“Can you
believe it? They wanted me to customize a house, by putting this piece of
scripture around the door. So I had to figure out—how to place the words for
maximum effect, visually, but also for the meaning of the text. And it took me
an hour or so, and I finally got what was the best design. So now they just
called me, and they don’t like it; they say it looks too crowded. Oh, and guess
what? It’s too crowded, but they want me to ADD more text! Can you believe
that?”
“Working
with the public...” I say, “It ain’t easy….”
“Right, and
now they’re over at the other store, and there’s poor David, who’s
half-atheist, and they’re grilling him about what church he goes to. So he
tells them—he doesn’t go to church, which did to them what the red cape does to
the bull. So they’re telling him there’s only one path to salvation, and David
has to start stuffing his face with food, even though he’s not hungry, so as
not to be able to talk. So now I have to go rescue David, and deal with the
religious people, and change their little house, by adding more text which will
make it—somehow—less crowded.”
“Ouch,” I
said.
Lady
brightened.
“Hey, why
don’t you come with me? You could give me cover!”
“I’d probably
misbehave,” I said. “With few exceptions, I can’t deal with heavily religious
people. I make the Jehovah Witnesses crazy every time I pass them on the
street—which is about seven times daily, they’re everywhere—by shouting my
heartiest ¡Buenos días!
followed by soy ateo.
It makes them crazy….”
Soy
ateo—I’m an atheist.
“Right,”
said Lady, “OK, it would probably be a violation of fire code, or something, to
have you guys together in the store. Pity, though….”
Well, I had
been occupying myself with Jessye Norman
for most of the morning, and was ready to take a break. First, though, it was
time to check in on Naïa, to find what she had gotten up to.
“What is
this, a siege mentality?,” I asked, since Naïa was sitting on a couch
surrounded by six plastic chairs placed in a semicircle.
‘I don’t
know what that is,” said Naïa.
I keep
forgetting she’s twelve.
Well, I
guessed right, because in fact Naïa was fortifying herself—and her dragon—from
an imminent attack from her archenemy—for the purpose of this game—Alexia, also
equipped with a dragon.
“Excellent
idea,” I tell Naïa, “and putting the red pillows on the seats of the chairs will
make, as you rightly pointed out, a standing-on-the-chairs attack less likely
to succeed. But I can identify six gaping areas of vulnerability….”
“Don’t tell
her,” said Naïa.
“I already
knew,” said Alexia, who obviously didn’t.
An hour
later, I came back to discover an additional six chairs, which had been placed
on their backs, with the seats covering the space between the legs of the
chairs in front of them.
Then I went
to the grocery store, and, while waiting in line, thought, ‘well, why
not?’
So I headed
off to the other store, and gave Lady no chance to greet me.
“Excuse me,
is your name Lady?”
“Last time
I checked!”
“You don’t
know me,” I said, “but they told me at the café that I could find you here. And
that’s…”
I glance
down at the casita,
the little plaster house that Lady has painted, complete with the offending
scripture.
“WOW, is
that beautiful,” I exclaim. “That’s LOVELY! Did you do that? That’s incredible.
And what’s the verse around the door?”
“Luke
17:4,” or some such thing, says Lady, who begins to rattle it off to me.
I’m nodding
my head all the time.
“I know it
well,” I breathe, my voice sopping with earnestness. “Ah, that verse has been
with me in my darkest hours! How often, in moments of spiritual desolation, in
the very darkest night of the soul, in those moments of spiritual anguish, when
I most questioned the path that I had taken, that very verse accompanied
me—nay, rescued me—from spiritual oblivion.”
I pause to
take a breath….
“It’s a
masterpiece,” I tell Lady. “An unbelievable piece of work. I can’t believe how
lucky I am to have seen it.”
Lady has
recovered.
“Thanks,”
she says, “I like it myself….”
Right, so I
dash off, after fictitiously getting permission to play my cello at the
café—“would it be ok…..?”—and having glanced at a very confused, as well as
religious, woman.
An hour
later, I’m playing Bach, after first noting that the siege has been lifted, or
maybe the dragons have been banished—anyway, the forts are gone and the chairs
are back to being chairs. So I work my way through G Major, get through d
Minor, and then am in the prelude of the C Major when it happens.
A two-year
old toddles in, looking intently at me, her round face framed by blonde curls.
The Gerber people completely screwed up when they passed over this kid for the
one on their bottles, and a note to any Renaissance painters out there…
…you’re
seriously going to have to reconsider how you’re painting your cherubim.
So she
watches me, intently, and that’s permitted, since part of what I do,
pretentiously speaking, is audience building. And who doesn’t like little
girls? So, she stares, and then begins to…
…pee.
All right,
that’s a first, so what to do? Well, I take my cello to the bathroom—another
first—and grab some paper towels. Then I go back to the little girl, who has
taken off her little panties and is trying to mop the floor with them.
“No te
preocupes”, I tell the
little girl. “Pero ¿dónde está tu mamá?”
Don’t
worry, but where’s your mom?
A woman
appears, and says something I don’t get. Then Gaby, from the café, appears with
some little red flip-flops. Next, Elizabeth appears, and she gets the mop. At
this point, the girl has vanished.
“That lady
shouldn’t have that child,” says Elizabeth. “She can’t take care of her, she’s
retarded or crazy or something.”
“Some
asshole got that poor girl pregnant,” says the normally pacific Jorge; it’s the
first time I’ve heard him swear. “I see her pushing her daughter in the
stroller down the middle of the street, right in front of the Hacienda building. And the traffic is totally
backed up behind her….”
“That’s
horrible,” I said, “shouldn’t we report?”
“Don’t
know,” said Jorge. “They’ll come and take the child away, but where will they
put her?”
“You know
what she did when I told her ‘no?’ She was about to sweep some ceramic houses
off the counter, so I bent down and told her ‘no’—firmly but gently. And then
guess what?”
Elizabeth
puts down the mop and begins slapping both sides of her face with both hands,
saying ‘NO’ with each blow.
“That’s
what her mother is doing to her,” say Raf, when I tell him hours later.
‘Life is so
damned unfair,’ I think. ‘There’s Naïa, whose one worry is of a dragon
snatching, and then there’s this little girl, and can you imagine—if she’s
pissing on the floor in a café—what her house looks and smells like? And there
are two people—Edwin and the woman I don’t like—who are homeless, and sleeping
in the most comfortable corners of the café they can find, probably because
they’re up all night. And then there’s Elizabeth, who hasn’t gotten child
support for months, and who decided it was too much trouble….’
‘And the
worst of it? It’s all around us, and we go blind to it. Remember that study of
people walking past their closest relatives, who were dressed up as street
people? There’s so much out there that we’ve trained ourselves not to see, and
everyone knows this woman can’t take care of her child, but we all do nothing,
which is the most heartbreaking thing of all.’
‘It’s some
screwy world,’ I think, ‘Raf and I can’t even get married in Puerto Rico, much
less have a child, but this woman? Not a problem—she can have as many children
as she wants. So it’s a question: a cherub walks into my life, pisses on the
floor, and what to do—report it to the Departamento de la Familia or not?’
I learned a
long time ago: I have more questions than answers, and that’s the way it should
be.
But I wish
I had the answer to this question….
