The Golden House

Fire is licking around the edges of my story as it comes to a close, and fire is hot and inexorable and will have its day.

The Golden house in those last months was like a besieged fortress. The besieging forces were invisible but everyone in the house could feel them, the unseen angels or demons of impending doom. And one by one the help began to leave.

The film echoed here is maybe the greatest masterpiece of the great Luis Buñuel. Its original title, The Outcasts of Providence Street, is not explicitly religious—“providence” is not necessarily divine, it might be no more than a metaphor, as also its colleagues karma, kismet, and fate—so the characters cast out by destiny might be no more than unlucky losers of life’s lottery—but by the time the movie arrived on cinema screens as The Exterminating Angel Buñuel had clarified its meaning beyond any doubt. When I first saw the film at the IFC Center I was perhaps too young to understand it. There is a large feast in a lavish mansion and while it’s taking place all the household staff find flimsy pretexts and desert their posts and duties and leave the building, leaving only the butler and the guests to face whatever is coming. I understood this simply as surrealist social comedy. That was before I learned that there are people who can sense impending calamity, like cattle predicting earthquakes, and that self-preservation is the explanation for their apparently irrational acts.

There was no feast in the Golden house and the staff did not desert on one single evening. Life does not imitate art as slavishly as that. But gradually, over a period of weeks, and to the increasing consternation of the lady of the house, people began to quit. The handyman Gonzalo left first, simply not showing up for work one Monday and then never being seen again. In a big house there was always something that needed fixing, a blocked toilet, a chandelier with dead lightbulbs, a door or window that needed easing. Vasilisa reacted to Gonzalo’s disappearance with petulant annoyance and a few remarks about the unreliability of Mexicans that were not well received belowstairs. McNally the butler/majordomo was able to handle most of Gonzalo’s odd jobs and knew who to call in for things he couldn’t fix by himself, so the absence did not cause the master or mistress of the house any serious discomfort. But the subsequent departures were more disruptive of the building’s daily routine. Vasilisa had always been rough on maids, often reducing them to tears with her savage critiques of their usually diligent work, and there had been a high turnover of cleaning and bed-making staff during her incumbency, so it was no surprise that the latest young Boston Irish girl should flee saying no, she didn’t want a raise, she just wanted to get away. In the kitchen there was a firing. Cucchi the chef sacked his assistant Gilberto because of an epidemic of petty pilfering. When the good kitchen knives started vanishing Cucchi confronted the young Argentinian who denied everything and flounced out. You can’t quit, Cucchi yelled after him, because I’m firing you first. McNally tried to cover the gaps by calling temporary work agencies and asking his professional colleagues in other grand homes to lend him people if they had some spare capacity and so the household limped along. But the rats kept on leaving the ship.

A part of me had been grudgingly impressed by Vasilisa’s swift and effective damage control in the days following my spilling of secrets in her living room. Nero Golden had been publicly humiliated and he was not a man who took kindly to humiliation. But not only did Vasilisa rescue her marriage, she also convinced Nero to continue to recognize Little Vespa as his son and heir. Those, I said to myself, were some fancy moves. Those were moves that placed her among the all-time pantheon of designing women. She knew how to hold on to her man.

It is not for me to speculate on what may or may not have happened between them behind the bedroom door. I will avoid such salaciousness, tempting as it is to conjure up the spectacle of Vasilisa at work. Desperate times, desperate measures, but in the absence of a sex tape there’s no more to be said. And to be honest it’s unclear that the bedroom was the basis of her defense. Much more plausibly one might say that she exploited Nero’s mental decline. This was an old and increasingly sick man, more and more forgetful, his mind very often a meandering trickle now, offering only short glimpses of its previous, formidable flow. Vasilisa took the duty of nursing him upon herself, dismissing the day- and night-nurses who had been hired previously to relieve her of the difficulty of the work. So, a further exit of household staff, and Vasilisa uncomplainingly performing the duties of primary caregiver. She and she alone was in charge of his medication now. Fuss and Blather were pushed further and further away from the presence of their boss until one day Vasilisa with feral sweetness told them, I am familiar with all his business practices, and am fully able to be his close personal assistant, so, thank you for your service and let us discuss severance pay. The large house began to echo with absences. Vasilisa was playing all her trumps.

The ace of trumps was Little Vespa himself. Not only was my son growing up to be the most charming of fellows as he approached his fourth birthday, he was also in Nero’s milky eyes the sole survivor of a calamity. A man who has lost three sons will not easily give away the fourth, and as Nero’s decline accelerated and his memory flickered and faded and the child sat on his knee and called him Papa it was easy for the old man to forget the details and hold tightly to his only living child as if he were the reincarnation of his dead brothers as well as being himself, as if he were a treasure chest which contained all that his father had lost.

Who was left? The babushka mother who might or might not have been from Central Casting, Siberia. McNally the butler and Cucchi the chef. Cleaning teams from professional housecleaning services that came and went and charged five hundred dollars a visit. No visitors. And Nero, invisible, not seen by any of his neighbors. I began to believe in Vito Tagliabue’s theory. She must have known he didn’t have long. And if she was tampering with his medication then the fewer eyes the better. She must have known this was a short-term state of affairs. What were his doctors saying to her? Was there a terminal condition that was not made public? Or was Vasilisa herself that condition. I see her in my mind’s eye kneeling each day in the living room of the Golden house, the “great room,” as she called it, in front of her copy of Tsarina Alexandra Romanova’s Feodorovskaya icon of the Mother of God, praying. Let it be today. Let it come now.

Baba Yaga, kill your husband, but please don’t eat my child.

The chef and the butler had been getting on each other’s nerves and it was “Cookie” who cracked. The chef’s default setting was complaint anyway, he was the maestro of the moan, endlessly undervalued and misunderstood, longing to serve up banquets cooked in his beloved extremist style, derived from the work of the grandmasters Adrià and Redzepi, food as performance art, plates billowing with seas of foam, and pieces of toast upon which black ants, still living, had been baked into lean strips of rare wagyu beef. Instead he was asked to make kids’ food for Little Vespa, burgers and more burgers, and vegan rabbit food for Vasilisa. Nero Golden himself didn’t care what he ate as long as it contained plenty of meat. “Cookie” Cucchi’s laments fell upon deaf ears. He had threatened to quit almost every week but had stayed for the money. Now, in the short-staffed house, tempers were frayed and finally McNally ordered the would-be gastronome to shut up and cook. The chef tore off his white hat and apron and waved a meat cleaver in the majordomo’s direction. Then with a grand thump he buried the blade of the cleaver in a wooden chopping board, leaving it there like Excalibur in the stone, and stormed out of the house.

Nero was drowsy and distracted. (This description is a version of the testimony afterwards given by Michael McNally to the police.) Mostly he stayed in his room, half asleep, but sometimes he was to be found wandering downstairs like a sleepwalker. But he could spark into sudden, shocking life. On one occasion he grasped McNally by both shoulders and shouted into his face, Don’t you know who I am, you asshole? I have built cities. I have conquered kingdoms. I am one of the rulers of the world. I don’t know who he imagined he was talking to, McNally said. It wasn’t me. He was looking into my eyes but who knows who he saw. Maybe he saw himself in those days as the emperor whose name he bore. Maybe he thought he was in Rome. I couldn’t honestly say, McNally confessed. I don’t have that level of education.

He’s being poisoned, Vito Tagliabue called me to repeat. No question in my mind.

There was a strange occurrence two days before the fire. The Golden house awoke to find that an enormous gunnysack of dirty laundry had been left on the Macdougal Street doorstep. There was no note. When the sack was opened it was found to be full of what McNally described as foreign clothes. Could he be more specific? From his attempts to describe them I understood them to be Indian clothing. Kurtas, pajamas, lehngas, veshtis, sari blouses, petticoats. There were no instructions and the sender was unknown. Vasilisa, annoyed at the mistake, ordered them to be left out with the trash. There was no need for the master of the house to be informed. The house was not a laundry. Some ignorant foreigner had made an ignorant foreigner’s mistake.

There were construction workers digging up the street. Something to do with vital repairs to the neighborhood’s infrastructure. When McNally was sent out by Vasilisa to ask how long the disruption would last he was told, three months, maybe, shrug. Which could mean six, nine or twelve. It meant nothing except that the workers were settling in for a substantial period of time. Construction work was the city’s new brutalist art form, erecting its installations wherever you looked. Tall buildings fell and construction sites rose. Pipes and cables rose from and descended into the hidden depths. Telephone landlines ceased to work and water and power and gas services were randomly suspended. Construction work was the art of making the city become aware of itself as a fragile organism at the mercy of forces against which there was no appeal. Construction work was the mighty metropolis being taught the lessons of vulnerability and helplessness. Construction workers were the grand conceptual artists of our time and their installations, their savage holes in the ground, inspired not only hatred—because most people disliked modern art—but also awe. The hard hats, the orange jackets, the buttocks, the wolf whistles, the strength. Truly this was the trans-avant-garde at work.

Parking was suspended and the song of the jackhammers filled the air, radical, atonal, the kind of urban percussion Walt Whitman would have loved, driven by the potent sweat of large uncaring men.

From the cinder-strew’d threshold I follow their movements,

The lithe sheer of their waists plays even with their massive arms,

Overhand the hammers swing, overhand so slow, overhand so sure,

They do not hasten, each man hits in his place.

So it was for the two days after the incident of the laundry.

Then came the explosion.

Something to do with a gas main. The blame shifting between agencies, this safety check not carried out, that human error, a leak, a spark, kaboom. Or it might have been a cynical landlord illegally connecting pipes underground, a leak, a spark. A possible crime, an illegal gas line concealed from ConEd inspectors, possible manslaughter charges, the landlord not answering calls and unavailable at his registered address. Who sparked the spark? Unknown. Investigations will be made and a report issued in due course. Terrorism instantly ruled out. No workers injured, mercifully. The blast smashed windows and shook walls and a fireball billowed and one house, owned by Mr. Nero Golden, caught fire. Four adults and one child in the building at the time: the owner and his wife, her mother, their young son, and an employee, Mr. Michael McNally. It appeared that the building had not been correctly maintained, the indoor sprinkler system had not been serviced for a considerable time and failed to function. Mr. McNally was in the kitchen heating olive oil in a pan, preparing to cook lunch for the family. According to his initial statement the blast blew out the kitchen windows and knocked him off-balance and dazed him. He believes he lost consciousness, then recovered, and scrambled for the door into the Gardens between Macdougal and Sullivan Streets. There he lost consciousness again. When he came to his senses the kitchen was on fire and the flames were spilling out of the burning frying pan and spreading rapidly across the entire first floor. The other residents were upstairs. They had no way of getting out. The fire department responded with its usual alacrity. There were some access problems resulting from the construction work. But the fire was rapidly contained, limited to one single residence. All other properties in the neighborhood were unharmed.

In the age of the smartphone, it was natural that many photographs were taken and videos made. Many of these were afterwards submitted to the proper NYPD authority to be studied in detail for any further illumination they might provide.

But at the Golden house that day there were people trapped by the fire. The high drama of the event played itself out, and ended in a triple tragedy and one miracle.

Unconfirmed reports mentioned that several individuals heard the sound of someone in the upper reaches of the mansion playing a violin.

As I see in my mind’s eye the flames rising higher until they seemed to be licking at the sky itself, hellfire flames like something out of Hieronymus Bosch, it is hard to hold on to that belief in the good to which I dedicated myself, hard not to feel the heat of despair. They, the flames, seem to me to be burning away the whole world I had known, to be consuming in their orange heat all the things I had cared for, had been brought up to defend and fight for and love. Civilization itself seemed to be burning in the fire, my hopes, the hopes of women, our hopes for our planet, and for peace. I thought of all those thinkers burned at the stake, all those who stood up against the forces and orthodoxies of their time, and I felt myself and my whole disenfranchised kind bound now by strong chains and engulfed by the awful blaze, the West itself on fire, Rome burning, the barbarians not at the gates but within, our own barbarians, nurtured by ourselves, coddled and glorified by ourselves, enabled by ourselves, as much our own as our children, rising like savage children to burn the world that made them, claiming to save it even as they set it ablaze. It was the fire of our doom and it would take half a century or more to rebuild what it destroyed.

Yes, I suffer from hyperbole, it is the previously existing condition for which I need healthcare, but just sometimes a paranoid man is really being pursued, just sometimes the world is more heightened, more exaggerated, more hyperbolically infernal than even a hyperbolist-infernalist could ever, at his wildest, have dreamed.

So I saw the dark flames, the black flames of the inferno, licking at the sacred space of my childhood, the one place in the whole world in which I had always felt safe, always comforted, never threatened, the enchanted Gardens, and I learned the final lesson, the learning of which separates us from innocence. That there was no safe space, that the monster was always at the gates, and a little of the monster was within us too, we were the monsters we had always feared, and no matter what beauty enfolded us, no matter how lucky we were in life or money or family or talent or love, at the end of the road the fire was burning, and it would consume us all.

In The Exterminating Angel the revelers at the feast in Mexico found themselves trapped in the salon of the grand mansion of their host Señor Edmundo Nóbile by an invisible force. Surrealism permitted its followers the indirections and strangenesses of poetry. Real life in the Gardens was much more prosaic. Nero, Vasilisa, her babushka and my son were all imprisoned in the Golden house by the banality, the lethal conventionality, the deadly realism of a fire.

If life were a movie I would have heard about the fire, run toward it like a superhero on speed, pushed aside the hands grasping at me and plunged into the flames, returning as burning beams fell around me with my child shielded safely in my arms. If life were a movie he would have buried his head in my shoulder and murmured, Papa, I knew you’d come. If life were a movie it would conclude with a wide-angle shot of the Village with the ashes of the Golden house smoldering in the center of the frame as I walked away with the child and a famous song welled up on the soundtrack, “Beautiful Boy” by John Lennon, perhaps, and the credits began to roll.

That didn’t happen.

By the time Suchitra and I reached Macdougal Street it was all over. Michael McNally was being treated at Mount Sinai Beth Israel and would subsequently be questioned by NYPD detectives who absolved him from responsibility for the fire. The other adults were dead before a ladder crew could get to them, Nero and the babushka quickly overpowered by the smoke, losing consciousness, never waking up again. There had been one moment of operatic emotion. The beautiful Mrs. Golden, Vasilisa, had appeared at an upstairs window holding her almost-four-year-old child, screaming “God, please save my son,” and before anyone could reach her she had thrown the child out of the window away from the fire. One of the firemen at the scene, Mariano “Mo” Vasquez, thirty-nine, who happened to be the catcher for his local baseball team on Staten Island, lunged forward and caught the soot-covered child just in time, “like a football,” he told the TV cameras later, and then blew air into the boy’s lungs and got his breathing going again. “He gave some coughs and then started yelling and crying. It was beautiful, man. Just a miracle, man, a miracle, and now I find out it’s the boy’s fourth birthday tomorrow, that kid had a guardian angel looking out for him for sure. It’s a fine and beautiful thing and I give thanks to Almighty God that I could be in the right place at the right time.”

After that Vasilisa fell backwards away from the window and all her hopes all her ambitions all her strategies fell away with her, nobody deserved such an ending no matter what they had been in life, and a few instants after she dropped from sight the fire roared out through the open window and there was no possibility of saving her. And later of course the fire was extinguished, and charred bodies, etc., no need to go into any of that. The building would have to be demolished and a new structure would be raised in its place. No other houses were damaged by the fire.

So ended the story of the Golden house. They thought they were Romans but that was just a fantasy. Their Roman games which begat their Roman names: just games. They thought of themselves as a king and his princes but they were no Caesars. A Caesar had indeed risen in America, his reign was under way, beware, Caesar, I thought, the people raise you up and carry your throne through the ecstatic glorifying streets and then they turn on you and rend your garment and push you down upon your sword. Hail Caesar. Beware the Ides of March. Hail Caesar. Beware SPQR, senatus populusque Romanus, the Senate and the people of Rome. Hail Caesar. Remember Nero the last of his line fleeing at the end to Phaon’s villa outside the city and ordering a grave to be dug for him, Nero then too cowardly to drive the sword into his own body and forcing his private secretary to do it at the last. Epaphroditos, slayer of the king. There were indeed once Caesars in the world and now in America a new incarnation on the throne. But Nero Golden was no king nor did he have a fallen Caesar’s end. Just a fire, just some random meaningless flame. What was it his underworld pals had called him in Bombay? The laundryman, yes. The dhobi. Here’s the dirty laundry, dhobi. Clean it up. No king on a throne. He was just the laundryman.

The laundryman.

The dirty laundry on the doorstep. The gunnysack full of Indian clothes.

I began feverishly to search the media for photographs of the fire scene, iPhone videos, everything, wherever I could find them, whatever had been shot professionally or posted by the public at large. The rubbernecking crowd behind the safety barriers. Faces seen through smoke and water. Nothing. Nothing again. And then something.

Two South Asian men in a photograph, watching the fire burn, one of them a dwarf. It was impossible to see the feet of his companion but I guessed that they would be unusually big.

Time passes. Big men dwindle, small men grow. This man shrinks into old age, those men’s reach grows longer. They can stretch out their arms and touch places and people they couldn’t reach before. There are companies here to lend assistance to companies there, to facilitate journeys, to execute strategies. Clowns become kings, old crowns lie in the gutter. Things change. It is the way of the world.

The news reports the next day were unanimous. The crooked landlord charged with manslaughter in the second degree. A tragedy. And a wonder that the young boy survived. Case closed.

And another story, not of interest to the American media, which I found by chance on my computer. The death in a distant country of a once-feared South Asian mafia don. Mr. Zamzama Alankar, formerly the godfather of the powerful Z-Company crime family, had gone to stand before the last judgment seat. An unconfirmed report.