Fiction from NER 40.2 (2019)
Subscribe today!

1.

In those days, the houses were built with courtyards slicing out their centers. Only a few square meters at the bottom, this careful extraction allowed light and air to filter through every level. Those days, I say, though the events of this story occurred long after the buildings had been divided into separate apartments and separate families, families who became, despite their different names, closer than kin. In partitioned houses, the courtyard was even more important. The interior-facing balconies were the only clean and airy place for those families who shared floors and staircases, who divided their rooms with each new generation. A building was known by its courtyard. Its residents’ reputation and, in time, their likelihood of surviving the war and interminable occupation, were judged by that slice of air and the small open heart at its base.

At 147 de la Concha, the housekeeper—who owned no part of the building but carried the keys and knew its history and divisions better than anyone—lived on the first floor. Though she had no balcony and everyone who lived above her walked through the courtyard—her only open space—she was paid for the intrusion with the information she gathered and the power she held in the residents’ lives. Doña Alba of 147 de la Concha was a kind tyrant, beloved by all who passed her tiny, arched door. She knew the secrets of each family and was called into their apartments to mediate disagreements or to provide the true account of events long past or passed in the night when only she could hear them. But there was one purpose, of the many to which she devoted her considerable power, that she held above all others: the preservation of young girls’ honor. For this reason, no matter the time or weather, Doña Alba could be found watering her plants or sweeping the dirt floor of the courtyard whenever Fidelia Armando Castell or Rosa Obejas Gijón came out on their balconies.

The residence of 147 de la Concha held two families and their extensions: the Catholic Armando Castells and the Obejas Gijóns, Jewish citizens of long standing in the small Creole city. Though each family was prominent, neither was wealthy, so the courtyard had a dirt rather than tile floor. There’s nothing cleaner than a dirt floor, Doña Alba said at least once a week. She preferred the earth that allowed her to water her hibiscus and mint without wondering where the water would go, and she did not have to spend extra time on her knees scrubbing tile. The residents not only agreed but held that the dirt marked their building as more prestigious. The newer buildings, with tile or those awful cement stones that burned children’s bare feet and palms, had been built after the long-ago struggle for independence, whereas 147 de la Concha had been built before. Under the occupation, that distantly remembered war was thought of rather quaintly, a time when friend and enemy spoke the same language, a beautiful tongue they could all agree on. A time when the enemy had been almost indistinguishable from themselves. Under the occupation, the enemy spoke a language they could not understand, that shared few words or roots with their own.

The courtyard’s passable space was mostly covered by Doña Alba’s flowers and herbs and the large rocker which could scoot across the floor depending on the balcony the residents she was talking with or spying on stood. Between Doña Alba’s sweeping and sprinkling water and the residents’ footsteps packing the dirt for decades—no one even remembered who had lived in the house before them or what long-dead Spaniard had built it—the courtyard floor was harder than marble. No heel could make a mark. Any shovel would have bent like a blade of grass trying to scuff a diamond.

Even the shoes of Fidelia Armando Castell, called Fidé, whose once-respectable kitten heels she had heightened with pieces of wood and whittled to points that stuck in the cobblestones and sidewalk grates outside the plaza, even these did not leave a dent deeper than a pigeon print in the dirt. This was the reason, Doña Alba lamented later, that it took her so long to know what the girl was up to. Fidelia left no trace, not a whisper. Only the ceiba tree, which had entered the building in a pot years ago and now stood in one corner of the courtyard, could mark the hard dirt floor. Doña Alba’s (now) late husband, seeing the tree’s struggles, had cracked the pot and carved the terracotta away from the ceiba’s roots, allowing it to expand into the heretofore impenetrable dirt.

Until Fidelia’s escapes, Doña Alba’s reign over the courtyard was firm. She argued that even if it appeared to waver, she was only allowing those she trained to step forth in their sacred duties. One such example that was often repeated was a story of Fidelia Armando Castell and Rosa Obejas Gijón together in the courtyard when they were still small enough to hide behind the pots of herbs and too fast for Doña Alba to catch, a story from long before the occupation. Their skin in shades of brown that shifted according to the season, their hair in two braids down their backs, one set dark brown mixed with red and tightly curled (Fidelia), one black and oiled straight (Rosa). With their backs turned, braids swung forward, only the color of their hair kept them from being twins. Their bodies the same disproportions: long legs, short torsos, big knees, and sprawling hands that Rosa grew into but Fidelia did not. Rosa had a fine black moustache that stood out on her skin, though she didn’t know she had it yet. Their features were different, yes, but their expressions and movements were the same, having been each other’s mirror since Fidelia was old enough to reach through the balcony bars and wave at the little girl across the courtyard.

Other children crowded around them, cousins and neighbors, on the balconies, passing through the courtyard, but to Fidelia and Rosa, no one else existed. So much so that when a girl from the other side of Calle de la Concha, a girl twice as tall who lived in a building guarded by royal palms and raised on both yucca and fine steaks, grabbed Fidelia by the arm, stopping her whirling, she threw her to the ground next to Rosa before anyone even knew she was there. Rosa leapt up and charged, head down, but the girl knew how to fight and dodged her. The girl went straight for Fidelia, who couldn’t even stand up so great was the whiplash from her fantasy game to this real one. She could only cover her face in her hands and wail. Rosa lunged at the girl again and kicked and pulled her dress but the girl had found the underbelly. She yanked Fidelia’s braids and spit on her pinafore, hammering her with scrubby fists, until there was a shout, a squawk really—like a hen or crow—from the balcony above. The big girl looked up and Elmo, Rosa’s youngest brother (who, though he was only two years younger than Rosa and eighteen months younger than Fidelia, was still too young to play in the courtyard), pulled down his short pants and pissed all over the girl. So perfect was his aim that not a drop landed on Rosa and Fidelia, who, hearing the squawk, had the good sense to run to the other side of the courtyard. Rosa shouted in triumph—a sound not too different from her brother’s squawk—and raised her fists in the air, holding them there, a tiny statue of militant joy. Fidelia, however, was silent. Her eyes darted between Elmo and the intruder. The girl, stunned and still dripping, slunk from the courtyard.

Rosa and Fidelia started laughing and it took them days to stop. Even years later, spotting the girl—who had grown up to be boring, respectable, and without an ounce of style—would send them into fits. Fidelia would sniff exaggeratedly or Rosa would raise her handkerchief to her nose and arch her eyebrows and they would have to run back to 147 de la Concha they were laughing so hard. Then Doña Alba would chase them with her dust cloths for showing their teeth and arching their necks in public, because who might follow them home after that display. She could only be calmed when reminded that she kept such a careful watch on the courtyard and had trained all the boys in the building to do the same. Doña Alba would sit in her rocker, both girls cooling her face with her sandalwood fans, and say, yes, she had trained the boys well, and a good thing too considering all that the girls—their white teeth, long necks—would need protecting from.

After the intruder girl had run away, both Fidelia and Rosa gave Elmo the sweets they had saved from Carnival the month before. He ate them all at once: the honeyed cake of the capuchinos now dry, marzipan with a crust of iron around their still-soft centers. He threw up on the balcony, and Rosa and Fidelia started laughing again.

Poor baby, Fidelia said when she could speak, poor baby Elmo, you saved us.

2.

Fidelia’s family (the Armando Castells) were haberdashers of middling new-Creole stock but Rosa’s (the Obejas Gijóns) had lived in the city for as long as anyone could remember. Through the various rises and ebbs of illiberality they had survived, not untouched but still there. Their name was a constructed one (their ancestors had picked at random a type of livestock, then added the last Spanish city they passed through before venturing into the New World), but their religious practices were not. Some cited magnanimity unheard of since the days of Old Toledo as the reason for the Catholics’ (variable) integration of their Semitic fellows. In truth, the city was small, located on the southern tip of a narrow island, bordered by thick jungle and choppy sea, and there was no way to keep families—whether their roots were Jewish, Indian, Maroon, or Castilian—separate. Rafael Obejas was fond of pointing out that most of the estimable Creoles in the city were probably Jewish or Muslim to begin with, as who else would be willing to settle in a gold-less backwater except those fleeing that lisping king’s maniacal wife. Yes, the Obejas Gijóns and the few other Jewish families in the city were accepted into the larger weave, but their position, and by this I mean their not being stoned to death or starved through exclusion, was one that had to keep being earned. They had held their station for many years but that did not mean anyone forgot it was earned and not inherent.

Neither Rosa nor Fidelia cared much about this history, about the nasty lies recirculating, about the dusty pamphlets on the laws of physiognomy that once lay decaying in the back drawers of aged pharmacists and now, since the occupation, had begun to resurface. Rosa and Fidelia did not notice the pamphlets’ etchings creeping slowly towards the front page of the most widely read newspapers or their terms slipping from the back of the mind to the tip of the city’s tongue. Rosa knew only that in the years since the occupation, her world had shrunk. Fewer dresses, fewer streets she could walk on, fewer custards and translations of French novels, fewer hours she could walk those fewer streets. Her world kept shrinking. Her dresses down to two, one to wash and one to wear, and then only one so at the end of the week she had to wait, watching her dress dry on the balcony railing, stuck behind the latticed shutters, not even able to peek her head far enough to see the drops of water land on the dirt courtyard below, waiting for Fidelia to return from where she’d snuck off to. Because by now Fidelia Armando Castell was nineteen, and there were few powers—not even Doña Alba’s—that could have stopped her from slipping out of 147 de la Concha and finding someone to wrap his arm around her waist while music played.

On each block, on each night since the occupation began—which was an eternity for Fidelia, as long as Elmo (seventeen) had considered himself a man, and certainly longer than anyone younger than little Mirian (Rosa’s second youngest sister) could actually remember—there had been the young people’s dances. They were held in the courtyards of the larger residencies, the ones with tile floors or not so many plants or with a building plan that allowed entry to the upper balconies without entry to each apartment. Even overseen by the housekeepers and older family members, the parties were riotous. The bands played all night. Musicians came and, even if they hadn’t been paid, wanted to keep playing, and the young people danced as long as there was music. The old people never complained that these parties occurred with a frequency and frenzy unheard of in their youth. They did not do what every generation does once its feet hurt too much to dance all night. They understood the dances were necessary.

For a time the parties followed a certain pattern. Each day the group of girls who would host set about decorating their courtyard with birds of paradise gathered beside the cliffs, bits of colored paper from old advertisements cut into stars and moons, anything they could scavenge from the tin man or their closets. By evening they had constructed their costumes, made of the same set of materials and shaped according to the theme of the night. The themes began lightheartedly, extensions of secondary school balls: “Land of the Fairies” with paper wings and flower coronets (both Rosa and Fidelia participated); “Beneath the Sea,” with conch shell tops over their dresses and skirts woven of seaweed with long tails, a hint towards risqué yet still innocent (Fidelia attended but by this time Rosa was no longer allowed outside after dark). At a certain point the themes began to twist, torque, and complicate, culminating in the infamous “Ripeness Is Only the Onset of Decay.” On that night, the girls wore elaborate headdresses of wilted carrot tops, pineapple heads, and onion skins. They picked the worst of the rags from the tin man and—like the mummies lately discovered in the mines further inland—wrapped themselves tightly in strips of fabric, allowing shards of skin to show at the midriffs and thighs. They looked beautiful until you got close. By morning the courtyard sloshed with fetid vegetables. Everyone stank from sweat, the garbage-stained rags, the rotten tomatoes the girls had smeared on the walls late in the night. The lead girl, who wore two boiled-to-almost-collapsing pig’s feet woven into a wreath above her head like horns, drank the final drag of cane liquor and said, The stench was the point. They lived, invaded and occupied by the most putrid stink, and no dance or costume was going to change that. The courtyard was almost empty, the band packing up, the morning coming slow and soft like her heartbeat had once been long ago in a time she could not really remember. And, she shouted to the pigeons and the pink dawn clouds, I will never forget it! I will never forget the stink!

She disappeared three days later and the themed parties stopped. In their place, the local boys concocted elaborate competitions, combinations of skill and chance with each point or deduction payable in a shot of cane liquor. Elmo was at every party, quietly leading the revelers though not drinking much himself, because, since they were often his own creation, the games were too easy for him to win. And he was always looking for Fidelia, who was always there until she was not, and even when she was there he would only be able to stand by her while looking up at the moon until someone pushed his way between them and asked her to dance. Before the moon set, Elmo, along with everyone else, had forgotten again about the girl in her pig’s-foot crown crying to the dawn. Instead, he was thinking of a memory he didn’t quite have but that had been told to him so many times he almost remembered it. It was from long before the occupation, when Rosa and Fidelia were still small enough to hide behind the pots of herbs and too fast for Doña Alba to catch. He could just remember—if he pasted words and other memories together to fit—the acrid taste of the sweets coming up his throat, the shape of Fidelia’s palm on his back, the sound of her laughter, the joy that he had in protecting her.

Whether due to the dirt’s silence or Doña Alba’s advancing age, no one knew when Fidelia started going alone to the dancehalls ringed round the Plaza Mayor. These dancehalls teemed, in the words of the pig’s-foot girl, like an overflowing outhouse, with soldiers and bureaucrats and all the occupation’s necessary detritus, celebrating again and again their presence in a city that had long ago stopped fighting. No one knew Fidelia was among them, the enemy, the occupiers, dancing in her whittled heels, no one but Rosa.

By the time Fidelia started going to the dancehalls, Rosa’s world had shrunk to the size of the courtyard. That summer, her father had forbidden her from leaving the house in the evening. By fall, he would not let her leave the house at all, even with Elmo as escort. The city had begun to turn on the Obejas Gijóns, first under the pressure of the invading forces’ dogmas and later through a motivation all its own. In their home, the windows facing the street were kept closed. Rafael Obejas entered at dawn and returned at dusk. No one else in his family was allowed to leave 147 de la Concha. His grown sons across the balcony with families of their own made their own decisions, but they soon mirrored their father’s. Señora Obejas had to rotate which neighbor she asked the favor of buying groceries, pressing carefully folded pesos into their apron pockets when they refused to take them from her hand. Rosa’s sisters Mirian and Bernicia watched her watching the courtyard all day, growing more and more silent, and each night, Elmo argued with his father that he wanted to go out, to the dances or just walk up and down the Malecón. It made him less of a man to not be trusted to leave and return, to take care of himself. He would shout and pound his fist on the table, apologize to his mother, and leave, with the instructions for that night’s drinking game crumpled in his hand. Rafael tried to stay awake to wait for him.

Of course, Rosa knew. She knew days and even weeks before the first venture, had asked to hear again and again Fidelia’s plots to sneak down Peñitas and Calixto street and enter the dancehalls. Begged her friend to tell her, in descriptions whose durations mirrored the living of them, what she saw when she finally entered. Fidelia described in a whisper the way the lights sparkled through the bottles of ersatz champagne—which even she knew was fake, though she didn’t care—how the lights made the singer’s dress look like flames. How the singer was always about to be swallowed up, not by the lights or the strength of her voice but by the eyes of everyone in the hall watching. It was only because the attention was never quite complete that the singer stayed alive long enough to finish her song.

In the day’s heat, the shutters closed to keep out the sun and prying eyes and closed too against any breeze, Fidelia whispered right into Rosa’s ear, hands cupped like she was speaking into a shell. In the moment before Fidelia spoke, they both remembered how they used to play in the courtyard together, when they were still small enough to hide behind the pots of herbs and too fast for Doña Alba to catch. They didn’t laugh remembering the bully girl and Elmo’s perfect arc of urine, but they remembered laughing and remembered being both afraid and amazed. The memory linked them as much as the words Fidelia shaped as they lay on the stained mattress Rosa had been born on, curled around each other, two c’s facing and linked, Fidelia speaking and Rosa listening. If Rosa’s sisters tried to listen too, Rosa kicked at them. When the younger girls retreated, Rosa and Fidelia let their feet dangle off the bed, toes curling and uncurling in the empty space between the mattress frame and the floor. Rosa asked Fidelia to elaborate and Fidelia would. Soon Rosa hardly needed to ask, she said just enough to keep Fidelia speaking and could lie for hours, carried away on Fidelia’s voice.

3.

What next?

Fidelia must go again to the dances and this time Rosa must go too. Then must come the dancehall itself with lights sparkling through fake champagne as Fidelia promised and the singer alight but not engulfed; then must come the officers and soldiers and translators and telegraph men, whom Rosa hated because they were the invaders, the occupiers, the reason her mother made coffee that was half chickpea flour and clogged the espresso pot and made it explode and cut Elmo under his right eye. Almost blinded him. Hated them for the ration stamps and rice with moths and the girl haloed in pig’s feet, hated them until a telegraph man complimented her dress, which was Fidelia’s but that even Fidelia admitted looked better on her, and a lieutenant pulled out a chair for her at a table with a white cloth, and another ordered a glass of fake champagne or cava or whatever it was that sparked in her mouth like those tiny paper parcels of gunpowder children throw on stone doorways to hear them pop. Then must come what Fidelia did or did not do and what the lieutenant and the telegraph officer did most certainly do. And after that.

But first the dancing and Rosa’s discovery that she could dance, to any music, and so well that it became a challenge the whole hall seemed to be in on: to ask the singer, imported from the capital, to play the newest songs, the oldest songs, the fastest songs. And that it was not the fake champagne or the tablecloths pressed as her grandmother used to press them or even the compliments, but that she, Rosa, was taking up a space large enough to be offered a chair, had a body that could consume a whole glass and ask for another, limbs that could fill in the layers of organza that made up Fidelia’s dress. Sitting in her apartment in the dark all day, sharing the bed with her sisters who pinched and snored and stole the blanket, rotating the wearing of the one dress not too tatty to appear on the inner balcony and when not wearing it, sitting in the shadows cast by the shutters, sucking on a licorice root like it was a cigarette, gnawing until the stick was a soggy pith and even her throat was numb. Waiting. Waiting for nothing except Fidelia to come home from the dances, pretend to sleep, and creep, on the pretense of a neighborly errand, to tell Rosa all she had done the night before. Sitting and waiting and looking over the courtyard in her slip so old it shone, Rosa started to believe she did not exist. She did not eat enough for a whole stomach. She did not speak enough for a whole mouth. She was being worn into a thin sliver, a lozenge disappearing on a child’s tongue. The very little that was left was sustained by Fidelia’s whispers. But that very little had been feeding on those words so long it was nothing without them. Rosa had listened to Fidelia’s stories until she felt she could devour her friend. Her hunger shaped into a thick cloud, smelling like the inside of an animal’s den, musky and slightly furred. This cloud swelled out of her pores that could do nothing but stain and stain again that hated old slip. Even the cloud was not her. Even my hunger is not my own and since it’s all I have, I am gone.

But she was not. Rosa looked at the men in the dancehall, some in uniform and some in fine suits, and they looked back at her. In their faces she saw herself. Not what she looked like but that she could be looked at. Further proof: their hands would not clasp around emptiness but around another hand, solid enough to pulse back against their palms. They did not walk to the dance floor to dance alone. They waited until the song was over and swept through the crowd to ask for the next dance, not from a slice of empty air, but from a body, whole and glowing in sweat that creased her gloves, breath passing lips that marked her glass with a stain.

It must be remembered that the men who raped her tore and battered at someone newly born to herself. Someone still blinking in the light of her shockingly solid reflection. The names they whispered, all the usual ones and a different one, a particular one, the one they claimed as their action’s catalyst and excuse, they cursed these names into ears still wet and unfolding. Ears newly wrung from the tunnel of the dance floor, reborn just moments before.

That new word—an old word, one that had ceased to be an insult before the occupation, but had become one as it slipped from dusty pamphlet to second page of the newspaper to the coffee vendor’s lips when he sold Rafael the lowest grade beans for the highest price, proving the insult was always there, carried generation after generation, a stowaway of hate—that word Rosa almost didn’t hear. But when the men were done and Fidelia, who had noticed Rosa missing but had only just started looking, opened a side door leading to an alley where she knew the soldiers often smoked or necked, it was the only word Rosa could hear. A word the men should not have known to call her. A word no one, except for Fidelia, her face framed in the light from the hall, would have known to tell them.

But before all that there is Rosa and Fidelia curled on Rosa’s bed, the endless loop of Fidelia’s words circling them and holding off, for now, the furry maw of Rosa’s hunger, their trip to the dancehall, Rosa pressed against the wall and Fidelia framed by the light, her mouth open to speak. They lay on the bed, wrapped around each other, warm from their circulating breath and still as if sleeping until Mirian (second youngest), trailed by Bernicia (youngest), wanting only to be kind and to hear a bit of the stories too, brought them a cup of linden tea to share. The tea was weak, the same leaves had been brewed the day before, but the water was hot. Bernicia stumbled on Fidelia’s shoe, cast off in the dark and boredom, and reached out for Mirian and Mirian fell forward. The hot water landed on Fidelia and Rosa’s bare feet hanging off the bed. The two shouted in unison, swatting at Mirian. Hearing their shouts, Elmo ran towards them and—not bravely because he didn’t think long enough to be brave—scooped up Fidelia’s foot and held it against the cool cup of his palm. Fidé, he whispered. Fidelia shrieked in mock modesty and Elmo dropped her foot. Shouting and swatting, the girls drove Mirian, Bernicia, and Elmo out of the room and when they were gone turned to each other and laughed, surprising themselves at the sound, then laughed again. There would be time later for rag bandages and to beg an aloe leaf from Doña Alba, time for the pain to reach them. But for now, they studied their feet. The water had scalded the top of Rosa’s instep and the outside of Fidelia’s arch. Their feet must have been overlapping because, when placed together just so, there emerged a detailed map of the splatter: brightly outlined in red, the water in the perfect shape of its own fall.

4.

When Fidelia saw Rosa pressed against the damp stucco wall outside the dancehall, no one holding her there but herself, her body straighter than a body could be, what did she see? Did she see what had happened, who had forced their way inside her, what word plugged Rosa’s ears? Did she know she was no longer looking at her friend but at a story that had been told about her, a story in which Rosa’s body was only a costume, one that appeared again and again, never relinquished despite its terrible wear? When Fidelia stepped out of the light over the dancehall’s back door, into the slender corridor that ran between buildings, paths taken by widows selling fruit and children racing to beat the new curfew, did she know that she was stepping out of herself and into that same story? Did she know she left herself in the limen, not even a place for that self to stand when the door eased shut?

If she had turned and returned to the dancehall, pretending she didn’t see Rosa, if she had dragged her friend back inside and found the men and berated them, demanding justice, if she had run past Rosa into the night and kept running to the sea, even then she could not have stopped her entry into the story. Only if she had stayed still, if she had spun time like sugar and kept them, two paper dolls pinned—one lit in the frame, the other plastered to the wall—could she have stopped what happened next. But she did not have that power and by the time she stood in the doorway it was already too late. Even before she took Rosa to the dance, even before she herself went to the dance, it was too late for her, the story waiting, feeling no need to rush, waiting to prove that she didn’t even have a self from which to step out of. Her body never more than a box of sticks waiting for the story to open and scatter.

Fidelia slipped off her petticoat and tore the bottom strip. With this fabric, she daubed at the blood on Rosa’s legs and ankles. She eased Rosa off the wall and tied her own shawl around Rosa’s waist. The dress was ruined but the shawl would cover the tears and stains until they were home. Off the wall, Rosa felt she could fall, that she would tip and shatter on the cobblestones. But Fidelia held her up, moving her hands when Rosa winced—the sound coming from far away—trying to find a point from which she could support Rosa’s weight that was not an already-swelling bruise. Away from the dancehall lights, Rosa’s face was almost invisible in the shadows but she smelled of blood, sweat, the butcher’s floor, and other smells that were foreign to Fidelia until that night and that she knew, instantly, did not issue from inside her friend but from the deep innards of others. The smell, Rosa’s silence, meant that though Fidelia held her as tightly as she dared, kept Rosa’s body as upright as she could, down the back corridors, skirting the Mercado, down Peñitas and Calixto until finally they reached Plaza de la Concordia only a few blocks from their house, she knew she was transporting a foreign form. Her friend’s body was burning, and Fidelia’s own flesh might come off at the contact.

On the outer edge of the plaza, Fidelia’s shawl began to slip from Rosa’s hips. Fidelia leaned her, still unbending as a yardstick, against a royal palm and, careful not to touch Rosa’s skin as much for her own sake as for Rosa’s, pulled the shawl back up. Fidelia made a knot and tightened it against her own hand. The lace was soaked in spots and still dry in others, the shawl itself made of intricate knots her mother had tied years before. Fidelia brought her friend’s weight from the coarse bark of the royal palm onto her own body, her arms slick from fear and effort. Across Calle de la Forja and then home.

Doña Alba had seen both girls leave. She had debated trying to stop them. But she reasoned their punishment for a committed crime would be steeper than an attempted one and therefore a punishment that would lead more quickly to them behaving like the good girls families like theirs should be counted on to issue even, and especially, in war time. She waited in her rocker, covered in shadows, for the girls to enter the courtyard. They could not return the way they had left, an improvised path from storm drain to outer balcony that Doña Alba had witnessed only by chance as she emptied her toilet. Instead they would have to trip right over her toes.

Once inside the courtyard, and thinking it empty, Fidelia leaned Rosa against a pillar. She couldn’t carry Rosa up the stairs, and now, in the moonlight through the courtyard, she had to decide whether to awaken someone and whom and what to say when she did. Did Rosa need a doctor, is that what she needed, or could it be kept a secret, as these things sometimes were? There were babies born without surnames, and girls who walked unstopped into the ocean, their white nightgowns floating on the waves. But Rosa’s face in the courtyard light was unrecognizable, hardly a face at all, and Fidelia knew from the fresh marks on her own dress that Rosa was still bleeding. She held her friend upright, pressed her shoulders back with the tips of her fingers, and stepped away, just for a moment, to decide. Just a moment without that weight.

But Rosa fell. Fell as she had wanted to and tipped over the table holding Doña Alba’s bougainvillea. The clay pot and soil shattered across the courtyard. Doña Alba stood, and when Fidelia saw her she screamed, as loud as she wished Rosa would, louder than she thought she could, though it took no effort. She charged the ceiba tree and threw her body against its trunk. It would not yield and neither would she. Doña Alba grabbed her around the waist and pinned her fists under her chin. But she kept screaming and she was still screaming when the courtyard and balconies filled with her and Rosa’s families, their parents, their sisters and brothers, ringing the balconies, story after story, and there was no decision to make, no secret left to keep.

5.

At dawn, not having slept, Doña Alba carried her broom to her courtyard to sweep the mess Rosa’s fall had made. But instead, surprised at her own strength, she lifted each pot as high as she could and dropped them on the packed hard-as-stone earth. She wanted to throw the pots. For them to crash and roll and burst like she was a god playing handball in the clouds. But she had watered the plants the night before, while waiting, and they were heavy, the soil inside rich and damp. Her destruction was slow. The results looked nothing like she felt. Even cracked, the pots held their shape. One was too heavy to lift more than a few inches off the ground. She pushed the pot over and smacked it with her hand, hoping to send it rolling across the courtyard. But the pot hardly bobbled and she felt, in the knuckle of her index finger, a sharp crack. She walked to the cupboard where she kept her tools and, digging with both hands, found the machete.

When she was finished, the courtyard was covered in stalks and leaves and flowers. It smelled of oregano, mint, the insides of calla lily blossoms, all too much green. She hacked at the ceiba tree as well, chopping into its bark and then arching the machete over her head at any branches she could reach. The fronds fell until she had to wade through the lopped limbs of the plants she had so carefully tended. Their stems and leaves, violently cut, tore at her shins.

In the silence Doña Alba could hear her own heavy breath and the soft rustling of vegetation settling. She had been staring at Fidelia for some time before she actually saw her. Fidelia was crouched under the stairwell leading to the second floor. She wore only a slip, her feet bare, hair wet and hanging in strips across her face. Doña Alba focused on the girl, who she had first seen when she was still coated in a caul. Fidelia held her face up to Doña Alba, her eyes searching for the old woman’s in the dawn light. Doña Alba wanted to spit but her mouth was dry. Instead she looked at Fidelia as long as she could and then turned away, as if she hoped she would never see Fidelia again.

When she turned back Fidelia was gone. Elmo had been standing in the shadows behind Fidelia, unnoticed by them both, and when Doña Alba turned, he grabbed Fidelia and dragged her up the stairs. Though Elmo was sweating and frantic, still he was Elmo, who had loved her all his life. Beneath the stairs, Fidelia had been caught by a terrible thought. Stumbling back to Calle de la Concha, wrapped in her stained shawl, Rosa was silent. The thought came to Fidelia then, in the courtyard, in the silence after Doña Alba stopped her hacking: what if Rosa never spoke again? Though Rosa’s words were rare, they were precious. What if Fidelia, the talker, would have no one to interrupt her, no one to prove she wasn’t just speaking to herself, no one’s voice but her own? The weight of that silence made her limp. She fell gratefully into Elmo’s arms, glad to be lifted, allowing him to swing her back and forth up the steps, through the door to Rafael Obejas’s apartment.

Inside, Rosa lay on the sofa, her mother and Mirian kneeling over her. Elmo dropped Fidelia at his sister’s feet and Fidelia was so frightened to see Rosa again—her eyes ruined plums, her lips a smear—that she grabbed for Elmo’s hand. He pulled away.

Rafael Obejas stood in a corner, as far from Rosa as he could while still in the same room. His mind was caught in a twist. In the days when there was someone to tell, he believed such a thing would not have occurred, and would therefore not need to be told. What to do now? In the occupation, he had to make new rules. Rafael asked Elmo what he was doing, what his meaning was treating their Fidé like that, but his mind was caught in the making and shaping of this new rule and he could not move from the corner.

Elmo didn’t hear his father anyway. Elmo began screaming and shouting, he punched walls, scattered furniture, and everyone who heard knew that he was so full of rage and guilt that he must have lost himself, must have put himself aside in the waves of his fury. But no one heard Rosa, no one knows what she said when Elmo laid Fidelia at her feet. Whether she tried to stop him, whether she screamed, whether she turned her head to the wall. When Elmo grabbed Fidelia’s shoulders, when he did not call her Fidé or Fidelia, when instead he shook her and said, you are going to tell us, you are going to tell us what you did, was Rosa still silent? Nothing, I did nothing, I didn’t say anything, Yes, you did, you told them, you told them who she was, you told them and then they hurt her, you did this you betrayed us you slut you. When Fidelia cried until she couldn’t, until Elmo’s hands were too tight around her neck, hands that had not touched her since they were children playing in the courtyard, that had kept their distance, save that one cupping of her burned foot. No please please no, until she had no breath to form into words, even such plain, formless words. When Elmo’s hands stayed around her neck long past her silence and when his father placed his own hands on Elmo’s shoulders, and only then did Elmo let go and Fidelia dropped to the floor. No one knows what Rosa said or did not say. Whether she saw any of this at all.

Rafael carried Fidelia to the courtyard. He cleared a space for her among the branches and broken pottery. Elmo followed him, shaking, his hands over his mouth, until he realized who his hands smelled like and then he did not know where to put them, wanted to chop them off. Rafael eased him out of the courtyard and back up the steps. He locked him in a room in his apartment that held potatoes and squash and old furniture and steadied himself for the trip to the Armando Castells’ door. There was no need. Fidelia’s parents stood on their balcony, the empty air of the courtyard hanging between them and Rafael.

The rest of the Obejas Gijóns fled to Rafael’s apartment and his older sons barricaded the door from the inside. All day, the moaning and the rosarios from the women of the Armando Castell family could be heard echoing through the courtyard. Rafael stayed crouched in front of the storage room, armed with a broken chair leg and waiting. But the Armando Castells did not charge his door. They did not plunder his sons’ apartments, nor—which was what Rafael truly feared on this terrible new day without rules—did they send in packs of the occupier’s police force. It was Diego Armando Castell, Fidelia’s father, who asked for the shovel from Doña Alba. At dusk, the Obejas Gijóns heard the peal of metal striking earth. After the sound rang out again, Rafael rose, gathered together his older sons, and joined Diego in the courtyard. When the dirt would not give, Rafael’s eldest son thought to make use of the ceiba tree. Together, the men hacked at the roots around the ceiba’s base, finally slicing through a large one. Together, they pulled the root out of the earth. From the small cavern the root had made, they gained entry to the ground. They carved with shovels and pry bars until there was a space large enough to hold Fidelia.

6.

Elmo could not forget what his hands had done and stopped eating. Rosa would not feed him. Mirian and Señora Obejas did, when they could remember, but Rosa did not. Elmo grew skinnier, skinnier even than Rosa. One night, when everyone had forgotten that Elmo couldn’t use his hands and the food on his plate had been stolen bite by bite by Mirian or Bernicia because even before the occupation food left alone so long was fair game, he and Rosa sat at the table alone. He stank from not having changed his shirt in weeks and no one would go nearer to him than they had to.

Rosa stared past Elmo in the dark, as if she could see through the closed shutters to the street below. For weeks, there had been whispers of the liberating army’s victories farther up the coast or farther down, or hidden in the jungle, lighting smoky fires to announce their coming, but there had been those whispers before and no one believed them. The table was empty save for Elmo’s plate and the kerosene lamp that hadn’t held kerosene in years. From her seat, Rosa reached out her hands to Elmo’s, those lumps of clay, those burning stars. She stretched his hands, one finger at a time, out onto his thighs, smoothing the knuckles and splaying the palms. His hands had become soft as the creases of fat at his neck and knees when he was an infant. Elmo tried to curl his hands back into fists but Rosa patted them down until they lay flat, spread across his lap. Rosa stood from the table and Elmo stayed there, staring at the spot where she had sat, the darkness now complete.

Elmo died three days before the liberation, which wouldn’t have saved him anyway. Rafael peeled off his clothes, too fetid to keep, to prepare him for the funeral. There was hardly anything left of his son. He resembled more closely a buried stork or dehydrated frog, his skin not like skin but a film nothing living had occupied in months. Rafael carried him out of 147 de la Concha so there would be no question of his body leaving the courtyard. For years, there was talk of adding tile to the dirt floor but in the end, no one ever did.

Rosa lived in 147 de la Concha for the rest of her long life, walking over the courtyard floor, sweeping and sprinkling water, carrying home bread and tomatoes. She cared for Doña Alba as she grew old and sick, and when she died she became the housekeeper on the bottom floor, sweeping and bustling and knowing everything there was to know about the residents as if she were not an Obejas at all but an Alba, some long lost inland cousin come to tend the oregano and take up the sacred duty. If she thought of Fidelia each time she left and entered her home, or never, or fiercely at first for years until her friend began to fade into the dirt, no one knows.

7.

What is known is what is remembered. On the night after the liberation, less than a year after Fidelia was buried, Rosa left 147 de la Concha and walked into the crowds. No one moved close to her. She seemed to push people away, her body at the center of a small but impenetrable orbit. Through Plaza de la Concordia, where children sang in the trees, stringing the occupiers’ jackets up like streamers, down Peñitas and Calixto, through the streets puffed and roaring with free citizens. The whole city was out, every wistful teen and crooked landlord, those who had snitched on the pig’s-foot girl and girls like her and those who had not. The people clogged the plaza, old women climbing on park benches, tossing guavas up to the children to keep them singing, mothers threatening to collapse the exterior balconies that had stood empty for so many years. No longer a city turned in on itself but gutted, each vein split and somehow still spilling. But Rosa spoke to no one. She saw few of the faces and she didn’t laugh or sing the old anthem or the other banned songs. She didn’t look back when the songs became a joyful garble because everyone had forgotten the lyrics but still wanted to sing. Rosa walked. In Fidelia’s whittled heels, Rosa walked down every street she could remember and those she could not. The shoes caught in the cobblestones and turned her ankles until there were no more cobblestone and the heels sunk in the sand and Rosa stood up to her knees in the ocean. The water was lit with firecrackers shot from the beach to burst above the liberator’s captured tanks and trucks, the city just one stop in their victory march. But the horizon seemed closer than it had when there was no hope of rescue from the east, when she had stood with Fidelia, their dresses tucked between their legs, screaming at the waves and throwing stones as far as they could, as if they could strike the invisible shores on the other side of the world.

Then Rosa turned back from the sea. I know this because I saw her, because everyone did, the whole city a witness, and she did not sing the old songs but she said one name over and over into the pink dawn and the rusted gutters and every corner of the city she knew and did not know. Whispered until her voice was only breath, warming the air, bringing each street back to life, until she became the shape of what she whispered, a dipped brush, slender and full, dyeing the city in the bright pigment of Fidelia’s name.

Nonfiction from NER 41.3 (2020)
Subscribe today!

But after Q? What comes next? After Q there are a number of letters the last of which is scarcely visible to mortal eyes, but glimmers red in the distance . . .  Qualities that would have saved a ship’s company exposed on a broiling sea with six biscuits and a flask of water— endurance and justice, foresight, devotion, skill, came to his help. R is then—what is R?
—Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

ABDUCTION

The act of being taken. Away, perhaps.

In Greek mythology, abduction precedes violation. For example, in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, woman after woman is removed from a place of safety and transported elsewhere for violation, by ship or chariot, sea or land, or the ethereal machinations of the gods. Blossoms and baskets are dropped by these maidens, life interrupted.

The Metamorphoses are tales of violence and resulting human change: to trees, to animals, to birds. When I read these tales as a young woman, I imagined transformation as both punishment and safety. When the gods shape-shifted a person from human to nonhuman, it might be punishment; however, that transformation made further violence less likely.

In fact, on the cover of my college edition of Metamorphoses, a Duchamp-like figure of a woman, geometrical, transitions to a tree with roots as feet and leaves as a bower of curled hair. She has become impenetrable.

I thought of the myths as having a sequence:

1. Abduction
2. Sexual violation
3. Transformation

Sequences radiate clarity. They can be interrupted, or, perhaps reversed. I’m comforted by these mathematics.

Alphabets have sequence, too; however, language itself isn’t constrained by its origin in order. Words are formed by disorder, and translation reorders that disorder further. The Greek verb viasmós collapses the concepts of abduction and violation, as does the Latin verb rapto. It doesn’t matter if English separates them.

Word, body, mind. I can separate these pieces of experience, aligning them with abduction, violation, transformation. But when I open the cover of Metamorphoses, on its heavy paper backing is inscribed a room number with the name of the dorm I lived in the second semester of my junior year.

Body, word, mind: These collapse.

BODY

Those last three semesters, I read a lot of contemporary poetry. I thought of myself as a poet. But the two books that stamped themselves on my consciousness indelibly were the Metamorphoses and Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse.

I remember clearly Mr. Ramsay, the philosopher host of To the Lighthouse: Mr. Ramsay imagines the challenges of philosophic vision as the letters of the alphabet, and he has reached Q. Beyond that, he can glimpse R, yet not quite bring it to mind, as if he stands upon a lonely spit of land casting itself out into the sea. This image has stayed with me all of my life.

“For if thought is like the keyboard of a piano, divided into so many notes, or like the alphabet is ranged in twenty-six letters all in order, then his splendid mind had no sort of difficulty in running over those letters one by one, firmly and accurately, until it had reached, say, the letter Q. He reached Q. Very few people in the whole of England ever reach Q.”

R his quest, his vision, his destination. That next step, to determine for what R stands. As a letter, R can be only a marker for something else, something unnamed or unnamable. Of course.

I, too, wanted to understand R—the unsayable and unspeakable—for what had happened to my body had also happened to my mind, the somatic and semantic clenched together as a fist grips an object of which it cannot let go. R was both a comfort and an impediment: A distant letter, blotting out a concept; an abstraction disfiguring whatever might have been “real.”

For many years, I’d figured the incident and its aftermath was “all in my head,” the way sympathetic persons will describe the process of letting go. As if the mind alone can evaporate troubles, transforming the quicksilver yet substantive nature of water into particles that waft away, invisible.

Then I read The Body Keeps the Score, which explores the physiognomy of trauma. I wish I’d known earlier that it wasn’t just in my head, but also in my body: trauma binds itself into muscle fibers and nerve dendrites, into the cellular ebb and flow of the body’s tides. Anxiety and panic, Dr. van der Kolk tells me, feed off a body’s tendency toward flight (arousal) or paralysis (numbing). Such bodies “develop a fear of fear itself.”

Lily Briscoe, feminist, artist, and foil to Mr. Ramsay, seems to grasp what I could not. Of her deceased friend, Mrs. Ramsay, admired chiefly for her beauty, Lily expresses the apparition of that bodily absence this way, “For how could one express in words these emotions of the body? express that emptiness there? (She was looking at the drawing-room steps; they looked extraordinarily empty.) It was one’s body feeling, not one’s mind. The physical sensations that went with the bare look of the steps had become suddenly extremely unpleasant. To want and not to have, sent all up her body a hardness, a hollowness, a strain.”

I read into Lily a paralysis, a need to transform, her hollowness like the trunk of a tree. Very little is said out loud in To the Lighthouse. Woolf taps into her characters’ stream of consciousness.

COMFORT

Often, but not always, before I fall asleep, just at the point at which sleep seems inevitable, I ask my husband, “Will things be okay?” He always responds, “Yes, everything will be okay.” This ritual comforts me. What it has to do with the truth of any situation is irrelevant.

The act of falling into sleep feels unsafe. “Falling,” of course, isn’t safe. That slip between conscious and unconscious, the moment the vigilant brain stands down into silence—I am afraid to be taken into sleep, an abduction over which I have no control.

During my senior year in college, I develop an interest in ekphrastic poetry, using paintings to prompt me toward words. The Impressionists are all the rage in the 1980s. Monet and his water lilies do little for me. It’s all too pleasant in ethereal blues and pinks.

Instead, seated at a long table in the art section of the library, metal shelves to my right and plate-glass windows to my left, I spread open the broad cardboard covers of a set of Pissarro plates. On the glossy paper, thick brushstrokes flattened, are blotchy images in brown, yellow, and green: a path, a pony, great rushes of trees and bushes. Chemin Sous Bois, En Été, reads the label at the bottom, “Path Through the Woods, in Summer.”

A path bends, in the distance, away from the light into underbrush and forest.

Two human figures and a pony stand small at the turn. I think they’re men. I can’t tell if they’re smiling or not because they lack faces.

I can bring the page closer to my face, and the painting becomes a residue of brushwork, the physiological remnant of an artist’s hand. The colored slashes and blurs are inchoate shapes. As I pull the book away, the images cohere.

Forward: all is chaos. Backward: revelation.

The two persons in the background send a chill up my spine. They block the pathway into the forest’s heart. If the painting were real, I would turn around in the foreground and walk toward the village that must lie in the other direction.

Everything will be okay. It’s a beautiful painting. But my anxiety senses something rustling the trees, even though there’s nothing there. Birds rise, an individuated dark unit, then scatter. Forever, this will be my personal totem of anxiety, an escape.

Another image comes to me now: A branch cracks and a deer freezes, evaluating the situation before it flees. Or the deer simply freezes and cannot move.

I studied Renaissance poetry in graduate school. The “thirsty deer” trope staged deer as beloved woman, huntsman as man besotted, the creek a lure. You can attract the deer by a gentle stream of affection, then capture her heart by wounding it, or her. “And with her owne goodwill hir fyrmely tyde,” as Edmund Spenser says in his sonnet sequence Amoretti:

Strange thing me seemd to see a beast so wyld so goodly wonne with her owne will beguyld.

No one asks the deer for her thoughts.

DISSOCIATION

Outside the infirmary window, trees loom tall in the night sky, evergreens ratcheted wide to narrow as the trunks ascend, deep black against a dark royal blue spiked with stars. I can’t remember definition of branches or needles; the trees seem opaque, diorama cutouts. That sky attracts me: the depth of its bluing in between the trees and flowing above them.

I think I’m up at night for an hour or so at the window because I’m restless. The nurse tells me I do this every night, all night long. I have no memory of dawn. I sleep most of the day. “I’m just off my sleep cycle,” I tell her angrily, “because of the antibiotics and lying in bed all the time.” The nurse insists I remain inpatient and go to counseling. I need to leave. If I can escape to my own bed, I’ll be able to sleep. They let me go, with a commitment to counseling not to be broken under any circumstances.

At its simplest, dissociation is detachment. In this way, detachment becomes part of the process of writing or philosophy: Plato’s allegory of the cave, in which words become labels for a truth imperfectly understood at an ordinary level of being. Res and verba, words and things, are stock terms of discussion throughout Classical philosophy, which forms the basis of early modern rhetorical practice, which becomes the basis for western literary theory. And so art may be said to depend upon how and in what way these concepts might be attached and detached, one to the other—association and dissociation.

Jacques Derrida provides the most nuanced and impenetrable discussion of how texts cohere and self-destruct. Dissociation might be deconstruction. All the semioticians draw their theories from that basic broad stroke: the differences and similarities between words and things. Are words a dream-world? Is life an illusion? Can “things” by their very solidity anchor us in a reality of any sort?

Writing, approached in our post-postmodern context, makes of reality a lucid dream, reifies an illusory world on the page, distills and elides truth, life, reality. Of course, the details of these theories are more complex than I would make them sound. And one could, of course, argue in opposition to whatever I have said. Choose your own mode of intellectual detachment.

I was a literature major in college, going on to earn a PhD in Renaissance poetry and Classical literary theory. As such, I have been certified “intelligent,” for whatever that’s worth these days.

Shakespeare writes endlessly that life is a dream, a play, a representation (a commonplace of his era by the playwright Calderón), each reiteration embroidered with verbal finery:

We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep . . .

If we shadows have offended,
Think but this, and all is mended,
That you have but slumbered here,
While these shadows did appear . . .

Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more . . .

When life becomes a dream, its terrors recede. “Think but this and all is mended.”

One purpose of art may be to redeem the unredeemable world.

That’s all well and good, to leave the theater feeling redeemed. But outside those double doors, in the dark on the sidewalk, mind, body, and word must come back together. The trees and the dark blue night sky were my theater, where I spent my nights awake, if not alert.

Outside the purview of art, if the emotional self becomes separated from the physical self, words must bring mind and body together. Sometimes, however, they can’t. Language, as we know, can fail us. Without it, mind and body separate and the past flashes only intermittently within the present mind, so that one can, purposely, no longer feel much of anything at all. Emotional numbing, it’s called.

Wordsworth writes that true art comes from “Emotion recollected in tranquility.” But what is tranquility? How can I find it? You see the problem?

EXPERIENCE

Is language adequate to describe experience? Are words good enough?

Of these dilemmas, Sarah Manguso writes: “Nothing is more boring to me than the re-re-statement that language isn’t sufficiently nuanced to describe the world. Of course language isn’t enough. Accepting that is the starting point of using it to capacity. Of increasing its capacity.”

But what if no one wanted to hear you use the language that would describe a particular experience? Or listeners turned away at the mere mention of the single word, itself a single syllable, into which is compacted some of the ugliest of human experience? Nuance, then, is for the birds, startling into a mass that scatters, incoherent.

Look, the classic example is Philomel, whose tongue was removed as punishment for her angry accusations. Later, the gods transform her into a bird. Philomel bores me. Her story isn’t nuanced. Her story’s sequence? Abduction (1) leads to sexual violence (2), which provokes her vengeance (as though we all had the capacity to engage vengeance in the service of justice), which leads to a protective transformation (3).

The abduction of Proserpina by Pluto, through the pool of Cyane, now that has the capacity of lived experience. The nymph Cyane demands justice of Pluto, as, defending her pool, “she flung her arms widespread, as if her slimness / Could block that onrush,” but Pluto

Now that’s an escape. Far better than that of the deer, frozen. “Inescapable shock,” Dr. van der Kolk says, is “a physical condition in which the organism cannot do anything to affect the inevitable.”

On using language to recollect trauma, van der Kolk writes, “the frontal lobe shuts down, including . . . the region necessary to put feelings into words, the region that creates our sense of location in time, and the thalamus, which integrates the raw data of incoming sensations.”

Creating a coherent narrative, let alone finding adequate language, left me collapsing again and again—nothing there for anyone to hold.

FINE

I am fine. I maintain this position throughout most of my therapy sessions. I have few memories of the counselor, a woman, or the room. We sit in chairs opposite one another. She wants me to tell her something, anticipates it. I don’t.

The room feels gray. I sort of know what she’d like me to tell her. But I can’t because I don’t know how to explain it. I might worry she won’t believe me. I might worry she might tell me what I think happened didn’t actually happen, or it wasn’t as bad as I make it out to be. Mostly, though, language is elusive.

After a few sessions of this, the counselor seems displeased, perhaps angry with me. I need to make her happy. I proceed to more or less fabricate a falling out with my boyfriend, S, of sophomore year, who graduated, thank goodness, at the end of that year. No one will call him in to ask him any questions.

He wanted to sleep with me (true). But he didn’t want me to be his girlfriend (sort of true). I felt bullied into sleeping with him (lie). He told other people I was a slut (lie). Now the brothers at his fraternity bother me (all but a sliver of this, a lie). I am upset (true). I am upset about the behavior of S (lie).

My story becomes so real, I begin to believe it. So I write an adapted version of this to S, with whom I talk intermittently on the phone and exchange letters. We’ve been considering I visit him over spring break.

S isn’t happy with my version of events. In his minuscule, scrawled handwriting, he pens, “I am not the monster you say I am.” His words make me cry from shame, but I’ve achieved my objective. The problem now resolved, I’m released from therapy.

GRAD SCHOOL

Enter Columbia’s main campus at 116th Street, through the black iron double gates, on a wide brick walkway. At the midpoint, stone and brick terraces step down toward Butler Library, where I spent most of my time, and, in the other direction, rise up to Low Library, which houses the administrators.

I have dreams about Columbia all the time: the terraces create surreal angles, their brick and stone creating bridges and tunnels that never existed in real life. Often, I’m downtown in SoHo, trying to walk uptown to my old apartment on 112th Street. In my dreams, I’m looking for something, and the cityscape changes levels and angles as I wander, the sidewalks’ streams of people, apartment windows above me lit within unfamiliar geometries.

In 1987 or 1988, the campus hosted a Take Back the Night march. I didn’t participate, but I read about it in the undergraduate newspaper. There were posters and candles. The words “stranger” and “acquaintance” appeared as differential modifiers for the word that seemed to match what happened to me.

When I remember connecting noun and modifier, the image I see isn’t of a photo in the campus newspaper, but the herringbone pattern of red brick, arrows pointing forward between two bands of beige mortar laid end to end.

A path. I have a phrase.

HURT

“She had done the usual trick—been nice. She would never know him. He would never know her. Human relations were all like that, she thought, and the worst (if it had not been for Mr. Bankes) were between men and women. Inevitably these were extremely insincere she thought.”

Lily Briscoe has been nice to Charles Tansley, an arrogant young philosopher, solely on the basis of sexual politics. Being nice is Lily’s duty, as it has been mine.

When X got up to turn off the television and lock the door of my dorm room, my first thought was a flurry of worry, not of danger, but of how I might manage the waltz step of I’m Not Interested in You That Way. How I might emerge with my feminine bona fides intact and not cause emotional damage to a friend.

“And then, and then—this was one of those moments when an enormous need urged him, without being conscious what it was, to approach any woman, to force them, he did not care how, his need was so great, to give him what he wanted: sympathy.”

That’s Mr. Ramsay contemplating Lily Briscoe, ten years after Lily has done her duty to support Charles Tansley’s ego. Mrs. Ramsay has died; Mr. Ramsay has no one who will replicate his wife’s immutable support.

Was that how X thought?

I hadn’t understood the magnitude of male entitlement then. I had thought it as old-fashioned as Virginia Woolf writing a century prior.

I was nice a half-step too long. Then I was pinned.

I

I kept diaries in high school, the typical sort: daily events and my crushes. The diary I kept before leaving for college had a sentimental drawing of a flower on the cover. On the inside flyleaf was a quote from Virginia Woolf, in a florid script that decontextualized her writing:

Our apparitions, the things you know us by, are simply childish. Beneath it is all dark, it is all spreading, it is unfathomably deep; but now and again we rise to the surface and that is what you see us by.

I imagined an iceberg. I liked this quotation, even though I’d no idea who Virginia Woolf was, nor from what book the quotation had come. At the time, I read it as the diary manufacturer probably intended, that I was becoming an adult, shifting my consciousness from the surface detail of childhood to the important depths of adulthood.

I didn’t keep a diary in college; I kept a writing journal, noting images and stray thoughts, any of which I might use for poems or stories. On the front page of each journal, I wrote the Woolf quotation.

Only during my senior year, reading To the Lighthouse, would I know the origin of the quotation. By then, Woolf’s words were visceral to me. After the incident, I’d developed a way to manage my self or selves. A person who seemed very much like myself lived on the surface of me, like a skin—the rest of me lost in an untraceable interior. Dr. van der Kolk says that trauma victims can lose their sense of self because their brains change. He calls it “a tragic adaptation: In an effort to shut off terrifying sensations, they also deadened their capacity to feel fully alive.”

I’d been away the first semester of my junior year. What had happened to me took place in the four-week surreal “winter term” that separated fall and spring semesters. That spring semester, the one during which I read Ovid, is mostly blacked out in my memory. I can remember track practice and track meets, my room, my roommate, and a few other things. The rest is gone.

All of my close friends were abroad that spring. When they returned in the fall, my psyche had iced over, and my apparition, childish, entertained them. Beneath that fragile surface, what I’d experienced sunk to unfathomable depths.

I can’t put much of this into words—when my friends returned from their time away, my world was restored, as if the recent past had been only theater, nothing real. Our common past and mutual present were bookends, isolating a dark incident alone on a shelf.

Dr. van der Kolk says, “Trauma by nature drives us to the edge of comprehension, cutting us off from language based on common experience or an imaginable past.”

In graduate school, the final lines of a sonnet by Sidney would fascinate me: “I am not I; pitie the tale of me.”

JANUARY

I go to the infirmary because J, a friend from high school, drops by my dorm room. Returning from my semester away, I’ve been assigned a single on a hall where I know no one; in fact, few of my friends other than J are on campus. J and I check up on each other periodically. Because he’s a man, when he tells me I look awful, I believe him. Coughing and wheezing, pale, I can barely sit up in bed. J is appalled and orders me to the infirmary, offering to walk me there himself. I decline. I’m probably going to be fine.

The light in my room is bright and clear, as it has been for many days, the associated clarity of cold seeping through the large glass window along my bed. I’ve found these clarities confounding, and I do not think I’ve been to a meal in some time, but the number of days eludes me.

Time shape-shifts. I’ve lost track of weekday versus weekend. I remember the incident, but don’t remember what happened afterward. Did I fall asleep? Stay up all night? I remember it was dark. I know I left my room to go running one morning—but that’s the last thing I remember until J knocks.

Track. I’m on the track team, and, although only early January, it seems prudent to begin training immediately. It’s cold, but I grew up in Vermont. Surely I know how to dress for a high of 17 degrees plus wind chill: sweat pants with wind pants over them; a T-shirt, sweatshirt, windbreaker. I’ll be sure to wrap a scarf around my mouth to warm the air going into my lungs. I’ll wear a hat, which I despise. Do I run three miles or five? It will be too cold to stop and walk, so I’ll just run more slowly if I tire. I think this run through carefully.

I remember the dorm parking lot, flat and black, spaces cleared of snow. The snow cover is old, compressed, with the crisp crunch and squeak of Styrofoam. I run into the countryside on a lonely road without a shoulder. My scarf does little to warm me, but each breath is cold and cleansing until the piece of fabric over my mouth turns brittle with ice.

KITCHEN

The kitchen seems very white in retrospect: white cabinets, white countertops, white sink. In contrast, the windows with their white mullions show black. C wipes down the shelves; I may have been drying dishes but am finished now. Perched on the table, X flirts with me and I laugh because that’s what I do when a man flirts with me. Men have fragile egos, or so I’ve been told. Best not to hurt their feelings.

After X leaves for his own house and housemates, C mocks my tone, my giggle, the entire charade, flipping the dishrag in disgust. Calmly, evenly, I point out that I’m not interested in X, nor he in me. “You like him,” I say, “and I think he likes you. Maybe you’re jealous.” C stops her pantomime, looks away, looks back at me, “You may be right. Maybe I am interested in him.”

The three of us are away from our home campuses for a semester program. We return to our regular college lives in January. C attends a college in Massachusetts; X and I are classmates at a college in Vermont.

C and I were roommates and we exchange letters afterward—those days-long deferred communications, pen marks on folded paper in an envelope. The voice- relay of telephone is as instant as we have, the phone attached by a cord to a wall. A stamp costs twenty-two cents; long-distance calls cost many times that, but per minute. C writes she will break up with X, something she’s been considering for a while. I don’t know if she plans to call him or write a letter.

I feel sad for X. He had been in love.

LETTERMAN

In January, I visit X on my way to my library shift. I plan to invite him to watch David Letterman with me later, so we can talk about C. She’s given him the news, I think, and I’m worried about him despite the fact he brims with self- confidence, which I suspect is all bravado.

As I walk down the hall toward X’s closed door, I can hear music playing—some kind of loud rock with which I’m unfamiliar and don’t much like. I knock and he invites me in, joking, flirting. He doesn’t seem down. I remember how spartan his room looked, dominated by the two huge speakers of his stereo system and a patterned cloth that looks tiny on the wall.

While we were, I thought, joking around—about what, I don’t remember—he flips me backward and down on his bed for a moment. I’m still smiling from our banter (banter: an effort at continuity arising from an unstable subtext) and I continue to smile because I don’t want to be rude, but his hands press very hard against my wrists. I ask him to let me go and he does.

That’s an etiquette sequence: an expression of discomfort yields release and/or apology. Sequences may be predicated on expectation, knowing what to do next in a recipe, for example.

I leave for my shift at the library. We’ll meet later for Letterman.

Sonnet sequences, a staple of Renaissance literature, tend to bury or embed the predications of their ordering. I came to enjoy decoding these rationales, a delight in a surprise. For example:

1.  Edmund Spenser’s Amoretti number 89 sonnets, connected to   verses in The Book of Common Prayer and the calendar events of the year before his marriage to Elizabeth Boyle.

2.  The sonnets of Sir Philip Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella total 108, the number of suitors Penelope had in The Odyssey. It’s a pun: Sidney was in love with Penelope Devereux.

Spenser and Sidney are the stars of their respective works, of course, their loves a mere occasion for wit.

In 1985, David Letterman is a huge star of late-night television. He was famous for his top ten lists, always in reverse order, ten to one. His methodology was surprise, sequence merely a convention.

MRS. RAMSAY

Recently, I claimed To the Lighthouse was the most calming book about upsetting things, such as time, existence, and eternity. It’s because of Mrs. Ramsay.

When I first read the novel, I was drawn to the image of Mr. Ramsay thinking his way from Q to R and, possibly, beyond them to philosophical nirvana. He wanted to succeed, to win, and I wanted that, too, then. The alphabet as an analogy to academic progression seemed right because it was orderly. I thrived on achievement.

Achievement got me through, my left brain, the hemisphere connected to logical thought. The right brain is the seat of the emotions. In the imaging studies of Dr. van der Kolk, his “scans clearly showed that images of past trauma activate the right hemisphere of the brain and deactivate the left.”

I had learned to compensate and dissociate: My intellectual self had triumphed over my emotional being. I would win a big fellowship to attend graduate school, only to find that my right brain lit up over and over again during my first year. My Columbia dorm room was in the same shoebox style as that undergraduate room, and I oriented the bed in the most logical way: the long side of the bed against the short wall at the back, all in an effort to make the room feel larger.

It would be more than a decade before I understood how my right brain had undermined me during that first year.

These days, when I read To the Lighthouse, I am drawn to Mrs. Ramsay, whose function in the novel is pure emotional being. Early on, Woolf writes, “She often felt she was nothing but a sponge sopped full of human emotions.” The passage from my high school diary comes from Mrs. Ramsay’s stream of consciousness: “Our apparitions, the things you know us by, are simply childish. Beneath it is all dark, it is all spreading, it is unfathomably deep; but now and again we rise to the surface and that is what you see us by.”

While I was in graduate school, my parents gave me a cat. I named her Mrs. Ramsay—a cat seemed a fine repository for unstated emotion, with her mammalian snuggling and purring. Nothing verbal.

Woolf’s Mrs. Ramsay lives to serve the needs of others. She has eight children and constant houseguests. I couldn’t appreciate her need to be alone until I had become a mother myself:

It was a relief when they went to bed. For now she need not think about any- body. She could be herself, by herself. And that was what now she often felt the need of—to think; well, not even to think. To be silent; to be alone. All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others.

It startles me that Mrs. Ramsay could find invisibility comforting, a nothingness, a darkness. But as she says, “this self having shed its attachments was free for the strangest adventures.” That’s how I often felt, as a young mother, that something lived within me that needed release.

Mrs. Ramsay sensed adventure in “losing personality,” in being a “core of darkness [that] could go anywhere, for no one saw it.” A wordless escape. Mrs. Ramsay stays up late into the night.

She waited for the moment “when things came together in this peace, this rest, this eternity; and pausing there she looked out to meet the stroke of the Lighthouse.” One could read this as Woolf acknowledging her own depression and her eventual suicide. That’s too easy.

The beam of the lighthouse marks the transitional moment between dark and light. That is what you see us by. Woolf wanted to be seen.

Unfathomably deep. The moment between waking and sleep, or reality and dreams. My insomnia returned during graduate school. How hard it is to let go, to fall asleep.

NO

Between M and N, the alphabet divides neatly in half: Thirteen and thirteen, two unlucky numbers unless combined. Say Mrs. Ramsay is the emotional brain, and Mr. Ramsay the logical brain, and now we’re on a familiar thematic path Woolf treads in A Room of One’s Own. Shakespeare, Woolf declared, had the perfect brain, a fusion of male and female affects.

O follows N, the word “no” embedded in the alphabet itself (the only word therein), a primeval command. M is a purr, a murmur, an OM of feline emotion wavering through the universe. My cat as I stroked her fur.

First comes emotion, then comes “no,” one of three words to which my brain had access during the incident. The others were “stop” and “please.”

In his push to move beyond Q to R, Mr. Ramsay’s logical brain snags upon his emotions, “Here, stopping for one moment by the stone urn which held the geraniums, he saw, but now far, far away, like children picking up shells, divinely innocent and occupied with little trifles at their feet and somehow entirely defenseless against a doom which he perceived, his wife and son, together, in the window.”

Those children on the shore remind me of a passage in Wordsworth’s “Ode: Intimations of Immortality”:

Hence in a season of calm weather
Though inland far we be,
Our Souls have sight of that immortal sea
Which brought us hither,
Can in a moment travel thither,
And see the Children sport upon the shore,
And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore.

Woolf was fascinated by water, and by waves. She surely knew this poem. Everyone did: Wordsworth was poet laureate of England from 1843 to 1850. Woolf was born in 1882.

Wordsworth writes of a lost world, and so does Woolf. World War I is the central omission of all of Woolf’s work, written around, but never truly discussed, the public trauma of her era. The OM, an absence of words, in precarious balance with a NO.

ORDER

These days, I spend January creating order: one year I reorganized my kitchen, pulling all the dishes, silverware, cooking pots, and utensils from their casually designated repositories and, with the choreography of meal preparation and family use in mind, re-shelved all. For some time, my muscle memory had me reaching for the wrong cupboard or switching tracks as I traversed the floor, but my mind and body eventually forgot the old habits and settled into new rhythms.

Everything I’ve represented here about the incident is out of order. Alphabets have order. Bodies do and they don’t. Minds pretend to order, and I can pretend to order with the mimesis of rearranging my things. The alphabet only yields language when its letters are taken out of order and mixed together, duplicated, deleted. Every word is a small chaos pretending to sense.

“Without sequencing,” writes Dr. van der Kolk, “we can’t identify cause and effect, grasp the long-term effects of our actions, or create coherent plans for the future.” Without logic, the emotions have no script.

I once wrote, “Human beings might be the art of chaos.” Yes. Dr. van der Kolk also says, “The imprints of traumatic experiences are organized not as coherent logical narratives but in fragmented sensory and emotional traces: images, sounds, and physical sensations.”

Something happened to me. An incident. I knew it as a violation, as sure as I am born. And yet I had no word or phrase for it, so it lacked communicative reality. All I could say was, “stop” alternated with “please stop” and “no.” My words shrunk to a reptilian part of my brain.

I reorganized my being, stripped myself to my essential core. A little wedge of darkness. But that core could go anywhere, “her horizon seemed to her limitless.” Some part of me survived. Something illogical.

PATH
During my senior year in college, I wrote ekphrastic poems, including this one:

Chemin Sous Bois, En Été

In this painting Pissarro obscures the sky,
Filling it with enormous trees and bushes,
Barely leaving room for the pale, gold path
Splashed with light, that wanders
To the forest’s heart. Two men and a pony
Stand in a pool of sun, just as the path
Bends. The two turn, invitingly, beckon your eye
To follow them into the green-gold vegetation,
Where trees and bushes blend and the leaves thicken
And rustle, fluttering like thousands of birds.
Their faces are blurred, with the vague sense
Of connaissance about them that figures have in dreams.
They pause as if they know you want to travel
With them, to penetrate the whispering forest,
The leaves drawing together behind you
When you pass, holding you in a green cocoon—
As if, sleepless, you might rest without dreams.

“Just as the path / Bends.” I was quite taken by that enjambment at the time, as it reifies the turn of this path, or chemin, and the slippage of what is real and what is dream or illusion becomes the poem’s bedrock. Many of the poems in my thesis were like that: reality vs. dream, and the use of elemental images such as sun, sky, trees, water, earth that appear to symbolize relationships between men and women, people and nature, and so on and so forth.

Paths more often fork than bend, but, in the painting, this one takes an invisible route to the left. A fork signals choice; a bend, fate or coercion. The sky here, obscured, a male icon in my little system, with physical counterparts on the path—inviting. Shy, I’m always looking to a man for the signal. The initiation. How can leaves thicken? Perhaps it’s not strictly visual, but synesthetic, a bodily effect, an arousal. The birds, of course, signal anxiety, the point before fight or flight. Which is it? Arousal, fight, flight?

The last eighteen months of college are characterized by my insomnia, which strikes several times a week. I beg the doctor at the infirmary for sleeping pills so often that he eventually refuses to prescribe them. Then, stoic, I suffer in silence, awake.

Fifteen years later, I revise the poem:

Brothers Grimm

The dream runs like this: two men and a pony
stand in a pool of sun just as the path
bends. The two turn, invitingly, beckon me
to follow them into the green-gold vegetation,
where trees and bushes blend and the leaves thicken
and rustle, fluttering like thousands of birds.
Their faces are blurred, with that sense
of recognition about them that figures have in dreams.
They pause as if they know I want to travel with them
to penetrate the whispering forest, the leaves
drawing together behind us as we pass.

I am thrilled with fear—I have never been
to this forest, never traveled with strangers.
How do you know me? I ask.
O my dear, they say in unison, you are so sweet.

The new stanza mocks my younger self, but I don’t really get that, nor do my readers. They want more characterization, more motivation, but the ending’s only there because the words felt right to me.

QUESTION

This year, in my women’s book group, we read The Silence of the Girls, by Pat Barker, a retelling of the Iliad from the perspective of Briseis. Sexual violence was encoded in both Trojan and Greek societies, a frightening expectation of life in wartime.

Our discussion opened to recent experiences in the news, as well as our own. I was hesitant to admit what had happened to me. It wasn’t until a couple of close friends followed me into the kitchen that I made my admission.

I ended up making it twice, to two different women in the privacy of my home. I explained all that had happened that night, in part, to assure them that I was, indeed, entitled to use the word I had chosen to describe it, the word that fit.

They believed me, of course. But the first question of each party, asked separately, was, “So what happened the next day?”

I was unprepared for that question. It had never occurred to me anyone would ask that.

In both instances, I was interrupted by something else before I could answer. Still, I can’t answer that. There wasn’t any “next day” because that assumes a condition of continuity. It was a discontinuous situation. Someone I knew had been transformed into someone I didn’t know. Why would I approach him? Why would he approach me?

We had changed, changed utterly.

R

Of course I remember what happened to me. “Indelible in the hippocampus” are the images and their linked sensations, the words I said, the words he used. The pressure and the pain.

But no one wants to hear this part. No one wants those words. No one likes to say or hear the word that signifies what happened, a four-letter word that can also be represented as “reap” or “pear” or “pare.”

I turn to Dr. van der Kolk: “Nobody wants to remember trauma. In that regard society is no different from the victims themselves. We all want to live in a world that is safe, manageable, and predictable, and victims remind us that this is not always the case.”

It’s preferable to think of such incidents in a criminal, rather than an experiential context. Therefore, one proves to others that what happened matches the intent, circumstances, and evidence of what the law defines as transgression.

It’s complicated: the very definition of horror, to which we are drawn and from which we turn away. The concept becomes a shape-shifter: Did it really happen? Or not? Who decides?

I say that what happened to me meets all the criteria. And that’s enough.

SHOCK

Dr. van der Kolk writes a lot about “inescapable shock,” which creates a sense of “learned helplessness.” The research, not his, was done by locking dogs in cages and administering repeated electrical shocks.

After administering several courses of electric shock, the researchers opened the doors of the cages and then shocked the dogs again. A group of control dogs who had never been shocked before immediately ran away, but the dogs who had earlier been subjected to inescapable shock made no attempt to flee, even when the door was wide open—they just lay there, whimpering and defecating. The mere opportunity to escape does not necessarily make traumatized animals, or people, take the road to freedom. Like Maier and Seligman’s dogs, many traumatized people simply give up. Rather than risk experimenting with new options they stay stuck in the fear they know.

Reading this, I am horrified—for the dogs and for myself. When I am triggered, I feel hands pressing down on my wrists, as though my arms are over my head.

Why didn’t I scream? Did I fight back hard enough? The attack was an electric shock, just as if administered to an animal.

TENNYSON

The original epigraph of my poem, “Chemin Sous Bois, en Été,” was from Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, which is a very long work. I hadn’t read all of it— just “The Death of Arthur.”

I had chosen a very long excerpt, spoken by Sir Bedivere, who has been charged with committing Excalibur to the Lady of the Lake, a return of the phallus of power to inchoate depths.

None of my professors understood what King Arthur had to do with Pissarro, and yet I stuck with my choice:

Then loudly cried the bold Sir Bedivere:
“Ah! my Lord Arthur, whither shall I go?
Where shall I hide my forehead and my eyes?
For now I see the true old times are dead,
When every morning brought a noble chance,
And every chance brought out a noble knight.
Such times have been not since the light that led
The holy Elders with the gift of myrrh.
But now the whole Round Table is dissolved
Which was an image of the mighty world,
And I, the last, go forth companionless,
And the days darken round me, and the years,
Among new men, strange faces, other minds.”

My epigraph was almost as long as my poem. I think, now, that I wanted to reify my own poem—a poem of sensations, of nuance, of an unconscious connaissance—as one of noble words, of savoir, of words that are good enough. Famous, in fact.

Manguso says that accepting language as insufficiently nuanced is “the starting point of using it to capacity. Of increasing capacity.” Instead of doing so, I wanted to hide within another’s coat of armor.

The words of the long epigraph that made the cut? “Whither shall I go? / Where shall I hide my forehead and my eyes?”

UNFATHOMABLE

In Woolf’s writing, including To the Lighthouse, World War I always represents an omission. She writes around it, not of it.

In fact, it seems she cannot bear to relive the trauma of another great war, so in March of 1941, the darkest days of World War II for Great Britain, before the United States is drawn in by the events of that December, Woolf fills her coat pockets with rocks and walks into the River Ouse.

Or at least, this is how Woolf’s decision to kill herself was presented to me during college. No one mentions that she was the victim of childhood sexual abuse. It’s the late 1980s; no one wants to discuss that horror, although the details of war are part of our curriculum.

I don’t want this to happen to me. I’ve pushed my trauma deep inside and can manage my own dissociation. “Dissociation,” says my therapist, “is the trauma survivor’s best friend.” It’s how I survive.

I will not fill my pockets with rocks so that now and again, whoever “I” am may rise to the surface. Or if not I, the fucking Lady of the Lake may break through.

VIOLATION

The pool of Cyane was violated, and Pluto, the death lord, drove Spring down to Hades. Because she ate six pomegranate seeds during her abduction to Hell, Proserpina is fated to live six months below ground, and six months above.

Pluto’s violation of Proserpina ensures us winter, while her release—a sort of probation—gives us spring and summer.

Cyane plays a minor role in Proserpina’s story, and yet it is with her sorrow that I most identify. Cyane flings out her arms, a slender defense against Pluto’s lust and says:

No farther shall you go! Ceres shall have
No son against her will; Proserpina
Should have been asked, not taken. If I may
Compare small acts with great ones, Anapis loved me,
And I became his bride, but at least he asked me,
He did not force or frighten me into wedlock.

Cyane speaks the truth of this episode, and, of course, she is completely ignored by the gods. It is Proserpina’s mother, Ceres, goddess of the harvest, who argues on her daughter’s behalf before them. Jove claims Pluto was in love and should not be shamed. Of course.

Ceres, though, raises the prospect of vengeance: if her daughter is not returned, men will no longer reap. In English, that’s a damning pun, a rearrangement of letters forming a bargain, a balance between violence and prosperity.

Cyane’s protective gesture—her arms extended as if in an embrace—proves her, to me at least, the true mother, as if she whisked a cape valiantly in front of death.

Throughout the first chapter of To the Lighthouse, Mrs. Ramsay wraps about her a green shawl. As she puts the younger children to bed after dinner, one child is afraid of an antelope skull nailed to the wall, a souvenir from one of their house guests. She wraps the green shawl about the skull, obscuring it from view.

And so the shawl remains, ten years after her death, until Lily, Mr. Ramsay, the children, and their guests return to the house in the Hebrides after World War I has ended.

Beneath Proserpina’s green, always, a skull.

WINDOW

To the Lighthouse consists of three parts: “The Window,” “Time Passes,” and “The Lighthouse.” Throughout “The Window,” Mrs. Ramsay’s wordless emotional depths are parried against Mr. Ramsay’s philosophical pronouncements and import.

The eponymous window is that through which Mrs. Ramsay looks toward the sea, the lighthouse, the weather. Section eleven of “The Window” means the most to me, from which came my diary quote, and in which Mrs. Ramsay finds a little tranquility from the life of the household, to look out the frame of glass at the lighthouse beam, “the steady light, the pitiless, the remorseless,” searching for words to verbalize her emotions.

Wordsworth had a point, strong emotions must be recollected in tranquility (Lyrical Ballads, preface, 1801):

I have said that Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity: the emotion is contemplated till by a species of reaction the tranquillity gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind.

Wordsworth’s primary objective is to break both the hold of received philosophy and that of ornate language that had long held sway in educated circles. These arguments, whether poetry is a part of philosophy or whether it is merely ornate rhetoric, have a long and circuitous backward path through the English and

Continental poets to the Classical writers of Ancient Greece and Rome, finding their origin in the teachings of Plato versus those of Aristotle. Plato calls poetry an emotional vice; Aristotle claims it is something more.

None of this matters, except to point out that by the time Poets vs. Philosophers, round 11,684, reaches Wordsworth, he must dutifully argue against the trope of the feminizing poetaster—and in his preface, he will tell us that it is, in fact, okay these days to use plain language, that of men speaking to men.

So he balances an intention to access one’s emotional side with a claim that one’s rational side must somehow prevail: Poetry is emotion recollected in tranquility. One must separate from the emotions that aroused the passions and wait until the time has come for the rational brain to process them. So that’s the way men speak to other men, rationally about emotion.

Woolf is in dialogue with Mrs. Ramsay as she writes, Woolf’s words bringing shape and contour to her character’s feelings. There is something in those unfathomable depths to be said; however, the only phrases Mrs. Ramsay can retrieve to say out loud are, “Children don’t forget”; “It will come”; “It will end”; and “We are in the hands of the Lord.”

Women talking to women? Woolf’s sentences are rushes of language, only lightly constrained by grammar and syntactical norms. An ongoing stream that might be emotion in action.

Dr. van der Kolk says, “No matter how much insight and understanding we develop, the rational brain is basically impotent to talk the emotional brain out of its own reality.”

If the wellspring of art is emotion, as Wordsworth purports to argue, art knows no boundaries; therefore, it is the duty of writers and critics to set parameters for its expression. When Pound and Eliot began using free verse in the early twentieth century, they faced reprisal over the loosening of expected restrictions, as though writing in a mode less constrained by the rules of meter and rhyme might also allow women to loosen their corsets and burn their bras.

Over the last fifty or sixty years, poetry is often used as a therapy for trauma, which truly bothers those writers for whom it is a vocation. As soon as Mrs. Ramsay says, “We are in the hands of the Lord,” she rejects it: “She had been trapped into saying something she did not mean.”

I have strenuously resisted with my own therapists the idea that my work can be reduced to the personal issues of my own recovery.

Trauma is endlessly femininized and shunned. And yet emotion recollected remains the foundation of the written arts since Wordsworth opened the window to a new and exciting way of making art.

Poetry survives, wrote Auden, “a way of happening, a mouth,” no matter how we attempt to channel it.

I will write. I will write of the incident, and I will be shamed for it. I will write of other things as well. I will find what words I can, stretching my capacity to the breaking point.

X

I don’t know what the key to trauma recovery might be. After reading The Body Keeps the Score, I’ve come to understand that I must reintegrate my mind and body.

Taking a mindfulness-based stress reduction course, I realized the following: I had to work hard to feel my body below my neck. I had to focus. I frequently feel as though my throat is clenched, as though my body seeks to protect me from speaking out. It is much easier for me to put my thoughts in writing.

The only time I feel fully embodied, feel the cross-hatch click between mind and body? When I’m running for exercise. I never wear headphones when I run; I’ve never enjoyed that. I don’t want my focus on my body broken—I want to keep my brain cycling through my body mechanics, the placement of my feet, the lift of my knees, the gradual feeling of fatigue in one muscle group and how I can use others to relieve some of the strain.

Running makes me feel alive, integrated, the one time in my day the soundtrack of my emotions finally recedes: This self having shed its attachments is free for the strangest adventures.

YEARS

Over time, I have had an urge to speak, to put words to my experience. But I reject putting a label to what happened because that word, ironically, would shift the context of my experience from something both moral and profound to a matter to be litigated. A judge might try to alter what I know.

The last novel published by Woolf in her lifetime was The Years (1937). The summer after I graduated from college, I read all of her novels in the order in which they were published. The first is The Voyage Out (1915).

That motif, travel (forward) and retrospection (backward), makes sense of myself. One of Dr. van der Kolk’s patients says, “I want to tell you what a flashback is like: it is as if time is folded or warped, so that the past and present merge.”

There are three strokes to the lighthouse beam: “The long steady stroke, the last of the three,” belongs to Mrs. Ramsay, she says. Always.

Over the years that ensue for me, a memory from the very closing of my college days, the way a lighthouse sits at the end of land (finisterre it’s called), rotates like a beacon: a kiss. That stroke of light is mine.

One autumn evening, an acquaintance, A, strides up to the library’s circulation desk, where I work. He has been away, and he holds a copy of last year’s literary magazine in one hand. “I like your poem,” he says. A’s unexpected boost to my ego fills me with delight and relief. We become friends, but romantic thoughts never cross my mind. They rarely do.

Some nights at the library, I’m the closer, which simply means I walk through every level of the building just before it shuts for the night, waking sleeping students, shutting windows, turning lights out. I carry a ring of keys for various offices. A finds me just as I’m leaving for my rounds. He wants theft-detection strips for a prank. It’s April, so close to graduation, I figure why not?

So I take him into the office where they’re kept on a high shelf. While I’m reaching for the box, A steps close to my turned back and says my name. I turn, and he kisses me, which is just a reductive label: a momentary charge of physical closeness, a gut-honest eye contact with a hesitancy that asks permission, my own returned gaze instead of looking away. Then gentle hands to my face and parted lips on my own.

To say “he kissed me” elides so much, as if all the tiny requests and acknowledgments can be glossed over. As if a kiss assumes a willing subject, always. As if any of us could ignore the fact that a sequence of willing gestures and signals stands in for words.

Abduction, violation, transformation. I was wrong. There’s no sequence. Only a break, if it occurs, between OM and NO. As the alphabet runs through its letters, the only recognizable word is “no.”

A’s kiss lights up my spine. I never knew knees could go weak; I never knew my limbs could feel like water.

Like Cyane, I melt into the pool, willing, this an alternate ending to the last time a man kissed me after my closing shift. Throughout my life, I will bring this moment back whenever I am afraid to fall asleep. It always comes, even though A is long gone.

ZED

To the Lighthouse, no matter its circular and repetitive themes, must conform to the linear act of reading, an end. Mr. Ramsay must reach Z, which has become, to him, the lighthouse. Lily Briscoe must put the final stroke on her painting.

C and I are on a train, deep in conversation. Several years have passed since we last saw each other; we have each graduated from our respective colleges. I’ve never told her what X did to me.

I don’t remember where we’re going or why, but we’ll get off at the same stop. I can feel, even now, the rocking of the train as it edged along, slowed, stopped, and the way it geared up again with a jerk.

C was one of those people who never had a filter, and I’d been awed by the reception her blunt honesty typically received: Acceptance. I knew instinctively my own honesty would not have the same capacity. But C had a way of moving through the world unassaulted.

During the time we were roommates, I remember her describing how she’d relax at home (when alone) by walking the rooms of her family’s apartment dressed only in panties. She liked to feel the city’s breeze from the open windows. Her boldness impressed me, and I imagined her prowling unobserved several flights up, the noise of traffic distant below.

Riding the train now, she turns in her seat to face me. You know, she says, her voice pitched light with dawning revelation, back then, I didn’t respect you.

I am mortified, paralyzed, my feet rooted and limbs numbing.

You didn’t respect yourself, she says with cat-like suddenness. A pause and she concludes with satisfaction, But now you do.

I want to slap her, hard. Instead, I smile and force out, Oh, thank you.

---

SOURCES

Auden, W. H. “In Memory of W. B. Yeats.” In Selected Poems: New Edition. New York: Vintage Books, 1979.

Manguso, Sarah. 300 Arguments. Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2017.

Ovid. Metamorphoses. Trans. Rolfe Humphries. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1955.

Shakespeare, William. The Riverside Shakespeare. Ed. Evans, Levin, Baker, Barton, Kermode, Smith, Edel, Shattuck. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1974.

Sidney, Sir Philip. “Astrophil and Stella.” In English Sixteenth-Century Verse: An Anthology. Ed. Richard S. Sylvester. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1974.

Spenser, Edmund. “The Amoretti.” In The Yale Edition of the Shorter Poems of Edmund Spenser. Ed. Oram, Bjorvand, Bond, Cain, Dunlop, Schell. New Haven: Yale UP, 1989.

Tennyson, Lord Alfred. “The Passing of Arthur.” In The Norton Anthology of English Literature (5th ed.): The Major Authors. M. H. Abrams, general editor. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1962.

Van der Kolk, Bessel. The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. New York: Penguin Books, 2015.

Woolf, Virginia. To the Lighthouse. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1955.

Wordsworth, William. “Ode: Intimations of Immortality” and “Preface to Lyrical Ballads.” In The Norton Anthology of English Literature (5th ed.): The Major Authors. M. H. Abrams, general editor. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1962.