was a day I thought a lot about loss, and not being able to find things.
I was out of coffee. I’d forgotten about this little detail when I was at Morton Williams the day before. The weather that morning was threatening. On sunny days, Bugs Bunny’s sister liked to take a lawn chair downstairs and sit just outside the entrance to the building in her Miami whites, sunning herself. But since it was overcast, that day she was contenting herself with a chit-chat with the doorman, Jorge. A chit-chat is another euphemism.
She screamed, “HOAHAY, WHAT’S DA WEDDAH GONNA BE LIKE TODAY?”
He said, “Madam, desafortunately ees gonna be more rainy.”
She screamed, “WHAT? I CYAN UNNASTAN’ YA! SPEAK UP! MY EAHS AH SHOT!”
I dashed over to Morton Williams and picked up some Café Bustelo and a little demerara sugar. When I got back, they were still yelling at each other about the forecast. Jorge paused to nod politely at me and say, “How are you doing, sir?”
Bugs Bunny’s sister looked at me and said, “WHAT’S DA WEDDAH GONNA BE LIKE?”
I screamed, “RAIN!”
She screamed, “I TOUGHT SO!”
Back up in my apartment, I boiled a little pot of espresso and flipped through The New York Times. I worked on the crossword puzzle. The wind was starting to rattle the windows and the sky looked increasingly ominous. I heard my cell phone buzz against the table: a text from Sven.
“im so sorry pina died :( ”
I stared at the message. Pina? This didn’t seem possible.
I Googled the news and indeed, there it was: Pina Bausch dead, at 68, just five days after a diagnosis of unspecified cancer.
Tears spouted out of my eyes. I felt like a cartoon character. Like my tears were arcing little dotted lines spouting out of my eyes.
Sven knew how sad this would make me. I’d dragged him all the way from Stockholm to Copenhagen on a train a few years before to see Carnations. I’d seen it at BAM in 1988, just before I moved to Sweden. I also cried like a baby when Lutz Forster did that sign language interpretation of “The Man I Love.” When Sven and I saw it together, we held hands and we both cried. When we left the theater we didn’t even talk for a while.
If you’ve never seen Lutz Forster doing this dance, you should really watch it on YouTube. That’s what I did as soon as I’d verified Sven’s news. The version that’s up is from Chantal Akerman’s documentary film, Un jour Pina a demandé… First she shows Forster rehearsing the song in a casual shirt. He seems to be in a dressing room. You can faintly hear him moaning the words over the recording of Sophie Tucker singing as he signs with his hands. His hands are so beautiful. The sign for maybe is a kind of indecisive wobbling of both hands, palms up. The sign for home is an O shape that sweeps up from the mouth to the cheek. When Tucker sings “just built for two,” Forster holds up two long, thin fingers in the shape of a V.
He signs roam by tracing a zig-zagging line before him. “Who would, would you?” ends with a wavering gesture, half pointing out, half pulling back.
We didn’t have to talk about why this moment was so moving. There’s a kind of obvious reading, of course, which is that it makes you think about homosexual desire. Sophie Tucker’s voice can say what Forster can only signal mutely. But I don’t really think that’s the heartbreaking thing about it. If you look at the comments on the YouTube version of the dance, you see somebody called “sagatyba” posted: “nice. made a drunken single_ lady cry. such longing and nostalgia.” It’s not just for the gays. I think it’s more about the lack of an object of desire. That song is about the desire for desire, a love object that doesn’t exist. Desire that doesn’t exist. “Some day he’ll come along, the man I love.” Some day. But right now, Lutz Forster is wobbling his empty hands, zig-zagging an aimless trail, wavering his extended thumb and his pinky finger before him in some vague question in the conditional. “Who would, would you?”
Of course, you can take all this with a grain of salt. You will remember the original title of my dissertation. My advisor warned me that “Derridean analyses” are really pretty passé. Everybody’s moved on to Agamben and Badiou.
That afternoon the sky broke open over Manhattan and the rain came down in heavy sheets. It seemed to me the world was crying for Pina Bausch.
The interesting thing is, Pina choreographed her dancers’ tears.
She also choreographed their chewing.
After I pulled myself together, I did my barre exercises in my underwear. Then I thought I’d do a quick load of laundry before getting back to moving those commas around. I pulled on some blue hospital scrubs (my housekeeping outfit of choice) and carted my laundry basket down to the basement where they keep the washers and dryers. An older Jamaican woman had occupied the folding table, and she was singing, “Trust and obeyyyyy, for there’s no other wayyyyy to be happy in Jesusssss, but trust and obeyyyyy.”
She paused to smile at me. She was folding some fancy little toddler clothes. It was evidently not her toddler. I smiled and nodded back.
I was pouring in a capful of soap when Felicia McKenzie came in. Somebody had told me she also lived in this building. She danced for years with Paul Taylor. I think she’s married to somebody who teaches at NYU. Anyway, there’s no reason she should recognize me, but she also smiled and nodded as she carted her basket over to an empty machine. She was still pretty but a little drawn. Thin. Kind of harried.
I wondered if she knew about Pina.
It was strange, acting as though everything were normal. In fact, I had the sense that my world was under siege. The ominous weather was probably contributing to this impression – but really, first MJ and now Pina… It didn’t seem right.
Of course my efforts at revising my manuscript that day were in vain. I took out a block quote from Eric Auerbach, and then realized that the subsequent reference to figures and figuration made no sense, so I pasted the quote back in. I tried switching the order, and then switched it back again. I replaced a semicolon with a period. That seemed like something. Sort of. I popped back down to the laundry room to put my clothes in the dryer. I stopped in the lobby to pick up my mail: Time Out New York magazine and some credit card promotions. I prepared myself a light meal (salad, sardines), and afterwards I made a cup of Earl Grey tea. When I finished it, I went back down to get my clothes. I folded them. It was a small load.
I wrote Sven an e-mail about St. Anthony. I told him this tip came from a neighbor but I didn’t tell him she was Bugs Bunny’s sister. I thought he might find it confusing.
The next day Sven wrote me back saying that it was time to brush up my Swedish for my upcoming visit: the parliament had just enacted the “språklagen” declaring it the “main” language in Sweden. There were more than a few people unnerved by the ubiquity of English.
Sven was teasing me, but I did feel pretty self-conscious about how bad my Swedish was, even after years of living there. So many people spoke English. Sven and I had some little pet phrases we’d exchange, but it seemed so futile to actually try to converse in his language. Sven signed off: “p+k” – puss och kram. Kisses and hugs. At least I got that.
Over the next several days, I watched that video of Lutz Forster a few more times. I noticed a clip from Pina’s Água in the related videos. That was the choreography inspired by Brazil. Frankly, I’m not such a big fan of those choreographies she’d started making in recent years dedicated to particular countries. Even though they avoided the obvious pitfalls of “ethnic dance,” there was still a hint of the touristic about them that made me uneasy. When asked about these pieces, she’d always say it was impossible to “capture” a national culture – that she just wanted to present traces of her experiences in these different countries. But the music in Água was beautiful – it’s hard not to find Brazilian music compelling.
I