A Village Life Read online

  When I walk home it’s night. You can’t see for once how shabby the houses are.

  The film is in my head: I tell myself I’m following the path of the hero.

  The hero ventures out—that’s dawn.

  When he’s gone, the camera collects pictures of other things.

  When he gets back, it already knows everything there is to know,

  just from watching the room.

  There’s no shadows now.

  Inside the room, it’s dark; the night air is cool.

  In summer, you can smell the orange blossoms.

  If there’s wind, one tree will do it—you don’t need the whole orchard.

  I do what the hero does.

  He opens the window. He has his reunion with earth.

  HUNTERS

  A dark night—the streets belong to the cats.

  The cats and whatever small thing they find to kill—

  The cats are fast like their ancestors in the hills

  and hungry like their ancestors.

  Hardly any moon. So the night’s cool—

  no moon to heat it up. Summer’s on the way out

  but for now there’s still plenty to hunt

  though the mice are quiet, watchful like the cats.

  Smell the air—a still night, a night for love.

  And every once in a while a scream

  rising from the street below

  where the cat’s digging his teeth into the rat’s leg.

  Once the rat screams, it’s dead. That scream is like a map:

  it tells the cat where to find the throat. After that,

  the scream’s coming from a corpse.

  You’re lucky to be in love on nights like this,

  still warm enough to lie naked on top of the sheets,

  sweating, because it’s hard work, this love, no matter what anyone says.

  The dead rats lie in the street, where the cat drops them.

  Be glad you’re not on the street now,

  before the street cleaners come to sweep them away. When the sun rises,

  it won’t be disappointed with the world it finds,

  the streets will be clean for the new day and the night that follows.

  Just be glad you were in bed,

  where the cries of love drown out the screams of the corpses.

  A SLIP OF PAPER

  Today I went to the doctor—

  the doctor said I was dying,

  not in those words, but when I said it

  she didn’t deny it—

  What have you done to your body, her silence says.

  We gave it to you and look what you did to it,

  how you abused it.

  I’m not talking only of cigarettes, she says,

  but also of poor diet, of drink.

  She’s a young woman; the stiff white coat disguises her body.

  Her hair’s pulled back, the little female wisps

  suppressed by a dark band. She’s not at ease here,

  behind her desk, with her diploma over her head,

  reading a list of numbers in columns,

  some flagged for her attention.

  Her spine’s straight also, showing no feeling.

  No one taught me how to care for my body.

  You grow up watched by your mother or grandmother.

  Once you’re free of them, your wife takes over, but she’s nervous,

  she doesn’t go too far. So this body I have,

  that the doctor blames me for—it’s always been supervised by women,

  and let me tell you, they left a lot out.

  The doctor looks at me—

  between us, a stack of books and folders.

  Except for us, the clinic’s empty.

  There’s a trap-door here, and through that door,

  the country of the dead. And the living push you through,

  they want you there first, ahead of them.

  The doctor knows this. She has her books,

  I have my cigarettes. Finally

  she writes something on a slip of paper.

  This will help your blood pressure, she says.

  And I pocket it, a sign to go.

  And once I’m outside, I tear it up, like a ticket to the other world.

  She was crazy to come here,

  a place where she knows no one.

  She’s alone; she has no wedding ring.

  She goes home alone, to her place outside the village.

  And she has her one glass of wine a day,

  her dinner that isn’t a dinner.

  And she takes off that white coat:

  between that coat and her body,

  there’s just a thin layer of cotton.

  And at some point, that comes off too.

  To get born, your body makes a pact with death,

  and from that moment, all it tries to do is cheat—

  You get into bed alone. Maybe you sleep, maybe you never wake up.

  But for a long time you hear every sound.

  It’s a night like any summer night; the dark never comes.

  BATS

  There are two kinds of vision:

  the seeing of things, which belongs

  to the science of optics, versus

  the seeing beyond things, which

  results from deprivation. Man mocking the dark, rejecting

  worlds you do not know: though the dark

  is full of obstacles, it is possible to have

  intense awareness when the field is narrow

  and the signals few. Night has bred in us

  thought more focused than yours, if rudimentary:

  man the ego, man imprisoned in the eye,

  there is a path you cannot see, beyond the eye’s reach,

  what the philosophers have called

  the via negativa: to make a place for light

  the mystic shuts his eyes—illumination

  of the kind he seeks destroys

  creatures who depend on things.

  BURNING LEAVES

  The fire burns up into the clear sky,

  eager and furious, like an animal trying to get free,

  to run wild as nature intended—

  When it burns like this,

  leaves aren’t enough—it’s

  acquisitive, rapacious,

  refusing to be contained, to accept limits—

  There’s a pile of stones around it.

  Past the stones, the earth’s raked clean, bare—

  Finally the leaves are gone, the fuel’s gone,

  the last flames burn upwards and sidewards—

  Concentric rings of stones and gray earth

  circle a few sparks;

  the farmer stomps on these with his boots.

  It’s impossible to believe this will work—

  not with a fire like this, those last sparks

  still resisting, unfinished,

  believing they will get everything in the end

  since it is obvious they are not defeated,

  merely dormant or resting, though no one knows

  whether they represent life or death.

  MARCH

  The light stays longer in the sky, but it’s a cold light,

  it brings no relief from winter.

  My neighbor stares out the window,

  talking to her dog. He’s sniffing the garden,

  trying to reach a decision about the dead flowers.

  It’s a little early for all this.

  Everything’s still very bare—

  nevertheless, something’s different today from yesterday.

  We can see the mountain: the peak’s glittering where the ice catches the light.

  But on the sides the snow’s melted, exposing bare rock.

  My neighbor’s calling the dog, making her unconvincing doglike sounds.

  The dog’s polite; he raises his head when she calls,

  but he doesn’t move. So she goes on calling,

&nbs
p; her failed bark slowly deteriorating into a human voice.

  All her life she dreamed of living by the sea

  but fate didn’t put her there.

  It laughed at her dreams;

  it locked her up in the hills, where no one escapes.

  The sun beats down on the earth, the earth flourishes.

  And every winter, it’s as though the rock underneath the earth rises

  higher and higher and the earth becomes rock, cold and rejecting.

  She says hope killed her parents, it killed her grandparents.

  It rose up each spring with the wheat

  and died between the heat of summer and the raw cold.

  In the end, they told her to live near the sea,

  as though that would make a difference.

  By late spring she’ll be garrulous, but now she’s down to two words,

  never and only, to express this sense that life’s cheated her.

  Never the cries of the gulls, only, in summer, the crickets, cicadas.

  Only the smell of the field, when all she wanted

  was the smell of the sea, of disappearance.

  The sky above the fields has turned a sort of grayish pink

  as the sun sinks. The clouds are silk yarn, magenta and crimson.

  And everywhere the earth is rustling, not lying still.

  And the dog senses this stirring; his ears twitch.

  He walks back and forth, vaguely remembering

  from other years this elation. The season of discoveries

  is beginning. Always the same discoveries, but to the dog,

  intoxicating and new, not duplicitous.

  I tell my neighbor we’ll be like this

  when we lose our memories. I ask her if she’s ever seen the sea

  and she says, once, in a movie.

  It was a sad story, nothing worked out at all.

  The lovers part. The sea hammers the shore, the mark each wave leaves

  wiped out by the wave that follows.

  Never accumulation, never one wave trying to build on another,

  never the promise of shelter—

  The sea doesn’t change as the earth changes;

  it doesn’t lie.

  You ask the sea, what can you promise me

  and it speaks the truth; it says erasure.

  Finally the dog goes in.

  We watch the crescent moon,

  very faint at first, then clearer and clearer

  as the night grows dark.

  Soon it will be the sky of early spring, stretching above the stubborn ferns and violets.

  Nothing can be forced to live.

  The earth is like a drug now, like a voice from far away,

  a lover or master. In the end, you do what the voice tells you.

  It says forget, you forget.

  It says begin again, you begin again.

  A NIGHT IN SPRING

  They told her she came out of a hole in her mother

  but really it’s impossible to believe

  something so delicate could come out of something

  so fat—her mother naked

  looks like a pig. She wants to think

  the children telling her were making fun of her ignorance;

  they think they can tell her anything

  because she doesn’t come from the country, where people know these things.

  She wants the subject to be finished, dead. It troubles her

  to picture this space in her mother’s body,

  releasing human beings now and again,

  first hiding them, then dropping them into the world,

  and all along drugging them, inspiring the same feelings

  she attaches to her bed, this sense of solitude, this calm,

  this sense of being unique—

  Maybe her mother still has these feelings.

  This could explain why she never sees

  the great differences between the two of them

  because at one point they were the same person—

  She sees her face in the mirror, the small nose

  sunk in fat, and at the same time she hears

  the children’s laughter as they tell her

  it doesn’t start in the face, stupid,

  it starts in the body—

  At night in bed, she pulls the quilt as high as possible,

  up to her neck—

  She has found this thing, a self,

  and come to cherish it,

  and now it will be packed away in flesh and lost—

  And she feels her mother did this to her, meant this to happen.

  Because whatever she may try to do with her mind,

  her body will disobey,

  that its complacency, its finality, will make her mind invisible,

  no one will see—

  Very gently, she moves the sheet aside.

  And under it, there is her body, still beautiful and new

  with no marks anywhere. And it seems to her still

  identical to her mind, so consistent with it as to seem

  transparent, almost,

  and once again

  she falls in love with it and vows to protect it.

  HARVEST

  It’s autumn in the market—

  not wise anymore to buy tomatoes.

  They’re beautiful still on the outside,

  some perfectly round and red, the rare varieties

  misshapen, individual, like human brains covered in red oilcloth—

  Inside, they’re gone. Black, moldy—

  you can’t take a bite without anxiety.

  Here and there, among the tainted ones, a fruit

  still perfect, picked before decay set in.

  Instead of tomatoes, crops nobody really wants.

  Pumpkins, a lot of pumpkins.

  Gourds, ropes of dried chilies, braids of garlic.

  The artisans weave dead flowers into wreaths;

  they tie bits of colored yarn around dried lavender.

  And people go on for a while buying these things

  as though they thought the farmers would see to it

  that things went back to normal:

  the vines would go back to bearing new peas;

  the first small lettuces, so fragile, so delicate, would begin

  to poke out of the dirt.

  Instead, it gets dark early.

  And the rains get heavier; they carry

  the weight of dead leaves.

  At dusk, now, an atmosphere of threat, of foreboding.

  And people feel this themselves; they give a name to the season,

  harvest, to put a better face on these things.

  The gourds are rotting on the ground, the sweet blue grapes are finished.

  A few roots, maybe, but the ground’s so hard the farmers think

  it isn’t worth the effort to dig them out. For what?

  To stand in the marketplace under a thin umbrella, in the rain, in the cold,

  no customers anymore?

  And then the frost comes; there’s no more question of harvest.

  The snow begins; the pretense of life ends.

  The earth is white now; the fields shine when the moon rises.

  I sit at the bedroom window, watching the snow fall.

  The earth is like a mirror:

  calm meeting calm, detachment meeting detachment.

  What lives, lives underground.

  What dies, dies without struggle.

  CONFESSION

  He steals sometimes, because they don’t have their own tree

  and he loves fruit. Not steals exactly—

  he pretends he’s an animal; he eats off the ground,

  as the animals would eat. This is what he tells the priest,

  that he doesn’t think it should be a sin to take what would just lie there and rot,

  this year like every other year.

  As a man, as a human being, the priest agrees with the boy,
/>   but as a priest he chastises him, though the penance is light,

  so as to not kill off imagination: what he’d give

  to a much younger boy who took something that wasn’t his.

  But the boy objects. He’s willing to do the penance

  because he likes the priest, but he refuses to believe that Jesus

  gave this fig tree to this woman; he wants to know

  what Jesus does with all the money he gets from real estate,

  not just in this village but in the whole country.

  Partly he’s joking but partly he’s serious

  and the priest gets irritated—he’s out of his depth with this boy,

  he can’t explain that though Christ doesn’t deal in property,

  still the fig tree belongs to the woman, even if she never picks the figs.

  Perhaps one day, with the boy’s encouragement,

  the woman will become a saint and share her fig tree and her big house with strangers,

  but for the moment she’s a human being whose ancestors built this house.

  The priest is pleased to have moved the conversation away from money,

  which makes him nervous, and back to words like family or tradition,

  where he feels more secure. The boy stares at him—

  he knows perfectly well the ways in which he’s taken advantage of a senile old lady,

  the ways he’s tried to charm the priest, to impress him. But he despises

  speeches like the one beginning now;

  he wants to taunt the priest with his own flight: if he loves family so much,

  why didn’t the priest marry as his parents married, continue the line from which he came.

  But he’s silent. The words that mean there will be

  no questioning, no trying to reason—those words have been uttered.

  “Thank you, Father,” he says.

  MARRIAGE

  All week they’ve been by the sea again

  and the sound of the sea colors everything.

  Blue sky fills the window.

  But the only sound is the sound of the waves pounding the shore—

  angry. Angry at something. Whatever it is

  must be why he’s turned away. Angry, though he’d never hit her,

  never say a word, probably.

  So it’s up to her to get the answer some other way,

  from the sea, maybe, or the gray clouds suddenly

  rising above it. The smell of the sea is in the sheets,

  the smell of sun and wind, the hotel smell, fresh and sweet