Sidewalks
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Sidewalks
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Overview
Vol. 1 Brooklyn, A Year of Favorites, Jason Diamond
Book Riot, 2014’s Must-Read Books from Indie Presses
"Valeria Luiselli is a writer of formidable talent, destined to be an important voice in Latin American letters. Her vision and language are precise, and the power of her intellect is in evidence on every page."—Daniel Alarcón
"I'm completely captivated by the beauty of the paragraphs, the elegance of the prose, the joy in the written word, and the literary sense of this author."—Enrique Vilas-Matas
Valeria Luiselli is an evening cyclist; a literary tourist in Venice, searching for Joseph Brodsky's tomb; an excavator of her own artifacts, unpacking from a move. In essays that are as companionable as they are ambitious, she uses the city to exercise a roving, meandering intelligence, seeking out the questions embedded in our human landscapes.
Valeria Luiselli was born in Mexico City in 1983 and grew up in South Africa. Her novel and essays have been translated into many languages and her work has appeared in publications including the New York Times, Granta, and McSweeney's. Some of her recent projects include a ballet performed by the New York City Ballet in Lincoln Center; a pedestrian sound installation for the Serpentine Gallery in London; and a novella in installments for workers in a juice factory in Mexico. She lives in New York City.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781566893565 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Coffee House Press |
| Publication date: | 05/13/2014 |
| Pages: | 120 |
| Sales rank: | 1,111,103 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.20(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.50(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Sidewalks
By Valeria Luiselli, Christina MacSweeney
COFFEE HOUSE PRESS
Copyright © 2010 Valeria LuiselliAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-56689-356-5
CHAPTER 1
JOSEPH BRODSKY'S ROOM AND A HALF
There is nothing more productive or more entertaining than allowing oneself to be distracted from one thing by another.
Unknown genius, possibly a reader of Blaise Pascal
Joseph Brodsky (1940–1996)
Searching for a grave is, to some extent, like arranging to meet a stranger in a café, the lobby of a hotel, or a public square, in that both activities engender the same way of being there and looking: at a given distance, every person could be the one waiting for us; every grave, the one we are searching for. Finding either involves circulating among people or tombs; approaching and scrutinizing their respective features.
To locate the grave, the definitive inscription we're looking for, it's necessary to examine the veining of the marble closely; for the face of the stranger, we must compare our expectations of the imagined profile with the various noses, chins, and foreheads present. We have to read the eyes of strangers, as an epitaph is read, until we find the exact insignia—the lapidary yes-it's-me of the person, alive or dead, waiting for us.
Marcelino Giancarlo (1900–1972)
San Michele is a rectangular island, separated from Venice by a stretch of water and a high wall that encloses its cemetery. From an airplane, the cemetery might resemble an enormous hardcover book: one of those stout, heavy dictionaries in which words—like decomposing skeletons—rest eternally.
There's something ironic about the fact that the poet Joseph Brodsky is buried there, facing the city in which he was always to be found, though forever just passing through. Perhaps he would have preferred a sepulcher far from Venice. When you come down to it, the city was, for him, a "plan B" or, to use a more literary metaphor, an Ithaca whose attraction consisted of being an always distant, imagined place. What's more, Brodsky once stated in an interview that he wanted to be buried in the Massachusetts woods; or perhaps the right thing would have been to return the body to his native St. Petersburg. But I suppose there's no sense in speculating about a person's last wishes. If will and life are two things impossible to separate, so are death and chance.
It's not easy to find Joseph Brodsky's grave there. Unlike many cemeteries in Europe, San Michele isn't a center of necro-intellectual tourism and so there are no guides or detailed maps, much less a list of the coordinates of its famous dead, like those at, for example, the entrances of Montparnasse and Père Lachaise. Other well-known people—Ezra Pound, Luchino Visconti, Igor Stravinsky, Sergei Diaghilev—are to be found in San Michele, but the location of their graves is only marked by a scarcely visible sign opposite the small, separate section where their remains lie. If you don't know that the notable foreigners are separated from the ordinary Venetians, you can spend hours wandering around between the Antoninos, Marcelinos, and Francescos, without realizing that you'll never find echoes of The Cantos or reverberations of The Rite of Spring.
Having searched for Brodsky's grave for several hours that afternoon, without even finding Stravinsky's, I was on the point of throwing in the towel. While gathering the strength to make my way to the exit of the cemetery, I sat down in the shade of a tree and smoked a cigarette.
Enea Gandolfini (1883–1917)
In his essay "On Running After One's Hat," G. K. Chesterton writes that if a person were to come across a cow during a country walk, only a true artist would be able to paint it, whereas he, not knowing how to draw the hind legs of quadrupeds, would prefer to paint the soul of that cow. I, who am neither an artist nor Chesterton, wouldn't know how to do either of these things. I've never been among that class of people—whom I greatly envy—capable of losing themselves in the pensive contemplation of a bird in flight, the industrious coming and going of ants, the serene suspension of a spider hanging in its own secretions. I am, unfortunately, too impatient to find poetry in nature's gentle rhythms.
But there's no need for a special sensibility toward the animal and vegetable kingdoms in a cemetery. It's enough to sit beneath the cypresses, gnomons of gigantic sundials, to allow oneself be possessed by the life force flourishing among the graves. Maybe it's just the silence that magnifies the frenetic flapping of the insects; just the calm that quickens the languid creeping of the lizards; just the death that animates the dying leaves of the black poplars.
I was about to stub out my cigarette and head for the cemetery gates when there was a sudden outburst of squawks. First just a few, then dozens, and then hundreds—as if squawking were as contagious among birds as laughter among people. The philosopher Henri Bergson maintained that laughter can only occur if its object is or resembles the strictly human; that a cat or an umbrella can't provoke laughter unless we see in them a human expression, form, or attitude. Could be. It seemed to me that, at least from a distance, the squawking sounded like the wheezing laughter of the elderly or the slightly insane, and for that reason alone I also burst out laughing in the midst of the silence. In any case, if I didn't admit defeat in the task of finding Brodsky's grave, it was simply down to the sudden rush of good spirits provoked by that prattling of hoarse seagulls. If I didn't find the poet, I could at least check if they were indeed squawks and not elderly Venetians laughing their way through death's door. Besides, why shouldn't I run after a grave or some birds if Chesterton, so fat, so dignified, and so intelligent, had been capable of running after a hat?
Lidia Tempesta (1889–1932)
"If there is an infinite aspect to space," writes Joseph Brodsky, "it is not its expansion but its reduction. If only because the reduction of space, oddly enough, is always more coherent. It's better structured and has more names: a cell, a closet, a grave." Brodsky recounts that the established norm for communal housing in the former Soviet Union was nine square meters per person. In the allocation of meters, he and his parents were lucky since, in St. Petersburg, they shared forty square meters: 13.3 apiece: 26.6 for his parents, 13.3 for him: a room and a half for the three of them.
One day in 1972, Joseph Brodsky, then age thirty-two, left his parents' home in 24 Liteiny Prospekt for the last time. He was exiled to the United States and never returned to St. Petersburg, because every attempt to visit his parents had to pass through the hands of a bureaucrat who considered the visit of a Jewish dissenter from the Communist Party unjustified. Brodsky was unable to attend his mother's funeral, or his father's—a "pointless" visit, said the official letter written by the gentleman behind the glass. His parents died about a year apart, sitting in the same old chair, in front of the only television in that apartment in which the three had lived.
Between that room and a half in St. Petersburg and his tomb in Venice, Brodsky occupied many other temporary spaces: other people's bedrooms, hotel rooms, apartments, prison cells, wards of mental hospitals. But perhaps a person only has two real residences: the childhood home and the grave. All the other spaces we inhabit are a mere gray spectrum of that first dwelling, a blurred succession of walls that finally resolve themselves into the crypt or the urn—the tiniest of the infinite divisions of space into which a human body can fit.
Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971)
The graves of the famous foreigners in the cemetery are not only in a separate section from those of the ordinary Venetians—heaven forbid that a gondolier should lie next to Stravinsky's wife—but there are also divisions among the foreigners. The Russian intellectuals who used to haunt Venice are on one side; everyone else on the other. The strange and ironic thing is that Joseph Brodsky is not to be found among either the Moscow or the Leningrad intelligentsia, but in a different section, next to his great enemy, Ezra Pound. And, in contrast to the others, Brodsky's grave isn't indicated by an official sign at the entrance to the section: instead, some benevolent soul has written his name in correction fluid between that of the writer of The Cantos and the arrow showing the direction of the two tombs:
Protestant Section: Ezra Pound (+ Iosif Brodsky) ->
I imagined that I'd find at least a handful of groupies eager to leave an amulet or a kiss on Brodsky's grave. But there was no one in the Protestant section. No one except an elderly woman, laden with every imaginable type of shopping bag filled with her belongings, standing by Ezra Pound's grave. I walked directly toward Brodsky without even nodding, as if marking out my territory: you with Pound, me with Brodsky.
Giuseppina Gavagnin (1824–1911)
On Brodsky's grave, inscribed with the dates 1940–1996 and his name in Cyrillic letters, were chocolates, pens, and flowers. But mostly chocolates. There was not, as is so often the case with graves in Italian cemeteries, a portrait of the deceased set into the stone.
In Watermark, his book on Venice, Brodsky writes: "Inanimate by nature, hotel room mirrors are even further dulled by having seen so many. What they return to you is not your identity but your anonymity." In a loosely paradoxical way, anonymity is a characteristic of absence: it is the absence of characteristics. A newborn face is almost devoid of singular expressions, and it gradually gains the features that identify it. But as that countenance ages and acquires greater definition, it simultaneously exposes itself to more and more looks from strangers—or, to follow Brodsky's image, to more hotel room mirrors, in which so many reflections have appeared that they all throw back the same visage, rumpled, like an unmade bed—so it also gradually loses the definition it has gained over the years, as if, being seen so often through strange eyes, it tends to return to its unformed original. This is a good thing, because the excess of definition that a face acquires with time, and which would perhaps otherwise culminate in a monstrous excess of identity—in a pained grimace, an unfriendly scowl, a worried frown—is balanced by the simultaneous loss of identity. In the very beginning and the final stretch, while a person is alive, a face moves asymptotically toward anonymity. It is natural, then, that a dead person should no longer have any face at all. The countenance of the dead must be, in any case, like those white, anonymous petals scattered on a bough to which Pound compares strangers' faces in his poem "In the Station of the Metro."
There was no portrait on Brodsky's gravestone. It seemed appropriate that that definitive stamp of identity was not there; the smooth, opaque gray of the stone was more honest—a reflection of the anonymity of a hotelmensch par excellence, a man of many hotel rooms, many mirrors, many faces. Better to stand by the grave and try to remember some photo of him sitting on a bench in Brooklyn, or bring to mind one of those recordings of his voice, at once powerful but broken, like that of someone who has passed many hours in solitude and acquired conviction through constant doubt.
Luchino Visconti (1906–1976)
The outcome of a long-awaited first meeting is often disappointing. The same is true of an encounter with a dead person, except that there's no need to hide the disappointment: in that sense, a dead person is always more agreeable than a living one. If, on standing before him, we realize that, in fact, we have nothing to do there, that the amusement lay in looking for, rather than finding the grave—what are the stones of Venice going to say to you unless you're Ruskin?—we can move away after a few minutes and the deceased will not reproach us. There's no necessity to be polite to the dead, even though religion has attempted to instill in us absurdly decorous forms of behavior at funeral masses and in cemeteries. Not speaking, praying, and walking slowly with head bowed, hands clasped at waist level, are customs that matter little to those lying six feet under.
That's why the apparently obtrusive presence of the elderly lady standing, as it then seemed to me, deep in thought by Pound's grave turned out to be so timely. She edged toward the shadow of the tree where Brodsky and I were already sharing an uncomfortable silence and began to scratch her legs as if she had fleas. When she'd finished scratching, she moved a little closer and stopped in front of Brodsky's tomb. I stepped aside. With complete calm, like someone carrying out routine domestic chores, she began to steal the chocolates which had been left for the poet. When she'd gathered them all up, she also took the pens and pencils. Looking me straight in the eye, she let out a short, abrupt cackle. Then, as if not wanting to seem impolite, she left a flower on the tombstone—purloined, I suppose, from Pound's grave.
She bent to scratch her legs again, picked up her heavy bags filled with necrological souvenirs, and left the Protestant section. I saw her disappear among the graves, as in that W. H. Auden poem Brodsky was always quoting, "silently and very fast."
FLYING HOME
Churubusco
For an impatient person, there's no torture more cruel than the one that became fashionable on transatlantic flights some time ago, where a map of a portion of the world is projected onto a screen across which a tiny white aircraft advances a millimeter every sixty seconds.
Thirty minutes, an hour, seven hours go by and the icon is still crawling over the same blue surface far from the coasts of the two continents. The best thing would be to sleep or settle down to reading something, only looking back at the screen once another two centimeters of the world map have been conquered. But those of us who lack patience are condemned to fixing our eyes on the tiny aircraft, as if by staring hard enough we could make it advance a little farther.
No invention has been more contrary to the spirit of cartography than these airplane maps. A map is a spatial abstraction; the imposition of a temporal dimension—whether in the form of a chronometer or a miniature plane that advances in a straight line across space—is in contradiction to its very purpose. As surfaces that by nature are immobile and frozen in time, maps don't impose any limitations on the imagination of the person studying them. Only on a static, timeless surface can the mind roam freely.
Hondo
Dust attracts dust. There must be a scientific explanation for this, but I've no idea what it is. All the dust in the Valley of Mexico City accumulates in the Map Library, as if this were its fate, its natural destination. This library has, for several years, and for some unfathomable reason, been housed in the National Meteorological Service building.
One would think that a place that treasures maps, or at least classifies and repairs them, would have a more or less ordered distribution of space. But this is not the case here. It's difficult to navigate your way around the Map Library and—although the space is limited—it's impossible not to lose track of where you are in relation to the entrance or, if there were one, some precise center. If you go into the room where the restoration work used to be undertaken, you no longer know where the corridor with cartographic instruments is; if you're in the small section of maps from the early nineteenth century, you completely lose any sense of the location of the modern North American ones.
In a series of long, narrow corridors, maps hang like perennially damp sheets. To study them you have to put on a surgical mask and gloves. The assistants—students of history or geography, anxious to finish their 480 hours of compulsory community service—help visitors to take the maps down and lay them on one of the large tables near the entrance. Two hands are not enough to carry the sheets—the years weigh down the paper.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Sidewalks by Valeria Luiselli, Christina MacSweeney. Copyright © 2010 Valeria Luiselli. Excerpted by permission of COFFEE HOUSE PRESS.
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Table of Contents
Introduction Cees Nooteboom 1
Joseph Brodsky's Room and a Half 7
Flying Home 17
Manifesto à velo 31
Alternative Routes 39
Cement 55
Stuttering Cities 59
Relingos: The Cartography of Empty Spaces 69
Return Ticket 79
Other Rooms 89
Permanent Residence 99