On Looking: Essays (15 page)

Read On Looking: Essays Online

Authors: Lia Purpura

The church’s thin spire against early night. The dark overtaking and honing the point. Filing it. Spire: the harder I looked for it, the more quickly it seemed to dissolve.
And after, back to her grandparents’ farm. The lean-to with bathroom, coats hanging, and workboots. Inside, the kitchen’s wood stove in a blaze. Soup going, and noodles. Walls stenciled with vines. Two small, high beds with crewel-work covers. Round tables with books, dried flowers, medicine. Steaming duck stew, blood sausage, pâtés, vegetable salads, brown bread, and more pickles. A hard bagel, blessed, and hung on a string along with the key to the wardrobe.
A spire. Ascent. A holy send-off. But the letter that came today said nothing of spires. Mentioned just an apartment. That she jumped from up there. Apartments in Warsaw are flat-roofed and blocky, each one like the next. Apartments are boxes and the stairs lead you up. We lived together like that. On weekends we’d hear the knife-grinder’s bright bell as he wheeled his cart through the courtyard below. The long whine as he’d hold the blades to the stone. Then the noise growing faint as he pushed his cart on to the next courtyard and the next.
Once visiting her parents, hours from Warsaw, we heard it again, from up on their roof. I think it was something she always did—go up for the quiet, the solitude, even in winter. Go up to isolate one sound among many. Knife grinder. Train whistle. From the living room’s balcony you could see—nothing. They hung their pheasants and quail out there, the meat so tender it fell from the bones and we picked shot from our mouths as we ate that night. Out there, the preserves and wrapped cheese stayed all winter. But you could see nothing. Just rows and rows of balconies piled with food and boxes and tools. So we went to the roof.
And from there we saw—nothing. From there, Skierniewice was snow-patched and half-built. The stark land was flattened and scarred with trenches. The train station a blotch of coal smoke to the east. Kids crawling through drain pipes, kicking tangles of wire. Frozen tire-track humps, hardened in cold. Greasy puddles half-frozen, fumes heavy in air and the oil drums toppled. The dream of trees was years and years off. You walked past the blocks and blocks of apartments, not looking until you got to your door and then you ducked in and went up.
From the roof you could see, she said, the whole town. The whole blasted site. The scandal of progress, the terrible hope. Landscape of false starts. Of political whim, invisible funds. Of work on hold. The dirty paths scuffed from street to door. She said,
You can see the whole town from up here.
(But not the neat market square, miles off, no. Not the rough wooden tables abundant with oranges, beets, children’s striped socks even in winter. Not the old, cobbled streets with cottages, yards, and small, resourceful, winterproofed gardens.)
She jumped from a roof, from forty floors up, two weeks before All Souls’ Day.
A hard depression
her friend’s letter said.
Up there was no spire, just flatness, blacktopped. Stubborn, decisive, she would have known this: a spire’s a hook, a snag into light, a handhold, steadying. A stake in the sky, and she wanted none of it. She would go instead to a practical block, hunched on the earth. Modestly, to one with back stairs. I know how she climbed them—huffing and stopping to rest on the landing for only a second. Red-faced from the effort. We did it each day, going out, coming back: school, work, library, movie, museum. She’d have measured and thought the whole thing through, as she always thought through—anyone’s sadness, disappointment, neglect. Birthdays. Occasions.
The street would be clear. She would carry ID.
She would not leave a note.
Ten years ago I sat at my window—reading and working, writing, translating, as she sat at hers across the hall. From there I could see young mothers with prams, sitting and chatting in the dry scruffy courtyard, their white breath gathering as they rebundled the children. I’d work and look out, work by looking—at nothing in particular: all the near balconies, tram cables, the highway, the bus lot that served as a market on Saturdays. Weigh and decide: this word or that one. Finish a line, go on to the next. I’d let the words come. I’d get up and come back, easing the distance between possibilities.
Once while I was working I looked up and saw a woman digging her window box out with a fork. It was cold. Late November. She dug and pulled the dry stalks up, shook the roots and put the old flower heads into a little basket. Then she hit a tough spot—it must have been frozen—and had to dig hard. The fork caught the plant’s root and flipped it in air. She watched it go down. Put her hands on the rail and watched as it fell. Then she stopped altogether. Left the fork in. Left the window box like that, half-finished, all winter.
 
(in memory, G. G.)
 
On Invisibility
 
I
t is black and dull and coiled like excrement between the overturned boats.
Coiled like excrement
—that was the phrase, word for word, and then I read that D.H. Lawrence saw a snake in just that way. Exactly that.
I’ll go on anyway.
Coiled like a rope dropped fast, coiled and dull as an arm after rowing, the slack muscle looped over bone and aching.
It’s early fall and I am living for a while in the seam between weathers, with the whining of crickets and junketing locusts. A Viceroy dodges; the light spots on its wings are fine scales to sift the body through air. I move closer to the snake and it shifts, seeing me.
Overturn the stone of my heart,
I think. Being watched is something like being remade.
Later that day, I stand in the place the snake was coiled, where its jawbones unhinged to swallow a frog and, when finished, the single rough scale of its eyelid dropped down and made the moment dark. I stand in the place its body was. And the place is fearsome and thickened with presence. I say
God-fearing,
which I’ve never said, and mean by that
a trembling when walking on ground crosshatched by so many lives
. I mean
I fear being one of so many.
Brown snake, barn snake, cow snake, no. “Common Water Snake” I read in the pocket guide, “vicious but not deadly.” I like the honesty, the drama delivered as simple fact: what flashing and tearing, struggle and edge—and
recovery
—the guide’s author observed to say that.
I stand in the place where a water snake rested. Between overturned boats with their rusting chains. On a bare spot of ground with tufted, dried grass.
And standing, I am stitched through by the hum and gather of wings on their way to a stand of cattails at edge of the lake.
When I step away the grass springs back, then straightens in sun. The world seals up and I am gone.
If the squirrels digging into our roof wore bells, we would hear them enter; then we could pound and scare them away before they got in. Barring that,
you got a friend with a BB gun?
the roofer asks.
Makes them go away real quick.
A woman in a sprawling suburb nearby is angry about bears. They come into her yard and topple the garbage cans. One day her dog cornered a bear near the fence—
He did exactly as he was supposed to do to give us time to get away,
she says. But soon the bear wouldn’t move at all; even as she banged on pots and yelled it wouldn’t leave. The bear comes around often now and she’s at the end of her rope. She wears a whistle all the time. Her kids can’t play in the yard, for fear, and the dog is locked up.
Something’s got to be done.
Make the bears invisible again. Invisible so that you must imagine: a bear once walked here, rocked this tree to shake down fruit before all the people moved into its space.
And fenced the apple. And planted peach.
Invisible: without a trace, kept out, planted over.
Unseen
.
There are so many ways: a trap as big as an oil drum. A gun. Bait, which lulls the bear to sleep. Something to stun. Bracelets and collars. Dogs and alarms.
In Bosch’s hell, being unseen is a sickening constant: the action’s all tripping, spilling, and cracking—all the bent bodies make a writhing mosaic—but no one is watching anyone else. If a tree were to fall in this forest of horrors there would be no philosophy, no koan about it—which requires the mind at nimble attention, human discussion, an idea in passing, passing along, gathering steam, gathering moss. And hell is being passed over untouched. Going glimpsed-but-unseen.
As happens anywhere, midafternoon. Or any time soft chairs are lined up, and the applause signs flash in the TV studio. And viewers in their own homes receive: the roars, the devouring, the language in filtered, monotonous bleeps. The music cued up and dramatically fading.
We hope that by bringing you the stories of these brave people you will be
—what, moved? educated? But first we will see, we will see and see: the stubby limbs, the mountains of flesh and crushed, cobbled ears, bodies pierced like St. Sebastian’s, cruelty, fate, the huge boy’s face filling the screen. And in the audience, the twisted relief on all the faces:
I am not he. Remember that,
the music says: remember, so gratitude grows and flowers, grows heavy and sweet with strange-shaped flowers, spiked and dripping. Flower-talons.
Ferocious, these toothy, untouchable flowers.
Remember the toddler as big as a bear—and his normal-sized mother and normal-sized aunt who spray their hair stiff and blink, silver-lidded, under the lights like the shutters of passé machines.
Framing us, whom they do not see.

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