M.T. Fallon
Snow falls outside the Fiat. The ferryworker flashlights trace across the dashboard and I remember the thermos of hot broth in my satchel. Would you like some? I say. Georg looks at me as if I have asked him to cut out his tongue. The calories are negligible, I assure him. I hold the thermos across the gap between us. He reaches for it, gingerly, as if it might explode, and takes it not with his hands but between his wrists, pressing it to his pronounced veins, warming the blood on its return to his undernourished heart. At last he twists the cap. The scent of Serbian hillsides: marjoram, tarragon, cypress. My stomach collapses upon its emptiness with a groan that rends the cavity of the small wagon. Georg's eyebrow lowers and he turns to me with a wan-lipped grin that starts in his sunken cheek.
There is a moment when hunger leaves you altogether, when your body releases you of its desire. This is the essence of the performance, something I have experienced once–although not performatively–in Zagreb, after leaving university and living on the street. In my poverty I paced narrow lanes filled with the heartbreaking aromas of challah and Croatian ghoulash and buttery mincemeat pies and all of it so delightful and yet I wanted none of it. The lightness in my limbs and the emptiness of my mind were unlike anything I had ever known. If I were to put a word to it, then bliss, and in that perfect moment I happened to pass through Zrinjevac park and find Georg in the menagerie. A pair of lovers had just moved on, and I was alone with him. I searched my pockets for a last coin and set it in the collection plate. It's all I have, I whispered to him. He blinked ever so slowly. His fingers lifted from the frayed velvet lining of the cage, summoning me.
A ferryworker shouts at us, waves his arm with vague threats that are muted by the sea snow. What does he want? I ask Georg. The menagerie, he says, they never know what to make of it. He starts the engine and we inch aboard the ferry. Tonight we cross the Adriatic. Tomorrow, Italy.
In Ancona, in the morning, we are in luck: there is a train strike, and the piazza beyond the station is teeming with stranded travelers milling about the replacement buses. Georg guides the Fiat through the restive crowd till we reach the barricades. I exit and unhitch the menagerie while Georg parks the car. I lock the wheels, unlatch the shutters, dress the bay with bunting. I squat to set back the shutters and there is an outburst beneath me, like the sound of a saw across wood. The bottom seam of my only pants. I had these pants tailored just a fortnight earlier, and Georg will not be pleased that I am so soon in need of new pants, as we did not fare well in Dubrovnik, or in Split, or in any of the villages we have visited since I began my apprenticeship. But when Georg returns and I tell him about the rip, he reaches beneath his cape and hands me a few coins. Go, he says. Find a new pair of pants. He winks at me with that famished eye.
Find something to eat, he says. There is no food like the food of Le Marche.
I do not wish to buy new pants. Every bit we spend is a sum deferred from the founding of the academy. Georg's vision, which I now share, is to work our way back to Bohemia and open a school for hunger artists. I will be his first apprentice. I do not know the actual sum required to start an academy, but it certainly must be more than the pittances we gathered in Croatia. Since joining Georg in Zagreb most of our earnings has been spent for my own food and lodging, but he reassures me that our fortunes will change in Italy. The Italian sensibility, Georg says, is piqued by foreigners who can refuse their cuisine. I hope he is correct.
The old man in the tabacchi directs me to a department store in the Via Palestro. I hurry through the racks and buy the cheapest pair of pants that fit. When I return to the menagerie Georg lies shirtless in the cage, his pallid torso strung tight upon its ribcage rack. He has already drawn a small crowd. I hurry across the piazza into a gelateria and order two scoops: fragola and stracciatella. Slipping through the audience I stand before the bars and raise my cup of gelato to Georg.
Do you want some fragola, mister hunger artist? I taunt him.
Georg lifts his hand ever so slowly, and wags his finger.
What a shithead, a woman says, pointing at me.
Oh, he's just part of the act, her companion says.
It's true. My primary role as Georg's apprentice is to stand as foil to his noble fast. I cannot say I enjoy it, especially the forced feedings outside the cage. I would rather be starving inside the cage, but my role is an integral part of the performance and a financial necessity for the operation. Georg says with a good apprentice the take is three times what it is without one. His last apprentice left him in Vienna, although Georg did not say why, and something in his tone prevented me from inquiring. In spite of my academic shortcomings, I’ve been a quick study under Georg, and I understood well the rhthym of the life: Enter the village or city, find a place for the menagarie, help Georg into the cage, then seek the most enticing local delicacies to consume before the gathering crowd. When the crowds thin, I run errands, largely involving trips to the tailor. I have gained weight, lots of weight.
Finding Georg in Zrinjevac park resolved the predicament of my poverties, intellectual and material. I well knew that I could not stay in the city, nor I could I return to my village, not after squandaring my father's life savings for the education I was ill-suited to receive. University, I found out, required a sensibility far beyond the reach of a village auto-didact. The ideas I had mastered in the remote countryside were centuries old and ridiculously out of date, and the rustic customs of my people were so deeply imbued in my person that I betrayed myself at every turn. Goatskin shoes, a single pair of country pants, a tricorne hat—I was a caricature of myself. I never had a moment of confidence the several months I was at university and so when the time came to stand in the hall and defend my writings, I stammered like an Albanian ass. Until then, the other students had treated me with cautious indifference, averting me with quiet civility, but once I had exposed the true depths of my ignorance they ceased to lower their scornful eyes or muffle their indignant asides. I could not blame them. My presence discredited the institution, devalued their ideas and accomplishments. I wandered the streets carrying my belongings in my suitcase, which I soon began to lighten by shedding a book here, a keepsake there, till at last I abandoned the case altogether on the steps of the Zagreb library.
Yes, the library. My hunger for knowledge did not abate. In the weeks after leaving university I wandered the great Zagreb libraries though I did not know which books to take down from the shelves. At first I searched out my familiars: Scotus, Hamann, Hume, but even as I delved into these volumes the mocking voices of my professors chided me from the empty margins. The shelves towered over me with ten thousand new ideas and yet I did not know with which one to begin.
Georg and I travel south: Molise, Campania, Basilicata, Calabria. We avoid tourists whenever possible, especially the English and the Americans. They have no imagination, Georg says, they pay others to do their thinking for them. They do not know what it means to hunger, and we will not perform for them. The hunger inside me resonates when he speaks. In the villages I stand before the crowds stuffing my face with bucatini, calamari, melanzana involtini, stews of kidney and tripe, capicola sliced diaphanously thin. The constant sunlight assails my slavic sensibilities. My blanched and girth-stretched skin takes a new complexion. The peasant imagination, Georg says, is the most refined. For them, we will perform.
In a Calabrian village I sit before the menagerie sipping millecosedde, a soup of cabbage, celery, mushrooms, chickpeas, and god knows what else. I set the bowl aside and pick at fried sardines, the little green flecks of mint turned black in the slather of oil on the plate. Two stooped women in mourning dress shuffle through the piazza, propping one another at the elbow. One of the women lifts her gaze and studies Georg where he reclines on his faded velvet palette. She signs the cross and shuffles away.
A trio of laborers swaggers across. Unshaven, covered with dust, they are artless ruffians, and I think they might be drunk. I feign an interest in my sardines when they approach, but one of them stabs a finger at me,
That man is starving to death and you sit there with your sarde e scapece, he says.
I shrug my shoulders. I mumble something in village dialect.
What did you say?
Nothing, I say, niente.
He strikes my face with an open hand, more of an insult than an assault. The sardines spill across the cobblestones shedding the breading from their little bodies. Georg cries out, a bewildering sound that turns all of us to the cage. He is kneeling, one hand gripping the bar and the other held up beside his face, palm turned outward. Emaciated, he seems two-dimensional, a Byzantine mosaic. The three men totter on their feet. They step back and gather as one body to hurry from the piazza. Georg falls back to his palette, his mouth moving but there is no sound. He wants to tell me something, and I put my hands to the bars and whisper everything’s all right. I fear it took every bit of energy in his body to raise that strange and startling cry.
My little Drago, he says. Georg, I say, it's me, Miklas.
Tetelestai, he says, the code word that signals he has finished the performance and I hurry to help him from the menagerie.
I cradle him in my arms and carry him down the viale to the hotel. It is like carrying a child. In my room I pour a glass of blood orange juice and search through his case for his communion wafers, the only food I have ever seen him eat. With trembling fingers, he puts the unconsecrated crackers to his quivering lips. An hour to eat a dozen of them, with little sips of juice between each bite. But he recovers quickly. In the morning we pack the Fiat and turn to the Tyrrhenian coast.
Georg sleeps in the Fiat for the crossing, but I am restless, and I go up on deck. The ferryworkers are breaking apart the trains and parking the cars in the hull of the ship. We embark and I watch the hillside lights of Reggio di Calabria diminish and then stare upon the whirlpools of the strait. Scylla, Charybdis. For a moment I actually fear for my life, but it is old folly, a fear from ancient books. The ferry engines surge and cut through the swirling waters and within minutes we land at Sicily. It is the first time I have ever left the continent, my first time on an island. In my studious youth, I always thought that England would be my first island, the halls of Oxford or Cambridge my destination. I certainly would not have predicted that my emigration would involve courting peasants as a player in anachronistic circus acts.
Along the northern shore Georg and I share an awed silence before the emerald waters breaking against the scoria of the inlets that pock the coast. The Aeolian archipelago threatens the horizon, Stromboli sending a flume of ash into a faded blue sky. We perform in Milazzo, Scopello, Cefalù. The Sicilians are appreciative, but the crowds are meager, they are poor, and we are merely earning a subsistence wage. We turn inland and pay a short visit to Ficuzza followed by Castelvetrano then continuing to the coast we try Sciacca, Gela, and Pacchino, but after two or three days in each place the audience is tapped and we are forced to move on. We are dipping into Georg's savings now—academy funds—to pay for petrol for the car and pasta and meat and fish and gelato and everything else I force into my burgeoning gullet. We must find larger crowds, Georg says. We batten down the menagerie and drive across the southern spur of the Trinakria into Siracusa.
Shadows saunter through the cedars and the passeggiatta begins. Georg rolls to his side in his cage and makes the sign, a firm little wiggle of his ear. I knew it was coming. The Siracusan passeggiatta has been profitable, uncommonly so, due in no small part to the spectacle of my consumption. I hurry into the quarter, seeking one of the little private trattorias that abound in this ancient city.
Two fishermen sit at a table outside a residence, smoking and drinking grappa with that Mediterannean contentment I find all over this island, as if these people are unaware of the philisophical and political turmoil of the great continent above them. I shadow the doorway; a girl not much older than I am washes dishes in the sink of the small kitchen. The table holds bulbs of garlic, fleshy red tomatoes, bunches of wild fennel, wine bottles filled with olive oil.
Scusi, I say. She turns a brown-eyed glare, almost feral, her complexion like the hills at sunset, her dark hair like gossamer of the underworld, which, if memory serves, is not far from here. She is upset, not with me, although that doesn't mean I won't get an earful of what is troubling her. But there is something about me that disarms her—my ill-fitting pants, my goutish eyes, my bloated slavic countenance. She lifts her chin, swivels her head slightly.
Pasta con le sarde, she says. It's all I have.
Va bene, I say.
Take a seat, she says.
In the tiny courtyard the fishermen cease speaking when I sit at the other table. They watch me unguardedly. The girl breezes through the door with a little carafe of wine and a stemless glass. I thank her profusely.
Still the men do not speak a word. My shirt is much too small and the lip of my belly hangs naked over my pants. Awkward, I pour the wine and return to the doorway with my glass. A pan on the stove sits atop a flame and the olive oil shimmers. I think of the molten earth this island is gliding across. These volcanoes could assuage every sort of hunger in a pyroclastic second. The girl passes a handful of chopped fennel into the pan then adds anchovies, tomato paste. She stirs with a wooden spoon. She drops the bucatini into a pot of boiling water. Without looking at me she says, Do you want the cassatta?
I don't know what she means, but I say yes. What do I care? All this food is just soft lead come to gild my hollow center. She lifts a piece of the cassata with a spatula and sets it in a cardboard container, then turns to me.
You are with the hunger artist, she says. You take this to the park, no?
Yes.
She closes the box. At the stove she finishes the sauce, adding sardines, raisins, pine nuts, a few threads of saffron. She ladles pasta water into the pan. Salt. Two more minutes and she strains the pasta and adds it to the sauce. She lines another box with wax paper and turns the pasta con le sarde out of the pan.
I lumber through the quarter, a pack animal carrying its own feed. I’m limping a little on the left side, the beginnings of gout. It occurs to me how this ancient city figured so prominently in my failed and fruitless studies. Siracusa: defended by Archimedes, frequented by Plato, evangelized by Paul. I could go on for hours about the Normans and the Saracens, not that anyone with a contemporary mind would care to listen. I take the stool beside the menagerie and think how I wasted the best years of my life struggling with irrelevant ideas. I consume the pasta and lick my fingers lavishly to rile the audience. They step forward to the collection plate. I reassure myself that neither the old ideas or the new ideas matter to a hunger artist; only the bliss of the desireless moment, the all-consuming emptiness within.
The cassatta is devastatingly delicious, a pound cake soaked in orange liqueur layered with ricotta, pistachios, pine nuts, and bits of chocolate. I shovel it into my mouth. The crowd gasps. Coins plink into the plate.
In Siracusa, Georg's performance is unlike anything I have ever seen. He is the greatest hunger artist of his generation in his greatest performance. I play my role but there is no satisfaction in it. I want nothing else than to be done with Sicily and on our way to Bohemia and the building of the academy. But the Siracusans throw coins into the collection plate with abandon, coming round at all hours of the clock. Georg stays in the menagerie a second week, then begins a third. He keeps giving me the signal, the woe-filled sigh, and so I keep running out for more gelato, arancini, trattoria pizza, fennel cookies. I sit before the menagerie stuffing my face and moaning with ersatz delight. I have five days of constipation then shitting spells so ferocious I faint while making my waste in the bushes by the Fiat. My new pants are soiled.
I cross the bridge into Ortygia and walk down to wash myself in the little fount of Arethusa. Standing nude in the shadows of the ancient yew tree I can no longer find my feet. My belly billows before me, my sallow skin horribly stretched. In four months with George, maybe five, I have gained half my body weight again.
When I return to the menagerie the carabinieri are poking Georg through the bars. I force myself into the crowd but it is not so easy slipping through. A woman taps the policeman's shoulder and points to me.
Ecco il pallo di lardo, she says.
You there, he says, vieni qui.
Georg, I whisper. Georg?
He is dead. É andatto.
But no. He is still breathing. I see a slow pulse in the hollow of his neck.
Please help us, I say to the carabinieri. My hand trembles as I produce the key to open the cage. They carry him to the car.
A soft rain falls as I hurry to the hospital. Georg's room is on the third floor and I make the mistake of taking the stairs. I am so winded coming up the stairwell that I must sit in the hallway to catch my breath. I brush the droplets from my shoulders and slick back my hair before entering the room. The quiet incandescence of the nightlight reminds me of my village home. At midnight, when I was certain everyone was sleeping, I would tiptoe to the kitchen with Leibniz under one arm and Spinoza under the other and sit within the faint light of a single candle. Once, the bedroom door opened and my father stood before me in his long underwear, his tricorne in one hand and a roll of toilet paper in the other. We stared at each other through an interminable silence, diametrically opposed, till the candlelight flashed against the tears welling in his eyes.
Papa, I said. I will turn out the light.
No, he said. Go to your books, my son.
He put on his hat, opened the door to the cold night, and hurried to the outhouse.
In the morning, the doctor tells me Georg has hours, perhaps minutes to live. You should prepare yourself for the end, she says. Some sort of bureacrat is waiting within earshot. He steps forward and says, His papers, we need his papers.
In the room I search through his clothes and find his pamphlet, which I hand over to the man in the hall and then return to the Fiat. The day is warm, like a Bohemian summer. So much sunlight. Children kick a ball across the cobbles while the aroma of strong coffee drifts across the piazzale. So much life. I hunt through the trunk of the Fiat for Georg's case and carry it back to the hospital.
There are only a few papers and nothing of the official documentation the bureaucrat wants—no birth certificate or passport, or any other government certificate—at least nothing for Georg. There is, however, a death certificate for one Drago Vezmar, deceased in Vienna last year at the age of twenty-four. My knees weaken, and I crumple into the chair beside the bed. I have been deceived, the academy is a ruse, the apprenticeship a lie. Georg stirs. I rush to his side.
My little Drago, he whispers.
No, Georg, it is Miklas.
For you, he whispers, the banquet of the world.
Quiet now, I say.
My little Drago, he says.
All the color the southern sun had put to him is gone; he is gray, his skin the pallor of the pages in my collected Descartes. I have no anger toward Georg, but I do not know now what to do. I have the menagerie, I have the Fiat, and I have the hunger. But I do not have the art. I pinch a little cube of jello from the tray and press it to the slight gap in his lips. It trembles with his last exhalation. He is gone, and so is his hunger. His perfect hunger. I pick the red cube from his lips and press it past my own. The taste of unreal cherry, the texture of wax, the regretted swallow.