It’s been occurring to me to re-read Ricardo Piglia’s The Absent City.
I haven’t read it in years, but recent current events keep reminding me of it—and though I know, also it’s that feeling that I must re-read it to get the full information. So I am. I pulled it off the bookshelf today, where it’s landed after many, many moves, where I haven’t opened it at any one of those locations, for years and years, but there it sits, waiting. Until now. Once I open it I know: something. Something in here is the thing. I read the introduction and the fog starts to clear a little: so near to us…from 1976-1983—all within my lifetime—the Dirty War in Argentina. Disappearings. Re-writing of events. Narratives…I remember it now.
It’s not the war I remember; I didn’t read this book until a class in Post-Modern Lit when I was in college in the 90’s. It’s this story, in a sense, of the war, The Absent City. It’s becoming, it occurs to me, where I live.
And life. Life is in Piglia’s writing: contaminated, as the introduction says, with history, but not straightforward history—history half imagined, like a dream.
And I realize this is life: a half-imagined dream contaminated and cross-pollinated with history, characters we think are real but are actually merely quazi-memories, quoting from their works they never wrote. Not quite a fiction, but not quite real, either.
This is now. This is LA.
LA used to be a city. I used to live in Burbank where I modeled and acted and wrote and argued with my roommate about juicer pulp in the sink. Where I discovered I could no longer read a map without glasses. Where I walked to the gym kitty-corner to my place, did my laundry illegally, once, on New Year’s Eve at the movie-themed laundromat across the parking lot from the gym. I let my dogs run (also illegally) on the baseball diamond across the street while I chatted with the two homeless people who lived there. Kenneth, the man-boy who lived behind the tree across from my house and who went to breakfast and a movie with me on Mother’s day, as a replacement son, but would, through skilled drawings that backed up his claim of relocation to L.A. to be an illustrator, let me know in a schizophrenic way that he was in love with me. Goodbye Kenneth. Madam Tussaud’s, and Au Lac, where I used to go on dates with my daughter’s father….L.A. was a real city then. It seemed, at least, so real.
Now I drive through my old neighborhood and remember, remember, remember. But it’s as if it were all a dream. Half-remembered characters in a story I seemed to write as I went, enjoying it all the way through, sad when it ended. And the now—all shot through with these semi-memories, maybe-facts, seems to be part of the active dream. But L.A., beloved L.A., why are you fading?
Reading diaries of people living and dying here long before I was born. Or overlapping, time-wise, with my life. Characters in the dream…real figures, injected into, grafted onto my experience. What a strange phenomena. My life is so dear to me, this somehow beautiful cacophonous symphony of what I know and love, hugging it all close to my chest—these half-dreams, quasi-real characters, books… a mish-mash mosaic that is only mine, mine, mine.
I look around at the plants I live with and care for, the colors and textures of my pink apartment, my daughter’s toys. She is sleeping at her father’s house and so I am her dream, tonight, and she is mine. Fabric-ed of remembrances and forgettings, neural synapses and gestalts. And where is L.A., now? The restaurants I used to love, the gorgeous Edison building (a Piglia novel in itself), old lovers and friends and nights leaning intently over delicious soil-smelling raw mushroom soup and intensely discussing everything, everything. For awhile, everyone I dated seemed to have driven here from Florida. L.A. is slipping away. The friends dispersed. The soup no longer on the menu. My apartment remodeled, the gym is gone. Disappeared.
A new story replacing the old…mandating a painful injection of dark insanity I can’t hug to my chest into the story I loved so much. No longer can I enter even the old favorites that are still there. To them, I will be the disappeared. Erased because I decline to participate in this new insane night terror. I shake my head, wipe my cheek, and turn away, my eyes gripping the concrete sidewalk I remember from my childhood, my grandmother’s apartment on S. Curson Street in Park La Brea. And the smell of all of it I will never forget. L.A., L.A., L.A., City of Angels, City of Dreams, how can they do this to you? Where will you go? You will always, always always cradle my heart in your palm tree arms, your jeweled ocean, your gossamer air made of sunlight and jacaranda blossoms.