‘To be here after the sun goes down,’ Sarah said. ‘Brr. .’
There were lots of churches, simple wood-and-brick buildings with signs out front saying that Jesus had died for our sins and that He was the only hope of salvation. We asked for directions twice, were sent to the tracks, which we had to cross. And suddenly there we were, without warning, the Watts Towers were standing there — smaller than I had imagined, less colorful too. Sarah parked the car, I climbed out and crossed the street. First the curb, then the wall lining Rodia’s lot — I looked up past the circling structure of the middlemost tower, which had much more color to it when seen from close by. It was too much to take in at a glance, I stepped back. Something so vital in such illusionless surroundings, so much concretized creative urge — it touched something inside me, something I had never known was there.
‘The sun again, sweetheart?’
Sarah patted my back. I nodded and wiped the tears from my face.
‘Come on,’ she said.
I kept my eyes hidden behind the sunglasses when we bought our tickets at the neighboring arts center. A woman led us to the gate and unlocked it.
It was no large plot of land on which those towers had arisen. But as soon as your eyes homed in on the details, the space doubled and a world of playful shapes emerged. This was the terrain par excellence of ‘ornamental man’, who works without examples, without predecessors, who bows only to a mighty urge to make something huge and irreproducible.
There were many spots where he had added his initials, I saw surfaces on which he had left behind the imprint of his tools, as a kind of signature: with this I, Sam Rodia, built these towers. With this hammer, this pick, this rasp, these nails and these pliers did I perform this miracle.
We crossed the decorated cement floors, peered up and became entangled in the endlessly spiraling structures, countless rings moving up. The towers were connected by arches, graced as well with sun-bleached shells. Rodio decorated in the same way nature overruns the earth when left to its own devices. This was a place that called for loud rejoicing. This was how one entered a faith, with the shock of a revelation.
Sarah pointed out a little group of miniature stone animals on an archway. I nodded and moved away from her a bit. This was also a place to be alone, without anyone else in your field of vision, a place you should have to yourself for twenty-four hours in order to see it as he had seen it, at sunup, in the afternoon, in the evening, murmuring come, let us build us a city, and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered upon the face of the whole earth.
And you realize that he had seen it only briefly in its current more or less finished state. Had that saddened him, the fact that all completion also constitutes an end? Or did he view with satisfaction the empire of towers he had built with his own hands? What did he shout when the hammer struck his thumb? You wished you could have been there to see him at work, hanging from a battlement. There were pictures of it, I had seen them in the book, a weathered man at the top of the little tower, wearing a hat, a pair of torn overalls over his street clothes.
His workshop had been at the back of the complex, but it was gone now, burned down after fireworks landed on the roof. In a kiln there he had melted his glass and iron, from the walls of the complex grew melted bottles of 7 Up and Canada Dry. Ceramic handles stuck out of the walls, the ceiling of the front gate was a mosaic of broken mirrors. Beneath my feet the ornamental urge rolled on, the wet concrete was etched with endlessly repetitive geometrical patterns of flowers and hearts. In the walls I deciphered shards of plates, oven dishes, pots, pitchers. A sign said he had used eleven thousand pieces of pottery, ten thousand shells, six thousand pieces of colored glass and fifteen thousand tiles; in total, more than one hundred thousand decorative elements. I let the details burn into my memory, the birdbaths, the fountains, the words I had in my mind I’m gonna do something, something big, and I did.
Slowly I came out from under the spell, signals from outside were making their way through, the silly, repetitive clanging of an ice-cream truck, very loud, very lonely, as though it were your own death knell being rung.
We left the city. I looked at the worn-down mountains, lightless, arid, with here and there a few clumps of sinewy scrub.
‘That people live here. .’ Sarah said.
Stretching out at the foot of the mountains was a ribbon of tens of thousands of more or less identical houses, in camouflage, covered with dust and the shadows from the ridges. People here did their shopping and sought enjoyment in shopping centers on both sides of the highway.
‘What’s up?’ Sarah asked at last. ‘You haven’t said a word for a long time.’
Schultz’s abyss and Rodia’s towers, they were tumbling through my mind, all jumbled together. By talking I could probably have imposed structure on the whole thing, by giving a name to the shiver of the sublime I might have been able to draw a line between the sacred and the sacrilegious, between the one who built a Jacob’s ladder and the other who thrashed the gods out of their heavens, but I didn’t dare. Instead I said, ‘Is this the Mojave already?’
We had wound our way lazily out of the mountains, a void had opened before us. Looking at the dashboard I saw that the temperature had suddenly dropped. Little groups of clouds hurried along above the flats, the monotony broken here and there by a lone, blunt mountaintop. Plastic refuse was washed up against low shrubs. Clouds were piling up in the east.
‘We’re going to Europe,’ I said, ‘my mother and I. Maybe next month already. Or else in December.’
She didn’t look over, kept her eyes on the road. I thought about my mother’s words. Maybe she wasn’t as pretty as I thought.
‘For how long?’ she asked. ‘Are we talking about weeks or months?’
‘It depends on where she has to work, and how long it takes.’
‘And you’re going along with her.’
‘I have to.’
‘Says she?’
I shook my head.
‘Says me.’
‘But why? Can you tell me why?’
From between the clouds, islands of sunlight fell on the earth. In the distance were mobile homes, tossed down at random around the desert as though by a tornado. A couple of answers were battling for primacy, but one of them seemed to stand in clearer light than the other. I said, ‘She’s the only one I have.’
The mobile homes were surrounded by wrecked cars, half-hearted attempts at demarcation with fences and barbed wire. Dogs lay on the cold ground.
‘She’s the only one you have. .’
‘I can’t leave her alone, not now. In this situation, I mean, now that she’s making movies again.’
‘And you have to babysit for her? Don’t you think she’s old enough by now. .’
‘I’m afraid not. Sometimes she works herself up into such a state. . She forgets who she is, even who I am.’
‘She seemed very sensible to me.’
‘You don’t know her. You have no idea.’
I looked over. Sarah was staring straight ahead. Her nose looked big and hooked, it reminded me of a cartoon in MAD in which a prince and a shepherd girl, both very attractive, were portrayed from the front throughout the story until, in the very last frame, we see them in profile and it becomes clear that they both have hideously huge noses. I knew it: my mother’s poison, entering drop by drop.
‘All I was asking was whether maybe you don’t make yourself too dependent on her,’ Sarah said in a small voice. ‘That’s all.’