My Father

By

Jackie Lopez Lopez

Ikebana

When I left home, my father said don’t you cry.

I gave him an apple for my rehearsal dinner.

My father spoke perfect English and Spanish.

He gave me my Puerto Rican eyes and my Spanish sir name and the alphabet soup.

My dark skin scared his family but made him want to send me to Germany for drum lessons.

He gave him an invisible thread of patrimony.

I never left him, although, I swam naked in the sun.

He was from the Bronx and thrifty and had shiny white skin.

He owned a building, and he saw spirits in the basement.

I was 3 when he came home drunk and hit me with a rum bottle.

My father loved me irrefutably and was never cross with me.

My father was a shaman fighting demons on the street.

He was the hero of the angels.

And, the fear of the merciless.

He saved the world on a daily basis.

I took his blood and turned it into a pen.

When I left my father, he said I would fall asleep on welfare.

I never cooked without a food stamp in my mouth.

I was wicked poor.

I was the envy of the third world children though.

And, shame paid for my room and board.

Worse things beyond poverty were to happen to me.

I was 7.

When I was 11, my father died from heartbreak on the streets.

He couldn’t live without me.

Recently, my father spoke to me in a fierce dream

and told me to go plant a flower.

Now, I fight demons on the street, am the hero of angels, and am feared by the merciless.

The world saves me on a daily basis.

When I leave home, I will not cry.

I love you, father.

I understand.

On Board Ship, an excerpt from Tristes Tropiques by Claude Levi-Strauss

That one civilization is ending and another beginning; that our world has suddenly found itself to be too small for the people who live in it: these are facts which became real to me, not because of figures or statistics or revolutions but because I happened, a few weeks ago, to make a certain telephone call. I had been playing with the idea of retrieving my youth by a return visit, after fifteen years, to Brazil. The answer was that I should need to book my cabin four months in advance. 

And I had imagined that, since the establishment of regular air- services between France and South America, the sea route was the preserve of a few eccentrics! It is, alas, a mistake to suppose that because one element has been invaded the other has been set free. 

But in between the marvellous voyages of 1935 or thereabouts and the one to which I returned an immediate No there was one, in 1941, which was charged with symbolic meaning for the years to come. Shortly after the armistice I was invited to the New School for Social Research in New York. (This I owed in part to the friendly interest which had been taken in my work by Robert H. Lowie and Alfred Metraux, in part to the vigilance of relations of mine long settled in the U.S.A., and, finally, to the Rockefeller Foundation's scheme for the rescue of European scholars who might find themselves menaced by the German occupation.) The problem was: how to get there? My first idea was that I should pretend to be returning to Brazil in order to continue my pre-war researches there. I went to the ground-floor rooms in Vichy, where the Brazilian Embassy had set up its temporary home, and asked to have my visa renewed. The interview was cruelly brief. I was well known to the Ambassador, Luis de Souza-Dantas, and he would, in any case, have behaved in the same way had I not known him. He was just raising his hand to stamp my passport when one of his staff reminded him, in tones of chilling respect, that under the new regulations he could no longer renew visas. For several seconds his arm remained poised, and there was a look almost of entreaty in his eyes as he tried to make his junior turn aside for a moment. My passport once stamped, I could at least have left France, even if I could not get into Brazil. But he wouldn't; and at length the Ambassador had to let fall his hand wide of my passport. No visa for me; he handed me back my passport with a gesture of distress.

I went back to my house in the Cevennes not far from where, at Montpellier in fact, I had been demobilized and began to hang about Marseilles harbour. Eventually I heard a rumour that a ship would soon be sailing for Martinique, and, after a great deal of to-ing and fro-ing from quayside to office and back again, I discovered that this ship belonged to that same Compagnie des Transports Maritimes which had found such a faithful and exclusive clientele among the members of our academic mission to Brazil. The winter breeze was blowing keenly when, in February 1941, 1 walked into the company s unheated and three-quarters-closed offices. The official was one who had been wont to come and greet us on the company s behalf. Yes, the ship did exist; yes, it would shortly be leaving. But I couldn't possibly go on it. Why not? Well, I didn't realize how things were; he couldn't explain, but it wouldn't be at all what it used to be. How, then? Oh, it would be endless, and so uncomfortable! He couldn't imagine my putting up with it.

The poor man still saw me as a small-bore ambassador of French culture, but I saw myself as marked down for a concentration camp. Moreover, I had spent the previous two years, first in the virgin forests of Brazil, and later in one improvised billet after another in the course of a disorderly retreat that had taken me from the Maginot Line to Beziers by way of the Sarthe, the Correze, and the Aveyron: cattle-trains on the one hand and sheepfolds on the other: so that my inter locutors scruples seemed to me out of place. I saw myself going back to my wandering life but on the oceans this time, sharing the labours and die frugal repasts of a handful of seamen, sailing hither and yon on a clandestine vessel, sleeping on deck, and gaining in health and strength from the day-long nearness of the sea.

I did at last get a ticket for the Capitaine Paul Lemerle. When the time came to embark the quayside was cordoned off. Helmeted gardes-mobiles, with automatic pistols at the ready, severed all contact between passengers and the relatives or friends who had come to see them off. Good-byes were cut short by a blow or a curse. This was not the solitary adventure I had had in mind; it was more like the departure of a convict-ship. If I had been amazed by the way in which we were treated, I was dumbfounded by our numbers. Somehow or other we were to be three hundred and fifty on board a little steamer which as I lost no time in discovering could boast only two cabins, with in all seven couchettes. One of these cabins had been allotted to three ladies, and the other was shared between four men, of whom I was one. This favour I owed and may I thank him here and now to M.B., who felt that it was out of the question for one of his former first-class passengers to be quartered like a cow or a pig. And, indeed, all the other passengers men, women, and children had to pile into the dark and airless hold, where the ship s carpenters had made a rough scaffolding of beds, one on top of another, with pallets of straw for bedding. Of the four fortunate males, one was an Austrian, travelling in metals, who doubtless knew what he had paid for the privilege; the second was a young beke , a rich Creole, who had been cut off from his native Martinique by the war; he deserved special treatment in that he was the only person on board who was not presumed to be either a Jew, a foreigner, or an anarchist. The third was a mysterious North African who claimed to be going to New York for just a few days (in itself an extravagant notion, since we were to be three months en route), had a Degas in his luggage, and, although as Jewish as I myself, appeared to be persona grata with the police, immigration, and security authorities of every colony and protectorate that we touched upon: an astonishing and mysterious state of affairs, at that juncture, and one which I never managed to fathom. 

The scum, as the gendarmes described us, included among others Andre Breton and Victor Serge. Breton, by no means at his ease in such a situation, would amble up and down the rare empty spaces on deck, looking like a blue bear in his velvety jacket. We were to become firm friends in the course of an exchange of letters which we kept up throughout our interminable journey; their subject was the relation between aesthetic beauty and absolute originality.

The First Time I Left Home (continued)

I arrived in Sao Paulo to overcast skies and chilly weather. Winter. Back home, in the Berkshires, it was summery August.  Over night, the calendar had skipped six months ahead. I was completely turned around, and exhausted. I’d never flown before, and you could say that, basically, I spent the flight in a state of high anxiety.

shutterstock

Before take-off, my mother had waited with me in the airport lounge at JFK making upbeat conversation, talking about her many travels. She was a college professor—art history, drawing—and part of the job involved taking her students abroad. She was abroad a lot, which was fine with me. We had arrived at a difficult stage in our mother-daughter relationship. I drove her crazy and she made me miserable. Between us, it was one fight after another, and much of it because of my friends. As friends went, she was convinced I couldn’t have chosen worse. When my dearest friend Julie and I got caught smoking—well, to my mother, it was the beginning of the end. Julie and I were behaving the same as most teens, and back then stealing your parents’ cigarettes was routine. Although, not from my parents, who were devotees of Jack LaLanne, also known as the godfather of modern fitness. My parents didn’t eat sugar, white flour, and they didn’t smoke Marlboro Reds. Julie’s mother did smoke. She bought her Marlboro's by the carton—stacks of them. A few cigs would hardly be missed, Julie and I figured. We were careful to dispose of our stolen goods by flushing the butts down the toilet. Somehow, the damn things ended up back in the bowl, like fish returning to spawn. My mother was livid. I was forbidden to see Julie again, or anyone else within a twenty mile radius for that matter. There were two things my mother expected of her kids: we were to have as little to do with the neighbors as possible and make it to college. Going to Brasil as an exchange student worked wonders on my disapproval ratings. Brasil was about as far from the neighbors as you could get, and significantly increased my chances of being accepted to a college. For my mother, my leaving was her victory. She reveled in seeing her daughter off on her first flight, one that would take me over thousands of miles of land and ocean

If that flight was half-booked, I’d have been surprised. I had an entire row of seats to myself. I kept looking around the cabin in the hopes there were other Americans my age on board. I would have thought there’d be a group of us traveling to Sao Paulo, a contingent of American youth eager for exchange and adventure. As it was, there was no one to talk to but the flight attendants. I spent a long night in which we flew through foul weather. Lightning strikes ricocheted among the clouds; torrential rains beat at the windows (let us in, let us in!); turbulence bounced the plane up, down, east and west. Thirteen hours passed before the wheels of the plane found the tarmac, and the flight powered to a violent halt. It was then I learned one of many travel customs: people of all nations clap and cheer during landings. How could they not? Their prayers have been answered: they survived the flight. They were alive.

Praise the gods.

But, I imagine that readers who pass this way have forgotten how this story began.

I was sitting in class listening to a fellow student talk about her year abroad.  Paris, to be precise. She'd spent a year in Paris as an exchange student. A lovely year in every way, as she described the experience.  She lived with a French family, and it had been great.  She went to school, and it had been great.  She learned French, and her French was great. By the time she finished her presentation, it was decided:  I too would go to Paris.  

Except I never got to Paris.  There was a glut of exchange students applying to France.  My sponsors told me not to worry.  They would find a host country for me.  And they did:  Brasil.

Back then, before the Internet, you didn't hear much about Brasil where I grew up.  Honestly, I had no idea where I was going.  But, I was going, and that is how I would come to understand the true meaning of "no turning back."

Kathryn A. Kopple works in Spanish and English. She has published original poetry and prose in numerous publications, including The Threepenny Review, The Bellevue Review and The Shell Game (anthology, U of Nebraska Press). She is the author of Little Velásquez (Mirth Press), a novel set in 15th century Spain.

A New Beginning

By

Jackie Lopez Lopez

Philip K. Smith III, Lucid Stead

My dreams act like new.
My sandals are speaking.
My dresses are twirling.
And, my pain is full of glory.
I found the love in the house of all horizons
and was acquitted of too much loving.
So, I danced to dance a lot.
I thought the earthquakes in California were divine.
I thought the tsunamis in Spain were slow.
I cried in my sleep when I was 12.
I read a Spanish book when I was 6.
I stole a glance at Joey Fordham from my classroom window in the 5th grade.
I was enslaved in the house of the rising sun.
I was freed in the song of a sugar plantation.
I committed anthropology when I was 25.
I committed adultery when I was 34.
New beginnings are hard to come by,
but it’s nothing that a little crucifixion and resurrection can’t fix.
My journal promised me land.
I live by the light of the naked moon.
I smile with the sand beneath my feet.
I plant a seed in the apple of my dreams.
I know how to dive into an ocean of ingratitude and come out grateful!
I know how to raise a saint from the pit of the Devil’s workshop.
I know how to begin anew.

Marital Tragedy

THE SUN ALSO RISES 

By Ernest Hemingway. 

Ernest Hemingway's first novel, "The Sun Also Rises," treats of certain of those younger Americans concerning whom Gertrude Stein has remarked: "You are all a lost generation." This is the novel for which a keen appetite was stimulated by Mr. Hemingway's exciting volume of short stories. "In Our Time." The clear objectivity and the sustained intensity of the stories , and their concentration upon action in the present moment, seemed to point to a failure to project a novel in terms of the same method, yet a resort to any other method would have let down the reader's expectations. It is a relief to find that "The Sun Also Rises" maintains the same heightened, intimate tangibility as the shorter narratives and does it in the same kind of weighted, quickening prose.

Mr. Hemingway has chosen a segment of life which might easily have become "a spectacle with unexplained horrors," and disciplined it to a design which gives full value to its Dionysian, all but uncapturable, elements. On the face of it, he has simply gathered, almost at random, a group of American and British expatriates from Paris, conducted them on a fishing expedition, and exhibited them against the background of a wild Spanish fiesta and bull-fight. The characters are concisely indicated. Much of their inherent natures are left to be betrayed by their own speech, by their apparently aimless conversation among themselves. Mr. Hemingway writes a most admirable dialogue. It has the terse vigor of Ring Lardner at his best. It suggests the double meanings of Ford Madox Ford's records of talk. Mr. Hemingway makes his characters say one thing, convey still another, and when a whole passage of talk has been given, the reader finds himself the richer by a totally unexpected mood, a mood often enough of outrageous familiarity with obscure heartbreaks.

The story is told in the first person, as if by one Jake Barnes, an American newspaper correspondent in Paris. This approach notoriously invites digression and clumsiness. The way Mr. Hemingway plays this hard-boiled Jake is comparable to Jake's own evocations of the technique of the expert matador handling his bull. In fact, the bull-fight within the story bears two relations to the narrative proper. It not only serves to bring the situation to a crisis, but it also suggests the design which Mr. Hemingway is following. He keeps goading Jake, leading him on, involving him in difficulties, averting serious tragedy for him, just as the matador conducts the bull through the elaborate pattern of danger.

The love affair of Jake and the lovely, impulsive Lady Ashley might easily have descended into bathos. It is an erotic attraction which is destined from the start to be frustrated. Mr. Hemingway has such a sure hold on his values that he makes an absorbing, beautifully and tenderly absurd, heartbreaking narrative of it. Jake was wounded in the war in a manner that won for him a grandiose speech from the Italian General. Certainly Jake is led to consider his life worse than death. When he and Brett (Lady Ashley) fall in love, and know, with that complete absence of reticences of the war generation, that nothing can be done about it, the thing might well have ended there. Mr. Hemingway shows uncanny skill in prolonging it and delivering it of all its implications.

No amount of analysis can convey the quality of "The Sun Also Rises." It is a truly gripping story, told in a lean, hard, athletic narrative prose that puts more literary English to shame. Mr. Hemingway knows how not only to make words be specific but how to arrange a collection of words which shall betray a great deal more than is to be found in the individual parts. It is magnificent writing, filled with that organic action which gives a compelling picture of character. This novel is unquestionably one of the events of an unusually rich year in literature.

Note: This review originally appeared in The New York Times in 1926.

Another Letter

A History of Flooding in the Sinking of Venice

by

Kathryn Kopple

Dear Marcel,

I woke up today terrified the electro-magnetic field had flipped. The air burned. My sheets were scorching. I’m better now but only because I’ve lathered myself in oils pressed from three-hundred-year-old cacti. Cactus oil costs a fortune. I get mine on the black market.

How I despise this season. It’s as sloppy wet underfoot as Venice when she finally sank into the ocean, despite all attempts to hoist her up with propulsion and anti-gravity devices. She sank regardless, and with her the most beautiful man I have known.

Yes, Marcel, yes. He is gone. I should be used to it by now. The only man I ever loved, leaving me behind in this melt, slosh, that by midday starts to let off steam. It’s unbearable. The ozone layer stretched thin and the sun behaving erratically. I was under the impression that the sun destroyed and remade the ozone layer every day, at least that’s what scientists said a century ago when we were still calling ourselves a country. Of course, that was before the last civil war. Or was it the one before? It’s so vaporous around here. Rancid smelling. Who can remember anything in this sauna?

But why complain while the world is sinking, burning, tearing itself apart? What good does it do? I think of him instead. My mind flees to him instead. My body is a map of all the places he touched me. I trace the travels of his fingers, his tongue. He saved me from the heat, this interminable fire. He never ran hot, always cold. It was wonderful to lie with my cheek on his icy chest, listening to his slow, beating heart.

When I was a child, I would crawl into the caves near our house to get away from the heat. It was damp and mossy under the rocks. The air chill. A dark, cold space. That was my love. He was my dark, cold retreat from this inferno we call earth.

Marcel, I can’t go on like this. I am exhausted. I need to close my eyes, sleep. But, I am in anguish. I think of the ocean carrying him far from me. I imagine the moment the water took him, the wonderful coldness of his being sucked from his body as the sweltering waves pulled him under. Did he die of drowning or boiling? I must sound as if I am raving asking such a senseless question. It’s just that I am so feverishly warm without him.

Have I made you sad? Don’t cry, Marcel. Don’t cry. It’s difficult, so hard. You loved him too. I know. And he loved you.

Trini

Another Letter originally appeared in Oblong

Sit

By

Jackie Lopez Lopez

Margritte

Sit at my table, and tell me your glory.

I have prepared a banquet of many stars for you.

I wear my garments of poetry.

Please don’t go.

Sit.

Sit at my table, and show me those eyes.

I found a feather when I was homeless, and I called you.

I keep you in my thoughts throughout my journey here on Earth.

Last sunshine, I took a weekend to the moon.

I know you are sincerely a Baptist and you like to heal people.

Do you often capitulate to hearsay?

I heard you were a shaman, so,

I stole your books.

I felt redeemed at your parties.

I never stole anything in my life, although, books follow me.

Sit.

Sit at my table, and I promise not to lie to you:

You are my kin.

Let me serve you some kindness with some truth.

Let me give you a plate of ordeals.

Let me struggle out of this dress.

Let me kiss your breath.

My feet have walked 153, 000 lives, and I am tired.

Sit.

I will behave the lady, the priestess, the Goddess, the nymph, the mother, your sister, and your child.

But I am the crone.

The desert is my skin.

The knife is my heart.

The rivers are my hair.

And the oceans are my home.

I am your kin that asks you to sit at my table.

I have prepared a banquet of many stars for you.

Sit.

Let me see those eyes.