15. Exodus

When I left, I swore to myself—there was no one else I could swear to—that I’d never return. I didn’t tell mother—I didn’t have the chance—but I’m sure she knew. I didn’t know, because I couldn’t’ve known, that this day—when I could and had to come back—would come. And of course, I couldn’t’ve predicted that it would come after the deaths of everyone who actually knew me here, including my mother. Or that it would come near the end of my own transformation.

But a day came, years ago, when I came to believe that by leaving, I’d precluded any chance of returning, whether or not I wanted to.

Through a series of lies, missteps and sleeping on various floors, couches and hallways (Men like to tell stories about stuff like this.) I opened my eyes one day—I didn’t know what time of day it was—to hissses rising from the narrow, sunwashed street into the window. I was warned that the weather would be very hot in that place. Though it wasn’t, it was the week before, I was told. The past weather—the past—sizzled in the cauldron of deep, dusty rose-colored brick and stone houses. The steam, the mist of dissipating voices, echoed the warmth of the morning’s—or was it the afternoon’s?—sun, which sucked away the film left by the shower that slipped onto, and away from, that street while I slept.

I only hope—and this is one of the few hopes I still hold, or have ever held—that I’m making some sense of this, as I describe it now. For I woke on that day and I had no words—not even the inelegant ones I’ve been using to describe my life on, run from and return to this block where my mother raised me in the kitchen—to describe that day, not even to myself. It wasn’t just that I was in a country where I hadn’t been raised and knew none of its language other than a few words Mrs. Littington yelled in anger or exasperation at her children when her husband wasn’t in the house.

A slender gray cat with a long tail slinked from the door of one of those rose-colored brick houses and into an alleyway lined by vines climbing a fence I couldn’t see. “Venez-y! Venez-y!” A woman whose brown hair swept from swirls above her ears into a mane at the back of her neck hollered for the cat, without the sharp, angry edges of the voices calling—or sending away—children and other domesticated milk-drinkers on my old block.

“Venez-y,” she intoned once more before turning away from her window. Not much later, the slick gray cat bounded, seemingly on tip-toes, toward the front of that rose-brick house. The door opened, and the cat disappeared inside.

For several days, the evening’s rain dissolved into a haze of the morning’s sun and the afternoon warmth simmering among the bricks. Bicycles and small cars left their places by the curbs and returned, along with their owners. Somehow—I didn’t know how—I knew they would. But when another woman who swept her hair back and lived with a cat and another woman left for a few days, somehow I wasn’t surprised when she came back on the day she did. And I didn’t hear any angry words from the woman who lived with her—who, I realized, was her lover—or any howls from their white cat.

I also realized—again, I didn’t know how at the time—that none of those women’d been born or raised in that city. Later, I realized that their accents revealed that fact: Even though I knew almost nothing of their language, I realized they didn’t sound like the women behind the counters at the charcuterie, boulangerie or librarie. In fact, the woman at the bookstore didn’t sound like the deli- or bakery proprietors’ wives; I could even tell that the woman at the bookstore wasn’t somebody’s wife.

Whenever I left any of those shops, they chirped, “Au revoir, madamoiselle.” Of course, that’s customary in their country, but there was something in the sing-songiness, and the seeming accent on the “voir,” that left a door, a window, or something—even a ventilation duct, perhaps—open. The interaction, the story, between me and whichever of those women said “Au revoir, madamoiselle” was complete—whole, actually—whether or not I came back, or whether or not we met in some other way.

Of course, I returned to all of those shops—especially the bookstore, whose proprietress/manager/eminence let me stay as long as I wanted, knowing full well by my few and halting phrases in her language that I could read almost nothing on her shelves. I did what any child does: I looked first at the books full of pictures. For the frist time in my life, I looked at art, at photography. I found a few things I liked, though to this day I still don’t understand why people go to look at most of the things they look at in museums, or why they buy almost anything displayed in galleries.

People came because they could. And left for the same reason. In that city—Toulouse, France—I realized that I had those same prerogatives, which I mistook first for privileges and later for rights. You were never neither terminally here nor gone: You were in transition, coming or going. Thus, for once, I didn’t find myself eternally condemned to the present, to a moment when you’re either here or gone.

If nothing else, I realized I was no longer one of the boys, one of the would-be men, of this block. It hadn’t occurred to me that I never was, that I’d struggled to fit , on lines and into clothes, into schools, churches, and other bodies where I didn’t belong. I realized then, for the first time, that I wasn’t going back to this block, not for a long time, and that I couldn’t, even if I’d wanted to.

I also never realized how quickly I could forget, or simply lose, people. I knew that nobody from this block—not even Mrs. Littington, who’d lived in this country until she met Mr. Littington—would find me in Toulouse. In fact, no image or thought of her ever, or anyone from this block besides mother, crossed my mind while I was there. For all they or I knew, I could’ve been in some other country yet, even though Toulon, where Mr. Littington got off a Royal Navy ship and met her in a café, wasn’t even half a days’ train ride away. I was in the city the French call la ville rose; she’d come from the war, from a town that was shelled and burned because the Republique’s battleships and submarines entered and left with the tides. It was never fully rebuilt, or made into any habitable place worthy of the appelation ville for the very same reason. More than one tourist guidebook has called Toulon the ugliest and dirtiest town in France; the same books celebrate (rightly, I believe) Toulouse’s color and light.

But none of those books, no matter where or in what language they’re published, will tell you about this block: the one on which I grew up and where I met Mrs. Littington. They couldn’t, any more than I could (or still can) describe exactly what I felt on that street on my first day in Toulouse. They, by the same token, couldn’t (or wouldn’t) tell you about the women or the cats, not any more than I have in my own ragged, clumsy way.

No, nobody’s written—nobody’s described or shown—in verse, story, music, paint or stone—the world in which I began: the day I left this block to make a transition I’ll never quite complete, simply to stay alive, and in the hope that I might be safe. But soon, very soon, I’ll travel to the physical end of that journey. I’ll have gone as far as that road I took from this block to that street in Toulouse and beyond, back to this block for mother’s funeral, can take me. I’ll’ve lost that last appendage connecting me to who I was on this block, to whatever memories the women in this funeral parlor may’ve had. Even though I now use that part of my body only for excretion, and am eager to be rid of it, I still wonder what I’ll be like when I no longer have to hide it under my skirt.