Drawing Blood Page 3

  I was happy, with a quiet joy that I’d never felt before, a slow and ferocious freedom. Solitude and newness were the twin gifts travel gave me, at the same time it took my context away. When I traveled I became nothing but an eye, soaking up the world. I lost all the dullness of home. I could draw with compulsion and rigor.

  After a week in the city, I went looking for Shakespeare and Company.

  Named for Sylvia Beach’s lost generation hangout, the bookstore on 37 Rue de la Bûcherie had opened its doors in 1951. Since then, it had become legend, not just for its selection of English-language books but also for its hospitality. Over the second-floor archway, the shop’s founder, George Whitman, had painted the words “Be kind to strangers, for they may be angels in disguise.” The store lived by that motto. Shakespeare and Company claimed to have hosted thirty thousand travelers on the narrow beds tucked between its bookshelves in the years since it opened. These guests—including writers like Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Anaïs Nin—were known as “Tumbleweeds.”

  I wanted more than anything to stay in Paris. The store was a center of the city’s Anglophone community, and I hoped that if I hung out there, I could find some work. Doing what, I didn’t know.

  When I got there, at eleven A.M., the store was closed, its green doors pulled firmly shut. I sat in the courtyard, beneath the cherry trees that were just starting to cry their first blossoms. There was a fountain in front of me, three art nouveau nymphs entwined. I took out my sketchbook and started to draw them. Drawing is always a disruptive act. You produce when you’re expected to consume. When you draw, you are performing quietly, inviting strangers to engage you. I often used my sketchbook as a talisman.

  The side door opened. An old man hobbled out. He was thin and stooped, wearing a stained velveteen smoking jacket and pajama pants. Beneath a torrent of white hair, his face was as lined as a piece of paper that had been crumpled and flattened and crumpled again. Painfully, he picked his way over to me.

  I knew it was the owner, George Whitman, though he did not introduce himself. Instead, he peered into my sketchbook. He said nothing for a moment, just stood judging. Then he nodded approvingly.

  “You’re in Paris, eh?” he asked.

  I stared at him, then nodded back. I’d read that he’d spent the year 1935 hopping boxcars from Washington D.C. to Central America, learning hospitality from a tribe in the Yucatan that once nursed him back to health. In the white sunlight, he looked every moment of his eighty-six years.

  “There is no miracle greater than to be a young girl in Paris in the spring,” George told me. He gestured to the bookstore, which was coming awake. A young man in a corduroy jacket unlocked the front doors, then started laying out rows of cheap paperbacks on the sidewalk. George told me that the man was one of the Tumbleweeds. In exchange for their beds, they had only to read a book a day and work an hour a day at the store. George invited me to join them.

  “Be my little daughter. I have many little daughters,” he said.

  To my astonishment, his intentions were genuinely paternal. Letting myself trust him, I left my squalid hotel room and moved into the shop.

  Shakespeare and Company hid thirteen sleeping spaces between its overflowing bookshelves. Some of the beds were boards with thin mattresses on top, propped up by manuscripts. Others were bunks, hidden behind the hundreds of letters George dangled from the walls. An obese cat prowled through the shop, scratching who it pleased.

  We woke up each day from the sunlight that spilled through Shakespeare’s bare windows, then waited our turn at the single shower, which hadn’t been washed for many years. Then we headed off to the Café Panis to jostle around the green zinc bar for our coffees. The manager always snuck me cookies, and I smiled at him mutely, too shy to flirt.

  The bookstore opened at noon. I worked the cash register, which was not a cash register at all, but rather a ledger and a money box. Like many Tumbleweeds, I made up prices on the spot. Sometimes George staggered downstairs in his stained dressing gown and demanded that we not sell a book after all. There was a small wishing well in the back room, and the Tumbleweeds told tourists fantastical lies about the luck it would bring them if they threw in their francs. When no one was looking, we scooped out the coins and spent them on cheap wine, which we drank by the river.

  Dirt coated every surface at Shakespeare and Company. It was brown, fragrant, a mixture of mold, cooking oil, and the dust of decaying books. Sometimes if I slept on a top bunk, cockroaches fell on my face. In the upstairs kitchen, the mold-furred refrigerator was stuffed with rotten soup. For Sunday tea parties, George baked pancakes with rancid flour. Ants drowned in the tea. Yet all that decay only made the store more lovely; the place had all the dark romance of Miss Havisham’s wedding dress.

  Tumbleweeds came and went. I shared the upper rooms with a Uighur dissident, a Dutch ballerina, and a slumming British violinist. I made friends with an aristocratic Sri Lankan girl studying math at Oxford. After work, we sat around gossiping next to a first edition of Ulysses. She had a delicate little fairy face and had chopped her thick hair into a 1930s bob. I remember her smirk fading only once, when a recurring vein disease caused her hands to swell to twice their size. She hid in the back room, crying, then wrapped them in mittens and strutted back out to the front.

  Sometimes, George’s daughter, Sylvia Beach Whitman, came over from England. She was twenty, a little gold Clara Bow, as shy as I was, and once she did a watercolor of a Ballets Russe dancer in my sketchbook. She was George’s heir apparent, but that spring it seemed like the old man would live forever.

  I was too intimidated to talk to George at length, then or during my other trips to Paris. But Shakespeare and Company showed me another way to live. The bookstore was a fortress, built from a past at once faded and imagined, when will and eccentricity were all one needed. George liked to call it “a little socialist utopia disguised as a bookshop.” Yet, unlike most utopian experiments, it has survived.

  I never wondered what deals George made to keep the store afloat. He was a businessman in a dying field, negotiating complicated French bureaucracies, while we kids wandered through his world. We drank and postured and disappeared without notice, thinking our incompetent efforts at the cashbox were enough to pay back George’s gift.

  Only later would I realize what a rare thing he had built, and how difficult it must have been to sustain.

  I had little but time in that lazy Paris April, so I filled the hours drawing. I bought myself a leather-bound sketchbook, heavy, marble-edged and so expensive that each time I touched a pen to page, I dreaded fucking it up. In it, I developed a drawing style as finicky as that employed by Victorian travel writers, but instead of a crow quill, I used a cheap, ubiquitous Pilot pen. Every day, I chronicled the store. I drew the award-bedecked poets who seemed too glamorous to speak to after they gave readings. I drew the slumming Oxford girl and the Dutch ballerina so they’d think I was worth their time. My ink grew spiraling, compulsive.

  One night, we sat around drinking in the upstairs office. The Uighur dissident had made us a vat of ratatouille, and we ate it out of unwashed cups. An American boy recited a poem about Notre Dame. How it must hate all those tourists, the poem read. One day, the cathedral would rise, its flying buttresses stretching out like the limbs of a daddy longlegs. It would stand for a moment, regarding its tormentors. Then it would jump into the Seine.

  As he read, I stared out the window. The Seine was black, and the streetlights shone gold where the wind rippled the water. In my sketchbook, I drew every single wave.

  One of the characters staying at Shakespeare and Company was a perpetually grubby British academic named Edward. Twenty years older than any other Tumbleweed, Edward had just been thrown out by his wife, yet I immediately liked his posh voice, cynical posture, and, most of all, the attention he gave me.

  Precocious girls often hope that older men will shape us. Older men often oblige in the hope that we’ll sleep with them. The trad
e is slanted in favor of the girl, since behind the Bambi eyes, we’re selfish little vampires. Edward bought me a blue shawl from one of the Vietnamese stores near Shakespeare and Company, and he sat with me at Panis, talking about a play he planned to write but never did. Inspired by my sour disposition, he based a character on me, naming her Molly Crabapple.

  Spring turned into summer. I moved on to Venice, where Anthony and I met again. We wandered around the beauty-drunk, tourist-flooded, false, dying city; then we visited Rome, sleeping on a single bed, wrapped around each other so hard we were ground into each other’s skin. I bought flowers in the plaza where the Roman Catholic church had burned the dissident astronomer Giordano Bruno, then laid them at the foot of his statue.

  Anthony went home. I went to Spain.

  On La Rambla in Barcelona, I met a girl named Alex with tangled red hair and a handsome boy’s face, pink from the wind. We were both hustling tourists: I drew portraits, she read palms. All around us were buskers and fire spinners, men painted silver, frozen, their ties wired stiff and suspended in midair. We spent our earnings at an absinthe bar in the crumbling Barrio Gotico. It was then a squatters’ neighborhood, beloved by the circus punks who performed beside us on La Rambla. They formed a tight, protective scene. As we drank, a boy clowned on a unicycle in the main square. The police shouldered up, barking at him. He snarked back. They moved to cuff him. The patrons poured from the cafés, surrounding the police, screaming Catalan words I did not know, but still understood as “Shame!”

  Alex swaggered like a boy, leading with her shoulders, turning down the corners of her wide, thin mouth. Originally from Canada, she’d been traveling for years, squatting, hitching, hustling, and telling fortunes—a skill she may or may not have believed she had. More important, she’d learned to project that silent message: “I’ll cut you if you fuck with me.” In Barcelona, we scanned outdoor restaurant tables for half-eaten meals abandoned on plates, then dove on them, shoving the food in our mouths until waiters shooed us away. We stayed up late in the graffitied alleys, telling each other dreams and secrets, and her confidence gave me a new sort of strength.

  Alex wanted to go to Morocco, so we caught a ride south together. Outside the window, the hills of Andalusia rippled with wheat. They were dotted with spindly trees, their foliage round as dandelions.

  I lay my head on Alex’s shoulder.

  In Seville’s parks, we climbed trees to steal the oranges. They were dry and bitter, but we choked them down anyway. We made a salad in a plastic bag, ate it with our hands, and then slept in the same bed in a ten-dollar room we’d found on the outskirts of town after walking in circles for hours, with Alex singing Ani DiFranco in my ear.

  “It’s a long, long road and a big, big world, we are wise, wise women and giggling girls,” sang Alex. She hid her hair under a knit cap, and she held herself bigger when any man bothered us. When I was with her, few did.

  The morning we were meant to leave for Morocco, Alex changed her mind. Somewhere else was calling; she didn’t say where, but it wasn’t Tangiers. She was splitting in an hour. She dared me to go alone.

  “Fear is a doorway,” Alex said, giving me a crooked grin. Then she ditched me in Tarifa, a small town on the coast of Cádiz.

  I decided to go.

  I got off the ferry in Ceuta, a speck of North Africa somehow still owned by Spain. Crowds swarmed the border, dominated by stalwart middle-aged women in djellabahs, many bearing huge parcels of the electronics sold more cheaply in Spain. They fought their way to the front of the line at the wire border fence, yelling at any Moroccan officials who dared tell them to stop.

  On the Moroccan side, the crush continued, with drivers trying to grab customers for the grand taxis that ferried passengers between cities. Seeing my confusion, one of the ladies yanked my arm. In French, she asked where I was going. “Fez,” I blurted out. Patting my hand, she dragged me to the correct taxi, deposited me inside, and warned me not to trust any men who said they loved me, because they were all liars, especially when they were speaking to guilible tourists. More women jammed into the taxi until we were spilling over onto one another’s laps.

  In Fez, I understood what the woman had meant. Unemployment was high. With nothing better to do, bored young guys hung out on corners, hassling girls. They screamed that they wanted to kiss me or fuck me or be my lips. “Relax! Relax!” one boy screamed, and I turned and yelled at him in a tangle of French so fast, so ungrammatical and mispronounced, that he choked on laughter. I went to a café, ordered a mint tea. It came in a small tulip-shaped glass, stuffed with fresh mint, the tea as thick as syrup. Bees converged. I swatted them. They came back. The owner laughed at me, then showed me how to put a plate on top to keep them off. Sipping the tea slowly, I took out my sketchpad. As I drew, bees walked across my hair. I barely noticed.

  How could I? Fez was incomparable.

  Students jetted in and out on motorbikes, through the old city’s twisting alleyways chatting into the cell phones that caught fire in Morocco long before they did in United States, since Morocco lacked our landline infrastructure. Street cats scurried underfoot. Shopkeepers sold plastic back scratchers and mountains of rose petals, stacks of busted electronics alongside exquisitely gilded old books. Objects sprawled everywhere, in abundance and abandon. My pen darted to capture a woman in a sky-blue djellabah as she argued with a store owner. She waved a hennaed hand dismissively. He relented. She bought a stack of books. I drew her long braid as she walked away. A little girl sat next to me and watched me while I worked. I sketched her on the corner of the page, tore it off, and gave it to her.

  In many Muslim countries, the Koranic prohibition on idolatry is interpreted as a ban on artistic representations of humans or animals. But creativity thrives on constraint. Moroccan artists had developed abstraction into something at once cleanly intellectual and sensuous. I stood in front of Bab Bou Jeloud, the gate at the entrance of Fez’s old city. Its arch curved like a teardrop, surmounted by blue tile work. The tiles formed leaves, flowers, circles. They swirled, hallucinatory yet precise, mirroring the order that underlies nature’s seeming chaos. Through the gate, I stared at Bou Inania Madrasa with its two gold domes, its walls colored like the sea.

  Every half block, I sat and I drew. A black kitten rubbed against my ankle. I bought a bottle of water, filled the cap, and laid it next to her. I drew her as she lapped it up.

  I slept on the rooftop of a hostel, alongside twenty other backpackers, each using our packs as pillows. There were few streetlights, so the stars felt close above.

  Each day, I smeared on black eyeliner, tied my hair into a bun, and walked for hours in my shoes so battered that the heels were flapping off. I snuck past the Spanish backpackers who liked to sit smoking in front of the hostel— I was too shy to join them, or to make friends with any of the locals. Instead I wandered alone through the city. The Arabic language made my throat catch with its loveliness. The glottal stops, the “letters of pain,” ayn and ghayn. The h in uhebik (“I love you”) breathy as a gasp. I asked the café owner to write me out the alphabet, then practiced it over and over, spelling out English words in Arabic letters as if it were a code.

  This new place focused my eyes as never before. Existing as a pure observer this way, I realized dimly, was yet another thing setting me apart from those who lived there—raw-nerved perceptiveness is unattainable in everyday life—but I loved it. Far from home, I never wanted to leave.

  I got food poisoning almost immediately, but I hardly cared.

  On the night train to Marrakesh, I fell asleep with my bag next to my head. The man sharing my compartment stole my wallet. Who could blame him? He needed the money more than I did. Luckily, I’d hidden my ATM card in my shoe. I reported the theft to the train’s security. I didn’t tell them anything about the man, but I wanted to use their phone, so I could call home and report the cards stolen. At first the head security guy was friendly. He was so sorry this had happened to me. Of course he w
ould help.

  Then the other officers left. I sat alone with the boss in my compartment. By that time, my food poisoning had turned into a full-blown fever. I was delirious. It was three A.M. I wanted to sleep. I lay down in the bunk. He pressed himself on top of me, his breath hot in my face. I didn’t understand. Then I did.

  I shoved him off, then stared in shock when he stuttered an apology. He looked sheepish, as if the whole misunderstanding was more awkward for him than for me.

  By the time the train pulled into Marrakesh I was nearly hallucinating. Nothing was open, but I knocked on the back door of a hotel. When it opened and a maid appeared, I begged her for a room. None were empty. I must have been a sorry sight, a teenage girl in dirty clothes, red eyes peering out from beneath a nest of oily hair, because the maid took my hand. She led me silently to the kitchen, where I fell asleep in a plastic chair.

  Curled up there, I felt a strange delight mixing with the nausea. Something bad had happened. And yet I was fine.

  In August 2001, I stepped off the plane in New York. After six months away, I had the swagger of someone who’d beaten down her irrational fear. Anthony stood waiting at the arrival gate. I ran to him, hugged him hard. I looked up at him, then at the crowds, the dirt of JFK, and the gypsy-cab drivers. Nothing felt the same.

  On September 11, 2001, the air had the crisp sweetness of the new school year—that time when no one yet knows you, and you can create your whole life again. Nothing could touch you on mornings when the sun shone that bright.

  I sat in a coffee shop in Chelsea, finishing a sketch I’d started in Paris. In two days I’d turn eighteen, and in a week I’d start classes at FIT. I was at the start of my new life—a real, adult life—and I was so excited my skin could barely contain it.