Saturday, May 14, 2005
Village Life
Rana leaves his black suit, comes to SA, decked in the princely togs he saves for the village, the stain of sugarcane upon his teeth. He takes the 14 bus downtown, sits beside the viejita and dreams with his eyes open. There are no shortcuts this morning.
A silver anklet steps on two stops later, the brown ankle the brown of his skin: behind her the skin is sallow, unshaven, shorts with legs in need of cover, but Anklet is in love. Sallow has a travel bag that takes up the aisle: one stop later, a woman 70 years out of Walker Evans struggles to sit behind the bag: apparently she is as invisible as she feels – Sallow makes no effort to help her. A blue-printed shift and blue river shoes on her feet: she had been walking up the highway while Rana sat waiting for his bus. She is a ghost in daylight, though a sunburned ghost at that. Now, seated across the aisle, she has the look of one who has given up looking for the rest of her life.
Down the aisle sits Yemaya’s sister, the only other rider with book in hand: she, too, alternately reads and looks: she looks Rana straight in the face and smiles, as so few do on these blue ships ferrying across town. Rana looks away and through the window that is now splashed with rain. When he looks back again she is reading. Moments later her sandals shuffle past him as she runs for the bus just ahead. One block later, Rana steps off.
He sees the mosque-like auditorium, walks down a street beside it, past a lone mansion – limestone, turrets, garden room above a driveway. Once, he remembers V saying, the home of his mother, now the law offices of C and S. There is a grey Volvo beneath the garden room. Rana thinks of desolation and his black suit languishing back in Lahore.
Beside the mansion is another building that invitingly forbids entrance: sculpted above its door: TOLTEC. The name he recognizes as ancient, though the red bricks of the building are anything but. Rounding the building, he sees a poorly painted sign proclaiming Toltec Apartments. The look from behind is of yet another shabby repository for broken downtown dreams.
Rana is early for his meeting with V: he rounds back to the mosque, sees a walkway down to the river – a section he has not yet explored, a section he did not yet know existed. He walks down, thinks to take a length before rounding back to his meeting with V. As he comes to the green stream – hardly a river – a man is walking up from the south with a confused and imploring look on his face. Rana is still far enough off to act as if he has not seen the look and glances north to his right, upstream. There is a lovely old limestone wall with green falling down upon it beside the imploring man, but bouncing off the wall is the sound of an animal howling. Just over the left shoulder of the man, Rana can see the animal: a large woman, slumped over and wailing. Two men Rana passed on his way down to the river had already passed the howling woman, though nothing on their smiling faces would have betrayed that fact. The imploring man does not have their callousness: he feels he needs to do something, but he clearly is appealing to Rana for help. Rana remembers the black suit he left behind and turns upstream to his right.
Up ahead, there is the sound of rushing water: under a cypress canopy, the river drops over a tiny dam. The walkway has ended: to reach the falls, Rana must walk along a dirt pathway and then pick the last thirty feet along a series of flat stones. At the falls there is a concrete slide down from a parking lot. At his feet are mounds of orange-red crab claws strewn beside the churning river. Rana wants to sit: the crab mess reminds him of the sludge of the sugarcane machine in the woods back home: but, he feels the approach of his meeting with V and walks on.
The café is behind the law office mansion, and is part of the ground floor of a building in which automobiles were once sold. Rana remembers V saying the name Studebaker, but he has no pictures in his mind for such a car. On a beautiful flagstone floor are tables for the café; further back, in the depths of the building, is a wide open gallery: upon its walls are paintings and sculptures: between the art pieces are doors to offices. Despite its echoes of cars and commerce, it feels nevertheless like sanctuary, like the reason he left Lahore and the black suit.
He is still early for V, so he sits in one of the comfortable chairs against the wall of the gallery, facing the old glass-paneled door. Half the tables of the café are full, but they are so arranged around the stone floor as to suggest that there are very few dining in the space.
Fifteen minutes pass and V walks through the glass door, a woman in black beside him. Rana is struck again by how, despite his usual customary uniform of slacks and guayabera shirt, V never looks like the same man. Despite his frailness, he has a very erect bearing and appears much taller at a distance. Not seeing Rana, he walks with the woman to the café counter and speaks with the woman behind it in the manner of a frequent visitor. Rana walks over, rags V with a good-natured comment about his incessant schmoozing – a word he has picked up in America as a result of being around a man who does it so effortlessly. A less tolerant man might say compulsively.
The woman in black is introduced: she is M—, an artist friend who also lives in the old converted hotel now known as the Sevilla Apartments downriver. Her head is wrapped with a blue bandanna; she walks with a cane. They sit at a long table, and while V plays host, M tells of her life in Honduras. As he listens to her, Rana feels himself – as he has felt at other times with V – closer to, rather than farther from, his goodhearted uncle halfway around the world in his jungle village. After M’s Honduran stories, V tells of his days in the Phillipines, which Rana learns is also where he was born.
The meal is simple: Rana eats a small bowl of green salad. V drinks a cola; M has a cup of coffee. All three of them finish their conversation with large slices of carrot cake, much larger than anyone’s appetite. M and Rana finish theirs; V goes in search of a doggy bag to carry the rest of his home, though he eats much of what he transfers to the travel bowl.
Rana walks at a leisurely pace with V and M over to St. Mary’s Street and their trolley stop. He bids them goodbye and walks towards the looming terra cotta library building three blocks north. After an hour of browsing the shelves and riding the escalators, he winds his way through the streets to take the bus home.
The bus is the number 8; in his mind, as he waits for it in the sun and later as he is riding, he tips the number over and thinks of endlessness, of the oceans he crossed to travel here, and of the distance V’s call must have traveled to pull a striving self-important man from the turmoil hidden within his black suit.
Across the aisle is a man in jeans, an untucked printed shirt, and brown ankle boots. Ankles again, Rana thinks, recalling the morning’s brown ankle and silver bracelet. Leaning upon the man is a beautiful young boy, all dressed in white: white shirt, shorts, and socks; his shoes are a light tan. Rana thinks of cricket players: he thinks of what is not black. There is an exoticness to the boy that the man – presumably his father – does not have. Rana wonders about the mother who would have given the boy her beauty: she could easily, from the look of the boy, be from his part of the world.
What is this world but a village? The boy and the man get off the bus at a raspas stand. For a moment – just a bare moment – Rana is tempted to introduce himself and join them, but in that moment of reflection the bus door closes and travels on.
