The Complete Elizabeth Gilbert: Eat, Pray, Love; Committed; The Last American Man; Stern Men & Pilgrims (69 page)

After a good deal of thinking, I finally brought up the subject of Cambodia with Felipe one morning over breakfast in Bangkok. I selected my words with a ridiculous amount of mindfulness, using such abstruse language that for a time the poor man clearly had no idea what I was talking about. With a good dose of stiff formality and a whole lot of preamble, I awkwardly tried to explain that, while I loved him and was hesitant to leave him alone right now at such a tenuous moment in our lives, I really would like to see the temples in Cambodia . . . and maybe, since he finds ancient ruins so tedious, this was a trip I should perhaps consider undertaking by myself? . . . and maybe it wouldn’t kill us to spend a few days apart, given how stressful all the traveling had become?

It took Felipe a few moments to catch the drift of what I was saying, but when the penny finally dropped, he put down his toast and stared at me in frank puzzlement.

“My God, darling!” he said. “What are you even asking me for?
Just go!
”

And my trip to Cambodia was . . .

How shall I explain this?

Cambodia is not a day at the beach. Cambodia is not even a day at the beach if you happen to be spending a day at an actual beach there. Cambodia is hard. Everything about the place felt hard to me. The landscape is hard, beaten down to within an inch of its life. The history is hard, with genocide lingering in recent memory. The faces of the children are hard. The dogs are hard. The poverty was harder than anything I’d ever seen before. It was like the poverty of rural India, but without the verve of India. It was like the poverty of urban Brazil, but without the flash of Brazil. This was just poverty of the dusty and exhausted variety.

Most of all, though, my guide was hard.

Once I’d secured myself a hotel in Siem Reap, I set out to hire a guide to show me the temples of Angkor Wat, and ended up with a man named Narith—an articulate, knowledgeable, and extremely stern gentleman in his early forties who politely showed me the magnificent ancient ruins, but who, to put it mildly, did not enjoy my company. We did not become friends, Narith and I, though I dearly wished us to. I do not like to meet a new person and not make a new friend, but friendship was never going to grow between Narith and me. Part of the problem was Narith’s extraordinarily intimidating demeanor. Everyone has a default emotion, and Narith’s was quiet disapproval, which he radiated at every turn. This threw off my composure so much that after two days I barely dared to open my mouth anymore. He made me feel like a foolish child, which was not surprising given that his other job—aside from being a tour guide—was schoolmaster. I’m willing to wager he’s terrifyingly effective at it. He admitted to me that he sometimes feels nostalgic for the good old days before the war, when Cambodian families were more intact, and when children were kept well disciplined by regular beatings.

But it wasn’t merely Narith’s austerity that prohibited us from developing a warm human connection; it was also my fault. I honestly could not figure out how to talk to this man. I was keenly aware of the fact that I was in the presence of a person who had grown up during one of the most brutal spasms of violence the world has ever witnessed. No Cambodian family was left unaffected by the genocide of the 1970s. Anyone who was not tortured or executed in Cambodia during the Pol Pot years merely starved and suffered. You can safely assume, then, that any Cambodian who is forty years old today lived through an absolute inferno of a childhood. Knowing all this, I found it difficult to generate casual conversation with Narith. I could not find any topics that were not freighted with potential references to the not-so-distant past. Traveling through Cambodia with a Cambodian, I decided, must be something like exploring a house that had recently been the scene of a grisly family mass murder, guided along on your tour by the only relative who had managed to escape death. This leaves one rather desperate to avoid asking questions like “So—is this the bedroom where your brother murdered your sisters?” or “Is this the garage where your father tortured your cousins?” Instead, you just follow along politely behind your guide, and when he says, “Here is a particularly nice old feature of our house,” you merely nod and murmur, “Yes, the pergola
is
lovely . . .”

And you wonder.

Meanwhile, as Narith and I toured the ancient ruins and avoided discussing modern history, we stumbled everywhere on groups of unattended children, whole tattered gangs of them, openly begging. Some of them were missing limbs. The kids without limbs would sit on the corner of an abandoned old edifice, pointing at their amputated legs and calling out, “Land mine! Land mine! Land mine!” As we walked by, the more able-bodied children would follow us, trying to sell me postcards, bracelets, trinkets. Some were pushy, but others tried more subtle angles. “What state are you from in America?” one little boy demanded of me. “If I tell you the capital, you can give me a dollar!” That particular boy followed me for long stretches of the day, throwing out the names of American states and capitals like a shrill, strange poem: “Illinois, madam! Springfield! New York, madam! Albany!” As the day passed, he became increasingly despondent: “California, madam! SACRAMENTO! Texas, madam! AUSTIN!”

Strangled by grief, I offered these kids money, but Narith would only scold me for my handouts. I was to ignore the children, he lectured. I was only making things worse by giving out cash, he warned. I was encouraging a culture of begging, which would spell the end of Cambodia. There were too many of these wild children to help, anyhow, and my boon would only attract more of them. True enough, more children gathered whenever they saw me pulling out bills and coins, and once my Cambodian currency was gone, they still flocked around me. I felt poisoned by the constant repetition of the word “NO” coming out of my own mouth again and again: an awful incantation. The kids became more insistent until Narith decided he’d had enough and scattered them back across the ruins with a barking dismissal.

One afternoon, walking back to our car from a tour of another thirteenth-century palace and trying to change the subject from the begging children, I asked about the nearby forest, wondering about its history. Narith replied, in an apparent non sequitur, “When my father was killed by the Khmer Rouge, the soldiers took our house as a trophy.”

I could summon no reply for this, so we walked along in silence.

After a spell, he added, “My mother was sent into the forest with us, with all her children, to try to survive.”

I waited for the rest of the story, but there was no rest of the story—or at least nothing more that he wanted to share.

“I’m sorry,” I said finally. “That must have been terrible.”

Narith shot me a dark look of . . . what? Pity? Contempt? Then it passed. “Let us continue with our tour,” he said, pointing to a fetid swamp on our left. “This was once a reflecting pool, used by King Jayavarman VII during the twelfth century to study the mirror image of the stars by night . . .”

The next morning, wanting to offer up something to this battered country, I tried to donate blood at the local hospital. I had seen signs all over town announcing a blood shortage and asking tourists for help, but I didn’t even have any luck with this venture. The strict Swiss nurse on duty took one look at my low iron levels and refused to accept my blood. She wouldn’t even take a half pint from me.

“You are too weak!” she accused me. “You have obviously not been taking care of yourself! You should not be traveling around like this! You should be home, resting!”

That evening—my last evening alone in Cambodia—I wandered around the streets of Siem Reap, trying to relax into the place. But it did not feel safe to be alone in that city. A peculiar feeling of composure and harmony usually settles on me when I’m moving solo through a new landscape (in fact, that very sensation is what I had come to Cambodia to find), but I never reached it on that trip. If anything, I felt like I was in the way, that I was an irritant, an idiot, or even a target. I felt pathetic and bloodless. As I was walking back to my hotel after dinner, a small swarm of children gathered around me, begging again. One boy was missing a foot, and as he hobbled gamely along he stuck out his crutch in front of me, deliberately tripping me. I stumbled, arms flapping clownishly, but did not quite fall.

“Money,” said the boy in a flat tone. “Money.”

I tried stepping around him again. Nimbly, he stuck out his crutch once more, and I had to basically leap over the thing to dodge it, which seemed awful and insane. The children laughed, and then more children gathered: now it was a spectacle. I picked up my pace and walked faster toward the hotel. The crowd of kids tagged behind me, around me, in front of me. Some of them were laughing and blocking my way, but one very little girl kept pulling at my sleeve and crying out, “Food! Food! Food!” By the time I neared the hotel, I was running. It was shameful.

Whatever equanimity I’d proudly and stubbornly been holding together over the last few chaotic months caved in Cambodia, and caved fast. All my expert-traveler’s composure fell to bits—along with all my patience and basic human compassion, apparently—as I found myself panicked and adrenalized and running full-speed away from small, hungry children who were openly begging me for food. When I reached my hotel, I dived into my room and locked the door behind me and pushed my face into a towel and trembled like a shitty little coward for the rest of the night.

One obvious way to read this story, of course, is that perhaps I should never have gone there in the first place—or at least not at that moment. Perhaps my trip had been an excessively willful or even reckless move, given that I was already fatigued from months of travel, and given the strain of Felipe’s and my uncertain circumstances. Perhaps this had been no time for me to go proving my independence, or laying down precedents for future freedoms, or testing the boundaries of intimacy. Perhaps I should have just stayed there in Bangkok with Felipe by the swimming pool the whole time, drinking beer and relaxing, and waiting for our next move together.

Except that I don’t like beer and I would not have relaxed. Had I reined in my impulses and stuck around in Bangkok that week, drinking beer and watching the two of us getting on each other’s nerves, I might have buried something important within me—something that may have ultimately turned fetid, like King Jayavarman’s pool, creating contaminating ramifications for the future. I went to Cambodia because I had to go. It may have been a messy and botched experience, but that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t have gone. Sometimes life is messy and botched. We do our best. We don’t always know the right move.

What I do know is that the day after my encounter with the begging children I flew back to Bangkok and reunited with a Felipe who was calm and relaxed, and who had clearly enjoyed a restorative break from my company. He had passed the days of my absence happily learning how to make balloon animals in order to keep himself busy. Upon my return, therefore, he presented me with a giraffe, a dachshund, and a rattlesnake. He was extraordinarily proud of himself. I, on the other hand, was feeling more than a little undone, and was not at all proud of my performance in Cambodia. But I was awfully glad to see this guy. And I was awfully grateful to him for encouraging me to attempt things that are not always entirely safe and that are not always fully explainable and that do not always work out quite as perfectly as I may have dreamed. I am more grateful for that than I can ever say—because, truth be told, I am certain to do this kind of thing again.

So I praised Felipe for his marvelous balloon menagerie, and he listened carefully to my sad stories about Cambodia, and when we were both good and tired we climbed into bed with each other and lashed our lifeboat together once more and continued on with our story.

CHAPTER SEVEN

M
arriage and
S
ubversion

Of all the actions of a man’s life, his marriage does least concern other people; yet of all the actions of our life, ’tis the most meddled with by other people.

—John Selden, 1689

I watched Felipe melt with relief as he wandered around the old place, touching and smelling every familiar object with an almost canine pleasure. Everything was the same as he had left it. There was the open terrace upstairs with the rattan couch where Felipe had, as he likes to say,
seduced
me. There was the comfortable bed where we had made love for the first time. There was the dinky kitchen filled with plates and dishes that I had bought for Felipe right after we met because his bachelor accoutrements depressed me. There was the quiet desk in the corner where I had worked on my last book. There was Raja, the neighbor’s friendly old orange dog (whom Felipe had always called “Roger”), limping about happily, growling at his own shadow. There were the ducks in the rice field, wandering about and muttering among themselves about some recent poultry scandal.

There was even a coffeepot.

Just like that, Felipe became himself again: kind, attentive, nice. He had his little corner and his routines. I had my books. We both had a familiar bed to share. We relaxed as much as possible into a period of waiting for the Department of Homeland Security to decide Felipe’s fate. We fell into an almost narcotic pause during the next two months—something like our friend Keo’s meditating frogs. I read, Felipe cooked, sometimes we took a slow walk around the village and visited old friends. But what I remember most about that spell of time in Bali were the nights.

Here’s something you wouldn’t necessarily expect of Bali: The place is bloody
loud.
I once lived in a Manhattan apartment facing 14th Street, and that place was not nearly as loud as this rural Balinese village. There were nights in Bali when the two of us would be simultaneously awakened by the sound of dogs fighting, or roosters arguing, or an enthusiastic ceremonial procession. Other times, we were pulled out of sleep by the weather, which could behave with startling drama. We always slept with the windows open, and there were nights when the wind blew so hard that we would wake to find ourselves all twisted up in the fabric of our mosquito netting, like seaweed trapped in a sailboat’s rigging. Then we would untangle each other and lie in the hot darkness, talking.

One of my favorite passages in literature is from Italo Calvino’s
Invisible Cities
. In it, Calvino described an imaginary town called Eufemia, where the merchants of all nations gather at every solstice and every equinox to exchange goods. But these merchants do not come together merely to trade spices or jewels or livestock or textiles. Rather, they come to this town to exchange
stories
with each other—to literally trade in personal intimacies. The way it works, Calvino wrote, is that the men gather around the desert bonfires at night, and each man offers up a word, like “sister,” or “wolf,” or “buried treasure.” Then all the other men take turns telling their own personal stories of sisters, of wolves, of buried treasures. And in the months to come, long after the merchants leave Eufemia, when they ride their camels alone across the desert or sail the long route to China, each man combats his boredom by dredging through his old memories. And that’s when the men discover that their memories really
have
been traded—that, as Calvino wrote, “their sister had been exchanged for another’s sister, their wolf for another’s wolf.”

This is what intimacy does to us over time. That’s what a long marriage can do: It causes us to inherit and trade each other’s stories. This, in part, is how we become annexes of each other, trellises on which each other’s biography can grow. Felipe’s private history becomes a piece of my memory; my life gets woven into the material of his. Recalling that imaginary story-trading town of Eufemia, and thinking of the tiny narrative stitches that comprise human intimacy, I would sometimes—at three o’clock in the morning on a sleepless night in Bali—feed Felipe a specific word, just to see what memories I could summon out of him. At my cue, at the word I had offered up to him, Felipe would lie there beside me in the dark telling me his scattered stories of sisters, of buried treasures, of wolves, and also more—of beaches, birds, feet, princes, competitions . . .

I remember one hot, damp night when I woke up after a motorcycle without a muffler had blasted past our window, and I sensed that Felipe was also awake. Once more, I selected a word at random.

“Please tell me a story about fish,” I requested.

Felipe thought for a long while.

Then he took his time in the moonlit room to recount a memory of going fishing with his father on overnight trips when he was just a little kid back in Brazil. They would head off to some wild river together, just the child and the man, and they would camp there for days—barefoot and shirtless the whole time, living on what they caught. Felipe wasn’t as smart as his older brother Gildo (everyone agreed on this), and he wasn’t as charming as his big sister Lily (everyone agreed on that, too), but he was known in the family to be the best helper and so he was the only one who ever got to go on the fishing trips alone with his father, even though he was very small.

Felipe’s main job on those expeditions was to help his dad set the nets across the river. It was all about strategy. His dad wouldn’t talk to him much during the day (too busy focusing on the fishing), but every night over the open fire, he would lay out his plan—man to man—for the next day about where they would fish. Felipe’s father would ask his six-year-old son, “Did you see that tree about a mile up the river that’s halfway submerged? What do you think about us going there tomorrow, to investigate?” and Felipe would squat there by the fire, all alert and serious, listening manfully, focusing on the plan, nodding his approval.

Felipe’s father was not an ambitious guy, not a great thinker, not a captain of industry. Truthfully, he was not very industrious at all. But he was a fearless swimmer. He would clench his big hunting knife in his teeth and swim across those wide rivers, checking his nets and traps while he left his little boy alone back on the bank. It was both terrifying and thrilling for Felipe to watch his father strip down to his shorts, bite that knife, and fight his way across the swift current—knowing all the while that if his father was swept away, he himself would be abandoned there in the middle of nowhere.

But his father was never swept away. He was too strong. In the nighttime heat of our bedroom in Bali, under our damp and billowing mosquito nets, Felipe showed me what a strong swimmer his dad had been. He imitated his father’s beautiful stroke, lying there on his back in the humid night air,
swimming
, his arms faint and ghostly. Across all these lost decades, Felipe could still replicate the exact
sound
that his father’s arms made as they sliced through the fast dark waters:
“Shush-a,
shush-a, shush-a . . .”

And now that memory—that sound—swam through me, too. I even felt as though I could remember it, despite having never met Felipe’s father, who died years ago. In fact, there are probably only about four people alive in the whole world who remember Felipe’s father at all anymore, and only one of them—until the moment Felipe shared this story with me—recalled exactly how that man had looked and sounded when he used to swim across wide Brazilian rivers in the middle years of the last century. But now I felt that I could remember it, too, in a strange and personal way.

This
is intimacy: the trading of stories in the dark.

This act, the act of quiet nighttime talking, illustrates for me more than anything else the curious alchemy of companionship. Because when Felipe described his father’s swimming stroke, I took that watery image and I stitched it carefully into the hem of my own life, and now I will carry that around with me forever. As long as I live, and even long after Felipe has gone, his childhood memory, his father, his river, his Brazil—all of this, too, has somehow become me.

A
few weeks into our sojourn in Bali, there was finally a breakthrough in the immigration case.

According to our lawyer back in Philadelphia, the FBI had cleared my criminal background report. I’d passed cleanly. I was now considered a safe risk for marrying a foreigner, which meant that the Department of Homeland Security could finally begin processing Felipe’s immigration application. If all went well—if they granted him the elusive golden ticket of a fiancé visa—he might be allowed to return to America within the space of three months. The end was now in sight. Our marriage had now become imminent. The immigration documents, assuming Felipe secured them, would stipulate quite clearly that this man was allowed to enter America again, but for only and exactly thirty days, during which time he had to marry a particular citizen named Elizabeth Gilbert, and
only
a particular citizen named Elizabeth Gilbert, or he would face permanent deportation. The government would not be issuing an actual shotgun along with all the paperwork, but it did sort of have that feeling.

As this news filtered back to all our family members and friends around the world, we started getting questions from people about what kind of wedding ceremony we were planning. When would the wedding be? Where would it be? Who would be invited? I dodged everyone’s questions. Truthfully, I hadn’t planned anything special around a wedding ceremony simply because I found the whole idea of a public wedding entirely agitating.

I had stumbled in my studies on a letter that Anton Chekhov wrote to his fiancée, Olga Knipper, on April 26, 1901, a letter that perfectly expressed the sum of all my fears. Chekhov wrote, “If you give me your word that not a soul in Moscow will know about our wedding until after it has taken place, I am ready to marry you on the very day of my arrival. For some reason I am horribly afraid of the wedding ceremony and the congratulations and the Champagne that you must hold in your hand while you smile vaguely. I wish we could go straight from the church to Zvenigorod. Or perhaps we could get married in Zvenigorod. Think, think, darling! You are clever, they say.”

Yes! Think!

I, too, wanted to skip all the fuss and go straight to Zvenigorod—and I’d never even
heard
of Zvenigorod! I just wanted to get married as furtively and privately as possible, perhaps without even telling anyone. Weren’t there judges and mayors out there who could execute such a job painlessly enough? When I confided these thoughts in an e-mail to my sister Catherine, she replied, “You make marriage sound like a colonoscopy.” But I can attest that after months of intrusive questions from the Homeland Security Department, a colonoscopy was exactly what our upcoming wedding was beginning to feel like.

Still, as it turned out, there were some people in our lives who felt this event should be honored with a proper ceremony, and my sister was foremost among them. She sent me gentle but frequent e-mails from Philadelphia concerning the possibility of throwing a wedding party for us at her house when we returned home. It wouldn’t have to be anything fancy, she promised, but still . . .

My palms dampened at the very thought of it. I protested that this really was not necessary, that Felipe and I didn’t really roll that way. Catherine wrote in her next message, “What if I just happened to throw a big birthday party for myself, and you and Felipe happened to come? Would I be allowed to at least make a toast to your marriage?”

I committed to no such thing.

She tried again: “What if I just happened to throw a big party while you guys were at my house, but you and Felipe wouldn’t even have to come
downstairs
? You could just lock yourselves upstairs with the lights off. And when I made the wedding toast, I would casually wave my champagne glass in the general direction of the attic door? Is even
that
too threatening?”

Oddly, indefensibly, perversely:
yes.

When I tried to sort out my resistance to a public wedding ceremony, I had to admit that part of the issue was simple embarrassment. How very awkward to stand in front of one’s family and friends (many of whom had been guests at one’s first wedding) and swear solemn vows for life all over again. Hadn’t they all seen this film already? One’s credibility does begin to tarnish after too much of this sort of thing. And Felipe, too, had once before sworn lifetime vows only to leave the marriage after seventeen years. What a pair we made! To paraphrase Oscar Wilde: One divorce may be regarded as a misfortune, but two begins to smack of carelessness.