In America (28 page)

April 16. Are we fools for coming here? The possibility is not to be excluded. Am I a fool? Complaisant husband, looking the other way while another man courts his wife? But she will not leave me for him. Ryszard is not the man for her. I am not a fool.

April 17. I was born thirty-five years ago, which makes it my birthday
à l'américaine.
Our custom of celebrating birthdays on the day of the saint after whom one is named is unthinkable here, and not just because this is not a Catholic country, with a religious calendar enshrining the most ancient histories and traditions. What is paramount in America is the personal calendar, the personal journey.
My
birthday,
my
life,
my
happiness.

April 18. Two Indian boys playing leapfrog. One with black hair like a horse's mane and filed teeth. 97°. And it isn't summer yet. I should get a book on pig breeding. And one on beekeeping and how to make mead. Talking to people in the village, I gather that these are the businesses that require the least amount of work and bring the best profit: pigs and bees. Mead is very popular here, but they don't make it properly. Julian and I made some, and it seemed very good. However, it would not hurt to have proper recipes.

April 19. I came too late into her life to entertain the fantasy of molding her. I had no aspirations to change her. I loved her exactly as she was. I was an ideal second husband. The husband of a great actress—that was a role I knew how to play. I wanted her to take me for granted, and now I find that I take her for granted, too. But I have never penetrated the innermost recesses of her heart. Odd how confident I am that M. will never leave me.

April 20. Juan María, Doroteo, Jesús.

April 21. Ryszard has proposed to take us, just M. and me, on a two-day trip into the San Bernardinos. I told M. I can't leave the work I'm doing with Aleksander on the stable, but she should go. To be sure, Ryszard may have counted on my refusing.

April 22. M. off before dawn with Ryszard, old Salvador in attendance. Ryszard was armed with his 14-shot Henry rifle, revolver, and bowie knife. Salvador carrying enough weapons for two bandits. M. took a gun, too. At supper everyone seemed subdued, having no one to perform for. Maybe they're all worrying that she will leave
them.
The most distraught was Aniela. How can Madame sleep outdoors, she kept saying. P. asked if his mother's absence meant he could stay up later and practice at the piano. The house felt empty and I went for a long walk around midnight. Away from our settlement, in the immensity and candor of nature, under the boundlessness of the night sky, I was suddenly gripped by a vision of the enormous falseness of human relations. My love for M. appeared to me as a great lie. Equally a lie are her feelings for me, for her son, and for the members of our colony. Our half-primitive, half-bucolic life is a lie, our longing for Poland is a lie, marriage is a lie, the whole way that society is constituted is nothing but lies. But I don't see what I can do with this knowledge. Break with society and become a revolutionary? I am too skeptical. Leave M. and follow my shameful desires? I cannot imagine a life without her. Returning to the house, sitting down to write this, I think once again: the house is empty.

April 23. They returned this evening. M. exuberant, full of stories of what she had seen. She had a nasty injury, the culprit being not some wild beast but a cup of boiling hot tea; the entire palm of her right hand is one suppurating blister. I don't think she discovered she was in love with Ryszard. But how would I ever know if something transpired between them? I have an actress for a wife.

*   *   *

TRAVELING EASTWARD
in the direction of the mountains, their horses crossed the wide sandy bed of Anaheim's seasonal river. After all his entreaties, Ryszard was astonished that Maryna had agreed to the excursion. Now he would surprise her, by showing that he did not assume she had conceded anything further by giving him this. Patience was the cardinal virtue of the hunter: he would not press his suit. Nor would he point out what they were seeing. From the vantage point of silence, that would present itself as an intrusion, as if he thought she could not see for herself the herd of Angora goats, the cock pheasants perched on the cactus, the antelope on the hill, the flock of rose-colored turtledoves hovering above. He felt ashamed of his ready spray of words. Words were easy—they flew out of him and filled everything with light. There was no need to talk.

Toward noon they stopped on a high ridge of the San Bernardinos. Salvador pointed to a large black oak on the edge of the glen and shouted something to Ryszard in Spanish.

Ryszard shook his head.
“No quiero oirlo.”

Salvador crossed himself, dismounted, tied up the horses, and began gathering brushwood for a fire.

“What did he say?” said Maryna.

“That a cattle thief was caught up here last summer.”

“Right here?”

“Yes.”

“And what happened to him?”

Salvador had kindled the fire, and was setting out his tinware—saucepan, kettle, dishes, cups—for a light meal.

“He was lynched.”

“From that tree.”

“I'm afraid so. Yes.”

Maryna groaned and moved toward the fire. Ryszard followed her, took a blanket from his saddlebag, and spread it out on the ground for them to sit.

“I won't ask if you're tired.”

“Thank you.”

“Do you wish you hadn't come?”

“Ryszard, Ryszard, stop fretting about whether I'm glad to be here. And with you. I am.”

“Now I know you love me. You said my name twice.”

“Yes, as you do.” She laughed. “‘Maryna, Maryna!'”

He thought his heart was going to burst with happiness.

“Are you happy, Maryna?” he said gently.

“Ah, happiness,” she said. “I think I have a vast capacity for happiness.”

It was not the moment to explain to Ryszard her new arrangement with herself regarding happiness and satisfaction. Happiness depended on not being trapped in your individual existence, a container with your name on it. You have to forget yourself, your container. You have to attach yourself to what takes you outside yourself, what stretches the world. The joys of the eye, for instance—she remembered her mad delight the first time she set foot in a museum: it was with Heinrich, Heinrich had taken her to Vienna, she was nineteen and sorely in need of initiation. She was a girl. One of the strengths that comes with being a woman, and older, was that she had less need to share those bright moments of exit from the self. But she had not forgotten, though Ryszard seemed to think she had, the joys of hand and mouth and skin.

Salvador passed them plates of dried biscuits and beef jerky and pint cups of Japan tea sweetened with honey.

Ryszard, grimacing, set his cup down on the blanket and shook out his burning hand. Maryna, he saw, was still holding hers.

“You don't find it too hot?”

Maryna nodded and smiled. “I'm not sure that I don't love you.”

Ryszard felt stabbed to the heart. He reached for his cup, still intolerably hot, and quickly let go of it. “Maryna, put down your tea!”

“Perhaps I do,” she continued. “Perhaps I could. But of course I feel guilty when I love someone I'm not supposed to love.”

“Maryna, let me see your hand.”

“When I was nine, right after my father died”—she set down the cup and shuddered—“I was put in a convent school for a year.”

“Your hand.”

She extended her hand, palm up. It was dark red. “Salvador!” Ryszard shouted.

“Señor?”

“Idiot! Idiot!” He jumped to his feet and got the jar of honey. “Will you let me put this on it?” He saw there were tears in her eyes. “Oh, Maryna!” He bent over her palm, blowing on it and applying the honey. “Does it hurt less?” When he looked up, her eyes were dry and glittering.

“I had a teacher there, Sister Felicyta, whom I realized I loved more than my mother, more than anyone in the world. So I trained myself not to look at her face, ever. She thought I was very shy, or very pious, with my downcast eyes, and all the while I was burning with desire to press my lips to her beautiful face.”

“Let me kiss you, Maryna.”

“Don't.”

“So I will never hold you in my arms? Never?”

“Never! Who knows what that means? What I do know is that the prospect of being in a … of having to hide, of having to choose, is unbearable to me. I need my life to be simple.”

“You find marriage simple.”

“Oh, that's not simple! Bogdan's not simple. But I suppose Bogdan is complexity enough.” They sat in silence for a while.

“Maryna?”

She stood. “I'd like to move on.”

After they remounted, seeing that she was using her left hand to hold her reins, while holding the right, wrapped in a kerchief, close to her breast, Ryszard took her reins and walked both horses through a stony ravine and up a steep brambly slope. From behind him she was saying something about a special torment that made life difficult for Bogdan, something about not knowing (but she couldn't explain) who he really was. Then they seemed to be arguing, which was the last thing Ryszard wanted to happen, especially after she had virtually promised that she would be his one day.

“If my grandfather had been a staff officer under Napoleon and my wife were my country's national heroine,” Ryszard had turned back to say, unworthily, “I suppose I might brood about who I was.”

“You're not being as intelligent as you usually are,” she had replied coldly.

But she seemed to forgive him as the terrain leveled off and she took back her reins with her left hand and they galloped together for a time, lifting their faces to the radiant sun and a few white smudges of clouds in the faultlessly blue sky, while Ryszard mused on his joy and Maryna's startling little lesson in how to endure pain.

As night fell they camped on the far side of the mountain, and an anxious Salvador served them salt pork and bread on the tin plates, and once again babbled his apologies and excuses.
“Señora, perdóneme, mil disculpas, perdóneme.”
His hands were so calloused, he said, he hadn't realized how hot the cups were.
“Ahora no está caliente, señora, está frío!”
Ryszard translated.

“Not the meat, I hope,” said Maryna, laughing.

Maryna was as delighted as a child with the bed Salvador made up for her of finely broken twigs of manzanita and ceanothus, spread with layers of dark moss and glossy ferns. Then, leaving Salvador by the fire with his gun, watching over the sleeping Maryna—he'd assured Ryszard once again that no rattlesnake could glide over the horsehair lasso he had laid in a circle around her—Ryszard removed himself from their camp to walk among the moonlit trees and smoke his pipe. The thought of Maryna asleep, under his protection, in the vastness of nature, beneath the boundless night sky, was the fulfillment of an old fantasy—they were two slender arrows passing through the largeness of the universe—and he was gripped by an exquisite sensation of triumph. He loved. He was loved. He was sure of that now. The wind had risen, and the silent forest seemed to thrum and whisper. Then his moment of rapt attention disclosed, to his dismay, to his fear, a sinister rustling noise. It could be, he reminded himself, the sound of ripe acorns breaking loose from their pedicels and rustling through the leaves as they fell to the ground. It could also be the stealthy approach of
Ursus horribilis,
about to jump from behind the tree and tear open his throat before he could utter a cry. And he had left his gun by the campfire. Lashed by fear, all his senses brought him fresh news. He could even detect, among the forest fragrances, a far-off stench of skunk. And the noises—hooting owls and another fainter rustling sound; and then … blessed silence, which he greeted with choking relief and gratitude, as if he had received a reassuring message from nature itself. All was well, all would be well. It was not that he entertained any fantasy of being invulnerable, Ryszard was too rational for that. But nothing could rout his immense feeling of well-being and self-approval. Even if my life ended now, he said to himself, I would still think, My God, what a journey I have made.

*   *   *

APRIL
24. Our community is like a marriage, M. says to me today, and suddenly I'm on my guard. I don't mean
our
marriage, she says, laughing. I mean a marriage that's matured by compromises and disappointments and abiding goodwill—obviously, I'm not thinking of Julian and Wanda either! An old dobbin of a marriage, one that the spouses find dispiriting to think will go on forever but impossible to imagine calling off. It's a flash of the old M., the one I love best: restless, scathing, self-critical, autocratic.

April 25. It seems so American that grapevines here are actually bushes. The local people think it most efficient: no fussing with trellises, etc. But all I can think of is: no mutual support, no clinging, no interpenetration. Every vine on its own. Striving, striving, to outdo its neighbors.

April 26. If I find a good book about drying the grapes for raisins, I could put a few thousand dollars into our coffers. This afternoon Julian and I visited two drying houses in the village, both badly operated. Still, the local grapes are far better for raisins than for wine; moreover, the raisins sell much better. Gardiner told me he sold raisins from twenty acres for $8,000. Jacinto's gleaming brown eyes.

April 27. We could try to diversify further. Olives, and oranges, of course, and lemons, pomegranates, apples, pears, plums—all these pay well. Figs too, which are sold loose, rather than, as in Poland, threaded on a long string. It appears the soil is too dry for bananas, and while watermelons grow nicely they are quite useless—too cheap. People also plant a lot of tobacco here, but mainly for their own use. They don't do much sericulture; although silkworms grow fast and the pods are wonderful, I've been told it is “too much work” for the American.