In the plaza near our apartment, people come every evening to stroll around in a circle. Lovers come drifting, connected by entwined fingers. Married couples come at a clip, the children like rafts towed on ropes behind the ship. No one is alone. Even the vendors sitting on stools around the periphery work steadily at connection, nodding at potential buyers, like a sewing machine prodding its needle into the cloth.
“We used to do this in Isla Pixol,” I told Mrs. Brown. “My mother always wanted to go walk the circle. As long as she had a new dress.”
Mrs. Brown in the jaunty blue beret dissected her fried fish, a late supper after our day on the road. But life in the plaza was just waking up. Two men wheeled a great wooden marimba to a spot near the dining tables and uncloaked it, preparing to play.
She said, “You’re home here. That’s good to see. It serves ye well.”
“I don’t know that I’m home anywhere.”
“Well, you are a queasy one, I’ll grant it.” she said. She used her knife to push the fish’s crisp head and tail together at one side of the plate. “I always knew you came from Mexico, at Mrs. Bittle’s you told us that. But see, we thought you were just bashful. We never thought of a whole country where you could call down a waiter in his language, or say, ‘Look, they’re going to do the hat dance,’ and they would do the hat dance. Now, that sounds silly.”
“No, I understand. You thought, ‘foreigner,’ and not of a particular place.”
“I reckon that is it. All along, you have known about these folk here and I’ve had no inkling. I read the Geographics, but you can’t think of the people in those stories as having life and breath, and knowing things you don’t. But that sounds silly too.”
“No, I think most people are the same. Until they’ve gone somewhere.”
“I thank my lucky stars, Mr. Shepherd, and I thank you. I do. That I’m a person who went somewhere.” She set her hands in her lap and drew herself fully into looking outward, as people do when settling down in a theater. Vendors had begun to work the dining crowd. You could buy anything if your supper went on long enough: roses, bicycle tires, a shellacked armadillo. A mother and daughter in long skirts and shawls moved from table to table showing their embroidery. I waved them off with a gesture so small Mrs. Brown probably didn’t see. She feels obliged to look at every single thing, lest the artisans be offended.
“I have been wondering what your novel will be about,” she said. “Apart from the setting.”
“I wonder too. I think I want to write about the end of things. How civilizations fall, and what leads up to that. How we’re connected to everything in the past.”
To my shock she said, “Oh, I wouldn’t.”
“Mrs. Brown, I declare. That’s twice you’ve told me how to be a writer. You apologized the first time.”
“Well. I’m sorry again.”
“Why would you say that?”
“I have no business. It just came out. Some of the things that happened back at home have set me to the fret.”
“I do step in the pie sometimes, I know that. Go on.”
“Should I?”
“Please.”
“I think the readers won’t like it. We don’t like to see ourselves joined hard to the past. We’d as soon take the scissors and cut every ribbon of that.”
“Then I am sunk. All I ever write about is history.”
“People in gold arm bracelets, though. Nothing that would happen to our own kind. That’s how I reckon people take to it so well.”
“So I shouldn’t try something new? What happened to the writer standing up for himself? Not leaving my words to be orphaned, my little bairns, as you called them.”
“I still hold by that. But there’s no shame in a clever disguise. To say what you believe and still keep out of trouble. Thus to now, it has done ye well.”
“Oh. Then you think it wouldn’t go so well if I set my stories, let’s say, in a concentration camp in Texas or Georgia. One of those places where we sent our citizen Japs and Germans during the war.”
She looked stricken. “No, sir, we would not like to read that. Not even about the other Japanese sinking ships and bombing our coast. That’s over, and we’d just as soon be shed of it.”
The marimba players struck up “La Llorona,” the most cheerful rendition of a song about death. I spied the man with the shellacked armadillo for sale. It was only a matter of time, he comes every night.
“If that’s so, then why did Americans make off with the historical artifacts of Mexico to put them, where did he say? In the Peabody Museum?”
“It’s the same as your books, Mr. Shepherd. It’s somebody else’s gold pieces and bad luck. If we fill up our museums with that, we won’t have to look at the dead folk lying at the bottom of our own water wells.”
“And who is we?”
She pondered this, eyebrows lowered. “Just Americans,” she said at length. “That’s the only kind of person I know how to be. Not like you.”
“You’d do that? Take scissors and cut off your past?”
“I did already. My family would tell you I went to the town and got above my raisings. It’s what Parthenia calls ‘modern.’”
“And what would you call it?”
“American. Like I said. The magazines tell us we’re special, not like the ones that birthed us. Brand-new. They paint a picture of some old-country rube with a shawl on her head, and make you fear you’ll be like that, unless you buy cake mix and a home freezer.”
“But that sounds lonely. Walking around without any ancestors.”
“I don’t say it’s good. It’s just how we be. I hate to say it, but that rube in the shawl is my sister, and I don’t want to be her. I can’t help it.”
A man walked among the tables working a marionette, a smiling skeleton of articulated papier-mâché bones. To the delight of a family dining nearby, he made the skeleton sneak along slowly, lifting its bony feet high, then suddenly leap on their table. The children squealed as it stamped on their plates, for the father’s coins.
“And history is nothing but a cemetery,” I said to Mrs. Brown. The puppeteer was behind her, she’d missed the show.