Lisa Fishman
I lost a stone with a tree in it, lines as if etched in the form of a tree or as if an entire tree, about four inches high, had been imprinted on the stone. The etched or imprinted tree was only a skeleton—trunk and branches, not an abstract tree, merely one stripped to its most minimal, recognizable form.
I remember that when I found it, I picked it up and turned it over in my hand before connecting it in my mind with a stone I'd found a few days before. Half of that stone was in the shape of a leaf. No one to whom I had shown the partly leaf-shaped stone was impressed; to them it was just another example of my tendency to exclaim over the most unremarkable of whatever the beach or sky might yield to combers and scanners: nondescript gray and mottled pebbles, turkey vultures instead of eagles, crows instead of peregrine falcons, and so on.
But I knew or believed that the rather flat, hand-sized stone with strange layers and lines in, if you looked closely, half of it, would appeal to Iris, who was in another country at the same time that I was in another country. In other countries, we were not writing or speaking to each other, and I knew that neither would we do so months later when we were home. Yet I picked it up, the quietly unusual stone—not the tree-imprinted one I've since lost, but its half-leaf-shaped predecessor I've managed accidentally not to lose. I picked it up with the certainty both that it was for Iris and that I would not see Iris again.
In fact I planned not to see Iris again. I was resolved not to do so, despite or because of having sent her, before we left for other countries, a bundle of papers that could be mistaken for love letters or love poems. However, they were my version of what could be called "natural history prose writings" mixed in with what John Donne might call "devotions upon emergent occasions." It seems important to point out, if only to remind myself, that Donne's devotions are not strictly prayers but also arguments—in his case with God and in my roughly pagan case with eros, whom I do think of as a little god, possibly the only god, but still can't bring myself to capitalize the word or name. Is it a word or a name, I asked Iris in some 20 pages, maybe 40 in all, with reference to a bush with purple flowers we'd seen on a walk. I felt that eros had made an appearance—for its own sake, not for ours—on the night that followed the walk, and that its appearance was related to the question about words and names. Iris agreed, I think. We also agreed that the trick is not to get waylaid by such a question—not to get distracted, caught in the endless inevitable tangle or re-named.
As for the rock I brought home for Iris whom I will not see again, I'm sure it would be preposterous, after all that paper, to send it from any of the places I live to the place where she lives. And yet, both things are true: I found the stone for Iris and there will be no occasion for giving the stone to Iris. Just as, that night, other things were true that would not seem able to be true at the same time. That is old news, an old story anyone who loves and loves comes up against. One needn't think of it as love but my belief in eros compels me to think of it as love, as momentary or eternal as the case may be.
Even before I left the other country, I realized that I had lost the rock or stone intended for myself, the one I thought of in relation to the one for Iris. I see that I find myself wanting again to distinguish between the two, even though only one of the stones remains in my possession, and so it's like distinguishing between something and nothing. "Mine" had the etching of a tree on it, imperfectly complementing "hers," the one half-shaped like a leaf. Mine, or the thing that is "something" (unless what's missing is something, and what was kept is not), is sitting in the suitcase now, along with all the other things that have no place or purpose as soon as you get home: a handful of shells, the wooden comb you didn't use there and won't use here, postcards ever to remain blank on one side, plastic shoes for swimming among poisonous sea urchins, etc. Not to mention the colorfully printed brochure about traditional methods for netting the little silver fish, alici:
The fishing is done always at night, when there is no moonlight, due to the big holes in the fishing net, only big anchovies are caught in a way that they are getting stuck and when they are trying to liberate from the net, they are injuring themselves and start to lose blood. This gives to the final product an unique and inimitable organoleptic properties. Because of this the salted anchovies will have an intense pink-red colour and emanate a sweet perfume which is unique of this product. [. . .] The young are managing to escape through the big holes for reproduction.
There is at the end of the alici brochure some helpful advice about how to use the juice, colatura, which is left over after curing the fish. It may be combined with garlic and oil and put on other food such as vegetables and mostly, it says, on spaghetti. The colatura is not to be used in excess ("no more than a tea spoon per person"). Therefore you will still have some left in some form: "Usually on the bottom of the container there is always a sort of deposit which is due to the segregate salt."
I thought about sending the alici brochure instead of the leaf-stone to Iris but couldn't think of why, other than having heard that Iris likes to cook. The brochure to me is a little horror story in itself, as if with a happy ending insofar as there is even a use for the leftover juice. The leftover juice is not blood, entirely, since the older anchovies caught in the net do start to bleed, but the bleeding stays largely internal. Hence the "intense pink-red colour" of salted anchovies in jars. I had not come across the word organoleptic before and was trying to piece together, as I read the awkwardly translated English, the nature of such unique and inimitable organoleptic properties. How could a sweet perfume emanate from injured bodies trying to swim out of the net? Is the smell of the organs released while the fish lose blood, some of which becomes colatura, not to be used in excess? And still some trace will remain, because of the segregate salt.
There was a priest, I had heard, who used to walk the mountains adjacent to the sea where alici are harvested in the traditional way. He would start at dawn and walk until dusk with no food and no water. When he was thirsty he'd pick up a pebble and place it in his mouth. No one knew what he was gaining by sucking on a pebble, but that is what he did, all through summer when it was often very hot, not only in spring and fall. He may have gotten or imagined he was getting moisture out of the pebble, or he may have been sufficiently distracted by the pebble in his mouth to forget his thirst. Perhaps the faintest vestige of saltiness in the pebble—absorbed from the air, or imprinted on the pebble from when it lived eons ago in the sea—drew out latent moisture from his own mouth, such moisture as would be thoroughly inaccessible otherwise. Even the priest might have wondered what it was yielding, the pebble rolling around in his mouth, imperfectly quenching his thirst or distracting him until he descended and could drink. Either way, he was able to walk all day without carrying anything—no pouch of carrots, no vessel of water—so his arms could swing freely and he could go home with nothing leftover, nothing to clean.