I came to visit a Ghanaian friend who runs a very tiny, very humble business. When he had no customers he came and sat down. He saw tears in my eyes and leaned forward to plant his hands flat on the table and make me hear. He said: Cathoel, the strongest woman I’ve ever met.
We sat by the big tree with the sky drowning our heads and he said, I don’t want to see you cry like that. The rainy season has started at last and due to climate catastrophe, it is months late. I love the rains. I told my friend, it is a luxury to cry. I am many miles from home and to be able to show such strong emotion and not have to hide it from someone, thank you for this gift. He knows I am newly single and the guy who had pursued me many months has turned out to be a fawkes. One thing I cherish about you, he said: one thing I love about you. Open hearted. To look at the world and see its beauty, to want to share that looking. When I sleep, I can’t sleep. I’m always thinking, where is she, is she ok? You are always on my mind. He said, how many people come out this way.
In Ghana, men come forward as soon as they see any woman unclaimed. All of our friendships turn out to be courtships. The night was withering its breezes all around us and I could feel its slim clouds passing. I began to wonder were we under some kind of spell — the spell of communion, the spell of know each other. You are beautiful, he said, you’re a beautiful woman. I took hold of a plait of my hair and held it. Its smoothness and the fluid stout solidity in my hand. My hair has silver threads like a costly embroidery and like an embroidery they are not real silver. My hair is turning white, I said. No, said my friend, what I mean is: beautiful is who you are.
I sat there in silence. You are a beautiful woman, he said, and you will always be what it is. No question about it. I can’t think what other words to use for you.
Walking home I passed a spot where a local woman with whom I have a fondness was sitting with a group of quiet men. Two of the men were speaking in German, she called me over. He’s not with you this evening? I told her why not. And my friend said, Wow. Well. You need good people around you. She introduced me and I had sweet and intricate exploratory chats with each of her friends in turn. It felt so easy. Sitting under the thin sketch of moon with a big dark tree staining the dark night like a hand. Some women walked by and they greeted each other, I learned the Ewe word for home. Efui. I don’t know how it is spelt but it has a whistle in the f. I stashed it carefully in my modest stock of local words, a few in Ga, a few in Pidgin, a few in Twi.
The same women walked by more slowly in the opposite direction, one of them had dropped her money and they were prowling the streetside to find it. At our purple plastic table the five of us sat talking. Our conversation was quiet and in four languages, plus Pidgin. One of the men my friend is friends with is a Ghanaian German teacher from the Volta Region who speaks Ga and Ewe and Twi. And I was bathed in the iridescent sense of being among philosophers, not those who use thought to keep life at arm’s length but who make use of conversation in order to swallow it whole, in order to bathe in it and swim right out into it. Conversation is the gift and prejudice of our natural human world. It’s what we’ve lost. It’s what loving relations of any kind regain: a business partnership, a neighbourly friendship, teamwork, collaboration, sharing a bus shelter in the rain. And I was thinking how a marriage is a deeper conversation: that’s what it is. You start talking with some stranger at a party, or at work or in a bookshop, and the two of you just want to keep talking. Before too long it seems your conversation has become precious and it now engrosses kissing, and all the kinds of touching two lovers can invent, which like stories, like songs, are numberless. Your conversation together is interrupted by misunderstanding, or deepened, and interrupted or deepened again with each child and you must now pay attention to the business you have built together, the garden you have grown, the home you tend, the songs you write, the holidays you plan. Sexual closeness is a thread in the conversation and so is sleep. And so is cleaning the house. And one day when you are quiet with age the two of you are going to sit down once more once the business has closed its doors and the children you raised have gone off into their lives, and you’ll resume the intimacy you first started out with, enriched and grown deeper by the years stretched in between.
You are far out on the wild black sea on the long journey you have built together and wherever you are is always home.
My three new acquaintance were funny and so interesting I had to keep reaching for my bag to jot things down. The Ewe man insisted he must hear the song in Ewe I had recently recorded and I sang it for him. I said, I have the feeling I maybe sound like an Ewe who has had a stroke, or a little bit drunk. No, he said, judicious and slow: I’ve never heard anyone get so close. And then he tipped his head. Is that really all your hair? I had loosened the elastic and released it like a thick fur collar too heavy to wear during the day. I grabbed a handful of it and tugged my head sideways: Yes. I grew it all myself, in my own head.
The third man was older and a journalist. He had travelled. Now he was recently retired. He told me, I don’t know what I am going to do now but I know there’s something, and I keep searching for it. I thought of everything I have encountered in Ghana and how I could never have known any of it before I first arrived. So I said, why not just wait to see what comes. Let it emerge. You cannot know it til it arrives. He said, I don’t know how it will arrive when I am sleeping all the time. And I said, napping is perfect for awaiting insight. Because in each new day you get several of those littoral dream times when you’re half woken and your deeper mind can speak to you. Your wild mind will seed ideas you yourself cannot conceive of and let you loose into the radiant last adjunct of your life. Yes! he said. He grabbed my hand and raised it like a trophy we had won. You are a natural conversationalist, my Australian friend! You, too, I said, rejoicing. He called our friend over and in her floral dress she came, riding on her big haunches, all woman and then some. The man set my hand down as carefully as though it were blown glass. My friend sat down and settled her skirt around her knees and he sat back and opened his arms. He was smiling. In any group of people, he said: Cathoel is going to be the heart.
Tag: beauty
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beautiful is who you are
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illicit flower factory
Today my boyfriend discovered the illicit dried flower factory I have been running in his apartment. At first glance it looks as though a two-dimensional squirrel has made herself a nest out of private papers and unwanted official letters retrieved from the waste paper bin beside his desk.
“What’s this?” he said, lifting away the heavy row of comic books along the shelf to reveal my little stack of flattened envelopes and folded paper.
“Uhm,” I said, “that’s my dried flower factory. I have one at home, as well.”
The whole city has burst into bloom and the streets are filled with love. On our way down to the post office a man in the street grabs me, both hands clasping my forearm in a grip surprisingly determined and strong. An African man, bearded, handsome, long muscular arms and that’s all I see of him. He is smiling, pleading, manly, he is wooing me in his own language. “Danke,” I keep saying, “Danke, nein, ich muss ~ ” and wrenching my arm away I turn back to the taller man I have come out with, my beloved, who is bristling and who wraps his hand possessively about me at the waist. “What was that?” he asks, “you don’t know that guy?” “No,” I say, “he just really liked me.” “You look confident today. But why would he grab you while you’re kissing me?” he growled, looking over his shoulder in a feint.
“Well, that’s why,” I say, having understood the man in an instant. Perfect attraction is like that, if it so often only lasts a moment. “He liked it, I think, that I was laughing and teasing and reaching for you. I think maybe he thought, I’d like a woman to look at me that way and to kiss me like she loved me. I’d like that woman.”
He isn’t really worried, because he knows I love him. Other men casting glances and women looking at him are not new. And I know that he loves me too, he treats me beautifully and his dark sweetness and deep limpid loving heart are my water and my salt in the desert of city sugar and fat. And I know that he understands me, better than the guy who grabbed me in the street and would not let go, his eyes imploring and his smile broad, might ever do.
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at boyfriend school
What bothers me most about getting older is losing that glorious, elastic authority which I used always to use to shame men out of behaving boorishly. This afternoon we came through the park and passed the boules courts along the riverside, ruled off with low fences like dust baths for human sparrows, and I was collecting blossoms from the various flowering trees, the Spring has waited so long. The park was full of drug dealers and pregnant women and dogs, everywhere dogs. It all seemed glorious and I collected eight different kinds of blossom. Finding a second bush with the same flowers as a sprig I had already collected, I went up to it to make my little sprig kiss a sister flower still attached and growing. Saying, “Sistah! Hey sis!” and making smoochy noises. Then at the next hollow where the table tennis tables are set up I found another bush with the same flowers and went over to it, making kissing sounds – my companion said, mildly, “Are we going to be doing this all the way home?”
Alongside the boules courts we passed a man unzipped with his back turned, right there among the people, women, children, men, dogs, he had barely bothered to shunt himself into the bushes and it seemed so arrogant, so rude. I stared at him, turning my head as we walked past until he looked up and then I could say, witheringly, “I can see you!” He stared back, a complex expression crossing his face. I believe I read him perfectly. I said to my companion as we walked on, “You know – this is perhaps the most galling part about getting older. I lose that natural kind of authority of gorgeousness. Ten years ago he would have gone, Oh my god, that beautiful woman! and I have disgusted her! I’ve lost status in her eyes.”
He murmured appreciatively and slung his arm around me. But I didn’t want his compassion, I wanted his incomprehension. After a few dozen more steps I nudged him. I was grumbling. “You do realise that now would be a great time for you to say something beginning with, wait but Cathoel you are a beautiful woman?” He laughed. “Jeez,” I said. “Didn’t they teach you anything in Boyfriend School?”
“Cathoel,” he said, “you are still a very beautiful ~”
“Nope!” I put up a hand. “Do not use the word ‘still’!” But he wasn’t done. Unperturbedly he carried on, “~ and you will probably be beautiful until the day you die.” “Ahh,” I said, my breath sailing out of me like a breeze, and then I felt my body relax and my face grow warm and I snuggled back under the crook of his arm, where I like to belong.
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the blooming grime
Though I live in one of the grimiest areas of Berlin, and that’s pretty grimy, right now and for a few short blessed weeks I can walk – from my house – clear down to the UBahn station – under an alleyway of pink cherry blossom.
It’s like a fairytale. All I have to do is cross to the middle of a major road and then walk down the raised dividing strip, which now after months of litter and dirt is transformed into dense grass and litter, and then I walk, as if entranced, among the flowering trees, burying my face in their lowest-hanging blooms.
Traffic roars on either side but I don’t care, I am in wonderland, and I walk this almost every day. Yesterday there was a hailstorm – Spring! – so I was able to gather handsful of the foaming blossom that had been stripped off the trees by sparks of hail the size of unbroken buds.
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New York is hard to write about
New York is hard to write about. There’s so much of it and it keeps changing. So much human landscape, people breathing, tucking their feet. And the streets, where it lives, with this endless panorama. The feeling of spectacle and the dense sharp wild feeling of endless participation. The relating to the city in itself, a creature of its own. I have every day many tiny full ripe conversations with strangers on subways, in pharmacies (they sell vitamins shaped like Darth Vader’s head!), in bookstores. Sometimes we talk for a little while, like the Hispanic man with his huge happy smile on the way to Yankee Stadium with his kid, his young pretty wife who spoke up now and then “when there was least danger of it being heard,” his two mates who were African American. I love the Bronx-bound trains where racial normality prevails, exposing the patronising lie of that persistent white-privilege word ‘minority.’ He held up the flattened round ball of black when I asked about it, turning it to show that its two steel antennae were its little legs. “I thought it was an alien,” I told him, pointing, “I thought maybe it was your little pet.” “It’s a speaker,” he told me, turning it upright on the grimy floor to show. “When we get there, we going to listen to some music. My little girl loves it.”
Oftentimes when you have some exchange with a New Yorker you will both turn away afterward, so as to show – or so I think – that there is no harm, no foul, that we are both not crazy people, the city has not unhinged us and there is no intent to latch on and keep talking once the moment’s gone. You might both say, See you later, when one of you climbs out, and I always find that beautiful and moving. And how at the checkout at the grocery store it is normal, it’s friendly, to stand and chat whilst buying but if I were to stand another five minutes, chatting on as the next customer piled their bags, I would become instantly a freaky aberration. All that openness and friendliness now has an agenda: we recoil. And in fact that friendliness and openness often does have an agenda: I want all beings to be happy. That is my secret and now it’s out.
We walked clear up the centre of Grand Central Park, as my German-speaking companion calls it, til we reached the tiny walled gardens of the Conservatory Garden by East 104th Street. There is a lily pond there where water lilies bloom in threes: pink, and hydrangea blue, and a strange candling white. Fish churn under the water now and then and two gentlemen who bought them, from a shop in Chinatown, and who have wondered, they tell us, every year what to do with the koi when the pond is drained for winter (“they can survive underneath the ice”) stand feeding them, occasionally, lavishly, from a crinkling foil bag that says colour enhancing preparation. This whole day is colour enhanced, to me: I have in my hand the middling growth of a breastplate I’m building on a scarlet leaf that was just lying on the path by the lake, splendidly maple-pointed, and every time I find another blue or purpling spray of berries, a tiny lavender or soft pink flower, I pluck it (“darf ich?”) and add the stem to my thumbsward of stems. The day is purple and blue like a beautiful bruise. The grey winter days have cleared away and we are out, everyone is out, we’re all bleeding into each other in the sun. We are urban animals, we can survive under the ice. The beautiful young Black prince staring at his black sneakers on the subway, wearing his trackpants as though they were a suit, who held himself tensely waiting for the demand when I said, Excuse me. You have such a beautiful, striking face. I think – if you were to go into a really good quality modelling agency in Manhattan – they might be very excited about you. Then I turned away to my friend, to show him this is not a clumsy pick up, the agenda is transparent and shown. My friend said afterwards, casually, relieving me, “That man was smiling so much to himself all the rest of the ride. What did you say to him?” My first time in New York, scared and determined in 2011, I spoke to a tiny white-haired lady on the Harlem bus. This was my first foray into Madison Avenue and the expense had exhausted me. The legions of unhappy looking children, presaging an article I read later online which said How to Tell if Your Child is Spoilt. Question one read: do they find it impossible to be happy? When I climbed on the bus, drawn by the enchanting name Harlem, its juicy community sound, its soft music, this tiny lady was sitting opposite. I said, You’re so beautiful! And she looked startled, to my surprise. “No one’s ever told me that before,” she said. I said, “What? I would have thought people would have been telling you, all your life. You are a beautiful woman.” We gazed at each other til we both had tears in our eyes. I have thought of that lady and her seventy years’ bloom. I have wondered what kind of fears lurk in the hearts of men and families, that we cannot say to a beautiful woman, or man, this is your just tribute.
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light at night ja
Sometimes at night I like to talk to myself
in the dark, on the way home, on my bike
and then Berlin you drive me crazy with desire
for you, the trees which flicker over my back
like beetles’ wings, going light and dark, light
and heavy, all three at once -
hair now gone to morels
Today I had my hair cut and lost enough length to stuff a small teddy bear. Afterwards I crouched on the floor in the horseshoe swatch of paler wood worn on the black boards where the hairdresser stands every day in an arc that sweeps back and forth around each customer, and tamped up the soft, drying clumps in my fingertips, and put them in a paper bag they gave me. My hair had spread across a wide area and I gleaned back as much as I could. I feel a bit weird saying, Can you give me a bag, I want to take this stuff home: and even weirder about leaving it there lying on the floor. To get swept up. Mingled in with other people’s hair. Dusted in landfill, with its bad magic.
I had chosen for this outing a place I felt safe in, in a chic part of town where women carry little dogs in their handbags. All the trees have sprung into service and the old buildings gleam. On my way home feeling lighter and breezier in the fresh afternoon Spring air I pulled the handles of the bag apart and peered in – a soft knot of washed and combed ends and curls lay there in a heap, big as my two fists, coiled on itself on the floor of the bag like some little dog lured from its home.
I so hate getting my hair cut that it happens only once every year, or two years; for a long time I used to cut it myself, with the scissors on my Swiss army knife. The girl who took my appointment earlier in the day had a blond bob severely asymmetrical but her eyes were soft. “I will put you with Damir,” she decided. “He has an unusual name too.” Damir was very cool, as all hairdressers are cool, and reminded me of my friend M. Same quirked brow, same smooshed beanie on the back of his head; same deft hips. He let my hair out from its elastic and said, Ahh, in a tone of satisfaction. Took his time, handling the masses of it for ten minutes, parting and lifting it, weighing it, judging the curl and its spring and the way the colour grows. Only then did he say, “Let us go wash,” lässt uns waschen gehen. It was a pleasure to close my eyes and let myself be handled. He said, see how it’s much curlier at the back. See how it’s ginger at the ends, I said, and he said: that’s because you wear it up in a knot and that’s where the sun most gets to it. Right, I said, slowly, thinking: oh, riiight. How little one notices oneself.
Would you like something to read? He went over to a low table by the huge windows and bent over, sifting and separating. In the mirror I watched him choose me out three magazines and order them into a stack. One had a photo in it of the beautiful photojournalist Lee Mitchell, shortly after the death of Adolf Hitler, in his apartment taking a bath in his tub. When Damir offered me a drink and I said I’d like some water he said, Still oder mit. This translates, “Still or with?” Germans ask each other these questions about water, still or sparkling? With or without. “With” means with gas: bubbly. The salon was huge and only one other person was getting their hair cut in it. How much was all this going to cost? “I don’t care,” I said to myself, trying to calculate when it was last cut: more than two years ago. It was peaceful there under his hands within the tent of my own hair. I remembered how I used to go to nightclubs just for the dancing, and would dance alone, all night, all night. When men came up to me I didn’t yet know how to get rid of them so eventually I would take the elastic out of my hair and let it fall across my face like this, making a thorough curtain through which I could see out but no one could see in. I used to smoke and I guess it was eerie to see a woman sitting smoking stolidly through the sheet of her own hair, certainly no one persisted past that curtain and this reminded me of that. I closed my eyes and let sensation scratch at me all round. The fingers brushing the back of my neck. The tugging as he lifted wings of hair up high to trim the ends. The soft feathering as it fell down over my face. The scent of tobacco from his fingertips, that lay on the hairs hanging combed straight over my nose. The faintly tropical, faintly chemical smell of salon shampoo. “You never blowdry it,” he said, and I said, “I don’t even own a blowdryer. Or a comb.” “You can feel it in the hair,” he said, letting it run through his fingers like water in sand.
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the lovely man
You know how sometimes two souls collide in a fleeting way, like two bells chiming in different trees, and you never forget that person even if you never again see them or think of them. Well, that happened to me today. A most beautiful man. I went out to buy eggs and to finally drop in and see my friend who runs an exquisite New Berlin gift shop – it is filled with lovely things – he sells liquors and vodkas brewed locally. He sells handmade cards on creamy laid paper which have perfect arrangements of tiny dried flowers on them. Each card is initialed by the lady who makes it and inside is a little sheet of paper with her wavering handwriting – she is quite old, he says, and lives in Bavaria – explaining which wildflowers she used for this card. After much hesitation among the meadows I chose one with violets and something called in German “geese flowerlings.” The lady’s name is Rotraud – that’s her first name. I imagine her an elderly maiden, Germanic, pure-hearted, fieldly.
While we were standing chatting a woman walked in whom I had passed on my way into the snooty health food store, she has a seamed and brown face round like a nut and he showed me the cards he also sells with her photographs on them. I was still reeling. Ahead of me browsing in the health food store opposite I had seen this lovely man, baby straps wrapped around his chest, long wrinkled pants and comfy shoes and somehow the back of his head attracted me. At the egg shelves we ran against each other and looked into one another’s eyes and smiled. I like you! I like you, too. As I was walking home feeling so filled with ardour and friendship he cycled past, slow and leisurely, making faces at his baby who lay smiling in the little wooden cart pushed in front of the bicycle. Hey, I said. Hey, he said. I came home to the man whose loveliness is known to me in more compelling detail and the sound of whose voice from outside the door lifts my heart. He took a photo of me in my crowded overalls, every pocket bulging with spinach, bananas, nectarines, tea. I put some water on to boil the eggs whilst telling him all about it. We gloated over the four different kinds of amazing German breadrolls I had chosen and their funny names. My favourite breadroll name is ‘Schrippen,’ a kind of ordinary light white bun. I bought potato rolls, farmer’s rolls, dinkel rolls and poppy and sesame fruit rolls, lifting each one out of its hutch with the long-handled scissor provided there for just that purpose.
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a beauty
When I woke up I remembered the beautiful girl who was sitting outside a coffee booth by the river yesterday. She got out her phone and scrolled, she was luminous like a black pearl. When we were leaving I went up to her and said, Excuse me. Do you speak English. Yes, she said, in American. I always prefer to give compliments on the way out, to avoid creating half an hour of shared embarrassment where they have to keep smiling at you for thank you, or avoid looking your way. “You’re so beautiful,” I told her, “it makes me happy to see you. Beautiful, classy face. Bless you.”
She looked shy and pleased and said Thanks, very soft. All along the river path people were pushing their bicycles, sitting in the sun on benches, tramping with their large and small dogs. I guess everyone is beautiful when you look closely but some people wear it like a treasure they are trapped inside of, which casts its light on everyone they pass.
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Kurfürstendamm
I saw a woman who looked just like you, I wrote to my friend, smoking a cigarette and wheeling her bicycle, big black spiky thing with a huge basket strapped on front, down the boulevard on swank avenue with her friend, who was peering in the glossy shop windows, also smoking.
Then as I posted the letter I thought: hey. If a red-headed person spots their own twin on the street – is that a doppelginger? The man who last week complimented me, “it looks so lovely with your open hairs”, that is, with my hair unbound, walked past and we were both hurrying in the cold and our beanies pulled down over our brows, still we managed to grin at one another and exchange a few visible breaths. When he said that, I felt so glorious and seventies, platform boots grew beneath my heels and I felt my freedom rising through me like a mist, like the mist on the old airport tarmac, my stride grew longer and the knotty bundle gathered in my parka’s hood felt its roots right to my brain. Oh, the well-placed compliment. It’s that blue light of evening makes everybody pretty. I assembled my adventures of the last several cold days. Crossing the old abandoned airport towed by a dog I felt the mist rising all around and how the sun burned a white hole in the dense white sky. People had erected little winter gardens using pallets and old baskets, others were flying their kites. And the virgin busker I think I spotted one night on the street. He was standing on swank avenue, swaying a little, jerking an empty paper cup and singing beseechingly, uncertainly; he made me think of the Mr Darcy’s younger sister who sometimes introduces shyly a sentence or two “when there was least danger of them being heard.” So I went up to him and gave him all what I had in my pockets (a whole 30c) and said, Beautiful voice. Really? he said. Yes, I said. He looked like a nightclub bouncer who had suddenly discovered folk roots.