Music for a Shadow Play)
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Gamelan (Music for a Shadow Play) By Lawrence R. Tirino ©2013 To the good people who have been led astray by madmen, and especially to those who have suffered as a result. 1.Death in the Afternoon Chucha de tu madre! Que bestia!¨ Louis grumbled under his breath as he listened to the men on red scooters visiting all the small shopkeepers. ¨Chulqueros! ¨ He spat into the gutter. ¨Todo el pueblo anda chiro; ¨ - meaning of course that everyone‟s pockets held lint, or dust, or assorted garbage, but none of them held any money. They can‟t get credit cards, and banks won‟t lend them the small amounts that they needed to keep their business running, so they look for one of the countless street shysters that sit drinking coffee at beachfront restaurants in the afternoons when the sun has mellowed. These merchant bankers are the survivors who fled the brutality of their own countries; and although they now wear fine leather shoes and silk shits, the scent of decadence still clings to their pores. Last year they were charging twenty per cent of the principle on the first of the month. Nervous shopkeepers were easily confused into believing that they were paying the same rates as banks. Now it was even easier; a few dollars every day. But all the borrower ever pays is interest. One day the victim wakes up and realizes their mistake; and then they fold and disappear into the nighttime air. Or perhaps the back page of the morning paper. Sunday, the saddest day. The dawning of cold church bells echoes the raw, sober, urban poverty. The tempo and aimless acts of the work week, suspended in contemplation. Louis bowed his head, inhaled the crisp morning air and continued sweeping the daily dust from the sidewalk in front of a small family owned restaurant. The grey sky had been getting cooler and smelled of the possibility of rain. There were scarcely a few weeks throughout the year for a chance to grow some quick crops before the endless heat returned and burned the land back to yellow and brown. He leaned on his broom handle as a funeral procession passed. It was led by a station wagon marbled with flowers. The wooden casket was carried through the streets on the shoulders of six large men. Close friends and family shared the honor. They took turns as they brought the dead on his last journey through the town. Behind the coffin were the women, veiled and dressed in black, crying arm in arm, holding rosary beads, suffering those final steps. They will mourn the year with novenas and masses as tradition calls for. The slow procession was accompanied by a man on guitar and another with an accordion. Passersby bent their heads and sometimes sang along. The men dressed in white shirts and black pants shared a ¨chata¨ in a paper bag as they circled once more around the square before lying to rest their friend, their brother, their father, and ultimately themselves. Wiping off the bottle with their shirtsleeves, they drank quickly and silently as they passed it around. A new blue heart painted in the street and an iron cross cemented at the curb mark where the deceased had been run over by an unidentified driver in a car that never stopped. Louis arranged the white plastic tables and covered them with red cloths that imparted an air of respectability. He wiped off the dark green chairs, and with his numb sciatic leg kicked a few plants into place. It was a poor man‟s feng shui. In truth, it didn‟t make sense to him whatsoever. He was just a near-blind street musician who played in front of the restaurant all night. The owner didn‟t care as long as he straightened up afterwards. A man walked by with a stack of newspapers on his head. Louis called out to him as he did every morning. The man reached up and pulled a copy off the top of the pile without looking. Louis paid for it from the spare change that he had earned, and left it on the table for the owner to read. He then packed up his hand crafted instruments and got ready to head for home. Felix, the owner, came out with a grunt and calmly disconnected the two alligator clips that he used to rob electricity during the night. He was grouchy and grumbling because he knew something was wrong. He blamed it on a lot of things: the political immaturity of the people, the mental darkness of the majority, and the indolence of the upper classes, which kept everyone else in poverty and subjugation. Kept them like dogs; to serve, to fight, and to amuse them. He wondered why it was that they were so affable, generous, and courteous, to anyone that they consider their equals, but miserable to anyone that they could look down on. Is it that the worse a man treats his subordinates, the nearer he can bring them to slaves, the more he feels that he is a man? Perhaps it was just the fear of slipping back into the ghetto that they left behind. Asi es la vida: such is life. Felix had worked in a private club serving bank executives, foreigners, military officers, and agringados: people who wished that they were from the United States. Like everybody else, he was overworked and underpaid. He decided that he could do better if he opened his own business. After emptying their bank account and hocking what they could, he and his wife found a place that had been a Christian bookstore with a small café. People were not concerned with saving their souls while they ate, so it had quickly gone out of business. They resurrected it with the name: Tres platos. At first, he tried to recreate the club´s atmosphere by hiring waiters with white shirts, vests and bow ties, a boy who grated pepper on the salad; and a separate dessert menu. But after a few months all of that disappeared. He still tried to maintain an appearance by wearing his chef jacket; but you could see that his cuffs and collar had been turned around to hide the frayed ends. And now the house specialty was arroz con gafas; which is rice with two fried eggs on top. His overweight wife flashed him a motherly smile as the greasy smoke drifted out of the kitchen. She was neither ugly nor pretty. Her beauty was in the ways that she put a woman‟s touch on everything she did. She seemed to work without sleep. During the week she got the kids off to school in the mornings, and then went to clean a young man‟s apartment and do his laundry. Sometimes she would sneak her own clothes and the restaurant tablecloths into the machine. At five o´clock her two boys would be sitting at the table in the back of the restaurant while she helped with their homework, or did the dishes, or waited on tables, or all of the above. Today she was making breakfast for her family. Felix took a deep breath, and for a moment enjoyed watching a group of children play. In a town where video games and television still hadn‟t completely hypnotized them into mindless consumers, a few seven or eight year old girls were jumping rope: ¨ Monja, soltera, casada, divorciada, viuda. ¿Con cuántos hijos va a quedar?¨ It was a game older than his own childhood. And their laughter was contagious. It helped him forget that half of them would not grow up, and the other half would become beggars, or thieves, or worse. He waved a friendly good morning to Carolina. She was a shapely twenty- something year old blond that brought him a daily smile. Her father had earned good money. He had probably worked in the refinery, but Felix didn‟t know for sure. She went to private schools and led a pampered life until he had a heart attack and lost his job. He left to live with his brother while his wife and three kids stayed behind to fend for themselves. The phone and the electric were disconnected; and in due course they were evicted. She dropped out of college and started a business that she ran from their two bedroom apartment. Carolina was adept, and charmed her numerous male friends into giving her work. Eventually she supported her mother, grandmother, brother, his pregnant wife, and her younger sister. They were forever dodging landlords and changing apartments. Finally she decided that the best way was to become a married man‟s mistress. It appeared to Felix that she had no regrets. Like most nearby houses, the paint on the restaurant´s overhanging sign was peeling from the heat. Felix squinted as he observed the depressed economy that he called his neighborhood. It seemed to stink of fear and despair. A despair that lead its inhabitants to spend their last quarters on beer and stay drunk enough so that everything became a blur. Drunk enough to keep from thinking; from remembering that they were starving, and neglected. Drunk enough so that they were no longer conscious of their helplessness, or of committing the acts for which they knelt, hands folded, fingers interlocked, and head bowed, on mornings like this. Praying together for their survival amidst social injustice, corruption, and economic collapse. Felix had watched the progression of concrete and asphalt paving over the tree lined streets.