For some time now in the delusion of being a writer I have been writing what I thought should be called DIPTYCH BEFORE DYING, based on the two journeys --- to Newfoundland and Mexico City--- I made with my father in the weeks before his death in the summer of 1973...recently i have thought it should be a TRIPTYCH as I discovered the imagined death of my first wife in Venice in the Spring of that year, while in Venice on the way to Bulgaria. At the beginning of August we were staying at the Hotel del Prado on Reforma, in Mexico City... so
The guy in the
hotel tourist office gave us the tickets and said in the summer they try out
young bullfighters. It gives them, what is
it you say, experience for the regular season…
You can’t learn to fight the bull in your head, I’m sure you know this,
you can’t do it only in the country out there in a village way beyond the city:
you have to come into the city eventually, be in the big stadium… these are not
good seats but they are high up… that is the best way to see it for the first
time, away from being there too closely, to see why people come to see what they
are seeing, up too close it is all personality and something to be written
about and make photographs of and you look at the people looking more than
they’re worth. And you can’t understand
what they are saying… Americans always insist on the best seats in the house...
you don’t want that, I think.
However, did this
man: here is the descriptive pause in recollection: ---thick brown frames of eye glasses, heavy
black hair combed back from the forehead, a broad face, blue suit jacket, white
shirt and black tie, neither tall nor short as he never stood all the time I
was in the office--- the brown envelope with the tickets had been handed across
the desk to me, silver ring on the second finger of his right hand with a small
green square of stone: enough you might say--- begins to talk to me in the
office off the waiting room with the faded posters and the broken down
over-stuffed leather covered chairs
which in the years developed wounds that had been sewn together, but never
healed, he was saying, when he could see my hand was on the sewn wound of the seat
of the chair next to the one I was sitting on.
The woman who sews
our chairs no longer seems to be coming by the hotel, I can’t account for her
disappearance as we pay her well and in cash and she did her work quickly with
no expectation of something more, I think, but one can’t tell people all the
time what to do and she was one of those people, maybe as your hand can feel on
the wound--- the words from a song: in mortis examine--- that is what
your fingers are moving over and I have seen you with your father is it?...
when you came for the car to see Teotihuacan… that is another reason for the
seats I found for you and your father as already it is all too close to you and
I am sure you feel this as he goes to sleep or if you awaken and see him
sleeping, preparing his face, we say here, sleeping, preparing our last face to
be remembered, something, maybe the only thing we do not have to do, to remember that---
what we looked like when we were
last seen, though they remember and you will remember forever and ever as they
say, ever and ever… replacing the living with the last memory, with your father
you will enjoy going to the bullfight, it is not to my taste but it remains
here and it will remain here though I am not in any way… sitting up in the
heights you will not be targets for the wild ones who like to throw things and
as long as your father keeps his hat on he will not be a provocation… it is written
about in one of the English language books about Mexico that the little boys
like using the bald heads of the gringo
for target practice--- I do not know in pursuit of what it is they are
training.
Eduardo has come
into existence.
We never say Eddie
or Ed like the Americans do in their constant intimacy, their constant drawing
the wagon train into a circle, even if only on the basis of a person’s first
name, Eduardo was saying, once the tickets for the bullfight had been pushed
across the glass topped desk, I had a friend who called me Ed. He had heard the name in an American movie he
had seen and liked the sound of it, as it was foreign and we each saw the other
as a visitor from some other place: I wanted to come from Russia and sometimes
I wanted to come from China, don’t ask me why, while my friend wanted to come
from the US of A. He liked saying that:
the US of A. He liked the sloppiness of
the Americans and told me the formality of our people will be the death of our
people: as you can see we were both
experts before our time. My friend said
we were so formal we had a code worked out for the different coughs a person
could utter for a multitude of purposes… and I’d ask him where his English originated
and he would look at me as if I was talking about the dark side of moon or some
other place at which point in an impossible to believe change of topic he asked
if I was… and I will complete that sentence for you as it gives the wrong
impression
You are to take a
taxi, Eduardo says, as a pause came after his sentence. I notice as his hands moved about on the
desk, moving pages from here to there and then straightening the little pile
that a blue and white paperback book moved into view and then disappeared but
not before I had seen the title The
Clothes of a Dead Priest. The
author’s name was unfamiliar to me yet it seemed close in spelling to John
Currier or it could have been John Carrier.
I did not ask
Eduardo about the book as I thought his revealing it was all he had wanted to
do, though I could not understand what he had wanted to tell me by showing this
book.
A taxi, from the
front of the hotel and the driver will know where to leave you for the entrance
these tickets will allow you to enter. I
doubt the stadium will be very crowded since it is summer time but those
attending will be there for the most honorable of reasons: the tickets are cheaper, they can really feel
superior to these toreadors, they will be encouraging of the young and sometimes
the comedy is of the highest order since it is wrapped in blood and death, even
if everyone involved is not of the first rank. And you should feel no
compassion for any of it: this is the hardest aspect of going to such a
spectacle, it is a moment away from the usual, a necessary turning from so as
to turn back.
Sea deep thoughts
are to be kept away from yourself and you should enjoy wondering when the boy
with the beer will be up to where you are seating yourselves … these trivial
details are finally more productive, if one must be vulgar about such a
matter. There will be an element of
winnowing to be witnessed: the last days
of the aged horses, the bulls that in some way are defective, not being fully
worthy of being killed by a master… and while the bull hardly has much of a
chance and the toreador runs his risks, there is always an unbalance… the
superficial wounds inflicted on the bull, don’t ask anyone their opinion of any
of this as this is your advantage of not speaking Spanish… the banalities of
protest and explanation.
Trust yourself to
what your own eyes see and be able to ask your father what he sees and I do
hope he will be able to find words for what he sees as such a spectacle is more
ably described by he who is closer to his own final moment but I fear I might
be intruding upon your own wish to be closer to the end of the story, am I not
right?
I had been
listening to Eduardo’s voice and while it is probably impossible for a reader
to believe I could have remembered this conversation at this great remove---as
the old books would have it--- I have to say Eduardo is here as close to me as
the skin on my fingers is to the bones it covers. Though there is no way I can claim to be an
anatomist and use the resulting authority to plead my case: yes, I did remember what Eduardo had been
saying though I am willing to grant some
of my memory might be frazzled by the passage of the something or other, but
that is neither explanation nor defense of the veracity of my transcription of
his sentences.
If it rains and it
is likely to rain on such a Sunday, a boy will appear with clear plastic rain
capes and the fight will go on no matter the weather… as in football matches:
the weather contributes its share to the struggle, unlike baseball that is so
easily defeated by the weather, baseball the constant humiliation of its players
by the whims of the weather through which the football player and those in the
impervious struggle with the bull labor for a conclusion must to be achieved no
matter.
I dislike the
poverty of our languages to describe this weather my friend in Arizona calls the monsoons, admitting in his choice of
this word, a failure of linguistic imagination, a poverty in need of bringing
over from the far east this word, monsoon,
but no matter, a Sunday outing for you and your father different from what you
are used to--- I am sure--- back at home as it is for me also--- a time to
rest, to sleep away the gloom that always descends with a fierce swipe of a
mental scalpel that cuts always after two o’clock on a Sunday afternoon any
strength we might have as we, the two of us know, the week will again be here
and this foolish day of rest and never asking: rest for what?
It makes me
nostalgic, Eduardo says, leaning back against the high back of his chair which
seemed to shrink him to only his voice though of course a man, really, a man
who had found these tickets for the bullfight and who was not going away and
would be at the hotel in the morning and was saying do look in.
Would
it be possible to imagine I handed Eduardo this photograph
which I had taken
during the intermission when these young men wheeled out this platform with a
large Pepsi Cola bottle wobbling and after a few minutes in the rain they found
as they tried to return the platform that the wheels had become stuck in the
surface of the ring and additional workers were called into both push and pull
the platform from the ring so the rest of the program could begin?
There would be no
need for the evidence, Eduardo was saying,
I do not always believe what I see as I am sure you are also skeptical
of those who retreat and that is the necessary military word for this defection
from the art of the tongue, if I may wax on before your scorn melts me to a
puddle. You have seen something we would
not have seen and for that I can only thank you--- though of what significance
can it have as already it is a form of ancient history, due only to evaporate
as the color of your photograph will fade or as in some cases burst into a sort
of golden obliterating stain?
I wonder if this is readable and if there is anymore the possibility of seeing something like this into what was used to be called book form? Please, keepi in mind that this is a prepared slide from a longer manuscript.
