two true stories

Somewhere in between acquaintance and friend I asked why?, and she answered: I survived cancer. 

It was some years ago, she said, a decade now without another challenge. I counted back: how young! And the thought dissolved - as some thoughts do - becoming a gentle interior rain, washing down to common ground, what is was lost, is loosing its grip, will be taken away. I was trying to remember where that exact feeling, or a feeling closely akin, had touched me before: it is aligned with beauty. It might have been the first curl and browning edge of a rose petal. It might be a spot on the stem. If there were no beauty, the sense would not be the same…

Several years ago I was engaged as an international liaison for a major multinational corporation. Working with the VP of Technology, we traveled first to Brazil, which was my home for nearly 8 years, and the birthplace of my children; then we hopped a flight to Buenos Aires, where the Argentine offices were located. Friday, meetings; Monday meetings. And in between, one of my favorite pastimes: walking the streets of a foreign city, perhaps taking in a few of the better-known sights, but angling always for the quotidian, the parks noisy with children, or quiet with old men playing weekend games; the vacant plazas with their rank upon rank of apartments surrounding; the backstreet restaurants overflowing with locals; the smell of the air; the sound of a foreign tongue; the glance of a stranger.

It was on top of the hill, not far from a colleague’s birthplace, I sat in the sun with the mirrored eyes of the penthouse flats leaning over me where I sat, where I emptied of the American me, and all the colors and shapes and noises poured around me like a dry tide which would drown yet not rob me of my breath. I began writing “Canción de la Soledad”:

Quasi no hay quien passa por aqui / en el Sabado solitario / Sabado de las ausencias…

Later I walked until I found a bookstore, or it found me: suddenly when I stopped, there it was, all four floors of it. I went in and asked for poetry, with my broken Spanish that sounded Portuguese, and my Germanic features. The assistant brought me a dozen books, old, new, male, female, and I began to read. It was like an archeological dig. I had scraped away the soil of Buenos Aires, and found another city…

One poet caught me, at the time, more than others. Alejandra Pizarnik. I turned page after page of her words, looking into the night, looking at the day, clear and incautious. There was such poignant beauty in so many of the verses. I fell in love instantly. It’s easy, when alone and empty in a foreign city, to fall in love with beauty and depth and grace.

Who was this woman? Was she born long before me? Was she traveled, like Bishop; or cloistered, like Dickinson? In the overleaf of one of her books, a brief passage. Alejandra was born in April, 1936. She published her first book of poetry at age 19: La Tierra Más Ajena (The Land Far Beyond). She studied philosophy. She learned to paint. About the time I was born, she was living in Paris, taking a few courses at the Sorbonne, working for the journal Cuadernos, and sitting on the editorial board of Les Lettres Nouvelles. That was a life. I have made my own small pilgrimage to the cafes near Mont Blanc and imagined I breathed the dust of great authors.

I read more of Alejandra’s poetry. Such a firm gaze into her interior darkness. But hopes. There were hopes and lightness.

On September 25, 1972, age 36, she took an overdose of seconal and died.

I sat at this small reading table near the window, on the first floor of a major bookseller in central Buenos Aires. I slammed the book shut and said, more forcefully than I could keep completely under my breath, God damn it! then covered my eyes with one hand as large tears of… rage?… anguish? spilled onto the worn wooden table. The saleswoman stepped over to me to ask if I needed help. I stood, messily drying my eyes and nose, and handing her the books. I didn’t realize, I said, how young she was…

It is years later. I easily analyze my isolation and tiredness and see in their shadows the emotional reaction to a few words, from a woman I could never have known, in a culture half-way ‘round the planet to the south. And that is a fine partial truth. The rest - the moment, the invitation, the embrace, the collapse, the burial - were real as the tears, and echo my first response to hearing a new friend had faced cancer and won - at least for now. That little stone rests down there, round the base of the gut.

Through all this I try to judge the rightness of youth and beauty to live long and well. Yet a deeper knowledge runs beneath that resentful surface: in my friend’s story, in Alejandra’s good bye, in my friend Brenda’s leave-taking, in my kids’ neighbors’ son’s illness, in my own this-many years and how-many more… we are all born with our death inside of us. There is no exception here, rather it is as much a part of our physical being as Dylan Thomas’ Green Fuse. So I let this friend have her experience - should I not? I have faced death enough times, it has taught me much. A friend has her experience, a poet her departure, and round and round this spinning world we dance from one day to the next, carrying flowers to our lovers, and flowers to our rest.

Alejandra y la muerte - Mark Schultz

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