Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

" that on the coast scattered with wild rocks

the sea the fields come together, the waves and the pines,

petrels and eagles, meadows and foam.

Have you ever spent a whole day close to sea birds,

watching how they fly? They seem

to be carrying the letters of the world . .

. . something something. .

. . pelicans. . like ships of the wind,

other birds. . like arrows, carrying

messages from dead kings, viceroys,

buried with strands of turquoise on the Andean coasts,

. . something something . .

and seagulls, so magnificently white,

they are constantly forgetting what their messages are."

She weeps, and she hears a man’s voice near Clara, who says, "I don’t know what is going on. There is nothing between ‘las costas andinas’ and ‘las gaviotas,’ ‘made of whiteness,’ ‘of purity’—but what comes before all that?" — she asks her husband for the book that’s on a table in the room across Central Park from where Luisa sits on the kitchen stool, one hand warmly snugged between her thighs—"but I remember. .

‘Tu me preguntas donde estoy? Te contaré

— dando solo detalles utiles al Gobierno—’

por supuesto, Luisa, el no quiere decir eso…"

No indeed, details useful to the state are not the sea and the fields, petrel and the meadow or even the sun’s atrocity upon the nitrate miners, but why an (albeit officially Swiss) opera donna should permit — why, is there a Swiss opera, as there is a Swiss fleet high and cold upon an angelic peak at the upper end of the world looking for a flood to float a lone whale to give their navy sperm power? The answer, my friend, lies in some Protestant comedy night that asks the question what nationality is the Pope’s gahd? — why, that is, a Chilean opera star (to continue) with a father under house arrest in the land of her birth, the land the earth the ground, permits an agent of that Chicago-model balanced-budget economy to take from her gently her clothes (read gently tug, read peel away from the very skin of her, life within life without end, slide down the grand pout of one buttock or up the soft give of her back while a thumb along the groove of her pretty spine keeps, with the operative fingers, love’s parallel compassed and gratuitous), the Druid folds of her priestess, the spangled shirtwaist of her barmaid’s Golden West, the silver rose from the auburn abundant hair of one who took off the satin breeches long ago and the white wig and doesn’t really like her lover to undress her anyway — oh what’s doing? she has to get out of all this — but would rather find her own way to the bathroom and come back smiling partly at him, partly at Clara reporting a new archaeological massage that you don’t have to wish would go on and on because it makes you longer(!), her robe of bright toweling open to her stomach for her not him, and yet for the first time she thought in her life wanted this man half lying half sitting by her bed table, his plain, uninteresting black shoes flashing, his necktie lowered almost like some more significant garment, opening the pages of a book she rereads at night that lies upon her tiny gilt address book {libretto!), to sort of follow her toward the bathroom having removed his shoes, his socks, and, leaning on the doorway or sitting on the edge of the bathtub watch her pee, her back thoughtfully arched, her eyes in his — but he lets her go her way though stares at what he’s reading with a close attention that to her feels affectionate as she recedes— follows herself — across her bedroom to the John, all but too absorbed in him to think (except she does) that she has the great silly Ford North’s unlisted number under M for Momo (her great bell of basso rotondo, her dear stammerer who finds his tongue in song, canto bell songo, and must phone to tell him of course she will not play Horatio to his unprecedented non-tenor Hamlet in his boyfriend’s three-night-stand opera (with-some-talk) (mysterious of origin, by repute) (J… I Just want to die. . I Sometimes you are so pitee-ous and pro-found) at the one-time warehouse owned by a ritual friend of course not, por supuesto, he asked her about it at the very moment when she was considering her naval officer on bended knee backstage finding a place to impress his Japanese now ballpoint upon her satin thigh, but Amleto, Amleto, what a lousy opera the real one had often made, Boito, Hignard, ho hum — in the absence oh what an absence of the only one for the job kicked by his priest as a no doubt cute young acolyte down the altar steps into unconsciousness (during which he might have imagined the whole nineteenth-century opera of American life if he had chosen), kicked into such near-immortality that if, long past his Requiem for a novelist, he wrote Otello at seventy-three and Falstaff at eighty, why not at ninety La Mestizia del Danese if those windy young waters ‘tween Elsinore and Sweden didn’t rush too wetly neither to be nor not to be for the old field marshal’s baton (for we know in all our keen relations that death don’t either want or not want us). . if in fact some text of Hamlet was not written years before and scrapped, dispatched, appropriated. . Hamlet’s mixed-blood upon the stale promontory an angel swiftly interprets, but no— mestizia means just "sadness," or, if we will, "melancholy.") So that — so that, lengthened like malleable shadow, this moment when Diva Luisa fears again her lover’s absence more than anything else (for she can’t hear except in imagination and memory the breaths she knows are calmly being taken and absorbed by his naked chest in the darkness just beyond the dark of her duplex kitchen) comes to contain the presence of another man so briefly in Clara’s closing words that when a click occurs along the line all that is left is the man’s name.

So that for us, collecting in and around such organism, what young Jim was in fact put through, that summer night of interrupted wartime sleep, can converge upon Mayn’s naming by an exile-economist’s mujer, yielding blindly a new brief obstacle to the three who heard the name, the lithe man who had gently uncradled the bedroom phone, and the two women who felt the intervention in their very hearts and therewith said, not in the Gluten Nacht or Buonappe-notte tongues of gran’opera but in good, honest Anglo, "Goodnight," yet not by a long shot American "G’night," or, literally — with the additives restored—"Have a nice day, tonight."

So that while Mayn in ‘63 or ‘64 (no problem) insisted that Roy Sievers had batted in 114 runs for the Washington Senators in 1957 (well before Washington was, lock, stock, and barrel, moved to Minn. — which means, observes the dictatorial interrogator with an accent of the sea shadowily awash in his syntax, that Sievers subsequently did not equal that personal best because with Washington in Minnesota he was himself to his own distraction permanently within shooting distance of the famed antler’d pike-whale of Lake Superior which our own nationals matriculating in the aeronautical program near that thousandfold lac, have been warned of by an Indian with a squint valuable enough to be worth preserving who exchanges such warnings for such information as our nationals have to offer, such as relocation techniques or disappearing acts used for certain anti-Castro Cubans now variously resident in our blessed coastal economy, its sovereignty cast like a shadow by the overlapping sea, a subject Mayn had to be interested in until the involvement of another whom he could not respect returned him to those routines by which he had made his living. He preferred to judge as waste-coincidence the convergence of his own route and that of an exiled Allende economist house-ticketed to an opera one of whose principals had a long-term relation with a simple, cuff-trousered Park Avenue G.P. who had fished with a Lake Superior Ojibway Indian with the same given name Santee as a diamond-squinting aeronautical trainee who relayed information about Cubans being relocated in Chile via an underground North American route more direct than if they’d traveled overland or underground from Cuba right to Chile. If not purely coincidental, at least impurely: which however hastily inhumed in lurid likelihood Mayn would leave to others to bring to light which when it came wriggling forth might have an ageless Spence coiling and coiling around it as if it were money in the pocket more than history on the make with or without that moral "eye" or epicenter Mayn quietly eschewed to own was his.