The Dogs, The Dust: Open

TamaraPanici

in the earth he digs through fall searching /out last year’s bone… see him rotting in a shady alley / how the grass grows through his ribs / a rake of eternal passage… particles spreading up in the stars / from where with this same wonder / he barks back at you –Gabriel Decuble

Uncle says, Mother says, (the silence says,)

We had to kill the dogs. They rummaged through our garden, chewed and swallowed our vegetables.

Who are we without a few beans in our bellies? Without a ripe tomato in our guts?

(It is true people will eventually eat anything to stay alive.)

The dogs deserved to die the same as anyone deserves death. It took hours or days. Days in line for handful of dust. A bag of mysterious grey pulp. We put the sludge on the smallest fire on the oven that worked harder than our country to feed fourteen mouths.

(Our bones never warm though our souls burn with the hunger for another day lived.)

We made traps with barbed wire, pulleys, and heavy rocks. Sometimes we used old car batteries.

Always there was nothing at the end of the line. (At the end of the line, you see there is nothing but a crying mother. A bloated corpse. No, not a corpse, a boy.)

When the dog falls into the trap, the weight comes down and pins his body. Then we slit his throat. The blood poured as we prayed.

Death provoked us to kill or run.

I whispered nothing in front of my neighbors and friends, my mother.

Before I ran, I was silent.

(Everyone is here.)

(Some are hidden in the ground or sky.) (Open your hands. Open your eyes.)

(Open every bone and bruise.)

(Open your head.)

(Open.)

(God has left you with the bodies.)

More Than Enough AndrewLaing

I had begun occasionally, secretly, to see an older man. He picked me up on the only blazing day of that early June, as I sunbathed uncomfortably on the concrete floor of the naked enclosure at the men’s swimming pond at Highgate. He was a hippie pianist in his late twenties who lived in a commune and smoked a lot of pot. His long straight black hair, childish face with soft brown eyes, and a posh accent made him irresistible. He adopted me, introduced me to a few bits of London he thought I should know, like the Bang disco on Monday nights on Charing Cross Road and a pub behind King’s Cross, just to get me started. My starter gay. I didn’t tell Ugo or any of my other friends at the school of architecture that I took the Tube up to Belsize Park every so often, in the afternoons, to his room with cascading spider ferns. I had never made that kind of arrangement before. He was my first. A hidden outgrowth of my adolescent touches at boarding school. My escapades I called them, nothing more, nothing less.

It was out of the question that I would tell Ugo about the hippie and my escapades; they were sealed tight in a lockbox. I was surprised he even acknowledged me during most of our first year, I felt so inferior to him. Ugo Antelminelli di Montepietro, from an ancient family in Rome with an estate in Calabria. He was the design genius of our cohort, adored by the professors, admired by all of us for his futuristic studio projects. He made it clear I was from a little provincial English place that I was leaving behind. It was useful. He spurred me on, made me determined to learn from his worldliness. And it was also surprising that he began to think I was intellectually interesting. I’m sure it was because I was reading well outside the architectural canon, veering left quickly, devouring the Marxists, the Situationists, and the Frankfurt School. I challenged him in debates about the elite class basis of modernist architecture; how the villas designed for the rich by his heroes Le Corbusier and Mies van de Rohe glossed over the inequalities of the capitalist system. He enjoyed my provocations, that I challenged his privilege. It was a way for me to flirt, though I wasn’t sure he noticed.

He invited me to stay for a few days with his family in their stylish modern apartment on the edge of Rome and to go with him to Sicily afterwards, that summer of our first year. I arrived lugging a heavy rucksack on a Eurail ticket, my first time out of England, hungry, smelly and scruffy after a rough Channel crossing. I had never been inside such a luxurious building. The uniformed attendant, who sat behind a desk in a glass-walled lobby, pointed me to a lift that opened onto Ugo’s family’s shiny, striated white marble foyer. We had lunch on a tenth-floor terrace shaded by a canopy. A contessa came for coffee. His father was a diplomat. The bedrooms had matching bedcovers and curtains. In one glance, I understood the ugliness of my mother’s slapdash house with its sitting room crowded with battered wingback chairs draped in homemade slipcovers.

The first inkling was when Ugo took me to a fusty museum to show me his favorite painting. We raced through a sequence of dull galleries to stand and stare at Caravaggio’s Saint John the Baptist in the Wilderness. Ugo explained how its dark background was a dramatic foil for the luminous pale skin of the saint, that the model had been a young laborer, our age probably, his neck sunburned, his face almost hidden in shadow. His skin was not so different than mine. The shocking beauty of the saint’s physique made me anxious, yet Ugo reveled in it. He could say things that I was not yet prepared to acknowledge, even to myself. Nevertheless, I used his admiration of Saint John as an indication of feelings he might have for me.

On our journey to Palermo in Sicily by train a few days later, I began to dare myself to wonder more. We had the cheapest class of tickets and sat crowded in a compartment with Italian soldiers in white uniforms and an old woman who shared little pastries from her basket with everyone. At the stations, young men ran alongside the train to sell fizzy, brightly colored bottled drinks through the window. As the train carriages trundled onto a ferry to cross the Strait of Messina, Ugo was slumped against me, his leg stretched out, touching mine along its length as he slept. I allowed myself not to move my leg away. I thought he was aroused, although he might have only been having a sensual dream, but I speculated that he was pretending to sleep, testing me.

We saw the lush landscapes around Noto Antico, the town ruined from an eighteenth-century earthquake. It had been rebuilt in honey-toned stone, in a far-fetched baroque style that Ugo showed me was fantastical, overelaborated, and therefore wonderful. We studied the temples at Agrigento, strung alongside the Mediterranean. He told me that we were sitting on the crepidoma, the three steps up to the platform on which the columns of the temple stood. But instead of sketching the columns in his sketchbook, he started drawing me.

But Duncan, your freckles it won’t show in the pencil, he said. Freckles? What are they? Duncan? I taught you before.

I felt awkward that he was drawing me, making it hard to remember the Italian for freckles. Lentiggini, remember? he said. They are spreading. And your skin is going pink. And the drawing won’t show your red hairs have gone yellow from the swimming. Blond, not yellow, I said, correcting him, as usual.

And even your blue eyes, he said, they stand out more now.

In Syracuse, Ugo was most excited to see the church in that oddly shaped square, the church built within a temple. Yes, the later seventh-century church had been constructed within the temple, so that the temple of Athena morphed into the Duomo. Ugo was ecstatic. He showed me why I should be thrilled to see it. And I was. Seeing the architecture through his eyes brought me closer to him, made me more like him.

We took a ferry out to the island of Lipari. We swam in the ocean among floating scratchy pumice stones from the volcanoes. In the evening, the local men held hands as they walked the passegiata, a casual kind of male intimacy unknown to me in starchy England. I commented on it. Ugo said ‘so what’ as if, of course, it was natural, and that it was me who was unnatural in finding it remarkable.

We returned to our studio projects and lectures in the autumn without further indications that anything might happen between us. I was surprised, yet again, that in the summer of our second undergraduate year, one drizzling lunchtime, Ugo asked me to go to Greece with him. We were sitting in the union bar, noisy with beer-drinkers. With my limited funds, I hadn’t made any plans to go anywhere. The summer was dwindling. He wanted to go to study the ancient Greek architecture seriously, sketch the temples, ensure we understood the details of the different classical orders.

We are the good travel companions, I would say, he said with his Italian accent, in his formal, oldfashioned way. Yet I was afraid worried about what it might mean to travel again with him, the questions it would inevitably raise. His possible interest in me would be confirmed or denied. I might have to make clear to him my own desires, for men. For him.

Ugo added that we could do everything ‘cheap, as you say, the rough way, like you talk about,’ as if to reassure me that our journey would be uncomfortable. His floppy, mousy hair bounced with excitement against his high forehead above his prominent nose. His commitment to traveling rough meant he might be willing to experiment with me, in other ways. The extra teeth of his wide smile flashed at me, not nearly as attractive as the hippie’s. But that didn’t matter at all, though. The hippie couldn’t give me Ugo’s laughter, his amazing ideas, his architecture, his heritage, his Rome and Sicily, his promise of what might happen in Greece.

Ugo would bring sketchbooks, had already made a list of temples in the little notebook that he always carried, just like on our giro in Sicily. Temples to be checked off. We could take ferries and buses and trains, but we had to fly to Athens first. I was honored that he wanted us to go together. He didn’t ask anyone else; it wasn’t going to be a group thing. Just us.

Yes, of course, I think I can do it, I said when he asked me, though I was worried about the cost, but I had a bit more money from washing dishes at the café of a rock club in Camden Lock, that summer of seventy-seven when punk was still big. During the weeks until we departed, my chest was tight with excitement.

Before Ugo and I flew to Athens in the middle of August, the hippie gave me a folded piece of paper with a tab of LSD in it. A farewell gift, to try, if I wanted to, in Greece. California Windowpane, he said it was called. The name intrigued me, suggesting tanned blond surfers and the hopeful abundance of the west coast of America. He told me to ask my friend to look after me when I took it. I secreted it in a matchbox to take with me.

But Athens disappointed. Our dismal youth hostel had shared dorm rooms in a nondescript hardto-find neighborhood. The travelers hung their limp handwashed laundry to dry on the rooftop which did not have a good view of anything.

The streets were crowded and noisy, jammed with ugly, cheap little cars.The people didn’t look like the ancient statues I admired in the British Museum. There was one river god in the museum that I liked especially, part of the Elgin Marbles stolen from the pediment of the Parthenon; he lounged, headless, with one long thigh raised up, his torso twisted towards you, his prick lolling on his other thigh, a robe hanging off one shoulder. The men in Athens were shorter and scrawnier. They smoked incessantly in packed cafes. We rushed around the Parthenon and went on a bus to Cape Sounion to see the Temple of Poseidon.

The first morning, we queued for the one shower room on our floor, behind a line of young men and women gripping thin over-used towels and little plastic boxes containing bars of soap.

Duncan, let’s just go together. Otherwise, one of us has to wait even longer, he said.

I didn’t have time to say no or think about it, but my heart was thumping as he held open the door for me graciously and looked proprietarily at the others behind us. He took off his shorts and t-shirt and hung them on a hook. I mimicked everything he did, to make sure I did the right thing in the unknown universe I had entered. I watched him showering, soaping himself all over, rinsing the sheets of his shaggy hair with his eyes screwed up, as I pretended not to be looking. I noticed his bushy, chestnut brown pubic hairs and his nicely shaped but not very big cock. Somehow, his balls looked proud in their curvy-skinned pouch. I turned away from him and washed myself.

I’ll wash your back, he said as though it didn’t matter.

He started soaping my shoulders and the middle of my back. I stared at the drain that was just a hole in the floor. He stopped soon and gave my back a pat and, to be honest, I was relieved. More touching would have been too much. For me, then. With him.

My disappointment with the men on the streets of Athens was made worse by having seen Ugo in the shower; it even influenced how I failed to appreciate the architecture. The Parthenon on the Acropolis was depleted of statues, edged by the tawdry Plaka, street after street of scrappy little trinket shops and over-priced cafes full of tourists.

We took a long overnight ferry to Rhodes. My mood improved when we arrived at the town of Lindos. Clear blue skies, quaint winding streets, startling white miniature houses with terraced roofs, a magnificent fortress and temple looking down on the town with its pretty bays and beaches. Beautiful young people flapped around us in white trousers, sandals, and cheerful t-shirts. Everyone at our college had said the thing to do was sleep in sleeping bags on the beach. Ugo said he was up for it, forcing himself outside the scruples of his rich family. After dinner on the first night, we crept down to the sea with our rucksacks and slept under scrubby trees on the edge of the beach.

In the morning, I found sand in my sleeping bag as I wriggled out of it. I didn’t know where I could wash. I lay watching young men in minute swimwear splash in the water. While Ugo went to find us breakfast, I tried to read from a book of essays by sociologists from the Frankfurt School; I don’t remember why I thought they were relevant for architectural theory, or why they were suitable beach reading. I think, looking back, I was burying my head in a world of difficult concepts to create a veil over my own contradictions: my secret escapades, my infatuation with Ugo, my inability to tell him how I felt about him as it would be the same as telling him I was queer. I didn’t deserve him, was less accomplished than him, would lose him, because I was queer. My looping thoughts went on and on, round and round. Habermas’s clear, rational chapter on the rise of coffee houses in the eighteenth century served the purpose of displace my dilemmas. I imagined sipping coffee and holding forth with other intellectuals, in a place where my bodily desires might not matter, would be irrelevant, or better still, invisible.

My book was open, but I had stopped reading. One man on the beach was impossible to ignore. Darkly tanned in a way that I would never achieve, wearing a tiny black Speedo, if Speedo even existed back then. Standing contrapposto. Ugo taught me that. One foot in front, the weight on the back leg, the body turned.

Ugo reappeared with sesame-covered bread rings and bottles of water. I nibbled on the bread. The man ran out of the water, his swimwear tighter than I was familiar with in London at the Highgate Pond or at the university pool on Malet Street. He pulled his sleek black wet hair away from his face and gave me a little look that suggested he knew it was a pleasure for me to observe him from my shady bower. He ran past us with a shiny bouncing bulge to the edge of the beach where his girlfriend was stretched out, face down.

Good looking, isn’t he? Like a Greek statue. Did you like him? Ugo said nonchalantly, twisting off the metal cap of the water bottle, smiling.

Yes, good looking, I said slowly, almost doubtfully, not allowing myself to celebrate him for Ugo or for myself.

I just wondered, that’s all, Ugo said, drinking water.

I turned over and returned to my book which I could not read, going red. The sun had already burned the skin on the back of my neck bright pink. Ugo went to look around the baking town for a scarf I could wear to protect myself but couldn’t find one, so I lay under the trees. It was a safe place to take the California Windowpane, Ugo next to me on the sand, late morning. At one in the afternoon, I told him I had swallowed the little tab from my precious matchbox and that he should watch out for me. I waited. Nothing happened for ages. After about an hour, I said that I thought the ripples of the sand were moving, as though somehow alive. It didn’t seem remarkable. That was the impression at first, everything moving, rippling, vibrating.

We walked to look at the wooden fishing boats resting on the beach. They were painted with a vividness that I could not describe to Ugo; he didn’t seem able to see what I was seeing: a navy blue immeasurably deep, an impossible apple green, an orange stripe around one of them that was the most perfect hue. It took me back to a childhood moment of rare contentment when I was lying in the grass with my eyes shut and the sun tinged the inside of my eyelids that very color; each saturated by the late afternoon sun.

We climbed up the hill to the town and sat on a wall gazing down on the Aegean. I had no sense of how long we sat there. The surface of the sea moved in circular motions, glinting as it sent me obscure messages. We walked further up into the town for dinner in an outdoor café. The sound of water being poured into our glasses was fresh and prominent.

Can you hear that? I said to Ugo. I’d never heard anything like it, what water pouring from a jug really sounded like.

Ugo was amused. The vines on the roof of the café terrace writhed like snakes.

I was being taught about motion and energy. But underneath the fascination, I fretted that the sensations might never end, that I would be trapped forever in hallucination. My brain frizzled. I wouldn’t be able to return to a rational intellectual life. I might lose my theoretical friends with their alluring foreign names.

We went back down to the dark beach to sleep, but I was wide awake, my mind agog with sensational revelations that I could not explain to Ugo.

I want to go in, I said, beginning to take off my clothes, folding them carefully on the sleeping bag to avoid sand. It was the first time I had chosen to be nude in front of Ugo, the shower in Athens didn’t count. I hadn’t thought it through, yet it was obvious to me that I should not wear anything. Now?

Yes. I’m going in right now. It was the perfect time, the only possible time. I’ll come with you. He sounded resigned.

I walked down the night sand, ahead of him, towards the black sparkling water. I felt every sand granule. Everything microscopic yet magnified. The full moon was reflected on a sea pathway of a million tossing diamonds of light. I had become a symbol of something, I did not know exactly of what. Something white and fragile, an apparition of my future self in need of protection. Yet I was ready to wade into the water to see what it might give me, to learn if it might change me.

Ugo. Look at the moon, I said.

The moist, warm salt air breathed on me rather than me breathing it. I touched the water, astonished by its wateriness as though all the molecules were sentient to me as theyinched up my legs. I was not striding into the water, the water itself was taking me in. The liquid became warmer, almost comfortable, alerting me to its soft stroking. When the water had invited me in sufficiently, I let it raise me up horizontally so that I was suspended exquisitely in place. I floated free, face up with arms outstretched, my body bobbing, part of the water, not of the land, dappled by silver. Ugo must be watching me, also skinned in silver leaf. I closed my eyes. I inhabited only the water. I didn’t know where Ugo was. I opened my eyes to the star canopy, clustered pinpricks of lights on black velvet, dispersed in endless constellations. I might know something of Greek gods.

Where are you? I called out. Who was the Greek god of the sea? He would know. I had to know. There were so many gods of water and the sea. But Poseidon was the main one, an Olympian God, he said.

He sounded close by, but I didn’t know where. I did not want to turn my head and face away from the heavens, yet I wanted Ugo to be part of what I saw, to know I had made a tantalizing discovery about the kinds of pleasures I might be able to have. They were almost in my grasp, if only I dared to speak and act.

You know about him, don’t you, we went to see it, the temple at Sounion, he said.

The water was feathering my skin. It could care for me; it was a new medium for me to inhabit. Me, a silvery scaled merman. Ugo must be close, standing, most likely also naked. I wondered if my outstretched arms could touch him.

We should go back up now. You’ll catch cold, my friend said quietly. I couldn’t stop luxuriating in the water. Yet I knew the only way I could have complete pleasure would be if Ugo would hold me, if the water would let us float together; if only he would circle his body around mine, wrap me tight, so that we spun and revolved together, looking at the stars. I didn’t think of it in sexual terms, it wasn’t his prick I wanted. But I couldn’t ask him to do anything. I couldn’t utter a request. I had no words, then, to say ‘come here, hold me, I want to touch you.’

I dropped out of my floating stance to become heavy again. My toes touched the roughness of sand and bits of shells. The viscosity of the water left me, dripping from my long hair on to my shoulders as I cooled from the breeze, yet its slight hold on me was a call to go back in. But I followed Ugo up to the beach. I admired the moving whiteness of his thighs and bottom as he ran ahead. I shivered. Without saying a word, he picked up my towel and draped it around my shoulders.

You were in the water a long time, he said.

His arm held me for an extended moment, but it was not an embrace. He rubbed my back and shoulders to dry me and get me warm. I felt every single cotton fiber of the towel, the heavy weight of the entire length of his upper arm across my neck and shoulders, an inestimable, miraculous thing.

I woke up the next morning gritty in my sleeping bag, relieved I was back to normal, yet thankful for the mysteries of the previous day. A slight after-presence of the drug remained in the lurid colors of swimsuits and a red plastic toy shovel behind on the sand and in how the crests of the waves scintillated, as if still trying to tell me something. We had another day on the beach before we left on the long ferry journey back to Athens. Ugo said we should celebrate on our last night by going to a disco he had heard about from some Italians he bumped into. The idea unnerved me, I was uncomfortable going to the obvious places where boys met girls. Ugo assured me that the place would be full of interesting people, it was higher up in the town, attached to a restaurant with marvelous views over the sea.

Colored lights were strung along the edge of the roof of the bar, open to the terrace where people had begun to dance. The crowd was our age from all over Europe. They looked good, tanned, in faded t-shirts, lithe boys and girls blonded by sun. We stood drinking ouzo. I heard Italian and French. I could tell Ugo was itching to dance, his body already making little moves. He looked closely at the smooth surface of the concrete floor painted in dayglo curvy patterns.

When they played T. Rex’s “Bang a Gong”, he touched my elbow and steered me onto the floor. I looked down at the sea through strings of yellow, blue and green lights. ‘You’ve got a hubcap diamond star halo,’ Marc Bolan sang. Everything was freighted with invisible meanings that I could not quite touch. Ugo didn’t seem to mind being seen dancing with me. He had led me on to the floor, as though we were a couple. Or just as friends. Or more than that, I couldn’t tell. Part of me wanted to avoid my confusion by not staying too close to him. We moved around the floor, mingling with others in a loose, unstructured way. The dancers flowed next to each other, moving back and forth across the little floor. Bowie’s “Diamond Dogs” came on. Ugo popped up next to me, one hand touched my waist.

I asked the DJ to play it for you, he said.

Oh. Oh. Thank you. He had remembered I was a huge fan.

I reluctantly enjoyed myself, letting the music push my mood. The floor became more crowded. Just as the song reached up into one of its crescendos, Ugo stuck himself directly in front of me and planted a short kiss on my lips.

There, he said, just for you.

He stepped away and carried on dancing, merging again with others, not paying any more attention to me. He even momentarily attached himself to a girl with long white-blonde hair and startling eyes. Perhaps it was a warning. I carried on dancing, the imprint of his lips on my mouth, afraid to look back at him.

The kiss meant I would have to speak to him. It was another mysterious gift. I couldn’t just take it as it was, for whatever it was. For what was it? The surprise kiss out of the blue, in the middle of a crowd, not at all discreet, in full view of everyone, yet they didn’t seem to notice or care. I was the only one shocked and spellbound. I had to discover its purpose.

As we walked back to the beach, more drunk from ouzo, I asked him.

Why?

Why what?

Why the kiss?

Oh, I just felt like you needed to know it was okay.

Okay? I asked.

To be who you are.

That was all. He had given me the imprimatur. To be. Okay to be whoever I was supposed to be, whatever that was, whatever that might be. That I was all right. That was the gift. It was more than enough.

And it was more than enough for me, then. But very many years later, I saw that the kiss from Ugo was the moment I should not have just graciously accepted, should not have let it go in that grateful way. Ugo might have been essential to me like no one else. I saw that later. Much too late.

What Rough Beast

JoshStein