Gilda Trillim

by Steven L. Peck

  The frats were tapping their watch and motioning toward the train station, but Gilda was not finished with the man. She walked him over to a clothier. She bought him some trousers, shirt, underwear, socks, and shoes. She also bought him a hat—a rather nice one. The frat boys were making snide comments about how in putting on new clothes on a filthy and wasted retch she was putting old wine into new bottles, but again Gilda just ignored them.

  As they left the store, the man was weeping openly and mumbling things incomprehensible but unmistakably expressions of gratitude. The Frats were now silent and seemed humbled and subdued. Then she did the most surprising thing of all, we walked down the cobbled street a little further, she holding his arm as if he were her father, until we reached a shoeblack stand. She had him get up onto the raised stand and motioned the shoeblack away. Then she knelt before the man and polished his new shoes. There was no need of course. The shoes were brand new, but she did it anyway. Then she rose and paid the owner of the stand with a generous tip and helped the old man down from the chair—she was much taller than he. He was quite stunned. She took out a ten thousand lire note and placed it in his shirt pocket. She smiled at him and made drinking-from-a-bottle motions with her hands and negated it with a shake of her head. He remonstrated that he would do no such thing. Then she stood on tiptoe, lifted up his hat, and applied a generous and lingering kiss to his forehead. He became unglued and fell to his knees and holding onto the front of her skirt wept. She assisted him back onto his feet and holding onto his hands looked at him with such intensity it unnerved even me. Suddenly, she reached up and grabbed his face between her palms like she was holding it steady, forcing him to look into her eyes. She looked for a moment into his gaze, as if trying to memorize what was there.

  Then she said forcefully, even harshly, “Who are you?”

  He looked away, but then returned her unrelenting stare and started to answer, surprisingly in heavily accented English, “I am Anton …”

  She cut him off. “Not your name! Who are you?” She demanded.

  The strange thing, and I can’t really say why this came to me, but she did not seem to even be talking to him. It was as if she were asking these questions to herself. There is nothing that I can describe to you that would make it apparent that this was what was happening, but it just felt that way.

  She held him like this for a few more minutes. Then suddenly laughed and said, “Yes! There it is. I see it.” And she let his face go.

  She shook his hand and said goodbye. We walked away at a fairly brisk pace, feeling the need to hurry so we did not miss the train. As we scurried away, the man stood and watched us for a long time with tears in his eyes.

  We made it back just in the nick of time to catch the train back to Obila. No one said a word all the way back to the ship. When we got on deck and were saying goodnight to the boys, Gilda suddenly laughed and said something odd to them, “We are not thrown into worlds. We make them out of the stuff at hand.” Then they excused themselves, claiming exhaustion, and said likely they would not come up for dinner and left us for the evening.

  Isn’t that strange, Mom? I’ve tried to bring it up to Gilda several times, but she just laughs off my attempts to get an explanation of the way she treated that man, and she says strange things like, “He was an apple seed with eyes. I wanted to look inside him to see what was there,” or “Everything is being, and hides from us its fullness.” It sounds crazy, sometimes, but the way she says it, it seems full of sense. At least for a little while.

  I’ll pop this in the morning mailbag. Next we are going to stop at Tripoli, then Cairo, Antalya, then Rome. I’ll try to write when I can and tell you more of our adventures. We are fine and having a terrific trip. This was so worth doing. Give my love to Dad.

  Love Your Affectionate Daughter,

  Babs

  Vignette 9: Trillim Cooks Emily Dickinson’s Black Cake. Circa 1962

  The following was written shortly after Trillim’s cruise to Rome where she seems to have overcome her bout of major depression. This occurred prior to losing her right hand and her two-year imprisonment in Southeast Asia. As always her life’s work has been to explore the connections between things: people, ecologies, and objects of all types large and small. This is one of my favorites because of the pictures that scholars found in an envelope tucked in her journal.

  I went down, down, down to the heart of an apple seed. I searched its depths, scouring under every stairway to find its truth. I swept out the cobwebs of appearance and dug into its hard subterranean earthiness to strike some vein of richness yielding its essence. Beyond color. Beyond size. Beyond smell, touch, and sound, and at the middle of its being I found its unlimited capacity to hide, to withdraw into hidden passages, and to mask all its coordinates such that no map could be drawn. No logic yielded its ways and in the end what it disclosed of itself was naught but a meager caricature–a smudge, a line-drawing sketched from perceptions it was willing to share. I sigh at my failure.

  Perhaps my approach was wrong. Perhaps to go in, to go down, I must go up. I must find all its fellows. Maybe, I’ll expand and swell and enlarge myself and discover firsthand the root of connecting patterns and in such webs see what can be netted. Perhaps as always, the best approach is to start with baking a cake.

  How about this one? Sent to a friend by verdant and bright Emily Dickinson with this note and recipe:

  Dear Nellie,

  Your sweet beneficence of bulbs I return as flowers, with a bit of the swarthy cake baked only in Domingo.

  Lovingly,

  Emily.

  2 pounds Flour—

  2 Sugar—

  2 Butter—

  19 Eggs—

  5 pounds Raisins—

  1 ½ Currants—

  1 ½ Citron—

  ½ pint Brandy—

  ½ Molasses—

  2 Nutmegs—

  5 teaspoons—

  Cloves-Mace-Cinnamon

  2 teaspoons—Soda—

  Beat Butter and Sugar together—

  Add Eggs without beating—and beat the mixture again—

  Bake 2 ½ hours, or three hours, in cake Pan Cake pans or 5 to 6 hours in Milk pan, if full—1

  And what is a recipe? The blueprint of ecology. A harmony of relationships. The ideal form, which every kitchen demiurge must try to instantiate in matter (so imperfect a substance!)—An act of creation from the unorganized material floating among the carbon/nitrogen offerings budding from the earth: flours, sugars, eggs, spices, and flavors rich and varied. Endless mixtures and combinations creating worlds, nations, and countries undiscovered and lying curled snuggly in the capacious ether misting in cupboards and pantries well-stocked.

  I start by taking raisins fashioned by grapes grown in the warmth of the San Joaquin Valley by a family who has grown grapes for many generations and who cherish their tended vines. These hand plucked offerings are laid out on newspapers (published in Fresno) by workers from Mexico who have come to bless their wives and children back home and make for themselves a finer life than they would have otherwise. Each fruit, graced by the sun, changes in substance as water is pulled through the fruit’s hide initiating chemical changes that draw into being flavors delicate and distinctly raisiny, signaled by a delectable dark blackening. Raisins, a gift from: grapes, sun, growers, Mexico, and a universe’s chemical underpinnings, and pulled from a box brought to me by a trucker and a grocer who have conspired under the rules of symbiosis to bring them dancing to my countertop.

  I put these to soak in a brandy whose genesis was framed in a distant distillery in France from grapes of a different lineage, reared in soils whose ecology was conditioned by millions of years of separation from the raisin’s sister-soil in California, each with communities of fungi and bacteria adding and enriching what flavors will emerge from the dark underpinnings of a thousand-trillion accidents. Then, aged in oak barrels fashioned from trees grown in the Tronçais forest, whose unique climate, soil, an
d woodland ecology create an oak with a density just so, from which a wooden plank will be made that will author forth a firm and sturdy barrel, produced by a craftsman with the ken of five generations of barrel makers stored in his soul, a barrel that will slowly leach its own essence and nature into the brandy.

  These are mixed and placed in a glass jar, made from sands carved out of sedimentary rock by ocean water, lifted and transported by wind to fall as rain down upon the pressed sandstone of Jurassic river deposits, themselves torn from ancient mountains long ago weathered to plains. Then beyond the material, scores upon scores of stories of how the glass factory was born through someone’s dreams, pain, and determination could be told.

  And so from around the world, gathered from ecologies many, from materials, objects, and substances with properties wrapped thick with the stuff of deep time and cantered across many spaces, and whose myriad stories of genesis and re-genesis call and peep to one another in tangled networks, sits my jar upon the shelf with raisins soaking, creating a new flavor in the world.

  And so it goes for the batter, with nutmeg from exotic islands grown among the palms of distant shores,

  And the sifted flour,

  And the mixed and completed dough,

  Until after baking, this object, this cake is born into the world.

  The taste is subtle, a unique mix finished from staggering complexity, its creation an accident of unimaginable improbabilities and a network of earth processes and history. I picture in my mind the network of associations as if they were strung from wires connecting and fashioning the flavors. Wires running among the grapes of California, their growers, the newspapers which provided substrate for the ripening fruit, the oak of France, and on and on from the wheat farmer who grew the flour, to the sea captain who brought the cinnamon, to cows who provided milk for the butter from the grasses the bovines fed upon, to the slopes of Mauna Kea where the sugarcane was grown and harvested. The wires may vary in thickness like the strings of a guitar, with thick wires between say the citron and current where the flavor connections are strong and thin wires between the wheat made into flour and the man who delivered the gasoline for the tractor which harvested the crop. I imagine these wires stretching into the past, perhaps to the Pleistocene, which provided the material substrate for the soils of France, which add subtle shifts in the nuances of flavor gracing the cake. I wonder. Were I to pluck any string somewhere in this web of connection, how far would the vibrations propagate? Would there be any end to the music that would issue forth? The music expressed now as flavor drawn from my cake and combined with my olfactory apparatus.

  Which all started with some tulip bulbs gifted by a friend and a favor returned.

  Vignette 10: An Account of Gilda’s Vision under the South American Hallucinatory Drug Ayahuasca. Circa 1966

  Because of its length, I will pick up this vignette just as the vision described begins. Trillim provides extensive details about her decision to take ayahuasca. In the well-known Look Magazine1 piece, she wrote extensively about traveling to Peru with her long time correspondent and friend, Russian anthropologist Valentina Czaplicka. There, she explains her interest and motivation for taking the hallucinatory South American shamanistic drug. There is much more that could be explored about the experience, but I want to focus primarily on the vision itself. Her complete journal entry of the event constitutes over two hundred pages, and although scholars (and true Trillim aficionados) will want to read the complete journal entries from the Archive, they are rather lengthy and full of technical details that are of limited relevance for this thesis. The primary question I want to take up in my recounting this event is whether it contributed to a propensity for hallucination later in life. This question has been considered in some detail by several researchers, but most thoroughly by Praskovya Blinova in her excellent treatment of the potential for ayahuasca to create long-term brain changes of a type that might explain Trillim’s extraordinary claims.2 She comes down on the side of such changes being extremely unlikely for Gilda’s case.

  However, I would like to draw on this hallucination to frame the discussion of Gilda’s madness later in the thesis so for my purposes it is sufficient to recount from her journals the vision itself. Trillim argued that this incident was life changing, which in some ways could be taken as ironic, given the long-term disability that follows from this experience. After these events her writing takes on its more characteristic shape and themes. We’ll pick this up just before she takes the drug.

  The unassuming indigenous hut was situated on the edge of a rainforest village that we had arrived to by river the day before. The dwelling was constructed of straight wooden supports, with round beams made of tree branches emanating from the three center poles. It was finished with wide pale-green plantain leaves covering the roof and sides in order to offer some shelter from the wind and rain. There were reed mats scattered about the hut for the participants to sit or lie upon. I chose one nearest the river and furthest from the front opening.

  There was an old diesel heating stove near my mat. It appeared unnecessary given that the temperature in the hut seemed pleasant enough, if not even a bit too warm. It was just me and Valentina taking the drug. The old shaman gave me a collection of three old coffee cans. My friend explained these were to be used if I felt the need to vomit. Then she laughed and said, “And you will need to vomit.” I had already had it explained to me that there was some inevitability in this unpleasant part of the experience.

  The shaman, whose name is now lost to me, without ceremony brought the brown/tea colored concoction of medicinal plants in the black metal bucket in which it had been prepared. It looked like a mass of vine sticks and boiled green leaves. Valentina told me it had been simmering all night. It smelled weedy and earthy like the mud pies that I used to make as a child growing up in Idaho. He ladled some of the liquid into a blue porcelain glazed tin cup and motioned for me to drink. It did not taste as bad as I thought. It was bitter, but had a sweet edge; maybe they had added honey. Even so, I gagged, but he motioned with a toss of his hand and by tilting his head back that I should finish the cup.

  Valentina was nodding vigorously and said in Russian, “Drink it all!”

  I did and he gave me another cup. This was too much. I thought I was going to die if I had to drink more, but I held my nose and forced myself to swallow it quickly. This failed. It took six more attempts to get the whole thing down. My stomach started making noises and I had a sudden worry that I’d been poisoned and this whole contrivance was a trick to rob me.

  The old man signaled with his hands that I should lie down on the mat and said repeatedly in bad Spanish, “Bueno. Bueno. Descansa un rato, Señora.”

  I lay down, but immediately, or so it seemed, I vomited violently into one of the cans, filling it nearly halfway. I tried to hold back, thinking he would make me drink more of the vile mixture, but he motioned for me to lie back down. I did, but was back up again in a few minutes vomiting. This happened at least twice more. I was filling my second can with a putrid smelling bile, when suddenly, almost instantly, I felt quite lighthearted and at peace. My stomach felt clean. Strangely clean. Not just in the sense of having gotten rid of some fetid poison, but my flesh and bones had been made virginal and innocent. Holy. As if I had been purged of all impurities and the taints collected over a lifetime of imbibing the dirt of existence had been washed away with clear water. My head felt weightless and the sounds of the others around me evaporated. And I mean evaporated. I saw the sounds bleeding into the air like the heat waves off a hot highway after a summer cloudburst.

  I glanced at the shaman. His brown wrinkled face looked more beautiful than a Hawaiian sunset, each line signifying a grace of angelic perfection, his sparkling eyes like that of a god, shone brown with glory. He looked at me and said in formal German, “Wählen Sie Ihre spirituelle Lehrer sorgfältig!” I told him I did not speak German and he clapped his hands in delight and returned, “Jetzt tun Sie. Jetzt können
Sie sprechen alle Sprachen.” And I knew he was right, I could speak all languages now. I tried out Latin and Hebrew in my head and I could speak them each with ease. I realized that I no longer needed language and it seemed a blunt and bloated way of communicating—wholly inadequate to conveying even a modicum of what I wanted to say. I supposed, happily, that my thinking had reverted to Adamic, the language of primal Adam and God. I could speak with power such that in knowing a true name, I could create the thing just by naming it.

  Then it was gone. The words fled me and I was back in the hut. Valentina was now vomiting, apparently having her turn at the concoction. All the smells and sounds of the place rushed back. I suddenly felt immensely sad for I could tell I had died, as I was now floating above my body, looking down upon the happenings of the enclosure. The shaman was busy handing Valentina a can. The air was thick with tobacco and other smokes. And the sounds! The music of the village was leaking with clarity into the room. There was the cry of monkeys, the sounds of crickets, frogs, and cicadas were clear and distinct. I could smell the smoke and the diesel and the strange assemblage of foreign scents. It never occurred to me that the soul free of the body would be able to smell. Then a lovely sorrow settled over me. I did not feel sad for myself, but for my mother who would hear of my death in South America and mourn bitterly. She warned me not to go on this trip. I had ignored her. Mothers are always right.

  I floated outside and like a balloon began to drift higher. Very slowly, but unmistakably I was floating up, up, up until I was even with the canopy of the highest trees. There I placidly hovered. Looking down over the top of the rainforest as it rolled into the distance, verdant with living things, I could feel the life of the place like a ringing in my ear—a buzz that was felt, not heard.

  Suddenly, I was approached by a gigantic dragonfly. It was large, electric blue, and it shimmered like a neon light blinking on and off. It said, “I am your guide.” Its legs were strangely shaped, and I looked closely and they terminated in tiny badminton racquets. Three miniature birdies were being volleyed back and forth between each pair of dangling legs. I stared at the legs going through their motions and thought, “How mechanical it all looks! How forced. Like a machine.” It said again, “I am your guide.”