Aritha van Herk

by

Wade Bell

This piece originally appeared in The Typescript

---

Aritha and I last met as we were leaving Shelf Life Books in Calgary after a reading. We hadn’t talked in years but we constructed a street corner conversation as if continuing one from the moment before. She’d read my latest book, she said. First lady of Calgary letters, a writer and scholar whose body of work is rivalled by few, mentor to several students who have gone on to have literary careers, Aritha finds time to keep up with Albertans’ writing.

I knew she liked my work. On the strength of my slim first book of stories she found a phone number for me. I was out of town working. Getting back, I discovered a message inviting me to the inaugural meeting of the Writers’ Guild of Alberta.

The meeting was held in an office in Edmonton’s warehouse district. Executives elected and our business concluded, we found ourselves in a nearby strip club. I don’t know which pied piper among us engineered that escapade but I think I can guess. Anyway, for a posse of writers, watching two nude ladies contorting together on an intimate stage proved to be a lesson in fiction as dance.

Oh, and I remember the Porsche. The famous Porsche. “Novel One” was the tag, wasn’t it? Her novel one, Judith, had captured the huge Seal prize. I once saw her driving that sleek speedster around Calgary. She was already a legend.

I don’t think I ever thanked her for including my stories in the anthologies she edited so I do so now.

Little does Aritha know but we may have a slender connection going back to childhood. Growing up in Edberg, AB, she would have been familiar with the charms of the village’s general store. That emporium belonged to my aunt and uncle. As a wee one visiting from Edmonton, I recall thinking that it was a very big place with many cans of different sizes. The cash register dinging and a number popping up behind a glass pane brought laughter from me so my uncle made it happen over and over. I imagine Aritha knew that magic well.

Edberg is a microdot on the prairie. Revered acts come from prairie microdots. Joni Mitchell, kd lang, Buffy Sainte-Marie. Rock bands hated or loved. Aritha van Herk.

Kananaskis Recapitulates Walt Whitman

for Connie, Raz and Gordon

by Wade Bell

---

Waterfall distant

Silence primal

Scat upon the path

Lone tree yellow

In a twilit field

Sings the song of itself.

Bullet and Song

by Wade Bell

After devouring a steak with fries and a liter of rosado in a bar near Barcelona’s polo grounds, Leo wandered through neighborhoods of a city he was still getting to know.

It was April, warm but not hot. Perfect for flaneuring.

Generalissimo Francisco Franco died the past November. Cold, spitting rain saw him off to the region of hottest Hell reserved for merciless dictators. Who would succeed him was Spain’s great unresolved issue. Another absolute ruler? The King and a Parliament? An elected President? For now, the fascist plague that poisoned minds and impoverished the nation lay over the land as it had for three decades.

Leo had been in Barcelona four months and with his Catalan amante six weeks. A singer, she was on his mind as he walked through the grounds of the Autonomous University. In fact, he was humming a Parisian love song from her repertoire when he spotted a group gesturing animatedly.

He supposed they were celebrating. Going closer he realized there was nothing jovial about them. A woman sat on the ground, shoulders heaving, and held a handkerchief to her face.

He was told that they’d been demonstrating against the blacklisting of a professor when a rubber bullet shattered the woman’s eye socket. They were waiting for a friend with a car to take her to a hospital. The riot cop who fired into the group and hit her still stood several meters away, beside an armored vehicle with a small blue light rotating on its roof.

Leo could do no more than shake his head in sympathy before walking on. Soon, he was at the Plaza d’España and its oak-paneled bar where young, up and coming fascists met to have fun, do business, and make out. He’d been to it once when a subject he wanted to interview, a well-known socialist, asked to meet him there. It was joke. The socialist loved calling out the evils of dictatorships while they stood three deep at the long, loud bar. The bar boasted an outstanding selection of Scotch whiskeys, as the socialist explained after ordering two rare malts which Leo would end up paying for as the price of the interview.

An hour later he was meandering through the sunless gloom of the city’s worse-for-wear Barrio Chino when a small man with large ears planted himself in front of him.

“Excuse me, sir,” the man said. “You are tall and pale. I’m guessing you are English. Yes? Then I will speak English so you understand me. I trust you find my accent not too comical.”

He took a breath. “Does the name Jean Genet mean anything to you? Jean Genet? No? Jean Genet is a great French writer, one of the most revered men of letters of our century.”

Shifting his meager weight from foot to foot, the man almost danced with enthusiasm. “Fifty years ago, sir, on this very street, possibly on this very spot, Jean Genet, cold, miserable, not much more than a shy and introverted boy, begged for food.

“The people of the barrio were dead poor in the nineteen twenties but Spanish women are religious and no matter how little they have they obey Christ’s commands. From their evening shopping they would hand him an olive or two, an apple, a bit of sausage.

“And in these hotels you see around you, sir, these fleabags scorned by tourists then as now. Yes, then too tourists came here, those with cameras looking for the humble naves, apses, and bell towers of Romanesque churches, of course, but also lechers fulfilling the salacious desires they kept well-hidden at home, wherever that might be: England, Germany, Sweden.”

The longer he talked, the more enthusiastic he became. “He, Jean Genet, tender orphan, ate his pathetic suppers in these rooms and for money gave blow jobs, if you will pardon the expression, and coupled in filthy beds with the brutal criminals he sought for love and protection.

“Alchemist of the soul that he was, he created books from that degradation. After receiving a sentence of life in prison for his crimes, Genet’s books gained him a pardon and raised him into the pantheon of the immortals of France.”

The eyes in the man’s lined face became soulful. “If not Genet, sir, would you be a devotee of the Russian ballet? You have the look…”

Leo wasn’t and might have said so but he was enjoying a glimpse of the city’s history that the guidebooks ignored.

The man continued. “Nearby, sir, in fact just one street over in the direction you happen to be facing, or, if you prefer, directly behind me, stands a small, venerable theater where a great impresario named Diaghilev last saw his beloved Vaslav Nijinsky dance. I will not ask if you are aware of those personages. I will say, however, that people by the millions on hearing those names entwined in a single breath would pause to reflect upon the arrows of love and heartbreak.

“No, no, no. Put the coin away. I did not stop you for monetary gain, sir. Seeing your eyes, I felt compelled to point out that as deeply rooted as your melancholy may be, you are not alone. No, sir. You have much company here both among the living and the ghosts. Barcelona, you see, is a city of sorrow.”

With a slight bow the man left it at that and said goodbye.

Flaneuring next into the fashionable Gothic Quarter, the city of sorrow became the romantic, sensuous city. In the crowded shopping alleys intimacy was inescapable. For centuries, people had rubbed elbows, touched shoulders, brushed past bodies in its cheerful lanes. Perhaps standing at a sidewalk coffee bar the fingertips of renegade lovers met for a clandestine moment and magic was added to a day, a week, a lifetime. Leo felt his mood lifting.

In those lanes he first met Ana, the one he loved. Now, home from work, she had showered and washed her hair and was in her midnight blue satin robe when he came in. The phone was ringing. It was María-José. They were invited to a party at her place.

Leo put olives in a cup and the cup on a black lacquered tray. He sliced a baguette, got out the cheese and soft, red sobrasada sausage they liked, poured the wine left from yesterday’s dinner into tumblers and went to the bedroom where Ana waited.

He entertained her with the story of the expert on French writers and Russian ballet. He didn’t mention the rubber bullet or explain that the man in the Barrio Chino stopped him because he seemed sad. Those details didn’t fit the mood he wished to create.

While they ate, drank the wine and talked, Leo felt a sense of the theatrical. It was as if they were on a secret stage or kids beyond the reach of parental eyes. She could do that to him. He had not felt such complete, shut-out-the-world intimacy with anyone before.

She napped because at María-José’s she would sing and it would be well after midnight when she began, and she wanted to be fresh.

He tried to sleep but musing on the rubber bullet and shattered eye unsettled him. He worried because Ana, too, took part in demonstrations where rubber bullets routinely flew and people sometimes died. His guardian instincts blossomed. But how protect an independent woman who was daily out and about in a city of millions? One patrolled by a jittery army?

Getting an idea, he finished the wine left in her glass and went to the small room at the end of the hall where he kept his notebooks. When Ana was married to another man, they had a maid, and the the maid had slept in that small room.

He didn’t yet understand the lyrics of the ballads she sang in Spanish and French and the city’s own language, the forbidden Catalan. Her spoken English was good but she read his work with difficulty so he used words he hoped she would recognize, cognates when he could manage them, and, trying for a cadence she would feel, let his sentences run on in the Latin manner, like undammed streams.

In the maid’s room he wrote a story. It wouldn’t bulletproof her. It wouldn’t solve anyone’s problems; it was just a fantasy about love by a man who had eyes on his mind.

When he finished the story, he went back to her. She had thrown off the sheet and lay naked, tan on white cotton. He hesitated for a moment, taking her in before waking her, but it was time. He showed her the pages. She asked him to read them to her. She said she liked his voice. Sitting cross-legged beside her, he did.

“From his eyes to hers he walks and from her eyes to his, the little man who balances on a beam of light as if it were a wire strung above a raging river.

“One foot surely, slowly, slipping forward, stopping and balancing, waiting for the other to cut smoothly by and take its place ahead. And in its turn waiting while the first swung out and down, and by, and up and onto the wire, surely, securely but delicately there.

“The ray the homunculus walks on is like a fiber of glass. It is like a vein of translucent marble. It is the color of a tawny cat or the amber of sunlight aged since the world’s first dawn. It’s the black of coal and nights without stars when the lovers’ touch is all that there is. And it’s white, a white that curls as in clouded chalcedony, that coils at the heart like dreams of love before love appeared.

“Back and forth he walks, smiling and proud. Fearless and free he cavorts on the ray. With nothing below and nothing at either end but the eyes of the woman ahead and the eyes of the man behind, he cartwheels, somersaults, plays hopscotch, does handstands. So sure is he in his delight that he never imagines a misstep, and so misstep occurs.

“When they grow tired, as lovers will, and he senses the beam weakening, feels it quiver and begin to give, he leaps for the nearest eye, entering it as the fiber shatters in shards of light that melt like snowflakes when they reach the pillow, warm from the lovers’ breath.

“In the brown, alluring haven of her eye or in the deep blue cave of his, the little man sleeps while the world claims the lovers.

“Patiently he waits to frolic, to dance, to balance on their ray of love.”

She thought the story was wonderful and kissed him. Then they got dressed to go out, took the stairs four floors to the street because the elevator wasn’t working and flagged a cab.

People sat on chairs. Some stood. Others sprawled on the floor, lovers in each other’s arms. María-José, magazine and book writer, with Ernesto, soft spoken medical intern from Menorca. La Falcόn, victim of government torture, stood tall and strikingly attractive. A dark eyed actor who’d had a bit part in an Almodovar film. A physics professor. Two American women from New York and their man, a writer from Washington State. There were others whom Leo did not know.

All who packed the pie-shaped piso across from the round church on Ronda Pablo Casals stopped their chatter as Ana quietly tuned her guitar. She was a voice of the city, singing in cafes and restaurants and the villas of the rich.

Tonight, petite and fragile, the instrument like an infant in her arms, she sat on the big round bed, a famous feature of the apartment. She strummed an intro, dark eyes downcast. Then, as she began to sing in their forbidden language, her vision rose to take in these trusted friends, and nodding to them and smiling the circle was united.

Life under the dictator had been hard. Dead only a few months, he still cast a long shadow and life was still hard but there were times, like that night, when sorrow, worry, and hatred were undermined by enchantment. The air in the room was soft with the perfume of dewy black Moroccan hash.

Ana touched her listeners’ spirits with Juegos Prohibidos in Spanish, Goettingen in French, and laments from Andalucia and Mexico. The lyrics Leo did not understand with the chords he couldn’t name were like water melodious over stone. They left behind in everyone an ache in a secret chamber of the heart.

Later that night, with Ana pressed to his back, Leo had a dream. He was begging on a dingy street. She offered him an apple. It was in the future. He had changed. She didn’t recognize him but she intuited that he needed to be reminded of love so she sang a song for him. It was about a little man who danced in her eyes and his.

Barcelona, 1977 – Calgary, 2024