Books

Thinking my way back to how I saw the world as a five-year-old boy

An extract from The Stone World by Joel Agee, introduced by the author

Joel Agee, photographed by Sharon Smith

Joel Agee
Wed Feb 23 2022 - 06:07

The idea for The Stone World was sparked by a memory, or rather by a photograph substituting for a memory. The picture shows me at the age of five or six, lying on a stone terrace of the house where I lived with my parents in Cuernavaca in the mid-1940s, rolling a marble from one hand to the other.

The knowledge that this child had once been myself fascinated me. What was it like to be him? An idea proposed itself with an appeal I found irresistible: to project myself back into that little body and view his world, his parents, his friends, the inner and outer events of his life, not from memory – as I had almost no memories of that time – but through his eyes, from day to day, in the absolute present of his experience.

A fiction, in other words, drawn from the depths of my own body’s knowledge of what it is to be in the world without prejudice and without fear.

Characters emerged whom I had never imagined before, along with a surprising sequence of unforeseen events. Nothing was planned. All I knew was that the little boy in my book would eventually leave Mexico with his parents by ship, as I had. I think my main ambition in writing the book was to show how a world of great depth and complexity can be refracted through the unjudging yet acutely perceptive mind of a young child.

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The boy liked to lie with his ear pressed against the cool shaded stone of the patio. Zita, the maid, might be hanging clothes on a line. There was a stone tub in the garden where she did some of her washing. There was green slippery slime on the edge of the stone that the boy liked to touch. For a big wash, Zita would go to the nearby stream, where other women went also to wash their clothes. Sometimes the boy went there with her. He would lie in the grass reading books or just dreaming, listening to the women’s talk and to the sound of the stream. Those two sounds flowed together so that sometimes it seemed that the water was talking and laughing and the women were part of the gurgling and sloshing of the stream. But he also liked to lie on the cool stone patio, feeling its coolness against his face and listening.

His mother asked him once what he was doing. He said he was listening. Listening to what, she asked. To the stone. Really, she said, what does it say? It doesn’t say anything, he said, laughing: Stones don’t speak! Then what do you hear? I don’t know, he said. I just like to listen to it. She didn’t ask any further.

His mother was a musician. She played the violin every day. She was practicing, she said. Why do you practice, the boy asked. So that I can play better, she said. But you play good already, he said. Play well, she said. Yes, I play well, but I still can play better, and that’s why I practice. Later, when my playing is perfect, I’ll play for other people to hear it. That’s called a performance. I’m practicing so I can give a good performance.

A perfect performance, he said.

Maybe, she said, smiling.

Zita pronounced the boy’s name like a Spanish word, “Pira.” Other Mexicans and even some American children who spoke Spanish called him that too. Some called him Pedro. Otherwise, his name was Peter. He liked the sound of his name the way Mexicans pronounced it. That made him feel Mexican, more Mexican even than Pedro did.

Playing in the street with Mexican children, he didn’t like it when his mother and father called him by his American name. Americans were gringos, so Peter was a gringo name.

It wasn’t good being a gringo. Sometimes the other boys used that word. Always they were talking about someone who wasn’t there, or even about all the gringos in the world, and always the word sounded mean. He knew that he could be called a gringo because he was American and his mother for sure was a gringa even in the way she spoke Spanish. His father was German, but that didn’t make Pira less of a gringo.

And yet nobody ever called him that. Once a boy cheated at marbles and Pira called him a cabrón, which he knew was a bad word, and the boy, instead of calling him “gringo,” said “chinga tu madre,” which was one of the really bad expressions that he was told never ever to use. That proved how bad a word “gringo” really was.

Sometimes Pira prayed to be allowed to be Mexican.

….

Bruno was Pira’s father, but Pira had another father named David who lived in New York. David was his first father, and Bruno was his stepfather. Martha said Bruno was just as real a father to Pira as David was, and in a way more real, because David was far away and hadn’t seen Pira since he was a baby except for a few weeks when he was four. But just for that reason, Martha wanted Pira to know that David was his father. “One day you will meet again and you’ll see that he loves you,” she said, “even though he hasn’t seen you since you were little.” She told him a lot about David.

She told Pira that David was a musician, like herself. That he played the piano. That David and Martha used to give concerts together. To show Pira, Martha put on a record that she and David had made together. She said that she and David had separated because they didn’t get along, and that now she loved him as much as ever, but not in the same way that she loved Bruno. Sometimes she sent photographs of Pira to David. Then David would write to Martha, and Martha would tell Pira that David had said that he loved Pira and was proud of him.

Once Martha suggested that Pira write David a letter, so he dictated the words to Martha, telling his first father about the zapote tree and Iztaccihuatl and Popocatepetl and Bruno and Zita and Tristan. Then David wrote back telling him about a concert he had given in a place called Tanglewood. Pira liked the name Tanglewood a lot. It sounded mysterious and dark like the woods in Hansel and Gretel, but it was light and real because David had been there.
Taken from The Stone World by Joel Agee, out now from Melville House. Joel Agee is a writer and translator, and the son of acclaimed writer James Agee. He has been awarded a Guggenheim fellowship and numerous prizes for his translation work. He is the author of two memoirs: Twelve Years: An American Boyhood in East Germany and In the House of My Fear. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.