Cynara, Come Home!

“She can never do this again,” said Montalvo, “and our big mistake? We should have gotten that padlock at the hardware store, and locked the gate of her apartment house. Nobody goes in or out—especially out—with suitcases!”

“I totally agree,” I said, “Imagine, just upping herself off to France, on the flimsy excuse that her husband is whole-French and her daughter is half-French. Remember how they told you, in grade school, that they hoped you’d brought enough for the whole class—when they caught you eating candy? Well, it’s the same thing: she can’t go anywhere—especially for a month—unless she takes everybody with her…”

It’s been a long month without Lady, the owner of the café, who generally mothers or sisters us as needed. Oh, and in the case of Mary Anne, her 70-something-year old neighbor, Lady even daughters her. So all of the creative verbdom, which she does so well, has left us bereft, in her absence. And we’ve been chafing without her, and now that she’s set to return, will we be reft again?  

“It was an unexcused absence, and that can’t be allowed to pass without consequences,” I tell Montalvo. “She should never be allowed to do this again.”

“And you know,” I continued, “if she were really going to be all French about it, she’d close all the businesses and we’d ALL be on vacation.” So we total it all up, and discover that it’s easily twelve people who would be trailing along with her—rather, being her distinguished guests—in France.

“It might slightly defeat the purpose of a vacation,” I told Montalvo, “to be bumping into all the people you’ve been bumping around with for the last two years, which is why I think it’s imperative—she has to rent a chateau.”

“Marc?”

OK—time for a bit of architectural enrichment. Google comes through with this:

“You gonna put fifteen people in that?” I ask him. “Remember when I told you, ‘less is more’ and you didn’t believe me? Well, in this case you were definitely right….”

So now we’re on the track of the perfect French chateau, which of course reminds me of Dorothy Parker’s perfect red rose; we take a little detour through poetry:

A single flow'r he sent me, since we met.


All tenderly his messenger he chose;


Deep-hearted, pure, with scented dew still wet -


One perfect rose.



I knew the language of the floweret;


'My fragile leaves,' it said, 'his heart enclose.'


Love long has taken for his amulet


One perfect rose.



Why is it no one ever sent me yet


One perfect limousine, do you suppose?


Ah no, it's always just my luck to get


One perfect rose.

“More iambic fucking pentameter,” remarked Montalvo, “except for the last line in all the stanzas…”

“You are not as you were under the reign of the good Cynara,” I tell him, needing to elevate things a bit from Dorothy Parker. So I derail that line by telling him that Parker had such fulminant writer’s block that her husband took to putting a human hair on the keyboard of her typewriter. As I remember it, it could be there, undisturbed, for months, though Parker swore that the nightly martinis were just recompense for a day slapping away at the keyboard….

Right, time to return to our French lodgings….

Montalvo proposes this:

“Still rather modest,” I told him. “The point, after all, is that you want volitional, not involitional, bumping into people. Try this….”

“Motherfuck,” he says, “they let Niggahs in there?”

“Lady will tell them,” I say. “Hey, and imagine drinking sherry before dinner here….”

“The staff will have to be sent away on paid vacations,“ I said, “since Mr. Fernández will insist on an English staff. And of course, you’ll have to know the service names of all the staff….”

“Hunh?”

“What do we call the chauffeur?”

“His name?”

“Wrong—the chauffeur is always ‘James.’”

“Hey, you can’t do that!”

“Oh, they love it,” I tell him. “And the upstairs maid?”

“No clue….”

“Daisy,” I tell him, “and the downstairs maid?”

“No idea,” he says.

“Exactly—no one cares about the downstairs maid, so she has no name!”

“But that’s terrible,” cries Montalvo. “You can’t be changing around the names of people!”

Reality sets in—how many cups of coffee will we have to sell to get a chateau for a month? We set aside the idea for a moment, and consider other plans….

“Maybe we should move everything around,” said Montalvo. “We’ll put the coffee shop in the gift shop, and vice versa. Then, when she comes back, we’ll act like nothing happened, and look at her funny, and say, ‘well of course it’s always been here. I mean, if you hadn’t been away so long….’”

“Too much work,” I told him. “And besides, she’s coming back today. Hey, what if we closed all the stores, put the hurricane shutter up, and posted big notices—OUT OF BUSINESS, LIQUIDATION!”

“EVERYTHING MUST GO!”

“On the gift shop, we put “REPOSSESSED!”

“Right, and on the café, we put ‘CLOSED BY ORDER OF THE DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH!’”

“And of course,” I mused, “We could write one of those notices to our devoted customers, thanking them for their patronage—that is, all the moolah they dropped over the years—and saying that we’ll never forget them….”

“Better yet, we go out and get one of those big black ribbons—very much in the Spanish style—and put it on the door, with the sign below it: Marc Newhouse, 1956-2014. Hah! She’ll be sorry then!”

“Don’t tempt providence,” I tell him. And that’s when I tell him…

…“We are not as we were under the reign of the good Cynara!”  
 

   Non Sum Qualis Eram Bonae sub Regno Cynarae

LAST night, ah, yesternight, betwixt her lips and mine


There fell thy shadow, Cynara! thy breath was shed


Upon my soul between the kisses and the wine;


And I was desolate and sick of an old passion,


Yea, I was desolate and bowed my head: 


I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion. 



All night upon mine heart I felt her warm heart beat,


Night-long within mine arms in love and sleep she lay;


Surely the kisses of her bought red mouth were sweet; 


But I was desolate and sick of an old passion, 


When I awoke and found the dawn was gray: 


I have been faithful to you, Cynara! in my fashion. 



I have forgot much, Cynara! gone with the wind, 


Flung roses, roses riotously with the throng,


Dancing, to put thy pale, lost lilies out of mind; 


But I was desolate and sick of an old passion,


Yea, all the time, because the dance was long; 


I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.



I cried for madder music and for stronger wine, 


But when the feast is finished and the lamps expire, 


Then falls thy shadow, Cynara! the night is thine;


And I am desolate and sick of an old passion, 


Yea, hungry for the lips of my desire:


I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.



Ernest Dowson

An Unexcused Absence

It’s not right, it’s completely not right, and if I weren’t absolutely schooled in grief, bereavement and loss, I wouldn’t take it.

“I’m going to go on a hunger strike until you return,” I tell Lady, who has the temerity to wander off to France for a month, for no good reason except that her husband is French and her daughter is half-French. Soooooo?

“Montalvo, are you going to join me in the hunger strike?” He’s joined us, my young son and less-than-accomplished parrot purloiner, in walking Lady home, since we’re savoring the farewell.

“I don’t think so,” says Montalvo.

“Not the right answer,” I tell him, “and if you’re going to be my son, you’ve got to know when I’m talking nonsense, which is most of the time.”

“Yes, Father,” he says.

“Father? That’s what he calls you? I like that….”

“So do I,” I tell her. She’s leaving for a month in three hours, and has she packed? Of course not!

“It’s a clear sign that you’re ambivalent,” I tell her. “It also completely portends that you shouldn’t go. Montalvo, kidnap Lady.”

“OK, Dad….” He’s picking it up nicely.

“Well, they have stores in France,” I tell her.

“Yes, but you need francs.”

Well, I don’t have francs but I do have—thanks, Taí—one Trinidad and Tobago dollar, as well as 40 Eastern Caribbean dollars. So I give her those, and she asks how long they have been traveling in my wallet. Over a decade.

“Hey, that’s wonderful! It’s got your energy! So every time I’m missing you, I’ll just take out the money and smell you….”

“It won’t be the same,” I tell her. I’m still having a hard time with it….

“Hey, can I take your backpack with me? It would be perfect for a carry-on….”

Right—so yesterday she had invited me to France—“hey, why don’t you come to France with us…”—and now it’s my backpack. And how is my computer supposed to get home?

So we unload the backpack, discovering an uneaten cookie from March of 2013 (I know this because the cookie was accompanied by a playbill), and guess what? In over a year, the cookie was miraculously unscathed by any passing microbe. Should I eat it? I decide no….

And now Lady is telling us about her mother, who had given her a manila envelope to open on the plane, since Lady was having major anxiety even thinking about boarding the plane, much less being trapped in it for eight hours. So what was in the envelope?

“It was filled with clippings of airplane crashes! Can you believe it? There wasn’t even a little note inside! She did it to get me to overcome my fear!”

“One tough bitch,” says Montalvo, admiringly.

“It’s simple,” I tell him. “We go to the hardware store, buy a padlock, and put it on the gate to their apartment building.”

“But then we’ll trap everybody in the building,” he points out.

“Not a problem—we can throw hummus wraps up at their balconies,” I say. I learned to think on my feet at Wal-Mart.

So now we’re at her apartment building and does she have her keys? Of course not, but she does her cell phone, as well as her husband in his underpants at home. So he comes down, and I take a good look at him, since how often do you see Frenchmen in their underpants? OK, maybe you do—and I bet Lady does—but I don’t….

“The fact that you don’t have your keys is a clear indication—as well as a major portent—of your ambivalence. You definitely shouldn’t go to France.”

“Don’t stop saying that,” she cries, and then tries to get us to believe that she meant, “Don’t! Stop saying that!” Ha! Montalvo and I aren’t buying it.

“What’s ambivalence?” asks Montalvo, a definite candidate for vocabularial supplementation. So we jog through the park of “ambi” words, and then begin to make up new words.

“Ambisexual,” I tell him. “There definitely should be an ‘ambisexual.’”

“But what would it mean?”

“Of both sexes,” I tell him. And then we meet Carlos, in full pirate regalia, who invites us to join him in his piratical pursuits: some days he makes ten bucks!

“I still can’t believe what Nico told me,” says Montalvo, “back there when we were saying goodbye.”

“What was that?”

“So I’m kissing Lady, and giving her your backpack and what does Nico say? He looks at me and says, ‘Don’t get arrested!’ Son of a bitch! I want to kick him in the face, the bastard.”

I can’t help laugh, and then consider—would a good father do that? So I throw him a bone.

“Don’t worry,” I tell him.

“He can’t help it,” I say.

“He’s just French….”

Can you believe it? Lady deserted us for THIS???

The Dying of the Light

Here’s the good news first: not having to do much of anything (one thinks of work), I have plenty of time to learn about wonderful, fascinating places.

And the bad news?

They’re usually being bombed, looted, and destroyed.

And so it is, apparently, with Timbuktu, which I have invoked a gazillion times without being sure if it really existed.

Well, it’s cultural snobbery, I guess, that’s afflicted me all these years, because the city has an old and illustrious heritage. It was founded in the twelfth century, at the crossroads of several African trading routes. Here’s Wikipedia on the subject.

In its Golden Age, the town's numerous Islamic scholars and extensive trading network made possible an important book trade: together with the campuses of the Sankore Madrasah, an Islamic university, this established Timbuktu as a scholarly centre in Africa. Several notable historic writers, such as Shabeni and Leo Africanus, have described Timbuktu. These stories fueled speculation in Europe, where the city's reputation shifted from being extremely rich to being mysterious. This reputation overshadows the town itself in modern times, to the point where it is best known in Western culture as an expression for a distant or outlandish place.

All of this was taking place well before it got into Columbus’s head to check out whether he could get to the Orient by boat.

In fact, in almost exactly the same year that Columbus set sail, Leo Africanus was being expelled from Spain.

It was a disaster for Spain, the Reconquista—it robbed the country of a significant part of its cultural and intellectual life. Think of the Jews who fled Germany in the years before and during Hitler, and then got together to make that little bomb we dropped on Nagasaki….

And Leo Africanus must have been a character. He was born El Hasan ben Muhammed el-Wazzan-ez-Zayyat (don’t blame me if this isn’t right—I copy / pasted from Wikipedia) in Grenada and then, in 1485, gets kicked out of the country. Right, so he goes to Africa, studies, and then accompanies his uncle on diplomatic missions in Northern Africa. Then—here comes the fun part—he gets captured by pirates who decide to present him as an brilliant slave to Pope Leo X.

Speculation break—did the pirates reveal their professional activities to the pope? I can imagine it: a group of pirates wandering into the Vatican, turning a corner, and discovering the pope deep in prayer in the quiet gardens of his palace. “Yo, pope, wanna take a little look-see at this slave we captured,” one of the pirates calls. Head jerks up, “hey, bring him on,” shouts back the pope….

All right, historical fiction may not be my strongest point. Leo talks to the slave, decides to free him, baptizes him as Johannis Leo de Medici (sorry, it may be my cultural bias, but I think it’s a step up from El Hasan ben Muhammed el-Wazzan-ez-Zayyat….) and commissions him, shrewdly, to write an account of his travels in Africa.

Isabel, dear? That’s what you should have done with all those guys….

(Sorry, can’t help it—one wonders how Johannis felt about being baptized. Did he welcome it? Did he have any say in it? Does being captured by pirates lead to a sort of philosophical equanimity about such life events? One imagines him shrugging and saying, “oh well, what the hell…”)

Shrewd because for the next several centuries, all that anyone knew about Northern Africa came from Leo Africanus. Who had been, by the way, to Timbuktu at its heyday, and described it thus:

The rich king of Tombuto hath many plates and sceptres of gold, some whereof weigh 1300 pounds. ... He hath always 3000 horsemen ... (and) a great store of doctors, judges, priests, and other learned men, that are bountifully maintained at the king's cost and charges.   

Sounds like a place you’d want to be, hunh? Here’s more….

The inhabitants are very rich, especially the strangers who have settled in the country.  But salt is in very short supply because it is carried here from Tegaza, some 500 miles from Timbuktu. I happened to be in this city at a time when a load of salt sold for eighty ducats. The king has a rich treasure of coins and gold ingots.

Well, forget the salt, it was—more speculation—those gold ingots that grabbed the attention of the Western World. The city was closed to non-Muslims, and there’s certainly nothing like gold and mystery to whet the imagination. So finally, in 1824, the Société de Géographie puts up a 10,000 franc prize for the first non-Muslim to enter the city. Four years later, the reward is claimed by René Caillié, who enters the city alone and disguised as a Muslim.

Time passes, Timbuktu is no longer rich, no longer influential. North Africa falls under French rule in the Scramble for Africa (and yes, that’s an historical event—the big boys of Europe having decided that it was better to get together, drink some port, smoke cigars and decide among them how to slash up a continent—rather than waste their sons’ blood fighting wars about it. This is civilization, see?). Eventually, Timbuktu became part of Mali. And that was one of the beacons of democracy in African.

One of the tragic things about a civilization is the speed at which “is one of the beacons of democracy” can become “was one of the beacons of democracy.” Timbuktu has or had things like this:

It’s the Djinguereber Mosque, built in 1327. Or how about these?

It’s one of a famous set of tombs that the fundamentalist Islamists who overtook the city months ago decided was idolatrous. And you know what happens when those guys get that idea in their heads? Remember the Buddhas? Well, here the tomb is today….

Oh, and all that learning, all that intellectual activity? Those documents that one scholar had compared to the Dead Sea Scrolls? Those documents, some of which had not been examined or even catalogued, much less photographed?

Might be there, might not. On their way out, just before fleeing the city, the militants set fire to the library. Even now, the damage is unclear. But we may never know what we lost.

It’s a story of fanaticism, hatred, stony refusal to come anywhere near reason. Only Pope Leo gets it. Once, the Islamic world was the center for learning and culture. Once, Spain had a Golden Era. Once, Timbuktu was a city of riches and scholarship.

Dylan Thomas had it right: rage, rage against the dying of the light.