Packaged Lives, page 7
Sheila waited patiently for them to finish their chitchat about ghosts. She politely brought their attention back to Dylan Thomas. “I know very well that the time is short. We won’t have time to see all the places the poet lived in or wandered about, but I think it is very important for you to see the place he mentioned in that famous poem, ‘The Hunchback in the Park.’” Sheila left the bus. The tourists followed. She led them to a beautiful park that looked like a palm spread across the breast of a woman. Neatly trimmed. A fountain stood in the middle. Leaves looking like flowers floated on its water. A small brook ran nearby. Sheila said to those standing around her, “He used to sit here,” pointing to a place, “This was his favorite place.” The group drew near a drinking fountain, a very ordinary fountain like any other they had seen in other parks, neglected, rusty, and dry. They looked at it in veneration. “It needs refurbishing,” Ghada whispered. “Yes,” Sheila replied, “the faucet and basin will be restored after this year’s celebration of Dylan Thomas’s birth.” They stood around the fountain. They contemplated it at length. Lingering in the places the poet loved and wrote about meant they had some of what their poet had, which would eventually allow them to possess the poet. The German, his hand reaching out to the fountain and his fingertips caressing the mouth, whispered in a dreamy voice, “Drinking from a cup chained to the fountain.” “He stole the cup,” Sheila said, “and the metal chain that locked the cup to the fountain too.”
A man passed by on a motorcycle. They turned their heads in his direction. He looked at them absentmindedly. Ghada put her hand on her heart and drew a deep breath. “Did you see what I saw,” she said, “doesn’t he look just like Dylan Thomas?” Sheila interrupted, trying to finish what she had started. “He spent hours and hours in the park, alone, reading, writing, walking, and of course drinking.” Ghada said to Michael as they made their way toward the bus, “These houses are beautiful.” “Yes, because they look over the park.” “They remind me of houses overlooking the Cornwall coast.”
The Pub
They sat to drink beer in a well-lit corner of the pub while their lunch was being prepared. Pictures of Dylan Thomas in different stages of his life hung on the walls. They looked around silently. “Is this his favorite pub?” Ghada asked. “No,” Sheila replied, “one of his favorite pubs. Whichever pub served him alcohol was his favorite. He chased after his drink wherever he went.” “How did he make a living?” “Dylan Thomas was a professional beggar. He took from people whatever he could get out of them. His family went through very difficult times because of him. But he always succeeded in getting what he wanted, using his name and his status as poet.”
A trembling, breathless voice rose from somewhere near the bar, a bit of a distance from them, a voice of a drunk that broke Ghada’s heart:
The hunchback in the park
A solitary mister
Propped between trees and water
Slept at night in a dog kennel
But nobody chained him up.
Ghada looked around her. Her heartbeat quickened. She was looking for a face that matched the voice she knew so well from the recordings she had listened to time and again. She saw a man, standing, in a dark corner, swaying, waving his arms, and bowing to the applause of a phantom audience. He did not finish the poem.
“How did he die?” the Dutchman inquired. “He died in New York after downing eighteen glasses of whiskey. ‘Massive abuse of the body’ is stated as the cause of death in his autopsy report.” “Was the glass full,” Ghada asked, “or did he drink eighteen units of whiskey?” “I don’t exactly know.” “What is the size of one unit of whiskey?” Ghada turned to her husband. “I don’t know. I know it by sight not measurement.” “Do you think it is 5 cc?” “Maybe.” Sheila interrupted once again. “I think the best way is to measure by the standard whiskey glasses.” Insistently, Ghada went on talking about the very same issue, as if knowing the exact measurement would help her solve an enigmatic, difficult problem. “Let’s say that the double of each unit is 50. Multiply that by 18 and you get 900. It is less than a liter. I don’t think it is a lethal dose, especially if we surmise that he drank it over a period of a few hours.” Michael made a decisive intervention at this very moment in what he thought of as disturbance to others. “It is lethal if it was the dose he had been abusing his body with every night.”
The Museum
A hall dedicated to the commemoration of the poet. His pictures. His notebooks. His things. Stage designs. His books. His voice, inebriated, overwhelmed the place, scattering a poem, one line after another, on the visitors, completing a poem whose beginning they heard in another place, as if he were reminding them that he would be with them wherever they went.
A middle-aged woman entered the hall. Petite, pale, her hair blond streaked with silver. Quietly, she sat behind a table and waited for the visitors to gather around her. On the wall behind her the pictures of her father and mother hung, as well as her childhood pictures with her brothers. Someone turned off the recording. The sudden jarring silence reminded them of the absence of that special familiar someone. Everybody looked around them, remembering that they were in a public place. They were not, as they had thought, alone with the voice of the poet.
The daughter of the poet swept through the visitors with exhausted eyes that had given in to the burden placed on her. A carnival of many nationalities brought together here by her iconic father, his poetry, his abuse of alcohol, his self-destructive streak, and his premature death. Because she was his daughter, they shrouded her in holiness with a translucent veil. They sat before her, peering, looking in her face for the features of their idol. She sat there quietly, waiting for questions. She toyed with the papers in front of her, like a child, with her father’s poems. She raised her head. She picked a face in the front row to fix her eyes on and start the conversation, the face of a woman, an Oriental woman, which reminded her of her recent visit to Istanbul University, where she read some of her poems translated into Turkish. “Does anyone want to ask me about anything specific?”
Silence.
Dylan Thomas was everywhere in the hall, in the person of his daughter, in his pictures, and his things scattered around the hall in a very organized fashion. The echoes of his voice were in their heads, growing even louder through his daughter’s voice.
“It’s not easy being Dylan Thomas’s daughter. It is a burden I finally gave in too after much resistance. It took a very long time for me to accept it. I didn’t choose to represent my father. I was pushed into it. The insistence of people pushed me into it, and my two brothers’ refusal to attend events having anything to do with him, even when they erected his statue to honor him in Wales. My brothers refused to go and I had to go on my own. They hate being known as his sons.”
“Shall I tell you about his poetry? His poetry is lyrical. His voice was lyrical. He created a new poetic language. Philip Larkin and Ted Hughes followed in his footsteps. He talked magically about ordinary subjects in his poems and plays: life, death, and nature. He is described as a Welsh poet but in truth he didn’t know the Welsh language at all. His mother tongue was English. His father forbade him from speaking Welsh since he was a child because he, i.e. the father, admired the English language and thought it would be the language of the future. This was how he became the most important Welsh poet, a stranger to his own language and an innovator in the language of strangers.”
“What about my mother?”
Her voice quivered when she talked about her mother.
“My mother was very attractive. She thought he was a genius. But she didn’t like to listen to what he wrote, particularly because he wanted to monopolize her attention. He loved to read his poems aloud and would repeat the line he liked tens of times. He liked how they echoed in the kitchen and in the bathroom. She would kick him out and send him to the garden.”
She then lowered her voice and sweetly said, as if confessing a secret to the eyes gazing at her in admiration, Ghada’s eyes, “Every time I talked about him I saw him with fresh eyes and his picture would change.” Her seductive eyes in a dream, she revealed something even more profound, “I began to feel attracted to my father. I felt I was getting closer to him. I understood him when I read his poems aloud to an audience, because I was reading what I knew, what I lived as a child, in his shadow. Slowly but steadily I recovered his voice, intoxicated, sad, glittering in happiness, drowning in isolation, high on admiration of others’ voices. I recovered my father.” Her voice rose and fell, giddy with happiness, drunk, mournful, and high, as she spoke the last words.
Ghada’s eyes filled with tears. She felt, like in her dream, a force pulling her toward something accompanied by a voice that gave her body goose bumps. She could no longer resist. She gave in to the eyes that could see through her, to that moment of private confession, to the words, to the voice of the commanding poem resurrected from a fragile body.
All night in the unmade park
After the railings and shrubberies
The birds the grass the trees the lake
And the wild boys innocent as strawberries
Had followed the hunchback
To his kennel in the dark.
n.d.
10
Painting
The exhibition would go on for a month, the organizer told her. She said to her son that a month was not a long time, I’ll keep watch in the morning and you’ll come in the afternoon. He burst out in sudden anger, waving his right hand violently, as if he wanted to push his father away, far away from him. “What about him? Why doesn’t he come himself? The paintings are his, aren’t they?”
She felt tired. A sudden fatigue, like her son’s anger. Nervous exhaustion from unending repetition. From years of being stranded between two charging bulls, the son and the father. Both accused her of weakness, of being obliging to the other. She sensed the coming on of another battle in which she would be the sure loser. She was stuck between two people who refused to move even a tiny inch from their position. She could tell from her son’s convulsive words, from his addressing his father in the third person. She could feel the rising heat of his stubborn rejection.
From There Is Such Other (1999), 41–46.
She gazed at his face placidly, holding down her temper, and said, quietly repeating what she had been saying to him hundreds of times for so many years, as if she were saying the words for the first time: “Your father doesn’t like to mix with people but I do. This is not complicated at all. Why do you complicate things? I also enjoy having you with me.” She added, pleading, “At least do it for my sake.” “One day you will beg people to come and see his paintings as well,” he whispered, looking at her lovingly, “and I’m sure they will come, for your sake.”
A feeling of warmth enveloped her. His simple words wiped away her fatigue. He was still able to express his love for her with a childlike innocence even though he, in his twenties, had long left his childhood behind. Hanging paintings on temporary walls was not really a difficult task, but she wanted him with her because she really enjoyed his company. It was her way of getting him to spend time with her, even if only for a few minutes.
The preparations were complete. Two sets of temporary wood walls in gray paint, one erected along the church wall and the other along the colossal southern columns of Covent Garden, marked out the exhibition space. The participating artists hung their paintings on these walls every morning and took them down every evening for storage in the church overnight. Five refugee artists from different countries took part in the London event. The exhibition, called Bend, was a collated European-wide effort in which parallel events took place at the same time in other cities. The artists, all five of them, sat on folding chairs with their backs to their paintings and their faces to Covent Garden’s courtyard.
Here, in London’s center for tourism, clowns were trying to make the tourists laugh. Masses of colorful clothes, skins, and features. Comedians performed silent sketches for a silent audience. Commotions of people coming and going, milling about, and drinking, eating, and chatting in cafés and restaurants generously fill the space. Who was watching whom? Three women mimes stood in the middle of the square. One moved. The onlookers screamed in admiration and amazement. Cameras clicked in nonstop succession as they tried to capture the fleeting moments of wonder before they disappeared even from memory. An African musical troupe played a rhythmic tune, and those standing around swayed with its beats. The church and the exhibition were the tranquil background against which the clamor of people enjoying life unfolded.
Another kind of life was churning in the day-care center at the far end of the church. Fathers brought half-asleep children in the morning, and mothers picked them up fully awake and frenziedly active in the afternoon. “If we were living in normal circumstances,” she whispered to her heart, “I would have had six children.” She sighed, full of regret, her eyes tearing, how she loved children, she thought to herself. She used to hold her only son in her arms during the days he would allow it and say, “You are my six children.” His will to fly away from her grew in proportion to her attachment to him.
“Arrange the paintings according to what you think best. I trust your taste,” her husband said so as to sever his ties with the paintings and to be rid of the burden of her anxiety. He would begin to pursue another interest that would in the end give him a new painting. Nothing in his paintings attracted attention. Ten paintings in only two colors: white and black. A serene statement about an incomprehensible situation. The viewers must study them, with the same tranquility, and patiently work out their signs and symbols. These were his most recent works. He painted them in the aftermath of the US bombings of Iraq, when he was possessed by anger and impotence, so he painted his anger, impotence, love, grief, and fear. He painted his feelings. He saw with his mind’s eye scenes, in white and black, of collapsed buildings, lands stripped bare, bombing targets, ruins, and falling bridges.
The only variable in the paintings is the shades. They are thick and in darker hues than the shapes he drew tentatively at the beginning when he thought he could see them but which he later abandoned, leaving them, like him, impotent. The background was gray. Holes. Openings. Severed lines. The city was a vast arena of ruins, inhabited by citizens carrying her ruins in their bodies. No indications of time or place. Familiar signs of inhabited cities were absent. Ruins, nothing but ruins, of the soul, of the city. Was it true that ruins begat ruins? The night was dark and the depressed prolonged its hours. He could not bear leaving the place of his pain, not even for brief moments, and sank into one abyss after another. His purpose was to reach the ultimate darkness so that he could rest forever.
She did not look at the paintings because she lived every moment of their making. She would occasionally lift her head from the book or newspaper she was reading and watch the viewers. She wanted to know their reactions. Did they see what she saw? How much of her husband’s message did they get? Some took a quick glance and walked away. Perhaps the pain coming out of the paintings was too distressing for the happy man? Others turned their faces away from them. Only a few stood before them and contemplated, quietly, before they moved away in slow steps. Were they avoiding awakening a city in ruins?
In the first, second, and third weeks, they spoke to her. They asked her questions. They wanted to know about the artist and his city. She told them, in great excitement, about the paintings, and the rubbles of the city, for she felt she belonged to both. These were her paintings as much as they were his. She lived them. She inhaled the stinging smell of paints and witnessed his withdrawal from the world as he painted them. Sitting among his works, she turned into another white and black painting. Her complexion was pale white. Her long jet-black hair covered her shoulders. And the layers of black she wrapped around her thin body gave her a sizable presence.
A woman in her fifties stood long before the paintings in the second week. Bringing her face very close to the small painting carrying the number 4, she peered at it for quite a while. She then turned to her, congratulated her, “wonderful miniatures,” and left. She was intrigued, put down the newspaper she was pretending to read, and walked up to the painting. She wanted to know what made the woman examine it with such concentration. She saw something new, two shapes that were not there before, a man and woman sheltering each other, holding each other close with what seemed like tens of arms. Their features were far from clear, but the heat being emitted from their bodies was enough to illuminate what was around them.
She told her husband that night about the stranger’s admiration for the shapes of the man and woman he drew. He said nonchalantly that he did not draw the two shapes but if the woman saw these two shapes then it was her right to see what she wanted to see and therefore they must be there.
In the days that followed, the painting grew, gradually but steadily, and picked up more shades. It changed. It acquired a coarse surface with the feel of colors mixed with earth and half-melted rubber that gave it a new solidity and density and at the same time redistributed its shades. The two colors, white and black, multiplied into myriad shades of gray, silver, and milk. Its hues became eye-catchingly distinct. The polite quiet statement disappeared. A sigh, almost a scream, shot out of the grays, an open mouth the size of pain. The colors of rubber were now celestial movements taking place at the far end of the horizon. Moving clouds touched still clouds above mountain peaks under the heaven. The painting came breathtakingly alive, brushing off the layers of dust accumulated on its body and the city. Varying formations began to appear in the painting every day. She breathed in, through it, the air of the city ruins, and became one with the people living there, its rubble and remains. She felt the rock sitting heavily on her chest begin to crumble. She could breathe again.
