“All right,” I told her, “today’s problem is what to do
about Matthias Goerne. I’ve finished up with Trump—I got him straightened
around yesterday. So, once everybody gets on the same page—it takes awhile for
some people to catch up with my lightning intellect—we’ll be entirely done with
him! Poosh! Back to reality TV, where we can all safely ignore him!”
“Poosh?” said Lady. “What’s Poosh?”
“It’s the particularly squishy sound that Trump makes when
he goes ‘poof,’” I told her. “No idea why, but there it is….”
“Well, I’m ready to move away from Trump,” said Lady. “In
fact, haven’t I told you that this blog used to be a Trump-free zone? And then,
all of a sudden, there he was! Just as he was on television, every time I
turned it on, and on every magazine cover, every time I went to the grocery
store. It got to be completely annoying….”
“Definitely time for Goerne,” I told her. “You remember what
I told Naïa, all those years ago? Back before the rats….”
Naïa celebrated her fifteenth birthday with the announcement
that she wanted a couple of rats for her birthday. She reported this quite
casually at an art opening that we all attended.
“Ahh,” I told her, “and have you informed your landlord that
you’ll be keeping rats?”
She chose not to respond.
“What about the health department?”
She examined a corner of the ceiling intently.
“And the department of sanitation?”
Began whistling Dixie!
So the rats arrived. But there was, as anyone could have
imagined, a problem. For it turned—and please don’t inquire too much right
here—that the sexes of the rats were disordered. The intention had been to
create a unisex environment, or perhaps a homosexual environment. But it turned
out that one of the rats was male. Or perhaps it was female—I don’t remember.
Anyway, it was some unwanted sex.
“So we had to call the guy in the outskirts of Caguas,” said
Lady. “And he got upset and complained, but he eventually came. But it took him
so long, that he came at rush hour, and the traffic was terrible. And then he
couldn’t find parking, so he was calling us every two minutes, threatening to
turn around and go back to Caguas. So by the time he arrived, everybody was in
quite a state….”
“Well, of course,” I told her. “What did you expect, when
you agreed to go along with such lunacy? And whoever heard of a fifteen-year
old girl wanting rats?”
“What’s wrong with rats?” asked Lady. “And what should she
want?”
“A horse,” I told her. “Which would be entirely more
sensible. You can keep it in the shower stall—it’ll be entirely content there….”
“That’s ridiculous,” said Lady. “And how would we shower?”
“Atop the horse,” I told her. “Thus solving two problems at
once. Oh, and the water will whisk away any little waste the horse might have
shed….”
Lady went off to paint some houses—her own personal variant
of whistling Dixie.
So the man with the rats—or the rattor—arrived with an assortment of rats, all of the desired sex.
Naïa, unable to make up her mind, chose two. Oh, and that’s in addition to the
two she already had. So that left the odd rat, of the errant sex, but the
rattor had the solution!
And that was?
Throw the damn rat over the balcony and go home!
Both Lady and Naïa were outraged.
“Well, it sounds like a perfectly sensible solution to me,”
I told her. “After all, that rat was shop-worn. In fact, it was a used rat—and
who’s going to buy that? Besides, the rat will have a perfectly splendid time
in Old San Juan, with its many exotic restaurants and their attached dumpsters.
Monday, it’s Vietnamese! Tuesday…”
Lady was outraged.
“You can’t have a rat eating out of a dumpster!” she
snorted.
“That is precisely,” I began.
“So then Naïa began to tear up, and it was her fifteenth
birthday, after all, so we decided: we will keep the rat, even with the
aberrant sex…..”
“This is getting to be like the Trump presidency after all,”
I told her. “It’s going on and on, and the sordid details keep getting worse
and worse.”
“You don’t know the half of it,” said Lady. “Because we
decided: the rat would have to be fixed.”
“Fixed?”
“De-sexed,” said Lady. “You know, castrated….”
“What!” I told her. “You’re actually going to spend good
money….”
Well, there was a problem, of course. And that was: who
would fix the rat?
“The vet up the street from the café just laughed,” said
Lady.
“The vet up the street charges people just for walking past
his shop,” I told Lady. “Anyway, now you see the advantage of a horse….”
“Well, so we finally found one,” said Lady, “though it was
out on 65th Infantry….”
65th Infantry is a charming road, with only two
little problems. First, every driver on the Eastern half of Puerto Rico is on
it, stalled, and honking their horns. Second, it will then start to rain, and
the road will instantly be completely flooded.
“You actually went out to 65th Infantry?” I asked
her. “And did you get your will written? Your affairs sorted out? And why
didn’t we know about this, so that we could have given a farewell party?”
“So we get to the vet,” said Lady, who has either learned
from or taught to Naïa the fine art of ignoring, “and it turns out, yes! The
vet will be happy to fix the rat!”
“Microsurgery,” I said, “though come to think of it, maybe
he could do a job on Trump….”
Dirty look….
“Sorry,” I told her, “you know, it’s my King Charles’ head…”
She gives me the punch line.
“But it will cost a hundred bucks…..”
I’m speechless.
Fortunately, that doesn’t last long.
“You are absolutely NOT,” I begin.
“But then guess what,” Lady surges on. “It turns out that
we’ve been to the vet before. In fact, that’s where we got Lorca!”
Federico García Lorca—in the rarified world of the Poets’
Passage, that’s a toy Chihuahua.
“And you know what? It turns out that we have a credit! They
charged us for a medicine or a shot or something. Anyway, it was 90 dollars,
and they kept it for us! Unbelievable!”
“Absolutely, since every one of those businesses on 65th
Infantry is a den of thieves,” I told her.
“So now, it’s only going to cost us 10 bucks,” said Lady.
“And how much did you pay for the rat,” I asked.
“Well, that was only one buck….”
“Anyway,” I told her, “it’s not costing you ten bucks. You
should ask for the ninety dollars back, get rid of the rat, and hold tight for
a couple of days. Then I’ll go down to the bus depot, and pick up a couple
specimens for Naïa.”
“It won’t be the same,” said Lady. “Naïa has fallen in love
with that rat….”
She goes away, and I’m left thinking. Wasn’t today going to
be the day to worry about Matthias Goerne? But then Lady reappears.
“Don’t tell Nico about the 100 bucks,” she tells me. Nico is
her husband, a Frenchman. They like snails, but not rats.
“He might not understand,” she told me.
I go off, leaving the rats behind.
Now, what am I going to do about Matthias Goerne?
