Latin Moon in Manhattan

by Jaime Manrique

  I sat on the couch perspiring, the towel and gun in my lap; I looked down into the dark alley. Were they watching me? Were they at this moment aiming the gun and about to pull the trigger? I closed my eyes, took a deep breath and held it for a while and then, pumping my lungs as hard as I could, I puffed it all out. I heard a clack, pop, clack—the weapon had been fired, I thought. I’m a dead man. I felt as if I were falling off the face of the earth. Before it was too late, I opened my eyes to see Mr. O’Donnell for the last time. I seemed to be all right. I touched my head, and examined my chest, searching for the wound. They had missed me. I looked out into the alley again.

  The rain had burst; a heavy wind blew fat drops through the window screens. I remained still, enjoying the refreshing wind. It was pouring with the violence of a typhoon. I hoped it would turn into a hurricane that would sweep away the killers down there in the alley, the crack heads outside the building, all the dirt and the grime of New York. There was nothing I loved better than a good summer shower. I flashed back to my adolescence in Barranquilla, when the rains were so heavy during the rainy season that the city became paralyzed and school was canceled.

  My adolescence—roughly from my twelfth to my fifteenth birthday—had been the unhappiest period of my life. And yet, out of masochism, or the futile need to exorcise ghosts that would always haunt me—I kept regressing to those years over and over, with an insistence that was disturbing. We had moved from Bogotá back to Barranquilla, and I hated just about everything about my native city, except the rainy season when apocalyptic, violent downpours fed my fantasies of natural catastrophes of such severity that school would be shut down for weeks, months, years, and I would be left alone in my bedroom, forgotten, reading Dostoyevsky, Kierkegaard, Camus.

  Barranquilla is situated below sea level. Barranca, from which its name derives, means gorge, ravine. The city did not have then—and does not have now—a sewer system. When it pours—the way it does in Jean Harlow’s Red Dust—the city floods, and the streets and avenues become raging arroyos that sweep away people, cars, houses, and buses full of passengers. Enterprising Barranquilleros make their living during this time of the year by installing over the street wooden planks a foot wide, so that the citizens can get across the streets without having to wade through the muddy, treacherous and filthy waters.

  Whenever the rains would burst after lunch, I knew there’d be no school that afternoon. Wilbrajan and I would change into our bathing suits and go out on the patio to play in the rain. Our patio—which was planted with banana and plantain trees—overflowed, and our domestic ducks and turtles came out. We chased them, running among the trees, splashing in the water that came up to our knees. At night, the patio became a swamp full of thick clouds of mosquitoes, and scores of frogs that honked and croaked a cacophonous music. Then the huge orange moon of the tropics would appear, casting its reflection on the onyx waters, like a golden spotlight.

  After our return from Bogotá, Mother had lived with Don Miguel, her lover, for five years. Don Miguel had a high post in local government and was a married man. He came every night for supper and slept with Mother until midnight, when he went home to his wife and family. This situation, though fairly common in Colombian society, was nonetheless painful for my sister and me. It was especially hard to explain to my school friends, though all the neighbors knew and understood. Don Miguel was kind and gentle with children, and was crazy about Mother, so Wilbrajan and I treated him as a favorite uncle. At night, when he and Mother closed the door of their bedroom, I would sneak out of my room and go through the kitchen to the patio and around the back of the house to watch them make love through the windows that opened onto the patio. Night after night I watched, discovering my own sexual appetites as I saw them go at it with a voraciousness and passion that to me was exciting, frightening, exhausting.

  That must be why I’m still a voyeur, I said to myself, thinking of Reinhardt. I shook my head to stop this reverie. Yet I was drowsy, and I had to get up early the next morning to go interpret again for Judge Warpick. I decided to sleep on the couch by the window with the gun under my mattress. I changed into my pajamas and set the alarm clock in the kitchen. Soon, a heaviness descended upon me, and I felt sinking, parachuting down a pitch-dark, airless well. Before I surrendered wakefulness, the last image I saw was the golden eyes of Mr. O’Donnell, shining in the dark: feral, deracinated, like the eyes of Blake’s tiger.

  Mr. O’Donnell walking on my chest woke me up. His head hovered above mine. In the dark I was aware of something caressing my nose; I looked harder and I saw he had a squirming mouse in his mouth, hanging by the head. “Aggghhh!” I screamed in disgust, sitting up. With the mouse in his teeth, Mr. O’Donnell flew twenty feet and landed in the next room. My heart threatened to erupt in my mouth. I got up and turned on the lights. I was having an attack of pavor nocturnus. I knew I was cracking up and ran through the different rooms turning all the lights on. I poured myself half a glass of scotch, guzzled it and then sat by the windows overlooking the alley to cool off. It was 4:20 A.M. Mr. O’Donnell entered the room with his prey. With the broom I tried to coax him into surrendering it. Angered, Mr. O’Donnell dropped the unconscious mouse, and, like a rabid jungle beast, bared his teeth, growling, and then scratched my legs and bit me to defend his catch. I raced to my room and shut the door and threw myself on the bed. After a while, collecting half of myself and getting up, I turned on the light over my bed, and the air-conditioning. I didn’t care whether anyone broke in or not; I would not get out of my room for a few hours, until the mouse was dead and devoured. Lighting a cigarette, I propped myself on the pillows and wondered whether I should try to go back to sleep or whether I should make an effort to stay awake. I began to daydream; I saw Christopher Columbus, on his fourth voyage, sick, crazed, broken, his caravel arriving at the coast of Paria. In the distance, he saw a pear-shaped mountain which he mistook for a huge breast, the huge breast of earth, reaching all the way to heaven.

  10 Ay Luna! Ay Luna!

  “What’s going down, dude?” Jeff greeted me as I walked into the Social Security office the next morning.

  “Good morning, Jeff,” I said, standing in front of his desk. He had his chess set out and a chair drawn to the side of his desk as a lure.

  Jeff put the New York Post aside. “So how come you don’t wanna play with me no more?”

  “It’s discouraging; you’re too good for me,” I said.

  “Thanks. But you’ll never improve unless you play good players. That’s how I learned.”

  At that moment, Judge Warpick’s assistant, who looked like a senior citizen version of Betty Boop, entered the room. “Are you ready, Mr. Martínez?” she asked me, batting her mile-long eyelashes.

  I turned to Jeff. “Is the claimant here?”

  “She was here before I arrived,” Jeff informed me. “She’s sitting way in the back of the room. Her name is,” he winced, “Fridania Moquette. I wonder where these people get those names.”

  I called out the name. Today the room was packed with claimants, their relatives and friends, interpreters, lawyers and paralegals. In the back of the room a young woman got up with some difficulty. My heart sank a bit when she started walking toward us without a lawyer. The young woman pushed a baby carriage and moved with the help of a cane. As she lurched toward the front of the room, I saw that she used a golf club as a cane, and that she had braces on her legs.

  Jeff tapped me on my thigh with the claimant’s folder.

  When the claimant reached the door, I accosted her with my usual introduction, “My name is Santiago. I’m your Spanish interpreter.”

  The girl stared blankly at me as if looking into a mirror. Slowly, we wended our way to the judge’s chambers. The claimant stationed the baby carriage (which was covered by a cotton blanket) next to her chair and sat down, placing the golf club on the table.

  I was feeling drowsy from lack of sleep. Presently, Judge War-pick entered the room swathed in her b
lack robe, her gargoyle features truly frightening. She asked me to explain to the claimant her rights. We were sworn in and the hearing began. The first two questions—name and address—were asked and answered.

  “Is it Miss or Mrs. Moquette?” Warpick asked.

  “Miss,” the girl said, blushing. I saw now that she was very young. She wore her black hair in two pigtails held with white and blue ribbons. Her eyes were decorated with gobs of purple eye-shadow and her nails were painted an aquamarine hue and dotted with silver stars.

  “Where were you born?” Warpick asked with some disgust, as if she were sick to death of asking the same question over and over.

  “In a hospital, I guess.”

  I couldn’t repress a smile. Warpick looked at me as if she wanted to disintegrate me with her stare.

  “The country, I mean.”

  “Puerto Rico.”

  “And when did you come to the United States?”

  Fridania shrugged. “I don’t remember; a long time ago.”

  “How come you haven’t learned English if you came here so young?” the judge asked in disbelief.

  A little voice chimed in, “Hi.”

  Smiling, Fridania tapped the blanket over the baby carriage.

  Craning her flamingo neck, Warpick focused her eyes on the carriage.

  “That’s the baby,” Fridania said, pulling off the blanket as if she were a magician about to produce a dove or a rabbit. A little boy’s head was exposed. With his mop of black curls, he looked like a miniature Yanick Noah and was grabbing the side of the carriage with his hands. He smiled at us. There was something odd about him; although he seemed tiny, his face looked older.

  “Hi,” the boy greeted me, and reached over to touch me with his hand. I sat still. The judge’s assistant sat up, snapping out of her usual torpor and put a finger on the tape recorder, ready to turn it off in case there was extraneous colloquy. The judge stretched an arm, opening her gnarled, knobby fingers to indicate to the assistant not to turn off the machine. “Miss Moquette, are you ready to continue?” Warpick asked.

  I could see that by now she was on the warpath.

  “Just a minute,” Fridania said. She opened her bag, pulled out a milk bottle and gave it to the baby, who snatched it, squealing, before disappearing to the bottom of the carriage.

  As if realizing for the first time the anomaly of the situation, Judge Warpick asked, “Miss Moquette, when were you born?”

  “In 1974.”

  “So you are …”

  Seventeen, I thought to myself, and took a real good look at the claimant. Then how old was she when she had the boy? That was Judge Warpick’s next question.

  “Thirteen and a half,” Fridania said.

  “So the boy is four and a half now?”

  “He’ll be five for Christmas.”

  “Isn’t he a bit too old to be in a baby carriage?”

  “No, ma’am. He can’t walk.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because he was born without legs.”

  “Why?”

  “How should I know?” Fridania retorted angrily. “Ask God. He made him that way.”

  Warpick snarled back. “Miss Moquette, if you want to go on with the hearing I advise you to control your temper. I will not put up with any tantrums from you or anybody else. Is that clear?”

  Lowering my head, I interpreted all this in almost a whisper. I wanted to close my eyes and—

  “Mr. Interpreter,” Warpick shouted at me. “You have to speak up, otherwise the machine will not pick up your interpretation.”

  “I’m sorry, your honor,” I said, giving her a look of hatred. Fortunately for me, she was staring at the claimant.

  “Hi,” the little boy said again. “Ya terminé el tete, mami,” he said. His head appeared again, and he handed his mother the empty bottle. For a moment, the judge, the assistant, and myself forgot about the hearing in process, and watched, galvanized, the interaction between mother and son. Fridania put the bottle in her bag and, taking the boy by his armpits, hoisted him out of the carriage. He was a perfectly developed boy from his head to his buttocks. The boy wore a red T-shirt with an image of Madonna grossly imitating Marilyn Monroe; his private parts were wrapped in diapers and covered with blue plastic. Fridania put the boy on her lap. Then she pulled a pad and crayons out of her bag, which she set on the table. The boy started to draw immediately.

  “What’s his name?” Warpick asked.

  “Claus Pericles.”

  “Claus Pericles?”

  “Claus after Santa Claus, because he was born around Christmas, and Pericles after my father.”

  “Where’s Claus’s father?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What’s his name?”

  Impassively, the girl said, “I don’t know that, either. I was raped by a gang of boys.”

  “Why didn’t you have an abortion?” Warpick asked, to my utter astonishment. “I know why,” she went on, “because you wanted to get on welfare as soon as possible.”

  “That’s right,” Claus answered in English for his mother, and resumed drawing fantastic beasts with red eyes.

  “You have to tell the boy to keep quiet; otherwise he’ll have to leave the room.”

  Claus set down his crayon and sat up straight, staring at War-pick.

  “Tell me why you are asking for additional supplementary income.”

  “Because I don’t have enough money to live on.”

  “But you get Medicare.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “And food stamps.”

  “Sometimes,” said Claus.

  I sat on my hands as if this would somehow help me not to break into laughter.

  Judge Warpick was becoming rattled; her features hardened as if set in cement. “What’s wrong with Claus … I mean, besides the fact he was born without legs?”

  Claus turned around to look at his mother, “Dile, mami,” he ordered.

  Fridania ran her fingers through her son’s black silky curls. “When Claus was born,” she began, “he weighed four pounds; he had a bump on his back the size of a grapefruit and …” She paused; this part was obviously very painful to her. “He was born without a penis. So the doctors told me it would be easier to turn him into a girl than to make a penis for him. They said I should raise him as a girl.”

  “Why didn’t you?” Warpick asked. “Why didn’t you follow the doctors’ advice?”

  Fridania slapped the table; Claus imitated her. “Because if God had wanted Claus to be a girl, he would have made him a girl.”

  “I’m a boy,” Claus shouted. “A boy, not a girl. Isn’t that right, Mommy?”

  “Sí, Clauscito,” his mother reassured him. Then she continued. “The worst part is that because he was born without a penis, his urine and excrement come from the same place. They’ve done two operations but haven’t been able to fix the problem.”

  “No more operations,” Claus said. He turned to me. “Mijo, no more operations.”

  “Why don’t you live with your parents, Miss Moquette?”

  “Because I have my own family now.”

  “You are a child, Miss Moquette. And an invalid. You seem to have a severe impediment with your legs; you should live at home with your parents. Maybe Claus would be more comfortable in a rehabilitation center. As he grows up, you won’t be able to care for him. He seems like an intelligent child. He will have to go to school. Maybe he can learn a trade and be a useful citizen.”

  “I will not put Claus in an institution!” Fridania shrieked, the veins in her neck swelling, her features becoming distorted by rage.

  “It’s not up to you to decide that, Miss Moquette,” snarled Warpick. “A higher court will have to deal with this matter. I certainly will recommend that the boy go to a rehab.”

  “Never!” Fridania shouted in English. “Over my dead body, you hear me?” she went on in accentless English.

  “Never, never, never, never!” shriek
ed Claus, leaping onto the table and hopping all over it like a rabbit. The judge’s assistant sprang off her chair and backed off against the wall.

  “Miss Moquette, the hearing is over,” the judge said. “Take the boy and leave.”

  Fridania stood up. Grabbing the golf club, she looked at me and raised it. I cowered, covering my head with my arms. But Fridania, inching her way toward the bench, started jabbing the club into the air, whipping it back and forth. Warpick stood up horrified, croaking hysterically.

  Still hopping on the table, Claus started to sing, “Bamba, bamba. Bamba, bamba.”

  “Mr. Interpreter,” Warpick called out imploringly. “Please stop her. You must stop her!”

  I realized Fridania meant no harm to me and I had no wish to get in the way of her avenging club.

  The judge’s assistant, who was across the room from Fridania, ran out of the room wailing. Warpick began to pitch the objects on her desk at the approaching claimant, who batted them with her club.

  “Mr. Interpreter,” Warpick screamed again. “Stop her! I tell you to stop her. If you don’t, you’ll be fired. You’ll never work again.”

  I got up and took a good look at Fridania, who moved as fast as a convalescing snail, and decided that Judge Warpick could protect herself without my help. I turned around to exit the room.

  “You’ll never work again!” Warpick’s voice trailed after me as I traipsed down the hall. I walked into the office to say good-bye to Jeff. I found the judge’s assistant collapsed on Jeff’s chair, blubbering as she tried to explain what was going on in the judge’s office.