BRONX LATIN

Andrew Hubner

Vete al norte con el chico si me muero.

Like he knew running dope couldn't last. Bride Toledo walked away from the Bolivia árbol del bosque, mountain water trickled wet, her dark ancient fathers rockface 1000 year highland village choked of thirst.

The paper bag in place of husband boors: Boliviano pesos, Brazilian and Mexican, Yankee dollars stuck together with dried blood.

Esme washed the soiled money, dried the bills in the sun like fruit, or the ears

Of a dead rabbit.

In festival across 1hc border in Peru she wandered Inca Inti Raymi revels. Fires burned gutters. Little bits ash danced in flames sparkled daylight.

At Plaza de Armas, holding her son's hand, a passing unicyclist offered white

and purple lilies.

Shadow great, ancient Hall of Justicia de los Conquistadores. A tall, shady willow trees mark olden crossroads. Nauseous and bent weeds. El chico's mysterious half-smile, bellybutton stuck our t-shirt. Headlights lurched to a stop, she called.

Vas por el camino?

Si.

Running water sienna alimañas of the tall grass. Hawks and crows hung low over old roads, the ancient migration route and each driver, whether out of respect co her husband or just the ancient rites of manhood and war, passed her off as if carrying out a sacramental duty. Sunset in spectacular Goya paintings; sunrises bought the red sleepy eye of God up over the mountains. She kept walking until she got to us. She was on her way here. None of us knew char we were waiting for her and her children here at our humble college in the Bronx, but God did.

The Lecturer heard the birds late on a Friday. He had stayed out, first in a Harlem bathhouse on Madison Avenue and later in a crack hotel on Park. He left the stem on a window ill and walked from the dingy room. The sun melted through the rip in the curtained window, and the Metro North train rattled the wood frame of the hotel.

The men and women the Lecturer had come with were still smoking. He had performed abominable aces through the night with them.

The blinding su11and the noise of the train shielded his exit from notice; our Lecturer was invisible. He feared for his life.

He needed air, and the oxygen in that bare dingy room was 1oxic with hours or smoke, sweat and the heady fumes of self-immolation.

The Lecturer walked to the #4 subway at I25th Street and Lexington Ave., descended the stairs and stood dazed by the turnstile.

Under the helpful gaze of a uniformed policeman, he found in his pocket, a wad of crumpled, soiled dollar bills.

Who can say how many hands and in what manner the bills had passed through?

The Lecturer tried to synchronize the beats of his heart and his breath with the multitudinous footsteps of the rush hour commuters. Thousands passed in either direction.

Four and d half dollars to an agent behind a bulletproof window produced a cardboard ticker.

It seemed utterly miraculous to our distinguished Lecturer that one swipe of a computerized stripe through an alloy metal detection system would result in safe passage.

The northbound train ascended from a dark pit in Manhattan bedrock to the elevated sta1ion at Kingsbridge Avenue, where the Lecturer debarked, descended the old wooden stairway beside the castle armory and stood rapt under a cacophony of starlings.

Just as such birds might fill a stand of trees to call after the setting sun, near a highway in Indiana or Nebraska, in the great American afternoon,

Here had they come and filled the old wooden rafters of the elevated train station, hundreds of oil black birds with their beaks wide open over their starred breasts, calling co the setting of the great God sun. The beating of their wings lifted his heart.

The brick facade of the old Kingsbridge armory fills an entire block.

For every single little child that passes, it rises as a castle filled with knights, tall horses and pretty damsels.

In the South Bronx redemption is possible every day. Like a five-cent plastic bottle, we are saved by strangers from trash bins and filled anew.

Once his Grandfather Tremont drilled in the great hall, hopeful, proud and returned from Somme,

A wrecked witness of the carnage not redeemed by the poetry that elevated war co myth, who 25 years later sometimes wandered outside looking for the soaring heart he had lose and empties to trade in to quench the voices char called to him in haunted sweating d reams.

We are haunted in the South Bronx.

We hold the instruments of the doom of our forefathers.

We ge1 spooked and walk away quickly co spend our dollars on bread, cheese, apples, and fifty cent ghetto cola.

We cross the Grand Concourse, past Edgar Allan Poe Park in mid-summer droves by the new library crossing Fordham Road as the day goes dark, with open fire hydrants gushing into the sewers.

The Tremont Oval near midnight found us passed out, asleep sitting upright on a bench.

The Tremont section of our fair borough was named by the postmaster Hiram

Tarbox after three hills: Mount Hope, Claremont and Mount Eden.

We can only see a piece of the world, the Mule told me once. To deal with this we give places names, and we act like we own shit. It helps to remember where the hell we are.

We were up on the Third Avenue El train, looking around at all the people,

imagining their lives. It only cost 50 cents in chose days. Outside our window ten feet away, a woman in a housedress pm up wash on the line ac ten o'clock at night. What was she chinking? We were kids and we were high, hue so what.

We don't gee co choose the ones who mark us. So some of us gee the killers. There's a bench up the hill in the park at the end of Mc. Eden Ave.

The wood slats have been replaced since our rime, when everything was burned.

Even as The Lecturer slept on the bench,

Esmeralda Toledo

bathed her son in the cradle of a fallen birdbath

by a crumbling fountain in the ancient courtyard

of a hotel in Mexico City. Five pesos privilege sleeping courtyard.

Morning sun climbed majestically over stately old cornices,

chased night birds from eaves, they ace McDonald's our of paper packages, solemnly, silent as mice, mounted a truck cab, awakening the penitent driver,

who blinked past long gray hair just as his hands came forward with automaton-like grace

& gripped the driving wheel chat would take our pilgrims all the way to the

north of Mexico in the scare of Nuevo Leon, over five long days

& nights, stopping in the highland to eat tortillas wrapped in wax paper & purchased from a roadside bodega by a mountainside stream that had been at the same location in some form since the advent of the copper coin. They spent a night in a bus shelter in the middle of the desert while the driver slept.

Ms. Toledo was thirty-seven weeks pregnant with the twins & any men char

came in her way either got out of it, knocking the closest like-wood surface handy, or did her bidding with the alacrity of circus clowns who fight ridiculously co gee out of the way of the elephants.

The globe of her stomach felt right as a marcher's snare drum.

They crossed the border with a Hawkeye band of Apaches char found her walking against the wind through the rain & picked her up for good luck. They joined a line of cars that stretched for fifteen miles.

Behind them followed a red Ford Gran Tori no with Michigan plates. They had seventeen ocher people in their truck.

On the side it said Old Carolina Biscuits. It had been stolen four years previous in the mountainous green lands between Tennessee and North Carolina that were once part of the forgotten English refugee scare of Frankl in. The Apaches had bought the truck from a dealer in the capital city of their Mexican province, Monterrey.

The Apaches' home had al o worn out. When the blackbirds began to fall out of the sky, the drinking water turned sulfurous, and in the maquilladora wars their women became targets of the atavistic appetites of drug mules.

They crossed as the wind

& rain swept over the Rio Grande.

The flood lasted for days as the great river swelled

& overran its banks. Hidden with her son in a furniture box, she read aloud the story of Noah from her bible as they crossed over the great border into America. They were not checked,

& twenty minutes later
the roads were closed.

In days the twins were born at a roadside park in a small town on the Alabama coast in Baldwin County off Bon Secour (Safe Harbour) Bay 35 miles east of Mississippi. When both of the babies had been pulled softly from her by the old aunt who assisted, the two women exhaled and laughed. A warm yet refreshing gulf

breeze blew in from the water. The old woman lira cigarette and they drank from a

bright blue can of cold Lipton Brisk.

She called the boy Baldwin & the little girl Alabama. The Apaches were eighteen, two older women, three older men & three young couples. They also had seven children.

Esmeralda paid for gas. She drank from a small stream in the park,

& spent the rest of the night on a blanket beside the truck with her babies, by

a verdant mid-summer field planted with tobacco stalks as large

& languid a lovers' laps. In the morning they continued north. They were on the same migratory path. They were on their way here when our itinerant Lecturer came out of a blackout

& found the young man lying passed om

& shirtless , face up on a bench overlooking Tremont Avenue.

The Lecturer had on a pair of slacks

& an Oxford cloth shirt:

Brooks Brothers buttoned to the neck. His socks were blue & gray argyle.

His jacker, a blue blazer with gold coin buttons.

He had a crumpled-up page from the Brahms score in his pocket with two last dollars.

We never knowhow

& when we will be couched by grace,

& afterwards we give ourselves the credit as if we had played a pare, as if it were not all a symphony written

& arranged by the hands of God. The boy could 1101 have been more than fifteen.

How could we have known char he had come with his father co work in the fruit fields in Buena Vista, California?

That his father had died of a heart attack

That he had no way to write or call his mother

& sister

& brother back home in the tiny mountain town in Peru where became from, that he had used all the money he had for a bus to New York

& arrived knowing no one?

He just wanted to sleep for a few minutes. His face was badly bruise d & swollen. He had contusions, clearly from fighting, on both arms & legs. Yee even in his condition, he radiated incense beamy.

As he told someone later, our Lecturer was drawn to the young man.

It was like he wanted to alleviate the boy's pain.

Like what happened to him years ago could somehow stop what was happening to the beautiful young man.

Thar whatever bad was in our Lecturer might soothe him.

Like the boy's deliverance was the Lecturer's.

When our Lecturer fished out a sweatshirt from a sidewalk Salvation Army clothing box, the young man took it, looking at The Lecturer warily, he started to walk away.

Ud. no es policia, verdad? he asked.

The Lecturer shook his head.

iC6mo se llama?

he asked. Bodaway.

1l1e young man followed our Lecturer back to the old abandoned chapel on Elton Ave. where they slept in the pews, and at dawn to the campus of our college just a few blocks away.

Meanwhile the journey of Esmeralda Toledo's family continued.

After arriving in our great city in late July they slept in Port Authority, parks, abandoned lots

& apartments with extra walls & tiny rooms, spared somehow thank God

from the unspeakable fate of many women

& small children, they slept in the fields, empty lots in the Bronx where there were once building s, even once in the rusted bumper cars from an abandoned amusement park.

When it was warm, these places were magical underneath the winking scar

strung sky; in the cold the children shive red and wailed, their voices echoing the haunted Bronx streets like the siren calls of lose angels: Los Angeles.

That day The Lecturer was standing on the steps of our newly christened East Academic Complex smoking a cigarette, staring into space. When she came in, the wind blew the rain inside the revolving doors. A classical

& jazz prodigy since the render age of seven, our Lecturer was in the art gallery working through Brahms' Intermezzo, when in walked the pretty, dark-haired woman with haze l green eyes.

She pushed the twin baby carriage up the stairs and into the great hall. In the

gallery there was a shrine with a cross.

With a great air of penitence Esme brought each of the babies to her lips then collapsed in a heap.