What is my favorite passage in Lila and why:
"Here's to Pancho Piquet."
"Who is Pancho Piquet?" she asked.
"The carpentero de ribera. He was an old Cuban. He spoke spanish
so fast
even the Mexicans had trouble understanding him. Looked like Boris
Karloff. Didn't look Cuban or Mexican at all.
"But he was the fastest carpenter I've ever seen," the Captain said.
"And careful too. He never slowed down, even in that jungle heat. We
didn't have any electricity but he could work faster with hand tools
than most people do with power tools. He was in his fifties or sixties
and I was twenty-something. He used to smile that Boris Karloff smile
watching me try to keep up with him."
"So why are we drinking to him?" Lila asked.
"Well, they warned me, 'El tome!' He drinks! And so he did," the Captain
said. "One night a big Norte, a norther, blew in off the Gulf of Mexico
and it blew so hard... Oh, it was a big wind! Almost bent the palm trees
to the ground. And it took the roof off his house and carried it away.
"But instead of fixing it he got drunk and stayed drunk for more than a
month. After a couple weeks his wife had to come begging for money for
food. That was so sad. I think partly he got drunk because he knew
everything was going wrong and the boat would never get built. And that
was true. I ran out of money and had to quit."
"So that's why we're drinking to him?" Lila said.
"Yeah, he was sort of a warning," the Captain said, "Also, he just
opened my eyes a little to something. A feeling, for what the tropics is
really like. All this talk about going to Florida and Mexico brought him
back to mind."
"What do you want to go back there for?" she said.
"I don't know. There's always that feeling of despair from there. I can
feel it now just thinking about it. 'Tristes tropiques,' the
anthropologist, Levi-Straus, called it. It keeps pulling you back,
somehow. Mexicans know what I mean. There's always this feeling that
this sadness is the real truth about things and it's better to live with
a sad truth than with all the happy progress talk you get up north."
-----------------------------------------------------------
I grew up deep in southern USA, in even deeper poverty. My grandpappy
raised me mostly since my dad ran off when I was a baby and my mom never
seemed to be able to stay put long without seeing greener pastures over
the hill and heading for them. My grandpappy cut posts for a living.
He'd been crushed by logs falling off a truck when he was in his fifties
and he walked and moved very slowly and no longer worked the big trees.
Me and pappy would go into the woods early in the morning just as the
sun rose and cut a load of posts, small sapling trees, and bring them
home and bark them before hauling them to the lumberyard. On a good day
we'd make a couple bucks. We got home about dark, ate what we could
find, and went to bed with the sun. No tv, no electricity if we had one.
We lived in a two room cabin way back in the hills. No running water. We
hauled water from a spring in the bottom below the house. There was no
bathroom in the cabin, only an outhouse. We'd use it a spell then have
to dig a new hole and move it. I still remember the lime bag sitting
there and how you'd sprinkle a little lime every time you took a dump.
Kept the smell down. There was no furnace in the cabin, and no stove.
All our cooking was done on a woodburner that sat in one room. Winters
were short there but cold at times nevertheless. Especially since our
house had no real door on it, only a screen door which we placed
cardboard over in an attempt to keep the cold out and the warmth in.
Pappy liked to drink too. Corn liquor. Nasty stuff that was brewed back
in the hills in those days. You could buy it at the local general store
if they knew you. We lived in a dry county and even if we didn't Pappy
never had the money to drink store-bought. He kept a jug under the porch
and before leaving in the morning he always had a long pull on it. And
when we came home from working he'd pull out the jug again. I guess that
was Pappy's way of dealing with the tough hand he was dealt in life.
Like Pancho Piquet, I bet.
We were dirt poor, but the funny thing is, I never knew we were poor
growing up. All my relatives were in the same boat. All our neighbors
too. Oh sure, there were rich folk about, but money ran in families and
either you had it or you didn't. That was that. There was an ever
present sense of sadness about that, a sense of resignation perhaps. It
was a caste system impossible to see a way out of. Yet it ran deeper
than that. Every day, me and pappy cut, barked and hauled posts to the
lumber yard for pennies apiece while the guy who owned the lumberyard
(and the grocery store, the filling station, the general store, even the
post office) just got richer and richer off our labors.
Pappy got sick and died when I was 16 years old. He lingered awhile and
died just like he lived, hard. I moved off north after that and didn't
return for many many years. So long in fact, that when I did finally
return I no longer knew the place. The old south was gone. New folk
moving in had brought money with them. The sadness is no longer ever
present, except maybe in the oldsters who still remember. Now everthing
moves just as fast there as it does here in the north. The old filling
station where all the old men would meet each day and sit around the
stove, summer or winter, is now an antique store. The old general store
is gone and a bright shiny Casey's is in its spot. The old barbeque pit
is a McDonalds.
They're trying to hide the sadness under glitter. Just like we do up
north. Everything is rush rush rush. Rush to work, rush home to supper,
rush to watch tv, rush to bed to get up and rush all over again.
Perhaps, just perhaps, if we stay busy enough we'll lose sight of that
incredible sadness that lies at the bottom of all our nightmares. I
notice this look if I stand and talk too long to the gas station
attendant, or to the clerk at the checkout line. This harried look.
Hurry up and say what you have to say, then get out and leave me alone
so I can rush to someone else. It wasn't like that growing up in the
south. Not at all.
I remember going to the neighbors to use their phone, since we never had
one. I call them neighbors but they lived all the way across the hollow.
An old logging road was the quickest way to their place. It ran along a
ridge, between two hollows, through some of the prettiest country God
ever made (now there's a housing tract going in). The neighbors always
welcomed me when I came to use their phone. Always had time to chat and
be brought up on the gossip. They weren't rich folk but they had money.
Old money, pappy called it. Well, I'd show up unlooked for every month
or two and they'd know what I'd come for. But every time I went, I'd end
up spending the afternoon there shooting the shit with them. Try doing
that these days! Just try it! What with our progress and our goals in
life. There's no time anymore for idle hours. If you drop in
unexpectedly on someone, they get mad at you! Maybe not to your face,
but you can feel it. The anxiety. The need to be doing something else,
anything else, other than just talking to an old friend who you might
never see again in this life. How incredibly sad that makes me feel. I
weep as I write.
Pancho Piquet reminds me of that sadness that we've done our very best
to cover up, with our fast food and fast living and fast dying. Every
time I go south, I mourn for old pappy. I mourn for the children growing
up now, who will never know about that deep down in the bones sadness
that is the truth of living. Despite all the glitter and finery that we
cloak ourselves in. The fine restaurants, the big handsome homes, the
manicured lawns. They're all an illusion in the face of an overwhelming
sadness too profound to comprehend. It must be lived.
Cory
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