Excerpts

Excerpts

from Marion Boyars Publishers front list

People say I have a fanciful mind - probably the most tactful way ever invented of saying "you’re talking nonsense!" They might be right. Whenever I get anxious and mess up what I have to say, am scared of people’s stares and pretend not to be so, introduce myself to strangers and feign ignorance about how estranged I am from myself, feel hurt by the past and find it hard to admit the future won’t be any better, fail to come to terms with either where or who I am... then at yet another one of those recurring moments, I know I don’t make much sense. But nonsense is just as far removed from deception as truth. Deception turns truth inside out. As for nonsense, it solders deception and truth to each other so much so as to make them indistinguishable. Though this might seem complicated, it’s actually very simple. So simple as to be expressed by a single line.Let’s presume truth is a horizontal line.
_____________________

Then, what we call deception becomes a vertical line.
I
As for nonsense, here’s what it looks like:
O
With neither an end nor a beginning to its trajectory, the circle recognizes no horizontal or vertical axis.
You can plunge into the circle from anywhere you want, as long as you don’t make the mistake of confusing that point with a beginning. No commencements, no thresholds, no endings. No matter at which instant or with what particular incident I make the first move, there will always be a time preceding that start of mine – always a past ahead of every past and hence never a veritable outset.
I never saw it myself but heard from someone wise enough that back in the old days when the garbage cans on the streets in Istanbul had round lids of grayish aluminum, there was a game boys and girls collectively played. A certain number of people had to get together; few enough not to crowd, large enough to enjoy, just the right amount and always in an even number.
First in the Garbage Game came the question "when?" For an answer, four different segments would be chalked on the round lid with a separate word corresponding to each direction: "Right Now–Tomorrow–Soon–Never." The lid would then be spun from its handle in the middle as swiftly as possible, and before it found a chance to slow down, the person in line would stop it with the touch of a finger. The same would then be repeated one by one for all the participants of the game so that each one could fathom which time frame he or she stood closest to. In the second round, four separate responses would be written down as possible answers to the question "to whom?": "To Me–To The One I Love–To My Best Friend–To All of Us." Once again the lid would be given a spin, once again the players would reach to stop its delirious circumvolution. In the third round, the turn would mark the time to find the answer to the question "what?" Four auspicious and four ominous words, always equal in number, to add a dash of fairness onto the whims of fortune would be marked on the remaining eight spaces: "Love, Marriage, Happiness, Wealth, Sickness, Separation, Accident, Death." The lid would turn once again with the answers now building up so the players could finally reach the long awaited response to "what will happen to whom and when?:" "To Me-Wealth-Soon," "To The One I Love- Happiness-Tomorrow," "To My Best Friend-Marriage- Right Away," or "To All of Us-Separation-Never"…

Chinese Takeout | Arthur Nersesian | £9.99 | Paperback | 0-7145-3111-1 | Jan 2005

Twenty years after the subway accident, at thirty three, I had two pieces accepted to a group on lower Broadway. My financée, June, and I were late to the opening at Entrance Art Gallery. June dashed off to meet one friend just as the curator, Laura Vierst, grabbed me. She said someone had already shown interest in one of my pieces.

"Orloff," she whispered, "I want you to meet Barclay Hammel."

Laura pushed me toward the back of a small, younger man chatting with the gray-fox mogul Victor Oakridge. The short youth looked like a big yellow dahlia and smelled of roses.

"So few artists realize that patrons are their hidden partners," I overheard Victor pontificate to his partner in wealth. "People remember Michelangelo, but if Pope Julius II didn’t toss him the Sistine Chapel commission or the Last Judgment , if the Medicis didn’t throw him into their funeral tomb, he’d just be an obscure stonecutter."

"Listen, Orr," said Laura, while we were waiting. "I got him to take your piece for half the price, and I think you should do it." In other words, instead of eight hundred, I’d get four, minus Laura’s commission – still twice as much as I would get on the street. ‘Barclay’s plugged into this whole dot-com survivor support group and I really think that if he takes this, we can move your other works in that crowd."

When Victor finally stepped away from the floral lad, Laura introduced us. Barclay talked about how much he liked one of my paintings entitled East River Swimmer. Done in acrylic paint, it was one of a series of four plywood square-foot panels. Each one was a different view of the swimmer. Although everyone complimented them, I had been unable to draw out all I wanted from them, and feared I had reached my artistic limits.

I wanted to work on the series longer and develop them into a solo show, but as usual, I desperately needed cash. I was hoping to rent a gloriously huge loft with June, so against my better judgment, I agreed to let Laura put the red dot next to it on the price list.

Delighted, Barclay shook my hand and went on about how great the work was: "I usually buy art as an investment, but your piece immediately grabbed me. You really feel the guy struggling. I intend to hang it in my bedroom so I’ll never forget that life is a challenge." I had to sell my labours at half price to remind a millionaire that life was hard.

When his cell phone chimed, he excused himself and took the call. I was expected to wait politely. Art collectors were a despicable bunch who held artists by a short green leash made of nouveau cash. A year before, I had painted a series of collectors like pompous Victor Oakridge. I characterized them as purple and bloated Turks destroying Armenian artifacts, prissy and gray Nazis looting the Louvre, and sleek, pedigree dogs fighting over a bloody piece of meat. Ironically the cycle sold well.

Only the ongoing fear of starving to death drove me to put my work on gallery walls.

In a flash, the boy fascist was of the phone. Before he could cut the check and scam, I brought him to my beautiful girl, Junia, who I introduced as a brilliant young artists.
Described by one critic as "a photographer ultra-realist," June was apt both in landscape and people. She could immediately scale down a scene – no matter how grand – to the perfect ratio of a page, with nearly no revision. Her weaknesses were conception and composition. Her talent seemed to overwhelm her. She’d work quicker than she could actually think. To look at her work, you’d see it lacked thematic cohesion. Still, I was in awe.

I genuinely hoped Barclay would buy something from her, but truthfully my vanity was also at work; I wanted to show him the living beauty I possessed that money couldn’t buy. After his eyes popped out and his jawbone dropped off, he asked if she had any pieces in the show. Of course she did. Colourful abstractions that looked like they had been composed by Rothko in a Spin-o-Rama, not her usual stuff. As he flattered her framed tie-dyed T-shirts, I saw another dark green jug of red wine having its black top unscrewed.

Klein Ritter got to it first. He was a shrunken, deviously mild-mannered man and the most venomous art critic on the scene. For the longest time he’d flatter me, come to all my shows, and perpetually promise to write an introductory essay in a major art journal. Eventually, though, I learned that he swore this to every good-looking straight male artist who crossed his crooked path.

When I started pouring the vino, he stood behind me and said,"So, Or, how does it feel knowing you have the best piece in the gallery." He gulped down the drink.

"I only believe reviews that I read in magazines." I refilled his cup.

"Come on," he replied, "Who do I look like, Robert Hughes? Good reviews are no fun. Besides, success is the worst thing for young talent." Like a bad odour, he seemed to dissipate away.

"Body and soul," whatever that meant, was the title and theme of the show. Inspecting the various works, I realized that Klein’s compliment had unfortunate merit. Among the many tiredly shocking pieces, a conceptual artist had submitted a series of Polaroids of his solid waste, which he referred to as "Brown Carps." Next to them, splattered configurations of his seed spilled on a black page were labelled, "O man, Onan!"

When I looked over to point out the vulgarographs to June, I saw that she was still with Barclay. She giggled as he yapped and I couldn’t be happier. He was obviously smitten by her. If her dark hair, almond eyes, and perfect breasts helped her shake a deal in the savage art world, so much the better.

I found myself falling in love as well. One particular work of neglected art, an incredible portrait of a little girl on a crowded street had completely enthralled me. It truly was the best piece in the place. The child was absently scratching the inside of her elbow with a lollipop. What the artist had captured was her amazing expression. While the girl’s face struggled for a seen-it-all cynicism, her eyes betrayed her bewilderment turning toward terror. The crowd, too, was complex and conflicted. Although their faces were united in a sort of mass placidity, they each subtly dwelled on their own little drama. One man in the crowd looked like a drug abuser; another guy on the other end of the canvas was a wealthy uptown type. The field of colours, the precision and composition of shapes, the delicate irony of relationships – all were perfectly balanced. I stared at it so intently that I missed a breath and gasped suddenly for air.

Laura was in her office tenderizing a prospective buyer when I politely interrupted and told her I needed to know who did the piece hanging in the corner.

"In the far corner?" She smiled freakishly, obviously pissed at my imposition. "That’s Bethsheba Argus’s work."

"You’re kidding," I remarked and dashed out to the crowd. The first time I ever saw this Australian artist, she was sitting naked on a table, modelling for seven bucks an hour at the Art Students League. With her stout legs, muscular ass, and large bosom, Beth was a sexy compact. Once, at an opening together soon after we met, she and I got soused and intimate. Over her years in New York her accent had completely washed away. Hopefully her artistic style was finally fading as well. She was known for her bland minimalism, but this new piece was nothing like that. It was gutsy and exciting, and that made her equally irresistible.

I circulated for about five minutes before I spotted her listening to some twinkie in a bow tie. I dashed over and gave her a big hug and a kiss.

"That is one amazing fucking piece you did!" I cut right in.

"Wow! Thanks," Beth replied, clearly pleased. The poor geek with the pink-tinted glasses faded into the artwork.

"Where did you come up with that?"

"It’s really pretty typical for me," she replied modestly.

"Do you know that little girl?" I asked pointing to the work.

"There is no little girl in my painting," she said, wrinkling her nose.

"Hold it." I led her to the masterwork.

"That’s not mine." She pointed to the neighboring work. "That’s my piece."

It was another rather boring minimalist watercolour.

"Well that’s nice too," I stated calmly, trying to gloss over my obvious fuck-up.

"You know Adele Oreckle?" she responded. "She painted that."

"Is she here?" I asked.

"I didn’t see her."

"I’m really sorry."

" It was nice being discovered, if only for a fleeting instant." She smiled demurely.

When June and I left the opening that night, we celebrated my cut-rate sale by buying a cut-rate bottle of white wine and dining out. While sipping down a pinot grigio over an Indian mean, June explained that Barclay had promised to pay her a studio visit in a few days.

" I described my three new works and he seemed interested," she said.

She had been experimenting lately, trying her hand at large abstractions. I didn’t have the heart to reveal that they were too gimmicky and derivative. Her strength was in realism. Her early pieces were inspired. Ever since she was a teenager she had toiled at her craft, and she deserved a break.

True to his word, at the week’s end, Barclay paid his first studio visit and June came home waving a thousand-dollar check. Instead of the half-baked abstractions she was hoping to sell, he had bought five pedestrian charcoal sketches at a premium price.

"I can’t believe he didn’t go for your oil paintings," I replied. Those were her best.

"Maybe I’ll show those to him next time," she added. "We’re going out for coffee next week."

"Why?" I asked nervously.

"I don’t know. He wants to be my patron."

Over the next month, she’d casually mention that Barclay had called. When June finally said that he was interested in seeing yet more of her work, I found myself combating incipient jealousy. She loves me, I’d assure myself. She loves me not, all my inadequacies kept whispering back. But how could I have any doubts? We were, after all, engaged to be married. Lately she had been talking about having children.

What my jealousy actually amplified was my very inadequacy as a provider. Over the past year, we had eked out a joint existence in our cramped hovel. More and more, June had been talking about the squalor we dwelled in, the mice and roaches, the used furniture, and the bad smells in the hallway. I didn’t mind austerity so long as I could paint. But for June, poverty was traumatic. During her childhood, June had hopscotched throughout the archipelago of low-income projects along the East River – The Lillian Wald, Baruch, and Jacob Riis Houses where her extended Dominican family lived.

A few months before this we had lucked out, subletting a summer work space nearby. That was around the time I began the East River Swimmer series. Each day, we’d take turns neurotically painting in the claustrophobic studio, a classroom in a former public school on Suffolk Street. During the late morning, while I sold used books on the street, she’d paint. In the afternoons and early evenings, while I used the space, she taught ESL for a labour union.

Although our classroom sublease was ending, a dear friend, Shade, was supposed to rent out his villa-like loft in Chinatown while he went away on vacation. During those late September days while Barclay was calling her, I hoped that the luxury of working in Shade’s marvellous space would miraculously curb my growing suspicions.
"What’s your problem?" she finally screamed at me in the middle of an eerily wordless dinner one evening.

"You know what I’ve been thinking?" I asked delicately. She didn’t respond. "That maybe we should have a baby soon. I mean we’re not getting any younger and you want a kid, don’t you?"

"How are we going to feed it? What’s he going to wear, paint? No way am I putting a kid through the hell I went through."

Of course she was right. A baby was the last thing I could handle, but I was terrified of losing her.

After the meal, when she was sketching, I finally made a wooden effort to allay my anxiety by bringing my jealousy out in the open. I explained that I found her friendship with Barclay slightly unnerving.

Instead of reassuring me that there was nothing to worry about, she threw it back in my face: "Hey, when I saw you kiss that cow in front of everyone at Entrance Art, I didn’t say a word."

"I wasn’t kissing her, I was kissing her art!" And it turned out not even to be Bethsheba’s piece that I loved.

She chuckled over her sketch pad. "You are so pathetic."

"Just say you’re not…seeing Barclay!"

"I’m not seeing him," she mimicked my whiny tone. "Now stop!"The danger of being a representative artist is that it’s all on the page. The sketchbook never lies. About a week before we were supposed to move into Shade’s loft, instead of squeezing my oil worms of paint onto the palette, I flipped through Junes many drawing books. Endless 18" x 24", 70lb., acid-free pads. No recycled newsprint for her. She was a compulsive sketcher. While watching TV, or eating dinner, sometimes while on the toilet, she’d sketch. At times I wondered if she even knew she was doing it. Images, places, animals were all caught by her nimble fingers.

Finally, after three hours of frenzied searching, I found the evidence. A sketch pad with page after page of nude interlocked bodies. An encyclopedia of sexual positions. Forbidden acts we had never dared perpetrate. The male model sported an erection brutally unlike my own. I felt my heart beat so articulately just below my thin layer of flesh that I had to close my eyes and catch my breath. With a ringing in my ears and a silent cry shooting from my throat, I had confirmed that my girlfriend had been cheating on me with a vengeance. I began tearing the images from out of the pad, digging through the book. How could she?! My volcano had only started smoking.

I pulled down her three latest works that she had propped against the wall. The stark feeling of betrayal translated into pure rage. Grabbing a palette knife, I slashed across her large-framed works-in-digress.

Still inflamed, I reached up to the overhead space above the doorway where she had her early autobiographical pieces neatly stored away. Yet as I looked at her early images I was humbled: a portrait of her grandparents, whom she had painted whilst visiting Santo Domingo just before they perished in Hurricane Hugo; a sketch she had done while still in her teens from her bedroom window of a nest of rats; a mother suckling her pups in the unweeded and littered lot next to her old home. Eight patiently painted panels of bombed-out brownstones with their sheet-metal windows and cinderblock doorways. These abandoned buildings made up her neighborhood before they had flowered into high-priced condos.
I placed these works back in the overhead space. She would have killed me if I had destroyed them. Though I was still pissed, what I had done seemed like a fair response.
I folded up my own artwork and supplies and piled them into my van downstairs. Then I raced home and shoved my clothes, along with a few other personal effects, into two old pillowcases. I took a final glance at the packed apartment we had moved into just a year earlier. I loaded up the rest of my things and headed downtown.

That was the first time I ever regretted being an artist. I knew that if I were some nine-to-five wage slave, able to provide basic comforts, I wouldn’t have lost the great consolation of a luckless life: my future wife, the mother of my unborn children.

Jungle Rudy | Jan Brokken | £9.95 | Paperback | 0-7145-3103-0 | Oct 2004

Translated from the Dutch
by Sam Garrett

He wasn't waiting for me when I got off the plane at Canaima. At least, I didn't see a man I should have recognized immediately by his ears: the right one had had a chunk bitten out of it by a rattlesnake while he was sleeping in his hammock, floored by the midday heat; the top of his left lobe had been gnarled by leishmanianis, a disease carried by a parasite of the sand flea, which goes with the rainforest the way seasickness goes with the sea. There was an Indian, however, leaning on the fence that showed where the landing strip stopped and the savanna began, an Indian with floppy ears. There were also a couple of women dressed for mosquito infestation and wearing so much khaki that at first I mistook them for soldiers. But the man I was looking for wasn't there, a man in his sixties who rarely shaved, whose hollow cheeks and emaciated body were reminders of the times he'd had visions of banquets while he himself dined on ants.

One week earlier I had sent him a fax with an urgent request to accompany me to Angel Falls. Even with a big outboard on the back of the curiare, it would take a day or two to motor up to those falls, and if what I had heard was true, he could easily talk our way through all those long hours on the river. Besides that, he could do so in my mother tongue. For though his name didn't immediately show it, Rudy Truffino had been born in the Netherlands, in The Hague.

His amazing career and his tattered ears, his restless eyes and his rattling laugh had been described to me by several friends on Curacao, during the years that I had lived on that island. They had made long journeys with him into the area he had opened up with the help of the Pemón Indians, an area that spread out below the Orinoco, an area the size of the Netherlands; they had planted the seed of amazement in me by telling me that he spoke the language of the Pemón, shared their aversion to property, and seemed to get along better with those semi-nomads than with his former compatriots.

What endeared him to me immediately was that his way of coping with the wilderness was to listen regularly to Don Giovanni, or to a very old recording of Ella Fitzgerald, or to a trumpeter who played the stars from the sky and who he could imitate perfectly as he washed the sweat from his body with river water after a difficult trek. In the middle of nowhere he had also surrounded himself with thousands of books, which was not difficult for me to imagine - I would do the same, deep in the jungle. That he had spent the last years of his life with an Indian woman gave me the feeling that he careened back and forth between two worlds, and by definition I have a weakness for people like that.

Truffino's wife had died, his three daughters had moved to the city, but he had stayed on in the Gran Sabana. What he'd told my friends in Curacao was: he wanted to be buried in the jungle, not in a cemetery; cemeteries were too crowded for him, and he had become pretty much used to the wide open spaces.

So he continued to guide the lovers of unspoiled nature up wild rivers to the tallest waterfall in the world. He didn't even ask much for his services; after a long, dry period on Curacao, I had sent him a fax.

Not that I was planning to write about him - I had just finished a novel and meant to spend my weeks in Venezuela thinking quietly about the next one - but I already saw him as a man of novelistic character. I had run into Europeans in desolate areas before who had gone off in search of the unknown, out of distaste for a life predictable as a book of hours, and I had been impressed by them, because I had never entirely succeeded in severing the bonds with my own past. Between leaving your country for an extended period and disappearing lies half a world of difference; they were not only born vagabonds, they had left never to return again, and what always intrigued me was how they had arrived at that decision, and whether they never regretted it. "The good traveler," says a Chinese proverb, "knows where he is going; the perfect traveler forgets where he came from." But I was not convinced that one could achieve perfection in that regard. Truffino, of course, thought differently; one of the things I wanted to ask him on our way upriver to the waterfall was how he had overcome the fear that always kept me on the straight and narrow: the fear of not belonging anywhere. He didn't seem like the kind of man who would answer that with a shrug; besides, a trip on a lonesome river like that inclines one to plain speaking.

Confident that Truffino would mention their names often, I had read before I left the classic travelogues by Von Humboldt, Bates, Wallace, Spruce and the Brothers Schomburgk, who had navigated the rivers surrounding the Gran Sabana, and those by Koch-Grünberg and Im Thurn, who had entered the area first without being able to penetrate it too deeply. I read the novels by Conan Doyle, Gallegos and Carpentier, set against the background of the high mesas, Thomas's study of the Pemón Indians, reports by Ruth Robertson about the first major expedition to Angel Falls, and the bundle of newspaper and magazine articles that Millicent Smeets-Muskus had given me when I told her I hoped to travel with Rudy Truffino. Millicent had interviewed him in 1984 for the Curacaoan daily Amigoe, and she was conscientious enough to have saved a box file full of all her documentation on Truffino and the Gran Sabana.

From Carácas I flew to Cíudad Bolivar, the town founded by the Great Liberator on the mucky banks of the Orinoco, from Cíudad Bolivar to Canaima. The plane was a Boeing, but it buzzed the canyons like a Cessna, granting me a glimpse of Angel Falls: two narrow streams that fell from a colossal mesa and landed hundreds of meters below at the top of a densely wooded valley. Through the window of the little plane I saw a few other mesas looming faintly on the horizon, four or five of the ninety-four that lie in southeastern Venezuela, northern Brazil and in the Cooperative Republic of Guyana, formerly British Guiana. In the language of the Pemón Indians, the mountains are called tepuis or tepuys, "houses of God," but from the air they look more like islands surrounded by a sea of cloud. Others have noted the resemblance as well, albeit in a different way: the geologist Uwe George, whose National Geographic article I had spread on my lap, spoke of these mesas as "islands in time".

The tepuis are the remnants of the Guyana Shield, the oldest sandstone formation in the world, dating from the time when Africa and South America were still one. Some of them are five, six, seven hundred kilometers in circumference, most of them are more than two thousand meters high. Because of their complete isolation, ninety-eight percent of the plants that grow atop them are found nowhere else in the world, plants from before the Deluge, plants - and perhaps animals and insects as well - that have elsewhere died out or evolved in a completely different fashion in the time it took Africa and South America to drift apart. Or, as Carpentier puts it: "Plants that fled from man in the beginning, to hide themselves away, here in the last valleys of prehistory."

When Rudy Truffino came to the Gran Sabana in the 1950s, almost nothing was known about the area; in terms of scientific exploration, it was as untouched as the moon.
As the plane started its approach, I saw the spot where Truffino had built his first camp, an incredibly beautiful place right across from five waterfalls that tumbled over red rocks into a lake. The second camp he built with his bare hands is located a few kilometers to the south, along the banks of the Río Carrao. He had named the first camp Canaima, the word the Pemón Indians use to refer to the spirit of evil. Evil, according to the Pemón, almost always comes from far away, from the top of a mountain, from a neighboring tribe in search of conflict, or from strangers blinded in their quest for jewels and gold. When the Pemón saw their first white men, it seems they whispered "canaima", and ever since Rómulo Gallegos used that word as the title for his novel about the unknown southeast of the country, it has become a household word in Venezuela. Truffino named his second camp "Ucaima". It lies close to a waterfall that continues to rush even during the dry season: ucaima means "that which draws all to itself".

The Indian with the floppy ears jumped over the fence and introduced himself. His name was Josef Gregori and, as it turned out, he worked at Rudy Truffino's camp. That very same day he told me that his father had been born in northern Italy, and that his mother came from the Gran Sabana. From his Indian mother he must have inherited his small size and the straight, blue-black hair cut in bangs across his forehead: the hairstyle of the old Caribes, who cut their locks with the razor-sharp jaws from the dried head of a piranha. Two things I then found out about his father: that he had named him Josef - a possible indication of Tyrolean ancestry - and that, not long afterwards, he had left and never come back.
Josef took me to the river in his truck, along a road which the rain had turned into a muddy creek. Before putting my baggage in the curiare, he first had to bail the rainwater out of the big dugout with a tin can: my suitcase and backpack he covered with a plastic sheet.

Veils of rain whipped across the river as we made our way up to the camp. The rainy season had arrived in full force; within the space of a single day, the river had risen a meter. We passed an Indian village; I hunched down deeper inside the plastic raincoat that protected me from the rain and the wind. A steady wind was blowing, in the middle of the river it was downright cold, not what I'd expected in an area only six degrees north of the equator. But a few minutes later, when I stepped out of the curiare and Josef handed me my suitcase, it was warm again.

Crossing a grassy field, I passed beneath a tree which Josef said had been planted after the earthquake of 1967. It looked as though it had been there for centuries. Right behind the tree was the hub of the camp, a building with the curved walls of an Indian hut.

"Señor Rudy," Josef said as we walked past a photograph on the wall - Truffino, wearing a felt hat, a long-stemmed pipe clenched between his teeth. It was unmistakable: the portrait was by a professional photographer, his quarry that self-confident expression on Truffino's face.

"Y señor Gerti."

Truffino's wife was holding a toucan by the feet; behind her, three little blonde girls were dancing on a bench of bamboo slats, and on Rudy's knee was an acure, the largest of all marmots.

On the same wall with the photo hung spears, baskets, bows and arrows, blowguns and other Pemón artifacts that Truffino had collected through the years, not so much to build a collection, but to keep them from being thrown away, and to keep people from forgetting how the Pemón had lived before the Gran Sabana was opened up.

After I was seated at the table, Josef served me lunch. I was the only guest. In the distance I heard a man talking on the phone in rapid Spanish; I had also seen two chambermaids, small Indian girls, who disappeared around a corner as soon as they saw me; there had to be a cook somewhere, too, but the only person who showed his face during lunch was Josef. I did receive a visit from an animal with a long snout, round ears and brown, bristly fur with light-gray stripes through it. A tapir. When Truffino had found it in the jungle, Josef told me, the tapir was so little it could barely stand on its own legs; now it weighed at least a hundred kilos.

It stopped raining. While I inhaled the aroma of the strong Venezuelan coffee Josef served me after lunch, butterflies the size of handkerchiefs went fluttering past; these were the impressive morphos, with wingspans of up to twenty centimeters, metallic blue wings that catch the light with every movement and reflect it in a dazzling glow.
The sun broke through, the temperature skyrocketed. Josef suggested we take the boat up to Salto Sapo, one of seven waterfalls close to Canaima; I asked him whether it wouldn't be better for me to talk to señor Rudy first about our trip to Angel Falls, but Josef said we'd see to that later; at this time of year, one needed to seize every dry moment.
As we climbed into the boat, the sky turned a blue that rivaled the blue of the butterflies. It was less than half an hour to Sapo; to get as close as we could to the falls, however, we would have to walk through the jungle.

We had barely crossed the first hill when Josef bent down to examine the purple fruit of a plant. He zipped open his hip pouch and took out a little paper sack: I was to hold the sack open for him while he pressed the seeds out of the fruit. When one had an infected eye, he gave me to understand, the best thing was to put a couple of these seeds under your eyelid and keep them there for the night, so they could absorb the dirt that was causing the infection. About fifty meters further along he plucked a few young leaves from a mango tree; if you let them steep in boiling water for half a day, the infusion would heal any infection. Coming down the hill he pulled a few shoots off a liana-like vine; the bejuco decadena is by far the best remedy for diarrhea. And when we were almost at the bottom, he took some leaves from the hoja anestesia; if you chewed them when you had a toothache, the pain would be gone within fifteen minutes. His next find, the fruit of the merey, the cashew, he praised as the best of all remedies for a sore throat; at the bottom of the hill he scraped some sap off a tree trunk; a very good cure for bronchitis.

As a child, his grandmother had taught him which leaves belonged to which trees; later she taught him what you could do with those leaves. Josef had grown up in Cíudad Bolivar, the city on the broad, brown river where his mother had gone to try her luck. He was about six when his grandmother came to live with them. His Italian father had disappeared years before, his mother worked at a laundry; it was his Indian grandmother who raised him. Once he had grown up, he was curious to find out where all her knowledge had come from, and he was the only one of her grandchildren to return to the Gran Sabana. He had worked in the kitchen at the camp at Canaima until señor Rudy hired him as a guide. It was señor Rudy who had completed his education; he turned to be as knowledgeable about nature as Josef's grandmother, and what he didn't know he could look up in his library.
When we arrived at Sapo, Josef reached out and took my hand. He led me under the falls; the rock formed a roof above the path, we could sidle our way along behind the curtain of water, but one false step meant a fall of fifteen or twenty meters.

Through the veils of water I could see a mesa on the horizon, square as a block, reddish-brown and robust, a temple towering over the savanna. The foot of that temple was choked with trees and bushes; around the roof, dark clouds were swirling, as though a hurricane had broken loose up there.

To get in before the rain, we headed back to the boat. At the bottom of the hill we met up with an Indian family. In the reed basket the father carried over his shoulder I saw rolled-up hammocks, a rolled-up mosquito net, a machete, a large knife, a rifle. The children weren't carrying anything; in her basket the mother had pots and pans, a plastic dishpan and a couple of plastic bowls. These nomads' entire household could have weighed no more than fifteen kilos. There were on their way to the next conuco, where they would stay for a few months, or for a few years, depending on the quality of the soil. Most of the soil in the Gran Sabana is arid, not really fit for agriculture, and after three or four years even the best fields produce almost nothing. The plots of land the Pemón cultivate are very far apart as well, which keeps them moving all the time.

We got into the boat; the man, woman and children crossed the river barefooted, jumping from one boulder to the next, and walked off into the savanna.

Problemski Hotel | Dimitri Verhulst | £8.95 | Paperback | 0-7145-3110-3 | Feb 2005

Our Sad Children Are the Future

The Prosineckis’ little boy came home from school today with a beaming smile. He was grinning ear to ear and it’s a shame he lost part of his face in a bombing raid because otherwise he would have been a beautiful child for as long as that smile lasted. Stipe is the little rascal’s name, he’s as old as his sorrow, and if I ever accidentally have a son myself, it would be a consolation if he turned out like Stipe. Preferably, of course, in a version with a whole face.

Stipe’s got talent, even if being suckled in hell increases your chances in that department, and that’s something I’m quite willing to believe. Talent is a dungflower. But still. He’s not the only kid here who, encouraged by the child psychologist, spends his evenings in the activity room confronting his brief past with a box of coloured pencils. They all draw the same gory scenes with bombs and knives and machetes – the predictable themes. Stipe’s no different from the others in that regard. He too reaches for the red pencil more easily than, say, the green. The wounds he draws, or rather, carves into the paper with his needle-sharp pencil are no more expressionistic than the little masterpieces of the other kids his age, but I always find his composition slightly more intelligent. The lad has a feel for perspective too. For someone his age he’s a good chess player, he’s not bad at table tennis and he’s a keen singer, even if he can’t hold a tune. And when he sings, he always misses the right notes. Actually, I’d rather he didn’t sing. Little brats who play the choirboy always make me cry; I’m a sucker for those artistic platitudes. Maybe later he’ll be able to afford an extra tin of dog food a day by playing tearjerkers on a fiddle in the high street; a busker with a stuffed-up face can still do quite well. Anyway, I like him, and it did me good to see him coming home from school with his mouth forming a broad bridge between the perfect half of his face and the caved-in half.

School attendance is compulsory for our children here in Belgium and as a result they’re more streetwise than their seniors and quicker to learn dirty words in Dutch. Stipe’s latest linguistic acquisition is ‘fuck you’ and he’s proud to see his vocabulary growing. Every weekday the children are dragged out of their beds a half-hour earlier than the adults so they can get their schoolbags ready before being carted off to the local council schools on public transport by a social worker. They all go to different schools because of the dispersal policy. Like everything else, this measure is for our own good. The reasoning is that if the children from the asylum seekers’ centre were all in the same class, they wouldn’t be so keen to integrate. It’s probably true.

Which leaves Stipe sitting somewhere at the back of the class chewing the end of a biro. Unless his classmates take the trouble to use simple words and speak very slowly in Standard Dutch, he doesn’t understand them. He doesn’t understand them. Playground football is the only language they have in common and the one thing he’s picked up from his education here is that Belgians can’t shoot. Stipe has a more graphic take on it, he claims that Belgians kick the ball as if it’s a person. I told you he has talent.
But he can’t read or write. The lessons go too fast for him and he really has nothing better to do than sink his teeth into his pen and pass the time until the bell rings gazing at his teacher. It’s too bad for Stipe, but if I was him I would have demanded another teacher if she’s only there to be stared at the whole day long. Mr. Prosinecki recently asked me to go to the school with him for some kind of parent-teacher evening and I got a look at her. If Stipe used his crayons the way she uses her lipstick, he’d fail art. If you ask me, her hobby is knitting in front of the telly. During this famous parent evening she didn’t have much to say about Stipe. What did she know, after all? The boy sat there in the last row under the map of coveted Europe sucking his pen and staring at her. Drawing, he was good at that. And gym as well. (‘It’s a shame the Eastern bloc’s been abolished, Mr. Prosinecki, otherwise I’m sure we would have seen your son shine at the Olympics. I love that, gymnastics. Especially the exercises on the horse.’) He always got an F for reading and writing, but could just manage the sums. She was sorry she couldn’t spend more time on him, but well, we had to realise – ‘…you see, you know, you understand, don’t you, Mr. Prosinecki?’ – there was no point in teaching the boy to conjugate verbs when it was quite possible, just to pluck a figure out of the air, that three weeks from now he’d be kicked out of the country and never hear a word of Dutch again. She had another thirty-four children in her class and although some of them might not have had the intellectual capacities of a guppy, she could see some point in pounding certain information into those tiny little heads of theirs.

We saw, we knew, we understood.

Stipe can really drag his feet after one of these days at school. Sometimes when I go to pick him up from the bus stop he gives the impression of being about to collapse under the weight of his own superfluousness. But not today. He was smiling. And that came as a relief because it was his birthday, his sorrow had just turned ten. He’s all his fingers old.
The displacement of air during the bombing attack in his drawings sucked the right eye out of his skull. Apparently that’s not too bad when it happens, the pain comes later. Stipe has, or had, brown eyes, but the only glass eyes in stock were blue. Although possibly fashionable, something like that does tend to spoil the appetite of table companions and makes dawdling in front of the mirror fairly uninviting. This morning at breakfast the management of the asylum centre presented him with a brown replacement eye. It doesn’t always have to be a comic book or a teddy bear. Stipe couldn’t have been more pleased and things only got better. At school his class made it into in the final of the football competition and he scored the winning goal. The other boys carried him round on their shoulders. And after that, after that, he celebrated a traditional Belgian birthday. I’m not that familiar with Belgian traditions, but Stipe told me about it: everyone gets to write a birthday wish on your body with a thick greasy felt-tip. Once they’ve all written their wishes on you, they stand around in a circle and applaud. He had wishes all over his stomach and all over his back, did I want to see them?

Stipe pulled up his jumper proudly and I read, ‘Go back to your own country you filthy wog.’

‘Well? Well? What’s it say?’ he asked. ‘Can you translate it for me?’

‘Stipe football champion!’ I said and his grin grew even wider. It was the best birthday he’d ever had. For he’s a jolly good fellow.

And so say all of us.

A story set at the Three Gorges
It is hard to imagine such a thing. It is even harder to imagine that something like that could happen to you. But when a woman is thrown in jail, tied to a man she doesn’t even know, she has to deal with more than just her own anger and grievances.

After the door has been slammed shut and their cell is plunged into complete darkness, they can see absolutely nothing at all. The floor and walls feel like silky smooth moss, the air is stale, and there is a strange smell: a rank whiff of blood mixed with the overwhelming stench of urine. She props herself up with her arms, trying to raise her body off the ground, but the other person’s weight pulls her down and they both fall back where they started. The man tries his utmost to keep a polite distance from her, but the embarrassing thing is that the harder they try to avoid contact, the more likely they are to bump into one another. And each time they do, they feel more awkward about it. The last thing either of them wants is to substantiate the terrible charge made against them.

She tries as best she can not to move the hand that is tied up, moves her body backwards a little and feels her way to a corner of the room where there is a cold mat, with frayed edges, covering some straw. Who knows how many prisoners have sat here awaiting their fate?
The very thought of it makes her panic; she realises she is in a predicament she can’t escape from without help. She desperately wants to hold hands with the man who is to share her fate, to speak to him, to open up to him. But the guard who is standing on the other side of the cell door shouts at them to shut up every time they start to speak.

She can feel that the man’s breath is even and his pulse normal, which calms her down a little. They are like two halves of a talisman, and because of the unreasonableness of the world they have been united and thus realise that all was one in the beginning.

Coming to the Three Gorges had turned out to be her journey to prison. But, had she known that it would lead her to understand something which had been a mystery to her for several lives, she would not have regretted it for a single second. After all, how many people find themselves living in the world of a former incarnation? However, as yet she could see nothing; the reflection of the mountain cliff-tops was blurred by the speed of the surging river.

She never imagined the hovercraft would be so quick; it had hardly taken any time at all to reach Liang County.
A luxury cruiser was going downstream; it must have just left Liang’s little harbour. She pressed her face against the glass to get a better look at the place, a place which twenty-four hours earlier she’d never even heard of. The town was neither large nor small, and like every other city in the Three Gorges region it was divided into two very distinct halves. Everywhere in the area – be it on mountain slopes or the walls of buildings – a red line had been painted marking 175 m above sea level. Above this line was Liang’s New City – all fresh paint, new tiles, and blindingly clean glass. Below it was Liang’s Old City – a strip of grey – messy, dirty and dilapidated.
This strangely incongruous combination was like a very unusual sort of cake: the sponge had long since passed its sell-by date, but the decorative icing on top was exquisitely designed and perfectly fresh.

Liu Cui watched as the greyish little harbour grew closer. The engine stopped, and the huge cloud of spray created by the hovercraft suddenly disappeared.
When she got out she noticed something different about this particular town: it was built on a stretch of red sandstone - spread out, flat, and somehow sloppy-looking. In stark contrast, on the slopes of the majestic mountain ridge which towered behind it, stood the New City. It was incredible; her eyes lit up as soon as she saw it. The spring sun shone on both of these two layers – brilliantly reflected by the upper – but absorbed by the lower, making its greyish mass even more of an amorphous eye-sore.
When the reservoir was completed, people here would wake up one morning to a completely new world and everything that wasn’t new enough would be submerged in great all-cleansing waters of the Yangzi. She was a little confused. Her mother had arrived in Liang County more than forty years ago, so she could only have seen the lower half. Had those grey-black ramshackle buildings ever looked better than they did now?

There was only one thing she was sure of: when her mother saw that mountain ridge for the first time, she was definitely feeling a lot better than Liu Cui felt that day.
The day before she had still been in her lab at this time. She had made a rule that no lab staff were allowed to talk on the phone during working hours, not even on their mobiles. In fact Liu Cui didn’t even have a mobile phone; she thought them unnecessary. All calls would be taken by the office and could be dealt with during official breaks. The main reason for this was that every time someone took a telephone call they had to wash their hands and change their gloves; it was a hassle, but otherwise their work could get contaminated.

It came as quite a surprise when one of the office girls had run in specially to get her. The person on the phone had said it was urgent.
She had no option but to put down the glass plates in her hand. Her eyes needed a rest anyway; looking under a microscope all day is so tiring. She pushed through two doors and arrived in the administration office. There was a big window in the south-facing wall. She used to sit there looking at the green buds of the parasol tree and the white walls of the research institute opposite, but somehow the courtyard looked neither green nor white that day.
"Ah, Professor Liu!" said the person on the phone. It was a woman’s voice. She introduced herself as Ms So-and-so, "secretary of the Great Lake Development Company", and went on to say: "Director Li said that I absolutely had to get hold of you; he’s got a present he wants to give you."
Liu Cui frowned: it was all very strange. Li Lusheng, her husband, called home at least once every other day, but he would never send someone to deliver a present. He hadn’t mentioned anything the day before. And he hardly ever phoned her at the lab for fear of disturbing her while she was working. He always called her at home in the evening or at the weekend. Why would he give her work number to a woman she’d never heard of?
"What present?" she asked tersely, trying her best not to sound annoyed.
"I have no way of knowing." Her voice was young, with a hint of coquetry. "I’m on a business trip to the Ministry of Water and Electricity. I have just arrived. Director Li said I had to give you the gift in person, and that it must be today."
"Give it to me in person!?" She said, unable to hide her surprise. She glanced over at the girl who had come to the lab to call her. She was sitting quite nearby and had turned her head to see what was going on. She must have noticed the surprise in Liu Cui’s voice. What was this Li Lusheng up to? In all the ten years they’d been married, he had hardly ever done anything romantic like giving surprise presents.
"Why does it have to be given to me in person?"
Since returning to China Liu Cui had never worked anywhere but the Institute of Genetic Engineering at the Academia Sinica. She had never been to the Headquarters of the Three Gorges Dam Project, despite the fact that Li Lusheng was always asking her to go and visit him there. The thing was that he came to Beijing on business so often – sometimes twice a month – in fact he spent as much if not more time in Beijing than at the Three Gorges. It didn’t seem worth it, and, besides, she didn’t want her work to suffer just so she could go and visit her husband. In any case, he was always so busy when he came to Beijing that he hardly had any time to spend at home relaxing; goodness knows how hectic his life must be at the Dam Site. There would really be no time for them to spend together at all. There really was no point in her going.
But she had no complaints about how little time they spent together. In the ten years they’d been married it had always been the same.
"Director Li has instructed me to give it to you in person." The woman on the phone could tell that Liu Cui wasn’t in the mood for all this. Her tone became more resolute: "I am sorry to have disturbed you -– it’s just a little bag."
Liu Cui realised she had overreacted. It really wasn’t worth getting worked up about a thing like this. Suddenly she had a brilliant idea: she told the woman her mother’s telephone number and said she could deliver it in person to her, and then she’d go to her mother’s place to pick it up "as soon as she had a minute".
The woman on the phone didn’t have much choice, though you could tell from her intonation that she wasn’t best pleased. But Liu Cui wouldn’t budge. If she was going to be roped into playing this silly game, she wanted to win.
It wasn’t until Liu Cui put the phone down that she noticed something different about the windows. The glass was as old and dirty as ever, but you couldn’t even tell that the trees outside were green anymore; they looked like that were covered in dirty old rags. She usually only paid attention to the lab itself – it had to be spotless, strictly conforming to the required standards for genetic experimentation. The room completely sealed with the air-conditioning set at a constant temperature. She noticed that tiny grains of sand were creeping in through the crack in one of the windows. She touched it with her fingers and saw how fine the particles were. She looked round, but no one was looking at her – everyone was busy with paperwork or typing away at their computers. The girl who had just called her to the telephone was the only person who noticed the puzzled expression on her face: "Sandstorm," she said.
"I know. I’ve lived in Beijing for years, but it’s almost June, and haven’t we already had three sandstorms this year?"
The office, hitherto apparently oblivious to what Liu Cui was doing, suddenly broke into animated discussion. It turned out they’d been talking about the fact that the problem of sandstorms was getting worse and worse just before she came in. They’d only stopped because she was there. Some people thought it was because too much of Inner Mongolia’s wasteland had been reclaimed and turned into pasture, others thought it was something to do with overgrazing, and some people thought it was because traditional Chinese medicine shops were buying too much bramble seed (?).
But Liu Cui didn’t find the topic nearly as interesting as the experiment she was in the middle of, so she went back to the lab.

When she left the building at the end of the day she had to cover her face with a gauze scarf, as indeed did all the other women who worked there. The scarves had floral patterns on them which made them look like the kind of thing you’d wear to a masked ball. She was used to sandstorms, but she was amazed when, standing on the stone steps leading to the main entrance of the Research Institute, she looked at the street in front of her. The whole city had been smeared in a layer of yellow and the air was full of dust. The visibility was perhaps less than a hundred metres; every one of the huge skyscrapers had disappeared in the grey mists. Even the trees were suffering under the weight, their long branches sweeping the road as the wind blew. Cars had to put their headlights on and drive extremely slowly. Pedestrians seemed to appear suddenly from nowhere like ghosts, covered in dust from head to toe, walking sideways in the sand-filled winds. The setting sun was a dark yellow colour – a bit like a dawn moon.
Thinking back to discussion among the office staff she realised that the sandstorm couldn’t only be affecting Beijing – it must be sweeping the whole of China, from North to South. Half of China must be witnessing something the ancients only ever saw during a solar eclipse.
She felt sand squeezing through every seam of her clothing. It even seemed as though sand was getting through her skin, making her feel heavier. The man next to her had a cold and had to breathe through his mouth. He was spitting the sand out on the ground.

Just as she was leaving the Institute one of the girls in the office had told her that her mother had called saying that she must go to her house that very day without fail.
Her mother must be taking Li Lusheng’s mysterious present too seriously. She thought it best to go straight home; she could go to her mother’s another day. Besides, the weather was so bad, and it was getting colder by the second.
At last a taxi came. It charged her twice the normal rate, but she didn’t care. As the taxi drove submarine-like into the sea of sand, she worked out that, if every square metre of China were covered by one kilo of sand, it would be impossible to take it all back to where it came from: the transportational infrastructure just would not be up to it.
"Where to?" The driver asked.
She opened her mouth to tell him her address, but for some reason found herself saying: "Summer Palace Back Street please" – where her mother li

III. The doctors of love

"Are we going to jeopardize progress, are we going to let the machines rust because of ejaculations?"
Doctors of love, doctors of death. Is that what we can call those persecutors who, for decades, have hunted down desire, smothered pleasure and killed love? As soon as war on sex was declared, the reasons were forgotten and all arguments were valid, even the most absurd, the most sadistic, or least thought through. We could talk here about collective persecution as meant by René Girard, violence committed by murderous crowds "like the massacre of the Jews during the Black Death." Those words are not too strong, for that persecution of several generations killed what the human soul was based on, what distinguished man from beast. For a time, it killed eroticism.
The witchhunt still had all the characteristics and stereotypes of collective persecution: the legitimacy confered by the medico-religious authority and the encouragement of public opinion. Europe having just come out of religious wars, and its paranoia for a while anaesthetized, asked only to be awakened under the most trivial of pretexts. The hand of God armed then all the educators, preceptors, and finally teachers as the parents gaze lacked vigilance. It armed the priest, the pastor, the cult minister to make them respect the law of Modesty. It helped the doctor to follow the law of Nature.
We could talk about "naïve" persecutors, faced by the stupidity of their arguments and their questions. First it was the question of origin that perplexed them: how could such a practice, such a deep abomination, be born? Where and when? It seemed they never touched their innermost being. "It is difficult," Doctor Fournier told us in 1893, "to determine when this vice was born. It seems it was known in early Antiquity, (…) but, when comparing the vigour of the Ancients to ours, we are bound to believe that onanism was less common at their time than it is in our Modern times."
One has to be a mediocre observer of nature to ask oneself such questions, when masturbation is a behaviour common to man and animals and is expressed in all human populations.
Fournier pursued his discriminatory thought: "The inhabitants of the North are less prone to masturbation than those of the South, and that difference can be explained by the ardour of the climate which, by itself, draws people to venereal excesses. Besides, it’s principally in Africa and the southern countries of Asia that adults are familiar with the practice of onanism." If that "depraved" attitude seemed to him more frequent away from civilisation, he too took up the widely prevalent idea of the time, according to which it was natural for primitives and unhealthy for civilisation: "The diseases produced by the excesses of onanism become more frequent as modern societies reach a higher level of civilization."
Their persecuting thought was not concerned by contradiction or illogicality. It blindly continued with its mission to eradicate evil wherever it was to be found. In the same way as the beginning of Christianity had been marked, after the manner of Paul or Augustine, by the rigorous precepts of a few frustrated men imposing, for centuries to come, morals of inhibition, the people who prescribed that witchhunt didn’t seem to have known masturbation – or at least they were very careful not to admit it – and justified a posteriori their frustration with the condemnation of the other. It is indeed very rare for a man never to have masturbated. It is only observed in cases of deep inhibitions or severe neuroses. That lets us believe that Tissot, Membrini, Surbled, Fournier and others were sufficiently neurotic and inhibited to become deaf and blind to elementary evidences.
The story now takes on the aspect of a myth, as some clinical pseudo-cases were repeated and embellished, as well as some exemplary stories which were skilfully narrrated with the aim of making an impression on minds. It was that "unfortunate story", told by Fabrice Hilden, "of a young man whose hand has been severed and who, while on its way to recovery, wanted to satisfy his desire without the participation of his wife. This young man produced an emission of semen which was immediately followed by violent accidents, from which he died four days later." What does that incredible fable want to show us except that a single hand is enough to perpetrate the crime!
One also has to be wary of the girls’ perversion, Lignac added, for "the size of the clitoris, which sometimes equals and even outdoes that of the penis, has led women to abuse it with others. That’s the reason why the clitoris has been called men’s contempt." The sperm is not at stake any longer, the myth of the phallic woman springs up again, a woman who has all man’s prerogatives, initiative and pleasure, and represents for those very reasons, a serious social threat, the risk of a revolution, in other words, the inversion of values. The same happens here: the arguments are strong, false, but impressive. It was the clitoris being equal and even outdoing in size the male organ which animated these women with boundless desire. It was that guilty clitoris one had to cut, burn, castrate in order to return sexual impulses to normality. Lignac continued: "The clitoris is usually rather small, it starts to appear in girls at puberty and grows as they become older and have an erotic disposition. The smallest voluptuous titillation makes it swollen and, in the union of sexual organs, it stiffens like the part that distinguishes the male. For that extreme sensibility, it was called in Latin gaude mihi (give me pleasure) and Venette calls it the fire or Love’s frenzy."
Beware of those deformed clitorises and their subversive power. It was said that a woman who had one as thick as a goose neck was whipped publicly for having abused it. Here lay the real threat: women who did without men and were their equal. They were called tribades, or rubbers, but also "French polishers"! Fortunately we have books of virtues which tell us morals and condemn onanism. Doctors, employers, educators must be vigilant, for the vice creeps in even where one wouldn’t think it would. With technical progress, a thousand new reasons for torment appeared too. "The use of the sewing machine," Doctor Pouillet recounted at the beginning of the Twentieth Century, "is not only a reason for masturbation, it’s also a means. During a visit I made one day to a military dress factory, I witnessed the following scene. Among the unwavering noise of about thirty sewing machines, I suddenly heard one of those machines functioning at a higher speed than the others. I looked at the person operating it. She was an eighteen to twenty years old brunette. While she pushed through the trousers automatically that she was making up, her face was animated, her mouth slightly opened, her hands distended, and the backward and forward motion of her feet carried along the pedals at an ever-increasing speed. Soon I saw her eyes convulse, her eyelids drop, her face grow pale and her head loll backwards, her hands and legs stop to relax. A small stifled cry followed by a long sigh was lost in the workshop noise. The young woman stayed in rapture for a few seconds, took out her hankerchief, wiped her temples where beads of sweat had formed, cast a shy, shameful, and still slightly wild look around at her co-workers and went back to work." If it was not meant to condemn it, this depiction of self-love would be a most beautiful description. The tone was rather free, real and lively. I think I’m not far from believing that the author of those lines took some pleasure in contemplating mechanical love.

It was unbelieveable how easy it was to leave Korea; it came down to a small thing.
A lie, a modest nod of the head, when they asked if I were visiting. They darted looks at me, trying to hide their morbid fascination at my multi-colored face. The stark asymmetry made them uncomfortable, so what they focused on was the papers and the money I handed to them.

When the plane climbed into the air, Myu Myu whimpered. She arched her back, tugged at her hair, and screamed at the roar of engines in her head. I felt it too, the earth’s pull reaching in through our ears, endeavouring to drag us back down. There was a moment of pain, then a small, audible "pop" of release; we were free.
Next to us Sookie bounced in her seat, exclaiming over the seat belt fastener, the tray table, the windows, the earphones. She plugged into the radio and began singing aloud to the music. When the stewardess rolled a cart down the aisle and offered us peanuts and soda, Sookie narrowed her eyes and asked, loud enough to drown out the music only she could hear, "How much?"

"Complimentary." The stewardess smiled slightly and plopped the bag of nuts on our laps.

"Complimentary?" Sookie echoed, sliding the earphones off her head. "Free?"

"Don’t count on it," I grumbled, shifting Myu Myu’s weight across knees that were going numb. "Mrs Yoon will find a way to make us pay."

"That’s why I’m going to enjoy it all," Sookie shot back. "Coca-cola," she said to the stewardess, peering at the drinks in the cart. "7-Up. Orange-juice. And that - " she added, pointing to a slender red and white can.

"Bloody Mary Mix." The stewardess filled a plastic cup with ice and soda and another with thick red juice that Sookie refused to touch. Leaning over me and Myu Myu, she lined them up on Sookie’s tray. When she noticed Sookie eyeing her cart again, she turned away and pushed further up the aisle.

I opened the bag of nuts and chewed one up. Spitting it out, I placed it on Myu’s tongue. She wrinkled her face and gagged. Crushed peanuts came out in a long stream of drool which I tried to catch in the small square napkin the stewardess had handed out.

"Disgusting." Sookie shuddered, adjusting the earphones and turned her face to the window.

The smell of peanuts made my stomach lurch. After fumbling with the seat belt, I managed to unbuckle myself and stumble into the aisle. With Myu Myu on my shoulder, I made my way to the back of the plane. Behind the line of people waiting for the toilet, I paused, noticing the rear exit door. I stepped up to the small window, skimming the emergency release handle with my fingers. For a moment, my hand tightened with the urge to pull down, to open up, to float into that endless dream of blue and white, suspended between heaven and earth. I exhaled, fogging the glass with a cloud of breath, and forced myself to step away.
We filed off the plane like cattle, jostled into lines for processing. Our passports stamped, we shuffled through a corridor towards a glass door. A pack of people pressed close to a doorway that opened and closed as passengers neared it. Peering in, their faces eager, anxious, they waited. A woman behind me cried out and pushed past me, through the doors which parted like water, and into the arms of someone who could have been her sister, or mother, or someone who loved her. Travellers were claimed, enveloped in garlands of flowers, their bags taken by other hands.

Yoon was there to claim Sookie and me. Her eyes widened, then narrowed on the baby I carried. "What the fuck?" she squawked, pinching me in the ribs when she pretended to embrace me. But she pasted a smile on her face as we passed the airport security.

"This way," she took my arm, her nails digging into my flesh.

I gritted my teeth, forcing a smile as well.

Sookie sauntered up to the airport guard. "We so excited to visit this, the beautiful state of Hawaii," Sookie said, rattling on in English as the guard, startled at her approach, stared at her. "I plan to feed fish at Hanauma Bay, climb Diamond Head, see Pearl Harbour. And, of course, shop, shop, shop at Ala Moana Center."
Yoon turned to Sookie. "Shut up," she said, shaking her arm. "There’s no official here."

Sookie pouted. "But I wanted to give my speech. I thought I would be asked questions; all they did was stamp here, stamp there. I memorized for nothing."

I looked at Sookie. She grinned and winked. We scrambled to keep up with Yoon’s militant strides.

"And you," Yoon hissed at me. "I don’t know what game you’re playing. How could you bring that, that child. You don’t know how much trouble they cause – food, clothing, rent, school, doctors. It’ll be a big problem."

"I’ll pay," I said grimly.

"I’ll make sure you do."

Sliding doors opened and we stepped into sunlight, raw and bright. Bursts of color shot across my lids when I blinked. My eyes felt heavy, but I forced them open, wide as I could. I had expected to see the ocean, trees loaded with flowers, hula dancers. What I saw was: grey asphalt that steamed with heat, concrete blocks and red dirt, chicken wire and tractors.

"Construction," Yoon said, leading us into a fenced parking lot. "America is always getting better." She stopped in front of a long blue car. "Nice, isn’t it," she boasted, "Cadillac."

"Cad-o-lac," I repeated, liking the way the word slid across my tongue. I liked as well the seats, soft and sleek, like the fur of a cat. I never before felt material soft as a baby’s skin.

We fell silent during the ride, Sookie and I looking out the windows. Myu Myu played with a button on the door that made my window whirr up and down. Each time the window slid down, the blaring noise of rushing tires blasted in with hot air. Yoon grumbled and pushed a lever on her door that paralysed my window. Houses, fat and white as lices eggs, dotted the dry, brown hills that rose above us; below, sprawled under the archway of traffic, squatted a series of buildings with laundry strung out on the balconies.

"This is U.S.?" Sookie whispered to me. "This is Hawaii?" Looks like another America Town to me."

Madame Bovary, of which Chabrol is properly proud, was filmed at Lyons-la-Forêt, a spruce little town in the Eure studded with antiquaires and guard-dog notices. There is a certain misconceived rivalry between Lyons-la-Forêt and the village of Ry as to which was the ‘real’ Yonville of Flaubert’s novel. Charbol favoured Lyons, partly on grounds of topographic plausibility (which is contestable) and partly because of the shared yon of each name (though an equal case could be made for Ry being the end of ‘Bovary’). ‘I got myself hated by the people of Ry,’ he says. ‘The only part I kept of Ry was the church.’ The rivalry is misconceived for two reasons: first, because given that the village is portrayed as a steaming compost heap of bores, prudes, hypocrites, charlatans and know-nothings, why should anywhere want to claim itself as the original? But they do. Lyons-la-Forêt rather more smugly and successfully: it declines any overt boast, while knowing that it has the prettier face, and that its cinegeneity has landed both Renoir and Chabrol. Ry is more strident in its claims, not least because they are stronger. It is indeed just the sort of undistinguished one-street village Flaubert had damningly in mind. In the churchyard there is a memorial tablet from the Fédération Nationale des Ecrivains de France to Delphine Couturier (later Delamare), without whom indeed. As you descend from the church you encounter La Rôtisserie Bovary, le Grenier Bovary (antiques), Vidéo Bovary and Le Jardin d’Emma (flowers). There is even a shop, whose depressingly whimsical title would probably have amused Flaubert, called Rêve Ry. The point is thoroughly made by the time you reach the village’s main tourist attraction, the Museum of Automata, a collection of 500 moving models, three hundred of which, on the ground floor, recreate scenes from Madame Bovary. The figures are a few inches high and oscillate mechanically to background music. See everyone sway, sway together at Emma’s wedding! See Emma dancing at the ball! See Binet coming out of his duck barrel! See Hippolyte having his leg sawn off! See Emma ripping off her clothes with Léon! It is all innocently tacky and dangerously hilarious, the only sort of ‘illustration’ of his novel that Flaubert, with a grim twinkle, might for once have blessed. In the same exhibition space you can examine a life-size reconstruction of Homais’s pharmacie (in fact the Pharmacie Jouanne Fils) and two coach lamps that once belonged to Louis Campion, the ‘original’ of Rodolphe Boulanger. These souvenirs produce a curious effect. It is one thing to linger over buffed and frayed memorabilia once touched by the living hand of a great writer or artist, another to gawp at personalia that have been wrested from their original owners by the powers of a work or art. Are these really Louis Campion’s coach lamps? Not anymore. Genius has effected their legal assignment to Rodolphe Boulanger – or Rodolphe, as his reader friends know him. And so you stare at a real item that once belonged to an imaginary character.

According to Chabrol, the inhabitants of Lyons-la-Forêt were at first all Norman and mistrustful about the film, but are now not just reconciled to it but commemorating it. Chabrol’s crew ‘improved’ the village square with a fake fountain: liking it, the municipality commissioned a genuine working replica for the long term. Similarly most people in Lyons were happy to have false fronts attached to their houses and shops. There was only one recusant, an estate agent in the main square. So whenever a wide shot was required, a wagon piled high with hay would be conveniently parked to block our modern commerce. Perhaps the estate agent disapproved of the book. When Stephen Frears was preparing to film Choderlos de Laclos’s Les Liaisons Dangereuses, his location scout came across the perfect château on the border of Brittany and the Vendée. Praise was offered, negotiations entered into, times and prices discussed, agreement reached. At the last minute the owner inquired the name of the film they proposed to make. The title of Laclos’s novel was mentioned. ‘Pas de ces cochonneries sous mon toit’ (None of that filth beneath my roof’) replied the owner and chased the money away.

The story of Emma Bovary promises cinemagoers, if not exactly cochonneries, at least the life and death of a transgressive woman. MGM advertised its 1949 Vincente Minnelli production with the slogan: ‘Whatever it is that French women have, Madame Bovary has more of it!’ Stars drawn to the role (in adaptations of varying looseness) have included Lila Lee, Pola Negri, Jennifer Jones and now Isabelle Huppert. There have been American, German, Argentine, Polish, Portuguese, Russian and Indian Emmas. The first French screen Emma was Valentine Tessier in Jean Renoir’s 1933 version. ‘Half swan, half goose,’ was Pauline Kael’s unflattering description of her performance. Certainly she was too old for the part (being in her mid-forties); worse, her style of acting was too old as well, being part Comédie Française and part tie-me-to-the-track-silent-screen exaggeration. As Charles, Pierre Renoir (Jean’s brother) managed the realist mode more convincingly, but was hampered by being made up to look like Flaubert himself, so that than eerie sense develops of an author walking through a transmogrification of his own work, wondering what they’ve done with it. Apart from Hippolyte’s operation and Emma’s death, there’s a genteel and strangely underpowered feel to the whole enterprise; Darius Milhaud’s perky music sounds appropriate, which it shouldn’t.

From ‘Book Into Film: Chabrol’s Madame Bovary’ by Julian Barnes

The sun was so bright outside that he had to shut his eyes for a while. When he re-opened them, the houses on the street still looked blurred and distorted, as did the passers-by. He did not know why there were so many people. Before long he found himself walking in a procession of young men and women, obviously students, with placards and little flags. They were shouting slogans.

Julian punched his fist in the air, and yelled something too. On the placards he only recognized the word ‘Japan’. He did not understand what they were shouting, but whatever it was, he was in complete agreement.

Suddenly, the orderly demonstration turned to chaos. People in the front stopped dead, and some started running back towards him. Although there were a few who refused to budge, the streets were emptying, and Julian now saw that in front of them were hundreds of policemen in black uniforms, carrying truncheons.

With one yell the policemen charged into the crowd.

Now even the most die-hard protesters started to flee into the alleys on either side. Julian, however, remained rooted to the spot. When a policeman rushed at him, he only raised his fist to repeat the slogan. The wooden truncheon crashed into his head, his eyes blurred and he fell to the ground. Julian was confined to bed. He had suffered a head wound, and been taken to hospital. There was no skull fracture, however, and he was released after the insertion of three stitches. The students who had not run fast enough were less lucky. Whether wounded or not, there were all arrested and carted off to the police station.

His two servants seemed to realize that it was time to put their minds to looking after him. He was cosseted with delicacies like soya bean milk and steamed small dumplings, served with a poached egg soaked in rice wine for breakfast. For lunch he had two dishes plus soup – lotus seed soup. In the afternoon, he had a snack of shrimp dumplings. This was followed by a big dinner of fried beef noodles, and fresh fish from the East Lake. In order not to discourage them, he ate a little at each meal, and asked them to take the rest away. But really he had no appetite, and just wanted to be left alone. It was clear that the servants admired him for marching with the students and taking on the police.
The vases and furniture he had bought had been delivered, and were left downstairs. Only the desk and chair were moved upstairs by the servants. He no longer felt much excitement about these things.
He knew the truth behind his heroism: he had simply been careless, and not looked after himself, and been attacked. His wound merely reinforced his low opinion of himself.

It was quite possible that the policeman who hit him had realized that he was a foreigner and although too late to stop the blow, had been able to lighten it somewhat. Julian thought that if his wound had needed ten stitches, and he had been loaded into the police van, interrogated and forced to answer questions with blood all over his face, before being allowed medical treatment, then there would have been a kind of equality. As it was, even the bandages on his head looked somehow false, a badge of his status as an imperialist.

He had heard someone come upstairs, with light rhythmical steps. Julian listened intently. It could not be one of his servants, since he had not called. The steps hesitated and stopped. Then there came the knock at his bedroom door.

He did not respond immediately. His heart leapt. It could only be her. He thought he had succeeded in forgetting her. In fact he had been longing to see her, and now she had come.

The door opened.

The first thing he saw was her arm, with a green jade bracelet at the wrist. Her long, thin fingers rested on the doorknob. Then he saw her feet, in plain blue velvet shoes, with a low heel. She was smartly dressed (was it for his benefit?) in wide trousers, and a short tight-fitting top. Now he saw the whole of her. She looked like a court lady in a painting, her hair in a single plait. He had not imagined that she would take this amount of trouble to impress him, and he was enchanted. Under her fringe, she had a high forehead. He loved women with high, open foreheads, like his mother and aunt.

She came to his bedside without speaking. Julian’s heart missed a beat, and his breathing quickened.
She walked to the window to pull the curtain half across, to keep the sun off his bed.

Julian smiled his usual mocking smile, and she gave an answering wry smile. She had learned fast, he was pleased to see. And he instantly felt cheered by her presence.

She sat down on the edge of his bed, looking him up and down. She wasn’t wearing glasses, they were in her hand. As he watched her face, she suddenly rose and went to examine his boat-shaped table. He felt that he saw her eyes moistening.

Somehow he knew that she had come to care for him. His injury gave her a perfectly good reason.
She touched his forehead, her fingers circling round the wound, and said in a low voice, ‘You’ve still got a bit of a temperature.’

He wanted to speak, but she put her finger first on his lips, then on her own very much like the way mother used to when she came to say goodnight. She ordered his servant to bring up some chicken soup boiled with red dates, and watched him drink until it was all gone.

With her close beside him, he felt that what he wanted was quite simple, far simpler than he had ever imagined. He felt at peace. After his full meal, his mind was hazy, and the tension of the last few days finally melted away. Frustration and self-pity were replaced by a comforting drowsiness. He closed his eyes, and let himself slide down, down…….. His breathing became more regular, and he slept for a long time.

Sooner or later I will get up and open that door and leave this building and get a gun. Sooner or later the demons will sleep, if only for a moment. They always do. I/ll be ready. Oh yes, this time I shall be ready, as well as willing and able. I know just where the shop is. And the hours. I/ll get there. Sooner or later. Its inevitable.Hi, what can I do for you?
Well… I was thinking of buying a gun.
Yeah, well thats something we have plenty of. Funny how thats true of gun shops, eh? So, what did you have in mind, AK-47, pellet pistol, elephant gun, bazooka, bubble gum that is, what can I do you for?
Well, Im not sure, you know. I mean—
You thinking in terms of a rifle, a handgun, a—
Oh yeah. A handgun. Nothing big, you know. A handgun.
Well, come over here. Got a whole display case of handguns. Target pistols, semiautomatics, revolvers, 22s, 38s, 357s, 45s.
Damn, sure are a lot of them, arent there?
Yeah, something for every need. I assume youre not a hit man, right?
Huh? What—
Relax. Only kidding. I mean you really dont know from guns, right?
Yeah.
Well, depends on what you want it for. Protection, right? Something to have around the house in case the moving men from B&E show up at 3 in the morning, right?
Huh, I dont—
Intruders. Burglars. 2nd storey men. Sneak thieves.
Oh… yes, yes. Protection. Cant be too careful these days, uh can you?
Thats right buddy. I got one of each of these at home.
Huh?
Joshing man. Just putting you on. A little joke.
Oh. Yeah.
So, what do you think youd like? Personally, I think you should go for this 357 here. Good weight. Good accuracy. Plenty of stopping power. Hit a guy anywhere and hes not moving. Bet your ass on that. Here give it a heft.
Oh, I dont—
Hey, its not loaded. Comeon, Im crazy not stupid. Relax. Here. Just see how it feels in your hand. Yeah, thats it.
Oh, its heavy. I had no idea handguns were so heavy.
Yeah, they look light in the movies, dont they? The way they run around firing at everything that moves.
Yeah…
Youll get use to the weight. I assume youre going to take it to a range and get used to firing it—
Oh yes—
Which reminds me, youll need a cleaning kit. Important you keep your weapon cleaned and oiled. Dont want it blowing up in your face.
Oh my god, no. Absolutely not. Oh no, no.
Dont worry about anything you buy here. All guaranteed. No weapon you purchase from me will ever misfire due to a defect in the weapon. Guaranteed. Go ahead, check it out. Imagine having someone shove that in your face. Youd shit a brick, right?
The more I look at it the bigger it gets.
Go ahead, hold it out in front of you and pull the trigger a few times.
It doesnt work, I cant pull it back.
You got the safety on.
Safety?
Yeah. Haha, you really are a novice. Look, see this, its the safety, so it cant accidentally be discharged. Have to push it over like this.
Oh, I see. But does a set of instructions come with it, I mean how will I know what to do??
I/ll be sure to give you some diagrams and a pamphlet. With the cleaning kit. But make sure you go to the range like I said.
Oh yes. Definitely. Dont want any mishaps.
Right. So, I assume youll want a box of ammo with that.
I guess so, if you think I should.
No good without it, right?
Not much.
Okay, let me fill in this form so we can get you approved. Put this information into the computer and we/ll get the ok before I finish wrapping this up. Great system now, no more waiting period. Check you out just like that. Unless youre an excon or escaped murderer or something.
No, no problem with—
Damn, now what in the hell does that mean?
Something wrong?
With the system. Cant process the request. Let me give them a call….
Well, whats wrong? What did they say?
Theres some sort of glitch in the software. Its new and I guess they havent ironed out all the wrinkles. Afraid youre going to have to wait a few days until they straighten out the problem.
A few days?
I/ll give you a call. This number, right?
What???? Oh yeah, thats my number. But theres nothing I can do? Go to the police station?
Wont do you any good. Its all the same system and the computer aint working.
Oh….
Hey, its alright. Dont look so glum. I/ll have this all ready for you as soon as the ok comes in an all youll have to do is come an pick it up. Hey, its alright buddy. Comeon, perk up. You look like you just lost your best friend or something. Its just a couple of days. Hey, if you get robbed before I get the ok, I/ll give you the gun for nothing, gratis. Hows that?
I just thought….So now I just sit here and wait. The rotten system isnt functioning. Always the system. Cant escape it. This stinking lousy life. Just wants to torture me. I finally find a purpose to my life and they thwart me. Wont even let me kill myself for krists sake. What kind of madness is that? They just keep squeezing until theres nothing left. The torturous world just gets smaller and smaller until youre locked in a fucking closet, sealed in the son of a bitch. A living horror story. Buried alive. Hearing every grain of dirt falling on your coffin, thumping through your ears, your head and down through your body to your toes and back again, thump, thump… and scratch… scratch the wood, a dead tree, trying to get out jesus krist, how can they do that to you? Can you imagine what it must sound like to be nailed in a casket with a ton of dirt on top of you and youre scratching the wood? It must feel like ice picks going into your ears and eyes, long thin picks of pure ice o krist, how long will it take them to give me an ok?

Meanwhile, in the outside world, everything was changing faster and more than we realized. We thought we were doing the same things we’d always done because the changes happened in slow motion, but happen they did, and when we looked out the window again we were someplace else.

We had run through a variety of aesthetic games: little magazines for which we couldn’t raise any bread, theatre projects in gigantic lofts which never materialized, a visit by me and Susan to Ezra Pound, who wanted us single-handed to change the nature of the programming on nationwide television. Leslie choreographed and produced his first dance recital; Peter’s fantasy paintings became eight feet wide and gloomier; I put together This Kind of Bird Flies Backward, my first book of poems, and Pete and Leslie solemnly assured me that it could not be published because no one would understand a word of the street slang. Don wasn’t accepted at Actor’s Studio and made a movie instead. Most of his friends were accepted and stopped coming to see us. Miles Davis moved away from Tenth Avenue; we no longer ran into him at three in the afternoon hailing a taxi in his dark glasses, looking as if her had just gotten up.

We lived through the horror of the 1956 election as we had lived through the horror of the Rosenberg executions and the Hungarian revolution: paranoid, glued to the radio, and talking endlessly of where we could possibly go into exile. Every inch of walls and floor in the apartment was covered with murals and wise sayings: ‘The unicorns shall inherit the earth.’ ‘Sacrifice everything to the clean line.’ ‘Think no twisty thoughts.’ Etc., etc. Wilhelm Reich was in federal prison.

The first fallout terror had finally struck, and a group of people were buying land in Montana to construct a city under a lead dome. In New York, the beginnings of neo-fascist city planning were stirring, and the entire area north of our pad was slated for destruction, to make way for what was to become Lincoln Center. The house next door to us, which had been empty for twenty-eight years, and had functioned as our own private garbage dump for as long as we lived there, was suddenly torn down, leaving a number of bums homeless and scattering thousands of rats – most of them into our walls.

Most of the more outrageous gay bars had been closed, and people cruised Central Park West more cautiously: there were many plainclothes busts. There were more and more drugs available: cocaine and opium, as well as the ubiquitous heroin, but hallucinogens hadn’t hit the scene as yet. The affluent post-Korean-war society was settling down to a grimmer, more long-term ugliness. At that moment, there really seemed to be no way out.

As far as we knew, there was only a small handful of us – perhaps forty or fifty in the city – who knew what we knew: who raced about in Levis and work shirts, made art, smoked dope, dug the new jazz, and spoke a bastardization of the black argot. We surmised that there might be another fifty living in San Francisco, and perhaps a hundred more scattered throughout the country: Chicago, New Orleans, etc., but our isolation was total and impenetrable, and we did not try to communicate with even this small handful of our confreres. Our chief concern was to keep our integrity (much time and energy went into defining the concept of the ‘sellout’) and to keep our cool: a hard, clean edge and definition in the midst of the terrifying indifference and sentimentality around us – ‘media mush’. We looked to each other for comfort, for praise, for love, and shut out the rest of the world.

Then one evening – it was an evening like many others, there were some twelve or fourteen people eating supper, including Pete and Don and some Studio people, Betty McPeters and her entourage, people were milling about, drinking wine, talking emphatically in small groups while Beatrice Harmon and I were getting the meal together – the priestly ex-book-thief arrived and thrust a small black and white book into my hand, saying ‘I think this might interest you.’ I took it and flipped it open idly, still intent on dishing out beef stew, and found myself in the middle of Howl by Allen Ginsberg. Put down the ladle and turned to the beginning and was caught up immediately in that sad, powerful opening: ‘I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness…’

I was too turned on to concern myself with stew. I handed it over to Beatrice and, without even thanking Bradley, walked out the front door with his new book. Walked the few blocks to the pier on Sixtieth Street and sat down by the Hudson River to read and come to terms with what was happening. The phrase ‘breaking ground’ kept coming into my head. I knew that this Allen Ginsberg, whoever he was, had broken new ground for all of us – all few hundred of us – simply by getting this published. I had no idea yet what that meant, how far it would take us.

The poem put a certain heaviness in me, too. It followed that if there was one Allen there must be more, other people besides my few buddies writing what they spoke, what they heard, living, however obscurely and shamefully, what they knew, hiding out here and there as we were – and now suddenly, about to speak out. For I sensed that Allen was only, could only be, the vanguard of a much larger thing. All the people who, like me, had hidden and skulked, writing down what they knew for a small handful of friends – and even those friends claiming it ‘couldn’t be published’ – waiting with only a slight bitterness for the thing to end, for man’s era to draw to a close in a blaze of radiation – all these would now step forward and say their piece. Not many would hear them, but they would, finally, hear each other. I was about to meet my brothers and sisters.

We had come of age. I was frightened and a little sad. I already clung instinctively to the easy, unselfconscious Bohemianism we had maintained at the pad, our outspoken sense that we were alone in a strange world, a sense that kept us proud and bound to each other. But for the moment regret for what we might be losing was buried under a sweeping sense of exhilaration, of glee; someone was speaking for all of us, and the poem was good. I was high and delighted. I made my way back to the house and to supper and we read Howl together, I read it aloud to everyone. A new era had begun.