Terroir Read online

  Terrior

  Terrior

  Love, Out of Place

  NATASHA SAJÉ

  Trinity University Press | San Antonio, Texas

  Trinity University Press

  San Antonio, Texas 78212

  Copyright © 2020 Natasha Sajé

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  “love is more thicker than forget,” copyright © 1939, 1967, 1999 by the Trustees for the E. E. Cummings Trust, from E. E. Cummings: Complete Poems, 1904–1962, edited by George J. Firmage. Used by permission of Liveright Publishing Corporation.

  Fernando Pessoa, “To be great, be whole,” from “Odes,” translated by Edwin Honig and Susan M. Brown, from Poems of Fernando Pessoa. English translation copyright © 1986 by Edwin Honig and Susan M. Brown. Reprinted with the permission of the Permissions Company on behalf of City Lights Books.

  Book design by BookMatters

  Cover design by Derek Thornton, Notch Design

  Cover art: Bridgeman Images 51539; Shutterstock 566962153

  Author photo by David Baddley

  Printed in Canada

  ISBN 978-1-59534-932-3 paperback

  ISBN 978-1-59534-933-0 ebook

  Trinity University Press strives to produce its books using methods and materials in an environmentally sensitive manner. We favor working with manu facturers that practice sustainable management of all natural resources, produce paper using recycled stock, and manage forests with the best possible practices for people, biodiversity, and sustainability. The press is a member of the Green Press Initiative, a nonprofit program dedicated to supporting publishers in their efforts to reduce their impacts on endangered forests, climate change, and forest-dependent communities.

  The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI 39.48-1992.

  CIP data on file at the Library of Congress

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  Contents

  Preface

  Mordwand

  Auntie

  Eros and Philia

  Town of the Big House

  Guilt: A Love Story

  Line upon Line

  The Performance of Taste

  Forever Taking Leave

  Acknowledgments and Credits

  Preface

  EVEN THOUGH I HAD A GERMAN MOTHER AND WAS BORN in Munich, my identity card was inscribed “stateless,” like my father’s. As a captain in King Peter’s Royal Yugoslav Army, he fought both Nazis and Communists, and when Britain switched allies and backed Tito, my father had to leave the country or be killed. Because of anticommunist fervor in the United States, in 1957 we received immigration visas and arrived in New York via Flying Tiger airline with two hundred dollars. I learned English from Howdy Doody, Romper Room, and in kindergarten, and by the age of eight, even though we still spoke German at home, English and its pointed syntax were colonizing my brain.

  The French word terroir refers to the whole environment in which something—grapes, for instance—is grown: the climate, the soil, the topography. As important as the root stock and the care of grapes, the effect of terroir is less controllable and more nuanced. Perhaps, when it applies to an immigrant, terroir does more work than family to shape identity. In other words, if such factors as class, sexuality, and nationality are fluid, and family is distant, then environment becomes, metaphorically, a honey that heals wounds or a pollutant that makes it difficult to breathe. My parents’ multiple dislocations shaped their views of immigration and nationality, and my own experience in an interracial marriage spurred my quest to understand racism. Working in the theocratic state of Utah sharpened my resistance to the repressive aspects of religion, particularly its persecution of gay people. The specter of class status pervades every category of identity. I have filtered these issues through the lens of place—a powerful, literally grounding motif. “Skies change, souls don’t,” wrote Horace—in error, I would argue. Whatever we are made of responds to wherever we are, and that “where” includes other people. If a neighbor had not adopted five-year-old-me as her grandchild, I would be a different person. I seek to understand how aspects of environment affect us, and although I can only speak for myself, I attempt to broaden the view by bringing in other voices.

  Several summers ago I visited the coast of Croatia and three medieval seaside cities: Trogir, a stone town on its own tiny island; Zadar, with its sea organ—a modern art installation with whalelike notes that echo in my ears to this day; and Split, which was our home base. On our last evening in Split, my wife, Laura, and I were sitting on a sunny balcony of the Adriatic Club, overlooking its ancient harbor and a cove packed with boats.

  I said, “We’re done with this place, aren’t we?” And she nodded.

  That night we’d be on a car ferry to Rijeka and then on to Trieste and Venice. How did we know we were done with Split? We’d relished the traces of the Diocletian Palace, wondrously accessible under the newer city. We’d taken pleasure in the lively pedestrian squares, swimming in the sea a few steps from our apartment, and a day trip we took to the island of Brač. But we hadn’t had a conversation longer than three minutes with anyone who lived in Split.

  When our landlord, a scientist supplementing his income via Airbnb, came down to explain the air-conditioning, I had the unreasonable wish that he would invite us upstairs for a drink. But with so many people traipsing through, why would he? We were tourists, customers, not potential friends.

  On our way to and from town, we passed an imposing new house whose mailbox displayed the name Zvonimir Mihanović in simple black print. Artist’s paintbrushes leaned against the triangular picture window on the top floor of the white marble-clad house. The ample driveway held a black Mercedes SUV with New York license plates, a motorcycle, and a Smart car with Croatian plates. In our apartment, I looked up Zvonimir Mihanović on the internet and learned that he goes out in a boat to sketch, to have a “live encounter with his motifs,” then returns to this house to paint eight to ten hours a day. Preferring a hyperrealist style, he produces just four oil paintings a year.

  A live encounter with one’s motifs—perhaps that applies not only to realistic visual artists but also to writers. My own motifs include language; I grew up knowing language is fickle and deceptive, and also that it shapes experience. The German word Sehnsucht is translated as “longing” but has deeper connotations—Sucht is dis-ease, an unquenchable thirst. I’m reminded that we wouldn’t need language if our desires were immediately fulfilled, if we were perpetual infants with parents always present to anticipate our needs.

  Perhaps my attraction to Mihanović comes from my desire to be grounded, to have a sense of home as he does. Yet philosopher Gaston Bachelard seems old-fashioned and narrowly European when he argues that childhood homes shape us forever. In the United States, capitalism-imbued restlessness—for education, jobs, and other “opportunities”—drives everyone (not just immigrants) to move households more than citizens anywhere else in the world.

  I’d go back to Split if I could meet Zvonimir Mihanović. Not because he’s a rich artist, or even because he’s a good one, but because his creativity is drawn from the place where he was born and where he lives. His work and life, past and present, are integrated. His realist paintings have the ethereal quality of external sight revealing an internal vision. A boat in a harbor, an island coastline, disappearing rocks—his paintings are permeated with an otherworldly stillness. He paints tile roofs, the colors of coral, and dove-gray stones, turquoise or periwinkle water—always
still water and always summer. “In summer, the song sings itself,” wrote poet William Carlos Williams. There are no people in Mihanović’s paintings, and their absence is haunting. By contrast, nineteenth-century seascapes like the early ones of Turner contain human figures, however small, to help viewers measure the natural grandeur. One doesn’t so much look at Mihanović’s paintings as through them to the stillness felt by the painter, a strangely intimate feeling. We are the people in his paintings. We are seeing without wave or wind, a moment of time caught between thoughts, between heartbeats, simultaneously sentient, alive, as well as lifeless, nonessential witnesses. The stillness, like realism, is an illusion. Physicist Carlo Rovelli echoes essayist Michel de Montaigne when he writes, “The entire evolution of science would suggest that the best grammar for thinking about the world is that of change, not of permanence. Not of being, but becoming.” These essays explore my “becoming,” and they attempt to integrate my past and present, my work and life.

  Whenever Laura is asked where she is from, she proudly says, “Boston.” When asked where I am from, I say, “I was born in Munich and grew up in New York.” But I don’t feel from Germany or New York or New Jersey or Indiana or Baltimore or Washington, DC, and certainly not from Salt Lake City—all places where I’ve lived. From implies more than a place; it suggests origins and authenticity. For the geographer Yi-Fu Tuan, place is security and space is freedom: “We are attached to the one and long for the other.” This sounds sensible, but what if no place offers security? What if place must be worked through as though it were space and time? Like any opposition, the terms raise questions.

  Determining the provenance of a painting establishes its legitimacy or reveals a theft. The provenance of a person, however, is revealed in her interactions with others, in what she makes and says and does. These interactions might pressure her to assimilate or to strengthen her differences. “Home is where the heart is” is the cliché. My heart is with those I love and in what I create. Perhaps this is true of everyone—Laura gives a simpler answer because of her connection to, and pride in, her origins.

  Sixty years ago, the proportion of immigrants in the US general population comprised less than 6 percent. Even today the figure is 13.5 percent, smaller than most people think. Sometimes I feel it is crucial to distinguish myself as an outsider by rejecting the norms of the dominant order. When people learn I live in Utah, they often raise an eyebrow, and I quickly say, “I’m not from Utah,” hoping they’ll grasp the subtext: I’m not Mormon, I moved to the state for a teaching job, a choice, but not my first. By contrast, the United States was my father’s first choice of countries in exile. We could have gone to Australia or to Canada, other countries that accepted refugees in the mid-1950s.

  Some peoples whose lands have been contested—the Dalmatians, for example—know well where home is. In Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, Rebecca West recounts a history that explains the emblematic wariness of the Dalmatians: “The conquest of Illyria by Rome, of Rome by the barbarians; then three hundred years of conflict between Hungary and Venice; then four hundred years of oppression by Venice with the war against Turkey running concurrently for most of that time; a few years of hope under France, frustrated by the decay of Napoleon; a hundred years of muddling misgovernment by Austria.” Since West wrote that list, the Dalmatian region has been invaded by the Nazis, incorporated into Tito’s Communist Yugoslavia, and finally, after a bitter war with Serbia, achieved independence as Croatia in 1991. Caution is the subtext of every encounter with outsiders; how could Croatians be anything but watchful and vigilant?

  “It is always sad to leave a place to which one knows one will never return. Such are the melancholies du voyage: perhaps they are one of the most rewarding things about traveling,” wrote Gustave Flaubert, creator of Emma Bovary, a character always seeking something other than what she has. Yet desire is not the opposite of gratitude, and being satisfied can be a kind of stasis, even a kind of death. In these essays, I am returning to the past in the hope of understanding myself. Awareness of the increasingly pressing question of how to spend my time on earth makes every choice significant.

  That sense of mortality—I didn’t begin to feel it until I reached my fifties. Why did it take so long? When friends were dying of AIDS, why didn’t I feel that more personally? Or when my father died? Perhaps a sense of mortality is like identity itself—a process linked to living in one’s own body, albeit one that moves from place to place. Perhaps prejudices, like physical frailties, have to be experienced viscerally to be truly understood. I feel temporality with diminishing eyesight, lung capacity, and muscle strength—slow erosions. In daily routines, change slips by incrementally. In returning to places by writing about them, I face loss more directly, along with regret for the ignorance of my younger self.

  My first trip to the Adriatic: the town of Cattolica at age five. A professional photographer took photos of my mother, my aunt, and me, digging my wooden paddle spoon into gelato on the beach. I also remember myself sitting in the otherwise empty hotel dining room at 5 p.m., at a round table for eight with only my mother, the inn having acceded to our request for an early meal. I remember the taste and texture of the spaghetti—so unlike what my mother cooked, this chewy pasta freshly, lightly tomatoey. Outside the dining room, the beach is crowded, the town is crowded—a cheap package tour destination, although I didn’t know that then. When my necklace breaks in the hotel lobby, strangers on their knees look for the beads and then place the cool glass spheres in my palm. In memory I string the beads together again as I write, a necklace that it now hurts to wear. I string together beads of memory, more fragile and easily scattered than those sparkling orbs of glass.

  Mordwand

  FROM BEHIND THE BAR, FRAU STEFFEN LOOKED ME UP and down as if appraising an animal at a livestock show. She was not quite thirty, tiny and blonde, birdlike with sharp features and large blue-gray eyes. Her nails were manicured with pink polish. Her voice suggested a hint of glass breaking.

  Herr Steffen strode out of the kitchen, wiped his hands on his apron, and offered a handshake. He was flouting a European rule I’d learned: women initiate contact. In his forties, he had the florid look of a drinker.

  Frau Steffen led me downstairs, below street level. I thumped my heavy suitcase on each step. When she opened the door to a room, I saw that each of the other waitresses had claimed a bed already covered with her things. Mine was in the middle, with about a foot on either side, and I banged my shin trying to get to it. The brunette waitress flicked the ashes from her cigarette into a glass ashtray on the windowsill.

  The blonde waitress, whose name I remember as Suzanne, was placing her clothes into the bureau that crowded the door. After introducing us, Frau Steffen left. I wondered how to unpack without space to open my suitcase. The two women did not speak. After what felt like a long silence, I asked, “Where are you from?”

  “Zurich,” they said, not in unison.

  “Like the Steffens,” Suzanne added.

  “I’m here to learn to ski,” I offered. They exchanged looks. “I was working for Daimler Benz in Stuttgart, and I wanted to stay in Europe but I didn’t want to au pair.” Their silence made me continue. “I want to know Switzerland.”

  We spoke High German, a tongue almost as foreign to them as Swiss German was to me. Disdain emanated from them like the smell of cooked cabbage. They spoke to each other in rapid dialect. The brunette was younger than I but entering her fifth season of waitressing. Suzanne had worked in a grocery store before her year of waitressing.

  Like me, they’d found the job through seasonal employee want ads in the fall of 1977. My Swiss friend Ursula had sent me the booklet when I told her I wanted to continue working in Europe. She suggested the village of Grindelwald, located twenty miles from where she lived in Thun, six minutes from the train station. To inject uncertainty into her life as a biology teacher, Ursula left her apartment exactly six minutes before her train. That way, if something delayed
her, say a conversation with a friend, she missed the train. This, she said, made her feel that her life was unpredictable. There would, of course, soon be another train. I liked the wry way she told me this, as though describing a stranger’s idiosyncrasy.

  My own life felt unpredictable enough—every day I encountered a situation that baffled me, an idea that made me revise my own. In Stuttgart one of my coworkers had been a Vietnamese woman who met her German husband while he was motorcycling through Asia. She was afraid to have children because they’d be mixed-race. “I wouldn’t mind a girl. But what if it’s a boy?” she said. In the United States, I told her, many people are mixed-race. “But we live in Stuttgart,” she replied.

  The Eigerblick had offered one hundred francs a month more than the other hotel in Grindelwald—eighteen hundred francs—eight times as much as a Roman countess offered for an au pair position. I’d heard stories of au pairs being exploited, and I never liked babysitting, so it was easy to choose. Luxury restaurants and hotels still employed exclusively male servers. The Eigerblick had only three stars, but saving even my Eigerblick salary would enable me to travel for many months and then pay my way back to the United States.

  Managing their last hotel in Ticino had left the Steffens with debts, the waitresses told me. Whether this was due to mismanagement or bad fortune or the condition of being German Swiss in an Italian canton—territorial allegiances replace class snobbery in Switzerland—or some combination, I never knew. But a dark cloud of debt enveloped them, and everyone who worked at the Eigerblick, all winter.

  That first night my coworkers’ sounds and scents kept me awake in misery. I was an only child who had never had to share a room except for a memorably awful first year in college. My college roommate had written “nonsmoker” on her housing preference form when in fact she was only trying to quit. The stuffy Swiss hotel room, with its three beds with white sheets so close together, smaller than my freshman dorm room, reminded me of an old photo: a row of shrouds inside caskets after the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire in New York City in 1911. At least our window, with a view of the loading area, was not barred.