When they put him in California in the bare sun he called it violence, and that—
the refusal above all—was how they knew him. Staring into the bleached tarmac.
A wool suit in the Pacific Palisades. On the garden patio, he sat with a monograph
he’d carried through Oxford, through New York, and read it in the glare of the
paradisal morning. Los Angeles was bleaker and wilder then. Every day he went out,
there was a new trellis, a crush of manzanita and hummingbird sage,
and when he came inside he washed and re-dressed and walked the unfinished avenues,
construction dust on his shoulders. When the sea struck high on the eucalyptus cliffs,
it was clear enough to be looked through: he could still be seen, moving as if each step
of fresh territory had to be weighted, unsure of how much it was willing to yield.
It is as if no one has ever brushed their hand over the landscape’s hair,
he’d written. By the time he reached pavement, there would be water in his shoes,
and he would wring them out and wear them again, even as the soles diminished.
Some things had to be retained even at the broad end of the world.
It was the reason that he stopped so often: not just on the bluffs, but for every
cream-float car that passed on its way back to the city. He had to judge the space left
in each curve. It was not so he could shrink, but so he knew how best to push
back, and this was the practice in their bedroom at night: when he unpacked
the summer linens, the ones he’d bought in Vienna. He kept the light on so he
could see the patches. There were not many—the fabric was holding,
and even most of the thread looked fresh—and yet they carried a paper-creche print,
the stamp of somewhere that had dissipated. The place was gone, but the fabric,
the remnant, held its shape in the air. The ritual made space for resistance.
It fashioned something solid out of the refusal to forget.
Not only solid, but difficult. It was uncomfortable and insistent, and it followed
him into the evening salons. He sat with the men in the courtyards
and listened to their voices, and they had learned not to expect him to talk.
They spoke quickly, eagerly, assured in their sincerity: convinced the meaning
they’d found in exile would be legible when they returned. He put his thumb
on the rim of his glass and did not say anything, and in the mornings
he shook off the resin and went out to walk. It did not take him long to find one of
the great Monterrey cypresses: he did not touch it, but stood at a distance
from its trunk. Even a year ago, he would not have believed there could be things
so terrible and silver, and that was what he would ask them: the men
at the salons. How, he would demand—to the men so eager to return, the men
who could not wait to go back—can you believe that they will understand you?
How do you know there will still be language?
