Excerpt of Great House by Nicole Krauss
(Page 3 of 6)
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Daniel was twenty-three, a year younger than I was, and though
he hadn't yet published a book of poems he seemed to have spent
his time better, or more imaginatively, or maybe what could be said
is that he felt a pressure to go places, meet people, and experience
things that, whenever I have encountered it in someone, has always
made me envious. He had traveled for the last four years, living in
different cities, on the floors of the apartments of people he met
along the way, and sometimes apartments of his own when he could
convince his mother or maybe it was his grandmother to wire him
money, but now at last he was going home to take his place alongside
the friends he had grown up with who were fighting for liberation,
revolution, or at least socialism in Chile.
The eggplant was ready and while Daniel set the table he told me to
look around at the furniture. The apartment was small, but there was
a large southern-facing window through which all the light entered.
The most striking thing about the place was the mess - papers all over
the floor, coffee-stained Styrofoam cups, notebooks, plastic bags, cheap
rubber shoes, divorced records and sleeves. Anyone else would have
felt compelled to say, Excuse the mess, or joked about a herd of wild
animals passing through, but Daniel didn't mention it. The only more
or less empty surface was the walls, bare aside from a few maps he'd
tacked up of the cities he had lived in - Jerusalem, Berlin, London,
Barcelona - and on certain avenues, corners, and squares he had scribbled
notes that I didn't immediately understand because they were in
Spanish, and it would have seemed rude to have gone up and tried to
decipher them while my host and benefactor set down the silverware.
So I turned my attention to the furniture, or what I could see of it under
the mess - a sofa, a large wooden desk with lots of drawers, some big
and some small, a pair of bookshelves crammed with volumes in Spanish,
French, and English, and the nicest piece, a kind of chest or trunk
with iron braces that looked as if it had been rescued from a sunken
ship and put to use as a coffee table. He must have acquired everything
secondhand, none of it looked new, but all the pieces shared a
kind of sympathy, and the fact that they were suffocating under papers
and books made them more attractive rather than less. Suddenly I felt
awash in gratitude to their owner, as if he were handing down to me
not just some wood and upholstery but the chance at a new life, leaving
it up to me to rise to the occasion. I'm embarrassed to say that my
eyes actually filled with tears, Your Honor, though as is so often the
case, the tears sprang from older, more obscure regrets I had delayed
thinking about, which the gift, or loan, of a stranger's furniture had
somehow unsettled.
We must have talked for seven or eight hours at least. Maybe
more. It turned out that we both loved Rilke. We also both liked
Auden, though I liked him more, and neither of us cared much for
Yeats, but both felt secretly guilty about this, in case it suggested
some sort of personal failure at the level where poetry lives and matters.
The only moment of disharmony came when I raised the subject
of Neruda, the one Chilean poet I knew, to which Daniel responded
with a flash of anger: Why is it, he asked, that wherever a Chilean
goes in the world, Neruda and his fucking seashells has already been
there and set up a monopoly? He held my gaze waiting for me to
counter him, and as he did I got the feeling that where he came from
it was commonplace to talk as we were talking, and even to argue
about poetry to the point of violence, and for a moment I felt brushed
by loneliness. Just a moment, though, and then I jumped to apologize,
and swore up and down to read the abbreviated list of great Chilean
poets he scribbled on the back of a paper bag (at the top of which, in
capital letters overshadowing the rest, was Nicanor Parra) and also
to never again utter the name of Neruda, either in his presence or
anyone else's.
Reprinted from Great House: A Novel by Nicole Krauss Copyright (c) 2010 by Nicole Krauss. Used with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
