Wittgenstein's Mistress Read online

  Yet after that paradoxically made my way westward across all of Russia with scarcely any maps at all. Driving out of the sun each morning and then waiting for it to appear ahead of me as the day progressed, simply following the sun.

  Brooding upon Fyodor Dostoievski as I went.

  Actually, I was keeping a weather eye out for Rodion Romanovitch Raskolnikov.

  Did I stop at the Hermitage? Why do I not remember if I stopped in Moscow at all?

  Well, quite possibly I drove right past Moscow without knowing it, not speaking one word of Russian.

  When I say not speaking one word, I mean not reading one either, obviously.

  And why did I write that pretentious line about Dostoievski, when I do not have any notion now if I allotted a moment's thought to the man?

  More baggage, then. At least here and now while I am typing, if not at that earlier time.

  As a matter of fact when I docked the launch after the last island and went hunting for an automobile again I was possibly even surprised that they had Russian printing on their license plates. Having half imagined that I ought to be in China.

  Though it strikes me at only this instant that one possesses certain Chinese baggage too, of course.

  Some. There seems no point in illustrating the fact.

  Even if I happen to be drinking souchong tea as I say that.

  And in either case the Hermitage may be in Leningrad.

  Then again there is no question that I was, decidedly, looking for Raskolnikov.

  Using Raskolnikov as a symbol, one can decidedly say that I was looking for Raskolnikov.

  Though one could also say that I was looking for Anna Karenina, just as readily. Or for Dmitri Shostakovich.

  I was looking when I went to Mexico too, naturally.

  Hardly for Simon, since I knew all too well that Simon was in that grave. Looking for Emiliano Zapata then, perhaps.

  Again symbolically, looking for Zapata. Or for Benito Juarez. Or for David Alfaro Siqueiros.

  Looking for anybody, anywhere at all.

  Well, even mad was looking, or for what earthly reason else, would I have gone wandering off to all of those other places?

  And had been looking on every streetcorner in New York before that, naturally. Even before I moved out of SoHo, had been looking everywhere in New York.

  And so was still looking that winter when I lived in Madrid, as well.

  I am not certain whether I have mentioned my period in Madrid.

  In Madrid I did not live at the Prado, as it turned out. Perhaps I have suggested that I had thought to do so, but it was too badly lighted.

  It is natural light that I am speaking about in this case, already having begun to shed most of my devices by then.

  Only when the sun is especially fierce can one begin to see that Rogier van der Weyden the way it wants to be seen.

  I can attest to this categorically, having even washed the windows nearest it.

  Where I lived in Madrid was in a hotel. Choosing the one they had named after Velazquez.

  Looking, there, for Don Quixote. Or for El Greco. Or for Francisco de Goya.

  How poetic most Spanish names generally sound. One can say them over and over.

  Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Marco Antonio Montes de Oca.

  Though in fact both of those may be names from Mexico again.

  Looking. Dear heaven, how anxiously I looked.

  I do not remember when it was that I stopped looking.

  In the Adriatic, when I was on my way from Troy to Greece, a ketch swooped toward me swiftly, its tall spinnaker taking noisy wind.

  Just imagine how that startled me, and how I felt.

  One moment I was sailing, as alone as ever, and a moment after that there was the ketch.

  But it had only been adrift. Through all of that time, presumably.

  Would it have been as long as four or five years, by then? I am almost certain that I remained in New York for at least two winters, before I went looking elsewhere.

  Near Lesbos, I saw that ketch. Or perhaps Scyros.

  Is Scyros one of the Greek islands?

  One forgets. There is a loss of baggage unwittingly, too.

  As a matter of fact I now suspect I ought to have said the Aegean when I said the Adriatic, a few paragraphs ago. Surely it is the Aegean, between Troy and Greece.

  This tea is baggage of a sort also, I suppose. Though in this case I did seek it out again, after that other beach house burned. Little as I burden myself with, did wish for tea.

  And some cigarettes as well, although I smoke very little, these days.

  Well, and other staples too, naturally.

  The cigarettes are the sort that come in tins. Those in paper had begun to taste stale some while ago.

  Most things did, which were packaged that way. Not to spoil, necessarily, but to turn dry.

  As a matter of fact my cigarettes happen to be Russian. That is just coincidence, however.

  Hereabouts, everything stays damp.

  I have said that.

  Still, when I remove it from a drawer, often my clothing feels clammy.

  Generally, summers as now, I wear nothing at all.

  I do have underpants and shorts, and several denim skirts that wrap around, and some few cotton jerseys. I wash everything at the stream, and then spread it across bushes to dry.

  Well, I have more clothing than that. Winter makes demands.

  Except for gathering firewood beforehand, however, I have taken to worrying about winter when winter appears.

  When it is here, it will be here.

  When the leaves fall, generally the woods remain barren for a time before the snows, and I can see all the way to the spring, or even to the continuation of my path to the highway beyond.

  It requires perhaps forty minutes to walk along the highway to the town.

  There are stores, some few, and there is a gas station.

  Kerosene is still to be found at the latter.

  I rarely make use of my lamps, however. Even when what seems the last glimmer of sunset is gone, traces still reach the room I climb upstairs to sleep in.

  Through another window at its opposite side the rosy-fingered dawn awakens me.

  Certain mornings the phrase does happen to fit, as a matter of fact.

  The houses along this beach would appear to continue endlessly, by the way. In any case infinitely farther than I have chosen to walk in either direction and still be able to return by nightfall.

  Somewhere I have a flashlight. In the glove compartment of the pickup truck, possibly.

  The pickup truck is at the highway. I suspect that I may have neglected to run the battery for some time, now.

  Doubtless there are still unused batteries at the gas station.

  Sister Juana Inés de la Cruz. I no longer have any idea who she may have been, to tell the truth.

  To tell the truth I would be equally hard pressed to identify Marco Antonio Montes de Oca.

  In the National Portrait Gallery, in London, which is not one of the museums I chose to live in, I was not able to recognize eight out of ten of the faces in the portraits. Or even almost that many of the names, identifying the portraits.

  I do not mean in the cases of people like Winston Churchill or the Brontë sisters or the Queen or Dylan Thomas, obviously.

  Still, this saddened me.

  And why does it come into mind that I would like to inform Dylan Thomas that one can now kneel and drink from the Loire, or the Po, or the Mississippi?

  Or would Dylan Thomas have already been dead before it became impossible to do such things, meaning that he would look at me as if I were mad all over again?

  Certainly Achilles would. Or Shakespeare. Or Emiliano Zapata.

  I do not remember Dylan Thomas's dates. And anyway, doubtless there was no specific date for pollution.

  One one eight six, the last four digits of somebody's phone number may have been.

  Actually, I have ne
ver been to the Mississippi either. Going and coming from Mexico I did drink from the Rio Grande, however.

  Why do I say such things? Obviously I would have had to cross the Mississippi as well, both ways, on the same trip.

  Still, it appears I have no recollection of that. Or was I mad then also?

  The queer selection of books that I read in that period, good heavens. Virtually every solitary one of them about that identical war.

  But frequently making up new versions of the stories on my own part, too, one's fanciful private improvisations.

  Such as Helen, slipping down from the battlements and meeting Achilles beside the Scamander on the sly.

  Or Penelope, making love to one after another of all of those suitors, while Odysseus was away.

  Wouldn't she have? Surely, with so many of them hanging about? And if it was truly ten years for the war and still another ten before that husband of hers materialized?

  For some reason a part I always liked was Achilles dressing like a girl and hiding, so that they would not make him go to fight.

  There is a painting of Penelope weaving in the National Gallery, actually, by somebody named Pintoricchio.

  I have said that quite badly, I suspect.

  One scarcely meaning that where Penelope is doing her weaving is in the National Gallery. Where she is doing that is on the island of Ithaca, naturally.

  Ithaca being in neither the Adriatic nor the Aegean Sea, incidentally, but in the Ionian.

  The things that do remain in one's head after all.

  I should also perhaps point out that the National Gallery and the National Portrait Gallery are not the same museum, even though they are both in London.

  As a matter of fact they are not the same museum even though they are both in the same building.

  Conversely I know next to nothing about Pintoricchio, though I once knew a great deal about many painters.

  Well, I knew a great deal about many painters for the same reason that Achilles must surely have known a great deal about Hector, say.

  All I can remember about the painting of Penelope is that there is a cat in it, however, playing with a ball of yarn.

  Doubtless the inclusion of the cat was scarcely innovative on Pintoricchio's part. Still, it is perhaps agreeable to think about Penelope with a pet, especially if I have been wrong about her and the suitors.

  I should have also perhaps said long before this that I harbor sincere doubts that that war did last those ten years.

  Or that Helen was the cause of it.

  A single Spartan girl, as somebody once called her. After all.

  But what I am basically thinking about here is how disappointingly small the ruins of Troy turn out to be.

  Like little more than your ordinary city block and only a few stories in height, practically.

  Well, though with people having lived outside of the citadel too, on the plains.

  But still.

  In the Odyssey, when she is older, Helen has a splendid radiant dignity. I read those pages two or three times, where Odysseus's son Telemachus comes to visit.

  Which means I could not have been tearing them out and dropping them into the fire, as I did when I read the plays.

  Meanwhile I have just been to the dunes again. For some reason while I was peeing I thought about Lawrence of Arabia.

  Well, I can hardly be said to have thought about him, since I know little more about Lawrence of Arabia than I do about Pintoricchio. Still, Lawrence of Arabia did come into mind.

  I can think of no connection between making a pee and Lawrence of Arabia.

  There is still that frisky breeze. It is early August, possibly.

  For a moment, strolling back, I may have been hearing some Brahms. I would say The Alto Rhapsody, though I doubt that I remember The Alto Rhapsody.

  Doubtless there was a portrait of Lawrence of Arabia at the National Portrait Gallery.

  And now I have the name T. E. Shaw in my head. But it is one more of those flitting identities that I cannot at all catch hold of.

  None of that troubles me, by the way.

  Very little does, as I may or may not have made evident.

  Well, how ridiculous under the circumstances, should I let anything do so.

  I do fret now and again, if fret is the word, over an arthritic shoulder. The left, which at times leaves me moderately incapacitated.

  Sunshine is a help, however.

  My teeth, on the other hand, do not speak of fifty years at all. Knock on wood, about my teeth.

  I cannot remember anything about my mother's teeth, trying to think back. Or my father's.

  At any rate perhaps I am no more than forty-seven.

  I cannot envision Helen of Troy with dental problems. Or Clytemnestra with arthritis.

  There was Cezanne, of course.

  Although it was not Cezanne but was Renoir.

  I have no idea, any longer, where any of my own painting materials may have gotten to, by the way.

  Once during these years I did stretch one canvas, actually. A monstrosity of a canvas, in fact, at least nine feet by five. In fact I also sized it with no less than four coats of gesso.

  And thereafter gazed at it.

  Months, I suspect, I gazed at that canvas. Possibly I even foolishly squeezed out some pigments onto my pallet.

  As a matter of fact I believe it was when I went back to Mexico, that I did that. In the house where I had once lived with Simon, and with Adam.

  I am basically positive that my husband was named Adam.

  And then after months of gazing set fire to the canvas with gasoline one morning and drove away.

  Across the wide Mississippi.

  Once in a great while I could almost see things in that canvas, however.

  Almost. Achilles, for instance, in his grief after the death of his friend, when he covered himself with ashes. Or Clytemnestra, after Agamemnon had sacrificed their daughter to raise wind for the Greek ships.

  I have no idea why Achilles dressing like a girl is a part that I always liked.

  For that matter it was a woman who wrote the Odyssey, somebody once said.

  When I was back in Mexico, all through that winter I could not rid myself of the old habit of turning my shoes upside down each morning, so that any scorpions inside might fall out.

  Any number of habits died hard, that way. For some years I continued to find myself locking doors, similarly.

  Well, and in London. Frequently taking the trouble to drive on the British side of the road.

  After his grief, Achilles got even by slaying Hector, although Hector ran and ran.

  I was about to add that this was the sort of thing men used to do. But after her own grief Clytemnestra killed Agamemnon.

  Needing some assistance. But nonetheless.

  Something tells me, obliquely, that that may have been one of the notions I had, for my canvas. Agamemnon at his bath, ensnared in that net and being stabbed through it.

  Heaven only knows why anybody could have wished for such a bloody subject, however.

  As a matter of fact whom I really may have thought to paint was Helen. At one of the burned-out boats along the strand, when the siege was finally ended, being kept prisoner.

  But with that splendid dignity, even so.

  To tell the truth it was actually just below the central staircase in the Metropolitan, where I set that canvas up. Under those high skylights where my bullet holes were.

  Where I had situated my bed was on one of the balconies, overlooking that area.

  The bed itself I had taken from one of the reconstructed period rooms, I believe, possibly American Colonial.

  What I had done about that chimney I had constructed was to wire it to the same balconies, so that it would not list.

  Though I was still making use of all sorts of devices, in those days. And so had electric heaters also.

  Well, and innumerable lights, particularly where the canvas was.

  A nine-foot
brilliantly illuminated Electra, I might have painted, had I thought about it.

  I did not think about it until this immediate instant.

  Poor Electra. To wish to murder one's own mother.

  Well, all of those people. Wrist deep in it, the lot of them, when one comes down to that.

  Irene Papas would have been an effective Electra, however.

  In fact she was an effective Helen, in The Trojan Women, by Euripides.

  Perhaps I have not indicated that I watched a certain few films while I still possessed devices, also.

  Irene Papas and Katharine Hepburn in The Trojan Women was one. Maria Callas in Medea was another.

  My mother did have false teeth, I now remember.

  Well, and in that glass beside her bed, those final weeks in the hospital.

  Oh, dear.

  Though I have a vague recollection that the projector I brought into the museum stopped functioning after I had used it no more than three or four times, and that I did not trouble to replace it.

  When I was still at my loft, in the beginning, I brought in at least thirty portable radios, and tuned each one to a different number on the dial.

  Actually those worked by batteries, not electricity.

  Obviously that was how they worked, since I doubt that I would have solved how a generator operated, that early on.

  My aunt Esther died of cancer, as well. Though Esther was my father's sister, actually.

  Here, at least, there is always a sound of the sea.

  And right at this moment a strand of tape at a broken window in the room next to this one is making scratching sounds, from my breeze.

  Mornings, when the leaves are dewy, some of them are like jewels where the earliest sunlight glistens.

  A cat scratching, that loose strip of tape could be.

  Where would it have been, that I read all of those bloody stories out loud?

  I am fairly certain that I had not yet gone to Europe when I wore my last wristwatches, if that is at all relevant.

  I doubt that wearing thirteen or fourteen wristwatches, along the length of one's forearm, is especially relevant.

  Well, and for a period several gold pocket watches also, on a cord around my neck.

  Actually somebody wore an alarm clock that very way in a novel I once read.

  I would say it was in The Recognitions, by William Gaddis, except that I do not believe I have ever read The Recognitions by William Gaddis.