Love Story

I

So. Here’s the deal. You’re going to have to bear with me on this one: There are all sorts of false starts, seeming feints and side-tributaries in the telling of this story but, trust me, by the end it all comes together. Sort of.

So, like I say, I was home, minding my own business, riffling through my latest e-mail, this was about two years ago, when--not so very unusually--I spotted yet another missive from Serbia. Ever since having covered the aftermath of the Balkan wars for The New Yorker, I’d been subjected to a steady if intermittent stream of hate mail bearing the telltale “dot-yu” coda in the sender’s e-return address. “You obviously must not be able to get enough of the taste of the blood of Serbian infants with your morning cereal.” You know: that sort of thing. Anyway, here was yet another one, emanating from some e.place like rabbit@enet.yu or some such. And for a few days I didn’t even bother to open it: Who needs such images rattling around in his head? Anyway, eventually I did open it, and--surprise!--this wasn’t that kind of message at all. On the contrary, it was from a fellow named Rasa Sukulovic, who introduced himself as an experienced literary translator (English into Serbian), veteran for example of texts by Salman Rushdie, and what he was inquiring about was whether or not I’d allow him to translate my book on the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles, “Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder,” into Serbian and then see to its publication in Belgrade. Now, as it happens, that book has received a bunch of translations: A work of magic-realist nonfiction, as it were, it’s far and away my most translated book, showing up in Italy, Germany, France and even Japan, usually finding a home in the catalogs of the respective publishers of Borges and Garcia Marquez and Umberto Eco. Japan, of course, was strange (and even stranger the vanloads of Japanese tourists who began pulling up at the doors of the Museum in Culver City)--but Serbia? What on earth were people in Serbia going to make of my odd little text? Still, I figured, what the hell, and by reply missive, I extended my somewhat dubious permission--don’t even worry about the royalties.

II

So anyway, hold all that in the back of your mind for a moment, as I pick up the narrative somewhere seemingly altogether different--in fact, a couple years earlier.

I happened to be visiting David Wilson’s little museum one day. It occurs to me that I ought to say something here about the Museum of Jurassic Technology for the benefit of those who haven’t ever read the book, or maybe even for some of those who have, because the place really does exist. Several of the book’s reviewers, at the time of its publication in 1995, indicated that they’d thought I was making the whole place up and had even gone so far as to call Information in L.A. to confirm its reality (though why they imagined that, had I been making the place up from scratch, I wouldn’t have had the wit to place a listing for my fictional creation with Directory Assistance in L.A., I’ll never know). (Which reminds me of the single coolest review the book ever got, which wasn’t even published in any journal but instead took the form of this guy who went to visit the museum one day about six months after the book’s publication: He spent about two hours puttering around the Jurassic’s labyrinthine back halls before reemerging at the front desk, where he hesitantly asked the fellow seated there, “Excuse me, but are you either David Wilson or Lawrence Weschler?” Informed by the sitter in question that he was indeed David Wilson, the visitor leaned in confidentially before triumphantly declaring, sotto voce, “Come on, tell me the truth, does that guy Weschler really exist?”)

Where was I? Oh, yeah, the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Culver City, halfway between downtown L.A. and Venice Beach, a place that really does exist (go ahead: Call Information; you’ll see), a deceptively diminutive little storefront operation that specializes in the breathtakingly lovely and loving display of some of the most astoundingly incredible material you’ll ever encounter--incredible because, as it happens, some of it may not be entirely true. Or not. You can’t be sure. There’s this sense of slippage: horned humans, pronged ants, mice on toast, microminiature painted renditions of Snow White and all seven of her dwarfs strung out along the shaft of a needle, the medicinal uses of urine--an entire hall given over to an exhibition on the career of Geoffrey Sonnabend, an American neuropsychiatrist who, during the 1930s, in despair over the collapse of his researches into memory pathways in carp, suffered a complete nervous breakdown and was shipped off by his mother to a spa near Iguazu Falls, in the Mesopotamian region of Latin America, which is where, one night, he happened to attend a recital of German lieder by Madelena Delani, the famed Romanian chanteuse, most famous perhaps for the fact that she suffered from Korsakov’s syndrome, a condition which had ravaged all her long- and short-term memory with the exception of the memory of music itself, a condition which imparted a “uniquely plaintive air” (New York Times) to her haunted and haunting singing; after which he (Sonnabend) spent a shatteringly insomniac night during which he came up with an entirely new theory of memory, a theory it would take him the whole next decade to elaborate into the three-volume masterwork in which he argued that memory itself is essentially an illusion which we all throw in front of ourselves to disguise from ourselves the fact that we’ve in fact forgotten everything, a theory which has in the meantime proved particularly intriguing owing to the fact that no sooner had it finally been put to paper than its author himself seemed to fall into complete oblivion, that is until his recent resurrection there in the halls of the Jurassic itself.

You know, that sort of thing.

III

So, anyway, Wilson and I were sitting there one day whiling away the time at the front desk when the mailman delivered a mysterious little package covered over with myriad colorful stamps from Italy. Inside, without any cover letter, was a beautifully produced little hardcover book, just published by Rizzoli, “Un cosi bel posto,” by one Fabrizio Rondolino, a narrative which apparently (neither of us could actually read Italian) purported to relate the love story of Geoffrey Sonnabend and Madelena Delani. Though as mystified as I was, Wilson hardly seemed the least bit upset by this sudden appropriation of his creation. On the contrary, he seemed entirely pleased by this confirmation of the palpable reality of these individuals whose existence heretofore had seemed entirely confined to the halls of his emporium.

Later that evening, I myself was dumbfounded to recall an incident that had taken place about nine months earlier, about the time of my own book’s publication. Shortly before that date, I’d been approached by the radio producer David Isay to see whether Wilson and I would be willing to collaborate with him on a half-hour audio version of my little narrative--completely re-reported for radio, to be broadcast on NPR’s “All Things Considered.” We’d all agreed, and there had ensued several days’ worth of surreptitious taping at the museum, eventually yielding more than 40 hours of overheard conversations among and with visitors to the Jurassic, which, following another several months’ editing, had eventually yielded the finished documentary.

And what I suddenly remembered that evening was how the documentary had included a passage in which I intoned on how people came from all over the world to visit the museum’s many exhibits as, for example, in this instance--and here the sound of a doorbell bubbled up from behind my narration, followed by that of a young man with a foreign accent launching into a series of queries--”this fellow here who’s come all the way from Rome, Italy, to pursue his researches on the career of Geoffrey Sonnabend, an American neuropsychiatrist who, back in the ‘30s . . .” and so forth. Listeners were then invited to listen as the fellow indicated to Wilson how much trouble he’d been having tracking down Sonnabend’s three volumes (“Yeah,” Wilson said, “those books are quite hard to find”), whereupon he asked Wilson whether he himself happened to have the books there at the museum, and Wilson sighed that no, as it happened, he didn’t (“They’re really really hard to find,” he assured the visitor), at which point the young man shrugged audibly and proceeded into the museum’s back halls.

A few days later, when I got back to New York, I called up Isay, went over and we foraged around for the original tape of that overheard conversation and, indeed, fiddling with the dials, sharpening the sound, we were able to make out the fellow’s self-introduction: “Hello, my name is Fabrizio Rondolino and I’ve come here from Rome, Italy, and I’m especially interested in . . .” and so forth. Incredibly, of all the days we could have chosen to tape there at the museum, we’d managed to pick the one on which occurred the sole meeting between David Wilson and Fabrizio Rondolino--and the amazing thing, listening once more to the whole conversation, was how neither of them had broken irony the entire time. They’d both gone on as if theirs were the most commonsensical sort of conversation to be having.

IV

But that’s not the story I wanted to tell you. Because the thing is--and now I have to come back to my Belgrade Rabbit friend (and as I say, this was a few years later)--Rasa now did indeed begin translating my Mr. Wilson book, he was sending me updates every few days until about three weeks into the process, when he sent me a fairly breathless piece of e-mail: “You’ll never believe what just happened,” he wrote. “I didn’t ever mention this to you before but my close friend is also a translator, in her case of Italian into Serbian, and she happened to be reading the part of your book I’ve translated up to this point and she almost had a heart attack, because, you see, she came upon the stuff about Geoffrey Sonnabend, and as it happens, she’s been commissioned by the same publisher here in Belgrade to translate a book by an Italian writer which claims to be a narrative about the love story of Sonnabend and Delani.”

Now, this was in the fall of 1998, and in the weeks thereafter the Belgrade publishers got in touch with all of us and we began planning to converge on Belgrade--Wilson, Rondolino and me--for a great Jurassic reunion on the occasion of the simultaneous Serbian publication of both books that coming March. And we would have gone, too, except that just then, in response to Milosevic’s escalating rampages in Kosovo, NATO started its air blitz and the whole thing had to be called off (the event, not the books’ publication--I’ve got my copy right here: “Kabinet cuda gospodina Vilsona” by Lorens Vesler).

And here’s the really weird part. It turns out that Rondolino (actually, I should mention that in the meantime I was able to get a report on the book from some friends who read Italian, and they say it’s actually quite marvelous, recounting as it does the story of a pair of lovers who seduce each other one evening and the next morning the woman has completely forgotten that they ever met and they have to seduce each other all over again that night, and so on and so forth, night after night thereafter--kind of a cross between Valentine’s Day and Groundhog Day, I suppose), anyway, it turns out that Rondolino’s day job, from which he’d only just resigned, had been as the press spokesman for the Italian prime minister, in which capacity he’d been having to justify the stationing of NATO planes at Italian bases, from whence they’d been heading off to rain bombs down on Belgrade.

As I say: weird, weird, wondrous world. Go figure.