Montalvo Meets Walcott

Well, it was a Joan Didion moment, or would have been if I were Joan Didion, or could even halfway approximate the skill with which Didion would have analyzed the setting, considered the antecedents, and then scrupulously scalpelled—I KNOW, computer, but it should be a word—the incident until it revealed precisely (a favorite Didion word) whatever it was she wanted to reveal.

So we were at the table, Raf and I, joined by Taí and Montalvo, since we had called him to tell him about Kitty’s death, and then to invite him to dinner. And however wrong it seems to serve up the news of Kitty’s death in an adverbial clause, trust me—we hadn’t taken it lightly.

We had taken Kitty to the veterinarian on Wednesday; on Thursday he was doing much better. But on Friday morning, the vet called to say that Kitty had a blood clot in his brain, and was showing neurological symptoms. When I saw him on Friday afternoon, it was clear: Kitty was suffering and no longer the cat we knew.

I wrote a poem about it, since there was nothing else I could do, nothing else I could write, and since I had been strong for Raf over the weekend, and now had the time to collapse on Monday. So we were talking about the poem, which went as follows:

                                Grief

The problem? Somebody decided it was time

To sandblast my heart, the fucker,

And so the stains of love, of nurture, of life itself

Have to be scoured away.

It will be a gray, gritty sludge that will drip from the attacked walls

Even as my heart still beats

Though at this point, well,

Is there a point?

The same committee sent someone off to find more

Hydrochloric acid to pressure-pump into my churning stomach,

Which has decided that food is no longer a necessity,

Since will anything again ever nurture me?

The chairman of the committee?

Well, they called him up on emergency duty,

Since there are now three shifts, the most active being

Of course! The night shift….

So I am there where he is not, alone in a dark apartment,

Looking at light outside that not again

Will come inside, despite the lamps that will get turned on

Only to light up nothing.

I only wonder, what manner of beast would chose this work,

What past traumas had left sullen purple keloids on every nerve,

What cataracts had so blinded their eyes

That even light was a distant memory, or perhaps forgotten?

They are the termites of the soul, these mites who man the hoses,

Who scour off both the stains and the patina,

Until the bleeding, beating heart is scraped of everything,

Until nothing is left but memory.

Well, it’s not much of a poem, but then, I’m not much of a poet. So we were talking about a man who is very much of a poet, Derek Walcott, who was born in St. Lucia and trained as a painter, which presumably is how the brother of a friend of Taí’s became friends with him. (Just parenthetically, though come to think of it, this is parenthetically, shouldn’t there be a word for “the friend of a friend?” How many times have you had to say that? I propose cousinfriend.) And Montalvo had never heard of him, though Walcott had won the Nobel Prize, for which Montalvo has the speech if not yet the book, or even the oeuvre, a word which came to my mind, since I had just read that the Nobel Committee had said that Walcott had “a poetic oeuvre of great luminosity, sustained by a historical vision, the outcome of a multicultural commitment.”

Well, an oeuvre seems like a totally cool thing to have, especially if some committee decides to give me a prize. But then I wondered, does having written over 700 blog posts count? Didn’t seem likely, so I went over to ask Lady, who definitely has an oeuvre, since the poems are hanging all over the walls, and what could be more evident—or oeurvent—than that?

So Lady doesn’t know the word oeuvre, but Nico does, since he’s French and therefore can even tell us how to pronounce it: “it’s just like the sound you make when you vomit—oeuvre (that italics being the best I can do to sound like a Frenchman on the computer….)

So Lady hears the story of Walcott and Montalvo, and goes on to tell me that she met Walcott, years before he won the Nobel, and what was Walcott doing? Being a bum on the beach.

“So we talked for a long time, and then he asked if he could come and take a shower at my house. So I took him home, and my mother talked to him for a while, and then she let him take a shower….”

See? Lady’s updated the old English saying: always be nice to the girls, because you never know whom they might marry. Or in this case, win the Nobel prize….

Then Lady goes on to say: she had texted Montalvo that he owed her an apology, and he had texted back: don’t hold your breath. Not a very inventive response for a poet….

“So he’s all yours now; I’m watching from a distance. I’ve done it for a lot more years than you….”

What had happened? Lady, ever trying to work Montalvo back into the Passage—that’s the Poet’s Passage, in case you thought that first phrase was vaguely obscene—had hired Montalvo to work at a private party. What had happened?

“I need to see you right now, because I’m having a nervous breakdown….”

That’s what Lady had said to me the day after the party, the entertainment—ok, the show—of which had been Montalvo, and nobody had been amused. In fact, Lady had spent four hours crying afterwards, and had thought to call me at four in the morning.

Montalvo’s story? He, surrounded by perfidious and jaundiced eyes, had been slandered!! Fresh snow looked like 42d Street in its luridest days next to Montalvo!

“So I’m done with him,” says Lady, and then goes on to ask, why had we been talking about Walcott?

“Well,” I tell her, and that’s when…

…the gun went off.