The Paris Review's Blog, page 91

The Review’s Review: Out of Time

TGV 9576 // Munich – Strasbourg. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

For years, John Edgar Wideman has been dropping simple words from his sentences. Here’s the opening line from “Nat Turner Confesses,” featured in his collection American Histories: “Nat Turner no stranger to me.” Why not “Nat Turner is no stranger to me”? Various answers to that question. Wideman’s prose has long had a breathless, out-of-time quality to it, which becomes more pronounced as he gets older. Wideman, a Pittsburgh-raised writer as versatile and openly ambitious as his late friend, the underappreciated Chicago author Leon Forrest, is now eighty years old. He has published four books with Scribner in the last six years: Writing to Save a Life and three short story collections featuring old and new work—American Histories, You Made Me Love You, and Look for Me and I’ll Be Gone.

This urgent productivity reflects a central aesthetic question: How much do I need to turn the specimen of history over and over again until it is understood, that is, seen by many different pairs of eyes from many different places and times? It’s also a confession of mortality. (I don’t think I’m psychoanalyzing; Wideman writes extensively about aging and legacy in his recent work.) For almost half of his life, since the publication of his memoir Brothers and Keepers in 1984, Wideman has wrestled with what his own life meant as his younger brother, Robert, and his son, Jacob, languished in prison for unrelated murder convictions. Robert Wideman’s sentence was commuted in 2019. After a brief release on home arrest in 2016-2017, Jacob was re-imprisoned for reportedly violating his parole. The particularly grueling, now-infamous sagas of John Wideman’s life are recurring subjects in his work. He is one of the great authors fixated on alternate lives—the lives that could have been, that probably were, on some other timeline—and in reading through his latest collections, I’m reminded of how silly it would be to try to categorize him as a writer of fiction or nonfiction.

From his story “Shape the World Is In”: “If a world is not known, how would anyone recognize its shape, even if they happened to catch a glimpse … I’m smart enough to know better, but ask my unanswerable question anyway. What surrounds me. How does it shape my beginning and end. The question worries me. I can’t help asking it.” —Aaron Robertson

I struggled to pull an outfit together one morning this week, and that same night I returned to Michelle Memran’s documentary The Rest I Make Up, a portrait of her friendship with the late Cuban-American dramatist María Irene Fornés, whose intractable wit and haphazard style bring me back to life on my most sartorially challenged days. “I have so much style you think it’s mistakes,” Fornés says early in the film, dressed in monochrome red velvet, wool, and tartan with incomparable ease. A leading playwright in the off-off-Broadway circuits of the sixties and seventies, her singular teaching and writing technique revolved around improvisation as method. The film is its own exercise in improvisation: untrained as a filmmaker, Memran began collecting footage of Fornés on a Hi8 camcorder years before the project took shape, just as they were becoming friends and just before Fornés began to deal with the onset of memory loss. Over the course of more than a decade, as her memory deteriorates, the camera starts to bear the evidence of her life—what happened five years ago, five months ago, last week, yesterday, this morning. Memran does not move the camera like a professional, and these intimate, low-resolution shots, cut with archival footage and more formally staged interviews with Fornés’s vast network of students, mentors, ex-lovers, and collaborators, are what make the film such a pleasure to watch. The portrait of Fornés that emerges is a deep collaboration between Fornés and Memran, made possible by the life they share as friends. “The artist is a person who is made of two: one who goes in and another who goes out,” Fornés tells Memran later in the film. “The one who goes in enters through observation and, in some mysterious way, then transforms it to produce a thought, a poem.” If the pair of them are twins, the camera is their third. Especially as her memory loss becomes more acute, Fornés is transfixed by the camera and by Memran as she holds it: “You want me to tell the world how much I love you, what a good camera lady you are, how you hold that black shapeless thing in front of your face and become gorgeous.” In front of the lens she is on, activated, in vogue, a one-minute movie star of her own making. It’s a moving study in biography and its collaborative failures, asking how it might be possible to write a life when memory is elusive. —Oriana Ullman

Cat Power’s Chan Marshall has always had a special relationship to other people’s songs—she reveals herself in them, troweling up unsuspected depths out of unassuming pop tunes and finding her own voice hidden in other people’s words and chords. Covers is her third full-length album devoted to other songwriters’ music, following 2018’s remarkable collection of stripped down originals, Wanderer. It’s as if Marshall turns to covers to recharge after the huge expenditure of emotional energy her relentlessly intense and searching songs must demand. Covers finds her in a typically searching and melancholy mood; these songs—Dead Man’s Bones’s “Pa Pa Power,” Iggy Pop’s “Endless Sea,” and a soul-stopping version of the Pogues’ “A Pair of Brown Eyes”—are reaching out from far away, distant signals reminding me I’m not alone in my yearning for daily shreds of hope. I don’t know how Cat Power has kept this up for almost three decades, steadfastly extending her shaky hand, but her considerable powers are undiminished. —Craig Morgan Teicher

This Sunday is New York City Ballet’s last performance of their “New Combinations” trilogy of contemporary(ish) pieces, the last of which is Danse à Grande Vitesse, Christopher Wheeldon’s 2006 ballet inspired by France’s TGV train network (train à grande vitesse). There’s little here evoking passenger-centric travel experiences (I expected, maybe, a meditative “world going by my window” sequence); it’s more of a SpaceX fantasy of hi-modern, hi-speed kinetics. Ballet might be the ultimate transhumanist art form: pointe shoes are early examples of (brutal) prostheses that, unlike most of body mod, actually achieve something strange and beautiful—a truly superhuman transcendence. Wheeldon’s choreography avoids the boring, barefooted—literally pedestrian—quality plaguing modern dance. Instead, he highlights extreme athleticism and classic male/female partner work, which, here, rather than illustrating a romance, serves to manifest more abstract power dynamics: the couples’ controlled and looping lifts bring to mind molecular collisions and molar lines of force. Each dancer’s body moves on a razor’s edge. It was like watching twenty-six live coins spinning indefinitely on a mirrored surface. I felt genuinely awed: humans are amazing, and so are trains. And Grimes, I think, should be doing Blade Runner Ballet. —Olivia Kan-Sperling

If There’s a Rip in It: A Conversation with Scott Covert

Scott Covert in 1981.

The artist Scott Covert is easy to spot in a crowd by his thick-framed glasses and mop of blond hair. I met him at a party at the Review’s Chelsea office, where I noticed him slipping behind the makeshift bar to swipe a slice from a tower of pizza boxes piled in the corner. “I’m thinking of moving to Paris,” he later told me, “because I don’t speak the language.” Born in 1954 in Edison, New Jersey, he began making after-school trips to New York City at the age of thirteen, catching the bus or stealing unattended cars to get there. After a couple of studio courses at Indiana University and a semester at San Francisco Art Institute, Covert dropped out of school and taught himself to paint. In the late seventies and eighties, he became a fixture of the East Village arts scene that came to be known as “Downtown,” cofounding Playhouse 57 with the theater artist Andy Rees, at the storied performance venue and nightclub Club 57 at 57 Saint Marks Place. Covert had his first solo show, curated by Keith Haring, there in 1979. He has since exhibited at galleries in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Paris; his work appears in collections around the globe. 

Covert leads a peripatetic life. For some four decades he has crisscrossed the country in his car and flown across hemispheres in search of the graves of composers, rock stars, poets, serial killers, and other cultural totems. From their headstones, he makes on-site rubbings with oil wax crayons, using myriad pigments and varying amounts of pressure. The canvases that make up the Monument Paintings, an ongoing series, are laden with text—layers of names, birth and death dates, epitaphs, and fleur-de-lis—and topped with scribbles and swaths of color. Covert renders some celebrity names nearly indecipherable through the sheer density of their replication; others appear alone in the limelight of the canvas. The paintings showcase his acute sense for depth and texture, as well as his attunement to death’s magnetism and absurdity. His work has taken him to Detroit, Montparnasse, Moscow, Luxor, Cairo, and Geneva. Soon, he intends to visit the Trinity nuclear testing site in New Mexico dubbed ground zero: “I’m hoping the government will give me some help. Get some soldiers out there to lift things for me.”

INTERVIEWER

When you were a teenager growing up in Edison, were you already hoping to pursue visual art?

COVERT

No, I was more of a dancer. I took classical ballet, jazz, tap. I got to meet faggots because they were all there. And then I realized it was all goofy, and I ran to New York. 

INTERVIEWER

So dance fed naturally into performance art?

COVERT

Yeah. I always felt I was special. I never felt inferior, even though the kids in Edison hated me, they banged me up. I have scars all over my body. I was really tortured there—head banged against the curb. I was pretty. You know what I mean? But they didn’t make me dress butch—if anything it made me react against them. 

INTERVIEWER

You’ve described attending your grandfather’s open-casket funeral service when you were eight years old. There’s so much pageantry in the Catholic Church. 

COVERT

“Mary, we crown thee with blossoms.” I loved the May Crownings. 

INTERVIEWER

Did Catholicism and its extravagant treatment of death leave a mark on your work?

COVERT

In eighth grade, I was told by a nun that I was going to burn in hell—I was a homosexual and there was no hope for me. So I went through life with that attitude—I’m going to be burning in hell, what the fuck makes the difference? It didn’t make me a mean person. I didn’t feel like I could go out and kill people or anything like that, because I didn’t want to kill people. But that’s what Catholicism did for me. I was always going to die. I was going to be condemned. 

But then, my brother’s a priest. He’s a very, very cool priest. When I was a kid and I was a faggot, he was the one who said, “God has preached that he is the son of man. That means man is God. If you feel no guilt for what you are doing, then you are not going to be in trouble.” I was taught that I was the eye of judgment of my life. I’m a part of God, and who knows more of what I’ve done in my life than me?

INTERVIEWER

Club 57 was located in the basement of a Polish church.

COVERT

An excommunicated Polish church.

INTERVIEWER

Excommunicated for what reason?

COVERT

Because it was basically just getting people into the country. 

INTERVIEWER

How did Playhouse 57 get started? 

COVERT

Andy Rees was my best friend. He was a genius. He knew everything about every movie, every Broadway musical. He had videotapes—which was unusual back then—to show me. He turned me onto Lana Turner and Ziegfeld Girl. And he was like me. I am a person of action, I don’t sit around and talk about things. It’s just part of my nature. “We should clean the house.” I don’t say that. I clean the house. Not recently, but … 

INTERVIEWER

I know there was a ladies’ wrestling night and a film series at Club 57.

COVERT

Monster Movie Club. I was the first person to put Kenneth Anger’s whole Magick Lantern Cycle together and show it. Because we were a church group, we could rent different films from the collection at MoMA at almost no cost. 

INTERVIEWER

And you were acting as well. Did you go to the theater a lot? 

COVERT

I loved the ballet, and I was fortunate enough to be able to go to New York City Ballet for free. At that time there was a doorman and elevator-man strike at the building I worked in on West Sixty-Seventh, where George Balanchine lived. Everybody had to have their turn at the elevator. I got out of work one day, and there was Balanchine, working the elevator. I said, “No, Mr. B. I will do your shift. You go and do what you’ve got to do.” So I did his shift, and the next thing you know, whenever I wanted to, I could go to the viewing box. 

That First Covid Spring, Sag Harbor, 2020. Wax oil crayon, acrylic, spray paint on paper. 29 x 23 in. Courtesy of the artist.

INTERVIEWER

The East Village of that period has been heavily mythologized as “Downtown.” What was it like to be there?

COVERT

There were three hundred people in society. Everybody else was other people that you didn’t get involved with. But there were only, like, three hundred people that would go to the Mudd Club, that would go up to Hurrah, that would go to Danceteria. Everybody knew each other, and everybody was making art. No matter what kind of drugs you were on, everybody was making something. 

I was a drag queen, too. I would do things at Club 57, quick little numbers. Andy Rees and I would go out, and he would be Martha Stevens, Connie Stevens’s second-oldest daughter. And he would wheel me in a wheelchair. I swear to God, one day, we were walking down the street like that and Richard Sohl, the pianist for Patti Smith, was walking by in drag pushing a baby carriage. You didn’t do things because you needed applause. You did things because you needed to do them. You had fun. It wasn’t about the recognition.

It was this group of kids in lower Manhattan, and the rest of Manhattan was something else. I felt like it was a family. Even if you didn’t like each other—you didn’t like everybody in your family. Cookie was very much a mother figure for me. Rene Ricard was, too.

INTERVIEWER

How did you meet Cookie Mueller initially?

COVERT

Drugs. Just from being around. After I made my first rubbing at the grave of Florence Ballard, the Supreme, I ran back to Cookie. And she loved it. She told me to quit acting to do this, because this was very modern. She said I had to focus on one thing, that I couldn’t do everything. Cookie is the one who made me do this.

INTERVIEWER

You started to focus more on painting then, in 1985, and I wonder how influential that downtown environment was on your work? 

COVERT

I guess it was. Though I never associated it with all my friends dying and going to cemeteries. Because I really suffered, I lost so many people during the AIDS epidemic. I became a full-blown alcoholic, a drug addict, because I was sure I was the next one to die. So who the fuck cares? Pour me another vodka. 

But I didn’t relate that to my work at all. I just related the work to what I liked doing, and going to cemeteries got me out of the city. So I started traveling. I liked that. I was making abstract paintings my own way, but I was making abstract paintings. I thought they would be the last paintings of the twentieth century. 

INTERVIEWER

So the journey to find the graves was always an important part of the work. You’ve written about “the moments between the brushstrokes.” What are your routines? Do you prefer to work in the morning?

COVERT

I like to get out there and just spend a full day. I don’t stop. The driving is a part of the process. I don’t listen to music in the car. I have no problem sitting with my own thoughts. When I drive, I like to make my thoughts rest. I notice the landscape. I enjoy seeing how it changes from going through the flatlands into the hills to the tall grass to the woods.

INTERVIEWER

This makes me think of David Wojnarowicz’s memoir Close to the Knives. There are these beautiful, hallucinogenic descriptions of driving through the desert, below “the domed curve of the heavens.”

COVERT

I’ll have to read those. On the Road was the most boring thing I’ve ever read. I thought, Ugh. Heterosexuals, ew.   

INTERVIEWER

How do you select your subjects? Do you decide spontaneously while you’re standing in a graveyard, or do you have an idea before you arrive?

COVERT

No, nothing is planned out in my life. I’m here in the moment. Let’s see what happens when I get there, because it might start pouring rain. It’s always about what’s going to happen.      

The first time I went to Andy Warhol’s grave, it was a big deal. At the time, I would do local cemeteries in New York—Woodlawn, or Leonard Bernstein in Green-Wood. I was working for this company, D. F. King, persuading people how to vote on their stocks. I had no idea what I was talking about, but I was very good at it, so I saved up enough to get an airline ticket to Pittsburgh. I took a train out to Castle Shannon, where Andy’s buried, and it was a windy day. I’d brought my paintings in a suitcase, and I was sitting on the grave with them next to me. Then I saw all of my stuff—and I was working mostly on paper then—blowing across the cemetery. 

Instead of getting upset, I said, Well, this is the way it’s going to be. Things are going to get beaten up. Several months later, there was Julian Schnabel carrying his canvases across the beach to get them beaten up. So, I said, Oh, I’m on the right track. If there’s a rip in it, it’s okay.

INTERVIEWER

Do you ever abandon a canvas?

COVERT

I leave them behind, but then I return. I have a whole bunch of paintings now that I could put thin layers of oil paint on top to see what’s underneath. There’s always something you can do with something. Right now, I’m getting into collage. When I was in Paris, I couldn’t bring as many canvases as I wanted, so I took stationery from the hotel and just started doing rubbings of Schiaparelli—you know, the smaller names. Now I’m starting to glue them onto larger pieces of paper, with other ephemera, and see what that becomes.

INTERVIEWER

Can you tell me about the piece you’re working on now?

COVERT

It’s Jacques Rigaut and Raymond Johnson. Two suicide people. And I just found Barbette’s grave in Texas. She also committed suicide—the trapeze artist who was in drag. Man Ray photographed him a lot. 

I wanted to put in Andrea Feldman, the Warhol superstar, but she was in an unmarked grave. I’m going to see if I can find a headstone for her. Andrea Feldman was a hero. She was just the coolest chick. Whips, they called her. And in an unmarked grave. It was just sad to me. I’d just write, “Andrea Feldman, Warhol Superstar,” and the years. 

INTERVIEWER

Do you end up thinking a lot about what happens to a person’s body after they die—whether they are buried, cremated, placed in a mausoleum? 

COVERT

Yeah. Who was it that was just cremated that I was really upset about? Someone always gets cremated and it just ruins everything. Christine Jorgensen.

INTERVIEWER

The first woman to have gender-affirming surgery. Given that you spend so much time in graveyards, does the work ever feel morbid to you?

COVERT

To me, it’s beautiful. I’m in beautiful gardens. I would like to live at the end of my life somewhere with a pet cemetery, just taking care of a garden around little animals that are loved. And people could come visit. 

INTERVIEWER

That sounds restful, but you seem to have chosen a practice that involves a lot of challenges, technical and otherwise. There must be complications that come with working outdoors, for instance. 

COVERT

I have to worry about sundown. I have to worry about how when it’s too cold, the canvases freeze, and the crayons don’t melt onto the canvas. They flake off easily. It’s always worrying about the weather, or if people are going to be there, or where the grave is located relative to the cemetery’s office. There are those kinds of things that I always get around. When we were at Rimbaud’s grave, it was right by the office, but the man didn’t mind because he saw I wasn’t hurting the grave.

INTERVIEWER

What would you say is the most difficult part of making a painting? 

COVERT

I have to sneak to do everything that I do. I can’t get in trouble for doing it, but the cemetery can get in trouble for letting me. It’s private property. That’s what happened at Père Lachaise. They kicked me out of Gertrude Stein’s grave, but I’ll go back. They put plastic around Oscar Wilde’s grave. But I’ll be back, with a locksmith.

 

Jay Graham is an editorial intern at The Paris Review.

Cooking with Virginia Woolf

Photos by Erica Maclean.

The boeuf en daube in To the Lighthouse, a 1927 novel by Virginia Woolf about an English family on vacation in the Hebrides, is one of the best-known dishes in literature. Obsessed over for many chapters by the protagonist, Mrs. Ramsay, and requiring many days of preparation, it is unveiled in a scene of crucial significance. This “savory confusion of brown and yellow meats,” in its huge pot, gives off an “exquisite scent of olives and oil and juice.” It serves as a monument to the joys of family life and a celebration of fleeting moments. Thus, it is with fear and trembling that I suggest that Woolf’s boeuf en daube, from a cook’s perspective, is a travesty, and that its failures may prove instructive.

First, it should be said that absolutely nothing else is wrong with To The Lighthouse, a masterpiece that stands out even among Woolf’s many masterpieces. On its shimmering surface, the story concerns a few hazy-blue, sun-soaked September days in a big rambling house by the sea, and what those days mean for the people gathered there. There’s a selfless mother, an egotistical father, and eight children, plus guests, including a young painter, an old poet, and a couple newly engaged. Their concerns are ordinary ones: Will Minta and Paul Rayley be happy together? Will the planned expedition to the lighthouse come off? Will the boeuf be perfect, as the hostess hopes? But Woolf’s true purpose is to evoke the great shifting mass of consciousness, and to locate each character’s purpose therein. What is each one doing here? How do they relate to each other? “What was the value, the meaning of things?”

She succeeds so spectacularly that some readers have perceived a mystical presence in the book. Eudora Welty, in my copy’s introduction, writes that Woolf’s “conception has the strength of a Blake angel” with “streaming hair and muscles stretched.” Her rapture is understandable. Woolf’s descriptions of what the characters see captures the subjective ways in which we see; the braided flow of what they think and feel resembles our thoughts and feelings, all mixed together at any given moment. The swooping, lurching passage of time in the book betrays how non-chronological our experience really is. And not only has Woolf created a fabric of consciousness that feels like life itself, she asks what the meaning of life is—and finds an answer: “And then there it was, suddenly entire; she held it in her hands, beautiful and reasonable, clear and complete, the essence sucked out of life and held rounded here…”

A character says of Mrs. Ramsay’s boeuf, “It was rich; it was tender. It was perfectly cooked. How did she manage these things in the depth of the country?” Photo by Erica Maclean.

The novel’s central thematic tension is explored through the painter Lily Briscoe, for whom making art is life’s central purpose, and Mrs. Ramsay, the hostess and mother of eight, for whom it’s marriage and family. Lily paints with a tortured intensity, striving to put what she sees on the canvas: “the shape of a white lamp-shade looming on a wicker table … roused one to perpetual combat.” Trapped in a society that believes women cannot or should not paint, she feels particularly oppressed and invalidated by Mrs. Ramsay, an archetype of Victorian womanhood, who appreciates art but has no urge to wander into the realm of image and abstraction. Instead, Mrs. Ramsay is constantly scheming to get Lily married: “Did that mean they would marry! Yes it must! What an admirable idea! They must marry!”

This is where the boeuf en daube comes in. The dish appears in a climactic scene as the emblem of Mrs. Ramsay’s domestic accomplishments. (Though, naturally, the actual preparation of the beef falls not to her but to the cook, Mildred.) A French preparation of stewed beef that was popular on English tables at the time, it can be flavored a la Provence, with tomatoes, olives, and capers, or with orange peel and cinnamon for a sweeter, more aromatic profile. In the novel, it’s Mrs. Ramsay’s grandmother’s recipe, and arrives buoyed by boat metaphors, suggesting a parallel between Mrs. Ramsay’s quest to serve dinner and her husband’s later mission to sail to the lighthouse. The group also eats from a “yellow and purple dish of fruit” arranged by one of the Ramsay daughters, which Mrs. Ramsay sees as “a trophy fetched from the bottom of the sea” that when “brought up suddenly into the light … seemed possessed of great size and depth.”

Mrs. Ramsay reflects that her guests see the fruit plate differently, “But looking together united them.” Photo by Erica Maclean.

These dishes are described with great fanfare but, as any competent home cook will know, beef stews are neither challenging to make nor impressive to look at. Although they cook slowly, the process is mostly hands-off. They do not require, as Woolf’s depiction would have it, a series of complicated steps that takes days. Some recipes call for an overnight marinade, but even that is not really necessary. And Mrs. Ramsay’s fear that the dish will be ruined if people are late to dinner is just as implausible. Stews can stay on the hob for hours, or be rewarmed when guests arrive, without detracting from the texture of the meat. I cooked a trial version for a full hour over the recommended time, continuing to add liquid, and the results were identical. I also heated up leftovers to no ill effect. Of my two attempts, both were delicious, but neither was something I’d choose to cook for a houseful of guests in the hope of a culinary triumph. In fact, in the recipe below, I couldn’t help myself, and added some technique-driven mashed potatoes in an effort to dress the dish up a bit.

I am not a gadget person, but a ricer is indispensable for making ethereal mashed potatoes. Photo by Erica Maclean.

It’s surprising that Woolf, a writer who despaired when she couldn’t get the play of light and shadow on a lampshade just right, would be so sloppy in this one respect. It’s tempting to conclude that, in choosing such an unimpressive dish, she was somehow, obscurely, denying Mrs. Ramsay her moment. That suspicion is reinforced when, a few pages later, she savagely kills off the mother in a parenthetical. (One of the most powerful death scenes in all of literature, but I digress.) By this theory, Lily, a stand-in for Woolf and other like-minded women of her time, cannot make art while Mrs. Ramsay—representing Woolf’s mother and the Victorian virtues of femininity and domesticity—reigns supreme. The mother must die for Lily to finish her painting. In that case, can we really expect the artist to spend hours fiddling around in the kitchen, finding a dish that could truly burnish Mrs. Ramsay’s reputation as a hostess?

As a frequent thrower of house parties, I identify with the portrait of Mrs. Ramsay as the person responsible for creating an experience for everyone else. When the novel mentions towels “gritty with sand from bathing,” I wince with recognition: towel management is a primary feature of my summers. And I, too, plot my house-party meals days in advance, as you must if you want the food to be excellent and appear on time. At the meal where the boeuf en daube is served, Mrs. Ramsay sits down at the table and thinks, “But what have I done with my life?” It’s a question I frequently ask myself after some absurd feat of logistics involving, say, pancakes, bacon, sausage, and homemade rhubarb crumb cake, all served piping hot before 8 A.M. But I also know the answer to that question—and so did Woolf.

Browned meat, red wine and crushed tomatoes make a dish that is simple, but has memorable flavor. Photo by Erica Maclean.

Even if Woolf did feel some need to symbolically kill the mother-figure in service of her art, what she achieves in To the Lighthouse nonetheless does full honor to Mrs. Ramsay’s accomplishments. The woman she conjures is one who cherishes her eight children, her difficult husband, her damp, impossible house on the seashore, her intellectual and artistic guests. She is fifty years old and yet has such magnetism that the novel’s young men envision her “with stars in her eyes and veils in her hair, with cyclamen and wild violets.” And she exudes, most often, a radiant serenity. When Woolf writes that “[f]lashing her needles, confident, upright, she created drawing room and kitchen, set them all aglow,” we realize that Mrs. Ramsay is a creator as well, not of art but of life—the very thing others attempt, in their art, to capture. The novel may seem to level many charges against Mrs. Ramsay—the insistence that everyone should do as she does; the refusal to claim an independent identity—but she’s also the character allowed to reflect that “nothing on earth can equal this happiness.” Despite her sudden death, she seems undefeated by time.

So I prefer a different explanation for Woolf’s strange lapse with the boeuf en daube, one that came to me as I was wondering how to recreate the “savory confusion of brown and yellow” she describes. This, too, was impossible. Beef is brown or pink, not yellow, and anything cooked for hours in red wine will turn a uniform red. In the end, I decided that the dish must have been wrong for the same reason the Impressionists chose to paint bridges as blurs and faces as planes of light: to evoke the impression the thing produced was to draw closer to its essence. The beef is painted as Woolf painted everything, in search of its inner truth. In contemplating this Blake angel of a book, that seemed to me the likeliest explanation.

Photo by Erica Maclean.

Boeuf en Daube 

Adapted from the website Good Food Stories . Serves 4. 

2 slices of bacon
1 1/4 lbs beef chuck, cubed, generously seasoned with salt and pepper, at room temperature
1/2 red onion, sliced
5 cloves garlic, minced
1 carrot, peeled and cut into coins
1 1/2 oz shiitake mushrooms
1 oz olives
1 1/2 tsp capers
1 14oz can crushed tomatoes
1 cup good-quality red wine
1/2 cup water
1 bay leaf
2 sprigs thyme
5 sprigs parsley
1/2 tsp peppercorns
Salt and pepper, to taste

Photo by Erica Maclean.

Preheat the oven to 350.

Cook the bacon until crispy in a medium-sized Dutch oven. Remove and reserve. Turn the heat up to medium-high and brown the meat in batches, adding some olive oil if your bacon didn’t release enough grease. This is the step that develops flavor. You want enough room in the pan so the meat fries instead of steams. When one side is browned (and not before!) turn the meat with a fork to brown the other side. Remove the meat from the pan and set aside. Repeat until all the meat is browned.

Allow the pan to cool a bit, then the heat to medium-low, add the onion and fry until limp but not browned, about 5 minutes. Add the garlic and sauté until fragrant, about 2 minutes. Add the carrots, mushrooms, olives, and capers, and fry for a minute more. Add the crushed tomatoes, red wine, and water, and stir to scrape up any browned bits from the bottom of the pan. Turn the heat to high, and bring the mixture to a boil. Tie the bay leaf, thyme, parsley, and peppercorns in a bit of cheesecloth to make a bouquet garni, and add it to the pot. (Alternatively, just throw them in, but you’ll come across some stems and whole peppercorns in the finished dish.)

Return the bacon and the meat to the pan, cover, and place in the preheated oven. Cooking time is between three and four hours. Start checking at the 2 1/2 hour mark to make sure the liquid has not dried out. (If it has, add water). The dish is ready when the meat is falling apart fork-tender and all the fat has rendered out. Serve sprinkled with parsley.

Photo by Erica Maclean.

Mashed Potatoes 

Required implement: a potato ricer. 

1 1/2 lbs potatoes
2 tbsp butter
3/4 tsp salt
1/4 cup heavy cream
1/4 cup milk

Bring a large pot of water to a boil. Add the potatoes, whole in their jackets, and boil until they can easily be pierced with a knife, about 20 minutes. Drain. When the potatoes are just cool enough to handle, peel them (the jackets should slip right off in your hands) and roughly chop. (Processing them while they’re still warm improves the consistency of the final mash). Put the potatoes through the potato ricer in batches, extruding them back into the pot. Add butter, salt, and heavy cream, and stir, turning the heat on low if you need help melting the butter. Different potatoes will absorb moisture differently, so continue to add milk 2 tbsp at a time until you’ve reached a loose, fluffy, cloud-like consistency. Taste and adjust for seasoning and consistency.

Photo by Erica Maclean.

Redux: Another Drink

Every week, the editors of The Paris Review lift the paywall on a selection of interviews, stories, poems, and more from the magazine’s archive. You can have these unlocked pieces delivered straight to your inbox every Sunday by signing up for the Redux newsletter.

“A crush goes nowhere,” Kathryn Davis writes on the Daily this week, in a piece adapted from her forthcoming memoir, Aurelia, Aurélia. “It’s called a crush because it’s like something landed on top of you, making movement impossible.” Still, who doesn’t love to nurture a crush every now and again? Flirtations, racing hearts, and fixations of all kinds certainly abound in our archive. Read on for Italo Calvino’s awkward habit of “falling in love with foreign words” as recalled by his translator William Weaver in an introduction to The Art of Fiction no. 130; dashed fantasies in “Rainbow Rainbow,” Lydia Conklin’s story of a teenage girl meeting her internet crush; Laurel Blossom’s sly poem “Plea to a Potential Lover”; and the photographer Prabuddha Dasgupta’s scenes of longing with accompanying text by Geoff Dyer.

If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, poems, and portfolios, why not subscribe to The Paris Review? You’ll get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door.

Interview
Italo Calvino, The Art of Fiction No. 130
Issue no. 124 (Fall 1992)

Writers do not necessarily cherish their translators, and I occasionally had the feeling that Calvino would have preferred to translate his books himself. In later years he liked to see the galleys of the translation; he would make changes—in his English. The changes were not necessarily corrections of the translation; more often they were revisions, alterations of his own text. Calvino’s English was more theoretical than idiomatic. He also had a way of falling in love with foreign words. With the Mr. Palomar translation he developed a crush on the word feedback. He kept inserting it in the text and I kept tactfully removing it. I couldn’t make it clear to him that, like charisma and input and bottom line, feedback, however beautiful it may sound to the Italian ear, was not appropriate in an English-language literary work.

Fiction
Rainbow Rainbow
By Lydia Conklin
Issue no. 237 (Summer 2021)

As soon as Heidi arrived at Kim’s condo, she suggested they go meet Lisa­ParsonsTwo, Kim’s online crush. Usually Kim was the rule-breaker, the wild girl whose mom let her do whatever she wanted, but Heidi hadn’t been able to stop thinking about Lisa­ParsonsTwo since Kim had told her about their messages last week. When Heidi found out Kim’s mom would be out for the evening, she’d invited herself to sleep over.

Poetry
Plea to a Potential Lover
By Laurel Blossom
Issue no. 65 (Spring 1976)

Don’t take me home, at least not yet;
Let’s have another drink, and sit
and talk—I want to be your woman,
but there isn’t any rush.
Let’s take our time,
and think it out.

Art
Longing
By Prabuddha Dasgupta & Geoff Dyer
Issue no. 200 (Spring 2012)

In Prabuddha Dasgupta’s photographic series Longing there is a powerful suggestion of travel, of journeys that have merged into a single journey. There is evidence of arrival and departure, but the main sense is of transit, of looking back on what has been left, or forward to what is to come. The photographs are rarely in the moment. The present tense flickers and is gone.

If you enjoyed the above, don’t forget to subscribe! In addition to four print issues per year, you’ll also receive complete digital access to our sixty-eight years’ worth of archives.

 

A Formal Feeling: A Conversation with Claudia Durastanti

Photo by Sarah Lucas Agutoli.

Claudia Durastanti has spent years interrogating the limits of language, first out of necessity and later by choice. Born in the U.S. in 1984 to Italian parents, both deaf, who never taught her sign language, she grew up between Brooklyn and Basilicata, a small town in southern Italy. The frustrations, silences, and miscommunications that marked her childhood—and the corresponding impulse to fill in those lacunae via the imagination—can be felt in her work as a writer, and as a translator determined to leave some room for “poetic imprecision.” Durastanti translated the latest Italian edition of The Great Gatsby and is also the translator for Donna Haraway, Joshua Cohen, and Ocean Vuong—which might give you a sense of her range. Her own fiction has been translated into twenty-one languages. La Straniera, her fourth novel, was a finalist for the Premio Strega in 2019, and its English translation by Elizabeth Harris, Strangers I Know, received a PEN award. 

Strangers I Know lies at the intersection of memoir, literary criticism, and bildungsroman, bleeding fiction into fact in order to explore the mythologies that have shaped Durastanti’s life and sensibility. Roaming backward and forward in time—between the stories of Durastanti’s parents, her adored brother, and her own often jagged attempts to forge a path into adulthood—the book interrogates the relationship between an individual and a family, with its conflicting layers of fable and self-invention. In Durastanti’s portrayal, her parents emerge as romantic but unreliable characters, in the vein of Joan Didion’s California pioneers and gamblers. The novel’s form is likewise playful, with forty-one short, often self-contained chapters collected in horoscope-like sections titled “Family,” “Love,” “Work & Money,” and so on. After reading it for the first time, I had the strange sense that it could be arranged in an entirely different order and lose none of its power. I experimented accordingly, rereading the chapters more or less at random, and found that the symphonic effect of the whole remained intact. 

When we spoke on Zoom, I was in London and Durastanti was in an apartment on the south side of Rome—next to the nineteenth-century Iron Bridge that burned down in October 2021—where she has been living for the past two years, after a brief spell in New York during the early days of the pandemic. “When we die,” she writes in Strangers I Know, “maybe on our tombstone they’ll write a loved one’s name, what profession we had, a line from our favorite book. What won’t be written on our tombstones is our distance from home.” 

INTERVIEWER

Is this the first time you’ve written about your family history? And why did you decide to publish Strangers I Know as a work of fiction when there is so much in it that actually happened?

DURASTANTI

I did handle aspects of my family in my earlier fiction. For example, my father kidnapped me when I was a child. The way I write about this in Strangers I Know is rather picaresque, while a similar episode in my second novel—where a father kidnaps a little girl—was angrier, more visceral in tone. I felt that I had already discharged my family history and childhood in my fiction, so I could now be freer and more experimental in my handling of them.

For a long time, I was not interested in my parents’ life. Everything exceptional becomes exceptionally boring if you’re with it every day. I was very suspicious of my parents as subjects, because when I was a little girl, people would always ask first, “What language do you speak?” and then, “Who do you belong to? Who are your parents?” I would say, “My mum and dad are deaf artists who split up,” and everybody would lose interest in me and my voice and what I do—instead they would be hooked on my parents’ story. I thought that was the opposite of literature. I was aware that there was no talent in blood. The talent is in manipulating the facts and, until I realized that, I didn’t have the right key to use the biographical material.

I insisted on a novel from life, because I was aware that if I went to a publisher and presented my parents’ story as fiction, they would say it’s highly unrealistic. What are the chances that they meet, both deaf, my father jumping from a bridge, you know, and they go on to have this very empowered life? Because my parents were pretty anarchic and empowered in their own way, even if they were rejected by the world. Their rejection was due to their rebellion against the expectations around what it means to be a “good” deaf person, or migrant, or poor person. My parents instinctively showed that disability might be just one layer in their fabric, not the whole plot. That was pretty disconcerting, especially within their small-town communities. Disability, to the outsider’s gaze, often sucks up the whole person who lives it. But my parents were fighting back. One thing that wouldn’t be believable in nonfiction is my grandfather buying headphones for my mother, his deaf daughter. If you write that in fiction, people think, Oh, he’s a funny, demented character in denial. But that’s a real person. That was my grandfather. I asked myself, How can I land in an in-between space, where the accounts are real but I’m handling them, in tone, as if they were fiction?

The book was also a tribute. A lot of people in my family didn’t read novels, but I think they had the ambition of being in a novel. They lived that way. My parents embodied the non-distinction between fiction and nonfiction.

INTERVIEWER

What do you think of other portrayals of families like yours? Were there any books that inspired Strangers I Know?

DURASTANTI

I’ve never been much of a fan of unconventional family portraits in nonfiction, unless we’re talking about, say, the mother-daughter relationship in Fierce Attachments, by Vivian Gornick, which was fundamental for me in finding a tone for this book, or La Place, by Annie Ernaux, where she writes about her relationship with her father and the working-class environment she was raised in and left. These books happen as meditations and recollections, not as bildungsroman.

I was always attracted to big, ambitious novels about outsiders or people at the margins who formed radical friendships, unexpected bonds. I read The Women’s Room, by Marilyn French when I was ten—ditching school, in a fever—and that book taught me how you could build a collective or community (of women, in that case) specifically because you wanted to get out of your own family.

INTERVIEWER

Is there a reason you chose not to write in English? Not to work on the translation of Strangers I Know yourself?

DURASTANTI

There are a lot of writers who at some point decide to make the switch, to experiment in a new language, something I always admire as an effort. The first part of that switch is mastering the landing language, which in this case is English. Being such a powerful, dominant language, English requires a standard that can be pretty suffocating. It’s no wonder that the experimenters within the English language right now come from undercurrent languages (Irish English speakers, for example), which bring something else. English itself is cracking up.

When I write in English, I’m making the reverse journey from the one I’m used to—English to Italian—so I’m obsessed with correctness. But then I don’t think it’s good writing. Usually, when you allow yourself impurities, the writing is actually stronger. I’m not interested in using English as an expressive language if it has to be the most polite and polished version. I think that is a sacrifice.

INTERVIEWER

What other differences do you notice when writing in Italian as opposed to English?

DURASTANTI

Architecturally, Italian has a wider scenario for verbs and time. The tenses are more nuanced. The hardest thing for me to do is to structure action in time when going from Italian to English. I feel there is a loss there. There are fewer tenses for the past, for the present, and for the future in English, so certain things don’t make sense in translation. Since we have more possibilities in Italian, you have a wider set of hypotheses, of imaginable forms of experience. English is like a shrinking of time, by contrast.

INTERVIEWER

In Strangers I Know, you write that “time is not healing at all; there’s a breach that can’t be filled.” How did you approach reliving your memories while writing the novel?

DURASTANTI

There is nothing more real to me than the image of myself in the future. My present is constantly poisoned and polluted by it. From childhood, you’re often longing for the teenage or adult version of yourself. Originally, I wrote the whole section of the book that’s set in London in the future tense. But this didn’t work formally—that section of the book felt too dystopian in the future tense.

In Strangers I Know, the parts that should have been most fresh are in the last two chapters, but they are also muddy, in a way. The recent memory of myself is murky and opaque. This is why the book shifts—the first part of the book feels like a novel, and then it cracks and delves increasingly into experimental autobiography. The distant past felt more available, perhaps because I’d thought about it so much and treasured it.

INTERVIEWER

We’re constantly reinventing our past self.

DURASTANTI

Exactly. I was exposed to my mother telling me the same stories over and over again. A lot of Strangers I Know is about tone and temperature rather than true or false.

I open the book with the Emily Dickinson line, “After great pain, a formal feeling comes.” I am talking about form, not distance. What kind of form do you want to give to the things that happened to you?

INTERVIEWER

Tone and temperature is really how we remember things, just like Maya Angelou said. “People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you make them feel.” We often graft ourselves to the narrative of the memory, but that’s not always an accurate representation of the inner experience.

DURASTANTI

And then, if you read your life as a novel, of course you’re worried about the main characters. I remember when Strangers I Know first came out in Italy, a lot of readers were quite upset when my mother suddenly disappeared from the book, because they thought she was the protagonist. But the book is about the legacy of mythology, and I knew there was going to be this gap when the mother is gone and then you just have the daughter, me. When we write novels and short stories, we often think we need to stick with the main character. Who will provide the drama, the action? I wanted to see what would happen if all of a sudden I decided to shift the focus.

That was something I never thought about before writing this book. Who is my mother without a daughter and who am I without a mother? I was trying to study my mother as an independent character, to see this woman before me and after me. This is something my mother involuntarily taught me, that it’s possible to delete or give up on the main character in our story.

INTERVIEWER

It reminds me of Thomas l’Obscur, by Maurice Blanchot. Earlier you said that you couldn’t write Strangers I Know until you found the right key. What was that key?

DURASTANTI

I felt like a genealogical tree didn’t work as a structure for how I perceived belonging to my family, or to a country, or to a language. Belonging had more to do with constellations. Think about your family members like stars. You’re trying to see how you orbit around them, but their light is not always constant. They dim and they light up, then they dim and they light up again, so I wanted to write the book in intervals. I asked myself, When is my mother at her brightest and when is she at her darkest?

I was working with light, tone, and temperature, and I felt that a horoscope structure could convey that better than a linear structure that was similar to a family tree.

As I was writing Strangers I Know, I wanted to see where the self would shatter, where the I wouldn’t matter anymore, and somebody reading the book could plunge into it with their own story. I wanted to factor in any possible “label” that has been attached to me or that I have claimed for myself—female, southern, formerly working class, a CODA, you name it—and see how they would collapse into one another or stretch to their limits. This book was my own personal tool to deal with the fragments that remain when we interrogate identity and stereotype. I wanted my story to become simply an echo, echo, echo—until you could hear yourself in the book.

 

Mia Colleran is an editor who lives in London.

The Review’s Review: Blue Geometries

Photo by Ken Heaton, via Wikimedia Commons.

Early in the morning last week, in a funk of sleeplessness, I tuned in to the afternoon matches of Round Three at the Australian Open. The cool blue geometries of the courts in Melbourne—especially when the sound is off—are usually a balm to my mind. But there’s always a danger that the match will be exciting, and when the Spanish up-and-comer Carlos Alcaraz fought through to a fourth set against Matteo “The Hammer” Berrettini, I gave up and made coffee. Then I reread (for the fourth or fifth time) the opening pages of Rowan Ricardo Phillips’s The Circuit, his account of the year 2017 in tennis—a year that witnessed the comebacks of Nadal and Federer, just when they seemed ready to pack it in—and a rival to John McPhee’s Levels of the Game for the best book out there on the sport. Phillips watches games the way we all do—on television—but he sees more, and more clearly, than the rest of us. Before I knew it, I had read half the book, Berrettini won in five sets, and I was ready to face the day. —Robyn Creswell

The other day I finally caught up with Pedro Almodóvar’s thirty-minute film The Human Voice (it came out in 2020), starring a single actor: Tilda Swinton. It’s based on the same Cocteau play that Roberto Rossellini made into La Voce Umana as part of his anthology film L’Amore, where Anna Magnani played the role of a woman on a phone in an apartment, trying to save a dead relationship. So I was expecting something similarly grandiose and extreme, but instead the movie was a study in concision and abruptness. Swinton’s performance was so affecting because it was as deadpan as it was anguished, and there was something similar in Almodóvar’s direction. Swinton kept moving between a studio set and an elegant apartment, so that every emotion was on the cusp of having its theatricality revealed. Everything depended, I began to think, on Almodóvar’s cuts and transitions—so that, in addition to being a beautiful picture of desolation, this short movie became an essay on a fluidity that only cinema can produce. I adored it. —Adam Thirlwell

I saw The Lost Daughter over the weekend. In the translation to film, the novel’s unsettling portrayal of maternal loneliness (the thing that makes Elena Ferrante’s book a success) gets rather short shrift in favor of a fairly steamy love affair that becomes the centerpiece of the story—but with such good-looking actors, who’s complaining? I can certainly recommend it as a hangover tonic, best taken on a Saturday afternoon. —Lauren Kane

Crush

Still from The Seventh Seal courtesy of the Criterion Collection. The film is available to stream, and as a disc set.

We’re in a room on the ground floor of a hotel, the bed facing a wall of curtained windows that in turn faces the street. It is nighttime. Rain is coming down, steadily, reflectively, a stream of passersby visible through the curtains, which are sheer. Everyone is moving in the same direction, bent slightly forward and holding an umbrella, from left to right, the good direction, from past to future, the opposite of where Death leads the knight and the squire and the monk and the smith and the mute in their final dance against the backdrop of time in Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal. The umbrella is the canopy of the heavens; the rain is never going to let up. We can see the passersby but they can’t see us, though Eric has turned a light on above his side of the bed.

I was obsessed with The Seventh Seal my senior year in high school; I was obsessed with the vision it presented of a handsome knight playing a game of chess with Death. Death’s face was unexpectedly round and white, the blackness of his eyes and their sparkling avidity as terrifying as the sound of his name in Swedish. Döden. There could be no doubt of the fact that death at the end of it elevated life—an otherwise lackluster affair in which human beings were obliged to eat and mate and have jobs and engage in pointless conversation—into a realm worthy of passionate attachment. The knight was handsome, yes, and virtuous (though not a very good chess player, according to my best friend Peggy’s older brother Marto), but Death was overfull of something that seemed more like life than whatever it was that animated his opponent. When the knight said, “You drew black,” Death replied, “Appropriate, don’t you think?” Unlike everyone else in the movie, he had a sense of humor. I was in love with Death. If I couldn’t have him, I would settle for someone like Marto, a handsome, quick-witted ne’er-do-well.

In the dream, Eric is propped against the pillows, restless, paging through a newspaper, scattering and discarding pages across the bedspread, which is heavily quilted in hues of old gold and dusty rose. Normally I would have removed such a bedspread and jammed it into the closet. “I’ve had it,” Eric says. I remind him that first we have to meet family. We can fake it, he says. He’s been ready to leave for a long time. “I thought we were happy,” I say. “Weren’t you happy when we were watching that movie?” That was okay then, Eric explains, but this is now. “Now, it’s enough.” He begins to move, putting weight onto his right hand in a way that suggests he’s getting ready to swing his legs out from under the bedspread and onto the floor. Then, all at once, he disappears. It’s as if he evaporated.

For many years of our adult lives we sat in bed like this, side by side. The difference is, it would be early morning, not nighttime, the paper recently delivered, a piece of the world hurled onto our porch in Saint Louis or dropped at the edge of our front yard in Vermont, requiring me to make a trek in my pajamas to retrieve it. I can’t remember the last time Eric and I sat together that way, sharing the paper. When someone you have lived with for a very long time dies, memory stops working its regular way—it goes crazy. It is no longer like remembering; it is, more often, like astral projection. “Like darkness in the movies, it tests the outline of your astral footprint,” my subconscious mind informed me the other night, speaking from beyond the bedroom wall, whereas the great memoirist Chateaubriand, speaking from beyond the grave, observed sourly that memory is often a quality associated with stupidity.

I first saw the knight on a class trip to the Cloisters my senior year in high school. Springtime, the trees along the parkway leafing out—romance was in the air, along with hints of restlessness and dread. It’s amazing how you see the places you’re headed in life ahead of time and have no idea that’s what’s happening. Death awaits you, you’ve been told. This is the fundamental fact of being alive and yet you try to jump across it. Eric had been reading the paper, and whatever he’d been reading, he was getting impatient.

In the Cloisters people trod softly. They spoke in hushed voices but even so their words echoed everywhere; it was as if the past was speaking, as if it issued from the smell of the place, water dripping on stone. I could stand by myself—enamored of the thought of myself, alone, standing there, sufficient unto myself—staring down at the effigy of Jean D’Alluye, the French Crusader knight, more handsome by far than the boy in my class I’d thought I had such a crush on and yet, somehow, both of them similar by virtue of their inaccessibility. Boys, then, were wearing their hair longer but they also had bangs. The knight’s flowing locks left his forehead elegantly bare; he wore a chain mail shirt, and folded his hands piously above his breastbone in exact replication of the knight at the beginning of The Seventh Seal, moments before he meets up with Death. There was a lion resting at Jean D’Alluye’s feet that our teacher had told us signified courage. He also told us, erroneously, that crossed legs signified death in battle.

That teacher is dead now. He may not have known that the knight’s sword came from China, or that the effigy of the knight, face-down, had served for a period of time following the French Revolution as a bridge over a small stream outside of Tours, watching the little fish swim by below. Of course the knight himself was no longer there to watch anything; whatever was left of him had been summarily disposed of by the sansculottes. We read “The Knight’s Tale” in the original Middle English in that teacher’s class. “Love is a gretter lawe, by my pan / Than may be yeve to any erthely man; / And therefore positif lawe and swich decree / Is broken al day for love in ech degree.” The words barely hovered at the thin edge of familiarity, not unlike the overwhelming beauty of the knight’s face, thoughts forming behind it in a mind of stone.

Eventually we were on the bus going home. It was dark; I was sitting beside the crush who, amazingly, had decided to take the seat next to me. The darkness of the bus was nothing like the darkness of the Gothic Chapel where Jean D’Alluye lay on his back, his eyes wide open, staring up at the ribbed vault of the ceiling for all eternity. Some of my classmates had lit the little lights above their seats but the crush and I kept ours unlit, his intentions perhaps having been amorous, whereas mine were to sink deeper into the darkness, made darker still by the intermittent lights appearing out the window once we’d left the city behind. In those days it was a three-hour ride from New York City to Philadelphia. The boys sitting behind us had brought whiskey in a flask. I could smell it, the smell of cocktail hour on Woodale Road. I don’t live here, I thought. I am not here. In the Gothic Chapel the only light had come from outdoors through the stained glass double lancet windows. It was hard to see anything, really. When we first came into the room there had been a single large candle in a candle stand in the corner, but at some point the candle had gotten blown out.

Shaken, not stirred, the crush said, accepting the flask from the seat behind us. Bond, replied one of the two boys, James Bond. The candle had gone out and the wick was still glowing, emitting the trail of smoke our teacher told us signified the presence of the Holy Ghost, the most mysterious and hence most terrible (as in causing terror, awe, or dread) aspect of the Trinity. Outside the window the lights of apartment buildings loomed near the highway, the shapes of trees, the great heaving bodies of the willows.

The boys were talking about Dr. No’s metal hands. They were his Achilles’ heel, the crush said, solemnly, and I knew, just as well as I would ever know anything in the course of my long and fiercely cherished life, that nothing would ever be sufficient. “The proof that the little prince existed is that he was charming, that he laughed, and that he was looking for a sheep,” my adored sixth-grade teacher, Mr. Fine, had read to us, and my adored sixth-grade crush, Eddie Williams, had rolled his eyes.

The point is, a crush goes nowhere. It’s called a crush because it’s like something landed on top of you, making movement impossible. It isn’t the same as a love affair that—whether star-crossed or blessed—confers motion, ferrying you through time. There you are, crushed, the sole stirring of life in you occasioned by the sight of the crushing object, no matter the grace of its limbs or the lightness of its spirit. And, truly, what is the point? In terms of the future of the planet, for example.

On the bus back from New York City I courted the terror, the whole span of what it is like to be born, to fall in love, to love someone and live a life with them and then at the very tail end of it encounter death. The dark room, the great dark vaulted ceiling. “Four suns hung in the afternoon sky,” sang the squire, following his knight across the plague-ridden landscape. “But if the sheep eats the flower,” Mr. Fine read, “for him it’s as if, suddenly, all the stars went out,” and Eddie Williams doubled over laughing. I wanted to be alone more than anything and I wanted to be in love. I wanted the entire history of it, not just a lifetime but something vaster, infinite even, except not really infinite since infinity was too frightening. “Cause I know just as well as I’m standing here talking to you,” Peggy Lee sang, “that when that final moment comes…” And the seven angels who had the seven trumpets prepared themselves to sound.

 

Kathryn Davis’s most recent novel is  The Silk Road . She’s received the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award and the Katherine Anne Porter Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim, and the Lannan Literary Award. She teaches at Washington University in Saint Louis and lives in Vermont. 

This excerpt is adapted from Davis’s forthcoming memoir Aurelia, Aurélia , to be published by Graywolf Press on March 1, 2022.

Redux: Functionally Insane

Every week, the editors of The Paris Review lift the paywall on a selection of interviews, stories, poems, and more from the magazine’s archive. You can have these unlocked pieces delivered straight to your inbox every Sunday by signing up for the Redux newsletter.

In a new essay published on The Paris Review Daily, the Chilean writer Alejandro Zambra explores how a lifetime of cluster headaches led him to seek relief in the hallucinogenic mushroom teonanácatl. He learns an important lesson: always wait before redosing.

In the spirit of experimentation, this week’s Redux riffs on writing under the influence. Read on for Hunter S. Thompson’s hard-won advice about which drug a writer should avoid, in the Art of Journalism No. 1; a hazy afternoon in J. M. Holmes’s “What’s Wrong with You? What’s Wrong with Me?”; Anne Waldman on the body as “just a bundle of drugs” in “How to Write”; Allen Ginsberg’s 1966 letter to the editor, regarding his experiences with LSD and psilocybin; and a portfolio of Nancy Friedemann’s loopy text-based drawings, as well as a sculpture.

If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, poems, and portfolios, why not subscribe to The Paris Review? You’ll get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door.

Interview
Hunter S. Thompson, The Art of Journalism No. 1
Issue no. 156 (Fall 2000)

INTERVIEWER

How do you write when you’re under the influence?

THOMPSON

My theory for years has been to write fast and get through it. I usually write five pages a night and leave them out for my assistant to type in the morning.

INTERVIEWER

This, after a night of drinking and so forth?

THOMPSON

Oh yes, always, yes. I’ve found that there’s only one thing that I can’t work on and that’s marijuana. Even acid I could work with. The only difference between the sane and the insane is that the sane have the power to lock up the insane. Either you function or you don’t. Functionally insane? If you get paid for being crazy, if you can get paid for running amok and writing about it . . . I call that sane.

Fiction
What’s Wrong with You? What’s Wrong with Me?
By J. M. Holmes
Issue no. 221 (Fall 2017)

The room was streaked with haze like we dropped cream in a coffee, but Rolls never cracked windows. He smoked like a pro even still, burned blunts and let it box out the room. He had the leather furniture from his dad’s old office and we sank into it. These days, he got lit every morning before work, after his bowl of Smacks. His latest was shooting an ad for the ambulance chaser Anthony Izzo. I was about to ask him if he still painted.

Poetry
How to Write
By Anne Waldman
Issue no. 45 (Winter 1968)

A lot of drugs can change you if you want
because you too are made of what drugs are made of

In fact you are just a bundle of drugs
when you come right down to it

Nonfiction
Footnote to Allen Ginsberg Interview, Issue #37
By Allen Ginsberg
Issue no. 38 (Summer 1966)

To readers of Paris Review:

Re LSD, Psylocibin [sic], etc., Paris Review #37 p. 46: “So I couldn’t go any further. I may later on occasion, if I feel more reassurance.”

Between occasion of interview with Thomas Clark June ’65 and publication May ’66 more reassurance came. I tried small doses of LSD twice in secluded tree and ocean cliff haven at Big Sur. No monster vibration, no snake universe hallucinations. Many tiny jeweled violet flowers along the path of a living brook that looked like Blake’s illustration for a canal in grassy Eden.

Art
New Work
By Nancy Friedemann
Issue no. 158 (Spring–Summer 2001)

Last year I had the chance to watch Colombian-born artist Nancy Friedemann work in her studio at the artists’ colony Yaddo in Saratoga Springs, New York. Amidst a scattering of fat permanent markers—the kind graffiti artists use on subway interiors—various books lay sprawled on the floor, but otherwise the room was clean and spare: just eight four-by-six-foot panels of semitransparent vellum-like Mylar on the walls.

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The Review’s Review: Back to the Essence

Three-year-old girl riding an Arabian horse. Miragexv at English Wikipedia, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

“The Bridge 94 (Demo),” by Mobb Deep featuring Big Noyd, went unreleased for twenty years. The fact that you could make something that good and decide not to put it out says everything about Mobb Deep’s seat in the pantheon. The whole thing is a kniving, wintry blast of phonetic artistry, but the last lines are Shakespearean. The rapper is Prodigy, a twenty-year-old Albert Johnson the Fifth (Albert the Third was Albert J. “Budd”Johnson, a major early bebop saxophonist who came out of Dallas and got his break recording with Louis Armstrong in the early thirties). Prodigy will die in his early forties from problems related to sickle-cell anemia, but at the moment he’s talking about his home ground in the vast housing projects of Queens. The song is a warning to would-be intruders or, in Big Noyd’s words, “motherfucking violators.” In six seconds Prodigy draws an eerie picture of cops surveilling the block: “As jakes look over the hill, their eyes see nothing but nighttime,” while in the buildings, “due murders” happen “at an unseen right time.” Whoever is being spoken to fails to listen and gets “two to his dome so his last thought is hot.” At that point the story needs to make a pivot from “Be careful or you’ll get killed” to “You weren’t careful and now I’ve been forced to shoot you.” Prodigy:

You came as a whole
But you’re leaving
In incomplete pieces
And didn’t expect to meet Jesus
In your adolescence
Sending you back to the essence
So you can feel at home
And safe in God’s presence

Whole, home. He murders you, and he blesses you. Even in the act of taking your young life, he retains the power to confer his blessing on you, and gives it. That’s how far above petty bullshit he’s hovering. Chills. —John Jeremiah Sullivan

While reading Hannah Regel’s Oliver Reed, I remembered that Sylvia Plath poem “Daddy,” in which she explains how her father—or maybe, every father—is like a Nazi, and, in a way, how hot that is. Famously, “Every woman adores a Fascist / The boot in the face, the brute / Brute heart of a brute like you.” (It’s an amazing poem because it’s such an obvious one.) Like Plath’s “Ariel,” the poem that titles the posthumous collection in which “Daddy” first appeared in 1965, Oliver Reed is poetry about girls and horses. Girls like Sylvia Plath love horses, and Regel points out how they are like horses: pretty, glossy, usually submissive—though sometimes not—and totally disgusting. Like its central conceit, Oliver Reed is clever, darkly funny, and always shifting between shapes; its language is composed, among other things, of a collage of imaginary cinematic scenes starring, for instance, Sarah Jessica Parker and interviews with famous men. The collection is divided into sections, the titles of which seem to imply a kind of protagonist: “Sorry Gets Hooved,” and “Sorry is a Girl, Grown Up.” Brilliantly, Regel transmutates that most feminine of linguistic gestures or reflexes into a name and a character. Sorry learns about “the furnished dream of a hip bone / softly concave under pale jeans.” Sorry drinks glittery apple cider vinegar. Sorry reminds me of the “pale blogs” that first introduced me to Sylvia Plath, most of which are now banned from Tumblr for depicting underweight, underage girls in knee socks baring pale pink lines striating their thin white wrists, and generally banned from polite culture for promoting aesthetics and ideas that are simultaneously dangerous and self-indulgent. Sorry, I think, much like pale bloggers and horse girls, would be perceived as an annoying kind of girl, especially in 2022. Girls are so annoying when they apologize too much. I am sure “Men” have told her she does not need to say sorry, but Sorry keeps saying it and saying it—and keeps drinking vinegar, even though, obviously, she’s skinny enough, and just won’t stop apologizing for it, and just keeps on vomiting glitter, on her red, knee-socked knees.

The blurbs describe Regel’s poems as “discomforting,” and their subject as the “all too familiar subjugation of women.” If they are discomforting, it is because, in 2022, women’s subjugation, especially poetry about it, is “all too familiar”—like beating a dead horse, perhaps —and maybe it’s all a bit too much to hear? But Sorry just will not stop saying her name. Oliver Reed is an insistent refrain recalling what we’re told in Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Virgin Suicides: it really is very sad, strange, and specific to be a girl—which is also, as we know from Sofia Coppola’s adaption, why it is so awesome. Regel writes the thin edge between both sides of that coin. “What happens,” she says, following a scene of a horse being butchered in front of Jennifer Lopez, “is as secret as lip gloss.”

Regel cuts sharply from image to image, and her syntax is tight and brutal, somehow constrained; a grammar for girls. It is a pleasure to read. If horse girls are disgusting, it’s mostly because of how much they like being like horses—how much, like Plath, they adore “the boot in the face”—and how much they read, talk, and write about it. Sorry actually seems to be having a lot of fun hating herself. Between and through the lines of her stylish sentences, Regel materializes an awful, sorrowful need, but also a cold and perverse satisfaction.

From “Sorry Leaves the Boat,” in which each of these lines appears on its own page:

I walk with my errors
Tight like little arm bands
Along the plank
As my pigtails swing
In the loop of an apology
As I downward
My best impression of a sucked thumb
Hotness is a miserly place to wait for it
I’ll show you owning a face
Really own one.

—Olivia Kan-Sperling

If you ever watched that sci-fi series Battlestar Galactica that was popular in the early 2000s and found yourself wanting just a bit more beauty in its depictions of sentient robots acting out against their human creators, then Olga Ravn’s The Employees is for you. Translated from the Danish by Martin Aitken and forthcoming next month from New Directions, Ravn’s novel takes the form of employee statements gathered from the human and humanoid crew of the Six-Thousand Ship, who are gathering samples from the planet New Discovery following some kind of crisis on Earth. The statements range from the poetic (“I dream that I’m cooking my dress”) to the poignant (“the child hologram has without a doubt helped stabilize me as an employee here”). As mutiny and the threat of violence become a danger, these statements become increasingly heartbreaking, as the language of bureaucracy breaks down and the question of what it means to be a human—rather than facsimile of one—takes precedence. —Rhian Sasseen

Teonanácatl

Illustrations by George Wylesol.

Teonanácatl. That’s what the Aztecs used to call the mushroom known today as pajarito, or “little bird.” My friend Emilio recommended it as a treatment for my cluster headaches, and he got me a generous dose in chocolate form. I stashed the squares in the fridge and awaited the first symptoms with resignation, though I sometimes fantasized that the mere presence of the drug would keep the headaches at bay. Sadly, soon enough I felt one coming on, and it was the very day we had planned a first-aid course. My wife Jazmina and I had just had a child, and after attending a clumsy, tedious introduction to first aid, we’d decided to call in a doctor, and ended up inviting other first-time parents to an exhaustive four-hour program that would take place at the house next door. But in the very early dawn of the designated day, I woke up with that intense pain in the trigeminal nerve that for me is the unequivocal sign of an imminent headache. My wife proposed that I forget about the course and stay home to take pajarito.

At four in the afternoon, Jazmina left with our son, Silvestre, and I devoured the first square, prepared for a brief, utilitarian trip. The chocolate was delicious, and I now think that that must have influenced my decision, after an impatient twenty-minute wait, to eat a second square. This time the effect was almost instantaneous: I felt hands reaching into my head to turn off my pain, like someone rearranging cables or dexterously pressing the keys on a safe. It was a delightful, glorious sensation.

I don’t want to get into too much detail about the misery this illness has caused me over the course of more than twenty years. Suffice it to say that my headaches came roughly every eighteen months, and their corrosive company lasted between two and four months, during which the idea of cutting off my head started to feel reasonable and efficient. Occasionally some medication or other allowed me to control or rather tame the pain, but none had ever brought the miraculous results I felt from this little bird. Teonanácatl—I should have mentioned before that the word means “flesh of the gods”—radically cleansed me. Of course, there was still the risk that the pain could return, but somehow I knew it wouldn’t, that I would be safe for a long time (eleven weeks and counting).

That was more or less the moment when I got it into my head that my friend Emilio was actually my son. I was convinced, but at the same time the idea was hard to accept. Still, in retrospect it was a pretty reasonable association: Emilio doesn’t suffer from cluster headaches himself, but he grew up watching his father, the children’s author Francisco Hinojosa, struggle with them for decades. If I didn’t manage to get better, my son would eventually grow accustomed to my migrainous periods, just as Emilio had to his father’s. I felt a light sadness, like the bossa nova kind. I thought about how generous Emilio was, just as Silvestre would be in a few years. I imagined my son at twenty years old, telling a friend about his father’s awful headaches. I pictured Emilio, or rather I focused my imagination on his face, specifically his bushy beard. I resolved to shave him, and I did: first slowly, realistically, meticulously, with an electric shaver, and then with a lot of foam and a stupendous straight razor, even dabbing on some aftershave. I wanted to text him. I wrote:

I started to get a
Hea

I men I started to get a headache

I ate two choolates

Now my hear doesn’t hurt bt I listening to silvio rodrigo

Then the doorbell rang several times. I’m aware that there are probably families for whom ringing the doorbell in bursts is considered pleasant, but my family is not one of them. When I peered out the window, my annoyance turned to consternation, because it was Yuri down there—the person who had just rung the doorbell in that idiotic way was the famous Mexican singer Yuri, who, when she saw me leaning out the second-floor window, yelled: “I don’t have cash for the taxi and this prick’s waiting!” Teetering on heels that could easily pass for stilts, Yuri struck me as forceful, brave, and admirable. Imperiously, she shouted her demand for money again; I had a five-hundred-peso bill, too much for a taxi, but I tossed it out the window to her anyway. She nimbly scooped it up and the driver handed her change; Yuri stashed it cheerfully in her bag and left without a goodbye.

I don’t remember thinking that Yuri’s presence might be a hallucination. I don’t remember doubting her identity. Why was I so sure—why am I still so sure—that that little moocher was the singer Yuri? As I was making my way toward the bedroom (our apartment is very small, but my sense of space had shifted), I did have the thought that Yuri’s husband was Chilean and an evangelical Christian, and that perhaps to Mexican eyes we looked alike. There’s no doubt I look Chilean, but maybe I also look evangelical—I have the face of an evangelical Chilean, I thought. That’s when I became aware, though without making any connection to the preceding events, that I was high.

My shock soon gave way to a giggling that sounded a bit false, diplomatic, bureaucratic: it was as if I were laughing because I was supposed to, or to prove myself capable of articulating laughter. And, like someone traveling on business who comes out of a long meeting and realizes he finally has several hours free to explore the city, I felt a desire to make the most of my trip, or rather I felt obligated to want to make the most of it. But since the purpose of my drug-taking had been sadly therapeutic, I was unprepared for enjoyment. In a fit of pretentiousness, I considered writing something in a lysergic key. I also tried to read—there were several books on my bedside table—but it wasn’t easy with my eyes so fuzzy. I fumbled around, earnestly and unsuccessfully, for my glasses. I texted Emilio again, looking for advice or maybe just attention:

Its a lit like marinara

Narigiana

Marimba

Marijuana

I meant that the effect was similar to that of marijuana, though I’m not sure that’s really what I thought—it was more just a conversation starter. Emilio called me, and when he heard the high version of my voice he laughed, but was also alarmed. He told me that half a chocolate square would have been enough to extinguish the pain. I told him how I had shaved him but he didn’t understand, or maybe he thought I was using a Chilean expression. He asked where Jazmina and our son were. I told him they’d gone to a first-aid class, and he couldn’t believe it—he inferred that my wife, on seeing me in this condition, had decided to go right out and take that class. It sounded like an illogical or extraordinarily inefficient reaction on her part: something like dealing with an earthquake by reading a study on earthquakes. I explained the situation, and he felt better. I said I was hungry and was going to order something from Uber Eats. He told me to call him if I needed anything at all.

Aware of the impending munchies, I ordered food galore. My purchase included tacos al pastor, brisket tacos, chorizo and pork tacos, steak and smoked meat volcanoes, a fig tart, and three extra-large cups of horchata. I amused myself by watching the Uber map on my phone, and it seemed like Rigoberto’s bike was moving unusually fast. I thought, Rigoberto is going to kill himself, and I felt a faint shiver as I pictured hundreds of cyclists, their backpacks adorned with the Uber Eats or Rappi or Cornershop logo, stoically crisscrossing Mexico City.

Illustrations by George Wylesol.

I heard the doorbell—a brief, prudent, almost coy little ring. I didn’t think I’d be up to walking down the stairs. I sat on the top step and devised the brilliant plan of going down on my butt. After a period that seemed like half an hour I reached the bottom, and then I clung scrupulously to the wall like a Spider-Man in training. By the time I managed to get the building’s front door open, Rigoberto was long gone. Later I realized he had called me and my phone was in my pocket, but I’d never heard it or felt it vibrate. I went up the stairs in the same inelegant but safe manner I’d come down. The fog was spreading in my eyes; I felt I was in the middle of a dense cloud. I tried to look for my glasses again but was simply incapable. Then I discovered I was wearing them. I had been wearing my glasses this whole time. When I took them off I found that I could see fine, or as well as my astigmatism and myopia usually allowed me to see. I interpreted this “change” as a sign of normalcy, but I was wrong. I dragged myself to the kitchen and devoured everything I could find: some dismal slices of cheddar cheese, a bunch of rice crackers, several handfuls of uncooked oatmeal, three Chiapas bananas and two Dominico ones, and a few dozen arduous pistachios.

When I made it back to the bedroom, pretty desperate by now, I thought of Octodad, that agonizing and Kafkaesque video game where an octopus tries to coordinate his tentacles to carry out human activities. I’ve only played it once, but I haven’t forgotten how hard it was for Octodad to, say, pour a cup of coffee or mow the grass or buy groceries. I lay on the floor like a ball of yarn and thought about Silvestre, and I wished someone would take me by the hands and walk me to where he was. I thought about my son learning to crawl. “There are some children who never crawl”: that sentence arose in my head, spoken in the voice of a friend. “Some children just start walking right away.” Specialists emphasize the importance of crawling for neurological development, but there are also people who claim that those specialists exaggerate. I remembered a friend of Jazmina’s telling us about a university professor with impeccable credentials who had a student over to her house and crawled during the entire visit. I mean: she crawled to open the door, accompanied her guest to the living room crawling, crawled to get a glass of water for her, and only after some small talk—made on all fours—explained to the flabbergasted student, with utter solemnity, that she had decided to spend three days crawling, because she hadn’t crawled as a baby and wanted to rectify that disadvantage once and for all. We had cracked up over that story, which now struck me as very sad or serious or at least enigmatic.

So without further ado, I decided to try to crawl. I managed to plant my elbows securely but not my knees, and then nailed my knees but not my elbows. This happened several times. I turned over repeatedly on the floor, remembering how I’d rolled down sand dunes at the beach as a child. I lay on my back and managed to drag myself over the floor with my heels, in a kind of inverse crawl. I lay on my belly again and tried using my toes and elbows, but I couldn’t move forward: a slug would have beat me in a hundred-centimeter sprint. Then I realized, or discovered, that I had never crawled as a baby. I’d asked my mother about this recently on the phone. “I’m sure you did. All children crawl,” she said. It bugged me that she didn’t remember. She remembered that I learned to talk very early (she said this as though referring to an incurable disease) and that I started walking before I turned one, but she didn’t have a memory of me crawling. “All children crawl,” she told me, but no, Mom: not all of them do. Crawling is, in and of itself, elegant, I thought, but so is not crawling—to get up suddenly, à la Lazarus, and simply walk, with spontaneous fluidity, without any visible learning process. To walk without having crawled is an admirable triumph of theory.

Illustrations by George Wylesol.

Then I went off on a tangent and found myself analyzing the song “La cucaracha” with some rigor, and it seems to me now that I thought I was understanding something about myself or about Silvestre or about life in general, something impossible to relate yet true, definite, and even measurable. I pictured Silvestre at eighty years old. I thought, with indisputable sadness, I won’t be at my own son’s eightieth birthday party, because by then I’ll be… But I was not capable of adding eighty plus forty-three. I thought about the ending of The Catcher in the Rye. I thought about a story by the Chilean writer Juan Emar. I thought about these beautiful lines by Gabriela Mistral: “The dancer is dancing now / the dance of losing what she was.”

I jumped from image to image with the speed of someone reading only the first sentence of each paragraph. I wanted to sleep, I tried hard to fall asleep, but I had both feet planted firmly in the waking world. Then came an awful moment when I heard voices crying out for me, I knew I had to run over to the house next door, that they needed me there, but I couldn’t and I felt utterly useless, I was utterly useless. I saw myself as a building whose windows were all smashed. I saw myself as a deflated yoga ball. I saw myself as a giant snail drooling slime on the floor where everyone would slip and slide. I heard the voices of my wife, my son, calling to me, and with a practically heroic vestigial reserve of energy, I managed to stand up and take a couple of steps before falling on my ass.

I lay aching on the floor and closed my eyes for several minutes. I wasn’t sleepy, but I knew I still had the capacity to sleep. And I did. The next thing I remember is that I felt better. Or rather, I thought I felt better, but I also mistrusted my feelings, so I started taking inventory, awakening my senses. I ventured a careful, timid crawl. My knees hurt a lot, which, maybe because of my Catholic upbringing, I interpreted as a positive sign. I reached the living room and stayed on all fours looking at the plants. Some beautiful ants, the blackest and shiniest and danciest ants in all of human history, were coming and going along a little path that began at a groove in the window and ended at the summit of a flowerpot. I looked at them intently: I absorbed them, I enjoyed them. I said something to them—more than one thing, I don’t remember. I concentrated on the plants. I called them by their names, recently learned: succulent, bromeliad, oleander.

I wrote this message to Jazmina; I felt better:

This trip

is terrible

But I’m enfoying the ants (ant emoji)

(ant emoji)

At a certain point I discovered it was dark out and that I could move with some degree of normalcy. The first-aid class must have been about to end, or maybe it was already over. I considered the possibility of doing nothing. I almost never consider that possibility. Instead, I decided to take some little excursions between the bedroom and the living room—I didn’t even think about the Charly García song, “Yendo de la cama al living”—practicing for my expedition to the house next door. I went on a lot of excursions. Judging by the time of the next message, which I sent to Jazmina immediately before going outside, I practiced for over an hour:

Finally I felt confident I would not take a nosedive. The fresh nighttime air on my face was a blessing. I idealized the imminent scene, eagerly anticipating or foreseeing Jazmina and Silvestre, and I imagined that they coincided, that they were once again a single person. But the first thing I saw when I opened the door was disconcerting: a group of adults crawling on the ground.

For a fraction of a second I thought I was still mid-trip, or that they had all taken pajarito, too, or that it wasn’t a class on first aid but rather on crawling. One of the crawlers, perhaps the most diligent, was Jazmina. When she saw me she got up, hugged me, and explained that the class was over but they’d spent the past hour looking for the doctor’s cell phone. Silvestre was asleep in his grandmother’s arms. I kissed him and wanted to pick him up, but I held back, just in case. I joined the group of crawlers with ambition and bravura—“Now this I can do well,” I thought—moved by a competitive, vindicatory desire to be the one to find the doctor’s phone. I ran into my friend Frank under the table, and he looked bored, or maybe remorseful. He told me, in English so no one would understand (though I think everyone there understood English), that the doctor was making too big a deal out of this.

Illustrations by George Wylesol.

The doctor did, in fact, seem disproportionately dejected: she was crawling around like a baby searching for her most treasured rattle. Then she stood up and leaned against a window in a melancholy pose. She looked at the ceiling and shook her head like someone trying, for the umpteenth time, to remember a name or an address or a prayer. The scene seemed to drag out forever, unbearably: fifteen or twenty minutes of the doctor mourning her lost cell phone.

Cold milk is recommended to cut a trip short, but at that moment I was sure the doctor needed it more than I did. She accepted the glass I handed her with apparent bafflement. Then came the sudden denouement, which was obvious, categorical, slapdash: Frank had accidentally stashed the damned phone at the bottom of a diaper bag. My friend gave the doctor a contrite, mischievous smile, but she wasn’t having it: solemnly and professionally she drank her glass of milk, and then she left. We all left.

I picked up Silvestre and started humming a very fast version of Yuri’s song “La maldita primavera.” Jazmina was laughing and yawning. We walked home with sure steps, with the enthusiasm and joy of people returning after a long stay in another country. My son was sleeping soundly as I told him, with my eyes, not to ever crawl, not to ever walk, that it wasn’t necessary: I could carry him forever.

 

Translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell

Alejandro Zambra’s latest novel, Chilean Poet, will be out next month. He is the author of Multiple Choice; My Documents, a finalist for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award; and three previous novels: Ways of Going Home, The Private Lives of Trees, and Bonsai. He lives in Mexico City. 

Megan McDowell is the recipient of a 2020 Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, among other awards, and has been short- or long-listed for the Booker International prize four times. She lives in Santiago, Chile.