And the way their third partner Gabriela stares at him! He never ceases to amaze her. She’s younger than the men are, hired straight out of school a year or two ago, to keep up their energy, Hank explained. She has a piercing eye, and a sharp tongue as well, and a wild laugh, usually inspired by her two partners. They can lay her flat on the floor.
It may be a while before work on my house is completed.
Other entertainment: I am joined here by a fellow exile, a Soviet woman named Nadezhda Katayev. She is here visiting an acquaintance of hers, one Doris Nakayama. Doris works in superconductors, and has perhaps been affected by too close contact with her materials. She is cool, tough, humorless; boggled by my bulk and confused by my speech. But she does have this friend Nadezhda, who, if she were not in her seventies and the spitting image of my grandmother, would soon be the object of my advances. Maybe she will be anyway. We loaf around town together like two aging diplomats, assigned to a backwater post in the twilight of our careers.
Our latest expedition was to a garden party. Ah yes, I thought: country culture. A pastoral Proustian affair, drinks in the topiary, flower-beds and hedges, perhaps even a maze. Nadezhda and I biked over together, me dressed in colonial whites, trundling along with other cyclists gazelling by me on both sides, and Nadezhda in a flower print dress which constantly threatened to get caught in the spokes of her bike.
We were greeted at the door of the Sanchez’s big communal house by our hostess Ramona Sanchez, who was dressed in her usual outfit of gym shorts and a T-shirt, plus giant canvas gardening gloves. Yes, this was a garden party; meaning we all were supposed to go out and work in the garden.
So I spent the better part of an afternoon sitting in my whites on newly turned earth, making repartee with dissected worms and keeping close track of the progress of my blisters. The only consolations were the beer, Nadezhda’s mordant commentary, muttered to me in delicious counterpoint to her polite public pronouncements, and the sight of Ramona Sanchez’s long and leggy legs. Ramona is the town beauty; she looks like either Ingrid Bergman or Belinda Brav, depending on whether you take my word or Nadezhda’s. Currently she is the focus of a great deal of gossip, as she recently broke up with her long-time mate Alfredo the mayor. My friend Kevin is interested in taking Alfredo’s place, but then so am I—the difference being that Ramona appears to reciprocate some of Kevin’s regard, while for me she has only a disinterested friendliness.
Though she did join me to weed for a half hour or so. I argued the civil rights of the poor decimated or bimated worms, writhing around us. Ramona assured me in her best biology teacher style that they were beneath pain, and that I would approve the sacrifice when I ate the food that resulted from it. A specialty of the area? I asked, squinting with trepidation. Luckily she only meant the salad.
Well, you get the idea. It really exists! Arcadia! Bucolica! Marx’s “idiocy of rural life”! I don’t think I truly believed it until now.
Not that the town is free of trouble! My daily workload reminds me constantly that in fact it exists entangled in intricate webs of law. Their system is a mix, combining a communalism of the Santa Rosa model—land and public utilities owned in common, residents required to do ten hours a week of town work, a couple of town-owned businesses in operation to use all the labor available, that sort of thing—with aspects of the new federal modeclass="underline" residents are taxed more and more heavily as they approach the personal income cap, and they can direct 60 percent of their taxes to whatever services they support the most. Businesses based in town are subject to the same sort of graduated system. I am familiar with much of this from my years in Bishop, which has a similar system. As usual in these set-ups, the town is fairly wealthy, even if it is avoided by businesses looking for the best break possible. From all the income generated, a town share is distributed back out to the citizens, which comes to about twice the national income floor. But people still complain that it isn’t higher. Everyone wants to be a hundred. And here they believe that a properly run town could make everyone hit the cap as a matter of course. Thus there is the kind of intense involvement with town politics typical of these set-ups, government mixed with business mixed with life-styles, etc.
And so there is also the usual array of Machiavellian battles. Prominent among these at the moment is an attempt by the mayor to appropriate an empty hilltop for his own company’s offices. He’s got at least an even chance of succeeding, I’d say; he appears popular, and people want the town shares larger. Moving Heartech into town would certainly do that, as it’s a very successful medtech company, right at the legal limit for company size.
The opposition to the mayor comes mainly from Kevin and his friends, and they are getting a quick education, with little or no help from the Green party brass, a fact I find faintly suspicious. Most recently they got the council to order an EIS for the zoning change that would make development possible, and they thought this was a big victory. You see what I mean about naïveté! Naturally the town planner, a functionary of the mayor’s, went out and hired Higgins, Ramirez and Bretner to do the EIS, so we’ll get another LA Special in a few weeks from the infamous HRB, urging the creation of an environment by development as soon as possible. And my friends will learn that an EIS is just one more cannon on the battlefield, to be turned in different directions depending on who holds it. I’m going to take them up to Sally and let her educate them.
But enough for this time, or too much.
Do write again. I know it is a lost and dead form of communication, but surely we can say things in correspondence that calls would never allow. As for instance, I miss you. In fact I miss almost all of my life in Chicago, which has disappeared like a long vivid dream. “I feel as if great blocks of my life have broken off and fallen into the sea,” isn’t that how Durrell puts it in the Quartet? I suppose I should consider El Modena my Cycladean isle, removed from the Alexandrian complexities of Chi and my life there; here I can do my work in peace, far from the miseries of the entanglement with E, etc. And there’s something to it. Waking every morning to yet another sunny day, I do feel a Grecian sense of light, of ease. It is no accident that the old real estate hucksters called this coast Mediterranean.
So, I will sit under my lemon trees, recover, write my reflections on a hillside Venus. Anxiously await your next. Thanks for sending the latest poems as well. You are as clear as Stevens; forge on with that encouragement in mind. Meanwhile I remain,
4
“Light cracks on the black gloss of the canal, and a gondola oar squeaks under us. Standing on the moonlit bridge, laughing together, listening to the campanile strike midnight, I decide to change Kid Death’s hair from black to red—”
Something like that. Ah yes—the vibrant author’s journal in The Einstein Intersection, young mind speaking to young mind, brilliant flashes of light in the head. No doubt my image of Europe owes much to it. But what I’ve found… could half a century have changed that much? History, change—rate constants, sure. It feels so much as if things are accelerating. A wind blows through the fabric of time, things change faster than we can imagine. Punctuated equilibrium, without the equilibrium. Hey, Mr. Delany, here I am in Europe writing a book too! But yesterday I spent the morning at the Fremdenkontrolle, arguing in my atrocious German which always makes me feel brain-damaged, getting nowhere. They really are going to kick me out. And in the afternoon I did laundry, running around the building in the rain to the laundry room, Liddy howling upstairs at a banged knee. Last load dry and piled in the red basket, jogging round the front I caught my toe on a board covering the sidewalk next to some street work, fell and spilled clothes all over the mud of the torn-up street. I sat on the curb and almost cried. What happened, Mr. Delany? How come instead of wandering the night canals I’m dumping my laundry in the street? How come when I consider revisions it’s not “change Kid Death’s hair from black to red” but “throw out the first draft and start the whole thing over”?