Adios, Cowboy, page 2
A few days before our great-grandmother’s death, a little monkey that lived at the time in our neighbor the vet’s garden slipped into our house. People said some rich tourists had grown bored with it and left it behind. It caused havoc all over the house, that monkey. We spent ages looking for it, I recall. It had crept in under the old lady’s oversize nightdress. Sneaky beast, we said. And soon it escaped the vet altogether, first into the park, and then who knows where.
“D’you love Great-Granny?” asked my sister.
Daniel and I nodded. The old lady was our wooden reptile—she touched our cheeks with her dry, odorless antennae. Our underground doll from the attic.
“Then we’ve got to help her,” said my sister, her green eyes looking at us straight from hell.
“Great-Granny’s suffering,” she said, “and we’ve got to help her fly up to heaven.”
I believe she really thought that. That we’d put a pillow over her head. A child playing with weapons is a terrible thing, and everything is a weapon, I recall. It’s really amazing that so many of us have survived our own and other people’s childhoods.
“Heaven doesn’t exist,” said Daniel quickly. “Go ask her.”
Things were easier with Daniel. That was the end of it.
“Don’t let Ma hear you,” I whispered.
“I never said God doesn’t exist.”
“You’re idiots! Pathetic! And craven,” said my sister. Her contempt was terrible, I recall. Still is, for that matter.
Craven, where’d she got that word from? Some film, I imagine.
And the old lady—“poor thing, poor thing” everyone said—really did cry out for help and blaspheme against God and the devil.
I think my sister loved Great-Granny, though you never know with her.
She prayed fervently to the saints for the old lady to die, even at mealtimes, which earned her a smack.
In the end her passionate spiritual euthanasia worked.
Great-Granny died like a fish, her mouth open.
That was the first time we’d seen death—it didn’t look that terrible.
She was lying on her bed, with her eyes finally closed, and Daniel lifted up her wide nightdress dating from the time when she was the insatiable one. We were looking for the tourists’ monkey, but there was nothing under her nightdress. Everything about Great-Granny had been dead for years already, her blue-and-brown shanks covered in scabs, hairless. The only thing alive was the muff between her legs, shaggy, shiny fur, bright black, that climbed from halfway up her thighs to her groin and then in a narrow spindle up to her belly button.
“Is that the monkey?” I asked.
“A cat,” said Daniel, surprised, covering her up with the nightdress.
That evening I discovered a hair under my panties. One single hair, but I couldn’t pull it out. I was almost a boy, just like my brother, who was “like a little girl,” my aunts used to say.
That wasn’t right, though, because Daniel was a boy the way boys are like those carved wooden angels that are supposed to guard your house or those Gothic ones with cheery expressions. They are free from either male or female sins, the only sunny, full-blooded creatures in church frescoes or in free flight above anorexic saints, hysterics, and virgins in the side aisles. Perhaps that’s because they have interesting jobs to do, dealing with the profane interactions between demigods and people.
The chubby little gilded angel above the Pietà behind the altar in St. Fjoko’s Church still chuckles at me today, sucking his thumb or picking his nose. All the devout ladies dream of nibbling his cheeks.
A neglected angel, perhaps, but not from a porcelain cup and not a little girl—that was our Daniel.
My room is a box in a house of boxes. Above the room there’s a bathroom, so damp stains come through the fresh paint on the ceiling. The bed behind the low cupboard is a still smaller box. The next box is me. The smallest box, a boxlet, is my cunt.
Before I go to sleep, I put each little box into the next, and then in the last one I put everything it’s agreeable to think about, everything that soothes me. Such as going into a clean empty kitchen, in which the fridge is purring; the sound of an airplane landing or taking off; something warm with a neutral smell like a dry child’s or cat’s head; sniffing the tips of one’s fingers, the chance touch of strangers, unexpected, with no ulterior motive; a hallucination while perfectly rational—that I am the white contents of a capsule or yogurt being poured out in a single dollop.
But if I spend too long awake, with insomnia that becomes like delirium and a torment, images appear, bursting rapidly into leaf.
The images I see most frequently are shots from an amateur porn video taken off the Internet, which I came across at a party two or three years ago. The images have rooted in my consciousness, draining and annoying me, because particularly nauseating images have a way of coming back and not fading. It was a custom at certain gatherings to show such amateur little films in one of the rooms, in the small hours, films that had been allegedly taken from certain sites, nothing illegal, allegedly, although I wouldn’t swear to it. The party guests would try to make fun of the two, three, or five people sporting lively genitals on the screen. I would most often wander out of the room at the very beginning of the projection, but this time I stayed to the end, because the main actor’s face caught my attention.
The film was poor quality and too dark; it had evidently been dark in the room where it was made. It was probably shot with a phone, I thought at the time.
It begins with the expression on the face of a man rearing up over a thin, white body. The man doing the fucking has very large hands and his face, which I can’t make out clearly, is blurred, but it seems to be on the verge of tears. The person under him occasionally moves an arm or leg and emits a barely audible moaning sound. Then there’s a cut and the next image is of the narrow thighs of that second person, boy or girl, it’s hard to tell: the thighs are bare and pressed together, with a thin barb between them, the big man’s snout. The third scene shows a boyish nape, with short hair and a huge fat hand on it: the face of the person being fucked by the big man is hidden by a pillow and can’t be seen. The fourth scene moves, but barely: with one hand the fucker holds the object of his lust by the shoulder or neck, probably too tightly, and slowly pushes it downward, grabs it lower down, thrusting in and ramming slowly and powerfully and crying increasingly loudly, then coming with a roar and a wail. His crying is the thing it’s impossible to forget, particularly if you want to.
I wouldn’t be able to say that these scenes excite me; rather they disturb me. There are some images that bruise me like slaps on the face: such as those of that huge ejaculating, crying man whose face I can’t put together.
In my box of boxes, droplets of sweat travel down my ribs, I stop them with the tips of my fingers and rub them over my belly. I turn the pillow onto its dry side, push my hands down inside my panties between my thighs, and try to curl up toward the aroma between my legs. That used to send me to sleep when I was a child.
Finally I give up on my efforts to fall asleep, I take off my damp T-shirt and light a cigarette sitting by the low window of the summer kitchen, looking up into the blue cleft above the street from where, instead of the freshness of nocturnal dew, a moist, lukewarm blancmange is sliding over the town.
All that can be heard in the Settlement is snoring—interrupted by curses and squeaking springs, the irritated thrashing of limbs coming through holes in the neighboring houses—and a cat exhaling air through its tiny nostrils. Someone’s left a player on and it’s emitting a thin, repetitive squeak. The fat town is sleeping in a fever, the guttersnipe.
It’s almost six, but the air outside is already warmer than inside.
Looking back, I can see clearly that everything had changed faster and more fundamentally than I had. I must have spent the last few years standing still on a conveyor belt while everything else was rushing and growing. I rarely came home, caught off guard every time I went to the center, to the west end of the town, where my sister lives, into that scintillating showroom, that garish shop-window of a broken and robbed world. Going into town is a digital adventure in which I’m met around familiar corners by ever newer and more unrestrained silicon hordes. The adrenaline scattered through the air is an aerosol that fills and pierces my lungs.
I go to the big beaches with their concrete plateaux, recliners, and cocktail bars, to the marinas where there are Russian yachts larger than our houses and to hotel complexes with ramps and a caretaker; a mass of rubble and broken glass, diggers and trucks, steel scaffolding, and smooth prisms of black opaque glass whose metal glare assaults your vision. But I pity only the birds, the dolphins, and flying fish. I believe that these things must horrify them when they leap out of the water or fly down from the sky.
In the east is the industrial zone. The east is a great stranded wreck. The shipyard with its tall green cranes, hangars, cement factories and abandoned railway tracks, and behind that vast garbage heap, on the edge of a peninsula, is the shabby Old Settlement, with a post office and church and dark runny mud in the polluted port, a comical little place under the distant skyscrapers, which blink at night at us beneath them… At me and Ma sitting on the balcony, sipping tepid beer out of plastic bottles or eating melon, while a fan on the railing pretends to be a breeze. Our neighbors who don’t have air-conditioning sleep on settees dragged out onto the terrace; whole families. Around the evening news time they sit around and watch TV. Here, nothing has changed; it hasn’t budged. Perhaps this is the only corner of the world I know, my haven, my salvation, my place of greater safety. Despair and refuge, a shred of happiness in a lukewarm bitter liquid.
The oleanders, capers, and bougainvilleas have come into flower in the courtyards. And our cat, ginger Jill, has a streetlight like a star in each eye.
On such evenings the world and the town are not divided into east and west, but, as in an animal’s head, simply into north and south. Because that, urbi et orbi, is the language of moss, compasses, and wind roses, migrating birds, the rhythms by which people rise and dance, the kinetic language that divides into hemispheres; eels and smelts that mate ecstatically in the shallows so that you can tread among them, through that lively seething and flickering, migrating birds, mapa mundi, Luna and the North Star and the place up on the hill up to where the broom bushes grow.
Ah, that’s when everything seems to be okay, and sometimes that’s the same as if it was.
Back here, I know every rat run, hiding place, and way out in case of danger.
As kids we all had that knowledge—in our legs more than in our heads, like a foreign language that waited, rolling around in our middle ear, whose hot-blooded Romance melody we had woven into our own, far more languid Slav one. Me, my sister, and Daniel, and the boys too, who came to us from the new estates beyond the railway—the Iroquois Brothers’ family and some other outlanders, always with freshly shaved heads in summer. At that time they wanted to be like us, so they gabbled the way we did, differently from their sweet fat mums and hairy dads whose consonants stuck in their gullets and who used to yell whenever they needed to speak.
We cobbled that language together from what we learned at home from our parents as much as from the unknown translators of film subtitles and dubbed cartoons; the language we’d picked up in the street and from announcers on the news and stolen from Dylan Dog, Grunf, Sammy Jo Carrington, and Zane Grey. It was the musical lingua franca from the west of the city and the center through the Old Settlement and as far as the railway. Wherever there were kids who talked and called to one another. We sought each other out and hung out, there was nothing else to do, and nor did there need to be.
Variations on the game of hide-and-seek offered endless possibilities. Or the game of group-seeks-group. Back alleys lead through unlocked villas, or through the kitchen of the cake shop with big vats of custard and tubs of ice cream, through dark vaults leading down to still darker cellars. The cellars come to an end in tight passages between buildings, pipes that emerge into bare courtyards with sheets drying above them, steps that end in the sky, garrets on rotten beams, roofs over which we leap to the old castle, then we clamber up on the sea side, dragging ourselves along the edge of the wall and coming down into the park, under upturned boats in dry berths.
That’s where we found Daniel, the first time he got lost; he had hidden under a boat on the slipway during a game of hide-and-seek and sung to himself so as not to be afraid. After that he kept disappearing and he would stay away for increasingly long spells—because he was no longer afraid, he said.
We thought all our games and wars must be even more exciting than those of the children who grew up in the movies with the cactuses and the big bright sun over the wide prairie. After all, there is a prairie here, too, at the foot of the hill above the cemetery where my father and brother are buried, even though now the path there is cut off by huge houses with hens pecking around them.
It was in a battle on the lunar expanse behind the cement works and old salt pans, between the road and the prairie, that I won my real name, Rusty, because of my red hair. That day I fell three times for justice and liberty, I was a courageous general and that’s the name I call myself—Rusty—in private.
Immediately after the war, through an exchange of volunteers, a precocious first-year student from Heidelberg ended up among us. He had come to interview us for their student radio station about the postwar life of young people in Croatia.
“You live in a multicultural country…” he began.
“No, I don’t,” I said into the dictaphone, distinctly, as though it was a microphone.
“Oh, I know what he means,” my sister butted in. “There’s various nations here, at least two nations in every house in our street, but it’s all the same mangy culture, if y’ask me. Only the Chinese can save us from boredom.”
My sister had her own way of being imbued with the spirit of internationalism.
“Eh,” said my sister to the lad from Heidelberg, slapping him on the shoulder in a comradely way, “before this war we used to play at war with the tourists; then the little Germans and Italians acted Germans and Italians.”
“And in this war? And afterward?” he cleared his throat and turned the dictaphone toward me.
“Oh, I don’t know. No one played at these Balkan wars, if that’s what you mean. Fuck it, they all wanted to be Croats.”
“Yep,” my sister confirmed.
“That’s why we played cowboys and Indians.”
“With the outlanders.”
“Against the outlanders. You have to have some kind of conflict: cowboys and Indians.”
English and Dutch people had recently settled in our narrow lane, followed by Belgians and French people—I don’t think the Chinese believe that poverty is especially romantic. It was fascinating to watch dwellings stuck together with stone, cement, and bird droppings—with worms burrowing through their beams and mice nesting in them—turn into little picture-book cottages. It was a delight for those with a bit of time and money.
All the Chinese people I’ve ever met live in high-rise blocks, I reflected. There are those who value the solidity of construction, I completely get that. They are people who live in settlements like ours all over the world.
“Jesus, these tourists are cracked,” said my sister before taking her suitcase and going down the hall, saying goodbye to us and disappearing behind the baker’s house, leaving a greasy, pinkish mark on her cup. My sister calls all the westerners who have moved into our street over the last few years, transforming those hovels into pleasant summer houses, tourists.
“Paint away, carry on painting,” she said, watching our Irish neighbor waving to us in a friendly way from under a paper cap. “You’ll never get rid of the damp and woodworm, the stink of burned onions, or the kids on your steps.”
Perhaps that’s why they come, I thought.
The daddy tourists push their children around in buggies, and we see them hanging out washing on the line between houses in the street. They don’t grill fish on charcoal in an old concrete mold or cardboard box in front of their front door with the other men in blue overalls. And they haven’t learned to play cards.
We used to have my father’s Yugoslav National Army officers, but they all married nice girls and evaporated after a while during the last war, or they ran off after some skirt, and their wives went back to their parents’ kitchens, in their unsuitably fine dresses, and later concealed their children’s surnames. We also used to have the working fathers, manual workers usually from Macedonian or, more often, Bosnian villages, who married bad girls. They stayed on in our street to drink with their wives and fight with their sons. Or the other way around. They were the only fathers we ever saw, apart from the occasional sailor or a dad working abroad. Every time they came home, those men would find a new bun in the oven.
And then there was my father, not quite like anyone else. He bore the surname of his long-dead mother, and whether his old man had been a kraut, as people said, no one knew for sure. At home no one talked about that, he least of all. He had this red hair and light skin. Like me and Daniel.
My sister is the image of Mother. She looks like the other women in the Old Settlement: brown velvet, black silk, sandpaper.
Later Daniel transformed that unknown forebear into a soldier of the Third Reich who falls in love with a young virgin in the occupied Town from—to make matters worse, but more interesting—a Partisan family. He returns several years after the war and in a brief and passionate affair he gives her a son. They never see each other again; she dies young of grief, a victim of complex political circumstances.
I believe that my father heard this story, because one morning at breakfast, out of the blue, he said that his phantom old man had been a customs officer from Cetinje.
