‘Not that either.’
She came back with crackers and a tube of cheese spread.
‘Fruit,’ she said. ‘Would you like some fruit?’
She put an apple down in front of me. Unless I was mistaken, I had seen this same apple a while back on the windowsill at the hotel. I squeezed a gleaming worm of cheese along the length of the cracker and smeared it out with the opening of the tube. I kept my eyes fixed on this chore all the while as I asked, ‘So what are you up to, during the day I mean? Globally speaking.’
‘Globally?’
‘No details.’
‘I don’t really feel like talking to you about that right now. Some other time, okay?’
‘When’s the next Lilith film coming out? You can talk about that, can’t you?’
‘In October, I believe. I’ll wait and see. The shooting for the new one starts in December, in Vienna. Then I’ll be leaving here as well.’
‘Don’t you miss your things, your personal belongings? Don’t you ever think about them? Don’t you want to have a house again? A real house? Not. . this.’
She shook her head.
‘Material things, Ludwig, I don’t become attached to them. I’ve never missed them for a second. There’s nothing to own, not yesterday, not tomorrow, right now is all there is — and you don’t own that either. Even our house. . it was terrible for me, a catastrophe, but do I miss it? No. We had a few wonderful years in Alburgh, apparently it was time for something new.’
Her feet shuffled across the tiles. She stood up.
‘Do you want to sleep here?’
I shook my head. She said, ‘Because I’m going back to bed.’
I had wanted to say that I did miss Kings Ness, and sometimes realized with a start that the house was gone, gone for good, that we had fallen out of our lives and that there was no going back anymore. I’d also wanted to tell her about the Bodo Schultz exhibition, about his abyss — that at this moment he was somewhere in this hemisphere, scratching at his insect bites in a pitch-black jungle. But I would save that for later, she would feign disinterest but absorb every word, then say, ‘He certainly makes life difficult for himself, the poor man.’
But that’s for later. First I’ll go to her house, sleep in the bed that smells of Sarah and me. Tomorrow she’s coming back. Today, in fact, it’s already way past twelve.
In July and August there were fires around the city. Cigarette butts, the sparks from a grinder, everything set the hills aflame.
Sarah gives me a silver ring to wear on my pinkie, so thin it bends all the time. She says, ‘If someone were to ask about the two of us, not that anyone does, but imagine they did, how should I describe it?’
She’s energetic and cheerful, when we argue it’s because of the tiny space we share, and the differences in temperament. She can be volatile. She starts arguing, and only asks questions afterwards.
Her body is a constant source of surprise to me. She has short, explosive orgasms, she has serial orgasms, a chain of little releases that seem without end, she has orgasms of which she says, ‘I don’t know, it started off real heavy but suddenly it was over.’
Rugby has given me a body that is fit for hard confrontations, only in love do I get to know and control it as an instrument of pleasure.
I lay there, my eyes open, sated, the world might be there or it might not — we had drifted off on a floe that had broken free of the earth. I look at myself from above, a boy on his back, no one wondering where he was, he knew no one and no one knew him; anonymity to the limits of nonexistence.
When I got up in the morning, later than she did, I would find the notes.
I’m missing you, at the moment you read this. Now and now and now again
Or
My heart stays behind somewhere with you (look in the bed)
While we were making love I sometimes thought about the fetus above our heads and was afraid she would get pregnant again, new life against the black death that had come out of her. I dreamed she was sitting on me, riding me; when I wanted her to get off I discovered that we had fused, our bodies had become a single organism, as though we had been grafted together — the sense of horror followed me long after waking.
I read a little book I had found among the esoteric volumes on her bookshelf. About a fourteen-year-old boy who boards a ship at Naples, he watches Vesuvius until it fades from sight, he is alone now for the first time in his life. The ship is headed for America. His brother, Ricardo, is already there, he has a job in Pennsylvania. Sabato Rodilla is following in his brother’s footsteps, in the new country he uses the name Dick Sullivan in order to get work more easily with the Irish foremen. His brother is killed in a mine explosion. Sabato, who now calls himself Sam, Sam Rodia, travels on to Seattle. In 1902 he marries Lucia Ucci. They have two children. Rodia is a problem drinker, in 1912 his wife divorces him. In the transcript of the interviews with him, his heavy Italian accent is preserved. I was one of the bad men of the United States. I was drunken. All the time drinking. But then suddenly he goes on the wagon. I quit the drinking in 1919. I don’t drink wine, beer, if you give me a hundred dollars. No touch it.
For a few hundred dollars he buys a triangular plot of ground in Watts, a suburb on the south side of Los Angeles. Using simple tools, a hammer, trowel, pliers, he begins work on a series of towers, open constructions of steel rods, chicken wire and mortar. He decorates the wet mortar with colorful shards and shells he finds on the beach, with the bottoms of glass bottles, broken cups, the handles of pitchers, everything he scavenges from the side of the road and drops in the bag he always carries with him.
The pictures in the book showed the angular structures lit by the sun — I wanted to go there right away.
Rodia started building his towers as a middle-aged man, he was forty-two at the time, and only stopped at the age of seventy-five. Crisis, war, recovery, through it all he sits in the tops of his towers, singing and talking to himself. I work in the night, midnight, sleep five hours a night. Work two hours in the morning, Sunday, Christmas Day.
I read that the entire complex formed the abstract representation of a ship, the walls surrounding the triangular lot were the hull, the three towers inside were the masts. The book didn’t say towards which point of the compass the bow was pointed.
The banal but essential question was why Rodia had spent thirty-three years working on the towers. He said: Why I built it, I can’t tell you. Why-a man make the pants? Why-a man make the shoes? The beauty of it, it seemed, was enough for him, that and people’s attention. I built the tower the people like. . everybody come.
When Rodia turned seventy-five he gave the ground and the towers to a neighbor and moved to Martinez, where he lived with his sister. A gesture simply and poignantly dramatic. The artistic and his — torical value of his work was recognized during his lifetime. When someone once showed him a photograph of Gaudí’s Sagrada Familia, Rodia asked (and I couldn’t help laughing when I read this): Did he have helpers?
They replied: Of course he had helpers.
Rodia: I had no helpers.
I asked Sarah to take me to see the towers. She had been there once, she said.
‘After that we’ll drive out into the Mojave. When you’re there, you suddenly realize that we live in a desert here.’
Watts. I had never seen a more cheerless landscape. Low houses, all built of the cheapest of materials. Only blacks and Latinos, we were the only white people.