by Margot Kahn
I hate Elton John flying over the Alps and thinking to himself, “That’s like all the cocaine I’ve sniffed.”
I understand the narrowness of my hate, the oversimplification and generalization. I do—I like “Rocket Man” too. But knowing doesn’t seem to make a difference. I still hate it, I still hate them.
“There are some amazing things in Bogotá,” I say, with a quiver in my voice while trying to maintain the same smile. “It’s a shame you didn’t really get to see them.”
“Hm…” he replies, slumping down again. “Well… I saw a little,” he says, feeling the growth of his beard with his fingers. “It’s really real man. Like… I’m from Chicago, so I know, right?” I nod, though shouldn’t. I’m not from Chicago, I don’t know. “We think we have it rough out here, but you guys down there… whew.”
I continue to smile but I don’t know why, because I don’t know what he means. But still, “Right,” I say, “Well,” feeling the sides of my smile cut into my cheeks, “It’s like everywhere else.”
I am not included in that “You.” That “You” is not me. Though I’m not sure he knows that, though I’m not sure how to tell him. I come from a long line of albeit frequently destructive and occasionally tragic, always educated, middle-class Colombians who mostly got by. And though my father has since lost nearly everything he saved and made, he did very well for a time. I went to a good Catholic high school in Bogotá. I got good grades, wore knee-high socks and a plaid skirt, and I washed my shoe laces dutifully when the former priest turned disciplinary director yelled at me after mass, because, “Where exactly do you think you are going with brown shoelaces? What exactly do you think people will think of you, of us, if they see you like this?”
I imagine a dilapidated airport hotel. Sheets made impermeable from wear, and sweat, and spilt coffee, and semen. Yellow lightbulbs flickering, dead flies on the windowsill, and the chill of Bogotá nights slipping through cracks in the glass. I’ve gone past these hotels more times than I can count and never before imagined that inside there would be a man like the one before me now.
He’s too tall for Colombia, even sitting down, I can tell. And he’s not dressed right either. Doesn’t carry himself like we do, like they do. Like those people would. I think.
I try to speak, but nothing comes out, nothing comes up. I wonder if he was scared in that hotel room, if it was fun. I want to know where they took him, what he saw, and why. And I want to know for whom he feels so much pity, because there’s insult and compassion in the sentiment and in this alone I think I understand him.
I’ve hated this man for such a long time, I’m paralyzed. Not this-this man across the table, but this man, these men, across the street, across town, across the border. Crisscrossing the Colombian countryside and financing its eternal war.
When I was a child I used to think that an enormous snake lived deep in the heart of the jungle. It had a long and bloated body covered in fine brown fur and black-tar pus, and it stretched out for miles into the mist, so far and so twisted that no man really knew how long it really was. In my mind I saw its body wrap itself around trees, saw it eat and eat and eat, and grow so fat it crushed those trees to splinters, chewed and chewed and chewed on bullet-riddled limbs and skulls like cracked goblets until it wore its fangs down to dull points. And then I imagined men would show up hauling bodies in wheelbarrows and, just as the creature began groaning for more, they would fill the creature’s belly, file its teeth to points and gather the white-fang dust into little bags to sell up north.
It was a disturbingly comforting image that I sometimes long for now.
I watch the toddler pull out a beat-up book from the donated toy chest, I click on a few links and watch error messages pop up, one after another after another. It’s like ringing doorbells and peering through darkened windows. Error 404, no one home, don’t come back. The toddler hits a button on the side of the book and a little MIDI tune plays out. I delete a link from the list. Where did this man go while he was there? I wonder, Where did they take him? And then, Where would I take him to explain this better? To the anise-scented clubs and the gastropubs, to a fútbol match? To the sharp edges of the city where the children sit in sewers listening to fútbol on the radio and lighting up cocaine paste cigars? To the dry fountain of Chía’s colonial town square where filthy pigeons flutter and flock? What am I trying to explain?
“Really real,” he repeats under his breath and I think I hear pity in his voice. That’s not fair. I think of Elton John, I think of the Alps and the Andes, and I feel my fist clench under the table. But then, I have a bed to in sleep in tonight, and a job interview in Ohio. I see the toddler press his backward-bendy fingers on the book’s buttons and the tune slips out again, and again, and again. I hear my mother in my head, singing about a mostly dry fountain on a wholly hot day and I want to leave some broken links up on the page. A few paths that lead nowhere, just because.
Then I think of one of the many boys who took Pablo up on his offer. How he must have gotten a friend to drive him to the nearest station so he could take out a tombo with a borrowed gun. He would have never heard of Elton John, he would have never been to an airport. He would have been angry, or he would have been numb, or else, he would have been bored. Most likely he would have planned to buy his mom a brand new television when he got paid, and planned to get very drunk that night. He would have probably had a family, though he could have, just as likely, been related only to the street. He would have been, almost unfailingly, young. Regardless, he would have been Colombian, and he would have been poor. Just like the cop he felled with a single shot, as if god himself lived inside the barrel of his gun.
Silence.
I hold my smile as if with meat hooks. Like I’m still worried about what people might think about me, about my country, if they see how dirty I’ve allowed my shoelaces to become.
The man speaks again. “So…” He starts tentatively while the woman tilts the screen toward herself, giving up, I imagine, on whatever attention he might pay to their joint search.
“Do you know anyone in the trade?” He smiles again.
Silence.
The feeling of a heel driven straight into my abdomen like light through a windowpane. A stomach made wind tunnel, no pain, no impact, only absence. A freshly dug well were my organs would be, and I find myself waiting just like him, for the pebble to tell me how deep it really goes.
“The trade.” I’ve never heard it called precisely that. “The trade.” The trade. El narcotráfico.
I raise my eyebrows. The woman beside him shakes her head at the screen.
The trade, the trade, the trade.
Then I hear myself laugh.
Because it’s funny. Right? If only a little.
I look at the woman beside him, nineteen, I decide, which judging by the toddler playing with a torn book, must have meant she was really very young when she had him.
“Are you serious?” I ask.
“Well,” the man shrugs, “You do, don’t you. You know someone.”
“I…” I stutter. “I don’t think so.”
He cocks his head, “Really?” And narrows his eyes. “You sure about that.”
“No, man. I’m not connected like that.” And I think about the first time I ever saw a “Colombian necktie.” Five years old, pressing my face against a seventeen-inch screen. Staring at a bloodless body on the news, at this murky stare and an open mouth like an empty grave. At a dry blood trail down his chin that I followed with my eyes like bread crumbs up into a deep, carnivorous-plant gash above the collarbones from which his tongue had been pulled out like a thread through the eye of a needle. Not at necktie at all, I realized, but a message: this is what happens when you talk.
“Not like a cousin, or an uncle, or someone?” He leans forward and examines my expressions closely. “No one at all? For real?”
I can feel my smile begin to slip. I want to go home, I want to stay here. I want to stay angry foreve
r, because it’s right to be, because someone should be, because that feels more like home than anything else anymore. But that’s not fair either. “If I did,” I say to the man as pebbles finally strike the rock bottom of my dry well, “Do you think I would tell you?”
Lina María Ferreira Cabeza-Vanegas is the author of Don’t Come Back, a collection of essays, short stories, and translations that navigates the Colombian civil conflict with a personal investigation into her own life, family, and mixed heritage. Ms. Ferreira received her BA from Brigham Young University and MFAs in literary translation and creative nonfiction from the University of Iowa. Her essays have appeared in The Sunday Rumpus, The LA Review of Books, and Fourth Genre, among others. She is currently a visiting assistant professor of creative nonfiction at Virginia Commonwealth University and the executive nonfiction editor of Anomaly, an international journal of literature and the arts. She is working on a novel about the devil and a second nonfiction book titled The Former New Kingdom of Granada. She lives in Richmond, Virginia.
Home in Four Acts
Akiko Busch
The Living Room
When my sister and I were kids, my family lived in Southeast Asia. In the summer of 1958, when I was five, we moved to America. We spent that first summer on Cape Cod, at our grandparent’s shingled ranch house. In subsequent years, that house became a year-round residence. Additions were built, a master bedroom suite constructed, a deck added. But that summer, it was little more than a fifties ranch.
The room I remember most, where my sister and I spent the most time, was the living room. My mother had lovingly brought with us our carved Siamese desks, tiny bamboo chairs, a small teak table, but it was our grandfather’s revolving chair that gave us the greatest comfort. Squat, square, upholstered in some synthetic fabric the color of dust, the chair was positioned on a fully rotational base, enabling its occupant to turn a full 360 degrees.
In retrospect, it was a feat of postwar engineering, physical representation of the marvelous idea that the fifties might be a time when one’s perspective on the world knew no limit. But for my sister and me, such a chair was a carnival ride, and we spent hours spinning one another around and around. It was the ultimate in human-engineered furniture. For kids who had just come halfway around the world, the spinning of the chair was a giddy relocation that made us happy, that thrilled us, that we could handle.
The room was also equipped with another staple of fifties design: a huge plate glass window. The view stretched from the intimate to the grand, from the patio and my grandfather’s rose garden to the marsh of sea grass beyond, to the sliver of beach beyond that, and then to the bay where all manner of sailboats drifted by all day long. This was a picture window in every sense; even a kid knows that a view of the ocean is a view to infinite possibilities. Much later in my life, a designer told me—in respect to having a desk near a window—that it is healthy “to look at infinity.” His statement took me back to that summer and my grandparents’ plate glass window.
There were plenty of other things in that room—armchairs, a chinoiserie desk, big chunky glass ashtrays, stacks of magazines and Reader’s Digest condensed books. But it is the chair and window that I most remember. One of them could spin me around until I was dizzy. The other provided a view that was nearly endless. And I know now that whether it is furniture or something else completely, whatever offers such experiences are enough to furnish a room.
The Blue Sofa
From the beginning, the blue sofa was too large for the room. A monstrosity upholstered in crushed velvet, it had been left by a previous tenant in an apartment that was far too small for its huge cushions and its massive arms. I wanted to think the color was a deep Mediterranean blue, but in fact, it was an ordinary dark navy. It seemed to consume the space, and somewhere in the first few weeks I lived there, its monumental presence and immense weight came to represent all those other troubles that seem to persist.
I couldn’t move the thing myself, so I asked the Salvation Army to come and take the sofa away. The man I spoke with gave me a seven-hour window of time during which the moving truck would come for it, and I agreed to be there for every minute of that time. But when I arrived home that afternoon to wait, the truck had come and gone twenty minutes earlier than the time stated. A few days later, a friend of mine told me he would take it away but he had to find someone to help him, and he didn’t know how long that would take. The sofa wasn’t going anywhere and continued to squat there with all its acquired malevolence. That the inanimate world has a tenacity all its own was not news to me.
And then one afternoon several weeks later, I walked into the apartment. In the first few seconds I knew that something essential had happened, but I didn’t know what. The air in the room had changed. And then I realized. My friend had found someone to help and had let himself in. The sofa was gone. Where it had been were only a few scratches on the floor, some dust, a few spectral vestiges of its vast presence. Suddenly, it was a memory.
And I remembered how I had once been on West 25th Street in Manhattan when a forty-ton piece of sculpture by Richard Serra was being moved out of a gallery. A crane was lifting the gigantic hunk of elliptical steel. People had gathered on the sidewalk to watch. “It’s like going to the moon,” said a man standing beside me. And I thought also of the artist Michael Heizer, who made arrangements to have a two-story rock weighing 340 tons trucked 110 miles from the desert in Riverside, California, to a museum in Los Angeles. The truck had 176 wheels and a bed that was 300 feet long and it traveled that distance between 5 and 8 miles an hour for 11 nights.
And I realized that in some funny way, accommodating a massive shift in the weight of things seems to happen both instantaneously and last over a long period of time. I thought there must be some psychological corollary and I asked a friend of mine who is a therapist if there is a word for this. You mean breakthrough, she said.
And I realized, too, this is how things so often exit our lives. We beg for them to be gone, have fantasies of that empty space and how we will put that to use. And then when it finally happens, neither the eye nor brain can quite fathom the absence. It takes a moment or two to register the empty space. And I can’t say now which is more important, acquiring things or getting rid of them. I know that comfort and how we furnish a room has something to do with how objects come into our lives. But I am certain that the way things leave us matters just as much.
Signs
Some friends of mine came to dinner last week. As they arrived, they handed me a narrow, white paper bag, inside of which was an expensive bottle of white balsamic vinegar. I was happy to have it, but the paper bag was what caught my eye. It was white, with a logo in the center, a circle outlined in dark forest green, and inside the circle, an intertwined G and C, letters surrounded by the words, “Williams-Sonoma Grande Cuisine.”
I knew this logo well. I lived in San Francisco once, decades ago, when the company that came up with this brand was just starting out in a small store full of exotic and expensive kitchenware, shining toasters, and beautiful white French country tableware. My boyfriend and I lived in a small apartment. We weren’t able to afford any of those things, yet somehow I had managed to have a little white canvas tote bag with the same logo from that store.
I used the tote bag a lot, but I remember it being most indispensable during that time I broke up with my boyfriend, suddenly and quickly one night. I stuffed some things in the bag—a blue shirt, a green sweater, a book, a cassette tape, a few other things—and I left the apartment. I didn’t quite know where I was going and spent the next few weeks on the sofas and in the spare bedrooms of friends. Eventually, I found a new place to live, got some furniture, kitchen things, but I remember those weeks, then months, as one of those times when nearly everything I did seemed like a colossal mistake.
And now, even all these years later, when I see that little green intertwined G and C on some bag or appliance, I don’t recognize the logo as some little insignia
of the good life. My reaction has nothing to do with elegant dinners or perfectly set tables with chic striped placemats. I do not think of shining pasta makers and blenders, Le Creuset pots, or virgin olive oils from Italy with lovely hand-drawn labels. Instead, I think of sleeplessness and hangovers, aspirin, loneliness, the fog in North Beach during a cold summer, the worry in my mother’s voice on the telephone three thousand miles away in New York, and all manners of uncertainty of the worst order.
I understand about branding. I understand about that practice of arranging letters and signs and little shapes to have them construct an entirely new meaning that has to do with beauty or speed or efficiency or luxury, or whatever else it happens to be. But what I don’t understand at all is why the people who make these logos and then apply them to bags and appliances and household goods and clothes and everything else are so certain we will attach that same meaning to them.
Because, of course, we don’t. My kitchen now is a room I love. The ash cabinets were built by my husband, the same man I left that night in San Francisco all those years ago. We have the imported olive oil now, and a blue Creuset stewpot and a little Italian espresso maker. This room is a place of sufficiency in every sense of the word. In an effusive moment, I might even imagine it as Grande Cuisine. But even today, when I happen to glance at the green circle and letters on the white paper bag that the vinegar came in and that is hanging on a doorknob in the kitchen now, what I think of most is not having any of this at all.
