Curious to see New Bedford? That’s a surprise. It’s not like you’ve made any big effort to come here. But it’s a fascinating little city, Frank. America’s number one commercial seafood port, did you know that? I have a friend who says it’s like a border town, except the border is the Atlantic Ocean instead of Mexico.
The air smells so strong of codfish
it makes one’s nose run and one’s eyes water.
Crossing the Public Garden in this cold just darkening, something of a tropical smell of cooking fire and effulgent damp turned frigid in the air. I can’t believe I never knew until yesterday about Memo not coming to the wedding; it was never mentioned by anyone in the family, at least not in front me. I never knew that my mother was pregnant with me when she sat for her famous painting, either, or that Herb was gay. Felman was his last name. It’s like watching a foreign-language movie without subtitles, being in my family. Flakes of snow like darting ice fleas. That first winter in New York, when I hadn’t gone back to Broener—but no, maybe it was the second winter—I heard John Cheever read a short story that ended right around here, in the Back Bay, the narrator climbing up on a statue, taking off his hat, and putting it on the statue’s head. The reading was at the Ninety-Second Street Y, Cheever’s polished, somewhat hoarse voice, the flushed glow of his forehead. I heard Robert Lowell read at St. Mark’s in the Bowery, Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso were there, too, that night, and the historic old church was packed. That rowdy, mostly young Lower East Side bohemian and punk crowd was taunting and shouting Lowell down as he tried to read his poems, and Ginsberg came onstage to scold them, indignant over how rudely they were treating his friend, a great poet, personally invited by him to give a reading there in the equivalent of Ginsberg’s home arena. Was it just because Lowell, with his swept-back, long, white hair, was so WASP patrician and spoke in that same John Cheever, Boston Banana Brahmin voice? “Again and then again the year is born … To ice and death.” True, not very beat or punk, more heavy metal or Jethro Tull, though that line was followed by a verse about spying through an icy window on a girl playing her French horn. Also, I heard Elisabeth Bishop read at the Guggenheim, a much more polite crowd, though I’m sure genuinely scintillated; don’t think she read “At the Fishhouses”; wouldn’t I remember if she had? Haven’t been to a single poetry reading since moving back to New York. It’s sad how you allow once pure or youthful enthusiasms to dim, but this is one I have it in my power to revive. Go to some poetry readings, Frankie Gee.
All over Guatemala, in the space of a small number of years, tens of thousands of still-young bodies were buried and hidden under the earth, the murdered young, firm supple arms embracing death and dirt for their long journeys to bone; plenty of others murdered, too, from infant to old, but mostly it was the murdered young. After the war, forensic anthropologists would spend years digging for their remains; they still are to this day. Of course, Penny and I were going around inside young bodies too. That line from the Iliad, “Everything is more beautiful because we are doomed.” I spent long periods enthralled by that darkness, perambulating through the invisible murder clouds drifting over the sidewalks all over Guatemala City, thinking I was living close to an eternal truth. It wasn’t until I was back there a decade later, beginning to look into the bishop’s murder and finding the city still so terrifying and haunted, that I realized that I’d missed it, that sense of vulnerability that also makes you feel young, as if allowing you to watch yourself through the eyes of parents helpless to prevent what’s coming. It’s fucked up. Nobody should go near any war or killing zone if they can help it; on the other hand, you really can’t learn such lessons about human insanity and depravity without being there yourself. Now Cara de Culo sends his emissaries all the way up here to wait in a parking lot outside a supermarket in order to threaten to turn poor Zoila and her relatives into invisible murder clouds; they come with visas, welcome, enjoy your stay.
This comes back to me now, too, from a couple of months ago, when I was reporting that story on the Abuelas de la Plaza de Mayo and their search for the children of their own disappeared sons and daughters. Most of those young mothers were already pregnant when they were abducted; some were impregnated in the Argentine military’s clandestine prisons, mostly by jailors and torturers who raped them. Born in the secret birthing wards of military hospitals, weaned after a few days from mothers who would soon be put aboard death flights, those stolen infants were almost never, as they grew up, told the truth about their origins by their adoptive parents. So far, nearly a hundred of those offspring have been found and united with their grandmothers. I interviewed several, in their twenties now, and was so struck by how they idealized their true mothers and fathers, whose very existence until recently they’d been oblivious of. Though some claimed to have intuited it, to have experienced confusing sensations they interpret now as signs of mystical communion with their biological parents, with their mothers especially. A young man, sensitive and musical, now a composer, told me that he’d never understood how he could have come from parents so unlike himself, so dull and melancholy, as well as suspiciously elderly, and who’d raised him in what was then an ordinary lower-middle-class
