Sara would have settled the matter in no time. But I didn’t feel comfortable asking “What about you, Ángela – do you love him?” It would have sounded odd coming from an old man like me, and I think it would have made even me laugh. And for country people, or maybe for everybody, love with all its intensity works for a while, when people are young, but it eventually loses its meaning as it becomes clear that a couple’s relationship is a question of survival and can always be summed up this way: “To keep the earth from swallowing us, you go out and swing a hoe, and I’ll cook and take care of the kids.” Love: irrelevant.
That’s the tangle I’m in.
Twenty-Five
Lying next to Sara, our hands still curled on my leg, I thought how all of us – Sara, me, the three boys, James, Debrah, Venus, and Michael O’Neal – seemed to be locked for eternity in a burning house. Sometimes I opened my eyes and saw the blind night through the window; I closed them again and contemplated the grief devouring me from within like the burning bush.
Sara’s phone rang, and I bolted upright like a spring. Instead of answering, she embraced me and soothed me. Then she returned the boys’ call, and it went the same as it always did. “Yes, yes, yes, of course,” said Sara, walking toward the bathroom. “I understand. But you have to do things…What? Exactly. Yes, exactly. Yes, yes, yes,” she said. She went into the bathroom and the awful lullaby cadence began, while I fled to the living room window to try to breathe the unwalled air and look at the Virgins below or to close my eyes and contemplate the burning bush inside me. I didn’t know how much time had passed, or which way it was going, or whether I’d fallen asleep at the window or maybe lost consciousness for a few seconds. Time was moving forward and backward, like a pendulum or like a reaper. Then I felt Sara’s breasts pressing against my back. (When she reached menopause, Sara said, “I’m not going let my parts dry up like pumice stone. I don’t care if I get cancer, I’m taking hormones.” She began hormone replacement therapy, and her parts never dried up, or anything close.)
“Are you okay?” she asked.
“What did they say?”
“It’s fine. Everything’s fine,” she said after a while, and I didn’t ask anything further so as not to risk losing hope.
We didn’t go back to bed. Sara went to talk with Debrah and James in the kitchen, and I went to take another antianxiety pill, which seemed to have an effect this time, and then to the studio to examine the painting. It was already very close to the abyss. The problem, it seemed to me, didn’t have to do with the luminous side of light; I was avoiding its other side.
Sara came back and suggested I go out for a bit. I had stashed my wristwatch deep in a drawer so I wouldn’t be looking at it every ten seconds, and I asked her what time it was. She told me it was three. Three! There’s still time, I thought, and Sara realized what was going through my mind, looked at me compassionately, and insisted I go out for a bit to get some air.
I walked down First Avenue to St. Mark’s Place, and from there to Astor Place. I didn’t want hard liquor, only a beer, so I bought a large bottle of Beck’s in one of those twenty-four-hour corner stores, which they gave to me, as always, in a brown paper bag. A city bus passed; there were only two people on it, like two seahorses in a lighted fish tank (though the image also evoked that melancholy painter from Nyack whose name I never manage to remember).
I sat at the foot of the cube sculpture to drink my beer. Two young men were doing spins on their skateboards. They moved without speaking, and the sound of skateboards and rollerblades echoed in the night. (Hopper! That’s the name of the painter from Nyack.) I looked up, looking for the stars, and there they were. Only someone without air, like me, would look for stars in Astor Place, outside Starbucks and Kmart. But I didn’t get to look at them long because a man about my age approached with a bicycle loaded with a basket full of some fifty vinyl records.
As things always are in New York, it was complicated.
The man’s name was Anthony and he spoke English with a heavy foreign accent. It turned out he was from Russia and had been in the United States for ten years, but he didn’t consider himself Russian, despite the accent, and he didn’t like speaking Russian, because he thought of himself as an American. He had lived in Rio for four years and also spoke Portuguese. He spoke to me in Portuguese for a while, and I asked him to switch to English, please, as I didn’t speak Portuguese. I cursed the bad luck that had put me in this mess, which could only happen in New York, right when I didn’t have the strength to deal with it. I knew these messes all too well, and I knew that things tended to get complicated.
Anthony bought and sold vinyl records. Without my asking, he took the fifty records from his basket and spread them out in front of the cube sculpture like a carpet, then sat down beside me to gaze at them. There was no way to look at the stars. The skateboards rumbled on the pavement. Anthony wasn’t leaving me any time to think about Jacobo either.
“Rolling Stones,” he said, pointing to a record in a nearby corner of the carpet, and indeed there it was, the donkey with the drums and the man dressed in white leaping with two guitars.
“Hm!” I said, unable to think of anything else to say.
Anthony remained quiet for a long time, but that was even worse, leaving me even more trapped than I would have been if he’d chattered incessantly. I liked him, too, and I was already intrigued.
I offered him the bottle.
“Okay,” he said and took a swig. I wiped the mouth of the bottle with my shirt, took a swig, and so it was established that we would drink the beer together. A bad time to make friends, I thought, but what are you going to do – you live in the city you live in. Someone went by and the flash of a camera illuminated us and blinded us there by the records. A fraction of a second later, Starbucks, Kmart, and the records appeared again. I asked Anthony his last name and he said his name was Anton and something that sounded like it ended in insky.
“Kandinsky?” I asked, and he smiled.
“No. Anton Demidovsky, but people call me Stravinsky because of the music,” he explained, and gestured toward the Rolling Stones’ donkey.
Twenty-Six
I lay down a moment to rest, and immediately heard Ángela knocking on the door. I got up to open it and told her to sit down. I’d thought about the situation with her husband and his fern girl, and maybe I had a solution.
“Whose name is the farm in, Ángela?” I asked. She was unfazed by the pragmatic coarseness of the question.
“The farm is mine.”
“All right, then,” I said, relieved. “There’s not much to think about. You tell him that he has to either dump the girl or get out. You don’t need him for anything, right?”
“Well, no. The kids are all grown up.”
I seemed to be confirming what she herself had already decided. I almost said “Easy-peasy,” but I refrained. Ángela stood there in the half-shadow of the room, all lovely and solid, pondering with an intensity and seriousness reminiscent of a precocious child. I didn’t want to tell her that he was no dummy and wasn’t going to run off with the mistress, because I might be wrong about that.
“Yes,” Ángela said at last. “The kids are grown. Would you like a coffee?”
I told her I would, yes, and she went to fetch it and I returned to my desk. I put on a concerto for piccolo and strings and basso continuo, which seems like it was written for blue-and-gray tanagers, and of course I couldn’t work, distracted by the intricate weaving of the little flute. “That music you play is like Semana Santa music, but very pretty,” Ángela always says. Which is not true. I play Miles Davis sometimes; Bechet, the slow pieces; Pee Wee Russell; Django Reinhardt; and also music in Spanish: Amanda Miguel, Lucho Gatica, or the rancheras of Chavela Vargas when she was young and didn’t caterwaul the way she did as an old woman. Singers, boxers, womanizers, bullfighters, and football players who grow long in the t
ooth and refuse to retire are always pathetic. And that’s coming from me, whom old age has left or is going to leave as blind as a baby parrot and who had to give up his much-loved craft and resign himself to writing. And who knows how much longer I’ll be able to keep setting my affairs down on these pages.
Ángela brought the coffee, and just as she was setting it on the table, the landline rang. That always means trouble, I said, and asked her to go answer it in the kitchen. She came back a minute later. It was as I’d guessed.
“If the journalist is old, tell him I’ve got Alzheimer’s but that I sometimes have good days and he should call back.”
“But you don’t have Alzheimer’s, Don David.”
“Ángela!”
“Ohhh, okay, okay. She’s young, I think. A woman.”
“You’re sure she’s a she?” I asked, and Ángela laughed and brightened as I’d hoped.
She was young, her name was Flor or Fleur, and she had a French accent. They wanted to make a documentary on three Latin American visual artists, and I was one of them. “The main one,” she said, and that bugged me, how people are obsessed with establishing hierarchies that always end up corrupting artists. “So the other two are second-rank artists, then?” I asked to trip her up a little. She stammered, gave me the two names – two other prostates – stammered a little more, and finally laughed. “For France?” I asked for the heck of it, as I have no preference with regard to countries or continents. Yes, she said, Paris. “And why not one painter from Japan, one from Morocco, and another from the Netherlands?” I asked. She had regained her footing by now and replied that she thought it was a wonderful idea and would propose it as soon as she’d finished this project. I told her to come visit me and we’d see.
Twenty-Seven
Two young men walked by with a pit bull that seemed anything but aggressive. Healthy, tattooed, they reminded me of Pablo. A world without suffering, I thought, would be as incomplete and as inharmonious, as ugly, as a sculpture or a tree that had no shadow. And there I was – suffocation, confinement – at the foot of the Astor Place cube, next to some guy named Anthony and several dozen records in the glow of a streetlamp.
But it turns out it’s easy to accept pain when it’s not your own, and my son’s pain was definitely mine. As I talked to Anthony – and suffered – I understood a little better the expression on Jacobo’s face when he tried to be social, to be with people in the living room, while pain racked his legs or abdomen. He spoke very little at times like those because of the agony; he smiled sometimes, and visible in that smile were the grimace and glittering tears of pain that were always on the verge of spilling out.
My eldest son.
Anthony told me, as the flames licked at the back of my eyes and the base of my skull, that he made his living buying and selling those records, some of which were gems. The bicycle was the only thing he needed for his work, and the basket. What was amazing was that he had traveled all over the world buying records and coming back to sell them in New York. He had customers on Madison Avenue, on Fifth, on Park. He had been in Bogotá, he said. He had been in Bombay. In Havana. The best city was São Paulo, a treasure trove of rare vinyl in good condition. In other words, I said, distracted from my sorrows, the tools of your trade are the bicycle, the bike basket, and a jet. He laughed, pleased with himself – quite impressed with himself, really – and asked for another swig of beer. He finished off the bottle and went to buy two more.
“Something’s wrong, isn’t it?” he asked after a while.
A man with a strong Medellín accent then explained to a man with a strong Russian accent – in other words, two quintessential New Yorkers – what had happened, what was happening, and what was almost certainly going to happen with Jacobo, his eldest son, twenty-eight years old. Anthony didn’t try to hug me or pat me on the back to comfort me or anything like that. He only said, “Oh, man!” The people of New York are a reserved bunch. They have big hearts, but they don’t sniffle or act like sentimental fools, at least not in public. And so you can be one of two ways in the city: either with your composure carefully under control, or totally schizoid and babbling to yourself or to phantasms along the bridges and avenues.
After that, Stravinsky and I talked about other things or just sat in silence. “Oh, man!” he said quietly another couple of times, as if he were still thinking about Jacobo. A group of dirty, smelly young men and women in dark clothing had gathered on the Fourth Avenue side of the square. They played their guitars badly, played their flutes badly, played their drums badly. They had rings in their noses and were sitting next to large, dirty black backpacks. When the breeze picked up, the smell of old sweat drifted over us. At about three thirty in the morning we finally did hug – to say goodbye – and each of us continued on his way in the ocean of the New York night…
I would love for Sara to be here so she could tell me, “David, that last bit was so cheesy, it makes me want to kiss you.” She sometimes said things like that, not always. Only when she knew they’d throw me off.
So scratch the bit about the ocean of New York. I went back down Lafayette and Bleecker so I didn’t have to walk past the odoriferous panhandling kids. On Second I crossed La Salle and paused at the corner of the cemetery to look up at the windows of the apartment. The light, framed and flurried by the metallic shadow of the ivy climbing up from the cemetery, looked cozy, as if the place did not know suffering. I looked at the grave.
Ellen Louise Wallace, 1880–1975. Ninety-five years old when she returned to the void.
I opened the front door of the building and Ámbar appeared out of nowhere. She smiled in greeting and asked after Arturo. I told her to come up, that Arturo was fine, he was upstairs. Ámbar must have gone home, because everything she was wearing, except her jewelry, was different from what she’d had on a few hours earlier, including her makeup. She was wearing a light-pink shirt, dark-green harem pants, and clear orange plastic sandals. A little West Village vampire. And it occurs to me, as I think back on climbing those poorly lit stairs, that if she’d started flying, she would have flown like the bats in La Mesa, which look like butterflies.
“Ámbar, what time is it?”
She said it was five past five. Are you sure? I almost asked her. It was as if words were no longer able to contain time, nor I to understand it, nor clocks to measure it.
Twenty-Eight
Ángela’s husband is named José Luis, or maybe Juan Pablo, and her son is named Juan Pablo, or maybe José Luis, or Juan José.
“Tell Juan Pablo to please come by here tomorrow to take me to the notary office” – I’m just giving this as an example, since the notary office is only three blocks away, but I don’t have time to come up with a more plausible scenario.
“It’s José Luis, Don David. Juan Pablo is my husband.”
Sometimes I call them Juan Luis, Luis Pablo, and other combinations, and it’s a rare occasion when I actually get it right and no one has to correct me.
What’s in a name?
Ángela’s son is talkative, yes, but funny, and he’s an excellent driver. He once told me a story about seeing two farmers, father and son, probably, in a pasture near a town called Funza, wielding ropes and chasing a very large, unfriendly cow, one of those lanky Holsteins you see on the damp plateau outside Bogotá. They reached a fence and the cow leaped it effortlessly, as if it had wings, leaving the farmers on the other side of the five strands of barbed wire, watching its rump disappear into the distance and then looking at each other, their ropes dangling from their hands. Everything Ángela’s son recounts creates an image. If you picked up a pencil and paper, you could draw his stories as he tells them. They are always a little absurd, comical, and he hardly ever needs to repeat one because he has so many: he keeps his eyes open and is good at observing the world.
Ángela’s son is quite fond of our station wagon. I think he wouldn’t have been able to
bear seeing Sara load it with mossy stones or bags of plants, or the endless bales of manure that she went out to buy from nearby farms to keep the garden lush. When we got back from Girardot at about four in the afternoon, the first thing he did was go wash it down with soap and vacuum the mats and seats. Juan Pablo, or José Luis, or Juan José takes care of it as if it were a living animal, a fine mare or a dairy cow.
Holstein.
At six I was perched in my yellow chair again with my beer in my hand, waiting for the bats. And they came, of course, or I thought I saw them come, which is the same thing. It’s funny because now they remind me of Ámbar, Arturo’s girlfriend, because of what I said about how she could have leaped into flight as we climbed the poorly lit stairs to the apartment.
Words are amazing things. I already tried my hand at poetry and short stories when I was very young, and I didn’t do so badly. In those days I seemed to have more aptitude for that than I did for painting: it was in my blood, since some members of my family had been writers. And now that I’m back at it all these years later, I am surprised once more by how supple words are – how all by themselves, or practically by themselves, they can express the ambiguity, the changeability, the fickleness of things. They are like the world: unstable as a house in flames, as a burning bush. And yet I long for the aroma of oils or the powdery feel of charcoal in my fingers, and I miss the pang – like the pang of love – that you feel when you sense you have touched infinity, captured an elusive light, a difficult light, with a bit of oil mixed with ground-up metals or stones.
Difficult Light Page 8