Nathaniel Rich - The Mayor's Tongue

Eugene didn't know what to say.

"Do you still have your parents?"

"I just have a father," said Eugene. "He doesn't show much enthusiasm for anything anymore, though. Not even English. He's from Italy, and retired, so he spends a lot of time with other paisans, speaking Italian and reminiscing about the old country. Whenever I talk to him he goes into long stories about obscure ancestors that he never mentioned when I was growing up. But when I ask him for stories about my mother, he doesn't remember anything."

He followed Sonia back toward the street, passing into a grove of elder trees, their flat white flowers heavy with fresh rain. The ground was covered with black berries that bled a bright lilac pulp and smelled like sulfur.

"I sometimes think that my father's lost in another country too," said Sonia. "If you can think of the past as a country."

"The way my father talks about Italy it's like it has no past or present, it's just some other universe. I think that's why I've never gone to visit. I get enough of that world at home with him. I don't need to see it on vacation."

They walked in silence back out of the park, their backs to the Hudson. As they reached Riverside Drive, Sonia took out her wallet and removed from it two yellow tickets. She waved them up in front of Eugene's face, her eyes flashing green-gray.

"For my birthday, my dad gave me two passes for a session at My Name Is Mud. It's a mud sauna. I don't know how the hell he got involved with this place — I'd guess it's because when he was young, Eakins would always take him to mud baths in Slovenia. The place is right around the corner, and this is my last chance to use the passes." She looked at the fine print. "It's seven now, so they've just opened. Want to go?"

"A mud bath? Where do they get the mud?"

"I think it's a mixture of peat moss and volcanic ash."

"From what volcano?"

"It's fine if you don't want to come," she said, putting the tickets back in her wallet.

"Of course I'll come."

As they walked to the sauna, Sonia told Eugene stories about her previous visits to Trieste. She talked about the family-run farms up in the Carso, a region of limestone cliffs surrounding the city, and of the adventures she had there with her Triestine friends — tubby Poldi, dashing Marco, and a butcher's daughter named Kasia, to whom Sonia bore an uncanny resemblance. For two weeks each summer, the farmers in the Carso would set up tables in their vineyards and backyards, and transform their homes into little restaurants called osmizze. It was an opportunity for the families to market their farm's bounty — cured meat, cheese, and the local Terrano wine — to local restaurateurs, neighbors, and Triestini in the know. The only way to find one would be to drive up into the Carso and look for olive branches, which the farmers tied to road signs to indicate the way.

"The most fun I had was with Kasia and Marco at an osmizza held on the grounds of an abandoned church at the edge of one family's vineyard. They had strung up Christmas lights over the trees, and after drinking several jugs of Terrano, we went dancing and singing on the tables under the stars. Of course, when I told the story to Dad, I replaced my friends' names with Eakins's. It made him so happy to hear that Connie was still spry and full of life."

By this point they had reached My Name Is Mud, which was tucked into a small alley between two apartment buildings, just off of Broadway.

"Maybe this isn't so fancy after all," said Sonia.

They walked into a spare reception room. A round-faced woman, pockmarked and chubby with a high beehive hairdo, sat at the front desk eating a bagel. When Sonia gave her name, the woman jumped up and hugged her.

"So you're Abe Chisholm's daughter? I see the resemblance. I'm an old friend, Stanislava — call me Stanka. He's told me all about you. You and your 'guest' may come along." Eugene and Sonia hardly had time to glance at each other before she hustled them off into their separate dressing rooms, handing each of them a voluminous green towel. In the men's, Eugene stood in front of a wall lit overhead by low-hanging fluorescent coils. He wasn't sure how much of his clothing he should remove, but after some heated debate with himself, he decided just to take off everything and wrap himself in the towel. He stared in the mirror for several minutes, removing sleep from his eyes and squeezing a pimple near his upper lip. He wondered if Sonia knew how much of her clothing to remove. He noticed, against the far wall, a heavy black door that bore two words in large bold print: TO MUD.

He passed through it into a room the size of a basketball court. Spaced apart in even rows were dozens of tubs filled with black mud. Some of the tubs overflowed and black liquid trickled onto the yellow-tiled floor, and then seeped into large drains. An elaborate network of gray pipes, flecked with peeling white paint, hung from the ceiling and dripped hot water into the tubs. The air was thick with a sour-smelling haze. Several fans hung from the ceiling, rotating idly, as if motored by the steam instead of dissipating it. Mud-crusted speakers stood on poles throughout the room, quietly playing a somniferous piano sonata that did little to drown out the sound of the pipes: an arrhythmic percussion of clanks and hisses.

Stanka was standing on the opposite side of the room. She called out to Eugene and gestured him over.

"This is your bath," said Stanka. "Have you been before in the mud?"

"Never," said Eugene. He noticed with a mild sense of alarm that Sonia was already submerged in a bathtub just several feet away from his own. Only her head was above the mud, and her eyes were covered with a damp white hand towel. The rest of the baths were empty.

"You just lie in it and wiggy around, until you sink," said Stanka. "And then you will fully be in the mud. Go on. It won't eat you."

Stanka gestured at him, and then the mud tub; at him, and then the tub.

"I'm not looking," she said, staring right at him. "Go ahead."

"Go on, Eugene," said Sonia. "I know it's kind of odd. But it actually feels good. Sticky and mushy but good."

He slipped off his towel and stepped into the tub. Pebbles and twigs were suspended in the thick, gummy mud, and it barely gave way beneath his body when he sat down. And it was scalding hot.

"Wiggy," said Stanka.

Eugene wiggled his behind and his shoulders, feeling the mud give way and swallow him. His body had never looked such a pasty hue. As he sank, he began to feel a trickle of scalding water against his ribs and the soles of his feet, pumped from hidden undermud jets. He glanced over at Sonia to make sure she wasn't watching him, or perhaps in the hope that she was. As soon as he was fully submerged, Stanka set down on the rim of the tub a plastic cup of ice water with a straw; Eugene sucked in a mouthful, and noticed with distaste that his lips had left a brown smudge on the plastic. Then Stanka pressed a cold, wet hand towel against his eyes. The water dripped down the sides of his face and into the mud. His diaphragm expanded and his bowels shuddered. It was eight in the morning.

After a minute or so he realized that Sonia was watching him. Her hand towel had fallen to the ground, and Stanka was gone.

"Relaxing, huh? Sort of?"

"It's hot," he said. "Too. . hot."

"Then do this." She raised one leg out of the mud. The skin was pale and dripped black sludge. "It cools down that way."

Eugene lifted his own leg, and the sensation was, in fact, oddly refreshing. The silt clung to his leg hairs. He lowered the leg.

"This will also do it," she added, raising a pale arm. "Just hold it up in the air." Eugene lifted his arm straight up, plops of mud falling on his cheeks and brow. He saw that Sonia's face was perfectly clean. Fearful of smudging his own face any worse, he simply lay there immobile, feeling the dirt coalesce on his nose. She was laughing gently at him.