In America (27 page)

I don't plan to introduce you to any of my companions, unless you so desire. But you will not be disappointed if you do meet them. Their life, edged with danger and free of banal conviviality, has bred a remarkable race of solitaries. They will not remind you of our shepherds from Zakopane who, throughout their long months alone in the high Tatras, remain cocooned in the securities of ancestral place, of family, of religion. The American is someone who is always leaving everything behind. And the void this makes in his soul is a matter of astonishment to him, too.

I am thinking of a squatter named Jack Goodyear—don't you like this American name?—with whom I've stayed several times on my longer trips into the mountains. Though by nature he is little inclined toward headwork, his Robinson Crusoe way of life has fostered a touching habit of introspection. I remember once resting on bare planks inside Jack's small hut; it was late in the evening, a long time had gone by without either of us saying anything, and he had just thrown another bundle of dry laurel on the fire. Then without any prologue he broke the silence to tell me that it sometimes seemed to him as though there were two Jacks: one who chopped down trees, hunted the grizzly bear, tended his apiary, hoisted a new roof on his hut, carried a discarded white beehive inside to use as a chair, cooked his cornmeal and doused it with honey; and the other—“By God,” he kept interrupting himself, “by God”—the other who was doing nothing but just gazing at the first. He told me this very simply.

Two Jacks. Two Ryszards. Two Bogdans, I do not doubt. And two Marynas, I am sure. Tell me that you don't feel you are acting in a play. Tell me there isn't one Maryna who is kneading dough for bread, washing clothes in the round wooden tub in the yard, weeding the vegetable plots, and the other, standing beautifully tall as only you do, who gazes at herself with amazement and incredulity. Tell me. I'll not believe you.

Maryna, ride with me …

*   *   *

MARCH
22. Visit to the dentist, Herr Schmidt. Not incompetent. Upper left molar extracted. Agitated when I awoke. Did I say anything while under the ether? I was having a tender dream about ________. But surely I would have been speaking Polish, and therefore wouldn't have been understood. But what if I just kept calling out his name?

March 23. Copper-colored skin. Cheekbones. Impure thoughts.

March 24. M. doesn't see how much I have to struggle against my natural inertia. Her penchant for exertion has been a good influence on me. What makes me strong is being strong for her.

March 25. We have been captured for all eternity near the house on a sheet of wet glass by an itinerant photographer, who was female, elderly, and quite droll. M. liked her. A diverting occasion for our community, I thought, but for M. it seemed to bring out a kind of foreboding. Or regret—as if we were taking the first step toward accepting the eventual failure of our colony, by making sure that we would have in our possession an image of what we are now.

March 26. I've always had a horror of making myself conspicuous or seeming different from other people. Beset by qualms, I didn't do anything outrageous. I was merely obstinate, absent-minded. Only in a theatre did I feel free to pay attention to everything that went on about me. While watching a play, in the company of actors, I found in myself nearly occult states of awareness. I thought I would never marry. I loved but I never wanted to seduce. Then everything became possible with M. She entranced me. She needed me. The sluggish coals of my emotions burst into flame. Can love be founded on adoration, I asked myself. Yes, replied my heart.

March 27. It is so habitual for me to support M. in anything she has wanted to do. For a long time I thought her wanting to come to America a whim. Worse: I feared it was an act of desperation, not thought out at all. So it was my task to make it
mean
something—or something else. I've heard her parroting my ideas to Henryk, about how the noble doctrines of Fourier could be adapted to our venture, almost sentence by sentence. I suppose it didn't matter that I was listening. That an actress is not the author of the play doesn't make the lines any less hers. Gophers have made havoc of the artichoke patch.

March 28. M. still treats P. like a baby. Actresses make willful mothers, smothering and neglectful. Now he's asked for piano lessons. It would be wiser to encourage his interest in engineering. The boy is already too high-strung. Unless he's a future piano virtuoso, which I have no reason to think likely, a passion for music can only strengthen his morbid, effeminate tendencies. Perhaps M. will be less than enthusiastic about these lessons once she realizes that the piano teacher, the pretty daughter of the town clerk, Herr Reiser, is already an object of Ryszard's lighthearted lust.

March 29. They are alike in many ways, M. and Ryszard. I understand, I suppose I envy, the actress, who has permission to flaunt herself in the guise of another. I feel more censorious toward the writer, who believes he has a mandate to say what he himself thinks to the world. But I can't help admiring his self-confidence and his blithe, almost American pursuit of his own happiness.

March 30. The defect of keeping a diary is that I note mostly what ruffles my temper. Tonight I could pen a whole sermon on the ugliness of a loveless marriage. Wanda has taken to wearing her hair pulled back and in frizzed bangs—
le dernier cri,
apparently, among the ladies of the village—and Julian is merciless.

March 31. I try not to be irritable. M. can't imagine I harbor
any
criticisms of her. She thinks of me as an admiring mirror. Perhaps that's her idea, the actress's idea, of a good marriage. But I know my jumble of feelings is what makes me right for her. Only I register her bad behavior as bad, only I see her vulnerability, her dismay, only I know that she doesn't want, really, to be possessed by anyone.

April 1. A day in the fields has left me feeling optimistic. Most of the grafts we did last month have taken, the vines have flowered, the grapes have appeared, and the leaves to protect them. The sandy land
is
fruitful, and we are working more expertly than ever. Ramon, age 17. My senses are sharper here. I cannot control what I feel. I cannot control its reverberations in my flesh and my heart. But I can control what I do. I will not betray M.

April 2. Jacinto, age 25. Curly hair. Scar on his right forearm. White teeth. Calloused hand inside his partly open shirt. The curve of his breast. Standing there.

April 3. This afternoon I rode with Ryszard out to an Indian settlement in the Santa Ana foothills. Packs of scrawny children came running out of the wigwams and a few grey adobe huts thatched with tule reeds—an impression of mournful poverty. An elder ordered some women to serve us bowls of acorn porridge and their jet-black bread made from acorn flour. The dessert was
tuna,
the red fruit of the prickly pear, and the drink was manzanita cider. On the way back, Ryszard and I argued about whether the insensibility of Indians to pain is proof of their inferiority. I said the more one feels, the higher one is racially, culturally. He accused me of the most benighted prejudice. I'm sure he said to himself, a Dembowski
would
think that. Despite everything, I like Ryszard. He is intelligent. He has a healthy nature. How fortunate for me that he can't offer M. the fidelity she requires, or even notice that she minds his trifling with P.'s schoolteacher and Fraülein Reiser.

April 4. Flashes of hope, like flashes of desire. Beginning again. How much must one give up for the privilege of “beginning again”? For more than fifty years Europeans have been saying, If it doesn't work, we can always go to America. Socially mismatched lovers escaping a family ban on their union, artists unable to win the audience they know their work deserves, revolutionaries crushed by the hopelessness of revolutionary endeavor—to America! America is supposed to repair the European scale of injury or simply make one forget what one wanted, to substitute other desires.

April 5. Staszek, Józek. The shepherd boy who gave me the feather. Mrs. Bachleda's grandson. I never anticipated California would be a new theatre of temptations. Indeed, I thought I was leaving these furtive pinings behind in our unhappy country. Instead, it's as if my weakness had flown ahead of me. While we were exploring New York, descending the Atlantic coast, crossing the isthmus, rising up the California coast, dallying in San Francisco, and then entraining for here, these reincarnated phantoms of endangering desire were already waiting for me. And with them a quiet, firm voice that says, as it never did in Poland, why not? You are abroad, no one knows who you really are. This is America, where nothing is permanent. Nothing supposed to have fixed, unalterable consequences. Everything supposed to move, change, be torn down, mix.

April 6. Transfixed this morning by an idyllic scene of comradeship straight out of Whitman's Calamus poems. Joaquin, age 19. Loose cotton shirt, trousers made of the skin of fallow deer. Seated on a tree stump playing a kind of small harp with one string which they call a
chiote.
Sinewy wrists, broad hands. Beside him on the ground, legs akimbo, carelessly leaning his head against Joaquin's thigh, another boy, no more than 15, was singing. His name, I think, is Doroteo. Level marked brows over large eyelids. His fat busy lips. When I asked him to translate the song, he blushed.

In the shade of the magnolia I dreamt of you.

When I awoke and found you gone,

I cried myself to sleep again.

Then I blushed. I wanted to stroke his leg from the knee to the groin.

April 7. It is eighteen months since M. first proposed coming to America. Spring rains are over, we are told. It will be dry until November. Moments of hard doubt when I think of the money (mostly mine but also Aleksander's, his aunt's legacy) slipping through my fingers. I am the only one who thinks about money, and I am the one least prepared, by nurture and temperament, to think about it. The others must be worrying too, but don't dare express their concern, as if they would be impugning my competence. Still, there is reason to be optimistic. I had not fully understood the scope of the depression in the wine industry, which reached its nadir the year before last. Grapes sold for $8 a ton and were sometimes fed to hogs. But prices are rising, they should soon return to what they were before 1873, around $25 a ton. Come this autumn or the next, we could make several thousand dollars.

April 8. Dream about Francisco. His hand on the iron pommel of his saddle. It is natural to be attracted by beauty. M. was so beautiful.

April 9. In the village this morning to have a horse reshod and buy grain for the livestock, I was struck once again by how plain, how meanly utilitarian, the buildings are. One can easily imagine any or all of them being torn down. Conversation about irrigation with that idiot Kohler.

April 10. Humbling experience to be without a past. Nobody knows, or would care if they did know, who my grandfather was. General who? Perhaps they've heard of Pulaski, but that's because he came to America, or Chopin, but that's because he lived in France. In Poland, I congratulated myself that my sense of my own dignity didn't come from my name or rank. I was too different from my family—I had better ideals, other weaknesses. But I was proud of being Polish. And that pride, like Polishness itself, is not only irrelevant here, it is a handicap, for it makes us old-fashioned.

When we first arrived, most of us were disappointed to have only foreigners, instead of real Americans, for neighbors. The more I know the villagers, however, I see that although they still speak German they really are Americans. What is European, indolent, old-fashioned, has no place here. And it seems easier for someone from Europe to become an American than I would have thought. But it will never be easy for Mexicans. Poor Mexicans will always be lowly foreigners to these newly minted Americans, while the few wealthy Mexicans remind me of our gentry back home—they are valiant, haughty, extravagant, hospitable, ceremonious, lazy—and destined to be pushed aside by the Americans with their unrelenting practicality and passion for work. The old California's doom is sealed.

April 11. Billy's the name, says the carrot-haired boy at the rodeo. What's yours? White teeth, a scar on his forehead. Bob-Dan, I say. Nice to meet you, Bob. Whinny and plunge of the horses. Imprecations of the Mexican cowboys digging their wooden stirrups into the bleeding sides of their broncos. Bellowing of cattle, thrown, pinioned, branded. No, not Bob, I say, Bob and then Dan. He calls me Bobby.

April 12. I think I have never felt so healthy, so pleased with myself, so agreeably simplified, as this morning, with the temperature at 85°F by ten o'clock, pitching forkfuls of hay down from the loft for the horses. Read Pasteur's
Etudes sur le vin
in the afternoon.

April 13. I decided to have a candid conversation with Dreyfus, the only Jew in Anaheim as far as I can tell and, not surprisingly, the cleverest fellow in the village. He says the only way to make a go of our enterprise is to start our own wine company. We must expand or perish.

April 14. Forbidden desire, straining to be liberated by foreignness. The curse on desire. But there is no puzzle about how I can be so strongly drawn to these boys and wholly in love with M. Loving her is the one steadiness I have.

April 15. One answer would be to plant other varieties of grape. From one grape, brought here by the Spanish fathers who founded the Missions, so many kinds of wine are made. The liqueurs, the brandy and angelica and sparkling angelica, and the port and sherry and other sweet wines, uneven though they be, are acceptable—the
criolla
grape swells with sugar under all this sun. But the dry wines, the riesling, the claret, being too low in acid, are flat and dull. Yet everyone drinks them. And not only in California. The companies here sell more and more on the East Coast, and even export to Europe. It is entirely possible that wine will become American, with an American standard of excellence, just as happiness is destined to become American, with an American standard of what it is to be happy.