Embedded Files
On RAÏ
by Habib Tengour
(translated from the French by Pierre Joris)
For a long time, raï was considered an obscenity. One couldn’t decently listen to it in a family setting, unlike andalusian, cha’bî or saharan music. Around the meïda (the low table that gave the indispensable exotic touch to indigenist literature), the Algerian family tastes the pleasures of the belly without refusing those of the mind and heart. Postcards guarantee it. In the good bourgeois homes shame (hashma), the cardinal virtue of the linage, forbade a music judged to be depraved. In those days, in the poor quarters of the city, it had to be mentioned at the entrance, on a wooden tablet hung from the lintel, in order to avoid any possible confusion that could have bloody consequences — for death was rarely idle. The razors’ searing intensity. The blood boiling over in the gutter as in Lorca.
Of its origins - ripe with controversy! - raï has kept the acrid harshness and murky glitter of the dives and brothels of Oran, Relizane and Bel Abbès. For the good city dweller of Tlemcen or Mostaganem, a certain bad taste — that of the bad boys and lost girls, of the rootless invaders of cities — transpires in every note, every intonation, every movement. All he can see in raï is the uncouthness of shoeless goatherds, the base exaltation of vileness, the triumph of instinct over soul. Which explains its repression.
In my early childhood I heard all tones indiscriminately. The moorish cafés of Tigditt, those of the lower suika or of Qadous el Meddah, broadcast the songs without worrying about the scratchy phonographs. The exclusivity of membership and the jealous care lavished on distinction ensured that one did not mix the genres; thus each place proudly confined itself to a music imposed by the taste of its clients. No matter the genre, the highest quality was required. There were constant arguments about some minor detail of the melody or about an inappropriate word. The specialists pulled a face.
The struggle for independence has hatched other sounds in the fracas of revolution. Before all it has imposed the silence of the augural expectation.
Today, as another silence grips the algerian landscape, I begin to see the painful and tragic consequences of the measures of austerity taken in those early days. (Certain perverse exegetes, due to impaired hearing no doubt, have always considered music to be the devil’s invention...)
Native grade school and then high school taught me to appreciate other sonorities by slowly draining the inherited ones towards folklore. My late meeting with raï was due to chance. Perhaps I can speak to it, but to transcribe it seems pointless. Oran had never looked as beautiful to me than during that spring of 1987! Captive, I jubilated. The various elements came together in a sudden bedazzlement. I was immersed in raï, a passionate drama, similar to what had happened with the blues during my adolescence, except that the intonations of raï scoured the depth of my memory. I enjoyed the moment deeply with the troubled sense of reliving it half in joy, half in pain. Banality of the great moments of tension. Interior distortions! Wahran, Wahran, ruhtî khsâra (Oran, Oran, what a waste!)
The mediatisation of raï since the 80s, first in Algeria, then in France and throughout the world, corresponds to a social phenomenon. Which doesn’t explain much. This kind of phenomenon rightfully scorns any explanation. “The facts are hard-headed,” Lenin used to say, but what does the hard-headedness of a music mean at the moment of a debacle?! The fear of a savage flood from the working-class suburbs may not be foreign to the interest invested in raï, rap and other marginal forms of expression. But the essence of raï is elsewhere!
“Ana bhar 'aliya wa ntiya llâ” ( I’m screwed, but you’re not ...) This leitmotiv of the raï song - it arises unexpectedly from each text like a collective signature - translates the cry of love and existential revolt of an algerian youth that is lost, idle and out of work in an quickly disintegrating urban space. It is from this crumbling younger generation, trying to grab life with both hands without worrying about any other form of identity quest, that raï draws its power and brilliance. A youth that no longer revels in big words, its eyes and ears wide open. Idle, by malediction. It does not want to lose itself without having spent all of its resources.
Indeed, raï is the music of the young ones, the chebs. They are numerous in Algeria: cheb Hasni (assassinated in Oran in February 1995), cheba Fadila, cheb Khaled, cheb Mami, cheb Sahraoui, cheba Zahouania, etc. Many leave the country, not understanding why they, who dwell at the core of their public’s (people’s?) frustrations, have become targets. Exile is their trade.
When questioned, raï singers deny being politically motivated. They say all they sing is sharp desire and amour fou, the definitive crossing and the daily problems of the young. “Problem” is a recurring word of Algerian parlance which they pick up on ad nauseam. They recite the Shahada in their concerts and naively confess to not understanding anything about the ploys of politics. Far from being stupid, they are aware that singing has become illicit. They go on singing because they enjoy it, because their public demands it and because, deep down, death means nothing.
Once upon a time, during the colonial era, the masters (cheikh and cheikha) of Oranian song, such as cheikh Khaldi, cheikh Hamada, cheikha Rémiti were the keepers of traditional beduin culture whose mode of artistic expression was the poetry called melhoun. They had a double repertory:
- The audible, dealing with didactic and religious matters, questions of love and praise, and with the perpetuation of the group’s unadulterated values. This register was that of the votive feasts of the tribe’s saints, of marriages, circumcisions, etc. It was the site of living memory and of the underground resistance to colonial occupation. There the masters communicated with their audience in shared aesthetic representations; the values remained solid.
- The unsayable, the forbidden, the repressed, what is unleashed when language bursts forth raw, brutal and proud of its transgressions. This register was reserved for small, limited audiences and for the places of bad renown. There the innovations were numerous and often illegal in the eyes of the censors.
That’s where lie the roots of raï which will develop in the seventies as traditional Algerian society starts to disintegrate.
“Where does the name ‘raï’ come from?” I had asked the taxi driver on the road from Oran to Mostaganem. The car’s radio-cassette player was blaring. “It makes you lose your head!” he had answered automatically. Châb al bâroud crackled on the player. It didn’t bother the driver. He upped the volume and shook his head as a connoisseur would. Today’s version, sung by cheb Khaled has nothing to do any longer with the nationalist epic of the thirties, which conjures up the “baroudeurs,” the fighters that were the companions of the Emir Abdelkader.
Raï is the desire-scream of that which can never be: the searing intensity of the moment that leaves no trace one could contemplate later on in a nostalgic unveiling of the soul. It is an open wound that never scarifies. The most diverse references come together here: a crossbreeding at times successful, often hybrid, but always bearing witness to the disjunctions of an Algerian youth starved for life. Here love walks on the wild side. The brutality of desire lights up the flesh without any other intention than the imperfect jouissance of the occasion (as an example, the famous provocative refrain sung as a duo by Hasni and Zahouania: Derna l’amour fi barraka mranaka / We have made love in a shaky shed).
But the lack of manners and of courtesy in no way prevents the total gift of self by the one - boy or girl - who is gripped by love. An unexpected love, defying all efficient planning. How not to be enthralled by the beauty of this plaint: Galbi bgha l’bayda wa zerga ‘lâh djât/ My heart desired the white, why did the blue (black, brown) come? indicating the struck lover’s surprise at the sudden apparition of the unexpected loved one. This simple question unfolds the surprising pain where bad luck pitilessly hammers the disoriented young man.
The violence of the scream breaks all chains, all barriers; it scares the thirsty bird above the head. Raï stands solidly on the ground where one has to dance.
But already blood and exile call us to other dérives…
Marilyn Crispell: Jazz Pianist (Interviewed by Jefferson Hansen)
This interview took place in January 2009, soon after Crispell had released Vignettes (ECM).
Widely considered one of the leading contemporary jazz pianists and composers, Marilyn Crispell's reach is tremendous. She can coax extraordinary beauty out of standards such as "You Don't Know What Love Is" or Coltrane's "Dear Lord" by locating pockets and eddies in the melody that allow for tremendous elaboration while still staying true to the tune. On her own compositions, Crispell has often been much more explosive, playing pounding rhythmic counterpoint opposite cascades up and down the keyboard. Since 1996, on her recordings for ECM, she has explored a more contemplative side, one that emphasizes space, interiority, and quietness. During the 80's Crispell was a member of Anthony Braxton's quartet. She has also played with such major jazz luminaries as Irene Schweizer, Barry Guy, Evan Parker, Reggie Workman, Noelle Leandre and many, many others. The interview begins with a discussion about her cat.
What is the name of your cat?
My cat's name is Freddy.
How long have you owned him?
I wouldn't say I own him. I would say that he appeared at my door full grown about 8 or 9 years ago.
People can find this out in different spots, but I find it interesting that you spent much of your career making money as a hostess in a restaurant.
That was very short lived. At the time I was living down the street from a French restaurant. And that was only for one season in a town just outside of Woodstock, New York.
What drew you to Woodstock as a place to live?
There used to be a school here called the Creative Music School, and it was run by two German jazz musicians, Carl and Ingrid Berger. It was a very unique kind of place where most of the names you would know in contemporary jazz and world music and even some in contemporary classical music would come to teach, and they would have 6-week sessions in the summer, winter, spring, or whatever. The school was on the grounds of an old hotel up near the Catskills. I came up here one summer to check it out, and I ended up moving here from Boston because it was an opportunity to meet all these musicians and work on their music with them in ensembles. At the end of the week they would do a concert with the students. It was beautiful, the Catskill Mountains, there was health food, a focus on meditation and all that kind of thing. It was a unique place that last until about 1983 or 4, until it went bankrupt.
That's usually what happens with institutions like that. They're too creative to last. I hate to divide your career up into two different periods, because I do not believe it is that simple. There is a lot of overlap. But there was a shift in 1996 when you began developing something of a new aesthetic, at least on the recordings under your own name. However, when you play as a sidewoman with Barry Guy or Noelle Leandre and so on, you often use your more dissonant and physical 'earlier' style. What is it like to move back and forth between these styles?
I was never just a sidewoman, I always had my own thing going on, too. I started recording under my own name in 1981 for Cadence records, and I did a lot of recording for Leo records and some other labels at the same time that I was playing in the Anthony Braxton Quartet. I did that because I wanted to establish something on my own, so that I was not simply associated with someone else. Because like any relationship it can come and go and also because I had a voice that was independent of what I was doing with Braxton.
Here's what I was thinking: the voice that appears, for instance, on Evan Parker's After Appleby, which appeared a couple years ago, is similar to the one that appeared on the pre-96 solo albums. How do you manage to work for several months on a solo project, then work under a different leader where you play a style more closely allied with your early work?
It's all connected. It's all a continuum. It's all recognizable as part of the same voice. There is an emphasis on intensity whether it be outer intensity or inner intensity, which the ECM stuff is for me. I think it would have been stranger if I had begun playing traditional jazz tunes, which I do some of. Even in the early recordings I am often playing ballads by Ellington, Coltrane, Bill Evans, even Monk. I allowed that to take precedence because that was what I was feeling at the moment and what I wanted to develop. I think what I am doing is not mainstream stuff, it's just that I allowed a lyrical aspect of my voice to come forward. I don't see it as a break in any way. I play in a lot of different circumstances and some of them involve what you call my 'early' voice, although I would say that with the emergence of lyricism has affected all of what I play, including the so-called 'energy music'. I find it more grounded in a way. It's something that's very difficult to put into words.
That's why it's music.
Yes.
Your latest album, Vignettes, is a solo album. You've made a number of solo albums over the years, The Woodstock Concert, Live in San Francisco, both on the Music & Arts label. And there were others. How do you approach a solo album differently than you do a group album?
I guess with a group album there is more planning. With a solo album I tend to leave things more to chance; this isn't totally the case because there is also total improvisation on the group albums. The more people there are the more planning you need, I think, although there are some people who disagree with me. There are some big bands that deal with total improvisation. In general, the more people you have the less definition things will have unless there is some kind of planning to leave space for things you want to happen. The more people you have the more you have people playing all the time and the less transparency there will be.
That dovetails into another issue. I assume that some of the songs on Vignettes are improvised.
Most of it is improvised
If it is improvised, how do you approach such a song? I assume you must have some idea of what you are going to do with an improvised song, or am I wrong about that?
Well, either or. It can be that, or it can be as simple as sitting down and playing the first note and going from there. It's like having a conversation I don't know what you are going to ask me and depending on what you say I say something. And then depending on what I say you say something and then we go from there. You don't necessarily plan what your first sentence is going to be when you meet a person and have a conversation with them. There does tends to be a back log of vocabulary, and a shared vocabulary if you are playing with other people. Many years of listening, studying, playing all provide a foundation for this improvisation. It doesn't come from nowhere. Just like if you are talking, you have a foundation of a language.
One of the two longest songs on the album is right in the middle and entitled 'Sweden'. Is there any significance to this given that ECM is a northern European label?
For one thing I named all the pieces after the music is finished, and I don't like naming things. I am not good at naming things. The reason I named that 'Sweden' is because I love Sweden. I have been going there since 1992 and it is a country that is very dear to my heart. There are people I love very much there. Somehow the music suggested to me something about the atmosphere of Sweden so I named it that.
In the case of this album how did you determine whether a song was going to be entitled Vignette 1, 2, 3 or something else?
The Vignettes were like small flashes of color interspersed among the longer pieces.
Given this relationship between part and whole, can this album be thought of as a suite?
Yeah. All of my recordings, I look at them in terms of the total picture, how the pieces fit together and how they segue one to the other. And Manfred Eicher at ECM records always chooses the order of the pieces. I think he does this very effectively. Sometimes he thinks one the pieces won't work, and then he figures out if he puts it in this place rather than that one, it works. If it were not an ECM recording I would definitely pay attention to the order and how things fit together. So, yeah, all of my recordings could be looked at as suites.
From what I have read about your recording sessions, you seem pretty ego-less, given that you had the composer, Annette Peacock, in the studio during the recording of Nothing Ever Was, Anyway: The Music of Annette Peacock. And now you say that the owner of ECM picks the song order.
That was not a matter of egolessness at all because she was the composer and knew very much about her compostions. She was very particular about how she wanted things played; very, very particular. I had her there conducting, basically, so that the phrasing and timing were just how she wanted it, or at least as close as possible. I could not have done that without her being there, to do that.
I just imagine that there would be a lot of jazz musicians who would balk at having the composer in the studio during a recording.
I grew up in classical music, so it's not that unusual.
I was curious about your naming the album Vignettes given that the word refers to a very slight narrative rather than a full-fledged one.
I had this image of a hallway and opening doors on either side as you walk down, and getting glimpses. I was looking at the word 'vignettes' to mean something like pictures or glimpses.
Ever since your first album on Cadence Records, I sense a strong percussive counterpoint between your left and right hands. My sense on Vignettes is that this counterpoint continues but is more melodic and harmonic than percussive.
Yeah, if I told you that Bach is my favorite composer, that might make sense. Counterpoint is a very, very important element in my music, I think. I would say that working with harmony was the last thing to happen. It started out more with rhythm and counterpoint being a linear thing than focusing on harmony. I mean, the piano is a percussive instrument. I am very into drums and overlapping rhythms, so I think it's pretty accurate, what you said. I think the counterpoint is often there, not always. It is a really crucial aspect of what I do, it's very important to me. So whatever form it takes, it's pretty much there.
On a few songs, particularly 'Vignette 2' and 'Vignette 5', it sounded to me as if you were plucking the strings inside the piano. Was this true?
Yeah, I think I was.
Have you done that before?
Yes.
Then I am a dummy because I've listened to almost all your recordings, and I never noticed it.
Maybe it was more evident on the Vignettes album because it was more transparent. It's solo; there's a lot of space. I've done it on some ensemble recordings, so you can't hear it as well.
I don't remember if I ever did it on a solo album before.
It seemed that the strings you were plucking tended to be on the high end.
Yeah, that's true. The lower end strings are harder to pluck, because they are thicker.
Listener response is something that can be extremely tricky, but I want to let you know about my response to the album, and see what you think about it. First, I think this is a beautiful album, terribly moving. As far as the mood goes, I find that most of the album feels elegant and melancholy.
I think I was very much in that spot. I recorded this two weeks before my father died. I did not know when he was going to die but I knew that he was really not well. I think that was very much present there.
I am sorry about your father.
Thanks.
It's approach to death is nothing like Dylan Thomas' lines "Do not go gentle into that good night / Rage, rage against the dying of the light." There is a quiet and elegant acceptance of death's inevitability. At least that's how it makes me feel.
Yeah, maybe it was a kind of unnamed melancholy. I can be fairly melancholic. Maybe that's why I relate to Scandinavians so well. There is something that I love about those northern expanses of snow, darkness, northern lights, very mystical. I can relate to all that.
I have spent some time exploring how women horn players have been treated by the jazz world. I would like to get your feelings about the issue of gender in jazz. Have you felt that your being a woman has affected your acceptance in the jazz world?
No, I haven't. Of course the music I was playing, I was not in the mainstream. The people who were playing the kind of music I was playing tended, I think, not to pay a lot of attention to race and gender, at least in the days when I first got into it. I think now they pay more attention to certain aspects, like race it seems to me. I am the kind of person who if I want to do something I just do it, and the fact that I am a woman does not figure into it. It doesn't hinder me. If there were difficulties of that kind I was not aware of them. I could guess that if I was not a woman I may have more work or be treated in a different way by some of the promoters and festivals and things like that. Then again, that's total conjecture because I have dealt with so many people who have been really respectful and treated me like any other musician they wanted to hire. It hasn't been a problem for me.
I thought you were going to say that because of your comments on the topic in the Braxton book about the tour in the 80's —
Oh, Forces in Motion.
Yeah, by Graham Locke. The last thing I have to say is that you have been such an inspiration to me as an artist because of the integrity you have in relation to your artistic vision. I admire any artist on the cutting edge who stays there because it is such a difficult place to inhabit.
Thank you for that, but if that's where your spirit lies, you don't have a choice. It is not an act of courage so much as merely following the path of least resistance. It's kind of like what you do, what comes easily to you, your natural path. It would be more difficult not to do it. I often think that people who fall by the wayside or people who decide to do something else because they are not going to make much money doing this, they didn't want to do this that badly to begin with. I would say that if you are not that driven to do it, don't waste your time. Enjoy it and everything, but if you are seriously thinking of doing it for your life's path, I think you've got to be very driven to do it.
That's what I admire about you. It was not duty. It was coming out of such a deep level, almost as natural as breathing, and you stuck with it. At least that what it seems to me.
You could also look at that as laziness.
Susan M. Schultz
from “Love in the Time of Alzheimer's”
Planet of the Apes at Arden Courts
—She sits slumped over to her right in a chair in the Country Lane common area. “Sit up, Martha,” Christine and I tell her. She props her left elbow on the arm rest for a few moments, then slumps over again. Christine wanted her hair done before I came; it's short, plastered oddly to her head. She wears black sneakers with pink lace holders, white socks, black slacks, shirt and brown suede jacket. When she stands up to go into the next room for lunch, she looks smaller than before, needs guidance to walk the several paces to sit next to Sylvia, the woman who speaks loudly, sings in the hall. One of the workmen awakened her, flapping his arms, pretend flying.
—I'm so tired at lunch (lost sleep, jetlag, a trip to mom's lawyer and tax preparer in Arlington) that I excuse myself, lie down on mom's bed and go to sleep. She's in room 9, has a new neighbor since last year. Christine brings mom in after lunch to go to the bathroom, then leaves. Then I hear loud noises. “YOU'RE TRYING TO KILL ME, I KNOW YOU'RE TRYING TO KILL ME!!!!” When I go to the common room, I see the fake Christmas tree's been knocked over. The glass angel is damaged again, its wing broken. Light strings in knots. Christine takes the tree down. It was Pat, whom I remember as a placid woman last February. She's angry now, back in her room, banging on the door.
—Later in the afternoon, Pat comes out; Christine gets her to sit in the common room, brings her Ensure in a small cup. Pat is nearly past language. Lifts arms up, as if to place them on the handle bars of a motorcycle, says, NNNNNNNNNNNO, NNNNNNNNNNO. Begins a sentence one way, finishes it, or fails to finish it another. J, the man she shoved, does the same. “Julie,” he says, nothing more. P's eyes get big when she gets mad, and she's mad now. She comes over to me to ask, "what can I do for you?" Can't finish her question. "What do you think you could do for me?" I ask. She holds her shirt up at the bottom. Christine intervenes; leads her to a chair.
—Joe says he has a “hole.” He keeps telling me about falling out of bed, waiting for three hours, crying out, and getting this hole, larger than a quarter, as he shows me with his hand. He has a cut on his forehead. But the hole is on his leg. Christine raises up his pant leg. “You have an abrasion,” she says. I try to help by reducing the word to “scrape.”
—”She used to be my best, first customer in the mornings,” Lena tells those gathered in the common room. Lena holds a large white ball, which she tosses back and forth while she talks. “Now it's you,” she tells a woman in the first row. Mom's too frail now, not interested.
—My mother dozes as the television runs. Before lunch it's Young Frankenstein. That was a movie I saw with her. Now five old people sit and sleep while Gene Wilder vamps. After lunch the Planet of the Apes movies come on. Charlton Heston sweet talks a young woman, thin and breasty, who doesn't speak. “Can you talk? Talk?” he demands. There is hair on his chest, loud teeth in his mouth. He gives her his dog tag. Says “Taylor” and points to himself. Says the name again, again points. Disappears, with a gun, off his horse into thin air. The second one, the one who looks like Heston, has the woman, who still can't speak English, take him to the ape village. A military ape rants about war, invasions, the need to conquer. A female ape mutters against the war. The man ape wins. Heston's clone is captured, escapes. I lose track, wander off. Mom still dozes. [Later, I find that the movie was the 1970s sequel, Beneath the Planet of the Apes.]
—Something has changed for me. This visit is easier than before. I am used to seeing my mother like this. She doesn't talk, smiles only occasionally, stares at the TV or into space, slumps over, sleeps a bit. I wonder why it feels easier now. Why there's less need to lock in, hold everything in memory until later in the motel room, though I have. I try to remember which residents are gone. There was the woman with the dolls around her neck; the woman who carried a kleenex box wherever she went; the woman who seemed European. Others I do remember: the grandmother who could not remember how many grandkids she had. Dr. French still has room, memory box. A Rev. B wanders the halls, as if to minister to the residents. It takes time to realize he is one.
—Amber who works the front desk, still hasn't sent me inauguration photos. She recommends a Vienna restaurant, Maple Garden, where I go for dinner. Beef stew. Reminds me of home.
Stories from Calle 59, Campeche, Mexico
by Kao Kalia Yang and Aaron R. M. Hokanson
Notes from a new husband:
She is ahead of me. I stopped a few seconds ago, an image that could only be of this place unfolding in front of me. A folding chair unfolded, a wicker back chair carried outside, and another brought to the edge of the stairs. These streets are narrow, the younger folk and a peppering of tourists are walking into the town square for the evening. We are headed back home in the morning. I stopped. The ocean breeze of summer air, carrying the vibrations that began from a finger touching a guitar string, a keyboard’s key, a hand on a drum, a push of air through the throat.
She continues walking. These women form an audience five or six blocks away from the small concert. Usually at this time in the evening we would see them as we walk down the street, on the other side of windows, watching television, or sitting outside in a similar fashion having a conversation which we assume has been continuing through their lives, as others move on, new people approach, children and husbands and sisters and brothers grow older, slowly, these three women, in these three chairs, have staked their territory, their watch-posts a third of the way down Calle 59.
I stop to stand behind. I hear the music bend with a shift in the breeze. The women speak quieter than usual, but still enthusiastically. I also notice the pauses, the moments for deep breaths. My wife walks on, I try to call out to ask her to stand by me, to look…
What happened to my words, how did they escape my breath? Did they crawl silently back into my throat, and slide silently, carefully back near my heart? Did they escape off the tip of my tongue, jumping without fear into the night before I had a chance to push them out?
The women sit. A leg kicks back and forth, a pendulum to the rhythm of the music, flip flop dangling. From this distance it is easy to see that there is not a very large crowd in front of the stage, yet these women, like some immovable part of the urban geography, like the paint on the walls, the concrete streets, or the large wooden doors, only turn their chairs and look up the street they usually look out onto. They do not get up to dance, or follow the few local folk who have wandered against the tide of those going toward the town square where they usually meet.
I watch my new wife walk forward. I doubt she has missed this moment, these three old friends, crossing their arms, staring forward, offering words and fragments of thought to each other, saying and seeing together how much the world around them changes and doesn’t change, trading presence for presence, moments noticed for memories.
I watch my new wife walk forward, noticing each crack, each person. I see her nod and smile at the strangers she passes. I take note of the song, but in memory the music is silent, the moment slow and mostly still, save for my wife walking ahead. Eventually she stops, turns around and offers a crooked turn of the lip upward. There are outreached arms, and I look at my feet, remembering that this is where I am standing, I remember my legs, my arms. I find, fluttering like fairies around me, my words, and whisper a sigh to ask them to come forward with me. I see one or two escape, and the rest land on my shoulder.
I reach for her arms and grab a hold of her hands. I swing her arms with the movement of my hand and move my feet in a childlike imitation of Fred Astaire.
She allows me the movement. She looks up into the sky. “This is beautiful” she says taking a deep breath.
I breathe with her and nod.
Old woman sitting in the sidewalk:
Life on the Street:
Grandma is real angry. The young teenagers walking away have left a mess in the house. One of the grandchildren is still crying in bed. They think they are so young and so interested in living. They think Grandma is so old and waiting to die that she has no more clues on the particulars of their lives.
Three of the grandchildren work in Hacienda Puerta Campeche so they think they are going places in the world. Isn’t the Hacienda the best hotel in this part of the Yucatan? It certainly is the most expensive hotel in the city. It has the best restaurant. Grandma doesn’t know that all three of them have taken naps on the most expensive beds. She does not know that they have all eaten from the most expensive dishes. All she knows about their work is that they have to wear traditional Campechian clothes. She knows that the two granddaughters tie their hair back in ponytails. She knows that the grandson puts pomade in his hair. She knows that they speak English to the guests. She thinks their English is so good. She doesn’t know English. When she hears them practicing English with each other, she is so proud. She stands silent and clasps both her hands to her chest. The truth is that they practice with each other because they are too embarrassed to practice with the world. The guests at the Hacienda are sometimes patient when the workers speak and sometimes they look away in disgust. The three grandchildren are scared of the guests. Each man and each woman and each child that visits the Hacienda has bank accounts large enough to flood Grandma’s whole house with potato chips and cola for a year!
Grandma spent most of her life as a fisherman’s wife. She raised five kids. Her specialty was baby shark tacos. She liked to talk about how she made all the clothes for her children until they became of age, married, found men and women to buy their clothes with them. When the grandchildren were smaller, she used to sit with them in front of the television in the small family room, right beside Grandpa’s parked car. They used to watch television dramas of rich families with deceitful hearts. The grandchildren would watch from the top of the car. They sat on its roof like little monkeys. The grandchildren used to be so confused by the drama on TV. Why was the butler stealing the wine from the owner of the house? Why is the maid so scared of the butler that she can’t tell the truth on him to the master upstairs? Why this and why that? The evil in the world they couldn’t understand. The darkness of the human urges made them question themselves and each other, made them ask her so many questions that she couldn’t answer them all. She had tried in the beginning. She had tried to teach them that a human being was complicated, and that there was tremendous variety in the human race. She had tried to explain the world the way her ancestors long ago had explained: there are tremendously powerful gods and they have the power to bring on the sun and the rain, enable huge harvest, or kill entire villages by sending drought and famine. She had told them that the butler wanted to be rich and that is why he worked in the rich man’s house but he wasn’t so all he knew was the urge, still, to be rich, and that the wine allowed him a moment’s escape into the life of the owner of the house. She had said that the maid was so scared of the butler because the butler was a man and he could hurt her in ways that would terrify any young woman. The children had pushed for examples of hurt. She had said, “Something like a hard slap to the face, close to the mouth, hitting the teeth, the teeth falling out. For the rest of her life, can she eat meat anymore without good teeth? Can she even eat a guava?!” The children had nodded as if they understood. It has been so long since their questions. Each of them, in turn, had found a way beyond the living room with the television screen lighting up the night. They had all said that they wanted jobs so they can work and take care of her—many of them had said the words as wishes when they were children. When Grandpa died, they had said the words once more, this time with the firmness of responsibility, the heaviness of a burden laid.
The grandchildren had gotten into a fight. The youngest one, the one crying on the bed still inside the house, had gotten hurt. She wanted a job at the Hacienda with the three. They said that it was not a good job for her. She had wanted to know why. The boy had said because she was a girl and the some of the hotel guests, the men, liked to take advantage of the girls, and he had his hands full looking over the two already. The two girls had gotten angry, saying that he did nothing for them, going so far as to recall the memory of last year when one of the hotel guests had gotten drunk and slapped the butt of Marisol. The Sun and the Sea—her name meant. Her Grandma had given her the name. She was passing by the hotel pool, lighting little candles in white bag around the dark courtyard paths, when the guest had said from the poolside, “Let me be the sun and you can be the sea inside my room.” The girl had trouble following the words. She had walked closer to him saying, “Excuse me, Sir?” When she was within arm’s reach, that’s when it happened: he swung his hand behind her for a grab, ending up smacking her butt in her struggle to get away. The boy had found her crying in one of the stalls in the outdoor women’s restroom. She told him the story between sobs. He had been angry for a little while, and then according to Marisol, he had said simply, “There’s money you can earn in that situation.” Oh!—how mad the Grandma had been. She had sputtered fire and called him filth. He denied the words. He denied ever having said that. Grandma had demanded the girl quit her job. The girl had refused. None of them was ready to do the right thing because of a cell phone bill, because of a meal out with friends at the club, because of a visit to Cancun—not to vacation, of course, but to be with the friends who were fortunate enough to find jobs working there! Take care of her?! Take care of her indeed! So: the youngest granddaughter had wanted a job and the three older ones had told her no, and in the end of their long talk, had told her that she didn’t “qualify” because her English was “too bad.” And now, there they were, walking away, back to the Hacienda.
The grandma watched them walk out the door. It wasn’t enough. She got out her folding chair and set it up, right in the middle of the sidewalk, up Calle 59, watching them walk away. None of them had the guts to look back. They walked away as if they were young strangers. La Puerta del Tierra in the green light at the end of the street. A couple stood talking in a doorway, hoping to be discreet. A lone woman walks by herself, slowly up the sidewalk. The grandchildren walking away like it isn’t their grandma sitting right there, arms over her chest, her heaving heart hoping that they would turn back, even one time, one last time, again and again, a last time and a last until it was her last time. That was what she was hoping for. That was all she had learned to hope for. In life, there was nothing, no person, no experience, nothing you could hold onto forever. All you can hope for is that the thing holds before it is your turn to go into forever.
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