"A new work of obsession, tragedy, and the unpredictable trajectories of the heart."(Cristina Garcia, author of Dreaming in Cuban)
A powerful testament about the far-reaching effects of political brutality and lost love, Draining the Sea sifts through the incongruities of history and memory, unfurling inside the mind of a man who spends his days driving the streets of Los Angeles, racked by visions of the Guatemalan Civil War and, in particular, of Marta--a beautiful young prostitute who died violently in the midst of it. Unfortunately, her death is a tragedy in which he himself may have played a role.
"A new work of obsession, tragedy, and the unpredictable trajectories of the heart."(Cristina Garcia, author of Dreaming in Cuban)
A powerful testament about the far-reaching effects of political brutality and lost love, Draining the Sea sifts through the incongruities of history and memory, unfurling inside the mind of a man who spends his days driving the streets of Los Angeles, racked by visions of the Guatemalan Civil War and, in particular, of Marta--a beautiful young prostitute who died violently in the midst of it. Unfortunately, her death is a tragedy in which he himself may have played a role.
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Overview
"A new work of obsession, tragedy, and the unpredictable trajectories of the heart."(Cristina Garcia, author of Dreaming in Cuban)
A powerful testament about the far-reaching effects of political brutality and lost love, Draining the Sea sifts through the incongruities of history and memory, unfurling inside the mind of a man who spends his days driving the streets of Los Angeles, racked by visions of the Guatemalan Civil War and, in particular, of Marta--a beautiful young prostitute who died violently in the midst of it. Unfortunately, her death is a tragedy in which he himself may have played a role.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781440631245 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Penguin Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 03/13/2008 |
| Sold by: | Penguin Group |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 352 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Praise for
Los Angeles Times Book of the Year
San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year
Winner of the PEN USA Literary Award
“Beautiful and disturbing . . . dazzling and disquieting.”
—Los Angeles Times
“Beautiful, brutal, and unsettling until the end . . . Marcom’s seamless, ethereal prose is suffused with raw emotion; there is heartbreak on every page, but also hope.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“Early on in this elegant, penetrating novel, middle-aged Vahé asks, ‘How did I become this sort of man?’ Marcom (author of the well-received Three Apples Fell from Heaven) supplies an answer with steely delicacy. . . . [Marcom’s] writing is mellifluous . . . poetically inflected . . . The shadow of impending violence troubles the calm, but it is the grim reality of what has already happened that is most harrowing—the evil that Vahé must confront each day, as much as he might try to make himself more comfortable in the world.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Marcom’s much acclaimed debut novel, Three Apples Fell from Heaven, was praised for both its beautiful prose and the casual candor with which it depicted the horrors of the 1915–17 Armenian genocide. Her follow-up, dealing with the persistent emotional aftermath of the genocide, likewise deserves praise for its fluid prose and haunting imagery, which now simultaneously articulate painfully clear memory and blurred, often brutal fantasy. Evocative, unsettling, beautiful.”
—Booklist (starred review)
Praise for
A New York Times Notable Book
“Fabulous and searing.”
—Junot Díaz, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
“Luminous . . . An unnervingly effective blend of imagination, artistry and grisly historical fact . . . Marcom’s prose is nothing short of gorgeous.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“The fierce beauty of [Marcom’s] prose both confronts the reader with many breathtaking cruelties and carries us past them. . . . But the novel is much more than a catalog of horrors, however brilliantly described. It is also about love and tenderness, the pleasures of customer and ritual, the moments of unexpected generosity and courage and, above all, the necessity of remembering—oneself, one’s family, one’s language, one’s history.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“A disturbing, powerful work . . . Marcom’s writing is intensely poetic. . . . The effect is surreal, imparting the sense of how it is to continue living when all normal things have gone awry.”
—The Washington Post Book World
“From the start you feel as though you are in the presence of an authentic voice, in this case a voice that weeps and wails and growls and shouts and chants and moans and sings. . . . Marcom is so talented.”
—Chicago Tribune
“Provocative . . . tender . . . utterly brutal.”
—Los Angeles Times
ALSO BY
MICHELINE AHARONIAN MARCOM
The Daydreaming Boy
Three Apples Fell from Heaven
DRAINING
THE SEA
Micheline Aharonian Marcom
RIVERHEAD BOOKS
NEW YORK
2007033674
Oh, take pity on me, the unfortunate still alive, still sentient but ill-starred, whom the father, Kronos’ son, on the threshold of old age will blast with hard fate, after I have looked upon evils and seen my sons destroyed and my daughters dragged away captive and the chambers of marriage wrecked and the innocent children taken and dashed to the ground in the hatefulness of war, and the wives of my sons dragged off by the accursed hands of the Achaians. And myself last of all, my dogs in front of my doorway will rip me raw, after some man with stroke of the sharp bronze spear, or with spearcast, has torn the life out of my body; those dogs I raised in the halls to be at my table, to guard my gates, who will lap my blood in the savagery of their anger and then lie down in my courts.
—Iliad
In the sound of these foxes, if they were foxes, there was nearly as much joy, and less grief. There was the frightening joy of hearing the world talk to itself, and the grief of incommunicability. In that grief I am now as then, with the small yet absolute comfort of knowing that communication of such a thing is not only beyond possibility but irrelevant to it; whereas in love, where we find ourselves so completely involved, so completely responsible and so apparently capable, and where all our soul so runs out to the loveliness, strength, and defenseless mortality, plain, common, salt and muscled toughness of human existence of a girl that the desire to die for her seems the puniest and stingiest expression of your regard which you can, like a proud tomcat with a slain fledgling, lay at her feet; in love the restraint in focus and the arrest and perpetuation of joy seems entirely possible and simple, and its failure inexcusable, even while we know it is beyond the power of all biology and even while, like the fading of flowerlike wonder out of a breast to which we are becoming habituated, that exquisite joy lies, fainting through change upon change, in the less and less prescient palm of the less and less godlike, more and more steadily stupefied, human, ordinary hand.
—JAMES AGEE, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
We are more alone in this city.
—Marta
BOOK ONE
THIS IS A FICTION: a man; a man collects corpses, proceeds on the streets of this city, the city an amass of street, of canine corpses he collects, loads them into his motorcar, and the bleeding snout, crushed full canines, the black and blow flies in the anus the snout the genitals; these black corpses, these half-breeds, and not worth a dollar, he thinks; he thinks that if he could kill them all he would do it. But they are dead already. This has become his work: he finds and then lifts the corpse and the meat putrefies and after the diptera’s children have done their work—the small black beetles, wasps, moths also—then the monstrous scent of death recants (the meat has been consumed) and a bone smell long remains, but not humors or loves; the bones less lonely, the dead loud and cacophonous, in the days succeeding their ancient animal forms.
He drives along the streets of this city, to the sea and up the tarmac hills, along the remote spoors of the Santa Monica Mountains, which are today the 405 Freeway, and here he is a driver and the world is seen and separated by glass, plastics, metal, and it is speed he seeks, and a girl also, he moves the mechanical steel bull along the blackened roads and gets down from the car in the parking garages, lots and he walks to the front door, the supermarket doors, restaurants, his offices; there are green signs on all of the highways and they indicate streets, miles to go, and the four main arteries of blood in this city, the moving autos and what is possible in his imagination, a carcass stinking through the steel trap of his trunk; these are the modern thresholds; here in this city, he does not walk the dirt paths or learn to keep the days.
The man is tired when he arrives home. He is thirsty and he drinks the water from the tap in the kitchen; the fescue grasses are shorn and green in his garden, and the palms line the avenue like great and tall birds. Here he has hot water, electricity when he chooses it, brown carpets overlay the concrete floors. He sits now on a wide and green armchair, and he watches the television shows in the evenings, and in his America time is made into an automobile and an interlude of shows after the business day, the things that he has purchased at the stores;—and the underground men, like dogs, are piling up, their corpses tossed onto his edge, into his mind, leave invisible markers on invisible roads; he piles up the invisible bones and the dead come to him like children invited to a party, a continuous return of the idols; he waits, he is entertained, and dying also; a sick man, and doesn’t know it or recognize them as they arrive, make a ruckus in his mind like the black and blow flies.
* * *
AH MARTA, the beast released, here is the truth of it: I am this monstrous we. I chance upon it as I had upon the obelisk in my capital: tall and opaque white stone, granite and marble sandstone, the immense needle holds traces of the old gods and a new history: a monument not to what is or was, but to what we idea’d, like a nation-state dream, or the clock surface in Room 24 of Roscomare Road Elementary School—its black numbers, its loud motor pressing the day forward as if the days were only a progress. We are in my classroom as a boy in Los Angeles, in the basement of the Polytechnic in your capital, on the freeways of Los Angeles, in the village plaza of Acul, high up the green-grey mountains of the Altos Cuchumatanes. We are in this theater of the mind, which could be a history book or America or a television show or a man—all of it passes through his heart again to make a record. I must live, it reads.
Here is the truth of it: I am an American man and my kidneys begin to fail me; my blood is unclean and I must needs piss every quarter hour. There is pain and I am irritable, a fat and ugly man, the body insists on itself despite my ideas education job.
And I would like to fuck you for other reasons than this lengthy inquiry: your tits, perhaps, slow thighs; a mark on your face; the scarred ropey ankle, and the red lines on your neck; the underlip look you give me as I drive by you on the Pan American Highway on the way to your capital; a little fat belly slips over your skirt, peeks beneath the cotton; all of your scars white lines and the imperfect marks to make the body yours; without hands. And if we are not in the same place or time, what does this have to do with fucking? with love? with my cock half-masted and then the money for the fucking the love the half-masted and lonely cock? with the obelisk? a needle? this we who speaks, monstrous and unkind?
Ah Marta, this is an essay
I remember the years of the clock in the classroom and each turn of the second hand around the clock face, time reduced split and spilled out by the seconds and each minute, this time of the clock, a lifetime’s containment, so that the days were endless, the hours were days, the soul under the relentless machine of the modern, in the guise of the civilized man: caged frightened howling in the fluorescent lighted room behind the teacher’s lesson for the day; behind the father and his shame-on-you-boy’s; behind the nation and its lessons for the shut-up children—of happiness, of freedom, of the discoveries, machines and roads; of the new Christian world and petrol and motorcars; of progress; of destiny; and inside America there is always a story about Europe, just as inside freedom there is always the story of slavery . . . And I have wondered if these were the hours when they held you in that place. You are in a garden and the sun shines and in the distance the church bells do not toll, they have not been rung in many years, the façade of the building has deteriorated, the white plaster peels off in sheaves, the priests have long since abandoned this paradise: you are alone in the garden. You know that it is a risk to be alone in this place, but you would like to sit by yourself for a moment and you would like to look at the trees and to look at the flowers in bloom and you would like the sky unhindered by steel by glass (which you’ve hardly known, darling), by metal plastic sheeting then; by a canopy of clouds. They find you like this and they pick you up like a man will carry his old mother; his mother is dying and you also are being carried in a casket of arms to your death: you will die soon, you will be killed as one kills a man or as the hen is slaughtered in ritual sacrifice. I am your killer and both you and I don’t know yet that our destiny has been love, just as our destiny has been terror: an ancient love awaits us at the threshold.
[Is this threshold inside or outside the body like a mouth? like the vagina? like a babe as he passes through the portal, between living? This threshold your beginning or edge or end of pain? of suffering? of my love for you as I sat in the classroom, there begun the years of my official training, I have been trained in the history and morality of my country, I have learned to drive the tarmac roads, to keep the time correctly. I follow the rules and routes of majority and mob, we hold my urges tightly.]
When they bring you to me you have not, unlike most of the men, shat your pants or pissed yourself; you also do not have a hard-on; I am aroused when I see you and when I see you I burn you with my cigarettes and I cut off your hands before I kill you, tomorrow, because I have been officially trained and educated in these things, because it is my job.
These are not the stories for the faint of heart; these are not the stories that will circulate willy-nilly in the paradise of nations: the days, or your smile, your skin sweet unpissed and unshitted, a doe in the day garden. In a paradise of metal automobilic dimensions, four lane roads and ten lane highways, all of it to the scale of the car not the man, and the modern religion for the modern man: speed and cars and sweet doughnuts and plastic things, and a girl who has not shat her pants; a girl who has not pissed herself, she is clean and happy and free—but not a girl I can make into something else: my dead grandmother; and a day without clocks, without time’s relentless hold on the modern, on my cock, my desires, my wishes for freedom from Freedom, and for you also: a girl in a red and green cotton shirt.
* * *
MARTA, today I found a lost photograph of a black. He is dead in the photograph and hanged from a tree; see that he has been burnt also. You can’t see his face clearly, the image is blurred, the edges erased; there is only a now, a look of water to the photo. Look carefully, closely. See his pants, see his cock not outlined in the linen. Can you see his hard-on? He is aroused by the crowd and so they needed to castrate him: he was a man without restraints, a whistler, didn’t bow his head or remove his hat, step down from the sidewalk and he disobeyed or some animal cock fully unrestrained, like a needle; and they needed to release his blood when they killed him in the sunlight, at noon, when to fuck is nicest and shadowless. His cock not outlined; see the piss marks; the darker stain on black pants in the black and white photograph. The piss implies the still present cock: the whites cut it off afterwards perhaps; the whites stand around the corpse, one smiles and his hand is blurred, as if he were waving to the photographer (who is the photographer?), and the dead man has pissed himself in the photograph; he’s soft cocked—and the genitals stuffed into his mouth after the photo is taken, like one puts an apple into a hog after it has been prepared for roasting; the whites cut off pieces of the black’s flesh as souvenir: the ears, an eye, knucklebones—placed them inside their vitrines, in picture frames, and shop windows. What could this mean? To see this black man’s pissy cock covered by the cotton trousers, the naked vulnerable feet loose, hang down in the photo; he is thin, young; the dead look and sad and to make him a black and then remove his testicles, his penis—and stuff it into his mouth when he can’t possibly eat it? or say anything. We say (he must have done something to deserve his fate): it’s sordid to name such things, dirty and indecorous: don’t put these sentences on the page: the dead do not approve of such things; the dead hurtle in, gather round, remove the black man’s penis, small, cold now like a piece of brown chicken fat, and put it back, essay him back into the man he might have been. A farmer perhaps; or a boy of sixteen; or a driver on the streets of this city.
* * *
THIS IS MY INQUIRY, an inquisition of the air: you say that you cannot be undone, and you say (with your looking) that I am a beast of clean proportions; you say nothing with your words, in fact you have no words in my language (and I none in yours) and you insist in your dark cold chambers, in the capital of darkness, you bring me there, into the pit with you, with the other handless corpses, the half-deads, the unclosed eyes of the dying: you, the rats and diptera girls, and faceless cockless boys, and black bowed beetles, and intrepid moths on your skin eyelids—that I stay with you in that place, that I take up your hands (beautiful veins of indifference) and bundle the unringéd, unpainted fingers fingernails to your mother in the Highlands: to your dead mother, the dead brothers and father, the crucified brother, who beat each other in the winters and for whom hunger is like an iron feast: send them these artifacts of the body, you say; rescue me from this hole, this hollow they’ve made for the half-deads, and I am crying uncontrollably now at the side of the freeway, and I can’t see you amidst the piles and it is you and then it is my mother giving me her five phrases about the Armenian grandmother when I am a boy, and the long distances between home and here, and then it is me, alone in my car, driving along the 405. Never so alone and not-alone either: a dog corpse making a fiesta from the trunk of my car.
I have wondered if the dogs make spirit; I have wondered about the soldier in the mountains who carried the mongrel on his back (an order from his superiors) and who with the other recruits slaughtered without an implement, his hands, drank the blood and ate the entrails of the bitch he had carried for miles on the path up into the mountains; his bitch-friend for days on the trek into the Highlands; how he told her of his dead father and the mother who beat him like a dumb beast and that he would love her and that they would live together as family and killers in these mountains in this . . . This the shame, the mark of wood, and once assumed not removable like broken glass or cracked asphalt or a broken tympanum on the descent into steep valleys: I am making an essay into the man; he is American; he is fatter and he looks like something I could hate; he is a man collects corpses. A purveyor of the dead. He is stained and dirty; the blood the violence of the last breath has mutated his form; he thinks that a dog ought to be buried in a marble mausoleum; he thinks that the dogs ought to have their place in politics, in the movies, in love. There is money; plastic cards symbolize credit, providence, hope and things he can buy (cars, shows, clothes and girls); there are dogs and drivers of dog corpses, and all the while his dear and lovely Marta lies in a pit at the Army Technical School, which is no pit for a drama of love, or for the sentimental movie-watchers-makers (there is no profit from it, or to be entertained by it, and happy endings are not happy): this is a pit in the capital of her country, in the Antigua Escuela Politécnica de Guatemala, Avenida La Reforma, 1-45, Zona 10, Ciudad Guatemala: she and the hundreds of half-deads await their next rendezvous with the ununiformed men, the boys who arrive in the garden with their garden-variety black ski masks, hellos, black tinted windows and 9mm pistols: these are the G-2 men; and he drives while she waits, and he waits with her as he can; this “with” a small and untruthful word in his English; in his city the Washingtonias rise high and bright above his head.
* * *
HERE IS THE CHURCH the Spanish fathers built in 1678 when they came to the ancient village of Acul, and the soldiers made you come here to the plaza to save the nation today. Where would you like to go, they say in their small and decided screams, to Heaven or to Hell? You (the boy with the black hood on his head has pointed out your uncle the neighbor’s boy the catechist from houses away); you. And you are sitting standing waiting (a boy’s blood runs out a few houses away and his mother has pleaded with the soldiers so that she may return to her boy, stanch the blood’s dispersal onto the dirt floor of her home and killing her son in this way with its unabated flood; and she is quiet now with her own split face and hands) and the small children would like something to eat (the soldiers arrived before dawn and it is midmorning now and they are hungry, tired) or to sit down quietly or to please return our sons to us (the now-departed boys, they are taken to Hell which is inside the church building); girls are crying loudly in the distance—you hear them?—this wail, relentless, it takes up residence in the middle ear, the tympanum, traitor to the race, turns the wails into wails, and from that moment it does not cease: terror once begun and entered into the body with sound and these blindly seeing eyes that day in the plaza on a Thursday in April 1982—is like any of the tightly wound string-catchers, without surcease, unstoppable until it itself stops, only to begin again in the mind, in dreams, at any moment on the street corners in the capital, walking toward the river, by the corner of the Polytechnic, on the Pan American Highway, behind the cypress in the plaza: to become, then, this inheritance for the terrified, the embittered, the fucked-ones who remain so unwillingly. Fear awakens inside sound like a good and obedient dog awakens at dawn.
Communist bitches; they are screaming now at the girls and huddled women (like bees) and the one mother begins to plead again for the bleeding boy she abandoned in the hut (the soldier’d entered, the machete in the gullet of the thirteen year old boy who is looking when they arrive; for the pigs, they say; and they say it in Spanish which is not your language and you understand the word—puerco—because); she now dispatched, like a memorandum from the capital, like the New National Security Program Initiative papers; Operation Ixil; and our respective presidents are having drinks shaking hands and smile into the camera lenses from a hotel in Honduras saying that everything is good in Guatemala; like a small wind which lifts your plaits in this infinitesimal way, only you notice its breath on your nape, only you know now seeing the arrival of the soldiers that this, for you and yours, will not end today, did not end yesterday, and the time of the clock, like history, little consoles you in this lifetime.
Acul is a small village in the Western Highlands of Guatemala. It is located in the Ixil Area, some three thousand meters above sea level, a two and half hour walk from the town of Santa María de Nebaj. The Ixil call this the Tierra Fría; a grey mist hangs above the village on most days; the Cuchumatán mountain range rises tall and green and black-grey above the hamlets and the town. At dawn you can see the smoke rise from the dispersed huts to the low-hanging clouds; see the girls carrying the bowls of maize, jugs of water, on their heads; see them make tortillas like good girls and cook them over the wood fire; the costumes of the girls are red and green and beautiful, and the lovely Indian ladies in their hand-woven skirts, shirts, and they smile at you when you see them on the dirt path and they will step to one side gracefully; bow to the bosses like dignified gazelle; hear the constant crowing of the cocks throughout the morning and afternoons; the dogs’ endless grey barkings into the night; bend under the leñna because it is a heavy load that the boys and men carry homeward down from the mountains, the wood stacked like ladders down their backs, like the master they once carried on their backs in a wooden chair tied to the waist; and in Guatemala, as in Mexico, a carga is still used as a measurement of weights: equal to two hundred pounds—the amount an Indian can carry on his back thirty to forty miles in a day.
* * *
IT IS NOT AS IF I have lost faith (I have not had it or had it not knowing that I did) in history or words or what sentences can make (the five of my mother’s estate, they were given to me at random, unwillingly, it seemed, they would spill from her mouth into English), what they might entail, what they hide and elide, elucidate and kill, and the nation-state dream which could be a perpetual desire, and we are still there on the banks of that river, desiring to awaken, to return to prehistories before the nation-states or man writ his progressive histories, his riparian novels were dreams and memories were longer and then not long, like this river. The nation is a thing made of ether, made by men, make: confidence, polities, policies; decree girls, races, infidels, the souls of the living and all of our progress as soul’d men,—this drive, this project, ideas which continue apace like a sound without end;—and faith? and a man writ large on pages of notes, a poetry for his progress; a dead end. Does it end? When does it? And the easterlies, civilization, and the Cuchumatanes in the distance. What have we made in these Americas and of them; who this we, this man who speaks? (he is speaking, dreaming) the etiology of his desires, the destruction of natural histories, the old gods, the heft of what remains and of what remains unseen (unseeable); silences amidst the endless soundings; and the interstitial noises are like a river in a small Highland village, in Acul after it rains—the silence between waters, beneath water—an owl in the ceiba tree, and the Cold War taken up into the mountains, onto her flesh, her brother’s body, inside the womb for eternity, which is the moment of their demise.
He is speaking and the succubus leads him into the river. The river is full and filled to with rainwaters, the bodies and bones of massacre, and the unspoken that is carried each day and on each back, and the mountain in the distance which saved and damned the living—modern History, the succubus will say, is writ by a very small group of men.
Yet the unhistories are also material, a brown etched spoor, as if all of life were a descent into the imagination, which is like a girl in Acul before she walks down the mountain path to return to Nebaj and then takes a bus to the capital city of her nation, and travels the four hundred and sixty-five miles to Ciudad Guatemala, and her village is a village on a Wednesday 21 April, and after the fires and the tree in the plaza (which was no real plaza) became a cross and her brother and the church with its paltry crossbeams and blue door and windowless alcoves like the windowless houses of the village—and then it is not. And the mountains are mountains and the Cuchumatanes a refuge and there are owls and grasses and roots which hold one teaspoonful of water; and a six foot deep and fifteen foot long pit that the old men of Acul are made to dig (by soldiers, Galils on the arms of the soldiers; there are green uniforms and black boots); and the black-masked boy from another village whose finger pointed named the difference for the men in Acul, the soldiers pulling boys and men from the rows, a yes or a no, his finger, put them into Heaven or Hell, and all of this is not pulled from the national History, the imagination plays its part, a man sits on his padded and green armchair in his valley paradise, which is like a man collects corpses on the streets of this city, and on a Thursday he is sitting in a high school classroom in Van Nuys and he draws pictures in his notebook of sailboats, girls, and notes for his class, and he stares at the clock to see the time on it; waiting; slow; and he is wearied by the teacher’s chronologies and lists words, battles—and she has no clock to look at and the Gregorian calendar is not on the walls, the daykeeper is killed today in Acul (and who will keep the old days of the ancient Ixil calendars now?), and there is no school in the village, and on this land her shoes are made from plastics, yellows, and it could be lunchtime soon, he thinks that he is hungry for lunch, and that he will have a chocolate bar for his repast and he buys chocolate from a machine and she does not eat for days afterwards, runs up into the mountains with the other villagers; sees from the mountain how the soldiers destroy the world in fire.
These are days. There are birds. There are weavers and they make the shirts for girls; and in her village each girl learns the embroidery of hummingbirds, of mountains, they are the tz’unun and in his language there are words behind all of the words: an infidel lurks in the bushes of the lexicon—infidels, perfidies—there are aberrations of trust, of faith, even if he cannot see it, even if he does not know it he knows it—that beneath the sentences lurks the feeling, an old sentir, and also the lies of the ages making edifices from pain, monuments to the hidden, the hungry, this is how we might write ourselves up, he writes, how a progress unprogresses.
* * *
WE ARE MEN writ large by the logic of sentences. By the: “They made the Ixil prisoners, branded them and took them slaves”; or: “The impact of the conquest must have been disastrous for the Ixil.” And on page 46 in a History book, “As a reward to Spanish settlers, the land and its Indian inhabitants were parceled out in large groupings called encomiendas, under a system already applied in Spain to ‘reconquered’ Moorish territories.” He is trying to find Marta on page 46, but how to get inside these phrases? how to be faithful? “The encomenderos . . . jailed them, killed them, beat them and set dogs on them. They seized their goods, destroyed their agriculture, and took their women. They used them as beasts of burden. They took tribute from them and sold it back under compulsion at exorbitant profits. Coercion and ill-treatment were the daily practices of their overseers.”
I would like to get beneath the phrases as if beneath water, and unravel the birds the mountains and find there discover the interstices of histories, our, flesh.
With faith, or without it then, he sits on a wide and green armchair and the sky is blue-clear today; soon he will drive to work. Now: “Such a drastic change must have had a profound effect on the Ixil population, and must have added a great burden to the logistics of corn growing, harvesting, and transporting. (On the other hand, logistical problems may have been alleviated with the drop in population caused by concentrating the people and making them more vulnerable to the devastating epidemics of the period. A reduced population would not have so far to go in the surrounding countryside to till their fields.)”
Then he is in his car and driving toward the sea through the mountain pass which in his mind makes a canyon, he thinks the word canyon while he drives, presses gas pedal and clutch pedal (and: I have driven these roads for years and each automobile that I have driven goes up the same roads I have always only known, the 405 Freeway like an equation for memory, recalls childhood, television shows, and even though I am no longer that boy, and even though it is possible that the roads, the city itself, has abated or been forgotten by the millions who reside here, Los Angeles could be a material dream, and it is this matter, among others, Marta, that I take up.).
* * *
AND MARTA,—even if I wished it and on many days I do, I cannot stop this thinking of, and making of, you in my mind and in my mind we are together (again) and where else and what else but with our clothes removed (and your torn skirt and your unshod feet and your unadorned face and roughhard soled feet; blackened toenails); naked you lie in my arms; your legs are open and your thighs press against mine and I would like only to stay there which is here forever in the pitch of my desire your sex is the beginning of this world and I don’t speak or need to and don’t want speech just your breathy cunt underarm body’s odors wet cunt and my lust which is your sex undried and my—I’ll eat this fruit—you say, I say it in my mind: devour the body when it sings; sing to me (O girl) of a man’s lost days in this city, of his perpetual loneliness, like a talisman made of the brown-grey air.
Without days without work without I will pay bills, cut grasses, shop for things, fix them up, take out the piles of garbage;—did you do you go to school make good marks in school make up homework do your lessons correctly (learn of: Jamestown Georgetown and English subjects, King George III and the desire to be free-men; declare the new places; Americans;—but not of this place or these rivers, or of the Spanish brother Fray Juan Crespí, when he stumbled upon this alluvial plain on the northward expedition from Baja California with Gaspar de Portolá; the Washingtonias unplanted in the eighteenth century distance; the Gabrielino girls and boys alongside the Los Angeles River before it was the Los Angeles River; the Ixil girl who walks the dirt paths of Acul; the monuments to rage and poverty beneath the tarmacked roads; the black boy lynched up like a dog in 1930; the whites stare into the photographer’s lens, point to their boy, Bo pointn to his niga; some of the boy’s hair, a swath of his trousers framed up also); make the correct thinking seeing; gaze as you should; buy as you ought to buy the clothes for shoes for toys for things on the scale of yes please now; make love from the lintel, at the threshold of doors; make rules and kill all of the: don’t be shy; you are happy now in this city, in this desert starred, the cinema at your feet; the daydreamed titties of the cinema at your feet and the water for this city comes down the causeway from the Owens Valley as you lunch with your bosses and friends and say thank you, please, sir; more of these things. Then you will rise from the dead as Lázaro, his sister is by his side, Marta; Marta, take me home with you.
And I did not intend to kill you, no more perhaps than I intended to kill and rekill the Gabrielino girls and boys (their existence) for this American man to become so: an American in his city; an idea of a man? and my ideas in my head (are they mine?) history’d from my teachers, memory’d from the boys on the playground, push my head into the dirt, tarmac, the playground view of the palms in the distance, the girls in the back row; the television blares in the background. These Americas make us and they unmake us, unmade and making you all of time—disease, the vagrancy laws, lynching laws, blacks whites roads rules and Indians.—Do you exist, darling? And if not, may I?
I am a man, these my urges. These are mine: thoughts, killers, dreams in a Los Angeles city landscape; the geographies of sadness. Look out;—see the girl by the cypress; it is a beautiful and hallowed tree before Lázaro is tied there: an evergreen in the plaza. The clouds lie low on the mountains; it rains today in Acul; it is cold and your unshod feet are cold and the cuxín fruit is sweeter in your mouth than the last season in this sentence so I’ll do it: I’ll make you from these phrases (make me also); the making of Americans from a particular order of words, syllable sounds, inside the sentences which killers, our deaths, and it is a tedious facile business—why isn’t it beautiful and kind? why is to make in America also to kill in America? I am seeking the old spoors and days via this tongue.
[I wish that I could ease into your voice your tongue’s dips and the hard consonant of love and on the tongue it would be sufficient—speak to me and speaking I’ll fall into your voice like a man into water. Do I need meaning to fall in? Can your Ixil be like a river and invite the modern inside for some atol because it is cold today in Acul and the atol is warm sweet thick cornmilk. My English is hard and sweet, I’ll give you some of it here; I’ll give you mountains rivers a way out of time and the basement in the capital of your country which is not yours, which is not the same as the unowned, what cannot be purchased, like sunlight cannot be sold. Beckons you back harkens you down from Guatemala over the Spanish and into English inside paradise on the streets of this city, the succubi guide us into the (concreted up) river.]
* * *
“WE’RE WORKING together to keep America strong.”
The men of Heaven are bundled up like canes and shunted into the main room of the administration building. The administration building in your village is a corrugated metal roofed shack in a not dirt-roaded place next to the church. The men huddle like bees: they listen to the outside differences; they wait and you are an adolescent girl and unable to hide beneath your auntie’s skirt, your mother holds a boy at her breast, the youngest, he’s wrapped up in cloth; invisible. 1982 in the spring and the desert sunlight hits the sky in Los Angeles; the clouds huddle like magnets. I am a young man, and he sits in a wooden chair in the classroom or later on the sofa in his living room; he eats ice cream; he watches the afternoon parade of deceit and lovely happy girls on the television screen (I don’t do my homework and your mother and auntie, and the boy too?, bleed onto your skin); the television sounds are too loud, my mother will say (I invent my mother in this moment),—the heft of our dialogue as the afternoon wanes into greys reds: I remember that they fell in love on a boat at sea and that they were eternally happy at the end of the show. I am eating ice creams and this the end of it—their happiness in the Show.
This a welcome to my country.
* * *
I STUDY THE LANGUAGE, Marta, move from time to time; think about words, of maize in this English rolls off of the tongue like a stone into the underbrush—maize from maiz and behind that the word from the Arawak: majisi?, it is uncertain—ah, the sorrows to be found in the smallest of utterances, the dictionary variances, so that we cannot, even now, know maize? And then the maze to the Arawak—see them? see the island girls on their knees, the boys; these words too a muddle; the Arawak X’d out and only the maize remains in these sentences. Makiz, Oviedo called it, he was the official court chronicler for the Spanish king and he made lists for the New World; ko’m you say in your Ixil; Indian corn in my American English.
Perhaps I’m not seeking you, but seeking a new tongue with which to lick this place up. I am fat and I am hungry; voracious like a man and I would like to lick it up and lively fuck it until it’s in my skin and bones (the Washingtonias tip in the breeze, a beautiful wind in the Highlands, greener air, the days long saddened); the organs are meaty.
I love it here. I am killing dying and wasting the days: the maize is the trace of it—I lose you find you—this can only be love; loneliness made ripe like a green banana after it’s boxed up, gassed, and sent out of your country. I eat it happily in front of my television set today.
Your village is not in a photograph: without windows, electricity, books; without a school or dirt or tarmac road which leads there, and you and the others living, electrified, elbows, knees, the veins myths of unhistory; the unmarked dead (XXMUJER); your mother’s blood; the covered up brother (he is sleeping suckling): all of it a mark on you and all of it unphotographed unwritten; denied—the Army never arrived on 22 April, your oldest brother was not a brother or crucified on cypress on Thursday. Subversives, they said. The guerrilla; commie devils. I can’t understand your language; I eat ice cream and I go to the cinema, and funny things, sad battles, and requited love in Shows, and justice like a sweet candy at THE END of Shows; and they didn’t waste their bullets: your brother was machete’d up,—who cares to spend a bullet on an Ixil dog? Shuttled the men out of the administration building; laughed at their cries for the cut-up bruised (alive yet) flesh of their flesh, piles of it from Hell inside the church; heaped up unhappily; bruised; blooded and the cries of the pained men from Hell; these men who soon (later in this book) will bare their necks for the slaughter like the good quiet sheep so that their fathers and brothers may kill them (for the patria). I can’t see any of this, Marta, I don’t want it, to see it, know, the decimation of the Arawak, their final days in the fifty years after the Genoan explorer and his crew disembarked on their island; you in the plaza, the boy bleeds out a few houses away and his mother pleading with the soldier until she is also bleeding out in front of you, but not me, darling:—I am a scribe, a stenographer of lust and the fucker inside and outside: I write what isn’t said slowly, it is an essay, my self in a page of vermin, of a man like a man limps on the streets of your capital; his eyes are opaque, grey, a dull dead animal thing. It was the listening that was the worst of it you say, you know it to be true: the men huddled, like bees, listening to the heft and the whistle of steel coming from the church; the machete-made cries, the smack of flesh, and rifle butts inside faces, the imagination behind the screams of girls and women and babes wrapped up, invisible: the imagination made the men and women into bees. What else does it make here? Here in the mind and entrails.
* * *
. . . ON A TRAIN or you are speaking, he is walking toward the kitchen to get something to eat (meat) and it arrives as it arrives constantly, like a train made from the trade winds: invisible, cacophonic loud, motored, irreversible by a small man, a man’s form—this is sorrow, he thinks; this can be an inheritance, like myopia or thick knees. do I love you? Perhaps in this lifetime I have only loved a corpsey girl, and she a woman I’ve not had or known her—and to be haunted by her (and my grandmother) is no more difficult than the sorrow arrives, an invisible force, the cold easterlies bring the rain and a train moves out of the pupil, down the mountainside, across the tarmacked avenues and into the mind—as if it were machinated, progressive, metallic and grey: a thing made for speed, commerce, to travel—this westward passage to the Indies; Atlantis on the brink of the mind.
I have lived as a half-alive man; I am a half-dead and the dead now my companions; and you, dear Marta, as you lie on the stonecold cement in the capital of your country (the Polytechnic), you are handless, the puncture wounds in your breast, they have removed your ears and nose—this is the corpse of the beloved, this the girl who must return to me in the heart of the Americas, in the semi-arid plains of Los Angeles, on the streets, in his automobile, at night as he watches the television Shows—a black metallic greyed container for the loneliness, for an old sorrow, a disbelief in this manner of dying—without the breast? two ears removed? to fuck her like a child and then slit the cunt open like summer fruit with the machete bayonet cut glass? this sound she makes as you cut her: what are we, Marta? And why does it not stop change stop or become for the millennial rounds—Or: why then can’t we simply fuck to our heart’s content, in the middle of the road, during concerts in movie theaters, classrooms, business meetings: as we wish it, as we are made to do it: I see you, you are bent at the waist in the fields the shop and you turn, smile, lift your skirt and invite me inside the glorious cunt-world: don’t you know, darling, that we cannot live without your form? It is the cunt has made us, the cunt calls us: we kill to return; the blood of the wound for your slit unadorned; invited; smiled upon: the eternal electric yes.
And no matter that you have died in Acul, in the mountain, in the capital of your country (the Polytechnic)—for it is no small thing to have found you in the midst the multitude, O for we have multiplied—to have looked and perpetual seeking and then there you are before me: mutilated, unadorned, brown-black haired black eyed—a beauty in the sea of loneliness; a god in my unidoled Christian sphere; my own madonna girl; this sweet christ mother—you gaze at me, the black unseeing allseeing eye.
Because I’ve not been seen or even, perhaps, been seeable—the driver, he drives along the streets of Los Angeles. I can make the work; I will make my way along the 405 Freeway toward my job, toward commerce, meetings, sales; toward this American dream, to a girl who has not been slaughtered (in Acul in the mountain in the basement of the Polytechnic)—you turn round, look straight at me, speak to me in your language, the autochthonous tongue, a tongue for the mountain river ko’m and the trade winds, two-harvested seasons: say: Listen, put your hand in my slit; here is the heart for the unancient boys, for the boys who would like to return to the sun moon gods: to the real of iconic days, of blood for the deities, not the lies of the modern, no longer the driver for the demonic weeks, this 365 day calendar of contained longings, the sky passes fast cars slower than this machine tarmac blurs trees wheat cotton because to fuck like this is like dying, and we all of us want out; and freed from this tyrannical real Show. I want it: to find the gods behind the maize, inside the maze, the old sentir.
* * *
WE MADE STREETS and wide avenues in the semi-arid plains. Filled the rotund brown-grey earth with highways with automobiles and mechanical lights, with the precision of painted lines. Palm treed horizons and blocked vistas and valleys without views. We pulled the mountain to the wayside, concreted the river, machined the world and clocked the days. where is the end of it? The sea is cold in the summers, perpetual paradise weathers—we are concrete exiles, strange and foreigners to this place—this our destination; we at the end, and there are no more travels, we move the metal machines round the circuitous holey roads like toy cars on toy roads; we are like children without childish ease: we entertain ourselves ruthlessly, as if masturbating on highwire. Endlessly—consuming the landscape; breaking and building it up; undesiccating the millennial dusted plains. We are no more able, drivers, movers, makers—it is at the end, the sea stops us: there is nothing awaits us now. The horizon has perished, and we are stranded here, at the pilgrim’s apogee; terrible; beastly; the strange millions in this city; the lackluster hordes: lonely beyond any recall—I cannot ken—ready to kill and be killers: I can smell your violent rush like a rush to purchase food in the supermarket aisles; to buy larger and metals plastics; to make heaps of capital gain-hills, houses, highrises, girls, foodstuffs and then more stuffs in piles.
I have come to understand, Marta, that it is in between the Americas, alongside the rivers we’ve undone, the valleys undesiccated, and waters dispatched, that I am come to find you. And we are not allied by History, by Progress, roads, by the misters Ronald Reagan and Efraín Ríos Montt (whom we did not know), the soldiers and sellers and the young conqueror, Pedro de Alvarado, as he marched down the Yucatán Peninsula in 1523, and Mr Crespí as he walked onto this alluvial plain two hundred years later, or Billy Mulholland making his water plans for this city in 1904, and Mulholland Dr leads to my childhood home (the street was named for a man?); and the unnamed countless million others who work in your capital drive in my city, make machines and itemized lists (TO DO’s) and children, money and the Cessna A37-B which flies over your prostrate form in the mountain; make plans and unmake your hands today in the capital (a coffee cutting implement); undo the slim wrists; make a boy in my city who drives an auto without a past or kin; a boy who knows things History like a dog knows his master’s tongue. You there like a small christ in the Highlands, the Cuchumatanes are a dream for what can be hidden inside them; he is here, driving, alone; seeking his daily bread for the hungers in his belly; watching the television Shows: a good boy a good citizen a good Show—he thinks that the world is a loud and dirty barbarian brood outside his borders; he thinks that the barbarians might eat his meat; he is happy and entertained and fatigued; he is tired every day, happy that the Shows end happy.
[Men are Makers, Marta; and since I was a boy on the playgrounds of this city I have not understood it well enough. I am the boy who would sit in the corner lie in the hammock spread your legs open like eternity’s siesta fěted because I am slow because it is inertia for this boy, not action, I am always the slower, stumbling, and the man of action as the book says is a stupid man, and silently howls: a beastly man; and if so he will make us again also, unmade your brothers mother; made you into a different girl, a girl in the capital; an Indian dirty like a dog who can learn Spanish if you split her skull in two and pour the lexicon inside like contract men pour cement into squares and rectangular skulls: say: we are not dogs men; we are men men.]
America does not exist.
[Why do you live in the Highlands? Why did you survive or die? Why are you coming to me now, this haunt,—leave me to my things! leave me to my televisioned visions; I am: happy; we are: white men and happy and rich; thinned and fattened and we laugh to the music of commerce, and the music of having nice days lives and Shows on the television—this is no complaint or rail, a rail on the tail-end of his happiness, of the dog, the American hounds are fat and happy also.]
I am an aberration. I am nothing. I am a man who is no man; a man who seeks you on the streets of this city, a city which is no place, not a central mountain or river god—we have a river here?—not, no, just the moving vehicles, the fucking doors, walls, shops, highways and roads; the girls, the boys, the language of TO DO, the houses filled with prosperity, jobs of work and work.—And in Los Angeles we speak five hundred languages and all of them, Marta, are lost to me. (What is this “half-Armenian” his mother goaded him on about when he was a boy?, and then afterwards always added, smiling, “But you are American, darling,” as if he wouldn’t ever have to worry about his place.) You’re lost to me, Marta, and me lost also to me.
* * *
IT IS NOT, perhaps, your obligation to speak it to me as I speak it back toward your unhearing tympanum, a drum without hammers—can you feel my sex harden like a tool (I can make girls?), the blood engorges it slow and although you are dead, I am wondering if you will fuck me today (today a holy day, after all).
Why am I making this love across the mountains desert, thousands of miles away in your America; across time and the myths of beginning and landscape and a babeled language game? We could be a compass, we could be nothing fancier than a slow fuck, than a: I will give up the auto and walk the dirt paths in your village, pass by the capital of your lost days and seek you there find you in the remains,—a spoor can last a thousand years,—I have inquired in books I have looked in the television Shows and it is all beyond my ken; my imagination; I am a burden, a failure, a slow livered man; inert; dirty, and I wont make a thing today; I wont idea a road or a girl or buy candies at the corner market.