His
fingernails were blue, blue like the color of an early sky or of a light shimmering-blue
sea. Silvina had painted them for him on Sunday in Tompkins Square Park, under
some large green trees all bursting with fresh, new-found color: Brazilian-flag
green, or perhaps a Madagascar banana hue. There was a radiant sun that spring
morning, in spite of the biting cold, and they felt happy, amidst their fingernails
and trees and who knows what else. They were thirsty for fresh air, not having
seen each other in too long, and after a seemingly endless, dispiriting winter.
Before they got to the park, however, walking down the planet, or down Eighth
Street in Manhattan, down the Sinai peninsula, down so many routes that lead to
the sea and to womanhood, his telescopic eyes spotting plates of felafel, humus,
mint, kibbe, yogurt, all types of Arab food, and as if all hell had broken loose,
suddenly getting hungry and everything but the kitchen sink, a very strong current
that takes everything away, everything, starting with his oh-so-precarious masculinity
drawn forth by a bittersweet mandragora breath. Instantly, they decided, much
as someone might say, full of fear: The waves! The waves! A storm is coming! Having
arrived at the beach for the first time in their lives, and seeing an earthquake,
or a whale hunt, a certain tsunami, the sea about to split in two, and not one
more second of this torture, stopping at the Syrian-Lebanese shop, all because
of a phenomenal sun and some newspapers, some old ladies staring at it all, and
look! I haven’t smoked in ages but I think that today I am going to go for
it. It was all written
in the palm of his hand. Fairy tales filled his mind, inspired by what they saw:
walls decorated with allegorical landscapes, scenes from the thousand and one
nights, belly dances, seductively attracting them like a spy from World War II
named Scheherazade, while they filled their mouths with familiar treats, their
minds feeding their desire for adventure and an English pilot burned from head
to toe in a lonely, empty hospital bed -- or was it a villa? -- in the Italian
countryside, my sister, with a cheap Topeka discount-department-store whore on
Loiza Street in Puerto Rico. There was something in the air, even the tiniest
animals felt it -- chloroform, or burnt rubber tires? The smell of Chanel nail
polish, or of fried Caribbean morsels in Piñones? Or perhaps the finest
incense I had never smelled? They
sat on a bench and began to work, for they were quite puritanical, in their own
way. Silvina’s were pink and she wanted to paint his, so that they would
match: boy and girl, just like the new Pampers disposable diapers or any other
random combination that would say: you and I. Like the green and yellow of the
Brazilian flag. Or the black and white of an old TV set, left along the side of
a road to Istanbul, that noble city which my grandmother, in her impeccably conservative
way, insisted in calling Byzantium. Blue for boys and pink for girls, for if in
Constantinople I played a violent, slapping count, and crossing the Bosporus is
such a threat, my lord, especially if there is a spill of crude petroleum from
the Caspian Sea. Imagine an older lady looking at them with curiosity, without
speaking a word, for the wench hallucinates with the absentmindedness of a cruel
and virulent mishap, like a sickness that mercilessly devours skin, without even
leaving a saint’s welts. Like saying: Adam and Eve, Anthony and Cleopatra,
or Laurel and Hardy. On the other side, a young man covered in tattoos was starting
to get interested, while his girlfriend, absorbed in reading a newspaper, paid
them no mind. They wanted to have some coffee; they had to meet a friend in half
and hour, and they were afraid that the nails would not dry in time. Silvina
had little experience in the matter, even though she was a girl. To be a girl
is a tongue-twister and my tongue is painted with many colors, she always said,
and I say and breathe deep. Or rather, Jerry breathed deep and refused to get
worried -- to participate in a blindman’s dance is one thing, the moon shines
but I do not have Tegucigalpa to heal that wound, he thought. I am telling you
everything by admitting that they feasted amply, ravenously. Tabbouleh, baba ganoush,
shawarma, French fries, kibbe. Rice and lentil mujaddarah, as if the Reconquista
had never happened, Puerto Ricans returning to their Arab roots, soaked up to
their cuticles in olives and pita bread. They felt a strong need for something
new, something that would shake up their routine and defrost the semi-arthritic
bones of their hands. They walked towards the park, and an old saying came to
their mind: "Full belly, blue fingernails." Just like that, just like
Ramito sang it, accompanied with a tiny, four-stringed folkloric guitar. Where
had he gotten the idea to paint them? Where, where, I struggle to find paths but
I cannot find the owner of these keys. It was not the first time: he had already
done so, many years ago, in Cambridge, when he decided to be like the punks from
Harvard Square; in Philadelphia, when he tried to be like the Liberty Bell; in
Orlando or Marrakech, when he decided to be Mickey Mouse and bought black fingernail
polish. He had painted them while sitting on the banks of the Charles River, or
the Nile, or the Mississippi -- and had he ever made a mess! As soon as she saw
Jerry, his sister, who worked at a small used-clothing store on Massachusetts
Avenue and fortunately lived with him, helped -- not in vain was her middle name
Auxilio -- just like one might aid a God-forsaken soul after some great cataclysmic
catastrophe. Fingers muddled in black, they didn’t even shine. Does anyone
bother to explain the complexity of these procedures? But this time it had not
been his sole idea, but rather that of a bottled genie. When
he decided to be like the punks from Harvard Square, as if a library in honor
of a victim of the Titanic or the sad memory of the Crusades… Please! How
exactly was Jerry like a punk? All he wanted to do was to have painted fingernails,
an armored sky with nuclear stars, and black seemed like a safe color, liminal.
Would blue be the same? Black and blue, like the marks he got after a certain
voluntary spanking, just like saying yellow and green, the day he tried to find
out about sadomasochism down around Stop Fifteen, between Pluto and Jupiter Bar.
And one day, while he was slam-dancing in Squeeze-Box, like black and white, or
silver and gold, he thought that if he fell, they could harm him, even if it was
dark and you couldn’t see absolutely anything (except the fluorescent smile
of a cat-like red and blue, pure flag!). Ana
Maria, for that is how his younger sister was called -- a fleeting star of asteroids
unknown by mere mortals like us -- removed the excrescence from his fingers (purple
and orange?) and explained a couple of things to him. She had spent many years
doing it and had it down pat, it was almost like a science to her. Something like
astrology or astronomy, I never knew the difference: first of all, trim and file
them and take care of the cuticles, in Venus; afterwards, a clear coat by Mars;
then, the same thing several times, but with a color from Scorpio or Uranus; finally,
clear Libra and Sagittarius gloss, to enhance the effect. One did not have to
worry about Virgo (or Viagra) nail polish spills on the fingers, as that came
out later while bathing with a little bit of maritime, pearl-colored Pisces scrub. And
the result, my dear beloved Madam? His fingernails had been a thorough success!
The hands acquired a new, marvellous expressive character as a result of the astro-cosmetic
intervention. He always carried the black fingernail polish with him, such an
intergalactic constellation of a space-age war films, in order to be able to retouch
them in case of an emergency. He always brought the bottle to work, every single
day, unfailingly. His boss, a videographer, laughed when she saw it, as he was
always in the clouds, because of his profession. And
then, as if he were an Arab woman (a desert astronaut, or a manicure queen, perhaps)
in a harem, convinced that her man would come one day, locked up on the banks
of the Nile, or between the Tigris and the Euphrates, with a multitude of other
women, who all shared the same dream: that she was his favorite, and would be
the first to step with very-nicely painted tiny toenails on the constellation
of Orion. With his painted fingernails, which could be seen through the subtle
veil that covered his face, making them more seductive. A large, strong man --
enormous, like a giant! -- with a long, dark beard and a deep stare, that was
undoubtedly who would save her. She had painted her fingernails to be taken far
away, on a magical carpet, perhaps, crossing asteroid fields and dwarf stars,
to a cave with forty thieves, while cleaning an old oil lamp which he would find
on Fourteenth Street in New York, in one of those stores where they sold large
clocks with the face of the Virgin Mary, and rugs with Jesus and Mohammed and
the twelve apostles, a photo of the moons of Venus and tigers and women in bikinis:
if Mohammed does not come to the mountain, well then, you know, bring the mountain
to Mohammed. Or toy soldiers that dragged themselves down the sidewalk, energized
by their small Duracell batteries, like Mambrú, who went to war to never
return. Or turtles that splashed in small plastic swimming pools, delighting passers-by,
especially children. A clock that he had given his ex-boyfriend, with the face
of the Virgin of Guadalupe, that made such a racket, with its almost infernally
loud tick-tock, which kept them all awake at night, staring out the window in
the distance, in the direction of Mecca and Medina, crying for that which he was
not able to defend like a man. Let
us enumerate: blue fingers, blue nails, bluish space ships decorated with a green
and white flag embroidered with lovely Muslim calligraphy. Walking down Eighth
Street, passing a Syrian restaurant, the smell of mint tea, a place to get interplanetary
tattoos, a woman who read the newspaper -- the New York Times -- or was it Tarot
cards, or my astrological chart? A commune in the middle of the Cambridge academic
community, a Hare Krishna center, a vegetarian restaurant on Tetuán Street
in Old San Juan, just by Magic Mountain or It’s a Small World After All in
the new Saudi Disney (there were no pigs to be seen anywhere): it’s three
little sheep that scream in the desert when confronted by the big bad wolf. Light
blue and pink, like the new disposable Pampers that they advertised on TV, arpeggio
of a sonata for the first man who stepped on the moon, or perhaps a tambourine
that keeps the rhythm for a sad lament, sung from the deep by an heiress of the
great Egyptian chanteuse, Umm Kulthum. A pile of clothes next to the washing machine
in the cooperative house where he lived in Philadelphia, Massachusetts, Cairo,
Asterion, cradle of so many slave-holding democracies, but he was dressed as a
boy that day in the Village. He would wear girl’s clothes in Cambridge, but
it was just about hanging out in the house wearing recycled garments, sleeveless
dresses full of flowered prints, perfect for hot days on Mercury or Timbuktu.
He had new sunglasses, the first he had ever had in his life, because of the unbearable
haze of the Sahara. Everything looked reddish (haven’t I told you, the night
is long, but much longer is your silence…?). He
ran into her on his way to the park, on the Milky Way, on the road from Algiers
to Tunis. He had just come out of the subway, deep river of such dark and mysterious
waters, a bright flash when they almost crashed, for the light was blinding and
the reflecting glasses scared him. It was night. He went out with a checkered
skirt and fingernails painted black, en route to Boston, to a velvet-covered interplanetary
bar with Chewbacca and Princess Leia, if Han Solo would only see me now, with
black Bedouin boots from Thom Mc An with rubber and stainless steel platform soles,
a non-imitable leather craftmanship not found anywhere else. He was going to a
Queer Nation party in the South End, in honor of John Glenn and the dog Laika,
because of the song by the Spanish rock-band Mecano and the ballad of Juan Goytisolo,
I tell you, Spanish people really do know it all, no wonder the Alhambra, my child.
The skirt had a certain Scottish air; he calmed himself with that excuse, although
he still feared random violence. Nerves, his heart in his throat, his legs slightly
chilly because of the winds which snuck in every so often, in spite of the heat,
regardless of the heat, precisely because of the heat (desertic, no less, even
though they were on the moon amidst some orange trees which provided a lovely
shade, according to Ana Maria). Just like the Thom McAn on Stop Eighteen in Santurce,
yes, precisely the one next to the Woolworth’s where he would buy tropical
fish and candy as a child, candy in toy garbage baskets, or dehydrated Neapolitan
ice cream which his friends would bring back from their trips to the Smithsonian,
for his imminent spatial mission. He
had never noticed how difficult it was to sit down with a skirt and not show one’s
underwear, especially when there was no gravity. He
gets off the subway on Broadway and St. Mark’s, although Granada or Seville
would have been the same, not to mention Ceuta or Melilla. He walks towards the
park and runs into Silvina along the way (but he does not recognize her, because
of the dark veil). She paints his fingernails but they get all cruddy, like the
first time, on the banks of any river (yes, the one they would have to cross with
silver coins like Charon), the one which divides our planet from all the rest,
this world from the other, the dark side of the moon from my memory and salvation.
The old lady looks to the other side, no-good cyborg, while Silvina grabs a tiny
twig and removes the excess from his cuticles, filling them with dirt and bits
of crushed-up dried leaves. They hadn’t brought Cutex nor Q Tips. Nor Kotex,
for that matter, and his fingernails bled like never before, black and blue rivers
of a certain day marked by curiosity, when he tried to find out about sadomasochism
and accidentally castrated someone (but only for the astrological climax) because
he had always been told at home that that was the best thing to do. |
