First few pages of Leaving by Sergio Waisman
Stuck again, I want to speak of piano staircases, accordion halls, of long walks in salty breezes, searching for reason in a madwoman’s soliloquy. Of large mirrors blank as I stand before them.
The beginning, in this context, a question. Not unlike what we allow ourselves. As opposed to what is imposed upon us, the laws of nature. Is the randomness that brought us together in a café in the Mission district the same which ulcerated several feet of my large intestine a few years ago? Is that what we should call it, random?
Wait a moment, I’d like to try again. Today, in the middle of February, it is 60° F. Everything is upside down. Until yesterday there was snow on the ground and it was dropping to below 20° at night. What has happened to our winter? Last week I shoveled the sidewalk and salted the wooden steps outside our front door, and now the sun shines bright and warm? I see people outside: some in shorts, others biking to school or work. Around noon, four gray heads jog in a tight group, healthy middle-aged men exercising for lunch.
I open several windows in our apartment to let fresh air in for the first time in weeks. This morning we talked about a blue guitarist who crossed the Atlantic to witness silver lands and breathe, just breathe. Now, I brew a pot of strong coffee, serve myself a large piece of chocolate hazelnut cake and take a seat at the kitchen table.
Suddenly it is hot and the wind coming in through the open window in the kitchen—the one facing southeast—feels like it is coming from the sea. The sea, in Colorado? But no, it is not the sea, not exactly. Not completely the marine feel of ocean winds. What could it be, then? A wind that has swept above open waters, wide enough to resemble the sea. And there is something else in the air, too; but there are no oceans or even large lakes near us. What could this unexpected warmth blowing in through my Boulder window be? Could it… Yes, I recognize it now. I can even see it, for there is a silvery haze to it. It is the ocean-like breeze off the port of the Río de la Plata mixing with the smoke of the Sunday asados drifting over the pampas. This breeze, in turn, reminds me of the bitter herb of mate in a hand-held gourd. And of the sounds of Spanish interspersed with Yiddish around another kitchen table, very far from this one, in an inner patio in Buenos Aires.
Inside, this breeze and the surprising sensations it triggers is warm through and through, almost moist. I remain sitting like this for a long while, my eyes closed and yet a part of me still seeing, as if my senses could reach down all the way across the globe to the Southern Hemisphere, back against the steady current of time, and somehow absorb the past through outstretched fingers, through my very skin, up and out of the basket we call memory. It is my body that is reaching against the currents, down, back. Voices and faces from the past rush in all at once, surround me on all sides. The house in the dream and the many houses left behind by families moving on to better lives. Walking through a city that is—and is not—my hometown. Chasing a soccer ball in a square after school, gathering rubber plant leaves for a boy’s private collection. Falling in love with songs of swallows flying through colonial arches, their shadows tracing our stories on adobe walls. Patterns that suggest new ways to draw up maps.
Eventually, I start cooling off. I don’t know how long I have been sitting in my kitchen. Involuntarily, I open my eyes; it is darker out and there is no trace of the sudden heat that just a moment ago entered the apartment. It is considerably colder now, much too cold to just sit here, and I must get up to close the windows. As I do so, I notice that there is still plenty of snow up in the mountains, as well as on the field across from our building, and that the sun has already begun to go down. I was wrong earlier about the change of seasons; we are still very much in the thick of winter. It is later in the day than I had thought, and you should be getting home soon.
*
I go back to my grandparents’ shop in the Bronx, find myself sifting through strings, clothing and buttons. Playing with pins, pincushions and thimbles in the rear room while my grandmother measures alterations on customers out front. I trace my need for a beginning there, sitting at my grandfather’s feet: a framework of light and texture, sounds and smells. As always, he works stooped over the material, sewing silently, deliberately. On the shelf above the old Singer a radio tuned to a Spanish station plays mostly loud commercials, some boleros. The air is singed and musty, an iron heating the moisture. My grandmother’s hairspray and the strange orange-like smell of the pomade my grandfather uses to keep his hair in place. My grandmother, who has learned a fair amount of English, is the one who deals with the customers; my grandfather never goes up front. Although he was to live in New York City for fourteen years—speaking Yiddish with his friends and broken Spanish with the Puerto Ricans in their neighborhood—he never got past hello in English.
And you trace it there, you ask, where your grandparents watched over you while your parents were at work? As if it all had to do with a tailor from Lublin via Buenos Aires. As if it could be narrowed down to a few words and strings, just like that. An early memory away from home. A name, a place, an image. Needles threaded, seams sewn in a crowded shop in the Bronx, a patchwork of cloth joined by a grandfather’s hands into elegant suits and dresses. For perhaps it can serve as a point of departure: from a time before memory to a time where memory became all there was to distinguish myself from the world around me.
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This page last updated
01/07/2005
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