15. Exodus

When I left, I swore to myself—there was no one else I could swear to—that I’d never return. I didn’t tell mother—I didn’t have the chance—but I’m sure she knew. I didn’t know, because I couldn’t’ve known, that this day—when I could and had to come back—would come. And of course, I couldn’t’ve predicted that it would come after the deaths of everyone who actually knew me here, including my mother. Or that it would come near the end of my own transformation.

But a day came, years ago, when I came to believe that by leaving, I’d precluded any chance of returning, whether or not I wanted to.

Through a series of lies, missteps and sleeping on various floors, couches and hallways (Men like to tell stories about stuff like this.) I opened my eyes one day—I didn’t know what time of day it was—to hissses rising from the narrow, sunwashed street into the window. I was warned that the weather would be very hot in that place. Though it wasn’t, it was the week before, I was told. The past weather—the past—sizzled in the cauldron of deep, dusty rose-colored brick and stone houses. The steam, the mist of dissipating voices, echoed the warmth of the morning’s—or was it the afternoon’s?—sun, which sucked away the film left by the shower that slipped onto, and away from, that street while I slept.

I only hope—and this is one of the few hopes I still hold, or have ever held—that I’m making some sense of this, as I describe it now. For I woke on that day and I had no words—not even the inelegant ones I’ve been using to describe my life on, run from, and return to this block where my mother raised me in the kitchen—to describe that day, not even to myself. It wasn’t just that I was in a country where I hadn’t been raised and knew none of its language other than a few words Mrs. Littington yelled in anger or exasperation at her children when her husband wasn’t in the house.

A slender gray cat with a long tail slinked from the door of one of those rose-colored brick houses and into an alleyway lined by vines climbing a fence I couldn’t see. “Venez-y! Venez-y!” A woman whose brown hair swept from swirls above her ears into a mane at the back of her neck hollered for the cat, without the sharp, angry edges of the voices calling—or sending away—children and other domesticated milk-drinkers on my old block.

“Venez-y,” she intoned once more before turning away from her window. Not much later, the slick gray cat bounded, seemingly on tip-toes, toward the front of that rose-brick house. The door opened, and the cat disappeared inside.

For several days, the evening’s rain dissolved into a haze of the morning’s sun and the afternoon warmth simmering among the bricks. Bicycles and small cars left their places by the curbs and returned, along with their owners. Somehow—I didn’t know how—I knew they would. But when another woman who swept her hair back and lived with a cat and another woman left for a few days, somehow I wasn’t surprised when she came back on the day she did. And I didn’t hear any angry words from the woman who lived with her—who, I realized, was her lover—or any howls from their gray cat.

I also realized—again, I didn’t know how at the time—that none of those women’d been born or raised in that city. Later, I realized that their accents revealed that fact: Even though I knew almost nothing of their language, I realized they didn’t sound like the women behind the counters at the charcuterie, boulangerie or librarie. In fact, the woman at the bookstore didn’t sound like the deli- or bakery proprietors’ wives; I could even tell that the woman at the bookstore wasn’t somebody’s wife.

Whenever I left any of those shops, they chirped, “Au revoir, madamoiselle.” Of course, that’s customary in their country, but there was something in the sing-songiness, and the seeming accent on the “voir,” that left a door, a window, or something—even a ventilation duct, perhaps—open. The interaction, the story, between me and whichever of those women said “Au revoir, madamoiselle” was complete—whole, actually—whether or not I came back, or whether or not we met in some other way.

Of course, I returned to all of those shops—especially the bookstore, whose proprietress/manager/eminence let me stay as long as I wanted, knowing full well by my few and halting phrases in her language that I could read almost nothing on her shelves. I did what any child does: I looked first at the books full of pictures. For the frist time in my life, I looked at art, at photography. I found a few things I liked, though to this day I still don’t understand why people go to look at most of the things they look at in museums, or why they buy almost anything displayed in galleries.

People came because they could. And left for the same reason. In that city—Toulouse, France—I realized that I had those same prerogatives, which I mistook first for privileges and later for rights. You were never neither terminally here nor gone: You were in transition, coming or going. Thus, for once, I didn’t find myself eternally condemned to the present, to a moment when you’re either here or gone.

If nothing else, I realized I was no longer one of the boys, one of the would-be men, of this block. It hadn’t occurred to me that I never was, that I’d struggled to fit , on lines and into clothes, into schools, churches, and other bodies where I didn’t belong. I realized then, for the first time, that I wasn’t going back to this block, not for a long time, and that I couldn’t, even if I’d wanted to.

I also never realized how quickly I could forget, or simply lose, people. I knew that nobody from this block—not even Mrs. Littington, who’d lived in this country until she met Mr. Littington—would find me in Toulouse. In fact, no image or thought of her ever, or anyone from this block besides mother, crossed my mind while I was there. For all they or I knew, I could’ve been in some other country yet, even though Toulon, where Mr. Littington got off a Royal Navy ship and met her in a café, wasn’t even half a days’ train ride away. I was in the city the French call la ville rose; she’d come from the war, from a town that was shelled and burned because the Republique’s battleships and submarines entered and left with the tides. It was never fully rebuilt, or made into any habitable place worthy of the appelation ville for the very same reason. More than one tourist guidebook has called Toulon the ugliest and dirtiest town in France; the same books celebrate (rightly, I believe) Toulouse’s color and light.

But none of those books, no matter where or in what language they’re published, will tell you about this block: the one on which I grew up and where I met Mrs. Littington. They couldn’t, any more than I could (or still can) describe exactly what I felt on that street on my first day in Toulouse. They, by the same token, couldn’t (or wouldn’t) tell you about the women or the cats, not any more than I have in my own ragged, clumsy way.

No, nobody’s written—nobody’s described or shown—in verse, story, music, paint or stone—the world in which I began: the day I left this block to make a transition I’ll never quite complete, simply to stay alive, and in the hope that I might be safe. But soon, very soon, I’ll travel to the physical end of that journey. I’ll have gone as far as that road I took from this block to that street in Toulouse and beyond, back to this block for mother’s funeral, can take me. I’ll’ve lost that last appendage connecting me to who I was on this block, to whatever memories the women in this funeral parlor may’ve had. Even though I now use that part of my body only for excretion, and am eager to be rid of it, I still wonder what I’ll be like when I no longer have to hide it under my skirt.

14. 84

Eighty-four. That seems to be the number that seperates this block from all the others. Or anyone who’s lived a life or died a death that intersected with mine in any way.

I’ve never known a man who’s lived to that age. On this block, the boys all seem to embark upon their paths—never by design—at the age of thirteen, or sometime around then. You know which ones will “make it”—that is to say, get out of this place—and which ones will die here, whether physically, mentally or emotionally. About that age, the few who know how begin to prepare themselves for life after leaving. A few are guided—always by women, it seems.

But most start moving toward the commands of the immediate gratifications this block has to offer. It comes when a boy first handles, however clumsily, his capability of ending someone else’s life—or his own. Something that would’ve been nothing more than a physical scuffle only a few days earlier lands somebody on a table. If he’s conscious, the murmurs of men in gowns melt into the black cones of the victims—and the ones making assesments of, and pronouncements about, his condition.

The ones who return—well, some, anyway—make plans to die or leave. Or, perhaps, they live as if they had the proverbial three score and ten coming to them. Some women live to such an age; so do some men—though none of the young men realize that these survivors to thirteen plus three score and ten found another place, another way.

Thirteen, then three score and ten. No man who’s ever lived on this block is aware of those two stages or lengths of a life span. A few men and a few more women get to live both—but no man, it seems, endures beyond them if he’s from or on this block.

Long after I left, I learned that Judaism has a ceremony that’s like a second bar mitzvah for men who live to be eighty-three: three score and ten years after the age of thirteen. I didn’t know about it growing up: Why would Adam’ve told me? He wasn’t the only Jewish man on this block, although this was also something I didn’t realize until long after I’d left. I wouldn’t’ve cared anyway, since I never planned to practice their religion, or anyone else’s, the moment I had the liberty to make that choice.

In fact, I never expected to live long enough to reach any Biblical or other milestone. I didn’t even think I’d live as long as I have: long enough to reach this moment, the last one I’ll spend with my mother or anyone else on this block: the last time I’ll live as the person who lived among them. The boy among dead and dying men; the boy who grew old. Which is the reason why, I realize now, mother had to keep me at home, in the house, until I left.

Eighty-four still seems very, very old to me, even though I’ve since met men and women who were older. Actually, it’s the age at which one can say for sure that someone has become, or will be, an old man or woman, not simply another who’d withered or fallen, and died. The first person I met who’d accumulated that many years was the owner of a gas station near Vivian’s old town. After we were driving back to her place, she told me how old that man was. I wanted to go, to take one more look at someone eroded but not corroded, a bit stooped but still standing and walking.

Now I know what I would want to know from him. How had he made it? That might seem like the most banal question in the world—unless you’re from this block. Every man who’s survived on this block, however briefly, did so by subduing in any way necessary for victory in a fight with to the death with another man. Of course I include Coach Tigler, Moon and Jack; I include me. In order to live long enough to make the transition I’m making, I not only had to vanquish a man; I had to kill him in order to render him nothing more than a name and a set of dates and other statistics.

At eighty-four, one is no longer a statistic. Or even a name. One becomes, finally, like the seacoast in Vivian’s old town or the mountain in another: one who has the lines of the succession of storms and sunshine that no other has experienced. Nothing anybody builds around those places ever fits quite right, like the clothes on old people. One’s belly shrinks or swells; another’s shoulders sag or neck bends: simply buying a coat in a different size won’t protect them from this year’s torrents. But somehow they survive. Like the man at the gas station. Even though it’s been years since Vivian even spoke to me, let alone since we drove by him, I don’t doubt that he’s still around. But I’m not sure how I could talk to him or whether he’d want to talk to me. Or what I’d do now with his answer to that question.

13. The City We Never Knew

 

Once in a great while, I get into a conversation that leads to the question, “Where are you from?” I answer with the name of the city in which this block is located. It’s probably the most untrue, or at least the most inaccurate, thing I say to anybody.

I only know this block. As for the city, it’s one everybody in the world’s heard about and quite a few’ve vistited. Unless you come from this block, you know more of this city, or at least what people think about when they hear its name, than I do. Or ever will.

No one who began or ended up on this block has any interest in seeing all of the famous edifices, monuments or other preserved specimens outsiders see through the windows of buses and the viewfinders of cameras. Some might say it’s like having no interest in the house once you’ve been in the boiler room.

You don’t swear off or hate the city the rest of the world knows. You just never see it, unless work or have some other reason to venture into it. Knowing that the city has the biggest or most famous anything in the world doesn’t mean much when you’re living or dying on this block. Especially if you’re a woman, or among women.

Someone once said there’re deception, theft and death behind every great fortune. Someone else said that to make omelets, you have to break eggs. To build the bridge that connects this city to the rest of the world, a whole series of blocks—like this one, I’ve been told—were destroyed, edited off maps: obliterated from the face of the earth.

And what of those plazas and towers that stretch across and above the narrow, shadowy blocks of the city? Or of this block—the name of this street? Behind every name there is at least one death. And more often than not, there’s bloodshed, intrigue, chicanery or some other rupture in what people call “the social contract,” whatever that is.

None of the violence ends when the death certificate, the checks or the documents that certify possession are signed. The generations born and unborn continue to give, willingly or not, their voices to the others that roil in the cauldron of unending death. The ones who escape this fate—and I’m not sure that I have—do so only because they had no other choice.

Nothing’s been named for anybody who’s ever lived on this block. Yet they—we—die in the name of those who leave monuments to themselves. And those landmarks, like the pyramids or the cathedrals in European towns, cast shadows over their communities from which nobody escapes. Everybody in those towns or nations gives his or her life to build the church or palace or to win a battle. And nothing and nobody’s the same again, ever.

So, while I know nothing about the city in which this block is located, this block is the one thing I haven’t been able to go without thinking about since I left it. I know the lives that were lost or destroyed while I was living here—including my own.