Tag: short fiction

Love Latin Style

Posted on by sterlingbennett

When I was a young man, I went through a period of doubt about myself, questioning whether I was the only male in our family who had difficulty approaching women he was attracted to. To gather advice, I decided to write my older cousin Dave, whom I knew the family considered–with clucking and raised eyebrows–something of a rake.

Ten days later, my answer arrived.

“Dear Cousin,

When our History teacher Mr. Plumley returned from four years in Mexico, he said things that made me uneasy. Also something had happened to his English, and he said verdad? when he meant, really? Frequently he qualified his statements with the phrase más o menos, which in English apparently means more or less. This qualifier left me confused as to how firmly he believed in the truth of anything he said. For example, in 1915 when Pancho Villa took reprisals against the village San Pedro de las Cuevas, shot the kneeling priest with his pearl handled pistol, and then sixty-two other poor villagers for an imagined betrayal, he was más o menos a paranoid homicidal maniac.

Mr. Plumley was a man who clearly knew things and said them right out, even if he had to qualify them in order to remain perfectly honest. In addition to that, he only ate avocados, Roma tomatoes, and tortillas, flat corn discs más o menos, which he bought in a Mexican market on the edges of the great declining industrial town of Lawrence, Massachusetts. This was a city we never went to because it was working class and did not figure our prep school’s view of what was relevant. He preferred gorditas, a somewhat thicker peasant tortilla, which he had delivered to his home by S.S. Pierce–each one carefully wrapped in pear-type wrapping paper, with a picture of a large-eyed Mexican woman, in a frilled folk dress, with light skin and a Betty Crocker likeness. Over her right ear, she wore what looked like an artificial rose, in full bloom.

None of this bothered us. But there was talk among the faculty, we heard, that Mr. Plumley, who couldn’t have been more than twenty-five, might have already acquired the romantic, that is to say, seductive habits of Mexicans. For that reason, they watched him closely when, at tea dances, he welcomed the girls from the neighboring girls’ boarding school Winston Road.

I attended those dances, and I too watched him very closely. Sophía was the half-American, half-Mexican dark-eyed beauty I waited to see, and I suffered greatly when on the occasion of the first dance after Mr. Plumley’s return, he shook her hand, looked her in the eye with sincerity and kindness and said, “Bienvenida, señorita. Cómo le va?” And she dipped as she had been taught and chirped, “Muy bien, Señor! Gracias!

I could only turn away, fighting for breath, and look out the window at the wet blowing leaves, the cold night and the awful darkness that was waiting for me on the walk home to my dormitory. Behind me, the phonograph played Guy Lombardi, the waxed oak floor began to squeak, and in the reflection of the window I saw Mr. Plumley reach out his hand and ask Sophía to dance.

It was clear what was happening, and I hoped that the other faculty could see it. Sophía’s young breasts–I had never seen breasts–were practically in Mr. Plumley’s experienced hands. Her green satiny dance dress, strapless, waited to be slipped down over her tan belly, and her lipstick lips, as soft as a real rose, were parted and breathing a softness that Mr. Plumley was in the very process of directing toward himself.

I forced myself to dance with Victoria, who asked me questions about American History. Did I know who had laid waste to Georgia in the Civil War? Instead of gliding into a step, she hopped. She was taller than me, blond, with braces weighing her teeth down so that her mouth stayed open when she finished a remark. How could she know that American history was nothing compared to Mexican history or to Mr. Plumley’s, not Sherman’s, march to the sea. His campaign, evident to me, was to ravage that landscape south of Sophía’s brown belly, an area I had difficulty imagining, but which I knew Plumley could, because he had been in Mexico.

Several times I came close to having to dance with Sophía during partner exchanges announced by the faculty hostess, Mrs. Thompson. Once, abruptly, Sophía stood before me again. I pretended I did not see her and chose Victoria, who immediately brayed out the question as to where I had heard about Plumley’s march to the sea and what exactly was it that he was intent on ravaging. I know Sophía heard, because she had not moved away, and her look was dark.

My face burned. I did not realize I had actually said the words. But then I did not see how Sophía could have understood the reference. I guided Victoria away in a few coordinated hops.

When the dance ended, we were good little gentlemen and helped the girls on with their coats, saving the scarves for last. I helped Victoria. Then we headed for the door and stepped into the cold night, with our sweaty bodies, saying good-bye, good-bye and hunching over against the wind.

I was just in time to see Mr. Plumley bow and, right in front of our eyes, take Sophía’s mole skinned glove and pretend to kiss it. “Gracias por todo, Señorita Sophía,” he hummed. And she cocked her head to one side, bobbed slightly, and said, in a clear, essentially adult voice, “Por nada, Señor!”

Stricken, I took that moment to slip past. Mr. Plumley stepped into a car with other faculty. I thought I saw a high heel enter just ahead of him. I heard the car door shut with a heavy click. I heard the purr of the engine and the tires squishing over wet leaves. I hurried forward into the dark. And I thought this must be what it is like to fall out of an airplane at night, without a parachute.

The night was wild. The bare limbs of the maples and elms slapped and rattled against each other. But I do not think I heard them. It was if I was under water, the sounds grew muffled, my steps were slow and labored. I had taken the long way home, chosen a path where I would not meet anyone, and was not paying attention. In the next moment, I hit the ground. I managed to tuck a shoulder just in time to break the fall, and rolled over to see what bastard had kicked my feet out from underneath me on this the most miserable night of my life.

Sophía stood a trip-length behind me, in her long blue coat, her white scarf, and her moleskin gloves. Her big dark eyes bore down on me. Her arms hung at her sides. She took two steps forward and kicked the bottom of my right shoe and then stood glaring at me.

I lay looking up, stunned in more ways than one. The sidewalk was empty. A gust of cold air pushed wet leaves against my ear. It blew a strand of Sophía’s black hair in front of her face. She pushed it aside. Then she dropped down on her knees. I could feel them against my ribs, on my left side.

“Plumley’s march to the sea,” she said, as if she were prompting testimony.

Another gust blew the same lock of hair back across her face. She reached up and this time tucked it back behind her ear. I lay very still, vaguely aware that there were stars visible on either side of her head.

She never took her eyes off me–like a surgeon, I thought, taking her time to decide where to make the first cut. She wriggled her knees deeper into my ribs. Then she leaned forward, placed her hands on either side of my head, swooped in, and kissed me on the lips. Without lingering. Just long enough to feel the cold tip of her nose. The strand of black hair had come forward again. She sat back and poked it behind her ear. Then she rested her hands on my stomach, just where it joined my chest, as if I was a piano and she was deciding what to play.

“I can feel your heart,” she said after a while, and I thought she looked pleased with her discovery. When I tried to rise a little, she moved her moleskin gloves up my chest and pressed me back down.

This was not like in the movies. Perhaps it was love Latin style, but I had no way of knowing. It did not seem dangerous. I could not help myself and smiled.

“Are you happy now?” she asked.

I nodded. In fact, I was enjoying my position very much. No más o menos about it.

I hope this has been helpful.
With love,
Your Cousin Dave”

The Down from a Thousand Geese

Posted on by sterlingbennett

My Great-, Great-, Great Uncle was half Chinese, half English. Chu Li was the son of a Portsmouth merchant and a warlord’s daughter. His parents were attacked by robbers on the high road and killed. Chu Li was still a very young man and went to live with his grandfather, the warloard. But not long after, he ran away from home because, he said in letters to those who knew him, there was more cruelty in his grandfather’s house than there was down on a thousand geese.

His grandfather sent out searchers and warned them that they would die if they did not find Chu Li and bring him back.

Meanwhile, Chu Li wore a disguise and sat on the bank of a great river, thinking about the beauty of the world and the pettiness of human beings. One day the warlord himself came to cross the river. While the group waited for the boat to ferry them over, the warlord asked the young man sitting on the bank if he would care to be one of his soldiers. The young man, who was in fact Chu Li, answered, after some thought: “If I declare my loyalty to you, what obligations will you have to me?”

The warlord waved his hand dismissively. “I will give you one thousandth of what I earn in a year, plus food and shelter and rice wine enough.

“But will you care for me like a grandson?” Chu Li asked.

The great man waved his hand, but did not leave. “I do not know how to treat a grandson so that he will not leave. I have lost my grandson and am looking for him. When I find him, he will not dare leave again.”

“Your lordship,” said Chu Li, “I do not think I would want to be the grandson of one so powerful, so impatient, so unwilling to learn.”

At that the warlord raised his sword and struck Chu Li on the shoulder with the flat of the blade, sending him rolling in the dust of the river bank.

When the boat crossed the river, a cable broke and horses and men were drowned. Only the warlord still struggled above the waves. Chu Li entered the muddy water, swam to him and held him by the beard like a goat. The water had washed away Chu Li’s disguise, and so his grandfather recognized him.

“I will throttle you like a goose when I have you in my hands again, you impudent excuse for a warrior!”

At which, the young man let him go.

“Why are you drowning me?” shrieked the warlord.

“I am not drowning you, old man,” said Chu Li. “I am only respectfully not interfering in my own coming punishment.”

At which the warlord hissed: “You will die by my hand,” and sank beneath the waves–heavier than the down from a thousand geese.

The Curve of the Earth

Posted on by sterlingbennett

One day, they say, a man my grandfather knew—actually it was my grandfather—fired up his tractor early and chained on the twelve-by harrow and started across the black earth, in his wake a cloud of crows swooping over the damp soil. He followed the curve of the earth, toward a distant boundary where, as the story went, maybe the lovers were below deck, he peeling her bathing suit off her brown body, exposing white, and curly hair, and sighs, the sea cocks opened, popped inward, and the tractor disappeared from the earth’s round, sailing over the horizon, leaving only the crows, and worms exposed to cries and sun and the sadness of young people’s death, lovers with flowers in their hair and flushed cheeks, dying into each other. That’s what he said, my grandfather.

There were other things, too. It was the summer Grandmother got up on the roof and refused to come down or speak until he promised to keep his hardness to himself, at least to ask first and to try thinking about her the way he first knew her, standing between the sunlight on the counter top and rows of preserved apple sauce, peaches, and cherries. And the flurry of snow, holly trees, and red berries. Didn’t he remember her with lipstick, her chestnut hair in a knot and her lower lip undiscovered, blue eyes unkissed. Did he remember her blue eyes, the sunlight, her white aprons, the arched silver buttons specially sown down her blouse?

When my grandfather disked or harrowed and I sat on the fender holding on, the sun circled about the field like a duck coming in to land–over near the bog with the rushes and herons and turtles and quiet newts. I shouldn’t tell you these things, he used to say, but how will you know if I don’t. You don’t want to be like me in every way.

Well, the dust followed us across the field, before the rains, making Arabs of us, or Indians, unrecognizable to ourselves, sailing across vast plains, lovers caught below with flowers, and preserves and hard things of joy and sighs and bathing suits that fell off just when the tingling reached boundaries, like the far end of the field, and disappeared, just at the curve of the earth.

I saw things drown in the furrows of that sea. Thistles, mugwort and tar, and small flowers, that didn’t know the ship was filling, too much in love, slipping bathing suits, the candles, ice cream, the preserves on the window sill, golden in the last of the afternoon’s sun.

My grandmother stayed on the roof for something like nine months. At least the whole summer. At least it seemed that way. Grandfather said she was giving birth to someone he didn’t know—to a woman who sang not only in church but also alone in the bath tub which she had placed outside at the edge of the garden, overlooking the field so that when he passed he would see her and remember what she could have been but never became, because of his intrusions at night when the fields slept their damp sleep.

When the nine months had passed and the wheat waved in the summer wind like the ocean, with us sailing before the wind on the red-seeded sea, my grandmother—who had not spoken since she first climbed the roof—all at once did speak to my grandfather when he had just switched off the tractor and stepped down over the hydraulics, walked out over the harrow and jumped ashore. She said, “William?” That was his name, and it was a question. He didn’t really hear her because of the seacocks and bathing suits and dust, I suppose. And she said it again, “William?” standing there in the claw-footed bathtub in the garden near the rhododendrons, naked, her hair up in a knot, and, as he tells it, with lipstick on her lips and the sun catching her chestnut hair, no longer twenty, nearer fifty, as I recall. And that was when it struck him, what a wonderful woman she was and he actually knelt before her and cried and apologized for his damn tractor and said other things about seacocks and dust and would she teach him to see her the way she had always wanted to be seen, and other things, a lot of it hard to understand after a world that curved into the distance all the way to the bog, with drowning flowers, thistles folded under, and the smell of tar weed and hope, and crows swooping down over the wake of his red tractor. That’s all I remember really—with variations. Memories that come around like the morning sun, and set, and are never ever quite the same, except that they’re always true.

Kneeling

Posted on by sterlingbennett

I am an unwilling participant in my own demise. In October 1969, for example, as an off-duty flight-deck officer, standing at the rounded forward edge of the aircraft carrier Ticonderoga. The ship is positioned fifty miles off the coast of Vietnam. The evening is warm, the sea is sleepy. The bow cuts through the water at a restless three-quarters speed – something like twenty-five knots. That in itself should have been a clue. Also, pain has made me careless. My first wife has left me for my best friend. I turn and see a green light six hundred feet away at the other end of the flight deck. I hold up my hand and block out the green. This lets me see the area around the light. The starboard catapult has launched an un-programmed flight, and it is coming right at me. I have less than three seconds before it hits me. I leap off the bow. The safety net catches me six feet down. The sound of the jet passing over my head stuns like lightening that is too close. The safety net fails, breaking away at one end, and I drop, head down, until I am ten feet over the Niagara Falls of the ship’s bow wave. I am wrapped in the net, hanging like a fly in a spider web, my arms pinned, unable to move, swinging back and forth, in the dark. No one will find me until dawn. If the net fails completely, the ship will drive me down and drown me under its eight hundred and forty feet of hull – until one of its two great barnacle-sharpened props, turning at 472 revolutions per minute, cuts me in half, and the wake turns red – visible to no one.

These are the things I see in the half light of morning, just before my black cat pats me once on my forehead, to let me know it is time to unlock the door and let her out.

On a recent trip to Manhattan, an air-conditioned bus rushes at me. I no longer hold up a hand to block out the green lights. I have gained more confidence in the world. I step back in plenty of time. It stops in front of me, and kneels with a hissing sound. That is, the whole front of the bus settles so that it is closer to level of the street. The bus driver – a perfect stranger, with lots of experience – has decided that I need help in reaching the first step. Never mind that I climb 203 steps, all a little irregular and some quite high, in order to reach my house in the Mexican city where I live.

But that is not the point. The point is that the bus driver has some reference, some paradigm through which he views me, which lets him see something I do not see. In short, he has determined that I have reached the Age of Adjustment.

This is not a laughing matter. I am not sure how much he sees. I sight back over the idea of him, and I sense there are things to be aware of, beyond those that are air-conditioned and go whoosh and kneel.

I step aboard. I am relieved that he did not think it necessary for the bus to lie down, so I could roll onto it. I stick my Metro Card into the driver’s scanner and am accepted into the bus’s agreeable safety. The bus rocks me gently over Manhattan’s small irregularities, over the suggestions of dark complexity that lie beneath the city. My head nods. I lean back in my seat. I am in a gondola, gliding through a late Venetian afternoon.

At about 82nd Street, the bus hisses again and, like an elephant, kneels, and I step down onto the germ-covered afternoon pavement. I walk the one remaining block. I wear my wide-brimmed hat, that blocks out the sun. I buy a Senior ticket to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The woman selling me the ticket, less than half my age – but old enough to be a flight-deck officer – hands me a pamphlet that will guide me through the labyrinth.

The publication is about the size of a large letter envelope. Two colors make up one side of the pamphlet. Two grey blues, in different values. One fairly dark, the color of an approaching thunderhead, the other a considerably lighter value, like a thunderhead still at some distance.

I do not know what has makes me do this, but at some point I begin holding the blue-grays of the pamphlet up and sight across them, to the paintings of the renowned nineteenth century English landscape painter Samuel Palmer. I hold them up against the Impressionists Manet, Monet, Cezanne, and Morisot. And then, in another room, I hold them up against Rembrandt.

A guard approaches me. She stares down at my blue-gray pamphlet, as if I might be holding a nine and a half inch knife or something that will cast a bean on the portrait of “Tito Reading,” by Rembrandt, 1658, on loan from the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna – and turn it all black.

She asks, “Can you see through it?”

No, I see over it.

But I do not tell her this. I smile and say, “It’s the pamphlet, available to us at the front door.”

For the most part, she is satisfied. Still, she gives me a last disapproving look, turns, and walks away – leaving me to my secret device.

The guards continue to track my progress. Suspicious remains suspicious. Other visitors stare at my motions. For a fraction of a second, they ask themselves, what is he doing? And then the question recedes, and they lean over to read the titles placed underneath the Great Paintings.

What I am doing is this. If you hold thunderhead grays in a way that blocks off the bottom part of the gold frame, then the eye and the brain see things that are otherwise denied to visitors to the Met.

Do not take my word for it. Try it, and you will see things emerge. A small smirking figure with a stem of grass between his teeth. Or something that moves, something that glimmers. Old oranges (the colors, I mean) answer the rumbling blue-grays of the pamphlet and come forward, secret, illegal, that have waited long-suffering through the years – for a friend.

I do not know what you’re thinking right now. Maybe a reluctance to believe what I’m saying, about this or anything else. Perhaps you are thinking my device with its grey blues will not save me, and you don’t want to be the one that has to tell me.

After all, what emerges when I block out distraction will not always whoosh and kneel to give me sanctuary. Or wink from within the Palmer, shift the grass stem from one tooth to the next, and smile and say hello, old friend.

Rather, you might be saying, in the end, the last rope holding the safety net pulls farther apart, and I drop the last ten feet through the soft Pacific evening, down before the Ticonderoga’s thundering bow wave, and – still unwilling – meet the demise that has been hurtling toward me all along. All I had to do was lift my hand to block out your friendly faces, and I would have seen it.

My Friend Tonio Kröger

Posted on by sterlingbennett

Recently, I ran into an old friend, Tonio Kröger. “Tonio Kröger” is the name of a short novel by Thomas Mann. Tonio’s father is a Lübeck patrician and the essence of North German purpose and propriety. Tonio’s mother is a southern dark-eyed beauty; she is passionate, musical, impulsive, and vague. She takes no positions on anything.

Tonio’s name comes from one of her brothers and is not northern and German enough. Tonio grows up learning how to see what is behind everything. He becomes a writer, a poet – and is therefore forever set apart from the blond, blue-eyed beautiful people who live robust lives of gain and satisfaction.

He wants his boyhood friend Hans Hansen to value him above all others. He is in love with Ingeborg Holm, who is more drawn to Hans Hansen. They – Hans and Ingeborg – are put off by Tonio’s brooding, sensitivity, his literary nature. Tonio becomes a sought-after writer. He scorns those who find themselves changed by his writing. He holds a long soliloquy in front of his Russian painter friend Lisaweta Iwanowna, who serves him coffee while he complains about not being one of those he wishes would love him – the blond and blue-eyed, who are popular and take riding lessons.

Lisaweta says, Tonio, I have listened to you go on and on, and now I am going to tell you what you are. I imagine her putting her hand lovingly on his shoulder. Du bist ein verirrter Bürger, she says. You are a member of the bourgeoisie who has gone astray. That is all she says, but the meaning is clear. He is a bourgeois, a city dweller, who has somehow fallen in among painters, writers, and musicians – at his own peril.

Lisaweta is a kind woman, a hard-working artist, and a friend. Tonio picks up his hat and leaves, unable to accept either intimacy or ironic truth. It is a great moment in modern German literature – Mann telling the truth to one of his own creations. A truth which ricochets in our direction. It goes to the question which secretly concerns most of us: To what extent are we artists? In which direction do we lean more – metaphorically – toward our orderly, somewhat melancholy patrician father, or more toward our passionate and beautiful southern mother? To what extent are we able to integrate both parts and achieve the creative tension between practiced persistence and dreamy passion?

Goethe speaks about true freedom existing only within a limiting structure. Nietzsche designates the two sides as the Apollonian and the Dionysian. Lisaweta describes it as der verirrte Bürger. The bourgeois gone astray, but still bourgeois. Writing fiction may require the unfettered inner voice – the storyteller – and the external sober adherence to clear grammar, economy of expression, cadence, and sound. The storyteller speaks from internal images, of things seen and actions taken. A painter uses years of learned technique to  reproduce a moment of recognition, to such an extent that the viewer of his art believes that he or she has glimpsed something known to be true and striking.

Goethe criticized the German Romantics for their lack of order and limits, for their adherence to mental suffering and excess. Yet, some of the German Romantics knew how to remove their protagonists from bourgeois restraints. The hero wandered away from town, skipping out on hard, boring work, and got lost, traveled through strange landscapes, and went through the stages of individuation, die Mutternachtseefahrt, the mother-night-sea journey, which both Jung and Joseph Campbell talk about.

After Lisaweta’s comment, Tonio leaves Munich and takes a trip north. He visits his childhood home, which is now a municipal library. At the hotel, a policeman demands his papers, suspecting him of being a confidence man from the south. It is an old Thomas Mann theme: the similarity between the writer and the criminal, perhaps because they both steal. Tonio carries no papers. In an effort to establish his identity, he takes out a manuscript he is working on. This act only increases the policeman’s suspicion. Still, Tonio manages to cross over to Denmark. He stays in a well-known seaside resort. He walks along the beach. He rejoices in the booming green and white of the sea. He appreciates the northern bourgeois non-writers he finds himself among. His scorn washes away. He is at peace.

A group of tourists arrives. They are boisterous and happy. By stroke of fate – at least so it seems – among them are his childhood loves. Hans Hansen – nearly twenty years later, still wearing his sailor frock and tasseled Imperial sailor’s cap. He is still blond and blue-eyed, still presuming in his rank as handsome and deserving burgher. And there – at least so it seems – is Ingeborg Holm, a little fuller, her bright blue eyes somewhat more squinty, but as healthy and lovely as ever.

From the safety of the dark terrace, Tonio watches them dance. He moves closer and takes a seat. They pass right in front of him, over and over, but they never see him, never recognize him. And therefore, nothing has changed. He loves them anyway but this time feels no pain, no suffering from being rejected. In bed, on his pillow, the boy in him still prays that she will come to him – but she does not. He whispered two names into the pillow,” Thomas Mann writes, “these few chaste, Nordic syllables which were synonymous with what he knew about love, suffering, happiness, life, deep feeling, and home. At the same time, he saw himself eaten up by irony and intellect, laid barren and paralyzed by knowledge…caught halfway between sainthood and rutting…and he sobbed, out of regret and homesickness.”

The next day he writes to Lisaweta Iwanowna. “I stand between two worlds, am at home in neither, and for that reason it is not easy. You painters call me a bourgeois, and the bourgeois are suspicious and want to arrest me…I admire the proud and cold, who venture out on paths toward demonic Beauty and who despise mere common people. But I don’t envy them. For if there is anything that can make a Poet out of a literati like me, it is this bourgeois love in me for what is human, alive, and common. All warmth, all that is good, all humor comes from this…When I write, I hear the sea churning, and I shut my eyes. I look into an unborn, shadowy world, which seeks order and expression, I see what looks like human forms waving at me, asking that I seize them and release them into Story. Tragic and ridiculous figures, or mixtures of both, I am very fond of them. But my deepest and most secret love is reserved for the blond and blue-eyed, the bright and vital ones, who are happy and kind and common.”

Thomas Mann redeems Tonio Kröger. But the question remains: Who will redeem us? To what extent are we the artist of der verwirrte Bürger, el ciudadano extraviado, the bourgeois gone astray? One part parched ordering patrician; one part feminine, fiery, passionate, and suspect. Does our own artistic grace lie somewhere on this continuum? Is that what we are looking for: redemption? I have not had answers to these questions. And that is why I was so happy to run into my old friend Tonio Kröger again, and Thomas Mann’s clear and passionate prose.

An Otter for a Hat

Posted on by sterlingbennett

Somehow, when I was growing up, I neglected to get the full story of how my mother met my father. You could ask why it wasn’t the other way around: how he met and pursued her. But it didn’t happen that way at all, and if you had known him, you would understand why. He was not a man who was capable of pursuit. He was a man who only knew how to love. And my mother, a profoundly private person – while still giving and generous to all who knew her — I think wished to protect that part of him from all scrutiny, including from her own children.

I knew it had something to do with an animal, but I didn’t know exactly which one. Because there had always been so many of them around our home and family. Pensive, conversational Rhode Island Red hens who, generation after generation, had the wisdom to get the roosters to perch on the outside, so the raccoons would take them first. A drop calf now and then, that grew into an 800-pound friend that always had to have her ears scratched. Goats that stood on the chicken house roof when it was time to milk them. And a pig or two that loved holes with water in them, so they could romp and splash and squeal and carry on in the heat of summer.

It was none of these. I know, because I asked her about them – albeit at twenty-five year intervals. But she was always cagey. She brought such inquiries to a swift conclusion. I’ll tell you when it’s the right time, she would say. Not now. Not while your father’s alive. But when he died, and she went on living, I forgot to ask again, and another twenty-five years went by. And then it was too late.

Not too long ago, an ancient aunt of mine died, at the age of 96, and her daughter found a book: “David Copperfield,” by Charles Dickens. With my father’s name written on the first leaf. In my mother’s hand, with the words: “To the man who loves me so well.” And then the date: 1962, when my father was also 62. And then my mother’s name: “Elizabeth.”

Yellowed and pressed between the pages of that novel – this much I do know, it was always my father’s favorite book – was a short manuscript written by my uncle Ed, my father’s devoted younger brother, who died many years before my father. At the top of the first page was a note: “For their children, when the time is right – and when I have Elizabeth’s permission.” And then the text, in the measured, if no longer steady, hand of a man who had already had more than one stroke.

This is the text of that manuscript, the one in our Uncle Ed’s trembling hand, otherwise impossibly neat, for us – our parents’ children – explaining how they met, our mother and our father, and told without our mother’s permission. The friend referred to, the “travel writer,” is none other than my own father.

“He was a man who looked good with a cat under his arm.
The trouble was his propensity for wearing them on his head. Some say this was because he lacked so much hair. He didn’t really do it that often. More on festive occasions. Once it was other things. A goose, white with an orange knob where the beak met the skull. Once an otter that had come up the stream, climbed the small plank dam, and entered the pond. It was a young one, ill with an infection, from a bite to the head by our domesticated Canada goose, who did not tolerate innocence. Mr friend, the travel writer, nursed the young otter, befriended it, coaxed it out of its wildness, and eventually – and this is the truth that I’m telling you, whereas before I took some leeway – so eventually this otter and my friend’s delights coincided, and the otter rode – his favorite place – with his hind feet splayed out, one on each shoulder, his forepaws across my friend’s bushy blond eye brows, and its warm belly draped over my friend’s bald and otherwise usually chilly head.

This is how my friend came to meet his wife Elizabeth, the great beauty of our town, whom men in suits and with education and shining cars and clever language traveled miles to visit and impress and court, to the extent she would let them.

It so happened that one day my friend went on a trip – to the neighboring large city, took the ferry, he rode the tram and, dressed in his best clothes – a shapeless tweed jacket, dark slacks, and the blue shirt with the least fraying around the edges of the collar – entered a well-known theater. Holding a lump of something in a raincoat he had brought along, he seated himself and watched “The Importance of Being Earnest,” by Oscar Wilde.

The play brought much laughter from the finely dressed, elegantly poised audience: the men with broad, confident, indulgent grins; the women with their long necks, strings of pearls, and hair piled stylishly but not too primly on their heads. If you had sat behind my friend, who was enjoying himself immensely and laughing along with the rest of the audience, you would not have been able to tell him from all the other women, because he too would seemed to have been simply another woman with her hair piled fashionably on top of her head.

It so happened that Elizabeth had gone to the same play in the same city, escorted by a man of stature, income, wit, and breeding, and was sitting two rows and directly behind my friend. The laughter had affected everyone, and people turned to each other, shaking their heads and remonstrating that the situations in the drama were just too funny. Perfect strangers exchanged warm, even defenseless smiles and appreciation – when a small cry appeared between the moments of laughter, punctuated the space between two spoken lines. A woman cried out, a muffled shriek I suppose it was, commotion and pointing, heads bending toward each other to confirm what had been seen – a strange animal climbing down from a man’s head and then reappearing, peeking backward over the man’s shoulders, first this side then the other and once, it seemed, looking straight at Elizabeth, who, it turned out, loved animals and especially otters.

Her escort snorted and said, Did you see that? That man is very strange. The things people do to get attention. Parrots on their shoulders, and so forth, but this is really obnoxious. At the intermission, Elizabeth and her escort – his name was George and I am told he is not a bad fellow – moved toward a table and bought wine – red wine for Elizabeth and white wine for George, and watched people and talked. But the whole time Elizabeth watched for the man with the otter. She did not see him, nor did she see him after the play. At the posh delicatessen where the after-theater crowd went, she didn’t see him either. On the ride home she didn’t mention him. She listened to George. She tried to pay attention to what he was saying but she found it difficult. She declined to go to his home in the country not too far from our town. She did not return his call the following day and put him off for several days with various excuses that would seem plausible and in a manner that she could barely explain to herself.

George fell silent, punishing her, she was sure. She was relieved. Again she did not know why. The following weekend, declining all invitations, she spent time by herself. She took walks, visited an old schoolmate, a woman who was an artist and a very good one, and they enjoyed themselves, drinking a whole bottle of Merlot, sat in mottled sunlight, listened to the rustling poplars, walked together in the growing shadows, and finally parted.

Elizabeth strolled through the town and past the local theater group, who were performing Shaw’s “Man and Superman,” and on an impulse she went in. The play was nearly over. She asked if she could just watch the last bit of it and was given permission. The actors were not professionals, and yet, as is often the case, they seemed fresher and more alive. They delivered their lines with great skill, and she regretted not having come earlier. She was glad to be alone, enjoying the play, the humble building and stage, the phenomenon of small town drama, and being with the kind of people who could relish Shaw and not have to wear suits and pearls and drive shining cars and make glittering conversation.

In the middle of this appreciation, this moment of thankfulness, she felt a tug on her jeans. She was sitting in the back row on the right, on the center isle. She looked left, then down. An otter stood on its hind legs with its front paws on her knee, and the friendly bright curious face was looking up at her and seemed, she thought, to be smiling at her.

She sensed the person coming toward her. I’m sorry, he whispered, reaching over and lifting the otter and cradling it in under his arm. I’m really very sorry, he whispered again. You really don’t have to be, Elizabeth whispered back. I saw you in San Francisco, I think.

The Importance of Being Earnest? he said. It was not only a question, it was the beginning of a conversation, a fact not lost upon a large woman in the row in front of them, who turned part way around and said, Please!

Elizabeth stood up and walked out through the door to the lobby, with my friend and the otter, under his arm, following. He, my friend, and the otter, too, Elizabeth told me later, seemed to be smiling the same smile as they approached her.

And Elizabeth said something very simple and truthful. She said, You look good with an otter under your arm, and from that moment on they were together and have, I can attest, carried many kinds of animals under their arms and, when the occasions warranted, on their heads as well – and only with less frequency when they began to carry their children in those places, who – I have always been convinced – learned that position through the imitation of animals they had seen riding there before them.”

That was my uncle’s text. But story is not quite over. Years after the first stroke, that took my mother’s speech, and after many succeeding smaller ones, that paralyzed her right arm and shoulder. And long after she appeared to no longer recognize her children — including me, it seemed, I was summoned by the nursing home staff to my mother’s side. It was about 3 AM on a Monday morning in April, in the midst of our apple blossom period. It had been no more than a month since my Uncle Ed’s manuscript had come into my hands. My mother lay on her back, shriveled and small and, as far as I could see, uncomprehending.

I sat with her, holding her good hand, which she held in a fist, I supposed, because of another small stroke. I cupped it with both my hands, and we sat that way, watching each other – her eyes clouded from cataracts, mine from lack of sleep. I must have dozed off at one point. I felt a tugging, and I brought my head up with a jerk. She was trying to move her lips, and then whatever effort she was about became – unmistakable – a smile. And her good hand, her left one, opened slowly, as slow as dawn, as slow as apple blossoms in the hills around us. Her hand opened and my cupping hands opened with it.

And on her palm – that leathery center – lay a small, smooth, carved stone animal – an otter – no bigger than half a thumb. I picked it up and held it and turned it, and then did as I had been trained over so many years to do – through imitation, I agree – placed it on the top of my own balding head and kept it there to her quite clear delight and toothless old smile – until, after some minutes and tugs at my hand to show her pleasure, her hand began to relax in mine and her old smile – I mean the one I’ve always known –changed, and she grew serene. And I returned the otter to her palm, pressed it into its rightful place, and watched as the old good hand slowly closed back over it, until her eyes – still watching mine – were calm, and finally still.

Dawn

Posted on by sterlingbennett

When my first wife died, I told my father I didn’t think I could ever love anyone again. He, in turn, out of habit, I suppose, must have told my Grandfather Edwin. My grandfather was older than old, and very senile. He could still walk about and speak a few sensible words, but otherwise he didn’t really exit at all. Occasionally I spent the night with them –my father, my mother, and Edwin – to extend the visit, and be with them just a little bit longer. Because I was very lonely.

Early one morning – it could not have been five o’clock – Edwin ghosted into my room and lay something on my chest, already heavy with grief. Then he brushed a boney hand over my forehead and sailed away, vanishing into the pre-dawn darkness, like a ship of sail setting out to sea.

At that point, he had me wide awake. I turned on the light and found he had given me a volume of a diary, bound in leather and brittle with age. A faded maroon ribbon marked a page that was dated September 18, 1925. The script was a tired black ink, the small careful flowing script of the mining engineer that he had once been. I squinted my eyes, furrowed my brow, and began reading.

“Yesterday was grey and rainy. In Belgrade, long before any sign of dawn, holding my breath against the combined bite of brown coal and unclean steam, I boarded the Oostende – Istambul Simplon Express, and stumbled immediately toward the dining car. The train was beginning the second or third day of its run north, I was not sure which. I was only hoping that its supply of thick dark coffee had not been exhausted.

There was only one passenger sitting in the dining car. He was a man like me in his middle years. He nodded immediately, with a friendliness that two solitary travelers sometimes grant each other, so that I continued in his direction, shaking out my raincoat as I went. I hesitated, as if the possibility existed that I would sit at my own table, next to my own dark window. But he gestured at the seat across from him and in an accented German – on the assumption I suppose that I was on my way to Berlin – said, “Sit here, my friend, and we will wait for the dawn together.”

The night waiter brought me my dark, thick Turkish coffee and sweet Greek rolls. My new acquaintance, a Hungarian and by coincidence also an engineer, continued with the second half of a bottle of a good German Riesling. We talked about our children, our careers, our youthful dreams, and as the first grey of dawn revealed the dark hills on the left side of the train – with the help of a second bottle of the German Riesling – we moved on to the most painful loves we had ever known.

His was a seventeen-year old beauty who was a gifted painter and was bound for art school in Budapest, and was the kindest, sweetest, most gentle and joyful person he had ever known. She had begun coughing during their encounters, in secret spots known only to them, in the meadows and woods, and as time went by, she grew paler and paler, lost weight, and in a year was dead from tuberculosis. After they buried her, on a brilliant Indian summer day, at the side of a quiet lake, in a clearing surrounded by ancient beech trees, her mother led him back to the house and indicated a large flat package that Sophie had intended him to have.

He returned to the university on the night train and sat down in his small student room. He placed beeswax candles, two of them, one on each side of the package. When dawn came many hours later, he carefully removed the common string and thick brown paper, and found a portrait of himself and Sophie, together – golden, young, and glowing in a way that kept him staring, until the first rays of morning sun rose up and flow over the edge of the frame.

“Just the way the sun has found our table at this very moment, my patient friend,” he said.

At that, the conductor entered the dining car, came half way to the table and said somewhat conspiratorially, I thought, “We’re here.” My acquaintance stood up, left a large bill on the table, gathered his coat and small canvas traveling bag, shook my hand graciously, and left the car. The Soplon Express slowed, shuddered almost to a stop, then immediately glided forward again, accelerating, as smooth as the smoothest European technology.

From the window next to the table, on the left side of the train, I saw him descending on a path toward a village with an onion dome church, some distance below the level of the rail bed, still un-touched by the sun. On the trail, climbing toward him, I saw a lovely poised woman reach both hands out to him, then hold him in her arms. Two children held his legs, one on each side. And while the angle of my view still made it possible, and by learning forward and pressing my head against the far edge of the window, I saw him turn and wave at me, with the same cordiality he had offered me when I entered the dining car, in that cold dark period of night before dawn.”

I turned off the light and closed the diary. In the grey light outside beyond my window, I could see Edwin standing motionless in his pajamas, barefoot, where it must have been quite cold, staring at something he appeared to be seeing. Each time that day, when he drifted by, he stopped and turned toward me and raised his bushy white eyebrows, as if asking a question. And each time I nodded my head and said, “Yes, I think I understand. Yes, I think I know why.”

A week later, he lay down and died, out on the lawn, in the same spot, in the cold of the early morning. They closed his eyes, but it took some time before they could make him lower his brows. For a while, I thought they had been raised for my benefit. But as the years have gone by, I have come to think that, in the moment, his brows might have been asking a different question, one directed toward himself, or perhaps toward someone he had loved, and still loved – first during his life, then right on into that long period when he no longer existed, but had not yet stopped living.

Underground Amphibians

Posted on by sterlingbennett

Guanajuato, Mexico has a lovely rare book library in the Jardín Reforma, mildly rococo, smelling of bee’s wax, with wooden balconies for book access. It is reminiscent of the eighteenth century, oval Duchess Anna Amalia Library in Weimar, Germany, before its devastating fire in 2004. It is part of La Dirección de Archivos y Fondos Históricos (DAFH), The Office of Historical Archives and Collections, of the University of Guanajuato. To touch a book, you must wear sterilized gloves.

My neighbor works there as an archivist. She once asked me to help them translate the titles and tables of content of old German books, to facilitate their cataloging. I dropped in unannounced, so they had to run around and assemble the books I was to work with. This took a little time. While I waited, my eyes fell on a folder that lay on the great oak table in front of me. To pass the time, and being by disposition nosy, I opened the folder a little and looked inside.

I found several yellowed pages of an article that had been submitted to what must have been an earlier version of the Chopper, the city’s thin weekly for history, news, and cultural events. The title of the first page read “Anfibios Subterráneos,” “Underground Amphibians.” A neat pencil annotation gave the date 1945, followed by question mark–which I thought might apply to the subject, or to the reliability of the date.

After performing my German translations, I asked my neighbor the archivist if I could photocopy the article. What follows is a rough translation of a text written by a Miguel Ibarra Chico, a state mining archeologist whose job had been to explore and map the 300-odd kilometers of tunnels and shafts that lay below the municipality of Guanajuato. This is his text:

“José Luis María Finbar was the name of a miner who works at the Canadian-run mine Las Torres, in Calderones, a few miles up above La Presa. His ancestors lie in the quiet, shaded English miners’ graveyard that looks down from the bluff above Real del Monte, on the outskirts of Pachuca. Finbar is the man who was once fired for bringing a turtle to work.

Tall and broad-shouldered, with a spot of white in the front of his red hair, he confessed that he put the turtle in his lunch bucket and brought it out for the break at approximately four in the morning, one quarter of a mile or 402 meters below ground. The temperature at that depth–although it was January and wintry on the surface–was 45.5 Celsius, or 114 degrees Fahrenheit, even with the pumped-in ventilation.

The turtle, still young and as long as a thumb, grew active in the heat, crawled through the muck toward the shaft head and the horizontal blast hole Finney had just gotten through drilling with the company’s very expensive Hendy caterpillar drilling rig. The miners–six of them, seven of them including Finney–watched the turtle’s progress. No one moved. It was the break, after all, and it was quiet, except for the hiss of the carbide lamps on their helmets. All seven beams focused on the turtle as it crawled forward.

At such depth, miners can form quick attachments to living things, and so they were concerned when the creature found respite from the heat by crawling into the blast hole.

For some minutes, they sat on their buckets and chewed on their cold aguacate and frijol tacos, until one of them said, “Finbar, you’ve lost your turtle.”

Finbar approached the hole, some seven centimeters across, took off his hardhat, got on his hands and knees in the muck, held the reflector of the carbide lamp and the hardhat up to the hole, and looked in behind it. He saw nothing. For all he knew, the turtle had crawled to the far end of the drill hole. He estimated it could be three meters away from him. It was four fifteen in the morning. They were to back out the driller and set the charge and be ready to give the signal–a simple electric bell–at four thirty.

The shot setter Francisco Ramirez unwrapped the charges. He looked at Finney. “What are we going to do?” he asked. Finney studied the hole, without replying. The turtle was his friend, and he wasn’t going to blow it up just to get at the silver. The other six miners looked at Finney. They were leaving the decision up to him.

Francisco Ramirez sensed the drift things were taking and began carefully repacking the charges in their brown waxed paper and lay them gently back in their wooden box. The miners picked up their lunch buckets. Finney backed the driller away from the shaft head, making them all cough from the fumes. At the proper distance, he shut it down.

A light came down the shaft. The Canadian supervisor asked, “What’s going on, Finbar?”

Finney didn’t know what to say. It was hard to think in the heat, standing in the warm muck, turning things over in his mind. The other miners respected life below ground. Sweat lines streaked their dust-covered faces. They could barely hear the supervisor’s voice. The roar of the driller had deafened them. They dreaded what was about to happen.

“Finbar!” they saw the supervisor mouth.

To Finbar, the priorities were very clear. A frown covered his entire forehead. In distress, and showing the whites of his eyes, he bellowed, “The turtle is in the drill hole.”

The supervisor had jowls. He stared at Finney, trying to understand. He spoke slowly. “You have twelve minutes to set the charge,” he said, holding up a finger.

The other six miners’ lamps turned toward Finney, who was considering his choices. Ursula and he had no children. She worked at the Presidencia. Her job was secure. She would be angry and make the house chilly for a week, but she loved him and would stand by him. He could kill the Canadian supervisor. But that broke the commandment about life below ground. Still, in the heat, he saw it as an option. But the man had three children, and he couldn’t blame them for being gringos. Or, he could feign mental illness. He could drop in a faint. He could pretend a heart attack.

The supervisor followed him, stumbling back over the hoses, through the muck and debris, to the shaft head. The bobbing lights of the other six miners came along behind. The turtle had not emerged, and Finbar made his decision. He turned around and walked past all of them, with a strong step, and accepted the supervisor’s pronouncement to the back of his head that he was fired, and wasn’t it stupid–all for a pinche tortuguita, a little goddamn turtle.

A new light bobbed toward them, passed Finney in the tunnel, and stopped in front of the supervisor. There had been a phone call, said the new arrival. On a level below them a small turtle had come walking out of a crack in the shaft head, and did the supervisor know what to make of it?

The supervisor knew exactly what to make of it. Finney’s self-propelled Hendy driller had drilled into a void of some kind: a geological fault, an ancient landslide, a washout millions of years old, or an mine shaft from earlier times, for which any record had been lost. The void, through which the turtle had passed, vented out onto the working level below Finney’s level. That meant that, if the shot had been fired, and if the blast had not been burdened by solid rock around charge, Finney’s shaft level, the one below it, and maybe one or two above it could have collapsed, crushing god knows how many men, and taking all kinds of machinery with it.

When Finney stepped out of the lift cage and out under the morning stars, he was greeted by miners from the new shift, who all took off their hard hats and looked at him with stunned expressions. Word had already spread, somewhat altered, that Finney’s turtle had saved them from being buried alive. Finney interpreted their looks as censure and walked straight ahead toward the dressing shed. When he came out, he found his supervisor standing in front of him. The supervisor held the little turtle up for Finney to see. More and more miners, the new shift and now most of the old shift, had gathered.

The supervisor–impressed by his audience–held a speech in which he extolled the value of turtles in mine shafts and how it would be the company’s policy from now on to introduce small turtles into blast holes to explore for voids. The assembled miners nodded their heads politely, but then shifted their eyes to see Finney’s reaction, which was not long in coming.

Finney reached out for his turtle, put it in his lunch bucket, clicked the top, turned around, and marched up the hill toward the bus stop, but not before exclaiming that there were enough living things at risk underground already, and that they didn’t have to add defenseless amphibians who were innocent and would be sacrificed by the thousands unnecessarily, and that the company should map the mines better and study the void phenomenon by making use of scientific breakthroughs which would be able to look through rock and see the dangers.

No one knew what he was talking about, but after a week had passed and Finney had calmed down, the company operating officer, recognizing a leader of men when he saw one, went to Finney and Ursula’s green cantera–rock–house in Calderones and hired him back on as a supervisor. Finney accepted but only on the condition that the company raise the wages of all the miners four pesos per week and renounce any plans for the exploitation of underground amphibians, including snakes, mice, and wild birds other than canaries.

From then on, miners under Finney’s supervision called him La Tortuga, the Turtle. That year, he was awarded the Miner of the Year Award by the president Manuel Ávila Camacho himself, in the capital’s Zocalo, before thousands of miners who had been bussed in by PRI officials, who hoped to co-opt Finney into serving their political ambitions. When interviewed by the press, Finney observed, when asked about it, that he had little interest in running for president of the country as long as miners continued to risk their lives unnecessarily below Mexico’s hallowed ground for still below-subsistence pay. At which point, all of the major political voices, not just the PRI, warned that La Tortuga was a populist who threatened the nation’s institutions and stability and was therefore an insult to the dignity of Mexico.”

That is the end of the text. I returned several times to Guanajuato’s rare book library, to help with the volumes in German. The last time, I found a folder with a picture of Finney standing with his three children–late arrivals–at the side of a large tortoise, at the León zoo. Underneath it, there was a second clipping, bordered in black, about a failed blast in the Las Torres mine, which vented into a unknown void and dropped six meters of peña, bedrock–the length of four railroad cars–on twenty five miners and their supervisor, one José Luis María Finbar, also once known fondly as La Tortuga.

Smart Women

Posted on by sterlingbennett

Ponciano is the head of the demolition crew the city hired to remove the seven-story building that is across from the Café Nada. The Café Nada is where I write each morning. Ponci is married to Lupita, a lovely solid Otomí woman with black eyes and amber skin. She is humble, but not common. She doesn’t read books, but she reasons better than most who do. Her husband Ponci reads, but to no great advantage, according to her. Pouring through the thoughts of people who are not particularly intelligent, she will say, serves little purpose. They use too many “that’s” and not enough “is’s.” That’s how she sees it.

Ponci has read journals on how to drop large buildings in their footprint. The city – a UNESCO Heritage Site and considered the Heidelberg of Mexico – was not interested and preferred to spend many hundreds of thousands of pesos running jackhammers day and night and driving the citizens crazy. But in this case, there was a deadline, and the building, made of concrete and rebar, was not coming down fast enough. The city would lose a contract with La Bohême, a slick restaurant chain for people with money, if the site wasn’t cleared and ready for construction by October 1st. It was already September 15th. The mayor said they would not pay the second half of the city’s contract with Ponci if his crew had not brought the structure down by September 21.

Ponci said he would stop right then, if they weren’t going to pay. The city said they would prosecute him for breach of contract. Ponci said, renegotiate with La Bohême. The city said, you demolish the building, we run the city. Ponci received a letter from the State Government. They were sending inspectors to see if Ponci was complying with state-prescribed safety measures. Ponci replied, they knew perfectly well there were no safety laws, and he would make a citizen’s arrest of anyone who entered the demolition site without his permission. The mayor said, by telephone, there was no such thing as a citizen’s arrest, and he would send the police to preserve order. Ponci replied that the police would need a warrant and show probable cause before stepping on the lot. La Bohême sent a letter to the city newspaper saying they were looking at other sites. That was the 18th, three days before his deadline.

Ponci also read the newspaper, and so, one evening after work, he saw the La Bohême letter. He read it aloud to Lupita. “Why would anyone give a restaurant chain a French name?” he asked. Lupita said nothing. Ponci picked up one of his journals. Lupita studied him from across the kitchen. He looked up. Her face was as beautiful as it was when he met her at a church dance twenty years ago. She was heavier but perfect in all respects.

She left the room. She returned carrying a box. She set it down on the table, in front of him. The side of the box said detonadores, fuses. He leaned forward and turned back the lid. He looked inside with intense curiosity, as if he didn’t know what it contained. He looked slowly. Lupita was smarter than him. He needed time to catch up.

Finally, he said, “You think we can do it?”

“We can do it, Ponci,” she said.

“How many do we need?”

“People?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“You and me. Maybe get Carlos and David. That’s enough. It’s just getting dark. We can work till dawn.”

He looked at Lupita. He revisited the fact that she usually knew what she was doing. He got up and held her wide, soft body against him. And then he said, “Okay, I’ll make the calls.”

“But don’t we have to drill a lot of holes?” she said, softly in his ear.

“I’ve already drilled them,” he said, back into her ear. “I told the men it was for practice.”

She held him at arm’s length, studying him again.

He winked at her.

At the first gray of dawn, the building was wired – two sticks of Simplex per drill hole, time-delay blasting caps set to weaken the lower columns first, total detonation time six seconds, each explosion timed by a fraction of a second to precede the one above it. All the wires led to a firing station out by the road. There would be no test shot. There would be no consultation with the city.

They told Carlos and David to stand by the detonator box at the firing station. Ponci disconnected the trunk wire to the box, so there would be no mistakes. The red detonation button was recessed. That was a further precaution.

Ponci and Lupita walked through the building one more time.

“You’re good at this, Ponci,” she said. “Maybe reading the journals is a good thing.”

“You’re a wonderful woman,” said Ponci. “You’re smarter than me in just about everything.”

They were on the ground floor, in the middle section.

“Show me how you connect them,” Lupita asked. “All I did was push in the charges.”

Ponci nodded. He disconnected the wiring to one of the foam-covered charges.

“Maybe you should disconnected this whole section,” said Lupita. “Just in case.”

Ponci looked at her. They didn’t really have much time, but he trusted her thinking. He untwisted the wire that connected the entire middle section. He came back to the Lupita. He showed her how to do a connection.

“You try,” he said. “You can do it with ease.”

In that moment, Carlos, out by the road – understandably tired – stumbled on a stray piece of escombro, and went down. The wire that had been disconnected from the detonator box as a precaution shed its security cap and fell back against its contact. Carlos landed on the box. His imitation Swiss Army knife, in a pouch on his belt, angled perfectly into the recessed firing button and depressed the button to the required depth.

Like any early morning mining blast, the rolling shot rattled the city – except that it went on for six seconds. And it was above ground. The structure melted, kneeled, and came down, perfectly, on its footprint. And then everything was quiet again, and the city seemed to keep on sleeping.

A thunderhead of cement dust billowed upward and out. Carlos and David staggered toward the site, gaunt-eyed from embarrassment and horror. They had broken the most important rule of all, which was not to kill the two finest people they knew.

They stopped, swaying, and peered through the dust. The bricks and concrete slabs, with their twisted and snapped rebar, had fallen everywhere – except in the middle of the building, where, inexplicably, the lowest – in the center – room, with thicker walls and ceiling, was still standing. Through an opening, they saw two dust-covered people holding each other, kissing, alternately laughing and crying and, finally, because of what had happened to their ears, shouting endearments to each other too private for anyone to hear.

Which is when Carlos and David decided to go home and sleep. They weren’t paid enough to answer to anyone for what they had done. They also didn’t want to be there when the police arrived. And the mayor, and the newspapers, and, soon enough – because that’s the way things went – the agents for La Bohême, safety inspectors who might actually exist, and – worst of all – the powerful governor of the State, who might or might not cite them all as criminals, depending on how the event turned out to reflect on him.

Skin Doctor

Posted on by sterlingbennett

On the last Thursday in July, I went to the dermatologist. She is the wife of an important academic leader, whose picture appears frequently in the local newspaper. He is known for speaking for a long time at inaugurations, openings, dedications, and other mind-numbing events. His wife, my dermatologist, has an office in the gentile section of the Old City. It is an area that reminds me of the Dahlem district of Berlin, with trees, fine buildings, and the lingering air of empire. A receptionist of great beauty, with painted eyebrows and a blush of rouge, greeted me. With reserve. Her eyes took in my face, my hands, and the spot on the end of my nose. She asked me to be seated. A thin woman with a rash on her face moved to the far end of couch. I nodded to her, thanking her. She smiled, sadly.

In a while, the thin woman with the rash was summoned to enter the doctor´s office. The door closed behind her. In five minutes the door opened and the thin woman came out, with tears in her eyes. She handed the lovely receptionist with painted eyebrows a slip of paper. The receptionist read it, then gave the woman a stern look.

“You are to take three kinds of creams.” She spun around in her swivel chair, leaned over, and opened a low cabinet.

Tubes of medicinal creams, some in boxes, some not, fell out. The revealed patch of skin between her blouse and skirt was as pale as a baker’s compost. A little east of her spine, I saw a tattoo of a beetle. It was ascending. Its right side had an extra leg. That made seven in all. I thought the extra leg might have been for luck. Except that the area around it was red and inflamed. She rooted around in the cabinet, this lovely beetle-backed receptionist, with the painted eyebrows. More tubes of cream, boxed and un-boxed, fell out. She snatched up one tube, then another, and finally the third, which had lain hidden at the bottom of the pile, and in back.

She spun around again, wrote something on the slip of paper, and said, “That´s 3,000 pesos for the cream, 500 pesos for the consultation. 3,500 pesos in all. Read the doctor’s instructions carefully.”

She placed the three boxes, so that they were parallel to the sides of the desk, and exactly the same distance apart. I divided the total charge by ten, to get an estimate, in dollars. The thin woman with the rash stood as still as stone. The lovely receptionist spun around again, showed her beetle, and shoveled the rest of the spilled creams back into the cabinet, drumming them against the metal rear panel. I started to count the beetle’s legs again, but it was too late, and she spun back around.

“I only have 500 pesos, “said the thin woman. “I don´t have any more.”

“Fine,” said the receptionist. She scooped up the three boxes, spun around again, and with intimidating force threw the three boxes of creams back into the cabinet. The thin woman hesitated, then lay ten 50-peso notes on the desk, one on top of the other, askew. Perhaps to prove it was all she had. The receptionist snatched them up and put them in her purse, then sat Katrina-like, Day of the Dead, as if the transaction were over. The thin woman, her eyes glistening with tears, turned and fled out the door and into the hallway.

I stood up, unsure.

“Sit down, “the lovely receptionist snapped.

I sat down. A buzzer buzzed. “You may go in,” said the receptionist.

The doctor met me at the door. Her skin was gray with patches of pink. Her hair fell to her shoulders and was dyed black, with streaks of ultramarine blue. I found her exceptionally attractive. Her diagnosis was grave.

“You have to burn all that damage off your face. You will not be able to sleep much at all for two weeks. Your face will be red and open sours will appear. Slice open five centimeters of an aloe spear. Smear the juice all over. Generally speaking, there is no relief. Each of the three tubes I´m prescribing costs $130 US dollars. I will give you a break on the visitation. 450 pesos. That will be 4,545 pesos. Please pay the receptionist. She will give you the creams.”

I divided by ten. She began writing out the prescription and instructions. I asked if I could use the bathroom. I locked the door behind me. I peed a pitiful nervous stream. I opened the window and climbed out. I walked down an alley. As I turned the corner, I saw the receptionist in the clinic door. She held a piece of paper. I broke into a run. I was just getting my stride, when she knocked my feet out from underneath me. I landed hard on the pavement, face down. She sat on my back. She reached the paper around and held it in front of my face.

“You should have a little more confidence, “she said.

She let me turn over, but still sat on me. Each of her exposed knees – lovely in shape – had a red caterpillar tattooed on it. She held the paper in both hands, in front of my face. Too close for me to focus.

“What is it?” I asked, trying to move my head back away from the paper. She adjusted the reading distance for me.

“A list of alternative treatments,” she said. “Follow the directions.”

I saw a column of images on the left, in red. Each one showed a creature. In the middle was the dose required. At the far right was the application time. The first image looked like a cockroach, then, going down, came a worm, an ant, ant eggs – I supposed – a bee, a wasp, a crayfish, a fly, two types of beetles, and then the largest, what I assumed was a locust. At the bottom were small curved egg shapes.

“Maggots,” she said, tapping the bottom of the page. “They are the best thing for your skin. You don´t need to buy all those creams,” and she let the paper flutter down onto my chest. She reached in my pocket. She found 500 pesos, and added them to her purse, which was strapped across her chest.

“If you were twenty years younger, I would ravish you right here.” She said something else with a sweet smile, but a bus passed at that moment, drowning out her voice. I could not help it, my eyes grew moist. She got to her feet, modestly, placed a shapely leg and her low-heeled shoe on my crotch, and wriggled them suggestively, then turned, and walked away.

I stood up, dusted myself off, and studied the list with ever increasing concentration, as I walked slowly, with the flow of traffic, toward the center of the Old City – an area that doesn’t really remind me of Berlin at all.