Chapter 7: Felix
Chapter Seven Felix
There is only one time when we give it all away, the sorrow and the joy, the circle of the soul. Before this is practice, imagining, puzzles with pieces missing, and afterwards - approximations, sometimes beautiful, but compromises nonetheless.
One August 1963 afternoon in the New York City apartment of a friend, the door flew open and a tall, lanky, long-fingered, big-knuckled, 18-year-old Swiss painter stepped into my heart. In the United States on a six-month visa, he had been traveling around the country and had the address of my friend to look up.Though it has been a good 40 years since that day, I can remember exactly the tone of his voice, the accent, the intensity that burst from him, and the smell of the unfiltered French Gauloises cigarettes he chainsmoked all his life (and which contributed to his death from throat cancer in 2002). He came out of a background full of European bohemians. His mother, Eva Aeppli, was an artist as well, her second marriage to the well-known metal sculptor, Jean Tinguely, ending in divorce that year. He spoke Swiss-German, French, and English and had spent the past several years in Paris.
Within a few months, I said goodbye to my recent traveling companion and moved into a storefront on the Lower East Side to begin spending the next 2-1/2 years with this young whirlwind. While he painted on a huge easel at home, I went off to work at the United Nations English Typing Unit on the swing shift and in the mornings wrote poetry and made ink drawings. Through his mother's connections, we both landed jobs modeling for Moses and Raphael Soyer, twin brothers famous for painting New Yorkers of that time.
The next several months as fall wore on into winter were increasingly emotional. We began to fight as his barreling-forward nature collided with my more cautious approach to daily events. I felt like a moth drawn to a flame, bashing against it till I was bloody. We drank some and even experimented with codeine cough syrup, but it wasn't chemicals that were to blame. As in my marriage, I felt somehow less qualified for life than he was. Near Christmas I turned myself in to Bellevue Hospital's Psychiatric Ward one evening, imagining a warm bed to sleep in and a warm counselor to talk to. By morning I knew I didn't belong there and made my one allowed phone call to get sprung that afternoon. In the midst of this volatile state of affairs, his visa was running out and with passion and immaturity we made a decision to spend the next nine months on the Balearic islands off the southern coast of Spain, to be paid for by his mother who had married into money the third time around and could afford to let her son concentrate on painting. In her European way, she thought it was good that he had a slightly older woman in his life for ballast.
In January 1964 we set out as part of a tiny group of passengers on a Yugoslavian freighter out of New York crossing the Atlantic to the port of Casablanca in Africa. In trying to find the actual distance in miles of this voyage, I discovered to my delight that none other than Jack Kerouac had taken the same trip just seven years earlier in February 1957, though his ship took him straight to Tangiers where he was going to meet with William Burroughs. Apparently, this was a common way to travel this route inexpensively at the time. Like him, we had a stormy midwinter crossing that took about nine days.
The ship entered the port at Casablanca at sunrise and a small boat glided straight down the path of the sun to the ship to sell fish. There were men in long white robes squatting on the docks in the habitual manner of sitting here. From Casablanca we caught a bus to Tangiers that passed through desolate countryside where I could see campfires burning in the distant night and once had to stop for a large herd of animals to cross the road. After a brief overnight in Tangiers we crossed by ferry to Gibraltar and headed along the southern coast of Spain by train. Felix had a haircut that resembled the new fashion set by the Beatles (though we didn't hear their music for the first time until we reached Ibiza) and along the way we heard calls of "existentialisti" as the small dark Spanish people tried to figure out what two tall blond nomads were up to among them. Eventually, we reached Barcelona where we got to see the incredible expressionist architecture of Gaudi before we crossed by ferry to Ibiza on the Balearic Islands.
In 1964, Ibiza, the island in the middle of the Balearic chain of three (Mallorca being the largest and Formentera the smallest) both in size and location, was just jumpstarting its notoriety as a tourist mecca. Its cobbled winding hilly streets were still relatively untrammeled and quiet seaside cafes within view of fishermen tending nets were still peaceful. It was, however, above our budget and we decided to try Formentera, ten miles long by four miles wide approximately, L-shaped, reachable only by boat, its roads mostly just paths between low stone-slabbed walls filled with tiny lizards. There we would live for the next six months on the shore of a large lake called Estanque Pudent and a short hike to the Mediterranean.
Somehow we found and rented a little whitewashed, blue-shuttered, tile-roofed, stone-floored cottage (that seemed huge to me) for $15/month out of sight of any other habitation and equipped with Spanish pottery and furniture. It had two tiny bedrooms, one main room with two little storage rooms to either side, and out the front door into another tiny room was a fireplace over which we cooked the chorizo and eggs, pasta and cheese, salads and dark purple aubergines that were our mainstay. The eggs were from chickens that ran wild on the property and laid their eggs anywhere. There were fig trees and tomato plants and parsley like grass. Water for cooking came from a cistern well and probably caused the E. coli infection I later contracted. No electricity, no running water, no indoor plumbing. Bathroom was a little straw chair with a hole in the middle sitting over a hole in the ground that was covered between visits. In no time, we became brown like boy scouts from the sun.
When we needed supplies we walked the path to the nearest village or took the boat to Ibiza for certain items and to visit friends. We did make friends among local artists and even entertained occasionally in a primitive way. Needless to say, we drank local wine and after a few months on the island for the first time I was persuaded to try amphetamines, which were called Centramina and could be bought without prescription at any pharmacy. This occasion prompted the one suicide gesture of my life. After being awake for far too many hours, I began to crash from the drug and not receiving the promised sympathy from Felix (who was also coming down) reached for a scissors laying on a table near me, cut my long hair to the scalp, marched out the door, to the sea, threw off all my clothes (ever the drama queen), marched into the water up to my neck, realized I wasn't deliberate death material, and retraced all these steps, now shorn and humbled. Things began to go seriously downhill after this.
Though I was writing and Felix was painting, life began to feel far too surreal, this adventure on an island so very far from home. My martyred mother back in Oregon was feverishly trying to scheme me home again and also dealing with the paperwork involved in completing my divorce so that my husband could remarry a French woman he had met while staying on in Moscow a second year. We began to think about leaving the island (partly because I was now ill and had lost weight) and returning to the States, although there was complication about Felix obtaining another visa. In June, having survived six months in paradise, we headed for Paris to stay with Felix's mother until we could go on.
In Paris, things became even more dramatic. Miserable and homesick, I simply walked off one day and wandered around the Left Bank until I found the same little hotel where I had stayed with my husband on our way through to Russia. I sat in a little room there for two days and talked to myself in the mirror on the inside of the open door of the closet, literally holding myself to sanity by sheer will. Somehow I hung on, returned to the apartment where Felix was, received money for return tickets by wire from home, took a train to Brussels, caught an Icelandic flight for the second time in my life, and on July 13, almost a full year since we had met, I was back in New York, exhausted, thin like a concentration camp victim, and within three days had found an apartment to sublet where I began to recuperate. It was here that I turned 25. Felix planned to come when he could get his own plans in order. It was the last time I would set foot outside this country.
I had planned to write a chapter for each five-year period of my life. This is the first exception. This year took more of my strength than any other year of my life. All of my childhood and adolescence, I had been programmed to believe I was fragile - or at least that the world was a place to navigate with extreme caution. Felix was not remarkable for being gentle or thoughtful or meditative. He electrified, bolted, dashed, gesticulated, leapt. He shone. He had his own very complex childhood scars about which I knew little and later he would become a full-fledged heroin addict before his death. Somehow fittingly, he ended his life not as a painter but as an internationally famous tattoo artist. When he was gone from my life later on, I did not regret the loss of his presence after the first excruciating weeks, but I left behind with him the part of me that would pull out all the stops, follow anywhere, totally adore, hold nothing back. Other loves later were probably more mature, but none were so naked and complete. For a shy farm girl, I had ventured almost farther out along the borderline than I could make it back - but our connection was not yet broken because our fate was to have a child. The next five years would find us in the Haight-Ashbury where both my children were born.
Leave
Leave - permission to depart the clever bivouac of childhood, epoch of a thousand treasons, for a place that looked so far as to be only after setting of the final sun. How many branches frighten the most anxious of such nomads, lost among an untied forest, never so extremely dark, the sandal of the night estranged, aloof. And on the way to speak to angels, plaiting on the hill their famous voices near enough to think that you were meeting white-winged sirens one to one, it suddenly occurs to me that once it may have been too bright to see the future fathering herself beside the road. The thick regret of patience slows my hand, but then perhaps it is the weaponless who are most suited to be called to arms. It may be that the ailing sun, chimera to the weak, awaits a traveler without defense, alone.
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