“Chuy, life’s too short, man.” Ernesto laid his glasses on the desk and rested the side of his head on his right palm, looking out the window. The phone grinding against his ear, at least in this instance, was better than having the musician sitting directly across from him nattering so silly an excuse. “Too short.”
He took in a breath. This was the second gig in a month that Ernesto had gotten for Chuy y Los Locos to which the band had arrived late. This time, Chuy explained, the Express Passenger had broken down. The Express Passenger was an aging Chevrolet van, quite used, from Chuy’s cousin Lester Bedoya in South San Francisco, which the band’s rising promise had allowed them to buy. They had removed all the seats in order to carry the band’s equipment, Chuy at the wheel. The other musicians, for whom there was no room in the van, would arrive in whatever way they could. The previous excuse, a month before, had been that the Siena had broken down. The Siena was an even older Toyota vehicle that the band had named El Barco de Los Locos, borrowed from Lester. It too had no seats.
At least on this second occasion, just the night before, the band had arrived, although an hour late. The first time, the band had not shown up at all, and Chuy had actually traded blows with the club owner the next day, on an Oakland street corner. Chuy had insulted him for being Puerto Rican. This time, the owner of the restaurant/bar on Mission Street in San Francisco, a friend of Ernesto’s father from Argentina, had shorted the band on its money because of their tardiness—“I had to do bird whistles, Chuy!” —and the other guys in the band had had to escort Chuy out of the place after the gig, so that he wouldn’t threaten the Argentine as well.
The musicians in the band were terrific, Chuy himself a timbales player of real note even though he was only twenty-two. But he had taken over the management of the band as well, from Joe Corteza, the pianist who had his head on straight, had two kids, no drug issues, and could organize the band well enough to get them to gigs on time. Chuy had recently fired Joe, jealous of the band’s dependence upon the older man’s more steady demeanor, and the fortunes of Chuy y Los Locos had begun to wane.
During Chuy’s explanation, Ernesto surveyed Minnesota Street out the window, and the buildings across the way. His small talent-booking office was on the second floor of an old factory building now filled with art galleries. It was becoming a kind of avant-garde neighborhood, judging from the art, and one with posh visitors, judging from the prices for the art…self-important on both scores. Comely young, aggressive, artfully dressed women walked around everywhere in his building, gallery employees, a daily excitement for the twenty-six-year-old Ernesto. The fashionable bohemian look of the many gallery visitors belied the clear poverty of the occasional artist seen sneaking around.
Chuy’s anger caused Ernesto’s mind to wander, and he had a sudden, affectionate recollection.
Twenty years ago, he had often visited this same building, which had had a different purpose then. His father Erwin Goyeneche had been the daytime shop foreman of a post office processing plant on the ground floor. Ernesto had loved the sound of the loose planking when he would walk across the shop floor on weekends, hand in hand with his father, when the machinery was silent. His father would have extra paperwork to do, and would bring Ernesto along for company. It was a sound that child and father both enjoyed, especially when Ernesto had been challenged by his father to find the squeakiest floor plank of them all. There had been thousands of thick planks, all of them many years old, most of them worn down along the edges, thick, warped, and poorly painted.
“Che chico, look around. You’ll find it.” His father would come out of the office now and then, to supervise the search. With so many loose planks, the quest was complicated and, for the boy, serious fun. Ernesto could never be sure which was the loosest. The day Ernesto finally found “The Number One Plank,” as Erwin had called it, Erwin brought him back to the office, sat him down across the desk, and brought an envelope from a desk drawer. Ernesto tore it open and found a paper sticker with an illustration of The Virgin Mary on it, like the ones they gave out to the best students every Friday at Our Lady of The Visitation school, where Ernesto was in the first grade. She smiled, The Virgin did, looking down dreamily from a swirling cloud. There were also two dollars in the envelope.
“You deserve it, kid,” Erwin said.
Ernesto ran around the desk and hugged his father. He pocketed the two dollars and told Erwin that he would stick the sticker onto his bedroom mirror. Ernesto still had the mirror, in his own apartment in San Francisco. While The Virgin Mary had faded badly, and parts of the paper had fallen away at the edges, She still held a kind of deteriorated court over Ernesto’s bedroom.
During the week, millions of pieces of paper, envelopes, letters, personal packages, messages from home, messages to home, greeting cards, birthdays cards and every other sort of mailed item swirled, were processed, and flew through all the post office machinery, Monday through Friday, eventually brought together in neat, paper-banded groupings that were then dumped into large canvas shipping bags. The noise in the shop made speech almost impossible. There was such a clattering metronomic racket everywhere that, of course, Ernesto could not actually hear the squeak of The Number One Plank when he would visit during the week. But this was another order of thrilling excitement for the boy. Even in such chaos, his hand held tightly by his father so that he would not wander toward the dangerous machines, he could feel the press of the loose plank against the bottom of his shoe and, so, knew that it was squeaking. The sound itself was a secret...knowable, the little boy thought, only to his father and himself. Ernesto had often thought since then that no memory could be so pedestrian, yet so deeply evocative of the feelings he had for his father.
The caress by the wood of the bottom of his Converse tennis shoe.
His father Erwin, whom he loved for the way he danced and, especially, the way he dressed when he danced—the perfectly ironed white dress-shirt, the jet-black silk necktie and just as black double-breasted suit, the black suede dance shoes with suede soles, his straight black hair laid flat against his skull with shiny Pomade—was Ernesto’s connection to his aunts, uncles and cousins back in Buenos Aires. Erwin was the man who had begun Ernesto’s journey toward becoming a stellar asador. His father was noted especially for his rosemaried lamb, and was to give Ernesto more than a dozen not-to-be-shared recipes for chimichurri. Those Sunday afternoon asados had also featured tango, of which Erwin was an aficionado. Born in the Villa Urquiza neighborhood of Buenos Aires, Erwin had wished to be in the military, and joined the Argentine army in 1980. Two years later, he was wounded in the Malvinas War, during the defense of the Stanley airfield, a bad flesh wound to the right of his stomach. He had lain on a stretcher for two days, the medics having run out of supplies. The head-wounded medic lying on a stretcher next to him died just before the evacuation finally began, and Erwin always remembered looking back at the fellow as they carried Erwin to a helicopter. The medic was dressed in his ripped, mud-stained fatigues, lying perfectly still on the stretcher, his skull wrapped in bandages stained brown with dried blood, crusted here and there with dead flies. Erwin was flown back to the mainland and, a few months after the Argentine defeat, was mustered out of the army, with a medal for valor.
Ernesto himself was born in San Francisco in 1985, the same year his parents arrived in the U.S.
With time, Erwin instructed Ernesto in tango. Erwin expertly essayed multiple agujas, amagues and boleos with rough, legible grace, and had been noted especially by the professional tangueros in Buenos Aires for his rough milonguero abilities, added now and then to his more elegant Villa Urquiza softness. Erwin danced with considerable grace, with a humorous helping of street-cool machismo tossed in. When the boy was eight years old and attending his first summer milongas in the patio behind their house in Visitation Valley, being led through the dance by his father, he understood right away what Erwin defined as “la intensidad, Ernesto. La atención.”
Erwin died in Buenos Aires while visiting a dying cousin when Ernesto was 10. Recalling this now, the telephone still held to his ear, Ernesto felt his eyes turning to glisten, and he laid his forehead onto the fingers of his right hand. Chuy, still making a defense of himself, didn’t notice, and kept talking.
—
Ernesto danced tango occasionally with Julietta Medina, a woman who had had three husbands, two of whom she had left. The third was Benjamin Arden, a retired American investment banker, a tall and quiet New England Protestant who had attended Choate and Harvard. He was quite well spoken despite his shyness, gray-haired, and usually clothed in New England tweed, a blue dress shirt and an old-school tie. He treated Julietta with extraordinary kindliness. He was many years older than she. They lived on Jackson Street in Pacific Heights and were of such polished elegance that they seemed simply out of place dancing the Argentine tango, so beautiful a dance, so working class….
When he danced tango, Ernesto made a point of dressing more conservatively than he did when he was booking music acts. He shopped at Macy’s downtown, always buying from his mother’s cousin Marco. Marco would call Ernesto when a special sale was going on, and would put things aside for him. So...when he danced tango, Ernesto wore black suits from Uomo, the closest things to Hermes ties and handkerchiefs that Marco could gather together, Cole-Haan Collections shoes (always black, and always resoled with suede), glasses with special Yves Saint Laurent black frames, and a Rolex watch that had been the only luxury item his father had ever owned…a gift from Erwin’s Buenos Aires cousin Polaco. With his tall, smoothly slim body and somewhat Iranian-style good looks, and especially because of his gentlemanly kindness on the dance floor, Ernesto never lacked for dance and conversation at the milongas.
Julietta was of Paraguayan extraction, very dark with extremely dark eyes, who was known among the tango people in San Francisco as a silent queen-like beauty who kept to herself. She dressed only in fashionable, museum-board designer luxury, noted by the other women dancers for her shoes, which she bought exclusively—and very often—from an Argentine company of considerable fame itself named Comme il faut. She spoke no Spanish, having been raised in East Side Manhattan on Fifth Avenue, across from the park. Julietta and Benjamin had a great deal of money, and had traveled the world, staying in the most remarkable hotels anyone could imagine. They had once described for Ernesto how they received an expensive gift every Christmas from the general manager of the Danieli in Venice, where they stayed for a month each year. A hand-written letter as well from that same general manager.
Julietta was so fine a tango dancer that she was complimented for the sensuous flow just of her walk. Her walk was itself a composed dance.
One evening, Ernesto and she were dancing at The Verdi Club, to the tango Tengo miedo, recorded by Ada Falcón with the orchestra of Francisco Canaro. This tango is no longer well known, but Falcón sings it in such a way that Ernesto felt it to be an undiscovered treasure. The lyrics tell of a woman afraid to love her lover. The irony of the performance is that, when Falcón declares her fear, she does so with a smile in her voice.
Ernesto asked Julietta if she knew the lyrics to this tango. When she replied that she did not, he translated them for her as they danced.
Tengo miedo... “I’m afraid...” A pause, in which he could feel Falcon's search for the correct words, which she delivered with considerable enjoyment, as though she were looking up at her lover and saying, with a smile, "Yes. Yes, I will." “Tengo miedo...de quererte.” “I’m afraid...to love you.”
Toward the end of the tango, Ernesto sensed that the emotional state in which he and Julietta had begun dancing had changed. For one thing, the front of his suit jacket was damp. The music came to an end, and as he released Julietta from the embrace he saw that she was in tears.
"It's just that...your translation...it reminded me of my father," she explained. "I...I so loved him."
"What did he do?" Ernesto asked.
"Oh..." Julietta shrugged. "He was unusual for someone from Paraguay. He was in shipping. I mean, he owned ships." She put the fingers of her right hand to her lips as she surveyed the dance floor. She wore a ring of black jade. "I stopped seeing him after I finished school. Sarah Lawrence. He wanted to see me. But I refused. I was very mean to him. And then...then he died."
"What happened?" Ernesto asked.
"I think...I think he died of guilt." She sighed, looking for a moment at the ring, caressing it with her fingers. "And sadness for me."
The following day, Julietta and Benjamin took Ernesto to the Britex Fabrics store on Post Street downtown. The staff knew the location of each remnant in the store—a store filled with thousands of such remnants—where each bolt of cloth was, each button, each sequin. The store was long, very narrow, and so well-tended that Julietta had seldom succeeded in finding a speck of dust in any remnant that she bought.
She shopped there for embroidery and brocade, cloth that reminded her, she said, of her mother, who had died long ago in Paraguay, when Julietta had been twelve. She and Benjamin invited Ernesto to tea afterwards in their home, and Julietta told him about the messages she had received from her mother, when she had been a little girl.
Her mother and father had been divorced, and her father had basically stolen the girl and brought her to New York. He had forbidden his former wife to visit them or to talk to Julietta on the phone. So, the mother had sent letters to Julietta that she had sewed into remnants of embroidered lace and brocaded silk. The letters were secret. All her father knew was that his ex-wife was sending Julietta the sewn gifts, and he allowed the girl to receive them. Julietta suspected that his doing so absolved him of the guilt he must have felt being so cruel to his daughter and his wife. Each letter was a soulfully made present to a little girl far away, and each one of them made her suffer terribly.
—
Erwin’s cousin Polaco’s real name was Roberto Goyeneche. Erwin had at least been able to visit this cherished, famous relative—one of the greatest ever singers of Argentine tango—before Roberto died in 1994. Roberto was followed quickly by Erwin himself, who had a heart attack the day after the singer’s funeral. The last memory that Ernesto had of his father was that of laying his forehead against the side of Erwin’s closed coffin, returned to San Francisco from Buenos Aires. Ernesto’s mother Geraldín’s right hand patted the back of his head, caressing the boy.
Erwin Goyeneche had often reminisced about his cousin Roberto. He was known as “Polaco” because of his pale skin and his skinniness. Erwin’s favorite of Polaco’s recordings was that of the tango Muchacho, about a little boy who does not yet know the sadness of losing love, or what would come to him when he finally found love.
“Children,” his father would say listening to the tune, his eyes seeming far away in reminiscence. “They know so little, hijo...especially about love.”
When he learned that Erwin had died, Ernesto knew that his father had been wrong about that. Ernesto’s soul melted within him when his mother told him that “your daddy’s...” Geraldín, sitting next to Ernesto on his bed, was unable to cry any longer. “He’s gone.”
A few days after the news, Geraldín sat with Ernesto on the couch in their living room. She leaned far forward and pressed the palms of her hands against her eyes. She had an opened letter in her right hand. She lay it on her lap and read from it, a description by her sister-in-law of how Erwin had died. “We had been dancing a tango, in Uncle Cacho’s house, for the memory of Polaco. Erwin was always so good at tango. And fifteen minutes later he was gone. So alive in one moment…and the next, his soul suddenly vanished. “¡Ay Geraldín! Erwinito murió y nadie….” His aunt had been unable to complete the written sentence. “Erwinito died and no one…” Ernesto laid his hands on his mother’s, which had crumpled a corner of the letter, himself wishing to run from this duty, that there be no need for it, that his father be alive and take his wife into his arms, to dance.
A priest eulogized Erwin in the Our Lady of The Visitation parish church. Ernesto himself spoke at the funeral, but could not finish. Now, years later, still looking out his office window, still muttering imprecations at Chuy y Los Locos, Ernesto recalled a visit to their house by Polaco himself, on tour from Argentina, and a musician friend of whom Ernesto’s father had been a true fan, a man who had written an immortal tango about his own father’s death entitled Adios Nonino. Ernesto, five years old, had been stunned by his father’s surprised, noisy amazement when the other musician had come in the front door of the house behind the celebratory, much-welcomed Polaco.
“Maestro Astor,” Erwin whispered, shaking his head and taking Astor into his arms. “Welcome!” He turned toward Ernesto. “¡Chico! ¡Imagináte! Astor Piazzolla!”
Erwin had to explain to the boy who Astor was, and when Polaco and Astor stayed for lunch—spaghetti al limón y crema, a salad of tomatoes, mozzarella cheese and sweet basil, salted, peppered and sprinkled with olive oil, and a great large loaf of Italian bread that they all broke up with their hands—Astor asked that the child sit next to him. He accepted a hunk of bread with a large clod of butter on it that Ernesto had constructed for him. Polaco and Astor both complimented Geraldín’s rustic cooking, especially the quality of freshness of her home-grown tomatoes, which, in Astor’s words, “leant music to this salad, señora.” Later in the afternoon, Erwin described that particular Saturday as the most important day in his life. “Except, of course, the day you were born, mi’jo,” his father hurried to say to the un-offended, equally happy Ernesto.
—
Julietta showed Ernesto several of her mother’s letters. She had catalogued them by date and had stored them singly in protective manila envelopes. The letters themselves contained bits of family news and were written in very simple Spanish. Each was framed in cloth, pink, green, light blue, made playful by the lace that her mother had sewn to the cloth, by the colored thread that held the lace to the paper, by little tassels, cloth buttons, quilted little squares of velvet, gold brocade, bright cotton and silk, silver and white.
"The maid had to read them to me," Julietta told Ernesto. "In secret, of course. I couldn't understand the Spanish."
"Why haven't you ever learned Spanish?"
"I couldn't stand it! Spanish was my father's language, even though he spoke English to me. He spoke Spanish on the phone every day, doing business. It was like a gun or something. He was always so formally dressed, shirt and tie. Perfect. His black hair combed, so handsome. And everything he said on the phone sounded so threatening." Julietta’s lips pursed, turned down. “Condemning.” She let out a breath. “I refuse to speak…the Spanish.” She smiled, her lips quivering with grief. “That’s what he called it. ‘The Spanish’”.
Ernesto read a few of the letters, translating out loud into English the forty-year-old news about the new bishop at the cathedral, about her mother's servant Locala, a Guaraní Indian woman who made such wonderful coffee, and Locala's sister Marisol who had six little children, all of whom prayed every Sunday for Julietta's soul.
Julietta nodded, joyful in the memories. When Ernesto looked up at her, she was seated in the sunlight coming in a window, on a chair for which she had done the needlepoint work on the chair-back herself, a pair of dark red roses on an ebony background. Benjamin sat across from her, a saucer and cup of tea in his hands. He had heard this story many times before, it was obvious. But he listened in silence nonetheless, allowing Julietta her sorrow.
She had handed the woman at Britex a fifty-dollar bill, to pay for a selection of colorful remnants, a few pearlescent buttons, some red velvet tassels and a quite frayed but nonetheless somberly beautiful piece of blue Chinese silk. The clerk put the items into a white plastic sack and handed it to her with the change, thanking her without looking at her. She was disinterested, the clerk. Bored. She explained that her break relief-person was late.
The three shoppers passed back into the flow of Post Street.
"What do you do with the remnants?" Ernesto asked as they stood before the shop awaiting Benjamin’s driver. The folded cloth showed through the plastic, as though shrouded by a cold fog.
For a moment, Julietta remained silent. "I donate them to the Catholic girls' school in my neighborhood.” She put on her sunglasses. “You know, Sacred Heart Convent, on Broadway. For the girls' art classes.”” She looked back over her shoulder at the store windows. "I like their selection here. Their prices. They've got everything." The glasses hid her eyes. "But mostly, Ernesto," she murmured, "I come here to weep.”
—
Once he was able to get Chuy off the phone, Ernesto sat silently as he recalled his father sitting in his office in the processing plant, a week or so following the boy’s discovery of The Number One Plank. Erwin wore a white shirt and tie, and was looking out the window onto the shop floor. Ernesto and Geraldín were visiting. Ernesto, as always, was amazed by the rush of so many pieces of paper through so much cockeyed machinery.
“Each of those envelopes contains something, no, Ernesto?” Erwin said. “They’re like tangos, no? Like Astor’s tangos. Each one with some surprise. With a secret, a heart of some kind.” He laughed. “Secretos.” His thin, dark face broadened with a smile. “Secrets. ¿No te rompen el corazon? That’s like saying in English…like…something like ’Don’t they break your heart?’”
Because of the mystery of it, the boy had always cherished the question, and still did.
Copyright ©2020 Terence Clarke. All rights reserved.
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This story is from my collection San Francisco, available everywhere in print and ebook versions.
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