This city is mine. I do not dream about it, nor do I see it in the daylight. It is hypnogogic, rising up brick by adobe brick as I close my eyes.
The city had a large arched gate through which pedestrian traffic flowed. But when we first arrived by ship, we entered by way of the sprawling port. My mother led the way, a child in each arm and me right behind. We staggered over sandy brush until we came to pavement, men carrying all of our possessions behind us.
I was born in the coastal region north and west of the Blue City. We came to the Blue City when I was five years old. My brother was three, and my baby sister was an infant. My father had died, and my mother had packed us up and taken us back to the city where she’d been born and raised. She had a house there, long locked and neglected, and aimed to open it up and start a new life for us there.
I remember very little about my father, just blurred images of someone large and kind. And remember almost nothing of where I was born. Memory begins—in fact, it is as if I myself begin—with my first view of my mother’s house. I’d imagined it would be ramshackle and overgrown. But my mother had written ahead.
We turned the corner on a clean street. In the middle of the block was a large metal fence with decorative frieze, painted green. A huge gate opened into a garden that was a tangle of fruit trees, flowers, blooming herbs, and ornamental grasses. The path was smooth and well-kept. Up two steps was the house itself, built around an interior courtyard. When you came in, the kitchen and cool stone pantry were on the left. Then, a large room used for meals, my mother’s bedroom, a suite of three smaller rooms for the children, and a kind of parlor or study. The courtyard was open to the sky, and a stone fountain played. Golden fish swam in its basin. Shiny black birds strutted about.
It was furnished in the old style. Enormous woven rugs were draped everywhere, displaying geometrics, florals, and scenes of life. Furniture was low and comfortable. Beds were folded up every morning and unfolded at night.
A tall man with a violent mustache stood stiffly by, smiling at us. His mouth wasn’t smiling, but his eyes exuded a twinkly warmth that even his beard couldn’t hide.
“Mussar,” my mother said. “Thank you for everything. It is a relief to be here.”
Her tone was ordinary enough, but even as a child, I could feel the soft waves of emotion between the two of them.
My mother had hired a small army of servants: cook, assistant cook, maid, two gardeners, and a young cheerful nanny. Mussar was officially our gateman. He guarded the house and boasted a stout cudgel. He walked with us through the city streets, protecting our every step. But he lived like no ordinary gateman. He ate with us and spent hours sitting with us in the courtyard. He taught me to throw a dagger and hit the target before I was ten. And he practiced both the long and short forms of the ancient exercises of war every day—and we children along with him.
And he slept…where? He had an official sleeping hut by the gate. But it was jammed full of his clothes and possessions. He slept with my mother, discreetly, every night. And he was out of her bedroom by dawn.
If people visited, he entertained them as an unobtrusive host. Once, someone asked him and my mother how they had met.
“At school,” they’d chorused and started laughing in a way that was difficult to stop. It was a private joke, just one of the many they shared.
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Blue City
by Miriam Sagan
Bio:
Miriam Sagan is the author of over thirty poetry, fiction, and memoir books. Her most recent include Castaway (Red Mountain, 2023), and A Hundred Cups of Coffee (Tres Chicas, 2019). She is a two-time winner of the New Mexico/Arizona Book Awards, recipient of the City of Santa Fe Mayor's Award for Excellence in the Arts, and a New Mexico Literary Arts Gratitude Award. She has been a writer in residence in four national parks, Yaddo, MacDowell, Gullkistan in Iceland, Kura Studio in Japan, and a dozen more remote and interesting places. She works with text and sculptural installation as part of the mother/daughter creative team Maternal Mitochondria (with Isabel Winson-Sagan) in venues ranging from RV parks to galleries. She founded and directed the creative writing program at Santa Fe Community College until her retirement. Her poetry was set to music for the Santa Fe Women's Chorus, incised on stoneware for two haiku pathways, and projected as video inside an abandoned building during the pandemic under the auspices of Vital Spaces. Her speculative novels include Shadow on the Minotaur (Red Mountain) and Black Rainbow (Sherman Asher Publishing).
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