Silent Bird (2 page)

As you know, my first name is Spanish, though
Pilar
only sounds graceful and Latin if you roll the “r” at the end of it. If you don’t—and believe me when I say that most people from Long Island don’t—it sounds serious and heavy, like furniture dragged across the floor.

Pila
rrr
.

A
s a kid, I used to say my name the Latin way then pretend to rip out my hair when my friends clunked it around.
What does your name mean, anyway
? They’d ask.
What language
is
that?

“Your name is Spanish and
means to peel, or pull one's hair out,” my father would quip if he happened to be around visiting or trying to visit. “Like a banana or an onion—or your mother!"

Despite the divorce, h
e still enjoyed making fun of her and our family’s superstitious stuff, most likely because it unnerved my mother. He wanted her attention too, you see. Hers and mine. And he knew that she believed, as did her mother and countless mothers before that, that names were a potent force, a vehicle of dark things such as the Evil Eye. The logic went something like this. Once you verbalized a person’s name, you acknowledged the meaning and gave wing to its immutable power. So to Mom, Pilar
had
to mean “pillar of strength,” not a stinky old onion. It was nothing to joke about.

“But h
ow can you be Spanish if you’re Jewish?” my friends also asked.

“
Because we’re Spanish Jews,” I told them, and they looked at me as if I’d said we were two-legged quadrupeds.

The long version of my family’s history seemed too far-fetched to even try to explain.
What was I going to say? We’re Spanish from the pre-Inquisition days of Moorish Spain, kicked out by
Ferdinand II of Aragon
 
and 
Isabella I of Castile
and migrating here and there and everywhere across the Mediterranean coast until we ended up in one little neighborhood in Greece—the island of Rhodes, to be exact—where my ancestors stayed for, um, four hundred years? So we’re not like Puerto Ricans or Cubans or any other native Spanish speakers because we don’t know any dialect of modern Spanish. We’re not even Greek descendants; guess four hundred years isn’t quite long enough to take on that identity. Just non-Catholic, non-Spanish Spaniards who have never been to Spain.

Huh.
And that was just my mother’s side.

My father
’s side was even crazier. He fared from a small British island whose name I hated speaking out loud—not that
I
believed in the Evil Eye. This island fancied itself so quaint and old-fashioned that it did not condescend to permitting cars. I knew nothing else about it apart from the few dim memories that I preferred to forget, and an old
National Geographic
that I never threw out.

All this is the long way of explaining
why, at age twenty-four, I chose neither Rhodes nor Sark as the place to which I would escape from that other island—
Lonnng
Island—and “find myself.” Instead I chose the South of France, where Grandma had visited for two weeks in 1930 before immigrating to the United States.

But
when I said as much to my mother, she choked. I mean literally. At my announcement she half-swallowed her bite of lamb, turned brilliant blue eyes in my direction, and gagged.

Let me put this in context for you.
This was one week before the stroke that put Grandma in the Sephardic Home for the Aged and ended up stealing her mind way before her body. She, Mom, and I were sitting at the kitchen table in the tract house in Central Islip (a nice enough blue-collar town though not a place where anyone would choose to settle for four hundred years). Grandma had made the lamb, of course, the way she made most of the family rules and then sat watching us like a spider over her flies. She liked gratitude for keeping us alive with food and love, which was the same thing to both her and my mother. Only I'd ruined things with my announcement, throwing the women I loved off balance while I attempted to balance myself.

“
France? What for?” my mother cried. Then: “
Ahrrgggckkk...
”

“
I need to figure out who I am,” I said while pounding her back. One little cough, and her morsel of lamb settled.

She kept eating.
“That’s a cliché. You don’t want to be a cliché, do you, Pilar?”

“
I’m not a cliché.”

“
You are, sweetie, if you go overseas to find what you’ve got right here.”

“
I want to travel.”

“
So travel. Who says you can’t travel? Take a vacation for a week.”

“
What’s this?” shouted my grandmother, who was also half-deaf. “Where is she going?”

“
She wants to move to France!” Mom shouted back.

“
What for?”

“
I’ll work!” I cried.

“
What work!”
Mom.

“
Well…my art!”
Me.

“
That’s not work.”
Grandma.
“You should get married, raise children. Family is what matters, not travel. Family lasts. Nothing else does.”

I tried to stay calm while keeping
my voice strong. “Grandma, I don’t want to get married. I don’t even have a boyfriend!”

“
I had a baby at your age.”

“
I don’t want a baby!”
Ever
, I thought, though I had the good judgment not to say it.

“
Bah,”
she said.

I was
n’t sure which of my statements she was
bahhing
, but her sorrow was unmistakable; by leaving I would break her kind, cranky heart. Inspiration struck. I said, “Maybe I should, you know, explore your history, Grandma. Like I could see the French village where you visited your cousin...before things happened. Before the war. Do you remember the name?”

She looked at me in disbelief
, her wise old eyes tearful.

“
You can’t expect her to get excited about that,” Mom said. “She doesn’t want to think about it.”

“I could
try to find out what happened to her,” I said, and yes, it sounded as lame as it felt.

“Nonsense.
You’ll end up rootless like your father.”

Before I could reply, Grandma snorted:
“
May his name be blotted out!
” I just stared at her. “This is not good for Pilar, leaving footprints all over the world!”

“
Just France!” I said. “You don’t remember the name of the village?”

“No,
France did not care about me, and I don’t care about France. I never wanted to leave Rhodes. Though I did go to French schools in Rhodes. That was how I spoke it so beautifully.”

“
Well, I’ll learn it too,” I said, grabbing at straws. Then, to distract her: “Why did they have French schools in Rhodes, Grandma?”

“
Oh, French was still
the
international language back then. Very important, not like that English. The Jews had a choice of schools, and I wanted to study French. I like to be modern.”

This coming from the woman of old-fashioned shawls and lace-up shoes: the same woman who had inward
ly died the moment she immigrated so many years before and then died a second time along with her husband, my wonderful grandfather. How many lives did she have left?

Desperate to cheer her up, I suggested that
after France I visit her home country of Rhodes too and walk the streets she had as a girl. But rather than looking pleased, Grandma’s face crumpled.

“
Oh, that is worse, Pilar. Much, much worse. There's no one left anywhere now.”

I should have known
. I’d been told that my mother’s family name was inscribed on a memorial for Holocaust victims in the walled city of Rhodes. But what was wrong with wanting to experience such things for myself?

Still shaking her head in disapproval, my grandmother shuffled out of the room.
I stayed at the table, staring at the uneaten lamb while my mother stared at me, ready to pounce.

“
For centuries we were a nation in exile, Pilar. That’s why our family came here. You think you’ll feel comfortable living in France? You’ll find plenty of terrorists and neo-Nazis there, and Palestinian supporters galore. Believe me; anti-Semitism is always in style, especially in Europe. Like a sickness, it comes back to haunt you.”

My mother, so certain about things far away and in the past but not seeing what’s right under her nose
—not seeing the connections that
really
mattered. What would she say if she knew that it was personal sickness drawing me away from her, from Grandma, and the only home I’d ever known? For this adventure I was planning had little to do with France or anywhere else. It had to do with my nearly overwhelming urge to settle somewhere completely anonymous and foreign. I would take along my clothes, my art supplies, and nothing else. A
tabula rasa
in the making…

“
Grandpa told me to be interested and curious about the world,” I said. “He would have understood.”

“Maybe, and
I understand too. I understand that you’re young and looking to catch your own shadow. But sweetie, you really won’t fit in. I know you. You won’t ‘find yourself.’
And
you’ll never find a decent bagel either.”

We looked at each other, picturing the life-altering lack of bagels. And we burst out laughing, though s
he turned out to be right about the bagels. Bagels and New York pizza: gone, gone, gone. Fortunately in France they did have scrumptiously fresh baguettes, which was what I was eating the morning after I slept off my jetlag and emerged from Hôtel de la Gare to begin my new life.

A blank slate.

The plaza I ended up falling in love with welcomed me like a disarming old photograph.

You know the kind of photo I’m talking about
. Every dusty family photo album harbors one: of a forgotten relative in her youth, as flirty as all get-out despite the conventions of the time, or maybe because of them. Well, this street appeared like such a photo. I’d been nibbling my baguette while searching in vain for “to rent” signs—or ”
à louer
,” according to my English-French dictionary—because there were no apartments, flats, shared cottages or hovels available anywhere. At home I had envisioned an orgy of French living opportunities in my new city, especially with the dollar enjoying such a healthy exchange rate. I wasn’t fussy; anything would do. Shared housing near one of the campuses, a large-windowed flat on the Paris-like pedestrian streets, or even a Bohemian studio with peeling paint—they all sounded good. But Montpellier, it seemed, suffered from an actual housing shortage. I hadn’t considered the flood of students living in the South of France, hadn’t done my research, and now would have to lay my head in the lack of bed I had made for myself.

El que corre, se cae,
Grandma would say.
He who runs, falls.
In other words,
forget problems finding a bagel; I was getting my Just Desserts…

Then, suddenly, the dim twist of cobblestones
I was following opened into an unexpected swish of sunshine and vivacity. The plaza, tucked into one of Montpellier’s deepest side pockets, with a For Rent sign directly in front of the loveliest building.

Talk about fate!
My heart whooped. I would have whooped and run along with it if my toe wasn’t itching so damn much.

Oh please be nice inside
, I thought, as I limped past café tables alive with students, families, elders, teenagers and dogs; past the scents of beef and baking bread along with something earthy and dank, maybe wildflowers or dog shit, which was also part of the panoply of sensations; past a door cheerfully ajar into a simply appointed rental office.

A middle-aged man sat at the lone desk.
He glanced up at my entrance. A young man standing over him smiled briefly in my direction too but kept talking; he was demanding something in a mishmash of sounds that seemed to end in the word
frigo.

Fridge?
Take me fridge?

The older man
held up a hand to the man with the food storage problem and stood. “Mademoiselle,” he said, following with a long string of nonsense.

“
Appartement
?” I tried in French, pointing at the sign and sounding like a toddler with a speech impediment. I fought down a surge of panic. Why didn’t these people speak English? This French stuff would never come out of my mouth; Mom had been right. I should have chosen Connecticut for my little adventure….

Th
e man pushed a few strands of over-ambitious hair aside and stepped forward to welcome me. He was a businessman, nervous but nice enough. He wore a well-made button-down shirt and creased white slacks. The younger man stood as well, his hair tousled as if he’d just climbed out of bed. He wore a white T-shirt over jeans, and old-fashioned rubber flip flops, black. He also wore dark blond stubble and a grin so bright I wanted to grab it and stuff it inside my purse.

“
Appartement
,” I said again, emphasizing a different part of the word. Apart
ment
. “Sorry, my French…”

The man at the desk said,
“
Oui, oui, l’appartement
,” and scratched at his head as if trying to unearth a new way of communicating. He settled on small sentences spoken very loudly. “No problem! Small! This is good, yes?”

“Small is good
,” I said, sort of. “Small is perfect.”

The tall, lean young man wait
ed patiently for me to finish. I placed a crumple of francs on the desk. To my surprise, the rental agent didn’t ask for a passport or count the money though he did un-crumple the bills, smooth them out, and anchor the pile under what looked like a Pet Rock. Then he stroked his comb-over again and lifted a set of brass keys from the wall.

The young man said something else about his refrigerator
—
My “frigo” is broken? It cracked itself?
—and the disagreement seemed to escalate. Both men gesticulated with genuine thespian talent.

I zoned out.
If the apartment worked out I’d haul my stuff from the Hôtel de la Gare to this charming plaza. I’d drink my morning coffee looking at that café and working on art. Corinthian columns outside; wainscoting inside. Maybe this building had been an estate house once. Maybe the plaza and café had replaced a seventeenth-century carriage house.

The blond guy’s voice rose.
My fridge is lost,
he might have said. Or:
My fridge has lost itself.

Had it been stolen?
Could be studios in France didn’t come with appliances. I’d have to buy my own or beg like this guy.
Will Sketch for
“
Frigo
,” my panhandling sign would say.

Su
ddenly Blondie heaved himself into a chair and crossed his arms.
Not moving unless you hand me what I want,
was the message.

I glanced
at Mr. Comb-Over, who smiled again—large yellow teeth—and directed me to follow him out of the building. In the doorway, he pointed at a smaller, plainer building across the street. It had no Corinthian columns and no balconies.

“
Oh,” I said. “The apartment is over there?”

He nodded, delighted with our dialogue.

I, on the other hand, did not feel quite so delighted. Maybe there was no fridge in those apartments across the street, or no oven, or…no toilet? Was that possible?

Waving goodbye to Blondie, I followed my prospective landlord across the plaza into a narrow hallway toward a long flight of narrow stairs.
And at the base of the staircase, he pointed to a small doorway, smiling apologetically.

“
Toilette.
He is down here.”