The Book of Salt - Monique Truong [14]
GertrudeStein looks at her reflection floating on the surface of a silver teapot and concludes that the pile of hair on top of her head is unacceptable. It is, she thinks, disrupting the continuity of her face. Shearing it, she tells Miss Toklas, will be an important act. Pointless overdecoration, GertrudeStein explains, thinking of the commas and periods that she has plucked from the pages of her writings. Such interferences, she insists, are nothing more than toads flattened on a country road, careless and unsightly. The modern world is without limits, she tells Miss Toklas, so the modern story must accommodate the possibilities—a road where she can get lost if she so chooses or go slow and touch each blade of grass. GertrudeStein should know. She is an excellent driver. She lapses, however, when she has to go in reverse. She would rather keep on driving until she can turn the automobile around, a 360-degree arc of obstinacy. That way, she is technically always going forward.
Miss Toklas likes the wind in her face.
It takes Miss Toklas nearly two days, interrupted only by their mutual desire to eat, to cut off GertrudeStein's hair. As each lock is slipped between the blades of her scissors, Miss Toklas smiles, and says, "Oh, this is so Spanish!" That is her highest compliment for any situation. Spain, Miss Toklas thinks, is where her soul first emerged, fully formed. Spain is where she first experienced Passion, without GertrudeStein. Every town has at least one house, marked by the sign of a cross, in which she could meet Her. Her flirtation, her lover, her Virgin. On their first visit to Àvila, she begs GertrudeStein to stay, to linger in the shadows of the city's cloistered walls. GertrudeStein suspects that on Spanish soil, Miss Toklas would become another's devotee. GertrudeStein could not bear such disgraceful competition. Paris, she knows, has its share of seductions, but those are at least corporeal in form. Miss Toklas is moved by the sight of GertrudeStein's shoulders as they are being eased into a shawl of newly clipped hair, lacelike, covering and revealing all at once. Miss Toklas keeps on cutting, remembering the monks who wound through the streets of Valencia, a slow-moving, deliberate act. She keeps on cutting, losing herself in GertrudeStein's conversion. After her two-day sitting, GertrudeStein is left with a patch of closely cropped hair that stops just at her earlobes, a mantle intended to be demure but instead alludes to the skin, bare and lurking below. She holds Miss Toklas in her arms, placing thank-you kisses in her palms. Miss Toklas remembers the children in Burgos who mistook GertrudeStein for a bishop and begged to kiss her ring.
Wiping her hands off on her apron, Miss Toklas would have walked down the hallway toward the studio door. She would have passed by her Lovey sitting deep within the shadows of yet another detective story. GertrudeStein is very democratic in her reading choices. She delights in the clipped prose, the breakneck speed at which she turns the pages, the steamy mix of petty crimes and bad love affairs. She is especially addicted to the flagrant use of a distinctly American English, a language that she thinks ignites these stories with their vigor and vim. Over two decades in Paris, and yet with each day GertrudeStein believes that she is growing more intimate with the language of her birth. Now that it is no longer applicable to the subjects of everyday life, no longer wasted on the price of petrol, the weather, the health of other people's children, it has become for her a language reserved for genius and creation, for love and devotion. As she is destined now to see it more often than to hear it, GertrudeStein has also grown to appreciate its contours and curvatures, captured and held steady on the pages of the books and letters that cross her lap. The words provoke the scientific in her, remind her of her days in medical school, dissecting something live and electric, removing