Today I am on holiday, I decide, no less than the tourists that flitted around us butterfly-gay wherever we stopped. Fisherman’s Wharf, Twin Peaks, the Golden Gate Bridge. On holiday from myself. Today with the ocean like goldfoil rolled out all the way to the horizon, bringing tears.
Would you not agree that even I am entitled to a day like this, once in a life.
And this place where Raven has knelt on the ground careless of his Bill Blass pants and set out for our lunch a loaf of bread long as his arm, chunks of cheese in their thick white skin, a wood bowl heaped high with strawberries shaped like kisses. All exotic to me, though when I tell him that he laughs and says no, it is really quite ordinary. I know he is telling the truth. Yet when I hold up a strawberry I can see it only as a perfect red gem with luminous curves, and when I bite into it I am overcome by its innocent, edenic fragrance. And suddenly it occurs to me that this is how Raven must see the everyday things of my life—cumin, coriander, clove, chana dal—and a brief sadness, delicate and inexplicable as fog, drifts over me.
Stop Tilo, for today you are on holiday from your thoughts also.
And so I focus my attention upon this place, with the Pacific waves crashing under us somewhere we cannot see, the gulls’ cries wheeling above, this place which I will remember like no other. Where I lean back and am, for a moment, elegant as any empress (yes, I) against a cypress bent by a hundred years of wind, and gaze at the salt-stained ruins of a bathhouse that shimmers against the water like a mirage.
“Built,” Raven tells me, “by a foolish dreamer.”
“Like me,” I smile.
“And me.” He too is smiling.
“Of what do you dream, Raven?”
For a breath-space he hesitates. Shyness sweeps like the shadow of a wing over his face, that look so rare in a man. Then a different look comes over his face, and when I read it something inside me begins to tremble. For it says, I will keep no more secrets from you.
This is what I have waited for, ever since I met him that diamond-dust evening. And yet.
Raven, is it not foolish that I am afraid, I Tilo who have been the keeper of so many secrets for so many men and women. But I fear that when I learn your desire, you will become no different from the others who come to my store. I will give you what you long for, and in the giving pluck you from my heart.
Perhaps that will be best. My heart which once again will belong wholly to the spices.
Even as I think this my mind scurries, frantic, searching for a plan to stop your words. But you are already speaking, the sounds turning to gold-motes on this salt-spray air.
“I dream of the earthly paradise.”
The earthly paradise. The words spin me back to my volcano island with the sea furled green around it, the beckoning coconut fronds. Between my toes the warm grit of sand, the sharp silver glint of it in my eye, bringing tears if only I would allow.
Raven how could you possibly know of—
But he is saying, “High in the mountains pine and eucalyptus, damp odor of redwood, bark and cone, a stream so cool and fresh to the mouth you feel you’ve never tasted water before.”
My American, once again I am made to see how we are worlds apart, even in our dreaming.
He continues. “Nature undiluted, in beauty and harshness both. Where you could live once again the primal life, alongside the bear lifting his mouth to the rowanberry, the antelope standing tall, listening for sounds. The mountain lion springing upon its fleeing prey. In the white sky would be black birds circling. And no man there or woman. Except—”
I look my question.
“I will tell you,” says Raven, brushing back the iridescent curtain of his hair. “But I must start where it began, my dream and my war.”
You at war Raven, with your certain, gentle hands, your lips so full of giving? I cannot imagine it.
As I think this, a darkness speckles the sun. A flock of crows, their flapping wings the color of neem leaves, crossing overhead. Their doleful cries fall on us like premonition.
There is a pool of shadows at the corners of Raven’s taut mouth. His face is all angles and hollows, the softness gone out of it. It is a face, for a moment, capable of anything.
Tilo how little you know this man. And yet for him you are risking everything. Is this not the crown of foolishness.
There is a high drone, like bomber planes, in my head. It drowns out Raven’s words. But already I know the name of the place he is referring to.
The dying room.
“Can you see us in that dim place,” says Raven, “my mother’s hands on my shoulder, guarding me, the old man with his failing body, his fierce heart? And me, a boy in his Sunday suit caught in the animosity sparking like a live wire between them.
‘The old man said, Evvie, leave the boy with me, and when my mother’s whole body stiffened into a no, he said, Please, I only have a little time. There was power in that imploring voice, so much that I couldn’t see how she resisted it. And a helplessness that caught at my heart, the broken tones of a man not used to asking for favors.
“But my mother stared into the dark as though she hadn’t heard it. No. As though she had heard it too many times before. And for the first time ever, her face looked hard and distrustful, ugly.
“I think the old man saw it too. His voice changed, grew hard as well, and formal. And though it was not loud it boomed against the walls of the room like a waterfall. Granddaughter, he said, I had hoped not to say this but now I will. I ask it as debt-payment for all those years you lived with me, all that I gave which you threw away when you left.
“That was how I learned who he was to her, and to me.
“All I want, he continued, is for the boy to have a choice for his life’s path. As you had.
“He’s too young to be forced into making a choice, my mother said in a choked voice. I could feel the fear closing up her throat. My mother, afraid, I thought in amazement, because I had never imagined such a thing possible.
“When you chose not to follow the old ways, did I force you? asked the old man, pausing between words as though each were a hill he had to climb. No. I let you go although it was like cutting my rib cage open. You know I would never hurt your boy.
“In the silence I could feel all around me the listening breath of the people. The room filling and emptying with it, like a lung.
“Very well, she said at last, taking her hands off my shoulder. You can talk to him. But I stay in the room.”
“When my mother lifted her hands from me and moved to the back,” says Raven, “it was like she took all the light with her.
“No. Let me say that again. What went with her was the light of everyday, by which we do our day-tasks and know our day-selves. But it wasn’t darkness that was left behind, only a different kind of light, a flickering redness that you could see through if only you had different eyes. And words. The room was full of words, only, they needed a different ear than I possessed to hear them.
“The old man didn’t move or speak. But I felt the pull of him on my arms and legs, in the middle of my chest. A warm pull, as though he and I were formed of the same substance, earth or water or iron rock, and now that we were close, it called to its own.
“I began to walk to him, feeling all the while that other will tugging me backward. My mother’s. She wanted so badly for me to turn away from the part of her life she’d replaced with the shiny furniture and the pretty flower curtains, though even then I guessed that it wasn’t those things she’d wanted but just the chance to be ordinary and American.
“Can you understand this?”
Raven in whose eyes I see the desperate memory of your mother’s desires, I understand more than you will ever guess. I Tilo who wanted so much as a child to be different, who as an adult now so longs for the ordinary life of kitchen and bedroom, fresh-made bread, a parrot in a cage to call my name, lovers’ quarrels and the small joys of kiss-and-make-up.
O the irony of desire, always hearkeni
ng after the liquid glimmer beyond the distant-most dune. Sometimes only to find that it is no different from the parched sand on which we stood days, months, years ago, in yearning.
Tilo here is a question for you to consider even as Raven’s story pulls you into it, an enchanted well for unwary travelers to drown in: Does one ever really know what one wants? Did Raven’s mother? Do you? You who begged once to become Mistress, will you ever be happy to be only a woman?
“Step by step,” says Raven, “I moved without knowing it, and with each step his pull grew stronger and hers less. Until I stood directly in front of him and could hear them finally, the words, stitched together into a song which gathered itself warm as a live animal skin around my body. I couldn’t understand the language, but the meaning was clear enough. Welcome, it said, welcome at last. We’ve been waiting so long.
“The old man was holding his hands out to me, and when I put mine in them I felt the softness under their calluses. They reminded me of my father’s hands. Only, these were old, all bone, with folds of speckled skin wrinkling at the wrists, nothing beautiful about them at all, nothing to explain why I felt so suddenly happy.
“They grasped me with a strength I didn’t expect, and then the room went bright with pictures: a host of men and women at the edge of a river, digging up roots in the sweltering sun, cutting branches to weave into baskets. Bent over sick bodies, waving their hands in patterns that left behind little lines of light in the air. Sitting in front of a night fire chanting the wellness songs, sprinkling in cornmeal that sparked as it burned.
“Slowly I understood that he was showing me his life the way it had been, and the lives of those who had come before and passed their power on. I felt the ache in their backs, the elation thudding like horsehooves through their chests when a man given up for dead opened his eyes. I understood that if I wanted that life, it would become mine.”
My breath comes faster as I listen. It is fearful-exhilarating to glimpse the parallels in our lives, the differences. To think that Raven too holds a legacy of power. To wonder why then has he come to me.
And to hope.
Ah my American, perhaps at last I have found someone with whom I can share how it is to live the Mistress life, that beautiful, terrible burden.
“I stood there, scared, not knowing what to do,” says Raven. “But slowly I noticed how the skin around his eyes was brown and crinkly and kind, like tree bark, how his eyes glowed like there were little fires deep in them. My great-grandfather, I thought, and the words were like a cool balm laid on fevered skin.
“Then I saw them behind his head, the other faces stretching all the way into the wall, like when you stand between two mirrors. The faces shifted, their features blending so that they were and were not my great-grandfather’s face, were and were not mine. Now he was reaching into his chest and lifting something out. His heart, I thought, and for a horrified moment I imagined him handing it to me, purple and bleeding, still beating crazily.
“But it was a bird, big and beautiful, charcoal black, gleaming like oil, which sat still in his ancient hands and watched me with red bead eyes.”
He nods at my unasked question. “Yes, a raven.
“There was drumming all around me, and the thin, air-filled notes of a pipe. My great-grandfather held the bird out for me to take, and I reached out, too. Then I saw the frames of other pictures rolling past: myself playing baseball with my friends down at the corner lot, sitting at the table doing homework with my dad, at the grocery with my mother, pushing the cart for her so she turned at the checkstand with a smile like dewdrops in the sun. I knew it was my life I was seeing, the one I’d have to give up before I could take on the other. I smelled again the moist flower-smell of my mother’s breath as she kissed me on the forehead. I felt the fear in her fingertips just before she’d let me go, and knew that if I decided to follow the way of my great-grandfather’s people, things would never be the same between her and myself. My heart sank under the weight of the terrible sorrow I would bring to her, and suddenly I wasn’t sure.
“What would I have decided? I don’t know. Over and over and over I’ve repainted the scene in my mind, trying to see past what happened to what might have.”
He pauses to look at me with a sudden hope in his eyes. But I do not know how to look into the realm of lost possibilities and must with regret shake my head.
His breath falls between us, heavy, solid. “I keep telling myself, it’s the past, let go of it. But you know how it is. It’s a lot easier to be wise up here—” he taps his head “—than in here.” He puts his hand on his chest and rubs it absently, as though to ease an old injury.
Raven, tonight I will lay on my windowsill amritanjan, ointment that is like cold fire, hot ice. Which makes you sweat away the pain and what is sometimes worse, the memory of pain that we humans cannot seem to stop clutching to ourselves.
“In the moment of my deciding,” he says, “this is what happened. From the back of the room my mother said, soft but urgent, in the special voice she kept for when I was about to do something really dangerous, No. It is possible that she had not meant to speak, for when I turned to look she had clapped a hand over her mouth. Still the harm was done.
“Hearing her tone I’d drawn back instinctively. It was a small movement, but it was enough. The bird gave a great cry and rose in the air. I could feel the rush of wind as it beat its wings. It rose straight up. I was terrified it would crash into the ceiling and injure itself, but it went through it like it was water and disappeared. Only a feather floated down and landed in my hands. I touched it and it was the softest thing. Then it melted into my palm and was gone.
“When I looked up my great-grandfather had slumped forward. A couple of men ran up, then shook their heads and laid him on his back. A wailing came from the others crowding around his bed, but I was mute with guilt. And loss as I remembered the kindness in his face, and that feather, like silk, like eyelashes in my palm.
“My mother was pulling me toward the door, saying, Come on, let’s go, we’ve got to go. I pulled back. Frightened as I was—for surely it was I who’d killed him—I felt I had to get to the old man’s side, to lay my hands in his one last time. But I had no chance against my mother’s adult strength.”
Raven looks at me blindly. “That was the first time,” he says, “that I really hated my mother.”
I see the memory of it in his eyes. It is a strange emotion, not the wild and stormy hatred one would expect a child to feel, but as though he had been pushed into a frozen lake and now, having emerged, saw all things with a changed, deliberate, icy vision.
“I didn’t struggle anymore—I could see it was no use. Instead I reached out and yanked at her necklace. It broke with a snap so loud I expected people to turn to look, but of course the loudness was only in my head. My mother drew in a sharp, shocked breath and raised her hand to her throat. Pearls flew in every direction, hitting the floor and walls with small, hard sounds.
“You made me hurt my great-grandfather, I said. He’s dead because of what we did. And then I turned and walked to the door. There were pearls under my shoes, smooth, slippery bumps. I trod heavily, wanting to crush them, but they skittered away, and when I looked back, the dark floor seemed to be strewn with tears of ice.
“A shivering had passed over my mother’s face at my words, and when it resettled, I saw that it was different, looser, as though the muscles had suddenly grown tired of trying. A part of me, horrified, wanted to stop, but the new, hating part made me go on.
“He was going to give me something really special, I said, and you took me away from it.
“Sometimes I wonder. If I hadn’t spoken those words, would my mother have said something different, I didn’t mean to cry out like that, baby, it just happened. But maybe not. Anger is always easier than apology, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” I say. “Yes—for us all.”
“This is what she said, in a voice so clear and reasonable that only I, who
knew her so well, could catch the edge of fury beneath it: He was dying anyway. We had nothing to do with it. I’m just sorry that you ended up being there when it happened. That was my mistake. I never should have let that idiot talk me into coming back. And as for something special, don’t let all the mumbo-jumbo in that room fool you.
“By now we were out on the porch, where more people had gathered. Thick-necked men wearing dirt-stiff jeans, some drinking out of bottles, a few eating chunks of fried dough dipped in gravy from paper plates. The women sat like pillars, heavy in hip and thigh. If they thought anything of us, a slender, pearl-buttoned woman and a boy in a suit, if they heard the words we hurled at each other, they hid it behind their blank faces. As we passed, one of the women lifted the edge of her dress to wipe a child’s nose.
“My mother stopped. This, this, is what I’m taking you away from, she said, and I didn’t know if she was referring to the entire scene, or to that unshaven woman-leg exposed so carelessly, the ugly folds of flesh and fat.
“Look carefully, said my mother, the disgust clear in her voice. Don’t forget it. This is what your life would be if you—or I—had done what he wanted.
“And then we were in the car.”
Now the sun hangs low over the Pacific, a giant burnt-orange gulabjamun for the waves to lick at. Raven and I pack the remnants of our picnic. I watch his back as he throws the last pieces of the bread to the gulls, the stiffness he holds in his shoulders and hips, for it has been hard for him, dredging up this story from where he had buried it, giving it, through words, life and power again. I wish to tell him so much: how his story has filled me with sorrow and amazement, how I am honored that he has given it to me, how in the listening I have taken a part of the pain into my own heart, to hold and understand, and I hope to heal. But I feel he is not ready for me to say these things. Besides, the story is not over yet.