South of My Dreams, page 1
south of my dreams
south of my dreams
finding my american home
• a memoir •
F. K. Clementi
© 2024 University of South Carolina
Published by the University of South Carolina Press
Columbia, South Carolina 29208
uscpress.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data can be found at https://lccn.loc.gov/2024026138
ISBN: 978-1-64336-495-7 (hardcover)
ISBN: 978-1-64336-496-4 (ebook)
Front cover design by Lauren Michelle Smith
Front cover photograph: © Jimena Roquero / Stocksy United, www.stocksy.com
To Fripp, My Island
Some of the characters’ names and other identifying details were altered to preserve their privacy and to hide the identity of those who don’t deserve one.
This is a true story.
Contents
Part 1. Chestnuts
1
2
3
Part 2. Bitter Herbs
4
5
Part 3. The Storm
6
7
8
Part 4. The Island
9
10
11
Part 5. Éclair
12
13
14
Part 6. Autumn Leaves
15
16
Part 7. The Shore
17
18
Acknowledgments
Notes and Translations
Part 1 Chestnuts
1
I had a farm in Africa at the foot of the Ngong Hills.
—Karen Blixen
Outside the United States, the world is divided into two categories: those who love America and those who hate America. I have never met anyone who is indifferent to America. If I heard the phrase “I am completely indifferent to America,” I would know that the utterer is masking with irony an ineluctably negative judgment. One must be pretty simpleminded to miss that America exists and demands a position: “Oh right, America! I always forget it’s there.”
I loved America very much. Then I came to America. And I understood that love can be like white hair: better than baldness, but just as dreadful.
I also loved Rome. I was born there. Same place where my father, his father, their forefathers were born. If those people could talk, they’d tell worthy stories of varying miseries and triumphs along a line that spans, I am told, at least fourteen generations … and dead ends with me. I loved my family home, its imposing building with a balcony that ran all around the perimeter of the house, polished marble floors, long corridors, long libraries, windowless halls, sun-drenched rooms, playrooms, unused rooms, old bathrooms with views and the glorious bidets. I remember the bakery downstairs; the air we breathed announced when the pizza bianca (focaccia) came out of the oven with its scent of olive oil, salt, and herbs. I remember the supplì at Franchi’s in Via Cola di Rienzo on Saturday afternoons. I remember the tiny butcher shop, whose only two interior colors were aged white (for the walls, counters, and attendants) and sanguine red (for meats and aprons). There, one could still receive that conscionable yet by now obsolete answer, “We are out of chicken today. Try us again on Wednesday.” Such an answer would spiral America into a national crisis. What I don’t remember is paying any special attention to any of this: it all just was, and I believed it had to be the same all over the planet, anywhere, everywhere. I didn’t know, growing up, life could subsist without these comforts, this beauty. Empirical reality refutes me. My crown for a paper cone of roasted chestnuts and a cappuccino at Castroni’s! My crown will die unclaimed. I am in America: none of this exists around me. Only in me.
Sure, one could drive—never walk—to the nearest Starbucks and only half-knowingly compromise one’s health with those half-toxic, half-unaffordable coffees. But, honestly, no thank you.
In any case, as I type this, there is no time for flights of fancy or the reemergence of subconscious drives, because a tornado is coming. I feel it, rather than see it, from the window where I sit, in this old southern home. (Southern as in un-northern United States, not Sicily.) The wooden structures of the windows tremble, the glass clinks, the light and the air change even inside the house. These southern storms are somewhat sadistic storms: they arrive slowly, don’t look like much at first, and end up annihilating everything in their path. A minute before, the birds stop flying, the squirrels stand petrified in the middle of the garden with the front legs folded on their chests, the crickets dare not rub their wings, only a few old and dry leaves complain with a desperate rustle frrr frrr frrr. A second later, the air is sucked away, the sun disappears, and the sky turns completely green.
These frightening minutes before the storm have a sedating quality too. When you understand that you cannot do anything against forces bigger than yourself, you give in to an almost Zen strength that holds no illusion of control. Inside, the adrenaline takes a holiday. Outside, the sky lowers, thickens, the heat becomes oppressive, the oxygen turns into stone. The hysteric warnings from news outlets make no sense: what happens is so different from the way they describe what’s expected to happen. Tornados, the fireless dragons of the Great Plains, the prairies and the American highlands, are always surprising. So monstrous that, in 1887, the government banned the use of the term itself because the panic it infused once announced caused more victims than its actual passage. Tornadoes have a dark sense of humor: they can lift up a bunch of chickens and return them back in the same spot, whole and healthy but completely plucked of feathers. Dorothy and her little dog Toto in the Wizard of Oz are taken away by a tornado. Dorothy comes from Kansas, the state where, historically, the entire Pottawatomi tribe was swept away by a deadly tornado near the Kaw River where they were all subsequently buried. Their spirits were to ensure that the area would never again be attacked by the Great Wind; however, the dead must have held a grudge against the place or simply gotten distracted over time because Kansas is regularly ravaged by this and other bizarre types of natural phenomena on an American scale, that is, humongous. Ninety percent of all the tornadoes in the world occur in America, so it’s no exaggeration that at least 80 percent of the fabulous stories about them originate here. For example, the story of the elephant-shaped tornado, which for half an hour slammed its proboscis left and right, causing a catastrophe in lives and properties in Salina, on June 6, 1876: while the elephant twister moved away sinuously on the horizon, a gentleman stood at the door of his north-facing house admiring it, when an unannounced second tornado came from the south side and hit the man and his house, obliterating both.
Laura Ingalls Wilder, the writer of Little House on the Prairie, remembers that Pa, the beloved father interpreted in the television series of my childhood by Michael Landon, told her that one day he was in South Dakota where a tremendous twister had just swept away the property, including the animals, the work tools, the shack, and the stables of a Midwest settler whom Pa was visiting. Everyone gathered to assess the extent of the devastation, and when they looked up, they saw a black thing circling in the air and starting to descent toward them: at first they thought it was a bird, but once the object got close enough they realized it was a door. The door of the peasant’s hovel, which no longer existed. From the now blue and serene skies, the door came down slowly, slowly, and settled at the feet of the dumbfounded bystanders. It did not have a scuff and was returned with the hinges still attached.
America can be discovered also thanks to a tornado observed from one’s own window. A personal America, different from the images embedded in movies, news, and songs, and different as well from the place this European teenager fantasized about moving to in her outlandish dreams. This teenager, me, dreamt of living in New York, the state-of-the art Caput Mundi, the matrix of glamor and poshness. Fuck poshness! Here poshness has no room to breathe. Here, one finds out, the prairies extend into Manhattan. America is a state of mind. You see what your imagination inspires you to see. When you stop dreaming, though, you realize that neither floods of money nor crates of San Pellegrino water (that pricey green bottle that screams “I’m not a Republican!”) will never wash away America’s rusticity, it runs too deep in its veins. America is also Fifth Avenue, but that’s because Fifth Avenue at bottom is still Dorothy’s Kansas.
I am 25 years old, and it is 1995. An extremely cold winter is underway in Jerusalem, where I am too. It is raining; wind is blowing mixed with sand; it is miserable. My parents send a couple of survival packages inclusive of some clothing items such as romantic long woolen coats, soft-brimmed hats Alexandra Fyodorovna-style, and a pair of burgundy lacquered shoes, with black laces, rather chic as if fashioned for an English Milord of another era, perfectly masculine. In short, I look like an androgynous German diva of the 1920s … think Marlene Dietrich. Except that Marlene Dietrich would not have set foot in a kibbutz. And like her, I’m completely out of place here, dressed like this. The beautiful burgundy shoes refuse to walk on these harsh grounds. They don’t look shiny anymore. I don’t know what to make of these worn-looking shoes. I’ve never known worn shoes. I always had new shoes. New clothes. Beautiful things. As a child, come September, my father would take me to buy school supplies for the new year. Everything new, even when the things of the previous year had not been unwrapped. New grembiulino (a buttoned smock—white for girls, blue for boys—topped by a broad cravat knotted in a front bow), new crava t, new binders, new erasers, new pencils, new notebooks, and all the necessary textbooks. It was a fact of life taken for granted in my family, just like having bread on the table. There must be bread on the table!—even if the menu of the day featured pasta, fried chicken, panino with frittata, and a slice of strudel. One needs a loaf of bread. One needs new school supplies every year. One needs a flaring Max Mara neck-to-heel coat and cashmere scarves in a kibbutz. Everything new. It is a miracle when something survives the frequent wardrobe purges imposed by my mother’s bon ton.
My mother is a unique case of insanity and care. Her origins are unknown to me, because they are unknown to her and, since she lies, I couldn’t believe a word about any story she would relate if asked. Her roots started somewhere in Vienna and stretch all the way to Rome, via Trieste, when her father moved to the eternal city to study belle arti and paint. The man was rich and had nothing better to do. I suppose he would have liked my lacquered shoes. They say we look identical. I have no idea. He died when my mother was still a small child.
I begged my mother not to chuck my burgundy shoes. She had her judgmental eyes on them. I wore them last year, in Poland, and they looked the part on those Romantic promenades and totalitarian boulevards. You ask: What has Poland got to do with anything? It does, because the current Israeli interlude in my life was preceded by a Slavic interlude; Picasso had the blue period, and I a Slavic one.
Before moving to Israel, I was living in Poland. After high school, I enrolled at university, threw myself heart and soul into Slavic Studies, and moved to Warsaw. I fell madly in love with the subject matter and the places I roamed for five years with burning curiosity: St. Petersburg, Moscow, Prague, Kiev, Lvov, Vilna, Odessa … I believed that I could live happily forever in any of those regions, with unsolvable inferiority complexes hidden inside overblown egos, anywhere between Vienna and Gorki. I could have but didn’t. I mistook geography for purpose. Then I mistook my purpose altogether. My purpose for living in those days was the love of a young Pole, Janusz Budulec. My love for Janusz Budulec made sense of everything in those days.
When, after an intense three-year relationship, Budulec vanished, my life blanked out too. I lost interest in life and in any part of the cruel and boundless Slavia. I left Poland (which was now loaded with my pain) and came to Israel. I hadn’t considered that the pain would follow me here. And here, like a wreckage from the past, my lacquered shoes wrinkle, exfoliate, split in the dry desert air. And here they’ll remain, in a black dumpster, full of rejected furniture, rotten lettuce leaves, and cigarette butts. Shalom.
Having these catwalk clothes is a real problem in the kibbutz because I cannot lose sight of them for a moment: if they end up in the laundry facility, the Russians and some old acrid Israeli woman will steal them; if I leave them unattended, the Americans, the only righteous ones around, will redistribute them equally among the members of the community following the fundamental rule of this place which requires that nobody own or desire more than anyone else. The kibbutz is a kolkhoz of sort, that, just like its Soviet relative, was obviously not ideated by Italian or French Jews. In fact, me and my two French friends, Sonia and François, although socialists, have no intention of redistributing anything of our own, let alone receiving the hygienically suspect stuff of others. We found ourselves the cushiest jobs. Sonia and I are sheltered from the torrid heat and the frozen rains in the nursery. François works in the laundry facility, where he leaves the bulk of the effort to his colleagues while he reads French newspapers and other intellectually stimulating materials, coopting the only bench near the only heater.
The harshest tasks have been left to the Russians and to the Americans: to the Russians precisely because they’re Russians, and therefore the kibbutz director, Roy, has no qualms in discriminating against them. To the Americans because they asked for them, wanting to experience the true reality of the place to the fullest, not wishing to avoid (like the Italians and the French) any aspect of this adventure. We, the West Europeans, on the other hand, promptly withdraw from any repugnant adventure: Americans, who grew up in ugly places, with fattening, carcinogenic foods, but also with a great sense of justice, meritocracy, and equality in that little bit of healthy blood that still flows in them, gleefully clean the chicken coops (with consequent irritation of the eyes and respiratory tract infections, and above all a 5 am wake-up call each morning); Sonia, François, and I count on the fact that experiences can be absorbed intellectually, not merely physically. The only exception to this geo-spiritual archetype is a French oleh chadash (new immigrant), Michel (pronounced Mishel): this one is determined to pass for an American, starting with his name which he insists on pronouncing in English “Michael” although it comes out of his tightly protruded Gallic mouth as “My-kòll.” My-kòll has a nonchalant cigarette hanging from the side of his meaty lips (Americans collectively stopped smoking around 1970), he wears his button-down shirt sleeves elegantly rolled-up (Americans only wear T-shirts), and he ends up picking cotton in the fields with his beloved gringos. He immediately gets a second-degree sunburn, an erythema, and is debilitated for days.
I share a tiny room with a Belgian roommate, the oldest among us (meaning, the closest to thirty), a bit hippie, largely minimalist, and ready to immolate herself for who knows what subconscious sense of guilt toward the Chosen People. I say this because, weirdly, she is not Jewish. The Belgian girl left Europe with merely her backpack. My parents paid a hefty overweight fee for my suitcases at the airport, and I have occupied every accessible corner of our room: guitar, violin, books, loads of impractical clothes. The Belgian girl does any work she is given without batting an eyelid. Exemplarily, and unlike all others, she never complains. The rest of us do nothing but. It’s a national trait. She likes to plant things that grow, and she works the land with her bare hands. She is an archaeologist by training, but she never speaks in such a way that the terms of her discipline would crop up and make her appear superior or snobbish. Her name is disarmingly Christian: Krista. “The last Kristos over here became quite famous,” I cheer her on. “Vell,” she says without smiling, with a cute accent, “I’d like to live past 33.” She has a point.
I’m curious to see if the Belgian girl will stay, or if at some point she’ll beat feet and declare defeat. She is severe in a Flemish way that blends together quietude and moderation into a kind of noble monasticism, and this can be a disadvantage in the countries along the Mediterranean basin, where the modus operandi is aggression. I am so tired of aggression. Maybe I should move to Bruges.
I make friends and I guess I make enemies too. Krista moves, untouched by others, like a holy spirit among the campfires of our young, fragile psychologies. I would like to talk to Krista about my problems (like friends do), because she strikes me as someone who would never give you wrong advice. But her Cistercian abstention from emotionality makes me uncomfortable, makes me feel stupid: what with my paranoias, my phobias, my anxiety about all sorts of diseases, my over-accessorized wardrobe, and my not knowing when to shut up. I would like, for instance, to hear her take on this one “pioneer” in the kibbutz whose erratic, clingy behavior has been bothering me since I arrived. But I shut up.
Luckily, the problem seems to be taking care of itself, as I receive a momentous call early one morning. It happens around 4 am: the phone in our room rings and we jump up to the rational thought “We are at war!” I pick up the receiver and hear on the other end the calm and cultivated voice of a gentleman who is looking for me: “This is Professor Antony Polonsky from Brandeis University.” He must have disregarded the time zones. Polonsky is reaching out in his capacity of director of the Near Eastern and Judaic Studies program to extend me the invitation to join the graduate body of Jewish history students in his department. “If you’d do us the honor,” he says. Is this a prank? No, I know it isn’t. I really know. But “honor”? And there is more: for the trouble, I am offered a lavish scholarship to cover university fees and life expenses. In the fog of my nightly drowsiness, I hear him talk of tens of thousands of dollars. This is how my life makes a 180.
