Maiden Voyages (53 page)

(1918–)

from
TURKISH REFLECTIONS

I thought that, instead of going by the main road, I would try to find and follow the path that Wood had discovered from the Artemision to the theater, if any trace of the sacred road still existed. I decided to search for it and, if I could find a trace, follow it around the mountain to the place where archaeologists think the Corresian Gate entered the city walls, although the gate itself has never been found.

So I, a foreign lady dressed in a large sun hat and sensible Reeboks, started one morning in the early sun, at the single standing column that is all that is left above ground of the hundreds of columns that were once the great temple. I set out on the main road until I saw that
there was a dirt road, more direct, that ran at an angle through farm fields and up the mountainside.

I dodged invaders in tour buses and private cars on their busy ways, and in a few minutes I had found a path through country silence, headed toward the mountain that is on the north side of the ruins.

I walked past orchards and farmhouses. The little path grew faint beyond the last farmhouse. I began to climb the hill, watching the shadow of my hat on the ground. Nobody had climbed there for so long that weeds had grown high in the middle of it, but it was still marked if only by the slight dip in the otherwise weedy cover and tangled vines. I began to thrust my way through them.

In the middle of what had become a ghost path, I saw the bones and a little of the torn pelt of a large animal—a cow, a deer—eaten there by wild things, and I knew that I had found something of what that world was like when there was no civilized modern overlay. I told myself that whatever beast it was, wolf or wild dog, it was asleep. At least I hoped it was well-fed and asleep.

I went on climbing in the sun that was getting heavier, searching the ground and the undergrowth. At the crest of one of the lower foothills, I looked, and looked again, afraid of being fooled. There it was, a fragment of marble that had been exposed by years of weather, and beyond it, a long straight edge of white marble that glistened in the light.

I had played at being Wood and I had found it, the sacred road. I went all blithe and brave in the morning, a nice lady in a big hat. I parted weeds, and struggled through vines, and when I parted two small saplings I found that I had walked to what I first thought was a cliff. It was not.

Down below me, still far away from the ruins of the ancient city within its fence and with its guides and crowds, was the small marble atrium of a lost suburban house. Weeds grew in an empty shallow pool. On either side of marble steps, there were still two dolphins that had once been fountains that poured water from their mouths into the pool. I slid down the hill to the level of the floor, and I walked a short path of marble to its door, where the two truncated columns on either side
still showed the grooves where, at night, they would have closed the house to marauders.

But one night the marauders had come to this house, and it had been so long abandoned that nothing of any world was left there but a Roman atrium, a little pool, two dolphins, a threshold, and silence in the sun.

I went on past it, up along the crest of the hill again. I slipped and slid and felt a fool, and at one point thought, if I break an ankle or my leg on this hill, I won’t be found until I am a lady skeleton in a big hat, picked clean. I parted the underbrush and looked down upon another atrium, this one large and complete, with a fountain base in the center, and roofless rooms beyond it. The wall looked about ten feet high, and I skirted the top of it, holding onto small trees for balance, to look for a way down.

I hadn’t heard anything move, yet he stood there in front of me, smiling, quite silent, a large strong Turkish man, holding in his hand a small bunch of sweet wild thyme. He held it toward me, saying nothing, still smiling. There was something so gentle about him that I could not be afraid. I took the wild thyme, and I thanked him, in Turkish. He smiled again and touched his mouth and his ear. He was deaf and dumb. I still have the wild thyme, pressed and dried, kept like a Victorian lady’s souvenir of the Holy Land.

Dumb was the wrong word for him. There was no need for speech. He was an actor, an eloquent mime. I pointed to the atrium below and held my hands apart to show I didn’t know how to get down into it. He took my arm, and carefully, slowly, led me down a steep pile of rubble.

He mimed the opening of a nonexistent door and ushered me through it. He showed me roofless room after roofless room as if he had discovered them. He dug and threw imaginary earth over his shoulder to show that it had been dug up.

I think that he had scared people before, and he was happy that there was someone who would let him show his house, for it was his house. Maybe he did sleep there. I don’t know. I only know that he treated me as a guest in a ruin ten feet below the level of the ground, and that he took me from room to room where once there had been marble
walls and now there was only stone, where he was host and owner for a little while.

He showed me a small pool, held out his hand the height of a small child, and then swam across the air. All the time he smiled. He took me to a larger pool and swam again. Then he grabbed my arm and led me through a dark corridor toward what I thought at first was a cave. It was not. He sat down in a niche in the corridor, and strained until his face was pink, to show me it was the toilet. Then he took me into the kitchen where there were two ovens. They were almost complete, except that the iron doors were gone. The arches of narrow Byzantine bricks were graceful over them, and the ovens were large as if there had been a large family there.

For the first one he rolled dough for bread, kneaded it in air, slapped it, and put it in the oven. Then he took it out, broke it, and shared it with me. I ate the air with him. The other was the main oven, and he picked vegetables from the floor of the cave kitchen, hit air to kill an animal, made a stew, and placed it in the stone and brick niche. We ate it and then we walked out into the sun of the larger atrium. Behind it, in the hill, he gestured that it had not yet been dug up, and then he pointed to a marble votive herma, whose head was missing, and knelt behind it, grinning, and set his own head there, to show me what it was. The grin was ancient, a satyr’s grin.

We stood beyond his house on the edge of the hill, looking down on the buses and the crowd in the distance. Across and behind the noise and crowds, in a field, looking abandoned too, was the church of the Virgin Mary. The house where we stood had looked out over that and the harbor, and although it has not been found, I knew that it was near where the Corresian Gate had been.

When I gave my friend, my
arkadaş
, some money, he kissed my hand and held it to his forehead, and then, pleased with the sun and me, and the fact that someone had not run away from him who lived like Caliban in a ruin, he put his arms around me and kissed me on both cheeks. Then I went down the hill to Ephesus. When I looked back to wave he had disappeared.

What was the place? I’ve tried to find it in the books that tell what digging has been done at Ephesus, but this was outside the walls and
not important enough to document, except for one obscure mention, that someone had dug there in 1926 and that there had been suburban mansions on the mountainside, and I already knew that. It exists across the tradition of a road, near a lost gate, near the stadium where Porphyrios the Mime was martyred as a Christian. Or maybe it was another Porphyrios; it was so long ago and there were so many martyrs.

(1934–)

from
THE WHITE ALBUM

On the Colombian Coast it was hot, fevered, eleven degrees off the equator with evening trades that did not relieve but blew hot and dusty. The sky was white, the casino idle. I had never meant to leave the coast but after a week of it I began to think exclusively of Bogotá, floating on the Andes an hour away by air. In Bogotá it would be cool. In
Bogotá one could get
The New York Times
only two days late and the
Miami Herald
only one day late and also emeralds, and bottled water. In Bogotá there would be fresh roses in the bathrooms at the Hotel Tequendama and hot water twenty-four hours a day and numbers to be dialed for chicken sandwiches from room service and Xerox
rápido
and long-distance operators who could get Los Angeles in ten minutes. In my room in Cartagena I would wake to the bleached coastal morning and find myself repeating certain words and phrases under my breath, an incantation:
Bogotá, Bacatá
. El Dorado. Emeralds. Hot water. Madeira consommé in cool dining rooms.
Santa Fé de Bogotá del Nuevo Reino de Granada de las Indias del Mar Océano
. The Avianca flight to Bogotá left Cartagena every morning at ten-forty, but such was the slowed motion of the coast that it took me another four days to get on it.

Maybe that is the one true way to see Bogotá, to have it float in the mind until the need for it is visceral, for the whole history of the place has been to seem a mirage, a delusion on the high savannah, its gold and its emeralds unattainable, inaccessible, its isolation so splendid and unthinkable that the very existence of a city astonishes. There on the very spine of the Andes gardeners espalier roses on embassy walls. Swarms of little girls in proper navy-blue school blazers line up to enter the faded tent of a tatty traveling circus: the elephant, the strong man, the tattooed man from Maracaibo. I arrived in Bogotá on a day in 1973 when the streets seemed bathed in mist and thin brilliant light and in the amplified pop voice of Nelson Ned, a Brazilian dwarf whose records played in every
disco
storefront. Outside the sixteenth-century Church of San Francisco, where the Spanish viceroys took office when the country was Nueva Granada and where Simón Bolívar assumed the presidency of the doomed republic called Gran Colombia, small children and old women hawked Cuban cigars and cartons of American cigarettes and newspapers with the headline “JACKIE Y ARI.” I lit a candle for my daughter and bought a paper to read about Jackie and Ari, how the princess
de los norteamericanos
ruled the king of the Greek sea by demanding of him pink champagne every night and
medialunas
every morning, a story a child might invent. Later, in the Gold Museum of the Banco de la República, I looked at the gold the Spaniards opened
the Americas to get, the vision of El Dorado which was to animate a century and is believed to have begun here, outside Bogotá, at Lake Guatavita. “Many golden offerings were cast into the lake,” wrote the anthropologist Olivia Vlahos of the nights when the Chibcha Indians lit bonfires on the Andes and confirmed their rulers at Guatavita.