In spite of all this beauty, there is another, darker side to California that lurks beneath the pleasant surface and occasionally pushes its way up into the light. If you go to the border in the south you will see an example of what we are referring to. For many years, there was a fence that ran along the border to keep people from coming into the country to look for work without the proper papers or permission. A few years ago, this fence was taken down and an invisible, electric barrier erected in its place. If a person tries to cross the border, in spite of the many warnings posted in a multitude of languages, he now receives a huge electric shock, strong enough to send him sailing backward through the air onto his own side of the line. For a while after El Oscuro (as the barrier is known on the Mexican side) first went up, there were protests. People suffered damage to their nerves because of the strong current; some young children who could not read the warning signs were hurt. But instead of taking down the barrier, the government put up a loudspeaker system so that those too young or not fortunate enough to be able to read could be warned to keep away. Since then there have been fewer injuries and the protests have died down as people have become distracted by other things supposedly more pressing.
We advise you to stay away from the border. Although it is not dangerous for you (you are not that kind of foreigner) the experience is upsetting and may ruin your impression of this otherwise bewitching place.
After you have spent some time in California, you may feel you would like to stay forever. This is common among travelers from our country, where the weather is gloomy and cold and where, in the winter, it gets dark early in the afternoon. We arrive in California and are whirled around by the ubiquity of light, the trees that the sea wind has twisted into dark green candle flames, the way the ocean stretches out ahead of you as if it might go on forever. We feel elated, weightless and amazed. We feel that everyone we meet is someone we loved when we were very young and have not seen for years.
This condition has come to be referred to as Golden Fever, and once it sets in it is difficult to shake. Our own researchers have sometimes fallen victim to it, and several of them have never returned home. To combat Golden Fever, there are now quite a few companies that make a business out of kidnapping foreign visitors whose families have become concerned about them. If your family hires one of these, masked men will come for you in the middle of the night and put a sack over your head, then drive you to the airport and put you on a plane that’s flying east. Unfortunately, this sudden departure can lead to withdrawal symptoms in certain travelers. In the back of the book, we provide a list of hospitals that can help you recover if you find yourself deprived of California and unable to cope emotionally with the shock.
After several months of treatment, most of the afflicted are able to recover some sense of proportion and resume their ordinary lives. They will remember the feelings of mysterious elation they experienced as if they heard about them secondhand. Their memories of California will seem like photographs, static and arrested and somehow no longer their own. Eventually, they will be just the way they were before, as if they had never been away at all, except occasionally, when they will stare out the window at the heavy sky and early dark and start to cry.
Even travelers from our country who are happy to be home may experience some strange emotions after they return. They may look around at our narrow streets and houses, our landscape that has been green and domesticated for a thousand years, or they may listen to the matter-of-fact way our people talk, their modest aspirations, their tendency to mock all that is too grand, and feel that there is something missing. This feeling will wear off after a while. For America, with all its beauty and variety, is wonderful to visit but not a place you’d really want to live. It lacks the substance and continuity of older, more established nations. Sometimes it seems to tremble like it might vanish at any moment; other times it seems like it is an imitation of a country, a set that will be taken down by a team of stagehands after you pass through it. After you have left, you may wonder whether it was real at all or just a trick of light and water, a mirage, a dream that you aren’t sure how to interpret. Was it good or bad or something else entirely? Most people who have been there find it is impossible to say for sure.
Three Marriages
1.
Shortly after they moved from their own house in Darien, Connecticut, into a retirement home near Fort Myers, Florida, Lucinda announced that she didn’t want to be married anymore to Fred, her husband of fifty-nine years. When she told her children this, they were first horrified and then dismissive. She could not mean it, they said to her and to each other. She could not possibly be serious. They interpreted it as a sign that she was becoming senile, that her mind and judgment, which had until then remained very sharp, were becoming impaired. They took her to get tested for other signs of reduced cognitive functioning, but the doctors they spoke with found Lucinda to be lucid and competent, her memory of recent and distant events remarkably intact for someone of her age, which was eighty-three years old.
“But what about this idea that she’s going to leave my father?” her son Harry asked the gerontologist who administered the battery of tests. “If that doesn’t count as crazy, I don’t know what does.”
The doctor looked at him and shrugged.
“I can’t comment on whether your mother is making a sensible choice in this matter,” he said. “But she is able to talk about her decision with perfect clarity. Being sane is in no way related to being wise.”
“But what do you think we should do about it?” her elder daughter Karen asked.
“There isn’t anything you can do,” the doctor said. “I suggest you take her home.”
So they did and for a while they didn’t hear anything further about Lucinda’s plans to leave her husband. They decided among themselves that her desire must have been a passing fancy, a phase, a strange fit that she has gone through as a result of her recent move.
But it was not. About a month later, with the reluctant help of her younger daughter Cynthia, Lucinda moved her belongings out of the apartment she and Fred shared in the Golden Years Retirement Community and got her own apartment in another, similar community nearby. She petitioned for a legal separation. She spoke to a lawyer about filing for divorce.
Her children were furious with her. One after another they came to see her, her two daughters and one son, and they told her how angry her decision had made them, how selfish they thought she was being. How could she leave her husband now? Their father, they said, was old and not very well. He’d been through treatment for cancer a couple of years before, which no one thought he would survive. But he had survived it and recovered, although he never gained back all the strength he lost during his chemotherapy. Every day during that difficult time, Lucinda had gone with him to the hospital where he would be wheeled down the corridor by the same strong and friendly nurse with long blonde hair and peppermint-pink lipstick to the treatment room. Then Lucinda would wait while he was given the dose of chemicals and afterwards she would accompany him home. And in all that time she never faltered, never expressed impatience with him, was as steady and devoted as it is possible to be. When the doctor reported his tumor gone, she celebrated with the whole family, and since then none of her friends or relatives had detected anything significantly wrong or altered between her and her husband. Why, then, was she leaving him now?