Western Alliances, page 33
Rupesh was soon taking the train every weekend now. Nees entered the room once and stared coldly at Rupesh, who squinted defiantly at the nurse; they had become officially enemies for life. Rupesh was squeamish about all wounds and bodily sufferings; the sight of the chest incision (which was healing well) about sent Rupesh to the bathroom to be sick and running to the train station to return to Amsterdam, far from the scar. (The chest wound, still hidden by the T-shirt, could yet be exposed to him like Perseus brandishing Medusa’s head. The threat of that corrected any number of Rupesh’s wayward behaviors.)
“I look old and fat,” Roberto said, hoping to be contradicted.
Nees was thickening him up with Flemish cuisine. She made a fabulous buoyant gingerbread, crushed under the weight of rich double cream. Blood sausages on a bed of salted pear slices, Stoemp—mashed potatoes and root vegetables with sausage and bacon bits—accompanied by a dense bread softened by a film of bacon grease and butter, meatballs of swine and boar and rabbit, under sauces of cream, sometimes sour cherries … He was gaining weight, at last, but it was centering in a little potbelly. The curse of the Thin Man’s Weight Gain, the skinny-man gut. This and the white hair at the temples, the gray in the beard when he was too weary to shave … Roberto standing in the bathroom, staring at himself, could now see the Dutch looks of Gehrman van Till staring back at him in the mirror.
Brussels was a monument to bureaucracy for its own sake. A perfect place for the capital of Europe. It was nineteen separate municipalities with their own bureaucracies and city halls and petty rivalries with each other. And this already in a country where the French and the Flemish barely acknowledged each other. Roberto tried to walk some in each of the nineteen municipalities (with help of the Metro) so he could have an opinion about it all. Roberto was struck by the prevalence of that self-conscious architecture of empire, the excess and insistent stone whimsy, the wealth of their colonial supervillain, Leopold II, king of the Belgians. The Belgians went down to the Congo and took the ivory, the metals, the rubber, the diamonds, everything of value and left the country a shambles it still hasn’t recovered from. The academic debate, last time Roberto looked, was whether ten million or fifteen million Congolese died so King Leopold, who micromanaged every operation, could dominate the rubber market.
Roberto sat on a bench, now too tired to get back to the house. Maybe he would flag a taxi. He dreamed of sunnier places to convalesce, like Spain, like Portugal … when it occurred to him that they too had decorated their cities and cathedrals with the spoils of empire. The gold altar of St. Joseph in Santiago de Compostela, the ocean of gold leaf affixed to the altars of São Francisco in Oporto … shall we pretend the gold wasn’t provided by enslaved indigenous, toiling for short brutal merciless lives in Spanish and Portuguese colonial mines? Potosí in Bolivia—didn’t eight million African and indigenous slaves die in that one mine alone? Where were the European treasures without sin? The stately palace of sculpted ceilings, Chippendale furniture, the gardens by Capability Brown … such serenity at Harewood House in Yorkshire for Lord Harewood and his family—thanks to a fortune derived from plantations in America and slaving. If ill-gotten gains were given to artists, composers, the ballet, architects, may we excuse and separate the resultant work from its funding source? In our own time, is any arts grant or fellowship courtesy of governments (none of whom are without wickedness) or generous donors (all of whose fortunes tie them to exploitation at some point) just as problematic? Roberto had a hankering to call up on Google Images the golden altars of São Francisco Church in Oporto on his smartphone … that was built in Asia by exploited labor amid a well-documented environmental devastation for the locals.
This was a new turn in Roberto’s thoughts. Anywhere wealth had accumulated, there was crime. Maybe not at first, but eventually. Ferdinand and Isabella. The burghers of medieval Brussels. Lord Harewood. Leopold II, king of the Belgians. Salvador Costa. Roberto Costa.
Land of Bolles
Because Norway is so pure and clean and its allotment of the earth looks indestructible and protected, there is an idea that Norwegians are all vegan, recycling, well-behaved, regularly exercising, happy socialists, but every Norwegian friend Roberto ever made would have given the most dissolute trailer park denizen in New Orleans—minus the guns—a run for his/her money on drink, random hookup sex, marijuana, pills, heroin (done by someone in the family, little brother, big sister), and American-style debt up to their eyeballs despite one of the highest wages and standards of living in the world. You’d be in debt too if every beer you had cost twelve dollars. For the craft artisanal beers, take out a mortgage.
“I think it’s a perfect country anyway, just about,” Roberto said to a full table of acquaintances in Angst (the name of the trendy, overdecorated-on-purpose Oslo bar). Among their number were two certified friends: Emilie, whom he backpacked with around Trollstigen in 2004, and her husband, Karl, who had two kids with her before they finally married. Karl knew that Emilie and Roberto had slept together, but then Emilie had slept with a few of the guys around the table, and Karl had slept with their wives/girlfriends in some long-Norwegian-winter circumstance as well. No one was sweating it. Roberto wasn’t sure which names went with which braying Viking boys, all fair-skinned, loud, and red-faced from beer and shots of Aquavit—Lucas, Aksil, Isak, another Lucas, and someone who went to get a pitcher and never came back.
“The sun does not come out,” said Emilie. “I am rained on all the time—better that it would snow! But no, the fucking Golfstrømmen keeps it raining in Oslo all the long autumn. There is no light. We are bored. We are also…” She seemed to have trouble thinking of anything else to complain about. “Oh yes, full of old people who are prejudiced, against all the Somalis and Middle Eastern people.”
“But there are too many of them,” said one of the Lucases.
“Welcome to Eurabia,” said, possibly, Aksil.
Isak (possibly) said, “I do not mind the beautiful Somalis. But the Poles—I hate the Poles.”
“Who would clean your house?” Emilie spat back at him. “We have become like those immobile blob-people in Wall-E, who have grown soft from never working. We don’t do anything ourselves anymore.” With two boys, three and four, Emilie knew every Disney/Pixar cartoon available.
Barely able to find anything seriously wrong with Norway, the attention turned on all the things wrong in Sweden (grimly becoming right wing, they serve cake with shrimp on top, too blond, hygiene issues, worse health care and social programs for the old, who have to steal from stores to eat) and Finland (all alcoholics, most boring country in the world if you don’t like ice hockey, moose, mosquitoes, grimly right wing, insisting on speaking their native language, which has too many umlauts and words like kääntäjää, and being too close to Russia, who will one day take over Scandinavia).
“Do you really worry about Russia starting a war?” Roberto asked.
Karl said his sister lived in Sweden, and it was all they talked about. There were always Russian submarines in their waters. “First the Baltics, then us,” he added.
The group, excepting Roberto, agreed that the major activity each winter in Sweden and Finland was committing suicide.
“Well, if you lived there,” a Lucas said with sympathy.
“Yes,” Emilie said somberly, nodding, “what choice would you have? You would fucking have to do it.”
Her husband discretely pantomimed that she should eat something.
Emilie had been threatening to make a run for bolles and french fries from a food van, one long block away from the bar. But she kept stalling, as she couldn’t find a stopping place in the conversation about the inferiority of all peoples beyond the border of Norway, but as this topic dragged on, she nudged Roberto and cocked her head to the door. They collected some ragged kroner from all pockets and slipped out into the frigid night, stomping across the wall of plowed snow slush into the street. At this hour (1:00 a.m.), there wasn’t a lot of traffic … but there were lines at the food trucks. Look at all the Norwegians in short-sleeve shirts when it’s in the thirties Fahrenheit. Burgers, kebabs, something called a burrito that wasn’t … but up Torggata was a twenty-four-hour 7-Eleven. Hot dogs! They call it a pølse; they are wrapped in bacon, inserted into a long bun, and then there was a world of toppings …
“This is what I love most about Norway,” Roberto said as Emilie loaded up at the pastry case. “And Britain. Lots of comfort food and junk food and no pretentions.”
“We make a point to eat every food that is junk from around the world.” Emilie felt hot in the overheated 7-Eleven and pulled off her wool cap. Roberto was surprised for just a second. She was bald. Apparently, the alopecia that was bothering her on the back of her head had continued to progress … He remembered hiking with her, following her on the trail up the troll’s mountain; she would often ask, “How bad is it?” and “Can you tell I’m losing hair?” She was, but he told her it was barely noticeable, blond hair, fair skin, et cetera. Maybe now, she had shaved her head rather than having a blond mane that was a patchwork.
He added, “I was a long time this year in France and Belgium. It’s exhausting pretending to be civilized about every meal.” He sidled up close to be confidential: “So you’re shaving? This is the first time I have seen.”
She laughed. “I have lived like this so long, I forget it is unusual. That is right, Mr. Roberto—this was beginning when we were traveling. Maybe it was you who made for it to fall out.”
Roberto leaned in, then kissed the top of her head. “It was me. I’m glad you’re not mad. I remember you telling me about all the grades of alopecia…”
For some strange reason, a woman and her five-year-old were up at 1:00 a.m. in the 7-Eleven. The little boy tugged on his mother’s skirt and pointed and tugged and kept telling his mother to “se, mamma, se!”
Roberto remembered. “There was alopecia totalis, which was no hair on the head. And what was the other one?”
Emilie turned and said, “Universalis,” before squatting down at eye level with the five-year-old and bowing her head for it to be rubbed by the fascinated boy. The mother apologized, but Emilie assured her it was all right. Emilie’s own boys at home were just as curious. She returned to Roberto’s side. “Universalis is no hair anywhere.” She batted her nonexistent eyelashes. “Even down below.”
“Did it go that far with you?”
“You have to pay to see … I charge you for an admission, hmm?”
His phoned pinged. It was, as it always was, Rachel. She texted: WE WILL BE EVICTED. IS THAT WHAT YOU WANT?
I HAVE NEVER WANTED ANYTHING MORE, he texted back.
At the 7-Eleven cash register, Roberto paid for it all: cinnamon bolles, cream-filled bolles, bolles with that addictive fudge-like brown cheese, ready-made sandwiches, and four pølser without buns for the others, all packed up and zipped inside Roberto’s coat for warmth-keeping on the trek back to Angst.
Roberto smiled. Even a month ago, he felt this world of the living might be denied him. Confined to live in a hospital bed in Brussels, looking out at a park, Nees feeding him soups and stews, him reduced to watching couples hold hands and children play under the trees while he felt bitterness. But now, he was back to his well-worn ways: people, conversation, clomping about in the snow, the lights of the city and the white ground-cover illuminating the low clouds so it didn’t really seem like night, material for his Notebook piling up, and eating deleterious crap after intemperate drinking.
These days, post-surgery, two drinks qualified as intemperate. He had switched to nonalcoholic after two tamer Hansa lagers. When one of the Lucases mocked this temperance, he said he’d just had open heart surgery, which no one believed. “Just say you are a lightweight,” said Aksil (maybe). “Why try for our sympathy? Raised on American piss-beer, you cannot keep up with the norske menn!”
He had slipped off his sweater, to the rapt attention of the table. Peeled off the Brown University T-shirt he wore for warmth over his dress shirt. Emilie put her hand to her mouth, not wanting to look but sort of wanting to. He unbuttoned his blue dress shirt so they could see a still-pink, livid scar. Instantly, he went from wuss-American lightweight to crazy macho American, staggering straight from the surgical theater to drinking and festing in Oslo—their hero!
Somehow, in the inexplicable ways of drinking nights, the festivities were suddenly over with revelers stumbling off in all directions. Lastly, Emilie and Karl confirmed that he must come by the house and meet the boys. Karl started to the parking lot, and Emilie said privately, “Sometime I will come see you, okay?”
Meaning his hotel? His bed in the hotel? Roberto plodded back to his comfortable chain hotel, the Scandia near the train station, not sure what she meant, but, as with life in much of this year, he was willing to let all things transpire. His main objective was to teach conversational English in Svalbard, a place with so little else to do, he might actually finish a draft of his Notebook.
How would he even begin a preface? He would do so tomorrow a.m.
After acquiring tea from the Scandia Hotel lobby, he fashioned an un-nutritious meal of two packs of Kvikk Lunsj (the Norwegian KitKat bar, but better) and some peanuts. Kvikk Lunsj means “quick lunch.” Peanøtter means “peanuts.” Oh, Norwegian, just stop it—when will you admit the truth to yourself? That you are merely badly spelled English!
Roberto, in preface mode, made a stab at the Kennedyesque.
I am American, but bin ich auch Europäer.
Yes, I’m one of those foreign language students who stayed too long on his study-abroad program and thinks he belongs in places most North Americans save for vacation. The hassles of foreign language, money exchange, odd toilets, no AC where one needs it most, being fooled or misled by your own incomprehension of the local language, accidentally eating what you are allergic to, accidentally insulting one’s hosts with some phrase you have learned incorrectly … most Americans enjoy their time in Europe but come running back home to the familiar, the ridiculously cheap-to-buy appliances and thoughtlessly great technology, the ease of acquiring drinks with more than one ice cube in them, the open-all-night convenience store that supplies snacks to accompany our collapse before our house-size televisions. Our patriotism is renewed!
But then there’s me.
When I went back home, I was sad. The United States was merely a waiting room until I got it together to head back to where life was, where Culture was in the air, where Art was on the walls and the great leaps forward of Architecture were in the main square across from the hotel, next to the medieval church, next to the Roman column, next to the Greek arena.
I know how people see me: the dilletante, the flâneur (even that is too European a designation), the snob, the annoying American who breaks into French or German and the accent sounds like the locals. If I listened to what my former friends and relatives thought of me when I was stateside, I might be bothered, but I am not bothered because I am never stateside.
Too personal? This would be a preface before thousands of pages—oh, c’mon, Roberto corrected himself, be realistic, hundreds of pages of cultural ramble and musings. One should expect an autobiographical preface, casual, friendly, self-effacing.
Having written that iota of text, it was now time to surf the internet.
Favorite music videos, travel videos of Norway (was there something he needed to see this visit? Americans don’t go inland to Røres—that looked good), an hour of downloads from the Trondheim Cathedral Boys’ Choir, Grieg’s traditional hymn arrangements, the current choral-god Ola Gjeilo, whom he had seen in New York City and who was also a hunk, work by Alsen, Olsson, a blind what-the-hell download of Emily Crocker, who was known for adapting Sami folk melodies, and modern works from Einojuhani Rautavaara. And some bluegrass Dolly Parton downloads, videos, interviews for no other reason but that the sound of her voice, talking or singing, pleased him totally and connected him with his abandoned America.
With so much writing accomplished, how to waste the rest of the day? He had already seen all the museums. Rupesh had sent him some dirty pictures …
But he was saved by his phone dinging; Rachel was contacting him. MERLE IS DISSOLVING OUR PARTNERSHIP. SHE’D LIKE TO SPEAK TO YOU.
Roberto texted back: TELL HER GOODBYE FROM ME.
Another ping, and his email received a picture from Rachel. Were they back at it? The European Treasure Competition?
She texted: THIS 1100S BEAUTY IN URNES IS HARD TO GET TO, BUT TRY. HOW, WITH ALL THE CANDLES AND FIRES INSIDE, DID THIS WOODEN VIKING ROMANESQUE NOT GET BURNED DOWN IN 900 YEARS? THOSE CREATURES THAT LOOK LIKE AFGHAN HOUNDS ARE LIONS. (THEY’D NEVER SEEN ONE.)
He texted back with a photo he had been eager to send her and would have much earlier, if they hadn’t been feuding: THIS IS A DOOR OF A CHURCH IN THE NATIONAL MUSEUM FOR SAFEKEEPING. THE VIKING SENSE OF LIFE IS PHANTASMAGORIC, GOTHIC, CREEPY. REMINDS ME OF THE SET WORK OF H. R. GIGER IN THE “ALIEN” FILMS …
Then the phone buzzed. Roberto thought it might be a ruse to connect him to Merle, who no doubt had “an offer,” a “compromise,” or a shakedown attempt, so he did not pick up. He listened to the message as soon as the voice mail icon appeared on his phone:
“Do you not feel,” a serene-sounding Rachel commenced, “that the Vikings had it all over the other Romanesque sculptors? Everything is interconnected. From the mythical figures, the griffins and dragons whose tongues and tails and serpent coils tangle and tie and untie themselves … how don’t you see that this is Life? Some deadbeat dad leaves his wife and kids who can’t make the mortgage, and that is the financial straw that leads to some clerk at Hightower Wiggins and Lehman and Bank of America noticing that the subprime house of cards and the whole financial system is wobbling, and soon the banking system of the Western world crumbles down around all of us, the good thing being that Obama got elected, the bad thing being that my trust fund got cut off by my brother. An intemperate punishment my father wishes to enact because Mom fucked around thirty years ago and I finally said something about it. The CIA and the SEC and the KGB and those CDOs and the Federal Reserve and the Forex international currency exchange—it’s all up there in that door, if you look hard enough. Where is God in all this, you ask? He’s not there. Only chaos and the entangled confusion of human existence. We all know the Vikings were Team Odin anyway, even if they gave lip service to Yahweh.”
