A Field Guide to Getting Lost (6 page)

She was supposed to be a paranoid schizophrenic. That was the diagnosis she was institutionalized with during the last decades of her life. I always thought that her worldview might have been perfectly reasonable under the circumstances, though by the time I met her she was a ruin of a human being, her mind altered by shock treatment and years of drugs and by whatever toll institutions take. It’s hard to say whether it was pain or the past that was being extirpated or whether they were the same thing. The doctors who treated her were unlikely to have experienced such profound instability: disappearing mothers, the vast gap between the medieval Russian-Polish Pale and glittering amnesiac Los Angeles, the three or four languages she left behind and the English she never completely acquired, the annihilation of the world she came from and of the relatives she left behind. Post-traumatic stress disorder is an alternate diagnosis a therapist once proffered for her behavior, a condition that recognized all the kinds of war she survived and a world in which nothing was too far-fetched or terrible to be possible.

I can count on one hand the stories my father told me about his childhood and family. He was a foot taller than his parents and, with his blue eyes and once-blond hair, far, far fairer than his mother, as though he sprang directly from Southern California with all its sunlight and abundance. He was part of that great assimilationist wave of the 1950s, when the ethnic past was regarded as unnecessary baggage, when America believed in the future like a religion. It’s not hard to imagine why he wanted to erase his rogue father and his crazy mother from his identity, though he was more like them than he looked, riding all kinds of runaway horses all his life. My father’s younger sister, my aunt, was as dark as her mother, and in her teens, when she lived with her father in El Paso, she was routinely suspected of being a Mexican and often had trouble coming back across the Rio Grande from Juárez. From her second husband, she got the surname to go with her appearance and passed as a Latina from then on. Caustic, literary, radical, she was the keeper of the family stories and photographs, though they served less as buttresses of a stable sense of the past than phantasms and fictions that metamorphose continually in accordance with the needs of the present. But all histories and photographs do that, public as well as private.

Another time my aunt hung a picture of her mother, my grandmother, in her house, another image I saw there only once. It showed a child standing next to a rough-hewn wooden farm implement. Had photography existed five hundred years ago, it wouldn’t have been hard to imagine this was a photograph from that time. It conveyed how backward was the world from which my grandmother came to the sunny optimistic boomtown of Los Angeles in the teens or twenties. The people in the photographs my aunt sometimes showed me seemed to have little or nothing to do with me; their faces, their poses, their clothes spoke more of time and place than of family and kinship. The technology and conventions of photography have given a particular look to each generation’s images, while history, fashion, and food have left their impressions on each body, so that nearly everyone in a given era has a kind of kinship to each other they don’t to other generations. Before the 1960s, light and air themselves seem to have had an almost undersea depth and luminosity, in which skin glowed opalescently and everything seemed to have a faint aura slaughtered by the newer black-and-white films made with less silver in the emulsion. I think most Americans who didn’t live through it think the Depression took place in a world of rough-hewn but secretly seductive black-and-white surfaces, as though texture itself could be a wealth to counter all that poverty. And the early part of the last century, when light was harsh and came from high above, was full of hollow-socketed stern faces above bodybelying clothes. There are fossils of seashells high in the Himalayas; what was and what is are different things.

About a decade ago, one of my brothers visited our cousins in Mexico City. These were our grandmother’s first cousins with whom she had stayed after her parents had emigrated and who emigrated to Mexico around the time she came to the U.S. The patriarch of that family, who had begun as a street peddler and become a wealthy art collector, remembered their childhood together and told my brother that our great-grandmother had never reached Ellis Island and the U.S. at all, but had been put in an asylum in Russia. When I heard that story, the image of the young Russian Jewess at Ellis Island suddenly vanished from my imaginary family album and became an impersonal image, a Lewis Hine image from the world called documentary, and the nameless woman from whom I’m descended became faceless and unimaginable again. I wonder now about what I was looking for when I seized upon stories and images to fill the void of her unknowability. That picture of Hine’s was taken in 1905, the year my grandmother was born, before her brothers were born, too soon to be my ancestor who likely never even reached Ellis Island. Though my aunt’s unreliability was visible then, my own is visible now: I can see that Hine’s picture looked a little like a dark haunted version of me and not at all like my grandmother, though who knows what, in the lottery of qualities that made up my father’s family of tall short pale dark people, her mother looked like.

I think sometimes that I became a historian because I didn’t have a history, but also because I was interested in telling the truth in a family in which truth was an elusive entity. It could be best served not by claiming an authoritative and disinterested relationship to the facts, but by disclosing your own desires and agendas, for truth lies not only in incidents but in hopes and needs. The histories I’ve written have often been hidden, lost, neglected, too broad or too amorphous to show up in others’ radar screens, histories that are not neat fields that belong to someone but the paths and waterways that meander through many fields and belong to no one. Art history in particular is often cast as an almost biblical lineage, a long line of begats in which painters descend purely from painters. Just as the purely patrilineal Old Testament genealogies leave out the mothers and even the fathers of the mothers, so these tidy stories leave out all the sources and inspirations that come from other media and other encounters, from poems, dreams, politics, doubts, a childhood experience, a sense of place, leave out the fact that history is made more of crossroads, branchings, and tangles than straight lines. These other sources I called the grand-mothers.

But this great-grandmother of mine represents something else. To have such an immediate ancestor who represented mystery and the unknown might perhaps be a gift, generous as the empty air above the prairie is generous, just as some questions are more profound than their answers. Shul, the path that is the impression of what used to be there, is what she is now, is perhaps the route I’m traveling. I could check genealogies and track down distant relations and find out the true story. But that is her true story, and mine is that I grew up with these shifting stories. And now, so many years after I first pictured a woman stepping onto a prairie, what seems vivid and near are the red-winged blackbirds on the marsh on the way to the mental hospital and the cherry cider on the way home, its taste like the red flash of the birds flying among the cattails. Often when I see the daisies the size of nickels and dimes that grow on lawns around here, I think of those wilting daisy chains. It is as though the birds were my kin, the place my ancestors, cherry juice the blood in my veins.

My aunt has nothing more to say on the subject. We spent her last day on earth together. A friend of hers had called me the evening before to say that her lung cancer was rapidly getting worse, though we still thought she had a month or so left then. I was busier than I’d ever been before, and it was out of character for me to drop my work so quickly, but for some reason I drove up the next morning to the forest in which she lived. Her house was on the north slope of what had been a Victorian summer resort, a place never meant to be inhabited year-round even before the redwoods grew back and brought with them permanent shade and damp. Her clammy house made her illness worse, as did her five cats, but she was determined to stay home until the end. Her proudest accomplishment had been a precedent-setting lawsuit twenty years before to defend this community’s watershed against logging.

So I traveled north past the town I grew up in and past more towns and apple orchards and vineyards into the somber redwoods and up the steep short dirt roads to her house. She was wasting away, and her eyes were wide and frightened. She breathed pure oxygen from a softly hissing apparatus. The cats walked across the table strewn with books and magazines. I gave her my first copy of my new book and convinced her to leave the house with her portable oxygen tank. We had planned to go out to lunch to celebrate my victories, which I always tried to insist were hers too, since she had supplied me with books and examples long before I began to write. She directed me to drive a way I hadn’t driven before as she spoke of many things, of how much she loved this place, of how she regretted that she wouldn’t live to see me buy land, of her children, of my family, this other branch of a small tree, of my future. Afterward, it seemed that day we had said everything that needed to be said.

The river we had been following flowed into the sea, becoming broad and tranquil at its mouth, and the afternoon light lit it to silver, the same silver as the sea. I looked and two things that had been stories seemed fact at that moment: the belief of many coastal tribes that the souls of the dead go west over the sea, and the description of death as the point at which the river enters the sea. I had driven my aunt to her death, or as it seemed in that luminousness, still like the moment after a peal of thunder, both of us to meet death. The forest we had come from seemed darker in this cool blaze of water and light, and we had entered the colorless, radiant landscape of death, charged with something as vital as life, too majestic to be terrifying, transfigured into another world. It was a little farther to the restaurant where we sat so that I saw her and she saw that ocean. The next day she sank into delirium, and she died at home four days after that trip to the sea.

Nine months later the two photographs I had remembered so vividly showed up at my cousin’s house in Scotland (two of my aunt’s three children have returned to Europe, as though the transplant to new soil didn’t take for them; their mother excoriated the United States in classic leftist style, but she loved her redwood forest, her river, her house, and rarely went far from them). Looking at those photographs I realized how much they had changed in my imagination. And only as I sit down to write this do I realize that I too have erased the past. I always knew that my middle name was an anglicized version of a great-grandmother’s name, but I dropped it in my teens, not liking its sound and feeling that a middle name was unnecessary, given how few people have my last name. Only now have I realized which great-grandmother that name belonged to, only writing this story do I know the name of that unknown woman and that it is also mine, or is now the blank space between my names.

I
n 1527 the Spaniard Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca refused his commander’s orders to take the ships of their expedition to a safe port while the commander and most of the men marched inland to explore. Narváez, the commander, asked why, and Cabeza de Vaca, the expedition’s second in command, answered “that I felt certain he would never find the ships again, or they him, as anyone could predict from the woefully inadequate preparation; that I would rather hazard the danger that lay ahead in the interior than give any occasion for questioning my honor by remaining safely aboard.” So the incompetent Narváez, Cabeza de Vaca, and three hundred men traveled north for fifteen days among the dwarf fan palms of an uninhabited expanse of what Juan Ponce de León had named Florida fourteen years before. They had met natives who told them that to the north was “a province called Apalachen, where was much gold and plenty of everything we wanted.” Honor and greed would be the two gates through which Cabeza de Vaca entered the realm of the utter unknown.

The Apalachen they found was a village of forty thatched houses with ripe corn in the fields, dry corn in storage, deerskins, and “small, poor quality shawls” as all its treasure. The gold seekers marched onward, wading through lakes, tramping for days, skirmishing with natives, eating their horses, building barges to head toward Mexico and the Spanish settlements there, not knowing how far away they were, dying of armor-piercing arrows, of disease, of hunger, of drowning. No one will ever be lost like those early conquistadors again, wandering a continent about which they knew nothing, not its topography, its climate, encountering inhabitants with whom there was no common language, plunging into a place for which they had no words for places, for plants, for the animals—skunks, alligators, bison—so unlike those of their own continent.

Eduardo Galeano notes that America was conquered, but not discovered, that the men who arrived with a religion to impose and dreams of gold never really knew where they were, and that this discovery is still taking place in our time. This suggests that most European-Americans remained lost over the centuries, lost not in practical terms but in the more profound sense of apprehending where they truly were, of caring what the history of the place was and its nature. Instead, they named it after the places they had left and tried to reconstruct those places through imported plants, animals, and practices, though pumpkin, maple, and other staples would enter their diet as words like Connecticut and Dakota and raccoon would enter their vocabularies. But Cabeza de Vaca and his companions would be conquered by this land and its people, and he at least seems to have found out where he was. All but four of the six hundred men who set out on the expedition died in this place they did not know, either quickly, of violence, illness, or hunger, or slowly, as slaves or adopted members of tribes, and their stories are mostly lost to history.