Morning on the Terrace

Occasionally, when I travel, I experience, not so much a senior moment, but “a surreal moment.” Perhaps it comes to the same thing. One such moment occurred a year ago on a May morning in Rome. I was sitting on the terrace of a villa in the via della Terme Deciane. I could see the Palatine Hill just across the way and on it the ruins of the palace of Septimius Severus (193-211AD). The view was magnificent, made more so because I was seeing it from such an intimate setting. It was like owning a Constable.

The villa sits on a sickle shaped street with one end at via Aventino and the other at via Circo Massimo. The street takes its name from the Roman baths that the Emperor Decio (249-251AD) built here almost 1800 years ago. Today, the street accommodates, aside from a string of elegant, private dwellings, the American Embassy to the Vatican. You can pinpoint the embassy by the two carabinieri who stand outside. Their vehicle blocks the sidewalk.

Just beyond is No. 31. The number, hidden behind a century's growth of ivy, is on a door embedded in a high, garden wall. If you didn't know it was there, you would certainly miss it. Behind the wall on a slight rise is a tall house. It is brownish gold, emblematic of the Roman sun. Its roof is tiled. A sign on the door says Attenti al Cane. There is, of course, no dog. That is not a deception. Perhaps there had been a dog. Maybe there will be again.

I breakfasted on the terrace of my apartment every morning, a cup of milky tea and a bowl of cereal. I couldn’t take my eyes off the Palatine Mount and the ruins of Septimius Severus' palace. I grew up believing that all roads led to Rome and now I was having breakfast just across the way from the carrefour.

What made that moment on the terrace surreal was a bit of history that suddenly popped into my head. Just over there, within yelling distance in fact, on February 27, 212 AD, Caracalla, son of Severus and joint Emperor of Rome with his brother Geta, whom he hated and who hated him, agreed to meet in their mother's apartment to reconcile their differences. Severus had hardly been dead a year. While they were talking, Caracalla’s henchmen leaped from hiding and hacked Geta to pieces. Caracalla joined in. Geta’s mother tried to protect him. She was wounded in the hand. He died in her arms, covered in her blood as well as his own. Caracalla visited her in the days following the murder. She feigned approval for the fratricide. She received her son’s embrace. She must have told him how nice it was to see him.

In a murderous follow up Caracalla slaughtered 20,000 countrymen whom he suspected of being friends of Geta. The year after the assassination, he left Rome and proceeded to spread murder and mayhem throughout his Empire. This is what Gibbon says about his Alexandrian massacre:

From a secure post in the temple of Serapis, he viewed and directed the slaughter of many thousand citizens, as well as strangers, without distinguishing either the number or the crime of the sufferers; since, as he coolly informed the senate, all the Alexandrians, those who had perished and those who had escaped, were alike guilty. (p. 118)

Just a few short blocks away from my terrace is the Viale di Terme Caracalla. I cannot fathom why there is anything named after him in the Eternal City. It would be like naming a square in Florence after Mussolini.

“Have things gotten better since the time of Caracalla?”

I suppose it depends upon the view from your own terrace.

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The One Armed Bandit

I went to Las Vegas, Nevada for the first time. Being a sucker for kitsch, I wanted the full experience. In downtown Las Vegas I watched the five-block long television screen with its 12.5 million LED modules, the one that flashed an alien invasion movie four stories above your head while you stood transfixed underneath wondering how they did that.

I watched gondoliers pole the cobalt blue lagoon of the Venetian singing arias from Puccini under an indoor sky of pink and white clouds. They wore black and white striped shirts and boaters, black pants and thick, red sashes. The only inauthentic thing about them—if you could overlook their being inside a shopping center that was itself inside one of the world’s largest casinos—was that some of them were women. I never saw a single woman gondolier in Venice.

It is no wonder these casinos are packed with people. An outside thermometer registered 116º. Whoever had the idea of putting a casino in the middle of the desert deserves a prize for visionary thinking.

For the complete Las Vegas experience, I needed to plunk down some cash. I don’t play black jack or mini-baccarat or Spanish 21 or Pai Gow poker or even roulette. There was no way I was going to belly up to the craps table and say “What do I do now?”

I saw a heavy set woman with blond hair and a cleavage that would make the fashionista press tremble like a dowsing rod over water.

“May I watch?” I asked her.

“Sure,” she replied.

“How much are you playing for?”

She pointed above the machine. Like a sign outside all night diner, a two and a five in chocolate brown against a yellow background blinked on and off.

“Where do you put in the quarter?”

She laughed. I felt as if I had just gotten off the boat.

She took a twenty-dollar bill out of her red faux leather wallet and slipped it into one of those slits that say Insert bill with picture side up.

She pushed a button. The numbers began to tumble. When they stopped, a row of five sevens appeared. The machine made a noise like a hook and ladder truck coming out of a firehouse.

“Wow. You must have won a fortune,” I said admiringly.

“Twelve dollars,” she said.

She printed out a voucher for her winnings and mechanically slipped it back into the machine. Twelve dollars of credit flashed across the screen.

In that same instant a memory flashed across my mind. When I was a kid, my mother used to play the numbers. Every day the neighborhood bookie—he lived just across the street—would come by the house with a pad and pencil. He only had one arm. I marveled at his dexterity in writing down my mother’s 25-cent wager by balancing the pad on his knee and writing 347 in a box with his good right arm. I called him the one-armed bandit, though never to his face.

Remembering Mom and the one armed bandit, I took a dollar out of my wallet and eased it into a waiting slot. The bill went in like a fly to a frog. In the next moment the machine made so much noise I had to cover my ears. Clearly, the fire truck had left the firehouse. I waited to see how far it had gone. When the noise subsided, I had won $2.50. I pressed the button that said something like take the money and run.

It felt good leaving Las Vegas ahead of the game.

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The Hardest Thing To Do

One day while I was walking along the street in Thimphu, a tall young man with a scraggly beard came up to me. We walked in step for a few moments in silence. Then he asked me where I was from. Ordinarily I would have been suspicious. In many countries I have visited a perfect stranger starting a conversation was a cause for wariness. But this was Bhutan.

“Boston,” I said.

“The Celtics,” he answered.

That was how I met Gelay Jamtsho, a Bhutanese artist, and, until recently, a member of Bhutan's national championship basketball team. He played for them for four years running. He expressed his admiration for Larry Bird and Kevin McHale. He told me that the Fourth King of Bhutan, the one who has declared that Bhutan will be a democracy, has a T-shirt with Maxwell emblazoned on it. That would be Cedric Maxwell, the power forward who played for the championship Celtics in the 1980’s.

Gelay was part of a group that ran a volunteer artist cooperative. He taught youngsters how to paint and take photographs. He helped put on exhibitions of their work and was thoroughly involved in art education for the young.

He told me his interest in volunteerism developed when he discovered that he couldn’t play basketball any more. His knees had given out. He doesn't even go to the courts to watch. He said it was too painful to sit on the sidelines. I asked him what he does now that he can’t play basketball. He said that he is a Himalayan trekker. This means that he acts as a guide, taking people on long hikes into the Himalayan Mountains that make up a good part of the Bhutanese landscape.

I had read about these treks. Some of them take hikers close to 17,000 feet above sea level. When Nancy and I walked a mere thousand feet up to Tango Monastery, I learned how devastating thin air can be. The monastery is roughly 9,500 feet above sea level. The walk from the road to the monastery proper takes a monk accustomed to the rarified air fifteen minutes. It took us well over an hour. For me it was like walking up a mountain with a ball and chain around my ankles. I had to stop every hundred yards or so to gulp in air and then water. I acknowledged with a wan smile the monks skidding by like so many red clouds on a windy day. I struggled to find the breath for the Dzongkhan greeting, Che gadey bey yoed go? (How are you?)

I asked Gelay if he had ever been a guide on the infamous Snowman trek. It lasts for 25 days or more. The guidebooks rate it as “strenuous and demanding.” I’m not surprised. The average height of the trek is 13,000 feet. Over two hundred and twenty miles long, it crosses eight passes, some at 16,000 feet. It is no wonder the Snowman is considered one of the most difficult in the Himalayas.

I asked him which was harder, playing basketball or doing the Snowman.

“The Snowman,” he replied without hesitation.

“Why?” I asked.

“After spending two to three weeks with people, you begin to get fed up with them,” he answered thoughtfully. “The hardest thing in the world is to mask your anger.”

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The Wind Chime

If Bhutan were a garden ornament, it would be a wind chime. Prayer wheels are as common as turkeys at Thanksgiving. They come in all sizes, big as compact cars, small as a can of soup. They are everywhere; in the monasteries, high up on the sides of Bhutan’s craggy mountains, in its public squares. Each turn of the wheel rings a bell and the Bhutanese are constantly turning them. It is a civic duty, like giving blood or voting.

Even though prayers are sent skyward by the muscle power of the people, people aren’t really necessary for prayer. One day I was walking in the mountains near Tango Monastery. I came upon a prayer wheel set over a mountain stream. The rushing water turned a paddle that turned the wheel. The bell rang incessantly, like an unanswered telephone. It didn’t matter that people weren’t there to do the turning. The important thing was that prayers were ascending. The Earth itself was praying.

The prayer wheels of Bhutan symbolize the essential serenity of the society. But that serenity doesn’t come from prayer. It comes from three things: a homogeneous population, the complete merger of church and state, and a monarchy. These values could not be farther from my own: diversity, separation of church and state and free elections. Bhutan taught me that my values come with a price tag. Democracy engenders conflict. Conflict dominates everything from politics to playgrounds. If Bhutan is a serene wind chime, America is a silver dollar, one side labeled freedom, the other, turmoil.

Next year the 4th king has declared that Bhutan will be a democracy. The new constitution allows for deposing a bad king. The Bhutanese love their king. If the king wants a democracy, then it must be a good idea, they told me. But, they added, maybe it is coming a bit too soon. Perhaps they looked at the price tag.

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The Divine Madman

The takin is Bhutan's national animal. The mythology around its origin involves the “Divine Madman,” Lama Drukpa Kuenley. In the 15th century when he visited Bhutan, the people wanted to see him perform a miracle. He called for a cow and a goat for lunch. When he was finished, he placed the goat's head on the cow's body and commanded the amalgam to rise up and graze.

From an evolutionary point of view this makes the takin the newest creature on the face of the earth. Apparently, taxonomists are unable to relate the takin to any other creature and have given it its own classification, budorus taxicolor.

I think the Bhutanese have made the takin its national animal instead of, say, the yak or the barking deer, for the same reason that the New Zealanders made the kiwi its national bird. Both species are absolutely unique. These nations are saying, we are sui generis.

The takin is a perfect choice for Bhutan. When it grazes in herds, it is made very nervous by the presence of other animals, so much so that yak herders have agreed to keep their animals away when the takin invades a valley. In other words, it likes to be alone with its own kind.

The Divine Madman’s influence in Bhutan is wide-ranging, going far beyond the takin. Tango monastery, where Nancy and I had tea with Uygen Tashi and his roommates, was founded in the 12th century. But the building we enter is the work of the Divine Madman. One of Bhutan's favorite saints, Drukpa Kuenley is noted for his unorthodox way of spreading the word. Like modern day advertisements for just about anything, he used sex to sell Buddhism. Once he was given golden good luck threads as a gift. They were meant to be worn around the neck. He wrapped them around his penis, expressing the hope that it would bring him luck in that direction.

Most visitors to Bhutan comment on the phalluses they find painted on the outer walls of homes all over the country, especially those away from the big cities. These paintings are so explicit they would never make it through the Hollywood censors. The phalluses are always erect. Sometimes they are ejaculating. They are always equipped with testicles, the testicles supplied with hair. But there is nothing pornographic in them, unless it is in the mind of the viewer. These symbols are fertility talismans. They are the “Divine Madman’s” genitals. Think of them as a St. Christopher’s statue on the dashboard of a car. He was the patron saint of travelers. Or as an “evil eye” designed in the Muslim world to ward off evil.

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A One Horse Town

We turn from the Wang Chu into the Haa Valley, stopping for lunch in the town of Haa itself. Paro, our final destination of the day and the site of Bhutan’s only airport, is forty miles away, half that if we could tunnel straight through the mountains.

The Haa Valley is beautifully manicured. Rice and potato, asparagus and wheat, millet and barley fields unroll beneath us like a by-the-numbers painting. When we reach the town, we are the only vehicle moving on its wide and treeless main street. An old graying pony is standing motionless in the center of the road, its hind legs knocked-kneed together as if it were sleeping off a drunk like Lee Marvin’s horse in Cat Ballou.

We decide to walk before lunch. It is like walking down the center of a street in a western movie. The road is dusty and so, too, are the shops on either side. People peep out from behind doors or windows, examining the strangers in town. When we make eye contact, they smile or wave. We wave back.

A young man comes towards us. He is thin as a rail and smartly dressed in a military uniform. What, I wonder, is a soldier doing in this innocent spot?

“Good afternoon,” he says in perfect English.

He tells me he is in the Bhutanese army. He says that just up the road is the headquarters of the Indian army in Bhutan. It is here because China, i.e. Chinese occupied Tibet, is just 40 miles away. He points up the road toward the mountains in the distance. He says the border is closed.

I ask him what he does in the army.

"I train people."

"In what?"

“Discipline,” he says.

He is a reminder that however serene Bhutan may seem, it is not free of the world it has been hiding in. The Bhutanese are nervous. And so, of course, are the Indians. They have made their anxiety known to the Chinese by establishing a military presence in the town of Haa, the sleepy, one horse town of Haa.

After lunch we drive up and up and up until we reach the Chele La Pass. A sign says the pass is 3988 meters high. In fact, it is only 3810 meters high. Either is high enough. A chill wind is blowing, rattling the sea of prayer flags that have been planted here. Below we can see the Haa valley and in a few minutes we will enter its neighbor, the Paro Valley and begin the twenty-mile descent to Paro itself.

That night Nancy and I have dinner at a hotel owned by Peldon Tschering's brother, Uygen. It is a beautiful hotel. Designed by an American architect, it has a Buddhist shrine that is worthy of any temple we have seen. Magnificent pottery and wall hangings tastefully placed around the atrium-like lobby combine art, religion and luxury into a single elegant pot pourri. The contrast between the simplicity of the town of Haa and Uygen’s hotel just five miles outside of Paro underscores Bhutan’s attempt to stand with one leg in the past and the other in the future.

Uygen is there when we arrive. We introduce ourselves. He is startled to find that we are from, of all places, MIT, the university that his sister attended. We tell him we know her, that she, in fact, told us to be sure to visit his hotel. He offers us a glass of wine. We talk.

The conversation quickly turns to the coming democracy. Like everyone else we have spoken to, Uygen believes democracy is a good thing but worries about the timing of it all. Still, he thinks Bhutan is well fortified against mishap. It will have, not one, but two living kings, one who abdicated and his son, who will be crowned in 2008. Such collective wisdom, he thinks, will be Bhutan's salvation.

Uygen's biggest concern is literacy. He thinks that for democracy to be effective, literacy must be 100%. Currently, Bhutan hovers around 50%. He asks me what I think. I tell him that I don’t think that literacy will be a problem in a country where people talk to one another. I tell him if I were Bhutan, I would study the democracies of the world, try to understand their failings, where they have gone wrong and why. I point out, for example, that in the United States over the last quarter of a century there has been an unprecedented migration of wealth into the top 1% of the society. This has undermined the middle class and threatens the stability of the nation. The lesson for Bhutan is not to allow too great a disparity between its rich and its poor. Otherwise it risks tearing the fabric of its society in two.

He asks me what democracy I would recommend he study.

After thinking for a minute, I say, "Study New Zealand. You both have strong social support systems for education and health care. You both have minorities that need to be dealt with fairly."

When we part, he hopes we will return soon and stay in his hotel. So do we.

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