Valleyesque, p.2
Valleyesque, page 2
I tried to recall the facts I knew about Proust, picturing him more as a mythical figure that passes in some way through people’s lives than as a writer. I knew he’d written this more-than-four-thousand-page saga that takes place in only about three allotted days; that he was in love with Albertine, and also deeply tortured by her.
During this walk I began to fear something absurd. I began to fear that if, for whatever reason, I finally sat down and read Proust, this scene I’d experienced with the street fight would be a passage therein—that the reality of Proust’s narrative had somehow been translated into my own, or maybe the other way around.
But who is the character of me all along? I wondered. And who is Swann here?
* * *
Back in my room, I wasn’t eager to go to bed or for a new day. The market warehouse changed my work schedule and I was no longer working night shifts. My record player had broken and I’d accumulated fees at the public library, so I hadn’t had new books to read in a minute.
I wasn’t surprised when Ram knocked on my screen door that night, and, with a feeling of relief, I welcomed him in. When I asked him what was up, Ram said, “Look what they gave us today,” and held out a regular-sized hammer.
“Who gave this to who?”
“Who do you think? The new gangsters. They sent us a box of them. Teachers are to give one hammer to every student. That’s actually our new education motto: ‘A hammer for every student.’ They’re also streamlining my science curriculum to include building projects year-round. Hear those people protesting out there? I just came over here from joining them. Wanted to hit you up about it earlier, but you seemed busy. What’s up with you?”
I recounted to him my earlier incident with the street fight and what had led to my spiral of thinking about the Dreyfus Affair and Proust—whom, it turned out, Ram hadn’t read either. This fact seemed to upset him. He stamped his feet and pouted, cursed this and that about the old and the new gangsters; then a vision must have struck him, because, pointing one finger at the wall for no reason, he said, “You know what must’ve happened? The reality Proust created in that book leaked into your reality. Do you see what that occurrence implies? It implies that there are similar leaks happening to other people’s lives all the time. Flannery O’Connor might be leaking down on a teenage girl at the park, or Pérez Galdós is leaking into a pensioned widower’s life. Daphne du Maurier, maybe, is leaking into somebody pumping gas at a station by a motel, or that story by Hawthorne about people throwing the world into a big fire, so we can cheer and heckle as it burns, is leaking into … I don’t know—”
“The life of a new gangster.”
“One of the new gangsters, yes. The only possible answer. Do you think that once you’ve created a literary landscape, that landscape will be forever leaking back into the world? Even if one has never read this author—these people who don’t read are probably the ones who suffer the most leaks into their lives, actually. But then what does that say about our own lives, yours and mine? Those of us that are familiar with these authors and these works?”
Ram stood up, and this time he was pointing at something else—he was pointing at the sound we’d grown accustomed to, the sound of the Science Fair Protest making the rounds of the town. “Whose literary reality is this,” he continued, “that is leaking into our lives? The obvious answer is Orwell’s. But, no. It’s gotta be a writer nobody’s ever heard of, hunkered in a cabin somewhere, or in some tenement house. What sweet, miserable poet’s story is leaking into our reality today? If only. If only the leaks were visible. That way we could plug them up. With cork or our dirty rags.”
After this exchange, Ram went on his way and I dropped the whole issue with Proust and the Dreyfus Affair.
* * *
The following day I awoke to a strange sensation that something had happened. Not to me, but somewhere out in the world. Something that would alter the landscape of our lives even more.
I refrained from reading the news, made coffee, and had the last of the bananas I’d kept frozen. A cool fall breeze came through my screen door, and from another apartment I could hear somebody playing bad pop music loudly. But I didn’t mind. I was even grateful.
At the market, all of us working in the warehouse cheered when the first truck of produce in almost a month backed up against the dock. Most of the produce was in great condition, and I spent the majority of my shift stocking the store as people picked items for their rationed amounts.
On my way home I had the feeling of being a piece in a board game—the streets and avenues were all replicas of pieces in a board game as well, along with the vehicles and the pedestrians wearing their headphones, rarely making eye contact. I was looking down at the ground, imagining the rules of this game, when through my peripheral vision I saw a tall figure, wearing the unmistakable Doxie’s Coffee uniform, walking toward me. I was startled when this person grabbed me by the shoulders and turned me to make direct eye contact. As other pedestrians walked around us, this person let go of my shoulders, struck a pose, and right there broke out singing a catchy verse I recognized from Xavier Felipe’s hit single “Volver a Vivir,” in an accent that gave away they weren’t fluent in Spanish.
I clapped and said, “Oh, shit.”
Even before I read her name tag, I knew this person was Verona, the tall woman I’d partied with back at my place. We talked about how fun that night had been, then she said, “I’m on my way to work.”
“Oh yeah? I just got out myself.”
“You work at Sobie’s Market, right? Are you guys hiring there, by any chance?”
“No,” I told her, “we are not right now,” even though I knew there were a few openings.
Somehow it seemed appropriate for a person like me to work at Sobie’s Market, but I could see better things for Verona; having her as my coworker would feel like some kind of injustice. She noticed my grocery bag and yelled, “Is that a banana? I haven’t seen any in weeks.”
I gave her a couple from my bunch and we parted ways without exchanging information.
Walking down the sidewalk, I pictured her both ways I’d encountered her: in a Doxie’s Coffee work uniform, and ready to party and get down, dry humping on my floor. Through no choosing of my own, I wondered what kinds of things she did day-to-day. I imagined her reading a book, or maybe writing fiction—and maybe some of it leaking here and there, into our real world.
As I turned into my neighborhood the sun looked like a bowling ball cracked in half. I listened to the streets growing louder, and asked myself how many days into the Science Fair Protest we actually were.
NOCTURNE FROM A WORLD CONCAVE
Frédéric Chopin awoke wearing his clothes and muddy shoes and feeling the cold slobber of the orange sun dripping down his face—he didn’t know if it was rising or setting, and let out a gnarled walrus groan. He struggled off his cot, unsure what getting up or doing anything really meant, then remembered the money. He pulled out the wad from his trench coat: old green dollars mixed with colorful pesos. He thought to count it, but it looked like all of it. Most of it.
Like a selfish, needy friend who drops in when never wanted, the retching arrived: one, two, three dry heaves, the third one long and pronounced and painful, and for a moment Chopin thought his organs had finally hatched their escape from his slopped-up insides. He made it to the toilet and the red sprayed in chunks and pellets, most of it settling on the seat.
Chopin brushed his teeth, washed his face, combed his hair, and grabbed the yellow customs papers tacked to the wall by the door. He exited his apartment and climbed down the steep staircase, clutching the railing with his right hand.
He landed on the sidewalk off Plaza Bonifacio near the market square of Ciudad Juárez. Hunched over, Chopin was still taller than all the people moving by him—the people that moved by him every day, and that once upon a time had even greeted him. Though he felt himself a ghost now, it was when people smiled or acknowledged him that he feared they must know more than they should of his soul—or that maybe they were familiar with his music. It seemed that just a few years prior people had been different; they were more bothersome when he was trying to start his day. But now people hardly said hello or made eye contact, which to him was no problem, really.
He spotted the kids on the bright side of the street, saw them pointing in his direction and laughing, and muttered to himself, “God, these damned kids want what’s left of my blood,” and he accelerated his pace. The kids (there were three of them—siblings: two boys, one girl), in their off-colored clothes, ran like they were dancing through the traffic, cabs, peseras, and people along the border. They cornered Chopin, despite his efforts to sneak past, and started chanting, “Papá Chopin! Papá Chopin!”
The elder boy was selling bags of chicharróns and fried chips, the girl was selling Chiclets, and the younger boy was selling nothing at all but held his hand out, begging for alms.
Chopin waved one arm briskly but slowly, like he was shooing off large prehistoric insects.
“Not now, kids,” Chopin growled. “Papá Chopin’s gotta make rent—”
“Papá Chopin,” the elder boy said, “nada más lo que pueda, para mi guitarra … quiero tocar la guitarra como usted toca el piano. Órale, señor, porfa…”
Chopin ignored the kids and hurried off. It was the only way to get rid of them, and he didn’t feel bad doing so, knowing that the good he’d done for them made up for these minuscule encounters.
With his left hand he felt the rubber band around the wad of money in his coat pocket and continued a few more blocks along Plaza Bonifacio, before turning left on Calle 6 de Mayo.
* * *
Chopin asked himself what month it could be, then remembered it, along with the year, and he chuckled with his mouth closed. All at once he realized that his shoes were soaked, that it had rained the night before, and that his mother was still dead.
“Goddammit,” he said, then muffled his cough with his coat sleeve.
* * *
Chopin had buried his mother the previous week, but when he thought about it, he had no idea what the term “previous week” meant. She was dead, though. Spared living past the inevitable premature death of her only son, and now Chopin saw his own terminal illness as something comical.
He thought of his mother’s final days and turned to the gray skies that reflected his bowels and the soup of his ailments. He felt the roar of border life convulsing, and the faces around him disappeared and became merely the sound of their breathing—the short breaths took over people’s bodies, their vehicles, the buildings, even the landscape, and the world became an Old West of incomplete breaths—Chopin was unable to hear anything else. He felt himself about to start retching again, but held it—for all he was worth, he held it, and kept walking amid the breathing around him.
Remorse and grief aside, he said to himself, “That was that, and this is now, and I must reclaim the Pleyel.”
Chopin looked at his left hand and found he was holding a lottery ticket, then remembered (as if he were experiencing it all over again) running into his favorite street vendor, Don Álvarito, and buying a lottery ticket a block and a half back. He wondered what kind of bill he could’ve given him, because he didn’t have small change in any pocket.
He pulled out the yellow customs papers and quickly fanned through them and put them away.
* * *
Chopin began slightly obsessing over a scientist he’d once read about. He didn’t recall the scientist’s name, but he remembered reading about how this scientist could prove to anyone quite simply that we live in a half world and we are all half beings. That we are all divided in half and it is only an illusion that we’ve filled out the rest—in this world, the scientist could prove, we are here to strive to fill the other half of ourselves in order to be born as full beings in the next life. Chopin remembered a quote from the scientist, saying, “Most people fail and they keep coming back as half beings. Until, one hopes, they learn and can be born as full beings in a forthcoming life.”
He wished he’d read the rest of the article then. At least far enough to find out how he could become a full being himself.
Since the death of his mother, that article had somehow become very present in his mind. It seemed to him a logical explanation of this reality. Physically we are halves, yes—we are born divided in half, yes; our real half is our imperfect half, yes; and, yes, we live out this life trying to fill in our other half, the one that would make us perfect, yes—and our brains, our brains are so powerful they collectively fill in the rest of ourselves so we won’t see how gruesome our insides are, yes; so we are always fooling ourselves, yes, yes.
Thinking this way worried him, but more and more the whole scheme of it made sense.
Chopin coughed and again was able to laugh at the cough.
Outside the customs office, by the curb, were two men in nice hats and flashy clothing having a conversation and smoking cigarettes with a police officer. The police officer laughed a laugh like ball bearings in a blender, and one of the sharp-looking men smiled and winked at Chopin.
Chopin thought the men must be musicians in their own right, since their wardrobe resembled that of corrido players.
Chopin gave the winking man a half nod and muttered something that sounded like Buenos días as he walked past them into the customs office.
He took a number upon entering the proper room, and as if he was expected, a worker with poofy auburn hair signaled to him from behind a desk. Chopin looked around to make sure she meant him, then walked up to her. Standing up, the worker asked if he was who he was. He showed her an ID and she said, “Your case has been taken care of” in Spanish.
Chopin struggled to explain it to her—how he’d had to play a show on the American side the previous day, not his first, but hopefully his last. And upon coming back during the thunderstorm, the customs people had confiscated his piano, and now they required him to pay a tax equal to a third of its worth, since it wasn’t a Mexican-made piano. A Mexican-made piano—what even is that?
It was a new law, she told him then, to encourage Mexicans to buy Mexican-made products.
Chopin found himself losing his patience and casually mentioned he’d just buried his mother, and now the Mexican government was holding his piano for ransom—what an outrage. He exclaimed that he was a simple artist with the urgency and need to keep making his living, a living more and more denied to him as time went by and that was secretly killing him.
The worker placed her hand on Chopin’s shoulder and he stopped talking mid-sentence.
With a droll air, the worker repeated, “Your case has been taken care of.”
She grabbed the customs forms from Chopin’s hand and tore them up and threw them into the wastebasket.
“I don’t understand,” he said.
“It’s easy. Your piano’s been retrieved. They’ve paid the tariff and some deliverers showed up to take it. Have a nice day. Go play your piano.”
Chopin had many questions, so he hesitated before walking away. The lady disappeared into the dim yellow of the cavernous office.
“It’s going to be delivered?” he shouted. “By who?”
* * *
Outside, Chopin was still wondering how his piano would arrive when he pieced it together: the two sharp-looking men he’d seen making the police officer laugh were suddenly before him, and one of them started to talk. He was friendly, respectful, and not at all threatening to Chopin. Chopin looked directly at him and tried to listen. Across the street was a seafood restaurant called La Piedra y el Pez. As the man talked, Chopin, as if lost in a storm, found harbor in the logo of La Piedra y el Pez—it was an illustration of a tiny fish about to be eaten by a medium fish about to be eaten by a big fish. They looked like different sizes of the same species, painted red and blue, with sharp yellow teeth.
Chopin was inside a dark pickup truck when he snapped out of it. They’d put a luchador mask over his head with the eyes and mouth sewn shut, and were driving along bumpy terrain as Chopin tried to think if he’d agreed to anything—he didn’t recall saying a single word to either of the men, but was in this truck riding the terrain of some acne-scarred planet.
He wasn’t afraid or alarmed, nor did he feel any kind of way about what was happening, and in the darkness under the mask he thought again about his mother—mostly, about the mirror in his mother’s room, the same room in which the disease finally took her. It was a tall and slightly oval mirror, in which you could see your whole body reflected if you stood far enough away.
The morning after the Cruz Roja took his mother, Chopin had sat on her bed and wept for her—wept for the pain she’d suffered, and for the way she’d finally been taken. As he wept, he looked into the mirror. He couldn’t remember how, but a white shawl had been placed around it and fluffed so that it looked like a pair of wings. With tears on his face, he laughed. Wings? What? It can’t be, he thought. Then, with some shame, he caught his reflection. Chopin noticed how mirrors are a lot like human eyes, and when looking into that mirror he felt the gaze of his dead mother.
* * *
He now felt himself lying vertically in a field of tall grass, the sun hot on his face, and he could feel every stem of the grass against his cheeks and forehead—he was climbing down a thick oak tree, when light and dust and a splash of wind like cold, still water dripped down his sweaty hair, and his eyes finally focused, and he came to. There were blurry figures surrounding him. For a few seconds he thought one of the blurry figures was holding a decapitated head for everybody to see, and its face was blue and red just like the fish illustrations at La Piedra y el Pez—but it wasn’t a head; those were also the colors of the luchador mask. One of the well-dressed men was holding it up, and turned it inside out for the others to see—there was apple-red blood on the mask. Chopin was handed a golden handkerchief, and a large man with a machine gun and a mustache pantomimed a mouth-wiping gesture to the great pianist.
