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. 

 

   

Open Arms for the Dalai Lama

I want to say this in ringing tones—nay, I want to declare this as fiercely, as ardently, as passionately as did the Christian martyrs, avowing their faith even as the crowd jeered at them, hissed at them, spat upon them, and even as the lions raged towards them, their open mouths lusting for blood!

I stand ready at any time, at any moment, to meet the Dalai Lama!

Nor am I alone in this courageous stance, since I have just gone to check in with Lady, who was taking a moment’s respite from redesigning the storefront’s window, since it’s Christmas time, and the original design nobody liked.

“Hey, would you meet the Dalai Lama?”

“Sure….”

We are, you see, unhampered, unfettered by fear and pusillanimity, undaunted by the economic might of China, even though we stand as the merest motes of dust as compared to that country. And in my case, at least, I’m a considerably diminished mote, since I seem to be battling everything, and guess what? Everything is winning.

I have a crazy Spaniard, for example. The owner of the floor below us, he makes a pretty penny—actually, it should be a luscious penny—renting the space to a shoe store, part of a chain, whose headquarters is in Omaha. So every time there is a problem? Omaha writes to him, and that’s a problem, since his English is rudimentary. So he calls the store, and then he calls Raf, and whom does Raf call?

“You have to go home right away, since the plumber is there, and it’s major, and they think it’s coming from above.”

“Oh, and call García and tell him you’re there.”

García being the Spaniard….

OK—go home, after first telling the manager of the store that I am home, and that the gate to the foyer is open. Oh, and where is the plumber?

“On the way….”

A plumber on the way comes as often as Santa Claus in July, so why is my day being disrupted?

Right—so what should have been a morning spent writing now becomes a day waiting for the plumber, so what to do? I decide to clean the dining room, which means washing an polishing two large buffets, two china cabinets, two small tables, eight chairs, the table itself and what can only be described as The Old Curiosity Shop’s entire inventory of bric-a-brac.

The plumber, a charmer, comes at five PM, which means that I had to cancel my class at the island’s largest bank—a client I would like to keep happy. But he does what he does in fifteen minutes, and tells me that it’s completely dry downstairs—just some old water stains, nothing emergent, now cascading torrents of brownish water—as had been described by the manager via Omaha via García via Mr. Fernández. So I pay 135 bucks and send Juan on his way.

Oh, but there is a problem, since Juan discovered that part of the sink is broken. So water was in fact spewing over our kitchen floor. And does Juan have the part? Of course not, so he will come back “tomorrow afternoon.” Given that today is Friday, that “tomorrow afternoon?” Next Tuesday, at the earliest. Still, I gave the plumber my number, and promised to have my cell phone next to me at all times, residing perpetually in my peripheral vision.

So I was grouchy this morning, since I hate it when a cat is at the vet, partly because Mr. Fernández really hates it, and that makes us both cranky. So I had just told him that I didn’t know if I was going to buy the damn turkey that his mother wants him to cook for Sunday supper, since we are celebrating the arrival of a sister.

“I’m having my coffee in peace and quiet and I’ll let you know about the damn turkey,” I told him. So he goes off to work and then is shouting at me from downstairs. Why? There’s a note from García saying the plumber is on his way!

Yeah? The same plumber who has my number and was gonna come in the afternoon? Then I get it—García wants to put me under house arrest, so that I can open the door to any putative worker who might need to show up.

So I break the world’s record for the highest ratio of swear to non-swear words in my response to Mr. Fernández, and then I go to the café, since that was the deal, and no—I’m not gonna spend another day waiting for the plumber, who makes Godot look like the soul of punctuality itself.

So there I am, and the phone rings and I conscientiously try to answer it, but guess what? I’d forgotten that while I can make calls on my wonderful new phone, I can’t for the life of me receive calls, so that means I have to call back one of Rafael’s sisters. And what happens?

There are people, Gentle Readers, whose voice can induce an insurrection, and is it her fault that she has one? Nor is it her fault that I am engaged in an insane transaction with…well, who? That, at least, is my problem, since I know that I bought an apartment as an investment but also as a place for a caregiver to live. And there’s a wonderful caretaker—the apartment is right next to the parents’ apartment—and everything is fine. Except the electric bill is too high, and maybe we should find a caretaker who would consume less electricity. Whatever happened to the romance of candlelight?

So now that’s a problem, but the other problem is that my brother, a lawyer, pointed out that—however logical this whole deal may seem to minds swept by gentle Caribbean breezes—it’s a little half-cocked. Who, for example, am I renting to, if anyone at all? And if the caretaker gets hit by a falling kitchen cabinet—John had a case just last week of that—well then, do I get sued?

So now I have a day with an impending plumber, a turkey that needs to be bought, an entire house that needs to be cleaned, and a stomach that is raging because I forgot to buy my medicine—as I always do, and then remember when guess what? You got it.

So I completely go off on my sister-in-law, who only wants to know if I have a charger for the MacBook Pro, since hers is broke and it costs about 90 bucks at Best Buy—oh, and it’s not just the charger who is broke.

Well, Robertson Davies once said that the person you have become is just as true as the person you were—all those years ago before you became the reigning diva of the Metropolitan opera, and began speaking of your pied-a-terre in Paris. So what does that mean? It means that a six feet three gringo is screaming, telling sis that this family has got to come up with a plan for their aging parents and I cannot be getting calls from six siblings and two parents all asking, demanding, pleading for things that have to be done right away. Remember that plumber? So of course I behave completely irrationally, and tell her that I AM NOT coming to any family gatherings this year, or until everybody gets their act together. Is this reasonable? No. Did I ever say it was?

No.    

So now it’s time to go talk to Lady, and get her to call me, so I can do Telephony 101—how to receive calls. And Lady, as she always does, has the answer. You don’t press the little green telephone, but instead swipe it, towards the little red telephone. Oh, and if you don’t want to take the call, you swipe the red telephone….

So now I’m totally annoyed with everybody, and what has to happen? I have to worry myself again about the Vatican, since it appears that the pope may not meet the Dalai Lama, for fear of offending China. Here’s The New York Times on the subject:

The action provoked a boycott by other Nobel laureates. Archbishop Desmond M. Tutu, the South African winner of the 1984 prize for his battle against apartheid, responded to Mr. Zuma’s action by saying he was “ashamed to call this lickspittle bunch my government.”

And what had the “lickspittle”—first good thing to happen in my day, thanks!—bunch done? Denied the dear old Dalai a visa to attend the Nobel laureates convention!

Lady drifts by, and I have to make sure.

“You’re not gonna renege on the Dalai Lama, are you?”

Lady is wise beyond her years: she knows when it’s better not to ask.

“Nope,” and goes off to find some Christmas ornaments for the front window.

Oh, and if the Dalai Lama wants to come on Christmas Eve or New Year’s Eve?

I’m available!

Kitty Continued

Montalvo has this theory: why study history since nobody knows it anyway and we’re all fucked to relive it anyhow, so why bother?

OK—this revision of Santayana’s famous dictum left me speechless, a state that only Montalvo seems to be able to induce. But I thought of him today, as I read the fifteenth article in The New York Times about the United States and torture. And why did I think of Montalvo? Because I wondered if he knew the source of my previous thought, which had been, “will nobody rid me of this meddlesome priest?”

It was Henry II who said it, four men who heard it, and one priest—actually the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Becket—who got it. “Got it” in our modern terminology of being offed, on the steps to the altar in the cathedral.

So it certainly could be argued that the four men had misled Henry, since he hadn’t said, “hey, go kill the archbishop.” And one has to admit, how many times have we all of us said something like, “I could just kill that guy?”

Of course, of course, what Henry should have said was, “please use all means that are consistent with international, nation and local laws and policy to mitigate the influence—if that influence be undue or unjustified—of his eminence, the Archbishop.”

Well, we have one president who thinks and talks like that—and he taught constitutional law at Georgetown. And we have an ex-president who took so many detours through his sentences that he rarely got to any destination. So Bush made some ringing declaration—“Gentlemen, your mission is to safeguard the nation!”—to the CIA, and they went off the deep end.

Oh—except they didn’t, since the Department of Justice signed off on it all, as Dick Cheney has utterly no problem admitting. But one thing should have been a red flag: the term “enhanced interrogation technique.”

Look, what’s the first thing that anyone has to do to disguise an unpleasant reality? Of course water-boarding and what we now have learned is rectal feeding—sorry, hope you’re not reading this over the breakfast table—can’t be called torture. So it’s enhanced—OK, let’s just call it EIT.

So of course over my coffee I was pondering the many enhancements that—if I were president of the United States—I could get away with. Enhanced amatory techniques, for example, for when I wish sexual activity and my victim does not. OK—that gets Ohio State off the hook. Enhanced merchandise discount, if the term “five-finger discount” becomes too much of a cliché.

It’s a day when I yearn for poetry, since it lives at the opposite end spectrum of all this purposeful linguistic deceit. And I need music, too, since my MacBook Pro has gotten all uppity and refuses to speak to, or even recognize, my new Galaxy phone. “This device is not recognized,” it tells me, and what do I tell it? “Yes, you do, in fact, you just did. It’s just the same as Eeyore, or whoever it was, shouting ‘Nobody’s home,” to Pooh. So stop it, make friends, and put my music on my phone!”

And I need music, too, since the drama of Kitty is still unfolding. The problem? Raf can’t get the look that Kitty gave him last Sunday, after Raf had screamed at him. So Kitty is marginally eating, and how will Raf go on, with that look of Kitty’s burned into his brain? So should we take him to the vet, after all?

I left it up to Raf, so he called the vet, or rather the receptionist, who told him, as she had told me two days ago, “3:30.”

If you have lived in Puerto Rico, you’ll know what this means: you are ostensibly being given an appointment, but in reality the receptionist is telling everybody “3:30.” So that means that we will arrive, and the waiting room will be full of dogs,, cats, and maybe a bird or two, as well as the anxious parents. And “3:30” will become 5:30, when the results come back, and the need for intravenous treatment announced.

Then the decision will have to be made: leave Kitty overnight, or try and take him to the vet first thing in the morning, run the IV in him, and then take him home. The question? How likely is it that Kitty will jump into the cat carrier tomorrow, and say, “hey, let’s go back to that nice place we were at yesterday!”

Equally, how likely is it that, once there, we will say, “well, let’s not treat?” I learned this with my mother: if you go to a hospital, you’re gonna get treated. So what did I tell my brother, when he saw my mother have a seizure? Don’t call the ambulance—keep her home with the Valium in her hand.

So it’s now several hours later, and it happened just as it was scripted. I found the red cat carrier in the back bedroom, and discovered that the salt air had gotten to the steel zipper, which meant that Raf had to slip the carrier over his shoulder and grasp both sides of the front of the case, all the while eyeing the top of the front of the case, through which an imminently fleeing Kitty was periodically sticking his head. So Raf was periodically pushing Kitty’s head down with his chin—all the while saying “bandito Kitty—which was excellent fodder for the cameras and the comments of the denizens of the three enormous cruise ships that had docked at the ports. So guess how many Facebook pages we’re gonna be on today?

“We’re taking a cab,” I told Raf.

“Oh, but I think we can take the bus…” said Raf.

I’m a saint, an absolute saint—we all know that. There are, however, certain occasions when my voice borrows a few steel girders from whatever construction site is handy. Right—so we took a cab.

And of course my plan, which would be to simply run the fluids in and take the cat home? Well, naturally it wasn’t that simple. So what, from a veterinarian point of view, was the best treatment?

“It’s your decision to make,” I told Raf, rather meanly, since seeing him caressing Kitty, nuzzling Kitty, and murmuring to Kitty, had put a few thousand daggers through my heart. Worse, Kitty knew perfectly well what was playing out, and was putting up no resistance.

“I just keep remembering that Pink—our beloved first cat—had revived after the IV treatment,” said Raf.

“You’ve made your decision,” I told Raf, and he could only nod.

The vet carried Kitty off, my imagination of how hard it would be to get a vein into Kitty went into overdrive, and we decided: time to go to Walmart, to get another carrier.

Is it crazy? Yes. But it also taught me something about the amazing nobility of animals, who know perfectly well that the end is near, and have no fear or reluctance to get to that end, but who patiently allow their humans to put them through pain and bother…all because their humans can’t let go.

Could I be that noble?

Don’t think so….      

The Policy of Torture

It was a headline that begged for an adequate infusion of caffeine, which I hadn’t had, but who could resist the improbably headline in The New York Times, “Pardon Bush and Those Who Tortured.” Even more implausibly, the article—rather, editorial—was written by the head of the American Civil Liberties Union, Anthony D. Romero. Why was he adopting such a stance? Well, let him explain:

But with the impending release of the report from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, I have come to think that President Obama should issue pardons, after all — because it may be the only way to establish, once and for all, that torture is illegal.

Remember Abu Ghraib and all those appalling photos of naked soldiers forced to simulate sexual acts, or piled naked while a female soldier gave the thumbs up sign? Or the man, standing blindfolded on a box, connected to wires, which would “electrify” him if he fell? Well, I’m not going to show you them, nor even hyperlink them, and why is that?

They are completely irrelevant.

The story was that it was just a bunch of bad apples, and in fact, some conservatives didn’t find anything bad about them in the least. Here’s Rush Limbaugh:

This is no different than what happens at the Skull and Bones initiation, and we're going to ruin people's lives over it, and we're going to hamper our military effort, and then we are going to really hammer them because they had a good time.'' ''They'' are the American soldiers, the torturers. And Limbaugh went on: ''You know, these people are being fired at every day. I'm talking about people having a good time, these people. You ever heard of emotional release?''

It’s an attractive narrative, this idea that a few bad apples got a little outta hand over there in the hellish condition that is war, but it misses the point. The point is that the United States had a clear—albeit sometimes hidden—policy justifying torture.  Here’s Romero of the ACLU again:

…George J. Tenet for authorizing torture at the C.I.A.’s black sites overseas, Donald H. Rumsfeld for authorizing the use of torture at the Guantánamo Bay prison, David S. Addington, John C. Yoo and Jay S. Bybee for crafting the legal cover for torture, and George W. Bush and Dick Cheney for overseeing it all.

And no less than our current president came out and said it:

“We compromised our basic values — by using torture to interrogate our enemies, and detaining individuals in a way that ran counter to the rule of law.”

Yeah? Read that sentence again, and pay special attention to the verb tenses.  And then ponder this quote, from The New York Times:

For 13 years, the detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, has operated as a legal black hole, imprisoning hundreds of men without any charges or meaningful access to the courts.

If government officials have their way, that blackout will include graphic videotapes of guards force-feeding inmates who have been on a hunger strike for as long as 21 months to protest their endless detention.

Oh, and the date of the article? December 7, 2014. Two days ago, as I write. And what’s in these tapes?

The 11 hours of recordings — which one military official said guards review like “an N.F.L. team watching video of the previous week’s football game” — show guards dragging a disabled Syrian man, Jihad Ahmed Mujstafa Diyab, from his cell twice a day, strapping him to a chair and forcing a tube up his nose and into his stomach. The procedure has caused some strikers to vomit or defecate on themselves. According to lawyers for Mr. Diyab and other detainees, there may be thousands of similar tapes.

And so sometime today—wait, this just in:

Have I read it? No, nor have I read the article entitled:

Well, odd that Bush didn’t see that cover of Time magazine that I saw, and distinctly remember shuddering at, one Thanksgiving when we were in—I believe—Dominica. It had the famous photo of the hooded, about-to-be-hooded man with the cover title running something like, “Does the United States Torture?”

I’ve looked for the magazine online, and could I find it? No, but I did come across Susan Sontag, and her article, “On the Torture of Others.” And she makes it clear:

The torture of prisoners is not an aberration. It is a direct consequence of the with-us-or-against-us doctrines of world struggle with which the Bush administration has sought to change, change radically, the international stance of the United States and to recast many domestic institutions and prerogatives. The Bush administration has committed the country to a pseudo-religious doctrine of war, endless war -- for ''the war on terror'' is nothing less than that.

I’d go further: the torture of prisoners was not an aberration. It was policy. And everyone who crafted that policy?

Ever heard of the Hague?