Antiques Shop

The antiquarian

He searches for antiquities. He collects expensive trinkets. He looks for them and finds them. He studies them. He penetrates them and puts them away. Some time later he returns to them and generally finds out that they are gone. They disappeared and he gets very worried thinking he lost them for ever, thinking they were never his. Quite often, though, they wait for him. There is always a thread of life that keeps them attached to him, in a latent state of suspension: a grandfather clock abandoned in the basement, long medusa hair locks hanging from a blue hatbox, solemn wicker and black leather loveseats covered with white dust, broken family portraits with flat faces in them, archaic wooden canes with embroidered golden handles, dense wet poetry books with an infinite number of pages, discolored boardroom games with blind decks of cards, worthless copper Roman coins, stuffed animals manufactured at absinth tanneries

The first time I saw Juanita she was walking on a sidewalk in a Los Robles street. It was in 1977, five years after a 7.8 earthquake had obliterated the city center of Managua, and all the shops, office buildings, government offices, churches, gas stations, and homes in it had either been destroyed or relocated to the outskirts and beyond. Los Robles, therefore, was not the exclusive neighborhood it once was, the neighborhood where the socialist guerrilla has crashed a house party with the cream of the political and military elite inside, killed the owner, and freed the other guests [now converted into hostages] only after a large number of revolutionary leaders had been sent abroad in a private airline jet. Now, numerous small businesses were renting the former mansions and continued their operations. The streets were checkered with signs of all shapes, colors and sizes announcing their trade: an exclusive French restaurant, an upscale book shop, a hat store, the national writers association headquarters, a group of expensive lawyers buffet, a medical center and clinic, a pharmacy, a hardware store, another pharmacy, a laboratory, yet another pharmacy, a commercial school for typing and computers, a night club.

The metallic blue dress faithfully followed the contour of her trim body, the black shoes marked the concrete sidewalk like a clock’s pendulum the seconds, her long wavy black hair moved worriless to the cadence of her generous hips, her long tanned arms perfectly balanced her six feet tall frame, her black eyes fixed with authority the indefinite horizon ahead; no stockings, no make up, no purse, no jewelry, just a dressed up Girl from Ipanema on a majestic march to nowhere. My two-cylinder four-door tan Suzuki slowed down by itself and I found myself offering a ride and she gracefully accepting. The travel agency she worked at was only two blocks away, time enough to get her first name and the name of her city.

He carefully rounds the halls of his business. Admirals dressed in pink are fiercely sacrificed by his insolence. The abandonment of offices and factories has meaning as long as the terrible exercises of language and memory do not befall euphoric, and the patterns of survival do not become exclusively inept. The frozenness of his pre-established relationships finds an echo in the totality of his non-search: a dumb and blind oblivion that requires forty days to initiate. ‘My spirit will always write’ he thinks with no explanations, ‘it is concerned with the songs, etcetera’. Finally sleepiness defeats him and schizophrenia takes over as an affective vehicle with which to implore hatred.

Her bare chest moved up and down in unison with the waves slowly caressing the shore. Her plump breasts mirrored under the moonlight the two other hills motionless beyond the opposite shore. The water was black-blue, with a silvery part that trembled on the surface of the Apoyo lagoon. “The purest of my relationships belongs to you” she announced suddenly sitting up. Her sincere eyes were like darts on my pupils, her Monalisa smile just insinuated. Crumbs of sand fell off her back. I cleared a few hanging from her hair. We kissed. We imagined Franz Kafka wandering inside volcanic craters, we recounted the plateaus that mischievously slid between the high green mountains of Jinotega north of the country, we discussed the nonsensical origins of Dada and Marcel Janco, we made a blood pact to always be together as in a Romantic tragedy turned Shakespearean play, we painted her poor Guanuca neighborhood with words describing its dusty streets with wandering dogs and wooden carts pulled by a pair of tan, tired, salivating oxen, a peasant at the reigns. We kissed again, and we made love madly. I was a rider taming a mare; she was Medea casting spells on me.

The Pawn

He writes in the shadows, representing and acting the false reality that surrounds him. The incredible weakness of his persona does not pretend anymore to rise and walk, waving a fist. The first time, it was darkness, and a long night covered the firmament. Invisible words populated the night. Like a mad man he injected his imagination with faces resembling hatred that he himself destroyed for good. He relived the neigh of a phantom horse. He was Don Quixote with a thousand unknown Dulcineas and ended a poor Chinese communist hiding in the caves of terror.

We torched the police station.

The Writ

He feels good walking by her side, biting the fruits that will never fall, being a rider that ignores how to ride. “Dress more colorful” she tells him, get the objects and something more. But an abandoned hangar knows best how to enjoy this nostalgia, this ingratitude, this happiness, this mortal sin.

The police had taken her, and countless others, at a rally close to the National University. We were marching down the street that connected the closest main avenue to the campus, a good 2-mile stretch of concrete pavers covered road we many times used at projectiles against armored Jeeps and soldiers in full anti-disturbs gear. The noise was smoldering: three helicopters hovered above us with megaphones shouting “Surrender! Desist and disperse or we will shoot!”; we were chanting protest songs and the usual slogans “Freedom or Death”, “We will not be defeated!”; the Jeeps revving their engines while closing in on us; the tear gas shells flying over our heads. One hit me right on the forehead and I fell, burnt and bleeding. She kneeled besides me and I saw a green hand that emerged from a green sleeve pulling her hair, then the back of a Garand coming to my eyes. I do not remember the thud that knocked me unconscious.

To recover your property

He feels a floating emptiness orbiting his head. He lusts the necessity to distribute his force again on her brimming energy. He refrains himself to not carry again her soft shouts with shaking hands. So many suns in the horizon, so many battles eternally fought. Chastised avatar punished with eternal life and forced to learn all the names, all the heads, all the attitudes.

“Juanita Méndez Pérez! You have a visitor!” The guard at the Ward yelled as if shouting numbers at a bingo parlor. I had convinced my Dad that Juanita was an architecture student like me and that she had been taken prisoner by mistake. He had important connections in the National Army and he and the Chief of National Security had kept a close friendship after graduated from the same high school. “You are asking for a lot. Are you sure neither your son nor this girl is involved in any activities against the government?” General Gerster asked my Dad while looking at me. His office was large. A fat man in khaki uniform, the black tie disappeared into the shirt half way down his chest. The bald head shined atop to descend into greasy gray hair neatly combed on the parietals. The glasses with thick black frames augmented the penetrating gaze of his green eyes. A ring, big as a rock, adorned his right hand, a memento from the Military Academy at West Point. He held a Parker fountain pen on the left waiting for the go to sign some papers on the desk, large as an altar. A black and white picture of General Somoza in full uniform hanged on the wall behind him. My Dad looked at me and asked me to wait outside.

Juanita emerged from behind a metal door painted in dark green. She had dark shades under the eyelids, her hair looked in disarray, but despite wearing the orange uniform of the inmates, her majestic demeanor was intact. “Hello, Ms. Mendez, I am Dr. Alejandro Cuadra Macias, Mr. Lopez’s lawyer. I came to inform you that we have arranged for your release. These are the papers that indicate you are free to go”. The Monalisa smile struck me again as a guard uncuffed her hands.

The Antiquarian’s Song

He carries the word inside, Ulysses submerging his body, jumping the crystal-and-fire ship. He toys with the word; a wood and leather pentagram spelling the song “more than yesterday, less than tomorrow, such is my love for you today”.
She is all gone wrapped in the doubt of not knowing, when or how, or why or if his promises were able to seduce her desire for blood.

The police found the cadaver of General Gerster on his bed. His hands were tied upwards to the headboard. He was completely naked, the legs separated. He had been castrated and his genitals tucked in his mouth. The newspapers in Nicaragua are good at providing these types of sordid details. It is not unusual to see photos of heads of decapitated peasants impaled on a two-by-four by the roadside “THE NATIONAL LIBERATION FRONT STRIKES AGAIN, this time around three men from the town of El Pedregal fell victims of the assassins, who claim to fight against the democratically elected government of commander…”

“General Gerster had recently abandoned his wife and two children, a boy 7 and a girl 5, and moved into his vacation home with a former inmate, Juanita Mendes Perez, who at the time of closing this edition, was still missing”. The newspaper went on to provide more vivid details of the murder. Her unexpected call unsettled me, love decanted in the everyday war of things that contain us: cell phones, keyboards, flat screens, back then telephones, typewriters, TV sets, people craving to trap with their gaze your image and my word. We could realize our dreams now that our skin is on fire. Let’s write our hidden history on love poems and woman’s tears, let’s escape dangerous geographies and tulips fields. The purest of my relationships contains you, incessant bride, continual rain, certain light illuminating my dark cave. I arranged for her to get out of the country.

Fallout

He will wander there to the end of his days. Repentance, this side of the conscience, cannot be full if the act persists.HeI will stay there to the end of his days; that is his place, even if he must travel far.

I received the first letter from Honduras in April of 1979. She was using a pseudonym, Medea de Agrileza. It was a brief but warm missive tucked inside a small white envelope addressed to my postal box in Managua. Her neat cursive handwriting in blue ink told me she was good and getting ready for the big assault. Look for me when this is over, she wrote, I miss you infinitely.

She sent two other letters, but I had travelled to Mexico with political asylum, so I never received them. When I return to Nicaragua in September of 1979, my mother told me of the letters that she chose to destroy “to save me from further hells”. I asked for Juanita to many friends and acquaintances. No one gave me word of her whereabouts. I thought her dead in one of countless battles with the national army, I imagined her slender figure in green fatigues carrying an AKA 47, I wrote to her each night in the mill of my mind. I left the country in 1985 and did not return until 2003. I bought a newspaper to get updated on politics and culture. There she was in the front page, ‘the judge of the people’, they called her, who had ascended through the painful ranks of revolution and poverty, marriage and university, childrearing and divorce, to become one of the most accomplished women in the country.

Her bureau was located in a section of the city where several bus routes intersect at a large former shopping center converted into government offices twenty years ago. It was relatively easy to see her for she had an open door policy. An assistant in military uniform was in her waiting room taking names, motive for the visit, and arrival time. There was a woman in her sixties with a long braid with many gray hairs and a disease of the skin asking for justice in a case of invasion of lands. There was a young couple in their early thirties looking for help in an eviction case, he was carrying a baby, she a baby bag. There was an old man so wrinkled by time, his eyes were like two slits in his face, yet two tears emerged from them. There were no less than forty people all pushing the assistant like the lepers and the crowds unto Jesus, and then there was me.

“Your name sir?” he asked me politely ready to write. I thought of lagoons and moons, of sands and breasts, of wars and mountains, of exiles and kisses, of conversations and lovemaking, of secret letters and false names, of Gregor Samsa and antiquarian shops. “She looks really busy, and my affair is really not that urgent. I will be back tomorrow, thank you so much” I responded and went out the door content with treasuring her Monalisa smile the last time I saw her.