go shopping, too. Wandering the 36 Streets of Hanoi’s Old Quarter, the city’s mercantile district. Here, commerce is face to face, and it doesn’t take long to get to know shopkeepers. Or to get known. You’re recognized on your second visit, because it’s a small shop and the same people are there everyday, nothing like a Walmart. The Old Quarter, a horseshoe-shaped square kilometer tucked between the Red River, The Citadel, and Hoan Kiem Lake, used to stand within walls, and the layout of the streets still reflects the compression of its former fixed limits. The streets teem, alive with buying and selling and living at a pitch. I fear that, like Allen Ginsberg in that “Supermarket in California,” I am shopping for images—one of my derelictions, one of the ways I fail to be fully human. But I try to make contact, and it’s easy to forget this is Vietnam, because in spite of the superficial differences, the goose blood soup and the weasel coffee, the stonecutters pounding out tombstones in the street and the banyon trees, the street life feels profoundly familiar. Human.
I’m staying in a modest hotel on Ma May, on the riverside of the quarter. The narrow street is in constant motion, cyclos and taxis, bicycles and street hawkers, motorbikes and pedestrians. It’s difficult to cross over to the other side. And yet, almost every night I see a man crawl up Ma May; paralyzed from the waist down, he drags himself along with his elbows, right up the middle of the street, a child with a begging bucket following in his wake. The traffic surges around him, not oblivious but not overly solicitous, either. He has a place. Give some money to the child. Show a little compassion.
I go walking, and walking I have become smaller. Eating less, I have become fit on the road. From the first notch in my belt to the last, my pants now blooming around me. A healthy change, physically, and a long way from anorexia, I know. But perhaps metaphorically telling. Thinking myself big, I have made myself smaller. A metaphor for ideology. Not as good a metaphor as anorexia, the real thing, the girls so thin still clinging to the idea that they are big. Thinking big their sickness. Thin to die for. Like jihad, like dominos. To kill for.
On my last day in Hanoi, I drop into the Café Pho Co on Hang Gai. From the street, it looks new, a shop full of cheap goods for tourists, but there is a hallway on the right that opens into the garden of what turns out to be an ancient shop house very like the ones in Hoi An. Café Pho Co is in the garden; it’s an improbably serene place, just that short hallway away from the loud rush of Hang Gai. There are only a few tables, and a middle-aged Vietnamese businessman gestures that I should share his rather than wait. We exchange nods and settle into the welcoming hush of the garden. When the waitress comes round I order a ca phe trung, a delicious concoction whipped out of a shot of strong coffee, sugar, and a raw egg. Fattening, no doubt.
I have been months away and am ready to go home to my small town on a river, home to Delta B. My welcome will be private, domestic. We will resume. Suddenly it will be winter in “the lost America of love.” We’ll take the dog, Worty, for walks in the graveyard when it fills with snow. We’ll talk and laugh and let the bombs fall out of hearing. I remember George Oppen’s Of Being Numerous, published during the Vietnam War, his judgment on those who “develop Argument / in order to speak,” that “they become unreal, unreal, life / loses solidity,” and his conclusion that
one may honorably keep
His distance
If he can.
And I hope I can.
The waitress brings the ca phe trung, and I eat it with a spoon. When I set the mug down I see my tablemate has asked the waitress for a second teacup, one for me, to share the pot of green tea that sits on the stone slab between us. He pours and nods. I nod, too.
(2002)
::
March 2004
We had suffered one of those sudden dawns you get flying east before our flight landed in Munich. Heads full of siren darkness, we wobbled through the sun-flooded terminal wishing for shades. The connecting flight to Florence arced over the Alps—so many—too black to see below the snowline and too bright to look at above. There are the Alps, I said to myself, because I am always quoting. I wanted to take my whole head into Photoshop and tone down the contrast.
When our taxi turned into the narrow streets of old Florence, the shadows felt welcome as a balm, soothing. Bleary-eyed, we’d still noticed the great banners hung along the route in from the airport announcing a Botticelli and Filippino Lippi exhibit at the Palazzo Strozzi: “Passion and Grace in Fifteenth Century Florentine Painting.” The banners featured a beautiful head chopped from Botticelli’s Pallas and the Centaur and blown up large. Still, our hearts did not leap up and not only because we were tired. We had come to Italy for the paintings, yes, but for early work, for what Delta called the pennyheads, more for Giotto and Simoni Martini than their heirs. We thought we had less appetite for Botticelli, jaundiced perhaps by the fame of his Primavera and Birth of Venus, big paintings but just plain silly in our view. Me and Delta, we got your opinions, no doubt about that.
However, we had no sooner taken up the strolling life in Florence, a town singularly well-suited to aimless wandering, then we bumped smack into the Palazzo Strozzi. “Well, we’re here,” I said, and without discussing it we sauntered under the stone arcades into the courtyard and climbed up the broad staircase to the exhibit.
I’m the kind of guy forever walking in the out door; so I got sideways of the curators’ intent first thing. My head turned as if magnetized to a tiny Botticelli on the wall to my right, Judith’s Return to Bethulia. Small, the painting invites you up close, and close is intimate. Receptivity dilates in the face of small things; we go a little less defended, want to be tender, and the small looms large in consciousness because of the quality of our attention. I first noticed the effect in poetry, because I am foremost a reader, but it’s true of small paintings as well.
I took off my glasses, my face within inches of the picture. I considered Judith’s sword, her confident stride, the serene beauty of her bright face. I stood there a long time. Delta appeared, put her head next to mine, and then she was gone. A fast looker. And perhaps Judith just wasn’t to her taste.
The subject is biblical, adapted from the apocryphal Book of Judith. Finding her town, Bethulia, besieged by an Assyrian army commanded by Holofernes, the rich and beautiful widow Judith decided to take matters into her own hands. She set aside her widow’s weeds and donned her showiest stuff, “to entice the eyes of all men who might see her.” Then, taking her maid with her, she marched out the city gate and right into the Assyrian camp. There, she wrangled an invitation to the commander’s tent, a private party (talk about your mistake on the guest list!). When the smitten Holofernes, overcome with wine, fell down dead drunk, Judith beheaded him, and returned with the severed head to Bethulia, to much rejoicing. She ordered Holofernes’s head hung from the parapet of the city wall. When the battle resumed the following morning, the emboldened Bethulian soldiers marched against the disheartened Assyrians, who were routed. And the town was saved.
The tale was well known in Botticelli’s time; any depiction of Judith would have called up the entire story. So, in a way, all paintings of Judith mean the same thing, the whole story. Even more abstractly, in Botticelli’s day the story of Judith and Holofernes was understood to figure the triumph of virtue over vice, of chastity over lust, and having the necessary pluck to do God’s will.
Oddly enough, then, the narrative background turns out not to be so narrative after all. The more familiar the story, the more the element of time is drained out of it. Sequence is suppressed—the end registers in the beginning, the beginning in the end. The whole story is known at once, as if from the side, “and then” hardly matters.
A residue of time does remain, of course. In a painting like Judith’s Return to Bethulia, time is most present at the point of insertion, where the artist enters the story. Before and after hover around the stilled moment depicted in the painting like two great wings. In this little Botticelli, before Judith returned she had beheaded Holofernes,