THE CALLE NICARAGUA

An Afternoon Seen Through My Eyes

His arms a scullery of red bumps and welts like those a hammer leaves when swung from hip to shoulder. Fingers tensed, holding onto the steering wheel with all his might. A butcher’s stock in trade, meat brokered from bone and tendon, sawing through hard gray bone, spurs of it catching the swinging light above is head, hair tousled and clumped into reeds. Moses’ boat choused from millet and hard toiling hands. Braided into equal lengths, to avoid tipsiness and improper keeling. His mount is much higher, reaching far above the clouds, high above the stratosphere. Sheep left to mallets, sluice, and God’s imprudence. His blue gray car cuts a memory in the tension of my thoughts, arms, welts, bumps, and a seeming indifference to pain. These I will never understand, and should I, would quickly forget. My stock in trade is forging other’s memories, not my own, but ones once removed and not subject to amelioration. I have no memories of my own, but a coterie of other’s recollections, experiences and forgetfulness. If I were to have my own, my own liturgy of memories, recollections and experiences, I would surly have to put an end to remembering, and then forget that I ever had memories at all. All this, this murder of words, is the result of me seeing a man driving a blue gray car this afternoon as I waited impatiently for a bus. And yes, his arms were a lurid reminder of viral infections, poor hygiene and shoddy eating habits; bulged and reddened with welts, carotids and eczema. You see, this is how and what I see, a simple afternoon waiting impatiently for the bus to arrive, and this is what slurries though my thoughts. My thoughts are bullies, not friends or old acquaintances, pushing and elbowing they’re way into the abattoir of my me. An afternoon seen through my eyes, captured in my mind’s eye, can be impossible, trickery at its best.

She often awakens to pain. Like a burning sensation or an itching, the result of too much of everything and nothing at all. Too much of this, too little of that. Not enough sleep, too much catnapping in between. Too many nights spent in a sweat, eyes pressed tight, ears thudding with footsteps and doors creaking open. A seam of hallway light, faint and yellow, illuminating the foot of her bed, hands groping and foraging for a scallop of skin, a hint of fear. She crouches, cowered, under the volcano: Popocatepetl, Ixtaccihuatl, and Quauhnahuac. All mothers, yet harbingers of death and short lives. The holes in mother earth, dug by suspect hands. Here she will cower, knees pulled in tight to her chest, heaving and galloping with fear. It is here, beneath these behemoths, that she will find her comfort, her distance from the pain and horror of childhood. I think of her often, her hair braided in rows, corn silk and muslin, eyes bluer than the bluest sky, somehow bluer. Of her cowering, legs knocking against each other, tether marks still burning where he lashed her to his perversion. I remember her eyes, eyes that filled a room, a place, a moment, with sadness and fear, a child’s eyes of lost innocence, innocence never had. Only fear and trembling knees, a heart galloping and heaving with fear and suspect hands. She will never forget one tooth mark, one scratch on the milk of her thighs. Eyes pressed tight into the furrow of her brow, thoughts receding into the illusion of time and place. I am someone else, she would say, someone not here, not now, not this, not again. Not him, not me, but here, someone else, but not me, never me, never again. These images never fade, never recede into the landscape of her thoughts, where hornets and bees, gods’ winged furies, tend garden flowers and honeysuckle. I, too, will never forget, as much as I try. She is with me, her breath crushed against my cheek, her eyes heavy with sleep, yet unable to close whenever I awaken in fright. I have never told her, but suspect she always knew, how when she had finally given into sleep I would listening for footsteps, look for a stitch of yellow under the door, my own eyes heavy with sleep and volcanoes. Memories are like thieves, robbing us of the gift of forgetting, yet staying the capacity to remember that which we struggle to forget. I have had more than enough memories, more than one person need remember, yet never forget.