Two poets

Literary Review, Fall, 1997 by Robert Wexelblatt

1.

Shortly after midday, swerving to avoid three children, a recklessly overloaded truck rolled on its side, spewing a shipment of Malaysian refrigerators and steel sinks across the recently finished Presidential Highway. The sight of new refrigerators, irresistible in that sultry, fetid city, drew people from the shanties beyond the rows of dusty palms on either side of the road. The police had to disperse the mob with threats substantiated by a few skyward bursts of machine gun fire. The upshot was that the arrival of the world-renowned poet Luz de Lanavalli was not followed by the intended procession up the six-lane Presidential Highway from the airport to the Presidential Palace. The unfortunate truck driver, hauled off to police headquarters, was beaten into unconsciousness.

Lanavalli had accepted the dubious invitation to deliver the opening address of the First International Conference on Cultural Rights chiefly because of the wish to see one of the few countries he had never visited. Moreover, he intended to make the junket into the first leg of an extended honeymoon, for Luz was a newlywed. Less than a week earlier in the Cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris, he, a widower near seventy, had married Min-Sun Paik, age forty-five, translator of his many books into the Japanese and Korean languages.

When he was informed of the traffic accident by the suave, not-quite-obsequious Chief of Protocol, the poet said he deeply regretted to hear of it. Yet he profited by the contretemps, since the limousine inched through the teeming streets of the capital, past decaying colonial buildings that reminded him of certain British authors he had loved in his youth, quite contrary to his political convictions, through squares crammed with market stalls that leaped with color and wafted astounding aromas through the open window of the Cadillac, whose air-conditioning was putative. People made way and gaped. Some waved. Lanavalli waved back and felt elated. "What do you think? I could almost be the Pope!" he quipped to his bride.

Min-Sun seldom spoke. Indeed, the poet's friends had speculated that it must have been the woman's taciturnity that won the heart of their ebullient Luz, her wordless serenity which they readily ascribed to Asian submissiveness. To them, she appeared a silent vessel into which all Luz's volubility could be poured, a sort of sexual complementarily. That she adored him went without saying.

The Chief of Protocol did not trouble himself to act as a tour guide. Though he did not like to show it, he was perturbed by the change in plans and confined himself to answering the poet's many questions with a brevity that turned increasingly acerbic.

"What is the population of the city?"

"Twice what it ought to be, Senor Lanavalli."

"Do people lose their tribal affiliations in all this hectic urbanization or do they tend to settle together into neighborhoods, like birds of a feather? Are they able to keep up their traditional ways here? Do they ever yearn for home, for village life?"

"Tribalism is a thing of the past in our country."

"I see. And were many ex-tribespeople displaced by the building of the new airport, which looks exactly like every other airport, and that rather grandiose highway?"

At this tendentiousness the Protocol Chief, who could boast of one degree from Oxford and another from Berkeley and frequently did, merely shrugged. He was anxious that the accident scene should be cleared by tea-time when two Airbuses full of worthies were scheduled to deplane.

"The sunlight here has real weight. Just look at that, Min-Sun! The way those three fellows are bending under the sun as if it were a load of bananas. `See how noontime desiccates the scene / how one substantial shaft of light / drops like a yellow guillotine.' Remember, my dear?"

The Chief of Protocol did not recognize that Luz was merely quoting a translation of himself and had chosen English for his benefit. He did not care for the mention of a guillotine.

"What is the title of your address, sir?" he asked, to change the subject.

"I've completely forgotten. What is it, Min-Sun?"

In her long white dress and smooth black hair, Min-Sun did not move a muscle or waste a word as she replied, "Cultures and the Conquest of Hopelessness."

2.

Olvidado Andrieu laid down his book, gazed out over his hazy garden, and wondered that he was still alive. His existence was a tuneless noise, one vacant, stupidly prolonged harmony. Time did not advance because he looked forward to nothing, and it did not move backwards because he lacked the self-deception of nostalgia. He lived in a country plagued by strange infections, swarming with frightful parasites, above a city that exuded a permanent miasma as if it were conceived by some myopic Impressionist, and yet his health was perfect.

And if I had married? Andrieu asked himself, as he often did when overcome by a mixture of self-disgust and longing. He recalled his cousin Sandor back in Chicago. Sandor had been like him in his unwillingness to socialize. But Sandor's wife Molly would "drag" him, as they both put it, to parties. She would invite people in, plan group outings in Lincoln Park. And, strange to say, Sandor was always the life of the party, always admitted afterwards that he had had a fine time. Nevertheless, this did not prevent Sandor from instantly recoiling into his congenital anti-sociability, like a badger retreating to his snug burrow, leading to yet another "dragging" scene the following Friday. Andrieu had also been invited to some of Molly's gatherings but, for him, just because he lacked a Molly of his own, they only honed the edge of his loneliness. "Solitude," he once wrote, "is best endured alone."