NIGHTS IN THE GARDENS OF BROOKLYN

by Harvey Swados

  Early in the morning two small girls began to play with an inflated rubber ball in the open patio beyond their door. The ball smacked sharply each time it struck the terrazzo, with a loud report like gunfire, and the voices of the little girls were shrill.

  “Those damn brats. Let’s get up and have breakfast.”

  “Brian, I’d try to find us a place in the country, but where? What will you do? You claim you can’t work without stimulation.”

  “I claim. How about you? Don’t you like to see different faces sometimes too?” Tugging at his trousers, Brian stared red-eyed at his wife. “Are you going to start in on me before breakfast? Are you going to tell me what I know better than you, that I ought to be painting all year instead of just trying to sketch in the summer? Are you going to put in for a medal because you haven’t saddled me with kids and a mortgage?”

  Madeline replied in a very steady voice, “I am going downstairs to see if they can’t give us a quieter room.”

  “The idea being that we could fight better on a good night’s sleep, is that it?”

  “If you like. I’ll see you at breakfast.”

  Somewhat abashed, Brian temporized. “I’ll order breakfast while you negotiate. Would you like huevos rancheros? Papaya?”

  “Lime with the papaya, please.”

  There was a vacant room on the far side of the court, the quieter side; its small balcony overlooked only the local street. After breakfast they packed up and hauled their stuff across the sunny patio to the new room.

  The morning sun, streaming in through the open windows and throwing the intricate shadows of the wrought-iron balcony across the woven-fiber rug, made everything seem at least bearable, and hopefully even pleasant.

  “I guess this might do, don’t you think?” Brian asked his wife.

  Madeline replied, a bit doubtfully, “The movie house is just across the way.”

  “At least it doesn’t open until four o’clock. Then I think you get a triple feature for your four pesos and you go home.”

  What they did not know was that the blind beggar woman was in the habit of stationing herself with her baby on the sidewalk in front of the movie theater every afternoon.

  It was several days before Brian himself had this brought to his attention. He and Madeline did in fact sleep better in the new room and in consequence were in a good humor to explore the city at leisure, to sketch and read in the parks and plazas, and occasionally to swim.

  One afternoon, when they had returned for a siesta in the shade of their high, dark, airy room, Madeline stepped onto the balcony to hang their bathing suits out to dry. As she glanced across the street, she uttered an involuntary cry.

  “What’s the matter, Madeline?”

  “Oh, nothing. There’s a blind woman in front of the Teatro Alhambra. She looks just like the one that’s always at the entrance to the public market.”

  Brian jumped to his feet. “Let’s see.” Wrapped in a towel, his bare feet slapping on the tiles, he joined his wife and peered down, following the direction of her finger. “That’s my girl friend. And there’s the baby. He sits there sucking at that damned sugar cane as though he’ll never have a care in the world. Dopey little bastard.”

  He took his sketch pad and pen from the round wicker table and dragged the armchair forward so that its front legs hung out onto the little balcony. Then he sat down and began at once to draw.

  Madeline watched over his shoulder for a moment as the figures began quickly to emerge from the blank pebbled paper. She touched her fingers tentatively to her husband’s sparse, wind-ruffled hair, smoothing it into place, and said almost shyly, “You’ll get arrested if you don’t put something on.”

  “Later, later,” Brian muttered impatiently, and continued to sketch swiftly, whistling almost soundlessly through his teeth as he worked.

  Pleased, Madeline tiptoed back inside, picked up an orange-backed Penguin novel, and stretched herself quietly across the bed.

  Every day thereafter Brian took up his post on the balcony, sometimes sitting, sometimes leaning against the wobbly wrought iron, staring down at the lively panorama below him and occasionally, but less and less frequently as the days slipped by, trying to draw: brown women with pale-green woven baskets on their heads, barefoot children slapping at flies and at one another as they ran laughing around carts and burros, sunglassed and sombreroed tourists staring impatiently, pink-faced, at the unconstrained life around them—and always, shortly before the movie opened its doors to the townsfolk and peasants, the blind woman squatting in her tatters with the nude infant at her side and her terrible empty eyes upraised, keening softly her dreadful demand.

  “My window on the world.” Brian extended his arm in a grandiose gesture. “I envision myself as an old man here, complete with pipe and slippers and sketch pad, jotting down my observations on those still climbing the hill.”

  “How about the meantime?”

  “You couldn’t resist that crack, could you? It’s easy to be demanding when you’re safe yourself—there’s never been a lady painter who wasn’t a second-rater. Yet I don’t see you even trying to sketch, and you went to art school just like I did. What’s the matter, are you so worn out from baby-sitting those seventh-graders that you can’t even pick up a Conté crayon?”

  “I wouldn’t want you to feel I was competing.” Madeline spoke between pinched lips. “All the best handbooks say it unmans an American husband.”

  “You want to know what unmans me?” Brian tore the topmost sheet from his sketch pad, crumpled it and threw it over the balcony railing. “It’s that goddam blind female, scrunched up there, mumbling about love and God. She won’t let me work, she sits there daring me to ignore her or to love her and help her—and I can’t do either.”

  “I suppose that’s as good an excuse as any. It’s better than the ones you had in Perugia and Cagnes and Torremolinos. Poverty should be as challenging to an artist as to a social scientist.”

  Brian swore. “It must be wonderful to be so liberal-minded that you can wipe out the smell of misery with one of those little cliché catchalls that you carry around with you like a spray deodorant. I wish I had your faith in progress. I could explain to that flea-ridden, half-starved bag of bones over there that her underdeveloped nation must make the leap into the industrial age. That she should petition for increased participation in UNESCO and bigger grants-in-aid from Uncle Sam. It’s so much more reassuring to pin a label on her wretchedness than to give her the price of a handful of garbanzos, isn’t it?”

  Madeline replied in a trembling voice, “I never stopped you from giving her charity. If it would make you feel better than painting her—which is what you’ve been trained to do—you could wrap up your dinner in a napkin and give it to her every day.”

  “You know what I’d like to give her? A swift kick. I’d love to give her a boot and say, That’s for tormenting me. That’s for rolling those blind venereal eyes and blaming me that nobody put drops in them when you were born. That’s for picking the busiest corners in town to do business, but not having the guts or the strength to raise your voice to the customers above a whining whisper. Then I’d give her one last shove, for borrowing a lousy little brat that hasn’t even got sense enough to cry, but just sits there in the dirt all day like a corny prop for a proletarian movie.” Brian sighed, shudderingly, and fell back in the heavy chair. “Now you know what I say to myself every day when I come out here and look.”

  “I’m sorry. Maybe we ought to go home, Brian. It was a good idea up to a point, but—”

  “But we’ve passed the point? Or missed it? Well, even if we have, the apartment is rented till Labor Day, remember?”

  “All right, then. We’ll continue to sun ourselves and stare at the beggar girl—is that the program? If only I could convince you that I’ve never lost faith in you! Wouldn’t that mean anything? Wouldn’t that help?”

  “Not as much as a little honest skepticism. Have you ever thought of tr
ying that?”

  They might have continued as Madeline had indicated, save for a rather ridiculous accident. The next afternoon, after Madeline had gone shopping, Brian padded over to the balcony to bring in his plaid bathing trunks from the railing. He felt a drop on his bare shoulder (he was wearing only dungarees and huaraches) and glanced up; yes, the rain was beginning a little early. He was about to turn away to push the armchair back into the room where it would be safe from the rain when it seemed to him that from the corner of his eye he could espy the blind woman feeling her way along the rough stucco wall of the movie palace, inching forward to her post with the infant wrapped tightly in the shawled crook of her arm.

  Brian leaned forward to make sure and accidentally brushed his trunks from their resting place, straight down to the sidewalk two stories below. He peered down through the bars at the little particolored bundle lying like a discarded rag on the sidewalk, then shoved the armchair back into the room, slammed the long windows closed, and hastened across to the open patio, which was already slick with rain and darkened with the reflection of the metallic sky above.

  Rather than cling to the shelter of the wall and its little overhang, he decided to cut across the patio to the main stairway. Halfway there, he felt the drizzle quicken to a downpour; Brian spurred his gait to reach the sanctuary of the covered staircase, but instead his foot suddenly went flying out from under him. He landed in a wet heap on the slimy smooth stone, his right leg bent grotesquely beneath him.

  He twisted himself into a sitting position, but when he attempted to rise, his leg flamed with pain. Huddled weakly under the pounding of the tropical rain, he began to sob aloud.

  As he sat, soaked and trembling, his head against his knees and his arms wrapped tight about his calves, the two little girls who had disturbed his sleep on the first day of his arrival stuck their heads out of their room and regarded him curiously. He raised his head and glanced at them, only half recognizing them and so only half acknowledging their existence, but they came all the way out onto the patio, wrapped from braided hair to ankles in plastic ponchos.

  They approached him warily, one on either side of him, as if his injury might have made him dangerous. Chattering with soft rapidity in Spanish, they knelt and took him firmly by the arms. He could not say to two small children, Leave me, I want to be left alone, so he allowed them to help him to his feet. His right leg buckled under him, but by bending the knee deeply in a kind of swoop and at the same time stepping delicately on the ball of the foot, he found that he could make his way with their assistance through the blinding rain to his bedroom door. With mature dexterity they maneuvered him over the ledge and through the door, which they worked open, to his bed, where they held him gently while he lowered himself to a prone position. Then, before he could protest, the older one had knelt at his side and removed his soaked huaraches, while the younger sister, whose front teeth were still missing, brought him a towel from the washstand to mop the rain and perspiration from his bare skin.

  “Gracias, gracias,” he mumbled as they stared down at him unsmilingly from either side of the bed, their dripping ponchos falling away from the braids that hung to their shoulders, the delicate gold hoops glinting below their pierced earlobes.

  He leaned over to the bedside table and took from it the paper sack of huge, sugar-sprinkled cookies that Madeline had bought to indulge a bedtime sweet tooth. But when the girls reached, tentatively, each for a single cookie, he tossed the entire bag to them. “Tómate esa!” They accepted it gravely, without protest, executed a funny little bow, as though they were retreating from royalty, and backed out of the room almost at a run.

  After that Brian lay there, without moving, listening to the sounds of the moviegoers filtering up faintly through the closed windows, for what must have been several hours. When Madeline returned at last, the rain had stopped; the sun had returned too, and it sparkled through the windows onto the chair where his sketch pad lay abandoned.

  “Hello,” Madeline said. “I almost got caught in the shower. But there was this crazy parrot—” She stopped abruptly. “Why are you so wet?”

  “I fell, with my leg under me. Now I don’t seem to be able to move.”

  “Oh my God, I’ll get a doctor. Are you in pain?”

  “Not as long as I lie still. Those two little girls next door practically carried me back in. I was going down to get my swim-suit—it fell off the railing. Did you happen to see it on your way in?”

  Madeline laughed a trifle hysterically. “You’re the one who’s always calling me naïve. If you dropped a washrag, it would be gone in two seconds.”

  “Take a look out the balcony,” Brian insisted. “Humor me.”

  Madeline peered through the window. “No,” she said after a moment, “there’s nothing down on the sidewalk. Nothing.”

  “Now see if you can spot the blind one and the baby over by the box office.”

  “Why?” But, not waiting for an answer, Madeline craned her neck. “No, no sign of her. Does that make you feel better?”

  “Worse. Don’t be malicious.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it that way. I’m going down now to see about a doctor.”

  “Which we can’t afford.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. Can I get you anything while I’m downstairs?”

  Brian shook his head. “Unless you want more cookies. I gave the hag to the kids for helping me in.”

  Madeline stammered something incoherent and hurried out. It seemed hardly a moment before she was back, breathing hard and looking a little peculiar.

  “The Señora says the girls told her about you, and she took the liberty of calling a masseur. He is supposed to be here any minute.”

  Brian started to laugh. “If he can’t help, maybe they’ll send a voodoo doctor.”

  “Do you suppose,” Madeline asked nervously, “we could explain to him that it was a mistake, when he arrives? Otherwise we’d just have to pay him and start all over again. You ought to have an X ray—we don’t know if you sustained a fracture.”

  “Sustained?” Brian laughed again. “I sustained worse than that. But I didn’t break any bones. Sometimes I think I don’t have any to break. I could use a good rubdown, though. As a matter of fact, so could you. When he gets here, let’s ask him if he has a special rate for aching couples.”

  “Please don’t make any more jokes. It’s no better than seeing a chiropractor, or a naturopath. What’ll we tell him when he gets here?”

  “I don’t know about you, Madeline, but I’ve had a bellyful of science. I’d like the touch of a healing hand for a change, instead of just a diagnosis and a prescription.”

  “Oh, Brian…”

  There was a knock at the door. Brian said politely, “Please let him in, dear.”

  Madeline opened the door to a big-bellied, jovial man of fifty, with a wrestler’s neck, a gold tooth, and a large black bag, which he gripped in his muscular brown fist. In the other hand he held a panama hat, as immaculate as his white blouse, which was delicately embroidered at the cuffs, the throat, and along the front and back panels.

  “Good afternoon, I am sorry I am so late.” He spoke a heavily accented but very rapid English. “I am mostly retired. My wife takes the messages when I go out. You have trouble with the leg?”

  “The right one. Madeline, would you get a chair for Señor—?”

  “Call me Tony, I am known widely as Tony.” He flashed a smile. “No chair is necessary, Madam.”

  “Can you tell,” Madeline demanded tensely, “if the leg is broken?”

  The masseur bowed. “I am thirty years in the business, eighteen years at the Chicago Athletic Club.” He manipulated Brian’s leg tentatively but tenderly. “If there is a break, we have to have splints, no? But I believe not here. How you fell?”

  “In the rain. I was starting to run.” Brian went through the ludicrous episode again, keeping his gaze on the masseur, away from Madeline.

  “And it hu
rts here.”

  “Yes!”

  “And here.”

  “Yes. Not as much.”

  “But not here?”

  “No. You see, I can walk on it, if I keep my leg bent.” He glanced at Madeline. “I can limp around quite rapidly, and without any pain at all, except that I must look like some god-awful freak, a Quasimodo or a boogeyman from a nightmare.”

  Madeline closed her eyes. Her fists were clenched.

  “I know what you mean.” The masseur nodded sympathetically. “Lady, will you leave us alone, please.”

  “Alone?”

  “I must remove his garments so to examine and to give him the treatment.”

  “Oh. Yes, of course.” She picked up her purse. “I’ll go down to the corner and have a coffee.”

  “Make it a tequila,” Brian advised her. “You could use it.”

  The door closed behind her and the masseur set to work. Removing his embroidered shirt, he proceeded to don a short-sleeved white blouse which buttoned up the side of the throat and gave him the look of a dentist, a Latin tooth-yanker with big biceps. Then he took a bolt of unbleached muslin from his bag and unrolled it alongside Brian half the length of the bed.

  “Now we take off the trousers.” He gentled Brian out of the dungarees and out of his shorts as well, and then rolled him onto the muslin and covered his loins with it, exposing the length of his leg. Brian lay hack with his arms tucked behind his head.

  He asked lazily, “Can you tell what it is?”

  “You know the anatomy?”

  “I used to know the name of every goddam bone and muscle.”

  “How come?” The masseur regarded him solemnly, almost with suspicion. “You studied?”

  “That’s right. I’m an artist—of sorts.”