I Heard Her Call My Name by Lucy Sante

Author:Lucy Sante [Sante, Lucy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2024-02-13T05:00:00+00:00

She had a keen sense of the quackeries of language. We developed private codes based on the oracular pronouncements of the autocratic White Russian woman who ruled the house then, and the kumbaya-flavored international-youth-speak practiced at the American Center on Boulevard Raspail. She had an especially good ear for the varieties of English spoken by people who had learned the language later in life, and the accents in which they rendered it. Her father was a Greek immigrant, a psychologist who had been one of Wilhelm Reich’s earliest American disciples. When I met Eva, he had recently divorced her mother—a daughter of Greek immigrants, a painter who had been a pupil of Milton Avery—and married a daughter of the German writer Jakob Wassermann, who was a spirit medium; together they founded a pocket-size cult. To Eva’s unappeasable rage, the hated stepmother was also named Eva.

I wanted to make love with Eva and knew it was expected and even inevitable, but I put it off for as long as possible. I was terrified. Meeting her was the greatest gift I had ever received, but I was sure I could easily lose her if I failed the test of sex. I had slept with a few women since losing my virginity, and sometimes it hadn’t gone so badly as I learned to work around my infirmity, but only relative emotional uninvolvement made that possible. I felt I didn’t know what I was doing, that there were explicit rules to sex that I knew nothing about. (It didn’t occur to me that if I could take to dancing naturally and immediately, I could apply the exact same energy to sex.) Predictably, my first intimacy with Eva did not go well, although I’m not sure how. All I can remember is her leaving my mansard room at dawn and my staring for hours at the yellow wall. Not long after that she went back to America. I was inconsolable, certain that our relationship was now shattered.

I spent a month and a half traveling around the continent on a Eurail Pass. I wept over Eva as I sat on a hillside overlooking the city of Bern. In Narvik, at the top of Norway, I danced to James Brown at a disco in a geodesic dome in the August midnight twilight, imagining I was dancing with her, when someone came in with a newspaper announcing Nixon’s resignation. In a museum in Basel I saw an exhibition of the works of Lucas Cranach the Elder, hung thematically; I stared for a long while at a row of Lucretias, each stabbing herself through the heart. On a ferry from Denmark to Sweden on which everyone was drunk and almost everybody was at the slot machines, I sat and watched the dancers, all of whom had Down’s syndrome, as they clutched and twirled to the music of a trio in red vests. In Rome my youth hostel was in the Olympic stadium built by Mussolini, where the showers only ran cold.

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