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An Immigrant Fisherman Stranded in an American Desert…

Adrianos is an aging immigrant from a Mediterranean island. He was raised to be a fisherman but came to the US seeking to avenge a betrayal of trust by an American sailor. In a day-long monologue, Adrianos describes key moments of his life in the US, his growing understanding of himself and of the strange customs and attitudes he encounters. He also describes loving connections with several Americans, relationships that offer a redeeming contrast to his sustained criticism of American values. Adrianos' point of view as an outsider provides him with a perspective on America that is by turns frightening, revealing, funny, and tragic—but always deeply human.

"Young people have no business being doctors. They have no place in law. They are too young to be staring all day into that rot and decay. Only at middle life should a man or woman study the medicine or the law—and even then, only with a calling to heal, a howl for justice on the lip. But then, for the American, there is always money and power. For myself I have had no calling. That is why I sit here in this park today, my long legs stretched before me, and watch the desert light to leap from the little waves the wind makes on the dirty pond. It is why I dream always of fishes."

Excerpt from Chapters 85 and 86

(Note: the first song refered to is "I've Got No Use for the Women" (a Western ballad made popular in the 1950's) while the second song is Bob Dylan's "Love Minus Zero/No Limit".)

                                    from Chapter 85

            We ate some dinner that he buys from the deli restaurant next to his building, and we have a little more of wine and Tequila, and we drink and talk until late at night. And after I have gone to bed on his little couch, I can to hear Miguel play lightly on his guitar in his bedroom, and he sings once again this American song, but very slow and very sad several times. And I think it is strange that this song can to be both so very funny and also in the next singing very sad.
            I fall asleep thinking of this, but I am not so very deep when I wake up again, and I can to hear him to sing another song that is also an American song. But this one has strange words that your head may to say do not make sense. He tells me later that this is a song that also he has heard on the radio, but the first words are so keen and soft, and both sad and happy at once, that even as I hear them, they make my heart to cry for the heart of my friend.
            The first words are like this, and although I cannot to remember all of the words, they say that love is so quiet, and without empty ideas of what would to be perfect or any willingness to hurt and destroy. Love, this song says, does not need to claim to be forever there for you, but rather is this love just real and strong and keen to be felt.
            My drunken ears hear these words that make no sense to my head, but they make sense to my heart, and to something else in me, and I know—just like that—that my crazy friend Miguel is hurt in a way that he could not to hurt if he were no more than what I thought he might to be. And I see that his talk of this beautiful woman is more than talk of a woman he has just met a month ago. I see that this is a woman he has moved away from for all of a long time, and that he is sad for missing this woman’s love, not just a love he found last week dancing in some bar. And I know too that he will somehow to be okay at last, and get beyond this sadness he has now, and also that my head is too drunken to understand all this right now, but that something understands, and that in time I will also.
            And I remember thinking that, when I am not so drunk, I will to need to have some thinking about these things for they are some kind of knot for me to understand. And then I went to sleep seeing a flame growing up from a cube of ice—and it felt warm like the sea near the island where I was grown, and also cool like the breath of a mountain wind.

                                         Chapter 86


            And so I came to see that this Miguel, there is more to him than his loving for first this woman and then for that one. And I come to see that there is something more than just his funny songs and his always clowning. To see that he is not just an American man in heat. And in coming to see these things, I come to see something more about the love I too feel for the people and for the things of this world.
            One of the things I come to see—and this is from thinking a long time about why the words of this song have moved my heart—I come to see that love, she is not just a feeling you have, although she is this feeling too as well. To listen to the American, love is like the wild rushing of the water after a heavy rain in August here in this desert, and this water fills the dry, narrow wash as it rushes down from the mountains above the city. This feeling of his love is so great and powerful that, like the flood waters in the wash, it can to drown a person, or maybe slam a person into the one he loves so hard it will to kill them both?
            But I find that this song does not make this mistake about love. “My love,” says the song, is gentle and quiet. And you cannot to tell what this means—is this love the feeling this person has, or is this love the one for who this love is felt? But for me maybe this is the point—my love is what is in me that is more than me and is also outside of me. This love is what is whole between me and the world I live in.
            And I come to think—after these years of thinking on all this—that the feeling the American knows as his love, it is a trick that your body and everything that you are will to play to help you to love, because we people we like this feeling, even when it is so strong as to frighten us some. But this feeling, I tell you again, it is not love. Love is a way to be yourself in your place within the world where you are, and while that feeling is part of this way, it is not the most important part.
            No. The important part of this way to be yourself is in the way you will to find to help the other things and the people of this world where you are to be themselves. While your feeling of love may to help you toward loving this one or that one, this feeling can also to keep you from this love. You may to find yourself trying to force the one you love into doing something you want for yourself so bad, or you may to ask that this person must to live up to what you think is best, although it has nothing to do with her or him, but has only to do with you. And these things—this ideal you hold for yourself and for others, or this little violence you are willing to accept as a part of your love and life—they are wrong; they are not love. Love will just to set you
aside, such that you will to help the one you love to be herself, or himself.
            When first I am seeing into these things, I have one of my calls with the woman I love, and I tell her. I say I think that love is not just a feeling but a way of living that is letting the things or the people you love be what they are. And she thinks on this a while, and then she says that this is not enough to her. She says maybe that is a man’s thought of love—a man’s thought because it is disconnected and uninvolved—but she says it is not the love she knows—and it is not the love she knows from me. She says that she believes love does not stand outside and watch a thing to be itself, but rather instead love lives in the world with what it loves. Love helps
these things to be themselves, she says, these things, these people. And from this her wisdom I come to see that this is true of what I know too as well.
            And so you see that my first thinking of Miguel, had I had nothing more to know of him, and had I done with him as this first knowing would to have had me to do—I would to have missed so much that I think is so important to my knowing. And you see that love is like I told my doctor about a heart, that this heart is not a machine you can to take apart, but it is instead a piece of living, and that you do not fuel this heart but rather you live it.
            And now I will to tell you that the American is wrong about his love—it is not just a matter of a feeling in his heart. And it is not just a matter of big ideas in his head either, although if you are to help a thing to be what it is, you must somehow to know how is this ‘what it is’—and your head can to help you here in this.
            But not if you use your head as the American uses him. For the American loves to take things apart like he takes apart his machine. You wish to know what a thing is? Take it apart and look at how it is made to run. This is what the American says. You want to know what a bird is? Take some apart and look to see. So you come back next week to ask the American what he has learned to know of what a bird is, and on his table there are stacks of birds’ skinny wings, there are piles of feathers blowing here and there, there is a little pile of beaks, a pile of the little feet of all these birds.
            But the American knows nothing more of what a bird is. And how could he see what a bird is from these piles of death that he has made? Nothing here will to fly, or sing, or look for its food on these waves' or under these rocks' or down in this sand by the sea. The head of the American has destroyed these birds and has learned nothing to do with birds. And there has been no love of these birds in anything he has done or said or thought or felt. There is no needle or thread, no clamps or glue you could use that would to make a bird from all this death. And so there is nothing in the world that would to let you to make of all these bits and pieces a bird that anyone could to know as a bird.
            The knowing that comes with love? It is not like this American knowing, and it is not like this American love. And it is Miguel and the woman that I love who take so many years of loving me to show me this is true—and also of my loving them, too, as well. But it makes me a little angry sometimes to think that the world is such that you cannot to know what is what—until it is so late that knowing may not to be of a help for your love. You must just to take your time and hope you can to get home before dark.