Wanda. The first time I went to Poland for some reason I searched for her mound right outside Krakow and Nowa Huta, a funereal ancient burial mound from the Neolithic. Polish patriots and nation-statists of more recent centuries had reimagined this old Neolithic structure to have been dedicated by the mourning-blinded King Krac to the body of his daughter Wanda who died defending the country, or maintaining her purity, or somesuch ennobled chivalric hysteria.
The Polish cab driver had brought me there, surprised I knew about it. We drove by the big cauldrons that I thought were a nuclear power plant but were really coal-furnace electricity centers.
Why was I doing this? Why do I seek a pilgrimage, to connect to some indigenous past of a country I visit, to map and understand the anxieties, demons, national delusions and hatreds, of its people, the dead hieroglyphs written on the insides of their grandfathers bayonets, the bowls of bone relics to evil saints who ate the minds of Jews in broth and on plates. I seek to understand and map the blood-helixes of the souls of nations that are alien, whose languages I do not speak.
My grandfather Aenuel Vycecberga was a Polish Jew who escaped to South America, he named his daughter Blonda which sounds a bit like Wanda though it is a name typical of the pro-USA 1950s Golden age superficiality: Linda, Wanda, names of women with tall beehive perms pushing vacuum cleaners on zebra carpets as "I love Lucy" episodes candidly laugh on the television screens in Art Deco houses. When my mother married an Argentinean exile, my grandma, her mother, his mother-in-law thought he was Rico in 'I love Lucy.'
St Lucy is the ikon of the Orthodox saint that brings light. If I was a Christian mystic and not a Jew I would pray to the ikon to awash in light the dark grass of Poland bent with shadows of drunks and griefs, the dark necropolis of Kaizimerz a city of cemeteries and the dead but now full of cafes and bars where tourists drink vodka and dance to electro-klezmer, I went there ten times 10X hoping to get laid and I got sick and weird in front of girl-women who look like Slavic tribal majesty of the dark infinite bone-forests in Silesia, each time I was thinking of the anger of qabbalistic souls who never transmigrated out of that necropolis because of the disgrace and infamy that had occurred there and here I was, their grandchild trying to obtain sex from a Polish woman, maybe one called Wanda, in any case a granddaughter of the Pagan sacrificed princess Wanda mourned by the gold snow crowned King Krac.
The corporeal-funereal mound, tall covered in green grass, geometric structures and Neolithic wizard architecture underneath the added layers of earth, was reminiscent of the Egyptian and Semitic Mastaba graves from the ancient world, or the Ziggurat of Mesopotamia. I sat there and thought, tried to think of Wanda. The wind that bled through the Polish forests of tall gray trees full of winged wolves carressed my bearded face, I was calm, my face washed with cool wind after seeing the ugly tourism at the Auschwitz-Birkenau center—I had shrunken horrified at their fat rolex hands folding the posters they bought with stacks of shoes, T-shirts photo-airburshed with the Arbeit Macht Frei Protestant work ethic gate; the river of women's hair that ends not in a sea but in a meadow. The river of women's hair that I wish had not been protected by thick fiberglass lit with fluorescents, otherwise I would have dove in head-first, or penis-first, and swim in the hair of a million Jewish women, some of them assimilated beauties, some of them whores singing Die Shtetl Brennt, some of them Orthodox women who were supposed to shave their scalp every morning and don a wig dyed in unreal colors over their fresh nude skull. (The river ended not in a sea, but some strands landed in a meadow. In the fields just outside the fences of the Birkenau memorial, I had seen gypsies who were relocated to the city by the government hang about like sleepy lizards—there surely they would go to inject drugs and commit public adulteries until sunrise. At sunrise the youthless gypsy teenagers dispel, fleeing the great mechanical automaton who clears the area by morning, protecting the space where the tourists will visit. The tourists, especially the young ones from Israeli school excursions, will walk the fields breathing some ash particles of the martyrs of holocausts and devourings. I saw a glimpse of this automaton: he had one cycloptic eye; one sieve for a helmet; two lance arms and one wooden penis. His cycloptic eye was a passionate blue around the dilated pupil, and on his chest was tattooed the Polish national symbol of a black hydra twin-headed hawk licking the red placenta of Stabat Mater sky. He hid himself, there were some other tourists nearby but none saw him, they had their stares set on an Israeli girl who had her shirt caught in the metal thorn of Birkenau wire-barb, tearing, she was trying to touch it sentimentally with one hand while shawling herself in an Israeli flag as her girlfriends angrily chanted kibbutznik war-chants and gave men ugly looks. All men, aroused at the sight of the gazelle-dove trapped in some barb wire by her underwear, suddenly felt seen as nasty and anti-semitic goyim, even me.)
The twigs in the treetops shuddered making the sounds that are like the word for "yes," affirmative, in Polish of onomatopeia and passionate staccatto whispers: tak tak tak Tak
Arturo Desimone, 28 years old, was born and raised on Aruba, in the Dutch Caribbean, but of immigrant origins foreign to the island (mother-father-entity was half Argentinean, half Russian-Polish.) He left high school when he was 15 of age to sell tobacco and replicas of Japanese swords while writing stories. At 22, left Aruba for Amsterdam but quickly decided not to stay. For the last two years he has led a migrant homo-viator lifestyle travelling through East Europe and the Near East and has been living in Tunisia. Also a visual artist, in September his drawings will be exhibited in Paris.
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