The Rain in Portugal (4 page)

From the back seat of an old Toyota

on a breakneck rush to the Mexico City airport

out of the city of Puebla to the southeast,

I could see in the rear-view mirror

the clenched face of the driver

as he pushed the car to 90 then 95 miles an hour.

The sun had yet to show its face

but already thin clouds were turning yellow,

and I was tired of thinking about death

in a country with its own day of the dead

featuring skeletons on horseback,

skeletons playing the trombone,

even bride and groom skeletons,

so I closed my eyes instead and pictured

a turtle climbing onto a log to sun herself there,

motionless and nearly invisible,

while the river flowed bubbling

around her on its journey to the east.

I was tempted to add some baby turtles

to form a kind of family,

but I decided to leave well enough alone.

Before too long, we ran into

the evacuation-scale traffic of the city

and inched along through the vendors

with their bottles of water and pink toys

and pinwheels that twirled in the wind,

until we pulled up to a curb at the airport

where we all parted company—

the driver heading back to Puebla,

me looking for the number of my gate,

and the turtle poking out her head

then sliding off the log and disappearing

into the less troubled waters by the shore.

Even here among the overwhelming millions

and the audible tremble of history,

a solemn trout stared up at me

as it lay on its side on a heavy white plate

next to some broccoli and shards of broken bread.

I could tell from its expression,

or lack of expression, that it was pretending

not to listen to my silent questions about its previous life—

its cold-water adventures, its capable mother—

and that its winking at me was a trick of candlelight.

But soon, all that was left

was the spine and a filigree of bones,

so I sat back to finish off the wine

and survey this place that had comforted me

with its chests of ice where fish were bedded,

drawings of fish in frames on the white walls,

and the low music. Backed by a hint

of guitar sang a broken-hearted woman

I imagined to be my waitress

who had no English, nor I any Russian,

and who never once smiled, yet she had waited

for me to close my notebook

and put away my pen before clearing my plate

as if she understood the provocative nature of this trout.

And how sweet to realize this only later

after I had put on my raincoat

and was back in the drizzle of the wide boulevard

among pedestrians on their private missions,

heading downhill to my hotel,

the onion domes of St. Basil's lit up in the distance.

If only I had not listened to the piece

on the morning radio about the former asylum

whose inmates were kept busy

at wooden benches in a workshop

making leather collars and wristbands

that would later be used to restrain them.

And if only that had not reminded me,

as I stood facing the bathroom mirror,

of the new state prison whose bricks had been set

by prisoners trucked in from the old prison,

how sweet and free of static my walk

would have been along the upland trail.

Nothing to spoil the purity of the ascent—

the early sun, wafer-white,

breaking over the jagged crest of that ridge,

a bird with a bright-orange chest

flitting from branch to branch with its mate,

and a solitary coyote that stopped in its tracks

to regard me, then moved on.

Plus the cottonwood fluff snowing sideways

and after I stood still for a while,

the coyote appearing again in the distance

before vanishing in the scrub for good.

That's the kind of walk it might have been.

Turn any corner in this village,

the owner of the eccentric bookstore assured me,

and you are likely to run into

the history of Greek poetry,

and sure enough there was a woman

picking out lemons from a pile of lemons

and a barber leaning in his doorway with folded arms.

I even thought I saw Yannis Ritsos

whispering something to George Seferis

as they sat under a white awning

while the others pulled down their hat brims

and pretended not to be listening in.

And Cavafy might have risen

in a room like the one where I woke up

to chalk-washed walls, two wicker chairs,

and on a battered table, coffee

and a single peach, newly sliced.

But let us not go overboard.

When I peered out the small window

at the foot of the bed

that offered the immensity of the Aegean,

I did not see the sail of Odysseus at dawn

rounding the island's volcanic corner

and coming slowing but plainly into view.

Rather, I heard the hornet whine

of a motorbike flying up the street,

a metal grill being unlocked and lifted open,

then some mourning doves on the roof,

a clatter of dishes in a kitchen,

and other siren songs of an ordinary day.

It wasn't until I took a class in oil painting,

which met on Saturday afternoons

in the painter's apartment on Central Park West,

that I realized that painters of still lifes

as much as they are displaying an affection

for the material objects of the world,

are also busy showing off their stuff.

Why else would anyone leave the ease

of a tableau of violin, curl of parchment,

a silvery knife and a pear, all backed by a velvet cloth,

and take on a glass bowl full of light bulbs

or a crystal chandelier reflected in a mirror

except to inflame the confraternity

of one's fellow artists with jealous furor?

I will never forget the stunner

modestly titled “Still Life with Roses,”

which featured so many decanters and mirrors

the result was a corridor of echoing replications.

For when I leaned in to examine

one of the softly textured red petals,

I could see suspended there a drop of moisture

and on its surface a tiny window catching the light

and next to that a solitary, delineated ant

who had paused in his travels

before the globular liquid mirror

just to see how he looked on that overcast weekday morning.

At first sight

the photographs in the series

appear to be the same—

all black and white,

a single lobster

at the center of each,

underwater, probably in a tank.

But look more closely

along the rows

and you will see the motion

of a single antenna, waving

as if to ask a question,

something you had missed.

Of course, this was late

in the old man's life,

well after the gymnasts

and the airborne racehorses,

after the leap-frogging boys

and that woman

hopping over a footstool,

even after the photographs of himself

swinging a coal-pick in the nude.

And then the lobster studies—

a reminder perhaps

of the falling off to come for us all,

a focus on the smaller parts

like a settlement of crumbs

beside a cup and saucer

or the bars of light on a painted wall.

That day at the exhibition

a small boy asked his mother

why the pictures were not in color,

too young to know that a lobster

wagging its claws at the bottom of the sea

is either black or a very dark green

and that it must be coaxed, by boiling, into being red.

After she swiveled on a heel

and headed with a flip

of the ponytail

toward Grand Central Station

I watched her

disappear into the crowd

the way a forest

may disappear into its trees.

And then I too began

to disappear, a scrivener's

eraser rubbing out

the pencil lines of my being.

Now neither of us

was either here nor there

and would fail to make our mark

on the history of civilization.

And that reminded me of the day

I stood in a museum

before a somber painting

then bent close to read

the little printed card

that told me it was a portrait

of an anonymous Dutch family

by an anonymous Dutch artist.

I don't know which cat is responsible

for destroying my Voter Registration Card

so I decide to lecture the two of them

on the sanctity of private property,

the rules of nighttime comportment in general,

and while I'm at it, the importance

of voting to an enlightened citizenship.

This is the way it was in school.

No one would admit to winging a piece of chalk

past the ear of Sister Mary Alice,

so the whole class would have to stay after.

And likewise in the army, or at least

in movies involving the army. All weekend

privileges were revoked until the man

who snuck the women and the keg of beer

into the barracks last night stepped forward.

Of course, it's hard to get them to stay

in one place let alone hold their attention

for more than two seconds. The black one

turns tail and pads into the other room,

and the kitten is kneading a soft throw

like crazy, pathetically searching for a nipple.

Meanwhile, it's overcast, not pewter

or anything like that, just overcast period,

and I haven't had a sip of coffee yet.

You know, when I told that interviewer

early morning was my favorite time to write,

I was not thinking of this particular morning.

I must have had another kind of morning in mind,

one featuring a peignoir, some oranges, and sunlight.

But now there's nothing else to do

but open the back door a crack for the black one,

who enjoys hunting and killing lizards,

while blocking the kitten with one foot,

the little cottontail fucker who's still too young to go out.

This time, a boy had gone missing

for so many hours a television crew had been sent

to cover the story, which is how I heard

one lifeguard explain to the camera

that a lost child will often start walking

along the shoreline, in the direction of the sun.

I took this as a hopeful sign,

not because it was a safer choice

than toddling into the pounding surf

or inland into the parking lot and the traffic beyond—

but something about the power of the sun and the bravery of children.

That's when I began to picture

a long single-file parade of lost children

walking through the sand toward the lowering sun

before that moment when their parents

turned to each other with the shock of the absence,

each boy or girl traveling toward

the light burning in the distance,

hundreds of little explorers striking out

into uncharted territory with nothing but a sunhat,

a useless pail and shovel—

Lewis without Clark, Clark with no Lewis.

The evening news showed the boy being swept up

into the glad arms of his parents,

you will be pleased to know,

but I continued to follow the rest of the children

as they disappeared over the horizon

continuing their journey into the days ahead

and in the process blazing a new path

across the upper reaches of the continent,

thus establishing a solid American presence in the early West.

On a bench one afternoon

in a grassy park in Minneapolis,

I realized that what I liked best

about the dogs of Minneapolis

is they have no idea they're in Minneapolis.

The same could be said

of the dogs of Houston or Philadelphia,

it occurred to me on the slow walk

back to my hotel, but I was

in no mood to be distracted.

I'm sticking with the dogs of Minneapolis,

I resolved as the elevator

rose to my floor, just as they stick

with their owners, the natives of Minneapolis,

most of whom know exactly where they are.

Alone in my room on the 17th floor,

I surveyed the vast prospect below me—

the slithery river and hills beyond

and the bluish hills beyond those hills—

in the manner of those English poets

who loved to regard the world from a height.

One of them even had a witty epitaph

inscribed upon the tombstone of his hound.

Among the more remarkable features of the calendar,

right up there with the meandering date of Easter

and the regular appearance of Flag Day,

is how the end of May slips unnoticed into the beginning of June.

It's a transition so subtle

(usually one day of sunshine and birdsong

passing into another day of sunshine and birdsong)

that it feels like being switched as an infant

from one of your mother's breasts to the other,

which is how the Bengali poet Tagore described

the smooth transition from this life into the next.

A truly striking way of putting it,

like saying the ants in your pants have ants

in their pants when you are more nervous than usual

because it's fun to think of ants wearing pants,

and it rhymes. Plus, it suggests an infinite

series of tinier and tinier ants

pulling on smaller and smaller pairs of pants,

like the facing barbershop mirrors

of my childhood when my newly shorn head

would repeat itself down a hallway of reflections.

I hadn't heard of Tagore back then,

nor had I given much thought to the calendar,

but I knew I did not want to vanish down that hallway

never to see my parents again or my dog Sparky,

and never to grow up, as it turned out,

to study Tagore and think about the months

bearing their old Roman names from one year into the next.