Wednesday, February 26, 2020

Home Alone


“I don’t know why, but I love it when he’s out of the house,” she says with a sigh.

“And what do you do while he’s gone?” I ask.

“Nothing special. Nothing I wouldn’t do if he was around. I just enjoy having the house to myself,” she shrugs.

Ever since I reached a certain age, I’ve had some version of this conversation with a number of women friends. It often includes expressions of guilt (“I feel bad about wanting to be alone …”) accompanied by reassurances of the otherwise healthy status of the relationship (“It’s not as if we don’t get along...”).

I  haven’t questioned friends in same-sex relationships, or long-married heterosexual men, so I don’t know whether this sort of thing happens to them as well. But I suspect that women with male partners are the most acutely afflicted.

Usually the situation doesn’t arise until the couple retires, when, after years of spending the days in their respective workplaces, they suddenly find themselves sharing a living space 24/7. All kinds of revelations ensue. I, for instance, learned that my spouse liked to listen to NPR all day long. After intense negotiations, we arrived at an arrangement involving closed doors and earphones after Morning Edition goes off the air.

When couples downsize, space becomes an issue. Getting rid of things seems to come more easily to women than to men. “You wouldn’t believe all his stuff,” my friends complain. By stuff they mean aircraft carrier-sized desks covered in tilting piles of papers, outdated electronics in various states of disrepair, and slithering tangles of neckties that once enhanced his business attire.

And then there is Order and Neatness, another mostly female fixation. “When I used to come home from work,” one woman explains, “I was too tired to care if the newspaper was on the dining room table, or the closet doors were left open, but now…” Now the parka draped casually over a chair instead of hung in the closet, the rug left askew, and the imperfectly-shut dresser drawer become a major irritant, especially since the culprit is right there, all the time, doing nothing about it.  It’s possible that there are obsessively orderly men out there who suffer from their wives’ slatternly habits, but if so I wish they’d speak up.

Nevertheless, putting aside Noise, Stuff, and Neatness (too much of the first two, and not enough of the latter), there remains something about a male presence in the house that makes women long for regular doses of solitude. For one thing men, even less-than-king-sized ones, seem to occupy a lot of space. I first noticed this when I entered a co-ed high school. I couldn’t believe how much room boys took up, and how much noise they made. Whooping in voices that swooped unpredictably from bass to soprano, they loped through the halls, dropping books, slamming locker doors, jostling each other at the water fountain, stretching out their long legs under desks, and generally wreaking havoc.

True, by the time they reach their sunset years, most men have tamed that adolescent turbulence, but they still dash around more forcefully than women. In my half century of marriage, I have learned to keep well away from a closed door, in case my spouse should suddenly burst in. Even with gentle, slipper-wearing husbands who creep silently around the house, male energy has a peculiar quality that makes periodic breaks from it essential for the wife.

I suspect, however, that the need for conjugal respite has mostly to do with the heart’s propensity to grow fonder in absence. When the beloved’s presence adorns each day from dawn to dusk, it’s a necessary luxury to miss him for a while, in full knowledge that the pleasure of an empty house will soon be matched by that of hearing the key in the door, and the door shake in its hinges as the wanderer crashes in.



Wednesday, February 19, 2020

The Prime of My Cat Telemann


My gray cat, Telemann, will be three years old next week. He has reached his prime, his peak, his zenith, his apogee.
 
I should have known, when I was signing his adoption papers and he jumped up and tried to grab my pen, that I was about to take home a certain kind of cat. But at the time, all I saw was kitten adorableness.

I was going to have a gray cat, just like the writer Colette,
whose last cat, la Chatte Dernière, was also gray. Maybe
it would help me write better! It would be glorious!

And in many ways, it has been.


In others, not so much. The last three years have been a continuous struggle to anticipate, outsmart, and outmaneuver Telemann. Every drawer in the house must be completely closed at all times, or he will pull out its contents. If I leave my laptop to get more coffee, I have to remember to put down the lid, or he will edit what I’ve written. And if you come to visit, do not, whatever you do, leave your purse where you can’t watch it, or he will scatter your belongings all over the floor.

But my main struggle with Telemann has been over houseplantsNow that I no longer have a vegetable garden, and the area around our cottage is too shady for anything more colorful than hostas, I depend on houseplants for my ration of botanical pleasure. The problem is, so does Telemann.

No matter what strategies I dream up, he defeats them. He is only a medium-sized cat, but when sufficiently motivated he can stretch his lean body like taffy and reach almost any spot in the house. And what he can’t reach by stretching he reaches by jumping, aided by the powerful muscles in his hind legs and fueled by the expensive diet of raw turkey prescribed by his vet.

When I brought a tall Dracaena home from Lowe’s a couple of weeks ago, Telemann set to shredding it at once. I surrounded the pot with a scat mat (a contraption that delivers a mild electric shock when touched) and for a few hours the Dracaena made itself at home undisturbed until Telemann figured out the angle of approach that would allow him to nibble the leaves without getting zapped. I sprayed the plant with a special herbal cat deterrent, and when that didn’t work, I swabbed it with undiluted peppermint essential oil. But Telemann nibbled on.

The thing is, the Dracaena, and the blood-red, sword-shaped Cordyline, and the gigantic Peace Lily I adopted at Walmart are all, according to the ASPCA, poisonous. I have watched Telemann closely for the slightest hint of drooling, gagging, nausea, vomiting, intestinal distress, and loss of appetite. But, in this endless war, if anyone is losing appetite it’s me.

I have lain awake nights trying to figure out ways to have both a cat and a few measly houseplants (is that really too much to ask?). And the only solution I have come up with is an exquisitely precise arrangement of each plant, at a specific height and distance from the furniture, that keeps it barely out of his reach, even at his most taffy-like. But if a table or chair is moved even a millimeter from its ideal placement, he’s on the plant like a vampire in the full moon.

Speaking of sleepless nights, I have, for various reasons, had more than my share of them lately. And that is when Telemann redeems himself. When I tiptoe out of the bedroom, he rushes miaowing to greet me as if he hadn’t seen me in a month.  He throws himself on his back and wiggles ecstatically in a kind of horizontal belly dance. If I stoop and tickle his stomach he seizes my hand with his teeth, but charmingly inhibits his bite.

He follows me as I head to my study, arrange my afghan on the cot, and stretch out with my book. When everything is in place, he leaps up and, tail held high, circles seven times before he settles on my sternum with his nose against mine. Then he purrs and kneads, purrs and kneads, spreading out his white toes and digging his nails into my skin.

With all this going on, I don’t get much reading done. But there is something about that rhythmic thrumming against my rib cage that soothes and relaxes me like nothing else can, and I soon put aside the book, turn off the light, and go to sleep.

Because of this and other charms (the way he comes when called, the killer way he stares at birds, his sudden yowling gallops through the house) I forgive Telemann for his plant depredations. I wish him a long, long life, and if he’s still with me at the end of mine, I hope for the comfort of his weight on my chest and his purrs in my ear, as I say goodbye.




Wednesday, February 12, 2020

First Communion


“Don’t disturb your mother! She’s embroidering your veil.” It’s August, 1951.There is an old sheet spread on the terrace of my grandparents’ farm house, and my mother sits on a low chair in the center, a billow of white tulle on her lap. She is embroidering a wide border of leaves, tendrils, and flowers around the edge of my First Communion veil, which reaches from my head to my feet. I have been told that in the coming years she will embroider the center, and I will wear this same veil at my wedding.

“Somebody wash this child’s neck, and her feet too. The dressmaker is almost here. She can’t see her like this!” The dressmaker is coming for the final fitting of my white organdy First Communion dress: long sleeves, tiny tucks across the bodice, full gathered skirt all the way to the floor. And, underneath, a long white slip to match.

“Let’s review the Commandments,” my aunt Xin says. “You have your test with Mossèn Ignaci this afternoon.” Mossèn Ignaci, the kindly old priest who married my parents, has acceded to let me make my First Communion early. He has been assured by the family that I am an unusually well-behaved, compliant child, and that I already know my prayers and most of the Catechism, so there is no need to wait for my seventh birthday, which is when, according to the Church, I will attain the age of reason.

In the sacristy, Mossèn Ignaci tests me on the Hail Mary and the Our Father, and also on the commandments about honoring my father and mother, skipping the ones about adultery and coveting my neighbor’s wife. And then we practice the communion itself. He takes an unconsecrated host from a box and puts it on my tongue, explaining that I must let it dissolve instead of chewing it. The little wafer tastes sweet, and before I can swallow it he feeds me another one, and another, as if they were candy, so that I have no choice but to chew them a little bit. 

The day before the ceremony, my father takes me to make my first confession.  I have scoured my brain for sins ahead of time, and have come up with “I have forgotten to say my prayers,” and “I have been distracted at Mass”—sins that will come in handy for something to say during my next fourteen years of weekly confessions.

Mossèn Ignaci is hidden inside the confessional, but I can hear him breathing.  After I finish listing my sins he gives me a penance (three Hail Marys), and absolution. But it’s dark in the confessional, and I can’t tell whether the little door behind the grille is now closed, or still open. Should I leave? I wait patiently until my father, wondering what on earth I could be confessing for such a long while, comes to rescue me.

The next morning, standing in my pristine white shoes, socks, and underpants, I hold up my arms as my aunts slide the chilly, silky long slip over my torso, followed by the crisp white dress which fastens down the back in a row of tiny cloth-covered buttons that look like the mushrooms that come up in the fall after a rain. My hair is arranged in untidy corkscrew curls (“Too much hair!” my aunts exclaim before giving up). Then the magnificently embroidered veil is placed over my head (“It almost cost your mother her eyesight!” they remind me) and secured with a crown of white silk flowers.

My mother’s mother comes in, holding the all-important First Communion medal, a bas-relief ivory Madonna set in gold, hanging from a gold chain which she fastens around my neck. My tiny paternal grandmother totters in on her high heels and gives me my First Communion ring (“a bracelet for your finger”).

Somebody puts white gloves on my hands (“Don’t touch anything!”) and hangs my First Communion bag, filled with little cards commemorating the occasion, from my left wrist. I pick up my First Communion missal, which has mother of pearl covers and a gold-colored clasp, and we are ready to go.

It is a brilliant summer morning, the sun not yet hot. I set out from my grandparents’ house with my parents, my mother’s parents, her two sisters and her brother, my maternal great-aunt and -uncle, and, all the way from Barcelona, my father’s mother and father and his two sisters. We walk solemnly down the dusty road, into the village, past the parish church and the fountain with the seven spigots, then out of the village, past vineyards and wheat fields and garden allotments to the hermitage of Our Lady of the Orchard, where Mossèn Ignaci is waiting.

During Mass, I glance up at the statue of Our Lady of the Orchard, enthroned above the altar. It is a reproduction of the Romanesque original (the one supposedly found up in the elm tree by a shepherd), which was burned during the Spanish Civil War. She sits grave and impassive, her robes arranged in weirdly symmetrical folds, one hand on her Baby and, in the other, the sphere of the world.

I have some trouble managing my outfit: my long skirt catches under my shins when I kneel, and my First Communion bag gets tangled with my veil. At one point, I drop my missal with a clatter onto the stone flags. But the communion itself goes smoothly. I remember not to chew the host and, back in my pew, put my head in my hands as I’ve been taught and try to think about God.

Afterwards we march back to the house, the sun hotter now and everybody hungry because of the pre-communion fast. In the afternoon, the village children arrive and I, still in my long dress, distribute sugar-coated almonds in pale shades of pink, yellow, and blue.

Then comes a special treat: my father’s father, who is part owner of a magic shop in Barcelona, puts on a magic show. The other kids are transfixed as he manipulates playing cards, draws peseta coins out of their ears, and does odd things involving handkerchiefs and red cups and yellow balls. But magic tricks always leave me cold. They remind me of fabric flowers, which only look like the real thing. I’m after genuine magic--the mystery for which there are no words.

At the end of the day, after the children go home and I’m back in my short summer dress and espadrilles, the family sits under the apple tree by the well. I am still high on adrenaline and divine grace, racing around and begging the grownups to play with me. My father’s younger sister, Montserrat, plays hide-and-seek for a while, but then it’s bedtime, and as my mother tucks me in I burst into tears. “What’s the matter? Didn’t you have a wonderful First Communion?” she asks.

“Yes, yes, I did,” I answer.

“Then why are you crying?”

“It’s because I’ll never be able to look forward to making my First Communion, ever again,” I sob.

Which proves that it’s never too soon to learn that the happiest times are those we spend awaiting happiness.



Wednesday, February 5, 2020

The Madonna in the Tree

That magical summer of 1951 culminated in late August, when I made my first communion in the hermitage dedicated to Our Lady of the Orchards, Nostra Senyora de l’Horta--or, as I thought of her, the Madonna in the Tree. Surrounded by fields, gardens, and fruit trees, the tiny church still stands outside the village where my mother was born.

According to legend, the Madonna was discovered by a shepherd who had been napping under an elm in the middle of the orchard. He woke up and there she was, perched high among the branches. Leaving his sheep behind, the shepherd ran into the village and fetched the priest and the verger who, followed by a crowd of the devout, sped to the orchard, carefully cut down some branches, got the statue down, and carried her in solemn procession to the parish church that presides over the village square.

But the next morning, when the verger went to light the altar candles in preparation for Mass, the statue wasn’t there. Panic ensued. Who had made off with the Madonna—thieves, heretics, the devil himself? The village was searched high and low, from the mansion of the wealthy mule breeder to the hovel of the poorest laborer.

The frantic search continued until, once more, the shepherd arrived panting from the orchard.  “She’s in the tree again, right where I found her yesterday!” he gasped. The priest, the verger, and the congregants hurried to the elm, got the statue down, and returned her to what they believed was the more dignified environment of the village church. But the following morning she was back in her tree.

Worn down by the persistent Madonna, the villagers eventually gave up, and built her a little hermitage in the middle of the orchard, where she has remained ever since.

The orchard stands on ancient Roman soil, and the Romans had inherited from the Greeks the enchanting notion that every aspect of nature—trees, springs, the very air—was inhabited and protected by benevolent deities. Dryads lived in trees, and were said to bleed when the trees were cut down. Oreads haunted the breezes, and naiads swam like minnows in every stream. Even the bees had their special nymphs, the meliae. The earth’s fertility, being especially important, was attended by, among others, Artemis, Cybele, Demeter, Rhea and Hegemone.

I believe that my Madonna too is a member of that committee of goddesses. She is in charge of fruits and flowers but, in that arid climate, she is especially in charge of water. “Have mercy on us and give us rain, since you have the power,” pleads the old hymn that villagers sing on her feast day.

Compared to her naked pagan predecessors, she appears outwardly tamed and Christianized, but my Madonna, and the many like her who dot the Catalan landscape, is a recurrent manifestation of the eternal Mother, the Old Goddess whose fertility even today keeps the universe going. Our Lady of the Orchard bears witness to the human instinct to regard all of nature as animate, and to revere those aspects—air, water, plants—which give us life.

Today, with our eyes fixed on various screens, our ears connected to disembodied voices, and our skin sheltered from contact with the seasons, we need neither walk nor grow our food. We are in danger of forgetting our physical and spiritual dependence on Nature.

 Like the rest of the developed world, Catalonia is overrun with supermarkets and four-lane highways. But out in the countryside, next to a spring or on the side of a mountain, you can still find stone hermitages housing the local version of the Madonna. The ancient polichromed statues, some with dark faces and hands, look solemn and forbidding. Farmers and shepherds once entrusted them with the fertility of fields and ewes, and couples hoping for children still visit them sometimes. But the churches stand mostly empty now, and the old madonnas stare out at the shrinking fields and listen to the hum of distant traffic. Who heeds their message now?


I didn’t know any of this the summer of my first communion. All I knew was that I felt a kinship with the Madonna in the Tree. Like me, who dreaded the return to Barcelona at the end of every summer, she preferred the orchard and the spring, the sheep and the honeybee to the civilized comforts of the village. In the dark, gray days of winter, as I tunneled by metro between my parents’ apartment and my school, I would think of my Madonna in her silent orchard hermitage, listening to the wind and waiting for summer, like me.


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