Merry Christmas, Happy New Years and stop necessarily fooling. This set of sketches is very long, but that doesn´t mean it´s very good.
It was a Wednesday more difficult than most. Rain was falling, and drops dripped from the sides of the concrete walls onto everything, onto Max too, as he walked down the sidewalk towards the doors of the restaurant. It was a difficult, sad Wednesday. It is true that there was sickness (Max had been throwing up for days) and then there was the letter. Yet, he felt that tonight there was something more – more subtle, more deep; that tonight his melancholy was not general, but precise – truth, like.
But Max knew enough about life to distrust these feelings. Big emotions in the young come without reason and recede as quickly, like erections at random.
Max had an occasional, cranky intensity and he wore this tonight. And when a boy walks like this, as if he is caught by some imperial weariness, he has an advantage: no one suspects much, especially that he might be alone. He of course had another advantage: he was gringo, and therefore impossible to understand.
He was walking towards a pizza place. He had never been, but the the memory of what it might be mingled with the sweet nostalgia of Christmas. There were other places – better places – but Max, after all, was an American far from America: pizza is his home, and that's where you go when you are sad.
The place was small, nothing more than two tables and an oven. A man stood in the open kitchen (only ten feet from the door) peeling processed meat. A woman with tight blue jeans – the man´s wife, probably – leaned against the counter. They did not speak. They both just knew too much, and the great weight of the unspoken left only silence. Being old is no better than being young, he thought. He sat quietly, pensively at a table against the wall, conscious not to disturb anything. Everything was silence. It was one of those place that smelled like cooked food and where it´s possible to see everything. The woman leaned over and the crease of her jeans pressed against the soft skin on her belly. The man seemed to know without looking. His face was steady and his eyes were deep-set, as if they knew and knew and knew.
Max looked through the window, dreamily. The haste and heat of the city outside shouted: move! – the city lights; dirty roads; hurried people slipped past slow-walkers down the sidewalk; small motorcycles pushed the street; young girls leaned beneath thresholds dripping rain. Move! But here he sat in silence, watching like a clinician or a voyeur. An old woman kneeled on a dry stoop roasting meat and shewing alley dogs. The dogs would shiver tonight in the rain, no doubt. But she did not seem to care. Max knew that it was wrong to withdraw from the pulse life – he knew it was wrong just to watch, if only because it was too easy. Lucho said that you shouldn´t use bridges; you´ve got to jump into the river. Max smiled at this. Leave those judgments for easier days, he thought. The heart is ruthless in its manufacture of illusion, and so it must be, sometimes.
I was my idea – to start the co-op. Lucho was Max's business partner -- but the word partner was wrong. Lucho is a big man; his face is angled, as if instead of bones in his face he had twisted rocks that pushed beneath his skin. Lucho´s eyes are puffy. Every moment it looks as if he is at the point just before tears (rage or glee, Max could never tell). He didn't belong to the city: he was an animal. But he lived in the city, alone, like a wolf, howling at the moon. We are all howling at the moon.
One of Lucho's workers had stolen Max´s email password and sent him some of Max's mail. Lucho yelled, “I do not need an educated American to tell me what to do.”
He continued to stare outside. Exhaust blew bits of skittering litter around the old woman's ankles. Sometimes on these street corners one can smell nothing but machinery. Thousands of people poured through the street. It was there, Max recalled, in this great crowd, possessor of every genius and every secret, that he first felt disfigured -- that everyone was moving together, like a larger body. At that moment he felt within it, the great mass of the current, the past, he was a part of the impulse everything and he could think to say within the throbing heat was, “my brothers, my brothers.”
But now in the pizza shop, he didn't much feel much like a brother to anyone. And if there were a larger body of Collective Man – well tonight, he felt all alone within it. No, if there were something larger, he felt like he was struggle against the extinction of himself, to that dear, dirty mass.
What am I doing? he thought. How can I work for a man who does not trust me. I trust him. Well, I have to trust him, because there´s money. What am I doing? The question – the question of whether you are squandering yourself – is remarkable because there is no answer, only perpetually prolonged guesses, secondguesses and guilts. Guilt! guilty about being guilty, guilty about not feeling guilty. Above all we want to confess.
The nausea returned. He put his head on the table. No one came to give him a menu; no one disturbed him. Silence and the scents of cooked food lingered like soporific lullabies. In time, he fell asleep. He dreamed. He was at a phonebooth. I am sick, yes, but I am surrounded by sadness, he said somewhere to someone. I live with a woman, he continued. She is beautiful, but she is all alone in the hotel. Shouts from around him began. It was a great mass of people, like the one he saw on the street. Tell me that I am decent for doing this – for trying to help somebody, for trying to disturb what is, he said loudly into the phone. The shouting around him was great, and he could barely hear his own voice. He said: I just need to know that I am not all alone.
He repeated, “I just need to feel like I am not all alone” a number of times, at first softly, then with greater force. “All I need is to know that I am not alone” he said, almost shouting. He felt in this dream that it was quite true.
His shoulder was pushed, pushed, a dream, he was awake, it was the woman. He looked up and she did not even smile and no one seemed to care that he was mumbling as he slept.
When the pizza arrived he was happy, because it was better than he had remembered.
· · · · ·
Max is now awake, vividly, fumbling with his shoes, his flashlight, the steps; every step is one more closer to the hole – his stomach, a cannonball, spiteful. Everything is lucid, the night – perfect photographs. He sees a bird on a branch. It looks like it is floating with the clouds in the sky. Fuck that bird.
He is there – the hole – release: for twenty minutes his colon purges into the ground. Then he tips over and throws up. It is treacherous.
Silence. At this hour, between the final rustle of men and the first call of the rooster, all is silent, except for the occasional movement of dogs and birds. Max is spread Christ-like, half-naked from the bottom down, on the shitting hole, in this personal mix of disgust, vomit and chemicals. The wounds from earlier in the day (he had slipped down the hill and to stop himself grabbed onto a thick, thorn-covered bamboo); these wounds are his stigmata. But for what sin? He could only think the words "No me importa ser una piedra mas." The silence, as he lay awake in the dark, unable to move, was only broken by the ticking of Max´s wristwatch; frantically ticking, harder, harder; and all the while, this young boy wondering why he is here, why it hurts so much, why consciousness, which was spinning like a top, is born.
· · · · ·
Papa Noel lives in the Andes mountain Huayatapallano, Max had been told. And that was where he happened to be this Christmas, in the mountains, with a family of gourd carvers visiting their uncle, searching for Santa Claus.
A beautiful girl entered the open courtyard of the house. She was wearing a colored skirt and holding a dead calf. Its face was defined, like hers, and its eyes were open, like all of theirs, but they were alive and the calf was dead. Dead as stones. She placed him down besides a tin bucket of fresh cheese. The man whose hut this is was in the yard, digging a hole and heating stones with an open fire. As he worked, gravel leapt into the air, leaped up and then landed lightly, rolling back down the mound beside the hole. I thought, Who is this girl? She picked up an axe from against the wall and raised it above her body. She swung down and cut the head from the calf. Tiny blood drops flicked into the air, onto her skirt, onto her cheek. Decapitated, only one swing, only one clean stroke. Her brother ground corn as she worked the skin with a knife. The blood specks stayed like a badge on her. And the head of the calf, lay alone, eyes open.
That first afternoon they all ate well. Together they were warm, though the thatched roof leaked water. And as they ate, Max was quite sure that killing an animal was not like killing a man.
- -
They set out early next morning to find Santa Claus. Surely he lives in the peaks. So they climbed high, where ice covers the ground and there is a lake filled with trout. The girl took long strides, and her skirt and apron brushed against the stones. “Tired?” she asked, whenever Max fell behind. "You okay?" she´d ask, and each time, he hated it more. He did not want to be a child, especially today, this important day, as he searched for Santa Claus.
He wanted to explain to her that sometimes an intensity finds him – of mind, of senses – when everything in the world becomes just one place. He wants to dig that place. He got that feeling sometimes lying with a girl or sitting outside. Small boys kicked a soccer ball through the stones; an eagle dipped into the blue. And now he had it, that feeling of great intensity, as he hiked in the cold air through these mountains. He hated the question because if he answered it – if he talked at all, then the wings are plucked from the butterfly, the moment is lost.
And, in any case, if he couldn´t focus, how could he ever find Santa Claus? (After all, what is Christmas, but an intensity of feelings?)
He reached the summit and could see the lake with the birds skipping on the water. Everyone had already arrived. He fell to the ground, breathing fast and heavy. “Tired” the girl asked, with no hesitation. She didn´t even smile. If her cheekbones weren´t so high and her face so nice, one might say that she stood like a man. She held her shoulders high and watched as her brothers shot stones at the birds. He wanted to punch her. Max got up from the ground and walked up to her. She didn´t even notice him. From behind, he touched her cheek, and then held her face firm as he bent forward and gave her big kiss on the chin. A big, facetious kiss.
She did not move or do anything at all. She stood in surrender.
“Thats a warning,” he said, smiling. “If you ask me again whether I´m tired, it will be on the lips.”
She looked at him with an open face and blinked. Never before – and not once for him again – would she look like such like a woman to Max.
- -
The next morning was the type when everything is still and you think – Yes, this is what a mountain feels like.
The air was cold and the great white clouds that would later blind the whole valley were now only whispers. Thatching from the roof drifted in the dirt of the courtyard. Max sat on the ground eating panetone and sipping a slippery drink that was white and tasted of oatmeal. He tried not to watch as the girls took off their clothes to bath in the river. Instead, he stared at the soup bowl in front of him: cold water, corn kernels and chopped bull testicle.
So this is Christmas, he thought. The mountain range was big and gentle as if it were its own reflection in a still body of water.
- -
Later, they -- all twelve -- piled into a taxi to leave these mountains. The white clouds of the evening began to float through the valleys, and at everything was thin and white and you see nothing. That was how it was as they drove through the mountains Christmas day. The sun was setting and everyone was going home.
But as happens in moments when you lose the present and have instead that heavy, fierce anticipation of what is next – their taxi lost a tire. They had no spare and the closest town was four hours away on foot and it was now dark and the the girls had nothing but skirts and mantas for the cold. They set a bonfire and the youngest girl said "I´m tired" Beside the road, together on in the middle of the Andes mountains, they came to solemn and unspoke understanding.
But this is the season of miracles. It was nine o´clock at night when the truck came. It was filled with watermellons. At least that moment, this big, dirty fruit truck suggested to Max the divinity of Jesus Christ. I don´t know much about these things, Max thought as all twelve of them were freezing together, laughing too, as they sat on the back of a truck filled with watermelons, diving them home. I don´t know much about these tings, but this must have something to do with the spirit of Chirstmas...
The truck moved forward and family said goodbye to their uncle. (I still do not know where he slept that night.) Max turned back and saw that the uncle, the man who dug the hole, now hundred of yards away, was still watching the truck roll beyond his sight. One understood solitude in that second; but he is not alone. One is never alone if one looks at these mountains. Especially, Max thought knowingly -- especially with Santa Claus roaming and receding in their peaks.
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