I pinned the postcard to my studio wall, dolphin side out, right between an alleged photo of a now-aged Thomas Pynchon walking the streets of New York with his son, and Lía’s only orgasm sketch that wasn’t done in her almond-colored notebook, a sketch that could have been of the trajectory of some South American river, with tributaries and rivulets and everything, drawn one cold rainy afternoon after we made love (placid yet uncomfortable, of course) in the bathtub.
His big obsession, Milan had told me at some point, was postcards. He liked sending postcards, not receiving them. In fact, he always refused to give me his own address. I don’t have one, he said jokingly, or on second thought, perhaps seriously. He said: I live on the lungo drom, which in Romany means the long road, with no set destination and no turning back. He said: I travel in a caravan of one. He said: On the road, for my friends, I leave a trail of patrin, which in Romany means signs placed along the way, like a branch broken in a certain fashion, or a handful of twigs tied up in a blue handkerchief, or goat bones sticking out of the ground. He said: Postcards are my patrin.
Lía told me that a long time ago she’d seen a movie in which different Gypsy caravans communicated by leaving those kinds of markers along the way, markers that were interpreted as witchcraft and necromancy by the inhabitants of a small, anachronistic town in Spain. One night, when a local girl suddenly died after having played near some Gypsy markers that afternoon, the town’s inhabitants became a frenzied mob and set out with torches and sickles and hacked to pieces every Gypsy they found sleeping peacefully among the trees. Men, women, and children. Lía couldn’t remember whether or not that was the end of the movie, but she thought it was.
The next postcard didn’t say anything, or at least it didn’t say anything in writing. I knew it was from him because of the minuscule block letters my name and address were printed in. Plus, who else in their right mind still sends postcards? According to the postmark, it was sent from Washington, D.C. It was a reproduction of a Chagall painting, or perhaps just a detail from the painting. At first, I thought there was no connection between the Chagall painting and Milan; then I thought that perhaps there was, and I spent several days trying to unravel it, to find in the image some meaning that would allude to the life of the Serbian pianist. It wasn’t until much later, though, when perhaps it was already too late, that I understood what Milan, by not saying anything, had said.
I got a postcard from Denver of an horchata-colored mountain, full of tiny black dots, which I took to be conifers or possibly giant skiers. Milan wrote: Once upon a time there was a king who was in possession of the Romany alphabet. And because in those days there were no bookshelves to hold alphabets, the king wrapped it up in lettuce leaves and fell asleep beside a gently flowing stream. After a while, a donkey came along, drank a bit of water from the brook, and ate the lettuce leaves. And that’s why we Gypsies have no alphabet.
I got a postcard from Boston of a bay by night, all lit up. Milan wrote: We Gypsies, Eduardito, have three great talents. Making music. Telling stories. And the third one is a secret.
Doll, in his Lilliputian block print, was how he’d entitled the next postcard, also enormous, sent from Mexico City. On the front was a collage with mariachis and tricolor flags and white sand beaches and, right smack in the middle, as though reining it all in to or radiating it all out from her beautiful golden aura, a flamboyant Virgin of Guadalupe. Milan wrote: Her real name was Bronisława Wajs, though everyone knew her by her Gypsy name, Papusza, which means doll. Like the majority of Polish Gypsies at the turn of the century, Papusza came from a family of nomads. A family of harpist nomads. When she turned fifteen, Papusza, of course, married a harpist nomad. And on her later travels, somehow, perhaps while the caravan was stopped in various settlements for a few days, or perhaps while everyone was holed up in the village until winter passed, Papusza learned to read and write. Even today, Eduardito, three out of four Gypsy women are illiterate. She wrote long ballads she called simply, “Songs from Papusza’s Head.” In the summer of 1949, by sheer coincidence, the Polish poet Jerzy Ficowski heard her sing and immediately began to copy and transcribe and translate some of her songs, which he published in a journal called Problemy. Papusza was forced to appear before Poland’s highest Gypsy authority, who, after brief deliberation, deemed her mahrine, or contaminated, for having collaborated with gadje, or non-Gypsies. She was sentenced to permanent expulsion from the caravan. A few months later, Papusza was discharged from a psychiatric hospital (No one understands me / Only the forest and river / That of which I speak / Has all, all passed away / Everything, everything has gone with it / And those years of youth), and she lived out the rest of her life in the most absolute solitude and the most absolute silence. Like a marvelous fucking doll, ragged and abandoned, that ends up rotting in some box in the attic. Isn’t it incredible, Eduardito, how in the end Gypsies always live up to their nicknames, as if they were providential orders or divine mandates? So what do you think my nickname will be? What will my divine mandate be? Papusza died in 1987.
Gently, with an acupuncturist’s steady hand, I pinned the postcard to my studio wall.
I’d made several attempts to track Milan down. A few phone calls. A few e-mails. Always halfheartedly, of course: without really wanting to track him down. I wanted to talk to him and to ask him things, but I also wanted to respect his desire to be untrackable, unreachable, almost missing, peregrinating, with no roots or ties. He’d adopted, as far as possible, the life of a nomad, but a modern nomad, an allegorical nomad, a postcard nomad, an ululating nomad in a world where being a real nomad is now forbidden.
I got a postcard of a mauve desert dusk, sent from Arizona. Milan wrote: Many centuries ago, a Gypsy was traveling with all of his family in a covered wagon, an old covered wagon pulled by a feeble, skinny nag. The more children the Gypsy and his wife had, the harder it got for the poor nag, and the whole covered wagon lurched this way and then that, and cups and frying pans rattled, and from time to time one of the Gypsies’ children went flying out of the covered wagon, barefoot. And that’s how Gypsies came to be scattered all over the world. All over Europe and India and the Middle East and Africa and North America and South America and Australia and New Zealand. Millions and millions of Gypsies, Eduardito, all children fallen from that same ramshackle wagon.