spend the day on Sardinia together. I think the shorter guy named Gerald likes me. He is just a pup, but I’m flattered.

  Later …

  We just got back from Sardinia. Gilda is taking a shower. I’m feeling strange. It was a weird trip. We landed in Olbia and had a pleasant lunch with our frat boys. We devoured a light meal of shrimp salad and some rather sweet Italian wine. We had not signed up for the group tour, thinking that we ought to be able to find ways to entertain ourselves. We decided to take the train up to Nuoro because there were some museums that looked promising and who can turn Gilda down?

  We wandered through a delightful cobbled street. We decided to cut through a narrow alley that our map suggested would take us to a street that would lead us back to the train station. About halfway up the alley to the next street we found a man sitting against a recessed wall. He sat with a large wine bottle between his legs. He had no hat on and we could see an old and scabby wound with thin hair tangled in the scaly yellow crust, gray wi
th pus. His trousers, grease stained and marred dark with odorous urine, were wrinkled around his legs like the baggy excess of a gray beetle grub. He wore only a sleeveless tank top undershirt stained with purple wine and vomit. His face was lined with hardship and his unshaved week-old beard was gray and coarse. We all passed by, looking down at him. The disgust on the frats’ faces was clear and unmitigated. I’m sure I looked at him no differently. But on Gilda’s countenance was puzzlement.

  We had only gone a few steps further when suddenly Gilda ran back to him. She squatted beside him and grabbed him firmly by the shoulders and shook him hard. His eyes slit open and he mumbled something incomprehensible and slurred. But Gilda was undaunted. She roused him to a finer state of awareness and got him to his feet. He was talking to her, but none of us spoke anything but a smattering of tourist Italian, like “How much does this cost?” or “Where is the bathroom?”

  She took him by the hand, and led him forward. He walked slowly, as if in a daze still talking to Gilda in a more and more animated way. We came out of the alley and Gilda steered him to the chairs of an outdoor cafe just outside the small street where we found him. The frats at first had suggested we abandon him and even demanded that Gilda leave him behind, but she would not listen. Once she got him seated at a table, she said to an obviously unhappy proprietor, “Caffè!” He did not move until she waved a few 10,000 Lire notes in his face. The frats and I sat at one table and Gilda and the man sat at another. A woman, perhaps the proprietor’s wife, brought us all an espresso and menus. Gilda managed to order us all sandwiches and soup. When they were brought out the man ate slowly but without hesitation, interspersing his bites with repeated expressions of, “Grazie. Grazie.”