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This one was an Englishman who fished with a rod. A high, thick nose on his long terra-cotta face; below, the mouth of a priest, drawn and still, the lips sunken; and a cigar from Catacaos; and one shaved hand; and a long, long, long rod. Undoubtedly, this Englishman was like all fishermen, an idiot, yet his legs did not sway; instead, he stood upon that support rail as slippery as moss-covered tiles. What was this Englishman fishing for, a careless lampo or minuscule tramboyos? I think he spent hour after hour fishing for a piece of seaweed with a drop of water on its tail that swelled and then collapsed before he could catch it. A poet? Nothing of the sort: a travel agent from Dawson and Brothers Ltd., but he fished with a rod. And the temptation to push him — and the Catacaos floating — and the rod driven into the sandy bottom like a topmast.
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In the bewitched mirror of the rainy street — a drop of milk, the streetlamp’s iridescent globe; a drop of water, the sky above; a drop of blood, one’s self with this foolish joy at winter’s unannounced arrival. I am now that man with no age or race who appears in geography monographs, with ridiculous clothes, a somber face, his arms spread wide as he arranges India ink pastures and charcoal clouds — the engraving’s sparse, ragged landscape. Here is the West; North on that wall; South behind me. That way to Asia. This way, Africa. Everything beyond the sierra or the sea suddenly approaches, meridian by meridian, in a man, upon the brown waters of the causeway. The Turk is the Levant and the Occident, a tightly bound sheaf of latitudes: the face is Spanish; the pants, French; the nose, Roman; the eyes, German; the tie, Belgian; the bales of hay, Russian; the restlessness, Jewish. As we travel to the East, the numbers increase. To the West, they decrease. Dakar or Peking. A haremesque joy as the blue cloth appears through the lattice with its drab edges of black rubber. The fields, with their rash of ancient burial grounds, at the road’s open mouth. Fading light of falling drizzle. Trees with wet birds. There is a reason the earth is round. And these cars, soiled by haste, by pride, by mud. The fig trees make the houses grow in the illusion of muddy and mossy foliage, almost water, almost water, water above, and below, sediments, chlorophyllous and clay, I don’t know. Swallows, grasshoppers. One might even open one’s round, ichthyological eyes. In the water, under water, the lines break up, the reflections are at the mercy of the surface. No, at the mercy of the force that moves it. But it’s the same thing, after all. Asphalt pavement, a fine and fragile mica sheet. A very narrow street widens then contracts from beginning to end like a pharynx so that two vehicles — one cart and a second cart — can continue together side by side. Everything is thus: tremulous, dark, as if on a movie screen.
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Ramón never thought that a minuscule, barren jacaranda tree looked like an Englishwoman with glasses. A somewhat crazy photophobic gringa photographer — the delight of a rooming house with cretonne drapes and clean lace curtains — wandered around Barranco day and night in vain. The gringa was a roaming road, blinded by the sun, leading to the tundra, to a country of snow and moss where a gaunt, gray city of skyscrapers loomed as mysterious as the machinery in a dark factory. Miss Annie Doll’s life had to be loaded onto a sleigh and an airplane, an automobile and a transatlantic liner. And in the end, Miss Annie Doll was a ruddy infant suckled on a sterilized bottle. Synthetic milk, canned meat, hard liquor, seven years in a sports academy, reindeer and squirrels, trips to China, archaeological collections in a suitcase from Manchester that holds all of civilization, aspirin tablets, the smell of sawdust in hotel dining rooms, the smell of smoke on the high seas, on board. You evoke so many things, photophobic gringa photographer, you who live in a rooming house, an enormous building with its third floor of gray planks, with its sadness of a railroad station and a chicken coop! Gringa: sheltered road leading to the tundra, to Vladivostok, to Montreal, to the South Pole, to the perpetual winter of whitewashed scientific academies, to anywhere at all.
But Ramón does not see your image spread into the jacaranda by the sun. To him, you are a somewhat crazy gringa, and a jacaranda is a tree that produces many purple flowers. You are a red, long, sinewy mobile thing that carries a Kodak over its shoulder and asks questions that are wise, useless, and nonsensical. A jacaranda is a solemn, old-fashioned, confidential, expressive, gaudy, mindful, family tree. You: almost a woman; a jacaranda: almost a man. You: human, in spite of everything; it: a tree, when we leave off the poetry.
Ramón, I’m not thinking about those splendid jacarandas in the park. Miss Annie Doll’s only relationship to them is as their antithesis: a vegetable antithesis full of nature and supreme truth. But there stands a jacaranda on a secluded street that smells of bananas: a zigzagging street full of laundries; an alleyway lined with whitewashed walls without windows or doors that have the aura of a military hospital or a recently inaugurated school building. And the jacaranda on that street is the one I say is the gringa, or I don’t know if it is a jacaranda that is the gringa or if it is the gringa that is a jacaranda. Whether the tree is very young or very old, I don’t know. Facing it we have the same doubts as when we face pieces of pottery in museums, not knowing if they are from Nasca or Chimu, authentic or forged, black or white. Perhaps the jacaranda on Mott Street is both young and old at the same time, like the gringa — lanky, almost completely naked, with just one foliated arm, one stump of purple flowers, free, as if blown there by the wind. Remember, Ramón. We have gone, many an afternoon, to Mott Street to hear the church bells ring for evening Angelus: iridescent soap bubbles that immature Saint Francis shoots through blowpipes from the church towers into a child’s sky. Ramón, don’t you remember how the bells would burst above us; how they gave neither sound nor sight, just the cold smell of water, much too brief and bright for us to notice at the moment it wet our faces, which were turned toward the darkening sky? The sunset was an overripe banana behind the Elysian bananas of Mott Street. But let’s forget about the jacaranda and the church bells of Saint Francis. Let’s remember Miss Annie Doll, tourist and photographer, a spring dressed in a jersey that sprang out of this Peruvian resort town’s box of surprises. You pushed a button, and Miss Annie Doll thrust out her body and a pair of yellow glasses. The toy was a local attraction, not for sale; it belonged to everyone, thoroughly public. The city and Miss Annie Doll. She lived on an income that came from far away, like a box of tea; she spoke a Latin that broke her clean porcelain teeth into a thousand smithereens like crystals; she failed to understand the bells of Saint Francis because she took to hearing them in Hebrew, and Saint Francis did not know any dead languages, only how to blow soap bubbles to cheer up God; she wore glasses with the same tortoiseshell frames as yours, only the lenses in hers were yellow, antireflective. And you, Ramón, are not a high-strung boy, nor do you suffer from conjunctivitis. Ramón, a normal boy. But the gringa, whether you like it or not, essentially. I guess. looks like the jacaranda on Mott Street.