Hey guys,
I’m sorry if I’m bogarting the blog. Please offer any feedback about this piece that is completely consuming me. Hope you’re all well,
JP
The American, Michael Edward Freedham, is sitting down in a comfortable chair at Café Las Quilles. There is the pretty waitress, his fifth cup of coffee now blood-warm before him, the bar and the little percolator working and the fat bartender with the pencil moustache bored and staring out at the organ man. There’s a feeling of summery drowsiness but it’s December. He’s come to the city of Abaixado at the rainy part of the year, right before the disbanding of the police.
In Chicago the winter is too much, all of the snow is businesslike and in stony piles. When it melts the soil underneath is raw like a wound. In Abaixado, warm rain has been falling. There are rainbows.
Two months ago, just after Michael arrived, the police were disbanded. The air felt too close that day and Gilson Cabral had been shot. Michael couldn’t always understand the television news and he still isn’t sure what happened. He thinks the thing about Cabral is that he was what in English you would call a “ring leader.” He was the head of one of the striking trade unions. Dead on television, his plaid shirt was pulled away from his neck and there were the scarlet, neat little holes on his chest and shoulders. He was handsome, even so.
For obscure reasons, the police were disbanded shortly after the death of Cabral.
The mayor of the city is Ulíses Días, a muchacho muy alto with plasticine good looks, and he has denied involvement. Michael the American, who didn’t catch every word, could tell the mayor was lying on TV.
For some reason, the striking trade unions were joined about a month ago by the teachers and the farmers, who came down from the mountains. And then by the student groups in their multifarious ideological permutations. The revolutionaries occupied the square by the Eglisa Santo Domingo and demanded the resignation of the all members of the ORP party from governing posts around the state, including and especially the post of mayor of Ciudad Abaixado.
Every few days an assembly is held and one of the revolutionaries gives the balled fist salute to his companeros and shouts things angrily into a microphone. Michael listens to them but can’t always follow — the revolutionaries scream about the superhighway being constructed across the isthmus, about the oil in the mountains, about the sudden and strange exodus of all of the corn farmers from the state of Abaixado. Michael the American only understands what he sees: there are 10,000 of them in the streets and they seem very upset.
Every few days they do this and now Michael Freedham has been in Ciudad Abaixado a while and he has settled down some: his days have taken on structure and shape. The mornings come and he yawns in the little hotel room, he fingers the curlicued hair below his navel. He goes to his balcony and the heat of the day is on him and it is good.
After a shave, he goes to the little café by the ministerial plaza — Café “Las Quilles” — and he orders a plate of juevos flacos. They also have granola even though this is Mexico, and sometimes he eats granola. He stays at the cafe for the better part of the day. Out on the patio every day, the same man — he could pass for 17 or 30 — is under the awning, reading as though possessed by words. Rain or no rain. The man’s lips twitch as he reads, and sweat forms beads on his forehead and he flips the pages so fast that sometimes they tear under his fingers.
For Michael, there’s the night, which also has a kind of structure. There are Emily from Kansas City and Henry, from somewhere out east. There’s Aurelien the Quebecois, and there are Mr. House (a novelist) and Marcel, the poet who lives in a brothel in El Jicaro, and who only comes down every so often. They have a nickname for Michael; it’s “Chicago Mike.” All of them run reckless at the nighttime together. The revolutionaries have occupied the central square and light bonfires at the intersections and obstruct traffic. Sometimes late at night the revolutionaries will grab someone by the scruff of his neck and ask him what the hell is he doing around here? They never even look at Michael Edward Freedham.
When the bar closes Chicago Mike goes to bed and sleeps the sleep of the dead. He wakes up and begins anew. It is a cycle.
At this instant he’s at the point in the cycle where he’s sitting at his table at Las Quilles, as he has every day for the past two months. It’s juevos flacos today and not granola. He is trying to read Carson McCullers or something when he feels the unnameable sense of a body too near to him and a pair of eyes on the base of his skull. He looks up: it’s the man who is somewhere between the ages of 17 and 30, who reads rabidly under the awning facing the ministerial plaza everyday at Cafe Las Quilles.
“American?” he asks.
“Yes, I am.”
“Here for spring break?” he says with very good English. “You’re a long way from the beach.”
“It’s winter,” says Michael. “Besides, I don’t like beaches.”
“No?” He is looking at Michael with an entertained, not-quite-friendly look.
“I prefer mountains.”
The man considers this: “There are some in America, I think.”
“I prefer mountains, but I hate cold,” says Michael.
“Are you enjoying yourself?” says the man finally. The man has air like an oil slick over dark, soft eyes, and there are firm bones under the flesh that angle gently toward a certain kind of mouth. For no reason at all Michael thinks of a thing he’s seen the night before in his little hotel room: a cockroach dangling like an autumn leaf in a spider web.
Sometimes, people confer on one another really unnecessary amounts of intimacy—liquor is involved a lot of times. But Mike isn’t drunk. There is something about the dark eyes or the voice. So as he stands there at Michael’s table at Café Las Quilles, Michael tells the man like it is: how he has left the University in Chicago and that he isn’t any better off and no weight is lifted from him, here, now, in Mexico, just the same bits of the same old stories coming and going, creating something entirely new and yet completely old. He says that it is interesting to travel so many miles and discover that he hasn’t really gone anywhere. He is talking like thirsty men drink.
It has sort of surprised him, but he has been very unhappy all this time.
The trick, he explains, is to find yourself in bars with nothing to say, wondering if you should say something. To decide instead that you have nothing worth offering. You go to the bars with the other expatriates, who will try to engage you in speak about surfing or fútbol or, of course, The War. Eventually they start talking about Appalachian National Park—but you’ve never been. And you watch the conversation pull away much as you might watch ruefully the bus you just missed.
He continues: You must have a sad and alone look because the others start throwing you sidelong glances. You order another drink, quietly, with your tongue feeling too thick. Eventually Emily from Kansas City asks you if you’re feeling okay. You try to speak but now you’re too drunk even to talk. Henry from out east intones you’ve had too much to drink and you can only glare helplessly. You’ve heard and seen and felt all this before, only in Chicago. It’s warmer now, is all. Later on, you and Emily and Henry are walking to the hotel together when those two slip away wordlessly down Avenida Duruti, folding into one another. When you come to your small room in the hotel you collapse onto your bed realizing a mule can’t come back a horse, no matter how far he walks.
Michael finishes, suddenly breathless.
“So you’re unhappy?” There’s no judgment in the man’s words — they’re just a sort of clarification.
He wonders: “I am.”
“I’m making the same choice,” says the man. So they begin to talk.
And what is it that people find to talk about?
There is religion, for example. There is in this man almost a palpable sense of disdain for faith, and it runs deep like some chasm. For him, faith is a kind of pinnacle of unreason. Michael, though he’s always hoped against hope that Some Thing is watching out for all of us, can’t quite articulate why the lack of visible evidence of a God may not be reason to doubt His existence. But it is revealed later on that this stranger has never missed mass. Not once.
And politics, too. They talk about politics on this day. The man sees government as only the meddling of men in things that aren’t their business. Sometimes he spits on the sidewalk, he says, just because. As for the revolutionaries — well, it’s not that he disagrees with them, exactly. The man has a hard feeling in his heart when it comes to those people at the square by the Eglisa Santo Domingo: the problem is that they are all in so much agreement. All agreement, he contends, is false. And Michael agrees.
Books. Oh, God, there are so many books to discuss. Conrad and Carson McCullers and James Joyce and all the wonderful, delicious books to be read.
They talk for a long time. The pretty waitress leaves and is replaced by a fat, balding, middle-aged man with curly hair. They don’t order any food or coffee or anything. The thing is that they are two men and they are lonely and reasonably intelligent. So they are friends.
After a few hours, the man introduces himself: “I’m Bocanegra.”
“My name is Michael,” says the other one. There’s a pregnant quietude for a second or two. “Well, I guess I should clear out.” Bocanegra nods. Michael picks up the book he has been reading; it feels strange and light. He shakes Bocanegra’s hand, leaves whistling. He becomes happily drunk and talkative at the bar and sleeps with Emily from Kansas City.
The next day Bocanegra is there again, at his table with the coagulant dishes and his burnt, cold coffee. He looks up when Michael approaches and puts away the book he’s reading and his notebook. It occurs to Michael that Bocanegra has set time aside for his arrival. This day and the day after that and the days and days after that they speak for hours that slip by like rolling, green hills.
Only one day, Bocanegra isn’t at Café Las Quilles.
sorry i haven’t gotten to this yet
you’re not dominating the blog, the rest of us are being lazy and slow, so don’t worry bout that.
August 19th, 2008 | #
Hey, so I haven’t quite been following the whole story, but I read this section and liked it.
I’m just gonna post some notes as they occurred to me –
“Michael the American only understands what he sees: there are 10,000 of them in the streets and they seem very upset.”
At first I didn’t like this sentence, then I read it again and realized how much I like the idea of ‘only understanding what one sees.’ That is, I don’t like it but I realize how common it is. You could do more with this. Build on it as Michael’s mode of perceiving his environment. And the next paragraph, about Michael getting comfortable, is helpful. I think you could do more to situate the American in this city a little earlier on, just a few more sentences like these, on his quotidian fittings-in.
I love the phrase ‘and it is good.’ I like a narrator that states opinions, though this may only be my taste.
‘He is trying to read Carson McCullers or something’ — I’m not sure you need to be unsure about what he is reading… why should the narrator be unsure? (This also applies to a later sentence, ‘For no reason at all, Michael thinks…’ about the cockroach. Why not just ‘Michael thinks…’?)
Before the man who reads says ‘And are you enjoying yourself,’ you might have another sentence to indicate the pause in conversation (presently indicated by the word ‘finally’).
I love the bits in italics… they capture many a night I’ve had in England.
Perhaps rephrase the sentence to ‘There was in this man an almost palpable disdain for faith… it runs deep like a chasm’ (why say ’some’?)
Kierkegaard makes a good argument for faith in Fear and Trembling.
So mainly, I guess, I’d like the narrator to be more certain. I’d be interested to hear why you disagree, if you do. Thanks for posting dude–
August 26th, 2008 | #
Also, the conversation between Michael and the reading man reminded me of one of my favorite conversations from a book. Which is to say, you have my compliments. It goes like this –
‘My dear Doctor,’ I said. ‘What a dull place the world would be if there were no fools. Here we are, two intelligent men, who know you can argue eternally about everything under the sun, so we don’t argue. We each know practically all the other’s innermost thoughts. With us a single word speaks volumes. We see through the triple outer husk to the kernel of our emotions. We find sad things funny and funny things sad, though in fact we’re pretty indifferent to everything except ourselves. So there can be no exchange of feelings or ideas between us - we each know all we want to know about the other and have no wish to know more. All we can do is tell each other the news. Have you got any to tell me?’
The conversation’s quoted in more full as a comment to my May 16 2007 post.
August 26th, 2008 | #
I’ve had too much coffee, so I’m going to make an illogical statement: your bits in italics and the post I just posted are eerily synthesized in the seminal 1967 Paul McCartney tune, Rocky Raccoon, which goes as follows:
Somewhere in the black mining hills of Dakota there lived a young boy named Rocky Raccoon-ah-oon, and one day his woman ran off with another guy, hit young Rocky in the eye-ee-eye, Rocky didn’t like that he said “I’m gonna get that boy,” so one day he walked into town, booked himself a room at the local saloon
Rocky Raccoon
checked into his room
only to find Gideon’s Bible
Rocky had come
equipped with a gun
to shoot off the legs of his rival
His rival it seems
had broken his dreams
by stealing the girl of his fancy
Her name was M’Gill
and she called her self ‘Lil
but everyone knew her as Nancy
Now she and her man
who called himself Dan
were in the next room at the hoedown
Rocky burst in
and grinning a grin
said “Danny-boy this is a show down”
But Daniel was hot
he drew first and shot
and Rocky collapsed in the corner
(doo de doo de doo de doo de doo)
Now the doctor came in
stinking of gin
and proceeded to lie on the table
He said “Rocky, you met your match”
Rocky said “Doc, it’s only a scratch,
“And I’ll be better, I’ll be better doc as soon as I am able”
Now Rocky Raccoon
he fell back in his room
only to find Gideon’s Bible
Gideon checked out
and he left it no doubt
to help with good Rocky’s revival
Ok I’m done.
August 26th, 2008 | #
I think your first comment is great feedback, so thanks for that for sure.
And wow… I really like the excerpt you quoted. What is that book? I’ve had those thoughts before, and presumably most everyone has because that’s what most of my conversations are about: the news. Except in my case they’re really awkward conversations and I make people uncomfortable when I discuss the news because inevitably I make a reference to my depression and/or alcoholism over the course of these conversations.
I think I’m going to reference that somewhere, the discussion of the news. It reminded me of the Ernest Hemingway story about the lion hunt where the guide keeps telling the American that it doesn’t bode well to talk about the Thing, talk about anything but–but don’t talk about the Thing.
Rocky Racoon is the best. But I don’t see it.
August 26th, 2008 | #
alright. Well, it also strikes me as a fantastic flow that jez and daphnie are following accross the world between us. makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside.
Bocanegra seems to me like a different person here than in the other installments. I’m not sure if that’s due to lack of close reading and over-reliance on my own imagination, but he seems so much more, i donno, slick in this story than he did in the others. Which leads me to ask about the time-frame here: i guess this is before the other installments, because the Mayor is still alive?
I kind of like the voice of an uncertain narrator. Maybe even do more with it, maybe come up with a reason why he’s uncertain–oh, maybe not, maybe if you just put the narrator as a character with limited knowledge, I wouldn’t like it so much. But it just strikes me that the idea of an “unreliable narrator” is bread-and-butter of high school English classes, but the uncertain narrator might not be very well explored at all.
I like, though. I also like the italic sections. But, question: are those supposed to be what Micheal says? Because they don’t read like dialogue. I guess that’s why they’re italic.
great work, though. I’m just interested to see how it all fits together, to understand what kind of whole you’re making out of this.
August 27th, 2008 | #
That’s totally it–something didn’t feel right and i think that it’s that B is too slick in this section. I mean, he doesn’t say much. I think he should be more awkward. I think the thing that I was trying to convey is that in the American Bocanegra spotted a kindred spirit. So he shouldn’t be slick, per se, but I wanted him to be a little more than what he was in the early section, in which he was just plain scared.
But yes Jez arrived today and I am going to meet him after this interview. Wish me luck
August 27th, 2008 | #
The book was ‘A Hero of Our Time,’ by Mikhail Lermontov. Old russian.
Jed, I exclaim that you should post something! What the whopee are you writing these days? I am curious?!
August 31st, 2008 | #
This probably isn’t actually about Michael and Bocanegra, it’s probably just about myself, or an expected self over the next 12 months, as I read on about completely unknown and incomprehensible Revolutions in Thailand (State of Emergency delcared Day Before Yesterday), Nepal (who are Maoists?), and even right where I’ll be outside Kolkata, where the Farmers and Workers have shut down a Tata Motors plant.
It was no mistake that Michael Freedham was there. He was sent there to be the American on the scene. Sent by America, I mean. He was there through all the awkward tension that surrounds a street revolution, all the little skirmishes entirely too personal to be News, that one day add up, if you’re lucky, at one coordinated time and place that is agreed upon ahead of time. He was there because America could never be there, it’s just too egotistical and inward looking. And Freedham one day looked too deep inward. Omphaloskepsis. Multicultural and multifaith and multigrain Omphaloskepsis. Not that he found anything there, necessarily. He had just looked inward as much as he could without looking outward on the other side. So he kept going, and plopped out on the outward side into the middle of a revolution. And there was Bocanegra, no mistake there, either, Bocanegra’s always been there, waiting to catch a loose America and show it what it was looking for out there, even if it wasn’t out there to begin with. Sure, he looks slick on the Outside, but he is Outside, that’s why he spends his time hanging around train stations and bus stops waiting to see a white face. Facades and tigers and ecotourism and lots of shops had been built for Freedham to land in, as part of an inefficient global wealth-distribution mechanism. Before the Unrest had begun to build. And when the Unrest happened, [that’s what’s going on now, so I’ll have to wait and write the rest after 2012. who knows what will happen after the Unrest?]
September 4th, 2008 | #