Walls to Put Up, Walls to Take Down
Walls to put up, Walls to take down
by Stephen Dobyns
The old madhouse in Santiago stood tucked back
behind the hospital on a side street to the cemetery,
walls of cheap brick, concrete through which
the inmates had bored little holes, and walking past
one could see dozens of cleft sticks with notes
offered to the passerby, some begging for money,
others for help or food, some asking that word be sent
to some friend or relative or lover who surely
must be waiting just as they themselves had waited,
all day holding their sticks as if fishing over
a dry pond, the water seeped away, leaving several
tires, a cat skeleton tied to a brick, a rusted
car door. I remembered all this in a hotel bar
in Belgrade when a whore was telling me, "My name
is Dragonova but I prefer to be called Lolita."
Lolita the promise, Dragonova the reality,
a beautiful girl hoping to become a hairdresser,
but no matter how much I wanted her flesh, to cup
her breasts, nuzzle my nose in her belly, it was
her flesh that stood between us and what I wanted,
stood between us like the wall of the madhouse.
"A little pop," a friend said, " you should have
taken her upstairs for a little pop." But what
could we really do? She might charitably moan.
I might have my little flash of light, a meal
after which one still feels hungry. The thing is
that nobody ever went down that street in Santiago.
It was a side street. But it didn't matter, it was
the only street they had. Sometimes with my wife,
if we haven't been quarreling, it feels like
we are sitting together without skin, a large basket
of confused body parts. "In this mood," as Wordsworth
remarked, "successful composition generally begins."
It's as if I could reach her skin from the inside,
burrowing onward instead of poking at the surface
like a dowser looking for water. Flaubert in Egypt
had a wounded whore, Kuchak Hanem, who he swore
would remember him more than all the others.
"Toward the end," he wrote, "there was something
sad and loving about the way we touched."
Later he realized his self-deception. "This
particular tourist who was vouchsafed the honors
of her couch has vanished from her memory like
all the others." Also, "As for physical pleasure,
it must be slight, since the famous button, the seat
of such pleasure, is snipped off at an early age."
And he concludes, "Travelling makes one modest--
you see what a tiny spot you inhabit in the world."
And as a postscript: " I must tell you, my dear sir,
that I picked up in Beirut (I discovered them in Rhodes,
land of the dragon) seven chancres...Each night
and morning I bandage my poor prick." Recently,
in Santiago I went searching for this madhouse
and it was gone, torn down, and only a section
of wall remained through which the inmates
had pushed their sticks. A hot and smoggy day,
the streets crawled with buses, cabs. Think of
all those people in transit--all those destinations
with one single destination waiting a little further
beyond. The mental patients, more like prisoners,
had been transferred. Or perhaps with modern medicine
they had been released and had no need to ask
for anything, plead or beg for anything, as they
proceeded in speedy transition from one less
than perfect place to the next. Do you remember
how Ford Madox Ford wrote that you marry a person
to finish a conversation with her? And I also
like how that summons up that somewhat outdated
legal expression for illicit fucking: criminal
conversation, or crim con as they said in the courts.
Many times my wife and I speak only to complain
and I am the bag of stones she wears around her neck,
but other times, fewer times, we are engaged in that
long conversation, the one we stay together for,
the one we always hope for, where the flesh seems
to disappear and the parts get all jumbled together
as in a cannibal's stew, even if she sits in one chair
and I sit in another. The whore in Belgrade knew
about one hundred words in English and half were
the specialty words of her profession. I bought her
a Coke. She asked why I was in Belgrade. In explanation
I showed her the book of my poems translated into
her language. She read a few, decided she wanted it,
asked for it, asked for me to sign it, then carried it
off to her next customer, beautiful skimpily dressed
girl with a face of shadow and a book of poems.
Oh, Dragonova/Lolita sleep with it under your pillow
just once. Those inmates in Santiago could see nothing,
hear nothing. All they had were those holes and their
messages--help me, they put me in here by mistake--
and years of wanting until the whole place was
torn down, And I asked my wife who knew the city,
Didn't you ever read the messages? And she said,
No one ever stopped. Some friends told her what
the bits of paper said. At the end of the street
stood the huge granite gates of the cemetery, like
the gates of a municipal museum but bigger, a city
of corpses with its ghettos and rich neighborhoods,
rows of fancy houses although no one asks to borrow
a cup of sugar. The trouble with Belgrade, the promise
of Lolita and the actuality of Dragonova, her mad-
house walls and my madhouse walls rubbing crazily
together, what if I grew to like it? It makes me
remember an old Texan in Amsterdam in 1959--
for us teenagers the lovely Dutch whores charged
two dollars and seventy cents if any of us managed
to dredge up the nerve, for this Texan they charged
twenty-seven dollars and a lot of laughter. Still
he would stagger out each evening, his guts hurt,
kidneys hurt, his prick was wobbly and battered
as he kept banging himself against the hard Dutch flesh.
Sometimes around midnight I would find him in a bar
too depressed even to speak. He had children
somewhere, a divorced wife. What beauty gives us
is the hope of intimacy. Fashion and advertising,
the whole package, all promise a certain closeness,
an occasion when the walls might disappear,
one inmate rubbing his belly against another
belly of his choosing, or which has chosen him,
the long conversation, the erasure of isolation,
as if we might all be piled together like puppies
in a pet-shop window, a tangle of extremities
and no barriers anyplace, hardly any need to speak,
each thought anticipated and responded to,
no concern for the future, no regret for the past,
just this complete touching, this discourse
with all the barriers gone, and that's the joke,
right? Who put the walls up in the first place,
who made them indestructible and now we want them
gone? I told my wife, can you take me to that street?
So we drove through Santiago. Smog so dense
our eyes burned, but all we found were just fragments
of brick walls with little holes bored through them,
thick walls, nearly two feet of boring and digging,
then the waiting, occasionally jiggling the stick
to show someone was there, and we knew without speaking
they hadn't been released, weren't out on the street,
but that somewhere were new walls of red brick
or concrete, and on one side someone was trying to
scratch his way through walls with a pin to make a hole
big enough for a little note, a little request,
and on the other side of the traffic, the honking,
air so thick with fumes it wipes out the mountains,
leaving just the city, its constant jittery motion.