A Turul Bird From Texas by J. F. Burnett

A TURUL BIRD FROM TEXAS

Our excuse for being there was so ho-hum that I don’t believe she even cared to know its details, but we proved ourselves worthy through our receptiveness to her story. She was sensible about it, got us off into a corner to talk, transparently needy. All the same, John was evidently on edge: it was not advice that she coveted. To know we were there was enough. While she gave us an account of herself, her blue eyes faded repugnantly in a glare of abstraction.

“I am a very conflicted person,” she said. Her conversation showed that. At the time, I did not know whether or not she was referring to the deep workings of her psyche, which many people used to consider it fashionable to brag about. They would blame some external thing for messing with their psyches, some traumatic experience or rapacious cousin or death in the family which by the merest chance had sent their whole lives off on a tangent. I held that there was really no such thing as a tangent in life, and human bodies were the only true frames, doing what came naturally to them by a kind of internal pattern made by matter over mind, and it was a trick of the mind that made people want to blame something else. I might be ungifted and untalented, but as long as I was a miner of frames, I’d be all right, I thought. I could not care less what people called the human psyche. Sure, it existed, but it was controlled by matter, as were the electric charges through the body that cybernetically caused the mind. Their psyches were nothing compared to their frames. I was a miner of frames, and I hewed away at the dirt on them.

During the sixties, Munich was a hotbed of rootless world travelers casting about for substance, complaining that life had mistreated them, that no one appreciated their talents. But it soon became clear that Magdalene had no pretensions to a damaged psyche. For this reason she became special to me, like a bulletin board bearing all the meaningful notices ever pinned. The more recent were the most obvious, of course, but by lifting a flap, I could read whatever I desired to know.

Magdalene was a blond giant of a woman, a Texas Brunhilde, an opera singer purportedly on vacation in Munich (from a three-year contract in Italy), to cure her “foreign-gitis.” That is what she told us, and it was as much of a lie as we were. The truth, I knew, would be much more interesting, so I let her bother me. John did not participate much after that first day.

“She’s utterly fucked up,” John warned. So what was new? Had she not said as much herself?

She talked a lot about her body, how real men went for it. She had somebody up there on the third floor every night at first, but that was also her grievance. She wanted to get serious about someone, have a baby while still young.

In my opinion, her body was not very sexy, but what did I know? She may have been a great lover, but she was too tall, big-boned, and her dresses were long, old-fashioned, stagey, compressing every additional mound she had accumulated in, say, the last ten years. She went bare-shouldered in all manner of Munich summer weather, and her flesh was starting to get flabby, with patches of pink on white from the sun. Her legs and arms were scarred and blotched, her fingers and toes strong and reddened.

Magdalene had a head like a pillar, the chin riveted to her neck with all the self-righteous austerity of revivalism’s purpose. With a big nose and a severe cast to her mouth, this pompous daughter of a southwestern missionary family would make a fair Brünhilde if she could really sing as well as she claimed. I had seen some pictures of strong female leads for the part that looked a lot like her. She also reminded me of the head of Athena etched on the contemporary Greek drachma.

Contrary to what one might expect of an opera singer, her mouth inspired no sense of a cavity — it was small and grim with many teeth. Her nose, enormously long and straight in profile, resembled many a boxer’s broken one; her eyes were square, time-glazed chunks of stoical fervor that did not glimmer or move, the pale blue of a sun-bleached sky, fading into the preeminence of her superb russet hair, a majestic thirst of tangled tumbling curls, the Grand Canyon touch, rugged, ambulant. Most incongruous in her face were the quick red eyebrows, pinched and sharp with enigmatic angularity.