Autumn fragments
Notes on Europe from a distance of time and geography.
It is a year today since I landed in Munich for the trip that heralded a celebration of submitting my PhD, and a big birthday. My dear friend Heidi, who has lived as long in Europe now as she did in Australia, travelled from her home in Berlin to meet me. I remember this day last year so well, though I had barely slept in the 24 hours of my journey. It was 6 am in Munich when the plane landed, and soon enough, I was passing through the gates to be greeted by Heidi. We had hot chocolates in an airport cafe, then walked to the train station to travel into the city. I remember seeing a stork nest atop a chimney.
We dropped my luggage at the hotel by the English Gardens, and walked for kilometres, all over Munich. I took hundreds of photographs, such was my endless enchantment. The river surfers in the swiftly running river that runs through the sprawling English Gardens were riveting. I had Spätzle for lunch, the ultimate comfort food. I drooled over cheese stalls in the marketplace. The beautiful churches. The cobblestones. I was hooked, though I was so tired by the end of the day, sitting in weak early springtime sun back in the English Gardens, I was nearly hallucinating. Heidi and I bought cheeses and other small things to snack on in our hotel room for dinner that evening. I remember seeing the sun glinting golden off faraway rooftops.
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Still thinking of Europe, I was gutted this week to find out something truly awful about a literary hero of mine, Pablo Neruda. If you don’t want to know, please look away now, because you can’t unsee this fact. In my late 20s and early 30s, I carried around Neruda’s Book of Questions everywhere I went. I read his memoirs and bought his other books. The translations of his poetry saw me through a lot of hard times. This is something poetry can do. It can be there for you. Poetry was there for my whole life. Pablo Neruda had a wife, less famous than the other wives and loves, called Marietje Hagenaar, with whom he had a daughter, Malva Marina Trinidad Reyes Basoalto, was born in 1964 with hydrocephalus, which causes a swelling of the head. Neruda abandoned the two in Europe when his daughter was 2 years old. He is reported to have written—
“My daughter, or what I call by that name, is a three-kilo vampire, a leech, a freak, [a] monster, a perfectly ridiculous being.”
Neither Marietje nor Malva are mentioned in Neruda’s memoirs. Malva died aged 8 in Nazi occupied Holland. Neruda is reported to have ignored Hagenaar’s pleas for burial costs, as he had earlier prevented the two escaping Europe prior to the Nazi’s arrival.
Reading these horrible facts took my breath away. The edifice of my literary adoration of Neruda fell away.
My son is intellectually disabled. I know many disabled children. I cannot and will not separate the artist from his art. All I can see are the blank spaces where his daughter is not written, and the life she didn’t get to live, when Neruda could have afforded the best of medical care for Malva. I think I will put all of Neruda’s books aside. I think that I would choke on speaking the words of these poems now, on my sorrow for an abandoned, innocent little girl who deserved better.
Malva deserved poems, and poetry, and the love of her father.
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Still in Europe—my sister, Indigo Perry (also a writer) is in Istanbul for two months on a writers/performance residence. Last week, she visited The Museum of Innocence, based on the Turkish Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk’s novel of the same name. Indigo’s photos, particularly that of an installation of cigarette butts mounted behind glass got me thinking about the breathtaking possibilities inherent of ideas of conceptualisation. That is, there are no limits to what art/literature/music/dance can do or express. If you think a bunch of cigarette butts enclosed behind glass is kind of gross, I agree on the one hand. On the other hand, if you think about it being a preservation of encapsulated memory and time and the moments and breaths held in each cigarette butt—well, that is stunning in its brilliance and its pathos. And conceptualisation. Let’s see generative AI conceptualise trace and time like this. Except it can’t, because this installation is all about what it is to be human, and precarious.
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Before she left, I sent my sister a postcard (a vintage postcard featuring a picture of a Venetian well). I’ve sent her a letter and a card in the following weeks. She has sent me a letter and a postcard. Last year when she was in Istanbul for a few weeks on a different writers/artists residence (lucky Indigo. I’m not at all jealous! My niece is over there with her at the moment), we also exchanged cards and letters. Not all of them made their way to each of us. This is part of why I wanted us to embark on this writing project this time, to think about the possibilities of lostness. When we were younger, we wrote to each other weekly between Elwood where she lived and Northern New South Wales, where I lived then. So this project is also a return to that. I am thinking of the struggle of the Turkish people at the moment, and the grief that they have been expressing to Indigo about the politics of what is happening in their current struggle for democracy and freedom, and sending love to their beautiful city. I’m looking forward to my sister’s missives and mine arriving some day soon. It’s nice to feel that little envelope heft in your hand. I recommend it, the writing and sending and perhaps receiving thereof.