Everyone is born a sinner. Not everyone is saved. That’s what makes life interesting.
His first words are spoken with a fiercity never to repeat itself. His eyes, leopard-like, detached from the doom of modernity, ascend to the tango music, life’s background music stained with shards of silence. His house speaks to both his history and his heirs.
It is not the orange home on Carlos Calvo, awash in tang-paper and wisps of white, but the next home where the music leaks through the walls and bites strangers who saunter down the street. It is the home with the metal gate of animal tails and proud tortoises, sharp noises awakened only by the daylight. There are tables for Mate or marmelade tostadas, tables for grandchildren with still-stout legs and children with spouses they cannot stand.
He is a musician and he wraps his guitar in gold, piecing it together as the years age him and break him apart. He cannot play, today, for his finger has been split by his passion, slightly tapered by the years of strumming through the silence. His collections are most outstanding for an urbanite, walls veiled in tinmen and antique soda cans, a menagerie of slight disappointments, the almost-beautiful, almost-beguiled.
The patio, set in a sprig of sunlight, is the most impressive point of recollection. A lair not of exit or entry, but shadowed in this linear home and home to a hearty Pomeranian that cannot belong in such disarray. It barks a fifth-avenue bark and nestles among the miniature, unkempt garden. The bathroom, linked to the patio, is painted goblin-green, feathering at the passageways between ceiling and wall, worn off by the bullets of water that slip from the faucet, soft-water tears that cannot be shed within the confines of the house. The enchantment of the garden—a patch of un-pruned plants—is magnified by a single red rose set among dirt and rocks and unfinished, fickle emerald archways.
The flower, cries his grandson and points to the single clot of blood of this living lair. He itches to pull its wet head from its stem, as he does the flowers in the plaza that please with the plenitude of the impure. He pinches where its neck would be, were it mammal and while it wilts, releases within a moment so its fiery color will not be drained.
On mornings with his grandparents, the grandson releases the stout Pomeranian from its makeshift lair, linking his fingers around its muddled gray leash, sauntering down the street with such pride for his own, small lion. With his shoe-laces tied just right, his pants folded at the ankle seem, his auburn curls awash his face, he is but miniature in his manliness. His performance stage in the street of Carlos Calvo, the women washing the sidewalks swept in water, boys with burnt sugar lollipops, tourists with too-short shorts, men with newspapers and small cafes, media luna pastries and goblin green olives that remind him of home.
It is a wilderness that both lies without and lies within. A wilderness that flowers the walls, that livens the dark, shaded passageways where little girls curl their lips around their lovers, where red brick passageways outlive the owners of this home, where a stern guard dog is the pomeranian’s utter paradox. Where everyone, born sinners, can die not saved but lie in the silence, while the Mate water speaks its first boil, the baby boy retires his tamed tiger, the music sparks then softens, the man rearranges his antiques with artist hands, and but for a moment be blessed.
