In America (29 page)

April 28. In Poland I thought that I was what I had to be. America means: one can strive with fate.

April 29. We were awakened during the night by our bed moving across the floor. A “small” earthquake, according to the villagers, and apparently common in southern California, though it is the first we have felt. Both M. and P. said they enjoyed it, M. claiming to have been warned in her dream. Just as she woke she heard the trumpet call from the tower of St. Mary's! P. now lives in hope of a big earthquake, like the one twenty years ago, before the Anaheim colonists arrived.

April 30. Our mare has been bitten by a rattlesnake, but it seems she will recover. As for me, I have been feeling resentful. M. knows I didn't want this. Now I want it more than she does. Perhaps you're having some doubts about your own sincerity, I say caustically. Of what use is sincerity without wisdom, she answers in her most adorable, ripest tones. I am appeased, but not entirely. She thought she was affirming freedom and purity, not a household and housework. I don't think she really wanted a home.

May 1. That I don't feel free to pursue my desire is surely not just because I am abetting the desire of someone else. Even in matters of the senses, I remain an amateur, a dilettante.

May 2. Last week, near Temescal, an Indian laborer entered the privy while it was being used by the rancher's wife and, she claimed, tried to assault her, though her screams brought rescue before “the worst” could take place. The poor fellow was tied up and castrated by the irate husband on the spot, and put in the barn, where he bled to death that night. We heard about it today. It seems vile to think, We didn't
have
to hear this horrifying story.

May 3. Jakub lectures me on the crimes committed here against the Indians. It seems that Indians were actually made slaves here after the Gold Rush, and this went on until about five years ago. He acts as if he were the only one among us with any moral feelings.

May 4. It can fail. But I must not fail. I must not fail M. We don't produce most of what we need. We don't sell most of what we produce.

May 5. 99°. The relentless success of these Californians gets on my nerves. I am bred to a distinctively Polish appreciation of the nobility of failure. (It seems vulgar to succeed, and so forth.) A plague of grasshoppers has descended on our fields.

May 6. Wanda seems unwell and left supper early. Julian said she has a fever. We are all concerned. Danuta, predictably, proposed a diet change, reminding us that when one of the little girls fell ill she'd fed her only fruit and sprouted grains, and within two days her fever had gone.

May 7. Cyprian took me to meet Doctor Lorenz. Slender, pale, with massive eyebrows overhanging penetrating eyes, a patriarchal beard, and a resonant powerful voice. The very model of the leader of a religious sect. Each member of the community has the title of Worker in God's Garden, but I saw that their daily routines include no farmwork—the ranch is tended entirely by Mexican labor—which may explain why the colonists feel in need of several hours of strenuous exercises following their morning prayers. I had a tour of the men's house and the smaller house where the children are lodged. These buildings, like the one where the women sleep, are perfectly round. Wives and husbands are permitted to spend Saturday night together. The principles of the Edenic Diet were explained to me, and we were invited to partake of a vile repast of wheat groats and barley, ground fine, moistened with fruit juice.

May 8. M. tells me that Ryszard asked Julian why he and Wanda don't have a child. It seems, according to Julian, that she can't have children. M. is thinking of starting a crafts school for Indian girls.

May 9. The people who settled Anaheim came here to live better than they had in San Francisco. Our settling here was mere happenstance, and we live worse than we did in Poland. If our community fails, it won't be because of the impracticality of all utopian schemes but because we have renounced too much of what was gratifying. We wanted to create a life, not a livelihood; making money was not, never could have been, our main incentive. It's rankling to know that if we give up, our neighbors will say we didn't work hard enough—that after we planted our crops we expected to sit on the porch or lie in hammocks while things grew. It's not true. If anything, we work harder than they do. But we are distracted. We lack a common sense that comes naturally to them.

May 10. I rode alone to Anaheim Landing, almost twenty-six miles there and back, and felt much the stronger for it. One patch of shore was strewn with iron pyrites—fool's gold they call it here—and I filled a pouch with it for P.

May 11. Others have failed before us. Brook Farm. The Fourierist colony that Kalikst Wolski founded in La Réunion, Texas. We knew that. Indeed, it was while we were making our own plans for emigration that I read Wolski's rueful account of his venture, published after he and his friends had returned to Poland. But even now I think we were right not to be discouraged by another group's failure to sustain a cooperative community along Fourierist lines here in America. If everyone were so prudent, nothing would ever happen. It would be like losing faith in marriage because of Wanda and Julian. One has the right to say,
My
marriage will be different.

May 12. Perhaps our venture will seem very Polish. I know the reputation we have abroad among those sympathetic to our nation's tragic history. That we lack political wisdom—look at our insurrections, which never had any chance of success. That we are gullible—Napoleon had no trouble convincing us that our nation's legions must shed blood for him; it was enough for him to wave the White Eagle in front of our noses, and off we rode into Russia in 1812, my grandfather in the lead. That our proneness to enthusiasm is childish, incapacitating; certainly not compatible with good management, cleverness, discipline, moderation, and other qualities necessary in the coming giant struggles of all nations for survival in an era of industrialization and militarism. That we can always be counted on for gallantry and acts of personal courage, but that there is a certain conceit in our high-mindedness. The most stinging charge: that we are a nation of dilettantes.

May 13. Poland is full of monuments. We commemorate the past because the past is a fate. We are natural pessimists, believing that what has happened will happen again. Perhaps that is the definition of an optimist: someone who denies the power of the past. The past is not really important here. Here the present does not reaffirm the past but supersedes and cancels it. The weakness of any attachment to the past is perhaps the most striking thing about the Americans. It makes them seem superficial, shallow, but it gives them great strength and self-confidence. They do not feel dwarfed by
anything.

May 14. About five o'clock this afternoon Wanda attempted to hang herself in the barn. She failed to secure the rope properly to the beam and it must have held for only a moment after she jumped off the ladder, but the fall tightened the noose—she would have choked to death in a few minutes had Jakub not been upstairs in his eyrie, heard the crash, and arrived in time to pull the ladder off her and undo the noose and run for help. We carried her unconscious to our house and I rode to the village to get Higgins, who has made a poultice for the bruises on her neck, set her broken arm, and given her some chloral hydrate. It's two in the morning; he has just left. Of course, she must stay here for several days. M. is still with her. Aleksander and Barbara have taken Julian in for the night. He was making a spectacle of himself outside the house, weeping and shouting that he was going to kill himself too, that was the only thing that would satisfy everyone, only
he
wouldn't botch it. But now, according to Barbara, he only sits with his head in his hands. M. has forbidden him to come near Wanda.

May 15. Wanda is still in great pain, unable to eat or even drink. Higgins, who came by today, says she is doing well, and urges us to keep her in bed for a few days. No one knows what to do. Julian is contrite, but how long will that last? “I know I'm not intelligent” was all she managed to say to me in a hoarse whisper. It is all so pitiable, but sordid and lowering, too. She has been pleading with M. to let Julian visit her.

May 16. We have almost as much reason as Julian to feel remorseful. Living in community means assuming responsibility for others, not just for oneself and one's family. Everyone disapproved of how Julian treated Wanda; as a community, we should have reined him in.

May 17. Wanda has returned to Julian. After she left the house, M. was almost in tears. Now she is irate. I remind her, no one can know what goes on inside someone else's marriage.

May 18. Since Julian and Wanda are no longer coming to meals, M. has told Aniela to bring them their food. When we visited them this evening, Wanda spoke of an attack of nerves, probably brought on by hard work, and Julian agreed that she had been working too hard.

May 19. Julian and Wanda will return to Poland at the beginning of next month. What has happened is so appalling that no one dares to urge them to stay, although, God knows, it is unlikely to go better between them when they are home. Julian will have a new reason to blame Wanda, that they have left their friends, abandoned the great adventure, given up America, that he has been disgraced by her weakness. M. is very sad. Jakub may take their house. Ryszard prefers to remain in the barn. Nothing else has changed, but everything has changed, I can feel it. We are going to fail.

May 20. I don't feel like writing anything this evening.

May 21. Nor today.

May 22. In America, everything is supposed to be possible. And everything
is
possible here, abetted by the American inventiveness and the American talent for desecration. America lived up to its part of the bargain. The fault, the failure, is ours.

May 23. Dinner today was acrimonious. Barbara mentioned hearing from a neighbor that there is a sick child at Edenica who is slowly starving to death on a diet of grated apple, rice, and barley water, and that no doctor has been summoned to visit her. Danuta and Cyprian insist there is a campaign to vilify the colony.

May 24. Taking down a dead tree near the barn with Aleksander. At one end of the crosscut saw, I lost the rhythm and the blade buckled. In America it is hard to think that failure has its nobility.

May 25. Don't wait to be a setting sun. (I have read this maxim somewhere.) Prudent people abandon things before being abandoned by them. Wise people know how to make every end into a triumph.

May 26. It can't simply be that we had no experience: neither did the Germans who came to tend vineyards twenty years ago, who included an engraver, a brewer, a gunsmith, a carpenter, a hotel keeper, a blacksmith, a dry-goods-store owner, a hatter, two musicians, and two watchmakers. Surely we were no less capable of learning what was needed to make our venture a success. But their primary purpose was to succeed as farmers. We were willing to be farmers, in order to have a quiet rural life.

May 27. Argument with Danuta and Cyprian. The little girl at Edenica has been taken by the village authorities, and formal charges of endangering the life of a child brought against Lorenz. He is to appear in the village court next Monday. Danuta and Cyprian assure us that he will be exonerated. M. particularly loving this evening. Sleeping now.

May 28. I rode to the mountains this morning and came back at dusk. About fifty miles. I didn't feel tired at all.

May 29. Meeting to decide what to do. Danuta and Cyprian want to continue. Jakub says he is willing to go on, and, whatever happens, he wants to stay in America. Barbara is very distressed by a letter from her mother—her father is ill and not expected to live long—but she and Aleksander are not considering making a trip back home, since they probably could not reach Warsaw in time. Aleksander has already assured me that the dismay he has expressed about our prospects does not mean that he regrets joining our venture, and I want to believe him. It is agreed we will continue until October and the vintage, and see if we can sell the grapes at a good price. M. says she could raise some money to keep us together until the farm becomes profitable by going back on the stage for a while.

May 30. 97° at noon. I should not like to think I am pushing M. back on the stage, to have an excuse for giving up our life here, which we will call an adventure, an interlude. And then I think: But she does want to go.

May 31. I suppose it's worth noting that the charges against Lorenz have been dropped. Apparently the community pledged a substantial sum to the building fund for the new school. Saw Doroteo admiring a straw hat in the window of a store in the village. He showed me that he had 15 cents—the hat cost “two bits,” he said, California(?) slang for 25 cents—and asked me to buy it for him. Feelings of shame.

June 1. We saw Julian and Wanda off at the depot this morning. They board the transcontinental express in San Francisco tomorrow. Their ship leaves New York for Bremerhaven in ten days.

June 2. I am plagued with useless questions. What moves us to take one direction in life and not another? How did it become inevitable that we would travel to California and not another place? Found Doroteo in the kitchen, trying to make himself understood by Aniela. Asking if we need an extra field hand. Wearing the hat.

June 3. A day of idleness and conversations about our future. Barbara received another letter from her mother: her father has died.

June 4. Barbara and Aleksander took me aside after supper. They have decided to return to Poland sometime this summer.

June 5. Danuta and Cyprian have announced their intention to remain in California: they will be moving to Edenica. M. remonstrated with them, to no avail. There's no arguing with fanaticism. Clearly, this folly has been in the making for a long time. And Lorenz's preposterous community has a better chance of surviving than ours had. Maybe we weren't radical or eccentric enough. Ay, Doroteo.