Don't Shed Your Tears for Anyone Who Lives on These Streets

by Patricio Pron

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  He ended up meeting Richard some years later. One afternoon a man knocked on the apartment door and, when it was opened, hastily introduced himself. Richard was tall and blond, and had washed-out blue eyes that he thought looked the color of laundry detergent. Richard explained that T.’s mother had given him this address and that he’d come because he’d always wanted to meet him—he said “Tomas” though his name wasn’t “Tomas” but “Tommasso.” Richard, who he’d thought was American, was actually Austrian and had decided to Germanize his name. He asked him to wait a moment and, after grabbing a jacket and writing a note, left the house. They went to Villa Scheibler, a nearby park, where Richard had parked his car, he said. As they walked over there, T. realized he had nothing to say to this man. Richard, on the other hand, didn’t stop talking: he told him he was on his way to Tuscany, where he was going to spend some vacation time with his family, that he’d abandoned the ashram two years earlier but not the beliefs that’d led him there, which he then summed up briefly. He asked T. if he believed in them too, but T. didn’t answer. “Your mother didn’t tell me much about you, you were always like a mystery between us,” Richard said when they sat down in the park. Finding out that he was a mystery to someone seemed strange to T. and he silently weighed what that meant. Sometimes he had the impression that he was empty, and that everything that happened to him came to fill him up somehow: he only had to contemplate how the experiences formed him and imagine how he would be in the future, when free of his grandparents’ watchful eye. Richard told him that he and his mother had talked on several occasions about bringing him to live with them in the ashram but that his mother had opposed it every time: as T. studied this childish man who could’ve become his father, in a life he was no longer going to have, he felt relief and something akin to gratitude toward her. The Richard he’d imagined was, naturally, much better than the one there before him, among other reasons because he was made up of the characteristics of many people, including the aspects he liked about his biological father, though his father worked in Africa for a human rights organization and T. didn’t see him very often. But the real Richard had never belonged to what—for the last few years, since two planes crashed in New York—was now called a “terrorist organization,” he hadn’t been in prison; he hadn’t studied while locked up; he wasn’t in some African country doing whatever T.’s father was doing, often something T. found unimpressive. Richard wanted to know why his last name was German, and T. explained what he knew about his great-grandfather, about his grandfather who’d been a carpenter, and about his father, who was in Africa and had been in prison. Richard didn’t know what to do with that information; after a long silence he told him he’d started importing fabrics from India and selling them to his friends in Feldkirch, which was a city, he said, that T. should visit someday; he could put him up, he added; and then said that his plan in the midterm was to build a company that took people to the ashrams in southern India; he said he’d already spoken with the guru of the ashram where T.’s mother was living, and been given a parcel of land where he could build some guesthouses for visitors, but he needed to convince more gurus and have more ashrams available if the business was going to be financially viable. Richard could see it right before his eyes, he said; but T. didn’t see anything before his eyes, except a man he didn’t really know. Although he already knew more than enough about Richard—unlike in the past, which T. now sorely regretted—to completely disqualify him as a mirror of T’s desire for a father. Absurd as it may seem, T. was going to continue to be a mystery to him, he could see that, and the man would speculate many times over the course of his life about what could have been, but T. would never think of him again in the same way. Perhaps Richard realized that, because he stood up, ending the conversation; a woman and a teenager T.’s age had approached them. “Is this him?” the woman asked in English. Richard nodded, and then he, the woman, and the teenager stood there, staring at T., who didn’t know what to do, not then and not later, when the woman and the teenager headed to a car on the edge of the park and Richard said he was going with them. So he too left a son behind to go to the ashram, thought T. for a moment; he wondered how many children were currently paying the price for their parents’ desire to find themselves, and he felt sorry for them all. He also didn’t know what to do when Richard slid a twenty-euro bill into his hand and smiled. Richard said he could spend it on whatever he wanted, although it’s unlikely that he’d have approved of T.’s decision, had he known what it was. The next day T. used that money to purchase a cassette by a band called Capitalist Casualties. He listened to it so many times that the tape ended up breaking: every time he did, he thought for a fleeting second of Richard, a father—only hypothetically, briefly, and to T.’s regret—selling saris to women in some Austrian city, selling incense that smelled of some promising exotic destination, but also turning his back on him and walking to a car, with a woman and a teenager who weren’t—but could have been—T. and his mother, on their way to a family vacation in Tuscany, perhaps with the intention of fixing something, but what, and how.

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  T. lives next to the train tracks—the line from Milano Cadorna to Saronna, and from there to Varese—and because he’s never lived anywhere else, he feels uncomfortable in places where the earth doesn’t move beneath his feet at regular intervals. He hears the trains before he sees them and, if he’s in the mood, he leans out his bedroom window to look. From there he can observe the passengers, almost always absorbed in reading some free newspaper or on their cell phones. Sometimes someone reads a book too, but the train moves at a speed that makes it impossible for him to make out the title or the author on the cover. For years, the neighborhood kids have fought over the spoils found on the tracks—newspapers, wrappers, matchboxes, cans, a porno mag, pages torn from books, things tossed out by passengers—but recently, the train car windows changed to ones that you can’t open, and the pillaging on the tracks ended. Since then, his friends organize fights, generally with the Egyptians who are numerous in Quarto Oggiaro; he’s taken part in a few but really isn’t interested. Sometimes he still walks down the tracks searching for abandoned objects, but there’s hardly anything. Once he saw a dead dog that’d been hit by the train: its hindquarters were fifty meters from its front half, which had been dragged, and what impressed him most was that the corpse looked almost as if it had been cut with a knife—the animal’s internal organs were whole and in place inside the casing of flesh and bones that had been the dog, like in an anatomical chart. The placid expression on the animal’s face also made an impression, as if the dog—which he’d seen before wandering around the neighborhood, an enormous black dog who couldn’t stand others anywhere near him—had died peacefully. He was intrigued by the matter for some time; at thirteen years old he’d come up with a hypothesis to explain the bliss on the animal’s face at the moment of its death: according to him, the dog had died before being hit by the train, of cardiac arrest, poisoning, or some other way; coincidentally it had happened as the animal was crossing the train tracks. The hypothesis satisfied him for some time—until he told his grandfather, who responded that T. must be mistaken. While he could, he regularly visited the dog’s corpse, which no one had picked up, to check on its beatific expression, which, of course, he couldn’t describe in those words. When T. knelt beside the animal, its expression seemed beatific; but as soon as he turned away he doubted what he’d seen just a moment earlier. The problem shifted, in some sense, and ceased to be about how the dog had died, or the nature of the expression on its face—of its “smile” as he might have put it—to become a problem of the reliability of his impressions. For as long as the corpse’s stench allowed, he visited regularly, trying to obtain information about it through the study and observation of the place where it was found. He acted like those characters so common on television in those days, who resorted to elaborate, often
incomprehensible reasoning to solve crimes that always seemed obvious to him from the start, and that were always resolved, inevitably, near the end of the thirty-five or forty minutes the episode lasted. Although this wasn’t the case with the dog, whose calmness in the face of death perplexed him, and T. never found a good explanation for it. He even drew several sketches of the scene in order to study them more closely. When his grandmother found them one day while tidying his room, she was horrified, and he had to promise her he would destroy them, but he kept them, hidden inside a large wooden box his father had given him on his first visit from Africa, when he’d made the decision to settle there for an unspecified length of time. The box held papers; his father had told him they were the books of a great writer, but to him none of the pages seemed to be any sort of book. His father had acquired them shortly before being imprisoned and hadn’t been able to access them until he was released; in all that time, he’d been obsessed with the papers; according to what he told his son, he’d thought of them day after day, wondering what to do with them, what fate to give them. Perhaps, when he finally left prison and could read them, he’d been disappointed by those papers, because he hadn’t done anything with them, as far as his son knew. His father’s life had been difficult after his release, he’d worked sporadically in factories and workshops over half of Italy until his employers found out about his past, one way or another, and fired him or invited him to continue in his position with new, not always acceptable, conditions. There were varying versions of that past: his father’s, his maternal grandfather’s, and the one T. had been forced to listen to, and repeat, in school; it seemed obvious to him, from the very beginning, that none of the versions was completely reliable, and that the truth must fall somewhere in between. He didn’t think his father or his mother’s father was lying, nor did he think his teachers were, not deliberately, but they had all been tricked by their senses, as he was in the case of the dog’s corpse and its blissful expression. When his father had handed T. the box, he’d showed him his paternal grandfather’s signature, which had been chiseled into one corner, but he hadn’t known his paternal grandfather and the fact that he’d made the box didn’t seem particularly relevant. One day T. went back to inspect the dog’s corpse and found it was no longer there: someone had taken it the night before, leaving only two stains of blood, grease, and hair where its hindquarters and front half were found. The stains would disappear shortly after, one more chapter in the story of the detritus the train left in its wake, which the adoption of new hermetic cars would put an end to, hindering children from the outskirts like him from accessing—even in that partial, parasitic way—knowledge of the lives of the inhabitants of the city’s center, what they did and what they left behind. But the sketches he’d made remained in the box for some time. Whoever had taken away the corpse had kept it from decomposing and becoming part of the earth, which is what T. found, in some sense, to be the most natural and appropriate course. As that didn’t happen, the dog’s death had remained incomplete in his view. Then his grandmother got sick and died, and he destroyed the drawings, blaming himself, unfairly, for having been the one to bring death into the house where she, and they, lived.

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  T. envies his mother, among other things, for the fact that she believes things happen for a reason, which is the same as saying they exist in an orderly and therefore reasonable way. Her conviction that life is made up of cycles, that you can exert some sort of influence over them, in such a way that those cycles rise or descend, must interject some order into a life that would, otherwise, and as seems obvious to him, lack any. Just like most people who listen to the fast, anarchic music he likes, he yearns deeply for some order in his life, and for things to happen slowly enough for them to be comprehensible. Perhaps his father has a similar yearning, as the periods of his life seem to have unfolded in open opposition to each other; but it’s also possible that in Africa—which strikes T. as a chaotic, violent place, based on the books his father has given him and the documentaries he’s seen on television—he has found some type of order, or a less hazardous type of disorder than what appears to have ruled over his prior existence. His father has always seemed afflicted, and T. sometimes wonders if that affliction is a product of his time in prison and his conviction that he’s guilty, though not of what he was accused of. Perhaps his father was different at some point, he thinks, but only because T. can’t know that what he—if he could—would call affliction is a characteristic of every man in his family, all of whom have had to compare their convictions to the results of their actions. They have all, traveling along different paths, arrived at the certainty that you can only act blindly, equipped with a fistful of certainties that make it possible to believe in the legitimacy of your actions; when those certainties come crashing down, inaction results. The men in T.’s family have never been good at talking, paralyzed by their lack of certainty; however, he does sense something, because some years back, when he was seven years old, he was tricked, he fell into some sort of a trap. A schoolmate a few years older than T. convinced him to break into the school at night to wreck the geography classroom. It was revenge for them both: the teacher didn’t like this boy, whom he considered dangerous; and T.’s grades in the subject were, as was to be expected of a child who had both parents snatched away by geography, very bad. His older schoolmate had already perpetrated a few minor actions, not very cleverly setting himself up: he’d destroyed a globe during recess; he’d lit a map on fire with a lighter shortly before class started; he’d stolen others, etc. Now he’d discovered that the school’s night watchman abandoned his post around eleven, leaving only a few lights on to dissuade would-be intruders; if he and T. went in through the bathroom windows, they’d have the school to themselves to do whatever they wanted. If they wrecked the geography room, the teacher would quit, said the older boy. T. had never done anything remotely like this, and his interest in punishing the teacher was limited: his interest in his schoolmate wasn’t, however, though it would take T. some years to understand it and a few more to accept it. What he’d felt for that schoolmate was sexual desire, a desire he would feel again for other men and some women throughout his life. In their nocturnal penetration of the school, in the execution of an illicit act with him, there was a sublimation of that desire, he would realize years later. And yet, as plausible as this theory seems, and as obvious, he would be wrong, at least partially, because the transgression was directed as much against the prohibition that men love men as against the paralysis and indecisiveness that was, without him having even an inkling, the only link between him and his father and his paternal grandfather. Despite knowing little or nothing about those two men, he wanted to distance himself as much as possible from them. T. and his schoolmate met up beside the train tracks, like two runaways, and went from there to the school, where the other boy leaned against the wall and interlaced his hands like a stirrup so T. could reach one of the windows and enter the building. When he had, they’d agreed, T. would extend his arms and pull the other boy up. The school was silent and only a few lights were on, just as the boy had said. When T. was pushed toward the window, he’d felt a pleasure unlike any he’d felt before, mixed with fear, the tension in his hands as he grasped the window frame, the scent of the other boy and of urine, which came up from the bathrooms. Once T. was through the window, he turned to settle with his legs hanging inside the building and his arms extending out, waiting for the other boy to grasp them. But when T. turned he discovered that the other boy had left. The lights came on behind him: the night watchman and the school principal were waiting for him in the bathroom. A few minutes later the older boy would join them, to reaffirm his version: T. was the one responsible for the prior acts of vandalism, as he had already told them when, in collusion with the principal, they’d decided to set a trap for T.

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  Some time later T. had run into that old schoolmate of h
is, who was still a student at the school he’d been expelled from, and also lived in Quarto Oggiaro. When he saw T., the other boy had tensed up, as if he feared that T.—shorter than him, a few years younger, as well as considerably weaker—wanted to punch him. But T. didn’t punch him: he asked him, in a frail voice, why he’d done it, even though that seemed obvious. “It’s a lesson; you won’t forget it,” the other boy had answered. Indeed, he had never forgotten it.

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  Before he stopped thinking about it, for years T. was convinced that death had entered his home through him and his drawings of the dog; perhaps, simply, that was the case. Some weeks after his grandmother found the drawings and demanded he destroy them, she got sick. She would cough, particularly at night: a cough that traveled violently up her throat, as if an animal had burrowed inside her and was just awakening from a long winter, making its way through her. The woman wheezed in a persistent panting that could be heard throughout the house. It was the flu, she said: she had grown up in the countryside, and would draw on the knowledge she’d accumulated there, about plants and infusions, as if returning to knowledge gained in her childhood and young adult years was an efficient way to return to the health she’d had then. T. had been cured by his grandmother on numerous occasions with plants she’d foraged and then taught him how to gather in the empty spaces between the buildings in Quarto Oggiaro and along the train tracks; however, it wasn’t always possible to find the plants she needed, which only grew in the south or no longer existed. The woman went to the hospital twice; on both occasions, the doctors kept her at arm’s length, the consultations were brief, the diagnosis was wrong. For a while it all seemed to T. a catastrophe, though a personal catastrophe, limited to him and his grandparents, the minimal unit the three of them had formed in the wake of his father’s confusion and his mother’s abandonment. She was in India, immersed in herself—a self the conditions of life in India were inevitably destined to change, or dissolve, until there was nothing left, no trace of her former self to search for and find, except the awareness of the search, completely befuddled by disease and hunger. T. finally understood, however, that the catastrophe didn’t only affect the three of them, and that it wasn’t a catastrophe: the family was poor; his grandmother hadn’t been able to go to school; she’d been reduced by circumstances to being a housewife, which wasn’t in and of itself a contemptible condition but did, inevitably, hold her back. T.’s grandfather had had to support the family with manual labor that left him exhausted: like most Italians, he had been fascist at some point or another and then gave it up, at least publicly. On one occasion, T.’s father told T. that he’d belonged to an organization that suggested putting an end to fascism, but T. knew, from his grandfather, that that wasn’t exactly the case because, actually, ending fascism was impossible if there were still fascists, including people like his grandfather. The matter was more complex, naturally, and it doesn’t now seem to T. that it could be simplified the way his father had simplified it, or how his friends saw it, as a confrontation between fascists and antifascists: the struggle was between the rich and the poor, between a system that served the former and exploited the latter, and the always delayed promise of a different system, which no one could imagine. Of course, his whole family belonged in the second group, and death had entered that family through his drawings of the dead dog but also through the doctors’ mistaken diagnoses, dispensed with shocking indifference even in the face of their own fallibility. Recently, T. can’t help but think: if his family weren’t poor, if education and money hadn’t eluded them over so many generations, his grandmother would still be alive, protected by the privileges they’d accumulated and by the general terror at the thought—the mere thought—of wealthy people dying. Because his grandmother wasn’t wealthy—and neither was he nor his father, nor his grandfather—she had been treated with the indifference addressed to the poor, with a diagnosis that strove to prolong her life while it was useful, but which was shrouded behind certain facts—the difficult working conditions in hospitals, the cost of medications, the inability of less educated patients to adequately explain their symptoms, the excess of patients, etc. (all of which were true but didn’t interest T., absorbed as he still was in the pain of his loss)—in order to justify the death of those less fortunate basically when their productive lives ended. Unnecessarily protracting life—which posed an interesting dilemma on the need for life, which T. didn’t know how to get his brain around—was very costly. In Italy and everywhere, it was forcing the government to close schools, museums, and libraries; reduce hospital staff; raise taxes; and cooperate with corrupt and spurious governments in order to guarantee access to natural resources without which the entire system would fall apart. T. found the situation comparable to something his father once told him: that in “his” era young men had no possibilities, that everything was in the hands of old men and former fascists; in the end his generation had made off with those possibilities, though not in the way he’d thought, and everything was in their hands, he said, but now they were the old men. It had all been a terrifying joke, a slow, painful replacement ceremony in which they relinquished their bodies as vessels for the old ideas and precepts they’d fought so fiercely. When the ceremony ended, they were their own enemies, and the enemies of the young. “If the young were intelligent, they’d kill us old guys before we offered them our ideas in exchange for their bodies,” he had said. It scared T. to hear it, knowing his father was right. This era’s problems stem from the artificial prolongation of life, he thought; what was needed was a replacement that didn’t become what it was replacing. Along a winding road he’d discovered the music that best embodied those ideas and he found the people who listened to that music, even though their ideas didn’t always seem intelligent. His father didn’t like those friends or that music, of course. T. had started listening to it shortly after his grandmother’s death, following several weeks in the hospital, wasting away and walking blindly. She never had the flu, as they’d told her; a cancer had climbed from her pancreas to her lungs, slinking silently through her, taking advantage of the doctor’s indifference, and her pancreas had been devoured by those things that devour the pancreas: overwork, poor diet, struggle, life on the margins of everything, including one’s self. T. likes to believe and tell himself that he was able to “say goodbye” to her, but the truth is that their last conversation was trivial, like always: if there was some deep feeling inside her—the sense of an ending, for lack of better words—he wasn’t able to perceive it and most likely she couldn’t either.