Category: ~ New Stories of Mexico and Elsewhere

Bojón

Posted on by sterlingbennett

People laugh at me when I tell them my name, or they frown, or they work hard to hold down a judgment. Or they feign interest.

“What kind of a name is that?” they say.

I tell them it might be Arabic or French or Brazilian. And that my mother was very dark, with green eyes and long black hair that was as shiny as a raven’s back.

Then they ask me where I was born, and I say I don’t know exactly where, because by time I could speak my mother was ill and soon too sick to talk.

By this time, the person has lost interest or tells me I should be a writer or looks away at a passing someone who is pretty or handsome or walks with their chest out, shoulders down and full of confidence.

When I went to the city hall—I continue explaining—to apply for my Crendential, which is what they call the voting card here, they said I was first far too young and second I didn’t have a last name—not to mention a middle one.

Then my mother died. They dressed her in a long white dress and laid her on her back on a table, put flowers in her hands and placed candles around her. Four people came to see her. One, an older woman said my mother owed her money. Then a neighbor who spent her visiting time looking at dishes and linen and things in my mother’s special box. Then a boy I knew, who wanted to know where I was going to live—and finally a handsome thin man with a mustache and gentle eyes who said he thought he might be my father. He said I should come and live with him in the city. I said I would like to but that I didn’t have a last name, and I didn’t want to leave my mother, who still needed me.

My father said, fine, we’d stay a while, and he and I slept on my mother’s bed, where he said not to worry, I could have his last name Opolo, which he didn’t need anymore. I thanked him and fell asleep. In the morning, my mother’s body was gone, plus all the dishes and linen—plus my father.

At first, besides feeling lonely, I worried about him no longer having a last name, since he had given it to me. But, with time, I thought less and less about him, and more and more about my mother, who was very beautiful, if a little sad. Why I never learned.

I have a voting card now. And I am a teacher for children between five and ten. They call me Señor Bojón. Which is the name I use—because my mother gave it to me and because it reminds me of her.

I grow vegetables and fruit trees. I have a garden area devoted entirely to grapes. I have started making wine each year, which I bottle and store in the first part of an old, unfinished mining tunnel. The label on my bottles says “Bojón” and people have started buying it from me.

One day, a young woman—the mother of one of my youngest students—asked if she could buy a bottle of my wine. I said of course. She and her little girl came home with me and I sold her the bottle. Two days later, she brought me bread she had baked. She was both kind and pretty and seemed to like me. I learned that there was no husband, no father for her daughter. I grew very fond of her but was understandably afraid she might die. I mentioned my fear. She said she would die some day but that we could, if I wanted to, be together until that day came.

For some reason, she had never asked me my name. I was always Señor Bojón. Then one day she asked me.

“Bojón’s my name,” I said.

“But what’s your first name?”

“It’s Bojón.”

“What’s your last name then?”

“Bojón,” I said.

She smiled and said she liked that and took my hand.

I thought I should ask her, too. I knew her first name was Rosa.

“And your last name? I don’t think I know it.”

“Rosa,” she said.

A Café Mouse in Vienna

Posted on by sterlingbennett

Friends have called me a café ratón, literally a café mouse, a person who spends, according to some, too much time chatting and sipping coffee (tea, in my case, and writing), when they should be gainfully employed somewhere else. Why do I mention this? I will tell you in a moment. A couple of weeks ago, we arrived at the outskirts of Vienna on bicycles, after riding down the Danube Bike Path from Passau, Germany, and rode right into the Old Center—the home, it turns out, of many of the writers who seemed most important to me when I was learning what writing and storytelling was. And where did they hang out, these writers? Why, in the Viennese coffee house like the Hawelka Café. And what was that venerable establishment like? I thank Tereza Ištvánkova and her very good Czech B.A. thesis “Wiener Kaffeehausliteratur in Beispielen,” “Viennese Coffee House Literature through Examples,” for the following description by the Viennese poet Hans Carl Artmann, born in 1921).

The translation is mine: “Here in the Hawelka, headwaiter Herr Fritz, greets his customers with a handshake, ruling over his sector like a British colonel. Water glasses on nicked trays clink on their way through the gray-blue cigarette smoke, held aloft like crystalline birds. Chess opponents pursue their life or death games in silence. On scraps of paper, the artist Kurt Moldovan jots and sketches of Mexico on letter paper, if that is what is what is available, and, elegant as always, greets with equal kindness the pretty and not so pretty girls who enter. Ernst Fuchs, the modern Dürer, orders through his prophet’s beard his one-egg-in-a-glass and lays down his gold-leaf words so that they shimmer lightly as if through a covering varnish. Young actors and actresses play Canasta—because they have no Tarot cards—until the two o’clock closing hour. Poets, painters, sculptors and musicians swarm like bees around the same table. Frantic waiters struggle to get through the forest of chairs. The air is filled with the jubilant war cries of philosophers, as well as with the aroma of Austria 3 which rises in countless smoke rings toward the molded ceiling.”

You can read the original German at the end of this posting.

We had been in Vienna for several days, and I felt paralyzed by its historical dimensions. There was just too much of it. Still, I began listing all the voices and images that had formed me: Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach’s “Die Judenbuche,” an early murder mystery; Franz Grillparzer’s Der Arme Spielmann,” about a man who is a terrible musician but has a noble heart and great courage, none of which win him his love, who instead marries the butcher; Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s “Brief,” a letter that Lord Chandos writes Francis Bacon on the impossibility of language to mean anything after WWI, and “Der Schwierige,” a play about an aristocrat who has returned from the Great War and finds almost all words suspect, clichéd and meaningless. Then there is Rainer Maria Rilke and his poem “Der Panther:” Der Panther Im Jardin des Plantes, Paris 1902:

Sein Blick ist vom Vorübergehn der Stäbe

so müd geworden,dass er nichts mehr hält.

Ihm ist, als ob es tausend Stäbe gäbe

und hinter tausend Stäben keine Welt.

Der weiche Gang geschmeidig starker Schritte,

der sich im allerkleinsten Kreise dreht,

ist wie ein Tanz von Kraft um eine Mitte,

in der betäubt ein großer Wille steht.

Nur manchmal schiebt der Vorhang der Pupille

sich lautlos auf -. Dann geht ein Bild hinein,

geht durch der Glieder angespannte Stille –

und hört im Herzen auf zu sein.

 

My translation: His glance has grown tired from passing back and forth

before the bars, so tired that it no longer sees,

as if there were a thousand bars and behind those no world at all.

The soft gait, the supple strong steps, which turn

in ever-smaller circles, are like a dance

around a center in which stands

a great numbed will.

Only once in a while, the membrane over the pupil rises silently,

then an image enters,

goes through the coiled stillness of his limbs,

and ceases it existence in the animal’s heart.

 

If Rilke thinks this is what has happened to the panther in a modern city, what does he think has happened to us?

Then there Adalbert Stifter and his “Bergkristal,” a short story about two children who take the wrong path on a mountain path, are trapped by a snowstorm and spend the night in the protection of a glacial cave. The boy’s trusting younger sister Sanna agrees with all his reassurances and says, “Ja, Konrad” something like twenty times (in my memory, more). The two feuding villages on either side of the pass come searching for them in the morning and are reconciled by the miracle of their survival. Sanna says Jesus appeared to them during the night. Peter Altenberg held forth at the Central Café and even had his mail delivered there; Karl Kraus’s satirized those who love The Great War, profited from it and invoke the patria as mother, father and homeland; Stephan Zweig is currently remembered through the movie “The Budapest Hotel;” and Arthur Schnitzler dramatized what Freud was formulating in theory. We ate and wrote in the Freud Café. We saw paintings by Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele. We went to the Musikverein one night and heard Mozart played by musicians in white wigs. This was the city of Arnold Schoenberg and Schubert, also of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Martin Buber, who warned us to see the Other as You and not It. Last of all: Lotte Lenya who collaborated with Kurt Weil and Bertolt Brecht (“Mack the Knife”).

I am sure I am leaving many out.

And finally, my favorite saying that supposedly distinguishes Austrians from Prussians (Germans). In WWI: a Prussian officer sends a dispatch with the message, “Die Lage ist ernst, aber nicht hoffnungslos.” The situation is serious but not hopeless. Fighting on the same side and in the same battle, the Austrian commander sends back the message, “Die Lage ist hoffnungslos, aber nicht Ernst.” The situation is hopeless, but not serious. The quote, perhaps apocryphal, I have always thought was gently complimentary of the Austrian character.

*This is the original quote describing the Hawelka Café in German: “Hier im Hawelka begrüßt der Chef des Hauses seine Stammkunden noch mit Handschlag, herrscht der Ober, Herr Fritz, souverän wie ein britischer Oberst, über sein Revier, schwirren auf vernickelten Tabletts die Wassergläser wie kristallene Vögel durch den bleiblauen Zigarettenrauch, werden lautlos erbitterte Schachpartien ausgefochten, Kritiken, wenn nicht anders, so auf Briefpapier verfaßt, der Graphiker Moldovan, elegant wie immer, begrüßt mit der gleichen Liebenswürdigkeit hübsche und weniger hübsche Mädchen, Ernst Fuchs, der Dürer der modernen Malerei, bestellt prophetenbärtig sein „Ei im Glas“ und spricht wohlgesetzte Worte aus Goldplättchen und schimmerndem Firnis, junge Schauspieler und – rinnen spielen bis zur Zweiuhrsperre Canasta, weil sie kein Tarock beherrschen, Dichter, Maler, Bildhauer und Musiker bilden manchmal wahre Bienenschwärme um einen einzigen Tisch, der geplagte Ober kann kaum durch den Sesselwald, und die Luft ist erfüllt von den Wohllauten philosophischer Kampfrufe, wie vom Duft der Austria 3, der in zahllosen Rauchringen nach dem Struckhimmel entschwebt.”

Utah Beach, or the Absence of History

Posted on by sterlingbennett

It was low tide—perhaps not the lowest—when I walked way out away from the dunes, easily as much as a quarter of a mile. I suppose I was looking for some sort of connection and that the solution was to walk in the direction they had come from, the frightened men, boys and men, by the thousands, over time as many as 850,000 of them.image

In places the sands were hard, in others soft. I vaguely remembered a scene, perhaps out of French literature, of a man sinking into quicksand. A two-wheel racing buggy raced back up the beach to the east, with its French jockey whipping away at the high-stepping horse for more speed—or, it seemed, to establish his mastery over the horse, both for himself and for the benefit of the few tourists on the beach that were watching him.

There was very little wind, the sun was out, it was a beautiful day, no one was out that far except for me. There was no trace of what happened; and so I puzzled, once again, what it meant to be standing there at that historic place. The connection, I have found, is easier to past atrocity. Thirty, forty or fifty Yahi people—mostly children and women—trapped and shot down by white men at Kingsley Cave, northeast of Chico, California. Buchenwald, in the hills above Weimar, home at times to both Goethe and Schiller. But what was the atrocity here? A war that is celebrated as my country’s greatest? A history of heroism and triumph—that story—that obscures the atrocity of killing and maiming—the unbearable loss?

I was so far out from the dunes that I enjoyed a near complete privacy. I do not mean to offend. I unzipped and peed on the sand, just at the edge where the tide was beginning to return and therewith I suppose at least established my own presence in history. Then I wondered how many others had done the same thing. Back then. Out of fear, or just because they had to go and there were no bathrooms—only raking machine gun fire and the aircraft cannons depressed to fire down into those who were landing.

On the way back, I stooped to pick up a shell. A lovely thing, dark, scolloped and blue-gray, the progeny of those that had lain there then when no one felt like a hero. Rather, only felt fear. And possibly hope. That the next bullet or exploding shell would not find them and disappear them prematurely into history.

image

Le Couleur de Chipotle Seco

Posted on by sterlingbennett

(Another attempt at translating one of my short pieces—”The Color of Dried Chipotle”—into French, as a language learning exercise, with much help from my tutor, whose name I will not mention—to protect him from scandal if the translation is just too horrible, to the extent that, if exposed, French cows would fall over dead.)

SIMIPAG c’est le nom du système d’eau dans ma ville coloniale. Cela signifie le Sistema de Agua Potable y Alcantarillado de Guanajuato—le système pour la distribution de l’eau et pour la re-distribution des eaux d’égout. Des générations de travailleurs se sont constamment précipités dans les quartiers ou l’un des fluides avait empiété sur l’autre.

Par hasard, j’ai rencontré un homme dans le café délabré où j’écris, qui avait travaillé pendant des années pour la ville et maintenant, dans sa retraite, était le seul et l’entièrement inconnu historien des sombres cours de l’eau navigable de la ville.

Luís est accro au café et à l’histoire. Son père Juan Gabriel a commencé à travailler pour la ville dans 1916 à l’âge de 17. Il portait un lourde barre pour ouvrir la chaussée et une pelle et marchait derrière son chef, les deux en répondant aux cris de cette señora ou à l’autre qui a signalé que les eaux usées coulaient dans sa maison.

Arturo n’était pas aussi intelligent que son jeune assistant Luís mais il avait la grâce de s’en remettre au jeune homme dans des matières des directions dans lesquelles coulaient des choses et dans d’autres problèmes de la physique. Peu de temps dans le milieu de la nuit—c’était le temps de leur travail—c’était Arturo qui allait chercher un sac de ciment et du sable, pendant que Luís perplexait sur l’emplacement des tuyaux et commencait à ouvrir le callejón avec sa barre de fer. Quand il soulevait le morceau de pierre sur l’endroit où il supposait qu’il avait échoué, il mettait la lanterne de plus prés et observait le mouvement autour de la fuite qui coulait au loin de la conduite et se jettait dans la maison voisine, dont la señora était à la porte qui les avait en premier lieu appelés à la catastrophe.

Elle portait son châle autour de ses épaules, en se plaignant de la fuite, la pluie, l’oscurité, la rapidité de leur progrès et des imbéciles que se propageaient la révolution dans l’état.

“On dois les pendre tous,” a dit-elle. “Il faudrait tirer sur leurs enfants et violer leurs épouses. Dieu va les brûler en enfer, vous verrez.

Luís a gardé ses opinions pour lui. Pendant sa seule nuit de repos semanal, il portait des armes à travers les ruelles, en le faisant vers l’aube quand même la police était endormis.

Pendant que la femme fulminait, il tenait la lanterne prés du tuyau cassé, où toutes les choses se déplaçaient comme il le faisait dans la nuit. En sous-sol, on peut dire. Sauf qu’elles étaient de la couleur de chipotle seco ou de sienne brûlé, comme le dit son ami le peintre—tandis que Luís était de la couleur d’un petit cheval brun. Elles avaient des antennes, probablement pour trouver leur chemin dans l’obscurité pendant qu’elles mangeaient de la merde humaine, combattant entre elles sur les meilleurs pièces qui glissaient dans le tuyau entrainées par la chute d’un seau d’eau d’un lieu plus haut ou bien par le ruissellement de la pluie.

La maison de la señora était en fait assez belle, comme son châle couteux qui brillait à la lumière de la lampe, pendant que sa bouche bougait, en disant des choses sur lui méme et Arturo, qui disait t’elle avait été là una fois avant et qui n’avait pas pris la peine de se laver et quel niveau de scolarité avait-il, Luís, jamais pris la peine d’obtenir; ou pensait-il rejoindre à la revolution et venir dans la nuit l’assassiner dans son lit, en soulévant de côté soigneusement le chat Lobo avant de plonger son couteau dans sa poitrine?

Les insectes grouillaient dans le trou en face de de lui, rouges et rapides dans la lumière de la lanterne. Il pourrait fixer des petits messages sur leur dos, qui diraient aux autres comme lui où vivait cette femme. Ou, plus important, où des armes étaient nécessaires. Des Winchesters, Springfields et Mausers. Sous la ville grouillait un millard des coursiers possibles, qui bougaient où personne ne les pouvait voir, transportant des informations sur comment pénétrer la ville pour le enfoncer l’épée dans son coeur comme dans l’arène des toros.

Il observait de prés. Les insectes haïs semblaient pulser et sautiller. Hop, hop, hop! Arturo ou quelqu’un d’autre s’approchait. Les bêtes le savaient à l’avance. Cela aussi pourrait étre utile quand la ville essayerait de se defendre contre lui même et ses confrères révolutionnaires.

Aruro a mis le ciment sur la ruelle, recouvert d’une bâche. Ils ont mélangé le ciment et le sable avec le fuide de la canalisation rompue et fait la réparation, replacé les pierres et ramassé la lanterne et ils sont repartis, pendant que la femme appelait en disant qu’ils étaient aussi inutiles que les personnes qui complotaient de prendre la ville.

“Cafards!” leur criait elle. “Cafards!”

Obligations

Posted on by sterlingbennett

My friend the newspaperman—he’s more of a distant acquaintance—asked me gently, or was it meekly, whether he could borrow….

“What?” I asked. It wasn’t clear.

“…a hundred pesos,” he repeated, speaking a little more firmly.

He stands behind his rack of magazines and newspapers. He folds the daily newspaper and hands it over the rack. You take it with one hand and give him eight pesos with the other. Behind him, there is a green metal box that houses more magazines, even some used books. He stores the rack and everything else in the box and locks it up like the Paris book stalls along the Seine.

I might have been sitting in the small restaurant opposite his stand, and he may have entered and asked for money there. I don’t remember exactly.

“It’s a loan,” I said, just to get that straight right at the beginning.

“Yes, yes,” he said, but with a voice that was less distinct. Maybe almost inaudible.

“When are you going to pay me?” I asked.

He took the 100-peso note out of my hand. I didn’t understand his reply. He tends to mumble in his natural state. I think he said tomorrow. But I could have been wrong.

I may have passed by two days later. I had given the 100 pesos readily; I expected an equally rapid and cordial repayment.

I leaned forward to hear him better. His two front teeth are missing. I thought that was perhaps why I missed what he said.

There was a problem. I listened for what it was. His dog ran away, his wife was sick, a Zeppelin crashed. I wasn’t sure which of those it was—or perhaps something entirely different. Whatever it was, you could tell by his expression that it was bad news and we would have to be patient.

The bad news lasted for a week. Each time I asked, his answers were equally indistinct, mumbled, filtered by the bland look on his face, as if he no longer knew me and wasn’t sure why I was talking to him.

One day, suddenly, he handed me fifty pesos, and I thanked him.

I asked him when I might expect the other fifty. I’m not sure what he replied other than that it had to do with time that would come, not with time that had passed.

Every few days, when I thought to or had to pass his stand, I would ask him if he had my money. I used precisely that possessive adjective – my, trying to keep the original ownership clear. Each day he became less interested in having to give me a reason for not repaying me; and each day I grew less friendly—which I think offended him, since he grew more unreachable, less diffident and felt, I think, that his financial responsibility had less standing, in fact may have ceased to exist at all.

Yesterday, I came upon a plan. I asked him whether he had a political magazine I read, politically on the left, but more importantly costing forty pesos. He could hand me the magazine over the rack, bless me with his bland face, and I would say thank you and walk away, satisfied with my trick. And he would owe me only ten pesos more.

But he said, “I’m sold out of those.”

In Spanish, it’s an impersonal construction – “Se acabó” – It has sold out.

I had no easy way of checking. I asked him for the most expensive national newspaper, La Jornada – also on the left side of the spectrum.

“Se acabó,” he said.

Whether that was true or not, my trick was not working as planned. I took the daily off his rack. Each one costs eight pesos.

“I’ll take one of these every day,” I said.

His face was pained. He was not happy. I am not sure why. Bad manners on my part? Perhaps something else. Perhaps his newspapers represented real value, whereas the fifty pesos he owed me had lost theirs.

My valued Mexican friend later told me I was behaving aggressively. He said I was more mature and more reasonable than the newspaperman; therefore it was my moral obligation to come to some sort of agreement with him that honored the poor fellow’s dignity. My friend has conducted the same kinds of negotiations with him over loans for years. I agreed with my friend. And also regretted my failing.

Today, I asked for another daily. He handed it over the rack. I took it with one hand and offered nothing with the other.

“I get four more,” I said, and started to walk away.’’

He came out from behind his rack, as if he was going to stop me.

“No,” he said.

“Yes,” I said. “That’s sixteen pesos in all. I get four more after this, at eight pesos apiece. That will make forty-eight pesos. You can keep the last two.”

“No,” he said. “The Sunday paper alone costs ten pesos.”

“Okay,” I said. “Eighteen pesos are returned.”

Whereupon he nodded halfway cordially, having found an opportunity to correct my math.

Epilog: Yesterday I passed his stand, he saw me coming, her reached for my newspaper, the AM out of León. I took it in my left hand and gave him my right, smiled and said, “Trato hecho!”—which isn’t quite the right expression, meaning more “a deal!” than “deal concluded!” Didn’t matter, he gave me a half smile, and we are back to normal.

The Color of Dried Chipotle

Posted on by sterlingbennett

SIMAPAG is the name of the water system in my colonial city. It means Sistema de Agua Potable y Alcantarillado de Guanajuato—the system for the distribution of water and the re-distribution of sewage. Generations of workers have rushed continuously to neighborhoods where one fluid has encroached upon the other.

By chance, I met a man in my dilapidated writing café who had worked for the city for years and now, in his retirement, was the sole and entirely unknown historian of the city’s darker waterways.

Luis is addicted to both coffee and history. His father Juan Gabriel began working for the city in 1916 at the age of seventeen. He carried a heavy iron pry bar and a shovel and walked along behind his boss, both of them responding to the shrieks of this señora or that who reported that sewage was pouring into her home.

Arturo was not as smart as his young helper Luís but had the grace to defer to the boy in matters of which direction things flowed in and other problems of physics. Soon, in the middle of the night—since that was when they worked—it was Arturo that went for a bag of cement and some sand, while Luís puzzled over the location of pipes and began breaking open the alley. When he lifted a chunk of stone over the area he surmised had failed, he brought the lantern closer and observed the movement around the leak that flowed away from the concrete pipe and into the neighboring house, in whose door stood the woman that had fetched them to the disaster in the first place.

She stood with her rebozo around her shoulders, complaining about the leak, the rain, the dark, the speed of their progress, and the fools that were spreading revolution through the state.

“They should hang them all,” she said. “Shoot their children and rape their wives. God will burn them in hell, you wait and see.”

Luís kept his opinions to himself. On his one night off each week, he carried weapons through the allies, always toward dawn when even the police were asleep.

As the woman ranted, he held the lantern closer to the broken pipe, where everything was moving much the way he himself did at night. Below ground, so to speak. Except that they were the color of chipotle, or burnt sienna as a painter friend said—and he Luís was as brown as a small Mexican horse. They had feelers, probably to find their way within the darkness as they ate human shit, fighting over the best pieces as those slid down the pipe, flushed by a bucket of water in a house higher up the alley or, in this case, by the runoff from the rain.

The woman’s house was actually quite fine, her rebozo expensive and glimmering in the light of the lantern, her mouth moving, saying things now about him and Arturo who she said had been there before and didn’t bother to wash, and how much education had he Luís ever bothered to acquire to advance himself. Or did he maybe think he would join the Revolution and come and murder her in her bed, carefully lifting her cat Lobo to one side before he plunged his knife into her breast.

The insects swarmed in hole in front of his eyes, red and quick in the lamplight. He could attach little messages to their backs, that would tell others like him where this lady lived. Or, more importantly, where weapons were needed. Winchesters, Springfields and Mausers. Underneath the city teemed a billion possible messengers, moving where no one could see them, carrying information on how to penetrate the city and pierce its heart like in the bullring.

He watched closely. The hated insects seemed to pulse and hop as one. Now, now and now. Arturo or someone else was approaching. The bugs knew ahead of time. That too could be useful when the city tried to defend itself against him and his fellow revolutionaries.

Arturo set down the cement, covered with a tarp against the drizzle. They mixed it with sand and fluid from the broken pipe and made the repair, replaced the stones, picked up the lantern and left—with the woman calling after them that they were as worthless as the people who were plotting to take over the city.

“Cucarachas!” she yelled after them. “Cucarachas!”

The Best Place in Mexico

Posted on by sterlingbennett

One of my favorite places in Mexico is the local barbershop; I don’t mean a chain like Starbucks for your male mop. I mean a room tucked back behind displays of cheap jewelry, or a street corner room about 15’ by 15’ with two doors, one facing each street, at 90 degrees to each other, so everyone can look in and see who’s sitting in the Forties barber’s chair; and where you can look out and see everyone that’s looking in at you.

I go to the first one, the one behind the cheap jewelry displays, next to the bank; the one that looks down Avenida Juárez toward the Mercado Juárez, a building similar to a 1870’s train station straight out of France. The other barbershop was in another town, Compostela, in another state, Jalisco. That one was staffed by two young women who treated me as a grand curiosity and worthy of a mixture of client care and intercultural flirtation. The only problem for me was they were still women. Let me explain.

In the wake of divorces, breakups and various scalp-numbing rejections, I had been cutting my own hair for maybe thirty or forty years as a way of lessening the impact of my Delilah Complex; that is to say, getting a handle on any personal caregiving that depended on the good offices of a woman with scissors in her hand. Also—before and since then—I have scorned any haircut that cost more than five dollars or smacked of styling.

I learned to run the buzzer over my own nobby skull but could never quite get all of it and would still have to ask my love to mow the rest of it in a final coup de grass.

One day, I complimented a white-haired Canadian acquaintance that I thought had a very good close-to-the-noggin haircut. He told me where to go and told me to simply ask for the Número 2. The number refers to the depth of the fence on the front of the clipper’s blades—Número 1 being the shortest cut.

Saturday morning is good, but almost anytime you’ll find a family with a father and a couple or three boys who have come to be shorn. You walk past the cheap jewelry, past barbers One and Two, then step up onto the slightly higher level in back and look for a chair in barber Three’s domain.

He nods and says, “Soon” and then turns his attention back to the father of three boys. That man is roughly forty. The barber seems to know what he wants: short on the sides and a sort of butte on top. The boy’s mother looks on, reserving comment but clearly sweet and proud of her males.

Then comes the oldest boy, who carries a handsome thicket black hair. He’s about twelve. The barber speaks from in back of the boy’s head.

“El mismo?” The same?

The boy looks at his father, looking for what—permission, guidance, a blessing? The butte forms on the top of his head, the barber dusts around his ears; and Second Son steps up, grinning as if receiving an award.

Everyone thinks this is high fun, and barber makes all kinds of observations about the speed of the boys’ growth being slower than the growth of their hair; asks whether they want to be able see out from under their mops when he’s through; and assures them they will be able to run faster afterward.

There are other customers waiting besides me. They all smile at the barber’s commentary and grin at each other; some make comments themselves; their eyes flick over at me at times to see whether the gringo finds everything equally funny. I do and spend most of my time smiling.

The littlest boy is about three or four and sports a fine mop. The barber places a little person’s seat that spans the chair’s armrests. He lifts the boy up onto it. The boy is shy; his smile appears and disappears in reaction to the banter. The barber addresses him in the same way he had his brothers.

“El mismo?” he asks. The same?

The boy looks over at his mother. She answers, “Of course!” The father nods. The boy perches a little forward, as if ready to take flight. The barber suggests he sit back. He says it gently. The boy doesn’t react. The barber asks several different ways, each one funnier than the last, and always gently. The boy looks at his father, then at his mother. It is a communication problem with a thousand factors. Finally, the barber lifts him a little and settles him against the back of the barber’s chair—intoning a brief chant that would reassure a colt. The rich black hair comes off, the ears extend sideways, the barber holds up a mirror. There’s the butte, just like his father’s. A smile lingers. With a puff of powder, the barber dusts around the neck, then lifts him down.

It has been twenty minutes at the most for all of them. The father pays; the boys say good-bye; the mother takes the littlest’s hand. The barber folds his money and wishes them all well.

He flaps the youngest’s black hair from the cloth, looks at me and nods. When he is through, my thin white hair will lie on the floor with the boys’ grackle-black shearings.

I say, “Número dos,” sweep both hands over the top of my head and make a kind of extended zupping sound to indicate removal.

He understands and begins. We do not speak. I am feeling taken care of within his culture. He is taking care of me even though I am foreign and he doesn’t know quite what to make of me—and probably assumes I don’t speak Spanish and can’t do client-barber talk.

He’s wrong about the first one. Maybe the second one will come with time.

My Visit to America

Posted on by sterlingbennett
Cache Creek Swimming Hole Cache Creek Swimming Hole

I use the word loosely.

I’m talking about just one of the Americas—the one we always see on top, a cartographical positioning that was chosen by a culture that assumes itself to be dominant, i.e. “on top,” the world’s default world view. The rest of the globe appears to have politely accepted European-North American on-top-ness, just the way it has accepted Greenwich Mean Time. Nice of them, but perilous for those who assume that their cultures can’t help but be the measures of all others; and perilous for the “southern” cultures who twist themselves inside out trying to adjust.

I flew from León/Guanajuato to Los Angeles, then on to San Francisco, where I rented a low-slung Ford Focus—which seemed to have no maximum speed for taking curves—and drove to Sacramento, to the 2014 Western Writers of America conference. I never had to ask a soul how to get there because of my portable GPS whose lovely female voice my love had switched to French—which added linguistic anxiety to general GPS anxiety. “Dans huit cents mètres, tournez à gauche.” Turn left in 800 yards! Leaving Sacramento, I insisted on continuing north on Route 5 to take the long way to Sonoma County through Williams and Clear Lake, instead of the shorter southern one Mademoiselle had plotted as shorter and more practical. As I passed by each possible exit, she instructed with increasing insistence, “Tournez-vous immédiatement! Tournez-vous immédiatement!” Turn around immediately, turn around immediately.

But back to the conference. I didn’t know what to expect. Perhaps people smelling of cigarettes and beer at nine in the morning, pushing pulp fiction consisting mostly of Bodice Rippers and Armed Male Heroes on Rearing Horses, holding Rifle Aloft. But what I found were kind, knowledgeable, intelligent writers, agents, publicists and publishers. I went to almost each session on the theory that I would pick up something useful whatever the topic. Which proved to be the case. I schmoozed and handed out my postcards that pushed my own Armed Male Hero with Moustache and Sombrero and brought up, whenever I could, the idea of the Mexican western, a concept I found not widely held among my fellow conference goers. In fact, the whole country seemed just slightly beyond my companions’ consciousness. Which is a whole topic in inself—one which I hope I will come back to later in this screed, but may not.

What I liked most about the conference was the hotel where the sessions held and where we stayed. I like to refer to it as the starship or maybe space station Double Tree Hilton, which consisted of several buildings connected by covered causeways, so that you never had to leave the building—which I hardly did over four days and five nights. The food available was delicious and reasonably priced. Especially the breakfast buffet, where I took huge servings of fresh blueberries and strawberries each morning, while others seemed more interested in the biscuits and gravy, eggs, bacon and sausages.

I was assigned a mentor, a kind man and good writer, who introduced me to various publishers and editors—for whom I felt no fear because I wasn’t offering them a manuscript with hands atremble. I had my own novel Playing for Pancho Villa—which I was now pushing as a Mexican western—and another book in gestation, which I would also bill as a Mexican western wherever that description seemed socially acceptable.

As I mentioned, Mademoiselle GPS et moi, headed north after the conference, quarreling all the way. I wanted to follow a route to Sonoma County I took in the old days when my two boys and I returned from Ishi country, as we called it, between Mill and Deer Creek, northeast of Chico, where we would commune with that fine man, a Yahi Indian, who came into the white man’s world, starving, when none of his people were left.

In Williams, I got off the freeway, probably to Mademoiselle’s relief and went into a hardware store for a piece of nylon rope from which I could hang my hand-washed clothes. Three men sat around the check-out counter, watching the World Cup on an overhead screen. The young Mexican team was trying to keep its miraculous one point lead over Holland. I concluded my purchase. All three men spoke Spanish and I asked in Spanish whether they knew where I could breakfast and watch the game at the same time. They said, almost in unison, “Nowhere.” Which was to say, We are not Mexico, where every eating place will have some sort of TV placed—even outside—for people to watch the most important game in four years. A game on which rode the entire nation’s self-esteem.

I went to the local Trading Post, or whatever it is called, where all the passing tourists were eating heavy and then buying overpriced packaged luxury food items that weren’t good for you. I had Eggs Byzantine or Florentine, or whatever you call it when there’s no ham. The sweet waitress automatically brought me ham. She was equally sweet when I sent her back to remove the ham and replace it with sauteed spinach.

After paying, I walked out into the entry area and found someone had turned on an overhead television. There was a bare table; three men sat at it in three chairs; I settled into a fourth empty chair. They were all over fifty: one man, Dutch; one South African; and one that looked Latino. They were watching the same game—Holland vs Mexico. I joined them until the enfant terrible Robben appeared to fake a foul in the penalty area and thereby win a scoring penalty shot. Holland won two to one. I didn’t want to hang around and live Mexico’s disappointment. I got into the Focus; and Mademoiselle and I headed due west. After a few side roads, she gave up trying to head me off and fell into a brooding silence. As a way of protecting her dignity, I shut off the GPS.

We entered the hot, dry, lovely hill country west of the Sacramento Valley and approached an area I knew used to have streams that the boys and I had swum in. At Cache Creek, North Fork, to the right, I saw a glorious swimming hole, with little kids—closely watched by mothers—leaping off a bank into the clear water. I drove on, looking for a way in, and found nothing. I turned around and passed the swimming hole again. I couldn’t find an entrance, and began to think it must be private property. At the creek bridge, on the right, the opposite side of the road from the swimming hole, I saw a State Park sign that said Cache Creek, Rose Bud Trail or Trailhead, and I drove in.

There was a parking lot, a small bathroom house, and various covered displays telling about the site, the fauna and flora, the site’s history. I parked Focus and headed straight toward Cache Creek to see if I couldn’t find my own swimming hole. Which brings me to my religion and the spiritual epiphanies it offers: skinny-dipping in California creeks, rivers and ponds. Then getting out and feeling the effect of water drying on my skin. That is the image and sensation I hope I call up in the moments before my death.

The first part of the creek I came to served perfectly well; not exactly a hole, but deep enough to swim twenty feet, then stand in the dry air and feel my gods breathing against my skin. One of the displays back at the parking lot had explained that Tule Elk had been released there in the Twenties and that, protected, they had flourished since then and could be seen grazing on the hillsides in the green of winter. As I dried, I wished for the appearance of one of the large creatures, preferably a gentle one—since I thought I might be swimming in one of their watering holes, without permission.

A car door banged; and then two others. I had just slipped on my clothes. Two women with children had stopped to use the toilets. The spell of being alone in an Ishi spot had been broken.

I had spent most of my life being alone in the woods in New England and then in California. There were certain spots that seem holy: a dark glacial pond with turtles; a beech grove with smooth gray trunks, far from a highway, let alone a freeway; a stream where Ishi had fished. That may be a condition of spiritual moments, that one is alone. It is hard to do in Mexico where one is never alone; where there are just too many people with a claim on the land, no matter how remote it may seem. Poor countries, the ones “underneath,” have very few protected wilderness areas, where it is possible to be alone. There is always someone moving through a landscape, sharp-eyed and intensely curious to know what you are doing in the same area.

Except in cars, where one is often alone. In Mexico, you watch for people and animals on the side of the road. They appear in abundance. At night it is quite dangerous. In California, I was alone and car-bound for much of my adult life, with National Public Radio figures as my closest companions. In Sacramento, I saw people walking in parking lots at Whole Foods and REI—but nowhere else. I miss casual contact with people when I’m in the States; I see few people walking, in contrast to Guanajuato, which is a walking city with few roads. I feel lonely in the States; I feel crowded in Mexico. But in that moment, when the toilet visitors were in their car and drove away, I resolved to visit America more often.

Just to be able to dunk naked in Cache Creek again—waiting for the elk.

The Illegal Grape

Posted on by sterlingbennett

For a few years, I smuggled grape vines into Mexico. You probably don’t understand why. It’s because when you ask for a grape vine here, someone leads you to a few dusty plants, you ask what kind, and no one knows. There are local grapes that supposedly grow at high elevations. We’re at 7,000 feet. I have one of these vines; it puts out plenty of growth, but in eight years has produced only one little clump of tiny blue grapes each year, without much flavor. I have since grafted a White Concord to it, hopefully harnessing its vigor for this fine—now immigrant—grape.

I stopped smuggling when I could no longer stand the anxiety of being caught by Customs authorities who published and distributed increasingly dire warnings of what would happen to those who tried to import agricultural products, living or dead.

It was important to me to have grapes in my Mexican garden, and I saw no other way to get them there. I bought them in California nurseries, rooted stock, in the dormant season, cut back the roots and branches, surrounded the former with wet sawdust, sealed them in a plastic bag to keep the moisture in and placed them in my bag with as much cleverness as I could muster. I slipped the offending twig into the pant leg of a folded pair of jeans and, on top of that, lay charging cords, a coat hanger or two, and a short clothesline and clips for hand washes, in the hope of confusing scanners and the persons operating them. I counted on bored airport customs officers at the entering airport thinking they were looking at something like a Chinese back scratcher or a long water color brush. I counted on other immigrants, let alone other travelers, not having the same needs I did and thus, over time, not training officials to look for and spot grape vines.

What were those needs? I needed Concord grapes, and I needed them because, as a boy, I used to climb up into a canopy of vines that grew ten or fifteen feet above occasionally boggy ground, between half-drowned New England pines and elms, beside a brook with dark water, more brown than black. There, perched in that web, we filled our mouths, fed like birds, sucked the juices out of the area between the skin and the core, swallowed the slippery center, then spit the tart skins out down onto the mottled shade below us.

When I was young and first in love, I associated Lilac blossoms with some vague, semi-anguished romantic longing—not far below which lay my intense interest in the smooth brown skin on the thighs of my sweetheart. But what does it mean now that recently, while in New England, I thrust my nose into a fullness of Lilac blossoms and found the scent too much like a cheap imitation of what I had known before? Still, in behalf of youth, I have to thank the English sea captain who is said to have brought the bush from Persia in 1695 and planted it in Portsmouth, New Hampshire—precisely the place where I had been visiting. Would the fragrance be different then, more appealing, if  the bush grew in my garden? Or I were young again? For the reasons given, I think I have no plans to re-assume criminal activity for the sake of the Lilac.

For many years, I lived in California, where I treasured, above all others, the Persimmon tree—of which I had two. In theory, one for us, and one for the raccoons—who, it turns out, did not observe the rules. I had to wrap tin flashing around the first four feet of our trunk and trim away all low-hanging branches to frustrate their intelligence and appetite. In the late fall, the Persimmons’ leaves were as brilliant as New England maples. When their leaves fell, the fruit became golden-orange Christmas tree ornaments hanging from the bare branches. I would place four or five on a white, south-facing kitchen windowsill, turning and testing them periodically for ripeness. I was quite aware that they represented a clean, important connection with my mother—who loved them—a connection that was otherwise fraught with complication and distance. I have a Persimmon tree, but it is under attack by an exaggeration of aloe vera plants (Northern Africa) and kumquats (from 12th century China). It is a gift from a Korean-American friend who decided I should have one when I told her what they meant to me. But something has happened. The leaves are wilting, I think because I left a long length of hose leading to the tree. Someone may have watered during the heat of the day and poured scalding hot water over the surrounding soil, that then seeped down onto the tree’s roots. A disaster for memory and connection.

Now, each morning, I reach a thumb and two fingers toward a grape that I think has the proper purple-blue color; and I put it in mouth. The juice is sweet, and still cool before the coming heat of the day. Several times, sparrows have landed unnaturally close to me during these feasts. I have never been able to get Mexican birds to eat from a bird feeder; and I don’t want them to catch on now and start eating my grapes. And so, instead of spitting out the skins, I collect them in one hand and, when I’ve eaten my fill, I toss them into the aloe vera jungle, where I think the birds will not go because of the danger of cats.

The grapes taste just as they did when I was a boy, and so I am happy. I can’t be a boy again, at least as far as my biology goes, but memory, while it is intact, is less affected by biology. And so I have this fruit that connects both beginning and end. The Concord grape appears to like it here in Mexico—as I do. This immigrant wealth—smuggled illegally into Mexico.

Tango, or Why I Love Mexico

Posted on by sterlingbennett

You might have thought I meant Argentina or Uruguay, but I didn’t; I meant Mexico. But you’ll say I could have mentioned Los Angeles, London or Tokyo, and that is true. I suspect there is a secret tango dancer in all of us, everywhere.

Last night my love and I had our second mass tango lesson. Well, it wasn’t mass. There might have been twelve students and those of different abilities. I just wanted to be sure you didn’t think these were private lessons. Two instructors drive over to our small colonial city once a month. I think I remember she was born in Argentina, then lived in Uruguay. I think he’s Mexican. She talks about the dance’s movement starting in the man’s brain but then being transmitted through the heart then the body of the woman. I was pleased to see two men dancing in the open session afterward. They clearly liked each other a lot and danced very well. Which shot her theory of the mind, heart and body, and the one-way male and female stuff. Which did sound a little sexist. Seeing the two men dancing together helped de-mystify tango for me. Two dancers, four ears and two hearts. And, of course, the feet—which are the crux of the matter.

D. and I have been dancing danzón for years. It is something like the tango, but more restrained. It is our passport to acceptance anywhere in Mexico. Let me explain. I look like a gringo. D. doesn’t like that term, and a Mexican would never call you one to your face. What I mean by it is my skin is kind of pink, my hair white and my eyes blue. D. is dark, with black hair. She could pass for someone from India, North Africa, Italy or from any Native American group in the U.S.—and of course from all of South America. On certain nights of the week, cities all across Mexico offer Danzón—a slow sensuous dance that, at the prodding of the Church, disguised its sensuousness in formality. It migrated from France through Haiti, Cuba and then to Mexico’s east coast, Veracruz, from which it spread like desire throughout the rest country. People look twice when they see us approaching, me in my Panama and black leather-soled dance shoes—or unprepared, semi-travel-scruffy, and even wearing a light backpack—and D. taller than most Mexican women and appearing somewhat exotic in both bearing and her ageless beauty.

We’re good dancers and we have about ten good moves. We try to spend them slowly; experienced dancer have thirty to forty. Fortunately, the second part of a danzón tune slides over into fast music and get you chance to add a little Cuban sauciness to the pageantry of the slower first part. This brings up the question of extroversion. Many more people stand around in the shadows watching than there are dancers; so that sauciness or restrained elegance requires a certain amount of self-confidance. Then there is just plain curiosity. Some people wear big grins when they see us move—the unlikely gringo and the fascinating South American woman; and they want to know where we come from and who we are. That is when we say, afterwards, that we are permanent residents of Mexico. My finest moment of vanity came when an upper-middle class Peruvian woman, after watching us dance, came up to me and asked me whether I was Cuban. But overall, spectators are drawn to D, who is far more interesting than my busy eyebrows or the color of my skin.

I should mention that Danzón is the dance of the people over fifty and of modest means; while tango appears to be the dance of younger people with more education and better earning power. Why, I don’t know. When we go to Argentina, we will see whether this observation holds. Both dance forms have rules, or dominant required moves. Danzón is based on a square step; tango is more linear and incorporates much walking. I suppose one could argue tango is something like danzón but in a straight line.

I was worried whether I could meet the spiritual requirements of tango. Foreheads touching, pelvises dangerously close, the woman doing her best to escape the man’s forward strides, which often reach between her legs—each dancer’s eyes half closed in tango reverence. Mind, heart, body. But the younger,male, less Argentine instructor—on occasion of the second lesson—emphasized listening to the music, moving with it and applying less male dominance, less mystique and more fun. That is all good for me, because D. is not a woman to be directed by my mind. She needs signs and pressures; she is not there to guess my whims. And this is not easy. She is an older sister, and I am a younger brother, therefore less developed in directive powers. And so I have to try harder than is my nature. Sometimes, we have spats as to who is doing what insufficiently. But as soon as we start listening to the music and fall back on the old delight we have in dancing together, the tension dissolves and we are—at least in my mind—in a rickety, wooden Argentine joint overhanging a river. A blind accordion player with multi-colored eyes is doing his best to make us weep to the wheezing strains of La Paloma, and we step, together, in a line, tango-correct, beside the current, then turn and come back, always parallel to the river—listening to La Paloma. And entering Argentina.