Blog

The Archaeology of Fathers

Posted on by sterlingbennett

Sometimes I lie in bed between dark and dawn wondering about my own assertions about the way the world is. That is to say—about my own writing.

I describe images, my characters act out a story.

Saying what a story is about is very different from the original storytelling. The latter is about invention, sculpting, spinning the tale—with the hope that the way I tell it will lead to the reader’s suspension of disbelief—to the reader’s willingness to believe what I am saying.

Another part of it has to do with my own need to believe—easier, if the book, on some deeper level, is telling me something about myself. Of course, it is, but how is far from clear. What is the invented Frank Holloway telling me, in my novel Playing for Pancho Villa? In what way are his adventures also therefore mine? Why would I even think or need to tell such a story? To what extent am I re-inventing myself?

The images and sequences I paint (laying down the brush strokes), how do I decide which color and where to lay the stroke? I have few answers for these questions—unless it has to do with all the fathers and grandfathers and great-grandfathers, and beyond, that stretch all the way back to the beginning of my line. The mothers and aunts were not silent, and I learned from them. But the fathers were quiet. I want to know about them. Being me may depend on it. But since they were so mute, through disposition or death, whom am I to ask?

Unless it is myself. Telling a story about a father—my grandfather, in this case—is, I suppose, my way of talking with the silent ones. First, re-inventing them—since to my knowledge my grandfather Frank never crossed the Mexican border on his father’s mare.

My brother recently sent me some genealogy records. A customs entry shows that Frank Bennett re-entered the U.S. on a ship from Honduras. Was it my grandfather? My brother assures me it wasn’t. But there is no proof either way.

I read a recent article in the New York Times about soldiers missing in action in WWII, whose remains are never found, and how it haunts family members, some of whom never even knew the missing relative.

Is that who these fathers are? Missing in action? And I am simply one more relative looking for them, lifting the spade—digging where I think they lie? Is this what my storytelling is about?

Cause and Effect

Posted on by sterlingbennett

I can lie in my bed at 6 am and hear the traffic cop that stands in front of the Compañia blowing his whistle. In my city this is a special art. It is not the usual kind of where the cop lets first one flow of traffic go ahead, then the other. No, in my little colonial city, it’s as if the cars don’t run on fuel, and the only reason they move at all is because the traffic policeman is blowing his whistle. He never raises his hand to signal “Stop!” or “Now it’s your turn!” He simply blows his whistle, as if it were he alone—with his whistle—that made it all happen. He is the perfect example of cause and effect. It is even possible he has read Aristotle. How else would he know to use his whistle in this way? He has clearly chosen one of the philosopher’s four elements. Earth, Air, Fire and Water.

His choice was Air, which rises from where it is—to where it is going. And, in the process, because the idea is so strong, the traffic is also carried along, from where it is, to where it is going.

Of course, there could be another explanation. That would have to do with the concept of Authority, which is strong in Mexico. Which is also mixed with strong Belief. My cop commands with his whistle. The traffic, all together, obeys and keeps on moving. None of it has anything to do with maximizing traffic flow. It has everything to do with Authority. The cars would not know to move forward without his hectoring whistle. They are not whistled forward, rather they are commanded forward.

Of course, there is another possibility, and it deserves to be mentioned along with the others. It is the doctrine of Hope, which is strong in Mexico. It exists in a context of belief that thing will not get better. Hence, the usefulness of Hope—the brave persistence in thinking things will change for the better, even though you know they won’t.

I do not understand this pessimism, but there it is. As a result, Mexicans have developed a manner of cooperation that, in my limited experience, is rare in other countries. And that is the concept of uno a uno—one car from this flow of traffic, then one car from the other. I find that Mexicans take great pains to observe uno a uno—except when they don’t want to. In which case it is best to let the other car go first. But generally it works. (My Mexican friend apoplectically disputes my last short sentence.)

And so, I can lie in my bed and enjoy what I know is the perfect arrangement. The whistle blows, moving the cars forward—even though it is uno a uno, in spite of all the Air moving from where it is—in the traffic cop’s lungs—to where it is going—a few centimeters beyond the whistle’s whistle opening. Resignation, Hope, Authority and Cooperation all function at the same time. Keeping the world moving even as I lie snug in my bed, safe for the time being from almost all cause and effect. Unless, of course, my cat Lilus, a local Authority, arrives and has decided that I should meet my Duty and stroke her ears for the effect she demands.

The Nalgas We Sit On

Posted on by sterlingbennett

A friend showed me a clip on his iPhone. A young woman walking along what I thought was a tropical beach. Since I am in Mexico, I think of all beaches as being tropical. She is naked, it turns out, after squinting at first to make sure she isn’t wearing something skin color. Then you check the top. The back, her back—after all she’s not an object—is free of any ties. She is also barefoot, the sand is deep, so her feet swivel as she gains purchase, pushes off and moves forward.

The camera focuses on her nalgas – buttocks, which are a little exaggerated in proportion to the rest of her body. Once, she turns to smile, and you catch just a glimpse of her left breast. Then she swivels away again.

I ask my friend what his thoughts are. “I like it,” he says. I say I like it, too. But I am wondering if there isn’t more to say, if we’re not just content with the reptilian-visual part of our brain.

He says, “I like it.” And I admire the simplicity of his reaction. I have the same reaction, but I find myself thinking of another woman, fully clothed, sitting in front of a piano in Holland or Italy, in concert. The conductor has just started the orchestra on Mozart’s concerto in D minor. The piano player’s name is Maria João Pires. She sits in shock and agony because the concerto is not the one she had been prepared to play. No nalgas at work here, except the ones she’s sitting on. She is in a panic, a performer’s worst nightmare has unfolded. The conductor has changed the program on her—and she sits in horror.

She addresses the conductor, while he conducts. I don’t have the music. I didn’t prepare this one. We did not agree on this one. What am I to do? He replies, while he conducts. You know this one. You know it by heart. You can do it.

The moment draws closer where she is to place her hands on the keys. She seems despairing. Then—resigned—she adjusts her seat. You could say her nalgas—because she has them, too—and at precisely the right moment she begins to play.

You wonder whether she can remember. As spectator, all of your fears of performance are at the fore. But she continues—flawlessly—all the way through.

I am glad she also has nalgas. There is a music theory that says by rocking first onto one buttock while playing, then onto the other, the quality of the music goes way up. But if Maria João Pires began doing that, I could not see it, perhaps because it was too subtle. But as far as attraction goes, the complexity of that person, as well as having shared her panic, her vulnerability, all those things make her more attractive to me than Miss Nalgas on the Beach, who—poor lady—is in danger of presenting herself as little more than a visual stimulant of remote male (or female) sexual appetite.

Don’t get me wrong. Probably most of the babies born to this world can thank their existence to visual signals radiating from nalgas, broad shoulders, the color of eyes or any number of other body parts that both sexes (all sexes) find meaningful.

I would be the first to sing a paean to nalgas—my own included, since they are what we sit on and what may have attracted mates in the past. I have heard my current love of many, many years, even recently, call me Bubble-Butt. That is very kind of her, but with the years the bubble-butt has gone the way of all flesh—there is less of it until, in the end, the worms or the flames get what little is left.

Miss Nalgas, all of us Miss Nalgas, will go the same way. And when we go to the flames or the worms, the wonderful, simple reptilian part—that delight in nalgas (or some other part)—will go with us. For that reason, we must remember, at our last breath or two, to sing praise and thanks to all buttocks—to Ours, to Theirs and to All of Yours.

Forgery

Posted on by sterlingbennett

I hope I’m not misleading you on the subject of your research. You’re ready to record? All right—I’m trying to remember when it began. Probably with the usual things, like imitating my father’s voice and style with a note to the principal of the elementary school, excusing me from gym class, then from arithmetic because of my brain tumor, then from lunch period—so I could go out behind the baseball backstop and slip into the woods, where I smoked Philip Morris cigarettes and met with girls too brain impaired to attend school.

How did I get them to come there? By imitating the principal, with invitations to join a softball team that would consist equally of elementary school children—without concern for mental development.

Later, when I was in high school, I studied, then submitted—without return address—unknown works by Hemingway, Emily Dickinson and the Brontë sisters. I submitted them to publishers, claiming they had been discovered in this or that archive nook or rare book library.

At first, there were nothing but rejections. Then, gradually, experts began to pay attention. A letter here, a short story there, a poem, even a thin novel hitherto unknown. Literary and library journals could not resist the fact that priceless pieces had been discovered, and they began to publish them and attribute them to the Brontës, Emily Dickinson and Ernest Hemingway.

I studied other languages and with the years managed to place essays by Camus and Thomas Mann, in clotted Courier type. Once even a pornographic piece by Richard Wagner. The submissions were always anonymous, but written with such skill—on blank pages ripped from old books—that academic journals fought with each other over who presented the best argument for their authenticity. All the while, I worked as a quiet librarian in Orange, New Jersey.

In time, I grew bored with these shenanigans and began submitting work of my own—with the result, over and over, that I was accused of borrowing, i.e. stealing the style and vocabulary of known authors.

I had a few successes with small literary magazine, where the gatekeepers—usually severely male—were so schooled in mimicry and where so many of their submissions were youthfully imitative, that my own lingering trickery went undetected.

I married and had a daughter—a delightful child with equally generous measures of intelligence and heart. When she went away to camp, I wrote her news and stories I had not made up. By college, she began to complain to her mother—we were no longer together—that she no longer knew me and—more troubling—that there was something inauthentic about me.

When my ex-wife told me this, with an expression between gloating and reprimand, I spent the rest of the day and night drinking enough whisky to kill an elephant.

I didn’t know what to do. I went to a psychiatrist, who told me to explore my relationship with my parents, both of whom had had careers in persuading people to trust them. My father, a financial advisor, had been warned a few times by his firm, for irregularities. And my mother had been a painter of modest talents, who openly painted copies of Breughel, Rembrandt and the Impressionists for clients in Santa Monica, California with blue hair and rooms to decorate.

After some years of therapy, I joined an ashram to learn how to meditate and give up wants in the material world. I spent time with a number of the lovely apostles of the promised more spiritual life, practicing the arts of defense and rendition. While my daughter, though always polite, grew ever more remote from me.

When my granddaughter was born, my daughter softened and allowed me to play my role as grandfather. She even allowed me to tell the child bedtime stories. And over time, something happened whereby I began to tell stories that were different from my earlier ones and clung more to the questions my granddaughter asked me. About whether bears could talk with children, and had I ever talked with a bear or an elephant. I did not want to lie to her, so I said I hadn’t. She was three or four, and so she suggested we could go to the zoo and try to talk to a bear and maybe an elephant.

And so we went to the zoo. And then we went again. And then, again. We tried other animals as well. None of them actually talked to us, but we made up stories about what they said and laughed because some of the stories were funny. And besides, we were happy to be with each other.

I began to go back alone, and when other people weren’t around I talked to the animals by myself. And something changed, and I learned something that seems too trivial to say. But I will. That there is no reason to disguise who you are. My granddaughter and the elephants were who they were—and pretended nothing more.

My time to leave the earth has come now—as you can see for yourself. On her last visit, my lovely ex-wife held my hand and said it was too bad we had not spent more time together—in every aspect—over the last twenty or thirty years. My daughter weeps uncontrollably when she visits. And my granddaughter—now a wonderful writer at the age of twenty-five—sits beside my bed and tells me in many different ways which animals I should visit and what I should say to them when I go to join them.

That is my story about forgery. It may not have been what you wanted. But there it is.

Ute Lemper Sings Cabaret in Guanajuato, Mexico

Posted on by sterlingbennett

A Fictional Interview with the German cabaret singer Ute Lemper, Guanajuato, Mexico, October 2013

Ute Lemper performed here in Guanajuato a few nights ago, for the Festival Cervantino. She will go on to the Belles Artes in Mexico City next. Here, she was a great hit with nearly everyone. This is how my fictional interview with her went.

Ute: You represent which newspaper again?

SB: Bennetts Blog—a highly influential voice on matters of artistic importance, read by thousands…

U: (A look of skepticism) Forgive me, but I don’t have a lot of time. Could you be as brief as possible?

SB: The audience loved you here in Guanajuato. That must feel good. I’m sure you are received with great applause wherever you go.

U: Not always. It depends on many factors—age, experience in the world, their knowledge of history, a concern for the voices of the past.

SB: It cannot be easy keeping up song and content for nearly two hours—one woman. That takes enormous courage, in my opinion…not to mention strength.

U: But? I hear a but coming…

SB: Not really—but it must be difficult to be the center of everything, one could even say self-referential—and at the same time honor the voices of great cabaret artists that came before you. Do you find that difficult?

U: Self-referential has a harsh edge to it. But I have been accused of that before…What did you say your name was again?

SB: Bennett…

U: Well, Mr. Bennett, you run risks yourself of being the typical critic, who puts nothing into my work, but after a few strokes at the keyboard begins to make observations surely headed toward fault-finding. Remember that no work of art is perfect, without flaws, that there are no works of art that are not open to correction—unhappily, often by those who have never attempted anything on a stage or anywhere else, certainly never faced an audience for two hours. Or who grew up in the culture I did.

SB: I admire your courage, I truly do. And I know it is easy to be the comfortable critic that always knows better what the artist should have done on stage.

U: Thank you….

SB: But…if you will permit me, may I return to my original question about the risk of being self-referential…?

U: Only if I can just insert, as I said earlier, that we are all self-referential. You are being self-referential when you presume to enter my world to tell me how to perform my art better than I do. Isn’t that true? I may have the patience to listen to your opinions—for a short while, I remind you—but I have as much right to tell you to mind your own business—whatever it is—and not to presume that you can press your adjectives on me when they probably apply just as well to you—as if dishing out criticism were going to be a one-sided.

SB: I agree, but let me try to characterize my remarks a little differently. You evoke Marlene Dietrich but without, I thought, telling us much about the real woman: who sided with the allies and not the Nazis, who reinvented herself over and over, a bi-sexual woman who—as powerful seductress—at her death had accumulated a long list of very famous persons who were her lovers. She often dressed as a man, which gave her an air of androgyny. Certain critics with psychiatric training, I think, chided her for the “fetishistic manipulation of the female image.” You clearly imitate Marlene with great accuracy. And, I repeat, it cannot be easy to evoke that woman and still be your own woman who attracts us largely by the force of her own personality.

U: Well, that’s a mouthful. But you have hit on something that I worry about: imitating Marlene and other others like Edith Piaf without becoming epigonic—without being the inferior imitator. Fetishistic? You mean wearing the top hat, showing leg, posing with one arm extended over my head Marilyn Monroe style, writhing as I slink across the stage? Where do you think all that came from? It comes from the need to please men. Prostitutes and cabaret singers recognized a niche market. Men were the ones who got excited by the androgyny, the slit in the dress that shows the leg, at a time when the leg was not supposed to be shown—along with the rest of the woman’s body. Have you ever seen a woman walk that is wearing a corset? Well, I haven’t either. But those men saw it all the time and paid to see a woman slinking. So, Mr. Bennett, who is it exactly that makes a fetish of the female body?

SB: Who are those big guys at the door that stare at me all the time?

U: Those are my bodyguards….

SB: I don’t want to upset them.

U: What about me?

SB: Sorry…could I mention, you didn’t have a lot of help from the technical staff. The volume was too high and your words got mushed. As you pointed out, singing and speaking in four or five different languages, there should have been translations on the usual screen over the stage. Plus, it was hot and the chemical stage mist made it hard to breath.

U: How do you think we feel with all those conditions? We try to get it right before we start, but local  “professionals” often think they know better, and they screw it up.

SB: It would help me if you smiled at your bodyguards.

U: It would help me if you smiled at all once in a while…and you have about thirty seconds left.

SB: Let’s see, you follow a long tradition of setting someone else’s words to music—like Shubert setting Goethe’s poems to music: “Der Erlenkönig.” In your case, Neruda’s poems and the woman Ilse Weber who wrote “Wenn ich wandere durch Theresienstadt….”

U: You speak German?

SB: Yes.

U: I’ll give you an extra minute.

SB: Ilse Weber apparently was a night nurse in the children’s infirmary in the concentration camp Theresienstadt. When her husband was deported to Auschwitz in 1944, she volunteered join him with her son Tommy, to keep the family together. I am sure she arrived at Auschwitz believing they would be reunited. On arrival, she and Tommy were sent straight to the gas chamber. Please don’t call your guards, but if you leave all that out and just sing a song because it was written in a concentration camp, it seems—at least to me—like you’re only giving token recognition to the horror of that time. Almost trivializing it. At least, that’s how it seemed to me.

U: Let’s clear something up. We Germans have been chewing on the holocaust for nearly seventy years. Half of France was anti-semitic. Perhaps. Maybe still is. Your country has splattered blood all over Viet Nam, Irak and Afghanistan and countless other peoples since 1945, and called it “collateral damage”—always with a presumption of your own innocence and rectitude. Always larded with an insufferable air of triumphalism. Have any of your singers ever bothered to sing a children’s song composed by a woman who was then slaughtered at Wounded Knee?

SB: I suppose Buffy Sainte Marie…but the fact is, I don’t really know. I’m simply suggesting that cabaret and sentimentality may be like oil and water…

U: That’s it. I’ll think about it—but you’re time is up. Good-bye.

SB: (standing, possibly out of politeness)…I think you should at least know that, as you were singing the Theresienstadt song, that awful artificial mist was billowing out from stage right and was far too closely suggestive of what you were talking about….and maybe you should try to prevent that next….

Bodyguards: Sir, please step back….

For My Friend Who Died

Posted on by sterlingbennett

It is hard to think of Howard (Limoli) not being with us on earth, or that he should have died at all. He was too integral a part of the department for this to have happened. He was like the keel of the ship, if not also its rudder—a man of reasonableness, a kindly presence—unassuming, constant and uninterested, in my memory, in pursuing imbroglios. I know he was a impassioned translator, but what he loved most of all was to button-hole a friend in the parking lot and explain the unbelievable deal he had just made in purchasing a second hand car that a very old and steady person had driven only 2,003 miles in her lifetime. That was when he was boy-like, and I became boy-like and envied him for his important good luck. He had a wry look when he glimpsed an academic intrigue he would not indulge in, and I know he would rather have spent his time in conversations about Dada, Italian and translation. That wry look calmed the hysteria I was quick to embrace. And now in my late years, when I am learning French, of all things, I wish he were around to patiently steer my grammar with his steady, generous hand. I will miss him.

The Girl on the Scooter

Posted on by sterlingbennett

There is a square in Saint Jean de Luz, the fishing port and resort, where France touches Spain, with the Pyrenees in back and the Atlantic Ocean in front. There is a square not far from the fishing boats called Place Louis XIV, at the end of rue Gambetta. Smooth pavement surrounds the bandstand in the middle of the square, then come trees, then restaurants—Le Majestic on one side and Le Suisse on the other, plus others. The bandstand has an awning held up and out by struts at angles, making the kiosk look like a carousel. If you are lucky and sit at one of the small round tables in one of the wicker chairs, at the Suisse, at night, sipping beer or wine, chatting with friends, you will see a girl of about six or seven circling the bandstand on her scooter and all the other children—mostly younger—running around it, while their parents sip and sup. She swings her right leg out in front of her, pendulum-style, then way out in back after each push-off, holding it there for a split second for balance, as she glides around the bandstand, first clockwise, then counter, widening the circles, weaving between trees and children and benches.

It is a thing to wonder at. She talks to none of the other children, she doesn’t look over at parents seated somewhere—and therefore must live somewhere close by. I have seen her more than once. She wears grey leggings and a darker short skirt and a small jacket. Her hair is light and hangs down in a braid behind her. But then, a few minutes later, she has a different skirt and lighter leggings, and her hair hangs in two ponytails. She appears to have been too warm and had to make a pit stop, where I can imagine her mother or grandmother, or father or grandfather, helping her make the quick change, so she will lose no more time and can return to her circling.

It is not exercise, not a competition, not for sport, nor applause. It is more like soaring—something a young hawk might do for sheer delight, working both the updrafts and the downdrafts. Swoop, kick. Swoop kick. Glide, soar, flying past under the turn-of-the-century street lights, I mean the century before, leaning into the curve, leg suspended out behind, in follow-through.

Then back into darkness, then past us adults again, who sit chatting and smoking and drinking, never looking over at us, or at anyone else. We sit upwind from the smokers, look across at the Majestic, eating our baked hake and sipping wine—while she comes, unexpected, from the other direction. In and out of the trees that ring the Place, slalom-motion, updrafts of light and dark, in and out of the light thrown by the streetlights, cutting out into the dark street, where the occasional car creeps by. She has chosen a moment when there none. Then it’s back into Place Louis XIV.

After a while she is gone. You notice it afterward. The vision has dissolved, one that wanted a metaphor. Aschenbach’s Tadzio—the Polish boy in his sailor suit, beckoning from the edge of the water on a Venice beach, in Death in Venice? Except that the scooter girl beckons to no one. Nor is she Rilke’s girl in a pink tutu standing on a white circus horse, trapped in not being a girl, in being a performance and desolate. Or am I thinking some version of a painting by Toulouse-Lautrec. A girl instead of a jaded circus performer, as in The Ringmaster? The mean looking man in the black top hat.

Or is it nothing more than what it is: a reminder of free flight. Unselfconscious delight and uncomplicated purpose. A reminder of how to be. Swooping—not drooping. The opposite of performance.

So very un-Parisian.

When I think of Paris, I think of the city’s beauty.

Then I think of competition: for jobs, education, training, housing—being cool, looking cool. A little like the world of writing. “Look at me, read my book, love it, write a review in the New York Times, sell my books.” In the age of corporate publishing, where profit is the guideline.

I am not the girl on the scooter, and so I think it’s a cool idea to find a venue in Paris where I can read at an open mic, have my partner take pictures, put them up on Facebook. All part of the hustle to be seen—to be noticed in the galaxy that is Amazon.com’s list of books for sale. “Yes of course I’ll appear on Johnny Carson, give your esteemed PEN Talk, appear in front of the United Nations.”

We returned to Paris from Saint Jean de Luz in the south, near the border with Spain. I thought, “I’ll read at the Chat Noir’s open mic,” a beat café at 76 rue Jean-Pierre Timbaud, Metro Line 2, Courrones. To do what I normally do: write and share what I write, rather than wander the streets and riverbanks as a tourist. After all, I’ve read in Guanajuato, San Miguel, many times for many years in Sonoma County, in Northern California. Why not in Paris? Had I anticipated the activity soon enough, I might have arranged a reading at a place like Shakespeare and Company—if they would have had me.

Being strangers to the scene—and I mean the Scene—we got to the Chat Noir early. Too early. Alberto Rigettini, the master of ceremonies, was not ready to take sign up’s. There were rules. I was told to return in a half hour. Alberto scolded me a little. Sign up’s were at 8 pm not 7:30. Even though the Internet had said both times.

I let the half-hour pass, then appeared dutifully at 8:00. Although I had been walking beside him to his sign-up table in a corner of the bar, he first slowly signed up two other people, who had not been ahead of me. Alberto was Italian, and now he had become Parisian. He addressed everyone in English. He warned several of us that it was not guaranteed we would get to read, since there were so many that wanted to read—even though one of the advertised rules on the Internet was that it was first come first served.

There would be three sessions, with eight readers each who would each read for five minutes. Alberto would signal when four minutes and forty-five seconds had passed. He would not tolerate a second over five minutes. He added that he would choose the order and that we would not know ahead of time who would read next.

My friend and I descended to the cellar below the bar. Others arrived, mostly young people, a few older ones like me. The young looked typically nervous, because they were going to stand up before an audience. Perhaps for the first time. There were old chairs and benches. The room was oblong-shaped and hot. I sat next to a doorway where a large fan had been placed. When the time came, Alberto turned on the fan—which produced cooler air and a substantial roar.

He wore a black stovepipe hat, ringmaster-style. He editorialized as he introduced each speaker. His tone was ironic—just this side of sarcastic. But he was not mean. There was to be no applause, he admonished. Someone lived on the other side of a wall near where the fresh air was coming from. We were to click our fingers instead.

I was uneasy. I had signed up to be the first reader in Group 1. He instead called up a young French poet, who read a good poem in English, with an edge of Sturm und Drang. Then he read it again in French—this time, harder to hear the Sturm und Drang. He was clearly one of Alberto’s favorites. Then he called on me. “Sterling, from Mexico.”

I had asked him ahead of time whether there would be a podium and a microphone. Neither, he had replied, as if his venue were the real thing and happened without the items I mentioned. I had mulled over what I would read. I chose the passage from my novel “Playing for Pancho Villa” where Frank is forced to play the piano—the stolen piano plopped down in a dusty clearing by some of the general’s men. My better senses began to tell me—too late—that a bizarre fictional scene out of the Mexican Revolution might be too far removed culturally and historically from a young, somewhat beat French audience—including from Alberto.

Plus, I had wanted to play a piano clip of “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” on my iPhone, to accompany the reading. I had a small bubble speaker with me that I could plug into the iPhone. I would have to juggle everything while I read, because there was no podium. The two spot lights over me made it impossible to see the audience. I had timed my reading a couple of times. It would fall easily within the five minutes.

I began reading. When the moment came to switch on the recording of “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” a tune already popular in 1911, nothing happened. No sound came out of the bubble speader. I realized, because of my unease, I had not turned it on. And when I switched it on, the song had disappeared and I was looking at a new iPhone page.

I muttered an apology and continued reading. My friend appeared out of the dark and took the iPhone and speaker out of my hands. I kept on reading. Then I heard a ragtime tune being played where my friend and I had been sitting. It was a different tune and too fast. I made a slow down, turn it off motion with my hand.

It had not gone well. I was unable to measure the volume or duration of the finger snapping. I sat down. Alberto announced a new rule. Readers and audiences should monitor their phones so that they did not accidentally come on during someone’s reading, or at any time, for that manner.

My friend had taken the propaganda photos with her iPod. They had not come out well. The whole Look-I’m-reading in-Paris! had not gone well. I had given many readings, and this one had gone the least well.

It took me a while to recover, and to understand what had happened. I began to think again about the girl on the scooter in Saint Jean de Luz and how unselfconsciously she had scooted around the bandstand, gliding in and out of the light. Then it occurred to me to do what I usually do: write about my experiences to make sense of them. To write an essay or a story I tell myself I need three elements. I had only two: 1) the girl on the scooter and 2) not feeling very good about my “Paris reading.”

But the third element arrived in a few days, and it was this bit of insight—that 3) just because it’s Paris is not a good enough reason for doing anything artistic.

Four or more years ago, I had puzzled over the mystique of Paris and how I fit into it as a painter. I had taken my watercolors to a spot across from Notre Dame and to other places along the Seine. There, with no audience, I did my painting in Paris. The paintings were not particularly good. Still, I was exploring the idea of being yet again one more American in Paris.

Once, while I painted, a dredge was working under the bridge that crossed the Seine between the Ile de Cité and Notre Dame. The steam shovel, a modern diesel steam shovel sitting on a barge, brought up a metal bed head frame, blacked from years of lying in the mud. I already had three elements that had caught my attention or were on my mind: 1) that my great-great grandfather had actually been born in Rouen, Upper Normandy and 2) a bit of information about a Gestapo headquarters at 93 rue Lauriston, in the 16th Arrondissement, where French resistance prisoners were tortured and murdered by the French Gestapo—the Bonny-LaFont. 3) The Question: Who threw the bed frame down from the bridge and why? And an extra one, 4) an exhibit on the top floor of the Orsay, where I had seen the exhibit of P. H. Emerson, who drew with ink pen over original Heliographic negatives back in the 1890s. The ink additions were hard to distinguish from the ghostly landscape backgrounds, especially in my favorite: “Marsh Leaves, Feuilles des marais,” London, 1895. I found it mildly disturbing, this process of super-imposing new representations on older ones, with a different medium. (You can read the story “Foreground” at my blog at sterlingbennett.com. Write “Foreground” in the blog’s search slot.)

In the present case, my third element had been the act of connecting the Girl on the Scooter with my “reading” in Paris—undertaken for all the wrong reasons: stepping back into the mystique of Paris, without prior reflection, let alone wisdom; a performance dictated by a writer’s need to hustle his wares; and, finally, being as much unfree in my reading as the Girl on the Scooter had been free in her scooting. Not really having a good time, not being myself, not being in control. Instead, being more the jaded circus performer, under the whip of the ironic Alberto—the Ringmaster.

The Killing

Posted on by sterlingbennett

With great frequency, climbing the two hundred and three stairs to our house in Guanajuato, I see young A. sitting with his friend on the stairs just outside his very modest house—crude stone walls with dirt for mortar, metal laminate roof. A. is young and shy. Over the years, I have engaged him by asking him questions about mathematics. It started out as two and two, then two and two and two; then, more complicated additions. We used to call him The Accountant, and he seemed to like that. He’s a bright kid. Maybe six or seven now.

His sister I. used to sit a little higher on the stairs with her next door neighbor M. At first, they just tittered when we spoke to them. I used to say, “I’m hearing what you’re saying,” because their heads were always very close together, as they chatted, and their eyes gleamed with pre-teen secrecy. Of course, I couldn’t hear; they knew that; but just being addressed sent them into a pre-teen tizzy. Especially by an old guy who was a gringo at that. Then, abruptly, I. had a boyfriend and M. sat alone on the steps, looking abandoned. The boy was older. I. needed the attention. She had probably just turned thirteen. Many girls are pregnant at that age, giving in to the pressure of an older boy. Now I notice she is no longer around. I don’t know what has become of her.

The Accountant and I. are brother and sister, I think. I am not sure. Their father’s name I never quite learned. When I went off in the morning to write at the Café Antik, I used to see him returning from the mine—I’ve never learned which one. He was on the night shift. And then he had his accident. Something fell on his head, and chances are it was part of the mine. He seemed different afterward. He drank more, he made less sense when he talked and he began asking for handouts. He was out of work a lot, I am told because he went on binges, and perhaps because the mine wanted sober miners who were not a danger to other miners in the sense of not being able to carry out basic responsibilities.

He began hanging out with the Usual Suspects, in the privada—side alley—just down the steps from us. We are currently traveling, and so I do not know exactly what happened, except that two days ago—according to the police—he was attacked in broad daylight (noon) by someone coming out of the privada. The person came up behind him and I suppose struck him—possibly on the spot where the mine had struck him earlier.

And now he is dead.

I have not used the word murdered. If someone killed him, I am fairly sure it was not premeditated. In one previous incident, which I have already written about—the incident of the brick fight, one of my first posts on the neighborhood—I was standing six feet from a neighbor when Q. walked up to him—minutes after the brick fight—and struck him on the head four times with a light metal pipe. In another incident, much later, I saw T. come up behind his drunk father, who had climbed up from the privada to rail against a public neighborhood organizing meeting. T. stood behind his father holding a good-sized rock, poised, it seemed, to bash him on the head, if there was no other way to control him. A very curious behavior for an otherwise obedient son. So in our barrio, bashing someone on the head is not an unusual recourse for punctuating disputes.

The Police—through their own connections—have a recording of the attack, from the surveillance cameras. There is not much more I can say at this distance, or want to say. Whoever attacked the victim must have been high on the usual substances: paint thinner, MagicMarker, airplane glue, etc. The effect of those chemicals is that you are aggressive and have very poor judgment—such as carrying out the act right in front of the cameras.

The neighbors are lying low, because now we enter the period when the privada realizes they’re in trouble again—with the police—and they are sending out their aunts, mothers and wives to find out who knows what. Of course, no one is saying very much—including, at this point, myself.

Greeting Josefina and Remembering Mateo

Posted on by sterlingbennett

I stopped by the church steps today and greeted Josefina, who sat in her usual place on the bottom step. She replied, “Mande?”—”Yes?” with like a school child afraid she has is being called to account for some mistake. “How are you?” I asked. “Fine,” she said.

I can see a kind of generalized confusion in her face when she addresses me. I hate the term mental illness. But I don’t think she’s all there. Then, of course, who of us is “all there”? She does what she does. I have no idea where she goes when she’s not at the steps.

There was another “beggar” that wandered up and down the side of the canyon that is Guanajuato. His name was Mateo. Most of his front teeth were missing, but his smile was always very much in tact. I usually could not understand what he was saying when I dropped 10 pesos onto his very dirty palm. I am embarrassed to say that. It’s like talking about an animal, but I also think twice before petting a dog that clearly has all kinds of problems.

Mateo suffered from some kind of mental problem, too. And I would think, from loneliness, as well. I know people were maintaining him. Once in a while he would appear washed and in warm new clothes. I think that is very typical of Mexico, and probably of most places in the world. People feed and clothe people like Josefina and Mateo.

There seems otherwise to be no solution for “saving” them. In Mexico, to the best of my knowledge, there are no agencies that sweep them up, wash them, feed them psychiatric drugs, dress them and give them a new life. I have no idea whether their families still exist or whether their families, still there, have given up on them. Recently, I have concluded that Mateo may be dead. He no longer shows up. On walks around the ring road on the side of the canyon, I look down into various vacant, overgrown pieces of land that have not been build on—looking for Mateo, or for what may be left of him. An old coat, a pair of worn shoes—still connected to Mateo.

Josefina at the Church

Posted on by sterlingbennett

Josefina is a beggar dressed in selected rags that are shabby but not too shabby. She sits on the bottom entrance step leading to the largest church in Guanajuato, the Iglesia de la Compañia de Jesuitas, the Church of the Jesuit Society, begun in 1747 and completed in 1765. It is said miners worked day and night until the project was finished. Little is known about the miners—how they were treated and how much they were paid—except that there some lingering questions. The pious José Manuel Sardaneta y Legazpí, the first Marqués (Marquis) de San Juan de Rayas and Visconde (Viscount) de Sardaneta—the Spanish crown conferred aristocratic titles in order to insure loyalty to Spain—largely paid for the construction. Its façade is carved in a pink stone that gives off a warm glow. The style is Baroque Churrigueresque. The OSUG (Orquesta Sinfónica de la Universidad de Guanajuato) plays there sometimes, and its music mixes with the sound of pigeons flapping overhead. Many large colonial paintings, heavy with solemn dignity and suffering, hang in the sacristy—works by famous painters like Miguel Cabrera, Baltasar Echave Orio and José Ibarra.

Josephina arrives at the steps at around nine in the morning. I changed my view of her when, a few days ago, from the comfort of a taxi, I saw her sitting there at nine at night. She sits crossed-legged with various plastic bags holding bits of food in front of her. She wears a shabby brown shawl over her head. Sometimes it is nearly impossible to see her face. Until I saw her sitting there at nine o’clock at night, I had always scorned her a little. It is so much a part of the public drama: the devout or semi-devout filing past the crafty Josefina, or someone like her, feeling guilty, especially on exiting the church, and then grudgingly dropping her a few centavos, because God might be watching.
But sitting there until nine or beyond means that she has no other life and no better place to go at that hour, and that was something that registered with me. So I stopped on the way back from pilates, with my trendy L.L.Bean yoga mat bag (with mat inside), bent over Josefina and said hello.

“What’s your name?” I asked. People were coming down the stairs. Josefina’s face lit up.

“Josefina,” she said.

I didn’t get it, leaned closer and asked her again.

“Josefina,” she said a little louder.

“How old are you, Josefina?” I asked.

I don’t know why I asked her that, but the question was out. Her face took on more color, showed some confusion, only the hint of embarrassment.

“I don’t really know,” she said, after thinking about the question for a moment.

She smiled. I smiled.

“Okay,” I said. “Doesn’t matter,” and placed a ten-pesos piece on her soiled palm.

And then I nodded and told her to take care.

The next time I see her, I will say her name and ask her how she is.

“Hola, Josefina,” I will say. “Cómo estas?”