by Ana Simo
Contents
1. Blue Ribbon
2. Prospecting
3. Execution
4. How and Why (a Philosophical Pause)
5. Baking
6. Scratching
7. Elmira
8. Fasting
9. Fishing
10. Sea of Tranquility
11. October
12. Father and Sons
13. Dry Blossoms
14. Reckoning
15. The New World
16. Migration of the Soul
17. Domesticity
18. Pilgrims
19. Burnt Feet
20. A Daughter
21. Gone
22. Searching
23. Ashes to Ashes
24. Mercy
25. In Labor
26. Navidad Blanca
27. The Grand Vizier
28. The Future Generations
29. White Fur
About the Author
1
Blue Ribbon
It all began in the summer of 1976 when I won the Blue Ribbon at Elmira County’s Junior Progymnasmata with “Benbassa,” an inadvertently anti-Semitic fable. In the first of a long series of obfuscations about my person, I pretended to be fifteen to qualify for the contest, when I was just eleven years, seven months, three days and seventeen hours old. At the time I composed “Benbassa,” I didn’t know any Jews, unless one counted the sweltering Rafael Cohen, which no one did, including him. That didn’t keep me from declaiming about The Jew: then, as now, I thought that ignorance about a subject is a rhetorician’s ideal state, an inoculation against false certainties. These I confined to the quickly dispatched, clichéd tale: the miserly moneylender Benbassa is stabbed to death in a dark alley of Constantinople’s Galata by one of his desperate debtors who steals his gold; the murderer, who does not know that the man he has killed is Benbassa, then rushes to the miser’s home to repay his debt. (There was a great deal of gore and mistaken identities in my youthful stories.) The fable’s heuristic meat, however, was Benbassa’s duplicitous essence and his transcendent love of gold for gold’s sake. Benbassa, the spiritual voluptuary, the absolute un-Elmiran alien, was me and I was him, as I scribbled on the kitchen table while my parents gurgled discreetly in their bedroom like oversexed carps in a stagnant pond.
Like Benbassa, I hoarded coins for spiritual pleasure and pretended obedience and ignorance in front of the adults, whom I secretly despised. I didn’t doubt having been spawned by my parents—they and the Cohens were the only spics in Elmira County at the time of my birth—but I was convinced I was a superior mutant. My parents and the Cohens were valiant, yet imperfect prototypes. As for the native white Elmirans who lorded over us from their superior heights, eleven inches above our heads on average, they were rejects from the Creator’s Divine Workshop. We feared and pitied the ugly, stupid, powerful giants. We humored them. They owned our bodies but not our minds. We kept this a secret. Thus, I knew my Benbassa inside out, like Dostoyevsky his Stavrogin, and Walt his ersatz Jew disguised as a Scottish duck. Benbassa was the Jew in me. His final punishment was also mine, a case of precocious fatalism disguised as morality: Truth will not set you free.
“Benbassa” was the first, and last, piece I enjoyed composing.
Writing made me want to puke. My mind festered with trivia, a writer’s raw sewage, but I had nothing to say. I didn’t find people or animals appetizing, so training on them a writer’s carnivorous eyes did nothing but repulse me. Nevertheless, I dared not contradict my post-Blue Ribbon reputation as a budding rhetorician because I had nothing better to do with my life: I was just a girl, brown, short, ugly, and poor, and had vowed, at age seven, never to marry some hairy, simian male. Since a precocious Blue Ribbon goes a long way in a small, fastidiously self-important county seat like Elmira, my fate was sealed. For the next four decades, I went through daily, monthly, or bi-annual writing ablutions. If those hygienic exercises were too frequent, I’d gag and faint; if too infrequent, I’d lie sleepless at night, afraid to die if I shut my eyes, and slink about in the daytime, feeling bloated and wormy with words. Every few years, I’d manage to squeeze out a tiny turd.
Why didn’t I quit when I still had time to become someone else—a gardener like my father, a maid like my mother, a janitor like Rafael Cohen’s father, Ezequiel? I spent many a sleepless night peering in vain into the Blue Ribbon thicket, pondering the mysteries of my lifelong inertia. As I curl now in this dusty crack under someone else’s deathbed, I can see it all clearly: I was born again that broiling August afternoon at the Elmira County Fair when the Blue Ribbon was pinned above my toilet-paper-stuffed bra, gluing writer skin onto birth skin amidst the award-winning cows so that any future attempt to peel it off would expose raw, pulsing flesh and result in a horrible death. A second rebirth was needed to escape the Curse. Yes, I see that now, in my inhuman clarity, but not when I still had bones, flesh, blood, hair—not even in my last fully human minutes.
So I drifted, clueless, in the arms of inertia and wishful thinking through early, middle, and late youth. For seventeen years in New York City, where I had arrived on foot in 1984, one of millions fleeing starvation in the heartland, I supported my writing curse with menial jobs (Resettlement Camp dishwasher, rat exterminator, public toilet cleaner, fetus disposal associate) and, after Reconstruction, with the greasy crumbs thrown once more to “minority rhetoricians.” Small triumphs buoyed my life raft, providing an illusion of movement. In 1992, I published a eulogy of the forgotten zoological epic Catomyomachia in The Seal, the University of Laredo quarterly. In 1995, my most prolific year, I wrote two fables for the journal Basileus, one of which ended up in a homo-bestial anthology that was reviewed in The New York Times. That was my one flirtation with fame, although neither my story nor my name was mentioned in the review, given that my writing lacked sex, AIDS, and the compulsory people-of-color winks.
After a long drought, during which I got unfashionably addicted to Seconal, I hustled one of those spics-only-need-apply welfare stipends to write a biography of one Teodora Comenia del Castillo (1820–1877), reputedly the first Hispanic [sic] woman to write a novel in English. It was a laughable yarn and Teodora was a picayune prig, ever lamenting her hacienda and maids lost to the barbarians from the North, but the welfare money was irresistible. The best part was that I didn’t have to write a word until I finished researching the subject, something that, given its obscurity, could take several centuries. Those were the happiest years of my life (2001–2011). I did nothing but eat, drink, fuck, sleep, fall deliriously in love, once (Oh Bebe, why?), and, in the glorious year 2001, cop some snowflakes for breakfast from the mounds that Zoë, my tranny Pre-Raphaelite roommate, left every night on the kitchen table, along with the business cards of her dazzled providers, corporatist America’s most exalted retainers. Every morning, during this breakfast of champions, I dreamt of blackmail, but innate sloth and virtuous shock—The names I saw! The immaculate blond wives and children I imagined!—kept me from acting. I’ve kicked myself ever since for having lost the only opportunity I ever had to earn big bucks and still feel morally superior.
We both slept through 9/11, Zoë and I, after an early dawn snow binge. When we woke up, well past midnight, her cell phone was clogged with the cries and sobs of the haute corporatist dead and survivors. One man begged her as he died to rush to his midtown office before his wife got there and remove an Altoids can filled with smack from the top drawer of his desk. His secretary would help. Others, the dying and the survivors confounded, wanted to see her, touch her, smell her, fuck her, snow-dive with her. Right now. I escorted Zoë on her nocturnal mercy rounds from the Pierre to the St. Regis, and from the Waldorf to the Carlyle. On that Luciferian night, hotels were the last havens of ci
vility in Manhattan. Only inside their well-ventilated bars could you unclog your nostrils of the stench of tire-collar death that permeated the island. Corporatist offices, where Zoë conducted much of her business, had turned into armed camps.
The next day I removed the Altoids can from the dead man’s desk. Zoë was too frightened to go. His secretary tried to stop me until I threatened to tell the wife about her lunchtime quickies with the incinerated boss atop that very same desk. On my way out, she asked for a pinch of dama blanca and I gave her two out of pity for her anorexic ass and plastic ballooning boobs. Zoë soon moved to Constantinople with a Pentagon arms dealer, old both in age and in length of acquaintance, two handicaps more than offset by the size of his Lazard account. I haven’t heard from her since, nor have I missed her. Like most people I have crossed, she belongs strictly to a time and place, and like most she had the courtesy to remain there, gracefully, thus allowing for fond memories. The rest of that year and into the next, I stapled on the back of Zoë’s corporatist cards the edifying profiles of the 9/11 dead that were published in the Times. Like a still life’s open-mouthed fish setting off plums, fowl, and skull on a large tray, the mellifluous, overflowing newsprint contrasted with Zoë’s laconic verdict (“sdfa”: “shrunken dick, fab apartment”) and the dead man’s engraved military-industrial power (GEN-CEO, ADM-COO, LTG-CFO). It would be fitting to have those corporatist vanitas with me now under this ultimate bed.
On January 6, 2012, the federal welfare bosses abruptly demanded to see the Teodora manuscript. Even if unfinished, even if just a draft of the first draft, even if just notes. Longhand is fine, too, exclaimed a Miss Sally Hume on the phone from Washington, D.C., sharpening her “fiiiine” into a curare-poisoned arrow. A lachrymose letter from the über-spic Executive Director followed. He was terrified that Hume’s low opinion of me would tar all other Latinos [sic], including him. Like my mother, he yelped about my betrayal of him, thus shame to the race. That the honkie Hume was his subordinate only frightened him more.
I had no bone left to throw them. Cuntess Hume had specifically nixed any new progress reports of the kind I had masterly conjured for a decade. All payments were suspended. I was threatened with jail unless I returned the welfare money “in its entirety,” or sent Hume the Teodora book. After my phone, gas, and electricity were cut off, and all I had left to eat were camping stove-cooked oatmeal and elbow macaroni, I was forced to sit down and write the first sentence, about Teodora’s birth in a Laredo, Texas hacienda during a snowstorm. I was suspicious when my first writing day ended and I hadn’t gagged or fainted, then creepingly hopeful when a second and third day—then a week, two weeks, a month!—went by without major incident. I was cured, I thought. Vera, my fuckbuddy at the time, mistook my giddiness for cheating and had me followed by a matrimonial P. I. She confessed to me after wasting $500 she didn’t have. Thrilled with my cure, I postponed her punishment. I dumped her at the next New Year’s Eve party. Her lack of faith deserved maximum pain.
That summer, fleeing Hume’s nasty letters, I hid out in a pay-what-you-can arts camp in an obscure knuckle of the Finger Lakes. It was so obscure that it had escaped the locust-like destruction of the Great Hunger migration years, the Reconstruction’s pharaonic zeal and now the attention of bloodthirsty, marauding gangs. Forest, lake, cottages, workshops, barns, main refectory, even the premonitory helicoidal evergreen labyrinth in the middle of an Italianate garden, were exactly as left by the Utopian commune that flourished there in the 1860s. Their sepia pictures—bearded men fanning themselves with their hats, stocky matrons in white perpetually sewing, knitting, and embroidering, golden-haired children, laughing at the enchanted future—looked at us reproachfully from the refectory walls. Everything went swimmingly at first, both at my writing desk in the morning and during my afternoon walks, which were timed to watch the local twelve-year-old girls, mysterious in their final days before their carnality overflowed, play polo by the nearby McDonald’s.
One morning, as I was rewriting the section in chapter three in which young Teodora displays her fondness for Zebu cows, I discovered that I had left out all conjunctions. I checked everything that I had written so far, and found no conjunctions anywhere. Was it a computer glitch or… ? A shiver went down my spine, but I controlled myself. My equanimity was not grounded in character, but in my addiction to the little girls’ knees sweating against the ponies’ palpitating fur, which I was in danger of missing if I didn’t get a move on.
The next morning, after getting lost in the labyrinth and then, suddenly, finding my way out, I decided to insert all the missing conjunctions. I couldn’t. My hands shook, my fingers cramped, my eyes twitched, I was covered in cold sweat. I had to stop and lie down on my cottage’s rough oak floor planks, fearing the onset of epilepsy, Parkinson’s, or worse. That evening I tried again—my knees gave out and I fell to the ground, unable to move for several hours. At dawn I took the first armored milk truck back to the city. Lower Manhattan was a foul furnace teeming with rats even at noon. I was immediately sorry I had returned. Obviously, I had overreacted. At my corner’s public laundry, I traded with a beggar two potatoes stolen from the art camp kitchen for a used Chinese battery-powered fan. Sitting in front of it, all windows shut to keep noise and rats out, I resumed my writing, sans the conjunctions. I imagined Miss Hume inserting conjunctions late into the night after the rest of the office had gone home. By the end of the week, this image had evolved into a delectable fantasy featuring Hume, whom I had never seen, naked from the waist down on all fours (rear view), typing each of my lost conjunctions with one finger. It was a singularly gratifying week. On the Monday after, however, I found I was also leaving out all prepositions.
This time I noticed it immediately. Since the conjunctions discovery, I was on the alert. An attempt to put back the prepositions ended with profuse vomiting and a bout of sciatica. I lost adverbs next. All of them ending in “ly” were the first to go, followed by those ending just in “y.” Then all pronouns fled, except “it,” which I still have. I tried writing simple sentences in French, Spanish, and Elmira High School’s miserable Byzantine Greek, and there too I lost the ability to write conjunctions, then prepositions, then adverbs, and finally pronouns in those languages: each vanished simultaneously from the language loci in my brain. I had no trouble speaking, though. My lapses, or is it lacunae, were restricted to written language. An autopsy of my brain may hold some surprises for science, but the humanitarian whiff of brain donation led me to evade the Central Registry. Safe to say that not much brain matter is left in me now.
I abandoned the Teodora biography in the spring of 2014, thirteen years after I had officially taken up the project. Writing, always repulsive, had become such a ruinous business that no welfare handout or jail threat could put it in the black. My indecent Hume fantasies notwithstanding, I had to hire two dimwitted female NYU graduate students (a quadruple redundancy) to stick in what I left out. Every Friday night, I paid them in speed mixed with pink toilet-scouring powder. In exchange, they took my dictation of the missing words. Oh, they were efficient and vapidly deferential. They saw a spic lady who could be their mother and had no idea what I could do to them in my mind if I wanted to, which I didn’t. I had to tolerate their clean, perky, blond and brunette presences in my midgetty, candlelit one-bedroom. One did have a way of slanting her eyes and touching her cheek with the fingers of her right hand that always gave me pause, but it was a prelude to nothing: an invisible windshield wiper would quickly wipe from her face any fleeting promise of lust. I had to lie to Perky and Clean: I told them that I was writing in a shorthand of my invention. Although obfuscation and delusion are second nature to me, outright lying is an intolerable strain, second only to writing. I disliked P. & C. for making me lie, and, aware that my dislike was unfair and irrational, I disliked them even more. In the end, I had to let them go because I was starving. I needed hard cash for my speed, not lost words. I tried to put back the diabolical conjunctions mysel
f—prepositions, adverbs, and pronouns, one at a time, sitting in my own feces and vomit—but the effort must have broken my last intact synapses: one sunny Sunday morning, after an early spring snowstorm, I lost verbs, and, at dusk, I was unable to write nouns. I had sunk to the bottom of the swamp.
I sat in a corner for the next two days, pissing and shitting myself. On the third day, I accidentally stuck a wet finger into an outlet. It was inexplicably live. The shock slammed me against the wall. When I came to, my guts were in perfect working order and I was crackling with energy and determination. I scooped, disinfected, scrubbed, aired, showered, and finally called Miss Hume from a payphone impersonating my poor (dead) mother. My daughter had been aboard the ferry that was blown up this morning while crossing the Bosphorus at Eminönü, I croaked. She was now at a military field hospital on the European side of Constantinople with burns on 70 percent of her body. Hume was unimpressed. She demanded the Teodora bio or her money back, but I thickened my mother’s Spanish accent and pretended not to understand, unctuously thanking her for wishing my charred daughter a speedy recovery. I then punched all the phone keys at once while yelling “Oigo, oigo, oigo!” and hung up on the bitch. Next, I methodically covered my tracks. To my landlord, and the world, I was leaving for Constantinople on a charity mission and subletting for three years to Dr. Petra Xin Hua Wu, a reclusive, retired Fujianese math professor. Dr. Wu put her name on my door, mailbox, and cell phone account, and returned Hume’s undoubtedly irate letters with a bold “Addressee Unknown.” By then, I had dumped my girlfriend du jour, an unemployed tax collector—she was getting fat and had acquired two hamsters in a city that didn’t need any more rodents—and had bid goodbye to my few acquaintances (I had no friends).
Holed up in my apartment, I prayed that I would outlast Hume’s vengeful interest in me. Only in the dead of night did I venture out, hunched under Dr. Wu’s black wig, sepulchral makeup, and padded Fujianese overcoat. Now that all writing and related furniture and paraphernalia had been removed to the basement, the apartment felt airy, almost palatial. For a while, I felt light and soft—dare I say happy? I wish I could have held on to it. But always one to poke a rabid dog, I was soon back in my natural ruminative state, aggravated by New York City’s traditional summer sewage floods, an onslaught of rats expertly swimming through the filth produced by twenty million eating and shitting souls.
