July 12

12:40 a.m.

I am sitting in a room alone with a dead man, trimming my toenails. It occurs to me as I press the metal edges together that the discoloration of my skin from the effort, as the fingers go bloodless around the edges, is much like his. Only no flush returns to him with the release of pressure. He is dead. It seems this way; normal. Normal that he should be dead. And yet not; I keep imagining that the chest of his striped shirt rises and falls; that he breathes. That he sleeps. But his breath when he slept invaded the whole room. Ragged, wrong, irregular. If it had stopped it would have meant one of two things: either he was dead, or you were asleep. So one didn’t get much sleep. One listened, for rate, for flux. I was only a stand-in, relieving (I hoped) those more dedicated than I. In spite of his pain — nearly constant, throwing hospice into bewilderment — he is lucky to have had these people attending to him. Loving him.

I went home yesterday afternoon (well, the day before yesterday; it is after midnight) and took a nap. Somewhere in my abdominal cavity something hurt; I broke into a sweat and huddled on the bed. Lord, this is nothing, I thought, yet I am something like him now. I rose, later, and caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror. I marveled at how full and luxurious and youthful I looked. I had been staring for long hours at an emaciated cancer patient a day away from death.

He died four hours ago. Afterwards, after I arrived, we sat in this room together: wife, brother, sister-in-law, nieces and nephew, me. And Ron’s corpse, on the installed hospital bed, looking less like him as the minutes passed. It seems this way; normal. Maybe it’s just me; I did not know him well. Maybe it is faith. Maybe it was the length and difficulty of his dying. Occasionally someone cried, but there seemed to be more laughter than tears. We talk of Ron and other things, awaiting the arrival of his son, the main reason I am here in the first place. I met him due to the illness of his father, and I met the father and all the rest introduced by the son. It has been a year since then. They razz me and grill me to pass the time. It seems this way; normal.

7:40 a.m.

I emerge from a spare room where I have slept on a mattress on the floor, after the latest night in recent memory. Nearly everyone is awake, despite similar lack of sleep. The four-year-old meets me in the hall and hugs me hello. She turns to the open door opposite and points. “That’s Uncle Ron’s shell,” she tells me. I take her small fingers and we go in. I ask her if she is sad, or scared. She says no. She stands by the bed and rubs his hand gently, where the bruise from the one-day i.v. still lingers.

“His body is cold,” she says, without withdrawing “but he’s in a better place.”

She’s actually saying that; I almost have to check to make sure she’s not lip-syncing. It’s not a platitude, coming from her. It’s real. Maybe she doesn’t understand death; but then, maybe she understands it perfectly. She runs outside to pick cherries from the tree; gets too high on the ladder, begins to cry from fright. I rescue her and tell her not to do it again and she smiles, already forgetting her mortality. But why not smile when one is rescued?

3:40 p.m.

By now, it is quiet. The funeral is next Saturday; I will be out of the country. The bedroom, the old sickroom, is disassembled. And what now, after death? That is the question. (I, the bodkin, ask, though it is not the first time one has asked it.)

I have been solicited to write something for the funeral program. This may be difficult. I know mortality, I think, better than I knew this particular man — and I am only 26. I do not know even mortality very well. What should I say; that I find death normal, barring the loss it leaves in the lives of the living?

And yet, still, it seems this way.

Melanin

The middle-aged woman, her skin the smooth darkness of equatorial Africa, beckons to the blonde-haired porcelain-tinted child of four. “Can you say ‘je m’appelle Esther’?” I ask the child. She smiles shyly and repeats to the woman: “shmpel Esther.”

The woman laughs and bounces the child onto her lap. “Tu as peur des noirs?” she queries cheerfully. I cannot bring myself to translate this literally, and ask instead: “Esther, have you ever been held by someone from Africa before?”

In this woman’s village, I know, a child of four might, conversely, fear a white person. What a bizarre and ghostly thing pale skin must be for those who have never seen it. The woman’s daughter, only half-white, was shunned (yet revered) by the other village children, she has told me. To compensate, the daughter once ground charcoal and spread it on her body in a thick (though short-lived) paste.

“I don’t think she’s afraid,” says the daughter “In America, there are lots of people with dark skin. She must have seen them before.”

The child is not afraid: she turns and innocently begins talking to the woman, telling her about the backyard swimming pool she likes to swim in when it gets hot outside. The woman understands nothing of the speech: Elle ne comprends pas.

The child is not afraid, but she is not completely at ease either. It is strange to be held by someone like this; someone who talks only incomprehensibly. She smiles but, even at four, she does not look the woman in the eye.

The woman, on the other hand, is unabashedly complementary. She tells the child she is beautiful. She gets the child to repeat it: “shwuibel,” and then, delighted with her propensity for the oddity of French, tells her she is intelligent.

Later, alone with the child, I finally translate the woman’s first question and ask if she was afraid because of the darkness of the woman’s skin.

“No,” she says “but I like light skin better, like me.”

“Oo,” I say (how politically incorrect children are) “that doesn’t mean she’s mean or anything, you know. Didn’t you think she was nice?”

“Yeah,” says the child “but I think light skin is prettier.”

How wicked, exactly, are the honest particular preferences for skin tone, language, nose shape, height-to-weight ratios, curves and muscle tone and teeth and hair and scent? Rarely are such preferences thought bad, unless they injure. Mentioning them, though, seems cruel. Borderline genocidal, even, if it has anything to do with ethnicity; never mind that most people still marry within their particular cultures. So the child must be educated, if not to think that this woman is just as pretty as she is, then at least never to say what is in her mind as she studies the melanin content of her skin.

Bateke scanning

I am scanning and scanning and scanning, page by page, a book I got by interlibrary loan, because I have not had time to sufficiently memorize it in the allotted time of a few weeks; it is a French / French Congo Bateke dictionary. This book, by the way, was published in 1911 and has apparently not been read since. At least I ascertain so by the fact that as I read through it trying to see if the dialect matched the one I have been semi-studying, I came across several pages that had not been cut apart by the printing press. No one, in almost a hundred years, had bothered to see what was between the uncut pages. So I did. I don’t know if it’s legal to use scissors on a century-old book I do not own.

The crustacean’s pinch

Friday evening was spent around the pinochle table; the cards had all been played by the time I arrived. Ron, pushed back from the table, had become the center of attention. He had a thin trickle of hose leading from a swollen stomach to a large syringe filled with brown goop, which he peevishly held aloft, to the commentary of the surrounding family. “It’s dinnertime,” they said, chortling. “he’s eating healthier now than he ever dreamed of.”

When tragedy strikes, it brings moments of humor with all the rest. Ron never seemed unwilling to take a joke, because he was so obstinate in making his own. Incapacitation has not taken away his personality… he winks at me in welcome … which makes the cancer, that all-involving all-invasive presence, in some ways, less real.

In some ways. In minute ways. And yet, in perhaps the only way that matters. All that one is in life might be summed up in the way one takes a joke and welcomes a person in from the cold.

L’elu

Nicolas Sarkozy, a man hated in the particular circles of French culture I frequented while abroad, was elected to the presidency yesterday. I am not typically a political person, but when one is in France, one can’t really help becoming political. When politics stop your trains and blockade your schools, you start, at the very least, whining about them. So, oddly enough, I have a political cartoon sketched by me in my 2005 journal of this fellow who has just been elected, but it would not be in good taste to scan it.

I got an e-mail today from my friend Pierre on the subject of the newly-elected. Pierre, like the opinionated semi-retired adventurer he is, did not mince words:

“Les Français ont cessé d’accepter de mourir pour leurs idées il y a plus 1/2 siecle
Les Français ont cessé d’accepter de travailler il y a plus de 1/4 de siecle.
Les Français ont cessés de se sentir Français et fier de l’être.
(mais restent juste arrogants du passé)
Sarko parle mais c’est tout…

Il n’y a plus de France et il n’y aura jamais d’Europe : tout est mort.
comme il n’y a plus de grandeur grecque, ni Romaine, …. les civilisations
naissent et meurent et le petit Sarko est juste une caricature.”

We will work, he says, or, rather, the neighbors will work, and thus no one will do anything, except riot in the streets when they see the fruits of their labor. France is no more: the French stopped dying for their ideals half a century ago, stopped working a quarter of a century ago; stopped being the sort of patriots that made them French, and were proud to do so. France is no more, and Europe will never be. All is dead, just as Greece and Rome is dead. Civilizations are born, and die, and Sarkozy is only a caricature.

I am kippy

One of my friends in my department described me the other day as “kippy.” When asked to define her terms, she said “kippy means you,” which I did not find very clarifying. “You’re like Gidget,” she explained, when pressed. (I’m like a blonde teenage girl who attracts boys by surfing… I’ve never surfed and I haven’t been blonde since I was 2. But Ok.)

Cut to a disturbing dream I had soon after: that several members of the English department were sitting around shredding me verbally because I had flirted with too many of them. I awoke, wondering if this was my conscience talking, and decided that no, it could not be, because I do not even know how to flirt. High school, undergrad, post-undergrad, you name it; the only guys who looked at me were weird artistic types who couldn’t get anyone else, or the perverts who wanted anyone.

Cut to this afternoon, as I studied with the abovementioned friend. Naturally, we got off topic, and naturally, the conversation turned to relationships (so much more interesting that even the shining beacon of awesomeness that is linguistics). In passing, this girl mentioned that I flirt with all and sundry. I was appalled. I do not flirt with all and sundry. Arguing is not the same as flirting. Being interested in what you’re saying is not the same as flirting. Lounging around in comfortable fashion is not the same as flirting. Smiling at something you said is not the same as flirting. She did not believe me, but claimed that my naivete was another flirtatious move.

“Look,” I said “you should see me try to flirt. It’s painful. Remember, I was homeschooled.”

I therefore submit a definition of “kippy”: frizzy-haired girl who grew up sheltered and reticent only to become an adventuring, wide-eyed soul stabbed by some sprite with the ability to flirt ceaselessly except when she intends to.

Maybe. Hopefully, upon further examination, this definition will prove false. I really think it’s a bad idea to be a ceaseless flirt, or a flirt at all, really. As a public service announcement to those who may know me only through my blog, I would like to clarify that I am not flirting with you right now.

Snach of linguistics project

I have a couple of weeks of class left, and a lot to get done in the meantime. This evening I’ve been working on my phonetics project, which, interestingly enough, is on a language that has not, as far as I or the “informant” from whom I am getting all my language information know, been heretofor documented much. It’s a Bantu language of the Congo and Western Gabon called Bateke, and it has no written form. Although it’s time consuming to listen and phonetically transcribe the words I’ve recorded my “informant” saying, it’s also very interesting. I am tempted to go into field linguistics based on this project alone. Here’s some vocabulary, in case you’re interested:

14. mother / ‘guRu /
15. father / ‘ta4a /
16. sister / ‘wa4i4i /
17. brother / ‘dumo /
18. daughter / mwana /
19. son / mwana o balaRa /
20. my / e mE /
21. your / e wE /

4= alveolar tap as found in Spanish “pero”
R= uvular fricative as found in French “rouge”
E= mid-front vowel as found in French “mais”
u= as in English “troop”
a= as in Boston English or French
o= monothong
i= high front vowel as in Spanish “si”
e= slightly higher than E, as in French “les”
‘=stress on this syllable

The language has no articles, few prepositions, and simple verb patterns, and, as you may be able to tell, the phonetics aren’t all that complicated, either. At least this is what my preliminary research tells me.

but what does ‘documentary’ mean?

As I was unlocking my bike from a rack downtown today, a man approached me, a clean-shaven man with a maturing face that I vaguely recognized. A youth sporting a camera on his shoulder advanced on his right and a girl (script writer?) brought up the rear.

“Excuse me,” said the man (I know where I’ve seen him, I thought; he’s a pastor) “But we’re doing a documentary on Easter. Do you mind if we ask you a few questions?”

I knew what was coming. It would not be painful. But my face contorted. “Um, sure,” I said, tipping my chin to survey him from underneath my eyebrows.

“Do you know what the word ‘holiday’ means?” he asked me, as the camera guy started rolling.

“Yeah,” I said “that would be ‘holy day.'” Tempted to make up an etymology; didn’t.

“Yes,” he said “So what’s your favorite holiday?”

I don’t actually know what my favorite holiday is. “Christmas and Easter,” I said glibly.

“Why is that?”

“You know, Jesus.” I learned how to do this in Sunday school.

“And who is Jesus?”

“The son of God. Or God incarnate.”

“Ok,” said the pastor “thanks.” He and crew exited to the left.

I had a similar conversation with someone yesterday, only it was phrased differently. The guy asked: “You don’t actually believe all that shit, do you?” And I replied at much greater length and in much greater earnest. I figured he, as a friend, had probably purer motives than the pastor and actually wanted to be answered.