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.
Category: ~ Uncategorized
The Girl on the Scooter
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.
Josefina at the Church
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?”
Dropping the Big Rock
The neighborhood has been calm for two or three weeks. But it may not last. Apparently, the Policía Preventiva have a new tactic. It was triggered by a recent spate of robberies of local houses. One of them was a policeman’s house. As a consequence, the PP have put out a standing order of apprehension I believe for both of the main delinquents in the neighborhood. They (and their families) were informed that the two lads would be arrested on sight; and for that reason, they have disappeared from view. Lying low, as we used to say. Peace reigns, and it is a good feeling.
At the same time, the two stolen cameras have just been replaced, in slightly different places. They now sit on metal frames that make it harder to steal them. Though I put nothing beyond the capacities of the past camera thieves-guerrillas. Three policemen spent the entire day standing by as the cameras went up. The installers hammered little plaques into the walls next to the cameras that said, “City of Guanajuato. The PP monitors these cameras twenty-four hours a day.”
Experts from both the PP and from the installers chose one very poor place, in my opinion. The lads will, I’m afraid, figure it out quickly. You can enter the vacant lot right in front of us, walk through the unfinished building, stand in a door-window opening to the alley right over the vulnerable camera, and drop the largest rock you can carry right on top of it. I would say the camera had a week or two at the most before this happens. I am encouraging the installers and owners of this camera to embed it in a steel cage that can withstand the heaviest rock you can carry.
The aunt of one of the suspects emerged from her house and said she too would be interested in having one of the cameras on her house, and of course the various codes and apparatus that she assumed would be given to her for nothing, so that she too could contribute toward the security of the side alley from whence most of the insecurity derives. I believe the Ladies’ Detective Agency have told the installers and the PP to not even to dream of acceding to her wishes.
My brother in New Hampshire will be pleased that the two new cameras are up. He checks remotely a couple of times a day, to see what’s happening in his brother’s (me) environs. What he sees is, to say the least, in great contrast to life in his New England village of swishing SUV’s, green lawns and white clapboard houses with black shutters. Here he sees narrow allies (too narrow for cars) which are also stairs, rising or dropping between graffitied walls, everybody on foot, carrying children and groceries—a whole different economic world, inaccessible to the police cruiser with its flashing lights and the promise of law and order.
Sunken Children
A friend heard I wrote stories for children. I told her I had only written one—for my granddaughter when she was five years old. My friend asked if the story was in English. I said it was in English, Spanish, French, and Dutch. She asked me whether I would read the Spanish version at a Catholic shelter here in Guanajuato for children who were victims of various kinds of violence and lived temporarily under the protection of the Church. The reading hour was called the Beatrix Potter Sala de la Lectura, Hogar del Buen Pastor, Guanajuato.
The appointed day arrived. I printed out the Spanish translation of “Biff and the Sinking Coal Freighter.” Its title in Spanish is “Biff y el barco carbonero que se hundía,” translated by Lirio Garduño, a fine local poet.
With barely enough time, I practiced reading it through, repeating the technical words so I would say them correctly. I had never read the Spanish translation very closely—only to see if it had reached a good equivalency. My friend wanted my biography, too. I estimated the age level might be about eight. This is what I wrote:
Sterling Bennett, con apodo “Plata,” vive en Guanajuato capital desde hace 9 años.
Sterling Bennett, nickname Plata, has been living in Guanajuato for nine years.
Tiene una gatita negra que se llama Lilus Kikus que sabe más que él.
He has a female cat named Lilus Kikus, who knows more than he does.
Vivió por muchos años en California, en Los Estados Unidos, con su esposa D, que también sabe más que él.
He lived for many years in California, in the United States, with his wife D, who also knows more than he does.
Tiene una nieta de siete años que se llama L. Escribió este cuento para ella. L. también sabe más que él.
He has a seven-year old granddaughter named E, who also knows more than he does.
Tiene dos hijos, M y D, quienes siempre le ganan en ajedrez. Ellos también saben más que él.
He has two son, M and D, who always beat him at chess. They also know more than he does.
Ha estudiado en la más famosa universidad en Los Estados Unidos, que se llama Harvard, donde los estudiantes también sabían más que él.
He studied at the most famous university in the United States, called Harvard—where the students also know more than him.
Le encanta mucho tener esta oportunidad de leer este cuento a ustedes—quienes probablemente saben más que él.
He is delighted to have this opportunity to read this story to (all of) you, who probably know more than he does.
El cuento se trata de dos osos capitanes marineros….que probablemente……(???)
The story has to do with two bear tugboat captains…that probably…..(??)
Then I read the story to them, stopping frequently while my friend made sure they understood what I was describing.
There were four large round tables, at which were seated about thirty girls between the ages of four and thirteen. Most of them were on the younger end of the scale. One whole table of eight very young children almost immediately lay their heads on their table and appeared to be sound asleep—so quickly and so uniformly that it seemed to me that their action was about something else—an invoked escape stupor, a largely psychological exhaustion because of family crisis, an agreed upon behavior in unison to deal with overwhelming anxiety—a block against information they did not know or understand: a man, a gringo, too old to being doing anything, who was doing something they did not understand—storytelling, talking a little funny in their language, using words they had never heard and didn’t understand. What did these things mean: tugboat, captain, cable, sinking ship, Great Lakes, Erie Canal, locks, steam whistles, with each great wave pushing the coal freighter up onto the beach so it would not sink?
Even the fact that the two heroes were bear tugboat captains seemed unable stir them from their curious slumber. Nor the dramatic moment that all seemed lost in the story—until the second tugboat captain came out into the storm at night and helped push the sinking coal freighter up onto the beach. And he was a she—and a second courageous tugboat captain.
We got through it. The story ended. I tried to say something about the elephant in the room (bears?) and mentioned how almost half my listeners were like my black cat Lilus Kikus, who slept ninety-five percent of the time…and knew more than I did.
They wrote me letters—the little ones were roused for that exercise by the two attending women, impressive professionals and volunteers from the outside—drawing flowers and bears, inquiring now and then who I was and even how to write my name—Plata, as in silver, as in Sterling.
Pictures were taken and sent me. I will not show you their faces, because some of the children are in deep protection from various kinds of targeted abuse. I was going to show one child whose face was hidden, propped on her arms—but I have decided not to.
When I got home, I told my love that it was the least successful public reading I had ever done—and the most meaningful one. Since I, in the end, was another audience—overwhelmed by a story told by sunken children.
Me a Boat, My Cat the Sea
It is cold and rainy and gray in Guanajuato. The quilt is thick and warm. I listen to the rain. My black cat and I lie against each other, she spread out along my spine. I do not know how to describe this sense of comfort, me so large and human, she so small and animal, my breathing a sea, hers a boat—or is it the other way around?
Solstice Tribute to my Mother: 2011
There are three things I remember most about my mother. She was a crack shot–as they said then, loved rocks, and relished persimmons. While driving, she would say, “Bill, I saw a rock, stop the car! And my father–because he loved her–winked at me and stopped the car, and we got out and heaved the rock into the car. Now, at the solstice, in Mexico, at 7,000 feet, I have four persimmons on a west-facing windowsill. They are the large kind, flat at the stem, curving up and around to a point. They were the best thing at our old farm house in Sebastopol, California. The leaves had all fallen. The persimmons hung like ornaments. I loved looking at them. They connected me with my mother, my own glowing Day of the Dead tree. I picked them and let them ripen, placed them on the south-facing windowsill in the kitchen. At night the raccoons tried to climb the tree, slipping and sliding on the metal flashing I wrapped around the trunk. It is getting dark and cold right now. I watch the persimmons, glowing still. Reminding me. And soon I will eat them, one at a time.
Nut Cake
We sat in the Café Zopilote Mojado. How shall I translate it? The Café Wet Buzzard? The four of us, his wife and mine, sipping cappuccinos and nibbling at a rich, perfect flan. I had also ordered pastel de nuez. Nut cake. My friend, an esteemed veterinarian, said, “You ordered nut cake?” He frowned in bewilderment. “But you don’t even know what kind of nuts.” My friend is cursed with a literal mind, and by a need for certainty.
“No, I don’t know what kind of nuts they are,” I admitted, inviting his skepticism. I know my friend, and I was glad to diddle with his need for verifiable information. I watched him, and took the measure of his doubt.
“Aren’t you going to ask them?” he smiled. He was referring to the two young women who were waiting on us and preparing the food.
“I doubt they know what kind of nuts they are,” I said. His look of bewilderment grew. There was a short pause, while he shook his head.
“You don’t care what kind of nuts they are?” he asked, as if we were getting to something about my character. Like a missing gene. I said I didn’t care, I would accept whatever they brought me.
Eventually, the cake came. Along with my second cappuccino – a luxury I seldom allow myself. I spread out the accompanying whipped cream with my fork, then cut into the cake. There were no discernible nuts. There were many very small dark flakes of something slightly larger than the flour. The cake went down easily. I was quite happy.
“You didn’t get any nuts,” my friend observed.
I nodded, and added that I also didn’t know what kind of nuts I didn’t get. His wife and mine, meanwhile, were having a different kind of conversation. They were talking about how they had met us, the men. He had been studying at the University of California, Davis. They had found each other in a sociology class. Their conversation caught my friend’s attention, and he joined in. He had done post-doctoral studies in literature and sociology in order, he said, to make himself more attractive to women. At that point, our wives smiled, erected a gentle invisible wall, and resumed their own conversation.
He turned back to me. “To snare more beauties,” he said, with a wink and an understood jab-jab in the ribs. His wife clearly had been a beauty and still was in her sixties.
“I had trouble in the literature class,” he said. “But I loved literary criticism.” I had helped him read some Spanish headlines in the Mexican political weekly Proceso earlier in the afternoon. He had thrown up his hands at the first unfamiliar word he came across.
“It’s the same problem I had with poetry, only worse,” he said, referring to the Spanish. “But I loved symbolism,” he said.
I thought about that now. He loved symbolism, but not vagueness, and not any kind of delay in understanding, not puzzling out meaning, whether in poems, or articles in Proceso. I could not resist my lower nature. I said, when I had his attention, “According to the great German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, a symbol changes a phenomenon (Erscheinung) into an idea (Idee), the idea into an image (Bild), so that the idea in the image remains always active and unapproachable, and, though expressed in all languages, including art, can not be put into words. Erscheinung, Idee, Bild.” This was something I had learned in graduate school, and I wasn’t sure I understood it any better now, as I said it, than I had then.
My friend looked at me as if I had just denied the existence of gravity.
“A symbol stands for something else,” he said.
“That’s allegory – the direct knowledge of what is meant. But what we have here – the nuts – is nothing more than simulation.”
He looked at me, uncomprehending, resisting what I had said, but also with sympathy – for a deficiency in me only a veterinarian could sense.
I continued. “If there had been nuts, instead of merely dark flakes, they could have stood for something, like for the essential nature of this cake. That would have been allegory. Nuts stand for essence.”
I was fairly impressed by my discourse, so I continued. “You know, like when Melville refers to the wild watery loneliness of Starbuck’s life. Wild watery loneliness stands for ocean stands for Starbuck’s life. Double allegory,” I observed matter-of-factly.”
At that point, not quite sure about what I had just said, I took a little more whipped cream on my fork, cut down on the cake, lifted the morsel, popped it into my mouth, and slowly chewed. I took a sip of cappuccino.
“They’re symbolic!” my friend said, with a fierce smirk of certainty. “The flakes are symbolic.”
I smiled at him indulgently and did not pursue the matter. He was a man cursed with a literal mind, and nothing Goethe, Melville, or I could say was going to change anything. He had snared his beauty, he was still with her, he had a successful veterinary practice – and he knew a symbol when he saw one.
When he died suddenly a year later, from an unexplained and permanent drop in blood pressure, three unaccounted for older women showed up at his graveside memorial. They were dressed in fashionable black and, like his wife, were enduring beauties. All three stayed in the background, but mixed graciously, when the occasion arose.
My friend’s college roommate, a man of many chins, bathed in a pallbearer’s sweat, explained in muttered confidentiality who the women were. I watched them as the minister spoke inaccuracies and other well-deserved praise about my friend. I could not take my eyes off the women. How had he done it? What explained this cadre of attractive women that had come to mourn him? There was some explanation, some cohesion of significance that hung just at the edge of my grasp. For some reason, I recalled the conversation mentioned earlier. Us sipping cappuccinos in the Zopilote Mojado, The Wet Buzzard. And now I did not know whether I stood before symbol, or an allegory. All I could think, as I watched his casket sink down out of sight, and what I heard now in my mind, was that he had been right about the nut cake, and that it had represented something more than just nut cake. But beyond that, I could take it no farther, other than to say that he was a man who, in the end, had been blessed with a literal mind, and had represented something I understood but could not express. Least of all in words.
“Mariana”
Playing Around with Possible Book Covers