The world spins askew, says the many-faced monotone that echoes emotionless ambition. Trouble simmers in the world. The clarion warns of potential boil-over, onto us. We could all surely die and possibly lose all this that we have gained. Ready the bunkers and listen:
Somewhere between the threat and the coup, in a break for tampons, detergent and the taste that comes alive, Pancho hits the mute. Overheard in the smoky pall is the opinion that Charles must be sick.
Someone says yes, so what else is new?
Maybe he’s flat on his back, someone says. Maybe he’s fallen down and can’t get up.
Maybe, someone says, it’s a compound venereal disease with supersonic acceleration.
Someone asks how bad it can get, I mean, now that regular women won’t go out with him, and he’s dating Mexican women. I hear one is pregnant.
Someone says Charles’ dick will soon fall off, and someone says, “Please!”
Someone says, in case you forgot, that Charles happens to be a friend and someone should go and see. Tomàs gets up and goes, because it’s hardly a mile through town and it is on his way home. A new fly on the wall could think it a lovely gesture, community goodwill in action. Volunteering with obsequious genuflection to the spirit of generosity, Tomàs says, “I’ll go. We ought to keep old Charles out of trouble.” Tomàs fails to fool the old flies; they know he only saves face. He comes in once a week or so, now that the forces of nature have come home to roost in his adobe.
Tomàs is broke, even by local standards. Tomàs stays broke, not by choice but by successful assimilation to the third world. Tomàs speaks the language and lives the idiom, down to beans and tortillas. Town visits get scarcer as he gets closer to the earth, to the dirt and scratch of it where he lives. Siesta time is safe, because he can nose around, say hello to his Mexican friends and savor his soulful connection, his earthy life. That his Mexican friends are socio-economic peers is another reality denied; Tomàs still nurtures the hope guaranteed to anyone born in the land of the free and the home of the brave, where a poor boy can grow up to be President.
Tomàs believes, yet faith is etched with a heavy hand where youth once shone. He will tell you things are not as they seem, for though the tooth fairy so far only left a nickel, he has more teeth to lose. New times wait round the bend, money and mobility coming on, a little late, sure, but worth waiting for. In the meantime he prepares for greatness.
The Mexicans are wiser, accepting ground zero as home and Tomàs as a compadre, a dirt scratcher, a beans-and-rice, serape-and-sombrero kind of hombre, because he understands the meaning of nutrition and shade.
Tomàs can avoid his former peers by coming to town at siesta time to watch world news on the dish-fed tube. But today the world is off; La Mexa is full. He ambles to the bar returning the hail-fellow brouha in his complacent, condescending way, and he orders a drink. He nurses it, listening to opinions on the trouble yonder, offering insights of his own. He holds back on his real thesis, and on the next round says, “None for me, thanks.” Because Tomàs sees momentum in the afternoon, sees an easy buzz going to a memorable drunk, for the history of the thing, leading to a bar tab in the hundreds of thousands. Tomàs can’t pay, so he jumps at the opportunity to leave gracefully in the spirit of service rather than cheaply, out of necessity. With pride intact, he can slip out gratis, head home and continue his “work.”
Home is the Little Casa. The ceramic plaque warbles at eye level from its nest of brick-hard mud beside the front door. A pearl-white glaze with blue-flower filigree and two blue birds surround the script. Little Casa announces warmth and hospitality, however brief. Tomàs is among the unlucky, the immortal, the wholly-committed, go-for-broke faithful who seek truth in art, who cling to faith if not to youth. He has the good manners—or maybe he realizes a more awful truth—to keep the subject of his art at bay.
Tomàs is a writer.
What he writes, his “manuscript,” exists like moisture on the roof of a cave, going nowhere, becoming nothing, not drying up either. Maybe Tomàs thinks that if he stays with it long enough it will solidify and demand attention, like a stalactite, or else people will get their heads banged for ignoring it. But stalactites require thousands of years, and Tomàs is good for another thirty or so, maybe.
His work, his art, is a rock opera. A rock opera? The question, unprompted, raises its furry head on cue. Tomàs understands the God-like act of creation. He does not understand that the rock opera, like the dinosaur, has come and gone. He discusses it with no one, yet he lets it be known once a season or so, that his commitment, his art, endures. He will say something like, “Oh no, I can’t come, that’s too early. I’ll be working, you know …” A year or two ago he actually said, “… you know … on my opera …” He bared his soul by mentioning his work, dropping the memo en passant, as if avoiding bad luck or a threat to the muse or realization that his life bore no consequence, down to the days and hours and relentless ticking minutes of the thing. Still his soul needs baring, needs someone else to know that hope characterizes his existence, to give him reflection somewhere else than in his broken mirror, to keep him in orbit.
Tony Drury suspects he needs weekly speech in public to affirm reality, to know that he’s more than a figment of a supreme imagination, more than another draft in need of revision or deletion. Here is the real blood pudding. Tomàs recalls the vicissitudes of art; the Sistine Chapel wasn’t painted overnight, nor did the Count of Monte Cristo escape in a single weekend.
Cisco says he had a chicken once who would sit on anything—bad eggs, a golf ball, a smooth rock, anything, until she got shooed off, which was a whack in the head to her, a good one, just what she needed, so she could get back to her life, scratching the dirt, copping bugs and grubs and on a lucky day maybe a scorpion or two, or a couple of centipedes.
“I am not your chicken,” Tomàs replies, simmering over the two beers Cisco buys for him. He hates pity; it so ignores his artistry. For without art, Tomàs is a tree falling in an earless desert.
A practical day for Tomàs might include a delivery, contraband no problem, or running someone two hours over the mountain to the airport at León—if the car is provided—or some light repair work, or, worst of all, he is available for general cleaning. This last is his dirt to scratch, his cross to bear; fortune renders him subservient to the Mexicans; him, with such an eye for detail, for art. His cleaning work is not for the visible Mexicans, but rather for the other, wealthy Mexicans in haciendas out of town. He is recommended by a woman from New York, another divorcée pursuing freedom and adventure through sexual liberation. She’s seventy-something and rich. Tomàs sucks up to that, can’t help it.
Heloise Hollister views groveling as the appropriate means by which lower class people define themselves, then comes cleaning up. She tips him thirty thousand on a regular basis and recommends him to a friend who is vastly wealthy and represents the kind of friendship money can buy. The old lady strives socially, throwing lavish wads of dough at frivolous entertainment. But only when she gives a resource like Tomàs does she achieve acceptance on the higher plane. Her presentation of Tomàs, the gringo domestic, to Juan Yermo Rincón of the Dolores Rincóns, to clean and maintain the grounds of Hacienda Rincón, proves her belief that all people are equal—even Mexicans—if they’re wealthy. She is found to be acceptable with equal largesse, and her investiture on the A-list is henceforth secure.
Tomàs gets a healthy tip from Juan Yermo as well, a tip greater than the actual wage for clearing rocks and shoveling shit. Tomàs figures the old lady recommended the big tip, or maybe Juan Yermo understands gringo needs. Nevermind, Tomàs grasps the money in his bruised, blistered hands, over which he murmurs smoothly, eyes down, “Muchas gracias, Señor Rincón.” Thirty grand is nothing to sneeze at, and Tomàs leans into manual labor knowing he is not a servant but an artist. Juan Yermo is impressed and says so, complimenting Tomàs on his work.
Tomàs laughs the humorless laugh, defending his honor
with superiority. What a laugh: him, Tomàs, a laborer. Ha. He doesn’t want to schtup the old lady because he plain doesn’t want to, but he will—Charles counsels him on the campaign and says it’s worth a half mil if it’s worth a peso. If she wants it regular, she can get a break on a monthly retainer, if she pays in advance.
“Hey,” Charles pours into his ear, “You won’t be young forever.” Tomàs stews, she’s so old. He’s headed that way fast, but Christ, seventy. Charles says opportunity takes strange form sometimes, and sex with an old woman is easy once you get the sausage swollen, and by that age a woman understands a man’s needs; she knows how—”Oh, my friend, she knows how.”
Most importantly, Tomàs must understand that opportunity and love are the same game of give and take. By making her happy, Tomàs will likely make her a nicer person, and he’ll get the money. Charles is prepared to negotiate terms if Tomàs feels squeamish.
Tomàs doubts that a thump in the crotch or electroshock therapy will make her any nicer, but she does have the money. He invests and reinvests a half mil in his mind, drinking more than he likes to drink, trying her on for size. He’ll be seventy before all that long, so he only needs to see now what he’ll see then, just like seeing middle-age women as seductive when he thought them so old in his childhood. A half mil converts to a hundred sixty-five bucks, and if he can work into a retainer, well, life will change all right. But he calculates too much, over-rationalizing in the blush of opportunity, in its first phase when it often fades away. While he stews on the break he’s waited for and what the money can do and what Charles has to say, Juan Yermo lets her have it. At least the tips get bigger, and everyone is relieved.
Tomàs still dreams of luxury. He takes refuge in refinement, collecting superiority in defense against encroaching destitution. Getting good service reassures him. With his origin and stature reaffirmed, his station in life remains bearable. Years of artistic diligence have left him poor, but he’s no laborer and can prove it. He squirrels pesos, lets the cookie jar fill a short way before robbing it for a spree. Then he spends with abandon on those things reserved for the educated, the accomplished, the landed. To preserve his taste and manner, his poise and etiquette—to prevent atrophy—so he’ll be ready when affluence arrives, he goes out. He changes for an hour or two, to urbane gentleman at home in uppercrust settings. Working Mexicans will never experience that.
Like lunch at La Brigón on the edge of town in the old world mode, where service goes beyond basic need, to subservience, to class distinction, where waiters in starched waistcoats wait, eyes down, murmuring acquiescence to whimsical desire. Tomàs loves the place. He says he loves it for the cuisine, but you can see him savor the attention of a grown man waiting to clear his salad plate, as if that corner of the world waits for Tomàs to make his point.
“I don’t see the Mexican middle-class evolving with the same methodology as the American middle-class, because it simply cannot have the same dream,” he says. “I mean so-called dream. I mean, you take an average American middle-class family and it can continue to gain material goods. It can move around. The father can earn more money and take better jobs and move up the ladder. Here, well, you take my friend Luìs. He sold fruit on the street for years and finally got a shop space, and now he has three shops in town. He’s a successful greengrocer, but where else can he go? He’s reached the pinnacle of his opportunity …”
This theory over lunch in lavish surroundings comes in Tony Drury’s second week in town. Joining him and Tomàs for luncheon are Professor Kathryn who comes down from California for three months a year to work in peace on her theories and theses. Another woman, tired from her work with severely disturbed children, has also arrived for a change, for a year, for a go at a new project, a film festival. You can tell her divorce was bitter by her reference to that rat fucker.
“Not so,” Tony says. “The middle class is in a deeper rut in America than anywhere. The father comes home to a tract house surrounded by a yard looking like all the other yards on the street. But the tract house now costs two hundred fifty thousand dollars instead of forty thousand like the one his parents bought. He’s more beat than his parents ever were. And where the hell did his life go? No. The American middle-class is entrenched. It’s franchised. It’s programmed. It suffocates and makes nothing more than more of itself. Your friend, Luìs, on the other hand, is positioned to buy a truck, a big one, and ship produce from all of Guanajuato to the city.”
“Mm … Possibly. But I think the intransigence of the sub-middle, which is really what you have to perceive in a developing, shall we say, situation, is the crux of the thing.”
“Yes. And on and on,” says Professor Kathryn.
“I agree,” says the other woman, Marylin Sweeny. “When a culture like this one finally does catch up to what you call enfranchisement, then you have to accept the assimilated, gentrified needs of the women, which isn’t to say they aren’t …” And so round the table.
Tomàs did not anticipate such engagement, has not discoursed in current jargon in far too long. He wants to jump back in, but he’s spent his ammo. His opening gambit was his best move. He sits watching with no reserves after using up his theory of methodologies. The women insist, approaching the descendants of methodologies: potentialities and eventualities. They strain for the pinnacle of the crux: impacting womanhood. Tomàs listens, nods and gives in to gravity, curving in the spine, shrinking to mentality.
The women assault the Pork Chop Hill of retroactive cultural underpinnings—the way we are, the who we be, the why we do. Tomàs’ theories are dashed in the maelstrom, outdated, wrong, nonviable. He’s been alone too long.
“This waiter,” he finally says with a grimace. “We’ve got his attention …” He eases into a smile. “But we still don’t have him in our control …” He pulls out the old blunderbuss, class distinction. It closes the fray with surprise and silence. He makes his point once more, proving himself a crude tactician, a hermit whose ideas have withered, a man in denial, a man bluffing, a man surviving but barely. Then comes the bill for lunch.
Newly arrived, still on dollar reality, Tony can laugh at a three-course lunch with linens and crystal and wine for four at something like thirty dollars. But aware of sensitivities too—maybe the women will be offended as feminists if he picks up the tab—he holds back. Picking up the bill could as well undermine what Tomàs has saved for, his moment of viability in the world of grown-up men and women. So the bill gets divvied up.
But the divvy gets down to the peso, painfully, in the worst way of feminists and failed artists. Tony wishes he’d grabbed the damn thing and paid it, and he promises himself to cover Tomàs in the future—the guy is viably broke, and moreover, Tony likes him, most admiring the laborious, laughable trench he’s thrown his life into, for “art.” This little man breathes pathos, his perspective distant as the hind side of Saturn compared to a company man’s view of the world. Tomàs is neither unweaned from security nor untraveled on the road of risk, adventure, life and death. Tomàs is his own character in search of development, one who found the proper place to turn the days like pages but has yet to secure a dramatic point.
He could hang around La Mexa on the day of growing concern for everyone’s friend, Charles. He could down as many margaritas as he could hold, and Tony would pay his bill. He could work up a solid matinee drunk, if he wants to, and maybe it would set him a little freer. But he doesn’t know that—doesn’t know that his life of sacrifice renders him admirable, that he’s covered on drinks anyway. So he leaves, grateful for the poised exit.
Tomàs is forty-nine but looks older, as people sometimes do who go whole hog to the mental side of life. He walks like a man in thought. But where his youth allowed him to look like a thinking man, he now stoops under years of labor like a man in a yoke. So he cobble-hobbles down the hill, around the corner, up the hill and up, around and down, past the Little Casa toward the only abode beyond his own in town.
He shuff
les through the dust like a little force of nature. Some days bring rain, some not. Life goes on, like Tomàs, resolute as a dung beetle in a stubborn turd, because it’s what he’s come to. What else can he do? Tomàs doesn’t care about Charles, doesn’t care about anything but sundown, sunrise, tortillas and beans, a drink at the bar when it comes his way, and every now and then a social outing to remind him what lies ahead for an artist with commitment.
Back in the haze of La Mexa, all eyes glaze. Some aim at Headline News. The swelter drones with earthshaking events, providing pleasant interlude to minds otherwise drifting affably along. Tony Drury smiles, easily imagining Tomàs slogging it out to Charles’ place to poke his head in for a look see, then back up to the Little Casa for an afternoon alone in thought, maybe savoring the day’s efficiencies like a good hermit; no bar tab and a few points in the-good-of-the-group column. He safely ducked out again.
Little Casa is a misnomer, empty words on a glossy tile, custom-made for a younger Tomàs in the days of less doubt. Hope lingers, but Tomàs arrives to a little brown hut, what Cisco calls Adobe World. With remnant fortitude Tomàs mudded up a base and mushed the glossy plaque into place, where it announces what the earthen hovel is not.
He got the tile when Mal got his, from the same potter, with the same design. Mal’s says Casa Malcolm and also hangs at eye level, embedded in peach stucco, on the front guard wall of the house Mal built soon after arriving in a hurry and a flush, about the same time as Tomàs. Mal had more money then, still fresh in town, still hip as a postmodern desperado, a drug dealer before all the athlete overdoses and bad press, before the drugs got cooked down cheap for the mass market, back when marijuana was a laugh and cocaine glamorous.
Mal had a few houses up his nose, but he had the luck to beat the heat out of Dodge and hightail it south, to run down below Sonora where the outlaws used to run to, way down and into the hills, where a man can live well on a modest stash in the safe in the top floor bedroom near the guns. They found each other, Tomàs and Mal, coming from the same epoch. The revolution was over but good times formed up south of the border. Mal found a market for a few more deals, much smaller and purely for the needs of friends, and he needed a man of Tomàs’ skills, which were simple, clean and efficient, mostly in the delivery and collection line.
Homunculus Page 5