MARJON KYRIE

Marjon Kyrie is an American writer and teacher who has spent most of her life traveling. She was educated in the US and in Europe and has worked in Italy and Taiwan. Living and working abroad, Ms. Kyrie has had an opportunity to be a true participant in cultures that demonstrate sometimes near irreconcilable differences in values from those held sacred in the United States, but that also often reflect precisely the same experience through these differences. Ms. Kyrie's wants to write stories for an American audience that give voice to a distinct 'other' to American society in the world.

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CARLO (a fragment)

She had a small black notebook that she carried with her in her purse, and by the entries recorded, you might think it served to give her a kind of mental companionship, the sort of thing good stories give us. Apparently, she would see things and they would form little dreams -imagination resolving into arabesques like a kind of fantastic ivy, as it met and grew around reality. These dreams might have been no more than a sort of excess energy resolving into figures like hieroglyphics, pictorial designs--images that suggest a code, a hidden bit of information-secret talk.

'He was convinced that his wife did not die naturally. That is, she died in the way of nature-overcome by a disease that is often fatal-but only because she had unnaturally gone and accepted death. In a sense she had called for it to come, and it had approached 'smothering the white-silver of living at the onset of day.'

For this entry, there was no date. On the next page, there was another note and there is no way to tell if they are related as they seem to be.

'On that day, he stopped playing the accordion at the side of the road near the university. The long narrow street with no room for parking and the cars careening down it at all hours, seemed on that day to be a deserted corridor, gray, dusty and somehow heartless-but perhaps that was its usual sense because of the prison a little way beyond the large, foul-smelling, industrial green trash canisters that stood to one side of the road. As he played through the mid-morning, his small exhausted eyes had followed the lithe young bodies of the students in the streets going in and out of the little convent door of the American school but still not populating it, not filling up its void of abandonment, wondering less about whether or not they would toss him a coin, and more about their love lives, and their mysterious 'other lives' in the far off lands that were their homes. They seemed, as all foreigners do, to live concurrently those 'other lives' in far off places somehow even while staying in Rome to study.'

There had been a street musician near our school in Trastevere, an accordionist, faithfully playing the usual folksongs, faithfully exhibiting the weathering of age, poverty and that zest of the village, its dust, singing, clannishness, and violence, its distrust of the big city world with its tall hard towers and broad, arrogant buildings, its immense stone, its glass and iron, so split apart from the small soft organism that drowned out, with a cacophony of harsh, inhuman noise, those soft songs of the feast days and holy days that he had learned as children learn prayers through rhythm, repetition and the very monotony itself at the heart of them. In fact, Rome retains something of the village in its big city turning, its stirrings and shiftings with streets that seem ultimately, when you have walked them and come home from them, to go round and round like a washing machine in motion. Yes, this world-- the industrial world, the technological world, the world of cybernetics has touched the old city, harshly and ecstatically, like an exultation of demons falling and rising back to contaminate and to seduce with their strange monstrous beauty. Still in the middle of this mechanized flutter, the stones of Rome whisper old unspeakable stories of blood and divinity, the horror in the quiet, unchanging, heaven-reflecting human and the way we forget in the village square at the banquet, with the children, among the old women leaning in their chairs to hear.

He stood and stood, bending and working the old instrument as it swayed in his arms for days. He called up perhaps not his memories, but someone's memories-and the dance where he had smiled and touched her wrist with a silken two fingertips, and she had imagined that he was in love with her. There had been an island in the night, the island of the night, where in the light they had come together, on the dolphin back of music, at the apex of the arc as he had taken her hand and raised it high; it had been a young girl's hand, a slight, unswollen hand all wing-like and quick, with an antique yellow-gold ring carved with strange marks in relief that she loved to finger.

She dreamed of white, not of weddings. It was that mystical white of the village that seemed to coalesce as if into the solitary moon, half puffed in mid phase, and reflect in her mind in a cold rippling sheen as if in dark water. That white struck her, in her mind, as violent and pure, sternly vestal, unspeaking but telling the one secret of living. It was the white that she wanted to bring him and the white in her that he did not understand.

That figure with the accordion, moving his body as if it merely enlarged on the instrument, bent in and swelled out, turned in fragmented circles and softly droned. Students passed him lightly. Few ever gave him a coin.

She told herself she loved him or at least her body did. He had thrown a shadow across her and it had quieted her, so that she was fearful, delicate, barely breathing with a pulse all rapid and troubled like a wild rabbit stopped for a moment in a field sensing the human at the hem of its fear-stiffened gaze. Alone with her thought of him, she in her imagination was as sinuous as Salome, but turning before this king of the moment in mid-dance, she was fragile and closed. She did not want: He had asked her her name with a compliment, perhaps expecting a pretty answer. She wanted his arms, his night-qualities; he had to, in her opinion, pick his way through the maze of her self that looked so monstrous sometimes in the morning in the mirror, to that delicious core where her eyes were gleeful and her smiles supple as roses; it was this core that she had kept, she imagined for the man who gave her pleasure.

The erect walls where he did not understand and she did not want closed them in. In the breath-light, green-dark garden where the honey fine air of the jasmine hung like a light curtain, he had bent his face towards her. And she saw that she was swept from the beginning of things into the belly of wisdom to come.

He played until the afternoon turned a watercolor blue and pink, until it was cool and through the arches, you could see people almost immobile in the outside seats of the bar, before cold beers and coffee cups, hands holding cigarettes drifting in the smoke down to the sides of the chair, up to the lips that moved in that formlessness of talk.

She saw in his eyes, there in the garden, that women always imagine love. She saw her quaint, breakable pride and there was fury on the one hand, modesty and tenderness on the other. Why, she could caress his face and call him love and there would be conversion instead of conflict, the middle ground not where they would talk one language but where the two languages would be seamed together with utmost craftsmanship. His eyes still showed her that he thought he knew her. He shone like a mirror with intimacy but she knew that much as it looked real, it was only a reflection.

The accordionist made a corner in the street. He reconfigured the city for just a moment into a grand hall with a corner. In that corner, moved that village with its white, and that one feast day where the women had danced in the square in the hot night in their long red and blue dresses and soft feet in open sandals, as if in a ripple of water. For a moment the illusion of music entered the lonely of the passersby and made them slightly sad, without knowing why as the music turned and turned inside.

Although they had told her that she had never had anything to lose, she felt she had lost him. There was a man as ancient as the hills and sung poetry that was to come slipping on his young flesh and know her core and the code of her not wanting. He was to wander down those deserted corridors like the wisdom of music into the wordless parts and build his habitation. She protested when she married him that it suited her that he was poor. He was warm and she had an instinct that she would taste life with him. Then the children had come and she had almost forgotten. And then her illness and she had remembered.

For years, the home village all blurred in the far off had seemed to her small and toylike, a little shoddy, papery and ephemeral as dust and summer. The city so big and close all the time as to be perceived myopically contained all reality. It had given her a sense of convergence to move through the streets when they had had enough money to buy just one new dress, or one little coral necklace for the little girl at her side. He drove buses and they made just enough money to buy a little house on the outskirts. But even when she succeeded in cooking the dishes his mother taught her to make, he never ate well, unusual for Italians who seem always to get their meals in and nourish themselves with confidence, and she thought it was a kind of resistance to the marriage, to being with her. He would gobble pizza and suppli on the road and his once handsome body began to get shapeless with fat. She blamed the city for bringing on a fatigue that was endless in her, although her children blamed themselves. They got used to seeing that sea blue under her eyes, the pallor in her dark loveliness, that almost transparent hover of whiteness that was her body that somehow made them feel as if her days had been wasted.

In her illness, the village had come back to her. She liked him to play the old songs. It was not betrayal that filled her mind when she saw him there again. It was rather the strength and satiety of the village with its garden where once her body had turned magical.

Her son was too young for her to die. She told him to make her tea that day and put into it a little honey. And he had poured the honey with all of a child's guile and faith that it would be right and too much had folded out and then oozed and dripped on to the floor as he pulled away the jar. She had kissed him because she was too tired and weak to scold him. And then something had brought him back-the one who smiled as if he knew her, that is, not the young, uninitiated-to-love, scared kid standing before him barely breathing, but the new woman that was in her veins, the one she saw in agony and sweetness, swimming naked in endless dark water, the woman who knew how to adjust life for a man, standing in white and silent under a light honeysuckle vine, encircled by its sweetness. And no one had ever touched that, the day she called death. Death came and found her a virgin, in reality, and virgin-like half jealous that loving would go on despite her, half sure of her vestal wholeness in offering herself up.

When she died, he began to act a little crazy. He went into the streets with his accordion and played the songs she had asked for when she was bedridden and dreaming, thinking so much and dividing herself from him.

Even when he thought of her, he felt a little out of sorts. It was as if it was useless because his memories of her seemed somehow like cheap imitations-glass jewelry imitating precious stones. What came to him now and then, making him sadder and angrier than her death was that one little comment she had made before the marriage. 'I think,' she had said looking at him as if he was as closed as stone, 'I really fell in love once but even that can be left behind'. And that was the only key to what she really was.

When she died, he took the antique gold ring off her finger. He set it down somewhere, and then forgot and lost it, and then found it again. The sight of it made him reflective as if it contained a message not revealed enough (somehow covered up or smudged) for him to know what it said.

She wrote in her diary: 'Children grow up here and marry and everyone acts as if they know what people feel, what love is, and how things are supposed to be. But I think there is a story, like a subterranean stream, that feeds people secretly with its freshness and coldness; and this story really is the basis, the living water here that people drink of to live without being able to tell you about it as if it is somehow not proper.'

In any case, the accordionist moved on. The cars continue to careen down the street and the students to travel in and out of the door of the university, talking their varied languages. Somehow, the empty space that he left, the corner that he made, the lone corridor in which the old village songs echo, is all filled up now as if it had never been and the life of the everyday modern city turns over and over with its rough monotony, its machinery noises canceling out the soft talk and laughter, the quiet singing.

'Rome, this city, is really dove gray, a tired, forgetful, dull soot-silver, I think. In my imagination, though, I am inclined to see it pink and in my memory white as a wedding or a shroud'.