my reflection in the photograph
Several years ago I was “improving” my photo collection, which had become a wobbling tower of Kodachrome, balanced precariously and in no particular order in a hidden corner of my closet. Every time I saw it, I felt a vague intolerance; and each time I saw it, I felt that intolerance grow, until finally the intolerance was itself intolerable, and I furiously shoveled the concealing junk out of the way, and hooked those boxes and stacks out into the middle of my bedroom floor.
There, kneeling among the colors and stories - of years and continents and loves warming and waning, friendships seeded and growing - I had to wipe away tears, and sometimes laughed through them, as I peered into those small windows in my hands, and allowed my memories to draw me away on long trails of emotion, into such deep and lush places…
One photo in particular stopped me. It was taken outside the smaller of our two houses, on the 2 hectare farm we owned in southern Brazil. Lest your imagination build stick houses using North American timbers, and our farm seem more plush than it has any business seeming, it should be noted that House #2 burgeoned with 300 sq ft of living area, and could boast that much only because I bricked in the entryway to make a bedroom for my son. His doorway, then, was graced with a steel exterior door with bars on the window and a deadbolt to keep him in (or out). We never locked the door, of course, and since no electricity had been built into the entry-cum-bedroom, his little opaque prison window allowed our living room light to serve as a nightlight.
House #1 was substantially bigger - at least 50% - but we were not living there, since at the time the photo was taken I hadn’t yet bricked in that entryway; hadn’t yet painted it the amazing mustard-gold which seemed to gather substance and glow as it moved up the wall; hadn’t yet built the divider for baby Isabela, who was yet to arrive, nor hung the hammock in which she would swing, naked and warm in the Estrada do Rincão summer, on her American grandmother’s belly, as they both rocked to sleep…; hadn’t yet felled small trees to clear the ground beneath our enormous spreading fig, huge and protecting as the tree of life - I swear we bought the property for the Tree of Life, and only later considered the houses - and in felling those trees, freed a veritable sea of cutter ants, who proceeded to clear a trail devoid of anything living as they headed north and (thankfully) off our property, looking for a new place to nest.
Nor had we yet chased the fugitive monkey from our fig tree’s branches, telling it in hushed tones to “Vai! Vai!! Go!!” as though abetting a freed slave (which we were), while the monkey’s owner, wife, and entire kitchen retinue came pelting after, the former brandishing a pistol and holy vengence, the latter with a kitchen-rag wrapped around her bleeding hand, and the remainder, expressing various degrees of excitement, satisfaction and humor, arrived with the story: the woman had opened the tiny cage to stop the monkey from screeching and, as its jailer was stupid enough to (a) keep a monkey in a cage hardly bigger than its body in the first place, and (b) imagine it would sit there when someone reached in to “shake some sense into it”…
Well.
They poured up against our tall gate like a frothing wave, roared up to it like a livid mob, rattling the lock and shouting.
-- Gringo! Gringo! Did you see a monkey?! Did you just see a monkey run through here…?! Waving his pistol vaguely in the air, and generally in everyone’s direction. Júlia and I exchanged blank looks.
-- “Monkey…?”
The Revolver, the Bloody Rag, and the Retinue ran off down the street, looking for a revenge they would never find.
~
You see the problem in a picture.
The photo I had just lifted, when the entire history of my life in Brazil breathed into my mouth like a lover’s kiss, taking my air and my attention completely away, was full enough in its own regard, without having an entire Cast of Thousands show up, shouting their lines at me from all directions.
In the picture, my son Nicolas (who was three years old at the time, a sandy-haired, tree climbing, soccer playing monkey himself) stood in front of House #2 - the small one - the small_er_ one - in a pair of blue overalls, no socks, and farm boots which just about cleared his knees. Behind him was the garden whose contents were constantly overrun with weeds - not for lack of diligence on our part, but due to the Voluptuous Growing Everything that is Brazil - and whose corners were guarded by the butiá palm on one side, with its beautifully cascading orange fruits, all fiber and succulence. Another was shaded by a tall jaboticaba tree, with its deep purple berries and their ivory-sweet flesh that, startlingly, grow right from the trunk, as though the fruiting instructions the tree received had been scrambled, or an addled junior draftsperson had been given the job of finishing the Tree Blueprints, and rather botched it.
On the third corner there might have been roses, if that marauding band of military ants had not eaten them in passing, as they boiled like black tar or like some horribly glittering ground-hugging cloud toward the doorway of House #2. They were dissuaded from pouring into my house only by a spontaneous bucket-brigade of boiling water, a deterrent moat that thankfully steered them away… though not before they had completed their main dish of decorative flowers. And in the last corner, somehow spared from the ants, was a scruffy romã - a pomegranate tree - whose entire production of three fist-sized fruits was altogether disproportionately satisfying to both myself and Nicolas.
That very same Nicolas stood in front of the garden, on a small cement walk, in his boots and blondness. In his left hand he held a hunk of bone, something left over from the previous day’s feijoada I suppose, and in the picture he considers offering it to a dog that in a few short months will be three times bigger than he is, if not by height, most definitely by body mass.
That would be Cortez, of course, who was hired as a pup with his ditzy sister Geena (as in Davis) to guard House #1 and House #2, since somehow it had gotten into the minds of our less-affluent neighbors that Mr. Gringo just might have ferreted away some good bit of yankee green in those little groundskeepers’ cottages - well, even if it didn’t show, it stood to reason. That assumption had blossomed into full-blown fact for their even less-affluent and proven-larcenous relatives, who twice when we were away had forced their way into House #1. The first time they met with little resistance, but the second time were greeted by an alarm that, designed to alert a land-owner of problems at the nether end of a thousand-acre property, was remarkably loud in a 300 sq ft concrete bunker. I know this because I had to turn it off. During this second attempt on my imaginary wealth, the self-same pistol-toting neighbor was at our joint fence in a flash, and this time I was decidedly more receptive of, and grateful for, his magnum presence.
Cortez - as in, murderer of countless New World citizens - was unfortunately named, because if ever a dog did not need perks to make him agressive, it was this 85-pound mass of German Shepherd Maleness who stood watch over us, our property, and (intellectually at least - they were both “fixed”) his incestuous ditz of a sister, with enough agression to make up for three dogs. The neighborhood was a little alarmed and annoyed at how he turned out. He nearly ate my neighbor’s son, when poor Otávio innocently jumped the fence once (and never again) to play with Nicolas. Because the boy immediately froze, he lost no limbs and no blood except for the quantity that had drained from his face, and my neighbor didn’t have to put a bullet through my chest. I suppose, tallying the pros and cons of that one, we may have broken even.
So. Nicolas, in the photo, is about to feed Cortez a bone. Cortez loves Nicolas; and Nicolas, for some strange reason, is not a little leery of the theoretically homicidal future Cortez. I am standing behind him in photo, showing him how to give a treat to what was, but soon would not be, a puppy.
~
Though I found the picture - and include it here, reimaged - it doesn’t do justice to the charm or the poignancy of the moment, or render it for you as it did for me. Perhaps imagination is better after all. Perhaps, if your own son or daughter has grown from a giggling, strong, adventurous young thing, into a young man or woman, ready for college… perhaps then you can fill in the blanks.
In any case, I was surrounded by a thousand photos, but stopped by this one. I held it in my hand, and all these stories began to leak into belly and up into my heart and finally my eyes; the distances of time and geography filled me up like a rising tide – that’s how it happens, those waters catch you unaware, as they follow no lunar calendar: they follow their own serendipitous logic, and surprisingly, suddenly, drown you.
With all the love that I hold for my son, and all the years we have spent together, growing up, the two of us, in that moment words came together with music. It was the expression of everything I have written above, in a little ball of emotion-sound. Sometimes, with a guitar in hand, touching a new chord will catch the ear and the mind, and will seed song; this time, the melody and the words just poured out of me, as though that salty water had no place to go but out my fingers, out my mouth…
Any song that I cherish - as I do this one - I cherish because no act of will was involved in its creation. I can’t tell, when it is coming to the page or the guitar, if I am singing the song, or if something is singing me. I know I write abstractly; I know that at times I live metaphor, when others would prefer something more concrete. In this case, I am not speaking in the least poetically, but as tangibly as I know how. The best songs are those ones that have shouldered me out of the way.
~
Just this morning a friend was telling me about the end of her relationship, so recent, and so fresh. Immediately, one stanza of this song I wrote for Nicolas came to mind, and I recited it for her. I told her I would send her the lyrics, but as you can see, as soon as I found them, there I was, sitting among the photos, while memories spoke in me again.
The Future of the Rose
When you were small as the sound of a footfall in the sand and the sun that you saw was the first sun of all was a golden fruit fallen in the palm of your hand the farthest you’d walk was the reach of my call and every path brought you at last to the warmth of my arms
From there, any danger adventure, any stranger a friend to be named wherever you turned was a lesson to learn a word to be tasted, a world to be tamed and I was by your side with every embrace I gave you a place in my arms
An ocean of lives spills around you, the waves call again and again even as you grow higher, so grows your desire to dive in those waters, and swim out a man I too swim that tide the current is strong but it carries you along in my arms
Everyone knows that the future of the rose is to bloom but who’s to say it’s the sun, or if rain is the one will deepen its color and sweeten its perfume?
How many candles will measure the sands of your years? And how many treasures lined up on your shelves will make way for new loves, their flowers, their tears? The world goes round and round the world you go wherever you land you’ll always be home in my arms.
In 2002, I made a scratch track of this song - I suppose that, for public consumption, I really shouldn’t record when I have a cold, or use a laptop microphone to pick up the sound.
Undaunted! If you imagine that you’re sitting at… oh, let’s say Club Passim… with an iPhone, and you liked the stage chatter well enough to want to clandestinely record the song itself, you can listen to what it might sound like here:
The Future of the Rose - Mark Schultz
A polished version will make it to a CD as soon as I make it to a studio.