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8. Proserpine’s Island
- University of South Carolina Press
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8 Proserpine’s Island I discovered early that we are all loners. Pop worked in downtown Manhattan and was gone right after breakfast, not to return until dark.We didn’t play catch together, and he never took me out to the ballgame. When Mom bent down to kiss me goodnight, I smelled her scent,“Lily of theValley,” a lily, coolish and white. Once a week on Fridays, she went to the movies, Loew’s on Kings Highway. I remember her walking away, down Avenue M to the bus stop. She was Myrna Loy to the life, her thick black hair crowned with a pillbox hat worn at a rakish angle, and I wondered if she would ever come back. When still in grade school and wanting to please her, I got in the habit of going to church every morning.This was before they replaced the Latin mass and the formal structure that had imposed an order on the day. But at the same time I found the order constricting, like a tightly wound scarf. The world I lived in felt that way too, as if it were choking me. Indians were out there, and I dreamed of building a fort in the Badlands, with crenels for guns and walls thick enough to withstand them. It took a long time before I realized that there weren’t any Indians. But the menace was real,though not personal to me.Today I’d call it existential, an all-purpose word for the ills flesh is heir to. Like many youngsters without a cause, I was an omnivorous reader. Already in my teens I was reading the five volumes of Freud’s collected papers, hoping to discover what ailed me. Effects got second place to caues. An early paper on the defense of neuropsychosis kept me on pins and needles for a nine-hour bus trip through rural Mexico,en route to the capital city.This was meant as a summer holiday to take me out of myself, proserpine’s island 131 said my parents. Mexico D.F. when I finally got there seemed less a city than an embodied chaos, foxy men with brilliant hair who looked like Cesar Romero,sexy women heavy on eyeshade,traffic wilder than the Circus Maximus in the days of Ben Hur. I won’t soon forget the rickety conveyance that brought me to the city. People and animals shared it, an open urinal ran down the middle of the aisle, and a hamper of chickens squawked in the luggage rack overhead.At some point in the journey I became aware of a wet substance dripping down the back of my neck. Looking up in alarm, I saw that a gunny sack of rice had split open and was aiming its soggy pellets at me. But I kept my eyes glued to the page, hunting order. Unconcerned with that and me, my fellow passengers smoked, snored, and sang, the chickens squawked, the urinal smelled, and at last the bus creaked into Mexico City.To my astonishment, I felt as if I’d been there before. I was seeing it, of course, through the lens ofAmerican movies. Foxy men with brilliant hair looked like Cesar Romero, women had ropey hair and went heavy on eye shade, and traffic was wilder than the Circus Maximus in the days of Ben Hur.But in the midst of chaos,sleepy-eyed paisanos sauntered along the sidewalk as if they owned it. Living in chaos, they gave no sign that they noticed.How astonished they were! I imagined them strumming popular ballads, “south of the border, down Mexico way.” They couldn’t have had more than a few pesos in pocket, reason enough to be glum, though only they seemed to hear a melody in the meaningless static around them. Our raucous sound and light show conspires to defeat all meaningful communication, and hearing the melody isn’t easy. But order is the condition of life, and if you meant to grow old, you must latch on to it. Otherwise life reduces to sound and fury. So, cocking an ear, I listened. Not knowing enough to come in out of the rain, I walk the ramparts of Enna’s castle, built seven hundred years ago and looking its age. Rain was falling all over Sicily the first time I came to the island, en route to a borsa di studio in Rome’s American Academy. Borsa is “purse...