Like I said, he is an ignoramus, and he never gets the humour of my literary, sardonic style. His speed machine has made him lose all interest in history and humankind.
But, nevertheless, he ends up by appearing at my door waving my letters in his hand: What exactly is wrong here? You are not a little girl and should not be afraid of spiders. And what do you mean by the words juridical rivers of blood. . welfare and warfare. . licit and explicit. . Are you trying to scare me by using big words? I ran your letter by a lawyer, pal. I say you better be careful what you write, because my lawyer can drive you up against the wall. If you keep threatening me and writing letters in red ink with “buccaneer flags”. . I might have to double the rent or kick you out altogether. I don’t have time for this! And your apartment is cluttered with books and papers, and that, my friend, brings all kinds of insects and rodents. So you might as well make peace with me and accept the spiders as pest control. And now, where is that flood you wrote about. . and who is this Mr. Moses, is he staying with you here. .?
LANTERN
BENEATH ME THERE is an agitated student who complains that my sluggish steps, the ship-like commotion of my hips against my ever-insomniac mattress, and the ultrasound fretting of my flying carpets are forbidding her from excelling in her studies, ruining her future life of grand diplomas and her prospects for a large car, a big house with a pool, a husband on a leash, and a free-range poodle mowing the lawn. A few times, she threatened me with the police. When she appears from below, she is usually in her pyjamas, her Mickey Mouse slippers frowning up at me, her hair looking like she’s gone through a psychiatric treatment or homegrown electric shock. I always promise that this is the last time she’ll hear a noise; I blame it on a pile of literature that fell on the floor and bounced for a while because of the lightness of the writing inside. She never gets the joke, maybe because she is studying to be an engineer, and falling matters are never a light matter.
Beneath it all, in the parking garage, there is my car, its meter and its long oval rearview mirror, and the lantern on its roof. In my car, on the dashboard, between the glass and the steering wheel, I keep a Kleenex box that I use, on occasion, to scoop dirt and stop spills and the slow movement of liquids extracted from running noses by bare, sweeping hands. I also use it to cover my nostrils from the assaulting smells of the poor and the drunks and the unwashables who ride in my car with the stiffness of floating corpses and the miseries of the underground.
When all is calm, after all the strange creatures in my building have settled down, retreated to their stoves to feed themselves, and then moved towards their televisions to receive their daily allowance of vitamin D from the eminent face of the news anchor, I get in my taxi and go out into the night.
SPIDERS
THERE ARE TWO kinds of taxi drivers: the Spiders and the Flies.
Spiders are those drivers who wait at taxi stands for the dispatcher’s call or for customers to walk off the streets and into their hungry cars. These human insects can be found on city sidewalks rolling newspapers, comparing cars, recalling customers and their own lives. They wait on corners for things to come and ages to pass. Nameless they have become, reduced to machine operators who identify each other and themselves by the number of their car: 101 had a fight, they might say; 56’s wife is pregnant; 97 just passed by. .
But I call them the Spiders.
Flies are wanderers, operators who drive alone and around to pick up the wavers and the whistlers on edges of sidewalks and streets. They navigate the city, ceaseless and aimless, looking for raising arms to halt their flights, for the rain to make them busy, for the surfing lanterns above their hoods to shine like faraway ships leaving potato famines and bringing newcomers. No wanderer ever rests on the curb to play or feed. No wanderer chooses to travel the same road twice.
I am a wanderer.
IN THE EVENINGS during my shift, I often pass by Café Bolero. It is open twenty-four hours and many taxi drivers stop here to rest, eat, and socialize. I sit in the corner and listen to their stories and complaints. I find consolation when I assess their tired faces and watch their knuckles open and liberate themselves from the clutches of steering wheels, the handling of doorknobs, and the counting of change. I am an oddity among these charioteers but I observe their ways, hear their words, and follow their movements between the tables and the chairs. I also assign them names because I fear to forget their numbers.
Spiders come in many forms and shapes and colours. And here is the Sleeping Spider, ladies and gentlemen! Also known as Mr. Green, he takes a very short nap at every red light. He wakes up just as the light changes. Some drivers say he shuts his eyes and doesn’t sleep but stays aware of everything around him; others say he has a colour sensor in his eyelids. But the truth is that when the colour green catches his eyes, he wakes up and thinks he is back home in the lush jungles of the south. It is said that once, in Café Bolero, he fell asleep in the middle of a meal, his head hanging over his plate, but when the daughter of the owner brought a green salad to the table, he was awake again. That is how he got the name Mr. Green.
And let’s all welcome the Piss Spider, ladies and gentlemen, the driver who never leaves his car! He works twenty hours a day. He has a grand plan! He wants to retire to an island one day, with a house and a young woman to marry.
Since he never leaves his car, he hardly ever takes a shower. But, even worse, this spider always carries an empty antifreeze container and pisses in it. Going to the bathroom is a waste of time, he thinks. He is afraid to miss a dispatcher’s call or a customer off the street. It is said that a young woman who sat next to him in the front seat asked him to stop the car and got out and puked on the side of the road. If I were a customer of his, I would leave the swine the change and never touch anything that touched his hands. I’d become a generous donor to help cease the epidemics of the world. That spider could plague you with typhoid, the plague, hepatitis A, B, and C, and the whole Phoenician alphabet.
The Piss Spider is a man who would win every fist fight. Just his grabbing you by the collar and pulling your nose towards his armpits would assault you with olfactory punches, give you instant menopause. A waft of smells stronger than a thousand filthy Crusaders would ravage you, and you would be begging for mercy and clean air, you would be on your knees chanting five Hail Marys and six Our Fathers. But he is also a Renaissance man. With his knowledge of the art and science of channelling and containing liquids, his great mysticism expressed through an ascetic lifestyle, his skills for long-term navigation, his capacity for alchemy and the gathering of gold, he is admired and feared by friends and foes. A real son of the European kings and nobility, I call him the Piss Spider, but he truly earned his royal status when he became known among his fellow drivers as Louis XIV, after the French king who never took a bath in his entire life. When the sun hits le Roi Soleil’s dashboard, it turns into a fussy layer of dust, enough for ten fingerprintings at the border crossings. And every December he says, One more year of this and then I am off to my little bride on the beach, but then the massive layers of dust in his car turn to sand and beaches, and the smell of his seat becomes the smell of the old and familiar, and the cavity of his chair becomes a hole of misery and an opaque quagmire of greed, dirt, warmth, and even comfort.