Winter Count Read online

  He wished for something to hold, something to touch, to strip leaves barehanded from a chokecherry branch or to hear rain falling on the surface of a lake. In this windowless room he ached.

  1833 Stars blowing around like snow. Some fall to the earth

  1856 Reaches into the Enemy’s Tipi has a dream and can’t speak

  1869 Fire Wagon, it comes

  Applause.

  He stood up and walked in quiet shoes to the stage. (Once in the middle of class he had stopped to explain his feeling about walking everywhere in silence.) He set his notes on the podium and covered them with his hands. In a clear voice, without apology for his informality or a look at his papers, he unfolded the winter counts of the Sioux warrior Blue Thunder, of the Blackfeet Bad Head, and of the Crow Extends His Paw. He stated that these were personal views of history, sometimes metaphorical, bearing on a larger, tribal history. He spoke of the confusion caused by translators who had tried to force agreement among several winter counts or who mistook mythic time for some other kind of real time. He concluded by urging less contention. “As professional historians, we have too often subordinated one system to another and forgotten all together the individual view, the poetic view, which is as close to the truth as the consensus. Or it can be as distant.”

  He felt the necklace of hawk talons pressing against his clavicles under the weight of his shirt.

  The applause was respectful, thin, distracted. As he stepped away from the podium he realized it was perhaps foolish to have accepted the invitation. He could no longer make a final point. He had long ago lost touch with the definitive, the awful distance of reason. He wanted to go back to the podium. You can only tell the story as it was given to you, he wanted to say. Do not lie. Do not make it up.

  He hesitated for a moment at the edge of the stage. He wished he were back in Nebraska with his students, to warn them: it is too dangerous for everyone to have the same story. The same things do not happen to everyone.

  He passed through the murmuring crowd, through a steel fire door, down a hallway, up a flight of stairs, another, and emerged into palms in the lobby.

  1823 A man, he was called Fifteen Horses, who was heyoka, a contrary, sacred clown, ran at the Crow backwards, shooting arrows at his own people. The Crow shot him in midair like a quail. He couldn’t fool them

  He felt the edge of self-pity, standing before a plate-glass window as wide as the spread of his arms and as tall as his house. He watched the storm that still raged, which he could not hear, which he had not been able to hear, bend trees to breaking, slash the surface of Lake Pontchartrain and raise air boiling over the gulf beyond. “Everything is held together with stories,” he thought. “That is all that is holding us together, stories and compassion.”

  He turned quickly from the cold glass and went up in the silent elevator and ordered dinner. When it came, he threw back the drapes and curtains and opened the windows. The storm howled through his room and roared through his head. He breathed the wet air deep into his lungs. In the deepest distance, once, he heard the barking-dog sounds of geese, running like horses before a prairie thunderstorm.

  The Tapestry

  MY FATHER GREW UP in the north of Spain, in a fishing village in Asturias called Cudillero. He moved later to the south of England, then to America. As he grew older he lost his desire to travel alone and asked me to accompany him. We always went to Spain together. I met members of his family who still lived in Asturias and came to know better his relatives in Madrid. I still thought of them as his relatives rather than my own, for they remained distant and unfamiliar to me, even after I met them. They had opposed his marriage to my mother, I understood.

  Europe changed for me during those visits. It became somber and melancholic. Or perhaps I only grew older and more serious, and now memory seeks some end of its own. Europe drew me powerfully when I was younger. When I graduated from high school, the product of a rigorous Jesuit education, I was awed by European culture, and impressionable. I went there immediately after graduation with several classmates and did things anyone could have predicted. Not wanting to be taken for an American, I spoke only French. I learned to prefer espresso. I even affected what seemed to me a European habit—tearing, rather than biting, pieces off my dinner roll. For three months I rose each day at dawn and went out, not wanting to miss any part of the day. I walked about nearly overwhelmed by the opportunity before me. I put off going to the bars at night; the sensual experiences I wanted were with the things that had become metaphorical fixtures in my mind. The gardens at Versailles, because of their contrived but soothing order. I wanted to see Assisi, the high Gothic cathedral at Rheims, Bosch’s Garden of Delights, and Newton’s rooms at Cambridge.

  In that superficial but harmless way of boys of seventeen, I decided that summer that Christopher Wren was not highly enough regarded, that Mann was correct—something evil did lurk in Venice—and that the paintings of the Prado far surpassed those in the Louvre. This all passed in time, though some of these judgments proved to have a certain foundation and were long-lived. On subsequent trips I often visited the Prado. I spent long hours standing among the Rubenses, the Velazquezes and Goyas and Grecos. It is by such early, seemingly inconsequential and innocent passions, of course, that we are formed.

  The spring after my father’s death I went to Madrid to close out his affairs, and, as seemed proper, stayed with his relatives. One evening, a dinner guest who had known my father from Cudillero, Eugenio Piera, invited me to visit the Prado where he was a curator. I hesitated to accept, wary of a guided tour, however well intentioned. Museums were places of intense, private feeling for me. But I accepted Piera’s invitation. He was genial; he seemed sincere and kindly disposed. We arranged to meet in his office in the basement of the museum the following day.

  The next morning I walked the several miles from the apartment down the Paseo de la Castellana, had coffee and croissants in one of the open cafes, and was glad again I had come in April. The air was cool, the trees in leaf, well-dressed people were walking about. The order, the endurance of Spain, soothed me now.

  I met Piera at his office. He put me immediately at ease and I felt a twinge of embarrassment at having vaguely mistaken his warmth for acquisitiveness the day before, as one can do in the wake of death. We spent most of the morning in the galleries of the main floor. He told wonderful, arcane stories about some of the acquisitions, was self-deprecating about the petty jealousies of museum collectors, and tried with anecdotes to make the artists more real and fallible. He made serious points, too, but not in a heavy-handed way.

  We ate lunch at a nearby restaurant, Las Puertas. He asked if perhaps on another visit to the museum I had seen a fifteenth-century Flemish tapestry that had once hung in my grandfather’s house in Cudillero. I had not. But of all the members of my father’s family I felt closest to my grandfather, whom I had never met; I was immediately interested.

  “How did it come to be in the museum?”

  “Your uncle, Ramirez. He got it when your grandfather died. It’s unusual, I think, haunting, more like Bruegel or Bosch. It’s a very good piece.”

  The tapestry hung in a storage room. I expected it to have an effect on me right away, but it didn’t. It was large, eighteen feet by twelve, depicting scenes of rustic and courtly life separated slightly from each other by a pattern of tiny, bright flowers.

  “One thing,” said Piera, “purely a technical detail, is the quality of the cloth. The wool threads in the weft are Arras wool—”

  “How did the family come to have it?”

  “I don’t know, really, but I think your grandfather probably purchased it on a recommendation. He was such an eclectic, you know, a very conscientious buyer but not concerned to be known as a collector. I enjoyed that about him. He was completely unpretentious.”

  “I’ve heard these stories. I wish I had known him—he died many years before I was born.”

  “Oh, yes. You would have liked each other,
I think. Well—I wanted you to see this. I thought because of your attraction to the Bosch downstairs this would intrigue you.”

  “Do you have any papers for it? I had a feeling at lunch that it was very important for me to see this. Now that I am here, I am not so sure—but I feel I am missing something right in front of me. If I had more specific information—”

  “Certainly. Of course—I think I understand. This piece is very like your grandfather—please excuse my being so familiar—but, not in the general style or these various scenes, but in the … in the innocent brooding that is here. At first,”—his fingers went to the tapestry—“you think it’s, I don’t know, sinister. But no, nothing you can put your finger on. It’s not that. It’s brooding, with a foreknowledge of some catastrophe or other. Look, here—at the woman in the garden, and at these men on horseback, the threshing here in the distance. No one is speaking. No one is talking. They are all staring. But it is still very agreeable. The women are charming, the men handsome, the beautiful scarlet colors, the periwinkles, lilies, daisies—there’s no turmoil, but no abandon either. I’ll tell you what I think: this is the moment just before the whole scene—all these people, the castle, the town, the countryside—is destroyed, and they know it. Do you know what St. Ignacio said, knowing the end of the world, what would you do? Would you run to the confessional? No! he said. You go on doing whatever you are doing. This tapestry reminds me of that detachment from, I don’t know—terror. Your grandfather was like that—serene, ingenuous, but still aware of a tremendous evil in the world.”

  Piera’s fingers touched several of the scenes of women sewing, of men in pursuit of a hart. He looked across the tapestry as a man might examine a wall he has just painted, to see if he’s missed any parts.

  “I’m very fond of this piece, but I can’t tell you why. What a thing for a curator to say, eh?” He raised his shoulders in a sign of inexplicable confoundment and motioned for me to follow him.

  In his office Piera withdrew from his files a set of papers, which he asked his secretary to copy. The man returned in a few minutes with the copies. He had also found a photograph of the tapestry, which he gave me. He gave the papers back to Piera.

  I had never felt as close to my grandfather as I did at that moment. The characters of the tapestry, their expressions, all shimmered in my mind—and, too, what Piera had implied, that he had accepted uncertainty in his family and in his daily life, that he was not tyrannized.

  I thanked Piera as sincerely as I could, caught for a moment in how differently emotions can be conveyed, wanting to express my gratitude without overstating it. We shook hands impulsively, warmly, hugged a bit sheepishly, and I left. With the documents, the tapestry promised to be much more accessible. I started back quickly to where it hung, intent on fixing all the detail of its texture and proportion and color in my mind, but I was too excited and suddenly afraid of my own compulsiveness, that I was making a mistake. I continued downstairs, out through the rotunda and into the street, intending to come back.

  I walked for miles in a state of both consternation and ease, unwilling to focus my conscious thoughts for fear of closing off something much deeper. I saw the emotional abyss in which I had placed both my father and grandfather. Piera’s belief that my grandfather was aware of a tremendous evil—it had been years since I had dwelled on what was evil.

  By the time I stopped walking I was in an unfamiliar section of the city. I sat down in a small park for a while, watching the faces pass, and then crossed the street to a cafe, believing coffee would induce an order from which I could proceed.

  I took the papers Piera had given me out of my pocket and began to read. The artist was unknown, but the design was probably from one by Jennyn Fabiaen of Bruges. Woven c. 1485, perhaps in Tournai. The information that followed—the French family who had commissioned the tapestry, their contributions to the arts—all this drew me away from what I sought. I recalled how sensitive the portrayal of the hands had been, the silent eyes, the bright translucent air—“… the change from almost white highlights to the deepest purple is managed with only three transitional shades. The resulting effect is a miracle of harmony and relief.” I looked quickly at the last page—technical notes. The scarlet reds were “derived from the crushed bodies of cochineal insects from the New World”; silk thread was used “for details such as the women’s hair and the line of the horizon, which require more refined execution.”

  I sipped my coffee and looked up at a wind cutting into the crowns of plane trees in the little park. Calmer now, I went carefully over each page of what Piera had given me, following the descriptions on the photograph with my finger, the references to historical figures and the symbols in each scene. There were hundreds of historical details—a famous horse, a heraldic forgery, the words of a love ballad cleverly hidden in a huntsman’s banner. But in the end the details did not touch each other. The vision, insight into my grandfather that I sought, was now very distant. My understanding of the black-and-white photograph, the tapestry itself, the faces, all of it had shifted. In the quiet slanting light of late afternoon I felt foolish.

  I put several coins on the table and left. “Senor! Ud. ha olvidado esto,” called the waiter, holding up the papers and photograph.

  “No. No son mios, eso es de otra persona.” They belong to someone else. I strode up the avenue feeling tight in my throat but with a feeling of sudden release, of guarded elation. I felt rid of a daunting exhortation to examine life which had hung in the air since my father’s death. I wanted very much to feel what I had felt as a boy walking out of the confessional, the moral debris swept away, all extenuating circumstances dismissed. That absolution was irrevocable. You could go ahead certain in the knowledge. I had each step before me again, if I wished; between myself and my father, and a grandfather whom I could only imagine. I could feel the nearness of tears, those that threaten when one senses how much one wants a promise of intimacy to be real.

  In death, both the strange elation and the withering sadness arrive simultaneously. One day, I thought, they wind themselves back together and disappear.

  The sun was awash now, fiery on the Manzanares River. I thought that I would ask my relatives about my grandfather’s attitude toward his enemies. It would be possible to start there. Then I would go back to the Prado and see the tapestry and Piera again. And then I would go home. The sun is setting at this moment across the harbor at Cudillero. I could go there, and sail home from La Coruña.

  The Woman Who Had Shells

  THE LIGHT IS BLINDING. The vast, flat beaches of Sanibel caught in the Caribbean noon are fired with a white belligerence, shells lying in such profusion that people unfamiliar arrive believing no one has ever been here.

  The shells draw July heat from the languid air, shells brittle as Belleek, hard as stove bolts, with blushing, fluted embouchures, a gamut of watercolor pinks and blues. Shivering iridescence rises from abalone nacre. Hieroglyphics climb the walls of slender cones in spiraling brown lines. Conchs have the heft of stones. One shell hides both fists; others could be swallowed without discomfort, like pills. A form of genuflection turned over in the hand becomes a form of containment, its thin pastels the colors to chalk a prairie sunrise.

  Here at dusk one afternoon, thinking I was alone, I took off a pair of pants, a light shirt, my shoes and shorts and lay down. On my back, arms outstretched, I probed the moist, cool surfaces beneath the sheet of white shells still holding the day’s heat. I flexed and shifted against them until I lay half buried, as if floating in saltwater. The afternoon trailed from me. I was aware of a wisp of noise, like a waterfall muffled in deep woods. The pulse of my own heart faded and this sound magnified until in the mouths of the thousands of shells around and beneath me it became a wailing, a keening as disarming, as real, as sudden high winds at sea. It was into this moment—I remember opening my eyes suddenly to see flamingos overhead, their lugubrious flight etched against a lapis sky by the last shafts of light, the murmuri
ng glow of pale crimson in their feathered bellies—into this moment that the woman stepped.

  I turned my head to the side, ear pressed into the shells, and saw her first at a great distance. I was drawn to her immediately, to her tentative, cranelike movements, the reach of her hand. I imagined her fingers as polite as the waters of a slow and shallow creek, searching, sensitive even to the colors of shells, the trace of spirits. She was nearer now. With one movement she bent down and raised two shells, scallops, and cupped them to her cheeks. I saw clear in her face a look I have seen before only in the face of a friend who paints, when he has finished, when the mystery is established and accepted without explanation. I held that connection in my mind even as she turned away, knowing the chance these emotions were the same was only slight, so utterly different are human feelings, but believing we could, and do, live by such contrivance.

  I wanted to speak out but could not move. She grew smaller, touched one or two more places on the beach, like an albatross trying to alight against a wind, took nothing and disappeared.

  I stared across the white expanse into the vault of the evening sky, toward the emergence of the first stars. My respect for her was without reason and profound. I lay for hours unable to move. Whenever the urge to rise and dress welled up, a sense of the density of the air, of one thought slipping irretrievably off another into darkness overwhelmed me. When finally I stood, I saw fields of shells around me luminescent in the starlight. Near where my head had been was a single flamingo feather. Across this landscape I made my way home.

  We carry such people with us in an imaginary way, proof against some undefined but irrefutable darkness in the world. The nimbus of that moment remained with me for months. That winter, on a beach frozen to stone I stood staring at the pack ice of the Arctic Ocean. The gray sea ice gave way to gray sky in such a way that no horizon could be found. In the feeble light my breath rolled out, crystallized I knew on my eyebrows, on the fur at the edge of my face. I wanted a memento. With my heel I began to chip at the thin, wind-crusted snow on the sand. There was a small shell, a blue and black mussel barely the length of my fingernail. Stiff with the cold, I was able only with great difficulty to maneuver it into a pocket of my parka, and to zip it shut. I was dimly aware at that moment of the woman, the turning of her skirt, extending her hand to the shells on Sanibel Island.