Fall 2011 by The Harvard Advocate

The Harvard Advocate

Fall 2011

the

ard harv

te advoca

Vol. 147 No.1

8.5

ART Camille Coppola*, Molly Dektar, Julian Gewirtz, Kristie La, Avery Leonard, Rebecca Levitan, Mary Potter, Scott Roben, Nicholas Schwalbe*, Madeleine Schwartz, Zoe Weinberg. BUSINESS Ben Berman, Sofie Brooks, Ross Ford*, Edward de Fouchier*, Skyler Hicks, Beñat Idoyaga, Andrew Karn, Temi Lawoyin, Dae Lim*, David Manella, Jaron Mercer, Sasha Mironov, Anna Raginskaya, Natalie Wong, Caroline Vernick*, Emily Xie, Ge Zhang. DESIGN Charlotte Alter, Lucy Andersen, Wendy Chang, Hanna Choi, Alejandra Dean, Kayla Escobedo*, Yuanjian Oliver Luo*, Sally Scopa, Michael Segel, Lora Stoianova*, Lila Strominger, Ned Whitman*.

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EDITORIAL BOARD President Publisher Art Editor Business Manager Design Editors Features Editor Fiction Editor Poetry Editor Technology Editor Pegasi Dionysi Circulation & Publicity Managers Librarian Alumni Relations Manager Community Outreach Director

EMILY CHERTOFF JULIAN GEWIRTZ SCOTT ROBEN SOFIE BROOKS WENDY CHANG HANNA CHOI MARK CHIUSANO SOFIA GROOPMAN MATT AUCOIN JEREMY FENG MOLLY DEKTAR CHARLOTTE LIEBERMAN MADELEINE SCHWARTZ RICHARD FEGELMAN STEPHANIE NEWMAN DAN COLE MICHAEL SEGEL ERIK FREDERICKSEN JOSHUA WILSON SALLY SCOPA

FEATURES Victoria Baena, Eric R. Brewster, Spencer Burke, Emily Chertoff, Mark Chiusano, Katherine Damm*, Eva DeLappe, Molly Fitzpatrick, Georgina Parfitt, Madeleine Schwartz, Indiana Seresin*, Georgia Stasinopoulos, My Ngoc To, Alexander J. B. Wells. FICTION Brad Bolman*, Emily Chertoff, Molly Dektar, Ricky Fegelman, Erik Fredericksen, Sofia Groopman, Patrick Lauppe, Charlotte Lieberman, Julian Lucas*, Joe Masterman*, Georgia Stasinopoulos. POETRY Matthew Aucoin, Hana Bajramovic, Samantha Berstler, Wendy Chen*, Anne Marie Creighton, Ricky Fegelman, Erik Frederiksen, Julian Gewirtz, Kevin Hong*, Sarah Hopkinson, Andrew Klein, Stephanie Newman, Adam Palay, Tyler Richard, Joshua Wilson, Justin Wymer, Lara Zysman*. TECHNOLOGY Eric Arzoian, Ben Berman, Dan Cole, Jeremy Feng, Mark VanMiddlesworth, Lakshmi Parthasarathy, Michael Segel. * The Harvard Advocate congratulates its newest members.

BOARD OF TRUSTEES Chairman JAMES ATLAS Chairman Emeritus LOUIS BEGLEY Vice-Chairman DOUGLAS MCINTYRE President SUSAN MORRISON Vice-President AUSTIN WILKIE and Treasurer Secretary CHARLES ATKINSON PETER BROOKS JOHN DESTEFANO LESLIE DUNTON-DOWNER JONATHAN GALASSI LEV GROSSMAN ANGELA MARIANI DANIEL MAX CELIA MCGEE THOMAS A. STEWART JEAN STROUSE

The Harvard Advocate will anonymously consider all submissions of art, features, fiction, and poetry. Submissions may be emailed to art@theharvardadvocate.com, features@theharvardadvocate.com, fiction@theharvardadvocate.com,orpoetry@theharvardadvocate.com.Submissionsmay also be mailed to 21 South St., Cambridge MA 02138. All submissions should be original work that has not been previously published. If you wish to have your submission returned to you, please include a self-addressed stampedenvelope.Questionsaboutsubmissionsmaybedirectedtotheindividual emails above or to contact@theharvardadvocate.com. Founded in 1866, The Harvard Advocate is the nation’s oldest continuously publishedcollegeliterarymagazine.Itpublishesquarterlyfrom21SouthSt, Cambridge MA 02138. Published pieces and advertisements represent the opinions of the authors and advertisers, not The Harvard Advocate. Domestic subscription rates are $35 for one year (4 issues), $60 for two years (8 issues), $90 for three years (12 issues). For institutions and international addresses, the rates are $45 for one year (4 issues), $75 for two years (8 issues), $110 for three years (12 issues). Payable by cash or check made out to The Harvard Advocate and mailed to the above address, Attn: Circulation Manager. Back issues are available for purchase at www. theharvardadvocate.com.Nopartofthismagazinemaybereprintedwithout the permission of The Harvard Advocate. Copyright 2010 by the Editors and Trustees of The Harvard Advocate.

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TABLE of CONTENTS FEATURES 4 16 26 35

The Knife Behind the Smile On Names Recurring The Finest House in the Colony William Topaz McGonagall and the Disaster over Tay: What Happened in that Life and on that Day

My Ngoc To Victoria Baena Alexander J. B. Wells Eric Roff Brewster

FICTION 12 Arms 34 We Were Supposed

Molly Dektar Mark Chiusano

POETRY 9 The Holiday 21 Psyche in Bed

Charlotte Lieberman Julian Gewirtz

ART 10 gallus 14 Attempts at Making Wheatpaste 32 Degradation and Cold Sores and Bed Sores and a Dead Dog

Ivy Pan Sara J. Stern Kayla Escobedo

Cover Design by Wendy Chang Illustrations by Yuanjian Oliver Luo (p.4), Lora Stoianova (p.16), Sally Scopa (p.26), and Kayla Escobedo (p.35)

NOTES FROM 21 SOUTH STREET

The Knife Behind the Smile MY NGOC TO

My dad was the first in the family to get plastic surgery. He lost the tips of his fingers sixteen years ago in an accident at the paper factory where he worked when we first moved to America. My dad arrived on time and never made trouble with the other employees. Every morning saw him stepping out of our apartment in the same outfit: a tuckedin collared shirt with a small hole or two hidden in the armpits, faded dress pants, and a belt to hold up his pants on his skinny body. The clothes were all from Goodwill, just like his lunchbox, which was blue and white and had frayed plastic on the edges. Eventually, they promoted him to a management position, in which he had to watch over the cutting machine. It had a huge blade that cut giant cylinders of paper into smaller, more usable rolls. One day, the machine broke, and my dad was responsible for fixing it. While he was poking his hands in and out of the machine, something released, and the blade dropped down, slamming its edge onto his hands. It sliced off the tips of his four left fingers, cutting cleanly through the bones of the first metacarpals. What was left behind were

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bloody stumps with shriveled, blue skin at the tip and glistening hints of bone somewhere in that mess. The doctors took chunks of meat from his thighs and sewed them on as fingers. My middle sister came next when she decided to get a nose job and eyelid surgery. Then followed my eldest sister with her tummy tuck. Now, my mom is about to fall under the blade. *** We sit in the waiting room as the nurses shuffle around us. They wear heels and tight pink shirts emblazoned with jewels that spell out “BOTOX” across their over-sized breasts. The receptionist flashes us her abnormally white teeth and greets us with a face that is evenly powdered with thick, matte make up. All the nurses wear similarly sculpted faces. They maintain eternal smiles and speak with a tone too soft and sweet, like preserved cherries. I help my mom fill out the paperwork and translate some of the brochures into Vietnamese for her. We pass the time flipping through albums of Befores and Afters, page after page of

magically shrunken bellies and tightened skin. A nurse comes and escorts us to the screening office. A large mahogany desk takes up the far left corner of the room. On top of it sits a computer monitor set to a solid blue screen. A single bookshelf stands against the opposite wall, and a full-length mirror leaned casually adjacent to it. A few green plants dot the tops of the furniture, and certificates and paintings of flowers decorate the cream-colored walls. If it wasn’t for the breast implants lining the shelves of the bookcase and the examination chair sitting ominously at the center, the room could have passed for any middle-class family doctor’s office. I remember such offices. I had gone with my middle sister to a consultation before she had her surgery. I think my middle sister chose the knife because my mom called her ugly all the time. Every time they met, my mom would criticize her nose or compare her to our ugly aunt, saying that they had the exact same face. Or sometimes she would joke, “Your nostrils are so big, you’ll never be able to be rich. Any money that you find will just slip right out of them.” Usually my sister doesn’t believe in superstition, but the jokes had some truth in them—of the three sisters, my middle sister was always the one who spent her money most lavishly on clothes and perfumes. Towers of shoes and once-worn gowns filled her closet. It didn’t matter that her boyfriend thought her nose was cute. It didn’t matter that she won a beauty pageant. It didn’t matter that my mom said she was just joking the whole time. These words entered my sister and tore her apart from the inside. Of course I didn’t know how hurt she was until she told me late one night that she wanted a nose job, and I stayed up until morning trying to hold her back. I thought I could save her, but then I looked at her. Something in her eyes had already glazed over. I imagined her body being cut up into pieces by my mom’s words and reassembled into a different person by a stranger. I saw that my sister had already chosen to go down this path, and I cried. *** That was four years ago. Now, I try my best not to let my emotions seep through as my mom and I go on with the consultation. We sit down in leather chairs, and the same pretty nurse with the

BOTOX shirt sits down in front of us. My mom conjures up her best English and explains that she would like a facelift, tummy tuck, and perhaps eyelid surgery. The nurse smiles. She selects a few videos for us to watch on the computer and then excuses herself from the room. My mom and I go through them. The videos take us through a step-by-step methodology of each type of surgery. To perform a facelift, the surgeons make a long U-shaped incision that starts from the temples, reaches the base of the ear, and curves backwards to the hairline. This makes a pocket in the face. The surgeons pull up the skin, disconnecting it from underlying tissue, and scrape away any excess fat within the pocket. The skin is then pulled back to the ears. Any excess is removed, and the wound is closed. In cases when there is too much fat beneath the chin, they will also make a small incision at the base of the chin to suck it out. To perform a tummy tuck, surgeons make three incisions in the body: a smile along the pubic line extending towards the hips, a frown below the rib cage, and a circle around the belly button. They cut the frowns and the smiles so that the ends meet each other, making an eye-shape on the stomach. This eye covers the areas of skin that will later be removed. The belly button is set free by the incisions surrounding it, so that it will not be ripped off from the body when the skin comes off. After these first three cuts are made, the doctors take a pair of clamps and peel off the skin starting from one corner of the eye. The videos present us with clean, spotless skin without any fat residues; seamless, bloodless cuts; and smooth, pink muscles in every diagram. When surgeons actually perform surgery, they have to tug hard because the skin is still alive and clings to the muscle throbbing underneath. Human fat is yellow and clings to the skin in tumorous clumps, like gelatinous stalactites. All of the fat is removed, sucked out with tubes, cut away with knives. A considerable amount simply rips away along with the skin. Muscle is red, and its sinews run parallel to each other, forming tiny grooves in between the fibers of the meat. Blood sometimes gets stuck inside these grooves and clots, forming brown puddles during surgery. It looks as if someone threw embers onto the body, turning the flesh to ash in areas where the skin was burnt the most. Once the eye on the belly is removed completely, the surgeons lift it off the body. It looks like a

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sagging hide of road kill, though everyone knows that it belonged to something human. To finish the procedure, they pull the flap of skin above the gaping hole down, over the belly button, until it meets with the bottom lid of the recently removed eye. The skin is held in place as they suture the flaps back together. Finally, they locate the belly button hiding beneath the skin and cut a hole around it so that it can reemerge. To finish the operation, they secure the bellybutton with a few last stitches. *** My eldest sister recently went through this procedure. I found out about it when I was roaming around Argentina. Sitting at an internet café, I opened an email from my middle sister explaining how she would be taking my eldest sister home after the operation. It would have been so easy if I could have just been mad. I wanted to place my sister into the paradigm of an insecure, needy middle-aged woman who complains too much. I wanted to be mad at her husband for agreeing, at my sister for being an ally. I wanted to have screamed in protest and written a long email in response. Then it would have been simple. But I couldn’t. Instead of words of rage, I found only sympathy. I couldn’t blame her—not after having seen her real stomach. I had come to her house and found her lying down breastfeeding her youngest son. It looked as though she had taken a nap with the baby because the sheets were rumpled, her hair was tousled, and her shirt was pulled back from turning in her sleep. It revealed a small triangle of skin at her stomach. We started talking, and at some point during our conversation she saw me looking and lifted her shirt up to reveal the entirety of her scarred stomach. It looked like a balloon that had been fully inflated and left to slowly deflate on its own, with wrinkles and dents and strange craters all over its sides. Stretch marks covered everything below the ribcage, and a smiling scar ran across her pubic line, the result of multiple caesarian sections. The skin sagged. It sank down the base of her pubic line. This was all the extra skin that her body had no use for after giving birth to three children. There was so much skin that when she clenched it with her hands, blobs rolled out from between her fingers, as if she were squeezing Play-doh. After

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her pregnancy, the skin realized its unnecessary role for the body and, on its own, willed itself to die—and turned brown, the color of rotting bananas. *** When my mom and I finish the videos, the nurse comes back and asks if we had any questions. We don’t. She smiles again, sweetly mutters some cordial phrases, and then leaves. The doctor comes in, introduces himself, and asks us if we had any questions. My mom asks him about neurological dysfunction, which happens when the nerve endings are destroyed after surgery. In such cases, she would lose the ability to smile. He comforts her by saying that these cases almost never happened. My mom then asks if he could also do a brow lift and eyelid surgery. These were simple: a small cut above the temples along the hairline, a little tug to pull the skin up and lift the eyebrows. I watch him scan my mom’s face for a few seconds. His eyes give two quick glances over her eyebrows. “Yeah, it’s pretty simple—and to be honest it’s not that necessary in your case.” In the prescreening, he asks my mom to sit on the examination chair. She is short—only five feet tall, so it is a bit difficult for her to get on. She wiggles onto the chair, sits, and then looks at him in anticipation. None of us spoke much. The doctor kneels down a bit to match my mom’s height, and then directs his professional attention to her face. With his left hand he guides my mom’s face up or down, left or right, depending on what he needs to examine. With his right hand, he places his thumb on her chin for support and uses two of his fingers to push skin back and forth in certain areas. After a few minutes he delivers his verdict: “So in your case we would have to cut behind the ears and at the base of the chin.” He saw the puzzled look on my mom and directed his attention to me, “Your mom doesn’t need that much on the face. Just a bit of work on the chin should do it, and she doesn’t have that much in the first place. Here is a really extreme case on an elder lady who could not have surgery on her face.” He shows both of us a Before and After of an extremely old lady who got a chin tuck. The woman originally had so much fat beneath her chin that she had no neckline, only a large, sagging flap that formed a triangle where her neck should have been. The surgeons made only one incision on her chin, but

they managed to suck out enough fat to give her a neck. My mom is impressed. The surgeon is now ready to examine her for the tummy tuck. “I’ll come back in a few minutes. For now, you can undress.” He hands her a white smock that opened up in the front. “Wear this, and you can keep your underwear on.” When the door closes, my mom slowly takes off her clothes. She is slightly plump, with a bit of fat resting on her thighs, around her arms, and surrounding her waist. Her stomach swells out a bit, and it carries a few stretch marks and scars in it, the aftermath of carrying four children. After she finishes undressing, she wraps the smock around her body and climbs onto the examination chair again. I realize that this was the first time I have seen her this naked. She looks so soft. Her skin is pale and almost translucent, and I can almost map out the veins running up from her feet. She is sitting silently on the chair, dangling her feet, and staring expectantly at the door, and I have a sudden urge to cradle her in my arms. The door opens and the doctor returns. My mom opens her smock, exposing her little white belly, and he begins his second examination. After a few minutes of silence, he gets up and explains that my mom only needs a medium-size tummy tuck. “Again, it’s not that bad. After the surgery, we could reduce it to about half. You’ll definitely still be able to tell the difference though. The results will still be good. As for the rest, we can’t get to it because it’s located behind the muscle frame. But you can easily fix that by losing … maybe five pounds. It’s not that big, and that should do it.” With that, he shakes my mom’s hand and then leaves. My mom scurries to the door and put her clothes on. She avoids looking at the mirror as she passes it. *** Perhaps my mom will someday be able to look at herself. My middle sister, after her surgery, claims that she, for once, feels beautiful in front of the mirror. She knows that the changes were very subtle, and that people can’t really tell the difference in most cases. She knows that being slightly prettier doesn’t affect her performance at work, but it doesn’t matter. She can smile at herself now. When my middle sister got her tummy tuck, she went to a family wedding dressed in a strapless, cream-colored gown that flowed to the ground. Small ripples of fabric ran across her torso and

emphasized her curves. Her waist was tiny, and from the side, her stomach was completely flat. She hadn’t worn that dress in five years—not since she married and had kids. I told her how fantastic she looked. She smiled sheepishly and said, “Oh come on. It wasn’t like I exercised or anything.” That night we took many family photos, and my eldest sister gladly volunteered herself to take fullbody shots. I thought of my dad, who never shows his hands. After his surgery, gravity pulled the meat to the sides as his fingers healed, and the tips look like they are about to slip off. The fingernail grew back on only one finger—the others have dents where the nails should be. They never regained their flexibility. They bend only slightly back and forth from the first joint, and when left unflexed, stick out like sock puppets craning their heads in jumbled directions. It’s almost as if the accident never happened because he hides his hands in every photograph. After his surgery he unwillingly joined my mom in the business and became a nail technician because there wasn’t anything else he could do. Work is more manageable now that he runs his own nail store. At first he started out working as a regular employee, performing basic manicures for customers. One time, he sat down to do a manicure for a young lady, but she recoiled and screamed when she saw his hand. Then she got up and left without a word. Both he and my mom agreed that plastic surgery might be necessary if my mom was to continue working in the nail business. Her customers, when they come to the store, don’t know that she works thirteen hours a day and comes home at eleven after thirteen hours of work, only to start cooking for tomorrow and do her accounting. They don’t know that she climbs into bed at two in the morning and wakes up at seven, and has been repeating this routine six days a week, all weeks of the year, for the past twelve years. They don’t see that she barely has time to put on her lipstick in the morning, never mind doing cardio exercise for half an hour three times a week. They only know that she has wrinkles, over-sized pores, white-hair, and pockets of fat forming at the base of her cheeks. Seeing this, how can they trust her to make them beautiful when she doesn’t seem to value her own beauty? ***

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The last person to see us in the office was the manager of the clinic. Perhaps she thought I was stunned by her beauty, and perhaps she has received the same reaction many times. Her body had been cut, sewn up, altered, covered, pulled, twisted, and inflated in almost every possible place: a nose job, breast implants, facelift, hairdye, heavy make-up, Botox, and a tummy tuck. She was around sixty years old, but packaged to be twenty. She looked neither old nor young. Her beauty wasn’t the sort of ageless beauty that some women gather as they age, when they manage to carry their gravity with grace. Her taut, flawless skin looked as if it could suddenly snap and spew out her contents. She turned out to be a sweet lady though, and an excellent businesswoman. She had been a patient at the clinic for sixteen years before she became its manager. Her surgeon was our surgeon. She handed us the papers. The tummy tuck would be $6,000, and the facelift would be either $8,000 or $11,000, depending on whether my mother chose general or local anesthesia. The conversation drew to an end, and the lady asked us if we had any final questions. My mom wanted to

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see her scars. The manager stood up and showed us her belly, and we could see a very faint scar at the pubic line where they had performed the surgery years ago. Then she bent down and showed us the scars on her chin and face. My mom’s eyes lit up when she saw how faint they were. In the car, my mom asked me, “Wasn’t that lady pretty?” I looked at my mom. She was looking at me. I turned my head back to the lines on the road, unable to say anything because of what felt like a knife in my throat. Instead, I kept on driving.

The Holiday CHARLOTTE LIEBERMAN

She dreams of morning. Because the rusty light coats itself with inquisitive steam rising across the body of water, small stone-fruits create fleshy knocks against the slick pane inside your mind, almost visible. Who is there to ask. Who would mind to inhabit that time, or to be that age once again. This morning, I watched a closely-trimmed dog, reluctantly panting, swallow the mist: he offered his own contribution of moisture to air. He chose not to feed, and instead gouged tufts of Bermuda grass pushing the wet earth aside and reserving space for the owlâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s shadow.

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gallus, 2011 Ivy Pan Top: Installation view Bottom: gallus (bone scans), bones set in agar Opposite: gallus (details), chicken and various packaging

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Arms MOLLY DEKTAR

When my son had both his arms amputated, he was less anxious about the recovery and more anxious that people wouldn’t like him. “Mom,” he said, “will people still like me?” “I have no idea,” I told him. He had gotten brown recluse bites on both forearms. On the left, a few inches down from his elbow. On the right, on his wrist. Only a very special boy can manage to get two brown recluse bites in the same afternoon, playing in a tame backyard. Calamine lotion did not work. Now he has a stub of a left arm and down to the elbow of his right arm. He’s recuperating adequately. A neighbor gave us a three-legged poodle—as though everyone expects me to knock the legs off the chairs and tables too. My son is not doing as well as the poodle, who, according to the neighbor, recovered its ability to squat and poop mere hours after waking up from its amputation. I spoonfeed my son. Oatmeal, ice cream. He flops his stubs around uselessly in their tight white bandaging and moans. “Shall I cut off my arms?” I say. “Anything for you, dear one.” “Tell me about my brother,” he says. “Oh, your brother,” I say. “A sweet child. He knew how to smile.” My son smiles. “Would you look at that, a smile,” I say. “You know, your brother had so many arms he was always begging us to cut some of them off,” I say. “We never did.” “Did you leave them on to punish him?” says my son. “Yes,” I say. “Mom,” he says, “will you close the window?” “What am I, your slave?” I ask, but I do it. “Never mind, I want it open,” he says. While I’m opening it, he says, “What happened to my brother?” “People without arms aren’t allowed to ask that question,” I say. “I still have arms,” says my son. “Your brother grew very lonely because everyone hated him because he had the wrong number of arms,” I say. “Mom,” he says. “People hate people with the wrong number of body parts,” I say. “There’s no way to get around it.” “Stop,” he says. “Your brother had some run-ins with the law,” I say. “They had to call in special police forces to handcuff him, because of the unique situation with his arms.”

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“I don’t believe that. Close the window,” he says. I go to the window. “Where’s my brother? Where’s Dad?” asks my son. “One day, when I least expected it, they turned into brown recluses and left for the back yard,” I say, closing the window and returning to the kitchen, where my table is supplicating on the floor. In the evening, my chief activity is picking up things I’d already flung to the floor in a rage and flinging them to the floor again. The next day, I painkill my son and sponge-bathe him. His little trainwreck of body. “It’s not true about my brother and dad turning into spiders,” says my son. “Right-o,” I say. “Good one.” “Tell me the truth,” says my son. “You’re a great kid, everyone thinks so,” I say. “Despite your astonishing susceptibility to spider bites.” “Do my brother and dad think so?” “They love you more than I do,” I say. “And that’s the truth.” And finally one quiet morning the doorbell rings. The poodle yaps. My son, prone on his arm-rail cot in the living room, does not stir. I answer the door. “It’s your brother!” I call to my son. “Your brother!” It’s the man with the prostheses. “I brought these for you,” he says to my son, pointing at him with four arms.

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Attempts at Making Wheatpaste, 2011 Sara J. Stern Cornmeal, water, resulting mold, vitrine Three 3.5” x 3.5” x 4.5” boxes stacked vertically to 3.5” x 3.5” x 13.5” The piece is the result of a performance of non-knowledge of the very simple process of making wheat paste. Once in their safety vitrines, the mold balls become a metaphor for a younger generation’s attempts to find new ways to mobilize. 14

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On Names Recurring VICTORIA BAENA

On a Sunday evening in June 2005, few pedestrians tread the cobblestone streets of Villa General Belgrano, in Córdoba, Argentina. A hymn wafts up from the church. Several parishioners are beginning to slip out early from mass. No one will notice—only the sloping Bavarian rooftops lining the path back home. The cuckoo clock in the town plaza strikes six. An elderly couple emerges from Café Rissen, the husband clutching a cane in one hand and his wife’s arm in the other. A chatting group of teenagers weaves around them, released from church, giddy with newfound freedom. Suddenly, they halt, peering through the windowpane of a tourist street shop, intrigued. Exchanging glances, they point at a row of black cotton shirts displayed in the window to passersby. The fronts of the t-shirts are imprinted with the figure of an eagle with outspread wings; below it, a white shield enclosing an iron crucifix. Superimposed on this: a cross tilted, its limbs bent, both at aninety-degreeangle—theunmistakableimageof a swastika. The story spreads, percolating first through regional weeklies and then into national media. Mayor Sergio Favot tells Rádio Universidad, “We are evaluating what legal framework we have to intervene.” He admits that within the realm of 16

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free speech, intervention has thorny boundaries— though he promises to appease the nationwide cries of condemnation dubbing the town a ‘breeding ground for Nazis.’ “People around here often ask for objects with military motifs of that time,” one store employee tells a reporter, uneasily. “Especially young people.” One Villa Belgrano resident is not entirely surprised. “Every so often we have these Nazi outbreaks,” she tells the national newspaper Clarín. “They just form part of the landscape.” The landscape of Villa General Belgrano has proved a prime tourist destination in the past few decades. Part of its allure lies in its strange foreignness: it’s easy to imagine the village uprooted from the Bavarian Forest and plunked down in the middle of Córdoba’s sierras, with architecture, language, and cuisine all remaining intact. Its Oktoberfest is the third largest in the world, surpassed only by Munich and Blumenau (in Brazil). German-style gnomes peer out of the kitschy tourist shops lining Calle Salta, one of the town’s main thoroughfares, as visitors meander among stores with names like Edelweiss and Bierkeller. Artificial, perhaps—it recalls the eerie superficiality of Disney World’s Main Street, U.S.A., an attempt to recreate what perhaps never really existed, through

the tangible projection of a romantic ideal. Yet it is not all hollow tackiness. Villa General Belgrano is home to the largest German community in Argentina. German still does mingle with Spanish, though to a decreasing extent, in homes and churches and bars. The town is the unofficial emblem of the entrenched historical ties between Argentina and Germany—a relationship whose existence is undeniable even if its borders have never officially been drawn. The swastika affair became such a controversy because it exhumed the murky, rank depths of this history, alluded to and appropriated but never fully explored. A statement emblazoned on a t-shirt came to stand for all that still remained to be said. *** In 1929, German immigrants Paul Heintze and Jorge Kappuhn were seeking a site for the agricultural cooperative they hoped to establish in the Argentine interior. The sierras of Córdoba proved home to a hospitable climate and largely unclaimed tracts of land—as well as, purportedly, reminding the duo of the Old World landscape they had left behind. A few intrepid families began to trickle in, as word spread through the GermanArgentine community centered in Buenos Aires. Yet development remained rudimentary until 1935, when a group of students, along with their teachers and parents, spent a week there on vacation. The idyllic landscape and nostalgic reminders of their native land proved irresistible for the adults. Many of them would return, becoming the 127 pioneering families of Villa General Belgrano, initially christened Villa Calamuchita. The village’s serene isolation would prove unsustainable, however, as its growth throughout the 1930s paralleled increasing national tensions. Argentina had thrived throughout World War I, using its neutrality to its advantage to become a supplier of food to all sides. But the global depression soon reversed these advances, leading the dictatorship to scramble for a force capable of uniting the nation. In doing so it looked to Europe—initially to the emerging fascist trends of Spain’s Franco regime. Argentine leaders began to consciously renew the language of an ancient Hispanic alliance between the‘sword and the cross,’emphasizing the shared customs, language, and history with Spain and the Vatican. The man who would become Argentina’s president and then dictator—Juan Domingo Perón—spent time in Mussolini’s Italy

and Hitler’s Germany as a military observer. He was entranced by the ideology and techniques he witnessed there: the idea that the pulsing vagaries of nations as diverse as these could be mastered, subsumed under a single personality. Persecution of the Jews was to Perón a minor offshoot of the political machine and just another means of asserting national power. It was an offshoot his own government had no need to reproduce, with its close ties to the muscle and weight of the Roman Catholic Church. Within the government, then, implicit approval of Nazism became the norm. Of course, stirrings of disquiet peeked through here and there, among civilians and every so often within the political apparatus—though a strict military hierarchy helped weed out those undesirables. Voices of dissent nevertheless reached a cacophony grating enough to persuade the relatively weak president, Ramón Castillo, to declare Argentina’s neutrality in World War II. And yet the military leaders who were actually in charge continued to be attracted to the German worldview: its unwavering sense of purpose and righteousness, its willingness to assert its own identity at the expense of any real or perceived threat, disregarding unsavory consequences. As an immigrant nation, Argentina saw in Germany an alternative to the ideology of individuality within pluralism espoused by the United States, for example (even if the latter tended to fall short of its ideals). As a bonus, a pro-Nazi stance would prove strategic to counteract increasing American influence in neighboring Brazil. Behind the curtain of Argentine neutrality was sprouting an intricate system of official Nazi involvement, as chronicled in Uki Goñi’s book The Real Odessa—telegrams promising freedom from arrest for Nazis who found their way to Argentina; the turning of a blind eye in cash-transfers funneled through Buenos Aires; a communication network linking Germany, Spain, and the Vatican to their partner in the South, as Hitler consolidated his strategy of conquest on the eve of World War II. Into this melee, in December 1939, sailed a vessel bearing Nazi arms, combatants, and a plan of action. The Admiral Graf Spee, captained by Hans Langsdorff, reached the Río de la Plata separating Argentina and Uruguay after completing various assignments around the eastern coast of South America. On December 13th, a fleet of British ships—the Exeter, Ajax, and Achilles—approached the Graf Spee. Langsdorff, miscalculat-

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ing the size of his opponents, was forced to prepare for battle at the last minute. He dealt a fatal blow to the Exeter, but the Graf Spee suffered 56 deaths and a few dozen injuries. The damage to the ship was severe enough to force it to turn around and limp into the port of Montevideo, where the surviving members of the crew were given 72 hours of amnesty. British intelligence, meanwhile, managed to sow false reports among Langsdorff and his crew that a massive fleet of British naval forces was fast approaching. On December 19th, the captain made the executive decision to scuttle the Graf Spee. He and the approximately hundred and twenty surviving crewmen crossed the Río de la Plata and made it to Buenos Aires, where they were lodged at the Hotel de los Inmigrantes. The following day, Langsdorff was found dead in his hotel room, wrapped in a German flag, a bullet hole in his forehead. In a note composed to his commander in Germany, he wrote: I can now only prove by my death that the fighting services of the Third Reich are ready to die for the honor of the flag … I shall face my fate with firm faith in the cause and the future of the nation and of my Führer. He was buried with full military honors in the German section of La Chacarita cemetery. From there, the contours of the story begin to blur. Records on the subsequent activities of the remainder of the German crew are vague, if they exist at all. Some remained in Uruguay, it is known. Others shed their Nazi uniforms, settling in Buenos Aires, learning Spanish, marrying Argentines, fading into the fabric of a society largely content to overlook the past. Still others, however, had heard rumors of an enclave of other expatriates, couched in scenery familiar and soothing to a homesick exile. These found their way across the pampas, over the sierras, and into what was still known, then, as Villa Calamuchita. *** Seeking the Old World within the New is hardly a novelty in Argentina. Like other American colonies, the original territory was only supposed to be an extension of the Spanish empire and, with it, a continuation of European norms. Even after independence Argentina continued to fashion itself in the image of its Spanish parent. A parallel if derivative identity was carved out of its Jesuit missions,buddingaristocracy,andgeographysoon

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wiped clean of the nuisance of natives. Today Buenos Aires continues to be known as the ‘Paris of South America.’ Farther down the continent, vacationers flock to the lakeside city of Bariloche for artisan chocolates and skiing, in the ‘Switzerland of Patagonia.’ It comes as no surprise, then, that when President Perón sought to consolidate power and ensure blind faith to a creed, he looked across the Atlantic, appropriating the power of spectacle and the hypnosis of dogma already present in Nazi Germany. In 1996, Argentine journalist Uki Goñi was conducting research for an unprecedented book on official Argentine-Nazi ties. Several times he sought access to documentation on postwar German immigration. He was told that the documents were classified, or that they had been misplaced. When he returned later that year, he learned that all midcentury immigration files were no longer in existence. They had been burned in a bonfire late at night, in his absence, in the vacant space behind the Hotel de los Inmigrantes—the same place where Hans Langdorff had ended his own life fifty years before. The final embers had already faded to black, the charred remains of damning evidence dispatched to the wind. Goñi still managed to write the book. The Real Odessa—the title based on a fictional account of ex-Nazis smuggling their comrades to South America—was an indictment far more damning of the Argentine government itself. It was not ex-Nazis, Goñi revealed, but Argentines in power who had facilitated the escape of war criminals to Argentina following World War II. A network stretching through Spain, Switzerland, Portugal, and the Vatican had enabled the safe passage of men like Thilo Martens, a millionaire who arranged cashtransfers between Nazis; Fritz Thyssen, a German industrial magnate who had bankrolled Hitler’s rise; and most infamously, Adolf Eichmann, the brain behind the ‘Final Solution.’ Perón sent agents—including Catholic bishops—to Europe to smuggle the Germans back to Buenos Aires, often assisted by the manufacture of falsified Red Cross passports. Perón was appalled by the sense of righteous justice sweeping the Allied nations after the defeat of Germany. Always partial to the glory of battle, the sheen of soldiers’ medals, he saw in military action a type of transcendental honor, and in war an ethical set of boundaries that failed to apply in peacetime. The idea that military officers should

be held responsible for their actions, should be considered ‘war criminals,’ was anathema to his very worldview. “In Nuremberg at that time,” he said regarding the trials, “something was taking place that I personally considered a disgrace and an unfortunate lesson for the future of humanity.” Welcoming ex-Nazis to Argentina became, for Perón, a means of asserting infallibility: not of political institutions but rather of the officials constituting them. Such a plan was inextricably bound to the vision of his own leadership in Argentina. It was a vision defined by the assumption that a single personality could and must determine the course of a nation, that this personality was himself, and that what some might call crimes against humanity could be incorporated into a broader, ultimately benevolent purpose: the good of the nation. The clenched fist, the chanted hymn, the rallying speech proclaimed from the balcony of the presidential palace—all were fascist tactics watered down. Some German methods were modified. Instead of drawing power from the persecution of Jews, Perón concentrated elsewhere, on the power of and alliance with the Roman Catholic Church. Argentina has never been a particularly devout country in practice; but its profound attachment to religious iconography—in rosaries, statues, portraits of saints—found a secular parallel, here, in the symbols of the nationalist parade. All would, Perón hoped, weave together a national narrative, in which he would play a privileged role. *** In most cases, the Nazis who had escaped to Argentina lived quietly, apart from politics or world affairs. Many Argentines probably never knew their pasts. Some may have suspected but said nothing; others prone to talk were swiftly silenced. And gradually the past was forgotten, or rather patched up, its stitches thick but haphazard. In 1943, in Villa Calamuchita, an Argentine flag was thrown into the town plaza. It had been lit afire and it burned to shreds. Three sailors from the Graf Spee were accused, but never tried. In response, the provincial legislature decided to change the town’s name to Villa General Belgrano in honor of a 19th-century national figure—a military hero, and the creator of the Argentine flag. And in time the old name was covered over, as was the reason for changing it. The Nazi connections, rhetorical strategies, and

iconographies adopted by Argentina were hardly on the same scale as the horrors of the Holocaust and of Nazi Germany. It is easy to dismiss them as the fancies of an authoritarian-minded president, fancies that would fade with him and with time. But a quarter-century later, under a military dictatorship, such themes would reappear. 30,000 left-wing or suspected left-wing citizens would face repression, torture, or assassination—and few would dare to speak out. Argentina’s Guerra Sucia, then—its “Dirty War”—has roots in a less systematic relationship: the disfiguration of the country’s failure to stare its old demons in the face. Today the traces of these old wounds, of uneasy partnerships, find their manifestation no longer in physical evidence or a militant nationalism but in the persistence of a national mood. “I come from a sad country,” Argentine writer and poet Jorge Luis Borges once said. In his writings he returned often to Buenos Aires, the city of his birth, retracing the certain broodiness—the subtle but pervasive melancholy—that to him continued to lurk beneath its surface: “Always with a blue-washed wall, the shade/Of a fig tree, and a sidewalk of broken concrete.” That poem, “The Cyclical Night,” continues: This, here is Buenos Aires. Time, which brings Either love or money to men, hands on to me Only this withered rose, this empty tracery Of streets with names recurring from the past … Squares weighed down by a night in no one’s care Are the vast patios of an empty palace And the single-minded streets creating space Are corridors for sleep and nameless fear. There is more in the Argentine past, the national icon suggests, than is allowed to be said—and thus allowed to be truly forgotten. Memory becomes crucial but easily subversive, vulnerable to so many cinders. Today the twice-named village retains the ghost presence of Nazi alignment: emptily tracing the streets, its names and its past recurring.

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Psyche in Bed JULIAN GEWIRTZ

To the god. Tonight there are no visitors. Stormclouds rise over the near mountains, beyond the finch-dense forest. For nine and ninefold nights I have waited in darkness, lulled only by wind-whineâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; unmoving, bedded, mind-whir muddles and buzzes into body. From between teeth seeps forth a strange issue, dries linen-white, paler than graying face. Untouchable. Sores collapse open skin-strata, shallow basins, suppurated sediment. Nerve-sensed I survey the subsidenceâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; does blood slow and flow around the wound? Tissue-silt crumbles, heats, as tubers sprout through the eschar, onion-stalks of bone, pungent. The blighted tendons. Each night hands return to rub

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limbs with damp cloths of camphor, but I know my stench persists. Grows with each sullen moon, slow-flowing night-water. Brackish, blackening, the unrushing slough, breeding like rancid trout roe, dug into gravel redds. Eels draw close, dazed. Residue of river, place where streaming stops. Tawny trace. Place where water slows, and flow is fallow. Have I fallen? My shocked knees molder and fold. My legs lapse. I will not leave. *** At times I vision a shaded window. The voice-veil with greened gaze avers: no grove grows on the hillock, and if below it somewhere flow sap-slinks they are locked in a rock-drum, deep and unrising. And what fate, spun from a frayed thread uncut by the rust-knife, will sphere me to stay if Eros does not come?

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*** Bright: a begonia blooms. Yolky calyx whorls below the twisted stigmas. Petalless yellow: the sepals. *** A dream tasked to me: disorder of grain-sand and light. The love-wind, careless, carrying, knew little of chaff and seed, lifting but what is too heavy. It came to pass. Day plunged into the far massif, fell like shatter-glass into the deepening forest. By my hands undertaken: you were and were. Another man might have beat the harvest, the hand-flail’s whining chain, unsettling the scale-shells, then fan the thresh-pile with vans of air-holding canvas, color of your hair, husk-grey. I was given no tools. Raised my hands to the slats’ beam-slits, let your prayer-name rise. And from great height, over the mountain-shadows, the winds, thinned-warm, startled cool eddies of dry-spooled air. Unweaving the grain, half-crazed scatter of field-fray, hazed, condign. Rainclouds followed the crossed currents, the streaming from the sky’s raised face.

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Were you there, resting on the low hay-bed, looking toward me as I left? Where I did not see, as a last breeze lazed in the wooden hold, the granary. Now what remains is only cold and golden. *** A door deepens into the marble-mottle floor. My jewelbox, gilt-crusted, fills with gems, pale, opaque, vivecon, combivir, kaletra, truvada. The box, plucked open like a square-set string. Should they be bezeled, set in shallow-cupped gold, fastened to rusted ears? My arms are furred with sloe-blue molds. *** The five-fingered god-hands dream. The thin indigo bird, startled, leaves. *** Foot-whisper of a woman— You, with paper-scent fingers, within the bruise-black hall— Go where I cannot. Find. You, I know your hands— Your legs, they will take you. And once he is found I command that his stiff limbs be burned— String him up, dangle him where all will watch, where any who loves him may freely go to weep— You will not find me there— *** The second task-dream: to winnow thin sticks from the sharp-sliver arrows. Fine finger-work for tips of small-silver: by feel to find the breaking-down

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of browns. O were I an arrow: freed from the bow-string to become vector—No: quivered into one thing. *** As a pulley shakes when rope runs through it. The bushes new-bloomed, shivering, opening the meadows dowered with trees— heavy-leaved, hovering above, and the silent star-pulses, alive. Spring crawls into eyes and scratches its way out. When he comes, I almost do not notice his light form, gauzed arrival, this low black breeze-blow, the feathered air suspending him above me— when he is not here, it is as if he is not here.

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The Finest House in the Colony ALEXANDER J. B. WELLS

that men may rise on stepping-stones of their dead selves to higher things alfred, lord tennyson, in memoriam TERRA NULLIUS—If you walk around the East of Sydney these days, you can easily forget what country you are in. The quarter based around Kings Cross is as cosmopolitan as they come: here the New Australia meets for focaccia by day and streetcorner cigarettes by night, while the traffic crawls past buskers and whores and teenage girls from private schools. The Cross is on the top of a hill, right between the business center and the green, wealthy suburbs of the East—yet strangely enough, in this city of views, you can’t see to the harbor. All the kids meet at the Coke sign, a big red vintage billboard that somehow got a heritage protection and now can never be replaced. There’s a hitech screen beside the old one, though, so really there are two Coke signs: one advertisement and one landmark. But they’re both owned by Coke just the same. The places here all have an indigenous name or the name of some British person. Kings Cross starts at the corner of William Street and Victoria Road; follow Macleay Street and you get to the headland in between Woolloomooloo and Elizabeth Bay. 26

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Here there are million-dollar views of the water; great houses jostle with dingy apartment blocks for sunlight and air like an overcrowded nursery. Their owners drink espresso on the balcony and complain that development on the other side has been ruining the vista. Down in Elizabeth Bay, all eyes focus on one house: It’s called Berthong and we locals don’t know anything about its history, except that Rupert Murdoch sold it to Russell Crowe for nine million dollars and that’s a lot of money. Farther up the hill, hidden away on one of the tortuous little streets that lead to and from the Cross, is a plain white rectangular villa with an unfinished collonade and a block of shaggy garden just across the road. Outside there are two little benches, a hanging lantern from another age, and a block of tall French windows. The sea is wild today; the gnarled old gum-trees in the park are swaying to and fro. And it’s cold, sunny-cold, the kind of cold that makes people stay outdoors for as long as they can. A sign in the yard says, Elizabeth Bay House— The finest house in the colony. The front door faces the mouth of the harbor: if a ship were to come in past the old Macquarie Lighthouse, bearing men or news from the homeland, it’d be visible here as soon as anywhere. But now the yachts are ev-

erywhere and they rock in the breeze, making it impossible to focus even briefly on the water. the fault is great with man or woman / who steals a goose from off a common but what will plead that man’s excuse / that steals the common from the goose? the tickler, london, february 1821 WALLA MULLA—In the 1820s, Old Sydney Town was still no more than a town. Twelve thousand people lived in one thousand houses, and the unlit nighttime streets were fitfully patrolled by soldiers, who were partly paid in rum. It took eighteen months to get letters to and from England. Where the ramshackle buildings wore thin there were troupes of bushrangers and a wild, forbidding bush all around. Alexander Macleay arrived in January of 1826—eleven years before his work colleagues came around for drinks after firing him; nineteen years before his son kicked him out and took over his debts; and twenty-two before he died in a carriage accident where his horses ran wild and bolted on a visit to the Government House. Macleay was short, red-haired, and imperious; he was also rather fat. After making his money in the wine trade, he entered the British civil service and held down a handsome salary in the War Office and the Transport Board. The Scot was also broke, however, having spent all his money on a country house and on England’s best entomological collection. He arrived on The Marquis of Hastings, a convict ship—and waiting for him was the governor and a post as Colonial Secretary of New South Wales. One of his daughters, Fanny, wrote to her brother in Cuba that Sydney was a vile hole, detestable … even the trees are as ugly as you could imagine trees to be. They were a long way from anything. There were two banks in town and the nearest bishop was in Calcutta. That year, Alexander Macleay saw the first street lamp ever lit in Sydney—it was a dimly burning oil lamp, but in his virile mind it represented nothing short of progress. Sydney society wasn’t sure what to make of the Macleays. The diarist George Boyes wrote his impressions: He is an honest looking man for a Scotsman, good-humoured and shakes hands with everyody as if he was glad to see them. As for the daughters—the young ladies, as they are called

by courtesy—they were short square built women and, I suspect, a little bow-legged like their Papa. From London, Justice Baron Field wrote what seems like a warning: They will be very nice about morals. Macleay was very close to the colonial governor, Ralph Darling; they were both politically conservative and both belonged to the evangelical faction of the Church of England. Together the two old Tories became wildly unpopular with Sydney’s radical young press. Macleay had made an effort to become involved in the Sydney cultural scene: he joined the Benevolent Society, the Sydney Auxiliary Bible Society, the Australian Religious Tract Society, the Agricultural and Horticultural Society, the Subscription Library, the Auxiliary Mission Society—and the Racing and Jockey Club. But he was hounded for his other involvements, especially his use of government connections to amass eight thousand hectares of agricultural property in his first three years—thus monopolizing the colony’s market for butter. In 1831 Darling got called back to England, but before he left he made a grant to Macleay of fiftyfour acres of the Crown’s best harbor-front land: the Elizabeth Bay Estate. When the colony was founded, Governor Arthur Phillip set aside most of the foreshore as a great Sydney Commons. Elizabethtown was a fishing village reserved for a composite group of indigenous inhabitants of the harbor area. After an outbreak of smallpox and the violence of the settlers, only three of the Cadigal people were left. Their hunting paths, their religion, and their stories are all etched into the coast— but impossible to see. While the convicts bickered and starved, the Eora nation lived from food and water sources that the English all ignored. This is the condition of being a non-indigenous Australian, writes Peter Carey. To know the land itself is like the index to a bible which we cannot understand. Which is more: it is a repository for a shame that is always in discussion but is never quite articulated. The bush bewildered the convicts, but for the half of them that escaped, it was at least a refuge from the whip. Imagine the silence in the old port town, with the tide waves slapping on the dock some way off and all the bushes rustling, everywhere rustling, from prisoners on the run or from natives in the wild or from god-knows-what creatures lurking in there. No wonder the settlers

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cleared all the land they could get their hands on—if only just to stop the whispering. The whole area was signed over to Alexander Macleay, Colonial Secretary, in the late 1820s. The locals used to call the place Walla Mulla, which can be translated as either place of plenty or place of blood. The grant was selected for its unparalleled outlooks. To the West, the squalid huts of the town must have seemed beautiful and bustling. To the East, the harbor mouth was in full sight: winding bays and heads, wooded thick with hardy gums and punctuated with crops of sandstone that were weathered to some strange, arcane design. It was near the town, and the wild was far enough away that it would only ever be part of the scenery. Picturesque—it was the perfect place for a villa. il faut cultiver notre jardin voltaire, candide THE FINEST HOME—When Macleay had his grant written out, he went straight to work— but on the garden, not the home. Plans were drawn up for the house but they had to wait some years while the Colonial Secretary paid for his bugs and his plants. The supervising architect, John Verge, was an Englishman who went out to the Australian countryside but couldn’t afford the development he wanted so he designed neoclassical villas for Sydney’s colonial middle class instead. Elizabeth Bay House was to be his greatest work, the finest house in the colony, and so it was. A Greek Revival villa made of white stone quarried on site; local cedar joinery with refined detailing and stylized plant motifs; grand arches and a Brussels weave carpet. The domed salon was considered the best-designed room in Australia, one of three oval domes ever built: each step in the spiral staircase is a single piece of Marulan mudstone cantilevered from the wall, and the oval dome lantern on the top floods the room with Australian sunshine. But the Macleays ran out of money and the plans were never completed. The vast Doric colonnade never got built, and the marble on the arches is simply painted onto the stone. One of the doors in the oval room opens onto a flat brick wall; it was only put there for symmetry. And they had started building the “Morning Room” on the wrong side of the house, because the declination of the Sun is opposite in the southern

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hemisphere. Still, Alexander Macleay was obsessed with natural science. His collection of lepidoptera was among the world’s best, and in the 1820s he had the biggest entomological collection there was. He paid fortunes at auctions, personally sponsored field collectors, and conspired for hours with colleagues from the Linnaen Society about where the next find would be found. But he never published any research and he never made donations. As a good nineteenth-century man of science, he believed that every living thing could be catalogued and compared according to a certain framework—it was just a matter of defining that framework. And so it was for his garden, which won him a great reputation for taste and dedication. The Sydney Gazette in 1831: five years ago the coast was a mass of cold and hopeless sterility, which its stunted and unsightly bushes seemed only to render the more palpable. It is now traversed by an elegant carriage road and picturesque walks. Visitors write of a pristine sense of order in Macleay’s carefully-tended lawn, botanical garden, shrubbery, rustic bridges, and terrace walls—and beyond that, the still-wild Sydney harbor receding into beautiful abstraction. He refused to destroy local plants unless he absolutely had to; he much preferred integrating the natives and the exotics. The garden at Elizabeth Bay was picturesque: a Landspace Movement oil-on-canvas, complete with paths and a record-book that had four thousand entries. See the pudgy Scot walk through his collections with a hat and a cane, checking that each specimen is still in its rightful place, trying not to think about his growing debts. Perhaps there’s a breeze, as well, and maybe all the plants are trembling just a little in their lots. jacaranda mimosifolia citrus aurantium cinnamomum camphora. Mango paw-paw blue-gum willow. The water down below shimmers in the sun, and the old man sweats in his coat. Above all else, the Elizabeth Bay Estate made a powerful example for those who saw it as an icon of colonial progress. In the Sydney Gazette, Macleay was congratulated as the first to show how those hillocks of rock and sand might be rendered tributary to the taste and advantage of civilized man. He deserved the boon, and has well repaid it. Over the next few years, ever more land was reclaimed from the Commons and from the in-

digenous peoples of the Eora nation; in the early colonial mindset, at least, it was finally time to do something with the place. there are few things more pleasing than the contemplation of order and useful arrangement, arising gradually out of tumult and confusion; and perhaps this satisfaction cannot anywhere be more fully enjoyed than where a settlement of civilized people is fixing itself upon a new or savage coast. governor arthur phillip, 1788 BLEAK HOUSE—In 1837, the finest men in the colony—including Macarthur and Campbell and even ‘China’ Jones—visited Elizabeth Bay House with a note for Alexander Macleay. That day, he had been hauled out of his job: unceremoniously dismissed, he called it. The deputation came to his house with an address signed by many of his colleagues, and it moved the old gentleman to tears. They stayed for refreshments in an adjoining room, then they called it a night. Macleay stayed at home, now bereft of a salary. But the garden wasn’t finished, and there was still work to do on the collections. His eldest son, William Sharp, had been loaning him money ever since they arrived—the insect drawers, bulbous plants, and garden parties had to be paid for somehow. When William Sharp was in Cuba, his sister had been sending him letters written criss-cross just to save on paper and postage. His father was going mad from his collector’s obsession. Something had to be done. Now, imagine this: William Sharp Macleay, the timid intellectual recluse, sitting with his father and telling him he had to go—pack up and leave, old man, we have to make sacrifices and you can’t help yourself, so just pack up and leave, please and thank you. Perhaps the old man cries, this isn’t your home. Then he leaves like he knows he must and swears not to speak to his son ever again. Was it in the Library, the biggest room in the entire continent? Or in the Morning Room, detailed in fine local cedar but designed for the English sun? Watch the son going over all the collections that evening: four hundred and fifty drawers, now his, each one full of specimens labeled by species and location in the scrawling formal hand of the absent patriarch. Papua Victoria Rio New Zealand. Did he look out at the garden when he realized, with a shudder, that now he was the man of the house—the man that

owned all the family debt? William Sharp was a man of science, as well; he entertained Thomas Huxley and wrote a book that earned a line in Darwin’s diary. Intellectuals were the only people he entertained: he lived alone for twenty years, cut off from Sydney society, building a wall along the beach so that no one could enter his property. He dedicated his time to academic work, hypothesizing classification systems made of circles and fives because the natural system is the plan of creation itself, the work of an all-wise, all-powerful Deity. The mathematical rhapsody of William Sharp did not go far in England, where a greater revolution of metaphysics was in the works. Yet every night he worked, building up his system, trying to find something like the fingerprints of God in the quivering, gnarled bush. God was a mathematician—it was still mid-century, Sydney was small, and the Macleay family villa was surrounded by estate. When William Sharp died in 1865, his brother George Macleay inherited the property and realized immediately it would have to be subdivided. If I were in the colony, George wrote to a friend, or even likely to see it often, I should not have the heart to dismember it in this fashion. But George, who was living in London, did indeed have the heart to do so: the estate was gradually leased out until only three acres were left of the original grant. Unlike his older brother, George lived long enough to see that Sydney was beginning to change in the deepest of ways—and beginning to place new demands on its land and its elites. Convict transportation had ended in the 1830s and most Sydneysiders had arrived, free, by boat. Sydney’s population trebled from 1791 to 1801, making it the second largest “white city” in the Empire. Eighty-five percent of Australians were living in cities, so the history of Australia had already become a history of socialized, urban man—and already the Aussie bush was something that only existed in the imagination of most Antipodeans. The advances of Victorian Australia in science and technology had changed everything, from health to transport to the new urban middle class. According to the colonial statistician, the average working class Australian in the 1890s was better paid and better fed than the German, the Italian, or the Englishman. The inner cities

THE HARVARD ADVOCATE

were terrible slums, however, with pitiful public health and infrastructure. Local barrister John Fitzgerald complained that Sydney had become the worst paved, most badly drained, most incongruously built, and the most selfish and backward represented city in Australia. As squalor and pestilence rocked the city center, the fortunate and the bold fled out to the suburbs and the aspiring middle class rushed down to Elizabeth Bay, to Walla Mulla, place of plenty place of blood, bidding high for a piece of the good life. A Sydney man at the turn of the century could become a gentleman in one generation, raised on the golden stilts of social mobility. The selfmade man and landowner looked around and saw a roaring city rising out of the bush; all his wealth and progress appeared to be the tangible result of his own endeavor. Books on etiquette were printed and mixed-class marriages occurred in great number. Then all at once it froze: the foreshore real estate was all bought up, social circles were welded closed, and the parvenus set about defending their new position with a newly exaggerated class consciousness based on social propriety and the ownership of land. In 1911 the Macleay family sold the Elizabeth Bay House to George Michaelis, a successful leather merchant in town who was prominent in the local Jewish community. The later Macleays had worked to repair the house’s reputation for antisocial behavior with a series of English-style garden receptions and opulent balls. Yet Michaelis sold the house to be divided into flats and resold—and then, just like that, the finest house in the colony was finished. the world is only too literally too much with us right now john fowles, the french lieutenant’s woman ELIZABETH BAY—The house fell into ruin. Most of the apartments didn’t get bought when they were offered for sale in 1928, and many remained unsold throughout the Great Depression and the 1940s. In wartime, the harborside locale became a liability; rumors ran wild about the Japanese invasion that always seemed to be imminent. The Cross was the meeting place of choice for soldiers coming ashore and their girls; it quickly became a local capital of vice and organized crime. Artists came to “squat” rent-free in the house,

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and the drunken caretaker turned a blind eye to their loud and raucous parties. They lived there for nothing, using candles for light and working undisturbed in the ruins of colonial splendor. This was the hub for the Sydney Charm School of painters, whose figurative artworks show a rather neoclassical concern with form and color as ornament, and who were very quickly uncollected after the war when Australian art veered towards the abstract and expressionist. Donald Friend belonged to this school; he was a selfdeclared middle-aged pederast who drew beautiful male nudes, wrote brilliant diaries, and had a series of rather public relationships with much younger men in both Sydney and Bali. Once he asked: Is one’s personal view of geography entirely colored by sexual fantasies? In 1942, Friend saw the first-ever foreign attack on Sydney, as three Japanese midget subs entered the harbor and shelled the city. Friend watched through the big French windows, pushing his eye against the crack in the boards, marveling at the brilliant display of Eastern pyrotechnics and wondering where the thunks were landing. Watch him gaze, and try to think what he thinks when he writes that this moment made him enlist in the Australian military. Sydney grew up that night, and suddenly subs were everywhere in the murky harbor. When victory came, the Cross remained the Cross—and was the backdrop for crack’s Australian debut in the 1980s—while the harbor front downhill slowly rebuilt its storied reputation. The shore became replete with garish modern homes— since there were and are practically no zoning restrictions—and into these mansions came the new Australian moguls of business and media. The Elizabeth Bay House was rented out for private functions; its bookcases were removed so the Library could be turned into a Ballroom. It was restored as a historic building and opened as a museum modeled on Alexander Macleay’s residence. Aside from the house, only a tiny garden remains of the Scot’s vast realm. It leads onto a flat, obedient block of a park, wedged between apartment buildings that spill hastily down to the water. All is new. But the roads still wind down the paths set out by the colonial gardener. If you take the main road through Kings Cross you veer left in a wild dog-leg at the top of the hill, crowded with commuters by day, taxis and young drunk flesh in the

night. When the colony’s surveyor-general was away on an exploration trip in 1831, Macleay secretly arranged for the planned road through his grounds to be built around the perimeter of his estate instead. The dog-leg is his legacy to the city that he grew to love despite its frightful isolation. (The one named Macleay St., by the by, is wide, straight, and beautiful.) And if there are lighter signatures of Australia’s deeper past, they have been buried in the silence of the soil—lost to the trees that shake in the wind and the cloudy harbor water.

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Degradation and Cold Sores and Bed Sores and a Dead Dog, 2011 Kayla Escobedo Acrylic on canvas panel 11’’ x 14’’ THE HARVARD ADVOCATE

We Were Supposed MARK CHIUSANO

We were supposed to go see a movie, get coffee, return calls, kiss, be alone, share a meal together, sleep on the same side of the bed, date, turn the radiator lower, find a studio, get two keys, move out for a while, get coffee, talk, see other people, get drunk, take a cab back to your place at two in the morning, fuck, return calls, date our friends, be angry, run six miles on the sidewalk, take a vacation, try again; get sunburned, sleep on the same side of the bed, reminisce, copy edit, get fired, find new jobs, move to San Francisco, eat only in Italian restaurants, get engaged, wear rings, wear black and console your mother, move back to Brooklyn, find an apartment, have your mother move in, be unhappy—paint the windowsills, drag your fingernails across the floorboard, over the socket with a dusting rag—be parents, buy diapers, find preschools with appropriate learning philosophies, read science books, play classical music, hire babysitters, write Christmas letters, go on family vacation (hate Disneyland, ride It’s a Small World, twice, because the kid loves it), go home, drive to rock concerts with your college friend Stanley, lock the bedroom door, go to Little League, scratch blood on our chests when the kid gets a concussion, play three-way catch, kick soccerballs, gain weight, go to funerals, move to Boston with the office, tell the kid he’ll like the new school, buy a basketball hoop, be pulled away from your mother in assisted living, drink two glasses of red wine at dinner, watch you drink no wine at dinner, stew, be bored in Boston—me walking alongside graveyards, discovering poetry cafes, coming home alone at four in the morning—drive the kid to school, take online classes, go on family vacation, have sex, write longer Christmas letters, watch a De Niro TV movie that hasn’t been on in a while, buy me a leather jacket and let me walk along the water, standing one foot leaned behind the other, watching people, watching men, tell the kid it’s not about him; do well in business, go on family vacation, argue on the balcony while the kid texts, come back, reminisce, edit applications, share a meal, bring your mother home, take prom pictures, shake the kid’s hand, bring the girlfriend on a weekend trip, feel the kid cry, explain love, put the kid’s head on our chests like we used to put ours, unpack the car on a college campus, walk around with college sweatshirts, watch the kid not turn around, wait for the kid to call first: buy books we don’t need any longer, pick grass stems by the river, press our names into each others backs with our fingers sitting on a park bench, stand at a gas station and let the gas drip, go see a movie, get coffee, return, kiss, be alone.

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ENVOY

William Topaz McGonagall and the Disaster over Tay: What Happened in that Life and on that Day ERIC ROFF BREWSTER

I. There was a mist over Scotland and there was a moon in the sky. But opinions differ as to which made 75 people die. The bridge was long, the longest of its day. It spanned two miles from Dundee to Wormit across the Firth of Tay. In 1871 the North British Railway Act received the Royal Assent. Government funds were lavishly spent. Within the year the Tay Bridge’s foundation stone was laid. However, to the depth of the central waters, little attention was paid. The bedrocks descended too deeply to support the originally planned piers. As a result, project completion was postponed seven years. The architect was Thomas Bouch, of English descent. He revised his plans to great extent. The piers were set deeper and spaced more widely apart. The superstructure girder spans were thus longer than envisioned at the project’s start. But Bouch pressed on, getting his revisions approved by the Board of Trade. And so the first fatal error was made.

II. William Topaz McGonagall was the town of Dundee’s most ardent supporter. But his time there was not without turmoil, often spent flirting with Edinburgh’s border. His father, quietly Irish, was an heirloom weaver. McGonagall soon caught his father’s occupational fever. The job was short-lived, as Scotland traded in its craftsmen for the Industrial Revolution. The transition was only the businessman’s solution. McGonagall, tasked with feeding a wife and seven children, still longed to weave. In the year of 1877, a revelation from within he received. He reported a“strange kind of feeling”that lasted precisely five minutes long. He knew then and there that to be anything but a poet would be existentially wrong. On the spot he sat down and wrote his foundational poetic feat, “An Address to the Rev. George Gilfillan,” an ordained pastor and poet in Dundee. The first of over 200 obscure works by McGonagall it would be. For one poem in particular, “Tay Bridge Disaster,” McGonagall is known. Its opening verse shall be presently shown.

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Beautiful Railway Bridge of the Silv’ry Tay! Alas! I am very sorry to say That ninety lives have been taken away On the last Sabbath day of 1879, Which will be remember’d for a very long time. III. The last Sabbath day of 1879 was December 28. Many onlookers that evening reported forewarnings of the bridge’s impending fate. At a quarter past six a northbound train crossed the bridge, sending sparks in the air as the wheels grated against the railing. But few suspected the bridge would soon be failing. To be sure, there had been worries of structural flaws. Many passengers experienced unstable transport, though of unknown cause. But Bouch was the most respected architect of his day. If he spoke with confidence then there was nothing left to say. Indeed, immediately following the completion of the bridge, Bouch was knighted by the British crown. Queen Victoria ensured he was of great renown. So when the next train passed through Dundee on the last Sabbath day of 1879, none feared the worst. Not even Bouch, who in structural integrity was so well-versed. IV. McGonagall declared 90 lives had been lost that night. In fact, the train had carried only 75 passengers, but he used poetic license, as well he might. And there was no doubting the burgeoning poet’s genuine dismay. Only one year prior to his masterpiece, he had penned an ode to the bridge titled “The Railway Bridge of the Silv’ry Tay.” To McGonagall, the bridge was the pride of Dundee. He rhymed with this much in mind in his poetry. To the rest of the town, McGonagall was a landmark in his own regard. His talents extended beyond that of a bard. Before his five-minute poetic revelation struck, McGonagall toiled in the works of Shakespeare. And so a theatrical homage he determined to engineer. Rehearsing “Macbeth” with fervor, he auditioned for the title role at the local theatre space. The producer offered to give him the role if McGonagall paid “a large sum,” a proposition the newly minted actor chose to embrace. On opening night, the theatre filled with friends of McGonagall who were prepared to witness a train wreck. McGonagall made the performance worth his paycheck. Upon the utterance of his first line, “So foul and fair a day I have not seen,” the crowd

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erupted into a standing ovation. With welcomed interruption he proceeded in his oration. In the final scene, sensing that the actor playing Macduff was jealous of his reception, McGonagall refused to die. The sword fight lasted for many minutes as MacDuff’s would-be lethal blows all seemed to go awry. At last, the actor burst into a rage and cried out, “Fool! Why don’t you fall?” It simply took a certain strand of Macbeth to have such gall. But there would be darker days ahead. Days when he would memorialize the dead. ’Twas about seven o’clock at night, And the wind it blew with all its might, And the rain came pouring down, And the dark clouds seem’d to frown, And the Demon of the air seem’d to say“I’ll blow down the Bridge of Tay.” V. The weather was unkind on that last Sabbath day. A westerly gale chose to blow across the Tay. Winds blew often and winds blew strong. But that day, the wind blew particularly long. Joints in the bracing bars protecting the rail chattered. Stress on the bolt holes led to cracks and fatigue from being endlessly battered. Many times the rail had supported trains upwards of a hundred tons, filled with coal and stone. But though the structural piers when blown by wind would sway, the continued loosening of the joints went unknown. The six o’clock train, destabilized by both wind and loosened joints, caused the rail’s safety tie bars to break. But in the dark of night there was no damage to visually intake. VI. McGonagall’s rise was swift. He knew he needed to share his gift. He quickly determined the obvious path to the top of the poetic scene. And so he set out to impress the Queen. From Dundee to Balmoral, 60 miles he walked. Despite walking straight into a thunderstorm and then a mountain, he never balked. Soaked and starving, “I am the Queen’s Poet,” he told the palace guard, and for a response proceeded to wait. “Alfred, Lord Tennyson is the Queen’s Poet,” the guard said, irate. Poet laureate he was not meant to be. He turned around and walked back to Dundee. When the train left Edinburgh Thepassengers’heartswerelightandfeltnosorrow,

But Boreas blew a terrific gale, Which made their hearts for to quail, And many of the passengers with fear did say“I hope God will send us safe across the Bridge of Tay.” But when the train came near to Wormit Bay, Boreas he did loud and angry bray, And shook the central girders of the Bridge of Tay On the last Sabbath day of 1879, Which will be remember’d for a very long time.

And wish them all a happy New Year. So the train mov’d slowly along the Bridge of Tay, Until it was about midway, Then the central girders with a crash gave way, AnddownwentthetrainandpassengersintotheTay! The Storm Fiend did loudly bray, Because ninety lives had been taken away, On the last Sabbath day of 1879, Which will be remember’d for a very long time.

VII. Boreas blew winds at an estimated force of 10 or 11 on the Beaufort scale. For comparison, 12 is a hurricane and nine a strong gale. With the already weakened joints, a slight misalignment in the tracks would cause increasingly severe windinduced oscillation. Defective cast iron lugs created a situation prone to devastation. Observers marveled at the sight off of Dundee’s coast. The bridge’s high girders wobbled the most.

IX. At 7:13 in the evening eyewitnesses saw the train reach the south end of the bridge with unease. Sparks flew as the cars shook in the unusual breeze. Seven minutes later, a markedly forceful gale on shore was felt. In the train, each passenger was decades away from being offered a seatbelt. The train wobbled and wobbled, then wobbled too much. Off the tracks went the train at the Storm Fiend’s touch. The central high girders collapsed one by one. Into the Tay went the train, and 75 lives were done.

VIII. McGonagall lived in a world unlike today’s, in that it was in a different century. It was equally easy for a poet to wind up in debtor’s penitentiary. Making a living on poetry was no simple task. Few would ask to buy his works, even those he would ask. He still took to the streets daily, selling copies of his poems to passerby. He resolved to rake in pennies or at least try. And try he did, with notable success. Not in selling his poems, but in getting friends to bail him out in times of distress. It was with said friends’ donations he published “Poetic Gems” in 1890, his first collection. Critics hailed it as a beacon of imperfection. The book brought him great publicity. Dundee viewed him as a unique voice with unparalleled authenticity. Soon he performed his poems nightly in taverns and bars. The gigs were not without harm, and he came away with many battle scars. He was often at odds with his audience, due to his staunch opinion that none should drink. Not highly of this opinion did the bar patrons think. McGonagall’s view on publicans was grim. As he often pointed out, a publican was the first person to throw a plate of peas at him. So the train sped on with all its might, And Bonnie Dundee soon hove in sight, And the passengers’ hearts felt light, ThinkingtheywouldenjoythemselvesontheNewYear, With their friends at home they lov’d most dear,

X. McGonagall was soon in financial straights once more. Maintaining a standard of living was quite the chore. So he took to the circus, as any performer would do. And at him, spoiled foods the audience threw. But McGonagall put up with the chaos, returning home each night with 15 shillings for pay. There was profit yet to be had from the tale of the Bridge of Tay. Until, at least, the circus became so popular and crazed that Dundee officials decided to shut it down. McGonagall promptly put on his poetic frown. But his poems in protest did not shake the law. His relations with the city would never quite thaw. He became mocked in public and hassled in streets. Few cared to buy his poem sheets. By 1893, he threatened that if treated so poorly, he would leave Dundee. It became a town joke that he would surely stay another year once he realized “Dundee” rhymed with “1893.” For one reason or another, McGonagall left in 1894. Dundee saw little of their poetic pride anymore. As soon as the catastrophe came to be known The alarm from mouth to mouth was blown, And the cry rang out all o’er the town, Good Heavens! the Tay Bridge is blown down, And a passenger train from Edinburgh,

THE HARVARD ADVOCATE

Which fill’d all the people’s hearts with sorrow, And made them for to turn pale, Because none of the passengers were sav’d to tell the tale How the disaster happen’d on the last Sabbath day of 1879, Which will be remember’d for a very long time. XI. The fallout fell quickly. Blame was layered on the architect Bouch damningly thickly. The Tay was poorly built, the press declared. To think not a single life had been spared. Vehemently Bouch did protest. Had it not been for the wind, he claimed, those 75 lives in peace would not rest. Surely the train had been blown off its track. And this was the train that broke the camel’s back. The Court of Inquiry did not agree. Eye to eye the Court and Bouch could not see. The Court announced the bridge “badly designed, badly constructed and badly maintained.” In the public’s opinion, Bouch’s fault was ingrained. A bridge he was building at Montrose was promptly demolished. His reputation could never again be polished. He grew sick and weary in his public flogging’s stead. Within months he was dead. XII. McGonagall, meanwhile, at last received the royal treatment he desired. According to a letter surreptitiously delivered one otherwise uneventful day, by King Thibaw of Burma his poems were admired. As the letter declared, McGonagall had been knighted. Now known as “Sir William Topaz McGonagall, Knight of the White Elephant, Burma,” all past wrongs had been righted. Pleased with his legacy, there was little left for the Knight of the White Elephant to do. And so McGonagall died without a penny to his name in 1902. Today he is known popularly as the worst poet of all time. Reasons cited are his total ignorance of meter, his obscure wandering content, his misaligned metaphors, his abrupt moralistic endings and (perhaps) his simpleton rhyme. But some are suspicious of this master of poor verse. They think the bad bard could have been much worse. Some believe his works and public shows were in fact brilliant displays of early performance art. Much like the cause of the felling of the Tay Bridge, we may never know the degree to which he was smart.

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But there is no need to quarrel over problems like those. There is only the problem of more of his prose. It must have been an awful sight, To witness in the dusky moonlight, While the Storm Fiend did laugh, and angry did bray, Along the Railway Bridge of the Silv’ry Tay, Oh! ill-fated Bridge of the Silv’ry Tay, I must now conclude my lay Bytellingtheworldfearlesslywithouttheleastdismay, That your central girders would not have given way, At least many sensible men do say, Hadtheybeensupportedoneachsidewithbuttresses, At least many sensible men confesses, For the stronger we our houses do build, The less chance we have of being killed.

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CONTRIBUtors' notes

VICTORIA BAENA is the sum of her parts.

ERIC ROFF BREWSTER rhymes with rooster.

One morning, after a couple hours’ sleep, MARK CHIUSANO.

CHARLOTTE LIEBERMAN is buying a goat and a sewing machine.

KAYLA ESCOBEDO sells comics, shirts, and handmade toys, which can all be found on her website: www.kaylascomix.com.

IVY PAN is an aspiring cook.

SARA J. STERN is writing a love letter to the system.

MY NGOC TO is wearing stripes on stripes.

ALEXANDER J. B. WELLS isst einen Berliner.

MOLLY DEKTAR doesn’t want to be friends; JULIAN GEWIRTZ knows why we can’t be friends.