Far and Away: Reporting From the Brink of Change (2 page)

Fortunately for me, my mother loved travel. She first went to Europe immediately after the Second World War, when she was twenty-two, when visiting the ravaged continent was considered enough of a novelty that her hometown paper chronicled her departure. Our first significant family trip abroad—to England, France, and Switzerland—came when I was eleven, and in the years that followed, we often tagged along on my father’s European business trips. He was never particularly interested in new places, but tourism brought out the best in my mother. Before we went anyplace, she would teach us about it. We’d read relevant books, learn local history, find out about the food we were going to eat and the sights we would see. My mother was a scheduler; she would have worked out an itinerary for each day, down to when we’d get up and when we’d return to the hotel. Such precision may sound alarming, but it was actually relaxing, because it meant that we were surprised only by the places themselves. We never rushed. My mother said you should always travel as if you would return; if you thought you were making your sole visit anywhere, you would try to see everything and therefore wouldn’t really see anything. “Always leave something for next time, something to tempt you back,” she said.

Not until high school, though, did I begin to connect these geographical adventures to a sweeping narrative. Mr. Donadio, my ninth-grade history teacher, was fond of the orotund phrase: he described various important figures (Ramses II, Pontius Pilate, Catherine the Great, Napoléon, Thomas Jefferson) as standing at “the crossroads of history.” I envisioned them as brave men and women who disregarded traffic lights, turning sharply left or right where everyone else had planned on proceeding straight ahead. I came to recognize that while such men and women had made choices that reshaped
the world, they were, equally, making those choices because of their circumstances. Another teacher insisted that it was impossible to determine whether such leaders were consciously making history or merely fulfilling its demands. I remember thinking in ninth grade that I would like to behold the crossroads of history, with some grandiose adolescent hope that if I could describe what happened at the intersection, I might even affect its course.

In 1980, during my junior year of high school, our glee club was scheduled to perform in the USSR, but the Soviets had invaded Afghanistan a few months earlier, so we were rerouted to Romania and Bulgaria. (My debut solo performance—which was very nearly my swan song, given my sonorous but strident baritone—consisted of my singing the Spanish folk song “Ríu Ríu Chíu” in a nursing home outside Pleven, Bulgaria’s seventh most populous city.) I had never even heard of anyone’s going to those countries. Before we left the United States, several teachers and other wise adults advised me that whereas Bulgaria was a Soviet puppet state and a terrible place, Romania had a brave, independent leader, Nicolae Ceauşescu, who refused to obey orders from Moscow. Once we arrived in Bulgaria, however, we all experienced unaffected warmth. Even when our lead soprano, Louise Elton, and I were briefly carried off by a troupe of Gypsies, the mood remained cheerful. In Romania, by contrast, we saw scenes of repression every day that stood in stark contrast to our hosts’ attempts to persuade us that their country was free and liberal. A patient tried to wave at us from a hospital window, only to be pulled back fiercely by an army-uniformed attendant who immediately lowered the blinds. Anxious-seeming Romanians approached on the streets and asked us to smuggle out letters for them, but were afraid to engage in conversation. Glowering military personnel could be seen at every corner. We were forbidden to explore in Bucharest on grounds that “here in Romania, we have no funny nightlife,” a remark we took great delight in repeating throughout the rest of the trip.

After we returned, I reported that Bulgaria was charming and Romania, a creepy police state. Everyone who knew better told me how wrong I was. When the regimes later changed, it turned out that the Ceauşescus were not so admirable—that Romania’s was quite
possibly the most repressive regime in Eastern Europe. That was a good lesson about intuition: places that seem lovely at first glance may actually be sinister, but places that feel sinister seldom turn out to be lovely.

Nearly three decades later, I interviewed Saif al-Islam Qaddafi, son of Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi. He was in some ways persuasive: beautifully dressed in a Savile Row suit, eloquent in English, socially well connected, and gracious in his grand fashion. He was also ominously self-absorbed and a patent liar; his buoyant narrative of Libyan life was so much at odds with what I saw and heard firsthand that it seemed almost like performance art. A few years after my visit, I was invited to a breakfast for Saif Qaddafi organized by a prestigious foreign-policy association. After his twenty-minute oration, each of us was invited to ask a question. I was astonished by the deferential posture of the interlocutors, many of them seasoned diplomats. When my turn came, I said, “All of what you have promised will happen is the same as what you were promising five years ago, and none of it has so far come to pass. On what basis are we to presume that those promises now have merit?” I was admonished afterward for having been rude to a “gifted statesman” who represented “our best hopes for North Africa.” Saif Qaddafi is now imprisoned and wanted for prosecution by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity after his disastrous behavior in the Libyan revolution, during which he announced that “rivers of blood” would flow if the populist uprising continued. A witness can be of more value than a policy analyst. An amateur witness, free of conceptual bias, sometimes sees the plainest truth. One should never be blinded by tailoring.

The summer after I finished college, I visited my friend Pamela Crimmins, who had landed a job as personal photographer to the American ambassador in Morocco. At the time Morocco had no cell phones and few landlines, so we had arranged beforehand that Pamela would meet me at the airport when I arrived in Rabat, the capital. It was the first time I’d ventured alone to a place so remote from my life experience. I landed at night, found no one waiting to greet me, and
panicked. A man with a decrepit car offered to drive me to Pamela’s apartment building, where I started up the staircase, calling “Pamela!” at every floor, until I finally heard her sleepy voice say, “Andrew?” In hindsight, the events of that evening were trivial, but I remember my mounting terror at being in a foreign place and not knowing how to take care of myself. I was scared as much by my ingenuousness as by any real sense of threat.

I woke the next morning excited about our plans to tour the country, only to learn that Pamela had been given an urgent assignment. She mentioned that Ahmed El Houmaidi, a driver at the embassy, wanted to visit his aunt in Marrakech and she suggested that I go with him; we set off by bus the next day. Ahmed’s aunt lived on the outskirts of town in a cinder-block house built around a courtyard with a pomegranate tree. She treated a foreigner’s arrival as a great occasion and vacated her room to accommodate me.

Every evening that week, the men of the household would walk to the Djemaa el-Fna, the big square in Marrakech, which is a tourist clot by day and the hub of local social life by night. Some of Ahmed’s cousins worked there, so we would all hang out with the magicians, storytellers, and dancers as twilight deepened. When we returned to the house, a tagine dinner would be awaiting us. The women, always veiled, would have spent all day cleaning and cooking. Now, they would pour water over the men’s hands, then withdraw, returning after we were finished to eat what remained. The house had no running water and no electricity. Ahmed’s aunt’s one prized possession was a battery-operated radio. Our last day there, she told Ahmed that she wanted to know the words to her favorite song, and since Ahmed’s English was unequal to discerning the lyrics, he asked me. “Your aunt may have a tough time understanding this song,” I replied. “It’s called ‘Girls Just Want to Have Fun.’ ”

Two years later, because my brother was studying evolutionary biology in college, our family planned a trip to the Galápagos Islands. Included with our boat tickets was a tour of Ecuador. My parents were not interested—and neither were any of the other people joining the cruise. So my brother and I had a guide to ourselves. After touring Quito, we proceeded to Cuenca to explore the Inca ruins at
Ingapirca. Our guide warned us of unrest in the area but said he’d be game if we wanted to go. The road was almost empty and we had the ruins to ourselves, interrupted only by the occasional llama. On the way back, we had to stop abruptly because a large boulder was in the middle of the steep road. Seconds later, a bunch of agitated people sprang out from behind a shrub and rushed the car. One slit the tires; one smashed the windshield; one brandished a gun. The guide suggested we get out, pronto. We were locked inside a shack with our guide while the driver negotiated with the revolutionaries, who had declared their independence because they didn’t want to pay taxes. We explained via the driver that, coincidentally, we didn’t much like paying taxes, either. The driver apparently told them that the US military could bomb their village and poison their crops, and after about two hours we were released. We shuffled down the mountain until we were able to hitchhike back to Cuenca. I was already a different person from who I had been in Morocco, much less unnerved by a much more alarming incident.

Living in another country is entirely different from traveling through it. I went to graduate school in England and found that even England was a place of unnervingly foreign habits—my fantasies of a spiritual homecoming notwithstanding. Adopting the accent and learning a smattering of different vocabulary was not cultural fluency. I had to master new rules of intimacy and conversation, of dress and comportment, of humor and reverence.

I had been assigned to a college-owned house I was to share with other Americans and a few Australians. The tutor for rooms explained that I would “certainly feel more comfortable” with my “own kind.” But I hadn’t crossed the ocean to cohabit with my countrymen. My pleas to move were politely but firmly denied; when I persisted, the denial became less polite and more firm. Two weeks into term, I developed a nasty cold and went to see the college nurse, Sister George, who volunteered that the newly laid synthetic carpeting in my house was full of toxins. “Perhaps you have developed an allergy to your room?” she suggested. Seizing the opportunity, I asked her to mention
that implausible likelihood to the tutor for rooms. He called me into his office the next day and said, with an exasperated sigh, “All right, Mr. Solomon. You’ve won. I’ve found you a room in college.”

It took a while to comprehend that in England an education was often considered a pleasurable luxury rather than an ambition-driven necessity. I hadn’t understood how delicate a hold meritocracy had in a class-riven society. I didn’t know why so much food was boiled so long. Neither had I imagined the confidence that accrues to families that had lived and toiled on the same land for centuries; the elegant use of humor to half mask urgent sincerities; the whole country’s reassuring habit of permanence. I was amazed by how many of my favorite writers my English acquaintances had not read, and by how many of their favorite poets I had never heard of. We were indeed divided by a common language that was less common than I’d imagined. I loved the universal penetration of pomp and circumstance, and the novel belief that pleasure mattered as much as success. I loved the country’s bank holidays and tea breaks. I loved how religion was high-minded and ritualistic instead of judgmental and perpetually reinvented. I was struck by how much more steadfastly the English traveled; indeed, their more immersive model of exploring helped launch me on the course this book documents. I came to love England for other reasons than those that had made me a juvenile Anglophile.

When I finished my first postgraduate degree, I decided to stay in England for a while. I set about sending inquiry letters to publishing houses and magazines, and when my parents visited me that spring, I airily told them that I was looking for a job in London. My father was so angry that he banged his fist on the table of the pub in Grantchester where I’d announced my plans, silencing all the other patrons. He declared that he was forbidding it, and I told him that he was no longer in a position to forbid things. We all revolt against our parents, but it is striking to me in retrospect that I did so in relation to place.

Actually, I had chosen to stay partly to strengthen my bond with my new home and partly to assert that I could exist away from my old one. I was twenty-three, and gay, and preparing to come out of the closet (although I didn’t entirely know it yet), and I couldn’t do it in New York, where I felt sucked back into a vortex of expectations and assumptions. I
needed to break free of America for breathing space—not to be myself, yet, but to figure out what self I was becoming. I confused, as many young people do, the glamour of being an outsider with the liberty to do or think whatever crossed my mind. It was not enough to acknowledge some newfound self; I would create a new persona and be famous for the radical imagination with which I did so. I sported outré clothing that I thought echoed some elegance of a bygone era; I used arch constructions of speech; I was socially promiscuous, accepting all invitations. This exercise in self-definition, though ultimately useful in the way of youthful misadventures, was often irksome to others. What I presumed to be originality often smacked of affectation. I was both presumptuous in expressing my new, English self, and hypocritical in cleaving to my native system of values. I disavowed my privilege and the autonomy it gave me, but I also discounted my turmoil. I manifested my confused sexuality via my ambiguous nationality.

Like many gay people of my time, I rooted myself in a chosen place and friendships. But as time passed, I came to realize that I had an amateur’s arrogance in my English friendships and had failed to understand that I had to be someone slightly different to succeed at them. I was charmed by how English my English friends were, and I assumed they would be delighted by how American I remained—but I had chosen to transplant myself and they had made no such choice. I deeply offended several people I loved. Perhaps those friendships would have foundered anyway; I was young, psychologically careless, and enmeshed in the solipsism of burgeoning depression; I also remained single while many old friends married, a difference of experience that made me feel uncomfortably marginal. Today, many of my closest friends are English people who live in New York or Americans who live in London. Displacement becomes a forgiving homeland, a thing held in common with others.